YouTubers Win the Box Office, Salesforce on a Tear, Bernie Sanders: A.I. is a Public Resource | Adam Iscoe, Danial Jameel, Mike Schroepfer, Nico Ferreyra, Sue Khim, Bernie Su

(01:05) - YouTubers Win the Box Office (32:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (35:40) - Bernie Wants Public Stake in AI (49:03) - Anthropic IPO (50:04) - Salesforce Invests $2B in France (51:03) - Salesforce on a Tear (55:37) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (59:39) - Adam Iscoe, a journalist formerly with The New Yorker, has covered diverse topics including mental illness, contemporary art, and cryptocurrency. In the conversation, he discusses his journey to The New York Times, his writing process, and his experiences covering various subjects. (01:23:52) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:36:33) - Danial Jameel, Founder and CEO of Saris AI, discusses how his company develops AI workflow agents to automate complex back-office tasks in banks and credit unions, enhancing efficiency and allowing staff to focus on more meaningful work. He highlights the significant impact on employees' work-life balance, sharing examples where staff previously working late hours due to backlogs can now leave earlier, improving their quality of life. Additionally, he mentions that increased productivity has led some institutions to forgo hiring additional staff, instead opting to reward existing employees with raises, thereby boosting overall morale. (01:41:43) - Mike Schroepfer, former CTO of Meta Platforms, is the founder of Gigascale Capital, a venture capital firm focused on climate tech investments. In the conversation, he discusses his transition from Meta to venture capital, emphasizing the shift from digital to physical innovations in addressing climate change. He highlights investments in companies like Heron Power and Radiant Nuclear, which are developing advanced energy solutions, and underscores the importance of rethinking traditional manufacturing and energy systems to achieve significant environmental impact. (01:55:36) - Nico Ferreyra, co-founder and CEO of Default, discusses the company's evolution from building top-of-funnel orchestration tools to launching a new product that integrates a real-time data layer with AI agents to enhance go-to-market execution. He highlights the challenges companies face with disconnected systems and how Default's platform unifies data to streamline growth processes. Ferreyra also touches on the company's intense work culture and recent $10 million funding round, emphasizing their commitment to solving complex problems in revenue operations. (02:06:55) - Sue Khim, co-founder and CEO of Brilliant, discusses the launch of their new AI tutor, Koji, designed to help users learn math and coding through interactive, graphical assistance. She emphasizes the importance of reducing embarrassment in learning, allowing students to ask questions freely, and highlights the tutor's goal of becoming unnecessary as learners gain confidence and independence. Khim also addresses the significance of multimodal learning experiences and the need for purpose-built educational tools that provide real-time feedback and personalized learning paths. (02:16:18) - Bernie Su is an American web series creator, writer, director, and producer, renowned for his Emmy Award-winning adaptations of Jane Austen's novels, including "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" and "Emma Approved." In the conversation, Su discusses the evolving relationship between Hollywood and YouTube creators, noting that the integration has been progressing for years, with recent successes like "Obsession," "Backrooms," and "Iron Lung" highlighting this trend. He emphasizes that these achievements stem from creators producing content authentic to their brand, rather than merely leveraging their follower count, and observes that YouTubers are increasingly adept at franchising their content across various media platforms. (02:37:14) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

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• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, June 1st. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

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  The capital of capital. We have some really exciting news. We heard you loud and clear.

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  Loud and clear.

• 0:16John Coogan?

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• 0:18Jordi Hays?

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  We are back and we're going to tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate.

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  All in one place. That's right. You wanted ads. We are bringing you ads and we're very excited that we have more.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  We are incredibly back.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, we're very excited. So expect to hear ads throughout the show.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  It's funny. We, we heard over and over and over. I'm not joking.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  I know I get sarcastic a lot, uh, but we heard over and over and over that they're a nice palate cleanser.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  It's like turning the page.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Right? In between different topics.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, we are excited.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  And we love these companies. We want to help them grow. We've always been huge fans of the companies that we work with. So we're very excited to have them back. Um, let's turn over to YouTube and Hollywood, uh, breakout news, uh, in Hollywood. Uh, YouTubers winning at the box office. YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017. It took a decade to get here, but, uh, YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood. And there's a bunch of crazy statistics, but, uh, 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally, it feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony. It honestly seems win-win here. Um, but.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Not total disruption.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:43John Coogan?

  No, no, no, not that. Actual collaboration. And so, I mean, we all know Hollywood's been faced with a ton of challenges. I was just listing them off. Off the top of my head, what's this?

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Trey says a TVPN without ads is like a human without a heart.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Couldn't say it better myself. Um, I was just.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says calling in to the waiting room and not the restreamed waiting room was a crime.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true. So I was just listing off like all of the challenges that Hollywood has faced over the past couple decades and it's so bad. It's piracy, like you used to just be able to for a lot for all through like the mid 2000s, people would just download movies. Then better TV shows like TV just got so, so much better that that really took a lot of gas out of Hollywood because it used to be if you wanted something cinematic, you had to go to the theater and then Game of Thrones came out and all of a sudden TV, we went through like the era of great TV. Streaming, obviously that moved a lot of people out of theaters. Covid, that shut down the movie industry entirely. There were strikes, the

• 2:48John Coogan?

  double strike, writers and director's strike and a whole bunch of other strikes that went on. There was competition from other production markets, lower cost and that, you know, that can sometimes help certain elements of Hollywood, but it also hurts Hollywood, the physical place.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Meanwhile, streaming just created the, such a massive boom in spending on like a bunch of random projects, not necessarily like, you know, block, like blockbusters, but just like every platform needed more content and there was a lot of competition.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so throughout all of that, there was sort of a silver lining. I mean, the, the streaming thing is a big one of that, that there were jobs and projects that were getting greenlit on streaming platforms, but also just the creator economy. Like even though the number, I was looking at the number of like shoot, traditional Hollywood shoot days in Hollywood, it's fallen off a cliff post Covid, never fully recovered. But the number of people working in front of the camera, behind the camera, around the camera in broadly has obviously gone up throughout the creator economy. Boom. And so this was always unsatisfying to cinephiles though, because no matter how viral a TikTok goes

• 3:59John Coogan?

  or no matter how much money Mr. Beast or some other creator like makes, it never feels as, as culturally important as The Godfather or some other, or The Titanic, or some, some movie that everyone comes together, everyone has the shared cultural experience around. We were all in these like little bit of these like isolated niches and, oh yeah, I, I'm really into this creator. But anytime I try and bring it up to anyone, they don't know what I'm talking about.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Our, our, our shared, our, our moment is I see a meme starting to grow. And I tell you, I make the call to you.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and then we just kind of bet on it, basically.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  But even those, it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone, your, your little nephew, or your.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  You know, you know, uncle, and they both have an understanding, like they did during the Titanic era, like they did during the Godfather era, like they did during Star Wars, which is at the center of the story because The Mandalorian and Grogu is the latest Star Wars project, and it's actually been declining in the box office, it's been eclipsed, and there's been three movies that have been really, really breakout performances. So also, the Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029, this, this whole, this whole trend is going to be in full force. So, um, look at the stats. So, uh, Kane Parsons' Backrooms opened to roughly 81.5 million in North America and 115 million worldwide

• 5:29John Coogan?

  on a $10 million budget reportedly. Uh, Currie Barker's Obsession climbed, uh, is climbing in his third weekend and hit 104 million, 104.7 million domestic, becoming focus features, uh, highest grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around 1 million. That seems.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  And right now on X, every single day.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  There's a post that goes viral about Obsession's return on their budget.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  They're like, this million dollar film.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  You know, it, it's just happening over and over and over.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  And then, and so like the business story.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Oh, it's huge.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  To me is like way more, is, I mean, is everything.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Definitely, definitely. Uh, and then we also talked about this earlier, and it's sort of looped in with this, but Markiplier, another YouTuber, uh, released Iron Lung, which he financed himself, $3 million production budget reportedly, uh, and opened to 18.2 million domestically before grossing 41.1 million domestic, 51.2 million worldwide, huge return on investment. And so, uh, it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is, uh, YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales. Uh, but that's not exactly, it's not really that clean, and there's a bunch of counter examples. So, are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, is that like a toy unboxing?

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ryan would unbox toys and it became a huge, huge channel. And they actually made Ryan's World the movie Titan Universe Adventure, but it grossed only $624,000 on something like a $10 million budget. And so he wasn't able to convert that audience directly over. And I think with someone like Ryan Young.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  Was he encouraging children to take their parents' keys and wallet? And just go down to the movie theater? Because that's part of the issue with with with these channels and monetizing them is there's somewhat of a there's a disconnect between the audience and who the actual like buyer is.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  The person that controls purchasing.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Power in the household. So you might have like an eight year old kid.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  Who loves these videos, but anytime they actually want to act on.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  The content, they have.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  There's a translation step. Sometimes that can work though, you know, you see the advertisements of the the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says ads back the world to see you.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Let's hear an ad. Okay, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Okay, so what is different about Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung? Is that the filmmakers had they'd shown, they didn't just have huge audiences, like some of these. Markiplier is a truly large creator, but the the the folks behind Backrooms and Obsession are in like the single digit millions. Alone, if they didn't have the creativity, if they didn't have the the risk-taking abilities to actually produce something that could sort of, you know, draw attention in theaters, I don't think they could have just converted their subscribers over. Like the conversion rates just don't match up because if you're on 1 million subscribers and you did 100 million in box office, the math just doesn't match up.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Did some, did everyone, did all of your subscribers go see it five times and pay $20 each time? No way. Like, that's not what happened.

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  So this like the idea of like this creativity, risk-taking, new IP. This is like at the core of Hollywood successes. I was reading the Hollywood Reporter. They were saying like this hearkens back to like the 1970s. George Lucas's first film. Ben Thompson has a great analysis that we can read through. But these creators aren't just big influencers with millions of fans. They do have big audiences, but they also stand up their peers in terms of artistic vision. So Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called That's a Bad Idea, where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Backrooms has a similar story. Kane Parsons, who goes by Kane Pixels, produced his original series, The Backrooms, in Blender and After Effects.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  And the internet myth had laid a bit of the groundwork and we can go into some of the lore of Backrooms. It's a very fascinating story. It all started with like a single image of a furniture store that was being renovated at the time. And that picture just went viral and went and just like kept building lore and became one of these like creepypastas. And then eventually, you know, turned into his YouTube series, which turned into this film. And it's one of these like very interesting like origin story behind a piece of intellectual property. Typically, you don't see just a random image go viral and become a movie. But let alone a successful movie. But here we are. And so Markiplier, he did have an objectively huge audience, as I said,

• 10:23John Coogan?

  but he still went full stack when he was producing Iron Lung. He even talked about building a server rack in his bathroom so that he could render VFX shots on a faster turnaround. He had a VFX studio, but he was taking too long to go back and forth. And so he racked a whole bunch of servers and had a big electricity bill and put 220 volt outlets, like it's an electric car charger in his bathroom, all so that he could render like the blood splashing in his film on a faster turnaround. And so this is sort of like this, like the YouTube feels like creating on YouTube feels like a way to attract an audience, but it also feels like a way to demonstrate your, do sort of like a talent.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Audition as like a full stack creator like I understand the color grade, the vibe, the sound design, and I can have opinions on all of that when I go into production. So it's an easier project to underwrite if you need that. Markiplier was able to fund it himself, but the other folks did have partners on their projects. Being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters. I think there is some stuff that translates. We're seeing this with the sort of like YouTube fication or retention editing on Netflix, but I think the bigger value is being like a full stack filmmaker. So gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and just expecting

• 11:46John Coogan?

  the studio to do the rest for you. I think that the traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to do to be deployed on anything but existing IP. So the dedicated writer, the dedicated cinematographer, the dedicated sound designer, that'll show up for the Mandalorian and Grogu because they know that there's a certain amount of people that will just see every single Star Wars movie. But to take a risk on new IP from a new creator, you have to understand that that creator is going to be able to leave their fingerprints and actually drive every piece of the production.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you think the big studio execs are processing, you know, these two, these two films? Because you would think, okay, movies are a hits driven business. If you have a hundred million dollar budget, like thinking about it like if you're an early stage investor, like super early stage seed series A, and you have a hundred million dollars to invest, like sometimes the best move would be putting a hundred million dollars into one team.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  But there's a reason that people say like, hey, we're gonna make 20 to 30 investments across this fund, maybe, maybe more depending on the strategy.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  They're doing a lot more ten million dollar films.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, and so it feels like it makes so much sense because one film can generate the entire

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Fund returner.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Can be a fund returner, but at the same time. Is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal, right?

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Is there some?

• 13:10John Coogan?

  As opposed to the high risk one?

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  Not basically like direct financial incentive?

• 13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Where like there's just something like the status associated with putting together like a blockbuster?

• 13:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think, I do think we will see more $10 million films, more, more lower budget films. But I don't know. It feels like there's definitely a certain breed of Hollywood executive that their, their, their whole skill set is aligned to how can we put 100 million, 200 million to work and actually guarantee a return on that? So they're going to be working on the avatars and the Marvel movies and the DC movies and the Harry Potter movies. But for the next generation, that, that track feels like very much bought in. So there are already more of these sort of like YouTube adaptations in the works.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  One is from Wesley Wang, who went viral for, interestingly, obsession in backrooms are both horror films, which are notorious for being cheap to produce and potentially very high return. He went viral for a non-horror YouTube short called Nothing Except Everything. TriStar picked it up with Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa producing and Wang set to adapt it as writer-director. And then there's also the much sillier but extremely viral Skibitty Toilet, which was created by Alexei Gerasimov in 2023. And that project has been going back and forth, but reportedly Michael Bay was attached at one point. They were thinking maybe TV show, maybe movie.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  But that, as silly as that sounds and as ridiculous as that series is, it does, it did build like a little bit of a lore world. It captured a lot of people's fascinations and the numbers are really staggering. There is a little bit more nuance there because on the IP side, because it was created in Source Filmmaker, which is basically like Half-Life. Or Counter-Strike. So you design the level and then you can move the camera around through that. He didn't use Blender and he didn't shoot it with a camera. He actually made the whole series in a video game. And a lot of the assets pull from Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike Source. And so if you want to maintain that, you have to go do a deal with Valve, which,

• 15:25John Coogan?

  you know, is a private company owned by Gabe Newell. It doesn't necessarily need to just allow someone to do this. And there's already been back and forths on like takedown notices. So that's a whole different negotiation if that winds up making it to the silver screen. But I do think there will be more unpredictable breakouts in the coming years. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And some members of our production team saw both Backrooms and Obsession, and I want to get some reviews. What do you, what did you guys think? Which one was better? Take us through it.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  My vote's Obsession.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Obsession.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Scott, what did you think? Obsession.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Okay. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  So Obsession was great. It felt like, I feel like the filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently. Like this, like Ari Aster type wave. I remember leaving Midsommar and just feeling like, like, like gross for like days. And I felt like Obsession like walked it back a little bit and it was a bit of a comedy too. So it was fun. I felt like the memes are all over it, which is great.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Backrooms, we all kind of walked out. I love Backrooms. Production design should win an award, but something was missing from the movie, I think.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Apparently they built 30,000 square feet of actual set for Backrooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic. And that feels like, I mean, the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like, yeah, just send us the Blender files. Like, we'll just continue using, like, you're already working in CGI. Like, it's not like, oh, this isn't true to the source material. Like, it's actually less true to go build the set. But they did. And clearly, you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was really fun. Scott's got something.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  I want to shout out Haley Johnson, who produced Obsession too. She went to our film school.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's go over to Ben Thompson.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Your guys' class at your film school, I think, no longer exists. Truly, truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. Well done.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  So Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. He was taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017. He said, "In 2017, when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote goodbye gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood, where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood, created the conditions for his predation." So he had a lot of power. As he noted in the article, "A similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported, but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising. However, the internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the specter of something similar happening to movies."

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Don't forget YouTube. "Video is a zero-sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another." And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every day in 2016.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  I've seen Tyler with two phones.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Watching two things?

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Wheels on both phones.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, Subway Surfers.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  On the main screen, just going like this.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Well, if you have VR, you can have way more screens open.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  You can.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  Because you can just...

• 18:41John Coogan?

  You can't... When is Subway Surfers getting an adaptation? That feels like that's due for a trilogy. Subway Surfers, the Movie? I think we got something. Are they... We cannot be the first people to think of Subway Surfers.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Angry Birds is like us, you know?

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they're making a third one or...

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  No, but I want it to be a movie where you're just like, you know, on, you're basically just going one direction.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in the Subway Surfers universe. So Ben Thompson continues, he says, "It's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the internet and digital media has affected media: text first, then music, then short-form video, etc. Movies..." The pinnacle of traditional media are the hardest to both make and distribute, particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And of course, movies ask the most of customers in return, they actually have to leave the house. It's also notable, I've been seeing more creators basically produce movies, like Johnny Harris, a video essayist, talks about geopolitics and breaks down history of the Middle East,

• 19:51John Coogan?

  history of Europe, and history of China, Taiwan. And his last few videos have been two hours long, which is just a movie. He's just making an actual documentary. It used to be, there was a 20-minute cutoff. Well, it used to be like 8, 10 minutes because of the ad breaks, you'd want two ads in there, then people sort of went to 20, 30 minutes because of watch time.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the only other difference is I feel like if somebody's making a documentary or a film, they'll do more maybe walk and talks, things like that, whereas I feel like the classic YouTube video is just like, like thinking about your YouTube videos, right? You're just set up like in an office, like talking to the camera. But just that slight difference makes it feel like way more like a film.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. There is an interesting way where you can pretty easily rotate from video essay scripted, long form, just write the script longer and longer, I've put out video essays that have been over an hour, to go do a bunch of interviews, get them to say some things, weave those in, and then do some sort of like walk and talk at the beginning. And you can have like a low-budget documentary very, very easily, with just a few shoot days. And I think a lot of people are moving towards this, but it's just been interesting that YouTube has sort of found its footing in delivering a two-hour video. And I think a lot of that has to do with how the algorithm surfaces content at certain moments in time, and then also resurfaces moments. So for a two-hour video, they know that they're gonna need to give you like a couple shots

• 21:17John Coogan?

  on goal to show it as a thumbnail. And then also, if you click on it, and you watch 10 minutes, and then you close your phone and you go do something else, they know that that's not necessarily means that, it doesn't necessarily mean that you were unsatisfied with the video, and they will say, hey, do you want to keep watching that? And so all of that has been algorithmic changes that make a two-hour video work a little bit better on YouTube, which is more of a casual world. So. Ben Thompson continues, he says that leads to two true but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why YouTube stars might succeed in movies. First is that they is that this is simply a new place to discover talent, and that's certainly true. The analogy I would draw is to the impact of AWS had on venture capital. Cloud computing reduced the cost

• 22:02John Coogan?

  of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founder's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers, and that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms meanwhile didn't evaluate companies based on a PowerPoint to fund sun servers, but rather on actual products and market signals. So it is with this new wave of talent, the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations, not that not just their ideas. That's what I was talking about. The the audition, the YouTube growth and the YouTube product and the YouTube series that gets 82 million views in the in the example of Backrooms, like that is the audition tape that gets you the production workforce behind Hollywood to to actually marshal behind you. And that's the same thing with, you know,

• 22:47John Coogan?

  the startup that shows up on Sand Hill Road raising a Series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. And all of that is possible because you don't need $10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. More true than ever in the age of AI. The second true but unsatisfying answer is that YouTube creators can bring their own audience. That's almost certainly true. Kane Parsons, who made Backrooms, has 3.2 million subscribers, which feels low based on how big Backrooms is, but that's the nature of these videos that go viral. They don't always all convert to to actual subscribers. Curry Barker, who made Obsession, has 1.2 million subscribers, again on that comedy channel.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  And then Mark Fishback, who made Iron Lung with Markiplier, has 38.7 million subscribers, huge account from years of streaming. And he purposely leveraged that to get distribution. Bloomberg sort of broke it down. He he was set to release his $3 million film, Iron Lung, in 60 independent cinemas. Fishback led a grassroots campaign encouraging his followers to phone up local theaters. And request iron lung screenings. This is something that a lot of people say in like CPG like, oh, fill out this form, request me in Aragon or Whole Foods. But it's usually really, really hard to get someone to actually do that.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Uh, because the conversion rate might be like 0.001 percent. But if you have 40 million people that are, you know, loosely entertained by you and you get, you know,

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  fraction of a percent.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  10,000 people who really, really, really care.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you talk about a thousand true fans. He probably has a million true fans out of that 40 million that are.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but then even 1% of those actually are.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  That's still 10,000 phone calls. It's a lot. And so the film was ultimately picked up by major chains, including AMC, which has been on a tear. AMC said that, uh, this weekend was the highest ticket sales they've had in years.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, up 20% today.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  The stock is up 20%.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 100 billion dollar company.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Hundred? Wait, what? No, no, no, no, no.

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  It's a 1 billion dollar company.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, they put some data centers in the theaters, I guess. Uh, Regal Entertainment Group and Cinemark Holdings also.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  They set it up so if you rock, you rock in your chair, you get a free film.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  They capture the energy.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  You're powering.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  You're powering.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Small rack of GPUs.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, potentially powered by Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, uh, the unsatisfying aspect that Ben Thompson's referring to is best understood through the lens of the movie Backrooms and Obsession, finished ahead of from Variety. So they talk, he talks about The Mandalorian and Grogu, which we mentioned, and he calls back to George Lucas's original film. Uh, so his initial claim to fame was American Graffiti, which made over $200 million on a $777,000 budget. That's a crazy ROI, over 200x return on investment for American Graffiti.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  The success gave him the support to make Star Wars.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  How, how do, uh, Ben, Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been, I've been, uh, I've been pitched, like, invest in my movie before, but given that I don't watch movies, didn't feel like it was really my strike zone. But how does it typically get structured? Like if a film needs a million dollar budget? Like, are the investors getting, like, an independent film needs a million dollar budget?

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  How does equity work? Any rough ideas?

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Typically, there's a series of buyers and investors.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm distracting you guys from running the show.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  Very similar to...

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it live.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  So...

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Scott's job is to change...

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Oftentimes, a screenwriter will sell an option to make a movie to a producer, some sort of production team. They are, the production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it, and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other scriptwriters.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Got it, got it.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  They might attach a, they might go pitch a, do the deal to bring on a star. And then from there, they go to another producer. And then the last, the last time, the last moment is, is the actual, like, marketing phase. And so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor, they're putting in a ton of money because they're gonna buy the billboards and, like, the Super Bowl ads. And that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point. But there's a series of, sort of, gates in the typical Hollywood fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent $3 million, that means he spent $3 million paying the actors.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 'cause even with Obsession...

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around LA.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, at least a million dollar campaign.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  Right when the videos were coming out saying, like, Obsession just turned 750K into 100 million dollars. And so I was like, well, this doesn't make sense.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  So a lot of times, that might happen after the fact.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's an after, there's more money being spent to, like, you know, it's like, hey, we have a hit now, let's, like...

• 27:57John Coogan?

  And then, and then basically, at every phase, there can be sort of an in-kind investment, where you, they call it, like, points on the back end, basically. But it's basically, like, the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man. He took a very low salary upfront, cash upfront, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  You're saying he's goaded?

• 28:21John Coogan?

  He's goaded. He's actually goaded. I think he made hundreds of millions of dollars off of the Marvel franchise that came from that. And there is a world where he would have said, no, I want only cash upfront. You're gonna have to pay me a ton. And then a production team has to come in. They put the money in, they get the equity, and then they get that on the back end.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  So now that Curry has this insane hit?

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Yep. He can make a Star Wars.

• 28:44Speaker 05

  Are people gonna come to him and say like, I want, I wanna basically buy your next five films?

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  Kind of thing?

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, multi, multi film deal, or if, it depends on what he's pitching. Like, he could, like, somebody could just come, come to him with something very open-ended. They could come with him to something narrow. Maybe he's already working on something, has a script, has an idea, and then wants to get that, you know, made or locked up, or maybe he wants to be, i- it's also possible he gets brought on as someone to adapt something else. So they say, hey, we already have this IP, maybe we wanna re, bring back Scream, and, and we would love for you to do it.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  He's actually, he actually is doing the next Texas Chainsaw.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, with A24.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Where Curry is?

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so he- Generational run.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  Obsession, he got his next feature-

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:30Speaker 05

  Which is called Anything But Ghosts.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:32Speaker 05

  And then from that, he hopped on with A24 to do the next-

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

• 29:37Speaker 05

  So he's already got stuff.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Which has already been remade a few times, but it's-

• 29:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  But, but, but it's established intellectual property, and bringing him on, sort of, you know, de-risks in some ways, but it also just brings some fresh energy to that, that IP, where whoever did the first Texas Chainsaw or the reboot, maybe they're doing something else, or maybe the studio wants to take a different direction, and so they license that IP, because Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not like a, it's not an A24 property from day one, but at this point, they went and got the rights, and then they got the director, and then they put them together, and so it's all a package deal. Anyway, Ben Thompson's blackpilling on Star Wars. He says, "It turns out, however, that actually making good movies still matters. A late Gen X'er like me, who saw, who as a teenager saw The Phantom Menace twice in

• 30:24John Coogan?

  its opening weekend, so excited was I by the return of Star Wars, and did not, and did the same for The Force Awakens, has basically no interest in The Mandalorian and Grogu." Has anyone in the studio seen The Mandalorian and Grogu? No one, no one's into it. It's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for Andor. That was more my, my speed. And he, and he agrees. He says, I'm clearly not alone. It's been clear for a while now that all the things that Disney worries about when making a Star Wars film or TV series, actually making it good has not been one of them brutal. The thing, that's the thing with IP-based business model. However, Disney seems to have assumed that because they control distribution, thanks

• 31:07John Coogan?

  to the massive consolidation of movie studios over the past years, that they could shove whatever supply they wanted through the tubes and audiences would slurp it up because they had no other choice. This is the exact opposite of YouTube specifically and the internet generally. On the internet, distribution is free. Anyone can set up a website or start a YouTube account and they can post whatever they want. Content that breaks through has, has to do so on its own merits. It is good and, and is it good and compelling or is it not? If it is, it gets more and more views. That's what the algorithm does. It is respond to and amplify interest. And if it's not, like 99.99% of YouTube content, it's barely seen by anyone. In short, the reason these movies are successful is not just because their makers were spotted by powerful producers or because they brought their own fans. I agree with this.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  It's not enough just to bring their own fans. It's because the necessary precondition for those two things happening is actually becoming popular on pure merit. It's a more merit-based system. These movies are successful because their makers are good and we know they're good because they're successful on YouTube. No, that doesn't mean everyone on YouTube is good. Indeed, that's the entire point. There's no quality bar to get onto YouTube, which means the quality bar to get noticed on YouTube is much higher than any gate. Indeed, as much as Hollywood types might, might look down on YouTubers, it's the latter who are far more impressive, at least if the goal is actually trying to make something that resonates. Very good. Very, very fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Your AI agents can now create, modify your Figma files with Design System Context. Go check it out at Figma.com. Famously not dead, still cooking. Saspocalypse is over, we'll get to that later in the show.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  Not a car.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Not a car. No one's a car.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Did you see the new George Lucas Museum Cinema?

• 32:53John Coogan?

  I thought this was interesting that this was going viral at the same time, or it launched at the same time. You know, it's sort of a turning over.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Makes me wanna throw on a tux.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yes, it looks very cool. Apparently a billion dollars to make this, a billion dollar investment in this whole facility, the George Lucas Museum Cinema, opening in September. This looks absolutely amazing. Quote, "All through the course of a normal day, one will screen documentaries about artists and filmmakers while the other one shows short films, some only a few minutes long." It's in Los Angeles. If you're coming by the TBP in UltraDome, make a stop at the George Lucas Museum Cinema. Very, very cool. There's also a cool video here of the history of liminal spaces. We should pull up because Backrooms, of course, is pulling from a lot of interesting videos. Let's play this. Can we zoom in this at all? There we go. Truman Show?

• 33:48John Coogan?

  Haven't seen it? I've seen it, it's great. I can't believe you've never seen Truman Show, it's so good.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Should we get some liminal spaces here in the UltraDome?

• 33:57John Coogan?

  The UltraDome is a little bit of a liminal space. We should make it more of a liminal space. There are some podcasters that have liminal space type setups. Unbox Therapy is a famous one.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  You guys haven't seen it, but do you know like the tape on the wall? Do you know what that is?

• 34:12John Coogan?

  No, what's that?

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I guess no spoilers, but.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We can put tape on the wall. People who've seen it will know what that means.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  That's a very cool shot. The Shining? The Shining? I never put The Shining in the same bucket as this. It Follows, that's a good horror film. That's a great one.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  We can just vibe out to liminal spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. This will happen too with AI in about a decade. Studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business from YouTube to anime to video games. We talked about Subway surfers. We're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Ooh, all the simulators, maybe there will be data center simulator, the movie. Can you imagine? We got data center simulator. Or what was the other one? Coconut simulator? We gotta get coconut simulator, the movie. Realistic mode.

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  Capybara simulator, the movie.

• 35:23John Coogan?

  That's just a nature documentary. Get David Attenborough in there. You're done. You're good.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Very interesting. Well, churn in entertainment finance this.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  David Attenborough narrating gameplay from Capybara simulator.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Ooh, I think that, I think we got a hit on our hands. Call 824, they're ready. Well, Bernie Sanders is talking about taking a stake in the AI labs. He says AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake. And he penned a full op ed in the New York Times, a guest essay. I need to confirm my account if I want to log into this, but we can, we can see the...

• 36:17John Coogan?

  I, I, I think I subscribed to my phone and so it doesn't sync with my Chrome installation. I don't know. Let's see. Andrew Curran is highlighting it.

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is rough.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a one-time 50% tax directly in stock from the AI labs, which will be used to fund the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund. This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because... So you take it 50% and like, when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean, it takes many tech companies like decades to actually return cash to shareholders. They're known for

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he wants to just be fire selling.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  After the IPOs.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  He's just, he's just like, this is the

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  I didn't tell you how there was going to be a dividend.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Dividend in, in sales.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  Um, no, it's, I mean, the, the positioning, I'm, I'm trying to get into the New York, into my New York Times account too. But the positioning, um, blank is built on humanities collective knowledge.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  What is not built on humanities collective knowledge?

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was looking at a lot of

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  TBPN is built on, TBPN is built on humanities collective knowledge.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  True.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  If, if humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Hey, be careful what you say. The, the United States, American citizens might own 50% of TBPN soon. You never know with this.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  You never know. You just never know.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  You're trying to create here.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  But, uh,

• 37:52John Coogan?

  Bad example.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the, the other thing is, um, you know, we, we have

• 37:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. AI 2027 talks about this. I think that's a, it, it is, it is right in line. He's clearly in the milieu of that crew and, uh, we'll see, we'll see where all this goes, you know? I don't know. We'll see. Um, it's, uh, a lot of people are sort of framing it as

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  Rather have universal basic tokens.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Hmm. Maybe that would be the dividend. I don't know. Um, he says, uh,

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  But it's interesting. So he's trying to ban data centers with the data center moratorium.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Act, but then he also

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  Wants half.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, those two things feel like, like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like, uh, you know, misalignment here. He says, uh, I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned or a public good that should be redistributed? He wants to have it both ways, which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show. This is about capital. Interesting. At the same time, I, I, I think that there is a world where if you, if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that does enable, especially if you have a board seat over every AI lab, you could actually do the thing where you say,

• 39:18John Coogan?

  we're all going to slow down simultaneously. That's a lot easier to implement if you have 50% control over everything. Tyler, what do you?

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you can just do like the AI FDA.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  You don't need like actual equity.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Okay, this is my kind of contrarian take.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  But this seems like extremely bullish, right?

• 39:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Bernie, you don't think of him as being this kind of classically capitalist person.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  But implicitly saying these are going to be the biggest.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  He's saying that the stock's underrated.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Undervalued.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  These are going to be the biggest.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, because, because if all the stocks were going to zero.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  And they're going to be so big that this is going to be like disruptive to the economy.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Like this seems like he's extremely AGI-pilled.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  It seems like it, yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like this seems like he's, he's basically saying like, okay, the data center stuff is like probably not going to work out. I'm not going to be able to ban these things.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  But.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Mark in the chat says, Mr. Sanders is your crazy uncle that your mom and dad uses as a babysitter when there are no other options.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Interesting. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 40:24Jordi Hays?

  Another Mark in the chat says, my wife wants me to tell you guys that I'm so loyal that even laying on the beach with her, I can't leave the boys. Mark is on vacation tuning into TV.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  Say hello to everyone for us.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  We hope you're enjoying the sun, Mark, and thanks, thanks for being with us.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Thanks for tuning in. So my question is, I mean, obviously, this is a New York Times op-ed. It's not a piece of.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  I know what you're going to say. You think that Bernie. Has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppen.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  I I I'm not going there yet. We'll get there. But first off, I mean, the big news today, Anthropic is confidentially filed for IPO. They should be out. SpaceX is going public. Google's public, OpenAI, there's rumors of of of an IPO.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and that's what that's what gets really crazy here, right? Because is is Google? Google's a leading lab.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Does Bernie Bernie want?

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Then, yeah, but then is is Salesforce an AI company?

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Is Meta?

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Is Meta? Yeah, Meta.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Mark, Mark would be, we were talking about this earlier. Mark would quickly be like, me? Trying to build personal super.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  I'm not, I'm not an AI company.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm not an AI lab. I'm not an AI lab.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  I'm just doing some experiments.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  I got these GPUs to.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Ninety nine percent of the value that we're creating is just recommendations.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna take half of all birds.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Oh, no. He's gonna take half of all birds. But seriously, like, how how deep does he go down the stack? I mean, Intel, like, Trump already took a 10%. Nvidia? Nvidia makes a lot of sense.

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  The American open source hero.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  But what about Microsoft? Like, Microsoft doesn't have, like, they have a huge partnership with OpenAI. They don't have a frontier foundation model, but they're definitely like a front door to a lot of AI services with Copilot, and they're vending these tools in everywhere. And so there's just a whole, like, Amazon, I heard Amazon Rufus for AI shopping.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  The Rufinator.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Surprisingly, surprisingly effective. It's working very well. Like, this is an AI assistant that's powered by other models under the under the hoods, doesn't need to be the most aggressive mythos for 5.5 Pro, like, you know, it doesn't need to be the the the frontier, but it's it's actually working and customers are using it. Same thing with Sparky at Walmart. And so is Walmart an AI company now? Like, the definition around this will be hotly debated, but of course, you don't want to get too over your skis here, because this is just an op ed. It's not in legislation. It's a it's it's to provoke thoughts.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, if the argument is that, basically, if something is built on humanities collective knowledge, the government should get half.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  You can go pretty far here. Pretty much everything in our modern world.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  Is built on humanities collective knowledge.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  And so. Yeah, I think everybody should get ready to, I mean, even your, your own home, right? Your own home is built on collective knowledge.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Somebody invented the two by four. Exactly. Yeah. No, you can go all over the place.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  Cutting down trees.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Yes. So maybe it ends with some sort of tax on corporate profits.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, tax on corporate profits would feel.

• 43:27John Coogan?

  If a, if a company makes money, they have to send some of it to the government. That would be.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  Why has no one thought of this, John?

• 43:32John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  Take this to DC right now.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Okay, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So there's a hot debate. Apollo's chief economist says there's zero evidence of AI related job losses. And this went viral. Torsten Slok, the partner and chief economist, says zero evidence of AI related job losses. He says, weekly ADP employment data, there's zero evidence of job loss. Instead, many firms are hiring AI implementation experts and the data center build out is putting upward pressure on salaries for AI experts and on prices of semiconductors, equipment and energy. The bottom line is that AI spending boom, the AI spending boom is stoking both employment and inflation.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  As a result, non-farm payrolls for May could come in significantly higher than the 95,000 expected by consensus. This is Jevon's paradox playing out in real time. Cheaper technology is creating more demand for more jobs. And he has a chart there and you can see ADP is in a really strong position. It looks great. It's really good. There is more nuance here because if you dig into this, what's actually driving the hiring boom is healthcare and the AI affected areas. There's not a massive wave of, of layoffs that's happening broadly. We're seeing layoffs at different tech companies, but broadly, like white collar work is not going through a massive, you know, employee unemployment spike.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  But the, the employment spike that we're seeing, the upward trend in ADP weekly employment is still driven mostly by healthcare jobs. And so I don't know how much you can actually say Jevon's paradox in real time. Maybe you can in the sense that, you know, asset prices are going up. There isn't, there isn't wide, broad unemployment. So there's more justification in hiring more in the healthcare sector. But this felt like maybe a little bit too, too soon to take a victory lap on this. I'm not exactly sure. It's certainly a better place to be than seeing unemployment go up. We want to see, we want to see lots of hiring. We want to see a low unemployment rate, and that's what we're seeing, which is great. But it is, it is soon.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  It is early and we're just getting to start to implement these tools. And there's still risk all over the place. Maybe not as much risk as what Jason Oppenheim thinks, though, because he went on the Ice Coffee Hour and made an audacious claim about job displacement, pinning, pinning it at 80% of people out of the workforce, 80% unemployment. We can play this clip from the Ice Coffee Hour.

• 46:14Speaker 06

  Far. There won't be any work. I disagree with Kevin.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  There won't be any work.

• 46:17Speaker 06

  Of people out of the workforce that we know of today and into the things that I talked about. So I think what we have to do is start creating, showing and creating value for those things. Start ascribing value to, to family and to hobbies and to sport and to relationships more. And it has to be less about work. So I hear a lot of I thinks and you guys are real estate people in the eyes of the viewer. What gives you guys credibility to talk about AI?

• 46:45Speaker 07

  Fair question. I would say that I've spent probably 500 hours listening and reading a lot of podcasts.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  Did the homework.

• 46:52Speaker 07

  I think it's, it's the quintessential like intellectual pursuit of the last two years of my life.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Call David Center. Listening to podcasts is the quintessential intellectual pursuit. Jeremy Gafford on Suicide Watch. Tyler, you had something?

• 47:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, just for some context. So in the peak of the Great Depression, unemployment was 24.9.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  24.9.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  And he's saying 80%.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Okay, so three times, four times the Great Depression is what we're looking at with AI?

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just, it's so, it's so funny to listen, to, to go and just like listen to a bunch of podcasts and come back with, with the 80% number.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 47:27Jordi Hays?

  Because. You also have to, you would have to qualify that, like what, what set of technologies actually enable that? Because you certainly would need like, you know, highly effective, efficient humanoid robots, you know, fully deployed throughout society. But, uh, but yeah, I don't, the strongest take we've seen yet.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, very concerning.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  But this is a stronger take potentially. This is the other side of it.

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  Sam Sulek revealed that 95% of jobs are safe from AI. He said AI is a tool. It won't replace discipline, grit, or hard work.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Instagram. How did this?

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  No, I made this. I made this. This is a fake quote. I sent this to John over the weekend.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  It looks very, like, the fact that it added the little Instagram buttons makes it look way more legit to me. I know you made this, but I, I still did a double take. It's absolutely wild. Uh, so funny. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very happy to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange. It's really going, really going today. And thank you to Aria, Aria.Tech. They produced all of our show graphics, the Chyron.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  Legends.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  The intro. They've worked with us for a long time. And they also activated my AI Siri for some reason. I don't know why that happened. On my phone and my MacBook. Wow. Uh, what a day. Uh, Salesforce is on an absolute tear. Uh, we talked about the dueling narrative. So Anthropic is IPO-ing, or, or they have, they have confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Pending completion of SEC review, this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. Uh, there's a race between SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Um, meanwhile, it was so over for the, all the SaaS companies,

• 49:32John Coogan?

  but, uh, the SaaS apocalypse might be canceled. That's what we're seeing. A lot of companies are up. Some of them are up on Anthropic Holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their traditional business.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  Mark's gotta be feeling good. He invested 50 million into Anthropic, I think in 2023 or 2024.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Cheeky 100x?

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  Very cheeky, very cheeky.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  I think he's

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  He's feeling good. He's now gonna deploy 2 billion euros

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  Into France.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he has 1,800 employees in France.

• 50:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, more committed than ever to driving innovation and agentic growth across the country. And I love this new meta. I think this picture is, this is the new, this is the new vibreal meta. So anytime you do a business transaction,

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Or a farm.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  Snap a selfie with your business partner, post it. You don't need to make a video with a bunch of, um, you know, sort of, uh, videos throughout history of, of, you know, hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that. Um, just take a selfie, post it, you're good to go. Much more efficient.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  And I'm dropping, after this partnership, I just gotta say, I'm, we're cancelling my personal beef with, uh, France.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  This is a fantastic progress.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Benioff won you over.

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah. If, uh, if they have Benioff's full faith, they have my full faith. And, uh, already this 2 billion euros, I think is significantly more than their, uh, their, their, the previous investment that they announced.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  That created the original beef.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Beef squashed. It's good to see. Good to see. Well, uh, Benioff gave some more context on Salesforce's progress. The fiscal year 27, Q1 results, uh, record revenue, 11.13 billion, up 13% year over year. This is a very mature company, still growing very quickly. Very good news. Uh, operating cash flow of 6.7 billion. Agent Force crossed 1 billion, uh, ARR, or, yeah, ARR. Uh, combined with Data 360 and Informatica, now at 3.4 billion in AI data ARR. We're not just talking about the, here.

• 51:40Speaker 08

  We're not just talking about the agentic future. We're delivering it. The number one agentic CRM powering the shift to agentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real. The future is unstoppable. Bioemoji.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  Thirty-four percent.

• 51:57Jordi Hays?

  What is a, yeah, so Relay says.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Really.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  What is a sarsaparilla? What's a sarsaparilla?

• 52:02John Coogan?

  Sarsaparilla is a beverage. It's like a Coca-Cola. It's a drink that you get at a soda bar.

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  Sarsaparilla.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  What? Sarsaparilla? Sarsaparilla?

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Sars. I'm seeing.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Nostalgic soft drink. You just call it sarsaparilla. I, I know it says sarsaparilla, but everyone pronounces it sarsaparilla, I think. Anyway, nostalgic soft drink, herbal plant, native to the Americans, sweet, earthy flavor. This is due for a comeback. This feels like this would sell for $20 a bottle at Arowan, don't you think?

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  I bet bringing back sarsaparilla, good business. Somebody do the call, call area, call day job right now. Start your branding packages and, uh, and I think you got a winner if you bring back sarsaparilla successfully. Well, Marc Benioff teased a little bit of the progress on our show and we can play this clip from him on TBPN, giving us a little bit of a view into the demand that Salesforce was seeing, the growth that they were seeing in their business.

• 53:00Speaker 09

  I wasn't really on the show at the beginning of the year, a year ago with you guys, but if I was, what I would have said was, I'm not hiring more engineers in fiscal year, you know, 26, the year it just passed.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 09

  Because I was using coding agents and I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 09

  And I didn't hire more service agents in the year. I held it flat and then reduced it slightly because I'm using service agents, but I did hire like almost 20% more salespeople this year.

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  Salespeople.

• 53:30Speaker 09

  We've talked about that because I need more capacity because we have more demand than ever through every market from small, medium, large customers. You know, guys like yourself who are like these great entrepreneurs, building a great business like TBPN, really going all the way through it. You need a technical infrastructure around you to grow your business. I know you use Slack, I know you use other products.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  Got us.

• 53:53Speaker 09

  And that's our job is to make you successful. And to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do it just with an.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Sales guy, final boss. He's so good.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  Final boss. It is, it is, I think the pushback there would be, well, you do sell customer service agents.

• 54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  Don't sell coding agents and, but you are selling sales focused agents. So why, so basically you're getting so much efficiency in these other places.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  That you don't need to hire more people, but in the kind of category in which your primary products operate.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  You're, he's not making the efficiency argument, he's making the demand argument. He's saying, we have so much demand, we need more reps.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  But he's selling a product that should be able to sort of meet that demand, right?

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Uh, yes and no. I mean, he's selling, he's selling like a tool that sits alongside a sales rep. If there's a booming economy, more sales, you would think that there's more people that go into sales, more people that need a Shopify, or, uh, sorry, Salesforce like installation alongside them. There's, there's still a bull case there. I mean, all the labs have Salesforce admins and stuff. We've seen this reported and, uh, and there's certainly like so much of the diffusion discussion is around actually, uh, meeting someone, having a human in the loop, having someone alongside you as you implement these tools, uh, so you don't go over your token budget, token maxing. Token maxing seems like a, a harebrained scheme cooked up by an SDR.

• 55:26John Coogan?

  He's just, okay, we're going to Salesforce. Agent Force, what should I do? Tell them to token max. Tell them to create a leaderboard where they produce as many tokens as possible. Like, okay, so, okay, Agent Force, got it, buddy.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Did you know that Jensen was such a good dancer?

• 55:42John Coogan?

  I had no idea. Do we have a video of this?

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  We do.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Okay, let's play this and then we'll read Brandon Gurrell's deep dive on Jensen's Computex 2026 keynote, which is being hotly debated. Okay.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Look at this.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  It's pretty good.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  Look at this.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  He's flowing. Ooh, I like the swimming. He's having fun.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  He's gotta be feeling pretty good this quarter.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  You gotta read into these, right?

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we read into, we read into him doing the arm-linked, you know, chugging beers in Korea.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  5.4 trillion, up 6% today. Wow.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Absolutely wild.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Where's he sitting on multiple?

• 56:31John Coogan?

  Pop quiz, what movie features a dance to this song?

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  Pulp Fiction? It literally says it in the caption.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  I don't know. Sometimes you're so, you'd be like, I don't know what those words mean. That couldn't possibly be the answer to John's question.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  Jordi, have you seen Pulp Fiction?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  I have.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  I have. That's one of the five.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  Five movies. We're slowly discovering that there's more than five movies. There's like 20. Uh, it's a good time. Uh, anyway, let's go through, uh, what Brandon Grell, uh, summarized from Jensen Wong's, uh, Computex 2026 keynote. Uh, Nvidia CEO made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex, Taiwan's annual technology expo. I guess it's their CES, but more enterprise focused even. Uh, he introduced the RTX, the Nvidia RTX Spark Super Chip, an ARM-based chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally. He announced that the enterprise Varus CPU is now in full production, and he announced several foundation models, a world model, an open weight flagship AI model.

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Do we have a model card for that yet? Uh, that seems like big news, open weight flagship AI model. We heard that he was investing billions of dollars in that, but, um, I, I think everyone's very interested to see where it benchmarks against the five fives, the, what, what is, uh, in 48 now? Um, and, uh, and the three fives from Google, like the closed source models have been on the frontier, and there's been the chart showing that the open source models from China have been sort of decelerating, or they're just, uh, they're, they're growing more linearly than the, uh, than the American closed source models. So is there a gap there? Where does Nvidia fit in with their open weight model? That'll, that's an interesting question. Um, and he also released a model specifically designed for humanoid robots.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  A lot of the attention from the keynote came, is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft's attempt to create its own Apple silicon moment. And Microsoft coordinated its announcements of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark and will be released this fall. Can you play Crysis on it? Can you game on this thing? Is that? Cool, or is it all about running agents locally? I wonder what the demand for these local agents on the desktop will be because so many, so many workloads, you know, you just hand it off and you wait 20 minutes and you come back, but there is some value to being able to do at least like the voice transcription locally, just all sorts of things.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you can do like tool calling, then that basically gets you like most of the way there because then all the hard things you can just outsource well.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  And then for like gaming, I'm still very excited to see any of these like real time video models used in gaming. This seems like it'll be a thing you do with these like super nice.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  We gotta get David Zuckey back on the show for, to talk about Roblox and the, the real time up ressing of Roblox games because I think that that's such a, such an incredible technology. I think it's going to be really popular, but it's going to take time for it to actually roll out. Anyway, there is a cut down of Jensen's keynote that you can watch. We linked it in the newsletter and we, we will go into that more later. But we have our first guest from the New York Times. He's a journalist, Adam Isco, just wrote a fantastic piece about prediction markets and he's here with us. The TVV Ultra, I'm Adam, how you doing?

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  With a slap wall.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Slap wall.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Ready to podcast.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Is that a slap wall or is that a virtual background? What we got, what we got?

• 59:51Speaker 10

  It's real, it's real. You think I do a virtual background on you, y'all?

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, thank you. With the suit, with the suit.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  Bringing a slap wall and a suit. You are ready to podcast.

• 1:00:00John Coogan?

  Okay, are you in New York City?

• 1:00:03Speaker 10

  I'm in New York City, long time listener, first time caller.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic to have you.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Since this is the first time and we have some, and we do have some time to kind of unpack this, I wanted to hear a little bit about your journey, your history, how you wound up at the New York Times, where else you've written, the type of topics, how you describe your beat, your process, just sort of give me the, the 101 on you and then we can dive into prediction markets specifically.

• 1:00:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, you know, at a party, if someone asks me, what the hell do you write about? Are we allowed to curse on the show? Is it's no FDC?

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to.

• 1:00:34Speaker 10

  We don't, we don't.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  I'm surprised the New York Times would let you. Are you allowed to drop profanity in the gray lady?

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  I can tell he's a bit of a bad.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  In the gray lady, bad boy.

• 1:00:45Speaker 10

  Been the great, it's been the great controversy with me working at the Times is that I spent the last five years at The New Yorker.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:51Speaker 10

  It's a magazine that encourages profanity in the pages. But the Times, you know.

• 1:00:57John Coogan?

  A little more bite up.

• 1:00:59Speaker 10

  Things are a little different there. Um, I've spent the last five years at The New Yorker writing about all kinds of things, whether it's mental illness and homelessness in New York City, or it's, um, like, you know, every year I read a story about a cool boat on the New York Harbor.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:01:11Speaker 10

  Uh, you know, I'm just trying to like go interesting places and see interesting things.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  What tree to the boat? I gotta know about the boat.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Since you brought it up.

• 1:01:19Speaker 10

  Oh, I mean, y'all ever see a shipping container ship?

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Speaker 10

  Like, you ever want to get on one? You ever been on one?

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  I don't think I've ever been on a shipping container ship, but I have wanted to go on one.

• 1:01:30Speaker 10

  I mean.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  I've been on an aircraft carrier. That was very cool.

• 1:01:33Speaker 10

  You've been on an aircraft carrier?

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  I've been on an aircraft carrier. I went on the USS Carl Vinson as part of the distinguished visitor program. There's a program where you can sign up for, you have to wait years and years and years unless you're actually famous. Uh, and I had a friend who waited years and years and years and they slotted me in at the last second. So I got to go with like, a lot of like, big Hollywood producers and stuff and they sort of give you the dog and pony show, let you sleep on the boat for two days, meet everyone.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Two days?

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, two days. You're like at sea with them and they, they, you have no cell service. They don't tell you where you are and you can kind of speculate, okay, well, we left from San Diego, we're probably around Mexico. But, um, but yeah, you get to watch the planes take off and land and they take you and they fly you off and stuff. It's a wild experience.

• 1:02:12Speaker 10

  We definitely knew where we were. We were in the New York Harbor.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:15Speaker 10

  Uh, like, we came under the Verrazano Bridge and, uh, uh, it was great. The cargo was a miniature of the Statue of Liberty.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:02:24Speaker 10

  A gift from the French government to, um, to, to us.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  They gave us another one?

• 1:02:28Speaker 10

  They gave us another one.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:30Speaker 10

  Around.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  They're just running it back?

• 1:02:32Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. Um, and I wanted to get on the ship. So I just sort of made some calls and I, I asked around and, um, they were, they were super psyched to have me on, on board.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:02:41Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  How do you think about sizing stories in that context? Like when you're at The New Yorker over a couple of years, I, I imagine that there's, there's shorter pieces, there's longer pieces. Like, how much, is it just a conversation with your editors and the team on, okay, I actually have something here. I need to go heads down on this for months and pull on this thread and there's a 70% chance it's great, 30% chance it goes nowhere? Like, what is the process? Cause we have like the same show every day. It's always like the same length. We don't really ever get in the world where we're like, we're gonna do an eight hour show, you know, next week and, but we're gonna take a couple of shows off. Like, how do you think about sizing projects?

• 1:03:18Speaker 10

  It's such a great question. You know, it's like if you're gonna write about a used car auction in Brooklyn, you know that that piece is gonna be 850 words. You know, it's gonna be a little just like a little tasty morsel for the reader to enjoy. But if you wanna do something where you're really trying to contribute to, you know, to society, to our culture, to, you know, then you need more words to tell a deeper story, you know. And if I wanna write about mental illness and homelessness in New York City and have New York City be a sort of proxy for the nation, then it's, yeah, we need 6,000 words. We need 10,000 words, which means I need six months or a year to work on that project.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 10

  And then, of course, you know, because The New Yorker is a business, you know, you also need to be writing shorter stories along the way while you're spending your investigating something that's really sort of topical and important.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  How did you first come into contact with prediction markets?

• 1:04:10Speaker 10

  Oh, my gosh. I mean, I don't know about y'all, but isn't, aren't there your friends? Just like, you know, degenerate gambling on sports or on all of these things?

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  For some reason, I actually don't know that many people that gamble on sports.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  They are most active group chat. No one has ever talked about a sports bet.

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  But they were very viral during the presidential election. I remember maybe, what was it, three cycles ago, 2008, the Nate Silver, before the Silver Bulletin, the 538 dashboard, everyone was refreshing that constantly. He famously called all 50 states correctly. It was a bit of luck, but those dashboards, the needles, all of that stuff sort of captures everyone's attention. And during the last presidential election cycle, it felt like the prediction markets were really having a moment. But I didn't actually know that many people that were actively betting on them one way or another. It was more just a curiosity to say, oh, well, you know, that source might be biased or that source might be biased. But, you know, at least if there's just money on both sides,

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  maybe it's more neutral. Maybe it will give me a stronger vision of the future. And I think that's where a lot of people, a lot of the goodwill around prediction markets came from, because it sort of told the story of the election somewhat more independently or more accurately. And so I think they carried a lot of that goodwill into the sports betting that you're talking about. But

• 1:05:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've always been, personally, I've been interested in the tension between

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  If you're just using prediction markets as a data source and like you're just logging onto a website, not even logged in.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  You, you kind of want people to be insider trading because that's going to make all the data more accurate.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  But, but the platforms, I'm not saying like generally that's good for society, but I'm just saying like, if you just want to get an idea of what's going to happen in the future, if there's no insider trading happening, it just means that people are just purely just better.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  That's not true. That's not true because in the, in the election.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, they could be doing like sophisticated research, things like that.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:06:15Jordi Hays?

  But on some, but on some of these markets, like for example, like the, the war markets around Venezuela.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Where there were, you were seeing like spikes in activity and then, okay, it turns out.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Somebody would, that did have inside knowledge on the operation was putting the whole operation.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's going to be better.

• 1:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Because, because they wanted to make, you know.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Underground or whatever.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 10

  Yeah, but when you look at the election or you look at, you know, you look at, you look at financial, any, anything, you know, sort of unemployment or the Fed or what have you, you don't need insiders to have sort of non-public information. You can just, you can sort of do what Wall Street has always done.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 10

  Which is go out and find an edge, go out and find the best information possible.

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 10

  Uh, go and talk to a bunch of people, go and look at really complicated, uh, weather data, uh, to predict oil prices. I mean, you can, you can do like sort of really intense research as just like an individual or a group of individuals working together. And so you don't need to be that guy that like, um, you know, compromise national security by, um, illegally trading on Venezuela.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 10

  You can be someone who just knows a lot more than the average sort of user or better, um, and, and kind of create tremendous informational advantage for people. I mean, the, the stat that I came across sort of crazy is that a third of. Adult voters in America insulted a prediction market, right? That's like, that's like a lot of, that's like a lot of people.

• 1:07:39Jordi Hays?

  They're basically at the ballot box being like, hmm, who should I vote for?

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  And I mean, in low liquidity.

• 1:07:44Jordi Hays?

  I only vote for winners. Who should I vote for?

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I think people do. I, I think people do actually see, okay, there's momentum. It's worth me donating to this candidate. And then you get this weird flywheel where potentially you could have someone who wants a particular candidate to win, then they artificially shift the odds of that, of that candidate. They spike and then that candidate runs a whole bunch of talking points or ads saying, I'm at 60% on the prediction markets. You should definitely donate because I'm going to run away with it. And then they, and then it becomes like a self fulfilling prophecy. There's like a weird cycle there that could be bad. I don't know.

• 1:08:22Speaker 10

  I think six months ago, maybe eight months ago, there may have been at least pre, pre 2024 election is may have been possible, but the way the markets are sort of becoming more efficient, just like any market on Wall Street.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 10

  I think now if you went in and you were trying to sort of artificially hype up a candidate that didn't have genuine support, smarter money than you would just buy your money.

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:43Speaker 10

  And just crush you.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So tell me about like what smarter money looks like in this context, because we've heard about, you know, big hedge funds, Citadel is doing clearing and there's, I think Steve Cohen's fund has a desk for this type of stuff. There's like traditional Wall Street. Then there are sharps and then there are the average traders. Like, how do you segment the market? How would you characterize the different market participants?

• 1:09:09Speaker 10

  Yeah. So I, I would say that the average trader, and like, that's me, to be clear, we're just getting crushed, absolutely decimated. I, I actually want to, I want to, I want to read you all something that, that, that, that one of my sources told me, you know, this is someone turned 200 bucks, they're quite sharp. They turned 200 bucks into half a million bucks just last year.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:09:31Speaker 10

  And so, and so, and, and, you know, it's a grad student. I'm going to keep them sort of, protect their anonymity. They're quite worried about being crypto kidnapped.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:39Speaker 10

  They go by this great name Frozen, and they said, I really am just taking money from people. Every dollar I gain is someone else losing and there's a lot of people joining and betting and losing and leaving. And then there's a group of a couple hundred guys, uh, winning and that's the whole story. And you know, that's not the whole story, but, but that's a lot of it, uh, is that you have, you have really smart people.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 10

  Just crushing the average trader.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Okay, so what I find weird about this is that I, like, I, I, I don't have that many friends who fall into the-

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but, but do the people that get crushed quit right before they're about to hit it big?

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  Yes, clearly.

• 1:10:19Speaker 10

  I wonder, I wonder.

• 1:10:21John Coogan?

  Um, so, so I, I have been, uh, I've had friends who have been in that camp of like smart grad student, uh, tech person, able to build a real model. And I always go to them and say, you shouldn't be trading because there's a much more sophisticated market participant sitting at a hedge fund with, you know, a data center worth of compute behind their models and they're going to crush you. And so I'm surprised that an individual of any sort can have an edge, uh, in this market. Like, is it just that, like, did you try and talk to any of the, the Wall Street funds that would more professionalize that, that, like, this activity?

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Because it feels like even the, even like the smart, clever, individual, disciplined, uh, individual who's maybe, uh, feeding off of like the casuals that are just coming in and out, uh, would eventually get crushed by something that's even more, uh, more robust and professionalized.

• 1:11:18Speaker 10

  Yeah, you know, I was so delighted. I had, I had a wonderful conversation with Guth Yass, uh, who co-pays Sig. You know, one of, one of the sort of most respected trading, trading firms in the country, um, if not the world. And, and I asked him this question and he said, we are just getting taken for a ride. We're just getting crushed by these sharps.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:11:39Speaker 10

  And, and I was sort of trying to figure out why. And I, I talked to someone who actually, you know, Sig is trying to go out just like a number of other places and they're going to, they're trying to hire these sharps, right? I, I talked to someone who had an offer from Sig. Um, and I said, you know, why didn't you take it? Well, you know, wouldn't you get, you know, better health insurance, you know? Um, and he said, not only am I just baiting a killing. But I can do things that a big institutional fund can't do. For instance, I can, you know, he's a Rotten Tomatoes trader. He trades, trades, how is a film gonna do on Rotten Tomatoes? And he's, he's turned, you know, uh, I, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but he's made quite a bit of money, you know, seven figures easily. Uh, and so, you know, he's, he's guessing, not guessing, he's predicting,

• 1:12:24Speaker 10

  he's building models to figure out how is a Rotten Tomatoes, uh, film gonna perform and, and such. And he's doing things, he's scraping websites and he's doing things that, that maybe CIG, through their corporate policies, wouldn't allow.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:36Speaker 10

  And he asked in the interview, like, could I do this technique? And, and they said, yeah, probably not. And so, in, in, in these markets, um, you know, and there's just so many markets.

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, is that because it's illegal?

• 1:12:49Speaker 10

  No, it's not illegal.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it might be against terms of service, like an individual.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Not like a law, but like a terms of use.

• 1:12:55Speaker 10

  Just, you know, as well. Yep, yep, exactly.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:12:59Speaker 10

  Uh, and, and this guy, you know, it's really interesting, right? Because he's someone who, you know, he, you know, pardon me, I'm going to swear, but, but he, he, he, he self-described as sort of like a dipshit from the Midwest. You know, the first remark he was like, you know, hey, I'm this guy. I didn't go to an Ivy League school.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 10

  Uh, and I'm able to out-compete Wall Street with a $600 Lenovo laptop.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:13:23Speaker 10

  If I didn't go to a fancy school, I, I could never have gotten a job on Wall Street. This is not, this is not my world, but I'm able to do this because I'm quite sharp on prediction markets.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  The American dream, Cullsocker and Jettie, he's gonna be so happy to hear that. Uh, no, I mean, there has been a ton of pushback, uh, but it feels like, uh, the greatest gift to the prediction market industry has been AI being more controversial. And I'm wondering if you are tracking any of the potential political moves that might, uh, change the regulatory landscape for prediction markets. They've grown so fast, feels like there's federal preemption, they're gonna be legal everywhere. Uh, but has anyone popped out as a voice of what regulation might look like in this market? Whether there's just, hey, no insider trading, or, uh, you know, make it more of a level playing field, more disclosures?

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  Even something as simple as, uh, with a lot of the Vegas casinos, you can self-exclude. I don't know how that applies in a modern prediction market world, but, uh, that's something that the, the, like, the anti-gambling lobbies would certainly like to see, I imagine.

• 1:14:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I think the regulatory landscape is incredibly important with all of this stuff. The Trump administration has been incredibly favorable to Kalshi, to polymarket, to the CFTC, which regulates these things. They also regulate, you know, like the derivatives that you might trade lean hog or weed or corn on. The, you know, the Trump administration, CFTC, has been much, much more sort of willing to play ball with prediction markets. And so, you know, you talk to folks and they say, there may be, you know, come 2028, come 2029, if there's sort of a change of power in Washington, things may shift, things may change.

• 1:15:14Speaker 10

  And in the meantime, I think, you know, who knows? It's really hard to think beyond three months from now. So it's really hard to think that far out. But in the meantime, there's a lot of people doing really, really good work. You know, Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, is doing really, really good work on thinking through, how do we just kind of come up with sort of sensible solutions on how to better regulate things?

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 10

  You know, how can we make sure that, you know, our national security is not imperiled by, you know, a lone wolf kind of going out and trading on, there's going to be a strike in Venezuela?

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It seems like there's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole where there's some really, really, really, really problematic markets that have negative externalities, like the Venezuela one you mentioned. And then I still don't really have a first principles problem with a broad presidential election market. That seems totally reasonable, totally useful, very valuable. I've found prediction markets useful all the time. We were checking Kalshi constantly throughout the OpenAI Elon lawsuit because we were trying to cover it independently and it's a good source of, okay, what, what does the market think? And it was accurate throughout the whole, the whole affair. But yeah, I mean, certainly people can get sucked into all sorts of different markets

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  and there are going to be hot, hotly debated issues for, for many years, but it does feel like this is like the, the key focus at the federal level will be AI, at least for the next couple of years.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, what do you think sensible regulation looks like? Because in the case of There had to have been some guidelines that would, you know, have somebody in the special forces, you know, if they check the rulebook, say like, hmm, should not send a signal to the internet that we are, you know, going to attack a foreign country, which is effectively what this individual was doing when they were betting on strike on Venezuela.

• 1:17:02Speaker 10

  Absolutely. It's terrible.

• 1:17:03Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't feel like, like, that just feels like it's not even necessarily, like, that must have been violating, like, a number of policies, I would imagine.

• 1:17:15Speaker 10

  And federal law and, you know, Justice Department and the CFTC are prosecuting the case. You know, you also want to see better enforcement, right? You want to see, you want to, you want to sort of flag these things before they, they even start, you know, I talked to Kalshi about this, I talked to Polymarket about this, and they say, you know, they say, hey, we're really working quite hard to stop this kind of, you know, this kind of insider trading, we're kind of, we're working quite, quite hard on, we're building AI systems to do it, we have, you know, teams of people working and working and working on this. We need to sort of make sure that they're actually doing that. And, you know, this is where, you know, there's lots and lots of other great reporters at the Journal at the time, at NPR.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a good story in the Journal about an independent watchdog that discovered a polymarket trader who was betting on Google search results, and he wound up working for Google, so he just had the exact, the exact data available, which obviously is a violation of the Terms of Service.

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what percentage of the sharps do you think just have inside info and are kind of taking you on a, you know, basically telling you a little story about?

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  I built a cool website for.

• 1:18:27Speaker 10

  I, I think, you know, I talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of sort of really top traders, and, you know, I asked for receipts, you know, I wanted to look at their models, you know, I went down to Texas and, you know, knocked on doors, I went, I went and there was a group I went down to Texas with to sort of check out their approach to modeling Texas Democratic primary, and they called themselves MAGA Kiwi Club.

• 1:18:52Speaker 10

  It's 12 or so guys and they went and knocked on more than a thousand doors, nearly a thousand doors to try to get a leg up in this election. And they were right, you know, they were right. I think there are some, there are some sort of really bad wolves out there that are taking advantage of the system. But the sharps, the sharps that we're talking about, people who are using information to make the markets more efficient are in a totally different category. And that's sort of, that's the vast majority of the activity that in Wall Street, you know, making love firms.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  We have a question from Emily Sundberg. Why is a New Yorker writer taking a job at an AI tech company?

• 1:19:32Speaker 10

  It's a great question. That's a question from Emily or from me?

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  It's from Emily for you, clearly.

• 1:19:36Speaker 10

  From Emily for me. You know, I, I, I love my job and, you know, I've been, I've been so lucky to have gotten to talk to all kinds of just wonderful people over the last five years. I have a sense that things are changing and I really, rather than sort of be on the outside as a reporter and, and, and watch as things sort of, sort of change and be, become a tech reporter. I think this would be the thing that I would do is I'd go be a tech reporter. I'd write wonderful stories about, you know, what's happening. And I, and I got the sense that I couldn't do it from the outside.

• 1:20:19Speaker 10

  Like I, I've become increasingly convinced that the sort of like AI is, is like the thing that I need to think about over the next N number of years. And I didn't have a sense that I could do this as a sort of a reporter from the outside without sort of having, you know, the street cred at some level of, of being in AI world. And then I went around and I, and I had to sort of find a place that, that shared my values. And I was lucky enough to sort of by happenstance meet, you know, this guy Ivan who runs this company Notion. And, and I really loved his vision of the world and I love this company's vision of the world. And I thought, okay, you know, I'll give it a shot. We'll see.

• 1:21:03Speaker 10

  And, and it seems like it's the kind of place here that you.

• 1:21:10Speaker 10

  Can tell wonderful stories about what's actually happening in the world. And it sort of has a, has a sort of, you know, a genuine curiosity and a sort of a genuine ambition to tell, to tell true stories, to tell real stories about what's happening in the world. And I'm, yeah, I'm quite excited to do it.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  How do you think about the opportunity at Notion to tell stories about the technology that, you know, ultimately drive traffic into the Notion ecosystem versus like actually give insight into what would make Notion like a dominant product for the next generation of writers? Like those, those two opportunities seem both interesting, but is there one that's sticking out to you?

• 1:21:49Speaker 10

  Well, maybe you could ask a different question or ask, ask it slightly differently. I don't, I don't quite understand.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  So, so Notion is a product that, that writers use to, to actually research.

• 1:22:00Speaker 10

  Writers and all kinds of.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  All sorts of people, but people also use it for organizing information of all sorts. But there is a world where you, as a member of non-technical staff, help advance the product. And then there's another side where you tell stories and do more, more written output to attract customers to Notion more. So it's more like product versus marketing if we went back in time.

• 1:22:27Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think product or, or marketing really resonates with the thing that I, I really do here.

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 10

  I think I'd be a terrible marketer. I don't think I know how to sell Notion as a product.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 10

  Um, but what I think I can do is come into this place, ask a ton of questions about what's happening here, go elsewhere, ask a ton of questions about what's happening elsewhere. And then, yeah, maybe tell interesting stories or maybe the first thing I can do here is sort of ask questions and start to tell interesting stories about what does AI look like in economy? What is, and, and maybe, yeah, maybe there, maybe there is a, an economic benefit for the business.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:05Speaker 10

  Uh, I sure hope so. Um, but, but I think there's also just sort of a deeply felt duty here to, to do good work in all kinds of different ways. And so I think, um, you know, part of that is, is this.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Very cool. Anything else?

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  No, it was great to meet you.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Breaking it down and congrats on the new role.

• 1:23:27Speaker 10

  A cargo ship, you know, just call me up, let me know.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's run it.

• 1:23:30John Coogan?

  Next one. I'll talk to you soon.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to, great to hang out, Adam.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Public, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. There's a whole bunch of IPOs going out. SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI. If you're on Public, you want to make sure that you don't go and buy the wrong ticker. Because apparently people are doing this on Wall Street Bets. Somebody claimed to put $129,000 to work in SpaceX IPO. They wound up buying Virgin Galactic by mistake. That's a different company. But the Virgin Galactic stock is mooning on the rumors of SpaceX's IPO or imminent reporting.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Virgin Galactic has the ticker S P C E.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Sounds a lot like SpaceX to me.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, fortunately this guy, I mean, hopefully he held after the comments came in because he'd be up 126%.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  It's still up? Who knows? Maybe there's a comeback for Virgin Galactic. That would be very cool. I mean, I think a lot of, I don't know what will happen to the rest of the space economy. Potentially, there's more capital for SpaceX, more competition, more demand for a duopoly. If you're a wireless carrier, you don't want to be locked into Starlink exclusively. And so you want to get an ASTS working for you and you continue to back that. Or if you are a company that needs to launch satellites into space, you are helping Blue Origin and Rocket Lab continue to chop down the wood that they need to do to get to space regularly. And so that's actually bullish. Or, you know, maybe they just eat it all up. Who knows?

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Tyler says, yo, we just got an ad read. Just made my day. We love you guys.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Kyle Kuzma, friend of the show, guest as of last Friday, said, look at IBM, hashtag quantum.

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  24% in the last five days.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Following the market. He was a very, he was a great interviewer. We had a lot of fun talking to him. Micron is also way, way up. They extended gains to rise above $1,000 a share for the first time in history. Look at that candle, of course, is very zoomed out. This goes all the way back to 2000.

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  One person on the team is clapping especially hard over there. A Micron.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  It was so funny because I was seeing this right as I was getting notification that the ceasefire or whatever the negotiation had blown up and of course Micron overpowering geopolitics.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Two different things, not dependent on the straight up removes apparently. Well, the stock is now, the company is now worth over 1.2 trillion. The stock was worth just 60 billion 13 months ago. Absolutely remarkable. There are some rule changes from the SpaceX IPO.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Micron is a Lambo candle.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Lambo candle. That's a Lambo candle. Up 22% today. Absolutely insane. Rule changes for the SpaceX IPO. Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to just five. This forces over 30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S and P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within six months. The Russell 1000 and NASDAQ 100 funds will absorb 24%. The rules built to protect passive investors. One S and P 500 required 12 months of trading and four quarters of GAAP profitability since

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  2002. Both are waived now. NASDAQ cut its inclusion window from 90 days to 15 and the FTSE Russell cut its to five. All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing before the lockup ends. So lots of buying activity for SpaceX. Nick Carter says, so this is what kills index funds. Cult of passive finally coming to an end. And yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to deal with this. If you for some reason don't want SpaceX in your S and P 500, I'm sure you can go and develop a synthetic S and P 499.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Probably do it on public.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can probably build something that is neutral to this move. Of course, if you're bullish on SpaceX, you'll be happy that it is in your retirement account. And if the progress continues and SpaceX delivers on everything that they have planned and are optimistic about, should work out for everyone. But there is a lot of risk in the system. So we will continue to monitor it. Well, there has been a lot of back and forth about how much you should work. How much you should work Corgi is going back with Kari at Linear. Um, we can go through this big debate. It's a lot of, a lot of long posts. People are going back and forth. I think this all started with Harry Stebbings had, uh, the Corgi Insurance founder on the show.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  And he said, if you're not working seven days per week, you're going to lose. Kari takes the other side. Nico goes back and forth with him. Uh, interesting timing with the Will Manitis.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Grind slop.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  Grind slop essay. I think that the Corgi Insurance, I, I was unsure if it was just random timing or if the, like, was the Corgi Insurance interview trying to bait a response from the Will Manitis post? Or was it recorded?

• 1:29:03Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, I think that, I think that, I think that Nico, this is just part of their culture as a company.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  It's working for him.

• 1:29:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's working for him. It's clearly working for him.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a lot of reasons not to have a culture that sort of expects people to work seven days a week. But there's a lot of reasons to have one. Uh, and, uh, in Nico's defense, he's built a, I think a $2.4 billion company in, in a very short period of time.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Remarkable.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and it's a remarkable, remarkable feat. Uh, Kari on the other side has also built a very big business and, uh, done it in maybe a more calm way. Uh, this is personal. Like I, I felt like over the last 18 months, we've worked harder than ever in our careers, but weekends are very much time off. And, and part of that is, I mean, we're still talking like multiple times a day and making, you know, decisions around the business, but I actually felt that was especially necessary because five days a week, we're coming here and hanging out, trying to put on a show.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Three hours.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  And so the weekends are, are good time to be able to actually, it feels like unwinding is particularly helpful.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  I mean, overall, Will Manitis, he makes a bunch of good points in the grind slop essay, but I'm different and they don't apply to me. That was basically my takeaway. Anyway, we have the founder.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, two thirds of Corgi's employees have the company tattoo.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. So Will Manaus was referencing that specifically because he mentioned that in the essay, uh, which we should read at some point. It's a great essay. If you haven't read it already. Will Manaus, grind slop.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  We could read it and put ads in it.

• 1:30:42John Coogan?

  We can. Finally, the, the final form of the content oral boros.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  After all, an essay about a podcast. Well, we have our next guest from Saris here in the TVP and Ultra Room with us.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you believe in working eight days a week?

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where do you stand on this?

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Where do you stand?

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Five days a week, seven days a week. Where do you stand on, on relentless work above all else?

• 1:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear? You guys able to hear me?

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm not able to hear.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  You can't hear us?

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no. Oh, no. Why don't you, uh, why don't you jump out?

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  We will bring you back in just a second.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Well.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  He was about to say, every person on my team has a tattoo.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Somebody should, uh, make, uh, headphones that work seven days a week. That would be an innovation. We'd like that. That would benefit us. Um, anyway, what did, what did Carrie said? Carrie said, he said, I get that certain business insurance is similar. Nobel level type pursuit of groundbreaking physics and the Manhattan Project. Hopefully the blast radius will be contained. They are burning back and forth, fighting back and forth on the timeline. The timeline's in turmoil. Well, uh, we do have a challenge. That I want your take on because I actually saw this post and I did a whole deep dive and I have a very informed opinion. I want your take. So Alex Tabarok, friend of the show, former guest as of last week, says this one is genuinely difficult and Salah in SF, uh, Salah underscore,

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  says, you have a one-way flight. Do you have this pulled up? I want you to see these images. And Tyler, you too. Wait, are you laughing at this or something else? Okay.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  But I'm looking at this.

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. I want everyone to weigh in on this. Uh, you have a one-way flight somewhere unknown within the red boxed region. You drop in via parachute at midnight. You're given $2,000 in cash or precious metal equivalent, an uncharged phone, three days of food, two changes of clothes, and an Israeli passport you're not allowed to get rid of. Your mission is to get to New York City. You get $10 million if you arrive within one day, $5 million if you arrive within a week, $1 million if you arrive within a month. Which region do you choose? And the first option is right between Panama and Columbia in the...

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Darien Gap.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  The Darien Gap, which is uninhabited. There's no roads that go through it. Did we lose the Chiron too? What happened? Our Chiron, of course, is created by...

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  I did have a crazy, pretty wild, uh, travel story.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:33:16Jordi Hays?

  Generally in that region.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:18Jordi Hays?

  I was in Panama.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  You crossed the Darien Gap?

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  I didn't cross the Darien Gap, but I was dropped into Panama and I was going to a place called Boca del Toro, which is a small chain of islands in the Caribbean.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  And I took an all-day bus and I arrived in this port, this Caribbean port, like at around midnight. And there were no more boats going to the chain of islands that I was trying to get to.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  You were stuck.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Because legally, I guess they're not allowed to make, like, you know, boat runs.

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and we ended up having to, uh, make a, uh, find a guy that was willing to, uh, willing to make the charge. So we made the trip, uh, lights, lights out, which was very sketchy. You're not supposed to be going, you know, traveling by boat, uh, at night in harbors without lights. But this one captain was, was on board. Uh, and if, and there was no hosp- like, there was no lodging in that little, like, port town.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  It was like, either sleep, basically, at a bus stop

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  in a Caribbean port town, or, or make, you know, make the, the trip by boat with no light. We took the boat. We were surfing.

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  That next morning.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Okay, so the options are North Korea, uh, remote Russia, the Iran-Pakistan border, Gulf of Oman box, or the Darien Gap. Which one would you go with and why? Tyler, do you have a pick?

• 1:34:45Speaker 04

  I'm going Darien Gap.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, why?

• 1:34:47Speaker 04

  You can just, so you can get a ferry around, right? Because you hear about these stories, people, uh, motorcycling.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:51Speaker 04

  Like, uh, you know, South America to Alaska or something.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  Yep, and I think the passport's less of an issue.

• 1:34:56Speaker 04

  You just get to the border.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, I think if you land in Iran, you're screwed. If you land in North Korea, you're immediately a political prisoner. And Russia, probably the same thing. Also extremely cold, uh, very, very harsh conditions. Would you go Darien Gap as well?

• 1:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the two, the 2,000 bucks, I mean, is the big constraint, right? Because it's not really enough for a significant, uh, incentive for someone.

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you only fly business class, so like, you would be stuck. Because you'd get there and you'd be like, well, sir, business, a one-way flight, uh, from Pyongyang to New York City, business class is going to be 2,500.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no idea. I mean, I just think if you're trying to get to the, if you're trying to get to New York from these places with $2,000 and you don't have...

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  No, Darien Gap for sure. Because you can get to Panama, you can get to Medellin. Either one is going to let you with that passport get to New York City.

• 1:35:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right.

• 1:35:52John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  But, but this implied, but I'm an American.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, but you have this Israeli passport, so that's the one that you, that, that, they will see this.

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  But it's a valid passport.

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  It's a valid passport. And so they will see it and they will say, okay, well, if you're in Iran or North Korea, they will say, absolutely not.

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  Regardless of your actual passport. Whereas in Colombia or Panama, I think they will say, right this way, sir, like, you can go to New York City. It's, it's much easier. Anyway.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, if I'm in Iran with an Israeli passport, the situation strongly suggests I'm a Mossad super agent on an undercover mission, which sounds awesome. Didn't really read the rest of the post, so not sure what happens next, but I picked that one.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  And Sean Frank agrees with us. Darien Gap first. Uh, anyway, I believe we have our next guest here with audio. Let's bring in Danial.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Are we back?

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Yeah.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we're back.

• 1:36:43John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm well. Fantastic. Let's be quick. Introduce yourself. Give us the news. What happened?

• 1:36:50Speaker 11

  Sure, I'm Daniel. I'm a founder, CEO of SIRCI. We build AI workflow agents for banks and credit unions focused on the back office. It's sort of the unsung heroes of, you know, any company in the back office. So we're helping automate a lot of their tedious, complex tasks that, you know, the humans don't enjoy. So, yeah.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  So how diffuse is your customer base? Because credit unions, I mean, I feel like there's, there's, I don't know, thousands of credit unions in the United States. It's like the backbone of American banking. Is that your goal to be, I guess, like more like mid-market versus like, we're going straight to JP Morgan and, and we're going to be at that level on day one?

• 1:37:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's a great question. We are working with one of the larger G-Sit banks, but to be honest, it's, it's sort of like sometimes founders just fall in love with this particular story or a segment of the market. And as you put it, right, banks and credit unions, it's about 8,000 of them all across the US. And they're serving, you know, the heart and soul of the economy. You know, our customers are the folks who are helping a lumber mill in Mississippi, you know, get their first loan. It's the young family in Arkansas get their first mortgage, or we have another customer in Illinois helping farmers, you know, get agriculture loans. So, you know, these folks often don't get the headlines, but they're really serving, you know, the heart of the economy. So it's just kind of cool.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  And how much of the business is like, I mean, we're already in unsexy territory, let's get unsexy, or how much of the business is like not even like AI doing the full workflow and more like AI enabling digitization, AI enabling ETL, AI enabling better organized digital systems? Because, I mean, I go to banks all the time and there's still paperwork and you're signing things and just scanning that, getting that into something that's, you know, interpretable from any computer system, it seems like it's still a challenge.

• 1:38:43Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two parts of this story. The first one is the technical part. I think creating point solutions is easy, you know, especially with foundational models and how quickly they're growing. The challenge really is that how do you connect humans, you know, the work that humans do with the regulatory environment, with the infrastructure, with integrations, with systems, not everything is API accessible, with semi-structured, unstructured data, like you said, in papers and so on. That orchestration, that's where the magic is. And I think that's where the boat is for a lot of startups to come in. Because if it's a point solution and it's more or less clear, foundation models will probably figure that out. So I think that's the first part. The second part of the story

• 1:39:27Speaker 11

  is more human again. And it's what we call, or what I call, the dignity of work, right? So I'll share a story with you. Like, we often talk about AI versus humans and they're replacing jobs and so on. But let me share some stories on the ground, right? So we have one, one of our customers, their team had a backlog of 300 sort of loan documents. And they are literally spending their time from 5:00 PM till 9:30 PM, five days a week, completing that backlog because nine in the morning, they have to get to another backlog.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Speaker 11

  We launched SARS about like, three weeks ago. Now they're going home at 6:20, they can be with their families, right? That's dignity of work. That's amazing. We have another case where, you know, we, it's, it's, it's

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  And that's what happened, that's what happened with other major technology cycles where the work week effectively just shrank, right?

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is great, just more efficiency, more higher productivity, which is the good news.

• 1:40:19Speaker 11

  Exactly. And I think it's also like the feedback loops we're seeing. So that, so, so we're not seeing so much that people are being let go. It's more that they're not hiring additional staff members. So one other example quickly I'll share with you is, you know, we've had a case where the president of a credit union has sent me a text that, hey, we were planning on hiring five people this quarter. But because the output of, with, with SARS is so much higher, they didn't hire those five people. However, they gave a raise to the existing team. Everyone's happier about that, right? So, so those are kind of like interesting things we're seeing.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Okay, give us the fundraising news because we're running late. What, what'd you raise? Who, who, who funded you?

• 1:40:57Speaker 11

  Yeah, so it was, I guess, love at first sight with a partner. We raised 28.8 million dollars in the same thing.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  What partner led the deal?

• 1:41:13Speaker 11

  It was Alex, man. It was on first sight and then we got to meet with Joe as well, who's just an awesome guy too. So it was great.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  That's great news. Well, sorry for cutting this short, a little bit of technical difficulty, but thank you so much. I'm sure you'll be back soon.

• 1:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Together.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  And good luck with the journey. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:41:33Speaker 11

  Awesome. Cheers, guys.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  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. And our next guest is already in the waiting room. We'll bring in Mike from GigaScale Capital. Mike, how you doing?

• 1:41:52Speaker 12

  Doing awesome. How you guys doing?

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Former CTO of Meta, by the way. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Tell us a little bit about yourself and the fund, the strategy. I have so many questions.

• 1:42:03Speaker 12

  Yeah, so I've been in Silicon Valley 25 years, been an operator, joined Facebook Meta 2008, scaled everything from data centers to Oculus to Instagram to building the Facebook AI Research Lab. I stepped away from that job.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  Just everything, just every important project there.

• 1:42:18Speaker 12

  A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. I mean, with a lot of great people, so I don't want to overly take credit. But I saw this change happening in the world a couple of years ago, which was, I thought we were moving from atoms or bits to atoms, which is like the physical world mattered again. That is, the marginal cost of software went to zero. The thing that really mattered is how much stuff can we build and how are we going to build it? And so I started a venture capital firm to sort of prove out this thesis. I wanted to prove it first by investing my own money to make sure sort of I knew it was working. And then, you know, our company started working. The question isn't, do they want to buy it? It's how fast can they make everything? Because they're making it sort of better, faster, cheaper than the way we did it for the last, I don't know, 100, 150 years in a lot of cases. And

• 1:43:00Speaker 12

  so we brought on a set of institutional investors and raised more money and are just getting going on this journey.

• 1:43:05John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:43:07Speaker 12

  250.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  250. Quarter bill. What were some of the standout companies in that first kind of like angel fund that you mentioned that made you think you were on to something?

• 1:43:21Speaker 12

  Well, there's a, there's a bunch of them. So, Pantholassa is building ocean data centers for inference. I think you had Garth on here a little while ago. And is one example. Heron Power, which is a more recent investment, but it's just on a tear. They're, they're saying like, hey, the way we brought energy to data centers is using 100-year-old technology, literally. We've got a new idea. We're taking the power electronics that are in your Model 3, Model Y, and we're putting them on the grid. And we can deliver you power faster, better, cheaper than, than anyone else out there. They're shipping products next year. You know, we've got Radiant Nuclear is building a, you know, container-sized microreactor. It gives you a megawatt and a half of power for five years with no refueling. And they've

• 1:44:04Speaker 12

  got Form Energy that said, hey, you know, these data centers, you, you have power swings, you might have renewables which are on and off. We're going to build a new kind of battery that lasts 100 days. So if you're dependent on solar and it's cloudy for three days, no problem. I got four-day battery. And that battery is super cheap because it's made out of, it literally like rusts and unrusts iron. It's like the basic chemistry of it. It's the cheapest possible material you could use to build a battery. It's big and it's heavy, but who cares? Because it's on the grid. So again, you're just like rethinking problems in a different way and using modern technology. And you come up with a solution that, that works for everyone.

• 1:44:41John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about publics versus privates? Because there's this massive boom, and I'm so excited about Doug and Radiant and Nuclear and bringing new solar on the grid. And there's so many different key technologies that it feels like we're in this crazy moment where, like, it's just hard to pull forward these foundational technology efforts in the private markets and startup world where, yeah, you're doing something completely new. It might take five years. And so in the meantime, it's just call up G-Vernova and 10x the amount of, you know, natural gas. And that, that is like a technical debt that I think we're

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  going to have to pay at some point. And I'm wondering about, like, is there a crowding-out effect? How, how do you stay sane if you're a startup founder who's doing something really cool, but you're watching some public company go 50x in the public markets? And, and I'm just wondering about, like, where, like, is the time compression, is the time scale a factor one way or another? Is it a benefit or curse or both? Double-edged sword? How are you thinking about that?

• 1:45:49Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, I fundamentally left a big platform to bet on startups.

• 1:45:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:52Speaker 12

  So I think you're gonna, you're gonna get my belief that it has never been a better time to start startups. And I'm seeing this, this firsthand.

• 1:45:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:59Speaker 12

  I mean, you think about the speed at which I can build tools, um, you know, using AI, using robotics in the physical world. Um, you know, even just using platforms like Stripe and Ramp and like all of these, it's just like, the amount of time you had said monkey with things before is just like free. You can have these tiny six, 10, 12 person teams have incredible, um, unbelievable impact. And you throw off all the, all the, you know, dead weight of doing it the way, you know, you've done it even for the last 10 years. You, you started a company six months ago. You would, you would form it differently than if you started it 12 months ago.

• 1:46:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:31Speaker 12

  Because like that's, that's prior to, you know, Opus 47.

• 1:46:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Speaker 12

  Um, and it's just, it's just an incredible time. And, and we even talked about this, just like a immense well of talent coming out of SpaceX and Tesla. Who are just like showing up to these old problems and saying like, oh, we know how to do this like 10x better, faster, cheaper. Starting with, with new technology. So, you know, there's this analogy recently about when electricity first came to factories. You know, we used to build factories with like a central like steam thing that would spin all these like shafts. And you built an entire factory around the structure. When they first electrified, they just rip out the steam thing and put electric motor, but everything else was the same. And productivity gains didn't really happen until you just rebuilt the factory saying, actually, I can put an electric motor at every workstation. I can completely reorient the way that the factory works.

• 1:47:17Speaker 12

  This is how I think it's happening in robotics now, or dropping in a robot where a human used to be. And you're like, wait a second, if I just like took a building and said, actually, my goal is to feed the robots and keep them 80% utilized. How would I build this factory? And that's a very different structure than like replacing a person with a robot in terms of it. And that's where I think you get five x, 10x wins.

• 1:47:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, are you worried we're gonna run out of problems in the real world for startups to solve?

• 1:47:45Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding. I do, I do.

• 1:47:47Speaker 12

  No one's ever asked me that one.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, it is, it is fun.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Return the funds. There's no more ideas.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, just return capital.

• 1:47:55Speaker 12

  We're done. Yeah, we solved it.

• 1:47:56Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but any intuition around like the, you know, the next big, big category and sort of atoms? Like, is it, is it just robotics generally? Like, how, how did, do you have a, do you have a, any ideas around like timeline of robotics and the application of them across different industries? Because this is one of those, you know, categories that I think it's been, it has been happening. It's real in certain industries, but it's been promised for so long. This time around does feel a little bit different, but I'm wondering, I'm wondering how you view it. Just because if you get the, if you, obviously, if you get the timeline wrong, you can get the bet wrong entirely.

• 1:48:40Speaker 12

  Yeah, predicting these things is, you know, we, we have two bets in fusion and the joke, fusion has been the, you know, the joke, it's 10 years away every 10 years for a long time, but this time it's, it's different. But the, so robotics, I think, is quickly going into that zone. I'm really bullish on industrial robotics and we already use robots in fact, in car factories all the time. And so the question is, can you move into like slightly less well structured things? Like taking a box, if you look at a lot of like factories and warehouses, like there's a surprising amount of like unboxing and boxing that happens. I get a box, I get a box cutter, I cut it open, I pour all the stuff out, I get rid of the plastic bags. It's all done by humans now. That's a really hard thing to automate with like a KUKO robot.

• 1:49:23Speaker 12

  Like, because it's just, every box is a little different and like the bag gets stuck and all the rest of it. And so like, those are the sorts of like things that I think are going to be really, because you're still in a controlled environment. I'm not in my house. I don't have a dog running by. You don't have to worry about the robot tripping over my pet. So I think the home is like, and like, I'm excited about it. I want a robot to fold my laundry and empty the dishwasher. Can't wait. But like, man, you're playing on hard mode to like start in the home. I've shipped home electronics, like people drop stuff. They spill wine on it. Like, there's all sorts of things that happen in the home that I just don't have to worry about in a factory. So I think you're going to see it in factories and warehouses first. And then you're going to sort of see it go out from there.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Spilling wine on your Oculus or your Qlas, that's a wild time.

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  That's something you would do.

• 1:50:09John Coogan?

  I'm sure it's happened. You ship millions of them, so, yeah.

• 1:50:11Speaker 12

  Oh, yeah, no, no. This is the, the, the thing that created all the gray hairs is like you do all this work making this awesome product.

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 12

  And then you're like, oh, we have this thing called a drop test. Like, the consumer takes it out of the box and it's supposed to go in my face. Instead of putting my face, I drop it on the floor.

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Speaker 12

  And like, does it break or not?

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:26Speaker 12

  And so we spend all this time like dropping them and putting these high-speed cameras to watch like which part breaks and then go reinforce it.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:32Speaker 12

  It's just like, it's brutal.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  A lot of weight and that hurts the product, yeah.

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the bigger issue with robotics is like then you have, like, you know, there's not a huge risk of like if I drop the Oculus, does, uh, maybe it does some minor damage to the floor and the device itself, but you add these like big humanoid form factors and suddenly it's like the dog died because like the, the robot, you know, just fell on it, you know? This is, uh, or it does like really material damage to an appliance or something like that.

• 1:51:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, besides laundry and emptying my dishwasher, I want to like make me breakfast, right? But like now we got a robot like operating with hot oil, you know, on a stove with a flame. Like, what could go wrong?

• 1:51:10John Coogan?

  That's gonna be wild. Uh, solar. Uh, I feel like there's, you know, the, the Elon Musk of space is Elon. He did electric cars. He's working on robotics. Uh, he's been a little shy about solar. Uh, I mean, he's optimistic about solar, but he, uh, he hasn't actually scaled up American manufacturing capacity of solar. We have a number of founders, you know, if you have Palmer Lucky in defense and, uh, there's a number of nuclear founders who have sort of taken up the mantle to go on the press tour that's necessary to get folks excited about nuclear. I haven't seen that in solar as much. Am I just not paying attention? Is there some sort of fundamental constraint why solar is not going through as much of a fast takeoff?

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  We've talked to the CEO of T1 Energy. That's sort of this, you know, acquisition, changing the management. It's very exciting, but it's not the same, you know, startup seed round, uh, you know, visionary founder all the way through this really broad vision. And I'm wondering if that's gonna happen, if we're early, if it's already happening and I'm not, I'm just not aware. What are you thinking about solar generally?

• 1:52:17Speaker 12

  Yeah, I, I, it's such an interesting thing because solar has gone through the biggest cost decline of anything I've ever seen. And, you know, it's 99% cheaper than it used to be. Um, it's mostly manufactured in China. It's a scaled manufacturing problem. That's not a great problem to go after as a startup, where it's like manufacturing scales what determines the cost.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  China.

• 1:52:37Speaker 12

  Against China, like, good luck. So I think that that explains a lot of it. What I do think is going to happen is if I'm just trying to make a, you know, 400 millimeter by 300 millimeter solar panel cheaper than China, good luck. But like, for a long time, we treated these things like they were like precious minerals. And so if you look at a solar farm, you like lay down all this steel and you put up all this framing and all the rest of it to like put this panel on. Well, when that panel was the most expensive thing on the field, then like, yeah, that makes sense. That thing is now the cheapest thing in the field. All the rest of the stuff, the like steel frame costs more than the panel. And so I think what we're going to see, and I'm excited about a couple of startups in this, who are saying like, let's rethink how we actually deploy solar from a form factor, from an automation perspective, and like, just go after installation cost.

• 1:53:22Speaker 12

  And assuming the cells themselves are basically free, it's basically glass. Um, like, what would you do differently? And that, again, I think this notion of like, constraints have changed is what creates a new opportunity. So that's, to me, what I'm most excited about in the next wave of solar.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, and even from, uh, obviously, there's a lot of geopolitical considerations with the US and China. But at the end of the day, like, a solar cell is not the same as buying, like, a full computer or something that has spyware on it. Like, it is just a chip there that, that it's, you know, where would the spyware be? Exactly. And so I think you'll see more like hybrid approaches like this. Like what Waymo is doing, where they're buying Chinese batteries and Chinese steel frames, but then they're putting all the software and hardware on board. So it's a little bit more, uh, you know, less politically dicey, I think.

• 1:54:11Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, last question, on fund size, fund structuring. I feel like a lot of these projects are capital intensive for the best possible reasons. Uh, how are you thinking about actually participating over time? Do you think you'll be doing SPVs to maintain ownership? Because some of these projects are probably going to be pretty capital intensive. That usually means dilution. Have you thought about that? And do you have a strategy in place?

• 1:54:36Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, so the first thing we have been doing is just going to work to get these companies fundraised. So we have a giant network of other, so PentaLoa has a great example, just raised a huge round from Peter Thiel. We were very early investors in that. So the first thing is get these companies successful, then you have the options. In terms of how we take advantage of that access and option is something we're going to figure out over time. You know, I think this is the beginning, not the end. We are oversubscribed in this fund, so there's lots of opportunities for us to sort of raise other vehicles.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:55:07Speaker 12

  And I think it going, but I wanted to keep it, you know, I give all our entrepreneurs advice, stay focused. So let's get out the gates, stay focused, prove that there's a bunch of early stage, to your first question, are there opportunities for early stage companies in this space? I think so. I think you're going to see a lot of interesting progress in the next year, and then we'll have lots of different ways to structure how to participate as these companies grow.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:55:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, excited to meet more of your companies.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:55:33Speaker 12

  Nice to see you both.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:55:34Speaker 12

  Okay.

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Niko from Default with an amazing Series A. I've known Niko for a long time, but it's his first time on the show. So we'll bring him in to the TV and also, how are you doing Niko? Good to see you.

• 1:55:47Speaker 03

  An honor. Long time no see.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  Get that overnight success button ready.

• 1:55:55Speaker 03

  Another one.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself, introduce the company, give us the news.

• 1:56:04Speaker 03

  Hello, gentlemen. Hello, listeners. I'm Niko, one of the co-founders here at default.com. Most recently, default.ai. We've got a nice URL redirect you on.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you were default.com? Wait, you're going from dot com to dot AI domain?

• 1:56:21Speaker 03

  We kept the dot com, still main domain, had to pick up default.ai.

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  Protect, protect.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  He's a dot com respecter.

• 1:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  How dare you.

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  The dot com.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  No, very good. Tell us about the product.

• 1:56:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we spent the last few years building out a bunch of top of funnel orchestration tools primarily for inbound scheduling, inbound routing, enrichment for very fast-growing B2B companies. And over the last like 12, 18 months, we just kept hearing from everyone that everyone was trying to deploy agents, was running, still running into the same issues people have been running into for the last decade. And we took a really big bet and basically built a new product over a good chunk of last year. And last Wednesday, about five days ago, we launched it to the world and it's been, it's been great so far. I've,

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  this is my 12th meeting of the day. So I'm glad to be, I'm glad to jump off the demo, demo router.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  Explain the, the flow. When does the agent come into the, into the, into the process? I imagine inbound lead, B2B SaaS company, they have a landing page, there's at some point they collect a form or an email and then the magic happens. Like what is the magic? What is happening?

• 1:57:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, John. So we, you know, the, the way we used to work before, you know, before we launched our new products, we'd basically come in, we'd hook into the forms on the website, we'd add a little piece of code that told us, you know, how many visitors were coming to your site, who was showing up, et cetera. And then we kind of build out all this middleware and plumbing between your forms, your website, all these top signals and your CRM and your sales team. Now what we do is we give you an out of the box data layer. And what data layer is it's a real time data warehouse you plug into your CRM with that the Salesforce,

• 1:58:20Speaker 03

  HubSpot or similar. We pipe in all, all that really rich context that agents can use to really answer these tough to, usually really tough to answer questions about your business. And, you know, everyone says that, you know, all growth problems are data problems. And, you know, at least in, at least in go to market. And effectively what we, what we do out of the box now is give you this data layer that plugs into your tools and this kind of semantic modeling layer that translates all this context from your systems, as well as different activity like meetings and form submissions and website, website visitors into a language that, you know, agents can actually understand and use to answer, you know, these really tough questions.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Isn't this going to grow into a CRM at some point? It feels like the opportunity to do a compound startup, do many more features like you have, not only is your company AI-enabled on the product side, but your engineering team's enabled on the products on the AI side. So I would imagine you'd be able to ship more features. Like, why have you stayed where you are? Do you think that will remain the case? Or do you have ambitions to build out something that looks like a legacy workflow? Is there demand for that? Or do you see the whole process just sort of evolving in a way that you'll never need to build what traditionally looks like a CRM?

• 1:59:48Speaker 03

  I think a lot of the same fundamental problems our customers are running into today, even as they're navigating this really challenging, really challenging kind of transition, even at really, really large scale. These are the same problems they were running into 10 years ago. So there's no shortage of surface area to solve for today for us. That being said, we're already seeing a ton of our customers really, really build some really cool stuff internally and completely flip the way, you know, things have been done for the last couple of decades. So that being said, you know, every road in this category

• 2:00:30Speaker 03

  and, you know, more broadly leads to an incumbent like a Salesforce or similar. So, yeah, we've built with that mantra since day one.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  How have you thought about segmenting the market, finding niches, finding little veins? Like, if you find that you're doing really well with startups or doing really well with real estate agents or like anything that takes inbound and has a go-to-market motion or in B2B software, there are other niches within B2B software, right? More dev tool focused, more finance focused B2B software. Do you find that there are sort of mini-network effects in these niches? Have you been successful finding a few? Or do you want to deliberately cast a wide net so you can sort of cross-pollinate all the learnings from one category to the others like immediately?

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  So I would say, you know, really early on, we were focused on working with the fastest growing, you know, really the fastest growing startups. And there was a bit of a, I don't know if network effects is how to put it, but a lot of our pipeline came from referrals really early on. You know, people would, would go and they'd sign up and book a demo for their favorite, favorite new, recently launched and fresh off the assembly line product. And they'd see the little powered by default logo down at the bottom. And that drove a ton of traffic for us and got us to where we are today. But, you know, it's really interesting. I think a lot of our customers, you know, we serve a lot of customers

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  in, in software, a few in like medical devices, some services, services businesses, fintech as well. And more or less, everyone, you know, everyone runs into some, some version of the same problem, which is they've got all these different systems that don't really talk to one another. And really kind of create this sort of like data soup or this like Franken stack is what we call it. That just makes it really, really hard to grow, creates like growth tax, you know, every incremental dollar of revenue past a certain, you know, past a certain threshold, depending on the vertical of market, you know, requires sort of army of operations people to sort of maintain the Franken stack and keep it at bay. So, yeah.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  So I, how, how prevalent is the Franken stack? Because I feel like there's a view of the world that's like data bricks exists, snowflakes exists, like everyone has this beautiful data lake. And of course, and, and not only that Zapier exists and, and there's vibe coding and you can clearly create these ETL pipelines between everything. Certainly every company has done that. Sounds like they haven't. Is there, is there like a revenue scale or an employee scale where that does become unblocked and does become best practice? And then is that, is that moving down into smaller and smaller organizations?

• 2:03:28Speaker 03

  Yes, I'll give two answers here. First and foremost, I've never met someone who didn't hate their CRM.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  I'll say that first and foremost. Second, you know, I think it's very rare that we run into a scaling, you know, revenue org that has, you know, very deep technical proficiency and, you know, is spending a lot of their time in a data warehouse or writing SQL. Typically, they're pulling reports and trying to answer, you know, a lot of these lies, normally tough to answer questions. That being said, one of the things that I've been, you know, my, the team and I have been really excited about here over the course of last year is seeing so many really, really fast forward companies like owner.com is a perfect example. Kyle Norton, the CRO there, has built just an absolutely incredible

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  good market operations team. They built so much internal, you know, basically just building their own distribution product, their own foundation they can use to scale. And as a result, they're able to gain a massive competitive advantage. And they started doing that very, very early on. You see the same thing with other hyper growth companies like Ramp and Rippling and many others. But, you know, the best companies treat their distribution as a product. And, you know, as an extension of products. And, you know, I think that is, that is getting earlier and earlier in terms of when, when companies start prioritizing that.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Tell us about the ramp.

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, before that.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Seven day work week.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  Five day work.

• 2:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Logo, tattoos.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Work week.

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Do you have the default as like kind of a back piece?

• 2:05:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've got a nice stamp down here, yeah.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  The whole back.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you gotta, you gotta.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  I mean, jokes aside, what is the work culture like at default these days?

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's intense. You know, we've been doing a really hard thing for a good chunk of the last year.

• 2:05:21Jordi Hays?

  It's basically a manhunt project for GTM.

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  For BBSS, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  But it is a competition. You want to win and there's other players and like, you know, if you, if you're on the beach five days a week, like you're just going to get smoked. This is real.

• 2:05:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  We're, we're definitely on the beach five days a week. Yeah. Too pale, too pale for that. But yeah, we're solving a lot of really hard problems. I think we have a lot of really smart people who are really, really excited at, you know, kind of solving, solving the growth rate problem and trying to help our customers grow better and faster. A lot of that stuff, you know, a lot of the problems that we run into are a lot of the same kind of boring things that our customers run into on a daily basis. We have the benefit of having really good resources and a lot of great minds, you know, thinking about how to solve these problems day in, day out. And, you know, we're very excited about the future.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Amazing. Tell us about the round.

• 2:06:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so we did a $10 million A last year.

• 2:06:27Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 2:06:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, one more. There we go.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Sounds like there are a couple of rounds.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  That's hard. That's a hard one.

• 2:06:43Jordi Hays?

  That's a hard one.

• 2:06:44John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Expert mode. Great to catch up, Niko.

• 2:06:47Speaker 03

  Thanks for coming on the show. Catch you soon.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:06:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  Very fun. That is the hardest one to hit. The glasses. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sue Khim from Brilliant. She's the co-founder and CEO, and she's here with us in the TV pen.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  Sue, how are you doing?

• 2:07:07Speaker 13

  Hey, thanks for having me. I'm doing great.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on the show. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company and the launch and for you to just take it through, take us through it.

• 2:07:18Speaker 13

  Yeah, so I'm Sue. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant. We just launched Brilliant's new AI tutor. His name is Koji. He's a little green guy. He helps you learn how to think and problem solve in math and coding. If you come check out the product, everything starts out very visual and interactive. And this tutor can see how you're interacting with all the concepts and the problems you're solving, and point and sketch and annotate on the screen with you. So we call it a graphical tutor because it's designed to feel like someone sitting next to you, looking over your shoulder and ready to help.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Talk about how people have processed.

• 2:08:00Jordi Hays?

  The intersection of AI and education to date has been such a big selling point overall. And personally, I think it's most powerful as a way to ask like the dumb question that you might be embarrassed to ask, you know, a friend or an actual teacher or even a tutor. But how have you kind of processed it? Obviously, you can use the base models themselves to learn, but there's a lot of missing functionality and opportunity for you to kind of, you know, extend out that kind of raw capability.

• 2:08:39Speaker 13

  Yeah, totally. You know, I think that lowering that barrier of embarrassment is huge. That's something that we hear a lot, that, you know, the student who would never ever raise their hand in class and ask a question, or, you know, even with a tutor, it's just kind of like, oh, I still don't get it. Like, can you explain it a third way? It's hard to do. And, you know, I think that these models have helped a lot with that, like lowering that embarrassment. And one of the things that we haven't yet seen them do is design for something other than the moment of explanation. You know, when we designed this tutor, we designed it for that moment of understanding, not for the moment of explanation.

• 2:09:20Speaker 13

  And there's actually a lot of research on tutoring that shows that when human tutors don't just sit there and explain stuff to you, the tutoring conversations become a lot more interactive and then students just do a lot more of work. And, you know, these like magical outcomes of why tutoring is so broadly effective, you know, ultimately, a lot of that just comes down to a learner spending more time on the material. And, you know, if the tutor talks too much and just like spits out tons of stuff for you to read, that is worse than the student doing stuff and just sitting in the confusion. So I think it's a combination of how much can you engage the student to actually do the work and then, you know, lowering the embarrassment, improving their motivation

• 2:10:01Speaker 13

  and engagement, and just getting to the point where they feel sort of confident tackling these things on their own.

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you feel like you have a duty to make learning addictive?

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  I was gonna say something similar.

• 2:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Because, because every, every, you know, uh, there's a lot of big companies out there, I won't name them. They certainly want people to spend as much time in their applications as possible.

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  It's like every company, but yes.

• 2:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not, not every company, there's, there's, there's, uh, but let's say like the, the algorithmic video feed.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like they want as much of our time as possible. I feel like you have a duty to take, to try to make learning as addictive.

• 2:10:40John Coogan?

  Good addiction.

• 2:10:41Jordi Hays?

  But because it's a positive addiction, right? I want people to be obsessed with understanding the world.

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Furthering, uh, their skills, et cetera.

• 2:10:50Speaker 13

  Yeah, you know, we talk about this a lot, like a, a big marker of success of the tutor is whether or not he can make himself unnecessary. Uh, and you know, the, the, the goal is that you scaffold the learner and allow them to ask questions until they get to a point where they can do it for this, for themselves. And then you wanna get out of the way. So, you know, one of our goals is that if we are doing a good job over the course of learning a concept, Tooty should become totally unnecessary. Like you should be asking the questions that he used to ask you. And, you know, one of the things that, uh, it, like, I find a funny parallel is that on our board is, uh, someone who started the dating company OkCupid and then, uh, he went on and, you know, became the CEO of Match, was on the board of Tinder.

• 2:11:36Speaker 13

  And he was like, you know, funny thing about consumer dating apps is that if you're successful, churn is built into the product. Like you want people to churn because like you don't want people just in the app, just going on dates all the time and not, you know, meeting that long-term partner.

• 2:11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:51Speaker 13

  Uh, and so, you know, we do measure whether or not people churn and, but we measure it very differently from how most other consumer products would think about it. Uh,

• 2:12:00Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like, I feel like learning is much more, learning is way more continuous. Like everyone should aspire to be a lifelong learner, whether, whereas like maybe it's not so healthy to aspire to be a lifelong dater. You know, somebody that's just like, I never wanna, you know, I don't feel like there's, there's never been a subject that I've like learned about. Where I've just run out of things to learn.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Well, it's interesting. That happens to me all the time. I feel like I'm like, yeah.

• 2:12:29Jordi Hays?

  But I'm talking about more.

• 2:12:30John Coogan?

  I'm done. I know everything about math. I know everything about science. I'm kidding.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but I mean.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:12:34Jordi Hays?

  You're joking, but there is specific things where you're like, okay, I've learned enough about nutrition.

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 2:12:38Jordi Hays?

  And I don't really care about it too much, you know, let's say, but like I've learned the basics and I can move on to the next topic. But there's so many topics. For me, that's nutrition.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Every single point.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Every single place that I've gotten to in terms of an overall understanding, I'm like, wow, this goes deeper than I thought.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how are you thinking about multimodality? I feel like, uh, the, the big labs all have different ways to turn out a result. That's not just a big block of text. There's an image, an infographic. We saw with Google I O, there's the Omni model that can show a 10 second video diagram or an explanation, a whiteboard lecture, and it feels like there's maybe a gap right now in that you have to come to the model or the chat app and ask for what you want. You have to say, I want this as an infographic or I want this as a video. Or you might even have to go to a specific model or a specific company. Like if you want video, you go to Google. If you want an image, you go to chat GPT.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering if you're thinking about how that fits in to, uh, your process of actually picking the right tool for the job.

• 2:13:47Speaker 13

  Yeah, it's very, uh, you know, working with a chatbot to learn is a very proactive process. And it's one of those things where, uh, when you use a chatbot, the chatbot gets very little data on whether or not you've actually learned the thing. Like technically the interaction with the chatbot is you ask your question, you get your answer and the exchange is over. And so for a lot of these like homework help type learning queries, uh, people answer, uh, people get their question answered and then they leave. And so the model gets back no data on did the learner actually learn this thing? And, you know, going back to the point about, you know, addiction, the thing that we try to get people really immersed in is like tons and tons of like dense,

• 2:14:26Speaker 13

  real time reps, uh, to, uh, in, in learning a topic so that we can self-improve and hyper personalize in real time. And to do that, you have to have a dense user model. You have to have a learning graph. You know, that's not going to come out of a model company anytime soon. The UI UX matters a lot, too. It has to be purpose-built or teaching with all the features that come along with that. And also, you know, just some of the stuff also has to be purely deterministic. Like, you have to be correct, and you have to guarantee that correctness. And so I think there's a lot of things that ultimately just add up to a lot of friction when you're asking the user to pull and sort of scaffold and

• 2:15:08Speaker 13

  structure their own learning. Whereas, you know, our philosophy is, we're going to pull you in and give you things to do that are the right next thing for you to do.

• 2:15:16John Coogan?

  Amazing. Where can people get started?

• 2:15:19Speaker 13

  Go to brilliant.org, and we have apps as well in the App Store and Play Store.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to finally meet you, and congrats. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:15:29Speaker 13

  Thanks.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:15:31Speaker 13

  Bye.

• 2:15:32John Coogan?

  Before our next guest joins, we have a new, a new release, new information from Sam Sulek. He has chimed in on the debate over should you work five days a week or seven days a week. He says you only need to work five days a week. Don't overdo it. You do not need to work 24/7. Overtraining reduces performance. Most of the time, you're not working on the Manhattan Project. Work hard, recovery, keep some balance. So Wise Works from Sam Sulek. No, I just took your image and put it in chat GPT. But it actually makes a lot of sense in the bodybuilding. You know, you do need to take rest days in bodybuilding. So it's totally reasonable that that would be something that he would say. But that, of course, is fake news. That's our fake news segment for the day. Fortunately, we

• 2:16:17John Coogan?

  have someone with some very real news joining us. We have Bernie Su, the Emmy-winning series creator, to talk about movies, go back to the YouTube-ification of Hollywood. We'll get his takes on my takes, my very novice takes. But why don't we start with an introduction on you and yourself? Can you tell us a little bit about you?

• 2:16:37Speaker 14

  Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Bernie. I have been working in the entertainment industry and tech-adjacent industries for over a decade. I've created many shows. Thanks. I've created many shows across YouTube, Twitch, and other new media platforms, including some shows that were in traditional Hollywood, but I'm most known for my three Emmy-winning shows, Emma-approved Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which were the first and second primetime Emmy wins ever for a YouTube show, and the show Artificial, which was the first Emmy win for a Twitch show, which also won a Peabody. And it's been, it's an honor to be here, guys.

• 2:17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on the show.

• 2:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for popping on.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  So, I mean, I-

• 2:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Rattle off your takes.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  Okay, so, I don't know if my take was that contrarian or anything, but it does feel like we're at an, we're at an interesting moment where potentially Hollywood is finding a stronger way to work with new media or YouTube than ever before. The Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029, and we have back-to-back-to-back YouTube massive successes at the box office, something that has been tried loosely before. Can you just get an audience of 10 million YouTube subscribers to show up in theaters? Hasn't always worked out, but this summer, it feels like we're seeing positive success stories with Obsession, Backrooms, and Iron Lung. And I'm wondering how you're interpreting those three movies.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Is this an actual turning point? Has this been a slow, gradual grind for years, and maybe this is less of a, of a important moment than, maybe this is something only outsiders are noticing, and it's been a trend that's been going on for a long time. But how have you processed the recent viral news around Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung, et cetera?

• 2:18:21Speaker 14

  I mean, you kind of said it there. I think it's a trend that's been going on for many years. So, if you, I speak at VidCon every year, for example, and I've asked every year, and it's kind of the same panel, like, when is, like, when are the creators of YouTube going to take over Hollywood and all that stuff? And I'm like, they are already going and getting there. You're just not seeing it and like you're seeing the ramp up and of course it's just getting bigger and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It's like, like, um, I think, uh, you know, regarding say like the Emmys, like Mr. Beast is not a YouTuber. He's a prime creator.

• 2:18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:51Speaker 14

  Because he has a show on Prime. That's what he's going for, right? So, so these, this is, we're now seeing in movies, as you said, like now we're seeing it, um, in the, in the last, you know, like you said, the back to back to back, uh, run of this year.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:03Speaker 14

  Um, but this is something that at least I've been seeing for, you know, five years or so as this ramp up and you're kind of, where you, where the earlier genesis of this was, is that you had this era where there was these YouTuber kind of led movies, influencer, influencer, influencer led movies. The movies probably weren't regarded as great movies, but I think what missed the mark there was that they just kind of plugged and played a dude.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:26Speaker 14

  In there. It's like, oh, you've got 10 million followers. Let's just put you in here.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:29Speaker 14

  And the problem with that is that that doesn't work because it's not on brand with the audience that it's coming from, right? So, so now with like Iron Lung and Markiplier and all that stuff, like it's his, right? It's, it's his. So it's very much him being him. Beast Games is him being him just amplified.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:48Speaker 14

  And you're seeing that tech and social media play coming in all at the same time.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've heard a lot about this in, in casting calls these days where, uh, actors and actresses will just get asked like, oh, well, do you have 10,000 on Instagram? Uh, or 100,000 Instagram? And it feels like that is, it maybe it's some sort of signal, but it's not really going to move the needle on. Is this going to be a success at the box office if, uh, a few thousand people buy tickets from your audience of tens of thousands of people? It's more just like, are you serious? And have you figured out the Instagram algorithm to like get a bunch of views? What do you think?

• 2:20:25Jordi Hays?

  Living in LA for most of my adult life.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  I've been surprised. I've met a bunch of people who are like, work in, in the, in the movie business.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Directors, producers.

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  And you'll ask them like, oh, do you, do you have like a YouTube channel? Like, and they'll be like, no, no, I don't, I don't, I don't do that. And, uh, it's always like surprising to me because it's basically saying like, I'm going to let other people. And like gatekeepers sort of like dictate my creative out.

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  Well, if you already have the key to the gate, why do you need to? It's no problem for you because you're going right in.

• 2:20:59Jordi Hays?

  No, but no, some people like that are trying to break in.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  Personally, if I was trying to break into the movie business, I'd be making movies.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  Start digging on the gate.

• 2:21:07Jordi Hays?

  As much as possible, even if they were, you know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, or just figuring out some of these other formats. And like, I think that's like, when you look at obsession.

• 2:21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:16Jordi Hays?

  That's an example of somebody who like really, really, really, really got their reps in.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Even if it wasn't like the format that led to the breakout, you know, like proper, like, like, uh, box office hit.

• 2:21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean.

• 2:21:29Speaker 14

  Thousand percent agree. I mean, I'll add to that, that like right now, all these young creators, like you said, breaking in. You are, you are more armed today with just tools, like, like not just audience, but audience and tools with like the, if whether you're on the AI side or not with the creative and the Gen AI, you have all this automation and all these like, like efficiency points you can activate.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 2:21:50Speaker 14

  And you can tell some kids a story.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Blender. It's a free, open source CGI package and.

• 2:21:55Speaker 14

  Exactly.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  Really like, and, and you go to Skibidi Toilet and it's like made in Valve filmmaker and people are making movies in Fortnite and, and Halo from a long time ago, if you remember Red vs. Blue.

• 2:22:05Speaker 14

  Of course. Another burning.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so, uh, I, I, I guess my, my big question is, uh, Hollywood still has an immense amount of prestige. And it's still seen as the, the, the, the Mount Everest of being a creator. If you can have a film on the silver screen and have a box office smash, that's great. But in terms of economics, the YouTube revenues have to be bigger than Hollywood right now. And I, I, I'm not, I'm not anticipating like a flipping where Hollywood comes back in the traditional sense. But I'm excited by the idea of, of YouTubers being able to graduate in the more prestigious, uh, you know, Hollywood filmmaking scene.

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  But I'm just wondering like, how much of this is about cultural shelling points, these moments that bring us all together? Versus something that's more abstract prestige? Like what is the long-term relationship here? Because it doesn't. Feel like you're going to see, oh, YouTubers aren't making any money anymore and everyone went back to making money in Hollywood. It feels more like Hollywood's just getting some juice back and restructuring a little bit to bring some young talent up. But YouTube will still continue to be a behemoth in terms of monetization on ads and brand partnerships and whatnot.

• 2:23:22Speaker 14

  Um, yeah, all of that is is accurate. I would just add clarification on like YouTube is, yes, it is bigger, but it's also more diversified. Right. Because it's just so many channels. It's like Hollywood puts out whatever 50 movies a year at most and, you know, YouTubers are doing that. One YouTuber's doing that a month, right? Like, or not movies, but videos, you get what I mean. And so what kind of what you're pointing.

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Hollywood's worth of content.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Like every month, basically, right?

• 2:23:46Speaker 14

  Per second, whatever. But like, so what you're going toward there as far as the the business side of things is is the kind of what I call the franchising. Right? So Hollywood is still the best place to like amplify your franchise, like take something and like send it to a bunch of other places. Okay, so, uh, obviously this is a little cherry picking, but like K-pop Demon Hunters is masterful in the sense of that it became a franchise overnight. And now the irony and fun of it is that Hollywood's trying to catch up to it. It's like, oh, my God, we need more everything. We're like behind on the toys, we're behind on the merch, we're behind on the videos. We need another series right now, all that stuff. Okay? So it's it kind of comes hand in hand and you're finally seeing it as you kind of mentioned at the top of this thing, which was that the YouTubers are now, okay, you know what?

• 2:24:27Speaker 14

  I'm really good here on this platform. Let's go up. Let's give it a shot. Let's see if we make it work. And we're seeing successes as we as we were talking about. I'm sure there's many failures. Okay? But we're seeing those successes now. And now like the Markiplier's and these guys, like they have basically a burgeoning franchise. Now, whether it continues over years and sequels and everything, doesn't mean it has to be a sequel, by the way, like if it becomes a video game.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:49Speaker 14

  And that's successful, that counts. Probably even more. Like, maybe even more, right? So like going kind of what they call transmedia, it's a weird term, but like if they can jump to different formats and different avenues. That's where the, if you're talking about the money, like that's where the real franchise ability of this thing comes from. And YouTubers, if anything, are actually way more nimble. I'm not saying they're better. I'm saying they're more nimble at this than Hollywood because just because the map, the the the definition of how small their teams are and how fast they can move versus these giant corporate behemoths, which have tons of resources, but have all this bureaucracy that could slow the the system down. So. That's where we're seeing this kind of, not a clash, but it's like an evolution as this goes forward.

• 2:25:33Speaker 14

  Where I would imagine that if you're trying to franchise out one of these guys', these movies, it's like, it's like, alright, alright. Let's, let's show you how we do it, but let's also kind of get out of your way.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:44Speaker 14

  Right? Let you guys do what you do too.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:48Speaker 14

  And see where we land.

• 2:25:49Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, uh, what do you think obsession will do for low budget film funding? Like the, the potential return here is so extreme, I imagine a lot of people would see this and go try to fund other projects like this? Or is it so, so out there and so rare that people won't try to replicate it?

• 2:26:12Speaker 14

  I mean, Hollywood loves trying to replicate, so, because, um, we've actually seen this kind of cycle before. We've seen it with, um, uh, Blair Witch Project, you know, over 20 years ago. We've seen kind of these versions of these like virally kind of things, Paranormal Activity, right?

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:26:29Speaker 14

  Like, like these, these started as very, very low budget movies that were just very, very cleverly done. Became sensations in their own, out, uh, own way and became franchises. And you also saw this kind of wave of like found footage movies after Paranormal Activity and like.

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  What is it about, what is it about horror movies that like, is it, it's a category that seems to do well with, with a low budget?

• 2:26:52Speaker 14

  Um, I think, I think, uh, it's because it's very just, we are, it's very understandable. Like universal, it's not a, there's no language barrier, there's no like cultural jokes you have to hit. It's universally understandable.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:04Speaker 14

  And so it's one of those things where, um, like, you know, as much as we love comedies and we're like, why aren't these comedies a hit? Like, it's still our cultural tastes, are like, like, what's funny to us in America?

• 2:27:14Jordi Hays?

  So like, fear, fear is like more universal than, than comedy. And, and you can create like an extremely scary situation with just a house in the woods, right?

• 2:27:25Speaker 14

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Or you don't need to be.

• 2:27:27John Coogan?

  And on the production side, yeah, just a house in the woods works, whereas even if you're doing a romantic comedy, you might want to shut down a street in Manhattan for a scene that's outdoors or go to some physical place and like. Travel around or let alone sci fi where you have to do a whole bunch of CGI and be on the be on a spaceship or something building complex sets whereas you know you can go and film something in a

• 2:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Team is also saying no A-list actors. Usually it's weird to see a Marvel star in a horror movie.

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Why don't A-list actors?

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Because it's more relatable. Because if I see Tom Cruise there, I'm like, he's not gonna die. But if I see some, some no name actor, I'm like, oh, that, that person could go next. I don't know who's gonna be the last one standing.

• 2:28:05Jordi Hays?

  So it's kind of, it's a way for like new talent on like in front of the camera and behind the camera to try to basically break in. So, so you're saying, well, we're gonna see one million obsession knockoffs in the next 12 months.

• 2:28:19Speaker 14

  I mean, I don't know about one million, but we're gonna definitely see some. That's for sure. Okay. The question is whether they're good or not or and all that. But it's like going back to your, your, the, I think with horror, you can bring the budgets down. Like you have to pay Tom Cruise, right? If you're gonna bring Tom Cruise in, you're gonna be, everybody's, everybody is, is a cost there. And if horror can just kind of generate its own audience, like, well, why are we paying for it? Like, why do we need to, to, you know, shell out all this money to bring in a star, a named star or someone with a big following to do this? So it's like, it's a, it's a business plan. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. Um, but it's historically the case. Like, look at any horror franchise. It's rare to even see any type of A-list, B-list, whatever, recognizable star even, you know, headlining it. Like, look at,

• 2:29:01Speaker 14

  you know, the latest Final Destination, right? That's a seven movie franchise, I think. And it's like, even the seventh movie didn't have a, really anybody, any household names, okay, that were in there. Scream's a little bit of exception. We'll give that. But like, Scream has kind of built its own. Yeah.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:29:16Jordi Hays?

  When, how long until you, uh, until you think we see a hit in theaters that had, where 90% of the budget was AI compute?

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:29:26Speaker 14

  A hit? Can you define hits?

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  A hit, a hit is like over 30 million, over 30 million of-

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  Box office and over 3X return on budget or something like that.

• 2:29:37Speaker 14

  It's a good question. I mean, I think we're gonna see in the next-

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  If you put 10 in, they get 30 out.

• 2:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Cause it, somebody has to be working on it. The question is- Like, do they have the talent? Are the models actually good enough?

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:49Speaker 14

  Yeah, yeah. And so we, AI in the Lot was literally last week and there was a lot of stuff that came out of it, right? The Amazon announcements and like the Higgs field movie, um, uh, heat check, I think. What was, I'm sorry if I misnamed it, but like, that's a ni-, that's a hundred percent, I think, or ninety.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:01Speaker 14

  It qualifies as far as your compute power situation. Could it do, you know, thirty million at the box office? I, based on what people, I've not seen it, but based on what I'm hearing about it, I'm gonna guess no, but prove me wrong, please.

• 2:30:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:14Speaker 14

  Like, if you're gonna go for it. But yeah, I do think it will come, I do, I think there's two factors here, right? So, one is the, does it matter that's AI? Like, most of the, most of the public worldwide audience just wants to be entertained.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:29Speaker 14

  Okay. It just want to be entertained, like, if it's, if it's real or not, like, we've been watching CG movies for generations. It's like, we just want to be entertained. Good movie or bad movie, okay? So there's that. But right now, you still have this kind of public vitriol shaming of like, oh, it's AI, ban, ban, ban. And we're still seeing a bit of that coming out of AI in the Lot even. So, so when we think of like, experiences that like, you know, we're building, we're just like, okay. We use a lot of AI right now, okay? And like, we're just trying to build entertaining experiences. So, to me, like, it's, I would say it's sooner than later, except for this, that, that X factor of the vitriol. Like, I just don't know how to predict that one.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:10Speaker 14

  Of when it'll be okay.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  But, but it does feel like there's someone out there who hasn't broken in yet, who has nothing to lose, who's just gonna be sitting at home, just prompting.

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:23Jordi Hays?

  And, and it could, that's why I think, I think it potentially comes from somebody that nobody has heard of before.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  There's also, there also might be, so, it might be like an AI movie that could break through because it's either like, self-referential or making fun of AI or doing something in a different way. Like, like Toy Story was about toys, it wasn't replacing actors with, uh, with, with CGI. And so, there, there's like, less of a conflict there. So, if you're doing some sort of story that could not be told without AI and it's handled the right way, like, it, it, you could maybe massage it a little bit more to get there. And maybe you don't jump straight to like, you were expecting Tom Cruise, but it's just an AI version of Tom Cruise. Like, that's probably gonna be pretty poorly received.

• 2:32:08Speaker 14

  I mean, you're speaking my language. So like, I'm gonna just slightly explain what I'm working on. So it kind of relates to this.

• 2:32:13John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:32:13Speaker 14

  So we're at Pickford, we're building, we showed Experience last week over at Sony, which was basically a detective series where the audience could interact with it in real time, because the AI was writing the show as it goes. Okay, so literally impossible without the technology. Okay, so this is one where my colleagues in the filmmaking and AI spaces, we talk about, well, what's more exciting is not just, hey, let's make an AI movie. What can AI do to juice up the form of art and narrative that we couldn't have done before? Not a cost thing, like a possibility thing, right? And so when you have a series like what we're trying to build, which is interactive, which can only be done because of live prompting audiences in theaters on phones,

• 2:32:57Speaker 14

  now you've driven the experience to the theater, which we're going to, self-plug, do at animal draft houses around the country this year. Now, we're not gonna, I doubt we're gonna generate thirty million dollars, like you said, to be a big hit. But, you know, we've proven, at least in our small sample sizes, that we can provide an in-theater communal entertaining experience, be interactive, be consequential, as a paid ticket even. And we're using AI tech, and it's just like, it's entertaining. Yeah, animation may be kind of a little wonky at times. The tech is very, very, like, it's calling all this complicated data and all in real time. Yeah, yeah, sure, but at the end of the day, we are entertaining.

• 2:33:41Speaker 14

  And that's what we are in the industry, first and foremost. All the tech aside and all the business side, that's what we're here to do, right? If we're not entertaining, classic, you know, Russell Crowe, are you not entertained? What are we even doing here? So that's where I look at it. Yeah, very cool.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  The personalization stuff is super interesting. I had a funny experience, maybe twenty years ago or so. I was, I grew up in Pasadena, and I was watching this movie in Pasadena, Kill Bill, Tarantino.

• 2:34:07Speaker 14

  Nice, love it.

• 2:34:07John Coogan?

  And I'm watching, and the bride pulls up in this yellow truck, and across the bottom, white text pops up, and it says, this scene takes place- In Pasadena, California. And I was like, this is so weird. Like, did I buy the localized version of this movie? It just happens to take place in Pasadena. But you could imagine a horror film that takes place in like any town USA that like uses your, you know, geolocation to make it more customized to you. It feels more scary because you're like, oh, this could be happening in the, right outside my window. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could instantiate like little personalizations that would be putting in your job.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  You know, if you needed a scene of a car like driving past, like, welcome to any town USA, generate it with the Google map.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, like on the fly, potentially, not for every place. But, uh, but yeah, there will be, I imagine that like, whatever breakthrough will be newer and weirder and break boundaries and won't be a clone of, uh, of the things that we love, like Star Wars, because we have Star Wars. We don't need AI version of Star Wars. We need something entirely new and creative.

• 2:35:13Speaker 14

  Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree. So it's like, I have this thing where I say like, AI is not going to game it out Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones. Like, we're not, it's not gonna do that. Like, AI can do things really fast and can fill buckets really quick, with like, you're trying to fill content on your feed. Really great at that. Yeah. So it's not gonna do that. So on the high-end art side, the great artists will probably incorporate some little bit AI, but it's not gonna end to end that thing.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  A little green screen.

• 2:35:36Speaker 14

  And then on kind of your side with customization, I really do think that's, I'm selfishly, I do think that's the play because, AI is really good at speed and optimization. And it's really hard to do customization without speed and optimization. So now you're playing to the advantage of the technology versus the disadvantage, which is the sloppiness that we're getting to. Okay? So not only on your side with the Pasadena example, which I think is an amazing, amazing example of customization for possibilities. Got me thinking about it, actually. I also think it's about consequentiality, which means that, did you feel like you impacted it? Right? Like, did you feel like while you're watching the movie, did you do something? Does it, maybe it's an eye thing, maybe it's a saying thing? Can you feel like you're part of it? And I do think that the young generations, the Gen Z'ers, the A'ers and everything,

• 2:36:19Speaker 14

  they're already growing up with like a parasocial relationship to their content. Okay? End to end, right? And that may be also why these movies are getting successful, because they're like, they feel like they have a relationship to the creator and they feel like, you know, we're gonna go. But to feel like they have an impact in their content, I think that's where the blue sky is. That's where I feel it's coming from. And that's where I'm trying to get to myself in my work.

• 2:36:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Make a horror movie that I can pause if it gets too scary.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  I think you can pause it.

• 2:36:47Jordi Hays?

  No, no, pause and if I pause, you sense it and you just tone it down a notch.

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Tone it down.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  It just gets less scary. And if you let it play. It's like a separate volume button.

• 2:36:58Jordi Hays?

  It's just like a nature documentary.

• 2:37:00John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, you could have a movie that you have a separate volume button for like, I want G rated, P 13, R rated.

• 2:37:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to get too spooked. I don't want to get too spooked.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  I somehow think that would break the, break the experience. Anyway, lots of fun, lots of new projects coming. Uh, well, thank you so much.

• 2:37:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Bernie. I'm excited to see your new project.

• 2:37:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, come back on the show when you launch it. We'd love to talk more. Happy to. Looking forward to it, guys. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Uh, we have some more updates from Sam Sulek. He says Hollywood isn't losing, it's teaming up. YouTube creators are no longer outsiders. They're the next franchise. Gatekeepers are gone. Discovery happens on YouTube. Now the best stories and the biggest audiences are moving into theaters. Wise words, wise words. He also waited on, on startup tattoos. Uh, we have another one here. Sam Sulek hot take. This is a whole format now. The Sam Sulek hot take is, is going viral in his young LA, uh, tank top here. You don't need to get your startup logo tattooed, even if you were an early employee.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  You do not need to work 24/7. Overtraining reduces performance. Most of the time you're not working on the Manhattan Project. He continues. Fun times. Also, Sam Sulek's very first post on X, 5,000 likes, 260,000 views. It's just him with a fish. Check this thing out. It's beautiful. Catfish, too.

• 2:38:20Jordi Hays?

  Check this thing out.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  Looking good.

• 2:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, dream guest. People ask us.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Yes, this would be a good one.

• 2:38:26Jordi Hays?

  What's your dream guest? Hands down.

• 2:38:29John Coogan?

  Sam Sulek.

• 2:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Sam Sulek.

• 2:38:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:31Jordi Hays?

  On AI.

• 2:38:32John Coogan?

  I really enjoyed him on Modern Wisdom.

• 2:38:33Jordi Hays?

  The hyperscalers, the build out, capability overhang.

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  He's been working on a build out for years. He's going fantastic. Some of these AI CEOs could learn a little thing or two from him.

• 2:38:43Jordi Hays?

  That's true. That's true.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Build out yourself before you build out that data center. Approval rating will be a lot higher.

• 2:38:50Jordi Hays?

  Build out.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  You're worried about the wrong.

• 2:38:51Jordi Hays?

  You're worried about the, you're worried, you should, you're worried about the energy bottleneck? You should be worried about a protein bottleneck.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  Exactly. Your own.

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  Protein shortages.

• 2:38:58John Coogan?

  Protein is the energy. Your muscles. Uh, well, we can close with Will Monitis. He says, I don't think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest five-year run in techno capital history. God help us all. I pray that when the judgment comes, he can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery. Well, he's bullish.

• 2:39:20Jordi Hays?

  He's flipped extremely bullish recently, which I don't know if that's bullish or...

• 2:39:26John Coogan?

  Him being bullish? Bearish. If he's bearish, he should be bullish. Be bullish when other people are bearish. Be fearful when other people are greedy. Who knows? Do your own research. Make your own decisions. Just do it on public. Uh, Adam Faye's also hired a sketch artist for a party. He said, I'm so tired of how many experiences of my life have been now been taken over by phones and content. So for my birthday party this year, I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the night instead. That was very, very cool. Wildly different and like, all of these can be printed or framed. I mean, I guess they're, they're physical pieces of art, but they

• 2:40:05John Coogan?

  could also be replicated for the partygoers. Very, very cool analog. Uh, this is why vinyl records are at an all-time high. There is demand for both the content barbell.

• 2:40:16Jordi Hays?

  This is very cool.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  And the slop and the artisanal handcrafted sketch artists from Adam Faye's. Very, very cool.

• 2:40:23Jordi Hays?

  I had the pleasure of running into Adam on the street.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:28Jordi Hays?

  New York last week when I was getting coffee. I ran up to him with my camera and I said, "Hey, sir, what do you do for a living?"

• 2:40:35John Coogan?

  What do you do for a living? Was he amused?

• 2:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Mildly.

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  That's what you aim for.

• 2:40:41Jordi Hays?

  I was more amused by my own bit.

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, oh, last thing. Arena Magazine. Arena Magazine is dropping issue number 008 at sea. They're covering deep sea mining, shipbuilding, undersea cables, maritime autonomy, autonomy, island building, American sea power, and so much more. Best enjoyed near a body of water with a cold drink in hand. Shipping to subscribers now. Go check it out. Arena Mag. One of our favorites. You can subscribe to get the issue at arena mag.com. We love the folks over there. Uh, so much more to talk about, but we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great week and...

• 2:41:19Jordi Hays?

  It's June.

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars. It's June.

• 2:41:21Jordi Hays?

  You see that, John?

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:22Jordi Hays?

  It's June 1st.

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  What was surprising about that? We said that on the intro.

• 2:41:25Jordi Hays?

  I know. I mean, it's just crazy to see it. It's June.

• 2:41:28John Coogan?

  It's June. Another month.

• 2:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Time flies.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  Another month. Well.

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  When your podcast.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for their newsletter at tbp.com and we will see you.

• 2:41:37Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  Tomorrow.