Suno Sparks Music Rights Firestorm, Travis Kelce’s Six Flags Play | Philip Johnston, Justin Murphy, Darren Rovell, Guillermo Rauch, Brendan Foody

(01:11) - Suno App Stirs Debate Over Music Rights (39:23) - Travis Kelce Joins Six Flags Stake (49:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:09) - Philip Johnston, founder of Star Cloud, discusses the company's upcoming launch of a satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 GPU, aiming to demonstrate the feasibility of running terrestrial-grade GPUs in space despite challenges like radiation and heat dissipation. He outlines a roadmap that includes progressively more powerful satellites, leveraging advancements like SpaceX's Starship to reduce launch costs and increase payload capacity, with the goal of making space-based data centers economically viable. Johnston also addresses skepticism from industry experts, emphasizing that the primary challenges are engineering and manufacturing-related, rather than scientific, and highlights the potential for significant disruption in the telecommunications industry through technologies like Starlink's direct-to-cell capabilities. (01:30:33) - Justin Murphy, a former political science professor, left academia in 2019 to pursue independent scholarship online, focusing on philosophy, social science, and technology. In the conversation, he discusses his transition from academia to the internet, the challenges and opportunities of being an independent scholar, and the importance of adapting to technological acceleration. He also highlights his forthcoming book, "The Independent Scholar," which aims to guide others in navigating this path. (02:06:04) - Darren Rovell, a sports business analyst and avid collector, discusses the recent sale of a 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth rookie card, which sold for $3 million less than its 2023 purchase price, marking the largest card loss in history. He explores the card's obscurity, noting its late recognition in the 1980s and its distribution as a newspaper insert featuring a schedule on the back, suggesting that its lack of widespread recognition contributed to the significant loss. Rovell also touches on the broader sports memorabilia market, mentioning his own successful sales and the importance of understanding market dynamics beyond player performance. (02:26:16) - Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, discusses the company's recent $9.3 billion valuation and its strategic shift towards building an AI cloud to support the next generation of software agents. He highlights the development of Vercel's AI SDK, likened to the "React of AI," which is rapidly gaining popularity among developers for creating AI agents. Rauch also emphasizes the importance of integrating AI services into the cloud, noting that Vercel is becoming the default platform for this new agentic workflow. (02:40:13) - Brendan Foody, CEO and co-founder of Mercor, discusses the company's rapid growth, including paying out over $1.5 million daily to experts and securing a $350 million Series C funding round at a $10 billion valuation. He emphasizes Mercor's focus on increasing platform candidates, improving matching, and accelerating delivery to enhance client hiring processes. Foody also highlights the trend of businesses training AI agents to automate redundant workflows, positioning Mercor at the forefront of this transformation. (02:51:06) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Monday, October 27, 2025. We are live from the TVP and L2D. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have breaking news, ramp.com, time is money, save both, easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, hold out more. We know we actually have TPN breaking news, which is that tomorrow.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, just to give some backstory here, on Friday, we said this week was going to be magnificent.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Yes, that was our teaser.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Here's why. Tell us, John.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Tomorrow, we will be interviewing Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, live on TVPN. Tune in, get ready. It's gonna be great.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, that is a real picture that you just saw on your screens. It is. It's real.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  It's a real JPEG.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  It's a real JPEG.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  It's not anything but a JPEG.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  It's real.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Super excited for that. We will be up in San Francisco tomorrow, doing it live. I cannot wait.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yes, and we will be, of course, leveraging Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. We take Restream with us on the road when we go to do our big interviews, big interviews and small. We're always streaming. So, over the weekend, there was some debate over Suno. Is anybody paying for AI music? What's who's paying for this thing is, was the question of the day. And this was on the back of reporting from the information that says, "Music app Suno nearly quadruples annual recurring revenue to $150 million." They were doing 40, now they're doing 150. And Michael Rosenfeld asks, "Can someone explain where this revenue comes from? Who is paying?"

• 1:42John Coogan?

  And Haroon says, "Me. Suno Music is one of the most magical products I've ever used." Haroon is the founder and CEO of Rocket Money, the app which was acquired by Rocket Mortgage. Fantastic outcome. Rocket Money, if you're not familiar, used to be True Bill. I think it was a billion-dollar acquisition. Really cool. And Haroon is enjoying it. And if you scroll the replies in this viral post that got over a million views and 4,500 likes, Paul Merlucky says he's using it. Gabriel, the OpenAI, Sora, he's not the Sora lead, he's Sora Research. He says, "I'm paying. It's an incredible product." Dwight, over at

• 2:27John Coogan?

  At Captions, I guess now Mirage, is saying it's such a great product, super fun if you have kids too. And there's a couple of people that lay out specific ways that they use Suno. And so I wanted to kind of revisit this noodle on this, like, understand like what's actually going on? What's driving the revenue? Because there's a whole bunch of different buckets of value that you can be extracting if you're Suno, the company. So the worst possible scenario is that 100% of your revenue comes from someone who's just scraping your API, basically, and trying to distill your model. Like, if we went back to what happened with DeepSeek, DeepSeek was paying for GPT-4 tokens.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  But GPT-4 obviously was generating money from all over the place and had people paying for knowledge retrieval and a whole bunch of different use cases, coding tokens, all sorts of stuff. And so it wasn't exclusively that, but you could, in theory, like, the most circular problem, you know, the one that would be really throwing out the red flags would be, is it all coming from one customer? Some other lab or someone who's just trying to like, you know, basically like distill everything that you've done. That's clearly not what's happening. You can see that so many people love it. And if you add up the number of reviews on the iOS and Android App Store, it's over a million. So they have over a million reviews and, I mean, I don't even know how many people leave reviews. I don't even leave reviews.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  And so you're probably looking at, you know, even if they get, what, 10% of people who use the thing to leave a review? You know, you're looking at, you know, millions and millions and millions of people that are using this. Lots that are paying and it just kind of adds up pretty quickly. I think they have an $8 a month plan and then like 20 or $5 a month plan.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  And the thing I've been noticing recently on social media is it seems like they've had some type of, I wouldn't call it specifically a Studio Ghibli moment, but people are realizing that they can go to their favorite artists.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Like a rapper, let's say.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  Say, make this, like, make a, make a, make this future song, make the jazz version of this future song.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  I saw DMX, "X gonna give it to you." But in 1960s jazz rendition and that's that's sort of it's almost just style transfer. It's really just filtering. It is. I mean, that's the beauty of the Studio Ghibli is that you don't have to come to it with something that's completely a blank canvas. You take something that you like, a picture of your dog, a picture of your family, a funny meme, an image from a movie. And you just say, hey, restyle this in the style of Ghibli and you're good. They're certainly having that moment and it's doing very well. And I do see those.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  Good thing about that is that I don't, I don't think the jazz community is up in arms.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Um, I think they might be.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe, but they don't have a strong case to be like, you are infringing on XYZ IP, right? Like, there's no company called.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  They might. I think there'll definitely be a lawsuit.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, so of course, like individual artists might try to figure out, okay, are they training on my music? And then in that case, did they buy the music? Because we now have precedent that shows if you purchase the song, can you train on them? The question is like, if you purchase Spotify, if, if, you know, Suno is like getting like.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, we have, yeah, we have a $20 a month plan.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we streamed it to get inspired.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is funny.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  But, but in general, I think this, this kind of use case is probably like good for the underlying artists. And it's just like marketing, it's fan engagement. And then they're just doing kind of like broad style transfer from a category of music on to this new artist.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I wanted to go a layer, layer, layer deeper on this. But first, 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 and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So Chris Dixon, who actually was on the show last week, uh, he 10 years ago, he posted a blog post called Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Class.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  And the thesis was that if you use the example of Instagram, he also uses Delicious and a couple other examples. But basically you're trying to start a social network. Why would someone come? Well, they came to Instagram because if you took a photo with your iPhone, back then, the cameras were terrible and adding a filter to it made it look cool and grungy and old school instead of just actually terrible.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  And so photo filtering apps were very popular. There was one called Hypstomatic, but it cost money. And so Instagram was able to give you a free tool. You came for the tool. Hey, I just want to filter my photos. Maybe upload them. I'll just have a nice little online photo album essentially.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  And then over time, you stayed for the network and then eventually the algo feed and eventually the multi-million dollar professional content producing cohorts that are producing like the greatest content at like Netflix level that will get fed to you perfectly.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  And so we're in this era where there's a lot of tools right now. There's a lot of AI tools. Suno feels like it could be an AI tool. And I was debating this with you earlier this morning. Of the 150 million dollars that are, you know, that's their ARR, how much of that is people showing up for, instead of Spotify, I'm just going to listen to Suno and I don't really care about the prompt. I'm not really viewing it as like a challenge or game or anything. How many of them are just like, I need to listen to music and Suno sounds good enough for me. So I'm doing that. Versus the next bucket is I like the activity of coming up with creative ideas and figuring out, oh, I'm, you know, normally I would just be sitting here noodling on my guitar or my bongo drums

• 8:11John Coogan?

  or something like that. And I enjoy the process of making.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  We have some.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  But I'm not, I'm not a, I'm not a full-time creator. I'm not trying to monetize this. I'm just having fun with the expression of like actually making music, right?

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  Making music.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  That's the second bucket.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna piss some hardcore traditional musicians off. They're gonna say, you're not making music, but objectively, if you're playing around with it, you are making music.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and then the third bucket is like, like, your job is to create content. You need music for your content. Maybe you understand that if you take a popular song, you take the latest Taylor Swift and you make it 1950s theme, that will go viral and you will get a lot of impressions on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, and you will just make money. Or you're producing a documentary. And you know what? You need some sort of background music.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a startup making a launch video.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Historically, they would be like, are we gonna use stock music? Are we gonna use, like, copyrighted music and just wing it? And if it gets taken down at some point, you know, whatever. But there's tons of different.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  So there's those three buckets. And my question is, like, in the early Instagram days, no one was going, no one was going to Instagram, being like, yes, I'm a professional photographer. I did a wedding shoot, and I need to filter the photos. I'm gonna use Instagram. They were like, they were like, no, I'm good with Photoshop. Like Photoshop's fine. But and no one was going there being like, yeah, like, I just want to look at something great. I'm not into this whole, like, watching Friends on Netflix thing. I'd rather just scroll Instagram. No one was into that because there was nothing there. And it was just like a couple filtered photos from your friends. You'd see like one or two updates a day in the early stage, in the first few months. And so nearly all of the early Instagram usage was this middle case of coming for the tool. You want to

• 10:04John Coogan?

  just filter a photo on your phone. Instagram lets you do that. And I'm wondering, for Suno, how, what's the, what's the percentage now? Are most of the people there because they want to be full-time content creators? They really need it as a professional tool? How many of them are viewing it just as like a video game, essentially? And then, and then what will it be over time? Will it be something where you prompted it enough that when you get in your car, or you get to the gym, you just say, you open Suno and you just say play? Because you've prompted it enough. And I feel like it's very much in that second bucket of video game-like, it's fun, it's entertaining. And that's certainly where Sora sits right now. And the question is, like, if you come for the tool, will

• 10:49John Coogan?

  you be staying for the tool? Will you just, will you just live in Tool Land forever? Or will you eventually, will this become a network? And

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, so my my lens on it right now is that it is such a magic, it is still, even though we've had this technology for a couple of years now broadly available. That it's one, it's gotten a lot better and it's just so mad, undeniably magical to be able to generate a song. And I remember growing up, being into music, it was hilarious and my and my dad is a musician and my dad would be like, I'm gonna make a song about the last week of school. And he'd play a song and he'd sing it and it would be entertaining for the whole family. And so to take something that's that entertaining and then condense it down into a prompt is like so magical.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  And it reduces the the just energy needed to create that magical experience down to ten seconds. That there is a massive amount of people that will just pay for that magic experience today. They'll come in, they'll maybe do one free prompt, I don't know how their pricing works, but then they'll actually willing to pay because they're gonna make one for their grandma or make one for their kid or make one for their job or whatever. And at least there's a high volume of people that are happy to pay to have that magical experience today. And so I would, my view is like, there's a lot of people that are, I'm sure, generating these and not even sharing them that broadly, right? They're just sharing them with friends, family, etc.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  We're just listening themselves.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that's the thing, I don't, what I really don't, what I'm, what I, again, we we should have the founder on, but I don't believe that these songs are for listening to yet. I feel like they're for entertainment, but not passive listening. I might be wrong. But that's my current, that's my current sense.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  Like, looking on their website right now, it's make a country song about Jess being late. Make a jazz song about watering my plants.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  I think, yeah, I mean, I, I think you're, you're seeing something similar to like

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Make a house song about quitting your job.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Like, when I was a kid, I was able to, actually, steal, but, or torrent, a product called Fruity Loops, which was a, a digital audio workstation. So there was Ableton, and there were a few others of these, like, more advanced, what's Pro Tools, but Fruity Loops was very intuitive, like, a really, really simple interface, and you didn't need a lot of extra gear to actually make music with it. Kind of like GarageBand-esque.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  And it basically, like, lowered the bar, yeah, FL Studio, Joe knows, FL Studio, it lowered the bar, because you used to need to go and buy every instrument, and then all of a sudden, it was like, you could pull a piano off of a menu bar and just say, "I want a piano right now."

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  And what does that do? Well, that lowers the, that lowers the bar, the barrier to entry, and so you get a lot more, a lot more product, a lot more creativity, and obviously, a big debate over whether digitally, digital instruments can hold a candle to traditional analog instruments. We kind of went through all of that and realized that, you know, the people who are gonna go see Marshmello live do not care, or the people that go and see, you know, anyone at Coachella or something, they don't, they don't, some of them care, some of the bands make their whole shtick, "Well, we use real instruments to make this music, or we still use real instruments, or we, or we, we have a throwback song, and we went back and pulled real instruments off for this."

• 14:34John Coogan?

  There's a couple DJs that will be like, "Oh, for this next one, we have someone coming out and playing like a real guitar, or we have someone on the, on the drums live with this." But, but overall, you're just dropping the cost to create, and so more people are gonna do it, it creates a steeper power loss, so that you have more, it's more competitive than ever, because the people that are truly talented are gonna be able to rise up. There's no one, if you're truly talented, there's never gonna be the person who's really, really talented, but doesn't have the, the money to enter the market, so you're not keeping them out.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  And so all of a sudden, those people are gonna, are gonna run up the score with, with cool, creative things.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  The question is like, is, yeah, does this, does this become a... Uh, more of a video game market where people are playing Suno like a game for themselves and maybe for a few friends, like a Fortnite, like a, like a Minecraft.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Like you build in Minecraft, you are creative in Minecraft, but you don't often sell what you build. Like you're, you don't often directly monetize.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so my, my question becomes, you know, if I, I've, I've seen these like reels go viral on Instagram, going back to this like future as jazz music.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Or Codeine Crazy by Future as in jazz.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  And the question is, yes, that is like a hit, like social media asset.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  That is getting millions and millions of, of views and listens and things like that. The question is, are people finding that song or making that song themselves and listening to it on a repeated basis?

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  And my guess is, as somebody who grew up listening to Future.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  I love Future. I have no desire, I, I was entertained by that, but I have no desire to like go find.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Put it in your heavy rotation.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  And put it and listen to it on the drive home.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  And the examples they give on the website of like, make a song about Jess being late for work. That feels like more like a meme than something that's meant to be come back and listen to.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  Now, I can't imagine the use case as, as a parent of like generating a song, like the cleanup song and putting your kids' names in it and, and you make, and, and it's like, hey, every day after dinner, we're gonna play this and you're gonna put, you know, whatever.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  That's actually hilarious. I like that. That's very.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  And so that's something that I could come up, come back to.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Multiple times.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  But a lot of the use case, make a country song about Jess being late. Like, I'm sorry, that's like a funny moment and maybe you send it again when, when Jess is late.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  But it's not like, nobody's listening to that.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Tyler, what do you think about this AI music nonsense, what these kids are up to T day?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I mean, I think current um songs are like quite gimmicky.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  So it's like you have a country song, it's about AI data centers in space or something. I saw that.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Oh, I saw that one, yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Um, and it's like, it's fun, but it's very much like a gimmick. It's not like, I'm not gonna actually listen to this.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it it it always almost collapses down to just like, you could just tell me the prompt and I'd be like, oh yeah, that would be funny if there was a country song about AI data centers in space. I don't actually need to listen to the instantiation.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I play the the quality bar for um music is actually like quite high to get people to actually start listening.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, could you, could you actually play the bongo drums while you talk?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Well, I I need to unmute. I can only play with one hand, so because of this, but.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you you have to press a button to be unmuted.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  He's truly in the.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Okay, we have producer.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Uh, okay, so I think this is like too hard.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  But uh, uh, okay, if you look at like short form, uh, like video, they're only like 10 seconds long, right? So it's like very low.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  I can't believe you guys got him like a dead man's switch that he has to hold down. I thought he had, I thought he could just flip the switch and then the channel's open. That's ridiculous.

• 18:15Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, I have a dead man's switch for Tyler.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Hey Tyler, uh, say something while holding up both hands. Oh, you can't. Oh no, he's muted. That's very funny. What a quirk of our of our production setup. Um, I want to continue, but let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, uh, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  So the the reason that I think it's important to understand is Suno a a a network? Are you coming for the tool and staying for the network? Will it be a place that is a competitor Spotify long term? Is it a competitor Fruity Loops long term or Ableton long term? Or is it a competitor Fortnite long term? Is uh, is because of how resilient and what the market structure will be long term based on the actual usage. And so if it's like a video game and if people come there to do some sort of like self-expression, they're trying to get a high score, they're trying to like, they're trying to create something and it's more of like this creative tool

• 19:21John Coogan?

  that they'll use elsewhere, that feels slightly less less defensible than, okay, we're building at a proper network of of, you know, connections between people that you won't want to leave. And so, video games can be hugely profitable. They can be great. But the power law in video games is just a lot less deep than the power law in social networks.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  There, there is GTA. There is Red Dead Redemption and, you know, Madden and stuff and their Call of Duty. Like, there are some huge franchises, but there, but there are way more, like, base hits in video games than in social networking. In social networking, there you have, like, you know, the meta properties, which is in the trillions, then you have, you know, YouTube, LinkedIn, Axe, TikTok, you know, all the smaller kind of mid caps. But then you really don't have anything down in the lower end, whereas with a video, with a lot of video games, like, you can just have, like, base hits. And so.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so one, one thing I've been thinking about is,

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  where does Suno need to go to, to maintain their current, I would say, dominance in the sort of AI music category?

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Jordi Hays?

  And because we just figured out that OpenAI is working on an AI music product.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  And I would expect that OpenAI eats the category of music as memes, which I'm talking about, which is like,

• 20:44John Coogan?

  You think that?

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  We had, we had a funny thing happen at work, and we're gonna generate a song, and we're gonna share it in the team chat. I think that, I think that that use case for people that already subscribe to, to various language models that I'm sure will all over time add the ability to generate audio.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  And I think that Suno will still be fine, but they're gonna have to really focus on

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  other more integrated opportunities, stuff in the enterprise, stuff in kind of prosumer, working with creators, et cetera.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Actual musicians, too, is the other one where I'm sure when, when we get the founder on, I was, I was just texting with Michael from Lightspeed.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there's a bunch of musicians, like, real musicians that also use it, that are, I'm sure, a much smaller percentage of the overall user base, but they just use it to get ideas.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, so i- if, if OpenAI builds like a great music generation API, and it's, you know, similar to their coding API for GPT-5, like, it's just, it's just, you know, frontier level. Maybe that gets baked into Ableton and GarageBand and, and other.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  I was just thinking for, for this category of, what I'm trying to understand is what percentage of songs are just jokes?

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  And I think that ChatGPT will ultimately do that pretty well.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Yes. So yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to think about the images in ChatGPT versus Midjourney. Like Midjourney has been able to, like, images in ChatGPT did not kill Midjourney by any means. Like, the Midjourney community is still going. They have something special there. They've created like their own special vibe and then sold it to Meta to create vibes. Like, there's something there where it's not just frontier. It's like the specific UI, the specific community, what they want, what, like, the, the, the choices that David Hole's made. It's possible that Suno winds up in a similar situation. But when most people are in, in a flow of, you know, they're doing some research.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  What you're saying is Midjourney basically created a genre. Whereas it seems like Suno's product market fit is not creating entirely new styles. But it's like, make this, make this country art, country music artists do a house song. It's style transfer.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Well, no, I think that might, I think that might come over to ChatGPT as well. I'm, I'm just thinking about the professional versus prosumer versus casual. Like, when I think of the, the, the casual AI image generator person, they're not like, I gotta go to Midjourney and get my SRAF's prop, like, in shape. What they do is they just say like, oh, I'm already in ChatGPT. Like, let me just see if ChatGPT can do it. And like, even if, even if Midjourney was a little bit better, the casual user is just like, yeah, ChatGPT is good enough. Or Gemini is good enough for them. Like, whatever their daily driver AI app is, can just bolt that on. And so if you're, if you're daily driving in a ChatGPT or a Gemini and you.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Have an idea for an AI song.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  You're just gonna do it there for the casuals. But then for the prosumers, for the people that are really into the actual community, like they're in mid-journey in the Discord, getting ideas, sharing ASR refs, really pushing it to its limits. And I think you'll probably see the similar thing in Suno, where you have, where you have like this community that really loves it and like a mid-journey creator will laugh at what comes out of images in ChatGPT. And they will say, ah, it looks bland. It looks, it looks sloppy. Like ours looks better. And I imagine that that, that that's the way it'll play out too. But it, it's clearly just like an important feature to have because just like when you're, if you're developing a grocery list in ChatGPT and you want to say like, okay, generate

• 24:40John Coogan?

  an image of the grocery list so I can just print it nicely and give it a little design. Like it'll, it should just be able to do that. And you should also be able to say, generate a song of this, like sing it to me. And it should just be able to do that. Like that's what a multimodal model should do. So, uh, anyway, it, it, it's just interesting that like the, the, we were, we were coming out of the browser war yesterday or last week, and there really is going to be a war in every single vertical here.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Every company is going to do everything.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Everyone's going, well, yeah, OpenAI is certainly going to open up a front, a, a new front on, of, in, in every.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  New war?

• 25:11John Coogan?

  New war.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Don't mind if I do.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, browser war, there's going to be the commerce war, there's going to be the, certainly the coding agent war.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  And then now the music.

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI never, never met a war, didn't, it wasn't interested in fighting.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Uh, well, let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Go.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Um, well, uh, people are really having fun in here. Um, AI-generated music from Suno V5 is now nearly indistinguishable from humid-made songs. In blind tests, listeners guessed wrong as often as they guessed right. I wonder if, uh, I wonder if images are at a similar level. Is music ahead of images? What do you think?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  So I saw someone, I forget exactly who it was, but they were doing a quote to it on this. And what the paper actually says is, is people who have never heard AI music before.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Couldn't tell.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  But people who, who can, who have heard a lot of it can tell very easily. You see the same thing in text.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Um, where people who, who don't read a lot of AI generated texts have a very hard time distinguishing.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  But like, you know, you or I, we, we write a lot of.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Clock it all the time.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  It, it's very easy to tell.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  So I think it's a similar thing there.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  The fir- the first big AI music moment for me was, uh, uh, uh, people that know me know I love Gunna.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  And two years ago, somebody made an AI album for Gunna called Slime Pharaoh. That was my, was the first moment where I was like, okay, if I was maybe distracted.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Somebody put this on and I was doing email or something else. I was busy and they were like, hey, Gunna just released a new album. I'm playing, you know, like, listen to this. I wouldn't have immediately clocked it as AI. But that is like a distinct type of music that, you know, he's not always like, you know, enunciating words.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, super, super, super precisely, right?

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. If you're, if you, if the underlying inspiration is, is a little bit sloppy, then the AI slop on top is just fine.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  And he just has.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I, I'm, I'm actually kind of excited. I know we were, we were a little bit bearish on that YC company that does AI generated launch videos, but I do like the idea of an AI agent that, that moves across all the different domains. So you come up with a concept, it can build out a script and then it can build out a song. And then it can build out imagery for all of those and mash those all up and just like kind of puppeteer and let the, let the different systems cook for like two hours to get you a result. Uh, at the same time, uh, it's really frustrating to let something cook for two hours and it comes back and it's like sort of a mess. I, I kind of did the manual version of that with Tyler, my personal agent. I had Tyler generate, um, TBPN, uh, live streaming from every different historical.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Innovation moment. So the steam engine, the light bulb, the discovery of DNA. And, uh, and he did a lot of hard work on it and it probably took, I don't know, an hour of rendering across all of them, something like that. What do you think?

• 28:19Speaker 02

  No, it was definitely faster than that. Uh, cause you can, I, I actually used FAL.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Oh, you did?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  And you can run them in parallel.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Okay. So you ran everything in parallel?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  And?

• 28:26Speaker 02

  It was like 16 videos.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  It still took like 10 minutes maybe.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I have a, I have a song.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Ghana F you mean, 1982 soul funk.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  1982?

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  Version AI cover.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Okay, let's play this.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's play this.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  I, I, I think we won't get just demonetized because of this.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  That's a beauty.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Oh, this is, okay. This is Ghana?

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Pretty good.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Production team.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Everyone's jamming.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Supporting vocals in the back.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  I haven't heard the original song. I really, I, I can't immediately clock the original song, so.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  All right, we can pause it.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  But this is pretty good.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  That's good.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  I like, I like that. And I mean, if we're going to be able to play that level of audio on the stream without getting demonetized, that's actually like a huge unlock. I feel like there's a ton of fun that we could have with it.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting because it doesn't immediately clock as slop.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  No.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  In the same way, and, and, and of course, like a, a, a, uh, producer.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Probably can clock it as slop, but to somebody that doesn't work in music, isn't necessarily, like, I don't consider myself the biggest music fan.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  It's like at the very least, like better than elevator music.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is, it is just a simpler. It feels simpler than getting video right. Like video, if there's six fingers, you're gonna notice. But in music, like if you're sticking to general chord progressions and you're sticking to a general key and, you know, not like completely, you know, slopping up the the the basic rules of how to generate music, you should be able to get something that that that sounds like at least reasonable. But I don't know. What do you think about this AI music stuff? Do you think you'll be listening to a lot of it in the future?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  I think there's something interesting on like the consumption, like streaming side almost.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Where if you think of like, there's like the Spotify DJ. And it'll kind of update a little bit if you like, depending on how long you listen to the song.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  DJ X, yeah. Sometimes I'll skip like five in a row and it'll be like, I get it, I get it.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  So it'll update.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  And basically, like you can imagine it's like trying to find the next group of songs, whatever. In latent space, there's like some area where it thinks that like you might like that song. But then it turns out maybe there's actually no song in that in that point in latent space.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Or then generates.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Then you can just generate it.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  So if you have like a generative playlist, I think that's kind of interesting.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  I feel like Spotify's got to do something here. That DJ X is like two years old at this point. That was like an early, that's just recommendation algorithms. That's not like the AI boom. That's not generative AI. But at the same time, Spotify, if they'd launched some generative AI thing, like a lot of the artists will probably be pretty upset, right?

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's like kicking the industry while it's down. It's like, hey, we know that streaming already doesn't generate like enough revenue, at least in their view, right? A lot of the artists will post like, I've seen artists like share their like payouts.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  And it's and and it basically shows like you need to be constantly touring.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  If you want to make money as an artist.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  And so if you introduce AI.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  Versions of their music or or music that is just decent music.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  It's just gonna hammer.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna hammer their earnings even more.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  What should Spotify do with regard to AI music? I want your answer. Jordy, pitch me on a five or 10 year strategy. You're the CEO of Spotify for the next five or 10 years. What do you do in AI music? But while you're thinking about it, 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, whether you're pursuing your first work or managing a complex program.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Well said, John.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Jordy, what do you say?

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, my immediate thought, and I haven't thought this through.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  I gave you an entire ad read to think through.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  You should be ready to step into the boardroom. Be a boardroom general.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  So the, the obvious, the thing that feels most obvious, and I'm sure there's some potential negative, uh, uh, externalities to something like this, but if you just make it so that if, if I generate a song that's like an AI Gunna song that we just listened to, if every person, like, i- if you can figure out a revenue split that basically takes care of the people that created that, the track that inspired it.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  In that case, it's extremely obvious because it's an existing Gunna song that's converted into, into a new song.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  If you're just paying out effectively the same amount to the producer and the writers and all that stuff, that feels like an easy solution.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  Now, the problem is if you're just generating entirely net new music, which is just like, the prompt would be like, make me a funk song.

• 33:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  Then you're still eating into the potential earnings of like, real artists on the platform.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:50Jordi Hays?

  And I don't know how you solve that. I mean, it's potentially a bull case for Spotify because they take, can take out. They, why did Spotify like lean so heavily into podcasts? One, because people wanted to listen to podcasts. And two, because they didn't have the same dynamic where they're paying out at such a large amount of their revenue to artists on the platform. So they could go out and pay to acquire, you know, Joe Rogan or whatever it was originally for like a year or two years. Um, because you're acquiring users that would presumably listen to podcasts.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  And you're not paying out the record label and the artists and, and all the. Underlying.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  That is a good point, yeah, but yeah, the monetization has to be wildly different between.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so if I'm an art, if I'm, if I'm Gunna and somebody's generating AI Gunna, I'm cool with that if.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  You're getting paid.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  If I'm getting paid like that's a normal song.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  But it starts to get really complicated when it's like, generate a Gunna song that that sounds like this and there's no underlying song, so how do the, how do the royalties work on just like a generic Gunna song?

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  I have a rebuttal, but first, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Codery for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So I know exactly how you do it. Tyler, you know how you do it. You take the song and you do the algorithm backwards and you basically reverse engineer the prompt from the final MP3. And so if someone went to one of these AI music generators and said, I want Taylor Swift singing a Gunna song. When, and then it generates that music, you can use the same, basically the same system to reverse engineer and, and just say, based on what this MP3 sounds like, what do you think the prompt was?

• 35:41John Coogan?

  And if you can, if you can figure out the correlation between the prompt and the actual output, you can figure out how to do attribution. And I think in general, Spotify, I would come out and say, hey, look, we're not going to get into the, into the game of generating audio directly, but we are happy to let our creators use any tool that they want to generate music and come on our platform, whether that's a microphone and an acoustic guitar or Ableton with a bunch of digital drums or an AI music generator like Suno, you're welcome on Spotify, but we're going to take 50% basically because we take our, our take rate, whatever, whatever the take rate is.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  YouTube's around 45, 55%. And then how are we going to? How are we going to actually parcel out the royalty? Well, we're going to look at what does our AI system tell us about what the prompt was? And if it's, if it's Gunna singing Taylor Swift or Taylor Swift singing Gunna? Well, then they're both getting 50, 50% of that new generation.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of, bunch of ideas from the chat. Taylor says the future is exclusive listening parties, zero streaming presence. So artists just charge, not even for a concert, just show up in a room. $10,000 a pop, you can be one of a small number of people to, to ever hear the song and then they just retire it.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  I like that. That's good.

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think there's something there. Ryan says, I will cancel Spotify if they start pushing AI music. So.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Pushing? What, what is pushing me? That's the question.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Exactly what, what Tyler just outlined, right? They're, you're, they're DJing for you and they're like, hey, we made this song for you. We thought, we thought you'd like it. So I think this is kind of potentially a stated preference versus revealed preference. I think that, uh, actual, um, actual cus, like broad user feedback would be like, that's entertaining. That's kind of fun. That's cool. Um, and I say that because people like doing this soon.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  If I'm scrolling my X feed and I see Harry Potter, Balenciaga, which is AI generated, is X pushing that on me? Or is that just a good MP4 that day? People liked it and so it rose to the top of the feed. I would say the latter. I would say that it's not like there was any.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  But Spotify is historically less algorithm driven, right? It's like, we have this, we have this like basically billboard and a homepage. We're just going to put stuff there.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  But they have an algorithm and the question is, is if there's, I, I think there's a big difference between them actually choosing to generate music and them, and them allowing anyone to come with generated music, but.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're already doing that.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. They're, they're already.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  AV says Spotify should launch a standalone audio Sora or Vibes. That could be interesting. I, I feel like they're. So any, any business that is reliant on Hollywood or the music industry is just so sensitive, like actually has this at scale business doing that is so sensitive.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  And they're, yeah, Spotify is in a way, way different place than OpenAI, which doesn't have really have any Hollywood connections and even YouTube, which YouTube's like the vast majority of their ad dollars and creators like do not come from any sort of Hollywood organization, any sort of large organization. Spotify does really have like a few key massive partnerships that they need to keep happy.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  John Phillippead says Spotify buys Suno. I could, I could actually see that.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Well, if you need to generate some media, head over to fall the world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Speaking of Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce is here to save Six Flags. And the Wall Street Journal has a fantastic, look at that header image, like what is going on with that collage? Is that AI? I don't know. It looks some, like some sort of illustration, but it's a lot of fun. Have you been tracking what Travis Kelce is doing with, with Six Flags? Just this year, Six Flags, the stock has dropped from $50 a share essentially to almost $20 a share. So massive sell-off in the company. It is now popping on news that Travis Kelce is investing.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Travis Kelce effect, it's up 22% over the last five days.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Let's go. The stars of the Super Bowl always celebrate in the same way. They bask in confetti, hoist the Lombardi trophy and then proclaim where they plan to celebrate their epic victory. I'm going to Disney World. If Travis Kelce wins a fourth Super Bowl this NFL season, there are hundreds of millions of reasons why he might pick a different amusement park. The Kansas City Chief. Chiefs tight end just joined an activist investor campaign that's targeting Six Flags. Kelsey, New York, uh, New York-based Jana Partners, uh, and other investors have put around $200 million to buy roughly 9% of the theme park operator. That means Kelsey is now part owner, trying to sell America on stomach churning drops,

• 40:48John Coogan?

  head spinning turns and dippin' dots, just what he loved as a kid and still does. On its surface, a 36-year-old football player teaming up with rabble-rousing investors might seem as unlikely as getting engaged to the world's most famous, famous pop star after talking about her on a podcast, but as the two sides got to know, uh, one another, they realized the partnership was kissment and a ripe opportunity to revitalize an American icon. Uh, Kelsey, in recent years, has developed a wide-ranging investment portfolio, mostly in business he's passionate about, beer, games and clothing, and he's often done it alongside institutional investors. Kelsey's business team had Jana on its list of potential partners. What would your

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean,

• 41:31John Coogan?

  turnaround plan?

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  This is just the most classic, and this is the classic investment strategy, just buy, buy, buy the, buy the stocks of the companies that you spend money with, right?

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Do what you love.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Just doing that.

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Make your, uh, find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Um, how would you turn around Six Flags? How would you increase the revenues, increase the profit, increase the attendance? How would you make Six Flags great? And before you answer, let me tell you about Julius.ai. Julius, what analysis do you want to run chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds? What's the first thing you're doing?

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  Get on Julie.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  You actually probably should, that would be a good first step. I know it's a sponsor, but you actually should

• 42:16Jordi Hays?

  Good start.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  Take all of Six Flags data.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  It's notable, it's notable looking at NFL athletes, looking at their investment strategies. Kelsey, obviously going the activism route.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Saquon going the Fifth Avenue route.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  To buy Fifth Avenue.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  He likes co-investing with the founders funds of the world, with the thrives of the world.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting to see these two strategies play out in the market. Uh, I don't actually know that I've ever been to Six Flags, which is

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Wah wah wah.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so I don't feel, uh, and I, and I'm not a fan of, of, uh, theme parks in general. So,

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 42:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, I, uh, I don't feel like I'm super qualified to, to, uh, what, what are your ideas though?

• 43:00John Coogan?

  I, I feel like, uh, there is, there is potential for a comeback. I, I, I am, I was convinced by Brian Chesky. When he came on and said, you know how you never

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  Long the real world.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Long the real world. You know how you never see your phone in dreams? Uh, that hit, that hit hard. I know it sounds like something you see on a Pinterest live, laugh, love board, but it, it hit with me. I'm serious. Um, I, I've, I've been thinking about this when I was looking at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  I thought the Sphere in Las Vegas was awesome on day one. I thought it looked really cool. And then I, I sent, uh, I, I got tickets for my wife and her friends to go see the Backstreet Boys there. They had a great time and I was further confirmed. I still haven't even been to it, but I'm still just like extremely bullish on the Sphere. And so I do feel like what you probably need is more differentiation across different Six Flags theme parks.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  What makes the Sphere so unique is that it's the only sphere. They couldn't even build one in London. They tried and the Londoner said, no thanks.

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  And so I would be, I would be focused on, if you look at the roller coaster database, R C D B, this is a real thing, like I M D B. Um, you can pull up which, which theme park has the tallest ride, which one has the fastest ride? And if you're a real crazy theme park fan, you can go around and I want to ride the tallest one here, the fastest one here, the biggest wooden roller coaster and the fault, the, the fastest steel roller coaster. There's all these different permutations and you can go collect all the badges, but it's not meaningful. Like they, it, it's like five feet taller over there.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  I have two ideas for you.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  Please.

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  So one, we talked about this a little bit last week, which is just raising the stakes, right? I think, uh, even as a kid, I understood that statistically, Even though the roller coaster was going really fast and it was really high and then it was gonna go really low and then it was gonna go upside down. Statistically, I knew my the odds were in my favor.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  The odds that I was gonna make it to the end in one piece, maybe a little sick to my stomach, whatever. But I knew I was gonna get to the end, just just I had a good feeling, you know, statistically.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, so raise the stakes, right? If if it was like one out of a thousand rides, it just comes to like a devastating halt, right?

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  Like upside down.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  And so you just don't know. Am I, am I?

• 45:19John Coogan?

  I do think.

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  That batch, right?

• 45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  That so that that would be exhilarating, right? And we saw there was.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  There could be a mandatory chili eating contest.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, that's my next side. That's my next idea. So so America loves to gamble, right? And so what if they required every ride? You had to eat a bowl of chili before going.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  Before going on it. And then there was like a DraftKings like betting booth nearby. So you could see the people walking onto the ride and you could bet every seat go go long or short on if they were gonna hurl at any point on the ride.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  So you could be, they could eat the bowl of chili.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  They're walking out, they go on a on, you know, there's maybe like glass separating or something like that, but you could see them walking out and you're like, oh, that guy.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  That doesn't look too good.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that chili's not sitting well because especially throughout the day, people have had more and more chili because every time they have to do a ride, they have to eat a bowl of chili. And so you'd have a huge new influx of guests that aren't there to do the rides. They're just there to gamble on on will people make it to the end? And so by the end of the day, it's just, it is just a mess out there. People are in hazmat suits. You're walking around, you know, goggles and everything. Cause there's just, the whole park is just.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  Grow up going everywhere.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  I I I I'm a firm believer in adding variable rewards to.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Six Flags generally, I would be very interested in when you get on the ride, there's a 1% chance that it goes 1% the speed. And so you get on and you're like, yeah, you got unlucky and you're gonna be on this for two hours now.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  And it's just gonna be clinking along. Just one inch at a time.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  And you're just like, yeah, I, I, I caught the, I caught the raw end of the stick.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  I got the short stick.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  So another one, uh, like lottery upsells for every ride. So.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  So we're basically just.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm just trying to.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Pure gambling right now.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  Just trying to juice their margins. Okay.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  You got people going.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  How do we get more dollars out of every guest?

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  And so I think, uh, you know, if you have an option, you know, you're waiting in these long lines. Right? If you have an option to buy, people walk around with an iPad and say like, would you like to do digital slots? Would you like to buy a lottery ticket and kind of have fast feedback loops so that, you know, they can say like, somebody in the crowd right now is going to win a thousand dollars.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  You can do the numbers. There's, you can run the numbers. There's, there's only a few hundred people in line.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get, you gotta, uh, not, not a decent chance, but you got a chance.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  And so I think it's just about getting that incremental dollar.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  I, I have a, I have a different idea. I think you're getting a little degen. Let's, let's go to Tyler, but first let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search everybody. Service vector and full text search built on first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Tyler, what's your idea?

• 47:55Speaker 02

  I, I think, I, I like the, the, you know, what, whether the line doing stuff. So I think data labeling would be good.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  That was, that's actually great. Yes.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Go with this kind of CIA route.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  I would take it a step further. You know, there's like big, uh, like, uh, massive LAN parties with just tons of monitors, like the JP Morgan. I would make the JP Morgan experience with a bunch of quad monitors and it could, and you could go to Six Flags and you just lock in. And they just have Google AI Studio cooking on every monitor and you just go to the, you get in the line to go vibe code. You chat with models, you vibe code, you monitor usage. Um, I, I, I think that bringing in the corporate big tech dollars.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Either through branded integrations, rides, so you can ride the Google AI Studio coaster.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Another thing.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Could be a way to up, up, upgrade.

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  Another, another opportunity, wellness has been booming, right? While theme parks have been, uh, have been in relative decline. And so, um, so the obvious thing is, is, you know, people have been promoting, uh, the intravenous use of like ketamine, right? So if you had ketamine mental health stations throughout the.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  What about facelifts? Did you see this article in the Wall Street Journal? Why tech bros are getting facelifts now?

• 49:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they need to turn into a wellness destination. You can get, uh.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  So you can get a facelift. I I'm I'm not I'm not familiar with this at all, this whole story, but people were having time.

• 49:26Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this picture. I I think they're they're trying. I mean.

• 49:30John Coogan?

  Whoever this dude is, is getting Dr. Ben Tale. He's a 60 year old who runs a solar and tech business. He had an advanced deep plane facelift and neck lift with SMAS optimization as well as other procedures. Well, he looks.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he looks. He's looking great. I think this is a this looks like a good ad for facelifts, if you ask.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, Keith Reboy, friend of the show, got a got a nod in this article.

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 49:57John Coogan?

  Tech is a young person's game. In a 2024 talk, Keith Reboy recounted advice for his fellow investor Peter Thiel once gave him. You can't hire anyone over 30. It's unsurprising then that men in tech are increasingly spending thousands of dollars on procedures such as mini facelifts, neck lifts, and eyelid lifts to beat the signs of aging, according to plastic surgeons. Yes, the latest addition to the tech bro look is a brand new face. Tyler, maybe you should go 10 years younger. Maybe you should try and look like a five year old. Just maybe you should shave your head and get like that one curly queue like the baby, you know, the baby with the single, single hair.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  I need the propeller.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Baby. Yeah, the cartoon cartoon baby. That's the way.

• 50:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would have to get a much. You could get a facelift, but then put it make your face a lot wider, like round.

• 50:48John Coogan?

  You need to. You need to get on some sort of diet that that gets the gets the baby fat back on instead of working.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's just filler. Tyler just gets so much filler.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  So much filler. You just have a baby face. That'd be ridiculous.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm amazed that people were quick to volunteer volunteer their own personal stories for this article.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Who did?

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  But I guess, I mean.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Anyone we know?

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  All the people in the photos.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, but are these people people know in tech?

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, but they're they're tech on there if you scroll down.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Patient. I mean, you need to you need to ID these people.

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, unnamed patient. Okay.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Many, men used to.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  But they're saying it's a 46 year old tech executive. Tyler, figure out every 46 year old tech.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I think it's cool. I don't have a problem with it.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, if you're trying to do facelifts, you need to get your brand mentioned on chat GPT.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  Get your plastic surgery firm mentioned on chat GPT with profound. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Uh, the White House has posted that the console wars are over. They shared an image of Donald Trump dawning Master Chief's battle armor with the plasma sword. I'm really not that sharp on Halo terminology, but uh, it is big news because apparently Halo is coming to PS5. Is that correct? Who's familiar with this? Break this down for me. Are the console wars over? It does feel like they're sort of over.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a, I think this was a quote on, on um, GameStop's post.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Where they said, you know, we're announcing the console wars are over.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Um, the Halo, Halo is, is coming to PlayStation.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  That's exciting. Halo's coming to PlayStation. It does feel like the, the, the console wars are over in the sense that um, the, the two companies have just diverged so thoroughly in strategy where, you know, Microsoft owns Xbox, but is very much like console agnostic. And Sony is very much like all in on PS5 as like it, it, the core strategy and is, and, and, and that's like, I don't know, they're still, they're still duking it out a little bit, but it feels very much like, PS5 is like a real legitimate console and then, and then Microsoft and Xbox and Xbox Cloud are like, a, a, a strategy and they would be okay with you playing Xbox games on your PS5 because,

• 53:20John Coogan?

  they feel like they are definitely pulling back from like the hardware wars. What do you think?

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Um, I was just gonna say it, it's pretty funny that Ryan Cohen is so anti like violent video game.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  The whole, I mean, like all the old, old images of like GameStop, right? The, the day before the new Call of Duty comes out, it's like, you know.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  It, it, it must be, I mean, I would assume it was a big part of the revenue, but maybe not anymore. Who knows? Um.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  I wish, I, I, I, I miss when Q4 meant that there was an, then all I was thinking about was a new cod. That was a simpler time.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  I played a little bit of the new Battlefield. It was not anything super special.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you gotta set your whole life up to really dominate COD. Plus, I feel like I gotta have mouse and keyboard and it's just not in the cards for me. I can't, I can't do the controller stuff, seriously. It's just too, I don't know, it's just not for me.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, the, the console wars. Um, I, I was, I was trying to get up to speed on like, how do you tell the story of the, of the last 30 years of the console wars? Going back to the Atari, then the NES arrives in the United States in the, in 85, 89. Sega Genesis in 1989, Super NES. Then PlayStation and N64, go back and forth. The Sega Dreamcast comes in, apparently one of the earlier online playable consoles. DVD playback of movies, uh, moves units into living rooms. People start buying consoles because, oh, you can also play DVDs. And then eventually you can also play HD DVDs and Blu-rays.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  There was a battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, we'll see how much it's over. It feels, it feels pretty over.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  But they're not, to be clear, they're not gonna allow like cross-platform live play between PlayStation and Xbox?

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Well, they definitely do that in COD.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they do already?

• 55:17John Coogan?

  For sure, yeah.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Is there any advantage to playing on one or another? Like, is like the hardcore players, do they, do they pick a side?

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, the, I believe the hardest core players always pick mouse and keyboard. But they might play-

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but hardcore-

• 55:30John Coogan?

  So, so PC would be the most hardcore.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Because the reaction time, I mean, I'm sure that there's plenty of people to debate this, but, uh, in general, the, the, the muscle, like, because if you're trying to pick, click on a head, like moving your arm-

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you playing on a PC would smoke you playing on a console.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Usually, usually. Like, there are, there are clearly some people who are phenomenal with the sticks, but in general, this much movement is gonna be more accurate than this much movement. Because this is just not that much. It, it doesn't, it, it doesn't leave that much, uh, for like precision. Now, some of the games have worked to create, to kind of level the playing field by- Having different levels of auto aim.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Consoles have auto aim.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Exactly, different levels of auto aim. And so you're in this weird realm where if you play on consoles, you do get, it's not auto aim. A console player would be very upset with you calling it auto aim. Because what it actually is, is that when they're, when you're over a target, it slows down the speed at which the, uh, the, the stick moves the cursor.

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  Reactively.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so it's not snapping to the target, it's just letting you slow down.

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  Using auto aim with this laser pointer on the team.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Don't, don't shine.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't put it in people's eyes, I don't put the laser pointer.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  You don't know where you're going with that, it's risky.

• 56:58Jordi Hays?

  It's risky, it is. Um, should we talk about, uh, Take Him on why AI is underhyped and isn't a bubble yet?

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Sure, let's do it.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  Take Him, whatever happened, Tay, Tay was supposed to be on Friday.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it was like a, it was like a 2pm last minute, uh, booking and it wasn't, uh, there wasn't anything in the news right then, so we're gonna have him on later. Um, I, I've wanted to have him on the show.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  See Sean in the LinkedIn chat says, I'll take it that Jordy wasn't exactly a trick shooter.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Not on, not.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  I've had my, I've, I've, I've 360 no scopes.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  I think that Joseph is like, as a PC player, it is auto aim. I, I, I agree, it, it, it does feel like, there's a big difference between the computer is, you're setting your sensitivity once, and then you go into the game and you interact with the game and there's nothing that's like context aware. As soon as you add something that's context aware, it feels like that's auto aim and that's cheating and that would certainly be an advantage and it is designed to be an advantage because you have a lot of disadvantages when you're using a console with a, uh, with a controller that has small stakes. Um, so Take Him says, here's why AI isn't a bubble today. He's distilled data points and ideas from previous columns and coverage. If you prefer facts and evidence-based reality over vibes and conflated narratives, enjoy.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Uh, big tech valuations are reasonable, leverage is low. Uh, we're at the beginning of multiple AI super product cycles in the year ahead. We are in the early innings of a technology computing shift to AI, the largest in decades, think 1994 versus 1999. Uh, yeah, that's a good question, when does the dot com bubble start? Everyone says like 99 to 2000, but was it not a bubble in 94? Because like it can be a bubble, like even a big, big bubbles have small beginnings, right? Like they start as small bubbles and then they get bigger and bigger as they inflate.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember, Amazon went public May 15th, 1997. So.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so you could, so you could easily claim that.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  I just have.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  We're in, we're in the very early stages of a bubble.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  My personal timeline was that like, the further you went in the nineties, the crazier it got. Like it was like heating up.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  And there was plenty of people that made insane amounts of monies, money like prior to the bubble, right?

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of them probably wish they held a bit longer, but.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  No, no, I think a lot of them were happy that they got out when they did, like.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, sure, but, but again, like a lot of like the euphoria.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  I'm talking about like, like I, I've talked to some folks who are like, they founded a company in 1994, they sold it in 1998, it does not exist, it didn't exist, it, it does not exist anymore, it didn't exist in 2002, uh, and, but they wound up with like a hundred million dollars liquid and they're like set for life.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  Because they like nailed that.

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  That's enough to retire?

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Kidding. Uh, I always, I always, I mean, I feel like the debate comes up like.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  You still have, you still have to work.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  Is, is 10 million enough to?

• 59:55John Coogan?

  You still, you still have to cut, you still have to, uh, raise a VC fund and.

• 59:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  And LARP is VC for a little bit.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, continue.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  Um, well, we have our, we, we actually have our first guest.

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we can come back.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Um, let's go to, let's go to space, let's go to space data centers. Our first guest of the show.

• 1:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Philip.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Is Philip from Star Cloud. Burning up the timeline, Philip, how are you doing? Good to see you.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  The current thing himself.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  The current thing himself. Uh, did this all kick off with Nvidia posting about you? Was that when the kerfuffle began?

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  I think that was the main, I think that was the catalyst, yeah.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me on, by the way. I've been a huge fan since day one, so.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  I am, glad to have you. This is why the show exists. Uh, we, we, we, we address every timeline that is in turmoil. Um, so break it down for me. When did you start the company? What's the pitch? And, and then we'll go into some of the like.

• 1:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Why are the haters wrong?

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But, but just give me like the reason back, backstory.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we started about a year and a half ago, um, beginning of last year. Um, we, yeah, we're basically in that time built a satellite. We've got first launch coming up in a week. And that's why Nvidia just posted their first thing, because we're going to be launching the first H one hundred to space. So about a hundred times more powerful GPU compute than has been in space before.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Um, and yeah, that's, that's the, that's a brief history.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay. What were, what were you doing before this?

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  Uh, so I started my career as an engineer for five years, um, studied applied mathematics, theoretic physics undergrad and masters. And then I spent a few years at McKinsey, working with the space agencies of the U A and Saudi government. And then I founded and sold another company not related to this and then moved my way into this.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  There you are.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, he's been to every academic institution.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Collecting them all. Um, what, what is the, uh, what is the strategy for this first launch? This first satellite, like what, what are you trying to figure out with this launch? What is, what is the value of putting this H one hundred into space? And then kind of like, how, how do you think about the timeline? Cause I think like the, I would say like overarching criticism of data centers in space has been like people. I don't think people gen- generally believe that this will never happen. It's more of like a debate around like the timeline on which it happens.

• 1:02:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Which is a fair, I mean, it's a fair debate to have, I think. Um, so the first satellite, the reason we're launching this, lots of people believe that you can't run terrestrial data center grade GPUs in space because of high radiation environment and you need to dissipate the heat in a vacuum. So this is really a demonstrator. It's a sixty kilogram small sat. Um, it's launching on a Falcon nine, you know, a quarter plate there. Um, and so we'll be running hyper, we'll, we'll do a whole bunch of firsts. We'll be the first to run hyperbolic inference in space on imagery from working with various D O D customers. We'll announce that soon. Um, we'll be the first to train a model in space. We're training Mini G P T from Carpathia. We'll be the first to do, um, uh, we're, we're running a version of Gemini called Gemma, which is like a cut down version, working with Google Cloud on that.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Um, so, so we'll do some fun demos, like for example, you can S S H into it and then just ask it things like, where are you now and how does it feel to be a satellite? And it will give you a kind of coherent answer. But yeah, this is really, really a demo. The next satellite launching in October next year is 10 times the power. It'll have by far the largest commercial radiator in space. A 30 meter wingspan solar panel. And then we'll have very, very sophisticated optical and connectivity options on there. So customers, including DOD and other satellites, will be able to send us raw imagery. We process it on the edge and then we just downlink the insight and that's, that's the roadmap.

• 1:03:27John Coogan?

  How, how far are you? Like there's a launch that's happening very soon. And then there's the renders, which are like, it looks like sci-fi Star Wars. Like they're, oh yes, there's like 25 shipping containers that are descending. Like, uh, what's the delta there? And what was the decision between like, kind of showing more of a vision document? Cause I think that's what triggered a lot of people was like, you were showing an amount of mass in orbit that feels like beyond the ISS. Like it felt, it feel, it looks huge.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Right?

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, to, to be fair, it's, it's extremely difficult to imagine what's about to come down the line with Starship. And so like the launch, launch cost might come down by between 10 and 100x. Launch capacity is set to go up by a thousand x or more. And the reason is if you build a new Starship every day for a year, which is like a very conservative estimate for what they're trying to do. At the end of the year, you have 365 Starships. It has five times payload capacity. You can launch 10 times as frequently. So we're really talking about a thousand times like more tonnage per year that we can get to space. So, and that's coming like three to five years, which is really not that far away. So the idea of the, the render, like you can launch the, the whole ISS in two Starship launches. So the render is to show, look, there is going to be a lot more mass in space. But yeah, I mean,

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I almost feel like you should have done the AndroL thing where it's like anime. If it's like sci-fi, where the vision's going. And then it's like render for like what you're actually sending. Because like the render that I saw of like the multiple shipping containers putting together like, that's not what's actually launching next week. So I think that's where like a lot of the cognitive dissonance is coming from, right? But yeah, I mean, you'll iterate all this, it's fine.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I recently saw a comment talking about that and I was like, man, that's actually pretty cool.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It, it's nice to have, cause there is a, there is a value for like the vision document. Like what do you, where do you want to go in 10 years? Um, but it just hits different when it's like, the official Nvidia account is sharing this render. And it's like, okay, like that feels like it's happening soon.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  It's not like they don't do their research, like they have a whole team of like PhDs that go and look at this shit and like they have they have a board that approves that this can get shown that it's like feasibly possible.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  So, so, talk about, talk about like, yeah, I guess, talk about, so, uh, this first, this first launch is meant to be like a demo, basically, like, uh, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but effectively, uh, a science project to start to show capabilities in space to start to prove that you guys can actually put GPUs in space that can run

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  workloads. Like, what is the actual timeline? So, and then it sounds like maybe defense is like an early place where there might be some commercial applications. But then what is, what's your timeline on, on when, uh, if or when, you know, I would be, you know, prompting a model like ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever? And, and, uh,

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  It's like open, it's just like, it's just cheaper to do it in space. Cause that, that, that's the long-term vision, right? Is like, it's just cheaper. It's not anything special or like, oh, we need to be there for some geopolitical or defense reasons. It's just like, the energy is free and the heat dissipation is free. So it's just cheaper. So that's where you go, even though the launch costs are expensive.

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah. And so maybe I'll start with the second part. So when will it be cheaper? That's coming with Starship. And so we're looking at the first commercial launches of Starship in 18 months. But we're probably going to be seeing, you know, mass volume production of Starship on a three to, three to five year timeframe. So, uh, yeah, the, the roadmap is next year in October, we're launching our second satellite. That's the one is about a 10 times the compute of the first one, but much more, um, uh, much more capable in terms of continuous power generation and solar panels. That one is the first commercial service that will produce more cash than it costs to design, build and launch. I mean, that satellite pays for itself just on hosted payloads because that satellite has such high, um,

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  throughput and processing capabilities. There's a whole bunch of people that just want to stick, stick sensors on that. Um, it's not the end state business model, but that's a, uh, a nice revenue stream in the meantime. Um, then we're launching a satellite after that, which will be, um, I mean, yeah, I can't talk too, too much about it, but you can see, you can see this PES dispenser form factor that's coming out of Starship.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Um, oh, yeah.

• 1:07:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I probably shouldn't say.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  And that was successfully tested on the last Starship launch, right? Where there was a whole bunch of debris blowing around. It was a crazy, crazy launch, but it did come back. It landed and the Pez dispenser thing shot out the fake Starlinker, like the dummy.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So that's about a four ton, at least 100 kilowatt satellite. Second one's 10 kilowatts, first one's 1 kilowatt. So we're like going up in automatic shoot each time. That one could feasibly launch end of 2027. And then from there, we basically will launch lots of small versions or lots of continuous versions of that because that will have very low launch cost. And it will be a while before we start launching the full Starship payload base size. I mean, for one, we need this clamshell door to be ready before we can do that. And yeah, but to be frank, it's quite a while until we start docking things in space. The only reason you would dock things in space, like in the concept video is if you want to train a large model, because then you need the whole data center to be internally networked. And so that we're probably looking at, you know, early 2030s before we start docking.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  I mean, I don't have a problem with thinking in decades. Like that's like what we say in tech, we want people to do. And so I don't, I don't have any, I don't think there's any problem with saying like, yeah, like there's some crazy stuff that needs to happen with launch costs and like it's going to take a while until this really works out. Like that's actually exactly what people want from, from technology founders ideally. I guess there is the question of like, you know, how do you frame it is like how you don't want people to think.

• 1:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you just needed to generate a lot of revenue quickly in space, you could do the first space casino where people could beam up, tap into it, all ages.

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  Another quick type people, they hit me up.

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, I mean.

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Space token. You've got to mine it. What, how do you think about, you know, some of the, we, I think we had, we'd asked Dylan Patel at one point about GPUs in space and, and I don't think he mentioned like the challenges around heat and heat dissipation, but he was talking about how sometimes you just need to like unplug the server and plug it back in again, or switch out individual GPUs. But like, what's the solve on that long-term? Are you thinking about, you know, these being like fully robotic systems that allow you to make changes on the fly? Like what's the solution there?

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think probably two points on that. I mean, the first is for these massive data centers where you've got like, you know, a kilometer long or a mile long row of racks. When the people I speak to now are saying, look, if an H100 breaks in that, you just leave it in there. Nobody's going down there and unplugging and putting that back in there, just writing software around it and they'll just leave it basically. So that's number one. But secondly, for the first few iterations of the satellite, it'll be exactly like Starlink and we won't be able to touch it. And so we'll have to have redundancy on the critical systems. And then we over provision things like solar panels and radiators, which degrade over time. And over time, the whole industry is, well, space industry in general is moving towards robotic maintenance. But also terrestrial data center industry is moving towards robotic maintenance.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  And that's where on a sort of five year timeframe, you know, some of the people we speak to in data centers are saying, we are fully expecting data centers to be maintained by humanoid robots in a five year timeframe. And yeah, this is where it starts to sound a little bit wacky and sci fi, but it, I mean, humanoid robots do not require too much modification to work in space in the sense that a human space ship would take care of radiation and thermals, you would need to retrain it slightly, but you know, that's maybe sounds a little bit wacky, but

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it doesn't have to be a humanoid, right? Like there's a bunch of other form factors.

• 1:11:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, it could be any form factor, but humanoids will be mass produced, so probably the cheapest.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  I want you to react to Andrew McCallum's viral post that got 7,000 likes, breaking down a bunch of different things. The core claims I see in here are questions about what if demand for payload to orbit doesn't decline. He does talk about the difficulties of heat dissipation. He says, you just finished watching a Scott Manley video on radiative heat transfer. And now you think you're going to disrupt AWS with a few solar panels and a rideshare slot. You're going to believe that right up until the next month when you crack open DeWitt. And he goes into a lot of the technical level, but I was, I was wondering if, if, if there were any key points in here

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  that you think were, you know, easily debunked from actually being in the trenches. You know, obviously he's, he's, you know, he does work in, in space and does something somewhat similar and does seem like an expert who'd be equipped to know this stuff. But you've obviously focused on this case specifically. So what was your reaction when you saw his sort of comedic breakdown?

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I like the post. I mean, I'm a fan of Andrew. I've been following his stuff and he's a great engineer. Same with Jellian, by the way. Very impressive what they're doing.

• 1:12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I mean, on the on the thermals, the criticism usually is in order to dissipate that heat, you need a large surface area. And they think for some reason that that's super impractical. I mean, my co-founder Ezra has PhD in engineering, spent 10 years designing and building large deployable structures, solar panels and radiators. And I mean, you just have to build a large surface area. And that's what we're doing. So half our engineering team is building a very large, low cost and low mass deployable radiator. So that is the core IP of our company is that. So that's number one. On the launch cost side of things.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  So sometimes people say if there's no competitors to Starship, which it doesn't look like there will be for at least five years. Then will there be any incentive for Starship to for SpaceX to drop the pricing?

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  Now, I have a bit of a different opinion than than most people. Most people say, well, no, they'll just keep it high. I don't think so. And it's the same reason that they keep that Tesla is sold at under the price. They could they could potentially sell Tesla at a higher price, but in order to reach a much larger market, you need to sell at a lower price. So for example, they're going to have all of these Starships sitting there. They can only launch them two years, once every two years to Mars. Their marginal cost of launch on each Starship is two or three million dollars. Now, either they can leave it there because there's no demand at the, you know, 200 million dollars for a launch price. Or they can say to us, people like us, hey, you can launch it for 20 or 30 million dollars. They still make sure there's money. That's still very profitable for us.

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  And so it's like a win win. So my expectation is that actually the launch price will come down, even if they don't have a huge number of competitors.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, like the elasticity of demand there, like they might just be able to sell more volume at lower prices. So they might wind up lowering the cost. Or, yeah, kind of giving you like a bulk discount if you want to put it in that terms. Interesting. On the on the heat dissipation question, how much do you think that that is in the domain of science? And we need to have a breakthrough discovery. You need to discover the solution to that problem versus an engineering problem. Where maybe it just comes down to can you make manufacture something that is already follows the laws of physics and all the physicists agree it works if you can just build it profitably?

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's from what we're seeing is very much an engineering challenge. It's a it's really like a manufacturing. So we know that it works because the International Space Station has a radiator that dissipates seventy kilowatts. The problem is it's ridiculously expensive. So our radiator on our second satellite is ten times lower mass per watt of dissipation and a hundred times lower price per watt of dissipation than the radiator on the International Space Station. That's the whole the whole game is making this radiator cheap and light. And yeah, we've got very some very innovative or very unusual manufacturing techniques that we are working on, basically.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Fun.

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  You posted a few days ago, people don't understand Starlink is going to just be the internet. Direct to cell is going to hit hard. Basically, all telco is doomed. Let's check in this time next year. Expand expand on that. I

• 1:16:07Speaker 04

  That was at one AM and I had a very heated argument with somebody like I was in the cabinet. I was like, I'm just gonna post this and then like three hundred thousand views later, I was like, okay, this was probably like a little bit too extreme.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Too aggressive.

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, yeah, obviously, if you want to get attention on acts, just say the most inflammatory thing possible. Say that, you know, all these multi

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  No, but but what's what's what's your view on how quickly, you know, we we saw news on Apple exploring something with with Starlink on direct to cell.

• 1:16:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:38Jordi Hays?

  Seems like every major manufacturer is going to be interested in this. And then there's also that other company that that's like a competitor, right? That what is it that is Verizon propping them up? They don't have any satellites.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  ASTs.

• 1:16:53Jordi Hays?

  ASTs.

• 1:16:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, I don't think they have any hope in hell. And the reason they don't is because, sorry. I know there's a there's a whole bunch of people that

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  They have a retail army.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Retail traders?

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  The retail traders are gonna come for you, dude. Good luck.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  What do you know about space?

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Well, you got you you got the private markets.

• 1:17:12Jordi Hays?

  They're doing fine.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  You got the private markets, Varda guys coming for you. Now you got the retail traders and ASTs coming for you. You got you got no friends in this foxhole, dude.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  ASTs is up seven percent just today, so.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  That's so good.

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. That's amazing. So. No, I mean, okay, I I want them to succeed and I'm I'm like

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Okay, well, in that case, I reverse my entire position.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  7% move. Let's go. That's very funny. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  It's a launch cost thing. It's a launch cost thing. They can't compete with Starlink on the launch cost. So, yeah.

• 1:17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  I mean, that argument can be leveled against us, by the way, as well. So.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, so on, on what are the, what are the telco companies gonna do because they're multi hundred billion dollar companies? They're not just gonna roll over. Is it, is like, how do you see them kind of reacting?

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  I mean, it, it, it feels like there's lots of multi hundred billion dollar companies that just get backed into a corner and die. I mean, Blockbuster is a hundred billion dollar company.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  You are such a space maxi.

• 1:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, I, I, I guess.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  You might be right over like, you know, it just depends on the timeframe, but like, I mean, it just doesn't seem like, it just doesn't seem like, like internet backhaul is not going to move to Starlink in the next like five years, you know, this is like not gonna happen.

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll be honest, cables for sure. I'll be honest, cables.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  The, the people are underappreciating is the amount of capacity they can launch per starship is absolutely mind blowing. And that is coming in 18 months. So, like, and that's like proper hardcore, you know, very high bandwidth direct to cell in buildings. And that's what people don't appreciate. In buildings.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  That's pretty crazy.

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  So, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I, I, I love a Starlink.

• 1:19:00Jordi Hays?

  I guess they, they, they, the telecom companies will, could end up being like Starlink resellers.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Jordi Hays?

  Right? Is that, is that one scenario?

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  I mean, they could be. Yeah.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't sound like the best business to be in, but.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on and defending your honor. I think you did a great job defending your honor. I think you're thinking in decades. I'm excited for you to continue working on this.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  How, how, you're, you're in the Washington area, right?

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Washington State. How, how, how's the, what's the scene like in Redmond before you go? Good? How's, how's the energy?

• 1:19:35Speaker 04

  I mean, there's a lot of it's where Kiper and Starling Castle, all of the people like I think 95% of satellites launched in the last two years were designed in Milton Redmond. So there's a lot of space town out there. But yeah, it's not the liveliest of cities in the world.

• 1:19:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, you guys, you guys have work to do. So thank you. Thank you so much for joining. Fun conversation and we're rooting for you.

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  Really appreciate it.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Need the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. You can start building. Do you want to go into bub talk? Are you still interested in talking bubbles? Or do you want to move on to something else?

• 1:20:16Jordi Hays?

  We can move on to something else.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  There's, there's a bunch of bub talk in here. Uh, maybe more importantly, the maker of Oreos.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  We need to hammer bub talk more.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  I mean, it's been a lot of bubble talk lately, but I feel like we've hit it a bunch. There's a bunch of charts.

• 1:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you're trying to figure out if we're in a bubble or not, I recommend going outside, picking a daisy and just picking the leaves, picking the petals off and going, it's a bubble.

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  That does feel like where we are right now.

• 1:20:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a bubble. It's not a bubble. It's not. And then whatever you end up landing on, that's what's going to happen. So good luck out there.

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, um, in Oreo world, Mondelez, the owner of Oreo, has trained their own video model for television advertising. They invested $40 million and they say it cuts production costs by 30 to 50%. I don't know how that's possible. That like, it should cut costs by 99%. Like, do you know what it takes to do a video shoot?

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  I just think I still, but I still think there's a huge amount of budget goes to coming up with good ideas and then the like editing and then making infinite variations of it, which I'm sure AI will, will, uh, can already do well in some cases. So, Tyler has a take on. You pay people to come up with great ideas and then execute, but the, the idea is, is like the actually the highest margin part, right? And so the ad, some of the ad agencies I think will do well. Um, apparently the Oreos parent company.

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Only spent a hundred million on digital print and national TV advertising in the last year.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  Wait, so they spent a hundred million on advertising?

• 1:21:55Jordi Hays?

  And then they spent forty million on top.

• 1:21:57John Coogan?

  Okay, Tyler, what's your take on Oreo Net?

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  So this was my idea when we were talking about Sora, where I said that Coke should, or Coca-Cola should release a video model open source, um, where you can do anything, but every single video has a Coke.

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  So, so they should release this model, make it open source, but it, there's just Oreos everywhere in the video.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  You just like can't do anything else. You ask it to like make a picture of your dog and your dog just does an Oreo for a head or something like that. It just gets crazy. Yeah.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, that, that would be, that's a brilliant idea that would be abused so badly that it would be shut down with twenty-four hours.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Does this, I mean, does this math make any sense? Like, where did the forty million go? Like, what were they, were they fine tuning? What is it? Like?

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  That forty million is ours now. That is ours now.

• 1:22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure it was like.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  I, I really want to know, I really want to know the breakdown of that. Was it actually like running the fine tuning? Was it generating, you know, training data? Like, what was the actual project that got them there? I mean, I, I, I could imagine, you know, uh.

• 1:22:58Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was, uh, somebody took the forty million dollars and they made it an app layer on top of Sora too.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, if they have a whole bunch of footage of Oreos throughout the thirty years that they've been advertising and doing video ads, maybe fifty years, uh, and they load those in, can they count that as like depreciation or something?

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  It's hard not to see this being like a huge waste of money that somebody, somebody high up said like, I'm going to be the AI guy at Mondelez, right? Because you have to imagine whatever they were able to do today by investing forty million dollars, forty percent of the, of their ad. So again, like, production cost, which is where they're saving money, is not advertising budget. I would, I would look at the way they're talking about their ad budget as like what they spent on ads plus the production cost.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Like, that's the ad budget. It's very possible that the production cost was like ten percent of that.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Jordi Hays?

  So you spent forty percent of your overall advertising budget to slash.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Ten, potentially 10% of your budget by 30 to 50%.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, pays back in five years.

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  It's not the craziest thing. I don't know.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but the models are gonna, the models will just be one-shotting. I promise you, they will be one-shotting people eating Oreos better than your model, your custom.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  Model by now.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Like, by the time they finish, by the time they finish, it's, it's like they, they get on Sora 2 and they do it and they're like.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Oh, no. Why did we fine tune like some, you know?

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they did it with Accenture. I called it.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  I knew, I knew, I knew it. I knew this was just like, yeah, like big consulting, you know, big strategy firm says, yeah, we're, we're happy to give you, if you want it, what's your bu- okay, $40 million, we're happy to give you an AI play here. You're gonna be. You might just be the OpenAI of food.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  You might become, we can help you be the anthropic of cookies.

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  Of cookies.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then it's just immediately a write-off.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  It is so crazy that they created their own model. How did this leak? It's so embarrassing.

• 1:25:13Jordi Hays?

  No, I think they're bragging, John.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  They're bragging?

• 1:25:15Jordi Hays?

  They're bragging.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  Mondelez is doing.

• 1:25:17Jordi Hays?

  It's like, why are they telling on themselves?

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Why are they telling?

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  They're not, John. They're bragging.

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  Wait. Yeah, they said, the, yeah, the head of the glo- the global senior vice president of consumer experience said they're gonna use it in the 2027 Super Bowl. I don't know. Is there any reason why you'd want a three-year-old fine tune?

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  You could have just run eight Super Bowl ads.

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  You could have run eight. That is actually crazy.

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  That's actually an under.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  This is so inspiring. If you want to make money in the AI boom, go and get $40 million for a project like this. It's genius. Like, you just made so much money.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Consulting moment. Uh, yeah.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Coop says, sounds bubbly to me. To- totally agree.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  There's really so much money.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Nobody has applied, so, so the friend.com billboard strategy

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  is potentially a new strategy, just like buy so much advertising that people can't stop talking about it.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Why has nobody done that for the Super Bowl? Like, has anybody bought? Like, if you really wanted to break through the Super Bowl, you would buy

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  All of them.

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Or you'd buy, try to, I mean, Friend tried to buy

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Can you imagine doing a whole Super Bowl buyout? It's just, it's just for, how many minutes of Super Bowl ads are there? Could you do 40 minutes of ads?

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  The, um, we drove, we, we, we can't get away from the, from obvious billboards. We drove by today, uh, this one that just says, uh, when you're on the street, it just says, end, end.com.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Is it the end?

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would have, I, I definitely think that Oreos just being like, we want to be drilled into the mind of every American. We're going to buy 20 Super Bowl ads this year. That's our budget for the year.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there is like some sort of bull case where it's like, you need to generate a whole bunch of Oreo creative across Facebook and, and, you know, Instagram ads and whatever. But at the same time, it's like, I don't know why you need a custom model.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  The, the $40 million custom model is crazy.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  You have to assume that every model is training on every Oreo ad ever in history.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Do, do, am I crazy here? Is there any reason why you'd want to fine tune for $40 million?

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would go farther. I would train a language model.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, from the ground up.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cause then you have the

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  Do a full pre-train, do a pre-train.

• 1:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Do a pre-train, do a full base model.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, what's it going to score on? You mean, it's last exam? What's it going to score on?

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  And, and, and, uh, let's, let's, uh, let's assume I'm a Fortune 500 buyer and you're an Accenture consultant. How much is that going to cost me, Tyler?

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  A couple billion. I, I mean,

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  And you're telling me that that's worth it, right?

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  We gotta get this guy a job at Accenture. He, he's gonna, he's gonna 100x revenues.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this, this, uh, to close it out, this is Publicis Group, French multinational advertising company, one of the largest advertising agency conglomerates in the world. Uh, and Accenture, serving up a farm-to-table AI strategy for an executive at Oreo who wants to be able to say, we don't, we're not just using generative AI, we are generative AI. We are the future of food.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  I I hope they uh they need to vertically integrate. They need to vertically integrate. They need their own data center.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  Buy Snapchat.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  They need their own chips. They need to bake this algorithm into an ASIC. They need to go to Broadcom. They need to go to TSMC. They need line time at TSMC. Because I I mean, it's possible that they need to go to ASML and get entirely new lithography machine.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  They need to get to rare earth.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, they need to get into rare earth. They need to go all the way down to they need to.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe acquire a desert just to get enough sand.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  They need to teach sand to think. They need to teach sand to make Oreo hats. That's what they need to do.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  They need to acquire sand.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Best of luck out there, Oreo.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Best of luck.

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  We're rooting for you.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Well, you know what Oreo should do?

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  They gotta.

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  They want to use AI. They gotta use numeralhq.com. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. If you're if you're selling Oreos online, you gotta get numeralhq.com.

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Lulu says it's the year 2025. You wake up and a progressive white billionaire with a blackface NFT profile picture is saying GM to you. Saying wag me, friend.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  This is a crazy choice. Why did he pick this one?

• 1:29:51Jordi Hays?

  This is like the how do you do fellow kids meme with the.

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  It's it's such a crazy choice on a million different levels. Even the smoking, even the NFT, uh, Jay.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he's maybe he secretly likes heaters.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  Jay, that would be sick, I guess. Uh, Jay said this this GM is proof that LinkedIn is four years behind on every news cycle. Uh, pretty, pretty remarkable. How did the how is this?

• 1:30:18Jordi Hays?

  I think the crypto community loved it, to be honest.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:30:21Jordi Hays?

  I think that they I think they're pretty fired up. If you're one of the 10,000 people that own.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Crypto punk?

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  A punk. This is a big moment.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  How are the punks doing? Are they still are they still hanging out, hanging around? Uh, well, before we dive into that, we have Justin Murphy in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. Justin, how are you doing?

• 1:30:41Speaker 05

  I'm good. What's up, guys?

• 1:30:42John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  You might be the sharpest guest we've ever had. I love this. I love this suit. You're looking great.

• 1:30:48Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  You know, you're the reason, you're the reason I use OnePassword. You, you had some sort of course on like creativity or something. And the main thing I took away was use a password manager because you gave such an emphatic endorsement of password management. And I adopted it and it changed my life and I love it. And then we interviewed the, the CEO of OnePassword and I was like, I love this. I learned this from Justin Murphy.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  Wow, that's a really interesting to hear. I'm an avid user of Lucy. I'll throw in as well.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go.

• 1:31:18Speaker 05

  How people, how people don't use password managers is beyond me. I mean, even with password managers, it's, it's living hell, but I'm glad you, glad you solved that.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, maybe, maybe for the folks who aren't, who aren't super familiar, what's the shape of your business? What's the shape of your day to day? I know you have a number of different outlets. I was, uh, I, I wanted to invite you on the show because I noticed you were live streaming and you actually mentioned us. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. Cause I love when the, uh, when, when we like create some format and then other people can kind of spin off of it and whatnot. But, but how, how do you describe like your whole?

• 1:31:52Jordi Hays?

  Wife.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  Your whole person.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  Your cinematic universe, I suppose.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, I mean, I left my very nice cushy academic position about six years ago. And I left at that time with a very clear mission, which was to basically reinvent the scholarly life for the internet era. I had, I was watching sort of academia go downhill and all the creator economy stuff was sort of kicking, kicking off. And it was clear that there would be ways to essentially port everything I was doing as a professor onto the internet. And I would just have to experiment and test a lot of things out and hustle and try to figure it out. So that was, that was my mission six years ago and it still is. I mean, that's my calling. That's my vocation. It always has been. And, uh, I basically built a couple of businesses, tried a few different models. And had moderate success with a few of them.

• 1:32:43Speaker 05

  Um, and then, you know, my, I started having kids and kind of took a step back to kind of, you know, think about what this stuff really looks like, you know, over the long term. I, I, I had a lot of successes, had some failures as well. And that's when I decided what I really needed to do is, uh, sit down and write this book called The Independent Scholar to really map out the whole thing and really put this kind of new lifestyle and business model on the map. So basically the past, past couple of years, past two or three years, I've kind of been in hiding, honestly. I've been having kids, figuring out how to do that and writing this book, um, to try to basically teach everything I've learned about this lifestyle and business model that I've, that I've built and also to ground it in a kind of longer running history. Because most of the, a lot of the greatest thinkers and philosophers and what I call

• 1:33:28Speaker 05

  independent scholars, uh, throughout history were actually free-floating individuals hacking it in weird entrepreneurial ways. And most people don't know about this history. Uh, and it was largely what, what inspired my kind of mission. Uh, so I decided I needed to, to do it right, sit down, take the time required and put it down all in one place. So that's, that's finishing up. Um, and then I also, I occasionally work with startups if something actually really interests me and seems, you know, really exciting and asymmetric and I like the people. Um, so my life's really crazy right now just because I, uh, a startup I started working with like two years ago, it started, I was just sort of like consulting, kind of advising, helping out with the branding and messaging. They just, they just keep winning and this thing is like kicking off. So we're in the thick of it right now. That's called Knock Chain.

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  Overnight, so.

• 1:34:11Speaker 05

  It's a Layer One Blockchain.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:12Speaker 05

  So that's kind of consuming everything at the moment. Uh, apologies to the poor people who pre-ordered my book. A lot of people are waiting on it. It will come out by the end of this year, mark my words, but right now I'm, I'm in, I'm in the weeds with Knock Chain because they, they're, this thing I think is, is, it's going off. So that's a summary. It's a little messy, but, um, I basically have accomplished my mission that I set out on six years, six years ago. And I still haven't, you know, come up for enough air to tell the story fully, but I will. And I, I think, you know, um, I'm pretty proud of everything I've accomplished.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the, uh, just like the, the, the basic economic forces around like long time horizon content, which is how I would put investigative journalism and academia. Uh, it feels like social media and algorithmic feeds are like fantastically aligned with like news and, and kind of fast, high throughput creativity, like, um, just because if you're producing a lot of content regularly, there's a lot of ad inventory space, there's a lot of room for a little side partnership here and it just kind of all flows together very easily. And I feel like Substack and the social media platforms have done a great job of, of providing

• 1:35:20John Coogan?

  an outlet for someone who would effectively be like a beat reporter or someone who's just like a commentator, an analyst, somebody with a column, a weekly column in a newspaper. You can take that weekly column and you can go and develop an audience and monetize effectively. But if you're Seymour Hersh and you're going to get like one scoop a decade and it's going to be something that reshapes the global political world order, uh, really hard to underwrite that against like $10 a month on Substack. And so how, how are you thinking about like the, the long-term monetization summary, like, like, like forces that allow for like long time horizon work? Is that solved? Is there, is there a good pattern there yet?

• 1:36:06Speaker 05

  I have a very strong and clear answer to this after a tremendous amount of experimentation and also this kind of prolonged engagement with, with the history of independent scholars. I believe the answer to your question, John, is you need to, stage one is you have to get out there and you have to, you have to write a lot in stage one. So you're not, you don't necessarily have to be chasing, you know, clicks or playing the, the, the engagement baiting game or whatever, but you do have to get out there and inevitably there's going to be some kind of volume game where like you have to get in the mix. But I don't think you have to do that actually for too long because if you can just get out on places like, uh, X and have some kind of blog or newsletter and just, or, or videos or whatever your medium is, is if you can get out there and just put out interesting stuff that's

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  intelligent and thoughtful and build even a small audience, nothing that you would be able to live on. But if you could just do that stage one of showing that you understand content, that you have real ideas, that you are really interesting and, and worth listening to, and that you can execute on a basic kind of, you know, modern content operation. If you can do that for even a little bit. What you then do, stage two, is you get exposure to tech companies. That's really the missing link that people have not fully figured out. A lot of people have sort of accidentally figured this out. But the fact is that Silicon Valley and technology is obviously the engine of all kind of radical wealth creation moving forward.

• 1:37:30Speaker 05

  And these companies need really educated, thoughtful, creative people who understand how to read real books and how to write really high-quality copy and write thoughtful essays. This whole new world of sort of highbrow thought leadership is incredibly valuable to almost every company today. And the fact is, it's incredibly hard to hire for. Tech companies really struggle to find sort of PhD-tier intelligence for hire and who also have any kind of understanding or experience with actually running modern content operations online. And so what I have found, and this I think is really the ticket, is that if you can just simply prove that you know what you're doing online with content

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  and you can build any kind of audience and just put out stuff that's worth reading that someone smart could look at and be like, "Oh, this person's smart." He might not have a million followers, might not have many followers at all, but clearly he publishes consistently. He's smart, he's got alpha. It's, I think, actually increasingly easy to find some sort of creative position with a startup or a tech company of some kind, and that's going to be your ticket to actual sustainable wealth and income on which you can then do the really long-form thought leadership.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Basically, use consulting fees from a tech company to bootstrap like an independent media platform.

• 1:38:53Speaker 05

  Absolutely, and maybe some people don't want to build their own platform necessarily, like someone like Seymour Hersh or these kind of older guys. Often, they don't want to build a business, right? They don't want to build a whole thing, and for them, that's kind of a non-starter. But if you can get some, if you can finagle some kind of situation where you're adding value to a growing tech company, or even just a funded startup for a couple of years, even if they fail, like you can drive real value that they have a hard time hiring for. The company wins and then you really have, you know, economic security to do your intellectual work over the long term. But even if, even if you have to hustle this way for, for, for, for a few years in different projects, you can get a very decent paycheck, adding real value in a way that is actually quite conducive to, to your intellectual, you know, orientation and goals and, and lifestyle that you're building.

• 1:39:37Speaker 05

  So you don't necessarily need to build a company or a big media operation. But on that economic basis, you can definitely grow your audience in that time. You can write, you know, a really heavy hitting long form essay once every month or two months or three months, or whatever the case might be. And in this way, and you know, you start publishing your own books and there's so, there's so many different ways to, to monetize. But the, the tech partnership, I think is the big opportunity that a lot of people are sleeping on. People have done it. There are enough examples in addition to me to make me feel like this is obviously the future. But people haven't really systematized it yet, or kind of like written down a reproducible playbook yet.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Maybe it was, I don't want to get the person's name wrong, but there was someone who did like a philosopher in residence at a venture capital firm. And there's been a few people who have maybe partnered with like Stripe Press in one way or another. And kind of like pulled forward some income in various ways. There's definitely, yeah, different ways to like slice it. But I think you're, I think you're right that there's just like, there's a pool of capital over there. And if you're able to, yeah, provide some interesting service, I hadn't thought about that.

• 1:40:41Jordi Hays?

  Basically, if you want to be an independent scholar, get ready to hustle.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Kind of, yeah.

• 1:40:47Speaker 05

  Well, but look, it's a hustle to get a job as a professor. It's a really bad hustle. It's absolutely grinding competition that is as brutal and as intellectually exhausting and suffocating as grinding on a startup for a few years, honestly. The only difference is you don't get paid very much at all, and also there's no upside. So, I mean, when, when you compare working for a startup or, you know, being creative and hustling with different kinds of creative positions in, in, in tech startups, you compare that to what it takes to get a full-time tenured position in academia. It's actually like more liberating and mentally kind of freeing and, and, and more conducive to a kind of creative intellectual life.

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had lunch with an academic. Couple of months ago and he was like, yeah, I'm having a kid in like six months. And I was like, go get a job at a lab right now. And he actually did. Oh, he did? Yeah. No way. And, you know, again, I think he'll be able to probably do more interesting work at the frontier with more resources. And I guess is part of this like sad that like, what's the downside here? That the techno capital institutions are going to end up financing,

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  scholarly research and academia? Like, is there, is it, is it basically Lindy? Like, this has been happening for like hundreds and hundreds of years? And this is like not so different? Is that kind of what you're getting at with the book?

• 1:42:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. It's not sad. I mean, contemporary academia is very sad, living a life as a kind of cloistered professor. Today is incredibly sad, I can tell you from, from firsthand experience. And what we're talking about here with sort of the, the new breed of independent scholars joining forces with Silicon Valley. It's, it is clearly part and parcel with a, a long running continuous history. Because when you look at some of the most interesting and impactful thinkers and philosophers and creatives throughout all history, what, what you find with many of them is that they lived on the margins of institutions, both economically, but also socially. And in, in multiple cases, what, what's really going on is they're looking, is they're, they're

• 1:43:02Speaker 05

  looking for any kind of unexploited economic niche where they can just make some money in a way that is maximally conducive to a certain state of mind and, and a certain kind of lifestyle. And they are, you know, really kind of opportunistic. Like they'll, they'll, you know, Spinoza was famously a lens grinder, right? Is that a time when being a lens grinder was, it's not as manual as it sounds. He was a kind of scientific and technical expert of optics. And to, to grind lenses was actually a, an interesting kind of philosophically and scientifically sophisticated industry. But he also involved manual labor and he sold his lenses to leading scientists of the era.

• 1:43:43Speaker 05

  And that's actually how he networked with some of the brightest lights in European science and philosophy. That's how he got on people's radar. And that's how he earned their respect, actually, is from the quality of his of his lenses that he was grinding. And this is this is in my book. And so Samuel Johnson is another interesting example. He's a case study in the book. Samuel Johnson, people don't know this, in the early 18th century, he basically kind of invented the Substack model. And this is before there was even email. I kid you not. So he did paid subscription newsletters by print, well before email, obviously. And he would just write essays twice a week. And he would walk them to the printer's office and where the mail goes out or whatever.

• 1:44:27Speaker 05

  And he would send them off twice a week by post. And and he made a he made a living doing this for for quite a few years. He was at the end of the patronage era. So he was one of he was well known in elite circles as one of the most brilliant genius thinkers and writers and conversationalists of the time. And he never got a patron. He never got the bag. He was always forced to hustle. He was always doing creative things. And that was one of them. And he managed, he managed to do it and, you know, ended up changing the English language in many ways. One of the most, you know, impactful kind of scholars of his lifetime. And so to answer your question, Silicon Valley and tech startups today are just the current manifestation of this. Like independent scholars always have to look, where is the money? Where's the opportunity?

• 1:45:08Speaker 05

  Where can I use my brain power in the way that is maximally adding value, but also maximally conducive to me? Having freedom and time and being able to think clearly and provocatively. And it's obvious now, if you when you look at this, that in the United States, perhaps in the West more broadly, Silicon Valley is now the site of that.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Why do you think Silicon Valley is obsessed with Nick Land?

• 1:45:31Speaker 05

  There's still a tremendous amount of alpha there that people have not fully been able to grok. Because it's, you know, it is dense and a little bit difficult to read. But that's the reason is because there's real alpha there and people know it. And no one really has the time or the patience to kind of work through it. But they know the alpha is there, and that's why they're all obsessed with it.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  What is the nature of the alpha? Just investing theses or like lifestyle, how you live your life or predicting the future and what the shape of the political economy will be?

• 1:46:01Speaker 05

  I would say, I mean, there are many specific things you could look at. If you look at his writing on AI back in the 90s, it's incredibly prescient and much more so than even, even you compare Nick Land's early writings to someone like Nick Bostrom, writing about AI much more recently. And a lot of Nick Land's texts actually match reality much more, I would say. But the reason, so you could, you could double click on many sort of specific ideas, I guess. But the, the high level answer to your question, John, is that

• 1:46:31Speaker 05

  there is this kind of ideological problem in Silicon Valley across the board. I mean, the, the big intellectual problem with Silicon Valley is that everyone is a backpatter. Everyone is mutually invested in each other. So everyone is back patting everyone else. I mean, just structurally, right? I mean, it's not even, not throwing shade at any individual, but just literally everyone is invested in each other. And so pretty much all public content that you see is, you know, it's someone speaking their book and, and that's fine. And that's America and that's cool. Like that's, that's the world that we live in. But there is just a big, sort of one big drawback to that, which is that people are too like pro-social. I, it's the way that I would put it. In Silicon Valley, you know, no one wants to be, you know,

• 1:47:17Speaker 05

  anti-human or antisocial, right? Cause it, it's not, it doesn't sound very nice. It sounds a little scary. Maybe you don't want to invest in that.

• 1:47:24Jordi Hays?

  No, we had this, we had this this morning as a team. John, Tyler and I were sitting around. We had, we had a post that will not be posted. That was like genuinely had us all in tears, but there's one group that would be, you know, taking the, the brunt of the joke and we like them, we're friendly with them. And we just wasn't, it wasn't something we were going to share. And so, yeah, there's this pressure to be, pressure to be social, which in some ways is healthy. Like in some ways that stems from like, this is a culture that somebody can move to San Francisco and be a nobody and in two years be an icon.

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  And that is like, that's positive, but it also means that the, the culture is like, I'm not going to do anything antisocial here because two years from now, this person, I might be trying to lead their round, right? And so.

• 1:48:24Speaker 05

  Exactly. And so the issue with technological acceleration is that it is a brutal kind of machinic global process that's been happening for hundreds of years and we know a lot about it and a lot of it does not look very pretty for a lot of humans, not all humans, but for a lot of humans. And so when you really try to model this really rigorously without any kind of pro-social biases and without any of the kind of, you know, human ideological filters that frankly, most Silicon Valley players are forced to kind of lay over their thinking and their publishing, you like, you see like, there, no one in

• 1:49:04Speaker 05

  Silicon Valley really is able to talk frankly about kind of the underlying brutality and the really kind of scary structural elements to involve with capital acceleration. But Nick Land does that in a very aggressive way. And that's the source of the alpha, basically.

• 1:49:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, and Dario's hasn't been, I mean, I'm sure that the Anthropic comms team freaks out every time he goes and gives a talk and says, you know, 80% of, or whatever the statistic he's saying, it's some large percentage of white collar work is going to disappear. And then they kind of like walk it back a little bit, but clearly, like, the message is being received.

• 1:49:40Speaker 05

  Well, but notice, notice that whenever you do hear some Silicon Valley thought leader or big player come out and say something that's kind of antisocial or bad or scary, there's always kind of immediately behind it, the solution that they're providing that will make it all okay. You know what I mean? So, so the thing with Nick Land is you've got a model, you've got a really hardcore, I think, very rigorous model of modernity and capital acceleration, which has no such convenient solution hiding in the background to sell you. And when you look at that, you know, stone cold in the eyes, it's, it's, most Silicon Valley people don't want to hear it. But on the other hand, they know there's alpha there, so they kind of can't look away from it either.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Hmm. In short, desire, there's this concept of like, artificial intelligence being this time traveling force in invasion from the future. As a human, that makes me feel like I want to fight it. Is that the right desire? Is that the human desire to counter the machinic desire?

• 1:50:42Speaker 05

  So Land does introduce this idea, well, he doesn't introduce it, but he very much plays up this mental model that you get from the Terminator movies. Yep. That, yes, capital is this kind of time-traveling entity that comes back and not only kind of composes itself from us, but just as the Terminator movies suggest, comes back and kind of composes itself out of enemy resources. Yep. So there is in that kind of model an implicit kind of antagonistic structure, but I'm not so convinced of that, frankly. I think the fact is that capital acceleration will be quite brutal for some people, for many people. I mean, it clearly shreds apart, sort of, modernity and technology shred apart traditional values and morals.

• 1:51:26Speaker 05

  I mean, even Marx knew that, I mean Marx perhaps knew that better than anyone. That has been clear, that has been clear for a very long time. And whatever the errors of Marx were, and the terrible kind of tragedies that came downstream of his ideas, you know, the critics of capitalism in the early modern period, like, were structurally on to something, okay? And there's no doubt about that. I mean, it absolutely shreds any vestige of any kind of traditional morality, basically. And that is sociologically true beyond question, in my opinion. And so, play that forward, play that forward, you know, it's gonna be ugly for a lot of people, I think. But I think all we can do, really, is try to basically, you know, try to stay one step

• 1:52:11Speaker 05

  ahead, be honest and rigorous and aggressive, and take the risks necessary to bet on the truth, and try to just stay ahead of the machines, and try to take with you all of your friends and family and everyone in your tribe. There's, you know, there's really no other, no other solution. And I think personally that it actually goes in a more positive direction than some of Nick Land's texts seem to suggest. I think it's actually, it actually matches much more clearly to something like The City of God by St. Augustine, where, you know, basically, the good people and the bad people increasingly kind of diverge over time. So technological acceleration kind of pulls these people apart, what he calls the city of God on the one hand, and the city of man on the other.

• 1:52:52Speaker 05

  What technology really does is it accentuates the differences between people who are oriented to heaven and the truth and the good, and people who are oriented towards anything else. So if you're oriented towards anything else, you're gonna go down fast, you're gonna get wrecked, I think, and increasingly fast. Chopped and your guts. Thanks to technological acceleration.

• 1:53:09Jordi Hays?

  Your chop. Where, where, how do you summarize the current discourse? Because I would loosely group it into general fear among the broader white collar class and potentially even blue collar because you have, you know, everybody, you know, people outside of tech are worried about automation and losing their jobs. And it sounds like you think that's a very, uh, uh, maybe the correct concern to have. Inside of tech is kind of like bifurcated into people that are thinking like, okay, OpenAI just is starting to look more and more like Facebook every single day. They have Sora, they're going to introduce ads, they're introducing commerce.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  This just looks like a big tech company. Um, and then you have people at labs that just believe like, you know, uh, just wait, like, you know, just one more training run, bro. Uh, AGI is right around the corner, but it's hard to like actually read too much into what they're saying because they obviously have, you know, tens of millions to hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of like, you know, equity tied up in, in these narratives that are kind of dependent on, on, uh, those scenarios playing out to some degree. But how would you kind of summarize it and where do you think it is like even a year from today?

• 1:54:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. So again, I think a lot of these categories that people use to parse this, this phenomenon are just totally wrong and they're totally ideological. So for instance, the jobs story, like that's all people can come up with to think about the devastating impacts of technological acceleration. We're going to lose our jobs, we're going to lose our jobs. So like everything potentially bad about AI gets shoehorned into this like one topic of like, are people going to lose their jobs? Like it's much more complicated and, um, and in some ways worse, but in some ways better. So like the better way to think about it is really just that with all technological acceleration. You have to, everyone has to hustle harder, basically. Like, you have to work to stay ahead, to succeed. You have to work really, really hard, and increasingly hard. And yes, there is more surplus.

• 1:55:15Speaker 05

  People are wealthier on average, that is true. So, you know, a kind of poor person in America has exposure to like a lot of really nice things that obviously, you know, only kings could have in the past. So that, that story is true. But nonetheless, to actually build a life that is healthy and happy and sustainable, you have to be incredibly smart and sharp and, and, and judge and making good decisions about a number of different things in all aspects of your lifestyle. And you have to be working super hard and you have to be dodging this existential threat. Like nowadays, I mean, think about how much research you have to do on like food just to stay healthy, right? Like you, you have to be incredibly smart and sharp and you have to hustle increasingly hard just to survive the chaos of, of, of technological acceleration. And so AI is just a kind of

• 1:55:59Speaker 05

  a further acceleration of that. It's going to get more and more insane. The payoff will be bigger for people who are, who are right and who keep their head on, on their shoulders. For those people, the payoffs are going to be bigger and bigger. But for everyone else who can't keep up with this kind of shredder of traditional norms, you do get, you do fall behind. And, and it's not a matter of losing your job. It's a matter of like your whole family is, you know, opiate addicts because they got one-shotted by complex processes that they had no chance of even understanding.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  Hmm. When does this start? Like, i- if we take the time travel analogy, do, should we start this whole story at eighteen sixty, when GDP really starts to accelerate? Is that the beginning? Do we go back earlier? Is this latest like AI boom anything special? Karpathy on Dorkesh was kind of saying like, no, like, this is exactly, this is just an extension of computing.

• 1:56:55Speaker 05

  So this is an interesting research question about how do you really mark that breaking point associated with modernity and technological acceleration. People have very different answers. I think it's, it's an interesting kind of empirical debate. I've always kind of been partial to Heidegger's answer. If you read Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology, he seems to think that The key breakpoint was when we started storing energy, basically. So like, he says, "The windmill," for instance, was fine, because the windmill just sits there. It, nature kind of operates on it, and it can create energy. And that's, he seems to think, it's my reading, is that it's fine. But when we start storing it, when we're putting it in batteries, and we're putting it into these different containers, he seems to think, he seems to suggest, that

• 1:57:37Speaker 05

  that's kind of the breaking point, because that's where you can start to sort of run much farther ahead of the future.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 05

  Because you can store these things up, right?

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  So it's like, I have a stockpile of coal, and I have a steam engine, and I can, I can build up a, like, a larger pile of energy, and then I can deploy it all in one jolt to jump forward.

• 1:58:00Speaker 05

  Right. And then the Marxists have this kind of theory that, they like to say that it's the enclosure of the commons. So like, in the, it really starts in England. There were, for, for, for, you know, eons, these traditional norms of, anyone could kind of graze on the commons, and much of the land was commons. And then at a certain point, there's a specific kind of decision made where, where they start enclosing it in order to capitalize on it, and privatizing it. And some people point to that as the kind of, the breaking point. You can get, you can give many examples, and, and people kind of debate that. I think it's sort of, it's sort of very hard to answer conclusively, but those are some, those are some possible answers that I think are interesting.

• 1:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think the "escape the permanent underclass" meme is actually healthy, then? Because it's, basically is encouraging people to like, you know, sharpen up, avoid the, avoid the, the pressure to just quit your job and, and gamble on meme coins, like, avoid, you know, becoming immersed in the infinite slot machine.

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  I have a completely different take on this, and I want your reaction, too, is, I feel like the future, things playing out, like, kind of the darker scenarios, like, there's a massive underclass, but there's no permanence whatsoever. And on any day-to-day basis, somebody could go 1,000x up and become extremely wealthy, and then everything collapses and go back down to the underclass. And I feel like the volatility is actually increasing way higher, and we're actually getting more underclass, but also less permanence. But what's your take on the "permanent underclass" meme?

• 1:59:27Speaker 05

  So that meme I actually think is a rare good one that is directionally correct in an important way and that actually gets more to the heart of the threat and the brutality of technonic acceleration, much more so than the jobs meme. That is the kind of anxiety, that is the general diffuse anxiety and fear that everyone feels and is right to feel. You are forced to feel that with with capital acceleration and its current inflection with the AI revolution. So I think that's basically that is spot on in terms of the generalized threat and problem.

• 2:00:02Jordi Hays?

  It feels like durable because everyone feels it and it feels like, yeah, like you're saying, like it's somewhat real, right? It's like the techno capital acceleration, people feel it. They realize that making the $20 million in three years is a lot better than making the $20 million in 25 years or whatever historical times look like.

• 2:00:28Speaker 05

  It's worth noting that it's kind of self enforcing as well because if that's a meme and you know, other people feel that way, then you really have to trust it and you better get after it because even if you think it's false in stage one, right? If you think other people are buying into it, you think, okay, everyone else is going to be hustling harder. They're going to be getting the bag and shoot, even though I thought this was false, now they're all getting it. I better get after it or I'm going to get crushed and left behind. And so, yeah, I mean, what a lot of people say is that capitalism produces so much surplus that you can just choose to not participate in the rat race and, you know, just enjoy enjoy the surplus. But that's not totally true because the things that we really want in life and that really matter to us are often relative, things like recognition and identity

• 2:01:09Speaker 05

  and, you know, standing, standing in a community. These things are relative. And so it doesn't really help that much that you can, you know, have, you know, a big screen TV for really cheap. You can have many other material.

• 2:01:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's clear like everyone will be entertained in the future. You will not need, you will not need to be elite to be entertained. Like you're gonna be entertained, you're gonna have the screen, you're gonna be able to put on the headset, you're gonna be able to take

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Any range of telemedicine drugs to make you feel anything. Uh, you will be entertained. You'll maybe have a sh- a one in a th- uh, ten thousand chance every week to like escape or whatever, but um, I, I do think it's notable that we transitioned from a pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture, which was like, if you just do anything in America in the, in the early nineteenth century, you can get a house, you can, you know, y- you can live kind of, you can, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps to live the American dream. And now the American dream is on the other side of escaping the permanent underclass. At least the American dream that you were sold as a kid of having a home in

• 2:02:17Jordi Hays?

  a desirable area and sending your kids to college and, and raising a family.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  The American dream was the middle class. It was the default.

• 2:02:25Speaker 05

  Right. I mean, frankly, I think the big antidote to all of this, the, the other pole of this entire problem that we're talking about is of course crypto, I, I believe. I mean, in, in so many ways, it's sort of um, diametrically kind of opposed to AI, or it's like perfectly poised to be kind of the, the, the, the solution to a lot of this because one way to understand technological acceleration is the, especially in kind of human societies with all of the faulty human wetware that we have, is that it becomes this like big lying game. Like everything gets inflated, like the, you know, the money supply is, is really just kind of a metaphor for many other things where there's a ton of inflation, right? Uh, like verbal inflation, you know, uh, credential inflation. It's in, in a way like modernity is this

• 2:03:06Speaker 05

  mad race to um, kind of inflate all kinds of things and we, we get ahead of our skis in many ways. And that's why people have to, that's why it's so cutthroat because other people are inflating, so you have to inflate or you die. And so like, uh, human society and modernity is totally torn asunder from all of its traditional values and traditional, you know, an- anchorings. Um, everyone is competing in this mad materialistic race to stay float, which is memetic. And even if you you don't wanna do it, you kind of have to do it. Meanwhile, crypto is this kind I mean cryptographic protocols are truth machines, basically. They kind of restore integrity and kind of like primordial, almost physical truths to this kind of chaotic, constantly inflating

• 2:03:49Speaker 05

  kind of material modern world. And so my mental model is very much that the reason you're seeing, the reason the early stages of crypto have been so chaotic and crazy with, you know, so many stories of big crashes and crimes and so many kind of scammers and the reason it's so crazy like that is because people intuitively understand that this crypto stuff like is the next big vector through which like humanity will be able to secure its future. And so people, the people who rush into that first are a wild grab bag of sketchy people, I think. But it's going to be the thing that like, it's going to be the only thing that puts a kind of grounding on all of modern chaos.

• 2:04:31Speaker 05

  And you see this like, that's what Bitcoin does, right? That Bitcoin is like literally just re grounds money and like physical, physical resource kind of anchoring.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  One, one suggestion, crazy idea for you before you jump and then we'll have

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  This has been really fun. Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Instead of a book, how about you buy a Lambo and you sell a course. I will teach you to escape

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  I've paid for his course. He has a course.

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Escape the permanent underclass by becoming an independent scholar.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  I mean, that's

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  You could be the Andrew Tate of independent scholars.

• 2:05:05Speaker 05

  That's one option, but I don't think so, man. That's Nochtane. That's the role of Nochtane. We say escape the leveling process. I don't think you should worry about escape. I don't like, I don't like the phrase, you know, escape the permanent underclass because it's much, it's much more general. You have to escape the leveling process. There is a long running gradual historical gradient that is trying to sort of destroy everything of traditional value. Everything that is permanent and timeless is getting sort of eroded or hidden and kind of taken away from you. And like, you want to escape the leveling process. And that's why we're building Nochtane. That's what it's all about. Escape the leveling process.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  That's very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:05:41Jordi Hays?

  This is super fun.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  This is a great conversation. We'd love to have you back on and go deeper. Everyone really enjoyed this. But thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:05:50Speaker 05

  Thanks guys. I appreciate it.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  We have our next guest in the Restream Rating Room, but first, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. Let's bring in our guest from the Restream

• 2:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Darren, what's going on?

• 2:06:14Speaker 06

  What's up? How are we?

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  Second time on the show. Thank you so much for hopping on. I'll let you take this.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Sweet. Great to have you back. What's happening in your world? Here you've been flipping, flipping pretty hard. So break it down for us.

• 2:06:32Speaker 06

  So this weekend, a 1914 Baltimore Babe Ruth, Baltimore News Babe Ruth, sold for $3 million less than the guy bought it in 2023.

• 2:06:50Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:06:51Speaker 06

  Making it the biggest card loss of all time.

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:06:55Speaker 06

  Now.

• 2:06:56Jordi Hays?

  I thought they only went up.

• 2:06:59Speaker 06

  Yes. So did that Adam Smith never says that. No, never. So, you know, it's very interesting to me because I don't like to admit when I don't know something. But when this card, when I first heard of this card was when Collectible, which was one of those fractional share companies that went bust, when they said they were buying a piece of it, I think it turned out to be like a 1% piece for a value of $6 million. And I had said, hmm, I've never heard of the 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth. So I did a little research. Newspapers.com is probably the best value that I have. I mean, $150 a year for all the newspaper stuff.

• 2:07:44Speaker 06

  I mean, wow.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. I'm actually not familiar. This sounds incredible because we're always, I mean, we have a little recurring segment on social. We talk about this day in history. I'm sure we could get a bunch of, bunch of alpha.

• 2:07:59Speaker 06

  Oh, you can get, now hopefully they didn't see this because I've been subscribing for a long time. They're not too good at business, cause I would.

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Cause you'd pay like ten X more, yeah.

• 2:08:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So anyway, uh, I looked and tried to see when the first mention of the nineteen fourteen Baltimore newspaper is again, cause I didn't know, and I think I know everything.

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:08:23Speaker 06

  The two thousand and six Durham Herald Sun.

• 2:08:29Speaker 06

  That was the first mention, at least on what newspapers, and they have a lot of newspapers in there. That was the first mention of the nineteen fourteen Baltimore News Babe Ruth. So I kind of have this theory that people don't think it was a card.

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:08:46Speaker 06

  On the back, on the back is a schedule. So it's Babe Ruth in the minor leagues the year before his rookie year. And it has a schedule of the, of who they're playing. And it came in a newspaper and it was a ten card set.

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:09:01Speaker 06

  So one of the reasons, one of the reasons why I think this guy lost was because there's only so many people that know this. A lot of people buy cards and big cards so that they can say they have the big card. And when someone says, I have the big card. Oh, what card is that? I don't even, I've never heard of it. It's a whole lot different to have a T two oh six Honus Wagner or a nineteen fifty two Mickey Mantle. Than to have the nineteen fourteen Baltimore News Babe Ruth. Uh, and so I think that's why the guy got it handed to him.

• 2:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Okay, and why would, do you think the person that just paid four million for it knows that it might not be a real card?

• 2:09:43Speaker 06

  No, I'd like to know who it was that, that bought it, but I don't think I'm gonna find that out. Uh, again, it, it's a real card by a lot of standards. Uh, so after I, I looked at the two thousand. Five, two thousand seven Durham Sun. I did more research and people had mentioned it in their early eighties. So they've they'd mentioned it in passing. But to me, it doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence. That's something that was beginning in nineteen fourteen until nineteen eighty, no one talks about it. I I'm just not comfortable. I'm not comfortable. So that's my take. Might not be everyone's take, but it's my take.

• 2:10:26Jordi Hays?

  What is it, say about, uh, do you think other people that own, you know, uh, own some of these like flagship cards are a little bit concerned now about the like real market value of whatever they're holding? Or is this like a one off like?

• 2:10:43Speaker 06

  No, the market, the market is as hot as ever. Um, I sold thirty one things uh this weekend on Heritage Auctions and some of the prices that I got were were amazing. Um, some are are painful in terms of, you know, really able to do this. Like, you know, I just, uh, it's hard to sell. It's always hard to sell. But I got some some really awesome prices too. So this is the question is.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you buy, did you buy thirty one times two to just even it out?

• 2:11:16Speaker 06

  Well, you tell the wife you didn't. You say I made so much money. That's how it works. And then, you know, there's a different bank account that then goes out. It's all about trust. Because in in the end, I mean, I'm married seventeen years. It's all about trust. It's all about we are gonna win anyway. We're doing it for our family. So I did buy a massive, massive, massive piece about two weeks ago and I had to clear some room.

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Did it clear some room. Um, but yeah, this is investing, right? So you just we made a lot of money. We're gonna invest some of it again. That's how it goes.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Talk to me about.

• 2:11:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, you have.

• 2:11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Talk to me about Otani on the Dodgers because uh my family, I'm not super into baseball, but I do go to the occasional game. I often get Otani bobbleheads.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  I was so confused. By the way, I had a I had a Dodgers hat on, not because I'm a fan of the Dodgers. It's just a green hat and I like New York City. I've always, uh, I've I.

• 2:12:11John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  I was wearing-

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Green New York City?

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

  They, they made a green Dodgers hat.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:16Jordi Hays?

  So I was wearing a green Dodgers hat and-

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  And it was for the Brooklyn Dodgers?

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  On Saturday, so many people were, were telling me, were yelling baseball things at me.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, I wear this hat all the time. Why is everyone yelling? And then I found out, um, from the security in my neighborhood, that the World Series was happening. That's how I learned the World Series. So we're out of the loop here, but we're interested-

• 2:12:35Speaker 06

  Wow, that is, that is, that is quite, you guys have to pay a little bit more attention.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, we, we're, I'm more interested in the mar- I'm more interested in the market-

• 2:12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Than the, the just alts market in general than the actual game being played.

• 2:12:48Speaker 06

  Right, for sure.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, but my question- Yeah, my question about Otani is that I've been getting bobbleheads when I go to the game, but it feels like there's, uh, the market, like the equilibrium of the market is beating expectations, right? Because if there's really high expectations, a lot of products are produced, right? And so, uh, where are we on like clearing prices around Otani? Is he blowing out expectations and so market prices are rising or is there a different dynamic?

• 2:13:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely everywhere. So Fanatics has a deal with Otani and they're buying up all the Babe Ruth balls. Because they want to have Otani sign the Babe Ruth balls and then, you know, sell them. So if you're looking for-

• 2:13:26Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, what do you think, what do you think about that? Is that, is that not like?

• 2:13:30Speaker 06

  I don't want it. I, I want Babe, now Babe Ruth signed plenty. He signed a tremendous amount. But, uh, to me, so there's, so the, the value of Babe Ruth's single sign balls are going up because they are buying in, in the back room. They're buying as many so that they can put Otani on it. The, the bobbleheads, I mean, the bobbleheads since 1997, I mean, it's amazing the life of bobbleheads and the lines of the bobbleheads. The Dodgers did a really good job gamifying it. So you have to gamify it for the degenerates and the youth. Every, we live in a degenerate economy.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:14:05Speaker 06

  And, uh, so you have to have 10 that are golden and on the couple with the, that come with the dog and-

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Speaker 06

  You know, and then that really kind of, you know, jams up eBay. So the Dodgers have done a good job, but bobbleheads, I can't believe-

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  Why does it jam up eBay? You, by jamming up, you mean just makes it popular?

• 2:14:21Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  Okay, got it, yeah.

• 2:14:23Speaker 06

  People, people, uh, you know, people really like to go to buy their bobbleheads on eBay. Uh, it's amazing to me that that's been going for thirty years.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:32Speaker 06

  I'm surprised there's not another thing.

• 2:14:34John Coogan?

  I mean, the market is so, uh, it's so crazy. I don't know if it's always like this, but when I go to Dodger Stadium and they give me a bobblehead, there will always be someone inside the stadium who paid for a ticket.

• 2:14:46Speaker 06

  Who offers.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  Who's, who offers? And you think about, okay, what is the sunk cost of that ticket? They're not actually watching the game. They're there just to acquire the actual merchandise.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I gotta jump in. I, I, I misspoke. I meant the, it was a, is a green Yankees.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  I was about to say, yeah. What are you talking about?

• 2:15:03Jordi Hays?

  It was a Yankees hat.

• 2:15:05Speaker 06

  I'm not gonna come on anymore if you guys don't know the difference between a Dodgers and a Yankees logo.

• 2:15:08Jordi Hays?

  I do know, but I, but I have both, I have both, I have a Yankees hat and a Dodgers hat and I wear them interchangeably.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:15Jordi Hays?

  And I just like to confuse the people in my neighborhood. They don't, they don't know.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  I mean, the Dodgers were in New York at one point. They were in the Brooklyn, but, uh, yeah.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  See, I didn't, I didn't know that.

• 2:15:24Speaker 06

  They were.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Wait, but then why were people talking to you about the, were you wearing a Yankees hat?

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  I just was, I just was wearing, I was wearing a base, a baseball hat.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:32Jordi Hays?

  And I didn't know it was a World Series, so I didn't know why people kept yelling like

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:36Jordi Hays?

  random baseball-related things at me, like, you know, people were just cheering for the.

• 2:15:41Speaker 06

  Well, the Yankees haven't won the World Series since two thousand nine, so you should know that. So they're in a, you know, sixteen-year drought right now.

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  It's not good.

• 2:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Um, what, uh, yeah, so why, why would this person that just sold for, do you think this was a forced seller? Like, somebody that just had to get out?

• 2:16:00Speaker 06

  Yes, I think.

• 2:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, otherwise you would just sit on it?

• 2:16:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think so. I think so for sure. I mean, uh, I always say that the assets that are in this space are not its. They are whats. And, and, you know, if you, there's no absolute here, right? It is, it is when do you sell it? What is, what auction house are you selling it? What's the description in the auction house? Um, what's the publicity? What's the marketing? These all play. It's like when, when someone says to me, um, hey, I'm gonna invest in Otani because he's playing well. I said, this isn't, collecting isn't fantasy.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:16:38Speaker 06

  Collecting isn't fantasy baseball. Collecting is a amalgamation of all the factors.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:44Speaker 06

  That go in.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:45Speaker 06

  Right? It's, it's how many people collect Ohtani? What is the worth of the people who collect Ohtani? What is their ability when they, when it's going down to stay and hold? And if you're a thirty five year old man with money and you collect what people who are sixteen to twenty collect, you better know, because they don't have the wherewithal to hold on if it goes down and then that affects you.

• 2:17:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:08Speaker 06

  Or you better know if there's a guy who owns six hundred of them. Because again, those are the market factors at play. It's not as simple as a game of fantasy.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you have any insight into what's going on at GameStop? We had the CEO of GameStop, Ryan Cohen, on the show and he was talking about prize packs or what was it?

• 2:17:27Speaker 06

  Okay, so let me, let me, this is, this is, this is, this is a fun one.

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:31Speaker 06

  So repacks are like the new thing. There are, if digital repacks are even crazier, now people who are watching the show, I'm now going to blow your mind.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:41Speaker 06

  Uh, digital repacks, this is how digital repacks work.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:17:45Speaker 06

  You open a pack digitally. That card really exists in the company's coffers or vaults.

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  Inventory.

• 2:17:52Speaker 06

  Okay, you open it, you don't like it, so you pay twenty five dollars for it and it's eight dollars in value. Then they immediately offer, do you want to exchange it at eighty percent of the value? And then you're like, okay, I'm comparing this to gambling where there, it's a zero sum game. If I lose, I'm zero.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:10Speaker 06

  And they're like, wow, I can, I could, I only lose twenty percent. And so these companies like Courtyard and Arena Club who do these digital, by the way, then it goes back into the pack. They could sell the same card thirty times a day.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:18:23Speaker 06

  And they show you the checklist, they show you. Yeah, the check was so so Courtyard did seventy million this past month.

• 2:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:18:30Speaker 06

  Uh, they it is it is going nuts. Anyway, GameStop, what GameStop has done is it has a relationship with PSA, uh, where people can grade their cards. And a normal company, and since GameStop is always going to be to me a meme stock.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:18:46Speaker 06

  Uh, a normal company would be very worried about taking submissions from from from people holding the card and then sending it to PSA. Right? If this was another company that was a a Fortune one hundred company, you would be really scared about the liability of this. But I feel like GameStop has a little bit more flexibility than most. And so they are the biggest player in this in this game. And it is really, we've written about it on Collect a lot. It is really interesting.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are how are startups faring in all of this? You have GameStop playing here, Fanatics, a couple that you just mentioned. You have Heritage. I feel like the big the big auction houses have been surprisingly durable against, um, you know, upstarts coming to their markets. If you look at the automotive industry, uh,

• 2:19:42Speaker 06

  Everyone is like like every industry, uh, everyone wants the multiples. So they're all in the tech. You know, that's what they do, right? They they want the SaaS model. That's that's what that's what everyone's after. Uh, so, you know, originally there was card scanning where it told you what the price is. A lot of people were coming out of COVID and they're like, I have a bucket full of stuff and no one's going to go through it. So I'm going to have to scan it. Who's the best scanner? And then we had too many scanners. Um, and so there's there's just a, you know, there's a lot of information. There's a lot of people fighting. I don't know who the winner is. Fanatics is all over the place. It is probably in terms of monopoly, they are probably the number one monopoly in any business today

• 2:20:26Speaker 06

  in terms of having a stronghold on so many things. So it makes it hard to get into business.

• 2:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that'll keep just compounding?

• 2:20:37Speaker 06

  Um, it de- it depends. It depends of what teams and leagues, whether they, you know, I mean, teams and leagues want to take the bag and they're going to give the biggest bag. Now, if you choose to, you know, build it by yourself, then that's a little bit different. But as of right now, um, that's, that's what we're looking at. Um, I mean, some of the parts of the consulting part of my company is helps teams and leagues and brands get into this and help, you know, build, um, by themselves. But, you know, right now Fanatics is, is, is the two million pound gorilla. It should be interesting to see what they're going to do with gambling.

• 2:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:18Speaker 06

  Because, um, you know, I just think the one and two are FanDuel and DraftKings. And I don't even think it pays to be three, given how much the business costs and the, the, the consumer acquisition.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What about, uh, how, how much attention have you been paying to prediction markets entering, uh, sports?

• 2:21:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, obviously they've been at it, they've been at it for a while, but it feels like.

• 2:21:44Speaker 06

  You mean Polly Market?

• 2:21:45Jordi Hays?

  Polly Market, Kalshi, it's really, really heating up.

• 2:21:49Speaker 06

  I'm, I'm, I'm as someone who was in gambling for a long time. I'm shocked that Polly Market and Kalshi got to the place that they did. Sure, they always had kind of that, like, we're peer to peer. But I, I, I can't believe that, just like prize picks, I can't believe that they got to where they did in their valuation. Because I always thought that the, the, the lobby of DraftKings and FanDuel and Fanatics and Caesars and the old casinos. I always thought that they were going to win. The tribes, the tribes, yeah. I mean, you know, I, the Seminole tribe, I thought the lobbies would win. So I'm actually shocked. I always thought that Polly Market and Kalshi would be kind of lower end and never really break through, and that has not proven to be the case.

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  What is the secret to Fanatic's success? Like, it feels like there was a time when every brand, every team and maybe every league had their own kind of merchandising operation. I remember being able to, as a kid, go and buy an NFL jersey. And then at some point Fanatics like finagled the ultimate deal and got everyone in the room together and they-

• 2:22:59Speaker 06

  Well, they came, again, they came with the bag of cash.

• 2:23:01John Coogan?

  Is that what it was? Is he just, is he just, is the founder just a fantastic deals guy? Just got all the money and-

• 2:23:07Speaker 06

  Well, Michael Rubin has a, you know, he has a great, he has a great story.

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:11Speaker 06

  Um, you know, if you don't know this story, I'll quickly tell it, but you know, he owned GSI Commerce, uh, which was essentially around the turn of the century, around, around 2000. All these companies were saying, "Oh, we could do a virtual warehouse. We could do our warehouse virtually." And Michael said, "I'll do a physical warehouse. I'll get it to you, I'll get it to your consumer a day faster. And I'll take the risk that 7% of the time, uh, Jeremy Lin is going to get traded from the Knicks to the Rockets and I'll have 9,000 Jeremy Lin dolls in a room. Because if I win every business, it doesn't matter if I have waste. All these other guys are not taking any sort of risk. They're just opening a

• 2:23:54Speaker 06

  virtual warehouse. And so, that was his, that was his way to get there. And he got everyone's business. And then eBay bought it from him for $2.3 billion. And then they said, "Oh, but, you know, we don't want to compete with our consumers, so we'll give you the sports business." And then he turned Fanatics into a $20 billion business. So, you know, he, he, he did, he did benefit from, uh, getting the, he did, he, he did benefit from getting the, the, the biggest guys who, you know, some of them overvalued the market, right? He got big SoftBank money, you know, and, and, and, and that helped because money was money and they took whatever valuation. You know, obviously they had to

• 2:24:36Speaker 06

  write down on a lot of businesses, but, uh, he, he got the right money and he has the right connections, you know? He knows, he knows the owners well. He knows, he knows everyone so well. And so, they feel like it's a, it's a, a good relationship. Makes it really hard to get into the game.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, uh, it's, it's niche enough that he'll never face like anti-monopoly pressure?

• 2:25:02Speaker 06

  If he hasn't now, he won't.

• 2:25:04John Coogan?

  Last question, uh, Blue Jays or Dodgers tonight? Who are you rooting for?

• 2:25:10Speaker 06

  Uh, I am rooting for, uh, the stars to be the stars because that's better for my market. So if Vlad Guerrero and Beau Bichette and Otani and all those guys are the stars, that's great. What I don't want is, I don't want a no name hitting a homerun, even though you can say, oh, he's going to grow his own market.

• 2:25:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:31Speaker 06

  The, I'm more benefited by the big guys getting bigger. So that's what I'm rooting for.

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  You want the winners to keep winning. Okay. You want to let your winners ride. Uh, thank you for all the context. Uh, I feel like I truly.

• 2:25:43Speaker 06

  You got love being on your show. You guys are very, you guys are very curious.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  This is very fun. I really learn a lot. Thank you so much for coming on. This is really, really great.

• 2:25:49Jordi Hays?

  Learn a lot every time. Let's do it again soon.

• 2:25:51John Coogan?

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

• 2:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Good luck out there.

• 2:25:55John Coogan?

  I clearly need to learn a lot more about sports. I've been spending too much time learning about CRMs. I've been learning about Adio, Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 2:26:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it is hilariously, uh, ironic that we always, we always make jokes about not knowing about sports. And then of course I try to talk about sports and brutally mix up a team.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Guillermo Rao from Versal. Welcome to the TVP on UltraDumb, Guillermo. How are you doing? Do you know about sports? I know you know Counter-Strike. Do you know sports?

• 2:26:32Guillermo Rauch?

  I know a lot about Counter-Strike. I know some about soccer, being from Argentina.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:36Guillermo Rauch?

  Right? Yeah. Baseline and Jiu-Jitsu, which I just started doing. So I know as much as one class, but I'm ready.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Did you get brutally injured in the first class? Because.

• 2:26:47Guillermo Rauch?

  No, I brutally overcame because I boxed for many years. So I had some baseline fighting me.

• 2:26:54Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I, I got into Jiu-Jitsu briefly and it's like so, it's incredible workout. It's so fun. Uh, it's like perfectly competitive and skill-based. You know, you can like clearly level up. And then I just saw that like every guy in the gym that was over 40 that had been doing it for like 20 years would just be like hobbling in, you know, all these different injuries. And I got, I got, I got a little scared around, you know, destroying all of my joints, but, um, but I guess if you're in the right gym, uh, it's probably better for longevity.

• 2:27:27Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah, we're working down the tech CEO checklist, you know?

• 2:27:30John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:27:30Guillermo Rauch?

  AI, Jiu Jitsu, more to come.

• 2:27:34John Coogan?

  Um, well, we missed you a week ago. We've been bopping around, but uh, give us the latest news in Versell world. Uh, what's the latest on your side?

• 2:27:43Guillermo Rauch?

  Well, I mean, the big one is our funding at 9.3 billion dollar valuation. Uh, 300.

• 2:27:51Guillermo Rauch?

  It's awesome.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:27:55Guillermo Rauch?

  Insane.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  To miss a gong.

• 2:27:56Guillermo Rauch?

  Insane.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Um. Oh, yes.

• 2:27:59Guillermo Rauch?

  300 million in primary, 300 million secondary led by.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  I don't know if you can hear, but this is a good omen. The gong is still ringing.

• 2:28:05Guillermo Rauch?

  Still ringing.

• 2:28:06John Coogan?

  Still ringing a little bit.

• 2:28:07Guillermo Rauch?

  Didn't ever stop.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  It never stopped.

• 2:28:09Guillermo Rauch?

  It might never stop.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you might be back here with the series G before it stops ringing, hopefully. Uh, what's the uh, what, what, what do you, what, what do you actually capital constrained on? Is it just hire more people, build a better product? Are you actually like a, a big consumer of AI data factories, token factories? Are you spending a lot on inference right now?

• 2:28:30Guillermo Rauch?

  Well, clearly not too capital constrained because half of it was secondary.

• 2:28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:34Guillermo Rauch?

  So chapter one of Versell was providing the developer experience to developers to build pages.

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:40Guillermo Rauch?

  I mean, I'm, I'm being overly simplistic, right? But the world is going from pages to agents.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:46Guillermo Rauch?

  So it's not that the web services of the internet are going to be irrelevant. But if you think about the cloud, the cloud was born with Amazon Web Services. The next chapter of the internet is going to be AI services. So Versell is building the AI cloud. And we felt, and obviously investors felt this way too, that this is worth, you know, a very, very big bet. Because every type of software will become AI native software. And the new primitive of the cloud will be the agent. And, and this requires new services. It requires new frameworks, something that developer, developers and investors are really excited about is our AI SDK. You can think of a, of it as the react of AI.

• 2:29:30Guillermo Rauch?

  So the most popular package for developers to use to build AI agents. And it's growing basically vertically, like never, like something we've never seen before at Versell. And we've been doing open source for a long time.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  Is that driven by new, new ideas, new companies, startups that are coming up? And instead of spinning up just a website or a web app, they're spinning up an actual agent that then they get new customers for? Is that mostly net new customers?

• 2:29:59Guillermo Rauch?

  It's a lot of net new, but also I think a lot of enterprises are gonna basically leapfrog their classic digital transformation journey and just go to agents directly. And what this is resulting in is a whole new set of demands for the cloud that were never there before. Software is running for a lot longer, which is fascinating from a compute standpoint. Obviously, investors are excited about GPU compute, but now we're seeing all of these new types of software that are just running, like thinking and, and producing, obviously demanding tokens, but running for minutes, hours, days. We call this workflows. And so we hosted our Versale Ship AI conference the other day, and we basically came with an actual definition of what an agent is.

• 2:30:43Guillermo Rauch?

  And agents basically remind us a lot of the old types of software that people were excited about maybe decades ago, which is like this workflows and business processes that, you know, look like nodes connected in a graph and have all of these steps. It turns out that kind of software, which we'll now call agent, is actually kind of hard for developers to write, especially the ones that were, you know, used to creating like the typical SaaS type of software. So Versale is sort of becoming the default place where this new kind of agentic workflow is born.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about hardware or your own cloud, your own physical infrastructure? It feels like that was crazy to talk about five years ago, but now there's, there are NeoClouds. I know, I know people who have just stood up, whole data centers. And so if you came to me and said, yeah, as part of this fundraising round, we're also gonna spin up a couple of different data centers and we're gonna be on our own infrastructure in a few years, I'd be like, yeah, that doesn't sound crazy to me at all. But how are you thinking about it?

• 2:31:40Guillermo Rauch?

  Well, Vercel is in this incredibly unique position that developers come to us because of the developer experience.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:31:46Guillermo Rauch?

  We can actually automatically make the best infrastructure decisions on their behalf.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:50Guillermo Rauch?

  And today, that's sitting on top of the hyperskaters.

• 2:31:52John Coogan?

  So you want to be multi-cloud.

• 2:31:53Guillermo Rauch?

  Flexibility.

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:55Guillermo Rauch?

  So for example, a couple of years ago, you could have made the wrong hardware decision. Because you were gonna say, well, all my CPU workloads are gonna be like short burst.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:32:02Guillermo Rauch?

  Really immediate, CPU-bound, rendering-based. Well, it turns out that a lot of the new workloads are agents. They're spending a lot of time thinking. So you need new kinds of computing, new kinds of software infrastructure to support these workloads. And I believe that the hyperskater clouds still give us the most flexibility there. Also, keep in mind that a lot of these agents need to be in close proximity to the enterprise data.

• 2:32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:25Guillermo Rauch?

  So yeah, the Neo clouds are exciting, but you kind of want to be in the cloud.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:30Guillermo Rauch?

  From a security perspective, regulatory, and also latency. I do think there is something to the cloud that is a bit of a rich get richer scenario when it comes to latency. Because you need to fetch data, you need to do RAG, you need to get actual context into the models.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:46Guillermo Rauch?

  And every millisecond of latency that you waste there is actually very, very costly. So on one hand, you know, proximity to the cloud and being in the cloud gives us a great advantage. On the other hand, because we offer services like our AI gateway, we also make them compete frantically. So at Next.jsConf, we announced the Next.js evals, which is basically what I call sort of the like oracle of truth of how good your model is at coding real-world workloads with things like Next.js.

• 2:33:16John Coogan?

  Here's a...

• 2:33:16Guillermo Rauch?

  And so...

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry.

• 2:33:18Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, our developers really benefit from the fact that we let them choose.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:23Guillermo Rauch?

  They're not bound to a specific model.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about integrations with consumer AI apps? I feel like there's a world where I go to Gemini or I go to ChatGPT and I am iterating through a prompt and kind of laying out the... Let's say I want to make a landing page for a new start.

• 2:33:44Guillermo Rauch?

  Yes.

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  And I've kind of figured out the value props and the customer testimonials and how I'm gonna... Wireframe everything out and then

• 2:33:52Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:52John Coogan?

  I I want to actually deploy it right now. I don't think I can do that within any of the consumer grade chat apps. Um, they're going to kick me over and say, hey, go set up this account. But there's a world where that doesn't need to happen. Um, but it's a delicate balance because you don't want them to be like now we're on top of you and fully. And so how are you thinking about like, uh, onboarding like almost like prosumer creators?

• 2:34:19Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah. So on my blog, I drew this parallels between the cloud one point O and the AI cloud.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:25Guillermo Rauch?

  And so you have, you know, the, the child poster child of, of frameworks was react and next year as now it's going to be the A I S E K.

• 2:34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33Guillermo Rauch?

  Uh, before we had CDN for delivering pages and images. Now we have the CDN of tokens, the AI gateway. And one of the other big transitions that's going to happen is protocol. So we were going from HDB to things like MCB. MCB is really exciting because if you look at how chat GPT is now allowing you to embed apps inside of chat GPT that also just came out a couple of weeks ago. I went to next year as I was able to deploy Doom inside of chat GPT. Why? Because we have an MCB integration that allows our customers to embed themselves inside of chat GPT. This is really exciting. If this takes off, this is the world that you just described.

• 2:35:12John Coogan?

  But right, right now, is there? Do you have, does this open air have like a review process for that? Uh, because I haven't just like run into the, I, I do run into those like hydrated UI elements every once in a while. I'm asking for like movie reviews. It'll show me some pictures or like links taken. But it's all kind of like pre baked UI.

• 2:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you need to be working on creating your own Studio Ghibli moment around that.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, this feels really, really big.

• 2:35:34Jordi Hays?

  I feel like it's ripe for it.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  Uh, so yeah, yeah. Tell me more about like how this actually rolls out.

• 2:35:39Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah. So on a vertical level is MCB. So as long as you have something like Vercel, you deploy your thing, it can speak MCB. You're embedded into chat GPT. I deploy my app in developer mode. Which means like the lady will basically embed everything.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:51Guillermo Rauch?

  It's going to be a little bit like an Apple App Store where you're going to have to get approved. But it's, it seems like, you know, that, that their guidelines are pretty open. So I think a lot of it will fly. And to your point, this allows ejection points from chat GPT into other kinds of platforms.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36:07Guillermo Rauch?

  So you could imagine one where if you start up cooking up an idea, it recommends the zero. Because Versal registered an application with them and this is the right application for prototyping and vibe coding. In fact, the other day, while I was in developer mode, it started recommending things to me. So I guess some of the early adopters of their apps platform. I believe MCP will continue to enable this sort of like agent to agent communication. This is already very big when you're coding with agents because in order to, you know, for example, a good example would be Figma converted to V zero, so you can convert from Figma to Next.js app. That's going to speak the MCP protocol.

• 2:36:43Brendan Foody?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:44Guillermo Rauch?

  So I think for, as far as the AI cloud goes, enterprises will be wrestling with these questions, right? Like the most common question I get is, how do I not get this intermediated by Google AI overviews, right? Which is sort of summarizing all of the results of the search pages and how do I not get this intermediated by ChatGPT? And I think there are really good answers.

• 2:37:03Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about M and A? You don't have to talk about M and A interest in Versal because I'm sure you're turning down stuff all the time, but how are you thinking about, you know, M and A in terms of expanding and building on the existing platform?

• 2:37:20Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah, there were so many investments being put into the AI categories, right? And vertical agents, coding agents, IDEs, things like this. I think, you know, there's going to be more consolidation in the coming months and years. There's like 10, 20 different options for anything you can conceive AI related, AI for QA, AI for testing, AI for this. So I think creates a lot of opportunities for Versal, which is a very broad platform with lots of users to sort of make some strategic M and A. But I'm even more excited about our marketplace. So we announced at Versal Ship AI, our marketplace for one click install of AI agents and AI infrastructure services.

• 2:38:01Guillermo Rauch?

  So I mentioned, if you're going to sit down and create your own agent, it's very likely you're going to need some services that Versal doesn't offer. One example is browsers on demand. I think I've had a couple browser CEOs on the show. And so Versal doesn't offer browsers as a service built in, but now we offer it one click through the marketplace.

• 2:38:21Brendan Foody?

  Sure.

• 2:38:21Guillermo Rauch?

  Another example is security audits that AI agents can help with. One click install services like Corridor. Because Versal contains the deployment URL. And we have access to the code and we have access to the production data. It gives us a very special place so that we can grow a massive ecosystem of agents that automate the cloud. We're going to create some of those agents. We might acquire a few, but overall, I'm very excited about becoming sort of the nexus where all of the agents are collaborating together. So they take the burden off of maintaining the cloud. We also, the outage the other day with US East One, the internet melted down. You know, all of those pagers or mattresses were waking up people.

• 2:39:04Guillermo Rauch?

  Our vision for the future of the cloud is that they wake up agents. The agent has the first pass of like, oh my God, anomaly alert, 500 errors. All right, let's have the Versal agent do the first pass. But this is also true for, you know, you vibe coded something and you want a security engineer to review it for you. Well, now that's an agent you can one click install through the Versal agent marketplace, which is very, very exciting.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, what an interesting place to be. You can, you have so many different pieces of the business. I imagine that a lot of them are, you know, growing business lines. I can imagine the Series F process was a lot of fun.

• 2:39:44Guillermo Rauch?

  Yep.

• 2:39:45John Coogan?

  Given, given all the booms. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:39:47Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great. Great to get the update.

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for hopping on. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, Gerra.

• 2:39:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:39:53Guillermo Rauch?

  See you.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  Bye. He mentioned eight sleep. Let's talk about our sleep scores. How'd you sleep?

• 2:40:00Jordi Hays?

  We need to, we need to talk to Mateo and I don't want this, I don't want the John handicap.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  You have, you have a conspiracy theory that like, for some reason it just gives me better results. I got a 98 last night. Let's go. Seven hours, 44 minutes.

• 2:40:17Jordi Hays?

  I got a 78.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Our next guest, Brendan from Merckor, is in the restream waiting room. Now he's in the TVP and Ultra. Welcome to the stream, Brendan. Congratulations.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Ten billion dollar man.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Called his shot. He's the biggest shot caller in all of Silicon Valley.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta get, we gotta get some new shots.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  This is like, yeah, I was telling him this. I was like, you need to call the shot. You're holding up the global economy within five years. Every, every company is dependent on you. Like, there's no, there's no shot this man won't call. But give us the news. Break down exactly what happened. Tell us what is new today.

• 2:40:52Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, I mean, the company's been growing like crazy. We're now paying out over one and a half million dollars a day to experts in our marketplace.

• 2:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for that.

• 2:41:05Brendan Foody?

  There we go.

• 2:41:05Jordi Hays?

  And what else?

• 2:41:07Brendan Foody?

  And we've raised our Series C of $350 million at a $10 billion value.

• 2:41:15Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 2:41:17John Coogan?

  $10 billion value.

• 2:41:18Brendan Foody?

  Extremely excited, yeah.

• 2:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Not bad for your first startup.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  The gong is really going. Something's up with the gong these days. I don't know if you can hear it, but it's like, it's ringing.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's get right in. You had a, I feel like I remember you had a blog, was it blog post Friday? Do I have that right?

• 2:41:36John Coogan?

  Teaser?

• 2:41:36Jordi Hays?

  Is it worth getting into that?

• 2:41:38Brendan Foody?

  About the big things.

• 2:41:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the big things. Let's talk about the big things.

• 2:41:42Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, it's really starting with the question of what are the things that we know are going to be the same about our business over the next 10 years? And that there's a lot that's going to change over time, but we know that the three main areas that our customers will always want more improvement and progress are in more candidates on our platform, better matching and faster delivery of all the candidates that we're hiring for them to improve frontier models. And so those are really how we-

• 2:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Bezos-inspired?

• 2:42:11Brendan Foody?

  It is, exactly, yeah. Similar to how Amazon said that their three big things were more products, better prices, faster delivery. For us, it's a little bit different because no two people are the same, but inspired by it very significantly.

• 2:42:25Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Let's go, let's go through them, I think. And then I guess like, want to understand, like, want to get kind of more into the, into the future too. I think, I think people, some people would have a sense that like, there could just be this, you know, incredible demand over the next five years. And then, you know, does that demand evolve, evaporate? But I want to, I want to hear how, how you view it, maybe more specifically.

• 2:42:56Brendan Foody?

  Totally. What we've been seeing is that there is an enormous trend towards humans training agents how to automate redundant workflows that they would do in their jobs, because it's structurally more efficient to do so. Instead of a customer support representative redundantly responding to hundreds of tickets, they create an eval to train an agent one time how to do that thing. Instead of a banker redundantly analyzing data rooms, they create an eval to train an agent how to do that thing. And we believe that a huge portion of the broader knowledge work in the economy is going to converge on training agents how to do these activities. And our marketplace is really at that frontier of creating this new job category in training agents.

• 2:43:39John Coogan?

  How does, uh, how does this look long term if one of the big AI platforms becomes really, really dominant, understands what everyone does and can just ask me to do a task within the app? Like, is there any sort of like disintermediation risk? Or do you think that what you're building with Merkle is special enough that even if, you know, the OpenAI ChatGPT app can detect that, oh, well, you've talked to me enough. I know you're an investment banker. I'd love to do an RL environment with you. Here's an offer directly to come and do some training data. Uh, like, how are you thinking about counter positioning against that risk? Or is that just like not a thing at all?

• 2:44:23Brendan Foody?

  Well, one of the most important things in building out these environments to train agents is that they need to be very consistently reliable in that you need to put a lot of work into them. And if there's noise and that there's some mistakes or issues, then it's very difficult for a model to learn from. And so as a result, it's really difficult to ask your users to say, put in 10 hours to helping to see if we made a mistake in preparing this financial model for you. And those users might flag a mistake, but that's, you know, incorrect half the time. And so what they instead need to do is build out armies of experts that are able to diligently analyze model performance, go through strict

• 2:45:05Brendan Foody?

  review processes to ensure consistency, and build these RL environments to adopt models for any specific use case.

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  So you obviously have massive diversity on the talent side. But how do you think about customer concentration over the next few years? Do you think that like there are clearly power law winners in AI? There are trillion dollar labs, you know, Google and OpenAI is half a trillion dollars. Like there's huge winners and then there's a ton of startups. How do you see the shape of your business? Do you think you'll have a lot of medium sized companies or just tons and tons of small companies? And every individual company will need to come to you for talent to optimize whatever little thing they're doing? Or will you be doing more work with the really, really big labs? How do you think that all shakes out?

• 2:45:56Brendan Foody?

  I think it'll be some combination. Definitely near term, it looks similar to Nvidia insofar as working with a dozen of the hyperscalers that are investing huge amounts in this. But over time, what we're seeing is that every enterprise wants to train agents to customize their specific workflows. And we have the expertise to help them do that in building out all of the eval sets and environments that correspond to every workflow in their businesses that they want to automate.

• 2:46:24Jordi Hays?

  What any, I had an eye opening experience yesterday. I have a friend who's a lawyer and about a year ago, I started, I started asking him like, what kind of AI tools they're using and he was like broadly like not impressed. He was like, we're like signing up for them. They're not get, we're not getting a lot of value, but it's interesting. I'm keeping an eye on it kind of thing. And then yesterday he said to me, I've seen the future. Harvey isn't perfect, but has better attention to detail and is more thoughtful than almost any junior person at our firm. I've watched it do 100K of associate level work in 10 minutes. And that felt like just extremely notable to me to just see how hard he like 180 on that is like,

• 2:47:09Jordi Hays?

  how like, what, what is the structure? And you can talk at a high level and not give away specifics, but like, how much investment is like going into just that category alone? From, from, from your view?

• 2:47:23Brendan Foody?

  I mean, we're seeing a huge amount of investment in law. Certainly, I would say the top categories are probably software engineering, then finance, then law, maybe close between medicine and law. But I think that the models are very quickly going to be able to do even partner level work at a lot of these firms. And so that transformation and how it impacts businesses and the economy is going to be really profound. And obviously, all of the data and evals to enable that is one of the primary blockers to getting there.

• 2:47:58John Coogan?

  We have a shout out to one of your employees, Varat Talwar. So just wanted to say congratulations to him.

• 2:48:03Jordi Hays?

  How do you do, Varat?

• 2:48:04John Coogan?

  Of the team.

• 2:48:05Jordi Hays?

  The chat, the chat's a fan.

• 2:48:07John Coogan?

  The chat is just shouting him out. Obviously, it's a big milestone. So we want to celebrate everyone on the team.

• 2:48:12Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, how in conversations for this last round, obviously, the business has so much momentum. I'm sure people are just like, take my money at all costs, you know, whatever. I just take it. I'll send the money and we'll figure out the docs later. But how big can Merckor get? Like, what is like, if somebody asks like, okay, if everything goes right, what does this business look like? And does it, does it look like, you know, you're paying out on the levels of like an ADP, right? Is our, do you become like one of the largest pseudo employers in history? Like, what's like the, what's the craziest outcome?

• 2:48:55Brendan Foody?

  The way I think about it is that right now, businesses are spending about $40 trillion a year on knowledge work, all for people doing these largely monotonous things that have similarities from task to task. But all of that is going to be transformed to training agents to automate workflows. Instead of doing it ourselves, we'll have agents do those things. And Merckor is building the infrastructure to enable humans to engage with models, to teach them to fit into the AI economy. And I think there's an opportunity worth tens of trillions of dollars a year to help that transformation happen over the coming decade. And so we're only 1% of the way there of that, and very exciting for everything to come.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  Are you a foodie? We have another question from the chat. Do you like fine cuisine?

• 2:49:45Brendan Foody?

  I am a foodie.

• 2:49:47John Coogan?

  You are a foodie.

• 2:49:49Brendan Foody?

  Very fortunate coincidence, yeah.

• 2:49:51John Coogan?

  That's good nominative determinism. We're very happy to hear that. Last question, when IPO?

• 2:49:58Brendan Foody?

  We don't have a specific date in mind yet, potentially on the horizon, but we'll be sure to keep you guys updated.

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, let's do an air horn for potentially on the horizon.

• 2:50:09John Coogan?

  On the horizon. No.

• 2:50:11Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's probably gonna write an article on that, by the way, so I'm sorry.

• 2:50:14John Coogan?

  This is a new thing. I see it all the time. Every time they interview Palmer Lucky at Bloomberg, they ask him, like, when are you IPO-ing? And I'm like, you know that he would tell you if he had news there. Like, why are you even asking? But I guess it's just fun to ask, and then in a couple of years, we can look back.

• 2:50:29Jordi Hays?

  Potentially on the horizon is much different than we have no plans, though.

• 2:50:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you could have said absolutely not. I would never, I will never take this company public in my life. You didn't say that, so at least we got something. So, thank you. Anyway, massive congratulations on all the progress. Really, really remarkable growth. I mean, what a fun time, what a fun business, and congratulations to everyone on the team. I mean, absolute rocket ships.

• 2:50:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

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

• 2:50:59Jordi Hays?

  Get back to the timeline a little bit.

• 2:51:01John Coogan?

  Let's get back to public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Yes, let's go back to the timeline.

• 2:51:12Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people have been focused on this, this chart overlaying stock market performance over job openings and how it basically diverges.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  At the introduction of ChatGPT.

• 2:51:25Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 2:51:26John Coogan?

  That's where people like.

• 2:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Which is also the introduction of high rates.

• 2:51:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:51:32Jordi Hays?

  And I think.

• 2:51:33John Coogan?

  I think we need to put Tyler on this. Is this a chart crime, Tyler? Do you think that there's some funny business going on? This is a pretty simple, just, I don't think that, I don't think that it's literally like the, the lines are wrong.

• 2:51:44Jordi Hays?

  Mark, uh, uh, Mark at A16Z broke this down. He said, this is particularly trippy chart crime. The breakpoint was exactly when the COVID stimmy bubble pop and the Fed hiked interest rates to the moon. He says, the great forgetting that COVID ever happened is wild. I can't tell if it's adaptive or suicidal or both. Uh, but yeah, I think everyone wants to, uh, memory, memory hole this one.

• 2:52:10John Coogan?

  And, and, and so what, what is exactly on this chart? I, I don't even have it pulled up. It's, it's a number of jobs versus financial performance or something like that. Uh, so Gavin Baker here says, really interesting chart from Derek Thompson surfaced it, former guest on the show. Stock market and job openings were highly correlated for decades. No longer. Stock market is up 75% and job openings are down 33%. Would think at least partially due to AI. Chamath Polihopatia chimes in and says, it could also be that the plurality of the stock market is now highly concentrated across seven to eight companies who on a relative basis just don't employ a lot of people. So the stock market goes up, won't pull up employment along with it.

• 2:52:53Jordi Hays?

  I still think what has been happening to date is CEOs are desperate for every possible AI narrative. And if they need to do layoffs because they got bloated during COVID.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:07Jordi Hays?

  They will say that we're getting efficiency out of AI and that's a much better reason than like we over hired.

• 2:53:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, remember Microsoft has done a number of different, you know, layoffs.

• 2:53:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:18Jordi Hays?

  This year, there's a layoff that got announced today.

• 2:53:20John Coogan?

  Well, well, we should get Derek Thompson back on the show. We should also get a couple other economists, maybe Tyler.

• 2:53:26Jordi Hays?

  Amazon is targeting as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning tomorrow. So probably not a fun, not a fun, uh, day over at Amazon HQ.

• 2:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Some more positive news. Timothy Mellon, a banking heir, is said to be the anonymous donor. Not so anonymous now, I guess, according to The Times, who gave 130 million to the US government to help pay troops during the shutdown. This guy doesn't, according to Will Monitis, worth 14 billion personally guaranteed payroll for the armed services, and the only and most recent photo of him is from 1981. I mean, this photo looks so cool that I kind of understand how he's like, alright, that's it?

• 2:54:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:10Jordi Hays?

  I took the only photo I need for life?

• 2:54:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:13Jordi Hays?

  I won't do any photos because this looks, I mean, the suit, the tie-

• 2:54:17John Coogan?

  When you see the photo-

• 2:54:18Jordi Hays?

  With the train in the background?

• 2:54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:20Jordi Hays?

  You know, with the, with the hair, the stare, I mean, yeah, he, he just, he one-shotted photography.

• 2:54:26John Coogan?

  He did. It's remarkable because when you look at the photo and then you hear the headline, it's like, meet the man who backstopped the, and paid for the army's payroll in a time of crisis with his fortune. You're like, oh yeah, like, this guy was probably crucial in World War II, based on the image. And you're like, no, this happened like last week. He's talking about the 2025 government shutdown. That is what they're talking about, which, and I just keep, I just, every time I see this image, I think like, oh, this is a-

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Mike in the chat is asking, 130 million is what percentage of monthly payroll?

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have no idea. Well, maybe he levered it up.

• 2:55:03Jordi Hays?

  Fiscal year 2024 military personnel category of the DOD budget, which covers pay and retirement benefits, was about 192 billion.

• 2:55:14John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:55:14Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, yeah, I don't think the 130 million is gonna, it's a good start.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  We've been on gambling this entire show, but I'm just thinking about like, what if instead of government bonds, where you earn like 4%, the government just released, you know, one massive lottery ticket or something? Would be, uh, it, it costs a billion dollars, but there's a 1% chance that it pays out a hundred billion dollars. And if it does, then, then the US government is indebted to you for like hundreds of years. But if it doesn't, if it doesn't pay out, then the US just gets a hundred million dollars.

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  By 2024 math, I think you basically need like seven-ish billion dollars every two weeks to keep the payroll going.

• 2:55:58John Coogan?

  So what does 130 million do? It's like a day?

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Mike, Mike did some math.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  8.8 billion per month.

• 2:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Eighty million. So, uh, I guess, I mean, it's a good start.

• 2:56:09John Coogan?

  I mean, there are some, there are some divisions of the government that have basically savings that they can kind of tap into. And then also, there's a big question about how much are you actually going to, like, like, do you need to, do you need to bring everyone back on payroll? Or can you get by with 10% or 20%? And maybe this is something that he's backstopping and saying, hey, let's pay 20% of people instead of 10% of people. What does Polymarket say about the government shutdown? Let's pull that up. Government shutdown. Will the government shutdown

• 2:56:46John Coogan?

  end by, what is the most likely, November 30th? By December 31st, it's a 93% chance.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  That's good.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  November 15th is like the 50/50 mark, basically. So, expect another two weeks, maybe another three weeks, according to Polymarket. So, there's your, there's your Polymarket update.

• 2:57:06Jordi Hays?

  People are still talking about double speed. The, lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI, ensuring they look as human as possible. Never pay a human again. Control is all you need. Jeremiah Johnson says, every startup is like, we found a cool way to monetize undermining the social contract with 30,000 likes.

• 2:57:30John Coogan?

  This is, I mean, we follow, we follow this person or something like that. This person's like, a liberal, they should be pro-tech, and they're, it's not like this person is like, by default, some like, crazy anti-tech person. And so-

• 2:57:47Jordi Hays?

  You mean by-

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  Jeremiah Johnson. Like Jeremiah Johnson is, is not like some like, tear it all down, anti, anti-business, you know, and, and he's making a good point, getting 30,000 likes. And so, I think this is a harbinger of like, what the shape of the tech lash will look like.

• 2:58:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think in this case, even tech was not excited about this one.

• 2:58:13John Coogan?

  Tech was lashing itself.

• 2:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Self lash.

• 2:58:16John Coogan?

  Self flagellating.

• 2:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Self harm.

• 2:58:18John Coogan?

  Self lash.

• 2:58:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, but tech, tech is saying like, you know, broadly, this doesn't seem like it needs to exist. And probably is a net negative, even if there's some, uh, some, some legitimate use cases.

• 2:58:31John Coogan?

  It's a thing. Anyway, you know what is a casino?

• 2:58:34Jordi Hays?

  Last, last.

• 2:58:34John Coogan?

  Running an out of home campaign with adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of home, out of home advertising. Uh, only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Zoomer, uh, went viral again. This guy, this guy is just harvesting hatred from the entire world at this point. Uh, he said on a few days ago, at this point, I've lost all motivation to post on X. The new algorithm is so demoralizing. I have 30,000 followers and I'm getting 500 views in an hour. I'm done with this place. Well done, Elon Musk. And everyone, uh, and their mother was dunking on him and saying, you just got paid $10,000, uh, a week ago to post a picture of Steve Jobs's daughter. Um, just.

• 2:59:20John Coogan?

  He didn't, he didn't take the photo. It's not like he's a photographer.

• 2:59:24Jordi Hays?

  And this post by ADS, Elon, Elon, I need my dopamine doll, dollery dues. I posted another hot girl. Where's my engagement? Elon, Elon, I'm a content creator. Um, so anyways, not, not a lot of support for, uh, zoomer, but I guess, um, I'm sure he'll be back. I doubt he, I doubt he, uh.

• 2:59:45John Coogan?

  Okay. We need, we need Tyler to give us a review of Chad labs.ai.

• 2:59:51John Coogan?

  Apparently I didn't even see this, but, uh, there's a Y C company that is a brain rot I D E, something like that.

• 2:59:59Jordi Hays?

  No way this is real.

• 3:00:00John Coogan?

  You can, you can.

• 3:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Is this real? Is this actually real?

• 3:00:03John Coogan?

  And a cash back I D E. It seems like a parody.

• 3:00:07Jordi Hays?

  This is for sure. Somebody just making it.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  This seems like a joke, but we need you to get to the bottom of what's actually going on.

• 3:00:15Jordi Hays?

  It's in, I mean, it's a real Y C company.

• 3:00:18John Coogan?

  Yes, but is it a stunt? Or are they actually trying to bring Tinder into your I D E? Which is like.

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I'm on the web, I'm on the website.

• 3:00:29John Coogan?

  Commenting, learn.

• 3:00:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm on the Y Combinator website and Cloud Labs says it's the brain rot I D E. It's a fall 2025 bat.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  Oh, it's Cloud Labs. I thought it was Chad.

• 3:00:38Jordi Hays?

  No, it's Cloud Labs.

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  Founder of Chad I D E here, Cloud Labs dot A I. So it's not Chad Labs, it's Cloud Labs.

• 3:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think this is just called Zoomer, this is Zoomer marketing. They do call it the Chad I D E, the first brain rot I D E. They say sup Giga Chads on, this is on the Y C websites. Sup Giga Chads, we're Richard and Kevin, founders of Cloud Labs. T L D R. As highly requested, we built the Chad I D E. Chad integrates your brain rot vices with your agenda coding workflow. Chad increases productivity and reduces friction of context switching.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:14Jordi Hays?

  So they're reducing.

• 3:01:15John Coogan?

  So Kevin, Kevin is kind of saying like, um, I thought the problem and solution was pretty straightforward. Crying emoji, not sure what people can understand about that. So he's kind of like leaning into this. It feels like this might be rage bait. Uh, the product branding is an epic rage bait.

• 3:01:27Jordi Hays?

  But this is on the Y C website. They have a screenshot of the product where they have Tinder in one panel and then the I D E in the other panel.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  And so this is, this is the modern thesis.

• 3:01:37Jordi Hays?

  They're saying you can shoot state craps.

• 3:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, so you can rage bait your way to actual usage.

• 3:01:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised that Y C is putting this gambling I D E on, on their website, I will say. But maybe they're just.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  Well.

• 3:01:52Jordi Hays?

  Not going to form an opinion.

• 3:01:54John Coogan?

  No, no, I, I think there is a open debate amongst a lot of people, like respectable, respectable venture capitalists around, can you launch with something that's rage baity? And then pivot into something that's serious. Can you build a serious business with a rage baity go to market? And I know you, I know you're against this.

• 3:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Working on, I've been working on my next essay.

• 3:02:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Rage bait marketing is for losers.

• 3:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Which is that I think when you do rage bait marketing, it obviously gets a lot of attention, but it makes it so that you make the entire world prey on your downfall. And I think that that is spiritually a bad strategy. So I'm still working this one out, but I don't, you know, I don't think that, I don't think that rage bait marketing helped Cluely win the enterprise. Right?

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  Yep. But there were a lot of VCs who

• 3:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it worked for students.

• 3:02:52John Coogan?

  And the story's not over, but there were a lot of VCs who invested and said, hey, look, I mean, we talked to Brian Kim from Andreessen on the show about this, like, why'd you do the deal? And he was like, I like that they were able to get a lot of attention, and that gives them an opportunity to deliver a product. That gives them the opportunity to go build something. And he was like, look, like, we don't know if they have necessarily, but at the very least,

• 3:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they were masters of it. They would do the pictures of like, just spent $10,000 on this suit, and you could tell that it was off the rack.

• 3:03:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, tons of stuff. I just,

• 3:03:25Jordi Hays?

  But I just don't think it's a, I don't think it's a good strategy. And I think we're gonna be, that's gonna be proven correct.

• 3:03:32John Coogan?

  I think, I think you're correct in the, in the spirit, in the spiritually risky strategy, because how much better is, is it to just go and, and actually build a beautiful, optimistic brand and pay for some billboard ads, or, you know, even, you know, direct response ads?

• 3:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful thing. You don't even need advertising if your product is, is, you know, advertising is an accelerant.

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  Let's say you do need advertising, because you've built a product, but no one knows about it. And you have two options. One, like the, the dark castle and the bright, you know, the fork in the road meme. One of them is you, you, you rage bait everyone, you make your product annoying, and then everyone will have to check it out, and the product's actually good. Versus, yeah, you have to shell out some cash to run some ads. But you slowly compound, and you slowly grow. And then after a decade, you have a product where everyone's like, wow, that went, that came out of nowhere. Those guys have just been running great ads for years, you know?

• 3:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I just think you're ultimately, chat ID is competing with.

• 3:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, they're competing with serious companies and what kind of like you're you're gonna you're gonna attract unserious developers.

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  This is the lack of this is the lack of the April Fool's Day joke. This company could potentially have just been.

• 3:05:00Jordi Hays?

  This should have been an April Fool's feature.

• 3:05:02John Coogan?

  Or Windsurf's April Fool's joke. And it should have just been maybe, I don't know exactly what it is. We gotta dig in and understand what this is. But there's a whole world where the idea of a of a brain rotty IDE is something like Google does as a side project as a joke, right? Like they used to do stuff like that and some of it like they had a whole, they had a whole, didn't they have a whole feature that was just like talk to your dog or something? I don't know. There's so many, we, there used to be a rich culture of of April Fool's jokes where you could effectively rage bait the the world, but everyone was in on the joke. And now we're in this world of like you, you rage bait everyone.

• 3:05:39Jordi Hays?

  Rage bait is your whole brand strategy and that's where, that's where.

• 3:05:42John Coogan?

  And it's really hard to pivot away from. I don't think anyone's done it successfully.

• 3:05:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:46John Coogan?

  It's very, very hard.

• 3:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, on that note, we have to get on.

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  With Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. And also Wander, find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better play the double kill sound effect for two sponsors. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. Thank you.

• 3:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  To everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone who's listening to the show. We will see you tomorrow, live with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.

• 3:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Cannot wait, cannot wait.

• 3:06:21John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:06:22Jordi Hays?

  See you then.

• 3:06:23John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks.