Disney’s $1B OpenAI Bet, GPT 5.2 Reactions, Saagar Enjeti Weighs In | Matt Levine, Mike Swan, Mike Gallagher

(02:12) - Disney’s $1B OpenAI Bet (26:57) - GPT 5.2 Reactions (40:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (58:46) - Mike Swan, owner and managing broker of Swan Land Company, specializes in ranch, farm, and recreational land sales across the Rocky Mountain West. In the conversation, he discusses the enduring appeal of land investments in the western United States, noting a slowdown in 2025 due to strong financial markets but anticipating renewed interest in early 2026. He highlights the premium value of properties with quality water features, the influx of tech industry professionals into Montana seeking safety and lifestyle benefits, and the challenges of generating significant returns from agricultural operations alone, emphasizing the importance of long-term appreciation and conservation-minded ownership. (01:24:40) - Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and author of the daily newsletter "Money Stuff." In the conversation, he discusses his transition from working at Goldman Sachs to becoming a journalist, the evolution and challenges of prediction markets, and the potential implications of insider trading within these markets. He also touches on topics such as the possible SpaceX IPO, the OpenAI-Disney deal, and the growth of private credit in the tech industry. (01:57:58) - Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense at Palantir Technologies and former U. S. Congressman, discusses the critical need for the U. S. to expand its naval fleet to deter potential threats, particularly from China, emphasizing the importance of increasing ship production to meet geopolitical challenges. He highlights the Navy's partnership with Palantir to implement the Shipbuilding Operating System (ShipOS), a $448 million initiative aimed at modernizing shipbuilding through artificial intelligence and autonomy technologies, thereby streamlining production and enhancing efficiency. Gallagher also addresses the role of autonomous vessels and the significance of international collaborations in strengthening maritime security. (02:17:28) - Saagar Enjeti is a political commentator, journalist, and podcaster best known as the co-host of Breaking Points alongside Krystal Ball. Previously the host of Rising at The Hill, he built a large following for his populist-leaning, anti-establishment analysis across foreign policy, economics, and U. S. politics. He is a graduate of George Washington University and the University of Texas’ LBJ School, and he has written on national security and international affairs for several outlets. Enjeti is widely recognized for his clear, independent commentary that resists traditional left–right alignment. (03:02:30) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com 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 Polymarket - https://polymarket.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 TBN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, December 12th, 2025. Just 13 days till Christmas. We're live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Uh, Death Star post. Now it makes sense. It all makes sense. It wasn't a vague post. It was, it was, uh.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  It was just early.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  A preview of a deal that would take shape four months later. Right? That's what was happening. Uh, Sam Altman, of course, what was this on GPT five day? August 6th. He posted a picture of the Death Star rising on the horizon. Uh, very confusing post at the time. Now we understand.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Now we get it.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  He was saying, hey, one day we're going to have rights to Star Wars properties through this deal with this.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Darth.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Darth Sama.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Uh, people did not like this post at the time. Uh, Nikita is in there saying, you should delete this.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Just delete it.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  There's time to delete this.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  And the timing, the timing was really funny.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  It implied that they were about to release, uh, something, you know, so all powerful.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was easy to read it that way.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  You could also read it as like, maybe they're going on the offensive against the, the Death Star, the Empire, which is Google. They're going to attack Google.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  There were a number of different ways to, to, to read into it, but it was.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  It felt.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Confusing.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  It was confusing and then, and then it, and then it was, I feel like people were somewhat let down.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  Right. By, by GPT five.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, people were expecting something remarkably qualitatively different. Uh, that's not what people got. And so the end result was, uh, you know, people just remaining confused. We had a bunch of different takes on it. We think it makes sense now, but now, you know, it's even more clear with the Disney deal. But you wrote about the Disney deal. You dug into the deal and you, uh, kind of crystallized your take. So take me through it.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I, some of the stuff I talked about yesterday, but I wrote about it for the newsletter today, tbn.com. I wrote 127 days. That's the gap between Sam's The Star Wars Death Star vague post and yesterday's announcement that Disney is investing $1 billion into OpenAI and giving them a three-year license that allows users to generate AI photos and videos of the most popular 200 Disney characters. Most notably, OpenAI has guaranteed a one-year exclusive on the IP. And while the post and the deal are probably not connected, I think it's funny to imagine that they are. Right before the deal was announced, Disney sent Google a cease and desist letter claiming Google had been violating Disney's intellectual property by allowing users to generate a variety of Disney characters.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Many people outside tech seem shocked that Disney would license their IP in the first place, given their history of ruthlessly protecting it. There's a number of examples of Disney coming after kids' birthday parties, or at least that's how they positioned it. Of course, these are businesses that are using, effectively using Disney characters to monetize.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  I read your draft and I was like, wait, they sued a child for having a Disney-themed birthday party?

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  There's two notable examples. One is coming after basically a birthday party service.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Company. Like a business that sells, "We will do your birthday party," and then they were selling, "And it'll be princess-themed."

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, so they wouldn't, they wouldn't directly call the characters that you could like rent the same names. It wasn't like Elsa.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Okay, but it was clearly.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  In the reviews, what Disney noted in the reviews, people would call the characters by the Disney name, and so that was one of their proof points. And then there was also a story of a father who like wanted to do a Spider-Man tombstone for his like very young son that passed.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  And I think it was the, effectively got blocked. It wasn't necessarily directly by Disney, but anyways, Disney has longstanding policy of not letting other people.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Such a PR nightmare. If your legal team comes to you and says like, "We want to sue a dead person," like tell them to back off.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  It was just like, it wasn't a lawsuit.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  Or maybe it was a tombstone company.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  They were just saying like, "No, you can't make a Spider-Man." Anyways, many people outside of tech seem shocked that Disney would license their IP. But Bob Iger knows that AI-generated Disney will happen with or without the company's blessing. So partnering with OpenAI today while setting up negotiations with Google and other players makes a lot of sense. Again, I just expect this like cease and desist is the start of a negotiation process in order to get the same type of IP and capability ultimately into Gemini.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  But in 2027, not in 2026.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, and maybe not, right? Like, one question I have is, they have a one-year exclusive. After that period, does Disney say, okay, you can keep having the exclusive, but you need to pay us like a billion dollars a year?

• 4:47John Coogan?

  And at least Google's at the table negotiating. Is that what you mean?

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. So, the strategic significance of the steal for OpenAI has been broadly underappreciated, mainly because for a company that frequently talks in the trillions, Disney's investment, a paltry one billion, just isn't enough to turn heads. But the advantage this deal gives OpenAI from a product and distribution standpoint is extremely significant. Per the most recent reports, OpenAI has 20 to 30 million paid users out of a total of 900 million globally. Disney, on the other hand, had 140 million people visit Disney parks in the last year and 128 million paid subscribers to Disney Plus. If you're an adult, spending thousands of dollars to take your kids to Disneyland or a Disney Plus subscriber, surely you'll pay an incremental amount to OpenAI to extend and personalize your Disney experience. As a parent, some of the most magical moments with AI that

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  I've had are simply generally, I've talked about this before, I take a real photo of me and my son, and I turn it to a generic design source.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Dino mode.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  Dino mode. It really brings us both a lot of joy. It's like, it's his reaction to the picture that I'm getting joy from because he just like absolutely loves it.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  I had a similar experience where I would, I would like take a picture of like, you know, we'd create a scene of toys and then we'd say like, make these Lego versions of this or something. But the models got so good at a certain point that I was just like, okay, like, I just, I made his toys look like toys and it just looks exactly like what I made. It's like, I just, I need to just take a photo. I need like more creativity to come up with something remarkable.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, I think people... My household is not into the Disney world yet.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Kids are just young.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  But I can imagine how excited if you're a Frozen superfan and Avengers superfan. Being able to put yourself, your kids into their world, I think is going to be pretty exciting. So having a license to generate high quality images and videos of 200 of these characters creates a temporary but very real differentiation for tons of current and future ChatGPT users. Creates a real catalyst to pay, right? Like my kids want more outputs. I'm assuming you'll get a handful for free and then you'll have to upgrade. And it creates, and it's just going to be super viral, right? These videos are going to be going into family group chats, they're going to be shared online. I think it'll, I think it's hard to imagine another Studio Ghibli moment in the way that that happened, but you can imagine that this will be getting a lot of attention.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Knowing Sam and Josh, they've likely negotiated to get Sora ChatGPT broad exposure across Disney properties, both online and offline. And we already know that select Sora videos will be featured in Disney Plus. I think they're going to be taking, really making sure they're hand selecting those because.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  I wonder what that means. I wonder if that means the Apple TV app or the Disney Plus app on the phone. Because on an iPad, on a phone, it feels a little bit more natural. But, I mean, just in terms of the Star Wars property, like there's, there are, there are the, the original Star Wars films, and then there's Young Jedi Adventures, which is Star Wars for kids, the, you know, there's even less violence, it's more G rated than a PG 13 rated. Even with Bluey, very popular children's show on, on Disney, on Disney Plus, there are full episodes that are like, a full episode might be, I want to say like eight minutes long, but then there's minisodes that are even shorter.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  So like, the short formification is happening within the Disney app already, but I think a lot of parents would have a sort of negative reaction to just.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  A feed.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  A feed, yeah. An endless scrolling feed of short form Sora content. That's going to be really tricky. It needs to be some, it needs, it needs a twist, it needs curation. They said that there's already going to be curation, but I wonder how that's going to roll out.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Curation, but it could still very well be infinite.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it well, it doesn't need to be infinite.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just imagine it could be a every week.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Like you could have like, like you could truly have like a monthly contest. Everyone prompts to create the most in the most incredible Sora uh videos with Disney.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  And allow the kids to bet on the winner.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, they definitely have to gamble on it for sure. That's that's a done deal. Um, but but you could you could essentially have like a like a film festival that's running and kids submit their generations and then those.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  Film festival of seven second videos. I'm sure Hollywood will love that.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  Back in the back in the Vine days, like the the the the creative skill ceiling was incredible.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  People were doing remarkable, remarkable things with that uh with that with that technology, that short form video. They would loop and do all sorts of stuff. I I still believe that there's some really interesting things that you can do with generative systems, with generative AI. Uh, and I and I imagine that we will see some cool stuff come out of the Disney partnership. But um, I don't know that I'd want a kid sitting there watching endless slop. Like, that seems rough.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  But I mean, at the same time, a lot of a lot of parents are like, yeah, that's great. Cause a lot of there are parents out there who are like, no, I I'm actually just in the market for something that.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Will keep their attention.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Today, right now, I want them to stop trying now.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  I need five minutes to do this thing.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Or I yeah, or just need a babysitter.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, I finished it out by saying my long held assumption is that over time, everyday consumers won't pay for L L M's. There will be great ad and commerce supported L L M's that provide the monetization to serve great models. But OpenAI's challenge is that even with future Hall of Famers like Fugit Simo and Denise Dresser on board. Denise is, of course, the former CEO of Slack, who's now the C R O at OpenAI. They can't massively scale monetization of the free product overnight. They can't just say, hey, ChatGPT agent.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Create a massive ad platform. Don't make mistakes.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  And I said, I don't expect those business lines to really begin ramping till the second half of next year, and they need to show continued revenue growth now. Hard to think of a better time for this deal to get done than 11 days into OpenAI's code red and right as Sora was about to fall out of the App Store's top 25. I looked earlier this week, they were sitting at around 24. And again, as this, as this new IP actually like rolls out to users, I expect it to go right up back to number one. I said, will the functionality be immediately abused? Yes. Will it create uncomfortable moments for Disney's leadership? Yes. Is it a smart move for Disney? Yes. Will OpenAI have to shell out billions to maintain exclusive access over the long run? Yes. Will it be worth it? I think quite possibly.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  So first, I want to tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. Second, I want to debate you on this idea that it will be abused immediately. I think it's actually really, really hard to abuse these systems. Like, there was the whole, the first Gemini model where people would say, make a, you know, a soldier from the 1940s and it would be a Nazi, but it would be a black Nazi. And so that people were very upset about that because it was like, just made no sense. But I think that the models and the, more importantly, like, the reasoning chains that happen, like, it's very clear that when you go to Nano Banana Pro and you say, you know,

• 11:57John Coogan?

  take this image and make it Christmasy, it's unpacking that using Gemini as an LLM first. And it's, and it's hydrating it into something that's, it's actually reasoning about what you asked, even if you just say, Christmas mode, Studio Ghibli mode, you know, like, you give it two words and it actually is clearly hydrating it to a much, to a much broader degree. And I think that that reasoning step happens before, and I also think it happens after, so that even if it accidentally generates Mickey Mouse, or, you know, someone doing something that they shouldn't be, Mickey Mouse holding a gun or something, then it will detect that and, and actually turn that off. Like, it's been very hard. The whole like, oh, jailbreak it, I got it to say something crazy, like, that's like, it's just like, seems like a thing of the past. What do you think?

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  I just, I just trust that the internet immediately will figure out, if you have hundreds of millions of people trying to jailbreak it, they will pull it off.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that will happen is people using different models that are, like, already don't have the same guardrails. And making it look like they're sore outputs, even though they're insane.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally, totally.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Again, I'm just saying like-

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Open source model that's completely unrestricted, you do something crazy and then you throw the sore watermark on it just to take a shot at Sam and-

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Stick it to Bob and Sam.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Little sigh up. What do you think Tyler?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna agree with Jordy. Like, I think-

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Hey, what's this? What's this?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I've just been, you know, I got a double jaw surgery.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Double jaw surgery.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  And a little bone smashing?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  I've been bone smashing a bit, yeah. Just trying to get my looks-

• 13:29John Coogan?

  You're looking fantastic. This is remarkable. I really, I really can't- hats off to the production team. This is a fantastic new feature to allow Tyler to look like the absolute-

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Look like how I do every day.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Yes, how you do every day. Sheesh. I love it. Yo. Chad's loving it.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Okay, but I was gonna say, like, yeah, day one, there's gonna be people on X that, like, easily jailbreak it. I can't-

• 13:52John Coogan?

  I can't take you seriously.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Just look at us. And then, and then they're just gonna post it and then it's gonna go super viral and then you have parents.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Chad ID.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  No, it says Chad ID, no Chad Podcast.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  I love it. Banta, automated compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Okay. Tell me your actual take.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, so, so I think, like, day one-

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Oh, he's back.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Oh, what, what, what happened?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Day one-

• 14:27John Coogan?

  There we go. There we go.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Okay, day one, you have people who jailbreak it, even if it's like one person, then it goes super viral next, and then it's like, oh, Mickey Mouse, like, shooting a gun, and then it goes viral, parents see it, and they're like, okay, my kids aren't gonna be on this because-

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Even if it's like mostly, like, you're gonna have a ton of backlash where-

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Could be bad backlash.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Goes super viral on CBS News or whatever.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  Nah, I don't buy that. I think, I think, I think it, I think it will be very magical, and I think that they'll immediately be getting shared in family group chats and, and, you know, between friends, and I think we're maybe underestimate the adult Disney audience as well.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  It could go two ways, adult Disney.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay, easy, John. Uh, it is, yeah, it is notable, adult mode and the functionality are rolling out around the same time.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  But the Pikachu getting barbecued, is that a violation? Is that something that they want to stop? If you're Bob Iger and, and someone shows you that Pikachu getting barbecued video, would you say, no, no, no, I don't want any videos out there of Mickey Mouse getting barbecued? What do you think? Do you think that crosses the line?

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  I think Disney execs, if they saw that in a pre-IPO world, would send a cease and desist.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Wait, what do you mean pre-IPO?

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, pre-AI world, pre-deal world.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  Like, I think that, I would imagine that anybody that's been creating content like that,

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  they come after them in the same way that Ferrari, if Ferrari sees you like, paint your, like Ferrari some crazy color and do donuts, they'll just send you a cease and desist, even though, even though you own the car.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Right? They care a lot.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  I'm just wondering, like, internally, how, where do you think the line is? So you think that they would, you, you, you think that, that, uh, you know, whenever this rolls out, maybe it's already out, it might be out soon, but let, let's just assume it rolls out January, you go to Sora, you can generate, you know, uh, Luke Skywalker fighting with Spider-Man, because those are two Disney properties.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Can you have Luke Skywalker cut Spider-Man's arm off? Because Luke Skywalker does cut off people's arms in the PG-13 rated Star Wars.

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Spider-Man does not ever get cut, he never gets his arm cut off because he's more of a PG character.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Right? So how do you blend those two together? And I'm, and I'm just wondering, like, where is the line for the Disney execs? Like, where would they draw the line? How do they even think about a framework for holding, upholding the brand?

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  I think we'll know it when we see it.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  I think it'd be a funny scenario where they only allow violence on Warner Brothers characters.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  But they don't have the rights, but it's just like, oh yeah, like you can, well, uh, they do that in Hollywood. There's some, there's some, uh, actors who have it in their contracts that they never will lose a fistfight, basically. They'll say like, you know, you, you can cast me in this movie, but if we're, if I'm fighting up as somebody, I don't lose, we can tie, basically. So you know how you watch a lot of like Jason Statham and The Rock and like Fast and Furious and they're like bashing each other through walls for like five minutes, like this crazy action scene. And then at the end, you're like, oh, and like neither of them won. It's like, that's because it's in the contract. They don't want to be, they don't want to be depicted as like losers.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  They don't want to be orafarmed.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  They don't want to be orafarmed, exactly. They want to use graphite.dev instead. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Um, Justine Moore has taken a victory lap. She's been on this case for a long time. Uh, she said, I got roasted by the anti-AI crowd for suggesting that IP holders might want their characters in Sora. They insisted that real entertainment companies would never willingly allow their characters to be used in AI slop. Two months later, how the times have changed. Fantastic prediction, Justine. Uh, great work. I, I completely agree with this take.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  I think, um, it is interesting how there are, there, there is just the reality that if you hold IP, you need to exist in the world. You need to exist a lot. You can't just stay on the shelf. You can't be the Humphrey Bogart. And yesterday, when, when Dylan from, uh, Puck was here, I, he was mentioning a bunch of old, uh, Hollywood references. And I was laughing to myself because I know you have not seen Casablanca and you have no idea what he means by get on the plane, uh, or Rosebud, or any of these references. You're just like, yeah, totally dude. Yeah, yeah.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Give me another, give me another movie to watch this weekend.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Because you told, you, you tried to get me to, you got me to watch The Fugitive.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  And it was good, right? I delivered.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, movies might be underrated.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Movies are underrated. You heard it here first. Movies underrated.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  At least in my household. Scroll down here, cause I wanted to show another, uh, post, uh, from Olivia Moore, who said, has anyone else noticed VO3 has no IP constraints? Prompt Mickey Mouse welcoming you to Disney. Look at this, John.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Sorry. Yes. I'm pulling up my movies, my movies list, which I will read to you in full.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so this was going back, this was going on back June 16.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  What's crazy is that this somehow looks, this, this looked so good at the time and I was like, oh, it's over. It's so over. Like, like they can fully do it. And yet this now, looking back, this looks washed out. It doesn't have, it's like overly saturated or something.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  It looks like a green screen.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't actually look that good to me anymore. And it's because the, the goalposts have moved as they always do. Um, anyway, uh, let me tell you about our daily newsletter. Tech analysis and news daily. Get our daily op ed, top headlines and best posts from the timeline every, every something, every day. In your newsletter, it still cuts off, we're working on.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  I'm just messing with the team here. Anyway, uh, numeralhq.com, compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, so you can focus on growth. Numeral.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  Bill Peebles is fired up.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Do you want to hear, do you want to hear my full movie? Okay. This is the full list you can pick and, uh, and Tyler, you can play along too. Um, first up, The Godfather. Have you seen it?

• 20:51John Coogan?

  No. Wow. Okay. Taxi Driver.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Never heard of it.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Star Wars. You've seen Star Wars.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  Seen at least a couple.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Uh, Raging Bull.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Scarface.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  You've actually seen Scarface?

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, Full Metal Jacket.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  But I didn't study it. I watched it, but I didn't, I didn't take notes.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Full Metal Jacket.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Die Hard.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Maybe like 10 years ago.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  See Die Hard. Uh, Goodfellas.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  You gotta watch Goodfellas. This is so good. Uh, Reservoir Dogs.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  Hmm, maybe.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Falling Down?

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  Never heard of it.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Falling Down's a good one. Uh, Pulp Fiction.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  Seen it.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Heat.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Heard of it, haven't seen it.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Casino.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Never heard of it.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Braveheart.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, heard of it, haven't seen it.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  You've never seen Braveheart. Wow. Okay. Uh, hackers.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Apollo 13.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Contact.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  The Fifth Element.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Saving Private Ryan.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  You haven't seen Saving Private Ryan. Wow. Uh, Fight Club.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Seen it.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  You've seen Fight Club. Thank goodness. Uh, The Matrix.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Seen it.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  American Psycho.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  Seen it.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Gladiator.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  See, now we're in the 2000s, so we're, we're more likely. But the fact that you haven't seen Gladiator, I mean, that's a fantastic film. You gotta watch Gladiator. Uh, Lord of the Rings.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  At least one.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  What do you mean, at least one? You mean, at least once? So you've watched the full trilogy at least once?

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm saying, I don't think I've watched the full trilogy.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  You just watched a random movie in the trilogy?

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Probably the first one.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  The first one? It's a, it's act one. You didn't finish The Lord of the Rings. It's a three act structure. You can't just watch one and call it, call it.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  I guess I can.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. Minority Report.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  300.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  You didn't see 300? That's crazy. Troy.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  The Departed. The Prestige.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're just.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  I'm not making things up. No Country for Old Men.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think I've seen that one.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  The Dark Knight.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  Seen it.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Iron Man.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  See, now this is, this is.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Now we're getting into good ones.

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  We've, we've passed, you know, we've passed the joke that I've only seen three now. I think I've seen, I've seen a handful.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  But, uh.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  A few handfuls.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Sicario. Have you seen Sicario?

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  No, but I like the, I like, I like the.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  You gotta watch Sicario.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  I like the, the, I know the memes from it.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. We gotta, we gotta run through the rest.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  The chat is, the chat's getting angry.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  There's so many good ones here. Iron Man, Gran Torino, Inception, The Social Network, Tron Legacy, The Town, Drive, Enemy, Wolf of Wall Street, American Sniper, Edge of Tomorrow, John Wick, Interstellar, Nightcrawler, Mad Max: Fury Road, Ex Machina, The Martian, Sicario, The Revenant, Dunkirk, Blade Runner 2049.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  I was, uh.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Ad Astra, Joker, Tenet, Dune.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  I, I have seen, I have seen John, I have seen John Wick. I have seen John Wick. Funny story. I was on a flight back from London.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  And it was like effectively 3am.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  The whole plane's dark.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  And Keanu Reeves just walks by my seat.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Wait, in the actual plane?

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  Just walks by and it was like.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Wait, and you were watching John Wick on the.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  No, I wasn't.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  But it felt like.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  He walks by and imagine seeing like Keanu, like you're just, you're on an overnight flight. It's dark in the plane and he just like walks by, he was using the restroom. And I did, I ended up watching it after that.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, to be, to be fully immersed. Anyways.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  I think Sicario would be the pick. If you, if you have one movie to watch.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Tonight.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Tonight, I would say Sicario.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  It's a great one. I, I know, I know that you're gonna like it in the same way that, uh, you liked The Fugitive with Harrison Ford.

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  Great. Uh, Bill.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Bill Peebles says, Sora meets Disney is gonna be pure magic dream come true to be working with them. Let's give it up for Bill. Bill Peebles.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, seriously. What a, what a great partnership for him.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, Hero.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Especially because, you know, there's, there's a lot of people that have been, uh, like pointing to like Sora falling out of the App Store charts. Like Sora's not doing that well. And it's like, that might be true, but Sora's still the number one generative AI video app, right? It's kind of like winning by default. So it's not like you should cut your losses. It's not like you've been beaten. Like it's clearly still a category that you wanna go after. And so why not go get a big partnership? Why not keep iterating to get to breakout success, to get to product market fit? The model's gonna get better. You know, the research team's working on that. And now you have more IP and then the actual, the actual implementation of the app is gonna get better.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  So, uh, congrats to Bill Peebles on the partnership. Job's not finished.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's already, I mean, it's back up to 15 already, probably just based on the news. Even though, even though I don't know that, uh, all this functionality is actually available yet.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, more importantly, Hero, Thousand Presence says 5.2. How about 5.2 cold ones with the boys? It's a beautiful Thursday night, folks.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  It's hilarious.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  This latest model is state of the art on Beer Bench, which is if I crack it open, it makes a fizzy sound and I go, hell yeah. Very good. Tyler Cowen says chat GPT 5.2 also knows exactly which are the best Paul McCartney songs and it can write a poem in Spanish as good as the median Pablo Neruda poem.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  Tyler Cowen loves loves the GPT models. He's obsessed. Have you?

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  He's he's the most obsessed and yet I've never seen somebody make the claim that he was one shot.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is pretty.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  He's he's using responsibly. He's using responsibly. Yeah, there I haven't I haven't really had a chance to play too much with the new model. Is it already? Is it already rolling out? Yeah, I am on 5.2 already 5.2 Pro. I I was working through I hit 5.2 Pro with a question because I wanted to know. So it does feel like OpenAI is a little bit of the the coming out of the trough of disillusionment potentially, you know, the the vibes have been really bad with the 1.4 trillion, but the global economy has not collapsed and the market is rallying and there were in fact not an Enron scenario.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  None of the big tech companies blew up like we've moved on. Now, maybe it happens, but in general, it seems like, you know, expectations have sort of reset and now we're going into 2026. It's kind of a new game, but you know, OpenAI still has a really dominant consumer business and it what looks like it's shaping up to be an oligopoly in the enterprise side or the B2B side. And so nothing is a five alarm fire. They're in the code red, but it feels like they will emerge stronger from it. The big question is, you know.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  How will Sam Altman be perceived? Will he be one of the greatest founders of all time, founder CEOs? And I was, and I was trying to benchmark him, you know, let's say that, let's say that he, you know, lands the plane, gets out of the code red, Baja blasts his way into the public markets. And, and he winds up, you know, being this founder CEO of a multi-trillion dollar consumer tech company. He's in the mag seven, it's the mag eight. How will he be remembered? And I was, and I was, and I was thinking about how unique his ownership structure would be. Because for most CEO, founder CEOs, if they get the company out into the public markets at a trillion dollars, something

• 28:59John Coogan?

  like that, they typically own a ton. Steve Jobs is notably, at various times, not a major shareholder. At one point, he owned five and a half million shares out of almost a billion shares. So he had half a percent, or 0.6% in 2011. That's, that's reported here. Bill Gates, on the other hand, absolute

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  13.7% ownership of Microsoft. So, you know, at a trillion dollars, that's 137 billion. That's a lot of ownership. Alphabet, Google, obviously, both of them became some of the richest people in the world today. The economic ownership is only around 3%, but still significant. Jeff Bezos is at 14% with Amazon. Jensen is at 3.7%, 3.77% of Nvidia. Of course, it's been a 30-year trip. Elon Musk, almost 20% at Tesla, 19.7%. Meta

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting to think

• 30:03John Coogan?

  at 13.5

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Given, given how much dilution OpenAI has had to take in all the shareholders

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Starting as a nonprofit.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  There's, well, that, but there's a world where if the company had just been formed as a C corp back in the day, in 2015, and they had just raised a bunch of

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Rounds.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  Rounds, back to back to back. And there was a bunch of co-founders initially. Would Sam actually have, it's rumored, what, he's going to get something like 7% was the proposal?

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Would he have? Would he have less than that in that scenario? Obviously, he could get topped up.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think I don't think in the fullness this will end up working out that badly for Sam.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is interesting because just like like being being founder CEO of a of a trillion dollar consumer tech company, that usually is good enough to get you 50 billion, 100 billion dollars, but we'll see where it lands.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  I'm not I'm not quite sure what will happen, but.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Did you want to run through this post from Greg?

• 31:01John Coogan?

  I'd love to, but first I'm going to tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Greg, comrade, who of course is the president of Arc Prize and the creator of some fantastic TVP and trading cards.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  That he's been printing out.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  He's been printing out. We were shocked by this. Thank you, Greg, for the for the tireless work on that project. It's very fun, very cool. And you have such an important day job. I'm shocked. We were shocked when we found out that you were making something cool on the on the side. But he says the jump to reasoning models will be studied for years. They are still wildly wildly underrated. Arc AGI one has been out for six years. GPT 5.2 is a five order of magnitude scale up, and yet it still lands at 12%. Add a bit of reasoning and performance immediately jumps.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  And so you can see the Arc AGI one leaderboard. GPT 5.2 is only a 12%, but when you get to low, medium, high, extra high over in the reasoning models, or you switch to the pro models, you're getting up to 90% on Arc AGI. Of course, the the the test of that any human can do, and yet AI has struggled with for a long time, not for long. AI is starting to make headroom or make headway on the Arc AGI leaderboard. Very impressive results. Opus 4.5 didn't do too poorly either. Grok 4, of course, is also doing well.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Who else is, and has Gemini not benched on this yet, or have they not been, have they not been focusing on this? I'm not exactly sure. But I'm excited to, to see what happens with Arc AGI V3. It feels like we're not even showing those scores yet because I think that none of the models are scoring at all yet. They're not even finishing. And I think it's, it's, it's an optimization problem to make the least number of moves.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  But it is interesting because the, the model card that Sam shared had a caveat around the OpenAI models. I sent this to Tyler last night, asking him about this because, so, so Sam Altman's shows OpenAI GPT 5.2 thinking versus GPT 5.1 thinking, and there's huge step ups across Sweet Bench, GPQA, Diamond, Frontier Math, AI ME, Arc AGI 1, Arc AGI 2, GTP Val. Like, there's, there's jumps of various sizes all over. And then there's also Anthropic and Google. Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5 are also benchmarked there.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  And of course, when you read into it, OpenAI's GPT 5.2 thinking wins on almost all these benchmarks, except for the advanced mathematics, tier one through three and tier four, where Gemini 3 Pro wins, actually. But down at the bottom, there's a little caveat, and it says, "OpenAI models were run with maximum available reasoning effort." So these models now have the ability to reason for longer. You can just throw more time at them. But, but I was asking Tyler, it's weird because like, like this makes it look like OpenAI is cheating and, and Anthropic and Google are doing more of a, you know, by the book approach to their benchmarking or whatever. But Tyler was sharing that actually, all the labs now run their models at maximum reasoning effort

• 34:34John Coogan?

  because they all want to maximize the benchmarks, right?

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, you're going to run out on your best model.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just weird to put that caveat for you and not your enemies. Isn't that weird?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. That's just like the standard practice. Like, they're not going to benchmark on their worst model.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, they're not. But if anything, you would want to say-

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Just put the note for all the different-

• 34:57John Coogan?

  All the labs, all the labs are running on maximum available reasoning effort. We're just like that. I don't know. Yeah, we should build a model that reasons for 100 years. What happened? Oh, he's back in chat, but I'm missing it. This is insane.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  You didn't even, you didn't notice the difference?

• 35:14John Coogan?

  No, I didn't. Because when I'm talking to Tyler, I look at his face. I don't look at the screen.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm gonna jump in here. So, Jay-

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Jay Bull, T A R D, over on X says, "Oracle is a train wreck. How did they not disclose these delays on the call two days ago? And Bloomberg is reporting that Oracle delays some data center projects for OpenAI to 2028. Oracle has pushed back the completion dates for some of the data centers it's developing for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027. The delays are largely due to labor and material shortages," said the people, "asking not to be identified. Uh, Oracle has been working to deliver on a $300 billion contract to supply the computing power necessary to train and run OpenAI's models since it was inked this summer. Even with the delays, the timelines for the project in the US remain ambitious for sites that are set to become some of the largest in the world."

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  I remember when this news broke, uh, we talked about how Oracle was basically saying, like, "We're gonna build AWS in two years." And that just felt like, um, uh, you know, applaud the, the sort of ambition. But I think some of these delays, labor shortages, et cetera, are, were predictable.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  Um, Bloomberg says, "Our take on, uh, on Oracle's massive bet on AI, uh, Oracle's AI bet has fast become a bubble barometer."

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  A little bub talk. Oracle spokesperson said in a statement that the company remained confident in its ability to meet its obligations and future expansion plans. "There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments and all milestones remain on track. Uh, site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI." Uh, and they said, uh, "We have ambitious, achievable goals for capacity delivery."

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  Yada, yada, yada.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  The whole market's down today. I wanted to wear a white suit, but it is not the day for that. Did you see Broadcom? We celebrated yesterday. It seemed like the earnings, but.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  And they revealed their mystery $10 billion customer.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Anthropic. Didn't people think it was OpenAI? I think, I think at the time, everyone thought it was OpenAI. But Broadcom is selling off significantly, down 10%. Really, really bad, really, really bad news.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Broadcom revealed during a September earnings call that it had signed a customer that had placed a $10 billion order for custom chips. Tan said yesterday that Anthropic had placed an additional $11 billion order with Broadcom in the company's latest quarter. So at the time, originally in September, Broadcom didn't say who it was, but yesterday, Hock Tan revealed. So anyways.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  So it's selling off because of questions about Broadcom's sales forecasts, contracts backlog, and anticipated future margins. Despite reporting a record $18 billion in sales and strong profit growth. That was, that's what we latched on to from that hilarious post of the crying bear. Well, the bear's not crying now. The bear is rich because the bear was short.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  The bear's.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  The bear is excited. Margins appear to be one area of concern. Chief Executive Hock Tan said Broadcom's fast-growing AI business has lower gross margins than other areas. Its forecast for non-AI revenue in the first quarter was flat. So the revenue mix is changing, the margin mix is changing, and so some analysts cast the stock move as an overreaction and noted it came after a 75% run-up this year so far. "We can expect it to recover," wrote a team from City Research that reiterated its buy rating on the stock, saying that upside from the AI business will continue to push up earnings estimates. I wonder why the AI business is so much lower margin. Like, we've seen, like, over the past few years,

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Nvidia has actually expanded margins and grown their gross margins significantly during the AI boom. Broadcom doesn't seem to have the same leverage as Nvidia, and so they've been struggling, unfortunately.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Apollo, according to Compound 248, casually predicting zero returns to the S and P 500 over the coming decade. They put this out yesterday. A note on expected returns in public equities over the coming years. The historical relationship between the S and P 500 forward P E ratio and the subsequent 10 year annualized returns show that investors should expect to get zero return in the S and P 500 over the coming decade. They have a chart below. They're like, hey, can we interest you in some private credit opportunities? Where?

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Or you know, the other option. What's the other thing you want to invest in when the stock market isn't looking so good?

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  Puts?

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Land.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Land.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  Land. And we have Mike Swan on the show.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Land maxing.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  The owner of Swan Land Company, we saw him advertising some land in the Wall Street Journal. We said, we got to get him on the show and we did. So we're very excited to talk to him in 15 minutes. All about land and his business.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  I've talked about this. Land, I think, is the most criminally underrated asset by new generation of investors. Nobody wants to, nobody wants to make steady returns. Land maxing. They want to, they want to hit the thousand X.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  Meme coin. They want to hit the, the 1% polymarket, whatever it is.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. There is, the timeline has been in turmoil over Klein. And some posts are getting deleted. So I don't even know if we're going to be able to pull these up, but.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  Here's what happened.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, break it down.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  Somebody at Klein commented on a picture from a hackathon.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  And said, imagine the smell.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  People thought he was making, they thought it was like a racist comment.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  People started piling on.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  The CEO initially defended him and said, I'm. Like, I know, I can vouch for this guy.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's, he's fine. People kept piling on. The CEO ended up turning around and said, actually, we've let this guy go.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  And then now the CEO is getting even more, more hate on, from letting the guy go. And then now he's deleting the posts and so, and so maybe the guy, maybe he ends up rehiring.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  Feels like damage is pretty done at this point. I'd imagine, you know, I'd imagine this, this engineer that was formerly at Klein.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  Finds a new op. It'd be hard to imagine him saying, like, going back and saying, like, I'm actually going to rejoin.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  The team that just let him go.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  I have a, I have a brief screenshot saved a little bit. I think I can, I think I can read it. Some of it. This is the CEO of Klein. Says, "A few days ago, a tweet from our head of AI offended a lot of people." And it definitely offended a lot of people. There's an article in the Hindustan Times in India. Like, this is like newsworthy.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  Global.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  In India. "While I don't believe his original tweet was attended, intended to be offensive, his response refusing to apologize does not reflect my position or Klein's. We recognize this caused real pain and that deserves blah blah blah." And so the rest is cut off. Lulu says, "This stinks." She's not a fan of it.

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. She says, "Re-coms mistakes. Everyone makes them. Sometimes things fall flat. It's happened to me and it also happens to people much smarter."

• 42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  "But betraying people or principles is in a different category. It's more preventable and less excusable. Cowardice doesn't happen by accident. In the case of Smelgate, it could be argued that Posh made the first kind of mistake overlooking how the joke could be interpreted, but then the CEO inarguably made the second kind of mistake, and that one, to me, is much worse." Nat Elyason posted, a friend of the show, I'm not sure if he's in the chat today, said, "Considering the unanimous reaction to the CEO's post saying that he will fight, that they let go of the engineer." Nat says, will he fire himself now? Only seems fair. So I don't know. I don't know if it'll get that far, but certainly.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  It's just the entire company gets fired.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Fireception.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  Does everyone gets fired? No. The funny thing is that the only reason I know about this joke is from a bunch of Indian friends who who seem to have like been making it on anonymous accounts years ago in some sort of funny attempt to like reclaim the the formerly racist joke, but.

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  Lulu says, when you cave to the mob instead of standing by your employee, now people are more mad at you than before. And she quotes, your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really, it's really odd because it feels like although it was going viral, like this just feels like something that would have blown over. At least like take a breather, take a week or two, just like, you know, take some time off to think about the action. It feels very reactive to do it like within a 24 hour news cycle, which like can just amp up so quickly and then fall out. Okay, I guess I guess the Hindu Stand Times is not very serious. It's the gawker of India, apparently. So don't, so don't worry about that. I guess I'm wrong on that. Thanks for fact checking me, Suraj.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  Frank says, is responding, Trump in an interview yesterday said that he would consider eliminating taxes on gambling winnings.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  This is so crazy.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Frank says prediction markets be like, never mind, it is gambling.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  It is gambling because they always use trade. They always use like, it's not, it's not bad. You trade.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Trade on future.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Trade, trade on sports, trading on this. Wait, actually.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it is interesting to think about, you know, creating tax incentives for gambling.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Taxes on tips? I remember that was like a thing during the during the election or did that ever go through? Because I remember we were joking, we're like, oh, we're going to tip everyone here. I think everyone made that joke at some point. Apparently it is a glorified tabloid. So, you know, don't, if you're an American CEO and the Hindu Stand Times is putting you in the true zone, let it be known that maybe take it with a grain of salt.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Anyway, I, this, this just feels like a whole series of, of people. It's like, it's like, Trump likes being edgy and funny, making jokes, and he says, I'd consider it, and then watcher guru takes it and turns it into a viral thing, and then somebody dunks on it, and they get viral points, and it, it all feels deeply unserious, and, and not really, like, it's gonna reshape the market anytime soon. But it certainly is a funny headline.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think a lot of people would hope that it'd be like, no, we're not gonna create tax incentivized gambling in this country. But

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  He didn't.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  Stranger things have happened.

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  Stranger things have happened.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  What is this classical theist says, "Increasing the incentive to gamble is an answer to the affordability crisis is nothing short of diabolical." That is, yeah, very, very rough. Um, I don't know, yeah. Seems like the thing you should tax extremely highly. Seems like the best thing to potentially tax. Arthur Pigou in shambles, the Pigouvian tax creator. Are you familiar with Pigouvian taxes?

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  It's basically this idea that, like, you can use taxes to shape, uh, you know, behaviors, incentives. So like, if you don't want people to drive gas guzzling cars, you just increase the tax on gasoline. Uh, instead of, instead of trying to make something illegal, or, or promote something, or incentivize something, you just, you, you just shift the tax to be tax on tobacco. People will smoke less, in theory. Of course, cigarettes, they're addictive.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  I mean, California's done, done this so aggressively with gasoline in the state.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  And arguably, it's worked. I mean, there's a ton of electric cars in California. Like, there really are less gas guzzling cars. So if that was the goal, mission accomplished, right? It kinda worked. What do you think about Pigouvian taxes?

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, uh, isn't that like the idea behind the land value tax?

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Yes, a little bit. Uh, it's not, it's not quite the same. Land value tax is more...

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Because you're incentivizing people to develop the land.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, but I think it's more like the opposite, like the negative, like it's a way to it's a way to disincentivize negative externalities, like negative behavior, but I suppose it works both ways. Anyway, this, yeah, this was interesting, this scoop from Alex Kantrowitz, did you see this? So Alex Kantrowitz from Big Technology, what a great name. He's a Scoop OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman gathered news leaders for lunch in New York City on Monday. He told them enterprise AI will be a massive priority for OpenAI in 2026. And Greg Brockman says, yeah, enterprise AI is going to be a huge theme for 2026. What's

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  And this tracks with hiring Slack CEO as CRO, right?

• 48:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is, what, what, what does this actually look like, right? I think a lot of people are using ChatGPT at work, they're using a variety of LLMs.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Does it mean they're going after Harvey? That's the big question. Harvey seems to be doing really well, and I think of law firms as enterprises. And I think of law firms as potential targets for an OpenAI enterprise plan.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Am I crazy?

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think you're crazy.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:55Jordi Hays?

  There was a funny post here from Peter Gurness, says, not a, not a super serious post, but I think it's worth reading. He says, last quarter, I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. Thirty dollars per seat per month, 1.4 million annually. I call it digital transformation. The board loved that phrase, they approved it in 11 minutes. No one asked what it would actually do, including me. I told everyone it would 10x productivity. That's not a real number, but it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I'd said we'd leverage analytics dashboards. They stopped asking. Three months later, I checked the usage reports. Forty seven people had opened it. Twelve had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  It took 45 seconds, plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a pilot success. Success means a pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured AI enablement. I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're AI-enabled now. I don't know what that means, but it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Cloudera ChatGPT. I said we needed enterprise-grade security. He asked what that meant. I said compliance. He asked which compliance. I said all of them. He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a career development conversation. He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted us to feature

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  they wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we saved 40,000 hours. I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot. The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction. I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000, but this time we'll drive adoption. Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches, but completion must be tracked. Completion is

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does, but I know what it's for. It's for showing we're investing in AI. Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is, as long as the graph goes up and to the right.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  134,000 likes on that one.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  What a long post you go. That's fantastic. I was thinking about the fact that we now have a data point for agent force revenue, and we also have a data point for-

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you have to take that with a grain you have to take that with a grain of salt because Salesforce-

• 51:49Jordi Hays?

  Is, are they are the greatest to ever do enterprise sales? And we do know that they're selling Agent Force as like an add-on.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's where I'm going with this, baby.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  But first, I'm going to tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want a multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Okay, so my point was, you can actually get to a dollar per token. Because we've, we've also seen that leak of how many tokens they're generating, remember? And everyone was like, oh, Benioff's like not generating that many tokens. And so you can see that he's probably making the most dollar per token of anyone in the industry. Because you can look at other companies and see how many tokens they're generating. Their rough revenues, and we can work through all the math. Tyler, have we done this with, with Anthropic or OpenAI?

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Because we were looking at, at like, rough revenue, token, how much they've done it.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think I, I tried doing this at some point. It's just so hard because they, they don't like break it up in a nice way. Like, I think, at some point, Demis said, uh, they're doing like over a quadrillion a month.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  But then, what is the revenue? We don't know.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we don't know for Gemini.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  And then for OpenAI, like, we, I think we knew their API token count.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  And then the, the revenue was leaked, but it was overall revenue wasn't broken up.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  So you can maybe estimate it based off subscription percentage.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  Still, still, still, I, I feel like we gotta, we, we gotta put together the Agent Force numbers to figure out.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  But Agent Force must be, because I mean, I, I think the leaked number was like 3 trillion or something? It was a very low amount.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  And they're making like half a billion dollars. So they're, they're printing. And that must be like 99.999% margin too, right? Like, how much does it cost to generate a trillion tokens? Like 10 bucks or something? I don't know.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I think we also calculated this too, because we wanted to get on the OpenAI.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  So if you do the batch tokens and like the 4O model, it's like 20 bucks.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Can you imagine? Benioff's just sitting there like, yeah, COGS 10, $10. I mean, half a billion. No, I don't know. Uh, yeah, yeah, tokens are the new page views, the new eyeballs. But we should, we, we should actually get both of those numbers in a spreadsheet and see if there's any other numbers we can pull through. Because I would love to see them. In the meantime, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  What are you laughing?

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  A post went very viral a couple of days ago, someone saying, come on now, because Tubi has a movie out called The Grinch that stole B I T C H E S.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  And Tubi responded.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Tubi responded?

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  'Tis the season.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  'Tis the season.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  Incredible, incredible response from the Tubi team.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Did you see this, sorry, did you see this chart crime from Ri, this is from Riley. Riley says, put this on a shirt. So OpenAI launched a merch store called supply dot openai dot com. Very fun, bunch of shirts in there. You can get basketball, you can get a bunch of cool stuff. But then Riley's, Riley's sort of dunking and saying like, put this on a shirt. It's like how crazy the financials are over at OpenAI. And I, and I get it, like, merch store, probably not the biggest priority while you're in code red on your core product. Like, that's a legit concern, but, but the Financial Times, like, like, what are, what are we doing with this chart? This is a crazy, crazy chart. So first off, this says OpenAI's estimated balance sheet, but then it has revenue on

• 55:24John Coogan?

  here. And like, revenue doesn't go on the balance sheet. So like, what, what are we doing? And like, it's like, I'm just so confused by this. And so, total cost of cloud compute, that's the, that's the purple bar down there. Cogs also don't go on the balance sheet. So, like, both of those don't belong there. Then, the red dots are new equity fundings that they're planning to do, and that should go on the balance sheet, because that's assets that come in. But then, free cash flow, that comes from the cash flow statement. So, it's just like, I, this is such a chart crime from anyone who has respect for the three statements.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  This is the Financial.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  This is the Financial Times. I have a lot of respect for the Financial Times. I love the Financial Times, but I was just very shocked. I mean, it's more like, OpenAI estimated financials. I don't know, it's, it's sort of an interesting chart. It's also, it's also just very weird how there's like, bars and dots. And it's like, what does the bar mean? What does the dot mean? Like, it's like, the dot feels like it's more of like, I don't know, it's a very confusing chart. It does tell an interesting story, though, which is that they're projecting revenue increasing, while costs also increase.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  And they're gonna have to raise more money and eventually they're gonna, you know, they're gonna lose a lot of money. There's gonna be negative free cash flow for a number of years. Then eventually they will turn positive. I don't know. It seems like it's a bold five-year plan. We've heard about this. It's funny to see it laid out like that, but ultimately, they, they're, you know, like, whether or not they deliver is sort of immaterial to their, to their merch efforts. Anyway.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is not gonna like the post I read after you talk to me about cognition.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  Cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devon, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. What, what post are you pulling?

• 57:17Jordi Hays?

  Jacob Elordi says he has no tolerance for AI and finds the whole conversation around it so effing boring. He would not like the show. He says, I would much rather kiss on the beach and read a novel and be sunburnt. Most, most pick-me moment of-

• 57:36John Coogan?

  It's a crazy line.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  Of the year.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  It's a crazy line.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  But it resonated. 91,000 people agree.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  This is hilarious. Yassin Madin, who makes technical deep learning tutorials, says, yo Jacob, come on my live tomorrow. We're going to be review this paper. It's almost as good as the stuff you mentioned. See you tomorrow, buddy. And it's, it's the surprising effect of negative reinforcement and LLM reasoning. That's a very, very funny-

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  Okay, one more post before we start land maxing. Suck says, God blessed us again. Shocker. A thousand-year American empire. And Open Source Intel is reporting a major deposit of rare earth and critical minerals has been uncovered in Utah, which the Wall Street Journal calls the most significant critical mineral reserve in the US. We did it again.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  We did it again.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  If you're a nation without, you know, a lot of critical minerals, it's probably a skill issue.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  This is actually a good transition to our next guest, Mike Swan. Before we bring him in, let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easier to build on crypto rails, securely spin up lightweight wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. We will bring in Mike Swan, the managing owner of Swan Land Company. Mike Swan, how are you doing?

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Good well gentlemen, how are you?

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to, uh, to, I don't know, probably random people.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  What was the, what was the timeline here? We saw the ad, was it Monday?

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was in the, it was in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal in the special mansion section. We saw the Swan Land Company advertisement and we were like, we've wanted to invest in land. We think that there's a lot of people in our audience who might be interested in investing in land.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  I've talked on the show before that I think the, the, the new generation of investors, they want to buy crypto coins. They want to, you know, be trading options. They want to, you know, do NFTs, all this stuff. They want to, uh,

• 59:33John Coogan?

  But maybe they should just be buying land.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like, uh, land is just kind of overlooked, but certainly not by you. So we were excited to have you on the show to give us kind of an update on, uh, your business and how, how investors are, uh, approaching, uh, the asset class lately.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  No, thank you for having me on, gentlemen. It's, uh, I've really been looking forward to joining you and, and sharing a little bit of what we see in our, in our arena out here in the West as far as, um, uh, ranch properties, uh, investment properties, uh, in the Rocky Mountain West, which we primarily serve. Um, basically right now what we're seeing is, is, as we always have, that, uh, you know, land in the western part of the United States isn't going out of style anytime soon, especially in Montana. We saw an explosion with, uh, with the rise of, of the, the Yellowstone phenomenon and, and how that, uh, that really hit us out here.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  Was it actually driven by the show? The show really caused people to think about it?

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  It amplified what we were already seeing out here in our, in our market, but it certainly didn't, uh, it didn't slow down the process of the interest in, in Rocky Mountain, uh, ranch property. So of course you, you receive the phone calls that, uh, you know, talking about the train station and, and, uh, and all the, the entertaining aspects of what Rip, uh, Rip and that show, uh, went through, but, but that's a, that's obviously Hollywood doing its best to portray, to portray our part of the world in a very unique and, and, uh, unrealistic light, but. You know, we're seeing, we continue to see investments in our part of the world. You know what, our market's very cyclical as we see many of the markets and we study those

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  and keep very close tabs on what the markets are doing, but you know, currently right now with the stock market where it is and the cash and the financial sector being as strong as it is right now, the capital flow has really been out of real estate. It's gone into the market, it's going to stay in the market until we see, until we see some corrections there and then typically we see that pendulum swing back and we see that money flow back in.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  So that's somewhat counterintuitive. I would imagine some folks, maybe some smarter investors, when they feel like markets are maybe a little bit overheated or overvalued, might say, hey, this is a good time to rotate into a less liquid asset like land or ranches and have some stability. What you're saying is it's maybe the opposite. A lot of people just wait for a correction and then get maybe a little bit scared at that point and then seek more stability?

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  No, I think we're going to start seeing that in Q1, Q2 and next year. I think we're going to start seeing that movement back into the, back into our arena. But we've certainly seen a slowdown, you know, early 25, all the way through 25. It was a relatively slow year outside of some, several large transactions that we've seen in the, in the marketplace, but we feel as far as looking at the markets and the economic indicators as well as the financial people that we work with, that we're going to start seeing that come back into the market early in, early in 2026 and really see it ramp up in our, in our neck of the woods. So, you know, our focus right now is, is getting quality listings, getting them priced well, getting them priced in the market.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  We continually see anywhere between a 10 and 20% rate of appreciation in these Western Montana ranch properties.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  That's year, is that year over year?

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  I'd say that's over a five to seven year period.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  Is what we typically see.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Especially in the Rocky Mountains. Now, there's a lot of factors that play into that. We see properties where you have a quality water component, fishing component, hunting component, there's timber on the property, different amenities like that obviously have a higher rate of appreciation than straight agricultural land where you're grazing cattle. But, but there's getting to be a real appetite in the investment world for these quality A properties, just like there are with, with, with quality stocks or quality business investments, whatever it may be. We see the same thing in the, in the Rocky Mountain portion of, you know, in our real estate world as well.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How many, how many people out of the buyer pool really care about having a, like a high quality water source on the property? I think, uh, our, our audience primarily works in and around tech. Uh, every, every once in a while, a headline will pop up of some tech founder, you know, buying a doomsday ranch. I think a lot of people like the idea of having a, a place with a dedicated water source that, you know, if stuff, uh, hits the fan, they can escape there. But what percentage of the buyer pool really actually cares about making sure there's, um, you know, a lake or a river or, or some type of natural spring? I'm assuming a lot of these properties you can just drill down and,

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  and access, uh, well water. But, uh, how does that all work?

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  A lot of the majority deals with the fishing aspect of it. Um, the blue ribbon trout fishing in Western Montana is some of the best in the world. Uh, so, so primarily it's more of a recreational driven.

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Uh, component of these properties and it is necessarily a, an end of times or a doomsday aspect to the property. So the fishing, we always refer to, to quality fishing water on these properties is really the golden thread on, on ranch real estate and recreational real estate in the Rocky Mountains in that A, we, we typically see these properties appreciated a much higher rate and B, they never go out of style and there's, there's only, there's, there's a finite amount of those A properties that are on legitimate fishing water available in the Rocky Mountains. So when they do come available, they're, they're typically in very high demand.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  And the premium over the pre is what's the what's the what would you say the premium is over a property that doesn't have a running water or a lake or or any of those things is it 50% is 100% 200%?

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  That's just what I'm gonna say. Each each one of these is so unique, Jordy. That's what's hard about it, but it's it's significantly higher. Then, you know, then you go to, you know, the timber properties, the the properties that are in the mountains with the mountain setting and that everybody sees in the magazines that that you really obviously recognized in in the magazine ads that we put out. But the timber, the elk, the big game are always an attractor as well as to those investment grade buyers. You know, back to what you were talking about from the tech standpoint, it's remarkable how Bozeman's exploded as as really an emerging in emerging market in that tech industry. We're seeing a lot of tech people,

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  high net worth tech individuals relocating in Montana, relocating in in the Rocky Mountains in general, as well as buying large properties. You know, we were we're tied by a lot of NDA documents and NDA contracts, but but there are a number of of high net worth individuals that re that are relocating out here for a number of reasons. One is from a safety standpoint. They see Montana is very safe. They see the Rocky Mountain West is very safe. As as you see the crime rates in some of these urban areas that that that, you know, regardless of your political affiliation, there's there's concern about it. And I think as there continues

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  to be concern about about that, we're going to continue to have people that are driven to this market seeing as a safe, secure place to to raise their family, to have their kids, to have their family, you know, a family compound where they can gather at.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  What what kind of opportunities are there to actually monetize and and generate yield on a on a ranch property? Obviously, if you can just buy a piece of land and and let it appreciate over time, are there opportunities to actually utilize some of these properties, even if you're not, you know, there to generate some type of incremental yield?

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely. You know, the ROIs on these is much lower than what a standard investor would demand out of their portfolio. So, a lot of it when we're working with buyers is changing that mindset that we're looking at a long-term appreciation. Obviously, the depreciation schedule and the depreciable assets that are contained within these properties is of significance to a lot of these buyers that they can use directly on their tax returns. But typically, the ROI on a cattle ranch, if you can get a 2, even a 3% return on some of these, is quite good. The land prices have gotten to the point where it really,

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  agriculture is making, it's hard for agriculture to really sustain and to pay for any of these. I had a good friend of mine, an ag family, tell me that, you know, really, the ability for agriculture to pay for these ranch properties, farming is a little different, but on a strictly cattle standpoint, finding a way to get cattle to pay for these properties, really, that wagon came unhitched back in the 70s. So, today, it's more of looking at how you can get the agricultural operation to pay for your operation, to pay for your expenses, hopefully get a decent paycheck out of it. But where you see the return is obviously

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  when you go to sell that real estate, or you look to 1031 out of an existing operation, upgrade into something a little larger, in a possibly not-so-desirable area that isn't commanding these record prices from a recreational standpoint, if that makes sense.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Does it feel like, essentially, most of the land that you're seeing...

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Come across your desk has been properly surveyed such that people aren't seeing it as a gamble. They're not buying and saying, oh, well, like, maybe there's a chance there's gold there or oil. Because we just saw a, there was a new rare earth element deposit that was found in Utah. And, and the Wall Street Journal called it the most significant critical minerals reserve in the United States, a whole bunch of rare earth elements. And that seems like, how were we not looking for that already? But I, but I imagine that most of your clients are not thinking about their land purchases as lottery tickets, right? So how do you think about these like wildcard events that seem to be happening?

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  And yet, what is your, what is your client base actually experiencing?

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  You know, we really don't see that in our client base. It typically what our clients are looking for is preservation.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  We have buyers that are typically very conservation minded, that look at the, at the land is how they can improve it, how they can possibly reduce man's footprint on that landscape, enhance the wildlife, enhance the agricultural components, enhance the land. So when they leave it, it's a little better off. A lot of what our role is, is actually educating these buyers to, you know, there's, there's a great, there's a great shot right there in a ranch that we have listed in Northern Montana. But a lot of these new buyers that are in our arena today are looking at ways to, that they can help preserve the West, which is very refreshing in a lot of ways. They want to find ways that they can preserve

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  the agricultural way of life, that ranching way of life. Oftentimes, we'll see buyers that'll come in, acquire an asset, and then go back to that owner and say, okay, we understand that the margins in agriculture are very tight. Let's, let's relook at this asset and say, okay, if we, if we have an influx of capital and we have the ability to, to put some capital into this property, what can we do to enhance it? Both from a production standpoint, but also from a recreational and a conservation standpoint as well. Looking at it through a little different set of glasses and possibly what that operator's been looking at it in the past, and in finding ways that they can better preserve the ground, preserve that

• 1:11:56Speaker 03

  landscape, preserve that Montana, that Western way of life, and not just come in and look at mining it, developing it, carving it up, putting Small range jets on it or whatnot. We've really seen a shift for away from that development aspect into more of a conservation minded buyer.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  What's the process if you acquire a piece of land to actually build on it? We're based here in California and the process is absolutely insane. I live in Malibu. If there's a property that you might look at, it might be reasonably priced, but you're looking at maybe six years to actually develop plans, get them approved and actually start, you know, getting to the point where you could really occupy the space. What's it like in Montana from everything from a permitting process through even just like labor costs, all that stuff?

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  I don't know if I want to answer that question necessarily. I don't want to see a big rush all of a sudden into our market, but I think you'd be pleasantly surprised to it. It's significantly smoother. We don't have the bureaucracy in Montana that you'd see in a lot of other states. Obviously there are processes, there are permitting processes as far as building permits, electrical permits and whatnot, but nothing remotely close to what you deal with in California. It's much more personal. It's much more hands-on. It's much more streamlined and not always is it, you know, with that being said, we have a development here in Montana called the Yellowstone Club, which you may or may not be aware of,

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  which is turned into quite a billionaire's resort area. Very, very high-end, very high-end. It's the who's who in the financial sector that are residing in that area. And what we're seeing is really the high, high-end construction taking place in that, kind of in that sector of our state. It, you know, we'll see some building in the more remote areas, but not the extravagant building like we see up in the Yellowstone Club.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Yellowstone, you'll have a

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  Typically more modest.

• 1:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Like a two-bedroom condo for 20 million. Is that pretty commonplace?

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  How much does it, uh, how, how, uh, how much does it cost in general to, to work with you in general? Uh, do you, you know, is there like a, like a floor price or, uh, how, how do people start, uh, to get into ranches, farms, land? Like what are all the different financial products or, or, or actual, uh, opportunities, uh, that you see people come to you with?

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of it, John, is just sitting down with a client, interviewing them. We spend a lot of time upfront. Uh, our time is money, just as a lot of our, our, our clients, their time is money as well. So we like to spend a lot of time upfront, interviewing them, understanding what their goals and objectives are, looking not only short-term goals and objectives, but long-term goals and objectives, not just of them specifically, but also their buyer, where are they at with their family? You know, what are their, what are their, you know, what time of year do they plan on using the property? What do they want to get out of the property? What are they looking at long-term? Um, you know, talking a lot from the construction standpoint, what those times look like, what are those timeframes, getting them hooked up

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  with the right people so they're, they get good quality information. So what we do is, is a lot of times is, is spend that upfront time. So, so when we have a buyer that comes out and says, Mike, we've, we've sat down, we've spent several hours with you on Zoom calls or, or personal meetings, a lot of time we'll fly to the client. We'll sit down with them at their house in California, Texas, East Coast, wherever it may be, sit down and have that face-to-face meeting. What we do extremely well is personalize a process that so many clients feel is very impersonal. And that's really been our niche that we do extremely, extremely well. We're very high-touch. We, this is a, these are big decisions with

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  big dollars tied to them. And so we want to make sure that A, there's no surprises. Uh, we want to make sure that we're totally upfront, we're, we have everything on the table. We, we, we inform and educate our buyers as best as we possibly can. So there's no surprises. That's the last thing any of us want is dealing with surprises when we get into a multimillion dollar or, or a hundred million dollar transaction is surprises. So a lot of that is done upfront and we sit down and talk them through that right up front. We, we explain the good, the bad and the ugly about these processes. Timing, uh, costs, um, in, in trying to make sure that those goals and objectives that they have are realistic. And so, once we get on track with that, we're, we're very strategic.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  Uh, we like to say we shoot, you know, we, we like to aim like a laser versus a shotgun. So we're very, we're very direct in, in how we approach these processes. So we put a property in front of a prospective buyer. It's something that they need to look at and we've, we've vetted it. We've gone through it. We've, we've visited the property. We've gone through and already done a lot of the due diligence already upfront before they ever even set foot on the property. So again, being efficient in the process, that's one of the things that we stress within our office is being efficient with our time. There's no wasted motion in what we do and we, and we convey that to our buyer and we convey that even to our sellers.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  That everything we do has a purpose. We have very strict, very, very systematic protocols in everything we do. And, and you know, I gotta be honest with you gentlemen, what we do, we're not building rocket ships here. Um, real estate is, is, is personal and it's being able to execute at a very high level. And that's one of the things that we do and we feel we do exceptionally well. We've transacted more a hundred million dollar plus ranch properties.

• 1:17:52Jordi Hays?

  What's the, uh, what's the, the total volume that, that you guys have done? If you're able to share.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Oh boy, I, I couldn't even tell you Jordy right now.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  But it's in the, it's in the bill, it's in the, in the billions?

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Hit the, hit the gong for, for Mike. We got a gong here.

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  I got, I got, I got two more questions for you. You gotta do the question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I got one more before that. Okay. Uh, any restrictions on building an airstrip on a, on a large enough ranch? If I wanna, if I wanna create a ranch and fly a PC 12, land that or a PC 24, is, is that all fair game?

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  We have some complaints with airstrips on their properties, private airstrips.

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  Hmm, okay, let's hit it going again. Again.

• 1:18:40Jordi Hays?

  And then we have a question we like, we like to ask all of our guests, but it's particularly relevant for you. What's, what's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, as crazy as this sounds, I don't fish a lot.

• 1:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  I really don't, you know, we.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  You're too busy land maxing.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Uh, we're, we're busy, you know, and, and when I'm not, when I'm not at the office, we have a, a small farm, uh, that my family and I have that, that's kind of my therapy. I, I get my hands in the dirt and it's where I work. Um, we're avid, avid sports fans, so we travel around watching our local college teams and, and my son is a college athlete, so, so my wife and I, we spend a lot of time on the road, uh, following him. And so, uh, I, I think one of these days I'll probably take up fishing. I do, I do like to go to Canada with some, with some good friends and we go up and, and fish, uh, walleye and pike and, and up in the, uh, in northern Canada. But, uh, around here, I, I just, I just don't have time to get on the rivers too much. It is crazy as it sounds.

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  We get on, we get on some of the most spectacular fishing water that you could ever imagine that very few people in the world ever get to see. And, you know, I, and now with that being said, some of my colleagues here in the office are exceptional and, and, and very accomplished fishermen. So that's probably a better question for, for them. I'm, I, I, I like to work too much.

• 1:20:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you. Uh, great stuff. Well, thank you for coming on, breaking it down. This is fantastic. And, uh, I'm sure there'll be another land story in the news sometime soon and, and we will reach out.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  I appreciate you having me on, gentlemen. Thank you very much.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to be here.

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  Merry Christmas to both of you.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Merry Christmas.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. We'll talk about Fall, a generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine tune models with servers, GPUs, and on-demand clusters. Up next, we have Matt Levine in five minutes. But let's go back to the timeline and clarify something with Augustus D'Arcio. He says, "Am I tripping, or did TBPN used to stand for Technology Brothers Podcasting Network?" He says, "Technology Business Podcasting Network." Did we get gentrified, bros? What happened? Jordy, break it down for Augustus.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think Real Ones will always know what the TB and TBPN stands for.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  We actually never refer to TBPN as like four words. It's just always, always the initial.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Always the initials, yes.

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  We leave it up to the audience to interpret.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  Yes, it's becoming a thing. But it is, it is actually on our website. There is, it is spelled out on our website. It says, "Technology Business Programming Network." I still get that wrong. Often I say, "Production Network." It's not production, it's Programming Network. Of course, it's a nod to ESPN. Of course, technology and business is what we talk about, and so that made sense.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  And Technology Brothers TB always remains.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  In our hearts.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  Eternal, eternal. Or epsilon.

• 1:21:43Jordi Hays?

  What's up with, what has Rivian been up to this week? We should play this clip. We should play.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Arj has been on a tear. He's, he's, he's making a, a serious run at self-driving.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  He's chipped up.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  He's chipped up.

• 1:21:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's play this with sound, please.

• 1:21:59Speaker 04

  And now, for the first time in R2, we're adding a third sensor, the LiDAR.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Oh, they're doing LiDAR? That's crazy move.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  That's bold, right? I don't know.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, clearly no one clapped when he's, when he said that. Go back, that was a really awkward pause.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Dramatic.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

  And now, for the first time in R2, we're adding a third sensor, the LiDAR.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  The LiDAR.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  People are like, "No, my iPhone camera's gonna get fried." It was a weird thing. Apparently LiDAR on certain cars, not all of them, can be so strong that if you point your camera at it with your phone, it can permanently damage the sensor.

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  What about your eyes?

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  And so it's got some recalls. I think it actually only hurts the phone. It doesn't hurt.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, good.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  You're good.

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, totally good. Nick, could you bring over that bag right there?

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  What bag?

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  I gotta see, we gotta see this. Look, we signed up for Picnic, TK's new service. Let's see this. Let's see this. What did you get?

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Try Picnic? TryPicnic.com?

• 1:23:10Jordi Hays?

  Look at this. We're supporting Travis Kalanick, Cloud Kitchen's team.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  This is unboxing.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  What'd you get? You got a, you got a, you got a slot bowl?

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  One slot bowl.

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  One slot bowl. Anyways, looks fantastic. We're excited to check this out. One of our interns signed up for the service.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  The orange bag stands out with the green background, too.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  You can have your lunch bag.

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  This feels like a, yeah, this is iconic. This is gonna be seen all over, all over the place.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  He's cooking. They're cooking.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  He's literally cooking. Well, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They're trusted by millions, folks.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  Tyler posted yesterday, "You're telling me a brainwash this cult?"

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Didn't get, didn't get into the three-figure like club, but Kristin Forti says, "Top 20 tweets of the year."

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  There you go. Okay, top 20. That's good. Yeah.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  I only need four more likes. I'm at 96.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone, go give it a like. Go give it a like. There's a chance. I tried to artificially give it a boost by quote tweeting that one, not the other ones. But it did out, it did perform the best, right?

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Cause we ran the experiment. We posted all four of Tyler's jokes and per my prediction, the, did a brainwash.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  All right, you can turn the GigaChat filter off now, Tyler. You can turn it off. It's kind of an old bit at this point.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Ridiculous, ridiculous. Well, we have Matt Levine from Bloomberg and Money Stuff joining the show. He's in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him into the TUPN UltraDome. Merry Christmas, Matt. How are you doing?

• 1:24:48Speaker 05

  Merry Christmas. How are you guys?

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show on a Friday.

• 1:24:53Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:24:54John Coogan?

  Uh, great to, great to meet you.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  And thank you for creating wonderful content that at, at times we have, uh,

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Remarkable, yeah.

• 1:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Many times included, included in our show.

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  Triple glaze, yeah. You know, we love, we love the work. It's been fantastic.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I, I did want to start with a little bit of background. I, I wanted to know about the day that you decided to become a journalist. What was the transition like? Uh, what was like the first inciting element in that story?

• 1:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Did you know we were headed towards a hyper financialized world where we would be able

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  You'd have a lot to write about.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  to gamble in this very conversation?

• 1:25:29Speaker 05

  Uh, I don't know, man. I worked, I was working at Goldman when I decided to become a journalist. I was, I was already pretty hyper financialized.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Oh, that's true.

• 1:25:37Speaker 05

  I was, uh, I, uh, the day I decided, I went to my boss and I was like, I'm quitting to go to Dealbreaker, which is like a financial gossip blog. And he was like, that's fine. You can stay for another two weeks and finish up your work. And then he was like, wait, did you say Dealbook? And I said, no, Dealbreaker. And he's like, okay, no, you have to leave the blog.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, we really.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Um, well, I wanted to, I wanted to take your temperature on a bunch of different topics. Um, the, the, the first might be, uh, prediction markets. I mean, Jordy was joking about it, being able to gamble on this, uh, this very conversation.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've had some uncomfortable moments throughout the year where people flood into our chat and they're, you know, betting on what Sam Altman is going to say, or Mark Zuckerberg is going to say on one of our conversations. And it becomes very distracting because everyone's just saying, say this, say that, obviously trying to, uh,

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Influence the results.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  manipulate, manipulate the conversation. Um, but, uh, but yeah, it's been.

• 1:26:35Speaker 05

  I, I get a lot of those people. I get a lot of, um,

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Speaker 05

  The overlap between prediction market people and my readers is pretty high. So there's a lot of people emailing me.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Wait, so, so, so what, I mean, one of my main questions is like, is like, how do you actually get to some sort of ground truth for what's going on with prediction markets? Because there's, there's a world where it was like, you know, this incredible crystal ball for understanding the election. Then it turned into, okay, this is going to give you information about all sorts of different things in the world. And then you peel back the onion and you think, maybe there's just a lot of sports betting going on. Like, how do you actually think about the, the shape of the business today and where it's going?

• 1:27:17Speaker 05

  Um, you know, I think that like, this stuff about like, what people will say, like, you look at the volumes on these things, they're like, you know, thousands of dollars. Like, it's not, like, there's a lot of stuff that is fun to write about because it's, uh, it's weird and silly and susceptible to manipulation, but it's just not that big, right? Um, when people talk about these companies raising huge valuations and becoming huge companies, like, it's 80% sports gambling? That's like a number I made up. Like, it's, it's, you know, it may be less than that as a volume matter, but like, it's, it's like, the next leg up is sports gambling, right? I mean, that's what, that's why their business is. I think if you talk to them, like, their view is sports gambling is this huge opportunity

• 1:28:00Speaker 05

  for them to, you know, get people there, right? To get customers who really like gambling and to get, uh, professionals who can make money gambling against the, the sort of like, you know, dumb money customers. And then, once you have that, it's easy enough to expand into, you know, markets that make us more informed about the future of the world. Uh, I don't know that that's true. And like, if they end up just being, um, weirdly regulated casinos, then like, that's possibly still a really good business.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  The question is, how does the market actually evolve? Because you have every traditional sports book adding prediction markets. And so if you have new businesses that can be in 50 states on day one, maybe that grows the market a little bit. But overall, you know, what, what is, what is the sort of like total enterprise value that all the popular online trading and/or betting platforms?

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Can really sit at is kind of unclear, right? Maybe.

• 1:29:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, clearly, the big opportunity is like cannibalizing sports betting. The other thing is like, it's not clear what they are because they're exchanges, right? So they're not making money by trading against customers, right? And so like one possible evolution of the market is you end up with people who are either literally sportsbooks or who are like, kind of like hedge funds that are replacing sportsbooks, being market makers on these platforms and sort of, you know, making their money by trading against retail flow. But like, you know, they're a separate business from the actual, you know, calcium and poly market platforms.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you have an idea of how sophisticated like Wall Street is around sports betting? Because you have to imagine that like, at some point, Jane Street or Citadel said like, well, what if we just went and put someone in Las Vegas and started trading? Could we make an edge there permanently? I, I, it feels like there might be a wave coming where Wall Street starts having like serious desks dedicated to sports betting, but, or is that already happening? Or do you think that won't happen?

• 1:30:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's already happening, right? I mean, like, Salskana is the big one who like, you know, famously have a sports desk and like other big, kind of like high frequency trading market making firms are dipping their toes into it. I think it's hard for them to get into like traditional sports book, you know, trading, but it's very.

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because if you're too, if you're too good.

• 1:30:27Speaker 05

  Regulated exchange.

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  If you're too good, you just get booted.

• 1:30:30Speaker 05

  Traditionally, you get limited and it's like, it's just like a different interface where, and then a different regulatory interface too, right? Like if you're trading on a commodities exchange, you're trading on a commodities exchange, they can do that.

• 1:30:41Speaker 05

  So I think they're very much getting into it. And if, you know, legal sportsbooks regulated as commodity exchanges are here to stay, then it's also just like. Whether or not it's a good business opportunity, there's a huge personality overlap. Like you go to these high frequency trading firms, like it's the same type of analysis, same type of adrenaline. So like they're very happy to go into sports books.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about insider trading on prediction markets? It feels like we've, I mean, this, this week, it seems like multiple people have been making the, the steel man argument that it's good.

• 1:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the, the problem is, is in some ways, it feels like if you don't have insider trading, then it's just a bunch of people guessing. And if you do have insider trading, then you potentially get greater accuracy of, and, and like more value out of the markets. And so it just feels like a very tough, tough, I mean, it's very tough for the prediction market platforms themselves to actually talk about.

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  Right. Like my impression is that everyone who started a prediction market is a true believer in the idea that like the job is to make markets as informed as possible. And like they all secretly love insider trading, but they're also trying to get approved by the CFTC. And so they have to say, we do not allow insider trading. I think the rules are weird, right? I mean, the rules of insider trading commodity markets are less strict than they are in securities markets because traditionally they're for like, you know, grain producers hedging their grain production. So like you're supposed to insider trade. And I think like maybe a little bit of that philosophy will be imported into the prediction markets. But I mean, if you look around at like the justice department is going after, you know, baseball players for breaking gambling in baseball, like no one, there's no appetite

• 1:32:27Speaker 05

  for legal insider trading in most of the markets that, that, you know, will be big money in prediction markets. So I think that the regulatory situation is kind of going to shake out that insider trading is kind of prohibited, but maybe like a little harder to monitor than it is in the stock market. But definitely philosophically, people in this market don't want that.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Is it, do you think we just need a, like a big, like, like bombshell case or story to sort of like catalyze some action around that? Because it feels like, you know, sports books have, yeah, yeah, I guess, but sports books have existed for a long time. So I'm interested in understanding like, what would actually change? Because, because for, what, like, I don't know, 50 years, it's been, you know, longer, it's been, for decades, it's been illegal, or, you know, against the rules for a baseball player to go and put a big, you know, bet against them and then throw the game. And so that should just, that, I would imagine that that framework just carries over to prediction markets. But

• 1:33:36John Coogan?

  maybe if it's lagging, then we won't actually get codified until there's a big headline case?

• 1:33:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there'd be more codified in prediction markets, right? I think the prediction markets have rules saying you can't use mint to get a lot of public information, whereas like the sports books, the sports have those rules too, right? But like, I think that, I think that it's gonna be pretty codified like that. But, you know, you're gonna have a lot of, like the sports stuff, the sports leagues have a real interest in policing and, you know, the Justice Department has a real interest in, you know, that's a sexy case to bring if you're like, you know, arresting baseball players. You know, people betting on, like, you know, Google search results maybe is a little bit less interesting and a little bit more lucrative.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Speaker 05

  That makes sense. And like also, we like live in a world where like fraud enforcement is just kind of less of a priority. So like, people will definitely get away with stuff in the next few months.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  How did you process Trump saying he would, quote, "would consider eliminating taxes on gambling winnings"?

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  Is this him joking around or something?

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was kind of offhand, but then the, the, the nature of the internet today is you have like a hundred accounts on X that are like pseudo news wire accounts and they'll take one line out of context and then blast it out and they'll get a bunch of engagement. And then you realize, you know, you, you, you look to like an actual credible news source and you realize that, you know, again, fully, fully taken out of context. But do you think we should be incentivizing gambling in the country?

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  So a couple of things. One, no. Two, you know, like, like, like, being the friend to crypto has paid big political dividends to him. And like, if you're sort of looking around for what other like aggressive young male demographics you can can appeal to, you can might be like, oh, I'll give the gamblers what they want. And then the other thing is there is this weird situation where the tax bill may be somewhat accidentally limited to deductions of gambling losses. So you can only deduct 90% of your gambling losses, which if you are a professional gambler is like quite devastating. And one theory is that that has been very good for the prediction markets, because there's an argument that if you, you know, are trading

• 1:35:54Speaker 05

  on prediction markets and you win some and lose some, and you win 51% of your bets, you can deduct all of your losses. Whereas if you're doing that on a sports book, you can deduct 90% of your losses. And so it's the difference between being profitable and unprofitable. As far as I know, that was sort of an accidental consequence of all of this. But you could imagine, you know, Trump, like, you know, Trump administration liking the prediction markets and wanting to send business their way.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep. I want to talk about the potential SpaceX IPO. A lot of people have been processing it in different ways. Some people were surprised this was happening, just given that SpaceX has thrived in the private markets and has plenty of access to capital and Elon has had a number of bad experiences in the public markets. I have a kind of working thesis that this is could be a spite IPO. I think we're going to see a lot of IPOs next year. And if you're raising a billion dollars, let's say, if you're going to float at like a 50, you know, if you're a $50 billion company and you only need to raise a billion dollars, you're not really threatened by IPO. But if you're a foundation model lab such as OpenAI

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  that wants or Anthropic that wants to raise tens of billions of dollars, it's very possible that a $1.5 trillion SpaceX IPO could kind of like suck the oxygen out of the room is is, you know, I want you to kind of give us your take broadly on it. And I'm curious if my tinfoil hat schizo theory has has any merit.

• 1:37:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't really know. Okay, so first of all, like I, you know, I read companies might go public next year all the time. So I don't, I don't know. I mean, I assume it's true, but like, I'm not totally sure. Two, like, one thing I've read is that the use of proceeds for this hypothetical $30 billion IPO is to put data centers in orbit. And like, you know, this gets to your spite theory, like, in a world where there's, you know, $10 trillion of broadly speaking, AI capex needs, like, there's going to be competition for that. And there's going to be like, like SpaceX can kind of, SpaceX has been able to raise as much money as it wants in the private market and like, you know,

• 1:38:08Speaker 05

  achieve a, you know, $800 billion valuation and like send rockets into space and be like a fairly capital intensive company while staying private. But like, if the next leg is, you know, they need tens of billions of dollars of AI-ish spending, then

• 1:38:23Speaker 05

  you might reach the limit in the private markets. And yeah, you might reach the limit in the IPO market here. Like you might like, there might just not be enough money to go around for all of these AI companies. And then I don't know why SpaceX is in the AI company category, other than this.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, so here's, here's the other, here's the other.

• 1:38:39Speaker 05

  Elon complex, right?

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but the other theory is like, there's a world where XAI could get rolled into SpaceX and taken public around the space data center narrative. And I think that there's a lot of people that would be excited about that narrative, even if other people in the space economy are saying, hey, space data centers will happen, but it's probably more like a 10 year timeline versus a three to four year timeline.

• 1:39:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, also like, I mean, I, I've read that they're like looking at a $1.5 trillion valuation on like $22 billion of revenue. Like, it's all pretty. It's on a pretty different timeline.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  It's in orbit. It's in orbit.

• 1:39:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're not paying for like that year's earnings, right? So you need you need some sort of 10 year story to tell.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, to be fair, it would be easier for, I mean, at least I believe it'd be easier for SpaceX to acquire XAI than Tesla to acquire XAI because of acquisition laws around a public company buying something big versus a private company buying something big. Does that sound roughly correct? Like, would you handicap?

• 1:39:48Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, it sounds roughly correct, although, I mean, Tesla has form of buying, you know, other Elon companies and

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, getting it through.

• 1:39:57Speaker 05

  Has moved to Texas in order to make it easier, right? Like, I don't think Tesla would have that much trouble buying, but they would get sued, you know, if you do it in SpaceX.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think I think part of the challenge is that Tesla shareholders might say like, hey, we already have a really good AI team. We've been working on self-driving, like, we don't need XAI. We don't necessarily want to dilute ourselves, you know, whatever XAI's current valuation is or whatever price it would come in at. So I just think.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  I guess I just feel like the sort of standard Tesla shareholder approach is like, we're going to trust Elon's intuitions on these things. And I mean, they bought like, you know,

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  SolarCity.

• 1:40:37Speaker 05

  Solar company, right?

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there was there still was pushback and that was like a much, I'm assuming that'd be 1% of the that'd be 1% like SolarCity was like 1. Something billion, wasn't it? It wasn't like a

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  It was much smaller.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't like a 100 billion, like I'm assuming XAI has a lot of debt, there varies a lot of equity, it would be somewhat.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  It has the Twitter debt as well.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  It has a lot of debt rolled in. Uh, well, speaking of debt, I mean, Netflix had to issue some debt for this Warner Brothers deal. I'm interested to know, um, your your thinking around how the Warner Brothers, uh, process will go. Are we going to wind up in a quiet period for the rest of the the year as we go into the holidays? Or you think it'll be, uh, you know, just as as, uh, just as many headlines as there have been? Where do you think it actually lands? What's the nature of the story?

• 1:41:29Speaker 05

  I don't know. It's been surprisingly quiet to me. I think it's weird that, um, that Paramount. First of all, launched a tender at the price that was rejected, right? Rather than saying, we're gonna raise a few bucks and go to the shareholders. They launched at the price that the board said no to. And that they've said publicly that it's not their best and final offer. I know. What a crazy. Can you, what is the logic there?

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Is there any, is there any logic where that makes sense?

• 1:41:56Speaker 05

  Okay, so I think that where that makes sense is that, um, is that there, it's not a real tender offer, right? Like, they can't close a tender offer for reasons, including anti-trust. They clearly want to do a friendly deal with the board, right? And so I think that saying very clearly, we could give you an extra two bucks if you sign a friendly deal with us is a, is a good way to get, you know, to the board and to try to strike a deal with the board. Um, so I think that's the logic there, but, uh, I, I don't, I don't know what the board is doing, right? I mean, I think the board likes the Netflix deal. I think that, I also think that like, um, Paramount has two things going for it.

• 1:42:38Speaker 05

  One is that they think they've offered more money, or certainly they can offer more money. And then the other is they really think the Netflix deal is dead on sort of anti-trust slash Trumpy reasons.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Speaker 05

  And I don't know how that plays out, right? Cause that's a, that's a potentially a year-long process and presumably nobody wants to wait that long. But I think like, there's some ability to wait a few weeks and see if like Trump says nastier things about Netflix to try to, you know, pressure the board to come to a deal. I don't know. I'm, I'm surprised that there's been so little news, right? I mean, like since Monday, like no one, like I would have expected someone to raise their offer by now.

• 1:43:17Speaker 05

  It's a good point.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hmm. Uh, what, what was your, have you formulated a take on the, uh, OpenAI Netflix deal? We kind of landed on-

• 1:43:26Speaker 05

  You mean Disney deal?

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Or, sorry, yeah, OpenAI Disney deal. Uh, we sort of landed on it being like, sort of an interesting way to create less commoditization in, uh, you know, the AI application layer, the consumer chat experience. They all are starting to feel very similar. I don't know if you've felt this way, but it feels like all the models are, you know, sort of at the same level. The benchmarks are pretty similar. Well, if you can get Spider-Man in one and not in the other, maybe that's a differentiator. Have you, have you processed that deal similarly or do you have a different frame of mind around it?

• 1:44:03Speaker 05

  I haven't thought that much about it, but that seems right to me. And it is like, you know,

• 1:44:10Speaker 05

  it's like, you know, you think about like the Netflix Warner situation, right? Like you have like, you have like content distribution services and then they have like content libraries, right? And there's some combination of acquiring the content and making, you know, commercial deals with the content providers, right? Like, like here, one possibility is that the AI chats are ultimately the next, you know, dumb entertainment channel, right? And so if you have the good properties in your dumb entertainment channel, then like, when people are like, oh, I want an AI to create a movie about me, I'll go to the one that has like the Disney characters like that. I don't know. It kind of makes sense, right? And it's like, um,

• 1:44:53Speaker 05

  like, the thing that is striking to me is that the AI companies like talk about like this sort of fundamental reshaping of society and, you know, discovering superintelligence. And then like, they're a little bit consumer entertainment products. But like, if you're a consumer entertainment product, like you want the Disney characters.

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  Also, adult, adult entertainment.

• 1:45:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yes, right.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14Speaker 05

  Disney character porn.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  It really has been just a kitchen sink of messaging.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Mode and Disney will be rolling out in the same effectively 30 day period. So.

• 1:45:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know enough about the deal to know if they like have, um, I hope they have.

• 1:45:32Jordi Hays?

  I hope they have a carve out.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  They do have a carve out. They do. This was confirmed. They did say that there are lots of restrictions on what you can and can't do with a Disney character in OpenAI properties. I'm sure that was, that was key. Uh, it's wild. Um.

• 1:45:50Speaker 05

  We're gonna, we're gonna see the jailbreak. That's gonna be good.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  There will be some jailbreaks. I think there won't be that many jailbreaks. I think in the last two years, they've gotten pretty good at locking it down. So that was, that was kind of my my prediction. Uh, I'm sure, but I'm, but there will always be chaotic stuff. It's, it's inevitable with AI and the internet. Um, what, uh,

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  How should tech people be thinking about the growth of private credit? I feel like there was a, an era where folks in tech were, you know, understanding that the foundation model companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, were operating at a truly unprecedented scale. The capital war was bigger than Uber, Lyft, it was bigger than anything folks in tech had seen. It was certainly more capital consumptions, consumptive than Google was when, before it IPO'd. And so all of a sudden, by a lot, so all of a sudden you have tech people that are grappling with the prospect of a $10 billion debt financing for something that is, you know, feels like a startup. It feels like a startup project.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  And so it was easy to point the, to sound the alarm bells, like debt is coming, debt is scary, debt blew up the economy in 2008. It's gonna happen again. But you talk to a lot of people in private credit and they say, no, there's plenty of areas where, you know, people pay their, pay their debt obligations on time. How, how have you processed like the, is Nvidia holding up the global economy? Is OpenAI gonna blow up the entire global economy? Those types of like Cassandra-esque narratives that have kind of spiraled and maybe are coming back down to earth now?

• 1:47:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's fascinating that, you know,

• 1:47:38Speaker 05

  like insurance companies investing in investment-grade debt are like ultimately underwriting like a stream of payments from startups, right? I mean, that's kind of what is happening here.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  Deeply unprofitable, deeply unprofitable startups.

• 1:47:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, but like also a lot of it is like people underwriting a stream of payments from Facebook, which like, you know.

• 1:48:01John Coogan?

  It's very profitable. Yeah.

• 1:48:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, like a Blue Owl data center for for Meta superintelligence, one gigawatt, the Hyperion thing like it's like Meta is going to pay that bill, at least I think so.

• 1:48:13Speaker 05

  Right. And if you had made like an equity bet on like if you if there'd been a way to make an equity bet on like Meta's pivot to the metaverse, like you would have lost all your money, but like, like, presumably, they paid their supplier bills for that, right? Like, like,

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:48:25Speaker 05

  Like, there's a there's like a difference there, right? If you're like, underwriting these like hyperscalers, like mostly, you know, these are very investment grade, very cash flow companies that, you know, could could turn off the CapEx if they needed to. But right, I mean, you're underwriting a lot of, you know, fixed payments on CapEx. And it's, it's, um,

• 1:48:49Speaker 05

  uh, it seems a little aggressive for a credit investor, but they're all like, one thing about private credit is like, uh, it's not going to blow up the economy. Like, it's, you know, it's like insurance companies making these bets. So like a little bit longer term capital.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Is there anything in the economy right now that gives you the same sort of jitters that you had during your famous interview with Sam Bankman Fried, where it's felt like at the time you were clocking, like, this just doesn't make sense. The math doesn't math like it feels like we're frothy, where everyone kind of goes around saying like, yeah, we're in a bubble. But at the same time, it doesn't, it feels like it's a bubble that's built on some real stuff, like even even the prediction market stuff. It's like, I can at least trace the cash flows. I might think that sports betting isn't the greatest thing, but like, at least I know that the businesses are going to make money.

• 1:49:43Speaker 05

  Right. Like, you know, AI sort of replaced crypto as the sort of darling of a lot of investors, but it's just you can you can, the consumer product is very tangible, right? Like the crypto stuff is all like, oh, we'll make tokens that other people can trade for more tokens. And, and it didn't feel

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  Wait, that actually sounds like AI too.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  Because I make I make anthropic tokens. I sell them to you. You make cursor tokens.

• 1:50:08Speaker 05

  The circular, like, the circularity is, is, you know, if you want to be troubled by the circularity, it's like a little weird, but it's, um, the difference between that and like crypto, where no one

• 1:50:19Speaker 05

  Like, like the thing about Sam Bankman-Fried that was obvious at the time was that he didn't care about crypto. He was like, oh yeah, this is a world changing product. It was like, oh yeah, this is a casino where people will give me money. And like AI is, there's a lot of people who are true believers in it. And again, they've like rolled out consumer products that Disney's gonna license its characters, right? I mean, like, there's a real, um, uh, sort of, there are many real obvious use cases. And so like, there's a lot of value being created. And then the question is like, is it commensurate with the, you know, $10 trillion of debt that's paying incurred? And that's, uh, it's not obvious, but it's like, you know, there's, there's something there.

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much would I have to, how much would I have to pay you for you to agree to not use any AI for the next year?

• 1:51:07Speaker 05

  I'm kind of a lot of like, I mean, I use AI, but, uh,

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming it's like for re- like research here and there of like better kind of search?

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  Give us the prompt for your column. Give us the prompt.

• 1:51:21Speaker 05

  People pretty regularly email me. They're like, I asked ChatGPT to write about this in the style of Matt Levine. And it did pretty good. And then they sent it to me and like, okay, I'm safe for like another three months. It's like never.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  Never close. No, it just doesn't get the flavor or something. I don't know.

• 1:51:38Speaker 05

  The answer to your question is less on you than like I did.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:43Jordi Hays?

  How have you been processing Oracle over the last six months or so? They've, they're getting zero credit for their backlog, their five, half a trillion dollar backlog. I think they're, are they trading at less than, less than the backlog currently?

• 1:52:03Jordi Hays?

  They, you know, people have brought up, uh, the dot com bubble and obviously you're drawing comparisons between the two moments. But what's your view?

• 1:52:16Speaker 05

  About Oracle being like not the darling of the AI bubble? I don't, I don't, I don't really know.

• 1:52:23Speaker 05

  They're just not, I don't, I don't, I don't know enough about like Oracle's backlog, but I think they're not just, you know, they're not the name that, that people go to as the, as the AI darling.

• 1:52:36Speaker 05

  I don't know. The dot com bubble is like, you know, it seems like a reasonable comp in that, uh,

• 1:52:43Speaker 05

  I don't, it just feels like obviously.

• 1:52:48Speaker 05

  Even if there's a huge shakeout, there will be huge value, you know, there'll be an Amazon of this bubble, right? Like, there'll be big, important survivors of it, which, again, like, I can't say wasn't true of crypto, but like, there's nothing inevitable about that in crypto, right? Like, that was, you know, like, there's, there's, there's the possibility of nothing happening there, whereas here, it's like, like, the changes to the economy and to society are kind of already tangible.

• 1:53:15Jordi Hays?

  The thing that's somewhat of a narrative violation is the, like, the median crypto fund has actually done pretty well over the last few years, and it's possible that the median venture for AI-focused venture fund will underperform.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  It is very much like the dot-com boom. It's like, you gotta be in Google or Amazon, or you're probably in a lot of trouble. And, and, and with crypto, they were a lot, because it's so liquid, there were so many funds that were like, trading in and out, even if something went way down. It's like, well, they already distributed, they got out early, like, you know, there's tons of ways to make money. I don't know.

• 1:53:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  One, one, uh, one kind of random question on your workflow. I'm assuming people email you kind of like tips, tips all the time that are really trying to like, feed you information on, on their enemies, things like that. How do you kind of?

• 1:54:07Speaker 05

  I'm not an investigative reporter, and so like, I don't, I'm not that useful for that. But yeah, people are like.

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  You should write about that.

• 1:54:17Jordi Hays?

  But how do you, yeah, what's your process?

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  You should call this securities fraud.

• 1:54:21Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your process for trying to figure out what if that is like, actually real? Because I mean, we, we, we get that, where people are trying to like, convince us of certain narratives, and, and we're trying to process, you know, maybe off-air, trying to process how real something actually is.

• 1:54:38Speaker 05

  Um, you know, again, I don't like do a lot of investigative stuff. So if people are like, oh, look into this secret thing, I'm like, no.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Speaker 05

  So like they, you know, like if I'm, if they're sending me information about their enemies, it's like, here's their AK filings and I can read them myself.

• 1:54:54Speaker 05

  And I do try not to, I used to like find it flattering when like, you know, big finance people were like, let me tell you about this. And then I was like, they're just shopping me their version. And so I try not to.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:55:07Speaker 05

  Try not to either have those conversations or if like, I have conversations with the hedge fund manager about how their

• 1:55:14Speaker 05

  position is so good, I just don't write about it.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:17Speaker 05

  I don't, I, I, it's like too easy to be, to be flattered and persuaded into thinking that what they say is right. And so like, I just try not to expose myself to it very much.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:55:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Like I just try to, you know, like, like people are like, oh, this is an interesting, like, okay, send me the public documents and I'll read them and I'll make my own thoughts about it.

• 1:55:39Speaker 05

  There's a balance.

• 1:55:39John Coogan?

  Somewhat related question.

• 1:55:41Speaker 05

  You have to get some information from people, but like I try not to be hearing their opinions.

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Somewhat related question. What is your theory on why Bloomberg is able to retain top journalistic talent? They've seen very little churn over the last couple of years relative to other legacy outlets. What's going on? What's the secret sauce?

• 1:56:00Speaker 05

  I mean, there's a lot of things. Like we have a great audience. Like the audience is so good. Like it's so, you know, there's like the feedback that I get from readers is like, they're so smart. Like it's, it's so concentrated in the financial industry. So like the audience is so good.

• 1:56:14Speaker 05

  It's the best business model in media. Like we're a good, stable, profitable company in a world where that is not true of a lot of legacy media.

• 1:56:24Speaker 05

  And, uh, I mean, and you know, and there's a flywheel where like your colleagues are great. Like I really like, like, I wouldn't leave Bloomberg just because my friends are all here.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:34Speaker 05

  And then the other thing is like, it is a huge organization that nonetheless gives people a lot of freedom to do weird stuff. Like what I do.

• 1:56:47Speaker 05

  Like, I've been doing this for like 10 years and, you know, if I tried to do it at like another media organization, they would have various stylistic objections. They'd say, are you sure you can do it this way? Like, I feel like I proved out the model and so Bloomberg just lets me do it. But like Bloomberg does that a lot, right? I mean, like, Oddbot's just had its 10th anniversary party this weekend. Like, Oddbot's is a weird... Overnight success. Yeah, it's like a program that just, you know, like, a lot of people in media would have been like, oh, that won't work. And Bloomberg just let them do it, right? So there's a lot of stuff like that where it's a huge organization that also is like quite experimental, agile, like, yeah, and like, gives people a lot of freedom.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  That's really cool. Yeah, that's great. That's a great take. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 1:57:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  Really enjoyed...

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is very educational.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Letting, uh, letting us bounce, bounce our theories off you.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Speaker 05

  This is cool. Thanks.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of the year. Have a great rest of the day. And we will talk to you soon. Thank you so much.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Matt.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Finn.ai, it's the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer queries on every channel with Finn.ai. Our next guest is...

• 1:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Mike Gallagher.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  Mike Gallagher from Palantir. He's the head of defense. I don't know if that one's gonna stick, but hopefully he's here. Welcome to the stream. Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Do you have some Christmas music for Mike Gallagher?

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Thank you. How are you doing?

• 1:58:16Mike Gallagher?

  I'm good. How are you guys? What's the nickname? The Galliganator?

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  That didn't stick.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  No, that one's not sticking. Have you had any nicknames throughout your career? Throughout your life?

• 1:58:24Mike Gallagher?

  Um, mostly just Gallagher. G-Money for a while.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  G-Money.

• 1:58:30Mike Gallagher?

  Uh, yeah, I think that's it. Mixmaster Mike G.

• 1:58:34John Coogan?

  Was that on the hill?

• 1:58:36Mike Gallagher?

  What's that?

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Was that on the hill?

• 1:58:38Mike Gallagher?

  G-Money. No, that was like high school, college.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  I imagine it was the year. Yeah, that sounds like a high school name, not necessarily one in, in Congress. But, uh, anyway, it's great to catch up with you. Uh, I hope you've been having a wonderful year. It seems like Palantir's been on a tear. Uh, I'd love for you to take us through the news today, uh, and, uh, and kind of get us up to speed on what's happening in shipbuilding specifically. And then I'm sure we can zoom out and talk about, uh, shipbuilding more broadly and, and geo, uh, geo, uh, just geopolitics and competition.

• 1:59:11Mike Gallagher?

  Well, I wonder if we couldn't reverse it. I think it's important to make the geopolitical case first. First of all, you guys seem to be crushing it as well. I see you everywhere. I have like merch in my office now. All my friends are constantly on your show. So congratulations on all your success and taking over the world. It's very cool to see and.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on so early and helping us. It was huge.

• 1:59:33Mike Gallagher?

  Hey, listen, some call it the Gallagher bump, you know, that you now are beneficiary of. Galliganator bump.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  The G money bump.

• 1:59:44Mike Gallagher?

  But really, you know, yeah, that's right. My entire like eight years in Congress was devoted to this question of how do we enhance deterrence with respect to China? And if you look at it, like there are things we need to do in the short term, you know, killer robots, a lot of the stuff Andorl's building, you know, longer precision fires. But over the long term, if you just look at a map of the Pacific, we need a bigger navy, right? We had a force structure assessment that called for a 355 ship navy when I was a freshman member of Congress in 2017. We made it the official policy of the United States to get to a 355 ship navy as quickly as possible, as quickly as practically possible was the language. And then the size of our fleet continued to shrink. It's on track to bottom

• 2:00:27Mike Gallagher?

  out at 279 ships in 2027, which happens to be the year that Xi Jinping has set for having his military ready to invade Taiwan should he make the decision to move. So if for no other reason than if you look at geopolitics in the most fundamental sense, the collision of geography and politics, we need a larger navy to preserve the peace. We need to start cranking out ships. We have the high-low mix of ships. Now, the reason we haven't been able to do that, I think, is a combination of factors, right? We have had an inconsistent demand signal from previous administrations, and that's usually what the shipyards say. It's like, we don't know the right mix of ships that the Navy wants to build. You have

• 2:01:09Mike Gallagher?

  inconsistent budgeting from Congress, right? I mean, we go from omnibus bills to big, beautiful bills to continuing resolutions. Continuing resolutions are particularly destructive for the Navy. A former Secretary of the Navy said because of continuing resolutions, the Navy put about $5 billion in a trash can and lit it on fire. All of this is to say is we were trying to figure out.

• 2:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Why, what are the dynamics that that causes that waste?

• 2:01:35Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, the biggest issue is under a continuing resolution, you basically agree to fund a previous year's levels, you can't have new starts, right? You can't fund new things, whether it's a new ship class, or a new innovative AI program, or a new, you know, robot that scares the hell out of Xi Jinping, right? And then there's just also a lot of uncertainty hanging over a CR, they're usually short-term, hard to do long-term planning. There's this other phenomenon where the military actually, because of how messed up congressional budgeting is, the Pentagon fails to spend about $15 billion a year. So think about that. For the last 10-ish years, we've lost about $125 billion in defense appropriations,

• 2:02:20Mike Gallagher?

  money that was appropriated for defense that went unspent, it goes back to the Treasury, it sits in abeyance for five years, and then it evaporates. Like, that's, for $125 billion, like, I could build you a regional military that could definitively prevent World War III. If I was unrestricted in how I could use that money and how quickly I could move.

• 2:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Certainly, you could have prevented the decline in the Navy's, you know, number of ships, like you mentioned just a bit earlier.

• 2:02:48Mike Gallagher?

  Exactly. I think there's another thing, right? Like, we obviously went to war in the Middle East after 9/11. I was part of these wars. I deployed twice to Iraq. The Navy was largely the bill payer for these wars. We had a large infusion of money into ground forces and overseas contingency operations. What we didn't spend money on was investing long-term in the future naval fleet and growing the size of that fleet, as well as the mix of capabilities on various ship platforms. And then we had cost overruns in key programs, whether it's the Ford-class carrier, Columbia-class submarine, you know, the Constellation-class frigate, the littoral combat ship prior to that. So, all that is to say, for the first

• 2:03:32Mike Gallagher?

  time in a long time now, in the Trump administration, under the leadership of Secretary Phelan, the Navy is taking advantage of some money that was appropriated by Congress for non-traditional bets on leveraging

• 2:03:45Mike Gallagher?

  AI and autonomy and applying it to shipbuilding and bringing in Palantir in this specific case to turbocharge production in key shipyards, both public and private yards and 100 key suppliers. So this is $448 million over two years. It's based on pilot work that we've already done at various shipyards and suppliers, the results of which have been incredibly promising. At one shipyard, we saved over 100 or 200 planning days, 20 planning days a week. You mask yourself, there's only seven days in a week, but that's because there's four people whose full-time job it is. They spend 160 hours working on man-drolic processes. Now with our software, it takes 10 minutes.

• 2:04:27Mike Gallagher?

  At another supplier, a process that used to take 200 hours for manufacturing bill of materials is now down to 12 seconds. So just by modernizing the underlying software, leveraging AI, it's our belief that we can maximize production at the shipyards and then link the suppliers to the shipyards and all of that, what's called the maritime industrial base, to the Navy itself. So key Navy officials in general and the Secretary of the Navy in particular can look at the maritime industrial base and understand what's going on in real time and make critical allocations decisions. Because a lot of what's happening at the yards, particularly the public yards, is just simple decisions about what do I buy now, what do I not buy now?

• 2:05:06Mike Gallagher?

  And there's really no, like, there's no, there's no source of truth to make a sophisticated judgment on that. And that's what causes us to waste money and time. So this is all about maximizing production, getting more ships in the water and ultimately fulfilling that geopolitical need for a bigger and more lethal Navy.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  Are there sailors that don't have boats right now? Or are we going to recruit a bunch more sailors as we build out the physical boats in the Navy? I mean, I'm just wondering, because I imagine if you, if you are, you know, an American citizen, you join the Navy, your dream is to be on a boat and then they're like, oh, we're all out of them. You gotta stay on land. That's gotta be depressing. But, but do you think there'll be a recruiting push for more Navy sailors as we build out our fleets? Or are these going to be autonomous boats? Like, are these support ships? Like, how do we think about the, the human side of the future of the American Navy?

• 2:06:00Mike Gallagher?

  Sure, it's a great question. I mean, one thing we've seen in recent years was a full-on recruiting crisis that had little to do with the decline or the growth of the fleet and more to do with a lot of, at the time, it was, in my opinion, a misguided push for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that were based on species, political science. That really turned off a lot of people. We had a retention crisis as well. The interesting thing is, at least in most services, that's starting to turn around. I was just at the Reagan National Defense Forum. They release a survey every year, and one thing that the survey results reveal is that the so-called Hegseth reset is extremely popular among current service members, which is important

• 2:06:42Mike Gallagher?

  because that's the big recruiting pipeline. It's usually someone who is serving or recently served to tell someone else, yes, you should join the military, and among veterans. So, when it comes to things like gender-neutral combat standards, you know, and some other changes, this is wildly popular. So, the recruiting crisis has gotten better. I actually think, over time, it's not going to be a problem if we stay on that trend because, and this is the second part of your question, yes, more of our ships are going to be autonomous. There's still going to be destroyers that are complex manned ships. There's still going to be carriers. There's still going to be submarines. Submarines are our biggest asymmetric naval advantage right now, but increasingly, I think you're going to start to see a lot

• 2:07:24Mike Gallagher?

  more autonomous vessels in the fleet, both autonomous surface vessels and undersea robots. And that's where you have, I think, as we talked about before, I believe, what's most exciting about the current moment is you have so many people in your world, right, in the investing world, that are willing to put capital into non-traditional defense tech startups that are building really cool capabilities for the Navy. And I think this is a really exciting moment for the non-traditionals. I think the defense industrial base is going to look a lot healthier four years from now, where, you know, Palantir shouldn't be the last company to enter the S&P 500 as a defense technology company. We need five more companies like that. And so, I actually think the companies that are building autonomous vessels,

• 2:08:08Mike Gallagher?

  that are building killer robots, that are building long-range precision fires, you know, hypersonic missiles like Castellion in California, I think it's a great moment for all those companies.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, have you, I mean, it's hard to like pick a favorite branch of the military, but it feels like.

• 2:08:22Mike Gallagher?

  Well, Marine Corps, obviously, it's the Marine Corps.

• 2:08:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:08:25Mike Gallagher?

  I mean, it's not hard.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  It's not hard.

• 2:08:26Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, I'm a Marine, so, yeah.

• 2:08:28Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong, hit the gong for the Marines.

• 2:08:34Mike Gallagher?

  Let's go.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  We're not picking favorites, but certainly we'll.

• 2:08:39John Coogan?

  But, but, but I am, I am super fascinated by this, this Palmer Lucky line that he's been delivering a few times about, he, he wants America to be the world's, not the world's police, but the world's arms dealer. And so, the idea that, that maybe, you know, if, if he's, if he's building something that can shoot down a drone, that goes in the hands of the Ukrainian service members and maybe America doesn't put boots on the ground in Ukraine, but we do put, you know, equipment that can neutralize an attack for a Ukrainian soldier. And so, I'm wondering how that interfaces with the naval strategy in your mind.

• 2:09:21John Coogan?

  Are there, are there, do you think that, are there already boats that we're going to be supplying to other allied navies? We want to build up our own navy, but is there also an incentive to build up ally navies as well? And, and, and what role do you think the US will ultimately play in that dynamic?

• 2:09:41Mike Gallagher?

  A hundred percent. Well, first of all, Palmer is at the leading edge of a lot of this stuff. And one thing that gives me hope is we look at this new Cold War with Communist China is like, I think our, you know, our private sector leaders, Palmer's a great example of this.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, did we lose you? Oh, no.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  A nation-state, again.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  What a coincidence. Wow, he starts mouthing off about near-peer competition.

• 2:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Gets immediately taken down.

• 2:10:06John Coogan?

  They get immediately taken down. Well.

• 2:10:08Mike Gallagher?

  Good question.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  We're, we're, we're under cyber attack, very clearly. We thank you for bearing with us while we have.

• 2:10:16Mike Gallagher?

  The moment I mentioned.

• 2:10:17John Coogan?

  I know, I know.

• 2:10:18Mike Gallagher?

  The Chinese Navy.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  It's crazy. Okay, anyway, kick us back off.

• 2:10:23Mike Gallagher?

  Well, I'll make it simpler. I think it goes both ways, right? Like, we are seeing foreign shipbuilders, world-class foreign shipbuilders like H D Hyundai, with the Palantir's had a longstanding partnership with. They represent, I think, seventeen percent of the global tonnage that's built. And a lot of the work that we're now applying to American yards is built on some of the lessons we've learned in applying AI to Korean shipbuilding, Hanwha, et cetera, are trying to invest in America. Hanwha bought the Philly Shipyard, and that's great. We need more shipyards. We need that investment, that sort of, and they're going to have, you know, American subsidiaries that are doing important work. So that's one thing. And then, on the other hand, and I think maybe the AUKUS agreement,

• 2:11:05Mike Gallagher?

  this was the arrangement we had to provide nuclear submarine technology to the Aussies, and is an example where we can take what we're best at, i.e. building nuclear submarines, and share it with our closest allies and get more interoperable vessels west of the international Dateline to enhance our collective combat power. I think this gets to a broader issue. Really, the promise of AUKUS and a promise of a lot of our alliances in the Indo-Pacific is that we can start to build out something resembling a free-world technological industrial base where humans, with appropriate clearances, technology can float seamlessly between the borders of countries that we truly trust. And then, if you layer on geography and you look at, okay, Taiwan, the first island chain,

• 2:11:50Mike Gallagher?

  the second island chain, we need countries, including treaty allies like Japan, to invest more in their military. There, we have a really positive story in terms of Japan, what's happening in terms of their investment in asymmetric capability. It's probably one of the best developments for deterrence in the last twenty years in the region. So the answer is yes, all of the above. We need to be, we need to have a more coherent foreign military sale process where we can provide our best technology and our companies can sell around the world, and we make it easy for them. But we also want to leverage areas where allies might have key capabilities, either to invest here in America, or we can fight as a team. And that's where a different sector, what Palantir does with our Maven Smart System, you know, we are the solution. For joint all domain command and control.

• 2:12:34Mike Gallagher?

  This is how you see the battlefield, how you see the enemy, how you see yourself. We obviously want us to have a similar, if not identical picture when we're thinking about how do we fight China? With the Aussies, with the Japanese and with other key allies. We have to fight as a team in order to enhance deterrence on a timeline that's actually relevant.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, not sure how much you can comment or riff, but what should, what should people be paying attention to? In regards to Venezuela as a casual geopolitical spectator. I saw that video floating out that, that very clear, uh, clearly at the top it said unclassified or declassified. It felt, uh, I didn't want to read too much into why it was immediately, you know, looked like SEALs, uh, you know, taking over. Uh, but what should people be kind of paying attention to on, on that front?

• 2:13:29Mike Gallagher?

  Well, you know, it's, it's almost similar in my mind to some of the recent naval operations we saw, um, relative to the Houthi rebels in, in CENTCOM.

• 2:13:39Mike Gallagher?

  You know, I started this conversation off, uh, laying out the challenges we've had with shipbuilding. That being said, what are recent operations in the Middle East and what our current operations in Southcom and in Western Hemisphere demonstrate? Is that we are still the world's best military far and away, and we have capabilities that nobody else has. Now that should not be a cause for complacency, like we need to build off that. We need to keep investing more in the military, but like our sailors, our soldiers, our airmen and Marines. Like when you give them a mission and a difficult job to do, like they will get it done. And if you are an enemy of the United States, like you should be on notice. When we have presidential leadership combined with military professionalism, there's almost no limits to what we can achieve.

• 2:14:23Mike Gallagher?

  And so I welcome a renewed focus on our own hemisphere when it particularly, uh, uh, particularly where it intersects with Chinese and Russian influence on our own hemisphere. That being said, what I'm most concerned about over the next five years and beyond is what is the conventional balance of power? The Indo-Pacific region because what I've been saying now for a decade is that Xi Jinping is serious when he talks about taking Taiwan by force and all these operations whether in the Middle East or whether they're in, you know, off the shores of Venezuela or in the Caribbean will look like child's play compared with a major naval war with China over Taiwan. The scale is almost hard for us to imagine

• 2:15:05Mike Gallagher?

  because we just haven't fought a war on that scale since World War II, really since the Battle of Lady Gulf in World War II. We haven't seen something of that scale. And I think one of the disadvantages, I almost hate to call it that, that we have is that in a, in a republic like ours and a democracy like ours, we're very sensitive to casualties, rightly so. We have an all-volunteer military. We don't want to spend lives uselessly, right? I mean, the American people won't stand up for that. In a, in a dictatorship and a Marxist-Leninist system like that in China, I don't think Xi Jinping cares if he loses 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 PLA soldiers to achieve his lifelong ambition. This is actually a lesson that endures from the last time we fought the communists on the battlefields

• 2:15:47Mike Gallagher?

  of Korea, on the Korean Peninsula. They were just far less sensitive to casualties. So I only bring that up to say there are certainly lessons that are relevant across the world, but there are certain things peculiar to the nature of the adversary we faced in China that I don't think i- is, we, that I think makes it a much harder problem to deal with than Venezuela, if that makes sense.

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, completely.

• 2:16:14Mike Gallagher?

  What's up with the gong? Can I ask about the gong? Is that, I, you know?

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  The gong is-

• 2:16:19Mike Gallagher?

  Can I get a Gallagher gong?

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  A galagon. There we go.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  The gong is usually a celebration of funding rounds, big numbers, milestones. Uh, yeah, I mean, this is a, this is obviously a massive deal and so, uh, totally gong-worthy.

• 2:16:37Mike Gallagher?

  And the Packers beat the Bears, so like, we have a lot to celebrate, you know, there's a lot going on, a lot of numbers.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  And we should ring the gong every day that Xi Jinping doesn't invade Taiwan because that sounds terrible. And I don't want that to happen. And you just delivered a very chilling- Uh, you know, potential sci-fi future where that doesn't happen and it's miserable. But thank you for everything you're doing to stop that from happening because I very much want peace in the world and in the Indo-Pacom region. And of course, you and the rest of the team over at Alteryx are working very hard on that. So, thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us.

• 2:17:12Mike Gallagher?

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:17:13John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:17:14Mike Gallagher?

  Peace, peace, peace on earth. Peace on earth.

• 2:17:16John Coogan?

  See you.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  Up next, turbo puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. We have Saagar and Jetty, the co-host of Breaking Points with Crystal and Saagar, obviously the realignment podcast, the second time on the show. He's also a girl dad. Welcome to the show.

• 2:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Suit it up.

• 2:17:40John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp.

• 2:17:42Saagar Enjeti?

  Good to see you, gents. Good to see you.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Great to see you. Uh, how's the family? Merry Christmas. How's, how's the holidays?

• 2:17:46Saagar Enjeti?

  Thank you. Merry Christmas to you all. Family's doing well.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:17:49Saagar Enjeti?

  We've, uh, she's, she's old enough that we've got her pigtails going. This is true girl dad. Yeah, it's, it's as good as it gets.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's amazing. Uh, well, I'm glad that that's going well because it seems like everything else on your timeline is not going well. Uh, what is, uh, if you had to pick one, uh, to snap your fingers and eliminate, would it be, uh, you know, rising energy prices from AI data centers or, uh, or, uh, sports betting at the, at the touch of everyone's finger all over the world?

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Impossible, impossible.

• 2:18:19Saagar Enjeti?

  Very tough because one is gonna be a future.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, before you, before you say, is it okay if I bet on this?

• 2:18:26Saagar Enjeti?

  I'm sure somebody already out there. There's, there's gonna be a market that, that's gonna exist in terms of which one that I would pick. I don't know. Both are gonna be very financially draining to the American household. Uh, sports betting in the immediate term would probably be the one that would ban immediately, but power use in the future.

• 2:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was that reason? There's a reason.

• 2:18:49Saagar Enjeti?

  That could be bad.

• 2:18:50Jordi Hays?

  There's a, I, I saw a study floating around that, uh, in states that sports gambling was legalized, like the average credit score drops like

• 2:18:58Saagar Enjeti?

  Yep.

• 2:18:59Jordi Hays?

  10 points or somewhere in that range. So it has like effect, effectively like a direct. Impact on.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  Do you think that sports betting is something that will come for us all? Because I, the odd thing is that I have.

• 2:19:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John and I, John and I have like some weird genetic like immunity because we went to Vegas for F1 and didn't gamble at all, had no, I have zero interest in gambling.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  I don't have the bug or something. It just doesn't do anything for me. If I sit down, it actually stresses me out. Yes.

• 2:19:27Saagar Enjeti?

  I'll tell you why it comes for us all.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:28Saagar Enjeti?

  Even when, if you casually watch sports, casually watch the NFL, I don't sports bet. I think sports betting is bad. I still know the line on every game.

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  Oh, because that's how you know who's gonna win.

• 2:19:38Saagar Enjeti?

  Because that's how.

• 2:19:39John Coogan?

  That's the drama.

• 2:19:39Saagar Enjeti?

  No, I'm like, oh, well, so and so's the favorite or the over under on how many yards somebody is going to throw. I shouldn't know that. People shouldn't know, but I do. Uh, even just casually, you know, the last time I was on here, I talked about how I think that there's a media bubble in sports because I think sports gambling is just pumping all these money into people with microphones who talk about sports, but that's part of the issue is in all mainstream sports coverage from ESPN, pardon my take, everywhere you go, a daily segment is, I like the over, I like the under. Here you're going to take the first half. And so even if you don't bet, you can't help but think about the sport without thinking in sports betting terms. And that's what I would say is like frame domination, you know, where

• 2:20:21Saagar Enjeti?

  even for people who don't bet, they have to think in betting terms. So that's a winning, that's winning in their part.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe I have a weird, uh, like a weird perception of it because I, I also don't watch sports. Like I really, I really, I watch like movies a little bit and, uh, but, but I, there's no, there's no sports that I follow like regularly. And so I'm, I'm like, I'm not even getting into the top of the funnel for this stuff. And so it's really, really hard to ladder me down. And so I'm a little bit more.

• 2:20:46Jordi Hays?

  So of course you were excited to hear that Trump would consider eliminating taxes on gambling.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  This must've been great for you.

• 2:20:52Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, okay, now let's talk about this though, guys, because he said gambling winnings, gambling winnings. And what I was crashing out about was there are no winning gamblers. It doesn't exist. There's a longitudinal study of sports betters. Only 4% of people over five years ever took profit. 4%.

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  So it is a skill issue.

• 2:21:13John Coogan?

  Be in the 4%. I'll take those odds. You're telling me there's a 4% chance that I could be one of the greatest gamblers ever? I love those odds. I'll take them all day.

• 2:21:22Saagar Enjeti?

  It does exist.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  I got the over on me becoming a generational gambler.

• 2:21:27Saagar Enjeti?

  I will tell you, if, if I had to bet, I would bet on both of you. But, but statistically, it would be a bad bet. And so the reason I was crashing out is because that is going to give advertising to casinos and sports betting apps who are like, all your winnings are tax-free. There are no winnings. The winnings are fake. 96% of you are losers. And all it will do is it will increase that funnel of people who may not previously have sports. But like, ah, it's tax-free winning. I mean, I can't lose, right? Except I'm going to lose. So I think it's, it's really disgusting, uh, basically just giving away.

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, we don't know it's gonna happen yet. There was an offhand comment and hopefully it doesn't go anywhere.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  You know, just him out of fun. Well, since, since you're the resident, uh, puritan on this show, uh, yeah, I mean, do you believe that you can response, that you can drink responsibly? You can have a glass of wine every once in a while? Obviously you don't want to become an alcoholic. Can you ever responsibly sports bet? Like Super Bowl squares? Super Bowl squares? That was, that was, that was the only thing that I ever did in college was I was in an office setting and they said, "Hey, there's squares. You put down $10. Whoever gets the right square gets $100 or something."

• 2:22:35Saagar Enjeti?

  I, I have never said people can't responsibly sports bet, but what I want to highlight is that responsible sports betting would put all these companies out of business. They literally cannot operate without addicts. Like what I'm trying to highlight for everybody is responsible sports betting would end the industry as we know it. The vast majority of the profit comes from a very small percentage of the customers, which is why. Look, this is the casino model, right? The mo, the whales are the ones who fuel everything and they lose the most. So that's why they shower these people with gifts and they call them every day and they invite them to games and then send them to concerts and all this stuff is specifically to milk them for as much money as humanly possible.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Basically a sales, uh, SDR that calls you with like a custom parlay for your specific, "Oh, I know you like this player and I know you love betting on the coin flip, so we're gonna give you coin flip."

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  What did you, what did you think about the, the policy, the, uh, like an MBS policy in Saudi on like, you gotta be in your bag to, to be getting, uh, cracking open a cold one, boys?

• 2:23:36Saagar Enjeti?

  So, I mean, in principle, I'm, I'm smiling a little bit, but no, I mean, because I lived in the Gulf, guys, I can explain this to you. That's just a way to target the Indian laborers. So I oppose it. So the way that it works over there is that they create this entire social structure so that all the Indian Pakistani and all these other laborers, like the day laborers are basically excised from all polite society and they don't want them drinking. So they're just going to set an income cap to make sure that the foreign laborers don't get to have a drink as well as their own people. And it would just apply to like the wealthy white, uh, expats. So because I know that it's just basically going to further immiserate their like slave labor population, I do oppose it. But you know, just broadly, you know, I just want to get to the fact, you know, from the gambling

• 2:24:21Saagar Enjeti?

  thing, like there is no such thing as a gambling company that can operate profitably without, with responsible gambling. Like if, if it literally would cease to exist and remember, because people always forget this, the sports betting apps, if you're actually good, they ban you. They literally do not allow you to place any large wagers.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Or they limit, they limit you. They say, we want you to be responsible here.

• 2:24:45Saagar Enjeti?

  No, no, no, they don't limit you because you're responsible. They limit you for being too good.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think Nate Silver is banned from sports betting.

• 2:24:51Saagar Enjeti?

  He is. Yeah. He's, he's, he's limited on all the major apps. My major question, when somebody tells me they're like, oh, I'm pretty good. I'm like, oh, really? I'm like, have you ever been limited? And they're like, no. I'm like, yeah, you're a loser then. I'm like, if you're any good, you would just be limited. It means you're a statistical loser.

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, you need like a complicated network of, you know, people that can make bets.

• 2:25:10Saagar Enjeti?

  Shadow accounts. It's a whole thing.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  And I mean, we were just talking to Matt Levine about this, like, like Sesquahana has a desk, like an actual trading arm of their firm. Like it's very serious. Like the guys, some guys trade oil and gas. Now there's people that are trading, trading the, I can't name a sports team.

• 2:25:26Saagar Enjeti?

  Sports lines?

• 2:25:27John Coogan?

  The Yankees. Uh, anyway.

• 2:25:29Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, that's the thing. The real betters, they don't care about the sport at all. They're just looking for value. They're like constantly, they're always betting on like golf and tennis.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  Cricket. And it's like, yeah, cricket. Yeah, this one is at the 2:00 AM, uh, halfway around the world, but it works for you. So you're going to play. But, but, uh, I mean, in terms of like the actual politics of this, how does this, how does this wind up? Becoming like, where does this go over the next four years? It seems like Trump's sort of like leaning in, but is this actually gonna, is there a constituency here of people that want to say like, hey, maybe we need to rethink this at the national level?

• 2:26:02Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, already the tide is turning, guys. More recent Gallup polling showed that all age groups, including young people, the most increase is against sports betting. The governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, he actually said that if he could go back in time, he would never legalize sports betting, knowing what he knows right now. I think people can feel it, man. It's the most expensive advertising real estate in the world is all being bought by these gambling companies. You can intuitively feel that this is off, you know? Nobody's getting rich if they're able to afford all of the stuff they're able to put in front of you. So I think America's beginning to turn. The Trump administration, very recently, you know, you didn't let me crash out on what I'm crashing out the most on, which is weed. But, you know, the Trump administration is making their vice play right now. You know,

• 2:26:44Saagar Enjeti?

  they're doing very badly with young voters, so they want to try and reschedule weed and yeah, let's do some gambling winnings and the TikTok thing. It's like this libertarian kind of giveaway. But I think that really misunderstands why all of these younger people are even turning on the administration for economic reasons in the first place. The reason they resort to all of these horrible vice activities is because they cannot afford, or at least feel they cannot afford, the very basics of life, like health insurance, being able to buy a house, crushing interest rates for a mortgage. So I would spend more of my time on that rather than a cheap trick like weed, but you know, that would require actually doing something.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  Maybe you get busted for weed, the arresting officer flips a coin, 50% chance you go to jail, 50% chance you get.

• 2:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about another thing I'm sure you're thrilled about, the Disney OpenAI deal. I think it's incredibly bullish for OpenAI.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  It's really good.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  So I just, I want to get, I want you to agree with me first that it's bullish for OpenAI, at least over the next year, that they're gonna have exclusive-

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, literally because, yes, literally because like, like if you're a dad and your kid comes to you and says like, I want to be in Frozen, or I want to be in Star Wars. Well, there's only one app that can deliver that. And even if Nano Banana is a little bit better for today, it's like you'll go to Sora because it's there.

• 2:28:08Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, sure, it's bullish for users, uh, it's for, for creating more users. I think it's one of the worst things that I've ever seen. I mean, last time I was on here on the show, I was like, Sam Altman is like, yeah, we're gonna do AI porn. And I was like, oh, well, I thought you were gonna cure cancer, but okay. Uh, and so now we're gonna have Disney princesses, uh, to addict children, like you just said, so that daughters and, you know, others will come to their dads and say, can you create a video of Elsa doing, saying my name and doing this, this and this, so that we're continuing to breed the phone addiction. And as you guys all know, we're also gonna see the most disgusting pornography known to man as a result of, yes, I know that they have controls and all that, they're very easily,

• 2:28:52Saagar Enjeti?

  they're, no, they're not, no, they're not. Have you guys been on Sora? Have you been on Sora or Grok or any of these? They're not that good at it, okay? You, people, people have been playing around, uh, with trying to create some pretty disgusting content.

• 2:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John, John, John is a, is a, is a little too confident that the, the,

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  I'm pretty, I'm pretty confident. I also had them generally.

• 2:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think I, I don't, the internet will always figure out a way to jailbreak anything.

• 2:29:14Saagar Enjeti?

  Exactly, they will always find a way.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  Earlier in the show, I went to Sora and I said, put me in a Sora video fighting Spider-Man and Darth Vader. And it said, this content may violate our guardrails, considering, concerning similarity to third-party content. So whatever deal they announced, they haven't implemented it yet, because I got completely blocked. Uh, but, uh, I don't know, as I've scrolled, I, I, I don't scroll Sora that often, but as I've scrolled, I have not seen shocking stuff. I was reflecting with Jordy about some of the crazy, crazy stuff that was on the internet, uh, when, when I grew up. I mean, the stuff that people would send you a link to, you'd open it up, it would be like jump scare level. I feel like I have not gotten that from ChatGPT randomly. I have not gotten that from Sora.

• 2:29:58Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think if you want to make the, the argument that, you know, this is, So bad because it's going to get kids more addicted to devices and their phones. Like you just gotta go even further and say like, well, we should ban all electronic devices for children or buy it and maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe you're willing to go there.

• 2:30:20Saagar Enjeti?

  Speaking my language, brother.

• 2:30:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, how do you, how do you feel about some of the, how do you feel about that new law in Australia that's, that's banning social media?

• 2:30:29Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, I love it. Yeah.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  You don't think it's going to create a bunch, you don't, but you don't think that so-

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  Why not put it on the parent? Why, I mean, it's like, there is plenty of evidence out there. There are plenty of access controls. You can set a passcode. You can, I mean, yes, like the really inventive 13-year-old can go out and make the money to buy the iPad and hide it under their bed every night, but like in general, parents do have the ability to, you know, effectively be the own authoritarian of their home. Why do you need the government? Why do we need a nanny state?

• 2:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my concern with these laws is-

• 2:30:59Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, as you guys understand, yeah, go ahead.

• 2:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my, my main concern is if you tell a group of young people like, hey, you can't use these apps, there will be new apps created. It's not hard to make a social media app and there'll be new like kind of homegrown Wild West social media apps where there's no, like the, the, the properties aren't doing any content moderation. They don't have any groups that are trying to make sure that, that, um, that, you know, pedophiles are not able to get on, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it'll just create a bunch of like dark corners of the internet that could very well be worse for kids.

• 2:31:35Saagar Enjeti?

  It's certainly possible, but to just answer like the spirit of the question, which is basically like, why should parents not be the sole responsible ones for this? In the same way that social media only works when everybody's on it, not being on social media works best when nobody's on it. And so if you talk to Jonathan Haidt or others, what the most, the best and most successful experiments for schools, for example, which are phone-free or people who are opting out of, of social media is being able to be in a social network where everybody else is also not on social media. Because one of the things that's often raised is like, oh, they're missing out on, I don't know, school drama or communication for this, this and this. And they feel as if they're explicitly removed by the parent from like the social way that their

• 2:32:20Saagar Enjeti?

  high school or their social network operates. Whereas by explicitly making it a top down way of saying, no, nobody's engaged in it. It's going to facilitate a lot more actual like pro-social, real social behavior and make it easier in order to basically, look, at the end of the day, what we're trying to talk about. And this is what I always argue with libertarians, like, no, this idea of like a totally free society is ridiculous. Like there are so many different ways in like, you could act quote freely, which would impinge upon my freedom. That's why we have, you know, we have government and enforcement mechanisms. Ultimately, what we're trying to do on this is to decide what is the optimal way and for our outcomes to facilitate happiness in the family unit and for our children.

• 2:33:03Saagar Enjeti?

  And there's just too much evidence here on social media and on phones. So that's why I get with the Sora thing, especially in the totally unfettered like Wild West that we live in here in the US. I just know this way that this is all going to go in a perfect world where everybody is very informed. But, you know, right now, in a lot of ways, there's a huge class divide on phones. Like from the very, very richest people you know are probably the least likely to actually give phones to their children. But the anxious generation might be the best selling book in the United States. But let's all be honest, like it's a class signifier, right? It's something that the top 25, 30% have read, are implementing, have the time to be able to. And then the iPad kid thing is still definitely not yet fully known, you know, for a lot of other people.

• 2:33:48Saagar Enjeti?

  And so I, I think everyone should try to live under a more uniform standard. And yeah, that's why broadly, I take your consor, uh, dude about Australia and they are like backwater ways to get around it. But the government's sending a signal and we have enough data on gambling, on other, all other vices. That when you send these signals, especially with a real information campaign, the behavior will reduce. And there's a lot of different ways that we can deal with the backdoor ways of getting around it. You'll never make anything zero. How do we try to facilitate the best outcomes for everybody, for all of our citizens? That's the way I would look at the Australia policy.

• 2:34:25Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever thought of setting up, you know, breaking points, you know, one of these neo cities? You know, you go down to South America and set up your puritan.

• 2:34:34Saagar Enjeti?

  Down to Honduras.

• 2:34:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:36Saagar Enjeti?

  Down to Honduras. Uh, no, I don't have enough money for that, right? I don't have nearly enough to buy off the president and then get him pardoned whenever he deals drugs. That's, that's not my bag. I'll leave that to a few of the other guests on your show. Uh, but no, look, I mean, at the end of the day, like, we have our country. Uh, we can just do it here. We don't need to leave. I think that the people broadly feel that there's a problem.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, no, that makes sense. Um, let's talk about H200s. Uh, Nvidia is now able to export them to China. The previous rhetoric was, we're not going to give China the best. We're not going to give them the second best. We're not even going to give them the third best. We're going to give them this nerfed H20 chip that's two generations behind, blah, blah, blah. Now we're giving them the second best effectively. Uh, the argument in favor seems to be keep the government out of the boardroom. And Jensen is a, is a founder of an American company. Let him sell everything. Again, to your point about the AI. It doesn't seem like you're doom-pilled. Is this nuclear weapons? No, it's AI slop. Let them, let them have it.

• 2:35:41Jordi Hays?

  If AI, if slop is so bad, don't you want, don't you want our enemies to have it?

• 2:35:45Saagar Enjeti?

  They're much smarter than us and they're not going to allow any of that. They don't have any problems over there about Sora or about image generation.

• 2:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Do they, do they, do they really though? Do they, they have like incredibly high rates of youth unemployment? Are, are they not using the phone to kind of medicate those people?

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  What are those 20% doing all day?

• 2:36:02Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Uh, you know, is it phone related, social media? I'm not entirely sure. They don't seem to have the same issues, at least in our way. Uh, obviously they're going to have their own unique set of circumstances, but on H200.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Imagine, imagine being one of these unemployed Chinese youth and having no job, but also no slop, no sports betting, no weed. What are you doing all day?

• 2:36:27Saagar Enjeti?

  You're getting shamed by your elders for not having a job. That's what we need.

• 2:36:31John Coogan?

  I suppose, I suppose.

• 2:36:34Saagar Enjeti?

  That's a good thing. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's great. That's what a good society looks like.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  Maybe you're studying, maybe you're practicing, maybe you're growing, you're studying the blade. Hopefully you're studying the blade.

• 2:36:42Saagar Enjeti?

  Studying to play.

• 2:36:43John Coogan?

  But anyway, sorry. H200s, it seems like a while.

• 2:36:47Saagar Enjeti?

  H200, you know, to say what your kind of articulation of the H200 policy, it's more complicated. And I've spent the last couple of days interfacing with some of the guys who are pro exporting H200. I'll give their their argument. Their argument is to keep China on the US and Nvidia technology tree as long as possible. So what would happen, according to them, is if we cut off H200, what it would mean is that Huawei would have the impetus and the incentive to not only compete, but to have all of the developers in China and everybody there explicitly build the software, everything on top of that, right? And so the argument

• 2:37:27Saagar Enjeti?

  that was posed to me was that it was a bad idea and a mistake to not have Android be very, to not have Android and other operating systems that are explicitly US-based be dominant in China, and that the domination of Harmony OS is actually bad for the United States. And here was my counter, and I'm really curious for what you guys think, is that in a world, as we see with Apple, where we see a huge portion of US business, which is based in China, there has never been, at least in my opinion, over the last 25, 30 years, since the PNTR with China, the reopening of trade relations, we have never had a situation where we have a huge business penetration in China, and that company ever really stands

• 2:38:10Saagar Enjeti?

  more for American interests. Usually what happens is that the Chinese use US market penetration, like US companies' market penetration, to make that company a lot more malleable to Chinese interests, and to basically make them this multinational actor, which, because of their ability, policy, and scale, they can shape for their own interests and strategic, let's say, direction. So the point that I really am trying to make here is that I understand the technology tree argument entirely, but the longer that Jen Sen, Nvidia, and others see China as this goldmine, which he obviously does, you know, he's over there once a quarter kissing their ass on camera, you know, out in the open.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  They have a, they have a, they have a dedicated, like, R and D center in Shanghai.

• 2:38:54Saagar Enjeti?

  Yes. Yeah, right, but not it's not just that. He goes there and explicitly is like, I want to continue to do in business in Beijing as long as possible. He's been lobbying for against a lot of these export controls. It's obvious that a lot of his stuff is getting trans shipped via Singapore or whatever, even the Blackwell chip. I'm sure you guys saw that very recently with the deep sea research that came out. But the point, the point remains, he knows it's good for his business. The more that this remains kind of an opening, it's going to have somebody have to straddle both sides and it's going to be a lot more beneficial, I think, for the ability of the Chinese to shape him as opposed for us to be able to have our companies working in our national interest. And look, I mean, there are more libertarians who are listening to the show would say, our company

• 2:39:37Saagar Enjeti?

  shouldn't even work towards our national interest. Their sole job is to make profit. I think that's a ridiculous argument, you know, sitting here in Washington and especially just over the last 30 years. I just don't think that there is a good example from Hollywood to tech or anywhere else where they've made a lot of money in China and they become, you know, very reliant on that business line where they have not shaped themselves as lobbyists against, you know, any more hawkish Chinese action.

• 2:40:04Jordi Hays?

  I think the my read on it generally is that selling into China will make it more expensive for them to reduce their reliance on

• 2:40:14Saagar Enjeti?

  Right.

• 2:40:15Jordi Hays?

  the USAI stack. They still will do everything that they can to reduce that reliance.

• 2:40:21Saagar Enjeti?

  Which they are. Yeah.

• 2:40:22Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, it's going to be more expensive because there's clearly the Chinese companies in AI have a lot of demand for chips and, you know, dollars that they spend with Nvidia and other, other players are dollars that aren't going back into local, you know, kind of national champion.

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  I'm trying to think of a counter example, and all I can come up with is the Hermes Birkin bag. As we've exported the Hermes Birkin bag to China.

• 2:40:47Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, that's French. That's a French company, not a US company, right?

• 2:40:50John Coogan?

  But it's Western. But they have become dependent on it. And the more Birkins that they buy, the harder it is to rip out the authentic Birkin bag, much like the Nvidia GPU. Where the CUDA stack and the open source CUDA ecosystem has been built up around. No, I'm still somewhat sympathetic to the, to the, you know, hooked on the AI stack.

• 2:41:12Saagar Enjeti?

  I get it. I just want to say, I don't think it's fully, I don't think it's wrong. I think it misses the forest for the trees. They're looking at it purely from a technology question. I'm trying to point out the dangers of extending this relationship. And also, look, let's look at the Chinese side. The Chinese were like, yeah, we may not even allow H200 in the country because they want Huawei to compete. They want to create the market.

• 2:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think they said that because of Lutnik's comments that they were very offended by, which he was like, we're trying to get them addicted. We're not going to give them our first, second, third, fourth. We're going to give them our fifth best. And they were like, actually, we don't want any.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  And also, like, the country's not a monolith. Like, it's very clear that, like, even if the CCP says, like, absolutely not, they're banned, like, there's still a world where, like, a Chinese company smuggles them in and uses them against the CCP's will because, and like, that could have a dynamic where that boosts the CUDA ecosystem further. Although I don't know why you'd be open sourcing CUDA software if you're stealing Nvidia or smuggling Nvidia in. That's probably a good way to draw the ire of the CCP. But, but who knows, of course, you know? We'll see how this plays out. I still think a lot of the reason why this H200 news is not

• 2:42:26John Coogan?

  so much of a firestorm is because this year has been somewhat of the end of the AI doomer narrative. And just, we've been backing off this idea that these are nuclear weapons. More and more people have been using the models for, I mean, ChatGPT is three years old now. OpenAI is 10 years old now. And, and after three years of everyone saying, or all the, you know, the wild, crazy people in Silicon Valley saying, it's going to kill you next year. It's like, okay, boy who cried wolf. One, the sky is falling the second year, third year.

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  It's going to kill you more slowly because of everyone falls in love.

• 2:42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's become, it's become more abstract. And so I think this, this idea that like, oh, just like one more training run and then it's the super intelligence and it's run away and it's going to completely dominate. And like, it's, it's either the United States or China. That narrative has kind of fallen by the wayside a little bit. And so I think people are maybe more more accepting of, you know, export controls loosening. My, my, my question is just like, like, do you agree with me that it was a phenomenal L by the tech community to come out so early with this like, AI is going to kill everyone narrative? That just feels like AI is the first technology that we've had since, you know, the phone, social media,

• 2:43:41John Coogan?

  software and the cloud, the internet. All of those were products that I feel like there were technologies that were enjoyed by people for years. And then we had the conversation about what are the phones doing to us? Like, but we got 10 years of like, phones are cool, right? And then we got, okay, maybe we should, you know, understand.

• 2:43:56Saagar Enjeti?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:43:57John Coogan?

  With AI, it's like, out of the gate, we hate it.

• 2:44:00Saagar Enjeti?

  That's why I'm, I'm not yet ready to say like, oh, they stopped saying that. I'm like, no, they still say it, guys. Like Elon was on Rogan the other day being like, hey, you know, you, you're never even going to have to work again. Like, don't worry about it. And Jen Sen, what did he say recently on Rogan? He's like, all knowledge in the world will be AI. And that's fine. I was like, um, is it fine?

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  I mean, I was watching, so I was watching Sam Altman on, on Fallon and, and, and Fallon comes to him with the, with the premise of like, give me the pros for ChatGPT. Give me some examples of how people can use it for good things. And then he's like, and I gotta ask you about the cons. Like, what are the cons of this technology? And I was like, no, no, no. If Tom Cruise was sitting there doing the interview and he's like, give me, give me the reason, give me some reasons why, you know, moviegoers might like the new Top Gun. And then he's like, now give me some reasons why people might hate the new Top Gun. Tom Cruise would be like, what are you doing? Like, no, I'm not talking to you about the negatives of my movie.

• 2:45:00John Coogan?

  Get out of here. I'm here to promote my movie. And, and same thing with, you know, any technologist that goes through the normal late night circuit. Normally it's like, oh, wow. You, you invented this new trinket like, and you can buy it at the local Walmart this Christmas? Like, amazing. You, you made a gadget. And with AI, we just, it's always about the, like, the negative has just been so drilled.

• 2:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's because it's new. People don't.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  I know. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:45:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's like, you could write a story every day about violence that happens in grocery stores, right? But it would not, grocery stores have been around so long, it's everyone knows. It's like, yeah, every time you walk into a grocery store.

• 2:45:36Saagar Enjeti?

  There's not one guy who controls all grocery stores. Okay, so it's like, you know, it's a little different. And look, I mean, again, to their point, like Sam and them don't do themselves no favors. Like when he's like, I can't imagine raising a baby without ChatGPT. Look, maybe just me, I'm like, whoa, man, I don't know. Again, it's just one of those where, look, they sold domination of our lives, our tech, our, our, not only in terms of our digital lives, but saying that they were going to take away our physical ability to work, uh, education. They said, we're going to take away all knowledge and we're going to feed it back to you. So I'm still not ready to just be like.

• 2:46:12Jordi Hays?

  You're extrapolating, you're extrapolating a little bit.

• 2:46:13Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, come on, man. He said, he said, all knowledge will be AI and that's fine.

• 2:46:17John Coogan?

  You're sort of piecing together like three different statements, which is.

• 2:46:19Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, but those are really important statements.

• 2:46:22Jordi Hays?

  All Reddit, all Reddit will be AI. It'll be one human on Reddit, just running around and talking to.

• 2:46:27Saagar Enjeti?

  That's the shit that they say, guys. They're like, you don't need to work anymore. Uh, what's his, the Dario? I mean, you guys are acting like this is three years ago. I'm talking about like three months ago. You know, all the comments I just made, I think are literally all within the last month. So the, they're continuing to feed the narrative. Um, and I think people believe them and, and I think that's the danger.

• 2:46:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, fear, fear really sells to the capital markets. Like if you, if you're, if you're somebody that has capital and somebody tells you that, like all jobs are going to go away or huge half of all knowledge work. What do you want to do with your money? You want to give it to the guy who's going to take away the jobs, right? And so I think that is the challenge is these people are having to go around and give the optimistic vision one hour and then the next hour to the fear based version of the story and then the next hour to the optimistic and, but then the content just gets shared everywhere, right? So it's like, then everybody sees it and they're like, wait, I don't really know what to believe at this point.

• 2:47:24Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, my, my, I mean, last time I was on the show, John, I have stolen your line completely. Credit card. I thought it was the best comp that I've heard is you, you were like, I think this will be like the credit card. We just made transactions more frictionless. It created more wealth. People built on top of it. And in, in general, people's lives were like mostly better and it didn't, you know, like horribly change anything, but it definitely was very valuable. I, I love that comparison. That's kind of the modal one that I'm working with right now.

• 2:47:52John Coogan?

  It just like leaks into all the different cracks. And I mean, there was, there was data yesterday from our, our sponsor Ramp that 55% of businesses are, they don't pay for AI. And that's like, and it's slowing down. It's like flatlining too. So it's sort of like a bombshell. Like, okay, like there's a lot of businesses out there that are just like, I'm good. And it's like, they are good because they're using other products that probably have enough AI in them. And so if they're on.

• 2:48:18Jordi Hays?

  So they're indirectly, they're indirectly buying AI because they hired a creative agency to make a logo and the creative agency uses AI or whatever.

• 2:48:25Saagar Enjeti?

  Or there's, you know, their backend finance and, and all that. I totally, I totally agree with you guys, but that also doesn't justify the valuations. And that also doesn't justify, let's say, the spend.

• 2:48:36John Coogan?

  It might, it might justify the valuations. I think it doesn't, it doesn't, uh, it doesn't justify the, the panic and the fear and the, it's gonna kill everyone. It's like, it's like, if we're talking about the credit card, it is like much more incremental, but of course there are other sides because we, we have the social media angle.

• 2:48:51Saagar Enjeti?

  I agree that that's where it'll end up. I'm mostly with you, but I can't help but take them all a little bit seriously. I mean, these are the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world. So like when the wealthiest guy in the world says, I don't need to work anymore. And especially if you're walking out there and you feel it very out of control of your own life and you hear that, you hear about the data center stuff that I've talked about here. You have a lot of fear about your own children and their addiction. You're watching their behavior. I mean, do you guys ever see your kids as, uh, you know, like my daughter is seven months old, man. She's crawling for the phone. Like it's, it's, it starts so early, like already I'm like, oh my God, I can't even use this thing in front of her. That makes me concerned. Does it make me a doomer? No, but it does make me feel like it makes me immediately calculate.

• 2:49:34Saagar Enjeti?

  Some of the downsides of the use of technology in my life.

• 2:49:37John Coogan?

  But letting her go for that phone might be what gets her into the 4% of gamblers that wind up making money. You gotta start her young.

• 2:49:45Saagar Enjeti?

  I forgot about that. You're right. You're right.

• 2:49:48John Coogan?

  Is there, is there an optimistic story being told by the cannabis industry about weed anymore? I feel like that one is just like, people are just like, ah, okay, it's.

• 2:50:00Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, they're still faking medical benefits, which is complete bullshit.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, explain that. Explain that.

• 2:50:04Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, I mean, they're, they're still talking about supposed medical benefits. There's a huge new study that just came out in JAMA. Almost all of the so-called medical benefits. Total BS. It's all fake. People just want to get high. It is what it is.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  What were the benefits allegedly?

• 2:50:17Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, you know, oh, somebody, you know, they're always talking about people with cancer.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Oh, anxiety.

• 2:50:21Saagar Enjeti?

  They're talking about seizures, epilepsy. The anxiety one is the fakest one out of all of them. But, uh, yeah, I mean, they're always like, you know, oh, it helps me sleep. And it's like, well, it knocks you out. That doesn't mean it helps you sleep. But it's like, does alcohol help you sleep? No, it's actually makes your sleep, you know, 10 times worse. You may not be, you know, awake, uh, but that doesn't mean that you're asleep.

• 2:50:40Jordi Hays?

  You'll be happy to know, we were looking, we were looking at a new studio space here in LA and it checked every single box. It was a great space. And, and, but right across from it, you could see out the window, like a pot store. And I was like, no way.

• 2:50:53John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:50:54Jordi Hays?

  There's no, no, I just don't want to look at the, the flashing lights and the.

• 2:50:58John Coogan?

  There was another, there was another studio that we looked at where it was like the royal flesh of like, of like, uh, gambling sin companies. It was like, the, the previous three companies had been like, uh, an adult content, uh, a weed company, and then also a gambling company. And we were like, that is just a cursed building.

• 2:51:14Jordi Hays?

  It was like an amazing, amazing building.

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  It was an amazing building.

• 2:51:16Jordi Hays?

  We told our broker, we're like, sorry.

• 2:51:18John Coogan?

  It's just like, it has bad vibes. Like, we can't possibly be there.

• 2:51:21Saagar Enjeti?

  I totally agree. Oh, John, we should do de-banking on the porn thing.

• 2:51:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, tell me.

• 2:51:25Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah. This is so interesting, guys. So you guys know about the whole de-banking, you know, Andreessen, Zuckerberg, everybody goes.

• 2:51:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was Operation Choke Point 2.0. Nick Carter's been on the show.

• 2:51:35Saagar Enjeti?

  So the Treasury, the Treasury Department takes this seriously and they conducted a study and they just put out their report two days ago from the Office of the Comptroller. And I was reading. This morning and it's like, oh, they've unfairly targeted gun companies. I was like, okay, you know, that's bad. They've untargeted unfairly targeted oil and gas. I'm like, oh, that's ESG. We hate that. They're like, the banks have unfairly unfairly targeted the adult industry. And I was like, whoa, whoa. I was like, hold on a second. Wait, what? What was that? So they are actually pressuring the Trump administration right now is pressuring via this report banks to do business with porn companies. Now, why do the banks not want to do business with porn companies? It's not just vice clauses. It's because they're afraid of the internal

• 2:52:18Saagar Enjeti?

  standards that these companies have been doing now for decades where they're often in violation of the law whenever it comes to children, exploitation, all of this, and they don't want anything to do with that. That's why OnlyFans, you know, had that problem at one point. So our great, the de-banking conversation is now basically being weaponized, you know, by the government to potentially force the largest financial institutions to do business with major porn companies. So this brings me back to the whole vice stuff.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  He's like, I've had enough. If you twist my arm on this one, I'm going to get in the White House.

• 2:52:53Saagar Enjeti?

  Come on. The idea he doesn't want to do business with porn companies because he has a heart, like, get out of here. Okay. Like, they're desperate to take their money. They just don't want their risk.

• 2:53:01John Coogan?

  I don't know about that. It's not that big of an industry. JPMorgan has like trillion dollars.

• 2:53:05Saagar Enjeti?

  Come on. What was it? 2.2 billion from consumers in the US just last year? It's not nothing, though.

• 2:53:11Jordi Hays?

  What is that? Revenant's?

• 2:53:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is that?

• 2:53:13Saagar Enjeti?

  That's only, that's OnlyFans.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  You're talking to AI, AI world.

• 2:53:16Jordi Hays?

  What do you, we had a guy on, we had a guy on the show earlier who brokers big land deals, ranches. What do you think the odds are that breaking points a decade from now is just based on like a big ranch property in Montana and you're just yelling into the microphone?

• 2:53:32Saagar Enjeti?

  It might, it's, it's possible, man, you know, regenerative farming, just fully off the grid, except for Starlink, right? I'll need Starlink to be able to zoom in, to be able to do shows like this. But it wouldn't be a bad idea.

• 2:53:47Jordi Hays?

  I put it, I put it at 55%.

• 2:53:51Saagar Enjeti?

  You want to make a market? Do you want to make a market on Calci? Yeah. Well, making a marketer. What was Tarek's exact quote? By the way, Tarek, if you're listening, I've been trying to get in touch with you, man. Please come on my show. But Tarek, what exactly did he say? He's like, "Our goal is to be able to create a market."

• 2:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Tarek going on Breaking Points is like Sam going on Tucker.

• 2:54:10Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah. Hey, that was good for Sam, wasn't it? Because it showed that he was open to difficult conversations. So, like I said,

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  No PR person in Silicon Valley believes that, but I actually do agree with you. I do think it was good.

• 2:54:24Saagar Enjeti?

  No, I mean, look, if you're going to live in a world where you're going to, you know, make all of these claims and you're going to have a high level of distrust already from the democratic populace, then you're going to have to go out there and defend your business. I mean, all of the big tech companies have been doing that or had done that for a decade prior. I know that they all now think that that was bad. I totally disagree. I think going on podcasts where you're just fluffing your product all the time makes you look even more disingenuous and you should come face hard questions. But yeah, I mean, he said, "We're going to make a market between every difference of opinion." And yeah, so look, Mr. Tarek, I would love to speak with you about why you think that's a good idea and vision for our future and some of the protections that you may have in place.

• 2:55:09Saagar Enjeti?

  John, did you read the prediction thing I sent you about the Russian map? I love this story. This just came out. So, I actually used to be an intern there. It's called ISW, the Institute for the Study of War here in Washington. What they do is they create battle maps. And so, there was a polymarket market for like 1.3 million.

• 2:55:28John Coogan?

  It was trading on this particular map.

• 2:55:30Saagar Enjeti?

  That was trading on this map. And there was like a 33,000% payout if Russia seized a particular town in Ukraine on this date. And the story that's now come out is that the guy who worked at the think tank altered the map specifically for that date so that the market would resolve in that 33,000% payout for that specific date of bet. And now, the think tank has actually come out and said that they fired Person and that he violated their internal principles by going in and editing this map beforehand. And it was a sizable enough market. We're not talking about one of these $5,000 ones. We're talking about 1.3 million. So I just want to highlight that, you know, just in terms of

• 2:56:16Saagar Enjeti?

  how these prediction markets and all that should work. I've been reliably told no realistically large market, even trades on anything degenerate. I can't think of anything more degenerate than betting on the fate of individual Ukrainian towns in a war.

• 2:56:34Jordi Hays?

  The really dark, really dark ones.

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  What if you just load, what if you just load a billion dollars into a world peace contract?

• 2:56:41Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, right.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  And then everyone has incentive to bring world peace around.

• 2:56:45Saagar Enjeti?

  You're gonna need a hell of a lot more than one billion. If you're gonna shame me about 2.2 billion, you're gonna need a shitload more than one billion.

• 2:56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe it's a trillion dollars.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  I, I, but I do believe in the next, call it one to two years, we'll see even darker markets, specifically around individual people. Like, John was, John was joking offline yesterday. He's like, Jordy, I'm gonna load a market that Jordy's gonna have a, I'm gonna put a million dollars into a market that Jordy's gonna have an amazing year next year. And he's just.

• 2:57:19John Coogan?

  Cause I'm betting on you.

• 2:57:20Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna, he's gonna bet on me because he's my friend. He wants to bet on me. And then what, what happens? Somebody says, well, if I can make Jordy have a bad year, I can make a lot of money. So anyways.

• 2:57:30Saagar Enjeti?

  Guys, the one I'm worried about the most is elections because, you know, now we have state, not, not just the national level. I don't think the national level will be as corruptible. But what I worry about the most is individual counties and these markets already exist. So, I mean, come on, like, if you guys know anything about our election system, an individual clerk in an individual county, the ability to swing, let's say, a mayor's race, and people on polymark already do these like parlay-esque style debate, you know, bets where they'll be like, all X counties in the state will go for Trump or something just because they have a little bit better odds. These are massively open to manipulation, county level races.

• 2:58:10Saagar Enjeti?

  Oral at the state representative level, there is just way too much about like the one I just gave you all is the classic example of somebody being able to manipulate just because it was based on a think tank map.

• 2:58:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:23Saagar Enjeti?

  And they couldn't, they never thought, oh, some guy making probably 25 grand a year who makes the map isn't susceptible to a 1.3 million dollar market. But I mean, in a lot of cases, our election infrastructure, it relies on volunteers, you know? It's not even people who are paid. So I'm very worried about stuff like that or individual primaries where there's not as much scrutiny. They, the, yeah, I mean, already we've seen the, there was the Google insider. Did you guys see that one?

• 2:58:53John Coogan?

  Well, I couldn't get to the bottom of that because what was weird was that that was, that was published by one of the, one of the.

• 2:59:01Jordi Hays?

  I was like, why are they, why are they admitting to this? And then it's like, no, they're not. They're bragging.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  And so, and so I, I, I, I don't know. I don't know that I should even believe that it's real because it's so counterintuitive that you would like kind of self, self snitch in that way. It was very, very bizarre and, and I didn't see it like truly fact checked. So I just kind of wrote it off as like, who knows? Just chaos on the timeline.

• 2:59:20Saagar Enjeti?

  Right.

• 2:59:21John Coogan?

  I don't know. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordy, anything else? We could do this all day, but we'll have to have you back a couple of weeks.

• 2:59:27Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you doing? Anything that fun this weekend? Let's lighten it up.

• 2:59:30Saagar Enjeti?

  This way. No, we're just, we're going shopping. Final, final Christmas. That, that's all it is.

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas. Let's play some Christmas music. Thank you so much for coming.

• 2:59:40Saagar Enjeti?

  Thank you guys for having me. Love you guys.

• 2:59:43John Coogan?

  I love you guys.

• 2:59:43Jordi Hays?

  Love you, dude.

• 2:59:44John Coogan?

  You too, man. I'll see you.

• 2:59:45Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 2:59:46John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about getbezel.com. What a great way to go shopping for a luxury watch. You can shop over 26,000 luxury watches. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. You can head over to getbezel.com. You can also get your loved one a billboard for Christmas. Go to getbezel.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. You know, you can also put an 8Sleep under the Christmas tree. 8sleep.com.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  How'd you do last night?

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  Without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.

• 3:00:21Jordi Hays?

  I better have one.

• 3:00:22John Coogan?

  8Sleep last night?

• 3:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Eighty-seven.

• 3:00:24John Coogan?

  I got a ninety. I got a ninety.

• 3:00:27Jordi Hays?

  You're...

• 3:00:28John Coogan?

  Lay that sound effect.

• 3:00:28Jordi Hays?

  You're cooking the books. You're cooking the books.

• 3:00:30John Coogan?

  I'm not cooking the books.

• 3:00:31Jordi Hays?

  You're cooking the books. You're putting a bunch of weights... You're putting a bunch of weights in the bed when you leave in the morning.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Tyler loaded ten dollars into "No, John will have a good sleep", and so I had to do it to win the ten dollars.

• 3:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Ed, I hope everyone enjoyed the conversation with Saagar.

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it's critically important that TBPN not just be an echo chamber of capitalism, libertarianism, and, you know, I think it's important to have an open dialogue.

• 3:01:03John Coogan?

  Tyler, what do you think about echo chambers?

• 3:01:04Speaker 02

  I love echo chambers.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  I love echo chambers.

• 3:01:06Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, I mean, on the bridge markets, I feel like I disagree with every single one of his points.

• 3:01:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:12Speaker 02

  Like, elections, like, that's like, there's so much value in the information of like, who people think is gonna win.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Yes, but when...

• 3:01:18Speaker 02

  If you're a local business owner, there's a local election.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:01:21Speaker 02

  Like, there's, and maybe one of the candidates says, "Oh, we're gonna do this tax, we're gonna start, you know, change the regulation around billing, certain types of billing, something like that."

• 3:01:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:01:31Speaker 02

  There's so much value in knowing that.

• 3:01:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, seeing that six months in advance, even one month in advance, that is valuable.

• 3:01:35Speaker 02

  If he's saying that someone has the incentive to like, actually mess with the election,

• 3:01:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:43Speaker 02

  I mean, that's like a felony. So, like, after one person, like, does he think that more people at the ISW are gonna mess with the map?

• 3:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:51Speaker 02

  It's like, one, okay, yeah, the first time it happens, it's bad.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  It's like, yeah, if there's economic incentives to meddle in local elections, like, yeah, like, at the end of the day, there are laws. I don't know. I think... Yeah, I would be much more worried about a normalized situation of the opposite, where the insider trading, not changing the underlying outcome of reality, based on a big market, but the opposite. Like, you know how the market will resolve, so you size up the market as much as possible. But we're clearly gonna be grappling with both of these issues going forward.

• 3:02:31Jordi Hays?

  Sean in the chat says, "Lock me in the echo chamber, never let me out."

• 3:02:37John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of Sean, we got a post from Sean Frank here. He said, "We are in the shop ads beta and it has been great." Eric Suft has a story here. He says, "Shopify is expanding shop campaigns with a new ad format that allows merchants to recommend products on other merchants' websites." So you're already in the checkout flow, you're buying a Ridge wallet, and you see, "Would you like some Tacovas to go with that Ridge wallet?" That's basically what's happening. Very cool. David Sticklin says, "Tell me why you would want to encourage someone to click away from Ridge to another website after you paid to get them there?" And I think the answer is that it's basically like an after sale, post

• 3:03:21John Coogan?

  purchase, you have someone, and you can cross-sell. So you're not necessarily surfacing an ad that will take someone away from your checkout at the most valuable point. It's that-

• 3:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the shop app, the way I use the shop app is for like, tracking an order, right? And so if I'm in there, and I bought something, and then I get served something else that says like, "Hey, you bought this, you might like that." It's a pretty, it's just a valuable ad placement. I think it's pretty additive.

• 3:03:46John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of advertising, John- Wander.com, here's an ad for Wander.com. Book of Wander with inspiring reviews, hotel reservations, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge services.

• 3:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Quinn had a post here. I've been seeing this lately. Meta has a special ad unit that they reserve for themselves. It's like a personal ad for the Meta Ray-Ban glasses. I've gotten this actually multiple times this week. It's a fantastic placement. And what's notable is you actually have to hit the X to like, close it out. So if you just see it and scroll past it, and you close the app and join again, it'll just be back there. So really, one of the greatest ad units of all time.

• 3:04:29John Coogan?

  It's fantastic ad unit.

• 3:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, well done to the Meta team. And yeah, sometimes you gotta save the best for the family.

• 3:04:36John Coogan?

  I mean, I would advise this to anyone who's starting a sunglass business.

• 3:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Get a few billion DAUs.

• 3:04:42John Coogan?

  Get a few billion DAUs on a major social app, so that you have effectively unlimited ad inventory.

• 3:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Take it public. Have a bunch of cash flows from that, and then invest that into the sunglasses.

• 3:04:53John Coogan?

  I mean, these, with this ad unit, like these, the glasses better move. I better be, I better see some big numbers.

• 3:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:02John Coogan?

  Because everyone should be aware of these at this point, but, you know, it is, it is

• 3:05:07Jordi Hays?

  It is a good, it is a good, it is a good gift, right?

• 3:05:10John Coogan?

  It's a great gift.

• 3:05:11Jordi Hays?

  It's the kind of thing a lot of people wouldn't necessarily buy for themselves, but they'll, you know, get some enjoyment out of it if, if it's under, if it's in a stocking. Flo over at Lindy is highlighting Max Meyer's post. Asked about, by the Wall Street Journal, whether spending 500 million renovating the fifth half of Tiffany flagship, Bernard Arnault replies, "You cannot dream when you talk numbers. When you create desires, profits are a consequence."

• 3:05:41John Coogan?

  You need to be creating desire.

• 3:05:44Jordi Hays?

  That is one of the hardest lines of the 20th century.

• 3:05:48John Coogan?

  Unironically, the most profound business insight I've read this year. Makes sense that it would come from the biggest luxury company and industry that only exists because of its ability to create desire. Arguably, the clearest distillation of the function of marketing. I have no idea if that can be applied to tech at all. I agree with Flo that it is a profound business insight, but I think it should probably be used sparingly because I can imagine so many scenarios where an enterprise software CEO would go off and spend 500 million dollars renovating an office and realize that it did not really move the needle for their business because what they are selling is not a Birkin bag.

• 3:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In other news, Lululemon stock, hashtag Lulu, surges over 12% after the company's CEO says he's resigning. This is not why you, not as a manager, as an executive of a public company, you never want the stock to rip when you resign. I'm wondering if we get Chip back in the driver's seat. He's been on kind of an activist, kind of a proxy fight. I would be interested to see what he would be able to pull off back in.

• 3:07:02John Coogan?

  Speaking of other stock pops, this is insane.

• 3:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of stock pops.

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  Google is about to turn a 900 million dollar investment in SpaceX into 111 billion dollars if the 1.5 trillion dollar valuation materializes.

• 3:07:18John Coogan?

  There's some crazy big tech like circular deals. I'm pretty sure, didn't Jeff Bezos invest in Google? If he held, then he gets SpaceX stock as well. And it all goes back to Bezos. Jefe boss.

• 3:07:33Jordi Hays?

  The final boss.

• 3:07:34John Coogan?

  The Jefe boss.

• 3:07:35Jordi Hays?

  The final boss. The nominative terminism. Zeke in the chats is going Tyler Potter and the echo chamber of secrets.

• 3:07:45Jordi Hays?

  We should actually build an echo chamber around your desk.

• 3:07:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:50Jordi Hays?

  A small echo chamber, just so that your own ideas and thoughts are just constantly reflecting back on you.

• 3:07:56John Coogan?

  It's very comforting to see these AI input names sell offs, as Bucha Capital blog. Very unbubbly confirms we are very much in a more rational discerning next phase of the AI build out and adoption. I agree with that. It does feel like we, there was a world where going into the end of the year, we were talking about valuation as a function of tokens or, you know, IPOing any company that could just throw a dot AI or, or, you know, throw a, throw an AI name on their company. And we, we backed backwards from that abyss, fortunately, I think. So I've been happy.

• 3:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You didn't have to have a dot AI domain. You just had to say, we're going to do something with AI at some point.

• 3:08:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:39Jordi Hays?

  You got a pretty big premium.

• 3:08:40John Coogan?

  Well, Chipotle rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, but they didn't hit the gong on TV.

• 3:08:52Jordi Hays?

  4,000 restaurants.

• 3:08:53John Coogan?

  4,000 restaurants, 4,000 restaurants. And we'll see. They're under intense pressure from Sweetgreen. Sweetgreen's putting 400 grams of protein in every bowl now, something like that. Can Chipotle turn it around? Win Jordy Hayes back as a daily customer?

• 3:09:11Jordi Hays?

  I would love to.

• 3:09:12John Coogan?

  We'll find out. Maybe 2026 is the year. We'd love to see it. I'm still a fan of Chipotle.

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love, I still, I still love that in tech, you have people that are like, well, like I can predict out pretty well, the next one to two years, but after 10 years, the way that we're accelerating, it's very hard to predict. Chipotle is like, in 10 years, we will add 300 new Chipotle locations in these key metros.

• 3:09:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. Things are more certain when you've been running business for a long time, I suppose. Well, in other, in other financial news, Wealthfront raises $485 million in IPO, valuing it at $2.6 billion. Let's go. Let's go. Oh my God. If the SpaceX IPO ticker is SCX, that will be crazy. It probably will be. SPACs would be better, though. I'm rooting for SPACs.

• 3:10:02Jordi Hays?

  There's no way. SPACs has terrible no-aura. I'm not saying I advocate for

• 3:10:07John Coogan?

  SCX?

• 3:10:08Jordi Hays?

  SCX, but I think that Elon will do that.

• 3:10:11John Coogan?

  Can't he just get dollar sign X? He likes X. Let's just do that. How about that? Anyway.

• 3:10:19John Coogan?

  What else is, is, is in the news? Is there anything else we should, we should cover? There's some, there's some news around Substack. I guess Substack changed their, their, how you, how much you can read without installing the Substack app. They're really pushing the Substack app. Gergli Orzoz is, Orzoz is upset about this. He says, "My paid subscribers cannot even read my email without installing the Substack app." Eric Newcomer says WTF. Bullish for Substack if they get everyone to install their app, obviously. D, like, like, yeah, and Max Child is there saying, "I was wondering if this was a growth hack."

• 3:10:59John Coogan?

  And Eric Newcomer says, "For Substack?" Yeah, it's for their, for their app. Would be very interesting. I don't know if this affects us.

• 3:11:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is, this is so-

• 3:11:06John Coogan?

  You should subscribe, tbpn.com. You should drop your email. You get a free newsletter. We don't have a paid version. I don't know if this affects us. We'll have to figure it out. We'll have to talk to Brandon.

• 3:11:15Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I'm sure it affects us. The newsletter's pretty long. And again-

• 3:11:19John Coogan?

  And so it's not sending the full thing in the, in the email?

• 3:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you continue reading in the app, which is just, it's, it's, it is, this, this kind of decision, I like Substack as a business, but this decision is good for Substack and it's not good for the reader and it's not good for the, the, the person sending, right? I don't, they could argue that it'll have a long-term benefit because people might be more engaged in the app. They might be more likely. But again, when, when you look at the data, at least for us, like 95% of, of readers are reading it in their email. They're not reading it in the Substack app yet. Substack wants to change that, but I can see why people would be frustrated here. And this is why the, the traditional- Email platforms have pushed back on Substack and said like, look, they want to become a

• 3:12:06Jordi Hays?

  social network. They want to, they want to build a garden. They're building a garden. Then they're going to put some walls up.

• 3:12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:12Jordi Hays?

  Right now, it looks like this beautiful garden. You can just come in and.

• 3:12:15John Coogan?

  I mean, if they get the app cooking, they're going to put ads in that thing and they're going to print. It's going to be a great business. On the flip side, we are, we are big fans of being in the big social media feeds. Like, we, we have not, like, we, you know, love X, love Instagram, love YouTube. These are algorithmic platforms. If there were to, if Substack were to become an algorithmic, you know, long post app, basically like Twitter with more words, I think we would be.

• 3:12:47Jordi Hays?

  The long trough.

• 3:12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, the long trough. We would be okay with that. I mean, we would certainly be the first ones because we have no paid subscribers.

• 3:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the whole premise of Substack and, you know, you look back at every, all the marketing materials is like, own your audience, have a direct relationship with your reader, don't be disintermediated by the platforms and sort of come out and make some, make a product decision like this and you see where this goes. It feels at odds with everything that the company is built on.

• 3:13:14John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, for me, it's about like, can our business model flourish in the long form written text and whether it's delivered. Like, there are a certain amount of people that read our newsletter in their email. If we can get them all to read in the, in the app, like, it's, it's kind of six in one and half a dozen of another to me. Like, it is, it is sort of neutral. And the, and the bull case is that by going into the app, we, our stuff can go more viral and we wind up getting more views on average per post. But you live and die by the content, just like we do on YouTube, just like we do on Instagram, just like we do on X. Just like we do anywhere else, it would be a unique thing.

• 3:13:57John Coogan?

  And every time that a feed switches from subscriber enforced to algo, creators always hate it. This is what happened with YouTube. YouTube, the default homepage used to just be your subscriptions. And then people realized that you could just bomb the subscriptions feed with a million videos and you'd get tons of impressions. And eventually they went algo feed and they show you a single video from Mr. Beast or whoever you subscribe to. Maybe you're subscribed, maybe you're not. Maybe they just know that you'll like it. And you could see that same thing happening with newsletters. You open up the Substack app and it says, hey, look, today, TVPN put out a fantastic newsletter. Here you go. Other days, it wasn't good, so we're not showing it to you. And that's weird because that's not the Substack model. That's not the email model.

• 3:14:41John Coogan?

  I think people would revolt, but there is a world where being in that, in that feed, being able to go viral within the Substack app is actually a net positive. It is, it is, it is, it's sort of a, it's like a Darwinian survival scenario. Like you really have to, you have to thrive. You have to fight it out. You have to, you have to earn every view, earn every impression. But we'll see, we will assess.

• 3:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it is notable. I don't, I don't think Chris or Hamish have responded to any of the criticism. Maybe they're responding on Substack.

• 3:15:21John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 3:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Over there.

• 3:15:22John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe we should have on the show, debate it more. I don't know. It's interesting. But anyway, that concludes our show for the day. Have a great weekend. Merry Christmas. Thank you for listening. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you on Monday.

• 3:15:38Jordi Hays?

  And next week is Christmas week. You thought this week was Christmas week.

• 3:15:43John Coogan?

  We're just getting started.

• 3:15:45Jordi Hays?

  We're just getting started. You're not going to be able to see us. There's going to be presents.

• 3:15:50John Coogan?

  Ready.

• 3:15:51Jordi Hays?

  We, we might be dressed up.

• 3:15:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:15:54Jordi Hays?

  We might be interviewing public company CEOs well dressed up. Yeah, so wait and see. We hope you have an incredible weekend. Thank you for being with us this week. We'll see you soon.

• 3:16:05John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Love you.