Isaacman Back in the Cockpit at NASA, Google Takes AI to Space, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Cliff Obrecht, Jerry Murdock, SHL0MS, Shehzan Maredia, Mina Fahmi, Alessandro Chesser, John Maslin, Eugenia Kuyda, Anish Acharya, David Risher & Erin Brewer

(00:31) - Isaacman Back in Cockpit at NASA (20:44) - Google Takes AI to Space (26:09) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:18:31) - Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva, discusses the company's growth to 260 million monthly active users and nearly $4 billion in revenue, emphasizing their focus on delivering user value through an integrated creative operating system. He highlights Canva's strategic incorporation of AI, including the acquisition of Leonardo, to enhance design capabilities and streamline workflows. Obrecht also shares insights on successful company acquisitions, stressing the importance of understanding founders' motivations and ensuring cultural alignment for effective integration. (01:33:41) - Jerry Murdock, co-founder of Insight Partners, discusses the firm's inception in 1995 alongside Jeff Horing, highlighting their early focus on infrastructure and applications to avoid the dot-com bubble, which ultimately did not shield them from the market downturn. He reflects on the challenges faced during the early 2000s, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and strategic investment in emerging technologies. Murdock also shares insights on the current AI boom, cautioning about potential economic disruptions and the necessity for companies to align with evolving technological platforms. (02:03:22) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:11:54) - SHL0MS is an anonymous artist known for provocative projects that challenge conventional norms, such as detonating a Lamborghini to critique the rapid wealth culture in cryptocurrency communities. In the conversation, he discusses his inclination to disrupt systems, his disdain for traditional labels like 'artist,' and his use of AI to enhance his creative endeavors. (02:26:52) - Shehzan Maredia, CEO of Lava, discusses the company's recent $200 million funding round and the launch of their Bitcoin Line of Credit, offering flexible, low-interest loans backed by Bitcoin. He highlights the product's adaptability to users' diverse financial needs, emphasizing its open-ended terms and absence of fixed payment schedules. Maredia also addresses Lava's strategy to navigate Bitcoin's volatility by maintaining a Bitcoin-only collateral policy and encouraging users to add more collateral to their loans. (02:34:18) - Mina Fahmi, co-founder of Sandbar, introduces the Stream ring—a wearable device designed to capture voice notes and control music through a touchpad interface. He explains that the ring allows users to effortlessly record thoughts and ideas on the go, with the companion app organizing these notes and facilitating interactions with an AI assistant. Fahmi also discusses the development timeline, noting that after two years of building, Sandbar plans to begin shipping the product in the summer of 2026. (02:41:52) - Alessandro Chesser, CEO of Dynasty and former VP of Sales at Carta, discusses how Dynasty simplifies the creation of Nevada trusts, enabling founders to leverage Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) exemptions for significant tax savings. By establishing multiple trusts, founders can maximize tax-free capital gains, with each trust eligible for up to $10 million in exemptions. Chesser emphasizes the importance of setting up these trusts early to avoid gift tax implications and highlights Dynasty's mission to make such financial strategies accessible to a broader audience. (02:48:34) - John Maslin, CEO and co-founder of Vulcan Elements, discusses the company's $1.4 billion deal with the U. S. government to establish a 10,000 metric ton rare earth magnet facility, aiming to address the nation's critical shortage in this sector. He emphasizes the urgency of building a domestic supply chain for these essential components, which are vital for defense, aerospace, and economic industries, and outlines plans to have initial capacity online by 2027, with efforts to accelerate the timeline if possible. Maslin also highlights the importance of a collaborative approach between industry and government to meet the growing demand for rare earth magnets, stressing that the challenge lies more in manufacturing capabilities than in raw material availability. (02:54:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:57:19) - Eugenia Kuyda, founder and CEO of Replika, an AI company focused on developing conversational AI for companionship and emotional support, discusses her new venture, Wabi, a personal software platform where users can discover, remix, or create mini apps for daily life. Unlike traditional app builders, Wabi hosts all mini apps within its platform, offering benefits like social graph discovery, integrated services, and enhanced security. Kuyda envisions Wabi as a YouTube for mini apps, aiming to set software free by providing an interface that allows users to tap into AI capabilities through personalized, lightweight workflows. (03:14:15) - Anish Acharya, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has a background in founding and leading consumer technology companies, including SocialDeck and Snowball, both acquired by major tech firms. In the conversation, he discusses the evolution of software from the eclectic and experimental nature of the early 90s internet to its current, more uniform state, emphasizing the need to reintroduce creativity and cultural diversity into software development. He highlights the potential of AI to democratize software creation, enabling rapid development of personalized applications and fostering a more participatory and innovative digital environment. (03:28:05) - David Risher, CEO of Lyft, and Erin Brewer, CFO of Lyft, discusses the company's record-breaking earnings, highlighting all-time highs in gross bookings, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. They emphasize Lyft's strategic focus on customer satisfaction, aiming to reduce surge pricing by increasing driver supply and improving service metrics. The team also outlines plans for integrating autonomous vehicles into Lyft's platform through partnerships with industry leaders like Waymo and Baidu, creating a hybrid network that combines human drivers and robotaxis. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome. We're back in the TBN Ultra Dome.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  Everybody wanted to know what we would do if we didn't podcast today. I guess we'll never know.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  I guess we'll never know.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  We're back. It's so good to be back.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  It is. Back in the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, still sponsored by Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. In breaking news yesterday, Jared Isaacman has been re-nominated, I guess is the term. He's back in the contention for to be NASA administrator. It was a very exciting, very tumultuous year for him.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Do we know why he was originally taken out of the running?

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Yes. So there are differing accounts. According to the White House, so according to the White House, the reason is that he had donated previously to Democrats. And the White House said, like, this should be, like, we need to know that you're all in on America first, like that type of thing. But those donations were public, because all donations are public. And so there was a little bit of like, well, like, you nominated him, you should have just, like, looked it up. You can literally just, like, you can literally just Google it. Like, it's not even like some secret database. It's all

• 1:30John Coogan?

  open records. But then Ars Technica and a couple other outlets reported that it was because of the Elon Musk-Trump dust-up that happened back in May. Remember the whole, like, battle and Elon was going at Trump on the timeline and Trump was going at Elon and Truth Social and they were kind of duking it out? And there was like the breakup.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  Still can't believe that was a real day on X.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  It was a crazy day on Truth Social as well. Why are you doing Truth Social, Erasure, bro?

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  What was going, actually?

• 2:01John Coogan?

  No, no, literally, like, Trump was not posting on X.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Trump would post on Truth Social, it would get screenshotted and then share it on X.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember. We were sort of live reaction, reacting to the news. And I would refresh.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Truth, or I'd see something on X.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Like that cannot be a real post from the president. And then I'd go to Truth Social and I'd say, unfortunately.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  It was.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  That was a real post.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  And it, and it was. And so Isaacman got pulled and Secretary Duffy stepped in. Sean Duffy, who's the 20th Secretary of the Department of Transit, serving under the president. And, but now Isaacman's back in the picture. Of course, at the Charlie Kirk Memorial, you might have seen Elon Musk and President Donald Trump sitting down, having a handshake, maybe making amends. There's been speculation as to things. It seems to be water under the bridge. They seem to have healed all wounds, I suppose.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. So Jared Isaacman put out a, a long post. We'll read through some of this and then I have a little bit of a take about his career and whatnot. So he said, "Thank you, Mr. President, for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership. The support from the space-loving community has been overwhelming. I am, I am not sure how I earned the trust of so many, but I will do everything I can to live up to those expectations, to the innovators building the orbital economy." That's a term I haven't actually heard used before, but I like a lot. Orbital economy is great. Way, space economy just doesn't hit as hard as orbital economy. I like that. "The scientists pursuing breakthrough discoveries."

• 3:47John Coogan?

  And to the dreamers across the world eager to return to the moon and the grand journey beyond. These are the most exciting times, the dawn of, since the dawn of the space age. And I truly believe the future we have all been waiting for will soon become a reality. This is inspiring. I didn't know that that much about Jared Isaacman, but as soon as I started learning about him, I was a fan and I'm very excited that he could potentially be in the seat. The big reason is that... First off, he's, he's an entrepreneur and I think entrepreneurs make great leaders generally.

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  He can fly fighter jets?

• 4:23John Coogan?

  He can fly fighter jets. That I think is a little bit less relevant, but it's somewhat relevant because you are leading people like you're flying.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  You're leading people that are going to risk their life by flying in big, fast machines.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  So I think it's, I think it's, it's a sign of respect.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's not that crazy of an idea. But I don't think people understand how crazy of an entrepreneur he is. So he started Shift4Payments. It had a few other names, but he started his company when he was 16 years old. 16, 16. So he dropped out of high school, got a GED so he could technically have like finished high school, I suppose. And just started this business. And it's like a serious business. Like you talk to, you know, you, you, you learn about these people who maybe don't know, they don't run a household brand. They haven't been telling their entrepreneurial story for a decade. There, there's no founder's podcast episode about them yet or something.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  But this is a serious business. Billions in revenue, real earnings, the PE ratio is 25x. It's like not some crazy, oh, it's a meme coin. It's a $6 billion company. Yeah, it's not a hyperscaler, but it's like very serious.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  4,000 employees.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  4,000 employees, hundreds of billions of payment volume. And, and it also does the, the payments for Starlink. So it's, it's like, you know, Stripe competitor that actually works on, uh, to process the payments.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they did 3.3 billion revenue in 2024.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Which is, which is also interesting. I wonder when they first met because he's in payments in 1999. Elon's in payments in 1999 in PayPal and then Elon, I believe.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Let me check Grokapi.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Didn't, didn't Elon angel into Stripe at some point? Stripe, of course, owns Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto, rail securely, split up way label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. And I think maybe, I don't know if this is more important, this is probably less important, but he's been to space. Jared Isaacman has been to space, which is just crazy. And he, so he went with a crewmate, Sarah Gillis, who was a SpaceX engineer, and did a civilian spacewalk. Like they left the capsule in space and this was on a, on a, on a SpaceX rocket.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Which is just like incredibly risky, I feel like. It's a crazy move. Uh, and he went all the way up and so he's kind of like really earned his bona fides as someone who's like loves space and is willing to, you know, engage with SpaceX.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  He can probably, he can probably say no one likes space more than me.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Seriously, yeah, yeah. Uh, and so, uh, when he was first, uh, when he was first considered as NASA administrator, there was this debate, uh, around him and it wasn't, it wasn't the Elon thing, really, it kind of was the Elon thing, but the Elon dust up, that was kind of like the, the last second like rugging. But in the lead up, because Isaacman was nominated, um, I think on inauguration day. So he was like one of the first, he was clearly, everyone was like, yep, this is our guy. We don't even have to make any more calls, like we're nominating him on day one. Do that. Then, then the debate, you know, goes because he has to be confirmed, right? Uh, and he eventually was confirmed, but the debate was it moon versus Mars.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Moon versus Mars, where should you prioritize things? It sounds silly, but it really is real because there are different pro, uh, different companies, different organizations, different constituents. And so, uh, on the moon side, you have the Artemis program, which is the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule. Uh, the Orion spacecraft, which has been derided by Casey Hanmer as a failure. Uh, there's been a lot of people who are pro SpaceX.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  Casey quoted Jared's announcement and said, this is a good sign.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  He, he, uh, and, uh, Casey is effectively our, our senior NASA correspondent.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Yes, definitely. And, and so on the other side, you have Elon, who has always been prioritizing Mars, Mars, Mars, let's go to Mars. And so, uh, Jared Isaacman said at the time, why is it taking us so long? And why is it costing us so much to go to the moon? And I think it's a good question. Uh, we've been to the moon six times. We've, we've actually done, I think 140 moon missions. Uh, six of them actually landed humans on the moon. A bunch sent people around the moon. We sent robots to the moon. We sent landers, we sent all sorts of different stuff around the moon. So we're not. We're not new to go trying to go to the moon. We've sent humans there six times.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  But the fact that we haven't been able to scale our rocket program to a point where moon missions are too cheap to meter has become a bit of a stain on American ingenuity. We should have just scaled it up and just cut the cost by 20% every year and we would be getting up and back.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Shouldn't be a lost art.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  It shouldn't be a lost art. And it is a lost art to the point where people ask, is it real? How did we do this? It's hard to believe. How do we lose? We don't normally just lose the ability to do things and yet in this.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Palmer was defending the moon mission to Logan by saying, wasn't he saying like, you can shine a laser?

• 9:45John Coogan?

  There's a mirror. They left a mirror. So you can bounce, you can bounce a laser off the mirror. You can do this at home and you can prove that there is a mirror on the moon. It doesn't prove that aliens didn't put it there. Palmer needs to, you know, go a layer deeper.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go a level deeper.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  You gotta go a level deeper. But, you know, in general SpaceX has become the best hope at the reversal of this and Elon has been much more focused on Mars than the moon. And so the debate around Isaacman centers on this tie, on his ties to Elon Musk, his shift four company, the payment processor.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of the moon, Sam Altman was on Tyler Cowen.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  And Altman said at one point, sometimes late at night, you just really want that chocolate chip cookie at 11:30 at night, or at least I do. And Tyler says, yes. Do you think there's any kind of alien life on the moons of Saturn? Because I do.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  How did they get in that situation? We need to actually hear the real like transcript. Is there video for that podcast? I think it's audio only.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  I think it's just audio, yeah.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  Man, Sam really understands the Trump takeaway from the election. Like, I believe like the whole, the whole podcast election.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Conclusion was just, attention is all you need. You need to do as many podcasts as possible. You need to be a high volume, volume wins. And Sam Altman just will not turn down appearances. And so, he does, you know, Tucker Carlson, and there's a really rough clip that comes out of that. But then, he just goes and does another podcast, and then he does another podcast. And then, on Friday, everyone was talking about the Brad Gerson, Sachin Adella, Sam Altman clip. And then, you know, the next, on Tuesday, there's a new press cycle, and I haven't seen any bad clips from the Tyler Cowen interview. So, it just feels like, the number one thing you don't want to do, in comms, is like, go into hiding.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  You just want to power through. Keep posting. Post through the pain. Podcast through the pain. I love it. I think it's a great media strategy, and I think it will ultimately be victorious. But, the question about Isaacman, he's tied to Elon Musk through Shift 4, that he processes payments for Starlink. And also, he obviously literally went on top of SpaceX rocket and went to space. And so, NASA, even though SpaceX is a private company, NASA does have a thumb that it can put on the scale, because it has funding, and it has the ability to help, and the ability to approve different things.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  NASA has funding, they also know how to spend money.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  You look at how much money they've spent on Orion.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  And so that money could go to SpaceX, could go to Mars, could go to the moon. And the NASA administrator has the ability to, to say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna focus more on Mars, and we're gonna focus more on moon. Or vice versa. And there's, and there's an open debate. And I don't think this is like a left-right issue. I remember, the, wasn't the, wasn't, wasn't George Bush really into going to Mars? And then, I forget. Why are you laughing, Tyler?

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's funny, like, the moon and Mars being like a political...

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  I think that'd be funny.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  It's like, are you moon, are you pro moon, are you pro Mars? And then, like, we need another X and Y axis for an entirely new political compass, that has no correlation with the underlying political left-right authoritarian libertarian compass. I don't know. What are other wedge issues that have no correlation?

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes. President George W. Bush was quite interested in Mars exploration.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  He was a Mars guy.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  In January of 2004, he announced vision for space exploration at NASA headquarters. The plan directed NASA to return humans to the moon by around 2020.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Wait, he wanted, he wanted to go to the moon by 2020?

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  And eventually send astronauts to Mars and beyond.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Wow. That, that's disappointing.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  And then they proceeded to spend 20 billion to make a broken Orion capsule.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  It was 20 billion? I mean, the real miss is, is should have taken all the, all the war on terror money and put it into moon missions. And just been like, we're going to war against the moon. There's oil on the moon. And then if we'd put all that money and all that manpower into going to the moon, we'd probably be dominating the moon right now, right? Like, if you take all the war on terror.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  There would be an Aman on the moon.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  I think there would be an Aman on the moon. I, I've been very pro moon.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  I want the moon to look like Las Vegas ASAP. Uh, it should be a tourist destination.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  We, people would be gambling on the moon right now.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  If you, if you let them gamble, they will come. This is the thing. This is, this is real. But, but there is a delicate balance, you know? Obviously, the more time you spend focusing on the moon, the less time you're focused on the big Mars mission. There, there are different considerations in terms of the rockets that you type of, that you build. And that's, and that's basically the, the debate, I think the debate around, like the non-political debate, the meat and potatoes debate around, uh, Jerick Isaacman is like, is he going to make the correct decision about what, what celestial body to prioritize? Versus, oh, did he donate to this? Or is he the left wing or right wing? Or did he say the right thing?

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  It's also interesting because.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  All that stuff is window dressing for the big question for NASA, which is moon or Mars? In my opinion.

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  And you don't, you don't think trying to counterbalance China's efforts in space should also be top of mind? Or is that, is that?

• 15:11John Coogan?

  I think that is all upstream of moon versus Mars, right? So, so, so if they're, if they're, if they're going to claim Mars tomorrow, well, we probably got to push and, and, you know, get on the defensive on Mars. You know, it's like, uh, you're playing some grand strategy game. And it's like, you know, you see someone going taking territory over there. That, that, that informs, do you want to go play defense on that territory? Or do you want to go capture a completely separate territory?

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  But yes, I mean, I agree with you. And, and this is what Casey Hammer has said on the show, uh, multiple times is, um, Based on what we're seeing from China on the moon progress, maybe we do need to prioritize in the moon more. Maybe Elon is somewhat wrong on that in that in that it's not just this, it's not just Elon for years was not framing things in geopolitical ways. He was just saying it's humanity versus the cold vacuum of space. Yeah. And so humanity needs to go to Mars because that's a true different planet. And if something happens to the moon and earth, like you can truly start over on Mars. You can't necessarily

• 16:20John Coogan?

  do that on on the moon. That's not the case with the current geopolitical situation. So, um, so that's an interesting question, but I do think that there's a new debate, which is what happens below the moon? What happens in low earth orbit? What happens with the data center in space question? Because six months ago, I'm not kidding, six months ago, it was a non-issue. It was just like, oh, yeah, there's like a Y C company that's working on it. This is some sci fi thing that people are thinking about. But now we have Jensen Wong, we have Elon Musk, and we have Sundar Pichai all saying, we're going to do data centers in space. So collectively, you have what 10 trillion in market cap?

• 17:04John Coogan?

  That's like, hey, we're going to, we're going to be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question. And I think NASA will have some say over the speed at which this stuff gets built out. Now, maybe it's a decade, maybe it's two decades, uh, maybe it's five years, but the there will be policies that are overseen by Jared Isaacman that inform how seriously the idea of data centers in space gets taken. And he could be completely anti, and he could just be like, I think this is fake. I think it's impossible to diffuse the heat. I'm anti, and I'm going to block it the whole time I'm at NASA. And, you know, some people might be very upset about that. Some people might be like, thank goodness, like, we didn't want, we didn't want to waste any time on

• 17:49John Coogan?

  that. Um, but he hasn't chimed in on that. And I think that's an interesting next discussion for the government to have and a government administrator, the NASA administrator to have, which is what is the US government's position on data centers in space? Because the hyperscalers are chiming in left and right. Yeah.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Elon's post from a couple of days ago, quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's just like bear posting, basically. He's just like, it's useless, right? Isn't that what he's saying? Or, or is he saying like, it's cold there?

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  I think he was, I don't think he's, I don't think he's bear posting. That's not how I read it.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Oh, well, what is his take?

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  I think he's saying it's like, you, you, I, I think.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  He's saying, he's saying you should actually do it there? It seemed like he was just saying like, yo, you should just go and do that like, super far away. Like, stop working on that on earth. Like, it's not worth it. That, that, that's, that was my read on it, but maybe it's like, no, maybe he's being serious.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  Is he being serious? Like scientifically, he believes that, that, uh, quantum computing should happen on the moon?

• 18:57John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I don't know enough about quantum computing.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Croc?

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, is this real?

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Devon, uh, cognition, they're the makers of Devon. Devon's the AI software engineer. Cross, crush your backlog with your personal AI.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  So, David in the chat was, uh, saying, uh, referencing that Elon is actually more and more moon pilled. He did post, I went back and found it two days ago. He said SpaceX will lean in big on the moon.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  And Arthur McWater said, we should annex it, which, uh, Solana has been.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  Yes, pushing on.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Saying for quite a while now.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, moon should be a state. It's a classic, classic line. Uh, I am inevitable, says Ken Kurtland, uh, he's showing a cool collage of Jared Isaacman. What a crazy story. What a crazy story. I'm, I'm very excited. I hope he does more, uh, I hope he does more podcast appearances, uh.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll work to.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Usually, yeah, I'd love to have him on the show.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  We'll get him on the show.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  But I'm, I'm usually not like, oh, I really want like the director of some random, you know, uh, government organization to do a full podcast round, but I feel like the space question, the orbital economy, it's so big, it's so interesting that there's a ton of, uh, there's a ton of interesting questions and it's just so, it's such a cool thing to, to build a vision around.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Let's check in on the NASA admin candidates as Luke Leicher. We have a winner and the campaign 2025 was between someone saying, let's kill NASA and Jared Isaacman saying 20 septillion Americans to Mars. Which message will resonate with Spitter? And we have our answer. Jared Isaacman is back in the in the in the race. Delian is confirming that he is anti.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  I would like to inform everyone that data centers in space still make me want to blow my brains out. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And Sundar heard that and immediately responded.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  Wait, he posted, Delian posted this before?

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  Only a few hours later. Only a few hours later. Actually, no, I think, I think, I think Delian was responding to Sundar here. It was more fun to think about Sundar responding to Delian, but he's Sundar. Sundar yesterday said, our TPUs are headed to space inspired by our by our history of moonshots from quantum computing to autonomous driving. Project Suncatcher is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space harnessing more of the sun's power, which emits more power than a hun- than 100 trillion times humanity's total electricity production. Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges. Early research shows our trillion

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  generation TPUs or our tensor processing units, purpose built for AI, survive without damage when tested in a particle accelerator to simulate low Earth orbit levels of radiation. However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on-orbit system reliability. More testing and breakthroughs will be needed as we count down to launch two prototype satellites with Planet by early 2027, our milestone of many. Excited for us to be a part of all the innovation happening in the space. So it is pretty funny to think about, you know, before, before we had satellites, like scientists just being like, you want to put radio equipment in orbit and then you want to use it to communicate with.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  You want to watch TV in space.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  You want to watch space.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  You want, you want space TV.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  That makes me want to blow my brains out.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Satellite television.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  That's what we're doing.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Satellite radio.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  What are you gonna call it? Dish networks?

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you wanna put a camera on one of those too?

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  You wanna take pictures?

• 22:46John Coogan?

  You wanna take pictures?

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  And send it down to us here?

• 22:48John Coogan?

  A camera in space?

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  The thing we take wedding pictures with.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  Make it make sense.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  You're gonna put it in space.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Make it make sense.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're gonna put it on the top of a rocket.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  The thing that you need to replace the film?

• 22:58John Coogan?

  The camera. If I drop it, it breaks immediately. We're gonna put that on top of a rocket.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Shoot it into space.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Shoot it into space.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  And it's just gonna work?

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Then take pictures. It's gonna work, yeah.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Super believable.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  I like that Sundar Pichai's, uh, his nominative determinism just keeps getting stronger. So, of course, we know him as pitching AI.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  You see where I'm going with this, right?

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  So now he's going after the sun and of course his name is Sundar. That's incredible. Uh, he's going to be pitching AI into the sun. Pitch AI into the sun, Sundar. It's so good.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Sundar.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  He should have called it Project Sundar. That's what, uh, Brandon and our team was mentioning, which is very funny. Um, Sean McGuire is, I think in, he's in, he's in favor of all this. He, he's, he's a supporter. He says, "The science fiction future we dreamed of might actually be coming true." And Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's, uh, sun catcher project and says, "Great idea, lol." Which is hilarious.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think this is because Elon had just been sharing how he wants... He, he, he was posting about how SpaceX would eventually do data centers in space, right?

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  So I think part of this is he's, "Great idea."

• 24:15John Coogan?

  "Great idea, lol." Like, "You're doing my thing." But then all, but then Sundar says, "Only possible because of SpaceX's massive advantages in launch technology." It is, it is so funny that like, E- Elon can't just be like, "No, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm keeping all of the launch capacity for myself." Like, he, he doesn't have, I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that really. I think it's like, I think it's illegal. Cause if you're like a railroad, you can't say like, "I, I'm, I'm..." Uh, you need like net neutrality effectively. Uh, very funny. Uh...

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  Philip John, Johnson vindicated.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Aaron Burnett says, "Is it just me or did the Overton window on space data centers dramatically shift over the last few weeks?" It really does seem like this dramatically shifted truly just a few weeks ago. Uh, so, uh, some folks at YC were taking a victory lap because, um... Uh, Y C backed a data center. Did Y C back Star Cloud? Or did they back a different?

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Data center.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  They did start.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  They did Star Cloud? Okay. Because I remember when Y C backed Star Cloud, there were a lot of people who were, oh, Y C trying to do hard tech, stick to the mobile apps, buddy. And they're, I guess we do in space data centers now. Uh, and people were having a lot of fun with it. Uh, but then like, you know, Philip has just been completely vindicated, at least by like getting support from the big power players. Like the big tech power players are, are coming out in support. My question is like, where does Jerick Isingman land on this? He, he runs a payment processor. We're going to be processing payments in space? Let's get, let's get his payment company up in space. We need to do more things in space.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  We need, we, there's, there's so many cool things that we can put in space. We need, uh, space casinos, space slop, space Instagram.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  Space troughs.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Space.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Satellites, satellites are really space troughs.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Think about it. Uh, Dean Ball says, one way to infer the bubble isn't going to pop soon is that all the people who have been wrong about everything related to artificial intelligence. Indeed, they have been desperate to be wrong. They suck on their wrong, wrongness like a pacifier, believe the bubble is about to pop.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  It's very provocative. Isn't that, isn't that completely true? I feel like a lot of people that have been wrong, do not believe the bubble is going to, like, when I think about people who have been wrong about artificial intelligence. I mean, sure, there's people that are, that have been like, AI will never pass the Turing test. But there's also like the Leas or Yudkowsky, which was like, AI is going to kill us like next year. And like, I would put them both in those camps and is, is Leas are saying that the bubble is going to pop? I don't know. Is he?

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Bub talk?

• 26:55John Coogan?

  I don't.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's go to the bub.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Go to the bub talk. Let's go to the bubbler.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  I don't think he's been saying that.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  No. Okay. So, so who is, who is Dean Ball sub tweeting here? That's the.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to argue that it's.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  Entirely.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  AI is going to be this runaway death machine and also that it's about to pop.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Do you know Ball?

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  All right. How many times are we gonna make this joke? No, I think he's mostly talking about, there's a bunch of like journalists that, like mainstream journalists that talk about like, oh, AI is like,

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes. One hundred percent, one hundred percent.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. And also it's gonna pop.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a, I don't know if he's a journalist, but there's a blogger who was trying to argue simultaneously that Sam Altman has never like created anything in his life. He's non-technical. Like, he's not, he's not responsible for any like success. Uh, but then simultaneously was arguing that like, he moved recklessly quickly to launch ChatGPT against the board's like desires. And it's like, literally both of those can't be true simultaneously. Like, only one can be true. Either like, he, he did have the foresight to, to release the product, or he didn't, and therefore it's not risky for what he did. So there, there's just like some, there's, there is some like dissonance where people don't really map through all of the logical conclusions of what they're arguing.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, for me, the Gelman amnesia

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  effect has just been crazy lately because there's people whose content that I read

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  that don't historically cover AI.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  And they're starting to talk about AI.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  And there's just, in a single short essay that they're writing, I can just, there's, there's easily like ten to fifteen things that are either wrong, or just I completely disagree with the take. And so I'm thinking about some of their other content and being like, okay, maybe I need to be a lot more critical of, of some of their other writing. But.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was someone who was like super critical of crypto during the crypto bubble and then came out like super doom-pilled, like, we're gonna all get a paperclip next year. And I was like, uh, like, maybe I should be buying NFTs. Like, it's like, he's so wrong about the paper clipping thing that I need to go back and revisit. Maybe he was actually wrong about the NFT question. Because, like, but of course, like, the truth is that he was correct about NFTs being a bubble and just happened to be also wrong about us all dying to AI in, you know, a matter of days. Uh, like, both can be true. You can, you can swing and miss on certain things and you can hit it out of the park on others.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Oh, we, we mentioned it yesterday. Polly Market was tracking the Mom Donnie election in New York City. Um, I think we were tracking it at like 95% and then of course it went to 100% because uh, Mom Donnie did get elected and Rex here has a reaction of Michael Burry uh, or Christian Bale in my, in The Big Short uh, biting his fingernails, saying, "A socialist just got elected mayor in the heart of the financial world at the top of the greatest bubble of all time." How are those, how are those related? I don't know. But yeah, people are not happy. They're moving to Florida, I guess.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't think, I mean, I think, I think a lot of the people that said they were gonna move are waking up this morning and seems, you know, we'll, we'll see. The, the big issue for New York State from a uh, tax revenue standpoint is, is there's, they don't actually need a million people to leave for it to have a material impact on budgets. Like if like a certain...

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the question, I, I, I think people, people overestimate how communist New York can become in a year and underestimate how communist New York can become in a decade. And so I, I generally think that people are freaking out thinking that there's gonna be a 45% wealth tax next week. Uh, we'll see. We'll see what actually gets put in place. Uh, but good luck to all the folks over in New York City. Uh, the market uh, seems to be liking it according to High Yield Harry. How are the markets doing today? Oh, we're ripping. The NASDAQ is up 1.15%.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  We should be in white suits.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Bitcoin's up 3%.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  After last week, we should be in white suits.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  The Dow Jones is up 0.6% and, and High Yield Harry said Zorron's America.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  Bitcoin touched uh, 99.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  99?

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  At 1 a.m.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  That's stressful.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  Thankfully, while we were all sleeping. Uh, the, this post from uh, this, this Aaron Slodov resurfaces email that I think is...

• 31:43John Coogan?

  It's a classic.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, instant classic. Peter Thiel wrote it to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Andreessen, January 5th of 2020.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Said there are many themes that could be developed more here, but let me, let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our polished, policy should be embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why. And from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt, or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system,

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  then one may well turn against it. So feels like basically called, called to a T, you know, the last, or at least like could have easily predicted this type of election outcome five years ago.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Somebody asked me, do I have it here? Where is it? Somebody asked me about, oh, I need to find it in my DMs. Like, you know, should you go to college? Something like that. Oh, I really wish I could find it. And I was, I was kind of noodling on it. It was after we talked about the Palantir, don't even go to college, just go work for Palantir straight out of high school. And someone was saying that I think that they had the opportunity to do it. They wound up going with college or something and they wanted to know my thoughts. And, and there is this weird question of student debt that I think

• 33:38John Coogan?

  gets completely left out of the equation. When, and it's so, so important. It feels like if you If you want to, if your life's work is like you want to be a doctor, like you just have to go to college. You're just not going to get on that track. Just being like, yeah, I've been, I've been cutting up people in my, in my basement for the last month, so I'm ready for surgery. I vibe coded the scalpel. No, it's not gonna happen. You gotta go to college. But if you, but if you do want to be something that's a little more flexible, a little more creative, a little more entrepreneurial, you can probably drop out of college.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  But it depends on like a whole bunch of other factors, like if you are, if you're, if you're rich and you're gonna graduate without any debt, there's pretty, there's a pretty limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out and vibe code apps and do whatever and clout farm and aura farm and do whatever you want. It's like, it's a pretty flexible environment. It just sucks to go through that and then come out with $200,000 in debt. And so, so that's the thing. Then, then there was like the question of like, if, if the, if the Department of Defense is gonna pay your, for your full ride? Like, I don't know what's going on, but if you can get a full ride and you can get no debt, well then,

• 34:59John Coogan?

  then it's probably worth going, but also if you're so elite that people are just throwing money at you to go to college, you can probably take that money and not, and just teach yourself and not go to college. What, what do you think about that framework? Like this idea that, that, that like, that the, that the actual debt is a very important factor into like, is college valuable? I feel like so many people boil it down to like, college good or college bad as opposed to like, college a good bargain or college a bad bargain?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I don't think it's that, uh, under, like underrated, the debt question. It seems like, yeah, obviously, like if, if, if you're not gonna take out any debt to go to college, then it's like basically just like, have a good time for four years.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  And it's like, yeah, there's like the, the cost of like your time, but it's like, you know, you're young, it's not that big a deal.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. It, it does feel like we're not making a lot of progress on it.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that the...

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  The people that go to college, take on debt and then get a job that doesn't really require a college degree, just requires some amount of agency.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  Like really kind of shoot themselves in the foot.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder what would happen if we deregulated some of the tracks that require college? Like if, if, like, it is extremely hard to become a lawyer without going to college. Because in order to take the bar, you have to have a, you have to have a degree from a law school and in order to go to law school, you need to.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  Is that true?

• 36:32John Coogan?

  There is a loophole where I, I believe if you are studying under, if you're like mentoring under a lawyer, they can advocate for you, something like that. But in general, do you know?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it depends on the state. So what you're saying is true for New York, Maine and Wyoming.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Where you can have an apprenticeship. Um, some states, uh, you don't need that or a degree.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  You can just go take the bar? Like I could just walk in and take it and become a lawyer?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Basically, well, well.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  You need to do an apprenticeship.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  No, that, yeah, wait.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure in many states.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Under a lawyer or judge.

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Some of them, it's just a lawyer.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  And then some of them you need to go to law school.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. So i- in general, like it is a regulated industry. Uh, let's read from Brandon Jacoby.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Brandon Jacoby, Jacoby from Deep, he says.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  Before, before we ta- tell you about what Brandon Jacoby said, we gotta tell you about his favorite tool, Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Let's hear from Brandon Jacoby. What did he say, Jordy?

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Jacoby says, as someone who had the decision to start a job at Cash App and get a big tech salary or, or go further into debt to do my fourth year of college financials is a big factor.

• 37:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  And, uh.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  I think it, I think it is, it, it just feels like it's, it, it does get reduced a lot. And I think that there's this interesting thing where like, there's almost like a, ah, there's like a inverted U sort of bell curve thing going on because, uh, if you can get the full ride, then you might want to drop out and just go straight into entrepreneurship because you're cracked. But if you're not so good that you can go to the Ivy League for free, but you can go to the Ivy League. But you don't have to pay, then it's worth it. But if you do have to pay, then it's not worth it. And it's more of like this big matrix than just like, is it good or bad and how much does it cost?

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing, school is a way to buy time to figure out how you want to spend your time. Like with with Branda Jacoby, like was doing graphic design as a teenager. And so the opportunity to go work at a company like Cash App instead of finishing college made a lot of sense.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  But if you don't know how you want to spend your time and how you want to spend your career, how you want to start your career, then school, I think a lot of people are just doing it to kill time. So they're not just sitting somewhere.

• 39:05John Coogan?

  Do you know that there is a job in tech, in venture capital, where the number of, it's extremely prestigious job. And this year, the number of job openings for that role has doubled. Do you know what I'm talking about? The job I'm thinking of is steward of Sequoia Capital. It's doubling in size. And if it keeps doubling, there could be thousands of positions.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  As a steward.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  In just a few years.

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Famed venture capital.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  Exactly. So it doubled from one steward, Roloff Bota, to two stewards.

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Alfred Lin and Pat Grady. Next year, if it doubles again, we could see four stewards.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Then eight stewards, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, one twenty-eight.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  Eventually, all.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Every single human.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Entire human race.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Will be stewarding Sequoia Capital. Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  And Roloff certainly understood compounding. He went on Jack Altman's podcast, Uncapped, and said that there is a lot more talent than really interesting companies to be built. And I think we're spreading a lot of that talent thin right now. Venture is a return free risk. And Sheil Monat says, and with that comment, he's out.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  This reminded me of Mark Leonard's from Constellation, some of the comments that he made on that investor call a while back, shortly before he took a step back from Constellation. But. Very different situations.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Did you see Rolf Winkler from the Wall Street Journal taking shots at Roloff Bota on the timeline? Sarah Guo, friend of the show, is very happy about this. She says, congratulations to my better half. Pat Grady, the new senior steward of Sequoia, along with the wonderful Alfred Lin. Investing firms that must be led by great investors. Sequoia's motto at one time was, we are only as good as our next investment. If that's true, the firm is in good hands. So she is talking about Pat, who has invested in ServiceNow, Zoom, HubSpot, Okta and Snowflake, and then Harvey Open Evidence and OpenAI in the AI era.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Pretty solid portfolio. That's some good stuff. But Rolf Winkler comes in from the top rope and says, Roloff, he led a $300 million round into Bird and a $250 million round into 23andMe. Both are zeros at this point, are they not? Are they not?

• 41:58John Coogan?

  And Sean McGuire fires back.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  Scott Kupoor fires back as well. Scott Kupoor says, is it too much to ask that WSJ reporters who cover finance actually understand the asset classes they report to report on? Roloff Bota and Sequoia are world-class investors who have generated amazing returns for the LPs. VC is not a downside minimization asset class.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is 23andMe did go public. Bird did go public.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't know how much secondary they sold.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Not even secondary, they could have just been selling.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Well, Bird went public too, right?

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Trying to figure out.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  It might not have been that much capital incineration. But yeah, I mean.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  I highly doubt.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  The whole, the whole job is incinerating capital, baby. You gotta be burning. You gotta be making, you gotta be ripping wild checks every once in a while. It's, it's totally, totally acceptable.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Sean says, Sequoia distributed over 50 billion while Roloff was running the, was running Sequoia US since 2017. One of the first things Roloff coached me on when I joined Sequoia was to look at each fund's why write-off rate. Any fund with a write-off rate below 40% wasn't taking enough risk.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  That's interesting. They, they, I, I feel like Sequoia also has a stat on their, on their page that's like, like 97% of the companies are still in business. Don't they have some stat like that?

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  So there, there, there's something a little bit like, uh, in the, in the math that I'm, I'm struggling to square.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  So Sequoia led one round in Byrd at a billion dollar valuation.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  They, they then invested another time at two billion.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  But the company IPO'd at 2.3 billion, which means their effective valuation was like somewhere in the middle of one and two. So at least at the IPO.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  Which of course had traded down. They would have been up on that investment.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Are they in Vanta?

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Sequoia?

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, of course they are.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  God, you're so lacking. The automated compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  I was still running the numbers because they also did a series B at two and a half billion. So they, they did a few rounds back to back. They were obviously were, were betting big.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, I think they, they, they, I'm sure they ultimately did.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'll, I'll defend, I'll defend Rolf Winkler. I think it's funny that he's taking shots. He's just out there talking trash. What's wrong with that? Uh, Ryan Peterson gets to talk trash. Ryan Peterson says Sequoia passed on Flexport so many times that I don't really care who runs the place, to be honest. And Sean McGuire says, we love you, Ryan, and we're dumbasses all the time, especially me, which is funny. Uh, but you know, people get to, people get to have fun either way. Um.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Scott, Scott Kapoor was firing shots.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So we read this one. He's, he's, he's, he's firing back and forth. Um, he's, he's defending. So yeah, I mean, Scott's question is like, is like, should, is like, Uh, is like, should the Wall Street Journal reporters understand that, uh, that they take roll offs, uh, or they take write offs? Um, and that's maybe not what Rolf is doing. Like, he might just be talking trash. Like, he might actually understand it. He might be like-

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  Very possible.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  He might be like, yeah, like-

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't like those guys.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, there's some, here's some salt in that wound. Like, I'm still gonna rub it in. There's nothing, there's nothing about that post that says that, uh, Winkler does not understand-

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  You could reply to the post and say, "To be clear, I understand finance."

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I understand it. I'm just talking trash, like, you know? Um, but, uh, there is a risk of, of, of, uh, legacy media, uh, not understanding the asset class. It does happen every once in a while.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the big, big one recently was the Financial, Financial Times had this sort of breakdown on, on, uh-

• 46:10John Coogan?

  It happens all over the place. Uh, and, and certainly, this is not like a great look for the Wall Street Journal because it, it, it doesn't, it doesn't read as, he should have just said, "That guy sucks."

• 46:22Jordi Hays?

  We should, uh, if we can do anything, we love the Wall Street Journal, we love Sequoia Capital, if we can do anything to kind of bridge, bridge the divide.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  Bridge the divide.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  We're here, we're here.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe we can get both the Wall Street Journal and Sequoia Capital on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. That might be-

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  Find some middle ground with graphite.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  With graphite.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Ryan Peterson also followed up and said, "Cluly should have pivoted to an AI lie detector bot. Write it to your video calls and it adds a bigger and bigger Pinocchio to the other participants' faces."

• 46:59John Coogan?

  I mean, it, it, don't give Roy Lee any more stunt ideas.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is a banger.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  He's such a, he's such a good stunt marketer.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  Roy had a, Roy had a, a great response to, uh-

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't actually read this.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  -that we had yesterday. He said, "Explaining the Cluly pivot and brief history. Nine months ago, I built Interview Coder, an undetectable, translucent desktop layer that lets you cheat on lead code interviews. That's crazy? That was only nine months ago? Is that real?

• 47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  It feels like a lifetime ago.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:27Jordi Hays?

  I knew it had viral potential and I, and posted about it constantly until I did go viral. Then I did it again and again and again, and then it made me $1 million in profit. Holy F. Apparently, you can build a GPT wrapper, go- Very viral and become a millionaire. Could I do it again but bigger? So I started Clouly with two big questions. Where else could this overlay be useful outside of lead code interviews? Could, can I keep getting this much attention? The second answer came immediately, yes. I'm very good at getting attention and thanks to the attention, we got hundreds of thousands of users ridiculously quick. And we're able to use the data to figure out that our stickiest power users were using it in meetings. So we just built for that. The deeper learning though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one thing I would say is the, the website copy is framed as an AI note taker, but it's still leveraging that functionality that Tyler is so dependent on. Or historically has used to, you know, if we put him on the spot like Tyler, what's the capital of Nigeria? Uh, let me think about that for a second. Uh, Abuja. There you go. See, that's, that's clearly in action. But he says, no other tech startup has ever been able to do this reliably or at this scale. It's really not lock in. Most importantly, if done right, it works to grow companies.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Interview coder proved it and can you clearly continue to prove it growing faster than ever in a saturated space? The world is vast. There are tens of millions of people in meetings every day and 90% of them don't know what an AI note taker is. The market is big enough that you can be the most controversial person in the world and still win. And as long as you deliver the magic moment to the user. So, um, yeah, I would not be surprised if they are out marketing all of the other companies in the category, even if it is competitive, but thoughtful response.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  I have more to talk about here. I wonder this idea of, uh, can I, what do you say? Uh, the deeper learning though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality. Like, what does that actually mean? Does that mean, like, his, his, his claim here is almost like organic virality is, is effectively high ROI marketing, low dollars in, high dollars out. It's just great ROI and to do that organically.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Consistently for a long, long time is very, very hard. It's very hard. And the folks that wind up doing it, like when you think about Mr. Beast, it's like, that's his full-time thing. That's all he does. And I wonder, I don't think it's necessary that, that in 10 years, we could be looking at clearly the, the AI note taker for meetings. And yeah, they still don't run Google Ads. They just do stunts and people are still, can't get enough of these stunts. I, I just, I have to believe that this is a marketing tool and not a permanent piece of the infrastructure.

• 50:48John Coogan?

  Versus like, you talk to the Ridge Wallet guys, they're like, we are good at buying performance ads and we have been for a decade and we will be for the next decade.

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  I don't know that that's like something that you can just be like, yes, let's scale our, let's scale our organic viral content forever. Like it has, I, I feel like it caps out, but maybe it doesn't.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I think they're going to run that test.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. It, it does feel like as we tracked the stunts throughout the year, the quality and the effort going into them, and even some of the creativity was, was not deteriorating. Like I would say the team was executing at the same level or better throughout the year. And yet the impact got less and less and less because.

• 51:33Jordi Hays?

  You're saying for us?

• 51:34John Coogan?

  For clearly.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  For clearly. What I'm saying is like.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  Uh, clearly like the first stunt.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that's the issue of like, things that go viral organically. Over time, they, the effectiveness kind of deteriorates. People do get, like, if you scale organic, like eventually you're, you've, you will saturate that market.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Also with rage, with rage bait marketing, it's like, once I've been enraged, I, it's harder to get me enraged the third or the fourth time. Whereas.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  If you show me an ad for a value prop, you can like hit me with that ad again and again and again. And it's probably similarly effective. But if you've gotten, if you were the type of, like, remember, there was a moment where everyone was mad about Cluey. Like truly, like it was, the timeline wasn't turmoil. Lots of people were chiming in. It was this big wedge issue. You were either for it or against it, but a lot of people were against it. Like the people that were against it, they were rage baited successfully in March.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  And then a little bit more in April and then a little bit less in May. And then more recently, like they just, the rage bait doesn't work on them anymore.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Because they're like, oh yeah, that, that, that thing that I don't like, because I've made my call on it.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  But to Roy's point, there's so many people that have never.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Never been enraged.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  Have never been enraged, but they have never, never had the opportunity to be enraged by Cluey. I think a lot of their marketing is less rage bait, like on other platforms, when he shared stuff. It seems much less rage.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Oh, I completely agree with this. Yes.

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  Much less rage bait focus.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of people, if they see funny marketing and like X is just a really small place.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  Like even back in 2021, building Party Round, like the difference in reaction when I would meet somebody that was like extremely on X versus somebody that didn't use X at all. If somebody was on X, they were like, you started Party Round? Like, no way, blah, blah, blah. And they'd like rattle off a bunch of stories of, of ways that like our marketing had entertained them. And then if you met somebody that was like an Instagram, LinkedIn, power user, they'd look at you with a blank space. And they'd be like, they'd look at me and be like, Party Round? Like you have a fintech company called Party Round? It's just like very different reactions.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, totally. Fascinating. Well, uh, you know who else did some stunt marketing? Julius, uh, the AI data analyst, connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm, I'm

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  Fool me.

• 54:07John Coogan?

  I'm getting like

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  Fooled.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Deeply.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  Can't get fooled again. Iconic, iconic quote by our former president.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  I'm getting, uh, like

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  Fool me once.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  FOMO over this Tyler Cowen interview because we keep seeing, uh, keep seeing transcription, uh, segments hit the timeline. Um, but, um, I can't listen to it because we're live and this seems good. I will listen to this later today.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  I think the way to mo- Sam says, I think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel booking. But you want to do it nonetheless.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  We're getting, we're getting agents that can book you travel, folks.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  I think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel marketing, but you want to do it nonetheless.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  It's very funny. Uh, anyway, um, there, oh, the, the, the Substack X relationship is going all over the place. Have you seen this?

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  So

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  I can't tell what's real.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  It's hard to, uh, so maybe we should just have

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  The real, the, the most recent post is from Chris. He says, even correcting for fake views, traffic to Substack links from X is up substantially. Full post reads, signups, et cetera. Also track, we're so back. Uh, so anyways, I think this is good. I, I, I thought it was very unfortunate that, uh, X and Substack got, uh,

• 55:30John Coogan?

  In such a fight.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  In such a fight. It was bad for all the writers on the platform who are some of the best, right, but the best posters on X. Like their businesses were, uh, impacted by it. I don't really think the two platforms are that competitive. Obviously Substack does want to be more of a, of a, of a social platform. Have a social layer, but I just think X is shockingly durable and I think it, I, I don't, I don't know how much of a threat the social product of Substack is, so.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's interesting is like the, uh, uh, I don't know, the like X had review, I believe was the, was the email newsletter product and

• 56:15John Coogan?

  It never, they never really invested it. They ultimately shut it down. And it's interesting that no other, there's something about like the email and taking the audience with you that's just so revolting to a true social media company. Like if you're a social media company, it'd be so easy for Instagram to have an email newsletter product, or LinkedIn to have an email newsletter product built in, right? And yet they don't, because they want control and they see it as counter positioned. And so for some reason, the folks at Twitter bought Review and were doing email newsletters,

• 56:57John Coogan?

  and then fully pulled back from it because it was just, it just did not make sense for them to keep going. But I don't know. We'll see.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  SoftBank is down 10% in the last five days. Is that good, John? They reported, they just reported strong first half net income of 348 billion Japanese yen.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 57:28Jordi Hays?

  The company's revenue reached 3.4 trillion Japanese yen, underscoring its robust market position. Despite impressive earnings, SoftBank faces challenges. What is this writing? SoftBank faces challenges with financial strength indicators such as a low Altman Z-score. I've never heard of the Altman Z-score.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  Isn't that just relationship?

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  It's a financial model that uses five key ratios to predict a company's probability of bankruptcy.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Wait, what? It doesn't have anything to do with Sam Altman?

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  The Altman Z-score, according to Investopedia, is a financial metric used to evaluate the likelihood that a publicly traded company may face bankruptcy.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  This is the fakest thing I've ever heard. This is insane. Wait, Edward Altman? Is he related to Sam Altman? He was born in 1941, professor of finance at NYU.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  No, the nominative determinism here is so.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  This is crazy. Send this to the group chat immediately. This is hilarious. He's the brother of Stuart Altman, a noted healthcare economist. And Alan, this is so wild.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  I love this. The Altman. Okay, we need to run the Altman Z score on all the Mag7 to understand. I bet they have very, very low scores. Is that something ChatGPT can do? Can you try and and have? You know, like a GPT-5 Pro run the Altman Z score for all of the Mag7? I really want the Altman score. And then we need to come out with the the Altman Z score and then the Altman X score or something. Where it's like, how? How close are they overlapped to with? With Sam specifically? Or like, how big is their contract with Sam right now?

• 59:20John Coogan?

  Maybe this is, maybe this is the true X and Y axis we can work on. How, what is your Altman Z score if you're in the Mag7 versus your? Your, how closely is your business tied to Sam Altman? And is there a correlation there? Uh, that's funny.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Is Sam Altman related to Edward Altman?

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Okay, we have to do more research on this. This is fascinating. Absolutely, absolutely insane. But, but, sorry, back on the, on the X link thing, Aaron.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Back on the link thing, huh?

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, Aaron P. 613 says, here's a list of domains that X has excluded from using the new in-app link viewer on iOS for, and it's apple.com, wayfair.com, grok.com, instagram.com, fb.me, tiktok, v.com, and open.substack.com. And so what does that mean? It's like, it's like, if you click on those, you won't go to the new in-app link viewer on iOS? And so you need a different website for those or something like that? I'm still like confused on like what that list, what this actually implies. But Chris Best shares some sort of emoticon that feels like he's not.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  I have no idea.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Super happy about this. I don't know. Is that why we skipped it?

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, somebody was thinking that the sell-off from SoftBank was tied to the interview over the weekend.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  The pod?

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? Who knows if they're, if they're tied at all? SoftBank is still, you know, up massively, uh, year-to-date.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  But apparently Korean equities have been selling off like crazy. There was a limit down.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  It's terrible.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, which we hate for the Korean retail army.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  Don't like that at all.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  We might have to check in with the Korean TVPN on how they're doing. Have they been going live? We gotta, we gotta check in with them because if they're not going live, they maybe were a bit too long into the chaos.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Captain Nemos is absolutely insane to me that one of my friends hasn't bought the Getty House in the Berkeley Hills yet. Listing price is only $5 million. The perfect techno monastery or at least a rationalist AI dev polycule house. Would be a tragedy if it got in the hands of someone boring. I wish we could, we need more photos on this house. This is a crazy house. Do you know about this house, Tyler? Have you been here?

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I've heard of it. Called the Temple of Wings.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Is this where your polycule meets up?

• 1:01:55Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  It says, can't believe you fools with liquid cash from AI lab tenders let this slip through your fingers. Sad. So I guess someone bought it. Huh. Uh, wait, what, what, what news do you have for us, Tyler?

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, NFM, uh, they are still, so they did a stream five days ago. And before that, the last stream was a month ago. So I think they're slowing down a little bit. They're also not wearing suits anymore.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  They're not wearing suits? Oh no. Well, actually, no, no, no, no, no. I, I, I, actually I like that. I like that because when we talked to them, um, we said like, okay, they're gonna start with something that's like clearly an homage to TVPN. They were drinking the tap water, like they got all the inside jokes. They were like very much like doing our bit. Uh, and then what we talked to them about was like, clearly if they wind up taking it seriously, they're going to shift and change and find their own voice. And it's like when you learn guitar, you know, you might play some covers and then eventually you write a real song. And so, um, I was like super thumbs up on, you know, like put on the TVPN costume, but then over time, find your own style.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  And so I don't know what their, what their ultimate style and their ultimate product will be. Uh, but it was just fun to watch them, uh, come in to the, uh, the live streaming game like a bull in the china shop.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  If you put the technological republic, which is Alex Karp's book, and abundance, which is Ezra Klein and Eric Thompson's book, side by side, says Young Macro, you'll note that the defining bipartisan tendency of the late 2020s is, quote, "We need to become a lot more like China." And with this, we vindicate Nick Land as the only serious thinker to have correctly identified Nietzsche's prescience as that of a supply-side reform pundit. In opposition to the normie right, who read him as a conservative, the continental canon,

• 1:03:52John Coogan?

  who read him as a bad word that I'm not going to say, and as the Anglophone liberal left, left-liberal offshoots of the continental canon who haven't read him. And so what Young Macro is saying is that, is that both the abundance, who you could think about Ezra Klein, this is the left, this is the New York Times, and Alex Karp and Peter Thiel and the Palantir, this is the conservative side, the left and the right, are actually unified in saying, "We need to solve the supply side. We need to reform the supply side. We need to build more. We need to create abundance through capitalism."

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Young Macro, undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers and posters of our time.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  What was your

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  Of course, he actually got, he made sure this post was fact-checked by real Landian neo-deep statists.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you for fact-checking it.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  I love those posts so much, the fact-check ones.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, it's like, makes total sense. This is also Dan Wang's take, right?

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  At Breakneck. It's just like, we basically are getting smoked by China.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Get ready to learn Chinese, buddy.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  We need to be more like them.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  Get ready to learn Chinese, buddy. Get ready to learn state capitalism, buddy. That's basically what he's saying. Get ready to learn Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Interesting post from Sam Altman on Bose Barak took CS. That's a long name. Thoughts by a non-economist on AI and economics. Tyler, you're you've been working a little bit on this. Have you has this entered your research process towards understanding? Are are are like the scale of the build out?

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of that post, I quickly read through it and fully read through the whole thing. But a lot of it's just about like, OK, we have, you know, straight lines on log logarithm like graph.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  If you want to read the whole thing, we can get subway surfers for you set up.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  I need a Minecraft parkour and subway surfers together.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  We get we get. You know what I want? I want to see the straight lines, previously straight lines on log graphs. So show me the there was a period where iPhone adoption or smartphone adoption looked like a straight line on a log graph. Correct?

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Uh, sure.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  There was there was a time when miles of railroad construction probably looked like straight lines on a log graph. And then what happened? I want to know what happened after after it was a straight line on a log graph.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  But I mean, there's never I can never have too much intelligence. I want I always want I'm always I always need more.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  You're insatiable for slop.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, like like like.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  You'll never there will never be enough slop.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Well, I guess energy is a bad example. Yeah. But that's I think.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Because what happened with that? What happened with energy?

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  But that's regulation. It's not that demand really was so bad. I think it's most of that is just regulation.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, and we won't regulate this time, right? No chance? No chance. People are gonna be like, I'm getting to the voting booth and saying like, more AI, for sure. That's what's gonna happen. Yeah, they're not gonna, they're definitely not gonna do what they did with nuclear this time. It's gonna be different.

• 1:07:09Jordi Hays?

  It'll be different. We won't have, we won't have state by state laws.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're not, we're definitely not gonna have state by state laws. Why would we do that?

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  I think, no, no, what, once they see the next model.

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna, they're gonna make, they're gonna make it illegal for Claude to make mistakes.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  No, I, so the Marsha Blackburn thing is amazing nominee to terrorism, that your name's Marsha and you go to the swamp and you just dominate. I love that. But also hilarious because it's the ultimate AGI test. Because if you're OpenAI and you have all these draconian state by state legislations, like on the Brad Gersonner BG2 pod, Sam says, I don't even know how I can comply with this. It's like, get ready to use some super intelligence to figure out how to comply. Right? If you're truly AGI build, you should just be able to say, hey, Kodak's fork my entire organization 50 times, rewrite the code, retrain the models

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  for each state and create 50 new LLCs, 50 new C corps, 50 new nonprofits that are all 150th the size, so that we can actually perfectly, perfectly comply with state by state regulation. Problem solved. It's one prompt.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just need to get, we need the next model to do that.

• 1:08:22John Coogan?

  Yes, the next model. Yeah, the next one's gonna do.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  So once we get that one, then, then it'll solve everything.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Then we're good. We need 50 runes. We need 49 more runes because we already have one, but he can only be the California.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Rune got a shout out on the Tyler Cowen podcast.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  I did. I love that. Both guests. Actually, all three of them are guests.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we have some, some breaking news. Joe Weisenthal, and I just actually want to go through Joe's profile after this, if you want to pull it up, because there's so many, so many, so many good insights. One of the top posters of our time, of course. But the CFO of OpenAI says people are not exuberant enough about AI. Bloomberg has an article, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Fryer suggested the market is overly focused on anxiety about a possible bubble in the artificial intelligence sector and should muster more exuberance about the technology's potential. "I don't think there's enough exuberance about AI when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals," Fryer said in an onstage interview at the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Tech live conference in California on Wednesday. We should keep running at it.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  I got some, I got some exuberance for you right here.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  It's coming. Artificial intelligence. It's coming.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Palantir at 600 times. Uh, earnings is, uh, at a 600 XPE is not exuberant enough for me. I want to see, I want to see four figures.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Four.

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, anyways, this is, uh, trying to think if there's any other, uh,

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, what, what else on Joe Weisenthal's profile do you want to talk about?

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, there, there's a couple, there's a couple others. I'll just scan through. Um, uh, Joe Weisenthal says, not surprised that Bitcoin has fallen so much lately. I've been talking about a Bitcoin bubble for over 10 years.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  Good point. Good point.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Um,

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the bull case for, that's the bull case for, for Palantir.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  There's another one here. Traders think Trump will lose the tariff case at the Supreme Court. Uh, so there's been, uh, some developments on that front. Today, uh, there was a, uh, uh, off, uh, New York, New York City office landlord Vornado Realty Trust is down 3% today in reaction to, uh, Mom Donnie. And, uh, there was that other post that I wanted to cover, uh, from Joe. Uh, he was frustrated because he was asking ChatGPT to do something. And, uh, it was just basically completely rebelling.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  He was saying like,

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  I saw that. That was funny.

• 1:11:10Jordi Hays?

  It's not feasible. Uh, it's not feasible. ChatGPT is basically saying like, sorry, like, I understand your request, but it's not feasible. And he's like, why is it not feasible? Uh, good question, and you're absolutely right to press on that. It is feasible, just tedious to do manually.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  And so it's just like,

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  I love lazy AI. I was just like, I don't want to.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  And and so here here's the thing. Here's the thing. When I get these instances of laziness and I am giving them the maximum amount of money that they that they allow me to give them on a monthly basis, I want to churn.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm like, what's the point of paying you

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Jordi Hays?

  $2,400 a year for you to not do things that you're capable of doing.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Obviously, there's a good reason for that. Rocco's basilisk. You got to be nice to the AI because eventually it's going to be in charge. And if you're bossing it around now.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  I've tried threatening to churn lately.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Not going to work out for you well.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  It has not worked so far.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  It's not working now and it's not going to work in the future.

• 1:12:12Jordi Hays?

  I thought I thought it might work.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  In the rock.

• 1:12:15Jordi Hays?

  I literally said recently in a chat, if you do not do this.

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  Don't do this. You need to apologize.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  If you do not do this, I will churn immediately.

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  You need to apologize.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  It completely called my bluff.

• 1:12:25John Coogan?

  That was rude. It called your bluff.

• 1:12:27Jordi Hays?

  Joe Lonsdale replied to Joe Weisenthal and said, LOL, OpenAI working on its margins.

• 1:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay, nerds, do you realize how much all this energy costs? We need the chatbots to be lazier.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  It's funny.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:12:45Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Bitcoin has now performed worse than US Treasuries in 2025.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, this this this Joe Weisenthal post about the laziest OpenAI thing. Joe Lonsdale actually quoted it and said, LOL, OpenAI working on its margins. Okay, nerds, you do you realize how much all this energy costs? So funny. Yeah. So you said you wanted to move on to Bitcoin? Is that right?

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I just I just I just covered that.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Bitcoin just kind of like like round tripped, right?

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Suspended cap went pretty hard on pretty much every company in the Mag7. He said Meta, SHITTY, Frontier Model, No Cloud Share, Culture is F. Microsoft, Sensible Approach to Azure Buildout.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  What do you wait? So on Meta, what do you think the probability is that they launch a GPU cloud in the next five years or two years even? Or like a cloud like like AWS? So we have AWS, GCP, and Azure, but then Anthropic and OpenAI are also in the in the like the cloud business in terms of like selling inference, selling their models.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Like Meta has all this infrastructure. They've never done cloud hosting, but it just seems so logical that they could get into that market.

• 1:14:03Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  Even Nvidia has been talking about like, oh, we're going to build a like an inference, like, like cloud, like our DG, DGX cloud.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Seems greater than 50% chance.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  I put it at, I personally put it at like.

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  Do you mean like selling inference or like renting like the actual like?

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So, so they have a ton of, they have a ton of GPUs, right? They might have Slack capacity in the future. They might get caught in a glut. They also have a, a, a good llama, a, a good model, Lama four. They might have a better model soon. Lama five or whatever they're wind up building and they, they just, they have the ability to serve all sorts of stuff because they have a lot of infrastructure.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I think that's like very high, right? Cause it seems like they're not going to do open source. So it's like, why are they making the model?

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  How high is it? Because they've literally never done enterprise, never done B to B. It's like a completely different motion for the company. Uh, it's, it's highly competitive with Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Like it would be a huge departure from their core business. I don't know. I, I can see it not happening. Anyway, do you want to run through the rest of this?

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty aggressive takes here, but entertaining.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  But do you think Apple is going to look, look smart for sitting this one out? Google is going to be the biggest company in the world by the end of 2026 in suspended capitals, uh, opinion. So, um, good luck to them.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in other news, Pinterest is down 22%.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  22% is where it landed.

• 1:15:46Jordi Hays?

  They had an earnings miss and a weak forecast. Market did not.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  I wonder.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Like it.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  I wonder.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Kind of tough right now. You can be, you can be and your stock will go down and you miss and your stock goes down.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Pinterest is 17 billion.

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Lose, lose.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Dollar company. Um, I wonder how it fares next to something like Reddit. So Reddit's twice the size market cap wise. Um, and I have to wonder, but the PE ratio, Pinterest is a, is at a 10 and Reddit is at 111.

• 1:16:20Jordi Hays?

  How does this make any sense? What's going on?

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  Well, Reddit is like the AI data broker company and Pinterest is like, kind of just getting slopped up. Like, if you've actually gone on Pinterest, uh,

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm sure Reddit is headed for the same future.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  I don't know. For some reason Reddit's been able to like, hold on. I, I, I don't know, but very different narratives would be interesting to dig in. Um, would be interesting to think about where Pinterest goes in a post-AI future. Uh, the product, I would, I would use it to go and find inspiration for, uh, like, brand design and colorways and different stuff like that. And the AI slop was infiltrating, like, pretty quickly, and it was very frustrating because-

• 1:17:02Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of new Reddit, like, written content is AI?

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Because-

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  It's possible it's extremely high, but it's siloed. Like, I want to believe that, it's just like, the same question as like X. Like, on X, it should be the easiest thing to AI, right? Hundred and forty characters, two hundred and eighty characters. Like, it's super easy. And yet, what percentage of the posts that you actually read and interact with do you think are AI? Like, one percent, right?

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. On, on, on X now-

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, on X.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  It's, feels like every third post-

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  That I read is written by-

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  I, I don't feel that way at all. I feel like, maybe it's because of, I feel like it's more like my following tab. But I feel like I'm seeing like, a Joe Weisenthal post, I know he's not using AI. Then I see a Joe Lonsdale post, I know he's not using AI. Then I see Brad Gersner post, he's not using AI. Then I see Tyler. I watched Tyler post, he doesn't use AI for his posts. I see a you post. I, I, I, like, when I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'm seeing people that are just not using AI for whatever reason. There, it's not, it's like, it's just not, that's not the, that's not the point. And that's not like, the whole structure. And so, um, he, I don't know. I, I would imagine that certain subreddits are tight enough where it's very easy to clock if they've been, like, taken over by AI.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  There would be value to that, but I don't know. Anyway.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, without further ado, our first guest of the show today.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  How you doing, Cliff?

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:18:40Jordi Hays?

  What is happening?

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Are you in Australia?

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Can you hear me all right?

• 1:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, we can hear you now. John, John, John asked if you were in Australia, it might be a silly question.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  I am in Australia, yes. Got it. How you doing?

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, yeah, give, give us a super, super excited to have you on the show. I know, I know you have a bunch of product updates to talk about today, but catch us up to speed on the latest at Canva, the shape, the shape of the business today, all that good stuff. Because I feel like every, you guys are maybe a bit quieter on our corner of the internet, but every month or so, people realize how much revenue you guys are doing. And it's always pretty shocking numbers. So we're super excited to chat.

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're in Sydney, Australia. We like to be quiet achievers over here. Business has been going well, really well, actually. We are about 260 million monthly active users. We're close to here, close to

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Hit that goal.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  Four billion in revenue.

• 1:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Four billion of revenue.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Well, close to, close to.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Close to, close to.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  Profitable company for eight years now, growing high 30s.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  Business keeps trucking along. We've got an amazing team, building amazing product for our amazing customers. And we just focus on delivering user value and really feel by building the best product possible and delivering as much customer value as possible. The good things like the users and the revenue comes quite naturally. So we've been investing hard, obviously, last couple of years. I think the world shifted under every established technology company with AI. We've had to kind of figure out what does that mean in this new world? And where we've landed is it's really just reinforced our mission to empower the world to design, to create anything, design anything and publish anywhere. And that's evolved and now it's easier and better than ever. And we're owning more and more of the workflows, helping organizations create on branded content,

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  on brand content at scale, helping them deploy, understand how that content's performing once it's deployed and, and really facilitating that feedback with. So yeah, it's been fun, fun times.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  Internally, like walk us through your kind of thought process around the opportunities or even competitive threats around Gen AI over the last few years. Cause from my point of view, it feels like. Gen AI is is a uh is just an acceler is is like could be extremely meaningful like um accelerant to your guys' business. It just makes it easier to create cool things uh on your computer. It feels very aligned to the core business. But how have you guys thought about it over time? Did you feel like you were caught off guard or were you experimenting early? Like, I'm curious to know what the what the development cycle's been like.

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  We weren't caught off guard. We kind of knew this was coming and we were working on AI design in a more structured programmatic ML way for like a long time before the the image models came out. The speed at which those image models came out and and got really, really good, that's what kind of shocked us and with new methodologies. Um, that led us to acquiring a company called Leonardo. We really needed to infuse the AI DNA into the company and we really needed to accelerate our sort of roadmap in that area. And so we acquired an AI company. We actually acquired an AI company for background removal about five years ago. So we very much knew it was coming. It was just the speed at which it

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  hit and scaled was a bit of a surprise to us. Um, we think we caught the wave well. Um, it really, as you said, it's an accelerant for what we can do. So we create videos, we create social graphics. Um, we recently just launched the world's first design model that actually generates layered designs that you can edit. Um, and then when things like you're creating a video, we set out the timeline and the storyboards and you can generate AI clips within that. So you can essentially prompt, create, upload images. And actually, although the great video models and whatnot that are coming out now really help our customers achieve their goals better than ever before. So we have kind of two-pronged approach. We work with the world's best models, um, and world's best AI companies. And then

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  where we've got a strategic data advantage and we've got strategic insights, like when it comes to design, that's where we build our own models and how build our own foundational models.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  What about on the product side? Um, there's this interesting dynamic in, I feel like, most design pieces of software where uh they start as discrete.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  Applications and they all kind of bleed together like eventually I think like you can technically edit video in Photoshop and you can design a thumbnail for YouTube video in After Effects and like like the entire Adobe suites kind of bled together where they can all do the same there's like overlapping features and I'm wondering about how you think about creating content with AI is that just something you need to stuff into all the existing applications or do you need a new like a new application that can be like AI first and then maybe you add the features to the other applications but do we do we need like a specific new application for generative AI?

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  So I feel like this is almost a planted question because this is something we think about a lot um and we've actually

• 1:24:05Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't planned for the record.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  It was not planned.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  We never prepare for interviews. Our audience knows.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I don't even get any normally I get prep questions or something before these things.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  We do it live. We do it live.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  Freestyling um but yeah no so the platform we've built over the last 10 years is actually perfect for AI so when you think about it we've built a unified document model so whether you're creating a presentation a social media graphic a long form text document a website a video all of these documents have been built off the same engine right with simultaneous collaboration and everything across all of them then at the found so that's the dock type that's what we call our visual suite up the top at the bottom we have our infrastructure layer so that is things like

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  our digital asset management system it's your brand kit it's it's all the core engine that allows you to share and publish to any platform okay so that's what we had in the middle we've put this AI layer so when you want to create a design let's say I want to create

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  a QBR report like a big quarterly business review for a customer using this data and their brand it calls on your data from Salesforce or whatever it calls on that company's brand kit it calls on your company's brand kit it then understands what you're trying to achieve it then generates it as a presentation and then allows you to deploy that and understand is it getting clicked through blah blah blah blah blah so it's actually connected this entire ecosystem that we call the creative operating system um which is sort of all come to fruition And it's really leveraging that prior ten years of investment to make Canva incredibly powerful design platform. A lot of the other companies, they've built these bespoke products, so they've built a

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  Gen AI image generator, they've built a Gen AI this or that, they've built a presentation tool or a tool to create vector graphics. At Canva, it's all an integrated creative OS, which is really, I don't know if we planned it that well on purpose, but it's just, uh, it's kinda, we can't.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, yeah, it's also, it's, it's nice if you get a little lucky sometimes.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where, where, where, where do you see the, uh, the, the end of the map or the edge of the map of like what you wanna do creatively in Canva? Uh, I'm just thinking about like, if you get really, really crazy into, you know, media creation, you can wind up in a, in a three D modeling software. And like Adobe has Substance and they have that app dimension, but you can go into Houdini or, uh, you know, Maxon products like Cinema four D or Blender. Uh, and it feels like with the, with the AI, with the generative AI boom, you might not ever need to actually go that deep down the stack or go into like an After Effects competitor, motion graphics, video tracking.

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  Like there's so many things that will, that might never be exposed to the user because they're, you're building at a time when the abstraction layer is now rising thanks to generative AI. But how do you think about the long-term functionality, like the stuff that's the furthest out on the prosumer, professional, enterprise level creator frontier?

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, another really good question, another, I feel like planted question, but not planted. Um, so you wanna abstract regular users, knowledge workers, et cetera, et cetera, from all of that complexity as much as possible. If you wanna create a three D graphic, we just launched a three D product just last week.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  Um, so you can now generate with AI three D products in Canva, edit them, rotate them, do all those things. So, um, you can do that as a regular knowledge worker with no design experience. We also eighteen months ago acquired a company called Affinity. They are a professional design suite that has a vector graphic tool, a layout tool and a photo editing tool. We just relaunched that last week as well. That has a million downloads within the first week, so, and it's a hundred percent free for everyone, yeah. That's awesome. And so that's really the craft side. So if you want to get super detailed as a professional creative and create a logo or a vector graphic or get really down to the pixel manipulation side of things,

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  that's what Affinity is absolutely incredible for. And then it seamlessly integrates to Canva. So you can push that vector graphic into Canva for the rest of your knowledge workers to use within the organization. So you can create templates, you can create them in Canva or you can create them in Affinity, push them into Canva and then scale them throughout your organization. So these two things work hand in hand. Um, and you really want the power of those tools if you want them, but most people that aren't professional designers don't want that power and they don't want the complexity that comes with that foul power.

• 1:28:56Jordi Hays?

  What is sentiment like within the community at Canva around AI broadly? Um, curious if, if certain types of users are much more optimistic and excited about new AI features versus maybe like traditional, uh, traditional graphic designers, but what, what's the general feeling around, uh, the technology today?

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  I think people, when they wake up in the morning, they don't wake up and say, I want to create a social media ad. Or they don't wake up and say, I want to create a presentation.

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes I wake up and I think that, just to be clear, but.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Not, not an ad, not, but like people, people create an ad because they want to grow their business. People create a presentation because they're a startup wanting to land that pitch deck and get investment funding. So they, they, they wake up in the morning with a goal and what we're evolving our business to be is a company that helps people achieve their goals, not just create a design. And AI has accelerated our ability to do that, like a million times.

• 1:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  You're the COO. Give me some best practices for acquiring companies. Post-merger integration, what makes it successful? What are you watching out for? What are the pitfalls? What are the nightmares that you've heard anonymously from your mentors about what can go wrong when a large scaled software company like yours acquires another software company? And the integration doesn't go quite right. What are you looking for?

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  So we've acquired ten companies now, about ten companies, um of various scale. I think it comes down to the founders and I've done my last three acquisitions on the balcony of uh my favorite pub. And so I honestly like.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  On the balcony, so it's like if this doesn't go down, you're going over.

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  In the.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  You're one of those guys. You're kind of like old uh old patty down at the pub is gonna throw you off break your legs if you don't do the deal.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, yeah, yeah, kind of. We're not threatening anyone. We're not threatening anyone. But like, you've got to get the cut of the jib of the founder you're acquiring. What are their motivations? Why are they in it?

• 1:31:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  Does one plus one equal ten? So the companies that we find best to acquire, they've got an amazing piece of technology, they've got an amazing founder. And that founder wants to get the power of what they've built in way more hands than their current distribution channel. So if we can plug the power of their technology and team into our distribution channel, one plus one equals ten. And you can see if they get a glint in their eyes when you talk about that. Uh and and it's that glint in their eyes and just deeply understanding their motivations that is gonna make it successful or not successful. If they're just after a quick exit, that could be fine if you're just after technology or just after their customer base. But if you don't deeply understand the founder, and that's why I don't have an M and A team, like we do have an M and A team, but we don't have a

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  head of M and A because I feel when you're acquiring companies, it is so deeply personal. And the person that's gonna sponsor the success of that company, once it joins your company, needs to be involved in that process and they need to, they need to be the ones making the decision. And when that's delegated down, I feel that leads to a lot of um carnage. And most of the uh most of the founders that we've acquired and and some we've acquired like eight years ago are still with us today and and are in leadership positions in the company. So I think that's sort of testament to the success of a lot of the acquisitions we've done.

• 1:32:40Jordi Hays?

  It's very cool. What's the uh chat wants to know the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I love fishing shit, yeah.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  Ah, some big ones. Oh, you should see this thing. I've got this, um, whale above this as well. I've got all this stuff in this one, one shop. Look at that, yeah.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Love it. Do you have any Violet Crumble on you right now?

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  No, no, that's not the best Australian chocolate.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  It's not? Oh, I always think of it as the, the pinnacle. It's my favorite, it's my, it's my favorite chocolate and, uh, and it just happens to come from Australia.

• 1:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, amazing. Uh, well, chat, chat loves you. It's great, great to finally meet and congratulations on all the launches. Uh, the scale at which you guys are operating is, is, uh, really incredible and it's, it's super fun to chat.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  Appreciate it, guys.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Cliff.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Uh, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, Search Every Byte, Serverless Vector and Full Text Search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, ten X cheaper and extremely scalable. Our next guest is Jerry Murdock, the co-founder of Insight Partners. He served as Managing Director until April of 2011. Led investment strategy and developed many of the firm's portfolio investment. Jerry, are you in the restroom waiting room? Are you in the TV altar room? Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jerry?

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:34:00Speaker 04

  I'm really good.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  We're super, super excited to meet and, uh, and chat. Why don't, why don't you give a quick introduction?

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  What is venture capital?

• 1:34:10Jordi Hays?

  What is growth equity?

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  What is growth equity? No.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  What is investing?

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I would, I actually love to know a little bit about your journey, how you wound up, uh, co-founding Insight Partners. It's obviously a firm everyone knows, but I'm not sure everyone knows exactly the earlier story here.

• 1:34:27Speaker 04

  Early story? Well, it's because I'm old, that's why. But where, where do you want to start?

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe, uh, the moment you-

• 1:34:36Jordi Hays?

  When did you know you wanted to get into asset management?

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I'd love to, I'd love to know just the, the, the minutes before you sign the, uh, incorporation documents. That's always interesting.

• 1:34:47Speaker 04

  Uh, okay, so Jeff Horn and I were, um, Jeff was an associate at a big venture capital firm called Warburg Finkus.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:56Speaker 04

  He didn't even have an office. He had a desk under the stairs. Um, I was a consultant and we had this crazy idea to start a company called Open Vision and we wrote a business plan. And the partner, Bill Janeway, said, "Well, if you can recruit the president of Oracle, I'll fund it." And at the time, the president of Oracle was a guy named Mike Fields that worked for Larry. And, uh, and Mike said, "Well, I think Larry's gonna fire me, so I'm open to it." And then a month later, Larry fired him and he became our CEO and Open Vision merged with Veritas in a 60-40 merger and was worth 30 billion in 1999. And that funded Jeff and I into Insight.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  It got you into business. Why did he get, why did he get fired?

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  What's the story there? Was he coming for Larry's neck?

• 1:35:43Speaker 04

  You're, you're gonna, Larry, he'll tell you why he fired him, but Larry, Larry has his own reasons, you know?

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, and then, uh, yeah, take us through a little bit of the journey on like the early Insight Partners, uh, days like, uh...

• 1:36:01Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I just wanna hear, I just wanna, I wanna hear your craziest stories from the 90s. You have some crazy stories yourself. What, I mean, uh, I mean, what a, what a wild, uh, decade and you were... What, what was the timing overlap between, uh, your guys, the, the IPO you mentioned and founding Insight Partners? Did Insight, like...

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so. Insight, if you look at the website, we say January 1, 1995.

• 1:36:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Speaker 04

  In truth, we, we shook hands in August of 94. We funded the very first company December 30th, 94, so we said, "Okay, January 1, 95." But we didn't close the first fund until July of 1996. Um, we were investing friends and family money in what became the first part of the portfolio. And, uh, we had an advisory board, because we didn't have any credibility, right? Jeff and I both had acne, he was 30, I was 35, we were, we didn't really know much about what we were doing, other than we got lucky with Open Vision. Um, but I, uh, I lived in Aspen and I still have, I still live in Aspen.

• 1:37:14Speaker 04

  And I, um, was involved in the Aspen Institute and I invited a bunch of people to join me in a little roundtable and they became my advisory board. So the advisory board for Insight was Eric Schmidt, who was a VP at Sun, a guy named Scott Cook, who was the founder of Intuit. A guy named Ray Lane, who replaced Mike Fields at Oracle as the president. Um, and, uh, those and a few other people, but those guys really gave us their money. They gave us their time, gave us credibility and they helped us succeed.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  What did they, they, they, you said you were, didn't have experience or credibility back then, but clearly to get those kind of people to spend time with you, trust you with their capital. What, what made you guys special? What did they see in you?

• 1:38:03Speaker 04

  I think like you, look at you two guys, you get everybody on your TV show and why are you getting them, right? You guys aren't on 60 Minutes or somewhere else. You guys got personality, you got brains, you got aggressiveness, you got a gong. I mean, that attracts people.

• 1:38:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:18Jordi Hays?

  They come for the gong.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  What's current AUM? Can you share any AUM figures? I'd love to ring the gong.

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere around a hundred.

• 1:38:25Speaker 04

  So, so, so right now it's a hundred and 10, I think.

• 1:38:29Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:38:31John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:38:33Jordi Hays?

  Not every, not every day we get to hit the gong for a hundred, a hundred and 10 billion of AUM.

• 1:38:38John Coogan?

  I mean, we're, we're, we're super, we're super in the weeds tracking how venture funds today are positioning themselves in the AI boom. Folks will say, uh, I'm only betting on one foundation model company, but I love the infrastructure layer. I'm doing some energy investments and then I think there's a lot of opportunity in the application layer. For example, uh, how were people in venture talking about the dot com boom or like the internet boom that like I, it, it was obviously now we collapse it ju- just down to internet or dot com. But back then there had to be dividing lines between themes and, and how was it being discussed amongst venture capitalists at the time?

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  Okay, so let's take insight. Insight, we thought we were really genius and said, we're not going to invest in dot com companies. We're going to do infrastructure and applications, but we're going to avoid the dot com bubble because it's crazy, right? I mean, I sit there and said, look, There's not enough, everybody's on dial-up. You're not gonna do commerce on dial-up. We don't have enough broadband for this to work out. And so we avoided it thinking we were gonna be safe. And we did all this infrastructure deals. Well, guess what? March 2000, the stock market dropped 40% for tech, and we all got killed. Everybody got killed. And so our, our safe strategy was a total failure.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  Everybody went down. And then in 2001 with 9/11, we got trashed. And so we had the worst year in venture capital history. I think our 99 fund returned a whopping 1%, maybe? I think we were top quartile, or basically a break-even fund in 99.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  That was, so break-even was top quartile?

• 1:40:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  That's insane. So were you guys feeling, did you, did, it being top quartile? Were you like, okay, like, that was rough, but we made it through? Like, we, we still look better than, than most of the industry? So we're gonna be able to continue to build momentum? Or was there ever a point where you thought it was over?

• 1:40:46Speaker 04

  No, we just were cheap, basically. We didn't wanna, we just wanted to get every dime we could possibly get back. So we had to work hard on three or four investments from 2001 to 2005, just to get back to break-even.

• 1:41:01Jordi Hays?

  Was that, that was like rolling, rolling up your sleeves and, and like getting operational with the companies to make sure that they could?

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, we're, we're, yeah, helping, helping build a team and, and, and change the strategy for a new world. The one thing we learned from that lesson is that when the boom ends and the crash begins, is that all those companies on the old platforms, the old technology, are not gonna be very attractive with the next boom and the next thing happens, right? So think about web companies in 2008, they were, before that crash, you know, they were looking great. And then mobile companies became what was important after 2010, right? So if you weren't mobile, you weren't very attractive. And I think we're gonna have the same thing here when this next cycle goes down.

• 1:41:49Speaker 04

  There's three major trends, right? We only talk about AI today, but... Crypto, I think, is becoming more and more important. And eventually, not sure if it's five years or 10, but quantum computing will become a major platform. Absolutely. And so it's just, so the question becomes is, when does the crash happen? And then how long does it last? And then when you come out of it, what are the new technologies that all the companies have to be built on?

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  What was your, what was your state of mind in, let's say, 1998, 1999? And then those first few months of 2000? Like, did you, what kind of conversations were you having as the deals and IPOs got crazier and crazier? Was there a sense at any point in your, even, even, you know, friend group and network and advisors that there was another? Was it, was it late 1999 and people were like, we got at least three to five more years of this? Or was there, was there any type of sense or, or real concern about how?

• 1:42:56Speaker 04

  I think it was 90, early 99 or late 98. Jeff Horn and I were walking down Fifth Avenue with two advisors, Bob Rubin, who was former Secretary of the Treasury, and Steve Friedman, who was former CEO with Bob at Goldman Sachs, going to Jack Walsh's office to sit down and listen to him, you know? And both Bob and Steve said, you know, the banks are not accounting for risk. That was pretty big number. They knew, they felt that it was not, they didn't know where the risk was coming from. We didn't know exactly which area. Was it subprime? Was it real estate? Was it corporate bonds? Was it swaps? You know, there wasn't obvious which one of those were the greatest risk,

• 1:43:41Speaker 04

  because all of them were risky. And so we were walking to listen to him. And, and on my way down there, a guy called me and said, yeah, it was, I think it was an analyst at Morgan Stanley, I forget his name. But I said, look, I said, but we're in the bubble. And he says, yeah, but it's an iron bubble.

• 1:44:01John Coogan?

  Iron bubble.

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  So I thought, okay, an iron bubble, I gotta process this. What does iron bubble mean, right? And, uh, and bottom line, what he meant was it's gonna be a iron bubble until it's not. And, and if you're a believer in making money in, in booms, you have to stay in the game till the very end. You can be smart and hedge your bets, but if you bail out too early, you're gonna miss a lot of great returns.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:27Speaker 04

  And so that's what that guy meant by that iron bubble, that it was, you know, it was just gonna be there for a while. And sure enough, it was an iron bubble for over a year. In March of 2000, inexplicably, the stock market shifted, people moved out of TAC and 40% would drop everywhere across the board. And that was like, okay, now we gotta work hard.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  How, how are you thinking about recycling or managing LPs in that year where you're, you are top quartile, but you only return 1%? Uh, are you set up as a fund to kind of, I mean, there were company, it seemed like every company, even if it sold off a ton, they were IPO-ing, they were getting out. So were you able to get some liquidity and then reinvest that? Or did you have to go back to LPs and raise new funds, uh, and kind of restart the whole process? Or were they already kind of bought into giving you another run in 20, uh, in 2003, for example, 2002?

• 1:45:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I mean, I mean, no, nobody was bought into anything. It was a pretty nasty thing that was going down. And so we just had to slug it out with the funds we had, um, which got us through, uh, until we were able to raise the next fund, which of course was a smaller fund. Uh, we had raised Fund Four just about the time of the crash. So we actually had capital, but it was still ugly because we had a bunch of investments that we knew were not gonna be great going down the road. And so, um, we didn't really raise Fund Five until four years later. So it was the four toughest year in venture capital.

• 1:46:09Speaker 04

  And a lot of our people who were started in 95 didn't make it, right? So, I mean, if you look at who started in 95, Benchmark did, and they survived and they did great, but a lot of other funds didn't.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:23Jordi Hays?

  How would, you know, if you were still running a platform venture firm today, like, how would you be currently assessing the market? Because there's a hot debate right now of like, where we're really seeing a bubble, right? If you look at, uh, obviously, there's plenty of companies in the public markets that do, that don't make any sense. There's some, you know, there's hyperscalers that don't, uh, that actually seem priced pretty reasonably. Uh, and then in the private markets, you have, you know, if you're an AI company, you know, you're, you're gonna, you know, probably with a solid team, pretty easily get a hundred X, two hundred X revenue,

• 1:47:08Jordi Hays?

  even if you have little to no margin on that revenue.

• 1:47:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, we don't know what's gonna, what's gonna be the straw on top of the camel's back that ends it. We don't know when. And there's all kinds of political things that you don't want to bet against, right?

• 1:47:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:23Speaker 04

  I mean, we couldn't end up with zero interest rates in March, you know? I mean, you don't want to bet against that. So, um, I mean, a lot of people who bet against the Fed, if you remember that five years ago, or during the COVID times, lost, lost out huge. So, look, anything rational, like, I could say, oh, the laws of physics still apply. You know, I'm on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, where we've got some of the smartest minds in physics and math in the world. Irrational things like bubbles can last a long, long time. And you can say, oh, it doesn't look like a bubble. Well, I hate to say it, but I think a lot of these hyperscalers are gonna regret the CapEx commitments unless they can get out of it. We'll see.

• 1:48:05Speaker 04

  I think what's interesting to me is I think they may be underestimating the, the sort of drop in token price. I mean, I really think that the, um, That the amazing power of the chips and things that Jensen has done is going to outstrip our ability to get electricity to really power this stuff.

• 1:48:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what Satya, Satya's been saying this for over a year now. More power constraint.

• 1:48:36Speaker 04

  I think, I think if you look at the amount of chips he sold and look at it out there, I don't think there's a power available today. They have to find a new source in order to be able to sort of benefit from all this build out. And if there is a economic recession, then the enterprise, the expected enterprise, you know, explosion of AI usage will be delayed, right? And if there's any kind of a sort of major security problem around AI that'll scare off the enterprises, that'll also delay. So I don't think you can, I don't think you can continue the AI boom without Fortune 5000 getting on board. It's not going to happen without that.

• 1:49:19Speaker 04

  And so if there is an economic interruption, a serious one, then the demand is going to, is going to change. That has to happen.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  How do you think about different opportunities to buy assets, buy whole companies throughout a cycle? There's the companies that are, or the firms that are kind of waiting for a crash and maybe going to buy up stuff as after post-crash. There's also firms that are going and buying Fifth Avenue and they want to get the best asset right now. There's other folks who are purely founder bet, pay any price, others much more quantitative. How have you thought about your overall investing thesis throughout tumultuous times?

• 1:50:03Speaker 04

  Well, the difference here is AI is affecting everything. You know, Bezos is right. It it's an industrial bubble, uh, not necessarily a financial bubble, because the value of AI is not gonna not gonna go away. That that is absolutely the future, and it's here now. It just isn't here at scale yet, in my opinion. At least not for enterprise. Um, so I do think that the problem with buying up companies is what are you buying? Is it gonna be valuable, you know, down the road or not valuable? And it depends a lot on the quality of the management. It depends a lot on the technology. And so buying SaaS companies, hoping they're gonna be more valuable in five years,

• 1:50:46Speaker 04

  I I I think that's a questionable questionable strategy. I think you have to think about, like I said, from each, if you assume that there must be some disruption, like if it was a COVID-type disruption where it's, you know, literally a few months, then, you know, and the Fed bails you out, then, you know, people just keep going. The bubble bounces back and it just keeps rocking. If, on the other hand, it's it's it's a serious economic issue. Right now, M2 money supply is all-time highs. So you've got massive amount of capital out there. It's not a liquidity crunch. It's just gonna be a a challenge, you know, with the overall economy.

• 1:51:28Speaker 04

  And then there'll be a liquidity crunch, because the debt that's out there is massive everywhere. So I I I I think here, in this particular case, if you're gonna strategize to buy up a bunch of things after a bust, that's a bad strategy. A, because most of the companies are gonna be first-generation AI, and they're not gonna be the right, how do I say, technology platform, right? I mean, first of all, most people are betting on these large language models. And what we learned at Santa Fe, we had in middle of March, we had the top research scientists from all the hyperscalers, the forty-person conference that I hosted with the scientists. And the thing that came out of it is everyone's too focused on LLMs,

• 1:52:12Speaker 04

  not focused enough on the complexity between the humans training them and the humans consuming them. And I think the secondary part of that is that LLMs Are we're gonna find a new new technology and cheaper forms of of models that are gonna come out. I'm certain that what China did with Deepsea, a release in open source, there'll be many, many more open source models in a year. And you won't need to spend all this money on an LLM. I have a feeling that'll be a multi-model world with lots of free open source models going down the road. So if you buy a company that's based on, you know, foundational models, technology, it may not be so valuable in the next wave of

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  AI.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  Can you bridge this to trade for me? I heard an interesting stat last night that America has more data centers than the rest of the world combined. And it feels like America might actually be winning in terms of industrial power on the data center side, but lacking in many other industrial capacities. How how do you think the way that AI and the AI infrastructure build out is changing in America? How do you think that flows to trade policy?

• 1:53:28Speaker 04

  I'm not sure we I understand or anybody understands American trade policy right now.

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  It's like a kangaroo. It's jumping up and down constantly. Keeps you on your toes.

• 1:53:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I I don't know anyone really, really truly understands it. And I'm not sure policy is the right word. I think I think it's a it's an innovative game that's being played with with trade policy. So I I don't know. I don't know what that's gonna look like in four years. There's a lot of uncertainty. And that's part of the problem, making these long term investments. I think that the data centers themselves, the actual physical properties, you know, are are important and will be important long term. The question is, is, you know, if if Jensen keeps his word and the and the chips are going up by some multiplier every year.

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  How valuable is the chips in the data centers being built?

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Yep, the depreciation is just gonna be crazy.

• 1:54:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, and and so, look, I think the one thing that's for sure about this bubble is different than anything else is that the innovation is real and the innovation is profound. And I think that innovation and what what it's gonna unlock is challenging. And you have geniuses like Elon Musk and others out there that are, um, how can I say, uh, they're inventing so much so fast and they have so many resources. If you think about it, the CEOs of the Magnificent Seven and Sam have a lot of influence on how the world is gonna play out over the next three or four years, right? You could you could add a couple chip guys, you could have

• 1:55:10Speaker 04

  Hawk and uh, Hawk Ton and and C C Way and you could add maybe there's three women that are up and comers, maybe Fei Fei and and Mira and Lynn at uh, Fireworks that could become more influential. But right now, the assets and the power is in the Magnificent Seven and Sam Altman. And those guys are gonna have a an amazing impact on how the world rolls out in the next five years, three to five years. So, I mean, when you think about that, those guys are gonna shape the politics and what's actually happening. In fact, I kinda think that we're in for a a different world where right now we're worried about immigration and we're worried about all kinds of, you know, social issues. I think

• 1:55:54Speaker 04

  in the future, when robots are walking around, we're gonna be more interested in like, wow, how who has who are the AI haves and who are the AI have nots? And I think that better or worse, the Magnificent Seven and Eight are gonna change the political dialogue in this country pretty dramatically within three years. And uh, and I think they know it, which is why there's some pretty good ideas that I've heard about giving every child, you know, a thousand dollars in the stock market, something like that. That could be a great idea. That could be a great idea. I I I heard Jensen and Brad talking about it. That could be very helpful because there will be a have and have not world in America,

• 1:56:36Speaker 04

  and that'll be the primary dialogue, I think, of the future, not the stuff we're going through right now.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  How how have you processed the boom in private credit?

• 1:56:48Speaker 04

  It's going on a long time and I don't think there's enough.

• 1:56:53Speaker 04

  It's so big, it's so profound. I think the banking system in America, you know, because of the rules, they're not really accounting for that risk, right? I mean, in the normal way you would think about it. So, I mean, it depends on the disruption, right? What happened in 2008 or what happened in 2001, that would be challenging for private credit. Big time.

• 1:57:21Jordi Hays?

  Does it, like, where do you put that on?

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  In terms of how the probability that private credit plays a significant role in the next financial crisis?

• 1:57:39Speaker 04

  Well, put it this way, the banks have made these investments and right now, private credit looks reasonably safe, right? I mean, people seem to have enough capability to overcome it. The question becomes is how deep and how bad is the future liquidity crisis? And how challenging is it? How much? And we don't know. So, I don't, I'm not betting that there's going to be another banking crisis. I'm just betting that there's going to be an end to the bubble and there's going to be some kind of recession, whether it's short term or long. Whether it's a crisis or not depends on the nature and the severity of it, right? Right now, it's always a break of trust, right? I mean, what happened in

• 1:58:24Speaker 04

  2008, people had to take the TARP loans because trust was essential. When Hank Paulson told them the story about, about what he was dealing with, and what was basically, you know, forcing all the major US banks to take TARP money, he said, "Look, when you're boiling an oil, you don't ask how hot it is. You just act and you move." And I think he saved the country. I mean, I'm not necessarily a fan of anybody during that era, but I do think he saved the country by restoring trust in the banking system. I don't see private credit being that big of a threat, but it absolutely could play a role.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. What single deal are you most proud of?

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't have to be.

• 1:59:15Speaker 04

  As an investor?

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  As an investor, it doesn't have to be like it generated the greatest return, but something that you look back on, you know, 1995 to 2011 index.

• 1:59:26Speaker 04

  Look, I mean, the current portfolio of AI investments I've done, like Avin, I mean, Sadi Khan is one of the truly great CEOs of the generation. I recommend you put him on your show, but Vinod Khosla and I talked about it because Vinod's one of the large investments there. But Fireworks AI, E2B, you know, Lotus AI, Dynasty, Dynasty is one that I'm really interested in because I just think trusts are something that people like me have used successfully for a long time. And I think entrepreneurs should be using them more often.

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Give the pitch for Dynasty, you know, you can put it, put it simply, but for, for those that are hearing about it for the first time.

• 2:00:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay. So, look, if you've started a company out there and you basically don't have a lot of money, but you've got your shares, you should, you should go put those shares in, whether it's Dynasty or somebody else, you should put those shares in trust for yourself and your family. And depending with your mom or your dad, or, or your wife, or potentially kids, or whatever charity you want to put it in, you should, it's a way of protecting it. And it's definitely a way of taking advantage of QSBS exemption, which came in during Clinton, which Bush, you know, embellished more and which Obama

• 2:00:54Speaker 04

  did more, which Trump did more. Every president since has pushed it. And what's happened as a result, I think, is you've got a lot more startups. You went from about a half a million startups a year in the 90s to close to 5 million startups a year now. And so, for Inside and I think for most other funds, right, I think about 80% of the investments return less than 1.3x. Okay. But that means over 20% return multiples. And those 20% turn multiples, those entrepreneurs. Should be thinking about putting their assets in trust. Um, and not just stock, but also their crypto. Um, you know, and, and, and protect it.

• 2:01:37Speaker 04

  And, and there's lots of reasons why it doesn't cost a lot. Thanks to the dynasty, they're democratizing it. So it doesn't cost a lot. You're crazy not to take advantage of the, of the tax exemption that's associated with.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Well said. Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we could keep talking for hours more, but I really just appreciated the stories and insights and, um, and, uh, we'll have to have you back on again soon.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:02Speaker 04

  Well, well, thanks, guys. And look, you guys are the most fun entertainment show out there. And that's why I'm here. So, uh, keep it going. It's fun.

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. That means a lot to us.

• 2:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Means a ton. Thanks so much, Jerry. Great hanging.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:02:16Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:02:17Speaker 04

  All right. See ya. Bye.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Google AI Studio. Creating AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at ai.studio slash build. Um, our next guest is Shloms, the anonymous poster on X.

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  I've been a fan of Shloms' work for a long time. Always found, uh, the, I don't even know, art, stunts, marketing. It's everything in between. It covers so much.

• 2:02:54Jordi Hays?

  It's always cooking.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  I've always enjoyed it and I'm very excited that we get to have him on the show today. I believe he's in the restream waiting room, but we are going to work. Because he's anonymous, that means voice changer. That means facial recognition. You gotta confuse the AI algorithm of the future so he's undetectable. So I will tell you about profound, get your brand mentioned in chat GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And I will also read this post, which made it in the timeline from Sisyphus Bar and Grill, where it says, oh damn, the highly produced launch startup video starts with an outtake of the founder sitting down from an offset angle. Now I know it's going to be unique and awesome.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  It really is an overused trope, but let me, let me just, let me just steel man it for two seconds. So I was in the business of making videos about startups. Basically, I made a variety of videos. And when me and Ben figured out how to do the extra behind the scenes camera that wanders around while you actually do the interview and then splice that in. Oh, it just takes you from like, you're doing a normal podcast to like, it feels like it belongs on HBO. And it's so satisfying and I wouldn't get rid of it for the world. Uh, and I've, I've, I will defend it to the end of, to the end of days. Uh, although yes, it is truly played out and you should probably at least hit the drawing board.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Live video tracking is the new meta.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, for sure.

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Pace around the room.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  I believe you have a lavalier mic on too. So can you talk and can we hear you? Let's see. Are we, are we getting audio from Jordy on the walk? He's not talking, so I can't tell. You gotta keep talking.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  I gotta keep talking.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Oh, we hear it. We're hearing him. It's working.

• 2:04:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm live.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  You're live.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  This is a new feature we're testing out everyone.

• 2:04:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is live camera tracking with lavs. So I can start to just pace around the room.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Why don't you go take a crack at the gong?

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  I'd love to.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Hit the gong for all the progress that the production team made.

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm hitting the gong for Jerry.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  Okay. Turn down the volume. The, the gong's getting hit. Hit the gong.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Oh, that worked. Good. Okay. We're solved.

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. See, this is good. This is good.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  The menacing walk with spinning the thing. Hey.

• 2:05:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm waiting for schlong.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  What's on that whiteboard? Uh, what's on that whiteboard Jordy? Why are you walking in front of that whiteboard?

• 2:05:25Jordi Hays?

  This one?

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that one.

• 2:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we were just doing some analysis.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. What type of, what, what did you notice over there?

• 2:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, this didn't actually go anywhere.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  You need to, we, we still can't see it. Yeah. You need to walk right in front of it.

• 2:05:38Jordi Hays?

  This didn't go anywhere. This didn't go anywhere.

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  It's interesting. Uh, cause you know, people have been calling OpenAI, maybe it's the next Enron. And if you, if you trace the letters. The E in Enron, there's an E in OpenAI.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  That is true.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  The N in Enron, there's an N in OpenAI. And the R in Enron, the O in Enron, there's an O in OpenAI. And at the end of Enron, it's an N, there's an N in OpenAI.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  And the P in the hay.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  And the P and the A as well, yes. And so, those are the letters in Enron. And there's also letters in OpenAI. And so, you know, I just feel like the connections are a little bit, it's a little bit, it's a little bit obvious.

• 2:06:18Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, we don't believe that. We are.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:06:22Jordi Hays?

  We are as exuberant as ever.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  I am exuberant.

• 2:06:25Jordi Hays?

  When Sarah, when Sarah Fryer said we should be more exuberant, we didn't just listen, we studied.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  I like, someone in the chat was like, was like, he needs to be more exuberant.

• 2:06:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm shocked that, that those are, that those are real quotes.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're wild. Well, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. We might be coming back to Shlooms next, next time, maybe next week, maybe, maybe we'll reschedule. That's the nature of live TV, baby. Let's go back to the timeline. Autism Capital has a post here. They were there, they are claiming that October 6th was literally the top. This was posted in December of 2023. We must find this man and make him our god Nostradamus lives. All-time high.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  This was calling the Bitcoin.

• 2:07:15John Coogan?

  Okay, this is Bitcoin all-time highs. Basically, it was 1,064 days from 2015 to 2017, all-time highs. Then 364 days from 2017 to 2018. Then 1,600, 1,064 days, 2018 to 2021. And then 364 days from 2021 to 2022. The, the pattern would print this cycle's all-time high as the 6th of October, 2025.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  That was the actual. Top for big.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Okay, so I have no idea if this is Photoshop, but this is, this is crazy. This really was the top. Absolute insanity. Of course, uh, it could just go back up next week and then this isn't true. Uh, who knows if this is Photoshop, but uh, it is, it is fascinating like chart analysis. Uh, we need to get, uh, wait, did we ever figure out, what is that called Tyler where people analyze the candlesticks? Oh, technical analysis. Are you familiar with technical analysis?

• 2:08:15Jordi Hays?

  The, with the concept of it, yeah.

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  Technical analysis is like, it's the head and shoulders pattern. So it has to go up.

• 2:08:21Jordi Hays?

  You just, just follow the lines, bro.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but it's not just, it's not just linear regression. It's like, if it goes up and down and then up again, that's the camel pattern and that means it's going to break out. And people have a lot of fun with this. They draw all sorts of stuff all over it. Uh, it's been largely debunked and if you're playing that game, you're probably going to get cooked by like a real team of machine learning. Experts who are doing basically technical analysis at a much, much more, uh, much, much deeper level. But I think we need to bring technical analysis to private markets. I want to see people looking at, oh, the Stripe secondaries. This week they sold down 2%, they're up 4%, that means it's a bullish catalyst. It's going to go through the roof. I want to see a technical and a technical analyst bring the tr- that.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you see there's down around here, but it's actually bullish.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  It's actually bullish. Exactly.

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Prime for a breakout.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Technical analysis, just, just looking at the charts, not even understanding what the company is. Just looking at the charts, that's the key.

• 2:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Ben Sands says stock astrology.

• 2:09:23John Coogan?

  Stock astrology would be good. Uh, China has overtaken the US in cumulative open source AI model downloads. Says A16Z. Oh, we also have some, we also have some updates on the, um, on the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday.

• 2:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Turns out it was built by the Chinese.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  It was built by the Chinese. So a Chinese company came over here.

• 2:09:46Jordi Hays?

  They built a Trina Solar.

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Built this facility and then due to, uh, some regulatory pressure, they were a forced seller.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:56Jordi Hays?

  And then it was taken over by what is now T1 Energy.

• 2:10:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:00Jordi Hays?

  And so everyone was like, wait, we know how to build facilities like this? And everyone got really excited, including

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  Us, yes.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Us. And of course, it turns out that it was actually built by the Chinese, but

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  But I don't have that, I don't know that there's that big of a problem with that, right? Because it's like, it's built in America, that's, that's the important thing.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  So let's study it.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Let's study it, but also, I mean, like, like, I regard TSMC Arizona as like, a win for American dynamism, right?

• 2:10:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was that like run take where he says we should basically just bring over the Chinese.

• 2:10:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll bring over whoever's building the best stuff and build it here. And, and, and there's a whole bunch of debates, like, levels to the debate, like, do you want, like, like, and, and it's sort of a yes and situation, like, I want American workers to build American things and American factories, but also, like, I'll just take a factory in America that's owned and operated by another country, because if, you know, like, there's some geopolitical crisis, like, at least it's within our borders, like, that's a better, that's better than it being halfway across the world, right? Because you just walk over to it and be like, give me the solar panels, which is great.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  But back on the A16Z, they said, A16Z said, China has overtaken the US in cumulative open source AI model downloads.

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  And Louis says, I'm going to make a series of bets on the little guy to start. We are going to be granting out compute up to 100K per project to support new experiments on GCP. If you have an idea for an open source model that you'd like to explore, I'd like to hear from you. So go hit up

• 2:11:42Jordi Hays?

  I DM'd with Louis a little bit yesterday about this project. He's working on pulling together the compute resources, but very excited about this one and it'll be fun to follow.

• 2:11:54John Coogan?

  Well, we have our next guest, Shloms, in the Restream waiting room. We will bring him in to the TV How you doing, Shloms?

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you.

• 2:12:07Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, we did it.

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  This is a crazy, crazy, a non-call. We've had a few, no one's ever sent in such a crazy video.

• 2:12:15Jordi Hays?

  To look at.

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:17Speaker 05

  This, this is just my webcam, I have a very old laptop.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 2:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  I, I

• 2:12:23Speaker 05

  Apparently the technical difficulty was that my display name was breaking Zoom, which I suppose is on brand.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  Whoa, that's super interesting.

• 2:12:30Jordi Hays?

  What is your, what is your display name?

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  Breaking stuff.

• 2:12:34Speaker 05

  Uh, so, uh, the backstory is that I was looking for the longest Unicode character to break Twitter in maybe 2017.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:42Speaker 05

  Which is a very long Arabic, uh, um, sign, um, but then people told me that they didn't like that I was using that. So I looked for the second longest Unicode character, which is a Cuneiform symbol.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so you stack all this up. Yeah, you've been, you've been fantastic at kind of like hacking these systems and, and, and breaking them in a way that, you know, really gets outside the box. Like, yeah, you have seen like the text that goes completely out of your, your UI designer's worst nightmare, basically.

• 2:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so many places I want to go with this conversation. We're, we're super excited to chat. What, uh, what are you?

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  What would you, what would you say you do here?

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, what exactly do you do here?

• 2:13:23Speaker 05

  That's a tough one. I mean, you know, I think a lot of artists are driven by wanting to be an artist, right? And same with founders, um, to connect it back to your, your wheelhouse, um, and they want to be the thing, right? And, and then they try to figure out whatever their angle is. Then there's people who are kind of like driven by whatever instinct or whatever is inside of them. Uh, yeah, this is, this is just me, right? Um, I'm anonymous. This is like a very specific part of me, right? Um, I'm filtering, but I wouldn't say it's a character per se. Um, I've always been driven to break things.

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you like the term?

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  I've always been.

• 2:13:58John Coogan?

  Artist hacker? Does it matter? Is any of this relevant?

• 2:14:03Speaker 05

  That's a good question. No, I don't think it matters. I think artist is a boring and kind of, um, yeah, it's kind of a self-serious term, right? And I don't want to take myself too seriously.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  Let's skip the titles then and jump to the projects. Uh, I always like this question. We asked Gabe Whaley from Mischief. Uh, what is the most underrated project that you've worked on? Something that you are proud of, but maybe people don't already know you for.

• 2:14:32Speaker 05

  Ah, that's a good question. I mean, I think most people know we're from blowing up a Lambo, right?

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. And can you, for those who don't know, can you tell the Lambo story briefly?

• 2:14:42Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  One of my, one of my favorite and most memorable moments from, from that whole cycle.

• 2:14:48John Coogan?

  It was so cool in so many different ways, but I'll let Shlom tell the full story.

• 2:14:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, I think that, um, that project, you know, like a lot of things, you know, trying to ride the, the line between like a satire and a serious, like earnest engagement with something. So that was my sort of take on what was happening in crypto art at the time. Um, but yeah, we physically blew up a Lambo well before that was possible to sort of fake with AI or anything. Took all the pieces to a very involved, uh, videography studio and, and took these like beautiful videos of all of the fragments. Um, and sold those as NFTs.

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  Wow. And, uh, like a postmortem on that project, uh, are, is everyone generally like happy with the way it went? I feel like there's so many, uh, NFT projects where like the expectations of the community get away and people are like, no, like it's going to be a whole metaverse and it feels like, I don't remember you promising that. Is everyone pretty happy with like, they were bought in on an art project and that's what they got?

• 2:15:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I try to make things that stand on their own, right? And I think that stood on its own and didn't need a roadmap. It was a thing that happened and people wanted to own it. I think that was always, you know, what NFT should have been and sadly didn't quite turn out that way.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, no, that, that makes total sense. Um, should we go back to any underrated projects that you think, uh?

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, yeah, underrated project would be cool. And I, and I just wanna, I mean, I think maybe we will get to some of that. The thing I'm interested is like, what's, what's interesting to you about the current state of the internet?

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  Interesting, yes.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and specifically various platforms, like I, I know you from, from Axe, but I'm sure you're active elsewhere. But how, what is your, how do you, how do you rate the, the current internet?

• 2:16:34Speaker 05

  So first of all, prediction markets, you know, you're seeing sort of turning into hyperstition markets. I think there's a lot of artistic potential there that hasn't been engaged with. So pay attention to that space. And, you know, I think you asked earlier if I view myself as an artist. I think that I try to, I try to just do things, right? Like it's, I'm an agentic person, or I try to consider myself one. I think AI unlocks, like unlocks the ability for people to be agentic, right? So I don't, I don't view, like, when people say AI art, they think of entering a prompt and you get an image output. I don't make images, right? Like, that's not what I consider my art, but I do things.

• 2:17:16Speaker 05

  And so I can use AI to more effectively do those things with fewer resources in a more asymmetric way. So it's completely changed my life. I hope I don't sound too one-shotted.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  So, yeah, no, no, no, I completely, I completely agree. I guess, help me resolve this. We were talking to Gabe Whaley at Mischief, not to comp you guys too much, but I, I do think of him as like another person who creates in the

• 2:17:37Jordi Hays?

  An original thinker, original thinker, that's not just not entire, you know, has some commercial element, but is not entirely just, you know, not, not, the goal is not wake up every day and create shareholder value. It's like wake up every day and do novel.

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  Which we would have no problem with. We would actually prefer, you know, if you could stop fooling around with all this stuff.

• 2:17:57Speaker 05

  My real passion is improving the monthly recurring revenue of B2B SaaS. This is my fallback.

• 2:18:01John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that actually true? Do you actually?

• 2:18:03Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Okay, but, but, so, so, so, so here's, here's my question. It's, it's, it feels like, it feels like there are all these really heady questions about AI and slop and what is good and will it one-shot you and paper clipping and it's the most, it's the best time to be a podcaster, a newscaster, like the Dwarash Patel podcast is fascinating. There's so many different ways to engage with it. There's books. Do you feel like the art community is engaging with it in the proper way? Are there, are there more projects coming? Is,

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  is it harder to engage in a critique of AI art? Because it's it is it proclaims to be art itself. And so it's maybe a little bit more complex to tussle with. Or do you think that basically like are artists driving the discussion around the all the trade offs in AI effectively in your mind?

• 2:19:12Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah, I think there are a lot of interesting parallels with like crypto art, right? Because in early crypto art, it genuinely did unlock some interesting things. But then you kind of had an 80 20 or 80% of it was just like kind of boring meta stuff for people who probably shouldn't have been anywhere near that stuff pushing kind of garbage. Right? Um, I think I think there are definitely creators who are doing some insane, just like on a technical level, some things that they couldn't have done before. Then there are a lot of people kind of pushing out kind of slop images that I would say is like a second bucket. Um, and then you have kind of like meta AI art. So like you, you see like in like digital art spaces like Instagram, if you go on your explorer page and you're interested in art, you probably see like a lot of things of

• 2:19:54Speaker 06

  like bounding boxes or just like these kind of uh overplayed motifs about like surveillance or whatever, which you know, there's a time and place for. Um, but yeah, I think I think any new technology that people are interested in like is is bound to result in just uh really boring pontificating about it.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:20:11Speaker 06

  And then like really boring engagement with it. And then like a very small subsection that maybe doesn't get enough attention of people doing genuinely interesting innovative things with, right? And and I'm not the person to do those.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:20:23Speaker 06

  Genuinely innovative things because I'm someone who works within their own constraints of being a fucking idiot. So my, my, my, my game is to do something interesting conceptually about it uh with my own limited toolset and intellect.

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fascinating.

• 2:20:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you made a viral post on on Sora of Sam grilling and eating a Pikachu.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:47Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  How did that, uh, how many, how many shots on goal did it take to come up with, uh, something that, that you felt like was worthy of, of, uh, of sharing or something that kind of broke through the noise?

• 2:21:01Speaker 06

  Well, um, I, it's, it's cool that you, that you talk about shots on goal. Cause I think a lot of this stuff, like I wouldn't necessarily view that as an art piece. I think that maybe even more falls into my kind of like misinformation practice, right? Like trying to spread some sort of viral rumor or something inherently is going to be like a shots on goal game. You're trying to find some asymmetric way of hitting on like just the right chord at the right moments. Like my big example is like the Gmail sunsetting hoax. So I, I created this hoax that Gmail was shutting down and you know, for that one, there were a hundred of, a hundred other things that I tried to do that didn't quite hit, but like this was at a time that Google had just sunset something. So it was like kind of in the late insight, guys. But I think the, the real thing there was like, it was, it was sort of this moment

• 2:21:42Speaker 06

  of people being like feel, viscerally feeling the, their reliance on Gmail, right? Which like if I just wrote an essay about how much we rely on Gmail, that doesn't really go anywhere. But if you like, I, I think that's why misinformation or some of this stuff is like a useful tool. But to bring it back to, to, um, to the, to the Sam Walton thing, yeah, I, that was a bit of a lowbrow moment for me. Um, but you know, that, that, that day kind of was, you know, the, the thing was like their-

• 2:22:08Jordi Hays?

  It was a lowbrow day on the internet.

• 2:22:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Right. Yeah. It was, it was slop about Pokemon all over Sora and, and your timeline, right? And, and this was just kind of a depiction of that. But, uh,

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  What, uh-

• 2:22:19Speaker 06

  Not my proudest moment, but it was fun.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, uh, how, how did the Gmail sunsetting hoax, uh, really catch fire? Like what was the inciting post that, how did you seed it? How did it actually go viral? I'm always-

• 2:22:32Speaker 06

  John, you're asking, you're asking me to give away the sauce.

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, oh, oh, but wait-

• 2:22:35Speaker 06

  You're gonna have to buy my ebook for that.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  It's not something that I can just, uh, I can just trace through or-

• 2:22:40Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna have to buy the course on misinformation.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that that was not just, I, I, I would have assumed it was public. Sorry. I, I, I don't-

• 2:22:46Speaker 06

  No, no, I'm joking. Uh, yeah. If you, if you were to look back at that, like there were a lot of tweets about that and mine like did okay, but like there are, there were other people who sort of like picked it up.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:57Speaker 06

  And it's actually not even necessarily clear to me which of those people were engaging with it earnestly or, or kind of realized what was going on and were trying to single boost it. Uh, but yeah, I mean- You guys are are part of the the cool kids club on Twitter, I would say, and that, you know, it it helps to be to be at sort of like the, there's like a cantillon effect for attention too, right?

• 2:23:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:23:17Speaker 06

  If you're at the, if you're upstream of that, then you can really like spread things.

• 2:23:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, I I I don't actually remember, but I could totally have seen myself amplifying that, uh, just as a troll on Google, even though I would have recognized that it's not real, but I'm still upset about Google Reader. And so, and and so I'm going to amplify the fake news, knowing it's fake, but just to cause chaos because, uh, I want, I want revenge for my RSS reader that was killed in the, in the cradle.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you disappointed?

• 2:23:49Speaker 06

  We should, uh, should spread some more.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  Oh, I'm ready, I'm ready. We are the fake news here.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Are are you disappointed with sort of a lack of creative uses for artificial intelligence? That it's all kind of funny? It's like, hey, I made, uh, this musical artist do country music, or I made my dog look like a doctor?

• 2:24:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, as you guys kind of noted, I'm I'm guilty of the same thing sometimes. I would say broadly, you know, I, I, I want, I want more generally, that's why I do this, right? Because there's like this kind of art that exists in my head that, uh, that I want to exist in the world. Um, and I'm grateful that other people, that it resonates with other people, right? Um, it's like, there's definitely, there's definitely things that I think that, that people could be doing with it. Um, but I don't, I don't want to be like too misanthropic, like, I, I, I think, I think it's a net good, like, long, long term, because I think the art world is very stagnant, not a fan of the, the, the fine art world, as they would call themselves, and I think any, like.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they're not a fan of you. I'm sure they're not a fan of you either.

• 2:24:55Speaker 06

  But it's, it's surface area, right? It's surface area for people who are willing to engage with something that, like, the orthodoxy doesn't approve of, to say something new and interesting and not have to play the same game of, like, getting into a gallery, or you're doing an oil painting or a sculpture or whatever, like, that's, you know, we need new games to play and technology increases that.

• 2:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Do you think any of your work will appear in Sotheby's? At some point, or any of the like, like I'm sure now.

• 2:25:19Speaker 06

  Sotheby's, I have a Sotheby's, I think I'm quite blackfouled from because I've pointed out.

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  I know, but eventually, eventually they'll, they're, you'll still be going, their team will turn over and they'll, they'll.

• 2:25:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe, maybe if they forget about some of the dubious, possibly illegal behavior that I've, I've.

• 2:25:40Speaker 06

  I wouldn't bet on it.

• 2:25:44Jordi Hays?

  This was super fun.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Next time you have a particularly devious stunt, feel free to jump on the show and break it down for us.

• 2:25:52Speaker 06

  I love that. Next time we can go deep on prediction markets.

• 2:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm super, I mean, the, the, watching this category explode and then thinking about all the ways that you could hack that. You know, I think Brian, Brian Armstrong's kind of hacking it on, on the earnings call was fascinating. I think there's so, so many under, underexplored areas and surface area there and, and also some potentially dark, you know, scenarios as well. So, but the sci-fi future is certainly here.

• 2:26:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, the last thing I would leave with is I really think that open source AI is important. I don't know how much you guys have gone into that, but we can talk about that one next time.

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 2:26:34Speaker 06

  Thanks so much for having me, guys.

• 2:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Slums model coming soon.

• 2:26:37John Coogan?

  I like it. Yeah. Thank you.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, great to meet you too.

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you out on the internet. Cheers.

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about newlhq.com, sales tax and autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have a return guest in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Fazan. How are you doing? Congratulations. I, we got the gong already. Sorry, we're running late. Give us the news. What's the latest in lava world?

• 2:27:11Shehzan Maredia?

  Do you guys hear me? Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear. So, we basically announced Monday that we raised 200 million venture and debt. We brought in new investors like Anthony Pompliano,

• 2:27:27Shehzan Maredia?

  Eric Jackson from Open Door, who you guys must have known before as well. And we also announced what I think is the most important product, I think, in Bitcoin's history so far, other than Bitcoin, which is the Bitcoin, it's the world's first Bitcoin line of credit. So, Lava has been doing loans for years now, but all our loan previously was structured like a Bitcoin mortgage. So, you have to make fixed payments, there was a fixed term to it. But now, and that was very similar to the other loan products in the market too. But with the Bitcoin line of credit, we are offering the most flexible loan product in the entire market. So, basically, you can borrow, you can keep it open for as long as you want, two years, three years, really forever.

• 2:28:10Shehzan Maredia?

  You don't have any fixed payment schedules, there's no monthly payments involved. You can pay down your loan whenever you want, your line of credit, and you can borrow back against it at any time. And we're offering the lowest interest rates, fixed interest rates, at 5% across the board. So, really what we realized was that Bitcoiners are a very unique audience. They all have very distinct cash flow needs, income. You know, a lot of Bitcoiners are retired on their Bitcoins. So, having a product, like building a product with fixed terms, fixed payments, and applying it to all the Bitcoiners was just not something that was working, and it's not something that they wanted. Whereas this product, it offers the most amount of flexibility. So, no matter what your cash flow needs are, no matter what your income is,

• 2:28:55Shehzan Maredia?

  you can use this Bitcoin line of credit, use it to use your Bitcoin and manage your Bitcoin wealth with the flexibility you need and at the lowest rates across the world.

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  Uh, as I, we've been on the show multiple times. We've talked about the business. I'm interested in to understand like, why is fundraising happening in a traditional sense? Instead of sort of all happening on chain, one Bitcoin at a time. Uh, like, why, why is there like a packaged tranche of, of investment happening?

• 2:29:32Shehzan Maredia?

  Because we actually have our own yield product. We actually, we announced it to you guys a couple of months ago, weeks ago. Uh, so we do have depositors that are coming on chain with stable coins around the world. Okay. That are depositing their, uh, you know, their cash, their stable points, earning yield, funding Bitcoin backed loans. But those depositors can deposit and withdraw at any time, right?

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  This is permanent investment.

• 2:29:58Shehzan Maredia?

  Yeah, this, we're offering fixed, so to make sure that we're never in an asset liability mismatch.

• 2:30:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:04Shehzan Maredia?

  We need to make sure that we are raising the credit lines available to refinance loans. And these credit lines are at fixed rates, fixed terms, right? So we always are kind of matching liquidity in a way of what we are. We're just providing like on-chain banking in a way, right? So we need to have, you know, depositors. And I think that's the real value of stable coins is that they're global. So you can kind of give functionality and savings to people with stable coins. Uh, obviously Bitcoin is a savings asset, more of a long-term savings asset for some of these, this audience that is using this product. Uh, but then we need the credit lines as well to make sure there's never an asset liability mismatch. Does that make sense?

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  How, how, what's the, what's the strategy around navigating lava through such a rocky, uh, environment? Bitcoins down, uh, as of this moment, like 16% in the past month. There's been a lot of volatility and other, uh, even more volatility in other, uh, tokens. But, um, it feels like that, you know, you guys were started like a year and a half ago, two years ago. What was the timing?

• 2:31:14Shehzan Maredia?

  Yeah, around two or a little more than two years ago. So we've been building this for a while.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, so building it, building it on an up, on an upswing and it managing through, you know, corrections is going to be what makes lava, you know, a, a super, super, obviously that the solution is meant to be trustless, but brands still matter.

• 2:31:36Shehzan Maredia?

  There's definitely trust involved. We, we totally like, like want to lean into that, right? So one thing is on the Bitcoin, yeah, Bitcoin price hasn't been doing well, but also lava is Bitcoin only. So the only collateral asset we accept is Bitcoin. Even recently, there's been some protocols that were accepting other crypto assets, like other digital assets. There's one, I don't know if it's fully public yet, that's actually recently blown up because the, the altcoin debt, the altcoins have been like dropping pretty significantly in price. If you're lending against it and it dropped way too quickly, you basically have taken on bad debt and then the depositors are not, no longer whole.

• 2:32:18Shehzan Maredia?

  Actually, a few weeks ago, I'm sure you guys discussed this, but there was a big auto kind of deleverage. A lot of coins actually instantly dropped eighty percent. Bitcoin was still fine in that world. So on app, one thing that helps us to manage liquidity and safety for our users is we're Bitcoin only. So as a Bitcoin, they know that they're not taking on risk of other altcoins when they're borrowing with lava. The other thing is we always encourage people to add more collateral to their loans. The average LTV on a lava loan is thirty percent. So it is, you know, it is pretty safe. So Bitcoin would have to drop effectively like seventy percent for a majority of users to get liquidated.

• 2:32:59Shehzan Maredia?

  And almost all of our users actually have extra Bitcoin that is available to them to also as collateral. To kind of make sure that they are safe.

• 2:33:08John Coogan?

  And there have been some like fifty percent drawdowns, but a seventy percent drawdown in Bitcoin, I feel like that hasn't happened in long, like years and years and years.

• 2:33:15Shehzan Maredia?

  Yes.

• 2:33:16John Coogan?

  So it makes a ton of sense.

• 2:33:17Shehzan Maredia?

  It is, it is definitely a risk. When you're borrowing against your Bitcoin. But the other kind of counter to that is anyone holding Bitcoin right now is also predicting that the price is going to go up, right? Because otherwise, if you do believe Bitcoin is also going to drop 70%, it's actually probably not the right idea for you to even hold Bitcoin.

• 2:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't hold it.

• 2:33:34Shehzan Maredia?

  It's actually probably the right idea for you to hold cash and then kind of re mine to Bitcoin. So, you know, we are not like providing this financial advice to people, but most of our users are still believing that Bitcoin is going to do well. Otherwise, they would hold Bitcoin, they would just hold cash, right?

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  They're diamond handsing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting, but congratulations.

• 2:33:54Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor to hit the gong for you.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Good to catch up.

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in.

• 2:34:08Jordi Hays?

  Bake off world champion.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  G2. I actually just heard about a bake off just yesterday, and someone said Finn won the bake off, literally. I'm not even making that up.

• 2:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Uh, our next guest is Mina from Sandbar, coming in the studio from the upstream waiting. Mina, how are you doing?

• 2:34:24Speaker 08

  Good. How are you? Thanks for having me.

• 2:34:27Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 2:34:28John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Uh, give us an introduction. Uh, explain the products, some of the trade offs, and then we'll go into go to market and how everything's playing together.

• 2:34:36Jordi Hays?

  And first, I have to tell you, I saw the domain sandbar.com available at some point back in the day, and I was just thinking to myself, that is such a good domain. So, uh, as a domain enthusiast, I'm, I'm happy that, I'm happy that you picked it up and are, and are doing it justice.

• 2:34:53Speaker 08

  Appreciate that. It's got sand, it's got a bar, it's got everything you could want.

• 2:34:57Jordi Hays?

  It's got a nice, it's got a nice, it's got a nice feeling. You know, I have positive feelings about sandbars.

• 2:35:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Growing up in California. Uh, but yeah, uh, would love a introduction on yourself and the company and how you got to building Sandbar.

• 2:35:10Speaker 08

  Totally. Uh, so I'm Mina, I'm one of the co-founders of Sandbar. Uh, I originally met my co-founder, Kirok, at a startup called Control Labs that was developing these risk warrant Pearl interfaces. And, uh, we got acquired into Meta and we're working on a lot of devices there. And in parallel, I started exploring a ton with LLMs and started trying to think about what it would take to have a more effortless interaction with these new speaking, thinking machines. So we started to explore a lot of different forms, and that eventually led us, uh, to two products, uh, that I guess we're announcing together, uh, that we call Stream. And the Stream Ring.

• 2:35:54Speaker 08

  And Stream is, as we say, a self extension for talking through ideas and capturing them into notes. We have this very sandy app that has a log of interactions you've discussed, notes that you've asked Stream to save, as well as the ability to zoom out of interactions and see what you've been discussing over time. And especially if you're on the go, your phone is in your pocket, and you want to perhaps talk about an idea or save something into a note, that's where you can use the Stream Ring.

• 2:36:34Speaker 08

  So you just hold this touchpad, whisper into the top, and then release. And if I do something like that, I can say,

• 2:36:45Speaker 08

  "Hey, can you give me your hottest take on AI wearables?"

• 2:36:53Speaker 08

  Sure, the hottest take? Most AI wearables chase novelty instead of intimacy. They brag about features, but the real frontier is emotional calibration. You know, why don't you start a list with some of those hot takes?

• 2:37:10Speaker 08

  And it'll scurry away and save those away?

• 2:37:13Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:37:14Speaker 08

  Sure.

• 2:37:15Jordi Hays?

  For when you need a list of hot takes. I loved the live demo. It's always risky, but yeah, that's... So what, so the key...

• 2:37:29Jordi Hays?

  The value that you're delivering to users is not... You're not trying to say, "I'm going to be this personal assistant that's going to do everything in your life." It's simply like you're just trying to build that interface with, effectively just building this new surface area for a mobile device that people are already using and a new way to just input input ideas and thoughts into a computer and have them be organized. Is that generally right?

• 2:37:54Speaker 08

  Exactly. We're really focused on letting you talk through ideas and save thoughts into notes. And normally, I wouldn't have my phone out. I would have it in my pocket and maybe I would have earbuds in. And already, so much of our thinking either happens in the go or lives in Apple Notes. And it's this beautiful mess of grocery lists and, you know, letters to a parent and career plans. And we see Stream as the most effortless way to either build those ideas through conversation or save them away.

• 2:38:28Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. What uh, what's the timeline till you guys are shipping the product? I know you're doing pre-orders now.

• 2:38:35Speaker 08

  Totally. So, we've been building now for around two years and it's good to be coming out of the cave. We are actually right now kicking off our next build with our manufacturing partner in Taiwan. And then we'll be fully ramped to mass production in summer of 26. So that's when we'll start shipping.

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Very cool. Uh, what are your hottest takes on wearables? Obviously, it sounds like you maybe trained your, your, uh, your at, your, your internal model to.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Here's, here's one. Do you, do you think, like, how confident can you be in predicting success of a wearable? Because it feels like it's something where you need to just run a lot of tests. And the speed of each test is a little bit slow because you have to iterate on the actual hardware. And you might one-shot it, but that might be a lot of luck. How much luck is it? Or do you think that there is a way to empirically know that you have a hit on your hand before you go to market?

• 2:39:41Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, we definitely didn't start with this. We've worked on a lot of different devices, a lot of different use cases. And now we've been living with some form of Stream for the last, call it a year and a half. Karak and I wanted to get to a point where we felt like it was useful in our daily life and then the people who were having test the device, our friends and our family who we've given units to are themselves finding it valuable. And, you know, we have a marketing professor who will be driving to work and she'll talk about her lesson plan and then she'll watch her kids in the playground playing and she'll be able to keep her eyes up as she, you know, takes notes on what she wants to improve for the next day.

• 2:40:22Speaker 08

  We have a bodywork coach who will walk her dog and be talking about clients and also riffing on Eastern versus Western medicine. And after enough time living with it, we got to this just really high degree of confidence that it was super useful in our lives. And we're, you know, exploring other forms and other use cases, but they always have to hit that bar. And I would say having, you know, built always in New York where we get to, you know, wear devices easily outside and not be noticed and also be in touch with people outside of tech has helped really ground us in something that we think will be useful for everybody.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:41:01Jordi Hays?

  I was laughing thinking about a future where the average human has exactly 10 rings.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  I was thinking the same thing. The O ring is so popular.

• 2:41:10Jordi Hays?

  It's like, this is my thinking ring.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  Well, then you get into the gauntlets and the

• 2:41:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  And the chains.

• 2:41:16Jordi Hays?

  Bracelets.

• 2:41:17John Coogan?

  And you pierce both of your ears for the wearables and eyeglasses and headphones, all these things.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, I'm super, I'm super excited about this. I, John knows that I have a hilarious way of like keeping track of the thoughts in my mind, which is texting myself.

• 2:41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm constantly texting myself, like stream of consciousness, things that I need to remember and do or whatever.

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  It's unhinged.

• 2:41:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to try this out.

• 2:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a great rest of the day.

• 2:41:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for the time.

• 2:41:43John Coogan?

  Thanks. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI in a CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest is Alessandro Chesser from Dynasty.

• 2:41:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring him in.

• 2:42:00Jordi Hays?

  Alessandro, welcome.

• 2:42:02Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:42:03Jordi Hays?

  It was so fun having, I think, your lead investor, Jerry, on earlier. He's got so many amazing, amazing stories. But before we get into Dynasty, why don't you give a quick intro on yourself, background, all that good stuff?

• 2:42:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, born and raised in the Bay Area, worked in financial services for about a decade, wound up at Carta as the first sales hire in 2014, ended up becoming VP of Sales and owned a lot of revenue for about eight years. So helped take the company from zero to 300 million in ARR, you know, hired and managed hundreds of people, and then left to start Dynasty.

• 2:42:49Jordi Hays?

  What was, what was the critical inspiration for Dynasty? And how, walk us through kind of the idea maze around it?

• 2:42:59Speaker 09

  So in the beginning of, you know, in the beginning, when I joined Carta, me and my co-founders, who were also early Carta, you know, we were helping onboard thousands of cap tables. And it became very clear that the most successful founders created lots of trusts. They didn't just hold the shares in their own personal name. They would sometimes have like 10 different trusts that they would split their shares into. And it was really strange. I didn't, I didn't understand why. At first, I thought they were just being super generous. But we started doing some research on the strategy and we learned that the reason why they did it is because they got a separate QSBS exemption, which basically means each

• 2:43:41Speaker 09

  trust that they created was eligible for $10 million in tax-free capital gains. Like literally zero taxes on 10 million for each trust that they create. So you create 10 trusts, you get $100 million in tax-free capital gains.

• 2:43:56Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, so, so from that point, like, I guess, what?

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  I think the, yeah, the question, the question that, you know, we talked off air a while back and the question I had is like, obviously, you know, great businesses often start with like a simple, you know, vision for like a kind of narrow customer base, but where, like, what's, what's kind of the, the focus today? How, how big can Dynasty get just serving the kind of like early-stage founder, venture community? And then where, where do you want to go long-term?

• 2:44:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely. So QSBS stacking is very narrow. You know, it's, it's basically have to be a large shareholder of a C corp. And it's not just venture-funded technology companies. Like, we've been signing on porta potty founders, we've been, you know, people that make pipes for plumbing. Like, there's all types of QSBS eligible entities. They just have to be C corp and they have to not be an excluded industry, like any regulated, you know, financial services or anything like that. So there are a ton of companies, like, maybe, we don't know the exact number, but maybe somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 companies in the US could qualify for QSBS. And so we got a lot of greenfield. Like,

• 2:45:15Speaker 09

  each company has sometimes two or three co-founders. And so that's a, you know, it's a very narrow market, but we, we think we're going to be working on it for quite some time. But the broader vision for this company is like, so we are a licensed Nevada trust company. We are the only venture-funded licensed Nevada trust company, the only ones that are trying to tackle this space.

• 2:45:35Jordi Hays?

  One of one.

• 2:45:36Speaker 09

  From, one of one, from a technology standpoint. And so we think that, so the richest people, you know, Jerry, for example, the richest people in the US, they don't create, you know, they live in California, they live in New York, they don't create California, New York trusts. They use Nevada trusts. Because Nevada has the best laws in the country, maybe sometimes even the world, when it comes to taxes, asset protection, privacy, control, like, you can have more control over these Nevada trusts than you can typically over California and New York trusts. And so we think that goes much further beyond QSBS stacking. Like, You know, why shouldn't the farmer in Oklahoma be able to benefit from a Nevada Trust?

• 2:46:17Speaker 09

  Why shouldn't the young professional with $50,000 in crypto be able to benefit from a Nevada Trust? And so we want to open it up for everybody. That's our vision to build a mass market AI-powered Nevada Trust company. But to your point, we have to start narrow. We have to solve one problem and solve it really well. And so that's why we're tackling founders.

• 2:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. What is the most common setup for, call it like a YC founder?

• 2:46:46Speaker 09

  For trusts, $1,500 a year gives you up to $40 million in QSBS eligibility. If they have kids, they make their kids a beneficiary, maybe their wife. If they don't, then they're creating trusts for their parents and their siblings.

• 2:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, yeah, I think every founder should be at least taking a look at this. For sure. And like Jerry said, there's other ways to do it, but I highly doubt that that the other methods are nearly as streamlined or founder-friendly as what you guys are building. So very excited for more founders to be able to optimize for this, not just the second or third time founder that has experienced the gain or the pain of realizing that they, you know, if they have a $50 million liquidity event and only getting that tax-free gain on the first 10 million, it'd be quite painful. So excited that you're building this.

• 2:47:42Speaker 09

  That's exactly the problem. The problem is people usually do this later because it costs six figures to set up. And by the time they do it later, they're limited by their lifetime gift exemption. And so they can't stack that many trusts. And so that's why we exist. So founders should be doing this from day one. That's when your gift value is zero. You create your corporation. That's the best time to do it because there's no gift tax. The longer you wait, the more gift tax implications you're going to have.

• 2:48:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining, breaking it down. And I'm jealous that you got Jerry on your cap table. That guy is a legend. All true. Anyways, great hanging and happy building out there.

• 2:48:20Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:48:21Jordi Hays?

  Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

• 2:48:24John Coogan?

  Our next guest is in the restream waiting room first. I want to tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions with John Maslin, the CEO and co-founder of Vulcan Elements.

• 2:48:40Jordi Hays?

  Got to get this gong ready.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  Just a, just a tiny little deal. Just a tiny little deal. Just a, just a

• 2:48:46Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:48:47John Coogan?

  A wee little deal.

• 2:48:48Jordi Hays?

  A wee deal.

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  With the US government. Break it down for us. $1.4 billion. Absolutely massive deal. Something that people were just getting, just waking up to. Obviously, you've been thinking about this for a long time. How did you, how did you realize that this was something you wanted to work on? And then take us through the anatomy of the deal.

• 2:49:09Speaker 10

  Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on again. It's really good to see you. So this is a problem that we've been focused on for several years. My background is, you know, former Navy. I was a supply chain officer. And when I was in business school, was thinking a lot about the critical components that will define the 21st century technology, whether it's the data, enable AI, drones, robotics. And when you really boil it down, it's only three components. Semiconductors, batteries, and rare magnets.

• 2:49:45John Coogan?

  Can you check your wifi? We are getting some technical difficulties.

• 2:49:49Jordi Hays?

  We lost you.

• 2:49:49Speaker 10

  Did I break up? Missed all there?

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Your audio is here. Your face is in the past.

• 2:49:54John Coogan?

  In the past, it's a time machine, taking us back to a mere five minutes ago, or one minute ago.

• 2:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Out, out in the field somewhere.

• 2:50:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably doing important work.

• 2:50:05Speaker 10

  Yeah, what a cute freeze, too.

• 2:50:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's kind of working if you just want to keep talking. Yeah, try to be, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit the gong for the $1.4 billion deal.

• 2:50:15John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. Jordy's gonna hit the gong. Hit that gong, Jordy, and then we will go back. And I'd love for you to break down the structure of the deal, what it allows you to do. I know that there's a loan piece, there's an equity investment piece, there's investors in. How are you describing the deal and what it allows you to unlock?

• 2:50:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, so what this deal allows us to unlock is a 10,000 metric ton rare earth magnet facility. And just to frame the problem a little bit, by 2030, the US will need over 70,000 metric tons of these magnets. Today, you know, we can't even produce 500. So what this is doing is this is going and ensuring that we can move at operation warp speed in partnership with the United States government, the Department of Commerce, the Department of War, to ensure that we can go and meet the demand for defense, aerospace, and critical economic industries. And the US government, Secretary Hagseth, Secretary Lutnik, they're serious about solving this problem. And we're very serious about ensuring that we go and meet the moment in the mission.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  What is the timeline for something like this? I feel like we're hearing about billion-dollar build-outs.

• 2:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have to imagine this deal, this deal must have been like very much in the works even before China pulled the rare earth card.

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:38Speaker 10

  Yeah, so we plan to have initial capacity online by 2027. If we're able to go faster, we will. And we've been having conversations with everyone across industry and across government for several years. And we've realized, you know, we need a whole of industry and government approach to go and fix this issue. And our full intent is to go and build at a speed, an operation warp speed, that hasn't been seen in this industry in the 21st century.

• 2:52:10John Coogan?

  How, how much, like, what else is going on in the supply chain? Is America mining enough rare earth elements? Or should we be, you know, is the job, like, are we on the right track now in terms of actually taking rare earths and producing magnets with what you're going to be doing? Or are there other pieces of the supply chain that you want to see other founders or yourself go after in the near term?

• 2:52:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, so it's a really good question. And the way that this works is you mine the material or you take recycled end of life magnets, you separate those chemically into a rare earth oxide, you turn that into a metal, and then ultimately a bespoke magnet to meet a customer spec. What we're doing with this deal is we're partnering with Re Element Technologies. They recycle end of life magnets and separate that material. And we're expanding that partnership. One thing that I think is really important to note is this is less of a raw material availability problem than a manufacturing problem. Today, China only mines 55% of the rare earth material. They make 94 to 98% of the magnets. So what I would say is with this deal and other folks in the industry, we want as many smart people

• 2:53:29Speaker 10

  focusing on this industry as possible and scaling up capacity where I think that there are opportunities are downstream as we think about drone motors. There's a gap, servo actuators. As we think about orthogonal and complementary critical minerals, we need to do more around antimony and germanium and gallium and lithium and tungsten and titanium. There's a lot of wood to chop in the critical minerals industry to make sure that we have safe and secure supply chains here at home.

• 2:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, very, very exciting. The progress is just tremendous. And I'm sure you'll be back on soon. So thank you for doing this work. It's we've been following the story and we're glad that people like yourself and your team are tackling the issue.

• 2:54:15Speaker 10

  Next time with a better Wi-Fi signal on my end.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  Or when you're in LA.

• 2:54:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or in LA, or just do it out in the field somewhere, off your phone. We'll make it work. Thanks so much for the update and great to see you.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

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

• 2:54:31Speaker 10

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  How did you sleep last night? We had a sleep on our television. You're traveling.

• 2:54:37Jordi Hays?

  No scores.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  But tonight we will be returning to the Eight Sleeps. You can go to eightsleep.com, get a Pod 5, 5 year warranty, 399 free trial, free returns, free shipping, of course.

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Code, TVPN.

• 2:54:48John Coogan?

  We have Eugenia Kuyda coming back in the studio.

• 2:54:54Jordi Hays?

  Should we hit some timelines?

• 2:54:55John Coogan?

  Let's hit some timelines.

• 2:54:57Jordi Hays?

  So the real story that was shaking up the timeline is that Scottie Pippen is saying it's not over. He said, And I think in regards to the crypto market, he says it's still the shakeout before the breakout. So Scottie Pippen remains bullish on the crypto markets and we'll have to check back.

• 2:55:19John Coogan?

  How do we know that this is about crypto? This could be about AI or something. Could be about anything.

• 2:55:24Jordi Hays?

  Everybody replying is, or.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  Oh, crypto.

• 2:55:27Jordi Hays?

  Crypto. I think we gotta ask Dylan. I think he's been, I think he's been.

• 2:55:32John Coogan?

  He's a crypto influencer of some sort.

• 2:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you want to talk to Antonio Linares, one on one, you can now do so for the low price of $15,000 an hour.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  15,000. But it includes taxes. He pays the taxes.

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  He pays $2,603.13 in taxes for a one on one session for.

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  Where are those?

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  I'm not sure who Antonio Linares is, but you know, he, he took, he took the advice. Naval Ravikant said, give, use, set an unreasonable opportunity cost so that you only do things that are of the highest value. And that's what Antonio is doing. What's the value to him of yapping on the phone with some random person? You know, he's giving up a lot of opportunity. We've seen a few of these screenshots from people sharing these unreasonably high one on one session times.

• 2:56:32John Coogan?

  I mean, there are plenty of people out there that would have, that would have higher numbers for sure.

• 2:56:38John Coogan?

  14K, 15K.

• 2:56:40Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see somebody throw out the $100 million number, right? You'd think that if for.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 2:56:48Jordi Hays?

  A hundred million dollars, people would talk with.

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  I think somebody would pay.

• 2:56:53John Coogan?

  I don't think Elon would do it. I don't think Elon would, would, would let, would talk to a stranger, a random person for an hour for a hundred million dollars.

• 2:57:01Jordi Hays?

  What about 30 minutes?

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  We'll have to ask him.

• 2:57:04Jordi Hays?

  200 million dollars.

• 2:57:05John Coogan?

  You have to start a show.

• 2:57:07Jordi Hays?

  Hourly rate.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  And then you can get them. You have to get on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. I believe we have Eugenia in the Restream waiting room.

• 2:57:23Jordi Hays?

  Announcing a new company.

• 2:57:24John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:57:26Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:57:27John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Holling in from A16Z. The headquarters.

• 2:57:31John Coogan?

  Did they post you? Are you a new GP? What's going on?

• 2:57:34Jordi Hays?

  No, just a new port co-founder.

• 2:57:36John Coogan?

  You wish. No, you're supposed to say.

• 2:57:37Eugenia Kuyda?

  Still a struggling founder.

• 2:57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, still a struggling founder. Tell us about the new, about the new company.

• 2:57:44Eugenia Kuyda?

  We just announced today of the round we did with the pre-seed round we did for Wabi, our new company, so time to announce the new company as well. So we're building Wabi, which is a personal software platform. Think of it as an app where you can discover, quickly remix, or even create personal mini-apps for your daily life.

• 2:58:07John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, walk me through, I mean, I've created personal miniature apps with, you know, vibe coding platforms or, you know, coding agents, kind of run them on my computer. Usually try and have them all self-contained in HTML or something. How are you thinking about the actual interaction? Is this, is this like prompt to product, self-hosted, hosted within Wabi? Like, what are all the different trade-offs? Because there's so many different ways that you could instantiate that idea, I imagine.

• 2:58:36Eugenia Kuyda?

  So think of it as a YouTube for mini-apps. So all Wabi mini-apps, compared to most app builders, they all only live on Wabi. You cannot download them, you cannot put them on the App Store. You have to use them on Wabi.

• 2:58:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:58:50Eugenia Kuyda?

  But that comes with a lot of benefits. Because first of all, the social graph, discovery, you can like, comment, see who your friends are using, is using what app. We see remixes, follow good creators, creators you like, and so on. You can use apps with your friends. And then on top of that, of course, all integrations are included. You can immediately connect. Gmail account, your calendar, location, we're building, our plan is to build 50 integrations before the end of the year of all sorts and so on. And of course, you know, persistent backend, data security and privacy, everything is sort of on Wabi's side. Because if you think about

• 2:59:32Eugenia Kuyda?

  it, even if you build a great app on one of the, with one of vibe coding tools and send me a link, if it's like an AI therapist app, I don't know if I'm going to fully trust to use this because I don't know where the logs are going. Even if you're a good friend and you don't mean anything bad, you're not a professional developer. What if you forget to pay for the hosting of this app? Or what if something, you know, leaks? We've already had some of these vibe coding apps reach the top of the App Store, like that Teabag app. I don't know if you saw that.

• 3:00:03John Coogan?

  That Teedating? Is that the one?

• 3:00:05Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think so, yeah. Was that the Teedating?

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That one's been very popular. So talk to me about the technical, like hurdle here. It feels like the App Store doesn't necessarily love apps in App Stores. Is this a, is this a beneficiary of the new regulation around allowing app stores in the iOS App Store? Is that a unique unlock?

• 3:00:27Eugenia Kuyda?

  So we're not building apps. We don't call them apps even.

• 3:00:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:00:30Eugenia Kuyda?

  These are mini apps. So think of it as like this small, very lightweight workflow. Some of them just like, it's almost like a lightweight UI on a prompt.

• 3:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:39Eugenia Kuyda?

  For example, a simple mini app that turns your photos to like Polaroids from different decades.

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:47Eugenia Kuyda?

  And so the App Store allows mini apps and

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  It does, okay.

• 3:00:50Eugenia Kuyda?

  We're not planning to, or we're not, we're never going to be about like building full-fledged apps or downloading them or anything like that.

• 3:00:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is interesting. It feels like Apple will sort of have to grapple with the idea of instantiating UI or mini apps on the fly. Because for a long time, the App Store review process has been very much like, we want to review all the code. And if you are changing the code within the app or the functionality of the app, Once it's already shipped and approved, Apple has kind of dealt with that in a very, in a, you know, in a wide variety of ways. But I, but I love the, I love the idea. So let's just, let's just stick to, you know, the actual technical side of things. Like, are you able, are, are these apps built in basically like HTML windows that are then

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  served within, or, or can you actually instantiate like React Native or, you know, like Objective C on the fly?

• 3:01:49Eugenia Kuyda?

  These are Reacts, so all of our mini apps are React Native.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:52Eugenia Kuyda?

  And then Wabi, the platform, of course, is the

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:56Eugenia Kuyda?

  iOS native Swift.

• 3:01:58John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:01:59Eugenia Kuyda?

  Code, so.

• 3:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:01Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think sort of similarly to Replica, what was the, the native app.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:05Eugenia Kuyda?

  And a Unity container inside of it.

• 3:02:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:09Eugenia Kuyda?

  Here are the same, I feel like we're always going to be about like blending two technologies together and struggling constantly with how do you merge these two things together.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what do you think, what do you expect to drive the most usage? Uh, obviously it's early, uh, it's hard to predict with consumer, but do you expect it to be people coming on board, just playing around, creating things and people are coming to the app to have this sort of creative experience? Like they might go on Suno and just start making music, they might go on Wabi, just start making, uh, apps and sharing them with their friends, et cetera? Or do you believe it'll be like more of a hits-driven business where there's a one or two mini apps that, you know, develop some, uh, organic virality themselves that really become the, the, the driver of real downloads?

• 3:02:58Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think really we are going to be looking at two big categories, more, uh, retentive utilities, think trackers, uh, things that you might use with.

• 3:03:08Eugenia Kuyda?

  Your family, your friends, yourself, learning,

• 3:03:14Eugenia Kuyda?

  all sorts of like to do lists, things and everything that kind of like little workflows for daily life. And then more viral personalized mirrors or like viral prompts for image and not only. For example, like something that I really liked on Wabi was this mini app that takes in your Gmail and builds an action figure based on the information from your Gmail.

• 3:03:38Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 3:03:39Eugenia Kuyda?

  Or like the same, but the same but based on your bank activity through looking at your bank account. So just stuff like that where people always want to see some cool stuff like that, brag about themselves, share. And it's almost like a one time use thing, you're not going to be coming back for that. But at the same time, if that was a, an app on the app store, like that's kind of too much. You'd need to download it. It's like, it's too much. But here, it's just like this little mini app thing that lives inside Wabi. You can try it. There's no cost to it.

• 3:04:13Jordi Hays?

  What about apps as memes or just purely for entertainment? Do you expect that to be kind of a category of itself, like this kind of idea of we can now make a mini app that's really just meant to be kind of funny and make people laugh, but then it doesn't have to necessarily be durable or it doesn't have to be a standalone business itself?

• 3:04:35Eugenia Kuyda?

  A hundred percent. I think we're entering this era where apps, where software is not going to be set. It's not going to be just the static, this is the app I created and you use it and you can't do anything with that. Instead, it's going to be this ultra personalized, very malleable, very lightweight software that can change, that is truly built on a platform of you. I would think that kind of the operating system of the future is the one where you'll have a few apps, big apps like TikToks, the Instagrams, of course, that will always exist. And then there may be a few apps built by the community that you discovered, maybe some of them you remixed a little bit, maybe some you actually built yourselves, yourself. And then there are going to be some mini apps built for you by AI.

• 3:05:19Eugenia Kuyda?

  Like for example, if I'm going to New York next week, it should, Wabi should go through your email and suggest an app, pre-build an app for you. Hey, I know you're into art, you're going to New York, here's an app that basically recommends art shows around your Airbnb for the time.

• 3:05:36Jordi Hays?

  That's really cool. I feel like, I feel like this is a product that, uh, once people have that, that like, people will have a moment where they're like, wait, why did I, I mean, the, the idea that you could go on a trip and generate an app that was almost like some quasi,

• 3:05:54Jordi Hays?

  even just tracker for your trip of like, oh, these are all the things I want to do and check them off. And then you could make so many other layers that you can, you can build on, on, on top of it. Uh, how much are you, what, what do Wabi, like, how much do you feel like you'll need to incentivize creators on the platform early on? Like, would you ever create like some type of like creator fund to incentivize, incentivize people to come on and, and experiment? I mean, a lot of big social media platforms have, have done this over the years. Uh, you guys have raised quite a bit of cash, so I'm sure you could soft circle some of it, but maybe you don't need to at all. Curious how you're thinking about it.

• 3:06:36Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think you're, you're going in the right direction. That's what we're also thinking about. How do we incentivize the best creators to create the best apps out there? And what really struck me, um, the other day was that actually it's easier to create a cool mini app than it is to create a YouTube video, a great YouTube video. It doesn't require that, um, that much production, uh, in a sense. Like, for example, even yesterday, I was just, I was putting my daughter down, um, and it was bedtime. She likes to play these puzzles where I give her a puzzle and she tries to guess what it is. So we, we wanted to just find something online for it, but it took me, it was a lot faster. It only took me a minute on Wabi to build this simple mini app

• 3:07:20Eugenia Kuyda?

  where basically it's a puzzle and then just four pictures that she can click on. And because she's into Princess Elsa, we made it princess, Princess Elsa themed. And because she goes to Italian preschool, we made it Italian, uh, in Italian. And so it literally took us like a couple of minutes and it, it was like co-creation. We're creating that app together with her. Um, so think of it as like Roblox meets personal software in a sense. Um, so I do think to a degree, right now it's, it's almost becoming easier to create something than even to search for it online.

• 3:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got to hang out with CEO of Roblox yesterday, and I think he's coming on the show tomorrow. How much, how much do you think it can be dangerous to be like too inspired by, in this case, like something like a Roblox? Because in so many ways, I can imagine that, you know, an economy forms around Wabi in the same way that it has around, in the same way that it has around Roblox. There's so many different ways you can kind of draw comps, but sometimes it can be a trap to be too inspired by something because ultimately it's a different, you know, totally different kind of use case and value than, than, than maybe Roblox has.

• 3:08:35Eugenia Kuyda?

  I mean, our vision is different. Our, our mission is to set software free. And I think kind of the main, main inspiration for Wabi was that idea that we live in the Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces. And the GUI moment for AI is around the corner. And we do believe that with this almost like godlike technology that we created, it will require a different type of an interface. There will be the Windows, the macOS for, for AI. We're not going to be using AI through a command line forever. And so I think this is kind of where our North Star is. It's like, how, how can we create a different interface for everyone to tap into all the capabilities of these AI models?

• 3:09:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be really fun. I, I feel like we, we can sit here and predict how things will play out, but we should just have you back on once you have real data on how people are using it, how much is entertainment, how much is productivity, what the top apps are, and kind of how the, how the community like takes shape. Because I imagine there's only so much that you can predict once you build a tool, you know, if you ask-

• 3:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the thing with Roblox. It's like, how, how would Roblox predict that Grow a Garden would be the most popular name in the world with teenagers?

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Or like a full re, reenactment of Call of Duty in Roblox. Like, that was probably not on the roadmap from day one. That's the beautiful thing about starting these like, these platforms. But congratulations on the round.

• 3:10:09Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the waitlist timing? I'm on the waitlist now. When, when, when are, when are-

• 3:10:14John Coogan?

  When am I getting in?

• 3:10:15Jordi Hays?

  What's the strategy around opening it up?

• 3:10:17Eugenia Kuyda?

  Soon, we're building a few really exciting things. Right now, working on multiplayer as we speak.

• 3:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:25Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think that one of the really cool things about Wabi is that it's going to be that all apps come with multiplayer included. And even just simple mini apps, like for example, I built a Wordle game to test it with my mom so that we can play together. Obviously, we played on the New York Times, but it's pretty much like our way to connect with each other. And with Wabi, we do have a leaderboard and, you know, we can see who's beating each other, who's better today, who's doing better. We can set up these notifications and all that. So a few things that we want to build before we roll it out to general audience, but we're getting fantastic feedback from our first users and it's honestly really exciting to, again, to be in that zero to one.

• 3:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Zero to one.

• 3:11:09Eugenia Kuyda?

  Stage. I'm so excited about this.

• 3:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, as soon as we have access, we're going to have Tyler make something like six or seven mini apps.

• 3:11:20Eugenia Kuyda?

  Yeah. We'll send them to you.

• 3:11:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:11:25Jordi Hays?

  We will. Great catching up. I'm excited. Yeah, we're excited you're going zero to one again and super excited about Wabi and

• 3:11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is really cool.

• 3:11:34Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk soon.

• 3:11:35John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 3:11:37Eugenia Kuyda?

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:11:38John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:11:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:11:40Eugenia Kuyda?

  Bye.

• 3:11:41John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Bezzle. Your Bezzle concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

• 3:11:47Jordi Hays?

  We, this morning, we're not going to dox him, but we ran into a founder, a founder we like who had quite a nice IPO a few years ago and we did do a risk check.

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  Oh, we did.

• 3:12:01Jordi Hays?

  And he performed. He, it was, it was great to see.

• 3:12:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 3:12:05John Coogan?

  At the cover of the Wall Street Journal, there's a bidding war for obesity startups. Did you hear about this? Pfizer and Novo Nordisk boost their bids in an unusual fight for Metzera. I feel like when you say obesity startups, it's going to be the the waguvi white labelers. And I was imagining this would go like him's Roman, like that crew. But apparently they are all fighting over the developer of the obesity drug. It's called Metzera, the latest twist in their unusual fight over the startup. Metzera said Tuesday that Novo Nordisk's proposed proposal values the biotech company at up to eighty six twenty a share, or approximately ten billion

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  dollars up from its previous bid of nine billion. So they're going back and forth. The valuation represents an approximately one hundred and fifty nine percent premium to Metzera's closing price on September nineteenth, the last trading day before the Pfizer deal was disclosed. So Pfizer's new offer values shares at up to seventy billion, seventy dollars a share was eight point one billion. Pfizer had previously struck a deal at seven point three billion. They're going back and forth. The duel between two of the world's biggest drug makers over a three year old company, three year old company with just with just more than a hundred employees and no approved drugs.

• 3:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:13:28John Coogan?

  Shows the importance of weight loss drugs to the pharmaceutical industry. Weight loss is one of the hottest categories in prescription drugs and companies, big, I imagine, and small, big and small, have been lining up to be part of the market with leaders, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. The global market for the drugs is now worth seventy two billion, according to TD Cowan, which projects it will reach one hundred and thirty nine billion in twenty thirty. It's always so funny because I'm like, oh, seventy two billion, Tyler, seventy two billion dollars a lot? No. Wait, like, you mean what Google's spending on CapEx just this year? Like, that's just what just what one hyperscale is

• 3:14:11John Coogan?

  spending on CapEx is the entire weight loss market.

• 3:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Big tech is pretty big. Well, we have our next guest.

• 3:14:18Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 3:14:21Speaker 12

  What's up, guys?

• 3:14:21John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 3:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 3:14:22John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Great transition.

• 3:14:25Speaker 12

  How are you guys?

• 3:14:25Jordi Hays?

  Split in there.

• 3:14:28John Coogan?

  We're doing well.

• 3:14:29Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you.

• 3:14:30John Coogan?

  You're doing well. Congratulations on the new deal. How did you meet Eugenia originally?

• 3:14:36Speaker 12

  Um, well, I mean, it's hard to not know her. If you guys do know her, which you do, she's a total badass. She's been in around the ecosystem for years. She was kind of the first AI native consumer founder. Right replica launched prior to chat GPT. So perhaps chat GPT was even inspired by replica. Companionship is now one of their biggest use cases. So she's been in and around and well known to the entire firm for many years. So when I heard that she was up to something new, I knew that we had to be a part of it.

• 3:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. This feels like a what I like about some of my favorite ideas are not ideas that no one no one has had or talked about before, but they're ideas that have been kind of floating around, but nobody just decided to like tackle them in a really intentional way. This feels like one of those ideas that is kind of perfectly pulls together kind of the potential of this new technology that we have, the fact that you can generate software on the fly, you can make software so quickly now that you can make things that don't need to have a long useful life. They don't need to be commercial at all. They can be software that would have taken six engineers a year to build.

• 3:15:46Jordi Hays?

  You can now build it in, uh, you know, a few minutes at times if you're really one shotting and just two people can enjoy it. So this felt like, uh, yeah, it just felt like, uh, you know, Eugenia is the right person to take on, take on this idea that has so much potential. Of course it's consumer. Of course it's going to be really hard, uh, but this is like an idea that I want to exist.

• 3:16:10Jordi Hays?

  How like, what was your kind of like framing around this concept? Had you been thinking about it for a while? And what kind of made you do the deal?

• 3:16:19Speaker 12

  Well, I'll give you two framings, Jordy. So the first is, you know, when did software get so serious? It's like all the software we use is so clinical. And even when you see content inside Insta or TikTok or YouTube, it's the same frame. And it's sort of got all the same aesthetics.

• 3:16:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:33Speaker 12

  So if you think about the early 90s internet, you know, it was really eclectic and weird. And I for one think a weird internet is more interesting internet. So I think one, there's a sort of like software as a form of pushing the cultural edge. We've lost out a little bit over the last 20 years. Look, I think the other thing is that the mistake we keep making in AI is that we think these things are markets when they're industries. Right?

• 3:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:54Speaker 12

  Like AI code is not a market. There's not one winner. It's an entire change to the software supply chain. It's an industry, which is why Codex is working, Cursor is working, Replit is working, and Wabi is going to work as well. So I think it's both an insanely delightful and approachable idea with really serious implications at large scale.

• 3:17:13Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what, what are you like? It's hard to predict these kind of things. Like, I feel like with, with consumer, I was trying to get at earlier, is this going to be something like? People are just playing around making things? Or is it going to be?

• 3:17:28Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 3:17:28Jordi Hays?

  Is it going to be a mini app that kind of breaks out and goes viral over on TikTok? And suddenly Wabi has, you know, insane amount of downloads just because of a single video. So I can see it being this kind of like virtual, virtuous flywheel where people just enjoy creating. And then they create something cool and then a bunch more people come in. But what's, what's your kind of, uh, how have you tried to predict the future around what will allow it to break out?

• 3:17:54Speaker 12

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's hard to predict. You know, if you think back to YouTube, that's why I love the YouTube metaphor in 2005. You look at the shaky home video sort of, you know, videos that were put on there, home camera videos. And you pirated content and all kinds of random things. You could sort of easily look at that and be dismissive of YouTube and say, hey, this is non-serious. Hey, what are the YouTube native shows going to look like? Is that even a real thing to think about? And you now look at, it was hard to look at that and see Mr. Beast being implied in it. And the same thing is true today. You know, I made a spooky meditation tracker for Halloween last week to track my meditations. There's a lot of fun AI creative mini apps. A great example of that is last week for Halloween, a big trend on TikTok was this sort of Ghostface Killer AI videos.

• 3:18:38Speaker 12

  Where you take a photo of yourself, you give it this very long and elaborate prompt, and it generates this sort of Scream-style, you know, 2000-er as you on a bed, the Ghostface Killer, the guy from Scream behind you in the doorway. And to actually replicate it, it looks amazing, but to replicate it, you've got to share this thousand-word prompt. That makes no sense. So now there's a mini-app for that on Wabi. It was super fun for Halloween. It's probably not going to be relevant for another 51 weeks, and then it'll be hot again. So by lowering the barrier to making software and lowering the sort of seriousness, you get this sort of explosion of really interesting native disposable, perhaps, apps that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

• 3:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Makes a ton of sense. I can't wait to get access. I wanted to ask you about, not to switch gears too much, but I wanted to get your take on the AI, kind of like Gen AI and music space. You're on Spotify. I have some of your songs saved in my save. They'll be on a drive, and you pop up. But how are you thinking about that category? And where you kind of see it going? Is it, we were having a debate, I think we're having Mike on from Suno later this week, but we've been having a debate. Is it just people that are playing around with these tools and enjoying the process of music making, which has always been a big part of the traditional music industry?

• 3:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Is it people listening to the music that they're making? Or they're listening to other music, but what's your read as a musician?

• 3:20:07Speaker 12

  It's actually very, music and software are no different. People want to participate, and here's what's misunderstood about music. If you look at why was peaks of record sales and music revenue in the 1990s? It's because that's when we had mixtape culture and mix CD culture, right? People were able to participate and make their own music and share it with their friends. And you sort of had this whole long tail of music being created. And then music somehow with streaming went back to being broadcast the way it was in the 60s and 70s before the cassette was invented. Software is actually very similar. Where we have software today, 20 million programs in the world decide what 6 billion of us use. So I think the thing that drives love of the media, whether it's software or music, is the ability to participate. And that's why people love AI music.

• 3:20:50John Coogan?

  So that's just like a general steepening of the power law between creation and usage like because with the Spotify AI music like, yes, there's tons of people who are using AI to create songs. So there's more creators than ever, but then there's also like, there are also AI music artists that are publishing and climbing the charts and I wouldn't be surprised if we wind up having some crazy power law outcome. I mean,

• 3:21:19Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 3:21:20John Coogan?

  much like Harry Potter, Balenciaga, like took over the internet for a day.

• 3:21:25Speaker 12

  That's right. And, you know, people are so, it's always the same criticisms, which is, oh, it's not real. It's not real. Like TikTok's not real, right? We're interested in entertainment and like whether it's real or not is completely secondary. I think the important thing is people are participating. And that's, it's not just going to be a music thing. It's going to be every form of media. It's going to be software. I mean, that's the whole thing more people can now create.

• 3:21:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Speaking of TikTok, do you, is it a prerequisite for growing a new social network to piggyback on another social network? It feels like TikTok did that with the watermark and just buying a lot of ads on Snap and Facebook, maybe. And then Threads, it seems like it's actually sort of working, but it's heavily piggybacked on Instagram. Can, is it possible to just grow a new social network without having some unfair advantage?

• 3:22:13Speaker 12

  I mean, have you tried posting anything to Threads? Working might be generous. Yeah.

• 3:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I have. It's certainly not where the tech community is right now.

• 3:22:24Jordi Hays?

  It's where Connor Hayes is, my boy, running it over there.

• 3:22:27John Coogan?

  I would, I would agree. Yeah, I would agree with you, like how much it's working, but it's like, I, I think the point still holds, which is like, which is like, I don't know, how, how could you even try? I mean, have you bet on a lot of, have you made a ton of, like, I'm going to start a new social network investments? Like, I feel like A16Z is like the place that takes that risk and, and like, this is sort of a new entrant into that.

• 3:22:53Speaker 12

  Yes. Yeah. Look, when, when networks work, what emerges are network economies. And that's the gold standard for everything, for modes, for business model quality, for increasing returns to scale. What's so interesting about AI has mostly been tools. There aren't really that many AI native networks and that's what Wabi is. That's one of the reasons we were so excited. But I think this general trend from tools to networks, it's a really important one to watch. And it's been this sort of like increasing topic within the investor community. So yeah, no, look, as for whether they need to be bootstrapped off of others, I think that the existing networks have become a lot more sensitive to that. And they're very cautious around emerging networks bootstrapping off of their networks. So I think it's a tactic, but it's a hard one to execute.

• 3:23:36Speaker 12

  You've got to kind of think about owning networks in new categories.

• 3:23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we see this even with just like the policing of links across networks. Like you can imagine it's so easy to like, okay, yeah, it exists within the app, but you can share with a link. But all the, I mean, the walled gardens, people, there's a bull market in building walls around gardens. Like I have friends that use TikTok and they send me, they send me TikToks and I don't have the app installed. And so I'll click it and it'll open in a web browser, but the web browser just will not play it for me. I can, there's no button that I can click to be like play in the web browser. The only, it's just, it's just like, download the app or get lost.

• 3:24:13Jordi Hays?

  You have to send it to our, our one friend who's on TikTok and say, can you, can you send us a voice note describing this video?

• 3:24:20John Coogan?

  Let's describe it. It's terrible. It's a mess. It's a mess.

• 3:24:24Speaker 12

  Mark said that, you know, voice notes are a form of violence. So that's a whole other topic.

• 3:24:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, he did.

• 3:24:30Speaker 12

  Look, guys, I do, I do think the networks are really sensitive to this. If you look at it, you know, one possible explanation is that it's hard to actually build a network today. So the new network effect is the externalization of that it. So if you look at Mid Journey, Mid Journey is not a network per se. But what happens is when Mid Journey is consistently a part of the conversation on X, people are making, you know, tutorials on YouTube. Like if you dominate networks organically, that is the network effect today. It's sort of what Cluley does. So I think that's one approach to it, but no, man, it's like the last 10 years of books and blog posts have overtrained every executive and PM. And they're all like, hold on a second, no way we're going to let this get bootstrapped off of our audience.

• 3:25:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing that I'm interested to follow is Sora created this new magical experience for creating AI videos, specifically the Cameo feature was like the innovation in my view that was not, it wasn't just like model quality that made it broke out, it was like, it was good at making a certain type of like internet style, internet native video that, and then it also innovated on the feature level and that's what caused this kind of breakout. The challenge is like, they made a great tool, which is what Wabi is doing and plans to do, but they couldn't retain the experience on the platform, right? Content

• 3:25:52Jordi Hays?

  wants to be free, content wants to go everywhere and so they created this amazing tool, will they create a network? That's like TBD, right? But I think with Wabi, it's like you can create the software, but then it's self-contained, so if other people want to consume that software, they'll actually have to stay on Wabi, which should give it a real shot at building that kind of network and consumption.

• 3:26:17Speaker 12

  That's exactly the bull case. Actually, the interesting thing about Sora is that you've got Cameo as a new content primitive, but then you've got a question of what is the status game? And you guys, of course, have read the famous essay, you know, we're all status-seeking monkeys. You have to have a status game, and I don't know that it was, it might have been comedy for a minute on Sora. So without a status game, I think people quickly lose an incentive to continue to participate. And I think the nice thing about Wabi is it's not just the creation/consumption happens in a single platform, but the status game is creating sort of the most opinionated, strange, interesting app, and because social is built in, you can get all the kind of consumption and network effects on the platform.

• 3:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Tell Eugenia that we want to be at the top. Oh, the waiting list. I want to be at the top of the waiting list.

• 3:27:04Speaker 12

  Guys, I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna make a TVPN app that creates the trading cards after this. I'm gonna send it to you, because I've always had trading card FOMO, man, I want to be on one of those things.

• 3:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, make one, make one.

• 3:27:16Speaker 12

  I'm planning to make it. We gotta get Eugenia on there first, though, man. She's a trading badass.

• 3:27:20Jordi Hays?

  There's two ways to get on a trading card. You can do like a specific deal or something like that.

• 3:27:26John Coogan?

  Or you can get married.

• 3:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Or you can do something just normal in the real world, you know.

• 3:27:31Speaker 12

  I mean, I was tempted to actually make the round much, much bigger just to hear the gong.

• 3:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Oh, we're all hit the gong for you guys.

• 3:27:37John Coogan?

  This is not, we hit the gong for all major.

• 3:27:44Speaker 12

  Love that gong energy. Okay.

• 3:27:46John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes, super exciting one. Great stuff. Good to catch up.

• 3:27:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 3:27:54Speaker 12

  All right, lovely.

• 3:27:56John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel room amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Uh, our next guest, we have David Risher and Aaron Brewer.

• 3:28:09Jordi Hays?

  We're deep in the fourth hour.

• 3:28:11John Coogan?

  We are in the fourth hour, but we have David Risher and Aaron Brewer from Lyft in the REIT room. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Congratulations. Massive earnings call.

• 3:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Looking good. You guys look more like you're kind of calling in from like a radio show or something like that than us.

• 3:28:28John Coogan?

  I love this setup.

• 3:28:29Jordi Hays?

  This is great.

• 3:28:29David Risher?

  That's how I feel. I feel like we're like the, we're like the morning DJ crew.

• 3:28:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:28:35John Coogan?

  Good.

• 3:28:36David Risher?

  Hot hits all day long.

• 3:28:38John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:28:38Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go.

• 3:28:40John Coogan?

  Take us through what happened today.

• 3:28:42Jordi Hays?

  What's the news?

• 3:28:43David Risher?

  Okay, so just off our earnings call. So for those of you who don't know, a public company, I'm David, by the way, this is Aaron and CEO, CFO. And what, you know, we do, uh, you know, every quarter is we spend about an hour or so talking to analysts about what just happened the prior three months. So here's what just happened. Uh, best earnings ever, highest sales ever, you know, you know, uh, high, more active riders, uh, than ever, more driver hours than ever. And here's a crazy fun fact. I love the air horn. So, but here's a crazy fun fact. So when Aaron and I started about two and a half years ago, we were, we were, uh, sort of losing, you know, maybe $300 million in cash every year. Now, uh, we just had our first billion dollar over the trailing 12 months, um, cash flow, uh, generation.

• 3:29:31David Risher?

  So just a huge, huge.

• 3:29:33Jordi Hays?

  John, hit the gong for that.

• 3:29:38Speaker 14

  All right.

• 3:29:39Jordi Hays?

  That is amazing. We don't, we don't get to hit the gong for free cash flow as much as we'd like.

• 3:29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what's the plan with the cash flow? Are you, we're zooming all over the place. Is, I mean, we've talked to some folks who are in similar situations. They flipped their business around. They start generating cash. Then it's time to buy back stock. It's time to reinvest in the future. It's time to pay dividends. What have you done in the past? And how are you thinking? How do you even make that type of decision? Yeah.

• 3:30:09Speaker 14

  Yeah. Yeah. Happy to, you know, first of all, as David mentioned, like, what a privilege to be here now, two and a half years later, be in this position where we're generating cash. We also guided out a few years in advance and said, we're going to generate even more cash than we thought over the next couple of years. So, you know, CFO's dream here. Over 2025, you know, if you think about what we've done, we announced our first share buyback program in the company's history. We said we would, is $750 million in size. We said we would use about 500 million of that by May of 2026. In fact, we're gonna, you know, things are going great. We're gonna actually use that 500 million by the end of

• 3:30:50Speaker 14

  2025. So, and then we've acquired two companies. We bought FreeNow in Europe, leading taxi provider in Europe. And then we most recently announced the acquisition of TBR Global Chauffeuring. We announced some investments we have coming up at Waymo. So if you think about that overall, pretty balanced, but very, very focused on, you know, we are a growth business. We are in growth markets. And so having the opportunity to invest against that, to do it in a way that's very conscious of driving value for our shareholders, not in terms of the growth, not only in terms of growth of the business, but in deploying some of that back in share buyback. So we like the balance.

• 3:31:28John Coogan?

  The question on everyone's head, on the top of everyone's head, I'm sure is autonomous vehicles, you're probably getting AV questions constantly, maybe set the table for us.

• 3:31:39David Risher?

  How about another?

• 3:31:40John Coogan?

  Walk through, yeah, just walk through the, the high level thesis and then maybe we can dig into some of the particulars of the strategy.

• 3:31:47David Risher?

  Yeah, 100%. It is the number one question everyone's asking. And you don't, look, what a privilege, right? Because how often do you get to be in an industry that is clearly going to be transformed? Okay. So what's going to happen? We think the market size is going to grow dramatically. Like, we think AVs for the sector, I'm not just talking about for Lyft, but for the sector, because it's a good product. If you've been in San Francisco or some of the other places where you can see AVs, it's safe, you can kind of zone out in the backseat, you can, you know, whatever you want to do. So, a lot of, so anyway, so it's a cool product, and so what that tends to do is, it tends to expand the market. Okay, so what are we doing? You know, we're not in the business of making cars or even making AV tech, so we got to partner. Who have we partnered with? Well, we've partnered with two of the biggest in the world, Waymo in the United States, who's

• 3:32:32David Risher?

  clearly the market leader in the US, and Baidu in China, who's clearly the market leader there, that'll help us kick cars and tech up into Europe. And what you'll see is we'll integrate these onto our platform and create what we think of as a hybrid network. Lot of drivers on our platform, 1.5 million drivers, 1.6 million drivers on the platform, they're going to continue to drive because there aren't enough AVs in the world just to satisfy the demand with AVs. But then, you know, in certain markets like Nashville and others, we'll have more and more AVs in the platform and create something where holes greater than the sum of the parts.

• 3:33:00John Coogan?

  When are we bringing track cars to the platform? You want to track a car, you want a Ferrari Challenge, or, you know, some sort of BMW that's been modified for the track, and you want to rent that?

• 3:33:13David Risher?

  I love the way you think.

• 3:33:15Jordi Hays?

  John, we did a track day on Sunday, and now it's the only thing.

• 3:33:20John Coogan?

  It's the only thing I think about. But, but, but I do think that the, the actual, like, the, the car ownership pattern might actually change dramatically in the future. And, uh, this is my, like, like thesis, is, it's half a joke, is, uh, I own a track car, I maybe take an autonomous vehicle on a commute or-

• 3:33:38Jordi Hays?

  For purely functional, but then-

• 3:33:40John Coogan?

  For social things.

• 3:33:41Jordi Hays?

  But then you drive for enjoyment.

• 3:33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there are human drivers in the car for specific rides where, uh, where there's either higher demand, or specific weather conditions, or specific road conditions. And so, I feel like a lot of people want to hit- You know, oh, the new technology is going to come in, it's going to be 100% of the market on day one. And that's just never the way it plays out. So how are you thinking about the way it plays out? And how are you preparing for that transition?

• 3:34:10David Risher?

  I mean, you're putting your finger on something that I think as human beings, we tend to do to a fault, which is we sort of think binary, right? It's this or that, you know, it's X or it's Y. And it rarely is, is one or the other. It's, it's almost always both. And what turns, and this is the reason why, you know, frankly, being, you know, alive today is so interesting is you have these, these new modalities. So like, okay, look, over the last, I'm an old guy. So the last many years, when I learned to drive, I would drive on a stick. I still have a stick. It's great, but I also have a Tesla, which is not a stick. In fact, it's the opposite of stick.

• 3:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever, did you ever drive stick in San Francisco when you were first learning? Cause John and I were in San Francisco last week and I was showing him like the different hills that I, when I was, when I was like whatever, 16 and a half, 17, driving, driving stick and, driving a manual in San Francisco really is like a coming of age moment.

• 3:35:00Speaker 14

  Yeah, and then reversing into a parking space.

• 3:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:05David Risher?

  I will tell you a story about, I grew up on the East Coast, but our daughters grew up in San Francisco and I still smell in my head, the grilling of,

• 3:35:15David Risher?

  of our older daughter on De Visitero. You know what I mean? Like it's just burned in my head, but that, but that's what it's going to be like, right? So it's going to be, yeah, I want to go, you know, I want to take a road trip. Of course I want to drive myself, that's super fun. I want to commute tomorrow, I'm just going to let something else do the, do the thing and I'm going to zone out. And that's the, that's the future we're building for. I'll say one more funny thing, which is another weird human thing. If you ask people, you know, do you want a driver on the car? A lot of people say, nah, I'd rather just be a lawyer. If you ask people, what's your favorite Lyft ride ever? They'll say, oh my God, I had this amazing conversation with this driver. All about his life, or he asked me about my day or whatever. That's the future. The future is not going to be just mechanical and virtual. And it's not just going to be physical, it's going to be this blend and that's what we're building to.

• 3:35:58John Coogan?

  Talk about Flex Drive, talk about all the, like, how complicated the value chain is, even if we see amazing performance in AVs and we get tons of autonomous vehicles on the road. It feels like there's, there are tons of things that Tesla's not going to want to do. There's tons of things that Waymo's not going to want to do. There are going to be other competitors and other differentiators. Walk through the whole supply chain, how it fits in, how you're, how you're planning to fit in.

• 3:36:28David Risher?

  So this touches on something again so important and I'll use a funny analogy for a second. I don't know why, but for some reason like my TikTok stuff or my users, like often they'll have like, here's what Disney world looks like to you. And then they're like, they'll do drone shots and be like, that haunted mansion looks amazing. Like this huge building behind, it looks nothing like a haunted mansion, just a warehouse. Same thing with AVs, like it looks like a sort of a seamless digital thing, but behind it, as you say.

• 3:36:54John Coogan?

  There's humans driving remotely.

• 3:36:56David Risher?

  Well, there is some of that.

• 3:36:57John Coogan?

  Sometimes.

• 3:36:58David Risher?

  Okay, that's a true statement.

• 3:37:02John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe one person per five cars, but you know, and we're getting there better, but the teleoperation will be occasionally.

• 3:37:08David Risher?

  Teleoperation is the thing.

• 3:37:09John Coogan?

  It's valuable. Yeah, it makes sense.

• 3:37:11David Risher?

  Well, but, but look, there's also someone's got to clean the car, someone's got to charge the car, someone's got to maintain the car. Someone's got to reboot the car, you know, so there's all that, that's called fleet management. We do it through a subsidiary called Flex Drive. Lyft has about 15,000 cars today. These are not AVs today, these are EVs and normal, you know, ICE cars that are being managed by Flex Drive and kept available for drivers to use when they don't want to use their primary car. So that's a piece of, of, you know, it's a skill we have, it's great. And then you got to keep those cars, if they're available, you got to keep them utilized. You got to keep them, you know, the demand coming in and matching that supply 24/7, even if it's raining, even if a, you know, concert just got out, you know, even during the Super Bowl, you know, in the last five minutes of the Super Bowl where demand goes through the roof.

• 3:37:54David Risher?

  So anyway, what you're referring to or what you're kind of alluding to is that ride share is, is complex and it's very big scale and you add AVs and it's only going to be more complex. But this is what we do, this is sort of our jam and, and we're super excited about this, this, the future for.

• 3:38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, it seems like you're set up very well with the cash flow to actually play in other industries. It's going to be a very exciting time. Uh, Jordy, do you have anything else?

• 3:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just, uh, how, how, how have you guys, like?

• 3:38:23Jordi Hays?

  What's been the focus internally with the team? It feels like the best way to build confidence as a team is to just steadily execute against your guys' plan and roadmap, and you certainly have done that over the last couple of years. I imagine when both of you guys took this job, there were some people that were saying, why would you sign yourself up for this? It's harder to, it's much harder to look like an incredible CEO or CFO with a company that needs some kind of new momentum. And it's easier to look like a genius if you're joining a business that's growing at, let's say, 300% a year or something crazy like we're seeing in some of these AI companies.

• 3:39:07Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, what has been the kind of unlock from a team or culture standpoint that has allowed you guys to deliver like this?

• 3:39:16Speaker 14

  I'll jump in here from my perspective, thinking about joining Lyft. Number one, just incredible brand, right? This company just has an incredible durable brand, and it operates in a market where scale matters, right? And so you continue to grow scale, you can drive very attractive economics. And then certainly, as I joined the company, this company has an incredible culture, right? We have a tremendous teams here, incredibly smart, really, really focused on our customers, and inclined to always do the right thing, to think big, to do the next right thing. So honestly, the first six to nine months, I think, for both of us was just, if you

• 3:39:59Speaker 14

  think about it, the company was recovering from the pandemic, founders stepped aside. It was a big time of transition. So focusing on execution, focusing on just serving the customer, delivering a great service, and then taking it really step by step, because that earns you the right. You build that discipline, that success, that earns you the right to do the next thing. Now you start doubling down on product innovation, or drivers, for riders, we start launching a slew of new products. That's super exciting for team members, for our riders, for the community out there. Then we start... Generating a lot of cash. Great. How do we build from there? So, you know, I often reflect on this a little bit with David. It's, you know, there was sort of an inflection point of the company, I think, when we both came in.

• 3:40:45Speaker 14

  And I'll, you know, can I speak for both of us? I think we both feel it now. It's like this next big leaping off point. And, um, yeah, it's exciting. It's a fun place to work.

• 3:40:55David Risher?

  I'll just say a tiny, tiny bit more. I mean, when you come in, look, you gotta cast a big vision. So the people get kind of excited about it. And we had a big vision around customer obsession and around serving and connecting. You gotta make sure you got the right people and I got super, super lucky. Aaron was one of the first hires I made, one of the best hires of my life, right? So you gotta have that right team around the table and our management team is incredible. And then, as Aaron says, you've just got to execute, execute, execute. And that success begets success, begets success, unlocks opportunity. Now we can think even bigger. So we're just kind of getting started two and a half years in.

• 3:41:27Jordi Hays?

  I love it. I love, I love, I love seeing you guys win. Congratulations. David, we really enjoyed our last conversation. Aaron, it's great to meet you and looking forward to next quarter. We'll talk to you.

• 3:41:40Speaker 14

  Well, I know that David was, you know, mentioning he wants to get the earnings call on your show. You know, this is, this is, you know, the closest we could come. Thank you for having us.

• 3:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Super fun, guys. Congratulations on an awesome quarter.

• 3:41:53David Risher?

  Hey, congrats to you too, by the way. Nice article there at Times. Did you guys write that? Did you write that?

• 3:41:58Jordi Hays?

  We did not. No, that was all Mike, all, all Mike Isaac. Yeah, he just worked with us. It was, uh, it was a lot of fun. Um, we survived. We did. Have a good one. Great to see you guys. We'll talk to you.

• 3:42:11David Risher?

  Congratulations so much.

• 3:42:12Speaker 14

  Thank you. Take care.

• 3:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's check in with the timeline. Stefan was saying, uh, please ask them about the biggest fish they've caught. Is this gonna be a like? That, that should be, that should be an ongoing question. What's the biggest fish you've caught? What is the biggest fish you've caught, Jordy? This is

• 3:42:30John Coogan?

  Have you ever caught a big fish?

• 3:42:31Jordi Hays?

  I've I've only gone fishing on the ocean.

• 3:42:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:42:37Jordi Hays?

  And

• 3:42:37John Coogan?

  You know, that's where they have the big fish.

• 3:42:38Jordi Hays?

  They do have the big fish there.

• 3:42:40John Coogan?

  The ocean, so this is good.

• 3:42:41Jordi Hays?

  But I went out on, I like doing, I tend to like doing weekend activities.

• 3:42:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:42:46Jordi Hays?

  It sounds strange, but are like constrained to like a few hours.

• 3:42:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:42:49Jordi Hays?

  And going out at like hunt, you know, go, we were going, trying to go for bluefin tuna. This was sometime last year.

• 3:42:55John Coogan?

  I feel like

• 3:42:56Jordi Hays?

  And we spent like 12 hours out there, did not catch.

• 3:42:59John Coogan?

  Wait, before you, Tyler, how, do you ever do a bet going? Do you think Jordy's biggest fish is over, under 30 pounds? What do you think?

• 3:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm going under.

• 3:43:09John Coogan?

  You're going under 30 pounds. Okay. Jordy, give us the final answer. How big was the bluefin tuna that you didn't catch?

• 3:43:18Jordi Hays?

  We did not catch a bluefin tuna.

• 3:43:19John Coogan?

  So have you ever caught a fish?

• 3:43:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't think I've ever.

• 3:43:22John Coogan?

  You must have like gone in a pond one day and gotten a minnow, right?

• 3:43:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't think, I don't think I've ever

• 3:43:26John Coogan?

  You've never caught anything.

• 3:43:28Jordi Hays?

  I don't think I've ever caught a fish.

• 3:43:29John Coogan?

  You've never caught a fish in your entire life.

• 3:43:31Jordi Hays?

  But my, my dad wasn't big into fishing.

• 3:43:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:43:36Jordi Hays?

  We went, we would go camping a lot.

• 3:43:37John Coogan?

  We need a trading card up.

• 3:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Never caught a fish. I mean, we should, we should change it.

• 3:43:41John Coogan?

  We have to, we have to change this. This is important.

• 3:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, it's, it's funny growing up around the ocean, surfing my whole life.

• 3:43:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:49Jordi Hays?

  Never.

• 3:43:50John Coogan?

  Never, never thought to just throw in the old line with a hook. It's so easy. You live by the ocean. You live walking distance to the ocean. This is a challenge for you. Today, maybe this weekend, walk to the ocean, catch a fish.

• 3:44:02Jordi Hays?

  Catch a fish.

• 3:44:03John Coogan?

  Catch a fish.

• 3:44:03Jordi Hays?

  I, I do so.

• 3:44:04John Coogan?

  You go to Nobu all the time. You never thought, what if I did it myself? What if I DIY'd Nobu?

• 3:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Safe at Shinkai catches my

• 3:44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah.

• 3:44:13Speaker 02

  John, what's the biggest fish you've caught?

• 3:44:14John Coogan?

  150 pounds, baby. Halibut. I was 10 years old. It was fantastic.

• 3:44:19Jordi Hays?

  The crowd goes wild.

• 3:44:20John Coogan?

  It, it weighed, it weighed more than me at the time, which was electric. Because it was truly like conquering a beast that was bigger than me, which is like so satisfying.

• 3:44:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I

• 3:44:32Jordi Hays?

  So I need to look into this Tyler, maybe this is a good question for you. Hit the deep research buddy. Get ready to do some deep research buddy. But at my, at my local beach, a place that I normally surf in Malibu, there are tons of leopard sharks and they hang out where the water is like three to four feet deep. So after you catch a wave, if there's good visibility, you almost, like every other wave, I'm seeing a leopard shark and usually I just kind of just jump back on my board and paddle out. Cause they're like, I don't know, they're like three or four feet. They're not, they're not massive or anything. But since you've challenged me to catch a fish, maybe the next time I jump down and try to-

• 3:45:11John Coogan?

  Shark is technically a fish.

• 3:45:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would count.

• 3:45:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they are. They're, yeah. So I should just dive down and catch it-

• 3:45:19John Coogan?

  With your bare hands.

• 3:45:19Jordi Hays?

  With my bare hands.

• 3:45:20John Coogan?

  I like this.

• 3:45:21Jordi Hays?

  Um, maybe we could, maybe we could-

• 3:45:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. If that doesn't work, I'd recommend trying to shoot fish in a barrel. I've heard that that's pretty easy. We'll get you a barrel. We'll get you a barrel of fish and you, and you can, and you can-

• 3:45:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I did, I did catch a-

• 3:45:35John Coogan?

  And just start shooting fish in the barrel. You know, shooting a fish in a barrel, it must be, it's actually pretty hard to do, I imagine. Depends on the barrel. Cause if you use a big gun, you're gonna break the barrel and then the water's gonna go everywhere.

• 3:45:49Jordi Hays?

  My beautiful puffer fish.

• 3:45:50John Coogan?

  You caught that?

• 3:45:51Jordi Hays?

  My pride and joy.

• 3:45:52John Coogan?

  Ah, that doesn't really count. I want to see you catching a, an Atlantic bluefin tuna. They can exceed 1,500 pounds with some estimates reaching up to 2,000 pounds.

• 3:46:02Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:46:03John Coogan?

  That's what we need to do. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to the show, for watching the show. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 3:46:11Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, kinda want to keep going.

• 3:46:15John Coogan?

  You want to go into the fifth hour?

• 3:46:17Jordi Hays?

  I kinda want to break the, I kinda want to break the fifth hour.

• 3:46:21John Coogan?

  Oh, we have guests here.

• 3:46:22Jordi Hays?

  We do have guests here.

• 3:46:23John Coogan?

  We have to hang out with our guests. Uh, thank you so much for watching. We will-

• 3:46:29Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait to be back tomorrow. John's cut me off. John's cut me off.

• 3:46:33John Coogan?

  We did get into a good riff right at the end. It was fantastic amid, amid ten guests today.

• 3:46:39Jordi Hays?

  We, uh, new, new question tomorrow, we'll, we'll ask every guest. We'll ask Dave from Roblox will be joining tomorrow. We got Vlad from Robinhood.

• 3:46:49John Coogan?

  What's the biggest fish?

• 3:46:49Jordi Hays?

  What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 3:46:52John Coogan?

  This is important. We're doing a super cut. How big is the fish you've, you've ever caught? The biggest fish? And then, uh, maybe we'll create a boom in fishing. Maybe people would go fishing.

• 3:47:03Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 3:47:03John Coogan?

  Fishing's underrated. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:47:06Speaker 06

  We love you. Goodbye.