Elon's Trillion Dollar Pay Package, Breaking Down the State of AI | Katherine Boyle, Mikey Shulman, Immad Akhund, Jordan Castro

(00:17) - Timeline in Turmoil over OpenAI (09:36) - Fannie & Freddie May Buy Tech Stakes (11:27) - The Mansion Section (18:23) - Elon's Trillion Dollar Pay Package (28:06) - Breaking Down the State of AI (55:55) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:11:07) - Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading its American Dynamism fund, discusses the transformative speech by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, which outlines significant reforms in defense acquisitions. These reforms prioritize commercial-first technologies, streamline the procurement process, and encourage competition from startups, aiming to modernize the military and enhance national security. Boyle emphasizes the positive impact these changes will have on Silicon Valley and the broader defense innovation base, marking a pivotal shift in defense technology integration. (01:29:44) - Mikey Shulman, co-founder and CEO of Suno, an AI-driven music creation platform, discusses the company's mission to democratize music production by enabling users to generate songs through text prompts, eliminating the need for traditional instruments or production software. He highlights Suno's evolution from a Discord bot to a web application, emphasizing the shift from a tech-savvy early user base to a broader audience seeking creative entertainment. Shulman also addresses the integration of AI in music, noting that while professionals increasingly adopt Suno to enhance their workflows, the platform primarily serves individuals who love music but lack formal training, fostering a new behavior of accessible music creation. (01:56:49) - Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a fintech company offering banking services tailored for startups, discusses Mercury's recent milestone of achieving three years of profitability, emphasizing the importance of building trust with customers by ensuring financial stability. He highlights the company's proactive measures, such as providing accelerated FDIC insurance to safeguard client deposits, especially in light of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. Additionally, Akhund shares insights into Mercury's strategic use of AI to enhance back-office operations and customer service, underscoring the company's commitment to innovation and efficiency. (02:14:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:36:51) - Jordan Castro is an American novelist and poet known for his works "The Novelist" and "Muscle Man." In the conversation, Castro discusses his novel "Muscle Man," which follows Harold, a discontented literature professor who finds solace in weightlifting, exploring themes of masculinity and academia. He also reflects on his personal experiences with fitness, the impact of physical activity on mental health, and critiques the media's portrayal of masculinity. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, November 7th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Time is money saved, both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp.com, baby.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  The timeline is in turmoil over

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Again.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Sam Altman again. What were we calling it? Backstop Gate? Backstop Gate continues unabated.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  John, the timeline's in turmoil over Sam Altman?

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Oh, every single day this week, every single day this week and last week. It is nonstop OpenAI. What will happen? Is it over? Is it the end of the global economy? Or will we, you know, live to fight another day? The main, the main point of debate is, is over, you know, Sarah Fryer's comments that she used the word backstop. She backtracked on her backstop comment. And just said, I wasn't asking for a backstop of OpenAI equity. I was advocating for this American manufacturing plan. Then Simfor Satoshi is going pretty hard. He says, here's an OpenAI document submitted one week ago

• 1:15John Coogan?

  where they advocate for including data center spend within the American manufacturing umbrella. They specifically advocate for federal loan guarantees and Simfor Satoshi says Sam lied to everyone.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's read the specifics.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yes. The specifics are AI server production and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the AMIC, which is the American Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit, will lower the effective cost of capital, de-risk early investment and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in the United States. Counter the PRC by de-risking US manufacturing expansion. To provide manufacturers with the certainty in capital they need to scale production quickly, the federal government should also deploy grants, cost sharing agreements, loans or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience. Okay, so.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Loan guarantees. So what's happening here is OpenAI, a week ago, and everyone can go and read this letter, which is publicly available on their website, is, was making the recommendation. That the government should effectively treat data centers or AI

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  Or token factories, uh, put them in the manufacturing bucket, which would qualify them for similar incentives that traditional manufacturing, defense tech, etc.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  And I don't have a problem with asking the government for a handout. I think that that's actually like best practice. It's actually in your shareholder's responsibility. Like you have a fiduciary duty to ask the government for as much help as possible. I think that everyone should go to the, go to the government right now. Hey, if you're, if I'm paying 50% tax, how about we take that down to 20%? How about we take it down to 0%? Like you have every incentive to ask your, your person in Congress and your senator, the people in Washington, to do everything they can to support your mission. This has worked out in the past with Elon and Tesla. It didn't work out in the case of Solyndra, but like the game on the field is if there are taxpayer dollars that are moving around the board, you want to get those into

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  And so

• 3:27John Coogan?

  The industries that are aligned with you.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  And so the thing that people are taking issue with

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Is that in the opening of his message yesterday, he said, we do not want, we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  And that seems to conflict with the message, the letter that they wrote a week ago that is still up on their website.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yes. So if it's, if it's, uh, what is it? What loan guarantees to expand

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Noah in the chat. And the X chat is taking the initiative, just sent the admin a safe to sign.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Send uncapped, uncapped note.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  You literally can do this now. There's a sovereign wealth fund. Like, like it sounds crazy, but like they're ripping checks. Like this is the new economy and, uh, you know, you can, uh, you can, you can be upset about it, but you also have to understand like, what is the game on the field? You can always advocate for like, we should change the game. Like, we shouldn't be doing this. Like, I would prefer a more of a free market economy. But in the world where we're not in a free market economy, you want to have your company win, right? That's just rational. That's just actually playing the game on the field. Now, it is weird optics to talk about the game on the field. That's something most people don't like doing. And that's very odd. Because when you say, oh yeah, this is a one hand washes the other

• 4:49John Coogan?

  situation, or, oh yeah, this is a, this is a situation where, you know, a backstop will allow us to be more aggressive. That feels like the banker saying, oh yeah, I knew that the government was going to bail us out in 08, so I was intentionally underwriting loans, that where it was somebody's fifth house and I knew that they couldn't pay it. I wasn't asking about their job. I wasn't asking about their income. I wasn't asking about their assets. And so, they, I, I pushed it way further and I made a lot of money and I got out at the top. That's what's really upsetting to Americans. Because the bailout comes in, the backstop comes in, yes, it makes sense to rationally do the backstop

• 5:28John Coogan?

  in that moment, but if some people get out early and then other people get cooked, that's a really bad optics. That's really, really bad optics.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  And, which is why I kind of expect a lot more of the narrative and to shift towards subsidizing and incentivizing, like bringing new energy online.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  You were talking about that yesterday.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Which directly benefits the labs and, and anybody building a data center. But it also feels very much in America's interests broadly, right? And it benefits, it theoretically would benefit the average American too.

• 6:01John Coogan?

  We were listening to Ben Thompson this morning. It wasn't on Restream, one livestream, 30+ destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. We were listening to the Stratechery RSS feed. Hopefully Ben goes live at some point on Restream. That'd be awesome.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I think the chat has discovered that, yes, this is a turbo puffer. This is a, one of two. I sent the other one to Simon for a turbo puffer. But you can see.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  It looks great, especially with the green background, the color grade. The production team is on point today. Let's, let's hear for the production team. So, so yes, I, I agree with you on the, on the energy front. I think Ben Thompson, his point today-

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  And fabs.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, and fabs too. Yeah, his point today was like, was like, OpenAI needs to be crystal clear about the position that they're in, which is that they are the hottest company in the world. There is unlimited demand for their shares. They could be a public company. They could go raise more private capital. They need to be on the opposite end of the risk curve from the stuff that's like, uh, no one really wants to invest in an American fab that might lose money for a decade. Like, like, there is truly much less appetite for, yeah, let's go and build a nuclear power plant that might take a decade and who knows? Like, uh, when you think about the things that make money in the short term, it's SaaS, right? AI for SaaS. Uh, just go and

• 7:32John Coogan?

  transform the legacy business with some AI sprinkled on top and just start printing money.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what works. You know, people's concern for, uh, government-backed data center lending is that you're lending against chips, which have a really fast depreciation schedule.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we don't know.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  There was some pushback. I, I made the comment, hey, maybe that these things don't depreciate as fast. Uh, there was some, there was some pushback in the comments. Uh, I think everyone kind of agrees that these things depreciate quickly. And so, energy infrastructure is the place.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and if you look at, uh, right now, uh, uh, its core weaves, uh, corporate default swaps are now sitting around 500 basis points, jumped up dramatically. And so, this is a, this is one of the leading NeoClouds.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Five, 500 basis points? Five, 5%?

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  They, they jumped 5%?

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, they jumped from like, I think like two to five.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to find it somewhere in the stack.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, uh, sorry, I don't mean to like, ask particular, uh, stats, but, uh, clearly like people are, are worried about this.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, so, and again, this is for a leading NeoCloud, right? We, we, uh, semi analysis, uh, ClusterMax, uh, the updated version came out yesterday. They're only-

• 8:46John Coogan?

  In the platinum.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  NeoCloud in the platinum, platinum tier. And people are worried about them, right?

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, potentially, you know, having some, uh, bankruptcy risk. And so, if you start doing, you know, basically government guaranteed data center lending.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  You could get in a situation where there's a bunch of new data centers that come online that really don't have a clear pathway to ROI.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  And it just incentivizes the entire stack to just get, you know, really exuberant. Right? And again, going back to Sarah Fryer's interview on Wednesday, she was, she felt the market was not exuberant enough. And I think a lot of people disagree with that.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of, there's been a lot of insanity this year, silliness. Maybe we don't need more, but we will see. The other news that was interesting out of today, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Poulter, says Fannie and Freddie eyeing stakes in tech firms. Bill Poulter, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking at ways to take equity stakes in technology companies. We have some of the biggest technology and public companies offering equity to Fannie and Freddie in exchange for Fannie and Freddie partnering with them in our business. Poulter said Friday during an interview at a housing conference.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  We're looking at taking stakes in companies that are willing to give it to us because of how much power Fannie and Freddie have over the whole ecosystem. So.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. This, this Wall Street Journal event is, just so many articles came out of this. The Wall Street Journal did a fantastic job bringing a ton of people together. This is where that Sarah Fryer quote came from. It's also where the CoreWeave CEO was on stage. You were mentioning CoreWeave earlier. And the CoreWeave CEO, the headline in the Wall Street Journal is, "CoreWeave CEO Plays Down Concerns About AI Spending Bubble." And the quote is from Michael, "If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business." And he went on and said, "If the economy doubles in size, it's not a lot of money to build all those data centers."

• 11:03John Coogan?

  And so there's a lot of folks to, you know, addressing bubble concerns right now. He says, It's very hard for me to worry about a bubble as one of the narratives when you have buyers of infrastructure that are changing the economics of their company, they are building the future. And so if you are, if the products are, you know, effective in growing the economy, then all of the investment is worth it. There's a fascinating mansion story we should get to that's actually related to this.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  So there is a, before we do, let me tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. Did you get a whole new soundboard? What's going on with the soundboard?

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  I did, thank you.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Wait, really? Like, they swapped them all out?

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  Michael.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Do you still have the horse?

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  I still got all the classics.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  You got all the classics.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  But I'm working with some new materials.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  Working with some new materials. I like the sheesh. Can we get the Vine boom on there? Is that on there?

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't know.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Boom, the thud, that's a big one. Anyway, Casa Encantada is a 1930s estate in Los Angeles. It's one of the most important homes in the 20th, of the century. In 2023, it was also briefly the most expensive home for sale in the United States with an ambitious asking price of $250 million.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 12:20John Coogan?

  This is in Bel Air. So it's a Bel Air property. It was sold in the foreclosure auction after the death of its longtime owner, financier Gary Winick. So it's an 8.5 acre property. He bought it in 2000 for $94 million. He bought it in the year 2000.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Do you know who this guy is? Gary Winick.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  He had something to do with the last bub.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  He did have something to do with the last bub. It's one of the craziest stories. So.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Is it a?

• 12:55John Coogan?

  To satisfy the debt, which has now grown blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, so basically, like, it's a 40,000 square foot house, built in the 1930s, counts hotelier Conrad Hilton and Dole Food billionaire David Murdock among its former owners. It's located right next to the Bel Air Country Club golf course. It has a, it's seven bedrooms, has a swimming pool, tennis court. It's awesome. Anyway, Gary is perhaps best known as the founder of Global Crossing.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Which built fiber optic cable, a fiber optic cable network across the world. The company made him a billionaire, but it imploded.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Did they have a little bit of dark, did they have a little bit of dark fiber?

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Little bit of dark fiber. Uh, imploded in the early 2000s under the weight of massive debt. Casa in, uh, in Cantada, Gary's primary home went on the market in June of 2023. Five months before his death, now it's asking 190 million and they kind of move on from there. But, uh,

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Global Crossing was, he was somewhat of an, uh, of a, of a global businessman. He was, uh, the headquarters were in Bermuda. You know this?

• 14:04John Coogan?

  I didn't know that.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  Wonder why? I wonder why?

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Um, I mean, it, it, it might literally because it, it insulates the assets in America. Like, like, like that is one thing that, um, uh, you can do if you don't want, uh, to have to give up your lovely home post bankruptcy. Um, you want to be able to get liquidity before the bubble pops. That's the lesson here. Sell, sell the shares before the top. Uh, buy low, sell high. That's the, that's the phrase that we, that we, uh, live by here. Uh, was there anything else Tyler that came out of your deep research report on Gary Winnick? Did you?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, so let's see.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  How do you tell?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  He also started, um, Pacific Capital Group in 1985.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  That was kind of the precursor.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  So he was set up to, to actually marshal all the debt to do the big.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, he had been a, he had been a global businessman for a while before.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for global businessmen.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Let's give it up.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, what?

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're, we're hyper, hyper local businessmen. We, we like to do our business right here in the Ultra Dome, but.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  We do.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  Got to give it up for them.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Also in the mansion section, which we should continue on. Uh, but first let me tell you about cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Uh, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Uh, you have a new neighbor, Jordy. You have a new neighbor. So Tom Petty apparently lived in your neighborhood in Malibu, California. Uh, the late free fallen rocker had a personal music studio.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Some deep lore.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Please.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  I saw Tom Petty. I believe it was the first ever. Uh, who headlined the first ever Outside Lands? Was it the first or second?

• 15:52John Coogan?

  He was living in Malibu in a 11.2 million dollar house, 8,744 square feet, seven bedrooms, has a music studio. Um, the buyer is Steven Slade Tien, a psychoanalyst and author. According to people with knowledge of the deal, Tien didn't respond for a request for comment. I wonder if he, if he'd wanna, you know, get beers sometime, hang out, maybe go surfing, go for a walk on the beach. We should reach out to him for comment on-

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, uh, the, I was at the first ever Outside Lands.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Really? Uh- How old are you? I thought, I thought you were-

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was my, basically the first ever, like, con- major concert experience.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  I didn't realize, yeah, that's-

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, Tom Petty headlined-

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, on Saturday, this was in August of 2008. And that was my first time smelling cannabis. And I kept, I was there with my, my, uh, my friend and his parents, and I kept asking, like, his friend's parents, like, "What is that stinky smell?"

• 16:58John Coogan?

  It's so stinky.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Every, we can't, we can't get away from it.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, very, very memorable.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Very memorable. That's amazing. Uh, do you know where this is? Uh, 2.6 acres above Escondido Beach, is that close to you?

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, it's, it's a few minutes away, but, um-

• 17:16John Coogan?

  It's a gated property-

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Escondido Beach is the most underrated beach in Malibu.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  It was Petty's home for decades before his death in 2017. Lead singer of the Heartbreakers purchased the property for about 3.75 million in 1998. Uh, Petty turned his guesthouse into his personal music studio with soundproof rooms for recording music. And, uh, said Levi Freeman, who's putting up, there's a one-bedroom guest, guest suite, seems like a very nice store. He was from Florida, he shunned the spotlight offstage. He's a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, best known for songs like "American Girl" and "I Won't Back Down." Um, what a, what a lovely little house. Well, uh, that's always fun. Anyway, we should move on to our, uh, top story. Should we, should we, do you wanna go through the Elon, the Elon pay package thing a little bit?

• 18:04John Coogan?

  I had two questions for you on that, and then we can go into our Mag 7 review. Is that, is that sounding good?

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's just, let's do it.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Okay, first, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Think helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  I really enjoy this graphic package we got. This is great. So Elon's trillion dollar pay package is done. It's signed. It's approved. I'm sure it will be contested in the courts. It's always contested in the courts, but the Wall Street Journal has a very nice little breakdown of how it works. They have a nice little infographic here I can share and it kind of shows.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  This is what technology podcasting is all about. Pull that up. Pull that up. Pull that newspaper.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. So basically Elon could get one trillion in Tesla stock if he hits all these different tranches. And so it's actually not that many shares. So he's worth half a trillion now, but he also owns 414 million Tesla shares outright. Got another award in 2018 of 300 million shares and this next award is 424 million across 12 tranches. So it's not like they're giving him twice as much as he already has. They're just kind of giving him a little like, like basically what he already had.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  They're giving him the same amount again. And there's a bunch of things that he has to do. He has to get the market cap really, really high. And then there's also these like qualitative operational goals, or I guess they're quantitative, but 50 billion in EBITDA, 20 million cars delivered, 1 million robots sold, 1 million robot taxis in operation, 10 million full self-driving subscription. Now, some of those are obviously more gamable than others. What's the definition of a robot? If he comes out with a really cheap robot and he sells a bunch of those because it's more of a toy, does that really fulfill the goal? Or like, what's the, what's the, you know, million robot taxis in operation? What's the definition of a robot?

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Qualifies. Is it just a Tesla that is enabled?

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yep. And I turn on FSD and my friend rides in it for one.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Is there anything for actual rides?

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Uh, there's, there's 10 million full self-driving subscriptions.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  And so some of these are more gameable than others, but the market cap really isn't.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  How many full self, self-driving subscriptions are there today?

• 20:27John Coogan?

  I saw, I, I looked that up. It's somewhere between like one and three million right now. So he has to, he definitely has to like triple the size at least. Um, Robo-Taxis obviously goes from like zero to one million because there's barely any on the, on the road. He hasn't sold any robots, so a million would be entirely new robots. Uh, he's obviously delivering a lot of cars. And on the EBITDA front, 50 billion in EBITDA. Company did like 13 last year, so that's, that's a huge increase in EBITDA. I mean, 50 billion in EBITDA is a lot of money, but he's, you know, it's not, it's not 20x where he is right now. And neither is the market cap. Like, he's, he only has to take the market cap to 8.5 trillion and Tesla's already worth a trillion. So, um, it's, it's, it's within, you know, striking distance. Uh, the market, the market cap is now around 1.5 trillion, actually.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  So, uh, my two questions, uh, were one, uh, like it's going to be weird to live in the world of the trillionaire. Like, but we are getting close. Like, that's going to happen, not just within our lifetime, like definitely within the next decade. This sets him up to be the first one, but it's going to happen. Um, and I, I wonder how that's going to reshape our, our culture. Like the world in America, because, um, when I had this, I had this, um, I had this realization that when billionaires became so prevalent and prominent, there was a lot of heat that was taken off the millionaire. Like, if you're just like a guy, yeah, I have an H back business.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Heat shield.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, yeah, I'm a millionaire. I have a boat. I go to Bass Pro Shops, but like, I'm not getting protested. Because I have a million dollars in my house and boat and.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  And isn't it like one out of 10 Americans is a?

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. So the millionaire became more accessible and the billionaire became the thing that the society scapegoats for all the problems.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, approximately 9.4 to 9.5% of American adults are millionaires.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, and.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  But my question was, what do you like, like, what happens to the billionaire when trillionaires come in? Because, you know, like Bernie Sanders and the whole, there's a whole crew that say like billionaire shouldn't exist, every billionaire is a policy failure. Well, like, what happens when you have to say like, well, like trillionaires are the real policy failure, but billionaires are also the policies failure and millionaires, we're like, kind of okay with, but it's not great. It's like, it becomes much more complicated. But at the same time, it definitely like, if Elon is the only trillionaire, it's gonna be really, really easy to target him and be like, he's bad, he's a trillionaire.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  Can he get anymore targeted?

• 22:53John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah, maybe he's maxed it out already. Uh, but I thought that was interesting. And then the flip side was, what does this mean for other companies? Uh, what does it mean for Sam Altman at OpenAI? Can he run a similar playbook? It's clear that he had a ton of soft power during the OpenAI coup. Could he go to the OpenAI for-profit board and say, hey, if OpenAI IPOs at 2 trillion, I want 20%? If OpenAI moons to 10 trillion, I want 50%? Like, how extreme can Sam get? We, we know that Sam runs a bit of an Elon playbook. They were in business together, they co-founded OpenAI together. So clearly they learn from each other.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Um, I wonder what, what Sam Altman can do similarly. And then I also wonder what, what will happen at the garden variety unicorn? If you're just the CEO of a $5 billion company and you're just kind of hanging out there and you say like, yeah, I, I had 30% of the company when I started, I've been diluted down to five or 10, uh, but I like this company and I want to get it up. Like, what if, what if I say, hey, could, could, could I go to the board and say, okay, we're at 5 billion now, if I get us to 50, will you double my equity position? And how would shareholders treat that? How would Sequoia treat that, or Founders Fund, or Kleiner, or A16Z?

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Like, how would the growth stage venture companies, the, the venture capital firms feel about that? So I don't know, any reactions to that stuff?

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a sentiment, like, there's, you know, any, any venture-backed founder is like, gonna be hyper-conscious of dilution, right? There's a sense that it's like one way.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Right? It just goes down and down and down and down. And I think the right way for founders to think about that is like, okay, you're not actually like, no one's taking your shares unless you decide to sell them.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Your job is just to make the share price go up.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  And there's going to be more shares issued over time.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  But if you just make the share price go up.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Forever, it doesn't really matter.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  And you can also buy back.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  But then there's also, you can also buy back.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  You can also, you know, you know, get.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Buy back like Drew Houston.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Drew Houston is the best example.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  And then give more share, create new shares if you want to get your percentage ownership way down.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Like if you want to go to zero.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  More like.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  If you want to bail.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, we, we, we need to do, we need to do, uh, uh, uh, an analysis of the most deluded CEOs in the public markets because if you look at some of the IPOs from the last 10 years, like some of the guys that are still hanging around, running these companies have, have sold out.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, sold down so much of, and this is what makes Larry so admirable.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, because just buy back, buy back, buy back. And, and, and he's the second richest person, 300 billion. It's remarkable.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I think Oracle is like fully round tripped now from.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  It happens. Well, uh, what about the, so, so, yeah, I mean, the, the question is like, on what time scale do you think this happens? Like, um, Jordy, do you think we'd actually hear the story of somebody, a CEO, founder, maybe past their vesting cliff? Maybe one of their co-founders has left? Cause I, I think about that a lot where it's like, okay, yeah, there were like, there were like two or three people. They were basically equal. They did their full like four year earn out, but then there's clearly one that's like still there grinding for the next decade. Like they kind of do deserve more. It's not that crazy. Um, and yes, there is the, just the stock buyback, don't sell. But is there a world where someone like Drew Houston goes to the board and just says like, I think I can five X this

• 26:28John Coogan?

  and I want the pay package to do it and I'm going to be in the office non-stop and I'm going to go more time.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  I think that happens all the time.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Not to this degree. No way.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Not, okay, not, not to that degree.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're saying you're saying.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Not even the headline number.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Not even headline number. Just, just in the sense of like, we're gonna dilute everyone like 5% or 10% if this happens. Like, a trillion on 8.5% is, is serious dilution for the rest of the shareholders. But if I'm holding at 1.5 trillion and I'm like, you're gonna take me to 8.5 trillion? Like, I'm totally in for 10% dilution. You're gonna 5x my shares. Like, I'm in. But what's interesting is that we just haven't seen other CEOs pull that from the Elon playbook and say, I'm doing it too.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  Why, was it, was it Kimball or someone else saying like, very, almost no other CEOs would take a deal like this? Because it's so ambitious.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  And so I think it's, I think it's healthy.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  I think people are gonna, people are offended by the headline number.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, I'm, I'm very pro this. I think we're all pro this. That's not the, that's not the discussion. The, the question is like, how widespread does this become? Does it become memetic? Is it like every CEO? Because there's a lot of people that are just like, oh, Elon did it this way. I want to do that way, you know? And I'm wondering how much it actually spreads. Anyway, we'll have to keep monitoring it. Uh, we'll also have to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with artificial intelligence. Vanta helps you get compliant fast and we don't stop there. Our AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. What else is in the timeline? There's so much in the timeline. Should we do our, uh, our mega cycle review?

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. I got the laser pointer.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  We got the laser pointer. Our, our good friend Tyler Cosgrove has put together a slide deck for us that tries to help map the MAG7. Really, I call it the TPN top 10. The top 10.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, technically nine.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  There's nine?

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, no, no, there are 10.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  There's 10.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  There's 10, yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  We'll see. Well, one of them maybe is shouldn't be there.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. There's actually 10 because it's the mag seven.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Oh, Oracle. I forgot Oracle.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yes, you did. So, so it is. It is the TBP on top 10. The 10 most important companies in AI loosely. The mag seven plus a few bonus ones. And we're going to try and take through and look, you're about to hit the horse.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  You got a hoof, man.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  And so we're going to try and go through the various companies and rank them based on how AGI pilled they are and how much they need AGI. Is that right?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. So let's pull up the actual scales. There's two axes.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Let's go to the next slide.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  So basically on the horizontal, we have how AGI pilled they are.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  So I feel like that's fairly self-explanatory. You kind of believe that AI will become something like it can produce the median economic output of a person.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And then. And there's a few different ways to understand if somebody believes in AGI. It could be the rhetoric of the CEO or the founder.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  It could be the actions of the company.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Like they're just.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Speak louder than words.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  And is there anything else that could that could lead someone to to show that they believe in AGI? I guess it's mostly just the actions and the and the words, right?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  I mean, those are the main things that you can kind of do as a person.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Say or do things.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  We will. We have it. We will be judging them by both their actions and their words.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yep. So then on the vertical axis, we have how much they need AGI.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  So I think this is a maybe a little harder. So I want to qualify this.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  So, I mean, this doesn't necessarily believe that you have this kind of sentient, you know, AI that's as good as a person.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  But I think it more so in this context just means that AI will continue to become more and more economically valuable.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  To where you can kind of sustain, you know, building more and more data centers. You can do more and more CapEx.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of like, how much will this company be transformed if the AI wave plays out well?

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  AI doesn't play it play out well. How chopped are they? How cooked are they?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Framework. Yes. And then also, yeah, if we if we flash forward, nothing really changes. Total plateau, total decline in in token generation or something. It is the business just continuing business as usual. Okay, so who are we starting with?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Let's start with Sam Altman.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Okay, Sam Altman. Where is he on this?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  So Sam Altman, I think this is. Uh, pretty reasonable spot.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  He believes in AGI, right? He runs kind of the biggest AI company. He also needs AGI.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Uh huh.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Uh, cause i- if you imagine that, um, you know, if the models stagnate, right? They, they have a lot of CapEx they need to fulfill.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  If models stagnate, like what are they gonna do? Maybe they can, maybe the margins somehow work out, but you're probably not in a good spot if, if models uh, get worse or people start using AI less, if you're Sam Altman. Um, but he's also not, you know, in the top, top corner.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Right? And I, I think this is, you can justify this through a lot of OpenAI's actions. Um, you see stuff like Sora, you see maybe the erotica. This is not very.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Who's, who's running the laser pointer?

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm running the laser pointer and I'm, I'm, I.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  You want him, you want him here?

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  Maybe put him down here.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Okay, explain that, explain that.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  I think that more and more, at least in the short term, OpenAI looks like a hyperscaler.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  They're kind of a junior hyperscaler.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  And I think their actions are more, you know, I, I, I think that OpenAI, a lot of people, you know, want to say that they're, they're bearish on, on OpenAI at the current level.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  But ultimately, when you look at how their business is evolving,

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  they seem to me like they'd be fine if the models plateaued.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Yes, but, uh, yeah, I, I, I, I feel like the, I feel like the mood on the timeline was much more slide Sam to the left, doesn't believe in AGI. There was that post about like, if, if, if OpenAI really believed in AGI, they wouldn't be doing Sora or they wouldn't be doing the erotica thing. Like, all of those were very much like, needs it, but it, but kind of accepts that it's not coming and so stop believing it.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I think in response to Jordi, I think, um, it, cause it's not like this, the vertical axis is also just about like, if it's gonna continue to be economically, you know, economically useful. So if people just stop using AI in general, or, or like people, if the kind of, uh, you know, revenue stops accelerating or any of this stuff, I think OpenAI will be in a bad spot regardless of the models like actually getting much better.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Like if they just make the models much more efficient to run, you could say that's not very like AGI pilling, cause the models aren't getting a lot better.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Um, but that's still like.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  But I'm just saying like, if there was no more progress at all.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  Like we never got a new model from any of the labs. I think that OpenAI would add. Ads, they would add commerce, they would increase.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, so they might be fine without AGI.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  They would make agents a lot better.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  But, but I mean, the 1.4 trillion.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  They would enter enterprise.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  But the 1.4 trillion in commitments, like, that is hard to justify if it's just the business today just growing like it's growing. Cause it's just like, it's good. No, no crazy breakthroughs. Like, just.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they're, they're, they're gonna play.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  You're laying out the bull case now.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  They're playing, they're playing.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  This is crazy. You're laying out the bull case saying, oh, if they just add ads, they're gonna be able to hit the 1.4 trillion, no problem.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying, I'm not saying, they, they can pull back on a lot of these commitments.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  They don't, like, I don't, I don't think these are like, gonna end up being like, real liabilities.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  The business is just cooked.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  They can't hit them.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Right? So, I'm just saying, like, I think there's a shot they have, they could, you know, when, when they talk about having success in consumer electronics, right, which is something you talked about yesterday. Like, they don't need, like, I, I, I think they can probably build a really cool device. And maybe it could be competitive with, you know, if, if there's, if, if it can be at all competitive with an iPhone.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Like, that, they could be fine without AGI, right?

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Bull.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  Also getting into, like, I guess, I guess.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Let's get some other people on the board, so that we can see where people.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's useful to be relative, cause, you know, these are not quantitative numbers.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  So, uh, next we have Dario.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  So, Dario is up here. So, I, I think, Dario is kind of, when, when you listen to what Dario's saying, he is, you know, he's extremely AGI-pilled.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Right? He, he, this is, uh, kind of the reasoning why he's, he's so, uh, anti-China.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Right? Because he, he sees it as an actual race, this is going to see intelligence.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  It is nuclear weapons.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  It is a national, you know, security.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  It's a problem if China gets there first.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Who is that new sound cue?

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Tyler has sound effects.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  What is it? UAV online, okay, I like that. We got, this is the UAV. We should give this UAV aesthetics for sure. This is good. Okay, continue.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  And but there's also a sense that he needs AGI.

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Because if if AI stops becoming, if it stops growing as fast.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And you imagine that things kind of settle where they are now.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  OpenAI is definitely in the lead.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  So you you need a lot of continued growth for for Anthropic to keep kind of making sense economically, I think.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, sure. Who else is on here?

• 35:39Speaker 02

  So I think next is Larry.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Larry Ellison.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Larry. Larry is in kind of an interesting spot here. So this is kind of a weird place to be where you don't believe in AGI, but you need it.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Okay, how did he wind up there?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  So I I think. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this corner.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Record scratch, freeze room.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  So I I think this is how you factor in. There's kind of the personal rhetoric, and then there's the actions of his company.

• 36:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  So when you listen to Larry speak, he doesn't seem the type that is believes in some kind of super intelligent.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  God that is gonna come, that's gonna, you know, birth this new thing, and humanity will will rise. But then you look at Oracle.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Has anyone found his less wrong username?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I I don't think, you know, I don't think Larry is reading Gern.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Okay, got it.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  But then, but.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  He's invested like he reads Gern.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  And they are, you know, they they need AI to work.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  They are, maybe they're levering up a little too much.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Or maybe not enough, depending on how AGI-pilled you are, but you know, he's not very AGI-pilled, so.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  It's it's kind of hard to square, but. It's a bold bet. Yeah, this is this is a unique spot, I think.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  It is, yeah. He's he's he's off the grid, okay.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Uh, who's next?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  So let's see, who's next? Who who did I? Okay.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Oh, Satya, okay.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  There we go. I think this is a fairly reasonable spot.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Um, obviously, there's, you know, there's some sense where he is slightly AGI-pilled, or maybe more than slightly.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  He believes in the power of the technology.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he's very early on OpenAI. He thinks that AI in general will become. Very useful, but maybe it won't become, you know, super intelligent. Maybe it's not going to replace every person. It's just a useful tool. It's the next.

• 37:13John Coogan?

  The quote I always go back to is him saying like, my definition of AGI is just greater economic growth. So show me the economic numbers and that will be, it's like, it's a, it's a very practical definition.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think people see him as very reasonable. He's not getting over skis.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like him in the center. I like him in the center of the grid somewhere. That seems like a real.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's also, um, you know, if, if AI doesn't work out.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  I think Microsoft is in a very good spot.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  It's gonna stick around. Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  You know, they're not crazy over investing in OpenAI. They have a nice share of it. Yeah.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  They'll write some code.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  If OpenAI works out, he'll do very well. If they don't work out, I think he's also, he's doing quite well.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  He's hedged. He's hedged. The man's hedged.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  He's happy to be a leaser.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is a good quote too. Okay. Yeah. You wouldn't be leasing if you were super AGI pilled, right? You're hoovering up everything. You keeping it all for yourself.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. I think, let's actually talk about that with, I think it's Jensen next.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Okay. Yes, Jensen. Wait, he doesn't believe in AGI. He's the whole reason why we're here. Explain that.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  So, yeah, this is maybe my personal take, but if Jensen was very AGI pilled.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  I mean, he is the, the kind of, he, he's the rock on which this all is built on. He has the chips. If he was AGI pilled, he would not be giving out those chips. He would keep them all to himself and he would be training his own model.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  So that's why I think he's, he's more on the doesn't believe in AGIs side. Uh, but if there's any kind of downturn in the AI economy.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  Could you put, could you put Sam like potentially closer in this direction too? Because he's talking about getting into the, yeah, like compute reselling.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, reselling for sure.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, if there's so much demand.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  And the models are progressing so quickly, wouldn't you want to just hold on to all, all that?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  I think this would also be interesting to see over time. Like Sam has definitely shifted, uh, leftwards over time.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  He's moving. He's moving.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Basically this summer, you've seen a lot of the actions of OpenAI. They seem less and less AGI pilled.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  I mean, pretty much everyone has been like moving the AGI timelines outward, which is, which you could transform into no longer believing in AGI. It's more just like, the timelines have gotten longer this year broadly. Pretty much everyone. Do our cash up, they do these timelines.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  There was a new blog post yesterday. It was basically AI twenty twenty seven. There was a new one. It was AI, uh, twenty thirty two. So it's basically very similar arguments.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Wait, is it the same team?

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Uh, different team, but the, the team of AI twenty twenty seven was promoting it.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  Did, yeah, AI, AI twenty seven, uh, twenty twenty seven should be like, uh, it was actually AI thirty twenty seven.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, typo.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  We're, we're AI thirty twenty seven.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  We couldn't get that domain.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  We were just off by a thousand years.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, but there's definitely the sense where if, if AI, there's a downturn.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Jensen, the stock is gonna go down.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Uh, but it's not gonna go down as far as, as Larry, right? Cause they're, they're still not on, they don't have insane.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  This is not financial advice.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Yes, but you know, they don't have, you know, completely unreasonable capex.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  They're not levered up.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  That I know of.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Their Z score is through the roof.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Their all men's Z score is through the roof.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Their all men's Z score is through the roof.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  They're looking pretty safe.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Um, okay, let, let's see the next one. Uh, I believe, okay, Sundar.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Sundar. He believes in AGI more than Satya, you think?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I, I think you can see this, um, in kind of, they were even earlier in some sense than Satya, right? With, with DeepMind.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Um, so, uh, I think AI has played a, a fairly big part in the Google story very recently.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Um, they've always, I think, basically for the past 10 years, they've been trying to get into AI. Maybe their actions didn't actually do much, but you know, they were the transformer paper. They, uh, you know.

• 40:38Jordi Hays?

  They're about applied AI, like they're actually applying.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  They built self-driving cars.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Discovery. And core Google search is just an AI product. It's just an index on information. They're organizing.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Also, I mean, compared to Satya, I mean, Gemini is a frontier model.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Uh, Gemini three is supposed to be this incredible model. Everyone's very excited. Satya is not, Microsoft is not training their own base model.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and also like, it's, it like, there is a little bit of like, if you really believe in AGI, the actions that we see are you like, squirming and being like, I gotta get in. I, I, it doesn't matter if I'm 1% behind or 10% behind or 80% behind. I gotta get in. And I think we know someone who's doing just that.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  Gabe, Gabe in the chat says, is this AGI or AG1 from Athletic Greens?

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  Needs AG1.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Needs AG1.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Mind without AG1. Believes in AG1. Now, we are the only podcast that is not partnered with AG1.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  But we do like green. Green is our hero color.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to the next person.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Okay, but also before then, um, I, I think Sundar is also definitely below this line because, uh, you know, Google has been doing very well. AI was at, at first, I mean, people thought of AI as like, oh, this is gonna, this is gonna destroy Google. This is bad for Google. So if AI doesn't work, then Google's just in the spot they were before, which is doing very well. If AI does work, then, um, I mean Gemini is one of the best models. They'll do very well too.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Speaking of Gemini, Google AI Studio, create an AI-powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires them up for you. Get started at ai.studio/build.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go, continue.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so I, I think, uh, yeah, next is Zuck.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  So, so Zuck is also kind of an interesting spot.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  I think, I think Zuck is actually someone who has shifted, uh, rightward.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  It's fascinating.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree with this.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  You've seen this, um, basically, I mean, for a while.

• 42:29Jordi Hays?

  He's been traveling.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for a while he was doing open source.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Which in some sense, it's very AGI-pilling because, you know, you're building it, you're training a model, right? It's like you're, you're moving the, the frontier forward. But it's also, it's open source, which you can kind of think as being, you're trying to commoditize everything.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  You don't think that there's gonna be some super intelligence that will take all the value that you need to hold on to. You can kind of give it out.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Uh, and now he's kind of moved towards closed source. We're gonna get the best people. We're gonna train the best model.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  It felt like Zuck was sort of like, oh yeah, AI, like it's this cool thing. I'm gonna check the box. I got my team. We did this fun little side project. It's this, uh, open source model. We kind of found our own like little lane. But we're not like competing in the big cosmic battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, uh, DeepMind, like.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, don't, do you think that was just a counter position to way to win, like try to win the AI work? Go say, hey, we're just gonna try to commodi- commodify this market and like.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  Commoditize your confidence. Yeah, commoditizing your

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that

• 43:31John Coogan?

  is a good strategy.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. And then maybe you could say that, oh, once the Chinese have have been getting better, he can kind of step out of that position.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  And he's moved towards close source.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but now it feels like he's way, way, going way harder on the AGI vision, paying up for it, investing so much money in it.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  You know, it's like

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  And depending on how much he invests,

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  you could see him neat pushing up.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's also been moving up.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  But right now, but right now, the business is just insane. It's so phenomenal that even if he winds up spending all this money and, you know, they don't even get a frontier model and like the all the all the the researchers are like, yeah, we didn't discover anything and we're just gone. Like, the business is fine because it's such a behemoth. So that's why he's fine without AGI.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Uh, after earnings, they took a fairly big hit.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  So maybe he should be a little bit higher.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe a little bit.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Meta broadly is still a very safe play if if AI doesn't work out.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  And it was the same thing during the metaverse. It was like, he believed in the metaverse, he invested in the metaverse, but he never needed the metaverse. And so after the stock sold off like crazy, it went right back up because everyone realized that, wait a minute.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  He's also raising debt off the balance sheet, which would kind of could push him up into this zone, right? If he's like, you know, if you're worried about, why, why, why don't you just carry it yourself?

• 44:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you carry it yourself? What do you, what do you, you believe in AGI? Just, just let it ride.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Okay, who else are we missing?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so I think next is is Jassy? Oh, Elon, Elon.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Elon.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Okay, Elon.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  So Elon, uh, I mean, he's been AGI pilled, I think, for a very long time.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Super AGI pill, I agree with that.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  OpenAI co-founder, even before that, he, I think he was fairly big in the in the safety space.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  You see him even on on Joe Rogan, he was talking about AI safety.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  He still believes it, yeah, he hasn't backed off.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  And AI safety is important because it's going to become super intelligent, it's going to take over the world, we need to be safe.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even this was part of the dialogue around the new comp package, wanting the the uh, voting power to be able to be part of securing his robot army.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think robots are are very underrepresented on this board.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Uh, and Elon is kind of the the main player in that space right now.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he talked yesterday about, uh, about, uh, humanoids being sort of an infinite money glitch. And I feel like you kind of need, uh, AGI in order to kind of unlock the the infinite money glitch.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  Yes, but at the same time, very strong core business. The cars don't need AGI, the rockets don't need AGI, Starlink doesn't need AGI. So he so he's so he's not entirely indexed on it in the way the foundation labs are, right?

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a significant part of the Tesla market cap that is basically betting on robots.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  But it's also a big part of it that's just.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  But that's why he's in the he's in the middle of the needs are fine without. It's like.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like XAI.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  He's not betting everything on it.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  Is needs.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's just one piece of the.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  AGI more than.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  SpaceX.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, SpaceX is very seems very uncorrelated with the AI.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Unless you have the data.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  He's happy to be a telecom baron.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  He's happy to. Yeah, he's happy to be the new Verizon. Uh, who else is on here?

• 46:38Speaker 02

  So I believe now is Andy Jassy.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  Jassy.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so um, he is, I think broadly does not believe in AGI, although he, you know, fairly major stake in Anthropic.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Uh, which maybe is very AGI point, but but they have not.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  He's hedging with Anthropic.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's basically what you can say. He doesn't seem at all worried about kind of the core business. AWS seems to be.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And isn't Google building their position in Anthropic? I saw some headline about that.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  That was wild. Imagine like Sundar is such a beast. Sundar and Satya, really, both of them, they just have huge stakes.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Broadly, Andy Jassy seems very quantitative. He's focused on the numbers.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Realistic. He's not making these, you know, grandiose statements about the future of.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Of intelligence or what humanity is going to be like.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, when you look at the AWS earnings, it feels like they invest when the demand shows up. And they build data centers when there is demand and they they are not in the business of of doing, you know, a 10 year hypothetical sci fi forecast based on breakthroughs.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  So Ben Thompson on the recent Sharp Tech, we were listening to it on the way in. He was talking about how uh, Amazon has repeatedly said, hey, we're we're supply constrained. We have a lot more demand than we can fulfill. With this new deal with OpenAI, the $38 billion, which only got announced Monday, which again feels like forever ago at this point. But Ben was kind of hypothesizing that they kind of let OpenAI jump the line because that $38 billion deal was starting effectively immediately.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  Versus some of the other, like Larry's deal with OpenAI was announced, this like massive backlog is revenue that cannot be generated in a meaningful way today because they have to build the data centers that can actually deliver the compute.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and you know, Amazon has been building data centers. They're building data centers. They're basically, they built all the data centers for Anthropic.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  But it still seems very kind of restrained. It's not overly ambitious. Anthropic has had issues with capacity and it's probably because, you know, Andy Jassy doesn't want to get over his skis. He doesn't want to build too much.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  So I think that's why he's kind of on the left side. And also, I mean, if you think AI doesn't work and we're going to kind of be in this, you know, the same spot of Web 2.0, you need AWS, you need your EC2 server.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  I think he's very well positioned there. And then I think the last one is Tim Cook.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Tim Cook.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  Let's go, let's hear for Tim Cook. Criminally underpaid, but has done a fantastic job not getting over his skis.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one I think is

• 49:17John Coogan?

  Goat contention.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  fairly self-explanatory. I mean, he seems

• 49:21John Coogan?

  He doesn't believe in AGI, doesn't believe in LLMs, doesn't believe in chatbots, apparently.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, the new Gemini deal signaling

• 49:30John Coogan?

  As of two years ago, Apple was like, yeah, we're not, we're not doing that stuff.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was that famous

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Three years ago.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  But I think what's under discussed, my takeaway from the, our conversation with Mark Gurman and Apple's ambitions around their new LLM experience with Gemini is that I think that there's a very real scenario where Apple like wants to compete for the same user base as OpenAI.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 49:57Jordi Hays?

  They want that like transaction based revenue, that commerce revenue.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I just I disagree on this point, but um.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm not I'm not saying that I'm putting their odds at like winning that market at over like ten percent. But I think that they would be right to realize that it's potentially an opportunity.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is it a billion dollars a year that they're paying Google for?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  I believe that's the number, yeah.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  That feels really low, doesn't it? I I don't know. It just feels super low to me and it among all the different deals that are going on. When I think about like, when I just think about like the value of AI on the iPhone. And and you're like, one billion dollars like when I when I think about like, what is the value that we're that the market broadly is putting on like? AI for the enterprise, AI for whatever.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  When when Sundar on the Google earnings call was talking about their top, I think, ten customers and how many like trillions of tokens they were using, but it really was netting out to like a hundred and fifty million dollars of like actual revenue.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  And so this is this will be their biggest customer for Gemini.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  Day one.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Until one of our listeners gets on.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think, I mean, even with the with the Gemini news, Apple still seems very kind of reactive to AI.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  They're not kind of seeing, oh, this future where AI is going to do everything and moving there right now.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  They're they're kind of seeing where the demand is, seeing where the users are and then moving, which I think is very kind of, you know, classically, you know, that's how business work. It's not very AGI pilling.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Also, on on that point of one billion dollars, like, I have no idea. How can they possibly know the amount of inference that's going to happen in Siri plus Gemini over a year period?

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Like, there's just no way to predict that. Or can they? Like, I, I feel like if the integration's good, there will be a ton of queries, it will, it'll-

• 51:57Jordi Hays?

  I didn't read the one billion headline, uh, chat can correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't read the one billion dollar headline. I felt like that was a technology license, not necessarily.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  And then there might be consumption on top of that.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Okay. Or, or maybe, or maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe they're licensing Gemini and then they pay per query for like the energy and the capex.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  And couldn't a lot of the stuff be done on device?

• 52:20John Coogan?

  For sure. Yeah. Cause Gemini, uh, Gemma has like baked down models that could be smaller. So that's possible.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  Chat says, where's Tyler on the chart? Feels like Tyler isn't AGI pilled anymore.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I actually am on the chart here.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Let's go to Tyler.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Uh, I am, so I'm over here. So I, uh, yeah, I, I think I'm very AGI pilled, right? I, you know, I'm ready for the Dyson sphere.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  I think it's, you know, only a matter of years, handful.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  Only a matter of years.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  It's, it's a couple thousand, hundred thousand days away.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  You need to, you need to publish a blog with AGI 2026.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, 2025. We still have a month left.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  We still have a month left. AGI on Christmas, this Christmas. It's coming this Christmas. Yes.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  This holiday season.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  But why do you need AGI?

• 53:03Speaker 02

  I think I also need AGI.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Why do you need AGI?

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, look, if you look at the current jobs data for, uh, like college aid students or postgrad, it's looking pretty bad.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  It's bad.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  So I think you kind of need AGI to really boost the economy. If, if AI does not work, the macro economy is looking not good.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  So I feel pretty bad about my job outlook, uh, without AGI.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Even though you're already employed. That's hilarious. Uh, well, thank you for taking us through.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, chat wanted to know where would you put Lisa Su?

• 53:37John Coogan?

  AMD.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Lisa Su, I, I think she's broadly been, um, Quite reactive, actually. You've really only seen AMD start

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  You don't get credit for being reactive, is what you're saying.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think it's really only over the past year, maybe, that she's been making any kind of deals, right? You saw George Hots, maybe a year or two ago, basically trashing AMD chips for how bad they were in

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  But maybe she's given so much of the company away, maybe she thinks that shares won't have very much value in the future. She's like happy to just give away 10% of the company.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think if I had to pick somewhere, I would say that she is she's honestly getting a little close to Larry in that AMD, it's very much like an AI play still, right? They're a chip company, obviously. But you don't get the feeling that she's a true believer.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep. That tracks.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Okay, the new Siri, I'm reading through some of Mark Gurman's reporting. Speaking of Apple and AI, the new Siri is planned for March, give or take. As has been the case for months, Apple has been saying for nine months, it's coming in 2026. Apple simply reiterated on that. And then on the actual deal, it's a $1 billion deal for a 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Google to help power its and overhaul the Siri AI voice assistant. The two companies are finalizing an agreement that would see Apple pay roughly $1 billion annually for access to Google's technology with the Google model handling Siri's summarizer and planner functions. Apple intends to use the Google model as an interim solution

• 55:19John Coogan?

  until its own models are powerful enough and is working on a 1 trillion parameter cloud-based model that it hopes to have ready for consumer applications as soon as next year. That is interesting. I feel like they're going to have to pay a lot more to actually run all the queries, generate all the tokens. But I'm sure we'll find out more as Google reports earnings and Apple reports earnings. Before we get to that, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  What else is in the news today? We have, we are

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  We have some breaking news.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  Through the timeline. What's the breaking news?

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  TJ Parker has finally found a new car

• 56:02John Coogan?

  No way.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  That he likes.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  Guess what it is? Guess.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Uh, a new car that he likes. Uh, it's not the Serato. It's not the Lamborghini Huracan Serato?

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  No.

• 56:12Jordi Hays?

  It is the

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait. Do I get another guess?

• 56:14Jordi Hays?

  Ford Raptor R. Look at this. Look at this. Finally found a new vehicle I quite like and great gas mileage to boot.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  This was the problem with your Ford Raptor. It wasn't the R.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't the R.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  You only had 600 horsepower instead of eight.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  That was the main problem. I also needed to park it in, uh,

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Park city.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  Cities.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Which is just absolutely brutal.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are the specs on the, on the, on the Raptor R again? It's a, it's a pretty wild. How much, how much horsepower? Uh, Raptor R.

• 56:43Jordi Hays?

  Zero to 60 in 3.9.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  720 horsepower. 5.2 liter supercharged V8. Fantastic. It's kind of the Julius.ai of trucks.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English. Get insights in seconds. No coding required. Um, I'm trying to go through the timeline. We got Will Menites talking about some other stuff.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, let's pull up this post from Pegasus since it's relevant to, uh, the overview we just did. Pegasus says Altman today. Of course, he's talking about yesterday. We're looking at selling compute, but we need as much as possible. Zuck last week, we could sell compute. Are we in a compute shortage or not? Because both are saying they're buying as much of it as they can and thinking about selling it.

• 57:31John Coogan?

  That's very interesting. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the supply and demand dynamics. I, I, I like that, that story about Jensen where like he understands the dynamic here, but there's still, you get kind of crushed if there's a sell off in terms of demand. Like you just have to go back and study what was, what was going on during the crypto boom for Nvidia? Like during the crypto boom for Nvidia, it was like buy as many as possible. Just ramp, ramp, ramp. And then they literally had a glut.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and I can

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Completely had a glutton. They took huge write offs.

• 58:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the steel man here, if you're a large tech company and you have the ability to and the financing capital to buy a lot of GPUs. You're you're it's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need. Right?

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  But uh. Yeah, the question is

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Historically, that has not have been how things have been done like uh I I understand the the the pitch there, but I mean, we just talked to David Bazooki from uh from Roblox and he was saying that, look, we had our we had our own on prem. But then we had we had spikes of demand. And so we went to the hyperscalers for that because they can load balance across while people are playing Roblox here and then maybe they watch some Netflix over there and then they are storing, you know, all sorts of different data. There's different workloads that happen at different times. And so traditionally, the the uh

• 59:03John Coogan?

  like the hyperscalers have been able to serve service like multiple users across them, uh jumping straight to uh selling compute. I think that the timelines are a little bit funky on this one. It seems it seems it seems odd. It seems rushed. It seems rushed, especially when your when your core product is growing so quickly. Like, Google Cloud Platform was released, what, seven years after Google launched? Same thing with AWS, same thing with Azure. Like, these were very mature businesses, very stable businesses with cash flow that were able to justify the investment. It was not something that was done as part in the growth phase as much. I don't know.

• 59:44John Coogan?

  Speaking of other wild, uh wild, uh, you know, new business lines, Elon apparently confirmed that Tesla is going to build a semiconductor fab.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  I've been advocating for this for a long time. I'd love to hear what Elon had to say. But first, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best gendered image, video and audio models all in one place, developing fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Let's play Elon. What do we got here? Let's play Elon X.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  From our suppliers. Uh, it's still not enough. So. I think we may have to do a Tesla Terra Fab.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  That is a bombshell.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  It's like Giga but way bigger.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Terabytes.

• 1:00:36Jordi Hays?

  He's feeling good right now.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  I can't see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we're looking for.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  So I think we're probably gonna have to build a gigantic chip app.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Morris Chang, he has to see he's like, no, actually, I'm fine. I will. I will supply you. Samsung is like, I'm good. I will do it.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this other. Pull up this other video of Optimus.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Even when we're just crazy.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Cause there was some new moves of Optimus. Uh, getting, getting jiggy.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's see, it is at the bottom of Tyler app. Look at this. Look at this.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  Okay, uh, so this was, this was shown in contrast to the first Optimus, which was just a guy in a suit.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  This thing, this thing has motion.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not bad. It'd be, this feels like getting to, getting pretty close to unitary level, definitely at that level.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you're working late at the office one night and this thing just walks out onto the floor and starts looking at you and doing these moves.

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, weird. It's so, it's so weird how these new projects like. They seem. I understand why a lot of people look at this with skepticism, but at the same time, like, it just doesn't seem that complicated to just manufacture that thing and ship it. It's like, like they do it at, at, you know, in China, they do it all over the place. This doesn't seem that insane. And at the same time, like, Apple couldn't ship a car. So like these new projects, like they do kind of.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Elon's shipped some cars though.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, I, I meant it more as like, as like, if you're doing one thing, it's can sometimes be hard to branch out into the other thing.

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  I remember a few weeks ago, there was a headline around Tesla ordering like 600 million dollars worth of actuators.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, like it seems like they're going into some sort of production.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Um, I wonder what, who they're gonna sell to.

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  You don't need 600 million for like test, just for testing.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  It's just, it, it, the, the car analogy is so tricky because it's like, uh, most people that bought Teslas already had cars. Right? And so it was just like a one for one slot swap. Who are you replacing with this? You know? It's tricky. What do you think?

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Well, with this, you can replace, uh, like an exotic dancer?

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true. I don't know if many people have that, an exotic dancer in their life, who they're ready to, who they're ready to replace. Um, it seems, I don't know. It'll just be very interesting to see where these things actually diffuse. Like, because if you sell them, if you sell them for one price to consumers to do their laundry, but they work in an industrial capacity, like people will just buy them and use them for that. But when we talk to people who are in industrial environments, they're like, I definitely don't want a humanoid robot for that. I'd rather just like a big, massive robotic arm that's like bolted to the ground and can actually lift like 10,000 pounds as opposed to one that can only lift like 50 pounds? I don't know.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Uh, Ryan says they're gonna sell them to the police. We'll see. Maybe. They certainly would be, uh, I don't know, backup.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  I think they would be pretty effective deterrents.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. I like Vittorio having some fun on the timeline, going viral, getting community noted. Vittorio said Elon Musk now has $1 trillion in his bank account. That's 1,000 times $1 billion. He could give every single human on earth $1 billion and still be left with 992 billion. Let that sink in. People love this funny math whenever it drops. Uh, what else is going on? The, the, uh, the humanoid. Uh, yes, China has a similar humanoid robotic project, although it's way, way scarier because it went full Terminator mode on this. Of course, this one is hooked up to, to power, but.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Yes, so this video was in response to, um, earlier this week, there was a, I think it was Unitree like presentation, and they brought out this new robot, and it was walking with such like.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Swagger.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  Natural gait. Yeah, basically that, that people thought it was actually just a person in the suit.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  And it was not.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  And so they replied with, uh, with the fully stripped down.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  That is remarkable. Yo, oh, because they put it, they put it, uh, uh, they put like the suit on the robot?

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like a Neo, kind of like the 1X robot.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  We're getting, getting spooky, spooky territory.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  This is pretty crazy. Oh wow, yeah, it does look human. It does look human. I'm looking at the other video, sorry. Uh, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search every byte. Service vector and full text search. Built from first principles and object stories.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  You see all these new logos, John?

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  And it's cheaper.

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  You see these new logos?

• 1:05:30John Coogan?

  Oh wow, stacked.

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Stacked.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  Absolutely stacked.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  They're cracking.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Chris Backy says, "In the last 10 months, three very talented friends have joined separate, hot, early-stage startups in senior roles and quit after realizing that the company's actual revenue was significantly less than what the founder had told them during the interview process and shared online." Hmm, few things to clarify. I'm not joking. In two of three, in two of the three cases, it would be hard to tell that you were joining a bad actor company on the surface. Solid investors, founders worked at unicorn companies. Uh, the third was maybe more obvious. The only ones who really lose here are the employees. The investors have 200 portcos and can afford some losses, and our industry doesn't really pursue founders over fraud slash misleading information up to a certain point. Four, if you're thinking about joining an early-stage

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  startup, ask to see their Stripe and/or signed contracts before you join. Not bad advice.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, again, this going back to spring, right? It just felt like there was this, like, every founder was feeling this insane pressure to show like 1 to 10 million of, of, of, uh, like a 1 to 10 million ramp that was just insane.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and, and the weird dynamic is that like, as that pressure ramps up, you just get more and more incentive to fake it with, uh, community-adjusted ARR and contracts that don't actually stick and, um, all sorts of different, uh, twists on something that's like, is it actually cash? Is it actually people coming in? Are they on long contracts? Um, the quality of revenue has been maybe degrading, but also just maybe, um, uh, in just, just, you know, uh, it's just been easier to game than ever. There's been more incentive to game it than ever. Uh, so stay safe out there, folks.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Kazakhstan has signed an MOU to buy up to 2 billion of advanced chips from Nvidia. Let's hit the gong for Kazakhstan. Warm it up, warm it up, warm it up.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Great hit. Great hit for our friends in Kazakhstan. Good to see them getting into the game.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  Does Borat take place in Kazakhstan? Isn't that, isn't that the whole thing? Maybe they should do Borat 3 about data centers. He, he, he goes to a data center.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Sasha Bear Cohen on data centers would be on the AI.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Reprises his role, all to bring AI to Kazakhstan?

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Sasha Bear Cohen doing a doc, like a

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Like, yeah, like

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  On, just on AI in general?

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  Incredible. It'd be amazing.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  So I can use it to do better web search?

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  So I can use it as an autocomplete?

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  You're not doing the Borat voice, brother.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm not gonna do the Borat voice.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  I will do the profound voice. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Go get a demo. Uh, the Kobe-esque letter says breaking Nvidia's losses accelerated to negative 5% of the day, now down 16% since Monday's high. That marks a drop of 800 billion since Monday. Wow, that is a wild sell-off. Uh, didn't Tyler quote this and say, is this bullish or something like that?

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  No, that was on the, the DoorDash. They went down 20%.

• 1:08:49John Coogan?

  Everyone's down 10 or 20%.

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, whether you, whether you beat or miss, you're going down.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  Wait, is this true, Raghav? Ari Emanuel said he's working with Elon to bring Optimus to the UFC? That would be incredible.

• 1:09:03Jordi Hays?

  Please don't be fake news.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Please don't be fake news. We need robots in the UFC. I mean, Rogan and Palmer Lucky were talking about it on, on their podcast and it certainly seems like a hilarious and wild thing, even just as a, as an exhibition match before the real UFC. Get an Optimus. Though, here's a question. Would Elon want a human to thrash on Optimus? Is that good for his brand? Or would he want Optimus to win? And if Optimus wins, then is that actually entertaining? I don't know.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  I think putting Optimus up against the best MMA fighters in the world

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  is fine.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  It's impossible though, right? Because if you just kick metal, you'll just break your foot. And if you punch

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  So Ari, Ari, they, this was Ari Emanuel at the All In Summit.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was released, I guess, one day ago.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  He was talking about wanting.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  Wait, wait. What a weird, what a, what a crazy, crazy timing. That's so, that's so interesting.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  I saw what he's creating. The man's a genius. I want to do a UFC fight with his robots.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Heisenberg, uh, sharing.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Sharing a little bit of red here. Microsoft down 10% in the last eight days, Nvidia 12% in the last four days. Allentier at 16%, uh, down 16%, Meta down 18%, losses, uh, have accelerated. Uh, Compound 248 was sharing yesterday. He's like, uh, when I clipped this, uh, I didn't expect to crash the markets globally. Uh, but he, uh, certainly that clip, uh, seems to have played a, a part in this, uh, little sell-off.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Always take a victory lap for, for being world, for having world historical consequences. I, I actually think that that particular clip was like less than 5% of the total views on that clip because there were other people that clipped it and it got a lot of views.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

  It went everywhere.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  But always claim victory. That's the lesson.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Katherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz, joining us. She's in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the TV Channel. Catherine, how are you doing?

• 1:11:16Katherine Boyle?

  It's great to be here. Good to see you guys.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Why are you playing the night vision goggle sound? You already got new soundboard today.

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  I felt a little tactical. I felt a little tactical. Uh, it's great to see you.

• 1:11:27Katherine Boyle?

  Good to see you.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  Should the Department of War get a soundboard during these speeches? Uh, I heard, uh, I heard Hank Seth was giving a big speech. Is it, are, are they sticking mostly to, uh, to the, the, the cheers and the clapping? Or are we doing firing off muskets? Are we firing off cannons? Is there pageantry? Is pageantry alive in the Department of War speech?

• 1:11:48Katherine Boyle?

  Bring the pageantry back to the Department of War. That is, that is important. You guys, you guys should definitely have your own sound for them.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:11:55Katherine Boyle?

  You guys are getting the, the first look at a, a major speech.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:58Katherine Boyle?

  Uh, so it is, it is just ending right now. I, I just hopped off the live stream. Um, and I can tell you my, my phone is blowing up with just how many people are enthusiastic, not only in the venture community, but just across Washington about what has been said in the speech and it's going to have. Dramatic repercussions for defense tech and for Silicon Valley and the broader defense innovation base. So it's extraordinary speech. You'll be hearing a lot more about it, but you're getting the first look.

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Take us through it.

• 1:12:25Katherine Boyle?

  And it is definitely, I'd say, you know, for the last, say, 10 years or so, we've been talking about defense reform, why it is so important for increasing competition for startups. And what is amazing about this speech is that it's not just lip service to, yes, of course, we need competition, basically what you've been hearing in Washington for the last 10 years. It goes line by line. Hank Seth actually made a very, very funny comment. He said, if you're watching this on Fox News, your eyes are glazing over because this is the most boring thing you've ever heard. But for everyone in the room, from the Andrels, the Palantirs, the SpaceX's of the world, all the way down to the little guys, to the primes, it was like, it was like Christmas come early, right? Because it's,

• 1:13:06Katherine Boyle?

  it really is changing the way that acquisitions are going to happen inside the department in ways that are so meaningful, not only for Silicon Valley companies, but for private equity-backed companies and for the primes. He basically told the primes in the very beginning, you have to be investing more in research and development. The companies that have been getting the large programs cannot just continue as business used to be done. He actually quoted Donald Rumsfeld, didn't tell us he was quoting Donald Rumsfeld for the first five minutes, and basically went line by line through his speech that he gave on September 10, 2001, about how important it is to change the defense acquisition process. And he said, you probably don't recognize this, but the speech I'm giving now is actually Rumsfeld's.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Wait, September 10?

• 1:13:48Katherine Boyle?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  The day before, just happened to be?

• 1:13:52Katherine Boyle?

  Happened to be the day before, where he said, we have to change the acquisition process.

• 1:13:56John Coogan?

  That is a crazy coincidence.

• 1:13:58Katherine Boyle?

  Very, very crazy coincidence, but it shows you just how long this has been going on.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:14:03Katherine Boyle?

  So I'm happy, I have my notes here, because I was taking Kobe's notes throughout the speech. Yeah, let's go line by line. To let startups know what's going to be changing.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Yes, please.

• 1:14:14Katherine Boyle?

  But the first thing that I think is really important for all of the startups in Silicon Valley is that he mentioned and called out the importance of commercial-first technology. So this is going to shock people who are not in the defense world, that right now, if you need to build a product specifically for the Department of Defense, the vast majority of contracts that are given out are not given out with a purview of what exists already in the marketplace that we can buy. People, you know, it's a requirements process, a very long 300 day, and you know, requirements process, actually, that that he called out, that requires the different program offices to say what they need, to write it down, and then to find people who will build explicitly for those requirements. They are doing away with the old requirements process and saying, this is not what we're going to do anymore.

• 1:14:59Katherine Boyle?

  We are going to focus on commercial-first technologies. Even if there is a technology out there that is only 85% of what we need, we will we will buy it, or that is that is the goal, and then we will turn it into what we need to for actually for the warfighter.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  This is COTS versus GOTS for the DoD, DOW nerds, like, commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf. This is what Anduril and all the defense tech community has been beating the drum on for basically a decade now, and it feels like it's finally getting echoed back from the administration. Is that correct?

• 1:15:33Katherine Boyle?

  Yes, and there was there was a lot, the administration and the EO that was that was out a couple of months ago said that they wanted commercial-first technology. Now you're hearing it straight from the secretary's mouth. There's always dust-ups about this on Capitol Hill with with, you know, various parties arguing over whether we need more studies or whether we should just do this. It looks like now that this is a real change that's about to happen, and it's going to be transformative for for all of the startup community. What it really says is that the best products will win.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, who are who are the losers here?

• 1:16:01Katherine Boyle?

  Well, I think, I mean, the major loser from this speech is the primes. I mean, he did, he said, I don't want to pick on anyone, I'm not going to call out companies, but you have to be investing in research and technology. Like, you have to be, the the fact that these that the primes only spend 2% on on research and development, and are focused on, you know, constantly kind of maintaining the status quo, that is not going to happen on his watch. And so I think it was a

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  2% on R and D.

• 1:16:26Katherine Boyle?

  Yes. And haven't historically been acquiring venture-backed companies. So this is also the problem where they're really just on a much slower timeline than is needed by the department. And I'd say that the takeaway from the speech, and I think the soundbite you'll be hearing more and more about, is that the new process is really going to be used to enable speed and volume. And one of the things that I think, you know, a number of companies have been talking about for a long time is that by taking more risk in the acquisition process, you take less risk on the battlefield. And he actually echoed that. He said, "We want to take more risk. We want to have, we want to reward the people inside of the department who are taking, making risky decisions or supposedly risky decisions because they're acquiring new technologies

• 1:17:10Katherine Boyle?

  or from companies that are, that are not Raytheon and the kind of big guys," right? But what they, what they ultimately said is like, they want those, the people who are going to be making these acquisition decisions to be taking on the risk because it takes less, it will affect the risk of the warfighter, right? It will make things safer for the warfighter. So it's basically linking this entire process, bringing it back to what needs to be done before war start and before products get into the hands of the warfighter.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  This is like a top-down directive, and then who are the players that need to actually put this into, like, who are the kind of key players that need to put this into practice?

• 1:17:46Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, so I mean, like, the, the main thing that I, this is definitely a message sent to Congress because there's, there's currently, you know, two different bills going through on Congress that are actually pretty aligned in, in most of the things that they're saying. There's a few call-outs where I think you'll, you'll see sort of some, some sort of back and forth between the House and the Senate, but, but this is definitely a call to them. Like, this is happening on, on the secretary's watch. This is something that he cares deeply about. This is something that the administration cares about, and so it definitely is a huge push. Not just a, not just a major signal, but they sort of outlined, this is how we're going to change things inside the department. One of the biggest things that they do is, is they created this sort of portfolio-based approach of how they're going to be allocating capital to companies now. And this is always shocking when I explain to people that this is revolutionary because

• 1:18:31Katherine Boyle?

  you'd say in a in a normal company, you're given a budget. And if the vendor you choose is, you know, fails, you'll go to another vendor and you'll use that capital in order to buy whatever product you need. That is not how the department works. And so with this new portfolio based approach, they're basically saying, we're going to give that what's known as the P A E's, the the portfolio acquisition executives, the right to say, okay, if this if this one product that we acquired 60 days ago, isn't working on the battlefield, we can use the rest of the money and reprogram it for a product that is working. And right now, that is that is not possible inside the Department of Defense. Right now, you have to write a whole nother list of requirements and ways that you would build a new product in theory that can take years to actually build.

• 1:19:13Katherine Boyle?

  And by the time it's built, it isn't meeting the requirements or the needs of the warfighter. So the fact that they're even changing the budgeting process and that they have an explicit call out of how they're going to do that, that will show up in this year's N D A A once it's passed, and it will be the way that things are done from now on.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  A couple weeks ago, I saw.

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this means that if a contract is allocated to a certain company, and they're they start underperforming in real time, the the person who's in charge of allocating that budget can basically say, hey, this other this other startup, like, we're going to like, rotate this budget over here because

• 1:19:49Katherine Boyle?

  Yes.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  they're actually going to deliver on this.

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  Some super bullish, for super early stage.

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've heard some horror horror stories, and even opportunities where some of the bigger primes have just been have just held on to contracts forever. They're kind of like barely delivering, they're kind of like trying to deliver, and startups coming in and saying like, hey, we'll actually take this over. And sometimes those deals can can happen, but this seems like it'll be a lot more effective.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  Are there any new categories that are opening up generally? I mean, in we, you know, we've heard this week about like data centers in space. So if you're tracking like data centers or space, like, that's a story. But I remember Secretary of the Army was talking about modularity of weaponry, taking apart a drone, fixing it. I feel like the whole idea of drones or autonomous submarines, these are new categories that sort of opened up. There have been a number of competitors, but at the thematic, like, within defense technology level, are there any categories that you think this new administration is maybe more excited about than ever before?

• 1:20:55Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, so I mean, you mentioned modularity and what the Secretary of the Army is talking about. I mean, this was actually called out in Secretary Hegseth's speech where he said, "Part of the reason why we need these PAEs, formerly called PEOs, but PAEs, these portfolio-based approaches, is because right now, if you want to take something apart and put it back together, you have to build an entirely different system to acquire those parts. And you have to go through a requirements process." So if you're building modular-based approaches that update in real time, and he actually said, "We want it to be more like software. We want to do software and updates in real time and not have to go through a requirements-based approach," you need to be thinking about things in terms of modularity. So I think there's a lot of

• 1:21:36Katherine Boyle?

  different, even just changing the way the budgeting works, it opens up a lot of different technologies that were not able to participate in the acquisition system because they didn't want to go through the requirements process, or they knew they wouldn't meet the requirements that are being put out by the Department of War. So it is going to radically change, I think, not only the types of products you're seeing in the hands of the warfighter, but just how quickly they get there.

• 1:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense. Switching gears a little bit, Sam Altman suggested on Wednesday this idea of, like, my interpretation of it was kind of like a GoCo model for AI factories. Without commenting on that specifically, can you give us the history of GoCos, when and how they work well, and what kind of some of the challenges have been?

• 1:22:27Katherine Boyle?

  Well, I actually didn't see what, can you give me a little more context on what Sam said?

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, yeah, so I'll read exactly what he said. So this was in response to clarifying the sort of backstop gate. He said,

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, he basically said, obvious one, we do not have or want government guarantees for open AI data centers. And then like later in the post, he said, what we do think might make sense is governments building and owning their own AI infrastructure. And then the upside of that should flow to the government as well. We can imagine a world where governments decide to off-take a lot of computing power and get to decide how to use it. And it may make sense to provide lower cost of capital to do so. Building a strategic national reserve of computing power makes a lot of sense, but this should be for the government's benefit, not the benefit of private companies.

• 1:23:16Katherine Boyle?

  Sure.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  And just in some of the like, some of the ideas around this just reminded me of how GOCs have worked in in defense tech, where the government is basically saying like, we have, we're willing to commit resources and land to like a certain initiative. And then you can have the private market potentially pay a role. And I have no idea how how this would, how this would look like in the AI context. But I just want, I just thought it'd be helpful to understand like, how these sort of like, public-private partnerships have worked in the past, specifically in defense.

• 1:23:49Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, well, no, I can, I can talk to one that was actually discussed today. So the Secretary of the Army was on Squawk Box this morning, talking about specifically, if we are giving the land and security for massive data centers, could the Army have its own data centers and be one of the largest providers and actually off-take that compute? So I do think that there are ongoing conversations. Candidly, I haven't seen, you know, massive conversations about how it's going to be enacted by the Department of War. But I thought it was very interesting that the Secretary of the Army was basically saying that this is something that they would be very interested in, that they know that they are going to need their own compute. And that if there is sort of a trade off of, we provide the land and the security, there should be an understanding that that compute then goes to the Army. So I don't know that they've fully fleshed out the details of those sorts

• 1:24:34Katherine Boyle?

  of things. But I do think there's a lot of conversations about this. And, you know, it's good to hear that Sam is also talking about that in certain ways. But I do think for the Department of War, they know that it's top of mind. And I think they're being a lot more experimental, which again, comes back to, if you have a system of requirements that is far more sort of open, I'd say to experimentation or working with new companies that can do that. It does give the, you know, Secretaries of the Army or the Navy a lot more authority to make those decisions on kind of the, the actual things like compute or energy that they need.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the the flow between like entrepreneurial ideas, like problems that are identified in the private sector, somebody starts a company like with Anduril is like the flipped model, this idea that R and D should maybe live outside of the taxpayer dime, be funded by venture capitalists, that company gets built, eventually those ideas are percolating into DC and then the the world updates, America updates, we change the way we work, things get better, but Anduril benefits and people are pointing the finger, you know, like, hey, you you're the one that advocated for this. And I feel like that's kind of where Sam's caught right now, where OpenAI is advocating for things

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  that I think are good for America, but also might benefit OpenAI. And so he has to do this delicate dance of like, well, I was independent on this one, but this one does benefit me, etc., etc. It's like such a communications challenge. Do you think it's like, do you have any best practices for like, how to not get over your skis on that?

• 1:26:10Katherine Boyle?

  Well, I think it's I think, as you said, it's sort of a typical Washington story where in order for things to change, you you do have to sort of, you know, kind of in Washington's a meme town, just as Silicon Valley is a meme town, like you have to be able to tell your story, why it's so important. I would argue that that Anduril was was exceptional at at really telling the story of why you need attributable systems, why you need modular systems, basically, the the kind of, you know, the the kind of frameworks that we're using today inside the Department of War came from those memes being established. But yes, if you're if you're successful inside of of Washington, you're going to tick off a lot of different people.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:26:47Katherine Boyle?

  And you're going to to certainly upset sort of the the bureaucratic class. And what was very interesting, too, about this this speech is that the secretary actually called out the bureaucratic class and said, like, this is not a problem with people that we have. This is not a problem with innovation or technology. It is the bureaucracy that is stopping us from making great decisions. And I think like that that is something that is that is, you know, always been the problem with DC. And I think, you know, the the most important thing that companies can always do is just continue. Saying what they believe, going to Washington, building those relationships. And I think if anything, over the last 10 years, this defense acquisition reform, which everyone said was impossible, is now actually at our fingertips and going to happen because it makes sense.

• 1:27:30Katherine Boyle?

  The argument has been made, it's been made in dozens of different ways across many administrations and everyone's in agreement on it now. So for founders that feel like, oh, gosh, like, look, look at these great companies that are getting backlash because they they've, you know, kind of spread their own gospel and now they're being attacked for it. Like, that's actually, I think, a sign of progress. If you're being attacked for what you're what you're advocating in Washington, that's usually a good thing.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Final question. What is your most up to date guidance for your portfolio companies around the shutdown?

• 1:28:04Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, no, so I mean, it definitely is having an impact, right? Like, the the companies that were expecting contracts to come in or reprogramming dollars, like, they're not going to necessarily see it on the timelines that they thought maybe, you know, maybe a quarter ago. That said, I do think that a lot of these provisions that are happening right now are so transformative that in the long run, like, the kind of if we look back on what happened in the year 2025, it will have been a very, very good year for startups. Maybe maybe their their numbers will lag by a quarter just because, OK, like, the funds can't be delivered, depending on how long the shutdown goes down. I think it's having a greater impact, actually, on the citizen, right? Like, I mean, what's happening with air traffic control? What's happening, you know, across, you know, civic benefits? Like, that is something that I think we're now all feeling the pain of

• 1:28:49Katherine Boyle?

  or people who are dependent on those benefits are certainly feeling the pain of or people who are traveling or planning to travel for upcoming Thanksgiving are certainly going to feel the pain of the shutdown. But it's certainly having an impact on companies. And I think most companies are still working exceptionally hard on the things that they can work hard on now, even if the even if the contracts can't get signed or the press releases can't be put out or the dollars aren't coming in yet. But I think when we look back this year, the story of this year will actually be the defense acquisition reform and what's happening for these companies in the long term versus sort of the short term.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, short term pain, long term gain.

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:25Katherine Boyle?

  Absolutely.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking notes and giving us the full breakdown.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:29:31Katherine Boyle?

  Yes.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Always great to catch up.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:29:33Katherine Boyle?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Uh, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. And start building. And we have our next guest, Mikey Schulman from Suno in the Restream waiting room. Here he is. Welcome to the TBN Ultradome. How you doing?

• 1:29:52Mikey Shulman?

  It's great to be here. I'm doing great. How are you guys?

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Fantastic to have you. I'm, I'm very excited about this. Um, I have a million questions and I, and I know that we're just going to go super deep into all the details of user behavior, but uh, kick us off with just a general high-level introduction on you and the company and then we'll go from there.

• 1:30:14Mikey Shulman?

  Cool. Yeah. It's great to be here. Um, I don't know. I'm not so interesting. Uh, the company's much more interesting. Uh, the way I like to think of it is we are delivering the best, most valuable digital musical experiences to the whole world. And right now, the things that are available to the end user are not always amazing. They're not always differentiated. Um, and I think that's just like a failure of imagination that you can do so much more with music and you can enjoy it so much more. So that's how I think about us.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  What was the first song that you ever made?

• 1:30:44Mikey Shulman?

  Ever made?

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Mikey Shulman?

  I've been playing piano since I'm four. Uh, I played in a lot of bands in high school and in college. I play every day, so uh, I don't actually know the answer to that, but it was probably like Chopsticks or something.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  Are you a foundation model company? Chopsticks is a classic. Or an application layer company or both?

• 1:31:02Mikey Shulman?

  Look, the, the answer is both. You know, all the technologies are ours. These didn't exist. But I think about, and maybe this will color the conversation and certainly, um, you know, when you guys were discussing us last week or two weeks ago, all that matters here is the product. All that matters is that we deliver an experience to a user that makes them feel a certain way. And so at the end of the day, um, like that, like if there were a way to do what we're doing without AI, like we would probably do that. There just isn't.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it in, in, so there is a win condition where you don't even train your models and you use someone else's models, but as long as you have the best application, like that's where the value accrues.

• 1:31:41Mikey Shulman?

  I think so.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of a tragedy story.

• 1:31:43Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah, users don't care. And I think probably at some point, maybe there's like a last model we officially release.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Mikey Shulman?

  And the rest is just like amazing product updates.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  No, no, I completely agree with that. That makes sense.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What, walk us through, we normally don't talk about the history of companies too much during interviews, but because you're, I mean, this is the first time on the show. Like, I'd love to kind of understand the different inflection points for, for the business. I mean, you guys just grown tremendously over the last, over the last year. So walk, yeah, walk us through kind of the history of Suno and then kind of the history of even AI music and how those two things track.

• 1:32:25Mikey Shulman?

  Sure. We launched this product a little over two years ago. I think it was in September and it was kind of barely passable back then. It was a Discord bot. It's actually something I got wrong completely. Thankfully, I have good co-founders who disabused me of my bad ideas.

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  And was that like a mid, was that a mid journey, we inspired by mid journey?

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was working for mid journey. Why not for you?

• 1:32:48Mikey Shulman?

  It was working so well for mid journey and I thought we'd be on Discord forever. And then it was like around Thanksgiving, we released of that year, we released like a really thin web app. It didn't even have the full functionality of the Discord bot. And five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. It's like, if ever there's a market signal that I got something wrong, that was just like very, very strong. And I think slowly but surely, you know, we keep releasing new products, new models. The product gets more engaging, the music gets more impactful. And slowly but truly, I would say the cartoon you should have is it becomes more and more appealing to a larger and larger group of people every time you make the product better. And so it's basically been a lot of iteration. Yes, there are inflection points.

• 1:33:32Mikey Shulman?

  Everything consumer is like a little bit lumpy, but that's, that's the history of it.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What did, what did the early cohort of users look like? How were they using the product? Where, like, why were they, I'm assuming they were, you know, you had, I'm sure you had a cult, kind of cult following, kind of early, what did that early cohort look like? And is it that much different than, than today or is it just scaled up?

• 1:33:55Mikey Shulman?

  It's very different today. So the early cohort, I would describe as like very tech-forward and music curious. And it's like, here's this new thing, you kind of have to suspend disbelief. You need to be really forgiving because the music actually isn't all that good. And as you make the product better, you grow out from there. And now it's like people who love music who are like a little bit tech curious. And actually, at this point, you don't even need to be all that tech curious. There's like a fairly easy to use experience on both web and mobile that you can just kind of dive into. And so I think the early users are indeed like, you know, if you were on Discord, let me put it this way, if you were on Discord, like you are a very different kind of user than the type of person who

• 1:34:39Mikey Shulman?

  might find our mobile app.

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Download a web app.

• 1:34:42Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, and so today, I think like part of the, part of the debate that we were having, and you can deliver some, some truth around this is like, what like, what are kind of the key cohorts that are using and loving Suno? Everyone by now has probably seen, you know, viral short-form videos where people are combining two different songs. And some of the reach on, on these assets is insane. You'll see, you know, somebody combining like rap artists like Future with jazz music and, and, you know, getting, you know, hundreds or tens of millions or, you know, potentially even more views on this type of content. But then we've also heard of stories of professional musicians using

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  this to like accelerate their workflows. And then we've now heard stories of people that are just using, creating music just for personal consumption. And so what, what are the different kind of cohorts look like? And what, what are you guys, what kind of user are you guys most focused on?

• 1:35:42Mikey Shulman?

  So the professional content creator, be they professional music creator or other content creator, this is like mid-single-digit percentage of our user base. And the vast majority of people are people who love music but aren't

• 1:35:58Mikey Shulman?

  Making music for any other purpose, that's just, we call it creative entertainment. This is like a new behavior.

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:04Mikey Shulman?

  And so I think trying to apply too much of what you know from other things, be it consumer social platforms or video games, it's always, you always just have to take everything with a grain of salt.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Mikey Shulman?

  But most people, they come and they find that music making is incredibly enjoyable. And if you have studied an instrument and made music with your friends, like you probably already know this, and you just don't believe that it can be done digitally, and then you kind of find the product and you realize, oh my God, this can be done digitally, I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of making music. I usually try to cartoonize our average user as people who would say, I love music, I love to sing, you don't love it when I sing. That's kind of, that's kind of our sweet spot.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Hmm, that makes sense.

• 1:36:44Mikey Shulman?

  That's interesting.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  And, and, and that tracks on like actual monetization. It's not like those are the free users and then the, all the revenue comes from professional people or like API, like it actually matches roughly what you described.

• 1:36:56Mikey Shulman?

  That, that's right. And so, I, you know, you guys mentioned a couple of weeks ago,

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01Mikey Shulman?

  the Chris Dixon thing, the like, come for the tools, stay for the network. I think about it a little differently for us.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:07Mikey Shulman?

  I, I kind of think of it for us as like, come for the gimmick and stay for the joy. And this is like, the party trick of making that song that, even if it's not, you know, your favorite artist, you know, which largely can't be on a platform, but it's, you know, make the country song about Debbie being late, that's the party trick. But there's something that is behind the party trick that you get pulled into, and all of a sudden you are a music maker and you're enjoying it. And so, I actually, I, I don't think it's bad that, you know, there's like, this, this, this song that is meant to be consumed once, that you're never gonna consume again, that like, you laugh for four seconds with your friend, I think, you know, one of you said like, I almost just need to know the prompt, and then I don't need to know the rest of the song. Like, I don't actually think that's bad, because there's this amazing experience that

• 1:37:52Mikey Shulman?

  it gets backed up with, that people spend hours a day on.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:37:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I, when I think about some of the most fun moments of my childhood, it was my dad writing and playing a song. For guitar and singing it one time and never singing it again. And I still like just remember the moments and the and the joy of that. And so like the concept of like ephemeral songs that can be created for a moment that historically you would have needed, you know, studio time, you would have needed to spend all this time like writing the song, you know, producing it, all this stuff. And now it can be done in an instant. I think it really is, it really is totally magical.

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  Where, where?

• 1:38:29Mikey Shulman?

  I think this is similar to, this is similar to this. Like there's ephemeral pictures on your phone, right? And you never go look at them again unless Apple tells you to.

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Where, where are the rough edges or where are the edges that you want to be like careful around? I feel like with chat GPT, no one was really expecting the whole like getting one shotted and like psychosis and like the delusions of grandeur like that came out of nowhere, in my opinion. And then all of a sudden it was like an issue and they had to work on it. And of course there's like guardrails that they can put up. Midjourney, I think a lot of people use that as art therapy. I haven't seen that many people or heard that many anecdotes about people like going crazy because of mid journey, but there's still like, if you're doing image generation, you don't want to generate adult content, for example. Do you have an idea of like the shape of the battle that you're going to be waging against like the, the, like the risks that you want to like fight off?

• 1:39:21Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah, look, I think for us, they're actually just fairly lower stakes than those other ones, like RAI turning anyone into paperclips. And not that I think that that's a real thing anyway. And I, like you said, I don't think we're, we're inducing psychosis in anyone. You know, this is a tricky question. Music, the, the, the content has kind of always been filthy in, in the best music. And I don't really want us to be the arbiter of that. So we have like some, some content moderation that's like pretty,

• 1:39:51Mikey Shulman?

  I would say pretty forgiving. And, and currently that's actually, that's it. And then lots of copyright moderation, of course.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was, I was raised on Little John and the East Side Boys. And it was, it was indeed filthy.

• 1:40:04Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  And yes, it would not be your place to necessarily filter that. I would imagine that you at some point have to do some sort of like KYC, age verification, or, or even something that's just like parental controls, that type of stuff. That certainly makes sense. I have a follow-up question, but.

• 1:40:22Mikey Shulman?

  Go, go for it.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, there was an article in the, in the journal yesterday about how Instagram had used PG 13 as a heuristic for the type of content that they would show to teenagers on Instagram. And the MPAA actually pushed back against that. And I was very upset about that because I feel like we need shared language for how we describe what is acceptable on new tech platforms. So like, I want you to be able to put the label of like explicit content. Remember that explicit content on every album? It became so iconic, it was actually cool, which maybe had a bad effect. But if you put that, if you put that black and white flag with the explicit on there,

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  I know exactly what I'm getting and I know that I'm going to keep that out of my, out of the hands of my kids for a number of years. And I would hate for, I would hate to be in a situation where you couldn't use that and you had to come up with some new jargon for your policy. I love just building on the shoulders of giants, but have you thought about adapting any of those terminologies or just making your moderation language match what people already know? Is that relevant to you?

• 1:41:37Mikey Shulman?

  Um, not as much as it is on other platforms. I mean, but it is, you know, I feel like, um, we should not be the arbiters of a lot of these things and, um, you know, quite, quite frankly, maybe like you don't want us to be the arbiters of these things and that there should be other guidelines set by other things. And so like, yes, if you're dealing with children, you're going to have different rules about the songs that you can make and that you cannot make. And actually, um, right now, parents making songs with their kids is actually a mega use case and it's probably half of my usage, um, which is a lot. I use the product a lot. And so. It's like, right now, this is actually not the biggest focus for us. Like, what we have, like, works pretty well. There are always going to be edge cases. There are edge cases in moderation on every single platform, literally, you know, ever.

• 1:42:22Mikey Shulman?

  And we kind of just work through them as they come.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Jordi Hays?

  What are your conversations like with people in the music industry? There were, there was some news earlier this week around the first, like, AI artist signed a record deal. I don't know if it was actually the first, but that's how it was being reported. How are the conversations with, are going with your users that are like true pro users that are using Suno to either like, you know, experiment with like a bunch of different variations of songs, get new ideas, make entire songs themselves? What are those conversations like?

• 1:42:58Mikey Shulman?

  You know, I think there's been a huge shift in the last six months. I would say like now, I really don't meet a lot of professionals who don't use Suno at least a little bit. Like, songwriters use this a ton. We run a lot of camps. As, it's cliche, but a creative companion or a creative co-pilot for helping craft the right songs, you know, verse by verse or getting ideas. Basically, every producer I know uses Suno. It was recently put to me, just in an incredibly pithy way of, we've become the Ozempic of the music industry. Everybody's on it, but nobody wants to talk about it. And while that might be frustrating for us that in the interim, nobody wants to talk about it, in the long run, that's actually great. You know, in the long run, the fact that everybody is using it and loves it is fantastic.

• 1:43:40Mikey Shulman?

  And so, it's this weird dynamic, I think, where one-on-one, people are quite pro, even though like the industry as a whole may have different feelings about it.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  That's interesting. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how this like, like, the creative, the creative element of this like really throws me because on, on the one hand, I see, if, if I'm thinking about Suno in the creative realm as like, you know, cursor for your...

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  For your DAW, your workstation, your fruity loops, or your Pro Tools, or your Ableton. And you're generating samples and actually working through that. I feel like that is something that, yes, we'd get to 100% penetration, but on the flip side, like, we've had the ability to generate blog posts and text for years now at human touring test level. And yet, like, it does not feel like we're close to just, oh, yeah, just put in a prompt, write a good blog post, and it comes out, and it's good. Like, you still need that spark,

• 1:44:46John Coogan?

  that inspiration. And then, most people, I feel like, are still not, they're still in the copilot era, for sure. And I feel like that's interesting. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:44:58Mikey Shulman?

  I think there's a big difference, though, here. Which is that, there's a few big differences. But for me, you know, hearing you say that, it makes me think a lot of, you're thinking of us largely as a tool. And it's because a lot of AI products are tools. And the point is not to just churn this blog post out. Actually, the point is to have enjoyed the process of it. I happen not to really enjoy the process of writing so much, maybe you guys are different. But like, for us, the way people use Suno, it's like you're coming, yes, there is some song at the end of it that you listen to, and the fruits of your labor are enjoyable, but the journey of doing it is actually why you're there. And so, the actual tool analogy doesn't really work there. Of like, I don't just write in the prompt, and it comes out perfect. That's not even the point here.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Yes. So, I think where I'm getting is that the actual market for AI audio is going to bifurcate, in my opinion. And there will be people, just like, there are people right now that use LLMs to just chat, and just have an AI therapist, or they have a friend, or they just ask ChatGPT-4O for, you know, "Hey, what should I do at work about this?" They're just having a conversation. And then, out of text generation, out of LLMs, we also got just the ability to do code completion. And so, we got, you know, Windsurf, and Cursor, and Codex. And, you know, we got these, like, coding agents. And then, we also got, like,

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  AI therapists. And these are two wildly different things from the same underlying technology. And I feel like- Like, I would, I would, I would just be shocked if you don't see both emerge over time. I mean, maybe the different company comes in and takes one more seriously than you because of the market's really big. But I would, I would imagine that you wind up servicing both to some degree, no?

• 1:46:44Mikey Shulman?

  For sure. I mean, we already service both, but I, you know, I almost think of this as, um, in the coding example.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:49Mikey Shulman?

  You might vibe code something.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:51Mikey Shulman?

  Um, and that's just a few prompts.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Mikey Shulman?

  Um, or you might actually need fine-grained control over the thing and then you use a different tool, like something that's basically auto-completed on steroids.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:00Mikey Shulman?

  I don't mean that in a guarded way. It's like amazing.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:47:03Mikey Shulman?

  Music is the same way. I might vibe, create something and have a session where.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:08Mikey Shulman?

  Music is generally what I'm looking for and I enjoyed the process of getting there. Um, but maybe that's the end of it. And if this is going to be a song that is everlasting and intended to top the charts, I need that fine-grained control and I need a different paradigm and a different set of workflows and tools for doing it. And so, um, there may even be the, the same underlying model that powers both of those things and it's a different end-user application.

• 1:47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you think, uh, like video creation is distinctly different than like music creation? Because I think, you know, on our side, watching the Sora launch, Sora was like a cool creative tool that had this novel like feature that was a cameo feature. But then immediately those outputs just want, wanted to go live elsewhere, right? They wanted to go where these big audiences were. And I feel like with Suno, the difference is like you can create music and you want to save stuff. And it's actually can be very enjoyable to just listen to the content. Um, is that, is that just a, like, do you think that will, do you think that will always be kind of the dynamic?

• 1:48:17Jordi Hays?

  Or do you think eventually like video models will catch up to the point where like people are generating videos? And then just like consuming them a lot, because I haven't, again, like, I think a lot of the, the output of something like a Sora has been like very ephemeral. It gets maybe shared in a group chat or gets shared on another social media platform. But people are not like revisiting the content.

• 1:48:39Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah, I think, look, very fast-moving space. And so, you know, this is just one guy's opinion today. Um, I think there's basically two big differences. One is, um, the joy in making the music. And I think people mostly enjoy consuming the Sora outputs and the, the. Experience of making it is is less interesting. And then the other thing about video in general, but especially AI video is it really tends to short form. And actually, the beauty of music is that it really is meant to grab you for minutes at a time and not seconds at a time. And it makes for a completely different consumptive experience. And so, and I think that's actually a lot of what's broken in music consumption today

• 1:49:21Mikey Shulman?

  is there's so much pressure to put on a song and then put, you know, through headphones and then put your phone in your pocket and not even really pay attention to it. But I I think a lot more is possible where I do have somebody's attention for three minutes, four minutes, and you can actually tell the story through music in a way that like a 30 second video really does not. And so maybe AI video will get there, maybe it will get there in a year, maybe it'll get there in five years, but like today, that's what I see as the the two big differences.

• 1:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. How how do you think the music streaming platforms will navigate AI music?

• 1:49:58Mikey Shulman?

  I I think they, look, they they already are. There's AI music on these platforms. Spotify has announced that they'll start doing AI music. And so I I I very strongly suspect that in like five years, this is not a conversation that's being had because I already know that there's little bits of our music everywhere in in, you know, mega smashes. And the same way, you don't think about like, was this song digitally produced or was it produced on a giant console in a studio somewhere? And that's maybe something that people thought for five years, you know, 30 years ago. I I my my very strong suspicion, or just like autotune, where now every song has autotune in it, even if you can't hear it. My very strong suspicion is that that is where everything ends up.

• 1:50:43Mikey Shulman?

  And the reason is it is better for consumers. It would really be bad for consumers and therefore bad for the size of the ecosystem if these things kind of bifurcate.

• 1:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep, that makes a lot of sense. It's like asking, I don't even think anyone ever asked the question, how will social media apps handle Photoshop? Photoshop was, Photoshop outputs were just immediately, the tool existed prior to social media, so it just proliferated immediately.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  I mean, speaking of Photoshop, Photoshop has had to grapple with the existence of generative images, through partnerships, through rolling their own.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  How important is it to you to play in the market of like the enterprise audio workflows, do deals, partnerships? Because what we saw in the text, in the, at least in code at least, every coding platform, and there were a whole bunch of new ones, like there's been a real battle for the IDE, and I'm wondering if there's like a battle coming for the, the top end of the music production workflow?

• 1:51:52Mikey Shulman?

  I think there probably will be a battle, but it will be not nearly the bloodbath that it will be in other domains. And it's just because the average piece of music today is produced in 800 different tools. And so, and everybody has all of the tools. And so, I actually don't think it's entirely reasonable to think that there will be one tool that uses up all of your screen time. And like, that's going to be the thing that you produce 99% of your music in, if you are a true professional. And so, there, the end goal is the perfect song, and a little bit less the journey of how you got there.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:52:26Mikey Shulman?

  Seeing code, it's like VS Code is just open all the time.

• 1:52:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:30Mikey Shulman?

  And I don't want to have another editor. And if you like, talk to people who develop iOS, they're pissed off because they have two editors. But it's not nearly the same 800 different tools that it is in music.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense.

• 1:52:41Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. This is super interesting. Thank you for coming on to break it down.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was awesome. Thanks so much.

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna- Use Suno to try to make bedtime with the my three and a half year old a little bit easier later tonight. So I'll report back.

• 1:52:59Mikey Shulman?

  I'm

• 1:52:59Jordi Hays?

  What are the best? What are some of your favorite prompts that you use with your kid or kids?

• 1:53:05Mikey Shulman?

  Um, you know, a lot of them are songs. I have a one year old and four year old. It's like still too early for the one year old. A lot of them are um songs about him in fantastical situations. Like my most favorite one is just like last winter after um the the Zamboni driver at the local ice rink let him like riding the Zamboni. And so it was like, like a whole album of songs about him riding in a Zamboni, doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Um, and yeah, they're like very special and personal. And I do go back to those and and um, gosh, yeah, I think this is wonderful. Sometimes we joke if we were a kids app, we'd have five times the revenue that we do. You know, it's just like um, kids is like the most straightforward way to get me to part with my money. I'm sure you're the same way.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally agree. Suno Kids, maybe the iPad, the iPad app.

• 1:53:52Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah, coming next year. No, not actually.

• 1:53:55Jordi Hays?

  So great to meet you, Mikey. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:53:57Mikey Shulman?

  Thanks a lot. Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 1:54:01John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Uh, speaking of kids.

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  So nice to drop the HQ.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, drop the HQ.

• 1:54:11Jordi Hays?

  R I P to numeral HQ.

• 1:54:13John Coogan?

  Speaking of kids, I want your review of this way to decide how to buy a house. So in New York City in 2023, this real estate agent worked with a couple who wanted to purchase purchase an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but they wanted their Pokemon obsessed six year old son to have a say. How? By playing Pokemon in each neighborhood before his parents would commit to a purchase.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  We spent an afternoon covering four neighborhoods as the child played the game and caught Pokémon characters. It turns out that Central Park West was a hotspot for Pokémon Go characters that day, and we toured a two-bedroom co-op that was listed for about $2 million. The child ended up catching a Snorlax as soon as we stepped inside Central Park. A Snorlax is a blue-green character that looks like a bear and is apparently extremely rare to find because it spends the majority of its life asleep. The child is screaming, jumping up and down. He was so excited to find it. Although my clients looked at seven other apartments that day, no other area came close in terms of Pokémon action, so they knew that apartment was the one. They wrote up an offer that same day for the full asking price.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  What's your review? Is that a good way? Is that cute and adorable to bring your kids in?

• 1:55:37Jordi Hays?

  I think it's cute.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Or is it weird?

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  It potentially could lead to total heartbreak, you know, if the kid's just like, "Yeah, this is the Pokémon."

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  It's actually a dry spot now.

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  This is a Pokémon hotspot, and then they're, then the Pokémon dry up a week in after moving in.

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  Good take.

• 1:55:52Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, "What are we doing here? I know we just moved in here, but we gotta, I, I..."

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  We gotta leave.

• 1:55:56Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get closer to the Pokémon.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  We gotta, Mom and Dad, we gotta book a wander. We gotta find our happy place, find our Pokémon hunting spot. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dream beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Um, yeah, I don't know. I, I think, uh, I think I like the idea of bringing the kid, the six-year-old, into the, into the house purchase process, but, uh, let's leave the phones at home and let's develop a taste for, uh, let's become snobs. How about that, six-year-old? Become a snob and say, "No, I, I couldn't live anywhere but..."

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't like the cafe.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  The Upper East Side because I have strong opinions about this. Get into the lore. What happened on this street? That's what the six-year-old should do. I'm fine to delegate to the six-year-old, but not to Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go. Anyway, uh, our next guest is waiting for us in the Restream waiting room. We have Ahmad from Mercury. How you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Great to see you.

• 1:56:58Jordi Hays?

  Hey, good to be back. How you doing?

• 1:57:00John Coogan?

  Great. It's been a little bit. Yeah, it's been a while. A little bit. Give us an update on what's going on in your world, and then I want to just talk about all the crazy stuff that's happening in tech, honestly.

• 1:57:09Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, let's go for it. We just announced today on Fortune Term Sheet that we had three years of profitability.

• 1:57:17Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 1:57:19Immad Akhund?

  Excited about it.

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  All the sound effects.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  That is, that is wild.

• 1:57:28Immad Akhund?

  Full founder mode. Yes, it's been a

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  One weird trick. VCs hate this. VCs hate this. One weird trick. Larry Aman discovers profitability. Congratulations.

• 1:57:40Immad Akhund?

  It's actually really funny. You know, I love my VCs, but there's definitely every, every board meeting, they're like, okay, you know, how can we spend this money a little bit faster?

• 1:57:48Immad Akhund?

  I was actually talking to some CEOs just like last, this week. And yeah, most of the time, like spending more money doesn't mean you grow faster. And that's kind of like what I was trying to celebrate with this milestone that like it's, you know, you should, we're building software companies there. At least we are, but not everyone.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:05Immad Akhund?

  And you don't need to spend money to grow.

• 1:58:07John Coogan?

  I got, I got a pitch for you. You're in a strong financial position. You should put out a press release, say, we don't need a backstop. We don't need a government backstop.

• 1:58:14Jordi Hays?

  No backstop permitted.

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  We are, we are profitable.

• 1:58:17Immad Akhund?

  I didn't know there was a backstop available to me.

• 1:58:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was ready to use, I was ready to, when, when those comments started floating Wednesday, I was ready to use the analogy of like, what would happen if there was a government backstop on venture backed corporate cards?

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Wait, I mean, I mean, truly, you are, you are a bank and you, and you've obviously lived through, you lived through the financial crisis.

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  You can't say he's a bank.

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  No, okay, okay.

• 1:58:41Immad Akhund?

  We're not a bank.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  Not a bank. Partner, but, but you're obviously intimately familiar with the financial system. Do you have any, do you have any unique lessons or stories that you tell from the financial crisis, warning signs that you pull from even just like movies or books or something that you keep going back to is like, you know, we want to stay sharp on this?

• 1:59:05Immad Akhund?

  You know, I think like building trust in what Mercury does has always been, it's actually probably the hardest thing we do, right? Because, you know, we're asking a lot from people, we're storing all their money for their business. And, you know, it's like, I had this conversation when we first launched Mercury with someone who'd raised $10 million, and he was like, this is more money than I've ever seen in my whole life. I'm not going to give it to a startup banking service. And now we have customers that have more than 100 million with Mercury. So like, building that trust is always so important. And, you know, obviously, I don't know which financial crisis you were referring to.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  I was in 2008, actually. But I do want to talk about SVB as well.

• 1:59:42Immad Akhund?

  It's like the SVB crisis.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  Take us through the SVB crisis. Yeah. What were the biggest lessons from the SVB crisis?

• 1:59:53Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing for us was, it can't just be all talk, right? Like, if I, you know, and I was talking to founders, saying like, hey, you should trust Mercury. And they'd be like, oh, man, like SVB is a 40 year old company. And they're just like, you know, are dying. Why should we trust Mercury? And then, you know, what we did, and what we've continued to kind of invest in is to make it so it's not just about trusting Mercury, it's about like, having products that deliver like trust. So, you know, we have like accelerated FDIC insurance, which is, you know, I guess on the website, we published 5 million, but it's actually, most accounts get way more than 5 million. So, almost all the deposits that sit at Mercury are FDIC insured. And that was the big thing. I think SVB was at 80 ish percent uninsured deposits.

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  And that's just because, just for anybody that's not super familiar, that's because they had standard 200 quarter million dollar of FDIC insurance, but almost every account had well beyond that, because

• 2:00:51Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, exactly. Especially VC backed businesses, you know.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  And also in a zero interest rate environment, in a zero interest rate environment, you're like, I'm just going to keep it in the checking account. I raised a $5 million seed, I'll just literally keep it in the checking account. Because like, what's the point? If I move it to some other vehicle, I'm going to earn 0.5% or 0.1%. Now, it's now it's a different environment.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Was it always the plan to get profitable, stay profitable as fast as reasonably possible? I think like

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  Or did that happen because of SVB?

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  If people are trusting you as a financial platform institution, it's not exactly comforting to know that you're burning money and your financial institution.

• 2:01:28Immad Akhund?

  Because I think the other, you know, the other thing that was part of SVB was, like, people just had so little time to move all of their banking operations. And it's just like, there's so much reliant on a bank account for a business.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  It was such a funny moment. I was with SVB, it collapsed, and I was like, I need to go someplace less risky. I'm going to First Republic. And then that collapsed too.

• 2:01:49Immad Akhund?

  It happened to a lot of people.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  But that feels like an even older, I don't know which one's actually older. I think First Republic was older, but it was this odd thing.

• 2:01:56Immad Akhund?

  I think First Republic was a little younger, I believe.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  Total refutation of the Lindy principle. It was like, actually go to Mercury. Would have been better off. Sorry.

• 2:02:06Immad Akhund?

  I was gonna say, I think one of the parts of that was like, you rely so much of operations. And it's even more extreme for Mercury customers because, you know, we do more than banking. So we do people's credit cards and invoicing. And, you know, we've been building more and more features and our customers are reliant on a broader set of features. So, you know, I think part of like being profitable and sustaining profitability is being, you know, making that promise to our customers that this is like something that's going to stick around. So if they use us, it's not like, you know, one day we don't raise a funding round or, you know, whatever.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

• 2:02:38Immad Akhund?

  There's like a crash or something and people have to like worry about that.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:42Immad Akhund?

  So it's definitely like a core part of that, kind of having that trusted service.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Where are you guys getting the most leverage from AI?

• 2:02:51Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, good question. The biggest thing we've done is like back office stuff. There's just a, to run a fintech, especially kind of on the banking side, there's just a ton of people that have to do a lot of back office things. And, you know, it's like, you have to upload a formation document and someone has to review it. And, you know, there's, all of these things are very ripe for AI to just, you know, smooth it out, either like automate a hundred percent or automate eighty percent so that like a human can just review the answers. So, yeah, lots of stuff on compliance risk back office has been our biggest investment. We've got lots of, you know, I'm not I guess a lot of what we do at Mercury is like not kind of follow fads or whatever.

• 2:03:32Immad Akhund?

  So we have, we've done a bunch of things that are user facing, but you know, we try to add like little bits of value here and there. So yeah, we have a chat bot. So you can ask it questions and that's been actually, actually it's solved like 40% of tickets. Customer questions are just like, you know, hey, when's, you know, how long does it take for a wire to settle and like that? Yeah, those kinds of questions. And that's just a better customer experience. And you know, we think about.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  And that's 40% over the baseline of like, cause most, most, uh, most customer support systems, like what if you email in, it would just previously do like fuzzy database search to be like, oh, it seems like you're asking about this FAQ. You got a 40% lift on top of that because you were already out doing best practices, I imagine.

• 2:04:15Immad Akhund?

  Um, yes, it's a bit more complicated because we still have that email system when people email it in. So this did replace like the suggested topics and like the live messaging system.

• 2:04:28Immad Akhund?

  So yeah, I don't know exactly.

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  What about on the cost side?

• 2:04:31Immad Akhund?

  The suggested answers was way, way less because people don't like reading those suggested things. Like they just want an answer and they move on.

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  What about on the cost side? Uh, we were talking to Ivan Notion. He said that, uh, his inference bill was actually having an effect on his gross margins. You've remained profitable, but if I'm looking deeper in your financials, will I see an uptick in inference bills? Based on actually, is that something that you're actually trying to manage as you stay profitable? Or has it been low enough that it just like?

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think it's wildly different. I think using it in back off, back office context where you're sort of processing forms and PDFs and things like that. Versus Ivan where people are like, I'm going to generate, you know, trillions of tokens because I'm just making long documents and.

• 2:05:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:05:20Immad Akhund?

  On the back office side, it's mostly been a cost saving, right? Like you're, uh, you're kind of giving leverage to humans and.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Or you're moving off of like a mechanical turk or scale or something like that.

• 2:05:30Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, exactly. And yeah, on the user facing side, it's, you know, I think a big difference for us is, you know, we have. Two hundred thousand plus customers, but it's not that many customers, right? Like, uh, a lot of like consumer services of millions of customers. Like each of our customers is obviously like much more valuable.

• 2:05:48John Coogan?

  And also, you, you, you probably don't have like a ton of DA, DA. I mean, you probably have a lot of DAUs, but you don't. It, it, it's not the app that people open when they wake up.

• 2:05:55Immad Akhund?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  You know?

• 2:05:56Immad Akhund?

  I mean.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  It's a great.

• 2:05:57Immad Akhund?

  It's much more utility than productivity, right?

• 2:06:00John Coogan?

  Like, people are actually kind of happy if they don't need to open. Exactly. And so, and so the inference is just gonna be so much lower than if Instagram is all of a sudden being like, we're gonna run an L L M query on every, on every, you know, photo that gets uploaded. It's like, okay, well, that's a huge amount of inference.

• 2:06:16Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 2:06:16Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, and we're doing more and more though, so, you know, potentially, uh, you know, when you're churning through all these transactions will go up. I don't expect for us, we also make way more on a per customer basis than, actually, I don't know about Notion, but than like most prosumer consumer type things. Uh, so I think it would net out that it would be a smallish percentage.

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:06:35Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you seeing across your angel portfolio?

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Like, you've been, you've been investing like, like.

• 2:06:44Immad Akhund?

  I guess for context, I've, I've done about three hundred and fifty investments in the last ten years.

• 2:06:51Immad Akhund?

  I don't know if I need to go.

• 2:06:56Immad Akhund?

  And I just actually announced, uh, earlier this year, um, I, I have like a formal angel fund now. Uh, it was a twenty six million, uh, kind of angel fund. I mean, I'm still mostly investing in the same way. Uh, I mostly invest because it's just fun to talk to founders. And I guess the same reason you guys run this podcast is like interesting to talk to founders and learn, learn new ideas. Uh, uh, you know, it's all, it's very A I focused right now, as you can imagine. Uh, you know, what's, I think A I is kind of fun to invest in because like every six months what you're investing in like changes a lot. Right? Like for a while it was kind of dev tools in A I and now I feel like that's done. Uh, so most of what I see right now is kind of deeper, vertical, uh, kind of B two B applications of A I.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  Do you think A I gives people the permission to invest in more unique categories?

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  Because basically like there there used to be like a whole set of categories that were just kind of like small businesses or industrials or some niche, some weird niche thing. And they would just be kind of off limits because it would be like, oh, no, no, no. Like the real money is made in in fintech, the real money is made in maybe maybe ed tech, but that one's difficult or ad tech or marketing martech. You know, it's like there were these easy themes, but with AI you can go and and actually put together a pitch around something that's maybe more or less untouched by tech and actually generate a deck.

• 2:08:30Immad Akhund?

  It's definitely like a, you know, this extension of the software is eating the world kind of vibe that Mark Andreessen talks about, right?

• 2:08:37John Coogan?

  A little bit more of the world on the edges.

• 2:08:39Immad Akhund?

  Like 10, 10 ish years ago, it was all like social and mobile, right? Like, that's where everything was. And then we started doing like even Mercury is like 10 years ago was probably off limits to like try to make a something that went after the banking market. And I remember when I started in 2017, it was like, you know, it sounded weird, right? Like it was, it was, it was not something that was done. I think the thing that AI does is like open up labor, right? Like in robotics, it opens up physical labor. And then in the case of kind of the white collar workers, it opens up like human kind of intellectual labor. And that is like a whole set of categories. So, you know, people generally VCs hate services firms, right? Like it's like they'll

• 2:09:23Immad Akhund?

  be like, oh, that's like a services firm. But now like services firms are cool. You're like, oh, yeah, it's human, it's human as AI plus human services firms are like the thing that a lot of people are investing in, ideally trying to get to like fully human only. So fully AI only. But yeah, it's definitely like opened up a lot of industries that wouldn't have been interesting from a investment perspective.

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Do you think people have been overly bearish on on SaaS? It's, you know, notable that OpenAI uses everything from Salesforce to Slack to Qualtrics. And I imagine you use a lot of on your business. I don't think anybody's out there saying, you know, I'm going to vibe code a bank, you know, even if they could, even if you could somehow build that on like a banking as a service platform, it's like the, the level, you know, the amount of work you need to do to maintain a vibe coded. Bank on top of, you know, it just doesn't make sense.

• 2:10:21Immad Akhund?

  And really, I mean, I think there will be a wave of disruption that will happen in SaaS, but I don't think the answer will be everyone's just making their own end to end like Salesforce. Like that just, that sounds ridiculous to me. I do, I mean, I hope someone builds a much better Salesforce. But it'll still, yeah, and maybe their pricing won't be like per seat and it'll be like per sale or whatever. But I think the category will exist, the shape of the category will change, the business model will change. But I don't think the answer is everyone's building their own Salesforce. Like that just, that just sounds inefficient. Like it just sounds ridiculous to me, but there will be like, I think actually like the incremental new applications people build will actually make, will just be more applications, right? Like if the number of vendors you had was like 10 and like you're paying a lot,

• 2:11:06Immad Akhund?

  like maybe you'll have another 90 internal apps that like people just made for like small use cases. So like the amount of software people will use will go up, I think because of vibe coding and the ease of coding. But I don't think like these big categories are going to just disappear because like people cannot make it themselves.

• 2:11:24Jordi Hays?

  And do you think, do you think companies will go multi-product sooner? And are you seeing that across the portfolio if like the engineering, actual engineering hours are less to go from, you know, one product to a second to a third, that, that will just encourage, you know, more companies to try to.

• 2:11:39Immad Akhund?

  I think it's going to be like industry specific.

• 2:11:43Immad Akhund?

  I mean, I think a big story about fintech in the last couple of years has been like every fintech going multi-product, right? I think it's partly because, you know, when we started in 2019, like no one was building like a better neo-bank. So that's, you know, that's all it took. Like our first product was a bank account and it was like really good. Now to compete against Mercury, you would have to have, you know, bill pay and credit cards and invoicing because like that's just what people look for. Like they look for more of a bundle product. So I think it depends where you're competing and in, to some extent, it gets a little easier because you can just make products quicker.

• 2:12:21Immad Akhund?

  But making like amazing products is, is never easy, right? Like I think you just like, like the quality and craft and all of that like do matter. And, you know, we try to invest a lot. Like when we make a new product, it's never easy. It's like, it takes a lot to make an amazing product. But when you're like very new to a category and like almost everything in AI is like very new, you can build more quicker and then like kind of refine it over time. But it's a good question. I think a lot of the ways people will end up competing with incumbents. Like I've heard a ton of like, I know why we're picking on Salesforce, but I've heard a lot of like, how do we beat Salesforce kind of strategies? And a lot of them are like, oh, actually, we're going to bundle like AI, SDR and some X and Y.

• 2:13:03Immad Akhund?

  And like, we're going to make it like a much more fully featured kind of version of like Salesforce.

• 2:13:10Immad Akhund?

  So I think like, when you're competing against incumbents, like doing a bundle strategy sometimes is like a better strategy. So like, we'll see that play out.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations to the whole team.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Three-year milestone. Looking forward to the fourth, the fifth, sixth, and hopefully hundreds of years of Mercury profitability. You gotta get past the SVV mark.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Become the longest-standing institution.

• 2:13:36Immad Akhund?

  It's funny, they were started like a year before I was born. So I have this like exact mental model of like, they were started 42 years ago.

• 2:13:45Immad Akhund?

  Maybe I'll stop thinking about that when they're going to further down.

• 2:13:49Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much.

• 2:13:50Immad Akhund?

  But yeah, really appreciate you having me on.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congrats to the whole team.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:13:55John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:13:55Immad Akhund?

  Bye.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  You heard about the importance of AI agents for customer service? You gotta head over to fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-off.

• 2:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Bake-off world champion.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  Ranking on G2. And he was also mentioning better CRMs. Why not try out Adio? Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Brett Adcock fired back at the hype around OneX presumably. Figure CEO Brett Adcock says his, quote, "Major competitors are using tele-operation, human operators in their videos," and calls it deceiving. Does, will he call out OneX by name? Will he call out Elon by name? Will he call out Unitree by name? Let's find out by watching this clip.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  His analogy, it's like if a self-driving car pulled up and we found out there was some guy

• 2:14:49Speaker 07

  Tennessee. A demonstration of a robot doing something that's like not teleopt or like coded. And what you're seeing now in the world is like, I would say most major competitor to us at this point are putting out most of their content and updates teleopt from a human. And I think it's like, perhaps some of the most deceiving things I've ever seen. It's like, if I was driving a self-driving car, if a self-driving car pulled up next to us and we found out there was some guy from Tennessee driving it, we'd both be like, that's not what I thought this would look like. What you want to see is-

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  So the funny thing is that, Tyler, why are you laughing at that?

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's like, exactly how self-driving cars work right now.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Teleopt is actually maybe critical to the development of full self-driving cars and maybe used by all the top companies all the time. Yes, I mean, it is odd that like-

• 2:15:44Jordi Hays?

  I thought that, I thought it, I thought it was, I think it's like a key, it's, it's the key enabler for OneX to actually get robots in homes and getting them to a point where they can do valuable work.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Right? And they're gonna be taking a loss on, they're gonna be taking a loss on that, they're charging like $2 an hour, but that's gonna be, you know, a flywheel for them to, to get more and more training data.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Oh, the founder of OneX actually replied, I think, Dar, that's the founder, right?

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  No, Dar's not the founder.

• 2:16:17John Coogan?

  Oh, but he's just the loudest voice on X, so I give him all the credit.

• 2:16:20Jordi Hays?

  He's one of the-

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  He created OneX, it would be nothing without him. Anyway, he says, so basically Waymo, there were two operators to every car when Waymo started. It is interesting that, yeah, Waymo has never, that I know of, they've never really like published data on how many operators they have per car. I think that that would actually give people a lot of reassurance around like, okay, these cars are driving around, are there people over watching them? And then you just get to a point where you say, okay, yeah, there's, there's 10,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And then next year, there's 8,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And eventually there's 5,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And then eventually there's 1,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And eventually there's one operator for 5,000 cars. But it's just

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  a slow process of getting people up to speed on the, on the new technology. And it just gives people co- uh, like confidence at every turn, much like the confidence that I feel when I go to sleep on my eighth sleep. How'd you feel? How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? Uh, 88 from me, seven hours, 38 minutes. I want to hear if that soundboard still has my favorite song on it.

• 2:17:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you got an 88? I'll give it to you.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  Wait, do we tie?

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I got an 83.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Oh, 83, okay.

• 2:17:35Jordi Hays?

  Rough one, rough one.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  Well, we have breaking news from the Pope. He chimed in on the AI bubble. Some bub talk from the, from the papacy. Papal bull.

• 2:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Is that a top signal?

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  On the bub talk. No, no, it's not, it's not on the bub. It's not on the bubble. It is, is about, is on the, is from the Pope though, who I should be following. Why am I not following the Pope? Uh, technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The church therefore calls all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life. I like that.

• 2:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Good line.

• 2:18:30John Coogan?

  Liquidity thinks it's AI-generated slop. Barry Barish.

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Yes, he used one M dash. Like, the M dash is not a telltale sign. You can just use one if you're just hammering on the keyboard. Or you can just write a note and then in the edit, someone can use an M dash. I don't know. Is the Pope one shotted? We'll never know. I think this is fine. I think this is a nice little call to action. What, what, what do you think Tyler? You put this in here, right?

• 2:18:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, what are you guys doing if, if the Pope comes out and says like, I don't, I actually don't care about AI margins. What are you doing?

• 2:19:07John Coogan?

  Uh, I would be extremely bullish on that. What I'm worried about is the Pope coming out and being like, actually like, I've discovered some novel physics. I've been chatting, I've been talking to Grok and I've been talking to ChatGPT for just like thousands of hours.

• 2:19:19Jordi Hays?

  People don't think about the recursiveness in the Bible.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, yeah, recursiveness in the Bible. Actually, it's crazy, you know, I'm the Pope of the Catholic Church, but I've been getting into polytheism recently. I went down a rabbit hole and I think there might be more than one God. I think there's multiple gods.

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, AB in the chat says, gotta get the Pope on Vanta. Totally agree.

• 2:19:40John Coogan?

  100%.

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  I, I think it would be, the, the, it'd be interesting if the Pope started coming out and said, we're exploring taking equity stakes in technology companies like, uh, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we gotta get the Pope on Bezel, cause your Bezel Concierge is available now. The source we already watched on the planet. Seriously, any watch, uh.

• 2:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Pope already has the, the drop top six wheel G-Wagon.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  Is it six wheels?

• 2:20:07Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  No way. I always thought it was a rules, you know, it is a G-Wagon, but there's, I feel like he has a wild set of cars. Uh, it's.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  No, it's not, it's not six wheels.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  No, it's not six wheels. Six wheels would be so.

• 2:20:18Jordi Hays?

  But it is a one of one and they made it, they made an EV.

• 2:20:21John Coogan?

  I love it. Um, speaking of EVs, the Ford F-150 Lightning is potentially going out of production.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  It, it, it is, it is close to failing. Uh, the Wall Street Journal has a story on the front page talking about, um, where is this? Pull that up. The Ford F-1, uh, Ford ways ending electric F-150 truck. Uh, executives at Ford Motor are in active discussions, active talks.

• 2:20:54Jordi Hays?

  We love active talks.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Uh, about scrapping the electric version of the F-150. People familiar with the matter said, which would make the unprofitable truck the US's first major EV casualty. Maybe this is, do you think this is all triggered by, uh, TJ Parker?

• 2:21:12Jordi Hays?

  Possible.

• 2:21:13John Coogan?

  World famous venture capitalist and founder himself. He bought a Ford, but he didn't buy an electric one. He bought a Raptor R. Why, they should make, why don't they make the electric one like the Raptor R?

• 2:21:28Jordi Hays?

  Like with an internal combustion engine?

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. I feel like if they want people to buy the electric version of the truck, they should give it like an exhaust and an engine and.

• 2:21:37Jordi Hays?

  A real engine note.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, a real engine note.

• 2:21:40Jordi Hays?

  When I had my Raptor, I.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  And it's more cylinders.

• 2:21:43Jordi Hays?

  People, anytime I was on a call in the car.

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:47Jordi Hays?

  People would assume that I was driving a sports car because there's so much.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  Oh, it's insane.

• 2:21:51Jordi Hays?

  Engine noise in the cabin. It was ridiculous.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the Raptor R has, how many cylinders does it have? Is it an eight, a V8? It is, right?

• 2:22:00Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was a.

• 2:22:01John Coogan?

  So, so it has, it has eight cylinders. The, the F-150 Lightning had zero cylinders.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  That could be why it's not selling very well.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  The, the Ford Raptor R had 5.2 liters in its engine. The F-150 Lightning had a zero liter engine because it didn't have one. So, uh, it makes sense why this, uh, has been struggling. Um, and we will, we'll see what they wind up doing.

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  We gotta change the subject because all this Raptor talks got me thinking about getting one again and.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Pull the trigger. Uh, well, if you think it's bullish or bearish that Ford is pulling the Raptor. No, they're going, they're doubling down on the Raptor. They're pulling the Lightning. Uh, head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Um.

• 2:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Quadrillion.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  What else is going on in the markets?

• 2:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Hero Nada says, uh, my inbox is full of people breathlessly trying to interpret this and it is one-year look at Spy.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  A slight dip.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  You can interpret this in two seconds. It's over. It's just completely over. The bubble popped. Now it's ready to start rebuilding.

• 2:23:07Jordi Hays?

  It was a good run.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  We can go up from here. Cause the bubble has popped. You're welcome.

• 2:23:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  It was rough. We got through it. We are now.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  It's almost a weekend.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  We are now past the trough of disillusionment. We're in the plateau of productivity.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  It's good.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  That's what I see.

• 2:23:20Jordi Hays?

  It's good. It's good. And, and pretty soon, oh, the stocks have already stopped trading.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:25Jordi Hays?

  So we're safe now.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  We're safe. They can't hurt us anymore.

• 2:23:28Jordi Hays?

  The economy can't hurt you on the weekend.

• 2:23:30John Coogan?

  Um, there's, there's, there's so many more charts. It's really chart talk time. Consumer sentiment almost back to its record low. People are not happy with consumer sentiment right now.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  You see this too, uh,

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 2:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Bank of America.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:45Jordi Hays?

  Just, uh, as of yesterday, just fully recovered.

• 2:23:49John Coogan?

  Nineteen years.

• 2:23:49Jordi Hays?

  From the global financial crisis.

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Took nineteen.

• 2:23:52John Coogan?

  Took the day and then it's like back in another crisis. Can you imagine? It's like, no, we just dug our way out of the hole. Uh, no, fantastic, uh, famously backstopped by none other than Warren Buffett.

• 2:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been interesting to follow. I mean, Berkshire Hathaway is green this week.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  He's got so much cash.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  So much cash.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Building cash pile.

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  So it's 1.07 trillion.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  Maybe the least AGI-pilled person in the world.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  Cash pills.

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if, imagine if, uh, Berkshire Hathaway just comes in and, and just acquires like ninety percent of OpenAI.

• 2:24:32John Coogan?

  He likes those authentic greenbacks. AG, what's, what's the I for? Uh, authentic greenback incentives. I don't know.

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Daniel, Daniel Eath says, uh, is commenting, um, so Nvidia put out something.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, on, on Wednesday, so as I've long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI. It's vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide. Uh, Daniel says, this is an insane statement. America is more than nanoseconds ahead of China in AI. The actual gap is months and it would be larger too if Nvidia stopped the flow of advanced GPUs to China. So putting him in the truth zone.

• 2:25:17Jordi Hays?

  There was some more information on the Snap.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  Snapchat deal.

• 2:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Deal. Snap gets 400 million, which is greater than perplexity's total revenue. Snap, uh, gives nothing except access to.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's more? What? They're, they're, they're paying more than their revenue?

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  How, how, we, how does that work?

• 2:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity is taking VC dollars, giving them to Snap for distribution. There's also, there's also an equity, all the Snap holders are-

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  Okay, sorry, this is extremely confusing, let's read this. Uh, the deal looks incredibly in Snap's favor. Snap gets $400 million, greater than Perplexity total revenue. Now, Signal is saying this is most likely 399 million of Perplexity equity to Snap, not cash. So there is a question about how much of it is cash, um, versus, so, yeah, the, uh, the, the raise VC dollars, give it to Snap is one theory, but it is possible that they're just giving $400 million of equity, like a stock grant.

• 2:26:22Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it's a, it's some split.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they, they published it.

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  But, like, like Signal's thesis is that it's, it's 399 million of equity and like 1 million of cash. And, and so it's basically just like, like, we want distribution in Snap and we're willing to give you equity to pay for it because 400 million on 20 billion is 2% of the company, right? Something like that?

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  It's crazy. 2% of the company. Snap gives nothing except access to an unloved AI chat. Perplexity gets indirect access to zero income teens. Sasha is not a fan of this deal. Uh, Spiegel negotiation masterclass.

• 2:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Go back to the conversation we were having, uh, I think Saturday. We were, uh, we had a couple hour drive and we were basically doing a podcast with no, no mics, but I was saying I was surprised that Snapchat has not figured out a way to just monetize all the capital that a lot of these, uh, consumer AI companies have, given their massive, massive user base.

• 2:27:20John Coogan?

  Well, well, it's because, it's because the, the numbers are like all flipped around. Like, like Snap is, is, I think, like way more mature on all the business metrics and yet worth half perplexity, right? Like, look at the, look at the difference in terms of like business metrics, DAUs, uh, paid views-

• 2:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity does not want-

• 2:27:44Jordi Hays?

  Will not want people comping it to Snap in their next financing.

• 2:27:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's odd. I don't know. It's it's it's some sort of like, you know, dance to actually integrate these two things. Tane says Snap will be integrating perplexity directly into Snapchat's chat interface. Perplexity will play will pay Snap $400 million over a year in a mix of cash and stock as part of the deal and gets access to Snap's 900 million monthly active users.

• 2:28:16Jordi Hays?

  AB in the chat, Snapchat's gonna accidentally build AGI just trying to make the dog filter blink realistically.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  What do you think Tyler's had a pathway to AGI?

• 2:28:29Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, look, Spiegel, I mean, Spiegel might be back.

• 2:28:33John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 2:28:34Speaker 02

  I mean, look, we know someone who was previously.

• 2:28:38John Coogan?

  What do you think he actually, what do you think he actually gets? What do you think he actually gets? I have a lot of trouble understanding what perplexity is because it's it's it's somewhat of an application layer company, but a lot of the APIs, a lot of the foundation model products like do deep research. Some of them have news hooks already. So if my choice like like Apple could have gone to perplexity, they went to Gemini, like, does Gemini give you search results the way perplexity? Like perplexity's initial pitch was it's a LLM, but there's no cutoff and we'll search the web for you. I feel like most of the LLMs just do that out of the box now. And so like, what are you getting when you partner with perplexity over something else? What's the difference?

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  You're getting cash. That's why I think, no, I think a lot of this deal had to have been cash because I think if I'm Evan Spiegel and I'm looking at like perplexity's revenue and user base relative to his own.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:29:35Jordi Hays?

  And you're not.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Okay, so help me understand this math. If I'm if I'm Apple, how many how many DA used does Apple have? Is it it's like the same size as Snapchat, right? In terms of like actual iPhone users, it's got to be a billion, right? There's like a billion iPhone users, something like that?

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  I think it's more, uh, like 1.5.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Okay, so and then Snapchat has like 400. Oh, wait, no, Snapchat is almost a billion, uh, M A U's, but D A U's is like 400, right?

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, like 470.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Okay, so let's say that, so let's say that Snapchat is roughly 40% as many users as Apple. So it's 40% to Apple's, you know, billion plus, 1.5 billion.

• 2:30:25John Coogan?

  Apple is paying Google 1 billion. Snapchat could potentially go and pay Google for access to Gemini 40% as much, right? Because they're 40% the size. So they could pay 400 million and get the exact same quality of, of AI product that Apple is vending, you'd think, because Apple says, hey, or Google goes to Apple and says, hey, you want to service a billion users? That'll be $1 billion. Oh, you want to service 400 million users? That'll be $400 million. Because it's billion, because it's basically a dollar a user.

• 2:31:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  Google's basically charging a dollar a user. But perplexity is in the opposite scenario where they're paying for the right as opposed to the other way around.

• 2:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  This is the flip.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  The definition of perplexity is inability to deal with or understand something complicated or unaccountable.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  It's perplexing. I, it is perplexing.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  Similar to confusion, bewilderment, puzzlement.

• 2:31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this was a little bit of my, of my question with Mark Gurman, and he was like, no, no, no. And he kept shutting it down. And I think he has a strong opinion, and he might wind up being right. But his, uh, my take was, was when, when a platform, when an aggregator partners with a foundation model lab, which direction should the money flow? And he was like, obviously, it should flow from the application layer to the foundation model app. So obviously, Apple should pay Google because

• 2:31:51John Coogan?

  Google is inventing a technology and then selling that technology to Apple.

• 2:31:55Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think again, it would have looked a lot different. It would have been flipped if Apple was just, if Gemini was becoming the default assistant within Apple, which they would never probably allow, right?

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  Well, they would if they're getting paid.

• 2:32:09Jordi Hays?

  Potentially if they were getting paid $20 billion.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. Which is like how I think this plays out, actually.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  I think somebody, maybe it's OpenAI, but I think somebody will be paying Apple for the right to funnel those LLM queries wherever they want and take the cut, just like what happens in search. But that's a hot take and I, I, I respect people that don't agree with me.

• 2:32:30Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Deutsche Bank is exploring ways to hedge its exposure to AI to data centers. It's looking at options, including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks and buying default protection via synthetic risk transfers. So they're hedge.

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  So they've, so they've bet big on data center financing. The scale of the expenditure on AI infrastructure has prompted concerns that a bubble is forming with some likening the enthusiasm to that which preceded the dot com crash. Skeptics have pointed out that billions of dollars have been deployed in an untested industry with assets that quickly depreciate in value due to rapid change in technology.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  Stream Yimby in the comments says, if there's one thing Deutsche Bank is really good at, it's being very exposed.

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  So in recent months, Deutsche Bank has provided debt financing to Swedish group Eco Data Center, as well as the Canadian company 5C, who together raised more than $1 billion to fuel their expansion. The investment bank does not break down how much money it has lent to the sector, but it's estimated to be in the billions of dollars. Hedging exposure to the industry could prove difficult because betting against a basket of AI-related stocks in a booming market will be expensive. Meanwhile, SRT transactions require a diversified pool of loans to earn a rating and investors to likely higher, uh, demand higher premiums. Hyperscaler pursuit of superintelligence has fueled demands for infrastructure that will help them build it. I mean, this is everyone from the, uh, from

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  the haunted mansion proprietor. Like everyone is getting in on the action. Like a few years ago, like the, like it was like, if you have anything that's related to AI, like go, go, go, raise money, grow it, uh, spin it, flip it.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  Turn it around, pivot it, whatever you want to do. Uh, Europe is expecting a wave of deal making consolidation in digital infrastructure. And the cost estimate from the Financial Times on the total AI build out, three trillion, three trillion bucks, um, pretty wild times. Uh, Business Insider has a scoop here that Google is looking to invest in Anthropic

• 2:34:38Jordi Hays?

  Early discussions.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  At a $350 billion valuation. Um, it's interesting. Anthropic seems what, one quarter the revenue of OpenAI? And yet, from a vibe perspective, from a, from a public attention, from a PR crisis perspective, Anthropic used to be in trouble every other week because Dario would be out there being like, paperclip, we're gonna paperclip everyone, you know, we're gonna get rid of everyone's job. And it was like, really aggressive, right? Uh, and so like, like, they had to back stuff up, they had to back stuff, they had to back stop their comms a couple of times. But it's been great. And Dario's looked great for the last six months. And he's just been beating the drum on, hey, there's a, there's geopolitical considerations

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  here with China, but overall, we're, we're building and we're happy to be an API. We're happy to be, we're, we're happy to help businesses. Yeah, generate code.

• 2:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Running, running the experiment of like highly focused lab.

• 2:35:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Versus highly, not distracted, but they're taking a lot of shots on goal with OpenAI.

• 2:35:44John Coogan?

  We could, we could be looking back on this in a couple of years and being like, man, they really missed erotica, they really missed slop.

• 2:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Consumer electronics.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  They missed consumer electronics. It's possible. But on the flip side, it does seem like they've built a, you know, a bit of an elegant business and it seems to align well with, uh, Google's strategy.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  And every hyperscaler wants a piece of it.

• 2:36:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, similar to how, uh, Microsoft has access to OpenAI models on Azure, you know, Google, uh, bringing Anthropic in, uh, through an increased investment. Also, I, I just wonder, is it hard to do a deal at 350B these days in the venture community? Like, there was already that reporting that Dario had to go all over the world to scrap together the last round? And I'm wondering if there's a world where you, if you're trying to raise $40 billion, you should just go to the hyperscalers.

• 2:36:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, they're using every possible capital source. Yeah. We've seen some of these SPVs that have like, you know, 0% carry, 10% management fee.

• 2:36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Up front, so we're tapping everything.

• 2:36:42John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Jordy, where do you want to go next?

• 2:36:52Jordi Hays?

  I think we should bring on our next guest, our first and only in person guest.

• 2:36:58John Coogan?

  Jordan Castro.

• 2:36:59Jordi Hays?

  A day.

• 2:36:59John Coogan?

  He's here live in the TVP in El Grande Dome and we will bring.

• 2:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Muscle Man himself.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  He is the author of Muscle Man and the novelist. Wait, you're, you're, was that your first novel? Did you write a novel called The Novelist?

• 2:37:12Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  What inspired that? That's, it's kind of like, it's recursive.

• 2:37:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, I wanted to say first of all, thanks for having me.

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:37:20Speaker 08

  You know, I, yeah, I, and shouts out to Norman Plays in the chat. Someone just showed me, they said, I'm here for Jordan Castro.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go.

• 2:37:29Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Shout out Norman.

• 2:37:32Speaker 08

  But yeah, I, I, I write novels, but also, you know, you guys had the Pope up talking about the Pope and I, I work with this guy Luke Burgess with this thing called the Clooney Institute.

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 2:37:43Speaker 08

  And one of the things I've noticed, it's sort of, we sort of do stuff at the intersection of like what we say Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley. And so sort of bringing religious wisdom into the tech conversation. But so I've been like, I'm not really related to tech, but I've been like at all these different like talks and so on about tech and whatever. And I noticed that when people normally talk about AI, they sound like AI. They immediately just sound like AI. And when you guys were doing your AI quadrant thing, I was like, they sound like people.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:38:09Speaker 08

  And I was like, I'm like, why do I like?

• 2:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for people.

• 2:38:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, let's give it up for people. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I was like, why do I like TVPN? You know, because I shouldn't like, I mean, you know, I shouldn't like it or whatever. And I was like, well, because you guys like talk like people and you talk about people. You know what I'm saying? And so much of the conversation about tech.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was, it was very deliberate to put the faces of the people there, not the logos of the companies.

• 2:38:30Speaker 08

  Yeah. And I noticed that they weren't. Particularly flattering photos.

• 2:38:34John Coogan?

  Photos?

• 2:38:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:38:35Speaker 08

  You mean, we didn't make them into GigaChads?

• 2:38:36John Coogan?

  We, a lot of times, we'll give them muscle. Well, we will literally make the muscle man. We have fun with that.

• 2:38:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  For that, that decision was actually more just about like, how do you actually fit them all in? Like, if you make them the muscle man, then you have to make it smaller. You can't see their facial features. No, I mean, some of those photos are like their hero photo. That like their comms department clearly like put on their Wikipedia page or something. I don't know.

• 2:38:58Speaker 08

  Hey, man, that's.

• 2:38:58John Coogan?

  Or like their corporate photo. You don't always get to pick what photo is, becomes you on the internet, but sometimes.

• 2:39:04Speaker 08

  Trust me, I know. When people get mad at me on Twitter, I've been publishing since I was like six.

• 2:39:07John Coogan?

  Oh, do they go find a stupid photo of you?

• 2:39:08Speaker 08

  They find pictures of me like in high school, wearing like a pink button up and they post it in their, you know, comment.

• 2:39:12John Coogan?

  That makes sense. That makes sense, yeah. Yeah, I've, I've, I've, I've some silly photos from, from, of, of old that I'm sure will resurface when people want to dunk on me. Uh, what, break this post down for me, actually. What, what was your read on this? So technological innovation can.

• 2:39:26Speaker 08

  You think he used AI for it?

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  Do you think he did?

• 2:39:29Speaker 08

  Well, I think the worst, actually, uh, the, the worst thing about AI is that people are saying you can't use M dashes.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:39:36Speaker 08

  And I love the M dash.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So I don't love the M dash. Like, it's not that I hate it. I'm just indifferent to it. I didn't, I don't even know where it is on the keyboard. And so like.

• 2:39:45Speaker 08

  It's, uh.

• 2:39:45John Coogan?

  You do minus sign, minus sign, and then space, I think, to decorate one?

• 2:39:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think you.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  I mean, I know.

• 2:39:51Speaker 08

  Double tap, double tap space, shift, option, dash.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  So like.

• 2:39:55Speaker 08

  Isn't it just double tap space?

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  And I go here.

• 2:39:57Speaker 08

  You can double tap it, but sometimes it doesn't show.

• 2:39:59John Coogan?

  Be like, this is the story. And then I want to do an M dash and then space.

• 2:40:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, or you can hold shift and you can hit it.

• 2:40:04John Coogan?

  Oh, you can hit.

• 2:40:04Speaker 08

  Putting on an absolute human M dash clinic right now. That's right, that's right.

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  Shift is an underscore. That's an underscore, dude. Look, underscore, underscore.

• 2:40:12Speaker 08

  Maybe it's just something that I know how to do.

• 2:40:13John Coogan?

  Test, underscore test.

• 2:40:15Speaker 08

  How do you do an M dash?

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:40:16Speaker 08

  I just run it double, double dash, space.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  No, no, so, so, so, so I completely agree with you. So, uh, I, I wrote, I write like a little, you know, 300 word, 400 word, like summary of my current thinking on whatever's in the news every day. Uh, I just write it right in Google Docs here. I don't use any AI. I hand it off to Brandon on our team. He edits it. I don't think he uses any AI. Uh, sometimes he would put M dashes in and if we put in even one M dash, all the comments would, M dash, AI, AI, what was the problem? And it's just like, okay, like now I just can't use the M dash because like, like the, the masses will go crazy.

• 2:40:53Speaker 08

  I refuse to let them take that from me.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  You're fighting the good fight. Okay.

• 2:40:56Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:40:57John Coogan?

  You think you can win? I think that it's just, I lost it. I was, and Brandon was like, really? Like, and there were places, I'll, I'll show you. Sometimes I will literally just write like, like a minus sign. Not an M dash. I'll just be like, you know, close a quote. I will deliberately break the rules that I know I'm not supposed to. Like, even when you, when you, when you put something in quotes, you put like the period inside the quotes or whatever. I will just break all those rules because it just makes it clearer that I'm not slopping it up.

• 2:41:26Speaker 08

  I don't know. I think you're accepting, accepting the frame of the haters.

• 2:41:28John Coogan?

  I think so. I think, I, I think it might be. I think you're right. I think you're right.

• 2:41:32Speaker 08

  Also shouts out Brandon. I don't, I didn't hear any claps for Brandon.

• 2:41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's get some claps going for Brandon.

• 2:41:37Speaker 08

  We call him in the, in a, he's in a.

• 2:41:39John Coogan?

  He's got a new haircut.

• 2:41:40Speaker 08

  He got a new haircut.

• 2:41:41John Coogan?

  We need a, we need a trading card for Brandon's new haircut.

• 2:41:43Jordi Hays?

  He's a sleeper muscle man, too.

• 2:41:44John Coogan?

  He's a muscle man.

• 2:41:45Speaker 08

  I know why I've got, I got, is it fair to say I got you into it?

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  What? You're, you, you're the reason? He's the reason you got jacked?

• 2:41:52Speaker 08

  Is that fair to say, or is that?

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  He's the reason that you're absolutely shredded and diced. He's the reason you're walking around at 2% body fat? Okay. Wow, wow.

• 2:42:02Speaker 08

  Brandon content.

• 2:42:03John Coogan?

  That's why, that's why you can bench three plates? You can just wrap it out because of him? Four, okay, four, wow.

• 2:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 2:42:12Speaker 08

  Look.

• 2:42:13Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 2:42:13John Coogan?

  It's good. Wait, uh, so yeah, actually tell me the story of the, the muscle man book. Like, how, like, what inspired it? What was the thesis?

• 2:42:20Speaker 08

  It's a novel about an English professor who hates being an English professor and loves lifting weights.

• 2:42:24John Coogan?

  Sick.

• 2:42:25Speaker 08

  Um, and part of it was that.

• 2:42:26Jordi Hays?

  And this is a real person, or?

• 2:42:28Speaker 08

  No, it's a, it's a fictional character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, um, but like, you know, part of it was that I, when I was growing up, I basically grew up online. And, you know, it's sort of a classic story, but it was like, I was totally anxious, you know, like I would be at school, then I would get on the screen and, you know, I would just post and sort of lurk and be sort of weird and creepy in front of the computer, you know? Um, and then when I started lifting, um, my anxiety and depression just like completely went away.

• 2:42:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:42:53Speaker 08

  You know, and, and, and, and I was like, damn, like, you know, was my dad right my whole life? You know, are all the sort of jacked guys who are like annoying and saying that, you know, you gotta start lifting?

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:04Speaker 08

  Were they just all totally right? Basically, I was.

• 2:43:06Jordi Hays?

  The other thing, that, that tracks with my personal experience. I used to have trouble falling asleep at night.

• 2:43:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, that too, yeah, exactly.

• 2:43:13Jordi Hays?

  I started lifting daily or six days a week. It just went away entirely. And the lesson is. People that struggle to fall asleep, at least in some cases, are just not exerting themselves enough to be just physically tired enough to like fall asleep.

• 2:43:30Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Started lifting soon enough, it's like, okay, you basically close your eyes, you're knocked out in like five minutes.

• 2:43:35Speaker 08

  Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah, and so I wanted to just kind of like, and then I tried to find novels, or even books about lifting, that I thought were like compelling at all, and I couldn't find any, so I started sort of trying to write something like that. It's also like a satire about higher education, there's like a lot of rants and stuff about the universities and stuff.

• 2:43:52John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:43:53Speaker 08

  So, um, so yeah.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Talk about the reception.

• 2:43:55Speaker 08

  Um, the reception's been sort of idiotic.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:00Speaker 08

  Um, you know, the, the, the, the media, as we all probably-

• 2:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for idiotic-

• 2:44:04Speaker 08

  Let's give it up for the idiotic media, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's, um-

• 2:44:12John Coogan?

  The idiotic media and we have a horn going off there?

• 2:44:15Jordi Hays?

  We are the idiotic-

• 2:44:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you know, uh-

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  We have a horse wearing a hat in the back.

• 2:44:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, idiotic good.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  We're not journalists, but I definitely consider us to be part of the idiotic media.

• 2:44:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, that's, you're, you're, now you're using it in a good way, you're reclaiming it, you know what I mean? But, um, but, but, but most of them are idiotic in a bad way, um, and the, the reception has been like, here's a novel to like explain the manosphere.

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  The manosphere, right?

• 2:44:36Speaker 08

  And like, here's like a novel about men, and I feel like, you know, back in the day, um, like, uh, there's this great, uh, the literary, uh, the writer Norman Mailer has this debate with these feminists like back in the seventies, and he keeps calling them lady critics. This is a very hilarious debate, um, and I feel like in a weird way they're doing the same thing to me, but they're calling me like a man novelist.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:54Speaker 08

  You know what I mean? Where it's like, this is a novel about a man.

• 2:44:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:57Speaker 08

  So like, it has to be about masculinity or something like that. Um, yeah, everyone wants to know what's going on with young men.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:03Speaker 08

  And it's this kind of fake discourse.

• 2:45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw Chris Williamson on, uh, Tucker the other day.

• 2:45:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  It felt, it felt very much, I mean, honestly, like, I feel like Chris has done a fantastic job of actually sort of explaining like what's going on with young men.

• 2:45:15Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  Like, it is an interesting question.

• 2:45:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  Uh, there's a whole bunch of, and I feel like every media outlet has their own way of interrogating this, whether it's Harper's or Vanity Fair or Wired, like, everyone's telling stories and writing profiles about interesting people and young men, and I don't know, it seems like it was somewhat worthwhile, uh, discussion to have if there, if it can inform interventions, even in, even just in your own life or with your own kids, it seems like there's some, some value to the discourse, but, uh, did you have any intention of actually- Uh sparking that debate or like actually like like was was one of your thesis like I need to put this book out so that more people lift weights at young ages?

• 2:45:54Speaker 08

  Uh no, but I did write an essay for Harper's that was just basically a straightforward pro lifting essay. And so that had more of that.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. That's awesome.

• 2:46:02Jordi Hays?

  The uh the thing that the my takeaway from going, I was very anti gym growing up because I was a skateboarder and

• 2:46:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, me too. Right, exactly.

• 2:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Skater, surfer, like the idea of like going inside, being indoors, lifting stuff up and putting it down just for the whatever the whatever the reason was, it wasn't appealing to me as a kid because I was like, well, I could just go to the beach and surf and like be out in nature. And so I had a generally negative sentiment around the gym. And I was also like super scrawny growing up. I've got like long arms. I'm I I was like in high school, probably like 140 pounds, like getting under like one plate on bench was like

• 2:46:43John Coogan?

  Big.

• 2:46:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna die at first and I never really got into it. I wasn't I didn't play football or anything like that. Uh and then I got really into it in college and it was the biggest unlock for like mental health.

• 2:46:56Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:46:56Jordi Hays?

  Like I prior to prior to that, I was like a, you know, teenager. I was like teenagers, I think, are just naturally kind of like moody and figuring out who they are and how they fit into the world and all that stuff. And then I found lifting and like a lot of that stuff just like went away entirely because I had a purpose. Uh I would, even if that purpose was like so simple and just like going, I woke up, I was gonna eat well and I was gonna go to the gym. I was gonna lift as heavy as I could and go on with my day and it's just it it ended up being like uh it it was like a drug almost immediately because I was like, I want the feeling of how I feel after I lift. It was it was incredibly addictive in a very positive way.

• 2:47:35Jordi Hays?

  So I did that and then and then about a probably a year or so, I went from like 100 and by that point of like 150 pounds to like One ninety in like a very short period of time, like basically spending, I was, this was from freshman year to sophomore year, and I was spending like so much of my energy just focused on lifting.

• 2:47:58Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:47:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I ultimately reached a point where I was like, okay, at some point, this is actually not the most productive use of my time. And I was fortunate enough to, at that point, to kind of like discover like work and things that I was passionate about and and ways that I could use my energy that was more interesting to me. And so I think like the debate to have around lifting is like, I think like basically everyone should be like picking up heavy stuff and putting it down, like at least a little bit, right? You don't need to go to the extreme. Uh, the, the advice that I find myself maybe giving like, you know, people that were in my shoes is like, figure out the point where you maybe actually want to dial it back a little bit because it's possible and probably healthy to go way too much to the extreme where you're spending like, like I was, like all my time

• 2:48:42Jordi Hays?

  and energy, like just lifting because I didn't have anything better to do besides like, you know, work and, and school. And then at some point, I actually needed to dial it back and actually apply that energy in other places. But I got the benefit of like that period of just like obsessiveness that I still carry with me.

• 2:48:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, I, that was sort of actually what the novel is exploring, you know, because when I first found it, like you said, it's like, is this the answer? Is this the ultimate answer? You know what I mean?

• 2:49:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:06Speaker 08

  And it, it, it really is. I mean, that's a part of the issue that I take with like the optimizers, you know, like Huberman, I mean, I know you guys had Huberman on or Brian Johnson, where you sort of become like perversely obsessed with health or with lifting or something like that. You sort of tinker, you know, you think of the person, the human person as some sort of like, you know, mix of neurons and chemicals and stuff.

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Like even between, uh, Brian Johnson and Huberman, I see a huge wide gap.

• 2:49:34Speaker 08

  There's a big gap, yeah.

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  But let's put them in the same bucket.

• 2:49:36Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:49:37John Coogan?

  How do you contrast your philosophy?

• 2:49:40Speaker 08

  I think you need to be injury maxing.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:42Speaker 08

  You need to be horsing heavy weights.

• 2:49:45John Coogan?

  Interesting, okay.

• 2:49:46Speaker 08

  And, uh, I think it's like a spiritual endeavor. I think you need to almost, I think you need to get crushed under

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:52Speaker 08

  A, a body breaking weight a few times.

• 2:49:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:55Speaker 08

  Uh, and

• 2:49:56John Coogan?

  And, and yeah, it's more of a, it's more of a spiritual process than an analytical process.

• 2:50:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, 100%. It's, it's, it's Eric Bogenhagen, who's like my favorite, uh, like lifter on YouTube, always talks about how it's a mindset.

• 2:50:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:10Speaker 08

  And he has these things where like he'll just fail. Insane amounts of weight, multiple times, and then just like work himself into this kind of like crazy mental state and then lift it, you know?

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  What do you think about the other YouTubers? What do you think about Sam Sulek?

• 2:50:23Speaker 08

  Oh, I love Sam Sulek.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  What do you think about the Trend Twins?

• 2:50:25Speaker 08

  I love the Trend Twins. I love, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Sam Sulek, also Sam Sulek is weirdly emo.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:31Speaker 08

  Like he will, you know, his vlogs, actually, there's this weird thing where some of my, I don't know, I'm talking about this now, but my brother died like a year and a half ago. And after the funeral, one of my buddies threw on a Sam Sulek video. And I don't, and, yeah, it was incredibly inspirational, but I noticed, I was like, Sam Sulek's videos are sort of emo, where he's like driving by himself.

• 2:50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:52Speaker 08

  He's like talking to the camera, he's like taking unnecessary loops around the parking lot, just. I guess, why he's so popular.

• 2:50:58Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I, I've maybe watched like 20 minutes of Sam Sulek. I appreciate like the content, like that, the, the world that he's built, but because specifically I remember being in that mindset of like, I was kind of like, again, I remember, I was like 19, I was in school, I wasn't that happy. I was like living in Santa Barbara, which was like paradise, but like mentally I was chasing that, like, I need to, I'd be like, that, those scenes where you're like driving, I'd be driving to the gym at like 5 a.m.

• 2:51:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, I can relate with everything you're saying, like down to the specifics. Like I started lifting too, like sort of like, I was in school, just moved, didn't really have friends, would like go to the gym at 11 o'clock, you know?

• 2:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it'd be the super, these early, early mornings or late, and then getting like food afterwards, and like honestly, that era for me, like Future, uh, the, the rap artist was like absolutely peaking.

• 2:51:48Speaker 08

  What year was this? Monster, for me, like, for me, Monster was just out, yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so I became.

• 2:51:54Speaker 08

  We might, we might be the same guy.

• 2:51:55Jordi Hays?

  I became a man at that time.

• 2:51:56Speaker 08

  Is your, is your full name Jordan?

• 2:51:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:52:00Speaker 08

  Brother.

• 2:52:01John Coogan?

  This is, make it make sense.

• 2:52:02Jordi Hays?

  Make it make sense.

• 2:52:03John Coogan?

  Make it make sense, what's going on here?

• 2:52:04Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, so I would, I would drive, I, I, I just remember like, at the time, I was driving a, a, a Prius with like 200,000 miles on it, and I'd just be like, driving to the gym, just blasting Future, drinking protein shakes, and that's like when I think I became a man.

• 2:52:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:23Jordi Hays?

  Like.

• 2:52:24John Coogan?

  Incredible, incredible things.

• 2:52:26Jordi Hays?

  And so I want, I, when, I, I think it's super important, and like when I hear, when I hear that a young person is getting into going to the gym, I'm like, great.

• 2:52:34Speaker 08

  Totally.

• 2:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, you're gonna become, you're gonna find yourself through that, and my only thing is like. I think at some point you have to evolve beyond that and take the learnings and that like that mentality that you get from going to the gym and apply it to other other ways. I think like the big takeaway that I learned early on was like, early on, I was obsessed with like, how many, how many sets am I doing? How many reps am I doing? How am I, uh, how am I, you know, just approaching different lifts? How many different exercises should I be doing in a lift? And I very quickly realized that there was like two fact, there was maybe three factors. It was like, was I sleeping a lot?

• 2:53:11Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 2:53:12Jordi Hays?

  Was I eating a lot? And was I like, hyper consistent and doing a lot of volume? And those are the same lessons that I've brought into my real life outside of the gym. It's like, am I sleeping a lot? Am I like nourishing myself? Am I getting the right amount of calories? Am I getting, you know, getting the right amount of, um, uh, just like the right kinds of food? And then am I being consistent in the work? And so we apply that every day. We come in and do the show.

• 2:53:39Speaker 08

  And you also go to the gym. I mean, I don't know, behind the scenes, look, the whole squad was at the gym this morning, which I think is a great thing that you guys do.

• 2:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:46John Coogan?

  Uh, a lot of people that were on that chart, a lot of the tech elite are deeply unpopular people.

• 2:53:53Speaker 08

  Mm hmm.

• 2:53:54John Coogan?

  I think Elon was polling as less popular than Donald Trump. So not just controversial, but actually just unpopular across the board. A lot of tech CEOs, a lot of tech people are just unpopular in America.

• 2:54:05Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Obviously, we love them here. Um, but we're weirdos about that. But my question is like, when I think about who's really popular, I think Tom Cruise, I think George Clooney, I think people that are in shape. Is there something, you know, we, we do this jokey like Giga Chat-ification of these people. Um, is there something where you like, like it would actually be in their best interest for the tech elite to get a lot?

• 2:54:27Jordi Hays?

  Look at Bezos, look at Zuck.

• 2:54:29Speaker 08

  I was gonna say like that, um, you know, I, I used to think Zuck was a full creep.

• 2:54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:34Speaker 08

  He was like a beady eyed sort of bug. He was like, you could, when, when, when Zuck would look in the camera, you could almost like hear him blinking. You know what I'm saying? It was, it was, it was, and then he got jacked and threw on a chain. I was like, this guy's not so bad after all. You know what I mean? So maybe, um, so maybe they would all benefit.

• 2:54:50Jordi Hays?

  All PR, PR teams hate this one simple trick.

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  Well, PR team should love it.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  No, they should love it.

• 2:54:56John Coogan?

  But they maybe aren't awake to it for some reason.

• 2:54:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, look, if you're on a billionaire's PR team.

• 2:55:01John Coogan?

  Step one.

• 2:55:02Speaker 08

  Step one.

• 2:55:02Jordi Hays?

  Hire a trainer.

• 2:55:03Speaker 08

  Trend, yes.

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  Bring the trend twins in.

• 2:55:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, bring the trend twins in.

• 2:55:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:06Speaker 08

  Get jacked.

• 2:55:08John Coogan?

  Get jacked.

• 2:55:08Speaker 08

  And, you know, then the public opinion.

• 2:55:10Jordi Hays?

  Why do you think health is so political?

• 2:55:14Speaker 08

  Oh, man, I did an event two nights ago here and someone asked the same question. And this guy in the audience stood up and he, because I actually don't know. I mean, one, one reason is that I think that when you're jacked and you're strong and you're, you know, or you're competent, it acts as a judge, actually. Because if you're like, you know, fat and you're lazy, then you feel just sort of implicitly judged. The other thing is that going to the gym and getting jacked implies a certain value system. You know, there's, there's like, you know, if you lift 145, you know, that's less than 225.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:55:52Speaker 08

  And if you're in the gym, you're trying to get stronger, the implication is that it's better to lift 225.

• 2:55:57John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:55:57Speaker 08

  And so like, a lot of people who are like dogmatically committed to a certain kind of like egalitarianism.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  Egalitarianism.

• 2:56:03Speaker 08

  Don't like that.

• 2:56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:04Speaker 08

  But the guy at the event stood up, this guy, he looked just like Joe Rogan. His name's Anthony, actually, shouts out Anthony, but he was like, he said that, he said that, generally speaking, the left tries to impose their ideas onto nature and the right starts with nature and discerns their ideas from there. And so there's something just sort of fundamentally different about that. And I think lifting sort of falls into the latter camp.

• 2:56:24John Coogan?

  I have a question.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm always, I'm always surprised at how much, like, there seems to be more controversies within, in between like various people, even that consider themselves all to be pursuing their ideals of health. It's like, everybody like kind of picks a lane in a category.

• 2:56:40Speaker 08

  Well, and there's also.

• 2:56:40Jordi Hays?

  And then it's like, they're fighting over like green powders. What green powder should you take? Oh, my green powder's better than your green powder.

• 2:56:47John Coogan?

  It is universal. Like, I feel like it's, it's hard to make a political issue out of something that doesn't affect everyone because you just keep bumping into people. And if your whole thing is like, you know. Corporate cards or something or like, you know, the, the manufacturing supply chain for large gongs. It's like, there's just a lot of people there.

• 2:57:06Speaker 08

  You guys have a lot of those, right?

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:07Speaker 08

  Even have the, you got, you, I noticed in the bathroom, the, the picture of the jacked guy, the shirtless guy hitting the gong. I think these guys love the gong.

• 2:57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's like, it's hard to get everyone animated about that. It's a niche interest. Whereas like healthcare, how much money you have, your job, your health, your food, like, these things are universal. So anyone can, uh, anyone can relate to them and I can give you a take and you can bounce off it immediately. Instead of being like, nah, I don't really know anything about that. Or that doesn't really affect me ever.

• 2:57:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, but there's also, there is so much, more people die in this, this is actually, I don't, I actually don't know if this is true, but you see this talking point all the time. More people die in this country from like obesity and from starvation. You know, there is this total cope around, around being unhealthy and people, people don't like the idea that there's actually something you can do about it.

• 2:57:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like everyone, everyone can be obese or not. Like, not everyone can have a, like a large corporation that goes bankrupt under their stewardship. Like, so it's just less relevant to them because like, they might not be the CEO of a company that's going bankrupt or something. Um, pickleball. There's, uh, I couldn't find it in here, but there's a, in the mansion section online, uh, there is a house that is up for sale right now that has a pickleball court outside and a pickleball court inside. What's your take on pickleball?

• 2:58:22Speaker 08

  Dude, it's fun. I hate to say it, but it's fun.

• 2:58:26John Coogan?

  Guilty pleasure?

• 2:58:27Speaker 08

  I mean, I played it one time with a friend and I was like, man, this is, I probably said some words. And, uh, uh, and then, uh, we played it and I was like, this is awesome.

• 2:58:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:37Speaker 08

  So I don't, I don't, I don't, nothing else.

• 2:58:38John Coogan?

  You played it inside or outside?

• 2:58:39Speaker 08

  Outside, yeah. I mean, two courts is a little bit, um, you know, I don't know if you love something.

• 2:58:45John Coogan?

  Zoom out for me. Build the, the, the ultimate mansion for athle, for athletics. Are you going all in on one particular athletic endeavor? Are you making sure that there's a pool and a basketball court, a tennis court? What's important to have around the mansion?

• 2:59:02Speaker 08

  For me, definitely a basketball court.

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  A basketball?

• 2:59:05Speaker 08

  Uh, and then like a gym in a garage with no AC.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  No AC?

• 2:59:09Speaker 08

  And...

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  And what's in that gym? Are we doing Rogue Racks? Are we doing?

• 2:59:13Speaker 08

  Rogue Racks are good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:15John Coogan?

  Free weights?

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  What is it about, uh... What's the archetype that can make a home gym really work? Do you have to be like, like spiritual? Like every time I've just been in a debt, like only like during COVID, I bought a bunch of weights and I was working out of my garage. And I just got so small.

• 2:59:32John Coogan?

  Hard to be motivated.

• 2:59:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, I got, that's a skill issue, bro.

• 2:59:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, no, no, I think I'm implying it's a skill issue because I would be going in there. And I was at home, so I could get an email and I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna run in and respond to this email on my computer, because it's easier. And if I was taking a more monk-like approach, I'd probably have been getting even more jacked because there's no distractions, right? It's just like more focused.

• 2:59:56Speaker 08

  Well, during COVID, I mean, we ordered a bunch of weights, me and my lifting buddy, like right when, like right at the tail end, because everything sold out like super fast.

• 3:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you still had a buddy, that helps.

• 3:00:06Speaker 08

  Had a buddy, yeah, and, um, um, and we, we ended up getting these like dinky, probably like 25 pound barbells with these like shitty weights or whatever. Um, but I would just go, I had a shed at the, at the house and I would like go in the shed and throw on music and it was actually the first time that I was lifting where I understood the power of like shrieking and screaming while you lift. There's a lot of power, you can, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the modern man does not shriek and scream.

• 3:00:33John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what's in the supplement stack? What's Lindy, what's interesting? What, what are you staying away from? Are you beta alanine, are you use creatine, protein supplementation, mass gainers? What do you like?

• 3:00:45Speaker 08

  I don't know, I'm feeling reactionary against the optimizers and I want to just say nothing. I mean, I, creatine for sure, protein's fine, but I think you could basically

• 3:00:55John Coogan?

  Just eat.

• 3:00:56Speaker 08

  Eat, uh, uh, raw milk, I do, I do like raw milk, I drink a lot of raw milk. Recently I gained, I went from like 165 to 200 pounds over the course of like three months. And so I was drinking like a gallon of raw milk a day, a tub of Greek yogurt a day. Yeah, uh, the raw eggs, I do think like drinking, you know, 12 raw eggs makes you feel amazing.

• 3:01:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:16Speaker 08

  Um, but that's kind of the

• 3:01:17Jordi Hays?

  I went through a raw egg, I went through a phase where it'd be like five eggs mixed into raw milk, just raw.

• 3:01:23John Coogan?

  Were you bodybuilding.com guy back in the day?

• 3:01:27Jordi Hays?

  That was a long, that was a long, I was like, I wasn't even like a phase, I would just, that was just me for a long time. I, I realized like, wait, I don't have to scramble the eggs, I can just put them in a jar and just drink it. I would, I, I didn't like the taste, I would kind of almost throw up sometimes, but it was just so effective.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  I mean, Derek from Our Place More Days talks about just drinking the full carton of liquid egg whites.

• 3:01:51Speaker 08

  He does, yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  In the carton.

• 3:01:52Speaker 08

  Yeah. That was a good era. There was a period where I was watching his videos, like when I was first getting lifting, watching like,

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  That was great.

• 3:01:58Speaker 08

  I remember being like, I can't believe I'm watching an hour and a half videos about some.

• 3:02:01John Coogan?

  But it's so meditative.

• 3:02:02Speaker 08

  Well, it's like what we were saying at, at, at breakfast, it's just amazing to watch anyone who loves what they do.

• 3:02:07John Coogan?

  Master of craft, yeah.

• 3:02:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:02:08John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 3:02:09Jordi Hays?

  You would have appreciated, we, we gave a, a talk last year, when we had done like a few episodes of the podcast, and then we, we, gave a talk at Hereticon, of like the case for like founders getting on like PEDs, because you have like, when you think about like pro athletes are like spending all their time trying to be healthy, sleeping well, working out and being as strong and as physically fit as possible, and they legally or cannot take PEDs. Although if you ask them, like, if you could take PEDs, if it was legal, would you do them? They'd be like, yeah, absolutely. I want to go to the next level. Meanwhile, in the business world, you have people that are not sleeping that well, they can't train that much, they're not that healthy, they have like,

• 3:02:50Jordi Hays?

  kind of not that great hormone profiles. In a perfect world, they just start sleeping well and training and eating well and getting on track. But for a lot of people, if you're a CEO, busy CEO, you're scaling your company, you don't have like, you, you, some of these people like, can't prioritize it, or they don't for whatever reason, and like I genuinely think if they just got on PEDs, they might build, they might build the, build the, you know, of course, under, under doctor's supervision, but they might actually like, get motivated in order to build some of those healthier habits, but at the very least have a lot more energy and bring that intensity. What do you, what's your take on, on PEDs?

• 3:03:27Speaker 08

  I don't do them because I haven't had kids yet, but they do seem probably good. I don't know. Have you done them? Well, actually, although I, I, actually, one of my buddies, um, from, from, from Cleveland, uh, was having a hard time on, I won't, I won't say his name. He was having a hard time on the dating apps. And he was like, um, no one's responding, you know, whatever, like, and he started blasting gear because he thought it would help him get girls. And I was Yes, immediately.

• 3:03:51John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 3:03:52Speaker 08

  And I was like, but he didn't even get jacked in the me, it was like, it was literally immediate.

• 3:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Was it, was it a mindset?

• 3:03:56Speaker 08

  I think it might've been a mindset.

• 3:03:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:03:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:03:59John Coogan?

  He's like, I got, I, I have, I've solved the problem.

• 3:04:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, it was crazy.

• 3:04:02John Coogan?

  Solved my problem, so I can bring the confidence.

• 3:04:04Speaker 08

  It worked for him like the next day.

• 3:04:05John Coogan?

  I, I find, uh, I find

• 3:04:08Jordi Hays?

  Dating hack last year.

• 3:04:10Speaker 08

  What's that?

• 3:04:11John Coogan?

  I find creatine genuinely very

• 3:04:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, I take creatine.

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  I also find caffeine extremely performance enhancing in the gym.

• 3:04:17Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  Like, if you can, like, the Celsius phenomenon, I think, is very real, like, 200 milligrams of caffeine getting actually very fired up before a workout, genuinely helps you stay focused during the lift, push your, push you a lot farther.

• 3:04:30Jordi Hays?

  We want to make the, the beta alanine for, for the workplace, you know, imagine you gotta do some emails.

• 3:04:35Speaker 08

  Is that the tingly?

• 3:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you start tingling, they're like, I gotta get through these emails.

• 3:04:38Speaker 08

  I mean, I will say that the, yeah, for sure. I, I guess the, the supplement stack is like drinking enough caffeine to like kill a small child.

• 3:04:44John Coogan?

  It, it's really, really

• 3:04:46Speaker 08

  Not that I'm gonna kill a small child, but that would if they drank it, kill them. Um, these mates are really good though. Are you guys sponsored by these guys?

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  We're not, but

• 3:04:52Jordi Hays?

  No, we're just friends.

• 3:04:53John Coogan?

  That's Andrew Huberman's brand.

• 3:04:55Speaker 08

  Fuck. God damn, sorry, man. Hey, look, look, look, I love your product, if you, you know.

• 3:05:02Speaker 08

  They're good, they're good.

• 3:05:04Jordi Hays?

  I don't consider Andrew's philosophy, like, about

• 3:05:07John Coogan?

  Nothing you said is wildly disagreeing with.

• 3:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but yeah, I, I, I think it's more about like, understanding, understanding yourself and the various inputs so that you can then make calculated decisions.

• 3:05:20Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, I still, I know how important sleep is. There's plenty of nights, we, we were traveling on Tuesday, didn't get a lot of sleep, made, made a call to try to get some more sleep, but ultimately, I think it's just about, my, my view is like, as much as possible, try to understand how the body works, but at the same time, you need to remember that the

• 3:05:45Jordi Hays?

  The, the real edge is like having like a, like a fiery like spirit like and just being like that, that is like, that's the thing that you want to cultivate, right?

• 3:05:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, there's that, there, yeah, I mean, I, I, um, yeah, I maybe part of the, the, my feeling about it is that the one time I tweeted something negative about Andrew Huberman, I got like ratioed into oblivion, you know, people, people calling me gay and it gets like 5,000 likes, you know, and I'm just, so, so, so, yeah, they came, they came after me hard, but you're probably, you're probably, you're probably right, you know, I don't know, there, but then, but the, the counter argument to that is like that.

• 3:06:20John Coogan?

  Makes delicious yerba mate.

• 3:06:21Speaker 08

  Well, yeah, he makes delicious, uh, matina yerba mate, he makes a great, a great product. Um, and actually in my first novel, there's a long passage about, uh, uh, how yerba mate is great.

• 3:06:32John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 3:06:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, in the novelist, but, um, I guess the counterpoint to the, to the sleep thing that you're saying is that, um, there's that, for a while when like the Tate brothers were just all over the field, there was that one of Tristan being like, um, you know, I'll, I'll go to sleep at 6:00 AM and wake up at 5:59 AM and, you know, one minute before 6:00 AM and I don't need any sleep and like that, that's the kind of, this sort of counter argument.

• 3:06:53John Coogan?

  That's what you want to do?

• 3:06:54Speaker 08

  I mean, it's just.

• 3:06:54John Coogan?

  Sleep for negative one minute?

• 3:06:55Speaker 08

  It's a, it's a, it's a, it's an admirable vibe.

• 3:06:59John Coogan?

  It's the attitude.

• 3:06:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, right.

• 3:07:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I always get it, I always, I always do beef with Brian Johnson about this because I'm just like, don't you think that if you just have, uh, like great will and a life's purpose, you can live forever even if you're super unhealthy? And I always cite like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett who like eat McDonald's and drink Coca-Cola all day long and like live to 99 and 100 and just like, you know, they don't look jacked, they don't really do any biohacking, but they seem to be extremely sharp.

• 3:07:28Jordi Hays?

  One thing we probably agree on is like, I don't think you should let health trackers like decide your mood.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Or decide like how you're going to approach.

• 3:07:35John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally.

• 3:07:35Jordi Hays?

  It's like, I wake up some days, I sleep on an eight sleep, I have like a.

• 3:07:39John Coogan?

  No, the tracker is a competition.

• 3:07:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm still going to the gym.

• 3:07:42John Coogan?

  It's not telling you what to do.

• 3:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, and it's, and it's just, yeah, it's just a, it's a, it's a little friendly.

• 3:07:46John Coogan?

  It's not tracking me, I'm tracking it.

• 3:07:47Jordi Hays?

  You're tracking it.

• 3:07:48John Coogan?

  I'm tracking it.

• 3:07:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, but then there are also studies that are like, you know, the people that live the longest have like, you know, they have like. Uh, good relationships.

• 3:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:56Speaker 08

  They have some sort of spiritual life.

• 3:07:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that stuff is very unquantified right now in the quantified self movement and it needs to be more included, I think.

• 3:08:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's why I don't think you can really like quantify that stuff. People are really uncomfortable with things you can't quantify.

• 3:08:08John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 3:08:09Speaker 08

  But I think probably a good relationship, some sort of spiritual life, general health, you know, eating the things that like you're, because also different people. Different, you know, diets work better for different peoples and stuff like that.

• 3:08:21John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:08:22Jordi Hays?

  What's your actual, uh, routine?

• 3:08:26John Coogan?

  Are you in the bro split? Are you in bro split, push, pull, legs?

• 3:08:31Speaker 08

  The manosphere split, just crushing.

• 3:08:35Jordi Hays?

  Not beating the manosphere, allegedly.

• 3:08:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 3:08:40Speaker 08

  Lately, lately I was doing, uh, uh, mad cow, I think it's called. It was just three days a week and it was literally just.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  Go crazy.

• 3:08:46Speaker 08

  It was, um, it was, uh, uh, just powerlifting. So it was like squat, bench, deadlift, barbell rows. Three days a week, five by fives, three days a week.

• 3:08:55John Coogan?

  So you do all of those every day?

• 3:08:56Speaker 08

  No, no, no, no.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  All of those three days or you rotate through them?

• 3:08:58Speaker 08

  You, you rotate through them, but you're, you're squatting three days a week.

• 3:09:01John Coogan?

  Okay, wow.

• 3:09:02Speaker 08

  Bench in twice a week, you're doing overhead press too. And you're adding, um, you're adding five pounds a week.

• 3:09:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:07Speaker 08

  So it was like, and that was when I was doing the, the, the spirit bowl.

• 3:09:10John Coogan?

  And five by fives?

• 3:09:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:09:12John Coogan?

  I like the five by five. That's good. That's a good.

• 3:09:14Speaker 08

  So I was doing that recently. I, I do like, I, I mean, the thing that God, I'll.

• 3:09:18Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, I, I, the, the thing that maybe we're just holding back a little bit of our progress is like, we want to work out every day. And there's actually like studies that show if you just take more rest days, you can put on, you can, you can just like start.

• 3:09:34Speaker 08

  But the problem with that program is like, I also like lifting every day.

• 3:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:38Speaker 08

  It was like a problem. Like I was like, it was actually not the most enjoyable thing. I do like, as much as I'm like, uh, uh, opposed to it in theory. I do like Jeff Nippert's programs.

• 3:09:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:09:47Speaker 08

  Power building programs.

• 3:09:48John Coogan?

  I like him a lot.

• 3:09:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, they're, they're very good. Yeah.

• 3:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:51Speaker 08

  So the power building one and power building three.

• 3:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:54Speaker 08

  I think my favorite programs up down.

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just like the way he like structures his like lessons and stuff.

• 3:09:59Speaker 08

  Well, he's also natural, which is like a big deal. You know what I mean? A lot of people who make these programs aren't natural, so it won't work for guys that aren't.

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, makes sense.

• 3:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're like, do 10,000 reps of this.

• 3:10:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm on enough trend to kill a horse.

• 3:10:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:10:18John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 3:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 3:10:20John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for talking about it.

• 3:10:21Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what, you have your next book in the works?

• 3:10:24Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah, kinda, but I don't, I don't, I wanna talk about it.

• 3:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:10:27Speaker 08

  Yeah. It's gonna be a thriller.

• 3:10:28John Coogan?

  Can you share the prompt? What's the prompt?

• 3:10:30Speaker 08

  No, no, I can't, cause the thing, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.

• 3:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 3:10:34Speaker 08

  No, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gonna do it, but thanks for having me on. Muscle Man is the current one, you guys can buy it.

• 3:10:38John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what about the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 3:10:41Speaker 08

  Dude, I just, I never.

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  You've never been fishing?

• 3:10:44Speaker 08

  No.

• 3:10:44John Coogan?

  No, not once?

• 3:10:45Speaker 08

  No. I mean, my family has, no, dude, I was too punk, I was too much like he was a skate.

• 3:10:48John Coogan?

  You've never shot a fish in a barrel? Nothing?

• 3:10:51Speaker 08

  Nope.

• 3:10:51John Coogan?

  Nothing, okay, well, we'll have to change that soon.

• 3:10:54Speaker 08

  Uh, uh, yeah.

• 3:10:55John Coogan?

  The outfit looks like you could maybe transport.

• 3:10:57Jordi Hays?

  I agree, I agree.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  Fishing boat and fit in.

• 3:10:59Speaker 08

  It's funny, that's funny, cause I, I wore this the other day for an event, and my buddy was, I told him, my friend, that I was coming on the show, and he was like, you're actually kind of dressed like, he thought the vest was somehow T B P N.

• 3:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it could work.

• 3:11:09Speaker 08

  Also, Brandon Content over there has the same, has the same vest, he told me about.

• 3:11:13John Coogan?

  Oh, very good.

• 3:11:13Speaker 08

  He told me that he has it, so.

• 3:11:14John Coogan?

  He's looking, he's looking sharp. Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 3:11:18Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:11:18John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:11:21Jordi Hays?

  And if you're listening to this, and you haven't lifted today.

• 3:11:24John Coogan?

  Hit the gym.

• 3:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Go for it. Getting a lift in.

• 3:11:26John Coogan?

  Re, uh, visit the Church of Iron.

• 3:11:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Uh, have a great weekend, everyone. We love you.

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:11:34Jordi Hays?

  See you Monday.