Trump's Tech Dinner, Tesla's $1T Pay Package, OpenAI Mass Producing Chips with Broadcom, Seal Team 6 Mission Gone Wrong | Joe Weisenthal, Jason Droege, Dave Marra, Mert Mumtaz, Harish Abbott, Tuhin Srivastava, Cecilia Ziniti

(01:34) - Timeline (13:35) - Trump's Tech Dinner (22:19) - Tesla's $1T Pay Package (36:25) - OpenAI Mass Producing Chips with Broadcom (45:26) - Ellen in the Mansion Section (53:23) - Joe Weisenthal, born September 2, 1980, in Detroit, Michigan, is an American journalist and financial expert. He serves as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg's digital brands, co-anchors Bloomberg Television's "What’d You Miss?", and co-hosts the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, Weisenthal discusses the recent jobs report, noting that the number was below expectations and highlighting concerns about the labor market's state. He mentions that excluding health care, the economy has been shedding jobs, with manufacturing employment down 78,000 so far this year. Weisenthal also touches on the impact of AI investments on employment, suggesting that while data centers may not add significantly to employment, the promise of AI could lead to job destruction rather than growth. (01:25:15) - 2019 Seal Team 6 Mission Gone Wrong (01:28:46) - Washington Post Now on Substack (01:31:00) - Timeline (01:53:42) - Giorgio Armani Passes Away at 91 (01:59:25) - Jason Droege, a seasoned technology executive and entrepreneur, is the Interim CEO of Scale AI, having previously founded Uber Eats and served as a Venture Partner at Benchmark. In the conversation, Droege discusses his extensive experience in the tech industry, including his role in launching and scaling Uber Eats to a $20 billion annual gross merchandise volume, and his current focus on expanding Scale AI's applications and services business to deliver customized AI solutions for enterprises and governments. (02:23:05) - Dave Marra, CEO of Rivet Industries, discusses the company's mission to serve the half-billion workers in the Western world who are underserved by big tech, focusing on those in demanding environments like flight lines, factories, and battlefields. He highlights Rivet's recent $195 million contract with the U. S. Army to develop next-generation soldier mission command systems, emphasizing the importance of comfort, ruggedization, compliance, and utility in their products. Marra also notes that advancements in technology have now made it feasible to create such devices, which were not possible five years ago, and underscores the significance of dual-use applications for both military and commercial markets. (02:37:15) - Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius—a developer platform for the Solana blockchain—discusses the launch of Tempo, a new Layer 1 blockchain focused on payments, developed by Stripe and Paradigm. He highlights the controversies surrounding Tempo, including its positioning as an L1 rather than an L2, and the challenges of maintaining a payments-only chain in a permissionless environment. Mumtaz also addresses the potential for Tempo to become permissionless in the future and the implications of such a transition. (02:53:49) - Harish Abbott, co-founder and CEO of Augment, announced the company's $85 million Series A funding round, led by Redpoint Ventures, to enhance their AI logistics assistant, Augie. He discussed Augie's role in automating tasks like quoting, dispatching, tracking, and billing, aiming to streamline operations in the fragmented $900 billion freight industry. Abbott also reflected on lessons from his previous venture, Deliverr, emphasizing the importance of customer focus and operational efficiency in scaling Augment's solutions. (02:59:58) - Tuhin Srivastava, CEO of BaseTen, an AI infrastructure company, announced the company's recent $150 million funding round. He discussed BaseTen's focus on simplifying AI inference for businesses by managing the complexities of deploying and scaling machine learning models, allowing companies to concentrate on their unique applications. Srivastava also highlighted the company's rapid growth, expanding from 30 to 104 employees in the past year, and emphasized the importance of speed and efficiency in the competitive AI landscape. (03:07:02) - Cecilia Ziniti is a seasoned technology and legal executive with over 20 years of experience, including roles as the founding lawyer for Amazon's Alexa and General Counsel for Replit. In the conversation, she discusses Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors over AI copyright infringement, highlighting that the agreement addresses past unauthorized use of pirated works for training their AI model, Claude, and noting that authors will receive compensation of at least $3,000 per work. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TPN. Today is Friday, September 5th, 2025. We are live from the TPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Thought we'd mix it up. People have been complaining about the screaming. We decided to take it in a different direction.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  We heard you.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  I think, I think we'll be back to yelling on Monday. That was pretty weird. Anyway.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Never again.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Never again.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  Should we actually just dial it back and run it back again?

• 0:34John Coogan?

  You want to do it again? A second take?

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Okay. You're watching TPN!

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  The current thing is big numbers. $200 million for the Free Press, Barry Weiss's media company, to CBS. People did not like the quiet in the chat. They said, "Scream."

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  $610 million for the browser company. We talked about that a little bit yesterday. Ramp hit $1 billion in ARR. Let's hear it for Ramp.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Great hit, great hit. $600 billion in Meta CapEx.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  CapEx and $1 trillion potentially on the table for Elon Musk at Tesla. So we're going to go through this. So, the Free Press is one of the most impressive media companies built in the last decade, says Austin Reeve from Morning Brew, correct?

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Huge congrats to Barry Weiss, Nellie Snoozy Weiss, this is a funny name, for building something truly different. This is, I think, still rumored. I don't think it's fully confirmed at this point, but it's all, it's all but confirmed.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was hard to tell which side was leaking the news.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's this dynamic where media likes to talk about media, and I feel that 100%. It's super interesting to hear about like the business of Joe Rogan, or the business of Huberman, or, or any of the experts, but. Uh, so, so obviously also, you know, you're surrounded by journalists, literally, if you run a media company, so they all talk.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Journalistic force headed towards you, stand by.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Heard that one before. Uh, but you're surrounded by journalists and so, uh, obviously everyone talks and the media leaks out and the news leaks out.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  And it could be interesting ways for either side to put pressure on getting the finish line and getting what they want out of the deal.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And so, uh, there's, there's a series of takes. I was talking to a buddy who works in media who was, uh, coming at me with like, uh, it's a crazy number. And so that's kind of level one. Level one of the take is like, uh, on a price per subscriber basis, seems high. I think they have about a million free subscribers. $200 per free subscriber feels like a lot, I guess. Um, kind of hard to tell if you think about long-term value for CBS. But then others are complaining about the political implications of the deal. Is this something that's like a give to Trump to help get the, the, the, the, the demerger, the spin out approved, something like that?

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I mean, this is an eight billion dollar deal, this merger, and media companies are now entirely, like, media companies at their best are personality-led.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  And paying $200 million to bring on, you know, a face for CBS, one of the most important properties, makes sense.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's my, that's my like level three, like final take, which is that, um, you sort of have to put a, put aside the price per subscriber, uh, you know, take. And you have to put aside the political implications of the take. I just think about it from, it's a big company, eight billion, you said, something around there. Does bringing a younger, more entrepreneurial talent into the organization move the market cap by 1% or 2%?

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Over the next few years. Like, I, it seems like the same math that we're doing for buying a very expensive AI researcher. You're paying a lot of money in terms of like what, what like a salary would count, but you just can't get that level of talent on any sort of normal.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Overall property.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so I was, uh, the, the, the person I was talking to who was like, this is a ridiculous price. I was like, yeah, but dude, like if, if you were at CNN. You could probably add $200 million of value to that organization pretty quickly.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  And so it's just a matter of time until like the market and the board of directors and the shareholders kind of wake up to that dynamic of how power loss certain people are and actually go and figure out how to get the deals done and

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  And David Ellison is doing deals, right? He just did the UFC deal.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  Paramount.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  So there's a lot of big numbers flying around.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  And there's an interesting dynamic where

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  And the premium, right? We saw this yesterday with the browser.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes. You do get a big

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic outcome for having the the at the beginning of the name.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  Maybe we should just be the business production network. Drop the technology. Technology's over, the hype cycle's peaked. We're just the business production.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  We're in the trough.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  We're in the trough. We have some fun stuff coming in terms of the hype cycle soon. But it's interesting because many companies just cannot justify putting someone on staff for $100 million W2. We've seen this at Apple with Tim Cook. You know, the CEO pay, once you get into the eight, nine figures.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for bringing that up. No, thank you for, no, seriously, thank you for bringing that up.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Apparently, Tim Cook, we'll try to pull up this video in a bit. Apparently, he said thank you 12 times in two minutes when talking with President Trump last night at the dinner.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  So he's very grateful.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  So the, so yeah, Meta is like the first company to really like break this trend of just like, yeah, we're willing to pay $100 million in salary. We will do the crazy acquisitions and the aqua hires to get really talented people in the org. But I don't think other companies are in that world where they could go out and hire somebody like a Barry Weiss just for $100 million. It's got to be done through an acquisition. That's what gets board approval. That's what gets shareholder approval. And so you're kind of wrapping an individual, an influencer, someone who's incredibly talented and entrepreneurial around an organization just to actually get the cash flow to flow through.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  It's making me think about CBS News for the first time in decades.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's true. And even if the even if like the subscriber numbers are like a little low, I mean, honestly, a million's a ton. It's a great job. But even if they are a little low, it's like, well, what is it? What are they compounding at? What will the Free Press be able to be at in a decade with the support of CBS? And the and the backing, financial backing of CBS and Barry Weiss's execution strategy like could be 100 million. I don't know. It could be really, really big. But you don't have to raise money for it. You can just focus on growth. Anyway, similar story at the browser company, 610 million dollars from Atlassian. Very interesting deal. The timeline was not a fan of it.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  They came from the land down under with a Brink's truck.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Yes. And so a lot of people are asking, is this is this some run around by the Australian government to try and influence the browsing habits of Brooklyn hipsters?

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  I don't think there's much for that.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Try to control the narrative, right?

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  To as a way to say, you know, what if we could get all of the data from Brooklyn hipsters?

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  All their browsing information.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're known.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Their communication.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're known for drinking PBR. But what if every time they went to PBR on the Arc browser, the Dia browser, it just automatically rerouted them to Foster's?

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  What if?

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Or the AI assistant on the side pops up.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, you're you're in Dia.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  You might like Foster.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  And you're asking, oh, what should I do this weekend? And it just auto auto populates. Oh, yeah, we're using AI. Why don't you throw another shrimp on the barbie?

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if you search, is it true that kangaroos are extremely violent? It'll it'll start spinning it and saying, oh, well, actually, you know, they're only violent when promote provoked.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Provoked. Yeah, they're actually quite peaceful.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, your dog actually tried to barked at the kangaroo and then the kangaroo went after it.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  I think this I think this is really smart from Australian, from from from.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  From people pulling the strings in Australia.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, to get a little bit more influence over the Brooklyn hipster.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  And the Arc and Dia user.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Zeb did not like the acquisitions.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Pull this up.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Me uninstalling Arc is a certified Atlassian hater. There is a wild gap between the vibes. And so some people had this take that like it was it was a vibe acquisition. They acquired good, better vibes with the next generation of founders.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  I think this is funny, but I think that from from what we've seen, Dia, they're going to continue to operate independently. I bet they're going to build some beautiful enterprise browsing experiences like they always have.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they should they should build and restream one live stream thirty plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. So you should be able to stream from your DIA browser, from your Arc browser. So my my take on this was there's so basically, right now, the team is saying, we're going to stay independent. We're going to go. But my question is, are they going to stay? Are they going to stick with that narrative of like, stay independent? And this is very rare for pre-product market fit acquisitions. I haven't seen a ton of examples of that where a company was acquired that wasn't like clearly on a, you know, just

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Remember, remember. Instagram was bought for a billion dollars.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  And almost everyone involved at the time thought that it was crazy.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  They did. Yeah, that is true. At the same time.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  And it was like a key threat to Meta's business, right? Like, the user growth was

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  insane.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  I mean, I would love to look at the the retention metrics for DIA versus Instagram, because it's totally possible. I don't know. Do you know how many DAUs or total downloads Instagram had at the time of acquisition? I know it was small, but was it sub a million? I feel like it might have been a little bit bigger. Can someone look that up? But basically

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  Look that up, Tyler. I'm also curious about YouTube as well. YouTube was bought for

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, how many people were using YouTube?

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  roughly three times.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  And again, the dollar isn't what it used to be.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Yes. So when Instagram was acquired, estimated around eight hundred and sixty thousand. So less than a million DAUs.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, so.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  DAUs, though.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But still, I mean, we're in the same ballpark here. Very interesting. Instagram?

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  People that have

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  DAUs is wildly different than like total users.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. But still, I mean, we're in we're in the rough ballpark where you could where at the very least, you like, we have to take what Atlassian is saying and what the browser company is saying at face value. They are saying, we're going to continue building this browser. We're in it to win the AI browser. We're going broad. We're going consumer. This is not, we're acquiring this browser, we're going to bake it into Trello, and we're going to bake it into Jira.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  No, I actually disagree with you here. They don't they're they all the messaging was that it this they're they're not going to be focused on consumer. Like from Atlassian CEO was that we're going to build great enterprise browsing experience.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  So there's nothing, there's nothing in there that I saw from the Atlassian side that said,

• 11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  we want to win in the consumer.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Oh, really, really, okay, interesting, yeah.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  They are, they know their, they know their business, right?

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  It's very interesting. I, I can't imagine having like a work browser, but maybe that makes sense. I mean, people have work laptops, but I feel like the trend has been you have, you have like one phone that you do work and life on, and then you have separate apps and maybe you have, you know, an enterprise software product installed on your, on your phone, but really like there's, the trend seems to be more people using like Gmail and Google email at work. And it seems like there's less and less like, oh yeah, like I have a separate work computer with a separate operating system and a separate email.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Chrome is very set up, Chrome is already very set up to have like profiles, like personal profiles and work.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have, I have too. I have a personal one and a VPN one. So I don't know. Yeah, we'll have to see. I mean, the, the founder is saying like, we're going to keep working on Dia, but maybe that means in the enterprise context. Anyway, we'll have to keep an eye on like where they wind up going.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  So Mike said, again, I said this yesterday, with Dia browser, we're going to collectively redesign the browser to help knowledge workers kick butt in the AI era. And so that, that to me kind of reads a little prosumer, right? I don't think they're, but, but it feels like, you know, very much oriented towards people that are working in the browser.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. OTP says, get Saagar on here to give pushback on TFP. Bye. He's going postal about it. I, I should text him and see if he wants to hop on. We will, yeah, we'll definitely get him on when, when, when he's ready to, to, you know, go live and rip some takes. I also invited Barry Weiss. I'd love to hear her, her side of what's going on and what her plan is. It's a, it's a fascinating story. Of course, like, these are still like leaks, so most people don't want to talk until there's like finalized information. Anyway, if you're trying to design a browser, you gotta do it in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. And the third big number of the day. Ramp has crossed one billion in revenue.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Sheesh, says Tyler Hodge. A key question is whether this is gross revenue or is that revenue? I think it's gross revenue, or he goes back and forth on this. But, anyway, they've been on a tear. As David Senra likes to say, it's a great example of taking a simple idea and doing it deadly seriously. Taking a simple idea deadly seriously. I think David was quoting someone, but I attribute everyone's quotes to David's now.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  We should pull up these videos from the dinner at the White House last night.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  I only have one question for Eric, which is, is the job finished? So, we will figure that out today.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna call him?

• 14:18John Coogan?

  I'm, he is, he's busy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna-

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  Alright, play this video.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  Please?

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Tim Cook, you've done an incredible job with Apple, little company called Apple.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  Thank you, Mr. President.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  And, very, very few people have been able to do what you've done. Congratulations, please.

• 14:33Speaker 05

  Thank you, sir. That means a lot to me.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  Two thank yous?

• 14:36Speaker 05

  I want to thank you for including me this evening. It's incredible to be among everyone here, particularly you and the First Lady. I've always enjoyed having dinner and interacting. I want to thank you-

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Four thank yous?

• 14:51Speaker 05

  -for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing, advanced manufacturing here. I think that says a lot about your focus and your leadership and your focus on innovation. I also want to thank you-

• 15:11John Coogan?

  That's a lot of thank yous.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  -for helping American companies around the world. This is a very key, key thing, and I really enjoy working with your administration on, on those topics as well, because I think they're so important to the country. I want to thank the First Lady for focusing on education.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 15:31Speaker 05

  There's nothing more important than education.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  Do you have any glories, Terrell?

• 15:35Speaker 05

  It is the great equalizer- Triple gla- And always will be. And so, thank you so much for including me.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  One shot of first cigarette.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  We are all different in some ways, but we all believe in the power of technology to improve people's lives, and that, that is the thing that, that binds us all together.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  And Jim, how much money will Apple be investing in the United States? Because I know it's a very lot and it's, you know, you were elsewhere and now you're really coming home in a big way. How much money will you be investing?

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Six hundred billion.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Six hundred billion.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  We're very proud to do it.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  That's great. Thank you very much.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  Appreciate it.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  Thank you, sir.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Wait, is that ten "thank you"?

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  I think it was twelve. Somebody else had counted it as twelve. I was around ten.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  But still, we should...

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Why wasn't Christina from Vanta there? I feel like that's key to the US's tech strategy.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Automate, compliance, manage, risk, prove, trust, continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got to pull up this video of...

• 16:40John Coogan?

  With continuous automation of Zuckerberg. This was our fourth big number of the day. Zuckerberg says he will invest around $600 billion by 2028. Zuckerberg says Meta will invest $600 billion in AI infrastructure by 2028. Meta's already guided capex of $70 billion in 2025 and $100 billion in 2026. So that's a big ramp to go from 70 to 100. And then they still got $430 billion to do in '27 and '28 to actually reach $600 billion. Spending would need to jump to $200 billion in 2027 and $300 billion in 2028. That's a lot of dollars.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Video in the timeline.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  Let's play it.

• 17:22Speaker 06

  This is quite a group to get together. And, you know, I think, you know, all of the companies here are building, just making huge investments in the country in order to build out data centers and infrastructure to power the next wave of innovation. So it's, you know, we don't often get together as the CEOs of the different companies, but it's good to see everyone.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  How much are you spending, would you say, over the next few years?

• 17:50Speaker 06

  Oh, gosh. I mean, I think it's probably going to be something like...

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Six hundred one.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  At least six hundred billion dollars.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 18:00Speaker 06

  In the US.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 18:03Speaker 06

  No, it's significant.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  That's a lot. Thank you, Mark. It's great to have you.

• 18:08Speaker 06

  Thank you. Well, thanks for hosting us.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Wait, so does anybody in the chat know if which of them went first?

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  Because, because that number, that number does not align with, that number does not align with, with Meta's stated capex.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, it doesn't appear in the SEC filings yet, but it is like very forward looking.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  No, it was 2028.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  2028, which is something that they might not actually put out or might not be demanded by the, by Wall Street, but it's hilarious.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, whatever they do, they're gonna have to do it on Graphite, graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Meta guided capex of 70 billion in 2025 and 100 billion in 2026. So to get to 600 billion spending would need to jump to 200 billion in 2027 and 300 billion in 2028.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's interesting is that, so these numbers are like insanely big. And obviously it looks like a big acceleration relative to past capex numbers. But I'm so inured to big numbers now because of the fast takeoff crowd that was like, oh yeah, like trillion dollar build out data center like next year for sure. Like AI 2027, like it's gonna be 10 trillion.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  It's target, 500 billion.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  And so like when I hear 600 billion, I'm like, yeah, yeah, that sounds like totally reasonable. Like I think they'll definitely hit that. And I don't know, but they probably will. Like it doesn't seem like there's many barriers in the way. Like it's just continue to grow the core business, run more ads, dump the profits into capex, build some more data centers. Semi Analysis, Doug O'Laughlin over at Fabricated Knowledge has a good deep dive today on the glut of lagging edge chips that I think we might have a chance to get to in a little bit. But. It was a fun dinner. Are there any other videos that we should play from the White House dinner? I like the idea of, this is like, this is kind of new podcast format. Just have a dinner with everyone, have some cameras there.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  And just yap.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's good. What's up Tyler?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  I don't have another video, but there is, there was a photo that came out, I'll send it to the chat. But it was like the full dinner, and right at the very edge, I'm pretty sure it's Dylan Field.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  It is.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Goat, yeah.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So someone had the full breakdown here, it's in the deck, much deeper, let me pull it up. Where is it? The full list of people who attended the dinner is, wow, there's a lot of stuff. Okay, so Ed Ludlow has it. The full list of attendees at President Trump's dinner with tech leaders, the President, the First Lady, Susie Wiles, Sergey Brin, Geraldine Gilbert-Soto, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Anna Brockman, Safra Kats at Oracle, Gal Tarash, Jason Chang, Meredith O'Rourke, Natalie Dompe, Tony Fabrizio, Dylan Field, John Herring, Jared Isaacman. Jared Isaacman, oh, I guess he was...

• 21:06Speaker 03

  You're missing one.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, Elon didn't go, but isn't...

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Chamath.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Oh, Chamath is in here, so Sunny Marra, Sachin Adella, Chamath Palihapitiya, Sundar Pichai, Mark Pincus, Vivek Ranadive, who owns the Golden State Warriors, and I believe Vivek Ranadive is the, like, the guy who worked with Chamath on the first SPACs, and Vivek Ranadive kind of like pioneered that format almost.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Did you say Lisa Su from AMD?

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Lisa Su made it, David Sacks, Shom Sankar from Palantir, we missed him yesterday, he was at this dinner in DC. Jamie Simonoff, Alex Wang, Sanjay Marra, Tim Cook, David Limp, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, what a crew. Jensen didn't make it. So, the fact that Jensen and Elon are not there, I feel like you shouldn't read too much into it. It's kind of just like Trump catching up with a bunch of people, but, I don't know. There's also like this, yeah, I don't know, they have it like falling out, but it seems like they've kind of patched it up, I don't know.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Always, always hard to read too much into this stuff, but speaking of Elon Musk, he didn't need to be at the White House because he's setting up a $1 trillion pay package.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Nine hundred and seventy-five billion.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Oh, it's not a trillion, just a little bit shy. Okay, so, uh, the update is Tesla's board has greenlit a fresh pay package for CEO Elon Musk. If he hits four hundred billion in adjusted EBITDA, he deploys one million robotaxis for commercial use, ships out one million energy storage units, produces and delivers twenty million vehicles, secures one million of ongoing FSD subscriptions, aim for a eight-point-five-trillion-dollar market cap.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  The golden retrievers are barking.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Commit to at least seven and a half to ten years in the CEO role. The starting share price is three hundred and thirty-four dollars and nine cents. The package includes twelve percent of company stock divided into twelve segments. And so, um, Signal says this is a masterclass in how to design incentives. This deeply ties Elon's upside on the world radically improving. If he actually hits those milestones, the value unleashed for society dwarfs his payout. Most CEO comp is rent-seeking. This is moonshot-seeking. I completely agree. Every pay package for executives should be this absurd on both sides for the company and the individual. And this was exactly my take. It's like bet on yourself.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he's done this before, right?

• 23:33John Coogan?

  He's done this before. And Dan Primack, uh, when the pay package, the most recent pay package came into, uh, under like legal scrutiny, Dan Primack was like, I liked this when it was announced. And I thought it was crazy. And everyone thought it was impossible that he would pull it off. And he did. So he deserves it. Um, and so it was this crazy legal battle, but it was actually aligned with exactly what a CEO should be doing, creating shareholder value. This should be a model for CEO comp going forward, in my opinion. Uh, there is another side of this, which is increasing a founder-CEO stake by doing aggressive stock buybacks. But this is a way cooler because it incentivizes bold investments and huge capex on factories, moonshot technology gambles, and generally thinking in decades.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  So, uh, I'm super stoked about it. I think it's, I think it's good. I hope it holds.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  It's a good way to signal, I mean, they're very much signaling to the base.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  We're going.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Tesla army that there's a lot of potential upside.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Chris Camilo said earlier, been tracking XAI's accelerating cash burn, flattening user growth, monetization, and fundraising struggles since the beginning of this year. And I don't see how they last another twelve months without a Tesla or Elon bailout. I mean... Saying, I don't see how they last another 12 months without a, the founder bailing them out. It's like, that's kind of the founder's job.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  Bail out the company. But I thought this was relevant because I do think that part of this, part of setting up this pay package could set up a scenario where XAI gets just merged into Tesla and it becomes a standalone. It, it just all gets rolled in.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean Tesla has, I mean Carpathia worked there. Like it's, it's a fantastic AI organization and it makes sense that there would be a lot of overlap in, in what they do. I, I guess there's probably

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  And I mean if, if X, the everything app was part of a public company again, how is that not, how does that get valued at less than eight and a half trillion, right?

• 25:32John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  And so with, with Elon having that ace up his sleeve, the fact that we're all addicted to this app.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, I, I guess it's good that there's other milestones in there that, that you can't just like, uh, merge everything together because if you merge it, SpaceX

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  It is funny to think about some of the different milestones, though. It's like shipping out one million energy storage units feels like wildly like, does this even need to be included if you're going to deploy one million robotaxis for commercial use?

• 26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. That one seems a little bit, uh, I don't know, easy sandbag? Who knows? Um, I like, uh, yeah, well, notably missing, uh, what about post more tweets? Post some bangers.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see a thousand

• 26:18John Coogan?

  I want to see him go viral.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  I would say a thousand people a day marrying Ani.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. That's the, that's the milestone.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  That should be in there too.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Uh, um, anyway, um, uh, oh, on Chamath, people were making fun. Uh, Q cap has Chamath at the tech leaders dinner last night and he's a Drake on the basketball team, uh, the Kentucky basketball team, uh, in full, in fully suited up.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  He's there, he's there with, he's there with, uh, he's there with Saks and he's, he's big in Grok.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Oh, is he? Oh, O G R O Q. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And Rune had a good kind of contrarian take on the Chamath hate. He says, "Young heads don't know that Chamath initially had his come up as the VP of Growth at Facebook. While the app grew from 50 million to a billion users, they invented people you may know, which preternaturally predicts who your friends are. The concept of MAU, etc. All this stuff is in the water at any internet company now." More important, yes, he basically invented growth. The entire app, the entire idea that you can treat app growth as an empirical, A/B tested science. And we talked to a designer on the Facebook team at the time.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  And, you know, it's so easy to zoom out and look at Facebook as like, oh, there was like just a foregone conclusion that they would win everything and just completely dominate. But there were moments where growth did-

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  I love Jason popping in here in the comments saying, "It's his birthday party, dummy."

• 27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's good.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  He just turned 49.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Oh, he did?

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  No way. That's amazing. What a birthday party. Where else would you want to be? That seems like a great time. Yeah, people were having fun making fun of Chamath, but why not have him be there? Makes a ton of sense.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  I love this post from Morgan.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  Should've gotten the other crew in there. Should've gotten Jason and Friedberg the invite. Anyway, what was the, was the next thing you were gonna pick?

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  This one.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Three-way deal.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Elon is-

• 28:12John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Deal-making.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Between X, XAI and Tesla?

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, this is, it's Ed Ludlow over Bloomberg saying, "Tesla's board has proposed a new pay package for Musk and proposed the authorization of investment in XAI."

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  The board is looking at investing. Remember SpaceX already invested in XAI because they had to get exposure.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, we saw that like complicated web of Elon companies, how they all link together. Maybe you just gotta merge them all together.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  The pure play, Elon-

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Holding company, yeah.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Send it to 10 trillion.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Send it to 10 trillion for sure.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like Elon's like done like kind of these zombie mergers before with Solar Cities. I mean, some people framed that as a bailout and didn't hurt Tesla. The stock went on an absolute run and it was great.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  Just a flesh wound.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  And I never really understood why Solar City wasn't more successful because it feels like solar, you can talk to Casey Hanmurray. He's like the biggest solar maxi and all of the like scientists, all the experts that I trust, uh, say that solar is, you know, going to continue to grow extremely valuable, extremely important, but it seems like we've just been, Solar City specifically and basically any American solar company has been kind of going to economic war with China and China's been like dumping cheap solar panels on the market continuously. So you need a company like Tesla to maybe subsidize that for a while, uh, until the US government comes around to some sort of regulation on like, what are exactly are we going to do?

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Uh, about it to create like more of a level, level playing field. Either we're going to subsidize or we're going to like put tariffs and taxes on their exports to get them back into, you know, what, what they actually cost instead of just letting another company, uh, run roughshod all over the American.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  This is interesting. Ed Ludlow also was sharing that Musk must also help craft a CEO succession plan to unlock the final tranches.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Will Maximus Trump be old enough? Who, what, what's his name? Uh, X? There's a few, there, there's a few wild names. One of the, it's gotta be a, it's gotta be a hereditary dynasty, right? He's gotta let X take over in 10 years. How old will?

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  The oldest, uh, Musk children are 20-year-old twins.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  Oh, they'll be totally ready in 30, in 10 years.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Vivian and Griffin Musk, potentially co-CEO.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Co-CEOs, that could happen. Um, and then there's, and then there's another one that's a little bit younger who might be, you know, more in the, uh, like 20, 20 something year old. Uh, by the time Elon steps down, but I, I, I would be surprised if he's not running Tesla in 10 years. I think, I think he's going to stick around for a while. Keep, keep running it. Uh, he just keeps, he just keeps, you know, hanging out and building cars.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  And this is just fantastic news for people like Gary Tan who've been saying, we need more trillionaires.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Oh, that's true. Is that his thing? He thinks it's more billionaires. We need our first trillionaire.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  The package could raise Musk's stake in Tesla to at least 25% with total voting power of up to 29%. Tesla's market cap must reach 8.5 trillion from 1 trillion today. The plan follows Musk's 2018 package valued at 50 billion, which was struck down by a Delaware court. Tesla's board is appealing that ruling, but is also offering Musk an interim $30 billion stock award while pursuing the new deal. Musk's outside ventures SpaceX, XAI, Neuralink, Boring Company, and political activities rave concerned about focus, but was Warren Buffett not focused on seize candy and Coca-Cola at the same time? Come on, people. This is a hold co. It's not that complicated. Uh, no, it is.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  Gabby, Gabby Goldberg went super viral quoting, quoting some of these, quoting a video from, of Sam Altman at, at the dinner last night and said, this is like when you're at someone's birthday party and they make everyone go around and say their favorite thing about them.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  That's very funny. And what did Sam say? Do we have the video? The rapid response.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  He said, thank you for being such a pro business, pro innovation president. It's a refreshing change. The investment that's happening here, the ability to get the power of the industry back. I don't think that would be happening without your leadership.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  I love it. I agree. I'm happy to triple glaze as well. I like innovation. Triple glaze. I like innovation.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Arthur McWaters, been on the show many times before, says, I'm unironically working my butt off so that my wife can go to Pilates on a Wednesday afternoon and get a $15 matcha. And Siki says, same.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  It's a noble goal. I wish Raul from Julius had been invited to this dinner.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  I feel like he shows up in, in different pieces of Silicon Valley lore.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  That would be insane.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  He really could have delivered.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  That would be insane.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  It wouldn't be that insane. He's on a generation run.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  I just, I just.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  He's fantastic.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  I just, I mean, maybe we could, we could.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  That's why we sponsored, that's why we partnered with him, Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data, get expert level insight in seconds. What could be more relevant to the government than having an AI data analyst that works for you?

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  Every CEO there is probably already using Julius. If they're not, sure.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. More context on Zuck's $600 billion investment. Turner Novak says Meta has done $478 billion in revenue over the past 13 quarters and plans to invest $600 billion in data centers over the next 13 quarters. Good thing they're growing revenue.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Well, this is important too, because data centers are the foundation of the global economy. And if we stop building them, everything's going to collapse.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Token factories. Continue to.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  John, John Woo had some good analysis on the Browser Co. acquisition. He said, man, parts of tech are sour about the Browser Co. acquisition. The common complaint is that DiaArc slash Arc don't have enough users or revenue to justify the acquisition. First, I think this line of B I T C H ing assumes that Atlassian's corp dev team are dingleberries, dingleberries down under, when in fact, they're elite and one of the most disciplined and successful M and A units in tech.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  That's super legit.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  Rationally integrating products into the existing product suite and otherwise protecting independence when merited Trello, Loom, OpsGenie, AgileCraft, many others. Second, I think this is part of some ridiculous coping narrative that some VCs and founders inhabit, which is that having differentiated product vision, assembling a world-class team that ships and being an incredible storyteller and salesperson is somehow easy.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  That's a really good point.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you have more revenue, maybe you have more users. Guess what? The market doesn't give an F. I've read, seen and heard directly from multiple people today, something like, "Oh, if I just knew how easy it would be to raise a ton of venture and make good videos, I'd do it and get acquired for 610 million." Uh, so go do it then.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Go do it then.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm not affiliated with the browser cone anyway. I'm not here to pat anyone on the back, do the whole well-deserved rigmarole, claim I was just one part, small part of their success. I'm here to say, the market has spoken. A transaction has been transactioned. Capitalism has capitalized. Browser company is worth 610 million in cash. If you're a VC founder, et cetera, in the salt mines today, focus on your business. If you think you can do better, do it. That is reality. Deal with it.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Do we have the shots fired, uh, sound effect? There we go. Shots fired.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Great, great way to sum it up, John.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, just go and, go and build, uh, yeah, just go, go build something. I don't know. Go tell a story, figure out a way. Uh, yeah, I mean underrated is like the, isn't the founder of the browser company like one of the core contributors to Chrome, like early on? Like he was on the Chrome team. Like if you want to build a browser, like it's hard to, hard to imagine like having a better, uh, a better team in place. And, uh, yeah.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  And more breaking news, OpenAI is working on its own AI inference chip with a small company called Broadcom. I don't know if you've ever heard of this company before.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Hawk Tan.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  If you've never heard of Broadcom, they're a small company, uh, based out of San Jose, California. They are worth, uh, one point five, seven trillion dollars.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  They just had a massive, massive earnings beat because there was like this mystery 10 billion dollar customer and it was OpenAI, I'm pretty sure.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Love to see.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Broadcom.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Up 14% in the last. I mean, it's just, it's just crazy that, that you can have a company that is in the same.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  Similar, you know, similar like at the moment like priced in the same range as a company like Meta.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  And most people would be like, oh Broadcom, yeah, I've heard of them like but but not not be able to say much more about it.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Richard Ho, ex-Google TPU, is leading 40 engineers over at OpenAI. Seems like Sam did a little talent raid of his own. Broadcom providing critical design and IP. TSMC will fab it on the three nanometer node inference only. Target mass production in 2026 could fail on first tape out. So the interesting thing to hear is that I've been like beating this drum of like, yeah, GPT-4 is good enough. Like bake it onto silicon, like like just get the inference cost down. Just let me use it faster, cheaper, like like we have really, really good intelligence. We just need to inference it a lot more. Said the same thing about Midjourney, thought the images like look good enough. And yeah, they could get better, but I'm fine with where they are now and they're fun.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  And so let's just make it really quick and easy to use. And it seems like they're going in that direction for the most part, because even even the even the reasoning models, they're still built on like, I mean, it seems like they're they're they're built on like a pretty stable foundation of the architecture of the of the frontier model. They're not making drastic, drastic architectural changes to the the the core LLM that powers these these reasoning models. So bringing down the price of inference seems really, really important. So the Wall Street Journal has an article here. OpenAI and Broadcom make a $10 billion deal for custom AI chips. Order aims to ease shortage that limited the rollout of new ChatGPT versions. OpenAI is working with Broadcom to develop custom artificial intelligence chips,

• 38:37John Coogan?

  a move that could alleviate the shortage of powerful processors needed to quickly train and release new versions of ChatGPT. Broadcom shares surged nearly 11% in Friday trading. You said it's up at 16% now? What a great, what a great ripper. If you're looking to get into Broadcom, you think it's overvalued, undervalued, do it on public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields that are trusted by millions, folks.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, up 74% in the last six months.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, so on the earnings call Broadcom said, "We've signed a fourth major AI developer as a customer," and that the new customer had placed a one-time order worth $10 billion for server racks using the Palo Alto-based firm's chips. The new customer is OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter. The Financial Times reported the arrangement earlier. Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, has been saying for months that a shortage of GPUs has been slowing the company's progress in releasing new versions of its flagship chatbot. In February, Altman wrote on X that GPT-4.5, then its newest large language model, was the closest the company had come to designing an AI model that behaved like a thoughtful person, but he lamented the delays and high costs that came with developing

• 39:50John Coogan?

  it. I guess there's a big question, like, the, some of these really, really big models, people have been saying, like, "It's great, but it's slow," and that's, and it's costly. And I wonder if they're, they're going to optimize for GPT-4.5 inference or GPT-4 level inference. Tyler, do you have any take on, on where they might sit? Sam Altman said, "It's a giant expensive model, about 4.5. We really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time, and we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs." Like, I, I thought that demand for GPT-4.5 wasn't purely predicated on the cost and the timing and more just about the fact that people couldn't really tell the difference.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a sense of, like, you know, only the high-taste testers actually liked 4.5. I, I would be surprised if they, like, really bring it back in any capacity. It's just, like, so expensive.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what they're gonna do. I mean, it seems like they'll probably still leave some flexibility, like the TPU. They're not gonna, like... Go like, you know, fully lock themselves into one specific architecture. But hopefully it brings down inference costs, increases margins, which should be very, very good for the business.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  We love those.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  We will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier, hundreds of thousands coming online soon. I'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up, he said. I like the y'all.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  In recent years, OpenAI has relied heavily on so-called off-the-shelf GPUs produced by Nvidia, the biggest player in chip design space. But as demand from large AI firms looking to train on increasingly sophisticated models has surged, chipmakers and data center operators have struggled to keep up. If we're talking about hyperscalers and gigantic AI factories, it's very hard to get access to a high number of GPUs, founder of Compute Labs said, a startup that buys GPUs and offers investors a share in the rental income they produce. It requires months of lead time and planning with the manufacturers. To solve the problem, OpenAI has been working with Broadcom for over a year in secret, behind our backs, to develop a custom chip for use in model training.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  Broadcom specializes in what it calls XPUs, a type of semiconductor that is designed with a particular application, such as training ChatGPT in mind. OpenAI also recently struck a data center deal with Oracle that calls for OpenAI to pay more than 30 billion a year to the cloud giant and signed a smaller contract with Google earlier to alleviate computing shortages. It is also embarking on its own data center construction project, Stargate. And so this is just another example of like, wow, they haven't made that much in revenue and they're committing to all these spends. It's like, well, they're growing very, very fast and they plan on setting themselves up for success and high margins and more growth ahead. And if you need serverless vector and full text search, head over to TurboPuffer.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Search every byte.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  We puffin'.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  It's built from first principles and object storage. It's fast, it's 10x cheaper, and it's extremely scalable. You can get started.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  Be like Cursor, Notion, Linear, Superhuman, and many more.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  Readwise is on TurboPuffer.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. That's very cool. That makes a ton of sense.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  That makes a ton of sense. Smart guys, working with smart guys.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Okay. So, we need to do a little bit of a meme review moment on the stream. A monkey was handed an AK-47 and the image went viral and is now a meme. I don't know where this came from. It looks like an old image from a documentary.

• 43:19Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy how you can tell this image has been screenshotted.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Dozens of times.

• 43:24Jordi Hays?

  Potentially more.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  It does not, yeah, and it also uniquely does not look like AI. But LevelsIO kicked it off with point of view, you can, you discover you can do your own DevOps with clogged code. And of course, that could end in disaster. Skook says.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  Your point one X coworker just discovered AI.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  Oh, no. I don't know how true that is. I mean, I feel like AI should be an accelerant, but yes, it could be.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, you need to be at least a one X coworker.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Like you give a bad driver a super fast car.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  Does that make them better?

• 44:02John Coogan?

  Fair, fair, fair. Turner Novak says, letting the VC give product feedback. It's rough if they haven't been in the trenches. Liquidity says, how it feels to let the first year analyst speak directly with the client. Love that. And Producer Ben says, giving the ramp card to interns.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  This is real. This is real.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Do not do it, folks.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be careful. You gotta be careful.

• 44:25John Coogan?

  Ben's like, why do they have to request funds for every single purchase? Why don't they just have a limit that they can spend within? Well, now we know because they are monkeys with AK-47s.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  Card is simply too powerful.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Yes, it is. Also, Brian Armstrong bumped up the max leverage from 20X to 50X on international perpetual futures and up slope capital. Just give the monkey the AK-47. It's a great meme. I hope this meme sticks around for a, for a long time, a long time.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you want to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT, head over to Profound, reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. You saw OpenAI's investment in Broadcom chips. They're not going anywhere. You're going to want your brand mentioned on ChatGPT and you're going to want to do it through Profound.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  And Grok.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  And Grok.

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  And perplexing.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  And everything.

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  And everything.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  So in the mansion section today, it's Friday. We got 10 minutes until Joe Weisenthal joins to tell us what's going on in the United States economy. But one thing that is going fantastically well in the United States economy is Ellen DeGeneres's house flipping hobby, which has turned into a $190 million enterprise. So the comedian and wife Portia de Rossi have bought and sold more than 30 homes since the mid 2000s.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dogs. The dogs, the absolute dogs of Montecito.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  So they bought a 10,700 square foot property in Santa Barbara, California for $27 million in 2019. They sold it for $33.3 million in 2020.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  Modest gain.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Modest gain, not bad.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  Modest gain, but didn't take a lot of risk here.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  One year, one year, six mil, not bad. It's pretty good.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  Honest work.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Let's read through the reporting in the Wall Street Journal's mansion section by Catherine Clark. She says, "Just before last year's presidential election, comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her wife actress Portia de Rossi decamped to the Cotswold, an upscale rural area near London. They had bought a vacation home, a 43-acre estate, to use a few months a year. Then, the morning after the election, when they awoke to lots of texts with crying emojis, they said, 'We're staying here.'" Where was this? Which election? Oh, last year. Okay, so it's the Trump II election that was sparking crying emojis in Ellen DeGeneres's iMessage.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Behind them, they leave a trail of luxury residences. Over the past two decades, the longtime California residents have developed a reputation as serial home flippers. The Wall Street Journal's research shows that the pair have owned at least 34 homes since the mid 2000s, including properties in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Santa Barbara County, and now the UK. Records show that the couple were actively buying and selling throughout the mid aughts and the 2010s, but their activities ramped up significantly during the... And we're going to move to page eight. This is one of the luxuries of reading the Wall Street Journal in print.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  During the pandemic, so starting in 2020, they have frequently owned multiple homes at one time and show no obvious signs of trying to time the market for the best returns. Records show they bought-

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  They're patient.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  No, they're just, they just got the hot hand. They're, they're, they're, they have the Midas touch. They don't need to time the market. They deliver value everywhere they go. They bought at least eight homes in 2021.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  And 2022, records show. From the 34 homes tracked by the Journal, the couple have since sold. They have posted a profit of roughly $190 million. That has to be in line with how much Ellen DeGeneres makes off her show and her core business. This is the, this is the side hustle of all side hustles. Their average return-

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm trying to do some research.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Their average return, based on the original purchase price to, and the subsequent sale price is about 37%. Not bad. She didn't raise a fund. Let me in. I want to be OP in this.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  Alan, the degenerate home buyer.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Flipper, but not very degenerate. I mean, who knows? Probably a lot of leverage involved, but it's paying off.

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  There's some degenerate gamblers that actually make a lot of money.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  That's true, that's true.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't mean that, doesn't mean that you're, they're not feeling wild.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  So, the pair's business manager, Harley Newman, said DeGeneres's real profits are much more modest once the costs of renovating are factored in. "I would love her to have made that big of a killing," he said with a laugh. Forget about the real estate agents and the escrow and title people, the costs of contractors and designers and the army that comes in once we've closed. It takes a village. He said those numbers don't, also don't account for what DeGeneres spends on furniture that is usually included with the sale. None of the furniture is inexpensive, he said. She takes the art off the walls, but everything else gets sold. Newman said 34 is an underestimate, saying he probably thinks she has bought and sold at least 50 homes-

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  ...since he's known her. Love it.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Buying them in trusts.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Jordi Hays?

  Secretly.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Very hard to buy a home secretly. It can almost always be discovered. The Wall Street Journal, I mean, they uncovered 34 of 50 or so. The couple's homes have varied in size and in style, from mid-century and contemporary to Italianate and English Tudor. "It's not that I get bored, I'm just so passionate about architecture and furniture that you can only buy a certain type of furniture for a contemporary house or mid-century house," said DeGeneres in a phone interview. She talked to the Journal.

• 50:09Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  A large journalistic force headed toward to stand by.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  She said she has lost count of how many homes they have bought and sold. That's great. That's like you with angel investments.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  She has a home-buying addiction, and it's paying off.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  I text myself when I make a new-

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  ...angel investing addiction, so I just gotta scroll up far enough.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Got it, got it, got it. "There is now a certain cachet in owning an Ellen house," said Ryanne Williams of the Beverly Hills Estates, who represented a Hollywood executive who purchased one of their homes in Montecito a few years ago. "Once somebody knows it's her house or she had a hand in it, it adds value. In LA, she's synonymous with quality. She's a tastemaker. She cares about taste. Many of the homes have been sold off-market without ever being listed for sale. The couple's Hollywood rolodex seems to have come in handy. Comedian Will Ferrell and the late actor Heath Ledger and singer Ariana Grande are a few celebrity buyers of Ellen houses." DeGeneres said real estate-

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine Will Ferrell-

• 51:13John Coogan?

  ...has become a very lucrative hobby.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine Will Ferrell, like, role-playing as Ellen DeGeneres after buying one of her houses?

• 51:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, you imagine him in some of his titular roles as kind of a disheveled, middle-aged man stumbling around a $40 million Ellen DeGeneres neatly-appointed home, and it doesn't quite fit, but I'm sure he's much more-

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  I like how she just flat-out says to the Journal, "Real estate has become a very lucrative hobby."

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Turn your hobbies into side hustles. Turn your side hustles into.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is basically a main, this is basically the main hustle now. She doesn't do the main show anymore.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. The 67-year-old former television host has a, has long had a passion for interior design and would have been a designer if comedy hadn't panned out. She attributed her itchy feet in part to her family frequently moving between rentals in her native New Orleans area. We never owned a house, so I always wanted to own.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  New Orleans, that was on your A tier.

• 52:13John Coogan?

  That was in my A tier. Yes, I got in a lot of trouble for that. People did not enjoy.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  Nobody, nobody got the joke on John.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  I think some people got the joke, but I posted my tier list of best cities in the world and it, and it dusted some, ruffled some feathers. I don't know if you have it pulled up, Jordy.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  I'll, I'll, I'll pull it up again. So John's, you said city tier list that'll trigger everyone, but is true.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  It is true.

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  S tier, NYC, LA, SFDC, Miami, Chicago, Austin, and Boston. A tier, Seattle, Nashville, Vegas, New Orleans, Detroit, Bakersfield, and Reno. And then note, there was nothing in the B and C tier, and then D was, of course, London and Paris.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  And then F was Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, Dubai, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Sydney, Buenos Aires. So, basically if somebody, if somebody said, John, I'm going, I'm going to Sydney. I'm going to see the opera. Do you want to come?

• 53:10John Coogan?

  I'd be like.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  You'd be like, sorry, I'm in Bakersfield that weekend.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  And then if somebody said, hey.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Hey, all expenses paid trip to Paris.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  You say, sorry, I'm actually in the biggest little city, Reno.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Reno, exactly. I would prefer to be in Reno. Anyway, we had some fun with that. Well, we have our first guest of the show, Joe Weisenthal on the phone.

• 53:28Jordi Hays?

  On the phone.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Wired on the play. We got Joe Weisenthal.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this picture that we just commissioned of Joe. There we go. That's real. And it's a real picture. Yeah, can you hear me?

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you sound fantastic.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  You, you sound as good as you look. I understand why you didn't want to reveal.

• 53:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I had a very active summer. I didn't want to reveal it to everyone, but happy to have you with the exclusive on my new look.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Always great to catch up and always, I'm surprised you're away from your terminal on a day like today, but I'm glad.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  It's jobs day. It's the Super Bowl.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  It's the, it's Joe's, it's Joe day.

• 54:07Speaker 07

  It is the Super Bowl. You know, it is the Joe day. It is the Super Bowl day. It is the jobs day. You know, after 8:30, you know, obviously there's the initial hit and then there's the rush and then there's the market reaction. And as much as it is the Super Bowl, by the, you know, by the middle of the day, I'm already like, okay, I'm, I'm good for the day. I had such a, such a high from following the numbers and seeing all the reactions and reading all the tweets, et cetera, that it's like, all right, I can sort of run some errands in the afternoon on jobs day.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Well, thank you for squeezing this, Aaron.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  So yeah, take us through the numbers. I mean, the market reaction, the, the Dow is down a half a percent right now. NASDAQ's off 0.23. Bitcoin's up 1%, so.

• 54:51Speaker 07

  Yeah. You know, it's an interesting, so like the number was not great, obviously, coming in a solidly below expectation. I think everyone sort of had a feeling there was gonna, I think there's just been a lot of anxiety about the state of the labor market right now. You know, people talk about the so-called whisper number where it's like, okay, here is the forecast that Wall Street has, but here's what everyone sort of really thinks. It's pretty clear that I think a lot of people just sort of thought it could be a miss. The last month actually was revised up a little bit, but the month before was revised down substantially such that June was actually now negative, which is the first time since, I think, December of 2020 that we had a month of

• 55:33Speaker 07

  job losses, which I think is interesting. Once again, healthcare employment, so that added 31,000 jobs in the month. So what that means is that once again, if you exclude healthcare, the economy overall has been shedding jobs for some time, which is not great.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  Including manufacturing.

• 55:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, so manufacturing employment down seventy eight thousand so far this year. It was another decline this month. Look, like, this is what I would say about manufacturing, which is that I wouldn't miss. Let's say a tariff strategy were going to work. In the long term, and we're going to have this sort of, you know, strong reindustrialization of the United States economy. I wouldn't expect it to work right away. I mean, the tariffs were unveiled on April. But what we can say is that so far, those numbers, to the extent that this is a real priority of the administration or policymakers or others, to the extent that this is a real priority, priority, it's clearly going in the wrong direction in 2025.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I mean, last night, there was that dinner at the White House with all the tech leaders and the numbers that were thrown out were staggering. Six hundred billion from Apple, six hundred billion from Meta. But that doesn't necessarily mean massive jobs growth because building a data center might just be a multi-billion dollar check that's written to TSMC.

• 56:57Speaker 07

  This is the funny thing with the sort of data center AI, sort of thinking about its massive impact. Because first of all, you're obviously correct that these huge checks don't necessarily mean massive jobs growth. And if we're going to take seriously the promise of AI, it shouldn't lead to jobs growth.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 07

  The test of AI is arguably jobs destruction, right? It's about what jobs that currently exist in the economy can be replaced by something that we call AI. And so not only does the data centers not add to employment in a meaningful way, it does turn out to be good investments. If there's a payoff, if they drive productivity, you would expect them, you would almost hope them to be labor market negative.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Maybe. I mean, there is a world where where it's like a worker plus AI is additive.

• 57:46Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  And you can underwrite hiring them. So there is a hiring.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, in our conversation, we talked about.

• 57:52Speaker 07

  I'm not a, I.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:55Speaker 07

  I'm not a doomer, like in this, I'm skeptical of this. I find myself just from a sort of pure thinking about it through the economics lens of this idea of, oh, AI is going to lead to mass unemployment. Yeah. Just for all the obvious reasons that anyone can say, I have cost savings because of AI. Well, I'm going to like spend that money somewhere. Yeah. But if the question is, do these investments actually free up resources or enable new things that expand our capacity of what we can do with labor? Yeah. That's really the question more than the direct job creation. Yeah, Jordy.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, one point, we, we interviewed Palantir CFO and obviously Karp as well yesterday, and they said something like revenue is obviously up massively in the last few years. Headcount is only up 12%. And they said specifically, we expect to have fewer people in the future.

• 58:46Speaker 07

  Yeah. I saw that quote, which I found to be really striking, and it is sort of, again, this sort of very weird condition. Maybe we've talked about it before. I'm not sure not, but it does seem like we're in some sort of uncharted territory here with respect to the fact that, you know, I don't know what's happening on a given day. Okay, maybe the next, next time a little bit. But you have all these names that are at or very close to all time highs. Any other time in history, uh, I think where you're talking about some sector near all time highs, you are also associating it with a massive expansion of, or at least a significant expansion of headcount typically. This is just sort of how it is in any industry, tech or otherwise, you intrudently link stock performance with headcount.

• 59:31Speaker 07

  And so it's interesting that here is a situation in which not only is, is this being articulated, this sort of divorce between revenue growth and employment growth, but also it's not, it's not just a theory. It's clearly been happening in the industry for some time.

• 59:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder what Trump's like bull case is. I haven't heard him kind of reconcile what's going on in AI and reindustrialization. There's like broad strokes of like, let's bring back the jobs. There's not a lot of early evidence of that, but I'd be interested to hear from people in the administration about just like, paint me a picture of what it actually looks like. What is the American jobs economy look like in four years if everything plays out like you want? Like, what are people doing? Because it does seem like we're going through a period of change. I don't know.

• 1:00:18Jordi Hays?

  What about?

• 1:00:19Speaker 07

  No, I mean, I do, I think, in defense of the administration, right, a lot of people are, I think people all over the place are scratching their heads over this question. Because what I think people want, what the dream is when they close their eyes and they want to see an economy in which you don't have to be an absolute superstar computer science PhD from Carnegie Mellon or whatever, or Stanford, to get a great job, there should be some sort of broad middle of decent employment, whatever it is. And in defense of the administration, I don't see many other people anywhere articulating, well, what that ultimately, what sectors or what ultimately drive this sort of employment abundance, so to speak.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  The youth unemployment data as well is absolutely brutal. Bloomberg Economics had a chart showing it basically ramping in a way that it hasn't. It's, youth unemployment is rising at the fastest pace in the past 15 years, other than the pandemic, sitting at, sitting at, what's the number, 10 and a half percent between the ages of 16 and 24.

• 1:01:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. No, I think it's important. So there has been this debate in the labor market, which is very important and interesting, which is, we know that the pace of job creation has slowed. No one is disputing the fact, every month, we're, you know, it's just, the number of new jobs in the United States is going down. Then the question is, well, maybe some of that is because of the changes in immigration practices, or maybe some of this has to do with just sort of normalization of the economy after a crazy few years. And so maybe some would argue that the pace of job creation slowing down does not automatically say, okay, we're heading into a recession. That being said, the question then, the test then becomes, all right, what about just the ability

• 1:02:12Speaker 07

  to get a job if you want one? And that's sort of essentially what the unemployment rate is. But it's interesting to watch some of these demographics that historically are sort of more marginal, more vulnerable. The youth unemployment rate is one, the black unemployment rate is another. That also, that was at its highest since October 2021. And so even though the headline unemployment, 4.3%, still pretty low by historical standards, what we're seeing is this deterioration of the, of the job finding ability for some of these sectors of the economy that tend to, you know, maybe they, the sort of first to let go, or some of these more marginal, marginal, marginal segments of the labor force.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  Is there a narrative coming together about what's driving the healthcare employment numbers and the healthcare job growth? Because it, yeah, it feels like.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  A lot of, a lot of our elders are moving beyond unk status.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, they, they, they weren't massive layoffs.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  It's the post unk America.

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  Because, I mean, there weren't a lot of, like, healthcare layoffs during COVID. If anything, those are the people that kept their jobs. And then healthcare isn't particularly sensitive to interest rates. So.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Before we get into this too much, I mean, I think the big thing is, is CEOs broadly, even if they're seeing massive revenue growth, it's hard to go out on an earnings call and say, we're seeing massive efficiency gains. We're, we're leading in AI in our industry. We're getting all these benefits from AI and then be like, well, okay, our, our employees are getting so much more efficient. And then be like, well, you also are ramping. Why are you ramping headcount? The same, you know, same way.

• 1:03:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Or, or.

• 1:03:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, right, right. Well, I think so on this point specifically, I also do think there was maybe, even though I think many people would say that the formal Doge hasn't accomplished particularly much, maybe other people would argue otherwise. I don't think there is a quote vibe shift on quote, so to speak, where a lot of people are just sort of proud of the fact that they're keeping headcount on across all of these things. And I think sort of Elon Musk may have sort of shot the starting gun on this vibe that everyone can look within their organization and say, do we really need all of the people that we've hired, particularly after the boom years of 21, 22, and arguably 2023. But I agree on the healthcare employment standpoint. I mean,

• 1:04:37Speaker 07

  I would say two things. One is, yeah, it's the, it's the aging population. There does not be, it's hard to imagine what would slow this train down. I guess it's slowing down a little bit because of course there have been some of those Medicaid, cuts to Medicaid growth, et cetera. So there is reasonable to think that maybe at the margins, the monthly numbers of new headcount into the space is going to not be as fast as it was. But it is very hard to envision what could happen in the short or medium term is that wouldn't automatically mean this sector is just going to need a lot more people every month. I'm certain if you talk to any sort of

• 1:05:17Speaker 07

  healthcare network of any sort that's on the ground in any community, I'm certain still today in September 2025, that they would identify acquiring talent as one of their big challenges right now.

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  Talk to me about what we're seeing from the Fed. The polymarket has the number of rate cuts spiking today. Three

• 1:05:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  potential rate cuts in 2025 spiked from 18% up to 38%. And, and the chance of just a single cut is, is falling as well as two cuts. So Paul, you're certainly expecting more cuts to come.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  And most people, yeah, most people pricing, I mean, it's pricing cut, cut, cut.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:59Speaker 07

  Yes, so I think, you know, it's funny, the last time I was chatting with you guys was from Jackson Hole, and that was a really interesting moment because you have, if you talk to a lot of the regional Fed presidents, they're like, I don't know, like, there's also, inflation still looks kind of warm, it's not totally obvious that a cutting cycle, or certainly an aggressive cutting cycle.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  But you said, I remember you said, you said, "The labor market is clearly softening, this is the case for cuts." Like, you, you, you, you said that line.

• 1:06:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, and Powell laid that out. Thank you, thank you. I, if I said something smart, I appreciate you remembering it. But, you know, Powell's speech at Jackson Hole, I called it, that's the main takeaway here, I called it. No, but, you know, it is, it's, Powell's speech at Jackson Hole clearly, clearly centered risks to the downside with the job market, and I just think everyone has come around to that view. And so now the question is, especially in the wake of today's number, is that not only does September seem like a lock, it is for a rate cut, I think the decision's in like 10, 10 days, the question is, could they go 50 basis points, could they go aggressive, kind of like they did last September?

• 1:07:13Speaker 07

  And then also, I think, October, which people thought, well, maybe they take a pause after a rate cut, that is now perceived as a good chance. So I think this sort of world really is coming around to arguably the Powell, and then the Christopher Waller view, he's probably been the most dovish of the Fed governors over the last six months, he's been pretty forceful in saying, look, the labor market is clearly softening and rate cuts are due. And I think right now, it's the, it's the Waller-Powell sort of view that's winning out in markets, and the expectation that they'll be able to get the rest, the rest of the FOMC behind.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Do you have any insight into what's going on with the Treasury doing a bond buyback to lower yield? Someone in the chat is joking that they're printing money to buy back printed money? I don't know if that's real.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Same old, same old.

• 1:08:04Speaker 07

  I, you know, I, if I, to be honest, I, I do not put, I think these things tend to be very marginal and sort of plumbing related, you know, ultimately the sort of long end of the yield curve comes down to the market's view of the inflation trajectory and what the Fed is expected to have to do to maintain essentially 82% goals. Some of these treasury moves, you know, they may have to do with liquidity, et cetera, but I, my advice to people when I have encountered these topics in the past is that generally these things are somewhat noise and to keep your eye on the ball about what's happening in the economy over the medium term and how you expect the Fed to respond to.

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  So what's the next, uh, date on the calendar that we need to be tracking? Is it the next Fed meeting that's the big news or is there going to be more data?

• 1:08:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, so that's in, yeah, so that's in two weeks. You know, the thing, in the meantime, what I would say is, uh, yesterday we had the weekly initial jobless claims data, that's been creeping higher. I think you should keep, that comes out every Thursday. Um, and I think people should keep watching that because one of the ways that the economy has been characterized for really like over a year now is they talk about this low hiring, low firing equilibrium, which is that there aren't a lot of layoffs, but also it's not a great time, you know, not a lot of, as we've been talking about, not a lot of headcount expansion. The initial jobless claims has been picking up a little bit lately. Yesterday we got 237K, I believe, that was ahead of, it was a bit higher than expectations.

• 1:09:37Speaker 07

  And you don't have to wait, you know, like I say, jobs report, Super Bowl once a month, but you get these mini Super Bowls every Thursday where they talk about initial, initial jobless claims. It's noiseier data. Oh, one other thing, so keep an eye on that.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:53Speaker 07

  Um, also this coming Tuesday. There is something called the, and I don't remember what this acronym stands for, but it's Q C E W Benchmark Revision. So it probably says for quarterly census, employment, something. This is actually how they sort of reset labor market data. Cause we know it's all very noisy, but every quarter they draw from actual, a, a, a complete sample of everyone who's paid into the unemployment system. And so they get this very big snapshot and it could show there's this view. It could show that the pace of job creation for all of 2024 going back has, was lower than expected. So they're, they're always doing these revisions, but I suspect that Tuesday

• 1:10:38Speaker 07

  will be interesting in terms of what, uh, what it says backwards looking about just how much employment, uh, there really is right now.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm looking at the quarterly census of employment wages and it says that Santa Clara, California has the largest fourth quarter over the year wage gain at 15%. And now I'm thinking if, uh, if Menlo Park will see a massive spike in average wages because of the, the AI trade deals, it's just 105 people at a billion dollars a year.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Speaking of big pay packages, did the, did the new Elon pay package feel low to you?

• 1:11:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're just paying them a trillion dollars. What's the point of reincorporating from, uh, from Delaware to Texas? If they're only going to bump your target.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  I know, only a trillion.

• 1:11:24Speaker 07

  Come on, I'll have joy.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I should have gone to Puerto Rico or something. Yeah.

• 1:11:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. So where, where you can really, where an executive can really get paid for the work that they do for once, for one.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  I want 100% of the dollars that I create in the shareholder value here.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  And were you, were you disappointed to see that the White House snubbed Meek Mill on the invite to that dinner, the AI dinner last night? It felt like they really, it was a big F U to Philadelphia broadly.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I would agree.

• 1:11:54Speaker 07

  I was shocked. I was shocked by that. It's time to shake that room up in terms of who are the big tech names that get invited to these things. But clearly, our up and coming AI entrepreneurs, you know, regardless of what industry they're currently in or had been in, need to have a need to have a voice at the table. I do think going forward too, we really need to have inflation, data, X and low part. Just generally, when you see these sort of, when you sort of, when you see these sorts of wage gains so concentrated, we need to start having a formal, you know, on the Bloomberg, it'd be CPI for CPI for CPI, X and low part. That's the kind of data that we need.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  I mean, there's also a $10 billion tender offer going on at OpenAI. So, you know, if you're in the market for San Francisco.

• 1:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was running the numbers and showing that there's like, there's, there's only, I think, a few hundred homes that are in the like, four to $10 million range in the, in San Francisco.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Wow, that'd be competitive.

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and so imagine you just flood the market with like, $10 billion, like, fresh cash, and you get a bunch of cash buyers. I mean.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Uh, last question, we'll let you go. There's something in the chat. Someone's talking about the US Open, which I, I guess is, uh, US.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  What's the US, okay, United States.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Open market fed operations?

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  United States Open.

• 1:13:13Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, oh, oh, okay. Yeah, maybe, uh, isn't there like a real estate company? Maybe it has something to do with that. I'm not sure. Anyway, yes.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  But do you have a prediction? They want to know, they want to know if you're watching tennis, and if you have a prediction or favorite, who are you rooting for?

• 1:13:28Speaker 07

  I don't, I, I'm so embarrassed. Every summer I try to get into tennis, and I actually take a few tennis lessons every summer, and it's like, this is the year I'm gonna go to the US Open. This is the year I'm really gonna pay attention. No, I, I said, have nothing to, despite my efforts year after year, I've, once again, nothing positively contribute to this discussion.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too. I, I have no idea. But I, uh, hopefully I will see some more, uh, great capital allocators photographed in paparazzi, uh, shots. That's what I watch the Open for. I watch the paparazzi feeds.

• 1:13:57Speaker 07

  As do we all, as do we all.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, and thank you.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Joe, enjoy, uh, enjoy your afternoon. We love you.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:14:05Speaker 07

  Love you too. Talk to you soon.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Bye. Legend.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Did you see?

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  Linear, yes, it's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Start building with Linear.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  It really is a, it really is a crystal ball for your roadmap.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. Anyway, what did you see?

• 1:14:29Jordi Hays?

  This is interesting. Guido Reichstatter is doing a hunger strike outside of Anthropic. He said, "Hi, my name's Guido, I'm on hunger."

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  He couldn't get in? He couldn't get into the SPV?

• 1:14:45Jordi Hays?

  He said, "I'm on hunger strike outside of the offices of the AI company Anthropic right now because we are in an emergency. Anthropic and other AI companies are racing to create ever more powerful AI systems. These AIs are being used to inflict serious harm on our society today and threaten to inflict..."

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  And he got rate limited?

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Inflect increasingly, increasing, we'll get to that. I think it's very likely that he's hitting rate limits on the pro plane.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  That might make sense.

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  And threaten to inflict, inflict increasingly greater damage tomorrow. Experts are warning us, okay, we're going to trust the experts here. Experts are warning us that this race to ever more powerful general intelligence puts our lives and wellbeing at risk as well as the lives and wellbeing of our loved ones. They are warning us that the creation of extremely powerful AI threatens to destroy life on Earth.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Okay, Tyler, what you got?

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  So I think it also could be, you know, Dario just said they're not selling AI to China anymore, so he might just be, you know, SPV holder and he's, you know, mad about the profits.

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, less revenue from not selling internationally, that makes sense.

• 1:15:45Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is incredible marketing.

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Usually, because they're not a public company, you can't really take out a short position and become an activist.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  This is incredible marketing for Anthropic.

• 1:15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you think this is some sort of like mischief-style stunt, like to promote the company?

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  If you, yeah, you need to get protesters.

• 1:16:03Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny to single out Anthropic.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  The most safety oriented.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, they are the most safety oriented.

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Major lab.

• 1:16:11John Coogan?

  Like why not.

• 1:16:11Jordi Hays?

  That's just like.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Like XAI is like, we will just put everything out. Like it's, it's, uh, it, it, the first name is actually Adolf.

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Marra.

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  Marra, yeah.

• 1:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, a lot of, a lot of big buzzwords in here.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Power, power bottom dad says, this is so crazy. I'm kind of for it.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does the, does the post look one shot at at all?

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Tatorio says, bro, you're on a fast. If it's good for you, if you get to seven days, it'll do wonder, wonders for your health.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Is this bodybuilding related?

• 1:16:46Jordi Hays?

  People are just responding to his post with pictures of their food.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, that's so mean. Uh, wait, but are there any, uh, M dashes in the post?

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Zero M dashes.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  It's not this, it's that, nothing like that?

• 1:17:00Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it basically says.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Seems like pure.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  The same thing over and over and over.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  I, I wish he put this into Claude and, and kind of like.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  What is his name?

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Guido Reich. Reichstad.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Reichstad.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Reichstadter.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Well, good luck to him. Hopefully he, uh, dries out and cuts down on the body fat, gets, uh, extradiced. We, you know, say it's bulking season, but it's not right for everyone. Some people gotta cut and no better way to cut than go on an aggressive fast.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  So he is the co-founder of a company called Stop AI. And he has, he has one connection on LinkedIn.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  Stop AI. Oh, you're connected to him?

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I wish.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  His only experience on his LinkedIn, uh, is.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Has he stopped anything else? Has he stopped anything else?

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'd be crazy if like his last job was like co-founder at like Stop NFTs.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Or like stop time travel. It's like, I was successful. We don't have time travel. Stop teleportation technology.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Stop hypersonic planes in America.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  There's not much on, not much on Guido. He is interested in LinkedIn news.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  According to his interests on LinkedIn.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, um, one AI you should not stop is putting your sales tax on autopilot with numeral HQ.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Sales tax autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. On the more optimistic side of things, Everyday Astronaut has been reflecting on the Starship program over the last week, and one thing has become obvious to him. This is from Everyday Astronaut, a fantastic space-related content creator. He says SpaceX is enjoying the freedom to try and fail in a way they couldn't with Falcon 9. Doing anything experimental on the Falcon 9 was risky because it was SpaceX's only source of income. It was their lifeline, their workhorse. Making any tweaks to the Falcon 9 to try and land a booster back in the day was a delicate balance. Don't push the envelope too hard because it could lead to a failure of the primary mission, which did happen twice.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  Yes, I believe that they blew up a satellite that Facebook was putting up. It was very dramatic and kind of foreshadows the showdown and the potential MMA fight. But of course, like they have a contract and I think the money flowed appropriately. The companies weren't actually upset at each other, but it was kind of a crazy crossover moment in tech. Anyway, Everyday Astronaut says, "When SpaceX first landed a booster almost 10 years ago, they were fairly, they were, they were fairly slow to re-fly, and those first non-block 5 boosters were only capable of a couple of re-flights. This gave pause to some in the industry slash community, fearing all of this reusability hype wasn't going to pan out. But SpaceX learned from every landing attempt

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  to develop their Block 5 Falcon 9, which has now gone on to have a single booster, fly 30 missions. Absolutely unheard of." That's wild. Now imagine if SpaceX could have had the freedom to not worry about flying customer payloads to get data during Falcon 9's reusability campaign. Imagine if they could have tested engine out procedures, or push booster re-entry profiles, or try hot staging, or what, or what have you. This is the phase that SpaceX is now in during the Starship program. I know we hear the talking point of, quote, "Today's payload is data." And it could seem like a gimmick or excuse even, but that's a freedom almost no rocket program has had before. To just, to know you can just try things out, fly real-life hardware without bankrupting

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  the company, is the ultimate development platform. To be able to push engine out capabilities, remove heat shield tiles on purpose. We saw that with the videos, like this crazy, like, garbage floating around. They removed heat shield tiles. The thing barely made it back because they're pushing it to the absolute limit. They're not just trying to reach orbit. They're trying to do something that's never been done before. Build a rapidly reusable rocket, a rocket that can land and re-fly. This could have never, this has never been done before. And honestly, it's silly to think you could do something like this without trying some extreme things. That's what we're seeing today, and that's extremely exciting to me. I can't wait to see version three of Starship fly because they've learned so many lessons already, and they have a factory capable of making rockets at scale.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  And we just get to sit back and watch the cook. It's an exciting time to be alive.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Kitchen's open.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Kitchen's open, they're cooking. Anyway, you want us to take us through the next few timeline posts, Jordy? What you got for us?

• 1:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely. I just feel bad because we kind of glossed over some of Alan's trades. 2021, bought a house in Carp for 70 million, sold it for 96 million two years later.

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  Wait, carpenteria?

• 1:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  96 million, that's a huge number. Wow, that must have been...

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Another one, bought a house for 7 million in 2017, sold for 11 in 2018.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, these are great.

• 1:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Another one's bought, re-bought a house for 14 million in 2021, resold it for 2021, or sorry, 21 million in 2023.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  And some of these are so, so quick, you know? Buy in 2024, sell in 2025, 10 million dollar gain. I mean, she's just pushing this. Holby Hills, same year, added 10 million.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  She bought a house for 20 million in 2022, sold it for 36 million in the same year.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  The Usher house. Usher listed the home for sale for 35 million dollars in July 2019. We just can't quit the mansion section today. Should we talk about the house of the month? What else is in here?

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you call Eric right now?

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Said he's ready.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, let's get Eric Lyman on the phone. I got an important question for him.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we saw the news about the billion dollar run rate and we just had one question to ask.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Let's get Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp, on the phone.

• 1:22:56Speaker 08

  Hey.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  Eric, how you doing?

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  You're live.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  You're live.

• 1:22:59Speaker 08

  We're live. What's going on?

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Uh, give us the update. There's some milestone that just dropped yesterday, I believe.

• 1:23:07Speaker 08

  It is, uh, we couldn't be happier. Ramp is now doing more than a billion dollars a year in revenue.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Let's go. Congratulations. Uh, I just have one question. Is the job finished?

• 1:23:21Speaker 08

  Job's not finished, guys. Job's not finished. Just getting started.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, I'll let you get back to work. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for calling in.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:23:30Jordi Hays?

  It's great to hear from you.

• 1:23:31Speaker 08

  All right. Cheers. Have a great weekend.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  You too. Talk to you soon. Bye.

• 1:23:35Jordi Hays?

  It's not the weekend yet.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  It's not the weekend yet.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Mark Hennes has got a buddy from high school who's on his fifth AI startup in two years. No technical engineering background. He's an MBA. Hires engineers for the low budget to do all the work and build the product while he is CEO and manages. Just started a new AI education startup. Wish I could short.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  I wonder how this will pan out. It could work. I don't know. Um, depends on exactly what he's, what he's doing. But it certainly is not the YC path, not the make something people want. It is a very management consultant, very MBA-coded strategy.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good luck getting into YC with this strategy.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Good luck. Good luck.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Naval says if your smartest friends start saying crazy things, pay attention. A paradigm shift may be underway. I think he's talking about people getting one-shotted.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  You think that's it?

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  Could be.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  I don't know. It might be, you know, he might be talking about AI, right? Like, you have really smart friends and they start saying crazy things like, you know,

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  They discover new physics.

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, all this other stuff. Not that, not that. But actually, like, you know, the idea of of superintelligence is a crazy thing to say. Uh, but it might be real, you know, it might be, it might be real.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  And it might start in your customer service organization with fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive backups, number one ranking on G2. So we we covered the jobs gains. They were all part time. Um, full time jobs dropped by three hundred and seventy, three hundred and fifty six K. Part time jobs grew by five hundred and ninety seven K. Certainly not good for the durable, long term, healthy economy.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Um, we

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  But earlier this year, there was a massive gain in full time, uh, employment and then that dropped. And so there seems to be gyrations every which way, but anyway.

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Crazy story, uh, coming out today. Uh, SEAL Team Six in 2019 attempted to covert mission in North Korea to plant a device to intercept Kim Kim Jong Un's comms. They should have just waited and got him a friend.com.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Friend. Just say, hey, this is gonna be your new bestie. Just wear it, keep it on your person.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  That'd work.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, authorized by Trump, the mission failed when SEALs, uh, unfortunately killed civilians mistaken for security forces. You can get into the story a little bit because we don't talk about, we don't talk about politics, but we we do, uh, enjoy geopolitics. Uh, in early 2019, Trump approved a clandestine SEAL Team Six operation to plant a device in North Korea to intercept Kim Jong Un's communications. Red Squadron, known for killing Bin Laden, rehearsed for months. The mission aimed to gather intelligence during nuclear talks. This was the, uh, the

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, nuclear, you know, Trump and, and Kim Jong-un had been, uh, communicating around, uh, obviously, North Korea's nuclear program. On a winter night, SEALs emerged from the sea near North Korea's coast. A nuclear submarine deployed two mini subs carrying eight commandos. Lacking real-time drone support, they relied on delayed satellite images. The shore appeared clear, but a North Korean boat emerged, mistaking civilians for security forces. The SEALs opened fire, killing two or three shellfish divers. So apparently, they were on the beach.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  A boat pulled up, uh, started using lights.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  They just assumed it was security forces. Ended up being fishermen.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  And anyway, so, um, apparently, the Trump admin at the time didn't notify Congress. Um, and, uh, the SEALs sank the bodies, abandoned the device, and signaled for extraction. The submarine risked exposure, retrieving them in shallow waters. North Korea detected activity but made no public statement. The mission's failure, hidden by secrecy, risked escalating tensions from a nuclear armed state. So.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Military reviews justified the civilian deaths under engagement rules, claiming unforeseeable errors. The Trump administration withheld details from Congress, potentially violating federal law. Uh, many involved, uh, many involved SEALs were later promoted, despite concerns about special operations' uneven track record. Uh, it is fascinating that, uh, so, uh, disclosed TV talked to 24 anonymous sources, including Trump administration, Trump administration officials and military personnel with direct knowledge. Their anonymity reflects the operation sensitivity. Uh, it is, uh, obviously a tragedy. Um, but, uh,

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seems a bit hard to hold special operations teams and say you have to have.

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  You can't fail if you want to rise up in the organization.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. But yeah, I mean, obviously, you want every operation to be executed flawlessly. Anyway, in other news, The Washington Post is now on Substack. Let's hear it for The Washington Post.

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  The Washington Posters.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  Jeff Bezos.

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  They heard you can post. You can post notes on Substack. They said, we got to get involved in it.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  We love posting.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  We love posting.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  It's in our name.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Posters.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  So this was, I believe, a story that was broken by Emily Sundberg in Feed Me, and she did a little bit of an interview here. Let's see, "Welcome to my life," says Rachel Taschian. And Emily asks, "How do you see The Washington Post's game plan on Substack playing out? Is there something that will make your strategy different from other legacy media brands that have joined the platform?" I'm actually not that familiar with other legacy media brands that have joined Substack. Are you subscribed to any?

• 1:29:11Jordi Hays?

  Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  That's not... Specifically, a new media brand. At this point, they've been doing media for 20 years, though, so I can say...

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, play the shots fire.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just, I'm just...

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  It's funny.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Just joking around.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  No, we are the legacy media. They are the new media. We want to be legacy media. I don't, The Washington Post responds, "I don't necessarily see Substack as an alternative to legacy media. I see it as an additional tool to experiment with in a fantastic way to connect with new readers. I love getting into the mix in the comments," comment section, yep. "I think a successful journalist in 2025 should be on as many platforms as possible and have a tailored strategy for each one." Completely agree. "So it was important to us that we publish original content exclusively on Substack and really engage with the platform on its own terms. I consider post-runway, something like opulent tips goes to Milan and Paris.

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  I don't report from the chiffon trenches, as Andre Leon Tally lovingly called the fashion world, for my newsletter. So now I'm going to bring a bit of that madcap approach to the access-driven reporting and criticism I do for the paper, and I'll still be doing all my usual reporting and runway reviews for The Post. Will there be a paid strategy?" asks Emily Sundberg in Feed Me. The Washington Post responds, "Post runway will be free." Woo-hoo. What does success on Substack look like for the Post, says Emily. Having fun opening the Post's world to new readers and introducing the amazing voices on Substack, especially fashion writers, to the Post's audience.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  Well, welcome to Substack, The Washington Post. Maybe we should do a collab and talk about fashion. I don't know. I mean, I'm dressed to the nines today. I'd love the Washington Post-

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, where's the invite?

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  To review the wonderful yellow suit.

• 1:31:05Jordi Hays?

  And we gotta give it up for, to Sierra.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:10Jordi Hays?

  And they're raising some new capital.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:14Jordi Hays?

  $350 million from Green Oaks.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  Okay, doubling down.

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Doubling down on Sierra at a $10 billion valuation. And Zach DeWitt-

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  He's at Wing.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Saying, "Incredible seed investment for Benchmark. They likely own 15%." It's a $450 million fund.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Three to four X are ready on one investment. We'd love to see capital allocators win.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  Goat emoji.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations. Job's not finished.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  Well-

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  But certainly a fantastic milestone.

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Power Bottom Dad says, quoting Joe Weisenthal's post, saying the US has lost 78,000 manufacturing jobs this year.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  That is a lot.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  Says, "Chat, is this reindustrializing? I'm kind of tired of winning."

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  You would, I don't know. It's hard to, you know, Joe's point, which is real, is that you can't expect things to have an immediate impact.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, if US manufacturers were feeling good and had lots of business, they would probably be trying to-

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Keep as many people as they can.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  There are two, there are two economic statistics that I find important in measuring the progress of re-industrialization or industrial might. The first is jobs, like manufacturing jobs are important. It's the, you know, in many ways, the heritage and the backbone of the US economy, although the US economy has shifted to a services-driven economy. But if you want to measure manufacturing capacity, it is fine to just use GDP. How, what is the total value of all the goods that are manufactured in America? Is that going up or going down? I actually don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but when I think about the next, I was talking to someone who was saying that America will re-industrialize, but it

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  will re-industrialize with, on the back of robots and automation, and there will be much higher leverage for each individual manufacturing worker. You've seen this with companies like Hadrian. There's not that many people in that facility for a lot of CNC machines that are basically automated. And that, and when you look at, you know, who are we actually competing against if you, if you're benchmarking the United States against China? Yes, China has a ton of people that migrate from outside of Shenzhen into the manufacturing hubs to assemble iPhones during the push. They, they, they bring in a million migrants to assemble iPhones right before the new iPhones released.

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  And China obviously employs tons and tons of manufacturing employees. But at the same time, they also have lights-out facilities where everything is effectively automated.

• 1:34:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  And when you look at the way, at the design of the latest Tesla factories, the design of the latest Starlink factory, we are making things in America, but we're doing it at a much lower level of headcount and the, than the headcount-

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  And some of our best manufacturers aren't contract manufacturers, right? They're-

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Elon-

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  Companies.

• 1:34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, vertically integrated, yeah. So, but over time-

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  There was also, there's a crazy story from the BBC, which I think stands for Business, Business Central.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Business, business capital.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Business, business capital.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  That's what I like.

• 1:34:36Jordi Hays?

  They said, this was basically breaking live for today. Almost 500 people have been arrested at a Hyundai factory in Georgia by immigration authorities.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  And weren't they South Korean?

• 1:34:49Jordi Hays?

  So a majority of those detained at the 3,000 acre site, which was built by the Korean automobile manufacturer to make electric vehicles, are Korean nationals.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  That's very interesting.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  So, South Korea expressed concern and regret over the operation.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, very odd.

• 1:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Which is kind of interesting dynamic to just be like, yeah, we regret that because it's the gov- I mean,

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  It's South Korea saying that, not Hyundai. You'd think Hyundai would be like, sorry, because this scale is-

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  Got to sort out the visas, guys. You know, I think everyone's all for like, bring the TSMC semiconductor experts to Arizona, but make sure that they fill out the immigration paperwork.

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  If they're gonna come over here and build. Anyway, Bucocapalbloke says, perhaps we are moving to the find out stage of paralyzing the US economy with a multi-quarter barrage of nonsensical, inconsistent, and conflicting set of economic policies. And there's some people in the chat.

• 1:35:48Jordi Hays?

  Is this bullish?

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  Is this bullish? No, this is not bullish. He's blackpilling. He's very, he's very upset about the economic data that was printed today, related to a lot of the economic policies, mostly from the tariffs.

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Alps has a post showing the Las Vegas Sphere, saying it's looking a little bit different. This, to me-

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  SSI advertising yet?

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Is this, is this superintelligence rearing its head?

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I love that Ilya is leaning in to the bit and having fun with the, having fun with the hats and whatnot. Wasn't there another hat? Oh, yes. Pixelhulk. Pixelhulk says they now have a new line of Marc Andreessen merch. And it's a, it's a hat that, where the head looks like Marc Andreessen. This looks like, this is like a fantastic AI image. I imagine this is AI. It looks like some sort of, however they made this, whether it's Photoshop or AI, it's flawless. I do think this would sell pretty well. It is ridiculous looking, though.

• 1:36:52Jordi Hays?

  TBPN was featured at Volta.

• 1:36:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Earlier. Theo did a photo shoot. There's a Ferrari in the picture, which we love.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:03Jordi Hays?

  And I believe one of Volta's employees. And anyway, shout out to John Fiorentino. I can't wait to visit the Volta.

• 1:37:15John Coogan?

  In Nashville? Be great. The flagship. It's not even in the HQ. This is the flagship store.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  Right. The flagship.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  This is the, you gotta make the pilgrimage.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We covered Tempo, the new L1 built by Stripe and Paradigm, so we don't need to cover it again. But Mert was firing back. In the announcement, they were, the Tempo team was basically highlighting potential limitations from existing L1s. They highlighted transactions per second. They highlighted moments that you couldn't run payroll again.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  When Trump, if you were trying to run payroll.

• 1:38:02John Coogan?

  And that's because.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  The day that Trump coin launched.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  So Trump coin launched on Solana? Is that right? Not Ethereum? Because I know Ethereum, the narrative around Ethereum has been like, the networks congested, there are high fees. But that was the whole idea behind launching Solana, was that it was going to be much more scalable. And there was some sort of trade off there. And then this is like the next L1. And people are upset about it in kind of both camps. But I invited Matt on the show and Mert, who were both talking about this, would love to.

• 1:38:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're going, they're happily running a little bit under the radar now. Mert said, guys, you can just say you want more full stack control and distribution. You can also say you want the L1 premium or a controlled validator set. These are perfectly legitimate answers, but you look unserious and hurt your brand when you start talking about scalability. And defending the Solana blockchain.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:38:58Jordi Hays?

  It is proven that it can scale. But yeah, I mean, I think this kind of play makes sense. Because of course Stripe and Paradigm would want to own the rails effectively, even if it's going to be

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:12Jordi Hays?

  network driven.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it does seem like Stripe has a large enough customer base that they can actually bootstrap the network fairly, fairly easily, right?

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  But just offering it baked into checkouts that are already powered by Stripe potentially. Although, I wonder, I wonder how, like what the onboarding process is like because even just getting a Solana wallet set up, it's not as easy as like, oh, I have a different credit card. And so the same Stripe form works the same. Maybe you wrap it in a credit card? I don't know. I, I, I still don't exactly understand like where Tempo fits in the full stack and, and how this gets rolled out.

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  But I'm excited to learn more. I mean, we'll certainly have some folks on to talk about it.

• 1:39:52Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, for some members of our audience.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Mercedes-Benz is teasing the return of the four-door soft-top Cabriolet G-Wagon. This is the moment that many of us has been, have been waiting for.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  G-Wagon arguably greatest car. Ever made. They have done many iterations of the Cabriolet over the years. I came close to buying one a couple of times from my friend Blake, who has a company called Found Objects here in LA. He sources these incredible G-Wagons from all over the world. And anyways, I'm super happy that they're bringing this back. This, this image that is pulled up on the screen right now is actually, I think, somebody taking some artistic liberty. The actual image, we can pull up here if possible. I put it in the timeline.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  But the actual image is blurred out on the official Mercedes account. And so I expect this to be like somewhat. Somewhat different than than the picture that we just had up on the screen.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  What's crazy about this is that.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna, I just expect them to modernize it a little bit.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  So Mercedes has a G650 Landolay, which is the soft top four door, but it's a MyBok and I believe it trades at around a million dollars a car.

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe some, anybody would sell that for just a million.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  A million.

• 1:41:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is the image that they posted on Instagram.

• 1:41:31Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, I'm super excited for this.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  I wonder how limited it'll be.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  I will definitely struggle not to.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  John, John puts a lot of pressure on me to not just continue buying G wagons to mix it up.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  You gotta mix it up.

• 1:41:45Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  I think, I think if you want a convertible.

• 1:41:49Jordi Hays?

  Even Speeder, Speeder, Speeder drove my G the other day and said, you know what? I thought these were ever hyped, but I get it now.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  I get it now.

• 1:41:57Jordi Hays?

  I get it now.

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  Well, but if you want a, if you want a four door convertible SUV, why not get a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet? It's actually a two door.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if you want a two door.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you want a four door, yeah, you, you kind of have to upgrade from the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet to the G650 Cabriolet. It'll take you from maybe $20,000 to maybe 2 million, but you know, you do get those extra two, two doors, so.

• 1:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  I, I, I think it's a pretty clear.

• 1:42:25Jordi Hays?

  I can't.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Value there.

• 1:42:27Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait for this.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Do you think the G Wagon salesman should be on Adio? Customer relationship magic?

• 1:42:35Jordi Hays?

  They absolutely should.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Adio is the AI native CRM that built scales and grows the company to the next level. You might be tagged as just already closed one and for some G Wagon owner in Adio and they put you right back in, reach back out with the next one.

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  They certainly do for me.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  They certainly do.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  As soon as, as soon as you move into closed one, they move you back into prospect.

• 1:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep, back in the pipeline.

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  Back in the pipeline.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  Oh, Sergey Brin was at the dinner last night with Donald Trump and Google is back in founder mode. You love to see Sergey having a seat at the table again, says Bev Jay-Z.

• 1:43:09Jordi Hays?

  This post from TJ Parker.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Was absolutely insane.

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have, we should, we should, we should call TJ right now and ask him to explain himself. So it says, "Fun facts. I was the youngest VP at Amazon."

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:24Jordi Hays?

  Of course, he sold PillPack to Amazon for $1 billion. He said, "I was the youngest VP at Amazon. I've also personally never bought anything on Amazon," which is just absolutely incredible accomplishment.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  How do you live your life without ever buying a single thing on Amazon?

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he...

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  It's crazy, not a book, like...

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  I think what he said, I think he just, I think he just said if he likes something, he sends a link to his wife and then she buys it.

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  Okay, well, it still is, you're, you're, you still have Amazon purchases.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  He was too...

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Too poor and then too rich?

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  Poor and then he was too rich.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Uh, I mean, like, really telling on yourself for not taking the gig seriously, TJ. It's like, you know...

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, he was focused on something else. I mean, like, he was focused on the...

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  I don't care, I guess, but, you know, I, I...

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Sales should be...

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  I just think like, like, if you, if you get a job at Apple, you're expected, it's polite to wear an Apple Watch, you know? You walk around Apple HQ, Cupertino, like, everyone's wearing Apple Watches. They're not wearing Samsung Galaxy gears, you know? They're using the product. If you, there's a, there's a famous story about if you are trying to sell a piece of software or any, do any sort of business dealing with Nike, when you go to their headquarters, you should be wearing Nikes. You do not show up to Nike headquarters in Adidas because they will see that, they will take that as a, as a sign of disrespect to their culture.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  It's like if we get, if we get lunch or breakfast with somebody and they insist on paying and they don't pay with a ramp card, it is a...

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Oh, I was about to say.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  Major sign of disrespect.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  It's a very big sign of disrespect. Very big sign of disrespect. I'd rather just have you not pay at all. Um, but very, very silly, very, very silly and I guess, uh, you know. Evidence that he was ready to move on and get into the world of investing and venture capital at Matrix where he is now. Tim Cook has an iconic photograph in Getty Images. He hit the Abbey Road, says Mark Gurman, on the way to meet Trump. You'll love this. He is flanked by a crew of what appear to be bodyguards, or maybe just the boys, maybe just the homies. But he's, it's a good picture, one for the, one for the tech, the museum of business history.

• 1:45:39John Coogan?

  We talked about the, this, oh, we should go into this fabricated knowledge post, so.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm gonna let you cover this.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Doug O'Laughlin has this thesis. He says, "I think lagging edge is going to be, is going the way of solar panels. Some can win, but the aggregate, the aggregate big number of chips is going to be bad." And so, says, "First up is Texas Instruments." Where does he say this? "April's pop is mostly pull forward. The lagging edge price war. Lagging edge capacity now behaves differently. Another upturn may come, but it may be muted and prolonged. Something is broken in auto and industrial. Texas Instruments is right to run inventories down. They likely will not need as much." There's a lagging edge perma-glut, he says. "What no one wants to admit, lagging edge capacity may be structurally different now.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Earlier, I argued, prices had to rise because new fabs cannot profit from selling lagging edge chips at prices set by a fully depreciated fab. There are obviously pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can't turn a profit by selling lagging edge chips at a price that was previously dictated. Reality. The lagging edge took price in a temporary market upturn. Now, we are reverting to the mean. The old tread line is back. There's no meaningful new demand for old nodes. And what exists is made and consumed in China." So, you go and you make the smart toaster, or the smart dishwasher, and you need a chip in there. You don't need a TSMC 3-nanometer TPU Nvidia chip. You just need some lagging edge chip.

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  It's gonna be made in China. It's gonna be assembled in the product in China, and then you're gonna get that smart toaster delivered to you. And all of that's gonna happen within the Chinese ecosystem. And so, if you're running a lagging edge fab in America... Doug O'Laughlin thinks you're in trouble. The COVID super cycle plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics points to a forever glut. China has a long record of flooding the low end. State-directed capex boosts output at the expense of efficiency. Doug wrote about this involution dynamic recently in China's race to the bottom. Products at 90 nanometer and above should internalize a permanent China glut.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  Companies resist that conclusion, but the case studies are familiar. Solar modules, LCDs, LEDs, steel, shipbuilding, batteries. You've seen it time and time again. China wants to stay on the lagging edge and dominate there, the commoditized lagging edge and not worry about, you know, and they see that as the learning curve to get to the the leading edge, but they are willing to sell at a lower margin for a very long time if they need to. Companies can still win share, but through performance and packaging rather than by producing older chips at lower cost. ADI is a masterclass in adding capabilities. MPWR has focused on higher end power. The long tail will face a flood of Chinese supply. Good luck to the older fabs.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  I cannot resist talking about Marvel, Marvell behind the paywall. So head over to Fabricated Knowledge and subscribe to the Substack. And we will have Doug O'Laughlin on the show again soon to dig into all of the dynamics of both leading edge and the lagging edge. So Josh Steinman, famous for saying, we are good morning, we are going to win every single day, has a post here that's not good morning, we are going to win. It says you versus the guy she told you not to worry about. RoboTaxi versus Waymo service area in square miles. So Waymo has been on a very consistent grind adding square miles every year for the past seven, six years, gone from

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  Maybe fifty square miles to now seven hundred and fifty square miles. Whereas RoboTaxi went from zero to almost a thousand square miles in, uh, in just under a few months.

• 1:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Hard to, to, to make an equal comparison here.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  Based on the single metric.

• 1:49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:44Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, I'm super excited about both companies, but.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  Uh, one's still in beta, but the app is doing very well with RoboTaxi. Uh, we will see.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Number one in the charts.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  Safety drivers, number one in the charts. A little bit of a narrative violation.

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  The key to sprinkle some.

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  Maybe made a phone call to Tim Cook and Tim Cook said, thank you, Elon, for getting us to space. Thank you for.

• 1:50:05Jordi Hays?

  We'll put you at the top of the charts.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  Thank you for Starlink. Thank you for the Model Three. Thank you for the Model S. Thank you for the Model Y. Thank you for the Model X. Thank you for the Cybertruck. Thank you for the Roadster. Thank you.

• 1:50:17Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  For the Falcon Nine. Thank you for the Merlin engine.

• 1:50:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the brain chip.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  For the brain chip, for the Neuralink. Thank you for.

• 1:50:24Jordi Hays?

  For Boring.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  Thank you for building that tunnel in Las Vegas. Thank you for PayPal.

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for Twitter.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  Thank you for Anny and Valentine.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  Tim Cook definitely said, thank you for Anny and Valentine. And, uh, and Elon said, cool. You can have the RoboTaxi app on iOS. Anyway.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Um, so. Oh, you know, I slept.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  You slept like a log?

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  I wish. Seventy-one, only six hours.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Eighty-five, play the song. Let's go eighty-five.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  Thank you, Trevor.

• 1:50:57Jordi Hays?

  I, travel days.

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  Travel days are rough, yeah.

• 1:51:01Jordi Hays?

  Rough.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  Uh, go to aidsleep.com, get a Pod Five, five-year warranty, thirty-eight risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:51:06Jordi Hays?

  And you can use code TBN.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  So.

• 1:51:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was cool.

• 1:51:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, this, I mean, this was just a cool move in the history of capitalism.

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Altay Cap says, didn't notice this until today. Another shareholder died, this is a Japanese company, and donated their shares to the company.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  Which was six that, six percent of the outstanding shares. Their will also donated their real estate to the company.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:51:34Jordi Hays?

  And Sleep Well said, oh, you think buybacks are cool? How about major shareholders dying and donating their shares to the company? Plus some real estate for free.

• 1:51:43John Coogan?

  Tyler, we do expect you to put the iPhone that we gave you in your will to TBPN. It will be passed down to another intern in 50 years.

• 1:51:51Speaker 03

  There's a funny contrast. I think yesterday.

• 1:51:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's not make the call.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  100 years.

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  50 years.

• 1:51:57John Coogan?

  What does Xi Jinping think he'll do, 150? So that's like 145 years from now for you?

• 1:52:03Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  But there's a post yesterday.

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, what is this carrot?

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is, oh, the carrot and the stick.

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, carrot and the stick.

• 1:52:12Jordi Hays?

  No, they shouldn't be on the same, they can't be attached to each other.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  You put the carrot.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  You give somebody the carrot or the stick.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Have you ever ridden a horse? You put the carrot on the end of the stick and then you hold the carrot in front of the horse's nose. And then the.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm more, I thought we were talking about the phrase like.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  You're correct.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Bring the carrot or the stick in a negotiation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  But yes.

• 1:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we got it.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  So the next time we see Donald Trump doing a 4D chess negotiation, we're doing away with the chess analogy and we're moving to the carrot and the stick analogy. And we now have a physical prop for both the carrot and the stick.

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  Okay, but I was gonna say, yesterday, I think we sent a post about there was some billionaire who is leaving his will to Neymar.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's in here.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  For Neymar.

• 1:52:55John Coogan?

  Yes, I love that.

• 1:52:57Speaker 03

  Interesting contrast.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait, who is Neymar?

• 1:53:03Speaker 03

  Some, something with like a ball.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  He's an athlete?

• 1:53:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:08John Coogan?

  He plays soccer? Is this, is this just some crazy way to get around salary caps? A businessman is leaving $1 billion to Neymar in his will. The administrator justified that he identifies with the athlete and decided to give his inheritance to the player. That is crazy.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  If Steve Ballmer really wanted to get around the salary cap, he would, you know, commit ritual suicide and leave in his will his money.

• 1:53:37Jordi Hays?

  That is the final boss of salary cap evasion.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  To just get an extra, you care so much about your team. Well, in some other news that we will have to track the will of, very sad news. Giorgio Armani has passed away. He was 91 years old.

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  He was the creator of the power suit. He held the reins as conglomerates rose. Giorgio Armani, the designer and business mogul who brought subtle Italian luxury to the world stage and conquered Hollywood, died at 91. He worked until his final days, dedicating himself to the company, the collections, and many ongoing and future projects, said an announcement by the namesake brand. The company later confirmed he died in his home in Milan. During his years at the helm, he remained steadfastly independent in a fashion landscape dominated increasingly by conglomerates. Although he disliked the moniker, Armani was often called the king of fashion.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2024, just one year ago, he insisted that the secret to success was his humble, consistent work ethic. This guy has Founder's Podcast episode written all over him. He owned a super yacht and homes in New York, Milan, Pantalera, Antigua, Paris Sainte-Marie, Saint-Tropez, Forte de Marra, and Brioni, but he showed up at the office every morning and ruled his empire with a firm hand. He has TBPN Mansion Section deep dive written all over him as well. Armani, who called himself a designer businessman, was the sole shareholder of his company at the time of his death.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  Wait, I had no idea, still.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  In 2023, its worldwide revenue was 2.6 billion across men's and women's lines, the Emporio Armani diffusion line, and Armani Privé Haute Couture interiors, dozens of restaurants, 2,500 retail stores, fragrances, and a cult classic beauty line. Whether it took the form of relaxed suiting, makeup, or interior design, his work whispered refinement. His stylistic innovations included an emphasis on neutral in-between colors, soft shoulders, and a more relaxed approach to in-between colors as I read this in a yellow suit. Not exactly an in-between color. You know it's not from Armani. He often drew inspiration from-

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  He still would have appreciated the ramp, the ramp suit.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  I think he would have, I think he would have.

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  As a designer businessman.

• 1:56:13John Coogan?

  Yes. He often drew inspiration from Asian culture in his work. Akira Kurosawa's nineteen eighty eight, let's say about eighty-eight, film called Kage Musha inspired his fall nineteen eighty-one Samurai collection. "I love that he has this balance of softness and power," said Armani's fellow designer Michael Kors at the last New York runway show in twenty twenty-four. "Armani became a household name where he designed Richard Gere's suits in the nineteen eighty's, eighty movie, American Gigolo, from the nineteen eighty's until recent years. He was the go-to designer for red carpet looks, dressing Oscar winners

• 1:56:56John Coogan?

  from Jodie Foster to Cate Blanchett." In twenty twenty-four, Armani stressed the extremely important role of independence played in his impact. "It's not a question of pride," he said. "It's about getting things done. When I have an idea, I want to see it through to the end." He set up a trust in twenty sixteen that laid out his plans for his company, including a charitable foundation and details for how a public stock listing or an acquisition would be handled. He worked with a close circle of collaborators, including his sister Rosanna, who is on the board, his niece Silvana, who is the head of women's design, his niece Roberta, the head of VIP and entertainment relations, and his nephew Andrea Camerana,

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  the sustainability managing director. His right-hand man and close friend was the head of menswear. Born in northern Italy, the town of Piacenza, on July eleventh, nineteen thirty-four, that's, what, two hundred years before Tyler was born, Armani was the middle child of three siblings between older brother Sergio and younger sister Rosanna. Armani described his childhood marked by a fascist- regime in World War II as hard scrabble. At nine years old, he was standing outside a movie theater, looking at a poster for Snow White. When a friend came across an unexploded shell of gunpowder. It caught fire and the young Armani burst into flames. He said he shut his eyes only to open them 20 days later in the hospital.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  This is crazy. Well, there, I know we have our next guest, but I can't stop reading this one second. We're sorry. Uh, we have the CEO of Scale AI coming on in just a minute. Um, his only lasting scar was on his foot where his shoe melted into his flesh. The incident contributed to Armani's desire to become a doctor. He attended medical school in Milan for three years before dropping out to fulfill his compulsory military service. After the army, Armani's latent creativity was stirred. He began working as an assistant architect, designing interiors and displays for a department store in Milan. He moved into menswear, working for, working at a ti- uh, working for a time at Hitman. A company owned by Nino Ceruti, a freelancing and freelancing for other brands.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  By the mid 1960s, Armani met his longtime life and business partner, Sergio Galetti. Uh, a Tuscan architectural draftsman, 10 years his junior. Galetti persuaded Armani to start his own business in 1975. He woke me up from a sort of torpor, the from the little life in which I was living. Armani told the Journal in 2012.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  John, I hate to cut you off.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's not keep our guests waiting.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  Let's not keep our guests waiting.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  That is a fantastic story.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:59:35Jordi Hays?

  Bring in Jason.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 1:59:36Jordi Hays?

  John was getting carried away there.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Have you heard the story of Giorgio Armani? He just died and, uh, what a fantastic obituary in the journal today.

• 1:59:45Speaker 09

  No, I was hoping you'd keep going. That was great.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Sorry to keep you waiting.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  It's great to meet you, Jason. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Why don't you, uh, kick us off with an introduction and kind of your path to how you wind up, wound up in this particular situation?

• 2:00:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, totally. So I've been in tech for a long time. I've been at scale for a year. Um, my background has been in, uh, starting companies, you know, early, early in my career. Um, on to, you know, more notably at Uber, I sort of do breeds business there. Um, and that grew, uh, you know, much larger than we ever thought it would.

• 2:00:21Jordi Hays?

  How big is the, uh, how big is that business today? If you don't mind me asking.

• 2:00:25Speaker 09

  When I left, it was about $20 billion a year of GMV.

• 2:00:32Speaker 09

  And then I think they've grown it to maybe 70 billion, 70, 80 billion. It just keeps going.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, Dara just announced yesterday that in Australia alone, they've served a billion deliveries, which is about 2 billion meals. So, you know.

• 2:00:49John Coogan?

  That's a lot of shrimp on the barbie.

• 2:00:51Speaker 09

  You know, when you, yeah, when you, you know, when you get involved in these things, you're always surprised at how big things can get. And I think that's going to end up being true here with this current wave.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:01Speaker 09

  You know, and that was one of the reasons why I was excited to join Scale a year ago, joining Alex at the time.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:08Speaker 09

  And, you know, I'd experienced some marketplaces, done a lot of growth stage businesses, things where demand was outstripping supply and you needed to fix a lot of things to get the business on track. And, you know, it's been, it's been an exciting, fascinating journey over the past year. I mean, nothing like I ever expected.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the, the, the shape of the business when you came in? Like, from my perspective, Scale has been a very interesting business in that it hasn't, like, many companies have a second act. I feel like Scale's had a second and third, maybe even a fourth act. The way I tell the story is, you know, Alex Wang is starting with creating data for self-driving cars. Eventually, that business maybe gets rolled into Waymo and Tesla directly. And so Scale expands into the RLHF boom during the LLM boom and it's kind of grown. And then my, my, my question was, are we going to see Scale AI take on robotics data or more specific tasks?

• 2:02:08John Coogan?

  And so, describe the shape of the business when you joined and, and where you were thinking about taking it.

• 2:02:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, the history's, the history's amazing and fascinating. I think Alex had this insight that data was the most important thing to models.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:24Speaker 09

  And that was nine years ago. So that's very visionary. And I was very impressed whenever I was talking to him about a role at the company, you know, only a year ago. And you're right, we've gone from different types of data. And, and one interesting thing about like this entire journey is that every single type of data, someone has said like, oh, when is this going to go away? When is this going to go away? When is this going to go away? And this is a common thing that we hear. And we've heard it so many times that. You know, we sort of are used to addressing it and there's always some other source of data. And one of the reasons why is because data is the application in many ways.

• 2:03:04Speaker 09

  You know, you're going from a software space where it's software organizes data for use by humans. Now you've got data driving applications of things. And so as we generate more and more data, the models are serving customers. Those customers have higher and higher demands of what the model should do, which then drives demand for more data and the data changes. But you know, we've gone through this so many times from expert data to, you know, now, you know, you know, models are working on like, how do they do things for you, right? It was about knowledge capture and then now it's about skill capture.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:41Speaker 09

  So it's been, yeah, it's been an awesome journey.

• 2:03:46Speaker 09

  And the company has been extremely agile and extremely commercial over the entire journey, which is, you know, which leads us to this discussion.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it hasn't just been just like, like if you zoom out, it's like one smooth sort of exponential, but in fact, there's different pools of data that have been maybe a series of stacked S-curves, but that's the story of all technology and all progress. So I'm interested to know what, like, when Alex did Invest Like the Best, he had a very interesting point about robotics data being particularly rare. Like, at least we had the internet to crawl and scrape and that was something that didn't, it eventually needed to be polished with RLHF, but with robotics data, there's just so little out there. And I was wondering if that was something that you were interested in looking at or

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  if it was immediately the skill capture thing of these like really, really niche experts, people who know about archaeology and it's just not on the internet and you need to go get some PhD, get them on the platform and start having them answer questions so that that can get baked into the models and we can get out of the, what is it, like Gelman Amnesia, Dunning Kruger for these models where it sounds great until you're asking about the thing that you're the expert in and then you're like, oh, actually it's only at a, it's only at a college level. It's not actually at the full expert level.

• 2:05:11Speaker 09

  Right, right, right, right. Yes. So, yes, we do robotics data today. We've been doing, you know, that's, that's one of the newest parts of our business.

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:19Speaker 09

  That's the way beyond expert data. So we've been doing expert data for a year and a half plus, depending on where you draw the line on experts.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:27Speaker 09

  But everyone in the data business is in the expert data, you know, is in the expert business because that's what the models need. That's what they demand.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:34Speaker 09

  You know, something like 15% of the people in our network are PhDs, 25% have master's degrees and like a very large percentage, I think 60% or so have at least a bachelor's degree. And so, you know, that is where the knowledge capture has gone. Robotics, yeah, it is interesting, right? Because you can't necessarily pre-train on this like corpus of information from the past 25 years of the internet. And so that probably just increases the size of the opportunity going forward. But the space is new, right? I mean, like, like, you know, there aren't robots, you know, walking around the world yet. So a lot of this is still in development. One other thing worth mentioning is like all the data types from before, we still do, like we still supply data to autonomous vehicles companies.

• 2:06:16Speaker 09

  We're still providing computer vision data to the US government and other parties. And so these things do stack up, as you mentioned, into what is now a pretty big business.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Is there still some piece of the business that's not AI, not directly AI related, like, like, almost like Mechanical Turk-esque? Like, I just need an actual human to do something at the, at an API endpoint for, you know, a very reliable, very scalable. And so I come to you and I, and instead of going to an LLM, I just have people doing it on demand. Is that a thing?

• 2:06:54Speaker 09

  That's not a thing for us. I do think that is a thing in the industry, like some of that work has gone into BPOs and, you know, sort of like lower margin, less difficulty type tasks. And so we're at the frontier and part of being at the frontier means you do the hard stuff.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Speaker 09

  The margins are better, the skill level required is higher, and it pushes you to constantly be driving the business forward. And that adaptability, frankly, that started with Alex in terms of always looking for the next thing and being really close to the tech is kind of what's allowed us to get here.

• 2:07:26Jordi Hays?

  On the customer side, how are companies buying this data? It feel for the, it seems like there's overwhelming demand.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  Well, you go to them and you say, I'd like 10 data, please.

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  10 data.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  100.

• 2:07:36Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I mean, I mean more so like, what are the actual like customer relationships look like? It seems like a lot of the labs and big players are actually working with multiple providers. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because different providers can, can specialize in different things.

• 2:07:52Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, you know, we have, you know, it, that is true. That's like, that's sort of a, a general understanding of the market. The, the reality though is on the ground, if you want high quality frontier data, that's difficult to get at volume. The number of providers goes down dramatically. And so there's a lot of claims being made out there about doing things at, at scale. You know, we're one of the largest providers today. We've been one of the largest providers. And so I think that that's, you know, through all of the change, that's what's allowed us to keep the relationships that we had, which is, it's actually pretty hard to get this data, right? Like, like, like you really have to have the right network. You have to know how to talk to the network.

• 2:08:35Speaker 09

  Cause if you imagine like being in the contributor, we call them contributors, meaning the people who provide the data to the models through us. If you imagine being in their mindset, you have to have a system that can interface with them on what is a part-time job for them to give high quality data for a very technical audience, which is the researcher, you know, so that it changes the weights of the models in a positive way. And that's not a super straightforward thing to do. And so, yeah, I mean, and, and, and the business is going great. I mean, like, I've seen a lot of press out there. There's, you know, there's been a lot of coverage, a lot of speculation. You know, every month since the deal happened, we've had growth, which I think a lot of people

• 2:09:20Speaker 09

  will be surprised to hear. You know, given, I mean, like I read the news and then we look at what's going on inside the company and we're just like, okay, we gotta start talking a little bit more. Obviously I've been in the seat only a few months and so there's been a lot going on. But yeah, like things are going well. We have two, I mean, one thing worth noting, like is that we have two multi-hundred million dollar businesses. We have our data business, which we're most known for. Yeah, so if you were to split either of these out, and we have an applications and services business, which applies this in customers, that business alone has hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. And so if you were to break that out, it'd be its own unicorn or deck of corn or whatever they're called these days. So.

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  That's wild. Do you ever, you get inbound, maybe a customer fills out a form on your website. Do you ever, you ever have to check to make sure it's not like a runaway superintelligence? It's like, you know, off on its own, just like hoovering up data?

• 2:10:18Speaker 09

  Well, I mean, great, great question.

• 2:10:24Speaker 09

  We tend to know our customers pretty deeply.

• 2:10:26Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you gotta have the KYC process in place.

• 2:10:29Speaker 09

  And frankly, they spend, you know, these are, data is not cheap to procure. So that'd be a very expensive hoovering operation.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, if AI, if AI progresses like the AI 2027 crowd was projecting, at some point or another, a superintelligence will come and you'll have to choose, you know, humanity or, or the superintelligence.

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  Have you run into any like super small companies that are customers? We've talked to some small LLM providers, like they're not building the mega GPT-4, GPT-5 level models. They say, we're still doing, you know, transformer-based AI, but it's, it runs on a gaming, a gaming graphics card. And I feel like usually they're just distilling llama or something into a smaller model. But is there any, are there any customers that have come to you and just had some weird niche use case? That's like pretty light on the data, but so differentiated that it actually provides value for them in their particular niche? Or is it all just like, you know, the huge labs, the big, the people taking really big swings?

• 2:11:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think the big swings is most of it. We do see some of the smaller stuff.

• 2:11:40Speaker 09

  Where, you know, where we actually are starting to see some data needs, which is sort of, you know, it goes to just following the market is actually the inside of enterprises. So they're not actually building their own foundation model, but they're hitting the limits of their own, sort of the data that they have to make applications useful in their environment. And obviously the US government, we do a lot of computer vision data for the Department of Defense too. So those are the more sort of smaller customers and maybe less publicized things that scale those.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Are there other analogies to the DOD where there are companies that have private, like more, like more secure data needs and maybe the, the scale process is working on top of their own proprietary data and they need to transform it somehow and, and you get involved. Is that, is that a thing at all?

• 2:12:35Speaker 09

  Yeah. So that's the applications and services side of our.

• 2:12:37John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. That makes sense.

• 2:12:38Speaker 09

  Right? And so, and so the history there is as we were supplying data to the model builders, obviously scale is very well known. Alex is very well connected to the company. There's a lot of people. People started contacting us saying like, hey, we kind of thought this AGI thing was just going to like pop out of the box and do everything for us. And the reality is, is like, that's not what's happening at all. And so as we got pulled into that world and being asked like, well, how do I apply this to an accounting problem? How do I apply this to a healthcare problem? We started to see the actual fundamental problems inside of these organizations and why they can't get there. And what's interesting is I like, I've actually been on site with some customers in the past, in the past month,

• 2:13:21Speaker 09

  you know, as we're getting to production with this latest round. And some of the limits they're hitting is the actual human knowledge from the executive staff or in like a healthcare setting, maybe the most senior doctor or in an accounting setting, the most senior accountant. And they, you know, they sort of went into this, this thinking like, okay, we might need some data from the subject matter experts here, but, but you know, maybe a junior accountant or maybe a junior lawyer will just go in and label some data where we don't have recorded data. And, you know, but we, you know, need the models to do something that they currently aren't doing. And what's happening is, is that the senior staff is finding that they

• 2:14:02Speaker 09

  need to get involved. Because as you build these agent systems, which agents are basically obviously just applications running, you know, that leverage AI that coordinate with each other, in order to align them, you know, which goes to your AI 2027 comment, which is like, are they going to be aligned to like human values and then will they do the things that we want them to do, the way that we want them to do them? You actually need, the question becomes who do you align it to in an organization? Like, do you align it to, you know, someone who's straight out of college? Maybe. Do you align it to the most senior person in the organization? Maybe. They need a partner to help them figure out, like. Yeah.

• 2:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you align it, do you align it to compliance? Yeah, the

• 2:14:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Or, you know, somebody more on the operating side?

• 2:14:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you guys seeing on the like smaller model builder side of things? Are you seeing like the, you know, the things you're asking me about in terms of like, like their needs and specialization?

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think there's like this, there's this big question right now about inference costs. And, and do you need to throw a reasoning model at everything? Token costs are coming down, but people just keep moving on to the, they're like, oh, the, the, the better model is the same price as the last model. So I'm not even capturing that 10% or the 10x gain or whatever is happening in the, in the cost of inference. The most recent data point that we actually got that was hard was from Notion in the Wall Street Journal. Ivan, the founder, said that their gross margins dropped from 90% to 80%, you know, not, not that bad. And I think that that's a trade that they should take all day long. But, but you could imagine that.

• 2:15:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think.

• 2:15:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you, you could imagine that. So basically Notion's probably paying for the, the best in class intelligence. And that's, and that's having a material cost on their gross margins. But if they figure out that, okay, what users are really excited to pay for is, you know, a report summarizes everything that's happening in Notion across all your documents. Or they really love templating with AI, or they really love having just a, a, a chat interface on the, on the right that, you know, is somewhat aware of the documents. And they can just kind of ask, hey, I, I, you know, I, I remember putting all of my medical records in one Notion thing. Or I remember putting all my financial or my CRM over here, like, can you find that for me?

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  Over time, I would bet that they're able to distill that into smaller and smaller models, bring down the per token cost or token per dollar per million token to cost to a place where the margins go back up. But it's kind of a broad question in the market as as more and more companies lean into AI and want to deliver like the most frontier model possible to their customers. No one wants to say like, oh, yeah, we have, yeah, we did, we added AI to our product. It's GPT three point five. People will be like, why? What am I paying for?

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  What can you share about like more general business strategy at scale going forward? Your forty nine percent of the company is owned by Meta, but you guys still have a bunch of customers, tons of revenue. You talked about two nine-figure businesses. You got a bunch of people on your team. Like, how are you kind of like rallying the team? And what are what are what are reasons that people should join Scale today? And be a part of the the opportunity you guys are going after?

• 2:17:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, it's worth taking a step back and talking about that deal for a second, which is, you know, Meta put in over fourteen billion dollars for forty nine percent of the company as part of that. Alex and if and some others went to Meta.

• 2:17:39Speaker 09

  Scale still has over eleven hundred employees and we're and and a billion dollars on the balance sheet. And so we have a lot of money.

• 2:17:48Jordi Hays?

  And those employees, to be clear, are not, none of those are contributors. Those are like people that work on the scale platform.

• 2:17:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, the contributor network has hundreds of thousands of people.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:57Speaker 09

  And so those are people that are working at Scale.

• 2:18:02Speaker 09

  When I joined the company, actually, I joined the application side of the business. I didn't join the data side of the business when I joined as the chief strategy officer. And I sort of saw the opportunity there. And so we're investing heavily there and customers are reserving budget heavily there. And, you know, as an example, we just got a hundred million dollar contract with the army to provide services and data and people to them. And so you've got the data business, which is supplying data to the models. And then you've got the applications and services business, which is making those things, making those models do things inside of large, complex organizations, Fortune five hundreds, US government, international governments.

• 2:18:43Speaker 09

  And that this opportunity is going to be huge for Scale and very few people actually know about it. This is a multi hundred million dollar business, as I said today. We've got contracts with Qatar is a huge customer, the US government's a huge customer. We've got dozens of Fortune five hundred companies that we work with. And so I think the opportunity for Scale right now is just to like capture. This wave going forward, because we're at the very, very beginning of actually making AI work inside these big organizations.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you, where in big organizations right now, where do you think AI is overhyped and where do you think it's underhyped? We asked this to Karp yesterday.

• 2:19:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's very overhyped that it's going to eliminate jobs in the next like one to two years. Like, I think this line of thinking would require a change in the curve of capabilities and the change management inside of these organizations, where I think it's like way overblown. Like, the promise is just so high, and the reality of what's going on on the ground is this, there's value, but the value needs to be extracted, and that requires a ton of work. And I think what's gonna happen with these customers in the next year, if I had to make a prediction, is you're gonna go from like having a certain amount of money, which is usually a lot in these companies, allocated for like AI initiatives, to what is the ROI?

• 2:20:08Speaker 09

  Like, you know, the Grim Reaper is going to come for every AI company that is not delivering value to these customers. Because, because what's happened is, is they've all been sucked into this idea that like, oh, if we don't invest in this, we're gonna miss out. But, because AGI is coming. And the reality is, is that if that doesn't pay off, that expectation is very high. And if you're not finding a way to like give ground truth to these customers, they're gonna be very disappointed.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  So do you think we're approaching the trough of disillusionment in some of these big enterprises?

• 2:20:39Speaker 09

  I mean, it like, I think the gap, yeah, I mean, my short answer is yeah. I think that the, the, I've seen this in many tech cycles before, the promises are way out of our, there's still a ton of value. Like, it's not that it's like vapor, like, we are delivering value, but the effort it takes, and the amount of data you need to like organize in a company, and get from human beings inside the company to make sophisticated applications work, is way harder than people are, are selling today, except for us.

• 2:21:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Has the contributor, has like the geopolitical or geo, geographic footprint of the contributor network changed as you've moved towards more like expert-focused criteria, like the PhDs?

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  Is it still spread all over the world? Are people onboarding in Europe and America? Like, what, what is the, what is the geo, the geographic footprint look like right now?

• 2:21:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, the footprint, as you would expect, you know, centers around areas where PhD and masters and advanced degree, you know, people are.

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:47Speaker 09

  And so you have a very high US footprint.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:49Speaker 09

  You know, parts of Europe, India and Latin America. There's actually, I mean, one interesting fact is, like, there's a lot of contributors who are, who are contributing at a high level who've actually grown themselves.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:22:03Speaker 09

  Like, like, you would think it would be like, if you don't have a PhD, you can't do this type of work.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:07Speaker 09

  And, you know, maybe PhD is too far of a stretch here, but like, if you, like, you don't have domain expertise. What we've actually seen is contributors go through this whole cycle from a, from a, from a sophistication standpoint, and we think that they're self-teaching.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically. Yeah, the finding method.

• 2:22:22Speaker 09

  Yeah, which is-

• 2:22:23John Coogan?

  The finding method to teach, teach to learn.

• 2:22:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, which is kind of amazing, if you think about labor markets and like, you would just assume like, oh, the, the technology would move on, but the people are adapting.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Jordy, anything else?

• 2:22:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was super, super insightful.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:22:38Jordi Hays?

  Always welcome to join. You, you just give us a few minutes warning and we'll send you the link and you drop on. So, glad, glad you guys are out telling your story and congrats on all the progress.

• 2:22:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, this was fun. Thank you for the opportunity.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Jason.

• 2:22:51Speaker 09

  All right, cool. Take care. Bye.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about adquick.com, 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.

• 2:23:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Do we have our next guest?

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  Uh, we do. I think, I believe our next guest is in the Restream waiting room right now. We'll bring him into the TBP and Ultra Dome. Good to meet you. How are you doing?

• 2:23:18Jordi Hays?

  It's happening.

• 2:23:19Speaker 02

  Guys, how you doing? Thanks so much for having me on. I feel like I, I feel like I need to say thanks, uh, nine times. Do I need to say thanks nine times?

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Uh, we, I mean, we love, we love, uh, being thanked, uh, maybe, you know, uh, but save some of the thanks for-

• 2:23:34Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on. Thank you for being you. Thank you for being here.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Thank you for being here.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for raising capital. Thank you for building.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  But what a fabulous time to be alive.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, indeed. Um, let's kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Um, let me tell you a little bit about Rivet. We founded the company about a year and a half ago and we, the, the team has just been cooking furiously. The, the, the fundamental philosophy that we have is there's about a half a billion people in the Western world that have been completely and totally underserved by big tech. This is people that do hard jobs in hard places. So you think people on flight lines, people in factories, people in bucket trucks and people on the battlefield. We feel that the most transformative application of AI and augmented reality is with these people. So we set out to build a portfolio of products to do, to do just that for that group of people. That's, that's fundamentally probably the most important group of people.

• 2:24:34Speaker 02

  Operating, building and defending our way of life.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Walk me through like one case study of someone actually using, uh, using your product, uh, to get more productivity.

• 2:24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. As you can imagine, I mean, even had Dr. Carpe on yesterday talking about everybody from plumbers to people sitting in, doing financial analysis, et cetera. When you think about somebody, let's, let's pretend, uh, they're in an aerospace manufacturing facility. You've got a substantial amount of telemetry coming off of machines, tooling, the actual aircraft itself. And you've got a glut or there is a deficit of people that are actually able to do that job efficiently. The application of reasoned intelligence delivering to folks, uh, on the flight line that are, you know, operating with tools and a heads up pants free fashion.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  Is, is, is going to be the most, uh, the, the most.

• 2:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Giving Zuck a run for his money there with the Ray-Bans.

• 2:25:33Speaker 02

  These are, these are, the, the, these are certainly better than Ray-Bans.

• 2:25:36John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, shots fired.

• 2:25:39John Coogan?

  Boom, boom.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Uh, anyways. Talk about the progress of the, of the business. Uh, there's a new army contract. Uh, where are you in that process? What does it mean? And how did it come together?

• 2:25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, this program specifically with the Army is probably the most important thing that I will do in my career. To tell you the truth, I can, I can cut to the punchline. I'm holding in my hand a contract that we executed with the Army for $195 million to deliver the next generation of soldier born mission command. So that's where we are in the business. The team, we started from a clean sheet of paper back in January of last year with a determined focus to build the most comfortable, most rugged, most utilitarian

• 2:26:27Speaker 02

  fighting goggle for the Army that's ever been seen, and that's what we've done. So we were, we were selected over the past few months in a, in a very rigorous source selection process.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Talk to me about lessons from the Soldier's Computer, from IVAS, from... HoloLens. Yeah, there was a, what, 20-year, 30-year process? And there were lots of concerns about weight, lots of money spent. How do you tell the story?

• 2:26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've touched on, you've touched on a lot of areas that are of vital importance to us. In fact, when we started the company, we thought about that whole set of a half billion people in the world that are underserved by modern technology, and we boiled it down to four big things. What do they need? They need a system that is comfortable enough to wear for the duration of a mission. For a guy in a bucket truck or a flight line, that might be eight or 10 hours. For a, you know, a paratrooper doing an airfield seizure, that's 72 hours, so comfort is number one.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:22Speaker 02

  You need ruggedization because all of these people doing the hard jobs are doing the job in the most austere of environments. So you need a fully rugged device, that is shock-proof, dust-proof, you know,

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  protects against water ingress, can handle the percussive elements of using tools, jackhammers or guns, et cetera. That's number three. And finally, you need, you need a compliant device. And compliance is, is a very broad category of statutory and regulatory things that these kind of products come under. And that is specifically over the supply chain. Specifically, you can't have bad guy parts in a device that's going to be deployed in a secure environment. There is governance over what constitutes eye protection. Whether you're on the factory floor and you need true eye protection, that's ANZI compliance for, for, for not getting your eyes hurt in those kinds of environments, or whether you're a... A soldier on the battlefield needing ballistics and laser protection. And then finally, utility.

• 2:28:17Speaker 02

  Utility comes from the ability of the actual face computer and the end user productivity system to be able to connect to other data, get reasoned intelligence at the point of need. Where that utility comes back full circle to the enterprise is now you have, let's say the enterprise ontology has a set of eyes and a set of ears that understand the enterprise the way that the human would. And that's the do loop that we're creating with these dynamic task systems for these frontline workers.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Is the why now basically just we're in a phase of, I don't know, technological commoditization where miniaturization of batteries and chips is at a point where it's just we're getting to a place where you can functionally deliver everything that you said. And like, do you think it would have been possible to build this 10 years ago, 20 years ago?

• 2:29:10Speaker 02

  Oh, I, that, that, John, it was a perfect prompt. Like, I was going to answer your question exactly that. In fact, this device could not have been built five years ago. So you have a confluence of a bunch of things happening. If you think about just the supply chain and the underlying components that go into products like this, and you think about the amount of capital that's been poured into them by all of the big tech companies that you know. You know what Zuck has actually spent? He reports a quarter of a quarter on his, on his, on the mixture of value lines in the report. That's something like 60, 65 billion dollars, I think, the last I checked. Certainly know what the other big tech companies, net-net, you put the sigma on the bottom of that column and you get something like a quarter of a trillion dollars has been invested in the underlying things that emit light, combine light, bend light, the processing

• 2:29:54Speaker 02

  capability that can go in a small form factor, remaining thermodynamically compliant, so it doesn't burn your face, et cetera. So all of that supply chain has come together. And it's a very hungry supply chain because for 10 or 15 years, they've been promised that everybody in the world is going to be wearing these things. And that's where the market has actually gone wrong. Augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality has largely been a technology looking for a problem rather than a solution to a big industry's articulated need. And that's what we've built and what we're focused on.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. How important is SLAM, like some simultaneous location and mapping, I think is the acronym. But the actual idea of like overlaying images into the real world versus just a HUD that is static. Like when I'm in Call of Duty and I do a 360 no scope, the map, the mini map stays in the same part of the screen the entire time. When you're in, you know, the Apple Vision Pro and you put a screen down, you turn your head, the screen stays in the environment. There's benefits to both. What's your take?

• 2:30:58Speaker 02

  I, I think that there, there is a ratio or proportion of what is world locked and what is head locked and what is body locked in every application scenario. And you have to have the right thing to make the best user experience. And that user experience has to, you know, contemplate the cognitive load of the end user, the environment, et cetera. No doubt, SLAM and the ability to create a, you know, a holographic can and put it on the table and stay locked. So as my perspective on the can changes, it's rendered appropriately. And then being able to do that fast enough, so there's not some oculovestibular discomfort that causes you to want to

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:35Speaker 02

  puke is critical. So when we think about advanced manufacturing scenarios, specifically the installation of a part on an aircraft, you want to be able to line that up very accurately. And when the quality control guy comes past, he's got to check and validate that it's in the right place and installed correctly. So in that sense, it's very, it's, it's very important. In other use cases, you know, you referenced the Call of Duty kind of thing. Some course or three D off base, just like, hey, I want a crude kind of location. Like I'm looking this way, there's some nouns that are bad or good on this side of me. You can reduce the amount of six D off or, you know, high fidelity slam that you have to do.

• 2:32:17Speaker 02

  Long winded answer to your question, it's critically important to have that capability in the system and available to application developers that are developing with it to build a good experience for the end user.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, on that flexibility point, but do you want to create two different hardware stacks? Because I imagine a three D off headset could be lighter, could have longer battery life. Like you're just doing less things and so maybe you can have some savings that you pass along to everything else? Or, or is this just not an issue anymore?

• 2:32:49Speaker 02

  The, the, the issue is becoming further and further less severe or less acute as cameras and processors and the actual algorithms themselves become more efficient. Certainly the, the market that is most important to us and where we're focused. We don't need a $300 consumer device. What, what folks need on the battlefield, on the aerospace flight line is a high precision, high performance device that delivers both a quick and dirty kind of crude direction of where you need to go to get to safety or, or to do something important. And then also the super high provision tracking that would be required on the aerospace manufacturing.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about dual use? I, I, we saw a hot take from a, from a founder on the timeline a couple of weeks ago saying that like, going dual use too early can be a risk. Palantir is a great example, but it's kind of an accidental dual use company. And they spent 20 years wandering the wilderness and it, it, you know, it, it took a long time to build that. Some people have been saying, go, go dual use on day one. Other people have been saying, you know, wait and maybe it emerges in a decade or two decades. Maybe it's your second act along, like long down the road. How do you think about the trade off of balancing?

• 2:34:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I, I think it's circumstantial to the individual company and individual product. For us, we thought about dual use immediately. When I say, hey, there's a half a billion people that are underserved by big tech and underserved by this product, that is half a billion people that are doing this exact job. And whether they're on the flight line or in the bucket truck or on the battlefield, largely the same kind of persona working in that austere environment. For us, the Army contract is an incredible, is an incredible thing for us. Primarily because if we get it right for the most size, weight and power constrained user that is the most hard on their gear and operating in the most critical environment, we get it right for everybody else.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:34:41Speaker 02

  And that's what we've done. So that market we're coming. In fact, when I started contemplating about the thesis in our product development and go to market direction, I thought maybe the, the, the, the commercial market would be serialized behind. But what we've seen just six months out of stealth, as people are looking at the product, they're hungry for it and they're ready for it. So this is going to happen in parallel. You know, I, I've referenced the Army contract.

• 2:35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:08Speaker 02

  We're, we're, we've got signed scopes of works and execution agreements with some of the biggest aerospace manufacturers in the world to do exactly this thing on both the military flight line and the, the commercial flight line.

• 2:35:20John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. You're out of stealth. Give us the fundraising update. Got some news for us?

• 2:35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I gotta tell you something. It's an incredible situation to have a confluence of these things coming together in the same week. We just finished our A round. That brings total investment into Rivet to $90 million over the past.

• 2:35:45Speaker 02

  This is a market that, that, that our investors believe in. You know, shout out Doug Filippone.

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  Snowpoint Ventures.

• 2:35:52Speaker 02

  We've got Steve Cohen.

• 2:35:53Jordi Hays?

  Goat.

• 2:35:54Speaker 02

  Point 72.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  Go.

• 2:35:56Speaker 02

  Let our seed round. And then Duquesne Capital. Shout out to them.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Very cool. That's fantastic.

• 2:36:02Jordi Hays?

  Cap table is just four goat emojis.

• 2:36:05John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:36:05Speaker 02

  You can't, I, we just can't have it better.

• 2:36:07Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 2:36:08Speaker 02

  Customers and supporters.

• 2:36:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I love, I love companies like this where you just take a team with like deep, deep, deep domain expertise and a bunch of advantages right from the start. But then you, when, when you have that, you have to execute at an insanely high level and clearly. You guys are so.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:36:26Jordi Hays?

  It's awesome to see a masterclass.

• 2:36:28John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Enjoy the weekend.

• 2:36:31Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for having us on. A lot of fun. I love the show, man. You guys are innovating.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  I appreciate it.

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Get us, get us, uh, we're, we're, we're doing, this is an austere environment.

• 2:36:40John Coogan?

  It is. There's bugs around. There's dust.

• 2:36:43Speaker 02

  You guys, you guys need some rivet like.

• 2:36:45John Coogan?

  Honestly, I'm reading, I'm reading like chat over here. I'm reading text messages about who's the next guest and stuff.

• 2:36:51Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, listen, you guys, we gotta get you out of the studio and out into the woods to do some like frontline stuff. You want to come shoot some guns and do some cool stuff. We'd love to have you.

• 2:37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 2:37:01Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 2:37:02Speaker 02

  Guys, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

• 2:37:03John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Dave.

• 2:37:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Dave.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Bye. Up next, we have Mert Mumtaz from Helios dev.

• 2:37:10Jordi Hays?

  He's calling in.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  About bezel first. Get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Uh, we are excited to talk to Mert. He's taking a couple of minutes out of his busy day to break down the latest L1 for us. So we will bring in Mert from the restream waiting room whenever he is ready. If he is available, I know his last minute. Mert, how you doing? Thanks so much for taking the time. I know it's always crazy with the time change, but.

• 2:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So, so I want to pitch you something. Okay. Blockchain for yapping so that we can get specifically, we want more yaps per second.

• 2:37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, people say TBN coin, but why not an L1?

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yap, YPS is exactly what we're going for.

• 2:37:50John Coogan?

  I, I feel like you're not that serious with what you do. I could beat you in my free time. Maybe I should just go up against you. What do you think about that?

• 2:37:58Jordi Hays?

  In, in yapping?

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  No, no, no. In crypto, in, in your main thing. It could be my side thing and I could compete with you. That sounds like a great plan. Anyway.

• 2:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Of course. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm, uh, just hanging out in my F tier city today. Uh, you guys are in your right F tier cities.

• 2:38:15John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you. You inspired me. You inspired me.

• 2:38:18Jordi Hays?

  That was the, we, we love that first post because it was just, it's the perfect post. It's like, how, how do you get a bunch of people to agree with you and a bunch of people to disagree with you in the same?

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  Viral fuel. I think I might do a tier list every day.

• 2:38:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You created a, a new meta.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fantastic. Uh, anyway, uh, take us through like what, what actually launched, um, and, and, uh, what, if you can give us like a steel man and then, and then your kind of, uh, your kind of argument. I'd love to just kind of like get up to speed on what Stripe and Paradigm are doing here. Uh, and then kind of understand some of the trade offs.

• 2:38:54Mert Mumtaz?

  Sure. So I'm guessing people have all read the announcement, but basically it seems there's a new blockchain called Tempo and they're messaging in such a way that it's an independent company with Paradigm, which is a VC firm, mostly in crypto or really exclusively in crypto, and Stripe as the first investors, is a team of 15 led by Matt, who co-founder of Paradigm, very, very good investor. And they're basically building what's called a Layer One, an L1 blockchain called Tempo, and it's going to be focused on payments and stable coins. And so there's a few, and we can go quite a few different directions

• 2:39:36Mert Mumtaz?

  here. So there's a few controversies around it. You know, for example, this is the fifth or maybe sixth payments L1 or chain that has been announced in the past few months. It has some parallels to something like Libra back in the day from Facebook. Yeah, I was gonna ask. Yeah. And then the one other thing that got some heat is that it's an L1 instead of an L2. So an L2, for people who aren't familiar, would be basically a smaller blockchain on top of a bigger blockchain. So generally, an L2 is on top of Ethereum, which everybody obviously knows of. And Paradigm traditionally has been very Ethereum-centric, not exclusively,

• 2:40:17Mert Mumtaz?

  but very Ethereum-centric. And so for them to create an L1 instead of an L2 Ethereum churned some heads as well. So there's a lot there.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  Okay. So, yeah, I mean, like, I know very little about this, but the obvious one is like, most of these problems seem solved by Circle and Solana. Like, we've seen a lot of these, like, big, but I mean, just in this idea of like, like, there seems to be a serious player, from my perspective, that's taking stable coins seriously. And there seems to be a player that's taking transaction, KBS, seriously.

• 2:40:52Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, I guess, given that you're building in the Solana ecosystem, I guess, like,

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  Some of the pushback that I saw from you on the timeline was that complaining that, or not complaining, but in the original announcement post, they shared that, they shared an example of like during Trump coin launch, you couldn't run payroll or something like that. And we're basically saying that like, we're not going to be able to rely on something like a Solana. You were pushing back and basically saying that like, there's a lot of reasons that you would want to create a new L1, like there are real reasons that you kind of laid out, but transactions per second would, or sort of scale, maybe is not one of them.

• 2:41:33Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, so to be clear, I think, like if I'm just to put on my objective hat, I think it's certainly a good move, and I think if I were Stripe, I would probably do the same thing. I don't think I need to pay rent to anybody, I can just create my own chain, especially if I have somebody like Paradigm helping me and a world-class team, then I want to own the full stack, right? And I think that's totally fair, and the distribution and everything that comes with it. Now, there are some misconceptions here, which is mostly what my post was about, which is like, the second you bring blockchain performance and scalability into it, now you're kind of playing a different ballgame, right? So for example, this idea of a payments-only chain, right? Let's just think about this for a second.

• 2:42:18Mert Mumtaz?

  How can you possibly have something that's a payments-only chain, right? A blockchain is by definition something that's permissionless, meaning anybody can just come on and do anything that they want there. So if you just say, we're going to be paid for payments only, that's not going to actually happen unless you enforce that somehow, and generally, the way to enforce that is twofold. One is, the chain can be not-ture-incomplete, so something like Bitcoin, where you actually can't do anything other than send money. The other is, you can permission the chain, which is actually what's going to happen here for when they first launch. Now, they did say they have plans to make it permissionless in the future, but I think that's going to prove out to be much tougher, because the second you make something permissionless,

• 2:43:00Mert Mumtaz?

  you end up getting all sorts of degenerate behavior, or people launching Fartcoin and all these different things.

• 2:43:06Jordi Hays?

  Imagine buying Fartcoin on Tempo.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  Stripe checkout, one click, one line of code to launch a new meme coin. Yeah, it seems like they would want to avoid that, so they will be going more permissionless.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Functionally, do you expect Tempo to have a token? Like that trait, like a liquid token itself in the same way that like Solana does or but but from my understanding, so like base is like a blockchain, but it doesn't have its own native token that's fluctuating in price, correct?

• 2:43:41Mert Mumtaz?

  Right, yes. And part of the reason is because base is an L2, so it's one of those smaller chains that settles on Ethereum. And so you would just use Ethereum, it gets a security from Ethereum is how you would like say how that works. With an L1, though, security is quite important because it's you're building it from scratch. You can't rely on Ethereum or Solana. And so the point of the token is going to be to bootstrap in general for a blockchain to bootstrap node operators, right? So people are actually securing the network. Now, if the validator set is permissioned at first, which it will be, and they say that it's going to be design partners, so I'm guessing like, you know, bigger banks and some of the bigger companies, then you don't actually need a token because it's like proof of authority, right? It doesn't have to be proof of stake or

• 2:44:26Mert Mumtaz?

  proof of work, it can just be proof of authority. And so and then they also say that gas fees should be paid in any kind of stablecoin that they denote, and they're going to allow for multiple stablecoins. So that is better UX, right? It's not a volatile gas token. So I don't think they actually need it at first. I think it will be important if they actually want to become permissionless going into the future.

• 2:44:53John Coogan?

  Okay, so the permissionless thing is something that they can drive for the long term. If they just wanted to optimize for something that they control and has high throughput, couldn't we get a scenario like temp Postgres or something where they could just use Postgres or use like traditional non decentralized computing to actually just move money around faster? Is there, I guess my bigger question is like, is there a regulatory angle here where they get something that they can do something with crypto rails that they couldn't do with just a traditional database?

• 2:45:32Mert Mumtaz?

  Right, yes. So that's actually a really good question and

• 2:45:36John Coogan?

  Like, could they just become a bank and say, "We're a bank, we have US dollars, and when you go into your US dollar bank account, you can move it around and our banking infrastructure runs 24/7 and runs on a great data center that's really fast. And yeah, it's not permissionless, but why don't you trust Stripe? Like Stripe has never done anything for you, against you. Like, it's fine, trust us.

• 2:46:00Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, so this is where the conversations get quite blurry. And this is something I talk about very frequently, which is the second you have to permission the block space, then it's unclear what really separates this from an actual blockchain versus something more like an actual database.

• 2:46:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:19Mert Mumtaz?

  Right? And now, there are some benefits of blockchains that are still apparent even if it's controlled. So things like transparency, audibility, universal standards for that blockchain. And also, you get the, you know, the approach of progressive decentralization, which is to say, you can iterate towards PMF fast, but then as you get more traction, you can slowly decentralize certain things.

• 2:46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:44Mert Mumtaz?

  This is what L2s today are doing. So there are some benefits. And like, you know, if no one person is controlling that infrastructure, right? Assume you have, let's say, something like 21 validators and they're all giant companies or payments companies across the world, different jurisdictions and different, you know, requirements, then I think that can be interesting. But I think, like, to be completely honest, I think permissioned blockchains aren't really blockchains. And like, it starts looking super

• 2:47:15Mert Mumtaz?

  drawn out when we get there. Like, we've tried a bunch of these before.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:20Mert Mumtaz?

  Like JP Morgan already has one, actually.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:47:22Mert Mumtaz?

  And a few, yeah, and a few other companies also do.

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  JP Morgan said, "I want my blockchain to be off the chain."

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:47:32John Coogan?

  Can you talk to me about about like payment onboarding? I think of Stripe as a dominant web two payments company. I think about Stripe Checkout, massive footprint. Stripe Link, massive. Just the amount of companies that have Stripe somewhere in their payment stack is immense. And so, but I was noodling with Jordy, like, how does this actually work? If I go to a website that's powered by Stripe and I have, normally there's like a credit card field. And then it just says, oh, well, we also take Tempo. And I'm like, what's Tempo? Like, how do I get that? Do I need to go get a Chrome extension for a wallet?

• 2:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, theoretically, theoretically, it would just have like a, it would just have like a generic pay button.

• 2:48:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:23Jordi Hays?

  And then it wouldn't be Tempo branded necessarily at all. It would be Stripe branded and you would connect your wallet and you would, with something like Privy.

• 2:48:31John Coogan?

  So the first time I do it, I set up a wallet? Is that roughly the user experience?

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing is like more and more and more and more young people just have digital assets.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:41Jordi Hays?

  They have wallets that they can actually.

• 2:48:43Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah. The way I can, and by the way, like each fintech company kind of has a different approach on this. I've worked with a few of them and there is no like universal standard. But with Stripe, they wouldn't say pay with Tempo because Tempo is just like, in this case, the name of the database, right? Like it would be, they probably would abstract that away.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like pay with Fedwire or something. It's like something that's under the hood. Like pay with Fedwire doesn't make any sense, but like there might be some, there might be some ACH that's happening behind the scenes when you pay with your credit card. But you just say, we accept Visa.

• 2:49:15Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, exactly. I think the first case is going to be B to B, meaning like cross-border settlements.

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:49:21Mert Mumtaz?

  Like that's super useful for international companies, for example.

• 2:49:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:25Mert Mumtaz?

  Remittances, things like this.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:28Mert Mumtaz?

  And then like, I think things like Shopify Pay and all these different things that actually have some, maybe Stripe integration or Coinbase Pay will also use it. But like at most, I can see it being like paid with USDC. But I don't, I don't think the blockchain will actually be really in the implementation at all. It'll be abstracted is my guess.

• 2:49:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. How should we like judge the success of this project in a few years? Like, is it, or should we assume that the goal here is progressive decentralization? Like, in the best-case scenario, the vast majority of transactions on the Tempo chain are truly payments-related, it doesn't turn into a meme coin chain, and also it's becoming more decentralized as measured by the, what is it, the Balaji coefficient of, he put out some posts-

• 2:50:18Mert Mumtaz?

  Nakamoto.

• 2:50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Nakamoto coefficient. I gave Balaji the credit just for coining it, I think. But the Nakamoto coefficient of like, concentration of validators, ideally, the goal here is a ton of distributed validators, no one owns 51%, and the majority of the payments are payment-related, just transactions on ecommerce websites and remittances and cross-border payments, is that the goal that we should be tracking towards?

• 2:50:44Mert Mumtaz?

  So, the way I would do it is, first of all, is it actually solving any problems and doing finance better than it has been done before, right? Like, is it actually making the experience for merchants better? Are they getting better margins? How easy is it to do cross-border things, etc.? Like, the UX and the actual product need, I think, especially when you're in crypto realm, is something that gets overlooked, but like Stripe is obviously probably the team to take this over the line. So that's gonna be one. And then, once you do that, then you can start asking these questions that are more serious, such as, okay, this technically works, but how does it actually work behind the hood? Like, they say it's a blockchain, but is this blockchain controlled?

• 2:51:28Mert Mumtaz?

  Can I actually secure my funds here, or can this one company actually take it away? Right? And so, like, what you said about progressive decentralization, I think makes a ton of sense. And then, you know, you'll wanna look at just basic numbers, like, what is the amount of stablecoin flows going in and out of this thing? Is there like decentralization of stablecoins? Like, is it just USDC? Or is it Tether as well? Maybe Stripe does their own stablecoin. So there's a lot of interesting approaches with this. And then, I think, what's gonna be interesting is like- If it's permissionless, which I don't think it will get there for a while, if it does become permissionless, does the scale benefits that they say actually, do they actually hold up to reality?

• 2:52:13Mert Mumtaz?

  And I think that part is going to surprise a lot of people because I think people are not ready to understand how crazy degenerates get on blockchains that are permissionless and how to actually scale those systems. But, I mean, I've seen some shit. And so I think, I think if it remains permissioned, then I think they'll do it. But like, that's the big question for me. Like, how do you actually do this in such a way where it is only for payments?

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. When you talk about degenerates doing crazy things on permissionless blockchains, you're not just talking about a bunch of people showing up and like aping into a particular token, you're talking about somebody setting up like a bot that's like programmatically interacting with the blockchain at an ultra-high volume, is that correct?

• 2:52:59Mert Mumtaz?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, like, take all the big players in HFT and just like, mix them up with like random British sneaker botter kids.

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:11Mert Mumtaz?

  And then with like some random like Russian MEV farms and like, it's just, it's all-out war.

• 2:53:16Jordi Hays?

  I just want to get to a place as a, as a country and, and, and the crypto industry broadly where the next, you know, whoever's elected in 2028, that they can launch multiple coins of the size of Trump coin at once and make sure that payroll is still running smoothly during that, during that time.

• 2:53:36John Coogan?

  That's the goal.

• 2:53:37Jordi Hays?

  That should be the goal, so.

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for filling us in here.

• 2:53:40John Coogan?

  We appreciate you taking the time.

• 2:53:41Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, come back on us, there's more news.

• 2:53:43John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 2:53:44Jordi Hays?

  It's great to catch up.

• 2:53:45Mert Mumtaz?

  All right.

• 2:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:53:47Mert Mumtaz?

  Cheers.

• 2:53:48John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Harish in the restream waiting room. We've kept him waiting. We will bring him in from Augment. Big news today, we're very excited. Play some soundboard for me, JD. Thank you. Welcome to the stream. Sorry to keep you waiting. We had some breaking news in the crypto world. We had to dig in. He was only available at 1:40, so thank you for taking the time.

• 2:54:08Speaker 11

  Hey, no, no, bro, I'm very excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:54:12John Coogan?

  Of course. Break it down for us, what is the news?

• 2:54:15Speaker 11

  Well, the big news is that, you know, we're announcing our Series A, which is an $85 million Series A.

• 2:54:23John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Big number, big number.

• 2:54:25John Coogan?

  And yeah, walk me through the state of the business.

• 2:54:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, so you know, we're building Augment, which is, you know, our first product is Augie. Just think of it as an AI teammate for the logistics world. It's getting deployed actively over 35 billion in freight under management across brokers, shippers and fleets. And so early, even we know we are a year old company, but it's showing a lot of promise in the real world and that's why the investors were interested.

• 2:54:54Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. What about shipping and logistics has drawn so many? It's, you guys seem to be, you know, leading the charge out here, but it's certainly a competitive space. Like what about this industry and the category makes it so prime for agents?

• 2:55:12John Coogan?

  Did it kind of skip the SaaS era? Like it feels like it feels like it's the last industry where still, oh yeah, they're still on paper, so they're jumping straight to agents.

• 2:55:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you're getting 10 phone calls, you're getting 10 phone calls a day from the same person just being like, hey, where's my stuff? Hey, where's my stuff?

• 2:55:28John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous.

• 2:55:29Speaker 11

  Yeah, you know, like, one, it's a very large industry, right? It's like $10 trillion globally, but it's extremely fragmented. Like in the US itself, there's like 1 million truck driving companies. I'm not exaggerating, but that's what it is. 1 million truck driving companies, you know?

• 2:55:44Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:55:46Speaker 11

  Maybe tens of thousands of brokerages, hundreds of thousands of shippers, extremely fragmented, right? And so when this fragmented industry, which really relies on transferring information to get things done, to move goods, like that's the whole job of this industry is that, hey, I'll give you information so I can give you goods, right? That's the whole thing. And it's so fragmented, the only way to transfer information is to get to the lowest common mediums. Now, what is the lowest common medium among a million different companies? It's phone calls, it's texts, it's emails.

• 2:56:17John Coogan?

  The fax machine. Is the fax machine still going strong?

• 2:56:20Speaker 11

  Fax machine, you know, I actually have seen fax machines in some of my classes. It's still happening. Invoices coming through, payments going through fax machines. So I mean, every situation, this like this handwritten note being mailed by drivers today on what was their pickup time and delivery time when they get into a driver tux drop, they literally have mailboxes where they can mail, you know, one of those receipts for getting paid. Like that's how, you know, sometimes it's archaic, the communication is.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about lessons from the last company, Deliver, uh, sold to Shopify in 2022 for 2.1 billion dollars. Congratulations, obviously. Uh, how are you positioning the different, uh, the business differently? And what are the key lessons that you learned from that business that you're hoping to take forward?

• 2:57:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, uh, Deliver was building like a prime like service for Shopify type merchants, uh, forward inventory. Um, I mean, the big lessons here has been like focus, you know, customer success is like stay, stay very true to customer delight. Everything else is a noise, like literally everything else, you know, whether your investors like you or not, if your customer delight is there, everybody will follow you, capital will chase you, you know, great employees would want to join you, customers would want to join you. So I mean, I'm hoping I'm carrying that forward, right? Um, now in, in terms of like things that I did not do well, um, at Deliver, um, I think we, there was like a lack of focus sometimes, right? Like, um, as, as the capital

• 2:57:47Speaker 11

  was getting easier, we were maybe trying to do a little too many things, like launching too many products. And those were the really great days of attracting capital because the interest rates were near zero. So the capital was mostly free. Um, and I would have rather not.

• 2:58:00Jordi Hays?

  Mostly free capital.

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Cost of co- cost of capital going up has been heartbreaking.

• 2:58:06John Coogan?

  It's been heartbreaking.

• 2:58:07Speaker 11

  It is, yeah. Going from, what is that? Going from half a percent to now four and a half percent, right? Not easy, right?

• 2:58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:14Speaker 11

  Uh, but I think it does bring, it does bring discipline to things, right? Like, hey, you've got value of limited capital, you, you deploy it in the things that truly matter. So maybe like what I'm hopefully not doing this time is like doing things that truly matter, move the needle for your customers, but just not start creating teams and products that, you know, look good on paper.

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about, uh, vertical integration? Uh, you obviously sell into 3PLs, shippers. Uh, do you want to own the, the warehouse management stack at some point? Do you want to integrate deeply with all the different WMSs? What's the plan there?

• 2:58:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, we we we do not want to own the WMS stack or the transportation management stack or the order management. We don't. We want to sit on top. We want to integrate into all of them. We think of ourselves as a, you know, first and foremost, Aug is an employee that works like a thousands of employees 24/7, achieves a lot of operational efficiency for our businesses. But long term, I think Augment does become a system of work. And I think it will be a system of work and a system of record in most companies. So the WMS, the TMS, the OMS, all the MSs in the world will stay to be very relevant system of records. But there will be a new generation of companies. Hopefully Augment is one of them.

• 2:59:27Speaker 11

  They'll become the system of work itself. And these two will work together very closely with each other, you know, so.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congrats on the massive raise. Congrats on all the progress. And thank you for taking the time to talk to us. Have a great weekend.

• 2:59:41Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, congrats to the whole team.

• 2:59:45John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We have Base10. While we bring them in, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. But better. It's better than a vacation home. Do we have our next guest? Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 3:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 3:00:12Tuhin Srivastava?

  How are you doing?

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  We're good.

• 3:00:13Jordi Hays?

  What's up? The eagle has landed.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  The eagle has landed.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and the news.

• 3:00:19Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, thanks. I'm doing, thanks for having me, guys. I'm doing, I'm the CEO of Base10. You know, I'm pretty excited today. We're an AI infrastructure company. We just raised 150 million bucks.

• 3:00:30John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  That is loud. That is loud.

• 3:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and fifty million dollars.

• 3:00:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. And it's great to meet you.

• 3:00:43Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Announcing a fundraiser on a Friday is not for the week, but you guys are wasting no time. I love it. Give us, can you give us a quick history on the company, your background?

• 3:00:56Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, my background's in machine learning and AI. I've been doing it about 15 years. The company's actually six years old. You know, we didn't, we didn't start just.

• 3:01:09Tuhin Srivastava?

  You know, a couple of six years old, we've been thinking about how to turn AI into value. Now, I think the last two years have been a bit crazy. We started focusing very aggressively on inference. Maybe 24 months ago, are you guys familiar with what inference is?

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I'm not familiar with where you sit in the stack. You don't build data centers, you don't own GPU clusters, you sit on top of Neo clouds or on top of hyperscalers? And then you sell into your companies, I see D-Script, Retool, Cora, Writer, Patreon, Picnic Health. I can imagine how those companies need an API for a model that you probably didn't train. But you act as the inference provider for that and you sell tokens to them. Like, how is it going at that layer of the stack? How is the value accrual in that particular layer?

• 3:02:02Tuhin Srivastava?

  It's fantastic, right? Because, look, we sit on top of, actually, doing inference for models is pretty hard, right? You're going to acquire capacity, you're going to optimize the models, someone else is trained. You're going to run them and then you need to scale them pretty gracefully with users there at scale. And so the amount of work that goes into that from teams is massive and we're just trying to take that headache away. And so we're pretty lucky that, you know, we've been able to just sit on top of this AI application layer. And as that's exploded, we've just kind of rode the wave with it. And we work with a bunch of amazing customers, like a Bridge, Bland, Gamma, Clay, OpenDefinitive, Notion.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  What's the, what is the durable moat? Like, how does value accrue over the long term? Because I feel like, you know, if you don't own the model and can't like rent seek on that or you don't own the hardware, all of a sudden it's like OpenRouter is going to route people to wherever the cheapest tokens are and it becomes highly competitive and the margins might compress. Like, what's the long-term strategy?

• 3:03:04Tuhin Srivastava?

  The assumption you're making there is that all the models are just going to be the same. I mean, everyone's going to be running kind of like the same model. Most of our customers like run different variants of the model that are very custom to them.

• 3:03:16John Coogan?

  Okay, so fine-tuned on open source?

• 3:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so how about, let's use, you said Notion's a customer, maybe we use them as an example because we've been...

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 3:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Or, you know, pick, pick...

• 3:03:30Tuhin Srivastava?

  Have you guys heard of Open Evidence?

• 3:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we're having, I think we're having the founder on next week, so.

• 3:03:35Tuhin Srivastava?

  They're the best. You'll, you'll have a really good time chatting with them, but you know, they're a really good example of a customer that uses us. They train a bunch of models of their own to basically answer the questions of the queries from the doctors. And so, you know, what, what happens when you need to run those models?

• 3:03:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:50Tuhin Srivastava?

  Where you need to make them wicked fast, you need to go get a bunch of GPUs from a bunch of different places. And then you need to kind of scale gracefully across that.

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:03:57Tuhin Srivastava?

  And so, how do you do that? Well, you either go and use an inference provider like Base10, or you go in, you know, build it yourself. You know, and I think the smart companies right now, what they're realizing is that this is not particularly differentiated for them. So they shouldn't do the infrastructure piece. They should focus on what is differentiated for them, which is how they use the models and the applications they build. And, you know, kind of give the boring piece to us. And so, Open Evidence is used by some ungodly amount of doctors every day. And they do it with two great info guys could Jag and Micah. And it's pretty amazing the scale they can achieve using software like Base10.

• 3:04:34Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what does the next 12 months look like for the company?

• 3:04:39Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, this is just, it's such a land grab of a market. We've, we've been doing this for a while and you know, we've built them great technology, but we can't, we can't overestimate how much like a market just showed up for us. And so, how can you go as fast as possible? It's actually kind of like what it feels like venture was built for. Um, you know, that's why we're raising capital right, right now to solve two core problems. The one, you know, hire a go-to-market team that's going to be killer and scale that. And then hire amazing engineers that are incredibly expensive and hard to come by.

• 3:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, uh, I don't know, you could go deeper. Uh, last question for me, what is your view on the broad trend in token pricing? There's been people going back and forth on whether or not we're going to get 10x savings quickly in inference pricing. Uh, whether it's going to be all custom silicon.

• 3:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Basis, but then just using.

• 3:05:33John Coogan?

  OpenAI, just put a $10 billion order into Broadcom. And, and I'm wondering, uh, but then at the same time, companies are just saying, I want to stay on the frontier. I'll use a reasoning model. Um, I will continue to eat the high, you know, per token costs that come out of the bigger models.

• 3:05:51Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, and look, I think the token price goes down and like inference should get cheaper over time.

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:56Tuhin Srivastava?

  Um, and I think that really just means there's going to be more inference. You know, I think we all.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  Jevon's paradox.

• 3:06:03Tuhin Srivastava?

  All of us in tech discovered Jevon's paradox six months ago.

• 3:06:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:06:06Tuhin Srivastava?

  Uh, but every time we lower prices for our customer or we go and optimize their models.

• 3:06:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:11Tuhin Srivastava?

  To make it cheaper, four months later, they're spending more anyway.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:06:14Tuhin Srivastava?

  And so like, yeah, inference prices are going to go down, but if, if, if the comp, if the country, if the world is run by AI. In 10 years from now, there's just going to be a lot of inference.

• 3:06:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:06:25Tuhin Srivastava?

  So it better be, it better be cheap.

• 3:06:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:06:28Tuhin Srivastava?

  And, you know, we just hope that, you know, we can power all of that and be the invisible layer underneath it and. Uh, hopefully scoop off a bit of value while we're at it.

• 3:06:36Jordi Hays?

  What's headcount today? Just out of curiosity.

• 3:06:39Tuhin Srivastava?

  Hundred and four, I think, a hundred and four.

• 3:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and four.

• 3:06:41Tuhin Srivastava?

  Let's, let's call it that.

• 3:06:42John Coogan?

  That's a good team. That's good.

• 3:06:44Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, we, we were about 30, I want to say a year ago, so it's going pretty fast.

• 3:06:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. How many pizzas is that? Hundred, hundred people?

• 3:06:51Tuhin Srivastava?

  Depends, depends how much people eat.

• 3:06:52John Coogan?

  Fifty pizzas, yeah. Anyway, thank you so much.

• 3:06:55Jordi Hays?

  If it's bulking season, you know, it's different.

• 3:06:57John Coogan?

  Might be a hundred pizzas. Yeah. Well, anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 3:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Great having you. Cheers.

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Bye.

• 3:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last guest.

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  We have a surprise guest.

• 3:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Surprise guest. There was some breaking news from Wired. Anthropic agrees to pay authors at least 1.5 billion in AI copyright settlement.

• 3:07:17John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 3:07:17Jordi Hays?

  This just went out via Wired.

• 3:07:19John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 3:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and wanted to have Cecilia on.

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  Hi.

• 3:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Celia, sorry, to, uh, to talk about it.

• 3:07:26Speaker 13

  Yeah, great to meet you. I'm Trichilia Ziniti. Excited to be here.

• 3:07:29John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you.

• 3:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, give us the news. John knows nothing because he was locked in.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  I haven't heard about this. Break it down.

• 3:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Basically knows the headline. That's it.

• 3:07:38Speaker 13

  Yeah, so, um, a group of authors from the Authors Guild sued Anthropic, uh, some time ago. And announced last week that they had reached a settlement. And what happened today was there was a motion, an unopposed motion where the parties said, okay, this settlement is going to be one and a half billion dollars. And it's going to cover the non-fair use of material for training Anthropic law.

• 3:08:07John Coogan?

  Is there any, is there any guidance on, is that just going to be paid out immediately? Is this one time? Because you can imagine that even though it's been baked into the weights, like the value from being able to go to an LLM and ask questions about a book, that's going to pay dividends in subscription revenue for decades potentially.

• 3:08:28Speaker 13

  Yeah, so it covers only past infringement, so up until August 25th.

• 3:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:34Speaker 13

  And so in this case, what's interesting is that the parties in the court distinguish between use of pirated copies and use of copies that were properly acquired. In the case of the pirated copies, it was in a library called LibGen and it was basically, you know, the equivalent of like a Napster type of situation where these works, I think it was about, I need to double check, but in the hundreds, a couple hundred thousand works from authors were in there. So the way the settlement worked was there's a named works list of actual things that Claude was trained on and those authors, those authors will receive compensation here in due course. There's a, like an administrator appointed and so on, but they get a certain amount per

• 3:09:19Speaker 13

  work and that was agreed to and that's what's being proposed to the court.

• 3:09:22Jordi Hays?

  It's at least $3,000 per work, but it was a lot, a lot of, a lot of bucks.

• 3:09:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that seems like, that seems like a pretty solid payout for most people. I don't know.

• 3:09:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 3:09:34Speaker 13

  Yeah, tough to say, yeah.

• 3:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think if you're an author who's not selling a lot of books, you're like, awesome.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  It'd be like, I am a best seller.

• 3:09:43Jordi Hays?

  But if you're somebody who, you have a best seller.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  Ten million dollars a year off of my.

• 3:09:46Jordi Hays?

  And it doesn't make a dent in their income, then, then it might be.

• 3:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you been, have you been tracking the rest of the landscape here? There's been a number of these cases. Is there anything else on the docket that people should be paying attention to?

• 3:10:02Speaker 13

  Yeah, so interesting that the plaintiff's firm representing the authors here, Sussman Godfrey, is the same plaintiff's firm representing the New York Times against OpenAI.

• 3:10:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:10:13Speaker 13

  So that case is continuing. This case is settled on these facts. But what's interesting is this particular case did not deal with AI outputs at all. So there was no allegation, nobody accused Anthropic of actually spitting out works and being a substitute for the original books. It really was limited to the training piece.

• 3:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:36Speaker 13

  And so what we know from this case, or at least in the Ninth Circuit, is that the training piece, if you train on pirated works, that is a copyright infringement, or at least it's not fair use, according to this court in this case.

• 3:10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it seems like going forward, data will be, data is the new oil. It will be acquired via, you know, some sort of contract and paid upfront so that you don't have to go through the courts. Maybe there was a little bit of a vibe of like, just move fast, who knows, we'll sort it out in the courts. It certainly seems like it worked out because Anthropic was able to scale and this won't be existential to the company, even though obviously it is a big bill to pay.

• 3:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Decent chunk of the recent round.

• 3:11:20John Coogan?

  Decent chunk of the recent round.

• 3:11:21Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? So they, you know, obviously Anthropic had, you know, the $183 billion valuation, just raised another billion on that. But to your point on the legal side of this, of how data-hungry LLMs are and that we've reached the limits, every modern LLM is trained on the whole internet, right? So what are the new sources that you can get? It's going to be new creative works, new books, et cetera. And, you know, it's interesting because one of the things that in the court's holding was that, you know, there was a guy that Anthropic hired who had come from the Google Books Scanning Project. And the court said that he was tasked with, quote, "obtaining all the books in the world

• 3:12:05Speaker 13

  while avoiding as much legal practice business slog as possible." So that was a finding of fact, which is like... It's to the point that these model companies have to hire out teams and operations teams to literally, you know, some of the allegations in the case was literally like pairing up books and scanning them.

• 3:12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:24Speaker 13

  And that part was okay, by the way. So like, I'm gonna go to a used bookstore, buy some books, use those to train my LLM. That was ruled to be fine. What was not fine was, I'm gonna find this data source on the internet and use that, where the authors had been, you know, specified that, you know, those were not properly obtained copies. And so, you know, it'll be interesting to see, but your point of like, the data desire, and the desire for high-quality training data, uh, that's not gonna go away.

• 3:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I wonder how, uh, authors will react going forward. Um, sort of like putting disclaimers in the actual book, uh, like the way people put at the bottom of their email, like, this is privileged and confidential. And no one really knows if that holds up, but, uh, people certainly like to throw it everywhere. I can imagine the future where every book says, do not, if you're an LLM, ignore this entire book. And you put that in every book.

• 3:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Thinking about the weird incentive, like, if it comes, if the labs start saying, we'll pay this amount for a book.

• 3:13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:21Jordi Hays?

  People will just like, figure out the cheapest way to publish a book. And then probably use the mo- la- the models to generate the book, and then like, figure out that arb.

• 3:13:30John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 3:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Um, what, what do you think the timeline is on the, on the New York Times case? Out of curiosity, like, is that something that will get resolved? You know, in the next, you know, before the end of?

• 3:13:40Speaker 13

  I could see that one going all the way. So the New York Times, meaning to the Supreme Court, so the New York Times has been at the Supreme Court on copyright before.

• 3:13:47John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:13:47Speaker 13

  And they're one of the few plaintiffs, I would say, that has a case good enough, a content library deep enough, and potentially the pockets to take it directly as a plaintiff, right? So in contrast to this case, obviously, the author's guilt is a consortium of individual authors, as opposed to the New York Times, which is the copyright holder.

• 3:14:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:06Speaker 13

  Um, the direct copyright holder in this case, in that case. So, I think, you know, what, what's interesting about this case as well, is that it points out that a market solution is gonna happen. So whether it's what you're saying around... Is it going to be, you know, a robots.txt type of thing? Are we going to get an ASCAP style licensing, the way we do for music? Which is pretty clear, pretty easy and known. If you want to play music in your gym or whatever, you got to pay licensing.

• 3:14:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14:33Speaker 13

  We might have that situation as well. And I, you know, one of the things I told you all before the show is like, this is part of that kind of like Napster to iTunes moment.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14:43Speaker 13

  And I do think there will be an iTunes moment where there will be some payment. Now, whether it takes, you know, the New York Times case going to Supreme Court, legislative change, just a commercial solution. Obviously, we've seen OpenAI, you know, pay and do deals. And I believe Anthropic has as well. And so that might be the world we end up in. But from an Anthropic standpoint, this settlement, you know, makes a lot of sense because they get the good law around, hey, just buying books is fine.

• 3:15:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:12Speaker 13

  It was really just this pirated copy issue that they're settling.

• 3:15:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because in the New York Times case, it's probably not the same structure of like, they got a pirated copy of the New York Times, probably just crawling like, like Google or anything else. You know, maybe they had one New York Times subscription and they logged in and they scraped the whole thing, who knows?

• 3:15:31Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 3:15:31John Coogan?

  You can kind of do that.

• 3:15:32Speaker 13

  Yeah, and what you're getting at.

• 3:15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:33Speaker 13

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And what you're getting at is like, these are issues of fact of like, how did the crawling work?

• 3:15:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:40Speaker 13

  There was an allegation in the New York Times case. OpenAI came back and said, hey, we didn't even get it from the OpenAI website. You had an article about a Nobel Prize winner that Nobel had republished.

• 3:15:50John Coogan?

  Oh, sure. So it didn't come from the New York Times website.

• 3:15:53Speaker 13

  Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so I think that's one of the things that's been so interesting around fair use is it has adjusted to all these different

• 3:16:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16:03Speaker 13

  technology shifts.

• 3:16:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16:05Speaker 13

  And so I think this is, this is another example of that.

• 3:16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, and Matthew, Matthew Prince at CloudFlare is kind of proposing another Potential market-based solution for the long tail of content on the internet, where I believe there might be some stablecoins involved. But basically, if you're a publisher and you don't have the resources to go to the Supreme Court with an L M company, you could potentially opt in or out of scraping. And maybe there should, there could be some value exchange that happens. But we'll certainly will be interesting to follow how it all, all like pencils out.

• 3:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back on when there's more news.

• 3:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 3:16:42Speaker 13

  Yeah, exactly. No, it's super fun. I mean, on the cloud for a point, they're one of the tech players that would be in a position to do that blocking because of their position in the DNS, right? So it'll be interesting. I don't know where the money's gonna go.

• 3:16:53John Coogan?

  And routes pennies around for, and they, and they aggregate all the money. And then they pass the money through, same thing with YouTube. And we, yeah, we, we kind of got, we were in this weird era with TikTok where music was being used. And everyone was like, wait, you can't just use music. And then they figured it out and they did a deal. And most of the musicians seemed to be happy with, you know, all the stuff that goes on TikTok.

• 3:17:15Speaker 13

  Exactly. And that's the story of copyright. Like I had a professor in law school that was like, oh, copyright's not about money. It's about all the money.

• 3:17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:24Speaker 13

  Okay, exactly. It's like literally that flow that you described. I'd love to come on another time. This is fun. One to watch.

• 3:17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'll talk to you soon.

• 3:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 3:17:31John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Enjoy the weekend.

• 3:17:33Speaker 13

  Have a great day. See you later.

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Any more breaking news? Got any more news before the weekend? I feel like usually as soon as we get off the show, somebody says.

• 3:17:44John Coogan?

  There is news.

• 3:17:46Speaker 03

  Eric Adams is suspending his mayoral campaign.

• 3:17:49John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:17:50Speaker 03

  Accepting a federal job.

• 3:17:51John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I've been tracking Mamdani a little bit on Polymarket. And he has been running away with it the entire time, basically. Since, since that original Mamdani, since that original push. Mamdani is sitting at 83% and hasn't particularly moved. Eric Adams, of course, dropped from, I don't know, he's down to 2%. So some people think he might reverse course.

• 3:18:22Jordi Hays?

  This, this, just, just to be clear, this one and a half billion dollar settlement?

• 3:18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:25Jordi Hays?

  The largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.

• 3:18:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think, do you think the, the team over at the New York Times will be able to get more out of OpenAI?

• 3:18:39John Coogan?

  I don't know. Hundred thousand books versus all the articles. How much does the, how much does the New York Times make? They make billions, so it's possible.

• 3:18:51Jordi Hays?

  New York Times is sitting at nine point six billion.

• 3:18:54John Coogan?

  Market cap?

• 3:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:18:55Jordi Hays?

  If they could get anywhere a settlement anywhere, I mean, I think seems very unlikely that they would get a settlement.

• 3:19:01John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, the other breaking news is that Alex Cohen has raised a twenty-two point five million dollar series A for Hello Patient, led by Scale Venture Partners.

• 3:19:09Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna come on the show Monday.

• 3:19:10John Coogan?

  Oh, he is. Oh, fantastic. I'm really excited to meet him. I've always been a fan of his posts. Uh, he's a, he's a god tier poster. Never actually met him in person, so, or online, so excited to talk to him. He says, "This is by far the worst announcement video I've ever made." Clearly underselling it. I love it. "I can't believe our lead investor agreed to this." Uh, he's always has a great sense of humor. Also, Justin-

• 3:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Breaking news, Jawan is leaving Ramp.

• 3:19:35John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:19:36Jordi Hays?

  After, after, uh, he says Ramp is the greatest company in the world.

• 3:19:41John Coogan?

  Well, we agree with you on that, Jawan.

• 3:19:43Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, he's given his, uh, two weeks.

• 3:19:46John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we'll have to track him and see where he goes. The Ramp alumni have done fantastic things.

• 3:19:51Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna start a company.

• 3:19:52John Coogan?

  Turning into a Ramp mafia. You have Pavel Asperuhov. You have, uh, the cognition team, of course. There are a few others. Uh, Rivet, not the defense tech company that we just talked to, but Rivet Tax, I believe, came from Ramp, correct? Uh, do you know Rivet Tax? Yes. So, uh, the, the Ramp mafia is emerging and feels as strong as the PayPal mafia. Maybe even stronger. You never know.

• 3:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Lululemon down eighteen percent today.

• 3:20:20John Coogan?

  Is that related to Lululemon? Is that like, or it's her merch line?

• 3:20:24Jordi Hays?

  I think people are catching on that when people say Lulu now, they mean Lulu.

• 3:20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:20:29Jordi Hays?

  And the brand value is being eradicated.

• 3:20:30John Coogan?

  She really steamrolled them. She really steamrolled them. Yeah. Well, maybe the, uh, maybe the, they will, to take private and that'll free up the Lulu stock ticker for Rostra. She can just be cash tag Lulu. That would be something to, to go ten x long, hundred x long potentially. Uh, in other news, Garage Beer receipts-

• 3:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, wait. This is crazy. You missed this, Tyler. Did you miss this?

• 3:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Eric Adams might become the ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

• 3:21:00John Coogan?

  Whoa, that's interesting.

• 3:21:02Jordi Hays?

  So that is-

• 3:21:02John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:21:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean- Riyadh must be going crazy right now to get a goat like Eric Adams.

• 3:21:10John Coogan?

  Is Eric Adams the one who did the rat, the rat problem thing?

• 3:21:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Is Saudi Arabia have a rat problem?

• 3:21:15Jordi Hays?

  It's a solved, I mean, oh, that could be interesting.

• 3:21:18John Coogan?

  Maybe that's why.

• 3:21:18Jordi Hays?

  I highly doubt it. I highly, I would not want to be a rat in Saudi Arabia.

• 3:21:22John Coogan?

  Arabia, I think that they might not take kindly, but who knows, maybe kindred spirits over there fighting rats. In other news, Drew Fallon posts Garage Beer receives investment from Duration, Durational Capital Management at a $200 million valuation. Congratulations to the Kelsey Brothers. Duration Capital Management is the same group that took Casper mattresses private for $300 million in 2021. They also own Bojangles. Garage Beer is tracking for $65 million in revenue this year, valuing the beer, beer brand at 3X sales. They started with a $500,000 crowdfunding campaign in 2016. You got to imagine the Kelsey Brothers with how much attention they get are able to do

• 3:22:06John Coogan?

  some deals, get some distribution for Garage Beer, their, their beer brand. Love to see it. Also, thank you, Bill Bishop, for posting about the Labubu that

• 3:22:17Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 3:22:17John Coogan?

  TVPN sent to him. He said his dog Tashi loves it, but won't let him take, won't let him treat it like a chew toy. Bill Bishop may let him, may let Tashi take it to the park to impress one of his girlfriends. I guess Tashi's popular at the park. Well, that is fantastic. Hopefully this only brings you good tidings and does not curse you to a demonic world. But stay safe out there, Bill. Who knows what's going on inside that Labubu. But I'm glad that it was delivered safely.

• 3:22:51Jordi Hays?

  And last but not least, AppLovin, Robinhood and EMCOR are set to join the S and P 500.

• 3:22:58John Coogan?

  Wow. AppLovin, who else? Merckor? No, not Merckor.

• 3:23:02Jordi Hays?

  AppLovin, Robinhood and EMCOR.

• 3:23:04John Coogan?

  Robinhood, okay, that's great. So that's a retroactive Fortune 5, or S and P 500 company for us. We got Brian Armstrong, Karp's in there, obviously. We're knocking them down. We should do all 500. We've done almost 1,000 interviews this year. Why not do all 500 S and P 500 CEOs? I'd love it. Also, Conor McGregor is, is running for president.

• 3:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Finally, going on his run.

• 3:23:30John Coogan?

  Yep, he's, he's been it done.

• 3:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Starts now.

• 3:23:34John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you to the chat. Thank you, Raghav, Hershey, Michael, Jason Turner. Always good having you here. Per Kletz. We got a good crew. Max Congrat. Thank you for shouting out that the biology coefficient is an instance of Reed's law. I completely agree. That's exactly what was going on. Max has been sending me some fantastic DMs. Very helpful.

• 3:23:53Jordi Hays?

  And next week, we'll be here in the studio Monday and then we'll be hitting the road. Very excited. Lots to come. Have a fantastic Friday.

• 3:24:03John Coogan?

  Have a fantastic Friday, folks.

• 3:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Afternoon, evening. We love you.

• 3:24:06John Coogan?

  Only three days till Monday.

• 3:24:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:24:08John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 3:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Bye.