New OpenAI Hardware Device, Google I/O Reactions | Erik Prince, Anthony Pompliano, Scott Wu, David Senra, Joe Wiesenthal, Nikunj Handa

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (04:06) - New OpenAI Hardware Device (34:49) - Google I/O Reactions (38:49) - U. S. Formally Accepts Luxury Jet From Qatar (58:20) - Erik Prince. Erik is the founder of Blackwater, a private military company that provided security services to the U. S. government and other clients worldwide. He is a former Navy SEAL and now focuses on logistics, security consulting, and international ventures in defense and energy. (01:29:17) - Anthony Pompliano. Anthony is an investor and entrepreneur best known for his advocacy of Bitcoin and hosting The Pomp Podcast. He is a former product manager at Facebook and Snapchat and now invests across early-stage tech and digital asset companies. (01:45:14) - Nikunj Handa. Nikunj is a machine learning engineer and writer focused on AI systems, model architecture, and deployment at scale. He shares insights through his newsletter and has built a large following for his clarity on cutting-edge AI topics. (01:59:47) - David Senra. David is the creator and host of the Founders podcast, where he explores the lives and lessons of history’s most iconic entrepreneurs. His breakdowns of business biographies have built a loyal following among founders, operators, and investors. (02:19:58) - Scott Wu. Scott is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition AI, the company behind Devin, the world’s first AI software engineer. A former programming champion, he now leads efforts to push the boundaries of autonomous AI development. (02:41:17) - Joe Wiesenthal. Joe is an editor at Bloomberg and co-host of the Odd Lots podcast, where he covers markets, macroeconomics, and financial systems. He is known for his sharp real-time analysis and engaging interviews with economists, traders, and technologists.

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 TVBN. Today is Wednesday, May 21st, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. I still have to send the call-in post letting everyone know what we're talking about today. And that's why I'm a little bit behind on

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  We got a little bit of a lag, but if you want, John, we can just all get a bit of a laugh out of you.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. No one's laughing at me. The studio audience does not find this funny. There is nothing funny about what's going on in the news. We got OpenAI. They bought Johnny Ive's secret AI company I/O for $6.5 billion. We got reactions to Google I/O. I have been calling everyone I know who works at Google to try and get me more VO3 credits because I can't get enough of it.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Maxed it out by like 6 a.m.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  I maxed it out immediately. It's fantastic. The videos are extremely impressive. There's still crazy hallucinations. We'll dig into it, but it's a lot of fun. Highly recommend you go and fork over the $500 a month, I think it is.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  And only 50%... You can get it for 50% off right now.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  I'm now, yeah, 50% off, so I think they hit me with 250, but I get 2.5 flash. I'm on Gemini Ultra, but I can't do video because I maxed it out. But the results were fantastic. I posted some earlier this morning. Jordy posted one of him fighting 100 gorillas and winning.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  And I won.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Only possible with artificial intelligence.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you simply wouldn't be able to find out the answer to that.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Of if, you know, 100 gorillas versus one tech podcaster, you wouldn't, you would need AI to really simulate that kind of conflict.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Then we're talking about Europe trying to get into the technology game. I think of technology,

• 1:44John Coogan?

  I think of technology as like a uniquely American thing, but apparently they're trying to do it over there.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  I tend to think of invention as an American invention. And so I've never heard of any technology coming out of Europe, but I guess people are trying to make it happen. So, you know, anything's possible in the, in the future of AI abundance, it's possible.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  We love our Nordic, we love our Nordic entrepreneurs. They're goaded.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Yes. And we love one Italian entrepreneur in particular, John Fiorentino, of course. Of Volta, of Fiorentino Label, of Moon Pals, of Gravity Blanket. You know, he's probably the best Italian entrepreneur in history. Definitely in the conversation, right?

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Definitely in the conversation, John.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's kick it off with, uh, let's also pull up the guest list, tell you who's calling in. We got Eric Prince, we got David Senra from Founder's Podcast, we got Scott Wu from Cognition, breaking down that question that I've been digging into. How does the AI coding market landscape evolve now? Uh, we got top-down enterprise approaches, bottom-up enterprise approaches. Windsurf's been acquired, Cursor's on a tear, raising at nine billion. We got Codex and Jules from Google now. Everyone has an AI companion and AI coding bot, a companion for the software.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna have, you're gonna have coding agents that code you your own AI companion. That's the future.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  The real, the real test for Jules is can Google's new AI, AI coding agent build, one-shot me Google Reader.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Beloved Google product of a sunset. I want one prompt, build me Google Reader.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  I was blown away by, by everything that Google announced yesterday. And, uh, I was kind of laughing a little bit because one of Google's agencies was, was interested in, in partnering with us.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  And the onboarding, just to get in the conversation with them has been so intense that I just haven't done it for, for weeks. And so it'd be cool if they build an, an agent that could sort of, uh, build, you know, an onboarding flow that, that didn't involve a bunch of Excel sheets.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  Anyway. Longer conversation.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Let's go to the, the, the breaking news. OpenAI is buying, buying Johnny Ive's secret AI company, I/O, for 6.5 billion of, uh, billion dollars, uh, although it is in stock. And they will develop a slew of devices. Uh, Ive and his return to hardware in love form will oversee OpenAI design, all the details, including interviews with Ive, Sam Altman, and others from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. I mean, What? He is assembling the Avengers all over again. It's crazy. Like the early OpenAI team was insane. And now he's putting together Fiji Simo. You got Kevin Weal. You got Johnny Ive. Now there's just more and more people coming into that building.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  Nine minute video. The video basically goes on, doesn't say a lot.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Product is, right? I didn't get to the end.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Lot of back and forth. I summarized it with chat GPT. It basically said Johnny's amazing. Sam's amazing and they're cooking. That was like the three big takeaways from the video. So if you don't have time, if you have time to watch this three hour podcast, but you don't have time to watch that nine minute video, that's kind of the.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  I really did like the cinematography for what is essentially a nine minute podcast clip.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Feels like you're a barista.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  But it's, yeah.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  And that kind of makes you think maybe they're signaling that's the last job.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Venture capital and being a barista.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  It'll be very interesting to see what they actually launch. Anyway, let's dig into the Mark Gurman article. Bill Gurley immediately, within minutes of Mark Gurman posting this, cash or stock? What was the deal? I want to know.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  I want to know.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  And Mark Gurman says five billion in stock. OpenAI bought an initial 23% in Q4 for about 6.5 billion in total. Patty's in there saying, I don't want an OpenAI phone. I want an OpenAI brain chip. I want the 4O hallucination straight to the brain. Love Patty. Hope he's doing well. Anyway, let's, let's dig into this article and break it all down. So from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg, OpenAI to buy AI startup from Apple veteran Johnny Ive in 6.5 billion dollar deal. They will acquire the AI device startup co-founded by Apple Inc. Veteran Johnny Ive in nearly all stock deal for 6.5 billion dollars. The purchase, which is the largest in OpenAI's history, will

• 5:59John Coogan?

  provide the company with a dedicated unit for developing AI powered devices. And that makes a ton of sense, given that they are subject to the platforms. Google, obviously, is Android. Tons and tons of AI products. As we saw yesterday, we're going to go into some of the Google I/O reactions and what Ben Thompson's saying on Street Techery about, about Google I/O. And then Apple. Apple's obviously a little bit behind the ball with Apple Intelligence, but they can charge 30% on everything still. They can, you know, gate things and they certainly can't let OpenAI have free reign of the OS as they'd certainly like to have. And so. Not a reasonable decision, although many companies have tried and failed to break into hardware. Facebook famously with the with the Facebook phone, which I believe was a project that was run by Shamaan Paul.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing here is that so OpenAI is not acquiring LoveFrom, which is the sort of consulting agency by Johnny.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  And but LoveFrom will work, continue to work on I/O internally at OpenAI.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  And not, sorry, not internally, but I/O is now part of OpenAI. So the big question for me is six and a half billion dollars is a big number.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  They must have made some meaningful amount of progress. Otherwise, they could just say to to LoveFrom, can we just pay you, you know, $500 million a year to develop a device ourselves?

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  And so in the video, the thing that was notable to me is that Sam has an early version of whatever their initial device is that he says he's blown away by. And they've gone out and said they're making a family of products as well.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Makes sense. I mean, at the same time, if you flip it around, what does it take to get Johnny Ive to join your startup? Is it close to 2% equity?

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  Probably. Couple, couple points at least.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Couple points, right? I mean, that's unreasonable. And so you run that math and all of a sudden it's like, well, we're taking, we're paying for this mostly in stock. It's an all stock deal. 6.5 billion, latest valuation is what, 350, 300?

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  330.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  330. And so it's, it's basically 2% of the company of OpenAI is going to Johnny and his team. He's going to slice that up, probably owns a bunch of it. And so what would it take to get someone to be, to get Johnny Ive, the legendary designer, to be their head of design? You know, if you were at any other company, you'd be like, yeah, 1%, probably, right?

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Maybe more.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  Senior executive.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Like the numbers, they're all, they all have four extra zeros behind them, but, but they, but they all make sense when you, when you rationalize it that way. Anyway. So there's going to be this dedicated unit for developing AI-powered devices. Acquiring the secretive startup named I/O will also secure the services of I've and other former Apple designers who were behind iconic products such as the iPhone. Here's a quote, "I have a growing sense that everything I've learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment." Very poetic. I've said in a joint interview with OpenAI, "Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, it's a relationship and a way of working together that I think is going to yield products and products and products." For the British boy and designer, the move marks a high-profile return to a consumer

• 8:59John Coogan?

  technology industry he helped pioneer, working for years alongside Steve Jobs. He crafted the look and feel of the modern smartphone in addition to the iPod, the iPad, the Apple Watch.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Johnny specifically called out that these are decades-old devices, right? And so his point here is what comes next, right? What is the next platform?

• 9:20John Coogan?

  So he left in 2019. Obviously, Apple was working on Vision Pro for more than five years, right? So he must have seen that project at some point and then been like, "I gotta leave."

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  Not it.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Here's my resignation letter. Now, I don't know. I mean, obviously, it has touches of Apple's design.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  And the crazy thing, there's this picture of the two of them here, which Johnny unfortunately fails the green line test.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  He did in this case.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull it up.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  He highlighted that for us and tagged us in it, actually.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  But the crazy thing here would be if Johnny is actually wearing the first device, right? We don't know the form factor, right? It could be something like a pendant. It could be glasses. It could be something else. I'm just speculating, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's Easter eggs.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  But I mean, the green line test here makes sense. It's like Sam's the CEO and Johnny works as the CEO now, so.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's hard to say he failed, maybe in some way.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  He represented the true relationship of the business partnership, right?

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the boss man. Always fail the green line test for the boss man.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't want to mog your boss in a photo.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  Don't log your boss.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  That's a disaster.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  I was once described by Jobs as his spiritual partner and his new stint designing rival technology products could be seen as a bad omen for Apple, a company already struggling to compete in AI. In the interview, Altman said Jobs would be damn proud of I've's latest move. "OpenAI is going to create a product at a level of quality that has never happened before in consumer hardware," Altman said. "AI is such a big leap forward in terms of what people can do that it needs a new kind of computing form factor to get the maximum potential out of it," he said. Not saying what form factor that is, but could it be a rectangle with the screen?

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  The critique of the video, if it was a beautiful conversation that shared almost nothing other than they clearly admire each other and they're excited about what they're building.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  It's just two guys hanging out, yapping. It's ridiculous. Why would anyone do that? Why would anyone publish multiple minutes of just two guys talking to each other? This is crazy.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love at the beginning of the video that, you know, they're clearly walking to meet at this coffee shop or bar or whatever they're meeting at. And to me, the idea of the two of them just walking around San Francisco seems probably hard to go that far without.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  I was thinking about that. I was like, if I saw Johnny, I'm just crossing the street. He's jaywalking, right?

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Just, you can just do things.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  You can just do things.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Johnny walking.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Jaywalking. Yeah. So they just walk in and yeah, full camera crew, very cinematic shot. Really, really cool.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  John, I called it by the way. Ben just broke the news to us in the chat that there was an earthquake in LA. I was sitting here at the table a minute before, a minute before, a minute before we went live. And I'm like.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Built different.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  I was like, there's an earthquake happening right now. John's like, no, I'm just banging the table.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Oh, there's an earthquake. I'm scared. I'm terrified. I can't, I can't live through between days.

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  Your water is shaking. I was, this is showbiz, John. The show was gonna go on. We were not gonna stop the show, but I wasn't imagining things. Anyways, the other thing here, OpenAI had acquired a 23% stake in I O last year. So already pretty major shareholder. And.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Separately, OpenAI startup fund also invested in Ives company, the last, at the la, at that time billionaire philanthropist Lauren Powell Jobs.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cause there have been rumors, do you remember, do you remember like rumors? I feel like it was about a year ago that Sam and Johnny were like in the Middle East pitching this like device product. So there'd been a bunch of rumors, but never a ton of clarity.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  I mean, Sam just understands the full implication of the AI stack and is, and is interested in, in. In having a play in all of them, like the Helion, he's thinking about fusion and energy at the super, super long tail. He, he was talking about chip fabrication yesterday. He's obviously doing data center build outs now as well as the product level and the foundation level. It's like, yeah, the app, where does the value accrue? The model layer or the application layer? It doesn't matter if it, if it, if the value accrues to the, the foundation model layer, the application layer, the energy layer, the data center layer, the chip fabrication layer, the device layer, or the energy level, like he, he wins because he's got, he's got bets in all of them.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  Full stack.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Full stack.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  He's verticalizing.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  The deal is expected to complete, to be completed this summer pending regulatory approvals. The takeover of I O will.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  By the way, if this gets blocked, I'm taking to the streets.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna be out there.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Two guys can't even get a coffee and build together anymore.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's ridiculous. I do wonder how Elon's gonna respond to this. He's probably gonna be like, this is ridiculous. I don't like this at all.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  It's very annoying.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  It's very annoying. For Elon.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  For Elon.

• 14:08Jordi Hays?

  For Elon.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Why?

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Because, because to be one of the most powerful, wealthy people in the world and have it out for somebody and be so publicly aggressive towards them, but not seem to be able to actually, you know, he's consistently trying to, you know, Sam's biking by, Elon's trying to throw like a broom through the, through the wheel, you know?

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's just, the wheel's breaking the broom.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  I feel like maybe Elon needs to pick up somebody, some, some iconic designer. Who is, is Penn and Farina or something?

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what are they up to these days?

• 14:51John Coogan?

  What are they up to these days? I mean, we've talked about like Mansori for Tesla, but maybe he needs to get someone to design some, some X hardware. The funny thing is that like, there have been these fake viral.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  But I would be interested, I would be interested to.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible Elon has a different thesis around hardware and AI, right? It might not, his point of view, who knows, could be it's Neuralink is all that matters.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  You guys are focused on the wrong form factor. I'm sort of, you know, playing, playing 10, 20 years in the future.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  You guys can make cute glasses, I'm gonna be in your brain.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, that's Elon's lawn game is like, he's like, going to make the best chip. And like, Sam is gonna have to, at some point.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Be like, okay, yes, the chat GPT app is available for Neuralink.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  I gotta get the chip. And then Elon's like, gotcha.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Gotcha.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  You let the, you let the fox into the hen's house.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  You let the chip in your brain.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's just like, imagine he's like, you know, Sam, Sam has endured, you know, having Elon, you know, comment the like crying emoji.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  But imagine Elon just piping that into Sam's brain.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Sam's brain is just like.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Why, why do I hear this in the background?

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Every time I talk.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  It's so distracting.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. It's funny, yeah. I mean, the other thing is like, you know, maybe the next AI product is just the humanoid robot. And, you know, Optimus just sits there. It's like C3PO, I was watching Star Wars this weekend. And, and like, you have a question, you just ask C3PO.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  You have your humanoid robot and you just ask the robot.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, the, the opportunity with, with, uh, the long-term opportunity with Neuralink and AI is that you have a new,

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  sort of artificial internal monologue, right? That basically is augmenting your existing thinking.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  And so, you have to imagine that Johnny and Sam have thought about that potential scenario. And so, it's possible, you could imagine they, Apple's working with that company around,

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Sort of brain-computer interfaces. They could just buy that company for a billion dollars too.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  True, yeah. There are a few players. Interesting. The deal is expected to complete this summer, the takeover of I O.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  I just want a Ramp card embedded into my finger.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  You can actually do that. You can get an NFC chip in your, under your skin.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Embedded in like a little capsule.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  Our, our people will.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  It's pretty, pretty wild.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Talk to Ramp's people and.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Biohacking.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  We'll make it happen.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, you can do it. You can do RFID. I know someone who did it and has, uh, could like open, open a door with it, basically.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Super helpful.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  Super helpful.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  So yeah, way easier than a key.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Gotta have it.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Totally worth it. And the really crazy thing is that, uh, it, it, the, the capsule is like metal. And so your body like rejects that. So they have to coat it in silicon. But if the silicon.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  What about just replacing a fingernail with?

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think there's probably other ways. I'm not into the body modification stuff. It's not, not for me. What about internal monologue? You got one?

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I've spent, after the height mocking incident, you know, went, went way down the rabbit hole around, you know, height surgery. Try to go from six one to seven one.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, wow. That would be impressive.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Height mog you. Um, but, uh, it would mean missing the show.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm not gonna do that.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Uh, you have an internal monologue?

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 18:08John Coogan?

  I, can you imagine not having one? Like I cannot imagine not having an internal monologue to the degree that I think the whole story about no monologue people. Or like, I think it's fake.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  TVPN audience all has an internal monologue.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Is it just like an, is it just like an IQ test, basically? Or do, do you think the no monologue thing is real? I think it's just entirely fake and just made up. I'm very skeptical of it.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  We should have, if you don't have an internal monologue, come on the show. We'll break it down.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, the pair.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  I O has 55 hardware engineers, software developers and manufacturing experts, a team that will build what Ivan Altman expect to be a family of devices. The two executives have already been exploring some early ideas for about two years. They said the pair expects the first device to be a truly novel type of product. People have an appetite for something new, which is a reflection of a sort of unease with where we are currently. I've said, the question is just like. Apple's really tested every possible screen size down to the watch is super tiny. Then there's the phone, the iPad, the

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  iPad, you mean the YouTube machine?

• 19:16John Coogan?

  The YouTube machine.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  And then, and then you put on the Vision Pro and the goggles and you can get an IMAX screen. And so like if the device has a screen, it's gotta be something between one inch and 200 inches. And, and quickly you fall in that continuum.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the question is, are they building for GPT four oh? Or are they building for GPT six or five, right? And, and how much better do the models get? And are screens

• 19:46John Coogan?

  I mean, wasn't Sam also an investor in Humane? I think he was.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  So, I mean, I won't list the investors in Humane because some of them are friends. And they wouldn't wanna be associated necessarily anymore.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  But I think Sam's been thinking about hardware in a, in a, in a bunch of different ways and wants to test both no screen. See if that works, maybe screen, maybe different, different opportunities. I don't know. Ivan Altman's first devices are slated to debut in 2026. That's just like three months before ASI.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right around the corner. One, one thing I feel really confident in is that I believe they could sell a million of these devices almost immediately, right?

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Well, it depends. I think, I mean, yes, a million is like low enough that like it'll happen no matter what. The, the question is like, if it's, if it's additive and complimentary to my current tech stack, it's a no brainer, absolutely. Everyone will, will, will, will get one. If it's a replacement, it, it really has to be also a good phone still. And if they don't hit the basics of, okay, it would be, it works with iMessage. Then there's a question about like, am I really gonna drop my phone? Or am I carrying two phones now if it's like a phone sized device, right? Whereas it was very easy to, to add a chromatic to my tech stack. And it's like, yeah, I could probably get a Game Boy emulator on my phone, but it's

• 21:11John Coogan?

  just a cool device. And I throw it in my backpack if I'm traveling, I have it. Same thing with like, even the Vision Pro, it's like very additive. It's not fully replacing your phone. So, so VR headsets could be something like glasses, like the Meta Ray Bands. People add those to their stack. It seems like it's easier to get someone to, to add something than to replace something as important as their laptop or their phone, which they have like 10 years, 15 years of like daily driving use and expectations on where the apps are, where, how things work. It's gonna be a lot harder to rip out the current flow.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  I don't know. When he, when he left Apple six years ago, I've started the firm Love From, a collection, a collective of designers and engineers. Their staff includes veterans of Apple's hardware and software departments, as well as friends of Ive and other collaborators. He then co-founded I/O last year with Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Handa, and Tan Tang. Handa was Ive's successor at Apple and remained at the company until 2023, while Tan led iPhone and Apple Watch product design until 2024. Absolutely stacked roster. Cannon worked at Apple before co-creating the once-popular email app Mailbox, which was acquired by Dropbox. Oh, I had no idea. Did you ever use Mailbox?

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Nope.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic app. 2013 comes out and it, and it invents the, the swipe to archive, swipe to snooze paradigm, and really makes it easy to start doing Inbox Zero. And that's where I learned Inbox Zero, because when you signed up for Mailbox, there was this big, long waitlist. It took you a long time to get through. It was very like, it was a hot product at the time. And one of the first things it would do is just say, hey, you have 5,000 emails, let's archive them all. Because when you archive an email, it just leaves your inbox. You can still search for it. It still exists. It's not deleting it. So just let's archive it all. And then from now on, you should triage your email by swiping. And it was, it was amazing. It was a great product. And then Mailbox bought it, or Dropbox bought it. And I think they shut it down.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  It was one of those Giro sushi products, right?

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Totally. It was like really great design. And everyone loved it for like the year that it was viable. And then I don't know what happened with it. At I/O, the group set out to, to develop, engineer, and manufacture a collection of products for an era of, of artificial general intelligence, the point at which technology achieves human-like cognitive abilities. The team will now continue that mission at OpenAI, becoming a threat to the very devices the designers helped create. That adds to the challenges of Apple, which has fallen behind in Silicon Valley peers in artificial intelligence. The company's AI platform released last year lacks the capabilities of rival systems and relies in part on OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot to fill in the gaps. Still, Ivan Altman don't see the iPhone disappearing anytime soon. In the same way that the smartphone didn't make the laptop go away, I don't think our first thing is going to make the smartphone

• 23:53John Coogan?

  go away. Okay, getting a little bit more detail here. It's a totally new kind of thing. I'm really excited for this. The phone, as it is, as it currently is, is a remarkable general purpose device, I've said, adding that people will connect with AI in very new ways. We gotta get.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm so excited to understand what the interface for this first device is gonna look like, because one thing stood out. Nikita was posting earlier that if you're onboarding flow requires any sound, you just see an immediate massive reduction in usage, because a lot of people use their phones.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  What's an example of an onboarding flow that requires sound?

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Some apps will play a video, but I'm talking about this in the context of like a voice interface, right, with the app. And so the issue is people use their devices in bed or at the bathroom.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Got it. And they don't want to be loud. So if it's, if the experience requires sound, you're cooked.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Nikita says the majority of new app installs take place in bed or on the toilet. If your app requires sound on or voice to sign up, you're voluntary, you've voluntarily accepted a 60% tax on your growth. And so that's, you know, if your voice, voice AI has progressed so much, right? We've seen examples of Sesame, super low latency. You could imagine a hardware device that's purely allowing you to interact with, with AI like it's a human, right?

• 25:22John Coogan?

  What if the device is a response to all the, all the fears around AirPods? And so it's a set of wired headphones into a Walkman-like device, and then you can talk to the AI without needing to use wireless headphones.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  That could be really trendy. They could go back to the original iPod video of the silhouettes dancing with the headphones on.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  So TJ has a great post here. OpenAI got the best hardware and design team in history for $6 billion, or framed differently, for the same amount Amazon burns annually on Alexa and devices.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I really think that this is not a crazy overpriced acquisition. It seems totally reasonable to take 2% of your equity and say, hey, let's take a shot at owning the next computing platform.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Because this is such a seismic shift that there's totally a world where they go and solve glasses, or watches, or headphones, or some sort of other mobile device that you carry. And maybe it's additive. We should get some of the device entrepreneurs on the show.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Avi.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Maybe Avi Schiff.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  What has Avi said so far today?

• 26:29John Coogan?

  I'm sure he's ripping tweets. I'm sure he's...

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  He's launching in 71 days.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  71 days?

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  He says, he just posted, he just posted a minute ago, "Too many cooks."

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Too many cooks in the kitchen?

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Which is funny, because is that a play on Tim Cook?

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 26:46John Coogan?

  Also, there's that Adult Swim video, "Too many cooks." I don't know if you've seen that.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Too many cooks in the kitchen. Avi, I'm very excited for his launch.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we should give him a call.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  And it would be, even if, even if OpenAI and the I/O team just completely come out with their own version of Friend, it's still a cultural victory for Avi.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Because he got the form factor right, but who knows?

• 27:10John Coogan?

  And he can probably sell Oracle for $1 billion, or Amazon or something. Yeah. I mean, the Alexa, the Alexa Friend, that'd be good.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  The Alexa Friend.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. OpenAI also shook up management ranks this month with the San Francisco-based company appointing Instacart chief Fijisimo as the CEO of Applications. She reports directly to Altman, allowing him to focus on the broader strategy. Handa, who will become an OpenAI employee along with Tan and Canon, said that ChatGPT's debut prompted a realization that hardware technology would have to change. A number of us looked at each other and said, "This is probably the most incredible technology of our career." So, agree, but how will it change? Tell us something.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Just one thing.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Just one thing.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Just a crumb, sir.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Just give us a weight. How much will it weigh? How big will it be?

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  That would be fun.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Is it bigger than a breadbox? Can we do 20 questions with one of these guys?

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  20 questions with, that's what we'll do with Sam.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Is it made out of metal, or plastic, or is it organic? Can I eat it? Is it a robot? Does it?

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is interesting. So we are, so, so Sam says, we are obviously still in the terminal phase of AI interactions. We have not yet figured out what the equivalent of the graphical user interface is going to be, but we will. That's saying that there's a.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like the graphical.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Potentially like a crud app.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  The graphical user interface didn't change with mobile. The thing that, that iPhone did well was multi-touch. And so being able to like pinch to zoom and all of that was like.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, I mean, I mean, obviously the breakaway app was when you could just.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  The beer, drink the beer, the beer app was the, was really the win.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that, the iPhone wouldn't.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  I mean, we've already had that with AI. That's the Harry Potter Balenciaga. That, that is the iPhone beer app of, of AI.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  That's a good take. That's a good take.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Love from has a number of former Apple designers who helped create the look of the Mac and iPhone operating systems that haven't changed in a decade since they did their work.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Somebody go check on John Giandrea.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  We never finished that article. I really want to finish it. They, they could help redesign OpenAI's app for new generations of consumer, consumers. Love from will continue its existing relationships like Ferrari and Airbnb, but it won't take on new clients. Their new hardware team within OpenAI will be overseen by Peter Wielander, who will report to Altman as product vice president. They should just buy Ferrari.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  And Airbnb.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Can you imagine if OpenAI owned Ferrari and they're just like, this is the new device. If you want to interact with ChatGPT, we recommend getting in.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  A 296 GTB.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  An SF90 comes with ChatGPT integrated.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  I mean, you're already paying $2,000 a month for ChatGPT Pro Plus. Why not put it up to 4,000 and get a lease for a SF90?

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ferrari will finance it for you.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, totally doable. For the price of a ChatGPT subscription, you could easily be driving a hypercar.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, everybody talks about the $20,000 a month, you know, chat GPT subscription.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  That should come with a Ferrari.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  Infamous. Yeah, it should come with an SP3, right? It should just be, it's not humanoids, folks. It's AI will be embodied by the legacy of Enzo Ferrari.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Think about how low churn would be if you were like, in order to use AI really effectively, I gotta be revving that V12. I gotta be ripping it up on the open roads.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  The device needs to be vibrating from the naturally aspirated V12.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Cutting canyons.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, there was, uh, didn't Elon say something yesterday that, uh, it wasn't off the table that, that Tesla and X could merge?

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Luke Metro was predicting that a year ago.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  I'd finally buy a Tesla.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  So I could be terminally online behind the wheel.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like those. Roll in Ferrari for sure. You heard it here first, breaking news. Ive said chat GPT was initially put on his radar by one of his twin sons, Charlie. Uh, oh, twin dad. Let's hear it. So twin dads. Love that. And he immediately knew he had to meet Altman after using it. The new team at OpenAI will work at I O's existing workspace in Jackson Square, a neighborhood in San Francisco and OpenAI's current offices, so they're not far apart. I have felt that my most important and useful work is ahead, Ive said, adding that he has been training for this moment. He compares the experience to Apple in the late 90s to an early 2000s before the iPod and iPhone. I'm real, I'm just really, really grateful. We all found each other. Ive and Altman wouldn't elaborate on what hardware products they are working on,

• 31:39John Coogan?

  but they will be entering a market in its infancy. Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is perhaps the most notable maker of AI devices. It sells the popular Ray-Ban smart glasses, which Apple, uh, which Google is now competing with. They launched two different, uh, devices, NREAL, these VR glasses that, uh, it's, it's not full virtual reality. It just projects a really big screen in front of you. I've been wanting to pick one of these up because my main use case for the Apple Vision Pro is just watch a movie on a plane. And these are like cheaper, lighter, easier to use, and they just put the big screen in front of you. Very cool. I want to get some of those and we should probably try and get the CEO on the show. And then, uh, and then they also launched, um, like, like, like smart sunglasses that don't have a display,

• 32:23John Coogan?

  but you can talk to Gemini, which also very cool.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  Ive took shots at Humane and Rabbit, saying those were very poor products.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  And says there.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  This is a quote.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  I, is that the problem, though? Like, those were definitely new ways of thinking expressed in products. They just weren't good new ways of thinking. They were definitely new, though.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Not every new way is gonna be a good way. Yeah, I also think that I still feel like the humane AI pen built for children.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Could have been a hit product.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  The, the, the rabbit R1 specifically, too. Like, it, it, it would be so easy to sell that to your, your, your, your, your four-year-old, your five-year-old. Is going to start demanding an iPad. Instead, get them this.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  No screen.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  It's nerfed iPad. And it's just educational.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  It's a machine for your, your child's curiosity. They can ask it any question.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  They can ask it any questions.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  They can say, tell me a story about.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  But they can't play Skinner Box games. And they can't play Candy Crush on it, or whatever.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, there's definitely some of those.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  They'll figure out a way to put Candy Crush on there. Some of these whale kids, spending 20 grand a day on Candy Crush.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  But, but it's a, it's a vendig.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  Johnny's like, this was not my intention.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, he just creates the most addicting device, device possible. They're calling it the new cigarettes, folks.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  Ivan Altman wouldn't elaborate on what they're working on. Tan, who was a central, who was central to developing every version of the iPhone within Apple's hardware engineering department, said the new team isn't tied to a legacy and will have an opportunity to rethink the space. It'll be worth the wait, Altman said. It's crazy, it's a crazy ambitious thing to make. Not much detail here, but thanks for the post.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  I am excited.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  I hope it's huge.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  I hope it's a hit.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Really, really big. I want it to be as big as a newspaper.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  I think part of, part of really loving big tech is wanting more companies to become big tech.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Or high technology.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  And OpenAI has clear potential to get into that group and.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Maybe they should launch a newspaper. This is kind of hardware. Just print out deep research reports.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  And just mail it to me. Put it, drop it off on my.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  People discount paper as, as a, you know, a potential hardware form factor. Yeah.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Anyway, uh, Google AI reactions. Let's move on. Um, everyone on the Google team made the exact same hand gesture, apparently. They were all trained.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Tulsi in there?

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Tulsi's in there. She's been, she was on the show yesterday.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  I guess Logan didn't make that.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  No. Um, maybe, maybe he had some wild hand gestures.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  Shweta says goog gang sign.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Goog gang sign. Uh, are you familiar with the Merkel route? This one? Angela Merkel would always hold her hands like this. It's pretty sick.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  Similar to Andrew Tate? Is that where Tate got it from?

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Wait, Tate does it? Oh, I didn't know that. That's hilarious.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think his, his infamous, oh, he does, he does like this, this one.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  He tenses his fingers. Tenting your fingers is very like pensive and thinking, I'm thinking, oh yes, I'm tenting my fingers.

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  It's not very golden retriever coded. You, you never see a golden retriever do that.

• 35:33John Coogan?

  No, definitely not. Uh, Charme Kapoor, founders waking up that to realize that their startup is now a bullet point in Google's keynote.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So a couple, couple, couple of things here. They've launched a product to generate product designs.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  It was interesting. They launched a Doji competitor, which is like a try on product.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  They obviously launched jewels, coding agent. They launched the eyewear, you know, basically whether you're sesame, Doji, Doji.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, even Figma, right? Figma has generative AI.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  Tools.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I feel like.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  But, but again, I don't think that founders, I don't think like the Doji founders are seeing that and thinking, oh, I'm suddenly worried, right? Because the idea that Google is going to dominate in fashion, which is so culture driven, is seems really.

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't see it happening. I can see them having

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  A version of the product in Google, Google Shopping that enables try-ons. I don't think it's gonna be this like social, cultural thing that, that Doji is clearly tapped into.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how many startups Google has actually killed in history? It doesn't feel like that many. The famous example, of course, is like, Microsoft really did, uh, kind of kill off, uh, Slack's growth with Teams.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Right? Um, and Slack kind of like, you know, reached its peak and kind of flatlined after, uh, after Microsoft Teams took off because Microsoft had such a distribution advantage. I feel like there's two different types of startups.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  Teams took off because defense tech got cool and all the defense tech.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Had to be ITAR.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  Had to be ITAR compliant.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  For sure. Um, but, but seriously, it's like, I think that if you, if you saw a Google feature and you were like, I'm gonna start a startup on that and you're basically copying Google, because you're like, Google's slow, then yes, this is real. Like, to all the companies that were like, putting up fake Notebook LM apps that weren't really like raising money and kind of just like cash grabbing on top of like wrapping stuff that's already been created and pioneered by Google, if Google drops a Notebook LM app and they like wipe you, you can't really be that upset. Like, you're always in a cash grab.

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  But if you have built like a massive design tool like Figma and it has so many different customers and so many different things and then they come out with like, oh, something that allows you to do like a little bit of design work, like, it doesn't feel like as nearly as existential. Um, and so I feel like this narrative is always like, oh, Google just like, you know, completely destroyed this stuff. And it really depends on like, is, is this, is this truly aligned with Google's mission that they're gonna just keep pouring relentlessly at? And they're gonna make this great and it's, and it's completely on their roadmap? Um, and were you always building a feature or were you building something that can, that can grow into its own behemoth?

• 38:27John Coogan?

  And if, if you're on, if you're on the right track, you're probably fine. Um, anyway, um, what's next?

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of behemoth, the US formally accepts luxury jet from Qatar for Trump.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  No way.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  And it will possibly be used as Air Force One. And Yahoo is reporting that turns out Trump's Qatar private jet wasn't even a gift.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  It wasn't?

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  Despite the insistence that the plane was a gift.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  What was it then? If it's not a gift?

• 39:06John Coogan?

  Payment for services?

• 39:06Jordi Hays?

  A senior White House official told CNN that Trump tasked Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy to the Middle East, with tracking down a replacement for Air Force One. After Trump learned that Boeing would not have new jets ready for another two years, Witkoff ended up leading initial conversations with the Qatari government.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  And they have them in stock, right?

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Boeing provided the Pentagon with a list of other clients who might be able to help with America's search for a new plane. One of those sources says that Qatar was included on that list of clients. And remember, we saw that chart, right?

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  There was not that many people in the world that actually have these jets set up in this way.

• 39:42Jordi Hays?

  There were also discussions about leasing the plane. So again, when we saw the initial headlines, we thought that, we imagined that it was possible that the full truth was not, not really revealed yet. And apparently, legal negotiations over the plane's transfer are still ongoing. And it's unclear how the plane went from being a potential purchase to a $400 million gift.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Anyway. Where should we go next? Probably ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. We already talked about Figma, but let's tell you about Figma as well. Think bigger, build faster. Figma builds, helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  The backbone of TBPN.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  If you like some of the merch that you've seen, that's where we're making it.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Let's go to this Gary Tan post. This is good, actually, talking about the cycle never ends. Every month, a new world's most powerful model takes the crown. We applaud, compare, and then wait for the next. OpenAI introduces the world's most powerful model, then Anthropic, then Gemini, then Grok. There's a little bit of fracturing now in the sense that I haven't played with Gemini's LLM enough to displace my OpenAI workflow, but the generative video, like VO3, is truly...

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Way, way better than Senra right now.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  And so I

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  You compared the two.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  I'd same prompt in both.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  And it was brutal.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Not, there was not even a question which one you would go with.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, the Senra output made me

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  kind of

• 41:25John Coogan?

  It was, it was a lot of hallucinations.

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  It was really hard to look at.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  It didn't tell the story.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  It was concerning to look at.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  It was definitely like, like a lot of gyrations and just hallucinations. Now, that's not to say that the

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  Looked like it was out of a horror movie, John.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  VO3 had a lot of crazy hallucinations, but they were not as disturbing or more like psychedelic. Like, we generated this one video of, of an Audi R8 with a TBPN livery pulling out of our new studio. And it peels out, it's very cool, but then all of a sudden it's driving backwards, which is very odd and jarring. I did another one with a Rolls Royce Phantom pulling into the studio with a TBPN GT3 cup car livery.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Foresight.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  And that was foreshadowing. And that one, when it pulled in, did you notice this? It had a wing on the back and it pulls in and then all of a sudden the car morphs and you're looking at the front of the car again. And so it kind of hallucinated and transformed. It did that a couple of times where us blasting through the Hollywood sign. It, we, there's a Hollywood sign in the background. We bust through one Hollywood sign, then there's a third Hollywood sign. Like, it is still hallucinating. It doesn't seem, it doesn't seem grounded in reality in any way, but just visually, the fidelity of the visuals is incredible and the ability to, to include three or four different concepts. And then it weaves all of that into an eight, into an eight second clip. It's very, very cool. And the sound is obviously amazing.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  And so I have been begging, uh, Google representatives for more VO3 credits because it's a lot of fun. But yeah, we love, we, we, we love a, we love a, an AI race.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have some kind of meta news. Somebody is doing live translation of TBPN in Dutch right now.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Really?

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to try playing it, Ben?

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we'll see if this works.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  And we have Anthony Pompliano joining at 12:30 now. So in the meantime, while we're pulling that up, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the work out of your, the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. I need Pom's email for this invite. Let's also tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Linear launched their agent's product into GA today, which is very cool. And I want to ask Scott about it because they have been working on some serious integrations there, which will be cool.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  We.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Ik vond dat van de VPN uit Nederland.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Wow, they're translating us. That's pretty amazing.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna get really, it's gonna get really freaky once they get to this point in the stream and they're translating us.

• 44:25John Coogan?

  It becomes very meta. Oh, wow, they're actually talking about Vanta now. This is incredible.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Wow, this is really impressive. Okay, anyway, let's move on. Enjoy that if you're looking for TVP in Dutch. Chubby shares, this is freaking insane, the holy grail of personalized AI for daily usage. If this demo turns out to deliver what it promises, we'll be much further ahead in 2025 than I would have thought. So this is a video of a guy who uses a Android phone to troubleshoot a bike that he's trying to fix. And he asks the AI to pull up the actual manual or yeah, manual for the bike. And it's scrolling the PDF and then it says, hey, go find a YouTube video. And it opens the YouTube app. So it's very much working at the OS level to use all of the features that are available on any Android phone.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  And that seems like what we want from Apple Intelligence that we're not getting yet. You can't tell Siri to go open the Notes app and search there or take a new note. Everything has to be puppeteered at like the API level through these specific integrations instead of just using the whole, the whole phone. And so it's a very, it's a very cool demo. There were a bunch more pieces of news. Sam from Futuronomics says Waymo does more rides than Lyft in San Francisco. There are only 300 Waymos. Lyft has 400, 45,000 drivers. Every Waymo is doing more than, more rides than 150 human drivers. Now, there's a community note on this. I don't know how true it is, but there were some staggering Waymo numbers. I think they crossed 10 million rides or something like that.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  There's this comment right underneath it that I think is probably why it's getting noted, which is that this guy, William, says that number feels implausibly high, though I wonder if that Lyft number includes surrounding area drivers who occasionally do ride. There's no way 45, Lyft has 45,000 drivers.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  In San Francisco, the streets would be packed. It's what, a city of like 7 million people or something like that?

• 46:22Jordi Hays?

  A lot of pink mustaches.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  And, and reminder, like Uber's what, 100 times bigger than Lyft? And so you have 4 million Uber drivers for 7 million people or something like that? Yeah, it makes no sense. Anyway, Olivia Moore over at Andreessen Horowitz says, although she-

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Lyft is flat on the last year, on the last 12 months. So it's up, actually up one cent over the past year. So.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, we need a poly market on the current best AI model. I want to see where that's trending because Google obviously released a bunch of models and Google was in the, in the, in the leading contender for top model. And I want to see where the poly market is shaking out.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  End of May, Google's sitting at 91%.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  91%.

• 47:11Jordi Hays?

  And 40% for December 31st, end of the year.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Olivia Moore here says, Google had a bunch of great AI launches today, but they're so hard for consumers to access. I completely agree with this. I get stuck all the time in the wrong flow, in the wrong app. Even accessing VO3, I wound up in Flow, which is their TV product or something. And it was just showing me AI stuff. And then there's like, I can get into the dev studio, but then I'm, have to set up an API key. And then I finally have the Gemini app, but the Gemini app wasn't upgraded. And so I had to go through a flow on, on Chrome, on desktop to- Get that and I get that I don't have an Android phone, but I feel like I'm being punished too much.

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The bull case there is that that kind of stuff is actually easier to figure out than being on the technological edge and leading in benchmarks and all these other things and having massive.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, but they should be able to do both. They have so many.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  No, I totally agree. I'm just saying it's, it's, you know, talking to Tulsi and Logan yesterday, they clearly are incredibly locked in, aware of, aware of the, the pushback.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Yep. So she goes on to say, it feels like every debut comes with a new subscription, which you need a specific account type to access and have to hunt down the playground for. I know AI products are expensive to run, but with Google's distribution revenue streams, I don't get why they don't offer some of, some more of this for free. That was my question, or at least make it easier to find. Notebook, Notebook LM feels like their last big viral launch, which had no paywall. At various times in the last three months, I've been subscribed to Gemini Advanced, Google One AI Pro, and now AI Ultra. The madness needs to end. I agree, although I'm now an AI Ultra subscriber. So maybe they got me. Maybe it's all part of the plan. 4D chess.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm interested to track the ramp data on Gemini over the next couple of months.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  See if, see if it's, see if it's ramping up. Anyway, everyone's going to have to pay sales tax on this. Get on Numeral, go to numeralhq.com, put your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Wes Roth says, Google I O 2025 was an absolute AI overload and everyone is still picking up their jaws off the floor. Here's the TLDR. Gemini gets an agent mode. It's so powerful. It borders on executive assistant. So excited to check that out.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  This post from Addie. Gemini is the kid that got bullied in high school and is now jacked a millionaire and practices gratitude.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  It's very accurate. Yeah. I mean, they just like, I mean, that's the nature of these companies that, that are on the annual releases is that like you're like they're behind for 11 months out of the year and then they're state of the art for the big release. And then of course everyone else will launch.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm just like feeling extremely grateful that, you know, we own, you know, 80% of, you know, what you know is the internet and, you know, we can leverage this into creating, you know, really great AI.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  Theo says, "Google buying DeepMind in 2014 for $400 to $650 million might have been the greatest acquisition of all time." Completely agree. It's definitely up there, definitely in the conversation.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  Definitely in the conversation.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  Signal says, "Google's edge in local data, especially now with LLMs, is absurdly underrated. Nobody touches the depth, the history, and granularity they have on local businesses, landmarks, real-time conditions. Every other mapping service is just a sad knockoff because Google's been building this moat for decades." Also, I mean, the YouTube data is super valuable. You have to imagine that their edge in VO is because of the YouTube data. Because, I mean, like, it's the biggest repository of video content.

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  And new stream of video.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Constantly.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  Constantly.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Constantly. Yeah, and so that's probably why there's so much good stuff coming out of VO3. Ben Hylak showed the first-ever ad produced in VO3.

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  Can we play this?

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Welcome to the Token Tavern. It's in the tab if you guys want to try and pull that up. Justine Moore, Venture Twin, says, "Man singing a song about being a capitalist."

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  We should play both of these.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Good Alexander contextualizes it by saying, "You can own Google at 17x earnings and short Costco at 50x earnings. Long AGI, short rotisserie chicken is actually value investing." People love Costco. And then Archie Sangupta says, "Got access to Google diffusion. Holy, 909 tokens per second. I made a calendar in three seconds."

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is what people are talking about in terms of being able to generate entire applications, right? And this is the risk to existing software applications that don't have network effects, are really sort of thin wrappers around AWS and, you know, these sort of simple applications. I mean, I still think that this will be one of those things, you know, people, people can make their own food. They still order out from restaurants, right?

• 51:56John Coogan?

  Yep. Here, let's play some of these with audio if we can.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  The Token Tavern.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  It looks so good.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  Ben Cooked.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  He cooked.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Ben Cooked.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  Although, although, I know that those graphics came from After Effects. That overlay, for sure, After Effects, not generated VO3.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  He said ad produced with VO3.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it uses VO3. This is the most impressive shot in the whole thing, though. Look at this. Perfect lip sync. The teeth look great, the voice, the texture. But get an alert when your AI product fails? That's motion graphics, baby.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Truth zone.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Truth zone.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  Ben Cooked, though.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Congrats to Ben. It's a very cool ad.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. What about the other one?

• 52:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  This one, I basically watched this and I said, I had to watch this. I'm gonna make John watch this. It is pretty rough on the ears.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  Is it bad?

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  Let's lock in, check it out. In the meantime, let me tell you about Public Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  Trusted by millions.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  Public.com.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  Public.com.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Get on there. Also, how'd you sleep?

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  You know how I slept, John? I had to come back. You've, you've had a couple of good nights. I had to show you who's boss.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  I think I did poorly. 90. Not bad.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  97.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Oh! I got you two days in a row.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm back in the game, I'm back in the game. Autopilot made 22 different-

• 53:36John Coogan?

  Get a Pod5 Ultra.

• 53:37Jordi Hays?

  Autopilot made 22 adjustments to the temperature of the bed to get my REM sleep up 8%.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Just last night?

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  Just last night. 22.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  That's actually a lot. Okay, anyway, let's play this next video.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Aidsleep.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Alright, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off!

• 54:03John Coogan?

  This is so bad. So bad.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  That's wrong. That's just wrong.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Let's just end the stream.

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just, just turn it off. That's enough. That's enough for today. Honestly, let's take the rest of the week off, too.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  Hang it up. That's so bad. Yeah, I was looking at that viral, that viral video of, and the prompt was just like, stand-up comic telling a joke. And everyone was like, hey, this is actually funny. It's like, I went to, I went to the zoo. They only had a dog. It was a shit zoo. Funny, but like, that joke is not created from AI. It's literally on Reddit. It's literally at the top of like Reddit slash R slash jokes. It's like, we'd still, we're still training on the same data.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, somebody, somebody take that video of, somebody take that video of the VC singing that song, post it on Blue Sky and said, and just say like, hey, I know you guys haven't been on X in a while, and, but like, here's what's going on. And given that they're generally decelerationist, I think they might actually, yeah, they're not going to be happy with that. They hate to see a young venture capitalist singing.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Very bad. Just, just go to adquick.com, buy a billboard. 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. Thank you. That was rough. Anyway, we have three minutes. Let's just do a little quick timeline. We'll get to the Ben Thompson later. But I wanted to cover this article in the Wall Street Journal. Europe's firms fall far behind in the race to create big tech. Lack of innovation holds economies back, weighing on the continent's future. Berlin, the world's technology revolution, is leaving Europe behind. Europe lacks any homegrown alternatives to the likes of Google,

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Amazon, or Meta. Apple's market value is bigger than the entire German stock market. The continent's inability to create more big technology firms is seen as one of its biggest challenges and is a major reason why the economies are stagnating. And so if you look at their chart, and they're looking at number of unicorns by region. In the United States, there are 90 unicorns with a combined value of 2.35 trillion. SpaceX and OpenAI, of course, the biggest. In the EU, there's 107 unicorns. So actually more companies, but their combined value is 330 billion, basically an order of magnitude less value. And they include Stripe in Europe, which is not fair, in my opinion, because Stripe is a YC company that's very San Francisco-coded.

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  They have their conference in San Francisco.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  In San Francisco. But I've been thinking more about European venture capital because a lot of people have been hating on it, thinking that it's impossible to make money there. This is kind of consensus. All the smartest venture capitalists think that it's just impossible. But there is something amazing about that type of radical risk-taking in such a challenging environment. Like, and if you just think about like, the act of launching a VC fund in Europe, it goes back to the early spirit of Silicon Valley. It's totally like a huge

• 57:11Jordi Hays?

  This idea of giving money to a company, giving millions of dollars to a company that has no cash flows, that's maybe entering a market that doesn't even exist yet.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  And

• 57:21John Coogan?

  It's a million to one.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  Investing in European companies.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  It's a million to one that you even make a dollar revenue.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Potentially a billion to one. You know, people talk about like, one miracle companies, two miracle companies. In Europe, you need to be a 10 miracle company to do anything. And so if a VC can go there and even return even just a 1X on their fund, I think that they should be at the top of the minus list. Because it is such a remarkable achievement. It's so bold.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  Who's running the minus list these days?

• 57:49John Coogan?

  I don't know. Post Conrad.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  Post Conrad.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  But it truly, like, given the, given the expectations, if you can, if you can even get out of there with returning 50% of your fund, you should be, you should be, you should be remembered as one of the greatest venture capitalists to ever do it. It would be, it would be a remarkable accomplishment. You need a reality distortion field to just, to just go and deploy in Europe. It's remarkable.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  Some level of hubris.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Massive. Anyway.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we have Erik Prince in the studio. Why don't we bring him in? Eric?

• 58:18John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  There he is. What's happening?

• 58:22John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Gentlemen, how are you?

• 58:24John Coogan?

  We're great. How are you?

• 58:25Speaker 03

  Great to have you. Thank you.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  Why don't, I don't know if you need any introduction, but why don't you give an introduction for those that may be unfamiliar?

• 58:42Speaker 03

  Born in Michigan, served in the Navy for a while and built a business called Blackwater, which was a defense services firm, a private military contractor, if you will. I sold that in 2010 and have done some things in resource investing, upstream in mining and exploration. And I still, I help governments from time to time with large intractable problems and started a company just over three years ago called Unplugged, which is a standalone, independent phone outside of the Google and Apple universe. It's really kind of an answer to surveillance capitalism.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  What was the first dollar of revenue for Blackwater? Like, how do you get that business off the ground?

• 59:30Speaker 03

  So SEAL teams, special operations units, because of the gun culture in America, have gone to private facilities really since the 70s. Some, you know, some champion shooter that's running a shooting school somewhere. And no one had done that on an industrial scale. And so I knew, coming out of the SEAL teams, I knew what the teams needed and I built the largest facility of its kind in the world, within an hour drive of Norfolk Naval Base and all the SEAL teams and military concentration that's there. And actually, our first customer was from the West Coast, a West Coast SEAL team. But yeah, we built ourselves into becoming a indispensable part of the train up of military units. And then

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  when Columbine High School happened, that terrible high school shooting, you had dozens of police departments that responded and didn't do very well because it took them hours to clear the building and people bled out that should have been cared for. And so we ended up building a big mock-up called Are You Ready High School, where we could train thousands of SWAT officers how to respond to those kind of disasters and process with all the sounds and lights and role players and screaming and... And that was very effective. And then with the USS Cole Navy ship was blown up in Yemen by a suicide boat. The Navy realized that, well, the sailors that regarding that ship were holding largely unloaded weapons that they never fired before because the Navy thought it was too

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  dangerous to train with live guns. And so we ended up training 100,000 sailors. That was really our first big defense contract. And then when, and then when nine 11 happens, obviously, the demand signal for security and training and aviation and, you know, operating in difficult places was our specialty.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  How do those contracts actually work? We're familiar with the defense tech pipeline. A lot of defense tech startups right now, maybe they're drilled, they're building counter UAS drone systems. And the typical path is they get some SBIR money, then they move to program of record, they start scaling up manufacturing. But for what you're doing, I imagine that the contracts are structured differently. How do you project revenue? How do you think about ongoing relationships with the DOD and making sure that the customer is satisfied for a long time?

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  It's a much shorter flash to bang in terms of demand signal. A customer would come and say, I need this kind of airlift in this part of the world, move this many tons, need to be able to fly on night vision goggles and operate under this level of FAA or not scrutiny. And we would bid it about 98% of our revenue was competitively bid. And I look, at the same time I was building Blackwater, I took over my dad's original business, which made diecast machines, a big, you know, heavy machine tool business. And I took that through a lean transformation process, really based on the Toyota production system. And, you

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  know, lowering the cycle time of large quantities of steel and other work in process. And so as in land out Blackwater, I kind of thought about it like a, like a factory. And what does a military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys and supports people to do a job at a difficult place. That's what we did. And because we were a training facility to start with, we could back into the recruiting and the vetting. We had our own in-house doctors and psychologists for all the psych screening tests, our own supply, obviously, and enormous and impressive armory.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what do you think the, the PMC of the future looks like, right? You have warfares changing. We have autonomous systems now. A lot of the new capabilities being brought online are, you know, drone based. I imagine your sort of vision of, of how you counter that probably ends up looking like a mirror to some degree, but, but I'm curious. I'm sure you've thought about it more than anyone else.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. Well, when you look back in history, the contractors on the battlefield have always been there. And if you were laying siege to a city in Europe a thousand years ago, the people you contracted for, the PMC's would have been the guys building the trebuchets or the battering rams, which was at that point, the most sophisticated system, mechanical system on the battlefield. Um, now those, that cutting edge, bleeding edge technology is obviously in the drone and autonomous space. And yes, you're right. The, the private sector can adapt and operate so much faster, including in the cyberspace as well, that the, that is how you deliver

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  significant punch above your weight by having a few people that do those systems very, very well. That's something that we're still, the US DOD procurement swamp is still truly not learning from fast enough is you go from idea. To prototype, to field testing in combat on in Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks, and you get a buy decision from a customer that needs it. That same process in the US takes years. And so the obsolescence of ideas is so quick that we are missing. And so that that speed of advancement is obsolescing.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  I would say hundreds of billions of dollars of past procurement decisions now. And and we're deluding ourselves if we think we're we're fat, dumb and happy just because we've spent trillions of dollars over the last 25 years in stuff. Buying stuff does not equate to buying capacity.

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Have you been happy to see the the Army's recent modernization efforts? They actually came on our show and and talked about it for 30 minutes a couple of weeks ago. It seems like they are extremely motivated. General George came. Yeah, and I imagine on your side, these are maybe things that you've been pushing for for coming up on a couple of decades now. But what was your read on it?

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I didn't see their specific comments, but I I know there's certainly trying to be a refocus on lead on merit and lethality and not all the other distractions. I would go as extreme as extreme as it would sound. I would push the purchase decisions of a lot of the next generation equipment down to the division or even brigade commanders. Instead of effectively, what we have now is a socialist monolith buying apparatus of these PEOs through a few verticals back in Washington with enormous headquarters staffs. And I I laud the guys that are trying to reform the Pentagon, but the fact is you have 800,000 Pentagon civilians.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  If they cut that number to 200,000, now we're getting somewhere because you have so much dead wood that it literally blocks any kind of the speed or innovation. And when I say devolve purchasing decisions, yes, that will come with with supply chain chaos. You're right, I want that. I want the 25th Infantry Division based in Hawaii, which is probably never going to go to war alongside the 1st Armored Division based in Texas.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  I want them to buy and adapt current drone tech to their unique needs of the theaters they're operating in and let the best ideas float to the top. So then the Pentagon buys, makes a much, much bigger buy across it. If they bought 10 or 15 systems that are okay, but they don't really like, the speed of advancement of obsolescence, as we were talking about, almost necessitates that kind of trial and error.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Have you been happy that the startup world is firmly pro defense tech investing these days? Is there enough new investment happening? Or is it already too much? What's your read on just how much investment activity there's been in defense tech?

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  I am happy to see defense tech money flowing into those spaces. I think there's a lot of great ideas. My worry is that for the Silicon Valley crowd, which is used to spending and investing at a pretty high burn rate of overhead, because they're used to finding somebody that will buy their stuff, because they have thousands or millions of early adopters, you don't have that in the Pentagon. You have basically four buying verticals: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and maybe a little bit from SOCOM and a little bit from CIA. But that's it. And so however optimistic or aggressive their acceleration

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  of purchasing timelines, it's not near what those defense tech investors are going to be used to. And so the amount of overhead burn time they have to plan for is probably three to four times what they're thinking it is. And so I worry that there's a lot of great ideas that are going to wither on the vine, almost like planting a seed in really shallow soil. Until you get roots to where they can get to water, you're screwed.

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's been your experience with the capital markets generally throughout your career? Have you ever worked with venture capital? Has private equity played a role? Is there, can debt be used to finance some of these problems that we're trying to solve? Like, how have you interfaced with the capital markets and where has it kind of fallen short in your mind?

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  Well, I had a, I had the luxury, because of my father's success, I was able to self-finance Blackwater.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  And after the initial tranche of capital, I think it was six million to start the whole thing, buy the land, build the facility. Uh, we didn't have a huge CapEx load until the aircraft purchases started. But we went from one leased aircraft to seventy-three aircraft that we owned in six years.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  All self-financed, no other equity. We got a, a, a working line, a revolver. And, and that worked. Um, I really don't like partners. I don't like PE. I don't like boards. I, I don't like any of it. I'm kind of a unilateral person that way.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Dictator.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  So I'm not, I'm, I'm not the, I'm not the right one to ask about that.

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fine. Uh, what, what was your pitch when you were scaling the team and hiring people? Uh, I mean, I've heard the narrative that, uh, that the money's better when you transition into private military work. But, uh, was there more to it than that? Or is that narrative kind of overblown? Um, talk about building the team throughout your career.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  That was, it wa, it became a significant, um, vortice, a, a, a real center of gravity of being able to pull talent. Because, um, yeah, you know, C-suite talent, I, I, I never gave away equity in the business because it was dangerous. It was volatile and I paid, I paid extremely well. I paid very competitive bonuses and then would bonus two, three to five times base at the end of the year. So it was effectively a big profit sharing. And maybe that's not as tax efficient or whatever. But, um, the, the people liked it. The guys that, you know, our ideal staffing then was somebody that spent time in a special operations or a military unit.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  Uh, not a career, not usually a full career, no colonels, no generals ever. Um, intentionally because they had spent so much time, this is, take note, DOD or venture capital startups. People that spend twenty and thirty years in the military. tend to get stuck in that way of thinking.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  And so they can't think of just finding a a unconventional, different, cheaper, better, faster way to do something because that's just the way it has always been. Um.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  The um.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  But our pitch to people was, and especially for the guys deploying, was you get to do what you're really good at and we will pay you very well for that every day you're in the hot zone. The day you leave, their pay goes to zero. So we really, our our pay for deployed guys is really more like paying a roughneck. A guy that's going to a rig, they're busting their ass for sixty to ninety days and they're off the rig, they're relaxing, they're going to the beach in Thailand or or managing their family farm or whatever. But they get to do, they get to maximize their martial skills, whether it's flying a helicopter on night vision goggles at rooftop level at night or a a sniper, a instructor

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  or whatever that might be, they get to maximize that skill set and and get paid for it without the nonsense and bullshit and the layers of of stupidity that sometimes goes with the military.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  In in in this like onboarding process as you're hiring, was there a story that you found yourself coming back to and telling people that would join the organization to highlight heroism or sacrifice? Like, what what was the defining story that you like to tell to kind of characterize the work?

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Well, I guess there's two. One happened to me when I was speaking at the National War College in Washington. So there's three hundred colonels that are training to become generals. And they had me come in and talk about what we were doing as a PMC in the battle space. And at the end of it, this colonel came up to me and he had just been in Brigade Command, so in command of about four thousand people in Baghdad. And he said, I want you to know that, you know, at the top of the dashboards of his people in Baghdad's Humvees were the Blackwater call signs and frequencies because those guys knew that if they ever got in trouble, the Blackwater guys would come for them. No bureaucracy, no nonsense.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  And that was, hey, I was happy to hear that. That's exactly the guidance I gave my people was the Good Samaritan rule applies if you see a friend in need. Go help them out and and they did that above and beyond way too often. And then I remember um at the change of command for Admiral Eric Olson, who was the first SEAL four star ever and a friend and a great guy. A another SEAL Admiral uh who was in charge of all special operations in Europe and Africa came up to me and he gave me a bear hug. And he said, uh, thanks. You guys really saved our bacon last week.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  And you have um it was some really sporty flying. I said, that's why we have very sporty pilots. And what had happened is a so there was a Army Special Forces team, active duty, training up in Mali. This is before the coup and the jihad, all the rest. And their tents were staked down and a big wind, okay, they called a schmal wind came through and it basically picked up the tent and tossed it with guys inside.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  And it killed one, broke another guy's back, another guy's uh trashed all their comm gear and it gave another guy massive internal bleeding. That was the guy that was in danger. It actually picked our aircraft up off of its moorings. Damage the landing gear and the wingtip. And uh our satcom was the only thing that was working in the aircraft. So they called the other aircraft, which was a thousand miles away. And we're in the shit and we need medevac. Uh, and the schmal winds were still going and now it's getting to to nightfall. And at that point, the DOD would not let us fly in that area with night vision goggles, even though we'd requested it. But that's okay. Our pilots came anyway.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  And they landed on a single set of headlights in the desert at night. Now, if you've ever flown over the desert, you see how utterly dark it is. And so to land on a single set of headlights is extraordinary and extremely dangerous. Wow. And they landed. And our medic, our eighteen, our former eighteen Delta medic was strapped into the back. And he gets all these wounded guys on board and he starts to work on this guy who's now his blood pressure has gone to like fifty over nothing because he's gone through every bit of liquid. And he works him for the next thirty six hours, keeping him alive. Now, the guy's body was distended because they couldn't figure out where the internal bleed was and they get him back to Ouagadougou.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  And he goes way beyond protocol to save his life at at personal licensing risk to the guy's, you know, to himself. He opens him up on an operating table of this lousy Wagadougou Burkina Faso hospital. And sure enough, finds that the guy's spleen is ruptured. That's where the leak was. And so he removes it, clamps it off, puts it in a Ziploc bag, puts the guy's organs back in, sews him up. And then finally, the high dollar Air Force surgical ward finally arrives 12 hours later. Too little, too late. But our guy, our guy completely saved his life. And he took massive

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  personal risk to do that because his job was to be a medic. It's not to do surgery. But he did it anyway. And so that's in keeping with the attitude of having the right people with the right attitude and the right skill set. With with it. And we try to do intent based leadership. Go forward and do good things and support the customer. Make sure the good guys win. And that was a good day.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  Incredible story. I want to switch gears completely and ask you about a topic that I'm sure you spent some time thinking about, but AI safety that you might you might laugh a little bit about that. But I'm curious if you've worked with any if any groups kind of globally around this idea. You know, just sort of the idea of AI safety as AI systems advance. You know, the labs talk about this quite a lot, the potential dangers of misaligned AI and the dangers of a adversarial government with with advanced AI. What what, if anything, have you

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  are your thoughts on on that sort of very broad question?

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Well, I guess the first question comes back to who's, yes, I agree. Those are all very concerning topics and undoubtedly there are hostile, unfriendly governments that have done serious germ and bio warfare, research and development that we're not aware about, not aware of. But I even question our own government when I think it's legitimate questions to ask of NIH and the rest of those guys for the gain of function testing that they were doing and funding in China, which ended up causing apparently the COVID debacle. I'd say almost like the Hippocratic Oath, let's first do no harm and let's not spend

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  money on dumb people that should not be doing that kind of research in the first place. But you're right. I am certainly no AI expert. I'm probably more of a, I don't know what I'm an expert in, but I.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  A few things.

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  It's safe to say that if AI can be used for malign purposes, and it will be, it's going to be done or it will be done. So whether it's for breaking passwords or for targeting people, I'm sure some entities are well along in that development and one should be careful.

• 1:19:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. I also wanted to ask you about, there was some unfortunate news, or at least it seemed unfortunate that Taiwan had decommissioned their last remaining nuclear reactor and are now completely dependent on imported natural gas. I'm sure you have some strong opinions around this.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I find that extraordinarily stupid of them and that's a DPP. I mean, look, the two political parties are the Kuomintang and the DPP. The KMT is the one that's really much more pro mainland CCP tilted. The DPP is just kind of a super green and a bit woke as a party that they would carry through on this and turn off a nuclear power that was, a nuclear plant that was not dependent on hydrocarbons coming from the Middle East is extraordinarily short sighted. It speaks to their. Uh disbelief, their lack of fully understanding that that we are not there to

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  hold their hand and to guarantee their safety. Um, I have advocated as loudly as I can that the only answer for deterrence there is an actual home guard. Because that government is corrupted at many levels. Any weapon system of significant or strategic value is already been probably pre-registered to be hit with not one, but probably five Chinese missiles. So whether it's an airplane, a submarine, or whatever, the only thing that can inject uncertainty into an invader is a home guard. Um, in the same way that, uh, you know, the American Revolution, there was only 3% of our population

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  that took up arms to fight. If we found, and in Taiwan, that's 24-ish million people, so over 700,000, if we were allowed to recruit and train a home guard, three to four weeks, their military is largely useless. The reserve forces, not so much. They don't, their idea of combat training is far from what ours is. Um, but if you find the citizens that are willing, it injects a massive uncertainty into an invader's mind because the terrain itself, either super urban or mountainous jungle, uh, definitely favors the defender. And if Xi Jinping and the CCP are going to go for it, they have to be quick. They,

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  they themselves cannot afford a long, multi-year fight like you see in Ukraine because they depend on hydrocarbons and, uh, even food for imports.

• 1:22:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, switching gears a little bit again, I'm, I'm curious, uh, to get your thoughts on the European defense tech ecosystem broadly. I'm sure you've done a bunch of business out there over the years. There's been some renewed, you know, new kind of spending bills.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Ryan Matal's.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Matal's been ripping.

• 1:22:54John Coogan?

  Fantastic stock, but I don't know about the company and, and, and I guess there's just this overarching idea that, uh, America has Anduril and now every European country wants to kind of own their own defense stack and there's a lot of energy there. But how do you think that the, the landscape around defense in Europe is changing, either on the, the government side or the private sector?

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  Uh, the only country I see being serious about it at all is Poland. They have invested, they have invested and built some real combat capability. Uh, the Baltics have not yet, Finland, a bit. There's lots of talk about a big European defense. Uh, extra spend, Germany has been atrocious. I don't know, I, I think, I think people have bid up Rheinmetall because I, I, I don't know that their earnings have been that spectacular. Their stock price has probably done great.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  But that's, I hope, it's a hope of future earnings.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  But, um, uh, I just see a complete lack of seriousness of European political leaders, uh, to address their own defense. And, uh, it's taken them a long time to wake up from this, uh, this hangover of, of, and lethargy.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Uh, uh, uh.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  That being said, that, that, that being said, the, the most capable military in, in Europe right now is the Ukrainian military. The lessons learned that they have are very significant. The drone tech is far and away the best. Their ability to, to fight against and to even conduct electronic warfare and even close air support in this environment is, uh, is leaps and bounds ahead of even what the US military is. So that's the military to learn from. Uh, Ukraine does, does have a corruption problem. I hope sincerely that Trump is able to, to get a ceasefire in place and to stop this killing because it's, it's absolutely pointless.

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  It's just Slavs killing Slavs at this point and it's, it's, nobody's going to advance. Um, and you have a, um, a blend of old and new. I mean, if you look at the pictures of the front there now, it's almost indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somme. Right? Artillery duels, static lines, bunkers, all the rest. Now the problem is somebody can fly an FPV into your bunker on the other side. But between tens of millions of landmines, which make armored breakthrough very difficult, it slows down any attack so that the FPVs and artillery can get to it. You're not going to see any kind of blitzkrieg, Hanskiderian maneuver warfare there.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  Um, until some significantly different weapon systems come along. So, uh, look, Europe needs to get serious about it. They're far from it at this point.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, at home, these conflicts have been raging for years, but they feel very abstract because in America, you just kind of go about your day and go to the grocery store and things feel normal, even though the the global tenor of great power competition and and even these more minor conflicts is growing every single day. Between Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, China, what is the most, where should the focus be right now? How should people stay up to speed? How do we get an even an idea of of where these conflicts are going? How should people understand

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  the nature and the risk associated?

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  Well, they can follow my podcast because I talk about these conflicts almost once a week.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Okay, that's great.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  That's a great place to start.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  What's the name of the podcast? Let's plug it.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  It's a it's Off Leash with Erik Prince.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  I got one last, I got one last kind of question for you. The rumors that we've heard around how the whole TikTok debacle is being solved haven't given us a lot of hasn't gotten either of us excited. Are we the, you think we're the laughing stock of China that we can't, you know, ban the Chinese AI brain rot app?

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  And will you promise us that TikTok will not run on your phone?

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  I don't think it's capable to run on unplugged phone. Now that you mention it, I will make sure that is the case.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  That's great. But yeah, any other color on the TikTok ban or just general relationships between China and the US with regard to technology and business, which is our focus here?

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  Look, the Trump administration is still in the process of getting its people in the seats and getting those institutions organized. I think, I mean, what what the president just did today in showing video to Cyril Ramaphosa from from South Africa about the the ongoing murder and genocide of white farmers was absolutely fantastic. And it I even happier that Senator Secretary Rubio is right there supporting the president.

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  About that. It's, it is a different administration that we've seen in the past and I am happy to see those kind of issues being addressed. I wouldn't discount the TikTok thing being addressed properly this time, since it wasn't the last, you know, the 45 administration.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Well, we're hoping for something good, but thank you so much for joining us. This is a really fascinating conversation and fantastic stories, really. I mean, just, I was sitting back, I'm listening to the podcast. I'm listening to you. It's great. But thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to have you back and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cheers, Eric. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Bye. Next up, we have a surprise guest, not on the announcement post we put on X, but we got Anthony Pompliano, good friend of mine, hung out with him in Miami a year or two ago. We talked YouTube. We talked all sorts of video essay stuff.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  And he's got a spec.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  He's got a spec now and he's also launching a, an asset manager with like a trillion dollars under management already. So he's off to the races left and right.

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Big week.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Big week for Pomp. Fantastic show as well. So excited to invite him into the studio and catch up with Anthony Pompliano and get a bunch of great takes. You're here. Welcome.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  Guys, I love to see the suit, but we need some ties going on.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Caught us, caught us lacking. We're working on a tie, we're working on a tie that has ads on it. That's our next ad unit.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining. How are things going? What's the latest in your world? How are you spending your time? Cause you've got a lot of, a lot of different things going on.

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I think that the future is very similar to what you guys are doing, right? You gotta be able to operate businesses. You gotta be able to invest capital and you gotta be able to create content on the internet. And if you think of what a business really is, is you gotta build products, you gotta be able to invest resources and then you gotta be able to market those things. And so I don't think there's any different than what people used to do in the past. It's just now that you do it more as kind of an individual brand rather than a company and that's what we've been doing.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the, the, the, kind of the, I feel like you're going through like the V2 of the pop media strategy. There's Daily Show now, and you were building businesses before. What'd you learn from those and where is this going with the next iteration?

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, actually, we used to have a daily show, very similar to what you guys are doing, the best business show, which was hilarious when people would have to cite us breaking news. You'd have to write the best business show. Credit. Good, nice little troll there. But no, look, I think you guys are doing it the right way, right? It's like, everyone is up-leveling. And the way I describe it is, when content started on the internet, everyone was basically on like their webcam. And then they were like, in their kitchen in their webcam. And then it was like, oh, I have like an extra camera instead of the webcam. Now, we pretty much just think you need TV quality with digital distribution. And so everyone is leveling up. You guys have built, I think you guys just got a 4,000 square foot facility, you know, all this stuff, right? We've got obviously studio stuff. And it's just the, the cost of the technology is

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  compressing. And now with a very small team, you're able to have massive reach. And I think that's just going to be the future of all this content.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  Can we just glaze X for a little bit? I know you've built a business on X. We love X. We've talked to the team earlier this week. I just think that like, it's so underrated as a distribution platform. People think YouTube and there are other great platforms. But the, the, the current moment with X has been particularly good for us. And I wanted to know what your, what your take on X is, how it's been going, and any, any learnings that you have to share.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  Is Linda hiding behind your cameras or something? Like, got a gun to her head?

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, she's got a gun to her head. No, we're gonna, we, we just invited Linda on the show.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  Amazing, amazing. No, look, I think that every platform is very unique in what it provides, both in terms of the type of audience. Obviously, you know, who's on LinkedIn is very different than who's on X. LinkedIn finds out things maybe a week or two after people on X find out about it. But also, I think the type of content that lives there is really important, both in the form factor, and also the actual substance of it. And so, it, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go and talk about, you know, kind of daily news on LinkedIn. It makes a ton of sense to do that on X. And so what I think many people, including ourselves, have figured out over time, is that we were essentially using X as an engine of growth to drive people elsewhere. Go watch on YouTube, go listen to the podcast, go read the email, go to this website, you know, whatever. Why not be able to just bring that content right there in the feed?

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  And I think that that's really what they have leaned into and that's why it's working. And so the daily show that we have with them, I literally sit at my desk, talk direct to camera. We cut it up in this modular format and deliver it right in your feed. You don't have to go anywhere, you just consume it right there in these bite sized components. And it's no secret that your guys kind of clip strategy and the live streaming and everything you're doing is like very eccentric. And I think that doesn't mean you give up on the other platforms. It just means that you're building for X and everywhere else is kind of the exhaust of that content.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is crazy. Like there was all this fallout from like, oh, they banned links. I can't link to my YouTube videos. And I'm like, but you can just upload those videos here. Like they literally have a video. And oh, like you, you, you wanted to link to text? Like you could just put the text on X and it'll do way better and it's not that complicated. And yeah, you might have to change your monetization strategy a little bit. Maybe the rev share is going to be different on YouTube. It's like a per video thing and X it's monthly, but like it all works out. You're just playing for attention and reach and obviously X has this. The thing that I like about the flywheel is like, is like on YouTube, I could, every once in a while, another creator like you would comment on my video or I'd comment on your video and we'd see each other, but we couldn't DM each other on YouTube.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  But on X, it's like if somebody sees a clip and they respond, oh, I think, you know, pump's wrong about this or I love this. Like we can all hop into DM group chat immediately and just start talking and then hop on the show, do whatever. And so like, I think the water cooler with all this stuff is actually really, really inventive. Anyway, Jordy, you got anything else?

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  It's been interesting. People, you know, will point out, they're like, I don't understand how TVPN is like has so much attention.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  People say it's good and yet it's small.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  It's like, yeah, we don't really spend any time on YouTube.

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Jordi Hays?

  We were happy to just focus on one platform as, you know, where a very young company.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  A ton of important tech people hang out. Yeah. Anyway, I, let's talk about the other news. The SPACs in the news, how do you raise $250 million? Where does that money come from? That's so much money. I mean, Jordy and I have both raised money at various times, but like.

• 1:34:44Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't six months ago that I think we were on the show talking about how. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  It's just been maybe misused or abused in the past.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  And also just bad timing, right? Because

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, timing, timing. And ultimately, what matters is the underlying asset. Right?

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Are you, you know?

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  So give us the pitch for your SPAC and then we're going to pitch you SPAC-ing TBPN.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  All right. I mean, look, I do think six months is actually an interesting timeframe because that's about when I decided, hey, I should go do this. And, you know, look, I got the big audience for years. Bankers have been coming to me saying, do a SPAC, do an RTO, do all these things in the public market.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  And I always joke that we're all about the same age. Pretty much everyone in our generation watched the social network and wanted to be zuck or invest in zuck. So everyone ran into the private markets. It was like, you know, Wall Street and hedge funds, all that stuff is kind of loser stuff now. The cool stuff is in tech. But we have a world where this undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy is a huge persistent tailwind for liquid assets. Crypto and Bitcoin obviously saw a benefit from this, gold, public stocks, et cetera. And so I think a lot of people, you're starting to see them say, hey, how do I marry technology stuff with liquid assets, right? And so you're going to see that. With the SPAC in particular, I agree with you guys that the vehicle itself is not the problem. It's that people were basically doing public venture capital. Buy a money losing company with a high valuation. You got to try to grow into it. And some people did do that, but a lot didn't. And so it got a bad name.

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  But what I really have talked about is like, look, if you buy-

• 1:36:11Jordi Hays?

  The other thing, sorry to interrupt you. There's an adverse, there was an adverse selection issue at the time as well, which is that the companies had huge access to capital in the private market. So if they were SPAC-ing, it was possible that they had exhausted.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Yep. If you couldn't do the Stripe thing and just do a $3 billion tender, you would SPAC or something like that.

• 1:36:30Jordi Hays?

  But there are businesses today that are fundamentally good businesses that have bright futures that maybe should just get public and get liquid.

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  I remember years ago, talking to a public markets investor and he was like, well, yeah, like once you're in the public markets, like you shouldn't ever need to raise capital again because you're supposed to just be a going concern. And I was like, wait, what are you talking about? Like businesses lose money. I'm in venture, like this is what you do. And he was like, no, no, no. Like, like if you're publicly listed, you should not be losing money for a long time because then you just shouldn't be a public company. I was like, I didn't even think about that. But yeah, anyway, sorry to cut you off.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think that, you know, I've always looked at this as if you buy a good company that has all the right criteria to be a public company and you do it at the right price, which is an important component. Basically, if you're a disciplined buyer, then it doesn't matter who the sponsor is. It doesn't even matter what the vehicle is, right? It should do well in the public markets to your guys' point. And people weren't doing that. And so I think that that is kind of one big component. The second thing is a huge part of what we specifically have said publicly and in the filings is we want to buy a profitable company. So we don't want to buy a company and then try to make it profitable. Like, that's hard. Let's go buy a company that is already profitable. And the reason why that six-month mark was so interesting that you mentioned that is that's about the time I started to get lots of inbound. And I frankly don't know why. I think some of it was the political change in DC. I think a lot in financial services. There was like a

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  regulatory shift from a headwind to a tailwind. So people are like, okay, like this may be a better time to go into the public market. And then also, like, think of all of our friends who have built companies that started sometime between like 2015 and 2020. Those companies are just now becoming big enough to actually be public companies. And so there's like that cohort of people are now like ready to get into that public market. And so they're looking for the vehicles to be able to do that. And we hope that, you know, we're one of many that they consider to be able to do that.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  How does the actual deal work once you find a company? Are you buying a minority stake in the company? Or are you buying the whole company? And then, as I remember, it was like, you'd usually see like a couple hundred million dollars in a SPAC, but it'd be trading at four billion. And then you take a company public and then the share price goes from there. Is that roughly correct?

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, the best way that I know to describe it is like, the SPAC gives you a lot of optionality, which is why I'm attracted to it. So you, we raised 250 million into the SPAC. You have the ability to buy a lot of a company, or you can buy a very little bit of a company, right? But you have 250 million dollars of cash. You do have to go to those investors and say, hey, this is the deal that I found. This is the deal that I negotiated in terms of the economic terms. They vote. So if you bring them a bad deal, they can also just say like, eh, screw it. We're gonna take our money back and like, you know, good luck. So you have to, you know, do a good deal that they obviously are signing up for. But you also have the ability to use pipes and other kind of capital markets tools so that you can size up in terms of total capital invested in one of these businesses. And then the beautiful thing about this is it's a negotiation

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  with a target company. And so it's two people in the market coming together and saying, this is what we think it's worth, right? This is what they're willing to take. This is what we're willing to buy. And I think that that tends to, if people are rational and disciplined, actually end up with something better in the public market.

• 1:39:31John Coogan?

  And it's different than a venture fund where the money is not literally sitting in the venture fund. They need to make a capital call. With the SPAC, like the money sits in T bills, right? Is that, is that correct?

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, correct. It's in the vehicle. Some people have interest, some people don't. There's some nuance there. But basically, you can go to someone and be like, I have the money.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  I have the money.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  Like, I don't have to raise the money out. But LPs can't tell me like, hey, sorry, you know, I'm not going to send the money. Like, I got the money.

• 1:39:54Jordi Hays?

  He's good for his 250.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  So, so I mean, I'm super fascinated by this whole industry. And so are people pitching you? Do you expect this to be something where you get an introduction from a venture capitalist, or an investment banker, or just a founder? Is this like a founder-led deal? Or are you going to be going outbound, finding some business where they're not even considering selling because they're profitable, they're happy, and you kind of come in, give them the pitch, and say, hey, this might be the right time to look at something else. Let's, let's do this deal?

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of rules, again, in terms of like, what you can do. So right now, I can't talk to any target companies. That'll be true for another 24, 48 hours. But once the deal's closed, I can actually talk. I've got a ton of people who've been reaching out to me. Frankly, some of them are probably interesting, some of them aren't. I don't know, I haven't talked to them or done the work yet. But also, I think that you have an idea of like, hey, it would be interesting to go talk to these types of businesses, right? And so you want to go and figure that out. The whole key to this thing-

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what categories are you excited about? What is, what is kind of, you know, what are you just going to kind of ignore, right? I don't imagine you're going to, like, defense tech obviously doesn't make sense, or I would imagine doesn't make sense.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  Maybe it does. I don't know. There's some profitable thing.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  Only in partnership with TVPN. No, we're very focused on financial services. We do have a, like, a legal mandate. We could do things outside, but financial services is a focus. And the idea there is, I think most people, you know, it's no secret, right? I've got a reputation from all the Bitcoin and crypto stuff. And so like, are you going to go buy that? And I just look at financial services as it's all becoming one thing. You know, Robinhood is a traditional exchange business, but they have crypto as a fast-growing segment. Kraken is a private crypto exchange, but they're adding US equities. And so we're just seeing the merging of the new and old worlds in finance. And I think that's where you're going to continue to see this go, similar to, you know, what we're building with Sylvia. That's what we're going to do on the SPAC side, is we're just looking for,

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  where can you get distribution directly to my audience with financial-related type product services and companies? And then that's where we want to play.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk to us about Sylvia. I know you got 18 million sitting in cash. We got some recommendations for hypercars you could pick up if you need one, but break it down.

• 1:42:01Jordi Hays?

  Stable assets.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Jordi Hays?

  They're not making any more P1s.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Well, before I talk about Sylvia, who's the best sponsor? Like, maybe we should just talk like, you know, you guys should just, uh, just boast them up a little.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Well, next up, we got Wander, so we could talk about finding your happy place. We sing. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better pomp. Do it. Just book a Wander today.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Do it right now. We're not letting you.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  People, you could live in a Wander forever.

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  People dream of organic integrations like that right there.

• 1:42:37John Coogan?

  We're gonna clip this. We'll both promote it. It's a dream come true.

• 1:42:41Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for, thank you for participating in that with us.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're, you guys got it. Um, so Sylvia is, uh, look, I, I think every single person I know, uh, who is in like the business tech finance world, they got the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet is basically the thing that ties together all your accounts in one place. So you know, just like, what do I own?

• 1:42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  There's not usually a lot of expense-related stuff. It's all about, you know, uh, how much cash do I have? What are my investments? What, what are they worth? All that kind of stuff. And so what we did is we built essentially a box that you go and you attach your brokerage accounts, your cash accounts, your crypto accounts, uh, your private investments, your collectibles. People have added precious metals, guns, cars, houses, all kinds of stuff. Um, in that box, it gets encrypted and anonymized. And then what we did, we overlaid a bunch of AI models on top of it so that you can do simple things like you can prompt it and say, you know, what's my debt to equity ratio? Or analyze my stock portfolio and tell me, uh, where you see risk. But also you can email Sylvia, you can call her on the phone. For those that are wondering, I do not have $18 million in my checking account and 500K in my savings account.

• 1:43:43Jordi Hays?

  At this very moment.

• 1:43:44John Coogan?

  That was some great, that was some great dummy data. Uh, but yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I feel like mint.com was popular and kind of fell off and maybe even got shut down. I, I was getting an email about that. Maybe it's done. Uh, and so obviously this is a, this is an opportunity.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  But those are very expense-related, right? It's all about like saving money. And there is a huge market, obviously, people in America, there's a lot of people focused on saving money. But I do think that there is this very specific cohort, you know, the, the data that we have right now, which we just crossed over $2.5 billion connected on the platform. It's been about four weeks.

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  Think about it, it's less than a thousand users that have connected accounts.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  And so these are people who are multimillionaires who are going onto this platform on average and connecting these accounts. And so to them, it's less about, you know, how do I save money? And it's more about how do I make more money? And that's what they're really trying to figure out. It's like, where's my money? Where are my assets? And then what can I do to actually grow those assets? And we think that there's something interesting to build there.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  We're gonna let you go, but finish it out with where can people get started with Sylvia?

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  Well, after they go and they stay at a wander and they sleep on an eight sleep. Then they can go to CFO Sylvia.com and they can check it out there.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Okay, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  We'll have to have you back for a deeper dive. This is fantastic.

• 1:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Excited to follow us back.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Next up, we're going over to OpenAI land. We got Nikunj coming in from OpenAI, talking about a new release, new tools and features in the responses API. Their MCP server, we're gonna explain, we're gonna have him explain the adoption of MCP, that standard. And welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 1:45:24Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, great to be here. It's exciting.

• 1:45:27John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 1:45:28Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the temple of technology.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it happens to be this podcast specifically, not OpenAI.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Also, big, big, probably, I mean, big day in OpenAI Slack today.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations on the merger, the acquisition. That's very exciting.

• 1:45:45Jordi Hays?

  I O acquisition.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  I'm sure we'll get into design and decision making around design and devices at some point. But let's start with the announcement today. Can you introduce yourself exactly what you do at OpenAI? Maybe even how long you've been there and then what you released today?

• 1:45:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. My name is Nikunj. I'm on the product team here, working on our API. Been here for almost two years now. I've been working on the API since day one. And mostly focused on getting out new models in the API, releasing new tools. Just making the API much easier for developers to use to build applications. So yeah, that's me.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  And then today, what's the big announcement around tools and features in the responses API?

• 1:46:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. So about two months ago, we released the responses API. We we used to have an API called chat completions that was, you know, the the thing that almost all of AI was built on top of. We we created a new iteration of that that endpoint called the responses API, which is much more powerful. It supports built in tools. It supports multiple model turns. It's really, you know, natively built for models like O three and O four mini, which which have reasoning built into them. And today, what we did is we expanded the suite of tools that developers have access to. So the most exciting thing is support for remote MCP servers.

• 1:47:09Speaker 04

  And so now developers can plug plug in their responses API integration into any remote MCP server across the internet. You you haven't you have servers like Stripe, Shopify, Asana, Linear, HubSpot, and I think this ecosystem is just gonna, you know, grow so much more over time. Really excited to see what people build on top of it.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  And is the benefit of of direct MCP support something about latency, the idea that, because I imagine that I could be interacting with the chat GPT API or the GPT API and then and then make a separate call to Stripe's API. And I can even have Cursor or Windsurf write that integration for me. And that doesn't seem that difficult. And so I've always wrestled with with MCP being it's great, it's cool, it's a standard. But what's the real value besides saving a couple developer hours writing an API binding library or wrapper?

• 1:48:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there are a couple of angles to this. So firstly, because these organizations and companies are building MCP servers, they're taking an LLM first approach to to to what the API needs to expose to the agent. So Stripe has, you know, a bunch of APIs that can be used to create a subscription or a customer or a product or a price. But for an LLM, they could just sort of combine that into a single function and start returning this like massive JSON object. They can return something that's very specific to the task that was being solved. So that LLM can like more easily understand what's happening. So it's an opportunity to like rewrite your APIs to be very LLM first. So that's the first thing.

• 1:48:50Speaker 04

  The second thing is like friction, right? Like what you said is like maybe two hours of work. But why do the two hours of work when you can do it in like? Four lines of code in like less than a minute. Uh, and so this is just going to make it so much easier for developers to to put together multiple tools and whatnot. Um, the other sort of thing that I'm really excited about is like responses API takes multiple turns. So in chat completions, you would have to like put it in a for loop and like make it keep going until it tells you it's done. Responses API, you give it three or four tools. You give it a task, it'll keep going automatically, single API call, finish the whole thing and give you the result. So it's truly magical when you, when you get that.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, Rune famously wrote text is the universal interface. Is it just standing ovation for him over there today? Because this feels like a, uh, like a victory for the text as the universal interface paradigm. But is there more nuance that you could add to that philosophy of, of machines communicating with other machines via text? Because that feels like, you know, again, the LLM understands JSON. I understand what you're saying and probably faster and smoother. But at the same time, we could just train an LLM to speak JSON, correct?

• 1:50:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. I think LLMs can understand JSON. I guess the meta point there was, uh, if you could optimize your tools and combine them for tasks that you want AI agents and developers to be able to do. That's much better, right? Like at the end of the day, uh, a model is not deterministic. So even if you ask it to call like four tools, one by one, it it's going to have some instances where it takes the wrong step and then needs to backtrack and like fix it. But if you have these like curated functions and tools exposed via an MCP server that it can directly go to. It just makes it so much more reliable for agents to be able to. Like do the thing that they're designed to do. And so there's definitely some benefit to that.

• 1:50:50Speaker 04

  In terms of text, yeah, that that's that makes a lot of sense to me.

• 1:50:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's that makes sense to me.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

  How how is your general high level view on MCP evolved over the past, you know, few months? Were you skeptical at first? Or were you always excited about the potential of it? It seems like a total MCP victory at this point.

• 1:51:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Initially, I mean, the the main goal was how do we get an ecosystem of tools started? And OpenAI did this thing with plugins back in the day where we built it all on top of open API specs. And our plugins was integration was like a little too early for its time because the models weren't that good at like using these like third party tools really well. And we didn't take a second stab at it, but the MCP folks did. And MCP is great. It supports so much more than just tools. It and it took off. It was initially like local only. So, you know, there was some hesitation about like, how will people easily plug into this thing? But now with the streamable HTV protocols so that

• 1:52:02Speaker 04

  these things can be hosted remotely across the Internet. It's just perfect. Like, I'm so excited about what's going to happen with MCP over the coming months. The hundreds of remote MCP servers that are going to exist. Developers are just going to like plug into them. It's it's just going to make things so much better. So really, really excited about the opportunities here.

• 1:52:22John Coogan?

  I mean, currently, most of these most of these, like when you hit MCP server, you're kind of expecting a few seconds of latency just because of how long it takes to inference these models. I've been kind of beating the drum on Hey, some of these models are just good enough. Let's bake them into silicon and make them respond in like two milliseconds. And I don't know if that's happening or not. You don't need to comment on that, but I like mid journey V5. I was like, it's good enough. Like, just make it instant. VO3, I'm like, I'm ready for it just to be like instantaneous, certainly with deep research and chat GPT generally. I'm super satisfied. I'm like, I don't really have any, any requests for improvements to the models. I just want faster and cheaper and easier.

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  But do you think that if inferencing does go through some sort of massive speed up, whether it's from custom silicon or architectural redesign, does geocaching or edge computing become important to the way MCP servers communicate with each other? For example, like, I don't necessarily, if I'm going to the Portland AWS hosting of some MCP server, I don't actually want to be routed to Virginia by accident. And so do you think that that will require like a new rethink of the spec? Or is that something that can just be naturally handled by load balancing?

• 1:53:46Speaker 04

  You know, the spec is just like, how do you communicate between the MCP client and the MCP server? So it tells you like, you know, literally the JSON RPC like object that that needs to go between the two parties. Optimizing the geocaching of it really depends on the service provider, right? So if I'm going to call MCP dot stripe dot com or allbirds dot com slash API slash MCP, which is, by the way, Allbirds has an MCP server. How crazy is that? Shopify has to route it to like the right place.

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  We need an MCP server. Help us build one. I don't know what we do, but we want to, we want to get in on the action. Yeah, you feel a little bit left out.

• 1:54:26Speaker 04

  Create a Shopify store and you'll have one instantly.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Oh, that's good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For the merch, you can integrate.

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I mean, OpenAI already does a lot of geo routing based on where the inference request is coming from. So we try to like route it to something near. And then when, when the request leaves OpenAI's infrastructure and goes to say Stripes or Shopify's, they could do that as well, based on, you know, either like an explicit URL or something more magical on their end, where they can detect where it's coming from and route it to the right place.

• 1:55:00John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Any other questions, trends in pricing? I know that there's pricing and availability updates, anything to share there?

• 1:55:09Speaker 04

  No, pricing is like, you know, it's, it's an infrastructure play over here. MCP is free to use. You just pay for the tokens. We have code interpreter, which is like the Python tool. By the way, the Python tool is the thing in O3 that can do geoguessor like things when you when you upload your images. So you can just bring that into the API. Yeah.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  So why is Python relevant there?

• 1:55:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. So what's actually happening is when you, when you put a, an image in the O3 model, it writes Python code to like zoom in.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:43Speaker 04

  Like try to find, tries to find clues, it crops them, it inverts the images.

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:55:48Speaker 04

  It then like does web searches. It's like all the, all the image manipulation is based on Python and that is enabled by the code interpreter tool, which is also available in the API today.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  That's interesting. I noticed that because I was, I took a picture of, of a, of a podcast. I wanted to see how tall the table was. I uploaded this images from the Pat McAfee show and, and, and I noticed that when I unpacked the O3 internal reasoning, it was like writing tons and tons of lines of image processing code in Python, all to, to draw lines and count pixels to see how tall the, the table was relative to the person. It wrote like 500 lines, 5,000 lines of Python. We were joking about it.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Poor O3 yesterday. I said, how many white boxes in this picture? And it, and it was coding for like almost 14 minutes and then unfortunately failed.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  It was like putting a, putting a software engineer on the task for a month, but you know, now you get it in two minutes. But it is incredible. I can see where that goes. It just adds a completely different angle of attack on reasoning and it needs to be an important tool in the tool chest. So yeah.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How are you, how are you leveraging Codex today? I'm sure you guys got, got early access, but I'm, I'm curious if and where it's fitting into your, your toolbox toolkit today.

• 1:57:05Speaker 04

  I see the engineers using it nonstop. Like, uh, we had to make a couple of changes for the launch. We had to like fix error messages. These are like such small things and, and you can just fire up a Codex task and do it. I've used it for docs changes, uh, a bunch of times where I'm just like, there's a typo here, change this heading. And, and these are tiny things. I just like write it, forget about it, create a PR. I mean, that I don't have to bug people anymore. It's, it's really, it's really helpful. Uh, and I think engineers are actually doing like even more complex tasks on top of it. Um, but I, I just see everyone in the company using it, which is, uh, really cool.

• 1:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  What do you, uh, what are you daily driving as a personal smartphone these days? Are you iPhone, Android?

• 1:57:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Maybe something else?

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  I O, I O, you got early access yet?

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Your pocket? Okay, okay. No leaks, no leaks today, but we've been asking, uh,

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  Still part of Johnny's legacy.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  We, we, we try to trick you into leaking the hardware here, but we'll get you back next time.

• 1:58:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I'm sure we'll find out soon.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  But it's an exciting, it's an exciting acquisition. Uh, but thank you so much for stopping by. It's very exciting. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:58:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congrats to you and the team on the, on the launch.

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Next up, we got David Sandler coming in the temple of technology, the godfather of podcasting himself.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Brother behavior. We need a lot of, uh, we need a lot of sound effects for this one. Uh, he's been on an absolute tear, dropping podcast after podcast, but, uh, today we want to talk about John, Johnny I.

• 1:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  I, and Apple and Steve Jobs. And what would Steve Jobs be doing in this situation? I want to, I want to play out that scenario for sure. Um, and then we got Scott Wu coming in from cognition. Um, talking about Devon coding agents. Every company has a coding agent now, crowded market. I want to know how it plays out. So we're excited to talk to him about that. Then we got Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg Odd Lots coming on the show. We'll get an update on the market. It's been flat for a couple of days.

• 1:59:03Jordi Hays?

  Week for Joe.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  It's been terrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:06Jordi Hays?

  He's not getting his dopamine fix.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  How is he? How is he getting through it? I want to know.

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure he's finding obscure exchanges where things are chaotic.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Short volatility.

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  Maybe he's just printing.

• 1:59:18Jordi Hays?

  Might be shorting Costco at 50 times earnings.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  Maybe we'll have to ask him. Uh, anyway, uh, let's do some more ads. In the meantime, let's tell you about bezel. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Any watch.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  And I think we got through our ads for the day.

• 1:59:35Jordi Hays?

  Download the app.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. We can also go through some.

• 1:59:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually shocked at how frequently I use Bezel. Like.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  I'm a DAU.

• 1:59:46Jordi Hays?

  I was talking to Quaid.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Friend and one of the co-founders and he was like, yeah, a lot of like, a lot of people actually daily are just DAUs.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  Regardless of if they're like actually shopping right away.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  Well, we got David Senra and Founders Podcast coming into the studio. Welcome to the show. How you doing, David?

• 2:00:05David Senra?

  What's up, guys?

• 2:00:08David Senra?

  Before we begin, I have to apologize for not wearing a suit, but I think you'll make an exception because I'm wearing a Ramp shirt.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go. It's here. Switch your business to ramp.com. Save time and money.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  How you doing? What's the latest?

• 2:00:23Jordi Hays?

  There, there used to be this thing. I mean, it's probably still a thing where David like would, you would, you'd be happy to meet somebody, but the one requirement was that they listen to founders. Eventually it's going to be you listen to founder and your business runs on ramp.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  I won't take a coffee meeting.

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  If you don't check both boxes, not happening.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  No shot, no shot.

• 2:00:43David Senra?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, what's the latest? Uh, did you, did you read the Bloomberg article about Johnny Ive joining OpenAI?

• 2:00:53David Senra?

  Okay. No, you, you have to tell me what's going on. I just got a bunch of text messages about this and I think there's something related to Steve Jobs coming back to Apple. We could talk about too. That's interesting, but no, I have no idea what's happening.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  So the article is obviously like, it's amazing in the sense that it's Johnny Ive, a $6 billion acquisition, huge number, 2% of OpenAI equity going over to Johnny Ive and his team. But the, and it's also super interesting because they're going to build a hardware device for ChatGPT, for, for AI, an AI first hardware. And if there's any team that can break through with a consumer electronics product, it's got to be Sam Altman and Johnny Ive, right? Like they are an incredible combination to go after this. At the same time, the article basically said nothing and they put out a nine billion video and it's just them saying, oh, he's one of the most thoughtful individuals. He's one of the best people to work with. His family's amazing and they're just talking about like how much they like love working together.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  And it doesn't actually give us any advice on like, or any guidance on like, is it a phone? Is it a watch? Is it gonna fold? Is it big? Is it small?

• 2:01:55David Senra?

  That's very Steve Jobs-esque. He'd be very proud. Uh, listen, I guess going into this, like I'm an unabashed, like Johnny Ive, uh, fan. Okay. There's actually an excellent biography of him that I think everybody should read. I read it like five years ago. If you want to, um, listen to the podcast that's on, it's episode 178 before you get the book.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15David Senra?

  But I'd highly recommend reading the entire book. Um, yeah, I just, I think, uh, if you think about like the conversation we had this morning, uh, about taking things very seriously, I FaceTimed you guys at like 6:30 in the morning and you're in your studio, like getting ready and preparing.

• 2:02:30Jordi Hays?

  We're sitting in these exact seats.

• 2:02:32David Senra?

  Yeah. Yeah, like I, I think that's one of the things that jumps out in Johnny's biography is just like his intolerance for a lack of effort. So like, there's a great story. Um, I just pulled up a bunch of my highlights from, um, the book, but when Johnny was in design, he was studying industrial design. Um, I think it was in England and there's this great line where a friend of his comes over, they have a project, right? And they're making these like foam prototypes of product they're designing. And he goes in Johnny's apartment and he found over a hundred foam model prototypes where most students would build half a dozen. So the normal expectation is, hey, I'm gonna make six prototypes of this, you know, new design for this product I'm doing. And Johnny's like, yeah, fuck that. I'm doing a hundred.

• 2:03:16David Senra?

  And I think when you read the book, you, it makes sense. Like, um, I just tweeted this out where it's actually Steve Jobs, uh, let me pull it up. Steve Jobs talking about Johnny and he's talking about Johnny.

• 2:03:29David Senra?

  With Walter Isaacson and he's writing the book with Walter Isaacson as he knows he's dying. And he calls, you know, he says that essentially if he had a spiritual partner at Apple, it would be Johnny. He's not just a designer. That's why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. And there's no one who could tell him what to do besides Steve. So again, I always think of like actions express priorities, like one of my favorite maxims. And Steve is telling you, you know, he had this, probably the highest bar of talent out of anybody's ever, maybe anybody's ever existed. And he's saying, this is the best guy. This is my number two. Yeah, I think that like speaks volumes about like what he thought of in terms of Johnny's talent.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's so interesting because

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  I guess the, I guess the open question in my mind is does Johnny Ive need a Tim Cook figure to do what he does? And what I mean by that is that obviously Tim Cook's been the CEO of Apple for over a decade now, but he was a supply chain mastermind. And Johnny Ive could throw a crazy idea out there like an aluminum milled unibody design for the MacBook Pro. And Tim Cook was able to actually go get it done. And in the new era of global competition with China, faltering relationships

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  and not a legacy at OpenAI around hardware manufacturing, which is a unique skillset.

• 2:05:01John Coogan?

  Can Johnny Ive actually deliver a product that gets into the hands of millions of consumers? With the quality that Apple is known for, without a Tim Cook like figure, will we see another acquisition?

• 2:05:15David Senra?

  Steve Jobs, he did a Tim Cook figure, I think anybody does. So like, yeah, the answer is of course he does. Like we'll have, we have no, obviously no idea what they're going to build. What I think is just interesting is which way more applicable to like us and the people that are listening is just like the study. I just tweeted this back at Sam Parr from My First Million. It's like you don't copy. The what? You copy the how? And so I think the important thing of like, yeah, you could hypothesize of like what Johnny's gonna build or just like, hey, how does this guy approach like his life and work? Is there anything that he said in there that I could actually use? And I think that's like much more interesting to me than be like, can you predict what's gonna happen with this thing that they're told no details about? And that like, who knows? I don't know, like, can they build hardware? Who the fuck knows?

• 2:06:00David Senra?

  Like, we're gonna find out. That's the one part. Uh, but yeah, I'm not into like prediction. I was like, we'll see.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, he wasn't a founder at Apple. He became a founder with by founding I O and his, his, his love from his agency. Now he's back in the senior executive role. Can you tell me a little bit about his management style? How hardcore he is? Anything that ties to Johnny Ives, like living like founder mode or any of those kind of ties to other executives? Kind of what we might expect or what we might pattern match against? Is it just Steve Jobs or other people?

• 2:06:39David Senra?

  Yeah. I think he had like, I would argue like, you know, equal to sense of like a high threshold for quality that Jobs did. I was just listening to the episode I did five years ago on Johnny's biography and it's like talks about like they, they thought very similar about design and products and they were very much partners. You know, I almost like a co-founder relationship is the, I know that'd be controversial, but like, that's the way I would think about like how deeply they were working together. But what I say is he's like much more diplomatic where Johnny's like, you know, we could do better than this. And Steve Jobs was like, this is shit. Get it out of my face. And, and part of that, they, I think they hypothesized, his biographer hypothesizes that it's like, you know, his, his growing up in England, like he's just more reserved and quiet manner.

• 2:07:24David Senra?

  But what I loved is I think the very beginning of the book, uh, the, the, the author is interviewing him and he, he was, and this is even before he was gonna write a book on him. He was just covering Apple at the time. I think he was a reporter, if I remember correctly. And he just like wanted a soundbite on this new Apple product. And he says, I just wanted a soundbite, but he launched into a passionate 20 minutes solidly about his latest work. I could barely get in a word edgewise. He couldn't help himself design as his passion. And I think that's just, he's just obviously completely obsessed and willing to like work hard. There's another thing that I thought was interesting. He calls it attention to invisible details. Says I've Johnny cared deeply about the parts users would never see believing that quote, care was taken even on details, hard and soft, that people may never discover.

• 2:08:09David Senra?

  And he says that he was fanatical. He provided a fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff. So these just like, that's why I'm just a huge fan of anybody like this. I don't care if you're building the iPhone or you're making a pizza. Like just, I'm very attracted to and obsessed with people that take whatever they're doing very, very seriously.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  It's funny that the opposite is is Enzo, who's like, I don't care if the door panels align. I care if the driver.

• 2:08:35David Senra?

  Shits its pants. I would actually argue that they're very similar because Enzo, remember like Enzo was building a race car. He wasn't building like, he wasn't trying to, it just happened that when they were winning all the races, then you have all these consumers say, hey, I want a Ferrari though, too. But I would actually think like, what they both share in common is they keep the main thing, the main thing. And in Enzo's cases, he's not trying to buy, build a luxury product. He's trying to literally make the fastest car. That, he didn't give a shit about Ferrari, the actual auto manufacturer. If you read his biography and in fact, the longest book I've ever read for founders. Let me see if I can find it real quick. Was a thousand page biography of Enzo Ferrari.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  Enzo, no way.

• 2:09:18David Senra?

  And it's, it was just republished, same author. This book is excellent. It's Enzo Ferrari by Luca Demonte. So this used to be a thousand pages. No one bought the goddamn book because no one wants to read a thousand pages. So they edited it down to four hundred and fifty pages. Yeah. So if you, you know, Enzo's one of my favorite founders I've ever, I've done like three or four.

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  Well, you know that Johnny Ive at Love From, his, his design consulting agency, one of their biggest clients is Ferrari today.

• 2:09:46David Senra?

  I didn't know that.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  And so there's probably some linkages here.

• 2:09:49David Senra?

  Perfect.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  So, so can you give us a little bit more about what we can expect? We were joking about maybe OpenAI should just.

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Device.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  Integrate with the Ferrari. And, and, and you just need to buy a Ferrari if you want to access the premium tier of ChatGPT. You can only access it.

• 2:10:04Jordi Hays?

  You should only experience it on the saddle leather of a Ferrari.

• 2:10:08David Senra?

  That, that, that, that, that will only work if they're going to do a collaboration with TPBN. I think that's the.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry. I, I can't do my homework today. My Ferrari's in the shop.

• 2:10:19Jordi Hays?

  This, this summer, I'm gonna, I'm gonna force you to go to the Ferrari dealer in LA and get one. Cause if you're really such an Enzo fan.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You should have a Ferrari.

• 2:10:29Jordi Hays?

  Shouldn't you be honoring his legacy every time you go to the grocery store?

• 2:10:31David Senra?

  It's funny. I would, I drove past the, uh, my daughter used to go, the, my, the doc, my, the school my daughter used to go to was actually next door to a Ferrari dealership in Miami, which is like the most Miami thing ever, right?

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  That's super Miami.

• 2:10:43David Senra?

  But there's a great, I tweeted it out when I passed by the other day, cause it says, uh, he had this great line where he's like, uh, passion can't be explained, it can only be lived. And I was like, oh, that's like a really good, uh, way to think about the way he lives his life. But to finish that thought, it's just like, his primary thing was just like, I want the fastest race car in the world. And so that's what he meant. He's like, I don't give a shit if the doors don't line up. I just, when the, the race car driver hits the gas, I want him to shit his pants, which is also a fucking hilarious quote.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder what the AI equivalent of that is. Like, what is the Ferrari of AI models right now? Cause they're all kind of completing.

• 2:11:17David Senra?

  I'm personally, I'm personally very excited about this. Uh, I was just talking to our mutual friend, Patrick, from Invest Like the Best. And we both feel very similarly. It's just like, I don't want to look at screens all day long. So I know you had, um, there, you had that guy that's building Friend. I, his name escapes me at the moment. Avi. Yeah. Just this idea, like, I'm not saying I want to wear something around my neck or have glasses on my face, whatever, but anything that would kind of get me out off of looking at screens is like, I'm, I'm very, uh, like, I would buy it day one, just to test it out.

• 2:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. John was saying like maybe a Walkman style device with wired headphones, you know, kind of analog, but just piping the AI right into your brain.

• 2:11:54John Coogan?

  Maybe a football helmet, something you could pack months of battery.

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking it's like Elon, what is Elon's AI hardware plays? One is Optimus, right? But then the other is actually just Neuralink. He's like, I want to jump, you know, he could say, I want to jump to like the end state, which is like human and computer become one.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 2:12:16David Senra?

  Yeah. I, I want the opposite of that. Um, I did this episode on Christopher Nolan and I, it was very fascinating because this guy makes some of the most high tech movies of all time. They're very difficult to make, and yet he lives a complete like analog life. Uh, one of the famous, famous anecdotes from his biography was hilarious where. He doesn't have an email, doesn't even carry, he carries like a normal flip phone, won't use GPS, like goes to a new city and has to like feel his way around and ask for directions and everything. But the funny thing was he would, people, you know, send scripts everywhere. So they're like, oh yeah, just like, I'll read your script, email to me. He's like, I'm gonna fly on a plane tomorrow and I'll be at your house at noon and he'll hand you the script if he wants you to be in the movie. And then he sits there and stares at you while you read it. And then you're done, you talk about it and then he takes

• 2:12:56David Senra?

  the script back and leaves. There's no other copy. Uh, so yeah, man, everybody's gotta figure out their own integration for what they want for technology. I want to disappear in the background. Many cases, like if you study this book, and again, I would order the book, I would definitely read it, it's worth it. Especially because he's gonna play a fucking huge role at one of the most important companies in the world right now. Uh, but I, I, I just like, I want a more like, I want technology to disappear. I do, uh, there is some quotes in the book that might be fascinating that kinda answers your question, John. I didn't mean to like side skirt it at all. But as far as like what he, how he thinks about design, he says, he takes big chances instead of evolutionary approach to design. And if they focus grouped any of his designs, this is a description from college, it was also accurate when he went to, um, Apple. And if they had focused his designs, they would,

• 2:13:41David Senra?

  they wouldn't have been a success. So he's not looking for like, he really wasn't interested in like any kind of like iterative design. Uh, he wants something that looks completely different. And there is a weird, uh, story. I think some people might find it odd. Story from his, uh, college days when he was studying design, that he talked about that the best physical objects, they, they are very inviting to the touch, that humans have this, I forgot what he called it, like an obsession. He has a word for it, but essentially obsession with touching things. And, uh, so he was asked to like design a pen. And people are like, okay, I'm gonna write a, you know, uh, create a pen that you can write and it works upside down or it never runs out of ink. He's like, no, but what do people actually do at pens? Like anybody holding a pen in their hand, they're like clicking it,

• 2:14:24David Senra?

  they, they move it around. He's like, they wanna, I didn't think he said this word, but they wanna finger it, for lack of a better word. So they were like, play with it a lot. Um, and so yeah, any kind of physical device that he makes, I think, isn't gonna just be like, oh, this kinda looks like an iPhone. I think it's gonna be like drastically different.

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a big challenge. Um,

• 2:14:42Jordi Hays?

  And I mean, he, he's pulled away from Apple, a lot of the people that were integral to so, to the magic of, of the devices, the MacBook, the iPhone, all these things.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  I'm really excited to see it. 2026 can't come soon enough. Uh, what about Jim Simons? You did a recent show about him. Uh, Very different from Johnny Ive, but what are the similarities? Because you think about a hedge fund versus a consumer electronics manufacturer. I imagine that there are no similarities and yet I imagine you found some.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  How much would you pay to rip a heater with Jim Simons and Johnny Ive at once? I mean, that's a priceless heater right there. That's potentially a seven-figure heater.

• 2:15:26David Senra?

  This is why I think I got so many text messages and they linked me to whatever article today. Uh, because OpenAI essentially what bought Johnny's company. Johnny was the founder and it's for like six billion or something, I guess is the thing. And everybody said the same thing in the text messages, like, how much money did Apple pay to like buy back Steve Jobs?

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:45David Senra?

  And this is one of the thing that Jim has in common, Rockefeller has in common, Bezos suggested Bezos' shareholder letters, which I think is a really good episode, Michael Dell over and over again. It's like this idea of like, you, you absolutely must work with the highest quality people you can. And everybody fucking says that and nobody does it because it is so hard to do it. And one of the reasons I also, Brad Jacobs talks about this, like you have to overpay for talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for talent. So that obviously the canonical example of that is, hey, uh, Apple's going to buy next for 500, half a billion dollars. They paid essentially half a billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs and they got the deal of a century. Nobody's going to look back at what Steve did and be like, oh, you overpaid it. It just doesn't happen.

• 2:16:25David Senra?

  So Jim, the crazy thing about Jim, and then actually me and a mutual friend of ours that I can't name, just stayed up till like two in the morning, talking to this guy, uh, that works at Citadel. And it was very fascinating, like Ken Griffin was the same exact way. We was like, I heard some of the competition for his top people. And guess what? Like they would blow, I think it would shock how much money they make, but then you look at their performance. It's like direct, essentially Ken won't cap their competition. So like, if you make him more money, you're like unlimited money that you'll, uh, that you'll get because of, he understands the talent. So the thing about Jim is that's, that's nuts, right? Is He churns through partners and you know, people say Jim Simons had a hedge fund. I don't think about it as a hedge fund. I think he had a magic money machine.

• 2:17:10David Senra?

  Like it was very different than normal, you know, the, the fund made well over a hundred billion dollars in profit. And it continues to make, from what I understand, you know, many, many billions in cash flow every, every single year. And there's no outside money. It's just owned, the only money's in there was Jim's family's money. And then you have to work at Renaissance.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:29David Senra?

  Uh, and then if you quit, they, they, you, the reason they have such low turnovers is because if you quit, you can't invest in the medallion fund anymore. So you're never gonna quit.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Go invest your money somewhere else.

• 2:17:39David Senra?

  But, but the crazy thing is, so what I'll do is like, the, the fascinating thing is Jim is like churning through partners because it takes him decades of trial and error to, to actually get the system that he wants. But then he would talk about, and he talks about this when he's an older man too. Uh, he'd give interviews, much older because he wasn't doing that when he was younger, but he's just like, you have to work with the very best people. And when you identify the person, you have to just put all the effort you possibly can to convince them to work for you. Okay? A lot of people understand that. But then you go look up the people he identified and it's just like that he hired nothing but mathematicians and physicists and you'd be like, yeah, it's not just like some professor in a math department somewhere. It's like this guy has a theorem named after him and he had, there's a wall named after him. It's like literally the top of the top of the top of the top.

• 2:18:23David Senra?

  Uh, because they were, you know, made a hundred billion dollars plus with three hundred, anywhere from whatever, 250 to like 400 employees. So a very, very tiny team, small team relative to the profits produced of just unbelievable A players. And I, I have to imagine that's what, you know, people at OpenAI are doing. It's like, well, who's the best, who's the best designer in the world? If we're going to build our own product, who would you go and get? And yeah, maybe, yeah.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, 2%. It's totally worth it. That's what I'm saying. It's a big number, but it's a big company. It's a big opportunity.

• 2:18:54Jordi Hays?

  And of course Josh, uh, Josh Kushner was already in IO.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  So now he's getting, uh, more OpenAI, drive gets more, uh, of OpenAI. Yeah. But, um, but anyways, speaking of mathematicians, we got Scott Wu.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got Scott Wu from Cognition coming in.

• 2:19:12David Senra?

  I'm jealous. I love Scott. Big fan of his. Have you guys ever played, uh, the video of him at a math competition when he's like 12 on the show?

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  I mean, it's been viral so many times. We haven't played it on our show, but we probably should.

• 2:19:24Jordi Hays?

  It still plays in my mind.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  But

• 2:19:26David Senra?

  It's excellent.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  We'll bring him in to the studio. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:19:30David Senra?

  Yep, of course. See you guys soon.

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 2:19:32David Senra?

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:19:33John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:19:33David Senra?

  Love you too.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Bye. Love you too. Bye. And we'll bring Scott in in just a second. Jordy, you want to kick off the intro?

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:41John Coogan?

  Take a quick break and maybe do some ad reads. Talk about his former employer, Ramp.com. Switch your business to Ramp.com.

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  John, use the restroom. Use the restroom. Get out of here. No dead air. We do not stop talking. Scott is in the studio. Let's bring him in.

• 2:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Welcome, Scott. There he is.

• 2:20:05Scott Wu?

  How's it going?

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Good to have you back.

• 2:20:08Scott Wu?

  Yeah, good to be back. And by the way, I love David Tenra. It's so fun to be on back to back with him.

• 2:20:13Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 2:20:13Scott Wu?

  I love the, I love the story of recruiting and truly just fighting for the best people. It's, I've always felt the same way, which is, you know, people always ask about evaluating talent, which is of course, you know, it's a very deep thing, but if anything, I think the much more valuable thing is just, you kind of already know who the really great people are. And the question is like, how can you, how can you build your whole, whole organization around, you know, making it the right one for them to join?

• 2:20:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. The sort of a random story, but, but was reminded of this. I think we talked about it a couple of days ago, but, Steve Jobs apparently called the founder, the original founder of Siri, like over 20 times. He called him every single day. He knew that he wanted Siri to be a part of Apple and he just repeatedly called over and over and over and over and over and over. Wouldn't stop until he finally said yes to joining. So, but I think something about it too is like, I think to, you, you said something which is like, everybody knows who the best people are, but I actually think that's maybe only the case if you're also ultra.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  No, it's easy. Hiring is easy. You just look up who's won an IMO gold medal. You hire all of them. And then you just raise a bunch of money and then the rest is easy. It's super easy.

• 2:21:28Scott Wu?

  No, it's fair. It's fair. Yeah. You have to be, you have to be in the right kind of circles and communities to know the best people, but, but I generally think that people spend. Relatively too much time, I think, on evaluating, you know, people who are at the border versus like really just fighting for that absolute top tier of people. So.

• 2:21:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's always, it's always a mistake to think like, oh, this is like a B player. I can make them into an A player. Like, there's just so much sweat there and the math rarely works out. Usually you're better just finding someone who's a great fit for your company, your team, the skills that they have, and you can just turn them loose and let them run, which is always the best. Anyway, I mean.

• 2:22:08Scott Wu?

  Lots going on.

• 2:22:10John Coogan?

  Tons of news. Every company seems to have an AI coding agent. I want to know, how should I be thinking about the market? I was, I was on X, talking to some people. I'd kind of mapped it out as there is consumer code that is written when I just prompt O3. So I, the example I gave was, I wanted to know how tall a desk was in an image. I uploaded the photo and O3, without me asking it to write code, wound up writing a ton of image processing code in Python. I didn't say write code, it just wrote code for me. That's kind of autonomous AI coding. Now there's Codex, which feels more prosumer.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  I have a GitHub repo. I want it to go fix a bug for me. Then there's something more in the enterprise side, like hands on the keyboard all day long. I need a superpowered IDE. That's Windsurf Cursor. And then I'm seeing the top-down enterprise deals from companies like Cognition. So how, is that the reasonable frame for thinking about the market? Or are there, is it all just winner take all? Is there one market? Are there four? How are you thinking about it? And what are you seeing in the market these days?

• 2:23:20Scott Wu?

  Yeah, for sure. So a high little breakdown. I think there's a few different product experiences. And by the way, it's fun to see, to see so many agents coming out this week. But there's a few different product experiences, but I think there's primarily two markets is how we kind of think about it. And it's, you know, in one line, it's basically engineers and engineering teams versus non-engineers. I think the thing about it with Detal, you know, totally agree with your point, obviously, that there's, there's some differences between enterprise and self-serve and so on. In practice, I mean, you know, we have both businesses, for example, like, and a lot of these other players that you mentioned also have both businesses. In practice, I think what happens with developer tooling is. You know, engineers are engineers, right? And so engineers are talking to the same people, you know, the same people who are building their

• 2:24:04Scott Wu?

  own projects at home are also going and, you know, shipping pull requests and stuff at work. And there's kind of a lot of overlap in this, that space. And so there's kind of the, I'll call it the like, kind of like the app builder category of like, you know, build me a simple app. And that's kind of like targeted towards, you know, non-engineers today and giving them the ability to write software, build software, like you're kind of saving. And then there's, there's engineers, which there are kind of some subcategories within, but, but I think for the most part, it's all, it's all connected much more so.

• 2:24:36John Coogan?

  My current AGI test, I've moved the, I've moved the goalposts 25 times, I'm moving them again. My current, and my current AGI goal is if I can go to Google's new Jules AI agent, and if I can with one prompt say, build me Google Reader, and it does it, then AGI has arrived. That's my new goalpost.

• 2:24:57Scott Wu?

  Yeah, it's kind of insane if you think about, so one of the things, you know, there was some research that came out and kind of people did some statistical analysis. And if you just look at, you know, the length of time that an autonomous coding system can go in between every human intervention, it's, it's kind of insane. It's doubled like every three months.

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:16Scott Wu?

  And so it's like, that's like 16x a year, you know, and we've been doing this for a couple of years now. So we're like, you know, I mean, not that long ago is like a couple of seconds at a time, and now you're doing hours of work, right? But, but it's like, I just mentioned that because, you know, Google Reader is obviously is like a really great product. You have to imagine they put like a million hours into that, right? And there will be a point at which it is, you know, that window is just a million hours of work, but yeah, we'll get there, we'll get there.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, Will Brown on the show, and he was saying that we, we have AGI, but I call it 15-minute AGI. And so, yeah, you can go and do something, but if it's, if it's, if it's a task that would take a human a week, it's not going to be one-shot-able in the, in the traditional sense of a single prompt.

• 2:25:54Jordi Hays?

  How do you and the team think about the balance between wanting to create product experiences that somebody could just be like, almost like a demo, right? Like, somebody was posting yesterday that they like, one-shot at a calendar app. And like, that's like cool and, and, you know, exciting and all that, but maybe not massively valuable. But I'm curious, do you guys have some sort of like internal framework for how you decide whether something is like really worth spending time on? Is it like a truly important problem? Or is it just, is it's an opportunity, just an opportunity to go viral and get attention, but doesn't create that enduring value?

• 2:26:36Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I mean, it's in the long term, our target has always been, you know, let's, let's do real engineering work that that is, you know, that, that teams are actually products that teams are really building out there in the real world. And I think the thing is kind of interesting is, is yeah, because it is all, you know, one group of people, I think it is the ability to build all these like cool things out does matter. It's a, we have a distinction internally where we call it street performer Devon. Basically, it's the version of Devon, you know, that, that, where people are asking Devon to just do really cool stuff, you know? And it's something that we spend some time on, but obviously the core by far is really just like, how do we have Devon solve real issues and real projects for your cookbook base? Yeah.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, street performer. I like that. I do wonder. So yeah, it feels like there's still two frames of mind, this consumer and enterprise, even for stuff that I would call it, I would call work. There are certain times when like, I don't want to open an IDE or I don't have time in my day as a live streamer and someone who does most of their work over email and phone, more of like the executive role. I still will want an engineer to intermediate the products that I want to build. And I'm wondering if there's a timeline for when that stops happening, or I start instantiating whole software products, this idea of like the, it feels like most of the time when you hear

• 2:27:58John Coogan?

  someone say, oh, I used AI and I vibe coded an app in the weekend, they're still a programmer and they're still running a business and they're still working on that 40 hours a week or something like that. But they're just getting a lot more leverage to this. I feel like the really cool moment that's maybe coming is when I actually say, I want Google Reader and just build it for me. And so, so in terms of shifting that enterprise experience of like real, not street performance, but real software into the consumer, into the consumer space, does that come top down? Or does that come bottom up from like the chat box that I'm already interacting with?

• 2:28:36Scott Wu?

  Yeah, and so I think both forms are gonna happen in the sense that, you know, big companies are gonna, like, there's, there's obviously always competitive pressures. There's a lot of relative things going on. And, and I think, you know, big companies that already have like, you know, software products that millions of people use, there's gonna be a lot more onus on them to just to make really, really great software, you know, it's, I mean, it's, I, I keep track of this every day, you know, when, when I'm doing things and I run into just bugs in software and the stuff that I'm using, it's, it's, it still happens all the time.

• 2:29:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, let's, let's, let's be honest.

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  Try and book a flight.

• 2:29:08Jordi Hays?

  X is, uh, X is the, the absolute worst culprit here. I interact with more bugs on X than any other piece of software I use.

• 2:29:17John Coogan?

  I completely disagree. I mean, it's so much worse if you go and try and book a flight on the American Airlines app.

• 2:29:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  The bar is so low.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I get, I get.

• 2:29:26Scott Wu?

  Yeah. Go ahead, go ahead.

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  No, go, go.

• 2:29:29Scott Wu?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, so that's, you know, their, like, product quality is gonna have to get way, way better there. I think the other side is also gonna be true, which is individuals are going to be, be able to build cooler and cooler apps. But, but yeah, I mean, I think the high level kind of general trend is, is, um, as we're saying, you know, as these tools get more and more autonomous, like, you want to be able to just use them for longer and longer stretches of time, which is, I mean, which is, which is pretty topical, given all the agent launches that we've seen this past week, so.

• 2:29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about positioning against Google's offering. My, my experience from, as a consumer, I only interact with, uh, Google right now on the AI front as a consumer. Uh, obviously, I've like run ads on Google from a business perspective, but in general, I see a Gemini launch, and then, as a consumer, it's very, very hard for me to access that product. That I have five different Google accounts, I can never tell which one is on the Google AI premium tier. I got, I finally got in, I got access to VO3. It was an incredible model, feel like, it felt like they were truly, uh, a step above, and there was kind of a chat GPT style moment for, for video that, given that the audio comes through, it's super photorealistic, it's a great experience, and it's, and it, it justified

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  me not only paying $500 a month, but going through the UX hurdle. Is the developer experience on the enterprise side dealing with Google similar? Or are they more dialed in there because it's more important? Because I imagine that one of the advantages that you have as a startup in the enterprise sales space is that you can do founder-led sales. You can take the needs of the enterprise into account much more, different SLAs, more custom solutions. There's so many more things where you can iterate, even if Google is able to come out with something that is like, wow, okay, they're really good at research, but on the product side, maybe it's lacking.

• 2:31:16Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, so it's, you know, Google has Jules now, OpenAI has the Codex launch, you know, GitHub is doing more with agents as well. And can I just tell you, I mean, it's, we have always had the view that just like, everybody's gonna go do this eventually, you know?

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  No, it'd be really bearish if everyone was like, oh, no, Scott's like, just kinda crazy, I don't know what he's up to. I don't think it's a good idea. It's like, no, you should inspire a bunch of people to be like, that's a good idea. We're gonna do it too. And then you should still beat them.

• 2:31:44John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:31:45Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's like, parallel asynchronous coding agents, you know, has been, it's been the core bed of our entire company, basically, for the last year and a half. And I think it's, it's really interesting to see, yeah. And so I think there are a few factors going on. Like, I do think there will be multiple players, you know, in the long term. But, but to your point, John, I mean, I think there's also just a lot of, there's a lot of meaningful differentiation. I think the thing that's so interesting about the coding agent space is like, it is truly, you can kind of look at most spaces and kind of call it, I'll say, like, this is a capability space, this is a product space, right? And to just give you a kind of a few examples, I would say, you know, it's like, image generation is like, sure, you know, there's a lot of kind of like icing you can put on and things like that, but at the end of the day, you know, if you just have a way better image

• 2:32:30Scott Wu?

  generation model, you know, that is, that is the kind of the core, like, that is the meat of what you're building, right? And like on other spaces, for example, you know, like customer support or something like that, you know, it's, no one would disagree with you that the capabilities are there. And a lot of it is just like, what is the right interface for humans and AI to really work together and, and get that going? With coding agents, it is truly both, where it is, you know, on the one hand, obviously, yeah, I mean, every, every IQ point really matters, you know, in the system that you build and every, every piece of data that it can use and analyze and work with, it really matters. And then on the other hand, it is, you know, it's, the software is just messy enough and deep enough that it's, it is, it's, You do want to have a lot more control of what's going on. You want to be able to specify these details.

• 2:33:14Scott Wu?

  You want to be able to check in and review the work yourself and all of these other things. And so there's a lot of deep work with interface. And it's, yeah, I mean, in short, I think these are, these are the kinds of problems that we've been thinking about for the last, for the last year, you know? And so it's, it's fun to see. And, and you know, the fun thing too, actually is like, I mean, we're, we're up 30% week over week, actually. With just the, and it's, and I think there's kind of a funny thing, which is like, you know, people, people know how to use chatbots, right? And it's like something that we've all kind of learned over the last couple of years. I, I think the, the agent form factor is just really different, right? And it's something that people have to learn and have to understand. And, and now that everybody's talking about agents, it's actually, you know, it's, it's actually been great for us.

• 2:33:55John Coogan?

  Do you think deep research is part of that? Like, I feel like deep research for a lot of people is their first, first introduction to agentic AI in the sense that it's like, you fire it off and you let it go for 20 minutes and then you come back, right?

• 2:34:10Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I, I think the whole, right, asynchronous kind of action is, is really like a, a big piece of it. And I think it's, you know, we were talking about this last time, but it's like, agents are going to be everywhere, you know, pretty, pretty quickly. And there's no reason you shouldn't have an agent who's, you know, going and buying your flight so you don't have to go on the website yourself or going and, you know, all of these different things. And, and I think for a few reasons, code has kind of been in the first place where that's really taken off, but, but, but yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:36John Coogan?

  This is a total wild card, so feel free to pass if you haven't dug into it. But Ben Thompson was talking about the agentic web. We're talking about agents now. And he was kind of noodling through the idea that stable coins could be a relevant tool in the toolkit for the agentic web. As you, you know, ask, one of the examples was plan a birthday and it's doing a lot of things on, online. Maybe it's buying birthday cards. It's also looking up a cake recipe and then printing that out. Well, that cake recipe website is monetizing with advertising right now. Stable coins in the future, you could just pay a tenth of a cent for that page visit. Are you thinking about stablecoins at all? Does that sound reasonable to you?

• 2:35:20John Coogan?

  Just if you noodle on it, how do you think about this stuff?

• 2:35:23Scott Wu?

  Yeah, for sure. So I mean, I think with, you know, building software engineering agents were probably, you know, on the further end of the way from it. But with that.

• 2:35:30Jordi Hays?

  Crypto pivot.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, not a lot. Yeah, I imagine that not a lot of customers are paying one tenth of a cent for Devon right now. It's probably more in the hundreds of dollars.

• 2:35:39Scott Wu?

  With that said, you know, it is like an interesting thing, which is like, maybe one way to put it is like, a lot of the norms of the internet are going to have to change, right? You know, it's, we have captures, for example, which is kind of how you prevent bots. And it's almost like captures aren't really the right like system where you actually now want your agents to be able to go and like navigate on the internet and do things for you. And like a simple example of that for us is like, this is again, totally unrelated to software engineering, but it's like, you know, we give Devon our ramp card and then Devon just goes and orders groceries for us and stuff like that. It's like, yeah, it's great. But you can imagine, you know, there's a lot of these systems of like, yeah, how should agents interact with money in the real world? How should they, you know, how can like products and websites and stuff have the right incentives? If it's not humans that are going to them anymore, but agents and humans.

• 2:36:23Scott Wu?

  And so, yeah, a lot of questions.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Has Devon ever missed a memo on a ramp receipt? Or is Devon pretty good about that?

• 2:36:31Scott Wu?

  I think Devon's got it all down. Yeah, Devon takes screenshots and stuff as well, so it's all, yeah.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about the sort of stack, right? Because I know you guys have a partnership with Linear. Obviously, we work with Linear. There's this idea that much like a member of like a team, an agent can kind of appear in a lot of different places, right? A teammate can be in the office, they can be in a Zoom call, they can be in Slack, whatever. And how are you thinking about kind of like agentic, kind of like orchestration, right? And sort of managing agents?

• 2:37:07Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah. Linear is, by the way, they just had a launch this week. They had launched this morning, actually. So, yeah, yeah, shout out to the Linear team. And yeah, it's, it's, it's an interesting one. I mean, speaking of this kind of like product interface question, right? You know, the, a lot of the work that you have to do is really like.

• 2:37:28Scott Wu?

  It is, is, you know, I, I think one of the big difference between chatbots and agents is an agent is truly like, it truly needs to be like basically an employee in the same way. You know, it is really like you as an engineer are using your team of, of, of junior buddies who are going to go and like implement this stuff for you, right? And, and, and, and so like a, a lot of what that means is it has to be in all of these same systems, you know, in, in order to work really cleanly. Okay. And like the, the, the standard workflows that we have, I mean, we have Slack, for example. We have Linear and, and Jira and so on, but it is a big part of it. Yeah.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Last question, uh, actually from your post, you asked for questions from people who follow you and Remy Olson asked a great one. What do you see as the primary limiting factor for coding agents between context window, reasoning, which I imagine is just the amount of, of inference, uh, you're delivering to reasoning tokens, managing complex environments or other things?

• 2:38:25Scott Wu?

  Yeah, I think of those, I would say, I, I would say managing complex environments is probably the biggest one in the sense that, look, if, if you like, speaking of 15 minute AGI, you know, if, if you give it like a, a, a very contained coding problem where it's just like, all right, write one, you know, one file of code that solves this thing. It's honestly, it's already insanely good.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:44Scott Wu?

  You know, A, AI is, is already basically there. I would say on that, I, I think that the areas where you see these agents or, or models in general, like really slip up is, is kind of stuff where like you actually just need outside information to go and do what you're doing. You know, it's, it's like the, the simple examples are, you know, if you're fixing bugs or you're implementing things, like you want to be able to go and test the code yourself. This is a big part of why connecting with all these systems is so important. And so, you know, plugging into Slack or Linear, for example, makes it really easy for you to kick off your dev and runs or whatever it is. But, but I think a big part of it too is like, if you guys are actually doing your issue tracking in Linear, or if you guys are, you know, this is how you do front end deploys and this is how you run the Linter or something like that. It is obviously, you know, the, the agent is going to be super handicapped if it doesn't

• 2:39:29Scott Wu?

  have access to the same things. And, and it's, you know, the, the next step beyond that, obviously it's not just accessing those things, but, but learning how to really intelligently work with these and, and, and use them to make decisions.

• 2:39:40John Coogan?

  Any reaction to the Lama four behemoth? I, I, I think I saw 10 million token context window seems bigger than ever. At the same time, kind of been going back and forth on how that project is progressing. There's been kind of mixed reactions online. What, what's been your takeaway from that?

• 2:39:55Scott Wu?

  Yeah, there's a lot of cool projects working on longer context windows. I would just kind of give as one point, which is it's interesting. You know, if you think about human, human thought, which is, which is not always the best parallel, but is obviously is the one example that we do have. You know, humans actually have terribly small context windows. You know, it's like when you get like the six digit code, you know, it's like, like, I don't know. It's like pretty hard to remember what the six digits were and type those in.

• 2:40:22Jordi Hays?

  Goldfish, goldfish mode.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Even with coding, it's like, it's like, well, once you have to remember like the three different files that it takes you a while to spin up the context window. And then you don't want to get pulled out of coding. You want to be in the flow.

• 2:40:36Scott Wu?

  And so the thing that humans are like really good at, I would say is almost more like intelligent retrieval, right? To your point, which is like you pull up this file and you're looking at it and you're like, oh yeah, like I remember why we did this like two months ago. And then you're kind of like, you can kind of like replay it in your head almost. And that's kind of the thing that's, that's, that's really interesting. I don't think it's so, so I guess a long story short is like, I think long context is going to help a ton. It's going to make things a lot better, but, but I think there are some kind of like fundamental things of like, how do you access all of the information that you need access to, to make this decision? That's right in front of you right now, which is like context alone doesn't solve that problem.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  Sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic chat. We'll talk to you again soon. This is great. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:41:17Scott Wu?

  All right.

• 2:41:18John Coogan?

  And up next we have Joe Weisenthal, the stalwart.

• 2:41:21Speaker 07

  Sorry, up 30% week over week.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Pretty big.

• 2:41:23Speaker 07

  It's Wednesday.

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  It's Wednesday. Well, welcome to the studio, Joe. Bring him in.

• 2:41:30Speaker 07

  Bring him in.

• 2:41:31John Coogan?

  Bring in Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:41:31Speaker 07

  I don't want to wait anymore.

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  Oh. Welcome to the show.

• 2:41:36Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:41:38Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me. I'm really good. I'm thrilled to be back here.

• 2:41:42John Coogan?

  How are you holding on?

• 2:41:43Speaker 07

  What do you do when the market's flat?

• 2:41:45John Coogan?

  The market was flat on Monday and we didn't know what to do. Normally we're either depressed and praying for something to change and then, or celebrating a big update. We've seen these like 5% swings and it's just been boring.

• 2:41:58Speaker 07

  It's so painful. I thought like, you know, the market stopped moving and I was like, the technology brothers will never have me back. They'll never have a reason to call me again. My, I had, I had, I had one month of relevancy. People listening to my podcast because the lines were moving up and down and then they stopped. And I'm like, okay, well, I enjoyed it while it lasts.

• 2:42:19John Coogan?

  It's all over.

• 2:42:20Jordi Hays?

  So we're having, we were having you on to move.

• 2:42:22Speaker 07

  Have me back on the show.

• 2:42:23Jordi Hays?

  We're having you on to move the market.

• 2:42:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, this will drive the market.

• 2:42:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll see what we can do here. We want to create some volatility, just off of.

• 2:42:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, so, so with the trade war, uh, we.

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  R I P.

• 2:42:36John Coogan?

  We, yeah, yeah. I, I kind of had this like somewhat controversial take that like the, the trade war was not like COVID or the, or the interest rate crash because the, the person who caused it could immediately undo it. And Trump could roll it back.

• 2:42:52Speaker 07

  Which he did.

• 2:42:52John Coogan?

  Which he did. And I was talking to Jordan Schneider, trying to talk about this, like, he was saying like, no, this time is different. It's not going to be like the trade war from Trump won. We're going to look back on this as like the beginning of the end. It's terrible. He was very doom pilled, but it feels like now, if we flash forward four years, we could be looking back on this and being like, that was a crazy month, but it wasn't that big of a deal in like the world historical context. What do you, what's your read on it now?

• 2:43:14Speaker 07

  It's a really tough call because I was very sympathetic to that. And then as soon as he walks back, you're like, of course he was going to walk it back. You're so stupid for everything this time. It's different. All that being said.

• 2:43:25John Coogan?

  We have a laugh track now.

• 2:43:26Speaker 07

  I love that. It's so professional. All that being said, a 10% baseline tariff on the rest of the world is not nothing. We are now a high tariff country.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:35Speaker 07

  Um, there is this pause, but a 50% tariff, whatever it's going to be, is not nothing. These are not complete nothings. And I do believe that they will change the economy in some ways that they anticipated. Look, when he unveiled that chart on April 2nd, I thought it's like, well, he's basically unplugging the economy. We can't function with these levels. And he sort of realized that too. He said the bond market got yips. He went back. And then, uh, he probably heard stories about potential empty shelves, a place like Walmart and Home Depot and stuff. And then he dialed it back further. We're still in a new era though of trade. It might be more like Brexit where it's like, yeah, if you go to, I was in London a few weeks ago.

• 2:44:18Speaker 07

  It's still the same old UK. It's still a pretty like rich country. It's doing well, but. It's they haven't grown that much. It hasn't been particularly good. So it might be the kind of thing where we don't notice it dramatically, except maybe it's that we don't grow as much as we could. Who knows, though?

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Can you tie this to the?

• 2:44:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if it's the weather, but when I'm in, when I'm in the UK, it's something about the slow growth of the economy that's just.

• 2:44:41Speaker 07

  You can just feel it.

• 2:44:42Jordi Hays?

  You can smell it.

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully that doesn't cover America. Can you, can you tie this to the credit downgrade? How serious is that? Should we care about what Moody's thinks about us?

• 2:44:52Speaker 07

  No, I don't. I don't care about credit ratings. I mean, I'm sort of a strict view that we borrow in currency, we borrow in dollars and print dollars, so we'll never default. But there is a, you know, I would say there's two things, which is one, that, you know, it looks like we are going to get some sort of inflationary mix potentially between tariffs and tax cuts.

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:13Speaker 07

  So I, that's tends to not be very good for treasuries. And to the extent, you know, that like, policy changes in the US are now, everyone understands that they can be unilaterally changed on a whim. Probably not great, all things being, all things considered for the perceived institutional stability. So that's probably also not great at the margin for the international proclivity to invest in the United States. You know, the one thing that's really notable is that a lot of markets clearly have rebounded to an extraordinary degree, most notably the stock market.

• 2:45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:44Speaker 07

  Um, the dollar is still very weak.

• 2:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Bitcoin, all time high.

• 2:45:47Speaker 07

  Bitcoin, all time high. Amazing. Uh, the dollar is still very weak.

• 2:45:51Jordi Hays?

  It hasn't rebounded.

• 2:45:52Speaker 07

  Well, can I, by the way, oh, Pomp was on earlier?

• 2:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:55Jordi Hays?

  He was a surprise guest.

• 2:45:56Speaker 07

  That's, can I just say, um, the, the first time I was on this show, one of the questions the two of you asked me was, well, SPACs have to come back.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:05Speaker 07

  And I said, well, in my lifetime, they will definitely come back. Pomp has a new SPAC. I went, but I said, when, when I said that SPACs would come back, I was thinking like five, 10, 15, 20 years. I did not think that would be getting rebounded.

• 2:46:20Jordi Hays?

  They said Pomp doesn't have the balls to launch a SPAC in the year 2025, and he proved him wrong.

• 2:46:24Speaker 07

  And he did.

• 2:46:25Jordi Hays?

  He proved him wrong.

• 2:46:26Speaker 07

  I've never had a prediction come true that fast as that one. So I appreciate Pomp vindicating, uh, my last appearance on TBPN.

• 2:46:36John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Vindicated.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  I want to talk about like the Middle East deals.

• 2:46:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:46:43John Coogan?

  What was your read on on all of that? It didn't seem like it was super market moving per se, but it was very big in tech. And it seems like there's this new era of cooperation there. It seemed like amid all of the turmoil of the tariffs, there was like this bright spot of like some really strong new alliances. Obviously, there's some controversy there. But what was your read on the on the Middle East news?

• 2:47:06Speaker 07

  You know, I've been posting about this a lot, you know, since I hit my mid 40s. I've been reading a lot about the Cold War and mid 20th century history, because that's what you do at my age and so forth. But one of the things that I've been reading about lately is that one of the, you know, every time the US and the Soviet Union appeared to have some period of détente, so to speak, one of the entities or one of the forces that pushed the countries apart were the sort of like the human rights groups, et cetera, that really didn't like, you know, various activities going on in the Soviet Union and that often made it difficult to have peace. It's an interesting thing to think about. Well, what if foreign policy just became a little bit more transactional? We sort of accept that like there's like a very different system

• 2:47:50Speaker 07

  in this country than, you know, this other country. But you know what? Maybe we can have stable relations if we agree to sell them cutting edge GPUs to set up an AI. It's an interesting thought. And I don't have like extreme or strong views on foreign policy. It's not my wheelhouse. But it's an interesting thing to think about. You know, for so long, there was this view that, you know, like an important aspect of stable relations was some sort of common ground in governance and values and so forth. And maybe we are entering this era where stable relations are who we agree to sell chips to.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  On the other side of-

• 2:48:33Speaker 07

  It's an interesting thing to think about.

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  Jensen, another 100 billion for Jensen.

• 2:48:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  He's been on a tear.

• 2:48:39Speaker 07

  Jensen keeps winning, yeah. Except in China.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  Have you been tracking how many conferences he's been going to? He's, it feels like he's at a different conference every single day. And yet normally that would be a very, very distracting for a CEO. But every time he goes to a conference, he leaves with a 100 billion dollar deal. So it seems like it's working.

• 2:48:57Speaker 07

  It's really remarkable. And again, I don't know how much. Like, I've been trying to think about this. Because the way people are talking about AGI, and you guys have probably a lot of guests who know way more, and being out there is like, you know, the race to achieve AGI is something akin to like, which country will develop the nuclear bomb first? We must get there. I don't know. It feels a little sci-fi to me. I don't know how much to take that seriously. Other people are better equipped to talk about that. But there is this sort of like, simple business story, which is like,

• 2:49:31Speaker 07

  ecosystem that powers AI? Or could it be the Huawei ecosystem, which is coming out strong? And so, to the extent, like, just from a business standpoint, Jensen going around the world, making all these sales, potentially boxing out Huawei from the Middle East, just from a business standpoint, seems to be doing very well.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were just talking to Scott Wu from Cognition. They have an AI coding agent. And this idea that we have AGI, but it's just 15-minute AGI. Like, you can get an agent to go and do 15 minutes' worth of research for you and compile a little dossier for you in deep research. You don't have AGI to the extent that you can just say, "Go create economic value for the rest of your life, like you can with a human." And the economic incentives just lead to a person finding their way in the economy and finding a job and buying things and consuming things.

• 2:50:20Speaker 07

  I still haven't had like, a great experience yet with any of the agent tools. I was, um, someone asked me, they're like, "Do you have a list of all of the Twitter handles of guests that have appeared on Odd Lots?" And I was like, "No, but let's see if I can do that." So I went to Manus, the Chinese Manus dot I am. And I said, "Can you put this together?" "Oh, yeah, sorry, I know." And then-

• 2:50:43Jordi Hays?

  It's pronounced Manus, too, by the way. Manus.

• 2:50:47Speaker 07

  And then it worked for, like, it was like, 30 minutes later, I went back and checked, and it said, "Oh, you're out of credits." So I never even got to see if it worked yet. So I don't know. I have yet to experience-

• 2:50:58John Coogan?

  Well, the question for me is, is how long would, do you think it would take, you know, like, an intern to do that job?

• 2:51:04Speaker 07

  Well, it would take a really long time. But like, I don't even, like, but, you know, like, my experience, I think we may have talked about this last time. Like- My experience, like, I'm still not totally convinced that they're, like, reliable yet. I don't know, like, I need to keep experimenting.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  I think you make a good point. It's just that, uh, when I think of 15-minute AGI, I think that, what's a 15-minute job? It's look at the most recent Odd Lots show notes and find me the one Twitter handle for the guest.

• 2:51:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:51:34John Coogan?

  And now, if you want to do that 200 times, that's not 15-minute AGI. That's, that's one-week AGI. And you need to spawn all these different processes and orchestrate them and fact-check them and build that up. And so, yes, man, I should be able to do that, but it's not there yet.

• 2:51:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it's just wildly unreliable right now.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:51:51Jordi Hays?

  And so, sometimes you get an output that is 10 times faster and better than your best employee.

• 2:51:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:51:58Jordi Hays?

  And then sometimes it just completely fails.

• 2:52:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:01Jordi Hays?

  And we're not really equipped to, like, process, okay, is the agent good? Okay, well, sometimes the agent is incredible. And then other times, it's like, yesterday, I wanted it to count a bunch of boxes and it, like, worked on it for 14 minutes and failed.

• 2:52:14Speaker 07

  I completely agree. Like, I'm, I'm every day still. And by the way, uh, I've, Suno, the music app, I'm a songwriter, that's incredible. That actually, of all the AI tools that I've played with, that might actually be the one that's most incredible. I've been doing this thing where I just sing a song into my phone.

• 2:52:33John Coogan?

  That's super cool.

• 2:52:34Speaker 07

  And then I say, now produce this to sound like an 80s country song, and it actually works. So that, like, some of these things just, like, absolutely blow me away.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  I have a thesis for that because with, with, with music, there's no right answer. Like, there's no, there's no, oh, you got one character wrong in the, in the Twitter handle, and it's not going to resolve, right?

• 2:52:53Speaker 07

  Right, right.

• 2:52:53John Coogan?

  But if you get one note slightly wrong, but it still sounds like music, you can kind of chalk that up to the vibe or slight differences. And so, I feel like that's why the, the image generation.

• 2:53:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  It, it, it's less, like, binary. Or you have code where it compiles and it can work against itself and check, okay, does the code work or not? Try again, try again, try again. And so, you either need to be, when you're in the messy middle of, like, human management, decision-making, analysis, that's where AI is really struggling right now.

• 2:53:23Speaker 07

  So just going back to the question of like, can, can AI compile all of the Twitter handles from every guest? I'm guessing the answer is yes.

• 2:53:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:31Speaker 07

  On the other hand, if that's what AGI is, I'm not really sure it's existential, whether like China, the Chinese model is better than OpenAI's model.

• 2:53:41Jordi Hays?

  AGI is when you can ask ChatGPT to bring down the long end of the yield curve. Cause it's really, it's really getting up there. And right now, if I could just go into ChatGPT and say, hey,

• 2:53:52John Coogan?

  Let's do something.

• 2:53:52Jordi Hays?

  Can you help us out?

• 2:53:53Speaker 07

  That we need to, that we need to develop right away.

• 2:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's, let's, let's talk about this. I know you have a.

• 2:53:59Speaker 07

  Manhattan Project level urgency.

• 2:54:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I know you have a podcast episode coming out tomorrow about, about bond yields globally, what's happening. Could you give people a little teaser preview on, on, on that? And then they can go listen to the full thing.

• 2:54:16Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Thank you so much for letting me plug our episode tomorrow. Stephen Englander, Standard Chartered, one of our favorite thinkers. We actually never had him on the show. You know, the story, there's, there's, there's a few moving parts to what's going on, but a big thing is this combination of countries around the world are spending more money. They kind of have to because, you know, like again, we talked about US foreign policy. Germany doesn't know if the US is going to be the same type of ally. Trump for years, even going back to his first administration, obviously encouraging the NATO countries to sort of more formally meet their commitments. So you have increased spending. At the same time, you have tariffs which are going to make business more costly, less

• 2:54:59Speaker 07

  effi-, probably less efficient because you're not going to have the most optimally designed global supply chain that would exist in a world of, you know, sort of pure free trade. So you have this combination of every country sort of having to become a little bit more self-reliant, at least in some respects. And you certainly see that in a lot of like tech areas, weapons, probably food even as well, energy and so forth. Combined with the fact that, you know, you're having sort of less efficient supply chains. That's probably all things considered means, you know, more inflation and for, to hit inflation targets, central banks are going to have to, generally speaking, keep rates up. We might get rate cuts in the US in the short term. That's what Stephen Englander thinks.

• 2:55:43Speaker 07

  That's certainly what the market is pricing, but he thinks the window for that will be pretty short and maybe even by next year, we could be talking about rate hikes again. Yeah, I know. I know. We need that AGI. We need that AGI to break down Raze.

• 2:55:57John Coogan?

  How do you think the big tech companies have been changing their tune around how they talk about AGI? It used to be all about safety, which you, you know, I think a lot of people have kind of just gotten sick of the safety argument. Now it's all product and all of a sudden it's we're not moving fast enough, you know, Siri isn't good.

• 2:56:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's confusing. It's a little bit confusing because, I mean, first of all, I agree, the safety story feels very yesterday. This is such a business story. The market, for better or worse, and I don't really have a view on safety, but the market, for better or worse, seems to be dictating to the companies, it's like, no, you got to race ahead as fast as you can. You do not have an alternative to this and so forth. And you even see it, you know, obviously, like when DeepSeek came out and it displayed its reasoning. OpenAI had to respond and it started displaying some of its reasoning models. So there's the sheer competitive aspect that like, you just sort of got to do what you got to do for like the product side.

• 2:56:55Speaker 07

  On the other hand, there are things that the tech companies are doing that do not sort of seem to me, oh, within a year, they're going to build or within a couple of years, um, you know, they're going to have these brains that are thousands of times more intelligent than you, uh, than a human. I saw there was something about OpenAI, I think about a social network, they hired a CEO for like product and revenue. There was that news today about buying a hard, I think, funny, I've, you've already talked about on the show. This does not, these sound like ventures or these sound like investments that are about making money for a business, which is great, and do not sound like we are building something insane in a lab that is going to change the world.

• 2:57:38Speaker 07

  So it feels like there is this impulse among the big AI companies of various flavors to basically build good businesses and profitable things rather than this technology that, you know, is going to render human existence obsolete in some way or another.

• 2:57:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it feels like OpenAI as a lab, there, there, there could come a time when OpenAI could kind of, uh,

• 2:58:06Jordi Hays?

  What's the right phrase for it, but but effectively like OpenAI will be in a position where they can be like, yeah, we're a consumer internet company.

• 2:58:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:58:15Jordi Hays?

  And there will be other, there will be other, there'll be other labs that don't have the luxury of saying that. And it'll be interesting if there's like this kind of divergence in.

• 2:58:25John Coogan?

  I mean, the side of this.

• 2:58:26Jordi Hays?

  Have to keep the AGI narrative going.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  I think the steel, the steel man on the AGI narrative is that like, would we have gotten this amazing consumer technology and enterprise technology and all this value without the crazy AGI narrative? That drove nonprofit investment in highly unprofitable research. And it's, it's kind of like, I feel like everyone makes the comparison to nuclear. But when I play back the story on nuclear, it's like, America did this incredible Oppenheimer Manhattan project to develop the bomb, which I don't see as really like a good thing. Like the bomb, obviously, it's just like.

• 2:59:02Speaker 07

  Brave take.

• 2:59:03John Coogan?

  It only destroys things and then it immediately becomes this, this arms race and this equilibrium is just that you have to build a ton of them, but none of them get used. They create no real economic value, right? But the good ending of nuclear would have been energy too cheap to meter nuclear power everywhere. We didn't get that. And my hope is that we're in this situation where we have the panic scare around AGI as a weapon, but we don't go the nuclear path where, oh, you can't possibly have chat GPT. It's too dangerous.

• 2:59:33Speaker 07

  No, I agree with you. And I think if you look at like, I mean, it is absolutely extraordinary, the rate of growth that big tech companies are growing from. I mean, this is what's sort of breaking the brains of everyone in the market, which is that everyone's been long big tech forever. They're the biggest companies in the world and they're still putting up some of the biggest earnings growth that you've, that you can find anywhere on the market off of a gigantic base. And I do think part of that story is gotta be that. The CEOs really believe to some extent, and I don't know what exactly what they believe, and I don't know exactly what AGI is, and they probably all have different definitions, but they probably all believe it's like, no, like, we're not going to slow down our spending

• 3:00:18Speaker 07

  on this stuff because we haven't achieved that thing that what that's out there that will be so special if it's achieved.

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, I gotta ask Joe, would you rather, would you rather own Costco at 59 times earnings? 59 Costco at 59 times earnings or Google at 19? Rotisserie chickens.

• 3:00:40Speaker 07

  You'll never get me to make, you know, you'll never get me, you'll never get me to get finance. Why is every, you tell me, why is everyone so negative on Google these days? What's the story?

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's dramatically. Products have just been really hard to access. Like they, they're incredible research lab, but they, but they haven't communicated very effectively around the product. So they introduced the product and it's in a research preview. They have a paper, but in order to access it, like chat GPT, when there's a new feature, you go to chat.com and it just says, use this thing. And, and with Google, it's like, there's the Gemini app and then there's Gemini smart responses and then there's notebook.

• 3:01:15Jordi Hays?

  But that's a product experience. And then there's obviously like the, the threat to the core.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Core business model. If you just wind up searching in chat GPT, you stop.

• 3:01:24Jordi Hays?

  They got a knife, they got a knife on the neck of the golden goose.

• 3:01:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, it's true. Um, the Google AI products, some of them are extraordinary. I've played around with some of the coding tools. I've put notebook LM is a very useful tool for research. It is true that like, no one would ever know how to find any of this stuff.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  It's really hard.

• 3:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's in the App Store now. Notebook LM is in the App Store. It's in the title.

• 3:01:48Speaker 07

  Notebook LM, what kind of name is that? Who would even know what that is? It does seem, I don't know.

• 3:01:52Jordi Hays?

  What kind of name is Joe Weisenthal?

• 3:01:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, but what kind of name, what kind of name is like oh, three mini?

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're all bad names.

• 3:02:01Jordi Hays?

  The names, the names won't, the names won't matter.

• 3:02:03John Coogan?

  The names don't matter, I think. But yeah, there, there's something about, uh, like Google is, if they really, really went full tilt into AI, they would just say, google.com is our AI product. Right? Instead of being like, there's a separate app Gemini and like, you can go over here and we have an extra thing. Instead of being like, no, like we are an AI company.

• 3:02:23Speaker 07

  Could you see that happening?

• 3:02:25John Coogan?

  No, no, I don't think the company set up for it at all, but I think that

• 3:02:28Speaker 07

  On a long enough time horizon, I can see it.

• 3:02:30John Coogan?

  It might be different if it's Mark Zuckerberg and he owns 100% of the shares and he can just do whatever he wants. It's private company and there's no investors that can sue. Like, there are different structural dynamics at Google than at a small startup.

• 3:02:41Speaker 07

  I can just see it being more as a spectrum.

• 3:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, please.

• 3:02:44Speaker 07

  Can I ask another question to you guys? Do you have a clear way to articulate the benefit that Meta is getting from all of its AI spending?

• 3:02:54John Coogan?

  I mean, yes, because the first, like, the base use of AI at Meta, the number one, like, just energy cost in GPUs is ads, delivery of ads.

• 3:03:09Speaker 07

  But isn't that just go old fashioned machine learning algorithm stuff? Like, what does that have to do with generative AI?

• 3:03:15John Coogan?

  It's the same thing. Like, the algorithm that decides what ad to serve you when you're scrolling Instagram is a big transformer now. And so it's a bunch of weights, just like an LLM, but instead of taking in text and putting out text, it takes in everything that you've looked at, how long you looked at it, what you liked about it, whether you commented.

• 3:03:34Speaker 07

  So it's just getting better and better at that targeting?

• 3:03:35John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so that's a huge training run. They never talk about this because it's not sexy and it's not the new hot thing. But you can think about, like, the Meta Ads training run as similar to like a GPT-3, GPT-4 level training run. And then the Reels algorithm for what content to serve you, not just what ads, that's also another huge vertical. And so when Zuck went to build out the Reels algorithm farm, the server farm that would power the Reels algorithm, because it's billions and billions of data points, right? He said, "I don't want to get caught flat-footed again like I did against TikTok, because when TikTok came up and the whole algorithm shifted to, I need to rank every piece of content across the entire network and match..." Billions and billions of videos with billions and billions of users.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  He said, I don't want to get caught flat footed again. Build me two data centers that are the same scale. And then he had, he had extra capacity thinking about, okay, I have two data centers because I just built double. Let's train an LLM. And then the more, and then the more tactical reason is that LLMs are going to get stuffed everywhere in every enterprise.

• 3:04:39Speaker 07

  I've noticed, and sometimes I just accidentally wander into an LLM.

• 3:04:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, but not even from the consumer perspective. Like, think about, think about within, within Facebook, they have to process payments from their, from their advertisers. And they might want to run those through an LLM to say, are we being defrauded? Or, or there's a consumer, there's customer support that's happening, or any little internal thing. Even just like, should, should we, should we censor this comment for a user who's under 18 years old? Right? Like that, that is an LLM that runs in the background. It's not consumer facing. Why would they have to pay OpenAI for that? Why would they have to pay Google for that?

• 3:05:18Speaker 07

  No, this makes, this makes a lot of sense. Can I say one more thing?

• 3:05:21John Coogan?

  Please.

• 3:05:22Speaker 07

  I need to, for anyone who's watching, I have a lot of dear friends. Please never send me a reel. I never watch them. I like, someone's like, oh, they send you a reel. I was like, I'd rather not. So I would like to use your platform.

• 3:05:36Jordi Hays?

  Carrier, carrier pigeon?

• 3:05:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:05:38Jordi Hays?

  What's the best way to get in touch?

• 3:05:40Speaker 07

  I love them. Yeah, you send me a DM, whatever. I'm just not going to want, watch your reel.

• 3:05:44John Coogan?

  But I'm going to mail you a DVD of the best reels.

• 3:05:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 3:05:47John Coogan?

  I'm going to mail you a DVD, a Blu-ray of just all the best reels.

• 3:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, what about taking it a step further? Vinyl, and it's us describing reels to Jeff.

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 3:05:57Speaker 07

  No, I love it. I would do that. We'd do that all day. If someone sends me a DMs to me a reel, I'm like, do we really have to do that?

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  Imagine a bunch of colorful marbles falling down the stairs endlessly. Or imagine subway surfers in the background while Joe Rogan talks about weightlifting with Elon Musk. Uh, that's really high performance stuff, but you'll hear it on vinyl for sure.

• 3:06:18Speaker 07

  Thank you. I appreciate it.

• 3:06:20John Coogan?

  Anyway, this was fantastic.

• 3:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's make this, let's make this a regular thing.

• 3:06:24John Coogan?

  This is such a fun conversation.

• 3:06:25Speaker 07

  Anytime, anytime. I love chatting with you all.

• 3:06:26Jordi Hays?

  We're going to just put a calendar hold on.

• 3:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll throw you something.

• 3:06:29Jordi Hays?

  And if you ever just, if you ever, if any part of you ever thinks, eh, I'm not excited to talk to John and Jordan today, then we'll cancel.

• 3:06:36Speaker 07

  No, I'm always excited to talk to you.

• 3:06:37John Coogan?

  That's great. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'd love to have you back. Thank you so much.

• 3:06:39Speaker 07

  I'll be back.

• 3:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for moving the market.

• 3:06:42John Coogan?

  This is great. He moved the market on our stream numbers. We're up at 10.8 K today. Good day on X. The live stream is popping.

• 3:06:50Jordi Hays?

  Google's up.

• 3:06:51John Coogan?

  Google's up 5%.

• 3:06:53Jordi Hays?

  8% today. Is that because, is that because Joe said, why, why is everybody bearish? He just had to ask that question and the stock popped almost 3%.

• 3:07:02John Coogan?

  This is reading tea leaves. Hey, ChatGPT, take this transcript from Joe Weisenthal and turn it into financial advice. Make it, make it ultra opinionated. No, obviously no financial advice on this show, especially for my guests.

• 3:07:14Jordi Hays?

  The question of like, what does, what does Zuck get from Llama? We obviously did our Llama deep dive, but it's like such a history and, and appreciation for open source and so many different platforms, right? He just, uh, it would be hard to take Meta seriously as.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:34Jordi Hays?

  As a hyperscaler if they didn't have any type of AI play. They also get the benefit of learning from other people building on Llama, even if there's not some massive direct revenue benefit.

• 3:07:45John Coogan?

  And I think, I think what Joe is, is really like hitting on, which is correct, is that the LLM chat-based chat bot UI paradigm is not a perfect fit for what Meta's products are right now. But as the, as the UI paradigms mature, you can imagine just, okay, we know that images are moving from diffusion to token-based architectures. So you could imagine that it, maybe I don't want to constantly generate AI slop and throw that up on my story, but I could totally want to take a selfie and say, hey, uh, just with natural language, can you make the sky clearer? It's a little gray today. Can you just make it blue back there?

• 3:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Also, it's a hedge against as, as AI companions and just people develop relationships with effectively the models. That is a threat to Meta's core business of connecting regular people that have conversations in the app that, that bring people back to the apps who, you know, they can serve more ads. So anyways, today was a very fun show.

• 3:08:50John Coogan?

  Very fun show. We gotta go take some photos.

• 3:08:52Jordi Hays?

  We had range from Erik Prince to Joe Weisenthal.

• 3:08:55John Coogan?

  We really covered everyone. I got, I got some text messages. Someone said, uh, great lineup today. I'll read this. Where is this? Uh, great lineup today. Blackwater. Blackwater for software engineers. Cognition. Blackwater for Sam Altman's haters. OpenAI.

• 3:09:13John Coogan?

  Lots of Blackwater folks. The Blackwater of podcasting, Joe Wesson Paul.

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:17John Coogan?

  Or David Senra. I think David Senra is more Blackwater coded when it comes to how ruthlessly.

• 3:09:21Jordi Hays?

  Operational efficiency.

• 3:09:23John Coogan?

  He pods. He pods. Anyway, thank you for listening. This is fantastic. Switch your business to ramp.com. Check out Polly market.

• 3:09:34Jordi Hays?

  I want to get, I'm gonna get work on getting a Polly market set up on POMS back.

• 3:09:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:09:41Jordi Hays?

  It does it actually.

• 3:09:42John Coogan?

  Does it happen? When does it happen? When does it go out? Like the IPO markets that we've been having a lot of fun with.

• 3:09:46Jordi Hays?

  And then as the rumors start circulating, who's the target?

• 3:09:50John Coogan?

  This is all great. This is great stuff.

• 3:09:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna be, we're gonna hit up all our boys, all our group chats. Hey, who's got a profitable financial services company that they want to take public?

• 3:09:58John Coogan?

  I want to, I want to highlight one timeline post before we get out of here. Leonard Heim, he's coming on the show next week. Jordan from China Talk recommended him. He talks about chips and AI. And I love this because there's a, there's a screenshot that he's quote tweeting from, I believe the Financial Times. It says, "We still don't know how much A energy AI consumes. Companies must give us the chance to understand the environmental impact of the tech we use." And he says, "Yes, we do. It's 21 gigawatts. You count all the AI chips produced, factor in that they're running most of the time, add some overhead and you got your answer. It's a lot and we'll only get more." But you know what? Probably worth it. And I loved, I loved it. Like there's so many of these opinion pieces that are like, we could never know. We could never know. And he's like, no, you can just add it up.

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  It's pretty easy to understand how much energy it's producing. So I saw this post after I already invited him, but I'm excited. I'm super excited to talk to him next week because clearly banger.

• 3:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Banger. It takes myth.

• 3:10:54John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

• 3:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Has been really explicit about this.

• 3:10:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:10:59Jordi Hays?

  If you like watching the show, our jobs are on the line.

• 3:11:04John Coogan?

  They will recast us. They will cast someone else.

• 3:11:07Jordi Hays?

  Ben is making menace, giving us a menacing look right now.

• 3:11:11John Coogan?

  His, his, his thumb is over the purchase button on an Audi R8 and he can only do it if you leave us five stars. If you don't leave us five stars, we're never going to get there. So thank you.

• 3:11:20Jordi Hays?

  All right. Cheers, folks.

• 3:11:21John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you.

• 3:11:21Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:11:22John Coogan?

  Bye.