Freedom 250 Recap with Bo Nickal, The Hand Anthropic Was Dealt, Fox Buys Roku | Bo Nickal, Gavin Baker, Leif Abraham, Aaron Ginn, Rafael Vivas

(00:57) - Freedom 250 Recap (04:43) - Bo Nickal, a former Penn State wrestling champion turned UFC middleweight fighter, recently secured a first-round knockout victory over Kyle Daukaus at UFC Freedom 250, held on the White House South Lawn. In the conversation, Nickal discusses his early awareness of the event, having known seven months prior that he would be on the card, which allowed him to prepare thoroughly. He reflects on the unique atmosphere of the fight, noting the supportive crowd reminiscent of his college wrestling days, and shares his plans to capitalize on the media attention post-fight, including a media tour and a trip to Japan. (14:11) - The Hand Anthropic Was Dealt (21:45) - Meta Tracks AI Usage (30:24) - Gavin Baker, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner at Atreides Management, is a seasoned investor with a background in technology and consumer sectors. In the transcript, he discusses the successful execution of SpaceX's IPO, highlighting the company's rapid ascent in the AI compute sector through strategic deals with Google and Anthropic, and emphasizes the importance of scaling terrestrial compute and the potential of orbital data centers to reduce infrastructure costs. (01:03:41) - Leif Abraham, co-CEO of Public.com, discusses the unprecedented retail investor interest in SpaceX's IPO, noting that nearly half of all stock purchases on their platform that day were for SpaceX, making it the most popular IPO they've ever seen. He highlights the challenges retail investors face in obtaining significant allocations during high-demand IPOs, as banks often prioritize their wealthier clients, resulting in limited shares for the general public. Abraham also addresses concerns about SpaceX's inclusion in major indices, emphasizing that Public.com offers direct indexing tools, allowing investors to customize their portfolios by excluding specific stocks like SpaceX if desired. (01:16:58) - Fox Buys Roku (01:28:31) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:46:44) - Aaron Ginn is the CEO and co-founder of Hydra Host, a company specializing in GPU management platforms for AI infrastructure. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges of regulating technology adoption, emphasizing the importance of empowering parents to educate their children on social media use rather than implementing total bans. He also highlights Hydra Host's recent $100 million Series A funding, which will be used to expand their software solutions for data centers, enabling them to become NEO clouds without owning physical GPUs. Additionally, Ginn addresses the global competition in AI, noting that China's rapid adoption of AI technologies may render U. S. export restrictions less effective. (02:00:19) - Rafael Vivas, General Manager of New Initiatives at AppLovin, discusses the company's evolution from struggling to raise venture capital to becoming a leading mobile ad platform valued at $180 billion. He highlights the vast and diverse mobile gaming market, emphasizing its significant growth and the increasing need for effective distribution strategies. Vivas also touches on the integration of AI in enhancing advertising algorithms and internal efficiencies, as well as the company's focus on expanding its e-commerce initiatives and maintaining customer retention through profitable advertising solutions. (02:16:13) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVB. Today is Monday, June 15th, 2026. We are live from the TVB entertainment, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, la capital de capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy score for cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. The chat wants me to pronounce la chaton, and it's gonna be a fun day. Obviously, Mistral is in the news. Incredibly bullish for Mistral. Obviously, very unfortunate drama happening in the anthropic world. We'll go through all of that. But if the if the sovereign AI thesis could not get any stronger right now, this

• 0:41John Coogan?

  weekend really showed a lot of countries. Hey, maybe we do want a national champion. Hey, maybe we do want someone that will provide us models forever. We're also going to be going through SpaceX IPO. We have Gavin Baker joining in 30 minutes. And we're recapping UFC Freedom 250. It happened at the White House last night. Jordy, take us through your reactions. Introduce our first guest of the show.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Okay, quick intro on the event overall. I am a UFC fan. It's one of the few sports, maybe the only sport where I actually know the names of the people that are competing. Our guest in just a few minutes is is one of those people.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Now, are you more of a fan of the UFC or more of a fan of the government? Because a lot of people were watching just because they're fans of the government. And there and there's said, oh, I will watch any. I watch C-SPAN all day. I'll watch anything that happens if it involves the government. This was an interesting cross.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  No, more more seriously. I, as a UFC fan, and as an American, I'm excited for the UFC to do well. I'm excited for the fighters to have a platform. I was a little bit wary of this event overall. Just because the aesthetics of putting on this crazy party in this moment when there is a ton to black pill about.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, interest rates, wars, all this other stuff going on.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, so war raging, gas prices are high, house prices are high, rates are going up. A lot of people in America are not having a good time. And it really felt like a bread and circuses moment. But the bread and circuses, John.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  It worked on me.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Top notch.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  It worked on me. Some of the best ever. It was, uh, it was.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Why was it so good compared to a normal UFC event?

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, you didn't watch, so I guess it's, uh, I guess it's hard.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Was it the aesthetics or the actual?

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, so one, the production value, one, the card was absolutely stacked. It was eight fights.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  No filler.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  Wall to wall.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, really, really, uh, fights that had a lot of, um, uh, they carried a lot of weight, right? So like the, the main, uh, title fight, Gagey versus Ilya Topuria.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that changed both fighters' careers.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Like, full stop.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  Right? Uh, and even with Bo Nickal joining, uh, uh, in just a few minutes, you know, Bo, that was the biggest possible stage.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  That any athlete could be on, and especially in the UFC, at least here in, in America. Um, so anyways, going into it, I thought the aesthetics were bad. I was excited to watch the fights.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Turned out, uh, it was just really cool.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and sure, there's still gonna be people that are upset that the, the, that the, the president, uh, and the admin is like platforming something like this. Turned out to be really fun. It was, it was a cool night. Uh, and I think America kinda needed it.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  A lot of people are saying it's not unprecedented because Teddy Roosevelt held a boxing match in the White House, uh, almost a hundred years ago, around that time, and apparently he fought in the boxing match, which is crazy.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was a big, big boxer.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  He was a big boxer, and so.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  So this is like a light, a light craziness. Uh, anyway.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  But anyways.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  We have a guest.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I, you know, the, the event was, was incredible, and I came away thinking that, uh, big parties and sporting events are potentially the most underutilized political strategy, right? I would actually expect, uh, the, the admins, like, overall popularity.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  To go up.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  Approval rating to go up based on.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, based just on this event, because there were so many iconic images. Funny enough, the most iconic image

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  is of a Brazilian named Diego, Diego Lopez, which we had up on the screen there.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Standing up on the.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, but anyways, uh, really, really wild, and, uh, let's bring in, uh, let's bring in Bo.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Bo Nickal. We've talked about it many times on the show. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Bo?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Doing great guys, thanks for having me on.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Long overdue. So backstory here is Bo somehow was like one of the first 10,000 people to discover TBPN. You're an entrepreneur outside of the octagon and somehow you were in between camps or maybe during camps, you maybe saw a funny clip of a couple guys in suits and yeah, I remember getting the notification like Bo Nickel has followed you and I was like, oh, who's this, who's some troll like telling me Bo Nickel?

• 5:20John Coogan?

  It's a fake account.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  It was you and it was a funny moment because yeah, you know, I probably hadn't even shared that I was a UFC fan on the show. So first off, congratulations. I was, a lot of the fights last night were high stakes and but yours was the highest stakes because I was watching and I can't imagine what you were going through in the lead up to the fight, but you had a perfect performance and it was really fun to watch. Wanted to first off, ask what it was like leading up to this event, highest profile UFC event ever by far and I

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  want to know, I want to know what that was like.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was pretty interesting. I think my experience was a little bit different than a lot of the fighters because I knew immediately after my last fight seven months ago that I was going to be on the card. You know, I think most guys didn't find out till, you know, probably 10, 12 weeks out and you know, I knew seven months that I was going to be on it. So I started prepping immediately and yeah, it was just a lot of, a lot more media, a lot more attention, a lot more buzz. Tried to take advantage of that as best I could, you know, first and foremost by being prepared to whoop ass. But secondly, just, you know, the opportunity with the, you know, viewership and stuff like that and maximizing that. So.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  But is that, is... Is that, knowing nine months out that you're gonna be fighting like, you know, five feet from the president on the White House lawn?

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Is that an advantage?

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  Is that an advantage or a disadvantage? Because in some ways, you're probably more locked in, you know, you're taking every moment more seriously, but on the other side, like, I know, there's been moments where I know I'm gonna be like, doing public speaking, right? I don't really love public speaking, and, and I, and usually I'm thinking like, ah, it'd be nice to just get this over with, but nine months out, you know, you're, you don't, you gotta, that's a lot of time being like, ah, I wanna, I wanna get in there.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it definitely goes in waves, like, you know, there's certain times where you feel a little more stressed than certain times you feel really relaxed. For me, it was just staying focused on the process, focused on my systems, refining everything that I do and improving every day, and I knew if I kept doing that for that period of time, that I'd just be as prepared as possible, so, you know, it really, like I said, riding those waves was, was big and just being able to, you know, kinda stay, stay focused on the process and my systems and refine those rather than like, thinking about this big moment 24/7.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Was the crowd any different? Was the vibe in the stadium any different? Does that affect you during a fight?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  It was way different. To me, I come from a college wrestling background, so, you know, when you're competing in a home match, you got 10, 20,000 people that love you, want you to win, right? And, uh, in, since transitioning to MMA, I've had like, a little bit of mixed emotions towards me, some people love me, some people hate me, which is, it's good for me at the end of the day, but this one definitely felt more like my college days, where it was a home match, I felt like everybody was on my side. President Trump was actually, the way he was kinda positioned around the ring, it was like, he was right next to my corner men, so he was like, almost in my corner, and, uh, yeah, it was, it was sick.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Uh, what, what about the prep? I saw folks, uh, doing walkouts from the Oval Office. Uh, do you have enough space to sort of get in the right mindset? Are you stuck in a trailer? Like, what is your day of the fight like?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, day of fights, I try to just keep it loose. They have you report a few hours early, but I'm just hanging out with my friends, everybody that's visiting and come watch me. And once you get in, you just, you get warmed up, get your gloves on, get taped up. And then what was really unique for this one is the walkout being next to a Medal of Honor recipient and another, another military member was just like, they're walking out with you. And so I showed up and the guy that I was next to, he like, was just a total badass older guy and was like, you ready to do this? And I'm like, hell yeah, let's go. And so, you know, that just got me hyped up and just had to have fun with it.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  I feel like every UFC is a Super Bowl in some ways. It's, it's the top every time. But this was a particularly special moment. Is, are you optimistic that the UFC will find other ways to sort of create even more special events in a calendar crowded with like special events that happen fairly regularly? Not necessarily it's going to be 250 at the White House lawn, but you can imagine that there's just something that breaks through and goes into the mainstream media even bigger like this one did.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't know how you, I don't know how you go bigger.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  I don't either.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  In space, on the moon, on a boat, I don't know.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Top of the Eiffel Tower.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, top of the, yeah, maybe. Who knows?

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Who knows? They're, they're gonna figure out something. They always do. There's always something that comes along. But yeah, I mean, I, I was told this actually did more viewership than the Super Bowl, which doesn't surprise me. But yeah, it was, it was unbelievable. I mean, they're gonna figure something out and I'm just gonna keep getting better at fighting. So I focus on that and take care of business on my end and thank you for the promotion.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  Where were you, where were you watching Ilya Gache from?

• 10:47Speaker 02

  So what they did was they had us go back to the hotel, do media, and then they had a little room set up for us where we could have all of our families and stuff because Post Fight had the presser with all the winners and we had to wait until main event was over to do the presser. So they kind of set up a nice little area with food and stuff for us, but it was all the fighters in there together and it was, it was a pretty cool environment. It was insane.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  That was, uh, John, John, given that he didn't watch, even though he was cheering for you in.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Calling you out here.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  No, you're, it's okay that you're, it's okay that you're locked in.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  It's okay that you don't like fighting. You probably like, uh, you probably play pickleball or something.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  No, but I was explaining, like, to me, to me, that was, that was the most, uh, you know, the, the Gichi Ilya was the most insane UFC moment, you know, going in underdog. He's lost to a bunch of guys that, that, uh, he's lost to multiple guys that, that Tapuria has, you know, wiped the floor with.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and for Gichi to do that in that moment just felt like what a way. I mean, I was, I was just really happy for the guy. One of those guys who's, uh, been on top and, uh, as an American UFC fan. Uh, I bet, I bet that fight created like a bunch of Gachis and a bunch of, and a bunch of Bo Nichols.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. What, what does the next week, month, uh, rest of the year look like for you now? Like, what is it like coming off of this?

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  I texted Bo last night, like, so happy for you, you have all the, you texted back in like 30 seconds. I was like, what are you doing right now? Like, I would, I would just throw out my phone.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  I do like, uh, yeah, Post Fight for me, I probably take like a week or 10 days to do a little media tour just to kind of maximize that and, you know, do as much as I can and. It's kind of just like, you know, business, but uh, I got a couple of things planned for the summer. Of course, a bunch of training, gonna take a two week trip to Japan, see Japan, which is gonna be dope. Uh, but yeah, usually post-fight, like I said, try to, you know, take advantage of the media buzz and then, you know, maybe work a little bit on, on some of my businesses, things like that while I'm not, you know, directly preparing for a fight and couple, couple of weeks for vacay if I can slip that in. But uh, yeah, always staying busy.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  You're going to Japan, anything we can do to get you to stop over in China and get in the ring with one of those humanoid robots. I want to see you clock it so hard.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need bow, we need bow.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Explodes into a million pieces.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  Companies, we need to create bow bench. And it's like, Ken, how long?

• 13:24John Coogan?

  How long can you last? It was like.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  With, with.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  10 milliseconds.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, easy money for me. I might break my hand on for that, but I'll, I'll, I'll destroy it for sure.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Padded gloves or something. I don't know.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, so happy for you. Enjoy, enjoy the moment and uh, come back on uh, next time, whenever you want to talk about some of your businesses. Uh, and yeah, we're, we're, we're very proud and, and uh, yeah, enjoy the moment.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Honored to have you as a fan. Thank you so much.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Let's do it. Thanks guys. Appreciate y'all.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell everybody on MongoDB, what's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Um, so the other big uh, topic over the UFC was the fact that Dario Amade was not in attendance. He wasn't front row. Mark Zuckerberg was. And it sort of underscores this odd situation that Anthropic's in where like, they just got dealt this weird hand where like, they're doing so well and the admin could not be more misaligned aesthetically with Anthropic.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Their, their whole brand.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the whole brand, a very, very different brand.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and I was, I mean, I was, I was, you know, I read the article yesterday that, that Anthropic staff were going to Washington DC. And it's funny, some people were like, oh, this, this, this is, you know, this is bad. Like if it was, they could, if they could solve the issue easily, they could, they could do it over the phone. Not how this works. Serious issue.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Everybody goes.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Show, you know, yeah, you would obviously go. Um, but going to Washington, flying to Washington DC to try to solve. An issue on a Sunday, there was not a worse.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  They'll be here, they'll be.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I know, but you can imagine you land there, you're like, okay, like, where is everyone? Let's, let's like, meet is a big issue, let's meet.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Let's go have some meetings.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  This is important, the national security is on the line, like, let's figure this out. And they're like, where is everyone?

• 15:19John Coogan?

  And like, if you take safety seriously, cybersecurity seriously, bio security seriously, export control seriously, like, like, UFC could not be less aligned with that, the stakes there. And so, like, there is this big gap between the administration and Anthropic. And I think that everyone should, like, every American should care about bridging this gap. Like, private enterprises should be able to flourish in the United States, everyone agrees with that. And the government should be able to enact reasonable regulations to protect America's interests. And both of those need to find a way to play together, but there is just a really, really broad gap between these two organizations. And so, everyone's hoping that things resolve quickly. And it seems like the right, you know, wheels

• 16:04John Coogan?

  are in motion, the flights have been booked or already taken, and things are moving along. But just to recap on the play-by-play, March 4th, Anthropic received a Department of War Supply Chain Risk Letter, that of course got rolled back eventually. April 7th was the Mythos preview announcement alongside Project Glasswing. June 9th was the Fable 5 launch last Monday. Mythos with guardrails around cyber, bio, and AI research. And on June 12th, just five days after the end of the week, Fable 5 gets suspended after the Commerce Department issues export, an export control directive. So, Anthropic explained in a blog post that the US government is restricting both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from

• 16:46John Coogan?

  being used by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the US, including foreign national Anthropic employees. And so, that's a huge compliance burden, very sudden, and that led Anthropic to. Completely suspend the use of those models for all users, not just not just foreign national employees, because they need to, at least if they want to comply with this, do all the KYC, understand how different organizations are using the model, who at those organizations has access, if something's being vended through an API and it's showing up in another product, does that product do all of the proper, you know, authorizations?

• 17:26John Coogan?

  And so it's a big, it's a big wrench in the gears of the rollout of this model. Then the information reported that Andy Jassy at Amazon had raised concerns with the senior administration officials about jailbreaking, the risk of jailbreaking Fable, getting access to all of Anthropic. Anthropic countered in their blog post, saying, quote, "We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass." So they're saying, "This isn't that big of a jailbreak. This isn't that big of a deal. We can move forward safely. We've taken safety seriously."

• 18:11John Coogan?

  But that is the debate that's going on between the admin and Anthropic. So as everyone knows, the rollout of Fable 5 has been a bit rocky. Incredible demos, incredible benchmarks, but offset by the odd decision to silently degrade the quality of answers related to frontier AI development. Instead of just refusing the requests like cyber and bio prompts, which that was the main thing that everyone was really confused about, the actual rationale behind AI development refusal is pretty sad. Like, people are upset about that if they're working on machine learning systems, recommender systems, anything that requires, you know, like instantiating an AI product, let alone if you're just, "Hey, I'm just doing open source AI research and I'd love to use the latest and greatest models to help me."

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Now it's not an option. And But at the same time, just think about the logic. If a model doesn't let you hack a system, just have the model build you an unrestricted model that does let you hack that system. And so clearly, in that scenario, it makes sense to restrict, if you want to restrict hacking or bio, you also have to restrict the tool that makes the tool that hacks the system or develops the bio weapon, in theory. And so, but the choice to silently degrade responses was not well received. These are important issues, and there's another timeline where AI leaders are cut from the same cloth as America's elected officials. But we're in a world where Anthropic has to make their case for safety in an age of RSI during a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  It's a very bizarre timeline, but here we are. Most of the big tech CEOs, they have figured out how to work with the administration effectively, showing up to large dinners, photo ops, the occasional movie screening to make their case about hot topics. Many of these CEOs also have business relationships with Anthropic, either on the customer side or on the investor side, and that's what's really complicated about the Amazon relationship. Obviously, Amazon uses Anthropic models, also is an investor in Anthropic, also provides compute to Anthropic, and so they have a very hairy, complex, circular relationship. And so that clouds the discussion over whether or not is Anthropic going to try and help Anthropic get through this? Are they doing everything above board?

• 20:21John Coogan?

  At the same time, you know, people were sort of putting out that like, oh, did Amazon like spike the ball on this? And at the same time, if the government comes to you and asks like, hey, you're a big tech company, you've been using this model a lot? They're a close partner to Anthropic. Were you able to jailbreak it at all? And your security team just issued a report like, yeah, we actually were able to jailbreak it a little bit. Like, you're not going to withhold that from the government. You're going to turn that over. That's different than calling and saying, hey, I really think it's dangerous, you gotta put pressure on them. So there's this, there's this wide range of levels of interaction that can go both ways. You can be a lab partnered with a big tech company, that big tech company can have a really established government regulation, government relations group that is actually

• 21:04John Coogan?

  helping you get through to the admin. On the flip side, you could have a big tech company that is competing with you or frustrated by your, your, your business and is actively trying to, you know, put their thumb on the scale the other way. So I'm sure we'll learn more in the future. Many of these CEOs have business relationships with Anthropic, so we'll see how all of this develops. And they're always renegotiating these contracts too, which makes things more complex. And they're competing across multiple markets. So expect the 4D chess to be on, to be on full display all summer long in Washington. Anyway, UFC, Anthropic, what else is going on?

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Meta is doing a 180, according to Amir over at The Information, trying to be the vanguard of token minimizing. I think the token maxing, token minimizing thing is so silly because do you know where maxing comes from really? Like it comes from gamer lingo usually and

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Adopted by looks maxing?

• 22:09John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't know if looks maxing community was the first one. They certainly made it really go really viral.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  They popularized like, I feel like through

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Effectively through Clav's clipping.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  That

• 22:22John Coogan?

  That language.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  The idea of like doing anything like, oh, I'm, I'm computer maxing today. Yeah. Isn't it from like min maxing?

• 22:28John Coogan?

  Min maxing. And that's what I'm getting at. Like you shouldn't be token maxing or token minning. You should be token min maxing. And the idea of min maxing is when you're in a video game, you want to get the most resources for the lowest cost. So if you're playing League of Legends, you're going to put just the right amount of, of gold into this particular item or this particular stat point in an RPG. And you're going to try and find the optimal build based on your resources. You have confined resources. And somehow it feels like these like tech and all these companies went through some sort of hallucinatory, hallucinatory period where they lost sight of that they should always have been min maxing because that is the goal of business at all times in all things.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Like you don't, you would never say like, oh yeah, we're ad maxing this quarter. We're going to buy as many ads as possible. Oh no, it didn't work. We, we spent way too much on ads. They were not effective. We need to add min, spend as little as possible on marketing. It's like, no, you always want to be spending, you always want to be getting the most return on ad spend, the highest leverage output.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. There was, and again, unsubstantiated posts.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  But somebody was saying they talked to somebody at Meta and there was one engineer that spent $90,000 in one day.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  And was quickly terminated.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Really?

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  Terminated within three days. So again, could just be entirely fake news, but it seems somewhat informed.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  The crazy thing is that, is that like the lesson from that.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  This guy's like, I'm not getting fired. I'm going to use AI more than anyone else in the whole company.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Riding loops.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  $90,000 bill.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  The, I mean, so, so the lesson that will be learned from that is, is don't spend $90,000 a day. But like the Super Bowl is liter- for a marketer, the Super Bowl is spend $5 million in one day. And it works sometimes. And sometimes, Super Bowl ads deliver $20 million.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but what do your teams do when they run Super Bowl ads, right? We ran our Super Bowl ad. We, we, we trained our own model.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Kidding. Um, no, but.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  No, we made sure that ours was ROI positive. And we only bought the ad in a small market and we did it before the game.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Where we already knew our audience was.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  And so for a very low cost, we were able to get a very high of that, high value. So I believe we got a very high return on investment. We mid-maxed the Super Bowl. Now, there were some companies that sort of just Super Bowl maxed and they just spent a ton of money. And when you looked at the data on how they were received by audiences, it seemed like, oh, they definitely didn't get $5 million in brand value back. In fact, maybe that ad was poorly received. Some of the AI-generated ads.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  The, I gotta, I gotta give it up to the UFC for the, for the level of advertising during the event yesterday.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  They're running full, full ads in the middle. I thought the whole thing with the UFC was no ads.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  No, so one, the interesting thing.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Just in, just branded.

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  No, with the new Paramount deal, there's a lot of ads.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, but one, Dana White was in a lot of the ads that were running. So, so like Dodge was doing a TRX ad. It was Dana White driving.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  There was another ad, I forget the brand, so I guess it was a bad ad. But Dana White was, they faked a podcast set where it was with an insurance company. And Dana was having a conversation about business insurance with the CEO of the company.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  So it looks like a podcast. So I thought it was interesting. They were casting Dana and all them. Then second, the, the, the level of advertising just in the octagon was out of this world. There was, um, uh, so many different ways to gamble. Uh, uh, every, there was, I, I like, there's no like, the UFC, UFC cannot do like a gambling exclusivity deal with anyone, right? Cause it's like they have, it's crypto.com, it's polymarket, it's bet365. Any possible way that you could wanna like gamble?

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Bet365. So the only day you're capable, you're taking off is leap day. Every four years you take one day off of gambling. That's the, that's the mission. One day off every four years.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then Kelsey's running ads during the event.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  So Kelsey and polymarket are duking it out.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Polymarket is in the octagon, but Kelsey's running a bunch of ads.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Against it.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Against it.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  And they're buying directly through Paramount because you streamed it on Paramount. Is that correct?

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Did you have to pay for it in addition to?

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Okay. So you pay for Paramount on a monthly basis and then you get UFC for free.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Gambling is just min-maxing done poorly. That's true. That's true. Anyway, um, so the, the, the news around Meta is, uh, Meta's doing a 180, trying to be the vanguard of token minimizing. Two months ago, Meta epitomized token maxing on trend, on track to spend billions a year on Claude, et cetera. We've seen an exponential increase in AI usage and we are tracking to spend billions on internal use alone in 2026. The memo said, at the same time, individuals and teams have limited visibility into and control over how they use AI. In 2027, we expect Meta will move towards managing AI tokens in a more structured way with bullet budgets, allocation decisions and supporting tools. That makes sense. You have a marketing budget. You should also have a token budget.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Um, as part of. I also saw something they have like meta code, which is their internal.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, they're like, you know, catching up to the frontier with.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of like these leaked calls where Suck is like, you know, you should imagine that Meta employees are going to be better than like the average open source contributor. So it's like the basically quality of coding data within Meta should be super good. You can train some model on that.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  It's the same pitch as take a frontier model, bring them in through some sort of consulting partner. They fine tune on your business workflow. They automate your business process. But your business process in this case, if you're Meta, is generating code that makes your social networks better.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's especially good because like in Meta, all of the like, you know, internal business, like whatever data, it's already in like code format. You don't have to like scan in a bunch of papers and to, you know.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  I still, I still don't know what Meta is actually building. And I think there comes a time soon that they should probably communicate that to the market.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Personal superintelligence, baby. What's there not to understand?

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  It's a 1.5 trillion dollar company.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  What does that mean?

• 28:49John Coogan?

  75% as valuable as SpaceX, buddy. Come on. It's crazy.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX, well.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  SpaceX is 2.3.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, if things keep going the way they're going, we'll see even more of a divergence. No, but I think like, it's so unclear.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  You should be able to put a lot of the SpaceX bull case on Meta, right? It's like, sure, maybe Colossus was built a little bit faster, but Meta is pretty fast.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  I think they're wildly, I think they're, they're, couldn't be more different. With Meta right now, it's, the bull case is it's potentially the greatest business in the history.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  That is not threatened by AI.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  That actually is accelerated by AI.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  And, and I don't think.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Any anyways.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  But I do think, I do think I would expect some communication from Meta around what their real strategy is.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Over the next month or so, because it's killing them that they just keep saying, oh, we're personal super intelligence, but wait, they're building like a coding harness and they're, and they're working on coding, like, are they going to sell that externally or is it going to be internal?

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Coding.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Are they gonna, are they gonna try to?

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Coding seems like it makes sense, like they're spending so much money on it.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Try to sell their model on an API and get into enterprise, like, the big question is like, do they take the leap? They kind of did that with Manus.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  But that's getting unwound.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Well, let's talk to Gavin Baker about it, but first let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange, one change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is CIO and Managing Partner at Trades Management. You've heard him on Invest Like The Best many times. Gavin Baker, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 30:29Gavin Baker?

  Doing great, man. How are you guys?

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Fantastically, right? SpaceX IPO, it seems like everything went just flawlessly to a T, like to the point where it wasn't even dramatic.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Give a round of applause for the banker.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  The banker, it's like 20%.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  20% pop almost through its.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, what I mean by that is like, is like, it would have been more dramatic if it like popped up 70% and then went down 30 and then went up 50 and it was drama, but it was just like perfect execution from start to finish. Was that how you interpreted it?

• 31:00Gavin Baker?

  I thought Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley did a very good job.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  What do you think the market is looking for SpaceX next? Is it all eyes on the first earnings report? Like, where do we go from here? Because there's so much of the SpaceX story pre-IPO that was a decade out, five years out, two years out, but is the market going to be processing quarter by quarter plays? Like, like many other companies?

• 31:25Gavin Baker?

  Well, I think the market is always, you know, quarters matter.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Gavin Baker?

  You know, the runners on X, you know, it's like there are these reply people on X for any topic or experts.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Gavin Baker?

  But, um, somebody once told me a marathon is 26 one mile runs.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Gavin Baker?

  And so, you know, and then all the runners were like, no, that's not true at all. Running, you know, obviously running a mile is different than running a marathon. But, you know, every quarter matters, uh, but at the same time, I do think if you look at how. Um, the market has, has looked at Tesla over the last five, six years. You know, Amazon during kind of the days of, you know, when they were building out AWS. And then, um, you know, kind of their, their retail distribution infrastructure, when they go through these investment cycles. I do think the public market has a much greater tolerance um for investment and a much longer time horizon than a lot of people in the venture ecosystem give a credit for. By the way, this is Foxy in the back.

• 32:26Gavin Baker?

  Um, he's our, he's, um, he's one of the analysts here at a trade ease.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  I was just listening to him on the Brad Gerson podcast. I think he chimed in on that, right? You brought him with? There we go.

• 32:36Gavin Baker?

  Yes, he did. But he did the work on SpaceX. So I thought you guys might wanna.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 32:42Gavin Baker?

  But I do think that I'm not sure the story is as far out as you made it seem to be. I think there are two variables that are going to matter a lot over the next year. The first is just how quickly can they bring on terrestrial compute?

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Gavin Baker?

  It does seem like they monetize gigawatts at a higher rate than anyone else.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Gavin Baker?

  And we know from Jensen that they bring on data centers faster than anyone else, per Jensen's words.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Gavin Baker?

  And everyone in the ecosystem is really incented to get um land and power in the hands of people who can energize it. Cause everybody starts making more money when the GPUs are energized. Um, so, you know, if they can, what, what are, what, what was the altimeter figure for how, what they were monetizing gigawatts at? Foxy, do you remember for which deal?

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it was like two to three, wasn't it like at least two times higher than like average Neo cloud pricing? And that's partly in due to scale and customer quality and things like that, but it was meaningful.

• 33:47Gavin Baker?

  Yeah. So they're, they're doing 50 billion a gigawatt on the Google deal. So how quickly they can add gigawatts really matters.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Gavin Baker?

  If you can energize two, three, four gigawatts.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:58Gavin Baker?

  In the next year, that's a lot of revenue. Now, you know, that prices may go up, they may go down, but that's really gonna matter.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  So all eyes on Colossus three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, et cetera, at least in the short.

• 34:10Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, our macro hard, macro harder, macro.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Hardest.

• 34:15Gavin Baker?

  To that name, yeah, macro hardest.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Gavin Baker?

  And then I think cursor is another big variable.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Gavin Baker?

  Uh, you know, we talked about it with Brad about how composer 2.5 after three weeks of, you know, RL and supervised fine tuning Colossus 2 is kind of Pareto dominant. So what's going to happen when it's applied to a bigger, better base model? Um, I do think cursor being in, you know, half the Fortune 500 is interesting. So I think those two things, you know, while I mean, I'm super excited for going to Mars and asteroid mining and, and, you know, a city and mass drivers on the moon. Like all that stuff is awesome. And I think there's a, you know, decent chance it happens in my lifetime.

• 35:06Gavin Baker?

  I just think there is, there's much more tangible near term drivers here.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you think about the tension of the cloud business versus their own application and, and model business? Uh, I think a lot of people were surprised when the initial Anthropic deal happened purely because, uh, knowing Michael Truell, he would have been very excited. That's my compute. Yeah, yeah. Get access. He's like, hey, you gotta share. Uh, David. I'm the only child around here. And it feels like, uh, you can imagine SpaceX, you know, bring on a lot more compute very quickly. Uh, but at the same time, every lab has had to go through this tension of like, how much, how much compute do we allocate to training versus inference?

• 35:48Gavin Baker?

  A way to interpret that is that maybe the team at SpaceX is pretty confident in their ability to bring gigawatts online.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Gavin Baker?

  And the altimeter figure that they've ordered 20% of the Rubens and the Ruben is an epic chip. Like Blackwell, it was really hard to get it online. Ruben is kind of a more drop in replacement. It's a really, really good chip. You'll have the, um, you know, the Grok LPUs integrated at some point in the next six, nine months. Um, so one way to interpret that is they're pretty confident that they can bring data centers online pretty quickly. Um, but I also.

• 36:31Gavin Baker?

  I don't remember all of the details, but I do think there was an out in the Anthropic agreement that if

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the Google, and the Google.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, could be short term.

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I just meant. It's like, it is, there is like a tension there where if you, you know, there's a moment where maybe you want to compute, but you don't necessarily have all of the revenue yet. And so you could see, anyways, I'm very confident they can figure it out.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, on the topic of like Elon Web Services, is there a world where SpaceX winds up building out more of what looks like AWS? Like, we've seen between OpenAI and Anthropic, there's this tension of like, you gotta be on AWS because ITAR or, you know, the ecosystem or enterprises just want to be on AWS. They won't even go over to Azure or Google Cloud for whatever. And you could imagine, like, is it enough to just be a token factory? Or do you need to have, you know, a database and in-memory storage and, you know, cloud storage and cold storage? And all the things that AWS provides?

• 37:32Gavin Baker?

  My thought is that being a token factory is more than enough for the next five to 10 years. Man, we are, yeah, we need more token factories. But we'll, we'll see. And if they need that stuff, like, they will build it.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the other hyperscalers, the other big tech companies? We were sort of puzzling over Meta's strategy at this point. Tons of resources, cash flow, data centers, they have experience there. Maybe they're not as fast as SpaceX, but there's a lot there. But it's a completely different motion to go into token factory. And yet there's still a lot of demand. So how do you think all of that plays out?

• 38:12Gavin Baker?

  Well, I think there's many ways to go to the token factory business. You could, if you're, if you're Meta, you could just say to someone like Fireworks, hey, here are 100,000 GPUs. We'll, we'll take a revenue split and we'll see what happens. I am increasingly looking at EV to net PP and E as a valuation metric. Just with the idea of being installed atoms on Earth, I think are getting appreciated in value. This is a little bit that halo trade that I think maybe Goldman Sachs came up with, you know, high asset value, low obsolescence. But Meta.

• 38:51Gavin Baker?

  You know, Meta's E V to net P P and E multiple is in an interesting place. It just suggests that the market has an immense amount of skepticism about their ability to monetize their own asset base.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  And, and I think that's, I think that's warranted, given that all we've really got out of management is this concept of personal superintelligence. And it would be different if Meta AI was like at the top of the app store and everyone you were talking to was like, yeah, you know, I'm using Meta AI.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Or there even there was like a killer feature within Instagram.

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  It's like, oh, people are shopping in Instagram now.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  And I think no one, no one doubts it. Like, once Zuck has an AI product with a billion dollars of revenue, he can take it to, to tens of billions. But it's unclear. I feel like, you know, going into enterprise, like, you know, what, what is this API business gonna, gonna look like? We know they can use the GPUs just on making the ads product better at the end of the day and, um, but there's a lot of questions.

• 39:48Gavin Baker?

  Look, I think a few things. I do think, eh, if I look at the way different players are behaving, it feels like everyone thinks we're entering the end game. Everybody, you know, loves to use these chess analogies. And it looks like the end game may be here sooner than we think. I think that's why OpenAI is cutting Codex pricing. Simply because coding, you know, coding tokens are so valuable. And if you don't have enough of them, you may not be able to get into this R S I loop that, that everyone is, you know.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Pushing for.

• 40:25Gavin Baker?

  And I, I think if you're Zuckerberg, you feel that acutely. I thought Muse, what is it? Muse?

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Muse Spark.

• 40:33Gavin Baker?

  It was, to me, it was an upside surprise and it made me feel like, you know, what's the, uh, what's, what's, what's from Talladega Nights? Or what is it? So you're saying there's a chance?

• 40:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:46Gavin Baker?

  Yeah. So you're telling me there's a chance?

• 40:49John Coogan?

  I mean, the other quote from Talladega Nights is if you're not your fir-, if you're not first, you're last.

• 40:54Gavin Baker?

  And, and, you know.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  That's how a lot of people.

• 40:56Gavin Baker?

  There's so many good quotes from Talladega Nights.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Sold the windshield.

• 41:01Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. But I think if, um.

• 41:07Gavin Baker?

  I'm pretty confident Mark Zuckerberg has proven to be a good entrepreneur over time and has been willing to pivot, you know, and it's just, it's so funny, you know, right now, Facebook is, you know, Meta is telling investors, there's like no chance that we're gonna, you know, you know, monetize GPUs externally. Well, like 10 days before, they announced all those layoffs, um, which I think was at the end of 22. If not, I don't remember when they started to announce the layoffs, shortly after Brad, maybe two months after Brad wrote that letter to Mark where he said, you're the king, you can do whatever you want, but this is what I might respectfully encourage you to do. Um, you know, they went from saying, we're not going to do that, we're going to keep investing to, you know,

• 41:53Gavin Baker?

  super focused on OpEx in a couple of days, man. So it's like people they meet with Meta and they hear, oh, you know, we're not, um, we're not going to monetize our GPUs externally. Well, I don't know, check back in a few hours.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's like everyone, it comes down to like everyone has a price. You look at, you look at Elon and Anthropic's relationship four months ago. Uh, and then you look at kind of, kind of as the opportunity unfolded, it made sense for them to partner. I wanted to ask how.

• 42:26Gavin Baker?

  On the Meta thing, I think there is one point that's important. What ultimately drives behavior for all these big cap companies? Like getting to AI, I think that does feel existential for all of them. But the stock price also really matters. Because if you don't, if the stock goes down, you know, you gave people a grant at this price, stock goes down. You know, your engineers are unhappy and it's tougher to get to where you want to go if you don't have, you know, these, you know, now forget the 10x engineer, people are talking about the 10,000x engineer. You know, you're not going to get there if you don't keep those 10,000x engineers. So just, I think. Like we'll see, we'll see what's better.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yep. Uh, how did this IPO, uh, update your, your general kind of framework for the role that retail is playing in capital markets? Uh, a lot of, uh, it was very funny last week to see people like, uh, say like, oh, the IPO is only 2X over subscribed by retail. Yeah, they're jumping. All these other, you know, three billion dollar IPOs were, were 10X over subscribed. And it's like, no, we're, we're talking about, you know, a very, you know, order of magnitude difference here. Uh, but it still feels like retail is going to play a very, very important role over the next 12 months, maybe more so than ever, given that the, the, the hyperscalers are now

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  running, um, you know, cash flow negative. You have the conflict in the Middle East, right? There's rebuilding efforts that needs to, needs to happen. And so I feel like retail, this is, this is kind of, um, retail's moment now, maybe more than ever.

• 44:05Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, well, so a few things. One, people say retail in a pejorative way, and I would just say stupid is as stupid does. And like, you know, we track, you know, there's all these indices of retail favorites. And man, they're up a lot. And they're up a lot, 25, and they're up a lot in 24. You know, so kind of stupid is as stupid does. So I'm not, um, you know, like, I think retail is probably outperforming the overwhelming majority of professional money managers, whether they're, you know, private equity managers, venture, you know, public equity managers, whatever. So like retail, I don't think it's pejorative. I do actually think in the case of, um,

• 44:47Gavin Baker?

  SpaceX, I'm not sure, you know, you process so much information. I'm not sure where this comes from. But I actually think after the IPO, um, you know, for whatever reason, it, some of that retail stock may have, may have gotten allocated to people who were flipping it. Cause my understanding is there was more institutional buying. I don't know where this, after the IPO, there was retail buying. Now I'm sure, you know, retail's very sensitive to momentum. So maybe what's happening today changes that. But I think another really underappreciated thing about the SpaceX IPO is that 10, over 10,000 SpaceX employees bought on the IPO. And that's just, you know, everybody does all these lockup analyses and oh, how much

• 45:31Gavin Baker?

  stock is gonna come, come to market and you know, for sure, there's all these triple layer SPVs or whatever, you know, or maybe there are, there are, people speculate there are, um, and I'm sure some of that will get unwound.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:45Gavin Baker?

  But the reality is, is that SpaceX employees own a lot of this. And if you're an employee, or even if you're an investor who has an S, an SPV, or you're directly on cap table, you've had a chance to sell every six months for the last 10 years.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Gavin Baker?

  If you wanted to sell, you could have sold and you know, whatever, when they did that offering in, in the second half of last year.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Gavin Baker?

  So I think the supply, demand dynamics here are gonna be very interesting, but with retail in, in general, um, yeah, man, they're, they've been a more powerful force in the market over the last three and a half years than at any other time in my career, including the year 2000 bubble, which I think this is nothing like, by the way.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:34Gavin Baker?

  Um, but yeah, they, they matter and stupid is, stupid does.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm interested to go a click deeper on the idea of like, value will accrue to companies that are in the token path. I think that phrase is, uh, extremely powerful right now, but I wanna sort of expand it and understand the fringes of the token path because, uh, we talked to Matthew Prince at CloudFlare, stocks at all time highs. It's delivering tokens at the edge and obviously there's an immense amount of AI agents that are interfacing with different websites, they need to be distributed. So there's a lot of value there, but is CloudFlare in the token path if they're the one finally sending you the packet of tokens at the edge?

• 47:22Gavin Baker?

  Well.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Or does that not count? How does that, how do you think about that?

• 47:26Gavin Baker?

  Every, every C D N.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Gavin Baker?

  Has, has this business, you know, Akamai, they signed.

• 47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Gavin Baker?

  Uh, what was it, a 1.8 billion dollar with Anthropic?

• 47:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Gavin Baker?

  And if you have all these points of presence.

• 47:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Gavin Baker?

  And you can deliver really low latency tokens to high value users. I think what's interesting for for for all these CDNs.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Gavin Baker?

  Is they're they're getting a massive premium for that latency.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Gavin Baker?

  You know, it turns out, you know, one of the lessons from from Cerebrus is people are willing to pay for speed.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Gavin Baker?

  And you see that in the prices these guys are commanding, but I do think, I mean, my God is in terms of tokens consumed. Um, on planet Earth, these CDNs are delivering less than 1% of them. And I mean, maybe less than 10 basis points of them.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Most of the things are happening internally and then you just get the result.

• 48:14Gavin Baker?

  Yeah. Um. Would I say that these guys are in the token path? I mean, I would say they have a path towards being in the token path.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Gavin Baker?

  And they are part of their they are part of their business that's in it today.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Gavin Baker?

  And try and and like everyone, they're trying to move it more and more there.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Matthew was talking about uh co-locating Nvidia servers on the edge, specifically for the delivery of voice models, because you want those to be very low latency. Maybe you want your coding model to go off and cook in Virginia for 20 minutes or an hour and then come back to you with the final result. But if you're trying to actually talk to a model, you probably want it as fast as possible. What about on the opposite end?

• 48:54Gavin Baker?

  Wasn't there that startup that Nvidia just invested in that like will?

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, on your house.

• 48:58Gavin Baker?

  Money.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Gavin Baker?

  To put a GPU, you know, for a four GPU server on the outside of your house.

• 49:06Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  GPUs are going everywhere, going in your bed eventually.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's full circle too, because wasn't wasn't Jensen talking about stuff like that back during like the original crypto cycle being like, everyone's gonna be, you know, mining.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, the Tesla power wall is like a version of that for storing energy. It doesn't store compute, but it stores energy locally on the edge, off the grid. And there's a lot of powerful things that get unlocked by that. What about land? Is land in the token path at some point on the extreme other end? Uh, because people are obviously searching for go going further and further upstream. They found a toilet company that makes a particular material that goes into semiconductor supply chain. People are hunting for like the final, the final ingredient. Maybe it's just sand that turns into silicon.

• 49:51Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, I do think the bottleneck bros, as they are called, are this like bottleneck trade is kind of nearing its end.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:59Gavin Baker?

  And.

• 50:01Gavin Baker?

  You know, I did, um, you know, the Wall Street Journal had the story about this Japanese company that makes, um, I forget what they make.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Isn't it Toto?

• 50:11Gavin Baker?

  Ajinobu.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Ajinobu, yeah.

• 50:14Gavin Baker?

  Ajinobu, um, and you, everybody's in this because they thought they were going to raise prices and then they just said, we're actually not going to raise prices. This is the wrong thing for us. And I almost posted yesterday on X, welcome to Japan to all of the bottleneck people. But you know, everybody's, you know, having claw run, what's the next bottleneck?

• 50:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:34Gavin Baker?

  That was, that was the game for the last year. The next game is what has enduring franchise value.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Gavin Baker?

  Kind of on the other side of these bottlenecks, whenever, whenever that is. As far as land, is land a bottleneck? Man, I do think the math for orbital compute to me, it, once they can reuse Starship.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:56Gavin Baker?

  I think the math for orbital compute becomes pretty compelling. You know, it's just 60 billion to bring on a gig terrestrially. 25 is power and cooling. You don't need that. It's based. And so the right comp for that 35 billion of kind of, you know, IT equipment, GPUs, CPUs, switches, um, you know, memory, storage, um, is, is that 25 billion versus the cost of launch. And once Starship is reusable, I think the cost of launch is 5 billion. So 20, that means you can put a gig into space for 30 billion and a gig on earth is 60 billion. And that 25, the power and cooling feels reasonably inflationary to me.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:38Gavin Baker?

  Um, so I don't know that I would say land is in the tokens, token path.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  Maybe beachfront property, but that's about it.

• 51:45Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, beachfront property is beachfront property, airplanes.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Gavin Baker?

  Really nice cars.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  Yep, firmly in the token path.

• 51:55Gavin Baker?

  All that stuff is in the token path.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  I got you.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how do you think the events of, of last week with Anthropic and DC update, uh, different countries on their own sovereign AI play? Cause there's been, there's been attempts. It doesn't feel like, you know, many of the attempts have, you know, you can have a powered shell and you can have the best GPUs, but if you don't have the talent, it's really, it's going to be really hard to get to the frontier. And now if you don't have massive usage, it'll also be really hard to get to the frontier. And so do you think the ship has sailed?

• 52:30Gavin Baker?

  No, well, look, look, I think every country is going to want to have their own sovereign AI strategy at a minimum for national defense. I think where that ends up is, um, I saw today that the EU had restricted exports of Mcstraws.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  I think that's a joke. I think that's a meme. So people have gone so far on the Mistrall La Chat thing, La Chateauneau, that they're saying it's like Mythos is distilled on it and it's breaking all the benchmarks. I think it's a good model, but I don't know that it's quite there yet.

• 53:01Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  But you can imagine that we get there for sure.

• 53:05Gavin Baker?

  Yeah. So I think what sovereign AI will look like for essentially all countries, really other than the United States and China, although I think China is going to fall further and further behind, is just some sort of, you do, you use, um, you know, you use one of these providers, do some reinforcement learning on your language, your culture, your values. Um, you have a system prompt, um, you do some supervised fine tuning, and you run that on whatever the best open source model is. I think that's where sovereign AI ends up. And then you run it in your own data centers. So you feel like, you know, it's safe and whatever defense questions you're asking it or whatever.

• 53:46Gavin Baker?

  Forget questions, whatever. Defense and intelligence, um, and maybe, um, you know, policing activities your sovereign AI agents are doing, you know, 24 hours a day, you feel like they're safe.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Gavin Baker?

  So I think that's where sovereign AI ends up. And I think, you know, there'll still be a big build out for that. But man, sovereign AI at the frontier, I don't see it.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think the drivers are of the widening gap between Chinese open source models and American closed source models is?

• 54:16Gavin Baker?

  China's made a terrible mistake not, you know, taking, it feels like the administration has been willing to let them buy H200s or P30s.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:27Gavin Baker?

  And I think they're on this like, You know, they have this crazy belief that, oh, you know, our own internal chips are good enough. They're not.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Gavin Baker?

  And then, you know, I think what's making them think that is that Chinese labs are very, very good at distillation. Somebody told me it only took 160,000 reasoning traces from O1 and O3 to get the original DeepSeek.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Gavin Baker?

  You know, they're very clever at industrial scale distillation, running it through multiple APIs, pegging each API from, you know, we've all seen those iPhone farms in China. You know, they've got, they've got the same thing for distillation and they've got, you know, 100,000 endpoints, distilling these models across every API available. They've got really, really good at that. But man, all that goes away if people stop releasing these models at the frontier. And I think Mythos is a sign of things to come there.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It seems like they're getting much better at locking down, the reasoning traces locking down the espionage. It feels like back during the O1 days, the labs weren't even aware that distillation was so possible, that that was, that that was something that was such a, such a potential threat, for sure.

• 55:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is any part of you worried that you'll never see another, another company like SpaceX?

• 55:50Gavin Baker?

  Um.

• 55:53Gavin Baker?

  Worried is the wrong word.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  Not, not worried, not worried, but, but like, you have to appreciate, you have to appreciate that a moment like that, it's possible that you have an opportunity to invest in a company like that one time in your career. And thank God you did it, because there's plenty of people that, that had the opportunity and didn't and.

• 56:12Gavin Baker?

  Well, I did own 15% of Nvidia when it was a sub $2 billion market cap, but I owed 10% of Tesla with a sub $2 billion market cap.

• 56:23Gavin Baker?

  But, um, but SpaceX certainly, it's been a special experience for me. And I think there is a chance that it is, you know, one of the most important iconic companies of all time. I mean, it already is. Uh, there's a chance it's the most.

• 56:43Gavin Baker?

  And I think in general, it's just, it like, I kind of want to take a step back and like, all this trillionaire hate from the left, it's like, the, you know, there's a great post from my friend, um. Kevin Mahaffey saying like, oh, this is a Bond villain who's decarbonizing the world. Last time I checked, people on the left were like the environment. Connecting, uh, you know, poor people in low income countries, schools and hospitals to the internet at very low cost. And he's helping wide people see today and, you know, interact with the world.

• 57:23Gavin Baker?

  That's a villain. Um, and then just like, there's so many parts of the SpaceX story, like all of the, you know, blue collar workers who've gotten super well. Uh, if you're opposed to data centers on Earth, because the environment, well, SpaceX is your, is your solution. So, um, you know, there was another great post that just said, you know, the left what? They don't even appreciate it. The world's first, first trillionaire, you know, has done more to kind of solve the environment than like everyone else on Earth combined. Yep, yep.

• 57:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw there was another good one. It's like, yeah, Elon could solve world hunger by, you know, market selling every, you know, uh, piece of stock that he has and send the world into a global economic downturn, losing, you know, millions of, millions of jobs in the process.

• 58:12Gavin Baker?

  Yeah, that, uh, somebody said Elon, that the World Bank could solve hunger with five billion. And he said, if you prove it to me, I'll do it. Yeah, of course. Turns out you can't solve world, world hunger for five billion dollars. Yeah. Um, but yeah, SpaceX is certainly, I would say, you know, SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla, they've all been very special to me in kind of a different way. But man, there is nothing like a rocket launch. And so I just don't think has a visceral experience. I highly recommend everyone listening, you guys, if you have kids, take your kids to a lodge. You don't want to go with SpaceX. Everybody's always like, oh, get me the special tickets. You just literally, you can go to a beach at Boca Chica.

• 58:55Gavin Baker?

  And where the special SpaceX viewing area is, you could literally be closer to the lodge. You can, there's hotels near Vandenberg. Take your kids, see a lodge. It's super inspirational that humans are capable of this and it's much more visceral than you realize. You know, the sound, the blast of hot air, a lot of people cry. So go see a lodge, but there will be a never, I don't think, uh, I'm pretty skeptical. That there will be another company that delivers a visceral experience like that. And then listen, if SpaceX puts a city on the moon and then Mars,

• 59:37Gavin Baker?

  it enables, you know, becomes the British East City Company, the solar system. I think this will, there's a lot of hard engineering that needs to happen to go into all that. This will probably be the most important company of certainly my lifetime, but maybe of all time. And so for that sense, I don't think there will ever be anything else like it. And yeah. I guess that is a little bit sad, but you know what? There's so much awesome stuff happening in the world that it's tough for me to get too down.

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hard to be too.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  I have one last question. We have, you mentioned owning Nvidia sub two billion. What is the health of the sub two billion market right now? Is there anything that you're excited about?

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Is there anything that the bottleneck bros haven't ran?

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  Haven't run up to it.

• 1:00:26Gavin Baker?

  Bros have taken everything under two billion.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  Maybe not even, maybe not even like, like public companies, but private areas. I mean, we're starting to see the knock on effects of AI in bio and material science. And like Neuralink was sub two billion for a long time, right? And so there are more like not in theme, but accelerated by. So I don't know. There's also just like, you know, SaaS company.

• 1:00:52Gavin Baker?

  There's loads of incredible venture companies, you know, startups under two billion.

• 1:00:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Gavin Baker?

  Like loads of them.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Gavin Baker?

  You know, I, I, I, I talked to them, you know, several times a week minimum.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Gavin Baker?

  In public, you know, until the bottleneck bros came along, until AI came along, there was not a lot happening in public, small cap land. And by the way, on this, like all these small caps, these bottlenecks, this AI, it does feel a little weird to me that you could have like a large following.

• 1:01:30Gavin Baker?

  On social media, post about, you know, buy, buy stock in something.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Gavin Baker?

  And then post about, you know, outline your thesis in a thirty five million dollar market cap company and send it up like a thousand percent. And there's a lot of that going on. By the way, this is not, this is not like a serenity comment. I think that guy's, that person is smart. But I mean, there's, there's, there's, there's a lot of shady stuff happening. It feels like to me.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and you look back at, you know, you were a young, young analyst at Fidelity, right? During the, the doc, you know, the end of the, the dot com cycle. And there was a lot of just like euphoria stuff happening. And in the years that followed, there was consequences, right? There, there were people ultimately had to, to face.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Sometimes civil penalties, all sorts of different things. Companies went bankrupt.

• 1:02:27Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  There were all sorts of different, you know, perturbations in the market. And of course, we got a, we got a bunch of really enduring generational companies through that period, too.

• 1:02:37Gavin Baker?

  Although a lot of these accounts are anonymous and I'm sure they're logged into social media with a made up email.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Gavin Baker?

  You know, got through a VPN. And so I don't, I don't know. We'll see.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  It is, it is different than a research, than a sell side research report that maybe goes a little bit too far, but there's still a whole compliance department around it. We are in, yeah, uncharted territory. So everyone needs to stay safe out there and do your own research, I suppose.

• 1:03:05Gavin Baker?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:03:06Gavin Baker?

  Well, guys, man, this was super fun.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  This was great. Let's do it again soon.

• 1:03:09Gavin Baker?

  On more.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Anytime. Let's get the whole team on, too.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Gavin Baker?

  Yeah. That's actually fun.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be great.

• 1:03:16Gavin Baker?

  Do that with the whole team.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  It'd be amazing. I would love it. Yeah. Yeah. You have a conference room with a, with a nice wide angle camera. You can just have the whole crew there. That's great.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  Partner me. Bring us into a partner meeting.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Great to hang with you guys.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Leif Abraham from Public. He's the co-founder, co-CEO, here to break down what happened on Public when SpaceX went public. How you doing, Leif? Good to see you. Beautiful background.

• 1:03:52Gavin Baker?

  What's up, guys?

• 1:03:52John Coogan?

  Hope you're enjoying New York City. What's up?

• 1:03:55Leif Abraham?

  It was fantastic. Great to see you.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Was was Friday crazy for you? Was the weekend crazy for you? Is today crazy for you? Is it all just like crazy in the wow, this is a historic moment versus like crazy at the office? Like the servers are on fire. Like, does that happen with you?

• 1:04:12Leif Abraham?

  Yeah, I mean, by now, it's obviously more kind of business as usual when IPOs happen. But on Friday, definitely, I mean, SpaceX was the most popular IPO that we have seen on the app ever.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Leif Abraham?

  By like a wide margin. And, um, you know, to give an example of like, you know, of everyone who bought a stock on Friday, nearly half of people who bought a stock on Friday bought SpaceX. Right? So, uh, which is obviously quite, quite crazy, right?

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  A Venn diagram is a circle.

• 1:04:44Leif Abraham?

  But like second most traded stock was Nvidia and SpaceX was like 533% more trading than Nvidia that day, right? And so, so definitely, you know, the, the, like, one of the kind of craziest IPOs that we've seen so far.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the retail allocation actually like on the ground? We heard numbers like it's, it's double oversubscribed, but then the number that I saw reported was like 100 billion for retail. And that seemed like way more than what would actually go to retail because so much of it is going to be anchored by the banks. And what I would not put in the retail bucket, like JP Morgan's, like, you know, clients, right?

• 1:05:24Leif Abraham?

  And, and you would think so, but I think when, when people talk retail, they think what you and I were just thinking of like basically people who use retail investing apps like Public and the like.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  Individuals and they're making decisions.

• 1:05:38Leif Abraham?

  Like self-directed, you know, and so on.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Not, not necessarily, not a fun.

• 1:05:42Leif Abraham?

  Like, but like retail is still, you know, the rich guy who has a JP Morgan advisor and stuff. That still counts as retail, right? And like, and like when you see. You know, and I know it was first about thirty percent, then it was like down to twenty percent in terms of like retail allocation of it.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Leif Abraham?

  You did still see that, you know, at least, you know, sort of, you know, half and a double, but like you, you, you, you did still see that. At the end of the day, when these retail locations happen these days, it still mostly goes to the good wealthy customers of the big banks and their wealth management arms first. And that's why you saw like, you know, the like retailer brokerages that had some allocation, you know, ended up mostly giving people like one share and stuff, and that is because most of that twenty percent still went to, you know, the good long-term customer with a very large account of JP Morgan and Merrill and whatnot, right?

• 1:06:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:32Leif Abraham?

  That is still the reality. And I think the main thing there is really is that, um, you know, the banks who are in most cases also like the ones who are underwriting the IPOs, you know?

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:41Leif Abraham?

  They are kind of managing all the process, they will sell it to retail location, etc. The most companies that go public, maybe also don't really have the, not saying SpaceX, but like, you know, most companies in the, in the city really have the perfect understanding of like the nuances in retail. And I think, um, you know, that's why you're still seeing that the, the banks who are underwriting are like pushing their weight around and at the end of the day, most of that still goes to, you know, the, the wealth management customers and stuff.

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about, uh, either the research that you're seeing folks do, or maybe the research that you're enabling with public's tools? Specifically, I, I, I read a very interesting report in the Financial Times where they visualized over the next year, how the lockup will actually play out. It's a very low float stock early on, gets added to the indices, and there's all these different milestones that, I mean, you could just say it's all priced in already, uh, but I imagine that many investors will care and want to buy ahead of, uh, ahead of a index purchase, but after a lockup ends or something like that. And I'm just wondering about, um, how you can actually

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  help a investor understand those dynamics.

• 1:07:55Leif Abraham?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't have a perfect schedule in front of me right now, but first off, I think this IPO specifically that the banks luckily have done a pretty damn good job. Like in terms of the pop was there, it was sizable, but it wasn't ridiculous necessarily. You know, um, even now on day two, like the, the stock clearly is holding up. Um, and then the whole orchestration of the kind of multi-stage unlock of the, of the float at the same time or, or, or the lockup in the same time where, you know, obviously like the whole renegotiation with the, you know, adding to the Nasdaq one hundred and so on, which then creates more buy pressure on the other side as the other ones kind of, you know, get unlocked. And I think that orchestration, we'll see how it all plays out as it kind

• 1:08:39Leif Abraham?

  of really unwinds, but it's clearly very well thought out. And if you would judge the performance of that, you know, orchestration so far through this IPO and stuff, I mean, I would argue compared to many other IPOs, it's been very well executed, right? Yeah. So my hunch is that a lot of smart people have done some, some, some good work there. That's, I don't know if you can really play it like that. Sure, sure, sure. You know, there's surely smarter people than you and me that have models that have all figured that out.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  So there's clearly continues to be more retail demand than allocation for these blockbuster IPOs. Uh, on one hand, Elon has benefited tremendously from like the power of retail, right? It helps to have a bunch of people invest at like, you know, you know, uh, uh, low two-digit, you know, billions, you know, with Tesla and sort of ride that up, right? But I feel like one of the challenges for retail to actually get meaningful allocation is just the lack of like reliability and the flipping risk associated with allocating to retail. Uh, I'm sure Elon in a perfect world would love to say like, yeah, we're

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  going to give half of the IPO to, uh, to, uh, retail, but then, uh, there's, there's going to be that risk that people are like, you know, not as, not as reliable as the big, you know, institutions and things like that, or, or certain even clients of the private banks that, uh, want to make sure they're in the next IPO. So how do you think that that gets solved? Is there a world in the future where like retail has like a true lockup? Like they, they cannot sell versus just saying like, hey, please don't sell? What do you think happens?

• 1:10:21Leif Abraham?

  Yeah, I mean, so as a broker, you, you know, what's, what, what most brokers do and also what the companies who IPO kind of ask for is just like, what's your flipping policy? And is that, in most cases, if you flip within a certain timeframe, you basically get restricted from future IPOs, and that's like one of the kind of forcing functions. But pure security is not a perspective, you can't create these, this notion where, you know, once this stock is common stock publicly trading, like every, you know, every investor has to be treated equally, I mean, you can't then suddenly be like, well, I, I'm like, I don't trust you, retail investors, so you can't sell, but the other institutions are sold to, they, they can, you know, like, those things can't, like, can't really happen. Um, but I think for the retail investors, it really depends on, obviously, like, the, the, the,

• 1:11:05Leif Abraham?

  at the end, the platform in most cases, right? So in our space, I would always invite it up as like trading platforms, where they have that focus, right? Trading platforms and like investing platforms, and like, trading is basically like your chart-based first product, technical analysis, where we have your options and futures and so on. And in that world, you do actually have a flipping culture, like, there's reddits about it, there's like, you know, uh, like Telegram groups, et cetera, about, you know, where these basic people like, try to find multiple access points to an IPO just for the matter of like flipping it. Um, but I would say that that is a small sliver of the retail market. Most people are actually more buying and holding. And what we've seen with IPOs in our history, um, our like net share retention on IPOs is like a hundred and twenty-five percent roughly,

• 1:11:48Leif Abraham?

  you know, which basically also means that people actually add to their positions afterwards. And so they get shares allocated, but didn't get everything that they wanted, in the, obviously, you know, so far, always. And then, uh, but then they add to it as it starts trading in the public markets. And I think most cases, what you're seeing, because like, normal retail investors, like, by the way, we're not traders, we're people who like build up portfolios for the livelihood and stuff, like, they are mostly people that are hold stocks, right? And that's what you've seen also with like the diehard Tesla crew, like, in the past, you know? These people were people who were trading out pictures of, you know, their monthly DCA, their monthly dollar cost average into their Tesla stock because they got a new paycheck, you know?

• 1:12:27Leif Abraham?

  And I think that is the much more normal behavior, I think, than this true flipping thing. So I think it's, yes, it exists, but I think it's a little bit, maybe, the fear is a little overstated, I would argue.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  There were a lot of people that were upset about SpaceX's inclusion in indices. They, maybe they don't like Elon for political reasons, maybe they don't like the stock because of the revenue multiple. There's a variety of gripes that people have, but I saw Jason Calacanis fire back, say, "Hey, you can create a synthetic index that, you know, you want to own the S and P 499, just go do that." And it seemed a little complicated. How complicated is it actually to do that today if you're genuinely so bearish on SpaceX that it can't touch your portfolio? Because you could go short, or you could just buy everything else in equal proportion, but then there's reweighting that happens and it's sort of complicated.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  But where are we from someone being able to just do that with a prompt or a click these days?

• 1:13:30Leif Abraham?

  Well, I love the question because I can perfectly now do a, put an ad in here. So the simplest way is we just go to public.com, sign up, and there's something called

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Public.com?

• 1:13:39Leif Abraham?

  There's something called direct indexing. There you go. Fantastic. So, and there's direct indexing, which basically means you can buy the S and P, you can customize them. You can be, you know what, I want to have the S and P 500 without this and that stock. You can have rebalancing built in, even Texas harvesting built in, which means you can actually, you know, save some money just on, you know, just on the taxes there as well. So that's selling the losers, you know, and rebalancing over time. And so that is super easy now, at least on public. And it's something that a lot of people do. I think the main thing that really was, I think what a lot of people got upset with was that people have

• 1:14:24Leif Abraham?

  trust in these indices because of the rigid frameworks that they have.

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  Yep, have to be profitable for a certain amount of quarters, have to be a certain size. Yeah, totally makes sense. I understand the critique.

• 1:14:35Leif Abraham?

  And so, and so, and so the minute It was basically like, oh, now we're making exemptions suddenly. I think a lot of people were just getting upset with that. It basically be like, hey, what the fuck? Like, I put my life savings into this.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Leif Abraham?

  Because of these frameworks and I have basically like, you know, agreed to them or whatever. I believe in however you structure it. And I think that was mostly what kind of came.

• 1:14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also, like, when I think about the S and P 500, I think most people mentally think, okay, I'm going to have 0.2% in every company, but of course it's cap weighted. And when you see a 2 trillion behemoth come into the index, you're like, well, that could be like 3% of my portfolio, maybe 5% of my portfolio if it runs and, and I don't want that index exposure necessarily. Of course, everyone has different risk tolerances, different preferences, but good to know that there's an alternative out there. Jordy, anything else?

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  I was going to say, if, if you have 30 more seconds to answer, how do you think the SpaceX IPO impacts how, you know, bankers and companies are thinking about, you know, potentially other IPOs this year? Obviously, retail's quite strong. They want exposure and it's at a level that is pretty unprecedented.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  And also, the market, I felt like there was one narrative was like, if SpaceX wins, everyone else loses because there's going to be so much rotation out of everything else. But the markets performed well today and stuff and that was, that's not what's happened at all.

• 1:15:57Leif Abraham?

  Yeah, I don't know. I would argue there's so much money in the world that it's totally fine. I think when you look at the big institutions, I put multiple billion dollar checks in the SpaceX. None of those were even like existing investors and so on. That kind of doubled down that positions and stuff like, you know? And so I, I, I wouldn't necessarily think of that argument. Um, I do think that, um, because this IPO, at least so far, has been really executed quite well, that it makes everyone very confident on the next ones.

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Leif Abraham?

  And so, you know, if I would be now in Thropic or Open Air or something, I, I would, I would like to look at this one now and be like, okay, fantastic, the market is ready and the bankers seem to be ready as well. Um, so I would say this, I would like, I would argue it's a, it's a, it's a very good sign of general confidence and so.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Way pal on a red suit day. There you go. What else? Sorry, I cut you off.

• 1:16:46Leif Abraham?

  Ah, what about, what about?

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  Okay. Thank you so much.

• 1:16:48Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  On the show, always great to see you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Hang on, hang soon.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless realtime experiences and new value with Cisco. Fox is buying Roku, the streaming service, for $25 billion. It's in the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  25 or 22?

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  25 billion in the Wall Street Journal here. Let me refresh the page, see if they updated it. It still says 25.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Weird. Barron's is reporting 22 billion.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  But, who knows?

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Somewhere in the north of a billion, sub 100 billion. Let's be very conservative with our estimates.

• 1:17:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, CNBC also 22 billion.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Weird that the Journal is...

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  The Journal, I mean, I have inside information, given that it's a News Corp. property, related there, right? Uh, anyway, let's read through the Journal piece, which might be... Well, I don't know.

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let... Go for it.

• 1:17:45John Coogan?

  Let me just give you some facts, and then you can sort of, uh, give me some takes and contextualize it with more information. So, uh, Fox Corp. said it's acquiring Roku in a deal valued around $25 billion. So the Wall Street Journal's saying around, is 22 around, maybe? Making a major bet on the future of ad-supported streaming. Ad-supported streaming, obviously Netflix pivoted to ads after saying, "We don't, we're not gonna do ads." Turned out to be a great business. Ads are undefeated and more people want...

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  Consumers are down with ads.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  They're just down with ads, especially if they're good ads. Anyway, the Fox, the, the deal. The deal is Fox's largest to date. It brings together a media company known for its live news and sports programming with the biggest provider of streaming platforms for connected TVs. Uh, it will add scale to Fox's streaming business, currently home to free ad-supporting streaming service Tubi, which the company bought for $400 million in 2020 and subscription-based Fox One and Fox Nation. Uh, in addition to...

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  Tubi, from my understanding, has been a home run.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know? I don't remember exactly what the revenue is, but they bought it for 400. It's in the billions now.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  And all the metrics about actual audience size are huge. And yeah, putting up, getting to tens of millions of dollars in revenue, hundreds of millions of dollars in ad sales against a big audience like the Tubi viewership, when you have the Fox machinery behind it, makes a ton of sense. In addition to distributing other streaming services through connected TVs and devices, Roku has its own ad-supported Roku channel. The combined company will better, will better compete with the likes of amazon.com and Netflix for ad dollars. Quote, "Bringing these two companies together will really help define the future of television in the United States and in many other markets around the world." Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch told investors on a call Monday. Fox will pay around $160 per

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  share, 96 in cash, and .9693 Fox Class A shares. The deal is valued at around 22 billion on an enterprise basis. Fox expects to fund the cash portion of the transaction with 12 billion in new debt as well as cash on hand. The combined company expects to cut around 400 million in annual costs. Fox plans to keep Tubi and the Roku channel as separate offerings. Consumers are increasingly opting for free and lower cost ad-supported streaming options as the cost of subscriptions marches ever higher. Ad-supported streaming plans now represent almost 50% of all premium subscription ad, video on demand signups in the US, up from 39% just two years ago. More than 100

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  million global households stream with Roku. Roku is the largest streaming platform for connected TVs with 25% market share. Samsung's Tizen is number two at 23%. And then I'm sure probably Amazon's Fire TV is not far behind. Fox remained on the sidelines during the heady early days of streaming boom. Pouring money instead into programming for its cable channels and buying up sports rights. It launched Fox Nation in 2018 and introduced direct to consumer Fox One, which includes sports and Fox News last year. Fox said last month that Tubi had nearly 100 million monthly active users and its revenue had grown by 23% in the fiscal third quarter.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  And so Fox's stock is down today. Roku is down 0.2%, something like that. And the market doesn't like it. Take him has a take here. We can read through his opinion. He says, I don't understand how this Roku deals makes any sense. Bringing together the most valuable live.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  I'll tell you how it makes.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  How does it make sense?

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  No, so I think it makes sense. One, Fox, they have a great product in Tubi, right? It's again, there are certain people that are happy with their HBO or Netflix or whatever, but Tubi has a great niche. It's been a great acquisition for Fox, north of a billion dollars of revenue. That is a product. Roku is a platform. They have over 20% market share in connected TVs. I was looking at the data. They have over 40% of the engagement with connected TVs. So when you think about it from an advertising potential, right? It's not just that they have 20% of the connected TV market.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  They have over 40% of like the watch time effectively, right? So looking at the potential from an advertising standpoint and how many dollars are still yet to shift from traditional television to connected TVs. So from that lens, I think it's, I think it's great. Roku's also a much younger demo. So like a lot of media, a lot of media properties, right? Especially television related are going to be, you know, older demos that are. That are eventually going to be aging out at least of like prime consumers. But these are consumers that are in their, you know, prime earning years, prime years as consumers. And so ultimately, I think it makes sense.

• 1:22:50Jordi Hays?

  I think it makes sense for Fox. Next, the thing that I hope that they can do as a consumer is rebundle, right? We've just gone, we've gone through this era of unbundling and the fact that you get a new TV and you're like, okay, great, let me log into, you know, 15, 10 different services, something like that. I would like to see them do, I would like to see them do something in bundling for a consumer. So again, looking at it from the lens of like having north of 40% of like watch time, right? That is a super valuable property and like with the right ad-driven approach, I think, I think it'll pay off.

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  I wonder how windowing fits into this. Like I, when I grew up, I didn't have cable, but you would get a prestige movie played on ABC like once a week. And for a while, that was the flow on Netflix and HBO was like its own premium subscription. You could open up the HBO app, it's all premium series and movies. And then some of that would trickle down, but then it feels like the ecosystem sort of branched a little bit where Netflix stopped getting like the James Cameron library for a while and Disney started hoovering up some of that, keeping some of the really popular

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  movies, the Marvel franchise off of Netflix, even for later run, a year or two after. Because there was more competition from the actual different pieces of the different studios. So I wonder if Roku will be able to, to provide some sort of like neutral territory in some ways where, where viewers can pick up something that's in the premium and some things that's, you know, a sequel to a franchise that they know and love, but it's not seen as, as competitive as, as, you know, Disney versus HBO or whatever. Well, we will see. The history of Roku is interesting. We got to take you through this briefly. So it was founded by Anthony Wood, born.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  In 1965, in, when he was a teenager, he published Lunarlander in the Ahoy magazine. Earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M. He met his wife there. Now they have three children. Congratulations. They live in Palo Alto. But in college, Wood founded his first company, AW Software. AW Software. What do you think the AW stands for? He's putting his name on the line.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  On the line.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  Andrew Wood Software.

• 1:25:26Jordi Hays?

  I got to meet Anthony recently.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Oh, you did? Wait, really?

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  That's awesome. So he was selling computer programs. He founded Sunrise Industries while studying engineering, developing software for the Amiga, the original Amiga system. After graduating, he founded his, I think this is his third company, and it's called Sunrise Version 2. Later in 1995, he launched another company, Iband. And Iband sold to Macromedia for $36 million in 95. That's a lot of money. And Macromedia, of course, was the makers of Adobe Flash. He left in 97, after two years, to launch Replay TV, which was a digital video recorder DVR. For you'd have something coming in over the antenna,

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  and you would be able to record it and watch it later, much like TiVo. TiVo was their main competitor. He, in 2002, he founded Roku, his sixth startup to market home devices. Roku means six in Japanese, and he's just like, "It's the sixth time I'm doing this." Imagine being on the sixth startup. I'm number four, three, or something like that. He also worked at Netflix. The Roku history is sort of interesting. So he founded Replay TV. Replay TV was not successful, so he worked at Netflix. In 2007, Wood's company began working with Netflix on Project Griffin, a set-top box. Netflix was thinking about getting into hardware, and it would allow Netflix users to stream Netflix content to their TVs.

• 1:26:58John Coogan?

  Like, they were working on like the Apple TV, basically. It was a crazy fork in the road. A few weeks before the project was due to launch, Netflix's founder Reed Hastings decided that it would hamper license agreements with third parties. Is all of our third-party license agreements, they're giving us content, they're going to be super upset about this. We're shelving this product. We're not doing it because we, we want to keep Netflix on all the other platforms. When the Apple TV comes out, or whatever other box is out there, we want Netflix there. We don't want Apple cutting us off because they say, oh, you got your own box. You can live over there. You're not on ours. Not that Apple would necessarily do that, but that type of set-top box would not integrate, or the smart TV would say,

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  we are not integrating. And so Fast Company cited the decision to kill the project as one of Netflix's riskiest moves. Netflix then decided to spin off the company and Roku released their first set-top box in 2008. In 2010, they began offering models with various capabilities, which eventually became their standard business model. And so they went on and on and wound up as a very successful company now owned by Fox, as long as this deal clears.

• 1:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Overall, real platform. They already have a product that sits on top of it. Tons of advertising potential. And I, I think that regardless of whatever the market reaction is today, I expect that people will, will get it over time.

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  Well, Roku is ad-supported, and we are too. So let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access request and password resets. Tyler Cowen shared some more thoughts on the recent Mythos brouhaha. It's a good term. We, this was all over. We talked about this earlier, but he says, according to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that the model could be jailbroken. There's debate over this now. The released Mythos already restricted bio and AI improvement queries rather than strictly in fact, rather strictly in fact. So now we are back to the model not being available. Here are a few of the constraints on the US government not.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  The only ones I might add, one, it needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it's now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce. Demis, Ilya, Andre for a start are all international engineers. It is much harder for the main competitors to drum up foreign business in a credible manner and sustainable manner. That's interesting. We haven't seen many breakout charts of how much revenue is domestic versus international, but we have seen reports of OpenAI and Anthropic doing big deals with international companies. Some of these companies, Fortune 500, they just have global footprints. So they got to use the models everywhere, ideally,

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  unless they do all of their software engineering in Silicon Valley. One B, how are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems moving forward? That's literally what I just said. I just predicted the next line. Whoops, I am a stochastic parrot. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power. So model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with partial model access when they get it in the future. Three, the US needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race. This is a big question. We have Aaron Gin from Hydrohost joining in just 10 minutes. We'll ask him for his perspective on this.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Four, the US needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable, and US citizens only doesn't fit that bill. That's a good point. You might have some KYC, but it's very difficult when these APIs leak into other products. All of a sudden, you're prompting a model within a piece of SaaS. We've seen this with, you go to Slackbot in Slack, Salesforce product. There's an AI model under the hood that's vended in by Anthropic or OpenAI, depending on the deal, depending on the product. And that now needs to be passed along to understand, is this a US citizen on the other end of the line? Let's find out. Furthermore, markets and everything. It is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing. That's a really good point.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  How can you verify that every American is loyal? Or for a matter, it is not that difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's been, there's been people. Over the last 50 years that have gotten caught like passing on or basically selling, you know, secrets around our various military aircraft, for example.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a very controversial story of Virgil Griffith, cryptocurrency researcher who I actually met once. He worked at Caltech, was deep in math and very excited about cryptocurrency. And he went and gave a talk on cryptocurrency in North Korea, explaining how cryptocurrency works and how cryptography works. And that was seen as a violation of export controls and he was sent to prison. And the crypto community is very upset about that because they they maintain that math should not be illegal, this information should not be illegal, the government side is like helping.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  What was his defense? Was he like thinking that he was going to liberate the North Korean people by giving them access to effectively or explaining how code?

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Can be used to create a store of value that is that is unsanctionable essentially. And so it was seen as a violation of sanctions by the US government and more importantly, it was seen as unpaid.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Do they have a North Korean stablecoin?

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know. They have a lot of houses.

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  They're calling it the most sanctioned stablecoin ever.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially. This one, number five by Tyler Cowen, was a little bit controversial. He says, "The US government cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively." And people were debating that, saying that it might be possible for the US government to to own the labs in some way and and leave them to their own devices to actually roll these things out. What do you?

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if you're like super RSI pilled, right, you don't need the employees at all because the AI just improves itself.

• 1:33:13John Coogan?

  So the government just says, "Continue to improve."

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  And that's it. So you don't actually...

• 1:33:17Speaker 03

  That's like, you know, the extreme scenario.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then and then on the other side, it's that, okay, these systems are actually extremely complex. You look at the uptime of some of these systems, the research taste. In fact, you need so many employees to make these products effective. You actually need the international employees as well because they come up with great ideas. And so, yeah, those are the two sort of sides of the of the debate. Six is Chinese and open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even though they are right now considerably behind the best proprietary models. And that's something that I want to dig into more. It does seem like the pace of open source development in China is slowing. I'm not entirely sure what's driving it. It feels like there's a number of different things. Gavin Baker said it's about compute and they're, and they're, they're turning their

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  backs on the Blackwells that they had the opportunity to buy. I think it might be research ideas that are more locked down now in, in tighter controlled circles in San Francisco. It also might be the data, might be, but you'd have to imagine that they have lots of people that are writing code, lots of people that are inferencing those models and then full data and, and information capturing of those rollouts. Uh, there are a number of different reasons why that pace might be slowing and we'll see. Maybe there's a big jump in the graph. Maybe we have another deep seek moment in the next couple of months. We'll see.

• 1:34:38Jordi Hays?

  It's, I think everyone should expect some type of, uh, update hopefully today from, from Washington or Anthropic or both. Hopefully today.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Anthropic had originally said, I think, uh, 24 hours.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  Obviously a lot more time has passed, but partially due to, uh, the events on the White House lawn yesterday.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Things a little bit harder. Um,

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  Well, before we move on.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  One person potentially impacted is, uh,

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Who was impacted?

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  One person potentially impacted is Karpathy.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Theo went to Google and said, is Karpathy a US citizen? And, uh, AI overview seemingly pulled, uh, went to Grok and said, according to Grok, Andre Karpathy is a EB1 extraordinary ability green card recipient, not a US citizen.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  This is a loop. This is a loop. Loop from Gemini to Grok and back and then it goes back into Grok now because the screenshot's been shared.

• 1:35:42Jordi Hays?

  This is RSI.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  This is RSI. For sure. For sure. Uh, where, where next, Jordy?

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what else do we have?

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  We've talked about La Chetan.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  La Chetan.

• 1:35:55Jordi Hays?

  La Grou Chetan.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  La Grou Chetan.

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  I think that's how you pronounce it.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  Okay, yes, take us through this, what's going on?

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, so there's rumors, I, I think that has not been formally announced by Mistral.

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Formally announced by a bunch of teapot schizos.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  So, so i- in closing, Tyler Cowen called out Mistral specifically, he said, rising in status, Mistral, AI nationalism, proponents of slow takeoff is the likely scenario, reticent, quiet CEOs. But he calls out Mistral as a potential beneficiary of all this, uh, government chaos, government restrictions, closing down, um, and so what's going on? What is, they, they, Mistral's released many models, they've done their actual pre-train, they're not doing fine tunes on Chinese models, correct? And, and, and it's been a good product, like, it's been working, they've been raising more money, but they've never been seen as one of the leading frontier labs, is that the general tone?

• 1:36:50Speaker 03

  Yes, I think that's correct. I, I think, I mean, very early on, I think they were like, oh, this is maybe one of the frontier labs, right, it was all, I think, ex-metta, uh, researchers. Um, but yeah, there's, the new model, uh, you know, is it real? Technically, no, but, you know, perhaps in the future, some of the, uh, the founders are vague posting, maybe they will actually release a model called this.

• 1:37:11John Coogan?

  Let's go through some of the vague posts.

• 1:37:13Jordi Hays?

  All I know is a lot of Americans have, ever since, uh, ever since this new model started being talked about, a lot of Americans that maybe formerly had some type of beef with France have been real quiet.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:37:25Jordi Hays?

  Real, real quiet.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Quiet down. Well, uh, people are having fun with the fat cats, Arthur Mensch, this is a fake screenshot, I believe, but Tensor QT shares the Death Star with the cat on it. And then, uh, Shashank Goyal says, "Le Château Fat is now number one on OpenRadar, need to urgently fix our axes." And he actually works-

• 1:37:49Jordi Hays?

  He's not really helping the confusion.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  He actually works at OpenRadar. And on the chart, it has a break in the chart because it goes so high that it's off the charts. "Le Château Fat is crushing it." I like, I like, I like a friendly hype, hype cycle, this is great.

• 1:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Lucas says-

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  We thought we had more time.

• 1:38:10Jordi Hays?

  I thought we had more time.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  And it's a fake and it's a fake image, but it says the French government citing national security authorities has escorted issued an export control directive to suspend all access to le châton fat by any foreign national, whether inside or outside France, including foreign national Mistral employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable le châton fat for all of our customers to ensure compliance. It's a direct copy pasta from the Anthropic post, of course. And Gary Marcus also says, I got early access to châton and it's terrifying. I was wrong about everything. Of course, Gary Marcus

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  has been skeptical that L L M's will deliver A G I, A S I, R S I, whatever you want to call it, wherever your goalposts are. Gary Marcus says L L M's are not the direct path. And so the joke here is that le châton updated his.

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Five says, anyone noticed le châton fat got quantized lately?

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Yes. People are also saying Mythos is a distillation of le châton fat.

• 1:39:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, there's various rumors around. I think the. Accelerate Harder says you can really tell who has early access to le châton fat and who does not.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  You know, like, like the, the, the butt of the joke here is that, oh, like le châton fat and Mistral, like it can't possibly be on the absolute frontier. But this, this is just good vibes. Like this, like it's showing that they are the leader in France for sure.

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  They're, they're getting a lot of attention.

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Still have mind share.

• 1:39:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Growing the valuation, delivering something. And now people are going to check out this model and see what it can do. And it certainly, it like, people wouldn't be making this joke if Mistral had, you know, been like completely languishing, not doing anything, not making any progress. Like this is a sign of, of some healthy attention. I can't tell if this is a joke anymore, but Nvidia is reportedly in talks with Mistral AI to supply 1.5 billion euros in compute per month to help support the demand for le châton fat and le châton ground.

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  That is a joke. That is a joke.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  I mean, Nvidia.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  It's all fake. It's all fake, except, except the vibe is real and it's amazing.

• 1:40:33John Coogan?

  You can tell who has early access to le châton fat and who doesn't.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  In other news, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has banned social media access for under 16s. He says, "These days, kids must find their feet in a world where technology intrudes into every area of their life. I just can't let that go on anymore, so we're giving children their childhoods back." Let's play the video.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Very interesting. Keir Starmer, right?

• 1:41:00Speaker 06

  Every parent wants the best for their kids. And that's what being a parent means. And for me, for my two kids, all I've ever wanted, hand on heart, is for them to be safe and for them to be happy. And the rest is up to them. But, you know, I think back to when I was growing up. And I have to say, I think we had it easier. These days, kids have to find their feet in a world that changes so quickly, where technology intrudes into every area of their lives. And we know that harms them. The response from parents in the consultation has been absolutely clear.

• 1:41:45Speaker 06

  Thousands of parents say their children are addicted to social media. It can leave them trapped in a cycle of endless scrolling that displaces play, sleep, and time with the family. It can harm their mental health. And frankly, parents need our support on this. That is why today, the government has decided to ban social media access for children under 16. It's a big step for our country.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Goodbye. If you're under 16 in the UK.

• 1:42:20Speaker 06

  It's not an easy thing to do. I'll be honest.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  We exist on social media. I think, I don't know, RSS feeds, are those social media?

• 1:42:27Speaker 06

  We've looked carefully at the evidence.

• 1:42:28Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if, imagine if they'll turn...

• 1:42:32John Coogan?

  Okay, so we can... You know what we have to do? We have to, we have to print every episode's transcript as a book and mail it and put it in children's bookstores. So every, every episode of TVPN needs to be transcribed.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  It works, because there's no swearing.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  Print it on paper. And deliver to children's books.

• 1:42:48Jordi Hays?

  Live plane over the UK and then drop.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Drop leaflets, a massive leaflet campaign, but every, every episode is a fifty, five hundred thousand words. So it just hits the ground like that every, every.

• 1:43:00Jordi Hays?

  So, so what's gonna, what's gonna happen? They're gonna require, they're gonna require major social media companies to require ID verification for every user.

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  There's potentially a bunch of, you know, issues with that, especially given that there's a sort of raging debate around free speech in the United Kingdom and a bunch of issues related to that. And so that, that, a lot of this, again, I, I will happily say that I, I'm, I look forward to trying to get my children to not use social media as long as possible. I don't, I don't think it's, I don't think it's good for anyone's mind, much, much less the mind of, of a child. But there's a lot of issues here. One, the other thing with vibe coding is like, literally, anyone can make a social media app with like one prompt now, right? And so my expectation is this is not really gonna work. And one

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  of the.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  I think it's power law, though.

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes, but, but imagine being a kid and being, and that's been, you're fifteen years old right now. You've been using social media for years.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  I, I, I mean, truthfully, like, if a kid goes and vibe codes a social network and sends it to like their five friends, like, yeah, that might violate like user account logins, it might be like a social app, but that feels like way chiller than not a big deal to me. Like, it feels like the spirit of the law is like held there. Anyway.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  We can come back to this later again in the.

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I just don't, I just think like, there will be a new social network later tomorrow that gets hundreds of thousands of users because social media is inherently viral.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  It's banned the next day.

• 1:44:38Jordi Hays?

  They all have, yeah, yeah. But, but again, like, these things pop up. I remember, I remember there was social media.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  If you have, if, if you have like, okay, there is a million dollar penalty for delivering a social media experience to someone under sixteen, then if I'm a vibe coder, first, the model's gonna say, hey, what you're doing violates UK law. I can't help you. Or they'll say, are you sure you want to do this? Because like, that's risky. And then you do it, and then you just get the fine, and you're like, I'm shutting down. Why would I keep doing this?

• 1:45:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there's gonna be plenty, I mean, there's, there's.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  I don't.

• 1:45:11Jordi Hays?

  Information flows. Information flows. One and and and the only other thing is people have had every issue with like metas like trust and safety, right? But for everything that they do is that is bad, they do probably a million good things, right? Like taking down content that shouldn't be online, stopping abuse, things like that. And so I'm just very interested to see how this plays out. I think the kids are going to find a way to gather online, no matter what the law says.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, maybe it's in the comment section of like the Financial Times.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:51Jordi Hays?

  They'll turn that.

• 1:45:51John Coogan?

  So so the the definition that the UK is using, they're using the Australian model. It's not anything with accounts and comments. It's user to user platforms whose purpose is to enable social interaction where users can post material and where content is distributed alongside slash through algorithms. So you got to have an algorithm is there. They explicitly named Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. And so the working definition is basically a social app where users post content, two other users interact socially, algorithmic feeds shape distribution. So messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal are not affected. So anyway, we can dig into this more. I I think we have Derek Thompson coming on this week.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Imagine being in the group chat that just everyone's sharing, you know, homegrown reels and that they're making in their own homes.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:46:42Jordi Hays?

  Imagine.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  That seems more healthy than, I don't know, it seems like it solves the problem that they're going after. If they think it's a problem, they solve it. Anyway, we have Aaron Gin from Hydra Host, he's the CEO and co-founder. You know, Aaron, how you doing? Been too long. What's up?

• 1:46:55Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, it's been a while, man. I miss David Cameron. So that that's why that's why I take away from that.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, really?

• 1:47:01Aaron Ginn?

  The Tori, they're a mess, but yeah.

• 1:47:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Have you been grappling with the phones, fertility thing, the social media thing? Like, where do you stand on all that?

• 1:47:10Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, one, most of the longitudinal studies, they actually can't normalize or control for most of the stuff versus like already predisposed behavior.

• 1:47:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:17Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, and then like you already were existingly depressed and accelerates the depression similar like alcohol and other things like that. Uh, but, but, but the second is that this is going to go the way of the eighteenth amendment. It because of the guy called Jordy said, which is like, but the world is flatter than it's ever been before. Just like the model stuff with the anthropic. It's like, it's like, okay, so we make a big deal about this, but then sixth of the layer, China already has it. So like, what's the point of this? And, and, and I think that that's like, I, I, I like the intent, but the intent should be like empowering parents to like, educate their children and empower them to control.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Or choose.

• 1:47:51Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, like. Which Apple is doing.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Even a curfew feels more like, even a curfew feels more enforceable or like enforce screen time, which is like you get thirty minutes a day on social media. Like that feels like easier for the platforms to actually enforce than, or the country to enforce than like a, a total ban.

• 1:48:12Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, uh, but, but this, this just goes the normal trajectory of how technology gets adopted. There's always a late stage of regulation and, and for like GPUs, you know, like the, there's a reason why the UK government is so aggressive on sovereign AI. And is because they want to do similar things the, to like what this is. And, and I, I think that that trend is a little bit unescapable because in the UK, you have the right to do that. Like they're, they're a sovereign country. You can regulate how you want to regulate. Uh, and then the latter component is that if, if you think about the kind of how this whole space is flushed out, well, like what has enabled our business? Uh, and why we just, uh, you know, closed a very large series A.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  How much?

• 1:48:52Aaron Ginn?

  Hundred million dollars.

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Woo!

• 1:48:53Aaron Ginn?

  Hundred million dollars. Yeah, yeah, I know. Right, right. So, uh, appreciate that. Uh, I, I have a gong in mind whenever y'all had your, uh, successful acquisition. I rang my little, I rang my little gong for you all. So. Uh, yeah, of course, man. The, uh.

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  Did you, did you prime it? Cause we've been getting a lot of critiques online. People said you didn't prime the gong.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  And I just thought you come in with the hardest possible hit.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  No, I'll show you. I'll show you. You have to do five priming strikes and then the real strike. So you go.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Now it's prime.

• 1:49:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  And then now the real hit like this.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  That's how you prime the gong before you strike it. This is the way you do it. We learned this from the commenters who said we weren't warming it up.

• 1:49:42Aaron Ginn?

  Hey, I'm pro appropriation of my culture. So like, this is, this is always a pro for the J and J.

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you brought us hats. You brought us hats that I didn't even, I didn't feel comfortable wearing because they just.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  I thought he was talking about appropriating GPU whisperer culture. Whispering to the GPUs.

• 1:50:01Aaron Ginn?

  The, I mean, literally, my dad gave me this on my desk. So like, this holds my phone.

• 1:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Very cute.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Love it. So $100 million. What is the distribution of that? I mean, are you going to be buying a lot of GPUs? You're working with Nvidia? Is this like one data center, multiple data centers? Are you building? Like, what restate the thesis of like where you fit in the bottleneck?

• 1:50:23Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, the, so no, we're not using any of the money to buy GPUs. We are an asset like company. I believe we hold the title as the only NeoCloud in Nvidia's orbit that is a software company. So we manage GPUs. So we provide an operating system for the data center to where any data center in the world can become a NeoCloud. We're already in almost two dozen countries, close to 60 data centers, and we have, let's say, several billions in contracts that have been signed for us to continue this project. So that's why Sovereign is a big customer of ours. It's got to think that, you know, is a US company really going to go try to build a data center and supply in England? Or are

• 1:51:06Aaron Ginn?

  they just going to rent from somebody in England? Then you then add the layers of, now we're on social media, but this is clearly going to be applying to GPUs. Then you can see how this all kind of all flows out where data residency in nation states is going to be a permanent fixture going forward. And then that's not me approving that or wanting that. Like, I just think that that's just where we are right now. And then you then add the continuous layers to that of like, well, what is AI going to work on? Healthcare, education, defense, already all those are nationalized industries in other countries. So in summary, public cloud is dead. And Nvidia and all the other accelerators are basically are applying a ton of free cash flow to that same argument. And so we're the software that enables all that to work together.

• 1:51:52John Coogan?

  How much of your thesis is like you want to stay Nvidia only, you want to compound the learnings around the Nvidia ecosystem, there's value, like we talked to another NeoCloud last week that's AMD super focused, but then you talk to other folks and they're like, we want to be completely agnostic, we want to be, you know, one big blob of fluid compute. There's multiple theses that are playing out and people are sort of testing every idea. But how do you see it? Like, what is your strategy?

• 1:52:24Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, so our software works with any OEM or ODM, it's intentionally designed that way. But of course, like the capacity in our data centers reflects exactly what the market demand is. And Nvidia is just the best. And yes, I do think that there is a place for, not necessarily the hyperscaler chips, I think that that market is pretty narrow. I think it's probably five customers that actually would ever buy that. But the rest of the kind of alternatives, they're all going to be designed for very specific use cases. But if you're in a market where power is going to continue to be constrained, data centers are going to be continuing, you're going to pick the most, like, you're basically always going to pick the Porsche Cayenne Turbo, over and over and over again. You want to

• 1:53:05Aaron Ginn?

  put your kids in it, you want to put some stuff in the back. You want to go fast, you want to go, you want to go fast, or Mercedes station wagon, right? The AMG station wagon, right?

• 1:53:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, classic.

• 1:53:19Aaron Ginn?

  So that's, yeah, so that's the Nvidia play, right? Is that I'm the best, I'm expensive, but I can do everything you want me to do. And ASICs and TPUs, et cetera, they're very, they're like, I'm getting a motorcycle, I'm getting a Skoda. And the market will eventually get there.

• 1:53:32Jordi Hays?

  Like a Nissan, Cross Cabrio, Cross Cabrio LA.

• 1:53:35Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  So react to what Gavin Baker just told us on the show earlier. I asked him about, it looks like the trend lines are widening between the United States close source model capabilities and Chinese open source model capabilities. There's a bunch of charts that show one line is growing linearly, the other is growing exponentially over time. That could be really good for America, it could mean a lot of different things, they could catch up, who knows. But he was saying that the big reason for that is that Blackwell's a great chip. They've had the ability to buy it and they've turned their back on Nvidia even though Jensen and Nvidia went to Washington and figured out the correct framework to allow for exports.

• 1:54:22John Coogan?

  Those exports have not been received on the other side because of the push to build an indigenous supply chain. How strong is that narrative for you? What would you add to that?

• 1:54:34Aaron Ginn?

  I think on one of my last op-eds and then during the show, I told the all that was gonna happen, that China was going to basically reverse ban.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:41Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, they because and that's why I wasn't really that concerned about the initial kind of button. Yeah, because that wasn't actually the goal. It's again, like y'all both know my disposition is I love this country and I'm happy my family came here. But there's a kind of under appreciation about how actually Chinese people think and what their goals are as society. So the I agree with Gavin's kind of like, you know, listen to him on All In, his other podcasts, like, yeah, yeah, he's very aligned with kind of our thesis about global compute.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:10Aaron Ginn?

  The the one thing that I would add as a caveat, like the question is like, does it matter? And that's what we don't really know is that if we're in the market as customers and I think probably all three of us has at least some German car.

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:23Aaron Ginn?

  Then other models of German cars are very interesting to us. But if China doesn't care because it buys Toyotas, it buys Volkswagens, it buys whatever, like lower end stuff, then it's just a different way of understanding the preference theory of another country. And and currently, I think the safest assumption that we should have as Americans is that it doesn't matter to them. And because it could be 80% and that's all it needs to be. And if you look at the history of CCG policies, everything from environment to manufacturing to buying stuff from TBO, it seems like the consistent strategy is that 80% is good enough. And and the one thing that we do have to be very careful about, which Zach just talked about pretty religiously. Is that they are winning on the adoption side.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Aaron Ginn?

  And in every kind of arc of innovation that has happened in the world like previously AI. America has won the several stages of the like industrial revolution to other phases of the internet. Because we are first to adopt and China clearly is the first to adopt on robotics, on drones, on AI integration. And and that's where maybe they figured out it doesn't matter. Like like they can solve it via other mechanisms like dirty power, inexpensive chips. And they can kind of go their own their own trajectory. So so like, you know, I'm I'm with the administration on the changes that they've all implemented. I I would say that the Friedberg's kind of last rant last week was definitely echoing like my view on things.

• 1:56:48Aaron Ginn?

  Which is like the the government always thinks they could do something about something when they're out of the can't. And then they spend a bunch of energy and then at the end of the day, it doesn't work and then they still claim victory. Like the world poverty is a great example. I and and and so I feel like that's where we're going to end with AI where in the end, it kind of like all this effort really didn't matter. And it caused entrepreneurs to slow down and eventually the government backs off and realizes that we have to. To quote David Sacks, you know, let America cook.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is distillation a bigger problem than chip exports?

• 1:57:19Aaron Ginn?

  I I think most of that's overblown and it's kind of hard to prove. Yeah, I think I think it's actually quite hard to prove and and and I I also believe there is this kind of.

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  Even if the model will just tell you straight up that.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  It's flawed.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, like that, like I I I in doubt, like I'm not to be clear, it totally does happen. The question is like, how much does it matter?

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Aaron Ginn?

  Like like the and and I think a lot of it is oriented towards the fact of like underappreciating the fact that Chinese engineers are actually amazing. That that this that this product and I think it's kind of all coded with that. They're like, oh, if they're copying us, somehow they can't do it themselves. And they have proven over and over and over again, they can.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:01Aaron Ginn?

  And then you then go into the fact of obviously coding is now universally accepted as a why adoption. Or like in the first season, they put a hole for AI. Well, that's because it was also the most widely used by the customer base. And it has a, you know, a firm yes or no answer. So now you see China, which is using kind of grade B models currently, but is accelerating in its adoption. Like, and it, you know, doesn't care about the what things that we care about in terms of everything from morality to safety and things like that. So of course they're going to be able to find use cases and things that we didn't understand. And, and then that, that's, that's something we as Americans have so far deeply underappreciated. And, and you can see that in the poll numbers where data centers are more unpopular than nuclear energy.

• 1:58:46Aaron Ginn?

  And, and that's a quite scary place to be, uh, which is why the kind of, I think in arc of the data center business, it's actually going to mimic oil and gas business where they, the reason why fracking became this great energy revolution. And why we became the number one exporter of oil and gas in the world is because oil and gas companies pay off owners of lands.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:07Aaron Ginn?

  So that that's just what

• 1:59:08John Coogan?

  Forever too. I mean, you have a small piece of land that they're fracking on, like you get a check in the mail.

• 1:59:14Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  And that's starting to happen. I, I, I, there, there's a

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like Brad is working on something.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  Oh, with the Trump accounts, but also, I mean,

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  No, not even, he was sort of teasing, like, we have something like around, like,

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Because we were just saying, why would you want a data center in your backyard if you can get, if you can use inference from, you know, somewhere in another state, right? Tyler just wanted to say hi. It's been a minute.

• 1:59:37Aaron Ginn?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  There we go. There's the hat.

• 1:59:40Aaron Ginn?

  He kept the hat.

• 1:59:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Oh, of course we kept, of course we kept the, your gift. We would never, we would have, we would never, uh, it's, it's here always in the office.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  It's on our hat rack with a space helmet, hard helmet.

• 1:59:51Jordi Hays?

  Cowboy hats, unicorn heads, et cetera.

• 1:59:55Aaron Ginn?

  Oh, that's so great.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Anyway, thanks so much for taking the time.

• 1:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congrats on the milestone. Great to see you.

• 2:00:00Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, thank you. Thanks, guys.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  It's been too long. Let's do this again soon. We gotta chop it up on all sorts of things. It's always a great time. Have a good one.

• 2:00:06Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, absolutely. And congrats to y'all too. God bless y'all. Y'all definitely, out of the few entrepreneurs I know, man, like, I was very happy for y'all. Y'all deserved it.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Aaron. Great to see you, dude. Congrats again.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And our next guest is here with us live in the TVPAM Ultra Dome. Rafael, welcome to the show. Please introduce yourself for everyone at home first.

• 2:00:35Speaker 08

  Rafael Alvejas, helps start AppLovin'.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Speaker 08

  AppLovin' is the largest mobile ad platform that you may or may have not heard of.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Let's put this.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  I think everyone on X knows, I feel like your guys, you guys have like 100% saturation, at least on our corner of X.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. I feel like some people learned like forcibly because they were like, hey, what's going on with this business? Came out of nowhere, like, wasn't, I don't know, wasn't like super noisy and then people were skeptical and then you kind of proved all the haters wrong again and again.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Not, not a venture story, right?

• 2:01:05Speaker 08

  No, not at all. We couldn't even raise a dime in San Hill. I think Adam was willing to give away 25% of the company out of 5 billion cap way back in the day.

• 2:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:01:13Speaker 08

  And now the company's worth 180 billion dollars. We've done pretty well.

• 2:01:17John Coogan?

  That's crazy. 25%. What, what was, as you tell the story, what was the key to get from 5 billion to where you are today?

• 2:01:26Speaker 08

  The big thing for us has really just been the model, right? The great thing is, in the world of performance marketing, advertisers don't have incremental costs typically to bring in new users.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:36Speaker 08

  Right? At least on the digital side for games. And then we went into e-commerce as well and we made the model work there, but people always want more customers, especially if they can buy them profitably. The question is, how many more times over can you do that? We've been able to do it at a pretty big scale.

• 2:01:48John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, mobile games, super interesting economy, sneakily large. Again, I think the part of the reason why AppLovin' is sometimes misunderstood is that people misunderstand how big the mobile games market is. They think like, oh, well, I'm familiar with like a blockbuster movie. Certainly it's about the same, it's entertainment. Uh, no, it's way bigger. Um, but walk me through, first, how big is the mobile game market? How international is it? Walk through the dynamics of like whales versus daily players versus free players? Like what, what's the shape of the market that you're describing to a potential new AppLovin' customer?

• 2:02:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, sure. So the mobile gamer is pretty much everyone. Think about it, you're on a first-class flight, right? You see somebody right next to you playing a word game or a solitaire game, or you're on the bus, or it's your wife at home.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:38Speaker 08

  So it's not just, you know, some kid sitting in their basement.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:42Speaker 08

  For us, we see over a billion people every single day, primarily. Heads of households and female. So for us, like, we see it's a massive market. And I think in the App Store, there's, I think, over $120 billion of annual spend just in in-app purchases. So that really speaks to the volume of it.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, the dads are PC master race, mouse and keyboard.

• 2:03:03Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  They have a collar, dead on a mobile game.

• 2:03:06Speaker 08

  And I mean.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  It's getting there, it's getting there. You get the backbone, you click that into your phone, you can play COD Mobile. There's ways around this.

• 2:03:13Speaker 08

  But.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Game streaming.

• 2:03:15Speaker 08

  The business grew 70% last year and it was primarily driven by the gaming side of the business. Now, ecommerce has been the really big massive thing for us. And, listen, you say everyone's heard about us. Part of our TVPN ad ownership, you know, helped with that.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 2:03:29Speaker 08

  But no, it's been incredible. I mean, you know, kind of looking back, we're in 26.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:33Speaker 08

  In 25, we announced doing, having a billion dollar run rate in the e-comm business. Just a year of it being open.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:40Speaker 08

  Now, we're, have our self-serve, referral only.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:45Speaker 08

  Thousands of accounts have on-boarded.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:47Speaker 08

  And hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of value's been generated for e-comm's merchants.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:52Speaker 08

  And we're so small. I mean, like, just for the context of the market here, right? So, I think Facebook's got over 10 million active advertisers. We only have a few thousand, right?

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:04:03Speaker 08

  And so, for us, this is like, a holy crap once in a lifetime, like, opportunity. Especially for advertisers that are looking for a new channel.

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:04:13Speaker 08

  For us, like, you know, we're at less than 0.01% of the market share.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:18Speaker 08

  But we have north of $12 billion of ad spend compounding at 70% year over year, right? So, we think this is going to be a massive, massive opportunity.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  So, two questions on AI. Let's start with the, the mobile game dynamic. We've seen those charts, the number of App Store submissions is skyrocketing.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  And yet, we all can't really point to like, oh, there's that breakout game that was vibe coded by the, you know, the kid in the basement or something like that. And we could during the early App Store boom. I remember, was it Flappy Bird?

• 2:04:53Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  Created by a kid who really not, it wasn't some Sand Hill Road $10 million.

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  There was some NBA related game.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, I didn't play it, but I had at least a handful of people, but it was all web based.

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  There's a few games that are happening, but what are you seeing in the data? Is anything starting to move where you're like, oh, like that's AI or that's vibe coding? I can see something changing about the business or are we still sort of like pre showing up in your business?

• 2:05:18Speaker 08

  So what we see is really cool. I'd say on the advertiser and the developer side, more and more people are coming onto the platform, right? And so on the developer side, what we see is that more developers are in need of distribution. It's now become a core part of the strategy.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  So much sense, yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 08

  In 2012, 2013, when we started the business, most advertisers would depend on just getting an App Store feature.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:40Speaker 08

  That is no longer the game.

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, buddy of mine vibe coded an app. Vibe coded an app.

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:45Jordi Hays?

  I downloaded it.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:47Jordi Hays?

  And then was later trying to leave a review because he's like, hey, this helps visibility. Couldn't find the app in the App Store, even if I searched the app, like the exact phrase.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, there were so many little like.

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Find it through the link. So App Store discovery seems like, you know.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  There were so many little like, I don't know, the, like the web 2.0 playbook of like, contact, import, invite your friends, share a social leaderboard and people would be, oh yeah, game center integration is going to be the thing that makes you pop out. And none of that was, they were always sort of over promising, but some of them did work. Like some of them really did go viral and, and had interesting distribution techniques, but a lot of those have been commoditized. So actually showing up and, and, you know, building your business on the back of Apple, it makes a lot of sense. What about AI internally? Eric Suft and Mobile Dev Memo is writing a lot about gems model, the gem model over at Facebook,

• 2:06:43John Coogan?

  that they're getting a lot of lift at Meta out of new, more advanced transformer based, you know, matching algorithms, advertising algorithms. It's sort of like the unsexy part of Meta's AI strategy, but have you started to see glimpses of just improvement in your system during the AI era?

• 2:07:04Speaker 08

  So yeah, so you know. On our side, our developers on a weekly basis are releasing improvements to our algorithm.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:11Speaker 08

  And a lot of those improvements are also on the backs of using the state of the art models out there. So we definitely get an advantage of it.

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18Speaker 08

  And outside of just like the ad algorithm itself, internally, our efficiency gains have been massive. Like, I can speak for myself personally.

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:25Speaker 08

  Our marketing team is eight other people.

• 2:07:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:28Speaker 08

  Every single person on the marketing team is a vibe coder, right? They're using Claude Code, they're using Codex, and they're building tools to make them more efficient in their role.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:36Speaker 08

  You know, we before used to have to run everything through an engineer. Now everyone is their own engineer.

• 2:07:41John Coogan?

  Are you token maxing? Are you token mining? Or are you token min-maxing?

• 2:07:45Speaker 08

  We're token maxing.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  Maxing?

• 2:07:46Speaker 08

  We're token maxing.

• 2:07:47John Coogan?

  Wow. Flashback to February. What's going on? Isn't this gonna be a problem? Aren't your shareholders gonna be upset?

• 2:07:54Speaker 08

  We've gotten some messages from my team.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Flashback, coming in.

• 2:07:58Speaker 08

  We've, uh, you know, we've got some messages about cost getting a little bit out of hand, but you know, the, the good thing is this.

• 2:08:03John Coogan?

  It's not showing up in the quarterly earnings yet.

• 2:08:05Speaker 08

  No, not at all. I mean, the beauty is that when you've only got a few hundred employees and you're generating as much revenue as us, you're gonna have to be doing a lot of token burning.

• 2:08:14John Coogan?

  Somebody who allegedly, might be a complete rumor, but $90,000 in a day.

• 2:08:18Speaker 08

  Wow.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  So I, I think you might be changing your tune.

• 2:08:22Speaker 08

  No, no, we're, we're nowhere near that.

• 2:08:24John Coogan?

  It was a light week. Half a million dollars. But yeah, judicious use, token maxing, but not taken to the extreme.

• 2:08:32Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  The judicious usage. That makes sense.

• 2:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what, what does it take to, all the digital marketers, growth people I know will happily test any new ad platform? What, what has been the key to retaining customers, right? Like, you know, marketer, let's say they're managing a $20 million budget. A lot of it's going to Meta, Google, handful, you know, maybe some TV. You come to them and you say like, give us a shot with like, you know, a quarter mill or half a mill or something like that. Everyone will take the shot, right? But you gotta, if you want to build a big business, you gotta retain.

• 2:09:09Speaker 08

  Profitability at scale. So that scale is different for everyone. Some people are happy with you driving an extra 10% growth for their business. Some are saying, hey, you have to be the next, you know, Facebook or Google for us. But I would say for us, like, we see over half our clients actually retain. So we do a pretty good job. The algorithm works for a lot of people who come on. Now it's just getting the word out to the masses, right?

• 2:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Awesome. That's next week.

• 2:09:32Speaker 08

  Uh, that is next week we open it. One other big thing is that we are going back to the AppLovin name. And this is a part of the rule as well.

• 2:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I love it. That's what I wanted. I wanted it the whole time. I wanted that the whole time.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  AppLovin's amazing. It transcends app. Like, I think of it as its own entity, AppLovin. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  And for, for, for anyone that's confused as to why AppLovin is going back to the name AppLovin, uh, you guys were thinking about having the ad platform be named something else.

• 2:10:00Speaker 08

  Axon. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  So, anyway, smart, smart play. I always, I always, that's what I always wanted. I have no say in the matter.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:10Speaker 08

  Let's hire more marketing people.

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Um, talk about generative creative. Is, is that in demand from your partners? Because I can imagine a marketer saying, you know, for this particular audience on this particular platform, yeah, I want you to just go to a frontier model and generate me 100 different copy lines that all fit neatly in the box and generate some images and here's some screenshots to sort of work through. You could even have an AI agent actually use my game, take real screenshots, then you don't get the slop allegations. But in terms of layout, in terms of distribution, like, how much of that is brands coming to you saying, look, I'm already really comfortable with ChatGPT images or Nano Banana or Higgsfield,

• 2:10:57John Coogan?

  so I got it handled. I don't need your tool versus I would love for you to do this for me.

• 2:11:01Speaker 08

  Yeah. So taking a step back.

• 2:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 08

  The value of creative is that if you find the right creative that resonates with the right audience, it can be one of the biggest growth levers for your business, right?

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  Sort of a power law.

• 2:11:12Speaker 08

  Exactly, right? It's, you know, let's say you spend an extra 5% on creative and you find a winner, it doesn't mean you're only going to spend another 5%, you could spend double, right?

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:20Speaker 08

  And so every advertiser wants more creative that's performing in high quality.

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:24Speaker 08

  And so. Amongst all advertisers we talk about, they all want the generative tools. What we have right now is generative interactives. So that has been very helpful for us.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:33Speaker 08

  Why is that? Why interactives? And we'll talk about video in a second. How our ad unit works is we show a video, then there's interactive, and then there's the catalog. A lot of the clicks that happen on our ads are within the interactive. And so that has been massively adopted.

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  And that's basically playing a demo of the game or a smaller version loaded probably in HTML or JavaScript, and then you get to demo it.

• 2:11:56Speaker 08

  You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  And that's probably extremely cumbersome for a small developer with a new game. They have to go create a new version of their game that loads quickly in the AppLovin platform very seamlessly. And that's a perfect use case for.

• 2:12:10Speaker 08

  A hundred percent. And imagine you're not even a game studio, right? You're an e-commerce store, you're selling wallets.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  And you want to use the interactive.

• 2:12:17Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:12:17John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:12:18Speaker 08

  Right? Well, the interactives are massive.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:20Speaker 08

  Right? And so it's where we get a majority of the engagement. And you're showing an ad within a game, right? So how do you gamify that experience? How do you allow it to look at more specifications of the product?

• 2:12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:30Speaker 08

  All, I would say 80% of our top advertisers use interactives. And so it's such a massive unit.

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:36Speaker 08

  Now, where is this going? So right now, we've got the interactives.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:39Speaker 08

  Now, video has been our main focus.

• 2:12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:42Speaker 08

  We have it in beta and it's been really good.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:44Speaker 08

  And so our goal is to get that out to everybody.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:47Speaker 08

  By the end of the year, how we envision onboarding on AppLovin is you go onto the site, you set up the pixel.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:55Speaker 08

  Then you create a campaign with one button. It automatically generates the creatives. It pulls the links.

• 2:13:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:02Speaker 08

  And then you're off onto the races, right? You just have to tell it your goal as well. So that's where we expect where the market is going. And it's part of our goal, which is making profitable advertising accessible to everybody.

• 2:13:12Jordi Hays?

  What's your advice for somebody that wants to be the first hire at a company that becomes worth 175 billion in the public markets?

• 2:13:22Speaker 08

  Work harder than everyone else around you and always be meeting people. You know, I got lucky to meet Adam.

• 2:13:29Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't think there was any luck. I think it was pure skill. That's why I asked.

• 2:13:34Speaker 08

  But I mean, like, my background, funny enough, is I am a high school dropout, right? And what I tell everyone is that-

• 2:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Did you get your GED or?

• 2:13:42Speaker 08

  No, GED. If mom and dad are listening, sorry.

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  Have you actually gamed out, can you get like an honorary PhD from some elite institution?

• 2:13:52Speaker 08

  I don't know. I haven't reached out.

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  Because that's the max.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  An advertising honor?

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, wherever like your hometown has a university, you go give the commencement speech, you start donating and all of a sudden they're just like PhD. And it's like probably cheaper, like if you donate what the tuition would have been, you probably get the honorary degree.

• 2:14:09Speaker 08

  Well, if Stanford and Harvard are listening, you know, my email box is open for you.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  I think they need you.

• 2:14:13Speaker 08

  But, but my analogy I'd always tell everyone is that, you know, when you send the warriors out to go get food, the first question they ask back isn't who is the eldest tribes leader? It was who killed the animal and who brought us back the food? And so that was always my analogy of like, as long as I outworked everyone and delivered a ton of value, then I would be at the same conversation and the same table as everybody else.

• 2:14:34Jordi Hays?

  So your advice, one word, kill.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, you kill at a lot of small companies and if you provide value, if you provide ROI, you keep showing up. What about other platforms? I mean, we were just talking earlier in the show about Fox acquiring Roku, they have Tubi, there's a lot of ad inventory there. Have you thought about getting into that space? Like, what does that look like? What is the product line expansion beyond the phone look like in the future?

• 2:15:04Speaker 08

  You know, it's funny, everyone talks about expanding, we're thinking about consolidating more.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  You want to focus.

• 2:15:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, focus, exactly, right? You know, you try to do everything, you can't go deep on many things, right? And so our, what I would say is like, our company has grown so much since we got rid of a lot of the gaming studios. Since we stopped focusing on that side of the business. For us, we feel like we have so much room to grow. I mean, remember, less than a tenth of a percent of advertisers in the world even use Apple.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:15:29Speaker 08

  So let us get to millions of advertisers. And then we can talk about the rest of the other.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  That makes sense. And also, you're very fortunate in like, you're focused on a market that is growing. Both like, mobile gaming and advertising in mobile gaming and e-commerce. And time on phone, like you're, I've got like 12 different tailwinds. Why go into a market that has headwinds?

• 2:15:48Speaker 08

  A hundred percent. I don't think people are spending less time on their phone these days.

• 2:15:51John Coogan?

  Nope. Nope. Maybe in the UK, if you're under 16.

• 2:15:55Jordi Hays?

  John with your Apple Vision Pro. You know, that's taking away some screen time. That's a real threat to you guys.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  It's actually twice the screen time because it's both eyes, two screens.

• 2:16:05Speaker 08

  Nixon, Nixon won YouTube on the left.

• 2:16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's asking, full brain rot. Anyway.

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, excited for more people to get access and great to meet you.

• 2:16:14Speaker 08

  Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on the show, guys.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Coming on the show. We'll close out there. Leave us five stars on Apple.

• 2:16:20Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  We got stuff. Okay, what do we got?

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  One of the best ads I've ever seen.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Okay, we're going from ad to ad.

• 2:16:26Jordi Hays?

  In my life, this ad is truly one of the best. Let's pull it up.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  Wait, what is this?

• 2:16:33Jordi Hays?

  This is just, this is an ad from.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Cheaper usually. Cheaper usually. This is one of those fake, this is one of those fake tech ads that the guy put up in the subway. That's what's going on. No?

• 2:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheaper usually. Yeah, I started thinking, hmm, well, in what settings is it not cheaper?

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  It's really tough if you're trying to get people to switch.

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  It's certainly not cheaper if you're trying to go, uh, like one block, like a car is always going to be, uh, is always going to be more expensive. But this also feels like, it's like, we're trying to be cheaper. It feels like price war with Uber still. But it's like, we're sort of doing a price war, but not all the time. So you don't know. It's not really a guarantee of any sort of, I feel like most marketing campaigns need to guarantee something. Even if it's a moderate guarantee, it's like 5% cheaper every time.

• 2:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but because if it's cheaper usually, could they not just say cheaper?

• 2:17:30John Coogan?

  Even

• 2:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Drop the usually.

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  The usually is hilarious. Like, I'm thinking about different campaigns like

• 2:17:34Jordi Hays?

  If you take, if you take a bunch of Lyft rides.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  The same route every single day and you take a bunch of like Uber rides.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  You could probably just make the argument that it's cheaper.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, what's the, uh, what, what's that airline that has the tagline bags fly free?

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  To put cheaper and then your logo.

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's not good either. Uh, I think it's Southwest that has bags fly free. Like, can you imagine how bad that campaign would be if it was bags fly free usually?

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Usually?

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Like, built Ford tough, usually. It's usually built Ford tough. Not always, but usually. What are some other, uh, big, just do it.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Usually, usually not the most expensive option.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Most I, most?

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  That's even, that's even, that's even worse because then they're thinking, okay, sometimes it's the most expensive. Um, anyways, folks, uh, I'm rooting for Lyft.

• 2:18:30John Coogan?

  There's some other billboards.

• 2:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's check in.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  The, the new chat GPT billboards are, are really good.

• 2:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Lyft is up 10% in the last month.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  The chat GPT.

• 2:18:36Jordi Hays?

  The campaign is working.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  It's really cool. I like it because it has the same like, it, it is aesthetically pretty, but it's also functional.

• 2:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Bags don't fly free anymore, apparently.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they don't. But there was one airline, think different, usually. I'm loving it, usually. McDonald's. A diamond is forever, usually. De Beers. Got me.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  What's the other one? Finger licking good, usually. KFC. It's very ominous.

• 2:19:07Jordi Hays?

  The best a man can get, usually.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  July, usually.

• 2:19:10Jordi Hays?

  Breakfast of champions, usually.

• 2:19:12John Coogan?

  Have it your way, usually.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm loving it, usually. Like a good neighbor, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there, usually.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  The few, the proud, the Marines, usually.

• 2:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Taste the rainbow, usually. Red Bull gives you wings, usually.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  That's actually probably accurate. Anyway.

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Fly the friendly skies, usually.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  I gotta tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. It lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Always. Shopify always lets you do this. They never, it's not a usual thing.

• 2:19:49Jordi Hays?

  Verizon's.

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  Let me also tell you about Codex. Codex always is a powerful workspace for always getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex always helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Always.

• 2:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Visa, everywhere you want to be, usually.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  Also, we told you about public earlier, but it's investing for those who take it seriously.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  BMW, the ultimate driving machine.

• 2:20:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We all, oh, we also got to talk about fin.ai, sale to Salesforce, fantastic outcome. True testament to founder mode. Give it up for Owen McCabe, friend of the show, Mark Benioff, friend of the show, teaming up. Absolutely amazing outcome. Such a wild ride to build Intercom, wind up raising a ton of money, build a great business, but not, you know, have this like, you know, founder energy. We talked to, we talked to Owen about this where it was like, okay, the business is working. Things are growing. It's not crisis mode. It's not wartime anymore. And he sort of got forced into peacetime and then AI shows up and he gets to go back into wartime.

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  And he delivered fantastic growth, fantastic new products, a fantastic outcome.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  Met the moment.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  For everyone, met the moment and is now on, you know, the, the Salesforce team. And can be absolutely knocking heads.

• 2:21:12Jordi Hays?

  Great outcome for Intercom and Fin, massive pickup for Salesforce.

• 2:21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the rebrand, crazy move. Like, I think a lot of people were like, wait, Intercom's like this known thing. Why are you launching a new product and rebranding the whole company? But that's the type of thing that you get when a company switches into wartime mode, switches into founder mode. And so you get these like high. Risk high reward things and I don't know if the rebrand or rename was you know that critical to the outcome. There was a lot of other stuff, mainly the growth, the product, right? But it just shows you that OWN came in and said, I'm willing to change literally everything, including the name of the company that I've been running for a decade. So fantastic news. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2027.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  That's a long time to integrate, but good luck to them to get through that. It's been 15 years in the making. So what's six quarters to wait around for the deal to close?

• 2:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Super happy for the Finn team.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic outcome. In the seat for 27 years, Benioff's been at it. So fantastic crew. Congratulations to all in all. Leave us Fox, ours and Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Goodbye.

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  Technologies Daily Show.

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  Technology in motion.

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  According to Train in the chat. We love you. Goodbye.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye.