Palmer Luckey, Brian Armstrong, & Brian Chesky LIVE | OpenAI Joins the Browser Race, AWS Outage Aftermath

(00:13) - OpenAI's Atlas Browser (12:53) - OpenAI Locks in Massive Chip Partnerships (27:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (57:02) - Palmer Luckey is an American entrepreneur and inventor best known as the founder of ModRetro and Anduril Industries, pioneering work that spans retro technology design and cutting-edge defense systems. (01:45:51) - Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, discusses the company's recent acquisition of Echo, emphasizing its role in streamlining on-chain capital formation and enhancing economic freedom. He highlights the potential for integrating Echo's platform into Coinbase to facilitate efficient fundraising for entrepreneurs, aiming to democratize access to capital and support the growth of innovative projects. Armstrong also reflects on the challenges of traditional fundraising processes and envisions a future where on-chain solutions simplify and expedite capital raising for startups. (01:59:51) - Brian Chesky is an American entrepreneur and designer best known as the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, where he transformed the way people travel and experience hospitality worldwide. (02:39:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:46:12) - Stuart Landesberg, an entrepreneur with over 15 years in technology, founded Seneca to address the outdated equipment used by firefighters, aiming to enhance their capabilities with modern technology. He discusses the development of autonomous suppression copters designed to rapidly respond to wildfires, carrying 500-pound payloads to contain fires before they escalate. Landesberg emphasizes that these drones are intended to support, not replace, firefighters by providing rapid aerial response in situations that are unsafe, inefficient, or impossible for human crews. (02:59:24) - Daniel Glassman, leading Samsung's new business development team across TV and mobile, discusses the integration of AI features into Samsung's 2025 smart TVs, including a dedicated AI button providing access to services like Perplexity and Copilot. He highlights the potential for communal AI experiences, such as planning trips or home renovations, directly from the TV screen, aiming to enhance user engagement and streamline interactions. Glassman also addresses the challenge of balancing feature expansion with user-friendly design, emphasizing the importance of creating frictionless experiences through intuitive interfaces like voice commands and dedicated remote buttons. (03:04:55) - Harrison Chase, co-founder and CEO of LangChain, discusses the company's evolution from an open-source project to a comprehensive agent engineering platform, highlighting the recent $125 million funding round at a $1.25 billion valuation. He emphasizes the importance of building reliable, mission-critical AI agents and introduces LangSmith, a platform designed to enhance agent development through improved debugging, evaluation, and deployment capabilities. Chase also addresses the challenges of agent reliability and the need for human-in-the-loop interactions to ensure effective AI applications. (03:19:56) - 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Tuesday, October 21st, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  It is good to be back.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Massive news out of OpenAI. They launched their browser. It had been rumored for weeks now, months now. The browser wars have been heating up. Perplexity has been in the game.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Thought they were over.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  DIA Browser, Browser Company, has since been acquired since all of this was going down. OpenAI dropped a trailer announcing the browser, which is called Atlas.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  By the way, the Atlassian Browser Company acquisition just closed today.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  It was announced.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Atlassian versus, so Atlassian owns a browser and OpenAI's browser is called Atlas.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  They keep doing that.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Remember they did that with Google I/O?

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  I/O.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  I/O, I Y O. Interesting. Taking shots. Well, I'd love to play the video from OpenAI announcing their browser, Atlas. Do we have that video? Let's play it. Here we go.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  I like the different sound cues. This one. It sounds kind of like typing on an iPhone.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's, it sounds exactly like.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Is that what it sounds like? Okay. I turn, it's funny. I like the sound cue in videos, but I turn it, I certainly turn the sound off on my actual phone. So I don't actually hear it very regularly. So this is, you're on AllTrails. Is that the website? So you're in Coursera and you're saying cheat on my homework. Wall Street Journal summarizes for me. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal actually has AI summaries now in every article, just a couple of bullet points. There, I don't go to them a lot, though.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Interesting. That looks like a Gmail.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  That is going to be a kind of a wild interaction. I feel like the war, the browser war is less significant than the war for like my actual email because every time I'm in Gmail, I'm getting all these different pop-ups from like, Apple Intelligence is saying like, do you want to rewrite this with Apple Intelligence? And then Gemini is like, do you want to rewrite this with Gemini? And now OpenAI is going to be like, actually, we want to be the ones to rewrite your bullet points into paragraphs and vice versa.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  And comments like, we will pay you $20 a month to use this.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  We will pay you to rewrite your bullet points. So does some online shopping. Tyler, were you, were you successful in your prompt? Give me your review. You actually downloaded this thing?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right. Yeah. So.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  How would you describe ChatGPT Atlas?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, people are saying, you know, it's a new browser. It's not just a browser. I think it's kind of a whole new way to really use the internet.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  Browse the web.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  To browse the web.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  To browse the web.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  But so the first thing I tried, I wanted to try to use the new agent mode.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  So you were successful. It's not a beta. You just were able to get it immediately.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can download.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  So it's not like Sora where you needed like an invite code or anything.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think it's right now. It's only available to pro and plus users. But you can just download it.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  And you have to log in with an OpenAI account?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's just the same thing under the hood and maybe no different inference thing? We can get into that. But yeah, what was your experience?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the first thing I tried was, I just want to use the agent mode stuff that's like, like really what's what's new here. So I tried to buy a Unitree robot and then it went.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  And so you open it up, new tab just gives you a prompt. You can type a URL or a prompt. You type a prompt.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  And your prompt is buy.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  I think I said.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  One unitree, please. Gabe in the chat says it's Mac only.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many of ChatGPT's 800 million weekly actives do you think are?

• 3:46John Coogan?

  It's not the weekly actives though. This is just for the paid users. And I bet a lot of the paid users are on Mac disproportionately, for sure.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  And definitely pro users.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Name a pro user.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, but they're trying to go out, I mean, they're trying to go after Microsoft.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  You think they're going after the PC Master Race? The desktop, desktop?

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, just a lot of people use PCs in the workplace.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Ah, I don't know.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Or Linux.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Linux, yeah. Well, uh.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to deny, you're trying to deny that people use PCs?

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the penetration, I mean, it's the same thing for like when you launch an, when you launch an app. Uh, you know, you always, like, Sora is iPhone only.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  I know, but iPhone Android is different than Mac PC for trying to build large-scale internet products.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think it's pretty close. I think it's closer than you'd think. Anyway, Tyler, what else did you, how, how successful were you?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think I said, go buy Unitree Robot, and then first thing it goes to is Amazon.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Um, it failed. I, I think.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, how did it fail?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I think it was when it was trying to do customize, like it loaded the page correctly, which I was a little bit surprised by because, uh, people have said that it, it's been blocking a lot of the search.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you would imagine that this is, since this is happening in a browser, it, the user agent is just like Chrome browser or Chromium or something like that. And it looks and it feels like a normal user interaction. Yeah, it's puppeteered by AI, but in general, you're, like, if you're the web server, you're just seeing, oh, so, like, like Tyler, who sends in, you know, one Amazon, get request to some webpage every once in a while, just send in another one. This doesn't look suspicious. It's not like, uh, you know, some deep research query where it's firing off like 50 queries really quickly, so.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Seems reasonable. Okay, so it loads it.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  For some reason it didn't work and then.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  What do you mean it didn't work? Like, it's not available on Amazon or?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  It said, so I think it was like during, you can press like customize and it just said error.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Error, okay.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And then it went to a different site.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Um, but then eventually, I mean, it went through the whole flow and got to the button where you do like confirm.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Um, but I, one cool thing they added was, uh, when you do the agent, you can choose to either be logged in or logged out all your accounts.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  So, um.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a new browser, so you have to log into everything. You'd have to log into your Amazon, log into your Netflix or whatever.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  I, I think, uh, you can very easily port them over.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, from like your previous Chrome? Oh, yeah, you could save all the cookies or something. Interesting. Huh.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  But.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Chat agrees with you, Jordy, by the way. Everyone says enterprise runs on Windows and you're right about the PCs. I still disagree, but we'll see.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  Just, you're right.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Hey, just because I didn't say you're right. I said chat thinks you're right. And, uh, yeah, I disagree with you and chat now. Bite me. Well, uh, car, uh, car.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think we can, like, the, the facts are the facts and then we can disagree on whether or not it matters.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So does it matter? Uh, we did, will, will this be successful?

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  I, so, so here, here's, here's, here's, here's the, uh, here's what I believe.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  I believe that chat GPT, especially once it had like some close to live search.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Was five to 10 times better than Google search.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  For a lot of searches.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  And my prediction is that Atlas in its current form might be 1.1 times better than Chrome.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  And that will not be enough to get large scale consumer adoption. Granted, I haven't used the product yet.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  I need to, uh, get access to it after the show today and play around with it.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, it's very different creating a product that's 10 times better and competing in that market, competing in search, which was like the browser, basically a monopoly.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so again, I'm not, uh, I'm not super bullish, but I think it's great that they're taking a big shot on goal and it makes sense strategically.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking for a product that's, that is 10 times better, go to ramp.com, time is money, say both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Um, I agree with you. I think that, uh, like, if, if I'm comparing, like, what the deep research experience of the GPT five pro experience is to a Google search, it's like you're searching for, you know, the story of, like, the history of the browser wars, let's say. And you might wind up on one webpage that kind of put it together. And then you might be on a Wikipedia page and you have a million tabs up and you're tabbing through them all. And GPT five pro just summarizes that all into a nice little dossier and it's a great experience. I agree with you on the five to 10x better than the typical, like, open a million tabs. Now.

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and historically.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  You could get what would have taken you navigating through a bunch of Reddit comments

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  And kind of summarizing them in your head, you could get that in a quick block of text.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Now.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  That was remarkably.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  The question is, um, on the browser, like, how sticky is the actual browser? Because if, if browsers just aren't sticky at all, people will upgrade to something that's 10% better. But I have a feeling that they're pretty sticky. I feel like people feel like their, uh, their, their bookmarks are locked up, all their logins are in one thing. But at the same time, I've been running this weird, this weird combo for years of Chrome on desktop, Safari on mobile. And I feel like that's very, I, I, I guess it's somewhat common, some people do it, but it doesn't, it doesn't really make sense because you'd think you'd want one unified browser across desktop and, uh, and phone. And it's not like I'm not using Mac products. I'm using a MacBook and an iPhone.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  And so you'd think I'd either use Safari on both or, uh, or Chrome on both. But I've never been a single browser. So I feel like getting me to install this and use it is not that difficult. I don't know. I feel like as long as it has most of the same features and it's feature complete, which like I need pin tabs, I need to be able to hit Ctrl T to open a new tab. There's a few other features that are probably valuable. But as long as it has those, I'd probably be down to try it. And then if I tried it, I'd probably stick around for a while. But the question is like, would I, would I, like, what's the activation energy for people? Because you need to convince them like, hey, let's.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  Kari had a, had a good post earlier, uh, at 9:00 AM, uh, saying, me, my daily driver in a peaceful corner of the internet, Safari power user.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Safari power user. I wonder if I should switch to Safari on desktop. What do you use?

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Chrome desktop. I've gone back and forth from using Safari on mobile and Chrome on mobile.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  Um, I think they're both fine. I just don't do a lot of web browsing on, on mobile.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  You don't?

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Like here or there, but like for

• 10:32John Coogan?

  That's so funny. I feel like I'm always opening webpages on my phone.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, opening them briefly, but oftentimes it's within another app.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so that's why Safari is fine. Cause if you open, especially if you're in the Safari web view, like you open, if you open a link in X and it's the Wall Street Journal and you're logged in in Safari, that login transfers. Whereas if you're logged in in Chrome, it doesn't transfer that I'm aware of, or that was a big problem for a while. I do, I do wonder, uh, the new liquid glass update to Safari is terrible and I really don't like it.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  And I, I mean, liquid glass, we can all agree is just terrible.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Like the, uh, I've had my new phone for a while now, and the only nice thing I have to say is that the camera is a little bit better.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  And everything else about the phone in totality, in my view, is worse. Like it feels, it feels cheap. It's getting dinged, dinged up constantly already. The software overall, every single time I'm in a new place in iOS, I'm like, oh, thank you. You made it worse.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  You made it different and it's worse.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the fact that they went from it to open a new tab in Safari before liquid glass was just one click, I think. And now it went to two clicks, something like that. So every time I want to view the tabs, I have to click two buttons. And I'm like, this is just so frustrating. And I was using someone who had, uh, Google Chrome in liquid glass on a new iPhone. And good, the Google Chrome app on liquid glass still has the ability to just launch a new tab with one button, with one click. And I was like, this is so refreshing. I maybe I should go back to this, but, uh, anyway, a whole bunch of, whole bunch of news around OpenAI. There was a massive long read.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  And first of all, let's say thank you to Sam Altman for constantly creating content.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  It really is like the bull market in tech news. There's always something to talk about.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Always.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  A Sam story.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Always something.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, today Jim Cramer read the piece we're about to talk about. He said, Wall Street Journal's OpenAI piece makes you realize Sam Altman must succeed. Or he could be a real problem for an otherwise sterling industry, dot, dot, dot.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, uh, OpenAI has been doing a stream. Let's hope they're using restream.io. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are. Let's uh, let's look through the Wall Street Journal piece. There was one big scoop in here that I wanted to get to. I had a whole take on this. My, my thesis and uh, we were sort of debating this is that um, Sam Altman is kind of becoming the preeminent deals guy of the modern tech era. He's done so many deals at such a huge scale for such a young company. He's a young founder, young CEO. He's only forty. Um, and now like the deals are so big and they're coming so quickly that a lot of people are asking like the timelines wondering like,

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  People are nervous.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Is Sam just so good at deals that all the counterparties are actually making mistakes by tying their fortunes to OpenAI? Uh, and OpenAI's aggressive forecast. Like if OpenAI doesn't deliver and Oracle does all the build out, but then or uh, OpenAI doesn't have the revenue, is Oracle in trouble? That's the narrative right now. And so uh, we love to use the fox in the hen house analogy around here. It's too funny to pass up.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  I could go out on a limb and say it might be our favorite analogy.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  It's such a good one. We're big into animals here with the horse, the fox, uh, the fox in the hen house.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's our next sculpture. We have the horse.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  We need a fox in the hen house for sure. With the fox going inside or looking and yeah, I want that. Uh, but that is a pretty good analogy here. So uh, you know, if OpenAI ends up getting the fox's share of value from deals with Nvidia, AMD, Oracle and SoftBank. Like, I don't exactly feel bad for Jensen, Lisa Su, Larry uh, and Masa because the primary job of a CEO is to defend the hen house from foxes. Like that's your job if you're a CEO. So just saying, oh, Sam's a good deals guy and he's like getting these people to do these crazy deals. Like that's not, that's not enough. Like the other part, the, the, the counterparty needs to make good decision-making here and not risk themselves. So the question is like,

• 14:47John Coogan?

  why are these deals happening? Uh, I don't think Sam's gotten any fox here now that he's forty. He's gonna be a silver fox.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  But he's always been a great dealmaker, right? He's always been a great dealmaker. Back to the YC days, back to, you know, solving log jams with founders and VCs. There's so many, there's so many examples of this throughout his career. Even going back to his very first company where he got, he got looped, acquired when the company wasn't doing that well, it was sort of one of the first Aqua hires that turned out really well. He went, he made out well financially out of that. But now everything has three, four, five extra zeros after it. And I think that the reason isn't just that he's become a better dealmaker, it's that he actually has more leverage now. He has a lot more leverage. And so.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  When you have the breakout consumer product of a generational tech trend.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  You have a lot of leverage.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Yes, and you've been saying.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and yeah, so I was saying to you off, off air, if you're running AMD or Nvidia or Oracle or any hyperscaler, you know, computing company, and you have to go in front of shareholders and they're asking you, are we doing anything with OpenAI? The company that scaled to over a billion users?

• 16:03John Coogan?

  The thing that will be the next Google, the next Amazon, the next Microsoft.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  And if you have to go in front of them and say no.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're, they're like, okay, what, what, what exactly do you do?

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Why, yeah, yeah, why are you missing this? And so I, I, I think that that's a good framework, but what do all the hyperscalers have in common? They all have monopolies over whatever market they're in, whether that's search, whether that's online shopping, whether that's, you know, the, the, the enterprise software stack that Microsoft has been able to monopolize in many ways. And this is the, this is the teal monopoly thesis. And Sam Altman, you know, he's basically created a new aggregator. So ChatGPT has, has captured enough of the consumer market that they now control demand at a very high level. This is what Google's done. This is what Meta has done. And that affords them an incredible amount of leverage in every negotiation. And that's why Meta has taken so much of the lion's share of the ad market and the

• 16:56John Coogan?

  D to C market is because they aggregate the demand, they aggregate all the users, all the eyeballs, and then they can point the value where they, where they need to. And so they can take a large, a large cut. And Ben Thompson was actually road testing this. Theory that OpenAI could swap out the underlying model and still accrue the vast majority of of value. So hypothetically, you could have ChatGPT, Chat.com powered not by GPT-5, but instead powered by Gemini or Claude and still see positive user growth monetization. Because at the end of the day, most of the users aren't there for the model. They're there for the app. They're there for the ecosystem. They're there for the platform now.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Uh, and so if if OpenAI is potentially going to be successful in building monopoly of the consumer AI level layer, uh, what's the strategy for the supply chain? So, uh, Joel Spolski in 2002, uh, coined this phrase commoditize your complements. And so anything that complements your product, you want to be a commodity so that it can bring more content onto the platform. This was the thesis behind Meta Open Sourcing Llama. If it's free to generate content, there will be more content on the platform. Just like the Sony camera, you know, commoditize the video production made more content for YouTube. And so, uh, that means that OpenAI needs to partner with multiple cloud partners, Microsoft, Oracle,

• 18:16John Coogan?

  multiple data center builders. You got Oracle CoreWeave, N scale, uh, Crusoe, multiple GPU designers, Nvidia and AMD, multiple foundries, maybe TSMC. Sam was saying TSMC does not produce enough chips. Maybe Intel's coming into the picture, maybe Samsung.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  There there's a whole bunch of other options there. And so not every link in the supply chain can be fully commoditized though. Because some of these like there are only so many GPU designers.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  And so if there's only if there's only two major players, AMD and Nvidia, you need to balance them out so that they have similar margins and are in direct competition.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  And so the memory market historically was a commodity market, but the players like, uh, SK Hynix are now telling shareholders like, we actually think that this new computing wave will, uh, make that no longer the case.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And so so there there's a little bit of this, uh, Desire to create an anti Nvidia alliance right now. Nvidia ramped full year revenue in 2023 was 27 billion, in 2024 was 60 billion, and in 2025 is 130 billion. So just a massive revenue ramp, but during that time, net profit margin went from 16% to 56%, like insane profit growth. And so, so you have this company that's just printing cash. All of their partners are looking at them, whether they're Google with a TPU program, Amazon with Tranium, OpenAI.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Sam's looking at that margin profile, just being like, Jensen, I'm so happy.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Does it have to be 56%? Why can't it be 30%? That's what AWS makes. That's what Azure makes roughly. That's what GCP makes roughly. Like, everyone's doing 30% around here. You're doing 56% in your hen house. Like, why don't we get a fox?

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  The whole industry is losing money. And they're like, we're trying to find the one guy that's making money.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  And they see Jensen, he's absolutely printing.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  If only there were another plate that we could eat off of. And Jensen's just there with like the massive Thanksgiving dinner on his plate. And you're like, I'd like to eat off of that plate, actually. And so everyone's kind of incentivized to like work against Nvidia. And that's the, and that's kind of the, the, the, the evidence of the leverage that's happening right now that was in this Wall Street Journal article by Berber Jin. And so the quote says, "As part of the deal, Nvidia is also discussing, just discussing guaranteeing some of the loans that OpenAI plans to build, to take out to build its own data centers." People familiar with the matter said, "A move that could saddle the chip giant with billions of dollars in debt obligations if the startup can't pay for them."

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Papa Jensen's cosigning.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  It's cosigning the lease.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like cosigning a mortgage with your parents, basically. It's like, you know, I have 13 billion in revenue or whatever OpenAI has, and they have 130 billion in revenue. It's high margin. We're losing money. They're making money. So let's put them on the, on the loan docs and they'll back us up. And now, this can work out great if there's huge demand, it can be fine. But at the same time, it is a risk. Otherwise, you'd probably just say, no, I'm good. I don't need to do that. Why would I sign for your loan? Well, the reason is because you have to stay in the game if you're Nvidia. And so dual sourcing is nothing new. It's best practice, but we just haven't seen a push like this happen so fast before.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Like exerting pressure deep into the supply chain is usually a hassle and something tech CEOs only do when they're backed against the wall. And single points of failure creep up really unexpectedly. I think about Apple in China. Like if you were in 2005 and you're Apple, are you really thinking like how advanced, how far in the future would you have to be thinking to be like, wow, I'm really indexed to China. I should start spinning up India and Vietnam. Like that was not something that was top of mind for Steve Jobs and Tim Cook two decades ago. Now it seems obvious. Now it seems like, why aren't you doing this? Why didn't you do this earlier? But, you know, but these things creep up on you. OpenAI is just unique in that they're, they're actually looking years out and saying, well, we want leverage at every single piece of the supply chain,

• 22:20John Coogan?

  all the way down the stack right now. And we want to set up these deals so that we're there when, when it matters in 10 years, in five years, whenever.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  So we should get into the article a little bit because there's a couple.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. What else do you want to read from here?

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Calling out one allegedly when Jensen had heard that Sam was considering buying TPUs.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  That is when he.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  That's another point of leverage.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  They had been basically Sam and Jensen, high level had been working on some type of deal, wasn't really going anywhere. Jensen hears that, that Sam was considering TPUs. He calls Sam and that's when this $100 billion investment, obviously it's structured and in tranches. But that's when it got announced. So it was in reaction to, it was in reaction to this, this interest in TPUs.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  Obviously Jensen wants everybody to, you know, stay.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  And, and I don't think that's a hedge. Like, I don't think that's like, oh, hypothetically, we could run our system on TPUs. Like, I think that they could. They could do it. Like, it doesn't seem like the CUDA lock-in.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  It just does not seem that crazy because we saw this with inference max from semi analysis like GPT OSS runs on AMD, on AMD chips right now, very efficiently on a token per dollar basis. And so you're like, what does it take to get GPT OSS or the frontier model running on TPUs? Like, I don't know, a year?

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  A billion dollars?

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Is it worth it? Absolutely.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  So, so Sam is straying a little bit. He's interested in other options. Jensen says, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, let's, we can figure something out here. Figures out this hundred billion dollar investment.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Two weeks later, Sam announces a deal with AMD.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  And this is, obviously Jensen would have been incredibly frustrated by this for a number of reasons. His reaction, very presidential, was, I saw the deal. It's imaginative. It's unique and surprising, considering they were so excited about their next generation product. I'm surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it. Anyhow, it's clever, I guess. So that is a very presidential way of saying. He's incredibly frustrated, in my view. So imaginative, unique, surprising. I'm surprised. It's clever, I guess.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  And, I mean.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  And so, so anyway, I mean, look, like, Sam is doing what he needs to do. Jensen is doing what he needs to do, but they're playing, they're playing, you know, a game of high stakes chess with the global economy. As far as I.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, high stakes hen house control. In the farm, on the barnyard. It really is a barnyard, because the fox goes in the hen house and then the piggies are at the trough. And the trough is on the barn. It's all barns and we're, you know, we're just riding by on our stallions.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  The world is a farm.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  The world is a farm. This is a great analogy. We need to, we need to, we need to flesh out farm theory.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  We need a.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Yes, on the whiteboard. For sure. We need to have the full farming map mapped out. 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. Transactions that integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. I have one last thing on the Wall Street Journal article. Uh, if we can pull it back up and scroll down. Uh, Berber Jin is a, is a journalist who, who writes very fact-based, uh, heavily sourced articles. Um, but, uh, and it's not, it's not an op-ed. It's not his hot takes, but if you look at the images that they chose, you can really understand what's going on here. Because the picture of Jensen that they picked for this article is insane, in my opinion.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  It's like him looking through this blurred glass and he's like, uh, and he's like, kind of touching his temple, like stressed. It's just like, it's just like a crazy, crazy image. Um, but, uh, I don't know.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he looks kind of like he's like wiping a tear away from his eye.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Uh, and I mean, all the, all the images in here, like even the SoftBank OpenAI one, they picked like the darkest image possible to show. Uh, Sam and Masa just like completely in silhouette. It's very ominous, like there's a lot of editorial stuff.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  This line from, uh, Lisa Su asking Sam, can I call you an AI icon?

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI has truly been at the center of the universe. She went on to tell the crowd, everyone listens to what Sam Altman has to say.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is, which is true. Yeah, they picked a much cooler picture for Lisa than Jensen.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lisa looks very heroic, shot from a low angle, very highly lit, very, uh, very brightly lit, smiling, you know, looking authoritative with her, uh, her Rolex, of course, but also her, uh, her microphone there. Uh, she looks great and Jensen is looking a little bit stressed. Uh, but who knows? These, these things can flip back and forth on the turn of a dime. Um, but we are clearly in the deals guy era. Let's go to this Jeremy Giffon post, but first let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So Jeremy Giffon, we've highlighted this before, but it's more relevant than ever.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Jeremy says, we're firmly in the deals guy era, the deal guy era. You can raise venture to make deals. You can do foreign policy via deals, build, build frontier tech via deals. We're trading off stability for dynamism. It's unclear if it's long-term optimal, but it's certainly more fun. I couldn't agree more. And Will Manitis quotes it and says, "The modern deal guy has no permanent capital, no permanent loyalty, and no permanent location. The modern deal guy is playing a repeated game. He doesn't care who he pisses off. There's going to be another hand. The modern deal guy is much more a broker than a principal. He has an ecosystem around him that he identifies as his guys."

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it used to be, it used to just be able to be good at fundraising and that made you a good deals guy.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  No. So, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because like, how much can you really learn from, from, uh, from Sam? Because obviously, it's a, like, he is very good at deals, but he also wound up, you know, building an aggregator, building an incredibly dominant consumer product that, that gave him a lot of chips on the table. And then he's very effective at playing the game on the table. But, like, it would just be a very different story if he was third in the market, you know? And he was like, "Yeah, I got 8%, uh, I got 8% market share. And my apps are at number 25 instead of number one and number two." Anyway.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, so I posted right before we got on the show, I posted, "Atlas isn't just a web browser. It's an entirely new way to browse the web."

• 29:12John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 29:13Jordi Hays?

  And a number of people don't get the joke.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  And are saying, and are like quoting it and saying like, "This was written by ChatGPT."

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, that's the, that's the whole joke.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Someone else says, "That's exactly what a browser does."

• 29:27John Coogan?

  I do have an interesting update on this. So, uh, ChatGPT is famous for using M dashes. You can actually go into your custom instructions and tell it to never use M dashes, remove all M dashes, just use commas or periods if you don't like M dashes. Uh, it doesn't really work, but I think it, I think it might steer it a little bit in the right direction. The other thing is that, uh, we've been, we've been identifying that whole, "It's not this, it's that, not a blank, but a blank," uh, syntax. I was wondering, like, what is that syntax? Apparently, it's called antithetical parallelism, or contrastive construction, or correlative conjunction pairs. And so, that's what you want to avoid, uh, because ChatGPT has truly beaten that dead horse completely.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  And if you use antithetical parallelism, even just accidentally, everyone's going to be like, you use chat GPT. So you just have to remove antithetical parallelism from your vocabulary, from your writing style, uh, which is unfortunate, but uh, some things, sometimes things get killed off. And so the, the, the meta of online writing has moved on. And so just, just don't use those because uh, no matter how authentic your, your writing is, people will just assume that you use chat GPT.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Will the Pew says, enjoy the vague posting while it lasts, my friends. Soon all the AGI companies go public and ruin an ice shit posts are also called security violations. Martin Shkreli says jail is not so bad.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  That's incredible. I, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, apparently.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny because OpenAI is uh, some, somebody at OpenAI Legal is going to probably send this to Will, his post to him and be like, hey, look, like a lot of people are going to read into this that going to go public soon.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I don't know, something about the culture there is, is, is pretty awesome because they still haven't made Will delete the infinite chess post.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Which is just incredible because like, I mean, posting that while Sora's on the, on the, on the roadmap is one thing. You might just be like, hey, Will, you might want to delete that. Like, we're going to do the infinite chess thing. But leaving it up is extremely bold. So I like that from a corporate comms perspective. I think that's actually a bull case. Before we move on, let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Our next post comes from Jacob Rintamaki.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Genuine question. For VC firms invested in both frontier model labs and coding application layer companies, how do you handle the discrepancy between the two? Since coding is number one on the roadmap of the labs versus other products which are more adjacent. What do you think? He's asking John Ludig, who did not reply, for how Founders Fund thinks about cognition plus OpenAI, and then Thrive is also in OpenAI and Cursor, right? And so there are a number of firms that are in the foundation model, which actively wants to be in coding, and then also the application layer. I mean, I think-

• 32:25Jordi Hays?

  I think it's similar. I think it's, if you're a company, I don't think there's huge downside here.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:31Jordi Hays?

  Like, VCs tend to give immense support for their winners.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  And I haven't, I haven't historically seen a lot of, you know, ultimately, I can see some potential upside, right, in helping sort of like manage some of these relationships, right? And back channel, things like that. But not a whole, not a whole lot of downside.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  I think, I think something similar might have happened with Palantir and Databricks, which had some same investors, actually. But there was this thesis of like, well, if Databricks is the database layer and they allow you to do AI on top of that, like, what is Palantir's role? And they, and they, they kind of wound up partnering. And, and Databricks does do some forward deployment implementations. They do build some software, but Palantir's been much more focused on actual, go into an organization, build a piece of enterprise software effectively that uses Palantir's systems to speed things up, but then leave behind, you know, basically like an enterprise software system that lives within the organization.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Whereas, most of the database companies are not really thinking about it that way. So I, I think that there might be more of a bifurcation between what the, what the, what the application, the coding application layer companies are doing, actually solving business problems, building software that then stays there, and they act almost like, more like New McKinsey than like new coding application. And so they're kind of squeezing the market from both sides. And I would see OpenAI as disruptive to like the, I don't even know if it's like the AWSs of the world or something, but it's more, it's more like at the tool layer, swap it out whenever you want.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  And at this side, you're more like partnering with an organization that's, that's-

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Helping you actually build a system.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  I think as venture investors want to become, want to invest in companies that become so successful that they launch products that ultimately compete in a bunch of different adjacent categories and ultimately compete with- A range of their portfolio companies like that is ultimately what success looks like.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  And I do think, um, yeah, I mean, uh, something, something I've been thinking about a lot is this dynamic between anthropic, where all of their revenue comes from having the best coding model.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Which is very different than having a lot of revenue because you have a hit consumer product because you have to keep training the next model. Whereas otherwise, your application layer companies that are using the API.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's say they're, they're coding based application company. They'll just switch to the next best model, right? It's like very easy to switch out. And so I don't think the kind of competitive overlap between investing in, for example, like anthropic and investing in, I, I just think it's like totally fair game for VCs to, to back, uh, both out of the same fund.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta automated compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. We were talking about VCs, we have a post from a VC here, Mark Andreessen. He says pets.com is the go-to slur of the dot com era. Let's see, pets.com burned $182 million of total investor capital before going bust. Today, just US online pet goods sales is $38 billion a year. 70 billion total market cap, including portions of Amazon and Walmart.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  Lesson, should have invested more in pets.com. I mean, that, that's the takeaway here. Like this was, in my view, that's my takeaway is like, makes sense to take a really big swing at it. What became a $38 billion.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Market.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Like it, you know, I, I have no idea.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  If they were set up for success. I mean, when, when did Chewy start? We had Ryan Cohen on, uh, from, uh, GameStop yesterday. If you haven't, uh, gone to listen to that, please give it a listen.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  2011.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  2011. So, and pets.com is probably over 10 years earlier. Yeah, a lot of these ideas, they just took, they just took a decade. They took the internet actually getting built. They took Stripe, they took online payments getting built. The friction was just so crazy that, you know, what are you underwriting? If it's a hundred, I mean. How much do you think they built, they burned in their last year at pets.com? Probably 150 million of that was burned in the final year, maybe 100 million of that. And so you're not just saying 182 million and then you could have stuck around for an extra decade. It's like, probably be spending 100 million a year for 10 years to get to a place where you're ready to actually ramp the business.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, there were a bunch of examples of that. MP3.com was basically Spotify.

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know this, but Amazon actually bought a 54% stake in pets.com.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  No way.

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  Early 1999.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  54%, wow. That's a, that's a lot. I wonder how much they paid. It was probably worth it. I mean, do you, I wonder if they got like some assets during bankruptcy, some customer lists? I wonder, I wonder what the final accounting on the pets.com.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, pets, pets.com is now owned by PetSmart, which also owns Chewy.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, they bought Chewy? I thought Chewy was public.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  I think they.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Oh, they, they, they did like a take private or something? I, I thought Chewy was one of the companies that got out and was doing well in the public markets.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it was acquired.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  It was acquired.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  But maybe taken public later.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Interesting. Oh, weird. Huh. Well, it's a 15.29 billion dollar company on public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. We got multi-asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. AWS was down yesterday. We were fighting for our lives on this stream. We thank you for sticking it out with us. We had to do some in-person interviews, some, some phone interviews, but we had a fun time and we kept everything up. There's a little bit of a postmortem. U.S. East is down from Syriac and it's, uh, what, what exactly is this image from? Is this like Rome falling? Is this the fall of Rome? This is very, uh, blackpilling. But services have been largely restored.

• 38:34John Coogan?

  The outage disrupted services from retailers to airline, social media apps and financial services companies.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  Do we know what caused it yet?

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Wasn't it database migration or something? Some data, oh no, DNS configuration, I think was the, was the root. Something like that. The outage began around 3:00 AM Eastern Time when Amazon made a technical update to a widely used AWS database service, DynamoDB. The update, which included an incorrect domain name service or DNS information for DynamoDB, kicked the database offline in Amazon's critically important Northern Virginia data centers with DynamoDB out in the region. Other AWS services began failing too. In total, 113 AWS services were affected by the outage, 32 of which had been restored by 10:30 AM ET on Monday. Not a bunch of stuff we use, not a bunch of vibe coding Tyler had done.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, all of the internal software that Tyler's built for the show was down.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  Really exposed to insane dependency.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  So we're taking it on prem.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we gotta go on prem for sure. We, I, this was my take yesterday. We're going back to sticks and stones. We're going back to pen and paper, baby. The computer revolution is over. AI is dead. We're going back to typewriters.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Did you know the story of James Hamilton?

• 39:55John Coogan?

  No. Who's that?

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  This is, uh, this account Tuxedo Sam.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Okay, break this down for me. Well, you pull that up. I need to make sure this. I'll tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. If you're creating fault tolerance in your organization, you probably need Graphite to review your pull requests.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  So Tuxedo Sam says, meet James Hamilton. He's Amazon's literal very top engineer, the brain behind all the data centers. He lives in a custom yacht and does not give an F about any RTO.

• 40:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 40:26Jordi Hays?

  And then apparently he was behind.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, like.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  Is this, is this real?

• 40:36John Coogan?

  Uh, there's a community note on this. So it, it claims that his lot, his yacht made landfall and this is like.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. Fake news.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  But it was digitally altered. It was fake news. Moving on, we got some massive news from Brian Armstrong, who's coming on the stream in just uh, maybe half an hour, an hour.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  This, this was making waves yesterday after we got off the show.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  This was a hot topic.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  There uh, is a podcast called Up Only.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  That retired at one point.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Yes. So I listened to this during the last crypto boom in like 2021, 2022, whenever he was going and I found it hilarious. Kobe was very, very funny. Uh, and it was just a very interesting nuanced take. They were very much like self-aware of the hype, but then also like giving, you know, some advice, but not direct financial advice. I thought it was just a great show. I think a lot of people loved it. Uh, and they put up an NFT and it said, if you, if anyone buys this NFT for $25 million, we will produce another season of Up Only. And so the holder of this, this is the uh, the image here. Uh, the holder of this admission ticket can compel Kobe and Ledger status into performing like monkeys.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Eight episodes of Up Only TV. It does not convey any sponsorship rights. So this is not a sponsorship deal. And we are allowed to call you idiots for buying it or ignore you completely with zero mentions of your existence during our eight episode season. We get to pick the guests, but if we like you, then we might ask you for some suggestions. And Brian Armstrong chimes in saying, the rumors are true. We bought the NFT Up Only TV is coming back.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  Million dollars.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  And of course.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  And so Kobe said, sir, you should fire whoever approved this. And Brian says, don't spend it all at once.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then of course today, uh, Coinbase and Kobe announced that Coinbase is acquiring Echo.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Echo is an angel list like platform.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for crypto. So they help uh, groups of people invest in different projects.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they paid 375 million. And so you can think of this as a effectively a $400 million.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, acquisition. But uh, yeah, I thought, I thought it was wild. That, that the announcement that they paid $25 million for eight podcast episodes.

• 42:53Jordi Hays?

  Was circulating group chats yesterday.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  And didn't fully make sense. It felt like a really big price to pay for goodwill, right? Obviously, people wanted it to come back. It makes a lot. And then, and then the pushback was like, you know, I saw a post, somebody saying, imagine you're a Coinbase employee and you just got passed up for, you know, a promotion or your bonus wasn't as good as you were hoping. And then you see that the management team spent 25 million on an NFT. Obviously, it makes a lot more sense. And we have Brian Armstrong coming on to talk about the deal in about an hour.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  We do. Quickly, let me check the poly market on what price will Bitcoin hit in 2025? The chance that it hits $1 million is at 1%. Can you imagine if that happens? That'd be wild. Consensus seems to be that it might hit 130, but it might trade down to 90.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  We will see.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  There's a lot of activity there.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  Atlas, Atlas would be a beautiful name for a baby browser.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Atlas said, please, for the love of God, ask Chesky what his one rep max bench press is.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  This got 1.3 thousand likes.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  And that will be our opening question.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  That'll be our opening question. We have to ask that.

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  What is your one rep max?

• 44:06John Coogan?

  But the Coinbase thing was a real, was a real roller coaster. Because yeah, it seemed like paying 3 million for a single episode, 25 for eight. That seems crazy. But I came around and I wind up loving it because if Coinbase, Coinbase is a huge company, 88 billion dollar market cap. And I feel like in crypto, there's a lot of companies that the general world is just not that aware of. And a $400 million acquisition, that's incredible. But at the same time, like, there's a lot of big numbers getting thrown around. There's companies that are raising $100 million seed rounds. They're all, Sam Altman's out there doing $100 billion deals. And so, how do you actually break through with the news of a $400 million acquisition if you just want to tell the broad community, like, we exist and this, we did

• 44:49John Coogan?

  this? Well, one way is to structure it such that a beloved founder, podcast host is coming back and you're doing this funny thing in this NFT. And even if it's all just structured in a normal acquisition and it's all part of the headline number.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  Natalia says, yeah, best crypto podcast by far.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Agrees.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  And so I, yeah, I just, I think that it's such a creative way to get a little bit more attention on an acquisition that would have been, would have been cool, but it wouldn't have been like a, like a, it wouldn't have, it wouldn't have had a narrative to it where people were like, this is crazy. Oh, it actually all makes sense now. So it was a really good Mission Impossible rip off the mask Coinbase isn't actually crazy. They're not actually paying 25 million just for a podcast there. And when I think about a founder coming into Coinbase, that, you know, the typical thing is like resting, investing, like bringing back a podcast, letting them do eight episodes. That seems like a really, a really fun way to kind of welcome themselves to the Coinbase ecosystem. They can, you know, do a lot of cool stuff there. So I

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  T J Parker was highlighting one of the most iconic quotes from a tech CEO this century from Chesky said, I was basically going room to room, just pouring out this stream of consciousness manifesto like Jack Kerouac writing on the road. I basically said, we're not just a vacation app. We're going to M dash, we're going to be a platform, a community.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  What's funny is like, I think of Airbnb as a community from like day one. I think that it's actually like started as a community and then like, maybe we became more of a platform.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  But what does community, what does community mean though?

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Uh, community means like it's a place to meet people and like in the early days, like in 2012, 2013, when I was using Airbnb, like I met my co-founders on Airbnb. I met in Y C because there was one listing for an Airbnb that was listed and there was like, we're going through Y C. And I was like, I want to live with people that are going through Y C because they'll be on the same cadence of like staying up all night, working basically and like not, not going out. Whereas if you, if you live with somebody who's like making six figures at Google, they're going to be like, let's, let's go to the park on the weekend.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. My, my pushback would be that maybe the last 10 times I've used Airbnb, it was to book a vacation rental.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  And I didn't necessarily want to meet the host.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  That's what I mean about it.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  I know some people, some people are excited.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  And then just

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  But, but that being said, like my, my lovely aunt, she likes to book like A studio on a house.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:16Jordi Hays?

  In when she's traveling in Europe.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  On a bigger property and actually meet.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, also, once I was traveling and I was staying in an Airbnb in New York and it was very clear that the the owner of the house like wanted to meet me and like wanted to like make friends and in that in that context, I was like, I don't, I don't, I don't know. Like, I I'm here on a business trip now. I kind of don't want to make a new friend. Um, you seem cool, but like I'm good. Uh, and so it like the community thing is a little bit tricky to massage. Like, when it works, it can be amazing. Like, I'm literally still friends with people that I met on Airbnb. Like, it very much was a community. Uh, but yes, over time, these things, these these things evolve.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:58John Coogan?

  But, uh, I mean, this, this was the start of the Airbnb 2.0 era, the question of of can you book more than just vacation homes on Airbnb? Is it a thing where you can go and get surf lessons or a dog walker? And then there's all these questions about disintermediation. Yeah, haircut. There's a whole bunch of different things about Airbnb being like the IRL app. Obviously, Yelp has been kind of like sequestered and relegated in the Google flow. Airbnb still has a big audience, but Ben Thompson's critique was always, well, uh, people just don't open the Airbnb app all that much. So most people, like, they don't really have DAUs. They have yearly active users, people that open it once a year and think, oh, I want to go to the mountains. Let me book a vacation. Oh, I want to go to the beach.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Let me book a beach house. Um, it's not like, it's not like an app where people are opening it every day and saying, oh, like, I have some free time. Let me find an option on Airbnb. So this was like, it's a big second act. And so I'm excited to talk to Brian Chesky about it. I'm also excited to tell you about Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Sorry, Jordy, please.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  Nathan Lambert shared a quote from Chesky said, we're relying a lot on Alibaba's Quen model. It's very good. It's also fast and cheap. We use OpenAI's latest models, but we typically don't use them that much in production because they're faster and cheaper models. We can ask him more about open source.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, there's also news in Anthropic world. Apparently Anthropic spent 2.66 billion on Amazon Web Services in the first three quarters of 2025, around 100% of their estimated revenue. I thought their estimated revenue was way higher than that for the first three quarters. That seems off to me.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  I thought they were at a.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  They're scaling just so rapidly.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  I thought they were at like a 10 billion run rate or something. Do you know where roughly?

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  I think they're gonna get there by the end of the year.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  I thought, I thought they were gonna be like around 12, but it was gonna be next year.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  And is that ARR or like projected full year next year?

• 50:02Speaker 02

  That's like the projected next year.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  How weird. I, I, I felt like Anthropic was, was doing well more, well north of 2.66 in the first nine months.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  I had just heard that they had got at some point in the last six months, they'd got to a $4 billion run rate.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  And they were pacing to get.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Jordi Hays?

  To north of 10.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, obviously this is a referendum on, on inference costs. If inference costs fall and, and, and usage, model usage is still growing. The business looks great. If inference gets more expensive for some reason, it's, it's a dangerous place to be. But interesting to see new data points hit the timeline. So, thank you.

• 50:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and something, do you, do you know, this might be a dumb question, but is, is Anthropic, how much are they leaning on AWS for training?

• 50:54John Coogan?

  So, so they, they, they use Trainium, but then they're also using Nvidia. And basically every foundation model lab is using a ton of different, like hyperscalers. Like they have to go wherever the.

• 51:05Jordi Hays?

  And so this article is implying that Anthropic has basically 0% margins, but it's possible that some of, like they're paying to serve and run the models.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:17Jordi Hays?

  For customers, API clients, but they're also training.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So, so if, if 2 billion of this AWS bill was training Claude 6, like, and then that's going to make 20 billion in inference, that's a wildly different thing. But, I mean, truly, like, no one is saying, like, "Oh, bombshell, I thought these foundation model labs were crazy profitable." It's like, no.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, no, we know that Jensen's the only one. Jensen's the only one making money.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Right now, that's not the question. The question is, like, will they turn it around? On what timeline will they turn it around? Will they use Ball? Will they use the generative media platform for developers? The world's best generative image and video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Patrick Collison and Jeff over at Stripe, as well as Haley on their team, announced that you can now fundraise in Stripe Atlas. It's very cool. Stripe Atlas generates a significant amount. I forget the exact percentage, but a meaningful, I think, double-digit percentage of all C corps created are created with Stripe Atlas. Now you can fundraise in the product. You can generate, send, sign, and track safes in a few clicks, according to Jeff. So, very, very cool feature. You know, all the founders out there now, you're pretty much, oftentimes, by the time you're setting up the C corp, you're like actively trying to take money, so it makes sense to.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  Extremely YC-coded. Like, Stripe, one of the earliest YC companies, the safe came out of YC, and they're just like building more and more infrastructure for YC companies that then scales, and taking a really long view, because I'm sure some founder out there is going to raise a bunch of safes and then wind up building a billion-dollar company. And, and doing a lot of painting.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  I believe it's already happened multiple times.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, like, the top-performing Stripe Atlas company is like a banger?

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm sure. They've made so, they've made so many.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  That's true. It's been around for a while right now.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, I, I built this product at Party Round. And it's very, it's very useful. It's not a great business, but it makes sense to, you know, tie it into the, to the Stripe ecosystem.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you think they're going to give this away for free? Is this all just like onboarding into the Stripe ecosystem, basically? Because then you already have your Stripe account set up.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  Basically, Stripe Atlas is basically free. Like, I think it's $3.99 to create a company.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  $3.99.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  $399. So, yeah, I would assume this is free.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's pretty, pretty cheap.

• 53:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is great.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  That's cool. Yeah, they probably need to put some sort of value there just as a gate. So people aren't just like spamming a C corps out if it was free. You'd just be like, yeah, codex, set up 1,000 C corps for me. Yeah, that could get very, very odd.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Samo Burja, who we should have on the show at some time, at some point. I've had some good chats with him. He says, "The world is changed, subtle and obvious. For the first time in living memory, the scope of live player action expands. We shall see a new Napoleonic era, both liberating and terrible, with an ending that is yet to be written. Are you prepared?" He has such a way with words. Do you know Samo?

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is a, this is a great vague post.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  This is a great.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  You should go work at OpenAI.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  He might be talking about OpenAI. He might be talking about the US government. Who knows? But he is, of course, the founder of this.

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  The framing of, of thinking of tech companies as nations.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, I was talking to, I was talking to a buddy over the weekend, friend of the show.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  And we were talking about Andy Jassy and how a lot of people are pissed off that Andy Jassy, for a number of reasons, primarily kind of like, in some ways, like not being on it with, with it. No, no, no, not AWS. This is pre, pre AWS going offline, but just kind of like, not like fully missing AI, but not being like in the game as much as people would like.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  And he was just saying like, Andy, Andy Jassy, Jassy may as well be like a prime minister, right? Even if you don't like him, like he's still in office.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally.

• 55:32Jordi Hays?

  And effectively has an unlimited term. And so if you start thinking of OpenAI in the context of like a nation state, and the nation state is saying like, we're going to need trillions of dollars, we're going to need a huge amount of energy. And yes, it's going to be distributed all over.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  It's not that crazy for, you know, a country to be saying like, we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on,

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  on it's like a, you know, digital nation state.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  I always have this question about, it, it, it still feels like the US government is at the top of the stack and the tech companies answer to the US government. But I do wonder if there's some element of flipping that will happen at some point or has already happened. Like, did you know that Walmart spends more money than the United Nations?

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Isn't that remarkable? I mean, that sounds like it makes sense, but.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't the United Nations just kind of like host some conferences?

• 56:26John Coogan?

  No, no, no, they have like UN peacekeeping troops.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  They have their forward deployed peacekeepers.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  They, they do a lot of stuff. It's the United Nations. They have massive buildings and like, you know, operations all over the world. Like health developments, all sorts of stuff like it's a.

• 56:41Jordi Hays?

  It's not easy to prop up the.

• 56:42John Coogan?

  It is the closest thing I think that we have to like a global government. Like it, it's who you answer to at the highest level potentially. Uh, I mean, obviously the US is like much, much bigger than the UN. And so we have this kind of flipped model, but, uh, anyway.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Uh, we have our first guest of the show. We have Palmer Lucky in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBN Ultra Dome. Palmer, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 57:08Palmer Luckey?

  I'm here.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  He's here.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  With the power of technology, the magic. How are you doing?

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 57:15Palmer Luckey?

  Doing really well. Although the thing I've been complaining about lately is I was recently on Joe Rogan.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:20Palmer Luckey?

  And what you don't understand when you go on Joe Rogan.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:23Palmer Luckey?

  Is that it's like calling in a distributed denial of service attack on all your communications. Because your email, your voicemail, text messages, your Facebook Messenger, your X DMS. Everything's becomes useless because you have so much incoming that even the important things like, Palmer, you need to go to your dentist appointment right now. Fluffy by bro.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  How many?

• 57:46Palmer Luckey?

  So sick on Rogan.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  How many float tank operators have reached out and said, we gotta get you in.

• 57:53Palmer Luckey?

  Let me think about this for a second.

• 57:56Palmer Luckey?

  I haven't even caught up with everything, but at least three.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Have you actually gone in a float tank? I mean, that, that, hearing that, hearing that, the beginning of the interview and, and, and realizing that, that this guy you're listening to wants to do a float tank, but hasn't yet. And you're like, I've been waiting for this moment my entire life.

• 58:16Palmer Luckey?

  It's, it's, it's funny too, because in, in, in talking about float tanks, we, we, Joe and I took a, we took a break during the show. And when we took that break, we actually went to go look at his float tank.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 58:27Palmer Luckey?

  And it was so funny because you're, you're, you're right. I'm like one of the only people who has gone on the show, knowing all about float tanks and the principle and the mechanism and the theory and the history. Yet I've never actually managed to, to get into one. So it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a rare combination. I think most people who haven't used float tanks don't really know much about them.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or care. Yeah.

• 58:51Palmer Luckey?

  I've actually looked a lot into float tanks, even beyond what we talked about on Rogan. Going back to like, but my initial kind of push into this was in VR, where I got into thinking about, you know, how do you, how do you do like sensory management? How do you, how do you forget the senses that are at conflict with the virtual reality you want to present? Float tank's interesting, but then also, you know, it's a sci-fi staple is to fill your lungs up with some kind of oxygen bearing fluid. And then go in your, you know, full fluid immersion pods so that you can achieve extremely high G-forces during rapid acceleration.

• 59:27Palmer Luckey?

  And what I've always wanted to do is build a dragster, like, like build a car that can accelerate so fast that it would kill somebody if they weren't in a full fluid immersion G-pod. And I think that if you could do that, it would be like, it'd be some kind of truly novel motorsports achievement where for the first time in any motorsport, the limit would truly be. The ability of the person to survive it rather than the power of the machine that is involved. Wouldn't that be so cool? Like, oh, don't floor it unless you've got your lungs full, or it will kill you.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they talk about, you know, supercars that don't have traction control being, you know, death machines, right?

• 1:00:07Palmer Luckey?

  But, you know, supercars that are accelerating over 1G, like, that's crazy. I want to do an inverted fan car, basically a vacuum car, that is accelerating at 80 or 90Gs.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Would you have to put, like, rockets on the back too, or explosives or something? Like, how do you actually, what, how do you max it out?

• 1:00:25Palmer Luckey?

  So my general opinion on these things is that there's an "I'll know it when I see it" element. If you're using rockets, you're not really a car. Like, look, I'm a huge fan, like, the NHR, it was the NHRI, right? The, I forget, whatever the sanctioning body was in the United States for, for, for drag races, they allowed rocket dragsters up until, I think, the late, late 1980s. There's a great video of a dragster called Vanishing Point, and it was a rocket-powered dragster that was the last one before they banned them. It was doing like 400 miles per hour in the trap, and its final run, there's a video on YouTube, I'll have to send it to you guys, although if you look up Vanishing Point Rocket Dragster on YouTube, you'll find it. Maybe you guys can cut it into the video later for people watching this not live.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it.

• 1:01:08Palmer Luckey?

  But, uh, its final run, they ran it at true full throttle, went faster than everyone, and the camera pans up and it blew out every single window in the control tower when it went. And the rumor is that it went so fast and so hard that the pilot passed out during the acceleration, and the parachute was actually pulled by a timer. I don't know if that's true, but it's a great story.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Great story.

• 1:01:32Palmer Luckey?

  So, anyway, the point is, rocket dragsters don't count. You have to do it with wheels. I'll know it when I see it. If it's rockets, it's not a car. And the, the, the, there was a guy in the, I think, the Air Force who set the record for most Gs sustained by a person, and he used a rocket sled to do that. Basically, it was a rocket sled that accelerated, and then very rapidly decelerated, and they couldn't, he thought it would be unethical to have anybody else volunteer. So it was a pretty senior Air Force researcher who did the test himself. And I think he, like, blew out all of his, the, all the veins in his eyes and his sinuses, and he's bleeding from every hole on his head. But he survived and recovered, and he proved that a human can survive over 50Gs of relatively sustained force.

• 1:02:17Palmer Luckey?

  Fifty Gs, over fifty Gs.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:02:20Palmer Luckey?

  But you were gonna have a very bad.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  That's leadership. That's, that's leadership.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  If, if, if the float tank's gonna get added potentially to your, uh, routine, what other bio hacks are you using or, or a fan of? Or what else have you tried? In, in, in sort of like the performance optimization.

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Being on a, being on a mission, I, I feel like being on the mission, being on a mission is the ultimate bio hack.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Palmer Luckey?

  I, yeah, I mean, it really is. Um, I mean, I've always been very straight edge, right?

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Palmer Luckey?

  So no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no drugs, nothing. I've recently started drinking since having a child. And, you know, if we can get into that or not.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Palmer Luckey?

  But, um, I, I, I'm very much high on life. I don't really want to use like.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Doesn't Mountain Dew have ca- uh, caffeine in it?

• 1:03:05Palmer Luckey?

  So it does, and I will, but, and like, I generally will avoid Mountain Dew for that reason, at least as a dependency.

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:03:12Palmer Luckey?

  I go to Taco Bell, I'm getting that Baja Blast.

• 1:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:03:15Palmer Luckey?

  And now that I've had a hot can and I drink, I can go to the Taco Bell Cantina, of which there's only a hint. Are you familiar with the Taco Bell Cantina?

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  I'm not, no.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  I've, I've, I've never been. It's, it's in New York. Is there one in SF too?

• 1:03:27Palmer Luckey?

  I think there's one in New York City. I don't think SF. SF, nobody builds anything in SF.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  But there's that Taco Bell right on the beach in, uh, Pacifica. You know what I'm talking about?

• 1:03:38Palmer Luckey?

  Taco Bell Cantina is this concept where it's like Taco Bell, but also they serve alcohol. So it's like a bar and a Taco Bell. And there's one less than five minutes from my house in Newport Beach. And so I can now go get, get Baja blasted on my, on my Baja Blast, uh, uh.

• 1:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but I have to ask, what about fatherhood made you start drinking?

• 1:04:01Palmer Luckey?

  Do you have kids?

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we both have kids.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  We actually passed the polymer test. We have five between us.

• 1:04:06Palmer Luckey?

  Well, then you should understand.

• 1:04:07John Coogan?

  Yes. I do.

• 1:04:09Palmer Luckey?

  You should understand.

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I understand it a little bit, but but but part of it's like like alcohol for me. I sleep terribly. Kids are also, you know, they make they they're very.

• 1:04:20Palmer Luckey?

  Oh, I see. No, alcohol knocks helps. It's different for everybody. It knocks me. It knocks me out.

• 1:04:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:26Palmer Luckey?

  Maybe because I don't have a tolerance to it. But so you asked about hacks. I've got one that I've been pondering that maybe we could talk about.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:04:33Palmer Luckey?

  I'm I'm really afraid that nicotine might be really, really good. You know, you've probably seen this theory, right? Like that, like, basically, America smoked smoked its way to being the dominant hyperpower. It kept people focused. It kept people fit. It's an appetite suppressant. There's this really interesting health trade off theory that I'm not saying I buy into it fully yet. So for people who are watching and shouting and screaming, I don't buy into it fully yet, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that the health benefits of not smoking were have not been properly traded against the health problems caused by the resulting

• 1:05:12Palmer Luckey?

  eating, not just in terms of appetite suppressant, but also just people filling cravings and filling the need for ritual.

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, I would tell you, out of experience.

• 1:05:21Palmer Luckey?

  With other with other things that are worse for you. I think the crazy version of this is we'd all be better off with lung cancer eventually, but fit until then. And it could be that smoking gets you there. So I don't know. I'm trying to figure this one out. But nicotine is near the top of my list of potential biohacks.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Sure. The other thing that it feels real is nicotine makes boring things pretty enjoyable. And it turns out that to do anything significant in life, like it's oftentimes very exciting early. Like, let's say you're working on a new product at Andorol. It's very exciting. You can make a 3D render, you know, internally, not for marketing materials. I know you guys don't do that.

• 1:05:57Palmer Luckey?

  No render policy.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  No renders. But let's say you make a render internally. You're like, this is really exciting. And then and then it gets into the mud. And you're like, OK, now we have to build this thing. And you're in the in the trenches of product development. And you get through many, many, many boring hours of struggle.

• 1:06:12Palmer Luckey?

  Well, I'll tell you, a lot of the people in the trenches, they are smoking.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, the literal trenches, also going back through war, like there were, that was how people used to be in rations, of course.

• 1:06:23Palmer Luckey?

  Well, I was gonna I was gonna bring that up. Yeah, they didn't. They didn't get rid of the they didn't get rid of the cigarettes in MREs until. Pretty recently. I don't know what date it was, but it was not that long ago.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:36Palmer Luckey?

  So that's the, and of course, there's other ways to have nicotine without having to have the health impact of actually smoking Atari substance.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:06:43Palmer Luckey?

  And so that's where it becomes interesting.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Palmer Luckey?

  You probably couldn't convince me that smoking is literally better than, you know, the food, but it's like, you know, is, is, is vaping worse than being fat? I don't know. I struggle. I struggle based on the evidence I've seen.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. Um, do you play video games before bed? You said that the alcohol helps you fall asleep, but uh, do you ever get locked in and you're like, or playing video games can't fall asleep because of that?

• 1:07:11Palmer Luckey?

  Um, you know, I used to play games all night long. I mean, I, there was a time where I was spending maybe 14 hours a day on the computer if I could.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  Same.

• 1:07:20Palmer Luckey?

  You know, like that's, it's you, that's you.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's amazing.

• 1:07:23Palmer Luckey?

  Wonderful.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  The best times. Um, I love them. I want to go back.

• 1:07:27Palmer Luckey?

  Was it, was it, was a good chunk of that. But also, you know, running online communities and other things.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:07:32Palmer Luckey?

  The, the, the problem that I have now is I'm, the, the types of games I really like, especially multiplayer games.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:39Palmer Luckey?

  You kind of have to be on your game.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:41Palmer Luckey?

  And if you play late at night when you're all wrecked, you're not even competitive enough for it to be fun. And I'm not saying I need to win or I, or I hate it, you know, I'm not, I don't hate skill-based matchmaking that much.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Palmer Luckey?

  But you want to know that you're playing to at least the upper limit of your own potential.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Palmer Luckey?

  And I find, so that, that's been the struggle as I've gotten older and I know, I know 33 doesn't sound that old. But there's a lot, there's a lot of things that are easier when you're 23 than when you are 33. And like, you're, you're not supposed to talk about that, particularly as an executive of a company in California, high Department of Justice. You're not supposed to acknowledge that perhaps it's possible, I'm not saying there are, it's possible that different age ranges have different strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps, possibly, but certainly nobody should ever make a hiring decision on that basis.

• 1:08:29Jordi Hays?

  That'd be a crime. That's right.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Yeah. I, I, uh, the, imagine in some ways being, uh, probably easier, parenting could be easier for, for people. In their early twenties, right, then their early thirties, just, just buy-

• 1:08:43Palmer Luckey?

  Oh, forget, what are you talking about twenties? Look at this, look at this mainstream NPC. No, no, no, kids, kids should be having, should be having kids when they're, when they're in their teens. That's when they're, that's when they're supposed to have them. And you could argue that maybe there's a reason to stretch it out a little bit. But if we're just talking about physical ability and, and depth of well of energy, you know, let's, let's not be politically correct. Let's just admit you're supposed to be having kids, you're sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and be done by the time in your twenties so that you can, uh, so that you can have your kids working on the farm by the time you're in your forties. Yeah. I mean, it's a, I, I mean, I, I regret not having kids. Even at the age of thirty-three, I regret not having them earlier because I'm like, geez, this would have been so much easier when I was younger. I've been with my wife since we were fifteen, though.

• 1:09:28Palmer Luckey?

  So it's a lot easier for me, you know, when people are like, oh, but Palmer, how do you know it's the right person? I'm like, geez, we should have just obviously had kids when we were sixteen. It would have worked out just fine.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, the whole world, you feel like when you're younger, everything's as complicated as it'll ever be, and it just gets more complicated every year and more busy every year. Take us through, take us through mod retro.

• 1:09:46Palmer Luckey?

  Well, this gets also to like the startup thing I say all the time. And I'll take this up this, this moment to, to push it.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Palmer Luckey?

  Especially for anyone young who's listening. People think that starting a company or taking a break from school is this very high-risk move when you're young. They say, oh, how do you find the bravery to do that? What I need, what I try to push on people is it will never get better. The, the, like, when, when you are eighteen or nineteen, you have no family, you have no real job, you don't have a career yet, per se. That's the best time to start a company. You're not giving anything up. All you have to lose is a bit of time. And all you need to do is better than you would have done otherwise on your resume. Like, running a startup and failing it is probably going to look better on your resume than whatever you are going to be doing part-time in school as a, as a, as a late teenager or, or, or early, early twenties.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Palmer Luckey?

  And so, uh, yeah, the, the best time to start a company is when you're young because you don't need any bravery to do it. The, the people who start it later, where they have a family and a mortgage and-

• 1:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, once, once these people have acclimated to like a two-hundred-and-fifty-k base, it's like, good luck, right, you know, building a-

• 1:10:52Palmer Luckey?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:10:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:54Palmer Luckey?

  And, and also, once you have a family, you have a sort of fiduciary duty to your family to maximize their quality of life. There's no life hack that says that you're allowed to degrade the quality of your child's- Childhood because daddy wanted to have that grindset mindset, right? It's irresponsible at that point.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:11:13Palmer Luckey?

  Yeah, I couldn't imagine starting Oculus where I am today. Like, it would, it would, it would just be, it would just be irresponsible.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us through Mod Retro. How much of, everyone's familiar with the Chromatic. We've talked a lot about it a lot on the show. We unboxed one. We've had a lot of fun with them. How much of the roadmap is public now? Where's the company going? Where's the company now? Just kind of give us the general update and then we'll dive into some stuff.

• 1:11:36Palmer Luckey?

  Before I tell you where it's going, I'll go back to where it came from in the first place. A lot of people think that Mod Retro is this very recent thing for me. You know, the first product we launched, the Mod Retro Chromatic, which was kind of the ultimate Game Boy. This, this kind of heirloom grade tribute to the Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Very high-end hardware, magnesium aluminum alloy shell, a lab-grown sapphire crystal screen lens rather than plastic or even, even glass.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Palmer Luckey?

  And the thing is, Mod Retro was actually the first company that I ever started, even before Oculus. So I started Mod Retro when I was about 15 years old. It was an online forum for.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  We have a soundboard.

• 1:12:17Palmer Luckey?

  It was an online forum for people modifying game consoles, handhelds, portables, also, also, also, you know, home television consoles. The main kind of thrust of the community was this hobby called portableizing, which is taking home consoles and turning them into handhelds by combining them with modern technology like LCDs and, you know, modern, modern high-energy density batteries. And, I mean, that, that actually was a pretty big deal for a while. I know in the modern day, this doesn't mean much, but we were getting millions of unique viewers every single month because we were getting covered. Our, the projects on this site, we had thousands of active members.

• 1:12:58Palmer Luckey?

  We were getting covered by Engadget and Gizmodo and Kotaku and, you know, the kind of the, the whole group of, of outlets that back then liked technology. They're now anti-tech, anti-tech.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  Take coverage.

• 1:13:11Palmer Luckey?

  But back when, back when tech news was about tech and not anti-tech, they were covering all of these things. And again, you know, these days, millions of uniques, I mean, you can get that on TikTok with, with a good dance, but, but that really meant something in the mid 2000s on the internet. And we, we actually started working on projects like what the ultimate Game Boy would be back then. There was a project that I did in 2008 called the PGB, the Power Game Boy. Power Game Boy was the ultimate Game Boy, was a Game Boy Advance, it was Game Boy Advance SP hardware, transplanted into an original Game Boy shell, but with an upgraded screen, upgraded controls, motion controls, an FM radio transmitter, so you could broadcast the sound to your car. So you could be playing and didn't have

• 1:13:53Palmer Luckey?

  to tether in and could have all that sound if you're doing LSDJ, Dell's DJ, or some other chip tune software. And that actually won the, the 2008 Portable Palooza. So I'm very proud of the Power Game Boy. I was also the first person to ever backlight a Game Boy Pocket, the first person to ever, uh, LED backlight an original Game Boy. So, I mean, I am an OG to the max when it comes to this.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  That was the original, like parental control was I just remember being a kid and being like, if I turn the lights on to play Game Boy, my parents are gonna see the light under the door. They're gonna come take my Game Boy. So I was like, trying to, it was probably training my eyesight.

• 1:14:33Palmer Luckey?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no, you're just, you're maybe hurting your eyesight, but training your brain. Now you can see signals from the noise. You have ultimate night, you're, you're Batman himself. Raised by it. But, um, so what, what happened is I started on this project all the way back then of what the ultimate Game Boy would look like. I kept working on it Oculus. I kept working on it post Oculus. And then after about eight or nine years of not making any progress, because I was just, like, I, I made some progress. We had some prototypes and stuff. I finally said, you know what? I need to get more serious about paying someone else to do my hobby, uh, because I'm not going to be able to get this done on my own.

• 1:15:14Palmer Luckey?

  And so, uh, ended up hiring a few people, uh, from my past life and, uh, getting, getting together with a bunch of people who believed in this kind of vision of building these tributes to what technology used to be, the best parts of what gaming used to be, and building a company around that. And we ended up pulling together the chromatic, all the pieces and loose ends from 10 years of, of, of, of hacking and modding and turned it into a real product.

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  Um, walk me through the, the roadmap, the M64 is coming out.

• 1:15:46Palmer Luckey?

  That's right.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Do you have other ideas or ways you define like what sticks out? Obviously the Game Boy is iconic, the N64 is iconic. But how, like, how broad are you thinking? Like, what reaches? Is it just games? Is it just games from the 90s, 2000s?

• 1:16:05Palmer Luckey?

  We did the Game Boy because it's the most important handheld console ever.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, it redefined the idea of gaming, what it was, how you did it, how it fit into your life, how you could build games that you didn't sit down and be tethered to something, but instead could be a thing that you would share with friends, bring to places, meet new people playing them. I mean, that was really, really a wild idea at the time. And um, there's a lot of good in that, but I think that as the games industry has financialized and gotten much bigger, uh, there's a lot of things that have gotten lost. I think that the, the, the need to make more and more money has taken things away from, I think, what were actually great product decisions in the 80s and 90s. When people were just trying to make great games and great consoles,

• 1:16:53Palmer Luckey?

  they weren't trying to figure out how to, you know, bump up their daily active users. They weren't trying to build live services. They weren't trying to build, you know, passive recurring revenue models. They, they, they relied on a variety of modern marketing concepts to juice people and get them, get them locked in.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you like in the modern?

• 1:17:09Palmer Luckey?

  And so I'd say just generally hardware wise, I want to go into hardware. There was like similar turning points.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Palmer Luckey?

  So M64 is an obvious one. You know, that, that was the beginning of 3D gaming, basically for everybody. You can say, but Palmer, there were people who are playing your 3D games on their PCs. Yes, but in terms of mainstream access.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:17:27Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, that changed everything.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:17:28Palmer Luckey?

  I'm interested in going to all these points where there's things that we can learn and releasing basically the best version of that. Combined with modern technology, it makes it more useful. So things like. What would a modern Sony Walkman look like? Like, what was good about the Walkman experience?

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:44Palmer Luckey?

  Versus modern streaming and kind of the digital morass that we've gotten into? The algorithmic feed, like, nobody's doing mixtapes anymore. Listening to music is not a conscious activity. It's not a curated activity. It's a, it's, it's being a receptacle for, for a machine. People talk about just what, you know, having AI slop fed to them without realizing that, you know, that the modern music industry has kind of been pioneering this for a long time. It's just the AI is behind the curtain. The computers are behind the curtain and the algorithmic recommendation engine is behind the curtain.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  Do you feel like there's some green shoots in the modern gaming economy? I'm thinking like, yes, there's a lot of, uh, you know, mobile games that are hyper optimized. And there's a lot of games that have gone free to play with all the micro payments and stuff. But then you do have folks like the, you know, the team behind Last of Us where it's just a story. And you don't really get sucked into any crazy micro payments. And it feels like there's an artist behind it. But are there, are there other areas of the modern game industry that are sticking out to you as like positives?

• 1:18:40Palmer Luckey?

  There, there certainly are. And there's lots of modern indie games that are, I think, doing a lot of, like, you look at like, you, you look at like Silk Song and

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:47Palmer Luckey?

  A lot of like

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Bellatro.

• 1:18:49Palmer Luckey?

  But where you're not seeing this, I think, is on the hardware side.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:52Palmer Luckey?

  Like, you're still living in an ecosystem. So like, let's say that you want to play a game that was built with these values. All right, so you're going to turn on your console. You're going to try to play it. Oh, there's a critical security update. Time for you to do your critical security update.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:06Palmer Luckey?

  Okay, now you need to also update your console. All right, you're updating your console. Nope, now that wiped out all of the cookies. It's time for you to log in again. You're going to log in. It wants you to do two factor authentication because fraud has become such a problem that you now need to do that. Oh shit, where's my phone? Let me see, I don't have my authent- It's one of those terrible things where it adds so much friction. And that's before you then get railroaded into a big giant UI of advertisements

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:31Palmer Luckey?

  that are auto playing the mo- Like- The idea of like being able to-

• 1:19:35Jordi Hays?

  That's just to get permission to upgrade your skins, basically.

• 1:19:37Palmer Luckey?

  I, I, I- The idea to just be like, I'm gonna take this.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, and just turn it on.

• 1:19:42Palmer Luckey?

  And that's it.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  And it's great.

• 1:19:43Palmer Luckey?

  That is, that, yeah, that is-

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I comped.

• 1:19:46Palmer Luckey?

  Modern games can't do that because of the platforms that they're on.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I was comping like What It Takes to Play, uh, actually on the, one of the, one of the newer quests. I had, I realized I had seven different passwords, Instagram, Facebook, Meta. I had all these different passwords, I had codes to different pieces to buy games and stuff. Versus, I went and pulled up an old N64 where you turn the button-

• 1:20:08Palmer Luckey?

  Yep.

• 1:20:08John Coogan?

  And it just says Goldeneye. And it's just like amazing. And I was saying that like, that, that seems like an own goal. It seems like modern video game designers should at least know that you will see lower churn if you pre-install one great game. And when the first time they unbox it on Christmas, you turn it on and it's Beat Saber. Or whatever the, whatever the piece of software or hardware that you're selling, like have it come with something great. Like, why don't people do that? Are they just stupid? Or is it like something more complex?

• 1:20:34Palmer Luckey?

  This is, it is complex. I mean, so you gotta remember, like, so first of all, there's a lot of people in the games industry who didn't necessarily get into it purely because they want to build great games. Or necessarily-

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  They drink Starbucks and not Mountain Dew.

• 1:20:48Palmer Luckey?

  Yep, you've heard my quote, right? And you have a lot of these people who, it's, it's a lily pad, it's a way to make a check, or it's a way to affect, affect social change in the world through some larger company's budget.

• 1:21:00Palmer Luckey?

  And so that's, that, that, that, that is part of the problem, but you're also at odds often. So like you just talked about this specific idea of having a bundled title. So I've been on the other side of the negotiating table inside of, you know, inside of-

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:13Palmer Luckey?

  Meta, formerly Facebook, and you know, formerly Oculus.

• 1:21:18Palmer Luckey?

  What's gonna happen is you're gonna say, hey, this is gonna be a great experience. And then you have someone who says, ah, but if we have a bundled title, then that gets rid of the revenue opportunity to have another company pay us to be the bundled title. And also they're gonna, our, our developers are gonna be really upset there because we're gonna be competing with them. And so for example, your holiday day one installs, they're mostly going to be of this new game. People are gonna be less likely to do day one buys of all of these other games if there is a game that you can already play.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Palmer Luckey?

  You say, well, well, what, which should we? We have to have something pre-installed. And then you have these conversations, well, it can't be a full game. It needs to be a thing that shows off hardware, it can be like a fun little bite experience, but we then need to have people go into it. And then here's another thing, they say- If you have literally nothing, that means they have to download something. And the time where there's going to be the most impetus for them to put in their payment details is going to be that day one. So you don't want to do anything that degrades your get the payment details because the moment you get their payment details, every purchase after that is an easy click. It's an easy dopamine hit. You don't have to go through all of the pain. And so it's one of those things where you have all of these intervariant money driven things and you have the platform holders so tightly intertwined with much of the content.

• 1:22:24Palmer Luckey?

  This is the problem when the hardware owners end up owning all of these studios. I mean, this is probably me getting a little too business political, but in the early days of Oculus, we were very clear with developers through our business relations. We are not Nintendo. We are not going to compete with you and basically destroy your sales by preferentially treating our own developers better, our own studios. So we made things, but we really said, our goal is to enable second and third party titles, to fund lots of other people. And we funded dozens of developers. As you become Nintendo, you make it harder for those third parties to exist. And the first party has their own goals that are not necessarily aligned with what you're

• 1:23:07Palmer Luckey?

  talking about, which is turn on the game and play it and have a good time. They have, they have, they have other plans for you.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Is the answer just out compete them? I imagine that the libertarian in you is not saying we need to regulate this. So what's the answer?

• 1:23:21Palmer Luckey?

  Of course not. I think it's a combination of reminding people what they've lost, like what they had and how good it was. It's about reminding and showing off for the first time to a new generation how things used to be. I mean, one of the things I love about Chromatic and M64 is people show like we were just at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo and a lot of the people coming by and having the most funs were kids whose parents brought them over like, oh, check out this game. Like this is the Mario Kart I used to play. And you can, you can.

• 1:23:56Palmer Luckey?

  You can show these people, I think a lot about how things used to be, how it used to work. And I think you can prove that people still want that. There's people who don't believe any of this. Like you'll talk, people say, well, that's not what people want from games anymore. They want live service games. They want games that are continuously updating with fresh new content. And like they say this, I think because their internal people have to convince themselves that it's true. Because otherwise their business model of being a $100 billion company doesn't pan out. And you contrast that with like the number, you know, how many people made the Game Boy? It was 12 people. 12. I mean, it's just, it's, you contrast that with like the 60,000 people you have in some of these. I, I, look, I don't think it's regulation. I think it's reminding people, showing people.

• 1:24:38Palmer Luckey?

  And then at some point, someone needs to take the best of modern technology. And they need to take these lessons from the past when people were trying to make things great without necessarily being concerned about the micro financials. And they need to build probably a new platform that it learns for, that combines the best of all of these things. Yeah. Uh, which is kind of the idea behind mod retro. You know, you, you want to combine the best of the modern and the best of the retro. And I think at some point, somebody's, somebody's going to do that. You know, who knows, maybe you'll see something like Sega reenters the console war and kicks everybody's ass. But, uh, maybe it'll, maybe it'll, maybe it'll be in television. Maybe Kaliko Vision's gonna come back. But at some point it'll happen. Yeah.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you expect mod retro to continuously make decisions that sort of limit the TAM? And that's, you know, not going down the path of hyper financialization and, and, you know, trying to create this open ecosystem. I just, I, I doubt you guys had any investors that, that passed on mod retro. But I imagine some of them would say, you know, the NPC VC that thinks it's contrarian to have kids in your twenties would say like, okay, I want to invest, but like, how do you think about the TAM? Right? Like, how, how do you, how do you address that? Cause I, I can see the obvious path of just selling a lot of really great hardware and building out, you know, millions of people in the world that just love the hardware, buy the hardware and you have a fantastic business, but maybe it's not an and or scale opportunity.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  And you're probably totally okay with that.

• 1:26:06Palmer Luckey?

  I think the opportunity actually is huge. I think that the entire modern electronics industry is in a sort of prisoner's dilemma where nobody can stop doing these things that nobody wants to be doing because the first person to do it can't really do it alone. I mean, that's why your phone is full of crapware. That's why you buy a laptop and it's preloaded with all of this stuff. The companies know just how much consumers hate it, but they're all in this competing for each penny, competing for each dollar race against each other with largely undifferentiated offerings. And so they have to play that game. If you can hugely differentiate and if you can convince a consumer that it really is a differentiated thing, I actually think that you can end up where the TAM is. Look,

• 1:26:50Palmer Luckey?

  here's what will actually happen. I think the TAM for doing things right is bigger than the TAM for things to do things wrong. The only problem is that the moment you prove that that's true, everyone is going to follow in your footsteps and become your competitors in this new post-prisoner's dilemma world. That's probably the form of success that I would be happy with. It's not let's do everything ourselves and nobody's going to follow us. Realistically, the moment you see success, everybody copies what you're doing. Changing the world is an outcome people need to be okay with, even if they don't own the whole market.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  Would MUD Retro ever make an M1 grand?

• 1:27:32Palmer Luckey?

  M1 grand? I don't think so. I think it's going to stick to consumer electronics, like technology products.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  Would you ever make a consumer electronics product that was created before you were born?

• 1:27:46Palmer Luckey?

  Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, we're working on a cassette tape player right now.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:27:52Palmer Luckey?

  So like, that's one example. Like, what would the ultimate Sony Walkman look like? Like, if you were making something today with those principles in mind, what would it look like today? How would it work? And there's a lot of things, and I'm not even talking about the complicated things like algorithmic music feeds, just basic things. It is, it was so easy to stop and start music or adjust the volume or know that it was playing in the first place. You know, like you have that haptic mechanical, like you can literally feel the, feel the wheels turning. A Walkman on your, you know, on an armband is a much better experience than using your phone to play music. And I understand why we're using one and not the other. And I'm not saying that the cassette tape part is

• 1:28:36Palmer Luckey?

  the part that made it good, but there's a lot of other parts that were good that I, that I think are worth learning from. Another one is like, an example would be modern televisions. I know I'm a libertarian and I'm not supposed to like regulation, but I sometimes flirt with the idea that smart TVs should be illegal. I, I hate smart TVs so much. They're so bad. And so you're clapping because everyone agrees. Everyone agrees. This is the danger of being a libertarian. You realize you can just adopt populist, pro-state positions and you can get voters. It's like, oh, we're libertarian, except for this thing that you hate. We're gonna regulate that.

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  You can be, you can be trusted with total control.

• 1:29:14Palmer Luckey?

  I would trust you. Exactly. You're not like the other ones. Like, smart TVs create a lot of these same bad incentives where you have the hardware manufacturer, not just trying to build a good TV, a good screen, good visual technology. They're now dipping their toe into, well, I actually need to be a services company. I need to be a software platform company. I need to run an app store. And it's a, it's a prisoner's dilemma. If you don't do those things, and if you don't introduce advertising into your TV feeds, and if you don't have, you know, a lock screen that's showing ads on your TV, how could you compete with the people who are, who charge, you know, just a few, a few dollars less? But I think that there's, I, I think that there's value in saying like, hey, like, one of the things mod retro is looking at doing is doing a

• 1:29:55Palmer Luckey?

  modern CRT display. And part of the value there is building something that is, actually has all those cool attributes of a CRT, especially when you're working with retro computer systems and retro consoles that were designing the art around the particular Technicalities of how a CRT works in terms of having very high motion clarity, very, very good color gamut, relying on the persistence of the phosphors to enable certain visual effects, a certain blending that happens on certain things, doing display interlacing techniques. But ignoring all that, there's also just the fact that a TV that you can plug something into and it just shows what you plugged into it is an incredibly novel idea. And I think bringing it back, reminding people of that, like I

• 1:30:38Palmer Luckey?

  would be, I wouldn't be surprised to see Mod Retro make a totally modern technology display that is just a TV that doesn't fuck you. Like, that's it. I think I

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, just, just think, just the, the, my biggest critique of all these smart TVs is how quickly the software degrades. Like, it wasn't good in the beginning and then quickly there's like a small lag every time you push a button. And imagine a TV that was just super snappy and just had the three apps that you actually want to use.

• 1:31:07Palmer Luckey?

  And I'm sure you could go to Go back and use, go back and use like a, even like a flip phone from the early 2000s. The UIs were literally orders of magnitude faster and snappier than the UIs of these modern smart TVs. Like, you could buy a TV with eight gigabytes of RAM and a three gigahertz processor and somehow, you're right, it still manages to have that lag.

• 1:31:30Jordi Hays?

  You know what? We're at a stage in the technology cycle where people make things that are different, but not necessarily better. There's this pressure to do things that are new and different.

• 1:31:39Palmer Luckey?

  Horizontal movement.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And I, and my biggest critique is the new iOS Liquid Glass. It's like, congratulations, you made it different. I don't believe you made it better.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think? Do you think there's a world where the next turn of VR kind of displaces TVs? We talked to James Cameron about this and it seemed like he'd kind of seen the next iteration maybe and was kind of excited about the idea of being able to watch a 3D IMAX movie at home. And from my experience with the Apple Vision Pro, the screen's getting better and better. Meta's working on this stuff. Like, we've talked to the big screen team. It feels like we might finally be at a point where we're thinking about replacing the home theater.

• 1:32:21Palmer Luckey?

  The way to think about VR headsets is not as a replacement for a TV, but as a replacement for a home theater. So, and the reason that's important is it's not just a TV, a screen. It's a controlled environment optimized for watching that content. The thing I've always liked about VR is you can have all this cool new VR content, but it can potentially also simulate any previous form of any previous media experience before. So like an example I've given when people said, well, yeah, what about like an ebook, you know, ebook reader on VR, you know, are we, are we really going to use that? And the point I make is well, look, if you make this good enough, it's not just the book, right? The experience of reading a book is also your environment, your surroundings. People will go places just to sit down and read a book in the right environment. Simulating that is interesting.

• 1:33:06Palmer Luckey?

  So, and the same thing goes for music, right? It's not that you're not trying to simulate a speaker. You're trying to simulate, you know, a listening room. And I feel like that, that's where things are going. I think that's why James Cameron is excited because you spend a lot of money to control a viewing experience when you're doing it physically, right? Like I'm building walls, I'm soundproofing a room, I'm painting the whole thing matte black, so there's no reflection on my screen. By the way, I've done that. I have a basement home theater that I made myself and it's, the walls are painted matte black and the ceiling is painted matte black. And I have custom matte black carpet that's mostly black, except for a few of my favorite galaxies printed on it from NASA imagery. Because I wanted to have some space carpet. Nothing's cooler than space carpet. But like, that was really expensive to do all that.

• 1:33:50Palmer Luckey?

  And I think VR is going to actually surpass that experience in short order. The technological path to VR displays being better than 99% of people's home viewing environments is a single digit year problem. It's not decades. It's, it's, it's within 10 years, certainly.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the, what's in the critical path? Is it, you've said that you liked pulling the battery out. Is, are there other things that you're pulling out if you're building the next version of consumer like BRS home theater? What are the design considerations?

• 1:34:22Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, I mean, I mean, where do I even, where do I even begin?

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  The second screen on the outside, you'd have, you'd definitely have that if you want to be in a home theater, right?

• 1:34:30Palmer Luckey?

  No.

• 1:34:32Palmer Luckey?

  I hear that was a Tim Cook special, but I can't, I can't confirm it. I don't, I don't work at Apple, but you need to relentlessly focus on the experience of the user of the device. You can't have features that are not adding to that. Like you, you don't, if you're, if your job is to try and make VR cool, which is largely what Apple was trying to do with the first generation Vision Pro, you might do things like have a screen on the outside and like, if you're trying to make it cool and acceptable, but at some point you need to optimize towards the experience of it all. And luckily in the long run, maybe even the medium run, these things are going to look like sunglasses, not like ski goggles. And so that, that, that's really where this is all going. I don't, I think if you, if you and me had James Cameron

• 1:35:15Palmer Luckey?

  right here to grill, I don't think he would say, I think the future looks like a bunch of people wearing ski goggles. I think he'd say, the glasses you wear to already like navigate and communicate that you're wearing all day will also simultaneously be the best home theater device you've ever seen. We're going to get there sooner rather than later.

• 1:35:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Let's talk about Erebor. There's been some press hits lately. The press seems entirely fixated on Palmer Lucky's crypto bank. And obviously that is not the, the, but the full story, nor is it the most, I think, exciting thing about it from anybody that's been in the tech industry that lived through the SVB collapse. And so I wanted, I wanted to hear it directly from you.

• 1:35:57Palmer Luckey?

  Well, you know, it's a little early to start talking about it. We just got our conditional approval, which is fantastic. We're still waiting on FDIC. Yep. We're still waiting on full approval. So it's, it's a little early for me to really get into, into, you know, going out and, and, and marketing the bank.

• 1:36:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But why, but, but, but yeah.

• 1:36:12Palmer Luckey?

  But what you're getting into. Yeah, no, I get it. Like the, I think there's this natural inclination for people to look at this and say, oh, it's like what SVB was. It's catering to the same customers. That must mean that there are going to be this really high risk bank that does all these high risk things. In reality, it's literally a reaction to that. It is an opposite. The reason that we got this approval is because we went in saying we are going to have the most conservative loan to deposit ratios of any bank in history. We are going to do this extremely novel service of taking money from people. Holding it for them and then allowing them to have it back. Like, we're going to be offering these services that banks used to offer. You can't get the service I just described in any bank. If you go and you say, I want you to just like hold on to my assets, but I don't want you to loan against them.

• 1:36:57Palmer Luckey?

  Like, that's, that's not what a bank is. What are you talking about? And of course, like, I'm not saying that all assets should be held that way. But when you're a business in the business of making your business grow, you don't care nearly as much about getting an extra half a percent on your deposits as you might about truly minimizing the risk that you're not going to have access to any of your capital. I mean, if SVB would not have been bailed out by the government in, in, in, in a, like, it wasn't just like the government's obligations. They were bailing up, they were bailing out well beyond FDIC limits. If they wouldn't have done that, it probably would have wiped out half the tech industry in one fell swoop. That's crazy. How can the tech industry have become so subservient to the banking industry, to the finance bros?

• 1:37:41Palmer Luckey?

  That not only can we not survive without them, but in working with them, we sign our own death warrants. Right? Like, we can't see what the risk is. We can't control it, and there's literally no other option. So that, it is, I agree. It's annoying to see everyone talking about how Arabor is this new bank in the vein of SVB that's going to be taking on higher risk, you know, higher risk bets. It's literally the opposite. It's, it's do what SVB didn't for the people that SVB was otherwise successful in working with. So think like national security companies, hard tech, deep tech, biotech, these companies that just need to make sure they have someone who understands how their business works. And SVB did do a good job at that. But then also is going to make sure their money is actually there when they go to get it.

• 1:38:26Palmer Luckey?

  That was the part that SVB screwed up.

• 1:38:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:29Palmer Luckey?

  How, how? I guess I'll end with one bit here, which is maybe worth noting. You know, I'm not, I'm not even, I'm not working on Arabor in an operational day-to-day capacity. I'm like, I'm a board member. I, I founded it because I wanted this to exist. You got to remember that the tech, sorry, the finance industry is full of people who love finance for the sake of finance, right there. They're truly, they're truly in love with, with all the levers and, and the machines and

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  They're in love with leverage.

• 1:38:58Palmer Luckey?

  That's right. And in addition, they probably like what it enables. They like free flow of capital. They love the ability to leverage things. Like I, I get that. Similarly, I'm a VR guy. I love VR for the sake of VR. I love what VR can do. I love that it can be a home theater. I love that it can be a classroom. I love that it can be a time machine. But I also strictly love it for the sake of the technology itself, that you're, that you're presenting an artificial view to your peripheral nervous system that is sufficiently advanced as to convince a body that has developed for millions of years to discern what is and isn't real. Like that's, that's incredible. I love it. I would love it from a tech perspective, even if it were useless from an everyday perspective. And I would say, that is not

• 1:39:41Palmer Luckey?

  how I am with finance. I don't love finance for the sake of finance. I'm not a finance bro. I want something like Airborne to exist because of and for the sake of my love for all of these other technologies. If something doesn't exist, a safe, reliable banking partner for people like me who care about tech for the sake of tech and what tech can do, uh, if, if something like that doesn't exist, people are going to have a hard time. So it's a little weird. It's one of the few finance companies that started by somebody who wants it to be in service of all the other true interests they have, rather than the culmination of their own personal interests. Like, I guarantee you, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, these firms were not started by people who said, you know, I don't really care about

• 1:40:24Palmer Luckey?

  banking, but, but, but I do, I do want to make this technology work.

• 1:40:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, speaking of other, uh, articles, there's this interesting article in Business Insider from six years ago. The US Army Wants Mixed Reality Headsets That Detect Enemy Fire, Translate Language, and See in the Dark Anduril. The startup founded by Oculus Palmer Lucky, Oculus is Palmer Lucky, is on it. Uh, this was a six-year project. What, what is the full story here? Uh, what was the genesis of this article? And then, uh, how did the, yeah, how did the product come together?

• 1:40:55Palmer Luckey?

  Well, the thing that that's so interesting, and I think there's a quote you should dig in there for. It's a quote from Brian Schimpf.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. He says, "The real moonshot for us is this idea. You want to have every soldier, every operator be able to have total awareness of what's going on. They know everything they need to know to do their job, and all of this is available to them in a millisecond, and the most critical, and just the most critical information that they need."

• 1:41:18Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, you could take that quote, and it's practically word for word what the Army is saying about soldier born Mission Command. I mean, it could be the press release for Eagle Eye, which we just, which we just started showing off publicly at AUSA. I mean, it's interesting because a lot of people think that this move into announcing our augmented reality efforts is this new thing that we pivoted into, rather than the culmination of eight years of platform building, building the software that you need, building the data integration techniques you need, the radio relay and meshing systems that you need. There's so much you have to do to accomplish this dream of a soldier born heads up display that shows you where the baddies are, where your buddies are, does your ballistics compensation

• 1:42:03Palmer Luckey?

  and calculations. I mean, like, it is, it is, it takes so much work. And we've been working on this since the beginning of the company. And so I think that article is interesting because it's, this was, you know, six, seven years ago, and people were asking, "What are you guys going to do?" We said, "Oh, we're going to build combat heads up displays that integrate data from all these sources and put it right in the soldier's field of view so that it's available in a millisecond." And when people, when we said that back then, people were kind of giving us side eye, and they were like, "Okay, one, that sounds crazy. Two, the Army just gave, like, to put this in context, that was like six months after Microsoft had won the IBAS contract." They're like, "Well, that's what Microsoft's doing. Why, why, why would you be working on that?" And even then, it's because we had a vision for what it needed to be. It was somewhat divergent from what the Army or Microsoft

• 1:42:48Palmer Luckey?

  was doing. And so we kept investing, we kept building. And I mean, who would have bet that eight years later, that Microsoft contract, that $22 billion contract vehicle for the architecture of the Army's AR future would move over to Anduril, that we would be launching something like Eagle Eye, and that it would be an extremely... You know that when we took over SBMC from Microsoft, that we integrated our UI and features that we've been building on Lattice in less than two weeks? Like, we literally, like, we did in two weeks what the Army had been working on for years, because we've been building this backend for it and kind of preparing for the day where this might happen. So it feels very much like a culmination of destiny, a bet that paid off.

• 1:43:32Palmer Luckey?

  I've been definitely talking to my investors and reminding them that they told us that this was a moonshot that probably was not going to pan out. Like, you know, I mean, try telling someone, "I think Microsoft is going to transfer their $22 billion contract to us at some point." It's just like, they're just like, Palmer, that's magical thinking. Like, it's not, like, it's a, literally, I've been told, "Palmer, that's the type of thing you think when you just missed the boat and you just can't bear to admit it."

• 1:44:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're like, "You're just coping, you're just coping."

• 1:44:03Palmer Luckey?

  It's cope, it's pure cope.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  Hey, well, let's give it up for a culmination of destiny.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, culmination of destiny.

• 1:44:10Palmer Luckey?

  I'm always a fan of people achieving their destiny. I haven't gotten to mine yet, although, you know, I won't, I won't, I won't do this. You know, I think, I think you guys might have even asked me about this at one point. I, so, you know, I have this, I have this, I have this goatee that I've been growing ever since I was fired. And, you know, that was like, coming up on nine years ago now. And I've told people who asked about it that I can't, I can't shave it until certain conditions are met, until I achieve certain goals in my life. And I've just been cryptic about it and never said why. I don't plan on changing that, but I will let you know, I have achieved those life goals.

• 1:44:53Palmer Luckey?

  I have achieved the, my destined end that I, that I set for myself eight years ago, so.

• 1:45:01Jordi Hays?

  Great, so does that mean you're just, you're just keeping the goatee because you like it? Is that what you mean?

• 1:45:05Palmer Luckey?

  So, well, I said, "I'm not going to shave it until these conditions occur." And there were people who believed that those conditions will never occur. We'll have to talk about it another time.

• 1:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:45:17Palmer Luckey?

  But, but it's not that I must shave it, it's that I now can shave it.

• 1:45:21Jordi Hays?

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:45:22Palmer Luckey?

  I tweeted about it a few years ago and I said, "Look, I'm not going to tell you what's going on in my, in my personal life yet here, but, but suffice to say, when the beard comes off, shit's about to go down."

• 1:45:37Jordi Hays?

  We need a, we need a, we need a beer, we'll get a beer tracker on the website.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Well, we have Brian Armstrong joining the show. Thank you so much Palmer for joining. That was a fantastic conversation. We'd love to have you back. We'll talk to you soon. How you guys doing?

• 1:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you Palmer.

• 1:45:55John Coogan?

  We'll see you later Palmer. Have a good one.

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Cheers.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Live long and prosper. Live long and prosper. That was correct.

• 1:46:03Jordi Hays?

  Brian, welcome to the show. Double Brian.

• 1:46:06Brian Armstrong?

  As you can see, I've already achieved all of my life goals.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. No hair whatsoever.

• 1:46:10Jordi Hays?

  None.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  How's your 24 hours been?

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  You guys have been dominating the timeline.

• 1:46:23Brian Armstrong?

  This acquisition of Echo out there, you know, Kobe's just such a legend. He's an OG in crypto. He's been giving us good advice for a long time, whether it was, whether we wanted it or not. And he was, he was right. Every time he put out some stuff. So I, every time I'd call him, I'd, you know, I DM'd him on, on X a while back and was like, man, you, you keep lighting us up on, on X, but you're right every time. And he always had good suggestions. So I was trying to court him for a while to see if we'd get him in the company.

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  Fantastic. I mean, I went on this little emotional roller coaster. Maybe it's just because I'm a little bit of an outsider. But when the story broke that you'd purchased the NFT, everyone, you know, I was seeing, oh, this is so much to spend on a podcast. This is so ridiculous. And I was kind of falling into that trap. And then when the acquisition happened, it felt like a brilliant way to kind of actually draw more attention and even just share a little bit more of like the roadmap of what's happening here. They're obviously connected, but talk to me about like how you decided to parcel out the information and why?

• 1:47:24Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, I wish I could take credit for that, but we actually have some really great people on our, our team that are, let's say a little more internet native and in the, a little DGEN and we've been, you know, we've been hiring some folks that really are following this. So yeah, they actually came up with the idea of like, let's bring his podcast back. That would be, that would be awesome. It had a, it had a cult following. I think everybody loved it. The Up Only Podcast. So really as part of this deal, we decided to have some fun with that. And the real news, of course, we're acquiring the company, but if we can get this podcast back up and running, I think that would be really fun at the same time. So. Yeah, and then I just, the broader story is just like, we're really excited about capital raising coming on chain.

• 1:48:06Brian Armstrong?

  I mean, that can make the whole process more efficient, more fair, more transparent. Every entrepreneur who I know finds the fundraising process to be pretty onerous, right? It usually takes like two to three months where everything else that you're focused on has to stop. You go do tons of pitch meetings, you get told no 19 out of 20 times. It's, you get punched in the gut over and over with these smart people telling you that your ideas suck. And then if you're lucky, you manage to get this thing over the finish line and it's always a very tenuous process with tons of legal fees. And so, yeah, we really think that capital formation can be just much more efficient on chain. And Echo is leading this space, you know, they've helped over, I think, maybe 200 or 300 projects now raise money over $200 million.

• 1:48:51Brian Armstrong?

  And so, it's not just going to be like token sales, like I think other startups. What keyword did I hit for that?

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  200 million dollars.

• 1:49:00Brian Armstrong?

  200 million, we gotta ring the gong.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, get that gong going for the Echo team.

• 1:49:08Brian Armstrong?

  I love it.

• 1:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I guess like dive into that a bit further. My understanding is like they're a platform, but they have, there's some editorial approach there, right? You're not, for now, it's not any company coming on Echo and spinning up. Or is it, it's community-led, is that it? It's like they have to have...

• 1:49:28Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. Yeah, the idea is you can raise from your community and they are curating it a bit, right? Because I think if it's totally open-ended, you could have an adverse selection problem. But yeah, they're bringing on really high-quality projects. And you can imagine that, you know, Coinbase has about half a trillion dollars in custody from our retail and institutional customers. These people want access to great assets and investments. So Coinbase is really building a network effect here. If we can have great builders come in who want to raise money and connect them with investors who have the money, you know, we're the perfect platform to help accelerate this and give Echo even more distribution. So... First, when they come in, they're going to keep Echo standalone, just make sure it continues to operate and do great. But over time, you can imagine us integrating this tokenization,

• 1:50:13Brian Armstrong?

  fundraising platform into Coinbase and really distributing it to all of our customers.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  Is there, can you walk me through some of the more like life cycle of a modern crypto startup? Like imagining if I incorporate, raise money on Echo, but then is there a world where I'm in an ecosystem of like Coinbase B2B products, or I'm building on top of Base, or I'm custoding my treasury with you? Like, how many, how many different products can I pull off the shelf if I'm building a crypto startup in 2025?

• 1:50:44Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you're pitching the vision better than I could. But yeah, let's say that you're, it's the full life cycle. You know, you're two kids with a laptop and a dream or whatever, you want to start something. You can go in there and open Coinbase account for your startup. Maybe we even help you incorporate on-chain at some point with like a Dow or these kind of things. And then you need to raise your first bit of capital, like a seed round, you know, press the raise money button and put your pitch deck together, make a video, like we'll distribute it to some of our early, or some of our customers that are interested in these kind of assets. We help you raise money. Now you've got kind of a business bank account equivalent open where the funds just arrive instantly with USDC from people all over the world. You don't have to be tracking

• 1:51:29Brian Armstrong?

  down these like wire transfers and lawyers and all over the world. We just kind of, you know, it's all raised on-chain in a smart contract. So your capital arrives immediately. Now you can actually start to generate revenue as well as you're building your product, like crypto payments are another button click away. Maybe financing is involved there. And eventually someday, you're going to want to go public, right? And have your company be traded by everyone, every retail customer out there. We can help you do that on-chain as well. So You can imagine this whole life cycle coming on-chain, and I think the goal is this will just increase economic freedom, it'll increase the number of companies who go raise capital and get started out there in the world.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  What is the process for the private markets coming on-chain? Like, it seems like there's now enough momentum, right? Echo is one version of this. Did, you know, on-chain companies, raising on-chain, that makes sense, but how do we get to the point where companies that maybe aren't crypto-native are able to utilize these rails and then particularly, you know, tokenize their equity and make use of, you know, crypto's full potential?

• 1:52:44Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, so it's starting with token sales, more crypto companies, but you're right, we're eventually going to get this, I think, to be every company just raising money this way if it's more efficient. They shouldn't really even have to care if it's crypto underneath, they're just, you know, they're raising dollars or stable coins, whatever that they want to actually raise. So, you know, there are currently some exemptions which allow this to happen under the SEC, both for crowdfunding or, you know, having accredited investors raise it, but we're actually, we're spending quite a lot of time with the SEC to try to get the next generation of this working that would allow retail to participate under certain conditions. You know, the accredited investor rules are there for a good reason, they want to protect people, the unaccredited investors, but it also prohibits people who are not already

• 1:53:29Brian Armstrong?

  wealthy from, you know, participating in these kinds of upsides. So, in many ways, the accredited investor rules are kind of unfair, we're hoping that we can find the right balance of consumer protection and also making these available to retail. And, yeah, it'll level the playing field, democratize access, that's what crypto's good at.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  Do you, has this happened yet for a company to go, effectively go public on-chain? Do you expect to see that in the near future? There's so much capital on-chain that would love to invest in, you know, that loves to invest in all types of different opportunities, but do you see that?

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

  Is that not just dropping a token? Like, do you not think of Ethereum as the first company?

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in some ways, but I'm talking about like, a company that, let's say, you know, we had Figma IPO this year, they could put, they could leave an allocation, like an on-chain allocation.

• 1:54:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  And so, some would go through traditional brokerages, and I just feel like you'd be getting the first calls for serious companies that wanted to explore something like that.

• 1:54:28Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, so there's been lots of precursors to this, you know, the whole ICO craze and everything. It just showed the amount of demand for this, or like the Ethereum launch or anything, right? But there's no, there's, hasn't been anybody who's done it yet with like a traditional IPO, like you said, with an allocation in the on-chain category. And actually, when Coinbase went public in 2021, I really wanted to do this. We spent a bunch of time with the lawyers trying to figure it out. And unfortunately, like the SEC at that time was not the kind of, it wasn't ready. Let's put it that way. And so now we have an SEC that's much more engaged and willing to innovate on this frontier. And they really want the US to be the crypto capital of the world. So I think that we will see, hopefully in the next two, three years,

• 1:55:10Brian Armstrong?

  the first company go public on-chain, you know, and could be in parallel with a traditional IPO. But over time, I think you'll eventually see like a marquee blue chip company go public entirely on-chain. And that's where, that's the direction this is heading, you know? Crypto is eating financial services and hopefully Coinbase can be the primary account for people in that new economy.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  How much are stablecoins an important piece of this narrative? I imagine that even crypto founders who are super bullish on crypto are still not in the world where they say, I want 100% of my raise to be denominated in Bitcoin or Ethereum because I need to hate people.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have a funny, I have a funny story from, from 2021. I built a company called Party Round back in the day. And we had a fundraising software that some variety web two, web three companies were using. And we had a big web three company fundraise with our product. And we had the functionality to raise in stablecoins.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:08Jordi Hays?

  And they say, we actually don't want to offer this because it's really kind of complicated to try to cust- like, they weren't set up to like custody the USDC. And so they were like, no, we'll just use fiat rails. Uh, because, I mean, the variety, the tech's obviously come a long way since then, but.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  But yeah, but I'm, I'm wondering like, are, are modern crypto companies thinking 10% in crypto? Or Bitcoin and ETH or something like that? Or are there companies that are like 50/50? Or are they like, I want to use crypto rails, but it's got to be all in stablecoins? Is it all over the place? Like, what's the current mood around like, just if you're building a startup and you want to build a product and you need to pay, you know, employees at the same amount, basically, every, every, every month? Like, yeah, how do people think about that?

• 1:56:57Brian Armstrong?

  I think most companies are going to raise using stable coins just because it's stable to price the terms and that.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:03Brian Armstrong?

  But then, right away, they're going to want to keep a percentage of their treasury in something that's more inflation resistant like Bitcoin. You know, we're seeing even large public companies like Coinbase and, you know, others use Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

• 1:57:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:19Brian Armstrong?

  So it's becoming more acceptable to have Bitcoin in the treasury as part of treasury management. It's almost becoming like a best practice if you want to hedge against inflation.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29Brian Armstrong?

  But to just actually get investment terms done, yeah, that's probably going to happen in USDC with people just clicking a button to sign the terms, agree to the safe, and then the money is instantly transferred as part of that.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. We're having Brian Chesky on in just a few minutes. I don't think we ever got your full take on Founder Mode. Like, you've been through so... I feel like you're in the best example of like a founder who's been at the helm through so many cycles. How have you distilled your philosophy, your operating philosophy on like keeping the team aligned, keeping focus, agility, keeping new ideas flowing through the entire Coinbase journey?

• 1:58:15Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, you know, I actually started my career at Airbnb and I got a chance to work with Brian and Joe and Nate. And so, you know, I'm a big fan of Airbnb and everything I learned there before going on to Coinbase. But yeah, I'm a big fan of Founder Mode as well. I think Brian struck a chord with that when he put it out. I mean, I'll tell you, one of the things actually we adopted from his Founder Mode talk and subsequent content that came out is like we're now doing product events twice a year where we go out and just package up everything we've been building and communicate it to the world. That's just one small example, but I think the core message of it is like don't apologize for running the company how you want to run it. And so, there's definitely times every week where I have to jump down into the weeds and be like, "Look, we're not hitting the bar here.

• 1:59:00Brian Armstrong?

  Like, let's level it up, let's go in this direction." And so, you're constantly, as a founder, sort of making those edits in the room, editing people's thinking, editing who's in charge of that team, editing the roadmap to get it all moving in the direction you want. So... Yeah, sometimes micromanagement is underrated and necessary.

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes okay to be a dictator.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  By Kobe DM as well. If he DMs you something, you gotta bring it to the team. Uh, well, I think we have Brian Chesky joining just now. Uh, thank you, Brian Armstrong, for hopping on the stream.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Hey, look, it's your old boss.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  It's your boss.

• 1:59:33Brian Chesky?

  Hey, Brian.

• 1:59:34Brian Armstrong?

  Hey. Strong black t-shirt game today.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, looking good, guys.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  You both look fantastic. Uh, thank you so much for hopping on the stream.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congratulations to, uh, the Coinbase and the Echo teams. Awesome moment.

• 1:59:47Brian Armstrong?

  Cheers. All right, thanks, guys.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  And Brian Chesky from Airbnb.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Is joining the show. How are you doing, Brian? Uh, we're doing great.

• 1:59:56Brian Chesky?

  Great, how are you doing?

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  Uh, congratulations on all the progress. We've been, uh, hoping to get you on the stream this year. We're really excited to sync up.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  We have to kick it off with the most important question. This is what I've been wondering.

• 2:00:08John Coogan?

  Thousands of people asked us to ask you this question. We have to.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  They want to know your one rep max.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  What's your bench press?

• 2:00:14Brian Chesky?

  Oh, for, for bench press?

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:16Brian Chesky?

  I don't bench anymore.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  What about all time best? Three plates, three fifteen.

• 2:00:19Brian Chesky?

  All time best, three fifteen. Um, I was better at deadlift. I deadlifted, uh, I think five ninety-five.

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:00:26Brian Chesky?

  Which I think is six plates.

• 2:00:30Brian Chesky?

  Now I do like squats. I thank you very much. I do, uh, three fifteen for sets of ten or twelve.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Um, yeah, uh, we, we were reviewing, um, uh, some of the, the, the more recent shifts in your strategy at Airbnb. I would love for you to give us just an update on this idea of Airbnb as a community, Airbnb as a platform. Uh, we were actually debating this earlier. I met my co-founders in my first company on Airbnb. Like, that's, like, that's how I needed a place to stay. They were doing YC. I said, this will be a perfect fit. I want to build a company. We wound up putting the companies together. Um, and I thought, uh, that Airbnb was actually a community on day one. And so when you say you want Airbnb to be a community, is that a return? Or is that an evolution? Is that an act two? Or is that a return to act one? How are you thinking about community building?

• 2:01:21Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. It's kind of both. I mean, I think Airbnb started very much as a community because people lived with each other. It was mostly bedrooms. Yeah. And so in that sense, it was implicitly a community and everyone left reviews for one another. Now, as we've grown, more and more people have traveled with families and groups and they've rented entire homes. Yeah. And there's still a community. I mean, a lot of people, two out of three people who book an Airbnb leave a review. Yeah. That's not true of most platforms. So people contribute. But I think that we can go so much further. So I think it's a little bit of returning to our roots, but then taking those roots and then taking a giant step forward. And so I'll give you a couple of examples. You know, we launched earlier this year, experiences. And one of the things we noticed was one of the biggest things we want to do with experiences is meet other people. Yeah.

• 2:02:04Brian Chesky?

  So we basically allow you now to opt in. You can publish on a guestbook. So when people book an experience, they can see who else is going. You can then stay in touch with people after and you can message them. Cause a lot of people were like staying in touch, but they would have to exchange WhatsApp numbers. It's really laborious. You can't communicate with everyone. So these are just small things, but we're going to be doing so much more. I mean, ultimately, you know, Airbnb is mostly a marketplace right now. Yeah. And I would love it to be first and foremost, a community. And it means that the atomic unit of Airbnb goes from a listing, a home to a person. In other words, the most important asset we have are all the people, not all the, not all the inventory. That is a really, really big shift.

• 2:02:45Brian Chesky?

  And we've made a lot of investments in our community. For example, we have 200 million verified identities. There's only 100 million, uh, 180 million passports in circulation, US passports. So we've done a lot around profile, having more of an ironclad identity system. Building out, there are really no social networks anymore. There's no profiles on the internet, uh, maybe other than like LinkedIn. And so we think there's a real opportunity to build something like a social network in the real world, where you can travel and live anywhere and you can get a home, you can get a service, you can get experiences, you can meet people, you can discover interesting communities. And it could go even beyond travel because we're starting to see people using Airbnb in their own cities, especially for service experiences. And why are we doing this? Because I like to ask entrepreneurs, like, why do you deserve to exist?

• 2:03:30Brian Chesky?

  And the best generic answer I have ever had been answered is, because if I don't do it, no one else will. And I kind of think the thing that we're working on, that I'm not saying no one else will, but the thing that's unique to us. Is the idea that we have a community and I think it's a superpower, but we could do a lot more with it. Um, cause we're built on trust and people do one of the most intimate things they can do, share their home with one another. So I feel like if we build the system of trust, we can do a lot more with it.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  I, I was reading an article about run clubs and they've become really popular and they were kind of branding, at least in the thing that I was reading is like a modern dating service or something. And I'm wondering like, how quickly does community building turn in, does Airbnb become a dating app at some point? Like, am I crazy for thinking that people will meet each other on this app?

• 2:04:14Brian Chesky?

  I think they will. I think it'd be more like a college party vibe. So less of a one-to-one matchmaking and more like, what's a, what's makes a college party unique? You kind of trust everyone because they went to the same college. It's not like a bar. So there's like filter and so people's guards are a little down at a bar, people are a little bit, guards are up. And so, or like a dinner party. And at a dinner party, it's, you don't go to a college party necessarily just to meet people and hook up. Just like you don't go to a dinner party to hook up, you go to make friends, but sometimes you will meet someone that you can start dating. And so it's more like, we're going to create a trusted environment for people to meet. There's no subtext of dating or anything like that. But of course that happens and, um, and so that's kind of how we think of it. We're not going to do like a matchmaking service.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it makes sense. If you go to a city and you want to do an activity and you go with a bunch of other people, you're, you're going to make friends, you're going to make business partners, but you're also maybe going to, you know, become romantically interested in someone. Yeah, all the above. That's the nature of these things. Jordy?

• 2:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's it like transitioning, uh, and I'm sure you, you consult with founders that are maybe five, 10 years, you know, uh, behind in the journey, but what's it like transitioning from the venture world in terms of like, uh, this sort of very mile, it's very milestone based. You're going from series A to B to C. It's very clear to IPO. And then you're public and you're just out in the ocean, right? And it's just sort of this endless sea of opportunity and, and paths and journeys. But I'm curious, like, uh, what, what mental shift was required to, uh, move into the public markets? Especially now that you're, you know, five years in.

• 2:05:48Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, this might be surprising to say, but I felt like it was harder to be a late-stage private company than a public company. Because a late-stage private company have all the disadvantages of being public, like your financials are like well-audited, there's beat reporters covering you. When you're of large scale, we found a lot of things leaking to the public market, so we were mark-to-market. So, we kind of had a lot of the disadvantages of being public. But there's always a sense when you're a private company, you get really big, like you're hiding something or there's more to the story. And so there's this insatiable desire, when you're a private company, for people to quote, "Get to the truth, get to the bottom of it." And once you go public, everything is disclosed through the S1, the document you have to file with the SEC.

• 2:06:30Brian Chesky?

  And then, I think people just assume like, like there's so much more transparency. I think it's harder and easier. It's a little less milestone-based. I mean, you literally like, I used to pay a really close attention to our valuation every round we did. And you're, everything you do as a private company, it's often to get to the next fundraising. And that can be helpful, but you can also make a lot of trade-offs. Like, I think we made, just to our prior test topic, I think we made some trade-offs around human connection and community, probably appears time, and the name of growth. And I think most companies, you live and die by that next round, and that round being an up-round, not a down-round, and making sure you have enough money. And we were one of the most profitable companies in tech. We raised not a lot of money relative to our valuation.

• 2:07:13Brian Chesky?

  By the time we went public, we had cumulatively burned, I think, zero dollars of cash, or very little, very little free cash flow. And yet, we were still pretty beholden to it. Now, once you're public, it's almost like, it's so omnipresent that you almost just, it becomes part of the background. Your valuation changes every second of every day of every business hour. And once you're public, you realize this is, you're gonna have a stock price the rest of your life. Even if you're not CEO anymore, you're gonna live and die by it. So somehow, I was able to just put it out of my mind a little bit more. The quarterly earnings is kind of like, instead of every year you have to explain yourself, you explain yourself every three months. But, you know, I think you have to develop like thick skin.

• 2:07:55Brian Chesky?

  And I think the public markets teach you that you cannot, like, your valuation isn't your value. Do you know what I mean by that? Like, if you associate your value to your valuation, then your self-esteem and the morale of the company's gonna go up and down. And I think, you know, Jeff Bezos told me really early on, this was more of a press thing, but he said... And this is when Airbnb was on magazine covers, when they had magazines and, you know, ten years ago and we were gone covers. And he said, beware, today's poster boy is tomorrow's pinata. And things are never as good as they seem, they're never as bad as they seem. And I think you have to have that, like, don't get too high when your stock price is up. You know, when we were in public, we popped from like, we were marked at eighteen billion dollars, five months, six months later, we went a hundred billion. And I'm like, we

• 2:08:38Brian Chesky?

  weren't as good, bad as when we were eighteen billion. We're probably not as good as a hundred billion. And today, our stock price has been pretty flat. We're probably a lot better than people giving us credit for. So you just gotta like, like not focus on that. And an easier said than done. But the more you can like drown that out, the more you can focus on what really, really matters, which is creating a great product and eventually be rewarded for it.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of times when we talk to public company CEOs, they'll tell us that one of the benefits is that you have a public currency for M and A. How are you thinking about M and A? Airbnb doesn't feel like, you know, Salesforce type company where you're just gonna buy up a bunch of B two B SaaS companies every, every couple of weeks. How are you thinking about other additions to the Airbnb ecosystem? What have you done? What have you looked at? What's your philosophy to that?

• 2:09:25Brian Chesky?

  Our philosophy is to be extremely discerning around M and A. The reason why is, we've taken an approach to run Airbnb that's kind of similar to Apple in its early days where we are one app, one brand, and we're a functional organization. And we have one customer, right? So that, that means that it's hard to take a really large company and bolt it on because we have a functional organization. For those watching, I assume you know a functional organization, but there's like an engineering department, a marketing department. We don't have a division. That was, we don't have divisions. So it doesn't preclude us from doing M and A if it's a really great opportunity. But for us to buy a big business, it just has to be extraordinarily compelling. Now, we're still looking at acquisitions. And I do think,

• 2:10:08Brian Chesky?

  you know, we do billions of dollars of stock buybacks. We generate a lot of free cash flow. We generate four to five billion in free cash flow every year. I think, you know, we're a good stock to own. Thank you. I like to think that, you know, this is a good stock to own and that there's a huge amount of upside. Given our multiple right now, which is not super high. So we're very much looking at it. We're also especially interested in smaller companies because they integrate much more easily with Airbnb. And of course, we're definitely looking at like talent acquisitions as well, especially companies related to AI. That'd be really interesting to us.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. On running on a quarterly cadence, there's been some talk this year and maybe interest from the admin to move to a sort of biannual reporting requirements. As a public company CEO, what do you think the impacts would be to your business? And what are some of the sort of more broad impacts that you would expect out of a move like that? Because it's easy for the podcast class or people on X to talk about why it would be good or why it would be bad, but I'm curious from your view.

• 2:11:15Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, it's a great, great question.

• 2:11:19Brian Chesky?

  I think it would probably be from the company perspective, marginally better. I don't think it would be a complete life change or game change. Like, we don't spend, we spend, we spend a decent amount of time preparing for earnings. You know, you want to show respect to the investors and be prepared. At the same time, if I was an investor, I'd want to know that Airbnb management was mostly focused on growing the company and making the company more valuable. So, you know, I tried to spend a decent amount of time on earnings and I do think some CEOs spend a lot of time on earnings. And insofar that they spend a lot of time on earnings, it's probably best for shareholders in the long run. Even though they want more information more frequently, I think there's probably just more upside in management being a little less distracted and being more heads down.

• 2:12:03Brian Chesky?

  And not much changes in the course of three months. I mean, that's the other thing I've noticed is so little changes every three months that you end up getting asked questions around like foreign exchange, like currency, like, like the the more frequent the meetings, the more tactical the conversations often are. And I I I wonder if a positive outcome would be less management distraction, but also the topics will be bigger, more strategic and actually more fundamental. I mean, we get asked a lot of really good questions, but we get asked a lot of things because they're trying to predict what's going to happen next three months.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:39Brian Chesky?

  And so the more frequent you have to report, the more tactical the trades are. And so the smaller the topics are.

• 2:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Yes, a great, a great CEO. You're thinking, how, how can we be a more valuable company a year from now, five years from now?

• 2:12:52Brian Chesky?

  Yeah. There's a slight misalignment in timelines between the frequency of the reporting, the questions that get asked and how I think about the business. Like, I'm not thinking about like the impacts that much of tariffs or like whether the currency exchange between Europe and the US, US dollar, like, these are not things that you can optimize that well anyway. And I don't think these are things that should determine whether you should buy your stock and hold it or sell it. Um, I think it's much bigger, more fundamental things. And so I think that would be, but I think on balance, probably good. I can imagine people that, um, trade on information want it more frequently, but I do think there's a cost to it.

• 2:13:34Brian Chesky?

  And so probably on net balance, it's probably good to go to every six months. But make no mistake, it's not a huge problem for me. Like, if it's every three months, we're fine.

• 2:13:43John Coogan?

  Uh, how do you think about the long-term opportunity in categories that previously struggled with disintermediation? Uh, Airbnb hasn't had that problem, but as I think about new products, whether, I mean, we, we actually went through this whole era of like Airbnb for dog walkers, Airbnb for house cleaners. And the problem with those product, those platforms was that there's a lot of disintermediation. Yeah, you meet someone on the platform and then you say, hey, I'll pay you cash the next time you come by. Um, do you see any long-term solution to those with, you know, just building a better payments platform or view platform? Or do you want to stay out of markets that are, uh, that have a risk of disintermediation?

• 2:14:25Brian Chesky?

  That's a really, really good question. And because historically we're a travel business, supply and demand are different cities and there's not a lot of repeat business. So there's a very low risk of dis remediation. And because the transaction is fairly high risk to both parties. Like, you know, you don't want to get scammed and you want to have recourse. You want to have customer service. Every reservation has $3 million of damage protection that is voided if you go outside the reservation. So in our case, historically, because we're a global network effect, it's a high, high consideration purchase with a lot of protections. We haven't had this problem, but we are now facing this because we just launched services. Now, travel services, like we have, you can get a chef for your Airbnb. You got a big kitchen, why not have a chef come over?

• 2:15:09Brian Chesky?

  We're starting to now see people booking chefs in their own city. And so if you get a chef and you love him, you might order him again. So we are now entering this and it's really local recurring services where there's a risk of dis remediation. And the more it's local recurring services that are commodity, where the differentiation is not big, like a chef, you might want the same chef, but you might want a different cuisine and so you might go to a different chef. And so, you know, you might not use the regular. My view on this is we should do what's best for the customer, not what's best for our business model. In the end, and if it means that we need to have a lower commission for repeat business or it means we have a different business model, I think that's okay.

• 2:15:50Brian Chesky?

  You know, we are absolutely looking at loyalty programs, things like that, that could create incentives. But I do think that, you know, you got to align your incentives. We never want to have a commission structure where you have an incentive to go off the platform. So if it's a recurring business, we should not do taking 15%. Maybe we don't take anything, maybe we take a really low percentage point, a low take rate, but maybe you also accrue some loyalty points, something like that.

• 2:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you turn, you start building, you know, business in a box, right? Or start something more like-

• 2:16:17Brian Chesky?

  The other way you can do it is membership, right? You can pay, have a paid subscription service where you just get access. And then within that closed garden, you know, you can do whatever transactions you want. So I think it's just a matter of start with a customer, work backwards to business model. And I think there's a number of different business models here. But I do not think a 15% take rate on recurring business model, a recurring service works. So the margins would probably be lower because you're not providing as much value, unless you're providing a lot of other protections.

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Where do you think AI is overhyped and where do you think it's underhyped?

• 2:16:51Brian Chesky?

  That's a great question.

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  You can try to try to answer this without without, you know, pissing off any friends.

• 2:17:05Brian Chesky?

  I might piss some people off right now. I don't think I will. Okay, here's here's my instinct. ChatGPT launched three years ago. More than three, this time three years ago, people were not talking about AI, right? October 2022, people were talking about Elon Musk buying Twitter. Like, that was what people were talking about. A little earlier, people were talking about crypto. And people were not talking about AI. And people that were were like, this is five or 10 years away. And then ChatGPT launched late November 2022, and in the last three years, that's all anyone's talking about. There's an old saying, people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what can do in 10 years. I think that's true of AI. I think that people are wildly overestimating what AI will do to society in the next two, three, four years.

• 2:17:47Brian Chesky?

  And they're probably wildly underestimating the impact of society in 10 or 15 years. I think it's going to be slow and then all of a sudden. And so, three years later, after the launch of ChatGPT, daily life is not that much different for the average person. The top three apps in the App Store are AI apps. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Sora. Apps four through 50, including ours, or most of them, are not AI-native apps. Most of us have some AI in it. We have an AI customer service agent. We think it's really great. But we're not an AI app yet. And so I think the real question is, when does AI change daily life for the average person? And the answer to that question is, when do the top 50 apps, when do all those consumer apps

• 2:18:30Brian Chesky?

  become essentially AI apps, AI-native apps? Think of AI intelligence as like a gold rush. And in this case, the gold is intelligence. And so you have companies that are mining gold. Those would be like the large language model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. And then you got a whole bunch of companies that are basically creating picks and shovels, enterprise. There are very few companies using AI in the consumer space at scale. In fact, I'm on the board of Y Combinator. Almost all the startups we are seeing are enterprise. There are not a lot of companies doing consumer. There's a couple of reasons why. Number one, I think some people are nervous about ChatGPT killing their startup. I think they're too worried. I think companies are too worried. I keep telling people, and I told this to Sam Altman, one of my best friends,

• 2:19:15Brian Chesky?

  that no one company can run the entire economy. First of all, governments won't allow that. But second of all, it's just too much bureaucracy in a company to do that. And there's a reason that when Apple created the iPhone, they didn't make every app in the App Store. Because can you imagine how big of a bureaucracy that would have had to be for Apple to build Airbnb and Uber and Instacart and Instagram and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? So there's gonna be a whole series of companies, but they're gonna take time. My prediction is that in the next three to five years, not in the next year, you're gonna see a huge boom in the consumer space of AI. And to me, the entire economy is gonna be built around the consumer adoption. You know, enterprise supports consumer. And I do think enterprise is being adopted quickly. Tools are becoming more efficient.

• 2:20:01Brian Chesky?

  But I do think the big question is, when does it reach the consumer's day-to-day life? And looking at our timeline of development, I'm gonna assume we're a little bit faster than the average company because we're really focused on this. And we're still like, it's gonna take a few more years for us to really transform the company to become an AI company. And eventually, we wanna be every bit an AI company as the truly AI-native companies. Because I think every tech company is gonna be an AI company or they're gonna cease to exist at some point. So the question is, how long does this shift take? It's not a year. It's longer than that.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  Wait, so you asked, you told Sam Altman he can't control the entire economy. Did he say, "I'm gonna try anyway"?

• 2:20:40Brian Chesky?

  No, he acknowledged that. This was, you know how this topic came up? It came up with the, um... The the Dev Day where they had essentially those SDKs.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:51Brian Chesky?

  And we were debating like, yeah, the GPTs. And we're debating like, well, what would that be? And my very strong opinion was, he said, like, what's the role of apps in the world of ChatGPT? And I said, I don't know how much different it is than the App Store. It might be a little bit different, but I don't think that every app is just a mere data layer. And by the way, I think what you need to do, unless you want to build everything yourself, and again, I think you have a whole different set of problems to try to build them yourself, is you need a really robust SDK. You really robust SDK. The thing they launched was a first version, but it wasn't a very robust SDK. We have, you know, and we have a community, you have to have an account, you have to be a member of the community.

• 2:21:31Brian Chesky?

  There's a lot of things that precluded us from being able to have a really good integration with the current SDK as it is. But I think ChatGPT could be an incredible platform.

• 2:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:41Brian Chesky?

  If there's a really robust SDK, um, just like I think, you know, like we can still have our app on the on the App Store.

• 2:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What kind of what kind of conversations do you think, uh, management teams are having around integrating with LLMs? We've seen, uh, OpenAI announce partnerships with Etsy, you know, Marketplace, Walmart, uh, notably not, uh, Amazon yet or eBay. I'm sure those conversations are happening. But from your view, running, you know, scaled marketplace business, what kind of what what kind of conversations and kind of concerns or questions do you think these other players have starting to integrate? Uh, around agentic commerce. Around, yeah, agentic commerce and specifically integrating with OpenAI when OpenAI's ambitions are obviously incredibly bold and and they do want to own as much of the user experience, I think, as they can.

• 2:22:31Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I totally understand why a company want to do that. Um, I think that, I think most of these companies are thinking of this as an experiment at this stage. Um, I don't think that most of these companies think that the amount of traffic or the business they're going to get is meaningful yet. So this is really about learning and deciding whether you want to participate or not. I think a lot of companies are going to have to ask themselves, do you want to be a destination? Or are you going to be, or are you going to allow ChatGPT to be the destination or a large language model to be the destination? And. I have a, I guess I have a unique view on this. I'm not an AI maximalist insofar that I feel like a few companies are gonna own the entire internet. Here's why.

• 2:23:11Brian Chesky?

  Number one, the models that ChatGPT has that are, that are in ChatGPT are available to everyone via an API. And if you don't use their model, you can use open source models that are three or six months behind. And the, and for most things, a consumer cannot discern the difference between a frontier model and a model three to six months behind it. Like, if you need to have a travel concierge plan your trip, I think a model like three, four months behind, I don't think you'll notice a difference for the average person because the queries aren't complex enough. So imagine as a thought experiment, we replace the name, I know this is not a perfect analogy. It's a little bit flawed in some ways, but imagine we replace AI with electricity.

• 2:23:53Brian Chesky?

  And it was like a hundred years ago and three companies had electricity and no other company had electricity. Suddenly, these electric companies would have a huge advantage. But we have this mental model as if these companies are the only ones with electricity. Every company is gonna have the access to all the same models. Unless companies start limiting their models only to their applications. But then other competing models would then get more widely adopted because they will have an API. So you have to make a choice. Do you want to limit your model or do you want to be like AWS? And AWS, amazon.com does not get much of an advantage that they're part of the same company as AWS. They make a point about this, by the way. And so I think you're gonna see a huge change.

• 2:24:37Brian Chesky?

  Where on the one hand, we all have to decide how to participate with platforms like ChatGPT. And I think if they build a really great SDK and we can still own the customer relationship, there's probably not a huge problem. It has to just be integrated correctly. At the same time, you have to remember, we're also gonna have

• 2:24:55Brian Chesky?

  Nearly as good AI, right? Via the fact that even if we don't produce our own models, there will be an entire economy that will allow those models to be accessible via APIs. There may be some advantages to the companies that build apps within. And so I think we then then it goes to the mental model. Do you want to go to one destination that then is like a macro agent that connects to all other agents? Or do you use different apps and those become different agents? So now we're starting to debate these mental models. And there's a trade off. The trade off is the advantage going just to chat GPT is now one agent can kind of cross pollinate and organize everything. But then if the SDK is limited, it will be not as powerful as going direct to the app.

• 2:25:37Brian Chesky?

  That is an AI app that can go really, really deep and do your job really well. And so this is the balance and where do I think this lands? Where I think it goes is I think chat GPT has to build an SDK. That's really robust and it will be just a channel. That's my guess, but we'll see and I might be wrong and um. But just remember that like all these companies are going to eventually have access to AI. And we're in there. So we're going through this whole electrification, so to speak. Period over the next three years of putting the latest models into our apps. And for us to do that, we have to basically rebuild the apps from the ground up.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, to go back to Airbnb a little bit, I'd love your take on where culture is going in the era of like online and offline content. There's this weird tension where everyone's brain rotted on Tik Tok, watching five second videos. But the Taylor Swift era's tour is the biggest concert and everyone's talking about it. Or the sphere in Las Vegas is this place where people go to visit. Run clubs are really popular.

• 2:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing there's is some quote. Yeah, I don't know who to attribute it to, but like when when an American has like a free week, they want to immediately go on vacation and experience somewhere new. And that feels really enduring.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  And so I feel like you're in a unique position to kind of comment on like the runaway brain ratification of American culture versus like touching grass, basically.

• 2:27:05Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I think it's a great question and. When I came to Silicon Valley, there was this thing called social networking. And social networking was literally, as you can recall, twenty years ago, a way to connect with your friends. Basically, people I cared about shared stuff they cared about. And social networking may be the most popular product of all time that was invented and then uninvented. It was literally uninvented. Because around 2012, it became social media. And the moment it became social media, your friends became your followers. You stopped connecting, you started performing. And social media is now becoming not social. Because pretty soon, the feed became algorithmic, not your followers.

• 2:27:46Brian Chesky?

  And now with Sora, the content is going to continually become AI. And so, pretty soon, the name "social media" is not even the appropriate name. I wouldn't, I'm not sure I'd call Sora "social media." I don't know how "social" it is right now. It's really AI media, if it's anything. And I think AI media is going to be where this goes. And I think the problem with it, well, maybe it's a problem, maybe it's not, but the name "artificial intelligence," AI, the key word, I think, is the first word, not the second word. Artificial. And I think what's going to happen is, more and more, what's on a screen will be artificial. Not to say it's bad, but it'll be like a fantasy land.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:25Brian Chesky?

  And increasingly, I like to say, you want to ride a trend or ride the opposite trend. And so, if we're basically creating this fantasy digital realm that is highly artificial, I think in reaction to that, people want what's real. And the way you're noticing this, if you look at Gen, Gen Alpha, you know, really young people, they're actually, some of them, adopting social media less. They're starting to see some of the adoption of social media go down. And they are, there's an enamoration with the eighties. Kids born after the eighties are obsessed with the eighties now. A bygone era that they weren't a part of before technology took over people's lives. Right? There's like this nostalgia, and we see it because we do these like, like pop-up experiences that's based on nostalgic. And it, like, young people are obsessed with them, especially eras before them.

• 2:29:09Brian Chesky?

  And concerts are more popular than ever. People now, Americans go to Europe on vacation more than ever. Like, how many of your friends do you know that go to Europe for vacation? And ten, twenty years ago, they weren't doing that. So people are looking to get away and have experiences. And so when AI automates everything, or more and more things, I don't think AI is going to change how we go on vacation, the physical aspect of it, that much. It might change how we book it, how we connect, but we want to be one of the companies that are getting people off their phone. If this was twenty years ago, and you were like time traveling to today, you would remark how the world looks almost identical than twenty years ago, physically, except now people are looking at these pieces of glass all day long. What is in this piece of glass?

• 2:29:54Brian Chesky?

  And they're just in this vortex. And I think increasingly, I think you're going to see a little bit of a reaction against that. This is not an anti-phone, like rant. This is not an anti-AI thing. It's just about the fact that we need to have a balance. Do you ever notice that devices and screens aren't usually in your dreams? There's something about the digital realm that doesn't quite stick in your memory the way physical experiences do. And I think increasingly, if AI frees up more and more of our time, hopefully that time can be spent in the real world having meaningful experiences with people we care about. And to me, that's what life is really going to be about. And I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of getting people off their phones, into the real world, meeting people, making the world feel smaller,

• 2:30:37Brian Chesky?

  having cool services, having cool experiences. And most of these jobs that we're going to produce, or like workforce, is not going to be automated by AI anytime soon. I don't think you want a robot massaging you or pouring you wine. And so I, I just think there's, AI is going to lead to this acceleration of really AI media, which I think is going to push a lot of people also into the physical world, just as you're saying.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  I think people will slowly wake up that, uh, that, that Airbnb is an AI bet, but not because you guys are going to use all the different forms of digital intelligence, but people are, people are going to increasingly just want to log off. Yeah. Uh, last question, if we have time. How do you see the, uh, the role of the designer evolving with various Gen AI tools? It feels, in my personal experience, the value of great designers is actually just going up. Like, I want, I want more of, I want more of their time. I think they're commanding even higher and higher premiums. But I'm curious what your view is.

• 2:31:37Brian Chesky?

  I think I would agree with you. You know, it's funny, just a quick story. When I started in Silicon Valley, I remember I pitched an investor and one of the investors, I give him credit for being brutally honest. Because the end of the presentation, he said, I like everything but you and your idea. That's what he said. And I was, I want, I, I wouldn't, I, I didn't think that was an insult. So I got home and I thought, well, what else is there? But he basically said, he was basically implying two things that didn't seem like, they seem reasonable. Um, strangers won't live in other, each other's homes. Okay. That, that seemed like a reasonable conclusion. And designers don't start tech companies. And it seemed plausible. And there weren't really a lot of role models. The closest thing to a role model I had was Steve Jobs.

• 2:32:20Brian Chesky?

  I don't know if people thought of him as designer. I kind of did. But then, you know, when he passed, there weren't really a lot of other iconic founders that came from that kind of world. And I view design as a huge differentiator. And in a world where, um, you know, you know, software, software programming is a language and AI is really good at language. And English to Spanish, English to a software language. Um, I think the role of designers can be really important. And also I think everyone's going to be a designer, whether they want to call themselves designers or not. Engineers, marketers, other people are essentially making design decisions. So then the question is, well, what is design?

• 2:33:00Brian Chesky?

  I don't think design is how something looks. It's fundamentally how something works. Design is an assembly. And I think the role of a designer is similar to the role of an architect of a building. An engineer is the ones building the building, but I think the architect is going to be one of the most important roles. And by the way, an engineer can design. I'm not saying they're only designers doing this. In fact, I think the AI tools will allow more people to be designers because you won't need to be a craftsperson. You just need taste. And I think more people can learn taste than can get through the craft. And this allows engineers, designers and everyone to be designer. Now, some people will be better designers and there really is going to be an expertise around design.

• 2:33:39Brian Chesky?

  But it's going to be about taste. It's going to be about intuition and intuition is not this like. Like just gut feel thing, like a vibe. I think intuition is based on your expertise. And one of the things I learned about great design is great design is simple. And simple isn't about removing something. Simple is about distilling, understanding something so deeply. You can distill it to its essence. And so I think great design is about making the complex simple, about caring about every detail, about having taste. Taste means having a sense of culture and history and where the world's going. And it's really about systems oriented thinking. This sounds a lot like the skill sets you need in the age of AI. And so if we believe that,

• 2:34:24Brian Chesky?

  then I, yes, I do believe that like suddenly more people can be designers because it's going to be much easier to build things in the age of AI. So I'm very, very bullish and I, I, I, I thought when Apple rose, that would lead to the creation of all these designers as founders and designers being elevated in Silicon Valley. It, it kind of did for a moment and then it kind of subsided. I am very optimistic that generative AI is gonna like, you know, really lift design in the world and make it one day equal to engineering. I think that, I don't think that's a crazy thing one day.

• 2:34:56John Coogan?

  Last question for me. We started with a bodybuilding question. What was it like being a bodybuilder at RISD? Were you a fish out of water? It feels like, you know, bodybuilder, I expect like, you know, SEC school or something. But was that a weird experience or was that just like normal?

• 2:35:10Brian Chesky?

  It was weird and I was a weirdo at college. I'll be honest with you. The way I got into bodybuilding was I, I, I was an ice hockey player growing up, but I was very skinny. I was a hundred pounds freshman year of high school and I went to a sports academy, like a prep school for ice hockey and I was way too small. And my junior, my senior high school, I was 125 pounds and I broke my leg playing ice hockey. I had to do physical therapy and I was kind of like an overachiever and I decided I was going to start bodybuilding and. I got really, really into it, kind of obsessively into it. And I remember my friends were teasing me about how skinny I was. I said, I'm gonna be one of the most muscular teenagers in the country. And I got into bodybuilding. And I loved it. And the reason I loved it, and I ended competing nationally as a bodybuilder.

• 2:35:56Brian Chesky?

  And I loved bodybuilding and it was before anyone in tech was like working out or anything like that. It was kind of weird back then. Now a lot of tech founders have trainers and are really into.

• 2:36:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like creatine what?

• 2:36:07Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, exactly. No one knew what that was back then. People thought creatine were steroids, like they couldn't discern the difference between the two. And I learned a couple of lessons from bodybuilding too, that I bring to Airbnb. The first lesson I learned is you can change your body, you can change your life. And I was a kid, my parents are social workers, and I didn't grow up in an environment where you thought you could change your life. I kind of grew up in an environment where a lot of kids didn't leave their hometown. And so to be a tech founder, to kind of design the life you want to live, that didn't seem like anything that someone told me growing up. I think we take it for granted, but a lot of kids watching probably come from hometowns where that doesn't seem possible. If you can change your body, you can change your life. And it's almost the most tangible thing to change is your body.

• 2:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:48Brian Chesky?

  The second thing I learned from bodybuilding is you can't get in shape in one day. Like, there's no one workout, I think, that gets you into shape. It's consistency over time. It's true of tech. Maybe you can have a flash of an idea. But you're not gonna build a company in a, in a day. And it's better to just be consistent, even if you have some bad days. And so you build your body one repetition at a time, and you build your company one day at a time. So these are some of the things I learned, but at RISD, I was totally a fish out of water. Because, you know, you have to eat a lot of protein. So I would walk around campus with like half a dozen hard boiled eggs, chicken breasts. I'd pull them out at very weird times.

• 2:37:27Brian Chesky?

  I would keep, uh, sometimes, um, like a steak in a Ziploc bag in my pocket and I whip it out in the middle.

• 2:37:34Jordi Hays?

  You'll appreciate.

• 2:37:35Brian Chesky?

  Class, people thought it was pretty weird, but that dedication, I just didn't really care. And it was, it was, and I, I'm glad I did it now that I'm forty four, because it, it's, it keeps you, keeps you feeling young.

• 2:37:45Jordi Hays?

  You'll, you'll appreciate my, my, uh, I, I got quite into weightlifting in college. My hack was I would go to the school cafeteria, all you can eat. And they would let you bring. Like sandwiches out. That was the one thing they allowed. And so I would take a sandwich and I'd make a hamburger puck of peanut butter and I would bring two between breakfast and lunch. I'd have two ham uh peanut butter sandwiches that were just like a full puck and then do the same thing between lunch and dinner. And then for dinner, I'd have two more. So I'd be

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  bulking. It's bulking.

• 2:38:17Brian Chesky?

  I know all those stories. Waking up in the middle of the night to chug egg whites, all those kinds of things. At my cafeteria, you had this meal card and if you if you don't use your meal card credit, you lose it. And a lot of the women wouldn't eat as much and they would basically have all this meal credit they would lose in a year. And so I made friends with them and they would give me their meal credit and I would that was how I got my protein.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Do you follow the sport today? Are you a Sam Sulek fan, a Chris Bumstead fan? Or are you too busy with Airbnb?

• 2:38:46Brian Chesky?

  I'm pretty busy. I follow it a little bit. I I like the classic bodybuilding more than the open class. It's just gotten kind of out of control in my opinion. I got the honor to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger and train with him at Gold Gym Venice. That was kind of like a dream of mine. And that was really cool. But I don't follow the sport too much anymore. But my trainer was a former Mr. Olympia competitor.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the stream. This is a lot of fun.

• 2:39:09Brian Chesky?

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Lessons on bodybuilding, company building, life.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we covered everything. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Right, hanging.

• 2:39:16Brian Chesky?

  Thank you. Bye.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. You can chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage, and more. And let me also tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. We didn't even cover the Airbnb story of their brilliant SEO journey during the Google era. Airbnb set up all these incredible landing pages for, you know, rentals in Tulsa, rentals in San Francisco. And so whenever you search for rental homes in a certain place, they were one of the greatest SEO beneficiaries during that boom. And you can be potentially one of the beneficiaries of the AI era with Profound.

• 2:40:04Jordi Hays?

  Buco Capital bloke, friend of the show, says, God, I could kiss Carpathia. SaaS has risen.

• 2:40:11John Coogan?

  SaaS has risen.

• 2:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Of course, the first company I looked up, Salesforce, up three and a half percent today. Let's give it up for the chief mogging officer.

• 2:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Back in the game.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for a while you've been you've been like the AGI bear AI SAS bull where you're you've been like it's all sass. It's all sass.

• 2:40:35Jordi Hays?

  Every time I get a pitch for AI agents and it's like uh.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  It's sass.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  It's sass.

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  And and you've been dropping it like a hot take, but you're not a doomer about it and you're not like it's nothing. You're like it's it's the best. It's actually the best. It's a bunch of opportunity for entrepreneurs. There's a bunch of opportunity for business efficiencies.

• 2:40:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm happy. I'm happy about it as long as you're focusing on what matters. Proper enterprise workflow.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  It's a bad day to be a manual workflow. That's for sure. That's for sure.

• 2:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, did you see?

• 2:41:04John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:41:04Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this picture? Uh, there it's looks like somebody found uh them filming the OpenAI.

• 2:41:11John Coogan?

  Is this real or is this just someone dressed up as Ilya? So this is Chris ChatGPT 21 says this movie's gonna be sick and it looks like.

• 2:41:20Jordi Hays?

  It looks like Joseph Gordon Levitt.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Oh, you think so?

• 2:41:22Jordi Hays?

  He's supposedly playing Ilya, right?

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. Oh, it does look like him. He's playing Ilya?

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  It would make sense that they would film in San Francisco.

• 2:41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. This is gonna be a wild movie. I can't believe they're making a movie so soon. It feels like it feels like the uh the Facebook story kind of marinated for I mean, I guess what Facebook came out in 2005. Yeah, it might be slop. Uh, Facebook came out in 2005 or 2004. I think they actually launched and then the movie came out in what? 2011?

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  2010, yeah.

• 2:41:51John Coogan?

  2010? So Facebook was, you know, had five years to simmer. Feels like, I mean, I guess OpenAI has been around longer, but really the narrative started with ChatGPT. Um, anyway, wild, wild, gonna be a good movie. Hopefully it pumps some people up. We'll see. It's probably gonna be a brutal hippies.

• 2:42:06Speaker 02

  I I wonder if we're gonna see any releases of uh who's playing Rune?

• 2:42:10John Coogan?

  I I would love to know who's playing Rune.

• 2:42:12Jordi Hays?

  If they don't, if they don't include Rune.

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  They should, yeah, they should just do it. He should be the animated character the whole time. You know how like in uh Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It's it's uh you haven't seen this? You haven't seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Who Framed Roger Rabbit is uh is one of the first movies that was shot with film, but then they animated characters, cartoon characters. Characters over the film. And so the cartoon characters interact with the real humans. And they like interact with each other in this funny, interesting way. It's the whole premise of the story is that like the cartoon characters broke out of their cartoon and like exist in the real world, something like that. And so I would love to see Rune played by an animated character throughout the whole film. That would be pretty wacky. Should we go to Apple?

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  David Sun says, "A supreme shape rotator can only rotate shapes, but a supreme word cell can rotate shape rotators."

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  Yes, this is a quote of Marc Andreessen saying, "High IQ experts work for mid IQ generalists. What means?"

• 2:43:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know if it's fair to call it. Steve Jobs, a mid IQ generalist. But yeah, Rune said this as well. The world is run by smart, smart generalists, smart generalists. There are no experts.

• 2:43:25Jordi Hays?

  What's this? What's this launch video from Apple? Let's pull it up before.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  They probably planned it on linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. And if you're buying an iPhone, they better pay their tax on numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 2:43:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's pull up this video from Tim Cook.

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  The restream waiting room. We'll bring in Stuart.

• 2:43:57Speaker 06

  Every story you love.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Very simple.

• 2:44:02Jordi Hays?

  They're launching a browser.

• 2:44:05John Coogan?

  They already have a browser.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  They're launching adult content. You see that? You see that? You can type whatever you want. They're not going to delete it if you go there. They're all in.

• 2:44:20Speaker 06

  Just a flicker on a screen.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Who, who?

• 2:44:24Jordi Hays?

  Apple Intelligence is coming to pages.

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  This is.

• 2:44:28Speaker 06

  What do you see?

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  This is Jane Goodall.

• 2:44:35Jordi Hays?

  Is this a new Mac MacBook Pro? Is that what we're getting?

• 2:44:39John Coogan?

  I don't know. It seems just like a pro Apple creativity vibe reel. People were saying it's kind of like a return to the roots, more like anti-AI, great idea, start here. It's just like-

• 2:44:49Jordi Hays?

  It's a Mac ad, John.

• 2:44:50John Coogan?

  It's a Mac ad. But was that even a Mac? That looked like a, that looked like an iPad to me. Was that a Mac? I don't know.

• 2:44:56Jordi Hays?

  It was a MacBook.

• 2:44:58John Coogan?

  But it's, but it hits extremely emotionally because that, that ad is voiced by Jane Goodall, who passed away on October 1st of this year. She was, of course, the British primatologist. She studied monkeys. She studied chimpanzees. A very noble, noble cough.

• 2:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Does she own a board ape?

• 2:45:20John Coogan?

  I don't know if she ever got into the board ape game. I'll have to figure that out.

• 2:45:26Jordi Hays?

  Jane Goodall would have loved-

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  Extremely disrespectful to her legacy. Let me tell you-

• 2:45:31Jordi Hays?

  How's that disrespectful?

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  Because she's one of the most revered scientists in history.

• 2:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Some of the most valuable apes in the world.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  And you're, you're trying to drag her down into the D-gen mud. You're tarnishing her legacy.

• 2:45:41Jordi Hays?

  It's on-chain art.

• 2:45:43John Coogan?

  Stop. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive makeups, number one ranking on G2.

• 2:45:53Jordi Hays?

  And before, before, before-

• 2:45:55John Coogan?

  Before we bring in-

• 2:45:56Jordi Hays?

  The new MacBook Pro is available starting tomorrow.

• 2:45:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna buy one.

• 2:45:59John Coogan?

  Mac M5, which is almost as fast as an M3 Pro and almost as fast as an M1 Ultra. It has this weird like thing.

• 2:46:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's not better than?

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  It is the best MacBook you can buy right now, I think.

• 2:46:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  I'm not sure. But there's some like plateauing going on in the M world. We'll have to dig into it. Anyway, we have Stuart Landesberg from Seneca in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Stuart. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Doing great. Thanks for having me.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on. We're, we're both excited for this one.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:46:33Jordi Hays?

  We-

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  We hate fire and we love water.

• 2:46:36Jordi Hays?

  We love water. We, I live in Malibu, John lives in Pasadena. Beginning of this year was super chaotic. Fortunately, our homes had burned down. But we had a crazy start to the year and we're looking and excited to see more companies working in the space. It's great to meet.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would love to keep you, for you to kick off with an introduction on yourself and the company and, and then we can get into the news.

• 2:46:59Speaker 07

  Sure. Well, thanks for having me and I'm sorry for you and for all the folks who live in Southern California about what happened earlier this year.

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:08Speaker 07

  I think, you know, it's a story we've heard too many times in California and that's a big part of why I'm here and why Seneca exists. I've spent the last decade and a half as an entrepreneur and doing other things in technology, but over the last few years, it's become, I think, increasingly apparent that building physical things that can solve real world problems, we need more entrepreneurs like doing this kind of stuff and maybe fewer people building, I don't know, the things that are fast to generate financial returns.

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  Infinite jets.

• 2:47:42Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:47:43John Coogan?

  The slot machine, the trough.

• 2:47:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Yes. Where are you on the farm? You're helping put out the fires on the farm, right?

• 2:47:55Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:47:56John Coogan?

  We're big into farming analogies. Anyway, give us the news. What happened?

• 2:47:59Speaker 07

  So, started this company, started working on it about a year and a half ago, doing research, doing ride-alongs with fire agencies and was amazed at the quality of individuals that we have in the fire service and amazed that most of these people are doing their jobs. And remember, these are people who literally run into burning buildings. They're doing their job with technology that is, in many cases, from the 60s and 70s, right? It's for people who've watched.

• 2:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Before that, when did we invent the hose?

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  Probably hundreds of years ago.

• 2:48:30Jordi Hays?

  We invented buckets and hoses and that's still, you know, key to the fight.

• 2:48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's amazing. And so you look at what we give to the warfighter, right? The other people who we rely on to keep our communities safe. And then you realize that aerial attack, which is so necessary, right? And you saw in the Palisades and in Paradise, you couldn't get aircraft up in the air, how bad that was. Still largely using manned helicopters on platforms from the 60s and 70s that cost tens of millions of dollars. And we all know what's possible in autonomous aviation. So you put those two together and it became really clear there was an opportunity to solve one of the biggest problems in fire, which is how do you get to the fire before it becomes too big?

• 2:49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:12Speaker 07

  So, put together a good team, announced yesterday that we'd raised $60 million and started that.

• 2:49:19Speaker 07

  Appreciate the con. Congratulations.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Raymond Tomzing.

• 2:49:22Jordi Hays?

  Well deserved.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  Caffeinated Capital.

• 2:49:24Speaker 07

  Thank you, gentlemen.

• 2:49:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's, I want to get into the specifics of the early product and kind of how you're thinking about, um, obviously wildfires are a big problem. You can't solve everything to do with them, but, uh, you know, why, why drone-based system and kind of where, where's the early focus?

• 2:49:44Speaker 07

  So when I, when I first looked at the problem, I assumed that we would go structure by structure. But when you talk to folks who are really deep, two things become clear. The first is almost no structure is safe if you have a fire like the Palisades, right? The, the flame lengths are too long. It's just too dangerous. The second thing is the holy grail of fire is really how do you get to fires before they become big? And a lot of times these fires start in places where it's like windy roads. They're not near a fire station. They're up in the wildland. And so the only way to get there is through the air. And so then you say, okay, well, what we did, we built a fire model and said, what's a 5% risk fire? How quickly would you need to get there? How much suppression

• 2:50:25Speaker 07

  payload would you need to carry? And do the physics work? And once we got convinced the physics worked, we're like, well, do the economics work? And the, the answer in both questions is absolutely. So we fly small fleets of autonomous suppression copters, as we call them, and they carry about 500 pounds per trip. Um, they sort of like can go round and round and round, load and refill from an engine. And the goal is to, there's a lot of use cases, but the best is to stop an incident before it becomes something like the Palisades.

• 2:50:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know if you know the story of the, of the Anduril firefighting tank? Are you familiar with this? One of the first projects they worked on was an autonomous tank that would fight fires. And apparently they ran into a ton of, uh, pushback from firefighting communities that said, uh, this is job displacement. We're worried about that. How have you framed this technology as like, uh, fitting in and augmenting the firefighter as opposed to replacing them?

• 2:51:21Speaker 07

  So I think Androld does better than anyone. Yeah. Understand that the job is not to replace the warfighter, but to give them superpowers and use their marketing copy. Our specific philosophy statement is to build advanced technology to support firefighters in situations that were previously unsafe, inefficient, or impossible. Sure. Right? And so we think about all the utility lines out there. It is literally impossible today to be able to get to those quickly. And so you need technology to do that. You talk to firefighters today, like, okay, well, there's a start on the ridge. You're joking about like buckets and, but literally they're hiking up in the heat with backpacks that have like a couple of gallons of water and an ax. There's this tool called a Pulaski, it's sort of like half ax, half shovel. Yeah.

• 2:52:06Speaker 07

  And so we're not, we're not trying to prevent those guys from getting up there. We're just trying to make sure that if you've got an aircraft that you can take off instantly, by the time those folks get there, hopefully there's something that's under control enough that, that they'll be able to do their jobs. Yeah.

• 2:52:21Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you guys focused on, are you guys focused on detection at all? Cause I mean, when I, when I think about like Malibu specifically, it's the area that I've obviously spent more time thinking about than any other area with wildfire risk. It's like you have homes basically around PCH and then you have all this wild land up in the mountains that nobody's around. So like theoretically a fire could start or, you know, could start on an electrical due to an electrical, electrical line falling. But how do you actually like, how does the discovery of, of, of fire happen? So that you guys can bring the response?

• 2:53:02Speaker 07

  There's a lot of good work that's gone on in detection. There's satellite based detection, there's sensors, there's cameras, there's people with cell phones. So the detection problem, it's not solved, but it's getting there. The big challenge is that it can take 30 minutes to 60, 120. Sometimes it takes days to get to a fire if it's really inaccessible. And at that point it can be too late. So we're really trying to fill that gap between, okay, detection is, is a problem that we sort of know how to solve. Fast response is something where there's only one solution. There is no solution today. And that's, that's really where we exist to stop. And I will say, you know, a situation like Palisades, the difference in getting there from like, you know, one minute to 20 minutes, fire growth is exponential, right? It could be 100x.

• 2:53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how, how do you think about, uh, uh, making the drones fireproof? I remember watching videos of like those huge, they look like 747s, like dumping like tons of fire retardant. And it, and it feels like they actually don't really need to fly through smoke. But do you need to harden the system or can you kind of use off the shelf componentry? Well, there's a fire truck pulling in right behind you.

• 2:54:07Speaker 07

  That's it. Now you know it's real background.

• 2:54:09John Coogan?

  That's a great background.

• 2:54:10Speaker 07

  I'm in San Bernardino right now.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. You, you, you timed this up perfectly. Uh, but yeah, uh, yeah. Just hardening for, for heat, smoke. Is that relevant or can you just fly above it and it's not a problem?

• 2:54:21Speaker 07

  So yes, it's relevant. Number one. And number two, if you go out and test on the field with firefighters, you can see in this video, you gotta be really careful, right? If you put a helicopter above a fire,

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:32Speaker 07

  you're going to put a lot more air on the fire. And anyone who's ever blown a campfire.

• 2:54:36John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that's crazy. I didn't think about that.

• 2:54:37Speaker 07

  More air does to a fire.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:39Speaker 07

  So if you want to build a drone-based system,

• 2:54:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:41Speaker 07

  we built a, we built a proprietary, gotta be super lightweight because you're flying with it.

• 2:54:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:46Speaker 07

  super high pressure pump.

• 2:54:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:49Speaker 07

  Like a water cannon.

• 2:54:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:50Speaker 07

  That, that sprays foam and we spray it out of the rotor wash. So it can go 40, 50 feet from the air and hits the fire with pretty good precision.

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:00Speaker 07

  So anyway, that's, um, that's like one of the core design elements. You end up having to deal with smoke and obstacle avoidance. And it turns out that some of the like IR stuff and it can get tricky. But in practice,

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:12Speaker 07

  you know, hopefully if you're doing your job, you're in and out relatively quickly.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:16Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about, uh, wind, wind conditions? I'm sure you've tested it in a range of, you know, different conditions.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  That was the big problem with the Palisades fire was there was so much wind all that week. It was crazy.

• 2:55:28Speaker 07

  Wind is gonna make any fire hard when it comes to aerial response, just always like, should start by acknowledging that. That's at the risk profile when you've got a $30 million helicopter with two firefighter pilots in it versus a couple hundred thousand dollar piece of hardware that's autonomous. I mean, they're not on the same level, right? So where you have to have a 99.999% chance of success in one mission, you know, could you take a risk in higher winds with a robot? Absolutely. It's the first thing. The second thing I'd say, if you look at our aircraft, right, a lot of drones are sort of agnostic about front and back. The whole thing is meant to be super aerodynamic.

• 2:56:09Speaker 07

  We have a hundred acres in Sonoma, that's our test range, and you know, when we fly up there, wind blows 30, wind blows 40, sometimes wind blows more than that, aircraft dead stable in the air. Doesn't mean that we're gonna recommend it for 40, 50 mile an hour winds, but we absolutely think hard about, you know, this is valuable a lot of the times, but it's most valuable when literally nothing else will do the job.

• 2:56:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay, last crazy sci-fi idea for me because I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this. So I get like a small discount on my fire insurance because I have good fire sprinklers in my home, like a modern system. And the home that I own previously before I owned it burned to the ground because a single tiny ember had like flown and gotten caught in the roof in this one area and nobody was around, so the house burned down even though there wasn't like a wildfire in the in the neighborhood. And so I was thinking at some point, and I'm sure you've thought about this, I'm curious how you think about it, you could just have a drone-based system that effectively had

• 2:57:18Jordi Hays?

  a fire extinguisher attached to it that would just monitor your property if there were wildfire conditions. Why or why not is that a terrible idea?

• 2:57:27John Coogan?

  D to C instead of B to E.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, where like I would go to Seneca and be like, okay, I want to buy one of your drones and park it on my roof so that if there's a fire and I have to evacuate it, it will monitor the property.

• 2:57:39Speaker 07

  We're hiring on the sales team. Do you want?

• 2:57:41John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:57:42Jordi Hays?

  In another, in another life.

• 2:57:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, the, the, one of the really big challenges, everyone understands, right? Ninety percent of structure loss is ember driven, which are, for those who don't know, it's like a little spark that's floating in the wind from house to house, basically. And aerial suppression is the best way to get those because they often hit the roof. Also an obvious compliment. But you're really limited in terms of air resources. The Seneca systems are made to be stationed remotely. So if you're part of a community that's in a high risk area and you're saying, hey, I want to think about how do I defend my community? We're not meant to defend house by house, right? That's, that's the wrong way to do it. If your neighbor's house is ripping, you know, it's going to be hard for even the best systems in the world to keep your home safe. But if you can protect the whole community, that has real promise.

• 2:58:28Speaker 07

  And so the systems are built to be able to be up in the air. It's relatively easy with an IR camera to spot like a tiny start on the gutter and the roof, whatever, right? Gets caught in these little mesh pockets or in the side of a deck. It's really easy to spot those. And then, you know, Class A foam is not exactly, which is what we shoot. It's not exactly what's in a fire extinguisher.

• 2:58:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:58:48Speaker 07

  But it rhymes.

• 2:58:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:49Speaker 07

  So absolutely, we think about structured defense, just like all the firefighters do, right? This is a core part of how we make sure that wildfires, you know, don't, don't prevent us from living in the American West, right? We have to, have to be able to protect our communities from fire.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for everything that you're doing. Congratulations.

• 2:59:08Jordi Hays?

  So glad, so happy that you're building this company.

• 2:59:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is amazing.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  I think we, we probably talked about this exact.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  So many times.

• 2:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Idea back in January and I'm really glad.

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Good luck and we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:59:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:59:20Speaker 07

  Thank you, gentlemen. Be well.

• 2:59:21John Coogan?

  See you soon. Uh, we have our next guest in the Restream rating room. While we bring him in, let me tell you about Adio, Custom Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. We have Daniel Glassman from Samsung. Imagine putting Adio, the CRM on your TV, on your Samsung Smart TV.

• 2:59:40Jordi Hays?

  That would be beautiful.

• 2:59:41John Coogan?

  That would be a beautiful. How are you doing?

• 2:59:42Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:59:44John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:59:44Speaker 08

  Great. Thanks for having me.

• 2:59:46John Coogan?

  Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the news today. Would love to get the update.

• 2:59:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, Dan Glassman, I lead a new business development team at Samsung, cross-device, both TV and mobile. So working across AI, gaming, art, a host of other different initiatives. And today, we had an exciting announcement. We announced that Perplexity is now live on Samsung TVs. Hit the gong.

• 3:00:13John Coogan?

  Congratulations. How does that work? I feel like, yeah, I feel like Perplexity, I gotta type a bunch.

• 3:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but here's my, here's my thesis on, on why this makes sense. A lot of people want to have hardware, AI hardware devices in the home.

• 3:00:25John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  You guys are sitting there, you've got TVs in millions of homes. Why not integrate it so that people, I imagine is the workflow, you can just ask a question to your remote effectively? And it'll bring up whatever you want on the screen?

• 3:00:39Speaker 08

  You nailed it. You nailed it. Yeah, so we have a, on new 2025 devices, our freshest lineup, we have a new AI button. Hit the AI button. And there's an AI home, we have a first-party agent, we have Perplexity, we have Copilot. And really, I think there are a host of endemic use cases, right? What to watch tonight? I think like cavemen and cave women were arguing over what to put on the wall in, in their cave. And we face that same, that same issue. And I think search has been broken for, for so long on TV. And so this is maybe one step to help improve search.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, just the other day, I went to ChatGPT, actually, and I, and I asked, like, what are the la, what are the best documentaries in the last 10 years? Maybe true crime, maybe business focused, but I don't want anything that's too depressing. And I wanted to have over 70% on Metacritic and this. And I had like seven different filters and it wound up pulling up like 20 different options. And that's something that is just so natural for an AI system, for an LLM. And why not just have that all baked into one system? So, yeah, exciting. That's really cool.

• 3:01:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think there are also a lot of orthogonal use cases, non-media, right? Like, I'm constantly on the couch, trading my phone back with my wife around. Home renovations or trips we're planning. And so being able to query and saying like, I want to trip an hour away and have that come out on the TV with hotels and options and then take action. I think it really goes from this one to one use case of querying a mobile agent to more of a communal. Let's call it like couch adjacent AI experience. Which, you know, is phones down, which I think is really neat.

• 3:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about, oh, sorry.

• 3:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, how are you thinking about partnering with other, other companies at the AI application layer?

• 3:02:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we, so we launched perplexity. We also have co-pilot integrated into our TVs as well. I think we want to bring users' choice. We have our own companion first party Samsung developed. And people have affinities to various different agents and we want them to be able to translate those affinities to the, to the TV and they all have, you know, their own strengths as well.

• 3:02:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how, how are you thinking about the trade off around features which people want every feature individually, sounds awesome, adds a bunch of value versus like product bloat and, and just adding so much that it becomes overwhelming. And surfacing the right product at the right time. That feels like a really big challenge, but how is the trade off? How do you think about that internally?

• 3:03:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's a great, that's a great point. I mean, we've seen this as we've kind of expanded the aperture of use cases on the TV. So you know, 10 years ago, we launched art mode on the TVs and art store on frame TVs. We're trying to redefine the black screen on the, on your wall. And then we launched cloud gaming with Xbox and G F N and Amazon Luna. So console-less cloud gaming. And like each step there, we've had to figure out, how do we create like the fastest path to engagement? And it's a work in progress, how you balance choice and feature overload with getting people into really frictionless experiences. So I think it's a work in progress. Having a button on your remote is helpful.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:57Speaker 08

  Just to get right in there and then to be able to query directly with voice. But yeah.

• 3:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was about to say I have a Samsung Frame TV. I have a PS5 plugged into it and I, and I opened up the Frame TV and it was like, do you want to play the game that you had in mind on your PS5 but cloud stream it? And I was like, I know I don't have an account. So yeah, having an AI button that's just like, actually just switch the source to PS5 because I know I have the game installed already. Uh, like that, like I can speak more naturally and that makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the partnership. Thank you so much for stopping by the show.

• 3:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great to meet you.

• 3:04:27John Coogan?

  Uh, we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:04:28Speaker 08

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

• 3:04:29John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Uh, Jordy, get ready to play the biggest sound cue you've ever hit because I got a 99 on my 8Sleep last night.

• 3:04:37Jordi Hays?

  99?

• 3:04:38John Coogan?

  Eight hours, 19 minutes. It's incredible. 100% on quality. 98! Oh, we're on a roll. We're on a roll. I don't know if we've ever gotten that, that, that close to both getting 100. That is fantastic. Go to 8Sleep.com by the way.

• 3:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, after the AWS outage.

• 3:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Back in the game.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Back in the game.

• 3:04:58John Coogan?

  It was just training your body to work harder, to sleep harder. It was great. Uh, anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Uh, Harrison from Langchain. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultra drum. How, Harrison, how are you doing?

• 3:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 3:05:10Speaker 09

  I'm, I'm doing well. Thank you guys for having me. Excited to be here.

• 3:05:13John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for, uh, for hopping on the show. Uh, would love to get a, a brief update on where the company is. I think, I, I think, uh, most people are familiar loosely, but I'd love to, for you to just, uh, uh, break it down for us and then we can go into the news today.

• 3:05:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely. So, so we started as like, uh, so companies like chain, we started as a open source project, uh, about three years ago, almost like this Friday is the three year birthday. So we'll do something fun for that.

• 3:05:39John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 3:05:40Speaker 09

  And then, and then started as a company a few months after that, right in the whole hype of the whole, you know, chat GPT, gen AI cycle. And have evolved from an open source package into a whole company. We have, we have Python and TypeScript packages and a platform now that's used by a, a number of sponsors here, including Vanta and then I saw the commercial for them earlier. So.

• 3:06:01John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:06:02Speaker 09

  Um, and, uh, yeah, we're, we're, we've grown up into a company.

• 3:06:06John Coogan?

  Awesome. And, uh, give us the news today. I want to ring the gong.

• 3:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Get that gong ready.

• 3:06:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, we're, we're excited to announce a funding round of 125 million at a 1.25 billion valuation.

• 3:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Let's get into the specifics of like what kind of the core product focus today and how companies are getting value out of it.

• 3:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm super interested in comparing how your approach is working relative to there are like no-code agent builders, there's all these different building blocks, then if you go to YC, you can kind of get an agent that's pre-built about anything for as a SaaS product. So walk me through some of the customer use cases, like how are people actually getting value out of LangChain and have they, how have they evolved the way they work with LangChain?

• 3:06:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, so, okay, so core thesis, we think LLMs are great, we think they're going to transform what applications look like, we think they're way more interesting when you connect them to data and APIs and build these systems around them. And that's what we in the whole industry call agents now. And we, and we think it's quite hard to build these agents. I think, you know, there was, Karpathy did a great interview the other week where he talked about the decade of agents and how we're not, you know, super close to AGI. And, and I think that's totally true. And I think it's quite hard to build these agents. And so we've really focused on going almost down the stack and providing more low-level tooling to build these like mission-critical, reliable agents. So comparing to some of like the no-code solutions, which I would argue are mostly used for like internal productivity

• 3:07:40Speaker 09

  things, we're much more focused on like external-facing or mission-critical things. So there's a lot of, I mean, Finn's a great example of a customer support bot, like it's external-facing, you're going to have engineering team building it. The interesting thing we've seen is that we, again, we're primarily like a pro-code platform.

• 3:07:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:00Speaker 09

  But a lot of the, a lot of the evals, a lot of the debugging, a lot of the prompting happens from, from product managers and, and designers and subject matter experts. And so that's really where LangSmith, which is the, the platform we're building, kind of comes in to bring all those worlds together.

• 3:08:15Jordi Hays?

  LangSmith.

• 3:08:16John Coogan?

  What is your token consumption look like? I imagine that I should think about you as like a SaaS company with great margins and stuff. You don't have to go into exact details, but it seems like you're not in the token reselling business, the buy from the token factory, resell intelligence. It feels like you're building more of like the proper shovel for the gold rush.

• 3:08:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Some fun news, though. One of the things we announced today is an agent in our product. So it's actually the first kind of like agent in the product. And basically, what it does is it will look through all of your agents' logs. Basically, one of the things that we saw is that people will put, you put these chat boxes in front of people and they ask anything under the sun. You have no idea how folks are using it. And so people want, and a big part of making these agents work better is understanding how people are using it and then bringing in the right tools, bringing in the right data for those use cases that people are trying to actually use it for. And so those types of insights typically done by humans, we now have an agent in the product that will help with that. But yes, generally, our token consumption is very low. Yeah.

• 3:09:19Jordi Hays?

  What are you seeing, what's coming down the pipeline on the consumer side? Obviously, engineers are using coding agents. You have agents like Deep Research that are search-focused. But what's exciting to you on that front?

• 3:09:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, so you.

• 3:09:38Jordi Hays?

  And I'm coming from the framework of like the decade of agents and that like what we were sort of maybe promised last year that people said would get delivered this year is maybe just taking a little bit longer.

• 3:09:52Speaker 09

  So one of the areas that I'm most interested in is this idea of what we call deep agents. And basically built upon the idea of Deep Research, Claude Code, Manus, all of these general-purpose agents that do run for an extended period of time and are actually, they're quite simple algorithms under the hood. But there's a lot of like prompt engineering and context engineering that goes in. And so deep agents is kind of like this agent harness that will help power a lot of these more longer-running things. And so to answer your question, I do think things like Deep Research, we see everyone building some version of Deep Research. Like it's just such a good kind of like product fit, not only because the agents, especially for some of the search things, they're good at it.

• 3:10:34Speaker 09

  But in terms of the UI UX, I think it's a quite natural fit. Because basically, it runs for an extended period of time, but it creates like this first draft of something. And if you think about AI in general, it's always struggled with like the last mile problem. Like it's easy to get to 80%, 85%. And so if you can, if you can come up with like. Products where AI will do still a sizable amount of work, but you have a human in the loop when it gets to the end and it can review it. And it's basically creating what we call like a first draft. I think those types of products are really well suited to be kind of like the, the, the next gen of what we see come out.

• 3:11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, with the raise, I imagine growth has been fantastic. Institutional venture partners, they're not, uh, ripping checks on a whim. Uh, but what's been the secret to growth? Has it just been, uh, a bunch of great customers that have been scaling up consumption and their lang chain bill is going up? And so you're making more money. Have you been moving up market to the Fortune 500? Have you been onboarding tons and tons of new companies, uh, maybe a combination? But, uh, how should I understand like the, with the way the shape of the business is changing?

• 3:11:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, it, it, it's a combination. I mean, everyone's doing stuff with Gen AI. Um, I, you know, we have, uh, we have Gen AI native companies, uh, that, that are, that are big customers. We have big enterprises that are big customers. Everyone's doing stuff there. Um, I'd say, uh, you know, of our, of our revenue, about like 30 to 40% comes from our self serve. To maybe give some kind of like idea there of just the split. So it's a pretty even split. Like I think we, um, and, and so we see everyone kind of doing things. I'd say in the past, uh, it has been a lot of the consumer facing companies. There's kind of this interesting dichotomy of use cases. So consumer facing use cases are like really high volume, but they're generally like shorter interactions because latency is still really high.

• 3:12:25Speaker 09

  Uh, uh, uh, it matters a lot.

• 3:12:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:12:28Speaker 09

  And so we, and so we see like a lot of our usage coming from these consumer facing companies. But then on the other end, you have these more B to B companies where the, where the agentic workflows are just much more valuable. Like they're doing way more work. And so there's maybe like fewer of them, but the, the ROI that they're providing is like much higher. And so the way that, the way that we charge is basically usage based. And so a lot of it comes more from the consumer side of things, but, but we see that there's a ton of value on the B to B side as well.

• 3:12:54John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the open source strategy? Uh, what, what are your role model companies there? I'm always fascinated by this. I know the story of red hat Linux a little bit, Gitlab. Uh, there's a bunch of other Databricks and it feels like open sources, sometimes just like a tool that people pull off the shelf as like marketing. Other times it's like the company would not exist without the open source community. Like, how do you see that playing a role in evolving over the next couple of years?

• 3:13:23Speaker 09

  It's a huge part of our company and what we do. The way that we think about things in terms of the life cycle of building agents is there's like a build phase. And then, and then there's like test, run and manage. And everything in the build phase, we try to do in the open source. And so this is line chain and line graph. And so I, I think like Vercell and Databricks are two of the companies that I kind of think are good analogies there. Um, and yeah, we want to build the platform for agent engineering, just like Vercell's building, kind of like the, the platform for front end engineering.

• 3:13:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, but uh, so like pitch me if I'm using the open source, uh, the open source repo, I'm happy, I'm scaling. And you know that I'm running this at scale and you'd love for me to be a customer. Are you just saying like the downtime will be less or you'll get extra enterprise features? Or you'll have some sort of forward deployed engineer that can come and jump in, do a sprint for a little bit and help me level up. Like what's the shape of partnering with you if I'm already big and scaled on the open source repo?

• 3:14:24Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, so it, it kind of goes in the story of build, test, run, manage. And we've kind of built out our product suite in that order. So people get started building, like that's where they enter in. And so when they come to us on the commercial side, it's mostly for the testing phase. So the big blocker that we see that, that people run into is that their agents just aren't reliable enough. Like it's hard, it's really hard to get them working well.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:47Speaker 09

  And so we have like best in class debugging and evaluation solutions that work with or without our open source. Actually, that's one decision we made early on is like the, the test, run, manage is going to be separate from the open source.

• 3:14:58John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:14:58Speaker 09

  Kind of like Vercell, you can run more than just next JS.

• 3:15:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:01Speaker 09

  So, so that like testing and evaluation and debugging is the first thing that people typically come for. Then we have the run phase. And so this is really running agents at scale. Um, we, we didn't do like deployment for line chain in the early days because to be honest, a lot of things that people were building in, in, you know, March of 2023 were like really simple compared to what they are now. And so there just wasn't that much new infrastructure that was needed. As we started going into like longer running and more stateful agents, like that's really what our runtime is, is aimed at. And then the, the managed aspect of it is something that we're just starting to do more of. This is where like our insights agent comes in. So now you have like millions of traces, um, going into your agent. How do you manage that at scale? And so our, our product development has kind of followed this, you know, where this, this life cycle.

• 3:15:46Speaker 09

  I think we tried to, I think we tried to stay pretty grounded in like where the industry is and what's needed at the time.

• 3:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Do you think reliability will always be one of the key challenges to agents?

• 3:15:58Speaker 09

  I think like making them reliably good. Yeah.

• 3:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like right, because right now it's like, okay, it's like 80% success rate for enterprise agents for a lot of use cases isn't good enough. And then it's hard to get it to 95 and then it's probably even harder to get it to 99 and then the last 1%. And depending on the use case, the reliability maybe matters more or less, but it feels like the the age of the age of agents will kick off when we have like highly valuable, reliable agents in, you know, multiple categories. But I'm wondering if it will just be kind of like a perpetual challenge because of the nature of L L Ms and constantly being in the business of predicting the next token.

• 3:16:45Speaker 09

  I think reliability is definitely the number one blocker that we see people focused on today. We did a survey about a year ago and like twice the amount of people said that they were worried about reliability compared to like cost or latency. And yeah, I mean, I think one of the taglines we use on our website is the platform for building reliable agents. Like we think it's by far the biggest blocker out there. I think, you know, as an industry, we're learning like techniques and practices to get better at it. The models are improving as well. That helps. I do think it will continue to be a challenge and I do think that the best agents that we see out there innovate a lot on UI UX to help overcome some of those reliability issues and put the human more in the loop like cursor, for example, I would say

• 3:17:27Speaker 09

  like their superpower in my mind, like they've just nailed the UX of how you interact with these models and what it's like. And I think a lot of the ambient coding agents are taken off because the UX is is is great because it creates this first draft. And so that first draft like paradigm goes hand in hand with this reliable reliability thing. So we're approaching it from different.

• 3:17:47John Coogan?

  Carpathia had a great take on this. He was like, yeah, like you can get a self-driving car to 99% accuracy and it's like you'll only crash every 100 miles, like 99 of the miles will be safe and then the last miles you get in a crash. And so he was saying that. Like it's not just nine, it's not just going from eighty to ninety to ninety-five percent. It's like you had need to add a nine, so it's ninety-nine point nine point nine nine nine. He really did the meme. I was wondering about the Carpathia, you mentioned it earlier, you clearly watched Carpathia on Door Cash. What was your reaction to the vibe shift around AGI timelines? There's one world where you're like, oh, like maybe the froth in the market will cool off. Maybe it'll be harder to fundraise, something like that is one possible reaction.

• 3:18:29John Coogan?

  Another one is like breathing a sigh of relief in that like I'm gonna have a job for a long time because I'm building something that's really durable and useful. Like, how did you process that? Or did it update you at all? Maybe you were already thinking all the same things.

• 3:18:45Speaker 09

  I, I, I think I probably have a boring answer here, which is like somewhere in the middle. I mean, I think one of the first things Carpathia said in the first five minutes was that right now, he's really focused on like what these LLMs and agents can do for us and how they can be applied. And that's what we're really focused on as well. Like, how can we take these LLMs and do things? And I'm personally not an AGI maximalist. I still think these, the LLMs and agents will transform what applications look like. And I think, I don't know, I think that's like a reasonable middle ground to, to, to kind of like take. So I, I don't know if, I, I don't know if that interview updated a lot of my beliefs on things. I think one of the memes on Twitter recently has been the idea of that we're in a bubble with a lot of this AI stuff.

• 3:19:29Speaker 09

  And I think again, like for that, I have kind of like a middle take as well. Like, I think, you know, we're, we're probably in a bubble in the sense that there's a lot of interest and a lot of hype here. But I think there also will be a ton of value created. And I think both those things can be true at the same time. And we obviously aim to be one of the companies that, that creates a lot of that value.

• 3:19:47John Coogan?

  Well, it looks like you're well on the way. Congratulations and thanks so much for hopping on the show.

• 3:19:51Speaker 09

  Good to meet you.

• 3:19:52John Coogan?

  Great to hang out again soon. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:19:54Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:19:56John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

• 3:20:01Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 3:20:02John Coogan?

  Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I would love to see a Langchain campaign on the 101. Let's make it happen. Uh, back to the timeline. Warren Buffett missed out on $50 billion in profits by selling Apple too early. Uh, Barron's calculated that he sold 650 million dollars, uh, 650 million shares at an estimated price of $185. Now they're at $263. His cost basis was an estimated $34. One of the greatest trades, uh, I think he made, he might've made more money than any investment manager ever with that trade. Um, and it was sort of a, sort of a, uh, narrative violation because he's often bought,

• 3:20:46John Coogan?

  you know, these low P E ratio stocks and not stayed out of techno and just generally stayed out of technology. Of course, Apple kind of violated them both, but it was a fantastic

• 3:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Crazy because I remember when the trade war hit, the tariffs, liberation day, everyone was like, oh, Buffett is a, is a genius, right? He looked so smart for selling when he did. And then of course ripped back up because nothing ever happened.

• 3:21:12John Coogan?

  Nothing ever happens. Um.

• 3:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Roblox.

• 3:21:15John Coogan?

  Roblox is in trouble.

• 3:21:16Jordi Hays?

  He had, uh, the Attorney General has said, uh, it has become a breeding ground for predators to gain access to our kits.

• 3:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm very interested to see where this goes. We've talked to some folks at Roblox, uh, very cool piece of software. Uh, I've always said that, um, yes, whenever you have a, like kids online with chat rooms, there's risk of this stuff happening, but hopefully, uh, AI should be able to do even better filtering. Previously you filtered for keywords, you know, if somebody's saying a certain keyword, that might be a flag for an ad, for an administrator to go in. Um. And with L L Ms, you should be even better equipped to screen messages, just like Elon said Grok is going to read every post now to decide where it goes in the algorithm.

• 3:22:06John Coogan?

  Roblox should be running every single message, I think, no matter what the cost, it's worth paying to go through an L L M and say, is this, you know, indecent? Is this a problem? Let's flag this to a moderator. They also probably need to hire a lot of human beings because we've seen the concurrent numbers of users on Roblox. It's what 50 million people like you need a huge, huge task force to, you know, control that you need moderators. It's not all public, so you can't have a community notes system. You can have some sort of, you know, tattletale system, I suppose. But when, when, when, when the stakes are this high.

• 3:22:42Jordi Hays?

  X chat calling Buffett paper.

• 3:22:44John Coogan?

  Paper hands. Yes. Well, Jacob Rintamaki is having fun on the timeline. He says, excited to do more writing, introducing agents and demons. Our first place is on AI goulash, the gem, the gems one finds in AI slop. And just asking chat G P T five, is this something cursor for serial killers stab stab stab? Well, you can go check out the latest Substack AI goulash at angel and demon agents and demons dot A I. And that's daemons with a D A E.

• 3:23:18Jordi Hays?

  And on that note, we'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:23:22John Coogan?

  On that note, head over to get bezel dot com.

• 3:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:25John Coogan?

  Your bezel com series is available now to source.

• 3:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Head over to get bezel.

• 3:23:28John Coogan?

  Seriously, any watch and Wander also dropped an update video. You can go find it on Kyle Tibbetts X account. So much exciting stuff coming at Wander. We've been happy to partner with them and you can, of course, find your happy place and you can book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great menus, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24 seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Thank you for watching.

• 3:23:52Jordi Hays?

  Very fun day. I, you know, we, we had ambitious goals for the year, but I, I wouldn't have predicted that we would get Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky and

• 3:24:04John Coogan?

  Palmer lucky.

• 3:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Palmer on the very same show.

• 3:24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we definitely in early be like, it'd be cool to interview a billionaire on this show, let alone three in one day. Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable day. Well, thank you to everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone who's listening and supporting us.

• 3:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait for tomorrow.

• 3:24:22John Coogan?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 3:24:24John Coogan?

  Goodbye.