Weekly Recap: Taylor Swift Gets Engaged, SpaceX Launches Falcon 9, Dr. Drew, The Labubu Craze

(00:00) - Intro (00:04) - Intel's Tricky Dance with Trump (50:05) - Taylor Swift Engaged (54:37) - Dr. Drew (Board Certified Internist) (01:25:11) - SpaceX Launch Reactions (01:33:53) - The Labubu Craze TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVB.

• 0:04John Coogan?

  Breaking, the US government now officially owns a 10% stake in Intel. The Polly market jumped to a 99% chance. This, this broke over the weekend.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  They didn't think Uncle Sam could get an allocation.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  They didn't. You know, this is technically Intel Series A. They did a seed round of 2.5 million on convertible debt in 1967.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  Convertible debt.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Convertible debt.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Vintage.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Arthur Rock, not the anonymous poster, not our fur rock, but Arthur Rock.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  The OG.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  The OG. And, and then they raised 6.8 million in 1970, and that was their IPO. So this is their Series A, in my opinion. Anyway.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Back then, back then, even if you would, you would round down, right? Like if it was going to be 6.9 million.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  The very Elon code to go with that number.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Close.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Decided, hey, let's round down.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  We don't need to.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Keep it classy.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's keep it classy.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Um, yeah. So, uh, over the weekend, uh, the Wall Street Journal reported, President says US will take big stake in Intel. President Trump said, uh, the government is taking nearly 10% stake in Intel, capping a two-week frenzy in Washington over the future of the company and fueling speculation about what else might be done to help the troubled chipmaker. Uh, Trump said in the Oval Office Friday that the company has agreed to give the government the stake as part of discussions about the company's future and billions of dollars in grants it has received from the 2022 CHIPS Act.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, I don't think they've actually received it yet.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  They've received 2 billion already.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  But there was, uh, something like, something that roughly 10 billion, maybe 11 billion.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Promised.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  In, in grants and then another equal amount in loans for an Ohio facility. And those are, are going to be rolling out and they should draw, and Intel should be able to draw down on them. But, uh, they could always be rolled back if something changes and the CHIPS Act kind of goes away. And so, um, this is all, they are the deal. This is the pressure. Um, and so, uh, it's very funny the way Trump phrased it. He says, I said, I think you should pay us 10% of the company and they said yes. Which is not typically how people discuss equity investments.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Government grants too.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, well, people just don't, people don't say, pay us 10% of the company. Like a VC will come to you and say, hey, I want to invest, you know, $20 million and I want a 15% stake in your company.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  In exchange.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  In exchange, and, and if anything, I, you know, I would ask for that stake, or I'm trying to build towards that stake. I want to build a position in your company. Not, I want you to pay me, but that's the nature of this thing. So there's, I mean, we've all been tracking this. There's been a little bit of back and forth between Lip Bute and Donald Trump. He originally called for the, for the resignation. We can take you through the timeline. The Wall Street Journal laid it out really well in an article, a deep dive that we'll go through, but let's kick it off with this Howard Lutnick video.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Let's play it.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  The art of the deal, colon, Intel. And this is from Howard Lutnick, sitting next to Lip Bute in a beautifully appointed room. If we can go full screen here, that'd be great.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  I'm sitting with Lip Bute in my office. And at 3 o'clock, we're going to sign and document together in the Oval Office, where the United States of America will own 9.9% of the great American technology company, Intel. I can't be more excited for America and for Intel that we get to work together.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  First of all, thank you so much, Secretary. And this is a very big, important, historical agreement that we can work together. And then more important, I don't need the grant, but I really look forward to have the US government be my shareholder and we can work together.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Have you ever heard Lip talk? So what happened is Lip Bute became the CEO of Intel. And he came to see me and he said, you know, the Biden administration gave this company a grant of $10 billion and we don't need a grant. We're a great company. Maybe not with the best leadership, but now it has leadership. This video is absolutely insane. He said, you know, and that was the conversation. And then when we had the conversation with the president, he said, look, we don't want to take your money away from you, but shouldn't it be fair? And we agreed that it would be fair that the same money. They're blogging, they're blogging deals from the White House in your bearish.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  And we agreed together and and then you went to your board of directors.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  And they agreed.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  It's a giant public company, so it had to be fair.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Had to be fair.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Had to be fair.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  There's no other way. And so we did it fair for Intel and for the American people. And I think this is this is exactly what Donald Trump is all about. I'm really excited that today we get to do the deal together.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for your support.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  What's that handshake?

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Saint handshake? What happened there?

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  I, uh.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Lip Boo went for the dap up.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  And Lutnick hit him with the power, the power grab, the power shake, and it just was botched. Interesting.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. We should, Ben, can we, can we put that in slow motion and play that back? Well, the Journal has a timeline here. Liputan was anxiously preparing for the biggest meeting of his life. Just five months into his ten years chief executive of Intel Tan was already fighting for his job. A few days earlier, Donald Trump had demanded he step down over his past ties to the Chinese military. The demand sent to Intel's leadership, the demand sent Intel's leadership into a panic. They immediately contacted the White House for a meeting. And Tan flew to Washington huddling with advisors for hours on Sunday, August 10. His team reassured him that the president would hear him out because, quote, "Trump loves meeting with CEOs."

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Who doesn't?

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  Even those whom he has attacked publicly, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He's been.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  This is WWE.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Trump is bought in WWE.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  This is WWE.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  He understands. You call out your opponent, you hash it out, you leave it all in the field. Yeah, it's good.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  The next day, Tan met with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besen. In the Oval Office, he sought to convince the president that he wasn't a Chinese spy and that the US government has a long-term interest in bolstering Intel, one of the only homegrown manufacturers of the computer chips that power the modern economy. The CEO's argument proved persuasive. The president also took a liking to Tan, a Malaysia-born, Singapore-raised US citizen who once considered a career as a professional basketball player and backed off his demand for the CEO's ouster.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Lore, Lip Boo.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, can we get a, Tyler, can you actually try to find a highlight reel of Liputan playing basketball?

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Can you generate an AI image of Liputan dunking on LeBron James?

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  But the truce came with a cost. In return for Trump's support, the administration proposed taking an equity stake in the company. It's interesting, in that video, they framed it as Liputam was like, you know what, we don't need the money, why don't you take a stake?

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe, you know, it's kind of unclear who made the initial move.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Both ways. So, just for context, last year, Intel brought in $50 billion in revenue, but they lost 18.8 billion. So, they did not do well on earnings. They missed on bottom line, essentially.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Just a little bit.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Just a little bit. And they switched CEOs. Obviously, they've struggled on the founding side, the foundry side. They're not making chips for, they can't find customers for their foundry stuff. So, you know, if that continued for a really long time, yeah, they would need the money, but they technically don't. And you can just look at the, you can just look at the stock price. Like, before any of this, like, it's not like Intel was trading as a penny stock. Like, it was still, it was too rich for Elon to buy with the, what was it, 40 billion that went into Twitter? Something like that? Like, I remember thinking, like, oh, I would prefer if he bought Intel, potentially, because that one seems important. But, but it's always been around an $80 billion company. And so, like, if it was truly on

• 7:58John Coogan?

  the brink of bankruptcy, the shares would be falling even more, in my opinion. So, I think Lipu is not being disingenuous there. They actually could get by without the money. But they would, they need to restructure, like, very seriously, and Liputam's, like, doing that. Like, he's cutting a ton, he's gonna cut more. And if you cut everything that's not additive to that 50 billion, and you just try and hold on to as much of that 50 billion in revenue as possible, and you cut everything that's losing money, yeah, you should wind up with something that actually generates, I don't know, maybe $10 billion of free cash flow.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Not a bad little business.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  No.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Intel decided to convert nearly $9 billion in grants, promised Intel as part of the 2022 ChipSAC into a 10% equity stake in the company, an unusual arrangement that makes the government Intel's biggest shareholder. Meeting was a pivot point in a frenzied period for Intel, once one of America's most venerated technology companies, now stuck in a years-long downward spiral. The company scrambled to control the fallout from the president's demand that Tan stepped Down, Ton, triggered by a Fox Business Network segment underscores the unpredictable environment major corporations face under Trump. By the end of the two-week roller coaster ride, Ton's job appeared to be secure and the company's situation more stable. Japan's SoftBank Group agreed to invest $2 billion, seeking to curry favor with Trump. On Friday,

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  Intel and the White House officially officially revealed the terms of the deal. "He came in, he saw me, we talked for a while, I liked him a lot, I thought he was very good," Trump said of Tan from the Oval Office. "I said, you know what? I think the United States should be given 10% of Intel," and he said, "I would consider that." Yet a host of questions remain.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  I think this might be the gong of the day. This might be the true size gong moment.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Hit it, John. Hit that gong.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  Clean first hit of the week. It is good to be back.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  We're calling it 1600 Pennsylvania Ventures.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  White House Capital Group.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  White House Capital Group.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Trump.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Tan must resolve core business challenges to get his company on track. Some analysts say Intel isn't in a much better position without new commitments from customers. Converting government grants to stock will only leave the company in a worse financial shape by diluting shareholders. Trump will likely need to find more ways to support Intel not wanting it to fail on his watch.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  And that's why, and that's why Liputan's genuinely excited.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Because he's like, now you're in.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Trump is effectively the SPAC sponsor of Intel now. It's a new, it's a new era.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, he has bags and so he's aligned. And so if Liputan needs to come to him and say, "Hey, you know, we're trying to make this a facility in Ohio, it's not going well. We need you to put some pressure on..."

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  We need to line up some customers.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  We need to line up some customers, all sorts of things. Like, in terms of...

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  He's on the board.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  He's value add. He, Trump is value, is a value-added investor.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  He's got audience. He's got, he's got, I mean, he's got his own social media tech giant.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  True, true. Could be a potential buyer. You know, maybe, maybe Truth Social becomes a hyperscaler.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  You know, it's happened before.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Truth, uh, Truth Cloud.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Truth Cloud.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  Intel needs a lot of help and the US needs Intel, said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior advisor to the think tank, Rand, who focuses on tech issues. Hopefully, something good is going to come out of this.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  We had Jimmy on the show like two days ago.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Jimmy, Jimmy, good work, Jimmy. Intel was founded in 1968 by semiconductor pioneers, Robert Noyce, who co-created the modern computer ship, and Gordon Moore, originator of Moore's Law, the idea that computing power and chip efficiency would likely double every year or two, a guiding principle in the tech revolution. By the 90s, Intel dominated the market for processors used in personal computers. Its Pentium line and Intel Inside Marketing Campaign with dancers in multicolored clean room suits made the company a household name. Then came a series of tragic missteps. The company largely missed out on the mobile phone and artificial intelligence booms by overemphasizing short-term financial targets, analysts say.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  Rivals in chip design like Nvidia and manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor surged ahead. It's interesting how you, if you're a huge tech company, you can miss maybe one platform shift and do fine, but you miss two, you're going to be out of the game. Even, even Microsoft said, you know, we missed mobile, we're going to get into social media, LinkedIn.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could, you, I mean, it's a really, really stretched metaphor, but you could say that like Nvidia missed mobile, more or less, like the, like, they weren't really switching into, okay, let's be the design arm of, because the iPhone-

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  You weren't buying enough chips for your gaming.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it was just a gaming company at that time, mostly in scientific computing a little bit, but there is a graphics processing unit on mobile phones. It's just part of the system on a chip that goes into the phone and it was never, Nvidia never really like figured out a way to get a piece of mobile. And, and there's a world where like the cloud rendering stuff happens, but Nvidia kind of sat that out, but it didn't matter because they, they crushed AI.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  So company is still as keen to reviving US manufacturing.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Look at Nvidia's sales. This is sales by quarter. And it's just like, and this is what a 30 year old company is just completely, completely.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Looks like a ramp.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  It looks like a YC demo day.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Looks like a ramp.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  The company is still seen as key to reviving US manufacturing. In his first term, Trump touted Intel's plans for $7 billion manufacturing plant in Arizona. Trump advisers began discussing what became the CHIPS Act, wanting to attract companies such as TSMC to the US.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  Has Arizona tried to brand like what they're doing? They have so many different chip manufacturers coming into Arizona. They need like Silicon Desert or something. They like.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Chip City.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Chip City. It really feels like that like there, there is a significant.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  Center of gravity.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  That, yeah, that will ultimately become like a company town type vibe.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Chip City. As discussion on the CHIPS Acts crescendoed during the Biden administration, Intel Pat, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbied aggressively, hoping for some of the law's tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. In 2022, he sat in the first lady's box for the State of the Union speech, during which President Biden touted Intel's investment plans. While the bill was being negotiated, senators, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, pushed unsuccessfully for a version that would see the government receiving equity in companies it backed. Very interesting. This is what Mark Cuban was saying last week. He was saying this is Sanders and Warren's dream.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  He said it in a little bit less PG language, if I remember correctly. But Intel became the law's biggest beneficiary, qualifying for roughly $11 billion in grants and about $11 billion in loans for a plant in Ohio, an expansion in Arizona and other projects. It seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Talk about ROI there. Like, like Liputan saying, like, you know, we don't need these grants. And I think he's like technically correct, but it's incredible nice to have. And the ROI on your CEO going to the State of the Union and just sitting in a box and like taking some meetings. And, you know, I don't know what Intel's lobbying budget was, but it probably was less than. 10 billion, right? It was probably less than 10 million. It probably wasn't very much at all. And, uh, and you get a huge, huge.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show, Andrew Ross Sorkin, said yesterday, should the government start taking equity in every startup for the federal tax incentives we offer? Or Tesla? How about the banks? How about when a state government offers a tax incentive? Should they get an equity stake in exchange? Board representation? This is a super slippery slope. And, uh, Bill Gurley said, here's my take. If the government is a quote unquote lender of last resort, they should take a hundred, 100% take equity and arguably 100% of the equity. Failed to do this with GM, Goldman Sachs, United, and other airlines. How do you know if they are the lender of last result? Resort? The company takes the deal, um, which, uh, tracks.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Because otherwise, the, the, the company would go with a financial investor who says, I only want 50% for the same price or whatever. Uh, and so, um, it, I, it is, it is a good, uh, it's, it's a good point. It's a good point by Bill.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, in reference to the original CHIPS Act grants, uh, the Journal says, it seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Late last year, Tan, who had been an Intel director since 2022, left the board in protest of Gelsinger's strategy. The board also soured on Gelsinger and pushed him out. Trump's victory presented another curve ball. He had bashed Biden.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Quitting in protest, deeply underrated. Deeply underrated strategy, just in life.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, I respect Tan for, for quitting in protest and then ultimately getting the job.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Coming back for the top spot.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  It's, it's pretty, it's pretty sick. Pretty sick. Under, underutilized strategy.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Just, I'm out.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  He decided basically, uh, in the trough of disillusionment, he quit in protest. And then he said, yep, I'll pop back on the, the roller coaster for the slope of enlightenment.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  That's where Intel is.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  And we're really, yeah, I think we're, I think, I think we were.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Who's, who's on the slope of enlightenment? I thought we were doing three colors. Me, you, Tyler.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  I didn't get Tyler on there yet, but you're on, you're, you're just,

• 17:15John Coogan?

  I'm still on the innovation trigger.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  Round it. You're just coming up to the peak.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  I just went to San Francisco.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Talking to AI researchers. They told me deep learning is undefeated. They told me that pre-training scaling will continue. And so I'm, I'm, I have yet to, my, my expectations can continue to be inflated.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  I am looking at the trough.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  You're looking at the trough?

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Looking at the trough.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  You're going.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm getting straight for the trough.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Tyler, where are you?

• 17:39Speaker 05

  I think I'm where Jordi is too. The, it's the red ones on the other side of the.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  The down slope? Wow. I thought you were so AGI pilled, bro. I thought you were so AGI pilled.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  But I, I mean, like, okay, even Dorkesh, Dorkesh is extending his timelines. Like, how can you, I mean, it's hard to still be.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Extending the timeline just means that the, the, the initial innovation trigger slope is just going like this, but he's still, he's still going up. He's still going up and to the right. He's happy.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  No, his expectations are worse.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  YX's expectations.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know. Let's just sprint to the plateau of productivity. The real move is that I, I don't think we're in the trough of disillusionment yet.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  How about, how about, I think we need to make the TVPN version of this for the AI hype cycle.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  And the slope of enlightenment, we need to just like.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Another, another vertical line, another vertical line.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  For the fast takeoff scenario.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, we get a bubble, we get a crash, and then we get a fast takeoff. That's the most likely, for sure. No, our job is, is to recognize and diagnose when we are in the trough of disillusionment and re-illusionize people such that we can get to the slope.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  I've never been in a trough of disillusionment that didn't one day get to the.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Slope of enlightenment.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Slope of enlightenment.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  So, there's always hope. There's always hope.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but anyways.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  You know what could have made that video better? If it was streamed on Restream.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Live. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-streaming, reach your audience wherever they are. Liputan, Howard Lutnick, if you're listening, get on Restream. Anyway, continue, Jordy.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Of course. So Trump's 2024 victory presented another curve ball. He had bashed Biden's implementation of the CHIPS Act, fueling worries that he could try to change deals or cancel them altogether. Intel's financial condition worsened and the incoming administration worried the company might fail. Even with the recent share price rebound in August, followed by reports of the deal with Trump, the company is now valued at 110 billion. A fraction of its dot com bubble peak. The stock is down roughly 50% since the start of last year.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Intel has been left behind, Trump said last Friday.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  So around Trump's inauguration in January, Lutnick and administration officials began evaluating CHIPS Act recipients and which tech companies generally could increase their US investments in line with the president's goals. They asked semiconductor companies receiving CHIPS Act awards to increase their total US investment, but they knew they might need to revamp Intel's deal or help the companies in other ways. What's interesting there is that when we talk to, like, all of this is like, like, everyone's doing art of the deal on each other. And meanwhile, like, when we talked to Doug Olafland at Semi Analysis, he's like, realistically, like, all this trailing edge capacity is going to be done in, like, South America. Like, it doesn't make sense to do it in America. Like, a lot of this stuff is just going to wind up getting offshored because it's easier

• 20:30John Coogan?

  to build some facility that's just copy pasted down there. And so it's very unclear, like, how, like, how it can actually work in the long term. And then, and then on the leading edge, like, it seems like it's TSMC and Samsung, like, Tesla's going with Samsung. And those will be in the United States. And those will be, like, cutting edge, like, PhD level jobs, amazing researchers, like, really, really great, like, American innovation. But like, we're kind of already on that path. And Intel's not really the party that you need to be twisting the arm of. It feels like if you want America to be like the leading semiconductor country, you just need to make sure that you have leverage over TSMC and Samsung. Not so, and maybe AMD, Global Foundries a little bit. I mean, Global Foundries is part of Intel now, but, but a lot of the.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  A lot of the trailing edge like it seems like it might not be a long term thing that America is ever good at again because it's like it's commoditizing so rapidly. I don't know. Anyway, clearly Trump cares about it and wants to keep it here. So that's what he's pushing for. The administration began early conversations with Intel's board about taking an equity stake. The talks didn't move forward in part because the board, which has often been mired in disagreement, wanted more than the administration was willing to give. Did they want him to take, take a bigger position? I know. They probably wanted like 40 billion in grants or something like, give us more for that. Former banker Letnick has had in recent months asked other tech executives what can be done to help Intel, even asking other chip companies like TSMC, AMD, and

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Micron, whether they would consider potential deals. This is what, um, this is what Doug is, Doug has just generally wanted people with semiconductor manufacturing experience to be involved with the company. And so it's very possible. This seems like a step in the wrong direction. It is heuristic because it's like more government people on the board. But, I mean, to be clear, the US government is not taking a board seat and not having a controlling stake. It's a purely financial stake, which we'll get into. So in March, Intel's board named Tan 65 as CEO. One of the biggest decisions he faces is whether to keep the company as one of the few chip firms that does both design and manufacturing. Some analysts say Intel should consider splitting the business or doing other types of deals to cut costs.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  Tan has so far shied away from spinning off the manufacturing segment, which lost 3.2 billion in the second quarter. He has told confidence he has inherited a very bad hand. In July, Intel said it would lay off 15% of its workers by year end, cancel billions in planned investments, and further delay work on the sprawling Ohio plant. The new rules of the road were no more blank checks, Tan wrote in a memo to employees. Tan's early decisions at Intel were aimed at getting the company on more stable ground, but the CEO's past work at chip design software company Cadence Design Systems thrust the company into the spotlight. In July, in late July, July, Cadence agreed to pay $140 million for violating US export restrictions by selling.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Ban technology to a Chinese national defense university. The sales happened while Tan was CEO. So, you know, you like, it seems like he probably had to sign off on that in some way. Of course, it's like, is it a university? Is that like, I don't know. I, I, I don't know how you like steel man this or dig into like, you know.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Steel man it. You're the steel man champion of the world.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Steel manning, it would probably be like, the, the export restrictions are just like super complicated and it's unclear. And it's one of those things where it's like, there's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. And they made some case for, um, you know, in this particular, in the, this particular technology did not fit within the export restrictions. Cause the export restrictions might just be like, um, you know, oh, chips of a certain size or scale. And they had, and they had a chip that was like slightly under and then they, the, and then the government like, you know, reinterpreted the export restrictions to include that. Like this stuff happens all the time. Because when these, when these export restrictions get, get, um, get written, it's easy to just say.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. You don't hear much about Cadence Design Systems, by the way.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Huge company.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-five billion dollar public company.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and that's why people think Lebutant's so equipped to run Intel. Because he took that company to like a hundred billion market cap, basically from, I think like five or 10 or something when he, when he, uh, when he joined the company. So he is, uh, he's a talented operator. Um, so, uh, a week later, Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's board raising concerns about Tan's ties to China. Trump was watching, this is wild. Trump was watching Fox Business Network on August 7th, when host Maria Bartiromo highlighted Cotton's criticism at 7:34 AM Eastern Time. Five minutes later, Trump fired off a message on his Truth Social platform.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately. It's crazy. He's just watching the news and then posting about it.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Journal says, "It was one of the first times in modern history that the president publicly called for the leader of a major company to step down. Trump's demand was seen by some on both sides as an opening bid in negotiations with the CEO. The president had already grown intrigued by the idea of government stakes in key industrial companies during his May trip to the Middle East, a senior White House official said. Though the official added that it wasn't what sparked Trump's post, the president wants to see more such deals in the future."

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Well, if you're trying to maintain compliance, get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  I imagine that will be, we know that Trump is not going to be on the board and not going to be sort of directly pulling the strings on the business, but I imagine one of the first things he wants Lip to do is

• 26:14John Coogan?

  Implement Vanta, yeah, for sure.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  So, Intel's stock price has been on a tear. Shout out to Leopold Oshinbrenner at Situational Awareness.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  They mocked him. They mocked him. They said, this guy's fund must have already blown up.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yep. Oh, he's long Intel. What a weird non-consensus bet. Oh, well, it paid off. So, Trump called for Tan's resignation mid-August. Then Trump met Tan, SoftBank invested $2 billion, and the share price rose from under $20 to over $25 a share, and the deal has been announced. So, anyway, sorry, I cut you off.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think people were speculating whether Leopold had some inside information or he just viewed Intel as a super strategic asset that

• 27:00John Coogan?

  There was some post about this where

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  the government wouldn't possibly let fail.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  There was some guy on X saying like, oh, this is like insider trading. Everyone is insider trading, even like Warren Buffett made his money on insider trading, very blackpilled. And so he was just being like, there's no evidence of any of this happening at all. And, and it, yeah, wait, what you got, Tyler?

• 27:20Speaker 05

  I think also like this trade, like him being long Intel totally aligns with the thesis of the

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Of the fund.

• 27:27Speaker 05

  Situational awareness. Like, his whole thing is

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  He's aware, he's monitoring the situation.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're gonna nationalize like AI.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  So, obviously, like, if the US is gonna nationalize, like, start a lab, start like building computing stuff, they're gonna have like, they're gonna take the existing

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  You know, infrastructure.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I hadn't even thought about it from that perspective. I was just thinking about it from, from the perspective of like, like, we, we, we talked to Ben Thompson about Intel. We talked to Doug O'Laughlin about Intel. Like, we were kind of like noodling on it back and forth as like commentators. And I didn't come away with a super strong like bull or bear case. I didn't really look at the stock price and the valuation of the financials, but it didn't seem like crazy to come up with a, like a, like a, an expression of your position in, in financial terms. And it's very clear that like Leopold and his team just like looked at Intel more deeply and saw that there was an opportunity there. You don't need, not every good trade needs to be insider trading people. It's like so ridiculous.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  And, and yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. Like, it's like, what does he know about Nvidia? Like, is it possible he just, he just knows that like every, like, he's not in Nvidia? What does he know? Is he insider trading? Or is he just like looking at like, oh, well, Nvidia is like the obvious bet. So everyone piled into Nvidia. It's like the biggest company in the world. Like, maybe not a lot of juice left there.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  I'm gonna go where

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Get 20%

• 28:47John Coogan?

  I'm gonna go and bet on the things that have high upside potential. And, yeah, I don't know. Anyway.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  In the Oval Office, Tan told the president, his ties to Chinese businesses were years in the past and he was loyal to the United States. He presented ideas for turning Intel around and investing more in the United States. Lutnick told Tan that he thought it was dangerous to have so much of the global chip making capacity controlled by foreign companies. Tan agreed and reiterated that he was dedicated to Trump's America's first manufacturing agenda. By the end of the hour-long session, the president was convinced and agreed to lay off the criticism.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  I will no longer call for your immediate resignation on my social media app, Mr. Tan.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  Tan and Lutnick then moved quickly to hammer out a deal for the government to take a minority stake in Intel. It was complicated negotiation because it was unusual to convert government grants that had already been awarded into equity. While they were in talks, SoftBank, led by Masa, suddenly agreed to put $2 billion into the company, part of its campaign to bet on US firms and appeal to Trump.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  If they, if they were putting together like a pitch deck for SoftBank, I feel like they should have used Figma for that. Right?

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  I would be shocked if SoftBank uses Figma for their, the design of their decks.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  Because they seem to be very PowerPoint coded, but they still are powerful. Imagine how powerful they could be if they would, you know, simply get on Figma slides.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  Let's see here.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Did I tell you that my first internship ever was at a SoftBank backed company?

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, DrDrew.com. So Dr. Drew was a radio host with Adam Carolla on Kiss FM in 2005.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Wait, that's crazy lore.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yes, this is insane lore. So Dr. Drew was a, like a board certified psychologist, psychiatrist, I think.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we're pulling up this website, by the way.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  And so Dr. Drew, during the dot com boom, wanted to start his own, like, live stream property, basically, and raised money from SoftBank and built a team of engineers and had their own data center, racking servers. And one of my jobs is like to go to the... Well, I mean, this is like what it is now, because he has like a podcast and stuff. And you don't really need, like, necessarily like a venture-backed startup to be an influencer.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  So Dr. Drew went to the same high school as me. And...

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Every single famous person has gone to John's high school.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's wild. But yeah, like, one of my, like, you know, pop by the summer office was like go in the data center and it was like super cold. It was like, not like a data center like people think today. It was like a room with a couple racks of servers, but there was no AWS. So if you wanted to set up a website, you had to like rack a server and like put the code on the server and then run it.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Just put the servers in the bag, bro.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. The brand was a little bit different back then. The first show that they were going to greenlight was this sort of like, it was about, a lot of his stuff was like relationship coaching. So Love Line, people would call in about their relationships. And so I think, I believe they were going to put two people, like a man and a woman who were maybe dating, and they were going to go on a road trip and they were going to like livestream it. And it was going to be like some sort of like new, new media.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, all I can see is, I can see why Masa needed to be in that website, John.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  It is, it is incredible lore.

• 32:25Jordi Hays?

  Is that part of how you underwrote the internship too? You're like, look, you know...

• 32:29John Coogan?

  I wasn't really like technically an intern. I was, I was so young, I was just like stopping by the office, basically, but... But it was cool. It was like a true startup environment, like a pool table, like pretty big office, like very much like

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  Pool table?

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, pool table.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  It was very, it was very iconic of like

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  You don't see pool tables in offices much.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Now it's like ping pong tables.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  They've taken over.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  We should, do you like pool?

• 32:52John Coogan?

  I like pool.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we should get a pool table back here.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Billiards.

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  Billiards.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it was like the classic, like, kind of overfunded ventureback.com bubble company, where, like, huge staff for something that, like, would ultimately be

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  Small media company.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Oh, see, yeah, yeah, a media company that should focus on, like, the media piece and then, and then, like, the YouTube should just be like a platform. And so it's like, it's like, it didn't make sense to be in, like, the middle. You either just wanted to be like the influencer or the, or the platform. Anyway.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  So SoftBank had already pledged to spend at least a hundred billion in the US on AI and other tech investments, a move announced by Sun at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club last December. SoftBank had also earlier this year discussed a potential deal to acquire Intel's chip manufacturing business. Intel and the US soon agreed that the government would use 8.9 billion in grants that had been committed but not paid to take a nearly 10% stake at a slight discount. The US won't have a say in governance. It already gave Intel 2.2 billion in CHIPS Act grants. That was what we were talking about

• 33:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  Earlier. Some had been given, but not all that was promised. David Shapiro, former partner on the Wall Street firm Watchdol, Lipton and Rosen and Katz, drew up the terms, including a provision that the government could acquire another 5% of Intel at a discount if the company sells the majority of its manufacturing business.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  It's an underrated naming scheme. I really wish startups would do this. Like, the next, like, AI startup should just be like

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  No, this is

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Coogan and Hayes and Cosgrove and

• 34:21Jordi Hays?

  This could be totally a new meta. It can only be done once?

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  By a great team?

• 34:26John Coogan?

  If we did Coogan, Hayes, Cosgrove and Kohler, it'd be amazing.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, at some point, we should just add the whole team.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  The whole team, yeah.

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  We could definitely get the dot com. Coogan and Hayes and Cosgrove and Kohler and just Over and over and over. So the administration insisted on this provision, this 5% at a discount as a type of poison pill meant to dissuade the company from fully exiting the manufacturing segment. And this is, this is what people are really excited about, you know, government involvement in the decisions of, of, of

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Highly technical project.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  Highly technical, complicated businesses.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Government famously good at building things.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes. So if Intel were to give the government another 5%, it would obviously dilute shareholders and complicate things. So despite the initial optimism, many analysts say the agreement will only be a boon for Intel if Trump can also find customers and attract more investment for the company.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  He might be able to do that.

• 35:22Jordi Hays?

  I think he's going to be able to do both, to be honest. I think he's going to be able to strongly encourage other companies.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  He's not going to be like a VC that just like sits back and like reads the investor updates.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  There's one thing, one, people can criticize Trump for a lot of things, but he is available the week of August 25th. He's online. While many allocators, he's not a Burning Man.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  He's not a Burning Man.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is crazy. Which is crazy. You'd think that he's starting to get into

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Venture.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Venture.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  That he would naturally

• 35:49John Coogan?

  He would go to Burning Man.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Set up an Oval Office camp at Burning Man.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  But instead of being at Black Rock City, he might be at Black Rock.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  On Wall Street.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Doing deals.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  That was, that was one of our good, there's an early episode of 2BPN where John and I are riffing out Black Rock City.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  The home of

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  The home of Burning Man.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Burning Man.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  And wondering if there's a connection, there's almost certainly a connection.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Obviously a connection to Black Rock, financial institution.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  SoftBank's $2 billion and the 8.9 billion in government funding that had already been promised, aren't game changing for the chip manufacturing business. In the grand scheme of things, it's, it's not that much money.

• 36:28John Coogan?

  They lost 18 billion last year. Like we're not even covering last year's losses. But it's better to have and not need, I suppose.

• 36:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the agreement is fueling speculation that the president could lean on other tech companies to work with Intel. Lean, strongly encourage, demand that they are fired if they are not, if they do not.

• 36:48John Coogan?

  He's gonna rip some posts.

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  Tan has met with potential customers, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, trying to win support for Intel's next generation manufacturing process. This is not the kind of thing I see Tim being super interested in. He's like, more expensive, less performant.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  Apple has spent, what, a decade getting off of Intel and Intel Max and going to Apple Silicon, which are like so integrated, so perfect for the Apple ecosystem. Like, like, now, like, you can run, you can run iOS apps on Mac and vice versa. Like, it's like, there's a ton of, there's a ton of, like, they've been spinning up, like, the ecosystem on top of Apple Silicon for so long, like, the different graphics engines and getting developers to go deeper into optimizing for Apple Silicon. And then they just like rug everyone, ah, back on it.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the Journal says, "Many executives say they would need big incentives to use Intel for manufacturing. Given how badly it trails industry leaders like TSMC, it is difficult to switch semiconductor manufacturers because the processes are specialized and have to be planned out years in advance. The government's taken Intel as the latest in a series of extraordinary interventions in the private sector."

• 37:58John Coogan?

  What's the craziest thing that they could do? Like, Apple GPU for a cluster at Intel or something, like, kind of fresh start? That seems like something way out of their wheelhouse of both companies. I have no idea how they would do that. But, I mean, if, if Amazon can do Tranium and Google can do TPU at TSMC, like, maybe there's a world where that happens. I don't know. Anyway, I'm grateful, I'm punching the air right now. Anyway.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  So they highlight a couple of the other deals that's worth covering. To the president, when a quote-unquote "golden share" of control over Japan's Nippon Steel in return for allowing it to take over US Steel. These golden shares are in reference to what the CCP

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Oh, I thought it was in reference to the president's toilet, which is gold.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes, and many, many of the fixtures in his, in the Oval Office.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, um, in last month, Trump struck a deal with Nvidia and AMD for the federal government to take 15% of their chip sales in China in return for allowing the exports.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  In early July, the Defense Department took a minority stake in MP Materials, a maker of rare earth magnets. Days later, Apple, which the Trump administration had long pressured to expand its US supply chain, announced a $500 million deal to buy MP's products.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, so that's an example of like Trump, like, acting as, uh, you know, biz dev, basically, for the companies he likes.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he's really gonna make a lot of ECs look bad.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Big promises during the deal process when they're trying to win allocation.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  And then kind of.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  I'll help you ramp your revenue, for sure.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll help you hire founding engineers.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  I know a lot of the top guys.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  I know a ton of founding engineers. I don't have 50 other portfolio companies that also want to hire founding engineers. I got you. I got you. Um, but the Intel stake is among the most notable, given Trump called for Tanda to resign, then quickly brought him to the negotiating table. There's this Darth Vader aspect of the whole thing, said Guantanamo Kunda, a lecturer at the Yale University School of Management, never heard of it, who studies innovation and leadership, referring to the Star Wars villain who started his good, became evil, then redeemed himself. Um, anyways, uh...

• 40:13John Coogan?

  So.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to read through this post from?

• 40:15John Coogan?

  The big question is, is this socialism?

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  Maga socialism?

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Is this maga socialism? A lot of people have been saying this. And, I mean, I think, like, my default take is that, uh, like, I don't know that Intel is so critical that we need necessarily a backstop. I don't necessarily know that, uh, the government is the right...

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  You don't trust Doug on this? Doug really doesn't want, Doug from semi analysis really doesn't, does not want intel to fail.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I'm, I'm still like on the fence about it. Um, but, uh, so the debate has been raging like, is this, is this socialism? Um, and so we're going to the socialists who are self proclaimed, the people's line, uh, from Carl, uh, Behr, uh, and Carl says, no, but that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it. And this is interesting because, um, obviously the Trump camp is very pro this deal. And they're saying this isn't socialism. What are you talking about? We're just doing art of the deal. We're making good deals and we're, uh, we're, this is an America first agenda project. Um, the Democrats are saying, oh, wow. Trump is a hypocrite. This is socialism. The socialists are saying this isn't socialism. It doesn't go nearly far enough.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling state. So, uh, uh, Carl says, former under Obama under secretary of state, Rick Stengel is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacturer intel. This is a quote from Rick Stengel. Uh, Trump, Trump's strong arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of. Once the GOP believed in laissez faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector. Look it up. The state owning the means of production is called Marxism. Uh, so Carl continued.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't find any evidence of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders taking a victory lap on Trump's, uh, acquisition of intel shares.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which was surprising, given that back in, in the Biden admin era, they were pushing for this.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Yes, but the key discussion that's going on right now is, is financial, uh, financial ownership versus true control over capital. And that's what Carl's going to get into here. So he says, anyone old enough to remember the phrase government motors. This is from the era of the take, of the takeover of GM should be able to appreciate what a wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official. As part of his troubled asset relief program, TARP, Obama took for the US government a 61% equity stake in General Motors, and the right's backlash was entirely predictable. Rush Limbaugh called this "a sterling example of the Left's crusade for government control of business that proved the Left's enchantment with socialism."

• 43:07John Coogan?

  John Stossel complained that this was a move toward more government control of the economy, and in the end, that's pretty close to socialism. That so many liberals have adopted this line of criticism, Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday, and Democratic consultant Jessica Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example, should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think of liberals as fellow travelers. While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively ambivalent to hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization. They will opportunistically support it when it's time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but they will aggressively attack it if they think this will score points against Republicans.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  There are a few things that contemporary liberals enjoy more than catching a Republican doing something that they can rightly or wrongly construe as socialist. In this case, I would say wrongly, Stengel's definition of Marxism as "state ownership of the means of production" is confused for all kinds of reasons, but here the most salient is that ownership does not imply control. Even if this was ordinary equity, 10% would hardly give the government any kind of significant control over the company, but as Intel made clear in a statement, "This deal doesn't even give the government 10% control."

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  9.9%.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  But, no, no, so there's more. "The government's investment in Intel will be a passive ownership with no board representation or other governance or information rights. The government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions." So this notion of passive ownership perfectly illustrates why socialists would do well to talk about control rather than ownership of the means of production. A major function of modern finance is to sever the relationship between those two. To identify Control, you have to look past the legal and business terminology and figure out who actually has the final say over any given lot of capital. In that light, it isn't clear that 10% ownership stake even represents incremental progress towards control of Intel, which is

• 45:10John Coogan?

  what the socialists want. Convincing a business to give you 10% non-voting stake in their company is very different thing from getting a 10% voting stake, let alone a 51% voting stake. Nevertheless, American partisans clearly aren't interested in litigating the fine details between ownership and control, and that's why socialists have an interest in this fight. If Democrats are going to vilify Trump as a socialist, the best response is to complain that he isn't even doing socialism.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  He's not doing enough.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  He's not doing enough. And so my takeaway from this is that it's a good point. Like, it is not the goal of socialist, but at the same time, it reaffirms that I do not want to do the socialist thing here because I don't want the government voting on what Intel should do. Like, I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on how they should position against TSMC, where they fit in Apple silicon versus TPU versus trinium. Like, it just doesn't seem like government's set up to actually run this company more effectively than anyone else. And so I'm very hesitant about that. It sounds like something that's like very good in some abstract sense to the socialist, but I have no, I have no faith that if the government were to

• 46:18John Coogan?

  get a 51% voting stake in Intel, that we would get a better outcome here.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, the better outcome, people were talking about this on the timeline, would be Trump answering questions on earnings calls.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  That would be fantastic. Maybe that's

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  So, that's a good outcome.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it'd be odd to have, like, I mean, if we went to pure direct democracy and socialism, like, you go to the ballot box and you vote, like, are we gonna do 3 nanometer? Like, decide, you decide, like, yes or no. Like, I think it's, I think it's a waste of money.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  Or just have the, whoever's the Intel CEO, just have that as, you know, an elected

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 46:57Jordi Hays?

  Official.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Like, let the people vote on who should be running.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the question is like, how much democracy do you want? You could vote on everything. You can vote every single day. California is extremely democratic. We have ballot measures for all sorts of things. We tend to not do ballot measures for different things at the federal level. We have representative democracy, not a direct democracy. And but if you if you really play out the direct democracy socialism thing, it's like, yeah, you'll be voting on whether or not Intel launches a GPU. Like, Intel, like, hey, we miss mobile. What should we do about that? Okay, let's ask the American people broadly at the ballot box. Like, that is the conclusion, which is kind of crazy to me.

• 47:32Jordi Hays?

  Should Intel launch energy drinks?

• 47:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  It's not really in our wheelhouse today, but, you know.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  Big, potentially large opportunity.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just it does seem it does seem fraught. It doesn't seem like it seems like they're they're.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  It's potentially one of the slipperiest slopes that we've ever been on as a country.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Well, I don't know. This is saying that, like, we're like, like, his point is that this isn't this isn't a step towards real socialism because it's not real control. It's it's purely a financial instrument.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the Intel board said the government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  What are those exceptions?

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  So what are the exceptions, right? I'm not sure not sure that we know. But anyways, the timeline.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Analysis says it's a bad idea. We can vote against you. That's the exception. Anyway, first step I would vote for if I was a in a democratic socialist society, I would vote that Intel gets on graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Canor in the chat says, I think Intel needs to launch short form content.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Well, make sure your voter registration is up to date because President AOC might just make it happen. You never know.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  I could see it. I could see it.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Possible. I mean, the the real wild one is, yeah, Tesla, because Tesla's had a number of government incentives that they've taken advantage of. You could make the same argument. You put the screw. To them and you say, hey, we need, we need voting shares for this.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  For the years and years.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  This is what Andrew, Andrew Sorkin was saying.

• 49:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  He was saying like, yeah, like where, like, where do you stop? And I understand that, yeah, there is this like slippery slope, but uh, to Bill Gurley's point, like intel could have said no. They could have said like, yeah, we're actually going to be fine without the CHIPS act money. And so we don't want, we don't want an equity stake.

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

  Although. Lip Butan is sitting there just on fire and you should be like, you don't need to help. You don't need to help put it out. I'll, I'll be good. I'll be good. Flames.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  Like, no, I'm, I'm good. I'm good.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  I'll, I'll cut more.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna give the president.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  More.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't wanna give the president the ick. I'm just gonna act all like.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Hey, I mean, BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company now. Maybe intel just like pivots all the way down to just like, yeah, we, we actually just own real estate at this point. Like, like all we own.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  Or re.

• 50:00John Coogan?

  We're, we're, we're real estate and we just lease to uh, TSMC. And that's it. We're, we're completely out of.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  Probably a decent business.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  In other news, Taylor Swift is getting married.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  The private jet enthusiast.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Well, I, I feel like most of our audience would know her for her Wall Street Journal op ed in 2014. Where she said for Taylor Swift, the future of music is a love story. Uh, where will the music industry be in 20, 30, 50 years? Before I tell you my thoughts on the matter, you should know that you're reading the opinion of an enthusiastic optimist. One of the few.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Enthusiastic beaner.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, one of the few living souls in the music industry who still believes that the music industry is not dying. It's just coming alive. There are many, many people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is and will continue to be based on the amount of heart and soul. An artist has bled into a body of work and the financial values and the financial value that, that artists and their labels place on their music. When it goes into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically. And every artist has handled this blow differently. In recent years, you've probably heard the article.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  About major recording artists who have decided to practically give their music away for this promotion or that exclusive deal. My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet is that they all realize their worth and ask for it. Music is art and art is important, is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable, valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free. And my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or underestimate or undervalue their art.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  So, did she get this right? To date, not really.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  I think she, I think she got, the thing that she got right is that what an album is can be extremely monetized. If you continue to think about what, like the album is scarcity. Like you either have it or you don't. And the internet kind of reduced that scarcity to zero because you could stream it, you could pirate it. But there is still scarcity to be created if you are an artist, if you are a musical artist. And so the way she does that now is when she releases an album, she goes on a tour that becomes so big. That again, there is scarcity because there are only so many tickets at SoFi Stadium and you have to be there.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  Because it's a moment.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  One of the best monetized.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Recording artists of all time.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And so she gets the long tail eventually and eventually her, her music is essentially free and played in, uh, in grocery.

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  So I'm gonna read you something from their Instagram caption announcing the engagement.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  It's not just a marriage. Dash, M dash.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  No way.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  The perfect love story.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  No way, no way.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  On X is calling this out saying, uh, claiming that Taylor and Travis are one shotted.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  No way. What you got Tyler, was that?

• 53:12Speaker 05

  No, well, I was gonna say something about like her like monetization, like, um, Kyle Scanlon has this good post. She said, um, Taylor Swift's engagement is actually very relevant to monetary policy because she is the most powerful stimulus tool we have.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  Oh, really? How so?

• 53:27Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, her, her tours are like massive, like you can see the like rise.

• 53:31John Coogan?

  In consumer spending?

• 53:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:32John Coogan?

  Ooh, interesting.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  Especially like smaller countries, it's like very.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. But, but how does her being married? Like she could just go on tour and be single, right? Is she gonna sell more tickets because she's married now? Does it allow her to tour more?

• 53:46Speaker 05

  Uh, you could also see it in, uh, a lot of people are talking about birth rates, right? So maybe a new boom.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  Baby boom.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  Catherine Boyle just posted a picture and just said, with the captioned, their pictures, pictures just said, "American dynamism."

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  I do think this will be good for the birth rate. It's, it's also gonna be, uh, some, some, uh, for anybody that's in a longer term relationship in their late twenties, early thirties, pressure is now on. These photos are gonna be getting sent around. They're setting a new bar, right? Uh, quite the floral display by Travis. Gotta give him props there.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  How many, uh, how many kids do you think she'll wind up having?

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  She's 35.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  She's 35.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  She's gotta get going.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, 1989.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, hopefully a ton, right? I mean, I think we'd like to see.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Luxury status symbol, apparently.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  Like to see at least 10.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Be great.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow, looking sharp.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  You really undersold this. You said you were just gonna do a phone call and now here you are.

• 54:48Dr. Drew?

  No, I thought I'd do the full Monty here.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  This is amazing. Okay, so first off, I need to apologize. I completely botched the story of DrD.com. In my defense, I believe I was 10 years old when I stopped by the office as a, as a kid, uh, but please break it down for us.

• 55:03Dr. Drew?

  It's so funny. The, the only thing I found disturbing was how, how miserably you did with my credentials.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 55:10Dr. Drew?

  Let me start with that.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Okay, please.

• 55:12Dr. Drew?

  I'm a board certified internist. I'm a board certified dictionary specialist. I'm a fellow with the American Board of, American College of Physicians. I'm, I was assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, practiced medicine my whole life. I'm not a psychologist.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Okay, yes. I love Love Line. I, I sincerely love Love Line. I wish I listened to it constantly. It was amazing.

• 55:32Dr. Drew?

  Well, it, it was very popular and it served a function back in the day, but, but this, this business spun out of it. I thought you guys would really like to hear this history because it is a piece of history.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 55:44Dr. Drew?

  Good friend of mine from high school, all you technically high school.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Dr. Drew?

  We went off to Amherst College and then he went to Harvard Business School. I went to medical school and I'm going along doing all these wild things, practicing medicine and then doing radio. And he shows up and he goes, I want to, I want to show you how to form a business. We're going to do a dot com company. Of course, I was hearing about all the dot com stuff in the, in the wind and he'd got some seed capital from a company in Orange County, like a million dollars. And then he put together a little board and we went, he grabbed me by the arm and took me up to Sand Hill Road and we sat at Softback, Softbank rather.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 56:21Dr. Drew?

  And he just said, follow me. I go, what are we doing? What do we, I had no idea what we were doing. Didn't know how to start a business. I didn't.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  Had you, had you bought your dot com, by the way? Had you like gone out?

• 56:32Dr. Drew?

  Probably had done something like that at that point. I don't think we would have been sitting there without that.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:38Dr. Drew?

  And, and he just goes, follow me. And I was like, okay. So I followed along and they go, what do you want to do? And I'm like, I don't remember what I said, but the six or seven Softbank VC representative marched out of the room and my Harvard Business School friend was anxious and like, I didn't even understand what was happening. Still, I did not. And they came back in and they go, okay, $10 million.

• 57:08Dr. Drew?

  That was that.

• 57:11Dr. Drew?

  We went down and we built the company exactly as you described it. And in fact, it drove my wife crazy. She goes, what are people doing here? Why aren't they, why aren't they working there? It shouldn't be this nice an environment. But most of that was for the tech team. And you pointed out how weird the tech situation was. You got that part exactly right. But the part you got wrong is, remember, people didn't have any idea what a website was. And so we had an editorial staff. We had a medical staff. We had a marketing team. And they envisioned, I kept saying, why do we need a magazine on my computer screen? Why, you're, you're building this really great magazine, but with a chat room and with

• 57:54Dr. Drew?

  some feedback. And they kept, they, all the, all the, all these sort of trigger words back then were interaction. And, and I didn't understand, I saw no value in any of it. I kept saying,

• 58:05Dr. Drew?

  I kept, we had 120 employees and we had a board of directors from, from Northern California who were demanding we quote, "Get big fast." This is interesting.

• 58:16Jordi Hays?

  Get big fast.

• 58:17Dr. Drew?

  This guy, this, I, I came to our first board meeting, I said, "Look, I, I'm trying to decide if we should figure out how to make money, how to make this profitable, or, or what we should be doing, or how to, you know."

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  Did they tell you, "Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that."

• 58:32Dr. Drew?

  Worse than that, this one guy goes, if, he was manic as hell, and he goes, "If I thought you were so stupid, I never would have been on this board." And he jumps up and he goes, "Here's how you make money at a dot com company." And there was a giant whiteboard, and he wrote in huge letters, "Get big fast." And they were demanding we burn through capital faster to try to get big fast. So that became the weir- is the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life. But the one thing I got right, I kept saying, "It's gonna be video. Why else do we need this thing? It's gonna be video." Well, look, look what we're doing right now, right?

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Dr. Drew?

  And I just kept saying that, and we put together a one night a week television show. That was really a high quality show. We still have some of the tapes from it. And everybody came in, Paul Rudd, Tommy Lee, everybody came in on that one night a week show, because it was the cool thing to do, because this is this new idea, this dot com company creates a TV show, and nobody could watch it. Do you know why?

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Because you couldn't stream it?

• 59:33Dr. Drew?

  Because nobody had stream. Nobody had broadband.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Dr. Drew?

  Broadband. You needed broadband back then. That's, that's how far ahead of the technology we were.

• 59:43Jordi Hays?

  How, were you guys, it sounds like you weren't making a ton of money, but were you selling the show on a subscription? Like, what, what did that?

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Was, was there any business model?

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Was it ads, sidebar ads?

• 59:54Dr. Drew?

  No.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Just eyeballs. But so, so Get Big Fast didn't mean revenue or profits, it meant eyeballs.

• 1:00:00Dr. Drew?

  Eyeballs, get big meant money, been number of people, and they kept talking about how the, you know, how the asymptotic curve would develop around viewership and engagement and this kind of stuff. And we literally... This was a company, I mean, it had lots of traction and engagement and stuff. People were kind of intrigued by it. So people were stopping by and looking at this thing. I'm not sure. We did lots of interviews with celebrities. It was sort of like E meets, Teen B meets, you know, it was all these different sorts of things all together in one site. And we literally were sitting in Goldman Sachs on, I believe it was March 19th, 2010. When was that?

• 1:00:45Dr. Drew?

  2001. 1989 or 2000. The day the Nasdaq fell apart. Oh, sure. The day. We were sitting in Goldman Sachs and the woman across the table was contemplating giving us $30 million on a $110 million valuation for a company that had never made a penny. Wow. And I, I just thought it was the dumbest thing I ever saw, but I, I knew it was tulips the whole way. And I kept, and one friend of mine finally goes, look, it's Amsterdam 1680. It's tulips. You're going to grow Brussels sprouts or are you going to grow tulips? Well, what are you going to do? I thought, all right, I'm going to grow tulips.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, it's interesting to think back and if, if it was structured as an investment that was actually in you and your name and likeness, it would have been a tremendous investment, but that wasn't a good dot com story.

• 1:01:35Dr. Drew?

  It was why we got the money though. In fact, there's an Inc. article on my wall here. I was going to actually pull down and wave in front of the camera. It'd be almost impossible to do it. Were that, they were sort of saying that's what they were, you know, that's kind of what they were thinking they were doing. But it was not, it was not a clear thought, but they were looking for brands. Yeah. And I don't think they really knew that. That was not a fully developed thought at that time. Yeah. Um. So what was, what was the conclusion? It was like going to business school. I saw the entire, the entire, from, from seed to dissolve. I saw the entire business cycle in one year.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  So did you, did you eventually take, take over the site again yourself or what?

• 1:02:17Dr. Drew?

  Oh, Dr. Coop brought, bought the site. Remember Dr. Coop? You wouldn't. You're too young. He was the Attorney General and then he had a website that actually did rather well for a minute.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Did he just redirect the website or was he still using drdrew.com?

• 1:02:31Dr. Drew?

  No, no, he was a redirect.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:02:34Dr. Drew?

  He absorbed everything. And.

• 1:02:37Dr. Drew?

  And he went bankrupt, as everybody did.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Dr. Drew?

  And we got, we were able to weasel it back. I forget how we got it back, but we had to do some sleuthing. We finally got it back.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  So, yeah, what, what, how did the shape of your business evolve then? And like, what, like, how do you think about packaging everything that you do now?

• 1:02:59Dr. Drew?

  Um, you know, there, there's, I was listening to you guys talk and I was thinking, boy, I don't have any framework. This is all very interesting to me, but I, but I don't have a framework to sort of understand what I do. My, my stuff is always an improvisation.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:12Dr. Drew?

  Right. When I started radio in 1983, I had no designs on radio. I was, leave me alone. So I can practice medicine. I'll come here in the evenings on Sunday and do community service. That was my little notion in 1983, when I started doing radio. Then some television guys came along. I'm like, Bob, how do you do a TV show? I've never, I don't even know what you're talking about. Well, this was the same thing with the dot com. My, my good friend comes to me, goes, we're going to do this. And I thought, I, I don't see it. I don't get it, but I think we might be able to do something with it. It'd be interesting. This was a hell of an education.

• 1:03:45Dr. Drew?

  And, uh, and you're asking how I frame everything I do now?

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I was wondering.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just been interesting how many techno, how many different technology trends from the dot com to, you know, podcasting. But it all comes back to basically radio and TV.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, like what, what, over, over the past, uh, you know, more recent tech boom history, have you been hit with the, hey, let's do, uh, let's do a

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  AI Dr. Drew.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Or let's do an AI thing. Is this coming, is it rearing its head again?

• 1:04:14Dr. Drew?

  It, that has been, that has been, I've had conversations like that.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 1:04:18Dr. Drew?

  Uh, exactly what to do with it? Nobody knows.

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  Nobody.

• 1:04:22Dr. Drew?

  Uh, but it's part of the exploration. Uh, I'm doing streaming shows regularly. You guys blasted them up there. It looked like hell. Wait, where you put it up there? I'm going to talk to my webmaster.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it looks really good for conversion optimization.

• 1:04:36Dr. Drew?

  For sure.

• 1:04:36Jordi Hays?

  It made me want to click. So I think you're, I think you're, your person's doing a good job.

• 1:04:41Dr. Drew?

  Not meant to be showing other people's shows again. But, um, uh, you know, that's been interesting. It, it happened, that all happened just because I got canceled for daring to say people shouldn't panic about COVID.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:55Dr. Drew?

  And, uh, that caused me to just stop doing everything. And I had somebody who said, hey, you should do a streaming show. I was like, what's that? Again, that's sort of my, that's where I start every one of these projects.

• 1:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You had a bad experience streaming the first time where you're like, if, if I make the show, you're sure people are going to be able to watch it?

• 1:05:11Dr. Drew?

  But, well, no, I knew we were different.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I, I knew it. I already knew that. I already, I saw what was happening with videos. I just kept,

• 1:05:19Dr. Drew?

  we just kept saying we were so early. We just, we, we could have been, who knows what we could have been you, God knows we could have been YouTube or something if we had sort of been the first to really advocate for this kind of platform. But we were way early and nobody else was quite as much of a believer as I was. And, uh, so the streaming thing has been very interesting and you just, I'm in my own, my kid's playroom doing this. And it's the same thing. Everything here used to require me to go out to a satellite booth, booth at CNN.

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Dr. Drew?

  And now I just do it from here. So the efficiencies are fantastic. And so I do television out of the studio. I do podcasting out of the studio. I do streaming shows. And it all started because I got canceled and some, my webmaster said the streaming is probably going to happen pretty soon. I said, let's try that. And, uh, I wanted to talk to all the people, other, other physicians who have been canceled. And one of them happens to be the director of the NIH right now. And so I had the sense that, that these people had something to say and the cancellation thing was some sort of bizarre aberration, certainly in, in science and medicine.

• 1:06:22Jordi Hays?

  Had you, have you gotten, you know, the, the opportunities that you maybe lost due to the cancellation? Have you gotten invited back in the last year or so?

• 1:06:33Dr. Drew?

  Set of opportunities.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Or is it, yeah. Are you looking at totally different, or do you not even want to go back to the, to kind of the old?

• 1:06:38Dr. Drew?

  Those are great questions. I, I don't know that I want to go back, but I probably would because I've taken the position that. My opinions have never changed. I'm happy to express them on any platform, anywhere. Uh, what has happened in the meantime is, you know, what I used to do, say, all the news outlets, all of them, all of a sudden, the only people that would have me on was Fox.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Dr. Drew?

  Uh, now, just last week, CNN called. So I thought, okay, good. This is a good sign. I couldn't make it, but I would have had I been able to.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Nature's healing.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Nature's healing, yeah.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  Um, uh, we've, we've been really obsessed with this idea that, uh, sort of a barbell is emerging in modern media where all the value either accrues to the platforms, like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, or the individuals, the Joe Rogan, the Andrew Huberman, the.

• 1:07:29Dr. Drew?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  And that it's very hard to actually build anything in the middle. Um, would you agree with that? Would you, i- is this something that you've kind of experienced? Uh, it, it feels like something that, um.

• 1:07:40Dr. Drew?

  No, I, the, I absolutely concur with the, on the talent side.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Dr. Drew?

  That, cause it used to be, I would require to do what we're doing right now.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:51Dr. Drew?

  There'd be an executive producer, there'd be a segment producer, there would be a director in the studio, in the satellite booth, there'd be somebody directing in the other end of the satellite booth.

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  And then you got the union, the unions involved with.

• 1:08:02Dr. Drew?

  There'd be unions, there'd be sales forces, there'd be executive structure. Now it's me.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Dr. Drew?

  That's it.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Dr. Drew?

  So it's so much more efficient and it drives that world crazy.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Dr. Drew?

  So when Colbert gets, gets fired for losing $40 million a year, I just looked at that and I go, well, of course.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Dr. Drew?

  That's gonna happen to all of them. This is just not a.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and our reaction at that point was he could just go set up his own home studio and probably have a fantastic business just with his existing fan base and none of the, none of the overhead.

• 1:08:32Dr. Drew?

  100%, but they are, they are, you gotta know how that world thinks. They're very spoiled. They're very spoiled and they're used to gigantic infrastructure and dozens of writers and I, this is, this, the world we're living in right as we have this interview.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Dr. Drew?

  To them looks sort of cheap and dumb and people aren't talented to do that. The real people, people back, back us with infrastructure and money. That, that is just not, so this, the other side of the barbell.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Dr. Drew?

  Which I'm wondering how you see it. I just see it as largely non-viable. Uh, so much of it has got to shrink dramatically and it's resisting.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:07Dr. Drew?

  It's resisting like crazy.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I would almost put the traditional media corporations like in the center. When I think of the far big mega side of the barbell, I think of the platforms. Spotify, Facebook, Meta, YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, the networks, and they actually accrue a ton of the value. And it is extremely hard to start one of those companies. If you do, you're not talent at all. In fact, you're probably an engineer and you probably at this point have the backing of like a state government because that's the only way TikTok got going was, you know, so much energy and capital flowing in to actually, you know, break through. The ship has sailed on starting like new platforms for the most part, in my opinion.

• 1:09:51Dr. Drew?

  I think that's probably right. And they don't need to buy talent.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  No, not at all. It just comes to them naturally and they give 50% of the revenue or whatever.

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we would rather, we would rather just have you jump on our show from your studio and you benefit because people are going to trickle over to you and

• 1:10:10Dr. Drew?

  And X makes money on their ads.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  We just get to focus on making content and not, not focus on talent management.

• 1:10:16Dr. Drew?

  But the interesting thing is you have to wonder, is there, are we somewhere in a business cycle that's going to lead to some consolidation? And when the talent consolidates, are they going to start negotiating with the platforms? Is there going to be some sort of, I mean, that would be a natural business cycle, right?

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was that new left wing Substack publication that just announced? So they're living out or something, remember this?

• 1:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what are the?

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Anyway, there's like a collection, the argument. So there's a new, a new publication that's launching that's aggregating a number of writers who are sort of on the left. And we were kind of debating, will they have leverage over different platforms because they're all together? Or does it actually make more sense for Matt Iglesias and Derek Thompson to just have their own Substacks and go direct? And then, you know, and then on the far other side is the, is the platform and there's really no one in between. But we're still early in the, in this development of the, the argument.

• 1:11:14Dr. Drew?

  There, there's something very strange. It says, there's a weird confluence of worlds right now. My son just texted me and he's He's been trying to get to you guys.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:11:26Dr. Drew?

  No way.

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Does he wanna, does he wanna?

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  Does he wanna hop on?

• 1:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll send him a link. He can join right after you.

• 1:11:31Dr. Drew?

  Listening, uh, maybe call my phone and I'll put you up to the, uh, microphone here.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:11:38Dr. Drew?

  He's consolidating the ad department, you know, the, the management, the can, the lawyering, the ad services, the distribution, he's trying to consolidate that onto a tiny little team.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:49Dr. Drew?

  Cause these things are necessary, all this stuff is not needed anymore.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Dr. Drew?

  You need an ad agency.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is amazing. The, the chat is going wild. Everyone's really happy about this. They're calling, uh, they're calling your son the prodigal son.

• 1:12:04Dr. Drew?

  Here, I'm gonna see if I can get him to call me. He said he emailed, he, uh, his, his partner named Jake emailed one of you guys.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. We'll have to follow up, but, uh.

• 1:12:12Dr. Drew?

  But they're, but they're having huge success and he's the one that, he's the one that started talking about AI. He's, he's in the middle of all of this. The tech influencers, the, the Google store, the TikTok store, all of everything.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Dr. Drew?

  But all of that is more efficient, more efficient, more efficient.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:28Dr. Drew?

  Right? I mean, and the, and you, what you have is these, the, the talent agencies and the ad agencies and the managerial services and the lawyers holding on. They're like, they're like going into the foxholes.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Dr. Drew?

  As opposed to adjusting and adapting and changing what, what it is they do. They are just insisting that things continue to be done the way that they've always been done. And it's, it's, it's, I guess a classic business mistake, right?

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Um, I have one, I have one, uh, one, one health, one health, one health question for you. What are the, uh, uh, uh, John, John and I are starting a, what we hope to be a multiple decades run of, of, uh, daily live streaming. Uh, what would you have done when, when you were earlier in your career, health-wise to, um, to better sell, you know, you, you seem to be doing incredibly well now. So what are, what are the key things to look out for health-wise to make sure you can do this for decades?

• 1:13:28Dr. Drew?

  Be hypomanic. It helps, which a lot of successful business people are.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:13:36Dr. Drew?

  You're going, you know, I hear many of the podcasts, you're gonna suffer, you're gonna work hard, you're gonna lose sleep. I wish I'd paid more attention to sleep, but if I had, I couldn't have done most of what I did. I'm trying to pay as attention to sleep now. And, you know, you've heard it all before. It's not, this is not new. Trust your instincts. Explore. Don't be afraid to fall down. For me, the, the, the big, as I look back on all the things I did, it just the willingness to improvise and to go into dangerous situations. I mean, a lot of, oh, he's calling now.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Let's get him on. We got the sun on.

• 1:14:12Dr. Drew?

  I don't know if they can hear. I'll have to translate.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put on speakerphone.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Hey, how's it going, guys?

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:14:18Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  It's not, obviously, but we, my business partner and I actually emailed you a couple weeks back.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  We wrapped Roberto Nixon.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. I love Roberto. That's amazing. Okay. Yeah, we gotta get in touch.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  My dad was on the air.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  I'm flying back from Seattle.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I do. So we did have a little exchange.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's follow up.

• 1:14:39Dr. Drew?

  He's gonna keep talking, okay? He can't, I'll tell him what you said. He can't hear you. He's talking, Douglas.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  I was gonna say that I, so Rob and Jake are going to an Oasis concert next week in Pasadena, and I was gonna ask you.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  If you could meet Rob in Pasadena.

• 1:14:54John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  His sister also, his, her kids are going to Poly.

• 1:14:58Dr. Drew?

  And Douglas went to Poly too.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:15:00Dr. Drew?

  Douglas went to Poly August. Like you said at the beginning of the show, only famous people go to polytechnics.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Sounds fantastic.

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  No, I just wanted to say hi and show you that we're not like the rest of those guys that probably email you randomly asking for things and wanting to build a relationship. It's, it's very funny that this all happened in a strange way, so.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is amazing.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  I actually have to take a call for this guy named Roy Keith. Is a Gen AI creator.

• 1:15:28Dr. Drew?

  Cool.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  Cause he's in Dubai and I, you know, just trying to get on the.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get on with Dubai. We know, we know how that goes.

• 1:15:35Dr. Drew?

  All right, get going. I, I called these guys because they butchered my, my.

• 1:15:38Jordi Hays?

  My dot com.

• 1:15:42Dr. Drew?

  John, is that, which one's John?

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  I'm John.

• 1:15:45Dr. Drew?

  John, John was actually at Dr. D dot com when he was like 10 years old.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Intern of the year. Yeah. I was in the very cold data center. Yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  Rack and servers.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  That's a cackler. So there's, there's a long history on, on, on all fronts.

• 1:16:00Dr. Drew?

  And he went to college. So, okay, we'll talk later. Yes, Andy went to college.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Amazing. Okay. Um, okay. I, I, I have one more question on the health side. For you, for you.

• 1:16:11Dr. Drew?

  Okay. Sorry, Douglas.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Later, Douglas.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Later.

• 1:16:13Dr. Drew?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Uh, for you, uh, last week we had Mark Cuban on the show. He said that, uh, drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous and should never be done.

• 1:16:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I drank, I drank, I, I'll go on the record. I drank a liter of raw milk.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  That day?

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Every day for two years straight.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  And you were fine?

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I was, uh, so anecdotal.

• 1:16:32Dr. Drew?

  Uh, did he explain why?

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  He didn't, he didn't give any underlying rationale.

• 1:16:36Dr. Drew?

  Yeah, I doubt he knows why.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  He was just saying that, that the L L Ms might convince you to drink raw milk and that might lead to some sort of doom scenario.

• 1:16:45Dr. Drew?

  You can get brucellosis, you can probably get tularemia, you can get listeriosis.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:51Dr. Drew?

  And we can treat that with antibiotics, no problem. Uh, but they can make you very sick and they're very rare.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Dr. Drew?

  Uh, I, I wouldn't do it, but I don't, uh, the fact that P, I, look, there's something terrible going on.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Dr. Drew?

  Where people are so fearful of being the biological agents that we are.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Dr. Drew?

  And the reality that we are going to die, that they are afraid to live.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:18Dr. Drew?

  Living well is the goal, not living forever, not living perfectly free of illness. It's living a good life and we are off of that. I can't, we are so far off that it is disgusting. And for a non-physician to have an opinion about milk that contains pathogenic organisms that he's never heard of, or he learned to pronounce yesterday, is disturbing to me. The same thing was when people went after hydroxychloroquine, the day they learned how to say that word, a medicine I've been prescribing for decades. So it's all, we are so out of whack with this gonna live forever, fear of death, illness, infection, oh shit. Yes, we are, we, we, my

• 1:18:02Dr. Drew?

  generation of physicians, we walked into illnesses that had 100% fatality. AIDS had 100% fatality and we did not know what we were dealing with. And we didn't cower in the corner, we marched in. It's the right thing to do. I don't know what's happened. I can't understand this at all. But here we are. We need to focus on living well, living a good life, period.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Did you predict?

• 1:18:27Dr. Drew?

  Biological stuff comes what may.

• 1:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Did you predict the decline of alcohol consumption?

• 1:18:33Dr. Drew?

  I did not.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  It seemed to fall off a cliff, right?

• 1:18:36Dr. Drew?

  Yeah, yeah, I did. That's still surprising to me, but it fits with the lack of dating and the lack of having sex and the lack of socializing. It, it, that was, that was a prime social lubricant for decades. I'm glad to see it. It's a good thing, you know, we're starting to understand it's a poison and it's not good for any tissue in our body ever. But it makes me also, I mean, what happens, when do we become such pussies? When did that

• 1:19:06Dr. Drew?

  happen? That's my question these days. When did that happen?

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever said something like that on CNN? This is why you gotta stay off the networks. You just gotta do your own show.

• 1:19:17Dr. Drew?

  I guess I'm just, I've been through so much lately. I've just lost all the strength. I'm a huge advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of many. I'm not happy about this flag burning thing. Freedom, freedom, freedom is what I'm all about now. It's sneaking my mind.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  I will pitch you one possible explanation. I, I think that the, the fear of very, you know, consequential but low probability events, like the raw milk or the risk from raw milk or the risk from COVID is tied to a lack of belief in immortality and not in the sense of, of living forever. Like biological immortality, like science will cure you this and let you live forever. That's just one way to think about immortality. You can also think about immortality and your legacy. If you are written about and you have lived a great life, you will be remembered and immortalized. You can also think about it through your children and also through the, the afterlife. If you're spiritual or religious, you could think that you're going to heaven.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  And if you don't believe in any of those modes of, of, of immortality, you don't believe that you're going to have kids or, or do your life's work and be remembered in the afterlife or go to heaven or, or you don't believe that science will be able to fix you if you do wind up getting sick from raw milk. Then even a small chance has the, has an incredible, incredible penalty. And so you, you discount it very, very high.

• 1:20:43Dr. Drew?

  I, I agree with you with a couple of caveats. I, I do agree with you.

• 1:20:51Dr. Drew?

  Embedded in that observation is a general lack of meaning making is if the meaning is I'm trying to ascend to a afterlife. Whatever the meaning is of my living, that meaning should be deeply meaningful to me and purposeful. It doesn't, it does not have to include an afterlife. It can also include just creating a good life for my children. That's why I'm here to do that, that kind of thing. But, but we, people are here for their narcissistic needs. And that's when things become fragile.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:22Dr. Drew?

  Because we, we are not the beginning and the end of everything. We just are not. And if we think we're all there is, is what's happening to me. Man, and then we have people whipping the frenzies and the fear and they're learning to control us with that. And that is disgusting.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what about, have you been tracking AI psychosis at all? Any thoughts?

• 1:21:46Dr. Drew?

  I hear about it. I don't, I don't believe it. I'll tell you, I'll, I'll take, I'll make a bet that it's over, way overblown. It was somebody who was already psychotic and you know, whatever. There, not that the AI relationships are necessarily going to be good. I, I worry about that. But this psychotic episode, I don't know. I don't know if you remember back in the nineties, there were news stories every night.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't born, sir.

• 1:22:12Dr. Drew?

  Do you have to rub that in? You just said, no, I don't remember.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Later nineties, I got into the action, but.

• 1:22:20Dr. Drew?

  But there was news reports like every night, like, oh, these parties where all the parents throw their keys in a bowl and they just, they just grab a set of keys and that's who they go home with that night.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 1:22:31Dr. Drew?

  The press, the fake, I don't think people are sensitive to fake news. We have to be very sensitive to reporting these days. And so much of what's being reported is fake. And it's just to catch your eyes. It's just to get your attention. They, they, the person that wrote that article was a 23 year old segment producer somewhere who doesn't do any research of, of any meaning. It, it just becomes something that they catch on the line. They saw other people report it, they report it. It's ridiculous.

• 1:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, the, the, my, my read on it is, is it seems obvious now that if a large number of people take ayahuasca, some of them are going to have some type of psychotic break of sorts. And maybe they were prone to, to, or, or had some, some underlying issue that, that enabled that, but the issue with.

• 1:23:25Dr. Drew?

  You're right. They already had a psychotic illness and it just happened to break when they're working with AI. But you're, you're raising, you're, you're making a very smart observation that the, that AI world is populated by people that microdose on acid and do ayahuasca, which I, I tell you, it categorically causes severe psychiatric problems. I've seen it my entire career. Scares the hell out of me. They should not be doing that.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  If you're listening. Did you ever consider, yeah. If you're listening live from Burning Man, just listen to Dr. Drew. Did you ever go to Burning Man, by the way?

• 1:23:56Dr. Drew?

  No, we got friends keep trying to get us to go. It's not, it's not my jam exactly.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Well, you could go there and try to, try to, you know, talk people out of it. How about we stick to the Bud Light, buddy? Yeah, let's stick to the crushing beers. Have a couple glasses of wine. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining. Come back on anytime. We appreciate this. We'd love to have you back.

• 1:24:17Dr. Drew?

  You guys are great. I learned something just listening to you guys, this talking about the playing, the baseball cards. That's fascinating. You guys have a great, you're obviously extremely well trained in your, in your respective fields. And it's very interesting to hear you talk about these various markets and opportunities and things. And I leave with one caveat.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:24:37Dr. Drew?

  If you don't call my son, he's gonna kill me.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  I know. We will definitely. We're gonna, we'll go to this concert with him. We will, we will.

• 1:24:42Dr. Drew?

  Exactly. It's in Pasadena.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  I live in Pasadena now.

• 1:24:45Dr. Drew?

  You live there now?

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  I do. I live over by Rose Bowl. Rose Bowl is literally walking distance for me.

• 1:24:50Dr. Drew?

  So do I.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Amazing. There we go. Okay, we should. Did you guys just become best friends?

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  I'll swing by. I'll bring you a 30 rack of Bud Light.

• 1:25:00Dr. Drew?

  We live by Anadale.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, I'm right over there.

• 1:25:04Dr. Drew?

  Okay, so.

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  Just up Lina Vista.

• 1:25:06Dr. Drew?

  No excuse.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  I don't want to get too, I don't want to get too, too precise, show up with people at my front door. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic. Great hanging. We will talk to you. Bye. Massive news from SpaceX last night. They did it. They did it. Flight 10 made it back, took off from Starbase, South Texas. The, the booster landed in the ocean in the, I think the Gulf of America, technically. That's absolutely right. And the actual starship executed a successful flip maneuver, deployed a mock payload of a bunch of non-functional Starlink satellites, survived re-entry, just barely, as we'll see.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  It was a really dramatic video. It was amazing. And then splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean. It was a false send. It was a full send. It was, it was a crazy, crazy. NASA could never. Watch. Yeah, let's watch the recap video that the Wall Street Journal put together. This is pretty interesting.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Starbase Texas, this is yesterday. They scrapped two attempts on Monday and Tuesday because of some, some problems with the vehicle, but they got it off the ground. Look at that. They lit the candle. Go into space. And so-

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  I wish we could get a better sense for just how massive it is from those angles.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  And so that, those are the dummy Starlink satellites, the dummy payload-

• 1:26:35Jordi Hays?

  You can see that little motor conveyor belt on the left.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, just the number of things that have to go right to actually release something from this rocket is insane. And then this is the crazy part. There's just a bunch of debris.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  That's not what we want to see.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  Where did the stuff come from?

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  We clearly didn't need it.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  You would think that, as soon as I saw it, I was like, okay, it's over. The whole thing's gonna blow for sure. It doesn't, definitely doesn't make it back. Because if it's like losing parts, like every part should be important, right? Like what's going on here? Um, and so, and they're also, the whole time they were like testing the, the flaps, like really pushing them to the limits, going farther. There it is, splashing down in the ocean.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  You were mentioning earlier, there's a soundbite of them saying they were, they were-

• 1:27:18John Coogan?

  They were going further than they needed to. So they were doing things like, like, okay, let, let's stress it. And then boom.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Convenient cut. You would have thought the journal and the legacy media would have let that happen a little bit longer, the massive explosion.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the vibes, the vibes going into this were rough, honestly. Lots of people with the Elon's been distracted by politics take, lots of people with the Elon too focused on AI romantic companions take. We covered that on the show.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine the conversation between Elon and Ani yesterday, right before the launch. You got this, babe.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  I mean, you know that, you know that Ani, apparently, allegedly, the, the original Ani romantic companion model runs on the non reasoning model. Just Grok 3, I guess.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Just pure love.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Pure love. And, and if, if there's any evidence out there in the just market of AI chatting and companions is that you don't need a reasoning model when you are chatting Romantic companion. So a lot of like the backlash to the GPT five launch was something like, you know, people were using it not just a romantic companion, but just as like a life coach, somebody to talk to is very conversational. And that quick back and forth was what people actually enjoyed. They liked the tone. They didn't care that it wasn't, you know, incredibly good at solving hard math problems or like the IMO or whatever. What you got for me, Tyler?

• 1:28:44Speaker 05

  I think there's also something to be said for like reasoning models kind of mess with the vibes.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:28:49Speaker 05

  It's like, it's like the music thing where.

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes you want a friend that's not going to think too hard. They're just gonna.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.

• 1:28:57Speaker 05

  In the musical, like taste thing.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:00Speaker 05

  All the reasoning models gave like these weird answers because they would like subtly prefer, you know, artist names with numbers, stuff like that.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  Yep. Although, I mean, I think the reasoning models actually had the best taste of all, but that's a bit of a hot take.

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, we got to pull up this post from Red Bull Futurist. It's very important. He says, super heavy, the effing goat. Wow. And I just needed to highlight this because obviously Red Bull, some of Red Bull Futurist's work actually has went into this.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. It's amazing.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  So absolute legend. A win for Red Bull, really.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Yeah.

• 1:29:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised. It's actually surprising that, that Red Bull and SpaceX haven't tried to collab yet. You'd think that Red Bull would just be like, we'll give you millions of dollars if you just put Red Bull branding over this. It's like, why not? It'd be good. It'd be good for both parties.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  Even the, even the explosions are feel like on brand for Red Bull. Red Bull's down for the crazy risk taking.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  I could see Elon going with White Monster, too.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, you really should do that. But I mean, SpaceX's brand is special and maybe you don't want to delete that.

• 1:30:05Jordi Hays?

  Are you, would you go so far to say the White Monster brand isn't special? Would you say that Red Bull isn't special?

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  They, the reason I was bringing up the reasoning models was because apparently Elon wanted Ani to use the reasoning model. Like the AI companion has to be able to do the hard math problems, which is funny. So, so, so maybe, maybe she really was in use. Doing rocket science and calculating the last final decisions before this this rocket went out. But it was a huge success. The Wall Street Journal has kind of the play by play here. SpaceX pulled off a smoother test of its Starship rocket, managing a more complete mission. After setbacks earlier this year, the Starship spacecraft flew through space after launching from the company's South Texas Complex Tuesday around 7:30 PM ET.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  The vehicle successfully deployed a batch of dummy Starlink satellites and re-entered Earth's orbit, facing intense heat and forces before splashing down in the Indian Ocean. This was the 10th launch of Starship. I believe this was the this was ship like 37 or something. They've built a lot of these. Not all of them have launched, some of them have been scrapped. Some of them blew up in the test stand, like they really push these things super hard. So it's a 403 foot tall rocket. They started testing this in 2023. There's been a series of explosions, mishaps, previous test flights that have been cut short. Elon Musk has much riding on the rocket, envisioned to one day carry satellite scientific devices and eventually astronauts.

• 1:31:35Jordi Hays?

  Just to put this into context, the White House is 70 feet tall.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  This is.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's it's like the size of the, isn't it closer to the Statue of Liberty? I think it's like around that tall, 403 feet. Have to look that up.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  The Statue of Liberty is 305 feet.

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  An extra 50 feet on that. For now, the company is pushing to show it can consistently fly Starship and experiment with its design. SpaceX set up Tuesday's mission to stress test parts of the Starship spacecraft. We certainly saw that on display with the parts flying all over the place, seeking to give engineers information to continue developing the vehicle. Basically, the calculus here is like, how cheap can you make this thing? If you use, you know, duct tape, will that work? Well, if you use tin foil, like they really are pushing these things like crazy, crazy hard.

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  I think the other the other way to put this into context, not everybody is fortunate to be able to launch, build and launch rockets for a living. But anybody that's built software knows that even if you're launching a relatively simple feature. It'll oftentimes break and have issues and bugs and things like that.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  It's a little bit, um, you have a little bit more leeway to ship stuff and, and make changes on the fly.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Um, in this case, they're doing it in this incredibly public, uh, setting where, uh, the internet is going to have a, a very strong reaction one way or another. So the pressure is just insane.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  So, uh, uh, Musk wants both the Starship booster and spacecraft to be fully and rapidly reusable, more akin to an airplane than a traditional rocket. SpaceX has made major strides with reusability with its Workhorse Falcon nine rockets, which are powered by boosters that can be used many times. SpaceX faces self-imposed and external deadlines with the much larger Starship. Musk wants to launch an uncrewed version of the vehicle to Mars next year, but has said, meeting that goal will be tough. Of course, there's a Mars transfer window that only comes up, I think, every 18 months or so. So it's really critical to hit it, uh, in 2026 or else you gotta wait till 2028, I believe. Uh, in 2027, a lander variant of Starship is supposed to be ready to carry astronauts on a NASA moon mission through the agency's Artemis Exploration Program.

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  That's going to be really hard because I think they have to refuel in orbit and then also make it safe enough that astronauts can fly on it. Like they have a lot to do there.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  This is why we need to get Ani to be able to solve complex physics.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Today we are talking about Labubus and the story of Popmart, which to me really stands out as a similar, like in the dot com boom, there was this, uh, the Beanie Babies went on a similar run. Incredibly popular, built on the back of dot com technology. I remember going over to a friend's house and loading the beaniebabies.com website. And it was so heavy because it had all these images.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Did it take like minutes to load?

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  It took minutes to load because they, like whoever built the website. Just didn't kind of think about like how long it would take.

• 1:34:36Jordi Hays?

  But even then, it was like, this is so cool.

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:39Jordi Hays?

  Takes 30 minutes to go to the store.

• 1:34:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. Oh, if it takes five minutes to load all down. And so, yeah, the page would load, the HTML would load, and then slowly one image after another would load in. And you could really feel the difference at the time. Many people were on dial-up, which was 56K, which is like a staggeringly slow speed compared to what you get even just on like a plane. And then DSL was one level up.

• 1:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Daniel posted that United has Starlink now.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think it's 300 megs per second, 300 megs. So that's, that's what, 6,000 times faster than what we were experiencing back in like the mid 90s.

• 1:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  And so then you could upgrade to DSL. DSL was between 256K and 1.5 megs. I had a friend who had a T1 line, which was like enterprise level internet in the 90s, 1 meg up and down. So you could get equal upload symmetrical line. And he could still, he could load the Beanie Baby website faster than anyone. It was like true status symbol at the time. Yeah, it was alpha. His parents were very successful.

• 1:35:47Jordi Hays?

  What was the, the, the most expensive Beanie Baby transaction ever, do you know?

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I do know that prices peaked throughout, just they perfectly tracked the dot com boom. So in 2, in 1998, Ty, which is Ty Warner, his company is called Ty, T Y, they make Beanie Babies. They made 1.4 billion dollars in sales, making it one of the fastest growing toy companies in history. Two years later, the market crashed almost overnight. Prices on the secondary market plummeted as supply overwhelmed demand and speculative buyers exited. So people were in the habit of. And yes, Adrian in the chat is correct. Uh, eBay was a major, major driver of, uh, Beanie Babies growth because people could buy them.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  And then the secondary market was way more liquid than ever before. Before it was like, okay, if you buy some, some rare drop or some limited edition thing and you want to go sell it, you have to go to like a trade show that maybe happens every once in a, once a, once a year, you have to find maybe your local shop, but there's not that much liquidity. Remember when we were talking to our friend about the, uh, the, the, the, the collectible card market Beatles memorabilia, he was saying like, I only need two buyers. It's very easy to find two buyers if you're, if you're, if you're interacting at internet scale.

• 1:37:08Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  It's harder if you're in some town and you have a rare Beanie Baby and you need to see, are there any other crazy Beanie Baby fans in this town? So eBay was a huge, yeah, Beanie Babies, the original or unicorn startup essentially. I mean, it was, it was an overnight success in the sense that I think the business was gone for about a decade, uh, before the boom, but they rode the wave of the internet.

• 1:37:28Jordi Hays?

  Interestingly, most expensive Labubu ever sold, uh, was a hundred and 70,000 in June of this year.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  And the most expensive Beanie Baby ever sold was something around, uh, half a million dollars.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  Half a million dollars. Oh, we got room to run, baby. We got room to run in the Labubu market. So my question's like, what is driving the Labubu, uh, yeah, in, uh, enjoy your victory lap, get, get out there, get some exercise, uh, do some pushups halfway through the lap.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Aiden.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Enjoy.

• 1:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Beltski.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Um.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Did we say that right?

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Uh, Beltskis.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Beltskis?

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  You said your full name now. There we go.

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching. Um, the, yeah, so Labubu clearly, uh, clearly a beneficiary of the social media boom of Tik Tok, of the unboxing culture, Timu culture, live shopping culture, flex culture.

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Because you, these people put them on, you know, their, their purse.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  Interestingly, not, even though it's like, it's like money is cheap right now. Everything is going up and to the right. Um, the market is booming. I can't find a, yeah, I can't really find a bridge between like the AI boom and the, and La Booboo's. It seems like it's just the social media boom that we're continuing to see. Yeah.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  It's the fart coins, the La Booboo's.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. There's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of just like gambling culture has, has infiltrated everything from sports betting, obviously, is being, is legal in more states and, and has been on a tear for a long time to folks gambling on crypto and stocks and out of the money options, all the way to, um, you know, the, the collector culture on all sorts of different platforms. Like there's a big, there's just a broad boom happening here. And then there's also the China angle, which I think is interesting. We were talking about this yesterday, that China hasn't had a major cultural export.

• 1:39:26John Coogan?

  And this might be sort of the first one, more or less. Like TikTok counts in some ways, but TikTok, I see it as like a bucket that fills up with the local culture of the people that opened the app. Like if you're in, you're in LA, you see LA.

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Chinatown when you go.

• 1:39:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But, but you can certainly access that if you wind up in that filter, if you search the right keywords and then you can go there. Yeah, yeah. Same with Instagram. But by default, I don't see TikTok as like a uniquely, a uniquely Chinese cultural export.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  It's an export, not a cultural export.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  It's a technology. It's a technology. And, and of course, like, uh, China's been exporting like manufacturing technology and manufacturing prowess for a long time. And so my-

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  Got a, got a real win with the demon dolls.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  They do look crazy, right? I just, I don't like them. I, I, they just rub me the wrong way. I, I don't know. They're, something is weird, but I'm just not into it. I don't know.

• 1:40:20Jordi Hays?

  That's why we bought one for Bill Bishop's dog.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Toshi.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  We're excited for Toshi to rip it apart.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  Rip it apart. Yes. It, it feels, it just, it's not a good look. I don't like the aesthetics at all. It's very odd. Anyway.

• 1:40:33Jordi Hays?

  Not buy one for my child.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  The bigger question that I have that I think we want to answer, so we're going to dig into the history of Popmart, take you through some of the, the history of La Booboo's. The, the question that I have is like, the, the horse is out of the stable with like gambling on toys, clearly.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Think about the TikTok story. There was a big discussion, nationwide discussion a few years ago. Should we ban TikTok? Is it spyware? Is it influencing our culture? Is it causing brain rot? Where did we land on that as America? We said, nah, it's fine. We're good. The answer was YouTube will compete in shorts and Instagram will compete in reels and you know TikTok will be out there and you know, buyer beware. Like you know what you're using and you're an American, you're a free person. And if you want to use that app, you can. And if you want to come over to a different app and you trust Mark Zuckerberg's team.

• 1:41:27Jordi Hays?

  Stated versus stated versus revealed preference. People are like, I just want to follow my friends.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:31Jordi Hays?

  The, the, you know, feeds that are algo driven.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Get to use more.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  And so my, my pitch and what I'm, what I'm kind of digging into what I wrote about in the newsletter this morning, you should subscribe at Substack, uh, to our Substack.

• 1:41:43Jordi Hays?

  TBN.substack.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  TBN.substack.com is, um, is the conclusion to the TikTok debate was the YouTube team and the Instagram team need to launch direct competitors and take it very seriously. And Mark Zuckerberg invested like tens of billions of dollars, I think, in like data center build out to actually support reels and the algo feeds. And they took it really seriously and they executed very well. Um, so what's the conclusion to the Lu Bu Bu story? Well, it's probably like Ty, the maker of Beanie Babies, or Mattel, the maker of Barbie.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  Has to get blind boxes.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  Like, that's the only answer. That, that's the way the, like, the arrow of progress moves in one direction.

• 1:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Children want to gamble.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  They want to gamble. And so I think that that's the end state here. And I'm just, I'm, I'm, that's the situation that I'm monitoring. I'm not holding my breath being like, oh yeah, Lu Bu Bu's are going away anytime soon. Yeah, sure, there might be like a bubble and then it subsides. But in general, I think that the future is like more mystery boxes under the Christmas tree, generally broadly in American culture. Like, we love gambling, we love freedom. Pick your poison.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Buying somebody gambling as a gift is crazy. Like, I buy you this blind box.

• 1:42:52John Coogan?

  You never give someone scratchers? Give someone scratchers. It's great.

• 1:42:56Jordi Hays?

  We should give the team scratchers. Send them off into their three day weekend.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  I bet some of the boys are like, I'm into scratchers. I had a friend in college who was into scratchers.

• 1:43:06Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  You know, the thrill of a scratcher. I bought one lottery ticket in my life and it was electric. I was like, I'm gonna win. Like, it's gonna happen. And then it didn't. And I was like, okay, I'm never spending $2 ever again.

• 1:43:18John Coogan?

  But, anyway, this is what happened with video games. They went free to play plus microtransactions. The whales drive everything, price discrimination and everything. We see this with OnlyFans. We see this with the future of romantic companions. Price discrimination is key and this will probably unlock some of that. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. But I think if you're a toy maker, you gotta get into mystery boxes. Unfortunately, maybe, maybe unfortunately, but like, that's where the, that's where the culture's moved.

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  Late stage capitalism.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Pretty much.

• 1:43:54Jordi Hays?

  Which I would say we're just getting started.

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  Pretty much. Anyway, let's go through, Brandon Gurrell has a fantastic thread on Popmart. And Tyler has the, the story here.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  Full history.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  Do you want to take us through the history?

• 1:44:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  Tyler, what you got for us?

• 1:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull this up on VHS, Ben? I think this is, this is gonna be important.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:44:13Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Clear as day.

• 1:44:15Speaker 05

  Oh, man, yeah. Okay. So I think we should first-

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  I just love the way this looks. I can't help it.

• 1:44:20Speaker 05

  Okay, let's first go through some big, big numbers here. So Popmart, public company currently at, what, like around 55 billion?

• 1:44:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44:29Speaker 05

  Hong Kong markets.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  Wang Ning is now the 10th richest person in China. He's worth $28 billion.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Pretty, pretty crazy. And a lot of these, a lot of the data sources here are Chinese and we tried to double check everything by translating. But there might be some details that are wrong. So, you know.

• 1:44:49Speaker 05

  Okay, so yeah, they have almost 600 retail stores, 2,500 vending machines, revenue's at 1.8 billion.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Vending machines, that's fascinating.

• 1:44:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's really the big thing. That was big. It kind of, so the kind of main story of Popmart is that they basically took a lot of things that were first in Japan and then brought them to China and then exported them basically worldwide.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:11Speaker 05

  But yeah, the revenue is 106% growth year over year and then 700 million of that is just overseas.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, the stat was crazy. I think in the first half of this year, they beat last year's total revenue.

• 1:45:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  And they're already like a scale, like a pretty huge company.

• 1:45:25Speaker 05

  Is that good?

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  It's, I think it's better than Nvidia.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  It's the backbone of the economy. Okay, so take us through some of the history.

• 1:45:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, so 2010, in Beijing, Wang Ning starts it. Originally, basically, it's just like retail store for these little collectibles.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Speaker 05

  They don't, there's a bunch of stores that do like license other people's IP. So there's like, I think they originally started with some marble.

• 1:45:51John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:45:52Speaker 05

  But then really, I mean, the majority of the revenue is just from like their custom IP that they basically license from artists they find.

• 1:45:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, so that's the nature of like Popmart. Like, it's like pop culture market. And Brandon says, started as a single variety mall store, thinks Spencer's or Hot Topic. Couldn't get, they couldn't get investment at the time because no one thought adult toys would work. Now he's the 10th.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  And when Wang was growing up, his parents ran small shops. So it was in the DNA.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Family, okay.

• 1:46:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, so then 2014, this is when they basically bring over these sunny angels. These are the Japanese like figurines.

• 1:46:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:31Speaker 05

  And this is when they, they start the blind boxes. This is like really the main thing that spurs the rest of their growth.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  Yep. Wait, wait, before this, this is, this is actually crazy. Brandon has some extra context here. So, starts the company in 2010, a year out of college. He had an undergraduate degree in advertising and a short stint at the Chinese version of Twitter. His single variety store in Beijing, in a Beijing mall, it's essentially a reseller. He has seven employees. Spends two years selling third-party stuff on thin margins, trying to scale with debt, but he's a It's hard to finance because investors don't get selling toys to adults. He manages to raise $320,000 equivalent in RMB. And then $1 million around there in 2013, which he opens to use, which he uses to open three new mall shops.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  And then in 2014, he hits his first lick, finds a repeatable format, blind boxes. So take us into that.

• 1:47:23Speaker 05

  Okay, so then, so they start with that. These are still different figurines from Japan?

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, these Sunny Angel blind boxes. They look kind of like 90s troll dolls. Interesting.

• 1:47:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, and then.

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I don't think we already, we covered specifically what a blind box is. It's you're going in, you're paying a generic price for something. And you have no idea what's in it. It could be the super generic one of, you know, 100,000 item. Or it could be ultra, ultra limited. And so you just get this massive, buyers get this massive dopamine rush when they're buying it. They're paying and that whatever item they unpack might immediately be worth like some significant multiple of what they paid.

• 1:48:03John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. Kind of like angel investing.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  So it has, it has, yeah, but way more condensed. It's like, I buy this and then I immediately figure out, am I, am I going to get?

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Put a hundred thousand dollars in, 10 cap.

• 1:48:15Jordi Hays?

  But unlike angel investing, I think there's like a floor, right? Angel investing, you easily go to zero. Laboo boos like have, you know, somewhat stable.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  Like it has some market value.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  So if you're trying to like gamble less and you're addicted to angel investing, maybe, you know, downgrade to just Laboo Boos and loot boxes.

• 1:48:32Speaker 05

  A big attraction of, especially the Laboo Boos, which we can get into later, is like they have like these sets that come out. So it'll be like.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  And you would collect the full set.

• 1:48:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like 10 and then they're basically all the same except like the color of the fur is slightly different or something.

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:43Jordi Hays?

  But then people are trying to create a complete set, which will then sell for more.

• 1:48:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, but obviously if there's 10, you can't just buy 10 of the boxes because you're probably not going to get all of them.

• 1:48:53Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that Porsche should get into blind boxes? Imagine if you just, imagine if like a nine, you could just buy nine elevens only with blind boxes.

• 1:49:03John Coogan?

  It's like you might get a turbo.

• 1:49:04Jordi Hays?

  It's like 200K. You might just get a bait, you might get a Carrera T, like super base model. You might get a G3RS.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  You might get an ST, wow. Yeah, yeah, there might be something there.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I mean, people would be, people would be sending it on those.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  I think so. Yeah, I mean, and you just work out the expected value, right? So you just charge whatever the, the expected value is. There isn't quite enough of a delta. They need to throw in like a Carrera, Carrera GT as well, a few of those as well.

• 1:49:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Speaker 05

  You used to see a similar thing in the sneaker market when that was like a really big thing.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:49:40Speaker 05

  On eBay, you would see these like a third party like mystery boxes.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Oh, eBay would just do it. Interesting.

• 1:49:45Speaker 05

  It wasn't, it was people on eBay.

• 1:49:46John Coogan?

  People on eBay, but that's crazy because like, that's even like less regulated because they can just totally like cook the books. I, I feel like, like versus like a real company that has probably some sort of oversight.

• 1:49:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you don't really know how many people were actually buying it. Or if it was just like for YouTube that they would make the videos like, oh, I bought this $500 mystery box.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  I, I remember I bought a, a mystery box of cords on, on a Woot.com, which was an electronics reseller that was bought by Amazon and.

• 1:50:12Jordi Hays?

  That's so Keegan Cote.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  It's incredibly.

• 1:50:15Jordi Hays?

  Box of cords.

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  It was just electronics, electronics. It was like, so Woot.com would go around and find like, like a bunch of electronics that had been discounted. Uh, I bought a, I bought an HD projector that was probably like three grand for like 600 bucks because like, they were like going out of stock and they just needed to like liquidate. And so we would go and buy the liquidation and then put it on the website and you could just buy it, but it was limited time. They would just do one daily deal every day. And one day they just did a mystery box and you could just buy, they would just maybe like, literally like whatever was in their facility, they would just pop back, like, like pack up for you. And who knows, I got like, oh, this is like HDMI to DVI cable or something.

• 1:50:54Speaker 05

  You can probably trace back to something like, um, do you remember Storage Wars, the show?

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:58Speaker 05

  Where it's like they open it, you can't go in, but you can just see the front and then you have to try to estimate the value.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:02Speaker 05

  And then, yeah, so there's probably some lineage there.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  So when did China figure out that this was gambling? Cause they banned the sale of Labubus to kids under eight years old.

• 1:51:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:51:12Jordi Hays?

  But that still means you got 10 years before you're legally adult here in the US at least where.

• 1:51:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, also I don't know how many like actual eight year olds are going to the store and buying it. It's not their parents.

• 1:51:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:24Speaker 05

  So it's kind of unclear.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Well, if you're worried about your employees gambling with your company funds, get on ramp.com. Time is money, save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Very easy to set a rule in Ramp.

• 1:51:37Speaker 05

  No Pop.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  No Labubu.

• 1:51:39Speaker 05

  No Popmart.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Anyway, continue.

• 1:51:41Speaker 05

  Okay, so let's go back. So 2015 is when Labubu first appears as, it's in a picture book. So this has nothing to do with Popmart. It's just this other artist Kai Sing Lung. And then 2016, this is Popmart's first like kind of real IP that they created that like went super viral.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  Yes. Ning, in 2016 Ning tries something new. He flies to Hong Kong and meets with artist Kenny Wong, who had created the trendy toy figurine Molly in 2006 and was a big designer in the toy niche. There he negotiates an exclusive license with Wong to develop and sell Molly products and blind boxes.

• 1:52:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think this was, it's done around 800 million in revenue.

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:52:25Speaker 05

  Since 2016.

• 1:52:27John Coogan?

  Let's go. So selling Molly not only gives Ning more control and capitalizes on trendy toy plus blind box signal, but it capitalizes on Kenny Wong's fan base and leads Ning to his next big unlock. Betting big on controlling existing toy IP with a built in fan base instead of selling third party. So in 2017, sales of Molly are going nuts. Total 22 million by end of year for Molly. Popmart rolls out vending machines, reducing rent they had to pay in malls and establishing way deeper reach with fandom. Company begins repeating.

• 1:53:01Speaker 05

  It's great.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  Replicating the Molly.

• 1:53:02Speaker 05

  Unregulated slot machines.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Basically, and then they Pucki is another Hong Kong artist derivative they launch it then they launch a Seder, you know, it's like half, half like goat legs, which is very odd.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Not beating the Antichrist allegations.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Yes, if you've been at the PT lectures in SF for who the Antichrist is, I think we got a lead here. I think we got, did you already write that?

• 1:53:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, this was already there.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  You already wrote that?

• 1:53:33Speaker 05

  Many, there's a lot of allegations here. I mean, it's unclear whether, you know, what's the original.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  I think we solved it, folks. Yeah, we've solved it. Is there really a star on them? Is that a thing?

• 1:53:42Speaker 05

  No, I just wrote.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  The pentagram?

• 1:53:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, that's why, yeah, question mark.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Max over in the Substack chat says we need to tokenize the Labubus. I think that's, I think that's how.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  That's obviously happening next. We know that's gonna happen. We know that's gonna happen. CS:GO loot boxes walked so Labubu could run.

• 1:53:59Jordi Hays?

  Brandon, Brandon in the X chat says we gotta get a bezel box going. Totally agree. Quaid, let's get some, let's get some blind boxes going. You might, you might get a Nautilus, you might get a Tudor.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go. There you go. Okay, so where are we?

• 1:54:14Speaker 05

  Okay, so now 2019, Labubu is then licensed to Popmart.

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  Yep. So just in, in 2018, right before this, sales spiked to 73 million on the back of Mali. Around this time, Popmart built its own in-house design team, the Pop Design Center, like a Porsche Design Center. It becomes a powerful pipeline alongside ever more exclusive artist licenses and big non-exclusive entertainment licenses. If you want to entertain people on a stream, get on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations.

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  Multi-streaming, reach your audience wherever they are. Continue.

• 1:54:49Speaker 05

  Okay, so they licensed in 2019, but they don't actually release like the modern Labubu doll.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:53Speaker 05

  Until 2023.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  So it's in the book or whatever.

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Like they're starting to build the lore, build the IP.

• 1:54:58Speaker 05

  They do characters, they do little figurines, but it's not like the, the kind of modern instantiation. So then, let's go to 2020, they IPO at 7 billion in Hong Kong.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  And then, wait, hold on. So continuing with Brandon, 2019, Popmart begins selling Labubu blind boxes in exclusive deal with artists. Ka Sing Lung, Labubu's original character in Lung's picture book trilogy called The Monsters, but was selling his figurines in Hong Kong by 2015. At time of the deal, it's only popular among niche toy collectors. And we do have some images in the deck, by the way, guys. If you want to pull up the pictures of these monsters, yeah. If you scroll down a bunch, there are some photos of the Labubus. It has like kind of a street art vibe, very chaotic drawings. Keep going, there's one more, keep going, one more, keep going. That's Molly, that's the first Labubu.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  The Monsters trilogy by Ka Sing Lung, the story of Puka, Pato and the Girl, Miro's Requiem. And so these start selling in 2019 and 2020. Popmart raises $100 million on a $2.5 billion valuation. Hit the gong. And a few months later, IPOs in Hong Kong, stock rips 80% on opening day. You thought meme stocks were just an American phenomenon. Meme stocks are a worldwide phenomenon. Ning's net worth doubles overnight. He's worth 3.2 billion at open, 6 billion at close. Popmart has a 12.5 billion market cap at close. That's a big company, that's a big company. So, let's continue.

• 1:56:36Speaker 05

  Okay, so 2023 is when the blind box Labubu phenomenon really takes off. This is, I think, probably it's mostly due to TikTok. You see a lot of this. And then, yeah, 2025, right now it's like around 55 billion.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Now it's at 55. Absolutely incredible, what a run. Should we pull up the Wall Street Journal video, watch some of that? What do you think?

• 1:56:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:57:01John Coogan?

  While they're pulling that up, let's tell you about Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and develop teams, build great products together, folks. Get to Figma.com, design your next Labubu drop.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, developing real IP this quickly is incredibly impressive.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  IP that can do billions of...

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it just takes so long. I remember learning about the Lucasfilm acquisition that Disney did. Even the Marvel acquisition. These are like, they were big acquisitions at the time, but like, single-digit billions, low double-digit billions.

• 1:57:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  And then they just created so much value as they actually monetized the IP and created like shows and merch and like, ran the Disney machine around it.

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  Seems like Popmart's capable of running like a Disney-esque monetization playbook on top of somewhat new IP, which is pretty crazy. Anyway, let's pull up the Wall Street Journal video and watch a bit of that. Aiden says it's nightmare fuel. I agree.

• 1:58:04Speaker 07

  Whenever Chinese retailer Popmart drops a new Labubu designer toys, it sells out within minutes.

• 1:58:09Speaker 00

  It sold out. Insufficient stock.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  It does seem like, like, it's truly like a worldwide phenomenon in a sense like, it's not just women that are doing it. It's not just men. It's like, it's really...

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  It's not just adults, it's children.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Children and adults. Yeah, yeah. You would think it's like, oh, it's just kids. So yeah, but their revenue doubled in the last year. Yeah.

• 1:58:34John Coogan?

  I mean, it just has the natural hook. Look at Madonna promoting it.

• 1:58:40Speaker 07

  But can the company continue to grow beyond this viral moment that has seen its share prices rocket more than 1,200% since the beginning of 2024?

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Here, pause it. So the...

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  Are you rooting for their downfall?

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  Hmm, preying on it even. The, I don't know. I think, I think the bigger question is like, there's something that, so it's easy to say like, these go viral on social media. Like, it's a beneficiary of social media. But like, if you actually think about, why is, and why is a Labubu more viral than, you know, the latest iteration of Barbie or Beanie Babies? Like, there is a reason, and it's directly related to the nature of the algorithm. So when you do an unboxing... There it like it naturally takes about one minute if you edit it down to do it. And the reveal comes at the end.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  So when you watch it, you say, oh, someone's doing an unboxing. They're introducing what the stakes are.

• 1:59:41Speaker 05

  It's good for the creator because they could get that retention.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  Exactly. It drives retention because it has a natural storyline of like, okay, how did I get this box? How much did I pay for it? What are my expectations? Do I have something on the line? Maybe I'm hoping to build the set, right? I want to build a set. I really am hoping for the red one or whatever. And, and then, and then you, you're, you're taken on this journey. And I believe when they, when they unbox them, there's like two stages to the unboxing. You, you take it out of the box and then there's packages.

• 2:00:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there's a box.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  The third stage is when you have your dog rip its head off.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  And see what's inside. What was, what was this?

• 2:00:15Speaker 05

  So there's the box and then there's like a nice like opening, like you like rip it. It's like nicely packaged and then inside there, there's a little bag. And then inside the bag is the actual.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so even that like lends itself to like keeping you engaged for 60 seconds, which is going to drive more virality in the, in the feed.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Aaron Frank, partner at Lightspeed says, I have the largest single collection of Labubus.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding. He texted me and said, this is hard to watch.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  This is hard to watch.

• 2:00:46Jordi Hays?

  So, sorry, we're, we're forcing you to sit through this, Aaron.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  Uh, let's play a little bit more of the journal video.

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's pull it back up.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, keep going.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Of Popmark.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Look at this culture. This is crazy outfits for this.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Siobhan Lawrence in the chat says, my startup has done 75 million in unboxings. Say more.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, elaborate, please.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Tamagotchi for real should come back. AI powered Tamagotchi. That's a good business, Daniel Cook.

• 2:01:19Speaker 07

  Is just added our own flavor to that.

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Look how international it is. Europe, all Southeast Asia.

• 2:01:28Speaker 07

  When you decide to splurge on a Popmark blind box, which could cost around $20 to $30, you don't go in totally blind. Take this collection. There are six possible characters you could unbox and a secret one that you have a one in seventy-two chance of getting.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  One in seventy-two.

• 2:01:44Speaker 08

  One of the things that the brand can do to keep engagement, to encourage consumers to get a little more excitement out of it, is to label the box. This one says, "Have a seat."

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  You know, people throw the satanic panic around a lot, like, "White Monster, Monster Energy Drink." There's like a whole 666, it's satanic. But it's always unclear if it's like, the founders are poking fun at Satanism. Like, no one accuses John Carmack of being satanic by, I mean, I guess people did when he released Doom. But in Doom, it's like, you're clearly playing as a mortal, like, killing the demons. And that's the name of that, that's the virtue of the game.

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Aaron just sent me the stock chart for Build-A-Bear. Have you seen it?

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Build-A-Bear's ripping too. Does Build-A-Bear have loot boxes yet? That could be the next unlock.

• 2:02:36Jordi Hays?

  Build-A-Bear is up

• 2:02:37John Coogan?

  It's outperforming Nvidia, I believe.

• 2:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Two thousand four hundred and seventy-three percent over the past five years.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  It's absolutely ripping. Who's clapping?

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Build-A-Bear blind boxes. No more building. Just gambling, children. Just come into the store.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. If Laboo is like the slot machine that you could be, you pull out of the vending machine, Build-A-Bear should turn it into like a game of like high stakes gambling.

• 2:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Has anybody done like remote Laboo Boo openings? So it's just actually like

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  I think I've seen that. Yeah, who was it? Blake Robbins posts about this a lot, how there's like apps in the App Store that are gambling.

• 2:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's probably happening on like Whatnot, to be honest.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Well, have you seen, have you seen the Claw game? So there is a, there is an app that you can download and you can pay real money to use a claw in the real world to pick something out of a, out of a, you know, a machine or like a bucket. And whatever you pick out, you get to keep and they will mail it to you. And so it's not technically gambling. Somehow they got some like loophole there. Very, very

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Right now on Whatnot, there's like seemingly hundreds of streams selling Laboo Boo.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  Wow. Don't gamble, folks. Don't gamble on compliance. Get on Vanta, automated compliance management. Proof of trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Uh, anyway, the last two years of, uh, what's interesting is the last two years of, of sales in, uh, in, uh, of Labubu have been heavily driven by international expansion. They've definitely figured out how to take the brand abroad. Uh, it was predominantly, uh, growing in mainland China and I believe it's still growing.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  It's doubling in China, but it's also like seen maybe like a 10x increase in, uh, in international sales over the last two years. So it's on a tear. It's on a tear. We'll see. We'll see how people respond. We'll see how the American toy companies respond. I feel like, um, this is like the, the horse has left the, the stable. The cow has left the barn. The dog has left the barn.

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Children yearn for the slots.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  They do. They're gonna, they're, they're gonna figure out how to gamble one way or another. I mean, what, what's the alternative? Like ban Labubu?

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Air one, uh, air one blind boxes, combo plates.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  You might just get the worst slot bowl of your life. How about sweet green blind boxes?

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  Or you get 12 ounces of blue caviar.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  You might get a bunch of steak. You might get a bunch of kale.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  You might get some caviar.

• 2:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Never know.