Meta AI Vibes & ChatGPT Pulse Reactions, Friend’s Billboard Blitz | Roon

(02:11) - Meta AI Vibes Reactions (45:21) - ChatGPT Pulse Reactions (01:12:00) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:35:06) - Friend OOH Campaign Reactions (01:46:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:52:26) - Roon, an anonymous and influential online poster, discusses the transformative impact of AI tools like Codex and Claude code on software development, emphasizing their potential to significantly enhance productivity and reshape the industry. He also explores the broader implications of AI integration into daily life, touching on topics such as the evolution of user interactions with AI models, the role of open-source AI, and the cultural significance of media like the anime "Evangelion." Additionally, Roon reflects on the dynamics of talent acquisition in the AI sector and the interplay between legal frameworks and innovation in the U. S. economy. (02:30:58) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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 fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, September 26, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital de capital.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  De capital.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  El capital, de capital. Massive news in the AI world, in the product layer, in the application layer. Two apps launched yesterday, really, two features. One in the Meta AI app called Vibes and one in the ChatGPT app called Pulse. Two very different apps. Neither of them are going to save you time and money. The only one that can save you time and money is Ramp, Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Good morning to everyone in the chat. We had John Exley live in the TBPN Ultra Dome yesterday. It was great to see him.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  He's not by. It's great to see you, John.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  We got a couple app demos, caught up with a few folks, did a little photo shoot yesterday, had a great time.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  We did.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  And of course, we are live on Restream, Restream.io. One livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Wherever they are.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  We also get this book, really quickly, just to say thanks to everyone before we go into our top stories. Grappetile sent a book called Fault Lines about the history of bugs, because of course Grappetile helps you find bugs. And I thought this was interesting. They tell the story of the first bug at the Harvard Computation Lab in 1947. Said, "One relay stalled. A technician checked the console, traced the path, and opened the door to Relay 70 on Panel F. Inside, a moth was jammed in the switch. They removed it, taped it into the lab log, and captioned it, 'First actual case of bug being found.' The log made the

• 1:48John Coogan?

  term 'bug' literal and cemented the practice. Find the cause, write it down, keep the knowledge."

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Let's get into the news.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  And we have, I guess we should highlight, we're gonna have none other than Rune on at 1:00 PM today, so that'll be in a couple hours.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait for that. In the meantime, a lot of stuff to talk through. The timeline has been in turmoil.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  It has.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Interesting that Pulse was launched the same day as Vibes. They got very different, they got very different reactions.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Steamroll big technology companies.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have to wonder, I mean, ChatGPT has the benefit of like, they're launching Pulse in the core app. People are just going to discover it and use it if they're paid and they can roll it out that way.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Vibes, I thought it was interesting that they even launched this so aggressively into the timeline.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, because the reaction was almost universally negative.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  On X.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  On X.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the question is, will children like it? Will the elderly like it?

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Moms like it, yeah.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Um, but we should, we should get into it.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Well, let's, uh, let's start by playing the actual video for everyone. So if you haven't seen, uh, Alex Wang, who we had on the show last week at Meta Connect, uh, posted the initial launch. I think he launched the entire product. Uh, he said, excited to share Vibes, a new feed in the Meta AI app for short form AI-generated videos. This is on the back of the Midjourney partnership. We can go way deeper into, um, what's going on here in the reaction, but I mean, just the numbers on this is crazy. 2.8 thousand likes, 2.4 thousand quote tweets or retweets and one, and 1.6 thousand comments.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  Insane ratio.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Insane ratio, but, uh, uh, this is of course, uh, you know, there, there's a lot of nuance here that we're going to go into, but let's kick it off by watching the actual one-minute trailer for Vibes, the new app from Meta. It's in the Meta AI app. You actually have to, uh, reinstall the app or go and update the app. Are you channeling the, the vibes? Are you feeling the vibes?

• 4:08John Coogan?

  The create button. Uh, so when this launched, I went to the Meta AI app and I, uh, and I typed in, okay, I Meta AI, I'm ready to use the new Vibes feature. How do you do it? And it was very confused and it was saying like, I'm not aware of that. I don't know anything about that. It's because. The the older app was not aware of the new app existing and so I had to go to the App Store and actually refresh. But once I did, I got in and I saw a lot of this type of content. An astronaut on a bike, two bears boxing, a cat talking at a news desk, women running in clouds, all very AI aesthetic. It has a very unique look to it that I would just

• 4:50John Coogan?

  describe as like the AI art look these days. It's not trying to. Yeah, it feels like it's not trying to be anything but AI in the same way that a lot of a lot of CGI and 3D renders have a certain aesthetic to them.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting thing where if you showed one of these assets to somebody 10 years ago, they would have thought, that looks really cool. And now the reaction is that looks like AI. And people just don't think it's cool. Like I, you know, personally, I think there's a market for this. And obviously, this is the worst that the model, the worst the models will ever be. So images will get better. But I think the reaction, Shom Shankar, he quoted it, he said, read the wall of quote tweets that categorically reject this AI slop. We are so back, we are going to win. And he hits it with a salute.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Salute to the American flag.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Which is crazy to be.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Picking it off.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  Crazy to dunk, crazy. You don't see Shom dunking.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  No, I mean, they're also partnered. I'm pretty sure Palantir is model agnostic, uses Lama, which is then Alex has worked in defense Lama. But you know, like, when people are not down with a thing, like, you know, they're going to speak their mind.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think the it's interesting because X is such a microcosm, right? It's not a reflection of of the average internet user. It's certainly not a reflection of the average meta platforms user. I think that there's another world where they just started promoting this and Instagram and Facebook and just started driving users over kind of quietly. And I think this was like a very unforced like PR air to come out because they you can't tell somebody, you basically.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, I believe that they want, they truly want and will build their version of personal superintelligence, but when you've just been hitting people over the head with messaging about personal superintelligence, and then the first thing you launch from MSL with your new massive partnership with Mid Journey is a trough, slop? That's, that's rough, right?

• 7:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  It sends a signal to the market, and I think this just makes their job harder from a recruiting standpoint, right? Do you want to work at Anthropic?

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  Which believes in Machine God, which has like a cult, right? Their team, they didn't lose a lot of people in the talent wars, right? They even lost some people to Cursor and got them back a week later.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, Luke Metro was commenting on this. He said, "I would not be surprised if this tweet alone is going to make Meta superintelligences raise their signing bonuses by $1 million."

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or even more, right? Because, because even, you know, even, when you, when you look at your options, it's like you can go live in Elon world and work on XAI.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  And be super hardcore and sleep in the office.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  Get that sort of, tap into that Elon.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  I mean, there's, there's a fair amount of slop going on in.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Sure, there's, there's slop, but it, but at least it's just like.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Romantic companion stuff.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  At least you're buying, you're riding with Elon, who is a.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Do you have the cool narrative around like building Colossus 2 really fast? And going after like.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then you look at their.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  The MO and the benchmarks and all that stuff.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Elon posts slop, but when you look at their, like, when they talk about benchmarks, what benchmarks are they really going after? It's like really.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Elon does a good job of like, he'll be retweeting a lot of, quite frankly, like slop, slop videos, right? But then he will refocus the conversation back on, "We're going to solve physics." Or like, "We're going to, we're going to discover new physics. We're going to do really hard math." And, you know, let's give Meta a couple of days to see if they can kind of steer the conversation back towards something that gets technologists excited, because they could. It is possible that they come out with something.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  For sure. It's just when you have the entire world waiting and honestly, kind of preying on their downfall, right?

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Like, the world is not rooting. The world broadly, the industry broadly, when you look at all these different camps, OpenAI lost a bunch of top talent, MSL, they're not, they're not sitting there, you know,

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Excited for Meta to do something amazing, right? Which I'm sure they will at different points. And so, your public opinion is already against you. And then you come out and launch a product that is, you know, dedicated to the thing that people like the least about AI.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I have a rebuttal, but first I'm going to tell you about Privy. Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  The official wallet infrastructure provider of the TBPN UltraDome.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  That's what you call a layup. Boom.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Slams it down.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, so basically they just set up this, they set up the perfect product, the perfect video.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  To just allow the entire internet to do the craziest alley-oop.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So, first off, I totally get, the backlash is undeniable. That's just a fact. Like, like the timeline hates it. In terms of like, if Meta's on the offense today and the timeline's on the defense, like, the defense slammed it down. Not a single point got through. But, what's weird about this is that David Holes, the founder of Midjourney, who created this model, who created this aesthetic, is loved in tech. And is one of the, I think the most, one of the most respected founders. He hasn't raised a dime of venture capital. He built this incredible model.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  Raised a bit of money in the terms of revenue from.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, but in general, Midjourney has been the one video generator, image generator, that has been sort of celebrated as, as the least sloppy, I guess, and the most opinionated. And so, I feel like maybe the Meta team just thought that by partnering with Midjourney, they would beat the slop allegations. But it is weird that we're not seeing any of the goodwill that David Holes has transfer over to MSL, which, which I don't know how to unpack, so.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  David.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  Pitch, pitch back on that.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  David is not, they had an announcement.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  But he's not a, you know, he didn't post yesterday. It's not like he came out and was like, hey guys, I'm really excited for our new checkout Meta.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  AI vibes.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  Also the name.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  The name is a little bit stale.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  It's just the most overused word of the year.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, didn't you call the top on slop like a year ago or something like that? I remember you saying like.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  It was earlier this year. I just, I, I think.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  You said like the term's overused at this point.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just why, you know, overly used.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  And Meta created a product that is giving slop, it's a bull market in slop again.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Okay, so.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  But, but again, and, and I want to be clear that I'm not like putting, like, I don't judge MSL based on this product.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  But I, I judge the, I, I think it was a poor marketing strategy for AI efforts at Meta broadly.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  When in a few days they're launching a product that has a heads up display with AI built into it. It's like get people to focus on that.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Maybe. Yeah.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Like that, that's the functionality that's actually really cool. We've used it. You can walk around, you can be like, hey Meta, looking at my fridge right now, what should I make for dinner? And it'll tell you and it'll give you recipes and it'll show it on a heads up display and it's awesome.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  But this was just a totally unforced error.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  There is a little.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  Like it felt like, um, it felt like the, it, it really, to me, I was seeing parallels between, you know, that iconic image of Mark Zuckerberg, like in the Metaverse, when everybody saw it and they were like, oh, with the Eiffel Tower. Yeah. And it was like, oh, it's over. Like the Metaverse is over.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Interesting. So the, I have a few, I have a few things I want to peel back on that. So, first.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Cognition is the maker of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Go sign up, please.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Also the makers of Windsurf.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Also the makers of Windsurf. Fantastic.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  They're absolutely cooking.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  And the hero of 2025.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic transition, John. Tried to interrupt my, you perfectly interrupted my rant with an ad.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Great sign of respect.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  So, so, so I want you to, I want you to shift back to the Studio Ghibli moment, images in ChatGPT, and try and relive that because I feel like that came out and it was AI-generated content. It had a very AI-generated aesthetic. There's a world where that looked really sloppy, but.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  It didn't.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  What was your experience?

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  It was AI perfectly emulating at scale, one of the most loved aesthetics on the internet ever. It wasn't, that was the beauty of it. It was like anybody could make something that wasn't sloppy.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  It was like, you know, time from somebody having the idea for the prompts to a beautiful image. And sure, it got overused. Sure, you don't see them a ton anymore.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  But that was, I remember the, the, the, the little joy of turning an image of like me and my fam, you know, with my family into a Ghibli picture, and that was fun.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  It was a super fun day on the internet. We had a ton of fun with it.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  I made multiple. I had a couple that went super viral.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Everybody made like 50.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Everyone made a ton, and then eventually it got burned out.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like any, like any aesthetic or meta, it just burns out on the internet, right?

• 14:55John Coogan?

  And so.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Like launch videos are.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  There were, there were a few hot takes on the timeline that were like, ah, I don't like this. Then, then there were also the, there was also the backlash to like, you shouldn't be stealing Studio Ghibli's aesthetic. You're.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if I was, if I was Studio Ghibli, I'd, I don't know if, like, what's your, what's your verdict? Do you think that was good overall net positive for Studio Ghibli, or do you think it, it actually?

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Well, I ran the, I ran a sort of test where I took an image from Oppenheimer and I Studio Ghibli'd it of Einstein talking to Robert Oppenheimer. It's this iconic scene and I Ghibli'd it and I put that up and that got like a thousand likes because everything that was decent, every decent meme that got Ghibli'd that day got a thousand likes. And then I took a real frame from Spirited Away, the most iconic Studio Ghibli film. Like a real frame, not an AI-generated one. And I put that up, 10 likes. And it was very funny to be like, people don't actually want Studio Ghibli. They want Studio Ghibli filter applied to something else iconic because it allows them to do this mental puzzle of,

• 16:05John Coogan?

  oh, I'm seeing something that's iconic. It's the bell curve meme. Or it's the always two astronauts in space shooting at each other, always has been, Ghiblied. And it's like, oh, I get the joke.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, and what was magical about is you took a style of illustration and animate, you know, illustration.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  That historically was extremely expensive and time-consuming and made it instant. And it was basically as good, right? I'm sure, I'm sure a true, uh, uh, Studio Ghibli enthusiast would be like, I'm gonna pull up the two pictures and look like they didn't get this part of the handwriting or whatever. But it was beautiful. It was magical.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  And that was, that was undeniable.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  Glad we're not seeing them.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  If you're trying to make something beautiful and undeniable, go to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. But my point was that with the Studio Ghibli aesthetic, it was actually personal superintelligence. It was personal. And what made that go so viral in a way that I think everyone liked was that they could Studio Ghibli themselves. They could Studio Ghibli, it acted as this interesting filter where I saw, remember the very first one that went viral? It was a man with his wife. And he was like, life hack, take a photo with you and your loved one. And Studio Ghibli it and send it to them. They will be overjoyed.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  And I remember the first 12 hours, people were like, I don't know, how are, how's everybody making these?

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  It was still like, there was a narrow window that.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Yes. But there's something where if you empower the individual to create something that's personal to them, then they are more inspired, more defensive of it, more happy with it. There's something there that's, that, that, that's more satisfying, even if it is like, it's, it's not slop because there's still that element of uniqueness in it.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  And this gets into the huge problem with meta AI vibes.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Vibes is that it's not, it doesn't start with your Instagram profile. And I was pitching this. I was pitching this. I was saying Instagram.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  No, even, even, even more specifically.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  You were showing some of the results you got this morning and to anybody that hasn't downloaded the app yet, you downloaded it and it's a bunch of high-quality assets for what they are, right? Well, you can say-

• 18:24John Coogan?

  It's the Mid Journey explore page.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Like, literally.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  So it's like elite mid-journey, like, results.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Right? Animated and, you know, it's solid. But it's more like just a collection of assets. It's not a, you know, they've basically seeded the feed-

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  -with a bunch of super-curated assets.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  And everybody, I think, we had a few people on the team looking at it, and everybody's getting the exact same results.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  It's like almost a mirror image.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  The, if you open the Meta AI app, I can guarantee you that within 10 scrolls, you will see a monkey on a jet ski.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  Hey, let's give it up for a monkey.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  The monkey on a jet ski, it's a great video, honestly.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Hit that horn, hit that horn.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Hey, every once in a while, you gotta slop it up, you gotta, you gotta-

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  You gotta put the monkey on the jet-

• 19:12John Coogan?

  You know, you can be sitting here and critique it, but good slop is tasty. And so the monkey on the jet ski is great, there's a cat in the newscast, there are a few feeds, they very clearly went and picked the best AI videos from Mid Journey and whatever they'd created and curated a, like, a starter feed before you get into the random algo feed to kind of, to kind of seed your algorithm. And so you automatically see the same thing as you scroll on your feed or my feed, it's all the same right now. Eventually it'll be highly user-generated and then eventually it'll be highly algorithm-driven, such that you could just wind up seeing, I guarantee this is where this is going.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  Well-

• 19:53John Coogan?

  So, I actually love those Mid Journey 1980s videos that have been on Instagram, where someone takes the aesthetic of like, imagine you're a Swiss banker in 1980 in Switzerland. And it's like Cherry Cherry Lady is the song that plays and it's just a whole bunch of Mid Journey images back to back to back. I love those videos and that's what my feed will be once the Meta AI feed tailors to me. Right now, it's just general AI video and I feel like when I see generic AI video, it's just a movie that I've seen. It's a very cool movie, once, but I only want to consume- 10 minutes of it and then I'm like, I'm good. I don't really want to revisit it. I want to go see something new.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  So I don't think this, at this stage, this level of content will be that sticky. It'll be novel to scroll for a lot of people if they haven't seen it. But, but eventually it will become more tailored and you will see stuff that you actually do like over time. And I think it'll be a long time until they really get the long tail of people. I think live players will basically stay out of this forever. I think that a lot of people will get kind of sucked in, but they're already getting sucked in on reels and TikTok and YouTube shorts and stuff.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, Vanta automated compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  It's socked.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And so my, my pitch to Adam Mosseri and the Instagram team was, was make AI video personal, make super intelligence personal. Go and preload a generative image for everyone's Instagram profile picture. And just like when you upload any photo, you can filter it. Go and pre-render that and give everyone a Ghibli or give everyone a mid-journey vision of what they would be like based on their most liked photo. Or their most recent photo that they've shared. And then just have that kind of pre-rendered, ready to go, and then they can share that. And you can create this like viral moment where people are sharing like the, like the Studio Ghibli moment.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  Their own personality brought through in an illustration. Instead of just, here's a bunch of random.

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I would say.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  I guess everyone likes that.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, uh, I think, obviously we love the meta team.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  And we're excited about what MSL is going to create broadly, but it's hard for me not to just give this a scathing review. Specifically because it's not just a bunch of user-generated content. It is, I mean, it was generated by users out there.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  But it's effectively like they created a folder that people can view in a feed.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  And it's cool videos, but then when you go try to make a video, the output is not at all on par with what you're seeing in the feed.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  Prompting mid journey is hard, like getting good results out of AI image generators is hard.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  But take mid, yeah, for sure.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Understand what keywords work, the S R A F S in mid journey. And then the animation step is really hard too, because oftentimes you're not really like you. You can kind of describe a scene and then you need to think about like, okay, what, what do I actually need to tell it? Do I need to tell it that the, that the background, that there should be actors in the background that are moving?

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, mid journey is magic, but it has a steep learning curve.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  It does sort of have.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  And Meta AI, they're making it, they're, they're, they're selling this, they're selling you slop dreams.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  And then they let you create assets, but they don't, they're not, and that, that's just a terrible, it's like, it's like running an advertising campaign of like, hey, uh, you know, they're, they're advertising what, what would appear to be the capabilities of Meta AI, because it's in the Meta AI app.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  But that when you as a user go to create stuff, it's just not good. Like you were just trying to generate a T B P N intro.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  And the letters were like, like you put T B P N in a blender, they were inverted, it just didn't make any sense.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  And character consistency and fonts and all these things are hard to generate. But it just didn't feel like the product was, if you were trying to create an organic moment where people were like, these videos are cool. Now I can create cool videos.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Myself, and then people are going to have this, a bunch of people are going to have the experience. So.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Again, the, the two, the main critiques are like, product level, just not great yet. It will get better.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  And then from a marketing standpoint, like total cell phone to launch this into the, to the audience that is going to.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  Have the most adverse reaction of anybody because we're sick of seeing Elon, you know, share these videos of like random, you know, Ani stuff.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like it's very much white labeled mid journey. Like even when you go to create, you type a prompt and it gives you four images, which is exactly what happens on mid journey. You get four and you get to pick and then you have to animate it and you're animating it from a single frame. That's not the workflow for VO three in Gemini. In Gemini, you go in and you describe a video with a whole bunch of different steps. And the results that I was getting from, from VO three were so far and above this. Mid journey has a cool aesthetic and it, it has kind of a cool, a cool like, it's like an animated painting almost. I don't know. It, it's like, it's a different thing than VO three. Like the camera was moving around as it tracks the car that breaks through the Hollywood sign.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  And then the champagne bottles bursting out. We were like, it fit that in there? And I think what's happening in VO three is that when you go to it with a prompt, it has, it kind of has like a reasoning step where it hydrates out what you're saying and gives it way more context and transforms it. A lot of times when I'm writing VO three prompts, I'll actually go to chat GPT and describe and talk for a long time and say, write a big, long VO three prompt that actually organizes all of this into what's happening in the background? What's the lighting like? What time of day is it? Where are we? Like, what's the setting? What's the camera? What's the focal length? Like, all of these things are things that you need to put in mid journey to get good results. And, and it's, it's hard to get people up to speed on that. I do wonder about the social component here.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  One of the secrets to mid journey's success has been the fact that David Holes was talking on, actually to Ben Thompson, and he was saying that, oh, wait, no, it wasn't, it wasn't David Holes. It was, I think it was Nat Friedman, who's now at MSL, was talking about why mid journey was successful and how mid journey works. And mid journey famously did not have a website, did not have an app. They just had a Discord server. And in the Discord server. People would go and prompt and

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  And they'd get a good result.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Yes, but the key, yeah, the key was the sharing because

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  They'd remix.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  When you give someone just a blank prompt box, they just type, dog, I want to see a dog. And then you get one, one generic image of a dog and it looks like a stock photo. And what you really want is a photo of three puppies in the snow in Christmas shot on a Kodak phone or the Kodak camera with this camera move. You do, you want the directorial style. You want something that's a different vibe. There's so many different pieces and tools that you would use to put together something that actually looks great. And the mid journey chat and the discord allowed people to see, oh, wait, this person's prompting in this way and they're getting this result. I should prompt like that. And they all built off of each other.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  And I think that's something that can actually happen in an app like vibes. I wouldn't be surprised. You can already see it with the prompt is described there and then you can click remix and you can use that as a jumping off point. So it just in terms of like the user experience of creating little pockets of, of creativity and solving that problem of like, how do you get a good result? How do you get a good prompt? It doesn't seem that hard. I don't know. I, I feel like I'm not that bearish on this product. Like, I know people are, are rejecting it, but it feels like this is a useful step in terms of like, they have a mid journey partnership. They're basically white labeling mid journey into this app.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  A lot of their, their testing, gathering feedback, gathering data. And then they're going to put this in Instagram.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a proving ground.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. And they, but they do need to, they do need to still go from zero to one.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  It felt like an alpha product, not a beta product.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's something, there's something there.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. Ben Thompson was wildly positive on this. He was the only one. He did an emergency podcast this morning, or maybe last night. And he said that he had an interesting take that said that basically, this technology, this AI feed, it solves a few problems. First, he liked the idea that we've all been suffering with this like, low-grade annoyance of is that real or is that AI? And I've, we've noticed this in the show. We used to be able to clock it immediately. Like, it used to be so easy to just spot six fingers. Oh, that's obviously AI-generated. But recently, there's been a few things where we've had to look at the community note.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like the monks in the Apple Store.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  The monks in the Apple Store. And then, once you dig in, you're like, oh yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Like, why would Apple have, like, the iPhone rendered wrong? Like, that doesn't make any sense. They're gonna show the full iPhone. And, and I sort of fell for this one of like, this robotic horse that looked really cool. I wanted to believe the robotic horse was real. And I think, I think there is a company that actually does make a robotic horse that is real, but this happened to be a AI video of that product. And so, it was like, it could exist, but not with this exact motion. And so, like, people are falling for this stuff, and they're sort of running with this low-grade stress. And what Ben Thompson was saying was like, it's nice that when you open the Meta AI app, you know that everything is AI-generated. Like, you're not running that question of

• 30:07John Coogan?

  like, is this real or is this fake? You're just like, I'm in fake world, I'm in cartoon world, I'm in AI art world. And so, that's actually a benefit, especially if you can kind of like, segment these two things out. That's kind of nice. And then, the second thing he said, which I will tell you in a second, but first, I'm gonna tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. The second thing he said was that this feels like an important step on the path to Virtual reality and a metaverse. This idea of like, when you look at these mid journey worlds, some of them look cool. Some of them look like they might be fun to go explore, walk around in. And if you can go from an image to a video, you can go from an image to a video to

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  To a world.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  To a world. And, and, and we've seen that with those, uh, with the, uh, I keep blanking on the name. It's Google's generative world product. It begins with a G. It's not Gemini, which is their app. It's not Gemma, which is their open source, uh, their open source L L M. It's

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so I think this, the meta AI vibes product.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  It's genie three, genie three, sorry. Genie three, you can go and, and you can go and like walk around, paint the wall and stuff. And you could imagine generate a mid journey world of this cool retro sci fi, whatever you want. You know, the aesthetic is going to be cool. And then you can step into it and actually walk around like

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  With a game control.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  So, no.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Or in VR.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so, so I start to get bullish on this product in the context of the Quest headset.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  When somebody's, you know, it sounds really dark and dystopian, of course, right? But if somebody's in, wearing their VR headset and they're able to scroll and just be in these worlds that are fantastical and feel like, uh, you know, uh, like you're hallucinating. I think that, I think people will be more excited to use that. It'll be quite a bit more interesting than just like scrolling on your phone and seeing. Yeah. Right, right now, I don't think that the meta AI vibes feed will capture people anywhere close to as much as, you know, scrolling regular Instagram reels, scrolling YouTube shorts, Tik Tok, whatever.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  You had a good take that was just like, I can watch a cat take off like a rocket. But once I've seen that and I've seen the cat also jump off a cliff and also dance around in the snow. Like I've kind of seen it all and I want to go back to like a comedian telling a funny joke that's new or someone giving me news or someone giving me their opinion or doing something in the real world.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Going back to niche topics I already care about.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. And so like the, just the

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Just random, randomness is not

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  That entertaining for that long.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, computer generated art has existed for a long time and People used to, you know, follow Beeple on Instagram and see something that he made in CG and in Cinema 4D and be like,

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  I think people still do.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  People still do. He posts a new one every day.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  But what he does is, it looks absolutely wild, but it's like culturally relevant to the moment.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  And so he's been very thoughtful and it's very provocative.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  And so just seeing, you know, as I, I, I love the monkey on the jet ski. I love monkeys, I love jet skis. You put those two things together, that's awesome.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  It's awesome.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  You make him do a, you know, spin around 360, amazing.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Am I going to use the monkey, you know, if I use this app a lot, am I going to get a,

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Do I want 10 hours a week of that?

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Am I going to get 20 of those? Yeah, 20 a day, right?

• 33:43John Coogan?

  Probably not right now. It's going to increase and as it gets better, but there are a bunch of different instantiations of that where it's like, if all of a sudden you generate the monkey on the jet ski and then you can play the game and then I can play the game with you.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  And there's an ad and the monkey on the jet ski is buying more jet skis for the Ramp card.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  And that's a promoted post.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  You can see how ads get into this.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  My first post, if you can go follow me on the Meta AI app, my first post is an ad for ramp.com. I went and generated and it's honestly, it's free real estate right now. No one's using this app yet. Go there, promote your business. Gold Rock AI, know you're going to do something. It's, it's in your name. You, you promote yourself in the chat here on TBPN. You should promote yourself in the Meta AI app. Uh, get some free impressions.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  This is wild. Uh, video game giant Electronic Arts is nearing a roughly $50 billion deal to go private.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  Silver Lake is cooking.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  They, they, uh,

• 34:45John Coogan?

  I wonder if they're going to try and change the business model because EA for a long time has, uh, has sold boxed software effectively. $60 for a game, $70 for a game. And if they want to go full subscription, full, maybe everything's free to play, like maybe that transition would be hard on earnings quarterly. And so they need to, they need to go private. I don't know. Uh, it'd be interesting to see, see where it goes.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  This would be the largest leveraged buyout of all time.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for leveraged buyouts. Should we ring the gong for that?

• 35:15Jordi Hays?

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

• 35:16John Coogan?

  It hasn't, it hasn't closed, but I'm excited. I just want to,

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  Preemptive hit.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  So, there are some projections, some leaks, some predictions about what Meta's next headset will look like. We obviously saw the AR concepts from, or products that are out, from everything from the Meta Ray-Bans to the Ray-Bans display, which have the augmented reality display in one side of the headset, or the glasses. And then, and then, and then the Orion, which is a full augmented reality, pair of glasses. I don't even, you can't even call it a headset because they're just glasses.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  But they are still working on VR. And I think when we talk to James Cameron, this is why he's genuinely so excited, is because he's tried the next product. And I think that he would not be that excited about the Quest 3. But I was calling it Quest 4. I was assuming that Quest 4 would be the breakthrough, where they take the battery out of the, out of the headset, they put it in your pocket, they use the, the, the display from the Apple Vision Pro, or even a better display. But it seems like they're going to do something in between Quest 4 and something else. And so, this is from Tom's Guide, they said, "New Meta prototype headsets combine goggle-like design with ultra-wide VR." And it could be a sneak

• 36:54John Coogan?

  peek at the, at the Meta Quest 4. I'll drop it in the chat here. There we go. So, this is, this is from Tom's Guide, and you can see these images of, of, like, somewhat smaller display. I don't know exactly how it is, but they're, they're going for 180-degree field of view, and aiming for something that's potentially much lighter, I've been hearing.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  This looks very cool.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  80 megapixel cameras, 60 frames a second, high curvature reflective polarizers and custom optical design. And so, this is still like in beta, but it feels like they could be doing something that's maybe a little bit more like what big screen VR is doing, which is a very, very small, light headset, under 250 grams.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  You gotta have the founder back on.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  I would love to have him back on. I was just thinking that. Because

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Nick.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  There's something there. Yeah, reach out.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Big screen.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  Big screen VR. He's been on the show before. We gotta get an update from him.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  Joe Weisenthal has an absolute banger. The emergence of quote unquote slop was foretold as soon as we started consuming content via the feed.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  I didn't see this. I put this, this is how I kicked off the newsletter today. Go to tbpn.com, drop your email. It says, why did they call them social media feeds? Are they feeding a slop at a trough or seating us at a Michelin star restaurant? It's both and always has been. You can use social media to follow the most insane craftsmen who spend years researching, writing, producing and distributing content. Or you can slop it up with some viral videos of scantily clad hot people in street fights, sometimes both in the same video. The distribution of between craft and slop has been growing for decades, maybe forever, and is continuing to grow with the development of AI content.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  And I, this, this post got 10,000 likes from

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  .005 seconds.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  We at Meta are delighted to announce we've created the infinite slop machine that destroys children from the hit book, Don't Create the Infinite Slop Machine That Destroys Children.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  This is such a good copy pasta. I forget what, uh, what the, the torment nexus is the original one. It's like everyone in tech is like, we've created the torment nexus from the famous book, Don't Create the Torment Nexus. I just think torment nexus is hilarious. Um, we will see if this destroys children. Um, I don't know how much it will destroy children. I don't know how much it'll destroy everyone. There's an interesting dynamic. Uh, most parents are aware of technology and, and that it needs to be measured and released in, in, you know,

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  If any parents are unaware of technology, we would love to interview you.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  For sure. Um, but, but the iPad kids meme is a thing. Are you going to give your kids an iPad anytime soon?

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  Only on flights.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Just as a replacement, like watch a movie, basically?

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's basically, it's basically like, I know this is bad for my child, but

• 39:48John Coogan?

  So limited.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to ruin, you know, uh, four hours with, you know, strangers.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  So, I mean, there was a time when, like, I actually grew up, uh, my parents were arts, art majors, studied fine art and, uh, film. And they insisted that I don't watch TV.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Like, do not watch television?

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  I was only allowed to watch television in Spanish.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I, oh, interesting.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, early on. So it was like, yeah, if you want to watch.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're learning, learning Spanish. Get ready to learn Spanish.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  Y ahora puedo hablar bastante español para conversar en.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Sí, sí.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  Blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  You clearly worked perfectly. But, but I had to watch a lot of the AFI 100, the top, the best films I've seen Lawrence Arabia like 25 times because of that, because that was one of the approved movies that I could watch. And, and I think parents know that, you know, you need to let the dust settle on the new technology before you expose the kids to it. And so, um, the phones are getting restricted, there's screen time limits for most kids. There's this idea of like, let the, let them cook, let them simmer, let their brains develop, uh, keep them focused on books and writing and reading. And then, yes, movies, but maybe a Pixar movie once a month, you know?

• 41:12John Coogan?

  I think it was Andrew Sorkin that was interviewing Peter Thiel and said, kind of put the screws to him and was like, you're on the board of Meta, how much screen time do you give your kids? And he was like, 90 minutes a week. And that feels like a very reasonable place to be where you're not going to become some zombie.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, also not all screen time is created equally, right?

• 41:30John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  You have a, an old school animated show.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's hand drawn and it's sort of.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Even just the moral lessons in one show can be wildly different than another. Like there can be shows that have really, they grapple with really complex social issues or, or instill, you know, they're retelling, like if you're, if you're watching something that's like essentially a, a transposition of a Romeo and Juliet story, or a biblical story, or something that teaches you to turn the other cheek, or the golden rule, right? The hero's journey, like these things are going, I, I feel like, you know, uh, like letting a kid watch the original Star Wars is not going to make them like a worse person. It's going to be like, yeah, be heroic, save the princess, like, like, you know, fight the bad guys, right?

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Those are sort of good and you need to unpack it and you need to follow the storylines from the beginning to the end and stuff. It's not just something that you can just mindlessly turn on. Like it builds a whole world and it helps you imagine things and explore the ideas of space travel and science fiction. Like these are, these are not that bad for you, I think, at least in limited doses. Um, and I think this will be the same for this AI slop. I think that, uh, most parents will say. You're not getting that much out of this, so it should be limited. This is very much candy and then there are vegetables.

• 42:53Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I would say is I don't think most parents are engaged enough to

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  actively control screen time.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Yes, and so there will be a barbell where certain parents will, will, will police it and see very good outcomes for their parent, for their children. And other parents won't, and they will see bad outcomes from their, from their children. And then there will also be dynamics within these groups where if you look around and you see that your peer group is all zombies because they've all been spending every waking moment glued to AI slop and they can't tell you anything because they're just watching like nonsense. Well, then there's incredible alpha for going to the library and reading a book. And so someone will figure that out and realize, wait, if everyone else is completely non-competitive and I'm the only one that's read this book, I will have the ability to make a ton of money and get a huge house and

• 43:46John Coogan?

  live a wonderful life. And so I should lock in and I should turn that stuff off, resist that and, and become a more interesting, dynamic and creative and, you know, independent thinker. And so there will be this natural game theoretic outcome where if everyone's falling for one thing. I mean, it's the land of the lotus eaters. If everyone's doing drugs all day and you're the one that's not on drugs, you're going to be pretty powerful in that society, right? Like if everyone's drunk all day and you're the only sober person, well, you're probably going to be, you know, the president or, you know, the, the ruler of the world potentially.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  I have no idea if this stat is fully accurate, but one study showed that the average American five-year-old watches two to three hours of TV

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Woo.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  a day.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  That's really dark.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Well, uh. A better way to spend your time, get your kids on Julius. Give them some analysis, give them some data. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. You turn them loose in this thing.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  How did you spend your allowance last week? You don't know?

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Julius?

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Run the numbers.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Run the numbers.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Run the numbers.

• 44:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is your lemonade stand actually performing or is growth decelerating?

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  If we add, if we really add in cogs.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know you.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Barely break any.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  I know you doubled lemonade stand revenue last quarter, but the previous quarter, you were tripling it. So, yeah. You're decelerating. We gotta have a talk. Don't you know the triple, triple, double, double, double is, that doesn't count anymore?

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's 10x, 10x.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  It's 10x. Did you 10x your lemonade stand? Put the numbers in Julius.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, we should switch gears and talk about GPT, ChatGPT Pulse.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Yes. So this was so interesting that it launched the same day because I view it as the opposite product. Like it is, uh, the meta AI product's free. It's very generic. Every single person gets the exact same. It's unpersonalized right now. Everyone got the same feed at the start. It's purely video. There's no meat and potatoes. You're not learning things. And then Pulse was like, let's go through all of your ChatGPT history. Learn what you're the biggest nerd about and then, uh, and then surface really rich, deep content. At least that's what I got. And it's only for people that are paying $200 a month. So it's like effectively for rich people. Um, and my results were wild.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Like with the meta AI, I got the jet ski monkey fun. I got the cat rocket. I got all this silly videos.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  The timing is, the timing is really.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. So.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Which way? Which way, Western man?

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  12:26 Pacific yesterday.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  Alexander Wang launched Vibes.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  12:36, his former roommate, Sam Altman, launched Pulse.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  You wonder if it was by chance.

• 46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably just random. Talk it up to random chance, probably, yeah.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Your P random is?

• 46:47John Coogan?

  Extremely high. No, no history.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no history of.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  No history between these big companies trying to preempt each other and launch.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  The culture war.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and launch products right at the same time. Take, take air out of the, out of the room for the other one. But, I mean, my, my pulse experience was wild, so.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  Open AI recruiters, you know, sending immediately.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  You want to come back?

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Saying like, which way, Western researcher?

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Seriously. So, so my, my pulse gave me five stories or something. I got completely nerd sniped. First one was a breakdown of Mag7 CapEx. You know how to get me going. There's nothing I love more than diving into Mag7 CapEx. Then a deep dive on Nvidia's Blackwell rollout cadence, which is exactly what I want to know about. An explanation of how memory bottlenecks computing performance. Going all the way back to the Apollo missions to now with HBM, what's going on in the AI revolution? Then a comparison of various enterprise level bonded cellular systems that can be used to live stream content on the go. We've been talking about taking cameras out of the studio and live streaming and streaming back.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  Well, you can't always just do that over a single 5G connection over a Wi-Fi hotspot. And so there's actually an enterprise level device that will connect you to Verizon and AT&T and Sprint and bond all of those together. So you have a very stable connection and this one fits in a backpack. And so I was researching that. It gave me a bunch of recommendations. And of course, they're going to be able to monetize that because when I finally make my decision on which bonded cellular system we're buying, they're going to take a cut of it. They're going to buy it for us. And so I was like extremely pleased with my pulse experience, even though it was AI slop. It was AI generated. It was AI, you know, just, it was all synthetic.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  It wasn't, there was no human in the loop whatsoever, but it was highly curated, highly personalized. And it felt like it, I came away from that feeling like I had leveled myself up and I had learned something and become a better person, more thoughtful, more knowledgeable. And I came away from the meta AI thing. Not even really remembering specifics of what I saw, just that I saw a lot of AI stuff. And and and I came away from it being like, oh, that was kind of cool. I I like mid journey stuff. It's interesting. It looks good. But it didn't it didn't stay with me and it didn't really.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  I'll tell you, I'll tell you a couple of mine.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  Like thought provoke. Yeah, what you got?

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  So I got one on vendor financing loops across industries.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Background here.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  What you're seeing, obviously.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  With OpenAI and Nvidia.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  And semis.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, chat GPT with Nvidia, they breaking it down, other, other, other types, you know, similar structures in automotive, aerospace, other industries, kind of breaking it down. It's basically like a deep research report.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  Then they have OpenAI core weave deal expands by six and a half billion. This is interesting to me because they are

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  effectively creating a net new, a net new news article.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  It's like curated based on what it knows about.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  How the the level of depth I want to engage with the story. So it's actually pulling from ten or so different sources.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  I think it's it's not even deep research, it's just firing off an O three pro query or like a GPT five pro query.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  But it's formatting it.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  It's doing it like five times.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  It's formatting it to feel like an article.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, it's very accessible. I I actually don't really love the way they present the articles with the images and the headlines. Like, I don't actually think they need to do that.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Another one on prediction markets. And this one includes some slop.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a picture of the South Park characters.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  Is it AI generated?

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, so they're generating images too.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  It just says predict market. So that's not.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Kind of a mess.

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  Good, kind of a mess. And then it says. Here's a key update on flight caps and staffing since you've been weighing NYC travel logistics.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Summary of how the FAA extends.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  I want to go way deeper on that.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  The article it generated for me is FAA extends Newark flight caps to 2026.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  You were looking for a gas station near you, so here's the full history of gas stations. Like, I don't know if I want that, actually.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so a little bit of a misuse.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  I'm good.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  Overall, it's cool.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  And what they've done is they've made it so that when you land in ChatGPT, you can click into this feed.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Which is the best real estate, because you're going to open ChatGPT regularly anyway, and you're normally presented with just a big blank screen, which is like the worst UX move ever, right? You have, it's free real estate. Put something there, they're going to be able to put ads in here. It's going to be a hugely monetizable surface and I think a great user experience. I think people are going to be really happy with it. And I think it's going to be personalized superintelligence. It's going to be very, it's already very personalized. Like, I guarantee most people that open the ChatGPT app and hit Pulse will not see the same articles.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  And the reason this is potentially great as an ad unit is that it's not putting it in a specific prompt, it's putting it in between prompts. So that means they can personalize the ad for you based on your interests and what it knows about you.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  But it's not doing it in a way that is going to be especially conflicted.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  As it would be in a.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, like if I'm asking for the best backpack, I want unbiased results. But if you just surface to me, hey, here are some new backpacks and there's a sponsored post in there, like, that seems very reasonable. I do think that they'll probably need to lean into audio more. There was no way to just click a button and have it play an audio of all the articles. And even if I see an article, I can thumbs up it, thumbs down it, I can save it, I can share it, but I can't just listen to it. So I actually have to click in and then scroll to the bottom. And then, once I scroll to the bottom, then I can click the audio button. So clearly some UX that they will be improving. There's some really obvious updates.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  But, I mean, such a great product and surface area to start building on. I'm extremely bullish on Pulse for OpenAI. It seemed really great. And the response was not, this is. This is slop. This is going to one-shot people. This is gonna be some like, you know, dystopian thing. I think the reviews generally were pretty positive.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  This is a well timed launch, good marketing.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  Well, if you want to build something like this, you want to store a bunch of data, fine tune something, get on TurboPuffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  So Daniel Tenreiro says tech luminaries be like today. We're proud to announce the most brain-dead AI version of the most joyless anti-human product imaginable.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  I think that was in a response not to Pulse.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, not to Pulse. That just like, yeah, I mean, Gabriel says predator drone aimed at the minds of men and women aged 55 to 65. There's a lot of that.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  Antonio Garcia Martinez says AI will be the biggest vehicle for ads in human history.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  I think so. I think that they're eating off of a massive plate.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Triggering for a lot of people, but.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  He loves ads. We love ads. Let's give you another ad. Profound, get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get a demo at Profound. Actually, super relevant. I mean, if you want to show up in these, in the Pulse update, it's like knowing where your brand sits and all the AI apps and LLMs makes a ton of sense.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a whole new service area.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, like clearly a growing, growing, growing space. So good to do if your brand.

• 54:54Jordi Hays?

  Dylan Patel with a white pill.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Whether you are religious or not, remember to start your day by being grateful and thankful for the opportunity to be in the eye of the storm of the biggest economic boom in human history. Let's etch our initials into the silicon of the information age.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Let's F up the world, gang. I like it. It is a, it is, it is a wild time and there's a lot of, a lot of opportunity all over the place. Even, even, you know, we're seeing like small developers build little things that just like, you know, the barnacle economy we call it. It was very disparaging because we were looking at it from a venture capital lens, but truly there are some, there are some folks who are, who are, you know, sort of barnacles on the, like just drafting off of the, what's happening in the huge hundred billion dollar market. It's like, imagine if you're a real estate agent and you're just like, yeah, I'm, I'm.

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  It's a good time to be a.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  I'm a real estate agent and I was on that. I was on, I was in Abilene, Texas and I just made a ton of money.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  Or you. You helped a few OpenAI employees buy homes.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Oh, that too, yeah.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  Now you're helping a hundred of them buy homes.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so, there's so many different ways. Daniel Morrell, Danielle Morrell says, today ChatGPT created the real estate they need for ads, which we agree with. Simon Smith has a little review of ChatGPT Pulse. First impression, it's going to be insanely useful. It's like a newsfeed tailored to recent conversations. It reminded me of perplexity's discover feature, only way more personal. I did find that when I use perplexity discover, it was not as personalized. But again, I wasn't using perplexity as daily. I've been a daily active user of ChatGPT, probably firing off like five or six queries a day for a year, two, three now. So they have a lot to work with there. And he says, you don't just get content on broad topics like artificial intelligence.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  You get content on very specific things you've been discussing with ChatGPT. For example, I was chatting with it the other day about AIs competing with each other. So it presented me some content on that. I even, it even finds content for things you've mentioned in passing, but are genuinely, genuinely interested in. I've noticed I've been asking about Toronto's crashing condo market, for example. So it found me an article on that. I don't know if it even found you an article, it created an article. It found multiple sources and then created the article on top of it. The onboarding experience is excellent. You get stuff right away and then you're scrolling. It often, it offers to do other stuff like refine the feed, give you email notifications or access your calendar and email. This feels like the most personalized newsfeed you can imagine.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  It also makes me want to dump even more information and context and app connections into ChatGPT. So it can be a better daily feed.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  Right now, it's a pulse on, on the world and your interest generally. But it could become a pulse for your life.

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  And I mean, people have fun with it.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  You did have your calendar connected. It could, it could figure out, hey, you're meeting with this person later. Here's a few things they've been up to recently.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there was someone who was laughing about it because they, they went in and it was like immediately recommending like, go check out Gemini and go check out, uh, go check out Grok. But that's good, like it should be, it should be, uh, you know, they, they shouldn't be putting their thumb on the scale. It should just be based on, if you were asking ChatGPT about Gemini, it should recommend you Gemini because there should be a wall between the editorial and the advertising. Like there is here at TBPN, we talk about companies and then we run ads for companies like Fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video and audio models, all in one place, developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. If you want to do something interesting and elevate the conversation around video, image and audio, head over to Fall.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  So a little bit more context, I mean, people are having fun with this. Will Depew says, "Do not build infinite jest, do not build the infinite AI TikTok slot machine, do not build the P zombie AI boy-girlfriend, do not build the child-eating short-form video black hole, do not build the human feedback optimized diffusion transformer porn generator, save yourselves." And Will just says, "Reminder," because it's exactly what they did. Matt Le Glacia says, "I've been telling people that one of my big concerns about the country is that we don't, people don't have enough access to enough short-form video content, and now they have even more." There's a little bit more context on what might be happening behind the scenes from Andrew Curran.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  He says Alex Wang explained in the thread that this partnership is temporary, that Vibes will eventually use Meta's in-house models that they are currently training, which will probably be trained on Reels data and on Instagram data and on video from Facebook and from Instagram.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  Because it might have the potential to be very good.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  I, I think so too, because when you look at what VO3 is able to do with YouTube data, you have to imagine that Facebook has basically the same amount of data. Like, it's not everything, but the crossposting is crazy. And there are so many, like, so many content creators just by default crosspost to Facebook because it's free views, right? And so the library of Facebook and Instagram content has to be massive. And, but I think that they need to build a massive data center, they need that one gigawatt cluster or something. They need some crazy, crazy thing. And so they're not just able to hit run and train on the entire meta data set, but they have immense data. So any, any argument that you're making for like, Google will, you know,

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  be able to use YouTube as this like crazy differentiator, you have to imagine that Meta is in the same, is in the same camp and has roughly the same amount of data. I don't think, I don't think YouTube is like several orders of magnitude bigger. I think they're in the same, in the same band. But Alex Wang said, for this early version, we partnered with Mid Journey and Black Forest Labs. While we continue developing our own models behind the scenes. This is the same deal that Black Forest made with Elon here on X. All the images here are generated by Grok. Were actually by Flux One until XAI's in-house model now named Imagine finished its training. XAI also has access to a lot of data from videos that have been shared on X.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Probably going to be really good at generating startup launch videos. Maybe less so on, you know, super cinematic, multi-hour videos. If there's less of that on X. But I mean, I've cross posted a ton of YouTube videos onto X over the years.

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of infinite short form, should we talk about the TikTok deal?

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:23Jordi Hays?

  There's a good, I mean, we covered it briefly yesterday, but Bloomberg covered it today. They said, "Prized TikTok business valued like boring blue chip in US deal." It's effectively trading hands at around 1X revenue.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they're saying, "The $14 billion price tag proposed for TikTok's US business values it like a mature, low-growth company. The valuation is well below previous projections and may be seen as quote-unquote 'daylight robbery' by ByteDance and its existing investors." The deal would spin out. And again, the other thing here is like ByteDance and the existing investors are retaining a position and it's certainly a lot better than a zero, which they could have been heading towards. But the deal would spin out TikTok US and do a new joint venture with ByteDance's stake reduced to less than 20% to satisfy US national security concerns.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, the rough, "The $14 billion price tag proposed for TikTok's US business values it like a stuffy old energy or food company than a leading global social media company. The rough estimate cited by J.D. Vance on Thursday is well below previous projections that scaled closer to $40 billion." $40 billion would have been still below. What Elon paid for Twitter. Vance's comments came as President Donald Trump pushed forward a plan for American investors to buy the US operation from Chinese internet firm ByteDance. Vance conceded that the purchasers will ultimately determine the amount paid while expected buyers, including Oracle and Silver Lake, would likely welcome a low-ball valuation.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  ByteDance and its existing investors may find it amusing, if not insulting. The suggested value looks like daylight robbery, said Wei Cern Ling, senior equity advisor for Asia Technology at Union Banker Privé. Anyways, my question here is, is it possible that their their user metrics are just massively have always been massively inflated, right?

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  In the US?

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  That was always the one of the reasons that creators started using the app and would continue to use it as they would post and they would get 200,000 views on one of their first like 10 videos, right? Which is just like the dopamine feedback from that is just insane.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a long lineage of when you want to bootstrap a social network, you basically put a bunch of bots on there.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  And so you could be inflating the views. I noticed I tested TikTok with like a brand new account and every video, it felt like it would get auditioned, basically, just randomly shuffled into, you'd get like 500 to 1,000 views.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  And then you'd and then you'd, you know, move on from that. And then if it did well, it would go viral. I think that that actually does make sense to send videos out. YouTube barely does that when you are on a fresh account. Although when I scroll my YouTube feed, I do see more and more videos surfacing that are like 23 views. I'm like, I'm like, really? I'm like the 24th person to like potentially click on this? And it's just testing like, hey, is there a chance?

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Is there demand?

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  This is a great video. Because if a lot of people click on it, a lot of people watch it, they enjoy it, then like maybe this should go viral and they have to test that on a lot of people. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of, you know, some sort of inflation, some sort of, you know, like fakeness. I think it'd probably be more about the just the growth rate, like has like when stories came to Instagram.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Snapchat stopped growing, basically. And when reels came to Instagram, it's entirely possible, I haven't seen the growth data, but it's entirely possible that TikTok kind of stopped growing.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so if you have a, if the US business was not growing quickly, is losing money.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  And potentially, a lot of the metrics have been inflated forever.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible that, you know, it's certainly, it's hard to, when you have these AI evaluations, you put other businesses in the, in context, right? Perplexity at 20 billion.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  This feels like a robbery.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  But, and I'm, and I'm certain that Zuck would have, would have happily paid. How much do you think Zuck would have paid for TikTok?

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  $200 billion or something.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something insane, right? Like, to be able to.

• 1:06:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  And obviously, the regulators would not have.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Allowed that, but, or at least would have.

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  So, is, so basically, Oracle's gonna own it, which means.

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  And Silver Lake.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Nvidia's the only big tech company, except for Broadcom, without a social network. We gotta make.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Broadcom never gets enough.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  We gotta make CUDA network, CUDA net.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Broadcom, 1.6 trillion dollar company, and, and barely ever in the conversation.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  It's rough, it's rough out there.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  They need a, they need a new, they need a new PR firm.

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Or Hock Tan needs to go direct.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Someone dug up an old Alex Wang tweet here. All of the new social apps suck. The last good one was Yik Yak. Maybe text slash photo slash video based social networks are saturated.

• 1:06:51Jordi Hays?

  From 2016.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  From 2016, that's a throwback. Now he's building a new one, a new, new vertical feed. Anyway, Dylan Patel says, my favorite thing about the new college grads that I've hired is that they don't ask you how to do stuff. They just put it in ChatGPT and try, even if wrong. So much better than new grads asking you how to do stuff without trying. Chat is breeding agency into kids. That's interesting. High agencies, I wonder, I wonder how much he's selecting for that.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  But because like to go.

• 1:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how much, how much activity never happens because somebody doesn't know the right way to do something. And isn't willing to fail at the start, or isn't willing to just take a shot at it, or isn't willing to ask. Yeah. Somebody.

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  But yeah, I, I, I like the idea that, that people are just feeling more confident about going and, and.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  And, and trying stuff and.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  Anyway, linear, linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Sam McAllister, 10K likes on this. Excited to share slop, a new slop trough for you all to enjoy. People were having a lot of fun with, with the slop stuff. Someone had, someone, someone said, I met, I never met a slop I didn't like.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Someone else had something funny to say. People, people were having fun with the slop puns. Had a good time. Packy was taking a really strong stance. He was saying, guys, it's very important you resist vibes. Disable your parents' phones if they tell you they're using vibes. Make fun of your friends relentlessly if they are, if they are caught using vibes.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Or until they stop using vibes. Fire employees caught watching vibes. We ordered, we ordered Tyler to watch like.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  We said, yeah, he's not here today, actually, because.

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  Oh, I wonder why. Yeah.

• 1:08:46Jordi Hays?

  Because he's watching. We said, watch like 12 to 14 hours straight.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  And he's just locked in watching, I suppose.

• 1:08:52Jordi Hays?

  He's got his Quest on.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you, does it, do you think it works in Quest?

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  No, I, I, I think it's only in the Meta AI app right now.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  But can you not?

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  It's only a phone app. I don't think.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  App in Quest?

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  No. I don't think so. I, I, I think that the, the app stores are completely separate. The Meta AI app is an iOS app and if it runs on Quest, it's a different, different app. And I don't think that there's like, you know, oh, you run any phone app on Quest. Like, that's not a thing. You can mirror, I think you can mirror your phone into Apple Vision Pro, but someone will figure it out. I, I figured out how to mirror my, my laptop into Apple Vision Pro. And there's actually a pretty easy way, if you're in Apple Vision Pro, to, to beam your screen into, into VR. So. You could certainly do that. I mean, I guess you could run the iPhone app on your Mac and then mirror your Mac into Apple Vision Pro, and that would be a way to see it.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  But yeah, mixed responses. Doug over at Fabricated Knowledge says legit, one of my favorite uses is a new digest tailored to my interests. So yeah, this rules. Talking about ChatGPT Pulse, huge, huge, huge support for ChatGPT Pulse. He also went on to say something interesting. He says, meanwhile, this is def not an AGI company, but the world's largest consumer company lol. Like this is a good product for a big consumer company. This is another move in the consumer direction. Who knows if they're actually, you know, pulling the, pulling the plug on, on AGI. Some folks were saying that Brett Taylor doesn't seem very AGI pilled because he's

• 1:10:31John Coogan?

  building an application layer company. And if you're truly AGI pilled, you should just, you know, go all in on the, on the foundation model companies, race to AGI. But you see this with Anthropic. They're partnering with other companies. They're investing in other companies. Anthropic investors-

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  They're running billboard campaigns.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So is anyone really fully AGI pilled on the short term? Even Eliezer Yudkowsky is saying that like, we're one to two transformer sized innovations away from superintelligence, which he thinks would be very bad. Well, the transformer was like a decade ago. So if these things only happen every couple of decades, like you could be looking at like 20 years, 40 years to superintelligence. And, and Eliezer like opens with like, I'm not putting a date on this. I'm just saying it's bad and it's gonna happen at some point. And so that's, that's his take. But we should, we should have him-

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Mark Andreessen had a good post earlier. He had, why this leading, it's a screenshot of like a CNBC article, why this leading AI CEO is warning the tech could cause mass unemployment.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  And then next to it is another screenshot from CNBC, Anthropic is trip is to triple international workforce and global AI push.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Very funny. Well, Anthropic will have to pay their sales tax. They should do it on Numeral HQ. Numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Other reactions, I mean, there's a ton of reactions to both Pulse and Vibes. Pulse and Vibes. That's the current thing. A lot of people are saying, Anthony says it's interactions poke, but on the ChatGPT app. Nick Dobos says, if this works, extrapolate out, it replaces social media as the go-to mindless doom scroll, potentially worth trillions of dollars about ChatGPT Pulse, which is interesting because you could say that about Vibes. Nathan Lambert says, he's more excited to have finally learned Kodak's is in the app. He's going to master the art of vibe coding on the go. This content Pulse stuff will be seen as slop to teapot, but very likely popular overall.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  Interestingly, it wasn't really seen as slop as teapot because Vibes came out and that was like the sacrificial lamb to slop. Riza Martin, who is running a competitor, a product that was similar to Pulse, said, so many people sending me the Pulse launch. Thank you to everyone who checked in. You're right, lots of similarities to Hux, down to the UX, the banners, the taglines, the entire concept. Building a new product is really hard. It requires so much out of you, but the something. So.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I pulled up Hux in the, they're focused on audio.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  So you can, and this looks pretty cool. They make live, or they say live stations. So you can tap in and immediately hear an update on your stock portfolio, right?

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  But they do have functionality that just says it's briefing you on your day, it's surfacing. But it's very audio driven.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  Well, maybe they'll integrate with public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. Will Monidas says, the central plot point of Infinite Jest is a film so engrossing that anyone who watches it loses all interest in anything else. They can't eat, sleep, or function. In the book, terrorists fight over it. In real life, Alex Wang got paid a couple billion to make it happen. Having fun. Benjamin says, flipping my companies I've worked for that have employed Emmett Shear as CEO and launched feed products called Pulse Counter from 1 to 2. What is he talking about? What was the other company? Did Twitch launch Pulse? Where else has Emmett Shear been?

• 1:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Been CEO?

• 1:14:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Twitch Pulse, no? Introducing Pulse, an always-on way for streamers and viewers to connect. Connections between streamers and viewers are part of what makes Twitch unique. Exhibit A, Twitch Chat, a big step forward towards strengthening those connections was when we released channel feeds, but that was only the beginning. Now we're launching a way to make it easier for streamers and viewers to engage with each other on Twitch, whether the stream is live or not. Introducing Pulse, a place where streamers can post and engage with all of their followers in the greater Twitch community, right from the Twitch front page. It's an always-on way to share clips, stream highlights, schedules, photos, and more. So it's a feed on top of your, on top of, it's an aggregated feed. It's a news

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  feed. It's a broader algo feed across the entire, everyone you follow on Twitch. Interesting. So they began the rollout. When, when did this launch? 2017. Eight years old. Okay, I haven't even heard about this product. I'm not, I'm not a DAU of Twitch specifically. But thank you to everyone that's holding it down on Twitch Chat. Thank you to Bobby Cosmic. He says Twitch Chat is goaded.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Cree says, everyone doing the same launch videos to announce their startup when all you really need is to have natural aura like this. And this is the Fairchild Semiconductor team.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  They look great.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Dropping an image exactly like this and saying, introducing your company.

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  Here's the team.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Here's what we do.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Could go pretty viral.

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's hard if it's like fully derivative. It could be done well if it's an homage.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying, yeah.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  But if it's just like, here's their team and the team looks interesting. I mean, I, I don't know if this photo did much for them at the time. I mean, they were making some.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Front page of the journal.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Could've gone pretty hard.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  I wonder where this photo was originally published. But man, the, the looks here are fantastic.

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm begging people to do something other than a cinematic launch video.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Truly, truly.

• 1:16:24Jordi Hays?

  We should talk about.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  Fin.ai, the number one AI for customer service.

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Exactly that, beat me to it.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  Number one in performance benchmark, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. We should talk about asteroid mining. Astroforge says asteroid mining is all they talk about because Adrian Ditman said, we don't talk enough about asteroid mining. Astroforge has got you covered. They're working on asteroid mining, apparently.

• 1:16:45Jordi Hays?

  That's good.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  In other space news.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  We should, before we dive into that, apparently this just broke. The Social Network follow-up sets 2026 release date and official title called The Social Reckoning.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Oh, they're not calling it The Social Network, too.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  Aaron Sorkin's film stars Mickey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Bill Burr, and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Kendall Roy as Zuck.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  Interesting that they're not.

• 1:17:18Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be hard for me to fully, I mean, I'm sure he'll, he'll.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  You, you know him as, as from Succession.

• 1:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:17:24John Coogan?

  You know him as Kendall Roy.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  So, Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin's follow-up to The Social Network now officially titled The Social Reckoning.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  But Jeremy Strong is a fantastic actor. Did you ever wind up seeing the Donald Trump movie?

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  I did.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was it called?

• 1:17:38Jordi Hays?

  That was wildly underappreciated.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  So underappreciated. It's a fantastic movie, highly recommended, 2024.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was a tough one. Calling it The Apprentice must have hurt its reach.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you type in The Apprentice and you just get the, the show. But anyway, it was an independent biographical drama and it takes you from Donald Trump, who he was in the 70s and 80s, and his relationship with Roy Cohn, who's played by Jeremy Strong. And Jeremy Strong brings out a completely different character. It doesn't feel like a Kendall Roy at all to me. It felt like an entirely unique, unique character. And Sebastian Stan, who's the Winter Soldier, I believe, he did a great job as Trump. It's, it's funny, it's interesting. It really takes you inside the mind of this person and how competitive real estate development was in the 70s and 80s in New York.

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  It's also just a very interesting view into the way that Trump might still be thinking today.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, a little bit more here. So, The Social Reckoning, a very ominous name.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  I wonder if it's gonna be positive.

• 1:18:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll hit theaters on October 9th.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  I think it'll probably just talk about like the, you know, how the

• 1:18:54Jordi Hays?

  How awesome social media is.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  And how the stock rebounded after the Metaverse sell-off. That was amazing. That's probably what it'll focus on.

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  That's yeah.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, the rebound.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Entirely.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  And just how DAUs have been growing.

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Up almost 10x on the bottom.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Time on sites been growing and fighting off competition from all these upstarts and winning. That's probably what they'll focus on.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  So Oscar winner Mickey Madison, Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner Jeremy Allen White, Emmy and Grammy nominee Bill Burr and Oscar nominee Jeremy Strong will star in The Social Reckoning, with Strong confirmed to play founder Mark Zuckerberg. The Social Reckoning is written and directed by Sorkin, who also produces alongside Todd Black, Peter Rice and Stuart Besser. Production is expected to begin next month.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Is that? Does that seem like an aggressive timeline? They're starting, they're basically starting production a year out from the release date? Is that normal, film guy?

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know what's normal anymore. Who knows?

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Described as a companion piece to The Social Network, the new film focuses on events that take place nearly two decades after the boy genius programmer and a troupe of tech pioneers invented what would go on to be the world's largest social media platform. The Social Reckoning tells a true story of how Francis Hoggan, a young Facebook engineer, enlisted the help of Jeff Horowitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to go on a dangerous journey that ends up blowing the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets. So.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Sounds super positive. Horowitz reporting a series of articles known as The Facebook Files was published in 2021 and exposes, uh, and exposed Facebook for its harmful effects on teens and its knowing proliferation of misinformation, which contributed to acts of political violence. Okay. 2010's The Social Network, also released in October, was a critical and commercial hit, earning 226 million at the global box office and receiving eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Sorkin's win for Best Adapted Screenplay was one of the three Oscars it ultimately took home.

• 1:21:04Jordi Hays?

  Man, if you were the meta team, you'd probably pay a lot more than 226 million to have this film not release because it's going to just ignite a whole conversation and rehash, you know, the Facebook files and probably introduce the Facebook files to more, more people than even read them originally. So anyways, it will be very interesting to watch. Of course, we should, we should probably try to do a, do a TVPN meetup, everybody in tuxedos, find the biggest theater we can and get, you know, a couple hundred.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  It seems pretty, I mean, it seems pretty negative, obviously, but I wonder what effect it'll have on tech because the first Social Network story was negative as well, not famously not loved by Zuck and when PT and Zuck had commented on it, they said like it didn't quite get the story right and it kind of assumes a zero sum world that was not really true in tech at the time. But the, but the interesting effect was that like you wound up with like tons of startup founders like listening to the Social Network soundtrack and like grinding and building companies. And so a lot of people saw it and they were like, yeah, that's kind of crazy. Like I wouldn't want to be in that position or, you know, get, get, you know, be on the wrong side of a deal. But a lot of people found it kind

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  of inspiring, honestly. And I wonder if the effect will be similar here or if, because it's such a big company, there's something still about the first Social Network movie that is just like a, like a from zero to one, like, you know, the story of starting something that's just relatable and inspiring, even if it does have like a negative tinge to it. Anyway, back to the timeline.

• 1:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Back to the timeline.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Jasmine's son is. Identifying something that has changed between GPT-3 and GPT-5 in the writing style, she says, "It makes it me sad how much GPT, ChatGPT's writing style has degraded in the last five years. Look at the quoted samples from 2020 versus today's response style." And this is an example of asking Paul Graham on ChatGPT. So the GPT-3 was was sort of channeling Paul Graham's writing and and kind of fine tuning in real time. And so the the prompt, if you will, is, "Dear Paul Graham, I want to start a startup. I am not able to figure out how to go about it. Can you help guide me? Sincerely, Paras."

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  And it says, and the response is, "Dear Paras, I wish I had some easy way to tell you how to go about it, but it's not easy. Here's what I know. Startups are not linear, unless you're talking about linear, the app. But your startup is not linear. Your startup should be using linear. They're not something you can line up and say, quote, 'Okay, do this, then this, then this.'" Startups go everywhere and nowhere. It's a particularly confusing process because and exciting, and the excitement throws you off. And since you don't really know what you're doing, you don't really know that you're lost. Most advice people give startup founders is either obnoxiously high-minded or uselessly vague. Don't be misled. This is normal. I wish I had an answer that was better than that, but I don't. My advice

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  is that you shouldn't take other people's advice too seriously unless they've started something big themselves. My advice is that you should not try to figure out what you should do until you have a plan for how you're going to do it. That includes getting customers. So a good first step is to make a list of companies that do things like what you want to do and see if any of them are already run by people like you. Try to identify their ideas and then get to know the people who run them and see what they did to get going. That seems like pretty good advice. It also feels like it's in Paul Graham's voice. And so over in ChatGPT-5 land, GPT-5, was the prompt was, "Dear Paul Graham, I want to start a startup, but I'm not able to figure out how to go about it. Can you guide me?" And

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  the result from GPT-5's interpretation of Paul Graham's voice is, "The best way to start is not..." By asking how to start a startup, but by asking what problem is worth solving. Good startups grow from founders who notice something missing in the world, often something they need, they themselves need. If you can make something people want, even in a very small, rough form, you'll be on the right path. Don't worry about the grand plan at first. Focus on building something useful, showing it to users and improving quickly. That loop, build, show, fix is the real guide. Sincerely, Paul Grant.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  It's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be based on the, based on her comment. But it definitely, I don't know, it definitely has like the, the reinforcement learning, like the, like the, the M dash has really been beaten into deep GPT five. That's what it feels like. And it feels less like just an email that was fired off by PG, which is the, the, the GPT three version has no M dashes. It's kind of written in this like casual email style. The, the, the, the GPT five version is a little bit more polished.

• 1:26:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's not that there's anything technically wrong with the current output. It's that reading the GPT three output was just much more enjoyable.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Felt like it was written by a human.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  Which is crazy to think about.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  This feels very clanker coded.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and it's, yeah, it's, it's interesting. It's become, uh, the GPT five's become like, everyone kind of gets the same tone out of it. But I'm excited for that to, to, to change. I, I hope that, uh, with more personalization, we will get more personality personalization and we will actually see different personalities emerge. Anyway, Cody Plofker says, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, says, "Half of the value I add as CEO is just applying urgency to situations." I like that. That's valuable. You don't know what to do necessarily, but you just need to empower people to go figure it out, move fast.

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  And Cody runs a massive beauty brand.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Jones Road.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Also switched to Ram recently.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  Let's go. Congratulations.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Also way that he added value as a CEO, but Jones Road is an absolute monster.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Customer relationship magic, cause Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Tane says, "AI influenced ARR is the new community adjusted EBITDA because Adobe shares jumped 6% as AI influenced ARR tops $5 billion."

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  What does that mean? I pay for some Adobe products at various points, Premiere Pro, After Effects. There are AI tools in there for rotoscoping, green screen. Uh, I think there's a subtitle product. We don't use a lot of this stuff. We kind of cobbled a lot of.

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the challenge is when you have something.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  I assemble the PDF.

• 1:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Community adjusted EBITDA.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  That can be applied to any business, right?

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:57Jordi Hays?

  You, any CEO can figure out how to apply that. Framework. And just say, hey, you're not properly evaluating how awesome our customers are.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  And so AI influenced ARR could be applied to any business.

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  That uses. Chat GPT.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like the, the, the name of the game, or what was happening in like the Adobe CFO's head is like, the market is rewarding AI revenue. And so. I need to shift my massive SaaS revenue into a bucket that's called AI revenue. And I can just do that by reclassifying existing revenue lines. Every quarter and have kind of a new growth curve emerge for the AI influenced ARR.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  But. It's very unclear, like if this is, if this is, uh, you know, outcome based pricing. Token generation, image generation, like Adobe has image credits.

• 1:29:03Jordi Hays?

  There's an article in Barron's, Adobe's stock gets downgraded, generative AI isn't all it's cracked up to be.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is painful because they're like, wait, we're just, we're actually just a SaaS company.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  So Morgan Stanley downgraded Adobe to equal weight from overnight, cutting its price target to 450 from 520 due to AI concerns. So Morgan Stanley is concerned about AI competitive, from a competitive standpoint.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean. It makes sense.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  So Morgan Stanley says it's still waiting for Adobe's push into Gen AI to bear fruit.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  They came out with an AI image generator like right after Dolly, like two years ago. And I have not seen a lot of adoption of it. And they don't really have the distribution for it. It, I mean, should weave its way into all the different Adobe products, but.

• 1:29:55Jordi Hays?

  It felt like they needed somebody like Scott Belsky.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  They had him for quite a while.

• 1:30:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:00Jordi Hays?

  To be leading that effort and doing the deal making that even Alexander Wang is doing with Mid Journey and things like that.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't, you just don't, we don't talk about Adobe much at all.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Jordi Hays?

  On the show, right?

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  Probably should.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  You know, if they were properly playing this market, making big bets.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised they haven't.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  One of their big pitches for their generative AI product was that they were saying like, we have a ton of stock images. We will only train on stock images. We're not going to train on any copyrighted material. And basically every other lab was like, no, we're definitely training on copyrighted material. We think this is fair use. We're going to fight this and we will pay the fines. And in the Anthropic's case, they're paying what billions of dollars in fines for a very specific thing, but that, the specific fine that they're paying is not because they trained on copyrighted material, it's because they acquired the copyrighted material in not an above board way.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  According to Gemini, Adobe's only made one acquisition in the last 24 months.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Company called Refraze AI.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Indian based AI video startup. You would think they'd be more acquisitive right now.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Given how many different Gen AI.

• 1:31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Creative tools there are and how many of them just aren't going to make it.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  They're only marginally better than generating images in Banana Banana.

• 1:31:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, where were they during the windsurf bidding process? Like where were they in these like, you know, they're letting these things get away.

• 1:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Uh, but yeah, I mean, that's the nature of being a big company, risk averse. They don't want some massive lawsuits showing up. I mean, like six billion dollars.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they could just be using the existing models.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  I think so too.

• 1:31:37Jordi Hays?

  Better, they could.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Just add entirely new product lines. Try to scale those.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Just through the existing distribution they have.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, maybe captions. The captions has done some good stuff on on video editing on mobile. I

• 1:31:56Jordi Hays?

  They just

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of questions on mobile. There's a bunch of questions. I'm sure they have a lot of enterprise stuff.

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  To my, I haven't met somebody early in their career that's excited about AI that's even talked about working with Adobe, right? And so if they don't have the talent, they're not going to have that exciting a product.

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, Connor in the chat says their software acts like bloatware. Two thumbs down for Adobe for me.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  They just integrated Nano Banana though.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  It's interesting. Thank you, Ground Paper Bank. Rune says, I would just walk around the research floor at OpenAI reminding everyone that they're propping up the world economy.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't be more true. How many, you got Broadcom that's popping on OpenAI partnerships, you got CoreWeave that's popping on OpenAI partnerships, you got Oracle that's popping on OpenAI partnerships. How many? We got a lot of, we got a lot of important companies that are riding with OpenAI. SoftBank, right? SoftBank, SoftBank doesn't get enough credit. The stock's up.

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  It is, it is crazy that

• 1:32:59Jordi Hays?

  Stock's up 118% year to date.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  When the, when the last batch of hyperscalers were birthed, there wasn't this, there wasn't so many big companies that were like highly indexed or dependent on them, you know? Like, like, Google's growth, people weren't like, oh, if Google doesn't work out, like, you know, Microsoft is screwed. Like, or when Meta, when Facebook first started, it wasn't like, oh, if Facebook, it becomes like, if Facebook stagnates, like, the global economy will fail. It's like, it was, it was like its own thing, off in its own world, building its own data centers, and they were scaling, but it wasn't that crazy. Yeah, I know. Well, Rune's coming on, so we're

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  We got three mentions of Rune so far. Well,

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  Well, how about a mention of 8Sleep? 8Sleep.com. Get a Pod 5, 5-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping, baby.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  I was away from home last night, so I have no idea.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you don't have a number. I got an 80, so win by default.

• 1:34:00Jordi Hays?

  Wow, right.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  Not amazing. We're getting back into it. I'm waking up early these days.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  Shouldn't be winning with an 80.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  I know, yeah, but win by default. Starbucks is closing. Hundreds of stores and laying off staff as the chain continues to struggle, is this post. But the community note says Starbucks is closing about 1% of stores, which comes out under 2,000. They plan to remodel old stores and open more. So, story is developing. 2Cents, the social network for your net worth, did a poll and said, "What's your main caffeine source? Who do you think won? Who do you think the richest said? The most amount of value, I believe, went to energy drinks, but the most amount of votes went to coffee and tea."

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  That's actually so bullish for energy drinks.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:49John Coogan?

  The read on this is that the rich people are using energy drinks and the poor people are using pills? Caffeine pills? That makes sense. I mean,

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  the most economically efficient way to consume caffeine is through pills, right? They're super cheap to buy caffeine pills. But no caffeine had a strong showing as well, so pick your poison.

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  Energy drinks. Might be something.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  This is a perfect transition. We gotta talk about Avi Schiffman's out-of-home campaign. If you want to run an out-of-home campaign, go to 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.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  And as much as we love out-of-home campaigns, as much as we love ads. Probably don't do what friend.com.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  It's an impressive move.

• 1:35:39Jordi Hays?

  The scale at which they have, they've seemingly bought up all the out of home inventory in LA and New York.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  I'll give you the numbers. So Avi shared, he came on our show and said he's doing the largest out of home campaign in history. And I was like, that can't be true. That's so crazy. What about, you know, Avengers? What about GTA V? Like, there's gotta be huge campaigns that have been run, but it seems like he might actually be running one of the biggest campaigns, if not the biggest campaign. He says 1100, 11,000 car cards. I don't exactly know what a car card is. 1,000 platform posters, 130 urban panels, West Fourth Street domination, 100% print, all five boroughs. It's the largest NYC subway campaign ever happening now. We have seen it all over LA.

• 1:36:30John Coogan?

  He said it was the largest billboard ad buying campaign of all time and the ads.

• 1:36:35Jordi Hays?

  And this is a crazy.

• 1:36:37John Coogan?

  Don't say a lot about the product. It just says friend.com and it shows you the pendant and the pendant is kind of white on white.

• 1:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, some of them do.

• 1:36:43John Coogan?

  You're jumping off.

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  So I'm seeing one from their subway campaign.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  It says, and, and one thing is Avi is pitching this as your new roommate.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  And the reason I think this is not, uh, there's, the, the, the, the thing that's great about the campaign is how controversial it is.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:04Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of people that are going to be taking pictures, just saying, look how dystopian this is and posting it.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  That's exactly what's happening. Someone defaced it and said, stop profiting off of loneliness.

• 1:37:14Jordi Hays?

  But then some, one person that saw that's going to buy it.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Or it could be more, right?

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  But Avi markets this as your new roommate is waiting, which is funny to me because.

• 1:37:23John Coogan?

  People don't like roommates.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Great roommates back in the day, but I like them even more now that I'm not sharing a space with them.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  Living by yourself.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:34Jordi Hays?

  Your family

• 1:37:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  is amazing and I'm not personally in the market for a new roommate, but I'm also, I don't think the target market for this because I hang out with you for 12 hours a day.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:45Jordi Hays?

  And if we're not hanging out, we're probably on the phone talking about technology and business. But in the Subway campaign, they say, it says, "I'll never bail on our dinner plans. I'll binge the entire series with you. I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink." So while he's saying it's your new roommate, he's implying it's better than your roommate because you're getting, I guess, the, the social benefits of a roommate without the dirty dishes in the sink and the bailing on dinner plans.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Jordi Hays?

  But people are, people are not happy with this for one specific reason, which is that I think Avi is very backlogged on orders.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  He's gotten a lot of orders.

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:28Jordi Hays?

  He's gotten a lot of orders over the last year

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:31Jordi Hays?

  since he started selling it. And it's not the first time he's going viral and getting a lot of attention. And he hasn't fulfilled a lot of them, it sounds like.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41Jordi Hays?

  So he was going back and forth with some people. You know, people were saying bad, you know, a lot of marketing spend for a product that hasn't shipped orders from July of last year. And so, yeah, if you're somebody who just hasn't received your device yet, you're going to be kind of annoyed to be seeing this, that they're trying to sell a lot more of these and you haven't gotten yours. And I'm sure they're going order by order, trying to get through. Avi had said he'd sold 400, or he shipped out 400 in the last week, which is a lot of hardware.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  But the question

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  But that's like, wait, how much are these? $99 or $200? How much is it?

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  $129.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  $129.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  But the, the main, I guess, the, this feels like, Avi more or less said this on our show last time he came on, basically said that

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  50K of book writing.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  "I'm going to do a crazy out of home campaign so I can raise my next round."

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:33Jordi Hays?

  That was, I, I'm paraphrasing that, but that was what I, that was my read on it.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Jordi Hays?

  Because it, it feels like the product is still super early.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  The review from Wired was abysmal.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure that, that, you know, you can make the argument that the people that reviewed it are not

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  The target demo. But I haven't, you know, it, it, it, the, the concern is that we're not seeing a ton of customer love out there.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:04Jordi Hays?

  People are getting these and so getting, telling the entire world about your product before it's ready. Billboard campaigns can work to get hype and early interest.

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  But they're best when you have a product that is already loved and you're just able to get more eyeballs on it, more attention, more customers. And so getting a whole new wave of customers that are then going to be waiting a long time for their device and then potentially people that are getting them currently are, are potentially let down. It just feels incredibly risky. The other thing I was looking into is, you know, the, the website right now, I wonder how it converts. It's possible that, you know, it's priced in, in a way that, uh.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  It is pretty affordable in terms of like where devices play. Like people were shocked that the Meta Ray-Ban displays are $7.99 and that's what? Seven times as much money.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  But it does feel like it just takes a while to tell you what the product is and like.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The main thing is this kind of parallax scrolling.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  It's a lot of like motion, a lot of physical, like I gotta do a lot of work.

• 1:41:12Jordi Hays?

  Order, you can't hit order from, from like landing on the webpage.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder, if you go in the Wayback Machine, can you find what Apple's website was back at the first iPhone launch? Let me find that.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  I bet you there is a big buy button every, you want to buy a buy button every, no matter where you are on the website, you should always be able to hit buy.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's like standard is like above the fold. Don't let, don't make them scroll. Okay. When did the iPhone come out? 2007, right? 2007. Let's see what the, the, the Apple website looked like in 2007, you know, October.

• 1:41:48John Coogan?

  Let's see, it's loading, it's loading, I'm so excited. Um, yeah. Well, you know what a better piece of accessory might be? Something timeless.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  I know exactly what you're thinking about.

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  What am I thinking about?

• 1:42:01Jordi Hays?

  Some hardware.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Some hardware.

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  For the wrist.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  I think of an Aquanaut as a friend, really.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  And in some ways, it's super intelligence.

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Can tell you the time.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  Can tell you the time, can tell you the date.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  Better than a human.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  A chronograph can tell you.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  It can track time better than a human.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  It can. It's super human. Oh, yes, of course. If you're timing lap times on the track with a Daytona, that's going to be way more accurate than doing it in your head. So head over to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Um, oh no, the Apple website is not loading from 2007. It's, uh...

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, the Apple website today is definitely best practice for selling consumer electronics.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's tough to make a comparison to today because everyone knows what an iPhone is and they're on number 17 and so they can just say, "It's an iPhone." It's the best iPhone. It's a new iPhone.

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  iPhone 17 Pro. You can hit the Buy or you can hit Learn More. If you hit Learn More, you land on a new page with a cool video that says, "Buy." It's just, "Buy, buy, buy." So anyways, we'll see how this plays out. The challenge is, you know, having this visceral of a reaction even from tech insiders.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  There definitely is something to, uh, like kicking the bear and rage baiting a little bit and getting a bunch of somewhat negative attention. But then people will, um, there will be a small percentage of people that are like, "I'm in, I want to try it." And that works. But it feels like at some point you have to flip into just, um... Like, normal territory and kind of just speak to the product benefits. Um, in January 31st of 2008, the Apple homepage, do you know what, uh, was above the fold? Was right there.

• 1:43:50Jordi Hays?

  What was it?

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Wasn't the iPhone, it was the world's thinnest notebook, the MacBook Air. Uh, you can, you have to click somewhere else to find the iPhone January update. Let me see if they have some other page. They're just like, yeah, we'll put the iPhone in the back, uh, you know.

• 1:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got some iPhones in the back.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  I mean, the MacBook Air was beautiful computer and certainly, uh, then they had the iMac. Uh, the iPhone is really not on display here, like, it's, it's, uh, store. The header is store, Mac, iPod and iTunes, and then iPhone. iPhone is the fourth item in the bar. It's like the fourth most important if you rank them by, by importance. Uh, but I'm trying to go to apple.com slash iPhone in the Internet Archive to see how they position it. Um, and it's extremely wonky. See, features, uh, phone, iPod, internet, the fourth feature. Can you guess the fourth feature of why you would want to buy the iPhone?

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Alarm clock?

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Nope. This is even better, you're gonna love this, you're gonna love this, you're gonna love.

• 1:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Stock.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Love this, no. So you got the phone, you got the iPod, you got the internet. The fourth feature for why you would want to buy the iPhone? High technology. I'm not kidding you, dude. High technology.

• 1:45:05Jordi Hays?

  What does that even mean?

• 1:45:07John Coogan?

  Let's find out. I gotta click on high technology. It just has a image of like a laser or something like that, like, I don't know what it is. And then they show some maps and stuff, but what is this high technology that they're?

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  They need to bring that back.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Oh, high technology, it means that it has multi-touch, it, it has wireless, it has an accelerometer and a proximity sensor.

• 1:45:28Jordi Hays?

  That is high tech.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Multi-touch was high technology at the time.

• 1:45:31Jordi Hays?

  That, that feature set allowed you to drink beer. An animated beer.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  The accelerometer was the reason that you could do that. That's right. That actually was high technology at the time.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  That was high tech. We don't know how to make high technology.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  We don't. We don't.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  We were talking to the meta team and we were like, make the beer app. What's the beer app? And, and it's such a jogo, the beer app, but the beer app is a, is a, is a moment that means that you've arrived and you have the crazy developers and people are making memes and they're using your technology in ways that you never could have imagined.

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  If you're not getting memes, you're caught.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. And, and Studio Ghibli was that. Uh, and, uh, we, we've yet to see that on the Vibes app. Well, you know, what will the friend version of that be? What will be the, you know, becoming a platform? What will be the product or the use case that isn't imagined by the designer that winds up driving value, at least for fun, you know? Uh, like going to wander, find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

• 1:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Better.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  Did you see the Fermi IPO? Q cap says the upcoming Fermi IPO will be the most 2025 IPO. All the red flags are there. Literally every single one. There's no revenue. It has a $13 billion valuation. It's powering AI by 2038.

• 1:46:49Jordi Hays?

  2038, get ready.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  The nuclear component will be called the Donald J. Trump generating plant, which only could mean one thing. Buy.

• 1:46:59Jordi Hays?

  So I think this is going out on the NASDAQ.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  Texas-sized IPO.

• 1:47:03Jordi Hays?

  requirements, then, and I see.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a wild, wild time out there. Be safe. Do your own research. And this, of course, is not financial advice. We might be.

• 1:47:13Jordi Hays?

  Founded only nine months ago.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Nine months to get to 13 billion? Is that a new record? That, uh, nine months to get to 13 billion? Who's done that?

• 1:47:23Jordi Hays?

  He did it in.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe, yeah, maybe in the coins, in the coin world. In minutes, yeah. It, it went out and minutes later was he.

• 1:47:31Jordi Hays?

  So Fermi, uh, stock listing date nears for AI data center and power company backed by Rick Perry. Founded only nine months ago, the company plans to build a Texas-based hypergrid. Let's give it up for hypergrid.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  And become a provider of data and power centers. They got a cool render.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Superintelligence is out. We're talking about hyperintelligence now.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  As the rise of AI continues, companies operating in this space relying on the technology are finding that they have two inextricable needs: data centers that can run and process the AI and access to ample energy to power those vast data centers. One new company, Fermi America, props for putting America in the name of the company. Aim software solutions for both these needs. And this week Fermi announced plans for an upcoming initial public offering and dual stock listings. They're going to be listing in the UK as well.

• 1:48:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  Fermi America is a very young company. It was only founded this year, just nine months ago in January 2025. The company is so new that its website is still a relatively bare bones affair.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:27Jordi Hays?

  If I pull it up, it just says, yeah, it looks like a stock website from, looks like they got a template of a website. It just, and, and doesn't even look like they replaced all the stock imagery. They just said.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  Hmm. They should have vibe coded something from scratch.

• 1:48:46Jordi Hays?

  Saying.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  Mixed bag with naming your company after.

• 1:48:52Jordi Hays?

  Enrico Fermi?

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Just after a famous scientist who's not involved, obviously Tesla's done very well. Uh, Zach Weinberg has Curie bio after, uh, Mary Curie, right? Uh, Nicola did not do well, of course.

• 1:49:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Fermi.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Blank foundation.

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  Was, uh, Enrico Fermi was an Italian and naturalized American physicist renowned for being the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile One, and a member of the Manhattan Project.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  He has been called the architect of the nuclear age and the architect of the atomic bomb.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:27Jordi Hays?

  Um, so anyways, let me try to get a little bit more color here. Given the youth of the company, it's no surprise that the majority of Americans are most likely never heard of it, but they have heard of its co-founder Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who ran as a GOP contender for president in 2012.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  Oh, he's behind this?

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to think like.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  Rick Perry, yeah.

• 1:49:48Jordi Hays?

  Rick Perry, I know that name, but it's not in the tech context. After unsuccessful presidential bids, Perry was appointed as the 14th United States Secretary of Energy during President Trump's first term in office.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in addition to Perry, Fermi America was also co-founded by Toby Newbauer, a former co-managing partner of quantum energy. Fermi American tends to be a provider of data and power centers that. Other companies can use to host their AI needs. But I say, quote, "intends to" because Fermi America doesn't actually provide any services yet. Heck, it doesn't even have any infrastructure yet to provide its services. What Fermi America does have is a lease. Let's give it up. We're having a lease, a lease for 5,200 acres of land owned by Texas Tech University, which is where Fermi plans to build a hypergrid in an undertaking dubbed Project Matador. Just hitting all that.

• 1:50:45John Coogan?

  The naming is fantastic.

• 1:50:46Jordi Hays?

  What is Project Matador? Project Matador is the name given to Fermi America's hypergrid project. This hypergrid will be combined data and power center that other companies will pay to lease.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Space Hundra Run. So anyways, uh, they want to deliver up to 11 gigawatts of low-carbon, hyper-redundant and on-demand power directly to the world's most compute-intensive businesses.

• 1:51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there's, there's stuff all over the place. This is the nature of bull markets. You get all kinds of crazy outcomes. Sean U. Matthew is sharing a quote from David Einhorn, the hedge fund manager. He's warning that AI's trillion-dollar infrastructure spending could destroy vast capital despite tech being transformative. He questions whether all the extreme spending by hyperscalers will deliver returns, saying there's a reasonable chance of tremendous capital disruption, destruction, which we hate. I hate the idea of capital being destroyed. Wham, wham, wham. But there's still a lot to look forward to. There's still great products coming out every single day.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  Like Vibes.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Vibes, I, I, I think, I mean, I'm, we've discussed it a lot. We're going to continue discussing it with our next guest, Rune. But I, I think that there is a way to have fun on Vibes. I'm already having fun with my promoted post, my SpawnCon. I came in there hot.

• 1:52:10Jordi Hays?

  Came in hot.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  With a rap ad.

• 1:52:12Jordi Hays?

  TBPN ad.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  A TBPN ad. I say, uh, I say, if you bring your own creativity, you can probably have fun on there. But be careful because you might just wind up in Infinite Jest world. Anyway, we have our next guest, Rune, the anonymous poster, the world-famous Rune in the TBPN Ultra Dome.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Rune?

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  Hello, hello. I'm good. How are you?

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  We're fantastic.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  At long last.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  What, I mean, it's a great.

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  Printing your posts.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  We've been printing your posts for months. So thank you for everything that you do for the timeline, always providing insight and levity.

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  You guys mentioned me four times this week and I was like, I gotta come on just to run off the week, you know?

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  It's time.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  It's, uh.

• 1:52:59Jordi Hays?

  Close it out.

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  You've been on a tear.

• 1:53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:03Jordi Hays?

  And thank you.

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  The technology brothers.

• 1:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for walking around the, and, you know, reminding the researchers that you guys are, you know, holding up the global economy.

• 1:53:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  It really is important work. What they're doing and also you to just make them remember.

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  I mean, I know you guys comment on this like all the time, but like, most of the growth in the equity markets is just AI.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:26Speaker 02

  You know, for the past like three years.

• 1:53:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  It's like really nothing else. So, you know, uh, you gotta not make mistakes. Gotta keep hunting out great models.

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, please don't make mistakes. That's all, that's all, that's all we're, but yeah, I mean, we, we talked about it earlier today. The number of companies that are now, you know, barnacles on the whale of OpenAI is, uh.

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  The entire global economy is sort of a barnacle.

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you could even get, you could even get more specific.

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  And, um, you know, the, the oracles, the core weaves, you know, you can make a really long list.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how are you feeling generally? The, the timeline was extremely split, uh, this morning and yesterday. Uh, a lot of incredibly great vibes around, uh, ChatGPT Pulse, uh, less great vibes around the Vibes app. Uh, are you happy with the direction that the productization of AI is going? Are you happy with the, the rollout and the, uh, the actual implementation of these models so far? Uh, how, how have you been processing the way these models are making their way into every, everyday lives?

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I don't know, like, okay, the chatbot medium, this one thing, it's uh, I I think the pulse is like a fine and good idea, it makes a lot of sense.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Um, vibes, I don't know, but like, the the the thing I am like manic about is Codex. And you've probably seen me tweeting about it like three times a day, but like.

• 1:54:57Jordi Hays?

  More than that, more than that.

• 1:54:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:01Speaker 02

  Like Codex and I guess like Claude Code are like genuinely amazing. Uh, like, I don't wanna like, you know, glaze a company's products too much, but like, i- it's like, I don't understand how I did software engineering before this. I have like twenty terminal agents open and like writing like five different things at once, and I have an idea and I just like open up a new terminal and I just like get it working on it. And it's like a completely different way of life than anything I was doing before. Which is like you like linearly slog through one script and I'm like, there's like three or four bugs and like, I don't know.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  Um, like, it's clear to me that this alone is like completely upends the software industry. And, you know, like, we're talking about massive data center capex across the industry and like, what is it gonna be spent on and like, even the inference alone for this kind of thing is like, first of all, like, super expensive and then like, super in demand, I think, once it like, really percolates through the economy. So, yeah, I mean, that's the thing that is uh, fueling my mania these days. Like, it it uh, reignited my, you know, fuel AGI fire.

• 1:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so you said, completely upending the software industry, what what does that actually look like in your mind? Because, you know, one thing is if developers are getting, if the average developer gets higher output.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Developers are gonna be fine, a lot of other people have been like, you know, ninety percent of software engineering will be automated, but maybe we do ten times as much, so there's the same amount, like, what's the long-term view for you?

• 1:56:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I like really don't know about the jobs or whatever. It's like extremely non non linear and hard to predict.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  I feel like there's so much, um, you know, like I see the product managers at my company, they're like vibe coding useful apps all the time. And like, people who are not even engineers are becoming like programmers because of these things. And I'm sure that's a case for like, the most junior level engineers who are like bright are like now they're like way better than they were before. I remember my first year of programming and I was like running to my mentor for like, uh, you know, like, how do I run this whatever basic thing? And like, they just don't have to do that anymore. Like they have to, they can avoid all that embarrassment. They have this like amazing agent or like the chat G P T itself or whatever it is.

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

  To me, it would seem like the productivity of an entry level engineer is like just way higher than it would have been like five years ago. Um, I can't, you know, speak to

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  jobs impact in like the two years or three years or ten years or whatever.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  What about in terms of like consumer impact? I feel like you still hear people complaining about like, uh, my United Airlines app is not as great as it could be. And it feels like in a world where software engineering gets way easier, more reliable, higher leverage, like we should start seeing higher quality software diffuse through the everyday lives of people that

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  interface with technology. Does it feel like that's happening, going to start happening? Or is there something sort of intractable about, uh, an airline booking app that just can't be solved?

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, first of all, I don't trust people's vibes on this. I don't actually think they're paying good attention now the United app looked like three years ago or whatever.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  I I I'm sure it's actually a lot better.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Speaker 02

  Uh, like I've seen the in-flight displays on United and they're like. What is this? It's like space age. It's way better than it was before.

• 1:58:43Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  Um, and okay, I I don't know that night engineers are using any of these tools. Maybe they're not. Maybe their company doesn't allow them. Maybe they use like some third party source or I have no idea, but. You know, that's what I was saying. Of course, these tools, yeah, I have no idea. What time it takes for them to percolate through an economy or like when people in like the. You know, like the the non tech Fortune five hundreds are using them or anything like that, but. I I from everyone I've spoken to. That works at like, say, like GM or Ford or something. They're like, what's Codex? You know, it's not there yet. Of course not. Um.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  I hope it will be, but. The fact that it even exists is just like exhilarating to me.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Codex has the potential to be a hit consumer product? And. Get, you know, end up eating into uh. The market share of some of these uh new vibe vibe coding, you know, companies.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  Um. Of course, but also I think they're very excited, like even just the curse for people because. I don't know, like, there's like a. Competition between OpenAI and like Anthropic and. Uh, that's probably good for them. I I don't know. Um, it's hard for me to say, but. I'm pretty sure that Curse is killing it and I'm very excited.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you using the various products? It seems like you're using uh. Codex all the time. Are you using Codex on mobile as well? Are you in sort of like a like? You know, wake up in the morning and you have an idea or like a shower thought. And I find myself doing this with uh with just GPT five pro queries or deep research queries. I have some idea. I fire it off and I just wait, uh, but I'm not writing a ton of software. Are you having a similar experience that I'm having with just knowledge retrieval in code generation where you might be firing it off like? When you're in the bathroom and uh getting dinner with someone and you just have a second, you just fire something off?

• 2:00:56Speaker 02

  No, I'm just like not a hardcore enough engineer to be doing stuff like that. But I, I, I definitely use like five pro or whatever all the time. Just to whatever random idea comes to my head. I wake up, I'm like researching some, I don't know, some statistic or like setting off some query like what percent of the economy is like software engineers.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much, how much do you think you personally cost OpenAI monthly? Like, how much are you?

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  A lot, a lot. I, I, I can't say, but a lot.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  A lot. Uh, what, what about other, other use cases? I mean, we saw that a lot of people are using um these models for like, uh, like life coaches and just people chatting. And I've never really gone down that path. I don't know, maybe I'm just busy or I talk to Jordy all day long, so I, I don't have a lot of room for that. I, I hit knowledge retrieval constantly, like the GDP of some country. Yeah. Give me the full history of it, build a bar chart, write code.

• 2:01:55Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday on the capital of California, thought, thought for 59 seconds.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:59Jordi Hays?

  It, it ran a hundred searches.

• 2:02:01John Coogan?

  I, I hit that stuff all the time, but I, but I, I haven't gotten in any sort of flow of, of asking for uh interpersonal advice, life coaching, therapy, any of that stuff. Have you had any luck or is that just like a, is that a skill issue or just personality or a certain type of person that uses things that way? Like, do, how do you think about that use case?

• 2:02:24Speaker 02

  Um, I've definitely used it in like a tough corner, like what decision do I make? And I like have it discussed with me.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know, I'm probably not a typical user because I like read what it says and I'm like, I was, this one seems kind of like bullshit and this is like a great point. And I like weigh it and ignore it or whatever, but uh, yeah, I, I think actually.

• 2:02:50Speaker 02

  New Sonnet was an amazing model um for this and this was uh

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55Speaker 02

  what they called Claude three point five Sonnet new.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:58Speaker 02

  Um, and I think that kind of invented this genre of like, I ask Claude for everything in my life. And I think like the latest GPT models can also do this, but like, um, yeah, there was like memes going around about the the Claude boys back then who just like, yeah, like literally everything they do, they'd run it through Claude.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  Uh, it's a, it's a bit weird for sure. Like, are you, you know, are you being populated by an AI? Like it's a, it's a bit loss of control vibes. It's a

• 2:03:29John Coogan?

  I feel like my interactions with AI are getting less back and forth over the last two years. I used to chat back and forth and ask a lot of follow-up questions. And I feel like now if I just talk to GPT five pro on voice mode for a minute and give it a bunch of context, it's going to come back with a very thorough answer that I might have one or two follow-ups on, but I'm not really. I certainly don't have this concept of like, there's one chat that's like fine tuned at this point on this particular that I, oh yeah, my economics chat. I go over here when I'm asking an economics question like everything is done at just like a new chat router level, basically. Is that kind of mirror your experience?

• 2:04:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I, I do think um the open hand models are built for that. It's like a single turn, think really hard, get you the right answer type of thing.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what about, what about like the flavor of the uh of the responses? Like with the GPT three API, it, it felt like if you, if you prompted it with like the green text, you'd get a green text back and it felt like there was a lot of uh, a lot of variation in the style of writing and now we're seeing Maybe it's just the way people are prompting, but it feels like there's a little bit of like a consolidation in the in the textual style, the stylistic flourishes, the it's not the it's not that, it's this and the M dash and all of that. Like, it feels very much like if I opened up your app and asked you

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  and asked the same question, I would get the same stylistic flourishes. And I'm wondering if that's something that you think will continue? Or maybe that's just a temporary moment of time and will wind up in the future where someone's talking to that, the vibes of Claude 3.5. Maybe in a different completely, in a completely different model, but they're they have those vibes over there and then someone has 4O vibes over here. But they're not talking to literal 4O or literal 3.5, but they've kind of landed in a local minima of this is the tone that they like for all of their interactions.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, these are great questions. I mean, like the the GPT-3 model to me was like my first feel AGI kind of like hair raising moment. I remember playing with it and just being like, oh, this thing's intelligent in ways that are like, yeah, just like non trivial, creative, etc. But people are also like too rosy about like the base models. They they just don't, they're like extremely random. They like they don't even have a concept of, you know, like, we talk about hallucination. But what the base model is doing is only hallucination. Like, it's not, you know, maybe one out of 20 completions will

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  have a coherent, like, front to back, like, sensical text. And there are people who can do like magical things with it, but there is a reason there is no like GPT-3 moment. And there was like a chat GPT moment where like the like it took off among consumers and same with like Claude and and whatever, right? But um, there is like at all these companies, there's this, um,

• 2:06:53Speaker 02

  what do you call it? Like a path dependence of post-training. So like the models sample and you collect comparisons between model samples and you're like.

• 2:07:08Speaker 02

  Um, I shouldn't talk too much about post-training, but like, the point being like, you are very reliant on the previous generation of models to train your next model. And so there's like some style burn-in that goes on.

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:21Speaker 02

  And like, the late Claude's resemble early Claude, and like, the late Gronks resemble early Gronk, and so on. Um. And, yeah, and like, they all have some similarities, probably because of like, well, I mean, they're all training on the same giant dataset of the internet, more or less, and they also have like, these common datasets.

• 2:07:41John Coogan?

  I guess I just wonder if like, there's, there's demand from people for more variation in vibes. I was, uh, I was asking Mark Chen about this, where, um, like, I was like, everyone was saying GPT four point five had a big model smell, better like flavor to it, better writer, uh, but deep research was the one that could get you all the results. And I was like, so is the best practice for me now that I should like, run a deep research report and then take that to GPT four point five and say, hey, rewrite this better? And, and I'm wondering if there's some world where there's just demand for, like, I, I like a lowercase

• 2:08:25John Coogan?

  person to chat with. I like really punchy. I mean, I guess you can kind of put that in the prompts, but I'm wondering if it's, if that's like, at some point, going to be an emergent property.

• 2:08:33Speaker 02

  Um, I think you should try the five thinking model. Uh, if you

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  I use

• 2:08:38Speaker 02

  have some use case like that.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  But

• 2:08:40Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah. Yeah, it's the same thing, basically. Does that work for you?

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's honestly like, I'm, I'm fine with the, with the, I, I like the, uh, the, the, the flavor and the vibe that it comes back to me with. Uh, it's just, it is impersonal, but, but that's exactly what I'm but, but that's exactly what I'm hitting it with, and I want that. I want it to be a, an assistant. I want it to be a helpful assistant. I want it to be like a textbook. I want bullet points. I want M dashes. I want clear analogies. And so I'm very satisfied. So I'm wondering if, I mean, maybe it's just a revealed preference versus stated preference, but it seems like there's a lot of stated preference out there that people are sick of M dashes, and if it's not this, it's that. Uh, and it's certainly like a tell that someone used in a LLM, but, um,

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  but I, I was just, I was just thinking more about, um, Like how if there really are people out there with the root with the revealed preference with the true preference for something and and and will the models eventually be able to be many things to many people show a different face to every single different.

• 2:09:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the end stage is like extremely personalized models that uh speak to you, guess even before you even tell them.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:55Speaker 02

  What it is that you want the model to sound like.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:58Speaker 02

  Uh, I see no real reason that's like not possible.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:02Speaker 02

  Just a matter of doing it and the what else?

• 2:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you think um, do you think memory will start to be like feel like more of a moat as uh products like Pulse get more popular? It feels like this is the first time that uh, you know, I I I don't.

• 2:10:26Speaker 02

  Hold on, can I ask you guys a question?

• 2:10:27John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 02

  When I saw the first episode, it was called the Technology Brothers Podcast Network.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:10:36Speaker 02

  What happened?

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  It was just Technology Brothers and and then.

• 2:10:41Jordi Hays?

  We had a big problem, which was that, which is that our community, T-Pot.

• 2:10:46Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  And and the and the tech community broadly honored that we were calling it Technology Brothers. But when journalists would write about Technology Brothers, they would introduce us as John and Jordy, the tech bros, and they would shorten it, which was massively disrespectful. Uh, and so we re- and once we realized we were doing our lives, life's work, we did not want to spend the next thirty years everywhere we go being introduced as the tech bros. And so.

• 2:11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's that's disrespectful. If they had called you Jordy and John, the Technology Brothers, that's like.

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  We would have, we would have kept riding with it, but it was a big problem.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  It's a battle we lost.

• 2:11:27Jordi Hays?

  But um. Uh.

• 2:11:30Speaker 02

  I believe you credited me with that one. You pull up a tweet on the first episode.

• 2:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were, you were one of the first people to to truly, you know, expand tech bros into technology brothers. So thank you for popularizing the term. What do you, uh, what do you think?

• 2:11:45Speaker 02

  Your, your change, yeah.

• 2:11:47Jordi Hays?

  What do you think of uh what Thinking Machine has been putting out lately?

• 2:11:52Speaker 02

  Um, I think it's really cool that. You know, like new labs, they're incentivized to speak very openly about their research, because you know, like. It's a great recruiting mechanism. You're like, there's some cool research you're doing and like, let me come join and then like, I don't know, maybe. I guess Facebook was pursuing this strategy a while back, uh, or Meta or whatever they're called now. They they would, uh, they open source everything. They write a lot of public papers and it was a big draw for people. Um, I haven't read the latest paper, but I read the last one. It was something I I had been wondering about for a while and like. Was a common question in the industry about, uh, determinism and non-determinism and so on.

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's good stuff.

• 2:12:40Jordi Hays?

  It's good stuff.

• 2:12:41Speaker 02

  I.

• 2:12:41Jordi Hays?

  It's good stuff.

• 2:12:41Speaker 02

  I don't know, like, it's it's great stuff. I don't know specifically what they're working on. I've heard rumors, but I won't, I I can't, I shouldn't talk about it.

• 2:12:50Jordi Hays?

  What about hardware form factors? What what's, uh, uh, you know, speak generally, you don't have to talk about what you guys are working on internally, but what what's exciting to you? Uh, in hardware broadly, do we need new dedicated devices, uh, or is the phone, uh, good enough?

• 2:13:08Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't have the answers to that. I like genuinely don't think about the hardware side very much.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's, that says something in itself.

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I I'm pretty happy with my, uh.

• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  Chat GPT on my phone, but.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  What was on your pulse today?

• 2:13:28Speaker 02

  I don't think I checked.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  Mine was.

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  Check right now.

• 2:13:30Jordi Hays?

  Check right now.

• 2:13:31John Coogan?

  Mine was, mine was shockingly interesting.

• 2:13:34Jordi Hays?

  Pulse is a window into the mind.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  It was, it was, it was extremely interesting, talking about bottlenecks and compute revolutions and. Retired coal plants powering AI campuses and, uh, it even had one, I was searching for different options for bonded cellular. Networks. So if you want to bond a Verizon and AT and T. Like SIM card together to get like a really powerful Wi-Fi hotspot on the go for live streaming, obviously. And it had a whole deep dive on that. And it's like, yeah, I'd search for that, but I would love to have that resurface to me in a different format.

• 2:14:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  And so I was, I was very pleased with the results. And it also felt like deeply, maybe it's just like the way I've been using the product, but it felt deeply anti-brain rot. It felt like, oh, these are, these are, these are articles. I don't even know what you would call them, but summaries that certainly push me to go deeper into something that's actually hard work, learning, as opposed to something that's more like candy and helping me just kind of tune out things. I enjoyed that.

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  Look, here's, like, mine is just exactly what you'd expect. It's like, tracking AI's impact on power markets. It's like Chinese infrastructure spend. It's, it's all this kind of stuff. Yeah.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  It's, I mean,

• 2:14:53Speaker 02

  A very predictable technology in business.

• 2:14:56John Coogan?

  Now I want to know. Send me, share me, share that article with me. I want to know about Chinese infrastructure investments and how they're tracking with the

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe that's a feature. Rune shared his Pulse today.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  Check it out.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  I mean, you can already share the link. So yeah, you'll need to be able to share it in the app. Anyway, what, what else is, is keeping you up these days? You were, you were talking, you, you kind of laid out, we reviewed the post on the show, just talking more broadly about the nature of process power and Dan Wang's book. Have you, where, where do you sit on the, the general characterization of the lawyerly society in America? Does it feel like we are becoming more lawyerly or less lawyerly?

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, some prominent engineers, founders in AI have certainly gotten litigious recently. So maybe America could do both.

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  At the same time, many engineers are crossing over into the government.

• 2:16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, um.

• 2:16:03Speaker 02

  I guess. What is interesting to me is like. The extreme depth of the capital markets in the US where like. One company can raise hundreds of billions of dollars on. Infrastructure spend and you know, together. The industry is spending, I have no idea, like you guys probably know the numbers better than I do. Um, and that's like, that's very interesting. So where are the like.

• 2:16:31Speaker 02

  You know, if it's like such a lawyerly society, why are we able to do this? Why are we able to spend so much? Um. And yeah, of course it's true, like. If you look at like the. West side of San Francisco, it's like it should not be this like rows and rows of. Single family houses, it's like a quite a waste, it's quite a shame, but um. There's many things like that that people have talked about ad infinitum. But in general, it's like, okay, like Elon Musk showed up and. He revolutionized two industries, right? Like the. Space travel um and. The electric cars. And I'm sure he fought with regulators and like there's a bunch of lawsuits and whatever, but like.

• 2:17:15Speaker 02

  You know, his like, his, I guess his will to power or whatever made it work and. So I I am always a bit skeptical when people say like, you know, the US is impossible to innovate in because of regulations or. I it seems like. It's it's getting done, people do it. Um, yeah, you know, maybe like the the highest level of government is more. Lawyerly in the US than China, but I don't um. There's also benefits to that, which Dan Wang talks about, you know, like there's no uh. I I don't want to get into it, but I I think you guys know the the upsides of uh. The great rule of law and whatnot.

• 2:17:55John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I do wonder if uh, yeah, I mean, that that's kind of the odd uh counter take is that. Uh, maybe the depth of the financial markets is actually of outgrowth of the lawyerly society. When you have a bunch of lawyers who can. Create robust contracts where uh somebody feels comfortable parting with. Ten billion dollars, hundred billion dollars. Is that a function of engineering? It might be a function of financial engineering in some ways, but it is also a function of strong legal contracts and the work of lawyers to be creative, but also fair in a way that instills confidence in the capital markets such that a company is willing to

• 2:18:37Speaker 02

  That seems right.

• 2:18:39John Coogan?

  To deploy a hundred billion dollars and know that there's a, at least there's an understanding of the pathway to the return on investment and that it's less, there's less uncertainty.

• 2:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, on the other hand, you have TikTok allegedly selling for fourteen billion.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Which I'm sure is less than what was spent to grow TikTok in the US.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:19:03Jordi Hays?

  But that's, that's more government intervention.

• 2:19:06Speaker 02

  I feel like it's worth a couple more zeros than that, but yeah.

• 2:19:10Jordi Hays?

  Just a couple.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  It does seem.

• 2:19:12Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the Gartner hype cycle is being over-applied in the context of AI? Do you think we could just have a straight line acceleration? And there's no, there's no trough or are you trough-pilled?

• 2:19:30Speaker 02

  I just don't get this thing where people like overlay graphs and they like do this like high level pattern matching when it's like, okay, like let's look at the basics, which is, to me, the basics are code-ups, which is like, like literally as of two months ago, this was not a thing and now it's a thing and it's like, to me, a mind-blowing product, just, I can't, I can't stress this enough. And, okay, like that alone is going to create just enormous revenue streams for both OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume, and Cursor.

• 2:20:07Speaker 02

  So, like, I don't know, I just don't, it doesn't seem worth the, yeah, of course.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes, will it create?

• 2:20:15Speaker 02

  The whole world is so over-leveraged.

• 2:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Trillion, will it create a, so, so will it create a trillion-dollar revenue stream?

• 2:20:24Speaker 02

  Um, I don't think it needs to create a trillion dollar revenue stream to to keep up with the uh the data center plans, but that's um, you know, it's not for me to say you should you should get on uh the CFO or something of one of these companies and ask them.

• 2:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, what what about uh, give us your read on the state of open source today? Uh, OpenAI's open source models were demanded, they were released, and then you don't hear uh, you know, there haven't been a lot of noise surrounding them, but certainly a lot of uh, a lot of noise coming around some of the Chinese open source models, but what's what's your kind of?

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  High level thinking on open source models?

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, there's two takes on that. One is that people demanded it, but they didn't actually want it. The other is that maybe the OSS model just wasn't meeting the market needs or like it was not good at whatever it is the market wanted. Um, I don't know.

• 2:21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a stated, I mean, to me, it's a stated versus revealed preference, at least for a lot of the people that were most loudly demanding open source.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  I mean, this has happened throughout so many years.

• 2:21:46Speaker 02

  The Chinese Kimi K two model is like really quite excellent to me. It's a it's a great rider. Um, yeah, it's like the model I compare against most internally. It's kind of cool.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  I mean, people have people have been demanding open source versions of technology for a long time. There were open source, social networks and open source, there's an open source version of Shopify. Uh, and yet Shopify accrued all the value and uh, no one's forking that particular uh, Ruby on Rails project just to get their e-commerce store up and running, uh, because.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  I think there's there's like two problems with the the kind of hype around open source. One is like. Okay, you've open sourced the model, but it's also clear that that doesn't immediately make it accessible to like a billion people.

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:22:35Speaker 02

  Um, like, obviously, the chat G P T product and, you know, like, whatever else. Grok is hugely downloaded Gemini, whatever, but like, the, um, it's like by far the easiest way for someone to access A I. And for free, they're like doing it for free.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:52Speaker 02

  Um, so like on that angle. It's not really all that decentralized just because the model weights are like flying around, um. Second of all, if everything was always open source, you guys know as well as I do that it's like. Whole industry would never support this kind of capex.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:13Speaker 02

  Um, and this R and D spend and whatever. And so like, there's just no, there's no way like that. That's just the only way to do things and like that's. I, you know, just, just normal capitalism, you know?

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, question from the chat, did you read One Piece?

• 2:23:32Speaker 02

  No, I have not. I have a bunch of friends who swear by it, but I've never, never gone into that.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Are there any other?

• 2:23:39Speaker 02

  Long.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  Are there any other, uh, cultural influences that you pull from? Favorite movies, books, comic books?

• 2:23:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, of course, all the time.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  What's at the top of the stack?

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  My favorite show ever is probably this anime called Evangelion.

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:55Speaker 02

  It's like a nineties TV show. It's like. Kind of grim, but like, like, is this a staple of like the Mecha fighter genre?

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Yep. Are there, are there metaphors from, i- is it Evangelion or Evangelion?

• 2:24:09Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  Uh, are, are, is, is there a metaphor?

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  Real heads called Evangelion, yeah.

• 2:24:13John Coogan?

  Evangelion, yeah.

• 2:24:14Speaker 02

  It's a, because that's like the way the Japanese say.

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there, are, are there themes in that story that, uh, people pull from and apply to like the modern world and they go? Oh, this is just like Evangelion, Evangelion.

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  Um, I certainly think there's like a dense religious metaphor in there for like, I don't know, um.

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  It's like a classic coming of age tale where um.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  Bill Dungelman.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's what they call it.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:47Speaker 02

  And this this kid, he's kind of like a depressive anti like he's got none of the good qualities of protagonist. He's like constantly crashing out and he's like uh is a bunch of girls who are into him and he's like not capable of talking to any of them. And he you know, but he's like magically like the best guy in the world at piloting these robots to beat these aliens. And like humanity keeps calling on him, even though he's like being mentally destroyed to come combat the aliens and. It's like the story about like, yeah.

• 2:25:22Jordi Hays?

  If you can crash out and not talk to women, but if you're good at if you're good at driving the robots.

• 2:25:27John Coogan?

  History will remember remember your name for sure.

• 2:25:30Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 2:25:31John Coogan?

  What's the best way to get started with Evangelion?

• 2:25:35Speaker 02

  Start with episode one. There's only like twenty.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  It's not like, oh, you gotta read the books first, that type of thing. You know how people will say that about like, don't watch the movie until you see the read the books or whatever.

• 2:25:45Speaker 02

  Um, if you wanna get really pedantic anal about it, there's like a different subtitles that came out in the nineties that are better than the Netflix subtitles. But like, it's not really that important, you know, like it's a pretty big barrier entry.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:26:00Speaker 02

  There's a twenty six episodes in a movie. It's pretty straightforward. It's not like some crazy watch order and whatnot.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  Okay, maybe I'll check it out.

• 2:26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:10Speaker 02

  It's a bunch of media I love.

• 2:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's the current state of the talent wars from your view? Did we peak over the summer? Or is it still just as intense? What's your read on it?

• 2:26:27Speaker 02

  I mean, it seems like, okay, if a researcher is a manager of compute and the compute numbers are growing. And then like the effectiveness of a researcher is more and more important than, I don't know, like that line is uh. Trending up and to the right as far as I can tell, but. Do you guys agree that logic makes sense? I don't know.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 2:26:55Jordi Hays?

  I think the logic makes sense.

• 2:26:56John Coogan?

  I just think it's interesting that we're seeing essentially the same thing play out that we've seen for, I don't know, for generations in entrepreneurship where a founder can marshal capital and have leverage and incredible economic upside. And now we're seeing founder level wealth and financial outcomes applied to employees, which is just a different thing. It used to be in order to get the big, big numbers, you had to go build something externally and then the board would justify paying you a bunch to bring it in-house. And now it feels like companies are more, they've actually just cracked the code on, hey, come work here, build this thing that's going to deliver a bunch of

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  value and we will pay you like you're a founder that was out in the wilderness and we acquired in. And it feels like it's, in some ways, it always should have been this way.

• 2:27:51Speaker 02

  It feels like an aquihire to me, like just some sort of distributed aquihire.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah.

• 2:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, that was, that was my framing for it. You just have to look at it as an unauthorized distributed aquihire.

• 2:28:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  It's like, you know?

• 2:28:04Speaker 02

  Okay, and like, how much did Zuck pay in total for all these researchers over the course of four years?

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:10Speaker 02

  Is it like that enormous? Is it like, I don't know, like compared to the value they're going to generate for him?

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  Certainly not relative to the market cap. And especially if you just think about like, even if you take the boring view of like, AI is just another business line that they need to be in, you know, it's like, oh, they're, they're spinning up a new division. It's like, well, if the new division drives 10% of their revenue or 20%, it becomes a significant business line, investing 1% of your market cap makes a ton of sense to actually just like be in there. There, there's way more complicated dynamics there, but even if you just saw it as like, We need an infrastructure team. We need a database team. We need a front end team. It's like you need an AI team and you're going to have leverage in this case. What do you think about this Rich Sutton take that's going out, just dropped on the Dorcas show?

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  LLMs are maybe not bitter lesson pilled. This idea that we need entirely new format. People have been saying this for a very, very long time. Deep learning is going to hit a wall. Then we come out with something new. What are your thoughts on the father of reinforcement learning? Potentially not thinking that LLMs are bitter lesson pilled.

• 2:29:24Speaker 02

  I think this is a common sentiment at like DeepMind that they were always like, they kind of held language models with a bit of like, this is icky. This is not pure. Because we're not starting from scratch. We're learning from the human internet and that's like, that's not, you know, it's not pure in some sense. Unlike say AlphaZero, which is learned from nothing. You just self-play yourself to superhuman performance. So yeah, like maybe it's not completely the most bitter lesson pill paradigm in the world. But like, I don't know. That doesn't mean to me that it won't like reach extremely useful levels of intelligence. And you should ask Ilya.

• 2:30:09John Coogan?

  It already is. It already is really useful. It's like the question of like, will we get value out of this is like answered by DAUs and just a million anecdotes of people that use the products, in my opinion. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:30:25Jordi Hays?

  I got a lot more stuff, but we're over time.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Glad we finally made this happen. Thank you for posting the posts that make this show possible. We truly enjoy covering everyone. John, you want to hit the gong for Roone?

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Yes, congratulations.

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Can't get out without a gong.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  250,000 followers on X, I believe is roughly the number or something like that. It's definitely gong worthy.

• 2:30:52Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Hit it.

• 2:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Good stuff, Roon.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming.

• 2:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for your thoughts and your posts and have a wonderful Friday.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having me on.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Good stuff.

• 2:31:09John Coogan?

  Let's go back to the timeline, run through some posts before we get out of here.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  You've referred me already.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Everyone in this company was given a whoop and is required to share their data. This seems like something we would do at the eighth sleep.

• 2:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Is this?

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  "I used to assign more work to those who are sleeping a little too well. You are a healthy military aged man. Why do you need eight hours of sleep? Because you need a high sleep score." But this is a lot of fun. I believe Omar Wasim, I feel like I've met him. Anyway.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Where should we go? There's some big posts. What is up with this bagel? The pop-up bagel shop? Do you know about this, Jordy?

• 2:31:47Jordi Hays?

  I've never been a bagel.

• 2:31:48John Coogan?

  Chris Corner says, "I'm calling it right now. This will be the next billion dollar franchise brand, the next crumble. They're copy pasting the crumble playbook, a playbook I'm not familiar with. 300-plus franchises sold in the first month. 2.2 to 5 million gross per store with 25% net margins after fees lines out the door." So, I'm not familiar with the crumble story. This feels like some new model.

• 2:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Crumble Cookies is probably the breakout franchise of the last 5, 10, I think more like 5 years. So, they sell cookies all over the country now, franchise model. So, I think they maybe operated their first few stores that now are like very focused on the franchise model. They have cookies that are probably like the least healthy thing that you could put into your body.

• 2:32:39John Coogan?

  They're like really over the top, right? It's like a whole cake in a cookie, basically.

• 2:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:44John Coogan?

  Really dense.

• 2:32:45Jordi Hays?

  Super high calorie. I'm sure they're super tasty.

• 2:32:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:48Jordi Hays?

  All over the country now and they just.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  But it sounds like a unique business model where they've gone, they've cracked the code on scaling retail through franchisees very soon. You always hear about like McDonald's and Burger King franchisees.

• 2:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, franchise, if you can have a durable hit consumer franchise, it's one of the most amazing businesses in the world. Because you get paid some percentage off the top.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  So, it's not a percentage of profits. You're getting a percentage of gross revenue in exchange for. Giving somebody access to your brand and like menu and supply chain, it is valuable.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  And they sort of have an entrepreneurial outcome as well. Like there's, there's plenty of towns where like there's a guy who owns a couple McDonald's and does very well and has a boat. And then there's also Patrick O'Shaughnessy profiled the company.

• 2:33:32Jordi Hays?

  And they're

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  Some street advisor company that does rollups of them and has done very well as well.

• 2:33:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Tons, tons of examples of people making a lot of money in franchises. You can start with, you know, working in one, then you can transition to being an operator, then you can add more. You can buy more, you can roll them up and, and they trade it pretty, you know, if you have a bunch of Burger Kings, they trade at a great multiple because it's a durable brand and, and, um, and so, yeah, I think, uh, 300 franchises is crazy because they're getting a ton of upfront revenue and then they'll get a percentage of the gross over time.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:34:11John Coogan?

  Uh, look at, look at this post from Jeremy Giffon. He says, staying below a $10 million deal size for 25 years is remarkable. The real lesson from Mark Leonard, the founder of Constellation, uh, to me is of maniacal discipline. And so the value of acquisitions was, wait, how, what is this? Average price per acquisition was, wow, down at $5 million for 2007, all the way through 2012, and then still really low for, for a decade. And, and paid a little bit more in 2013 and is now starting to pay more, but really just, I, I mean, people think about these like

• 2:34:51John Coogan?

  private equity software rollups, uh, you know, the software company sells for, you know, we, we see the marks. People raise $20 million, they sell for a hundred million, 200 million. That's the one that gets the attention, but there are so many companies that are selling for $10 million, $5 million, $20 million. And Constellation's picking them all up and has built like a fantastic business integrating all these. You have to have some serious infrastructure to, to, to do something with a $5 million business like that you just acquired, but uh, certainly good coverage.

• 2:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Buko Capital has a great post here from, uh, Intel, apparently was up another 19%. Yesterday, wow, it's up another 20% in the last five days.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  I mean, do you know the story here? So Intel reached out to Apple and TSMC for, for investment as well. And so Nvidia wound up just kind of getting in early. Nvidia was like, we're gonna do something.

• 2:35:42Jordi Hays?

  USA got in early.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  The USA got in extremely early.

• 2:35:44Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you read through that? Read through that, I'll be right back.

• 2:35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure. So, the news is that Apple and TSMC might be playing ball, might be, open up the checkbooks for Intel. Efforts to gain tech backers accelerate in the wake of US 10% stake in chipmaker. Of course, Donald Trump and the US government announced a 10% stake in Intel. Intel chief executive L. Bhutan has been hustling to secure investments and customer commitments needed for the chipmaker's comeback. Among the companies Intel has approached about investments or manufacturing partnerships are Apple and TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Those efforts were already underway before President Trump showed up, showed an interest in the company last month,

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  but have gone, has since gone into overdrive since the US took a 10% stake in it, according to people familiar. The Trump administration has been using its influence to help revive Intel's sagging fortunes. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others in the administration have, for months, been urging tech companies to work more closely with Intel, which was for the long, was for long, the world's largest semiconductor firm before it losing its lead to TSMC. SoftBank made a $2 billion investment in Intel, Nvidia made a $5 billion investment in Intel, and is now, and that also includes a provision for Intel to design new hardware to integrate with Nvidia's chips.

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  Masayoshi Son and Jensen Huang have both been demonstrative in their support of the administration's technology agenda, which includes building up domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity and supercharging the construction of data centers needed by the artificial intelligence industry. Bloomberg earlier reported on Intel's overtures to Apple. Tan earlier this year met with Tim Cook and has also spoken to C.C. Way, his counterpart at TSMC, about a partnership or joint venture, according to people familiar with the matter. And so, basically, there's a question about how much can Apple even get out of Intel? Apple, of course, moved off of Intel chips and is now going direct to TSMC with the Apple Silicon project.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  And Apple doesn't, doesn't pay a lot to Intel, if anything. I think they sell like one Intel Mac still. It's like 10 years old refurbished. It's like a very slow computer. But of course, there are still things that Apple needs Intel chips for in the server and to run their data centers. Like, every company is kind of a customer of every other company. So there's probably something to be done there. But the question of like, how would an Apple Intel deal actually work is way less clear than an Nvidia Intel deal, because Nvidia sells the Hopper chip, but then they sell Grace, which is the CPU. They call it Grace Hopper.

• 2:38:36Jordi Hays?

  And you got, and you got Donald Trump, who led the Series A.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  He did.

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  Now, so now Intel is trying to raise the B.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:38:44Jordi Hays?

  And the Series A lead is going to look at, you know, potential B leads and be and say, hey, come on.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  It's kind of like that. I think the better analogy is more like the Series B lead is going to the Series A lead and saying, because Apple and Intel grew up together. Apple had a, like, Apple exists because Intel exists. Apple would not have been able to build that MacBook Air that we saw from 2007 without Intel. There was an Intel chip in the Mac for a long time. And so Apple's been a beneficiary.

• 2:39:14Jordi Hays?

  You just be front and center in the marketing.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Exactly. Intel inside.

• 2:39:18Jordi Hays?

  You're buying this new computer because...

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Yes. And so Apple has gotten so much out of Intel. They're so rich. They have deep pockets. They have tons of cash. And so the Series B lead is saying, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a bridge round here, but the Series A lead's got to come in if they want to maintain their position or they're getting crammed down. Crammed down in this position in this scenario is getting crammed down in tariffs or getting crammed down in taxes or some other thing. It's all part of this art of the deal craziness. But it does seem like if you're Apple, you say, hey, there's a way to extend an olive branch to the administration with their technology agenda. They want to bring back semiconductor

• 2:40:02John Coogan?

  manufacturing in the United States. We're just going to see this as an investment. We could put our money in Treasury bills. We could put our money in Intel stock. Let's put some money in Intel stock. It makes everyone happy. And so that might be the wind, that might wind up be the, being the nature of this deal. But then at the same time, it's totally possible that Apple wants to do some sort of new chip design and they want to go to Intel and they want to fab it with Intel and they, they find a way to do that. There is a world where Intel becomes a, a manufacturer for Apple silicon chips because they are trying to get their, their, their, you know, most cutting edge node off the ground. They don't have customers. This is the famous thing that Liputon said on that quarterly earnings call that panicked everyone. He was like,

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  the big thing that we've been planning, no one wants it. And so that raised alarm bells and that's where all this kind of came from. And, and Apple could potentially go to them and say, hey, yeah, the next iPhone chip or the next Mac chip, we'll work with TSMC. We're happy with TSMC, but we'll also work with you Intel on your new fab that gets up and running if you can deliver at these levels and how are they going to deliver on that level? They need a lot of cash. So we're also putting up the cash.

• 2:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  And so another sort of circular deal, but you know, the administration is kind of like greasing the wheels of all these deals to hopefully get Intel back on its feet and restore American semiconductor manufacturing.

• 2:41:22Jordi Hays?

  In the meantime, Leopold's printing.

• 2:41:25John Coogan?

  In the meantime, Leopold is printing. So congratulations to him. What else is going on? You shared a, a story about a Radio Shack Ponzi.

• 2:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, this was Tai Lopez.

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, I'm familiar with this.

• 2:41:39Jordi Hays?

  He did something, he managed to raise like hundreds of millions of dollars for the new Radio Shack brand.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:41:46Jordi Hays?

  I think turned into crypto.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  He was buying all sorts of interesting things.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Here on imports.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Rebs primary business. So Tai Lopez is famous for the Here in My Garage Guru video that was kind of sort of a book club, I think at the bottom of the funnel. Sort of a how to get rich, educational, inspirational hustle type genre of social media influencer, huge buyer of YouTube ads in the early days. Everyone saw that here in my garage video. But he went on a spree. Rev's primary business was purchasing distressed retail companies with name brand recognition and converting them to e-commerce only businesses. The securities offering that at issue involved eight rev portfolio companies, Brahms, Dress Barn, Franklin Mint, Linens and Things, which I have heard of, Modell's, Pier One, which

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  I've heard of, and Radio Shack, which I've also heard of, and I've never heard of Steinmart. Franklin Mint, Radio Shack, this is of course from Matt Levine, one of the greatest writers on the internet these days. Not Bed Bath & Beyond, not GameStop. Bed Bath & Beyond sure was distressed. It filed for horrific bankruptcy in 2023, but before it raised a ton of money from retail investors and absolutely doomed at the market offerings. As its bankruptcy lawyers later put it, "It raised that money as part of the meme stock movement started and fueled on Reddit boards and social media website because, quote, 'it checked the two boxes needed to become a meme stock: a troubled financial situation and nostalgia value.'" And because it checked those boxes, Bed Bath was able to go out

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  to ordinary investors and get them to shovel money into a furnace. GameStop was also a part of that movement. Where is GameStop trading these days? GameStop was that movement because it was troubled and nostalgic.

• 2:43:30Jordi Hays?

  If you're nostalgic and troubled, we got a stock for you. GameStop, up 18% in the last month.

• 2:43:38John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  But down 13% year to date.

• 2:43:41John Coogan?

  What's the market cap?

• 2:43:43Jordi Hays?

  Current market cap's 11 billion.

• 2:43:44John Coogan?

  That's huge. I feel like that's a lot.

• 2:43:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  For such a troubled, I mean, Bed Bath & Beyond's bankrupt, so it's zero. On a relative basis, that's the meme stock that, you know, had some value for a medium amount of time, we'll see. But it did so well out of being a meme stock that it's no longer particularly distressed. GameStop, as you saw, is going, but it's definitely benefiting to e-commerce. My point here is that if you go to retail investors and say, "Hey, let's teach those fat cats on Wall Street a lesson. We're going to revive Radio Shack, but with e-commerce, you're tapping into some deep and obvious patterns and you will undoubtedly raise a bunch of money," then you can steal it. The quote at the top is from a Securities Exchange Commission enforcement complaint against Tanyo Adrian Lopez, Alexander Mayer, and Maya Birkenrod.

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  Bloomberg News reports, a company that snatched up distressed, distressed, brick and mortar brands, including Radio Shack Pier 1 imports and promised investors, big returns and a pivot to e-commerce, operated like a Ponzi scheme.

• 2:44:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they actually raised debt.

• 2:44:46John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:44:47Jordi Hays?

  And they were offering a 25% preferred return.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:52Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, there were a lot of red flags.

• 2:44:55John Coogan?

  It's pretty crazy. They, they put out promotional videos that bragged that the portfolio companies were, quote, "on fire," which the regulators did not like. It says in the complaint that while some of the retailer brands generated revenue, none generated any profits. At least 5.9 million of the returns distributed to investors were, in reality, Ponzi-like payments funded by other investors.

• 2:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:21John Coogan?

  Now, so there, you framed it as debt. It sounds like they were equity investments that were paying some sort of fake dividend.

• 2:45:28Jordi Hays?

  No, I think they were paying a fake dividend on the debt.

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:45:32Jordi Hays?

  It was like, oh, uh-oh. Yeah, so it was a lot, a lot going wrong.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  So, they accuse the defendants of misappropriating approximately $16.1 million in investor funds, which were diverted to defendants Lopez and Mayer's personal use. That's not good. The complaint also explains the business strategy, or at least the fundraising strategy.

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  So Rev's primary business was identifying distressed companies with name-brand recognition, raising funds from investors in order to purchase the brand's assets and converting them into successful e-commerce-only businesses. In one promotional video publicly available on the internet, Ty Lopez touted Rev's business approach as, quote, "one of the best strategies you can invest in."

• 2:46:11John Coogan?

  That sounds like financial advice. I wouldn't do it myself.

• 2:46:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Seems wrong.

• 2:46:17Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, Matt Levine finishes it off, quote, "a troubled financial situation and nostalgia value, two best things you can have to raise money from individual investors in the 2020s." So, I think enough people are getting burned on these now that, that I think people will, will learn their lesson.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hopefully, but history repeats, or at least it rhymes. Well.

• 2:46:41Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  It's been a fantastic show.

• 2:46:43Jordi Hays?

  Great show. It is now. Uh, it's close to the weekend.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:46:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, whatever you're doing, have a great time. We will be back Monday.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  Be back Monday.

• 2:46:53Jordi Hays?

  For another episode.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:46:57Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 2:46:58Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:46:59John Coogan?

  Bye.