The Death of the Tech Conference, Jake Paul Joins, Dimon Launches Deregulation Blitz | Jake Paul & Geoffrey Woo, Matt Pavelle, David Senra & Lulu Cheng, Casey Newton, Alex Epstein, Jamie Siminoff

(02:19) - The Death of the Tech Conference (23:27) - Dimon Launches Deregulation Blitz (27:49) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:16:29) - Casey Newton, an American technology journalist and founder of the Platformer newsletter, discusses his investigation into a viral Reddit post alleging unethical practices by food delivery companies, which was later revealed to be a hoax. He details his initial belief in the post's plausibility, his communication with the purported whistleblower, and the red flags that emerged during their interactions. Newton reflects on the challenges posed by AI-generated content in journalism and emphasizes the need for enhanced vigilance and fact-checking in the digital age. (01:33:44) - Alex Epstein is an author and energy commentator best known for The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, where he argues that affordable, reliable energy is essential to human flourishing. He is the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and a frequent speaker on energy policy, climate, and economics. (02:09:09) - Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring, discusses his extensive experience at CES, highlighting his journey from personally constructing early booths to now showcasing professionally built exhibits. He reflects on his 2013 "Shark Tank" appearance, noting that despite initial rejection, Ring evolved into a leading home security company with over 100 million cameras deployed globally. Siminoff emphasizes the integration of AI in Ring's products to enhance user experience by reducing unnecessary alerts and improving the relevance of notifications. (02:31:04) - Jake Paul is an American professional boxer, influencer, and actor who began his career on Vine and YouTube before transitioning into boxing. In the conversation, Paul discusses his venture capital firm, Anti Fund, co-founded with Geoffrey Woo, emphasizing their founder-first approach and commitment to providing value beyond capital, such as expertise in distribution and marketing. He also highlights their investment in OpenAI's SORA project, where they contributed to the platform's functionality and launch strategy, leveraging their social media experience to enhance user engagement. (02:49:14) - Matt Pavelle, co-founder and CEO of Doctronic, has over 25 years of experience in building startups, including the e-commerce unicorn Moda Operandi. In the conversation, he discusses Doctronic's AI-powered healthcare platform, which has conducted over 20 million consultations for 2 million patients, offering free AI interactions and access to licensed doctors across all 50 states. He highlights the platform's ability to provide timely medical advice, noting that users engage with the system multiple times a month, and shares that in Utah, Doctronic's AI is legally authorized to renew prescriptions without doctor oversight. (03:06:29) - David Senra is the creator and host of the Founders podcast, where he distills lessons from biographies of history’s most successful entrepreneurs. He’s known for his intense focus on long-term thinking, obsession with craft, and the habits that drive exceptional founders. Lulu Cheng is a venture capitalist and writer known for sharp analysis on technology, startups, and ambition. She has worked in both investing and operating roles and is widely followed for her candid commentary on founder psychology, power, and the realities of building companies. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, January 6th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Capitol of Capital. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  Save both, folks.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. We actually ran into some good folks at Ramp today at breakfast.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  And Calvin.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Very good omen to the start of 2026 to run into some, some folks at Ramp. We had a good time. Anyway, they were here in LA. They're working on a secret project that I'm sure we'll talk about at some point, but

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  You'll hear about it.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  They, where they weren't, is they're not at CES. Because Ramp is not a consumer electronics project.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Yet.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Yet.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  You could see them get into the AI hardware phase.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Maybe. They should launch a TV.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  You shouldn't count anyone out.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  They should launch a TV.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  I saw that Razer launched an AI companion. You know, Razer?

• 0:49John Coogan?

  The?

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Razer Computer.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The gaming company.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  They have an AI companion now. They launched at CES. So you should never count anyone out.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. It really is like the, the festival of creativity for like weird AI projects, weird tech projects. Everyone has some side. It, it has a little bit of like hacker culture to it almost, but it's also a little washed, right?

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Is it hacker? I, I, I

• 1:14John Coogan?

  It's not hacker. It's more just like, I don't know, bizarre spinoff. What do you think?

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, it's, I think at this point, it's like fairly boomer coded.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  It's very boomer coded, but it's also like there's novelty. There's novelty to it.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  So I think I, I was talking to a buddy

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  who texted me yesterday morning.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Said, are you at CES this week?

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  He seemed desperate to, to, to hang out.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  And I said, unfortunately, I'm not. And I was thinking about it and it's, and in some ways, it feels like somewhat of a humiliation ritual

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  for people in tech to say like, you just had this nice holiday and now we're going to force you to go to Vegas and schmooze

• 1:50John Coogan?

  For a week.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  for five days.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Get ready to go to Vegas.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  Get ready to schmooze.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  It sounds exhausting. I, I've actually never been to CES, but they, do you know what they call CES? They, they, they still got it in terms of the branding. They're coming in strong.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  What is it?

• 2:03John Coogan?

  CES refers to itself as the most powerful tech event in the world. Really bringing the superlatives.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  It might be. It might be.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it still is.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  It probably still is.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. There's a bunch of launches that we should talk about. I want to talk about the Smart Brick.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Okay, for sure.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  From Lego. But why don't we go into your, to your op-ed?

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, I call it the death of the tech conference because I noticed something which we'll get into. But what's interesting is CES launched so long ago, 1967. Isn't that like, I would have said like 85, maybe 92, right?

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  What were the consumer electronics at the first event?

• 2:43John Coogan?

  So, I mean, the number of things that launched at CES is actually crazy. So, the VCR launched at CES. Like, the thing that you put the tape into, I know you don't watch movies and you never had a VCR. I had a VCR.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  I actually did.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  You had a VCR?

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  Like a personal little...

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, you put the tape in, you have to rewind it when you're done watching the movie. That launched at CES. CES started in 1967. It was a sleepy affair until 1970, when Philips unveiled its N1500 video cassette recorder. Till that point, VCRs cost upwards of $50,000. Imagine dropping 50 Gs.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, the first one in 1967, they had transistor radios, early color televisions, phonographs and tape recorders.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm going to tell you more about what launched at CES, but first I'm going to tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference. That scale, from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Can we show our new...

• 3:46John Coogan?

  We have the Lambda Lightning round. We have a cloud, a physical cloud. This is not AI-generated, not CGI.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  This is real, here in the studio.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  And we're very excited for Lambda Lightning round. We have a Lightning round today with a bunch of folks, including Jake Paul is joining. We have Jamie Siminoff. We have Matt from Doctronic. We have a lot of folks. All of that is in the linear run of show, which we can show you. The linear lineup, taking you through the guests of the day.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up, there we go. Alex Epstein, Jamie Siminoff.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  We're going to dive into the piece that I wrote yesterday about energy with Alex. He's an expert in energy production.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  We are going to cap it off with Lulu today.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  We got a massive lineup. So, anyway, speaking of lineups, the lineup of stuff that launched at CES. The Atari Pong console, 1975. The CD player, launched in 1981 at CES. The Commodore 64, 1982. The DVD, 1996. The Xbox in 2001. And we really gotta play this video of how the Xbox launched because it will 2001, Bill Gates gets on stage at CES. He doesn't host his own conference, which is what I'm gonna talk about. My thesis of like why the tech conference is dying, but he launches and you know, today we think we're so cool. Oh, tech companies, they have vibreals and they have cinematic videos and they go on podcasts and they do podcast circuits when they launch things.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Get on stage with Dwayne The Rock Johnson. That's the bar because that's exactly what Bill Gates did in 2001 when he launched the Xbox. We gotta play this video. With Dwayne.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Unveiling the Xbox.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  This is the product that will be out later this year and there's an amazing amount going on. Working with partners who helped build the hardware, working with the software developers, working with the retailers. The program around this thing is really quite phenomenal, but the box itself is another thing that we put a lot of energy into. So you may have been wondering what this great device was here.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  This is showmanship.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  This is the Xbox.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  This is the Xbox.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  For the first time, let me now unveil Xbox.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Whoa. Do you ever have one of these? With the controller in the plexiglass, very cool. Yeah, dangling down there. This was iconic. Play Call of Duty, the original Modern Warfare was on there.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  The design here was driven by spending time with gamers and actually putting the control in their hands.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, the controller was huge. The first controller was so big, they had to make a smaller one. They just went like way too big for some reason. I guess they were testing on the wrong type of people or something. Were they testing on you? No, there's this whole meme that it was like really good for Shaq, but that was it and Shaq loved it or something like that. I seem to remember this. I don't know.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Loaded as you move from level to level. What you're seeing on the front, the eject, the on off button and four game ports. That was one of the big pieces of feedback was people didn't want to be limited to two.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, the PlayStation I think just had two at the time and maybe the N64 had four, but this is like a big jump forward.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  And then Dwayne comes out?

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, 2:46 while they are skipping ahead. Let me tell you about Labelbox delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. And we can go to 2 minutes and 46 seconds.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  That are so state of the art that they'll only be done right as we finish the manufacturing. So we'll plug those chips in. Except for that, everything in this box is the final design.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Here we go. Look at this. Getting a celebrity like that? Like, OpenAI had so many announcements this year.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Look at the fit, dude. The glasses.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  There was the whole Scarlett Johansson thing. They didn't bring out The Rock.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I might want to use that sometime, Bill. Well, thanks, Rock. And it really is.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Thanks, Rock. The celebrity cameo tech launch is completely forgotten art. We don't know how to do this anymore.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Five-time WWF champion.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  All right, pause for a second. Because I think people would be shocked at how inexpensive it could be to work with a effect, I don't know about A-List, but maybe like an aging out. Like, somebody that was iconic.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  An actor.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Yes, totally.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  An athlete, etc. And just, instead of spending $30,000 on some insane launch video, just get a camera and hire some celebrity and have them explain your product.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  That would be genius. Yeah, I mean, you see a lot of these.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  There was that, there was that, that drink company that, that did this. Do you remember? They, they had some celebrity, like, read every sign.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  I do remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Orca?

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, Orca. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We remember it today. And, and a lot of, a lot of founders have figured out how to marshal the right resources for really cinematic footage, good editing, a bunch of things to, to introduce their product. But some of them just aren't charismatic on camera, unfortunately, and they just don't have the reps. So if you bring in a celebrity, it can just, also, it's just way, way more thumb-stopping. Like, you're just gonna be scrolling, and you're gonna be like, "Oh, what is The Rock doing there promoting your product?" Obviously, not everyone has the resources of Microsoft. I bet that was expensive. And who knows how doable it is. But I bet if you get creative, there is a way to do it. Anyway, CES, when it launched, I, I thought this was impressive. 1967, no, like, no precedent. There's not really a tech community.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  It's sort of new. Seventeen thousand people show up, two hundred companies put on exhibitions. That seems like a lot. It's grown, not even ten X. I mean, this was, this year or in twenty twenty four, they had one hundred and thirty thousand attendees. Like, it's grown a lot, but it's not, you know, it it started out pretty big. I personally love consumer technology. I've always been like a tech nerd and liked tinkering with gadgets and whatnot. But I think this year should be more interesting because the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, I O T, all that stuff was like sort of annoying. Maybe the A I. stuff gets annoying, but I still feel like there's more opportunity for actually cool integrations with A I. in in all sorts of different hardware things. At the same time, I was at Best Buy over the break and I saw a T V. That said it was powered by A I.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  And I was just shuddering, thinking about how bad of an experience that probably was because, like, what is it going to be trying to do? It's probably not integrating like a frontier model. It's probably some really, really sloppy thing.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Samsung had had a big announcement last year.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Perplexity integration.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  I don't know if that makes sense.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  And again, I just think anytime you're in a situation where you could ask your T V.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  For information, it's probably easier to ask your phone.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Usually, usually. And yeah, and so I I think you need to be a little bit more first principles when you think about these integrations thing. We'll get into some of the stuff that actually launched that sounded interesting. But I wanted to go into the history of like how the tech conference, like the the the tech conference that's not linked to a single company sort of died and a lot of it goes back to the iPhone, actually. So the iPhone, probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history, it should have been launched at the Consumer Electronics Show. Like, it is the consumer electronics juggernaut. It should

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  be the most important consumer product.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Ever.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Of the twenty first century.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Totally. And they got scooped by Macworld because Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go. So he chose to debut the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on January ninth, two thousand and seven. And Macworld was technically independent from Apple. So the conference was created by I D G, this international data group. Very interesting story there. They had Computer World and PC World and a bunch of different conferences, publications.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  That guy started a magazine.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  Great name. International data group.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to make names like that.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's right up there with IBM. Seriously. And, uh, and, and he, you know, kind of scaled this business. Eventually Macworld was technically independent from, from Apple, but Apple was like, obviously the cornerstone draw to the event. So they give them the keynote, great floor space, and then all the other independent third-party Mac developers. So if you were developing a piece of software, or even just like, you know, a phone case, it didn't make sense at that time, but like, you could imagine all sorts of different peripherals, a printer, you would go there and, and figure out partnerships and, and do deals. But, uh, uh, launching the iPhone at Macworld, which happened at the exact same time as CES. It allowed Jobs to control everything about the big reveal, the lighting, the pacing. He was famously like fanatical about this. Uh, he rehearsed for weeks and weeks and weeks.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  He wanted things exactly, he wanted certain demos to happen after, and he just got way more control at Macworld than he would have gotten at CES. And the big thing is that at CES journalists go around from booth to booth and they compare spec sheets. So with TVs, we know like 4K, 8K, 3D, not 3D, OLED, or refresh rate, or number of ports, price point. So they create these like charts and they keep everything in a category. And he wanted to be category defining and he wanted to break the category. And he also did not want to be compared to, uh, to the Nokia N95. No, the Nokia N95 was actually the best, weird name.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  It was more, more performant.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it, it beat it on basically everything at the time.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  He didn't want to go spec to spec.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  He didn't, he didn't. So the Nokia had 3G already, it had GPS, it allowed for copy pasting of text, it had a front-facing camera, it had a 5-megapixel rear.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  He's like, until we can copy and paste.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  We don't have that power yet.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  No, no, the number of features that the Nokia N95 was crazy. Uh, it could record videos, the iPhone couldn't record videos. Uh, it had a 5-megapixel camera instead of a 2-megapixel camera. It even had an FM radio, which I don't, I don't think anyone really wants, but, uh, you know, it had a bunch of features that if it was just, if you just created a table of iPhone versus Nokia, uh, N95, the Nokia beat it on like, you know, 10 different specs. The only thing that the iPhone really had going for it was that it had a touchscreen and, uh, and the Nokia didn't. But people didn't think they wanted a touchscreen at that point because most touchscreens were terrible and the iPhone sort of had the first good. Touchscreen. And then also it had some other unique Apple innovations like a full-featured Safari

• 13:43John Coogan?

  web browser, but it didn't even have third-party apps. The Nokia did. And so Steve Jobs was able to sort of reframe the whole iPhone discussion as like, it's just this own thing. Don't comp us to Nokia. Why are we talking about Nokia? We're not going to talk about Nokia. They're not at Mac World. They're not allowed to be here.

• 13:58Jordi Hays?

  Best marketer of all time.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Clearly. And everyone copied him. So very, very quickly, every tech company wanted to do the same thing, set their own agenda, have full control over the event from start to finish. Apple actually pulled out of Mac World two years later, started doing WWDC and their own their own self-hosted events, self-distributed events. Obviously, technology itself makes a lot of that easier. Cameras are cheaper. You can livestream. You can go to Restream and you can and you can get your your your event everywhere. So you have Google I/O, Microsoft Build, Meta Connect, Samsung Unpacked. Like, when Zuck introduced the latest Meta Ray-Ban displays, he didn't do it at CES. He didn't wait for CES. He was just like, I'm gonna have my own event. He did it at his own event. He created his own news cycle. And it was it was like, you know,

• 14:44John Coogan?

  he had full control over that. And so everyone's followed Jobs' playbook, and it's been remarkably successful. Like, I don't think it's been a miss. The older trade show format still works for lots of companies, and big tech companies do still have presences. So just today at CES or yesterday, Jensen was there, and Nvidia unveiled Vera Rubin, their new

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  Which looks incredible.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, but also, it's not a consumer electronics product. It's kind of an odd place to do it, but it's like a fun event. But even Nvidia has their own conferences now. So and but my main takeaway is like, just like, in terms of key moments in tech history, I don't expect them to happen at independent trade shows anymore. And truthfully, they haven't happened there for decades. We looked at the VCR and the CD player and the Xbox. That's, you know, over 25 years old now at this point. Although, The Rock alongside Bill Gates is an iconic moment. But that is of old at this point. And so still, there's plenty to get from a show from CES. It's a fantastic place. If you're in the industry, you don't go as like a fan. A lot of people who are Apple fans will watch will watch an Apple keynote just to know, hey, should I buy the new

• 15:49John Coogan?

  iPhone? You don't really go to CES with that same idea or that goal. You go because you're there looking for a supplier or someone to distribute.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  You go because

• 15:59John Coogan?

  You're in the industry.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  Your CEO has

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Get ready to drink, buddy, in Vegas.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Get ready to go.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And there are some fun things that did launch at CES. The first thing that I wanted to go through was the Wall Street Journal's write-up of CES coverage is interesting because it's almost no consumer electronics. So of course, they highlighted Nvidia, the faster artificial intelligence chips, Vera Rubin, the CPU GPU combination, Mercedes-Benz. Nvidia has a partnership to make the first autonomous car built in partnership with Mercedes-Benz, set to hit US roads in the first three months of this year.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  The tire of my Mercedes-Benz exploded autonomously this morning on the way to work.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  You've been complaining about the roads in LA and making this point like you need an SUV since the beginning of the show.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  And what's happened? We've had three tires blown out on LA roads. I do think I was complaining about, I'm not sure if it was on air or off here, but at least in the last 48 hours, I was joking about needing an SUV for the LA roads. And of course, this morning at 5:35 AM, the tire did not survive a pothole. Anyways.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Ridiculous.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Going forward, AMD, the Journal says AMD also unveiled its latest AI chips, known as the Instinct, which will launch later this year. They're expected to be AMD's strongest competition to Nvidia yet. Shares fell more than 2%, however. Uber, the ride-hailing company, plus EV maker Lucid and Neuro have begun on-road testing for their planned robotaxi service. Uber expects to offer the service in San Francisco later this year. Stock jumped 5.5%. So CES, at least announcements are still moving the market.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  There's some other cool stuff. I mean Dell's in here. They're reviving the XPS computer line. But they also launched a massive 52-inch monitor or something like that, a 6K monitor. I feel like that could be pretty sick if you need.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  If you're monitoring situations, get like six of these.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Lego launched a smart brick and

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  High-tech Star Wars toy.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  This was, this was the launch, launch of the year contender and

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Already?

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  It's the first week in January, so let's, let's pull it up if, if

• 18:47John Coogan?

  But, yeah, let's watch this, let's watch this.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  And you'll see from the sound and the color when it detects it. But it's not just looking for the mini figure, it knows who that mini figure is. And actually it knows where that mini figure is. So as I move the mini figure around, you'll see different lights and colors depending on where the mini figure is compared to the brick.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  What does this allow us to do?

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  More dopamine for children. Let's go.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  I think this is good. I, I remember.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  We turned every Lego brick into a mini iPad.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  I, I remember there were.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  We're excited to addict your children to Legos.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Uh, there was some sort of Lego programmable computer, but it was much larger. It was about this big when I was a kid and, uh,

• 19:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Lego Mindstorm.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  Mindstorms. That was it. That was amazing. Cause you could actually learn to program a little bit and you could do little like self-driving cars like line following. You could draw a line on the ground that can have a little camera that looked at the line and follow it around. Uh, and it, it just let you.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Our, Ryan says the Lego turbo puffer is gonna need a rebuild.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Simon, we need to make this a smart Lego puffer.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Smart puffer for sure.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  But yeah, so Lego's launching the most ambitious brick it's ever made. A tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic two by four Lego brick. It will make entire Lego sets come to life with humming lightsabers, roaring engines, light up blasters and more. From the Verge, Tom.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Coverage. Very cool.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Boston Dynamics.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  Demo champions of the world.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, they gotta give

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  The best to ever demo.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Robots some 11 Labs voices. 11 Labs, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  That actually is a real call to action. Let your robots talk.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  With 11 Labs.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  It definitely needs as a feature, but.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, so Boston Dynamics.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  Is starting the year strong.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  They seem to be upset that Figure is valued at roughly one Ford Motor Company. And, uh, they're not happy about it. So they're, uh, they're launching, they had a new video of. Uh, various Boston Dynamics.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  They should be the de facto.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Hyundai.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, here. They've been doing this for so long. Um, but, uh, I don't know. It looks good. I don't know. How tall is it? 2.3 meters? Oh, that's how long it can reach. That's pretty big. I feel like a lot of the humanoid have been really, really small, just kind of like taller, smaller. Is this, is this not CGI? I can't even tell at this point.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  This looks like.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Wow. Oh, that was a cool move.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  The way that it can move.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  That was a cool move.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  The way that it stands up is wild, too. There's a video of it standing up. It looks like a spider and then it just kind of.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, uh, disconcerting, but that one is crazy. Oh, that, we, we, we saw this from one of the Chinese, uh, uh, humanoid.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, do you think that this, uh, maybe their, one of their first use cases could be gloving?

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's really trendy. I've been seeing that.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Gloving. I saw some video of somebody gloving on an airplane or something. You see that one? Yeah, you saw that.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler, you need to start gloving.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  When a founder, anytime a founder raises more than a hundred million dollars, you gotta say, can I glove for you?

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Can I glove for you?

• 22:11John Coogan?

  What is that from like EDM culture or something? I don't know. Uh, that's very funny.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Dark.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Uh, what, uh, what else is in this?

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, the Boston Dynamics robot has an operating temperature range of negative four degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty interesting, all the way up to a hundred and four.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Hundred and four?

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  Six feet, two inches tall.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Hundred and four feels like that's.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Got a great build, honestly. Six two, 198 pounds can work in negative four.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  What is this mid-face ratio?

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  How's this upper maxilla?

• 22:42John Coogan?

  How's this upper maxilla?

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  It's a circle.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  It's a circle. Okay. Well, perfect. That's a perfect ratio.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. So apparently Hyundai is preparing to deploy tens of thousands of their robots into their manufacturing facilities.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Sixty-six pounds sustained, uh, you know, weight capacity. Most, most people can lift more than that. Come on. We gotta get those numbers up. But, uh, yeah, this will be interesting. I, uh, I wonder, I wonder what the future of the, this company's trade, traded hands so many times. It's owned by, uh, Hyundai right now. Uh, they gotta spin it out. They gotta go public. They gotta get this thing in the public markets again. They gotta launch on the New York Stock Exchange. If they want to change the world, they gotta raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Great idea. Uh, should we talk about Jamie Dimon?

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in the New York Times today, Jamie Dimon's 770 million haul shows how bankers are on top again. Let's give it up for the bankers.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Is this gong worthy?

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  This is gong worthy.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Let's do it. First gong.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  The Trump admin is lifting regulations and deal making is heating up for Jamie Dimon. Being JP Morgan Chase's chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever. For nearly 15 years, Jamie Dimon, the bank chieftain, has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials and journalists.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Wait, what? Talisman?

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  At just, uh, at just the right time in meetings, he breaks out a single page printout that he calls a spaghetti chart. On it, Mr. Dimon's underlings have crammed in tiny type, a comically complicated flow chart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, JP Morgan Chase, is subject. The theatrics have finally worked. The Trump admin is not just taking apart regulations, but attacking the whole regulatory agencies that date back to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to peddle in risky assets again, like cryptocurrency and President Trump paused enforcement of foreign anti-bribery rules.

• 24:46Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Uh, the deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker, but there's more. Falling interest rates and a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging M and A. As the $100 billion bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Brothers discovery shows. Uh, once imperiled, real estate loans look steadier thanks to the rebound in in-office work. Stocks are near record levels. The bond market had its best year since 2020 and gold and silver have soared, all of which feeds the trading businesses that keep Wall Street's profit machine humming.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  In other words, as analysts at Keith, Brew Yet and Woods recently put it, there's something for everyone. Big, uh, big bank stocks rose 29% in 2025, almost doubling the gain of the US, uh, stock, stock market overall. Smaller lenders and community banks, which tend to have a narrow, narrower focus on areas such as residential mortgages and consumer checking accounts, also gained, but performed considerably, considerably less well. Uh, so again, I mean, a big part of this is, uh, banks have just been, you know, obviously lending with their hands tied behind their backs as, as the P, uh, as the private credit chat.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  That's true. That's actually true. Yeah.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  So they're just sitting here.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  And it's sort of the same thing with like crypto. It's like, uh, you know, if, if there's going to be a, uh, if you're going to have a competitor that's like on less, way less regulated, that is a very, uh, that's a huge.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  And why would I work with JP Morgan Chase when I can work with World Liberty Financial?

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Which is reinventing.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the whole de-banking self, or not de-banking, uh, bankless movement and stuff. Like, I don't know. It's been a huge headwind. Uh, but.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think the, uh, combination of M and A.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, private credit that, that they have just been, um, you know, private credit is just much more loosely regulated.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a combination of salary bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank shares yielded roughly 770 million, uh, for Jamie Dimon, uh, for the chief executives of Citi, whose shares rose more than 65% in 2025 after the bank slashed tens of thousands of jobs in a years-long restructuring and Goldman Sachs shares.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Tyler, Tyler. Displacement?

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Not, not because the jobs. No, because they were up 60.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Okay.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Yeah. Cause the way that you reacted there looked a little suspicious.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  No, obviously. For the, for the labor displacement. But this is not, this is not AI-driven, of course.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, they're, they're counting some unrealized gains here, of course.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, anyways, big, big year for, for Jamie Dimon.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  Do we pop over to Tuna?

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's in?

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tuna says, you're.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  But first, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents, baby.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Tuna says, "Your soul is out of balance because you have fallen out of touch with your consumer demographic. Pay more attention to your personalized ads. Let them flow through you."

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  Pay attention. They do really tell you something about where your energy...

• 28:09John Coogan?

  I've been getting, I mean, speaking of the CES consumer products, I've been getting personalized ads for the board, the smart game board. But we had the founder on the show and I bought one.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  I bought one too.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  What, give me your review. What'd you think?

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Haven't played it yet.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  No.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  So, so here's the challenge.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  We had less help around the house.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Over the last two weeks.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  And board is designed for, I think, kids like, I think it's like six and up. Like, it's not, it's not like a under-five game. And so trying to pull that out and play when you're just gonna have, you know, like a one or three-year-old just like, you know, messing with it, it's pretty much impossible. But I'm excited to play it, hopefully this week. You guys should play live during the show, right?

• 28:53John Coogan?

  We should, yeah. The, the review from the four-and-a-half-year-old was A+. He loved it.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  What'd you play?

• 28:59John Coogan?

  We, we, we stuck to the more simple games, I think. Also, they're still rolling out some of the games, so it ships and you get a number of pieces in bags. And, and some of the pieces that they ship to you, the games haven't actually finished, they haven't finished decoding them, I guess. And so they're not live. But we played this sort of like Space Invaders game that you put this like, sort of triangle block on the screen. And then when you're in this one zone, you're basically firing at these like asteroids that come by and you break them up and you get the score. And it was, it was interesting. It was like... It was intuitive enough that the four-year-old could pick it up and actually get some points.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  But there were enough layered mechanics that if you collected enough of this material, you could turn on this massive laser beam that would sort of like destroy everything. So there was like, I, I found myself being like, oh, I know that there's a, that it's possible to get 4,000 points, even though we're averaging like 2,500 points now. If I really max this out and we were to play this at a high level, like the skill ceiling's actually sort of high, which is fun. So I thought that the game design was pretty good in that one. Then there were-

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  I love how you don't, you don't, every, like, every game, anything like that, you're just like, I need to max it up.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  I need to max it up.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  Even if you don't care about it, you care about maxing it, the score.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I told Buzz-

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  It's a good, it's a good personality trait.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  I, at one point I had the highest score in Robo Recall in the world.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so apparently, so, so Mike on our team says, "My three-year-old nephew loves the weird alien dog game."

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Is that the one where-

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Apparently this is, apparently it is suited for three-year-olds and I need to get into it.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Is, is the, is the weird alien dog one where it, it comes in the house and you have to wash it off? That's the one, right?

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Cause that one's really funny. It's more like a Tamagotchi. Like, you're supposed to check on it every day and it comes in from the house, it's all dirty, so you wash it off, you soap it up, scrub it, and, and you have all these different tools. So you have a little watering can and you put the watering can on the screen of the board. And when you do, it, it sort of showers the pet and then it washes it off.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I think, I think for board-

• 31:08John Coogan?

  And so that mechanic was really fun, too.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  For board to sell a million units-

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  They need like a super, super viral individual game.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 31:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't think it's gonna, it, it won't be enough to have like a hand, you know, eight games that are all fun.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  They need a breakout. This is a hits business, right? So they need, they need-

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Like a Catan.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like they're gonna be-

• 31:30John Coogan?

  People are getting together specifically to play this game together. Yeah. None of the games were at that level. All of the games felt like a couple of minutes and you're done and the mechanics, you could play them again, there's some repeatability, but none of the games were so intense that, also there just aren't that many pieces. Like there's, most of the games have like six pieces, there's ten pieces. And so if you have resources, I guess all those resources could be sort of digitally like counted, which might be nice actually. Because you can play a more complex game with more resources where, you know, have you ever played one of those board games where there's like seventeen different resources and you have all these different tokens and counters and it's like, it actually gets overwhelming and annoying?

• 32:11John Coogan?

  I don't know. But let me tell you about vibe.co because maybe vibe should advertise on streaming TV. Because vibe.co is where D2C brands-

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  You mean board?

• 32:21John Coogan?

  -be startups. Oh yeah, board. AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. That should be their next place to advertise. And-

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  And it's a lesson to everyone to get in touch with their consumer demographic and pay more attention to the personal ads. They need to let them flow.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  Did you want to talk about capital in the 22nd century?

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Yes, let's read Philip Trammell's post. He says, "A week ago, Dwar Kesh and him, Phil, posted a fun essay using Thomas Piketty's capital in the 21st century as a lens through which to explore the possible impacts of AI on inequality." As the Financial Times kindly put it. That was all it was meant to be. The discussion has definitely become more intense than I'd expected. This is my first time on X in any serious way. Welcome to the arena, brother. Get in. Buckle up.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the dive bar.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's been good to see so many people engaging with the essay and the topic. I can't complain about the negative responses since I expect most of the positive responses were from people who did not read it at all and just like seeing another person- Another reason to tax the rich. That's funny. I hadn't thought about that. I think there's also people that gave a positive response just because they liked Orkash, right? And they're like, oh, cool, new Orkash thing. I'm a fan. But there is one point some people, mainly economists, have raised that I should acknowledge briefly. Also, I mean, this was a, I don't think they wrote it knowing that there was going to be this whole, like, Ro Khanna, Peter Thiel, Teddy Schleffer, like, the whole, like, wealth tax thing that was going on in California. And they just happened to drop something that read like a critique or commentary. It was in

• 34:02John Coogan?

  the zeitgeist at the same time, but I don't think that was intentional. I think they were working on this piece for like, probably months. It's like a very, it's like a paper. And so it's not like they were like, oh, let's react to Ro Khanna's viral post and let's hammer this out. It might have even dropped like the day before. But he says, he's responding to the economists that put him in the truth zone, or at least tried to. He says, and before I read this, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate Compliance and Security, the leading AI trust management platform. So, they say, "The labor share could rise if human-provided goods or end services are gross complements for capital-provided ones, quote, 'in our utility functions,' what Nordhaus 2021 might call 'on the demand side.' And even if we build machines physically capable

• 34:44John Coogan?

  of producing everything people can, what Nordhaus might call 'on the supply side,' this gross complementarity at the utility level could be maintained indefinitely. Bunnily enough, on the list of, on the long list of blog posts I've been hoping to write for a long time, one is titled, 'Is Labor a Luxury?' Is, is about how this possibility is underappreciated, but then makes a case for why I think, on balance, it probably won't happen in the long run. Naturally, I'm especially prioritizing that post for now. As for now, my only substantive reply on the question is a lame, 'Just give me a month.'" But whether the case is wrong or right, I promise it doesn't rely on a conceptual mistake

• 35:28John Coogan?

  like assuming that galaxies made of capital will have to get a higher share than labor because they'll be large and productive at producing the incomplete set of goods they are used to produce. Maybe that blog post should have come before this one, but I figured that in writing the current blog post, exploring the case against long-run gross complementarity on the demand side would be a distracting rabbit hole because, one, Piketty implicitly assumes gross substitution across the board already. Two, Nord House and related discussion have taken the position that advanced enough machines would probably yield gross substitution across the board so that we need fast-growing all-purpose robots to drive the supply-side singularity or gross substitution on the demand side so that we were satisfied with

• 36:11John Coogan?

  large quantities of IT consumption goods instead of shifting our demand for non-IT goods. For capital to accumulate rapidly, but consumption to be bottlenecked by labor, the price of consumption goods would have to rise relative to that of capital goods. This is totally fine, of course. We're imagining a very different future in all sorts of ways, and I think it is a very far future, but it is one interesting to think about.

• 36:33Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it'd be helpful to kind of summarize, if people haven't read it, a kind of key fact, so that thesis is basically like inequality is going to get worse because of AI. That's core thesis, and maybe you need to figure out a way to different methods of taxation to redistribute the wealth that is ultimately created if people cannot effectively increase their own capital via their labor. So, key factors, they talk about privatization of returns, so like very, very hard to get exposure to XAI right now if you're just a normal person. Two, most people have their wealth in their home, right? And the issue is like

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  home equity is not a good way to benefit from increasing returns to capital that come from automation, right? So if you have a home, I think they said, if you have a home in Ohio and you have like $300,000 locked up in that, you're not going to get some massive incremental return from that. Maybe somebody that is pursuing AI automation or building factories or something.

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  They could like buy your home at a premium, but they could also just buy acres and acres and acres of just like land somewhere else in the US at far, far less. They talk about the end of international sort of catch up, which is basically that poor countries historically had a lot of cheap labor. They'd bring in capital, they would turn that and they would Put the cheap labor to work. Yeah, they'd create value and retain some of that value, even though a lot of the investment was foreign. And then, and then the, the sort of, they talk about like wealth transfer as the, a lot of more developed economies are sort of like aging, aging out effectively.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  So we'll see, we'll see, but certainly sparked debate. I thought, I thought this post from Tomas Barjartur was interesting. This was sort of reaction to the post. Tomas says, both for our cash and his critics, imagine an absurd world. Think of the future they argue about political economy doesn't change rapidly, even as the speed of history increases in the literal sense that the speed of thought of the actors who produce history will be the thousands of times, will be thousands of times faster, not to mention way smarter. These are agents to whom we've seen, who we seem like toddlers walking in slow motion. It is complete insanity to expect your OpenAI stock certificates to be worth anything

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  in this world, even if it isn't, if it is compatible with human survival. So many can't contend with the scope of what they project. They can't hold in their mind that things are allowed to be different. So we get bizarre arguments about nonsense. Own a galaxy? Question mark. What does this mean for a human to own a galaxy in an economy operated by minds running thousands to millions of times faster than ours? Children? What sort of children? Copies of your brain state? Are you even allowing yourself to think about the level of bizarreness required? Because these are table stakes and even they will be economically obsolete curiosities by the time they're created. Things will be much weirder than we can possibly comprehend. How often have property rights been reset throughout history? How quickly will history move in the transition period?

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Why shouldn't it trample on your stock certificates if not the air you breathe? But institutions are surprisingly robust. Maybe they are. How long have they existed in their current form? How fast will history be moving exactly? Suppose OpenAI aligns AI, whatever that means. Will it serve the interests of the US government, the CCP? Will they align it to a humanity weighted by wealth, to OpenAI stockholders, to SAMA, to the coterie of engineers who may as well be AIs who actually know WTF is going on, to the coding agent who implements it, tax policy, question mark? Truly the important question. What does it mean to be a human principal in this world? How robust are these institutions? How secure is the human mind?

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  Extremely insecure, given how easy humans are to scam. There's going to be a lot of incentive to break your mind if you own, check notes, a whole galaxy. Oh, you will have a little AI nanny to defend you now? Wow, isn't that nice? Please return to the beginning of the paragraph. A human owning galaxies? That's bad space opera. Treat the future with the respect it deserves. This scenario is not even close to science fictional enough to happen. So anyways, I guess pushback here generally, like, hey, even in the scenario that you lay out, things could get so crazy that we won't have any, the institutions just break. The way that the world currently

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  works breaks. The thing with, the thing with, I was thinking about with, if you own a bunch of OpenAI shares in, in this sort of fast takeoff scenario, is this, you know, to, maybe there's a world where you could pay for things with OpenAI shares, right? But is a superintelligence gonna say, oh, oh, yes, I would like to buy some OpenAI shares, right?

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Buy them all.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Buys them all, or just rebuild, you know, effectively just rebuild, you know, so, so, this, I think it's, in any type of these, in any type of like, fast takeoff scenario, how do you actually, it's hard to have, I think, I think the, I love, you know, reading, I love reading this essay, I'd like to see more of them, but it's so difficult to, any scenario you can imagine, there are 50, there's an infinite number of parallel realities where none of the same ground rules apply.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I wonder, the

• 42:24John Coogan?

  The 22nd century thing is, it does, I mean, you keep, you keep coming back to like this idea of fast takeoff and it feels like even in some sort of like slow progress, like if you just extrapolate like the default trend lines and nothing really changes, like you still see a lot of these effects happen with tech companies becoming more powerful and the owners of capital becoming more powerful. Ben Thompson had an interesting, an interesting interpretation of this saying that, he said, "This gets at what I found the most frustrating, what was most frustrating about Patel and Trammell's, Trammell's point of view. The core assumption undergirding their argument was also about the

• 43:06John Coogan?

  human condition. It just happened to be negative." And, and he basically said that, like, you have to imagine a world where humans remain the same and that they are still like bothered by wealth inequality, because in this scenario, there's abundance and there's enough like, like, you know, robots can just pre-create everything. So you have like unlimited, you know, everything you could possibly want from a consumption perspective, but you're still bothered by the fact that like that guy owns 10,000 galaxies and I only own 1,000 galaxies.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not right.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  And that, yeah, yeah, it doesn't feel balanced and that's, and it's odd because you have to think about this world where, okay, you own galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of years apart and so you, it takes you a million years to get there and it's like, and maybe you're still bothered by that. Like, it would be funny if we, if we discovered aliens that were just extremely rich. Like, would that make us all worse off? Like, would, would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to bed sadder if they found aliens like, you know, a million light years away?

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, your size is not size.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're just like, yeah, we actually, we're actually sitting on an, an entire planet of diamond. And we're, we're worth quadrillions of dollars. Everyone here is worth quadrillions of dollars. You guys are nowhere near us in terms of wealth. Would that actually bother you? Or would you just be like, ah, it's okay, there's aliens that are over there. I can't even get to them. It doesn't affect me. Like, how much is it, how much is wealth inequality a direct focus on like the keeping up with the Joneses? Like the neighbor affect, the direct memetics of like the person that you see as your, as your equal. But, I don't know. But he, Ben Thompson kind of returns to this, this idea that you're, you have to assume that, that, that something about the human condition holds where humans...

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Are upset by wealth inequality. But they don't value other humans, or the work of other humans, or the creativity of other humans. And they don't see any value in that. And so, because he's making the point that, he quotes Louis CK in an October 2008 appearance of Late Night with Conan. And he says, "Everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy." And he says, "You've almost certainly seen this clip, but if not, it's worth watching." Louis CK focuses on three incredible technological...

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Should we pull it up?

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, let me send it to the team and see if we can drop this. So, he says, "Louis CK focuses on three incredible technological innovations and how quickly we took them for granted. Smartphones, internet access on planes, and the act of flying itself. It's certainly a sentiment I can relate to. In just the last 72 hours, I have chafed at slow airplane wifi, complained about jet lag from having literally traversed the globe," he went to Taiwan, "and back, "and gotten frustrated at an iPhone bug that is sapping my battery. It is also terrible. Until I remember, I have access to everything, anything, everywhere, can be anywhere, anytime,

• 46:08John Coogan?

  and oh yeah, I can achieve both simultaneously. If anything, you can make the case that technological innovations, by virtue of conferring their benefits on everybody, has actually had the perverse effect of making everyone feel worse off." That's a very, very weird concept, but I feel it as well. Let's watch this Louis CK clip.

• 46:28Speaker 05

  We may be going back to that, by the way. But, in a way, good, because when I read things like, "The foundations of capitalism are shattering," I'm like, "Maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides." You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to, and you had to dial it. Yes. Do you not realize how primitive... You're making sparks in a phone, and you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers, because it was more... It's like, "Oh, this guy's got two zeros, screw that guy, why do I want to..."

• 47:15Speaker 05

  And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank. When it was open for like three hours. You'd stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you'd just go, "Well, I can't do any more things now." Right. "I can't do any more things." That's it, yeah. That was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, "Ugh," and he'd bring out this whole "schunk, schunk," and he'd write... Yes. You'd have to call the president to see if you had any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president, yeah. It was ridiculous. Yes. Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world,

• 47:58Speaker 05

  and it's wasted on the craftiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, and they're like, "Ugh, it won't... Give it a second! It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space? Is the speed of light too slow for you?"

• 48:25Speaker 05

  I was on an airplane, and there was internet, high-speed internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane, and they go, "Open up your laptop. You can go on the internet." And it's fast, and I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  2008, watching YouTube on a T9 plane?

• 48:40Speaker 05

  And they apologize, the internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, "This is bull..."

• 48:48Speaker 05

  Like, how quickly the world owes him something Yes. he knew existed only 10 seconds ago. Right, right. And on planes...

• 49:04Speaker 05

  Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. And it's like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. Right. They're like, "It was the worst day of my life." First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there. Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you not contributing zero? That you got to fly? You're flying! It's amazing!

• 49:48Speaker 05

  Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, "Oh my God!" Wow! Yes! You're flying!

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  He wants to bring back clapping, clapping on after the plane lands.

• 50:02Jordi Hays?

  Alright, pause it, pause it.

• 50:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  I did, uh, this reminded me a couple of days ago.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Before you tell us this, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, John. Couple of days ago, my one and a half year old has not, has not been sleeping super well. You know, toddlers, they go through periods where they sleep well and then they stop sleeping well. And with my three year old, we hired a, when he was going through a similar phase, we hired a sleep consultant. These are people that just help your baby. It's like a sleep coach for your baby and the parents or whatever. And with my three year old, we hired somebody and they effectively, you know, it's effect, the effective rate is like hundreds of dollars an hour, right? Because there's some retainer and blah, blah, blah. And it works really well, like it's a lifesaver. But with one and a half year old, a few days ago, my wife just goes through an LLM

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  and just like breaks down exactly like what's happening.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Gets the answer.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  And it is effectively running calculations based on the child's age and their sleep patterns now and how to get them back on a better sleep pattern. And within 24 hours, like the problem was totally solved. Like back to sleeping on the right schedule, napping on the right schedule, like basically one shot it. Then I was just thinking how, you know, you know... OpenAI has gotten so much, specifically Sam has gotten so much pushback because he'll go out and say like, we're gonna solve this, you're gonna have person, you're gonna have like a personal tutor in your pocket and all this stuff. And then people like, you know, hammer him because it's like, well, then we're doing Sora and we're doing, you know, adult entertainment and things like that. But it's actually, like, AI is actually

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  already delivering on, on this sort of-

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Do you remember the Fallon clip that, where that went viral? Where Fallon asks him, like, are, do you use ChatGPT to parent your kid? And he was like, honestly, like, it feels weird to say it, but yes. And it's like, that's exactly your experience. It was like, it is, it is helpful. And yeah, it is, it is a weird thing. But it's, it's this, it's this, when technology goes broad, it becomes available to everyone. I was reflecting on airplane travel over the break. You know those pictures of like, back in 1965, planes used to be so nice. And now you're like stuffed in the back like cattle. You know, you know these photos where they're like, we gotta return to 1965 planes. I ran the numbers and it, and it turns out that the total amount of flights, the total amount of passenger

• 52:40John Coogan?

  flights, like individual person gets on a plane, goes somewhere in the United States in 1965, in total, across everything, is the same number, almost exactly the same number, as total first-class flights in 2025. And so, basically, anyone who could fly in 20, in, in 1965, is now flying first class. And then you added, there's 10 times as many non-first-class flights that are happening as well. And so it's like, you, you basically actually kept that level of service. It just became known as first class.

• 53:12Jordi Hays?

  Different product.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  But in 1965, even just getting on a plane was first class, because it was really expensive. It got cheaper, but all those, all the rich people stayed in first class. And then, and then you gave the ability to fly at all to 10 times as many people. And, and that just continues. And so, but it's this weird thing, because that doesn't feel satisfying. Because you see the people up in first class, and you're like, I wanna be up there.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  Let me go back to Ben Thompson and close this out, but first let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average VOD coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build.

• 53:48Speaker 06

  Oh, John, okay. Also.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Code back prototypes and apps.

• 53:50Speaker 06

  John, you always have this critique of the coding models and you're like, oh, they're not being used by everyone because the United app is so bad.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 53:57Speaker 06

  You always have this thing.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 53:59Speaker 06

  And then, so there's this post, it's in the timeline.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:01Speaker 06

  It's someone, they're saying, one of the things I love about United is how good their iOS app is.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, because it like, it works well and they're just like glazing it.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  I, yeah, I talked to Rune about this as well because I brought that up when I was talking to him and he was like, uh, kind of stomped and then, and then I talked to him again and he was like, actually, I think it's better than you think it is. I think it's actually pretty good. And, and so, so I think that, uh, I think that you're, you're right and it's a good point that like the software, the quality of the software is increasing. And I think I've probably been unduly mean to the United app. It's probably, it's probably better than I'm giving it credit for. Probably just remembering bugs from years ago and I just have a bad taste in my mouth. But there, there, there's, there is something that AI is not at least solving immediately, which is just the business realities of where businesses have walled gardens or adversarial business incentives.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  So I'll give you an example. Uh, Apple TV, it's a great product. I, I love the Apple TV, plug it into your TV, works really well.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  Are you talking about the Apple TV?

• 55:01John Coogan?

  The, the physical device.

• 55:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  On the Apple TV physical device, yes, we're going here, is an app called Apple TV. And they have set this to be the default. I didn't know this, but you can actually change the button, the home button on the Apple TV, the Apple TV remote, to go to the home screen, which has all the icons. So if you want to watch Netflix or HBO, you can go there. But by default, it now ships with a, the home button goes to the TV app, which is a... Unifying layer over all of the content. And so if you want to find sports, or you want to find the latest Apple TV show, or you want to find something that's on Peacock or Paramount Plus, that will be integrated in there, and it's a great universal interface. At least, it should be a universal interface, except Netflix said, "We're not participating." "We want to be in our own app."

• 55:46John Coogan?

  So, you cannot find a Netflix show in the TV app on the Apple TV box. And that is something that, like, no amount of vibe coding, it's not a coding issue, it's a business model issue. It's because Apple and Netflix are in competition. And so they have decided not to do a deal, and that results in a worse user experience, but, but are like profits for both companies, and it's a rational thing for them to do, and there's no amount of like Claude code that can solve for that. So, my take now has evolved to be that-

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you move the goalposts?

• 56:17John Coogan?

  I will move the goalposts.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Move the goalposts.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  I gotta move the goalposts, because the AI, AI coding models, until they can solve fundamental business competition issues with a, with a single prompt,

• 56:34John Coogan?

  it will not satisfy my AGI. I need Netflix in my Apple TV app, and then it will be AGI. Then it will be AGI. Because it's not, it's not a coding problem, it's a business model problem.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm sure we'll, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to move the goalposts back-

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  Back, back where they started the show.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  And business model problems are, are enduring, and Ben Thompson makes the case that, that, that, that there are human conditions, there are human elements that will be enduring, even, even in a post-software-only singularity.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  I had some, there was a post I put in from Samuel Hammond over at FAI.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  He said, "I was just asked about my current views on AI takeoff speeds, both in the sense of GDP economic effects and the time gap between AGI and ASI." Given I believe we'll get fully automated AI R and D by 2029, he said, here's my response via quick email reply. Read GDP, I think we'll get a higher trend TFP level growth rate as past general purpose technologies. This will be a new higher growth regime, five to 10%, but not hyperbolic exponential growth.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  So not with the Elon triple digit?

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  So there.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Real output will still be bottlenecked by infrastructure, legal and regulatory regimes, supply chains, human in the loop. We will still see a Digi Foom software singularity, but this will feel more disinflationary than anything.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  I.e. mostly captured in consumer surplus. A lot of knowledge work will be outright automated, but a lot will still remain given human rents, social relationships, celebrity status and demand side factors, people liking other people, science.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. The big question for me this year, you know, Anthropic is, you know, they have created the drop in software engineer, right? With Claude Code, it's clearly working. But, and it's changing that industry. Today, you know, their goal for 2026 is clearly like the drop in replacement, like what is the Claude Code for every other industry? And it'll be very interesting to see if we see a, if we see progress in AI SDRs, because that historically has been steak dinners, wine, relationships, like getting to know people. And it's been a more, much more human role that hasn't been verifiable in some, you know, oh, you know, you checked in this code, it worked, so you're, so you get paid.

• 58:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not just hitting the right keystrokes in the right order.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Any good SDR will tell you like, it's not actually about the emails that you send. That's just one piece of the, of the.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he says, science and R and D will speed up dramatically, but these also will have delayed GDP effects, given production cycles and the fact that a lot of fast diffusing beneficial science greatly improves quality of life, i.e. GLP-1s without necessarily boosting GDP. I think this interim TFP growth regime will last until the mid, late 2030s before entering another even higher growth regime, greater than 10% as robotics matures and reaches scale production volumes. Fully automated factories and robots that can themselves build the factories that build other robots will have much more tangible effects on economic output. This is also when you start to see the Baumol effect start forcing adoption in areas that may otherwise be resistant.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  E.G. We get Robocop and Robo nurses because the human cops and nurses become prohibitively expensive in comparison. And he goes on to some other stuff, but thought that was just kind of relevant on from a timeline standpoint, when you're trying to understand capital in the 22nd century.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  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. To close out what Ben Thompson is talking about here, he says, when he was a child growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, he said, I had some sort of vague sense that there were rich people in the world, but my perspective, but from my perspective, taking my first airplane flight around the age of 10 was a source of great wonder and it even provided a sense of status. After all, many of my friends had never flown at all. That was the comparison that mattered to me. Social media, or more accurately, user generated content feeds, which increasingly not social at all, has completely changed this dynamic.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  All I or anyone needs to do is open Instagram to see beautiful people on private jets or on beaches or at fancy restaurants, living a life that seems dramatically better than one's dull experience in the suburbs or a cramped apartment. Never mind that this mean that the means of achieving that insight is a level of technological wealth that would have been incomprehensible to the richest person in the world 50 years ago. To put it another way, what Louis CK identified in this clip was the extent to which human happiness is a relative versus an absolute phenomenon. What we care about is how much we have, is not how much we have, but how we compare. That by extension is what drives the technological paradox I noted above. More capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously enriched the world on an

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  absolute basis, but the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more immiserated than ever. If we discover the trillionaire, quadrillionaire aliens, we're all done.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  We're going to be miserable.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  It's going to be brutal. It's just like, oh, there's an alien out there with a, with a two mile long yacht and a, and a plane that holds 700.

• 1:01:52Jordi Hays?

  Their yacht is actually an asteroid.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  He has so much Crumb Hearts.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and he has piles of Crumb Hearts everywhere.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  He never wears the same pair of chrome jeans twice.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  No, never, never.

• 1:02:05Jordi Hays?

  One more post from Boaz Barak. He's over at, probably mispronouncing his name, he's over at OpenAI. He wrote a post on Less Wrong on New Year's Eve.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  He said, what's that?

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  I mean, a white pill title, certainly.

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the title, the essay is "You Will Be Okay." He said, "Seeing this post, which is another post on Less Wrong, and its comments made me a bit concerned for young people around this community. I thought I would try to write down why I believe most folks who read and write here and are generally smart, caring, and knowledgeable will be okay. I agree that our society often is underprepared for tail risks. As a general planner, you should be worrying about potential catastrophes, even if their probability is small. However, as an individual, if there is a certain probability X of doom that is beyond your control, it is best to focus on the 1X fraction of the probability space that you control rather than constantly worrying about it. A generation of Americans and Russians grew up under a non-trivial probability of total nuclear war,

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  and they still went about their lives even when we do have some control over possibility of very bad outcomes. It is best to follow some common sense best practices, but then put that out of your mind. I do not want to engage here in the usual debate of P doom, but just as it makes absolute sense for companies and societies to worry about it as long as this probability is bounded away from zero, so it makes sense for individuals to spend most of their time not worrying about it as long as it is bounded away from one. Even if it is your job to push this probability down, it is best not to spend all of your time worrying about it, both for your mental health and for doing it well. I want to recognize that doom or not, AI will bring a lot of change very fast. It is quite possible that by some metrics, we will see centuries of progress compressed into decades.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  My own expectation... Is that as we have seen so far, progress will be both continuous and jagged. Both AI capabilities and its diffusion will continue to grow, but at different rates in different domains. I believe that because of this continuous progress, neither AGI nor ASI will be discrete points in time. Rather, just like we call recessions after we are already in them, we will probably decide on the AGI moment retrospectively, six months or a year after it had already happened. I also believe that because of this jaggedness, humans and especially smart and caring ones would be needed for at least several decades, if not more. Let's go. It is not a, it is a marathon, not a sprint. Again, this like this, you have two months to escape the permanent two years.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's really, you know, even if you believe that, try not to operate on that. Like trying to be, trying to become rich in, in two months is going to make you do things that are not super productive, not super enduring. And I think that young people just need to get that concept out of their heads. And still, you don't need to be thinking on, don't try to think on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon, maybe like a legacy career, right? Which is like, I'm going to be a lawyer and I'm going to get a 5% raise every year until I retire.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  But think on three, five year time horizons and don't have this stupid sense of, of urgency and this sort of insane scarcity mindset. I just, I just don't think you're going to do very good work. He continues, people have many justifiable fears about AI beyond literal doom. I cannot fully imagine the way AI will change the world economically, socially, politically and physically. However, I expect that like the industrial revolution, even after this change, there will be no consensus if it was good or bad. Uh, this is, uh, I was thinking here, people have been, uh, kind of asking like, hey, why, why are we trying to automate everyone's jobs?

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  You know, people are like, I actually like, I know I was complaining about my email job, but I like that I go and I write some emails, I get paid, I go home. Uh, do we really need to automate this? Uh, continuing, us human beings have an impressive, dynamic range. We can live in the worst conditions and complain about the best conditions. It is possible we will cure diseases and poverty, and yet people will still long for the good old days of the 2020s where young people had the thrill of fending for themselves before guaranteed income and housing ruined it. Nothing like the thrill. You've had that thrill in the tenderloin back in the day?

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:06:28Jordi Hays?

  On a, on a YC budget?

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  I'm just thinking if they, if they really do cure cancer with all this AI, it's just, it's so over for the gravediggers.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  For the morticians, the coroners, anyone in the death economy is just going to be displaced immediately.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Cooked.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  They're out of a job. They'll have to find something new to do, but I, I'm optimistic that they will find a new, new, new job.

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Anyway.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Uh, speaking of DAUs, do you think OpenAI is going to buy Pinterest?

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Where is this coming from?

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Came from the information. They, they, they made a list of, uh, predictions that we went through a number of predictions yesterday on the show. Um, this was just one of them, but it seemed like it hit a nerve because people did sort of report on it like it was a rumor or like it was some leaked document. It was just a prediction, uh, but do you think that that would make sense? This idea that, uh, you know, Sora was sort of, you know, supposed to be a social network. It's, it's still in the, in the charts. It's just, it hasn't seen like massive adoption. Um, maybe you go and you, and you buy, um, a, a social platform.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  So I thought it, I thought it was incredibly unlikely, just because I can't, I, I personally am trying to find the logic of why this is a strategic asset to them.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  X, XAI has X and Twitter and

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Wildly different. I would have to understand what percentage of content that is uploaded to Pinterest today is AI generated.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  It's a lot of AI.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would expect that a lot of Pinterest content is just

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  It used to be so good, too. I remember when we were doing the initial brand exploration for TBPN and Technology Brothers. I'd go on Pinterest and find interesting images and it was a lot of still frames from movies and stuff. And, and you would see a little bit of AI and now it's just so much AI.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  So they did around four billion of revenue in 2025.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  So

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Jordi Hays?

  I, I just, I just don't know, I just don't know what they're really, I just don't know what they're really buying here. But the CEO's name is Bill Ready. So the nominative determinism would be that he's ready.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  For a deal.

• 1:08:40Jordi Hays?

  Ready, ready to do a deal. So that kind of takes me from, you know, one to two percent.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  And the founder, Ben Silberman, is, and Silver's been mooning and they have similar, similar names. So maybe Pinterest will moon. This is, this is the level that

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  You can only get here, folks.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go through, uh, this Rittenhouse research post about, uh, OpenAI's business. Um, but first let me tell you about Graphite. Uh, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  So Alex Cantoritz sat down with Sam Altman, December 18th, right before the break. Uh, he says he had a long substantive conversation with Sam Altman about OpenAI's strategic position. It's planned to build memory into ChatGPT, which is already ongoing. It's enterprise play, compute AI devices, and whether AGI is still a useful term. Rittenhouse's work, uh, research breaks it down and says, uh, the biggest takeaway from this very good interview was Altman's outline, uh, for how OpenAI's financial model could eventually work. OpenAI enterprise is growing faster than consumer. Companies do not want OpenAI to train on their prompts. So

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, apparently right, right when, right when we said you will be okay, the stream went down.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Technology is like, no, actually you're not.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  OpenAI enterprise growth is constrained by lack of compute capacity. Enterprises coming to OpenAI asking for custom APIs and ability to process trillions of tokens, which OpenAI can't provide yet. Rapid growth in inference revenues from these enterprises at a stable to improving gross margin percent will eventually drive inference gross profit dollars large enough to fund OpenAI's training investments. OpenAI could curb training investments today and reduce cash burn, but training investments should translate to more inference revenue down the line. If OpenAI is not seeing overwhelming inference demand, there is flexibility in their $1.4 trillion of commitments. Have to think a good portion of these are earmarked for training runs. 1.4 trillion of commitments takes place over a number of years.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  We kind of knew this, but it feels like Sam's maybe just signaling to the market that there is more flexibility in the spending commitments than maybe people initially thought. And that was sort of always penciled in because there was a gradient from like, this is a press release, this is a handshake deal, this is still being papered, this is contingent on milestones, or there's some flexibility here. But it kind of got all lumped together and mentally, people were just putting it on OpenAI's balance sheet as liability when in fact, there was some flexibility there all along. While the 1.4 trillion of spending commitments is of course absurd and almost surely was intended to position OpenAI as too big to fail, I feel like there's much more logic to their capital planning process than I previously thought after watching this interview.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  That's great. What a comeback. I mean, people were really flustered by Sam's appearance on BG2. It feels like his appearance on the Big Technology Podcast is sort of a return to form, resetting of the narrative. And he clearly like thought about how to peel back the onion of the 1.4 trillion commitment. So, Rittenhouse closes by saying, if you assume they raise $75 billion in one last private round, 25% haircut to the rumored 100 billion, and another 75 billion in IPO, that's so much money, the model probably pencils out where they have enough capital to bridge until they reach cash flow positive. So. They can do it. They can get out and there is enough.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  So, I don't know. Nathan wasn't a huge fan. He said he found the pod a little too spoon fed and not very info dense. Interesting. I don't know. I'll have to give it a listen. But I will have to tell you about Linear. Linear is the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products.

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  The product planning tool behind OpenAI.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Should we take it over to Jaco?

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jaco Willing.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  Jaco, Jaco, one of the greatest podcast capitalists, maybe, right? Apparently, I didn't even know he had this brand Origin, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  He has so many products.

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Made gear. Apparently, somebody is a, somebody in the government is a Jaco supporter because they threw Maduro in some Origin, looking sharp, got him out of the Nike tech.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  It's called Origin Built By Freedom Hoodie On Maduro.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  We got to get Maduro on some TVPN merch.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  I think we absolutely do not have to do that. That's ridiculous.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Silence in turn.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  Into these photos. There's a whole bunch of. I guess he was transferred and he made the cover of the Wall Street Journal again.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  It was interesting.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Says I am, he says he's innocent. So, you know, innocent until proven guilty.

• 1:13:32Jordi Hays?

  I think Marco Rubio was talking about how they don't have to pay out the reward now because they just got them themselves. We, of course.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  I feel like we deserve a small slice for promoting the reward.

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  We did, we did, we did do a promoted post for the capture Maduro back in Q1 of last year. But, but yeah, I ultimately think the Delta gets all the credit. Maybe the DEA.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  They do. Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges during his arraignment in US federal court in New York City on Monday, defiantly telling a judge that he was still the head of his nation despite being whisked away by US forces over the weekend. "I am innocent," he said. "I am not guilty. I am a decent man. I am still the president of my country," he said through a Spanish interpreter, adding that he was a prisoner of war and had been captured from his home in Caracas. Maduro's top lieutenant, Delsi Rodriguez, was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president Monday, and Delsi Rodriguez is picked by Maduro, so should be a Maduro ally, but there's been back and forth on how much he'll be cooperating with the United States. Security

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  officers were out enforcing Crocus, running checkpoints and patrolling neighborhoods to prevent protests. In Manhattan, Monday's hearing kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle over a foreign leader in a US court. The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both prosecutors and the defense. The two sides could spend years sparring over the legality of Maduro's arrest and charges before he goes to trial, so.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Chat says Maduro uses perplexity because of Ronaldo.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  Not because of the F1 sponsorship?

• 1:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe the Lewis Hamilton.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  The Lewis Hamilton helmet sponsorship, honestly, massive props to perplexity. That is a remarkable one, because apparently the drivers can sell the stickers on their helmet themselves, or something like that. And so, when you watch Lewis Hamilton's helmet cam, he has perplexity logo right on his helmet, that I guess he was able to sell directly, and it didn't go through the team or something, so he gets to keep all of that money or something?

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  That's a crazy.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  It seemed like an interesting, interesting.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  He had some leverage there. I wonder, the chat is going off saying, "Good," you know, the Jaco line?

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:49Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Maduro is looking in the mirror from the clink?

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  Got captured by US Delta Force, good.

• 1:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Good, wearing his origin.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Arrested, arrested on drug trafficking charges, good. More inspiration to grind harder. Time to lock in. More, more, it's an opportunity to learn about the US legal system. You're gonna learn a lot. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle customer support, go to fin.ai. We have a surprise guest joining us. Casey Newton from Platformer dug into the whistleblower, the Reddit, the AI food delivery story. We're having him join the show. We're very excited to be joined by Casey. How are you doing, Casey?

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:16:36Speaker 07

  Long time, first time. Nice to see you.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on on short notice.

• 1:16:40Jordi Hays?

  What a moment. So great to have you.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  Absolute scoop of the century. Incredible story. I was riveted reading it. Thank you so much for the hard work.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  The scoop Hall of Fame.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Scoop Hall of Fame, I think. I don't even know if this is a scoop. This is more investigative journalism.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  This is capital J journalism.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  I don't know. It was great. But, uh, but how did you, did you see this go out on social media? Were you on Reddit? Like, how did you encounter this story first?

• 1:17:06Speaker 07

  That's exactly right. Believe it or not, I first saw the screenshot on threads with somebody saying like, look how evil the food delivery companies are. And, you know, I was like a few days from having to come back and write a column again. And I thought, hey, maybe this turns into a scoop for me. So I was super bummed when the whole thing fell apart. But then it was actually my boyfriend who said, people might actually be more interested to know about how the whole thing fell apart. So I think he was right about that.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  So, so what was the process like to actually dig into it? What was your interpretation? Because we read the Reddit post. I saw the screenshot and I was kind of like, and people were going back and forth, is it AI generated, blah, blah, blah. It didn't feel AI generated to me, but there were some red flags in there, like being drunk at a library seemed weird. And, and he said something, there was some other element in there that was like very, very odd to me. I forget exactly what he said, but, uh.

• 1:17:53Speaker 07

  Some people are like pointing out the M dashes that were in there. And, you know, this is one of those where like the moment that, that everyone knows it's a hoax. Everybody knew it was a hoax from the first word. You know what I mean? Like, everybody figured it out before I did. But that's fine. The truth is, I didn't figure it out right away. I did think it seemed plausible. Like, we both know that Uber and DoorDash have been caught doing some pretty shady things over the years. So I thought it was at worst, it was at least worth messaging the guy and seeing what he could tell me about it.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  So did you message him on Reddit?

• 1:18:26Speaker 07

  I did. And I sort of assumed that, you know, by that point, the post had like, I don't know, 80,000 upvotes. I thought there's no way I'm ever going to hear back from this guy. But instead, he messages me back within nine minutes, which again, in retrospect, was probably a tell that maybe there was something fishy going on here. But yeah, he was happy to get on Signal. He did sort of strangely only give one or two word answers. Like, I was expecting him to, you know, be a little bit more verbose based on the post. Again, another red flag in retrospect. But, you know, I've talked to a lot of sources like this over the years, and initially, a lot of them are pretty skittish. They don't know you. They don't have any reason to trust you. You're gonna have to build up that trust over time. But, you know,

• 1:19:01Jordi Hays?

  We had that with Soham Pareek. He came on, and he was just like, "Yeah, I worked for five companies at once." Wasn't skittish at all. Immediately, immediately admitted to doing something really bad.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  It was a very odd moment. Yeah, the thing that stuck out to me in here was, he, he claims that, that the, that the speed up fee, what is it, is psychological value add? But then, and so he says, "It does nothing to speed you up." But then, in the next paragraph, he says that, that in fact, they're slowing down all the other orders, which again,

• 1:19:37Jordi Hays?

  So you are getting order faster.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  So you are getting a speed up. So it's not logical, it wasn't logically consistent to me, which was a little odd. That was more of a red flag than any of like that it's an AI-generated text. And I want your reaction to this, because if you were a whistleblower, and you, and you're writing something, and you're worried that your boss is gonna be able to clock your writing style, it doesn't seem crazy to me to pass your, your testimony through ChatGPT and just say, "Hey, rewrite this like it's, you know, GPT-5." Because then, yes, it will have M-dashes. Yes, it will have telltale AI-generated things. But the points will stand, the facts will stand, and then you'll be more anonymized. So, do you think there's anything to that?

• 1:20:15Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, this is a lot of what the job is now of being a reporter, particularly in tech, where we're working with really savvy companies. You know, like, I've reported a lot about Meta. They have former CIA agents over there who are doing, you know, investigations of leaks like this. So, we have to spend a lot of our time trying to do opsec with our sources. So, yeah, if the source said, "Hey, I might run this through an LLM to sort of take the stink of me off it," I would say, "Go for it."

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So then,

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, so. You message this guy, he responds, he starts sending you proof. What kind of proof is he sharing?

• 1:20:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  How did you process that?

• 1:20:52Speaker 07

  Yeah. So the first thing that, you know, I'm obviously want to know his name. He's not comfortable sharing that at first. He says, um, I could send you an employee badge with my face and name blurred out. And, you know, in, in this line of work, it's, you, you kind of just want to keep them talking, right? Like, see what they'll share and it'll all sort of add up to something over time. So I said, sure, let's see it. He sends over a badge. Uh, I don't know if you're able to sort of show it on the screen. And I have a new funny story about it, but basically it says that, you know, it's an Uber Eats badge. Um, I learned today from a reporter at NBC News that she had sent him her employee badge. And he appears to have used that as the basis for this and said, transform this image into an Uber Eats badge.

• 1:21:35Speaker 07

  So I've now seen her original image and he literally just must've put it in Nano Banana and said, turn this into Uber Eats.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's super interesting because I was looking at the actual image being like, are there any telltale signs? I'm like, pretty good at clocking little things, but Nano Banana really is good at like, leaving enough of the original image that you don't get any of those weird articles.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  I feel like you can prompt things to make it look like an iPhone photo anyways.

• 1:21:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 07

  Totally. The, the tell, by the way, I've heard from some, uh, former Uber folks today. And the tell that they wanted me to know is that there are not actually Uber Eats badges.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's the other thing I was gonna say. It's, it's, you just, it's Uber, it's, it's not a separate company.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  That's funny.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Why would it, why would you have a separate?

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  That is a little bit of a.

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Badge. Uh, and then, and then you got, and then there was some internal document that you got as well? What was up with that?

• 1:22:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. So this honestly wound up being the most interesting thing to me was that I had said, look, is there anything you could do to corroborate your story? And he was like, well, I'm sort of uncomfortable with that, but let me see what I can do. He disappears for a full day and then comes back the following mornings. This is Sunday morning and says, does this work? And it's an 18-page document that presents itself as a sort of highly technical overview of how they built the system that sort of, uh, takes advantage of drivers desperation.

• 1:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm. Okay, so what's the, who, what's your theory on who this person is? What's the point? Because in some ways, in some ways, like I feel like DoorDash was the loser here.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Because I feel like DoorDash has a reputation for just like being incredible ruthless operators. And so people are just like, oh, this is DoorDash for sure.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then, and then they had to come out and defend themselves and say, we don't even use this language.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  There's probably like some fourth tier, like the fourth player in the ecosystem that we don't even know is like languishing at like $400 million market cap. And they're like, we're trying to be as ruthless as that, man. Like, trust us, like our profits are gonna be great next quarter. And we're like, no one thinks it's you. No one thinks it's you.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I just don't understand the point. Is this, is this, is this a driver?

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  Could be a short seller, could be a disgruntled driver. Did you get any, any, any interest or any ideas of what this could be? Like, why are people doing this?

• 1:23:43Speaker 07

  So, and again, like this guy, like his, his answers are so short that I never really got any sense of motivation. You know, I do think, like, this was over the holiday break. I do think that there's a chance that this is like a bored teenager, you know, in a basement type of thing. But I think, you know, one thing I haven't done, and I would encourage people to do, is like, were there any poly market or calcie trades around the time of this post dropping? Like, because it would be crazy to me if somebody was trying to like take the Uber or DoorDash market cap and, you know, make a few bucks.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, they could do that in the public markets or, or I guess some prediction markets or, or maybe, because sometimes there's like a dedicated prediction market for this specific thing. Like, is it real or not? And then they could be trading that.

• 1:24:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Because they know it's fake or something. What, what, what, what do you think the, the actual platform should have done? I mean, DoorDash was very, they, they did the founder led comms, they did the corporate comms, they did, they did a number of things. Do you think they handled it well? Is there something that they should be doing with journalists when something like this happens? To like, not put their finger on the scale too much, but be open with you? Like, how, how should they respond?

• 1:24:44Speaker 07

  I think they did the right thing. They, they both came forward and they just said like, this is categorically false. You know, the Uber comms said like, this is a fake document. You know, they really just sort of like went all in. They put their credibility on the line. And, you know, often corporate comms are a lot more measured. But with this one, they were just very confident in knowing that this did not come from them. And so there was no reason not to just leave with that.

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Where else are you seeing interesting like AI fake news stories pop up? I've been, there's this interesting irony that, I mean, I don't know where you stand on like the water issue, but it feels like the electricity issue is something that people should be talking about, and the water issue is maybe way less important, and yet like AI has created this like somewhat fake narrative about itself, and it's like a victim of itself, but it's not fully AI generated, but this is a weird like paradox there where people seem to be distracted.

• 1:25:35Speaker 07

  I mean, to me, the thread that ties all those together is that AI is a superpower for motivated reasoning. Like if there is something you want to believe, like AI can immediately generate the materials that will help you sell that case to other people. And, you know, we're all just gonna kind of have to like upgrade our cognitive hygiene and say, we now know that there are tools that can get me to sort of believe my own eyes when I shouldn't be doing that. And, um, you know, it's, it's, it's screwing with my mind. That's why I wrote this piece. Like this whole thing is screwing with my mind. And I, I want all of us to be having a conversation about it.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, there, there was a very interesting thread just like two weeks earlier, maybe, about, uh, someone claimed to have delivered a DoorDash delivery, but they just generated an image of the person's front door or something, which I guess they got that image from Street View or something. And that feels like a fraud that would make you like $10, then you'd get deplatformed. But, uh, but, but it is weird that like, uh, I, I mean, Rune was posting that, uh, hopefully DoorDash will be the first major company incentivized to build a reliable deep fake detector. Very doable, though it will become a Red Queen race and hopefully license that technology. I never would have picked DoorDash as the company to do. I would have thought YouTube or Instagram, but, uh, I don't know. I don't know if you've seen anything else going on in this, uh.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, so, so do, do you think that, uh, this post, even though it was fake, ends up creating any type of change in terms of how these platforms are operating? Because it seems like right now that you have kind of like. From my view is like actually like as these platforms have saturated and everybody uses them whether they're you know using them to earn a living or supplement their income or they're using them as a consumer. Everybody seems to be like frustrated with the platforms. Is that just the enduring state of delivery products where people and maybe it's solved through robotics where eventually these platforms say like we heard

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  that you hate working on our on our platform and the good news is that you don't have to anymore because we have drones and you know little little toy cars driving around. But where do you how do you think the the if anything anything in the industry changes over the next kind of year?

• 1:27:53Speaker 07

  It's a good question. It's a big question. I think that anytime you feel dependent on a platform, you come to resent it and people do feel dependent on Uber Eats and DoorDash to bring them their dinner particularly you know if you're living in Silicon Valley and ordering from them like three or four times a week. Um, you know, I think one reason why the fake resonated was that it was so easy to believe a delivery platform would want to figure out how to pay their drivers less. We've seen them do it in other real ways in the past. And so my hope is that if there's any change here, it is that these companies now realize, look, if you're truly building exploitative system for your drivers, there will be a backlash and people will turn against you. So that would be my hope coming out of it.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Odd, odd vibes for sure. Um, what I'm interested to know about your process using AI tools as a journalist. I feel like the hallucination incidents has definitely gone down like it just in terms of like if you just need a fact or you just need to know what's the biggest company in the world like these are good knowledge retrieval tools, but obviously you have a very high bar for what is factually accurate and what you're printing. What is your process for when you need to maybe not hunt down a specific fact in a story, but you need to corroborate it with, you know, you're just looking up a whole bunch of extra context around how DoorDash operates, is Uber Eats a wholly owned subsidiary, all of these different things like would there be a badge like how are

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  you using AI tools in your day to day?

• 1:29:20Speaker 07

  Absolutely. So I think that I probably use AI tools maybe more than the average reporter. Like, I feel like I understand the ways in which that I can trust them. I'm happy to turn to them and say, hey, give me an overview about this industry that I haven't written about very much. The reason that I'm comfortable is that I'm using bots that cite their sources. And, you know, as a longtime journalist, I know which sources I can trust. So I'm happy to do that. The other thing that I do is I'll sort of go out and, you know, get my own facts for the columns that I'm writing. But then I'll feed them into ChatGPT, I find is really good at this, and just say, hey, fact check this for me. It does a really great job of catching my mistakes all the time. That was not true a year ago, by the way. So that's one of the places where I felt the most AI progress in is in using these things as fact checkers.

• 1:30:02Speaker 07

  Don't let them write the column, but absolutely let them try to catch your mistakes because in my experience, they will.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you agree with this idea that for what you do, the writing, the instantiation is not the hard part?

• 1:30:17Speaker 07

  Well, how do you mean that? Because there's a lot of like days where I'm on deadline where the writing absolutely is.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Okay. Because so what I've heard is that is that it's the, you know, it's the, it's the ideas inside. It's the facts, it's the scoop, it's the, it's the information that you spend, you know, seven hours. And then when it's time to go type it up and file, uh, yeah, you kind of know the phrasing, you know how to write in. And sure, you might dictate a little bit, but like you're not just going to ChatGPT and say, write a column.

• 1:30:46Speaker 07

  No, I'm not. And like honestly, like even if I wanted to do that, I still think that they're not great at it. Although I will say the most recent version of Claude, when I gave it this test was like good at mimicking my individual style in a way that sort of freaked me out a bit. But I just think that like most, like at least my readers, like they want to know what I'm thinking. And if I delegate that job to a chatbot, they're probably just not going to want to pay me.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I also think people are surprised, readers are surprisingly open to like the rough edges. Like they actually don't necessarily need everything to be in the super consistent style guide that you would get from enforcing an LLM on top of everything you published. Uh, and if you use parentheses one time and then quotes another time or brackets and other like, it just doesn't really matter. It actually gives more flavor and texture to the writing. And so people are open to that. I don't know.

• 1:31:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think like readers tend to be really forgiving when you tell them what you're doing and like if they hate something, listen to them. Like there was a time when I was illustrating my columns with AI-generated images because I thought it was like, hold out the superpower to do that. So many readers were like, please stop doing this. We hate this slop. And I was like, all right, like, we're in this together. I'm gonna stop doing this.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Uh, yeah, there's been, there's been all sorts of like, it really depends on like the community that you're building. What, what, how, how, uh, like respected, uh, that's not.

• 1:32:06Jordi Hays?

  Do you think you'll ever come back to X?

• 1:32:10John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:11Speaker 07

  Guys, it's a, it's now just like a CSAM generator and nudyfication app. Like, what are we doing here? Do you remember how bad people got at Cambridge Analytica? Like, what, literally, what are we doing here?

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Mute, mute all that and then hang out for the Andre Karpathy post. You know, there's some good stuff, you know?

• 1:32:30Jordi Hays?

  There's some diamonds in the rough.

• 1:32:31Speaker 07

  The Karpathy posts are great.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, you, you, you gotta, you gotta really hone it in on the AI researchers who are still hanging out there.

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  We, yeah, you have to accept that, you have to accept that you're getting engagement farmed. I think Nikita shared earlier that, that like, that all the, the highest engagement days in X history have all been in the last week. Part of that is like the, the Maduro story, but, uh, still.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on. And anytime, anytime you have a story, give us a shout.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Where, where, where can people find you? Uh, give us the landscape of the, of the Casey Newton empire.

• 1:33:06Speaker 07

  Sure. It's very simple. You can just go to platformer.news. You can find this story. And I also co-host the Hard Fork Podcast. And why don't you head over to youtube.com/hardfork, check it out too.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  There we go. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great, happy day.

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 1:33:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Alex Etting. He's live here in person in the TBP and Alterm. Alex, welcome.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  He brought us books. Thank you.

• 1:33:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, just in case.

• 1:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. You don't have to have these happy dads. That's for later.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  We have a happy dad investor coming on the show. But for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. How are you describing yourself these days? Obviously, you're an author. The book is Fossil Future. You can get it wherever books are sold, I'm sure.

• 1:34:01Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, traditionally, I do energy expert and philosopher because I actually think philosophy is the reason people disagree about energy.

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:09Alex Epstein?

  And then these days, it's really independent policy advisor, since most of the stuff I do is is behind the scenes with government trying to get them to adopt energy freedom policies.

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  Interesting. Do you feel like the book touches on the philosophical debate around energy?

• 1:34:24Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, touches would be a would be an would be an understatement. Yeah, I mean, I think of my life really, or the last 19 years in energy have been basically two things. One is trying, and the one the book addresses is trying to shift the conversation from an anti-human conversation to a pro-human conversation about energy. And actually, I think, did we meet at HeretaCon? Is that where?

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:34:46Alex Epstein?

  We might have met at HeretaCon or one of Peter's other things. But I gave an example in my talk there that I think is the easiest way to see that we have an anti-human way of thinking about energy, which is I'll ask people, hey, which of the following words would you use to describe our current relationship to climate? So are we in a climate crisis? Are we in a, do we have a climate problem? Do we have a climate non-problem? Or do we have a climate renaissance? And, you know, that audience is going to be more, it might even consider renaissance, but most people won't, right? Most people will say crisis or problem. And then the extreme is non-problem. But then I share the data, which you can actually look at the rate of deaths from climate disasters

• 1:35:30Alex Epstein?

  such as storms and floods, extreme temperatures, et cetera. And it's very clear cut. And we have this just incredibly dramatic 98% decline in those deaths.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  Which would imply renaissance.

• 1:35:41Alex Epstein?

  Which would imply renaissance.

• 1:35:42John Coogan?

  And that's over like 100 years?

• 1:35:44Alex Epstein?

  That's over the last 100 years. Yeah, and if you go back further, it's even, it's even more. And then if you look at the data in terms of damages.

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was something, even with the California wildfires a year ago, I think there was something like 30 deaths, which was the most deaths in a fire in recorded history in California, from what I remember.

• 1:36:04Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, and wildfires is actually, I was going to mention the economic piece of it. Like, even economically, if you adjust for GDP growth, the damages are flat. So.

• 1:36:15Alex Epstein?

  You would say it has to be a renaissance, right? I mean, we're much less threatened from climate than ever. And if you think about that in fossil fuels, and you think for a minute or two, you think, well, that actually might have to do positively with fossil fuels, because fossil fuels power the irrigation systems that alleviate drought. Drought is actually the number one climate killer historically. They obviously give us heating and air conditioning to deal with extreme temperatures and even abnormal temperatures, and cold is by far the bigger killer than heat. And we have all kinds of sturdy infrastructure and storm warning systems. So it's this really interesting phenomenon where what actually happened is, as I put it, fossil fuels didn't take a safe climate and make it dangerous. They took a dangerous climate and made it safe. But the interesting question in terms of philosophically is, why is it that so many

• 1:37:00Alex Epstein?

  people say we're in a climate crisis, even though from a climate livability perspective or a pro-human perspective, we're in a climate renaissance? And I'm telegraphing it a bit, which is that they're not looking at it from a pro-human moral perspective, they're looking at it from an anti-human moral perspective. But specifically the perspective that our goal should be to reduce or eliminate our impact, which is the idea of being green.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, is there a factor here of just media awareness, like the fact that, you know, in times of old, you wouldn't, if there was a fire, like the Palisades fire, you wouldn't see that everywhere for weeks on end, but now there's much more visibility? So I hear about an earthquake over there or a storm over there, and so it feels like there's more happening.

• 1:37:48Alex Epstein?

  Well, that's a mechanism that people can use, but of course, they could use the opposite mechanism. I mean, they could say, and this would happen all the time, look at this, look at this minor climate problem that 100 years ago would have been a total disaster, like compare this to the Galveston storm 100 years ago. So my conclusion is, the people leading the charge who think it's a climate crisis, like there are a lot of people who are just ignorant of these facts, but the people who know these facts, who know that... We're at a renaissance from a climate livability perspective. They're evaluating the state of the climate, not by how good it is for humans, but by how little impact we've had. Sure. So their goal is an earth with minimal human impact. Yeah. And by that standard, we are in a climate crisis because we have had some Impact. Impact. Of course.

• 1:38:32Alex Epstein?

  And so my view is, if our overall impact is positive for humans, that's a good thing. Sure. Their view is, if there's more impact, that's a bad thing. Yeah. And this is, this illustrates that this is overwhelmingly a philosophical disagreement. So whether you view today, if, once you know the facts about climate livability, whether you view it as a climate renaissance or a climate crisis, that's not based on science. Nobody, nobody has disputed these facts. I mean, New York Times tried, everyone tried, nobody has successfully. Vivek really popularized this when he ran for, for president because he, he learned this in Fossil Future. And no, everyone tried to refute him and nobody could do it. So it's, it's only that you have a different, what I call in philosophy, what we call in philosophy, standard of evaluation. You're looking at the same facts. Yeah. But you have a different measuring stick.

• 1:39:15Alex Epstein?

  And my, my basic contention is, if you look at fossil fuels in a balanced way, from what I call a human flourishing perspective, the benefits are obviously far, far greater than the negatives, including climate wise. Okay. But that's, that's why, like I have the moral case for fossil fuels and fossil future, which is about why global human flourishing requires more fossil fuels. But it's, the number one thing I'm doing is I'm just changing the yardstick by which we're measuring it. And I'm using that very consistently.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  You think AI is taking the wind out of the climate crisis sails?

• 1:39:45Alex Epstein?

  Yes.

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  In the sense that, uh, climate, the climate crisis was a powerful story for the media industrial complex. Because let's say you have a slow news, news day or week, the TV can just show a big chart on the screen of a bunch of counties and they're all red. And it looks, it looks really bad just because of the, the, the way the graphic design is done.

• 1:40:07Alex Epstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and now we have this like, uh, Worldwide sort of systemic fear of this impending, I feel like

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  Oh, so you mean you just

• 1:40:18Alex Epstein?

  There's two sides of it.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  People are talking about AI doom, not climate doom anymore.

• 1:40:21Jordi Hays?

  We're just using way more energy, we're

• 1:40:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  We do gas turbines.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:24Jordi Hays?

  Then there's also the media story of just giving this sort of like media.

• 1:40:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  The media industrial complex loves a sense of impending doom.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  Like, like, like, L. E. Azar Udikowsky is more popular than like Al Gore as of yesterday. Or as of last year.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that content is getting much more

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, AI doom is just a, is just a bigger, meatier story.

• 1:40:41Alex Epstein?

  I think right now it's much more the energy side.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, it's coming back.

• 1:40:44Alex Epstein?

  It's much more the energy side.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Alex Epstein?

  But the doom side really concerns me and AI is actually the only issue I'm considering getting into in terms of mastering it and mastering how to communicate it, just because I feel like there's nobody has really mastered it from the pro-human, pro-technology side. And it's hard to do.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I, I said this yesterday, I mean, the tech industry right now suffers because nobody can, nobody can speak in, into a, a, a, let's say, like, the Super Bowl demographic. If the tech founder went and talked at the Super Bowl during the halftime show

• 1:41:17Alex Epstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  and they were like, we're gonna automate all the jobs. Everyone would be like, boo.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Boo.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  I'll hit the boo button. You can't do that. Uh, but, but like boo, like this guy sucks, get him out of here.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Jordi Hays?

  And, and so, so it's been very difficult and, and people talk about UBI and this sort of post scarcity element, if you can just bring a bunch of robots online. Uh, but nobody, especially at the labs, I feel like has, I, I don't even think, um, this idea of like a personal tutor or personal expert in your pocket is really, I don't think people appreciate it that much, even though the labs talk about it. So finding the pro-human narrative, I think is super important. It's something that's like critical to the industry because I think we're in the second, the beginnings of like the second real tech clash. You had the sort of like social media tech clash era. Now we're in the AI tech clash era and it's only gonna get worse if we just keep promising the world, hey, we're gonna automate your job away.

• 1:42:13Alex Epstein?

  You're motivating me to, this is the tension in my life right now because you know, I've been working in energy for a long time. We've gotten to this point where the opportunity, like a lot of the debate has shifted and I've had some role in that, but also the politics have shifted where I and others have never had more opportunity to actually change the policy for the better. But then AI.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  You're kind of getting shiny shiny objects.

• 1:42:36Alex Epstein?

  Well, I'm not deterred yet, but it's it. But also I like I need to innovate in AI actually for what I'm trying to do in energy and there's there's anyway. So so it's it's tempting. But I would just say if anyone here is watching who thinks that you might be able to be this, I would much prefer to help you and teach you what I've learned in energy and apply to AI than do it myself. It would be more of a matter of like, I got plenty to do in energy, but but there needs to be somebody doing this. So [email protected]. Just send me an email.

• 1:43:05John Coogan?

  Can you set the table for me on like the state of American, the American energy industry? Because I grew up at a time when the big oil companies were the biggest companies in the world. Exxon Mobil was the largest company in the world. And then now we live in the era of big tech. And I'm wondering if the big oil companies are still well run like they don't feel founder led. They don't feel like they're in founder mode. I don't know the names of people who are running large energy companies. I can't name Elon Musk of energy where I can.

• 1:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Kids at kids at elite universities are not like clamoring to go there.

• 1:43:43Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, I'm older than you guys. And I remember because I was at one of the top math science high schools in the country. And I was at Duke. And I just remember thinking later, because I myself had no interest in fossil fuels at the time and a little bit of an aversion. I'm like, looking back, none of those brilliant people wanted to do this. Like, it wasn't aspirational. So interestingly.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  But is it is it is it an industry where the product has such insane product market fit that you don't need the most elite executives and operators?

• 1:44:14Alex Epstein?

  You get some. But so here's the thing is, I don't think oil and gas has attracted overall the best of the best. There are definitely some brilliant people. The bad news is that electricity is much, much worse.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  Okay, explain that.

• 1:44:27Alex Epstein?

  So well, so the thing about oil and gas is, and a lot of this, the two variables are going to be what's the degree of freedom in the culture or in the in the political system for achievement? Because that's going to determine largely the economic upside. And then there's the issue of the culture. So with the culture, obviously, there's been huge hostility toward oil and gas, and of course, coal as well. And that that deters a lot of people early from even wanting to go in. The positive of oil and gas is that it's within the energy industry, it's by far freer than many, many other parts of the energy industry. If you look at, say, particularly in Texas, you look at where the Permian Basin dominates, you can get a permit to drill in the Permian in a few days. Now, if it's the Texas Permian, if it's the New Mexico Permian

• 1:45:09Alex Epstein?

  on federal lands, much different story. You know, that that stack of paper is probably 10 times higher. But there's a lot of, a lot of oil and gas doesn't involve federal permitting, which I hope we talk about, trying to fix that at the moment. So, that means that you can act a lot more quickly on good ideas, which attracts good people. Now, if we shift to the electricity sector.

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  I had, real quick, I had, last year, I was at a, kind of a VC founder dinner, and one of the, one of the founders there had some, some company, I think in advertising, but he had a piece of land in California that he was just, he had been drilling for oil.

• 1:45:47Alex Epstein?

  Really?

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  He just had like a small, like, kind of lifestyle business.

• 1:45:50Alex Epstein?

  That's crazy.

• 1:45:51Jordi Hays?

  But he ultimately, there was some new regulation that was getting passed, and I think that basically put him out of business.

• 1:45:56Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, I mean, the Calif, I admire all these people in California, to some extent Colorado, and it's, it's hard. I, I actually refuse to invest in energy just because I advise politicians, and it creates conflicts of interest, but I just say, as a, as a hypothetical investor-

• 1:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Are we not in a post-conflict era?

• 1:46:11Alex Epstein?

  No, I mean, I'm very extreme about conflict avoidance.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I'm kidding. I appreciate that.

• 1:46:17Alex Epstein?

  But, but it's, it's, yeah, California's really hard. I mean, you can, you can, of course, imagine high-risk, high-reward things, but it's just, you look at the governor on down-

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, you would think, we import so much oil, wouldn't we want to produce some, and the politicians don't feel that way.

• 1:46:29Alex Epstein?

  Yes, and there's just, I mean, there's a bit of a shift there, just as there is in New York and, and Massachusetts, they're a little bit more open. But it's, it's bad. But if we take, if we take the power sector, I mean, first of all, we're talking about something that, that is institutionalized as a monopoly in the first place. And then, not to go into too much detail about the power sector, but there's, we started quote-unquote deregulation, which is just a new and in many ways, worse form of regulation. We started that a couple decades ago. And broadly speaking, there are two really big types of electricity systems. One is a traditional utility model where the utility does everything. So they have the generation, what's called the transmissions of the longer distance travel, and then the distribution, which is the more local stuff.

• 1:47:10Alex Epstein?

  So in that, you can imagine that doesn't tend to attract the best people. Because like a lot of monopoly type things, like a lot of the military stuff, it's a cost-plus model. So, and you get paid for spending more money. You get paid for incurring more cost. But then, as bad as that is, the market model is a mess, in part because they allowed, once intermittent solar and wind came on, they allowed that to be treated as a reliable power source when it's not in fact a reliable power source. Now, it has utility, but it's primarily a fuel-saving device. So people think like, oh, you hate solar, you hate... It's not about that, it's just, what does it functionally do? What it functionally does, in the vast majority of cases, is it saves you fuel on a reliable power source.

• 1:47:54Alex Epstein?

  Because most of what we need in electricity is we need on-demand electricity. And with a solar panel or wind turbine, you can't get on-demand electricity. It's both the existence and the amount is weather-dependent. So if there are situations, such as, say, China with coal, where they have, you know, a lot of coal power, and they need enough coal power, they need that much capacity to meet their peak demand. But if you have a bunch of solar, and particularly if they overbuilt a bunch of solar that they were trying to sell to the rest of the world and it didn't work as well as they thought, you can, you can have basically coaler, right? Coal plus solar, where every time the sun shines, yeah, to what extent the sun shines, you're saving fuel. And depending on your fuel cost, that can be efficient. Yeah, that makes sense. Now, it tends to be efficient at lower levels versus, versus higher levels.

• 1:48:39Alex Epstein?

  But, so the electricity markets got screwed up for many reasons, but that was the biggest one, where if you allow solar and wind to compete as reliable sources, it screws up everything. And in particular, it screws up the economics of the reliable sources. Because if they're not, if it's a monopoly and one person owns everything, you can decide, hey, I'm going to pay this much for solar for fuel savings, and you can make it work when it works. But if you have a quote "market" where all the generators are competing independently... And you allow solar to be its own independent generator whenever it's available. That natural gas plant doesn't benefit from the fuel savings. It loses operating revenue. And so this is what we did to all the reliable power plants on the grid is we subsidized the hell out of solar and wind, spammed the grid with this fuel-saving infrastructure, but on the power markets, it doesn't benefit them.

• 1:49:24Alex Epstein?

  So it screwed up. So this this gets technical, but you can imagine that a lot of the people who've succeeded in this field are there, there can be a scam element. You have some smart traders, but their efforts are not going to a productive thing. So it's both talent level issues with the utilities, but then you even have some smart people in the markets, but their intelligence isn't being well-directed. Because it actually can screw up the grid. And then the culture has pushed pushed so many people into the green space where the relative opportunity was much less than in fossil fuels and in nuclear, if you had a proper market. So that's, that's, it's really bad.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  You mentioned nuclear. Get us up to speed on how you're thinking about nuclear these days. It feels like there's incredible energy, both the government just announced a $2.7 billion grant yesterday. And it feels like there's nuclear startups for the first time in my lifetime getting funded.

• 1:50:17Jordi Hays?

  I learned yesterday that we get enriched uranium from Russia.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  We did.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  That we used to.

• 1:50:23Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, there are other people who can do it, too.

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  It's rare.

• 1:50:26Alex Epstein?

  So I know, you know, you you wrote that really interesting essay yesterday on energy production. And I think in in your space, there's many forms of energy production, but the main thing is going to be electricity production. And specifically, it's what's called dispatchable or reliable electricity production. So on demand. We could talk about how AI fits into that. But in general, I think there are four things that have screwed that up. And one is the near criminalization of nuclear power. The issue with that is that's a hard one to unwind quickly. So if you if you look at, there's a lot, there's this attempted a nuclear renaissance, and I'm working as hard as anyone to try to make that happen. But we don't yet, we're not yet having any kind of rapid build of new nuclear infrastructure.

• 1:51:11Alex Epstein?

  You know, since the establishment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, we only started building any reactors from, we only started conceiving and completing reactors in 2023 for the Vogel plants in South, right, in South Carolina.

• 1:51:24John Coogan?

  And when did they actually?

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  You're saying they didn't?

• 1:51:28Alex Epstein?

  There was nothing that went from conception to completion.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:51:31Alex Epstein?

  From 1975.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  So they got completed in 2023.

• 1:51:34Alex Epstein?

  2023, but with, you know, 10x cost.

• 1:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:37Alex Epstein?

  Overruns. So we have now, there was already some progress before this administration. We had what's called the Advance Act, which was a significant improvement. Tried to redirect the NRC. They're definitely much better people at the NRC now. So they're headed in a much, much better direction. Congress, both Republicans and Democrats are aligned. But we're just talking about something that we've lost arguably 50 years of potential progress. Because we had, we had something in the late 60s where nuclear was by many estimates the cheapest form of electricity and the safest in terms of reliable electricity. It was already true with that technology.

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheapest, safest, cleanest.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:15Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, obviously.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, the talking point that I hear about the NRC is that we haven't approved any new nuclear reactor designs, but we also haven't just been copy pasting the ones that work.

• 1:52:24Alex Epstein?

  Right.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  So it's like twofold problems.

• 1:52:26Alex Epstein?

  And this, the nuclear industry is fascinating in terms of communication because their usual thing is just, we have to change everyone's opinion about, perception about nuclear and then we can do stuff.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Alex Epstein?

  Which I think that the public is more pro-nuclear than they think, even historically.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:41Alex Epstein?

  Right now it is. I think what we have to, we have to do what you're looking at, which is say, wait a second. We could already produce these large nuclear plants and get this incredible result. Why don't we fix that problem first? Because we actually know how to do these things. There are all these exciting companies doing new things.

• 1:52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Alex Epstein?

  But, but part of the reason is these communications people have an aversion toward traditional nuclear.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02Alex Epstein?

  Because they, it has these negative associations. But you have to, you have to kill those associations. You have to kill the idea that this was uniquely dangerous.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:09Alex Epstein?

  No, it was uniquely safe.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Alex Epstein?

  Like Chernobyl has nothing to do with what we would ever do in the United States. That was like a half weapon, half reactor. And even that damage doesn't compare to the damage done by a lot of other things.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:53:20Alex Epstein?

  In the Soviet Union.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:21Alex Epstein?

  And as one economist put it, Soviet toasters probably did more damage.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:53:25Alex Epstein?

  Than Chernobyl. I don't know, that's a stat, but that's.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 1:53:27Alex Epstein?

  So nuclear, it's like, what we need to do is we need to fix the political stuff as quickly as possible. And we're getting some funding there, but we have to recognize that it's the overall problem is just a political restriction problem.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:42Alex Epstein?

  So that is a very exciting thing to do, but it is the least near term.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:46Alex Epstein?

  Of the four things. So the other things are, I mentioned, the electricity markets are screwed up.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:51Alex Epstein?

  That's part of a broader set of preferences for solar and wind or for intermittent energy, let's just say. And the other piece of that, which I was involved in and has largely been fixed, but not totally, is the subsidization of intermittent energy. So that was in the big, beautiful bill. That was a lot of what I spent 2025 on is killing as many of, trying to help people who wanted to kill those, kill as many as possible. So we've got the nuclear criminalization. We've got the preferences for intermittent energy. The biggest thing by far is we have the prohibitions on reliable solar, reliable fossil fuel energy. And that's, you'll hear about things like the endangerment finding. There was the Biden Clean Power Plan 2.0 that basically made it illegal for existing coal plants to function, for any new natural gas plants to be built past a certain date.

• 1:54:35Alex Epstein?

  So, and then we have the general permitting problem, which is anti-development permitting. So you just imagine we had all of these factors restricting the supply of electricity. And then we had the previous administration and others artificially increasing demand through electrification, right? Forced electrification. So trying to shut off natural gas in homes, trying to force us to use EVs, which I'm totally in favor of people using freely, but we pay over $50,000 per EV. Like taxpayers pay over $50,000.

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  That was 7,500.

• 1:55:04Alex Epstein?

  No, no, no, no. That's just one small part of it. We could go into all the different subsidies because there's a lot of fuel economy trading where you basically get.

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's wild, it's wild too, because you get the subsidy and then the consumer buys a vehicle for $60,000 and it's worth half that in like 12 months.

• 1:55:23Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, but it's also the way the fuel economy things work at the federal level and the California level. A lot of what they do is they set the fuel economy standards impossibly high for regular vehicles. And then they give EVs this ridiculously low, high fuel economy score.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:55:38Alex Epstein?

  And so everyone, Tesla on down, just trade, makes huge amounts of money, trading their emissions credits.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  Oh, got it. And that's per vehicle.

• 1:55:46Alex Epstein?

  Yeah. And by the way, this is something the current administration has been doing a good job at the, in terms of the administration, executive actions, trying to undo a lot of these things. But you want as many undone congressionally. So again, we have these these factors of artificially restricting supply, artificially increasing demand. And then, of course, the one you guys are focused on is the organic increase in demand via AI. So the

• 1:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so, yeah. How do you, how do you predict that this feels like, you know, and rising energy costs have always been a political issue. They're going to be like at the forefront, I think, of a lot of debates going forward. Politicians, I imagine, are going to try to score points by, you know, beating back data center development, just because they know their constituents are going to cheer it on. How are you advising all these different players at the at the center of these debates on on how to, knowing that energy usage is going to go up dramatically with with data centers, one way or another, what is your, how do we kind of thread the needle?

• 1:56:55Alex Epstein?

  So there's there's what to advocate policy wise and what to advocate messaging wise. So let's start with messaging wise. So one thing is to pin the recent and baked in rises on the proper culprits. So there's an attempt to to pin it on reducing subsidies. So it's in particular, I try not to be political about this, but there's this idea of Republicans reduce subsidies, therefore that's why your electricity bills go up. The the timing doesn't even work on these things. The logic is actually the opposite. The subsidies by depriving, one of the things they've done is they've deprived the reliable power plants of capital. They've had less reliable power. And so what happens is you have shortfalls in supply relative demand, and that puts the market prices up. In particular, what's called

• 1:57:39Alex Epstein?

  capacity markets, which you see particularly in regions like PJM, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Merrill, and that whole region, like those prices go up. So there's just this all this false narrative. So what people need to recognize is the reason prices are going up. Is because of prohibitions on reliable power and preferences for unreliable power. And then artificial force electrification, like they need to understand that. The data centers, one thing people need to understand is new demand does not increase inherently increase electricity prices. In fact, usually what it does is it decreases electricity prices because you have the same amount, you have relatively the same amount of capital spending spread out over more different entities. You'll have different, you know, um, Bergam Interior Secretary, former governor, like

• 1:58:24Alex Epstein?

  he and Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy have been pointing out, hey, North Dakota is looking really good price wise and they've had massive increases in data centers.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Because they've been investing more in energy?

• 1:58:32Alex Epstein?

  Well, no, no, because the data centers, there's on any grid, you have the peak usage and then you have the regular usage and you very rarely hit peak. So when you have more demand.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:58:43Alex Epstein?

  You're actually spreading out the costs among more. So the, the, one of the questions with AI that's interesting is what's the flexibility of the demand profile going to be? Because the more flexible it is, the less you need to increase the peak, which is, which is good to increase the peak, but that's the most expensive thing to do. The more you can use off peak, the more you're actually lowering prices.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  And this is already happening a little bit where sometimes if you prompt an image generator, it will, in your, in your, in the middle of the day, it'll go across the world and it'll use it where it's dark there in the middle of the night because there's maybe more energy or something or like away from peak load. What do you think about my, my question of, uh, you know, energy production growth in America 2026? Uh, are we going to see, you know, a break in the curve? Are we already seeing a break in the curve? Is this even the right question to be asking about just e- energy progress in America over the next few years?

• 1:59:37Alex Epstein?

  I mean, it's a good, it's a good measure of progress, particularly industrial progress to look at energy production in general. In a country and the fact that we've had flat electricity usage.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:47Alex Epstein?

  If you look at ours versus China's, I think we're at about one-fifth their industrial electricity uh, usage. So those are really bad signs. So it's a sign that you're being less productive than you can and often that you're offshoring things because you have such a restrictive anti-development

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:01Alex Epstein?

  environment. With the electricity thing, it's, it's one of these things where I'm trying to create the future, so I try not, like, I'm trying to make the future happen.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:00:10Alex Epstein?

  But

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  But you're rooting for 5% growth this year.

• 2:00:13Alex Epstein?

  Well, yeah, I'm rooting for the enablement

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:16Alex Epstein?

  of the capacity. And the nice thing is, you have a lot of smart people in the administration who are really interested in this problem. So that's, that's a good thing at the margins, because then you can, you can make things happen more quickly. You have, private industry is very focused on this because of AI.

• 2:00:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33Alex Epstein?

  Whereas they haven't been before. So you're getting a lot of ingenuity and, and it's gonna be really interesting to see. There's gonna be a lot of things at the margins and we'll see how they add up. I mean, one thing is we use, we're using very small oil plants, natural gas plants, uh, you know, they're talking about using the backup generators in Walmart on the grid. There's gonna be these interesting questions. And it's, we have a new class of smart people who are now being added, who, who's now focus is on generating more dispatchable power.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 2:01:03Alex Epstein?

  There's lots of things you can do. I mean, there's interesting things you can do with, with batteries, like you can, this, I'm in agreement on Elon with, like, you can, you can build batteries and you can charge them off peak. People think you need solar and wind to go with batteries, but actually the easiest way to deal with batteries. And the way most batteries get charged today is you have a reliable source of energy and you charge it off peak.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:23Alex Epstein?

  Right? You can run your nuclear power plant at night and charge batteries and then for a few hours, you'll have those batteries to meet peak demand.

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:01:30Alex Epstein?

  You can also, what's called, uprate natural gas plants. So a lot of the natural gas plants in the country were built a generation or two ago. And they might get, uh, 30% less capacity than a new natural gas plant, but you can, without, without dealing with the fundamental supply chain issues in many cases, you can actually add capacity to hundreds and hundreds of existing gas plants. So we've got, there's a lot of industrial potential. There's a friendly administration. What we have fundamentally though, is ultimately the administration doesn't properly make any law. It enforces the law, it administers the law. And so what we need as much as possible is to do things congressionally. So subsidies were one piece of it. The thing right now that I'm very focused on is permitting reform.

• 2:02:11Alex Epstein?

  And that is because it's impossible to get permits for things or it's so difficult. And I don't know how much time we have, but there's a lot, there's a lot that needs to be fixed. And it's, it's actually hanging by a thread right now.

• 2:02:21Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to. We have a lot of time because you're our new energy coordinator. Yes, yes, we'll have to have you back. We can't let you leave without talking about the actions in Venezuela, how that's Sure. impacting kind of global energy markets. You know, everybody on X has their own theory of why we did it and all that stuff. But let's talk about realities of like how this can impact just different geopolitical dynamics.

• 2:02:47Alex Epstein?

  All right, let me just say one thing to the audience because one reason I was excited about coming here is you've got, you know, a group of people that's very engaged, I think, interested in these issues, but that I don't always get to, to speak to. And I just posted this on X, but I want people to know like, if you find this exciting, we're hiring. And I just put out, you know, for one of my groups, Energy Freedom Fund, which is the only principled pro-freedom lobbying group in the world, basically. We are, yeah, $50,000 referral bonus if you can find anybody.

• 2:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:03:14Alex Epstein?

  So, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we have an assessment, there's an assessment that will tell us whether you can do it or not.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:03:21Alex Epstein?

  So it's two hours, so if people are up for it, it's worth doing. If you do a decent job at all, we'll at least give you good feedback. But yeah, that's, that's my limiter right now in fixing these problems is we have enough money.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:33Alex Epstein?

  Fortunately, but we have a talent deficit. So this is one reason I wanted to come on today. So let's talk about Venezuela. I mean, Venezuela, I try to be a master of energy and not pretend to be a master of other things. So obviously many aspects of the Venezuela situation are beyond energy. I think there's two really interesting things about this that are important. So one is that this is not making a difference, a big difference to global oil markets in the near, near future. So we're talking about something where Venezuela is kind of like Venezuelan oil in some ways is like nuclear power, whereas it used to be good.

• 2:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:11Alex Epstein?

  And it should have gotten better, but you know, you're talking about going from.

• 2:04:14Jordi Hays?

  It's all potential.

• 2:04:15Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, well, it's, you know, it was once, I think its peak was three and a half million barrels a day. So right now we're at about 102 million barrels a day. And by the barrels, barrel is 42 gallons. So it's about, you know, 500 million gallons or so of oil, you know, produced a day. And 1% of that right now, a little less than 1% is coming from Venezuela. And both because of how dilapidated so much of the industry is, how much incompetence there is, and also because. Physically, the crude they use in terms of heavy crude is more difficult to process than other things. It's not like this is just you're going to go from one to three anytime soon. So there's a lot of invest, you know, this is not any kind of slam dunk. By the way, Canada has in some ways better oil. It's a lot for your country.

• 2:04:58Alex Epstein?

  I think we're totally underutilized in Canada as a trading partner. So it's an interesting, I think economically near term, it's not super interesting. It's not as exciting as people think. It's probably most exciting for oil field services. If you invest a bunch of money and send a bunch of people down there, yeah, that benefits Halliburton and Schlumberger and that kind of thing. Also benefits potentially Gulf Coast refineries who are very good at this kind of crude. Then they don't need to get it from Canada, so then it comparatively hurts Canadian people. So there's that whole thing. The thing I find most interesting, though, is that for the first time that I can ever remember, a pet issue of mine is now in the public, or this pet issue is in the public, which is that all of these oil countries stole our oil.

• 2:05:41Alex Epstein?

  Like, this is, I'm really, now, I don't always agree with exactly how the administration is saying it, but it's very important, and read the book, The Prize is really good in this regard, by Daniel Yergin. Yeah, yeah. He doesn't, he's not as judgmental as I am about this. He probably doesn't have as negative a judgment, but you just look and country after country, what happened was, they had some, you know, random mild dictator-type person, or king, or, you know, wasn't the most evil person in the world, but they made a very clear deal with the West. So you take Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia couldn't even find water before we came there, you know, before the West, and particularly the US, came there, and Standard Oil, right? And they couldn't find water. That was their, that was their big problem at the time.

• 2:06:24Alex Epstein?

  And then we, of course, make it possible. We get what's called these concessions, so we're getting a kind of right. And what happens is just they keep pulling back on these things, and because of cultural and political forces at the time, nobody stands up to them. So they keep stealing more and more, and then they just totally nationalize it, they declare it their national heritage, they've totally broken the agreement, and then they use this to fund some of the worst dictatorial behavior in the world. So I think it's very, very important that people are now saying explicitly, hey, we had rights to that oil, and it's been stolen, and there's some sort of reparations.

• 2:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because this has been memed, memed to no end over the last few days, which is, you know, the, when, when, when people... See Trump say that's our oil or something to that effect. People normally dunk on it because they're like, well, how could that possibly be the case? It's we don't own, this is not the 51st state, it's not our land.

• 2:07:17Alex Epstein?

  Right.

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  But you're pushing back and saying, no, we actually did originally have.

• 2:07:22Alex Epstein?

  Yeah, I mean, it's not we, it's it's specific companies, right? So we need to be clear on it's it's not necessarily, it's not the government's thing. But it is, it is an interesting, it's a real case of reparations because the seizures happened not too long ago. When you're talking about a lot of them culminated in the seventies and then happened, you're talking about the forties, maybe through the seventies and eighties. And then even once they nationalize it, they screw over companies in different kinds of ways. So I think this is a really good thing, but it needs to be talked about in a very precise way. One thing that that Trump will do that I think is wrong is like he he'll have sort of a feeling of like, I want all these other countries' resources. So like, I'm so excited about Greenland and even making Canada the 51st state and then talking about Ukraine in certain ways.

• 2:08:05Alex Epstein?

  And I think there's, you're on really firm ground when somebody actually broke contracts with your companies. There there's a difference between like, oh, I'm really excited, like having the mentality that others have.

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  It would be nice to have access to that versus there was a time when there was a a contract in place.

• 2:08:24Alex Epstein?

  And and access, we can access them in a very real way by trading with them. So with Canada, we have enormous opportunity that I think we're squandering right now. I think we should be, there's a lot, I mean, Ukraine is a whole other issue, but I think we should be supporting Ukraine a lot more. So, yeah, but but it is a really interesting narrative shift that is a good thing.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for getting us up to speed. We have to jump to our next guest.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Come back on.

• 2:08:47John Coogan?

  But we'd love to have you back on the show.

• 2:08:48Alex Epstein?

  Anytime.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thank you so much. The book is Fossil Future. The author is Alex Epstein.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Go, go get that job, do the assessment.

• 2:08:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, securities, treasuries and more, all with great customer service. Our next guest is the founder of Ring at Amazon, Jamie Siminoff is at CES. We're going to have him break down how CES is going. Jamie, sorry for keeping you waiting. Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the show. It's great to meet you. How are you doing?

• 2:09:25Speaker 09

  Doing great.

• 2:09:26John Coogan?

  I would love to hear, how is CES? I imagine you've been going a long time. I've actually never been. It feels like a playground for me. I'd love to go sometime, but how is it this year? How does it compare to other years? What are you introducing there?

• 2:09:39Speaker 09

  It's pretty fun. Overall CES is pretty fun. I think this is like my 15th or 17th year or something like that. So it's been a long time.

• 2:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:48Speaker 09

  Um, I started, I, I, I started, you know, building the booth myself and driving in here in a, in a, in a U-Haul truck. Um, and you know, graduate, I've graduated now to a booth that, you know, built by professionals.

• 2:10:04John Coogan?

  Wait, what? How did you build the first booth? Is this like plywood or are you? With scraps in a cave. Scraps in a cave.

• 2:10:09Speaker 09

  I actually took, I actually took the Shark Tank set, you know, when I was on Shark Tank.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13Speaker 09

  And I took the Shark Tank set and we like put it in a U-Haul truck, brought it to CES. It turns out that you can't use power tools as a non-union person at CES.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:25Speaker 09

  And so like we, we were like violently like threatened. I couldn't, I couldn't afford union labor. So I'm like, guys, you're gonna have to like pull me out of here in handcuffs. Like I have to get this booth done.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:10:35Speaker 09

  And so yeah, we would literally build, build the booth and it got bigger and bigger. And now we, you know, we've graduated.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Okay, tell me the story of Shark Tank and I want to know if you could play it back, uh, with everything you know now, do you think you could have convinced the Sharks to invest?

• 2:10:51Speaker 09

  Uh, with everything I know now, sure. I would have told them they're gonna build the world's largest home security company and sell it for a billion dollars. Do you want to invest?

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  But you could have told them that. You think they would have gone for that?

• 2:11:01Speaker 09

  I, I, I should have told them, like, you know, don't worry, I'll, I'll let you invest at a seven million valuation. It's gonna sell for a billion. You're totally fine.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, one of the greatest misses.

• 2:11:08Speaker 09

  It, but it is like, to be fair to them at the time, like I didn't know what that was gonna do, you know? It was, it was, uh, we were doorbought. We were figuring it out. Like a lot of, you know, like a lot of startups and things. We didn't necessarily pivot, but we pivoted inside of our own sort of mission many times to get to where we are today.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and how, how do you describe, uh, the scope of the company? I mean, you, you teased it. You said it's the world's largest home security company, but what's the shape of that? What's the footprint? What does your organization look like? Take me through sort of a day in life.

• 2:11:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I mean, you know, because of Amazon, there's some things we reported. So we're over 100 million cameras out there, profitable business.

• 2:11:46Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong. Hit that app-loving gong, John.

• 2:11:50Speaker 09

  There we go.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go. It's a camera-shaking hit, as usual.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:11:56Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  I mean, did you ever think you'd be at that scale? Or what was the initial introduction?

• 2:12:02Speaker 09

  No, I remember when I launched this thing, Nest, I think when Nest sold to Google, it was reported, I don't know if it's true, but they were doing like 30,000 like units either a month or a quarter.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:15Speaker 09

  And I remember thinking to myself, man, like if I ever got to 30,000, like, you know, it's like, if I ever got that big, you know, holy. And, and, you know, we're now, I mean, it's like, you know, literally 100 million plus cameras out there, um, global. I, and it's, you know, for me, I, we, the mission to make neighborhoods safer, the impact we've had there has been substantial. And that's, I, I truly am proud of, like, I really try to focus on those things and then the output, let it happen. Let people reward us for purchasing a camera because they think it's going to make their home or neighborhood safer.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. Can you take me through sort of how you are thinking about the product suite? The, uh, the, the feature sets, like how you're positioning the, the overall portfolio? And then some of the announcements today?

• 2:13:04Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, I mean, from a macro side, I, I look at AI as I A. So we're, we're the intelligent assistant. And so our job is now where, you know, when I launched Ring, a motion alert was like mind blowing. Like, dude, you got a motion alert from your front door to your phone? Like, that's crazy. Now you hear, they hear them too often. And so our job is to use AI to basically curate for you as an individual, unique to your home, what you want to see, when you should be interacting with it, and really take down the number of alerts and in- increase the, um, the efficacy of them. So that's, that's like from a, from a macro, that's what we're doing.

• 2:13:43John Coogan?

  How are you, how are you thinking about the trade-off of like cloud-based artificial intelligence, obviously? Processing a ton of video constantly that feels like something that needs to be done on a server. At the same time, there's privacy. So people might want it done on device, but that creates power constraints and all sorts of things. Have you, I mean, also, I feel like being at Amazon is great because I feel like most people trust Amazon to be secure because ABS and all this stuff. But uh, how have you, have you tussled with like where the AI lives and the benefits and costs and trade offs there?

• 2:14:12Speaker 09

  So for us, it's, it's layers. You try to determine it's a human or motion event at the camera level. So you're not just flooding. To your point, like you're not flooding the AI or the servers, the cloud with the stuff, because it's very expensive. I mean, it's using a lot of power, using a lot of processing. So it's like trying to have like these different layers, but you know, where we like to end is the cloud. We like to have the cloud as the place that's doing the final processing. AI is moving so fast that in our area, I think anything you put at the edge is going to age like fish on a hot day. And so we're trying to be very careful not to put too much intelligence at the edge because that intelligence. It, it decays so quickly that by the time you actually ship that product, it's maybe no longer intelligent.

• 2:14:56Speaker 09

  And I, I want my team to be able to write on and you know, big build code and put out features. That are literally the best in, in the world at that moment. And the cloud really is the only place to do it right now for that final sort of.

• 2:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Where, where are you uh, most excited for various models to improve? Like, do we need capability advancement? Or do you feel like there's a capability overhang where there's enough product? That, that it's yeah, more about implementation.

• 2:15:24Speaker 09

  It's such a good question because there's, there's so many like places where we're putting models and different models and custom models and this. Like there's so much coming out, but I would say where you're going with it, I, I think we are starting to now, I think that the AI is ahead of what we can sort of like. You know, chew and sort of digest our food with. I think it's actually getting farther along than we can put the features around it, the UI around it and, and. Have customers understand it. So I do think it's actually starting to get almost faster than we are. Um, in that, and it's up to us like now to try to figure out like how to get, because again, no one. Our customers don't buy technology. They buy something that makes their home feel safer,

• 2:16:07Speaker 09

  makes their home better, like gives them more attachment to their home. They're not buying the best AI. They're buying the best service for their home. And so it's our job to sort of not sell them technology, but sell them, obviously technology in the background, but sell them the features and the services. So, but I do think I have not been able to find lately, and it's, it's amazing how quickly this is happening. Every idea I have, it's like the AI is ahead of the idea. Whereas before, the team would be like, well, it's not really there yet. You can't do that. Like, you don't understand. And now it seems like it's, it's really just going so much faster than even I can sort of think.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  Is that, is that re-engaging you as a leader? I mean, it's been over a decade. I feel like there's a lot of times when you're post-acquisition, you're at a large company, it can be exhausting. Maybe you want to go fish all day or something. I don't know if you fish, but the, but the AI moment, it feels like it's been re-engaging a lot of business leaders. Have you had that effect over the last year?

• 2:17:04Speaker 09

  Oh, I totally. Like, there's so much we can do. We can build it so fast, get it out. I mean, we launched today. I was, I live in Pacific Palisades, so I live in the fire zone. And, you know, it's like, yeah, as you know, like, it was a crazy thing. So I was able to go from like, living there, seeing what happened there, you know, and then building a feature that we launched today, which I think will hopefully be a way to assist in future fires, which we did with WatchDuty. Where now, you'll get an alert as a Ring customer if you're in a fire zone. We had over 10,000 cameras in the Palisades area. And so now you, now you would get an alert that says like, would you like to join into WatchDuty and give them sort of data? And now we'll have an accurate, up-to-the-minute

• 2:17:47Speaker 09

  map from AI, looking for embers, looking for smoke, and seeing where the fire is jumping. And so now we can give real-time information to everyone, and hopefully.

• 2:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to talk, I want to talk a little bit, yeah, kind of a little bit about kind of some more sci-fi stuff. I'm curious to kind of get your opinion on. So John and I, John's in Pasadena, I'm in Malibu. So this time last year, John, like, I didn't have electricity, cell service, anything like that.

• 2:18:16John Coogan?

  Also, you live in a house that previously burned down.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my house burned down in 2018, was fully rebuilt. And six months after I bought it, I was like, oh, it's.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  There's a reason it burned down.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  No, but it burned down because like an ember had floated from a faraway fire. An ember's floated to like six houses in my neighborhood and all them just burned down. And luckily, the majority of the homes were fine. And I was just thinking like, there's gotta be better. As we, you know, head into the kind of robotics era, there has to be better. You know, detection is one thing, but then actual response feels like an inevitable next step over time when if it's literally a single ember that can, you know, be the reason that a multimillion dollar property burns to the ground. We should be able to detect that quickly and put it out without having, you know, a bunch of heroes in a truck drive, you know, 10 miles and come put it out with water.

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Right. So how are you thinking about kind of like actual response? And, and is that even something that Ring would do? Or do you think there's other startups that should leverage your guys' detection?

• 2:19:23Speaker 09

  So this is where I'm, we worked with watch duty. So our, our fire watch, which is our system that we go into where AI is now watching your camera. You've put it in this mode and said like, yes, I want to share this. That then pipes right into watch duty. Watch duty is what's happening. The command center has watch duty up. Residents have watch duty on their app. So that is the centralized place where the map is forming on the fire. And I, my hope is that, and being in the fire myself, I saw that like a, a bush is smoldering next to a house. And I could go put it out with my feet. You know, people are like, how'd you put out the fire? And I'm like, I, I literally would stamp on it until it was out, put some dirt on it. Like now, if that had kept going, you know, I don't know like the exact incident, but like, yes, that's what happens.

• 2:20:05Speaker 09

  Like that keeps going, then it burns a house down and that house starts a fire and puts out more embers. And so if we could, if you could see that on a camera and, and say, oh, wow, like there's, this thing has jumped over to this area. It's a quarter mile away and there's smoldering next to this house. You can put it out so much easier and deploy those resources. So I think that's why what's, what's great about this one is we're bringing the information in and then it's going to watch duty, which is already being used by all of the people that are deploying the resources today.

• 2:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Are you excited about robots and drones as responders to various home, you know, home security wildfires? You have Boston Dynamics.

• 2:20:42John Coogan?

  Sorry, Amazon has a drone that flies around your house, but is that a Ring project? Or is that?

• 2:20:47Speaker 09

  I built that.

• 2:20:48John Coogan?

  You built that? No way. Tell us about that. How was that going?

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and then specifically, so Boston Dynamics has been showing off their new humanoids. I've been wanting somebody to build a humanoid home security product forever. I'd love to have a, just a menacing, I mean deterrent, it's having, you know, various criminals knowing that most homes now have, you know, video.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  I mean, just those signs that you put in the, in the, in the ground.

• 2:21:12Jordi Hays?

  American flags apparently help.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  That helps a little bit. But yeah, I would love to know more about drones and robotics.

• 2:21:18Speaker 09

  So there's different, like different layers to drones. I mean, so you have companies like Axon out there that are doing police drones and like literally are, you know, going miles. So for a fire or responding to something, there's that layer. And then I think there's going to be layers down all the way to where we were, which is like, I'd say the complete other side, which is inside the home. So having like a small drone inside the home that can fly around, see what's going on for security. I'm very bullish on the whole robotic space. Like in general, I think AI has also, you know, what took, what was so hard for us years ago when we were building this thing is now, I don't want to say it's easy, but wow, is it different? Like, like there's a real tailwind behind us. And so hopefully, I mean, you guys

• 2:22:02Speaker 09

  are, you guys are in LA, maybe I'll bring something by the studio in a few months.

• 2:22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love that.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but more specifically, is the idea of a humanoid pacing around your property, is, is that, is, is that a reasonable deterrent? Is there?

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Have you built one? There's one in your ground right now.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  The reason I say is because like, when people are like, oh, you have a robot that's going to do your laundry. It's like, well, I have a wonderful woman who does my laundry and I like employing this person. And if you give me an $80,000 a year robot, or $80,000 robot that's going to depreciate and it's going to do a worse job, I'm like, I'm happy with the human, at least for. You know, the next few years, right? Whereas hiring somebody to stand in your backyard.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  All night long.

• 2:22:53Jordi Hays?

  All night long.

• 2:22:54John Coogan?

  That's a brutal job.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  That's like a hundred and fifty K a year. I don't know for somebody that's actually like worth, worth.

• 2:23:02Speaker 09

  And it's also, it's a, it's, there's all these studies of security guards that they like their, their effectiveness goes down like it literally like, like algorithm. It's like, uh, it just falls off. Um, and you think about it's like, just cause you get so bored, right? Like you're sitting doing the same thing every day. Nothing's happening. So it's like the effectiveness of a security guard is actually like a human security guard is very tough to be because you're not. It's not normal that you're actually doing something on the security side. Uh, so I do think robotics, I think at the higher end places enterprise, maybe there will be, you know, humanoid, uh, security. I, we always look at it from high volume, low cost. Like I'm, I'm always on like the high volume, low cost residential size where we start. And so, you know, what can we build to bring robotics in into and around the home and the neighborhood?

• 2:23:48Speaker 09

  Um, that's affordable at high, high volumes. I don't think, I don't think that's going to be a humanoid for a long time.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:55Speaker 09

  That said, if a humanoid costs $500 or something at some point and you could do it, of course, like it's great.

• 2:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I also, I was saying to John, the tele-operation potential here, which is like, hey, ring to sex something. I have somebody, somebody could be anywhere in the world. Suddenly they can pop into this embodied form factor and actually be a physical deterrent. Cause I mean, so many people in, I mean, LA, like I, I talked to anybody that lived, I mean, the Palisades had like, uh, prior to the fire, an insane break in epidemic. I have friends who would have multiple break-ins in their home per year, super, uh, like elite operators that would come in, use metal detectors, figure out where your safes were, pull them out, throw them out in a truck. It'd be like five minutes, everything's gone. So there needs like, video is not enough for true deterrents. Like there's going to have to be physical.

• 2:24:47Speaker 09

  And we have stuff like virtual security guard that is you can set it in like you know for my house when I go to sleep I set virtual security guard on if someone comes on the property they're notified those are human so like there's response so I think that's I I do think you're correct though in how you're looking at it which is like it's not just technology like the idea that like just technology is going to solve everything is not correct I think we can use our IA like our intelligent assistant to bring people into the scene when they need to be on a limited basis and when you do that I think I think that's how like it for example what you're talking about the Palisades like how you would reduce that crime or even try to zero out that crime which I I do believe we can do over the next few years with deploying the AI as well as merging it with other human responses.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  Uh how is the enterprise side or the B to B side of the business evolved uh what's the shape of it when what trade offs have you made to uh focus on particular niches or verticals I'm interested to hear uh because obviously this technology applies everywhere.

• 2:25:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we really started focusing residential uh that pulled us into small medium business you know we're in you know uh over half a million small medium businesses use us uh we don't even know exactly all of them.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course they treat it like homes they buy it as like a prosumer effectively.

• 2:26:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly so we don't like know exactly how many but but we think it's you know it's definitely north of of call it half a million.

• 2:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:12Speaker 09

  Um and you know just like it's like how the iPhone sort of slowly got into or not even that slowly but got into the enterprise.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:26:19Speaker 09

  Like the iPhone like you know Apple didn't have a bunch of salespeople go out and sell enterprise iPhone.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:24Speaker 09

  It's you know this the CEO brought the iPhone in that they had and said I don't want this other one anymore.

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  I'm not using BlackBerry anymore.

• 2:26:31Speaker 09

  Not using it.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  I demand an iPhone.

• 2:26:34Speaker 09

  That's exactly right and so I I think we've kind of gone slowly at the stack today we actually launched a whole line of new cameras that are multi 4K lens like really higher end we call it the elite line and I I do think that will sort of get us just kind of similar to the iPhone getting into enterprise I think it will pull us in um and we'll see we'll kind of see how that goes we also now have an app store that people And build custom applications because historically, again, pre-AI, the camera did security like that was all it could do in a reasonable, you know, cost efficient way. Now, if you think about like a, like a coffee shop, if you have ring cameras all over your coffee shop, why isn't it telling you that a table was dirty and someone wanted to sit?

• 2:27:16Speaker 09

  Why isn't it telling you about the line? Why isn't it telling you about which team is the fastest? Why is it like, like we're seeing it like it's all there? And so being able to allow the long tail to be built by entrepreneurs, just like any marketplace or any app store. I do think we're going to unlock a lot of value for enterprise and small medium business that way. So I'm, I'm really excited. We actually just launched that today too. We launched a bunch of stuff today. So.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that being really good. Have, have you been, uh, focused more on job sites than like large enterprise, like software campuses? That type of, that, that type of security that feels like it may be a separate problem, but I could imagine you getting there at some point.

• 2:27:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, like job sites have been great. We have a lot of solar powered cameras. So people use them. They put them on, like you'll see them on a pole, like you'll just take one of, we have cameras and lights.

• 2:28:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:02Speaker 09

  So that's also been on job sites. Like someone walks onto the job site at night, light goes on, cameras there.

• 2:28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:07Speaker 09

  Uh, we have a talk down so you can say like you're being recorded. So like, there's a lot like we have the virtual security guard.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:28:12Speaker 09

  Uh, we launched today, one of the trailers. So if you see those trailers that are out the parking lots.

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:17Speaker 09

  Um.

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's usually solar panel on top and a bunch of cameras, that type of thing. I've seen this.

• 2:28:21Speaker 09

  Yeah. So we launched one that's more of like, say like a product, lower cost in that market, again, high volume, low cost.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Speaker 09

  Um, so we're gonna, I wouldn't be surprised with the next couple of years, we sort of really have a big dent in the enterprise. But we're not going to do it through the front door. We're not going to sort of not be responding to RFPs. We're not going to have an enterprise sales force. We're going to just, you know, come in like the iPhone, like let, let it come in.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like you could spin that up in a heartbeat at Amazon, but, uh, but it makes sense for the overall strategy. Uh, one, one, one last question, uh, and we'll let you get back to CES. Um. How do you think about camera sensor technology in security cameras and door cameras? I was looking specifically at like a wildlife, like a squirrel cam for my son who's four and a half. And I was, but I'm also like a camera nerd. We use like, you know, Sony FX3s and full frame cinema lenses here. And I was like, I sort of want like a 4K, not just 4K, but like full frame cinema lens hardened just to find my squirrels. And it's like a ridiculous thing. I don't know that that's a real, the real product.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  But how do you think about the, the, the learning curve and just the diffusion of just better camera sensors, better lenses into these commodity consumer products over time?

• 2:29:35Speaker 09

  Yeah. So there's definitely diminishing return. You know, you can go to like a 20K like sensor. It's, it's like not going to, for a norm, again, very special applications. Yes. But for like a normal home, it's not going to give you any more value. I do think 4K is a giant leap. Uh, we now have a whole 4K line with our elite line. We have like now like multi, multi 4K lenses that are, are, um, lens downs to the pixels. So it's really pixel, like what you really want to look at is pixel density. Like that, it's actually not 4K, 2K. It's like, what is the pixel density?

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:07Speaker 09

  That the camera delivers. And then that's also like, the AI can only process what it sees. Like the, the camera can only be as smart as what it sees. I do think the current line of 4K cameras we have right now for most residential use cases are as good as you're going to want at the price point. And then we'll just kind of let, just like everything in technology, as AK sensors come down, as bandwidth goes up, we'll kind of keep adding that. But I do think we're right now, like kind of right at the edge of that curve of price. You know, price to sort of quality, what you need.

• 2:30:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:30:40Jordi Hays?

  No, this is super fun.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a lot of fun.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate you making the time. Great, great to meet you and happy customer.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 2:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for.

• 2:30:49Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly. Overnight success. Exactly.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  It's amazing. It's amazing. Uh, well, enjoy the rest of CES. Have a great rest.

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Come back on soon.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Uh, quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. We have an exciting set of next guests. We have Jeff Wu and Jay.

• 2:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring them in.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Joining TVP.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Here they are.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  How are you guys doing? Welcome to the show.

• 2:31:18Jake Paul?

  Good. How are you? Thanks for having us.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  We're good. Congratulations. Can you set the table for us on the most recent raise? How did it come together? What's the goal of the fundraise? How are you describing the the strategy of the fund these days?

• 2:31:33Speaker 11

  I mean, I'm happy to kick it off. I mean, anti-fund.

• 2:31:38Speaker 11

  We think that boomer VCs are boring and just like there are UAI companies and the next generation of American entrepreneurs like taking over just like the business ecosystem. I think the same opportunity exists for VC.

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  What was the original anti-anti-fund? Like, how did you come up with that name? Why? What are you anti?

• 2:32:01Jake Paul?

  Yeah, a lot of time, we're both founders and we know how hard it is dealing with VCs and move slow and updates and not providing any value and they just become a nuisance. And I think we were very founder first and wanted to bring a value add. I think what we can bring is like distribution, marketing, all of these things, expertise on social media advertising. We worked with, obviously invested in OpenAI, but then worked with the Sora team to help launch the product, brought in the content. So that's just like one really good example. But that's what we wanted to do is just be anti the establishment essentially and and bring something new to the table that wasn't just money.

• 2:32:45Jake Paul?

  We believe money is a commodity and that things beyond that are way more valuable and helping grow the companies.

• 2:32:53Speaker 11

  And I think the double click on that, I think as founders and as VCs, you have to be anti-establishment. I mean, we are disrupting existing large players. If we don't want to take over existing large markets, then you should not be in this business. So that should be what you expect as a founder, but you should expect that from your investors. If your investors not as hungry as you. Maybe you choose other investors.

• 2:33:18Jordi Hays?

  What can you say on fund strategy, ownership targets? My assumption is that you guys are multi-stage, so you're kind of flexible. I imagine there's pre-seed rounds that you'd be excited about leading, but at the same time, you don't mind participating in a later-stage round where it's a breakout company and you can, you know, add fuel to the fire.

• 2:33:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think the way we think about it is that we've taken barbell, but we call it extreme barbell. We want to be the first check in technical founders, and that's people just dropping out where their first phone call will put a hundred, two hundred and fifty K, just put them in the business. Or we identify and built, you know, really great relationships with like Sam Altman and Mark Chen of OpenAI, and we want to support what we think will be generational defining companies. And I think everything in the middle is very hard. And I think we know where we're strong and where we may potentially, you know, weaker.

• 2:34:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, tell me more about this Sora partnership or that project. Like, how did that come together? What was the reaction? I feel like.

• 2:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, did you hesitate at all about giving up your name and likeness? I mean, you and Sam Altman, you guys kind of jumped first, and I think it went surprisingly fine, right?

• 2:34:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but what was the reaction?

• 2:34:37Jake Paul?

  Yeah, so they wanted to build a social media platform, and we met at the inauguration with Sam Altman. We were like talking about how there needs to be a new social media platform. What does that look like, et cetera? And so we just started having idea brainstorms, and it eventually turned into what Sora is. And then just helping them on the functionality, you know, me and my brother's expertise of however many years we've been making content, all the little dials, triggers, change this button, change that button, make this easier, boom, boom, boom. This is what fans are looking for, super detailed stuff. But then, once it finally came to launch, yeah, I was, I gave my name, image, and likeness,

• 2:35:22Jake Paul?

  and I knew it was gonna get crazy. I wasn't hesitant, and.

• 2:35:29Jake Paul?

  It just caught like fire and obviously we saw the the results and what happened and um it was a pretty phenomenal experience in marketing and like showcasing what the internet loves these days.

• 2:35:42Speaker 11

  Yeah, one of our portfolio companies archive.com tracked a billion impressions in six days of Jake.

• 2:35:48John Coogan?

  Wow, that's so many.

• 2:35:50Speaker 11

  Makes sense.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  Well, what advice are you giving to uh folks who want to become creators in 2026? It feels like a completely different era from the Vine days. At the same time, there's some lessons that never change, but how are you seeing it?

• 2:36:07Jake Paul?

  Yeah, I would say authenticity is everything. I think showing your whole entire life is the key. If you're a new and up and coming creator, like the struggles, what you're going through. Tell tell your audience about financially what you're doing and what you're having to do. Um, talk to them about your ups, your downs, share with them your your life story. And then you just have to be posting and posting. And I think a lot of people aren't good at editing, like simple stuff, captions, music, video, timing. How long is the video? Um, so it is very difficult and you're competing with every single platform as a content creator. You're competing as a content creator, I'm technically competing against Netflix.

• 2:36:49Jake Paul?

  Why are they gonna watch, you know, some Jake Paul Instagram videos versus going on on to Netflix? And so you have to realize that you're actually playing one of the hardest games. And people think it's easy, but it's actually a very, very um technical thing. And you have to have a certain skills that to be able to do it. And you have to be entertaining. You have to be providing something that's a niche that no one has ever seen before. We we have the Paul brothers, we have the speeds, we have Mr. Beast doing his videos, we have Whistling Diesel. Blowing up trucks and cars. So you, what are you doing?

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John has talked about this. You, you used to be able to get a million views by just having a Ferrari. Now you need to blow it up. The games change.

• 2:37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it went from, it went from have the car or rent the car to give the car away where you take the tax deduction. So now you must destroy it.

• 2:37:42Jordi Hays?

  How do you, so, so 2025, there was a lot of founders doing like rage bait marketing. Uh, this, this style of like using rage bait in content was popularized on YouTube and various social media platforms. I would say Jake, you've done this very, very effectively at times of being under, knowing I'm going to put out this video. It's going to make a lot of people mad, but a lot of people are going to enjoy it too. And they're going to become fans and I'm okay to alienate some people. Do you, how, how, how have you kind of like evolved like that even like, what is your framework? What is the right amount of rage to, to generate in an audience and, and, and because you really need to thread the needle.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:24Jake Paul?

  So the way I look at entertainment is invoking emotion. You want to invoke fear, sadness, happiness, joy.

• 2:38:34John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 2:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Good, good, good.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  But yeah, you need all of them. You need all of them.

• 2:38:41Jake Paul?

  That's what I'm committed to and I don't care who likes it or not. That's what I'm doing. I posted a video where like I was acting like I was depressed, like traveling around the world in like my jet and on vacation. I was like, what is life? I was like, what is life even about? And I was trolling and like my friends text me like, yo, bro, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, but, but the video got like 30 million views because everyone was like, oh, this is like, I'm kind of sad too. Yeah. What is life even about? And just different random things like that. So just be committed as an entertainer to invoking emotion and you, you can't care about the result of what anyone thinks. Because at the end of the day, people will come back because they feel something. That's the key.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Sure. Someone asked me to ask you, uh, all time, all time record for bench press.

• 2:39:28Jake Paul?

  I've done three fifteen, like three times.

• 2:39:34Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:39:35Jake Paul?

  That's where you go.

• 2:39:38Jordi Hays?

  What uh, what do you find yourself when you're talking with founders, uh, bringing up stories from like the fight game and, and different, cause I, cause I met like, building a company kinda can feel at times like getting, waking up, opening your email, getting punched in the face, maybe an investor is rejecting you, a customer went with a competitor, et cetera, et cetera. You're pretty used to getting punched in the face and, and chewing glass at this point. And I imagine some of those learnings, uh, carry over.

• 2:40:07Jake Paul?

  Yeah, well, a hundred percent. You know, I say after boxing, everything is easy because you're actually physically having to fight every day and taking the licks and punches and you have to bob and weave. Sometimes after the first round, you go back to the corner. Boxing is a great analogy for life and your companies, you have to go back to the corner, talk to your coaches, reset, come out for the, for the next round and you can be losing a fight and still win in the end. Um, not me against Anthony Joshua, my jaw is broken, but, um, but.

• 2:40:41Jordi Hays?

  But you're still yapping.

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  People were wondering, can he talk on the show? And you know, here it's proof.

• 2:40:48Jake Paul?

  Yeah, I have a little bit of a list right now because of it, but, um, we're just pushing through. This is story shake, actually. This is the AI version of me I tapped in.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  Uh, can you talk, maybe both of you could, uh, talk to me a little bit about focus. You're both involved in a ton of stuff, you know, boxing, content, investing, building companies. Uh, at the same time, yeah, W. At the same time, I think of you as, uh, very insightful early on on the importance of daily work, daily repetition. The it's every day, bro is a meme, but I actually think it's deeply insightful and, and the key to many successes. And I credit a lot of the growth that we've had here with becoming a daily show instead of just this show that is every once in a while. Um, and I'm wondering how you deal with focus and, and when, when is the time to go all in and do something every single day?

• 2:41:42Jake Paul?

  Yeah, you have to figure out that org chart for yourself in terms of what do you know feeds the rest of the ecosystem the most? Um, and for me, that's boxing, but I look to Elon Musk as an example, right? How he's build built some of the biggest companies in the world and he's managing all of these teams and he's devoted and you know, sleeps on the couch in the offices. You have to be that level of committed and it's a non-stop working hustling. You know, whatever it is that you you have to do, but I I think the importance of having a great team around you allows you to be able to do um, a lot of things.

• 2:42:22Jake Paul?

  I had Jeff um, that boxing fuels the rest of the ecosystem, the content, the businesses, the attention, the all of these things, the networking, the connections. So um, then Jeff can put his priority as Antifund, etc. And it all turns into this great flywheel, uh, but it's definitely just staying committed and working harder than you know, anyone else that's doing it or just as hard and just really checking the temperature if you're actually doing that.

• 2:42:55John Coogan?

  Have you guys uh, have you guys done any recent deals?

• 2:43:00Speaker 11

  Um, some the most recent things that we're excited, well, I was gonna say. We're getting happy dad. They just happened to crack open a happy dad.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  You you you know.

• 2:43:11Speaker 11

  Yes, we are. Yes, we're happy investors and happy dad. Uh, obviously the Duckboys are are homies and the Kikis bros are are great. It's a great operating team. Plus, I think that influencer-led CPG play, I think, is

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:27Speaker 11

  challenging, but like the very, very best operators, the best celebrities we like to partner with. So another example of that is Khloe Kardashian's cloud popcorn and obviously our own businesses, W.

• 2:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's your guys' framework for or for investing in celebrity brands? Because people have the sense that, oh, so they they see celebrity brands that work and they just assume that all celebrity brands. They don't see the Travis Scott with his canned cocktail brand that that look like it had a lot of potential, but didn't go anywhere. And there's a bunch of other examples like that. I'm curious, like, what you guys think the formula is, is a creator limited to, you know, one brand over a 10 year period? Do you do you see multi-brand strategy emerging? What do you think?

• 2:44:11Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think it's, I mean, similar, I'd say it's similar assessment as a normal investment, right? 90% of startups fail. So I think we just like look at that statistical norm and just expect, and even for a celebrity, let her not to just have that statistical pattern. But then I think after that, it looks at, but what you do have is that you have unfair distribution advantage, and you need to make sure that the market in which that distribution focuses actually makes sense. Right? Like, I think Happy Dad is a great example, where Milk Boys, to me, is like the frat bro, older onk of internet. I don't know, they're like 30 now, so they're either onk.

• 2:44:50Speaker 11

  But, but to me, it that that is a very good founder, market, product fit. Right? And I think if celebrity or not, you just look at that thing as an asset, just like there's a technical advantage. Why are OpenAI researchers just like raising a ton of money out the gate? Because there is an assumption that it have some technical ability to have to find product market fit. So it's the same thing with with a celebrity, it's just like very distribution oriented. And I think it's maybe a little bit less quantitative, it's maybe more taste driven. I think that's where I think Jake, I value, and I think Logan as well, where they have seen over, you know, 10, 15 years of being famous, how many people that have come and gone as famous people?

• 2:45:34Speaker 11

  I think it's super rare to be top of field and relevant across multiple platforms for such a long time. So I think.

• 2:45:40Jake Paul?

  Those are patterns we pull out.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  What about the launch of W? I thought it was interesting because you didn't do what I thought you would do, which is direct to consumer, purely just sell just to the audience. You came out of the gate with a big retail partnership. And I think maybe some influencers or just celebrity type people, they forget that the CEOs of big retail establishments might be in their audience, too. They might be able to get that introduction to Walmart sooner or Target sooner. And I was wondering how deliberate that strategy was. As you reflect on that strategy, would you recommend it to someone else in that position?

• 2:46:16Jake Paul?

  Yeah, well, 100%. I think playing across the board also is key. But we wanted to go retail first. And we saw the success of that with my brother's brand with Prime and the accessibility of, you know, all of our fans walking through these stores on a daily basis. I would say a lot of my fan base is a Walmart shopper, etc. So yeah, being able to have those content points digitally, but also in person and people seeing the things in stores. And yeah, being able to have retail D to C, all of that, I think is super important. But we decided to go with the retail first strategy and it's worked out great.

• 2:46:58Jordi Hays?

  Part of, I think, the way that you guys have maintained such relevancy is just reinventing yourself. Obviously, you reinventing, going from a YouTuber to a fighter. Do you think about fighters having notoriously short careers? I mean, I'm sure you'll be able to come out of the woodwork when you're 60 and do the Tyson thing, you know, lock up another 100 million pay-per-view. But I imagine at some point, maybe in your 40s, you'll reinvent yourself again. Do you think about, are you thinking five, 10 years out around how you want to reinvent yourself again? Or are you just tunnel vision on boxing at the moment and nothing else matters?

• 2:47:34Jake Paul?

  No, yeah, definitely. No, um, I, I naturally will lead myself into politics without a doubt. Like it's, it's within me. I'm passionate about it. I, I follow it very closely behind the scenes. And I try to speak up as much as I can to help my audience better understand it and um, to state my opinion on things. Uh, but I don't know what that exactly looks like.

• 2:48:00Jordi Hays?

  Are you thinking like AI czar or president?

• 2:48:03John Coogan?

  Controller of a local city.

• 2:48:06Jake Paul?

  I just want to help the, the world and I know it's needed, um, especially in the generations moving forward. And um, that's, you know, something that Charlie Kirk was doing. I don't know if it's something that looks like that, but it is needed. And um, it's very important. And I think since the beginning of my whole entire career, I knew I wanted to help kids and help the world. And that's what I've done with my charity and boxing bullies and renovating gyms and all of these things. But I know I can do it at an even greater level. And so working on some things in that area in the future will definitely be exciting.

• 2:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, chat saying Vance Paul 2028. So.

• 2:48:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you. Awesome. Well, uh, great, great to have you both on. Uh, I'm sure you'll be back on soon. And uh, yeah, congrats on the new fund, uh, and the recent fight.

• 2:48:55John Coogan?

  And the portfolio. They got everything in there.

• 2:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you guys pretty much uh, got them all. So, uh, it's been, uh, very cool to watch.

• 2:49:03John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:49:04Jake Paul?

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Our next guest is Matt from Doctronic. He's the co-founder and CEO.

• 2:49:24Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 2:49:25John Coogan?

  And we're going to welcome him to the stream.

• 2:49:26Jordi Hays?

  What's happening, Matt? How are you?

• 2:49:30Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear me? Not yet.

• 2:49:32Speaker 12

  I don't know if something happened with the AirPods.

• 2:49:34Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. AirPods. AirPods are rough. They create this split second delay. Now it feels like

• 2:49:39Speaker 12

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 2:49:40Jordi Hays?

  We're face to face now. Uh, how you doing? Great to meet.

• 2:49:43Speaker 12

  Yeah, great to meet you too. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:49:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, first time on the show. Would love a quick introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:49:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, sure. So I'm Matt. Um, I've been building startups for a long time, 25 years at this point. Built a big, uh,

• 2:50:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, right. Built a big e-commerce unicorn called MotoRandy a long time ago.

• 2:50:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:50:05Speaker 12

  All of the startups, computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Doctronic is the number one AI doctor. Alright, so got 20 million patients, uh, or 20 million consults so far, 2 million patients.

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, Wow.

• 2:50:18Speaker 12

  And we're an AI doctor, where anybody can come for free and talk to AI, et cetera. And we have a telehealth practice behind it too. So you can talk to AI, it's gonna diagnose you. At the end of that, you can take all that information, full diagnosis, full treatment plan, et cetera, Uh, and talk to our doctors. So it's a pretty straightforward, simple process. Um, our doctors are available 24/7, licensed in all 50 states.

• 2:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when, when did you, when did you start the company and what is, uh, what's been the primary kind of distribution method? Is this something that people just, they end up, they have a pressing need, they want medical advice, guidance, they're gonna find you? Uh, or are you selling through, you know, how are you actually getting 20 million people using the product?

• 2:51:01Speaker 12

  Yeah, so we're direct to consumer. We launched in September of 23, so been around for a while. Actually, when we launched, there was this open question, uh, you know, did anyone want to talk to an AI about their health? It was kind of an unknown. It was, you know, early, early in the, the GPT-4 days. Um,

• 2:51:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:18Speaker 12

  And it turns out, it's a resounding yes, right? People really want to talk about their health. The other question was, could you make an AI accurate enough to practice medicine, right? Um, and it turns out you can. Uh, you can't just use the foundational models. You have to do a lot of, a lot of work with them. Um, and so we're direct to consumer. We get a huge amount of our traffic from just organic search. Um, you know, we get 100, 150,000 people hitting us inside a week. And then, of course, we're doing social networking, paid stuff, et cetera.

• 2:51:43Jordi Hays?

  How much more do people, when, when, when people have a doctor in their pocket, do they, are they going, are they effectively talking to a doctor or an agent that's acting as a doctor? Is it, is it 50 times more? Is it 100 times more than they usually would? Because I mean, I think everybody's experience, like, you know, researching, it was, you know, doing a search, adding Reddit to the end. Now people might try a foundation model and it's obviously giving a disclaimer. Well, we're a foundation model. We can't actually give, you know, medical advice. Do you have to put a disclaimer like that or, or still? Or how does it actually work?

• 2:52:19Speaker 12

  Yeah, super interesting. So, so first off, let's, let's talk about like how often people use it. So I think the, the stat is the average American sees their primary care doctor three times a year, which is, you know, kind of crazy. And of course, there just aren't enough primary care doctors.

• 2:52:30Jordi Hays?

  For the guys out there, they're like, three times, three times in my life?

• 2:52:35Speaker 12

  Yeah, right. I haven't seen mine in years. My wife is a doctor, which makes it a little bit easier. But yeah, you know, but, but my wife doesn't want to help me anyway, right? That's, that's not something you ask your wife. But, but yeah, so people are using the system multiple times a month. Right? So we're close to weekly active users for a lot, a lot of people. So the question is to like, what, what would happen if you had a real doctor in your pocket is, I think you'd talk to them about everything. You'd talk to them about how you wake up in the morning, your back is sore, you know, you have herniated discs. Is it worse than a couple of days ago? You don't know, but you talk, right? And it's totally gathers all this information about you. Right? So, so it's certainly changing

• 2:53:14Speaker 12

  the way people are, are interacting. As far as disclaimers go and such, we are, so our AI for most situations outside of the state of Utah right now, doesn't practice medicine. So it's going to talk to you and it's going to always say, look, you're four.

• 2:53:29Jordi Hays?

  Wait, in Utah, in Utah, you guys, it does practice medicine?

• 2:53:32Speaker 12

  Yeah, that's the cool part. That's what we announced today. I'll tell you about that in a sec. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just, so other side of Utah, you know, let's say you're on a diagnostic pathway and you go through the diagnostic agents, et cetera, right? The, the AI is going to kind of come to this consensus and they're all going to say, look, it's probably one of these four things, right? And here are four treatment plans for each of those. And here's a note that you can take to your doctor and... We're not practicing medicine. You can also take this to our doctors. This is all just for you to take to your doctors. It's a tool to help you communicate with your doctors. And it's more accurate than ChatGPT and Gemini and all those because we're feeding it all sorts of, you know, this massive corpus of medical documents that our doctors have written for the LLMs and we've got lots of agents. We can get into detail some other time, right?

• 2:54:17Speaker 12

  But it doesn't practice medicine.

• 2:54:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:19Speaker 12

  At all. It's gonna just say.

• 2:54:20Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you, do you, do you think that uh this aspect of Gen AI is still kind of underrated by the world? I had a kind of a weird, uh, cool moment this week where uh my, my one-year-old wasn't sleeping that well. My wife was about to hire a sleep consultant that we had hired for our first kid. She started talking with an LLM and it basically, within 24 hours, had like got the one-year-old on a sleep schedule that was working again. And that was such a cool moment because I was like, we were happy. It, it, historically, it was so worth it to hire a sleep consultant because if your kid's not sleeping great and they can, and you get them sleeping great. It's like life-changing.

• 2:54:59Jordi Hays?

  Um, but now, but most families are not going to spend a thousand dollars to have some expert come and coach them on sleep schedules and things like that. So it feels like underrated at a society level. People just see the slop in their different social feeds and they're like, this is dumb. Why are we building data centers? Um, and yet.

• 2:55:19Speaker 12

  I think you're right. I, I think it's totally underrated. I read the other day that 20% of ChatGPT traffic is health-related. And for, for things like that, helping you sleep train your child.

• 2:55:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:29Speaker 12

  Awesome. Like use ChatGPT. It's great, right? But when you actually want to start getting into medicine, like, like real, actual medicine, ChatGPT can't do that. It can't. I mean, e- even if it could, right, it probably shouldn't, right? But it's not gonna help you understand a prescription and what the dosage should be and what the schedule should be. If you have high cholesterol, it's gonna say you probably need to take a statin and then you need to get some exercise, which is great and true. Right? And that's just helping with your health. That's not practicing medicine, right?

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:56Speaker 12

  And which, you know, again, outside of the state of Utah, we're not doing that either. But we, we have a partnership with the state of Utah now, uh, with um, with the Utah AI Learning Lab. And so that launched a couple of weeks ago, but we just announced it. So our AI is allowed to legally renew prescriptions for residents of the state of Utah with no oversight from doctors.

• 2:56:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:56:19John Coogan?

  I see, uh, uh, Tusk Ventures on the cap table.

• 2:56:23Jordi Hays?

  And Faye Lee, the goat.

• 2:56:25John Coogan?

  I mean, Faye Lee, amazing. Um, but, uh, I, Faye Lee signals like you know what you're doing technically. Uh, Tusk Ventures signals like this is going to be a city by city, state by state, like battle. At least, uh, for those who don't know, Bradley Tusk, uh, worked with Uber and, and did a lot of the on the ground.

• 2:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Regulatory athlete hall of fame.

• 2:56:46John Coogan?

  Exactly. Regulatory athlete. And so I'm wondering, like, do you think that there needs to be regulatory change on a state by state basis? Is there a federal preemption discussion in the mix? Like, where does all this go? Um, and, and what, what, are there any like keys to the success for you, uh, on the regulatory side?

• 2:57:03Speaker 12

  Uh, that's an awesome question. So historically, uh, not even historically, currently states regulate the practice of medicine, right? If you want to practice medicine in a state, you get licensed by that state's medical board.

• 2:57:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:14Speaker 12

  We believe that what we're doing is practicing medicine. Obviously, the state of Utah agrees.

• 2:57:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:18Speaker 12

  Uh, and so we have been kind of mitigated from the laws in, in this AI sandbox with Utah that prevent non-licensed doctors from practicing medicine. We think this applies to other states too. And other states have regulatory sandboxes for AI and we're talking with them as well. Uh, it's just that Utah is super innovation friendly and forward thinking. They're the first, they're the best.

• 2:57:38John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:57:39Speaker 12

  They're really good at this.

• 2:57:39John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:57:40Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you?

• 2:57:41Speaker 12

  This, the state's right.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:43Jordi Hays?

  What, what do, what do doctors think about DocTronic? Are they happy that they're, their patients? Cause the patients coming in, they're informed, the, the DocTronic's already kind of summarized the symptoms and the conversations. Gets them up to speed quickly, helps them process more, see more patients themselves.

• 2:58:00Speaker 12

  We, we see it like a 10x efficiency in our doctors in treating patients because the AI has done all of the work gathering things. My co-founder, who is a doctor, I'm not, but he is, he says it's like having the best chief resident in the world, seeing every single patient for you. I, it just, it just does all that work. But then it says, look, it's, it's one of these four things. You, you figure it out, but it's almost always the first one, right? The AI is just that good.

• 2:58:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've had a couple funny experiences lately. I went to the pharmacy, picked up some medicine. My wife asked me to ask the pharmacist how to use it and I watched the pharmacist, you know, just use an LLM to get the answer. I was like, wait a minute, I have a more expensive plan. I should just be doing this myself. So the demand is clearly-

• 2:58:44Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you're not even using Premium Plus?

• 2:58:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, you didn't even run the deep research report on this one. But do you think that there's, is there going to be some sort of stopgap where there's some sort of hybrid, where you have a human in the loop to accelerate progress? Do you already have that? What role do you see as like, building out the hybrid portion of the business in certain states that are maybe less aggressive about moving quickly on this?

• 2:59:10Speaker 12

  Yeah, there's certainly a place to use those efficiencies you get from AI in the states that are not able to move that quickly.

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:17Speaker 12

  Our hope is that that hybrid approach won't last for long because we will prove that this is effective and works really well. It saves the taxpayer money, it makes people healthier, it reduces costs, right? The healthcare system is enormously complex and far too expensive. There aren't enough primary care doctors. No primary care doctor wants to renew prescriptions. Nobody went to med school saying, gosh, I hope I can renew prescriptions. So I sure hope that we'll be able to move faster, but there are definitely hybrid approaches. We're already doing that with a bunch of our video visits in other states that don't allow for this.

• 2:59:50John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:59:50Jordi Hays?

  You have a background building in e-commerce, so a little bit of a tangent, but I was curious what you expect to see at the intersection of LLMs and commerce this year specifically. It feels like last year, people started discovering and doing a lot of product research using LLMs. It feels like this year will be the year of like, action. What's that?

• 3:00:14Speaker 12

  Like, I said, I sure hope we're shopping in ChatGPT.

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:17Speaker 12

  Or Gemini, right? I should be able to buy something from there.

• 3:00:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:21Speaker 12

  I shouldn't have to go to Amazon. I should just be able to click buy.

• 3:00:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:24Speaker 12

  Love to see that.

• 3:00:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something as simple as that. Amazon's like, actually, we like our search ad revenue business quite a lot.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Oh, they'll figure it out. I'm sure they'll have their own L L Ms or something like that. What do you think about like the actual feedback loop on the? I feel like there's the the value of medicine is not just treating the patient, but then filtering those results back into future research efforts to update on what's working, what's not, both on the individual patient level and also on the societal level. How do you think about improving the system over time? It's a little bit different than just just coding, in my opinion, but are you thinking about, you know, successive interactions with the with the patient?

• 3:01:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, you know, AIs can learn more and remember more about patients anyway. And the funny thing is, you know, we measure N P S with the A I and with our human doctors. And we have great human doctors, right? Like, we pay a lot. We hire the best.

• 3:01:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:26Speaker 12

  Everybody still likes the A I a little bit more. That said, I don't think that A I is going to replace that deep human interaction.

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 3:01:36Speaker 12

  Right? Like, there's this easy eighty percent of these rote interactions that you have with a doctor where you're just like, look, my kid's sick, I need an antibiotic.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:45Speaker 12

  Let's just figure out which one is most appropriate. Let's get the A I to handle that.

• 3:01:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:49Speaker 12

  I don't, you know, specialists diagnosing chronic conditions.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:54Speaker 12

  I think people are always gonna be.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  At the same time with that, if the kid's sick, they need antibiotics, I feel like you should still maybe bring them into a clinic, get some some data that can't be accessed on the phone. And so doesn't that lead you to some sort of like B to B scenario or somewhere where you're acting more as a a co-pilot than, you know, a B to C company? Do you think you'll get there? Or is that something that's like adjacent?

• 3:02:19Speaker 12

  I think that's adjacent to where we are right now. I guess I guess the way I think of it is, we are pretty well positioned to handle anything that can happen during telehealth visits right now. And that's kind of our goal, right? There's already this a bit of a line drawn that said, these are these are things that can happen with telehealth. And so, I mean, you're right, there are certainly cases where. You just need to see someone. We had one the other day. I mean, they happen all the time, but we talked about one today. Someone had an appendicitis, right? The AI said, look, you need to go to an ER. You have an appendicitis and it's about to rupture. And the person still chose to see our doctor. And it was great because the doctor said, I totally agree with the AI, but this is pretty emergent. Like, you probably should

• 3:03:01Speaker 12

  go to the ER. And they did. And they were taken care of and it happens. So we're not going to try to do those things that we can't do via a tele visit anyway.

• 3:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

• 3:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 3:03:17John Coogan?

  And I hope you have a great 2026.

• 3:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Are you the first AI licensed to practice law?

• 3:03:23Speaker 12

  Or, sorry, not law, medicine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:03:27John Coogan?

  First and only.

• 3:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Wow. That is, that is wild. That, I feel like, yeah, I imagine in five years, we'll look back on today as a very big moment. So congrats to you and the whole team. It's great to meet.

• 3:03:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:03:40Speaker 12

  Thanks so much.

• 3:03:41John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 3:03:42Speaker 12

  Appreciate it.

• 3:03:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses.

• 3:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's Gusto. Let's Senra. Let's Lulu.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  We'll bring them in in a couple of minutes. In the meantime, I'm going to tell you about cognition, the software. They're makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 3:04:09Jordi Hays?

  We have some breaking news.

• 3:04:11John Coogan?

  What's breaking news?

• 3:04:12Jordi Hays?

  From two hours ago, from XAI, they've raised a $20 billion Series E.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  20 billion?

• 3:04:18Jordi Hays?

  XAI completed its upside Series E funding round, exceeding the 15 billion targeted round size and raised 20 billion.

• 3:04:24John Coogan?

  It's a huge.

• 3:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Investors include Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group. What is Baron Capital Group? Is that, is that Baron Trump? No, no, since 1982. Okay. Not Baron Trump. Strategic investors in the round include Nvidia and Cisco. Let's give it up for Cisco Investments getting in the mix.

• 3:04:53Jordi Hays?

  We're still working out the kinks with this gong. We're figuring out that that was a clean hit. That was a clean hit, but we're figuring out the new kind of method, how to strike it effectively. But that was a great hit. XAI says 2025 was a year of breakthrough momentum where the XAI team advanced a multitude of key initiatives, including data centers, Grok 4, Grok Voice, user metrics, and Grok Imagine. I'm very excited to see what Grok pulls off. Grok and the XAI team pull off this year. They are highly, highly motivated, highly capitalized, crushing it on the infrastructure side, and a lot more to come.

• 3:05:32John Coogan?

  Well, before we bring in our guests, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. You can see Bitcoin is back up 93,000.

• 3:05:44Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:05:44John Coogan?

  And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software development, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. And with that, we are ready to bring in our guests.

• 3:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 3:05:59John Coogan?

  Elon is saying that we've entered the singularity. So he is fully AGI pill, fully singularity pill.

• 3:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Lulu's singularity.

• 3:06:05John Coogan?

  GDP growth is going to be 100%. And with GDP growing 100% a year, 20 billion for XAI in Series E seems like a steal.

• 3:06:15Jordi Hays?

  How about 200 billion?

• 3:06:16John Coogan?

  How about 200 billion? I'm dying to see the user metrics. Eventually, people will pull out.

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  We'll pull out. Why are we doing bubble talk?

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. We have Lulu. Welcome to the show. Welcome. We have David Senrump back in the studio for the seventh time. Good to see you. Welcome to the show. How long are you in LA, Lulu?

• 3:06:40Speaker 04

  It's a matter of hours.

• 3:06:42John Coogan?

  Matter of hours?

• 3:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Matter of hours.

• 3:06:43Speaker 04

  Oh, it's like 28 hours.

• 3:06:45Jordi Hays?

  28 hours.

• 3:06:46John Coogan?

  Would either of you like a Happy Dad?

• 3:06:48Speaker 04

  What is it? Is it beer? Oh, it's a fruit punch? Gluten free.

• 3:06:52John Coogan?

  It's a fruit punch with 5% alcohol.

• 3:06:54Speaker 04

  I'd like to see it for the ingredients.

• 3:06:55John Coogan?

  It's the latest anti-fund investment.

• 3:06:57Speaker 04

  That's great. Yeah.

• 3:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Now, Koi is John Shaheen.

• 3:07:00Speaker 04

  I think I'm the wrong demo for Happy Dad. I don't think it's funny.

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  It is. It is.

• 3:07:03Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's a mindset. It's a mindset. It's not an.

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  Jeff Wu described this frat boy, unk, unk frat boy brand. It's a hilarious way to describe it.

• 3:07:10Speaker 04

  I am the right demo.

• 3:07:13Jordi Hays?

  We're all, we're all, I turned, I turned 30 over the holiday.

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  That's all my thoughts.

• 3:07:17Speaker 04

  I was gonna ask, yeah, I could tell.

• 3:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you can tell.

• 3:07:21John Coogan?

  No, it's just the lack of looks maxing. Lulu, take us through the most recent post, burning up the internet, three million views. Give us the pitch.

• 3:07:30Speaker 04

  Okay, the pitch is that every year has a big theme. All right, let's get, thank you.

• 3:07:37John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 3:07:37Speaker 04

  All right. Every year has a big theme for where narrative alpha is gonna come from.

• 3:07:42Jordi Hays?

  And you decided as the narrative executive.

• 3:07:44Speaker 04

  And then I share what it is, and then hopefully we do the thing. So in 2024, it was going direct. That was where the alpha was coming from because everybody was going through three different layers of intermediaries. Then last year, it became just grab attention for some people at all costs. So that's when you saw the cinematic launch videos. That's when you saw the kind of clue-ification.

• 3:08:03John Coogan?

  No, it's too many, too many gaps.

• 3:08:04Jordi Hays?

  And I said, when everybody.

• 3:08:05John Coogan?

  Stop going direct.

• 3:08:06Jordi Hays?

  I said, I said.

• 3:08:07Speaker 04

  A little bit less direct.

• 3:08:08John Coogan?

  Stop going direct. Some of you are not good on mic. Some of you just.

• 3:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Some?

• 3:08:13Speaker 04

  Some people should go direct some of the time.

• 3:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, I also said, I said, if everyone has a cinematic launch video, no one does. Like, it just, it got to the point where it's like, I'll just read, I'll just go to your website and I'll see what you do.

• 3:08:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:08:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't need to see the, the, the 50.

• 3:08:29Speaker 04

  And they're all kind of the same. So companies are spending six figures on these cinematic launch videos. No, they are, they're like 150K. And they're all the same. So anyway.

• 3:08:37John Coogan?

  How, wait, how much did you guys spend on yours?

• 3:08:39Jordi Hays?

  Two grand.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  Two grand.

• 3:08:40Speaker 04

  Oh, these are.

• 3:08:41John Coogan?

  And that included a helicopter rental.

• 3:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  I think the helicopter rental was like 1900 of that.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  Maybe a tour, a tour for a couple hundred bucks.

• 3:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Handling the rest.

• 3:08:51Speaker 04

  Shut up, Ben.

• 3:08:52John Coogan?

  That was a fantastic video.

• 3:08:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, value per dollar off the charts.

• 3:08:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:55Speaker 04

  So this year, the narrative alpha is gonna come from doing real things that are enduring, that are hard, that are gonna stick around, and then just to keep doing that for a really long period of time. So I liken it to going to the gym. Instead of fasting for 72 hours and not drinking water and then showing up for the bodybuilding competition one time, just go to the gym three times a week and do somewhat normal stuff, but do that for infinity weeks and then you'll be a fit person.

• 3:09:21John Coogan?

  Which founder's doing the best version of that right now? Or the best job at that right now?

• 3:09:25Speaker 04

  There, okay, there's a bunch. Toby Luka.

• 3:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Hard to pick a favorite.

• 3:09:29Speaker 04

  It's hard to pick a favorite.

• 3:09:30Jordi Hays?

  All of your children.

• 3:09:33Speaker 04

  I'm biased being on the board of Shopify, but I think if I were to look objectively, Toby is somebody who doesn't try to do the flashy thing. He's actually kind of averse and nauseous for trying to do the flashy thing.

• 3:09:42David Senra?

  He's showing much more of his personality too on his Twitter feed lately.

• 3:09:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, he also can't not. You know, some of these people, Brian Armstrong is another example.

• 3:09:51John Coogan?

  My favorite Toby story is he did an obscure Starcraft podcast where he just, because he's a Starcraft fan, and so he just went on and talked about Starcraft strategy. And that was a cool, like, going direct moment years ago. This happened like seven years ago. But it just felt like, okay, he's, a lot of comms people would probably tell him like, no, stay on message. Like, you should be talking about Shopify. But he's like, look, there's probably people in that audience. Also, I'm just having fun talking about Starcraft with some people that are interested in Starcraft. And so he did that. And it made, for me, it made him a much realer CEO. It just kind of painted a broader picture of who he is.

• 3:10:25Speaker 04

  And the Starcraft stuff directly translates into how he runs Shopify. He runs Shopify like a zerg swarm, you know, that's like his corporate strategy.

• 3:10:33David Senra?

  You know what's funny?

• 3:10:35Speaker 04

  What?

• 3:10:36David Senra?

  I had breakfast with Kareem from Ramp. Do you guys know about Ramp?

• 3:10:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:40David Senra?

  Yesterday. And we talked about Toby and his using, like, his love of video games for how he actually runs Shopify. We had this conversation yesterday morning.

• 3:10:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:48Jordi Hays?

  I think more and more people are feeling that with agents now, where it's like, it feels like you're.

• 3:10:52John Coogan?

  Puppeteering.

• 3:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:10:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Can I say a few more things about this?

• 3:10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, please, please.

• 3:10:57Speaker 04

  Okay, so the overarching theme is to do real things that are going to be enduring and lasting. Couple of the sub-things under that. What makes things enduring and lasting? One is beauty is back. Being beautiful is allowed again. We've had a decade. Looks maxing for companies. Pretty privilege for companies. Like, the same way that people get better treatment. And they're literally seen as, Tyler's smirking because he's like, this is my era. The same way that people are seen as more competent, more intelligent, more trustworthy, if they simply look and present better. The same is true for companies and products. So just like, put an inordinate amount. Almost an extravagant amount of effort into that. Another one is-

• 3:11:36Jordi Hays?

  It's so much harder too because it's not just enough to have a pretty website. Like every animate, you, you have to somehow demonstrate that it wasn't one shotted by-

• 3:11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Some vibe coding app, right? Which they can, you can make a, make me a website that looks like linear. Like that's really easy now. And that was like the gold standard.

• 3:11:55John Coogan?

  You saw Dylan Field's demos of Pigma Make. He, he, he like vibe coded like 10 different websites and they all had like the most obscure, because he has a lot of artistic references that he can pull from. It was things that I would have never come up, come up with. But all of them looked like not linear clowns. Like they looked like very unique and, uh, I don't know.

• 3:12:12Jordi Hays?

  It's like beauty and original thinking.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The instantiation of it was now what made it special.

• 3:12:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we, there was basically a decade when we just had to pretend that every single thing in person was equally beautiful.

• 3:12:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:12:24Speaker 04

  And it was not allowed to say that something was less beautiful than another thing. And now it's allowed again. Apparently this, the Victoria's Secret runway show-

• 3:12:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:12:32Speaker 04

  With the angels in the wings is back.

• 3:12:34Jordi Hays?

  It's back.

• 3:12:35Speaker 04

  It's allowed, it's allowed to be pretty again. Um, another one is, um, things that are not perfect. The just be yourself. But like CEOs just being themselves in a way that is maybe not optimal. Like Palmer Lucky can go on any show in the world at any time. He did a recorded Zoom with me. Toby did that Starcraft thing a while back. Brian Armstrong went on a podcast with like, I don't know, 500 listeners or something- A little while ago, just because he liked the guy's content.

• 3:13:02John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 3:13:03David Senra?

  Palmer Lucky is literally the best podcast guest in the world. I can't tell you the details of this. I just spent eight straight, I spent a longer time with this. Eight straight hours trying to stump the guy. I was with him for eight straight hours. I had to call in other podcasters that just happened to be there. We couldn't, we, I was like, I don't, I have nothing else to talk about, man. I don't, I just can't. And he was unlimited with like his knowledge on every single subject. Storytelling is off the charts. I've never met anybody with a mind like that.

• 3:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, so, so here's the thing though. So people see Palmer. He's an archetype that founders want to emulate now.

• 3:13:36David Senra?

  You can't.

• 3:13:36Jordi Hays?

  He's the ultimate Joe Rogan CEO. And I think that founders shouldn't feel this pressure that they need to be, like, that is a certain archetype. And it's possible that, uh, you can say like, oh, you should, every founder should just have a growth mindset. Maybe you're not great on a three hour podcast. You should just become great. But I think people need to pick other archetypes. I feel like Toby is another archetype. Like he's not just trying to put up- Fifty hours on podcasts, right? It's more like strategic and different, using different.

• 3:14:06David Senra?

  He's about to do my new show, so.

• 3:14:09Speaker 04

  So he'll be making 420 minutes of sustained, intense eye contact. I love this concept of calling in other podcasters for backup.

• 3:14:21Speaker 04

  Code, right?

• 3:14:22John Coogan?

  So like doing sustained, sustained effort, you know, accomplishing something great. That sounds amazing, but in the short term, like you do have to acquire some attention from investors, employees, customers. What do you think of, I love Jaco Wellink's Instagram where he goes to the gym every single day and he takes a picture of his watch in the morning just to prove that he wakes up. And it's this interesting thing because it's not as labor intensive as like going on a podcast, doing a whole tour. It's not really self-aggrandizing, but it just like reminds you of him every single day. And I'm wondering if there's a, I don't know.

• 3:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, you never forget about Jaco.

• 3:15:01John Coogan?

  I never forget about Jaco.

• 3:15:02Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 3:15:03John Coogan?

  But I wonder if there's like a business equivalent of that that might emerge. Maybe we can't just come up with it right now, but I wonder if someone will come up with something like that where you're like, oh, this person is, is in the zeitgeist constantly with something that's actually very high leverage as opposed to do it.

• 3:15:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Josh Steinman.

• 3:15:21John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 3:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Good morning. Good morning, we are going to win.

• 3:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Augustus does this, so anytime it rains anywhere in continental America, he has a comment on the quality and quantity of the rain.

• 3:15:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:15:34Speaker 04

  And if it's not raining, he's like, why is it not raining? It was raining in China, why is it not raining over here? Just like he's, he just made himself the, the weather guy. So any day that has weather is a chance for Augustus to remind you that he has a company.

• 3:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. What were you gonna say about Jaco? I know you're a fan.

• 3:15:50David Senra?

  I also just spent time with him and.

• 3:15:52Speaker 04

  How many hours?

• 3:15:53John Coogan?

  You've been on a podcast tour, you've talked to everybody.

• 3:15:56David Senra?

  So, uh, there is funny, we were, we-

• 3:15:58John Coogan?

  Is that the first time you met him?

• 3:15:59David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:16:00David Senra?

  And-

• 3:16:00John Coogan?

  What was that like? I mean, you're, like, can you give some context on your relationship with Jaco?

• 3:16:04David Senra?

  I can't tell you what was going on, I could just give you the context-

• 3:16:07John Coogan?

  No, I'm talking his-

• 3:16:08Speaker 04

  Was it a covert?

• 3:16:09David Senra?

  Basically, yes, I can't tell you what-

• 3:16:11Speaker 04

  Was brunch, was brunch going on?

• 3:16:13David Senra?

  All I know is, we were, we just happened to be in undisclosed location, we're the only ones up at 4:30 in the morning.

• 3:16:18Speaker 04

  Strip club, strip club.

• 3:16:19David Senra?

  And so, no, no, no, never, never, gross.

• 3:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Everyone just leaves. I think he was in the, deep in the Pacific.

• 3:16:25David Senra?

  No.

• 3:16:25Speaker 04

  Undisclosed location.

• 3:16:26David Senra?

  So anyways, I'm in this like hut, and there's nothing but the, um, um, like windows, like a circular room surrounded by windows, all, all dark. And I see a slow, huge silhouette, I'm like, what the fuck is that? Oh, what the freak is that? And then I see his, I know his face, and I just see his giant head, and I have a big head, so I'm not making fun of him. I see his giant head, and I was like, and I opened the door, I go, Jaco, come in here. And I was like, you don't know who I am, and I basically told him, so I go, just, just sit with me for at least a minute. Cause as he was coming in there, he's been my alarm clock every, for like five years.

• 3:17:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:17:00David Senra?

  And he's like, get up, get to the gym, like literally, that's my alarm clock, and has been forever. So yeah, I wound up having like, of course, we talked for a podcast, about podcasting for like an hour. And I explained to him, like, the reason I started a solo history show, reading books of, you know, autobiographies, is because I found your podcast in 2015, that was doing that for people that served in combat.

• 3:17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:21David Senra?

  And these stories were crazy, and the book review was like an hour, and I was like, I'm learning so much, and then I'm also reading all these books. I was like, I should just do that for business.

• 3:17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I should go back and listen to some of the old Jaco episodes.

• 3:17:31David Senra?

  There, we had a long talk, cause he just hit episode 500, and I was like, dude, I, you're a very clear communicator.

• 3:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:37David Senra?

  I listened to your episode 500, where you were talking about, this is what my podcast is gonna be, I was like, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. And I was like, I don't, and he goes, that's cause I don't know what I wanna do yet. I go, just, talking to another person, like you've been doing, is like not really differentiated, go back to the book reviews.

• 3:17:49John Coogan?

  That'd be cool.

• 3:17:50David Senra?

  Read Patton, read Napoleon, read Frederick the Great, all that other stuff, man.

• 3:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's really good.

• 3:17:55Speaker 04

  Do you learn new things from meeting someone in person? So you, you study them from afar, to like the maximum extent possible, but then when you interact in person, is there like new stuff that comes up?

• 3:18:04David Senra?

  Yeah, 100%, like, it's, it's just, it- Man, like, I'm in, I'm in trouble. Like, I'm in real big trouble with this new show because I am completely addicted to it. It's all I want to do. I called Rob Moore. We're gonna have dinner with him. We're all having dinner tonight. I guess everybody else knows, but, uh, uh.

• 3:18:19John Coogan?

  Doxing.

• 3:18:22Speaker 04

  I'm just close location.

• 3:18:23David Senra?

  And he's just been lining people up. I was like, I want some fucking smart, driven, other maniac in front of me every single day. Like, I want to do this every single day. I can't do it every single day. Lulu's been insane with connecting me with all these people. She, she sent me, uh, we were together with Gabby in New York at the cognition event. And you had the funniest thing. You're like, David, you have groupies, but your groupies are...

• 3:18:45Speaker 04

  Ninety-year-old billionaires.

• 3:18:46David Senra?

  No, middle-aged, not ninety.

• 3:18:48John Coogan?

  Ninety-year-old.

• 3:18:49David Senra?

  Middle-aged billionaire men. And so she's been incredible about connecting me with those people. And then I'll get on the phone with them and like, immediately, we just click and we can talk forever. Um, so yeah, of course, you, you, you just learned so much. And then I'm high as a kite. I don't do any drugs. Uh, Justin was texting me about this masseuse. I guess I shouldn't say so much.

• 3:19:10Speaker 04

  You gotta finish that sentence really fast.

• 3:19:12David Senra?

  Lulu texts me, like, remember like, a couple of weeks ago, you're like, you, we need to travel everywhere together. You need a, a...

• 3:19:17Speaker 04

  He needs a crisis comms person on staff with, it's like hockey teams travel with a dentist.

• 3:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:23Speaker 04

  He needs a crisis comms person next to him to tell the waitress, like, oh, no, what he meant, what, oh, sorry, man.

• 3:19:29David Senra?

  So to answer your question, yeah, you, you just learned so much more. And then, um, like even with somebody like James Dyson, right? I read his first autobiography five times. I've read his second one at least two times. I've read highlights from both those books dozens of times. I read his encyclopedia on the history of greatest inventions over and over again. I thought I knew everything about the guy. And like, then I got to spend three hours with him in New York. And it was just like, I was learning more about what motivates him, how he was. And the cool thing is how great all these people have been. Unbelievably witty, kind, generous, just like great people. I always, I think I ended that episode with, everybody says, hey, don't meet your heroes. I was like, fuck those people. They're wrong. Like, I met my heroes.

• 3:20:04John Coogan?

  Has James Dyson seen the Dyson Airblade meme? Have you seen this?

• 3:20:09David Senra?

  No, I haven't.

• 3:20:10John Coogan?

  So there's this meme that goes viral every Christmas. So you're familiar with the Dyson Airwrap?

• 3:20:14David Senra?

  Of course.

• 3:20:14John Coogan?

  It's the hottest gift for men to give their wives, probably something like that. But, uh, it's usually used by women with long hair. And Dyson also makes the Dyson Airblade. Which you, which is when you're at the, when you're at the airport bathroom, you put your hands in and it, and it's, uh, it, it dries your hands very aggressively.

• 3:20:33Speaker 04

  Can you stop doing that?

• 3:20:33John Coogan?

  And so, yeah. And so the, and so the joke is always someone takes a picture of the Dyson Airblade and says, "I got this for my wife and she's upset with me. What happened?" And it's just a very funny thing, cause you know, imagine giving some.

• 3:20:46Speaker 04

  Can I use Dyson? Okay, one of the best comms case studies comes from Dyson. This is when the predecessor to the airwrap, which was the, the blow dryer, was coming out, like the hairdryer. And I actually flew to China and met with the guy who was responsible for spreading the gospel of the Dyson hairdryer in Asia, at a time when everybody still thought of them as just like air filters and vacuums and stuff.

• 3:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:10Speaker 04

  So what they did was, okay, normally what you would do is you have an ad campaign and then you put it in the stores and then you, you advertise that they're in the stores and you try to get people to buy them. What they did was they went in completely stealth mode under the cover of night and put them into the most expensive salons and then didn't say anything.

• 3:21:27David Senra?

  They told me about this.

• 3:21:28Speaker 04

  So then, okay, I'll tell you the version I heard.

• 3:21:29David Senra?

  No, no, tell me, no, tell me, go ahead.

• 3:21:31Speaker 04

  So they put them into the, we should learn to speak in unison.

• 3:21:35Speaker 04

  They put them into the most expensive salons and then after every cut, at least for women's hair, what men do, for every cut, you get a blow dry. You, I, I once tried to not get the blow dry and they tried to make me like pay extra, like you must get a blow dry, so you gotta come and blow dry. So they just start doing your hair with it and then it blow dries it much faster and better, I guess. And then the women ask, "What is this thing?" And it looks really different too, it looks super futuristic. "What is this thing? Where can I get one?" "I'm sorry, you can't get one. It's only for salons, you know, you have to be a special." So now you've got the richest women in China with the right hair for it, who like really care about their hair, obsessed with this thing that they hope that they can get. That they can't get.

• 3:22:14David Senra?

  Yeah, that's the story.

• 3:22:15John Coogan?

  Is, uh, does that come from Dyson or people he hires?

• 3:22:18David Senra?

  I don't know who it came from, but the interesting story is, um, I, I was just...

• 3:22:22John Coogan?

  But is he a distribution genius in addition to being an inventor? Or is he someone who's very good at hiring marketing?

• 3:22:27David Senra?

  He describes himself as an engineer.

• 3:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:29David Senra?

  There's a lot in the way Dyson thinks that's very similar to Kareem, where like... I asked him about this on the episode two where it's like he has a very Dyson has a very simple organizing principle. It's just like he picks up a product and he's just like, why can't this be better? And so he goes, then I make it better. And then I put it back down. And then I pick it back up and go, why can't this be better? And I find another way to make it better. And he goes, I just never interrupted the compounding. So I've been doing it for 45 years. And so he's the, I just read about his family office. He's reorganizing his family office right now. He's the richest person in Britain. And from what I understand, the numbers that are reported are vastly under. Do you want to hit the gong for him?

• 3:23:03John Coogan?

  Does he have an heir to the Dyson empire? Like, do we know who this next CEO is going to be? Is it like a Warren Buffett situation where Greg Abel was going to come in?

• 3:23:11David Senra?

  His son works in the business. I highly suspect they're going to go the route of what the Waltons did, where like transition to professional management. That's nothing they told me, but that's just like my read on the situation. What was the question about Dyson before?

• 3:23:25John Coogan?

  Oh, just is he a marketing genius?

• 3:23:26David Senra?

  Oh, no, the engineer. No, so yeah, his whole thing was just like, I just have to make it better. The largest, the crazy thing about the beauty category is what she's talking about is like, how do you actually infiltrate infiltrate and like spread that? And it's exactly what Lulu just said. And then what they told me is, you know, the biggest revenue category is still obviously the vacuum cleaners. It's like everybody has them. They're $500, high margin. But their beauty category is only 10 years old and it's also already the second biggest source of revenue. I highly suspect they think it's going to be bigger than the vacuum cleaners, but it gives you insight into Dyson because Dyson is obsessed with vertical integration. And so he starts with beauty supplies and then what else you need? Well, what else you, now he has like styling creams and stuff like that. But it's

• 3:24:11David Senra?

  not, he's like, I'm not just going to make a styling cream just to make a styling cream. So he also has.

• 3:24:14John Coogan?

  That's not vertical integration. That's horizontal.

• 3:24:16David Senra?

  No, no, check this out. I'm about to get there. So next year, they want me to go to their UK. We're going to do another episode with them. I'm going to tour his UK headquarters and the farming because he's essentially like applying some of the highest tech.

• 3:24:27John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:24:28David Senra?

  So all, so this is the way he thinks though. If I'm going to do styling cream, every single ingredient from the styling cream and all these other things have to come from my farm.

• 3:24:36John Coogan?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 3:24:37David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:38Speaker 04

  It's like Zuckerberg with the macadamia nuts.

• 3:24:40John Coogan?

  Wait, he's doing macadamia nuts? I thought he was only doing beef.

• 3:24:42Jordi Hays?

  No, he's got to make the nuts to feed the.

• 3:24:44John Coogan?

  No, really?

• 3:24:46Speaker 04

  He plants the macadamia trees to get the macadamia.

• 3:24:48John Coogan?

  I had no idea.

• 3:24:49Speaker 04

  You don't? You just use store bought macadamia nuts?

• 3:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 3:24:53John Coogan?

  No, I get chicken fingers from.

• 3:24:56David Senra?

  I talked to a guy that listens to founders that like cornered the world market on macadamia nuts. He's like a young kid. What's the brand that's advertised on Rick Rubin's podcast and all the other ones? Okay, well, it's one like 28 year old kid in like South Africa. Wow.

• 3:25:12Speaker 04

  Can I tell you about a beauty thing?

• 3:25:14David Senra?

  Yeah, please.

• 3:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:15Speaker 04

  So anytime something becomes a beauty thing, the margins get better and the cost goes up. So like Stanley cups. Remember how a year and a half ago Stanley tumblers became viral? They did this massive influencer campaign, but they didn't go to like water influencers. So the way that Stanley cups were positioned before was a blue collar working man would take a Stanley cup to work alongside his like pale.

• 3:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I always saw it as a camping.

• 3:25:40Speaker 04

  It was, and then they went to beauty influencers and grouped it as a wellness product along their wellness and beauty things. So you might pay $10, $15 for like a water bottle to drink water out of, but you would pay nearly infinite dollars for wellness and hydration. So they went to like beauty and wellness influencers who would do like yoga stuff. And then after their workout, they would do like dewy skincare and then they would have like their Stanley thing there the whole time. So you could charge like 5X more.

• 3:26:12David Senra?

  When you.

• 3:26:13Jordi Hays?

  That's very interesting.

• 3:26:14David Senra?

  When you talked about the.

• 3:26:18Speaker 04

  That looks delicious.

• 3:26:19David Senra?

  I love these things. I'm drinking way too much, by the way. So when you talk about like the comps predictions for 2026 and you talk about there's going to be emphasis on beauty, like what is that actually like? What's an example of that?

• 3:26:29Speaker 04

  An example is the basics, like the website looks good, the product looks good, but then the experience is beautiful. The experience feels calm and serene. There are some things where it just feels chaotic and stressful. It's like a beautiful experience, beautiful physical spaces. So physical spaces in general, I think, are going to be a big deal because these are, you know, solid, tangible.

• 3:26:50David Senra?

  Anti-AI.

• 3:26:52Speaker 04

  I don't think it's anti-AI, but we still exist here in meatspace, IRL, in the world of atoms. And so like making beautiful spaces.

• 3:27:01Jordi Hays?

  It's a little rough. It's a little rough. It's a celebration of podcasting.

• 3:27:06Speaker 04

  It's masculine beauty.

• 3:27:07David Senra?

  I feel like I'm in like a spaceship.

• 3:27:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. But it's very intentional.

• 3:27:12Jordi Hays?

  With spaces, how do you coach founders on the value of community events? Because I've gone back and forth on this. Sometimes when like a small company is like, yeah, we're hosting a dinner with like a bunch of founders. I'm like, should you really host a dinner or should you like?

• 3:27:29David Senra?

  Any founder that goes to dinner is not any good.

• 3:27:33Jordi Hays?

  So that's your take. No, no.

• 3:27:37Jordi Hays?

  No, but how do you like?

• 3:27:39David Senra?

  It's all B C layers.

• 3:27:40Jordi Hays?

  How do you understand the value of like community building and IRL community building?

• 3:27:44Speaker 04

  So you have to define the community.

• 3:27:46Jordi Hays?

  If you're going to create beautiful spaces, obviously you want people to, whether they're your team or customers, et cetera.

• 3:27:52Speaker 04

  So one of the other things, themes I think are useful to, one of the other themes that I think is useful to think about for this year is qualitative over quantitative. So last year was very quantitative. It's just like get as many clicks, get as much engagement as possible. This year, I hope that we all think more about, well, who is it and what is it? And so who is in the community? People will say our community and what they mean is anybody with a credit card. And actually it should feel like, well, there are some people who don't belong in this community. Because if it's exclusive, then there's more value. Like you don't want to go to a club, that whatever secret club you went to with Jaco. People don't want to go into a club that anybody can walk into, like, right? You don't want to go to a club that has no bouncer.

• 3:28:33Jordi Hays?

  It's a CrossFit gym just for podcasters.

• 3:28:37John Coogan?

  That's great. Do you think we're actually in a post-rage bait era? Because we, okay.

• 3:28:45Jordi Hays?

  He's mad at the question.

• 3:28:47John Coogan?

  I think we saw, we saw a lot of rage bait.

• 3:28:51Speaker 04

  I think every podcast of this.

• 3:28:52John Coogan?

  And then, and then.

• 3:28:54Jordi Hays?

  They are.

• 3:28:54John Coogan?

  And then, and then Jordy wrote Rage Bait is for losers and it felt, it felt like it did, it did sort of update the valley and VCs to where a VC would kind of say like, oh, this is maybe not the deal I should be doing. They're going to think twice about it. It's a little bit less like handcuffs off, but.

• 3:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, we had Jake Paul, we had Jake Paul on earlier.

• 3:29:12John Coogan?

  It just works and it's human, it's human.

• 3:29:14Jordi Hays?

  He's going to make effectively make a billion dollars from rage baiting, right? Like he's rage baited his way to a hundred million.

• 3:29:21John Coogan?

  Boxing?

• 3:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a hundred million. He, every time he fights now, he makes a hundred million.

• 3:29:24John Coogan?

  But how's that rage bait?

• 3:29:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the entire marketing process is.

• 3:29:27David Senra?

  Everybody's watching just to see him get knocked out.

• 3:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Is, he's, it's, it's the way he shows up. He's like, he wants to be like the most punchable.

• 3:29:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:29:34Jordi Hays?

  He wants to be the guy that people want to see.

• 3:29:35John Coogan?

  It's being the heel, the heel.

• 3:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's the heel.

• 3:29:37John Coogan?

  Sure, okay.

• 3:29:38Jordi Hays?

  But that, so that's like a durable strategy.

• 3:29:40Speaker 04

  But there's something, but there's something underlying that. So underlying that is the heel persona and then the actual punch to the actual face happens. He's actually in the ring. There are people who are, who at least have created things that are just pure rage bait and then when you sweep away the rage bait, there's nothing else there. He's just rage bait all the way, all the way down.

• 3:29:56David Senra?

  You said something interesting that me, John and Jordy talk about off camera all the time, that people are chasing numbers, but it's more important than the numbers. It's like, who is in that number? What does that number represent? So like if you ask John and Jordy, like they're not trying to be like Mr. Beast. They're not trying to get the most views. They said, I don't know.

• 3:30:12John Coogan?

  Quality of audience.

• 3:30:12David Senra?

  I'll just say this publicly. They were like, we want the top 200,000 people in tech and finance and business paying attention to us every single day. Like the best of the best. And if we hit that, they'll get everything they want out of life as opposed to having 20 million, you know, people sitting in Idaho or no offense to your new, um, your new hire over there.

• 3:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Nothing wrong with Idaho. We love Idaho.

• 3:30:31David Senra?

  No, I meant like Idaho sitting on a couch, eating chips or some shit. Like it's just like, that's not, I'm not interested in entertaining that person or educating that person. But like, this is something that, it's fascinating. You brought that, like you, you're bringing it to like the, what's happening in 2026 where it's like, I feel like if you talk to podcasters. Especially like in business, it's like something we've been doing for a long period of time where it's just like you're not just going after views, you're going after actually high quality people and giving them useful information so they can actually like utilize in their day to life.

• 3:31:00Speaker 04

  Like you would not trade one Michael Dell listener for any number of non-Michael Dell listeners, for 500,000, millions, I wouldn't take it.

• 3:31:09Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about, does AI have a narrative problem? Does it have a reality problem? Are we entering the new tech, tech lash, updated tech lash probably?

• 3:31:19John Coogan?

  We talk to Sid and Jedy about this all the time.

• 3:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I, I just think like you can't, you know, we have venture capitalists come on the show and they'll say like, I don't care about margins because we're displacing labor. And I'm like, you gotta rephrase that.

• 3:31:32John Coogan?

  You gotta call it in.

• 3:31:34Jordi Hays?

  You gotta reposition that because you're pissing off everyone. On one hand, you're like, you're, you're saying like, we're burning money.

• 3:31:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Even the investors are unhappy in those cases. David Zedder is like, make some money, make some money.

• 3:31:47Jordi Hays?

  You're excited about, like, you have a, people are, yeah, people are basically like, they're like, no, this is amazing because it's going to create job loss. And it's like.

• 3:31:58Speaker 04

  Well, we're destroying jobs.

• 3:32:01Jordi Hays?

  You gotta figure out a different.

• 3:32:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:32:03Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and I don't even know, you know, again, you can debate on whether or not that's actually going to be true, right? Like you, hundreds of years ago, if you told people like, you're not going to have to work in the field, you're going to have to, you're going to go get your matcha, go to a Pilates class, and then you're going to send three emails, and then you're going to go hump. And that's going to be, you're going to earn a living like that. They'd be like.

• 3:32:21John Coogan?

  Day in the life. Sounds like a good tech guy.

• 3:32:25Speaker 04

  Office cafeteria.

• 3:32:26John Coogan?

  But yeah, the comms issue in AI.

• 3:32:29Jordi Hays?

  And just tech fraudly, there's so much, we just talked to a guy who now has made an AI that is licensed to practice medicine in Utah, right? Should be a huge white pill, right? It's going to be like the cheapest possible way to get access to. What should be quality, quality care.

• 3:32:47John Coogan?

  And also just inconvenient, even if you have the money, you have to go to the doctor, book it, it's a whole thing.

• 3:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:52John Coogan?

  Lowering access is like amazing, but there's a lot of tech leaders who aren't making that case effectively. What do you think?

• 3:32:58Speaker 04

  You know that David Foster Wallace anecdote that he said with the two young fish are swimming? And they come across an older fish and the older fish says, morning boys, how's the, how's the water today? And they said, what's water? AI feels like water to fish now, it's like everywhere, all the time. And so when I see companies try to use having AI as a selling point, it's like bragging that you have cloud storage. Or like, you know, right, like, yes, and, and, and I think there's a lot.

• 3:33:26Jordi Hays?

  Software now in the cloud.

• 3:33:29Speaker 04

  With connected solutions. It, it feels not only just tired and worn out. What is it that Dave Chappelle said about Afghanistan is bombed out and depleted? You know, there's just no more value to come from using the list of AI buzzwords. People are fatigued. So just skip to what is the thing that it actually does? And then prove to me that it actually does do that. And then you're good. And then as for the broader messaging.

• 3:33:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like tech is right now is a heel, right? It's like, yeah, we're gonna automate a bunch of work. And tech has historically played the role of we're connecting the world. We're changing the world.

• 3:34:06John Coogan?

  Or we're just giving you something that delights you.

• 3:34:09Jordi Hays?

  And right now, the tech industry is like unintentionally operating as the heel. So it's like, if you, if you wanna be a heel like Jake Paul and you want people to kind of.

• 3:34:18Speaker 04

  Try to punch you.

• 3:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Want, want, want to see you get punched, that's one thing, but I don't think the tech industry actually wants the entire world to hate it.

• 3:34:25John Coogan?

  No, not at all.

• 3:34:27Speaker 04

  Well, there's a tension between what you wanna say to attract talent? And then what you wanna say to not be hated and maybe get customers? And these people live in different worlds. So the, the, the customers and please don't hate me category of people are not in this tech bubble. Whereas the engineers and technical people you wanna attract very much are. And so sometimes companies feel like, I, I get this question a lot, like, how do we talk to both audiences at the same time? And sometimes what they'll do is they'll say, okay, well, talent matters most of all. We're just gonna talk about how awesome and technical this is and how much money we're all gonna make and how many jobs it'll replace. And then that lives forever and now they have to go encounter normal people and their reputation is.

• 3:35:09Jordi Hays?

  And the old interviews are gonna get pulled up, right? Like, how often do the lab leaders have a comment that they made about like at some like at a less wrong like case and convention like seven years ago comes up today? And it's like, wait, you're trying to sell me AI? You told you were telling people seven years ago that it was gonna kill everyone?

• 3:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:29Jordi Hays?

  How do I square these things?

• 3:35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, the famous quote is Sam Altman, something to the effect of, AI might kill everyone, but in the meantime it will create a lot of profitable businesses. It's like, you're clearly trying to talk to two different audiences in that same sentence. One is like, I'm taking AI doom seriously, which is good, but in one community gets that and likes that. And then another is like, hey, there's economic opportunity here for businesses and startups. And he's kind of put his YC hat on for that one. And it's like, two different messages in one sentence. No, go.

• 3:35:58Speaker 04

  What people miss is that there is overlap in the Venn diagram. So it's not just over here and over here. Like, there's actually some overlap, even if it's just a sliver. So for example, the concept of what makes my own life better, and it's made my life better so much that I want this for other people too, that appeals to talent, that appeals to normal people, or something that is like, okay, in this world where a lot of things are ephemeral or fake or are not making our lives better, I want to make something that is high quality and enduring that I'm proud to one day tell my grandkids about. That's a great message for talent. They don't want to build the next little toy that goes away in six months after raising a bunch of venture money. They want to build the thing that is like an enduring, an enduring artifact of human ingenuity.

• 3:36:43Speaker 04

  And that's the thing that people also want to experience.

• 3:36:46David Senra?

  I think Bezos has the best line of this. He's like, we're trying to build something that we can tell, we can be proud to tell our grandkids about. So if you look at what you're doing, like, through that lens, like, would it be, your grandson's on your lap, you know, 20, 30 years from now, like, would I be proud, like, grandfather did, granddad did this shit? What, you, we were on the phone, you mentioned about the, like, being anti-ephemeral as like something else that you think is gonna happen in 2026. Like, can you say more about that?

• 3:37:11Speaker 04

  I don't know that it'll happen, but it's what I hope will happen and it's what I would encourage founders to try to make happen, which is so much is happening all the time. So I looked up the literal technical definition of white noise and it's basically just maximum intensity at every frequency all together so that it's mushed into this nothingness. And that feels like the information environment that we're in. And the only way to break through the white noise is you don't actually compete on being loud and competing on like temporary intensity is not it. But one normal volume or quieter note that is sustained for a long period of time actually does cut through. The other thing that's cut that cuts through is super personalized and super local things

• 3:37:55Speaker 04

  where someone could only be talking to you. Like if you're at a cocktail party, have you heard of the cocktail party effect? If you're at a cocktail party.

• 3:38:02David Senra?

  I wouldn't be at a cocktail party.

• 3:38:03Speaker 04

  You're at a secret podcaster CrossFit retreat in the ocean before the Venezuela raid. And there's just noise and you can't hear anything. But if somebody says David Senra, by David Senra, then you would hear that because this is like the secret frequency for you.

• 3:38:25David Senra?

  Yeah, people love hearing it on a name.

• 3:38:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, but but people also love hearing the thing that they are feeling and can't express articulated in words that they wish they could have thought of.

• 3:38:34David Senra?

  This is gonna be a random thought that kind of affirms what you just said. I just spent a crazy amount of time reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography and it's kind of crazy, it's 600 pages and he wrote the entire thing by hand. It took him seven years, he wrote it like out longhand multiple times. But he said something that I feel the reasons, one of the reasons people listen to founders is very similar to why he says people go to his concerts. He's like, people aren't coming to my concerts to learn something new. They're coming to to remember something that they know is that they already know is true. To be reminded, sorry, to be reminded of what they already know is true. He was very powerful.

• 3:39:12Speaker 04

  There are not that many new truths in the world.

• 3:39:14David Senra?

  Play the hits.

• 3:39:16Speaker 04

  Play the hits. There's a few eternal truths that resonate to all humans from the dawn of civilization.

• 3:39:23David Senra?

  I need to put like faces on these ideas though. So like who else is doing comms the way that you would recommend? Like who do you just think is doing, the founders are doing the best at this? Are they just literally your fucking all your clients? Just like go to.

• 3:39:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, part of it, part of it is your selective about the clients you work with. So you can, you have the luxury of being like, well, I only want to work with people that I think can be great because I am going to be limited in my ability to provide a great service by how great like somebody like Augustus, like fresh out of college, you can tell from the first conversation with him that he has a potential to be a Joe Rogan CEO, right? Like that is just something within him, right? And you can identify that pretty quickly. At least I personally can clock that in like a 15 minute interview. If somebody's going to actually, if somebody's like well suited to be

• 3:40:19Jordi Hays?

  the kind of going direct CEO, that kind of thing. But there's different, again, there's different archetypes that work for different people.

• 3:40:24Speaker 04

  Augustus is amazing. He does his own stuff. Like he's had these huge, high profile interviews. He just sets it up.

• 3:40:32Speaker 04

  I have a couple Augustus stories that I think are so emblematic of how he does these things. One is the first time we ever met was after this founder, after like a founders fund event and everybody had this huge sushi dinner. And then the next morning, which was eight hours from the time the dinner had concluded, he texts me, he's like, want a lift?

• 3:40:55Speaker 04

  But the second thing is there was this incoming potential hit piece about how. It was about how

• 3:41:03Jordi Hays?

  He liked lifting.

• 3:41:04Speaker 04

  was too male dominated. You know, there was some reporter that was still stuck in 2019, wanted to write an article about like, there's not enough female representation in the gundo. And he texted to me and he's like, gotta go consult with the boys. So he goes and consults with the boys. And he's like, alright, we're, we're ready to deal with this. What should we do? And I said, well, I think you should just talk to her. And he said, has anybody ever tried just being hot and charming? I actually think, no, it hasn't really been tried. You should go try it.

• 3:41:31David Senra?

  Do you want to know? Do you want to know the advice I gave Augustus?

• 3:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Didn't that work with Shkreli too? Martin Shkreli? Didn't he like?

• 3:41:38Speaker 04

  Really worked.

• 3:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Didn't he rise up like journalist?

• 3:41:40Speaker 04

  Oh, god damn. We were ending her marriage and then she wrote a book about it. She left her husband.

• 3:41:45David Senra?

  That's great.

• 3:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Alpha widow.

• 3:41:47David Senra?

  Guess, guess the advice I gave him? You need to spend more time with these older entrepreneurs. I swear to god. Cause he's like, well, me and my boys are killing it. I go, listen, listen man, like, I like you, you're a nice kid. There's a hundred fucking companies there. Five are gonna be here five years from now. Like, they're all dead, they don't even know it. Like, you're just, you, you don't know what you don't know because you're so goddamn young. I go, go spend time with older entrepreneurs. I just promise, like, still hang out with the young guys, still do whatever you're doing. It's like, just talk to somebody that actually survived, was successful and survived for half a century.

• 3:42:16Jordi Hays?

  This is good. You're gonna bait the gundo into having a hundred percent success rate. We're not gonna let this podcaster come over from Miami and say that only five of us are.

• 3:42:27Speaker 04

  That's true. That is how they operate.

• 3:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is good. This is, I can see what you're doing.

• 3:42:31David Senra?

  No, it's all startups. It's not just that. It has nothing to do with their, their, wherever they happen to be geographically concentrated. It's just, most of them are all dead. And that's the point. Just like, you're, you're paying attention. This goes.

• 3:42:40Speaker 04

  Building during things.

• 3:42:41David Senra?

  Exactly. I'm anti ephemeral. I am succeed today, tomorrow, five years from now, 10 years from now, 40 years from now. Like, that's, I think, the important thing.

• 3:42:48Speaker 04

  I'm scared. You told me that I, I, I introduce a lot of people to you. I'm scared to introduce someone to him who hasn't been in business for like 10 years and made billions of dollars. Because he's not being that.

• 3:42:57David Senra?

  No, I will.

• 3:42:58Speaker 04

  He's like, follow me when you're a billionaire.

• 3:42:59David Senra?

  No, that's not true.

• 3:43:02David Senra?

  Kind of. Um, no, I, I, I've been doing a bad job of just hanging out with all the older entrepreneurs because this is what I happen to be interested in. That one? And, no, because you've just learned. Dude, I, I told this story recently. It's like, I spent, um, I'm part of the thing about differentiation, which is why I love Dyson. And I think we talk, me and you, we talk about this all the time. Podcasters don't think about differentiation. So I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm going to grab some interesting podcast guests that I know are really good. But I also want to convince people that don't do podcasts at all to come on. And I've spent a lot of time doing this and they, it takes a long time. Oh, he's got, he's getting it. You saw that? Yeah, I didn't curse. Almost. Um, and so, and so I talked to one guy. He's 71 years old. He worked in his company for 50 years. He just sold it for $50 billion.

• 3:43:44David Senra?

  And I spent an hour with him in New York. And the information he transferred to me in an hour, it's just like, it's, it's crazy how much information like that could happen. So I, what I have to do a better job of like taking that information. I mean, I guess the podcast, no, I don't have to do a better job of this. I do this on the podcast. Just listen to the podcast. Like take the generation, uh, the information from the old guys and push it to the young ones. You just gotta listen. I want to go back to this though, because I'm still not getting what I want.

• 3:44:06Speaker 04

  Who's doing well?

• 3:44:07David Senra?

  I, I loved your Pirate Wires piece that came out, I think yesterday or the day before. Is it literally just comes down to this last paragraph, like the people who are really going to stand out are the people who are willing to be candid and truthful?

• 3:44:16Speaker 04

  Yes. So, um,

• 3:44:18John Coogan?

  Wow. Agree with Jake Paul. That was his number one advice for creators in 2026. It's very similar.

• 3:44:23Speaker 04

  You, me, Jake Paul.

• 3:44:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, I feel like when people are, like, the, the idea of authenticity is important. People have just heard that so much it means nothing anymore. It's just like, yeah, it's important. But then they don't actually go and practice it.

• 3:44:36Speaker 04

  Can I tell you a secret?

• 3:44:37David Senra?

  Why don't you think they practice it?

• 3:44:39Jordi Hays?

  I think people are,

• 3:44:40Speaker 04

  They're scared. They're scared. And they're getting gaslit.

• 3:44:43David Senra?

  They don't love themselves.

• 3:44:45Speaker 04

  What, why'd you have to take it to another level like that?

• 3:44:47David Senra?

  Because that's all, it's the stuff that's important. It's like, I'm looking for what's real in the noise. No, I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people,

• 3:44:53Speaker 04

  They're getting gaslit from the outside.

• 3:44:54David Senra?

  A lot of people are so terrified of what other people think about them. They have low self-esteem. I, I had this argument on with, uh, most people think entrepreneurs are like too arrogant. And I say the opposite. And I was just like, we have so, we could have so many more entrepreneurs. We don't have an epidemic of overconfidence. We have an epidemic of humbleness. We have, no, we have an epidemic.

• 3:45:10Speaker 04

  America's do-humbleness.

• 3:45:11David Senra?

  Be more hubris.

• 3:45:13Speaker 04

  Number one humble.

• 3:45:14David Senra?

  We have an epidemic of people that don't believe in themselves enough.

• 3:45:16Speaker 04

  Which is why they let themselves get gaslit. So the secret, okay, so, so, um, I'll, I'll give you a little bit of a roundabout answer because you asked, who does this really well? Eric and Kareem.

• 3:45:27David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:28Speaker 04

  Were greats.

• 3:45:29David Senra?

  What company were they?

• 3:45:30Speaker 04

  Before I met them.

• 3:45:31David Senra?

  What companies?

• 3:45:32Speaker 04

  Time and funny, Time is Money, save both. They were great.

• 3:45:35David Senra?

  Do I have a ramp shirt on? No, oh, god damn.

• 3:45:38Speaker 04

  We're on it, we're live, this is why. They were great before I ever met them.

• 3:45:43David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:44Speaker 04

  And if I had never met them, they would just continue to be great. And when we talk and brainstorm, a lot of these, it's not like they want to do nothing, or they want to do something that sucks, and I'm like, no, you should do something that's good, and they take that away. They have the fire, the ideas, there's a million things that they want to do, and sometimes it's helpful to have somebody bounce that with you and say like, even if this is not normal, do it anyway. Right? A lot of times, um.

• 3:46:12David Senra?

  You've got a little like Rick Rubin in you. Has anybody ever told you that?

• 3:46:15Speaker 04

  Is it the beard?

• 3:46:16David Senra?

  No. I'm stuck in this edit from hell for like fifteen hours. That damn episode's only gonna be like forty minutes long, but I've kind of messed it up. Um, and so I'm like, I've been inside of his brain for a while. Um, and I also listened, re-listened to the old episodes I did on him. I really admire, like, do you remember when I text you, I was like, dude, or I didn't say dude, I was like, I want you to do the new show. Do you remember what you, how you responded? You said, you're crazy. And I was, because I was like, no, I'm serious. No, I was like, I'm serious.

• 3:46:44Speaker 04

  Oh, I said, I said, David, are you out of your mind?

• 3:46:47David Senra?

  Yes.

• 3:46:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:46:48David Senra?

  And then you hit me with a meme. Do you remember the meme you sent? Have you ever seen this meme?

• 3:46:52Speaker 04

  I remember anything past yesterday.

• 3:46:53David Senra?

  It's like, oh my god.

• 3:46:54Speaker 04

  Oh, is it Big Bird at the table?

• 3:46:55David Senra?

  Yes.

• 3:46:55Speaker 04

  I sent them the Big Bird at the table.

• 3:46:57David Senra?

  And so it's like, Lulu's Big Bird, and you have like Daniel Ek or Brad Jacobs on the, on the other ones. I'm very fascinated and kind of obsessed with people that have singular careers, and that's what I told you, it's like, you are, you're literally like, people, I don't even know how to say your last name. I have no idea how to pronounce it. Because I don't even hear it, I don't even ever hear it, it's just Lulu. You have a very singular career.

• 3:47:17Speaker 04

  I've only seen it in writing.

• 3:47:18David Senra?

  But the stuff here that's coming out of your mouth is very strange to me, because it sounds like I'm hearing Rick Rubin, which, like, he, there's a, you should read his book, The Creative.

• 3:47:27Speaker 04

  I have, it's great.

• 3:47:28David Senra?

  Oh yeah, there's a lot of, like, you got a lot of Rick Rubin.

• 3:47:30Speaker 04

  But sometimes you just give people permission to do the thing that they would have liked to do.

• 3:47:34David Senra?

  That sounds like Rick Rubin.

• 3:47:35Speaker 04

  That the world is telling them is not normal and they shouldn't do it.

• 3:47:38David Senra?

  Yes, and his whole thing is about listening without judgment. And just like, you go into this idea where like, the world is way more complex and you, we tell stories about the world, but we don't actually understand what's going on, right? And so his whole point was just like, stop overanalyzing, stop overthinking, like, try it and then see what happens and see how it feels. And he basically goes off a lot of intuition and he thinks like the, essentially, I'm not gonna speak for him, but I highly suspect that he thinks the truest human wisdom is actually in like, from the subconscious. Not from like, the rational, like, part of our brain or the, even the storytelling part of our brain.

• 3:48:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, which suppresses the good part.

• 3:48:12David Senra?

  But again, he does a great job too, because like, obviously, he went direct, he has his own podcast, but when he goes on other people's podcasts, it's not like, oh, who's this, he's the same person everywhere he goes, which goes back to your importance of consistency. John, don't even try to end the show.

• 3:48:25John Coogan?

  We gotta hop on with Munich, sorry.

• 3:48:27David Senra?

  I can feel the body language as soon as you do this.

• 3:48:31John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 3:48:32Speaker 04

  But that's the mark of a good podcaster.

• 3:48:34John Coogan?

  It's been a fantastic show today.

• 3:48:36Jordi Hays?

  We almost made it to the fifth hour.

• 3:48:38John Coogan?

  We almost did.

• 3:48:38David Senra?

  How long has it been?

• 3:48:39John Coogan?

  We do, we do have to hop on with Munich in just a few minutes. And we'd love to have you back on the show, many times this year.

• 3:48:47Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a great year.

• 3:48:48John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a fantastic.

• 3:48:49Jordi Hays?

  Thank you both for coming on.

• 3:48:50Speaker 04

  Cheers to the year, thank you guys.

• 3:48:51Jordi Hays?

  David just had, he just had to get one more podcast in for the day. He's got a true addict.

• 3:48:57John Coogan?

  Thank you everyone for listening to TVP on today. We will be back at 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow.

• 3:49:03Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in. Cheers.

• 3:49:04John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:49:05David Senra?

  The four of us need.