Bezos Launches AI Startup, GPT-4o Debate, LeCun’s LLM Revolt | Eric Glyman, Stacy Rasgon, Luca Ferrari, Healey Cypher, John Tenet, Reed Duchscher

(01:02) - The GPT4o Debate (15:24) - Bezos's AI Startup (26:27) - Yann LeCun's Says LLM's are a Dead End (33:00) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:13:48) - Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a financial operations platform, announced a $300 million funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, elevating the company's valuation to $32 billion. He highlighted Ramp's exceptional growth, noting that the company is doubling its revenue at a scale exceeding $1 billion annually, outpacing the median publicly traded software company by tenfold in gross profit growth. Glyman also emphasized the transformative impact of AI on Ramp's services, enabling automated expense management and accounting, thereby enhancing business efficiency and profitability. (01:33:32) - Stacy Rasgon, a Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research, specializes in U. S. semiconductors and semiconductor capital equipment. In the conversation, he discusses the robust demand in the AI sector, noting that companies are rapidly deploying GPUs to meet computing needs, contrasting this with the underutilized infrastructure of past tech bubbles. He emphasizes that the current AI growth is driven by genuine demand and strategic investments, suggesting a sustained period of expansion rather than a speculative bubble. (02:01:45) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:17:32) - Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, an Italian technology company specializing in mobile applications, discusses the company's strategy of acquiring digital businesses with untapped potential and transforming them through extensive software redevelopment, infrastructure re-architecture, and feature enhancements. He highlights the recent acquisition of AOL, emphasizing plans to modernize its products using AI to improve content recommendations and user experience. Ferrari also elaborates on Bending Spoons' approach to maintaining the autonomy of its business units to preserve brand value and operational agility. (02:46:55) - Healey Cypher, CEO and co-founder of BoomPop, an AI-powered group travel company, discusses his background growing up in Saudi Arabia and Nebraska, and his career in building and selling companies. He highlights the significant role of group travel in corporate settings, noting that 60% of corporate travel involves group events like offsites and SKOs, and emphasizes the growing demand for in-person gatherings in the AI era. Cypher explains how BoomPop's AI agent streamlines the planning process by analyzing data points to suggest tailored event options, negotiate with vendors, and manage logistics, aiming to become the default way the world gets together. (02:55:32) - John Tenet, co-founder and CEO of CHAOS Industries, discusses the company's focus on developing advanced radar systems to address modern battlefield challenges, emphasizing the need for agile, multi-product solutions to counter evolving threats. He highlights the limitations of legacy radar systems, such as their size and lengthy manufacturing times, and introduces CHAOS Industries' innovative approach to creating more adaptable and rapidly deployable technologies. Tenet also mentions the company's recent $510 million funding round led by Valor Equity Partners, which will support further product development and manufacturing expansion. (03:04:57) - Reed Duchscher, founder and CEO of Night Media, is a prominent talent manager known for representing top digital creators like MrBeast and Kai Cenat. In the conversation, he discusses the evolving landscape of content creation, emphasizing the ease of becoming a creator today due to improved discoverability, and highlights YouTube's superior monetization opportunities compared to platforms like TikTok and Twitch. Duchscher also touches on the challenges creators face with platform algorithms and the importance of diversifying income streams beyond traditional ad revenue. (03:41:30) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Monday, it's November 17th, 2025. We are live from the TVP in Ultra though, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital Capital. I didn't think you'd get that much use out of that.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  One second. May I podcast with you, John?

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yes, of course, Jordy.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Also, you might notice, Yellow Suits, Ramp, announced a new valuation today. Time is money, save both, easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place in just over an hour.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  Go to the wide, go to the wide for a second.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Eric Ramp himself.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  No, the main, the main wide.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Eric Ramp himself will be joining us.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Look how, look how visible we are, John.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  We are very visible, yeah. Wow, this is, we should wear yellow every day. Well, thank you for tuning in on this Monday. There's a bunch of stories, but first, I wanted to debate with you about Restream first, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are. But second, I wanted to debate with you about what to do about GPT 4.0, 4.0, not 4.0, 4.0, for Omni. There's a debate over whether or not it should be sunset, whether it should be taken out back, because people are not happy with how OpenAI has sunset 4.0 and then brought it back. And then other people

• 1:23John Coogan?

  who don't use it think it's gotta go, it's one-shotting people, it's making them crazy. It's a very, very interesting, weird scenario. And, and we were sort of debating with it, and I wanted to debate it a little bit further, because there were some posts that actually hit the timeline that were talking about this. Aiden over at OpenAI was, was talking about this, saying that, you know, he's noticed the, the amount of, he says, "I see dozens of keep 4.0 posts a day. I respect this group's tenacity, as I respect all friends co-exploring the singularity. To them, know that I too miss parts of 4.0, know that I too dislike modern alignments in precision, know that we are trying to fix it. We don't

• 2:07John Coogan?

  think any current chatbot is optimal. Know that my colleagues and I are up at 3 a.m. on Sunday's babysitting runs. We want to make a delightful robot friend. We're, we're obsessed with it. We're not there yet, but the work will continue." So. I wanted to dig in a little bit into what was actually going on there because that that for Aiden works at OpenAI, it's right in his bio, like it's very public that he's sort of addressing this. It feels like a big deal. It feels like a crazy thing that they brought it back. And I mean, 700 likes, that's, that's not nothing, but it's also not 10,000. It's not, it's not a huge community of people that are there. There's some, and

• 2:52John Coogan?

  I was looking at the hashtag keep4o, like who else is posting? There's a couple posts with 10 likes, 50 likes, there's a couple with 100. But it doesn't feel like there's this insane community. I went over to Reddit and checked that out. Obviously, on the day 40 was sunset, just to give some backstory, it's been 18 months since 40 was introduced. It's been three months since it was initially removed, but then it was quickly brought back. And now it's, and now it's tucked in under that modal. So you have to enable legacy models. And I always thought that they should just remove it. But I wasn't, I wasn't even saying that because I thought it was one-shotting people. I just thought, hey, let's clean it

• 3:34John Coogan?

  up. Like, like, consumers don't need to know version numbers for models. And my example was always Google.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Some consumers disagree.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Some consumers do disagree. The question is how many consumers, how, what percentage of their consumers? How big of an issue is this? When you think about Google as a consumer, you don't care what version of the ranking algorithm you're on. You might have a worse experience one day, you Google something, you don't find it. The next day you go, hey, they found it for you. They probably changed the algorithm. But there, and there have been big updates to the algorithm. Back in 2013, they released Hummingbird, which was the code name. And they came out and they actually did a presentation. They said, hey, we have a new update to our algorithm. It'll handle natural language more effectively. So if you go to Google search and you say, what is the capital of?

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Russia. It won't get confused by what is the capital of. You could just type in. Whereas before, you needed to say Russia plus capital, you know, and then it would find it. But it would get confused by the natural language and Google fixed that. They rolled it out. Interestingly, they had this event where they announced, hey, we have this new algorithm update, Hummingbird, and guess what? It's actually been live for a month. They announced it at this event. It had already been live for a month. No one was complaining. No one noticed because it just improved the Google search experience.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  I bet. I bet people that were like keyword hacking.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  For sure. The SEO folks, for sure. For sure. They noticed. And Panda was another update. There were a number of these updates where if this was your business, you knew. And I'm not saying OpenAI shouldn't share model numbers and version numbers with their enterprise customers or with their B2B customers or API customers. I'm saying in the actual ChatGPT app, don't tell people what they're using. Just improve it and let them complain a little bit all over the place when you're making minor changes.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  If they do that, they lose the companion market.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. That's my question is why? Why can't GPT OSS fit in there? Why can't, if you want a permanent model that you can run forever, like why is that model not satisfactory?

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  If you're gonna fall in love with the model, make sure it's open source.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  And yeah, there's the thing, not your server, not your girlfriend, right? Or not your waifu, not your weights, not your waifu. That's what they say. I'm not kidding. People believe this. But the broader 4O community was not able to migrate to GPT OSS. Now, Tyler, you had a take on this. You think that GPT OSS just isn't at the level of 4O?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just not that. I mean, it's like a fine open source model.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  Why?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  It's just not.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  But it's been 18 months. Or I mean, when did GPT OSS come out, like six months ago?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  I also don't think, people don't like 4O just because it's like super smart. It's because it has like the personality.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  It has the texture, the flavor. Yes, that's correct.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  It's like the big model smell.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  And yes, yes, yes. And so it's been a year and it's been a year. And so there's a one year gap where the open source community should be able to catch up to 4O's ineffable qualities. It's je ne sais quoi. It's raison d'être.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, for a while, you've had open source models that have been like personality like forward, right? It's like replica.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Or, um, what was Noam Chisier's company? I'm forgetting the name.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Character?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Character AI.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Character AI.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  It's like very similar thing. It's just personality.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  And I mean, those, a lot of people use those. I'm actually curious what the numbers are compared to 4O of like the one shotted 4O people. But I think it's probably pretty comparable.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, like, my whole take on the 4O thing was like, uh, one-shotting 4O is like not a good thing. But if you completely kill it, how many of those people will then go to open source models that are like totally unfiltered, where there's no kind of oversight?

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  And that seems much worse, uh, because then if someone is saying like super dangerous stuff, then you can't step in at all.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  I think stepping in at some point is good. So you, like, you, it's like, part of you wants to keep those people on the platform. So then you can have oversight, but also you don't want to be like.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Continuing this.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem, it does seem more responsible. I don't know. Where do you land on it? Kill 4O or leave 4O tucked behind the, the menu options? Give in to the keep 4O crowd? Because.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  I think the real, the real question, the real question, so ChatGPT latest numbers are 800, 800 million weekly actives.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  20 million of those people pay.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of the 20 million that are paying are using it for this companionship functionality? And that is like a huge unknown right now. And so I think my, uh, they're like, they, they, they deprecated 4O. They got a horrible pushback from folks. The question is, did they, did they bring it back because, because people just were really upset? Or did they bring it back?

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Because they were about to lose. And remember, the, the two days after every single Reddit post.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  At least every other was like, I could just cancel my membership. Like, I don't need this anymore.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I was, I was thinking about the, the Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle thing, like, that got a really powerful negative reaction. The stock is up and like, sales are up presumably because like, it got a negative reaction, but it also got a positive reaction that was bigger, right? And so, I'm wondering like-

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but in this, in this case, it could have been that 4O was effectively a product that was generating hundreds of millions of dollars of annual, annualized revenue.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Yep, that was now-

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  And that was just gonna go away.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  It was just-

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  It's not like people were just gonna upgrade to a new model. It was like, you killed my friend.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  I no longer need to pay for this.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just seems like, I don't know, it's hard to, it's hard to benchmark against like, the, like, yes, there was like, a big dust up that was surprising, because I would have thought it would be zero. But at the same time, like, the, the, the original Reddit thread of like, bring back 4O, is like, a couple thousand people. It's not actually like, protesting in the street, millions of people, like, it hasn't spilled over all the pla- all over the place, like, it's not that big. But it does, I, I will agree with you that it is crazy that they even said yes to it. Like, most, most companies, when consumers come to them and say, hey, I want you to bring back, like, we went on this show and we were like, bring back the old Sonos app that doesn't take 25

• 10:11John Coogan?

  minutes to load. And they just didn't do it. They didn't listen to us. They didn't listen to us, right? I was talking to, about Adobe. I was like, bring back-

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they will now, now that we're wearing yellow suits.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Uh, Sonos, I will wear a Sonos-

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  Here's a question. What percentage of their paying users, what percentage of their paying users, do you think are paying for the product because it's a companion to them?

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Because it's for, because of 4O specifically, like, like, how bad would churn have been? How bad was churn? Well, it was clearly bad enough that they, that they did something about it, which is the crazy thing. Because most of the time, like, when, it, it was typically a, a revealed preference versus stated preference. So, when Facebook updated the newsfeed, and instead of just having you log into Facebook and go to someone else's page to find what they were up to, instead, they surfaced the newsfeed, they aggregated everything together. Everyone was like, I hate this new Facebook. And they went on Facebook to complain. Right? And so there was a, there was a

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  User minutes probably went up.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  It did go, it did go up. Exactly. And so that's why, and we talked to some folks at Facebook at the time around this, they, they stayed the course. The question is, uh, yeah, like how bad was churn? Because it, it's weird that we're still having this conversation three months out.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Do you like the zombie ant fungus analogy? Jacob Rintamaki was, uh, was posting this saying that, uh, there's this weird, there's this very weird dynamic where, um, specifically humans are using 4O to protest the deletion of 4O. And so it's very much like the AI is using the human as a host. Like the, the A, the human is the bot for

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  This is why I think it's overall under discussed.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. But at the same time, I, I was, I was laughing because I was like, that Photoshop app, Photoshop mix, like I'm complaining about that. If I go and make a meme in that about protesting the deletion of Photoshop mix, like is, am I the zombie ant for Photoshop? Right? Like, like it's, it's not exactly the same. I agree that, that the AI thing is weirder, but it's somewhat similar. It's somewhat similar. Right? What do you think?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  So, so just back on the churn question for a second. I don't actually think churn was that high because the, the reason 4O was originally deprecated was the GPT-5 release, which was August 7th.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And then, uh, the tweet of Sam Altman saying we're bringing back 4O was August 8th. So it was one day later.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  So unless like a massive amount of people quit that day, which I, I mean, maybe that's very likely. I think that's what happened. You think it was just one day of like

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Why would you bring it back so fast? If you didn't see like massive

• 12:59Speaker 02

  People on Twitter were saying

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Sell, sell, sell off. Like, like normally you'd be like, like If you saw, if you saw like, if you saw like half a percent or 0.1% of your, of your audience like float out the door, you'd probably be like, oh, these people are just sour grapes. They'll be back in a week, right? But if like 10% of your customers like cancel on day one, you're like, oh, we gotta stop the bleeding today. Like, let's bring this.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's why I was asking if they have 20 million paid users.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  And that's where you're.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  5% of them churned and these are people that are willing to pay a lot.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  It seems unbelievable to me. It seems unbelievable to me because I don't use this product this way.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  But that would have been, that could have been like effectively 200 million of MRR that just evaporated instantly.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  It's possible. It's possible. And also there is just the fact of like, like by putting 4O under the legacy models and tucked away, like to your point of like, if it's 200 million of ARR, just to like leave the servers running over there, that's pretty simple.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  It could have been a million, like roughly a million people that were paying.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  This is complete spitballing, but let's use that.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  But it could have been a massive number.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  If you have a million people and they're just going to want the same model forever on cheaper and cheaper hardware that you can deprecate, bullish for depreciation rates. Let's hear it. Depreciation schedules should extend, right? Right? Let's go. We got room to run. You know what I'm saying, right?

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. You shouldn't be, you don't need to depreciate them over two years. You don't need to depreciate them over five years because you'll still be inferencing 4O in 30 years for these people that are like, yeah, it's not this, it's that. I love the 4O so much.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it will be.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yes, I will arrive and people will still be like, yeah, but it's not 4O. I'm in love with 4O.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think it'll be interesting to, if there's like five years from now.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  It's like, here's the five most popular friends that are models. And there's 4O and there's some others. And, and people end up like, we'll see.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  No, it's a good point. Anyway, let's, let's move on to some other, some other stuff. But first, let me tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build and crypto rails securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on infrastructure all through one simple API. And let me also tell you about cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Double kill, of course. Jeff Bezos is back in the arena. Jeff Bezos creates AI startup where he will be co-CEO and it's called Project Prometheus.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  John, what happens to Prometheus?

• 15:38John Coogan?

  He had a really good run. Prometheus, everyone seems to focus on the first part of the story with Prometheus when they name their AI project. So Mark Zuckerberg named his, his AI data center cluster, Project Prometheus as well. Now Jeff Bezos has also called AI project Prometheus. People love the Prometheus brand. No one can seem to properly trademark it. I don't know what's going on in the legal division of, of, you know, the Bezos, Bezos family office or whatever's going on there. But they're both using Prometheus and it's a very odd story because in Greek mythology, Prometheus is a titan responsible for creating humanity in its earliest days. You might have

• 16:20John Coogan?

  seen the Alien movie Prometheus, great film. He defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology. And so it's a great, it's a great analogy. We're stealing fire from the gods and giving it to us. AI is fire and this is what we're going to steal, I guess. And, and so he creates knowledge and civilization. But.

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  Fast forward a little bit.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  Fast forward a little bit. He gets punished for this. It's not a good ending for Prometheus. He gets punished for stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to humans.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  How does he get punished?

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Uh, he gets bound to a rock and an eagle, which is the emblem of Zeus, is sent to eat his liver, uh, every day. And then it would grow back.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  Taylor in the chat says, everybody want to steal fire from the gods? Don't nobody want to have their liver eaten by an eagle for eternity?

• 17:14John Coogan?

  That is true, Tyler. Uh, so his liver grows back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day in an ongoing cycle. And I was thinking about like, like, what is, what is the metaphor here? Let's continue to extend the metaphor. Like, what is the liver in this metaphor of like, building big AI projects? And then what is the eagle? Is it possible that the eagle is like, blue owl is more of an owl?

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  Private credit.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Credit, maybe in blue owl is coming and eating your liver. And the liver is the free cash flow that you had on your balance sheet. Cause if you're one of these hyperscalers, you have a lot of free cash flow, but less and less as you sign these big debt deals.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  And, and the, and the blue owl comes and eats your free cash flow every day for all of eternity. Um, and, uh, eventually, eventually there is a little bit of a, of a reprieve because Hercules comes and breaks the chains of Prometheus and Prometheus is freed and his liver regrows and, uh, Hercules slays the eagle. And so I think obviously in this analogy, uh, what did you say? Who would be Hercules in this analogy?

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  Jerome Powell.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Jerome Powell, who comes in and slays the debt dealers with low interest rates, right? Uh, and so, and so clearly we can see where this metaphor is going. They're all, they're all winking. Both, uh, both Zuck and Bezos are winking and saying, hey, hey, come lower interest rates, save us because we're about to get our livers eaten with our Promethean startups. Uh, anyway, let's actually dig into what he's doing because it's not just a found, it feels late to get into AI. It feels late to get into foundation modeling and training runs.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Big Euro summer. He's back.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  He's back.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Back in the driver's seat.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. He went to Coachella. He went to, uh, he went to a few different big events. It's possible he got back from those events, started, opened up the newspaper, realized what was going on.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  AI is a big, I gotta get in on this. I gotta get in on the action. Ran a deep research report. What did I miss?

• 19:18John Coogan?

  What did I miss?

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  What did I miss?

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, anyways, in the New York Times, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is throwing his money and time into an artificial intelligence startup that he will help manage as its co-chief executive. I feel like co-CEO, this is like more popular than ever.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  It is. Sequoia Capital has co-

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  Co-steward.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Global stewards. They're global stewards, right? Or is it something else?

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  I think just co-stewards.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  I thought there was-

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Drop the global.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  I thought there was something else. Senior steward. That's what it is. Senior steward. So is there a junior steward? Sequoia.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  It also implies there's a steward's steward.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Wait, why?

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Like, presume, you know.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Wait, they're co-stewards. Oh, wait. So Roloff stepped down as senior steward. Now Pat Grady and Alfred Lin are co-stewards. So they're actually at a lower level. So one of them will have to emerge as the senior steward.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  The other will become the junior steward, I would imagine.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  But the stewards are, look after the firm, but it's possible there's a steward that looks after the co-stewards.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  That is possible.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's Andrew Reid. Anyways, the company Project Prometheus is coming out of the gates with 6.2 billion in funding, partly from Mr. Bezos, making it one of the most well-financed early-stage-

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  With authority.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  That is a massive round.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Strong hit.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Six billion out the gate. Let's go. Congratulations.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  This is the first time Mr. Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. Though he has deeply evolved in Blue Origin, his official title at the space company is founder. Since leaving Amazon, Mr. Bezos has received as much attention for his personal life as his businesses, including an extravagant celebrity-filled wedding in Venice this year. He has also become more closely involved in Blue Origin and has shown increasing interest in the race to build. Artificial intelligence. His new company now firmly plants him in the middle of that competition. Project Prometheus is entering an increasingly crowded AI market with smaller companies trying to carve out niches in a race with industry giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and pioneering companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  The new company has until now kept a low profile and when it was started is not even clear. Project Prometheus is focusing on technology that dovetails with Mr. Bezos' interest in taking people to outer space. The company is focused on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace, and automobiles.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Is this his next? Do you think this is his next? Do you think he's doing what Steve Jobs did with Next, where Steve Jobs was fired from Apple? Obviously Bezos was not fired from Amazon, but he did retire. And it'd be weird for him to jump straight back in to the CEO seat at Amazon. But Steve Jobs founded Next and then was acquired into Apple and it kind of made for a more smooth transition back into the driver's seat. Could that be what Bezos is doing?

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  I could see it. He's 61.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  He's young. He's got the whole third, he's got the whole like third triple, the third 30-year period that is so, such a positive omen in many people's careers, like Warren Buffett. Where was Warren Buffett at?

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  And he's got to have more energy than ever. He's been gallivanting around the world.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  He's in peak physical condition.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  He's having, stacking up win, win after win all over the globe.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  I think he, here's a, here's a tinfoil hat. Set it up as co-CEOs, because Amazon will buy Project Prometheus. His co-CEO becomes the, you know, the internal CEO or lead on that project at Amazon. He takes the throne again.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Hmm. I wouldn't, I wouldn't.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  A boy can dream.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  So, so what is he actually building? Let's get into this.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  The company is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace, and automobiles. Unclear where the company will be based. Bezos' co-founder and co-chief executive is a physicist.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  AI that helps in manufacturing of computers, aerospace, and automobiles.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  So, computers, he manufactures racks at AWS. Aerospace, he manufactures rockets at Blue Origin. Automobiles, he's a big backer of Rivian. He manufactures cars there. And so, he wants to do some sort of automated, like, supply chain? Is it ERP?

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is clearly not PR that they wanted to do.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  So I think there's a lot of guessing going on.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  Okay, well.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Um, but Mr. Bezos' co-founder and co-chief executive is Vic Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google's co-founder Sergey Brin. Uh, Sergey Brin at Google's X, a research effort often called the Moonshot Factory. Google X produced a wide range of ambitious projects, including Wing, drone delivery service, and the self-driving car that became Waymo.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  It's so interesting how divergent, like, those two paths were. Like, Wing, you don't hear about very much. Um, when you think drone delivery service, you think Keller at ZipLine. Uh, they're the ones that are really running away with that compounding. I don't know the status of Wing. Maybe I'm just out of the loop on that. Maybe it's doing great, but, uh, it feels like Wing has not certainly garnered the level of attention that Waymo did, which was this success out of the exact same, uh, sort of incubator. So, interesting.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Hudson comments in the chat says, "It's just gonna be robots doing science on the material level, not the industrial scale."

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Materials, interesting.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Um, there's more details here. Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design, and scientific discovery. Last year, Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a startup that is applying AI to robots.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 25:21John Coogan?

  And, building, okay.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we'll have to get, uh, Jeff on when he's ready to talk.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Where did, where did the money come from exactly? Do we know?

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  I think it was.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Just Bezos himself?

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Mostly Bezos.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  It's interesting. It's like, yeah, but like, I'm super interested in like how you size a round if you're investing in your own project.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Because you could just be like, this is my thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna fund it every payroll cycle. Yeah, whatever the bill is, I'll pay it because it's my thing. You don't necessarily need to like, do some sort of funding round necessarily. I don't know.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  I accidentally opened the comment section of the New York Times article that we were just going through and it says,

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  first comment, "These large ego models seem promising."

• 26:12John Coogan?

  Large ego models?

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Like if you're, if you're a, you know, a tech billionaire and you have a large ego, you, you wanna, you want your own large language model?

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds like he's not very much not training, just another LLM, but we'll have to see. Well, Yann LeCun was in the Wall Street Journal's weekend paper profile by Megan Barosky. "An AI pioneer thinks everyone is wrong again. He's been right about AI for 40 years. Now he thinks everyone's wrong." What do you think, Tyler? Do you think Yann LeCun is wrong or do you think everyone else is wrong?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  I mean, so in this article, he doesn't, there's nothing really new here. They're just kind of talking about his, the points that he's been making over the past couple of years, which is just that like, LLMs will not bring us to AGI or ASI or anything. And like, even if you keep scaling, they don't, they're not like actually intelligent. They can't reason or whatever. Which, I don't know, it's like, these models are much better than me at math. Like, they can do, they can get IMO gold medals. Like, I cannot do. And that's like, it's like, does that take reasoning?

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  Never doubt yourself.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Yes, but I mean, like, yeah, I mean, there is an element of like, the computer has been able to do good math fast forever. Like, since like the 80s. Like, if you were like, what is 7,642 divided by 12?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a difference you can, you can make between just like raw calculation and like, how to like think about solving a math question generally.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  And like, you can say that he's been right about like, you could say that he predicted like spiky intelligence, maybe, of models?

• 27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  And that's like, sure, yeah. But I, yeah, it's like, I, I think it's not true to say that he's been right about AI for the past 40 years.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  That seems man's never had a bad take forty years, not a single bad take.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Not a single bad take. Now he thinks everyone's wrong. Um, and yeah, it's very, it's very funny for me because, uh, oh, does he think, uh, George Hots was wrong when George Hots said that, uh, GPT six will not be AGI and the GPT paradigm will not scale on the Lex Friedman podcast in 2021? Does he disagree with that? Does he disagree with Andre Karpathy saying it's slop and that we need new ideas? Or, you know, there's like seven other people that have kind of echoed the same thing. He doesn't think everyone's wrong. He just thinks some people are wrong. But, uh,

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  Sort of, I mean, Tyler's take, I don't know if now's the right time. I can go through this Karpathy post.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Please.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Karpathy posted yesterday, he said, sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy. AI has been compared to various historical precedents, electricity, industrial revolution, et cetera. I think the strongest analogy is that A is that of AI as a new computing paradigm, software 2.0, because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing. If you were to forecast the impact of computing on the job market in the 1980s, the most predictive feature of a task job you'd look at is to what extent the algorithm of it is fixed, i.e. are you just mechanically transforming information according to wrote easy to specify rules, i.e. typing, bookkeeping, human calculators back then.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  This was the class of programs that the computing capability of that era allowed us to write. Uh, with AI now, we are able to write new programs that we could never hope to write by hand before. We do it by specifying objectives. I, uh, i.e. classification accuracy or reward functions. And we search the program space via gradient descent to find neural networks that work well against that objective. This is my software 2.0 blog post from a while ago. In this new programming paradigm, then, the most predictive feature to look at is verifiability. If a task job is verifiable, then it is optimizable directly or via reinforcement learning. And a neural net can be trained to work extremely well. It's about to what extent can an AI practice something?

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  The environment has to be resettable. You can start a new attempt, efficient. A lot of attempts can be made and rewardable. There is some automated process to reward any specific attempt that was made. The more a task/job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation in the new programming paradigm. If it is not verifiable, it has to fall out from neural net magic of generalization. Fingers crossed, or via weaker means like imitation. This is what's driving the jagged frontier progress in LLMs. Tasks that are verifiable progress rapidly, including possibly beyond the ability of top experts, i.e. math, code, amount of time spent watching videos, anything that looks like puzzles with correct answers.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  And while many others lag by comparison, creative strategic tasks that combine real world knowledge, state, context, and common sense. Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Okay, you gotta go to this other post for the perfect example of what's hard to verify. From Nat Purser. This is my personal benchmark for AGI and looks like we're a ways, a ways, boys. A ways away, boys. Can you come up with 10 jokes in the same format as the "You're telling me a shrimp fried this rice" joke? "You're telling me a shrimp fried this rice." And the, uh, and GPT-5 Pro reasoned for one minute and 31 seconds. It says, "You're telling me a hamster drove this car? You're telling me a pigeon delivered this mail? You're telling me a Roomba cleaned this mansion? You're telling me a goldfish coded this app?

• 31:48John Coogan?

  You're telling me a squirrel filed these taxes?"

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  I swear, I swear, I swear AI just has a different sense of humor. Sense of humor is just bad jokes.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, GPT-5 thinking did a little bit better. You're telling me a chicken fried this steak? You're telling me a hand made this pasta? Hand pasta? Handmade pasta? That's like...

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  That actually is a good one. Look at, uh, number 10. I think that one's good.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Number 10, "You're telling me a ghost wrote this book?" That's good. Ghost-written book? That one does make sense. "You're telling me a star crossed these lovers?" That's actually pretty good. Okay, so we're getting somewhere. We're getting somewhere. At least it like understood the prompt on this one. "You're telling me a beer battered this fish?"

• 32:29John Coogan?

  I like that. Steve? You're telling me this Figma thought bigger and built faster? Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  We gotta whip through a bunch of these posts. I, I, I will not leave this show before we talk about the Apple, the Apple iPhone sock. What is up with the sock? Have you seen this? Apple launched a sock. So it's a, it's a fashion accessory and everyone's debating it. Do you see this? It's this blue, light blue sock that you put over your shoulder or over your hand. And people are very, very upset about it. Aditya Agarwal says, when a company releases something that is so obviously underwhelming, then the natural question is, did no one at the company see how bad this is? Or did no one have the courage to speak up? I'm not sure which is worse.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  And someone else says, look, Apple has a lot of fumbles. This is not one of them. They knew exactly what they were doing and exactly who would buy it. Also, it's okay. Fashion accessories are not for everyone. And the news, of course, is that the, it's called the iPhone Pocket, a beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone. Not carry the iPhone, remember, they, you don't say the iPhone, you say iPhone. And so born out of a collaboration between Issey Miyake and Apple, iPhone Pocket features a singular 3D knitted construction designed to fit any iPhone. Jaya, who I actually did a collab with on Instagram, very fun, tech commentator, she

• 34:10John Coogan?

  says, a lot of tech bros prematurely dunking on this release because they don't get why it's a big deal. So let me translate. You're not the only consumers Apple designs for. This is a huge designer and the mind behind Steve Jobs iconic black turtlenecks. I didn't realize that. People outside the US wear phone straps and slings all the time and would pay for this. They're tapping into an existing trend. Apple has infiltrated music, entertainment, but not high fashion, even though the tech X fashion is exploding, tech built into Met Gala looks, et cetera. The 3D knitted construction reduces material waste and shows a push toward more sustainable, made to shape production. This will absolutely sell. So what do you think? Are you bullish or bearish on the Apple iPhone Pocket, Jordy?

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I know a lot of people. Most, I feel like most of, uh, I feel like my mom would love this, to be honest.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  It seems like it's a great Christmas gift. So interestingly, how much do you think this costs?

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, like 230 bucks.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Wait, did you look it up?

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, the long one's 230, the, the short one's 150. Uh, but I, I think most people would look at this and be like, okay, uh, it's a sock. Like, but it's from Apple, so it's probably like 30 bucks, maybe 50 bucks. Some people were surprised that it was a little bit more expensive, but, uh, you know, it's from this famous designer. And it's this interesting status symbol. Um, the question is like, this could be like, I, like, I don't think I'm gonna be using this thing no matter what. The question is, is this gonna be like La Booboo's and gonna be like super popular or like Stanleys? Like, will this become actually like a very, very popular form factor in America specifically? I don't know. It's hard to tell. I, I'm not really the person to like, you know, handicap it.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  I, I think Apple knows what they're doing. I think they'll, I think they'll make money on this certainly.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, ever since the, the AirPods, uh, AirPods early on looked really silly. And I could see this becoming,

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  I could see this becoming a popular form factor for accessories.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  And I could see Apple seeing like, hey, there's a world where we not only sell a case with every iPhone, we can sell a, a sock.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  A sock.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Well, the sock maybe makes it so that you don't need a case. Because this is your case. Like, if you have it in there and then you drop it, like, it's kinda nice.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's kind of a crazy weapon.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Defense weapon, yeah.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Self-defense.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  You can swing it around and smack people in the face with it. Uh, I don't know, the colors are pretty cool. And I don't know, it's, it's clearly not for me, but I think I'm gonna buy four of those for, for Christmas. We'll see. Uh, and give them out to people. Um.

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  Get ready for your iPhone sock, buddy.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Well, uh, speaking of socks, uh,

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Jim Cook is stunning in some, what are these? New shoes? Travis Scott's new Fragment AJ1 Lows. Uh, these are Nike shoes, I suppose, but these are not Air Force Ones, I suppose. I really don't know enough about shoes, but, but everyone's saying he low-key got aura. And so, congrats to Tim Cook on looking great. And even though the succession planning is intensifying, the rumor mill is churning. Obviously, Apple has not been commenting, but something's going on in Cupertino.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, releasing this photo is more than a comment, it's a statement.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  I like reading into it, just being like, oh, really? Oh, really, Financial Times? So, the Financial Times has this article that says, this is, "Apple Intensifies Succession Planning For CEO Tim Cook. The iPhone Maker's Board Preparing For Its Longtime Leader To Step Down As Early As Next Year." John Turnus, Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware, is widely seen as Cook's most likely successor, although no decisions have been made. So, basically, everyone's been leaking this, whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's the Financial Times here. And of course, Apple is not commenting, because they'll, they'll talk about who they're going to move the market when they decide their next CEO. If they even, if they don't even stick with Tim Cook, Tim Cook. They might stick with Tim Cook for another two decades, who knows?

• 38:16John Coogan?

  But I like the idea that this photo came out being like, yeah, I'm not leaving.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  No comment, but I'll make a statement.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  I'll make a statement. No comment, but I'll make a statement. I do, I do want to have some folks on to debate, like, whether or not. I was, I was thinking we should invite John Gruber on, because he wrote this piece, like, Something Is Rotten in Cupertino, all about the failure of, of Apple Intelligence. And when we talked to Mark Glyman, we saw, Glyman was also saying, like, yes, like, Cupertino really was shook by the, like, dropping the ball on, on Apple Intelligence by missing AI. But I, I still wonder if all of this is, is, there's all these rumors, oh, Tim Cook's gotta go.

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if you post that picture, if we see a real correction in AI, just post caption, "Do nothing, win."

• 39:05John Coogan?

  Do nothing, win. Yeah.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Stock, stock pumps 10%.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  I missed artificial intelligence, but I didn't miss getting this fit off. I'm having a good time. What else is in the news? Vanta, automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast, and they don't stop there. Their AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. There's a bunch more news.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  We have to talk about paper hands.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  This is the fakest of news. Get ready for the fake news hour, buddy. Okay, so what?

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  Peter Thiel sold his entire stake.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Everything, all of it.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  And 76% of his friend's company Tesla.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Okay, yes. So this is from a, so this is from one of those 13Fs, disclosure forum with the SEC, from Thiel Macro, his fund, his, some of the money that he runs. But of course, it's very, people read into 13Fs all the time for a variety of reasons, and they sort of get it wrong a lot, it seems like. And so Zero Hedge sort of sums this up where he says, Peter Thiel net worth 20 billion, Thiel Macro AUM 75 million, like what's going on, what make it make sense? And it's almost certainly because of disclosure rules, like what needs to be disclosed

• 40:33John Coogan?

  might only be a fraction of what's actually going on there. So odd to read into it, but at the same time, I think the reason why this made headlines is just because it feels like something that might happen. Like, if instead this headline had been, oh, like Peter Thiel went on a podcast and said that he thinks the AI bubble is, has reached the top, everyone would just be like, oh, yeah, like that's, it feels like people have been waiting for someone to call the top. And so they're really, really like digging in for top signals and top calls. And this slight change in the,

• 41:13John Coogan?

  in the 13F, even though the odd part is that if you actually read the 13F, which of course is just this like $75 million slice for whatever, for whatever reason, even if you dig, even if you read that, like the other three holdings are still big tech companies. So it's not like super bearish. It's like there's some Microsoft in there. I think there's some Apple in there.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the Thiel Macro team is trying to generate the Greatest returns that they possibly can.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Go viral. They're trying to go as viral as possible.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  They don't care about IRR. They just want to go viral. They're just trying to create headlines. No, they're trying to generate returns.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, famously.

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  It's possible to sell a stock that you're that you're still bullish on. Or at least that you expect like some amount of price appreciation.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:59Jordi Hays?

  Or even long-term price appreciation.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  And also like, there's all these weird like tax, you know, implications of like selling one thing like, it's not even clear that this is all of his Nvidia. No one's, no one's gotten to the bottom of that. I don't know if they ever will. But people love, people love deep diving 13 F's and they are so, and they are fun. Situational awareness is.

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  Certainly a bull market in 13.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  13 F deep dives.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  Deep dives.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Let's, let's talk about the situational awareness 13 F, but first let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So situational awareness 13 F for Q3 dropped Friday. Nick Carter broke it down. Massive new $500 million position in CoreWeave, which has been down a bunch, but they're going in.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Big adds to Core, C O R Z and Iron added some new miners. Intel, Intel calls remain unchanged. Trimmed Broadcom, a couple of other names here and Nick is giving it some, some context. I believe Nick was the first, one of the first investors in CoreWeave, correct? And.

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  Angel.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Angel in CoreWeave. What an insane investment. Congrats to him.

• 43:14John Coogan?

  So he says, all these numbers are as, are, are as of 930, many of these names sold off since then. Portfolio value, counting notional value of options doubled from 2.12 billion to 4.15 billion, mostly due to 1.5 billion of new cash. So.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for new cash injection.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  We got to ring the.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Massive, massive, massive funds. But the fund did generate 700 million in appreciation. So a huge, huge, huge gain.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the concerning, you know, again, last, last, last time 13F dropped, remember? People were like reading too much into it and they were like, wow, he, he was long Intel, like, is he cooked? And then they did, Intel did the deal with the government and it absolutely ripped. This 13F, you know, so situational awareness had a half a billion dollar new CoreWeave position as of basically the beginning of October. And obviously CoreWeave has been down into the right,

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  down 46% in the past month, but...

• 44:40John Coogan?

  Wait, down 46% in the past month?

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  I thought it was in the past like three months or something.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  No, past month.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  So that position is probably not...

• 44:50John Coogan?

  It's down 5% today.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah, one month it's down 46%. That, it's at a 36 billion market cap. Yeah, it's so, it's so odd because like, yeah, when you, when you look at, when you look at just this one name, it feels like, okay, like it is over. Like AI, if you told me like, oh yeah, like the, the company that really is like the most indexed to the AI wave is down 46%, I'd be like, wow, so this is like the total popping of the bubble, complete pop. Like it's over, it's like, like when the metaverse bubble popped, when, you know, when crypto bubbles pop, like Bitcoin trades down 50%, 60%, like, and then it's over and then you start rebuilding, right?

• 45:37John Coogan?

  And yet, and yet the overall market feels nowhere near popped, right? Like, I mean, I'm sure Nvidia is down somewhat, down 5% past five days. But Nvidia over the last month is still up. Over the past six months, it's up 40%. And so you would, you would expect Nvidia to be maybe like, you know, selling off more. CoreWeave is just in a, is just in a unique position, like truly, truly rough month for that company.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, as well as Core Scientific, which Core we've tried to buy.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  It was rejected.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  Core Scientific has traded down 24% in the past month, which Leopold also had built a position in. So we'll see.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what the thesis on CoreWeave is. I mean, obviously, the company is, has a great product. Like Semi Analysis has ranked them platinum on ClusterMax. It's a, it's clearly a, a real company with real, with real products and services and holdings. Maybe the market, it was just overheated. Maybe it's pulling back. It's kind of unclear. But if you want to go in, analyze a bunch of 13Fs, do it in Julius, the AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, get insights in seconds, no coding required. Speaking of other data.

• 46:57Jordi Hays?

  So he also, he also added positions just in Western Digital.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Oh, he's getting in.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  Seagate. And I was just going through.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  On the hard drive trade, got to store that data somewhere and potentially.

• 47:11Jordi Hays?

  Modine Manufacturing.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Okay. I, I'd be interested to know what he's thinking about in the, in the energy side, on the, the gas turbine side. Right? Isn't that what Semi Analysis was drawing the most attention to? Feels like they've been very ahead of the curve on identifying.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Companies that are basically already supply constrained. And if you just look and if you look deeper into what's going on in their book of business.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  They're about to flip to incredibly high margins. Because once, once everything goes out of stock, this company can just all of a sudden say, "Yeah, actually, actually, we need 60% margins." People will be like, "Yeah, no problem. Like you're, I want to buy as much as possible."

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the story from situational awareness is like, all the NeoClouds have sold off a ton. CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Iron.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Saying Satya unloaded his risk onto the NeoClouds. It's a game of sort of.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  I don't know, musical chairs.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  So that's.

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like the deal with, uh, the deal with Microsoft.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, just wasn't, uh, it like seemed to be like little to no mar- margin.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  Um, but anyway, so if you, so the Neo Clouds have also sold off, but he, uh, Lumentum Holdings, uh, is up forty-six percent in the past month, which he added Western Digital up twenty-five percent and Seagate up fourteen percent. So.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he's making up for it.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, it's, it's the birth of a new, of a new fund. It's just like, it's, it's the very, very hot part of the cycle. I think everyone's wondering like, how big will this be in a decade?

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  That's a, uh, that's a big question. It's a, it's, it's a very exciting time and, but you gotta stick to landing. And I think people are, I'm sort of rooting for him. I think he's, I think he's gonna do it.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is like, are, like, is it gonna be a true hedge fund? Like, is he gonna make money?

• 49:11John Coogan?

  In a down market?

• 49:12Jordi Hays?

  In a, in a, in a correction.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah. I bet we're gonna open up one of these thirteen F's and be like, wow, he's short everything now. Okay. And then, and then you're gonna see everything sell off and it'll be like, wow.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  That would be much higher signal than PT in a, in a, you know, seventy-five million dollar fund.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, uh, there, there's some Blue Owl news in the Financial Times. Um, Blue Owl Investors faced hefty, faced hefty losses as credit fund blocks exit ahead of merger. Blue Owl has blocked redemptions in one of its earliest private credit funds as it merges with a larger vehicle overseen by the asset manager in a deal that could leave investors with large losses. They could lose about twenty percent of their holdings. The deal underscores the risk that retail investors have taken in pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into private debt funds carrying limited liquidity rights. It comes as scrutiny builds on the valuations and returns on private credit

• 50:12John Coogan?

  funds, which have caused publicly listed debt funds to sell off and trade at steep discounts to the stated value of their assets. And so, um, we, we, we talked about this, I think on Friday, but Blue Owl has been selling off, uh, this year and they said, we should be performing better than everyone else. Uh, but it feels like a little bit of the narrative might be around liquidity here. Earlier this month, Blue Owl told its shareholders that it planned to merge its Blue Owl Capital Corporation II fund, which has a billion dollars in assets, with its O B D C fund, which has seventeen billion in assets. B O C C II investors are being asked to exchange their shares in the private fund for shares in O B D C at the stated net asset value of both funds.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  However, O B D C trades on public markets at a discount of about twenty percent to the stated value of assets because of the liquidity problem.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, and because it's possible that the market doesn't feel like they're pricing the assets correctly.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  There's some discount.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Got to see what's in there. Redemptions in B O C C II have climbed to a level where it could event, where it would eventually be forced to restrict investor redemptions. Its investors pulled out

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 51:24John Coogan?

  A hundred and fifty million in the first nine months of this year, a twenty percent increase from the same period last year, according to security filings. Redemptions in the third quarter nearly doubled to sixty million, or six percent of its net asset value. Jonathan Lamb, chief financial officer of O B D C, acknowledged that at current prices, investors could take a potential haircut on their investments. But he said that the merger came with significant benefits, such as the ability to own more liquid shares in O B D C. The trading price of O B D C has been hit by souring sentiment on private credit markets that was not backed up by the performance of Blue Owl's underlying loans, he added. If shareholders were to vote down the deal, B O C C II may be forced to limit redemptions.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  So, good luck if you're hanging out in Blue Owl Capital. Sundar Pichai has more news in the data center world. She says, "Today, we're announcing a new forty billion dollar investment in Texas through twenty twenty-seven to build cloud and AI infrastructure and support thousands of new jobs."

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  Yee-haw.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  This includes new data centers in Armstrong and Haskell counties and a major investment to strengthen energy resilience and abundance. We're also providing funding to more than double the projected pipeline of new Texan electricians.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  To power the AI era.

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  It's the golden age of being, uh, the golden electrician age.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Blown around in private jets to different data centers.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, you do. You do. That's right. Uh, so $40 billion investment, thousands of new jobs. That feels like a higher ratio than what was the other example you kept quoting? Something like 500 jobs for some anthropic data center or something?

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  It was the anthropic data center. They were like, we're investing 50 billion. How many jobs did you create?

• 53:14John Coogan?

  20 jobs. I mean, that's not that goal of this stuff. The jobs should not necessarily be created in the data.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I just brought, I just always brought that up because you have to understand what people outside of tech, their reaction to that.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 53:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, great. You're investing $50 billion then.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. In some way it just doesn't create jobs.

• 53:33Jordi Hays?

  There was some, there was a good article, uh, uh, in the journal on, uh, on Blue Owl as well. I think it also ties into Abilene, Texas. It might be a good moment to, to cover some of this.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  In the journal yesterday, Wall Street blows past bubble worries.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  To supercharge AI spending frenzy. Uh, and they say firms such as Blue Owl Capital have raised trillions in investing firepower. The AI build out is a perfect match, though warning signs are flashing. Not long ago.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  Does Blue Owl have better PR or worse PR than Aries? They seem to be, they seem to be quickly becoming like the main name that everyone knows in private credit. And to my knowledge, like, they are not the only firm in the category. And yet they are the ones that, that, if you need an example, you bring, you, you pull Blue Owl off the shelf.

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a strong brand.

• 54:30John Coogan?

  It is a strong brand.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  They have the dot com. They have blueowl.com.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Blueowl.com.

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  Not long ago, Blue Owl Capital was an upstart investment firm that lent money to midsize US companies such as Sara Lee Frozen Bakery.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  These days, the firm is financing massive data centers costing tens of billions of dollars for the likes of Meta and Oracle, a sign of just how quickly Wall Street has become the enabler of America's AI boom. Fund managers such as Blue Owl amassed trillions of dollars of investing firepower and have been hunting for big deals where they can put that money to work. They found slim pickings for years until a perfect match appeared in AI, which has provided a bigger target than anything in history due to the vast sums tech companies need to ramp up computing power. "We're talking about numbers that are so large, even in the low cases," said Blue founder, co-founder Mark Lippshultz.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  Lippshultz.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Lippshultz. "Does it even matter if you keep counting after you get to 1 trillion of capital expenditure in the next couple of years?"

• 55:30John Coogan?

  This is insane.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't it even matter?

• 55:34John Coogan?

  You really undersold this.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't it even matter?

• 55:36John Coogan?

  You told me you read this, and I was like, is it good? You were like, it was okay.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  There's one moment that's...

• 55:40John Coogan?

  No, there's another one I saw, I scrolled down.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  Last week's sell-off in tech-related stocks and bonds marked some of the most serious warning signs that the frenzy could be overdone. But any worries on Wall Street about a possible investment bubble have largely been trumped by the fear of being left behind. Lippshultz and co-founder Doug Ostrover jumped into the fray at a posh retreat in California's Ojai Valley for dozens of tech VIPs and celebrities in the spring of 2024. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella were there, along with Pharrell Williams and Serena Williams. The Blue Owl duo, a Wall Street superstars who built the firm into a $295 billion fund manager in 10 years by perfectly timing a surge in private lending, looked like just two money men in office sneakers and fleece vests.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  But the billionaire co-owners of a professional hockey team who have talked about skating where the puck is going.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  It's awesome that they both...

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  Seized the opportunity to get in on the AI boom.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  They built this firm huge. They make billions of dollars, and they're like, let's get a hockey team. Why don't you go 50-50?

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, what hockey team do they own? Can you find that out?

• 56:44John Coogan?

  But the next line is the one I was laughing at.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  While David Gata DJ, the Blue Owl executives cut a deal to acquire IPI Partners, an investment firm that owned and operated big data centers for Amazon and Microsoft. Blueout already had close ties with the organizer of the treat, Iconic Capital, which manages the personal fortunes of Silicon Valley elite, including Zuckerberg, and was a part owner of IPI.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go to Tyler.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  They own the Tampa Bay Lightning.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Huh, do they spend a lot of time in Tampa Bay?

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  Is that a, is that like a NHL team? Yes.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  NHL team in Florida? That feels like an odd thing to have.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  That's gotta be, I mean.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  I feel like Tampa isn't.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  Just trying to keep the ice frozen.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  I feel like a lot of the hedge fund guys, they're on the other side of the peninsula, right? Like, aren't they in like the Key West and Mar-a-Lago area, or Palm Beach, or Miami? Like, or maybe they just fly in and out? Like, I don't know, it's just, it feels like, I would love to know more about how they selected that particular team. And that sport, even.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The purchase gave Blueout a seat at the table to bid on mega AI financing. Let's give it up for mega AI financing. Not long after, it got arranged, it got picked to arrange a $14 billion package for an Oracle and OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas. Then last month, Blueout raised about $30 billion to build an AI data center for Meta in Louisiana, putting in $3 billion of its clients' money and borrowing the rest. So, the lender is borrowing in addition to their LP's dollars. The deal included a provision considered extraordinary on Wall Street, giving Blueout's equity investment a debt-like guarantee in case the partnership falls apart, showing

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  the new financial wizardry bankers are conjuring to meet AI's ravenous financial demand. Let's give it up for financial wizardry.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  We love wizardry.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  Spreading the risk. Silicon Valley's biggest players are flush with cash and are able to fund much of the initial AI build-out from their own coffers. As the dollar figures climb ever higher, they are turning to debt and private equity, spreading the risks and potential rewards more broadly across the economy. Some of the financing is coming from plain vanilla corporate bond sales, but financiers are making far bigger fees off giant private deals. Virtually every Wall Street player is angling to get a piece of the action, from banks such as JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, to traditional asset managers like BlackRock.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Before we go, let me tell you about Fall. Generative platform for developers, the world's best generated image, video and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Continue, Jordan.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  Investor appetite for data center debt is so strong that some money managers have booked billion-dollar gains in a matter of days. Let's give it up for booking billion-dollar gains in a matter of days.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Even before construction of these facilities, their financing. I mean, we talked about this where money managers.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like, you know, people say there's no such thing as free money, but it kind of seems like it could be in a kind of a free money situation here.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  I think you gotta, you gotta do something pretty powerful to wind up at the iconic.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  Here's the catch. Still, the longer-term performance is hardly assured. Big tech companies are expected to spend nearly $3 trillion on AI through 2028, but only generate enough cash to cover half that tap, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley. Big names in the finance world, such as Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, are warning about AI-fueled froth in the markets and in capital spending. At the same time, the fear of missing out is real. Days after Solomon voiced his concerns to analysts, Goldman formed a new team in its banking and markets group focused on AI infrastructure financing. They are getting into the game.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  What do you say? What we do know for certain is that the big tech companies that want the world to spend trillions have huge financial incentives to be believers. If you haven't noticed, Wall Street is also being paid a lot to promote the story. Greenlight Capital, the hedge fund firm run by David Einhorn, wrote in an October letter to investors. So, how will?

• 1:00:53Jordi Hays?

  And this is, this is the line that stood out the most to me because like on the West Coast, you have the labs, which are effectively every single person, as well as the investors, are incentivized to keep, keep the current, you know, AI supercycle narrative going. And then on the East Coast, you have Wall Street, who is getting paid to effectively do the same thing. So you have, you know, these two centers of power that are both incentivized to keep the party going.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, this this breakdown here. So the the Wall Street Journal is slicing up how the next three years will look based on projected global spending on data centers by financing source. So of 2.9 trillion, which is estimated over the next three years, I guess, four years, tech companies will cover 1.4 trillion of it. Private credit will cover 800 billion of it. Corporate bonds, 200 billion of it. Asset-backed securitization, 150. Private equity, another 350. And to me, this looks like a very healthy way to actually finance this.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  This feels like it's not, if it was, like, if we were looking at this, if you broke down, we've been through a $2 trillion like bubble before, and it collapsed very rapidly. What was that? It was like the meme coin era. And who and how did we break that down? It was not, it was not the the cash flows of the most profitable companies in the world that were buying the long tail crypto assets. It was retail. And so the fact that this is like, pretty removed from retail feels like safe to me. It's much safer than

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  getting a huge bubble inflated in, oh, everyone has to get in on the latest coin, and they're all nonsense. Like, there will be nonsense deals. We're already seeing nonsense AI companies, and there certainly will be projects that could finance and they just cannot build.

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would say, say, using the excuse like, well, at least this isn't retail getting hosed. Doesn't hold up that well when you think, okay, the alternative is like, large institutions, insurance companies, pension funds that are also financing this, which is effectively

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  I'm talking about the fragility, not necessarily where where the where the financial pain, or who the who the person ultimately pays for it. If there is a pullback, it's like, how fast can that pullback happen? Right? Because if if it like, i- i- if the write downs, if there's something that goes wrong, and the write downs come out of tech companies' cash flows, that's just not as big of a deal as as everyone waking up and and just slamming the sell button.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  It's just a very different, it's a very different set of dominos. Like, like the dominos of like, the, the, the interest rate crisis, the NFT crisis, like, FTX blowing, blowing up, all that stuff. Like, that, those dominos were spaced right next to each other. And so as soon as one went over, it was like, the next person has their finger over the cell button, their next person has their finger over their cell button. Whereas if you're like, yeah, I'm a tech company and I produce, you know, $50 billion of free cash flow, and, oh yeah, I'm not getting a great return on the $20 billion of free cash flow that I earmarked over here for the next few years. It's like, it's bad, but it's not, it's not like, it's not as calamitous.

• 1:04:24Jordi Hays?

  And I think, I think, you know, going back to this quote from David Einhorn, he says, what we do know for certain is that the big tech companies that want the world to spend trillions have huge financial incentives to be believers. In case you haven't noticed, Wall Street is also being paid a lot to promote the story. And in that same letter, Einhorn and Greenlight said, this was, this was the AI math makes no sense, which was basically the way it is today. Consumer business spends $1 on a chat GPT subscription, which is OpenAI revenue. Then OpenAI provides the service by spending $2 on Microsoft AI infrastructure, which is Microsoft revenue.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Then Microsoft spends 60 cents leasing GPUs from CoreWeave to handle the compute load, which is CoreWeave revenue. And then CoreWeave spends $2.40 on chips from Nvidia and, and another $2.40.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  Yes, but you're completely discounting exactly how addicted the 4O user is. They will pay any amount. So let's say that it's, if it costs $20,000 a day to serve a 4O user, they will find the money. They will be stripping copper out of empty buildings to pay for their 4O bill if they have to. They will be, they will be-

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Whatever it takes.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  They will be, they will be breaking into cars to, to sell stolen CD radios.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is notable that Blue Owl has sold off 16% past month. So even during this sort of like boom in lending, it's not, they're not getting.

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Very much credit for it.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's an odd, it's an odd time. Like, there's still, there's still so many things that are working. The, the results from that newcomer event, the AI is, uh, Cerebral Valley, uh, where he had every, it's so good. He, he took like a straw poll on stage and asked everyone like, who do you want to short? And everyone said perplexity. So like, he didn't really have to say like, I'm shorting perplexity. He just was able to like, take the temperature and sort of maintain like, you know, some, uh, arms length distance to it while still like, getting the take out there. Uh, but everyone was saying that they wanted to buy more OpenAI, more Anthropic, more Androol.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  A few other names came up, I believe. Um, and, uh, and there's still like an incredible amount of bullishness in a lot of different areas. Uh, but, uh, I think, yeah, people are still, still worried about some of the, some of the other stuff. But at, at the same time, it feels like there's so many companies that have like, gone through a, they've gone through the AI pump and round tripped, not just Oracle, but even like, like Klarna was going through the whole like, hey, we're going to get so many efficiencies out of AI. And then it came back to normal, but then they still got out and it's like a reasonable company. That's not like, it's not zeroed, right? It's like, oh yeah, their business is just what it was before the AI boom.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  And they are not getting like, they didn't get moved up or down. And so there's just like a ton of companies that are like that. Where is Klarna since the IPO anyway?

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  They're sitting, uh, at around a $12 billion valuation, 12.6.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  Down 20%?

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, down 26.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  That doesn't seem calamitous to me. That seems like, pretty like, solid, like, I don't know, the overall markets kind of, you know, up and down. I don't know.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  A firm, on the other hand, is up 28%.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  How's a firm doing?

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Up 28% in the past six months.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  In the past six months.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  They're getting.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Today is a real bloodbath. It's down, it's down 6% today. Everything's down today. What else is down today?

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Bitcoin.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Let's check. Nasdaq's down 1.3, Dow Jones 1.3 as well. Well, we're, we're going to 10,000 year mortgages, doing 10,000 year mortgages.

• 1:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Announced the second round of stimulus checks already.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Gemini 3 must save us. There, there's a prediction on Polymarket that was quote posted by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. He says, "Prediction markets are betting on Gemini 3 release week. 69% says November 22nd." Can't wait for that. "We were wondering if we were going to get it before Christmas. It was our Christmas present. It was Tyler's Christmas present." And fortunately, looks like we're going to. And I couldn't be more excited that we are partnered with Gemini and Google AI Studio. Create an 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/build."

• 1:09:09Jordi Hays?

  So, speaking of Google, Google Capital says his final investing decision was to buy Google.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 1:09:16Jordi Hays?

  I think that's beautiful.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  He doesn't even need to say who he's talking about. It's like so obvious. It's Warren Buffett. It is, it is beautiful that Warren Buffett is going long Google. And Darren here quotes this Rune post that says, "Not enough people are emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble." It's a good post. It's like, it's like, is it, is it a, is it a bubble if, if all the big tech companies rip? And there's like a couple Neo clouds that trade down a little bit and like, there's like, you know, one or two application layer companies that burn a bunch of VC dollars. But there's still a new hyperscaler that's born, like. Kind of. I guess it's a bubble, but it's a survivable bubble. It's just like, it's move on, you know?

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Rolling bubbles.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  But people are getting wild on the timeline about Gemini 3. Rune says, "The model must be good because the Google people have adapted the OpenAI culture of vague posting and hushed rumors and sending really weird texts." So, we are, and Signal says, "LMAO explicitly calling out OpenAI culture of vague posting is hilarious." People are excited. There was also a Reuters profile of Demis, and Morgan says, "A Demis profile can only mean one thing." I imagine that that's Gemini 3.0, and that it will be good. The question is like, what does good mean right now? Like, are we expecting anything that's like a qualitative step function?

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Because what I would say, what is Gemini 3 good? First off, I mostly just want better UI and little features in the app. Like, I want, as a consumer product, I just want like, you know, better productization of the model that I already think is good. On the actual AI model side, I would imagine it's, you know, little 10% bump to how long it can reason. Maybe a model picker, or not a model picker, an automatic reasoning mode so that if I, even if I think it's going to take 10 minutes to get me the answer, if it has the answer handy, it gives it to me in one minute, vice versa. It knows when to think really hard, it knows when to think just for a little bit.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  I'm expecting it to be like slightly better at all the benchmarks. I don't know, I don't even know what would blow me away.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, at this point, it's getting like fairly hard to find good prompts that like show how good a model is. Like, there was one earlier we showed about the shrimp fried rice one. That's like, pretty good. But yeah, I mean qualitative, like just in normal kind of natural language, it's like pretty hard to get.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Also, like, if I go to Gemini 3 and I say, "Tell me a joke," or I say, "Write me a tweet that gets over 1,000 likes."

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  I'm not actually that disappointed when it falls flat on its face. I'm like, yeah, it's fine. It's spiky intelligence. I don't really need you to do that. I don't need you to be funny. I need you to look up data really accurately for me. I need you to do that really well, or I need you to write code really accurately for us.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  I think another question is, like, what will OpenAI do if they'll do anything?

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  Because we've basically seen every big Gemini release, there's been some response from OpenAI. Like, usually they do it the day before.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  What is jury laughing at?

• 1:12:38Jordi Hays?

  I just don't know. I don't. I know that they want to steal Gemini's thunder. I just don't know if they have the juice this week.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  Who? Oh, OpenAI. Yeah, I mean.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  It feels a little bit like all the people at OpenAI are throwing in the towel a little bit. No one is, no one is vague posting over there.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I would, I, it feels like they've, they've launched a lot of the things that would be easy, like, layups. Like, if they launched Sora this week, everyone would be like, oh, we gotta focus on Sora. These videos of Sam Altman stealing GPUs are just too funny. Doesn't matter what happened in Gemini 3 world, because Gemini 3 probably will be somewhat of a incremental.

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  They released, they released OpenAI, the I/O acquisition, the week of Google I/O.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  And then it turns out like they couldn't, I don't think they could use the name I/O. Like, they got that, like, trademark lawsuit right away.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Just like, we, big news, we hired three Geminis. Their birthday is in the month that makes them Geminis, and so we're introducing them today. And we're doing a whole press release for it.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  The new Gemini team at OpenAI.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  At OpenAI. Just anything to steamroll the SEO, it will be fun. Well, we have Eric Lyman from Ramp in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TDP and all the stuff. Eric, how are you doing?

• 1:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Yellow suit. What's going on?

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  Did you not get the memo?

• 1:13:58Eric Glyman?

  Oh, my gosh, guys, I'm, I'm on the road today, but I'm gonna be wearing my yellow suit all week. It's so good to see you guys.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Good to see you, too. Good to see you, too. Give us the update. What's the latest? What happened?

• 1:14:12Eric Glyman?

  It's, so today Ramp announced a $300 million raise at a $32 billion valuation.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:14:25Jordi Hays?

  They've done it again.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  The big question everyone wants to ask, the chat's going crazy, is the job finished? Guys, the job is not finished.

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Is that the third, is that the third?

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  It is the fourth time we've asked.

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I was gonna say, is that, is this the third financing this year?

• 1:14:48John Coogan?

  Something like that. Yeah. It is the fourth financing that Ramp has announced this year. Okay, let's go. Congratulations. Yeah, what, so, so why, why this financing? Why this partner? Why this number? Kind of break us through, walk us through the, the, the thesis behind the round.

• 1:15:09Eric Glyman?

  Of course. So I, I think if you start, look at the fundamentals of the business, Ramp is just competing in a category of its own. You know, the company, companies generally, the bigger they get, the more they slow down. Ramp is growing faster this year at significantly larger scale than we did last year. This is, you know, at over a billion dollars a year in revenue. The business is doubling. It's generating passion. If you look at gross profit specifically, which is a good metric of how efficient are the underlying mechanics of the business, we're growing 10 times faster than the median publicly traded software company. So it's just in a category of its own. I think on top of this, AI has just been an incredible accelerant for the business itself.

• 1:15:55Eric Glyman?

  There's pull from, from customers. Everyone is thinking about how can I take what's happening in AI and apply it to, to my business? And there's a push of these models are getting dramatically better. And so outcomes like automated expenses, automated accounting, moving funds to higher yield for, for customers are just coming out of the box. And so, you know, I, I would say if we were to sum it up, I think for many millennia, money talked. We're keeping money to think. And I think the implications of that are pretty profound. You know, better run businesses, more profitable organizations. And so that's the first part. The second part, we're absolutely thrilled to be deepening our partnership with Lightspeed, who led this round. I think they're an extraordinary firm.

• 1:16:40Eric Glyman?

  Led the rounds of many great companies, I think notably Anthropic's round earlier this year, which has proven to be, I think, one that's changed the industry quite a bit. And I think they've just been a great partner in deepening our thinking, helping us grow. And so we're very excited.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Talk about accelerating at scale. This morning at breakfast, Jordi and I were reflecting on the fact that we were feeling this way, even with our much smaller organization. We were like, wow, like it's only been a year and we feel like we're already losing some of the agility that we had when we were just three people. And we were saying like, I understand, what was this thing you said? You said, I understand why companies write down their principles because it's so easy to lose sight of what is important. What makes you great? What you do specifically? And so I would love to know just your reflection.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even across this year, like a lot of us, the process of making the show better is us remembering the things that we did great early on and that you kind of end up losing your way in slight ways. And then it's about remembering that and kind of coming back to it.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I'd love, I'd love to know both what are the things that make Ramp great? But then also your thought process for not losing that because I imagine you agree that that is important to have principles and redouble the focus on them.

• 1:18:06Eric Glyman?

  I love that you asked about this because I think it gets to the heart of what we're trying to do inside of the product, right? If you think about probably your very first year, every dollar out of the organization was something you thought about. Someone wants to buy a software subscription, you know exactly why. Someone proposed to a consultant, it's a debate over it. Everyone knows who approved what, was this, this, this purchase worth it or not? And, you know, years later, suddenly businesses just start happening to you. You're not happening to the business. Things are renewing on autopilot. Things you thought carefully about are just running on its own. And what we're really trying to seek to do in the product is, when we say money that thinks, you know, it's the idea is that before funds.

• 1:18:50Eric Glyman?

  Leave your account. We understand the principles that you run your business and we check, does someone have the permission to spend it? It has memory. So, once the thing actually moves, you don't need to ask like, why did we buy this thing? What was it? Like, there's an audit trail of who approved it, budgets are updated, and then there's reasoning. And so, we can actually start to show businesses, here's how you can get more of every dollar an hour. And so, I think that's what's so different. You take things that used to be systems running to now there's checks in the system. And I think for us, it's an interesting moment, right? We're, as a company, we launched our first product, simple product card and expense about five years ago. Today, we're 2,436 days old. We still count the days.

• 1:19:31Eric Glyman?

  And the reason is, we want to be thinking about, you know, with every day, are we getting just a little bit more done? Or a little bit less done? And kind of this practice of thinking about kind of the passage of time. Auditing our calendars, asking, you know, are we getting more work done with the same or less amount of effort? Goes a long way. And then last, I would say, specific to you guys.

• 1:19:59Eric Glyman?

  I think part of why I, we've just felt so proud to work with both of you and call TBN our partners is I think there's this like unbelievable care of craft. I think there's, it's not about who's done everything. It's like who can write great copy? Who can think of funny ideas? How can we take an idea to, you know, we're doing it tomorrow? And I think that you guys have really lived. I mean, if you'll forget, a year ago, TBN, I don't even think you guys recall TBN, or was it? You know, you've turned into something great. And so, I feel strongly you guys don't have trouble with this. And I think just emphasis on speed and quality and craft has been what I've seen out of you guys.

• 1:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, totally. Something I was thinking about, we were reading that Carpathia post earlier around how software 1.0 was like kind of more general automation. Software 2.0 is you're automating tasks that are verifiable. Verifiable tasks. And I just feel like finance is like, just like. Prime for verifiability, right? Because it's like, well, was this in the policy or outside of the policy?

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, I'd love to know more.

• 1:21:07Eric Glyman?

  Or is your policy incomplete, right? You know, there's all these practices and you can actually start to learn based off of the actions. And I think something that's so unique is that every time, you know, months close, there is someone actually going in and saying, this transaction is categorized here, this goes there. You can see if you grew your revenue faster, if you grew your cash flow faster, or if you didn't. And so there's this incredible feedback loop that allows Ramp to add more value. And we think that's why the average customer that adopts Ramp spends 5% less. And also, the median Ramp customer grew their revenue by 12% over the past year, which is much faster than the median in the US. And I think a lot of it comes from this learning.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  So help me understand, you're generating cash, but you're also raising money. You're implementing AI, which can be very expensive. We've heard from Ivan at Notion that, you know, he saw a slight hit to his gross margins. It's still fantastic business, but did actually see that show up in the income statement. How is, how are you thinking about the adoption of AI as a piece of the tech stack? Is it actually reshaping the financials at this point? Or is it something where you see it sort of just like another subscription, just like another piece of the tech stack?

• 1:22:34John Coogan?

  And it hasn't really changed the way you think about the cost structure of your business?

• 1:22:41Eric Glyman?

  It's a really good question to zoom into. And in my general view, it's been fairly overwhelmingly positive. I mean, I still think that for us, that the goal is, you know, our goal is not to sell someone like a card or a bill payment software, it's to...

• 1:22:56Eric Glyman?

  It's helped your business run more profitably, right? And I think a lot of what we're trying to do is if we can actually pay for software where the output is there is an hour of your of your time that you don't have work you don't have to do anymore that's somebody's software, that's really great. Next, I think about, and you ask most founders or leaders in technology, like, what's the biggest constraint on your business? Everyone says, I'm having trouble hiring engineers. It's like, I want to hire great salespeople, great engineers. And if you can adopt software, I mean, we look at our sales team. You know, the quota that folks on the sales team have is multiple times of our next closest competitor, in part because we have a lot of tools we built to make our team far more productive.

• 1:23:41Eric Glyman?

  Our engineers are shipping about 50% more code to the code base than about four or five months ago, and that's continued. And so our general view is, look, if you can actually make the best even better, that's something we are gladly willing to pay for. And so in our business, we've actually seen, you know, margins expand as we've adopted this, in part because we think that our principle is let's create a lot more value than we capture. And we're able to do that because we're creating much more value than it even months ago.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  And it just feels like Ramp is agile, new company, that people love the product. And so it's just so much easier to say, hey, if you want a new AI-powered feature, we have that on day one. You don't need to rip us out and go to something else. You don't need to have some bolt on, you can just get it all here. And so you can effectively monetize whatever cost is coming through the actual token generation on your side pretty quickly.

• 1:24:43Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how are you thinking about headcount planning over the next few years? We don't have to zoom out to like 10 years. I think it gets extremely, extremely fuzzy. But I'm curious if you care about, you know, every, every once in a while, these sort of like revenue per employee or sort of like net income per employee, like statistics start floating around. I'm curious if you, if you, if you think about that at all. And obviously, profit, you know, running, running Ramp as, you know, one of the most efficient companies in the world is really good marketing for the products, probably the best marketing that you can do. But I'm curious how you think about, about those things.

• 1:25:25Eric Glyman?

  It's exactly the right question because I think, look, when we kind of think about our operating model, every year, we try to increase the ratio of whether it's revenue, contribution, profit, margin per employee, it's all to say like, we anticipate revenue is going to grow very, very rapidly.

• 1:25:46Eric Glyman?

  And while employee headcount is going to grow, it's going to grow a little bit slower. And so the effect is you start to see this widening, it gives you more margin to invest in, whether it's a use of AI itself that you can drive into the product, more marketing, all those types of things to reach more customers. I think more abstractly, though, if you kind of step back, you know, most businesses in the US run, are actually profitable, I forget that in the Valley, but have an 8% profit margin. And, well, we'll talk about this, but, you know, it's like, if you make a company more efficient by like 1%, it's equivalent to like an increase of, you know, $1 in savings

• 1:26:27Eric Glyman?

  is equivalent to $12 more in revenue at an 8% margin, just mathematically. And if you can do this repeatedly, I actually think that there's, you know, A, you have a lot more businesses that are good, but don't have this automation and skillsets to grow much larger. I think a lot more companies will get bigger. And I also think that if it's just easier to run a business, I think more great businesses will get started. I think there's a lot of creative people out there who would be running organizations who, I think, as the tools to build get easier, you see a more interesting world. And so, you know, I actually think it's a pretty important and really profound thing

• 1:27:08Eric Glyman?

  to knock out inefficiency to allow smaller companies to succeed. I mean, even you guys are a perfect example. TBPN is a small team that's changed the media landscape and captivated the world. And like, I think that there are probably a lot of people where if you make the tools better, like, they will come.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  How do you, how do you feel like CFOs are ranking like AI-enabled software on their list of priorities when they're making a decision in this category? Like, is it, because it feels like there is some great stuff, there's some stuff that's commoditized, some stuff that you've built that's differentiated, but are CFOs as a class, sort of like, okay, I've checked the box, I'm exhausted with the narrative, or I'm just ramping up and I feel like I'm just starting to get value and I actually understand it? Or are they just learning what AI is for the first time tomorrow or today?

• 1:28:02Eric Glyman?

  This is, this is a fun one. So I would say there's a few different types. I mean, I would say small and mid-sized businesses, just it's like, look, I want to run, you know, same business for less, I want to grow, meet my goals, be more profitable. And I think for us, it's just, hey, it's an easier to use expense report, or like, you want you to do expenses, your card will do it for you.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:28:25Eric Glyman?

  You don't need five tools to pay bills, run procurement, earn yield on your treasury. Ramp will simplify that. But I think that for large customers, look, I think it's like 80% plus of the earnings calls of the S and P 500 mentioned AI about six months ago, and I think it was 95 over the most recent quarter. It is 100% on the mind of CEOs and CFOs. What they're wrestling with is, you know, there was a great study at MIT in the fall that went fairly viral, where it said 95% of enterprise deployments are not creating return on investment. And I think part of why CFOs have been so enamored with Ramp is, you know, we can demonstrate

• 1:29:08Eric Glyman?

  very, very clearly, A, for most customers, it's product that pays you to use it in the form of cash back, B, it helps reduce your spend, and C, when you have all this time back for your sales force to go and sell and not do low value tasks, it's a very easy business case. And so I think this, this ultimately, like, our focus is on saving people money, and that ROI focus makes it easy for them to buy. I think it's very important.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  That MIT study.

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  How does that track with what you guys have seen from various AI pilots?

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Because I would imagine Ramp doesn't even count on either side. I wouldn't think of like bringing a Ramp into a company as like an AI pilot. I would see it as like a completely different thing. But are you the 5% that's successful? Or are you just not even counting?

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  If you were looking, if you were talking with the team, and the team's like 95% of our pilots haven't panned out, you'd probably be like, what were you guys doing?

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:05Eric Glyman?

  Yeah, it is, you nailed it. So one, I think that a lot of, you hit this first phase of people who were like told they need to buy AI. They're like, fine, I'll give you some experimental budget. You'll go do it. And people tried a bunch of stuff. And I think you end up, and I think this speaks to the importance of design, where you'd end up with like disconnected tools. You have like a thoughtful chat, like a great chatbot here. This thing that kind of plugged into some of your code base and others. And if you look at, I think part of what's made Ramp so effective is, you know, it's just a smarter card that happens to use AI. It's not telling you, hey, this is an LLM that categorized your transaction. This is an LLM that's read this 30-page invoice, detected it was fraud, told you not to pay for this.

• 1:30:47Eric Glyman?

  This is an LLM that detected you could be earning higher yield and moved it for you. It's just part of how it works. And I think this next phase and the AI native companies that are working very, very well have these deeply integrated products where it's not like some, you know, AI tool. It's just how it works. And so I think that's the distinction. And you're right, for a lot of CFOs, it's, hey, we have this tool. It's going to help us cut out waste and pay us cash back. Should we use it or not? And it's a pretty easy decision. Yeah.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it might not even be in the category, but it's still delivering AI properly. And I just love that that's, I feel like there's something very valuable about just using every possible tool, AI or not, or linear regression, if that's the best tool for the job, behind the scenes, and then just delivering the actual value to the customer, solving the problem. Because customers, they don't necessarily want technologies. They want solutions, right?

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:46Eric Glyman?

  And one of our customers and someone I look up to quite a bit, Brett Taylor, started a company called Era, term of OpenAI, and he was on it a week or two ago. In one of the things he said is like, look, I don't want anyone at Sierra spending like time on expense reports or invoices.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Eric Glyman?

  And Ramp is automated categories of work that used to slow us down and we actually can work on the things that makes us great, building great products for the business. And so I think you nailed it. It's solutions, not.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Not actual technologies because most of the customers just, just, they just don't have a strong opinion about the, the underlying technology. They care about saving time, saving money. That's what matters. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for taking.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Massive milestone.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  Day.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  Fourth of the year.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  I'm sure you'll feedback next week. You're always welcome. That's why we bought these suits. We don't rent them. We buy, we bought them.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  Tailored because we knew we were going to be using them a lot.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  We're going to be using them a lot.

• 1:32:49Eric Glyman?

  Guys, it's so good to see you. Thank you so much.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Incredible milestone.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you sooner. Bye.

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  Quickly, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search everybody. Service vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  By the way, median, median public SaaS company, growing at 12 to 17% a year. They're growing at 10 times that rate.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, we, our next guest is Stacy Ragson. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll have you sit down here. And while you're sitting down, I'll tell everyone about profound, get your man mentioned in chat GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Are we in a bubble? What's going on?

• 1:33:38John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself first.

• 1:33:39Speaker 04

  Sure. My name is Stacy Rasgon. I'm a stock analyst and equity analyst. I'm a managing director and analyst, senior analyst at Bernstein Research.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:49Speaker 04

  Where I look at the US semiconductor and semiconductor capital equipment space and. Thank you. Clearly, AI has been the only topic for a couple of years.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. I want you to react to this Citrini post here. It says, "Just reviewed a bunch of stuff for our November macro memo. We might low-key be going into a recession, boys. No clue if this matters at all for stock prices anymore, though."

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  It's a good point. You could argue some parts of the economy, and I'm not a macro guy, I'm not an economist. However, you could argue some parts of the economy are already there, right? I mean, people use the phrase "K-shaped recovery," which is sort of interesting. But I think especially the lower half of the population is not actually doing all that well. And we've actually seen that more recently in a lot of just, not the semiconductor reports, but a lot of the consumer reports and the restaurants and, you know, the retail. Yeah, so there's probably parts of the world that are already there. And clearly, the infrastructure spending, the AI spending, has been supporting GDP. And it's been supporting the stock market.

• 1:34:58Speaker 04

  I mean, Nvidia's, I can't even remember, 8%, 9% of the S&P now, so, yeah.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 1:35:03Speaker 04

  We may be there already.

• 1:35:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, we had a thesis that Nvidia is gonna do just fine this earnings cycle. Specifically, the only reason, not just overall demand, but that Jensen was slamming beer.

• 1:35:17John Coogan?

  This is the most quantitative research. You can't get this on Wall Street.

• 1:35:21Speaker 04

  He's not acting like a CEO that's really worried about his quarter. I don't know that he would generally care anyways. However, you know, they just did an event in DC a couple of weeks ago called GTC. I mean, he put a slide up behind him that basically said, "Numbers next year are too low." What the slide said, it said they had $500 billion in cumulative orders for Blackwell and Ruben. Blackwell is their current generation of AI servers, and Ruben's the next generation. $500 billion cumulative across 2025 and 2026. And they said, "We've already," I can't remember, it was like 20 million chips for orders. And they said, "We've shipped six to date." So we got fourteen million left. They've got five quarters. You can sort of figure out how much it is and you can compare that to where the numbers are. And he's basically

• 1:36:04Speaker 04

  saying numbers are too low. So I'm not terribly worried going into the quarter on Wednesday. Now, you know, with stocks is always is not just the numbers, right? It's the numbers relative to the expectations.

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:36:15Speaker 04

  So I think everybody expects it to be good. And so we'll see how good he can make it.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  It does feel like we've entered a period over the last month, maybe, where even beating would still result in a sell-off. Is that just everything priced to perfection? What's going on there?

• 1:36:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, especially in the AI side, there's been, you know, the sentiment ebbs and flows.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  Right? And we've been in a bit of an ebb.

• 1:36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  And there's been a lot of stuff. You know, we had Burry's comments about a GPU lifetime and depreciation.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  And we had a couple, to be honest, a few, what I would call self-owns on the part of the OpenAI folks, Altman and Sir Fire, a little like unnecessary angst that they caused.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  They did. They did that to inspire themselves to have to work harder.

• 1:36:57Speaker 04

  Maybe, maybe. It's, it's fine. Look, and you're early guys, are we in the bubble or not?

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  I mean, so bubbles are as bubbles are, right? You can look at a lot of things. You can look at valuations. I mean, Nvidia's mid twenties price to forward earnings right now. It's not, we haven't got anywhere near crazy yet. And I mean, I'll say the same thing I've said since this started. And it's, it really got started, you know, ChatGPT showed up in November of twenty-two and Nvidia's sort of print heard around the world was May of twenty-three. That's, that's when it started. And even then, people worried about, okay, twenty twenty-four is going to be awful, right? I'll say the same thing I said then. At some point, you know, nothing goes up into the right forever. At some point, you'll have a digestion or an air pocket or a, it's, it's not now. It's clearly not now. That's all I can say. I don't know when.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  But it's not now. It's not this year.

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  Doesn't look like it's next year. And then all of these projects that OpenAI is, you know, signing with Broadcom and Nvidia and even AMD, they don't even start to ship until the end of twenty twenty-six. So at least from a spending standpoint, from what we can see, it's probably not 2027 either. Now, we'll see what the stocks do, like they tend to be anticipatory, but in terms of like an air pocket or something in spending, I'm not really all that worried yet.

• 1:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  When? I don't know, but like it's not now.

• 1:38:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you, do you, how much have you subscribed to this idea of like rolling, rolling bubbles? So like right now, like it seems like we've had, we've had like explosion, you know, a lot of excitement around NeoClouds this year, all, you know, pretty much all of them have sold off a ton in the last month. Maybe partly because of some of the comments out of the opening eye camp and lack of, lack of confidence.

• 1:38:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  But, but at the same time, you know, Seagate, Western Digital, these other companies are up, you know, tremendously in the same time period.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, the storage, they're covered by a colleague of mine, but, but I mean, they just go up 10% every day, right? But, but that's the thing, it all really comes down to demand.

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  Demand is off, off the charts. Nobody can get enough compute. The NeoClouds are all, you know, even with CoreWeave, they, there was, they had a bit of a delay, they just don't have the capacity, right? They're, they're, it pushed out a little bit, it's still there. Again, the storage guys are ripping because the memory prices are going through the roof because there, there's so much, um, uh, there's a lack of supply relative to demand. All we've seen from the hyperscalers is, is capex numbers going up and up and up and up. Like, nobody can get enough compute right now. That, that's where we are. And I think that is, so the overarching, I mean, that's the overarching thesis, like either way. Like you go back to the, to the question about GPU depreciation, GPU lifetimes, for example. This is what Burry was getting at. He was saying, oh, well, you know, the, they're all using your six-year depreciation lifetimes

• 1:39:38Speaker 04

  and, you know, these things don't last more than three years because you've got new stuff coming.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:39:42Speaker 04

  It's not true right now, right? I mean, you, you can look, they're still renting out old GPUs for, I mean, and for much more than it costs them to operate them. It's clearly possible to run them longer than, than three years. It comes down to demand. Right now, demand is so strong, it is absolutely economic to run that stuff. If demand weakens, maybe, maybe it won't be, but if demand weakens, we're all screwed anyway.

• 1:40:05Speaker 04

  So to me, all of the bear cases that you, that you come up right now, to me... Collapse into the same thing. Is demand there or is it not? Right now, it's there and it's not showing any, the demand side is not showing any signs of weakening.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  What about the, uh, the, the leaked phone call from Sarah Frye, the CFO of OpenAI, where, uh, there was this idea that, uh, potentially there was weakness on the demand side.

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  What she said was user minutes, user minutes were dropping, which implies less demand for computer.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  In the core ChatGPT app, which feels like the leading indicator for all AI demand.

• 1:40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's more than just OpenAI too, right? I tell you, now, now, you could argue that we want OpenAI to be there because like Altman's driving a lot of this incremental.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:47Speaker 04

  So we'll, we'll, we'll see. But I mean, there's, there's, there's lots of, there's lots of demand. It's not just OpenAI, it's OpenAI, it's Anthropic, it's Gemini.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:40:54Speaker 04

  Um, in general, right now, I mean, usage is going up.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I'm sure we'll get more information on the, on the Google side because it could be.

• 1:41:02Speaker 04

  I was a little wary about some of the, when you see these leaks, like you always have to be a little careful about.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was very odd that it was like from an investor only call.

• 1:41:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  Like what investor would leak bad news?

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  And by the way, we, we do calls like that. And stuff gets taken out of context. Because I was, I don't, I don't know what they said. I wasn't on, on that call.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:17Speaker 04

  I'm always a little hesitant to take, and I do this for a living, right? I'm always a little hesitant to take that kind of stuff at face value. You have to, you know, you have, you have to diligence.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the same time, like to your point of the like S curve nature of these adoptions, it's possible that, you know, 800 million is a lot of people.

• 1:41:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  You do at some point saturate everyone and there's only, there's only so much time in the day and then.

• 1:41:38Speaker 04

  There's 8 billion people in the world.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, it took, it took Facebook years to get up into the high single digit billions.

• 1:41:44Speaker 04

  And that is, that is the thing, by the way. I, I've been doing this job almost 18 years.

• 1:41:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:49Speaker 04

  Um, same seat. I've never seen anything like this before.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, this is, this is unprecedented and just in, and that's why people get nervous.

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  Because the numbers have gotten so big.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  So quickly, you just sit there and stare at them. It's like, oh, this can't be sustainable.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  We've been hearing it for, for two and a half years.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Speaker 04

  Still going.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean, in this idea of the K shaped recovery, or this, you know, cycle of little bubbles popping up and popping. How do you process something like CoreWeave? Like, it feels like everything is going so well. And, and to the point where the negativity around AI is like a rumored leak of a phone call. But then we're seeing a company trade down by 50% in a month.

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, again, I won't talk about CoreWeave specifically, but I mean, like, anything that goes out where valuations are high, expectations are high. You know, it's not just that. Lots of things have weakened, you know, off of peaks. I mean, it's fine. You know, the NeoClouds in general, I mean, they're all seeing tons of demand, right? They're, you know, it's, I'm not really worried in general right now about where the demand is going. The only thing we're seeing in terms of spending intentions and everything else is right now is up. And again, I think that is the question, how long does it last? I don't think anybody knows. If you just look at, like I said, what, at least what is currently being forecasted by the companies that are doing the spending at this point? There's no signs of a slowdown, not, not yet.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  What do you think of this thesis that some of the hyperscalers are maybe offloading risk to the NeoClouds?

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  Oh, they clearly are, right? I mean, yeah, which is, which is fine. That's part of the purpose, I think, that the NeoClouds serve.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:29Speaker 04

  You know, you're kind of at the tip of the spear, right? It's, it's, it's boom or bust, right? Yeah, I mean, but that's, that's part of their business model, I think.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  What about, what if you go further on the tip of the spear? Is there a company like, organization like Blue Owl or some of the?

• 1:43:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, on the financing.

• 1:43:44John Coogan?

  On the financing side, because Blue Owl is another example where, you know, like, Google's doing very well, Microsoft's doing very well. The hyperscalers are doing very well, even OpenAI is doing very well, growing a ton. But then you have some froth in the NeoClouds and some more froth in the private credit markets. What's your take on what's going on?

• 1:44:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, those are probably frothier parts anyways, but I mean, the financing question is interesting because. I'd say some of the these debt deals.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  Again, if you're looking at, you know, parallels to prior bubbles, that is one thing that there's a few things that people worry about.

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  Raising a lot of debt to do to fund the stuff and then they also worry about what they call kind of circular revenues, right? There's a lot of like crosstalk.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:27Speaker 04

  We've seen a lot of the the companies around here and maybe to address both of those. I'd say on on the the debt side, most of this capex is still being funded off of off of income statements.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, cash flow.

• 1:44:37Speaker 04

  That is one difference now versus say 2001 is the companies that are driving the spending by and large are the largest, most profitable, best businesses that humanity has ever devised.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  I'm sure you remember what the actually largest business was in 2000 is ExxonMobil and Chevron.

• 1:44:56Speaker 04

  Different, different world.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  It was big, big oil and big oil was not driving and they were not funding the telecom build out.

• 1:45:02Speaker 04

  I mean, there were a lot of, a lot of the companies, they were, I mean, they were raising money. They weren't profitable. That does not really.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a very different thing. It wasn't like an immediate beneficiary.

• 1:45:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  That was, that was just the, oh, the biggest companies are just getting bigger. So it is a very different.

• 1:45:13Speaker 04

  And so in this case, we are seeing, starting to see some debt deals to fund this, but I'd say the, by and large, the vast majority is still being funded off of operating cash flows. I don't feel too bad about it.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  Out of the 2.4 trillion that the Wall Street Journal estimated, the number that was funded by cash flows was 1.4 trillion. And then there was 800 billion in in private credit.

• 1:45:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  So it's, it's, it's still a pretty reasonable debt to equity ratio, in my opinion, if you think about it that way, or debt to cash flow.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  For now.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, for now.

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that's right. And then in terms of like the, the, call it the circularity. So I mean, Nvidia is behind us. They're investing a lot.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  They have deals in opening eye, but I mean, Jensen's got his fingers pretty much in every.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:49Speaker 04

  He's in every startup, right?

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  He's been doing it for a long time, too.

• 1:45:51Speaker 04

  But think about like, what else can he do with the cash? And so I'm, I'm hard pressed to think of a better use of it. If you, we'll see where the numbers go, but if you believe the numbers, they're going to be generating hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of free cash flow over the next like five years, say. So what can he do with it? He can't do big M and A. Nobody will let him.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:09Speaker 04

  Right? Just nothing's going to get through antitrust. They have a buyback and a dividend, but relative to their market cap, it's, it's going to be de minimis. There's no choice. And so. Is there anything better than he does except invest and help to grow the AI?

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  They also have a wildly different business in terms of M and A. Like with Microsoft, they buy LinkedIn. That makes a lot of sense in the Microsoft ecosystem. Uh, you know, Teams, they grow Azure. Like there's all these different places where they can plug other businesses in. Like if Nvidia bought LinkedIn, we'd just be like, what is?

• 1:46:38Speaker 04

  But he tried to buy other stuff, right?

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, certainly, certainly, certainly other pieces of the stack.

• 1:46:43Speaker 04

  Could you imagine if he'd been able to buy ARM?

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  That would be crazy.

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

  He'd be unstoppable.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  He'd be unstoppable.

• 1:46:47Speaker 04

  So, nobody's gonna let him do anything like that.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  No one's gonna let him, yeah.

• 1:46:50Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how important do you think the Chinese market is to Nvidia? Cause we, we debate this quite a lot.

• 1:46:56Speaker 04

  It isn't, and it isn't. In the near, at least it's not important to the numbers right now because it's out of the numbers.

• 1:47:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:01Speaker 04

  So, and, and Nvidia, and even AMD, they, they took it out. So that was smart because it's still questionable whether or not they will be allowed to sell. Um, and so from a numbers standpoint, it's okay. Um, from a strategic standpoint, I, I think it is important. And Jensen hasn't hidden this, by the way.

• 1:47:16Jordi Hays?

  Second largest computing market.

• 1:47:17Speaker 04

  It's, it's more than that though. So it, it is the second largest and he's talking about $50 billion of lost opportunity. And over the long term, it's probably bigger than that, right? I mean, China, China's big, but I think it's more strategic. You have to remember the, the Chinese developers want to use Nvidia. They have better products, right? They do. However, you're not gonna stop China. So China has, has like companies like Huawei, for example, that's basically a state-owned enterprise. And they already have parts in China that have higher performance than what Nvidia is allowed to sell there.

• 1:47:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Speaker 04

  They do. They burn a lot more power. Chinese don't care.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, way less efficient.

• 1:47:51Speaker 04

  They just throw up another coal plant, right? But, but the thing is they're much harder to use. They don't use Nvidia's ecosystem. It's called CUDA. And the Chinese developers want to use Nvidia's ecosystem. If you don't allow him to, to sell there, what you do is you potentially encourage those local developers, of whom there are a lot, to coalesce potentially around a local alternative like, like a Huawei, for example, and start to build up potentially over time, a more robust ecosystem in, in China. And then, then you're shut out. And then the longer term, where it'd be is once it's, it's robust in China, does it move out of China? Now do you have a more robust global competitor?

• 1:48:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  And so that's why I think strategically, and he said almost exactly that. He hasn't tried to sugarcoat it.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Speaker 04

  Where I think he gets a little bit of a benefit is, at least with Huawei, the parts... Because of some of the other US sanctions, they have to make their chips at local companies like SMIC on deficient process technology, so the chips don't work as well, they're not as power efficient. I do not think those chips will really be competitive outside of China, where they will be competing on a global basis with much better products from Nvidia or AMD or whoever. So, I think that helps. Yeah. But ideally, you, you, and, you know, Lutnik said this, what did he say? He said, "We want to get them addicted to our technology." Yeah. To your, I wouldn't have said it that way, but he's out of line, but he's right. Right? Um, we'd like them using it, and to have some control over it, and, and, and if, and we're letting that slip away. Yeah.

• 1:49:11Speaker 04

  And, so, yeah, and, I don't, I don't think it's, it's great that he's not able to sell strategically. At least from a number standpoint, it, it's out right now.

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  I want you to react to this, uh, quote from the CEO of KKR. Uh, he says, "And candidly, when we read some of these headlines, it's clear that many of us have PTSD from the financial crisis, and are looking for what will trigger the next one. Like, where is the next boogeyman? From our standpoint, this market and economy really don't provide a simple narrative like that. What do you think?"

• 1:49:44Speaker 04

  I think that's true. And to be fair, I started this job in April of 2008, about three weeks after Bear Stearns failed. That, that's when I made my move to Wall Street.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:52Speaker 04

  And so, I was forged in that fire, and I have the financial crisis, like, tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. I lived through it. It was a remarkable time, by the way, uh, to live through Wall Street. This is, this is not like that.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04Speaker 04

  Um, that was, people thought the world was coming, but we'll, we'll, we'll see, like, if there is an air pocket, may, maybe it will become like that. But people really thought the world was coming to an end back then.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Speaker 04

  Um, but are people looking for the, yeah, maybe, right? There's, people are always, investors are always looking for pattern recognition.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  One thing that I go back to on the pattern recognition side is just, um, I feel like, for it to feel, like, there, there is a world where there's some massive correction, and, like, a lot of the top players see big haircuts, but, uh, it's just hard to imagine a big widespread, like, with the dot-com boom, every random person on the street was trading dot-com stocks. Uh, with the NFT boom, everyone had Bitcoin. They were telling you, oh, you gotta buy Cardano. You gotta buy this. You gotta buy that. You gotta buy this NFT. And then in the housing bubble, everyone was like, yeah, I just got a second house. Morton didn't zero down mortgage. They didn't check my income. And so there was a lot of like places where just hundreds of millions of Americans could participate in the bubble on the way up

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  and on the way down.

• 1:51:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  And here it just feels harder.

• 1:51:06Speaker 04

  There's some, I mean, there, there's a lot more retail participation, I think.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:51:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and Robin Hood and all this.

• 1:51:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:13Speaker 04

  And they, they, they get a little nasty sometimes. They trade these zero data expiration options.

• 1:51:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:17Speaker 04

  So there, there's some of that. I don't think it's, maybe it's as widespread as, as what we've seen in the past.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:22Speaker 04

  But there probably is some of, some of that.

• 1:51:23John Coogan?

  I just, well, yeah, I just wonder if like, if you go to the, the, the median American.

• 1:51:28Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  Do they have significant exposure to the data center build out right now?

• 1:51:34Speaker 04

  No, so I mean, maybe they're electric bills.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe that's it. But if there's a collapse, that, that's gonna go down. That's gonna be cheaper.

• 1:51:41Speaker 04

  Presumably. And but there's, there's two ways that it could quote unquote collapse, right?

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:44Speaker 04

  And, and they have different implications. So one is just, you know, there's a digestion cycle. There's an air pocket.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Speaker 04

  And you look at the hyperscalers, how they spend money, even before AI, they would tend to build and digest and build and digest. It happens.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  And I always say like, what's the chance of a digestion cycle? It's, it'll happen at some point.

• 1:51:59John Coogan?

  Sure. I like this digestion cycle.

• 1:52:01Speaker 04

  But that wouldn't be structural.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  Sounds better than a correction.

• 1:52:03Speaker 04

  Digestion.

• 1:52:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Speaker 04

  It would be good for the, but you could hold it through that.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:52:08Speaker 04

  Like the way it quote unquote collapses is, and it gets back to some of your earlier questions on, on the return.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:13Speaker 04

  If it turns out we're spending all this money, there's no return, then the whole thing comes crumbling down.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:52:17Speaker 04

  For everybody, right?

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's like, it's like, I, I just really struggle to imagine a world where it's like, oh yeah, like it was so bad that like Apple's at a 10PE.

• 1:52:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Google is no longer valuable. It's like, these companies have been valuable for decades. Like where are they gonna go?

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Someone, uh.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  They can go down a little bit, but like, they're just not that exposed at this point. Anyway.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat asked, please ask Stacy about CDS spreads affecting debt financing costs. So that's Oracle and CoreWeave.

• 1:52:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  I.e. how does the domino start?

• 1:52:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a little out of my wheelhouse, uh, the CDS spreads. But people are looking at a few specific areas like, like Oracle.

• 1:52:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  And Oracle's one of the, I mean, Oracle's not exactly hyperscale, but they're trying to be a hyperscaler sort of. Um, and, and they don't have the balance sheet and the income statement to fund it. So they are going more to the debt market. And, and CoreWeave, I mean, I mean, clearly, you know, they, they have to fund this debt with debt. Most of the other ones you look at, look at a Google or a Met or an Amazon, like you're not in that kind of a stage, right? They're still, they're, again, they're raising a little bit of debt, but they're still primarily funding this out of, out of free cash flow, basically, out of cash flow from operations.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Speaker 04

  But it is something people, people sort of look at it like for sure.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Have you, have you tracked situational awareness, the hedge fund? Leopold, Oshinbrunner?

• 1:53:33Speaker 04

  I have not, no. What is that?

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, uh, former OpenAI researcher.

• 1:53:38Speaker 04

  Oh, this is that kid that started the?

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's got four billion under management.

• 1:53:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  This is a real deal.

• 1:53:43Jordi Hays?

  And I was curious, so, so his strategy, like he, he raised the fund like at the beginning of this year or closed it?

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  Closed it. He was raising it for?

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  He'd been raising it for a while, but, but it started deploying aggressively this year and has, and has performed really well, at least.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  It's the best performing hedge fund in the world right now.

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  He's in the right place at the right time, right?

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and the whole thesis was just AI is going, is real.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think some more traditional hedge funds have sort of just overthought the AI traders of the last year?

• 1:54:14Speaker 04

  Well, I, I don't know about.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Because it's not like he, it's not like he was buying like somewhat, somewhat, uh.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  He had a somewhat unique, uh, take.

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  He had a very informed take, but it wasn't.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  But he also didn't go Nvidia. He went Intel. He went other places on the map.

• 1:54:29Speaker 04

  So, by the way, Intel's gone up, not because of AI. Intel's gone up because, you know, Donald Trump wants the stock to go, which, which is a bull case. It's fine, you know? Um, but it's not an AI story. Uh, my view in general, and, and yes, I don't know if specific hedge funds have been, you know, overthinking or not. I haven't wanted to overthink it. My, my general call this year has mostly been own the high quality AI names, ignore most of the rest. And like, that's, that's been fine, right? It hasn't had to be complicated. Number go up, right? That's, that's, that's it, right? It hasn't had to be, it hasn't had to be complicated.

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  Number, number go up.

• 1:55:00John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, what do you, uh, what do you put in that high quality name bucket? Uh, do you put the iPhone?

• 1:55:07Speaker 04

  I, I mean, we've covered like Nvidia and Broadcom, for example.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  Just mostly those.

• 1:55:10Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, and, you know. We've been more lukewarm on AMD and that's one I've missed, right? Because, you know, it's also like ripped. You haven't necessarily had to be quote-unquote high quality to work, right? Because right now, we've been, again, if you think about an S curve, if we're on that exponential growth part, it takes everybody up.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:30Speaker 04

  It's been fine. But again, you haven't had to overcomplicate anything.

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:33Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, what about, I mean, talking about not overcomplicating it? Like, if you just bought Google and Microsoft, that's a pretty broad index on AI between D-Mind and OpenAI.

• 1:55:43Speaker 04

  But you gotta remember, like, it wasn't that long ago that people were looking at Google as an AI loser.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah. No, it changed. It completely changed. Completely changed. They positioned themselves very, very well. Citrini has another post here on the 2022. "I saw a lot of very smart people in 2022 fail to recognize the reality of reflexivity, i.e. stupid headlines that with a few hours of research could reasonably dismiss as nothing of consequence, would add fuel to the fire and result in further downside. Understanding that this dynamic works to the upside as well as the downside means that, yes, even if you know that the CDS on Oracle and CoreWeave are blowing out because the CDS market is easily pushed around by a few parties trying to get cute and hedge their exposure to AI lending, you also recognize that if enough people view that CDS widening

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  as indicative of a problem, it will become a problem." What do you think about these stupid headlines?

• 1:56:35Speaker 04

  I mean, headlines have certainly been more of the bane of my existence, probably over the last couple of years. Yeah. Yes, so there have been lots of movements from headlines that if you were, had any depth of subject matter expertise, you'd know the headline itself didn't mean anything.

• 1:56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do you fall back on? Do you go to just the earnings reports? Yeah, I'll give you an example.

• 1:56:58Speaker 04

  That kind of stuff tends to correct itself over time, too. I mean, you get pops and, I mean, I'll give you an example from my own coverage, and this is stock that I've, Qualcomm announced, this was, this is their headline, it wasn't like some stupid headline or something, but they announced like an AI like server. And there wasn't a whole lot of information in the press, but the stock went up 20% the moment of, and then it kind of gave it back.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 04

  As it probably, but it had a, it had a pretty big pop

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:23Speaker 04

  on the headline just because it was AI, whereas if, you know, you kind of know, and by the, don't get me wrong, I mean, there's, we'll see what happens with that, with that product with them and, you know, and you can argue it's option value and everything, but to go up 20% on one day was probably overdone, and it gave it back. You know, it's fine.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Giving it back, I feel like has been the story of Oracle. They got this, you know, tremendous pop off the OpenAI deal. Now they've retraced it below.

• 1:57:50Speaker 04

  Is it lower than it was?

• 1:57:51Jordi Hays?

  It's lower than it was before, which to me says like either the market doesn't believe that it's it's real and or the the other reading would be it's real, but it's not going to be ROI positive, right?

• 1:58:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm again.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  At least for Oracle.

• 1:58:07Speaker 04

  Without making any comments on on Oracle, I mean, those are the for for any of these investments, those are the worries that you're going to have, right? Yeah. Either because again, especially if it's OpenAI. So Altman's committed to a tremendous amount of capacity. I mean, it's just between on the on the chip side between Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD, it's 26 gigawatts.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Speaker 04

  Right? And just for some context, I think the whole global data center installed electrical capacity, I don't I want to say something like 70 gigawatts, something in that ballpark, right?

• 1:58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Speaker 04

  All right. So it's it's a lot.

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Speaker 04

  I mean, he was even making comments. He wanted to deliver, what was it, a gigawatt a week?

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:40Speaker 04

  At one point, I mean, it's a lot, right? And so you already are wondering, can he actually deliver on that or or not? And those are valid questions. And I but I wouldn't I wouldn't count Altman out like he's aggressive, but you know, he's got like like large aspirations. But then with someone like an Oracle, like who doesn't have the balance sheet or the income statement that some of the others do, and you look at the size of the, I can't even remember what it was, $400 billion or something. It was a massive step up.

• 1:59:07Jordi Hays?

  300.

• 1:59:07Speaker 04

  300.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:08Speaker 04

  In in one quarter, like you wonder where it's coming from. It's always around like, can they deliver it and can they pay for it? And those are the general worries, I think, for anybody that's announcing something.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:18Speaker 04

  That you're going to have.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  How do you analysts try and dig into, you know, there's quality of earnings, quality of revenue, quality of backlog feels like an important thing to dig into.

• 1:59:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  But I don't know that the contracts are available.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  They're they're not, right? So like, I mean, you you talk to whoever you can and You know, you've been doing this while you look for pattern recognition, but I mean, look, nothing in semiconductors is ever really baked.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:43Speaker 04

  Right? I, I mean, in fact, we just discovered why, like during COVID, they, a lot of these companies were experimenting with, with quote unquote, non-cancelable orders.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:50Speaker 04

  And we saw what happens. It's like, yes, maybe I could contractually force my customer to take a year's worth of parts they don't need.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Speaker 04

  Am I really gonna do that? Historically, the answer was no.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:00Speaker 04

  During COVID, for some companies, the answer was yes, and, and those particular companies are, are still paying for it.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Speaker 04

  Because, okay, great, I just took all my parts. I don't need to order anything from you for, for a year, right?

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:00:11Speaker 04

  Um, and so I'm always a little hesitant of, of, of backlog and, and commits. And even some of these, by the way, even with these open A I deals, they put out big numbers, but it's not like the whole thing is committed. Like maybe the first gigawatt at this point is committed, and, and which is how it should be.

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. It's great.

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Are you A G I pilled?

• 2:00:30Speaker 04

  No, probably not.

• 2:00:32Speaker 04

  I'm not exactly sure what A G I means yet. You, you know, there's a lot of different definitions and sometimes it tends to change.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Well, do you find A I useful in your day to day life?

• 2:00:40Speaker 04

  I do. No, I, I, I do. I have to be a little careful because from a regulatory and compliance standpoint, it's not like I can just start throwing stuff into, into modeling. I'm very limited. We have some internal stuff that we can use, which is.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Enterprise plan.

• 2:00:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and it's, it's, it's ring fenced and everything. Um, but I mean, simple stuff, right? I, I, I mean, what it was this notebook L M. I can literally ta- I could take a YouTube of this, what is it, three hour podcast and toss it in there.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:04Speaker 04

  And it'll give me a, a summary, not just a summary, in five seconds.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  And then we can take that summary, put it into another model and say, make me a three hour.

• 2:01:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure, yeah. Pretty soon it's just A I's making and watching podcasts, right?

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  It's a slurry of content.

• 2:01:15Speaker 04

  But that's just one example. Like, so there, there were, there were clearly

• 2:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Speaker 04

  ways where it's influenced my, my experience in my, in my work. And, and I'm probably on the low end, frankly, of, of, of, of what I could be using. Again, I am, I am constrained.

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:01:29Speaker 04

  On what I can can do with this. I'd love to use it more.

• 2:01:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:32Speaker 04

  If I could.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming by.

• 2:01:34Speaker 04

  Oh, you bet. My pleasure.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  The studio. This is a lot of fun.

• 2:01:37Speaker 04

  You bet.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  While he's hopping off. 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. Speaking of turning things into podcasts, Kristoff has some fake news here on the timeline. I love Kristoff, coastal futurist. Kristoff says, "Still crazy to me that Steve Jobs slash Apple invented the word podcast and that it's a mix of iPod and broadcast." And apparently, this isn't true. Apparently, BBC journalist Ben Hammersley coined it in a 2004 Guardian article. But then it got ported back to Apple and the word and the term podcast was adopted.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  But it is it is funny that.

• 2:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Podcast has always felt like a very boomer. It's always felt like a very boomer term.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:32Jordi Hays?

  And it makes sense. I never.

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  Radio show?

• 2:02:34Jordi Hays?

  I never knew that it was it was a combination of.

• 2:02:36John Coogan?

  Oh, you didn't know that it was iPod plus broadcast. Yeah. Yeah. What else?

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  I guess that that makes.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  The cast. Casting is very, very popular. Anyway.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  What's this article from?

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  Evan Armstrong over at The Leverage published an article on who actually makes money when robots work, looking into some of the venture funding that's flowing into humanoid robotics. And he is trying to create a field guide for separating the real companies from the grifters. Talks about OneX, the home robot costs $20,000 upfront or $4.99 a month. The website looks like every other VC-funded D to C brand from 2015. Millennial beige sans serif typography that works. Buried in the fine print and tech cover tech coverage is the actual product for most chores. A human in a call center will drive the robot around your house via teleoperation

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  while the system records training data for autonomy that doesn't exist yet. And so there's a big question about how. Like what will the actual margins be? And he was trying to dig into that. So you can go read Evan's piece over on the leverage if you want, get a seven day trial.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Who actually makes money, though, when they work? Is it the call center operators?

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  I believe, I mean, I would not bet against Elon on this. I believe that the hardware manufacturer will ultimately be the one that makes money in the long term. I think that the, everything else is more commodity in the stack, but there is going to be a compounding advantage to actually having the manufacturing capability to build the robots at scale. Now, this is years away, but I'm certainly AGI-pilled in the sense that the tele-operation will become less and less important and the Tesla model of having a economically producible product will be very, very important. So that would be my take.

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  In other humanoid news, Brett Adcock was putting a company in the truth zone.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  What did he say?

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  Shenzhen-based company Ubtech claims to have completed the world's first mass delivery of humanoid robots. And the Shenzhen-based company has secured apparently over 112 million in Walker S2 orders this year. Brett Adcock says, "Look at the reflections on this bot and then compare them to the ones behind it. The bot in front is real. Everything behind it is fake. If you see a head unit reflecting a bunch of ceiling lights, that's a giveaway. It's CGI." So he's putting, he's putting Ubtech in the truth zone and then Christopher comes over the top and puts him in the, and it says, "Such an embarrassing post for a

• 2:05:32Jordi Hays?

  CEO at this level to make, so people don't necessarily believe that the CGI claims."

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  Did UB Tech actually deliver it? There's no community note on the original video. I, I, for something like this, I mean, we've seen iRobot. Like, you can actually just do flawless CGI that is indistinguishable. There's no way to tell. Uh, so I would, I would, I would be relying on some sort of, you know, on the ground reporting. Do you have an idea, Tyler, of whether or not this is real? We've seen demos of this robot before where it pulls the battery out of the back.

• 2:06:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, I, I don't know for, for sure if it's real, but it is a public company.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, so Brett kind of needs this company to be totally fake. Because UB Tech is a public company. It's valued at around, uh, seven and a half billion dollars.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and they have, uh, they have real revenue.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  Okay. UB Tech, man, they're, the humanoid market over in China is extremely competitive. You have UB Tech and then you, then you have the, the, what's, what's the other company? I keep forgetting.

• 2:06:44Speaker 02

  Unitree?

• 2:06:45John Coogan?

  Unitree? They're, they're two different companies, right? But they're both publicly traded, both have revenue, both make humanoids. Um, I wonder if there's like, I wonder what the CEOs of these two companies would actually say? Like, what is the differentiation between the two, uh, the two products? Uh, because, um, they look pretty identical. Maybe we need to do a side by side. But I don't know. What, uh, what, what else here? Said Martin Scully said, best part of UB Tech is it's public with real revenue. So its valuation is naturally far below pre-revenue robot.

• 2:07:17Speaker 02

  Naturally.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  That's wild. Yeah. Um, uh, you know, I, I, I do think it's real, but I don't know. Like, it's, it's really hard to prove it one way or another. It's hard to prove any of these videos that, that, that come out with the humanoids. Because humanoids are just like, it's the textbook, like CGI product. Like, you can just, if you're all good at CGI, you can make a humanoid robot look great. Because it's all just polished steel, basically, perfect reflections. It's much harder to make a human face look CGI, CGI real. Uh, and so we've had the ability to make like CGI stormtroopers, CGI C3PO. Like, that's been at perfect, uh, indistinguishable level for years.

• 2:08:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  But, uh, getting the actual human.

• 2:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. To, to be honest, I care a lot less about, uh, About, did they use CGI to like, put a hundred of these robots in one room versus like, what are the actual capabilities of the individual robot?

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, that's why I think 1X, I think they're pretty straightforward about, uh, about it being teleoperated, or that being kind of the value, is you're buying a robot that can be teleoperated in your home.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  It really feels like these are gonna come to the United States like, fairly soon.

• 2:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Why is, why is Adcock like, obsessing over a competitor, and then what, what he, what can he do in the next three to six months to justify his forty billion dollar valuation? Right?

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  It probably needs to ship a bunch of these things.

• 2:08:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:46John Coogan?

  Like, just for any reason, uh, just manufacture a lot of them, I would imagine, because, um, with Unitree and this other company, and, you know, 1X is starting to ship, and Elon's clearly getting serious, like, the, the race is on to, uh, to actually start manufacturing and shipping them, and it'll be, it'll be interesting with, with the flying car thing, a lot of it's like regulatory, so you're, it's harder to assess what the progress is like, uh, because you can always just kind of get hung up in, in regulatory. I wonder in the humanoid space. Um, well, speaking of flying cars, what, what's up, Tyler?

• 2:09:22Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, I, I think it's interesting, we, we still haven't really seen any, um, uh, humanoid CEOs, like, talking about sanctions against China.

• 2:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know, that's the thing to call for.

• 2:09:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:34Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's like, a very easy argument to make.

• 2:09:36Speaker 02

  I would not be calling them fake, I mean, you can do that, but you, you should just say, like, even if they are real, like, we want these made in the US, like, in the way that you see kind of Dario saying in AI, um, and it's just kind of weird that you don't see, like, Elon saying that we need to make these in the US, or the, the 1X guys saying...

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bring out the ban hammer.

• 2:09:54John Coogan?

  The ban hammer. Let's, uh...

• 2:09:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that, yeah, I just, I, I, that's gonna be an easy one for, you, all you have to do is like, do you want a million robots? In in American homes that could have, you know, the sci fi scenario where you have a backdoor.

• 2:10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And But the argument against DJI was always like, well, you know, if some tiny drone is in your bottom, you know, sock drawer, like, what's it gonna do? It's not just gonna bust out of there, but like, a humanoid robot will just bust out of the whatever you put them in, unless you store them in your like, your gun safe or something, walk-in gun safe. Let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. And then we have an update from Keller from ZipLine. We're gonna watch this two-minute update from him.

• 2:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 2:10:43Speaker 05

  Hey, everyone. It has been an insane two months, but I thought it'd be cool to give a two-minute update. Whenever I post something on X, people are always asking me, like, when is it coming to my metro? Why aren't you scaling faster? We are definitely hearing you. We are scaling as fast as we possibly can. In fact, I am standing in our expansion space for the manufacturing facility as we speak. We're getting ready to build 20,000 autonomous aircraft a year, all here in South San Francisco in the United States. Mid-December, we will actually start producing the first aircraft here in this space. So this past week, I was in Dallas, visiting a lot of our different customers, going and visiting a lot of the different stores that ZipLine is delivering from. And my mind was basically blunt. Right now, we're growing the number of deliveries we do per day at around 15% week over week.

• 2:11:26Speaker 05

  And we've been growing that fast for about 30 weeks straight. And a lot of our customers out there are placing orders three to four times per week. In fact, some customers are ordering three times a day. People actually just fundamentally change their ordering behavior. Some people are grocery shopping once every one to two weeks and then ordering from ZipLine three to four times a week, just to do fill-ins. We've also been able to launch a new Walmart Supercenter every week across Dallas over the last couple of months. And by the way, I, you know, have been talking about really exciting hyperscale in the US, but a lot of people are often like, well, wait a minute, like, isn't that ZipLine operating a huge logistics network in Africa? Yes. In fact, that network is growing faster than ever. Today, we serve 5,000 hospitals and helps us deliver across Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and Kenya.

• 2:12:09Speaker 05

  That has become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth. Together, what we do in the US right now is ZipLine is doing an autonomous delivery about every 30 seconds. We're also adding a lot of new products. For example, in Ghana, we just added HPV vaccine to the overall network. And in the first week, we delivered 150,000 doses of vaccine. This is a

• 2:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Crazy scale.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  John's back.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  I'm back. He's going on the show next week. We love Keller. Congrats to all the folks over at ZipLine on

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really wild. They're building in South San Francisco, scaling deliveries like crazy.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  I think this is one of those things that's hard for it to be, hard to be that excited about.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Ooh, Ryan, there's a spicy question in the chat. How long until they pivot to a weapons company? I don't think it will happen. I think that drone defense is like the most, it's such a, such a crowded industry. It would be really, really hard to break through there. I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's something in like logistics. I've talked to a few folks in defense that will do drone-based transportation or delivery for, let's say, how do you, how do you get supplies from land onto an aircraft carrier that's stationed off of the coast? Well, you could fly a whole helicopter there, but what if you just want to deliver one smaller

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  package back and forth? You could use a smaller drone for that. There's companies that are building in that category. So, I mean, I could see it happening, but I wouldn't expect ZipLine to be, you know, on the front lines of Ukraine, competing with Nero's to, you know, arm the resistance there anytime soon. The drone delivery, like just delivering a burrito, is going to be a massive market. Like, DoorDash is, does it, it's a hundred billion dollar business. Like, I don't think that they, they need to deal with all the craziness of DOD procurement. Anyway.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  So, someone in the chat mentioned that UB Tech fired back and released a behind-the-scenes video.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  No. Okay, okay, we gotta pull that up. Do we have it? Thank you to the chat for letting, letting us know.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm adding it here.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Let's add it. In the meantime, more on robotics. Blake Robbins has a great take that I was curious about. If anyone knows anything about this, please fill me in. He says, "As robotics continues to get more attention, I always wonder what Boston Dynamics is cooking. It feels like Boston Dynamics should have been the OpenAI of robotics, and yet I can barely mention anyone that worked there." And there's a whole bunch of different debate on, you know, what happened. Boston Dynamics was sold a few times.

• 2:14:50Jordi Hays?

  Boston needs to be studied.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, Boston Dynamics.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  What's the dynamic over there?

• 2:14:56John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, Boston Dynamics is the original browser company in New York. They just took their city and what they do and put it together. This is the, you know, they should be the dynamics company of Boston. Rebrand, come out with a humanoid. Let's play this video. This behind the scenes video.

• 2:15:10Jordi Hays?

  Los Angeles Dynamics would just be like an influence, like Lincoln BIOS.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Well, at one, at one point, Boston Dynamics sold the Hyundai Heavy Industries. So I believe they were across the Pacific Ocean. Let's react to the second video posted by the humanoid robotics company. Okay, Ubtech, industrial walkers. They've been pumping these out. It feels like the question has never been, can China make a lot of these things? Like, obviously they can.

• 2:15:41Jordi Hays?

  In the, in the bio, they said, they said it looked too perfect to be real. And then they used some chat GPT slot, but perfection isn't fabricated. It's delicately in here.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  It's so good. You know, you know, for a long time, people were saying that there was no way to watermark AI created content with, because like, oh, how would you do it? You change one, it's like, actually, all AI content is watermarked. It turns out it's just perfectly watermarked. Yeah, this looks real to me. I don't know. It also could be CGI, honestly.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty funny to see Brett say this was all faked.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it looks, it looks real. I mean, it would be way, they could have done so much better to make this look real. Put a bunch of humans there, touch them. A lot of the hard part in CGI is the handoff between the CGI character and the human character. And so what you should be doing is you should have a human who takes like a smoothie and pours it on top of the robot. And then like wipes the robot off clean with a towel. And you're seeing how the fluids interact with the robot, interact with the person. And like, that was, that was not actually that satisfactory. I don't know.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  I think, I don't know, I'm not calling it fake, but it could be fake because CGI is really, really good. Like CGI just is at that level where that's possible.

• 2:17:08Jordi Hays?

  Anyway. Yeah, we know the, we know the caption or the, the description of the video was AI generated.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  That is hilarious that they they had to use a caption. It's like, it's like AI on it. And it's like, after all, it is an AI company like it would be on brand. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2, and get started for free. Our next guest is Luca from Bending Spoons in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Good to meet you. How are you doing?

• 2:17:42Speaker 06

  Hello, hi.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. I imagine it's late there. Thank you for staying up late and coming and chatting with us. For those who don't know you, would you mind introducing yourself?

• 2:17:54Speaker 06

  Of course. One of the co-founders, the CEO at Bending Spoons. And what we do is we look for digital technology businesses with unexpressed potential, and then we acquire them if they'll sell them to us and transform them sometimes radically by rewriting big chunks of the software, re-architecting the cloud infrastructure, redesigning the UI, launching a lot of lots of features, optimizing monetization and marketing, rebuilding big parts of the organization. So lots of handsome work. And then if we do it right, we generate a lot of value. We plug back into bigger acquisitions and strengthening our platform. So basically, our proprietary technologies, our expertise, access to talent.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  The company is huge now, $11 billion valuation. How did you get started with all this?

• 2:18:44Speaker 06

  So I founded a startup in 2010. Interestingly, talking about AI, we were trying to create a self writing diary or journal with AI in 2010, which was pretty early. We couldn't, I mean, it worked fine, but it wasn't good enough. So that was like your typical startup. You work from a garage. It was really our, you know, living room in our apartment. But more or less, the concept is the same. We worked on it for three years, couldn't make it work commercially. And then we kind of shut it down. And through that experience, we came up with the the strategy for Bending Spoons. Basically, why don't we try to outsource, looking for product market fit to the market? We try to be the best in the world at the, call it functional expertise that's

• 2:19:29Speaker 06

  necessary to run a digital technology business. So software engineering. Product design, growth and all these things. And then we buy businesses where the owner is basically doesn't want to work on it any longer or where maybe we can do better, so we can offer an exciting price for all involved.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Is the reference, is the name a reference to the Matrix?

• 2:19:52Speaker 06

  Actually, yes. Yeah, it is.

• 2:19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like, at least to me, like it's kind of an odd name for any business. It's cool. I like the reference, but why did you pick that name in particular?

• 2:20:08Speaker 06

  So we knew we weren't going to work on just one product, so we couldn't call it, say, Facebook, if you do, you know.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, you need like a name for a holding company on day one, sort of.

• 2:20:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, something like that. So we chose to find a name that would somehow convey a couple of principles or values that we thought were important to us. And bending spoons reminds us of two things. One is the power of the mind. For obvious reasons, if you are going to bend spoons with your mind, it means you believe it's powerful and you can do great things with it. And the other one is, call it perseverance, hard work, dedication. In my imagination, to get to the point where you can bend spoons with your mind, you probably have to work pretty hard at it. So, and plus it was kind of memorable, so we liked it.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I like it.

• 2:21:00Jordi Hays?

  I reached out, or one of us reached out when the AOL acquisition got announced. Like, give us the backstory on that deal, how it came to be, when you started thinking about the business, what value you saw in the business and maybe why it was a target that was overlooked by maybe American private equity players and what you saw in it.

• 2:21:28Speaker 06

  There were multiple private equities that were looking at it too. So we weren't the only ones.

• 2:21:37Speaker 06

  It was owned by a private equity, or it's still owned because the acquisition was only signed, it hasn't closed yet. And so you could imagine how they would run a proper and competitive process.

• 2:21:51Speaker 06

  Typically, we follow a business for a long time before an opportunity to acquire presents itself. I don't have precise statistics, but my, off the top of my head, I'd say it's quite rare that we end up acquiring a business we haven't followed for at least a year, sometimes more. So we had been following AOL for a while, and when it became available, we made an offer that we thought was quite competitive, and here we are. What do we see in it? So I think it's actually a great business. People are a bit stuck with the idea of AOL from the 90s or maybe early 2000s of internet connectivity. Doesn't do that, haven't done that for a long time.

• 2:22:35Speaker 06

  Today, it's two different products. There is a web portal for people to consume news and entertainment, and an email client, like Gmail, pretty much, you know, like that sort of thing. They have well in excess of 30 million monthly users, 8 million daily active users, so it's huge. Give or take one in 10 Americans uses it.

• 2:22:56Speaker 06

  And it's just not necessarily, you know, the new hot thing that you would read about online, but it's still massively used and, you know, very good retention because people are self-selected. If they still use it for really liking the brand and the offering. And nevertheless, we think we could help make the product more modern, more effective. We think that through AI, we could create better recommendations for the web experience, essentially better content to consume. We'll see, but it's exciting. We look forward to working with the team on it, plenty to refine and expand. And it's exciting to work on a storied brand, you know, I find it kind of cool, actually, to be able to get our hands dirty with a brand of the caliber of AOL.

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it truly is one of the great, America Online, one of the great, one of the great names in business history. How do you think about, like, I feel like Silicon Valley, like, has this sense that businesses are either in hypergrowth or they're dying, right? And there's nothing in between. And that's just because, like, the industry venture capital dollars are deployed into companies that are growing really quickly. And as soon as you stop growing, like, that, that sort of source of capital is, is turned off and you kind of fall out of the headlines. But how much, like, I assume, like, the kind of part of the thesis for bending spoons is that a lot of these businesses are

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  just like way more durable than like the tech industry maybe gives them credit for, because even after they're not getting like headlines in tech crunch, they can still generate a lot of cash flow for a very long time. But how, how do you think about like durability of, of digital businesses? And, and when they be, can, can become sort of like Lindy and, and survive across decades versus when they evaporate?

• 2:24:51Speaker 06

  I would say, I kind of agree. And I, and I will say that if anything, a business that has a lot of history, it's a lot easier to project its, you know, its future and, and make accurate forecasts. Maybe, you know, it's not gonna 10x, but you also have a ton of data, historical records for all the cohorts at scale to know roughly where it's going. So, yes, maybe the upside is not transformative, as it would be in a seed or VC investment, when if all the stars align, you know, maybe 10x or even 100x money. But, but you also know you're very unlikely to, to see it melt in your hands.

• 2:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:31Speaker 06

  Many of these businesses have excellent metrics. They're just not cool and hot, so to say. And so, the, the entire Capital markets, particularly on the private side, not so much the public side, but on the private side is geared toward growth, very aggressive growth. And there's merit in that, but it also means there is perhaps an opportunity to be less opinionated about growth at all costs. We, on our part, we try to, we're basically quite mathematical about it. We make our projections, have our own return thresholds, and then we are happy to buy fast-growing businesses. We have many times stagnant businesses, decline businesses, as long as the math checks out.

• 2:26:10Speaker 06

  And this has been quite good for us, not being too, you know, thesis, you know, limited by a very narrow thesis, but actually staying opportunistic.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  How are you structuring Bending Spoons? Do you have a deal team and an operational team that goes in and actually runs the companies? Or is it more of a, you know, a hybrid model where a partner who finds, someone who finds the deal might be immersed in that company throughout the lifecycle of owning the deal?

• 2:26:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's actually say that we're kind of 25% private equity, 75% tech company. So we do have an M and A team. It's actually pretty small, probably eight, nine people. And, and they, they do what you would imagine a private equity firm would do. They, they create a pipeline, scout the deals, negotiate the deals. And then really probably 95% of the, of the team here are software engineers, product designers, growth managers, AI researchers. And once we close a transaction, we add a, call it a task force of experts to get, you know, get in the trenches with the core team and study things in fine detail and help with those kind of radical transformations I was describing earlier. So that's the tech, tech technology company part.

• 2:27:26Speaker 06

  We, almost all we do is writing software, developing and refining technologies, user experiences. And we, we buy to hold and operate forever. We're not a fund, to be clear, more like a Berkshire Hathaway. We buy off the balance sheet, you've never sold a business or do intend to.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  So you, so is it, is it fair to think, yeah, you'll, you imagine AOL and Vimeo existing as companies in 50 years or brands as 50 years or both? Like, what is the critical?

• 2:27:54Speaker 06

  Business units, I would call it.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  Business units, okay.

• 2:27:56Speaker 06

  So if a company is more a kind of a legal entity, that may be dissolved in the future, maybe yes, maybe no, depending on considerations. But there will be a business unit with its dedicated management team and engineers and designers. And, sorry, I don't know why.

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  That's on our side.

• 2:28:17Speaker 06

  Zoomed in.

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  We just zoomed you in a little bit for the viewers at home, sorry.

• 2:28:20Speaker 06

  Okay. I can see my baby's cradle just in the background. Oh, nice.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  Congrats. We have five kids on our side. It's amazing.

• 2:28:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, mine is two and a half months old, so.

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. We really appreciate that.

• 2:28:39Speaker 06

  No, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  I'd love to know, like, what, what, what is it actually like buying a 5,000 person company? Or, like, because I imagine, like, if I'm, like, if you buy a company and you can actually go interview everyone, but with 5,000 people, you're like, layers and layers and layers deep in everything, like, how do you actually go and start right sizing? We've seen a little bit of what happens through the stories of Twitter, what Elon did there. Obviously, that was a, that was a company that seemed like post Elon was massively overstaffed. But, but even, even, even if the staffing is correct, I mean, Apollo's owned AOL for

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  a while, so I imagine that it's not wildly overstaffed. How do you actually go in and just get your handle on everything that's happening within the business because it's such a, such a huge entity?

• 2:29:35Speaker 06

  So we have never acquired a 5,000 person company, the largest is about 1,000 people. Okay. I think your point stands, I mean, but just to for accuracy sake. Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, I, I think it's very difficult, perhaps impossible to do if you are, again, a private equity and you have a small investment team. Um, in our case, we will add a task force that's sized uh in relation to the size of the organization we're trying to study. And so if we acquire a 1,000 person company, we'll probably have, say, 50 people. Okay. If it's a 100% company, maybe as few as 10. And then over the course of a couple of months, uh, you know, we will split the work.

• 2:30:15Speaker 06

  So everyone is in charge of understanding a piece of the organization that's not too big, like the right size for them and, and specific to their capabilities and expertise. So if there is a more technical part, maybe an engineer, if it's something has to do with design or marketing, you know, and so on and so forth. And then th- those people will be talking to each individual in, in that part of the organization multiple times. They will be looking at the code base, they'll be contributing on ongoing projects. So we take our time to learn, I mean, I was about to say everything there is to know. Of course, that's not entirely true. Like you don't learn everything in two months, but tru- truly learn the vast majority of what matters. And only then do we come up with the, say, a, a new vision for the company, a new roadmap,

• 2:30:58Speaker 06

  the, a new design for the updated organization. Uh, it is extremely time consuming and only feasible you have, if you have a large, call it corporate staff or, or experts, like in our case, uh, only, only then can you do it at scale. Otherwise, yeah, you couldn't. I agree. Yeah.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  What, how, how much is like, I'm assuming when you're thinking, evaluating a potential acquisition, you're thinking, how much can this company benefit from AI? And what is kind of the AI disruption risk? Uh, oftentimes it could be both. I can, I can, you know, imagine with AOL, you're saying like better content recommendation that you could roll out maybe with, with, uh, less resources invested, but at the same time, uh, there's risk of new companies, you know, entering the market. But what's your, any sort of like framework that you're using to evaluate what companies are going to do well? Cause nightmare scenario is you buy like a great business today and that becomes, uh, you know, less relevant. But there's also, uh, I, I think Silicon Valley also maybe.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Again, going back to my earlier point around durability, like there's companies from, you know, that that have been disrupted multiple times that can still continue to produce cash flow. But I'm I'm curious what your framework is.

• 2:32:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think there's, I believe you can come up with plausible visions for the future. I mentioned earlier, we were working with AI in 2010, where I I didn't know a single other person who was interested in AI back then. So I mean, I'm sure there were many in the world, but it was not mainstream. So, you know, we did have a big vision for AI in the long, in the long run. It turned out to be way too early, maybe a decade or more. So I'm I'm a big believer in, yes, you want to have a vision for the future. But at the same time, if you think you know what's going to happen, and especially over what timeline, you're very likely to be disappointed. So I would never want to bet our future on those sort of assessments. What we try to do is evaluate whether a company is more or less likely to be disrupted.

• 2:33:03Speaker 06

  And of course, also enhanced through AI, and that that's basically qualitative assessment. We try to embed that in our acquisition thesis, but also we always need a contingency plan in case there is a very aggressive rapid disruption. So we need to make sure that we have ways to get back our investment in case we end up in that, or most of our investment, if we end up in that scenario. So you, some businesses are structured in a way that if things don't go well, you you may be able to trade long term health for short term returns and at least salvage your investment overall. I mean, it's not going to be a stellar investment, but still you break even.

• 2:33:44Speaker 06

  So we we try to have a, an escape route, just in case things don't turn out the way we we think they will. And of course, the fact that we're so diversified, the biggest business we own contributes about 15% to our revenue. And they are across many different segments.

• 2:34:01Speaker 06

  We are massively less exposed to this sort of disruption than any company running a just one product, no matter how successful that one product may be today.

• 2:34:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Any, any plans to create a NeoCloud or anything of the sort? Or you guys like staying at the product level?

• 2:34:20Speaker 06

  No, no such plans for now.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  What's the Italian early stage?

• 2:34:28Jordi Hays?

  I want to dig, I want to, I want to dig into that a bit more, just, just out of curiosity, because I'm, I'm, I'm assuming there's a lot of different players that would love to give you guys capital to help deploy cloud, given that you're running a lot of, you know, companies that are going to be buyers of, of compute and you have a track record of being able to deploy large amounts of capital. Is the decision to, like, you, the strategy is you're, you're invested in a bunch of different companies, but do you like them to be the same kinds of companies? And that, like, again, is it just a mandate around digital products? Or would you one day branch out? Because again, if you use the Berkshire Hathaway comp, it's like you've seen them buy everything from Coca-Cola to Google,

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  right? And operate a bunch of different businesses.

• 2:35:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, look, I, I think there's a trade off between, let's say there is a, you know, going back to Warren Buffett, a circle of competence, as he calls it, where you, you have proven you're good or very good, better than most. And so on the one hand, if you stay within that circle of competence, you're more likely to do well. But at the same time, if you venture outside of it, you extend your toolkit, your capabilities, and the TAM grows with it too. So there is a trade off between expanding that circle over time, while seizing the opportunity at hand with what you already have proven that works. In our case, we'll, we'll be, next year will probably be about 2.5 billion in revenue.

• 2:36:01Speaker 06

  And the overall, the overall digital technology market is about $2 trillion. So it's not exactly we're saturating the opportunity here. So before we get into something we know very little about, other than on a high level, I, I think we should make sure that we are saturating the core opportunity. But yeah, maybe in five or 10 years, if we ever feel that we're getting too big for, for the TAM, and maybe we'll look beyond that, we'll know what will be appealing then.

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's funny that the the US venture capital ecosystem is somewhat like off balance sheet R and D for you guys? It's like they can deploy a bunch of capital into these categories, create good products like Evernote, and then you guys can come in and own them for the long term?

• 2:36:52Speaker 06

  Look, when acquisitions are opportunistic, I don't, you know, whatever the market offers, if you think we can deliver great returns, we'll be happy to buy regardless of the particular history. I don't know, I don't have a other gratitude or any particular opinion on that. You see that many have done really well. I guess it's normal that, at least in some cases,

• 2:37:17Speaker 06

  their investment didn't turn out to be the exceptional success that it could have been.

• 2:37:21John Coogan?

  Well, in many cases, some of those firms actually IPO'd and, you know, delivered a bunch of returns for the LPs in the venture fund. I am interested in, now you've acquired, Evernote's probably a good example, but any, any example of acquiring a company that's already publicly traded, how does that work? How, how do you work through those, that process? Are you going directly to the board? Like, are there, are there best practices around, like, when a company or a group of shareholders might be more receptive to a, to a takeover?

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Or, or do you see yourself ever getting into more of like a hostile takeover scenario? Does that, does that, does that matter to your strategy?

• 2:38:12Speaker 06

  I've done two take privates so far. One is Brightcove, early this year, and the second one is V-mail. So I'm now, I wouldn't consider myself a world expert in take privates, but I've seen a couple of them, so I can probably provide at least some, some input here. We have done it quite collaboratively, reaching out to the board and, and just saying, look, we'd be interested, and we'll make an offer. The, I would say the, the negotiation is not massively different from what you would do in a private deal, but the, there is a lot more. Pressure on a board of a public company to uh to to to act in the best interests

• 2:38:54Speaker 06

  of the broader shareholder base, uh because the liability is a lot more. Uh legally speaking, it's probably not very different, but of course, the transparency of that process makes it really difficult to say, I don't like it, fuck you, you know, if it's a good offer, you have to entertain it. So on the bright side, if you have a great offer relative to the stock price, you have, I think, better certainty that it'll be at least entertained than with private companies, where sometimes you find you you're absolutely confident you're making a an incredible offer, but say the founder is just not not gonna sell, or a particular investor maybe invested at a really high valuation and they're now maybe even delusional in thinking, oh, we'll get back to three billion if we wait for, you know, long enough. And so there you didn't really have any leverage.

• 2:39:38Speaker 06

  It's like, okay, end of end of the conversation with a public company that can't really happen, or at least is quite rare, uh on the on the, you know, so that that's the positive. On on the negative, the process is a a little bit more uncertain, because with with a private deal, typically, if you have a handshake agreement with the two, three decision makers, then it's quite unlikely that uh the deal falls through. The public company, um basically, at any point in time, if someone comes with a better offer, and it can be quite public, so uh everything is, you know, uh back to square to square one, uh you need shareholder votes. So you only know after multiple months, and so you're kind of keeping your fingers crossed. But overall, I love public deals. I think they're in many ways more straightforward. There's no hiding behind illusions.

• 2:40:23Speaker 06

  I mean, your your stock price speaks volumes, and if it's been at a certain level for a long time, uh that is it, you know, for the most part.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh is it also, do you have more confidence in audited financials, uh or any other sort of process power that comes from actually being a public company? Do do you do you feel like when you go into a company that's been taken private, uh you can just feel the difference? Oh, okay, this this company has been operating like a public company, and that has maybe pros and cons, but you can definitely tell? Or is it purely in the deal stage that you feel that there's a difference?

• 2:41:04Speaker 06

  We have seen private companies that are run really well in terms of uh FPNA and we've seen, uh, public companies certainly had to reach a pretty high bar. So yeah, I guess we're you're more certain that uh on the one hand, you're more certain that the public company will be better geared uh uh to to provide you with the say the due diligence materials you need and whatnot. On the other hand, there's generally and understandably so and rightfully so more uh more risk aversion in a public company because if there is a leak that can truly you know, create a pretty difficult situation for for everybody involved. We try the companies. It's it leaks are also less likely because the incentives to leak something are lower.

• 2:41:48Speaker 06

  Uh, there are all sorts of uh perverse incentives with a public company for obvious reasons because the stock is so liquid. So sometimes uh deals are leaked that if the company was private, uh, wouldn't be leaked. Um, so I I would say yes, the data tends to be a little bit more ready, cleaner. But on the other hand, uh, the the company tends to be more carefully in bringing people under the tent. And so at the end of the day, it's not always necessarily faster or easier, you know, I I think frankly, I don't see that's a major uh point of difference, to be honest. I think uh

• 2:42:24Speaker 06

  it's not so important when you look for for an acquisition.

• 2:42:27Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any type of internal forecast around when some of the current the new generation of like uh or or just the the new crop of AI native startups will start becoming for sale is like right now, if you're growing quickly and you have a great product, you can probably raise a bunch of uh capital, but I could imagine in in two-ish years, there's companies that maybe don't fully break out that have great products, but uh, aren't necessarily going to be, you know, uh, public companies one day themselves.

• 2:43:02Speaker 06

  No, we haven't discussed that. We at our

• 2:43:06Speaker 06

  because we try to focus our time and effort on things we control. So our focus right now is to just meet as many great entrepreneurs and investors and private equities and management teams and bankers as possible to make sure we are involved promptly every time there is an intention to sell a business. We have historically been a great acquirer, very fast highest bid every single time we actually competed.

• 2:43:34Speaker 06

  And essentially, no requirements on management teams to stay if they don't want to stay. So we just need to make sure we are called upon if something is happening, but we don't necessarily need to know or have an opinion whether in three years' time or two years' time, a particular company becomes available. There are so many variables that we wouldn't be planning for. Yeah. For being ready for that anyway, so who cares in a way. Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:43:56John Coogan?

  Last question from my side. How are you think about synergies across the portfolio? You're not doing rollups, but there are some similarities between the video products developed by Brightco, Vimeo. Like, are you thinking about how these businesses fit together over the long term? Or do you see them all as like individual projects, products and companies that you want to kind of grow in their own way?

• 2:44:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, great question. So the short answer is the latter. The reason is

• 2:44:29Speaker 06

  that the, I think those synergies are actually much more limited than people would imagine. And also, and perhaps more importantly, we believe that our business units tend to perform a lot better if they are allowed to operate with extreme levels of autonomy and flexibility. We want our small teams to feel like they're almost like a startup, like we, basically, we trust them to make decisions and move quickly. And if you, if you start asking many business units to coordinate on branding and cross-selling and yada, yada, yada, then all of a sudden you're creating a ton of glue and that kills sense of ownership, agility, excitement. So it's a trade off.

• 2:45:12Speaker 06

  You want to have teams that feel very entrepreneurial and empowered or maybe extract an additional 5% of revenue through. Um, say cross selling or some sort of bundling. Uh, we've, we've found a former in the long run. He has much better returns. Uh, so we go for it. In a way, I think you can think of a Ben is supposed a little bit like the technological version of a P, uh, uh, uh, the PNG Procter and Gamble where there is a ton of shared infrastructure and capability in their case. I su- I suppose I don't know them well, logistics and distribution and marketing and product development. But the, when you look at the brands they sell, they, most people wouldn't even know that they are by the same broader corporation. And, and in a way we would like Ben is supposed to be similar. We don't

• 2:45:56Speaker 06

  really care necessarily that a, say an Evernote customer knows that Ben is supposed to be behind it. And we're fine out of way, but we don't try to push that message on them as long as they think Evernote is perfect for them and they stay subscribed and they love it. Uh, and, and in fact, we think that if we try to, uh, homogenize our brands, we will be destroying a lot of the value that we acquire in the first place with these storied brands and loyal customer bases.

• 2:46:21John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 2:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 2:46:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking some time. So soon after having a, a child to join our show, we really appreciate talking to you. I learned a lot. So thank you so much.

• 2:46:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Thanks a ton, Luca. Come on, anytime.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to talk to you more.

• 2:46:36Jordi Hays?

  Fall on the journey.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:46:39Speaker 06

  My pleasure. Take care.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  Uh, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that's built, scales and grows your company to the next level. Fun fact, Jordy, uh, Brightcove acquired by Bending Spoons was founded by Jeremy Alair, who runs Circle now. Yeah. 2004. Uh, very fun. Well, our next guest is Healy from Boom Pop. Healy, how you doing? Welcome to the TVP and Ultra.

• 2:47:06Speaker 07

  Hey, how's it going?

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  Haven't seen you in a while. What's up, man?

• 2:47:09Speaker 07

  Been a while. How you doing, man? Good to see you.

• 2:47:11John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Uh, introduce yourself for those who don't already know.

• 2:47:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, my name's Healy Cypher. I'm the CEO, co-founder of Boom Pop.

• 2:47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:20Speaker 07

  And, um, we are actually, not so funny. Hold one second here. I'm gonna close this.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, no worries.

• 2:47:26Speaker 07

  Okay, I got you. Um, yeah, we're an AI-powered group travel company. I've been running and selling companies my whole career. I'm from Nebraska, which is a small state in the center of the country you probably haven't been to. And the plot twist is I grew up in Saudi Arabia.

• 2:47:39John Coogan?

  Wait, what? You grew up in Saudi Arabia? I didn't remember that. That's crazy.

• 2:47:42Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Riyadh for 16 years.

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  16 years? Wow.

• 2:47:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Very cool. Anyway, let's go back to the business.

• 2:47:50Jordi Hays?

  What is somebody, if, if, what is the must-do thing in Saudi Arabia for you today?

• 2:47:55John Coogan?

  Beast World wasn't there when you were there. Well, how did you survive?

• 2:47:59Jordi Hays?

  Beastland. I think it's Beastland.

• 2:48:02Speaker 07

  The, the new hotness in Saudi, there's this place called, I think it's Al-Awaba. It's like Petra in Jordan, but northern Saudi. And they actually, I think they're building an Aman there right now. So there's like, there's some stuff going down. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  So give us the latest. Give us the news. Give us the fundraising news.

• 2:48:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Thanks, man. So we raised a $25 million round, uh, pulled in some, oh, yes, thank you. Uh, appreciate that. Appreciate that. Thank you, Jordy. Uh, pulled in some debt and equity. And yeah, it's, it's all about growth, you know? I think travel has produced some really good returns for venture. You know, you think about Airbnb, Expedia Booking, it's crushed. People don't think about it. Travel's like 10% of global GDP. It's $11.7 trillion.

• 2:48:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:52Speaker 07

  And often when you think of travel, especially in the corporate setting, you kind of think of like, whatever, your EA is booking you a flight.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:59Speaker 07

  Turns out 60% of corporate travel is stuff involving groups. It's like an offsite or an S K O. And, and especially in today's day and age, we're finding the demand for group travel is the most it's ever been. Some fun facts. One, most people are exceedingly less trustful of Zoom meetups. They want people, people in person. Uh, most AI companies now are hiring event teams. Like, it's one of the first hires because it turns out for scaled ARR businesses, um, events are like one of the number one demand channels. And so as you looked at group travel, we were kind of like, wait, wait, wait. It's this massive part of travel and it's so anachronistic. If you want to, if you want to, for example, book over 10 hotel rooms, you literally can't do that online. Did you know that?

• 2:49:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy. We run into this. We run into this a fair amount of times just with the small team traveling. Like, it happens. I don't know if you saw that Block party that they had, where like showed up in their earnings because they spent so much on group travel.

• 2:49:57Jordi Hays?

  They spent like 68 million or something on one trip.

• 2:50:01Speaker 07

  No, this is, this is real. Like, I was at this conference and the then president of Brex walked over to me. He was like, hey, are you Huliot Boom Pop? And I was like, yeah, but who cares, man? Like, you're the president of Brex. Like, I'm nobody. He goes, no, no. Guess what the second biggest expense category is for all of our companies after payroll? And I was like, no way. He goes, it's group travel and event spend. It's like, holy shit. So it's on the rise. It's crazy.

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So talk through the actual product experience. How do you, and then, and then how do you actually make money? Are you just taking a fee on top of whatever is booked? Is that the secret?

• 2:50:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the product is pretty rad.

• 2:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Is revenue the secret to success?

• 2:50:41John Coogan?

  Or, or, I mean, it could be like seat based.

• 2:50:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:45Speaker 07

  Turns out you should buy low than sell high.

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  Yes, this is good. This is good.

• 2:50:51Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah. Heard it here, folks. Uh, yeah. So it's, it's simple. You talk to our AI agent. You give it a simple prompt. You're like, yo, I want to do an offsite within whatever, a two hour drive of LA, a budget of this, 50 people with some cool fun outdoor activities. What should I do? And it looks at millions of data points. It looks at weather, seasonality, hotel pricing, what you've done, what your guests like. And then it puts together a couple of really good options. Like, here's Joshua Tree by the minute of what you do. Here's Pioneer Town you haven't heard of. You should go there. Here's Montecito, go there. And then if you like it, you just say, hey, cool, do it. The AI will then go out, it'll reach to the vendors, it'll negotiate for them, look at the contract, it'll book them for you. It makes an agenda. It even makes your website in a couple of seconds,

• 2:51:33Speaker 07

  keeps it live. And when people RSVP, my favorite thing is, everyone gets a text message, all your guests get a text, and it's from the AI on the phone. And so if it texts, like, yo, how can I help? And you can say, hey, like, how do I get to the hotel? It's like, take an Uber, you idiot. Like, oh, okay. Or like, who else is landing right now? And it's, oh, well, Jordy and Coogan land around this time. If you want to share an Uber. And you're like, oh, that's Awesome. So it's it's like this corner of travel, which is so big and it's all these random joint solutions, like point solutions. And we decided, let's just put it all into one place where it's super easy. Our ultimate vision is, very simply, we want to be the default way the world gets together. I'm sure you guys have seen all the, you know, I saw Chesky on on TBN, I think it was last week. Like, we got a problem, guys. We have a real problem. I mean, people are lonely. They're

• 2:52:17Speaker 07

  not getting together. I don't know if you saw this study. Back in the seventies, it was eight out of 10 high school seniors said they would party twice a week. Now it's one in 10. Like, that's a problem.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  Red alert.

• 2:52:34Jordi Hays?

  We don't even know how to party in this country anymore.

• 2:52:37Speaker 07

  That's right. That's right. That's right. So that's how it works. Um, yeah. And then, yeah, it's it's it's it's a simple SaaS model. You pay a very low amount, and then we make money from the hotels.

• 2:52:45John Coogan?

  Okay, cool, cool.

• 2:52:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, all the money in travel, it turns out, is in hotels. It's not in flights.

• 2:52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, are you, uh, so so, uh, we were thinking about taking the team to F1, and I ran something through ChatGPT. Hey, build a whole thing. Uh, couldn't get to a place where we could just build it. Didn't really, didn't really hit the goal. But are you worried about some of the agentic commerce being a headwind? Or can you turn AI and ChatGPT into like a tailwind and actually like more of a top of funnel for you?

• 2:53:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, totally. No question, it'll be it'll be a tailwind and top of funnel. I think about this a lot, like, AI applications are under a lot of scrutiny. Like, aren't you screwed? Like, it's kind of like the 1990s. Everyone's like, why would you build an app? Microsoft is gonna roll you. And that's what everyone says about AI apps. It turns out, it's not gonna do everything. And so there's kind of, I think there's three things you can do, in general, as an AI app to like, protect yourself. One is you have some sort of proprietary data. We've got that. We spent two years building out a database, and it's got all this stuff you can't find in ChatGPT, like, private dining rooms, which, how would you do that today? You gotta Google it, you gotta call, meeting spaces, we have a bunch of stuff you wouldn't get. The second thing I think you gotta have is a learning network that they don't have access to. So every event that happens in our platform, it makes the next event faster

• 2:54:03Speaker 07

  and easier, the next event faster and easier. So if you talk to hotel and they come back and try to negotiate something, we know exactly what they did at the last hundred events. We're not gonna send that to them. We make it easier.

• 2:54:13Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:54:14Speaker 07

  And the third thing, which tends to be under indexed, is just building a purpose-built application for a specific use case. It turns out like-

• 2:54:22Jordi Hays?

  It's so underrated.

• 2:54:23Speaker 07

  Just looking at black and white.

• 2:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, it's- I know, I totally agree. I totally agree with you. I mean, I've just been testing like LLMs on finding, like browsing the internet for cars that I'm, that I'm like interested in. And they're, it's so-

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  You would assume that like AutoTempest is cooked. And yet you can still go to like an AutoTempest and search across all the cars, right?

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:54:47John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 2:54:47Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 2:54:48Jordi Hays?

  And that's not even to mention, I mean, my, my experience on, uh, John, John and I are probably not good at, at like event logistics. Like we just don't pay any attention to it. So whenever we're traveling, we're like, what airport are we going to? What hotel are we at? Like finding. And, and so Nick on our team, bless his heart, is just like kind of locked in around the clock when we're traveling to make sure. And it would just be nice to be able to go to a single place.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:16Jordi Hays?

  In order to-

• 2:55:17John Coogan?

  But now you can. And we thank you for coming on the show. Have a great day. Thanks so much for coming and hanging out.

• 2:55:23Speaker 07

  Thanks, Jordy. And congrats, by the way. This is awesome.

• 2:55:26John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:55:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on and, and congrats to your whole team.

• 2:55:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:29Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:55:30John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon.

• 2:55:30Speaker 07

  Thanks.

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about public.com investing. For those that take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Our next guest is John Tennant from Chaos Industries, I believe. Chaos? Yeah, Chaos Industries, correct?

• 2:55:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. How you guys doing?

• 2:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  We're great.

• 2:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:55:47John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show.

• 2:55:49Speaker 08

  I love, one, I love the suits. Uh, Bo and I were gonna wear the Dumb and Dumber tuxedos to our Christmas party this year, but we might need to go y'all.

• 2:55:56John Coogan?

  Yellow is a good one. I imagine your whole brand is like black and white. So you can't get too crazy with it. But if you ever

• 2:56:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, you know, we got some, we got some tan in there, but that's why we figured like maybe you go dumb. Tuxedo lighting up a little bit.

• 2:56:08John Coogan?

  Maybe like high vis, high vis, like you're on the work site, like, you know, orange or something that might be

• 2:56:13Speaker 08

  Like high vis multicam like

• 2:56:14John Coogan?

  I think that could work.

• 2:56:15Speaker 08

  And blue.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Bring the construction site into the, into the suit, the formal suit this holiday season. Anyway, uh, let's kick it off.

• 2:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Half a billion dollars. Huge number. Who'd you raise it from?

• 2:56:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, uh, we led from Valor Equity Partners.

• 2:56:36Speaker 08

  Hey, by the way, also, sorry, I got, I'm like swagger jacking you guys at every turn. Where did you get the gong? Because again, this is something Bo and I have been talking about. We want to get like a sales gong in the new office.

• 2:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Got to get one. We should honestly make, we should make, we should make.

• 2:56:49John Coogan?

  We should, yeah, we, yeah, yeah. We'll figure out how to make, how to send you a gong.

• 2:56:52Speaker 08

  I'll buy it from you guys.

• 2:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a couple, uh, we, we were actually become like somewhat of gong experts where we've tested a number of different gongs. We've learned that if you don't warm them up, you can break them.

• 2:57:03Jordi Hays?

  Durability, sound quality.

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  Also, the price gets exponentially bigger, like exponentially higher. So going from like a 30 inch gong to an 80 inch gong will like 100 x the price. So you go from like 800 bucks.

• 2:57:18Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna need a

• 2:57:19Speaker 08

  It sounds like it's a good margin for you guys.

• 2:57:21Jordi Hays?

  I know you raised, you raised quite a bit.

• 2:57:23Speaker 08

  My co-founder is like, yeah, it's like my, my co-founder is probably like the greatest tactical mind of a generation. The, like the in-depth conversation he and I got into about the right type of gong that he wants to buy for the LA office.

• 2:57:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:34Speaker 08

  So I think we may have to both come back and talk through this with you guys pretty soon.

• 2:57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we're not here just to talk about gongs. We're here to talk about you. Uh, can you introduce like yourself, the shape of the business, how you're describing it these days?

• 2:57:46Speaker 08

  Yeah. Uh, so first of all, thanks again for having us. Uh, yeah. So founder chaos industries. So we sort of look at the world in, in three waves, uh, kind of is this sector's grown over the last 20 some years? And, you know, wave one, you have Palantir and SpaceX, Wave 2 of Androl. And, you know, Wave 3, we didn't see like another big multi-product sort of new prime being built. And that's sort of where, that was the sort of initial thesis, seeing kind of where the world was going in terms of especially, you know, the Russians have been taking advantage of the lack of integrated air defense systems in Ukraine. And they've been attacking energy infrastructure and civilian targets, sort of in an effort to break the wall of the Ukrainian people. You know, the Iranians

• 2:58:31Speaker 08

  have been helping them, you know, build their drone capacity. And so we sort of saw this. And all the while, by the way, the Chinese are watching here about, you know, what's gonna, you know, what could happen in Taiwan. So I think we took it from the angle of, you know, we got worried about the fact that America's losing air superiority. And so we wanted, it's like the first wave of our products, we wanted to build, get away from sort of the monolithic legacy structures that were built during the Cold War and bring new systems to the warfight and really protect our people downrange.

• 2:59:03John Coogan?

  So, multi-product, interesting. Androl certainly gotten there, but started with a sensor tower and then, you know, Anvil, like one, you know, counter UAS drone system. Did you follow a similar path, knocking down single products to get multi-product? Or did you like the compound startup thing where you, on day one, were working on multiple products to bring them all together?

• 2:59:27Speaker 08

  So we were, so we were, the chunk we were biting off first is sort of in the radar markets. We've got four different products.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:34Speaker 08

  Now, now there's, now, but there's a sort of long tail of products that we're investing in that the Department of War has been asking for as well. And we'll come back on and talk about some of that stuff in the future with you guys. But the goal here is you're gonna do this the right way, you have to be multi-product.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  How much of what you're doing in radar, when you say multi-product within radar, is different radar technologies? Or the same radar, like the same data output, but this one is waterproof, this one flies, this one goes in the back of a truck?

• 3:00:03Speaker 08

  So I would say different, like, yeah, I would say like completely different form factors, different technology.

• 3:00:09John Coogan?

  Oh, everything.

• 3:00:10Speaker 08

  Types of sensing technology. So we've kind of like rewritten the book on how it's done. And I think a big credit to Obviously Bo, um, he, he knows more about, you know, weapon systems, radars than, you know, most people. He's forgotten more than most people will be able to learn in a lifetime. He's probably the most brilliant technical mind I've ever seen. And so

• 3:00:31John Coogan?

  Why is the old radar not good enough? Is that because the drones are getting smaller these days?

• 3:00:35Speaker 08

  They can't see drones, right? These are legacy monolithic systems, right? So one, manufacturing times are way too long.

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:00:41Speaker 08

  Two, the form factors are enormous. So I think if you look at Patriot, right? Like the things, size of a tractor trailer, you'll be lucky to get those within two and a half years of, of, and three. And like, look, they do some things really, really well. Like, don't get me wrong. But these are sort of like monolithic legacy Cold War era built systems. And, and the, the reality is the battlefield's changed, uh, very dramatically and, and you need more tritable systems as well as sort of like more expeditionary systems. Um, I think like you guys had my buddy Scott Sanders on this week, right? Forterra. Um, so shout out Scotty, love you. Um, but, uh, you know, we partnered with Forterra, right? Because like the, the, the ability to have, uh, um, these systems be mobile and move around the

• 3:01:23Speaker 08

  battlefield, um, not have your transmit and your receive in the same location, I think is, you know, buys our warfighters so much more time than they would already have. And I think if you talk to our chief mission officer, uh, Chris Musselman, you know, Muss was SEAL Team Six. Yeah. Well, he was a Navy SEAL named Chris Musselman, by the way.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go.

• 3:01:42Speaker 08

  Half the reason I started, by the way, half the reason I started trying to get my PRs in the weight room again is because Muss comes and talks shit to me every day in the office. Sorry, excuse me, I don't know if I can curse on here, but, but I think Muss will tell you. Yeah, sorry. But I think Muss would tell you that, you know, 30 seconds is it in a being in a gunfight? Like we're buying exponentially more time. So that, that's really the goal here.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  Is the US Department of War, uh, happy to buy systems that are maybe influenced by the war in Ukraine? Uh, like, like are the learnings they are translating or, or, or do the Ukrainians want something that is maybe fundamentally different from the way the US has set up?

• 3:02:25Speaker 08

  No, I mean, I think, I think Ukraine is one of the best test beds out there. We've had our systems over there for a long time. I think is we sort of look at this as two pronged, right? Because there's a big international component to what we do. So our international partners, all they care about is, hey, has this been tested on the front lines in Ukraine? Right? And then I think, you know, if you look at some of the work we've been able to do overseas, you know, in the Middle East and in Ukraine, it is a, it is a real key discriminator. When we go in, it's like, we don't have a PowerPoint, like, we've got data, the thing works, you know, take a look at it, right? And so I think it's been a big, big help.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you optimistic about the, the Ukraine war winding down? It feels like it's, it's gone on much longer than I expected it to. It's been this war of attrition. I've been very hopeful that there'll be just some sort of conclusion.

• 3:03:18Speaker 08

  You'd hope so. You'd hope so. I mean, I think obviously it's just terrible what's been happening over there. And so this is why, you know, we want to do our part to help.

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:26Speaker 08

  But, you know, it doesn't seem like it's ending anytime soon. But again, you know, I'm not a policymaker, so I don't have an asymmetric view into it.

• 3:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Putin needs to pivot to AI. He's falling behind in the race for artificial intelligence. Should be focused on building data centers instead of.

• 3:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Or transitioning the, you know, building tanks into building gongs.

• 3:03:46John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Do something productive, Putin. Stop fighting.

• 3:03:50Speaker 08

  I still wouldn't buy gongs if he made them, though. I'm only buying them from you guys.

• 3:03:53John Coogan?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 3:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Merry gongs.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  Well, well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Do you have another question?

• 3:03:59Jordi Hays?

  No, great, great to meet. And congrats.

• 3:04:01John Coogan?

  Congrats on the massive round. Congrats on all the progress. And thank you for everything that you're doing to support.

• 3:04:06Speaker 08

  Appreciate it. Thank, thank you, guys. Hope to, hope to see you guys in person soon.

• 3:04:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 3:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Come on the show for, for the next round, whatever, whatever letter that is.

• 3:04:14Speaker 08

  We'll do. Absolutely.

• 3:04:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:04:15John Coogan?

  Thanks, guys. See you soon. Bye. Let me tell you about eatsleep.com. Get a Pod 5, five year warranty, 30 hours free trial, free returns, free shipping. And also, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines expertise, data to enable efficiency, technology, out of expertise, data to enable seamless ad buying across the globe. I was checking my eatsleep score. I got a 93. Let's go. Let's hear it from me. And we got Reid. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  Well, he's sitting down. I'll also tell you about

• 3:04:59Jordi Hays?

  I love that.

• 3:05:00John Coogan?

  bezelgetbezal.com. Your bezel concealer is available now. Source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 3:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Quick wrist check to start.

• 3:05:08Speaker 09

  Yo, I miss the yellow jacket and pants.

• 3:05:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, an MO. It was, it was, uh, it, it, so our, our lead sponsor Ramp raised a big fundraising round today. Uh, we have the CEO on the show.

• 3:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Fourth, fourth round of the year. We knew they were going to be raising a lot. So we decided to get these suits.

• 3:05:24John Coogan?

  And when we initially, uh, we, yeah, when we initially thought of the bit, oh, let's get some yellow suits. Uh, I sort of assumed that we'd just go and buy like a yellow suit from Target. Uh, Jordy called our tailor and got a very nice tailored yellow suit. And I was like, that's, that's hilarious. It was very funny, but we wound up using it a lot.

• 3:05:42Speaker 09

  They look great, fellas.

• 3:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, they look pretty great. Uh, anyway, please introduce yourself for those who might not.

• 3:05:46Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah. My name's Reed. Uh, founded a company called Night.

• 3:05:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:49Speaker 09

  You and I have known each other.

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:50Speaker 09

  Now going on probably like three years.

• 3:05:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:52Speaker 09

  Um, but we represent the biggest creators on Twitch, YouTube. It's, it's kind of taken on a life of its own now. I'd say we're like, the, the idea at the beginning was like, be the internet's management company.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:02Speaker 09

  That's kind of transitioned to like, be the internet's media company. And so we bought a podcast network from Warner Brothers called The Roost.

• 3:06:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:06:08Speaker 09

  We have a venture studio, uh, a few things that have come out of that, like Feastables with Mr. Beast, Tone with Kai Sannett, uh, Outtake, uh, which is a company that you guys are probably familiar with. So that, that's a little bit of the company. And then, you know, I represented Mr. Beast for seven years. So it was a crazy seven years.

• 3:06:23John Coogan?

  Okay. Maybe, maybe we start with like, uh, like a state of the union in just like where opportunities are for creators. Uh, it felt like TikTok was the hottest place to, to, if you were going to be a creator, uh, TikTok was the place you could go break through. Then Mark Zuckerberg copied it with Reels and, and YouTube answered with Shorts and, um, maybe the plateau in TikTok world was like a little bit, like maybe they were slowing down and then they were going through this, will it get banned? Will it won't? And so there was a little bit of hesitance if you're a new creator to maybe pick that platform. Uh, is that overstated? Is there still opportunity on TikTok?

• 3:06:59Speaker 09

  No, there is. I think being a creator today, it's the easiest it's ever been just because discoverability is so easy.

• 3:07:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:07:06Speaker 09

  And I think that also becomes the hard part with TikTok is the algorithm has gotten so good that like if you, the three of us pulled up our For You pages, like all of them would be completely different.

• 3:07:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:07:15Speaker 09

  So I think breaking out-

• 3:07:16Jordi Hays?

  It also makes it more competitive for existing creators where the, if you were living in a world that was like, wasn't algo feeds, if you just got to a critical mass of subscribers, it wasn't, it wasn't as competitive with like, a new creator would have to grind it out for five, 10 years before they could actually be competitive. And now, if you're just making better content, it will get surfaced faster.

• 3:07:37Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah. If you, like during COVID, everyone was seeing Charli D'Amelio dance videos, like she went from zero to a hundred million. That's very challenging to do in today's world, just because your content gets fed to the people that only want to watch that and your content doesn't get seen by people who don't want it. I think the platforms have actually done the same thing across the board where they don't really want creators to break out and become a Mr. Beast anymore. They'd rather like widen out the mid-tier. And so they'd rather have, you know, YouTube, for example, I think would rather have 10,000 creators with 5 million subscribers than have 100 creators with 100 million subscribers. Like they don't, they don't want that. I think a lot of that is like, they don't, they also don't want creators to have any leverage against the platforms.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:20Speaker 09

  And so it's been interesting seeing that like shift over the last three years to this like, you know, push down a little bit further and make, make it harder for people to really break out.

• 3:08:28John Coogan?

  And what is the nature of, of Mr. Beast's leverage over YouTube? Is it just that if he says YouTube isn't treating creators, you know, correctly, that'll be front page news? Or is it something more about the structure of his business?

• 3:08:42Speaker 09

  I think a lot of it is when, you know, there is like negative press and we, we saw this for those people that are like OG YouTubers, like PewDiePie kind of went through this whole like adpocalypse back in the day.

• 3:08:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:08:53Speaker 09

  That was very negative on the platform as a whole.

• 3:08:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:08:55Speaker 09

  And so I think when you, when you get individuals that are at the top of those platforms and they start to almost overshadow the platform because they've gotten so big, that when negative press starts to come out about them, now advertisers are pulling out. We started to see this a little bit on Twitch.

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:09Speaker 09

  Because it is a very top-heavy platform. And so I think that has a lot to do with it. You know, I think in Jimmy's case, like- For the longest time, you would go on trending page and he was just dominating trending page. And so it's, you know, now it's like, people don't really go on trending page, but even on, on homepages now, there's a lot of variety of different content. That's ultimately what the platforms want. They're trying to widen out their fan base as well.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  Uh, talk about the evolution of Twitch. It's, uh, you know, you gave us the basics on TikTok. Twitch is interesting, uh, because when I see what Google is doing, um, YouTube is like front and center in so much of what, uh, YouTube does. And yet I feel like with Twitch, it's not really the front and center, uh, you know, star property for Amazon as a corporation. Uh, and I'm wondering if that reflects just it being a little bit more arms length, a little bit newer of an acquisition, maybe. I mean, it's still been a decade, but, uh, uh, what, what's the vibe on Twitch these days?

• 3:10:05Speaker 09

  Man, um, we could have a whole conversation about this. I, I think your, your observation is correct that Twitch inside of Amazon, they haven't really cared about it. You know, they'll, they'll do deals now that is predominantly focused on Amazon Prime Video.

• 3:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:19Speaker 09

  And Twitch is, is somewhat ignored. You know, I, I do think like it's such a small like peanut inside this Amazon ecosystem that even if Twitch's revenue quadruples, doesn't really do anything.

• 3:10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:31Speaker 09

  For, for Amazon as a whole. And so.

• 3:10:32John Coogan?

  And it also is this weird dynamic where, uh, and correct me if I'm wrong, but there might be a lot of money being made on Twitch, but a lot of it is driven by the Twitch Prime program, which is not actually new dollars for Amazon. Whereas, uh, subscribers on YouTube, uh, YouTube, uh, premium subscribers, that's just actual dollars that people are paying.

• 3:10:52Speaker 09

  Yeah. You're saying like net new, or I can explain that for a second. So, uh, a couple of years ago, Amazon released something where, where every Amazon Twitch, or sorry, every, every Amazon Prime person gets a free Twitch sub.

• 3:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:03Speaker 09

  So they can essentially use their Amazon Prime to subscribe to some person's Twitch, which, which would be $5 a month in most cases. So what you're saying is like, no, that's no longer net new revenue. They've never released how many actual Twitch like subscribers are like actual Amazon Prime. So we have no idea.

• 3:11:21John Coogan?

  Oh, we don't.

• 3:11:21Speaker 09

  But I would guess it's a large number.

• 3:11:23John Coogan?

  It felt like it was like, at least in the early days, it was like 80% because it was like, my parents have to have.

• 3:11:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised somebody didn't, did anybody try to make a stream that's just like, make me a millionaire? And they're just streaming and they're just trying to get people to like, use their one Amazon sub.

• 3:11:37John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, tell some stories about subathons.

• 3:11:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, the subathons became a thing a couple of years ago. Kai's obviously had the most notable one. They had Mafia-thon, which led into the third version of that that we did this last year. Um, and it was, you know, 31 straight days, 24 hours a day. He had, he broke a million subscribers over a 31 day period. But subathons are not a new thing, but people using Amazon Prime to subscribe to Twitch has been around for a while. And that, and that is like the hook that a lot of people use. They'll be like, use your one Amazon Prime sub on me. Uh, and but the, and so Twitch does like, we know kind of what their advertising revenue is, but we have no idea what the makeup of like a Twitch Prime subscriber is. Um, but it has been disappointing. I think from someone who sits on the creator's side that, you know, whose company represents the majority of, of the Twitch streamers.

• 3:12:24Speaker 09

  You know, YouTube leans so heavily or Google leans so heavily into YouTube as, as a platform underneath their umbrella. Or Twitch does feel like this, like, kind of like band of misfit toy inside of Amazon that they don't really care about, don't really talk about. Uh, even when they do the, you know, the, the NASCAR deal and they're negotiating to get all these rights for the NBA. It doesn't even feel like Twitch is in those conversations.

• 3:12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:49Speaker 09

  That, that's also been frustrating for us too, because for a lot of guys that are streaming on Twitch, that's their main distribution.

• 3:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Have you tried to buy Twitch?

• 3:12:57Speaker 09

  I think that we would have to, uh.

• 3:12:59Jordi Hays?

  Cause I know, no, and I, and I, I know like it sounds crazy, but there's a world where you have all of the talent, like a lot of the most important talent on the platform. There's a lot of investors out there that if they would happily, probably if you're like, hey, this is being under, you know, this underappreciated Amazon. And we can turn it, I don't know what, what, wasn't it like a billion dollar acquisition?

• 3:13:20Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, like that, that feels like worth well more than that.

• 3:13:25John Coogan?

  The psychology of the 99, 999 is so funny. It's like, clearly there was some weird board fight.

• 3:13:31Speaker 09

  I just don't know why Amazon would sell it. Like, why would they part ways with it? It would only. Ultimately make them look bad if someone could come in and and actually operate this so.

• 3:13:40John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 3:13:41Speaker 09

  I would be the first in line.

• 3:13:43John Coogan?

  We were joking about how we were praying for Andy Jassy to to get on Twitch because obviously he's a very by the book, you know, he operates AWS, he's a very quantitative executive. But if you look at like Mark Zuckerberg is on Instagram, he's using the platform and it's like, of course, Apple's keynote will be streamed on Apple TVs, of course, Google's going to do I O on YouTube and yet Amazon hasn't really leaned into Twitch in that way of like, hey, maybe if we bring our executives here, it's always been like, it's a little bit too crazy. Like, that's a little party and we're like a little bit more serious.

• 3:14:19Speaker 09

  You'd have to think like if you're gonna pay a billion dollars for the NBA rights, that you would have to allow Twitch streamers to go stream courtside whenever they want. They get full locker room access. Like, you'd have to open up the aperture so all those creators could benefit from Amazon owning the NBA rights, which ultimately like just keeps people in the system that can then watch the games or watch their favorite Twitch streamer backstage or whatever that stream ends up being.

• 3:14:44John Coogan?

  It just feels like it hasn't been fully integrated in any meaningful way, whereas with with YouTube is like front and center in so many of the different parts of the ecosystem with like V O three and the generative AI stuff flows right back.

• 3:14:57Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:14:58John Coogan?

  And so.

• 3:14:58Jordi Hays?

  What's the best, what's the best platform to be a top creator on when you think about Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok?

• 3:15:08Speaker 09

  It's to me not even, it's not even a question, it's YouTube by far. Like, I think just their alt monetization, their AdSense monetization, like if you're at the, even in the top 10,000 channels on YouTube, you're making significant income. And I've said this for a long time, like, we we kind of value a fan of just like relative time spent with that individual. And people are spending a lot more time with individuals on YouTube than they are on TikTok. You know, you'd have to watch, I don't even know how many TikToks of a single person to get up to like a 17 minute Mr. Beast video where the average person's consuming 70 to 80% of that video.

• 3:15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you believe in this, I like this exchange rate concept, but maybe it all just boils down to watch time, but I feel like it's, it's 10 times harder to get like a live viewer than a video essay viewer. It's 10 times harder to get a video viewer than a shorts viewer. Maybe there's, maybe there's like a chain of exchange rates through these things.

• 3:16:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, but you, you can parlay it now on YouTube, which is why I said YouTube because you can use YouTube shorts as the discoverability mechanism, which is a lot easier to get someone in the door to then figure out what your content is, to then create long form videos to now they're watching a 20 minute video and they're watching mid rolls and a unskippable ad. And so I think YouTube has done such a masterful job of just like continuing to build the platform for an amazing place for creators.

• 3:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think about this, uh, this idea that like YouTube just seems to be coalescing around the old TV formats, like Mr. Beast, it feels like he landed on like, oh, it's about a 22 minute video, which is like exactly how long like an episode of The Simpsons is in a 30 minute time slot. And then though there will be around eight minutes of ads because that's just the ad load that TV discovered. And some of those will be in, in the video and some of those will be out of the video, but effectively it just feels like humans landed on like, yeah, like half an hour slots.

• 3:17:03Speaker 09

  Yeah. I think a lot of it comes down to, um, yes, you can put multiple mid roll ads within a 22 minute video. And so you can kind of just understand like how many mid rolls you can fit in a 22 minute video, but TV watch time on YouTube is now, I believe, 11% of, of watch time consumed on an actual like smart TV. And so YouTube also is feeding those, those videos into a system and, and YouTubers have gotten smart. A lot of them have syndicated their videos on other platforms like an Amazon or a Tubi. And in those formats, usually you have to deliver a video that's like 20 to 25 minutes in length. You can't distribute a ton of videos that are nine minutes onto Amazon or Tubi or some of these other places. Uh, and so I think just creators have gotten smarter over the years of like

• 3:17:45Speaker 09

  playing to the, how do I get high ad sense and how do I syndicate my content on other platforms?

• 3:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's like these one-off arb opportunities I feel like that happened like for Snap- Snapchat was one for a while where the Creator Monetization Program was really good. I don't know if it still exists i- in the same like lucrative way, but there was a moment where it was like, if you have a backlog on YouTube, just go put it on Snapchat because you're just making money.

• 3:18:08Speaker 09

  It still exists, but you have to make native content. So the ones that do well, like David Dobrik does really well on Snapchat. But he's making a hundred plus pieces of content a day. And then the programmatic ads are just like slated. Yeah, he's posting a hundred times a day. So it's like, I mean, there's a lot of creators that are doing this where it's just like spam posting your entire day. So you're essentially vlogging your entire day, but you're filming it in ten to fifteen second increments. And so people will just like continue to click and like watch the entire video and then Snapchat will insert ads and that whole thing. And it's done well. I don't know if it's going to continue like that. I don't know if Snapchat will continue to be able to sell ads within that system, but it's worked for the biggest creators at least.

• 3:18:50Jordi Hays?

  You have a prediction, there was sort of the era in which a podcaster could get paid fifty to a hundred million dollars to like go exclusive. That kind of happened. There was the same thing happened in live streaming. Do you ever expect, like, I don't think both of those have like necessarily panned out that well for the platforms. Do you expect somebody to like try to run that playbook back again to like kickstart a new network? Or do you think it's been learned enough times that it's not necessarily?

• 3:19:22Speaker 09

  I don't know. It always kind of feels like someone has to continue to try to spend a hundred million dollars to create a competitor to Twitch or YouTube or TikTok. So I don't think it'll be the last time. I do think someone else will come into the system and put up money to do some of these things. Mixer probably won't be the last like competitor to Twitch that fails. I would imagine someone else is going to try and do it and they're going to be able to raise a ton of money to try. But we've just seen time and time again that like even in the Twitch example, the community on Twitch is hard to compete against. If you're Mixer, you could spend a hundred million dollars and still not even put a dent. And like Kick is trying this right now. They're probably the newest one, which is like owned by Stake, and they've spent. Hundreds of millions of dollars on trying to figure out how to compete with Twitch and they

• 3:20:07Speaker 09

  just really haven't been able to like really crack any of the live stream.

• 3:20:11John Coogan?

  Nvidia has not gotten into live streaming yet.

• 3:20:13Speaker 09

  That may happen.

• 3:20:13John Coogan?

  Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all these companies have plays in live streaming, but not Nvidia.

• 3:20:21Jordi Hays?

  What's your point of view on creator payouts on different platforms? It feels like, obviously, you would love for platforms like Instagram to do ad scale creator payouts. We've had a debate on the show whether X payouts are good. And we ultimately got to a place where we think like creator payouts on X make the platform worse because the content is relatively easy to make. And if you just create this sort of like profit motive on the platform, it just floods the platform with content that, I wouldn't say the content is like better today than it was like five years ago, pre creator payouts, whereas on YouTube, making great videos is really hard.

• 3:21:03Jordi Hays?

  And so you talked about it, like there's, if you can be in one of the top channels, you can make a great living doing it and that has a very positive effect and that more people can spend all their time, you know, creating content, but I'm curious what your view is.

• 3:21:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think on X, like they reward shitposting. Like in all the like Twitter meme accounts or X meme accounts, like if you start getting likes and retweets, like it just continues to go. And so like memes do really well or just shitposting does really well. On YouTube, it now like comes down to statistics, like you need a good click through rate and a high retention or else that YouTube is not going to recommend your videos. So it's really hard, like it's impossible to shitpost on YouTube. You can like have a clickbait thumbnail, but if the video asset stinks.

• 3:21:45John Coogan?

  That was the craziest thing. Uh, Mr. Beast released that video, it was like, here's his video to like 10 years in the future or something, and I think it flopped, like I think it was.

• 3:21:54Speaker 09

  It was only three minutes in length, yeah.

• 3:21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was only three minutes in length, so it just wasn't in the meta. And even though it's like this mind blowing thing and you know, it's this moment, it's still just like, the algorithm expects 20 minutes and a million dollars poured into the production. And so your, your face video, you're just like, hey to the camera video, even though it's novel, just doesn't break through in the same way.

• 3:22:12Speaker 09

  But, but if X is ever going to compete with YouTube, they have to monetize, right? Like they have to sell ads.

• 3:22:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:22:18Speaker 09

  So I, I just, I, I don't know where they're kind of at in terms of like, do we need a video player? You guys obviously live stream on, on X, but. It seems like they have to get to a point where they're monetizing or they're allowing creators to monetize their content. Or I just don't see why anyone that actually puts quality, yeah, quality into their content or podcast or whatever would post it on X. Unless you're a podcast and you're already putting five ad reads in your video and AdSense is an afterthought. And then you want more scale and distribution by X and you're already monetizing the video. That, that I can see, but I just, I just don't think if X really wants to compete with TikTok and Instagram and YouTube that they cannot monetize their content.

• 3:23:00Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:23:01Jordi Hays?

  How early, how early are you signing creators today? Cause it's, I mean, you guys have a lot of leverage from all the talent that you've worked with. Uh, and just the track record, but at the same time, I'm sure that when somebody pops up. And now the, they get shown to a ton of people really quickly. They can go from zero to millions of views in no time. I'm sure it's like a highly competitive dynamic where in a perfect world, you like, well, I'd like to let this person like create content for another like at least a few months. But if I don't, somebody else is going to like jump in and sign this person. And then, you know, maybe it'll be hard to kind of like, you know, take over that.

• 3:23:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, we're, we're definitely never the first. I would say we're hopefully the last. Um, usually everyone that we sign already has had like a manager and agent or like someone in play. You know, I think we come in with a little bit different value prop of, you know, we've done it so many times and kind of had the blueprint for like, how do you get a creator to scale? Then how do you build businesses on top of them that have real enterprise value? So I would say we're, we're a little later and we don't really represent that many people. Um, so we're not like chasing, hey, what's hot and viral at the given moment. Uh, although I pay attention to it and my screen time is incredibly high. And I don't think that'll ever change. Um, but I'm just like, I keep an eye on people. I think like, you know, we have this whole system internally. Where we just have thousands of creators and we'll just keep an eye on them.

• 3:24:23Speaker 09

  What are they doing? Are they, it's hard to have like real longevity. And it's really hard to stay creative over like years.

• 3:24:30Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:24:30Speaker 09

  And so I, I see a lot of creators like come and go into the system. They'll make a good video. They'll go viral. And it's really hard for them to back that up month over month over month.

• 3:24:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or they have like one bit that's hilarious for, and there's also like creators. We, there's this guy on, on Instagram that we've been laughing at a lot lately. He makes these videos where. I don't even know, I forget the account name, which goes to tell you like, yeah, yeah. Like, it's like, it's not a super valuable account, but he has this one joke that we just think is absolutely hilarious. And like, there's probably, there's probably nowhere for it to go. Like, it's probably like, he's getting like, millions and millions of views with this one joke. And then eventually it'll fade or something like that. But, I mean, I think, uh, yeah, not, not all, not all views are, are created equally.

• 3:25:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, there's this creator that I really like to watch and he like eats lemons in public places. So he'll be like on a plane and he'll like pull up, have you seen this? I don't know how he does it.

• 3:25:29John Coogan?

  Was it onions?

• 3:25:29Speaker 09

  He does onions too, and now, and now eggs, like not a hard boiled egg, like a full egg and he'll just chew it. But like that, that bit.

• 3:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler, get ready to eat eggs, buddy.

• 3:25:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, have you guys, have you guys ever tried to bite a lemon? It's hard to eat a whole lemon. Yeah, like, he's like gagging, so that, that like, yes, I, I can't remember what his Instagram is called. Which goes to the fact of like, I'm like doom scrolling. And I'm like, oh, I found this guy, he's hilarious, he eats lemons. But I'm like, there's no real longevity here, like, I don't know where this goes.

• 3:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, versus like Chuck in Paris, who like, you know, tells his whole story.

• 3:26:01Speaker 09

  Beautiful storyteller.

• 3:26:02John Coogan?

  And he's in the thumbnail and he tells you, oh, he brings you into his whole life.

• 3:26:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, way, way different.

• 3:26:06John Coogan?

  So many of those folks that actually do a great job.

• 3:26:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, uh, the nature of some of these live, live streamers is actually forcing them to create products and startups or like businesses earlier than maybe on YouTube? Because I feel like a lot of the, the Twitch streamers, like, there's so much unpredictability because it's a live stream that they're not super advertiser friendly.

• 3:26:29Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think a lot of them have figured out other ways to make money. And, and that can be like apparel was the easiest one. Like, I think a lot of them have Minecraft servers or Grand Theft Auto RP servers or now Roblox games. And so they, they've all figured out other ways to make money that's not so centered around. Twitch, Prime subs, or YouTube AdSense. And so I think like just in this like internet world, these like kids are in the crevices of the internet. They just like figure out how to make money. Like if you're a Grand Theft Auto streamer, you probably have an RP server. You're probably monetizing that RP server. Things that you guys probably don't even think about. And they're like, oh, like, I know he streams on this like Grand Theft Auto game. Like you wouldn't even think that like, oh, people are paying to be in this server.

• 3:27:10Speaker 09

  And so things like that, like these kids have figured out, like even the first gamer that I represented had a really large Minecraft server. And it was like a PvP server in Java. It was pay to win and made.

• 3:27:21John Coogan?

  It was pay to win.

• 3:27:22Speaker 09

  It was pay to win. It was like not you look compliant. I don't know if Minecraft's gonna care anymore. But like, wasn't you look compliant and it just printed money?

• 3:27:31John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:27:31Speaker 09

  And, you know, he would use his YouTube channel as the catalyst to drive people into that. And that, that server was the, the real way that he would make money.

• 3:27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 3:27:40Speaker 09

  So.

• 3:27:41John Coogan?

  Uh, do, do you have an internal philosophy on how you talk to creators through like where they should draw the line on their comfortable? Cause like pay to win Minecraft, that feels like gambling adjacent, but at the same time, you know, like we talk to entrepreneurs all the time and they're like, yeah, my first, first way I made money was like doing some crazy stuff on, on Minecraft. And I'm like, is that really that bad? And then you look at some of the crazier stuff and it's like, obviously like rug pulling a coin on your audience is like the worst thing you can do. But how do you think about like the gray area in between coaching creators? Giving them like, are you just hitting them with a ton of anecdotes?

• 3:28:20Speaker 09

  It's become so much harder. Like there, there's, I mean, you can now just, you can buy CS skins and now you're playing Counter-Strike and you're like incentivizing kids to buy crates. There's just, we, we've kind of taken the line of like, if, we understand that gambling exists and daily fantasy football is fine. Some of our creators have steak deals that will livestream on Kick. And so it's just like, where do you draw the line? Like I'm having a hard time with that right now because gambling is so widely accessible in so many different genres, including video games, which I think like even NCAA football, that's gambling, like they have packets that you open within their game mode and you just like spin packs and try and get players. So it's like every video game now has some type of gambling baked into it.

• 3:29:05Speaker 09

  And so it's, it's hard for someone who like came into this industry that like didn't want to be in the gambling world. Every single video game. Including like maybe a Roblox, like there's like things that you can buy where it's more like pay to win-esque. And so it's tough. Like I, I think that it's not something I wanted to get involved in, but now it's we sit so deeply in the internet and in gaming. That is just like become of like a part of every creator's business.

• 3:29:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's fascinating. I mean, I played Counter-Strike 1.3, 1.5, like before it got productized at all. And it's hard to think back because I was talking to one of our buddies, Sagar and Jetty over at Breaking Points. And he was kind of chastising me for being pro video game. And I was talking about my experience with Counter-Strike. But it was a very different game then than it is now. And so, yeah, where you draw those lines.

• 3:29:56Speaker 09

  But it's still like, it's a $5 billion economy, just, just Counter-Strike skins, weapons, knives. It's a $5 billion economy. And so that, that to me will just continue when, if GTA 6 ever comes out. You know, there's going to be a lot of people with RP servers and there's going to be pay to win mechanisms. There's going to be rank mechanisms that kids are paying for. So I, I don't know. That's like a big, that's a tough one for me.

• 3:30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder if, uh, yeah, I wonder, I wonder where this will actually meet, like where the rubber will meet the road. Because you could imagine some level of, uh, regulation around, um, you know, can you target a, something that is gambling legally to kids? Like maybe that, you know, if there's this type of advertisement in it, it goes over into this pool of the algorithm that's maybe 18 plus. I'm not sure. It's obviously something that like, America is publicly discussing right now, but it's tricky.

• 3:30:51Speaker 09

  Have you, are you guys using Sora at all?

• 3:30:53John Coogan?

  Sora?

• 3:30:54Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:30:55John Coogan?

  No, not really.

• 3:30:56Speaker 09

  Okay, not, not on it, like?

• 3:30:58John Coogan?

  No, I'm on it. I, I made my cameo like available. Anyone can do one with me.

• 3:31:03Speaker 09

  You do? Okay. So people can make videos?

• 3:31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I was like, yeah.

• 3:31:06Speaker 09

  Only, only absolutely Jack.

• 3:31:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I put, I put in always depict me as a bodybuilder. So it's really funny.

• 3:31:12Speaker 09

  Is there a lot of videos on Sora? Like are people actually doing it?

• 3:31:15John Coogan?

  Not my my community has not certainly not moved over and and the retention on the I think on both the viewing certainly on the scrolling. We've been polling everyone in the studio. Hey, what's your screen time on Sora this week? What's your screen time on Sora? Because we want to know are people actually getting into this as like a consumption tool?

• 3:31:33Speaker 09

  Is there any hope for Sora?

• 3:31:35John Coogan?

  We haven't seen any of that. Now, I do see occasionally there'll be a new clearly a Sora video that's been integrated into vertical short form in one way or another. I found a funny guy who makes like tech comedy and at the end he puts a little Sora clip just to kind of like add a little spice on top and it's funny, but I haven't seen a lot of stuff that's been like really breaking out.

• 3:31:55Speaker 09

  I mean, at the at the current moment, I I don't. If you just like base it on momentum, it feels like it's lost.

• 3:32:01John Coogan?

  It does feel like it's falling off.

• 3:32:04Speaker 09

  But I mean, there's hilarious videos on there.

• 3:32:06Jordi Hays?

  Pull this pull this video up so we can watch it.

• 3:32:08Speaker 09

  Is he fully jacked?

• 3:32:09John Coogan?

  Wait, did somebody make one of me?

• 3:32:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, can you guys pull it up?

• 3:32:13Speaker 09

  I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna have like a Discord server just make thousands of videos of you and just flood the Sora system.

• 3:32:20John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:32:21Speaker 09

  And it'll just be your videos all over the place.

• 3:32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, yeah, I mean, I don't know. It might be like uncanny valley thing. We we do use VO3 a decent amount for for like pre-vis on like, hey, we want to shoot this video. What if it looked like this? Let me get some ideas for like lighting and tone so I can send it to somebody. This is what we think we're doing, but we always shoot everything normally and we have it. We actually have a benchmark where we have something that we shot manually, like we shot the normal way and then we try and recreate it in all the video, the AI video systems. And it's remarkable how hard it is, even when you have a perfect idea.

• 3:32:58Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got it.

• 3:33:00Speaker 09

  Oh, you are.

• 3:33:01John Coogan?

  Why am I walking a pig?

• 3:33:04Jordi Hays?

  And the caption is what too many ramp ad reads does to an MF?

• 3:33:08John Coogan?

  They they figured out to make my legs small. They hacked me. They hacked me.

• 3:33:13Jordi Hays?

  Wait, aren't those your real legs?

• 3:33:15John Coogan?

  Those are not my real legs. I did not scare my.

• 3:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Real arms and real legs.

• 3:33:19John Coogan?

  What is the nature of the pig? Why do I have a pig? This is hilarious. It does. It does look like me in the face.

• 3:33:25Jordi Hays?

  With the Jim, the Jim shark.

• 3:33:27John Coogan?

  Jim shark?

• 3:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you got a Jim shark C. Jim shark stringer.

• 3:33:32John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:33:33Speaker 09

  Yeah, I don't know. It feels like it's lost a lot of its momentum. I'm not convinced like people are gonna go on there and watch content.

• 3:33:40John Coogan?

  So my, my core thesis for most of the AI generation apps like Mid Journey, Sora, are that they are more like video games than, than consumption mechanisms. And so you go on there and you have an idea and you are trying to express it. And once you get it to generate it, you watch it and you watch it just for you. And then you're like, yeah, awesome. And maybe you said it's like one other person, but you really aren't. It really isn't just sit there and just a random person makes something and I enjoy it. It's more of the experience of like, can I get it to generate the thing that I have in my mind? Whether that's Suno or Mid Journey. Somebody described Mid Journey as like art therapy.

• 3:34:22John Coogan?

  People like going on Mid Journey and just, and just whatever they dreamt of last night, they'll prompt. And the images, they look just like any other Mid Journey images. They're no value to you, but to the person that generated them, they enjoy it. And so they pay for the content that they produce themselves.

• 3:34:36Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:34:36Jordi Hays?

  How do you think there's a dynamic in the future? I think we're pretty far away from this point from a just model progress standpoint. But right now YouTube doesn't make any videos themselves. Why are you smiling?

• 3:34:50John Coogan?

  I just need to go edit my Sora prompt to say, never depict me with skinny.

• 3:34:54Jordi Hays?

  Small legs.

• 3:34:55Speaker 09

  No, I'm taking advantage of that Sora later. You're gonna see all kinds of videos.

• 3:34:58Jordi Hays?

  No, but so right now, any, any video that YouTube surfaces, let's say, is they're paying out like a fixed basically revenue share on that. And there's a world in the future where YouTube knows exactly the kind of video that someone liked.

• 3:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:35:12Jordi Hays?

  So like at night I watch like documentary style videos.

• 3:35:16John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 3:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Right? So it's like, okay, Jordy likes World War II, like voiceover documentary style videos. We could just serve, we could serve them a video of an existing creator or we could just serve. Jordy, a video, same topic, but we created it ourselves. So there's like some cost to like generate the asset and serve it, but theoretically a lot less. Like, do you, like, I think that that scenario creators are going to be, creators that are worried about AI today are not worried about the right thing necessarily. They're worried about like, I don't, I don't know, but I think that's like a very real possibility.

• 3:35:55John Coogan?

  They're overestimating how much they can get destroyed in a year and underestimating how much they can get destroyed in a decade.

• 3:36:00Speaker 09

  Do you, but does YouTube, who has been predominantly very creator first pivot to that where they're now like making content through generative AI that is ripping off, let's say, a documentary storyteller or true crime. Like, did, it just feels like if they start to take that path.

• 3:36:17Jordi Hays?

  They would, they would do that if the number, if like watch time continued to go up. Like, that, that, like, I, they're, they're, they're a massive public company. They have an incentive to like increase profits.

• 3:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:33Speaker 09

  Just keep 100% of the profit.

• 3:36:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm just saying, like, it sounds great in theory that they're like, okay, they're very creator aligned and they've made a bunch of good decisions to date, but, and I don't think it's.

• 3:36:42John Coogan?

  That story, that, that story that we just watched, like, that was generated by someone who prompted it, someone with a sense of humor, obviously. It, it doesn't seem that crazy to me to actually figure out how to parcel out the ad dollars. Like, if that video generates a hundred dollars of ad revenue because people watched it and then they immediately watched an ad before or after or whatever, and it's attributable. You could give me a slice because of my likeness. You could give the prompter a slice. You could give Jim Shark a slice since their logo's in there. You, you could give whoever created the music.

• 3:37:14Jordi Hays?

  Jim Shark should pay for that.

• 3:37:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and so if we have AI that's good enough at generating that, we should also have AI that's good enough to say, hey, this is a mashup between these two artists. Let's split the revenue share 50 50. YouTube already does this. If you put one song in, it'll route the, I, I actually made a video about Mr. Beast once. I used some footage and, and it got routed to his team. Probably you, you got the check.

• 3:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sorry about that.

• 3:37:38John Coogan?

  No, sorry.

• 3:37:40Speaker 09

  You're never seeing that.

• 3:37:42John Coogan?

  It was, yeah, you know, so there's like fair use discussions, but in general, it's pretty easy for a system to understand. Okay, this is a combination of of this footage from here, this music from there, that IP over here. They took Donald Duck off the shelf over there, some Mickey Mouse, some Batman, some Spider-Man, and they're all from different IP owners. But let's just flow all the money through. And then, yes, if you're coming out with something completely new, then you don't need to pay as much. And maybe you minimize that. But this all just feels like it'll happen just over decades. So I don't know.

• 3:38:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, music's kind of figured this out where, you know, you have writers, producers, like there's so many different people on a track.

• 3:38:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, you sampled this.

• 3:38:18Speaker 09

  That gets divvied out to. So I could see that happening in the future. I I hope we don't live in a world where YouTube is understanding like psychologically what type of videos I watch at 9pm. And so they're feeding me generative AI videos that like is taking away from a human. But like, maybe that is a world that we live in 10 years from now. And that's that's who you're competing against. You're ultimately competing against the system of YouTube, who is making amazing videos. And their their incentive is to own 100%.

• 3:38:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of the a lot of the AI investment thesis is around labor displacement, which is like, we have to, you know, these companies are like, we have to invest in AI. Because like future future spend in the economy, instead of going to labor, will go to these data centers effectively.

• 3:39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do wonder. I do wonder about YouTube's positioning with creators because that sort of what do you describe 9pm, serve you generative imagery.

• 3:39:10Jordi Hays?

  But that to be clear is like a very specific type of content that where I don't feel the creator matters as much, right? If it's like.

• 3:39:18Speaker 09

  Yeah, but what but what if it's like sports news or or just news in general? Like, I would I would imagine you could pull they could pull that in real time and be talking about what's going on.

• 3:39:26John Coogan?

  What I mean is like, that's already happened because there's going to be a a company out there that says, let's use every available AI tool. Let's be the AI native, you know, beast enterprises. And let's have no one in front of the camera and spend $0 on cameras and spend a lot of money on Sora credits and VO3 credits. And let's start producing as much as possible and let's use YouTube as our distribution pathway. And maybe YouTube takes a stance. I don't know that they would. I think that those creators who are who are puppeteering all the. AI slop will probably stick around enough, but I don't know. It's it's there might be a reckoning to the degree where where YouTube says, hey, we're detecting AI and we're putting

• 3:40:11John Coogan?

  it in a different tab, or we're not allowing it on the platform. But I would be shocked if they do that. I'd be very shocked because you could use because there are so many creative ways to use AI. Like, we just watched that. It was genuinely funny because we had context. It was not just like, you know, trying to take a dime out of someone's pocket.

• 3:40:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think I think it'll start with thumbnails. Like, that'll be, you know, you'll get a AI-generated thumbnail as soon as you upload your video. It'll it'll watch your video and explain like what it thinks the thumbnail should be. And then title, maybe title's his first, thumbnail's his second. Where it goes from there, I'm a little unsure. But you guys need Neil Mabon on the show. So you can ask him this directly.

• 3:40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the title thing is like, I've I've titled hundreds of YouTube videos. I hated doing that every single time. And so and I never got to the scale where I had like, oh, yes, like, I have a title person who's like amazing on my staff. And and like, I would be displacing their job if I had a if I had a tool for this.

• 3:41:05Speaker 09

  Well, it A B test it now. So there's title A B testing, thumbnail A B testing. Eventually, it probably just prompts you what they think you should title it. And then it'll A B test it on its own and figure out where it lands. So.

• 3:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Anything else, Jordan?

• 3:41:18Jordi Hays?

  Lots more on my mind, but can do it again soon. Yeah, thanks for having us. Super fun.

• 3:41:24John Coogan?

  Awesome. Thanks so much for coming back. Yeah, we'll close out the show and we will talk to you in just a minute.

• 3:41:28Speaker 09

  I will wear yellow.

• 3:41:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, next time. Yellow suit. Thank you so much. We have to tell you about Wander, Find Your Happy Place, Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Delian has a post here. It says, just read this in an investor update. This is bad news for Tyler. He said, older engineers who graduated from college pre-GPT are actually best suited for our purposes. They have fundamental programming ability that's lost amongst most of the current generation. The AI-induced thinking slash skills decay has begun. Wild. What do you have to say? Are you low background radiation steel, pre-war steel, or are you post-war steel?

• 3:42:13Speaker 09

  Once we get the next model, we just need the next model.

• 3:42:16John Coogan?

  Then you'll be good. Then then then you'll be able to prompt, explain to me what you did when you built the thing. It is, it is funny. I don't know. I think that it, it certainly depends on, I mean, there's obviously people that use, you know, GPT coding tools and it accelerates their learning. There's probably a lot of people who are effectively cheating at learning anything and do not, do not accelerate. But I don't know. I wonder if this phenomenon will be sticky. I wonder, I wonder what the durable, we're still so early in understanding the, the durable trends that come out of, out of the AI era and how it changes people.

• 3:42:57John Coogan?

  I don't know. Kevin O'Leary is neck deep in data centers right now. I love that. What a quote. That's hilarious. So what is this, the treaty post? I am starting to be a real believer in AI. Will be a mega trend like no one, like no one is really imagining right now. I'm sure lots of ramps and drops along the way, though.

• 3:43:18Jordi Hays?

  Shitposting.

• 3:43:19John Coogan?

  Oh, well. And Bill Ackman, of course, said, may I meet you is his preferred pickup line. What a time.

• 3:43:26Jordi Hays?

  That's why, of course, why I asked you, may I podcast with you?

• 3:43:29John Coogan?

  May I podcast with you? In other news, Dario from Anthropic went on 60 Minutes and gave a number of interesting answers. The one thing that stuck out to me, and I'd love to know if anything else stuck out to the rest of you, but previously, it was the quote that came out of Anthropic was half of all white collar work obsolete by some timeline, five or 10 years. And, and the twist, the thing that stuck out in my mind was, it was half of all entry level white collar work being automated by AI, which felt like a step back in terms of like AAGI-ness. What do you think?

• 3:44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I feel like we have to look at the exact timelines, though, because this is one to five years. This is next year. Half of all white collar.

• 3:44:19John Coogan?

  He's so bullish. I love him. He's, he's so bullish.

• 3:44:24John Coogan?

  But yes, I don't know. I mean, yeah, it is. It's an interesting quote to match with that that that Delian post about what's going on with the younger, the current generation programming ability, the AI-induced thinking skill decay that's begun. Maybe you don't need the skills because, you know, AGI is coming. Why build skills when you can just say, do it for me. Don't make mistakes. Yes, half of all AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment. Let's play this clip. Let's play this clip from Anderson Cooper.

• 3:45:02Speaker 10

  And spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years. Yes. That's shocking. That is the future we could see if we don't become aware of this problem now. Half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Well, if we look at entry-level consultants, lawyers, financial professionals, you know, many of kind of the white-collar service industries, a lot of what they do, you know, AI models are already quite good at and without intervention. It's hard to imagine that there won't be some significant job impact there. And my worry is that it'll be broad and it'll be faster than what we've seen with previous technology.

• 3:45:43John Coogan?

  It's such a funny thing to say because it's like you're the one doing it. I still don't get that. It's like, and that's why I get up every day. Like, what is his proposal? Does he actually have a proposal? Is it UBI or something?

• 3:45:58Speaker 02

  I think the other clip in here is actually even better. He says, I'm deeply uncomfortable with these decisions being made by a few companies, by a few people. It says Dario Moda, CEO and co-founder of AI company Anthropic. It's Lee. He's talking about himself.

• 3:46:11Jordi Hays?

  It's me. It's me, Dario.

• 3:46:13John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 3:46:15Speaker 02

  He has to bring peace and safety.

• 3:46:18John Coogan?

  Peace and safety. That is wild. Okay, let's read this post from Dorkesh to close out. He says, "People with short timelines sometimes shrug off models inability to perform basic economically useful tasks end to end by saying, 'Oh, but we haven't trained models to specifically do those things.'" But this misses the point. Human workers are valuable precisely because we don't need to build bespoke, schleppy training loops for every small part of their job. Every day, you have to do 100 things that require judgment, situational awareness, situational awareness, and skills and context learned on the job. These tasks differ not just across different people, but from one day to the next, even

• 3:47:03John Coogan?

  for the same person. It's not possible to automate even a single job by just baking in some predefined set of skills, let alone all the jobs. People will sometimes debate, "How much progress have we made so far between village idiot and AGI?" And I'm just thinking, "What the F are you guys talking about? The models are currently so much dumber than the village idiot. Village idiots generally generate trillions of dollars in wages a year. Taking shots at the village idiot." These models generate 30 billion in revenue a year. That's a good take. That's very funny. Who's the real village idiot?

• 3:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Village idiots are underrated.

• 3:47:40John Coogan?

  Who's the real village idiot is the AI models. In fact, I think people are really underestimating how big a deal actual AI will be because they're just imagining more of this current regime. They're not thinking about billions of human-like intelligences on a server which can copy and merge all their learnings. And to be clear, I expect this, aka actual AGI, in the next decade or two. That's crazy. I completely agree. It is crazy. I've been Reese. What else is in here?

• 3:48:09Jordi Hays?

  Another post here. Mustafa over, CEO of Microsoft AI, says, "Already, our Fairwater Data Center in Atlanta has taken over 15 million labor hours to build, even more once it's fully finished. For comparison, the Empire State Building took 7 million." And Elon comes in, ratios him and said, "Are you sure you're doing it right?"

• 3:48:32John Coogan?

  Oh, it's so ridiculous.

• 3:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 3:48:36John Coogan?

  Okay, well.

• 3:48:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's do a lightning round for just, just another pod guy who I invited on the show a while ago.

• 3:48:44John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 3:48:44Jordi Hays?

  He's worried about, um.

• 3:48:46John Coogan?

  Indoxed.

• 3:48:46Jordi Hays?

  Exposing himself, but uh, he says themes for 2026 in no particular order. AI trade intensifies, panic-ins get steamrolled.

• 3:48:56John Coogan?

  Believe it.

• 3:48:57Jordi Hays?

  Humanoid robot production ramp. I guess we're seeing that with UB Tech. Uh, robot taxi accelerated rollout, Starlink capacity ramp with QPier fast follow. SMR nuclear, D reg and pilots. Um, federal warp speed for the US electrical grid and pharma APIs. Drone US manufacturing ramp, enterprise software spend shifts towards AI at cost to traditional SaaS. He's a SaaS bear. AI models go true multimodal and crank engagement levers. Grand bargain with higher ed to restructure system in exchange for student loan forgiveness. Federal housing program that attempts to free up supply, which likely fails as soon as home prices drop by 2% and boomers riot.

• 3:49:41John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, GLP-1 adoption in second order impacts accelerate with recent price drops. AI for drug discovery becomes a hot topic and naysayers will rush to downplay, but will look stupid before the year is out.

• 3:49:53John Coogan?

  Uh, I. This is so crazy. There's so many predictions in here. People forget about quantum. Panic-ins realize that all alone DQs were a non-event driven by illegals defaulting. Panic-ins pivot to, pivot to attempting to quantify systemic risk. Like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It keeps going.

• 3:50:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it gets, it gets steadily wilder, wilder and wilder, but we'll check back on this next year.

• 3:50:16John Coogan?

  We decouple from China. Very funny. Um, anyway, uh, I think that's good for today. Um, Martin Scrawley also has, uh, some data on institutional trading of private market stocks. The team's laughing because we just keep going. Um, and.

• 3:50:35Jordi Hays?

  Just one more post.

• 3:50:36John Coogan?

  I, I want these in here.

• 3:50:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm laughing at how many times you said one more post.

• 3:50:39John Coogan?

  To close it, to close it out, you gotta update the ramp figure in his data because ramp raised an up round. Let's go. Uh, well, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. What you got, Tyler?

• 3:50:49Speaker 02

  One last thing.

• 3:50:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:50:50Speaker 02

  Uh, Tyler Cowen on Marshall Revolution, he said, there is no great stagnation, not anymore.

• 3:50:54John Coogan?

  Interesting. It's official.

• 3:50:56Speaker 02

  Wrote the famous book.

• 3:50:57John Coogan?

  Okay. Wait, he wrote the famous book?

• 3:51:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, his book, A Great stagnation.

• 3:51:02John Coogan?

  That's wait, oh, I, I.

• 3:51:04Speaker 02

  That's Tyler Callen.

• 3:51:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't realize that he wrote a book on the Great stagnation.

• 3:51:09John Coogan?

  I will have to.

• 3:51:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, The Great stagnation, from 2011.

• 3:51:12John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, it's over. It's been officially declared over.

• 3:51:16Speaker 02

  See ya.

• 3:51:17John Coogan?

  I'm excited. Let's dig into that tomorrow. Let's figure out what metrics he's using, what his GDP assumptions are. I want to know more about that piece, but I want to read it before we get on air. Thank you for tuning in. Great show today. Have a good evening. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:51:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye.