Delian Asparouhov, Ridge Wallet Interview, Nvidia Earnings, The Sheikh of AI

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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 TBPN live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's right. Today is Thursday, February 27th, and this show starts now. We've got a great show for you today. We're going over Nvidia earnings. We're talking about the spy sheik, a man out in the Middle East who's making waves in AI investing. And we're also breaking down Stripe's letter from the founders. Lots of interesting fintech data in there. We're going to have two call-ins today. We got Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet and Dalian Asparouhov from Varda and Founders Fund.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  What are they going to be talking about, John?

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Sean is actually going to come on and talk about AppLovin. A lot of turmoil in the stock. I think they're down a bunch recently, right? I actually haven't been following that, but he's the expert. That's why we're having him on.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll pull up the chart right now, but Sean has been a big customer of AppLovin. There's been a lot of attacks against them recently. He's come out in defense of them, saying that, you know, you can say that it's overvalued. That's fair, but it is a real platform. We've driven real results on it. And so it'll be interesting to get his perspective there. I think he spent a few million dollars there last quarter. And so we'll get an update there. And then a very exciting day for Varda.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, second re-entry, successful. And so Dalian will come on and break it down and hopefully give us some color on what's going on in the space economy. And, you know, hopefully get political, explain what's going on with DoD procurement.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Said hopefully get political.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We don't get political. We let our guests get political. I don't know. He'll talk about whatever he wants to talk about. Anyway, let's kick it off with a report in the Wall Street Journal about Nvidia's earnings. They beat earnings. They're down today. If you want to pull that up on public, I'd love some extra context, but I'll start reading from this. "The chip giant has stayed relevant even as DeepSeek and other reasoning AI models rise. Nvidia faced a growing threat earlier last year. The artificial intelligence world was shifting in a way that invited competition as millions of people started using AI tools, operating the underlying models to respond to their many queries became more important than the computing-intensive work of training them." This is the training-to-inference shift that we saw happen, and which was expected. You train the model and then you want to

• 2:10John Coogan?

  actually serve it. And so you've got to do inference. This had propelled Nvidia to the top of the AI boom. Many expected that shift could give competitors, including Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, an opening to pry away market share. But Nvidia was already preparing to adapt and stay at the forefront of the AI race despite the shift away from creating models and toward operating them, a process known in the industry as inference. And I love this article because all the killers are here. They got Dylan Patel quoted. They got a bunch of other people that we'll get into shortly. Its latest AI chips, Blackwell, are larger in size, have more computer memory, and use less precise numbers in AI computations. They can also be linked together in large numbers with superfast networking, which

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Dylan Patel, the founder of industry research firm Semi Analysis, said led to breakthrough gains in inference. So, bull case for Nvidia laid out by Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis. Nvidia's performance gains for Blackwell are much larger in inference than they are in training, he said. Nvidia's latest quarterly earnings report on Wednesday partly reflected its success in adapting to the industry shift. It included sales and profit that exceeded analysts' expectations, coupled with an optimistic forecast for the company's current quarter. Inference has become a growing focus as AI evolves towards so-called reasoning models, where a digital brain thinks through answers to users' queries step by step. That process can require 100 times more computing power, chief executive Jensen Wong said

• 3:39John Coogan?

  on a call with analysts Wednesday. The vast majority of our compute today is actually inference, and Blackwell takes all of that to a new level. We designed Blackwell with the idea of reasoning models in mind. So, yeah, obviously, when you're reasoning, so many more tokens are being generated, hundreds of, hundreds times more, and so inference is becoming much more important, and Blackwell has positioned Nvidia well to take advantage of that. Got anything for me, Jordy?

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I mean, it's just, it's only a company like Nvidia could have an earnings beat and a very optimistic forecast, and the stock trade down 6% the next day, which is where it's at, six, almost six and a half percent. So it wasn't just price to perfection.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Price for perfection.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  It was price beyond perfection in there. The stock price is paying for it today. But let's get into the rest of it, and then I'm sure we'll have other thoughts.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  So Collette Crass, Nvidia's chief financial officer, added that many early developments of the company's Blackwell chips were earmarked for inference work. That pattern was a first for a new generation of the company's chips. Among the companies pursuing reasoning models are OpenAI, Google, and the upstart Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which we've covered on the show. The emergence in January of DeepSeek, which said it had built sophisticated AI models that required fewer of Nvidia's chips, touched off the significant scare for Nvidia since the AI boom began. So, of course, it sold off, then it gained back, and now it's back down.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of DeepSeek, I don't know if this is in the stack for later, but somebody shared yesterday that they have off-hours pricing. So you can basically, it's already extremely cheap, but then off-hours, which are their sort of non-busy hours, it's like off another 50%. And somebody was saying, great, we have T-Mu AI now.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  Well, there's a ton of load balancing that does happen in these AI inference models. So Midjourney, when you're in America and you're using Midjourney during your workday, you are likely running that inference in Asia on an Asian server. Because of the time difference, they're not using it in the middle of the night, and then vice versa. And so that type of load balancing happens all the time. But it is funny how sometimes it seems like the models, if they're under stress, they still work, but they become like lower quality, or there's a bunch of knobs that people are tuning, and it's basically like, yeah, your AI worker is getting

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  Just won't try as hard.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Just doesn't try as hard, exactly.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Need some protein.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Wong brushed off that threat on Wednesday, describing DeepSeek's advances as an excellent innovation that AI developers everywhere were taking inspiration from. I think that's true. A lot of those gains will be baked in, but people will still want to run them on really big, really big server farms and using a lot of Blackwell chips. Why not stack all the gains together if you can? In the past, Wong has suggested that inference and training will eventually converge as AI more closely aligns with how humans operate. People don't absorb new information and reference it separately. He said at Stanford University last year, you're learning and inferencing all the time.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Great point.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  And some of these models, actually, it's what's called online learning, where you can continue to train the model even after it's been fully trained. Yeah, so I mean, obviously, there's the pre-training, post-training, but a lot of these models are now what's called online, so they can be essentially updated. And I think that the people that look at AI as, you know, we're kind of replicating the human brain, think about it that way, where there's like fast thinking, slow thinking, all these different models, and you need to replicate all of that.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  And humans are fixated on, you know, especially in our corner of the internet, improving your thinking day over day, not in sort of quarterly installments.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  Or, and yeah, it's interesting, because right now, people seem very comfortable with the idea of, it would become a lot to process if, you know, Claude 3.5, you know, there's some people today, I saw the Cursor founder sharing, he still prefers Claude 3.5 over 3.7, and people are sort of oriented now around these sort of releases and having like fixed models.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  But there's a world in the future where they're just constantly morphing and evolving, and I think that that's what this point's getting at here.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen some diagrams where people have said like, oh, there's too many algorithms now and too many like hacks on top of the core LLM to really call it AGI. Like, it doesn't count. It needs to be like one simple algorithm. The algorithm for AGI will be just some simple transformer, and then it'll just be massively scaled up, and that will give us everything we need, as opposed to what we have now, which is like, yes, like, it has the ability to use a web browser, but that's adapted to it, and has like ability to look up data and index things, and it, but another way to think about it is like, in your mind, you have the access to go to the library and look up books, and you have the ability to use a calculator. And so, maybe we don't need to create an LLM

• 8:28John Coogan?

  that can do every single calculation from its head. It can just use a calculator.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  That feels more like superintelligence, right?

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Closer to the definition of something that doesn't need any

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Anything else.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  External references.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Exactly, and it's almost like, yeah, it's almost like an academic exercise of like, can you just create some superintelligence with a single, simple algorithm? Well, it doesn't matter, because really what people want are just agents that do their jobs.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  And so, it doesn't matter if it's, if it's, you know, just going and writing some Python and then coming back with the correct answer. I just want the correct answer.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  So Nvidia still faces strong competition in inference industry insiders say while Nvidia's advances in hardware and investments in its AI software have kept customers around a variety of new chips from startups and more established chipmakers mean it won't be easy for Nvidia to maintain its position at the top. Robert Wacken, the co-founder of AI chip startup Etched, I actually spent three hours interviewing him last year. Great team, fascinating team, two teal fellows on that team. And they are trying to build a, an inference based chip that's just a transformer baked down into silicon. So those, so those would run much faster. And they've done

• 9:37John Coogan?

  some cool demos where they've been able to generate Minecraft essentially on the fly. And the only thing that it takes in is the input from the controller. And then it just generates the next frame that you would expect to see. And so you can just play this full game and it's all being generated. There's no game engine. Yeah, exactly. So

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  Level, the guy on X, I think, uh, levels I O, he's doing something with flight, uh, like a, an alter, like a flight simulator, fully generated version.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  We'll talk about that later, but I'm pretty sure what that is, is he had, he had AI write game engine code.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  It's different than generating the video. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, but, but similar things. I mean,

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Regardless, yeah, with the pace of development, some of these models, you can imagine a future where games are just perpetually generated in every, you know, in every possible direction, right? It'll be a totally new experience to play games versus historically, there's a map and there's sort of boundaries to the game. And then what happens when there's, there's no more map, like the map is whatever you can imagine or whatever the game can imagine.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  There's no finite levels. Like you can, you can go to chat GPT right now and just say, tell me a story about a knight fighting for a castle and then just immediately be like, continue the story. Where does it go next? Where does it go next? And you can do that for

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Or do that with Star Wars. Say, pretend, you know, you just finished the movie, you know, this movie, you know, continue the movie.

• 11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And right now it might get boring, but eventually you can say, hey, hey, make another level for me, make another level for me essentially, and do it all in real time. And so he said Nvidia's chips were fundamentally limited by their origins as graphics processing units adapted for AI instead of custom made for the moment. Sharpening the Swiss Army knife only gets you so far, Wakan said. You have to build specialized hardware if you want to get maximal performance. You're hitting a wall here. And we certainly saw that in Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin was originally mined on the CPU, then eventually GPUs, then what are called FPGAs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, which are really kind of customizable silicon pieces. And then, and then after FPGAs, it went to ASICs, which are, the algorithm is baked into silicon.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  The chip can only run one algorithm. And the algorithm that the Bitcoin ASICs run is the Bitcoin algorithm that just mines, mines, mines. And hugely risky because you're

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  Chips yearn for the mines, much like the children yearn for Minecraft.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  True, true. Everything converges to mining in this, in this world. Mining and tokens, crypto tokens, AI LLM tokens. You know, there's these weird crossovers all over the place. But for the Bitcoin folks, it was very risky because you, you have to spend all this money to make these chips. And then if the price of Bitcoin doesn't go up, well, you're not going to reap your benefit. Now, a lot of those

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  Or the price of energy goes

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Or energy, exactly. And so this, it's, it's the same game that we're seeing playing out right now. And Etched is betting that Transformer architecture is here to stay and that AI inference is going to be here to stay. And I think that's a very safe bet. I, I, I'm very excited for what these guys are building. Of course, it's a huge task to actually go and build a Transformer based chip and get it manufactured. But the, the co-founders

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  It's so interesting to think about the comparison between humans thinking, just the process of thinking requires a bunch of calories, which is one form of energy, right? Inference, on the other hand, the same, the same level of human thinking is going to require some amount of inference to accomplish sort of the same generalized sort of reasoning process.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  But it also requires energy. So it'll be interesting to think like I actually want to see comparisons of for a human to reason something out, what is the energy cost? What is the comparable energy cost for a machine to do it? I would think that right now it's very possible that it takes more sort of calories in almost energy in for the machine to do it. But eventually that'll that could flip, but it might be closer than you'd actually think, but it's interesting comparison, right?

• 13:33John Coogan?

  You just gotta take all the people, put them in pods.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  How many David protein bars do you need to have a good take, right? For you, it's maybe like a quarter of one.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you every time.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it really, it's, yeah, the matrix is basically that story.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  So he goes on to say, a number of startups have begun making inroads among large AI customers. Cerebras, which is a company we've talked about before, they designed the largest chips ever produced wafer scale chips.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I love this because everybody's like, we need to make the best, smallest, most performant chip. They're like, no, we're just gonna make the biggest one. We're gonna try to make the biggest and best chip, very American out of a French, French firm.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  I don't know if they're working with Mistral now.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  They're working with Mistral.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  And, and, and it was interesting because Cerebras, I think they might've gone public or they, or they became a pretty big company and they, they had one deal that wasn't with a company that people had actually like used the product of. It was kind of more of like a hypothetical.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Cerebras is in, is in Sunnyvale. So not French, but working with Mistral.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  And so, and so they're working with Mistral now to build the world's fastest AI chatbot. So because it's all on one chip, you can inference it very quickly. There's no memory bandwidth to deal with. And so there's advantages to that. Of course, there's a bunch of drawbacks. We talked about this when you're manufacturing at wafer scale. One tiny defect throws out the entire chip as opposed to if you have a wafer and you're getting 50 chips off of that. If you, you know, your, your yield is, you know, 49 out of 50 instead of zero out of one. And so there have been a lot of risks to that approach, but I love to see that they're trying a different approach and trying to create just a new product that optimizes around a different vector of, of progress.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  And so Saudi Arabia's oil giant Aramco is working closely with AI chip startup Grok, which is with a Q. It's a different Grok.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  That's a tough one.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  It's very tough and Samba Nova Systems to set up large computing facilities for inference. And now the Grok GROQ, they went viral with a demo because they ran Llama on their chip, which I'm not exactly sure. They did something where they optimized for like super fast memory bandwidth, but low, low total memory allocation or something like that. They made some trade off and the result was that you could inference Llama and generate tokens like extremely, extremely quickly. And it would just, you know how like you're kind of waiting for ChatGPT to load with the GROQ chip, it would just like spit out a full page like immediately. And that was like kind of magical.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  When you're so used to LLMs taking a little bit to think and when it happens instantly, it's really shocking.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  It's magical and it also, yeah, exactly. And I'm sure there's that, that, that thing about like Amazon, you know, every five milliseconds of optimization really matters. And so you could see that really driving adoption. It's unclear if that's, if GROQ is like scaling up and, and successful in all the new models, because some of the new models, they might need, oh, this one needs more memory and it just doesn't work on their chip. So there's always been a fear there.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  When you're, when you're looking at a reasoning model, sort of think something out. Right now it's paced out in a way that, that it sort of, you can see the sort of chain, the logic chains. And it, and it's more or less as fast as, as you know, you, you might think through it if you were knowledgeable on the subject. Yet when it happens instantly, you start feeling a little paperclippy and it's certainly nerve wracking.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  It is so funny that the, the, the first AI thing was clippy and then everyone's worried about getting paperclipped. And like, it's like, it all comes back to the paperclips. I wonder if that's where the paperclips, the paperclipper, like AI doom scenario came from. Is it at all tied to Microsoft's clippy? I don't know. Well, it's like the etymology of like the paper clipping thing. I understand the, the, like the thought experiment that like, hey, you know, you tell it to, it's a good example. You tell it to go make a paperclip and then it just turns everything into paperclips.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  So the, the, I think the original, the origin of this was that philosophers have speculated that an AI task with, with a task such as creating paperclips might cause an apocalypse.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  By learning to divert ever increasing resources to the task and then learning how to resist our attempts to turn it off. So I think that that that's sort of the

• 17:53John Coogan?

  But why did they choose paper clips? Is it because of Microsoft's Clippy? That's what I mean.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Because they could have said staples. They could have said staples. Or they could have said hats.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  So they could have said. Yeah, so it's a 2014 thought experiment by this guy Nick Bostrom.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  And so Clippy would have predated that.

• 18:08John Coogan?

  So he's very possible. I don't know. We got to ask Bostrom. He does. He does shows every once in a while. We should get him on. Ask him where he came up with paper clips specifically. I think that's interesting. I have to imagine that Nvidia is going to drop some kind of inference powerhouse sooner rather than later, because I think they will get eclipsed in that market. He said it may take many years, but I think that's the direction things are heading. And this was Jim Piazza, an executive at IT management company and Sono, who formerly worked on computing infrastructure at Meta. He said that Nvidia might need to take further steps to directly address the competition in inference by developing chips specifically for it. So if you can think about this, like, you know, what is Apple doing in inference? Well, they have, you

• 18:51John Coogan?

  know, the M1, M2, M3, M4 chips. Those are Apple silicon. They aren't really wired together in a way where you can do a large language model training run. I'm sure you could get it to work if you worked hard enough and you got enough of them. And we've seen some previews of this where like, maybe they just, you know, networked a bunch of Mac Studios together to do some sort of small training run. But it's not really designed to be like Blackwell competitive.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Or A100, H100 competitive. But, you know, Google has their TPU, and I think Amazon has a custom silicon chip as well. And so there's a few different hyperscalers that have chips that are specifically, they're like, hey, we're going to do all our inference ourselves. We don't want to pay Nvidia their margins. And so Nvidia needs to keep up with that, cut it off.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the competition for Nvidia is the Grox of the world, the GROQs, right? These sort of upstart chip, chip, design, design companies. But then it's also the hyperscalers. And that is honestly, in many ways, more risky, because it's very difficult for, you know, startups can can kind of pick a, you know, a certain edge. But the issue with the hyperscalers is they're the big buyers of these chips as well. So if they start developing their own. That's a huge risk factor. The other thing is in the news this morning, well, we are the news, but in some other news this morning, Andy Jassy was on, I think it was Bloomberg, talking about Amazon's new quantum computing chip. And so every hyperscaler cares a lot about this category, is innovating themselves here and, you know, in hopes to one day be,

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  you know, running a lot of their data centers on their own chips, right, would be the goal.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Cut out the middleman. Well, regardless of what you think about Nvidia, the best place to invest in Nvidia is probably public.com.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  I would say so.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com for stocks, bonds, treasuries, options, and more.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  And treasuries are a great option in this market when everything seems to be in freefall. They rolled that out when interest rates first popped in 2022 and have just continued to ship improvements on it. So, yeah, good time to have exposure to historically much more stable assets.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so go do some research and move some assets over to public. Let's move on to the spy chic taking the AI world by storm. This is a fascinating profile on Abu Dhabi's Tanun bin Zayed al-Nahyan. He has more than $1.5 trillion to spend and he's in a hurry. He's grappling with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Your size is not size. You remember that line? I think this was when Luna was crashing.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  That the people were sort of poking fun at the founders. He had this, you know, his company did collapse, but he had a good line in there, which was, "Your size is not size."

• 21:50John Coogan?

  So good.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  People were saying they were shorting. But nobody's size is size when you compare this royal throwing around 1.4 trillion.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, move over Masa. There's a new.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  There's a new big dog.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Big dog.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  No, Masa, when he, I mean, it's funny, it's funny when Masa's talking about raising $500 billion. You know, this is a guy that could do it, but he's certainly not going to put 30% of his entire portfolio into one, you know, sort of potentially high-risk project. So.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  So let's kick it off. The Abu Dhabi royal, sometimes called the spy sheik, is accustomed to using his vast wealth to master his many obsessions, which have ranged over the years from martial arts to chess to video games. Now, Sheikh Tanoun, the United Arab Emirates National Security Advisor and brother of the president, is deploying a similar playbook at a much grander scale. He wants to muscle his tiny emirate to the front of the race to develop and control AI systems that could transform the global economy. The world is taking notice. The CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, and BlackRock have all paid homage to his elaborate Persian Gulf Royal compound in recent months. You know, we love royal compounds.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Love compounds. I've been, I told you before we joined the show, I've been on an absolutely iconic Persian Gulf Royal compound in the UAE. I don't think it was this one. There are many. There's plenty of space in the desert to put these compounds, but they really are an oasis. The one that I went to had over 100 Ferraris stored on the property. There was actually, it was actually to the point where he would have like one F40 in each color.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  And so, and he'd have, he'd be like, oh yeah, I like vintage Range Rovers. And then he would have the entire rainbow of just one, one car, same spec, just changing the paint color. So.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  I mean, it's like the Sultan of Brunei. At one point, the Sultan of Brunei was buying more than three cars per day for years. And he wound up with a collection in the tens of thousands of cars.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  He was a client of my father-in-law, actually.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Insane. He was making custom cars.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he would go and get.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  The Bentley Dominator, the precursor to the Bentayga, never sold to the public.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, a lot of great.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Sultan of Brunei just asked, just asked Bentley, I want an SUV. And they said, oh, there's so many. We'll make 10.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  So there's a bunch of incredible cars that originated because somebody in the Gulf said, make me this car. And we can thank them for that. The G-Wagon was actually, so the G-Class was developed as a military vehicle from a suggestion from the Shah. Of Iran.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Back in 1972.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  It started as an Iranian, and it's still loved by Persians.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Specifically here in LA.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, whatever Iran deal happens next, we gotta make sure that there's some cool cars involved.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Let's let's deescalate and and shift from, you know, the geopolitical jockeying to just who can design a cooler car.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  That's the world peace that I want to see.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  In the world.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. We're working towards that.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  But this guy seems like an absolute boss.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  He, on a fall trip to the United States, he grappled with fellow Brazilian jujitsu devotee Mark Zuckerberg and donned a sweatshirt and jeans for a visit with Elon Musk at Tesla's Texas Texas factory. All of this is possible in part because of the because the 56 year old Ta Nen controls more money than almost anyone on the planet as the chairman of two Abu Dhabi wealth funds with an estimated 1.4 trillion in assets and the steward of an enormous personal personal fortune. A new artificial intelligence fund he leads MGX is set to be infused with more than 50 billion from his wealth and other Abu Dhabi sources. And that's like a drop in the bucket compared to the 1.4 trillion. It's crazy. These numbers are so big now.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  According to people familiar with the fund, billions of dollars more are sent are set to be spent on AI by Group 42, a company he controls. This is all part of more than 70 billion the UAE has pledged to invest in France and Italy earlier this month. Last month, MGX was one of the few names mentioned backing Stargate $100 billion data center project.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so how are they calling this $100 billion data center project when the headline number just a month ago was 500? Are they dialing it back?

• 26:07John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's possible that they started the road. They basically started the road show.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  And said, you know, shoot for 500, even if you miss and land at 100, you're still in a good spot, right? You're starting to be more competitive with some of the hyperscalers, but definitely dialing it back a full 80%. If I'm assuming that. I'm assuming that the Wall Street Journal sort of like fact check this and sort of confirm because for them to just call this, if it was still a $500 billion project and then they're going and calling it a $100 billion project, it doesn't look good on the Journal.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the numbers just go up and down every other day.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  Add 100 billion, take 400 billion off, who knows, it doesn't matter. And then is it over what period of time and oh, then Zoc's doing 200 billion over here and

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Big numbers.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  And Satya at Microsoft is good for his 80 billion, but then maybe pulling that separately. And no one really knows how you're counting this stuff up, but a lot of money's going out.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Data centers are being built.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  And the products are getting better. So they're, you know, the hype is somewhat.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Over here, Saudi Aramco is working on their own project with, with Grok.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Okay, so it is also written, big checks to OpenAI and Musk's AI, XAI and, and Amazon backed Anthropic. So he's in all three foundation companies.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Good. Why not?

• 27:36John Coogan?

  And at that point, I think people are just like, I don't like that you're in my competitor, but I, who else am I going to go to for 100 billion?

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  You're the only person. So yeah, I'll take, you can have a slice of everything. You can create an index.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's super smart.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Even in a world awash with AI in funds, even in an AI world awash in funds, Tanun stands out while many are plunging tens of billions of dollars into concentrated areas. SoftBank is making a huge bet on OpenAI and the tech giants are heaving money at data centers. Tanun is planning to spend more money broadly around the fledgling sector than almost anyone else. It's a risky time to be splashing so much cash on AI. Citation needed. Who knows? It might be the best time ever.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, so the next, so they back this up by saying the low cost AI model from China's DeepSeek has abruptly shaken assumptions on the need for heavy investment. Got to put them in the true zone here. It's already come out that they spent way more than the headline number that they had. And so. At this point, if they they came out with a super low number, single digit millions, and then sort of revised it. And then since then, they've probably revised it again, but the whole sort of world moved on, right? So we still don't know exactly how much it costs, but it certainly wasn't anywhere near the original number that they threw out. I'll keep reading here. Valuations across tech have skyrocketed, and even optimistic venture capitalists often acknowledge the market is in a searing frenzy. Leading AI

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  companies expect to lose billions of dollars for years to come, while pledges of future profitability rest on hazy assumptions of a tidal wave of demand. Many see parallels to the late-stage dot-com bubble when cash splashers of the era.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  That's a great one. That's a great one.

• 29:13Jordi Hays?

  Gunslinger, cash splasher.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Cash splasher is great. You've got to be a cash splasher. If you're not splashing cash, what are you splashing?

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing? So when the cash splashers of the era plunged tens of billions of dollars into public into building out fiber optic cable networks based on projections that internet growth would be even more rapid than it was, a glut of fiber and enormous losses followed. We've pushed back on this before. It seems obvious that we're in an AI bubble, but at the same time, our leading AI companies have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue, which the dot-com era companies did not have. And the actual adoption of AI seems like it's taken place much faster than the internet.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  And the reason for that is because the internet is the greatest distribution channel for software ever in history, right? You can launch a new model and get, you know, hundreds of thousands of users in the same day.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want to give some more color on who this guy is, because there's a bunch of fascinating anecdotes in here. So it's from his ornate palace in Abu Dhabi, Tanun personally tracks the progress of global large language models on a dashboard his researchers built for him on his phone and computer. He urges subordinates at the giant network of companies he owns to rapidly incorporate AI. So he's probably like pulling up like Chatbot Arena and like MMLU like every day, basically, and seeing how.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's great. It's so much better when you're invested in every single company because Chatbot Arena is just your personal sort of dashboard, right?

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what else he's tracking on the progress, because it could be like DAUs, right? If you can get that data.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  I have this, I have a situation right now where I have these two, I have these two companies in the exact same category that I'm a shareholder in. They're both growing very quickly.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  They both raised a lot of money. And I just happen to be friends with both CEOs. That's how I ended up there, but it's sort of funny because every other week they sort of alternate between sharing, you know, once one person's like, oh, I did this. The other person's like, I did this. I'm like, I'm happy for all of you. It's fantastic.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  It's great. I like this one. So Tanun was meeting with Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Satya mentions a book by George Washington University Professor Jeffrey Ding that suggests AI could be the base of a coming global economic boom. And this is clearly what informed this book, clearly informed Satya's idea about, hey, let's get to 10% global GDP growth, 5% growth in the developed world. This is what we should be thinking about AI, not reading like the AI doomer books, right? But the sheik scribbled it down on his notepad and soon after Ding was eating lunch at his, in his Washington DC office, when a representative from the UAE embassy knocked on his door and said, I can't find your book in any bookstore. Can I get two copies?

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Just like send my guy to just like go get the book directly from the source.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  We've talked about this before. Billionaires have guys.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  The middle class has apps.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, everyone has apps.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, but when you get to a certain level of like the super billionaire, the trillionaire class. Yeah, I mean, he controls a trillion dollars. He, I don't think he made it to the super billionaire list we looked at yesterday.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  I think that guys in his category pay to not end up on those lists.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, or it's just like they have control over capital, but they don't personally own it. And so it's all vague.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  When you look at the list, all the people are people that you can basically clock their net worth.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  By publicly available data.

• 32:37John Coogan?

  Like nobly absent.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  You can see, we know how much of Tesla Elon owns.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  So when the stock fluctuates by $20 billion, you just look at his share per rata and you calculate. You know, how, what his net worth did that day.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  I think, I think they said there were 26 super billionaires ranging from 450 billion for Elon roughly to down to 50 billion for some other folks. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, not on the list.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  It's like, how do you not include those guys when they clearly control 50 billion worth of, you know, economic power, no doubt. And they're, and they're not just, oh, they're around for a couple of years doing the job of president. Like they, this is their life. Uh, anyway, uh, that is the nature of these things, but I love this guy because.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  We're having a Zoom difficulty, so I'm going to just keep reading through this.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  And you can help Connor get the stream back up.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, read this story about the Age of Empires thing.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm catching up here.

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, folks.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  So I'm going to backtrack here for a second, but Tanun grew up in the shadow of his brother Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nayan, the longtime Crown Prince, who was named president of the UAE in 2022. While his brother rubbed shoulders with foreign leaders and crafted plans to remake Abu Dhabi's economy, Tanun honed extracurricular activities. His, he became so hooked on competing with his brothers in Age of Empires, a video game where players develop hunter gatherers into powerful civilizations, that he hired an employee from the company that, that makes the game to coach him on tactics, former employees said. He turned a palace within his royal compound into a gym. He funds one of the world's top cycling teams, the UAE Team Emirates, and he rides on an island near the presidential palace he ringed with cycling pass.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  He likes super light Kalnago bikes so much that he instructed one of his companies to buy the Italian firm that makes him. Uh, incredible. Tanun has poured money into building up Brazilian jiu jitsu and other forms of grappling around the globe. A black belt, he started a well-funded championship tournament that has become the Olympics of our sports, says Bobby Razak, a filmmaker who is making a documentary on Tanun and the event. He's definitely one of the founding fathers of mixed martial arts, he said, a sport that, quote, "would not be where it was today without Tien Nhoon." The interest in AI has roots, uh, his interest in AI has roots in the early 2000s when he was so intrigued by computer-aided chess that he hired a sizable team of engineers to make him a program called Hydra that could compete with the world's best players.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  Erdogan Goons, a computer chess specialist for opening moves, said he often talked by phone for two or more hours a day with the sheik as they monitored Hydra's games. That's incredible. So in late 2017, Tien Nhoon's interest increased after he learned that Google's AI program, AlphaZero, had beaten the world's best computer chess program after needing just four hours to learn the rules. "It was far more powerful than Hydra ever was," opening his eyes to the power of AI, he told associates. The following year, he tapped Peng Xiao, the former chief technology officer at software turned Bitcoin firm MicroStrategy, to start G42, a company devoted to applications in AI. Um, so it's very cool. He's been, he's been very obsessed with this for a very long time.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so at the time, Abu Dhabi's wealth and economic strategy was largely under the control of Tien Nhoon's brother, Mohammed. As de facto leader of the country, he pushed to siphon off part of the Emirates' oil wealth and put it into investments in economic development, building the wealth fund bounty Tien Nhoon would later inherit. So the thing that I think people don't fully understand about, you know, a country like the UAE is it's almost more of a kingdom that is forced to define itself in certain settings as a country, right? So when you think about the wealth of the country, of the UAE, you're, you should be thinking about it as the wealth of a kingdom, which is controlled by the royal family, right? And there's, the, these families are massive, right?

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  And so you can, you know, visualize a sort of family tree, and the closer that you get to the top, the more of the wealth that you control. If you're farther down, you might control some. Small aspect of the kingdom's operations, you're going to have like a team that works under you, but you're the ultimate decision maker. And so what's interesting is if you want to get big deals done in these, in these sort of kingdoms, you actually have to, you know, if it's a big enough deal, you have to get the sign off of, you know, more or less the king, right? And so you can see these sort of decision trees that trace up. And that's why, you know, the venture world has had this idea that you can just sort of show up in Abu Dhabi and expect to raise, you know, billions of dollars, like it's

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  some easy task. But if you talk to any large allocator, they'll tell you that these relationships are developed over years, sometimes decades, and you have to, you're going to have to genuinely be, you know, invest time into those relationships and ultimately get the sign off of, you know, the most powerful members of the family.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, isn't like every Emirati gets just like a payment?

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's effectively a UBI. So, so education is funded. There's enough, you know, sort of a monthly sort of payment to cover a lot of living expenses. This is part of the reason why cars are actually so popular there. One is because it's an oil producing nation. So gas has always been super cheap. There's like an incredible car culture there.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  But two, if your education and your, you know, house or your apartment are covered and you're working, what do you, and you don't, and you have a perpetual income by being a citizen of the kingdom, you're going to spend it on cars.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually interesting, there's a dynamic, you know, speaking of cars, cars are actually, you would think they would be more expensive in the UAE. They actually end up being cheaper because they're, they, they, one, these cars can't sell back in the States, but two, there are people that use cars to export wealth from sanctioned countries. Let's say you're an oligarch in Russia and you want to get wealth out of the country. It can oftentimes be easier to move a LaFerrari than it is to move $5 million out of the country. So there's a bunch of cars there that sell below retail and below their sort of market value in the US because people just want to get them into the UAE, move them, and then they have, you know, real dollars that are sort of protected within the Kingdom.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think they were also struggling to set up like top-tier universities. And so that's where they came up with this, with the idea of like, we'll just pay, if you go to a school in the US, if you get into Harvard, we'll pay full tuition for you.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Because like, yeah, then it's just.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a lot of that.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  It's as good of an investment as trying to build the next Harvard in the UAE.

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, did you get to the, to the section where they had to rip out the Huawei routers? Do you see that?

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  No, we didn't get that far.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  The UAE has long seen itself as something of a Switzerland, a trusted point for trade for the East and West, and choosing sides on AI would risk damaging relations with China. But the allure of the US lead on AI was too much to ignore. Tanun picked the United States. Let's go.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  And he says Huawei routers were ripped out of G42's offices and Western equipment put in its place. No more spying. Do not, do not look at our internet traffic, China. While Tanun and his aides continued negotiating with the administration on details to enable the deal, the administration paired Tanun's company with Microsoft. G42 agreed to use Microsoft's cloud for AI work and also to comply with US export restrictions as part of the deal. And Microsoft invested 1.5 billion in G42, joining its board of directors. Still, China hawks in Congress are being concerned that the UAE's overall ties to China remain strong, fearing the country could allow powerful US tech tools to make their way to China. Those

• 40:30John Coogan?

  lawmakers could be an obstacle if Tanun comes back for similar deals.

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the challenge of being Switzerland of the Middle East in many ways is that, you know, the UAE does have a lot of economic ties with, from what I know, Iran, right? There's, there's a lot of Iranian money there, Russian, et cetera. But the cool thing about being in the UAE is if you go there, you'll sit down at dinner and you're at a table with, with, it's the most diverse group of people I've ever been a part of. I got a chance to go a couple of times in, what was it, late, early and then late 2023? And you'll sit down at a table with.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Somebody from Iran, somebody from Israel, somebody from Russia, somebody from the UK, an American, and everybody's getting along because everybody's just generally there to, you know, in that setting, enjoy F1. And, you know, everybody's, you know, generally pro-business there. So it's a great environment.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the capitalism in business has been like the one thing kind of holding the Middle East together.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  Universal language.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  With, with, you know, UAE and Saudi Arabia kind of playing nice with both sides and kind of keeping everything together and a lot of pressure to not let anything fall into just absolute chaos.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Which is obviously risky. So, speaking on a podcast in December, they were talking about Josh Kushner, or Jared Kushner, recalled a 2018 meeting when he was visiting the region. Tanun told him, Jared, I'm not meeting with you unless you spend two hours after with me to talk about AI.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  And so he is, he's trying to build his.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  He's going podcast mode. He's like, you gotta talk to me for at least two hours, the shortest Joe Rogan episode.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  And we'll get into the details.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  That's great. And so, yeah, he's, he's been investing in a lot of stuff. And I'm sure he'll be someone.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  We've got to have him on the show.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Whose presence only grows over the next few years as he continues to make big investments. Anyway, if you're looking to take a trip and stay in a nice place, maybe impress a sheik while you're on the fundraising tour, we recommend going to Wander.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. And we have some big news from Kyle over at Wander. They just crossed 600 total locations. And you were in the chat asking, weren't you at 500 a month ago? I said, yes.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  It's pretty, pretty great growth, 20% month over month.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  The growth is insane. It is incredible. It's amazing. And it, what's cool is Wander's a platform where every incremental property makes the platform more valuable, right? You know, I think that.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, we dealt with this before. I was trying to stay at a Wander in when the fires were happening. They were all booked. I'm sure you know, they've added multiple properties within Southern California and the pace that they're operating at is just incredible. So go check it out. They actually are running a spring sale for the last day today that you can get $400 off plus a Wander hoodie with code SPRING400. So go check it out and you won't regret it. It is unbeatable. And we are going to be staying in at least one Wander in early March and very excited to record a

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Film and video podcast.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to do the show from the Wander because their wifi is so fast.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  It makes it all possible.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Live stream it. That's great. Well, let's move on to an analysis by Shiel Monat, breaking down Adyen and Stripe's 2024 annual reports. They both are out and so now you can benchmark these two companies against each other. Adyen processed 1.34 trillion and was up 33% year over year. Stripe's growing faster at 38% year over year and is now at 1.4 trillion. Adyen's valued at 56 billion, public company. Stripe is valued at 91.5 billion. And in terms of employee count, Adyen has 4.3,000 employees. Stripe has 8.2,000. They're both profitable. Adyen EBITDA of 1 billion. Note, Stripe has higher margins. And so this comes

• 44:39John Coogan?

  to us from this wonderful Stripe community letter that we will read some of this stuff, but it highlights a lot of interesting applications for the company and we'll go through some of the highlights here. So

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the big, I mean, the big thing that stood out to me from Shiel's analysis, everything, you know, the two, the two numbers that jump out, one is Stripe is almost double valued more than double.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  And Stripe has almost doubled the number of employees, right?

• 45:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, there's the big story here is how, you know, how is Stripe worth twice Adyen despite having less EBITDA and twice the employees and all these things. But yeah, the letter here is fantastic and just shows the level and the leadership that Stripe has with the Carlson Brothers.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  So there Stripe's mission, of course, is to grow the GDP of the internet, right?

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  And payment volume represents 1.3% of global GDP now.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Absolutely insane.

• 45:49Jordi Hays?

  It's one of those things like they could have said, hey, over time, we think the internet's going to grow a lot. We think internet payments are going to be big. We think we can actually get 1% of the global GDP running through. And it's the most ridiculous number because every founder has thought about a world, oh, if we just get 1% of this market, you know, we're a multi-billion dollar company. Stripe actually did it. And, and, you know, an example of a of one of the most hyped companies of the last 20 years, living up to the hype, right? With the way that they're growing, they will, there's a world where there is a scenario where they have double digit percentage of global GDP running through their rails, which is just obscene.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Yep. Stripe billing alone is on a $500 million revenue run rate. We use Stripe billing. Over 300,000 companies are on Stripe billing. And Stripe was profitable in 2024 and is expected to remain so in 2025 and beyond. And of course, they were one of the companies to kind of move quickly during the last downturn and kind of, I don't know if they had to lay a lot of people off. I think they actually mostly just froze hiring and kind of grew into their valuation. And it set them up for profitability and then kind of scaling from there. So they kind of know what the base, you know, how the business operates, how it runs. Obviously, they're very big and they can kind of grow into their valuation.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Nearly 200 million active subscriptions are managed via Stripe billing. Stripe is trusted by half of the Fortune 100, 80% of the Forbes Cloud 100, and 78% of Forbes AI 50 companies. One in six new Delaware corporations incorporates via Stripe Atlas.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  That's crazy because I always thought of that. I mean, there was Clerky years ago and those products, they're very easy to get, you know, popping in like small Silicon Valley crews.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  But you don't get to one out of six without being like a mainstream product.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  The dynamic with Stripe Atlas is fascinating because it doesn't seem like they do a lot of independent marketing. It seems like a product that Stripe built truly for the community. It was a pain, you know, it makes sense. It's a perfect wedge product for payments, right? What do you need to do before you can accept payments online? You need to have an entity. They built what I think is the best way to create an entity online. You know, we used it for TVPN. It's a fantastic product. It's still super simple despite it being a relatively complicated process to create an entity. The product is fantastically simple and it's turned out, you know, it's turned out to be an amazing wedge product for them, just given the scale.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's got to be a hard product to advertise, right? Because like you only incorporate once and not everyone's incorporating it all the time. And it's not like there's, so yeah, I'm sure they're all over Google Ads and stuff for when people are thinking about incorporating. But outside of that, it's hard to do a lot of awareness for that product. But they've done a very good job getting penetration there. Hertz, and then they give some case studies here. Hertz increased 4% of online payment authorization rates after switching to Stripe. Turo saw a 4.7 boost in recaptured revenue, translating to an extra 114 million per year. I had no idea Turo was that big.

• 49:04Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  That's huge. Intercom improved conversion rates by 2.1%. Forbes saw a 23% revenue uplift within six months after switching to Stripe. There's a ton of examples of this. Major AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney, 11 Labs are Stripe partners. Stripe's agent toolkit and virtual card tools enable programmatic spending and control. More than 14,000 vertical SaaS platforms utilize Stripe's payment services. I mean, it's just like the default in Silicon Valley at least. Stripe Capital provides fast funding with funds arriving in under 48 hours. So they've really like just built every possible fintech product on top of, it was initially just like three lines of code.

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I have to try to pull this up, but if you look at their product timeline, there is a pretty amazing, you can actually see, I wish we could pull this graphic up, but it's going to be difficult. But they basically come out in 2010 with payments.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Two years later, they launched Connect.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:02Jordi Hays?

  Four years after that, they launched Radar and Atlas. So this entire time, they're just focused on making this perfect payments product, right? And to show that level of patience, even when they, they had sort of exploding growth and traction and many, many operators would have said, hey, we should go multi-product. We have all this traction. They waited and then since then, starting in 2016, they really ramped up the pace. They launched Atlas, Radar. 2017, they launched Sigma. 2018, they launched Terminal issuing billing. 2019, Capital, as well as corporate cards and the infrastructure to issue corporate cards. And then in 2020, they launched Treasury as well as Climate. And then they launched a tax product in late 2020 as well.

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  So the velocity went from, hey, let's just have this sort of narrow focus and really own payments. And, you know, I think that Stripe is one of the best examples in history of focusing early on, really, really directly on startups as a category.

• 51:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  And they sort of ignored the enterprise pretty broadly, but they benefited from between when they started in 2010 and where they are today. Many of their early startup customers became public companies that are now massive. And those were, you know, customers that were able to prove out these use cases that would, you know, go on to allow them to, you know, sign companies like Hertz, right? Which is this legacy company or Forbes, things like that.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  I remember Shopify. When Shopify started, like the default payment integration for a long time was Stripe. And you kind of bring your own Stripe account. And then they were doing Shopify Payments, which was kind of a white label Stripe account, but it was all Stripe under the hood. And yeah, they've just, they've just really, really benefited from just letting the internet grow and being like the index on the internet economy.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, a good example where the, the mission of the company, grow the GDP of the internet, was truly, truly aligned to the potential of the business itself.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yep. I thought this was interesting. They mentioned the Bridge acquisition. Transaction volumes in stablecoins doubled from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024, and Stripe now supports 40 million monthly active stablecoin wallets.

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  And yeah, that's something that like, they've been talking about crypto for a long time. They've integrated crypto products of the past, but like, the the stablecoin thing feels like the first time that stuff's like really taking

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  taking hold. And I know I saw

• 52:21Jordi Hays?

  They made the Bridge acquisition. They they spent, you know, over a billion dollars on it specifically because of the developer activity that Bridge had.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  So they, I think, saw a younger, you know, they saw the stablecoin version of Stripe.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  Which had an early developer traction. It was a product that developers loved.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  And then all of a sudden, you know, public companies are using the product.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  Yep. And so they write, "Stablecoins: Room-Temperature Superconductors for Financial Services. Top stablecoin uses today involve tangible, real-world activity. CFOs use stablecoins to manage corporate treasury. Immigrants use them for remittances. Citizens of countries with unstable currencies use them for dependable savings. And payment teams use them to enable customers from countries with low card penetration." Some are our favorite examples. SpaceX uses Bridge to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets. Dollar App and Neobank in Mexico uses Bridge to to help individuals receive USD payments from payroll providers like Deal. And Airtm uses Bridge to disburse payments to workers all over Latin America.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  So as as we start paying more people all over the world, the stablecoins make a ton of sense. I've I've actually paid people in stablecoins before because they've been in countries where getting them US dollars was very, very volatile.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Delayed, high fees, change rates, etc.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  And so.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And and to be clear, there was a lot of analysis of the Bridge acquisition at the time where people said, how could they pay 100, you know, it was like more than 100 times revenue. It was a really big number. And the obvious answer is that Stripe has Over a trillion dollars of volume. They're big believers in stable coins. They had had their own internal efforts. Why not spend a billion dollars to acquire a leader in the space and then focus on integrating it with all of your existing customers? So I think we're going to see over time that that could very well be the, an Instagram style acquisition for Stripe in the sense that you can imagine the bridge product, you know, 10 years from now, having, you know, hundreds of billions or potentially even trillions of dollars in volume.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  And I like this. We've been seeing this AI growth chart all over the internet and Ramp or Stripe, Ramp's done some analysis on this, showing adoption of AI tools on the corporate card side, Stripe seeing something similar. They say, we are seeing an AI boom on Stripe. We're partnered with a large number of companies with rapidly growing businesses, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Suno, Perplexity, Midjourney, Cognition, 11 Labs, Langchain, Pinecone, Mistral, Cohere, Sierra, so many of these. And the median time to annualize revenue milestone for the top 100 AI companies on Stripe in 2024 was 24 months. They compare that to back in 2018, it took SaaS companies,

• 55:00John Coogan?

  the top 100 SaaS companies by revenue, 37 months. And so they're providing extra data to show that the AI boom is real and companies really are accelerating their revenue growth faster than in previous, I don't know, in previous waves.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  And so Cursor, the AI-powered coding assistant, raised to over 100 million recurring revenue in just three years. We're also seeing the likes of Lovable, which hit 17 million ARR in just three months.

• 55:28Jordi Hays?

  This is wild. So Lovable, for those that don't know, is a Swedish company. Harry Stebbings, fellow podcaster, was one of their early investors. And it, you know, Lovable doing that in three months, it just puts so much pressure onto every other company because that's now the bar. I remember in 2021, the narrative was you should be able to hit 1 million of ARR in nine months post-launch. That's now seems childish in comparison. In the cage, we're trying to hit a million in three months. And but anyways, the demand for these AI products is insane. And I believe lovable has more ARR or is at a much greater run rate than booking.com was when they went public.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Really?

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we dug into that during the Dara Khosrowshahi and that Mary Meeker article when she took them public. Yeah, I remember that. There's an interesting point in here. Some people have called these startups LLM wrappers. Those people are missing the point. The O-ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just in terms of cost, but in the success of the entire system. In a similar vein, we see these new industry-specific AI tools as ensuring that individual industries can properly realize the economic impact of LLMs and that the contextual data and workflow integration will prove enduringly valuable. So they're bullish on these quote unquote

• 56:55John Coogan?

  wrapper companies, which I thought was interesting. Anyway, let's move on to tell you about another fintech company that we love here on the show, Ramp. Go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go get to know Ramp on ramp.com.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so speaking of Ramp, we have a major Ramp customer, Sean Frank.

• 57:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:17Jordi Hays?

  Going to be joining the show in two minutes.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  So I'm going to text him right now and we'll get him on here.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Well, we can do this one DM that we got in the meantime. It says, ahoy, John. Hope you're doing well. Apologies apologizing for hitting you with a bunch of questions, but I've posted 50 blogs and I have four subscribers. I'm not gaining, not that gaining subs is the goal, but still, I've talked to family members who collectively hired thousands of people and they're out of ideas too. The whole add value and it will come approach just hasn't worked. I want to work with smart people before going out and building something on my own, but I'm not sure what the move is. What do you think, Jordy?

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  So I think that one of the things that seems very obvious with content is that you need extreme levels of patience.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  That's not an excuse to not refine the product every single day.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, we, we take this approach, we're, we're lucky to be in a position where we have a daily show, we're trying to improve the show and every, every single day, there's some days where, you know, maybe we weren't, we're underprepared, some days where, you know, we, we sort of miss a segment that we wanted to do, but in general, trying to improve the product every single day and then improve how you're distributing that product.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  I think it's the distribution. So I posted 50 YouTube videos before a single one went viral.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and for me it was like- And that was over a year, right?

• 58:36John Coogan?

  It was, it was a full year, I posted them once a week for, for, for a full year. And it was like, oh, I got a hundred views, awesome. Oh, I got a thousand views on this, that's great. And then finally, one got picked up about SpaceX and the algorithm, it went to 70K views, and I remember seeing the chart go up, and I was like, wow, this is amazing.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  But it's really hard for blogs to go viral.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Because there's no algorithmic recommendation.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  There's no discovery mechanism.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  There's no discovery. And so what you should probably do is figure out, can you repackage this in terms of just a long post on X?

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:03John Coogan?

  Or a thread? Or, because a thread can go viral. Short form content. Short form content, i- i- if you, if your natural voice is on short form video, make one minute videos, break your blog post up into a series of one minute videos, try a bunch of things, and then very quickly, the algorithm will start sending you the signal of like, this got 10 times as many views as that, what did you do differently? And you can introspect. But it's very hard when you're just hanging out on a dead Substack with no traffic coming to it.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  That, I, I think that's very hard, and I think the people that have been successful on Substack have built audiences elsewhere. Like Ben Thompson talks about, Jirtekkery would not exist if not for sharing on, sharing links on, on Twitter and LinkedIn at the time.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  And now, he's got it cornered, and people share it, and his stuff goes viral, even if he doesn't post it, because people will say, oh, there was a great interview, we gotta talk about this.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll cover it.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the main thing is YouTube specifically, as well as some of these other platforms, can be very demoralizing.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't necessarily, you know, the, the X factor now is that the algorithms need time to learn your content before they figure out the right people to distribute it to.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  So, um, anyways-

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Do we have Sean on the line?

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  We have Sean on the line, he's in the waiting room, let's bring him in. We're gonna talk with Sean about app lovin', uh, and Sean is one of the sharpest minds that I know on ecommerce. Actually, I'm gonna go ahead and say-

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Hey, Sean.

• 1:00:21Jordi Hays?

  There he is, Mr. Ridge himself, Mr. Wallet.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  You guys are in person. I was expecting you guys to be doing Zoom yourselves, but damn, IRL. Love to see it.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  IRL. Always. Always. Always. Unless you're dealing with this traffic in LA these days, Sean, if you want to leave your house now in LA, it's about an hour to go anywhere. Are you still going into the office in Santa Monica every day?

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  No, I went yesterday. Yeah, it's like an hour and a half, bro. PCH is still closed, so yeah, LA traffic, bud. Can't, can't, can't beat it.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, tell us about AppLovin'. Yeah, so, so AppLovin', for some backstory for the audience, founded in 2012, really started to, it wasn't even necessarily a company I feel like that was on the map for a lot of people until last year. I think last year was the first time you guys started spending money on the platform. Is that correct? Or had you tested it at earlier points in Ridge's history?

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here's, I think AppLovin' has three discussion points. We'll go from what I'm least qualified to speak on to what I'm most qualified to speak on. So, least qualified, short reports are coming out that they are violating, you know, App Store Terms of Service, their ads target children, all this type of stuff. What AppLovin' is, is there's two sides to business. They run a bunch of mobile ad space, so games, mostly games, but whatever old people are playing on their phones, they have that sort of ad space. And they have an ad engine, right? So like they're the ad exchange. Think of like a Trade Desk or Google Display Network. So they run both sides of those. They've

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  never done e-commerce. Their e-commerce push was like August or September 2024, so we're like six months ago.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  And the majority of their, and just question, so the majority of their customers, until they push into e-commerce, were other mobile games, I'm gonna guess, and other sort of digital apps, services that they were pushing people to? What was, do you have any idea of what their customer base looked like until last year?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was all mobile games, so. You know, they've been called like a pyramid scheme, all these types of things. So you're a a mobile ad engine where other mobile games can run on top of, right? I think they also do like display branding, like trying to get you to go to the movies or just like real top of funnel campaigns, nothing conversion optimized, right? Now, a lot of people spend a lot of time on mobile games, so there are a lot of ad units available, but it's something Ridge has never touched at all, right? Like, we're mostly a Facebook advertiser. They get some years, 75% of my budget. We do influencer, that type of stuff. We've never really done that much in the world to display and especially nothing in mobile display, right? The industry does have a bad reputation.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Mobile display ads are just like, that's where click fraud exists.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Well, and from my understanding with Ridge, you know, having, you know, worked out of your guys' office and worked on the Ridge business myself back in the day, you guys have had a policy where you'll test any channel once, but you're very, very ruthless with pulling back that spend if it's not working. So I remember, you know, Connor being, you know, who's the CMO of Ridge, being willing to test some obscure ad network and being like, yep, doesn't work, you know, almost like the same day oftentimes. So when you guys decided to test AppLovin and then actually start to really spend on the platform, I think that sent, you know, a real signal.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Right, well, I'll say that we're a very sophisticated advertiser, right? For people unfamiliar with Ridge Wallet as a business, I mean, we'll spend over $100 million this year on digital advertising, right? So that's everything from LinkedIn ads to TV ads to influencer to Reddit to Snapchat. Like Meta is the biggest, best game in town. They might get 70% of my budget some year, sometimes they get 30% of my budget, but like outside of them, we're spending money on every single possible channel we can. So what are the accusations against AppLovin? I'm gonna put the unverifiable claims that I cannot speak to in one box. And that is, there are short reports saying that like, you know, they're doing one-click

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  forced downloads, they're tracking users, whatever. Cannot speak to that at all. Like, if that's true, you know, let's hope there's an investigation that we don't want them targeting children with inappropriate content. So I don't know anything about that. The second thing is, the stock price has gone parabolic in the past like two years or whatever. I think the IPO maybe in 2021, I think it's up 4X in the past year. At one point, it was worth more than Uber. So as soon as a company is trading at 100X revenue and is worth more than Uber and no one's ever heard about them, people just get immediately freaked out, right? It's like, you know, they had the same, you know, revenue multiple as Palantir, right? Palantir's been around a lot longer, people know about Palantir, so.

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just for some, for some extra context, so they were worth 3.8 billion at the, at the end of 2022, at their peak, just a little bit ago, they were worth 160 billion, so. Generational run.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And anytime that happens, I mean, a lot of people start speculating, right? Revenue's growing really, really fast. I can't, I'm not a stock trader, I fucking buy ads, so is the, is the company overvalued? It's about as overvalued as Palantir is. So depending on where you land on that side of the conversation, that's, that's why there's so much interest right now, right? The thing that I'm qualified to speak to is, as an advertiser, they shoot us an email in August, and they're like, hey, we're rolling out e-commerce, we'll give you a lot of ad credit to test it, right? And we get ad credit from Snapchat to test stuff, from Reddit to test stuff, from Meta to test stuff, and free ad credit, even if it's the shittiest ad space on earth, I mean,

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  okay, yeah, I'll get some, I'll get some bunk ass impressions, whatever, right? They end up, you know.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  It ends up working really well. I probably spent $4 million of my own money on app-loving ads in Q4, and I was spending 250 grand a day. It was matching Facebook ad spend, right? So, one of the short reports is seeming that like, oh, they're stealing Facebook's data to be able to target these people so good. Once again, I don't know how the fuck that would work, but what I will tell you is that, as a sophisticated advertiser who tracks everything via Northbeam, via incrementality holdouts, via post-purchase surveys, coupon codes, people were playing app-loving games, seeing Ridge Wallet ads, buying those products, and then telling us they saw it on the ads. So, it's a real ad channel. It really worked in Q4.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  I have an invoice right now. I owe them $1.5 million that I have to pay by the end of the month. So, like, it's a business. I don't know what to tell everybody about the shorts. Now, do I think the company's overvalued? Yeah, I don't own any of the stock. That's fucking insane. It's like, it's a company, it's a mobile app platform. What do you mean they're worth more than Uber? Like, I fucking call an Uber every day, right? I don't play any mobile games. So, that's like the stock price question. Then it's like, oh, all of this nefarious, whatever, inside dealing subsidiaries. I don't know anything about fucking that. What I'll tell everybody listening. And what's so weird is I'm public, I'm on Twitter, like, I post my ad spend on these channels. No one's reached out to me, like, none of the shorts. I'm like, guys, I'm around. Like, I'll show you the fucking app-loving platform.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Hey, get on, uh, make them pay for it, you know? Don't give that, don't give up the sauce for free, you know?

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta go on Tegus, become an expert, uh, uh, uh, expert consultant. You can make $1,000 an hour, $10,000 an hour.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Like, I have no dog in this race. I'm like, yeah, dude, whatever, it was an ad channel. If they went away tomorrow, I would spend money on Snapchat or TikTok or anywhere else, right? But like, the very viable proof is that I gave them real money. It was a good ad channel. And I think the reason why people... Like their revenue is growing super fucking fast, right? Their revenue is up 80% year over year. And they're like, yeah, we have a billion dollar run rate for e-commerce advertisers in December. And I'm like, yeah, no shit. I spent fucking a million dollars.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, I spent a ton of money with you guys. Like, it doesn't take too many people like me spending that to get really, really high revenue. Dude, ads are the best business on earth. I don't know why this is so surprising for people. Now, are they compliant? Do they owe Apple money? Are they stealing data from Facebook? I don't fucking know, but pretty good ads. You got any questions about that?

• 1:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good ads. What's the, can you talk about the relationship between AppLovin and Flip? Are you, has Ridge had any success on Flip? I remember Flip blowing up out of nowhere. They were giving a bunch of credits to basically give away products for retailers. I know they have an ad partnership. Have you found any success on, on the Flip platform?

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I've never used Flip. As far as I know, Ridge has never worked with or advertised on Flip. It would be a surprise to me to hear that my ads were on Flip via AppLovin.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  I've had friends who've had very bad relationships with Flip, so I've always avoided it. And our products don't work for live shopping anyway, like TikTok shops, it doesn't really work for us either. And it's because of like, with a very male-focused demo, we're more of a premium product. You know, those typically live shopping works for like, you know, leggings that make your butt bigger and that type of shit, right? Like, it's not, it's not our core product that's crushing on there. That whole affiliate GMV world is very, very dark and shady. I know a lot of people who are doing weird stuff there. You can check out the affiliate top charts, like what Goalie's doing. They're giving people fucking mansions if they, you know, hit GMV targets of a million dollars.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I don't think about Flip. I've never used Flip. They email me all the time.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, I mean, even an idiot like myself, I'm like, that looks like a pyramid scheme. I'm not, I'm not gonna hang out there. But, you know, I have the data on AppLovin, right? Like,

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Eighty-five percent of our traffic from Apple and came from iOS devices, right? Like, one of the concerns is that, like, oh, this is just bot traffic on Android devices, like ClickFarms in Bangladesh or whatever, right? It doesn't look like it's that. So I don't know how they have good quality iOS traffic coming through. It all seems to be games called like Tomb Blast or some shit, but like, anyway. Old people bought RidgeWaltz.

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the reason I wanted to have you on is, is, you know, there are major brands out there that will run on an ad platform that's just sending them bot traffic and they won't even necessarily turn it off because to them, they're just optimizing for, you know, impressions and clicks and Ridge has always been a company focused on, you know, the end actually, you know, conversion, right? And sort of building your guys' engine around that. What, what happens, you know, shifting the conversation a little bit, what, what's your outlook on e-commerce in our year 2025? We covered, uh, maybe a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how the whole Amazon, you know, it's a terrible time to be an Amazon seller.

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  It's been a tough time to be a Shopify, uh, brand as well with all this sort of tariff action and things like that. Historically, Ridge has made a bunch of products in China. It's shaping up to be a rocky year for e-commerce broadly. It helps to have a fantastic brand like Ridge, but what's your outlook, uh, going into the rest of the year?

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Uh, dude, just take it day by day. I mean, uh, there's more tariffs announced today. There's more supply chain disruption, um, you know, and it's not just the US government. Like every, every government on earth is becoming more protectionary, like Section 321.

• 1:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt, but we had Ryan Peterson from Flexport on yesterday that said that was talking about the, the, the actions that Mexico had taken around, uh, what, what's not the same as the de minimis loophole, but I'm forgetting the, the right name for it, but, uh, to sort of protect American, uh, textile workers. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of action.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like we like to think of this one like very one dimensional like Americans importing things from China cheaply, but like that fucks over other manufacturing economies like in Mexico. They don't want fucking cheap auto parts or cheap apparel coming from China, sitting in their warehouses, going to America duty free. Like everybody gets pissed off in that. So yeah, that happened yesterday. The the quick summary is just take it day by day and try to survive. Don't have any debt if you can afford it. Keep a lean team. I think D to C 3.0 is like incredibly lean teams like ridges down to 60 US full time employees. We're doing more revenue than ever with less people than ever. And I think that's going to be more of the trend.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  And yeah, I mean, if you can bring stuff to America, you should. I mean, we're probably eight months away from 60% of the while it's being made here. So I'll keep you guys updated when they start getting made here.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Where's where's your new factory going to be? Or you you you on towards some manufacturing that's been a long term process, but you know, what does that look like?

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, it's all component part manufacturing. So like we have inner plates that are going to be made in Missouri. And then they get shipped up to Philadelphia to be finished and they get shipped to Arizona to be assembled. And then they go to fucking Kentucky to sit in the warehouse. So this is one of the challenges. You know, China very strategically has everything within like a one hour radius when they do like, you know, these these industries.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  But with tariffs today, I mean, it's 85% on aluminum goods coming out of China. So gets very close to the same price now. So I think that's why he's doing it.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for stopping by. Appreciate the update.

• 1:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Love the take, Sean. You will be a regular, a regular. Welcome to the show. And thank you for for posting your heart out every single day.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, I'm the number three, the best guest you guys had so far.

• 1:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll give you an NFT just for you.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Thanks. Thanks, Sean. Talk soon.

• 1:15:01John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, Delian should be joining any minute. I don't know if he's in the queue yet, but.

• 1:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Quick backstory. So Ridge sent, or sorry, Ramp sent Ridge a plaque for spending $100 million on Ramp. So putting up some huge numbers. And yeah, Sean is an absolute animal.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, let's see. Is Delian in the queue? Not yet. Okay, I'll text him and let's move on to Michael Magnano. He says, are people, and people are still wondering why every single podcast is pivoting to video? And it's a result here that says that a billion people are watching podcasts on YouTube every month.

• 1:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, if you think about it, Rogan really led the charge here. I feel like he had such a massive audience on YouTube and so much of the attention that he would capture was YouTube oriented. And you remember there was a period where Rogan's influence and attention felt like it fell off a cliff after the initial Shopify deal. And you could feel it almost ramp back up again as he went back on YouTube. So massive platform. You know, one of the biggest reasons for this is obviously that podcasts have replaced a lot of television consumption.

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  And what people don't always realize about YouTube is that a massive amount of YouTube viewership happens on TVs. So this is people in their house. Instead of turning on CNBC, they turn on TVPN.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  I get crazy screenshots all the time. People text me photos and they're watching it on the TV.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  And it blows my mind. And it was the same thing with my YouTube videos. I was like, you're watching this on TV? That's like insane. But I guess like, you know, when you put a lot of production value into it, it looks like TV.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, and that was our thesis. That was our thesis around if you actually want to compete with television around news, you have to record every single day. Otherwise, you know, nobody.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  In high quality like this. And it's also just so much more snackable because we can take that clip. We can take some of those, some of those great clips that we just had, put those out on X, put them out on shorts, make vertical shorts out of it. And if you just have pure audio, you just can't distribute it that much. It's really, really hard. Sometimes there's transcripts that can go viral every once in a while, but it's rare.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, Delian should be joining in one minute. Let's see if we have another post we can go through. Bullish on one person teams. Card is at 2 million ARR. Chat base is at 3 million ARR. Levels I/O products are at 3 million ARR. Testimonial I/O is at 1.5 million ARR. Tdin.me or underscore me products at 1.2 million ARR. Ben Lang says he's bullish on one person teams. Pretty crazy. What was the decision between PMF or die to go two person team?

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  The whole thing was that PMF or die was like, how do you apply these sort of extreme constraints? 90 days, 25K to at a million dollars ARR, sort of the simple concept. But then outside of that, you have to stay in the house, but there's no real rules. You can kind of do anything you want. That's, that's business, right? That business has sort of, there's laws that govern business, but there's no actual like rules in the same way that when two teams go on an NBA court, they have to follow, you know, specific guidelines. And so we wanted it to as close as possible match sort of like free market competition. The one thing with this Ben Lang post that's interesting is this to me proves that if you are really ambitious and you want to have extreme scale and impact, you actually have to build a team, right?

• 1:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Because this, this list would be more impressive if every single, you know, company on here had 20 to 100 million of ARR.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  I think we're ready. Delian, are you there? Can you hear us? Let's bring you in. I think he's close. We're figuring it out. Let's see. Three, two, one. Hopefully he's live. Going in.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  He says he's waiting to be let in. He's in the room.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  Let's get him on the show. Two call-ins one day. It's a big, big push, but we're ramping up. We're going to be doing 10 call-ins a day pretty soon. As long as people want to come and chat.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  We gotta make this, this easy for folks. Hey, Delian, how you doing? Can you hear us?

• 1:19:11Delian Asparouhov?

  Yo, what's up? Sorry.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  No, all good.

• 1:19:15Delian Asparouhov?

  Been a while.

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  Give me the update. What's the latest with Varda?

• 1:19:20Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, you brought in a capsule from, you know, sort of Mach 25 down onto the, you know, sort of Australian desert floor. Teams out there, you know, going to retrieve the capsule over the course of the next couple hours. Currently nighttime in Australia. Yeah, all things, you know, sort of looking pretty good. So we're two for two, baby.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  Nice. What was in the capsule?

• 1:19:43Delian Asparouhov?

  This time around is an Air Force Research Laboratory spectrometer. They're basically staring out of the window of the reentry capsule to basically characterize the plume of the reentry vehicle and compare that to some of the materials that are onboard. I'll leave it to the viewer to speculate as to why the Air Force might want to do that in relation to potentially trying to figure out what other vehicles are made of, perhaps ones that they themselves did not make. And well, we'll leave that exercise up for the viewer. But we're super excited to sort of help out with the maturation of that type of technology and what it means for, you know, our country's national security.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  That's awesome. We got to call Jesse Michaels to get him to speculate. What

• 1:20:20Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  What does the cadence look like going forward? Are you just doing, what do you know when the next one is already? Are there going to be just dozens of these? Give me the kind of next couple of-

• 1:20:29Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, next week. You know, hopping right back up and getting back to it. So, you know, a quick turnaround time, turning this from a, you know, one-off R and D mission to this year, we're planning to have four vehicles total. Three of those will be more DOD-focused missions. It's not to say that there won't be some farm onboard, but it just won't be like the primary, you know, sort of focus of the mission. And then one of our missions this year will be a primarily pharmaceutical, you know, sort of focused mission. And, you know, we kind of expect that, you know, sort of blind on a go-forward basis. And, yeah, looking to basically just continue to increase the cadence, you know, sort of year over year. Definitely some, you know, sort of vehicle improvements that'll happen, you know, from one mission to the next. And generally, for the time being, continuing to, you know, sort of land in Australia, just given the regulatory regime and the emptiness out there, making it a bit easier. But at some point, looking forward

• 1:21:12Delian Asparouhov?

  to returning back to the United States once that becomes available.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  Are you expecting that to get easier in the US with the new administration?

• 1:21:21Delian Asparouhov?

  For sure. I think it's something that the administration is clearly aligned with, but it is just one of these operational things that just takes some time to flow through, designating which of the military ranges is best as a landing range in the United States. We're basically just taking the same legal and regulatory framework that exists in Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, both of which were government-run ranges, that now obviously prioritize commercial activity. There isn't the equivalent of that for reentry. Right now, there is no dedicated government-run reentry range. We're exploring a variety of other use options, potentially private ranges as well, as we continue to narrow in the size of our landing radius. And so, over time, may not need to be reliant on a government plot of land, but instead, perhaps there's some private plots of land that are

• 1:22:04Delian Asparouhov?

  large enough. And so, yeah, we're super excited to have a... Say again?

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt. What is the ideal range size, in your view, this year? How much smaller can it be over the long term? And is that even the right question to ask?

• 1:22:20Delian Asparouhov?

  I think that information is ITAR restricted. So, what I can say is, on the order of around 100-kilometer circle or so. That's pretty big, to have that be fully empty and owned by one person. But that circle will get smaller, and maybe sometimes we won't open the parachute, and it'll be a very small circle.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  Fun.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Are you tuning into the next Starship launch? What are you hoping for there? What are you watching for that?

• 1:22:53Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. I mean, look, we built this business predicated on Falcon 9, sort of reusability and the cadence of that. And it's been really exciting to see that mature over the course of the company's life, right? Falcon 9s at this point are launching every 24 hours. We're super enthused by SpaceX's progress and the potential of Starship. There's definitely, obviously, lots of kinks that need to be worked out, but not so dissimilar to Falcon 9. It definitely took it a decade from the first landing to becoming a true workhorse that was launching every day. Both SpaceX is much larger, but also Starship in terms of complexity. And so, I hope that they sort of get... Through that, you know, sort of faster than a decade. But also, they've got a lot of programs and payloads that are more important than us.

• 1:23:37Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, they've got everything from the lunar activities that they've got. Martian activities, they've got Starlink satellites to launch. And so, you know, at least, you know, sort of my internal underwriting is like, I'm not quite sure that you know, Starship is going to be launching people like Varda, you know, before the end of the decade. So it's like, super exciting, but like, I also have to run a business, you know, month by month, year by year. And so I can't focus on things that you know, sort of relevant to 2030. You have to focus on the things that are taking me up to, you know, sort of space today. Falcon 9 is a pretty damn good ride to orbit every 24 hours and, you know, reusable, at least for the first stage. Pretty, you know, sort of pretty good offering and, you know, perhaps there are other people that are starting to, you know, sort of, you know, try to, you know, elbow into that, you know, sort of world, you know, God bless Papa Bezos and, you know, hope it works for them.

• 1:24:18Delian Asparouhov?

  And, you know, we're, we're, we're happy to get up to space, you know, which way or how, you know, uh, you know, rocket, railgun, space plane, you know, just whatever works, I don't care, I just need my, my sweet, sweet microgravity.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Amazing. How, how big is the company? What, what roles are you hiring for? What's kind of like the biggest challenge over the next couple of years?

• 1:24:37Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, we're about 115 people, basically entirely in the Los Angeles, you know, area. You know, over the course of next year, I think there's, you know, sort of two, you know, sort of, you know, sort of core, core areas. One, you know, sort of pharmaceutical, you know, sort of teams, definitely, you know, growing. Where we are sort of starting to, you know, work on a broader, you know, sort of set of assets. We're, you know, about to open up a new, you know, sort of lab space for the team. And so anybody with a, you know, sort of, yeah, formulation, crystal engineering, you know, sort of background, process engineering, you know, the types of things that we do up there, we'd be super thrilled to have. And then, yeah, generally on the aerospace side of things, going from a, you know, sort of, you know, one R and D mission to now four flights next year, even more, hopefully, you know, sort of year after, just means obviously we need, you know, a lot more talent on that side of the house.

• 1:25:16Delian Asparouhov?

  And that's everything from, you know, yeah, firmware, software engineers, flight software to, you know, avionics, structures, thermal, you know, mechanisms. And then we're starting to think about, you know, sort of more manufacturing engineering since, you know, we're starting to, you know, see, we're early in that transition from, you know, sort of vehicles manually assembled by high-end engineers to starting to introduce, you know, sort of more technicians into the mix and, you know, sort of more automation. Time to say that we're, you know, going to be looking like a Tesla style, you know, sort of assembly line anytime soon. But, you know, you know, one day need to, you know, start to, you know, look more like that over time. And so, some manufacturing engineering as well.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Are there any proposals that you're excited about in the new administration around like the space economy? Any like, oh, there's, if there was one law you could change, what would it be? That type of question?

• 1:26:04Delian Asparouhov?

  Well, you know, sort of the new administration hasn't talked a lot about the space economy, but it has talked a lot about, you know, sort of space being a potential zone for deterrence for our, against our adversaries. And so that's definitely something that we think, you know, has a lot of potential. We think we can field something pretty near term there. And as you start to think about, you know, sort of space, space activities that, you know, perhaps want to, you know, sort of go down to the ground, all I'll say is, you know, the company that just bombarded Australia from space is probably, you know, sort of well-suited to help out with that. You know, this time around, we pulled the parachute, but, uh, you know, so next time if you want us to not do that, we're happy to leave the parachute.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Our very own, uh, space arms dealer. Taking a quick.

• 1:26:51Delian Asparouhov?

  I've always been consistent. I'm a space drugs and arms dealer. No surprises here, you know?

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it's amazing. You were putting the secret master plan in your bio years ago, so it's amazing to see it play out. You recently ratioed Chamath after he tried to, you know, make a, make, reply to one of your posts. You said you had made, you know, more investments, I think, in the, in the last few months than you had in potentially the last couple of years. Where have you been investing? You know, you don't have to speak to specific companies because I'm sure a lot of those rounds haven't been announced, but where are you investing? Obviously just chasing generational founders, but what's most exciting to you in the early stage market today?

• 1:27:30Delian Asparouhov?

  It's all AI slop. I just want everybody to have their own anime girlfriend and she just, you know, sort of jerks you off every night and that's how we, you know, sort of maintain world peace and as much as possible. That's what.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Bread and circuses, right?

• 1:27:44Delian Asparouhov?

  That's what, you know, really changes the world and, you know, is really for the best. Uh, no, I mean, it's kind of what you'd probably, you know, should expect. I just like, I love stuff that is making stuff in the real world and it turns out with this admin, they want us to do more of that in the United States and I want to fund people that want to do that and I want to do it with people that are like serious and it's their life's work and they're not just doing it because. Is like, you know, dynamism is the new meme and they want to be a part of the meme. You know, I want to, you know, sort of fund the people where, you know, their family's been a manufacturing family for three generations and they think they can do it better. Because they're going to integrate some robots, some AI, etc. But, you know, I still have that, you know, sort of, you know, lifelong tie to that, you know, sort of particular industry. And so I've been really, you know, excited over the past couple of months where it just feels like, you know, a lot more people are thinking about that being the type of company that they can build.

• 1:28:29Delian Asparouhov?

  And I think you're really just starting to see, you know, sort of the clear, you know, the difficulty in, you know, sort of being somebody that was screaming, you know, sort of atoms not bits. You know, in, you know, 2019 was my, you know, sort of former, you know, sort of colleague Everett, you know, sort of RIP. You know, would always, you know, sort of critique me for, you know, sort of saying that, you know, Dylan just likes investing in low margin. You know, sort of capex intensive businesses and, you know, sort of five years later, you know, my sort of, you know, spin back to Everett would be, you know, which one do we think is going to be more valuable? The like, you know, sort of TikTok captioning app or, you know, sort of the company that's, you know, sort of cutting, you know, sort of metal for all the, you know, sort of nations, you know, sort of, you know, future warfighting capabilities. I like the cutting metal one, but, you know, Everett, you're welcome to, you know, sort of go, you know, invest in your, you know, sort of captions, use your products. I'm sure that would be great, brother.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  Shots fired.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Love it. A little friendly competition. You guys can put their notes in a decade.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Well, it's 1:30. We'll, we'll let you get out of here. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 1:29:25Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, sweet. Later, boys. Bye.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on. Talk soon.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  This is great. Never a dull moment with Dalian.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got two of the top, the top poster in e-comm and the top poster in hard tech in the same day.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  Same day.

• 1:29:39Jordi Hays?

  It's fantastic. Putting on a show. Yeah, for, for those, those listening, you know, our, our strategy here is to develop regulars on the show. People that call in, you know, we want to have, if there's big news in e-commerce and big M and A, we'll have Sean Frank call in, you know, get really sort of like boots on the ground takes on that. If there's stuff happening in space, we'll get Dalian to call in and both of them really delivered today. And I wish those, you know, it'd be, it'd be fun. It's actually, we want to leave the conversation wishing that it could just keep going.

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 1:30:12Jordi Hays?

  And we'll bring them back on the next week.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Oh, that's fantastic. Well, let's go back to the timeline. We got plenty more to talk about today. AJ Metta says, couldn't be more excited to share what I've been building over the past year. A cute AI alien friend that is fun, helpful, friendly, and won't try to fall in love with you. Tolan's remember things about you. They're really good at voice chatting and they can peer into your world through photos. It has been so inspiring to see how people use their Tolan. Help with school, relationship advice, fit checks, and just hanging out. It's been such a treat building this with his co-founders, an incredibly talented team of engineers and artists can promise that Tolan is unlike any alien you've met so far. We're live in the App Store. Go check it out.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I know AJ. He's LA-based entrepreneur. He actually was partnered with John Fio on birthday candles. I don't know if you've ever met him.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  I have. He worked at a crowdfunding platform that I used back in like 2013.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. So I had seen Tolan. I had been, somebody had sent me them probably, I don't know, maybe six months ago at this point. I didn't know, even though AJ is a buddy, I didn't know that he was involved with it because they didn't really come out very publicly. So this is, this is really cool. This is a thesis, you know. People have been thinking about this sort of like AI Tamagotchi or this AI sort of Pokemon. Been a lot of conversation about it, but very cool to see they have over half a million, you know, downloads, developing, you know, some, some meaningful ARR and a number one spot in the App Store. So I think there's going to be a lot of stuff here. You know, there's another company, I'm forgetting the name of it right now, but, but making like embodied AI.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  So kids' toys that have LLMs built into them, which is cool. So I'm just, you know, expecting to see a lot more of these.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  That was always my take with the Rabbit R1, you know, is this hardware device, really cute teenage engineering developed it. But MKBHD got ahold of it and was like, this isn't replacing my iPhone. And it's like, that's totally fair. But I always thought, I didn't buy one, but I thought that it would be a great device for kids because it's something that they can just ask questions to, interact, take a photo, what flower is this? What animal is this? Like, and it just feels like the bar for. Hallucination, as long as you gate it, so it's not saying crazy, crazy stuff. If it tells you that like this squirrel is a mouse or something like that's not that big of a deal. It's not that high stakes and some of those.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  It's not like calling an Uber and it sends it to the wrong place.

• 1:32:36John Coogan?

  Exactly. So the frustration of a kid dealing with like, you know, some sort of rough edge around an AI. That's still friendly and fun. It's like, it, it, it's like the gen emoji thing, but applied to an audience that is totally receptive.

• 1:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And what do, what do five year olds do? They ask questions.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:32:53Jordi Hays?

  So it's just this constant stream of questions and it's great when a parent's around, but it's funny when, uh, you know, my son, my oldest is not really at this point yet, but I imagine he's about a year or two away from starting to ask questions that I don't know the answer to. And so having this thing that's, you know, not necessarily a cell phone that they can have independently or when we're together to sort of generate those answers.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  The five whys stage, you know, that whole question of like in, in management, you need to be able to ask five whys deep to understand the root cause analysis. Toddlers amazing at that. They just keep asking, uh, you know, why does the fire truck come? Where does the fire truck come from? Who makes them? Okay. Who makes that part? I'm like, I actually don't know the supply chain that deeply, man. Good luck.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  I'll have to have somebody on the show.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Deep research. Yeah. I'm sure we can pull it up, but speaking of AI products that have gone off the rails and not been, uh, you know, as focused as what is happening over at Tolan. Notebook LM from Signal, Notebook LM has had insane potential, one of the best products Google's ever put out in years. We talked about this in the show very early on, uh, you could have it generate a podcast of two people talking about a topic to educate yourself about it, uh, but in classic Google fashion.

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  For a show once.

• 1:34:05John Coogan?

  You did?

• 1:34:05Jordi Hays?

  Cause we were, I was driving in one morning, we were doing a deep dive on something. I had zero context on the entire story. I generated, you know, a podcast about it and it helped me really quickly get up to speed. So it's cool. But I actually have some backstory here. I, I was at a dinner in Venice, uh, that, that. To my buddies Ben and Adam, who have a venture fund hosted and one of the guys that the product designers from the Notebook LM team was there. And he was excited because when you're at Google and you're working on this super hot startup within Google or this product, you become an instant sort of micro celebrity in the organization and there's all this momentum and more resources coming your way.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  It's a similar sort of thing that a founder goes through at an external company when they have a lot of hype. But I believe he and the team or some members of the team just left to start a basically that product. So I think that they lost potentially the sort of founder spirit that they had that were able to create that product.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  So he said in Signal says, but in classic Google fashion, it seems like it lost all momentum and got left to die. No mobile apps, no meaningful iterations, just VPs choking it out. The vultures came and picked it apart. Google's playbook for smothering internal innovation is unmatched. And then Andre Karpathy chimes in, they iterated on it a bit, custom instructions and the ability to join the podcast. But overall, I agree. I think I actually used it again this morning after a while and felt a bit regressed even. The woman's voice especially sounds more slightly more dead slash less interested. And Signal says, yeah, it got hijacked by terrorists parentheses, AKA Google leadership.

• 1:35:42Jordi Hays?

  Not holding back.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  And yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like, even when it was announced and it was gaining traction, it was still hard to get into that pipeline. It was very unclear. It wasn't its own app. It wasn't the Gmail launch where Gmail became this like phenomenon and it was a separate website. It was a, you know, first it was this Easter egg, then you had to refer a friend, get storage and stuff. And they ran a great playbook, not just promoting that as a separate product for Gmail, but also running all the growth strategy to make it more viral and make it work.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  And it just seems like that energy has kind of left, especially when there's such an incentive to spin out of Google, raise a bunch of money and instantly be at 100 million ARR and a billion dollar valuation, which is something we've seen again and again.

• 1:36:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Now, the big thing here is that Google's leadership deserves a lot of, they're certainly under pressure, but they deserve the scrutiny and they deserve to be called out by letting these sort of high potential products, you know, like Gemini in general, right? A lot of people are saying Gemini is great when I can find where to use it or how to use it, or it's not, you know, over promising and under delivering. But there's this general, when you compare Sundar to Satya, they're just not even in the same league, right? And it sounds harsh, but I think that we should hold our trillion dollar hyperscalers leadership to a high standard. And I think it's very possible that Google needs new

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  leadership at the top. People called for it when their AI image generation models were just, you know, generating just, just, you know, made up history, basically. And now it just seems Google has the most, the most potential in, you know, they should be, Google should be trading as a meme stock if it had good leadership and they're not getting, you know, any, any credit for the position and the opportunity that they have in the market because they seem to just continue to, you know, squander these, these opportunities.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, you know, that, that, that whole Gemini generative AI image generation debacle, I think they fixed it. It's pretty easy to go in there. It seems like it was fine tuned after they built the model to inject a bunch of extra keywords to try and make it more diverse. And it had all these weird anomalies. Easy to fix, easy to fix. There was clearly backlash. I guarantee they fixed that product, but they didn't integrate it anywhere. I just went to Google and I said, draw me a picture of a frog. And it just gives me like Google Images results and then Adobe Stock footage and then Pinterest and then Reddit. And it just gives me like the normal Google results. And it's like, the Google search bar is my entry into the Google world and it should know that that

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  is a, that's an AI query. I asked it to do something and it didn't do it. And so like, whoever's on that team is probably like, oh, well, like they're not letting me stick my product in the main thing. And so now I'm off on this siloed thing and how do I even get to that? I think they're just announcing that they're going to do a separate Gemini app. Maybe that's a good decision. I don't even know at this point. It's all very confusing from a strategy perspective.

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  But they got to retain the talent. They got to stop these people from jumping ship and raising billions.

• 1:38:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like if, if, you know, we could probably talk to the guy who built the product. I'm blanking on his name now.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  You'll have to get him on when he launches his company.

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  No, he already raised money, I believe.

• 1:39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should announce it here.

• 1:39:09Jordi Hays?

  And anyway, so we'll see, but I hate to see a good American technology company, you know, squander incredible opportunities.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  And there was that whole narrative of like during the AI boom, Sergey and Larry got super interested and they were coming back in and grinding and like picking up the momentum and the pace. And there was a moment where we were like, oh, wow, like Google's going to go back into founder mode. They're going to own 100% of Waymo. They're going to like, you know, really double down on this stuff. The, the mission of Google is to organize the world's information. Like what could be a better distillation of that than building an LLM? Like an LLM is just distilling the worlds and organizing the world's information into weights.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  Lost in the sauce.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  And they've done phenomenal products. The actual LLMs perform very well on the benchmarks, but they're just not productizing it effectively yet.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  They allowed a bunch of external investment into Waymo.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  That was weird.

• 1:39:59Jordi Hays?

  Which is weird, right? Why, why do you, you don't even have the, you're running this massive balance sheet.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  And you have a breakaway, you know, potentially world, truly world changing product that's growing exponentially.

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  And you need, you know, these big external.

• 1:40:17John Coogan?

  I mean, that one I can kind of steel man because it's like Google's mission is to organize the world's information and Waymo doesn't exactly do that. It doesn't exactly fit in the, in the mission. And so I understand why that might be. And it's a very different capital intensive business. There's all these different layers of the stack, the routing, the partnership with Uber, who cleans them? It's just a very, it's like getting into delivery. It's like, it's more akin, I would just expect like Amazon to really like want to be in that more than Google. But for the LLM stuff, like they got to figure out this product side. Anyway, let's move on to designer Ben Hylak. He's been on the show before, known for his Jaguar redesign. He, he says, I used to be really afraid of competitors and then I realized they can't hire me.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Iconic line. Ben, I actually threw this in because he rolled out a new website that he made himself. And I think it's one of the best new sites that I've seen. So if you're listening, go to dawn.s and check it out.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  D O N?

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  D A W N.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  D A W N.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  S O. And he cooked it up himself. It's been, I'm navigating around it right now. It's fantastic. And yeah, check it out. But, but yeah, I think his broader point with this post, which is somewhat of a, of a S word post, really trying to, John was, you know, upset that I said the S word yesterday. So I'm not going to say it again today, even in the context of an S post. But the broader thing here is, is, you know, having that confidence

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  in himself. It's called a meme post, a joke post.

• 1:41:54Jordi Hays?

  A meme post.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  He's joking around.

• 1:41:55Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  You know, it's like meme, we say meme coins, not S coins.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep. But, but yeah, I think founders that are overly focused on their competitors, it's just the biggest trap. You need to focus on what you're truly great at and try to spend as much time as possible doing what you're great at and augmenting your skill set.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  And you should never be afraid of competitors. It actually, yeah, it took me a while to realize that, you know, these markets that most people are playing in are so big. Just focus on your customers and focus on yourself, king.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Become unhireable, become ungovernable.

• 1:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, let's move on to Nick Carter, who did a fantastic job censoring some foul language on the timeline. He says, holy F star, star, star, S star, star, star, 35 billion, I'm weak, hold me.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So the news here is that CoreWeave is planning an IPO within a week that, that would allow them to raise $4 billion and would get priced at around $35 billion and pull out the size gong because Nick Carter is the Jason Calacanis of CoreWeave. He said it himself. There we go. Chris Pitt of the gong. Fantastic investment. Nick, I saw in the comments is a friend of the show, but he was in the first round of CoreWeave. And you can make a guess if he entered, assume that he entered at 50 million posts.

• 1:43:27Jordi Hays?

  The multiple on this one is absolutely egregious and will probably dwarf his earnings from his day-to-day job.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Who knows, right?

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  He made a lot of money in a lot of places. He's very successful.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  But still, he says this is his best investment by far. It's not even close. And we're just happy for him. So I wanted to highlight this.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  I love it. Yeah. CoreWeave, a lot of people are going to be looking towards this to price other data center projects. They're an AI cloud computing provider. They build data centers and then lease to people like Satya Nadella at Microsoft.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Satya loves to lead.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  And so there's a number of players here and there's a big question on how the public markets will receive companies like CoreWeave as they go out to the public market. And so everyone is waiting with bated breath to see where this trades. We talked about Stripe earlier.

• 1:44:16Jordi Hays?

  The timing is certainly shaky, right? You can imagine Core is running the analysis on Nvidia is down 6% today. Even as they beat earnings, the market is starting to, the animal spirits are...

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's a few things going on. I mean, DeepSeek, people got, they kind of coped through it with the Jevons paradox thing. And then the XAI news and they kind of balanced out. But it was definitely like, it made people just do a slight double take on like, should we really spend the trillion on a big data center or something like that? And then also you have a lot of questions about the public markets and how the US economy will do under the Trump administration as these campaign promises actually get rolled out. And if there are really significant tariffs or something like that, like there could be dislodging behavior in the market. And that could have an effect all over the place. And so we'll see, but good luck to them. And if you're losing sleep...

• 1:45:15Jordi Hays?

  Over the markets?

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  Stressing over the markets. We recommend that you get an 8 Sleep. Go to 8sleep.com. Nights that fuel your best days.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  8sleep.com/tbpn.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  You have a fantastic quote there.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. How'd you do last night, Jordy? Let's check it out. Eight?

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  I am mugging you in the sleep department. I already know I have a better score than you.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  Eighty-five.

• 1:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-seven.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go. Okay, I gotta get on my game. That was, that was rough.

• 1:45:40Jordi Hays?

  I think-

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

  Six hours and fifty minutes last night. What'd you do?

• 1:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Seven hours and fifty-nine minutes.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  Whoa, there we go.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm just really dialed into my routine.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Jordy's way up there.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  I, I was texting somebody at, at eight-twenty last night.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:52Jordi Hays?

  And they, they, they were like, they, they listened to the show. They were like, isn't this your bedtime?

• 1:45:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  I was like, yeah, it is. I'm about to put away my phone and, and crash.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Nobody outsleeps me.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Nobody outsleeps me. It is, um, no, it, it's one of those things. I do think that sleep, uh, you know, from a, from a fitness standpoint, once you identify as somebody that goes to the gym, I find it's very easy to just go to the gym every single day.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:46:17Jordi Hays?

  So when I started working out, uh, after I parted too, partied too much my freshman year of college, I just started going to the gym and I just, you know, identified as somebody that went every single day. So I would just go every day. Super easy. Sleep is very different. You're doing stuff in the evenings. You have varying levels of work. Sometimes you need to be out of the house earlier than other times. So it's hard to get consistent. Um, but just been focusing on getting extremely, uh, consistent and it's paying off because, uh, we need to put some real money on the line.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Real stakes for sure. And we also need to test the testosterone levels because I was scrolling through YouTube, see a great Chris Williamson quote or clip. He's interviewing Dr. Pia, Peter Attia.

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  You know, two steps to one secret hack to improve your testosterone. Open it up. I'm expecting some crazy supplement or something. He's just get some sleep. That's it. I'm like, okay.

• 1:47:08Jordi Hays?

  Wish it was more exciting.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  But it's easy.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  It's easy.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  With an eight sleep.

• 1:47:11Jordi Hays?

  It's free to sleep.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Emily Sundberg, one of the greatest journalists in the game right now. Uh, if you don't subscribe to her Substack, we highly recommend that you do. Uh, she says she wrote about unwell and breaks down Alex Cooper's podcast career. So in 2018, Alex Cooper, now famous for Call Her Daddy, started alongside Sophia Franklin, debuted the Call Her Daddy podcast. So she's been in the game for seven years, eight years now. Um, this show quickly gained traction with downloads soaring from 12,000 to 2 million within two months. That's a historic run. Fantastic. Tensions arose between Cooper and Franklin over contract negotiations and creative direction, leading to Franklin's departure. Cooper continued as the sole host, steering the podcast through a transformative period.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  Cooper signed an exclusive three-year deal with Spotify worth over $60 million.

• 1:48:00Jordi Hays?

  So here's a little bit of lore.

• 1:48:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:02Jordi Hays?

  Back when this article, when the, when the feud was happening between, uh, the Call Her Daddy hosts, this is in 2020.

• 1:48:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:10Jordi Hays?

  I spoke with Taylor Lorenz.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:12Jordi Hays?

  Taylor was writing for the New York Times at that point. Um, and anyways, I, I helped Taylor get some context on the story. This was before she was, this was at a time when she really had the tech industry's attention.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  This was the booming creator economy.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, I said, we're entering, this was a quote that ended up in the article, "We're entering a period where creators are business owners and media brands of their own. They can't just be seen as employees. Uh, the tools are available to them to become founders and CEOs of their brand and develop businesses with multiple powerful revenue streams like merch, ad sales and subscription revenue."

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  This is your quote.

• 1:48:47Jordi Hays?

  This was my quote.

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  In the New York Times.

• 1:48:49Jordi Hays?

  In the New York Times. And, um, what I was speaking to was that, uh, it was going to be, uh, Ms. Cooper was such a star that it was going to be really, really difficult to keep her there.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  Because she had so much attention herself. She could spin up a new RSS feed and, you know, have, you know, hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of subscribers in a week.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Right?

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  So the value, you know, historically, you'd have these sort of, um, Creator types that were dependent on the distribution of a TV channel, right? So they could only be this big, you know, figure, personality if they had their, you know, relationship with ESPN or CNN or CNBC. Now, you know, and this really proved out. She went on her own entrepreneurial journey, realizing that she had a lot more leverage in that situation, even though she was making, you know, millions of dollars a year at Barstool.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Yep. And so she signed with Spotify for $60 million, which was one of the platform's most significant agreements for a female-led podcast, 2021. Then, along with her husband, she launched The Unwell Network, a media company aimed at developing content with emerging creators. The network's initial signings included influencers Alex Earl and Madeline Argie. In 2024, she secured a $125 million, three-year deal with Sirius XM, setting to commence.

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  These are super max deals.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  These are massive deals.

• 1:50:09Jordi Hays?

  It's wild. NBA money.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, for the super top power law podcast, they get up there. Similar to Pat McAfee with ESPN. I think the deal is, yeah, in the 100 million-plus range. Joe Rogan, same thing. Transitioning Call Her Daddy to a new platform. And then in 2025, Cooper introduced Unwell Hydration, an electrolyte-infused beverage line developed in partnership with Nestle. Interesting that they're going with the big corporate partner out of the gate, targeting women's wellness. She also added several new shows to the Unwell roster, including former Barstool host Grace O'Malley. And so she's really grown her empire, and we'd love to see.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and what Emily gets into in her piece, which you can go subscribe to her Substack and check it out, but she just lost Alex Earl, which is this massive figure right now, one of the biggest anchors. And so the same, the same issue that Dave Portnoy was experiencing with having the star and then losing said star is now the same issue that Alex Cooper, which is why people have had this, you know, idea for the Barstool for X, the Barstool of business, the Barstool of XYZ, right?

• 1:51:19John Coogan?

  And the challenges. Completely the wrong, because Barstool is not the Barstool of something, it's Dave Portnoy.

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and when we set out to start TBPN, you know, we, there was a bunch of different networks that we could have worked with, but we were, you know, our point of view was we can set out on. Our entire business, we can have one producer, we're gonna have to incur some costs to get to get the show running, but there are costs that are, you know, most adults can can cover, right? It doesn't, it doesn't cost millions of dollars to start a podcast when it would have started, cost millions of dollars to start a TV network.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  And that talent retention problem is so real. You saw it with Vox Media. I think eventually Kara Swisher spun out after she sold Recode, started her own thing again. Johnny Harris spun out of there and started a YouTube channel. He learned all the skills. And so, yeah, there were startup costs. He had to hire people to do the motion graphics and he had to work really hard to get it off the ground. But very quickly, people recognized him, oh, that's the guy from Vox who does the border show. I love, I see it in my YouTube feed. And Cleo Abram left Vox as well to do the same thing. She was at a million subscribers in, you know, a couple of months. And it's because Vice, the Try Guys, did the same thing. BuzzFeed saw, I guess they were at BuzzFeed, but Vice and BuzzFeed guys, teams have left over

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  time. And the easiest way to go viral on YouTube for a long time was just put up a video, say, why I quit BuzzFeed, why I quit Vice, why I quit Vox. And boom, it goes viral. And overnight, you have, you know, 100,000 followers or a million followers. This just happened with Donut Media. I don't know if you follow them at all, their car channel. A lot of people have been leaving that. They got bought by, I think, some private equity firm or some investment firm. And so, the talent wasn't fully economically aligned. And over time, more and more of the talent just realized, wait, I should just be running my own show. And so, there's always this, it's, talent retention is very, very tricky. It's very, very tricky to align the economic incentives when you have these, these small teams. But the future seems to be like, the networks are not, to me, the, the Donut Media

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  or the Barstool or the Vox or the Vice. The networks are X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and you can be on all of them, but they have the power and they have something real that they are going to get a cut of our business and, and Alex Cooper's business and everyone's business. And then, and then the shows are the individual people. And so aggregating people together, it just doesn't work unless there's something really crazy going on. It's really perfect. And so I, I, I think that the future is definitely what we're doing right now.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  And if you're more operating a scaled network or media business, you have the option to grow homegrown talent, which takes a long time and it's really hard.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  And then you might actually get a hit and then they'll leave.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:05Jordi Hays?

  Or you have to pay a ton of money, which is what Sirius XM is doing, spending 125 million for a three-year deal.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  And that's just distribution rights.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  That's just distribution rights.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Or maybe it's some, some piece of it's exclusive.

• 1:54:16Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not fully exclusive.

• 1:54:17John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  But it makes sense because they'll be able to sell $200 million of ads against all of that on the radio, hopefully.

• 1:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or get, you know, subscribers that, that offset that cost, you know, user acquisition, basically. But, but yeah, overall, uh, gonna be, uh, only, you know, Sirius XM is cable at this point, right? It will, uh, just sort of fade away over time and will probably, you know, have, have some enduring value, but, uh, won't be the giant, you know, that it, that it once was.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to advertise a podcast, get on AdQuick. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Get an AdQuick billboard, folks.

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  We got our own podcast billboards coming up.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  We're working on it.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait.

• 1:55:08John Coogan?

  And I imagine a lot of people listening, we need to do the Sirius XM deal too. So then you can be listening in your car to TVPN and then you drive by our billboard and it's just 24/7 where in your.

• 1:55:18Jordi Hays?

  Sirius XM is so funny. I, you know me, I cycle through cars a lot. So anytime you get in your car, they're just sort of like aggressively marketing to you and they'll send you, you know, mail that says, "Open this right now." You open it up and it's like. We'd like to offer you a free month of Sirius XM. And you're saying, okay.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:37Jordi Hays?

  You stop opening them. But anyways.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Well, we got some news from Cognition Labs. Devon just got faster. They've heard your feedback that Devon is too slow. Devon is an end to end agent that makes hundreds of decisions for each task. So that test time inference stuff that we've talked about, essentially the reasoning models, that's what Devon's been doing for a long time. So there was and is still a long way to go, but they've made Devon 2.1X faster over the past five months and the trend continues. And so congratulations to the team at Cognition Labs. If you're running a startup with a big GitHub repo, get Devon in there. Get it in your Slack.

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  Get him in there.

• 1:56:15John Coogan?

  Get him in there.

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Could be your next top engineer.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, Devon is, it's weird saying he by anthropomorphizing it, but Devon is like the top engineer at Gumroad, right?

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anti-work.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  That's so crazy. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like, there's so much junk little tickets here and there, code that needs to be fixed. And like, no one wants to hop on those.

• 1:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  Put Devon to work over the weekend.

• 1:56:38Jordi Hays?

  Put him to work.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  Put him to work. Let's go to Paul Graham.

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  Put him in Workspace 17, actually.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Historically underperforming.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  Historically underperforming. Famously underperforming.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's go to Paul Graham.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Paul Graham says, "There are a lot of people attributing crazy beliefs to Elon lately, but to me, the clearest sign that he is not entirely rational is the continued deprioritization of tweets with links in them. Everyone can see that this makes Twitter worse."

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  And hits him with the T-word.

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  Tweets, yeah. Oh, that's disrespectful to the X culture.

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Paul follows it up by saying, "The suggestion that one should put links in replies is such an obviously broken workaround. Who, starting from scratch, would design Twitter to work like that?" I totally agree with Paul here. It's totally possible to simultaneously see exactly why Elon is doing this.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  It may make X, you know, lack of links makes X worse for users.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  But it makes X better for Elon, right? He wants to keep people on the platform and I bet you that it is working exactly as intended.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  Twitter used to be a place you'd go on and you'd discover articles, blogs, videos, music, you know, you're just, it was just sending you across, it was like the most amazing discovery engine

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  for the internet. It was, it was effectively like a stumble upon like product where you just go on, you didn't know what you were going to find, but you were going to find interesting, you know, topics. It was a great place for writers to distribute their work.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:09Jordi Hays?

  It's still a distribution platform, right? With PMF or Die, we saw this, we, you know, launched a post, got a million plus views on the post.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  Didn't include a link, made the post native for X. What works on X, Vibrales, what works on X threads? So whatever you want to do elsewhere that would be on a link, you can upload a two hour movie if you want.

• 1:58:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  You can't link to Netflix.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  I would argue that X is now a platform for attention and not distribution. So you can get people's attention on X, but it's, it's, it's not the sort of linear distribution of, I wrote a blog post, I'm going to post it on here, a bunch of people are going to click over.

• 1:58:45John Coogan?

  Distribution's never guaranteed.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, I still get a lot of links out to my personal website, but there's a very clear line. There's every single month, millions of people see my posts. Some percentage of those click to my profile and then a smaller percentage click to, you know, my personal website and I see all the traffic, right? So anyways.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  But it's a skill issue. Some people post links and still go viral.

• 1:59:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the tough thing with Paul, with Paul, he's an incredible writer. He condenses his thoughts down. He writes in a very straightforward way. He should be able to just post his post directly.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  He can, but I think he likes the aesthetics of his website.

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  That's the main thing is he doesn't want to conform to the X thing. But he should just copy the, just literally just copy the text and put it in a long post.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  And it'd be fine. But.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  No, and there's, there's a huge edge that people like Paul and Ben Thompson, they built up these newsletter, these, these newsletter lists.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  PG even mail? I don't even think he has a newsletter. I think people just literally just go and check, oh, there's a new PG post.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, it, you either gotta build your list, you know, offline and have that as a channel and, and grow it and have different growth strategies for that, or repurpose all your content to be X native, whether that's through threads or long posts, you know, Lulu's been able to do it. I see tons of people that can do it with threads, tons of people that can do it with videos. All sorts of people have, have found ways to break through with the algorithm. But it is frustrating.

• 2:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Because it's high standard deviation. And when you have a post flop, it's hurtful to your, you know.

• 2:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've talked about it before. I've had a lot of people, uh, reach out to, you know, me or you and say, oh, I think I'm shadow banned and all this stuff. I go, brother, you haven't posted, you haven't had a, had a banger in, in weeks. It's not, it's not the platform, it's you.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  It's you.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  You gotta take responsibility for the flops.

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of an absolute master of algorithms, let's go to Mr. Beast. He's raising, uh, he's raising money at a $5 billion valuation. The YouTube star aims to raise a couple hundred million dollars and he quote, "lost tens of millions of dollars on the Amazon reality show." I don't even know how that's possible because isn't Amazon paying for it? But I guess he may, might have.

• 2:00:50Jordi Hays?

  I think he has a history of, uh, betting on himself to such an extreme degree that he will go out of pocket.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, consistently.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  And like, you know, ultimately the, the Amazon show is as much, uh, distribution and sort of marketing for the rest of his business empire as it is, it's, you know, I, I'm guessing he looked at it and said, I don't need this to be a profit center.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm fine if it's a cost center. I have lunch, what is it?

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Because it's going.

• 2:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Feastables, he's got.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  So in the Mr. Beast deal, if you invest at a $5 billion valuation, you get shares in a company that's making, uh, 400 million in sales. And that's across Lunchly, the Lunchable, uh, product, uh, Feastables, the candy company, Mr. Beast Burger, the, uh, ghost kitchens driven, um. Burger delivery company and then Mr. Beast LLC, which is the production company. And so you get assets in all of those. But yeah, he's always been reinvest everything. He wants to be aggressive. He's running his business more like a Silicon Valley startup, trying to burn money, really go for growth and then capture the value later. And so far it's been working.

• 2:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  Big numbers.

• 2:01:58Jordi Hays?

  We gotta hear the update on Mr. Beast Burger. I think the other, from what I know, the other, you know, the, the sales of Lunchly and Feastables have been pretty phenomenal.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Beast Burger had a bunch of issues early on. I've never seen it anywhere out in the world. It's a delivery only product, but I haven't even seen it online once. The last time I saw it was around the controversy around the quality issues that they were having.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the quality control on a product like Feastables is way, way easier because it's just, if it leaves the factory in a good condition, it's probably going to get to the customer in a good condition, especially when your chain is Walmart delivery as opposed to it's being made in all sorts of different kitchens and then delivered by all sorts of different people. There's a million places where that can go wrong. And there's way more people taking a slice of the profit in these ghost kitchen companies than in consumer packaged goods, which are already not super, super high margin. But the, the Mr. Beast Burger, I think the financials were, it was always a harder lift than something like Lunchly or Feastables, which can, you know, just be, hey, we make a million chocolate bars.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  We drop it off at Walmart and it flies off the shelf because I'm a celebrity.

• 2:03:12Jordi Hays?

  So now the whole concept of airdropping food to people is, is, it sounds incredible in theory that you can just sort of instantly create a brand and produce it all over the country.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  The actual reality is that these sort of fast food companies that you're competing with, right? Raising Canes, things like that. They have, you know, spent decades developing these super, super, you know, Chick-fil-A has developed these super sophisticated supply chains to deliver the perfect meal every time. And Mr. Beast has a great, you know, brand with his demo, but the idea that he's gonna, he's, it's. Competing with Chick-fil-A is really tough, right?

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you see Mr. Beast on Flagrant 2? Do you know that podcast?

• 2:03:58Jordi Hays?

  What is that?

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Andrew, why am I blanking on his name?

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  He was on this comedy podcast and they play this prank on him where they're like, hey, we got some Mr. Beast burgers here. Let's all have them. And they open it up and they'd replace them with Big Macs from McDonald's. And they're just like, oh, this looks exactly like a Big Mac. Like, yeah, like, like, and they say that there's like some song that was popular with, with Big Macs back in the day. It's like sesame seed bun and like, you know, cheese and spread or whatever. And they're like, this looks a lot like a Big Mac, Mr. Beast. Like, what's going on?

• 2:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Wow, they really put him on the spot.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  And he like, kind of didn't get it for a while.

• 2:04:30Jordi Hays?

  He probably had to play along with it.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  You're like pranking me, right? And it was very funny.

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It's been, I have.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I think the Big Mac has an extra slice of bread in the middle, so he should be pretty obvious. But, and of course, like, he should know if it's his product. But anyway, people are having fun with it. But overall, you know, I think he's, I think he's kind of pivoted through that, spent less time with the things that are underperforming, spent more time with the things that are performing. And obviously the Amazon show, even if he lost money on it, it probably raised his profile nationally.

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  His audience on YouTube was basically maxed out, right?

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's hard to.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  You say that, and yet it's like every couple of months, he's celebrating like, now I'm at 400 million subscribers. Now I'm at half a billion subscribers. It's like, he really does seem to be able to just continue.

• 2:05:19Jordi Hays?

  His TAM is probably, but his TAM is probably less than Facebook, right?

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing that you see with like CNBC, where CNBC just does not have a younger audience. And so if he wants to expand the audience, going into more reality TV style, older crowd that's just tuning in.

• 2:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Just being on America's home screen.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Amazon Prime is a dominant TV screen in America.

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  He's a generational game show host and there's no reason why you wouldn't see him develop reality TV shows, co-host them, host them, or develop game shows. And the next, you know, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I remember that being like a really, really popular, Jeopardy is a game show that's, you know, it's a little bit less gimmicky. But that, that show has a really enduring value. It's had a number of hosts. And you could see him developing something like that, that captures both the online audience, which is future and growing, obviously, but still goes after the old audience that's just tuning in every night.

• 2:06:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question is, at a $5 billion valuation.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Is that a company that, you know, the, the, the idea behind Mr. Beast raising for this holdco is that he will take the company public at some day?

• 2:06:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:29Jordi Hays?

  None of these investors would be plowing, you know, potentially a billion dollars into the business if there wasn't a path to liquidity. And I just don't see there being a, an acquire that's not the public markets, right?

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  And the question is, uh, that stock has very real meme potential of like, you have this younger generation of fans that just want to be a part and, and feel like they're an owner of the Mr. Beast world. At the same time though, uh, looking down into these, he's got CPG companies that are prop, that, that we don't even know if they're profitable. So they, they, they account for 400 million, you know, there's $400 million of revenue across the portfolio. We don't know if they're actually producing any sort of actual, um, earnings. And then the production side of the business, unclear what the margin looks like on that. And over time, uh, he's going to have to launch many, many, many more businesses.

• 2:07:23Jordi Hays?

  So investors that are investing at five billion are probably thinking this company, you know, this group's going to go public.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:29Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to have to launch a lot of other companies to sort of even grow into that $5 billion valuation.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  It's a very different corporate structure because you could totally see Mr. Beast LLC, the production company going and getting acquired by Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney even.

• 2:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Any of those could pick that up. Do those companies want also a CPG company? And Feastables, natural home at Nestle, natural home at Unilever, right? But does Unilever also want Mr. Beast LLC? So I wouldn't be surprised if you see him launch a company, scale it, use his platform, his production company as the go-to-market strategy, the initial marketing. And then at a certain point, it's like, hey, look, Feastables has really saturated our core market of Mr. Beast fans. Now it's Super Bowl ad time. Let's just hand it over to Nestle, take that cash back into the business and then do an even bigger stunt, more content, and then a new product.

• 2:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:08:24John Coogan?

  And then just keep doing that. Uh, he's been talking about getting into mobile games and, you know, we've talked about him getting into a VPN or something, something, software, high margin. We'll see where it goes, but it's a fascinating story. Um, anyway, let's move on to. An interesting question from Yun Yu Li says, what happened to all of those companies that raised $500 million to train a foundation model for coding? Did they all just get mogged by Claude? Mogged by Claude is a funny, funny phrase. I'm genuinely curious for what it's worth. I don't see cognition labs, cursor, windsurf, bolt dot new, using anything other than Claude or GPT, maybe with the rare R1 sighting. And so, yeah, there's this debate over do you train it yourself or not?

• 2:09:05Jordi Hays?

  So a couple of these companies, there's magic AI, and then there's poolside AI. Poolside was started by, I think it was, was it one of the?

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  Isn't poolside a reference to the poolside PMs?

• 2:09:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. What's the poolside?

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  Oh, you don't remember that viral video of the, of the product managers saying they're remote working during COVID and it's these two girls and they're at the pool and they're like, day in the life of a product manager, here's what I do at my job. Well, I check in with the engineers and make sure that they're doing the, the tickets and everyone, it's super viral. I think that's the reference for poolside. I don't know, maybe not, but I think the idea is like, you use this poolside AI thing and then you can be at the pool hanging out, which is just hilarious to me. And I love the brand, but you know, who knows if it makes sense to train a model for 500 million dollars?

• 2:09:46Jordi Hays?

  We've, we've talked about this in the past, you know, so, so a little backstory on poolside. So Jason Warner is this co-founder and CEO of Poolside.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Was previously had a illustrious career, was the CTO of GitHub.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  GitHub, yep.

• 2:09:59Jordi Hays?

  And he was the VP of Engineering at Heroku. And he was also Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. So it makes sense that, you know, when he starts a new company that raises, you know, obscene amount of money, there's two strategies in, in AI that we've seen to date. There's the ultra-public sort of compete for attention on the timeline, which many of the foundation models have taken. And then there's the strategy of SSI, which is we're going to raise a bunch of money, but that's when you'll hear about us and otherwise we're just sort of shooting for ASI.

• 2:10:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:29Jordi Hays?

  It's totally possible that, you know, these companies like Poolside and Magical, which is backed by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  Another GitHub guy.

• 2:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Another GitHub guy.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  They're both in the two different companies.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dogs.

• 2:10:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  It's totally possible that they decided, hey, you know, there's, there's this bloodbath on the timeline for attention. Let's, you know, focus on just core traction and, you know, there's other approaches if you have. $500 million, you could spend tens of millions of dollars a year on direct sales and it could be a lot, you know, more under the radar, but it is, it is a very interesting call out that when you think about all these AI coding tools are using Claude, right? That is like the preferred, you know, LLM under the hood. So credit to Claude for staying so competitive despite it not even necessarily being their core focus. They just.

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  I need to do a deep dive on GitHub Copilot. Like was GitHub Copilot a custom trained LLM? Or was it built on top of GPT-3? I think it might've been built on GPT-3, but you could imagine that that would color, like the GitHub experience could color how you think the market will evolve. Because if they're, if they're building Copilot and these two guys both have real deep insights into what's going on GitHub and they're seeing this and they're saying, hey, it makes sense to train a custom model just for code, then it makes sense to double down on that. At the same time, there's a lot of people in AI who believe that, I talked to one guy, actually the guy from Etched, he was saying that, I was like, how do you think like the humanoid thing plays out? Like, is it important to just include all human knowledge in those training, in those foundation models as well?

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  And he was like, literally yes. Like, I think that adding the corpus of every book ever written will help a humanoid walk. And I was like, that's, that's an interesting take. But like, there's this idea that like, yes, Claude, like in order to be a good programmer should also understand every single language and every single philosophy textbook and every single history textbook, even though it doesn't feel like it applies at all.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's the same exact thing for any, you know, career path. If you have a bunch of knowledge from totally unrelated subjects, it can oftentimes allow you to be better at that one specific thing.

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:12:38Jordi Hays?

  And so I think there's a real case for that. But all that being said, in the same way that there's, you know, 20 different consumer LLM and sort of like chat apps. There's 20 plus heavily funded AI coding products and they won't all make it. There will be multiple winners because these aren't, it's not obvious yet that, you know, it's not obvious yet that these are sort of winner take all markets, right?

• 2:13:03John Coogan?

  But I say, let them cook. I say good luck to them. Hopefully it works out. Hopefully we get some cool products. I'd love to see it. Anyway, let's move on to Levels IO. He says, I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. And every time I load it, I'm stuck downloading new 10 gig updates and it takes me 15 minutes before I can even fly with my game. At least I can just fly immediately without updates. And so he, Levels IO is an indie hacker. He's been on Lex Friedman Show, very popular on X.

• 2:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Very popular about his wins, but also his failures. He's launched, I think, 100 plus products, many of which have flopped, but many of which have done very well.

• 2:13:43John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:13:43Jordi Hays?

  And his, his general ethos is just take tons and tons of shots on a goal. And he's, he's bucked the venture train. He's, he's very outspoken in that he thinks venture is silly. And at times it is, but he's managed to create a bunch of really cool products, especially, you know, more recently, he, I think, a few years ago, was focused on remote work. So we had a bunch of products related to, to that.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  What was it called? Like?

• 2:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Nomad List.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  Nomad List. That's it. Nomad List.

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Just cool. He was sort of living that sort of digital nomad lifestyle. That was, I was never big in that world, but it became very popular. And then now he's pivoted into AI. He does some stuff in image generation, which is really cool. And then I'm excited to see what he's doing in, in flight. He's created this sort of flight simulator that almost feels Minecraft-esque. And did you ever do flight simulators growing up?

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Not really. A little bit.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  I used to do flight lessons and, and it was a fun way. I had the full rig, you know, everything strapped up to my desk and. You know, the the yoke and everything.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  I was I was big into that world.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 2:14:53Jordi Hays?

  And so this is funny. This guy Gabriel is pissed off that Levels is monetizing his game that he released for free. So he releases his game. He says, you can play it. And then he adds these upsells where if you want to buy like a F 15 in his game, you got to pay 30 bucks. And Gabriel says, I make games for a living. Personally, I wasn't bothered until he added a 20, $30 microtransaction.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  It's not really a microtransaction. That's a pretty

• 2:15:16Jordi Hays?

  That's more of a macro.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Macro transaction.

• 2:15:20John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, it's it's fun. It's good demo of of him being able to build a basically a game, you know, with a bunch of AI coding tools. And he's building in public, but then still driving a bunch of attention. I think Elon quote tweeted his announcement video, and he did a great job of taking the the product he produced. And instead of just saying, hey, hey, go check this out. Here's a link. He posted a video to really give you full context.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  Went viral. Elon quote tweeted it. I'm sure a lot of people found it. A lot of people downloaded it or or just opened the web browser, started playing around. If they liked it, they pay 30 bucks. He gets to make a little money. It's great.

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Capitalism at its best.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  With all that money he's making, he should, of course, buy a Vacheron Constantin watch. I was in West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, going to a business meeting this morning. I should have been wearing this watch because everyone at breakfast was in absolute hitters. But I love that Vacheron's advert, running this ad campaign called The Quest. And they are on the back of The Economist this week.

• 2:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Goldcore Press.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Say, 270 years of doing better if possible, and that is always possible. In 1755, in Geneva, a quest begins, a quest for excellence in high watchmaking, a quest of passion, perseverance, and mastery, a quest to do better if possible. And that is always possible, the quest that never ends. Vacheron Constantin celebrates seeking excellence for 270 years. They're celebrating their 270th anniversary of a big ad campaign.

• 2:16:52Jordi Hays?

  So just to give people some context, Vacheron was started roughly 20 years before America.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Jordi Hays?

  Which is pretty difficult to fathom.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 2:17:02Jordi Hays?

  So this single watch brand predates America by 20 years. And it's important for people to know that they can go on Bezel today and see almost the entire catalog.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  They got a bunch of stuff on there.

• 2:17:16Jordi Hays?

  They got a bunch of stuff on there.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  There's a 222 on there too.

• 2:17:19Jordi Hays?

  We should put it on the record. We have a thesis that Vacheron, you know, it's the least well-known Holy Trinity watch brand. When people, even if, you know, you just said Holy Trinity to somebody that wasn't super familiar with watches, they would think Rolex, AP, Patek.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:35Jordi Hays?

  But it's actually Vacheron, AP, Patek.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  That's correct. Yeah.

• 2:17:40Jordi Hays?

  And I think that this brand is about to go on a generational run. You just picked one up.

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:46Jordi Hays?

  I've been looking at a few myself and, you know, it's a sort of undiscovered Holy Trinity brand.

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:53Jordi Hays?

  And the world is, you know, seems to be responding now. They have the new 222, which I have my eye on.

• 2:18:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:01Jordi Hays?

  If I can get my hands on it.

• 2:18:03John Coogan?

  And they, yeah, they haven't really overextended in the way the other Holy Trinity companies have.

• 2:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:08John Coogan?

  Less stunts.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Coming out with a Cubitus terrible press run, terrible reactions broadly. Probably going to get discontinued. Who knows?

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  I think potentially underrated, but continue.

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 2:18:20John Coogan?

  And AP's going crazy too.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  Just massively overextended, kind of pissing off a lot of core watch enthusiasts by these crazy sort of DJ partnerships, which may end up being smart, but you know, following more of a LVMH style playbook.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  Let's move on to Jonathan Wassersstrom. He says, I need some liquidity so I can take all of that liquidity and put it back into a different, equally if not more illiquid new deal. I love it.

• 2:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Jonathan's a buddy. He started a commercial real estate marketplace back in the day. So he's a founder. Now does a bunch of. Venture stuff, has a pretty active syndicate on Angelus. We did a deal together last year, but this resonated with me. My entire life has been, you know, working in illiquid private markets, getting some liquidity, tripling down into the next thing and, you know, just doing that. And I'm sure I will be doing that for the rest of my life.

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  That's the game.

• 2:19:18Jordi Hays?

  And I love it. So you may as well just say it how it is, which Jonathan says very eloquently.

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  But if you've got a bunch of illiquid assets, you gotta lever up. You gotta take out some debt against them and then roll that into something else.

• 2:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, leverage, baby.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  Let's move on to Sam Parr with an absolute banger. It's at 16K likes. I saw this and was like, this is so good.

• 2:19:38Jordi Hays?

  We don't have the ability to play it.

• 2:19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can't play the video.

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get videos.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, we will figure that out. We had a brief ride.

• 2:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Videos working.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  But it's a fantastic meme of Sam Sulek photoshopped into a board meeting, talking about his leg day in granular detail. Sam says it's the best meme he saw in the last seven days, hands down.

• 2:19:59Jordi Hays?

  That's saying a lot.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  I saved it to my phone because it's so funny. I think I could actually maybe just play the audio for everyone here.

• 2:20:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do that.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 2:20:10Speaker 04

  Legs pumped. Holy shit, veiny as well. I mean, pumped, veiny, fatigued. What other descriptors are there of a good lift? But I'll make this quick because I gotta get some, I gotta get some rest ASAP. The last thing I want to do is wreck my sleep schedule. But you tell me, man, I mean, that's a fucking pump for sure. I've kind of lost a little bit of the striations kind of on this side. Unpumped, there's a ton of fancy pants lines in here, but this is way more swollen than I need to be happy with.

• 2:20:45John Coogan?

  Oh, it's so good.

• 2:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  I love Sam Sulek. I really hope he becomes a Terminator.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  He sounds like a fish tank.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  Maybe. I don't know. He just like has his own little like tone of voice, but what a fantastic influencer. He's been on a historic run and good luck to him in the Arnold Classic coming up. He's going for his IFBB Pro Card.

• 2:21:04Jordi Hays?

  You gotta stream that.

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I think it could set off a huge wave of IFBB attempts in the Silicon Valley world. A lot of capital allocators getting into bodybuilding. Keith Rube was early with the berries thing, popularizing working out. The next logical step, become a mass monster. Go for the IFBB Pro Card.

• 2:21:24Jordi Hays?

  We've been working on it. Speaking of optimization, it's official. Go to the next post. You can now track Blake and Patty. They're in the cage. You can track their productivity live. So somebody was inspired by Optify, the YC sweatshop SaaS company that went viral. Or was it Monday?

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it was Monday.

• 2:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Weekend or something. And they basically rebuilt the exact product. So leveraging the stream, it takes footage, live footage from the stream.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  And then tracks when they're seated at their desk, actually working versus off doing other things. So you can pull this up. It's pmf or die.xyz. They got their own domain.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:22:06Jordi Hays?

  Posted it and you can live see, you can see exactly when they're sleeping, like not on their desk. You can see how much sleep they're getting.

• 2:22:13John Coogan?

  They built this so fast.

• 2:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I need to find, we need to find the guy that did this and hire them.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  I guess by at my real dev. So go give them a follow because they're going to build something fantastic soon. This is, this is great. I love this like meme website, one-off, you know, just simple demos. We've seen a bunch of people build stuff like this for the show. Ad networks and automatic clipping for us and stuff. There's so many cool things that people are doing. So you'll love to see this. And it's funny, this is the thing that like, it could just be photoshopped a years, a few years ago. You go back 30 years, Photoshop didn't even exist, right? You couldn't even make a meme. Now you can actually make the full website, make the full product. Thanks to artificial intelligence for sure. It's great. I love it. Let's move on to Lewis Hamilton. He says now's the time. He's on the cover of Time Magazine. Congratulations to Lewis Hamilton.

• 2:23:01Jordi Hays?

  What a fit.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Now at Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton races to claim his place as F1's greatest. Certainly hope it happens. He is, he's a phenomenal, phenomenal driver to watch.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be very tough, right? Ferraris are known for their. Lack of reliability.

• 2:23:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:18Jordi Hays?

  And if there's one thing that that helps in F1, it's a reliable, you know, racing.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  I don't know how real that meme is, but I got into F1 for a couple of seasons and I was like, okay, yeah, I know Ferraris are unreliable. And I saw Charles Leclerc like, like breaking down all the time. And I was like, how did that translate to the F1 team? You'd think it'd be like, maybe it would apply to one, but not the other. But it really does seem like it's a, it's a thing across the board. And it's got to be extremely frustrating if you're a driver, but good luck to them. Hopefully Ferrari irons it out, has a great car this year.

• 2:23:49Jordi Hays?

  They're doing testing right now.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:23:52Jordi Hays?

  In Sakir.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I'm excited to see the season.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  It could be the downfall of this show. You know, people complain about other podcasts pivoting into pure politics, staying away from technology and business and markets. We like to say focus on technology and business. We slip into some other categories every once in a while. But if the show really goes down the hill, I think it's going to become an F1 podcast. We'll only be talking about racing and cars the whole time. So hold us accountable if we do that. Get us back on the topic. Keep it tech and business, guys. Anyway, should we close out with Bology? Bology has an announcement about Biograph, the world's most advanced preventative health and diagnostics clinic designed to drive meaningful advances in health span and lifespan. Bology says, what's wrong with you? You don't know. You don't know if you're quietly sick. You don't know if there's a creeping time bomb in your body,

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  one that might be detected and prevented by a simple test. But you're busy. You can't spend time worrying about this stuff. Ideally, you just want to get periodically scanned by a set of machines, have them determine what's wrong, if anything, and then dispatch treatment accordingly. That's why Peter Attia and his friend John Herring founded Biograph. And it's why Bology became one of their first investors. The product packages just about every useful biomedical test into a single battery, from blood work to EKGs, from CT scanning to whole body MRI. It integrates all these measurements in an app that entrants them across time, giving a comprehensive overview of known risks for cancer, heart disease, metabolic disease, neurological issues, sleep disorders and more. It schedules you for a recurring checkup every six months and uses both basic baselining

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  and advanced AI to determine whether your results are normal. I'm sure. That Elizabeth Holmes is crying in prison, thinking that she should have built this instead, use off the shelf hardware.

• 2:25:36Jordi Hays?

  We don't know if she's using, you know, cutlery from the kitchen to assemble her own chips and develop her own machine.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  She's like, give me all the shivs. I'm building a new MRI. She's collecting, why does she have so many illegal cell phones in cell block 17? Oh, well, it's because she's developing an EKG and a CT scanner.

• 2:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is, this is cool. It makes, it makes sense to combine all of these technologies. And if there's one thing people value, it's their life. So I can imagine that people would pay a lot to get access to this. And there's so many cool things you can, you know, do with this data. You can imagine that life insurance companies would, you know, one day ask their clients, like if you've ever gotten life insurance, they'll send somebody out to, you know, do tests on you. And yeah, you can imagine, you know, life insurance being like, cool, we're happy to insure you, but get this test first so that we can set your rate, right? And yeah, so, so very cool application of the tech. And it's already seen, you know, people catch early onset, you know, cancer and things like that

• 2:26:41Jordi Hays?

  through blood testing biomarkers all the time. So I'm excited about, I hate when a company like this goes live and I didn't hear about it until it went live because it means I'm not invested in it. But, you know, very cool to see Peter Attia launch this. And it's cool because, you know, Peter Attia is historically, you could email him and sign up to be a client or a patient of his, but it was something in the range of 200K a year. So it's completely unattainable for most people. And even with that kind of pricing, there'd be a really long waiting list. You'd see him a couple of times a year and he'd give you advice. And so he's going to be able to offer a lot of the value of his service for a fraction of the cost, I imagine. You can imagine something like this costing.

• 2:27:26Jordi Hays?

  $5,000 a year and getting a lot of the value of what Peter provides in terms of longevity from that.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  Let's get Sam Sulek in there. I want to know his biomarkers because I want the same biomarkers.

• 2:27:38Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  And that's our show. Thanks for watching.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Real quick, some, some live breaking news. OpenAI launched a new product 4.5. Today, we're releasing a research preview of GPT-4 or 5, our largest and best model for chat yet. So again, we've talked about the roller coaster, the LLM roller coaster. We're all on it. We're all riding it, whether you like it or not. And, uh, you know, Claude out its moment earlier this week. XAI had its moment last week. DeepSeek had its moment.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  Over the weekend.

• 2:28:09Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, this is why Lulu's advice of just launch because you're not, you know, the best case scenario is you kind of own the spotlight for a few days.

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  Did OpenAI even do like a video for this?

• 2:28:21Jordi Hays?

  They did a live stream.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Not on X.

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then they've posted a handful of videos.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting because I wonder how much Elon is nerfing their, their reach. Might actually be, he might actually be a little wary to do that, given how many billions.

• 2:28:38John Coogan?

  He might be amplifying it with the crying emoji.

• 2:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Who knows? He gets in there.

• 2:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Saying scam.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  Reply something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, attention is attention.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, yeah, it says rolling out now to all chat GPT pro users. And so we should go, uh, and try it out and get our reactions tomorrow.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll break it down tomorrow. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of good analysis and we can test drive it. Oh, I got 4.5 right here.

• 2:29:06Jordi Hays?

  Ask it to tell you how many Rs are in strawberry.

• 2:29:10John Coogan?

  It's just like 10.

• 2:29:13Jordi Hays?

  4,450.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Just like shut up, actually. I don't want to hear any of your joke prompts anymore. I'm sick of you, human.

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Log off, touch grabs.

• 2:29:21Jordi Hays?

  I have, I have levels of intelligence that, that you couldn't even, you know, experience.

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  Get out of here. Get out of here. Anyway, we're getting out of here. Uh, thank you.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us a review. Put an ad for a company you work for, company you started, company you just love in the review. We'll read it on the show and that's our show for today. We'll be back tomorrow. We'll see you then. Have a great day, everyone.

• 2:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  Bye.