Ferrari Goes Electric, The Return of Nonsense Metrics, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | John Quinn, Martin Casado, Preston Zhou, Scott Stevenson, George Kurdin, Zachary Townsend

(01:20) - The Return of Nonsense Metrics (11:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (26:33) - John Quinn, founder of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, discusses the firm's unique focus on litigation and arbitration, emphasizing the advantages of specializing solely in disputes work. He highlights the firm's reputation as the "most feared law firm," attributing it to their commitment to taking on challenging cases and achieving favorable outcomes. Quinn also addresses the impact of AI on the legal profession, noting its potential to streamline case resolution while anticipating an increase in litigation due to AI-related disputes. (57:07) - Martin Casado, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of Nicira, discusses the impact of AI on software infrastructure, emphasizing the need to revamp networking, compute, and development tools to keep pace with AI advancements. He highlights the resilience of startups against cloud giants, noting that dedicated focus often leads to success despite competition from major players. Casado also addresses the strategic importance of reducing reliance on Chinese hardware in critical infrastructure, advocating for local capability development to enhance national security. (01:31:06) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:02:09) - Ferrari Takes on EVs (02:16:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:28:59) - Preston Zhou, co-founder of Relace, transitioned from a physics PhD program at Harvard to establish the company with Eitan Borgna, a machine learning PhD student from UChicago. They recently secured $23 million in funding to enhance AI agent infrastructure, focusing on auxiliary models that improve agent reliability. Their tools, such as the fast supply model and embedding and re-rank models, are already utilized by over 40 companies, including Lovable and Figma. (02:36:41) - Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of Spellbook, an AI contract review tool for legal professionals, discusses the company's rapid growth, including a recent $50 million funding round led by Keith Rabois, and their mission to make contracts move at the speed of commerce. (02:44:18) - George Kurdin, founder of Monk.com, discusses how his company assists businesses in saving time and increasing revenue by streamlining invoice and collections processes, addressing common issues like ineffective emails and errors that contribute to payment delays. He highlights the evolving role of CFOs, noting a shift towards greater financial rigor and openness to experimentation, which has facilitated Monk.com's go-to-market strategy. Additionally, Kurdin emphasizes the integration of large language models into their workflow, leveraging advancements from industry leaders to enhance their services. (02:49:54) - Zachary Townsend, CEO and co-founder of Meanwhile, the world's first Bitcoin-denominated life insurance company, discusses how Meanwhile integrates Bitcoin into life insurance by accepting premiums and paying claims entirely in Bitcoin, offering a hedge against inflation and currency depreciation. He explains that their whole life insurance policies involve paying one Bitcoin annually for ten years, with a guaranteed payout of 1.5 Bitcoins, ensuring beneficiaries receive a fixed amount regardless of Bitcoin's market fluctuations. Townsend also highlights that Meanwhile operates like a traditional life insurance company, being regulated and licensed in Bermuda, and emphasizes their conservative investment strategies and robust risk management framework to mitigate risks associated with Bitcoin's volatility. (02:58:33) - 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 Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. George is in front of the horse. Today is Thursday, October 9th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, The Capital of Capital. Today, I want to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. That's why the horse is wearing the yellow hat. Also, the show is made possible by Restream, one livestream, 30+ destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. Dylan Patel took to the timeline to say he's going to be dropping something huge in 24 hours. This was, what, this was 19 hours ago. We have five hours to left to go, 4:00 PM Pacific on October 9th.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  He will drop something that will reshape how everyone thinks about chips, inference, and infrastructure. It's directly supported by Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, OpenAI, Together AI, CoreWeave, Nevius, PyTorch, Super Micro, Crusoe, HPE, TensorWave, V, V, V, L, L, S, G, Lang, etc. If you are pressed, I went to this, I'm very excited for him to drop it. I got the whole briefing and it is very cool and I do think it will be huge. And it's, it's in classic semi-analysis fashion. It is very rigorous and detailed and I think will be very, very interesting to dig into when it drops. In the meantime, I have something that's the opposite of rigorous. It's completely, it's the other side of the mid-wit curve.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  It's just complete slop analysis, but I think it's a useful. It's a good thought exercise. Yes, so I said, token adjusted EBITDA, of course, a nod to WeWork's community adjusted EBITDA. To be clear, no one's doing this. This is something you should not do. You should not value AI companies as a multiple of the total amount of tokens they're generating, but as soon as I saw that OpenAI news, they're generating 6 billion tokens a minute, they're worth 500 billion, I see 500, I see 6, I start dividing those, I gotta know what the valuation multiple is. How much am I paying if I'm buying a dollar of OpenAI stock for a stream of tokens?

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Of course, this is nonsense analysis because tokens have various values, they're growing, different profit streams, different costs, exactly. There's a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of reasons why you shouldn't do this, but I thought it was interesting to do it anyway, because I like silly things. And so I think of this more as like, like, there's a lot of bubble talk. We aren't yet in the eyeballs phase of this dot com boom, but if we start seeing this, yeah, if we start seeing

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  We say bubbles so much, we just call it bub talk.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Bub talk, exactly. But I wanted to give a little bit of history on the 1999 bubble and how valuations were processed then. It's pretty fascinating. So back in the late 1999, in the late 1990s, eyeballs became a hilarious but deeply important KPI for tech companies. It's a very funny name, but it was basically just, it was basically just audience size, unique visitors, page views, time spent on site. These were all non-financial, non-GAAP metrics that were meant to service proxies for eventual earnings and value creations. Revenues were tiny and earnings were always negative. So eyeballs were the best metric that folks had to understand who was growing, at least relative to other.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine the dropout posts back then. Somebody sends around physical mail. They're like, I'm dropping out of college. I have 10 eyeballs. I raised $100,000.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  I mean, we, we see the charts now fastest to $100 million in revenue. Obviously, that's a very good, very strong business metric that assumes that you will be around for a while if you're generating a lot of revenue very quickly.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  Time to 100 too is also very old news. Obviously, everyone's focused on time to a billion.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  A billion in run rate now.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Was recorded, reported that cursor will be somewhere around there by the end of this year.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so that's like, what, two years, maybe three from?

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Was it 2022?

• 3:57John Coogan?

  They were technically any sphere before, but really you should start it as like the launch of cursor, the product probably. But they've been on a tear. But it's way different to look at the size of a business as if I'm buying a dollar of, of stock, it's tied to a stream of revenues, which could be very profitable, versus just eyeballs. But this is, audience size has, you know, been around for decades, even in the 90s at that point in the marketing world. And so it was just kind of pulled over. And a lot of this came from Mary Meeker. She's now at Bond Capital. She was the hotshot analyst of the day at Morgan Stanley. And this is what's interesting.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  So we think of eyeballs in the in the dot com bubble. We think of it as a 1999 phenomenon. In 1996, she wrote, what's the value of an eyeball or an ear? Three years before the 99 bubble got crazy. There's a you can read her whole Internet Trends report on Scribd, which is pretty cool. And then three years later, she was profiled in The New Yorker. We actually read the whole profile on this show about a year ago. And that was a really interesting piece. And the name of the piece in The New Yorker was called The Woman in the Bubble. So The New Yorker, like the bubble talk was not like you think about the bubble talk right now on X and it's like it's bubbling up really quickly. But like, The New Yorker is not writing profiles on the AI bubble yet.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  They'll probably get there a few months, just like what we saw with French TV, like, like the legacy media takes a little bit longer because they do a lot more research to write a profile. It just takes months to write a profile.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting how, I mean, social feeds just are perpetually months ahead of headlines.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Right? And so we're seeing every single day I see somebody outside of X or outside of Teapot or the tech community on X calling it a calling it a bubble, saying, you know, when this thing blows up and you guys crash the global economy, like, it's all going to be so obvious.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just it's just starting on the most bleeding edge. It's still not in the pages of of The New Yorker. Yet it was in 1999, the the title of the article about Mary Meeker was The Woman in the Bubble. And this is what's extra interesting to me. It took 11 months more after that article for the stock market to actually peak. And so in that article, in that profile of her, of Mary Meeker, in The New Yorker, she's saying, it's a bubble. It's crazy. I've never been seen anything like this in my career. And she's kind of grappling with the fact that it's her job to analyze these dot com companies.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  But everyone can tell, even her, she can tell that it's a bubble. And so you're in this weird dynamic where people can can say we're in a bubble, but they don't know exactly that you can't stop it because it's a it's animal spirits and it's a force greater than any one person. So. In 1999 eyeballs were highly valued. Let's get into some numbers. The market was pricing traffic at around $700 per monthly unique visitor. So if you got a million unique visitors on your website, you could sell that company for $700 million. And I know people that did, and they're venture capitalists now, and they retired, and they got extremely lucky by some concerns. They sold the top, basically, and they did very well.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  $700 per visitor.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  $700 per monthly unique visitor.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  That's not even somebody that has an account.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  That's just somebody that visited.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Chooses to go to the website. I mean, you could do the math for us. It'd probably be around there. But.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  No, it's worth noting that we haven't gotten there yet.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  No, not at all. Now, to be fair, that's $700 per monthly user. That analysis was heavily weighted by Yahoo, which was by far like the largest platform that was driving this metric. If you pull Yahoo out, you get a much lower number, around 400 per unique visitor, but that's still a high. And then for M&A, for smaller companies, it's not like everyone is actually comping to the Yahoo number. It was more around, it was closer to $150 per monthly unique visitor. But still, you know, you get a million unique monthly visitors and you sell the company for $150 million in 1998. That's pretty good.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's worth noting how much harder it would have been to get a visitor back then. It's not like you could just run, if you were getting, if your business was being valued at just getting somebody to your site and they were putting a value on that, today, you could just run traffic to it like crazy through all of, you know, search engines, through social media, through organic content, through TikTok. So it was much harder to get somebody to your site.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  I don't know. There were a lot of crazy, like, there's a toolbar that's installed that automatically routes traffic.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  Sure, I'm just saying it wasn't quite as programmatic.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  A lot of people would pay Yahoo for higher ranking because it was a portal, not necessarily a search engine.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  But I'm just saying, everybody didn't have a mobile device in their pocket.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Where now they're probably visiting an order of magnitude, you know, multiple orders of magnitude, more websites.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're 100% right. If you if you apply this metric to OpenAI, I had to. OpenAI has 800 million weekly active users and is worth 500 billion. So that's

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  And I believe, but I believe they're counting this as like people that have created an account, not not just a website visitor.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Wildly different, way stronger, way stronger audience. And that's still at $650 per eyeball. That's way lower than what the Yahoo number and the average number was in the in the dot com bubble. And you could also use the estimated 6 billion estimated visits for OpenAI and get $83 per visit if you're trying to get a little bit closer to the comp. So you're still off by an order of magnitude there. Again, these are all nonsense estimates. I did want to flip them around and go towards token generation. Instead of like, if you thought about a dollar of OpenAI equity as buying a stream of token generation instead of a stream of discounted future cash flow, which you should not do.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  You could estimate something like a 22x ratio between valuation dollars and tokens generated per minute. You could also flip this around and estimate that for $100 of equity, you're the owner of an annual stream of 2.3 million tokens that then need to be sold and eventually drive profit from. That doesn't seem that crazy to me. I don't know. A lot of it depends. 2.3 million tokens right now would sell for, what is it, 10, 20 bucks or something? It's $10 per million tokens for the high end.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere around there, yeah.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  So so like, and of course, like, this is extremely silly because tokens are sold for a variety of prices. Token volumes are growing exponentially. Token generation cost is falling. This is funny math, but I like funny things. And so I hope this doesn't show. The most important thing is that I hope this doesn't show up in sell side analysis. And also, I also hope that I don't hear whatever the equivalent.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Founder that I saw posting in the last 24 hours that was trying to get people to focus on site visits, which I don't think is. And I'm not going to name the person, but

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Well.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  But again, sophisticated investors today, or even not so sophisticated investors today are not going to put a lot of value on just pure site visits.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, well.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  That's healthy.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  Before we move on, let me 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, integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. In other, in other data point about the incredible growth of these properties, Bill Peebles, who's coming on the show tomorrow from OpenAI, said Sora hit 1 million app downloads in less than five days, even faster than ChatGPT did, despite the invite flow and only targeting North America. Team working hard to keep up with surging growth, more features and fixes to overmoderation.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  It's worth noting, so if you look at the, the charts on the App Store, in the top free apps, you have Sora, ChatGPT, Gemini, T-Dating, Threads, and McDonald's.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  McDonald's.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  And the top paid apps are Shadow Rocket, Hot Schedules, Anki Mobile Flashcards, Procreate Pocket, Tonal Energy Tuner, and Auto Sleep, Track Sleep.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Wow, I feel like the paid app rankings.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Six apps you've never heard of.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then, again, it's still worth noting, T-Dating just still in the top five is actually insane.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  I see them as wildly different markets. I almost see them as the free apps are venture-backed, hyperscaler, multi-billion dollar, multi-trillion dollar company efforts. And the paid apps are much more like lifestyle businesses. They're probably generating cash flow. I feel like all of those founders, they might be part of a roll-up or something, but they're thinking about it in much more financial terms than just go, go operate in some winner-take-all market.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Seems like there's alpha right now, being a venture-backed business and just making a paid app. So if you want to charge.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  For the charge.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Seems way easier, 10 times easier to.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  I wonder how cheap you can make your app. Can you make it a dollar? Can you make it one cent?

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  $2.99, I think, is what the few of these are.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Anki Mobile must be printing. Their app is $25 and it's top three paid apps in the world.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  If you're looking for an app that you can get started for free with, get Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Greg Brockman was talking about move 37. This is the big question in AI. When will we see a Lee Sedol move 37, a truly novel strategy in Go that DeepMind was able to achieve? When will we see that in text? When will we see that in image? When will we see that in scientific research done by LLMs? And Greg Brockman was on a podcast and said, on move 37, I do think next year, we will have some incredible models. The milestone I am most excited about is having models that can solve hard problems. And the analogy that I like to make is think back to AlphaGo, you know, move 37. That changes people's understanding of the game. Imagine that in coding. Imagine that in material science. Imagine that in medicine. Having real breakthroughs that are either

• 14:19John Coogan?

  potentially the AI by itself, or the AI assisted with top humans, I think we'll start seeing that. And so we've seen a few examples of now, you know, top tier mathematicians kind of going to GPT-5 and saying that there's breakthroughs. Tyler, what's your read on how close we are to a move 37 like breakthrough in a non, you know, perfectly simulated environment like Go?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. I think first, what we'll see before we see like completely novel breakthroughs is just like being more helpful to the top people. So like, you saw Scott Aronson talk about this a couple of weeks ago. He said GPT-5 like helped him get past some roadblock that he said, you know, he would have figured it out if he spent another hour or two, or maybe asked one of his grad students. But it just like helped speed him up. So it's always hard to figure out, especially with these novel breakthroughs, because people want to like, take credit for them, right? If you're gonna, if it's something that's worth a Nobel Prize, someone is gonna want to like, take credit. So they might try to like hide the, the impact that the AI made.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  So I think it's hard to see, hard to figure out the exact like attribution that you can do to LLMs.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that he's kind of not drawing a, a super clear line between AI by itself versus AI assisted with top humans. Because you have to imagine that a vast majority of modern Nobel Prizes are computer aided, just in the sense that, that like, the lab notebook was digital and like, the pipetting machine was automatic and like, anything that you're doing to win a Nobel Prize, you're going to be leveraging computers now just to speed up your workflow? That's very different than, than just

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Prompt.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  I did get a.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Figure out a novel science.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  I got a, I got a lunch with, with a physics professor right after the GPT five launch and he was able to one shot a problem that he felt, he, he estimated would have taken him three months to complete. If he was just doing it.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Self, which.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like, that's interesting. It's just, it's not move thirty seven because move thirty seven was something that Lee Sedol felt that he would never have come up with, not in three months. It was not something that was even on his radar.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Totally. So I'm not putting it in the same bucket and, and neither was he, but it was, again, it was, it wasn't doing anything especially novel. It was just doing a massive amount of work in, you know, twenty minutes.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, but the impact is still massive. Like if, even if you're just like, okay, we're going to speed up the, the level of scientific discovery by two percent. Like that's just massive. So we don't necessarily need move thirty seven to justify all the work that's going into AI, be super excited about AI. Like it's fine if it's just, if it's, if, if for a long, long time, it's just an assistant because why not? Why, why not speed things up?

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you want to speed up your development workflow, head over to cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Spike is sharing, there's nothing happening in America besides AI. And there's an article that says without data centers, GDP growth was point one percent in the first half of twenty twenty five. Harvard economist says that is brutal and not super surprising. At least, at least we're able to admit that here that, you know, AI capex is driving GDP growth.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  And there's again, that just massive disconnect between the real economy and our, our little bubble.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I would love to know more about breaking down how they're counting like data centers in this GDP growth number. Is it specifically like the data center construction? Is it chip production? Is it energy production? Is, are any of the like revenue streams from the foundation models actually moving GDP at this point? It seems like maybe not. I don't know. This does seem like a, like a higher level analysis, but certainly, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, Ludwig says, had a, had a great post that we got a chuckle out of this morning. He said, "Wearing my TVPN jacket and thinking cap from Anthropic. Look at my OpenAI coin. I'm such a good boy. Did you know I got an OpenAI coin? It's because I gave them lots of money. Anyways, I'm a 15-year-old dropout and I'm building the first $1 billion..."

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Evaluation.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  ...evaluation solo company in the world.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Evaluation.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, having, having a lot of fun here. The, the Anthropic cap and TVPN jacket combo is, is, is, is pretty, pretty on the nose.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Ludwig is a master of the WoJack.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  He really is.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  This reply to you is remarkable. Not like the rest, part one. Where did you find that yellow token? Where did you find that jacket? Thinking cap. The, the, the cap with the helicopter wheel on top is underutilized.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, underutilized. Nobody, we don't know how to make these hats in America.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was kind of the, the, the, the, the most iconic tell of like the, I don't know, 2005 nerd is very like, I don't know, just kind of like you're hanging out on some sort of corporate campus, like a Google. It's multicolored. It's very, it's very sophomoric. No one's brought that back and re-appropriated it. So maybe someone should, maybe, maybe someone should make it, make it trendy.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  The, the spinning wheel cap.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, in other news, Francois Chalais is very impressed by the new tiny recursive model from Samsung. A tiny 7 million parameter model just beat DeepSeek R1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and O3 Mini at reasoning on both ARG AGI 1 and Arc AGI 2.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  And the model is 10,000.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  It's Arc AGI one.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay, okay. I was like, I'm not familiar with that.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is odd because I I felt like at the end of this, it looked very AI generated. Because this isn't just scaling down, it's a completely different, more deliberate way of solving problems. So it feels like AI generated text, but the typo there is a little bit odd.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  But it's cool to see Samsung getting in the game here.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is unexpected. I feel like a lot of the labs are are pretty excited about Arc AGI. Obviously, XAI did very well with Grok. And it seems like the the level of respect for performance on Arc AGI is pretty high right now.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Tyler had a chance. Are you still at the top of the leaderboard? Or have you been unseated on Arc AGI? If you're just tuning in for the first time, Arc AGI is a is a benchmark for AI systems. But we we put Tyler on the task and he was able to defeat all of the systems, actually.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  One of the top humans.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  And and and I think he was in the top 10 at the time, but he probably should have fallen at this point because so many people.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  I would hope so. Liquidity says Prime might need to rebrand to Subprime. Apparently in 2023, they sold 1.3 billion in product. It's on pace to do only 300 million in 2025.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  I don't know how that's possible.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  Has this happened? I mean, I do know. So so what Prime did, which was genius, was they created a a sports drink.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  And then they also created an energy drink. And they look exactly the same.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that children were buying the energy drink. Their parents think they're just buying a like a Gatorade alternative.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  And meanwhile, the kid is getting ramped up on hundreds of milligrams of caffeine.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Which, I don't know, back in back in my day, when I was a kid, my parents were like, don't do caffeine. And I pretty much abided by it until I was probably, you know, 18 and started.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't really have caffeine until I was in college. But I remember being maybe a freshman or sophomore in high school. And a friend's older brother had access to Red Bull and was talking about the experience of drinking Red Bull like it was hard drugs. It was remarkable.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it it's still 300 300 million dollars is more than respectable.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  But I've never seen a brand go. I've I don't as as.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  We should actually look at the history. Do brands going to north of a billion dollars in sales and then retracing down to this level is?

• 22:46John Coogan?

  I mean, I worked in consumer packaged goods for a long time and with my first company, like it was a rough go, but that the the the pattern of that rough go was very fast revenue ramp and then plateauing.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  S curve, not a falling off cliff.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Because because once you have a customer on board and they're subscribed.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's also it's about distribution. So I think in this case, they basically, when you have these influencer brands, it's when you have KSI and Logan Paul, they effectively probably put like $200 million worth of like marketing firepower into growing the brand initially.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  And even the biggest influencers in the world are not typically enough to sustain a brand. You you need to branch out, right?

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Because eventually the the the ads just become less effective. And so, again, I think this was a number of factors contributing here.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  So you think it might have been a lot of trial that was driven where some sees Logan Paul viral video explaining that he launched the brand, they try it and they're like, ah, like, it's not available in my local store, so I'm going to churn.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  They just try it and they don't love it and they don't stick around. I mean, the the number one, more so than like influencer partnerships, CPG brands work in the for the most simple reason, because the product is great and people love the product and they come back and they buy it again and again and again. And it becomes a part of their life. I'm not like a DAU or a weekly active user of Red Bull, but I probably have consistently had like 10 Red Bulls a year for my entire adult life randomly.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  How real do you think that 1.3 billion number is? Because you could imagine that this was like in 2023, Logan or KSI like leaked a number that was crazy as like a stunt and it was taken out of context.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  They took one month of revenue and multiplied it by.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Or even someone leaked a number and then they multiplied it and it wasn't even on Logan and KSI. It was in fact on someone downstream, some some, you know, somebody who wanted to go viral. Just said, oh, well, I saw that my Shopify order number was this, multiply it by that and and come up with some crazy number that was never really what they actually did that year. Because I am, I am shocked because typically it's like, we talked about this with create. Once you get the, the target distribution, like you should be able, you, you wouldn't necessarily just see a massive spike. You might see some trial and then some drop off.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Bloomberg, Bloomberg has here reported.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Forex. They reported, wow. 1.2 billion in sales, not valuation.

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  That's a lot. That's crazy. Um, well, I mean, still, if you're, if you're, you know, just thinking about this from like an influencer perspective, launching, launching a brand, uh, winding up with something that does $300 million a year is nothing to laugh at. So, uh, still impressive run for the folks over at Prime.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Delta had blowout earnings and guided up.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, while highlighting bookings have actually accelerated the last six weeks into Elian Capital. Uh, this is confusing because if we're, if, if, uh, you know, usually you would see a recession in the real economy impacting bookings, right?

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, not, you know, Delta's not seeing it. So.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate 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.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think, I think it's time.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  I think it's time.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  We have an absolute legend.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  We have John Quinn from UltraDome.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in the UltraDome.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  We're very excited to bring him onto the show. And I have here printed out, good to meet you. Welcome to the show.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  I have here printed out one of the greatest out of home advertisements in the history of California Burbank Airport, I believe is where I saw this one for the first time. It says, Quinn Emanuel Trial Lawyers, "Justice may be blind, but she still sees it our way 88.4% of the time." Did you think of this marketing copy, was this some genius on your team? How did this come about?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  It was within our firm. It wasn't some outside PR.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  But, you know, we came up with the copy.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing. Talk to me about a little bit of the journey. How are you defining the firm now? Has anything changed over your career? I mean, it's not exactly a non-traditional path. You went to law school, built the firm, but what were the key decisions along the way?

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Well, I started out at a big firm in New York that's very well-known, Crevasse, Swain & Moore. But, you know, I'm from the West. I grew up in Utah, went to college here in LA, really liked LA. I liked New York. But I decided I wanted to come back to LA. Came back here, bounced around a little bit. And we started this firm in January 1986. And we started with four lawyers, downtown LA, not too far from here. And along the way, we decided to focus just on disputes work, litigation work. So, most large firms, we're now 1,300 lawyers almost.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  In 34 locations around the world. Most firms of that size were our so-called full-service firms. So, they'll have some deal lawyers.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Corporate.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, they'll have corporate lawyers, they'll have some tax lawyers, trusts and estates, and somewhere they'll have some litigators. And we thought, we got, we came to realize that this model of only doing litigation, arbitration, disputes work, government facings, kind of dealing with legal risks in all its different forms, was a very powerful model. And so, we decided just to stick with that. We're not going to try to be...

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  And historically, people would diversify because they wanted the stability of a variety of different businesses, or they wanted to be able to add, kind of, contract, effectively, like, add hours to existing relationships.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  You know, so if you have a client...

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm sure you would have had pressure over time from people that say, "I love working with you, can you do more for me?"

• 28:56Speaker 03

  You know, I think the thought is, you want to be able to service all the client's needs. So, a client may want to do some M&A work... They may want to raise some capital, they may, and then they may have, need tax advice.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're effectively cross-selling.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  From time to time, they'll have a litigation. So, the thought is to cover all those. And by the way, that's how our industry is organized. We're, we're one of one.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  I mean, there is no firm, I don't know what the next largest litigation-only firm in the world is, but it's probably not more than 50 lawyers, wherever it is.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  And we're almost...

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  So, you started in 86. How long did it take you to become the most feared lawyer in the world?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Well, so what you're alluding to is, there's a consulting firm, BTI Consulting. We had nothing to do with this. They called us up one day and told us they were doing this survey, that they survey the general counsel at like 350 large corporations around the world. And they asked them, what law firm do you least want to see on the other side in a dispute? And they were publishing a list, and you know, we've always been on that list of the top four. They call it the fearsome foursome. And a few years ago, we got them to tell us, okay, of the four, which one actually got the most votes? And they

• 30:11Speaker 03

  told us, and for five years running now, we have been, we say, we characterize it as the most feared law firm in the world.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  It's good to be feared.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  What's the secret?

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Well, in our business, we don't find clients very often, they're looking for shrinking violets to represent them, to stand between them and trouble.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  They're looking for lawyers that will cause the other side to think twice.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  You know, there's a settlement here, this can go away for this amount, or you can, you see what's behind door number two.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  And so, you know, we think we can get resolutions that other firms can't because of our reputation and our record.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  What's the secret to 90% win rate?

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can pay for yourself.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Is it case selection? Walk me through all the decisions that make sure that you're...

• 30:55Speaker 03

  No, we don't, we don't just select winners.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  We don't select just winners.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  I mean, we're, we're, we're in for the hard cases, the tough cases to win. And what's behind that is frankly, there aren't shortcuts.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Doing what we do at the highest level is, is labor-intensive.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  And it requires people who are not just smart, but truly dedicated.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  What's the hardest case? What's the long shot that you actually wound up winning?

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Well, early in my career, I mean, I'd be embarrassed to kind of tell you the facts. It was an employment case and it was, we were defending a discrimination case where there were two plaintiffs. They were both African-American. They were both, you know, over 55 years old, I think, and they were both let go. And there was evidence, I mean, the plaintiff had some evidence that the motivation behind the, they'd both been terminated from their jobs, that the motivation, you could argue that age entered into it, maybe race entered into it. And it was a very, very tough case. And I'm kind of embarrassed to tell you almost these 30 years later.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  I mean, we won the case.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What about in tech? You've been a part of some of the biggest tech cases. Is that something that took you a while to get up to speed on? Is there anything different about working with a big tech company from any of the other work that you do?

• 32:31Speaker 03

  So, we noticed 25-plus years ago what was going on up in the Bay Area and in Silicon Valley. And we made a decision that we wanted to be part of that and start doing some intellectual property work, patent litigation work, tech work. So, we're there for the conflicts. We're not raising money, we're not doing the M&A work. It's primarily patent litigation. We now have the largest patent litigation practice in the world. But we sent a lawyer up there to start an office. And frankly, it was a little bit difficult to get traction in the beginning because there was then, I think it's diluted somewhat now, kind of a Silicon Valley culture. And people wanted to know, how much time did you, how much Valley experience did you

• 33:16Speaker 03

  have? And we were kind of outsiders. We did recruit some people locally, but it took us a while, frankly, to get some traction.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  What's different about Silicon Valley? There's so much about Silicon Valley that is weird around IP. It's like in software, you would have, there's a world where if somebody developed a unique user experience, you would have been able to really enforce that in the scale of time. If a big platform creates some incredible feature, it's going to get copied by every big company that it's relevant to. How did that kind of evolve? Because I think early on, you maybe would have expected that you could have, if somebody like a Snapchat creates a stories feature, that they, that could have been, there's another world where that could have been IP, but it didn't play out that way.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  There is kind of a culture, there's a feeling in many circles, especially among the biggest companies, the hyperscalers and the like, that you should compete based on your business, don't compete on IP.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  I mean, there is a reluctance.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Which is completely different than like, almost every other industry in the world.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, biotech would never say that.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you don't, you don't see the big automobile companies suing each other either.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  You don't see the big airplane companies, there'll be trade disputes between Airbus and Boeing, but not so much technology disputes.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  And there is kind of a feeling, and you know, Elon Musk has been outspoken about this, that you know, anybody, we're not gonna, anybody can use our inventions.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  He's said things, he has said things like that.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  In the past. So you don't see the big players going after each other so much. They will, there are examples, but there's kind of an ethos that you compete on the business, you compete on your offering, and you don't compete with IP lawsuits.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  What lessons did you take away from working with Elon? Is he different than other clients? Is there something that you were coaching or advising at various, at various points in time?

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Well, we've represented Elon in a number of cases, including cases that have gone to trial here in California, there with that defamation case.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  The British cave driver.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yep, I remember.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Diver, where there was a tweet about whether this was a pedo guy.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  And the case about wanting to take Tesla private for $420 a share.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Funding secured, we tried both those cases. I was not on either one of those trial teams.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  So I have not, we have a team of people that work very, very closely with Elon, so what I know about him and our experience working with him is secondhand. I do know... You know, he values his time.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  He closely guards how he spends his time.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  I don't, I think it's fair to say that based on what I've heard that spending time with lawyers, preparing for depositions and trial at the like is not at the top of his list of things that he likes to do.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  Not a priority.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  I can imagine.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  So he's a busy guy and obviously he's got great instincts himself.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  What about?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  I can say just one kind of, one story.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  So in that defamation case, he had tweeted that I assure you this British guy is a pedo guy. And he came into Elon, then lived in Los Angeles, sued him for defamation here. We didn't have a lot of time to prepare him for trial. And when the trial started in federal courthouse downtown, the plaintiff called him as their first witness. You can do that. You can call the adverse party, put them on the witness stand and immediately start cross-examining them. So the jury, the first witness they see is your adversary being cross-examined. And the question to Elon was, when they put him up there was, this is a defamation case. You're Elon Musk, so the world really cares about what you say.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Not a bad question. What's he gonna say?

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's hard to deny.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  And there's kind of a beat and he says, well, well, I'm not so sure. I don't know. I've been talking about our need to get away from fossil fuels for so long now and it just doesn't seem to be happening. I'm not sure people listen.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  People aren't listening to me at all.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  People listen to me at all. It was like genius.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Yeah, that's a good argument. That's very funny. We, I mean, we're tracking like a crazy AI boom, crazy tech boom right now, mostly from the financial markets. We have founders on, I'm sure we have seven people on today that are raising a lot of money. Is there a boom in tech litigation right now?

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe even before that, talking about kind of the dot com era, you saw this craziness. We opened the show talking about how people were just valuing eyeballs, right? And there was, aside from that, there was like, you know, these round trip, you know, effective, you know, commercial agreements that ended up getting litigated in the years following after the, after the crash. What kind of stood out from that era? What was, what was just? You know, I guess, what were the takeaways from that era? Did you ever think we would repeat those kind of, that kind of cycle? Because I'm sure you that you were in the, your job even after the crash just got busier and busier.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Yes, whenever there's a crash, as in the financial crisis, for example, 2008, which we weren't very involved in, that plays out in the courts, of course. There'll, there'll be people who've lost a lot of money. There'll be claims of fraud and misrepresentation. You know, in the dot com boom, there were down rounds. There were class actions of all kinds, securities class actions. So every deal gets scrutinized in retrospect.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  In AI, where we are, look, I'm not an economist and I'm not a prognosticator about where we are in terms of whether this is a bubble or not. I can tell you, in our world, the disputes world, litigation, we're seeing a lot of AI-related disputes.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  And is that around primarily today? I can imagine the trajectory is like, right now, it's a lot around IP, right? We saw case against Anthropic around their, their usage of, I forget.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Reddit.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  It was, well, there's Reddit, it's getting litigated, but then the books where they had.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  They just did a huge settlement.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  It was a big settlement. And so right now, it feels like we could be in the era of like, litigating around IP. And what even is IP in the, in the world of generative AI? But then, but then, but then it feels like the, the next wave could be around just rehashing and litigating. It's going to be a lot of lawyers looking over, you know, this, this announcement that went out. It's like, yes, in the fine print, it said that it wasn't an actual deal yet. It was just a kind of a, a general sentiment from the two companies. But, but I, but yeah, how, where do you think, do you think we're at all close to having some like precedent around AI and IP? Or is this going to take years?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  I mean, AI is throwing up so many novel legal issues. I mean, IP for for sure. Everybody's heard about the cases that have been brought relating relating to music, literary works, visual works, using copyrighted materials to train large language models. And whether that's copyright infringement or what's called fair use.

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  So we have dozens of those cases. We finally have a couple of decisions now out of the federal court in San Francisco where the judges in those two cases, one case involving Meta, another case involving Anthropic, decided that it was fair use, that it was not copyright infringement to use copyrighted materials to train large language models, although both decisions were kind of qualified and there were some unique facts in both cases. But yeah, we're starting to have those those decisions on various issues, but there's so many things. All this money is going into large language models and AI and there's

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  And you think you think a lot of founders are just running the calculus of I know that I'm going to have to eventually pay out something for what I'm doing, but I'm just going to run with it because I'll be able to eat the eat the cost later and if I wait, then my competitors will will.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  I don't know. Losing one of these cases, the copyright cases, there's so much involved. The the price tag could be could be very, very big.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  So I don't know that people are sitting back saying it's just the cost of doing business.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but at the same time, if your competitor is like willing to take the risk and they can ramp their market up, market cap up into the hundreds of billions, they're they know that and and the alternative is, you know, being safer around IP and then you just lose the race, then you're a zero anyways. So I think a lot of people are it feels like a lot of people are willing to just roll the dice and say, we'll figure it out later.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Well, Apple in its early, in its early years, uh, had a reputation for not being very careful with its IP. You know, they launched the iPhone, knowing they did not own the name iPhone.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  It was owned by, I think, Oracle.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Oracle owned it. Yeah, Cisco, Cisco.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  And so as soon as they launched it, there was a lawsuit filed.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Cisco versus Apple, and it was immediately settled. I've never heard what it settled for. Uh, but you know, that was Steve Jobs, you know, driving ahead and, and kind of doing what you're saying. I think they've gotten, I think they've gotten a lot more careful. But there's just a host of issues. Like, you have all this money going into AI and AI inventions. How are you going to protect it?

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  You cannot patent an algorithm. You cannot patent a mathematical application. You know, it's, the, these come under the rubric of general ideas.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and again, again.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Laws of nature.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, and then you, and then in the talent, the talent wars are a whole other thing. I'm curious if, what, what your kind of, uh, view on, you know, over the summer, we saw all the labs kind of poaching, pulling talent from different places and people realizing that in this person's brain is like potentially a hundred million.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  You think that's, they're not being hired for what is in their brain?

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  They know, yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Of course they are.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  Which they.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  And that's an example of what I was referring to earlier, where the major players are very reluctant to sue each other. I'm kind of surprised there hasn't been more litigation over the, this poaching. But I think it's this phenomenon that.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but our view is that they're very much like aqua hires, just unauthorized aqua hires, where it's like, this team knows how to do something really well, that they've learned through spending tens of millions or hundreds of millions, or sometimes even billions of dollars, and we want what they know how to do. We want the, uh, we want the process that's in their, in their head, basically.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  You know, there's no doubt. I mean, some of the, what you're referring to is trade secrets.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Trade secret law, which is another area of intellectual property. And that's an awful lot in the AI world, what we're talking about, mathematical applications, algorithms and the like, that can't be patented. They can be trade secrets and they can be protected as trade secrets. And if somebody has access to those and goes to work for a competitor, it's not lawful for them to be using that information when they go to work for the, for the competitor. But then proving that actual use,

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  you know, is, is another thing altogether.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  How often would an issue pop up and you have multiple, uh, let's say it's Mag Seven on Mag Seven and you're getting, you're getting calls and texts from both of them racing to, to, to work with you guys? And then have you ever had to make a call in the moment?

• 44:58Speaker 03

  You know, in that world, uh, we never encountered that because we always end forever.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Have been adverse to Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  We've always represented Google, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Salesforce and some others. In our world, it seems like you come to a fork in the road and you decide we're gonna go this way.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  And you never come back because people know you will, you're the firm that will be adverse to Apple. It's like being the firm in Seattle.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  That'll be adverse to Boeing.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  I mean, that's kind of a job in it, in itself.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  What about, um, uh,

• 45:34Speaker 03

  I mean, it does happen in other areas of practice, like in private equity. I mean, we had a situation just within the last couple of days where two global private equity firms.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Who were opposite each other with respect to a particular transaction. Both of us called us.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  And we accepted the engagement from the one that called us first.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  So that does happen.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Is being litigation only an advantage in being able to create this patchwork of clients? That you don't have conflicts because you're, you're also already doing their contracts or anything? So you can be a little bit more, uh,

• 46:08Speaker 03

  You know, I think as a litigation only firm, we have fewer, fewer conflicts.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  So, um, for us, the world is, is divided to the, into, uh,

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Companies and individuals we represent and those we don't. And sometimes a party, a company or an individual moves from one category to the other.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  But we don't have, we have very few sort of lasting conflicts vis a vis the business world in principle. Where deal lawyers, you know, there might be some industries that they know, well, we just can't be on this other, other side of this issue or represent a competitor or the like, because it's a little bit different in the deal world.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Where's your firm getting leverage from AI today?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  We're using it, uh, we're using it a lot. We're using it to, you know, not only to manage documents, uh, the things that are produced in discovery, because we've been able to do that for a long time. But to be, if you can imagine, we tried a case in Delaware a few months ago. And we had loaded into the database, all the deposition testimony, all the documents and the trial testimony as the trial's going down. And as somebody's on the stand, I mean, you can imagine, you can query this database. What is the best evidence that so and so just lied about that?

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In real time.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it'll, you know, you press a button and it'll give you a list of things in rank order.

• 47:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Now, if you had the.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  And before, back in, back in the day, nineties, early two thousands, twenty teens, you had to be.

• 47:39John Coogan?

  Go back to the filing cabinet.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you're relying on your memory and what you know and, uh, what you know about the case, and still that's the most important thing, I think. And mostly it's kind of a backstop, you know, it's a check, things you would have thought of anyway, but it'll also come up with things that you wouldn't have thought of, or maybe you would have thought of if you just had more time.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Uh, what are your thoughts on, uh, resolving co-founder conflicts? There's been a number of really high-profile cases around, uh, a group of people came together, started a company, the company grows and grows and grows, some people leave, and then there's.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Vingegaard Twins.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  That was one example?

• 48:15Speaker 03

  We settled that case.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  And we didn't file the case, we were brought in to settle it.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Uh, Snap.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  There was, uh, there was a third guy in the garage.

• 48:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Who got kicked out.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Uh, and he, he brought a clown.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Are there any, uh, like, common pitfalls that you see on, uh, the, the incorporation documents or the safe node or specific?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  People start working on these projects, sorry, all the time.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  And they're not thinking about. This might become super valuable someday.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Of course, yeah, yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 03

  You know, maybe they're more sensitive now in the tech world.

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  It's easier than ever to create, you can create a C corp in a few clicks, you can see.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they don't think to lay out, okay, who owns what, what's my share, what's your share, we're friends, right?

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  So they don't think to document it.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Uh, and it's not till later that, and suddenly it's super valuable.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  And they're getting all these views and followers and realize, wow, this is super, now remember, this is one-third, one-third, one-third, right?

• 49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  That was not my understanding.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, how, how much, um, in, in a case like this, is it worth, uh, pursuing a settlement, taking it to trial, like, what are the, what are the key decision points where you realize, okay, this is going to trial?

• 49:27Speaker 03

  I mean, usually, so there's a, there's a stage, uh, called summary judgment.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Where, uh, a party can go to the court and basically say, look, on the undisputed evidence that's been developed in the course of discovery.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  I'm entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  It's basically, you're arguing to the court, no reasonable juror could find for the other side, they could only find for me.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  And, and there has to be no disputed evidence. And the judge has to find, okay, on the law, and yes, the evidence is undisputed, you win. If it gets, and a lot of cases are dismissed at that level, if it gets past that, then there's the prospect this case is going to go to trial. There's nothing really going to stop it.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Because that's kind of the last court off-ramp.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  A lot of cases are resolved in mediation. In any significant case these days, the courts will expect you to go through a mediation. That is to say, engage a neutral professional mediator, spend some time with the mediator, and see if you can resolve the case. And that happens, sometimes it happens right at the beginning of the case, or even where there's a dispute and no case has been filed, you get a mediator together.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Sometimes it happens on the eve of trial, but a lot of times it happens in the course of a mediation.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  You know, if it's gone past summary judgment, if you've gone through a mediation and that hasn't been successful, then that looks like a case that may go to trial.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  And is that a function of total settlement? How much is at stake relative to the legal bills? Is, am I more likely to settle a case if it's $1 million at stake, but $500,000 in legal bills that I'm looking at versus there's a billion dollars at stake?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  I would certainly think so. If the legal bills are more than what you would get out of winning the case.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Sometimes there's other things, you know, at stake.

• 51:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Whether ego or whatever, reputation. But it's usually a calculus. I think most clients, it's, it's pretty much an economic calculus. What, you know, what are my chances of prevailing at trial? What do I get if I, what does prevailing mean? What will I get if I prevail? And obviously, what's the cost to get me there, including primarily attorney's fees?

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that AI will speed up cases? Or is there some element to litigation that just because maybe one side realizes the longer this goes on, the better for me, I'm just going to drag it out? Like, will it actually, even though a lawyer could now do two weeks of work in an hour, maybe if they're properly using some of these AI tools, they might, it might still just take the full, you know, however many two weeks in order to?

• 52:11John Coogan?

  Because the other side's going to be using AI, right?

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, I mean, cases settle when parties realize the strengths and weaknesses of their case and the strengths and weaknesses of the other party's case. And they, they assess that. You know, cards, in the, in the discovery process, everybody's cards are basically put on the table.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  And you have a, you have a basis then to make a judgment about, am I going to win? What does winning mean? What am I likely to get in damages? I think AI will accelerate that process. There'll be more disclosure and more ability to handicap the potential outcome sooner. So I do think there's a potential for resolving cases sooner. However, I think AI is going to result in in much more litigation.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  More cases.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  More cases. Why? There are already early-stage companies out there. Who are putting cases together. They have put into databases all records about permits, licenses, advertising. What parties claim is in their product. What they say their product can do. All this information and information about what is actually in the real world. What's the experience there? They'll put that together and they will serve up to lawyers. You can subscribe to these services and they'll come to you to say, I've got these great class action lawsuits for you. And so they're finding, they're finding cases. So I think there will be more cases, but I I think there's a potential they'll be resolved sooner.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Do you think the legal profession is a mentorship business? Do you, like, when you bring on, do you see, you know, young lawyers needing to find a mentor to establish a full career? Is that how you, is that how you think about it or?

• 53:52Speaker 03

  I really think the best way to learn is working with more experienced people. That was certainly true in my case, whether you call them mentors or just senior people in the firm who you work with. Go to court with and see how they examine witnesses and the like. So I do, I do think that's really important in terms of learning what it means to practice law.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  What advice are you giving to young lawyers today that want to be where you are in thirty years or so?

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Well, as I said earlier, I I tell people, you know, this is practicing law, litigating high-value cases at the highest level is, there's no shortcuts. So you have to be prepared to sacrifice and work super hard. It's a, it's an hours commitment. There really are no shortcuts.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Is it thrilling though? Do you love it?

• 54:40Speaker 03

  I do love it. I do love it.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  Is the case more thrilling, or is it who you're working on behalf of? Is it the partnership between you and the client?

• 54:48Speaker 03

  No, the partnership with the client can be very, very satisfying.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  This is a team sport, right?

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's definitely a team sport. The team within the firm, the team with the client. What I love most about it is we're constantly learning. We have to be able to cross-examine experts, whether it's on biotech, steel manufacturer, AI. I mean, you name it. We have to get to the point where there's an expert on the stand, somebody maybe has a PhD in something, and we're going to cross-examine them. We have to learn. That's what I love about my job.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  And that an expert could make... Yeah, an expert can make some... You sound really silly. They're like, "What do you mean by that? Like, I don't understand what you're even asking." And then they could just be, you know...

• 55:28Speaker 03

  You sound like an evasive expert here.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  That's not gonna be great for your credibility.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 55:35John Coogan?

  What about how the media characterizes law? Is there a book or movie that stands out to you as kind of telling the story the correct way that resonates with you? That's something that you don't feel like it's a mischaracterization of how you work?

• 55:52Speaker 03

  You know, there are a number of good books about trial lawyers. And perhaps my favorite was written by a trial lawyer who recently passed away, Jerry Spence. I don't know if that's a name you know. Famous trial lawyer from Wyoming. He did the Karen Silkwood case, that uranium...

• 56:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  She claimed that she was injured by exposure to radiation. She... He represented Emilda Marcos in a trial in New York City. I mean, but he was always kind of this Wyoming buckskin-clad country lawyer.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  A character.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  And he, yeah. And he wrote a book called Gunning for Justice.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  That was about his own life.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  And it was a very, very moving, moving book. That's one that I really like.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  I will have to pick it up. Well, thank you so much for coming by and doing this interview.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Thank you, John. Enjoyed it very much.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're welcome anytime.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  What a legend.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  That was a lot of fun. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let's first 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. And our next guest is Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz. We have a bunch of breaking news. We're very excited to talk to you. How are you doing?

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  Welcome, Martin.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Can we adjust the levels, make sure that we're hearing him okay? How was your day? Just tell us how you're doing.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  I'm doing very well, thank you. It's actually a pretty chill morning because I had a couple of meetings canceled, which is kind of the best gift you can give me.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  There we go. Cancelled meetings, hop on TVPN. What more could you want in the Silicon Valley life?

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  How's your Q4 been? Pretty mellow?

• 57:47Speaker 04

  Most of my companies are still in Q3 because we shift by a month, but pretty good, thank you.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Wait, why do you shift by a month? Is that standard now? Is this something?

• 57:57Speaker 04

  It is. It is very standard. I mean, listen, so I did enterprise sales for my company for 10 years and I don't remember a Christmas or a New Year's where I could be home because we were like deep enterprise sales. So 50% of the year came in the last month. And so everybody realized that if you're pushing to the end of the quarter, it's probably better to do it when people are still working. And so most will use the end of January. And so that's the majority of the companies I work with, which is by a month.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  How often are you investing in a company and they haven't made the shift yet? Are you going that early?

• 58:30Speaker 04

  Honestly, if they don't, I recommend them to.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I imagine that's a first. You like the holidays at the end of the year? You like spending time with your family?

• 58:38Speaker 04

  I would say 2008 to 2012 of my life, maybe 2016 was me on the phone like in a beach somewhere trying to close a deal.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Paid off and here you are. Uh, leading the infrastructure practice. Uh, I want to get to robotics in China, but uh, first I'd love just an update on uh, how you're thinking about infrastructure at Andreessen. You have 1.25 billion under management for that fund and infrastructure. I mean, we're seeing deals for energy. Sam Altman's doing stuff with SK Hynix and HBM. There's, you know, the, the Neo clouds. There's the hyperscalers. There's so much in infrastructure. And then there's also just like dev tools, which I think could maybe be in there. So, how do you define it? What's interesting? Where are the key themes these days?

• 59:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we do primarily software infrastructure and things that directly relate to software infrastructure. So everything from like, let's say, chips to AI models to, to your point, dev tools to the traditional compute network and storage. Um, a very interesting thing about this AI wave is like, it's very hard to distinguish between like a, like a deep infrastructure model company and like, say, an application company. And so we're having kind of a renaissance in the field where everything has to be redone. Like you have to redo networking. You have to redo compute and you have to like build new dev tools. And so, you know, we're just trying to keep up with all of this change that is coming from, from AI.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about uh, competition from the hyperscalers when you're looking at a startup? We've talked to a bunch of founders who they're going up against AWS and Andy Jassy's not asleep at the wheel. But at the same time, there's this meme of like, you know, a VC would always tell you, what if Google does this? And then we have, you know, CloudFlare and like, you know, GitLab. And there's like a million companies that we could name off that are, you know, Decacorns, public companies that successfully went up against the, the, you know, the, the public clouds and won, or at least saw, you know, massive businesses built. So is there, is it all about the founder? Is it about the particular market or the technology or lock-in or being program record or being a, you know, some sort of system of record? Like, how are you thinking about it?

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  Um, so listen, I've been an infrastructure investor for 10 years and um, Uh, listen, in that entire time, the public cloud has been incredibly dominant. Right. And so I would say after reinvent, which is the AWS show, I have to like move into therapy mode. I'm actually, I'm actually on the other side of this. I'm never the one that actually worries about the public clouds. I'm always telling like the founders, I have this line. My, my line is, is like, can you name one company that AWS has put out of business? One, just one.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Good point. Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Like they literally have copied everything. They've hosted everything and like, and so the reality is, is that if you have an entire, if, if the market is large enough and you have an entire company focused on it, you're going to win. And that's just the reality. And AI in particular is a new behavior, which, you know, you know, companies, incumbent companies are terrible at new behavior. So like, this is definitely an advantage to startups. Like it's like a new buyer. It's a new use case. It's a new way of thinking about things. So they don't have the incumbent institutional momentum. And so I think that like, you know, we're free of, of a lot of the trappings of the cloud. And I think the future is very bright for startups. So I, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the incumbents.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  That said, I have to say one thing is, listen, Anthropic and OpenAI are, are startups really in the classic sense. Um, and they are incredibly dominant. And so I would say I would put them in a different class. There's, there is a class of these new types of incumbents. Think like Stripe, Figma, where the founders are still there. They're still hungry. They're executing very well. I think those are much more dangerous than, you know, Google or Microsoft.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was talking to a founder who is, uh, going up against an AWS point solution that was rolled into stuff. And I was like, you, you are going up against Angie Jassy, but you're really going up against the particular product manager who's on that particular product. And that product manager might not be taking calls on a beach in, on December 25th, you know, like they, they might be taking a vacation. And so if you're going to work them, it's possible you could beat them.

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  Totally. And, and like, this is a company that, you know, is famous for bragging about two pizza box teams, right? Okay. Yeah. So fine. You've got, you know, the 12 people on this product is dying on the vine. Like if you can't beat that, you kind of deserve to lose.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great point. Um, well, I, I'd love to go into robotics in China. Uh, you recently published a Wall Street Journal op ed, which I love. I read the journal every day.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Wait, before we dive in there, one question around, uh, when you're evaluating, uh, how you think about, uh, How do you think about revenue ramps specifically? You know, there's always this question if a company's ramping revenue just, just at an ungodly rate, there's a question of like, how durable that revenue is? Is it, is it going to be possible for another company to come into the category and sort of pull off the same type of, pull off the same type of growth? What are you evaluating for these software infrastructure companies on whether they have actually done the hard work to figure out, develop something that's unique and proprietary?

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  Or they're just capitalized, or they're just like a, we did talk about it's like a barnacle on the side of a whale like OpenAI.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  Oh, reseller.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  We're into the barnacle economy.

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  We love the barnacle economy, where you just naturally grow at the growth rate of Anthropic and you're like, it's a miracle.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, listen, so there's always this concern of easy come, easy go.

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  Which is kind of like what you're asking about. Like, you know, you got this revenue so quickly, how hard could it be? But, you know, listen, we're three years into this and we've got a lot of data points that this stuff is actually pretty durable, right? I mean, mid-journey bootstrap to actual scale and it still is very much a leader in image. You know, OpenAI roared into dominance in text and it's still the leader. Anthropic roared into this. I mean, Cursor roared into this. And I think that these revenue ramps are much more of an indication of the size and the growth of the market, which, I mean, these things have just been so large and growing so fast. And of course, like, the leader that becomes the brand monopoly will follow brand effects and then people will know the name and then they'll go ahead and adopt it.

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  So I think that, you know, like, there is no indication just because the revenue ramp was quick that it's not durable. That said, I don't know of any endemic defensibility in AI. I think companies have to figure out traditional modes. And there's a lot of traditional modes we know about, right? Integration modes, two-sided marketplace, brand modes, like whatever the mode is, they've got to get to that. So when we evaluate the company, just because it grew quickly, we're not like, oh, easy come, easy go, right? I mean, that's kind of like intellectually lazy. On the other hand, we do look for like, what actually is the mode, right? If you're basically just... You know, reselling TPM, you know, tokens per minute from Anthropic. That's probably not as durable as if you've got a workflow and a bunch of users that use

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  it and, you know, they save configuration in this and you've got good retention numbers, etc. So we do kind of full-fledged investment, like we always do, but I don't think it's correct to just say, just because the growth is high, it must not be durable.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  How quickly can a brand moat emerge?

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  In, in infrastructure?

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I mean, the last time I remember brand moats like this was the internet. I think when markets grow incredibly quickly, like, education is always kind of out of date and so you default to brand. Like, remember Netscape was largely a consumer phenomenon and very quickly, everybody was talking about Netscape very early on and we're seeing a very similar thing. So I think it's been probably 25 years since we've seen brand effects dominate adoption, especially for highly technical projects. I think the last time was probably the internet and before that, like, maybe the PC, like, Windows 95, again, was very much kind of a brand name. And so I think it's more, again, an indication that the market's very large, it's growing very fast. There's so much confusion in the market so that a few leaders end up becoming brand

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  monopolies and then the adoption is literally because people can't keep up. So they just kind of adopt the one that they know about.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's, uh, speaking of brand, there's actually a comment in the chat. A16Z blows my mind, how can they be a venture fund and a brand at the same time? And I feel like there's, like, Andreessen really is focused on brand in many ways, both the Andreessen brand, but also partnering with brands on the consumer side or, or, uh, you know, uh, internet consumer side. But do you have, do you have thoughts or advice for infrastructure founders on brand? Is there, is there, is there an equivalent of like, make sure you have your dot com or make sure that you have, you know, a specific brand package? Like, do you spend any time thinking on that? Or is, is that at all relevant? Or is it just something that, you know, kind of check the box, make sure it's converting customers and think about it in more quantitative terms?

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, so quite frankly, this is a pretty new phenomenon. Like, I am part of the nerdiest part of Andreessen. I don't really think about brand. It's like, that's not the conversation we have. Normally, it's either talking about like, the mechanics of, you know, inbound bottoms-up growth or the mechanics of enterprise sales or something like that. That said, we've all had to, all of us, the founders and the investors had to become students of this because like, you'll have model companies that'll be consumer companies and those are very much brand-led. You'll have- I mean, you know, I mentioned Cursor before, like, you know, Cursor is a dev tools company, but it's got so many users, like, brand effects are at play, brand is really important. And X now, because this stuff is proliferating so quickly, has become a primary distribution

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  channel. Like, X has its own way of propagating information that's very, very different than going to, like, traditional press, or doing, like, a press release, or writing content marketing, or whatever. Like, we're in a very different world. And so, I would say, you know, historically, I personally, while the, while the firm has, I personally have not been very focused on brand, like, the opposite. But now, I've had to learn a lot more about it.

• 1:08:22John Coogan?

  It used to just be, make the docs dark mode.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Do you think some of the...

• 1:08:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  But now, yeah, now we are emerging in a different...

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  Sell the, sell, sell the thing and be technically correct.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  Like, that was kind of my, yeah.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you think public SaaS is generally oversold, or people too bearish, or is the, is the, is the, the, uh, the conversation we keep coming back to, Brett Taylor was on the show talking about how it's easier to change the, the, your tech stack than your business model. And he was referencing, you know, the dynamic between, you know, seat-based pricing versus...

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  But that's, but that's kind of not as relevant in, in public company, infrastructure companies that might be disrupted by...

• 1:09:03Jordi Hays?

  Systems of record.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Because, because of public, I, I, I imagine that most of the infrastructure competitors, the incumbents, are already on consumption-based models. And so, you're not seeing a dramatic shift in the business model of the companies you back. It's more of a technology shift? Or am I mischaracterizing that?

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  Uh, okay. So, I, I definitely think we're seeing, um, a pricing shift from seat-based to usage-based. And, and listen, we saw that. Listen, when I was taking my company, we saw the shift from perpetual to, um, to, uh...

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  SaaS.

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  To recurring, right? To SaaS recurring, right? And so, we're seeing that type of shift, and that's being accelerated by AI. It was, it was started by the cloud, but it's being accelerated by AI, because, you know, the tokens are so expensive. I don't think that alone is depositioning anybody, right? I think that the, the SaaS companies are very good at adopting that and using that. I really think a lot of the story of AI is actually kind of new capabilities and new use cases and like that's kind of like the untold story. I mean, these things now speak English, right? They develop an emotional connection. They can create something from nothing. Like, that's cool. That's net new behavior. That's net new budget. And you can see this in this dramatic growth. Now, of course, budget has to shift to cover that, right? And so I think we are seeing a slowing down of traditional SaaS spend, as you would

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  expect when you have something super cool and new and whatever. But I don't think that this spells the demise of the traditional sector. I mean, it's actually not even good at things like systems of record yet. Now, over time, that will change. And maybe it'll change the consumption layer. And once you have the consumption layer, you can change the backend. But I really think the story we should all be talking about is like, what are these net new use cases? Like, what is it enabling? Where does that budget come from? As opposed to like, who is this necessarily going to kill? Because the zero sum thinking, I think, is the biggest mistake we all make in this AI wave.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Totally. All right. Well, let's switch gears to robotics.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Yes. There is a, what's the major robotics company out of China?

• 1:10:56Jordi Hays?

  Unitree.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  There's a unitree for sale on Walmart.com for like $20,000. I'm hovering over the buy button. How un-American am I if I pull the trigger? Take me through the landscape. Yeah, I think we're maybe going to try and hack it and do something weird. But yeah, yeah, take me through the current understanding. In general, it feels like, maybe I'm wildly wrong, but it feels like tension between China and America is calming down almost? I don't know. Just maybe that's just the news cycle and people have shifted to other geopolitical topics. But I mean, polymarket has the chance that China invades Taiwan

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  by end of 2026, down at 14% from 25%. And we're doing more trade deals. There's crazy news today. But walk me through how you're understanding the geopolitical landscape.

• 1:11:48Speaker 04

  So listen, I'm not an expert on geopolitics. I will say today China put export controls on rare earth metals that are useful in things like lithography. So that's clearly like, I would say not a detente. I mean, that clearly is kind of more of an aggressive posture. Probably this is because Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping. Probably this is just kind of for negotiation. I don't know, right? But I would, you know, again, I am not an expert on these things from my perspective, which is through the lens of technology. Like, there is not a detente. I think that things tend to be escalating. Now, that said, you know, the technical collaboration between China and the US is the strongest it's ever been. I mean, you know, half the founders I work with are Chinese, half the teams I work with,

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  half the papers I read, half the models I use, half the models the companies I work with use. I mean, like, I think from a technical academic standpoint, it's the strongest I've ever seen in the industry. And so in that way, there's very much a positive. But politically, there's clearly some jockeying, and I think we're trying to all understand what that means. And I'll just tell you, my very quick view is like, I don't think anybody wants a generational struggle with China, right? I mean, like, the, you know, the hope is, is that both of us collaborate together and take over the solar system, right? These are two just phenomenally great countries with a tremendous amount of talent. But there is some level of Pollyanna in that belief. And so then the question is, is to what extent do we want to depend on China?

• 1:13:16Speaker 04

  It's not about being aggressive, it's not about being proactive. It's like, you know, do we want to depend on them for critical infrastructure? And I would say my position is the answer is no, we don't want to depend on them. In which case, it's important to understand what they're capable of, what we're capable of, and what we can do to develop local capabilities.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  Do you read anything into the fact that Xiaomi was able to be a phone company that launched a car and Apple was maybe rumored to be working on a car and never got it out? Is that just a market structure thing? I'm interested in understanding, like, where is China behind? Where are they ahead? It feels like Tesla was way ahead in electric cars and China's catching up there, but now Tesla's playing catch-up in humanoid robots. And I'm interested in the landscape of like, what each country does best.

• 1:14:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, okay. So I mean, this is gonna be a very polarizing topic. So I just want to say upfront that I'll send some opinions. These are not rooted in fact. There is no agenda here. Just, you know. As far as your first question on the structure of companies like Xiaomi and the car and Apple. You know, Asian companies tend to do more, right? I mean, think about the Korean chaebals. There was like, for a long time, there was five companies that did everything, like everything. They did everything from the cone to the car. And so I don't think that that is like a China versus US thing. I think that's something quite a bit different. You know, that said, we've seen China be like, you know, very, very effective at a number of areas in recent memory, right? I mean, 5G, China basically won, which is, you know, critical infrastructure communications, right?

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  I mean, for solar, they've been dramatically good. And then I wrote this post on robotics where they're very, very good. And so it's clearly a country with a ton of capability. On the other hand, like, listen, like, the United States continues to like, do two things that I think are pretty distinct from China. One, they're very good at complex software systems, right? Like, like, you know, not building a model, but building kind of like the OpenEyes and the Anthropics and, you know, and everything around it. Very, very good at complex software systems. And two, this is gonna sound funny, but the US is actually really good at building stuff people like. And I, no, but I think that, I think there's a, I think there's a specific reason for that, which is we're more like the rest of the world than China is. Like China like caters to a local market and the local market is just different behaviors,

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  different buying behaviors, different political behaviors, different economic behaviors. And so like, the stuff that they produce is just weirder. And so in some way, I would think like, like, you know, there's, there's two areas where they're just not as strong. It's very complex software systems, which we historically have just not seen come out, especially for B2B, but also like software that the rest of us can like use and adopt. Outside of like these viral consumery things.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  La Boo Boo. I was about to say, yeah.

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  La Boo Boo, right? Like this consumer thing, but I'm not a consumer guy, man. I'm a, I'm like.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  There's these cars that have like LED front dashboards and karaoke machines inside and they float and they're all very cool. But I don't know if the American consumer actually wants that necessarily.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  Well, I think, I think you could reduce it to like, you know, listen, people are people and whatever. But like enterprise buyers are very different in China than they are in the United States. And like, can you name one large Chinese enterprise software company?

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:16:32Speaker 04

  Software, yeah, it's impossible. I mean, we

• 1:16:35Jordi Hays?

  Does ByteDance get into enterprise in China?

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Does Alibaba, Quinn like count or like does DeepSeek count? I know DeepSeek is getting inferences a lot.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm like, well, this is a data brick, snowflake, Salesforce.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  The US enterprise companies and then in China you're like, well, you're kind of trying to like, well, it's a consumer company, but maybe they do enterprise.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  There's kind of these weird telco companies that people will mention.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  It just, you know, listen, I, you know, I built a team, you know, I ran a team in Beijing, I ran a team in Shanghai when I was working at VMware after they acquired my company and we sold software in China. It's just different. It's totally different. Like the consumption patterns are different, how you sell is different, what they expect from the software is different. And, and, and the market is large enough and localized enough that any local company is going to focus on that. And if they focus on that, they're just like through Darwinistic forces of acceptance are not going to build something the rest of the world really understands. And so I do think this is an area that the United States has a tremendous advantage is like

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you think?

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Based on your experience selling software, enterprise software in China, do you think in, in our lifetimes, we will go back to American companies trying to sell enterprise software into China? Or is that, is that ship sailed? Because I, I briefly lived in China, I studied abroad there. I was at a, I, I worked out of the China Accelerator office in Shanghai. And I, there was a lot of international companies that were trying to sell into China. This was 2016 era. And there was a sense that the Chinese market sort of wanted to learn about what was being sold, but they didn't actually want to adopt it.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  And it was more like, how do we learn about this so that we can just build this ourselves and utilize, you know, our networks locally to just kind of out, outcompete here?

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, so listen, I think behavior follows business. I think that there are some systems that are pretty straightforward to reverse engineer, like a like a actual hardware system where you can pull out the embedded software and you can look at the chip like what like, you know, like, let's say, network routers, right, you know, classically, you know, WASC, Huawei copied Cisco routers early on. I think for very complex software, it's just, you know, it's like all the operational like know-how is just a very tough thing to copy. You can look at the code all you want, but what you want to know is what it does when it's actually running, and that's just not something like the state space is too large. And so, no, I think behavior follows business. I think there's a lot of business between the two countries. I think they're both commercial countries. They're full of commercial entities.

• 1:19:03Speaker 04

  I do think we're going to go back to like having a market between the two. But I do think like the landscape is shifting. Like, I do think like, listen, like, right now, you know, we buy, you know, the majority of, you know, our kind of hardware parts for robotics from China, and I would, you know, assume, you know, we sold a lot of software in in China, that a lot of the business software, like, they're adopting from us. And, you know, that, you know, what that looks like may shift over time, but I don't think it's going to go to zero.

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  Do you think humanoid robots are going to start as an enterprise product or consumer product? And how confident are you that it will start where you think it will start?

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  I mean, listen, I'm not an expert. So can I tell, maybe can I just talk about the piece that I wrote very quickly?

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  Just to put this in context, because I want to show like the area where I am expert versus not expert. So like-

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  You're a VC, you're an expert in everything. Give yourself some credit.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  I know politics, yeah. I know humanoids, I know, no, it's not. So, so, listen, the area I'm expert is is infrastructure software, right? And that's what my PhD is in. That's what my company is in. That's what I, you know. And so in order to, you know, know what is impacting enterprise software and software infrastructure, we do these market studies, right? We'll study like what's going on with energy. We'll study what's going on with microchips. We'll study what's going on with robotics, like, these are. And we did this study on robotics, and it was in service to our software investing, which we do, even though, like, a lot of, you know, the groups in Andreessen Horowitz do hardware investing, right? Like, I've sat on the board of hardware companies, like, we do it, but like, the purpose of this study was software investing. And we got the result of this, and like, oh, damn.

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  China's kicking ass. We're like, wow, they like got the supply chain locked up. They're doing incredibly sophisticated stuff. I think something like 50% of all deployments for the last three years were done in China for the globally. And so the purpose of the piece that we wrote was just to say, listen, you know, we do these studies normally. We did tons of studies like this, but like this was so dramatic, like maybe we should kind of make it a little bit more apparent to everybody, um, like, you know, uh, you know, how China is doing. And so I don't, listen, I am not an expert on any given robotics market. Like if it's an enterprise industrial thing, I'll have more of a sense to it. Where like from a humanoid standpoint, I think there's huge expert on, on that.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  But I will say that like when it comes to China and the United States, I mean, they're a very, very real contender when it comes to, you know, the full supply chain all the way up to the hardware. It's the software where I think, you know, things start to differentiate.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  Like, how do you characterize the opportunity for America, America to catch up? Like, should we be more bullish on the hyperscalers, the mature companies, the Teslas of the world, uh, stepping up and taking it seriously, or completely new startups from scratch, building solutions and then kind of integrating, creating their own Kretsu, if you will?

• 1:21:55Speaker 04

  So here, um,

• 1:21:57John Coogan?

  Shabon.

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  Let's talk about the areas where I think that like, um, uh, the US has an advantage, right? I mean, like I mentioned, like complex software, the United, the United States does a great job of.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08Speaker 04

  When it comes to like building products that people want, I think the United States does a great job of. Um, uh, and so I think that right now, when it comes to, you know, Chinese hardware, I think we have to really look at ourselves and say, you know, do we want to like start putting like import restrictions and tariffs on those, not, not to penalize China, but to kind of incur local, uh, capability building for these things. And I think that would be an important thing for us to consider as a nation doing. And there's another very interesting area, which is, um, you know, uh, for a lot of AI, you want big GPUs, right? And, um, so you can do a lot of robotics with smaller microcontrollers, but you kind of want the big GPUs for the heavy processing, like certainly for AV. And it's pretty well known that China doesn't do anything below nine nanometer very well. You know, like seven

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  and five, they can do it, but the yields are pretty low. And of course they'll be subsidized by China, but they're well behind. So I think at some level, like we should continue our... Export restrictions on SME like, you know, ASML lithography machines. Like, I think we should do that, just because it does slow them down. I think we should, you know, do import controls, you know, and tariffs so that like we can do local capability building. But again, I like, I have no interest in a generational struggle with China. I just think that we need to understand where we're weak and then we need to, you know, put in the controls necessary so that the United States can catch up. And these are the areas I would say. So I would say it's not, it's not, you know, the big chips. I think we're pretty good about that. It's not the software. I think we're pretty good about that. But I think actually a lot of the hardware supply chain, I do think that we should put

• 1:23:37Speaker 04

  our finger on the scale.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, the interesting thing, seeing Unitree robots selling on Walmart.com when everyone in the tech community realized, probably starting about a couple of years ago, that letting DJI flood the American market with cheap drones.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Just killed GoPro.

• 1:23:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, killed, killed our, killed our internal, you know, they, they, they were willing to sell products at a loss in order to, you know, subsidize these products in order to, to make it impossible for American companies to compete. And now we have, you know, millions of drones here in America that are flying around that we don't own and they're going to continue that. And allowing them to do the same thing with humanoids feels like an even bigger national security risk to me and would again, just set us back in an entirely new tech.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Yet it's crickets. It's crickets. I haven't heard anyone.

• 1:24:29Speaker 04

  I mean, the implications, yeah, the implications are enormous, right? It's like, it's like healthcare. It's like economics. It's like industrial capacity. It's, I mean, it's like basically as broad basis software if you take the generalized form of robotics. And so it's incredibly critical that we get on top of this.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we have a geopolitical rival and we're going to allow them to put a human sized robot that can presumably do human things like.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  Wait, I saw a movie about this once.

• 1:24:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, they could do laundry. If they could do laundry, they can do a lot of other things that maybe we don't want them. You know, so, so anyways, I think this is something that I hope, I hope it gets more attention before it's too light because they're already selling again on Walmart.com.

• 1:25:08Speaker 04

  I will say one last thing too, is like, we kind of sometimes hope that, oh, like, listen, this is an issue of scale and like, you know, we want to work with our partners and our allies and so like, what about EU? Can they help out here? But like, if you actually look at some of their dominant robotics companies like Kukos, I think it's a hundred year old company. Like, that's now owned by China as well. And so. I mean, even on the global footprint of industrial robots, China is incredibly dominant. And so I think now is the time for us to map it out and figure out what we do to enable local capability building. And again, the point is not to penalize anybody or to have a lifelong struggle. The point is to not depend on them and.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  What's happening in India on the robotics side? Obviously, Apple is trying to shift a lot of iPhone production to India. Is that is that an area that you're?

• 1:25:53Speaker 04

  I don't I don't have any expertise on that, no.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  What about open source L L Ms? Have you changed your thinking at all? I know that you were pro open source generally. We had the deep seek moment. Now OpenAI has GPT OSS. Meta Llama is sort of, you know, declining in favor, but there might be a new generation of models for Meta. They're certainly staffing up for it. And so do you think that that market has resolved? Is it calcified in any ways? Is it heating up? Is it something that people should be paying attention to?

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I, you know, I generally think AI is following open source as we've historically seen it, which is the closed source models get eighty percent of the market and open source mops up the remaining, you know, twenty percent. And like, that's happening now. I think open source is incredibly important to the broader dynamics of markets, you know, like kind of anti monopoly stuff. It's good for startups. It's good for pricing. It's good for academia. It's good for research. So I maintain that position. I think the Chinese models are phenomenal. I think they're leaders. I think we should keep having the academic partnerships. I feel very strong about that. I think any sort of import or export restrictions on software is stupid. Like, it just doesn't really work to begin with. And so my view is software kind of, you know, let it all play out. The US is dramatically

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  ahead, I would say, end to end when it comes to capabilities and capacities for OSS. The Chinese models are fantastic. You know, we use them. It kind of will keep us honest. I think that's great. Where I think that we should be more serious is import and export restrictions on hardware. And we've done them in the past. We've done them incredibly effectively. I mean, you know, especially when it comes to critical infrastructure. I don't say this from an economic or even from a job standpoint. I literally say it from a national security standpoint, like, you know, do we want to run Chinese hardware infrastructure for our our internet backbone? Probably not. And if you know what has happened in the last few years with the telcos in China, you can see why this is the case. And so I do think that having like an aggressive posture when it comes to like what we run nationally and what our capabilities are.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  So are you not worried about the national security risks of running an open source model from a near peer competitor? There's this idea of the the Manchurian candidate hiding inside of the weights of an L L M. It all seems fine when you benchmark it, but once it realizes that it's inside of the, you know, the NSA or something, it phones home. Red Star Linux from North Korea does that. It phones home and there and, you know, there's there's rumors that TikTok and.

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think what Martin Martin is saying is like having our our physical infrastructure, whether it's in manufacturing, like robotics in a manufacturing context, or or even a humanoid in somebody's home, having that not be something that is a.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  No, I I I get that.

• 1:28:44Speaker 04

  Oh, hardware, I totally agree, but like you're asking the specific question.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm asking about software, like, like, if if hardware is like a 10 out of 10 risk, where is running an open source model from a near peer competitor that might want to sneak something in? I don't know if technically they can, but but is it? Is it a one? Is it two? Is it five? How would you think about it? Yeah.

• 1:29:02Speaker 04

  Super legit question. So first off, I'd say like I'm much more sympathetic to like import restrictions and export restrictions. I think it's it's just a net good for the rest of the world to use US technology and to have that footprint, right? And so like when you talk about export restrictions, I think that like when it comes to software, like we should never have any. When it comes to import restrictions, I think that you should differentiate between what we use for like the government and critical infrastructure versus like what you have access to academia. I think, for example, if we if we did import restrictions of like the latest greatest models, we would be handicapping our research as. In a very significant way, and I don't think that that would justify whatever gains we might have, given the fact that like half of what we get is from China.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's also like a free speech, like math is should be legal argument here where, yeah, like the government and critical systems and maybe our Fortune 500 companies should be very careful with what they run if they're running a Chinese open source model. But if you're just as a libertarian, you know, you could think like, yeah, if you want to go and run this on your local hardware in the cabin in the woods, like, that's pretty American, in my opinion.

• 1:30:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm very, very much about never do kind of export restrictions and import restrictions when it comes to software.

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:30:11Speaker 04

  It's strictly, and listen, I used to work for the the intelligence community back in 2001 to 2003. And like, this is kind of the height of like concerns around Huawei. And so maybe I'm just a little bit more.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  Sympathetic to arguments of not having, you know, these components in our critical infrastructure.

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  That was the height of the concern around Huawei? And it took us how many years to?

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Actually act on it? That makes me concerned about.

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  It was one of the many, one of the many peaks of.

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  That makes me concerned about it. By 2045, we'll get around to banning UniTree in the United States. After they, after they get a robot in every.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Every home will finally be like, you have to pay us 10% tax on this. That'll be the resolution. As long as we're making money from it, maybe we'll be fine with this, the result. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic.

• 1:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you, Mark.

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. And let me tell you about FALL, generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models, all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Backed by A16Z.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Used by Adobe, Canva.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 1:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Core, Shopify, Plexid.

• 1:31:24John Coogan?

  Did you see this post by Jacob Rintamaki?

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  He said, truth nuke. What are you scared of? Oracle being 500% leopard and not 1,000% because Larry isn't AGI-pilled enough.

• 1:31:36Jordi Hays?

  And tell us something tangible you want. Porsche 911 that comes with a signed copy of the new Dorkesh Stripe Press Book. We should be able to make this.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  Those are fantastic answers. I believe that's a screenshot of the Thiel Fellowship application, maybe something like that.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  That's hilarious. Yeah, Jacob, just post more. Post your way to being able to cover a 911. You can get it. You can get a 997 for like 40 grand.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the, yeah, yeah, what would the monthly payment be on that?

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  My first 911 was like $32,000. Bought it on Bring a Trailer.

• 1:32:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You finance that. You pay for it with the X post. I think he's.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Harder to finance a 997, but yeah, just post your heart out for 12 months and you'll be in business.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Oh, we of course have a Substack now. You can go to tbpn.com, drop your email, and you can get a summary of the show, some posts that we like, some important links, the run of show, and sort of my take, my current thinking on whatever the current topic of the day is. I'm also posting those on my personal X account. And yesterday we got a quote post from Zephyr, who kind of answered the question that I was asking, which was, you know, we have to trust the Sam Altman plan. What is the Sam Altman plan? Are they building their own chip, their own data center, their own everything? Like, how mature will this be? Zephyr says, is OpenAI building its own chip?

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  Yes, they are in collaboration with AVGO. Fab by TSMC. Will be available in the second half of 2026. That's forever in singularity terms, in my opinion. The second half of 2026 feels like it's a decade away, but obviously it takes time to actually design and fab these chips. But I want to know more. I want to know more about the plan.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing on August 7, 2009?

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  August 7, 2009? I was in college. I was, where was I?

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, instead of having a couple beers, you could have bought Broadcom at the IPO. It was $1.64 a share. It's now sitting at 345.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  There we go. So.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  That would have been good.

• 1:33:46Jordi Hays?

  Go back in time, John, and figure it out.

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  Indeed. And I could have gone back in time and signed up for TurboPuffer and been searching every byte. But you can do it today. With the power of the internet, serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles and object stores, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  A Wordle game show is in the works at NBC. Jimmy Fallon is set to produce it. Get that size gong ready. Harvester Salas says, well, you know what they say, strike when the iron's cold and has been stored in the cupboard for several years.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, Wordle. That was a, was, was that a COVID phenomenon? I believe it was 2020. Everyone was doing Wordles. I still hit them up every once in a while. I like a good word game. I like a puzzle. The New York Times has been on a tear. I like, I like, it is not true, but I like the meme that people will, uh, the New York Times makes a lot of money from their games, uh, and, and they have a separate subscription for games and they, and, and everyone kind of says, uh, oh, the New York Times is journalism on a life support by games. And it's kind of, uh, it's kind of evolved to the point where like they make 99% of their revenue from games. And it's like, that's not true.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  They gotta get into, they gotta get into, get into gambling.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  They should get into gambling. That's a great idea.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  They have an insane user base.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, they're, they're an eight, uh, they're a $9 billion company.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, basically about the New York Times value the same as Polly Market.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, what, you know, what, what, what could the New York Times do with, uh, they, they could do mail order gambling.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  I would love that.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Mail order prediction markets.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  I would love, I would love a daily gambling, a daily.

• 1:35:24Jordi Hays?

  The daily gamble.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  The daily gamble.

• 1:35:27Jordi Hays?

  Imagine the, the New York Times betting podcast.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  Yes. I have another idea for them. Since they're into games, they're into Wordle. They should do a first person shooter.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Don't you think it'd be good? You know, we have Call of Duty, we have Battlefield. Yeah. Team death match. You go to newyorktimes.com. It just preloads a vibe code.

• 1:35:45Jordi Hays?

  You get to play as the legend of Mike Isaac.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  You get Mike Isaac.

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Russell Paulson quoted our post, we were talking about the Anthropic ad campaign.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Jordi Hays?

  He added some insight. He says, "This is all about values-based marketing. It's not about the hat or what Claude does technically. It's about how it makes us feel and how it elevates our inherent humanity. It's a breath of fresh air to feel like an AI tool makes us better rather than replaceable."

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Very well said.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  I like that a lot. And it does feel like a pivot from the early rhetoric.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  This feels a little bit written like Claude. It's not about the hat. It's about...

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  You can't, I like, when I, when I write now, I actively think like, okay, if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna try and put something in a, it's this, not that, I'll just completely rephrase the sentence to just be, you know, just wildly different structure. Because it can just, it just has a tinge to it these days.

• 1:36:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  But anyway.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  DeBaul says, "OpenAI plans to detect underage users and give them a model with more safeguards. This may clash with Colorado's SB 205."

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  "Which prohibits algorithmic discrimination based on age." What is Colorado doing? "One of literally millions of pro-social AI uses plausibly rendered illegal by that stupid law." Very, uh, yeah, very interesting that a single state is gonna be able to, uh, potentially create policy, uh, nationwide policy around AI.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  I think David Sacks has been kind of ringing the alarm bells about this. And there's been a number of folks we've, we've talked to on the show who have said that like, the state-by-state stuff is gonna make it really, it, it sort of turns us into Europe where you have like, one cookie policy that then cascades all over the place. At the same time, I feel like, is it not possible to just like geofence a feature?

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Still, I mean, you have 50 states if they all have different laws. Colorado only has 6 million people. We have 40.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  I'm not worried about the technical burden. Should be able to one-shot that with Codex. Come on, we're in the future. But I am worried about some weird situation where one of those Coloradines is on the border and the cell phone tower that they connect to says that they're in a neighboring state and then that creates a liability and there's a class action lawsuit, or they're using a VPN and the VPN doesn't count as actually leaving Colorado. And so there's a lawsuit there. And if it just becomes a legal precedent that requires you to treat the entire United States populace like the folks in Colorado, that could be very, very annoying and kind of just dampen everyone's experience. Because

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  when I think about, you know, we have kids, when I think about if they're using AI tools, like, I like the idea of more safeguards. I, you know, I like that if you open up the Disney app on, on Apple TV, you can choose, don't show anything R-rated or PG-13. And just, you know, content filtering, adult parental controls, like, these are good tools that should be in the hands of parents and they should be, and they should be surfaced by the tech companies.

• 1:38:56Jordi Hays?

  Also, I don't really want, if, if, you know, my son's very into dinosaurs, and if he's someday talking with ChatGPT about dinosaurs, I don't really want, I don't feel like it's necessarily fully appropriate for the, for him to feel like he's becoming friends with the dinosaur machine.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Yes, I would also.

• 1:39:14Jordi Hays?

  I think we're probably years and years and years away from him using LLMs.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  I would also just be worried about annoying syntax leaking into his vocabulary. He's like, Dad, this isn't a tyrannosaurus, Rex. It's the king of the jungle. Come on, dude.

• 1:39:31Jordi Hays?

  It's not bedtime, it's playtime.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  It's playtime.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Which is basically the constant debate.

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

  Anyway, did you, do we mention profound, get your metal, get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands? He's got to mention them.

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  P E Cooper. At the timeline, built his own T B P N.

• 1:39:54John Coogan?

  Meme template.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Meme template, and he's putting it to use.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  What is this picture? Is this just how he sees himself as a royal lord? I love the.

• 1:40:04Jordi Hays?

  Very base.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  I love the enthusiasm to just. Hard line that you're an 18th century or 15th century king or something.

• 1:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  I like it. It's very royal, very.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Bill Ackman.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  You can go check out, he has a, he has a meme maker. You can make your own. People have been adopting the TVP and trading card aesthetic. Uh, thank you for, to Tyler Cosgrove for, I believe inventing that whole diet, like strategy or something like that. I think you made the first one of the AI researcher that got five million views on X and then was shared all over the internet and wound up, wound up getting us on French TV. Did you wind up talking to the French journalist, by the way?

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Uh, I talked to them, but I, I don't think they wanted me as like an actual interviewer.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  Okay. They didn't know you?

• 1:40:47Speaker 02

  They, I think they want, uh, people that work.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  They're not real fans of the show, clearly.

• 1:40:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't understand. You're, uh, yeah, a heavyweight in the industry. We, we, we tried to pitch them this idea that, that Tyler was, uh, was, was beyond the medal, the Metis list, the zero F.

• 1:41:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  AI researcher, since of course lists are indexed at zero.

• 1:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Bill Ackman says in one week Jared Kushner pulled off the biggest LBO of all time. That is EA. And then negotiated one of the biggest peace deals of all time, a pretty good week.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Really just running the art of the deal playbook.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  We have been so behind on our EA coverage. Uh, would love to have Jared on the show. Uh, in the meantime, you can listen to his interview on Invest Like the Best. If you want to understand more of his investing philosophy, uh, the EA, uh, take private is fascinating. It's a massive deal. Uh, EA has so many interesting properties from Battlefield to, they have Madden, right? And FIFA, they have all the sports.

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Got a lot.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  And, uh, it's just a very interesting business. We've talked for a long time about, uh, what it takes to pivot a business model in the public markets, how difficult that is. Will they be pivoting the business model to what? If so, will they be doing that? Is that the point? Or is there some other restructuring that will happen while the company's private? That's fascinating to me. Ben Thompson had an article in Strategery Today, which of course you should go subscribe to. All about the, the, the basic, basically the failure of Xbox Game Pass because Microsoft paid something like 70 billion dollars for Activision, they got Call of Duty, and the idea was they would put people on a Netflix-like subscription and you'd be able to play any

• 1:42:27John Coogan?

  game you want. And according to some, you know, rumors and talking to some Microsoft employees and some leaked data, it seems like the LTV went down. So it seems like it was actually better to get people to shell out 60, 70 bucks a couple times a year for the big games that they want, as opposed to putting them on a $10 a month plan, and then they're playing all these games for much cheaper. And so it's been, you know, the, the conclusion is that it's, it still isn't working. We'll have to keep checking in on it. But it'll be interesting to see, does EA go private and then find land with Sony or something? Or like land with another, another, you know, gaming platform? Does

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  it create its own store? Or, you know, pivot into, you know, buying other companies and getting into mobile gaming? Is there some sort of other monetization microtransactions? Like, what are they going to ramp up? They've tried a lot of stuff, but it'll be interesting to see where it goes. So we'd love to talk to the folks over at Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's firm.

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  Will

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Understand that.

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Manitis says, "It's genuinely nuts that if you get good enough at New York City real estate, that the only other place where those skills are useful is negotiating world peace."

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that these two were, these two were connected, but of course it's about Jared Kushner. That's hilarious.

• 1:43:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and Trump, of course.

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, yeah, Trump. That's very funny. Should we cover the, the China news today? So Dmitry Alperovitch says, "Huge escalation by China. MOFCOM, MOFCOM announces new export controls, taking effect after December 1st of rare earths to anyone, anywhere in the world, producing chips or equipment to make chips below 14 nanometer and 256-layer memory due to military applications." And so Dean Ball had a big take. On this that we should probably read through to get up to speed. I'm not an expert on this, but I hope to be after talking to Dean. We're hoping to have him on the show soon. Dean says, this is a very big deal.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  China has asserted sweeping control over the entire global semiconductor supply chain, putting export license requirements on all rare earths used to manufacture advanced chips. So we have the design firms with Nvidia. We have TSMC kind of on our side. We have ASML. There's a whole bunch of American IP that goes into the Western semiconductor supply chain. But China's upstream of all of that with their rare earth supply chain. There was a comment in the chat earlier about about what

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  does China control all of the rare earths? I think the the the common cited metrics are that they control a huge portion of the of the rare earth supply today, but they don't actually have all of the rare earths in.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Or processing than supply.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Rare earths aren't as rare.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  We just call them earths.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and around here we call them earths.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Because they are, in fact, all over the place. And you hear about these rare earth deposits being found in Ukraine and in various parts of the United States. We have them. We just haven't actually gone.

• 1:45:34Jordi Hays?

  Mining.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  Built the mine and processing, and that takes years. And so in the short term, putting an export restriction on the actual processed rare earths is very geopolitically significant. So Dean Ball continues. He says, if enforced aggressively, this policy could mean lights out for the US AI boom and likely lead to a recession slash economic crisis in the US in the short term.

• 1:46:00Jordi Hays?

  Remember, this wouldn't be the first time they tried to. I mean, the DeepSeek moment felt at the time very calculated. Let's ramp this app up the charts that I didn't still didn't know a single person that was using DeepSeek. It felt entirely that that that the chart run felt entirely manufactured. And that the immediate effect on markets was insane.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Counterpoint, maybe they were just trying to take a little bit of air out of the bubble to create a bull catalyst.

• 1:46:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, everybody knows if markets go down, that's a bullish catalyst.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Yes, it also inspires us to grow, grind harder.

• 1:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:46:37John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you know Ball?

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Dean Ball?

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  Oh, I know of, yeah.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Oh, you do? Okay, cool.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  Oh, he knows Ball, okay.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Good. Do you know Linear?

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  That's why we hired you.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You can start building for Linear. Some thoughts and recommendations from Dean Ball. Many things are unclear, including how intensively they will enforce this. This is a costly decision for them too, and not without risk. These controls are being imposed on the whole world, not just the United States. My current assumption is that China is doing this to gain leverage over the US in advance of the president's upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping at APEC. It'd be very funny if they just put the controls on the United States and then you had a bunch of startups that were like, "I'm gonna do diversion and I'm gonna go set up a rare earth,

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  you know, buying and selling operation in Dubai or Malaysia or somewhere." That'd be very interesting. Number three, I do not think they are doing this to get the US to relax its export controls on Nvidia Blackwell chips. In fact, my guess is that they want us to think that's their goal. We buckle by relaxing Blackwell controls and then the PRC shrugs and says, "No, thanks. We're very confident in our domestic chip industry." That is a message I'd want to be delivering to APEC if I were advising the PRC. Four, further relaxation of export controls is therefore unlikely to be a useful policy lever here. Instead, it is time for the US to get serious about export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  Five, because we have been mostly unserious about this issue, China has stockpiled most durable equipment needed to make semiconductors, so most controls will not have an immediate effect. Six, he really ran through this, this is great. Six, however, there are some consumable materials needed for semiconductor manufacturing that China cannot make domestically, even better. Those consumables are often degradable, meaning one can only stockpile so much. These would be on the top of my list if I worked at BIS. I would strongly, I would retaliate strongly, but in a targeted manner. The ultimate root to de-escalation here is tariffs and broader trade war policy moves, not AI compute. This only underscores the urgency for the US plus allies and partners to accelerate

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  domestic efforts to mine and refine rare earths. Let's hear it for that. The Trump administration has been especially strong here and Congress allocated serious money to this goal in O3B, but all options must be on the table, including the Defense Production Act. Policy will be important here, but remember that these rare earths are essential to the functioning of the global economy. It has heretofore been hard to solve with markets alone because China already supplies these commodities in abundance and at low cost, but they are fundamentally just commodities. We can make them. And 10, to the extent China enforces this policy, they will have made the price of these essential goods infinitely high. Remember most of all that supply is elastic, not on arbitrarily short time cycles, but

• 1:49:44John Coogan?

  faster than most people think. So we, if the price is infinitely high, there will be a huge incentive to go start mining rare earth elements in the United States.

• 1:49:54Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, MP Materials is actually down 0.6 of a percent in the last five days, which is of course the company that the Trump admin took roughly a 15% stake in.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  In rare earths.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  Well, Peter Haig says, sir, a second whispering to the president meme has hit the timeline. Is this a real photo? This feels like something that someone would have AI generated, but it looks real to me. It's from Reuters. And sir, a second ad read has hit the timeline with numeralhq.com, sales tax autopilot, spend less than five minutes on sales tax compliance. I screenshotted that one twice, it was so good. Andy Jassy says, Joseph Carlson, the current CEO of Amazon has been with the company for 28 years. Wow, Andy Jassy, what a run. In 2003, he played a pivotal role in creating and scaling AWS, which is the most valuable part of Amazon. A significant portion of the modern internet is powered by AWS.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Amazon today is worth $2.4 trillion and is one of the most critical companies to the United States and the world. Yet, the CEO makes less money than many YouTubers, comedians, podcasters, professional athletes and actors that don't manage or guide anything nearly as important or critical to the US or have millions of employees. We need to stop pretending that the CEOs of Fortune 10 companies, who have helped build trillions of dollars worth of value for investors, should have their salary compared with the delivery drivers working their way through college. This trope is old and should be retired.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Josh Hawley, Senator for Missouri, is firing shots at Jassy, saying, "How is it pro-worker or pro-American that he makes at least $40 million a year, while the average Amazon worker makes less than $38K a year?"

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  Well, he needs to go on a campaign. Bobby in the chat says Andy Jassy doesn't even have 200,000 Twitter followers. That's rough. He's also never streaming on Twitch. Get on Twitch, Andy Jassy.

• 1:51:59Jordi Hays?

  I know, that's your product.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  I know, they own it. Amazon owns Twitch, and so that's where he should give his press releases.

• 1:52:05Jordi Hays?

  This is wild. Chip Wilson, Lululemon founder, takes out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to roast the brand that he started.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  When was this in the Journal?

• 1:52:14Jordi Hays?

  Lululemon, in a nosedive. He says, "When I founded Lululemon in 1998, it was built on a relentless focus on innovation, product culture and customer experience. We invented a 'technical product' business model, created a new apparel category, pioneered community marketing and developed system processes so simple a refrigerator could manage them."

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  By its 25th anniversary, Lululemon should have been a $100 billion market cap company. Instead, its trajectory has declined. Why? Lululemon directors have systematically dismantled the business model and lost employees who held the institutional knowledge that made the company great. Like a plane crash, decline rarely happens because of a singular failure. It's a series of mistakes. He's adding some different sections here. One, the founder leaves. When a founder leaves, boards tend to fill committees with operators or finance-focused directors who are beholden to quarterly commitments. A company bereft of a visionary loses its singular voice for product and long-term strategy, a strategy that builds a moat around success.

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  An operations/finance-driven board lacks the moxie to understand the market pulse. Gap-ivization: Loss of creative to the merchants. Every few years, a design team will stumble. When that happens, merchants and MBAs swoop in, claiming to be the adults who can deliver consistent quarterly projections for Wall Street. To meet those projections, merchants follow algorithms and double down on what sold the year before. This kills risk-taking and prevents new innovative product from emerging. As a result, innovation dies, the brand becomes predictable, customers drift, and the best creative people leave. The domino effect. As top talent leaves, short-term results often look strong. The board harvests brand value by rapidly growing store count, while margins expand through economies of scale.

• 1:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Wall Street is ecstatic, and the egos of directors and management soar. Meanwhile, owner-operated competitors seize the opportunity, producing better product. Lululemon's institutional knowledge walks out the door, often to competitors, and is replaced by Nike executive shots fired- Ooh, he's taking shots all over the place. ... who import a failed business model. Desperate for growth, Lululemon squandered $1 billion on Mirror and wiped out $10 billion in market cap with a wildly inappropriate Disney collaboration. To squeeze margins further, directors cheapened store design and shifted to non-technical fabrics, eroding the brand's premium positioning. Cultural erosion. New executives from old-school companies chase short-term margin growth and resume-building. Directors unwilling to confront their own role in the decline and attempt to replace

• 1:54:39Jordi Hays?

  the CEO, only to realize for the third time that they've failed to develop an internal successor. With the brand faltering, no capable candidate wants a CEO job. The nominating committee struggles to attract directors because no great leader wants to join a sinking ship. Loss of cool. The board insists on operator finance CEOs who can speak Wall Street rejecting the idea of a product-driven CEO. These types of finance-focused CEOs don't know how to attract or motivate creative talent, or even worse, they think they understand how great product when they don't. Without an eye for outstanding design, the company dies a slow death. Lululemon forgot its muse, the woman who inspires culture not just follows it. By drifting toward the mainstream and trying to appease everyone, Lululemon lost 50% of

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  its market cap earned from brand power. It lost its edge and with it, the ability to hire the best people. The result, on paper, Lululemon still looks good, but it's losing its soul.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  It's still a $20 billion company.

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  That is getting absolutely smoked by aloe in their core segment, which is the muse that he described above.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  And founders back at Outdoor Forces, too.

• 1:55:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he says, "The deeper issue is not just management, it's a disengaged nominating and governance committee that has failed to safeguard the company's long-term vision. The path forward, I believe Lululemon can recover, but survival requires courage. Put product and brand back at the center. Rebuild the knowledge and systems that deliver product in nine months, not two years. Bring entrepreneurial ownership back onto the board. Three, empower creative leadership over merchants. Four, stop chasing Wall Street at the expense of customers. Five, recommit to the muse, the woman who inspires the brand. The world doesn't need another bland quarterly-driven apparel company. It needs bold vision. It needs Lululemon to fly again. Lululemon can keep growing, but growth alone is not a healthy measure of success. The true measure must be innovation and brand reputation. When those are strong, growth comes naturally.

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  When they're not, growth halts. The path is clear, but only with a revitalized board of directors with diverse capabilities. Sincerely, Chip Wilson, founder, Lululemon."

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Chad Wilson.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  When did he actually?

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  Step off the board.

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  When did, when did this actual article come out?

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  It feels like, I mean, it's not, it's not in today's paper. I checked every page, so.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  But I think it.

• 1:56:52John Coogan?

  But it must be recently.

• 1:56:53Jordi Hays?

  Came out, I'm on the journals. Yeah, I think it came out yesterday.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like, I'm surprised he had to pay for this. Like, this would just be a good op-ed to throw in there, but it does hit.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of, it hits harder that he's paying out of his own pocket.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  And the layout also just feels very, I don't know, iconic. It, it looks a lot different, so.

• 1:57:15Jordi Hays?

  We should get Chip on the show.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  I'd love to talk to him about that.

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, they're just being competed from every possible angle. There's new brands popping up all the time that are more catered to the early kind of core lemon customer. You have ALO, you have Vori, you have Skims from Kim Kardashian, right? And all these brands are just better serving that, that initial cohort, so.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Well, let's get him on the show. Let's pitch him thin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  More sass, Chip.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive big offs, number one ranking on G2. Did you see Wagy Capital taking a shot at Samuel Gibson? We'll hold our, we'll hold our judgments until we actually meet him. So Wagy Capital says incredible things are happening in the nuclear grift space. Meet Samuel Gibson, Zoomer, who graduated from college in 2023.

• 1:58:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Zoomers.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  Yes, and is now co-founder and CEO of Hadron Energy, a nuclear vaporware company going public via SPAC at a $1.2 billion valuation.

• 1:58:31Jordi Hays?

  They have, according to LinkedIn, between two and 10 employees.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  Okay, but 11,000 followers.

• 1:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Everybody starts, everybody starts somewhere.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, you gotta get the money to build a nuclear reactor at some point.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  And they raised a pre, they raised a $900,000 pre seed, according to Crunchbase, but that's also.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  You went from 900K pre seed to 1.2 billion dollar SPAC? I mean. Built different, Gen Z really on a tear. He had a 3.4 GPA at University of Nebraska Lin- Lincoln.

• 1:59:05Jordi Hays?

  Not bad at all.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Get the, get the bag, get the, get the cash, build the thing, hopefully. Got to build.

• 1:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  You can't purely cash out and then write it down. You got to turn it, you can SPAC it, but you.

• 1:59:18Jordi Hays?

  On their, on their website.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  Deliver the actual energy.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  On the website, they just have, they have like a bunch of renders.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  And one of the renders just says data center one on it.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  They got, so they got data centers.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  They got data centers.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they're saying the world's smallest, lightest, most versatile micro modular reactors.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  This, yeah.

• 1:59:38Jordi Hays?

  And the design is awesome. The renders are awesome.

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of, a lot of work. I mean, I, I, I feel like.

• 1:59:45Jordi Hays?

  And they have a Tesla Cybertruck render, pulling a render of their.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  Render on render battle.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Reactor. So it's a, it's looking, it almost looks kind of like Fortnite.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Huge question on who's actually underwriting the SPAC, who's running this thing, how did the cap, who's, how did the capital go into the pipe? Like what, what actually happened here? Um, you know, there's, the SPACs are not inherently bad. You can raise money in a variety of ways. And if you go and actually deliver and generate a lot of cash flow, at some point you'll be worth way more than what you SPACed at. So, um, good luck to him, but it does seem like a tall order.

• 2:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think gig, gig capital, gig capital global is putting up.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  How much?

• 2:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Some of the cash here. And they also, uh, you might remember they are investors in Big Bear AI.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  I don't know Big Bear AI.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  I didn't think you would.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:47Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, we'll, we'll see here. I think, I think we should withhold, uh, judgment. I.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  The renders look cool.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Plug it in.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Plug it in.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Plug it in.

• 2:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Plug it in.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Just plug it in.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  It's time to plug.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Plug it in the nuclear reactor, generate some electricity profitably.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  It's time to plug. Tyler, you should talk to him and see, see how real it is.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I've been thinking about getting to the spec game.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, what are you going to spec?

• 2:01:12Speaker 02

  Uh, I think I'll probably figure it out later on.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  Once I've kind of started the, the motions already, but.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  Just empty shelf for now.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Self spec.

• 2:01:20John Coogan?

  Cabaluraza.

• 2:01:21Jordi Hays?

  Self spec.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Could go any direction.

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised somebody hasn't tried to spec themselves with some type of income share agreement yet.

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  During the NFT boom, someone did, was it Alex token? Am I getting that wrong? Some.

• 2:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but a lot of, he definitely, I think, started a trend of people.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Isn't this the Ben Pasternak thesis as well? You will, everyone will have a, a coin attached to them or their project.

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Nathan Summers in the X chat, are you guys hiring for a narrator intern? I have great cadence. He's a drummer and tonal variety for an exciting viewer experience. I also would hate to see a vocal cord strain cut down on your ability to run the live show DMs.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Imagine being able to say.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, reach out to Nathan. We, we want to talk to this guy.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, he's just sitting here and we say, read, read me this Wall Street Journal article.

• 2:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, narrator.

• 2:02:08John Coogan?

  Narrate.

• 2:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Having.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  And we will just do the reaction, but we want you in person, live to read us this story from the Wall Street Journal on can Ferrari persuade the super rich to buy an EV sports car that won't rev? We're going to read this article, but first I'm going to tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. So the brand Ferrari is planning to unveil its first all-electric model next year. And it's a bold move. It's a bad time, probably something that was greenlit years ago, but we will dive into it in this Wall Street Journal article.

• 2:02:45Jordi Hays?

  And some backstory here. Ferrari just updated guidance.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  They had a capital markets day. Uh, Wall Street was not excited about it. The stock is down 18% in the last five days.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into their next vehicle, which I think is something no one wants.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  We will see. Extravagantly powerful and noisy engines helped make Ferrari the ultimate sports car brand. Now the company wants to persuade the super rich to buy a model with no engine at all. The Italian carmaker this week started lifting the hood on its first electric vehicle, a years-long project that has cost the brand hundreds of millions of dollars and promises to set a benchmark for how battery-powered sports cars should look and look, sound and drive. At a glitzy launch event at its headquarters in Maranello, Italy, Ferrari showed off the technology that will power the EV, including a new electric axle, motor and battery pack set to be made in-house at its factory. Wow, going vertically integrated all the way down to the battery on day one. That's bold.

• 2:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is wild because Ferraris have always been known to have electrical issues, including the Ferrari that I owned.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:00Jordi Hays?

  That I think I replaced the battery. Forget exactly how many, but I had to replace the battery multiple times.

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  In a single quarter, so.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Skill issue. It said the vehicle called the Ferrari Electrica. What do we think of that name?

• 2:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  It's not quite there. The Dolce e Trillendi hits, you know, the Electrica, maybe?

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  It feels like a name that somebody that was like trying to come off as an Italian.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Brand would would use.

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  Well, it'll be able to go from zero to 62 miles an hour in 2.5 seconds, which is fast, but not as fast as a Model S Plaid that you can get on Bring a Trailer for 50K now. So it has a top speed of 193 miles an hour. The range on a single charge will be at least 329 miles. That's not bad. The company won't reveal what the model looks like until next spring with deliveries slated to start later.

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Apparently the Model S Plaid does 1.99 seconds, although.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  1.999999 seconds.

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't want to try that out, to be honest.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  You wouldn't? Or you would?

• 2:05:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe on a, maybe on like a runway.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  But on a, on a normal road, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't.

• 2:05:15John Coogan?

  You wouldn't want to go that fast?

• 2:05:16Jordi Hays?

  I just.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  Maybe when you're an adult, when you're, when you're a man.

• 2:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  Then, then you could do it.

• 2:05:21Jordi Hays?

  When I finish growing.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  The debut comes as the global auto industry adjusts to a slower transition to EVs than expected when Ferrari announced the project. So when Ferrari started working on this, everyone was saying, everything's going to be EV, EV is going to dominate. It's not just going to be some like subcategory of the market. It's going to be everything. So you got to get in on it. And of course, other sports car makers such as Porsche, Lamborghini, and McLaren have delayed plans to build electric models citing weak demand. While Ferrari is committed to launching its first EV on schedule, it has scaled back its wider bet on the technology at Investor Day Thursday, which you mentioned. The company said EVs would account for 20% of its vehicle lineup in 2030, half the share previously indicated.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  "We know that this path is not easy," Ferrari chief executive Benedetto Vigna said in an interview. "But we also know that we, as a leader, need to show the entire world that we can harness this technology." At the same time, the company plans to release many new vehicles with traditional engines, according to its latest product roadmap. The Ferrari Elica is one of 20 models set to launch through 2030, more than previously planned. Despite the new models, Ferrari issued a cautious sales forecast, 5% annual revenue growth through 2030, and the stock fell 12%. Since being spun out of Fiat a decade ago, Ferrari has become Europe's most valuable carmaker by persuading uber wealthy

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  gearheads to splurge hundreds of thousands of dollars on meticulously crafted sports cars. EVs pose a particular challenge for luxury sports car brands, which say roar and rumble are central to their identities and appeal. Ferrari, perhaps more than any other automaker-

• 2:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Imagine Nathan in the chat narrating this right now.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  I know. It could be so much better. The brand is known for its noise. The Dolce Trilindri is naturally aspirated, meaning it doesn't rely on a turbocharger to push air into the cylinders, an old school approach credited with a more natural, open roar. Ferrari said its EV wouldn't mimic engine sounds as some competitors have like the Kia EV6 GT. I forget what it's called, but.

• 2:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was an engineer from the M.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Series, right?

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Oh, that's Hyundai, actually.

• 2:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  So the, the, the engineer who created the M division at BMW went over to Hyundai and created the N division because N comes after M and tuned up a bunch of the Hyundai's to be performance cars and one of them is the Hyundai EV6 or something. I'm getting the, the exact model name wrong, but it has not only engine noise that comes through the speakers, but a simulated dual clutch transmission that you can operate via paddle shifters that are entirely digital. And so you can essentially be rev limited and be redlining the car, even though it doesn't have a real red line.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  And a lot of the super old school car lovers tried it. Doug DiMuro and a bunch of other folks, Matt Farah from Smoking Tire all tried it and they were like, this is amazing. Like I forgot that I was driving an electric vehicle after just a few minutes in the car. And so the prediction at the time was that every electric vehicle car maker would adopt that same simulation technology.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Because it was popular and it's a pretty easy feature to add. Seems like Ferrari won't though. They're going natural EV. Instead, it will pick up the sound of what it calls the electric engine and amplify it into the cabin to give the driver feedback when required. So you'll hear the electric engine whirring. The company compared the difference between its conventional sports cars and the EV to the difference between an acoustic and electric guitar. Ferrari also faces the risk of EVs losing value faster than traditional models as the battery degrades. The promise of timelessness is a selling point for Ferrari buyers. The company leans into the economics of the luxury industry, carefully limiting supply to ensure that its top models retain their value over time, like, like Rolex watches or Hermes handbags.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  And if you want a Rolex, head over to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet, seriously any watch. So. Elcan also recruited Johnny Ive to work on the brand's first electric model. Oh, interesting. I didn't realize this.

• 2:09:44Jordi Hays?

  That's love from.

• 2:09:45John Coogan?

  We talked about this with love from having a Ferrari partnership. This is the car that was designed by Johnny Ive. That's fun. To make its electric cars, Ferrari built a state of the art factory, which became known as the E building after heavy investment. The question now is whether Ferrari's wealthy clients will want to drive the new model.

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine, you know, spending your whole life is, you know, being obsessed with the Ferrari brand, learning to work on, on, on these engines and then getting the tap on the shoulder and saying, you're actually going over to the E building.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I think there's, there's also this factor that the, it feels like the really highly engaged Ferrari buyer maybe doesn't care about straight line speed that much. It's never been a muscle car. The more exciting number that folks track is like the Nürburgring time. And the gas cars are still performing extremely well.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Also, just the feeling.

• 2:10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:43Jordi Hays?

  The, the factors that.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  Feeling is important, for sure.

• 2:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the feeling of driving the car, what the, the ownership experience, right?

• 2:10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:50Jordi Hays?

  The, the main critique of Ferrari from some of the more, I would say casual clientele is like the depreciation recently. The cars are just losing value far more quickly than they historically did. Part of that is already because the hybrids, right? The SF90s, the S, the 296 is also a hybrid, right?

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  Is that depreciating? I thought that one was kind of holding its value a little bit more.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  A little bit better, but I mean, you can buy them for less than sticker with like three, you know, way less than sticker for like 300 miles on them. I would have expected Ferrari to try to go more towards something like a Nissan Cross Cabriolet.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  I would love that. Take the purr song, way, give it a drop top.

• 2:11:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, iconic.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  A rag top. Purosangue might be the move for them.

• 2:11:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, this is interesting, though. A Canadian collector, Luke Poirier, who owns thirty eight Ferraris, said he was open to the idea of buying the EV, having found the company's hybrids engaging and emotional to drive. See, the SF ninety is a wild driving experience. I was in Dubai and rented an SF ninety and took it out. It's pretty funny. They they give you tickets in the UAE based on you'll get, they have cameras, they'll they they'll give you tickets without you even having any sense of it. So you can actually go out on a drive and get multiple tickets if you're not safe.

• 2:12:21Jordi Hays?

  I was, so the so the rental service was, they keep like a deposit aft, like long after you've returned the car and insured that they're like, okay, the car is good.

• 2:12:31John Coogan?

  But you might get

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  But you might have gotten like five tickets.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  That's funny.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  And so we need to hold this. But Luke, Luke says, my only hesitation is reliability, since it will involve so much new technology. Ferrari started dabbling in hybrid technology on the racetrack in two thousand and nine, and hybrids now account for almost half its output. Vignus said Ferrari would apply lessons it has learned from hybrids to its EV. We will not sell an electric car without considering the expiration date of the battery. Many EVs and hybrids haven't performed well in the secondhand market, a problem typical of fast-moving technologies. SF ninety and SF ninety Spider, for example, have depreciated faster than comparable models with conventional powertrains, according to Hagerty. Again, there's a lot of people that bought SF nineties at the top for way over sticker.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  It also came out during like the zero interest rate sort of bubble. So the auto loan rates were really low and a lot of people were flush from various crypto schemes and all sorts of froth in the market.

• 2:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, everywhere.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  It was easy to buy it over sticker. Do you know David Lee, the Ferrari collector? He has over forty Ferraris, I think, are all in red. He has all the supercars, the F forty, F fifty, the LaFerrari, the Enzo. He says, to be a top client of Ferrari, you you buy every car that they introduce, and he says he's planning to buy the EV.

• 2:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:48John Coogan?

  But I wonder how many. How many of those collectors will stick around if they just took a bath on an SF90? They're not doing well in their 296s.

• 2:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the, I mean, so city analyst Harold Hendrisky says it is somewhat surprising that Ferrari is going ahead. Overall, demand for those cars is minimal. We were talking earlier off the air, just saying they had such an amazing opportunity to let the rest of the automotive industry go. You know, Porsche went heavy into EVs, is now pulling back. Ferrari could have said, we never wanted to go into EVs. We like, you know, naturally aspirated V12s. We're going to continue to focus here.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  If they were the one that never did the EV.

• 2:14:31Jordi Hays?

  It would have been crazy.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  It would have been a very special thing to the brand. And now they're, they're still, they're still like in the same conversation as Porsche and Lamborghini and McLaren.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  But again, if you're a client and you want access to the F80, you can better, you better believe that you are.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  Pick up a couple of these.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Go into your dealer, get pre-order a few of the Ferrari Electricas.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the same time, like I, I feel like if you're David Lee, you own 40, like you definitely want to own the first EV just because it's going to be interesting to see what Ferrari does with an EV. Like it will be a different experience. It will be, there will be a Ferrari twist or take on EV. Even though that's been the major.

• 2:15:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm so interested to see what happens with the Purosangue. From a depreciation standpoint, they're holding up well now. It's a naturally aspirated V12. I think it looks, you know, people debate the, the looks all the time, but.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can always put a monster body kit on it and get the Pogonator and then you're good.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, we'll, we'll see how these hold up.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  Maybe lower it, make it off-road edition, safari edition.

• 2:15:33Jordi Hays?

  I, I don't know, the, the Urus has held up incredibly well because it still looks exactly the same as it did in 2019.

• 2:15:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it hasn't been refreshed.

• 2:15:41Jordi Hays?

  People will happily buy, happily, you know, continue to purchase a.

• 2:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Older Urus and use it to sell courses or whatever they do. But I don't know about the, it's hard for me to imagine people paying half a million dollars for a Ferrari SUV or even $400,000 in a few years, right?

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Well, if you want a Ferrari for your bedroom, get an eight sleep. Pod five, five year warranty, third year risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 2:16:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm back on a roll. I got a 93, eight hours, 23 minutes.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Well, let's read this post from SMB attorney who says, wait, what'd you get?

• 2:16:24Jordi Hays?

  I got a 93.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  Oh, I got an 89.

• 2:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Two 90s back to back.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  SMB attorney says, people keep telling me the American dream is dead, but every day I meet entrepreneurs who know more about SEC football than accounting, drive trucks and think getting dressed up means a good pair of jeans, who've made millions running businesses that clear land, trim trees and install equipment. The American dream is alive and well, it's just hidden behind hard work and a little bit of sweat.

• 2:16:51Jordi Hays?

  We have to get a plumber or an electrician on the show that's cashing in on the data center boom. There has to be some guys that are, that are on their way to at least getting a PC 12, you know, a turboprop.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised. But I, I think that this post is more just about like, you don't, you don't need to be a janitor at a data center to, to experience a boom if you're just running a well-run operation and have scaled it. There's a reason, you know, the meme is the private equity guys will come and buy these companies, but the reason they do is because they're good companies. And so maybe there's still, still an opportunity there. And there's also opportunity in the public markets on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, they're trusted by millions.

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  They now have direct indexing.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  I am playing around with.

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  Well.

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  What do you got?

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Wilmanitis on the timeline.

• 2:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Back.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  With a longer post. Take us a minute to read through this, but should be fun.

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Get started, I'll be right back.

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  He says, "You can leave the kingdom, but you're still paying tax. Incumbents realize their industry is too regulated and too consumer unfriendly for growth, so they build a parallel, less regulated, often cash-pay, alternative next door. The parallel system is easier, but causes massive consumer harm." I've seen this myself. "The prime example of this over the last five years is the rise of telemedicine pill mills in healthcare. Think of the healthcare industry as defined by two factors. One, extremely limited supply. Medical doctors are scarce and costly. And two, a principal agent problem with payments. Your insurance pays and you don't. This has allowed the industry to behave in incredibly weird ways.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Costs can constantly grow. Patient experience can constantly degrade, and clinics will still fill up with waitlists because patients trust it, need it, aren't paying for it, and have no choice. As a result of this, we saw a world where patients replaced their primary care doctor with a fleet of telemedicine pill mills for lifestyle drugs. Further, lax regulations during the 2021 era allowed for these telemedicine services to offer things the traditional system could never offer. Fund lifestyle drugs with limited medical supervision. Sure, it was a better experience, but that patient went from having 75% of their care subsidized by insurance to having 0% of their care and drugs subsidized.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  The parallel system passed costs on to the consumer. Furthermore, the consumer is likely harmed in the form of lower coordination and regulation, opening the door to all kinds of harm. Bad drugs, conflicting drugs, etc. How many people do you know that are now on four, five, six, or seven drugs of dubious medical need?" I actually don't know that many people that are on that, but I certainly hear stories about it. Flip a coin. Either way, the percent of your income spent on healthcare is going up. That seems true. We see this playbook across industries. When the kingdom was built, the merchants paid taxes, coordination, regulation. They hated paying taxes and boxed themselves in via regulatory capture, so they pushed it onto the consumer. Unable to conduct

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  business, both the merchant and the consumer leave the kingdom. Things are easier outside of the kingdom walls, but the merchant gets richer faster and the consumer gets harmed. You see this in options markets today. You see this in defense procurement, which I don't know what he's talking about. I've never heard of defense procurement happening outside of a regulated environment. I do see it in healthcare. You see it in crypto. That seems like a great example. You see this everywhere. I would love to know what he's thinking on defense procurement specifically. We build palaces of regulation to prevent consumer harm and force consumers into unregulated legal gray area systems in order to conduct business. It's easy to see why. This is a durable economic effect we see across economies. You can simply squeeze more growth out of

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  an unregulated market. Look at rising Asia. And the US has allowed for a continuously developing set of emerging economies by its glacial pace of gray market regulation. We should view this as an incredible indictment of a regulatory state. The solution is to overregulation of essential industries isn't to allow the progressive construction and delayed regulation of legal gray areas. The solution to overregulation is to remove regulation on existing industries. Parallel construction of regulated system harms consumers. And I have a great example of this that I've lived for years, but I can take you through. Hit me.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  So Juul started 10 years ago, got immensely popular, and was so regulated by the FDA that at one point they were banned and then they finally got approved. And all of this was justifiable in the micro, but during the time that they were banned and going through all this, guess what happened? There was an entire massive gray market of illegal vapes that weren't even trying to be approved by the FDA. They weren't participating in the regulated structure. They were not in the kingdom. They were just out in the gray market and they

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  You saw that video too of like a of a child testing the vape?

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Like they were coming off the line of child and China's hitting them all to make sure they're they're they're working and then before they ship them out to America?

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Yep. So crazy. So so the market moved to gray market and and I I don't know what the stats are most recently, but at at one point, illegal vapes, mostly imported from China, were the second largest category of nicotine consumption after cigarettes. So it was much, much bigger than Juul and and the and the companies that were trying to be regulated. There's obviously regulation that needs to happen in this category, but if it takes 10 years, yes, there is a gray market that's going to develop. And so I I firmly agree with Will. I've seen it in in the business that I know best. And he's obviously seen it in the medical space. I have no idea what he's talking about in the defense space, but do you have any thoughts on Will's latest long post, the Yuga, as he puts it?

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  The Yuga. I don't know. I think it's interesting that we haven't seen more about the pail mills and all the telemedicine shops from the from the 2021 era.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  And we were hearing rumors.

• 2:23:03Jordi Hays?

  Working through the courts.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. We were hearing rumors of like ATF getting involved or the government getting involved. Some of these companies going bust. A lot of them, they kind of had legal problems and then they just kind of melted away and they just became quiet and I haven't heard from these companies. Maybe they still exist. Maybe they just kind of quietly stopped doing the bad thing.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure they're all doing it again or they're being reborn to do various peptides and semaglutide and all those.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Well, we heard about a fantastic company, biotechpeptides.com or something. Oh, do not go there. I don't know that that's the website.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  We saw someone.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Saw somebody.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Friend of the show.

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show shopping for Chinese peptides offline. The website was just called biotech peptides.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't seem like the most legit.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  It seems extremely legit. I love biotech. It's the most important technology, you know? It's like reliablemedicine.com.

• 2:24:04Jordi Hays?

  It's called medicinemedicine.com.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically.

• 2:24:08Jordi Hays?

  We haven't talked about this First Brands bankruptcy. Did you see this?

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  I don't know anything about this.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  I'll read through a piece in the Journal from yesterday. So First Brands, auto parts supplier First Brands crashed into bankruptcy last month. Now banks are sifting through their exposure to the company and its chain of customers and suppliers. Jefferies on Wednesday said funds run by an asset management unit, Point Bonita Capital, are owed 715 million. From companies that bought First Brands' parts, UBS, in bankruptcy court filings, said funds it operates, including through its O'Connor hedge fund unit, which the bank agreed to sell earlier this year, have around 500 million of exposure. The exposure is also mainly to customers that owe First Brands money. A person familiar with the matter said the twin disclosures from the banks illustrate

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  the tangle of financing that flowed through First Brands, which collapsed in late September owing more than 10 billion in a messy and sudden unraveling. Newly appointed directors have said they are probing irregularities in its financing arrangements. Jefferies said it doesn't have any information yet on what the probe has found, and it would also act to enforce investors' rights. UBS also said in a statement that it was working to protect investors' interests. Of course, they are. Neither firm indicated any significant direct exposure. Analysts at Morgan Stanley calculated Jefferies' possible total exposure as an investor in the funds at 44 million. So the timeline is getting into a junk bond. Analyst on X says

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Jefferies is in the crosshair as the main investment bank behind First Brands with a history of bringing risky capital markets deals. New facts are coming to light. The unraveling of First Brands comes just one month after Jefferies was pitching investors on a $6 billion debt refinancing deal. Investor concerns caused the refinancing efforts to fail as Jefferies struggled to get diligence information from First Brands.

• 2:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing followed weeks later. New information about Jeffries' level of involvement. First Brands set up a so-called side letter with Jeffries for an additional trade financing facility, which enabled First Brands to raise funds at an interest rate above the limits permitted by its loan documents. The workaround, First Brands paid Jeffries a supplemental incentive fee instead. This new disclosure caught investors by surprise, increasing financing costs and breaching rules on existing loans, which Jeffries helped arrange and syndicate.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  On their website, they have a list of brands. I don't know that many of them, but I do see the Michelin logo. They don't actually own Michelin. I was thinking that they might also own the Michelin guide, but they do license Michelin in tires, I suppose, or wipers, actually. Michelin wipers, they sell, they don't sell the tires. Interesting. I was not familiar with this company before we pulled it up.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, still, still sort of unraveling. There's a bunch of different groups that, there's other reporting that says 2.3 billion has simply vanished from First Brands' accounts. So, again, people, there's a, there's an email here from someone at Oric that says, "Wheel Team, thank you for your help yesterday in respect of the orders and our clients' comments. We would like to set up a call with you today to ask two questions, which our clients needs for informational purposes. First, do we know whether FBG actually received 1.9 billion, no matter what happened to it?

• 2:27:44Jordi Hays?

  We got one, almost $2 billion just missing. Second, would you tell us how much is in the aggregated accounts in respect of the factored receivables as of today?" And they answer, "One, we don't know. Two, $0 in their accounts." So, big, multi-billion dollar mystery here. And... Yeah, we'll see how this how this turns out.

• 2:28:11John Coogan?

  Well, Clark in the chat says is talking about the example I gave about vapes. He highlights that something similar happened in THC with Delta Eight and THCA. I completely agree. It was the same thing that there was for a decade or longer. Like, people were saying, oh, there's going to be like a federal bill on on, you know, where does where does America stand on THC? And it just kept being kicked to the states and is legal in medicine in some areas and then recreational in others. And in that time, basically, you go to one of these trade shows and every gas station owner is there buying like basically whatever they want. And it's it's just like a complete failure to just have clarity around what the market structure should be.

• 2:28:56John Coogan?

  So lots of work to be done on the regulatory side, unfortunately.

• 2:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, without further ado, I think we have our first guest.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  Seems that we do.

• 2:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Waiting room. Let's let's bring them in.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Preston.

• 2:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. Welcome to the show, Preston from Relays.

• 2:29:15Speaker 05

  Hey, guys, it's great to be on.

• 2:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you. Give us a quick introduction on yourself and the company, and then we'll get into the news.

• 2:29:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course. My name is Preston. I've been working on Relays with my co-founder Aetan Borgnia, and we recently raised $23 million.

• 2:29:34Jordi Hays?

  There we go. When John gets back, we'll we'll hit the gong. But how did you get into building Relays? When did you start it? What were you doing before?

• 2:29:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a great question. Before this, we were both PhD students. So I was doing my PhD in physics. I'm a co-founder, a time of students PhD in machine learning.

• 2:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Same college?

• 2:29:55Speaker 05

  No, I was at Harvard and he was at UChicago, but we went to Caltech as undergrads together.

• 2:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Very cool. So straight from PhD program into Relays? Did you? Did you drop out or did you guys actually get your degrees?

• 2:30:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, we dropped out.

• 2:30:12Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go.

• 2:30:13Speaker 05

  Chat GPT has just come out and we were like, this is the time to do it.

• 2:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. What? Obviously, hyper competitive category, tons of activity. What? What's been your guys' initial edge and focus?

• 2:30:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we've been really focused on approaching the developer experience from but from the experience of the agent itself. And so we don't consider ourselves like competitors with like cursor or cognition or anything like that. We're building the infrastructure that someone would want to use when they're building AI agents. And so what we've focused on to start are all these auxiliary models that make these AI agents more reliable. For as an example, if I'm a human, I love my autocomplete, I love my tab autocomplete. If I'm an agent, I have a different set of models that are really useful to me. So this is like what we've started out with. This is like our fast apply model, which applies

• 2:31:13Speaker 05

  diffs, and our embedding and rerank models, which is able to find the relevant code in your code base in less than a second. And this is used by 40 companies, including like lovable and Figma, etc.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  How do you think OpenAI's agent builder product is gonna is gonna play out? It seemed like a cool, like, like new capability and but I'm not sure. I haven't had the pull like the other products that they've released in the last couple of weeks to just like jump in, try it, play around. What's been your read on agent builder from OpenAI?

• 2:31:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've heard good things. I mean, it looks very beautiful. It's it's definitely a different category than what we've

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:31:59Speaker 05

  But I think the launch went really well.

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:03Jordi Hays?

  What does success look like over the next 12 months?

• 2:32:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, for us, we really want to now with this raise optimize the infrastructure along with the models itself. I think as an example, like Curse has done such a great job of optimizing the product with the models. And so all the models that you have within your IDE, the apply model and the tab autocomplete make this product work very seamlessly. We want to do the same thing for the infrastructure. And so we recently also released Relays repos along with our Series A announcement. It means that you can now have retrieval embedded directly into your source control. And we're really trying to like reimagine like, hey, like, what does source control look like when you have access to models

• 2:32:49Speaker 05

  to make it better? And when you're like exclusively focused on building it for the agent?

• 2:32:55John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the biggest company that you've pitched or talked to in customer development? I'd love to know the mood and the receptivity. We've seen some, uh, some news about like the Fortune 500 trying a bunch of AI stuff and then kind of pulling back from it. Have you talked to any big companies? And, and can you share any context on how bigger companies are thinking about adopting AI broadly?

• 2:33:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And have you been in focus there? Are you focused on scale ups like lovable and sort of founder mode companies like Tigma?

• 2:33:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, I mean, we're talking to all of the big, uh, five coding companies. You know, lovable, Tigma are some of the examples. Um, I think the way we think about this is that, uh, these L L M's are going to continue to increase in capability. We're seeing kind of what dominoes fall in the first, say like year, year and a half of, uh, like models that are like reasonably good at coding. And so already if I need a, um, marketing website or, or a simple presentation, I can actually like vibe code that on like Repli or lovable. I think over the next year, two years, three years, as we continue to see, um,

• 2:34:13Speaker 05

  the capabilities increase, uh, more and more things that are now traditionally software will be able to express, uh, in code. And, and this is like what we're very interested in. This is why, uh, we're saying that we're building the rails for software on demand. It's because things, we've seen people build like PowerPoints and decks in TypeScript and React instead of using PowerPoint anymore. Uh, we've seen people use like consumer Tik Tok filters that are entirely expressed in code. It's one of our customers, Gizmo. Uh, and we think that a lot of what we might not consider software today will end up being software. And the thing that runs and creates it is going to be a coding agent.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the round.

• 2:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Congratulations on the raise. I'm sure we'll have you back on again soon for the B.

• 2:35:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:07Jordi Hays?

  With the way things are going currently and congrats on all the initial traction.

• 2:35:11John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  We have a review from Trip Carolyn that we got to read through. Uh, he says, and of course, as a reminder, if you leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, put an ad for your business in that.

• 2:35:27Jordi Hays?

  Review.

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  Review. We'll read it on the show. Uh, Gulfstreams, wrist hitters, impeccable ad reads, the daily coverage of technology news. Uh, what more could one ask for? Between John and Jordy, they have the height and the hair to revolutionize technology and private capital commentary, putting the TB in capital journalism. I have been an avid fan from the inception and will be for life. Cannot recommend more to anyone interested in business, technology, or loud opulence. Wow, he really does.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  And I'll take over now. He says, TVPN is a hundred percent electric, just like Flux Marine's a hundred percent electric outboards. Great transition.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  Flux Marine.

• 2:36:05Jordi Hays?

  That's a true fan.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, escape the noise, fumes, and maintenance of traditional gas engines with a Flux outboard. Now offering our high-performance, 115 horsepower outboards, as well as complete boat packages.

• 2:36:15John Coogan?

  Complete boat packages.

• 2:36:16Jordi Hays?

  With industry-leading hull partners.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  We gotta get a boat.

• 2:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Only outboard suitable for recording podcasts at full throttle. Visit fluxmarine.com and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you.

• 2:36:26John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:36:27Jordi Hays?

  We love you, Trip. Uh, Trip truly has been, uh, a friend of the show.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Day one.

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  Fan of, uh, of, uh, Technology Brothers since the very beginning.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thank you for riding with us and excited to get the update on Flux. You guys have been, uh, cooking, uh, over the last, uh, nine months or so.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  And without further ado, our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring Scott in to the TVPN UltraDome. How are you doing, Scott?

• 2:36:54Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:36:56Speaker 06

  Fantastic. Uh, thanks for having me.

• 2:36:58John Coogan?

  Uh, give us, uh, give us an introduction on yourself and the company and then we'll get into the news.

• 2:37:03Speaker 06

  Sure, I'm Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO here at Spellbook. We launched one of the first gen AI products for lawyers back in the summer of 2022. A little before ChatGPT were an AI contract review tool. So we allow 4,000 law firm and in-house counsel teams to draft and review contracts with AI. My background is in engineering. My co-founder, Daniel, is the lawyer of the team. And yeah, we're based in Canada.

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  Give us the news today.

• 2:37:34Speaker 06

  We've raised 50 million, led by Keith, your boy.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, Keith, he's a lawyer, right?

• 2:37:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was a lawyer. He was a former lawyer, yeah. He doesn't love to admit it.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:37:51Jordi Hays?

  What's it like, what's it like building a point solution these days? We've, we've, I feel like this month, there's just been so many different announcements for, for different legal AI tools. Some are legacy platforms that are launching AI features and have a bunch of different workflows across the law firm. We had Crosby on yesterday, who's taking a different approach, obviously building the entire firm.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  And then we talked to other, we, we, we had someone on the show last week who was building, you know, AI legal, but just in.

• 2:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Ambulance chaser agents, basically.

• 2:38:26John Coogan?

  Personal injury, which is a very small niche. So when I hear curse of contracts, that makes sense, but it's like a different slice of the market. How do you settle there? Why are you confident about that slice?

• 2:38:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. So I guess there's a couple of questions there. Like one, yeah, we like being a point solution. So we think of our product often as like a toaster. Like there's a lot of broad AI solutions for enterprise right now. For the beginning, we're like, we're going to be a toaster for contract review. So really easy to use, really easy to adopt. You know, we don't even do a sales call most of the time. It's just like, welcome aboard. Let's, let's get you using Spellbook in five minutes.

• 2:39:02Speaker 06

  I think there's a bunch of advantages and I think there's a lot of opportunity to build these kind of, I would say, like point solution products. And there's a lot of very like broad AI solutions out there. Why we chose contracts specifically.

• 2:39:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, the story of how I started the company is I had a small business before this. And then one day I had a legal bill that took like half the cash out of our bank account to do some like very minor things. I didn't have much cash. I was like a new grad. But, you know, I thought that it was hugely painful to just do like simple transactional work as a small business. And I thought, you know, we could do it much more efficiently.

• 2:39:42Speaker 06

  But then the reason we settled on contracts is because the contract market size and the contract pain goes way beyond just lawyers, like 30 trillion is estimated to flow through contracts in the US alone every year. It's happening very inefficiently. There's a lot of risks. There's a lot of litigation from bad contracting, which, you know, Keith used to clean up as a litigator. And, you know, when you look at the actual overall size of contract pain in not just for lawyers, but in procurement, in HR, and sales, that market size ends up being really, really big. Whereas if you if you just look at the market size of, you know, X number of lawyers times Y dollars per month, it's actually a much smaller market than when you look at like the the overall pain of contracting and, you know,

• 2:40:27Speaker 06

  I see like the millions of transactions that happen around the globe every day and contracts often being the bottleneck. And, you know, what is it worth if we could speed up all those transactions? If we could remove that bottleneck, I think so much of commerce of the last 20 years has sped up. Like, we have credit card networks, we have, you know, we have Stripe, we have digital payroll. But contracts have largely remained the same except for Microsoft Word. And so they've become a bottleneck. So our mission is to make contracts move at the speed of commerce. So we can all transact and work together much more efficiently.

• 2:41:03Jordi Hays?

  How often is a lawyer or firm signing up for Spellbook when they have like, when they're bringing basically like, hey, we have this contract that we're working through right now. We're trying to create or provide feedback on, we want to use Spellbook like this afternoon. Are you, what's like the time to value between signing up and actually being able to leverage the product?

• 2:41:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's close to zero and that was our design philosophy from from day one is that a lawyer should be able to adopt this almost instantaneously. So yeah, I mean, they can adopt it in almost five minutes without having to do a big rollout or a ton of training. And we've optimized almost the whole company with with that in mind. Yeah.

• 2:41:48Jordi Hays?

  And do law, I'm not, nowadays, engineers at every software company have the ability to just sign up for tools themselves? Are law firms at that point yet where they have some amount of discretionary software budget that they can allocate as they see fit? Or are they still, or is it still maybe like, you know, Silicon Valley engineers in the 2000s?

• 2:42:14Speaker 06

  It depends on the segment. So 70% of lawyers work for small and midsize law firms. So when you envision lawyers, you usually think of big law, but actually 70% of lawyers are working at these much smaller firms where they actually have a lot of autonomy, they have access to a credit card, they might be one of the founding partners of the firm. So in that segment, yeah, it's very much you can do self sign up. And then we also serve in-house counsel teams. On in-house counsel teams, like we have customers like Nestle and eBay, you know, the decision making power is still very concentrated. I think like with with Wiz, one of the reasons why they cited it was such a great motion is because, you know, the buying, the decision making power for was like with the CIO or

• 2:42:57Speaker 06

  Chief Security Officer and, you know, they're sort of the technical buyer, they're also the user, they're also the check signer. Similar thing happens in these in-house legal teams where there's often a GC who's the user, they're the check signer, they're like the sort of the domain expert and they're the champion all in one. So you still get these, I think, really fast buying cycles in these large enterprise in-house legal teams as well.

• 2:43:23Jordi Hays?

  What does growth look like?

• 2:43:28Speaker 06

  We are growing very quickly. Yeah. So we launched.

• 2:43:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, we launched. We launched in 2022. We have 4,000 customers today. We're tripling this year. We're over tripling this year for sure. You know, hopefully even more. Yeah, it's been, it's been pretty wild. Yeah, I think, yeah. Over the last two and a half years, I think we did something like 7,000% growth, something like that. So yeah, it's been, it's been.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  Up and to the right.

• 2:44:02Jordi Hays?

  Up and to the right.

• 2:44:03John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll have you back on again soon for the C. Have fun out there.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:44:10Jordi Hays?

  On Scott.

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Bye. If you're looking for cursor for billboards, head over to adquick.com. Adform Advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of adform advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, adform expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We are joined by George from Monk next.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  The monk himself. Welcome to the show, George. What's happening?

• 2:44:32Speaker 07

  Hey, guys. How are you? Thanks for having me.

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  Uh, kick us off with an introduction. You launched the company. How are you positioning the value proposition, the business? How are you explaining the business these days?

• 2:44:44Speaker 07

  Yep, we're monk.com. We help businesses save time and make money by solving invoices and collections, which now that I say this in the show, kind of sounds like a ramp.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Yep. Um, wait, what is the typical collection process? Is that, is this like, uh, just automated emails? Is that an important part of getting paid as a business?

• 2:45:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a huge part. It's a huge part. I mean, most of it is email and, and up until now, it's all been like these very boring, done emails that get sent and then get ignored. Yeah. And then like statistically, a big piece of delays is just an error in these emails. It's like a tiny thing that we accept, but it's like a $3 trillion problem, right?

• 2:45:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, uh, what were the legacy solutions, uh, in the category? Why, why start this business now? What was kind of the key unlock? I, when I, when I saw the launch, made a lot of sense, but at the same time, you know, you, you look at a business like this, I think every business owner can go to monk, you know, dot com and think, okay, I'm having these problems. This feels like, uh, an elegant solution for it, but, but why was this not a solved problem yet?

• 2:45:54Speaker 07

  Yep, it's a good question and it's it's a red ocean like there's a ton of players before L M and now every person with a wifi connection is gonna rip a competitor.

• 2:46:06Jordi Hays?

  Just diving into your real shark. It takes a real shark to dive into a red ocean.

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  I like the honesty. I appreciate this. This is much better. We're the only person that thought of this.

• 2:46:15Speaker 07

  Cap, you know, capitalism is inevitable, you know, a few things. A, the selling into the office of the CFO changed twice since deserve. So like A, there was deserve and like it was super frothy.

• 2:46:29Speaker 07

  And then, and then, and so, and then, and then there's a lot more financial rigor. And then now with post L M, there's just a lot more appetite to experiment. So like, I think the, the G T M motion got easier and then the onus on the CFO or like the business leader, even the founder, the sole founder get like a lot, a lot harder. Like they have to do a lot more with less. And then B, like when Sam Altman and Satya compete and they pour billions in CapEx and OpEx and R and D, we at the Applayer just get to rip that into advantages. And so like, we are applying L M's and three parts of this workflow and it just works. And like every, every week that they improve, we improve. Before, obviously not possible.

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  How'd you get monk.com? That's a great domain. What's the story?

• 2:47:12Speaker 07

  Uh, wanted a poker game.

• 2:47:14John Coogan?

  You wanted a poker game. You're a pro poker player, right?

• 2:47:17Speaker 07

  No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I bought it. I bought it.

• 2:47:18John Coogan?

  Okay, but you made money in poker and then so you paid for it. So you kind of wanted a poker game. I like that.

• 2:47:24Speaker 07

  Kind of wanted a poker game, kind of shield at B T V gave me some money. No, it, we used to be called Atlas because I think Greek philosophy is cool and I thought, you know, finance function like holds up the, the world. But then there's like 50 atlases.

• 2:47:37John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. Stripe Atlas. There's a bunch of other.

• 2:47:40Jordi Hays?

  What makes, uh, what makes poker players so elite at, uh, at the sport of business?

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:46Jordi Hays?

  I know a buddy of mine, uh, uh, still plays like pro, pro-am, pro poker.

• 2:47:53John Coogan?

  Business is basically degenerate gambling. Professional. I was just kidding.

• 2:47:57Speaker 07

  I mean, don't you think you can sort of like cross supply from, I mean, you, you run a business and now you're on a very popular, should you just cross supply? Like a lot of the same principles govern all these domains, right?

• 2:48:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:48:11Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  Is this founder bluffing or will they come on the show? Will they come answer hard questions in the T B P Ultra Dome? Will they have a poker face on?

• 2:48:22Speaker 07

  Expecting values, thinking, you know, risk, discipline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:48:26Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:48:27John Coogan?

  Uh, take us through the round real quick. What happened?

• 2:48:30Speaker 07

  You mean like the money?

• 2:48:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:32Jordi Hays?

  The money.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  I want to read the gong. How much raise?

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  From who? The Greenbacks.

• 2:48:36Speaker 07

  War led by Sheila and Yihar on BTV. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  We love Sheila. Is this from his new fund? He, he came on the show just like a week ago. He's already deploying, ripping checks. Or maybe you were the last one in fund two.

• 2:48:50Speaker 07

  I think I'm the last one in the fund two.

• 2:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Last one in the fund two.

• 2:48:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:54Speaker 07

  Well, GTM fund and we rail also helped, but yeah, Sheila and Yihar led.

• 2:48:59John Coogan?

  Very cool. Uh, and tell us about the last company. Super interested.

• 2:49:04Speaker 07

  The last company?

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  Streamlabs?

• 2:49:06Speaker 07

  The one, oh, Streamlabs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a big business. It's a creator economy business. It's like, we're a big developer for Twitch and YouTube. So like, if you're a content creator and you live stream on Twitch, YouTube, or like back then when Facebook was Facebook, we're using our tools.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:21Speaker 07

  So live streaming, patronage, moderation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and we sold because we're a developer and like Twitch was just ripping our roadmap, which is fine. Like, yeah.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who'd you sell to?

• 2:49:36Speaker 07

  Logitech.

• 2:49:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:37Jordi Hays?

  Logitech. There you go. Awesome. Well, uh, yeah, congratulations on the raise. Uh, and, uh, yeah, it seems like there's quite a lot of demand. So good luck keeping up with it.

• 2:49:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, thanks for the support.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is in the restroom waiting room, but first let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We have Zach from Meanwhile coming in to the TVP. I'll jump. Zach, how are you doing?

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  There he is. Welcome. Great. Happy to be here. Great to have you.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. We'd love to learn some.

• 2:50:16Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah, my name is Zach. I'm a long time fintech entrepreneur. I've built Meanwhile, Meanwhile is the world's first Bitcoin life insurance company, but our intention is to build the world's largest life insurance company.

• 2:50:29John Coogan?

  How does Bitcoin life insurance fit together? How's the normal life insurance market work? How is this different? Walk me through just the like one step deeper in the thesis or the product.

• 2:50:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the normal life insurance market, you know, this is about 3% of global GDP. You've probably never talked about it once on the show, but it is gigantic.

• 2:50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:51Speaker 08

  It is not just life insurance. It's about retirement savings. It's about, you know, protecting your family when you die. But what also happens to your family when you live longer than you're supposed to? That's deferred annuities. It's insurance bonds. It's all sorts of saving products. It's a huge, huge market that is completely untouched by technology. And the reason it's untouched by technology is because you need to be big for technology to matter. So that is why you have a bunch of companies who have like built marketing engines on top of the global life insurance ecosystem. What we've done is we have built a full stack vertically integrated life insurance company in Bermuda.

• 2:51:35Speaker 08

  It just happens to entirely be nominated in Bitcoin. And what that means practically is if you want to save for the long term, you can now do it in Bitcoin. And there are tax advantages and there's a state and, you know, tax planning reasons to do that. But fundamentally, what we see is that if I bought a life insurance policy in 2018 when my son was born, I've seen the purchasing power of that dollar policy go down 25, 30%. Whereas if I had done that in Bitcoin, I've seen the purchasing power go up hundreds of percent. And we want to bring that not just to everyone in America, but if you're a middle-class person in Argentina, you don't save for your retirement because you are going to live longer than the Argentinian peso. So that person should save in Bitcoin.

• 2:52:21John Coogan?

  Okay, so you want a million dollar life insurance plan to

• 2:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, walk us through the actual

• 2:52:27John Coogan?

  10 Bitcoins by paying in Bitcoin?

• 2:52:30Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:52:31John Coogan?

  Because most people think about their life insurance policy as, okay, it's going to be a hundred dollars a month. I have a job. I can pay that. If it's in Bitcoin, it goes up and then all of a sudden I can't make the payments. Like, how does all that flow?

• 2:52:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the current product that we do direct to consumer, but this round's actually about all this other stuff we do, is it's called Whole Life, so it lasts your whole life, it's very well named. You, in our case, you might pay, I'm gonna use big round numbers, you might pay one Bitcoin a year for 10 years, so you've paid us 10 Bitcoin, and then whenever you die, you get 15 Bitcoin. But yes, you're absolutely right, in a way, you're short Bitcoin, so I suggest, do not buy a policy bigger than your existing amount of Bitcoin.

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:53:16Jordi Hays?

  What, you mentioned some, you just raised 82 million, so we should acknowledge that.

• 2:53:21Speaker 08

  Eighty-two million dollars.

• 2:53:22Jordi Hays?

  From Bain, Apollo, Northwestern Mutual, that's big, Han Ventures, and Pantera, a couple others. What was the catalyst for this round? What are you working on outside of the direct-to-consumer product that you just mentioned?

• 2:53:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, so actually, we raised a Series A in February, that was 40 million dollars, from Framework and Folger and Wences. And what happened after that round is that a ton of the largest life insurance and retirement companies in the world approached us and asked us if we could work with them to bring these products to their markets, if we could help them do indexed annuities, indexed life insurance that had exposure to Bitcoin. And that is how this 82 million dollar round came about, is that Han and Bain Cap Crypto in particular, they had sort of been hovering around, they reached out to us in the summer, they said,

• 2:54:22Speaker 08

  "You're one of the most important companies, going to be one of the most important companies in crypto, can we invest?" And I said, "For a large enough check, you can do it."

• 2:54:33Jordi Hays?

  I love the honesty. What is it about, give us the Bermuda lore, I've only been there on vacation, but...

• 2:54:43John Coogan?

  It sounds un-American to me, but I'll let you defend it.

• 2:54:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's long been a sort of, you know, financial hub, and it has like some deep history and ties between, you know, Wall Street and Bermuda.

• 2:54:56John Coogan?

  You're not winning me over, it's not in America.

• 2:54:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the fundamental history is that Bermuda used to be a tourist destination when you had to get on a boat to go to your vacation spot. And once there was an airplane, you're like, I'm gonna go to the Bahamas, or I'm gonna go to Jamaica. Bermuda is actually like way out in the middle of nowhere in the ocean and it's just not as hot as you'd like, right? So.

• 2:55:15Jordi Hays?

  And it's the Bermuda, Bermuda Triangle out there.

• 2:55:18Speaker 08

  Bermuda Triangle, you know, not, not a great, uh, history on boats. So, uh, basically they had some really enterprising people in the fifties, the nineteen fifties and sixties who decided to make it an offshore financial hub. And now it is like the insurance capital of the world. So I'm surprised you went there on vacation because there is about as many actuaries, lawyers and accountants on Bermuda as there are Bermudians.

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:55:43Speaker 08

  Uh, you walk around and it's like Munichary, Chubb, Swiss Re. Uh, it's like huge financial institutions. And I guess the next huge financial institution there is gonna be Meanwhile.

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:55:54Jordi Hays?

  That is.

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Is, is the Bermuda Triangle fake news or are you taking a wild route when you go there? Are you avoiding that?

• 2:56:04Speaker 08

  I'm gonna call it fake news, but, uh, they're actually, Bermuda has this really crazy history. They did a lot of things. They like, ran a ruthless salt monopoly over the Caribbean. They were like gun runners in the Civil War. They had ran a penal colony. They.

• 2:56:19Jordi Hays?

  They're like, why not finance?

• 2:56:20Speaker 08

  They have found ways to, um, be innovative for hundreds of years.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  So if, uh, so if me and you are flying in a Cessna to Bermuda, you're not telling me to fly around the triangle. You say fly right through the, through the triangle?

• 2:56:36Speaker 08

  That's right. I've only been there on commercial jets, so I'm not prepared to support the Cessna plan, but.

• 2:56:41John Coogan?

  But you're fearless generally around the triangle.

• 2:56:44Speaker 08

  Generally fearless.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  That's great to hear.

• 2:56:46Speaker 08

  That's what it takes to take on a three trillion dollar industry.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  I like it. I like it. You shouldn't be afraid of the triangle. You shouldn't be afraid of the financial markets.

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  How are you innovating on the direct, like the actual experience? I got a, uh, like I got life insurance through my neighbor who happened to be an agent. It was kind of this weird. You know, it's not a, it's not a, didn't feel like the most seamless digitally native process. So there's also, I think, a lot that you can do on, on the actual.

• 2:57:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, fundamentally, look, we want to do with a thousand people what Allianz does with a hundred thousand people. Our, we didn't mention it, but Sam Altman actually led our seed round. And our pitch to Sam was this is a once in a century opportunity that we can use digital money in the form of Bitcoin and stable coins to reach billions of people with these savings products. And then we can use AI and automation to serve them profitably. So we have built everything from the ground up. We are a fully vertically integrated life insurer. So yeah, the, the experience of filling out the application is quite seamless. People can get underwritten and we can close policies in a single day. We do all our actuarial,

• 2:57:57Speaker 08

  we close our books, this sounds so boring, but we close our books in like two and a half hours at the corner end. Most insurance companies, we're talking like 45 days.

• 2:58:06Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:58:07Speaker 08

  But we do all of that. Like, we have a chief risk officer, we have an enterprise risk manager, we have all this boring stuff. But because we built it, you know, feature by feature, step by step, system by system, we are building a durable advantage in the life insurance space.

• 2:58:24John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congratulations on the progress.

• 2:58:28Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  Host a show out in Bermuda one day. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:58:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on, Dex.

• 2:58:32Speaker 08

  Happy to host a show there sometime if you'd like, gentlemen.

• 2:58:34Jordi Hays?

  I would love that. Awesome, Dex.

• 2:58:36John Coogan?

  I'll get my Bermuda shorts.

• 2:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for joining.

• 2:58:38John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on your progress.

• 2:58:39John Coogan?

  Speaking of life insurance, Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis says life insurance in Taiwan is delaying Nvidia's expansion in Taiwan. Remember, Sam Altman was talking to Ben Thompson just earlier this week about wanting TSMC to ramp up. He obviously wants more chip production. And so Semi Analysis tells the story. They say, "At Computex this May, Nvidia announced plans to establish its constellation headquarters in Taiwan. However, the project now faces uncertainty. The proposed site for the Taiwan headquarters was the T17 and T18 plots in the Baitu Shilin Technology Park." Nvidia had signed a memorandum of

• 2:59:22John Coogan?

  understanding, an MOU, with this life insurance company, a Taiwanese company with total assets exceeding $100 billion USD, but the MOU expired on

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  September 30th and is no longer valid. The key obstacles are as follows. Shin Kong Life completed the registration of building rights for the T17 and T18 plots in February of 2022, securing a 50-year leasehold. Shin Kong expressed willingness to directly transfer the rights of T17 and T18 to Nvidia. However, the Taipei city government opposed this, arguing that Shin Kong must first construct the buildings and obtain an occupancy permit before transferring the rights. The government is concerned that if Shin Kong gains additional benefits from Nvidia through a direct transfer, that may be seen as favoritism. So furthermore, Nvidia requested that the road between the two plots be incorporated into the site.

• 3:00:16John Coogan?

  They want the road as well, not just the buildings, and that would require changes to the urban planning regulations, and it would increase the value of the land rights, and again, the concern of favoritism. So Shin Kong proposed constructing the headquarters for Nvidia and transferring it afterwards, but Nvidia said no. Nvidia wants full control over the design and construction of its headquarters. You gotta get a nice corner office for the big man. Who knows what Shin Kong is gonna do if you let them build it?

• 3:00:40Jordi Hays?

  And a closet for leather jackets.

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Yes, a massive walk-in closet that makes a...

• 3:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Entirely the same leather jacket.

• 3:00:47John Coogan?

  Lots of leather jackets, and the jackets come flying out of every possible closet. The Taipei city government suggested terminating the existing contract and signing a new one directly with Nvidia. Shin Kong opposed this, citing its 50-year leasehold and the expected rental income. The city's proposal did not account for Shin Kong's anticipated future revenue. Regarding rumors that Nvidia may abandon its Taiwan HQ plans and move to India, Semi Analysis has the following view: Taiwan's supply chain remains more concentrated and efficient than any of the other countries, and with the MOU expired, Nvidia is free to seek alternative locations or quit the site entirely. Therefore, we believe Nvidia will not give up on establishing its headquarters in Taiwan. That's where they want to be.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  The city government is reportedly leaping toward persuading Nvidia to give up sites T17 and 18 instead, and instead, accept a different site, T12, along with surrounding private land. Discussions with Nvidia are expected soon. They believe the likelihood of Nvidia accepting the T12 proposal is low as the site is similar, and surrounding private land involves many owners, which would drive up costs. So Nvidia is duking it out with life insurance provider in Taiwan.

• 3:01:57Jordi Hays?

  In other news, REI announced it's shuttering its Soho flagship. It's also closing flagships in Paramus, New Jersey, and Boston. These shores will shut down in late 2026. Also, apparently, OpenAI is opening an office in the same building.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 3:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Soho flagship.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  I think Michael Miraflo was saying that on X, something about that being like very symbolic, right? I have a lot of happy memories of being and visiting REIs as a kid. It was a wonderful, wonderful place. So hopefully, hopefully, this isn't a sign that it's so over, and hopefully someday soon, we can be so back. I did want to close out. There's the figure three robot.

• 3:02:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Released today.

• 3:02:49John Coogan?

  We have a video of that.

• 3:02:49Jordi Hays?

  We should pull up the video.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  I'd also like to pull up the video of Mark Zuckerberg talking about the barbecue, because isn't it the anniversary of that video at some point? Let's watch those two videos, and then we'll get out of here.

• 3:03:04Jordi Hays?

  While you pull it up.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, so Mark Cuban went in Sora.

• 3:03:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:03:10Jordi Hays?

  And said, "Free for all" with his likeness.

• 3:03:13John Coogan?

  I went free for all as well.

• 3:03:14Jordi Hays?

  But he did something that was even smarter than you, which he prompted it to always depict you as a bodybuilder. Cuban added a tag somehow that says, "Brought to you by Cost Plus Drugs."

• 3:03:26John Coogan?

  I was gonna do that with the Ramp logo on my forehead. He did that?

• 3:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:03:29John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:03:30Jordi Hays?

  He did it, and it looks...

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  It works?

• 3:03:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it works.

• 3:03:33John Coogan?

  Very funny.

• 3:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Beautifully, Dylan posted a couple of different screenshots.

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  Very clever. Okay, let's watch this video. Thank you for pulling this up. Uh, we were just talking about humanoid robots with Martin Casado from A16Z.

• 3:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Nobody does.

• 3:03:48John Coogan?

  Trying to do it.

• 3:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Nobody does videos like Figure. Got to give him credit for that.

• 3:03:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic launch videos. Where, this is the third?

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  So, this is version three, but they're still in alpha and they haven't, they haven't shipped these? Or, or they, they installed some into a demo plant with BMW, right?

• 3:04:06Jordi Hays?

  So, what's notable here is they're not, I, I scanned the video. I don't think there's any, they're not just depicting it in a factory setting at all.

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:13Jordi Hays?

  Seems like this is a pivot away from.

• 3:04:15John Coogan?

  Going more consumer.

• 3:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, commercial.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  Which was one of my questions for, uh, Martin. What do you think, Tyler?

• 3:04:21Speaker 02

  Uh, right at the end of the video, it's in a factory.

• 3:04:22John Coogan?

  Oh, it's in a factory at the end?

• 3:04:24Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing here that's notable, they followed 1X Robots.

• 3:04:27John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 3:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Who was doing the fabric covering.

• 3:04:29John Coogan?

  Fabric looks way better, I think, than the hard metal. It just looks, yeah, it looks.

• 3:04:34Jordi Hays?

  I can see why.

• 3:04:35John Coogan?

  Oh, there, there's a house. Okay.

• 3:04:37Jordi Hays?

  I can see why the retail army just loves Figure.

• 3:04:41John Coogan?

  It's not a retail army. We're seeing the emergence of a new army. The private markets retail.

• 3:04:45Jordi Hays?

  Market, retail army.

• 3:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need a new word for it. It's not, it's not retail necessarily, if it's private, but, uh, people have been pumping.

• 3:04:53Jordi Hays?

  It's a special army. It's a special purpose vehicle army.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  People have been asking questions about how much pumping is going on on the timeline, uh, and whether it's too much, but, uh, I mean, it's a great video.

• 3:05:05Jordi Hays?

  It's a $39 billion company, John.

• 3:05:08John Coogan?

  Is it still? Wow.

• 3:05:09Jordi Hays?

  Still, yes.

• 3:05:10John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Hey, look, that dog.

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  That was an opportunity to make that a robotic dog. It is interesting that they're not, they're only focused for, you know, straight shot to humanoid robot. No Boston Dynamics, uh, project. No, no four-legged friend first. Um, a lot of the other, uh, robotics companies have kind of taken a more incremental, uh, uh, like prog- progress.

• 3:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you think they trained on Biden's?

• 3:05:39John Coogan?

  It does, it does seem like the walk of an elderly man.

• 3:05:43Jordi Hays?

  But it's a start.

• 3:05:44John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not, I mean, the Boston Dynamics demos are always like way more agile and same with the Unitree demos.

• 3:05:52Jordi Hays?

  So the question here for the in-home, for the in-home space is going to come down to, one, how effective is it, right? If we both have kids, kids tend to like destroy the living room.

• 3:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, create a lot of chaos.

• 3:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Bed, you gotta clean it up and stuff.

• 3:06:06John Coogan?

  A humanoid should be able to clean it up, you'd think.

• 3:06:08Jordi Hays?

  The question is.

• 3:06:09John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a little slower.

• 3:06:10Jordi Hays?

  How effective and what's the cost, right? Are people going to buy, can they come in anywhere near Unitree at 20K for a comparable robot?

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Seems unlikely.

• 3:06:21John Coogan?

  I mean, the big, the big debate here is just how, how much does this stuff generalize? Because, I mean, we've seen in all sorts of other AI applications, like it's simple to RL on one certain, you know, one certain problem and get really good at it, but then does that learning generalize? And so you can have a model that's fantastic at IMO level math, but can't, but can't complete ArcAGI, which is so simple that a 10-year-old can do it.

• 3:06:47Jordi Hays?

  It's doing dishes.

• 3:06:48John Coogan?

  And so, you know, if it's, if it's trained to be really good at this one dish with this one, this one faucet system, can it generalize to your faucet system? Or, or when will that generalization happen? It's certainly happened in LLMs, so you would hope that it happens in humanoid robotics very quickly. It's a, it's an interesting time.

• 3:07:10Jordi Hays?

  Brett shared that none of this is teleoperated.

• 3:07:12John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, none of this is teleoperated.

• 3:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Which I still think tele, even a teleoperated humanoid would be very cool. That would be.

• 3:07:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you're still paying by the hour more than just power. There is something that's very important economically about getting away from teleoperation over the long term, but I don't see a problem with teleoperation as a, as a data flywheel, as a way to actually get these into people's homes. You're teleoperating them, you're collecting more feedback and data and you can train that and roll that into reinforcement learning.

• 3:07:44John Coogan?

  I do. Yeah, the the the the question is like, did he comment on whether or not this is scripted? Because it could be recorded motion, right? Because that would not be teleoperated. It would be running on the robot locally, but it could have been, uh, you know, teleoperated at one point and then memorized and then, um, and then, uh, you know, played back effectively like, is this, uh, there's a big question about like, how long has this robot?

• 3:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think for for figure.

• 3:08:12John Coogan?

  Environment.

• 3:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for figure to, uh, develop like legitimacy within.

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:19Jordi Hays?

  Like our bubble.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, people are gonna need to be able to do some type of live demo setting where they can be in the house with it and they can task it with doing things that aren't necessarily pre-planned, right?

• 3:08:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's something about like with the other AI companies in the LLM world, like the models go out, the APIs are available, the benchmarks are.

• 3:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Because if if you can just walk into a room with a figure robot, dump a bunch of laundry on the bed and it just folds it and puts it away.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:49Jordi Hays?

  That is gonna be mind blowing, but I don't know how how.

• 3:08:52John Coogan?

  I mean, to be fair, uh, Noam Brown, I think at OpenAI was, uh, was saying like, okay, like, this is a nice example of the robot folding laundry at a table. What happens if you raise the height of the table six inches? And Brett Adcock raised the height of the table six inches and posted another video and said, it still works. It still works. So he is, uh, he is, uh, duking it out on the time.

• 3:09:16Jordi Hays?

  There it is, more commercial setting.

• 3:09:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Delivery robot, they had it, uh, at the opening of a hotel.

• 3:09:22John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder what makes it so much slower than the, the Boston Dynamics example? Like, it feels in some ways more advanced than what Boston Dynamics does, certainly.

• 3:09:35John Coogan?

  Uh, the demos here are more generalizable. Like, I haven't seen a video of a Boston Dynamics robot doing any of these like useful tasks. It's always just like dancing and doing parkour, which doesn't seem very commercially viable. Um, but, uh, but the Boston Dynamics, like, the actual motion just feels so much smoother and so much more fluid. And same thing with the Unitree robots. So the room, the Unitree robots, you kick them over and it does a 360 to jump back up. That doesn't feel very economically useful, like folding laundry or delivering packages. But it's certainly impressive.

• 3:10:07Jordi Hays?

  MKBHD responded and said, I have so many questions. Um, I wonder, what do you, how long, how long do you think until MKBHD can, can, uh,

• 3:10:17John Coogan?

  He's, he did a huge review of the Boston Dynamics dog. He got one. I think he might've even paid for it himself and like been able to play, really play around with it and really put it through his basis. And I love that. I, I would love for him to, uh, do a proper review on a, on a figure robot. That would be very cool. Um, there was something else that was, that was top of mind on the, on the MKBHD thing. Oh yeah. Did you see that? Somebody posted their product and MKBHD responded with a meme that said like, interesting. And it was like a funny just gif or image. And the company took the text out of the, uh,

• 3:10:57John Coogan?

  out of the meme and put it in quotes on their website and attributed to MKBHD. It was like, he said, it looks interesting. And it was like a meme that he sent. And then MKBHD was like, this is ridiculous. Like, I didn't give you a quote. Like, you can't just use me on your website. And the founder of the company was like, oh, well, we also emailed with your team and they said like, it looks interesting. Like, we'd love to, you know, like, like hear more about it. And then they took that as an example. And it's like, that's not quite the same as like,

• 3:11:26Jordi Hays?

  We'd love to hear more about it.

• 3:11:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, they were just being nice. Uh,

• 3:11:29Jordi Hays?

  The chat right now, it's AV says it's slow for dramatic effect.

• 3:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's actually moving at five times the speed, but they filmed it with a slow motion camera.

• 3:11:42John Coogan?

  They filmed it with a slow motion camera to make it look more sci-fi and cinematic, for sure.

• 3:11:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:48John Coogan?

  But, anyway.

• 3:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, no more information on when it'll be available for sale. But I'm sure somebody at the right point will pit the... I mean, the first thing somebody's gonna do is pit the Unitree G1 against a figure and just make them compete in a variety of contests.

• 3:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to that.

• 3:12:07John Coogan?

  I mean, Christopher Mims has a whole deep dive on America's manufacturing resurgence and the robots that are doing that. More focused on cobots, which we've talked to some companies around, less on the humanoid side, but it's a fascinating deep dive if you want to go check that out. Maybe we'll cover it on the show at some point.

• 3:12:23Jordi Hays?

  That would be great.

• 3:12:23John Coogan?

  Is there anything else you want to react to?

• 3:12:24Jordi Hays?

  That's it. That's it. We can react to this iconic video.

• 3:12:28John Coogan?

  Let's head out. Let's head out.

• 3:12:30Jordi Hays?

  On this day.

• 3:12:30John Coogan?

  Friend of the show, Mark Zuckerberg, TVPN.

• 3:12:33Speaker 07

  Hey, everyone. We are live from my backyard where I am smoking.

• 3:12:39John Coogan?

  See, imagine Andy Jassy doing this on Twitch. It would be so much better than another conference call for earnings.

• 3:12:47Speaker 07

  It's smoking, so...

• 3:12:48John Coogan?

  Is this the edit where they just show the smoking meats?

• 3:12:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, someone asked me, "Do I smoke meat?" Smoking meat.

• 3:12:54John Coogan?

  This is the least charitable...

• 3:12:56Jordi Hays?

  That's Lassie. Did you see Lassie?

• 3:12:58John Coogan?

  You can edit any video. You can edit us to look like idiots, too. If you took our 15 hours a week of content and dialed it down to all the times we say something silly.

• 3:13:10Jordi Hays?

  He's smoking. He's smoking.

• 3:13:12John Coogan?

  And he went so much farther. He has his own cattle ranch. He vertically integrated his meat smoking operation, so cheers to Mark Zuckerberg.

• 3:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in today. We hope you have a fantastic afternoon and evening wherever you are in the world.

• 3:13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:26Jordi Hays?

  And we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:13:27John Coogan?

  Here in my garage.

• 3:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman, live on TVPN, noon Pacific.

• 3:13:32John Coogan?

  Tune in.

• 3:13:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you then.

• 3:13:33John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Goodbye.