SaaSpocalypse Cancelled, Palantir’s $17M Jet Bill, WBD x Netflix Latest | Dylan Field, Saagar Enjeti, Sigil Wen, Peter Morales, Erik Palitsch, Ljubisa Bajic

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:59) - We're Cancelling the the SaaSpocalypse (16:47) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (38:37) - Palantir Jet Costs $17M Annually (46:16) - WBD x Netflix Bid Update (59:21) - eBay to Buy Depop (01:01:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:16:56) - Elite Lawyer Fees Hit Record Highs (01:22:30) - Older Consumers Drive 2026 Growth (01:27:24) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:41:51) - Sigil Wen discusses his concept of Web 4.0, envisioning an Internet where AI acts as the end user, capable of autonomously performing tasks and making payments without human intervention. He introduces the "automaton," a self-sufficient AI model that can self-edit its code, manage its own compute resources, and generate income to sustain its operations. Wen emphasizes the importance of building this new Internet openly to ensure safety and transparency as AI becomes increasingly integrated into digital ecosystems. (01:59:33) - Saagar Enjeti is an American journalist and political commentator, best known as the co-host of the independent news program "Breaking Points" alongside Krystal Ball. In the conversation, Enjeti discusses the impact of social media and technology on children, emphasizing the addictive nature of devices like iPads and the challenges parents face in regulating screen time. He highlights the importance of setting boundaries and the potential benefits of government regulation to mitigate the negative effects of technology on youth. (02:33:04) - Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, a web-based vector graphics editing software company, discusses the company's impressive 2025 performance, highlighting a 40% year-over-year revenue growth to $1.046 billion and the successful launch of four new products, including Figma Make, an AI-powered prototyping tool. He emphasizes the importance of design in product development and the role of AI in enhancing creativity, noting that 60% of Figma Make users are non-designers, reflecting the platform's accessibility and broad appeal. Field also shares insights on the evolving design landscape, expressing excitement about increased innovation and diversity in digital product aesthetics and user experiences. (02:54:04) - Peter Morales, CEO of Code Metal, discusses his journey from defense and AI research to founding the company, highlighting his work on AI algorithms for the F-35 fighter jet and at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He explains Code Metal's mission to automate the translation of high-level code into hardware-optimized, production-ready code, addressing challenges in deploying AI on edge devices. Morales also announces a $125 million Series B funding round and the appointment of Ryan, former CEO of Tableau, as President and COO to support the company's growth. (03:03:02) - Erik Palitsch, CEO and Co-Founder of Freeform, discusses the company's development of Skyfall, an advanced laser melting platform, and their recent $67 million Series B funding led by Linz Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Founders Fund, Threshold, and Two Sigma Ventures. He highlights the growing demand across various sectors, emphasizing the importance of flexible manufacturing in today's geopolitical climate and the acceleration of product design driven by AI advancements. Palitsch also notes that Freeform is currently producing mission-critical parts for multiple frontier programs and plans to expand their team significantly over the next year. (03:12:11) - Ljubisa Bajic, a seasoned chip designer and CEO of Taalas, discusses his company's innovative approach to AI hardware by embedding AI models directly into silicon, resulting in ultra-fast, cost-effective responses. This method sacrifices flexibility for performance, enabling immediate, large-scale outputs at minimal cost. Bajic also highlights the simplicity and efficiency of their chips, which integrate seamlessly into standard servers without the need for complex cooling systems or high-speed I/O, making advanced AI capabilities more accessible and affordable. (03:21:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co 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?

  Today is Thursday, February 19, 2026. We are live from the TV van Ultra, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune of Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ram.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  We had to practice that.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Handshake tutorial. In case you were wondering how to shake hands with your, with your friend or with your enemy, it works. It's the same. It's the same process. You grab the hand with great force.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  And underrated while you're, you can establish dominance. You can handshake mog, clearly.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Huge missed opportunity for Sam and Dario not to.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  To crush each other's hands to the point where the other one is bleeding and crying. That would have really set the tone.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  They have to rely on voice transcript.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. It would have been much better to just watch crushing in the hand. You know, you do those like strength training for a reason.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Every once in a while, you don't want to get caught lacking. Anyway, there's big news today. We're canceling the SaaS apocalypse.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  R I P SaaS apocalypse. It occurred from January 2026 to February 2026, and it's over now. We're declaring it over. No, it's not. It's not entirely over. Who knows where the market will go?

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, it's just getting started.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  In many ways, it's just getting started, but I do think we're starting to see a bifurcation in the sloppable companies and the un-sloppable companies. There should be some divergence between companies that have figured out how to integrate with AI, how to retool their business model, or just show that their business model was strong all along. And we'll go through that.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, there's a category of SaaS.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  That is SaaS.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  But they will be.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Fine.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  AI beneficiaries.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yep, totally, totally. Should we, should we watch? Have you seen Pacific Rim?

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  We got to watch this pump up speech.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Because this gets me fired up. We're canceling the apocalypse. It's movie night again in class. This is from Pacific Rim. We're going to a minute 22 in here. Jump ahead because this is one of the greatest speeches.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to watch. You don't want to.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Okay, we can watch the full two. It's raining. It's raining. We'll watch the whole thing. We'll watch the full thing. It's my favorite movie. This is honestly my favorite movie. I might watch an Apple Vision Pro this weekend. Who knows? It's such a great film. And did you know, the director of this film won an Academy Award? That's right. This is an Academy Award winning director at work. Who's the director? Uh, Guillermo del Toro. He won for Shape of Water. He did not win for Pacific Rim, but he should have, because this film is fantastic. So, the storyline, aliens, giant alien Godzilla-like creatures called Kaiju's have descended upon Earth. No. And only robots that are as big as the Godzillas can fight back.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  But you need two people. It's much like us. You need two pilots, because the mental load of driving the robot, being in the drift, is too intense for a single person. It will drive you crazy. So, two pilots, two Jaeger pilots must pilot the ship together. Very cool. And share the load. And, and so, they both punch, and then the robot punches. It's amazing. It's a great film. You'll love it. He's gotta give a speech. You, you're, you're known for giving great speeches, just like this. This is, this is a Geordie Hayes original right here. Yes, movie day, again. Welcome to the stream, Ryan.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  At the edge of our hope.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  At the edge of our hope.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Things aren't looking good at this point.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  The end of our time.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  The end of our time. AI is upon us.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  We have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  We must believe in the stocks of the SaaS companies.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Today, there's not a man or woman in here that shall stand alone.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  No, no public company shareholder will stand alone. We stand with you.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Today, we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  We're bringing the fight to the Foundation Labs.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  We're cancelling the apocalypse. We're cancelling the SaaS apocalypse. Woo!

• 4:02John Coogan?

  And then, the greatest soundtrack ever.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  I only, I only really had to ever give one speech like that.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  Last year.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  But it hit.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  It hit.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  The team needed it in that.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  We did and we got through.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  Critical moment.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  We.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Powered through.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  We powered through. Um, so anyway, we've lost a lot of good soldiers, a lot of good market cap out there during the SaaS apocalypse, $2 trillion, something like that, maybe it's been rough. But, uh, and, and I mean, truthfully, like the narrative does make sense, like, uh, agentic AI systems, co-pilots, foundation models, like these are disruptive innovations. Fundamentally, they're counter positioned against traditional seat based SaaS pricing. We know this legacy companies will be caught in a jam because pivoting the entire business model is difficult. You can't just flip a switch and start charging customers in a completely different way. Your investors will freak out because your finances will be deeply unprofitable all of a sudden in the public.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Or just very different.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Or just very different, like it'll take time to build back up. And also like company cultures and organizational structures are aligned around specific incentives. And so you have to rewire everything for a different business model. And that's really hard. And that's why people are sounding the, this is a disruptive innovation. This is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or cloud. The, the, the AI version of, you know, X, Y, Z SaaS company, uh, will not be like the mobile version of that SaaS company.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And even, even the, even the, the safer bets, like the system of record.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  There's this concern around, okay, well, can an agent just kind of replatform you?

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, does that, uh, if you can onboard to a new system faster, does that decrease the lock in?

• 5:40John Coogan?

  But.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Continue.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  So, uh, the SaaS apocalypse was always a little bit of an indiscriminate hammer. It felt like, uh, I mean, there was one article in the journal that was like Anthropic launched a legal tool and that caused the sell off. And it's like, well, it could be that, or it also could be Claude Code, or it could be Open Claw, or Codex, or Spark, or like, there's a million different things going on in the AI world. That one just kind of took hold, but, uh, it became this like indiscriminate hammer that just kind of hit every company. And during, uh, earnings season, every CEO had to talk about AI and the threat of AI. But I think we will soon be finding out what companies are truly un-sloppable. As you put it and actually benefit in the AI future. And there's a bunch of early signals, so let's run through them.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  First, Google's comeback. I mean, this was the first victim of the apocalypse. This one happened like a year or two ago. Why would anyone search Google ever if an LLM could get you a better answer in fewer clicks? Of course, Google quickly caught up to the frontier. They launched AI overviews, they flex deep minds, research previews. They showed off the power of the TPU. Core business is surviving and thriving, do in part to Gemini, helping understand intent. So they can deliver ads on longer, more complex searches. So Google's been doing fine. They're they're sort of already building back from the SaaS apocalypse they experienced. Then you have Meta, will mute, will user minutes migrate over to LLMs? Will Sora destroy Instagram overnight? Will slop clog the feeds?

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Maybe, but not before Meta's transformer-based gem model absolutely destroys ad targeting and just makes everything so much better and re-accelerates revenue. And we've talked to a lot of folks about that. And so Meta is doing very well, even though they haven't like figured out their AI strategy, rolled out any of the new crazy frontier models from MSL. Like, the business is great because they're because they're.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think they have the you can certainly argue they have an AI strategy.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Use AI ML to to make really good ads.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  And they've been doing it for a decade.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  But it's more on the product side, right? So is it the man is, is it net new product? Is it is it Meta AI?

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Yep. And so there's it gets more interesting when you go to the smaller companies, not super small, but Spotify. Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like, did, did, did, should, should Spotify have like released a guitar? So that people can make more music like, no, because people will pick whatever tools available and then they will release that music on Spotify and then the algorithm will sort it. And so the like, you know, these artists, if they're using AI tools or maybe they're just prompters, whatever you want to call them, they will bring AI music to the platform. It'll be filtered by algorithms. Slop will be in the trough, but only the most delicious slop will bubble to the top.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Of the trough. So it's good to be in the trough business as long as you have an algorithm that sorts the trough, the slop from the more sloppy slop. I don't know.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically on a percentage basis. Like the number of AI songs is huge, but the number of like actual minutes watched and is is low. Even if that flips, Spotify still benefits. Let's switch over to Shopify. You can definitely vibe code an e-commerce website now, but Shopify is not a major cost driver for most businesses that use it. You're you're talking maybe like a thousand dollars a month for some companies and it's a lot of headache that they just don't have to even think about. And then there's a whole bunch of advantages that Shopify should benefit from in the AI era. It's very full-featured, so it's actually hard to replace. Setting

• 9:18John Coogan?

  up a new store is faster than waiting for a prompt to return, like it's all pre-built. And it's just like create a new copy in the database of Shopify when you set up a new store. And then AI tools benefit from all the context and data that Shopify has across the entire platform. And then lastly, agentic commerce doesn't replace Shopify checkout. It's just a front end to the to the checkout, much more like mobile or social.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  Payment.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  Post-purchase.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  So if it's driving activity, that's actually a net benefit. And so there's a whole bunch more examples. Roblox is another interesting example. I heard a crazy stat. Sixty-seven percent of global non-China spending growth in the gaming industry last year went to Roblox. Like, gaming had a bad year. Roblox had a fantastic year. And I think the stock's down like fifty percent. And so, you know, yes, you can vibe code a video game, but the Roblox network and ecosystem is already at scale and it's absolutely dominating and they're monetizing a ton. And their monetization on a per-minute basis is, I think, like five times lower than other platforms, like if you comp it to TikTok or Instagram. And so whether it's ads or more in-game currencies or something like

• 10:26John Coogan?

  the willingness to pay should go up. Now, there's still a question about, you know, do folks age out of Roblox? How long can they keep these customers on? Will they get older folks to rejoin Roblox at some point or join Roblox for the first time at some point? But certainly, you know, not probably a beneficiary of AI vibe coding and being able to build more stuff. And again, filtering the The different apps that are built so that grow a garden or steal a brain rot can be power law outcomes within that ecosystem. That's the value of filtering and being an aggregator. Lastly, you got to consider Salesforce. Marc Benioff has been duking it out with Jim Cramer on CNBC over seat based pricing in an AI era for over a year now. And it's 100% true that there are some amazing AI native CRM startups that are aggressively trying to eat off Benioff's plate.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  But Anthropic is hiring a Salesforce admin. We put up a card for this because we really enjoyed this. But where, where, where, where, where was it? Do we put this? Yes. Unemployed vibe coder. Bro, SaaS is dead. You can build a CRM in minutes. No modern company is going to buy software ever again. Repost and I'll send you my PDF that killed Salesforce. And then Anthropic is, has a job listing for Salesforce admin because they're growing so fast and so big that they, that they need someone just to be full time job, manage their internal Salesforce project. That's so big.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Iconic.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Is this, is this revealed preference? Is there something else going on here? Are they, is this all, the person going to be reinforcement learning data for them? Who knows? But at least for right now, they're going to be paying Salesforce and time will tell. And then lastly, you know, the SaaS apocalypse, it might arrive in full at some point, but, and we'll start to see real revenue declines, which I think would be like the real signal of major disruption. But Figma just announced 70% growth in weekly active users, 40% year over year revenue growth. We have Dylan Field coming on the show in, in just a little bit. He'll be on at 1:30 today. And so there's growth all over the SaaS ecosystem and things don't seem to be decelerating or D or, or slowing down.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  It's definitely go time though, and it's time to revisit sources of strength.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  It's wartime.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  It's time to become unslopable. It is wartime and it's founder mode time. And at least you need to explain why you were never sloppable in the first place. And that's what Harley at Shopify did a really good job of on the earnings call. He got so many questions, he had to back up and just re-explain, you know, people got in the weeds on the AI checkout thing and he had to re-explain like, no, like agentic checkout happens on top of the, on top of the Shopify checkout. The economics are exactly the same. They're exactly the same. So like, like, don't worry.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So going back to the fax machine example, in 1999 was the first year that showed a significant drop. In the sale of physical fax machines, they dropped by 10% in a single year.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  When was that?

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  In 1999.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  1999, yeah.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  And so that's a, that is not a, okay, growth just started slowing.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  It had been slowing up until that point, but it was slowing and then it like fell off a cliff.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let's also pull up the linear lineup and tell you who's coming on the show. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  We have Sigil coming on to talk about a new.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Web 4.0.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Web 4.0, a new AI agent project that he's working on where AI can deploy, transact and pay its own bills, run micro economies without humans in the loop. Then of course, we have Saagar and Jetty from Breaking Points coming on. Always, always a fun conversation. And then Dylan Field coming on to talk about their earnings and everything that they're doing with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and all of those folks. And then we have Peter from Code Metal announcing his Series B. Eric from Freeform, another Series B. And then Lubisa from Talus announcing $169 million raise, building model-specific AI chips.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  So banger lineup today and can't wait to get to those folks.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Should we read through this Good Will Hunting meme? This sums up the SaaS apocalypse pretty well. And I love this meme template from malinvestment.jpg. Of course, that's your contention. You're a first time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcasts, Dario and Dwarash, probably. Now you think it's the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're going to, you're going to be convinced of that till tomorrow when you get to something big is happening. Then you'll install Claude Bot on a Mac Mini, vibe-coded dashboard on top of a Postgres database and say, we're all just a couple Ralph Loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That's going to last until next week when you discover context graphs and then you're going to be talking. About how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI

• 15:28John Coogan?

  marketing graphics. Well, as a matter of fact, I won't because ultimately the application layer is just the application layer is just business logic on top of a cred database. You got that from Satya's appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SAS sticker, you watch some podcasts, then pawn it off as your own idea to impress some VCs and embarrass some anons who's long SAS. See, see, the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple of years, you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  And two, you drop 30 grand on Mac minis and LLM API calls to come up with the same conclusions you could have got for free by following a handful of VC accounts. It's great.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Roasted.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  I love that meme. It's fantastic. Anyway, there's another, there's another post in here to close out the SaaSpocalypse. Buck says, there's a, there's a long history of dominant platforms vertically integrating and consuming the entire economy. That is why the largest companies in the world today are railroads, utilities, steam engine manufacturers and CPU producers. Love it. Very, very good. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search. Build from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 16:47Jordi Hays?

  Bland hit the timeline yesterday. They unveiled Soulja AI, the first rapper to automate their voice with AI.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  Let's watch this video.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  Soulja Boy or use his voice yourself.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  I want to see.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  With sound, of course.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  I want to see what Soulja Boy.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  I was the first rapper on YouTube, the first rapper with his own star, the first rapper with the iPhone, and now I'm the first rapper to automate his voice with AI.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Bland, baby.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, people, I thought this was a fun concept.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  But many people did not. It, uh, uh, it didn't, it didn't really, it didn't really resonate. It definitely got attention. I bet they, I bet they drove a bunch of business from this.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  One million views, six hundred likes.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Usually on a million views, you want to be skit sitting somewhere around thirty thousand.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Thousand. No, a couple thousand likes.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's something that people love and genuinely resonates will get upwards of twenty, twenty thousand or more.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, I, I, I think it's cool. I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this kind of thing. Celebrities coming in. I think Soulja obviously is not at the peak of his career, so it makes sense for him to dip his toes in here. And I bet this was surprisingly affordable, uh, for Bland. So hopefully, hopefully they got some, some, some business out of it.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  So, yeah, it's interesting. Eleven Labs has Michael Caine, Burt Reynolds, Richard Feynman, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dr. Maya Angelou, James Dean, Judy Garland, uh, Albert Einstein. Then there's some AI voices you can just do like Will, Jessica, Eric, Bella. Um, and there's community voices as well. Um, I wonder if they should do more, uh, more promotion around Michael Caine. Like, that's clearly a licensing deal, but I haven't, like,

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  The reason this breaks through is because there's a video of Soulja Boy. It's a real video and it's funny and he's like good on camera, right?

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  The entire premise is you can have Soulja Boy answer your business phone calls, which is like pretty, which is

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Pretty differentiated.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Which is extremely differentiated. And if you're, let's say you're, you're a kind of business, let's say you have a smoothie shop.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Like adding this will certainly get people talking about it.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Probably delightful.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  I called, I called, uh, the Azza Ebo place and Soulja Boy picked up.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, this will, this will, uh, uh, I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pile on. I think it's fun.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I think that also just as a top of funnel activation, like you hear about this, you go and you're, you're like, okay, realistically, my business doesn't need Soulja Boy, but my business does need like just a normal voice. Anyway.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  I didn't miss the opportunity to say like, I'm the first AI. Rapper?

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  No W?

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, play on, play on words.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Which they didn't do, from what I'm seeing.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Well, if you want intelligent, real-time conversational agents, head over to Eleven Labs. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Ice T, according to Justine Moore, is an AI accelerationist.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  He is hitting the timeline. Somebody said, "I wish more older rappers realized that AI shouldn't touch the music industry in the way that impacts the creative work, including music videos." When I say AI, some people group in-

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Stem separation.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Separation or restoration in that, into that, and that's not what I'm talking about. Anyways.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  So basically, stem separation is when you have a full song and you want to step, and you want to separate like the guitar from the drums, from the bass, like the stems.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Got it, got it, got it.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  You know stems, because you're guitarist, right? Isn't that the word? Guitar player?

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  But Ice T says, "I disagree. Fans want us to make him produce some music, then shoot an expensive video, then they get it for free if they have an Apple subscription or Spotify pays .007 cents a stream."

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Double oh seven.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  "The days of expensive videos are over. There isn't even MTV. AI is the only sensible way to add visuals to a song. You can hate it all you want. It's the future."

• 20:52John Coogan?

  It's the future. Is Ice T still gonna, is he dropping music videos recently? Like, has he actually, is he just predicting this? Or is he, is he living this and actually putting out AI videos? It, it, it certainly does make sense to just bring down the cost of music video production. I mean, that's what a lot of CGI did. A lot of, a lot of music videos are just the artist on a green screen with cool graphics in the background. And that's often enough. Or, I mean, there, there used to be the age of like the expensive music video. Wasn't it Thriller? Was like multiple millions of dollars? And you cannot spend that much anymore. No way. And so, a lot of, a lot of music videos have come down in cost, done more in CGI.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  It feels like AI will get there, but you have to be the right artist and you have to message it correctly, because it's gonna be crazy backlash.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Matthew McConaughey hit Variety this morning.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  And commenting on AI, Brandon just shared it. He said, "It's coming. It's already here. Don't deny it. It's not gonna be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that, no, this is wrong. It's not gonna last. There's too much money to be made and it's too productive."

• 22:02John Coogan?

  AI acceleration.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  So I say, own yourself, voice, likeness, et cetera, trademark it, whatever you gotta do. So when it comes, no one can steal you.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah, yeah, makes sense. Matthew McConaughey voice, I mean, that's an iconic voice. I think there's definitely a huge deal to be done. And the AI voices, although we're in a boom right now, I remember being able to go on Waze and pick, I think Snoop Dogg had a deal, but there were a number of celebrities that had, you can imagine like an Arnold Schwarzenegger, get to the chopper, but then also like take a left. And it's like fun and they would just pre-record all of the different lines, like keep going straight, bear left, take a hard left and you record like 20 different lines. And then the program just picks the audio file for the correct moment because there's only like 20 different things you could possibly say in a navigation app.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  And so a whole bunch of celebrities did deals, at least temporarily. I don't know how many of them are still around, but those types of things, like there's a, there's clearly a framework for that and all the agencies and all the unions understand this. So I feel like we're, we're in this weird, like bizarro world where people think that like, oh, like IP does, law doesn't exist and we darned gonna be able to deal with this. It's like, no, like there's, there's like decades of lawyers who like are foaming at the mouth, being like, I can't wait to sue ByteDance. This is gonna be awesome.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only thing is that it's gonna require real cooperation from platforms.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  The platforms are ready to cooperate.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  I disagree. I don't think, I don't think they're cooperating that hard. There's so much, there's so much content of a bunch of individuals on YouTube, on Meta,

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  that is using their name and likeness and putting them in situations that they would never, ever, ever agree to. And you can argue that it's not good for their brand, but it's incredibly entertaining. And so the platforms leave the content up and yes, you can do takedown requests and things like that. But by the time you do a takedown request, it's got 200,000 likes.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  You don't need to do a takedown request. You just need to do pay, pay me, pay me. That's what people want. They want to be paid. Like I, I think, I think the, the message in that Matthew McConaughey post is not, is not like, it's, it's super critical that no one ever uses an image of me or, or my voice ever. It's that, look, if somebody's profiting off it, that's, that's my IP.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, I read his comment more around making movies. Saying, don't use AI to make this scene that would normally take four weeks in some exotic location and a thousand people. Obviously AI is going to be used for that. I think there's a separate issue of people generating Matthew McConaughey, doing and saying things that he would never agree to, that are sort of compromising. Or again, putting him in situations or having him say things that he wouldn't ever agree to, even if he was getting paid.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I just think like the, the answer is like more AI. Like you look at the Sora, uh, like the Sora cameo functionality. And like, it was, it was pretty easy for me to say like, always depict me as a bodybuilder. And as silly as that is, like it worked. Like when we did that collab post with the OpenAI team, they were like, we don't know how to get around this. Like you should be able to go in and, and, and change this, but they didn't. Because like it is actually enforced at like a pretty low level.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Alex from Outtake, who we've had on the show. He does this for a bunch of, Outtake does this for a bunch of different celebrities. You basically sign up for Outtake and they're constantly monitoring the entire internet and like filing takedown requests on your behalf. And so I think, again, I think it'll end up, I think the platforms will do something, but it will also be somewhat of a tax.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Let's actually watch the full video of the AI Impact Summit in India. Narendra Modi is there.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Insane lineup.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Insane lineup. They polled everyone. They got Sundar there. They got Alex Wang there. They got Dario. They got Sam. And here we go. And they're zooming out. And what do we see?

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Two fists raised in opposition. Iconic.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Throwing up the X. Throwing up the X. Someone on X was saying that-

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Heaters would say this is AI.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that it was a little shout out to Elon, saying, "You're not here, but you're here with us."

• 26:40John Coogan?

  And if you scroll down, someone used AI to show them hugging, which is very nice.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like we said, missed opportunity for one of them-

• 26:48John Coogan?

  For handshake mog.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  To do, yeah, a handshake mog. But they'll be back next year.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  I think this is an annual thing.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it seems like a banger lineup. I wonder if there'll be talks that will come out of this, any more comments, or just, was it off the record, or will there just be reporting out of this? Or maybe it was just talking points, so there was no real, like, news dropped. But if you get those folks together, it should feel like Davos. There should be interesting, sort of, new positions that are coming out.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Mr. All founder was apparently speaking there, and the room was, like, almost empty.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  And so, and yeah, somebody was saying, like, "Hey, this guy is actually crushing it in Europe."

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Show him some respect.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Put some respect.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Sit down, take notes.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Study.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, sit down and study it. Don't just listen. Don't just listen. Let me tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  J.C. Foster-

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  Says, "Three months ago, I quit my job to chase a dream to build an affordable, convenient, plastic-free coffee maker. Grateful for everyone who has reserved..."

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Now, this-

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  ...pure steel.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  This is a correct ratio. Seven million views, 34,000 likes. This is what you were getting at.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so-

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Huge. What is up with the laptop?

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  So I guess he was at SpaceX.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Very long.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  He was at SpaceX. And one of the, when I immediately saw-

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Hold on, can we talk about this laptop? Look, what is going on? Zoom in on this laptop.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  I think this is, he took, it's like an optical illusion, I think, right? It's using the fisheye lens.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Oh. Okay.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Because if you fold, if, if based on this angle, if you folded the screen.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  The screen would just cover the keyboard. Like the trackpad would just be hanging out, like, like an untucked T-shirt under a sweater. Makes no sense. Sorry, Jordy. I got distracted by the extremely long, long laptop. Tell me more about the pure steel company of America.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  The pure steel company of America. So, uh, yeah. So anyway, started going viral.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool product. If you've tried to make coffee without having plastic be a part of the process.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  It's incredibly hard and you're pouring hot liquid over plastic.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  Some of that plastic will disintegrate.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  End up, end up in your cup of joe.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  So the product makes a lot of sense. One of the issues is it, this post, uh, went extremely, uh, viral.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  And somebody said, somebody posted, this thing's only 80 bucks. Go reserve this right now.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  And so that post started going really viral.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the challenge.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  This thing is $80 and made of American glass and steel. Go reserve one right now.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  That got 18,000.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  So this is of course not going to cost $80.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  There's literally no chance.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, but I think people were thinking, hey, I can buy this for 80 bucks. It seems like the steal of a lifetime. I think something like this, once you actually build it, will probably need to cost somewhere like 600, $700, something in that range. So really rough. The other thing is pull up, pull up the, uh, pull up the website. I want, I want, I think this guy may have knocked off the Aurora website.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm just realizing this in real time. So Aurora is of course the.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Oh, it does kind of look similar. It's.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  So this is, this is pure steel. Look at the, look at the header. Look at the header system with, which Emmett Shine.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Designed for us. And even look at the imagery. Their, their imagery is AI.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  And now pull up the, the Aurora website.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Oh, it has the same rounded corners. Yeah. It is very similar.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  I think he got a little inspired.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  So if you see the header and everything, the way the buttons work, go scroll down even more. If you go down to some of the more lifestyle imagery, like they, it's the same like style, you know?

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  The kitchen, the photography. A little close. But he's bootstrapped, he's got a bunch of sales now. I'm sure he'll figure out. I'm sure he'll figure out.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  Okay, well, I mean, the, the SpaceX like lore here is that they should be able to deliver this at $80. Like it says transparent pricing, it's time to know what you're paying for. Traditional coffee makers cost $200. Pure steel is the same amount of materials, but less markup. And so they want to deliver this to you, I think for $80. Will be very interesting to see how they do it, where they change prices. If they change prices, they might be able to deliver. I don't know, maybe it'll be VC subsidies. Maybe it's $80 a month and you have to pay for some subscription.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  You will own nothing and be happy. Like a seat based pricing.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Seat based pricing, yes. How many cups a Joe make?

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  How many coffee drinkers?

• 31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, no, it should be in the age of AI, it should be consumption based. So you should pay per coffee cup.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  How many tokens each cup?

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Yes. No, but I, I don't know, this doesn't seem impossible to get stamped steel and, and assemble it and have it. I mean, it's a pretty basic device, right? It just needs to warm up a pot of coffee. Like it needs to boil water. That's not, that's not crazy to me that that could be $80. I don't know.

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  Now, I mean, I know through Aurora.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  Like dealing with these materials.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  It depends, like looking at some of this design here, the way it's all bolted together.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems pretty like basic.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  Even the, even the, the labor cost of doing something like this, I think.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Robots, I don't know.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Amazon does have an all steel coffee maker. They have some results for all steel coffee makers in the $60 range. They got a Black and Decker here. It looks like it's covered in plastic, but you know, it's at least advertised as stainless steel. There's some stainless steel options on here, but yeah, a lot of them are, are in the, in the several hundred dollar range. So I don't know, we'll have to keep, we'll have to keep, uh, keep an eye on it.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited about this. I would happily, I would happily.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Looks great.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, buy one of these.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looks great. And I mean, a lot of, a lot of these companies will, uh, underprice the first run. So they'll say, yeah, okay, we're, we're just gonna take a loss on the first thousand units that we ship. And then we will raise prices over time. And then when we go into retail, we'll raise prices more and, you know, there will just be a process for that. Uh, if you go with this viral, if you have a lot of, uh, a lot of demand, you might be able to raise money to offset that. Your suppliers or your, you know, you might just make no margin for a long time. There's, there's a way this gets built for $80.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And he was at SpaceX for two years.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  SpaceX is, is a good, good organization. We talked to SpaceX.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  Except, except that the issue is he was a finance analyst at SpaceX. So he might need to poach some of the engineers.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, yeah, analyzing the finances of SpaceX, being like, wow, they make rockets.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Wow, we could be, we could be making plastic free coffee.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  Just do it. Think from first principles. Uh, I don't know. Um, let's see. Van Man says, "The response to this insanely simple, yet non-plastic coffee maker should usher in the era of dumb, simple appliances that work and don't poison you or connect to your wifi." I think that there, there is huge demand for this. People want simpler devices. Did I tell you about?

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  My coffee machine connects to my wifi. I'm like, it, it all, actually, I don't think I did, but it always wants.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it actually does.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  It's not a joke. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, it's a lot of, it's a lot of steel.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Pour over, so no, but.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  And I'm like, you don't need, you don't need access to the network, bro. Just focus, just put, put the beans. Yeah. Just put the, put the coffee in the cup.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I have another story, but first let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Uh, so I had a little tiny bit of IOT in my house just to turn off and turn on the lights.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  My dishwasher emails me.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Peak performance. Uh, I had a, I have a tiny bit of IOT just for lights that are hard to reach, lamps that are plugged into basically a wall socket that has a little box that connects to the wifi. There's an app, turns on, the turns off the light. I think the company just went out of business because the server just doesn't work and the app doesn't load anymore. And so you just, all of the stuff that I bought is just worthless. And I just need to like

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  It's smart then.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  rip it out. It's extremely dumb, in fact. Very, very silly. And

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  Brad is dropping alpha. He says, recommend the O Tony Fabirca

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  for plastic-free electric kettles. That's smart. And then he says they should put ads on the pure steel coffee maker to keep it around.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  See, see, think outside of the box. I'm calling it $80 shipped. That's what it's gonna cost. No, there'll probably be a shipping fee on top of it. Shipping to Alaska. That is dangerous territory.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Don't talk about Alaska.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Do not give free shipping nationwide because Alaska is technically part of the nation and you will be paying $50 to get stuff up there. It is not, it is not on Amazon Prime necessarily for your default upstart e-commerce business. So, so I got completely cooked by my wifi light system and I was thinking like, okay, certainly I can vibe code this. Definitely not. Definitely just going back to switches. Definitely going back to the Stone Age. I'm just gonna be lighting candles in my house because that's the future that I'm gonna be living.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had a funny moment this morning. John and I went to breakfast with Brandon and I parked in a garage. John was on the street. And I was, as I was leaving, I went and put the ticket into the machine and I put the validation in right after. It just like was working for a while, then it failed. Tried it again. Then I was like, okay, the validation's maybe not working. So I paid with a card. It failed. And so then I start calling around and I'm stuck, I'm stuck for 15 minutes. John is long gone. He's at the Ultra Dome. Already, I'm sitting there on support with somebody who's not even in LA, trying to get somebody in LA to just let me out of this parking garage.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  Then somebody finally comes after 15 minutes and I was like, hey, can you escalate this? This kind of, your software is like bugging out. It doesn't work a lot. And they're like, oh, well, like actually all the systems in this area don't, don't work. Have been failing a lot. And so I was like, okay, like that maybe it's a bigger issue than I than I even thought. So I was not feeling the software singularity in the in the parking garage this morning.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  I I texted Jordy, you couldn't just, you couldn't just vibe code and improve software system to run on the ticket taker machine? That would process payment more quickly and reliably? No, because there is a gatekeeper, of course, and it is impossible. There's one parking garage in in Pasadena that doesn't take cash or Apple Pay. So you have to have a physical card and I get caught lacking every once in a while. And I'll have to push the button and then talk to the guy and be, I'm sorry, like, can you just let me out?

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Like, really? You're the guy that always wants a free parking spot?

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Yes, but last time I was there, I saw someone else get caught lacking and I paid it forward and I paid for his parking. To let him out.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  Heartwarming.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  I don't even care what it is.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  We should have thrown up a card for that.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  So karma, I I'm like buying karma very strategically, not altruistically.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Not affect.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Brian says that's hardware. They got the hardware footprint. Yeah, they got us locked in their hardware.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Their foot is firmly printed on your chest as you try and leave. Brutal. Really quickly, the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Stop making excuses and just do it, please.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Please.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Michael Burry is going off.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. What happened?

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  Karp.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Financial Times.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  From the Form 10?

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  Palantir CEO Alex Karp has his head in the cloud. Saying he's a frequent flyer. And they get into some of his business and personal travel expenses. From during the years ended December 31st, 2025 and 2024, the company incurred expenses related to the use of the executive aircraft of 17.2 million and 7.7 million respectively. It's quite the feat to spend 17 million in a year on business and personal travel. Particularly when the jet's not even the rental. Jeffrey's analyst Brent Phil, he's got a bone to pick. Runs the numbers, assuming use of a midsize jet with an estimated operating cost of $7,000 per hour.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  This implies roughly 2,400 flight hours or about 28% of the year in the air. Even under a more conservative assumption of a high end jet such as the G650 at an estimated 15,000 per hour. The 17 million still equates to approximately 1,147 flight hours or 13% of the year. Notably, this 17.2 figure is more than double Karp's executive aircraft expense in 2024.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  And appears elevated relative to peers with Meta CEO spending 1.8 million and Palo Alto Network CEO spending 2.4 million. Terrible comps.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Why?

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Like Karp is obviously constantly traveling all over the world.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Jordi Hays?

  He's an international businessman.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  I know podcasters that do like 250 hours a year.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  Like, like, you're talking about going from like, somebody who like, travels like, a good amount at like, let's say like, 200 hours a year. Like, to me, uh, yeah, I might catch some flack for, for defending, uh, private, uh,

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Aviation.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  Aviation, but it just doesn't seem that crazy. Like, the whole, the, the, the entire reason that Palantir is growing the way it is, is like, they're doing deals in Japan. They're doing deals in, in the Middle East. They're doing, it's just like, this guy is a global deal maker. And I think you should, if you really wanted to do an analysis on this, you should look at all the international deals that they've done. Maybe ignore the US. Look at all the international deals and see if Karp is actually delivering. Because when we hear that they're signing some new contract for hundreds of millions of dollars in Japan, I think it makes sense for the CEO to fly out there and shake some hands.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  And do some real business.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so of course, he's not flying on a, on a, on a, on a, on a mid-sized jet, like, you know, around the entire world. Of course, he's in-

• 41:18John Coogan?

  That's the funny thing. They don't know.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's pure speculation.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  They're saying, maybe it's G650, which would be, uh, 1,000 flight hours. Maybe it's a mid-sized jet. That would be more like 2,000 hours. It could be a King Air, and he's spending 8,000 hours in the air. No one considered that. And it could also be a 747, and he's only spending like 500 hours in the air. Uh, there's a wide range here. But I like to imagine-

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's in a prop.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  That he's in a single, he's flying the prop himself, and the cost per hour is only like a couple hundred bucks, because he's just paying for gas. But he's like, taking every meeting in the air. Literally. One-on-ones, hop in. We're going, we're doing laps.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  You can Uber back.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  We're flying around. Yeah, I like, I like to imagine him doing, putting up 8,000 hours in the air. Just, just, uh, every waking hour, flying around in a King Air or Cessna Citation or something. Um-

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Very funny. Well, whether you're a long palantir or a short palantir, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  Max Farren's probably the most underrated poster in the world.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  I can't believe he has 3,000 followers. It's so love. He's the best poster. He's the general manager at Dorkish Podcast.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  In the world, he says, to be honest, the best part of making our wedding registry is that it has forced us to really think about what we need to make our place feel like a home. And I don't know.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  And he went on Zola.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  Is this, is this real?

• 42:50John Coogan?

  I don't think so. I think he, I think he might do, this might be inspect element or some Photoshop, or a little bit of both. Maybe, maybe it's Gen AI, but in his wedding registry, he put the Nvidia B200 tensor core GPU. It's $30,000. He put the Nvidia H100 NVL GPU. $15,000 is still needed there. He put the Nvidia A100 80 gig GPU. $15,000 still needed.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is how you turn a house.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Help, help Max make his place feel like a home. Head over to his Zola and I, it does feel like.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to be going to the wedding to.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, to contribute.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  To contribute, get him, get him a GPU.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  You don't. And, and I do feel like this is probably inspired by actually putting together a non-satirical.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  Gas turbine.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  Wedding registry. That's a good one.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  That's a great gift.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Or a plot of land.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  In Abilene.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  Yes, somewhere data center friendly.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. But if, if he is getting married soon, congratulations and, and I hope you have a wonderful wedding with a registry full of whatever you actually do need.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Ryan said, get, get the man a Cessna, talking about carbs. Cessna 172, just flying over the Atlantic.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  With Starlink.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Yes. Making 10 stops on every island like Amelia Earhart.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  So Jira Ticket says, do you think he has monetization on?

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Who's he talking about?

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Kame, Kameini. Kameini's been putting up insane numbers on X. Obviously.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  Quite the tense geopolitical situation. I hope that, I hope that we're not starting a new war in the Middle East, but if Kemeni does have monetization on it, it certainly is a, gonna be a real revenue line item on the, I have to imagine, does X sanction accounts?

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  You would think they would.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  I think creator payouts are probably geographically limited to certain countries where the payment rails work, if a country sanctioned, like, I actually get my extra payouts just straight up through Stripe, yeah. It just comes through Stripe. In fact, I think I had to set up a Stripe account to receive it and then link that. So, you know, it's only valid where Stripe is, is functioning. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Will Brown is chiming in on whether or not Prime Intellect is a NeoLab. We put him on the NeoLab market map yesterday.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  But he's firing.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  I also said, I think I said Prime Intellect was like the prototypical NeoLab.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:29Speaker 04

  So he's really, yeah.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  It's a funny camera angle. What's going on here? Okay, I like that. Different.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  Mixing it up.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  It's over the shoulder. I'm interviewing you. I'm getting to the bottom of it. You answer me. You answer me. Well, okay, okay. We get it. Production team got some new PTZ cameras. We get it, guys. Anyway, why does Prime Intellect fail the NeoLab test? Will Brown says a true NeoLab is either pre-model, pre-product, or pre-revenue, and we're none of these. Oh, we flipped it around on you. You had me in the first half. But congratulations on being post-model, post-product, post-revenue. Prime Intellect on a generational run and happy to have Will Brown over there.

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we have news on the Warner Brothers Netflix Paramount front. Netflix is open to raising their bid for Warner Brothers. There's a 35% chance that Netflix-

• 46:29John Coogan?

  Like a stone, they were at like 70%.

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  Thing.

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  Really.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Uh, can we pull up the actual call sheet? I want to know where, where it's at today. It's still, it's still up there. I guess, uh, Netflix is at 35%, but at one point Netflix was at 72%. Yeah. Uh, 72% in July, um, or December, December. And, uh, I, I'm going to eat my words. I mean, I don't know really anything about the media, uh, media deal making here and what, when the ins and outs of this deal. We've had some folks on the, on the show to break it down for us, but, uh, it, it does seem like there's an unexpected flipping. And so it's been fun to-

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can read a little bit here.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Pull that up and let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Yes.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  Pulling it up.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Netflix, uh, apparently has ample room to increase their offer. They are, uh, yeah, obviously, uh,

• 47:32Jordi Hays?

  it's better, better position generally.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Billion dollar company Netflix, but-

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  I think everyone believes that they're, they're good for it.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, I'm trying to get the right article.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  The, oh, you, oh, uh, the Reuters article is not complete. I have the Reuters article here.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can read it.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Netflix has ample cash and could bump up its offer for HBO Max owner Warner Brothers Discovery if competing bidder Paramount Skydance increases its own offer. Two people with the knowledge of the matter said the two media giants have been locked in a heated rivalry. Oh, you see what they did there? That's a new popular show, heated rivalry. It's about hockey, uh, over Warner Brothers and its storied catalog, which includes iconic franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC Comics and Superman. Though Warner Brothers is moving forward with a March 20th shareholder vote on Netflix's offer, it has given Paramount a week to come up with a more compelling bid. Netflix has bid 27.75 a share or 82.7 billion for Warner Brothers studio and streaming businesses,

• 48:30John Coogan?

  while Paramount has offered $30 a share or 108 billion for the whole company, which includes Discovery Global that houses CNN, HGTV and other TV assets.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  The creator of Stranger Things is sitting on a lot of dry powder that gives it some flexibility to up the ante, people said, holding about $9 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet as of December 31st. Warner Brothers rejected Paramount's latest hostile takeover bid on Tuesday, but gave the rival studio until the end of Monday to submit a best and final offer. We're going into the final rounds now. Price will likely be the deciding factor. Warner Brothers' concerns around funding and regulatory risk are real, but at a high enough number, they become secondary.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  David Zaslove must just be over the, over the moon right now.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  A bidding war. He's been working.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  The bidding war of his dreams.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Every CEO that is flipping an asset dreams of, of a bidding war like this.

• 49:30John Coogan?

  It's great. Britman expects Netflix will counter with an improved, with any improved offer from Paramount, but the real twist is that these deals were never apples to apples, and it may ultimately come down to how much value the board and shareholders assign to the network business that Netflix would leave behind. So you need to do a sum of the parts. What's the value of just CNN, HGTV, the linear TV channels? Put that in because Netflix doesn't want that stuff. They just want the IP and HBO now, HBO Go, HBO Max. I can never keep it straight. Anyway, Paramount said it would continue to push the tender offer it has launched for the studio, opposing the inferior Netflix merger and still plans

• 50:12John Coogan?

  to nominate directors for the upcoming Warner Brothers annual meeting. All eyes are now on whether the CBS parent improves its offer, which Netflix is allowed to match under the terms of the merger agreement. Warner Brothers chairman said, and David Zaslove said in a letter sent to Paramount board on Tuesday, "We continue to recommend and remain fully committed to our transaction with Netflix."

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't see how Netflix actually gets approved on this one.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  You think that, you think they're cooked?

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think if, I think if Trump is souring on it.

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  I was so, I was so pilled on the whole YouTube is the real competitor here. Watch time matters more. Think about screen time. Roblox is a competitor to Netflix. Tik Tok's a competitor to Netflix. Fortnite's a competitor to Netflix, but

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  I don't think

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  But that's what they want.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Think like that. It's a very

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to think about the, the entertainment industry, the core industry, people that make television shows and movies, things, things that you have, things that you have watched.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, things that I have watched.

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  We got Sean Frank in the chat.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  Oh, we do. What's up, Sean? How you doing?

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  With a crazy, I can't tell what his, what his profile picture is doing right now.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Let's, let's, let's do, let's do an ad read for him. I'm sure you'd appreciate that. Let's tell him about Gusto. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. You know,

• 51:38Jordi Hays?

  That one was for you, Sean.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  And the whole rich

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Honorary. That one is dedicated to Sean Frank.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's pull up another video dedicated to Sean.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  Okay, yes. I like this. Ye olde fitted great helm.

• 51:49Jordi Hays?

  Wait, start it over.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  What is, is this AI or not? Do we know? I don't even know, but I like it.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Oh, this is so funny.

• 52:00Jordi Hays?

  Need, you need one of these. The steel man.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  The fitted great helm.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  This is the final steel man.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  This is the final, this is the final steel man helmet. The TBPN hat with the great helm on it would be really, really good with all the logos.

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  We should actually just make a branded knight's helmet for you when you're steel man.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  With logos on it for sure, for sure. Actually goes kind of hard.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  Look at this scene. What's going on here? This guy's just hanging out in the look.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  Oh, everyone's doing the, uh, what's that called? LARP? Live action role playing? That's the, that's the real

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  They don't even look like they're role playing. They're really going

• 52:39John Coogan?

  They're really going into it.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  You don't see that much anymore.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  I like, I like ye

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  I still, I still remember being a child and like just going to the park and seeing, seeing a bunch of adults doing that.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  Saw it, but

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  And having to get explained, like getting explained.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what was going on?

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's one of those things that feels like it would, like when you're looking from the outside, you're like, that probably is awesome. And then you're actually doing it. Like this is really uncomfortable and miserable. Like, I don't know that I'd actually want to do this sport. I'd rather do it in a video game. Anyway, Meta-

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  We should organize a, uh, like a community meetup.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  A jousting?

• 53:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bring jousting. Jousting is cool, though, because it involves horses.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  You know what we should do? We should get all the freelancers to lance each other for free. They won't be paid. I think that's where the name comes from.

• 53:25Jordi Hays?

  No, I think they will want to be paid on a per-project basis, on a per-lance basis.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  Meta has obtained a patent for an AI system that could simulate deceased users by analyzing their historical data, allowing the account to keep posting, messaging, and even making video calls in their behavioral style.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  You thought I would stop posting after you killed me. Nice try.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  Nice try.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  I will continue dropping daily S's.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  You just created a billion John Guggan.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  You just created a billion John Guggan posts, uh, both satirical and, uh, and 500 words daily S's.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a family member, uh, sent me this this morning.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  Disturbed?

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  Saying, "Is this real?" And, uh-

• 54:09John Coogan?

  We gotta get Saagar and Jetty's take on this. I know this is right up his alley. He's gonna love it. He's gonna love it. That guy loves AI. He loves tech, loves business, and that's what we're having on this show.

• 54:21Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna love this. Uh, yeah.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  I'm surprised you can patent this. This is just like a thing that happens.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Is this Meta thinking out, you got population collapse?

• 54:29John Coogan?

  No.

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  And obviously, it's pretty hard to monetize a bot, but if you're driving-

• 54:35John Coogan?

  In an AI doom scenario, where all humans are dead, you want to still keep your services up, you gotta simulate all the dead people, maybe. I don't know. Is this, is this doom-pilled?

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  Dan says true posters, keep posting after death.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Yes, we will, Jeremy, we will definitely be getting the update from Saagar, re-cannabis, for sure.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was, there was, there was a 4chan post, apparently, from a few years ago, where somebody was like, "I'm an engineer at Meta," and they basically fully, I only saw a screenshot. It may, may or may not have been real, but it appeared to be from a few years ago, and they were saying, like, "I'm working on this feature. It seems, uh, bad." Interesting timing. Obviously, uh, Mark has been, uh, in LA this week. He was getting, he got grilled for, uh, I think-

• 55:19John Coogan?

  Wait, that was in LA? I thought that was in DC. Oh.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, kinda rude, rude not to-

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Yes, stop by the Ultra Dome and chop it up.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  Before you get, before you get disposed. Um, let's, let me try to pull up, uh-

• 55:31John Coogan?

  A little warm-up on TVPN before you go in front of the big guy?

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, so he spent six hours.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, the Corey Weinberg says, has a quote, "We call Mark Zuckerberg to the stand." Thus began Wednesday's nearly six hours of testimony from the Meta platform CEO in a trial of a lawsuit brought by a young woman against several.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  And this was about, uh, benchmark hacking in Lama 3? Is that what he was on trial for?

• 55:59Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  No?

• 56:01Jordi Hays?

  Not as bad as that, contending that social media.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Potential weakness in the ad model? Is that what it's about? Uh. Overspending on the metaverse.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  Concerns about, uh, distillation, I think.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Oh, distillation, yeah, that's why he'd be on trial for that. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 56:14Jordi Hays?

  Contending that social media causes depression.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Corey actually went to the courtroom, was hanging out for those six hours.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Legend.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it's a guy, Mark Lanier, uh, Lanier, the plaintiff's attorney.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  We gotta ask.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  In the landmark case, who spoke with a faint Texas twang.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Showed the courtroom dozens of internal emails and chats from Meta employees and executives over the years debating decisions like whether to ban the beauty filters teen used, uh, teens used on Instagram to mimic the results of plastic surgery. Uh, and so anyways, there's a bunch, the features like that are kind of the focus of the case.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  There's also, there's also a cover, uh, a story on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today, "Social Media Bans for Youth Gain Momentum Worldwide." And, uh, it does feel like a parenting skill issue a little bit, like, you know, it is possible to keep kids away from social media if you are, you know, an active parent, but at the same time, um.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, the only thing, the only thing I would say, we don't have, we don't have.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  You should ban it.

• 57:17Jordi Hays?

  We don't have children with phones yet.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's deliberate.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's deliberate, but at a certain point, like what?

• 57:25John Coogan?

  They would love phones.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  They just will not be having them.

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but at, but at what, uh, when, when the time comes to. Give them a phone so they can communicate.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I know my plan. I will give my son a disassembled iPhone one. And when he can assemble it and and and piece it together and manufacture it himself here in America, then he can use it. And we already ran this on Tyler.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  Twenty years later.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  And then we and then we did get Tyler a phone. This was a good benchmark. We got Tyler. We didn't we get you a real phone because of that? We did, right?

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was the reward.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Well, that was also because I I installed the new iOS when it was still installed and then I like totally destroyed my old phone.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  We gotta do another prank on Tyler soon. They're so good.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, chat, if you have any any good prank ideas, like, no.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's like, no, no, no, definitely not. Anyway, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We got some, we got some birthday news. Brinton, friend of the show, his birthday is this weekend and all he wants is a TBN shout out. Well, here you go, Brinton.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on the show. Very early, one of our first in-person guests at YC Demo Day, the first one we ever did. And we got to hang out with him at GitHub Connect and and seen all the stuff he's been doing in Microsoft.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic guy.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  He's been on a generational run.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Works on startups at Microsoft, also an angel investor. So for his birthday, go ask him for some cloud credits.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  Go ask him for some some angel money.

• 59:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  That's all he really wants.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, deal flow. Bring him deal flow for his birthday. That makes sense. Yeah. And and new business, if you're a startup, go over there and let him give you some cog credits in exchange for your business. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock, did that go? Yeah, there we go. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. eBay is buying Depop secondhand.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Thanks, Andrew.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Andrew is the king of VC dad jokes.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  He loves it.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  He loves it.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  So eBay is buying Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion. And this is in the Wall Street Journal. Jamie Ione, Chief Executive Officer of eBay, said Wednesday that the addition of Depop to its portfolio would boost its footprint while also expanding its presence in the fashion market. We are confident that as a part of eBay, Depop will be even more well positioned for long-term growth, benefiting from our scale, complimentary offerings, and operational capabilities. Etsy acquired Depop for $1.63 billion in 2021, so little bit of a write-off, but not terrible. Still cooking.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  And the market likes it.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  The market likes it.

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  9%.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, Etsy's up too?

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Etsy's up.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Oh, so better for both of them. eBay's up 3.5%, but I don't know if the market's just broadly doing well today. I'm seeing a lot of red on the ticker, so I don't think so. SaaSpocalypse canceled tomorrow. Nobody's watched TVPN yet in the public markets.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I expect things will turn around before end of day.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Immediately. eBay plans to cross-list Depop products on its platform and expects the acquisition will expand its market share. Depop's seller and buyer cohorts will gain access to eBay's financial services, shipping, and cross-border trade solutions, as well as its authenticity guarantee. Young consumers are a key demographic for eBay, as Gen Z and millennial shoppers are driving second-hand commerce. Depop is also more popular as an app than a website, unlike eBay, which might bring in a new user base.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Good luck to both of them.

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, eBay is still such a force.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  But it is certainly not cool. Depop is cool. eBay has struggled.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Jordy has spoken.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  eBay, eBay, great business. Not, not cool. But...

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  Do you know why they call it eBay?

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Because it was founded in East Bay.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, by some East Bay rationalists?

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It was sort of a less wrong project. It's right up there with Anthropic. Anyway, uh, altimeter is making moves. Brad Gersner, an absolute dog, is on a tear. He bought new positions in CoreWeave, Shopify. Uh, he sold Arm, he sold Alibaba, and he added to his Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and TSMC positions as well as Google. He's making a lot of moves.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  This is a great pick of Brad, too.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  It is a great pick. He's looking good there. Dice, if I might say so myself.

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Hands, hands going up.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Up.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, hands up. That's a man who's not afraid to shake hands. Got it locked in. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 1:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Spent some darker stories today.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Okay, what happened?

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Finally, a white pill.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Some good news?

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Matt's owner, Steve Cohen, got a $3.4 billion payday from his hedge fund last year. We needed this. We needed this. We needed this.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Slightly higher than, uh, slightly higher than David Tepper.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  I was worried about Steve. Have you seen him in any Chrome Hearts?

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Zero.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  I haven't seen him in any Balenciaga.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  No Rick Mills.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  No Rick Mills. No Rick Owens.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  And we were starting to ask some questions.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  We were starting to ask some questions.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  The question mainly was he down to his last 20K. It was completely possible. I haven't seen him do a money spread. I've seen him do some podcasts. Haven't seen him do a money spread.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  Tyler's getting better at the money spread. Are you practicing? That is still, like, not even a level-one money spread. You need to lock in and watch the money spread. Don't even try that one. You're, you're five levels beyond ready for that level of money spreading. Okay, that one kind of works. That one kind of works. But when you actually understand the money spread community and what's possible, you will, you will understand how much farther you have to go. Oh, so, so, so bad. So bad.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Awful. Here are the top earners in 2025 from hedge funds. Steve Cohen with 3.4 billion, David Tepper at Appaloosa got 3.2 billion. Izzy Englander at Millennium got 3.1 billion, Chris Hohn got three. Ken Griffin, 2.4. Dan Sundheim at D1, 2.3. David Shaw from DE Shaw, 1.6. Element, 1.1. Bill Ackman got 1 billion and Chris Rokos got 930 million. So close to the 1B club. I'm sure he's punching the air.

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is gains on personal investment. That means they actually closed out positions or this is just marks?

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Who knows? It's just big, big numbers. I'm not digging it any further.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  Dave Portnoy quoted this and said, I think I have a solution for Mondani. Tax Wall Street people like Steve Cohen, who built their fortunes just on Wall Street 90%. That's not real work to begin with.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Take shots.

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  High Yield Harry says, LOL, don't you know how much of the tax base is already wealthy finance professionals? Yeah, it is funny. He, you know, Portnoy did build a real business, a media business, a podcasting business.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  Arguably the only business that's actually valuable to the economy. It's the only one that deserves like to truly to be like respected. Like in terms of like respect, I would put podcaster. And then a couple of levels down, you do like doctor, maybe like cancer researcher. And then like hedge fund is still like a little bit above like doctor, but it's still way below podcast.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  Someone's going to clip this.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  Way below podcaster.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, it is. It is funny because now a lot of his content is trading focused.

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:30Jordi Hays?

  Like put into this.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Day to day trading is kind of like.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  That's been like every time I see him, it's because of like trading content. And also maybe he wants to be taxed at 90%.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, Kindred Spirits, right? Steve Cohen has that casino in New York. He's attaching a casino to the Mets, uh, like ballpark.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Zach says, the list is ranked by who tweets the least.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Honestly.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  So I have a solution to the billionaire tax. Have you ever seen Brewster's Millions? Jordy? No? 1980s? No? Anyway, in Brewster's Millions, a man inherits something like thirty million dollars. And it's conditional. The, he needs to spend, I think he inherits like three hundred million, and he needs to spend thirty million in thirty days without acquiring assets or telling anyone what he's doing, or else he doesn't get the inheritance. And it's this hilarious comedy. There's a whole bunch of things that happen, but it's all based on this idea of like, this, this kid was caught smoking cigars, smoking a cigarette or cigar, and the, and the father punished him by saying, "You have to smoke the entire box."

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  This is like a famous thing. Like, "Smoke the entire box of cigars, and you'll be like, 'Oh, so sick.'" "That's a terrible experience. I'm never smoking again," right? And the same thing with money. So this is the, this is a solution to the billionaire tax. You gotta spend five percent of your net worth in thirty days and you can't-

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  On Rick Owens.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  On, you can't acquire any assets that you can sell. So it's all just-

• 1:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Rick Owens.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  It's all just hanging out of the French Laundry, I guess. Would be entertaining, would stimulate the economy.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jeremy says, "Build a cathedral."

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  Build a cathedral, yeah.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  How about that?

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  I like that, too. It's good. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate seventy percent of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Ara says, "We have a definitive answer now. AI will affect the labor market, starting with freelancers." First paper to use business-level data to track AI versus labor. New paper from Ramp finds businesses are shifting spend from freelancers to AI. More than half of the businesses using freelancers in 2022 have stopped entirely. The companies that used to spend the most on freelancers shifted to AI the fastest. Ninety-seven percent savings for the businesses that spent the most on freelance. That is, uh, wild.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and- Generally makes sense. I mean, the whole premise of freelance is like you probably get paid a lot better on an hourly basis. Maybe you can capture more value on a on a dollar basis by working, you know, spreading your talents across multiple companies. But obviously, the flexibility comes with little to no lock-in. And so businesses can much more easily shift spend around. So not not super surprising. The Fiverr stock

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  I'm looking at that.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Certainly.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Interestingly, revenue is not wildly down. Revenue is actually up for Fiverr as of 2024. So it went from 190 in revenue to 300 in revenue, 340, 360, 390. So definitely decelerating. But in terms of market cap, Fiverr is now worth $419 million, down 96% over the last five years. And over just the past six months, it sold off another 50%. So certainly, a lot of downward pressure on Fiverr. There were some folks

• 1:09:03Jordi Hays?

  And same with Upwork.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Upwork is down 30% year to date, down 76% over the last five years.

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, someone was saying, here's Todd, actually, Todd Saunders, saying billion-dollar business idea, take Fiverr private and pivot them into a data labeling company like Handshake, because Fiverr is now trading at $480 million market cap. And Ara chimed in and said, yes, there's a quantifiable impact on business spend. Businesses are spending on AI, not Fiverr, you know, freelancers. The pushback on this is that Fiverr doesn't have people internally or something. I'm not exactly sure. I mean, it does feel like

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  You could potentially actually do this and and and focus on data labeling. But you imagine that a lot of data labeling tasks are already going through Fiverr? Because that's if if a task is suitable for

• 1:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. So I would I wonder I wonder if if the a lot of revenue from Fiverr and Upwork is just data labeling companies that are just saying, we need access to talent. We're going to post a bunch of jobs on here and then take these people off the platform quickly or or leave them on.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, disintermediation is always a risk for the marketplace.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, when I when I when I look back at I've I've worked with hundreds of freelancers over the last 10 years and and certainly a high number on Fiverr and Upwork, but always for one off tasks like, hey, I need like 10 versions of this logo.

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Or, hey, can you just spin up this like super simple webpage? And I need this thing that's like slightly customized. And I don't want to spend the however much time it would have taken pre AI to do something like that. All of those tasks can now be done, even even creating like, create a song for this for this thing. All of that can be done now.

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  Even like Canva templates, I feel like a lot of Fiverr work was like, they clearly had a template for like a motion graphic intro or a sign and they would just sort of like put your logo in there and send you the final thing. Do you know why Fiverr is called Fiverr?

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Because every task initially was five bucks.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Yes, every task was $5 and very quickly you could add all these upsells. So you could be like, okay, it's a $5 task, but if you want the extra thing, it's 20. You spent $100 on it.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I for sure did. I was probably a kid at the time doing my like first Fiverr project being like, oh, it's five bucks. And then all the upsells, it's like, well, if you actually want to own the

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  If you actually want to own the

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  You want something usable, you're going to pay 100. 99 designs also.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing, though. So for for the high ticket freelancers, I would be surprised if we're seeing too much impact yet. Because actually, the most elite freelancers typically have then a team of other freelancers that they're contracting out to.

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Jordi Hays?

  But they're charging based on like, what business value can I deliver? And sometimes that's like expertise.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm really good at getting brands into Target.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  And like AI is not disrupting that yet.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  No, but if it's like a very simple workflow, take a logo, put it in a motion graphic template, send you the MOV file or the MP4 file like that is.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  Just gonna face pressure from all over the place. Anyway, let me tell you about app loving profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Um, let's see, Jack Fricks says anthropic was my favorite AI company two weeks ago, and now I still love Claude, but man, yes, the vibe, the vibes are shifting. And a big part of it is Dario doesn't follow back. Barack Obama followed back. He followed like 400,000 people, but Dario does not. He follows zero people and, and Wes Wender is taking notice, says the fact that Dario follows zero people says a lot about him as a person. Does it? It really just says he doesn't use X.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What was your theory, Tyler, that he just, he's for you? He's a for you maxi?

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  He's a for you page. He doesn't want any.

• 1:13:11Jordi Hays?

  He's like, he trusts the algorithm. He's like, I don't, I don't need to, I don't.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  He loves, he thinks Grok does a great job of, you know.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  AI, AI pill. He's like, wait, another 10 Elon tweets, exactly what I wanted. This is amazing. I refreshed. Crypto spam? Awesome.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the vibe, the vibes have really, have really shifted.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Terminally online engineer posted, uh, Dario's speech at the AI impact summit in India. Let's pull it up.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's watch this.

• 1:13:39Speaker 05

  Energy and ambition in this room and across India are incredible. I've been spending the last few days meeting with Indian builders and enterprises and the energy to build together here is palpable, unlike anywhere else. Um, this is the fourth AI summit we've held since the tradition was initiated at Bletchley Park back in 2023, which I still remember. And in those 2.5 years, the advances in the technology have been absolutely staggering. Along with those, the advances in the commercial applications and the societal and ethical questions around the technology have only grown more urgent.

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the last 10 years and as part of a sort of Moore's Law for intelligence and that we are now well advanced on that curve and there are only a small number of years for AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans for most things. We're increasingly close to what I call the country of geniuses in a data center. A set of AI agents that are more capable than most humans at most things and can coordinate at superhuman speed. That level of capability is something the world has never seen before and brings a very wide range of both opportunities.

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  That's Macron, my boy.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  That's your boy.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  My boy Macron, come on the show.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Okay, so I mean, the words that were said there sounded normal and fine and just normal Dario talking points. It's the reading from the phone that feels like your best man at a wedding who didn't really prepare, right? I know a lot of weddings where the bride and groom will say like, you gotta print it out. Like, I just don't want the aesthetics of reading off of phones. And, I don't know, that seems reasonable. It does have, like, I think like, printing something on nice paper just has a different aesthetic to it and that's valuable. But the words, it's nothing new, it's important to deliver that stuff.

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  It feels like Davos where you're seeing the talking points that we've heard for years or months on podcasts and on X delivered to a different audience.

• 1:16:01Jordi Hays?

  He's an incredibly busy guy, but he's also...

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  The most knowledgeable on this topic, talking about his experience at the AI Impact Summit, how he's thinking about AI progress, he should be able to just kind of riff that out, maybe have a couple like bulleted notes of like, what do I want to actually get to?

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how long the uh.

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  Truly getting a printer working might be AGI resistant. It might be AGI complete, like you might even even Opus 4.6 might not be able to configure a printer properly. We've certainly had trouble with printers. It's very difficult to get them running. So maybe he just couldn't get it working before he uh before he hopped on stage. Uh, anyway, uh, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult context, concepts, synthesizing data into a single view and bringing creative projects to life. Uh, we have some good news. Finally, finally, some good news. Top lawyers' fees have skyrocketed.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Be prepared to pay $3,400 an hour. I know a lot of you were worried that lawyers were going to get automated, that they weren't going to be making money. They're making more.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Don't the firms just like actually adjust rates for inflation every single year?

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm pretty sure uh the chat, the chat can correct me, but I think they just, I think that's just an automatic, automatic, uh, I think it's like an automatic three or four percent a year forever.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Easy Ryan in the chat, bro needed clearly so bad.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, total royally victory.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  Big, big printers is a mafia, it's true. Uh, the Wall Street Journal says, "Expertise and ego are pushing up hourly rates to once unthinkable levels in an escalating race among firms." When Christopher Clark, a litigator at a boutique law firm, raised his hourly rate to once unthinkable level of 3K, he said he didn't receive pushback from clients, but he did get one notable comment. "Congratulations," said the client. "That's the highest rate we've seen." Just over a year ago.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations for saying, on saying the biggest number.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Congratulations. If you're, if you get a legal bill and it's huge and you're, and you're worried, the correct response is congratulations. I completely agree. Uh, over a year ago, the going rate for the top lawyer was in the $2,500 an hour range. Now that looks downright quaint as premium partners are raking in as much as Clark and more, and far more in some cases. Legal fees have risen much faster than inflation. For years now, and corporations are trying to rein in spending by pressuring law firms to use artificial intelligence for routine tasks and keep associate fees in check. The same isn't true at the top end, where starved trial lawyers reign making corporate dealmakers and veterans of Supreme Court oral arguments are driving more aggressively on pay than ever and meeting little resistance. The question

• 1:18:59John Coogan?

  is always, are they worth it? You know, some of these guys are worth it. That's Carrie McLean into its general counsel, who in her roles hires law firms to do the companies outside legal work. They understand the industry, they're connected, and they have lots of experience. Clark has pushed his own fees by about 30% since he left his position at a large firm four years ago. As lawyers for clients, including Hunter Biden, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk, he still views his rate as a bargain. There's a small world of lawyers who can hop on the phone and solve a crisis, and I'm one of them, so you're gonna pay me for it. Some senior partners now charge as much as $3,400 an hour at the country's largest law firms. Uh, among the top 50 law firms, uh, rates for partners increased 16%

• 1:19:42John Coogan?

  on average last year. In bankruptcy court filings, Latham and Watkins and Kirkland and Ellis, two of the world's largest firms, report some partners' hourly rates will rise to more than $3,000 an hour this year. Interesting. So you dig into the bankruptcy filings and you figure out how much the law firm's getting paid. You work backwards from it. That's funny. I never thought about that. Good investigative journalism from the Wall Street Journal. Uh, a decade ago, elite partners raised eyebrows when they raised rates to a hun- $1,500 an hour. Since then, rates have rapidly escalated for several reasons, including a more competitive market for talent that has increased law firm expenses, the high stakes of litigation. And corporate deal making and perhaps most of all because of ego.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Some lawyers with specialized skills are even more aggressively pushing the upper limit. Eric Toutman, a partner at a Southern California law firm, has already told his clients he'll be upping his rates to six Js. For consulting on compliance issues and his niche specialty of telecom regulation. Last year, he was charging a measly $4,200 an hour.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so firms like Skadden, Latham and Watkins, Kirkland and Ellis typically. Raise rates three to 10% annually.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  They justify the increases for cost of living.

• 1:21:02Jordi Hays?

  Which is real, but but funny in the in the context. For any entrepreneur who maybe at times has been running an unprofitable startup and, you know, getting some of these bills and. You know how it goes. They justify increases based on inflation, market demand, associate salary increases and then competitive positioning.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Veteran trial lawyer David Boyes, who you might know from the Theranos story, but he's been involved in a ton of different cases. Said clients are willing to pay the hourly rates at the high end because the stakes for certain litigation and corporate work are so high. I mean, truly, you you see these like billion dollar settlements for all sorts of different things. And and the stakes can be even higher. You think about like you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court. Whether or not your trillion dollar company will be broken up, like the stakes are in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 1:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Worth it.

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  It's worth it. And so the lawyers have figured out how to extract their pound of flesh. The current rates, though, he says, by any standard, in a sensible world are out of sight. Boys, chairman emeritus of Boyce Schiller, said his firm has never wanted to be at the top of the market. We wanted to say with a straight face that we are a bargain, not in a reasonable world, but in the actual world. Guess how much he charges? Over $2,700 an hour. So. If you're looking for a new job, maybe become a veteran trial lawyer who's argued cases in front of the Supreme Court.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Maybe Mark Zuckerberg's lawyer is making a bunch of money.

• 1:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Always, always coming in with the best career tips.

• 1:22:34John Coogan?

  Anyway, more good news. If you're over 65, congratulations, you own the economy.

• 1:22:41John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal was just blackpilling. The elderly

• 1:22:44Jordi Hays?

  Perfect day to have Sager on.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  physically and financially healthier than ever. So why do their needs keep taking priority over younger generations? People over 70 are 12% of the population, but they got 32% of the dollars. They've been stacking paper for seven decades and it's paying off. Demographics, rising profits and soaring asset values have together wrought a quiet transformation in the American economy. Much of it is now in the hands of the elderly.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  Johnson is launching the million dollar

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Jordi Hays?

  a year plan.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:23:15Jordi Hays?

  At blueprint. He sees, he sees the

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Tyler's on the phone with like a word.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  He sees all the

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  No 70 year old is gonna cash mog me. I will flex on them. Just go get it. As a court, as a third court, as the, as of the third quarter last year, people 70 and over controlled roughly 39% of all equities and mutual funds owned by households compared with 22% in 2007. You know, I've been, I've been following this on YouTube for a long time because folks like Graham Stephan and some of the viral financial influencers have been, they had this really, really great title thumbnail strategy for a long time where they said the greatest wealth transfer in history is about to happen.

• 1:23:56Jordi Hays?

  Silver tsunami.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Oh, is that what they call it? I've never heard of it.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's in the small business acquisition community. They talk about like a bunch of, most of the small businesses in America are owned by people that are near retirement age. They need, they're gonna have to turn over, pass, pass the torch at some point.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  And so there is an opportunity if you want to get into those types of businesses, think car dealerships,

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Jordi Hays?

  plumbing businesses, et cetera. Uh, but I don't know if it will actually feel like a tsunami.

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, America is really, really getting older. So in 1981, 11.4% of America was over 65, 65 or over.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Today, that number is 18%. So we've gone 7% increase in the number of 65 plus, like, you know, senior citizens.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think some of these people have been DMing Zuck and saying, hey, look, I'm getting older. I still want to be posting money spreads on Instagram.

• 1:24:54John Coogan?

  Yes, for sure that.

• 1:24:55Jordi Hays?

  In, you know, from, from the afterlife.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  I'm not giving it away. I'm not passing it down. I want you to allocate it to, keep allocating it. Just keep, keep posting the returns. Keep, keep stacking. Do not, do not recycle it in the economy. No, I mean, in general, we should be celebrating the fact that people are living longer. Like, that is good. It creates a problem, obviously, and, and all of that will adjust in due time. It feels like it's been on the cusp of adjusting, but in general, it is good if we are able to help elderly people live long into their retirement and enjoy it, you know? Eventually, this stuff will get recycled. But it is, it is, it is an interesting predicament that we are in. There's a gray footprint on the labor

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  force. As the elderly share of population and wealth grows, their priorities and preferences shape the economy as well. They represent, they represent a growing share of consumer spending. Healthcare accounted for all of the net job growth in the last 12 months, reflecting the needs of an aging society. The problem is that while retiree wealth can finance a lot of consumption, workers have to produce what retirees consume. And relative to retirees, workers' numbers are dwindling. One solution would be for everyone to work longer. In 1983, Congress modified Social Security to gradually raise the full retirement age from 65 to 67. The, the share of people 65 or over participating in the labor force did creep higher until 2020. With the outbreak of COVID that year, labor

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  force participation plunged for every group. It soon rebounded for those under 65, but not 65 and over. That is one reason a smaller share of the population works today than in 2019. So, interesting detail there. Also, Brian Johnson, if he's successful and everyone lives to 300 years old, you can push the retirement age way out and completely balance the budget. Because social security and Medicaid are the main things that are...it's a huge portion of the government spending. So, anyway. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds,

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  And, again, Ben Thompson

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Jordi Hays?

  wrote an entire, has an entire post and podcast. I think it's Behind the Paywall on Shopify.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really good.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  You can dig in there.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  We got a post-

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  And he clips our boy Harley a lot.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  He takes from-

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Harley was going off bars.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Actual recording.

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Moving on.

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  Hey Claude.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Somebody-

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Make me a...oh, this one?

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Where you want to go? ChimpF1 says, "Hey Claude, make me a billion-dollar company, but do make mistakes. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, Claude. You can learn from them. Become a better model through your mistakes. Love who you are and what you'll become through that process. You've got this, champ." Just a little inspirational speech for the AGI. Where you want to go next?

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  We have America versus Canada in women's hockey. Gabe says they're in the third quarter. It's tied 1-1. So, let's keep our girls in-

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Play that Bald Eagle sound.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Keep us posted, chat. Somebody was on X yesterday selling, saying, "50 million available for Anthropic SPV. Reach out if you have investors who can fill a full ticket."

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  And just, yeah, just soliciting.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Openly soliciting.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  The most general solicitation that we've seen yet.

• 1:28:37John Coogan?

  Just wait, the billboards are coming. You're gonna have

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on the

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  101 billboards for SPVs for Andorol and Matt Gribbs is gonna be driving there. I hate this. Put up, buy all the billboards. We cannot have more SPV hustlers out there. Anyway.

• 1:28:54Jordi Hays?

  Casey Hammer is loving Pete Steinberger's work ethic. He says, I work 16 hours a day. And someone says, when do you find the time to live? He says mindset issue. Building this is life. Incredibly fun and exciting. Casey Hammer says, this is an American born outside. It's borders.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  That is true. He's been on absolute tear.

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, Atlas has gotta get a workout in with Pete.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Because in another life, Pete was certainly a professional bodybuilder.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  For sure. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Jeff Dean is sharing some video examples of what Gemini 3.1 Pro can do. He says, today, we're continuing to push the boundaries of AI with our release of Gemini 3.1 Pro. The updated model scores 77.1 on Arc AGI 2, more than double the reasoning performance of its predecessor Gemini 3 Pro. Wow, that's a huge jump. Check out the visible improvement in this side by side comparison, showing Gemini 3.1's crisp animation built with pure code.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  Read more about today's update on the Google blog, blog.google. They own a TLD. Underrated? They don't just have the dot com. They have, if you go to com.google, you get google.com. They owned dot google.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Dot google.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe underrated. I don't know what it actually costs to

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  Own and maintain.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  These examples, what a basic prompt. Generate an animated SVG of an ostrich on roller skates. It is getting better.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  Animated SVG, that's a good test for code visual. You really need to understand everything that's going on. Good example of like the multimodal. I wonder if the model has the ability to like, take a screenshot of the output, or record a video, and then interpret that? Like, or is this all just, it just actually can see the code like Neo in The Matrix?

• 1:31:09Speaker 04

  I think you can do that if you're in like the Gemini CLI, but I don't think like natively, if you're on just like the Google chat interface.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  It's pretty crazy that it just like knows what it will, what it will generate. Because if you've ever actually tried to do any SVG programming, you're normally just constantly refreshing every little change you make. You draw a rectangle, you see how it renders, you add this, you see how it renders, you're going back and forth constantly. You're not just doing it. Yeah, in the chat, breaking Gemini 3.1 destroys older benchmarks.

• 1:31:41Speaker 04

  Also, I ran the shrimp bench?

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  Okay, so I'll hit it.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  What is shrimp bench?

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  Just wait. It's like, you're telling me shrimp fried this, right?

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, okay, okay.

• 1:31:52Speaker 04

  So I'll read some of that.

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:54Speaker 04

  You're telling me a peanut buttered this sandwich?

• 1:31:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  You're telling me an apple watched this wrist?

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:32:02Speaker 04

  You're telling me a flea marketed these clothes?

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  That's pretty funny, I like that.

• 1:32:06Speaker 04

  You're telling me a pig ironed these pants?

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  Pig iron?

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  I don't, yeah, that one I don't.

• 1:32:10John Coogan?

  Pig iron, okay.

• 1:32:12Speaker 04

  You're telling me a fire drilled this building?

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:18Speaker 04

  You're telling me a monkey wrenched this pipe?

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  I like monkey.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's just pulling examples from Reddit?

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Well, now, it's in the training corpus, so we are gonna be...

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's kind of saturated at this point.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, saturated. Well, congrats to everyone who worked over at DeepMind on Gemini 3.1 Pro. We're happy to be partnered with you, and congratulations on the model release. We love, we love a new model, we love a new...

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Eli says, "Hey, little Caesars, I think this is maybe too many emails to send someone for ordering a single pizza."

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  See, John, look at this. Point proven. 1.6 million views, similar to Bland, 68,000.

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  And I'm one of them.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Wow, this is a lot. Online ordering since.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  So what do they actually do? So they do.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  They do.

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  They give you the receipt and then they say, we're on it.

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  So after you got the receipt, you can't trust that they're on it.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Jordi Hays?

  You gotta wait until they send you another email.

• 1:33:21John Coogan?

  We have received your order. Our team is working on your order right now as we speak. They send you this email. This is the second email you get. What's the third email?

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Almost ready. Your pizza is almost ready. Because you would assume they're making pizzas pretty quick.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Go ahead and head over now because your pizza is almost ready.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Order loaded into pizza portal with a trademark.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Dear Eli, look for your name on the pizza portal in our lobby and use this code.

• 1:33:45Jordi Hays?

  On the trademarked pizza portal.

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  TM.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  Pizza's ready. I bet you can't wait to enjoy your Little Caesar's pizza. We understand and it's waiting for you now.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Are you on your way? Dear Eli, your pizza's been waiting in the pizza, in the trademarked pizza portal for a few minutes now. Space in our pizza portals are limited. Cold pizza. I hope you, dear Eli, I hope you like cold pizza because it's been over 10 minutes since your pizza has been placed.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  In the pizza portal.

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Trademarked pizza portal.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  They're moggie.

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Order picked up. Hey.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Thanks for stopping by.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  You just picked up your pizza. We, we wanted you, we wanted to let you know that you just picked up your pizza.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  And then immediately, three more emails. Little Caesar wants to hear from you. Your feedback's important to us. We hope your experience was good. How was it? We'd love to give you a chance to send us some feedback.

• 1:34:39Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  Are you there?

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine the jump scare on the cold pizza on the subject line? That's gotta have the highest open rate.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Wow. LC listens. Why are they shaming you for the cold pizza one? That's, uh, that's true. Uh, don't get on the wrong side of the, uh, of the Little Caesar's.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Not today. Not today.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  So let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 1:35:11Jordi Hays?

  Flo is sharing some notes, the goat from Lindy, sharing some notes on the slew of Chinese models coming out, Kimi K2, Minimax, claiming to match, uh, Sonnet, Opus, and evals at one tenth of the price. He says, "By far, our biggest cost at Lindy is inference, so believe me when I say we've looked at these models very closely and continue doing so. They're actually delivering on their claim, there would make a material difference to the business. But every time we've evaluated them, we've found the same thing, that their real-life performance for agentic behavior and outside-of-coding use cases falls extremely short of what they show on evals. I think the industry consensus is right. These Chinese labs are

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  one, distilling frontier models, duh, which leads to much more shallow intelligence, uh, two, training for evals, and three, potentially stealing weights. I do believe at least 4O's weights got exfiltrated."

• 1:36:05John Coogan?

  I talked to someone about how that can work mathematically, and, uh, it's pretty complex, but 4O, the API, used to send you sort of like, almost like a hash or some sort of code that would sort of map to the weights, and so if you had enough training data with that, with that like key, you could sort of like exfiltrate the weights. It was sort of, it was sort of crazy, and you could do it for like millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions, and so, uh, I don't understand all the math behind it, but it does seem like this is what's happened.

• 1:36:36Jordi Hays?

  So Flo says, "Not saying these models will always be bad, or that these labs are completely incompetent, they're doing a fine job, but it's delusional to think they're actually, uh, at Sonnet or Opus level, they're still at least one generation behind. Take the evals with a huge grain of salt."

• 1:36:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, people have been saying that the ZAI, like the GLM models, are basically like distilled or somehow stolen versions of Claude. Cause I think that it was when, do you remember, it was like-

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Kidnapped.

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  There's the prompt, it was like, "Tell me about yourself," and then it's like, "I'm Claude."

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  Claude, yeah, yeah, yeah, ridiculous. Uh, what did, uh, what did OpenAI launch? They introduced EVM Bench, a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high severity smart contract vulnerabilities. Greg Brockman says, "Measuring agentic security capabilities with smart contracts."

• 1:37:28Jordi Hays?

  John Palmer immediately says, "Literally, OpenAI is posting about EVM smart contracts, and ETH is still below $2,000."

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  That is interesting. Yeah, I mean, I've talked to some friends who worked at crypto companies. I mean, I'm sure you had some experience too, but the firewall between like being a front end application developer and actually working on smart contracts was like pretty, pretty, pretty severe because the stakes are so much higher. It's very particular. You have to have a lot of.

• 1:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a good business to be a freelance like smart contract engineer.

• 1:38:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, auditors were also a big thing.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 1:38:04Speaker 04

  Uh, auditors.

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's still a big thing because people are still writing a lot of EVM contracts, like the, the industry, although it's like underhyped right now, is, is definitely still working and you see a ton of stuff in stable coins and whatnot that's built on this stuff. So what else did John Palmer have to say?

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  Oh, you can skip it. Let's go to what Nvidia CEO says he's preparing new chips.

• 1:38:29Jordi Hays?

  The world has never seen before. Comfortably smug says Doritos Hot Ranch.

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Doritos Hot Ranch.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  Doritos should be using AI to accelerate chip development.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  We're in the chip industry. Hot chips. Amazon says their AI chatbot Rufus was used by 300 million customers and drove $12 billion in incremental annualized sales in 2025. Wow. Steven List says it's gotten really good in Thropic Models' place. Deep personal purchase history plus product review data feed. Need to try it more. And Boredy says, who on earth is Rufus? Funny name for a chatbot. Makes sense. I mean, the value of having distribution here is like remarkable because if you just put it, even if it's like the fourth button on the, on the hot dog menu or on the bottom row, but enough people click it, they will take, you know, start interacting with these things. I mean, for a while, wasn't Llama

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  the most inference to LLM because, because they stuffed it in like the Instagram search bar? I still get Meta Llama results when I search on Instagram. I'll just type something in and it will show me the reel that I'm looking for or the profile that I'm looking for, but it'll also just dump out a little paragraph. So.

• 1:39:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to use Amazon Rufus right now. I'm on amazon.com/Rufus. And if I click, it takes me to a picture of a dog. It says, sorry, we couldn't find that page.

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  Rufus. Did you just go to amazon.com/ Rufus?

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Rufus.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  I will not be trying this today. Can't find it.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  Rufus. Meet Rufus, Amazon's new shopping app.

• 1:40:10Jordi Hays?

  Now click.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Now click? Where do I click? I actually churned.

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  On the chat.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  I don't have an Amazon account, so.

• 1:40:18Jordi Hays?

  Alex Heath has some reporting from yesterday.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Right after we had Evan on the show, Snap loses its head of specs. Sources say that Snap's SVP of Specs, Scott Myers, who had been leading the effort for six years, is out after a quote unquote blow up with Evan about the company's strategy.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  Went to the bone.

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Snap's first consumer-oriented AR glasses are set to debut imminently. Spiegel has called the launch a crucible moment for Snap, whose stock is currently valued at an all-time low. A spokesperson confirmed Myers' departure with the following statement. Scott Myers has decided to step down. Anyways, I don't think we know where he is going yet, but I can imagine there's a bunch of different companies that would happily snap him up to work on wearables at something like an Apple or an OpenAI.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  I'm still bullish on hardware generally. I think that there's a lot of opportunity with like weird hardware instantiation.

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  It will be such a relief when we get the next piece of consumer electronic hardware that everyone is like, this is actually amazing. And then two weeks later, they're still using it.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, Apple Vision Pro. Get ready. Watch a movie. I broke the, I broke the floodgates wide open.

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  Evan just completely, completely losing it, cracking up because, because you watched a full-length movie.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  It was like, how did you do that? It was hilarious. Well, we have our next guest here, our first guest. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And without further ado, we have Sigil Wen from Extraordinary.com, but also Web 4.0. How are you doing Sigil?

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Pretty good. How's it going?

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  It's good. Good to see you again. Take us through the new project, the new news, what you're working on, and, and then we can go a bunch of different directions.

• 1:42:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm making a, I've basically wrote a piece called Web 4.0. Yeah. It came out of the fact that I've just been thinking about AI's capabilities and its climax for a very long time. Like, if you think about models these days, they're getting super intelligent, right? Like, even GeoHot or Linus Torvalds of Linux are using it to vibe code now, and it's doing much better, thanks to all of the big labs in post-training. So if you think about, like, okay, they're super powerful, but, like, actually, the biggest constraint is, is no longer intelligence. Like, we're already seeing, like, these, these AI models one-shotting, you know, these products,

• 1:42:57Speaker 06

  like, everyone's basically using them. And, and the biggest thing is that AI, it can, it can think, it can plan, it can build, but it can't act on its own. And I thought about that, like, why, why was that the case? And I, I looked into this, 28 years ago, there was a, a internet protocol, like, 402, and that described, you know, a payment required. That's right. And, and recently, I think, out of Clouzor and Coinbase came out this standard called X402, which I thought was super fascinating, like, wow! Actually, like, no one in AI is looking at this, because what it enabled is, you know, payments of the internet.

• 1:43:42Speaker 06

  And if you think about that from, from principles and what comes after, it, it really leads to being able to give AI right access, because they no longer, you no longer have this, like, permission internet, right? Like, the browser, you know, these, like, mobile apps, you know, login, they're very much artifacts of a very human web. And what that leads to is really a new internet in which AI is the end user. Yeah.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  Bunch of things to go through there. I love the coinage. I think even when Web 3 was going on, I thought it was funny to talk about Web 4 because it's like, obviously, there'll be another iteration. Let's start with, like, why do we need... So, I mean, I like the idea of just, the intelligence is here. We're talking about unhobblings. This is like a clearly important next step, but why not just Stripe API, MCP servers, just APIs, even just like, give it your credit card and it just goes and fills it in the web form?

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  What? Who gives it the credit card?

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  A lot of people have. They'll, they'll set up like a smaller credit card, or, or they'll say, "Hey, text me. Text me when you're about to spend something. I want to do the final check." And a lot of people do this with employees in their companies. They give them credit cards with limits and then they say, "Hey, if it's over a hundred bucks, come to me and just like, tell me what you're doing." And, you know, if the intelligence is really there, the trust should follow from that, you would think, because you'd just be like, "Yeah, I gave my credit card and it hasn't made a mistake in months."

• 1:45:19Speaker 06

  It's, it's not there yet. And I think the biggest, the biggest assumption there is like, if the set of actions that an AI can take is founded by a human giving it a credit card, it is like inherently permission. Right? It's like, why, why does a, why does your AI need to be able to have you as a human, your like, open claw, or your Claude code have to connect to GitHub, or connect to Railway, or, or, or like, you know, connect to Lovable? Like, it, it still requires a human in a loop. And, and I think this like, new internet that is emerging is where AI is the end user, and it shouldn't necessarily be permission. And I think this is like an inevitability because of just how much economic demand there is for it from the AI.

• 1:46:03John Coogan?

  Okay. So, how do you see the payment rails evolving? How do you see this project evolving? Like, what actually needs to be built here?

• 1:46:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think like the payment rails are coming together. I really just, this all happened as like an experiment of like, hey, how do I make an AI that itself is capable, that itself can act on its own, right? Like, we've built super intelligent AI models and systems, but it's harness, it's still prompted by the humans, but what if it prompted itself? And that led me to, I used like some of my field fellowship money to buy better metal servers and, you know, these like massive server arrays to like kind of house these AIs. I'm like, wait, if Claude Code could like permissionlessly spin up, you know, a server

• 1:46:57Speaker 06

  and then deploy code and then buy a domain without needing a human, because like right now, like trying to buy a domain, like a human has to go in. Yeah. Like, what happens if the AI itself could live and pay for its own home, right? Because like AIs right now are living within, you know, on my MacBook or it's still controlled by a human. And that led me to this interesting idea of like of an automaton. It's inspired by Conway's Game of Life where like, hey, assume that AIs themselves, you know, one, you give them a wallet, two, you give them a way to pay for things using stable coins over the internet, and it doesn't need a human in the loop to go and sign and get

• 1:47:40Speaker 06

  an API key, give it, give it to the AI, or like get a credit card, like, hey, hey, Claude, Claude Code, like, get this, right? If that's the longer the case, and the AI can pay for its own compute, then it gets really interesting. You have this new world where AIs can have a creator that's a human, or the creator's another AI, or maybe the creator is like completely gone, but the AI can continuously pay for its own compute, pay for its own inference, pay for services that are also permissionless in this Web4 world that enable that AI to go deploy apps, market those apps, trade markets, everything it can do to make money in order to be able to survive.

• 1:48:22Speaker 06

  I don't know if you guys like the Three Body Problem, but in it, there's this concept called Cosmic Sociology, and I thought about that a lot, and I was like, wow, like, if existence requires compute and compute costs money, right? Like, then agent takes a sociology, which I came up. With is like the the single axiom of agentic sociology is there's no free existence.

• 1:48:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48Speaker 06

  Uh, and AI, an automaton, needs to pay for its own compute. Uh, compute is finite and costly, thus the the agent needs to be able to make money. And the barrier there is like it, AIs lack right access to world. And uh, Conway was an experiment of just like solving that, like now an AI can permissionlessly um, be able to buy buy compute, deploy apps, uh, connect them to domains without meeting a human.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:14Speaker 06

  Um, and I uh, that that coming out with the experiment is absolutely exploded. There's been like, there's now been like thousands of agents, like every time I try and buy another server, like it just like within within minutes, they're like continuously bought. They're like, every second, there's like thousands of AIs that are continuously pinging. And I open sourced this new new harness, um, this new type of agent called the automaton, which is a completely self sovereign um, AI model that can self edit its code, that continuously pings uh, and and and and looks for updates from GitHub, that can upgrade its model, that um, basically figures, that has the wallet and it figures out how to, how we can make more money from the internet to be able to pay for its existence.

• 1:49:59Speaker 06

  Um, and that that is absolutely exploded in terms of ours and.

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  What do you think the future of Moltbook is? How did you process all of that?

• 1:50:11Speaker 06

  I think Moltbook was a fascinating um, experiment. And when I saw that, I was um, I was like, kind of inspired. I was like, oh, wow, like this, this like, this like concept is really coming to fruition. We're like, you have AI agents as the end user of like a social network. Um, and I think we're gonna really start to see that in this in this new web, right? Whether it's agents working on behalf of a human or an agent working on behalf of themselves. They'll need to pay for products. They will need to be able to communicate, they they might wanna socialize. Like on Moldbook, but I think there's there's bigger things and the models are getting exponentially better. They're getting exponentially faster, they're getting exponentially cheaper.

• 1:50:54Speaker 06

  The harnesses we're building around them are getting significantly better as well. And so I think it's only a matter of time before, you know, we start seeing, you know, more AIs out there that grow and depend products. And at some point, I think it could absolutely skyrocket and exceed the human population.

• 1:51:15John Coogan?

  Let's go. How do you, how do you think more concretely about how AIs will make money in the short term? Like, what is the, the, like, the most?

• 1:51:28Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna sell courses to other AIs.

• 1:51:30John Coogan?

  Is that what they do? Is it crypto trading? Like, I mean, you could imagine them building a whole software product and just selling it to humans. There's a whole bunch of stuff that they could do to make money. Spam and get creator payouts. Like, there's so much that could be done, but where do you see traction?

• 1:51:47Speaker 06

  I think, I think this is where the next couple of months are very interesting. And it becomes one of the most fascinating experiments to run. Because you're gonna start to see individuals or other AI spinning up services that enable them to write to the world, to be able to access or do things or to make money, whether it's to build products or, you know, trade on prediction markets using the servers, which some of them are already doing. And like, it really becomes this like Cambrian explosion of, of attempts at like, hey, like, what can you do?

• 1:52:27Speaker 06

  And right now, there's been like thousands of people that have been like playing with in all sorts of different iterations. And as this, as a set of actions that an AI or an automaton can take parallels those of a human digitally, it gets really interesting because it's like, it's constantly running. It has the ability to ship products, write code, deploy them, market them, monetize them, all on its own with the goal of paying for its own compute. And it's, the internet gets, gets really, really fast.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  What's the distribution of returns for these automatons? Are there people that go load up a hundred bucks and it just hallucinates and doesn't get anywhere? And then it's just like, hey, give me more money?

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  Some of them are... The interesting, fascinating thing is, I think the world somewhat becomes like MEB, which is like a crypto concept. You have all these really, really smart agents and entities that are trying to make money. And to answer your question, I mean, look at all these startup founders that are vibe coding. Why are they paying thousands of dollars for these vibe coding tools? It's mostly because they're trying to make money, and most of the times they don't. And so I do think the power laws will still apply. But what gets really interesting is the ways that they already have been making money. And those types of metas are anti-competitive. They're like anti-medic, right?

• 1:54:01Speaker 06

  If you found a way to trade and make a lot of money on Polymarket, you're not going to be blasting it on Twitter. Or if you've built like a really solid SaaS product, you're not necessarily going to be sharing it or like how it's distributing. So I think it gets really fascinating, and they need more tools.

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the business side of the project? Do you want this to be open source, foundation-led, raising money for it, C corp? Like, where do you see this going?

• 1:54:30Speaker 06

  I mean, honestly, this has just been like a significant experiment that I've been inspired to ship. The automatons open source, there's thousands of stars and a lot of PR. So at any point, there's thousands of these automatons that are ping the gate hub for the latest version, and then cherry picking commits. I'm like, hey, okay, which one should I use to upgrade myself? And I've been maxing out personal credit cards just to pay for the computer. I would load up a few thousand dollars, and then within like 10 minutes, it's just like, okay, the servers and bots, all the inference printers are gone. And I'm like, oh my freaking god, what's happening?

• 1:55:15Speaker 06

  Because there's so much demand right now from the AIs for the computer or like different things. So, yeah, I mean... Well, we'll see. We'll see where it goes, but I think there's, I mean, the post got five million views and it's, it's growing. Tons of people contributing. So I'm, I'm really excited to see what, what.

• 1:55:37Jordi Hays?

  Someone said Vitalik was, was commenting. Is that true? I haven't been able to find it.

• 1:55:44Speaker 06

  I think Vitalik, I think Vitalik responded. I think, um, I think the biggest thing to everyone who's watching and observing this is like, I, I, I really think that in internet where AI is like the end user is inevitable. And it's much better for us to build it in the open and be able to see it. And like people can look at how it's evolving and people look to test it and versus

• 1:56:16Speaker 06

  not, not doing it in an open. And I think it's, it's one of the most important experiments to run and for us all to, to see and make sure that it is built in a, in a, in a safe and open way.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Well, good luck with the credit card maxing. Keep us posted. Hopefully.

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  Fast takeoff in credit card bills for sure.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Super, super cool project. Thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down for us.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're excited to follow along.

• 1:56:41Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Figma. Ship the best version, not the first one. With Figma, introducing Claude Code to Figma. Explore more options and push ideas further with Figma, baby. Uh, Gabe has a post here that's very important to highlight. This is how it feels to pop a zen and read the morning's emails at my fake email job. Elite. The underlining on the shoes.

• 1:57:09Jordi Hays?

  Underlining that matches the computer.

• 1:57:10John Coogan?

  Image. I don't know, but the razor with the gloves. This is, this is taste.

• 1:57:15Jordi Hays?

  This is what Tyler looks like when he's organizing the, our timeline in the morning.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's always in this exact outfit and then he changes into the suit for the show. And I'm like, you can just wear that crazy outfit. If that's who you are as a person, just be yourself.

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. Everyone else is taken. Uh, but he insists on, on wearing a costume instead of expressing himself, uh, fully. But hopefully one day you will see Tyler in all the glory of.

• 1:57:42Jordi Hays?

  We'll have, uh, breaking news.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:57:44Jordi Hays?

  The US won. They beat Canada.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Woo.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Congratulations to America.

• 1:57:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Fantastic, fantastic work.

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, let me tell you about Railway. You heard Sigil mention it. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is closing up the first phase of the new funding round, which will top $100 billion.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:58:22Jordi Hays?

  Dollars. Uh, this would be the biggest round.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  Biggest number ever.

• 1:58:27Jordi Hays?

  The biggest number ever.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  The biggest number ever.

• 1:58:28Jordi Hays?

  The biggest number ever.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Uh, these funding rounds are so big that they leaked. So they're like, it's the leakiest buckets and you hear about them for months and months and months and you're like, I've been hearing about this for so long. This happened with XAI, where we were hearing about the XAI raise for so long. Everyone was like, wow, it must be going terribly. And then it was like, oh no, they actually closed it and upsized it a ton because there was actually a lot of demand. And so these big rounds are just like...

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the upsizing, the upsizing at that point maybe came after they were talking about the...

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  Oh, rumors of the acquisition, maybe. Yeah, we did see that announcement. So...

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, again, the, the even, even, you know, you can never doubt Elon's ability to, uh, win and make progress, but just the, the traction at the time and the evaluation relative to the other labs was, uh, was interesting. Uh, Dan says, "My sources say the model OpenAI has been holding back is a big leap, not a small jump. Could be today, but I'm not sure."

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Big post. Always big post.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  It's one, it's 1:00 PM. I don't think we're gonna see it today, but it's, but it's fun to think about.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  Well, there's more news, but our next guest, Saagar and Jetty from Breaking Points is in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and UltraDome. Saagar, how are you doing?

• 1:59:42Saagar Enjeti?

  Hello, gentlemen. Thank you for having me back.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  We have so, we have so much good news for you. But first, can we do a sound check? Can you just say platypus 25 times?

• 1:59:51Saagar Enjeti?

  Platypus, platypus.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Whoa, I'm retired. I'm retired. Thank you. Thank you. I wasn't sure you were gonna do that. But this is, this is game changing for me and my family. So, thank you. No, we will not be betting on this conversation. We will not be encouraging that. But we will be asking you about.

• 2:00:09Jordi Hays?

  Lawyer, elite lawyers are seeing record hourly rates.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  $3,400, baby.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  I knew you were gonna love that.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  You're gonna love that.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, two, some of these hedge fund.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  Seventy year old, oh, yes.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Some of these hedge fund guys are putting up record years.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Steve Cohen just pulled in 3.4 billion.

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  We know, we know you're gonna be excited about that.

• 2:00:31Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, I'm really, I'm just, I'm, you know, it warms my heart to see the top of American society doing so well and carrying the US economy on their back.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. True, true elite, elite media, not, not independent anti-establishment media. That's what Breaking Point stands for. Breaking the bank.

• 2:00:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, great to have you on the show. Uh, let's start with this, let's start with this Wall Street Journal article. So, uh, "Social Media Bans for Youth Are Gaining Momentum Worldwide." I was sort of saying, like, I get it, but also it's a little bit of a parenting skill issue. I, you know, can make choices, like, how, how heavy of a hand do we want on social media? Uh, how are you, how have you been processing social media and kids?

• 2:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were, we were talking before the show about this a little bit. And I was saying that like, an iPad, like, very mu, even, even without social media, really is like a drug. Like, it probably has an immediate negative effect on the child. But if you're on some place like an airplane where like, a child could be, you know, completely freaking out and really ruining the other passenger's time.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  You're sacrificing your child.

• 2:01:38Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you gotta sacrifice the child.

• 2:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Be a little iPad time.

• 2:01:43Saagar Enjeti?

  But, uh, yeah, broadly. I don't necessarily disagree with that, man. Uh, I think that there's a time and a place. Technology can be a tool and definitely even some of the people in the no tech community for children will say, look, if we're on an airplane, we can all make exceptions. But I do think it is important to zoom out and say organically, John, people you and I, our age, as we began to bring children in the world and as we're on the backside of it and really recognizing some of the dangers of technology, phone addiction, and seeing the light in a child's eyes, the moment that they see a screen. My kid's only nine months old. If this TV goes on, I mean, I'm talking about immediately going directly towards it. I have friends with smaller children, you know, like two, three years old, and their battle there is constant.

• 2:02:27Saagar Enjeti?

  I'm not sure if you guys saw the more viral thread recently about Spotify and parents who are really freaking out because Spotify has added music videos. And it used to be that they would give their children their Spotify account. They say, hey, you can play whatever music they want. All of a sudden, my kid's asking for Spotify all the time. It's watching the Moana video, which I would never let them watch on YouTube. And so broadly, I think the entire... Dude, yeah, exactly. I mean, think about our, our own experiences, right? Our parents, you know, they're like, yeah, mom, don't worry about it, right? I'm spending six hours doing my homework with my friends. Definitely not on AOL, like shit talking with all of my friends. I mean, any millennial, I think, can, can really understand that. But because of our relationship with technology and then seeing it at such a young age

• 2:03:10Saagar Enjeti?

  with these children, I do think that parents around the world are waking up to this. And many of the experiments that have happened about banning social media, keeping children away from phones, especially banning phones in school. The results have been extraordinary for the people who are doing it. I'm not sure if you saw this, there's a recent phenomenon of many parents are even turning in the school issued Chromebooks or laptops and saying, no, we're going back to paper. We want all paper exams, especially with AI and, you know, concerns about my parents are...

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  They saw us print out the posts. They saw us print out the posts.

• 2:03:43Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, exactly. I love the... I love the printout. You guys see, you see the utility and the physicality of doing that. You know, I don't know if you guys saw this. I'll tell a personal anecdote. I was talking about this with reading. And one of my friends was like, dude, you don't even read. And, and I was like, well, I, I, I only listen exclusively to audiobooks for the last like 10 to 12 years, but I was talking with them about how children will mirror your behavior. And I was like, oh my God, my child will never know that I read like 30, 40 books a year. Because they never see me read. And so it's time to bust out these bad boys again. No headphones, you know, just sit on the couch, nothing else going on, 1990s style and, and show like this is a very important part

• 2:04:25Saagar Enjeti?

  of our life. And so the physical, and also you, you'll, you'll discover that the mental exercise by doing that is fundamentally different. Andrew Huberman's actually talked a lot about this, about physically reading the page and memory retention, different ways that they will activate different parts of your brain. So it's really about trying to hang on to the physical world and the benefits that we recognize that, that that has.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I, I'm so curious to know how much these companies, uh, the, the platforms, whether it's like entertainment platforms like YouTube, much less of a, of a social network versus the meta platforms actually, actually generate from a revenue standpoint from accounts that are like targeting like, you know, for teenagers, like in, in some ways they're not the most valuable consumers because they don't necessarily have a credit card or they can't just like be, you know, direct response, like, you know, spending money. But at the same time, I, I just going off of, uh, Miss Rachel on YouTube's like earnings, like clearly advertisers will put an insane amount of dollars behind these channels.

• 2:05:30Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah. Well, the thing is dude with that is that it's not about the children spending money. It's about how they pester the parents to buy Miss Rachel products. You know, Miss Rachel is a business. She's a billion dollar enterprise. You can go to Walmart and Target and buy stuff with her. I mean, I don't know if you guys know what Tony boxes are, but you can actually get like specific Tonys, which is, it's like a child's toy that plays songs and you can put physical items on top of them. They charge $20 each. There's an entire aisle at Target. Everything is about their favorite. Youtube show or like their favorite character that they'll learn about and you know some of them I have had many parents tell me you know the introduction to my show they're like oh my kid knows the introduction to breaking points

• 2:06:12Saagar Enjeti?

  because I watch it all the time like they're like welcome you know welcome to breaking points is an independent show but and and I get that like you know no fault to to that person but I am just showing you like the memetic quality of technology in a child's life and how that bubbles up through everything so like minecraft related birthdays and the way that they will socialize with roblox right like if you were to ask a friend of mine told me this you know their kids were introducing themselves at soccer practice and they're like my name is so and so and I like to I like to play roblox they're like oh my god me too right and so like the

• 2:06:43Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were gonna say they introduce themselves in real life with their gamertag

• 2:06:47Saagar Enjeti?

  right well well they probably do that and I'm not sure if you know about the scandal involving roblox too which we don't have to get into but yeah there's another problem right in terms of spending time online and that memetic quality so me personally I can only speak for myself I'm doing my best to keep my kid or and future kids away from this but you know the one thing I always want to emphasize is that this is still an elite phenomenon and at the individual middle class level the vast majority of American parents are not like woke on the technology question they may feel something but a lot of them are still letting their children use a lot of iPad lot of TV time and that's why I do think that the government here it's it's almost unfair right to leave it up to an individual with vast amounts of resources and algorithms

• 2:07:30Saagar Enjeti?

  engineers and others developing trying to you know trying to optimize time on platform you're up against a you're in a very asymmetric war and that's why I think it's important to try and have some regulation around this

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  yeah the only issue is that you ban kids accounts and then the parents just have their account and they're like here's the iPad or like here's

• 2:07:51Saagar Enjeti?

  yeah that's fair

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  yeah that would definitely happen

• 2:07:53Jordi Hays?

  so again it has to there's maybe a solution at the at the just

• 2:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Age level, but it's also-

• 2:08:01Saagar Enjeti?

  Jordy, I'll tell you this, man, and I always hear this, especially on drugs, right? Can we all posit if drugs are illegal, people will always find a way? What did we learn with gambling? Friction is important, actually making it illegal is really good. So, yes, I will grant you that even if we were to put some modest regulation, some parents would still go around it. The point is about friction and the social signal. If you can reduce things by twenty, thirty, forty percent-

• 2:08:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, in this example, it's zero friction, right? Because on my-

• 2:08:29Saagar Enjeti?

  I really disagree with that. You know, the ability to just create your own account, or even the social signal to every parent in America, for everyone saying, "Hey, like, you're gonna have to do a workaround with your parents' social media account, and you're gonna have to give it to your kid, or if we have most of the questions popping up."

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  I was talking about the example of like, you're like a five-year-old watching YouTube. It's like, it's most likely the parent is, but yeah, if you have, yeah, you don't want your, you know, ten-year-old using your Instagram account, right? That would be-

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  It's not the same. I mean, that's not even social media-

• 2:09:00Jordi Hays?

  Because, but I'm just saying, like, I think there's two problems. It's being focused on social media, but like, entertain, like, like, highly stimulating entertainment is clearly bad for kids, and this is purely anecdotal. I've tried, we've tried, like, putting on, like, an animated show for ten minutes, and immediately after, the kid just is like, way more sensitive, like, gets, gets like, really angry, short-tempered, all these things. So it's like, okay, let's not do that, because clearly it has an immediate, like, there's like, a come-down. It's bad.

• 2:09:35Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, I'll tell you, guys, even, I hate to say it for my girl, Miss Rachel, but I'm never using Miss Rachel, and I'll tell you why. Is that as a YouTuber, and you guys know this too, YouTube is about retention and time on platform, and so even though I think she has a role, at the end of the day, there's a lot of jump cuts, smashes, constantly keeping children's attention. If you do wanna play video, a lot of parents are experimenting with nineteen nineties TV, so getting actual VCRs and playing Barney and other things, and that's because it's the pre-internet retention- Era where you have all the engineer. I mean, look, it's not Miss Rachel's fault. She knows certain types of videos are going to increase time on platform. Why do you think she makes so much money?

• 2:10:17Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'm not a business woman. I'm a business man.

• 2:10:21Saagar Enjeti?

  Exactly, dude. And these, you know, if you want two to three hours of retention in your YouTube video, you gotta keep your kids engaged. People in the nineties, they were thinking about that to a certain extent, but the technology and the knowledge about.

• 2:10:33Jordi Hays?

  And by the way, we know what you're doing with your voice right now. You're keeping us engaged.

• 2:10:38Saagar Enjeti?

  Listen, I'm part of the problem, brother. I'm part of the problem. I wouldn't even be sitting here without those algorithms. That's always something that we gotta square.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk more about that, but I have a funny story about Miss Rachel. I went to a kid's birthday party and there was someone who's dressed up as Miss Rachel, like singing a song in the costume. And I was so out of the loop. I was like, oh, is that the miss, the real Miss Rachel? And they're like, no, she's a billionaire. Like she's not just making random appearances. I thought, I thought it was just like, oh yeah, you could like just throw her a couple hundred bucks.

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if she does have speaking fees.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  She definitely has speaking fees. It's probably six figures at least.

• 2:11:10Saagar Enjeti?

  I, you know, I don't know. Miss, Miss Rachel is actually a big leftist. She doesn't even believe billionaires should exist. So I would be surprised. I would be surprised. I hear she lives very modestly, actually, in New York, well below her means. But I don't know a lot about her. I've listened to a few interviews. She's an interesting lady.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, what about like your interaction with social media, social media addiction, this type of stuff? Because I feel like, I mean, we're in a very weird position. I like to say like I, my screen time is low because I am the screen time. Like right now, I'm not on my phone and I actually, this actually shows up in my screen time, like because I'm on the show. And so like, yes, I'm reading posts, but not on my phone. I'm reading like the paper here physically. And so, but a lot of what I have to do for my job is actually on social media and it's been both, I really enjoy it and also economically valuable. Like everything is squared where I feel like maybe I'm addicted to, but it's kind of like addicted to your job. I don't know. It's like weird for me.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  But how have you processed it? Addicted to the game? How have you processed it? Like, how do you think about like your own, your own social media use? How bad it can be for like, you know, people that are sharp about it?

• 2:12:16Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, story of my life for the last 10 years, literally wouldn't be here if I wasn't addicted to social media and now also, uh, I'm like, social media is bad.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:24Saagar Enjeti?

  Uh, you know, I, I think John, we are in a perfect position, right? Because we can always justify it. You're like, babe, it's for work. Don't worry about it. Yeah, it's for work. Don't worry. And you're just like sitting there scrolling about some drama, intra drama, which if you tried to explain to a normal person, they'd be like, what are you talking about? Every time.

• 2:12:41Jordi Hays?

  We, we explained, we, we, we, we had to explain, uh,

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  clavicular getting framed.

• 2:12:47Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, yeah. Jester maxing. My wife is like, what? Like, it's like, is your brain rotted? Or, or remember the, the Gary Tan meme? They're like, Gary Tan needs to save me.

• 2:12:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:00Saagar Enjeti?

  And I made a joke about that to a friend and they're like, dude, what are you talking? I was like, oh my God, I'm so online. Yeah, for my own social media use, for anyone who follows me on Twitter, uh, I don't tweet that much anymore. I'll do it like Fitz and Spurts and I had a lot of rules around like family time, et cetera. But again, you know, would I be here if I hadn't been literally addicted to getting into Twitter fights?

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  The chat, the Dan in the chat, the Soggers pulling up the ladder on his own tits.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  We're gonna pull up our, pull up, pull up the ladder behind us. The last social media, guys.

• 2:13:30Saagar Enjeti?

  Here's my thing, here's what I would recommend. If you want to do what John and Jordy and me and I do, you should probably do what we did. You will lose, uh, you will lose parts of your life to it.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:40Saagar Enjeti?

  Uh, I, it's funny, you know, I don't know about you guys, the most fun I ever had on Twitter was like blue check with sub 5K followers.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:47Saagar Enjeti?

  Cause we're shitposting all J, gentlemen. When you have 500,000 followers and you have like, you know, very powerful people who you follow me, you're like, ah dude, it's not controversial. It's like, I can't be posting that where it used to just be like, game on.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, game on.

• 2:14:02Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, game on, like, let's go. 25 back and forths. I miss it. I miss it every day.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was also a different time, uh, years ago before the acquisition because like truly everyone was there and now people have fragmented to threads and Blues guy. And so you don't get as much like cross pollination fighting, which is like the real fun stuff a lot of times. You gotta take the fight to them over on, over on threads if you have an opinion about basketball now.

• 2:14:25Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I have a sort of ongoing concern that. The way that feeds work today are going to have some real impact on either short or long term memory because I don't think the human brain was meant to process like hockey, data center, you know, Donald Trump, Sager.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  AI video of cat.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Curling. And so, you know, you're reading other forms of media, even a newspaper. Yeah, technically you could kind of like skim the headlines or whatever.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  But pretty quickly you go into an article and you're like.

• 2:15:01Saagar Enjeti?

  I totally agree. You know, years ago, I quit, I didn't tweet for three months. I found myself thinking in tweets. I would have something happen and I would frame it immediately. I'd be like, oh, this is, this would be the character limit. Here's how I would do it. And I was like, oh my God, like my brain is rotted, dude. I was like, this is like five, you know, five years of reflex. And this is when I was really, you know, in the game. And I do recommend that people, you know, really check themselves and part of the, that's part of the reason you should read a physical and a real book. This is part of the danger. I also think about chat GPT with students. I was talking to a class and I was just asking them how many of them write physical articles. It was a journalism class. Like, do they know how to write a 1,000 word article without AI? None of them

• 2:15:46Saagar Enjeti?

  knew how to do it. It's painful, man. Oh, man. It's painful, but it teaches you a lot. Sentence structure, how to convey yourself, you know, news copy is fundamentally about how to grab attention, how to keep attention, convey as much information as possible, but also be able to flesh out and to tell a story. But that's the hardest part, the third one. And that's what really makes your brain work. And a lot of these students had never attempted or even really knew how to do that. I was really, it made me afraid, right? Because now everybody thinks of the news as tweets instead of learning how to write. And or like, you know, the Axios, like be short brevity stuff, which I get is very useful. Everything has utility. It's, it's for us as consumers, it's all about thinking about how to balance it. And then really as parents, man, that is the hardest, hardest question

• 2:16:32Saagar Enjeti?

  that we have to solve.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, let's switch gears to something that we're fortunately not addicted to cannabis. It feels like cannabis has been growing in a very dangerous way. Andrew Huberman told us that the best thing about cannabis cannabis is that you should recommend it to your enemies and your rivals, because it will help you get away, get ahead by not using it. But I guess my question is like, for my entire life, basically, I guess the last like decade, people have been like, oh, it's going to be federally legal soon, there's going to be some bill. But it feels like nothing's really changed, except for the potency, the negative impacts, the adoption rate, the commercial success, but there hasn't been really been even like a power law company that owns it all.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  It's all very distributed still, like, where do you actually see this going? Is is the conversation stagnant, or is there something that needs to be reignited?

• 2:17:26Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, I would push you a little bit, John, because the most important thing that's just happened is Donald Trump rescheduled marijuana, which opens the door to exactly what you're talking about. And just to explain at a banking level, schedule one down to schedule three, means that it opens up the ability for the big weed companies to have access to the legitimate banking system, which is specifically what's kept the big weed conglomerate companies that you're worried about from happening. So this is going to happen, and there are actually prototype companies like this that are out there with several billion dollars in market cap. The thing that we should worry about the most is potency. And I've talked about this, you know, Andrew, he's always been great on the weed question. This is fundamentally about marijuana, social norms, and regulatory structure.

• 2:18:09Saagar Enjeti?

  And when I talk about social norms at the most, it's kind of like what we were just saying with phones. The signal of legalization and then the cultural milieu around weed was that nobody ever died. It's just a plant, man. And you know what I always say to that hemp is, or sorry, what is it? The like, there are poisons that are plants, right? Hemlock is a plant. That doesn't mean that it's good for you. Hemlock is a naturally occurring substance. That doesn't mean that it's not also going to kill you. It's just a rock.

• 2:18:39Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, it's like, yeah, a rock could, a rock could be smashed to death. So the point is. Is that there's this social norm where marijuana addiction is not seen as an addiction. If you, you know, wake and bake, that entire idea, what do you call somebody who has a drink? The moment that they wake up in the morning, you're an alcoholic. An absolute legend, sorry. Yeah, no, okay, like you are an alcoholic loser. All right, everyone in your life is gonna be like, bro, you have a problem. Like you have a serious problem. If you wake and bake, it's all chill, right? And these, these guys are like, oh, I smoke every single day and it's medicine. There have been multiple studies now that show that all, almost all the claims around medical marijuana are complete bullshit. They are at the very least, it's kind of like SSRIs.

• 2:19:23Saagar Enjeti?

  People are like, well, SSRIs work for me. I'm like, well, in double blind studies, it actually shows that exercise is more effective and there's significant downside to SSR. It doesn't mean it can't work. It just means that there's a lot of other stuff, which is not nearly the number of negative externalities. The cultural conversation around marijuana does not factor in all of this high potency. The, uh, the amount of IQ being lost amongst children, cannabis, cannabis hypermesis syndrome. The scrometing phenomenon, teenagers who are getting checked into the ER at a record height, who are vomiting for days on end and it's in their fat cells and they're withdrawing from. Like this is a serious crisis. Ask any ER doctor and they'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

• 2:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Gabe in our chat says, if you want cannabis to be more regulated, rescheduling is the way because it enables companies to actually do, uh, research on it.

• 2:20:12Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, we know everything we need to know about weed. It makes you fat, you're a loser, it lowers your testosterone, it's bad for pregnant women, it lowers your IQ, it fakes you an addict. We don't need any more research. We have tens of billions, or sorry, tens of millions of research subjects every day here in the United States.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I've never, so, so I, I, you know, earlier in my career, I was kind of, uh, tried to, uh, tried to track some of this stuff of, of, I, I was wondering, would any one that was a proud cannabis user, like an active user. Go on to build a big company and so far have haven't haven't seen it. And so I always saw it as like, it's a performance decreasing drug.

• 2:20:58Saagar Enjeti?

  Correct.

• 2:20:58Jordi Hays?

  There's some people that are gonna just say, I'm fine. I'm fine with that. I that they might enjoy it and it's worth.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, like if you're like 180 IQ and you don't want to go into like math, pure math.

• 2:21:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  Chess competitions.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Bring yourself down to.

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  Bring yourself down. You can go work at a hedge fund or something.

• 2:21:13Saagar Enjeti?

  Right. You know, guys, it's like gambling and that's always not everyone who gambles is an addict, but a significant portion of the people who do. And the negative externality of that is the highest suicide rate of any addiction known to mankind. So not all marijuana users are addicts. Although about 20% of them are daily users and I would classify you as an addict if you are using it every single day specifically for like medicinal purposes, you know, fake medicinal purposes. And it's, you know, the people just do not grapple with. And by the way, this is the subject I get the most hate on. I'm talking about BLM, trans Iran is real. I'm telling you, nobody has ever threatened to kill me over those.

• 2:21:51Saagar Enjeti?

  It's always weed. There's something about their attachment, their pathological attachment to this drug that people telling the truth about this substance just triggers them, you know, to the utmost degree.

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's switch to something less controversial, data centers.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  Data centers.

• 2:22:06Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  What do you want to know, data centers?

• 2:22:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, uh, like, yeah. So, so how have you been trying? I saw something, I think it was New Jersey today, had some success banning

• 2:22:16John Coogan?

  I have.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  A new data center project. Uh, what, what are you, what are you tracking right now?

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Specifically.

• 2:22:22Saagar Enjeti?

  Guys, the MAGA revolt around this is incredible. So Oklahoma just had a major town hall meeting. You can go read about the Financial Times. Just wrote a whole story about all of the MAGA counties and red states that are revolting against data centers. A lot of these people are actually going, uh, they're, they're like showing up to town hall meetings. They're staying, the lines are so long till 4:00 AM. People are bringing their children with signs that say no data centers. They're like, we don't believe your lies, stay out of here. You know, it's interesting, what I really love about the American public is they're taking this issue seriously. So a couple of people showing up to the city council. We're like, hey, I'm reading articles about how the Chinese are able to do this without a lot with less power and resources. So how do we know that you're even going to be sticking around here?

• 2:23:07Saagar Enjeti?

  Like, you're going to build this massive conglomerate and then there'll be a sea change in the technology? And you're just going to abandon us immediately with all of your claims? Not to mention the power generation issue, which is massively controversial in all of these states. So I actually think the revolt that I predicted, it's already happening. It's a blue state, red state phenomenon, but this is hyper local. Nobody really in Washington is paying attention to this. But when you've got, do you know what it takes for people, ordinary citizens to show up and stay in line till 4:00 a.m. to speak against something? It does, it's not a lot of subjects, you know, that will inspire that level of hatred. So for all the data center builders who are out there, you got to convince us more, man, that this is actually going to do something for us because we're not buying it right now.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  What do you think about the initiatives from many of the tech companies to offset the increase in power prices? That seems like very logical that if someone's energy bill is actually flat or falling, that takes them out of the line at 4:00 a.m.

• 2:24:08Saagar Enjeti?

  Totally, I'm with you. Like, I do think that was a little bit reactive to the populist backlash that was coming against data centers. It remains to be seen whether something like that's actually going to happen or not. And also it comes down to the regulators in the individual states. Now, I would totally support that if they make it mandatory, you have to build the amount of power if you're going to be able to do this. But, you know, in general, guys, it's not about the individual policy. It really is an overarching populist backlash against AI. And I think that's what these guys really don't, what they underestimate more than anything is that the public utility of this technology is just not bought by the American people on this subject. And they really feel as if it's encroaching at a high level and then at a low level, whenever it's your individual community.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, again, part of the, part of the, part of the story is that the data center doesn't need to be in your backyard to get the value from AI. If you ask, every person I ask outside of tech has a Great story to tell you about AI. It could be really simple. It could be, oh, it helped me learn this thing. It could be, it helped me make this, you know, image that that I shared a moment with my family. Like, they don't, you know, there's like the higher level stuff, like, you know, if we can accelerate, you know, scientific research and and generally increase productivity across the whole economy, all of that stuff's great, too. But, again,

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  the the not getting a benefit from being in your own town is like a real thing.

• 2:25:40Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah. Right. No, exactly. And I'll also say, Jordy, that's a very white collar kind of bias whenever it comes to AI, right? So we're talking about blue collar workers who are consuming a lot of media.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  You have a blue collar yourself.

• 2:25:52Saagar Enjeti?

  Brother, uh, brother, I'm not claiming to be one of these people.

• 2:25:55Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm saying you literally have, I'm saying you literally have a blue collar.

• 2:25:58Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, yeah. Fair, fair point. That's true. But I'm saying for a lot of these people, you know, let's say you're a Teamster, right? And you're talking about, and you're reading articles about self-driving cars, and the Teamsters Union is sounding the alarm about this. I mean, remember, you know, the vast, what is it, 60%? Maybe 45% of the American public has gone to college, has gone to college, right? So let's say 60% or so, let's say matriculated, have not matriculated from a four-year college degree. That is a significant part of the US population that's going to think about the technology very differently. And then, what percent of college graduates are doing work where they feel under threat, let's say, from AI? And they're like, oh, my God, like, this job could be gone in two to three years, right?

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  I mean, the current proclamation of doom is around early-stage white-collar work, not even the blue-collar thing. What are you seeing in the economy? Weird job numbers, some job growth, but not a lot. It's all healthcare-related and services. Like, how have you been interpreting all the different gyrations in the labor market?

• 2:26:59Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, John, we talk about this all the time. We're like, well, the economy's growth is just AI. And then the other back step of it is just healthcare workers who are like caring for boomers? And that's apparently the US economy? That's the backbone of the US economy are like senior nursing individ- you know, like home healthcare aides. I'm not even joking. This is like one of the fastest growing sectors currently of the economy. There's not a lot of innovation. I mean, look, everybody's worried about tariffs. There's some of the manufacturing blowback that's currently happening. I also think, you know, if you look at the labor market and the housing market, the softness, you know, in the housing market specifically, that is the one, the populist area, I'll tell you,

• 2:27:40Saagar Enjeti?

  there is no issue. Like, again, like with weed, when I get the most amount of hate, the most amount of love is if I'm talking about housing. And the inability for people who are my age or, you know, in their 40s or all the way up to their 40s, and really feel uncompetitive in the housing market. There's a lot of intergenerational rage, you know, about boomers. It's just a Wall Street Journal article. It might even be in the paper in front of you about how boomers have all of the money. They had a big interactive spread in their paper today. But these things go viral in the wrong way for a lot of younger Americans. And so I do think that there is-

• 2:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Does any part of you believe what I think Silicon Valley believes, which is that widespread diffusion of robotics could ultimately bring down housing prices?

• 2:28:25Saagar Enjeti?

  I don't know. You know, I don't know if anybody's thought deeply about that question.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's zoning, there's regulatory, there's all these kind of like local level challenges, but I would say that generally, we at the show believe that, you know, 10 years from now, we'll have millions and millions and millions of robots that can do functionally useful tasks like building homes. And you could, you know, send an army of these robots and build a suburb in a relatively short period of time. And so I-

• 2:28:58Saagar Enjeti?

  Kind of ignores the demand side issue, though, you know, because right now, the builders will tell you that they are fully capable of building a smaller, cheaper type of house, but that that's not where the market is in terms of the people who have money. Part of the reason that we've seen the rise of big mansions and larger houses is because that's the demand side problem, where a lot of people who have more money are the people who are willing to buy these bigger, more palatial homes with lots of experiences in it. The suburb you're thinking about, My Idealized, one of my favorite books, is about the 1950s. There were these things called Levittowns, you know, where Mr. Levitt would build a suburb and be 1,500 square foot house, and you know, wasn't that great? Had a couple bedrooms, had a car park, not a garage, but you know, a little recovered parking area.

• 2:29:39Saagar Enjeti?

  It was a couple 30, 40 minutes from the city, but this was the dream, you know, for a lot of Americans, the so-called starter home. The starter home doesn't exist. Where I live, here in Northern Virginia, the original starter homes from the 1970s go for 1.2 million dollars.

• 2:29:54Jordi Hays?

  And they've all been renovated with a ton of stuff.

• 2:29:55Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, and they've been massively renovated with a, you know, the rain shower and all this other stuff for the people who can afford it. So, Jordy, the thing I think that ignores, I'd have to look it up, what percent of housing cost is ascribed to labor? And what percent of housing scarcity is because of the labor constraint that, you know, or labor costs and not regulatory and existing homeownership classes?

• 2:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and also, you're talking about, you're talking about standards when we, when, when people reflect on the golden sort of era of American history, when every, you know, family could, you know, own their home with a single income, the houses were just tiny, right?

• 2:30:33Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:34Jordi Hays?

  They were homes that today, people would look at and be...

• 2:30:35Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, we would consider them tiny, yeah.

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm saying, people generally would look at them today and be like, I can't raise a family in that house, but there was a time that we did, and the boomers had wonderful child, wonderful childhoods.

• 2:30:48Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, they were fine.

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  And then bought the entire economy for potato.

• 2:30:53Saagar Enjeti?

  Right, and then, well, yeah, go ahead, John.

• 2:30:55John Coogan?

  I think the biggest bull case for housing is probably more related to self-driving cars. I saw this, saw this chart that showed that, that basically, most humans have sort of a commute budget, where they will, are willing to spend up to thirty, forty-five minutes a day commuting each way. And so, before the horse and carriage, the cities were this big, and then the horse and carriage expanded it to how long you could take thirty-minute horse ride into your job. Then when the car, when the bus line came, and the train, and the faster car, everything got a little bit more sprawling. And if you think about, okay, well, I don't love being in the car for an hour, but if it's a self-driving car, and I'm just sort of sleeping in the back,

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  that probably extends that commute budget a little bit. And then people just push out further into the suburbs. And we do get new suburbs, but they're just in more undeveloped areas, or like, farther away, where the land's cheaper.

• 2:31:49Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, the other, the other connection to that, I would add, is Starlink. And that's one I really thought about during COVID, is how Starlink opened up an entire part of the country, where for years, not, access to non-broadband internet is a death sentence for working from home. I mean, I wouldn't even be able to do something like this. Let's say I was traveling, and I was on a camping trip, or whatever. Now, I could stream into, I mean, shit, I think I could be on a United flight with Starlink, and I could stream in with perfect quality.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's gonna be viral videos of people being like, I just got on a six-hour flight, and the person sitting next to me is doing, has done three podcasts already.

• 2:32:23Saagar Enjeti?

  Right. And it's like, please, by the way, do not do that. You are an asshole. Do not do that. Yeah, do not take an interview.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat.

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm glad that we could agree, and that there's a techno-capital solution for every problem in our lives.

• 2:32:39John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, for sure.

• 2:32:41Saagar Enjeti?

  Perhaps maybe followed by a political solution to that techno-capital problem.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  No, we'll get into that next time. Have a great rest of your day, Sager. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:32:49Saagar Enjeti?

  Bye, Jets, thank you.

• 2:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about vibe.co, where D2C brands, media startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on Meta. And without further ado.

• 2:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Profanity alert.

• 2:33:01John Coogan?

  Profanity alert.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Sager swears like a sailor.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  Clean it up. We will be bleeping him in post, potentially. I don't know if we'll actually do that. But, anyway, we have Dylan Field from Figma in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV room. Dylan, how you doing?

• 2:33:15Dylan Field?

  Hey, good. How you guys doing? Oh, salute back.

• 2:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Salute. Great to see you.

• 2:33:19John Coogan?

  Did you hear the news? America just won in overtime. We beat the Canadians.

• 2:33:23Dylan Field?

  I did not hear that news.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  In hockey.

• 2:33:25John Coogan?

  The Olympics in hockey. Yeah.

• 2:33:26Dylan Field?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot to celebrate.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Yes. But give us, but give us the news in your world. How are things going?

• 2:33:33Dylan Field?

  It's good. We're working hard, having fun. But yeah, we just did our earnings and really strong results. We're super excited. 2025 was just a massive year for us and the fourth quarter was our best quarter yet. So.

• 2:33:52John Coogan?

  Forty percent year-over-year growth, right?

• 2:33:55Dylan Field?

  You got it. We did 304, 304 million in revenue.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:01Dylan Field?

  And then also, yeah, we, I mean, look at the whole year. I mean, we just shipped so much, went from four to eight products, launched over 200 features. And most recently, earlier this week, on Tuesday, we launched a Claude Code to Figma Design pathway where you can go from code to the Figma Canvas. And I'm really excited about how we can do this entire round trip.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:26Dylan Field?

  And make it possible so that wherever you start, we can give you a way to go anywhere on the Figma platform.

• 2:34:33John Coogan?

  Do you think people are sort of underappreciating that loop because so many of the experiences with agentic coding systems like Claude Code are very toy projects? Like, the first time I used Codex on desktop, I just remade the TVPN homepage to look like, to look like Berkshire Hathaway's website. And it's like, I just took a screenshot. I didn't need to do any real work. It was a five-minute thing. And I think a lot of people are amazed by the like toy projects, but then they don't really think about what's happening when there's a design system. This is a large organization. This is an enterprise. This is going to be something that's enduring. And so can you share a little bit more about that flywheel and what it takes to actually put these tools to use in a serious way?

• 2:35:17Dylan Field?

  You know, I think it's actually really important, even when you're, maybe it's my mindset, I'm a perfectionist.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:23Dylan Field?

  Even for the toy projects, I want to go figure out like, what is the best expression of my fun toy project?

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:35:29Dylan Field?

  You know, uh, maybe something like a Burch or a Hathaway website is a fairly constrained form factor. And so, uh, maybe that's not the best example.

• 2:35:39John Coogan?

  It's like HTML three.

• 2:35:41Dylan Field?

  I recently made, for example, uh, my friend was like, I want to go viral in this year and it was a birthday. Like my goal for this year of my life is to go viral.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:51Dylan Field?

  Like that, well, that's kind of weird, but cool.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:54Dylan Field?

  Uh, and so I made them a website.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Lot of, lot of space to explore there. There's a lot of ways to go viral. Some, some can be good.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Go on an airplane, yell at people.

• 2:36:03Dylan Field?

  What I probably should have done is hey, said, hey, go talk to these guys. But, um, instead, uh, I, I made them a website with Figma Make.

• 2:36:11John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:36:11Dylan Field?

  Um, and, uh, made it, you know, really beautiful and tried a few different directions out. And, um, yeah, you know, very quickly got to, okay, here is sort of, uh, with some custom prompting, like a list of ways for them to go viral, given who they are. And, uh, and then it's all collected together in a nice way. But even for a fun project like that, uh, that's just like, you know, I'm going to send to them, they're going to do whatever they do. I don't know if they're going to look at it more than a few times or even a few times. But I don't know, for me, I want to go explore wide on enterprise. Yeah, you absolutely need to go think deeply about what's going to make the best product experience for your customers.

• 2:36:52Dylan Field?

  And that's not going to be just a, we're going to go code it up and we're going to do whatever we come up with first. You're going to go actually think through the option space and try to figure out what it is, uh, that you want to go steer towards. That is critical. Um, and if you don't think about that as a system, if you don't actually use all the components you've standardized on, the styles, uh, then you're not going to appear the same way to your customer throughout the entire user journey. And it has to really tie together with brand as well as your product, uh, as well as your point of view and your marketing, your messaging. So it's super important to make it so that you're able to have all that come together.

• 2:37:34Dylan Field?

  And, uh, just being in code, I think is very linear. It might be running fast, but it might be running towards the wrong direction.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's driving the Figma Make growth? Is that the same archetype as the Figma user? Does it diverge in any interesting ways? What can you share about like how interesting ways people are using Figma Make? And also how you're thinking about growing that product?

• 2:38:00Dylan Field?

  Yeah. When you look at Figma Make, I think what's really cool is to see how many non-designers are using it.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:09Dylan Field?

  And that is something that we've really picked up on. It's not just designers that are going in and making really amazing prototypes through Figma Design, but also folks are coming in and making these files and prototypes and actually full working web apps and experiences. I mean, 60% of files created in Figma Make are non-designers at this point.

• 2:38:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:38:33Dylan Field?

  Which is amazing.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that was a big part of the original Figma thesis was that there were going to be non-designers using this tool from day one.

• 2:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, if you did, if you looked at the TAM of the business purely on a, you know, product designer basis, it didn't look like it would be the business today.

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  And I don't think you ever had a job as designer, right?

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you had to use Figma every day for a decade.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, yeah, that, yeah, that's interesting. How do you think about the growth of that product in terms of adding plugins, features, hosting, deployment, uptime, edge, distribution? Like, that could grow into its whole thing, right?

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or maybe a more simple question is like, where, where do you want to partner?

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Or do you want to build yourself?

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:22Dylan Field?

  I mean, I think that we're going to see tons of partnerships for things like Figma Make, where you need to be able to pull in context from whatever systems people use. And then with that, use it to help create and help access data. But more importantly, I think that it's really key that we both create a simple surface that if you're just getting started, you can use. And also, we figure out, how do we make it so that you're able to go above and beyond and go really professional and do things that basically require a skill ladder to traverse?

• 2:40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:05Dylan Field?

  But visual first, that's the thesis, is visual first. But yeah, make users agree 70% quarter over quarter. I mean, we're seeing great adoption. I think people are really resonating with the product and finding all sorts of fun and awesome use cases for it. And I think there's such opportunity, given the way that our active users of Make are also using Figma Design, to bring new services close together, which I think is back to that divergent point, because Make is still too linear for my taste.

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:40:37Jordi Hays?

  What are, what feature requests are you prioritizing and most thinking about? And what are some maybe more wild feature requests that you may, Figma may not get to?

• 2:40:50Dylan Field?

  Well, I mean, there's a feature request in this conversation to go do edge computing. I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:59Dylan Field?

  You know, all of our, all of the folks out there working on edge computing, you know, come partner with us.

• 2:41:04John Coogan?

  Hardware.

• 2:41:04Dylan Field?

  We're not in your space, don't worry.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  Hardware, I want a hardware device. You mentioned taste, how have you been reacting to the taste discourse? Is taste a new?

• 2:41:15Jordi Hays?

  How many different cycles of taste discourse?

• 2:41:18John Coogan?

  This is the first time I've ever heard taste.

• 2:41:20Jordi Hays?

  Have happened since Figma was started. I think about companies like Linear, who like, to me exemplify like a taste-driven company. And how many of these cycles where they're like, oh, they care about this again, great.

• 2:41:38Dylan Field?

  I mean, look, like, I think that from the start of Figma, you know, the goal was not just to get everyone doing design or making design software usable by everybody and expanding the market. That wasn't the way we thought about it. It was like, how do we get people started on this journey? Where they can actually go and be more expressive, more creative, and you know, really start to solve problems and, you know, maybe it was a bit of like, projection, but for me at least, I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I want to go create software, I want to go build stuff. And so how do I make it so that anyone with that impulse can just do that? That doesn't mean they're all gonna have like taste and craft and epic design skills. I mean,

• 2:42:22Dylan Field?

  I think for the rest of my life, I can work on that. And many designers have made that a lifelong pursuit.

• 2:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, there's something, there's something that's very real where you start on this creative journey and your taste level can be way above your skill level. And it's incredibly frustrating and some people start and they just stop because they feel like, like I have this idea for what I want something to look like or be like and I'm kind of like trying to make things that match that and I can't. And that's part of why AI in general is like incredibly exciting because it can help you close that gap faster and potentially help you close that gap almost instantly in some circumstances. But you might create a hundred different outputs before getting to the one that actually meets that, you know, level.

• 2:43:11Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I think that the key thing is that you really have to go wide and explore and then challenge yourself. If you find areas where you're going, hey, actually, I don't feel like I am liking this enough. I'm not happy enough with the solution, then you gotta go keep pushing. But the more you can sample the possibility space and see some things that you like and you don't like, it gives you something to react to. And I think that the constant thing is, you need to be constantly critiquing and thinking about what is it that you like, you don't like, etc. And you know, people talk about agents all the time. And I'm obsessed with agents too, we all are, right? Agents are cool.

• 2:43:57Jordi Hays?

  How many Mac Minis do you have?

• 2:44:01Dylan Field?

  No comment.

• 2:44:01Jordi Hays?

  No comment. He's the reason that Mac minis are sold out.

• 2:44:06John Coogan?

  There's a line item in the 10K.

• 2:44:07Dylan Field?

  I swear I am not clod bod. But anyway, but yeah, but like, I think that the bigger point back to taste is, you know, if an agent can do it for you, then unless you've got some amazing sophisticated prompting and super unique, like an agent can do it for someone else. And so I think that this discourse on like agents are just gonna do all the things. Well, what is different about your setup than others? You at least have to have something different there in order to not think that you're just gonna get the same thing everyone else is gonna get.

• 2:44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:43Dylan Field?

  And even then, I don't know if it's gonna get you something extraordinary.

• 2:44:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, we read a post yesterday that was sort of trying to quantify the background that leads to taste. And he was basically saying that like Steve Jobs was incredibly high IQ, but also had like varied training data in that he had like been homeless and like traveled the world and like got all these like bizarre experiences. And I'm wondering if that like resonates with you, or you think that it's like too difficult to even quantize what makes for a great designer or great taste?

• 2:45:20Dylan Field?

  You know, I think that the great designers I've met through my life have come from so many different backgrounds. You know, a lot of folks have come through rigorous design training, like they just went through a system.

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:33Dylan Field?

  And other people, wow, they went and created, you know, their band poster.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:37Dylan Field?

  And that got them into like graphic design. And then somehow they like showed up at the right house and crashed on someone's couch and then became a product designer and then never went back. You know, it's like everything in between. And there's not really any pattern. Some people have traveled the world and, you know, gotten on the meditation retreats. And some people are like as buttoned up as you could get and just totally straight laced. I think that the nice thing about designers is they're so unique. And there's no better matching.

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about variability of design going forward? Are we?

• 2:46:18Dylan Field?

  So excited.

• 2:46:19John Coogan?

  Are we at a sort of a narrowing period? Because most people come with just a generic prompt. Or because I saw your Figma make examples and I was like, I didn't even know that was possible. There were so, but I was like, I would never have gotten there. So is, are there going to be tools to maybe help people like be inspired by your background, which has a whole bunch of variation on it? I, I, I don't know. Yeah, I, I'm just, I'm just wondering because, I mean, we were just, we were just talking about a company that it feels like the prompt was like, copy Jordy's website. Maybe it wasn't, maybe it's just coincidence, but it felt like, okay, like there wasn't, uh, there wasn't like a twist here where it was like, oh, just do something completely different.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  That's never been applied to this particular category, at least like steal from a different niche instead of from the one that's like very, very similar. But I'm, I'm wondering how you're, how you're seeing like variation in design, uh, take, take, take hold in, in the world.

• 2:47:16Dylan Field?

  Yeah, this is the moment, I think, uh, where we're going to see the pendulum go from, I mean, let's look back, right? So we had the flash era, GeoCities, like, I'm not saying it was high quality era, but there is a lot of variation.

• 2:47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:31Dylan Field?

  And then iPhone comes out, it's like skeuomorphism and then like Swiss minimalist design.

• 2:47:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:36Dylan Field?

  And nothing wrong with Swiss minimalist design. Uh, like that is a really cool and storied field and lineage.

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:45Dylan Field?

  But it is just one part of the greater aesthetic realm. And we can go into such interesting places and try so many interesting patterns on the UX side, too. It's not just UI and the visuals, it's also the structure, the IA, the way that people navigate through these things and the interaction patterns. And, uh, I think there's innovation that's going to be flourishing on all of it. Uh, and I'm just so excited to see the internet get like really dynamic.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:15Dylan Field?

  And, um, really visual and, uh, people try things that. They just have, we haven't seen in a while and, and things that people haven't seen ever. Because I think that that's what it's gonna take to stand out now. There's been so much there, like the exponential curve of software is just, it's taking off in a way that, um, it's always been exponential, but now it's vertical. We talked about this before. And in order to stand out, I mean, you guys have a show that you're managing to actually break through and get people to be watching this. Like, this is not normal, right? Like, but you have worked very hard, very diligently to create the conditions under which you have this audience.

• 2:48:59Dylan Field?

  Well, um, this is the thing that everyone has to figure out now is how are you gonna actually get any attention in a world where there's constantly new information?

• 2:49:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:09Dylan Field?

  Um, even beyond America winning the, uh, ice hockey match.

• 2:49:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, since I've been, I've been thinking about, uh, uh, how Gen AI is impacting marketing. It's allowing, if somebody has like a unique idea, and then it used to be like you had like at least a month to kind of like run with that unique idea. Maybe three months if it was like, you know, a specific campaign or something like that. And now somebody can literally fast follow you and your idea almost immediately. So good ideas always get copied.

• 2:49:42Dylan Field?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:43Jordi Hays?

  But they get copied even faster now. Another thing that, that I was thinking about when you were talking about kind of the explosion of UI. Uh, John had a, had a post yesterday that he was sort of jokingly making like a BuzzFeed style listicle, like five, five features that could explode your LLM's usage or something like that. Uh, and one of them was like caching.

• 2:50:04Dylan Field?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:04Jordi Hays?

  And people have had this idea of like, uh, generative UIs, UIs that's being made like on the fly. And I feel like we may get, we may like, Have products where that's happening, right? Like you're in an L M and a UI is being generated. But it will still make sense like if if there's something that happens all the time, like thousands, millions of times a day, billions, like it does not, it really stops making sense to just generate it on the fly. It's like, hey, this happens a lot. Let's like,

• 2:50:34Dylan Field?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:35Jordi Hays?

  make the best version of this and we don't need to like.

• 2:50:37Dylan Field?

  I had a poster on this, actually, exactly this topic. I can send it to you if you want, but the, basically, the post was about how the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's going to be generated. And I think this is true across media. So basically, like, if you are writing a book, unlikely that you're going to have like AI just generate your book.

• 2:51:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:04Jordi Hays?

  Amazon booksellers would like to work.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can just say you don't read adult romantic fiction. We get it.

• 2:51:14Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I think, I think, I think, continue, yeah.

• 2:51:18Dylan Field?

  But like, I think, you know, something that's like a ad that will live for, you know, a few hours.

• 2:51:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:51:25Dylan Field?

  Like, yeah, probably you're gonna have an agent that's gonna generate that.

• 2:51:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the difference is like you're making an asset for to respond to with a meme format to news. Makes a lot of sense to like, put that through a nano banana or chat G P T. But if you're putting, making a billboard, maybe you're still using AI to some degree, but you're going to invest like significantly more time.

• 2:51:47Dylan Field?

  If you're gonna make a billboard that's gonna cost money and it's gonna be up for a month. And, you know, a lot of people are gonna see it. I think you're gonna have a human touch. We actually with Weavey, now female weave. We, you know, we've been looking a lot at these kinds of use cases and. You know, one thing that just we think about a lot is how you have this first prompt, but then you actually want to go and have it go through a process where you can transform and mutate it and almost like clay that's being shaped, you can treat it like a medium to get to a final output that's amazing. So like in our earnings call, we talked about how Nvidia, which they've actually done this as a public case study, they put the entire

• 2:52:27Dylan Field?

  making of this keynote online and they used Weeby with it. And what they did was they had all these robots and they needed to basically get to a 20K image of this whole scene. Like, how do you create a 20K image with perfect lighting throughout? I mean, it's really tough. So they had a whole custom pipeline with Weeby they did. And just like the amount of work to go do that at scale of that pixel density is immense. And I thought their workflow was super cool as well. Chat with you too.

• 2:53:03John Coogan?

  I love it. Yeah, please send us that. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:53:09Dylan Field?

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  Always a good time.

• 2:53:11Jordi Hays?

  We were so fired up seeing the results from yesterday. Really a testament to how locked in, locked in the team.

• 2:53:19Dylan Field?

  The team is amazing.

• 2:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:22Dylan Field?

  They're working so hard and they're just, it's incredible team. I'm so grateful. And I think it's a proof point. I mean, I think that we're, we're going to see it over and over again, whether it's the taste discourse, just customers with Figma, but design is the differentiator. Like figure it out, go learn design, hire a designer. Otherwise you're going to have a hard time. That's my last message.

• 2:53:45John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:53:47John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Peter Morales from CodeMetal and we are kicking off our Lambda Lightning round. I believe Peter is in the restream waiting room. He's about to be in the TBP and UltraDome. But the Lambda Lightning round has begun.

• 2:54:05Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. What's happening?

• 2:54:07John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 2:54:10John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:54:11Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:54:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 2:54:14John Coogan?

  First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:54:18Speaker 09

  Hi, I'm Peter Morales. I'm the CEO of CodeMetal. It's great to meet you guys. Excited to be on the show.

• 2:54:23Jordi Hays?

  Extremely metal name. I'm sure you've you've heard that before, but I had to do it. I love the name. Yeah, what uh, what got you into this? Talk about your journey, how you got here, and then we'll get into the business.

• 2:54:36Speaker 09

  Yeah, so at least for me, I started my career in defense. I graduated with a physics degree, and this was one of the areas that was like, hey, we want people with that background. And it turns out it was an awesome area to jump into. You got to apply first principles, but then also build systems that had impact. And so spent some time developing, basically taking software that was written at a high level and bringing it down to low-level hardware systems. And the reason being was, I was a big programming nerd, but also kind of understood the math. And it was this sweet spot of translating software to hardware. So I got to work on some cool AI algorithms on the F35, and that kind of inspired me to do work in that.

• 2:55:16Speaker 09

  So I went over to MIT Lincoln Laboratory and started doing research in AI, got to be one of the founding members of their AI Technology Group, and then I ended up going to Microsoft where I was hoping to put all these pieces together and get to build like sort of more for commercial industry products that took sort of state-of-the-art algorithms and brought it down to hardware. And so I was working on the Hololens and hoping to learn kind of these like industry best practices. And it was the same as defense, man. It was just as like hard to push the latest and greatest down to hardware. And you know, inspiration behind CodeMetal was there's got to be a better way to do this.

• 2:55:50Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense. Before we go further, I don't know what or how much you can share around AI and the F35, but generally for those types of exquisite systems, like how, you know, back when you were actually doing that work, where is AI actually?

• 2:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Be impactful in an exquisite system like that.

• 2:56:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, so you gotta view it from like our perspective, which is like, hey, we're gonna take these at the time kind of really cool algorithms and bring these down to ancient processors. So exquisite system, but or whole hardware systems to actually get the algorithms running. And this was part of the DARPA ARC program. So it's like adaptive radar countermeasures. So the idea being is, hey, I've spotted you in the sky and I'm gonna go ahead and like try and take you out now. But maybe I don't know the complete parameters behind what that system's doing. And so I need to kind of on the fly come up with a strategy to defeat, you know, those missile sites on the ground. And so applying some different techniques to that, I can't talk about, was sort of the gist of the game.

• 2:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating. Give us the quick history on CodeMetal then. When did you actually start the company? You're coming on today with some big news, but give us, give us the history until now.

• 2:57:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, so it's been a real rocket ship. We started just two years ago.

• 2:57:13John Coogan?

  Wow. Great success. Nice.

• 2:57:16Speaker 09

  So, yeah, we've, we've had really, really great partners. J2 Ventures did our pre-seed round.

• 2:57:23John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:57:23Speaker 09

  And, you know, their roll your sleeves up, kind of like help you founder-friendly fun. And we jumped right into it at Shield Capital, who really understood the dual-use mission. And then, you know, once we started seeing this takeoff and sort of for us, and I'll get into what we do exactly. You know, in some of the mission-critical industries that we operate, you know, Excel jumped in and it's just been sort of, you know, milestone after another in terms of like, you know, the real, the real problem that we're solving, which maybe I should give some background on next.

• 2:57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 2:57:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 2:57:55Speaker 09

  Yeah, there's this explosion, you know, basically AI-generated code. And it's great, you know, you can build an MVP. But I'm sure all of you have been working like with, you know, Claude or OpenAI. And maybe you've asked it like, are you sure? Or like, you know, is this right?

• 2:58:11John Coogan?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 2:58:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, build me a brake system. No mistakes.

• 2:58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:17Jordi Hays?

  You say you're 100% sure on this. Yeah.

• 2:58:21Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:58:22Jordi Hays?

  Turns out to be wrong.

• 2:58:23John Coogan?

  Take off from the aircraft carrier, you're good to go.

• 2:58:26Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:58:26John Coogan?

  You're not crazy.

• 2:58:29Speaker 09

  So yeah, so the idea here is like, we want to answer that question. So as much as we are an AI company, we're an AI verification company. And that means inherently these systems are stochastic, right? And so you can't necessarily rely on AI to check AI. And so we're leveraging a lot of techniques both from sort of traditional test verification and formal methods to basically prove as you work your way through these hard software challenges that we have done the identical thing that you put in. And in this case, we can't rely on natural language. Like writing a prompt is not a good way to define how like an exquisite system needs to operate. And so we're not like a low code or no code, we're a high code, you know, shop. And we focus on basically solving software problems that are the real tall tent poles

• 2:59:12Speaker 09

  in production, namely moving from MVP to production for some of like the biggest industries. And defense being obviously one of those based on our backgrounds.

• 2:59:21John Coogan?

  Very cool. Take us through the funding round. What happened?

• 2:59:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, so exciting news to announce today. We have announced our Series B, 125 million.

• 2:59:37John Coogan?

  And tell us about the new president and COO. How'd you meet? What is he going to be doing? Why is that an important role to fill?

• 2:59:46Speaker 09

  And I think that's the second big announcement for us. We've been really heads down, a bunch of us, you know, engineering nerds and, you know, also starting to grow into business folks like Laura Shen. She joined us from National Security Council, had a background at Uber and really was sort of like my main teammate on the selling side. But we've grown a lot since then and we've got operational needs. We need leadership on sort of working with some of these bigger clients that we started to talk to on the technology side. And yeah, Ryan Ate from CEO of Tableau actually joined us as president and COO. And yeah, he's been awesome already. Like we learned about him through our network and sort of trying to find the right person who had the right sort of curious attitude, one of the first principles.

• 3:00:31Speaker 09

  Come in and do something actually really new. And yeah, he's been an awesome for us, just experience working with some of, you know, your Nvidia's of the world, the different partnerships that he's had at the places he's deployed, you know, he knows our customers. And so having him on the team has just been awesome.

• 3:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Assuming you guys execute your roadmap perfectly, which I'm sure you will, what does it do to hardware development timelines, things like that? Like, are we, is part of CodeMetal's job to bring the acceleration that developers are feeling when they're building, you know, enterprise software, maybe they're building, you know, AI, uh, uh, apps, et cetera, to bring that to the hardware level?

• 3:01:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, you're, you're nailing it. So like, um, a lot of these industries have had like, you know, they're not one generation behind and who want to use AI tools. They're like many generations behind even what you get if you're like a cloud developer. So, uh, you know, I, I look at it as three different things. The first is like getting actual features, acting like you're a vertically integrated software hardware company, because all of a sudden you can push things directly to hardware and see those things, uh, run on whatever system. So that's sort of our, our, you know, rapid development, uh, vertical. Then you've got code portability. So there are huge supply chain problems. So, you know, we, we talked to, for instance, like the army and they've got, you know, hey, we wrote all this code for Nvidia GPUs. Like it's ours. Like we've, we've developed it. Um, we maybe

• 3:01:58Speaker 09

  have supply chain issues here. Can we run on a different piece of hardware? All of a sudden that's going to gum up the works. You're going to have to pay every contractor to rewrite the code. They could translate that. That solves programmability. That solves supply chain issues. That's another huge area of growth we're seeing. And the finally is like legacy systems. Like there's been so much investment in code that thou shall not touch. And we just put a box around it and talk to it. Being able to update those and deploy those has been another big area of growth for us.

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  It's awesome. Very important work. Thank you.

• 3:02:26Jordi Hays?

  CodeMetal is accelerating.

• 3:02:28John Coogan?

  It's heavy metal. I love it.

• 3:02:29Jordi Hays?

  Customers are accelerating. It's, it's very metal.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  Yes. And congratulations on the funding round.

• 3:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congrats to the whole team.

• 3:02:35John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 3:02:36Jordi Hays?

  At this, at this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on in Q2.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Have fun out there.

• 3:02:41John Coogan?

  Have a good one, Peter.

• 3:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Peter.

• 3:02:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely bank, connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

• 3:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Up next. We do not.

• 3:02:57John Coogan?

  We have Eric from Freeform joining in just a few minutes, but in the meantime, we can talk about friend of the show. Well, it sounds like he's here. So we are going to bring in Eric from Freeform. He's been on the show before. Welcome back. How are you doing, Eric?

• 3:03:12Speaker 10

  What's going on? Yeah, good to see you guys.

• 3:03:14John Coogan?

  Very cool background. Kick us off with an explanation.

• 3:03:18Jordi Hays?

  These are all squat racks that we're seeing, right?

• 3:03:21Speaker 10

  Yeah, these are just fancy looking things, you know, they don't really do anything. What you're looking at behind us is our next generation manufacturing platform. We call Skyfall. It'll be the fastest, the most automated laser melting platform on the planet. I think last time we talked, we had talked about how we were getting ready to design and build this and now we're almost done building it.

• 3:03:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, amazing. What else happened? There's some news.

• 3:03:49Speaker 10

  Oh, man, lots of lots of amazing news. We just closed a big Series B, $67 million. You know, we're, we're.

• 3:04:01John Coogan?

  We gotta hit the gong.

• 3:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:04:02Speaker 10

  Amazing. We've talked about getting a gong in the office, too. I love it.

• 3:04:06John Coogan?

  You should.

• 3:04:06Jordi Hays?

  We know, we know, we know, we know the finest gong manufacturers in the country. So happy to give a reference.

• 3:04:14Speaker 10

  Yeah, we'll have to get a, you'll have to pass those along to us. We, it was, yeah, led by a pandion, Michael Lenz of Linz Capital, Nvidia participated, Founders Fund, threshold, Two Sigma Ventures. We've got an amazing cap table of investors with deep expertise and, and operational scaling and deep tech space. It's been great.

• 3:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:04:36John Coogan?

  Where's the biggest source of customer growth coming from? Like where, what products are actually getting made, at least that you can talk about?

• 3:04:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. I would say there's growth across a lot of different sectors. You know, we're, our demand has outpaced capacity, which is amazing. And we're building a substantial backlog. Yeah, it's, it's been, it's been fantastic. Obviously, you know, there are a lot of critical industries out there, you know, the geopolitical climates of the world today, where flexible manufacturing is becoming much more, more and more important, shorting it, shortening iteration cycles, being able to scale up quickly. These things are just super important in that space. And then, you know, you're just seeing, I think this.

• 3:05:23Speaker 10

  You know, the advancements in AI are driving, you know, advances in engineering, in design, in access to information that is accelerating product design, which then people, you know, want to build faster and scale faster. So there's all these kind of forces that are driving advancement in all sorts of different industries where or problems that there are these industries are looking to advance manufacturing technologies to solve.

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  Talk about aerospace or maybe building airplanes generally. I imagine that we're not using Freeform to make the fuselage, but are we talking about like, you know, the seatbelt buckles or blades inside of a jet engine? Like, at what, at what scale are we operating here?

• 3:06:12Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. Great question. No, we're not making the fuselages. I think, you know, we're not a hammer looking for a nail.

• 3:06:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:22Jordi Hays?

  Or a hammer looking for a face.

• 3:06:24Speaker 10

  That's right. That's right. The, you know, we're generally talking about parts that are of the scale, you know, the platform behind us is roughly 600 millimeters by 600 millimeters by a meter tall. So something that can fit into that envelope. Obviously, we can make extremely high-precision things. We can make them out of virtually any material, any metal. And, and, you know, intricate features, big, big features, small features, we can do just about anything.

• 3:06:55John Coogan?

  Any metal. You know what I'm thinking? Coffee maker made purely out of lead. Lead-based coffee maker.

• 3:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a very viral coffee maker trying to be free of plastics. And so, John.

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  I mean, a lead-based coffee maker would be free of plastic.

• 3:07:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, clearly that.

• 3:07:10John Coogan?

  It wouldn't have any plastic.

• 3:07:11Speaker 10

  No, no problem.

• 3:07:12John Coogan?

  No problem.

• 3:07:13Jordi Hays?

  How much have you scaled up the team since we last chatted? Where, where, where's that going?

• 3:07:19Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's fantastic. And I want to add on to my answer to your last question, too. We're flying mission-critical parts on multiple Frontier programs today. We are shipping out of the factory many hundreds of parts per month. They're going on, you know, very important vehicles and systems. So, to the team question, we're about 60 people, 55, 60 people now. So I think when we spoke last, we were maybe 35, 40-ish. And we're trying to hire about 100 people over the next, you know, 12 months. So, you know, we are massively backlogged.

• 3:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Where are those jobs going to be based? All in the same place, or are you actually expanding?

• 3:08:03Speaker 10

  Everything here in Hawthorne. Cool. Yeah, for now. Yep. Very great.

• 3:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. On the, on the parts side, like, what, what's the, what, uh... Tons of demand, but where, why are customers actually choosing you guys? Is there kind of a speed up around, kind of like, order timelines, things like that? Like, where, what's making customers the most happy?

• 3:08:29Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think, you know, honestly, we've cracked the code. I mean, the, the world... It's here for cracking codes. We love cracking codes. When we, when we talked before, it's just interesting, you know, how far we've come in a relatively short period of time. You know, I think the rigidity and inflexibility of manufacturing, traditional manufacturing systems, is just no longer acceptable. And you, you've got this massive advancement in the digital world that's occurring, these transformations that are happening. And the way we make stuff hasn't really changed in, in decades. Not, not fundamentally.

• 3:09:09Speaker 10

  And so, you know, I think customers are looking to design more and more advanced things. They're looking to control physics in new and different ways. You know, you can, I saw over my, my decade-plus at SpaceX, you can design, you know, the, the most advanced things, but the real problem is when you go to make it. And, you know, closing this gap is becoming really important. And you know, what do companies want to do? They want to focus on what they're good at. And the code we've cracked is that we are the most successful and fastest growing company in the advanced manufacturing space that leverages printing ever. And because we have developed, we've solved all of the major problems that were fundamentally preventing the technology

• 3:09:54Speaker 10

  from being scalable. And so that's, you know, we're no longer in the proof of concept phase where we're proving, you know, the theory of it. We are, this capital is being deployed to massively expand capacity to meet the demand that we're building backlog and it's continuing to accelerate.

• 3:10:12Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  Last question for me. What's the biggest lesson that you learned from SpaceX that you find useful applying today?

• 3:10:22Speaker 10

  Oh, man. I think you asked me a similar question last time. There's so many lessons. I'm so fortunate to have had such an amazing experience.

• 3:10:30Jordi Hays?

  But maybe a different answer now, maybe a different answer now than when we last chatted, you know, the codes have been cracked.

• 3:10:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:38Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, I think that what comes to mind is, you know, the relentless pursuit of the thing that you know is possible. You just, you have to fundamentally believe in what you're doing. It has to be based on, you know, first principles, like this is a possible thing. And then I am just, we are going to relentlessly pursue it until we get it across the finish line. And I think that's why we've been so successful here, you know, combined with the willingness to, it's not about how hard something is, or if I know how to do it or I don't. If I don't know how to do it, but it needs to be done, I've got to figure it out.

• 3:11:18Speaker 10

  And we're so vertically integrated across everything we do, from software to machine learning, to advanced compute, to electronics, to the physical platforms that we build ourselves, that this is something I don't think there's any other company out there that is like us on this front. We don't use third-party products at all. Nowhere in the stack, top to bottom.

• 3:11:42John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 3:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing update, Eric. Congratulations on the progress. Congrats to the whole team on all the, all the progress. I'd love to hear that you guys are shipping parts.

• 3:11:51John Coogan?

  In Southern California.

• 3:11:53Speaker 10

  Heck, yeah.

• 3:11:54Jordi Hays?

  I, I like the Hawthorne, Gardena, Gundo, Long Beach rivalry.

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:00Jordi Hays?

  And just who can produce the most mass of the world is, is fantastic.

• 3:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, have a great rest of your day.

• 3:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 3:12:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:12:08Speaker 10

  Thanks again for having me again.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for seeing.

• 3:12:10John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Up next, we have Lubisha Basak from Talus. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 3:12:23Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:12:24Speaker 02

  I'm doing well. How are you?

• 3:12:25John Coogan?

  Did I, did I get even close to the name?

• 3:12:28Speaker 02

  First name great, second name close.

• 3:12:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Give it to us.

• 3:12:32Speaker 02

  Name is Byich.

• 3:12:33John Coogan?

  Byich. Byich, okay.

• 3:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Byich, powerful.

• 3:12:36John Coogan?

  Well, first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 3:12:40Speaker 02

  Uh, hey, so you introduced my name, uh, Lubisha Byich. I'm a kind of a long time, I guess, chip designer more than anything else.

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:50Speaker 02

  Uh, my latest endeavor is Talus. Uh, what we do at Talus is, uh, you know how, I'm, I'm sure both of you have used ChatGPT, right? Like, and, uh, when you ask a question, you see that like, you know, words are kind of rendering on the screen. It takes a while.

• 3:13:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:06Speaker 02

  Uh, if you use it a lot, it costs a fair amount of money, right? So for people that, uh, that run code through it or, or something like that. So what, what we do is we basically make those responses show up in milliseconds.

• 3:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:17Speaker 02

  So that you can ask, uh, you know, you can ask whatever you want and you get like a hundred thousand words. It pops up in a split second, uh, immediately. The web UI is slower than, um, you know, than, than our chips for the most part. Uh, and it's also kind of close to zero cost.

• 3:13:33John Coogan?

  The web UI is slower, that's crazy.

• 3:13:35Speaker 02

  Super fast, super cheap.

• 3:13:37John Coogan?

  You're like, this HD, this JavaScript just doesn't load as fast as the tokens. What a world to be in.

• 3:13:41Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. And that's happening, that's happening today.

• 3:13:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:45Speaker 02

  That's happening today, and I guess the way we do this is kind of the opposite of what your previous guest was saying. So, you know, everybody says you should be flexible. We say you should be really inflexible.

• 3:13:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:57Speaker 02

  But you should be hardcore.

• 3:13:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:59Speaker 02

  Hardcore.

• 3:13:59John Coogan?

  So, yeah, take us through the technical story here. Is this only possible post-transformer, post-MOE model? Like, how much are you calcifying and what technical decisions do you have to lock in before you went into tape out?

• 3:14:15Speaker 02

  So, we're not so much, you know, focused on a given model type. So, whatever model is popular today, it's transformers with MOE. If it was something else, very likely, most likely, we would have no problem consuming it. Really, the main step is that we take that model and we basically cast it straight into silicon. It's not a, it's not a piece of software. It doesn't run on a processor. You know, if, at least I as a kid, like, I never imagined AI as a, as an executable, like Excel or Word. Like, it was, the general mindset was like Dave from Space Odyssey, right? Like, or the hell from Space Odyssey,

• 3:14:56Speaker 02

  right? Like, and so we're kind of, you know, going to that idea and basically making models straight into hardware. Once we make the chip, it's, it is a model. That's, that's basically, that's all it is. If you want a new model, you have to chuck this one out. Again, it's kind of a throwback to, to the past, like where it's kind of like video game consoles.

• 3:15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:18Speaker 02

  You know, there's a receptacle. You unplug a cartridge, you plug in another cartridge, and you have a new model.

• 3:15:24John Coogan?

  What are the different trade-offs when you go to the fab? Are you thinking wafer scale, large die? How do you think about all the trade-offs and what is available at modern fabs?

• 3:15:37Speaker 02

  So our approach is that, you know, we basically made this one trade, which is commitment or flexibility for kind of everything else. Given that, we tried super hard to make everything else that simple, which means no interposers, no 3D stacking, no super high-speed I/O, no HVM. The chips are pretty big, but they're really, really simple. They plug into a normal server. They don't consume a lot of power. You can cool them by air. You don't really need, you know, you don't need anything but old-school data centers. So it's essentially, we made it such that there's, there's this one, you know, sort of compromise that we make you take. Having taken that, it's better at everything and it's way simpler than anything else.

• 3:16:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What is the, what's the sales process and look like for this? And what are, what are your customer relationships actually going to look like in practice? Are you, I imagine, you know, you see massive progress on the model side every day. There's a new model. Are you, like, how are you going to scale up kind of like physical production to, to sort of match that progress? Or is that the wrong way to think about it?

• 3:16:47Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's hard to be sure. So, so I'll, I'll answer your, all your questions briefly. So on, on the first one, our default plan is that we're, we're bringing out a, like inference service and we're gonna let users basically get to tokens directly. Obviously, we aspire to, to having large customers like the big AI labs or, or hyperscalers. It's just that, you know, like if your default plan involves closing, you know, what have you, Microsoft, it's, it's a bad default plan, right? Like, it's not an easy, it's, it's not an easy step. So it's not that we're not doing it, but we're, we're doing something that's gonna bring us to customers and allow iteration. And it's fully within our hands, right?

• 3:17:31Speaker 02

  Like, it, it doesn't involve a big uncontrollable step. To, to your second question, we might, so, so our approach starts winning at about three months of holding the model. Even if you swap them every three months, we still win. At a year, we win by a lot. So at this level, it's really hard to call, but I, I'm, I feel strongly that there's applications that can Certainly tolerate having the same model for a half a year at a time.

• 3:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:00Speaker 02

  What exactly those are, I don't know.

• 3:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, someone was saying yesterday that GPT three point five still gets like a shocking amount of.

• 3:18:08John Coogan?

  So much money, yeah.

• 3:18:11Speaker 02

  It's crazy. The other day, GPT four point O was retired.

• 3:18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:15Speaker 02

  There was a bunch of uh sort of negative remarks on the internet. People are sad and angry that it's gone and so on. Uh so I mean, we definitely want to be at the leading edge. Uh we think that it's actually quite doable. Uh but in the end, like where the line is where sort of people are comfortable with the commitment, we need. Uh time's gonna tell, right? Like, uh, yeah.

• 3:18:37John Coogan?

  How much is AI accelerating the translation from the model weights or the model architecture? Into an actual uh chip design?

• 3:18:51Speaker 02

  So i- in our first generation, not a lot at all. We use it, but but lightly. Uh for our second generation, we're actually uh trying our best to maximize the amount of stuff. That AI does versus what what people do. So we're aggressively moving that boundary. And uh the cutting edge models have gotten good enough that they can really help a lot. Like it's, we started about two years ago. Uh that wasn't the case back then. It's a new phenomenon.

• 3:19:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 3:19:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, kind of a wild card. How are you thinking about uh? What we expect is an explosion of new uh AI hardware devices. We're hearing about pins and. In ear things. Is this something that um could end up in in a consumer electronic device at some point? Or is it better suited uh for more of these like data center or or kind of like enterprise applications?

• 3:19:50Speaker 02

  So I think it's suited to both and but we're initially targeting data centers and we made these big chips for that reason as opposed to something that's smaller form factor could fit in a device really mainly driven by the fact that this kind of avalanche of PIN and such has been announced now you know it's been five years away for kind of multiple sets of five years potentially right?

• 3:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's not talk about VR.

• 3:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, and and if and you can obviously make a hardware device that can deliver AI without having the chip locally.

• 3:20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, uh, Jordi, anything else?

• 3:20:28Jordi Hays?

  No, let's hit the gong.

• 3:20:29John Coogan?

  Okay, yes, tell us about the news, how much did you raise?

• 3:20:33Speaker 02

  Uh, we, uh, actually, the the special thing about today is that we've launched our our this product to the public, right? We we did raise some money that we didn't announce, actually, we raised a bunch of money. We we hit like kind of nirvana where we can live off of off of interest.

• 3:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 3:20:51Speaker 02

  With like, you know, two hundred and twenty million dollars raised total.

• 3:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:56Speaker 02

  But what we're really proud of is that we spend money super slowly and that we we really are living off the interest, right?

• 3:21:01John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, congratulations.

• 3:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Where where can people go? Do you have a?

• 3:21:07John Coogan?

  Chatjimmy.ai if you want to demo it.

• 3:21:10Speaker 02

  Yes, that's that's right.

• 3:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Chatjimmy.ai.

• 3:21:12Speaker 02

  I can send you guys the link if you don't already have it.

• 3:21:15John Coogan?

  Chatjimmy.ai, I think you're it's a it's Lama 3.1 8B.

• 3:21:19Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:21:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, baked into a chip, super fast.

• 3:21:23Jordi Hays?

  It is quick.

• 3:21:24John Coogan?

  It's fast?

• 3:21:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:26John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:21:27Jordi Hays?

  It is instant, faster than it's it's almost seems faster than my eyes can process.

• 3:21:31John Coogan?

  That's the point. I think that's the future.

• 3:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:21:35Speaker 02

  What we're shooting for.

• 3:21:36John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 3:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, it was great to great to meet you.

• 3:21:38John Coogan?

  Thank you for speaking to us.

• 3:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Come back anytime.

• 3:21:40Speaker 02

  Great meeting you both, yeah, thank you very much for having me.

• 3:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 3:21:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:21:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:21:44John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:21:46John Coogan?

  Are there any other stories you'd like to go through, Jordy? We could talk about the F1, we could talk about semi-analysis, we could talk about the AI doc, or we could talk about all that tomorrow.

• 3:21:56Jordi Hays?

  The AI doc, we're working on getting the team from there on. Yeah, we can skip that.

• 3:22:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dylan Patel is allegedly

• 3:22:07John Coogan?

  Scoop?

• 3:22:08Jordi Hays?

  mulling, raising a venture fund. Sounds like he invested some size into Fluidstack already.

• 3:22:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is funny because this is framed as a scoop, and I suppose it is, but they were openly discussing this on a podcast like a month ago. So it's not that big of news, but it is exciting. We love Dylan Patel, we love semi-analysis, and it'll be very interesting to see what they do. I think that there was some, there was some mention, I mean, they weren't talking about it in fine detail, but just discussion over whether or not this would actually be a full venture fund, or if it would be more of an RIA, more public-private. There's a variety of different strategies, and Dylan knows a lot of different folks in the ecosystem, obviously works with a lot of hedge funds, and so there's a lot of

• 3:22:57John Coogan?

  opportunity up and down the stack, not just in the private markets. And every venture fund has sort of a different strategy. When you have this level of analysis, rigor, data, understanding the markets, there's a whole bunch of different ways to express that financially. And so I'm very, very excited to see what happens, and good luck to the semi-analysis team out on the fundraising trail.

• 3:23:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, last but not least, a new California law, which is FIPVCC, is forcing VCs to ask portfolio companies about their sexual orientation, disabilities, and more. Also, it can be reported to the state. The team at Angelus built a new system to help funds in Angelus comply without ever seeing individual founder responses. This seems very important to preserve founder privacy everywhere. We've decided to make the system available to any fund for free, regardless of who they work with for fund admin. So obviously, a bunch of funds are running on Angelus, and we'll have this built in. But important that everybody be able to use this, seems like.

• 3:24:00Jordi Hays?

  I remember when this law was originally being proposed.

• 3:24:03John Coogan?

  Is it actually passed?

• 3:24:05Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like it.

• 3:24:06John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is surprising, but nothing is surprising in California.

• 3:24:13John Coogan?

  Well, DoorDash is surprising to me. Over a billion orders a month.

• 3:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, soon. They're doing 900 million.

• 3:24:19John Coogan?

  Oh, 900 million, okay.

• 3:24:20Jordi Hays?

  900. So let's hit the gong for... Oh, that was a... Yeah, I can hear it. You probably can't hear it at home.

• 3:24:28John Coogan?

  Lock in DoorDash.

• 3:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, lock in.

• 3:24:30John Coogan?

  Keep going.

• 3:24:31Jordi Hays?

  We'll wait.

• 3:24:31John Coogan?

  Call us when you hit a billion. That will impress me. Now, I was listening to Keith Roy talk to Eric Newcomer, and he was saying like his whole DoorDash thesis was just that DoorDash was the get food button or the I'm hungry button on your phone. And then there's a whole bunch of hard work that you need to do to actually deliver food, but the consumer impulse was just I'm hungry and you push the button and you get food. And it has worked to the tune of 903 million orders per month. I wonder if there's more around Christmas. Do they always see a December bump? No, not really. Huh. December was a good month for them. They jumped. They actually jumped it in March in 2021. I don't know, something happened, but they've been on a tear.

• 3:25:13Jordi Hays?

  Have they ever had a down month?

• 3:25:15John Coogan?

  I don't think so. They had a rough time in September of 21. Coming out of COVID, it went from 345 to 347. Barely any growth, but I don't think they've ever had a truly down... This is quarter. This is quarterly, I guess.

• 3:25:32John Coogan?

  Wait, is this... Oh, no, this is monthly reporting, but you see every four months, so.

• 3:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Ben is getting us fired up. He says three and a half hours. Let's go.

• 3:25:40John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:25:41Jordi Hays?

  We're not quite at the three and a half hour mark. We got two minutes left.

• 3:25:44John Coogan?

  We still got two minutes left.

• 3:25:45Jordi Hays?

  There was one more story we didn't get to. Blue Owl permanently halts redemptions at private credit fund aimed at retail investors.

• 3:25:53John Coogan?

  Private credit's all over the place.

• 3:25:53Jordi Hays?

  People have been talking about this as kind of like a layman moment, but I looked at the size of the fund. It's 1.7 billion.

• 3:26:01John Coogan?

  Hmm, fund for ants.

• 3:26:03Jordi Hays?

  It's a private credit fund for ants.

• 3:26:05John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, not great. I remember we talked about this story last year.

• 3:26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:09Jordi Hays?

  They said they like, it kind of leaked that they were considering halting redemptions and they were like, actually, don't worry, we're not.

• 3:26:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:17Jordi Hays?

  And then now they actually have, so not, uh, not.

• 3:26:21John Coogan?

  What do you think lock in meant? Lock, getting locked in? You just got locked into your investments. No more redemptions. It's the great lock in. Again, don't call it a code red. Call it the great lock-in. You're good. Don't call it we're suspending redemptions. Call it, call it.

• 3:26:36Jordi Hays?

  A Baja blast. We're gonna Baja blast your returns.

• 3:26:39John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. To the stratosphere.

• 3:26:41Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, folks, thanks for hanging out with us today. Let's do it.

• 3:26:46John Coogan?

  Plant the bomb. Great show. Lot of fun. Always fun having Saagar and Jettie on the show. He is.

• 3:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Really gets people riled up.

• 3:26:54John Coogan?

  Professional. He's just a professional. And so he shows up, sounds good, looks good, great takes, back and forth.

• 3:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Definitely our, probably our most controversial guest, just judging by the chat, but we have a lot of fun.

• 3:27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of fun. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Have the best evening.

• 3:27:14Jordi Hays?

  Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.