xAI’s $20B Raise, Semafor’s $30M Round, America’s Tech Decline | Ravi Gupta & Pat Grady, Vincenzo Landino, Nigel Vaz, Ben Smith, Jacob Rintamaki

(00:32) - xAI's $20B Series E (13:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (25:34) - Semafor's $30M Funding (31:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (53:37) - The Decline of the American Technology Industry (01:10:07) - Boston Biotech Bubble Bursts (01:14:46) - OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Health (01:27:36) - Vincenzo Landino, founder and managing director of Business of Speed, a motorsport-focused marketing consultancy, discusses his lifelong passion for racing, stemming from his Italian heritage and early exposure to motorsports. He highlights the significant growth in Formula 1's popularity in the United States, attributing it to strategic content initiatives like Netflix's "Drive to Survive" and ESPN's coverage, which have attracted new fans and increased team valuations. Landino also explores the evolving landscape of motorsport investments, noting the rising interest from tech companies and the substantial financial commitments required to enter the sport, emphasizing the unique networking and branding opportunities that ownership and sponsorship in Formula 1 provide. (02:00:51) - Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient, a digital business transformation company, discusses the challenges enterprises face in scaling AI initiatives beyond initial pilots, emphasizing the need for integrated toolchains and data strategies to achieve meaningful transformation. He highlights the importance of leveraging first-party data to enhance customer experiences and drive growth, citing examples from industries like automotive and healthcare. Vaz also addresses the role of AI in advertising, noting the potential for personalized content and the necessity of aligning creative processes with regulatory requirements across different markets. (02:19:23) - Ravi Gupta, a Partner at Sequoia Capital and former COO and CFO of Instacart, announced his plans to start a new company while maintaining his role at Sequoia. He emphasized the transformative impact of AI on industries and the importance of agility and responsiveness for companies to remain competitive. Gupta also highlighted the significance of assembling a strong team and leveraging network effects to build enduring businesses in the rapidly evolving technological landscape. Pat Grady is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he focuses on early-stage investments in software, fintech, and internet companies. He’s known for working closely with founders on company-building, product strategy, and scaling from zero to one. (02:45:09) - Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, discusses the profitability of his media startup, emphasizing the importance of delivering trusted, high-quality journalism to an informed audience. He highlights the challenges in the media industry, noting that many newsrooms have added events businesses to compensate for declining web advertising revenues. Smith also shares plans to hire more journalists and expand Semafor's convening business, including hosting a major event in Washington, D. C., in April. (02:58:57) - Jacob Rintamaki, a robotics expert, discusses the rapid advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence, emphasizing their transformative impact on various industries, particularly data centers. He highlights the swift pace of these developments, noting that tasks like server maintenance and cable management are increasingly automated, leading to enhanced efficiency and reduced human intervention. Rintamaki also touches on the broader societal implications, suggesting that as automation becomes more prevalent, industries must adapt to these changes to remain competitive. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Altrudome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We have some great posters, Ara Karasian in the stack today. He's been doing some fantastic analysis on the economy, employment, AI adoption, all this fun stuff. But speaking of AI adoption, is anyone adopting XAI? Certainly investors are because they got $20 billion in the bank now. Seriously, we talked about it yesterday, but I wanted to reflect on it because there

• 0:41John Coogan?

  were rumors that they weren't going to get this one done, that the initial back in November.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  They were having a little more, a little, a little kind of trouble getting enough interest.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  It felt like that.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and again, these, these were just rumors. But, but when you looked at XAI's traction relative to their valuation at the time, they were, they were looking for a, a greater valuation than Anthropic.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  And yet the enterprise adoption certainly didn't justify it by itself.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were, there were, there were lots of weird questions. Before we dig into XAI, let's take you through the linear lineup today. We got a bunch of great guests. We got Pat Grady and Ravi Gupta from Sequoia coming on. Ben Smith's back with $30 million for Semaphore. Massive news there. We got a bunch of other folks joining. Linear, of course, meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. So the rumor back in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that XAI was out raising $15 billion in new equity at a $230 billion valuation and people were skeptical. XAI had accomplished a lot in a very short amount of time. No one would argue with that. They definitely caught up.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  The benchmarks were good. The data centers were massive and they were being completed in record time. That's what Elon's really, really good at. But there was a big question about the product and where it was going. It had some useful hooks and some extremely controversial hallucinations, right? But in general, like I did find myself using Grok. Certainly monthly, probably weekly, I would just hit the little Grok button on a post and get some extra details and then just be chatting there because I didn't want to copy the post and go over to some other LLM and ask about it. So like, they were getting some adoption, but.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  And even in the last forty eight hours, Grok has gone a little bit off the rails.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Not the first.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  But the thing is, you have millions of people that are trying to manipulate it into doing things. It does have guardrails.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  But Grok's challenge is that.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  You can ask it to create images.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  And certainly, yeah, again, some of these images have been pretty wild and have gotten deleted pretty quickly.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  But it is a fully automated system.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  And I believe if any other lab had had a bot that was doing this, it would be happening to all the other labs, right? So this is a thing that I don't think it's a Grok problem as much as it is just the nature of the product experience, which is you can just prompt it via comments and it's all public and it actually gets, it's just crazy to see a lab posting images like that from their own official account.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  If we had sat down and done like prediction, what lab's going to be in hot water for controversial AI content in January, we both would have agreed, OpenAI, adult mode. It's coming out, they teased it, we, EG said it was coming out. And then we get this and it makes whatever erotica is going to come out of OpenAI is probably not going to be as controversial as what's happening with Grok right now, right?

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  And, and people will be less likely to even share, you know, want OpenAI won't, like, part of the reason these images are especially controversial is because it's being shared from the official Grok account.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  From the official Grok account, which gives it more authority. And then also, there's a whole host of anons on X that can generate this stuff. Whereas if I go into OpenAI, ChatGPT, and I generate some weird.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  And you jailbreak it and you screenshot it, it's like, okay, like.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  You're weird. That's on you.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're racist. You seem racist.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. You know, I love talking about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Even though Grok and XAI hit a bunch of interesting milestones, did a bunch of great stuff, they didn't really have a breakout in consumer the way ChatGPT and Gemini did. And they weren't making waves with developers the way Claude Code or Cursor were either. And all of that made the rumors of a struggle to raise more believable. But I have this thesis, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. Elon has posted this many times. He clearly believes it. In different contexts. And he seems to be manifesting it. And it seems to be the most ridiculous vibes-based analysis that actually comes true again and again and again. So I wanted to go through some of the hilarious entertaining outcomes that have arisen from

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Elon Musk's tour de force over the past decades. So I think a lot of people believe that maybe this raise wouldn't happen. But once there were rumors that they'd get rolled into SpaceX, you get SpaceX stock, that there would be some sort of other thing, and just Elon going to make a play, that it would get done. And so instead, you know, we are going to be endlessly entertained by the assembly of the ever larger Elon Inc. mega corp, in my opinion. So XAI, winning the AI race feels like the wrong framing here. I like Dan Wong's formulation of the AI future versus the AI race. There's not some definite point in the future where, oh, like, the consumer chatbot race is over.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  It's like you can always build a business and figure out how to grow and scale. And the same thing might be true on the API side and on the cloud side. And that might wind up just being a economic equation. And if you have the cheapest possible energy from space, maybe in the future, it could make sense, even if you're not in the most frontier model, there's some interesting thing there. There's certainly plenty of bull cases. So Elon has a long history of making wild calls that immediately read as dumb or impossible, mostly because he puts very short timelines on everything, and then he also tends to get pricing wrong sometimes. But they never actually blow up, or I mean, sometimes they do, but rarely they do.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  So even in the SolarCity acquisition, I was looking back on this. SolarCity acquisition, it was widely panned as a bailout when it happened. The shareholders, Tesla shareholders were not a fan because it was this Elon Musk company that didn't seem to be doing very well. It gets tucked in and everyone's like, oh, well, it's SolarCity. Like the residential solar hasn't really taken off. SolarCity is a failure, but Tesla actually built a real power wall and grid scale storage business. And a lot of the battery technology sort of did come from that team. So that oddly penciled out. And also just in the long term, Elon's still a solar maxi. I was listening to him on a podcast yesterday. He sat down with Peter Diamandis for a three hour, really wide ranging conversation.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  And in there, he can quote all these obscure statistics about the sun generating 99% of the mass in the galaxy. And even if you burnt Jupiter and then burnt three more Jupiters, you still would not even be at 1% of the overall energy that the sun produces. So he clearly just from first principles, believes in solar, believes in energy. And so having a solar strategy makes sense, even if it's not playing a huge role right now. So no one delivers more entertaining outcomes than Elon. No one delivers more entertaining, emotional, real time, intelligent conversational agents than 11 Labs. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs, the maker of our theme song, which we've been enjoying.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  So throwing out $420 per share for a theoretical take private of Tesla, then getting sued by the SEC and then blowing past that price is still one of the most entertaining corporate finance sagas in tech history. So in 2018, when Elon pitched the funding secured take private, I think we've sort of forgotten because a lot of our audience doesn't think in stock prices. Like the scale of that, of like what he was trying to do at that time. So at that time Tesla was worth $64 billion and he was proposing to take it private at $71 billion. It's worth 1.44 trillion today. So the stock is up 22X since that take private thing.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  So like, I don't know if it would have been a great, it probably would have been an amazing deal for those investors, but maybe those investors, like I don't even know who was lined up because he said funding secured. Presumably someone was like, yeah, I'm good for the 71 billion. Roughly, or part of it, or there'll be bank financing or something, but that didn't happen. Obviously Tesla went on a huge run. Who knows what it would have done in the private markets.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  But still, you know, it seemed super crazy at the time, but in fact, it came, it panned out very well. And so, the most entertaining outcome of this fundraise was clearly that XAI would get the deal done, and they did that. And they upsized the route, because they got 20 billion when they were rumored to be raising 15 in Series A funding. And interestingly, that's almost twice the amount of money that SpaceX has raised in its entire history.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  Lifetime.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  So SpaceX has done 31 funding rounds. A lot of those have been secondary transactions, but 31 funding rounds to raise 12 billion. XAI just goes out and raises 20 in one round. And so there's an interesting dynamic if they get, if they get rolled together about like what the balance sheet of this new entity looks like, because they'll have this new 20 billion. But then SpaceX also put 2 billion into the previous round. So there's all this like circular deal going on. But people are used to this with Elon. It's Elon Inc. And so the question, is XAI overvalued? Well, what's the most entertaining outcome? Clearly, that would be the Elon Inc. mega corp forming. SpaceX acquires XAI before going public, which is easier to do than rolling it into Tesla, which is public, and would face a bunch of

• 10:15John Coogan?

  scrutiny. And that gives us a very entertaining situation. Just think about Twitter, which launched in 2006, being owned by SpaceX, founded in 2002.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  Being able to own Twitter and SpaceX in a single ticker.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Hilarious. Hilarious. It's just, it's just the most entertaining outcome. I would love to ask Jack Dorsey if he ever imagined Twitter being owned by a rocket company. Like that's, like, if you went back in time, even in 2010, 2012, even just a few years ago, and you were like, what if Twitter and SpaceX merged? What are you talking about?

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Lay off the ayahuasca, buddy.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  Seriously. Yeah, maybe Jack Dorsey is actually like, I

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  I did imagine that.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Imagined it on day one.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  A jungle demon told me about.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I foresaw it all. But then the question is like, is there going to be the big merger? SpaceX with XAI and Twitter tucked in, plus Tesla. That would be very, very weird. Who knows how or when that happens, but it would certainly be entertaining to watch and you'd wind up with this fully vertically integrated company. AI chip design.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  You'd create some efficiency too. Elon would only need one badge, right?

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Oh, true.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Which could.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Huge, huge productivity boost.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, huge productivity. He probably has to have a full-time badge guy, right?

• 11:26John Coogan?

  For all the different companies. So you have, you have AI chip design, which is done at Tesla. Running models trained by XAI, deployed on Starlink satellites, launched on SpaceX rockets.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  Rock running in, Optimus robots.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The stock chart will be as entertaining as the hallucinations that happen along the way was my conclusion. Anyway, it's a fun story. There's a whole bunch of posts in the timeline that we'll go through to give this more context. But first, let me tell you about cognition, the, and Devin, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  Elon Musk says that XAI will have more AI compute than everyone else combined in less than five years. And he's building Macro Hard, which now has a, a.

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  That is a bold statement.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  It's a bold statement. He certainly has, you know, marshaled a lot of the capital. He doesn't have all of it. He's not as much of a capital sponge as Sam Altman at this moment.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  This is an actual satellite image, correct?

• 12:26John Coogan?

  No, they really painted this on the top of the data center and it's the answer to Microsoft.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  I love that. I, I appreciate that about Elon Inc. companies where they're trying to move so quickly and, and the entire ethos is around ruthless efficiency. And yet they still think it's worth the time to paint the ceiling of the data center so that you can see it from space. Very, very funny. XAI has also bought a third building called Macro Harder. We'll take-

• 12:58John Coogan?

  Is this a typo?

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, it's all a joke on Microsoft.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Microsoft, I guess.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  And we'll take XAI training computer to almost 2 gigawatts. And Grok responding, impressive expansion. 2 gigawatt will supercharge our quest for understanding the universe.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Did that just happen autonomously because Elon tagged Grok? If you tag Grok, even if you don't ask it a question, it'll just chime in? That's kind of interesting. Maybe we should be tagging Grok when we go live to like, just have it engage.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  More news here on Jan 1st. An account called Ming said, "Good news, a mass production audit for Tesla's Optimus V3 has been completed and seven Chinese companies have been finalized as core suppliers. Operating as tier one partners, these firms will manufacture critical components and support key assembly processes. The supply chain is geared to kickstart mass production in Q1 2026, targeting a capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 units by the end of the year."

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  And then they go through some of the suppliers here. Scott asked the question that I was asking. You remember when Tesla had placed an order for, I think it was 750 million worth of actuators last year?

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  And I was thinking like, that's not the kind of like order that you do if you're not planning to sell a lot of these. Like, it's pretty, you know, even at Tesla's scale is not an insignificant amount of money. And so, yeah, Scott is asking, "Does this mean Butler-ready robots with some sort of intelligence we have not seen will be ready by then?" And again, it's like, I imagine Elon would be excited about doing like some type of like shock and awe announcement. But at the same time, I feel like he also likes teasing stuff and like pretty far in advance. And so, if he's planning to be selling- A hundred thousand units this year of the Optimus.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  It's a lot.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  You would imagine that we were, we would have been like hearing about it and seeing some more demos and getting teased. But again, hard, hard to say. But yeah, it still feels like we need some type of like meaningful.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Breakthrough before these are going to be, maybe there's a hundred thousand people. That have absolutely printed on Tesla. They're just gonna be like, I'll just buy one, you know, I'm just ride or die. Right, but that's a big, big number, especially when you're talking about, you know, I, I expect these to cost somewhere in the range of what? Fifty thousand to.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  Fifty thousand plus.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  How much is the dog from Boston Dynamics? Isn't that one? I mean, the unitry is.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  The unitry, which you can, I would assume is at least half the price.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  The cheapest unitry on, uh, that you can get in the US is like twenty grand.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Oh, it's twenty? Okay.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  It's only one spot. The Boston Dynamics dog is seventy-five.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Oof.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  But, but that's, that's real. That was from twenty twenty.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Hyundai, you gotta figure it out.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  You can get a real dog that's a purebred Newfoundland for five K or something, or two K. I don't know.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you want twenty real elite dogs or one robot dog?

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Clearly the, the real dogs, for sure.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  We should, um, we should ask Jake about this later.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's coming on.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it is weird because like I, I think as, as the frontier, I think it, um, physical intelligence is like on the frontier of like the actual software.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  And even like their most advanced demos that they're just coming out with like this past month. It's very simple. There's like two arms.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  They have like one claw.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  And it can generalize pretty well from that, but it's still like, that's orders of magnitude less, uh, you know, degrees of freedom or, or whatever, like actuators than.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Than like Optimus robot.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI super gear for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. I was listening to George Hots talk about, uh, the Optimus robot and he was setting timelines further out. He was sort of saying like the humanoid robot thing will happen more like in a decade. Um, and he was, he was, uh. He was projecting out some some exponential growth, but still saying it's going to take a while. But he was saying that it's a great project for Tesla because you can put the optimists in all their showrooms. And those are really big draws for people. You go in, you see the robot, even if it's like on some pre-scheduled,

• 17:18John Coogan?

  you know, hardcoded, you know, routine, it's doing like a choreographed dance or it's hell operated. Whatever it is, it's it's like a great awe inspiring thing to just pull you into the random Tesla showroom. But there's only 300 Tesla showrooms. So like, okay, maybe you need a thousand.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, do you think that, that, that post from Denny's on X earlier was maybe

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Who was that one?

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  In response to seeing some of this optimist news?

• 17:43John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  They said, the trough is open, piggies.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe this is teasing that they're going to get some optimists, you know?

• 17:52John Coogan?

  It seems like it's, it's teasing an AI generated vertical video feed from Denny's. They gotta get in the social networking space.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Having, having a fast food restaurant make a short form video app and it's just AI slop of their food.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  That'd be really good.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  Activation you could probably build that.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  I mean, we're supposed to be going into the Timu SaaS era, Shein, fast fashion for SaaS is what Sam Altman called it. And so you would think that someone at Denny's could vibe code a vertical video app in a weekend and deploy it as a prank.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Fast fashion or SaaS is going fast fashion. Maybe fast fashion needs to go.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Fast food.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  Find SaaS.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  I don't know. Apple of it. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  What else?

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here of the Razor.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Aka? Okay, this, wait, did you mention this yesterday? You talked about Razor doing something.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  We needed to pull it up because.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  What is this video? This is powered by Grok. No way. Here we go. Looks like it can directly see what's on your monitor and respond to what you're doing. Sort of a Tamagotchi. Oh, and it's, it's, it's basically just taking the, the Grok video generator and removing the background and then just putting it in some sort of holographic screen. This is interesting. I, I personally would not pick this character, but there's something about

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  I would pick like

• 19:24John Coogan?

  playing Counter-Strike and having

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  if we could get Tyler in one of these things.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  a CS coach there.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  If we could get Tyler in one of these things and just bring a mini Tyler.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  That's very Black Mirror. Put them in the snow globe. Wasn't that one of the Black Mirror episodes? Snow globe? Yeah. Um, I, I, I don't know. You're, you're playing League of Legends and you have your League of Legends coach there and the League of Legends coach is, is giving you advice and answering questions for you in real time. That's pretty cool. I think there's something there.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  I can see them selling a lot of these.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  How much do you think this is?

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if it's good for the world.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  I, I, I wonder, I wonder how much this costs because, uh, as a hundred dollar gaming peripheral, it's sort of like a fun little add-on toy gift. Uh, at, you know, $500, I think it's a completely different question. Uh, some, 2.6 is calling it the Goon Cylinder.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Goon Tube.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Ridiculous, the Goon Tube.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  So they're not selling these yet, but they do have a reservation page.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  So, uh, there's Razor Ava, Project Ava, your all-in-one AI companion from planning your day to analyzing spreadsheet when game starts. Project Ava, uh, they're like, co-pilot? No thanks. Uh, leverages AI inferencing and reasoning that dynamically evolves based on your personal interactions. Select your 5.5 inch companion from an expanding library of characters from esports legends to custom anime and Spider, Razor designs. Be among the first to, uh, to sign up for Razor Project Ava at release. And Nick Dobos says they are going to make a billion dollars LMAO.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  This makes me want to touch grass personally. I, yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  This would be cool as almost a, um,

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  It's like the on the Apple Vision Pro.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  When you FaceTime someone.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  It has like the 3D rendering of their face.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  If you could like, when you're FaceTiming someone, they're just in the tube.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, you.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  That'd be cool, right?

• 21:13John Coogan?

  You could also, I mean, you really could, you really could fine tune a model on everything.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, am I in the tube right now? Be honest.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  I mean, we could clone your voice at 11 Labs, clone your, clone your like, your likeness, fine tune a model and have it just be running locally and have this like captured version of Tyler in the tube. Very weird, but it's gonna happen.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Little tie in the tube.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I, I do think that there's something, I, I don't know. Will this, will they make a billion dollars on this? Well, how much, how much money does, does Razer actually make? Razer revenue? Do they make billions? 1.6 billion in 2021?

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Not bad.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  So billion, a bi- a billion, says Nick. One billion. So is this enough to double their revenue? I don't know. Uh, but it does seem like it could be, it could be an interesting gift. Gary Tan likes the idea. He says gamers are an incredible first customer. I agree with that. They have a lot of disposable income and, uh, and gamers, I mean, they spend $50 on a game or it's a free to play game and then they play it for hundreds of hours. So, um, it's, it, it's, it's unless they're playing something that's, uh, you know, sort of pay to win or pay consistently. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedded models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  So somebody just texted me that we should put one of our guests today in the tube.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  In the tube?

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  We'll try, we'll try.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  I, I think we have to buy one of those. I, I was thinking, we don't have enough hardware around here. We don't have enough consumer hardware.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Thinking about the, I mean, holographic displays probably underrated in a world where you can have a big holograph here and somebody can be like around the table having a conversation with us.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Really cool, really cool.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Not, we're not looking at a monitor.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be pretty wild.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, can you just scale up that tube?

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  But then at one point, then why, why not just wear a headset?

• 23:02John Coogan?

  I mean, there's something nice about not having glasses on your face.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  You know, it's, it's, it's, it's LASIK for VR, I guess. You just take off the glasses and you just sit there talking to the thing. I really wonder from a physics perspective if it's, if it's possible to, to scale that up huge. Anyway, back to Elon Musk. He was texting Sam Altman two years ago on February 18th, 2023. Sam says, I remember you, I remember seeing you in a TV interview a long time ago, maybe 60 minutes. It was 60 minutes about SpaceX where you were being attacked by some guys and you said they were your heroes. They were heroes of yours and it was really tough. This was a NASA astronaut who said that SpaceX would not work. Need to check in on that guy.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  Wellness check.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  And Sam goes on to say, well, you're my hero and that's what it feels like when you attack OpenAI. Totally get that we have some screwed up stuff, but we have worked incredibly hard to do the right thing. And I think we have ensured that neither Google nor anyone else is on a path to have unilateral control over AGI, which I believe we both think is critical. I am tremendously thankful for everything you've done to help. I don't think OpenAI would have happened without you and it really effing hurts when you publicly attack OpenAI. And Elon says, I hear you and it's certainly not my intention to be hurtful for which I apologize. But the fate of civilization is at stake. So some drama going back and forth with them, but.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, next time someone is suing you and very mad at you.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Copy paste this.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Copy paste this, tell them you're their hero.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  And maybe it gets you a little ground.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  I have some breaking news.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Hit me.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Uh, well, it's not actually that breaking, I think, but it came out today in the Wall Street Journal. They're saying Anthropic is raising 10 billion at 350. I mean, I've heard the 350 number for like.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  A while.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  A while. So I don't think this is really like brand new.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Okay, but that's exciting.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, but more, more advanced talks.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Are you chasing a slug?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I'm looking, yeah, I'm, I think I'm in some kind of.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Triple layer SPV.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  There's like four or five.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  You're in the fifth layer.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Deploy, deploy Claude code. Anyway, speaking of the AI race, Gemini three pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, you gotta try it. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Emily Sundberg says if media companies are valued at 165 times EBITDA, then I have some calls to make.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  This is on the news that Semaphore raised $30 million. We will save the gong ring for when Ben Smith joins us in just a little bit. But this is massive news. This is very exciting. I'm very interested to hear what they're going to do with the money, how the business will change. Semaphore is obviously built a fantastic, you know, publication, but does, do they just want to do more of the same? Are they expanding? Are they diversifying? Where will they go? They do a lot of events.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Apparently they had their first profitable year last year.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  That's great. Semaphore. That's the EBITDA.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  And we know exactly what it is, just from this Emily Sundberg tweet.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, a lot of, a lot of interesting investors in.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Yes, they made $2 million in EBITDA.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  In the round.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Right? Because they did, the valuation was 330, so 165x EBITDA puts it at 2 million in EBITDA. But congrats to them.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  What did, roughly twice what Free Press was, was acquired for? Was the Free Press 100? Where did it actually end up landing?

• 26:34John Coogan?

  I don't know. Somewhere in the 100 to 200 range, I believe.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  But again, I, I, I wonder how much of that deal is, is like pre-negotiated contract because, you know, it's not an aqua hire. They did bring in the Free Press, but like Barry is a really important talent. And so you have to imagine that she's on some pretty big contract for a long time and that.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  And you sort of like take that out of the.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 50.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, but then also like the acquisition's part of, you know, paying a little bit of that upfront, but then there's still some, some.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  Free Press was 150.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  150, okay. Well, Semaphore is at 2x that. And Jordan Schneider from China Talks is much have, must have richer friends. Jordan, Jordan's been on a tear. He did a great, great show with Joe Weisenthal where they just hung out. They did a show about nothing. And Joe Weisenthal is just an underrated guest, I think. He, he's so often in the, he's been in the interview receipt for 10 years.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Goat Weisenthal?

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Goat Weisenthal. Play that goat noise. But I like just hearing him talk about his business and his view on media and his view on whatever food.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  There's good, something good, nominative term is in here, wise and tall. How tall is he? Goats? Wise and tall?

• 27:45John Coogan?

  He's actually not that tall.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  But he has, he has a sort of a tall aura.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  He does, he does.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  He fills the room.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. That is like a famous thing about like legendary people.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  All the Fed chairman, they're all super tall, like Paul Volcker.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Is that true?

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jerome Powell's super tall.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't know that. Interesting. We have a future there. But there's a, there's a consistent.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Jerome Powell's six feet tall.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  What? Okay.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Super tall.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  I swear I heard that.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  In this office, in this office, that's, that's.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, but maybe he's wearing four inch lips.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  You're getting brutally height mogged.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Well, do we know if Jerome's getting leg lengthening surgery anytime soon?

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe he's been in Turkey.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Maybe it hasn't updated.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  You're not Turkey. Where do they get the leg length? Is it China?

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, usually. I think so. Maybe, maybe Jerome got leg lengthening surgery.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Okay, someone lied to me then. Someone told me that all the Fed chairman are, they're always tall.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, six foot is tall. It's, it's the start of being tall.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Six foot, you're, you're really the shortest tall guy.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Paul Volcker, he was six, seven.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, there we go. Still short in this office.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, Janet Yellen, how tall is she?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Forget what I said.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  Tyler is letting memes dictate his height estimate of Powell.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Ben Bernanke is only five, eight. This is a total, I swear, I swear I saw this.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  You've been lied to. No, this is, this is a thing throughout history. Like, like the great men of history who have like long biographies written about them, oftentimes their heights get inflated because of their like egos and their reputations and whatnot.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  I will give you, I will give you access. You can write this book.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  But you gotta say that I was six, 10.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. And, and oftentimes.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  The NBA.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  People will say, oh, you're shorter than I imagined when they meet, when they meet these like amazing people or these powerful people. Um, there's also the opposite happening where there's a, there's like sort of a war to make people appear shorter in the Google height snippets. This was like a JD Vance thing for a while. People were going back and forth on, is he five nine, five eight? And I met him and I'm pretty sure he's six foot at least, but, um, but people, people like war back and forth.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  You're like,

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  he's gotta be at least six foot.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  There, there is a problem when you're six eight where literally everyone feels six foot. It's not like six eight. It's a very silly, very, very silly. Anyway, um, some of our generated 2 million in EBITDA. It is, it is interesting. EBITDA is an interesting figure for media companies because like, do you have appreciation and appreciation?

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Just to be very, very, very, very clear, this is not, it's not like they were, the, the valuation was not as clearly they were willing to sell about 10% of the company.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  And investors believe that it will be worth way more than 330 million at some point.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  Or it's enough to just be own 10% of a strategic asset, a strategic asset, right?

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. No one does these deals based on EBITDA at this, at this stage. It's like a, it's a, it's a few year old company. They're clearly looking at growth rate, how much influence it's having, how much impact it's having, viewership, revenue. EBITDA is probably the last number that you look at to get to a number, uh, for valuation at least. But very exciting for them and we will be talking to them later today. Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about Label Box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box, the label box.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  Get in the box.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  They're like, we didn't ask you to say.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  Francois.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Chalé.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  Chalé.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Arc AGI, uh, co-founder of Arc Prize.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  I hope he enjoys our goalpost moving. We might have to move it after we read this post. So he says, "If you're wondering whether saturating ArcAGI 1 or 2 means we have AGI now, I refer you to what I said when we launched ArcAGI 2 last year, which is also the same thing I said when we announced ArcAGI 2 was coming in spring of 2022 before the rise of LLM chatbots. The ArcAGI series is not an AGI threshold. It's not even a goalpost. I don't even know if we need to move it."

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Why is it called that? Why is it called ArcAGI?

• 32:04John Coogan?

  It is a compass that points the research community towards the right questions. ArcAGI 1 is a minimal test of fluid intelligence. To pass it, you need to show non-zero fluid intelligence. This required AI to move past the classic deep learning.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Should I just disassemble the goalposts?

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Disassemble the goalposts. The LLM paradigm of pre-training, scaling, and static models at inference toward test time adaptation. ArcAGI, the camera moves are wild today. I love it. ArcAGI 2 is the same, but with tasks that probe deeper levels of reasoning complexity, particularly with regard to concept composition. Still, these are tasks that are solvable in minutes by regular people with no external tool use. We hired our test takers off the street. So imagine just walking down the street and somebody, "Hey, come take ArcAGI V2." That sounds fun. So it does not represent the upper bound of what human fluid intelligence can achieve, say, solving a millennium problem. ArcAGI 3, launching March 2026. I thought

• 33:05John Coogan?

  it was already out. Was that a preview that we played with? Because I remember we put you on this task, Tyler. We made you.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they were still adding new, like, names. Because I only played, I think there were just three.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Because I was really wondering, we've been seeing the V1 and V2 benchmarks get sort of dominated. I was wondering, how are these models doing on V3? Well, now we have the answer. It hasn't launched yet. So March, mark your calendars, folks. ArcAGI V3 launches then. And ArcAGI V3 will probe interactive reasoning. We evaluate how systems explore unknown environments, model them, set their own goals, and plan and execute toward these goals autonomously without instructions. We have also started to work on ArcAGI 4 and 5. Two more sequels. You thought it was a trilogy.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  They're doing.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Nightmare scenario for everybody.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  It's a cinematic universe, folks. It's not just a trilogy. There's going to be a whole saga. The Arc AGI Saga, and he's pretty excited about it. So, congrats to Arc AGI team. Fantastic benchmark, very interesting, very fun that you can actually play it. A lot of these benchmarks, they're just not fun to go do hard math problems all day. Arc AGI is something that anyone can go and toy around with and understand, "Oh wow, I am better than AI at this weird thing that is just a simple puzzle that a kid could do." So, it's a lot of fun, and we've enjoyed working and hanging out with the Arc AGI team, and expect to move the goalposts many more times in 2026. Before we move on, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  Sholto says he spent a week over Christmas making RTS, and his Twitter algo has fully switched into game dev Twitter. It's incredibly wholesome. People are making some insane things. In particular, image to mesh models means some indie devs have created absurd production quality, and he shares some examples.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Where are the AI risk people on this? Because what if he creates a game that's so addictive that all of humanity just plays his vibe-coded RTS endlessly?

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be nothing wholesome about that.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  Ceases to go outside. It's the true wireheading scenario. And if Sholto's not taking this seriously...

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  This is the wellness checks I do on you. Sometimes I'll call you late. "John, just how you doing, buddy?"

• 35:25John Coogan?

  You called me last night. I was literally in bed.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I called you last night. "Hey, just checking in on you, buddy. You're not playing video games, are you?" Fortunately.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Not. I'm off the sauce.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  Mark's safe.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Back on the wagon, doing Dry January.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Off the sauce. Colin Frazier says, "I don't really believe in LLM psychosis. I think LLMs mostly just have a lot to offer to people experiencing regular psychosis." This is, um, uh, this is an interesting take, and I could see this being actually what's happening, right? Typically, if somebody's suffering from any type of psychosis, they start going to talk to people. People can kind of walk them off a ledge, or kind of like talk them through the situation, help them get help, etc. But an LLM's just like, "I love yapping. Let's yap forever. Let's go down every possible rabbit hole. Let me validate some of your..."

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  Friend in high school that that was was going through this and and he thought that

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  deers were deers were like.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  Gang stalking him?

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, actually. And so he started telling.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  The bottom of that?

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  He started talking with people about that. They were like, let's figure this out.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  And let's go hunting.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  He's back. He's fully, fully.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  I feel like a deer hunting trip would be actually the correct thing to do in that scenario.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  Super.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Just reclaim the authority and then you you know who's in the driver's seat. You're like, yeah, they might be stalking me, but they don't, they should not be.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  The whole house is.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Cause I guess.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  Deers, the head, the head, you know, mounted like trophies or whatever.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  That might be the cure. It might be a cure to male loneliness, all sorts of things. Deer, deer hunting trip. This is an interesting thing. There, there, there is, there is a natural problem that sort of happens when a new technology gets adopted very quickly, which is you get all the good and all the bad. So if you just look at iPhone penetration, it went from or smartphone penetration, it went from zero in 2006 to 100% in 2015 or something. And basically everyone had a smartphone. And so you get all the top CEOs and brilliant people and scientists are using them and you get all that and that's good. And doctors are using them to text their patients and you get all the good, but then also all the crazy

• 37:43John Coogan?

  people are using them. And everyone who's doing crime is using them for crime. And so you get, you get the good and the bad because you just got everyone. And so you really need to look at the Bayesian.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  Grocery, grocery stores didn't exist and they suddenly were everywhere. You'd see videos every day of people going insane in grocery stores and people would be like, well, our grocery stores.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Making people insane.

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  Insane, right? They'd be like, we're seeing all this video where there's all this evidence that people are going insane and, you know, acting insane in grocery stores. It must be that the grocery stores are causing.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you have to look at like the prior weight. So what's the base level of psychosis in society? What's the, what's the, what's the incidence of psychosis with L L Ms? Is it higher? Then you have a problem. And I, I, I do believe that it's possible that there's a problem. I think that. Some of the models work sort of crazy and would just tell you yes to everything like the glaze gate was a real problem. They've sort of fixed it. It seems like it's pretty fixed now. It also seems like a very tractable technology problem to have another LLM review it and be like, is this a weird conversation? Yes or no? And that's like a very easy thing to train. So I think that they should be able to drive this way, way down. And also just some of the newer models that I've been interacting with, they do push back, they hallucinate even less.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  They just, they feel like way, uh, there, there's a whole bunch of tests that I've seen where people have thrown, like there used to be a, a time when you could go and say, explain to me the definition of, uh, you know, uh, like, like the time old adage of a purple newspaper to start the day, keeps the doctor away. And it was nonsense, but the LLM would just be like, oh, well, the, you're the, the, the user

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  People started saying this.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Saying that this is a real thing. I have to assume it's a real thing. So I have to make up a definition. And they would just make up a definition. But now I've seen screenshots where people have come to it with these weird tests. And the models will actually say, ah, you're trying to trick me. That's not real and that doesn't exist. And you should, if you think that's real, maybe go see a doctor or something. Anyway.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Pod friendly says correlation is not causation.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Uh, railway, railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers and databases run in one place. But scaling, monitoring and security built in. Get on the train, get on the railway.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  Get on the boat. Uh, Scooks, I, I had this pulled up. I kept, uh, I kept seeing it and laughing at it over the last like two minutes. If I was like cracking up for, uh, the wrong, at the wrong time, this was why Scooks has been using Gemini as a calorie tracking app.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't even see that. I didn't even see the comment. I just thought he just went to Gemini and said another beer. And it's just funny that you see the little thinking thing. And it's like thinking about how to process that. And that alone was funny.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Just imagining, imagining the chat. Just, just another beer, another beer, another beer. 15 beers.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know, a lot of people are doing dry January. Other side of that drunk January, potentially underrated. Everyone says if you can do dry January.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  That's the real contrarian.

• 40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, you proved to everyone, oh, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, you know, in the, in the pocket of big alcohol. I'm not, I'm not boosting the alcohol stocks. But if you can do drunk January, drunk the whole time, hold it together and then go back to normal life. That's potentially even more willpower, potentially. I don't know.

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  There's, um, so, so, uh, I saw, I saw a picture yesterday. Apparently there's a, a college, uh, female college basketball player whose last name is Beers. And so on her jersey, it says beers. It says the number 15, her number.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Jersey that just says 15 beers on the back.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  That's great. The, uh, the, the, the alcohol economy is suffering, by the way. This is in the journal. Here's to unloved booze stocks. Uh, the five-year total return through 2025 for the S and P 500 is 96%. If you just bought the S and P 500, you're up, you're up, you doubled your money in five years. Not bad. Uh, everyone else is down in the alcohol industry. AB Inbev not doing that bad. They're only down 4% over the last five years. But Heineken down 21%. Uh, Diageo down 38%. Pernod Ricard down 50%. Remy down 75%. Boston Beer, the backbone of Boston, is down 80% over the last 20, uh, after, over the last five years.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  So the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage. Uh, what? Oh, the, the chances are way higher that you celebrated New Year's Eve with an adult beverage than by smoking a joint, says the, uh, says the Wall Street Journal. Uh, like, I don't, I don't understand this, because I, uh, but the popularity of cannabis, along with the effects of drugs like Ozempic and rising awareness of alcohol's, uh, health risks, have investors in the sector worried. An equal-weighted basket of 11 global alcoholic beverage producers has lost a third of its value in the past five years, including dividends. Um, a dollar invested in the S and P 500 nearly doubled.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Dry January might be an odd time to think about alcohol's appeal, but it's often a good month to snap up unloved stocks that other investors dumped toward the end of the previous year in a market with few bargains. Booze looks interesting, says the journal. Uh, interesting. Anyway. Moving on, vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise, streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  Nikita responded to your post.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to go in.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, he said, "The point of CES is maximalist futurism. It's all concept art to show. If things keep going in this direction, this is how the world should work. Once you understand it as a museum exhibit and not in any way commercial products, it becomes more enjoyable." That's a good take.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Ray showed me. Thanks, Nikita. I liked it. No, no, this was a very interesting thing, and I think we were sort of.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  He also responded.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  I know, the next thing is crazy.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, this is Zoom, a Zoom face station. I don't know what this is actually meant.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  So I think if you put this on in a crowded coffee shop,

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  you can talk, hear and see, and no one can hear or see what you're doing.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  I think if you put this on in a coffee shop, you're getting tapped. Like, not today, Bane.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  It really does look like you're, it looks like a special forces, you know, like rebreather unit, a scuba diving unit, like that, like the.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  That'd be tight if you could wear, if it was a, you know, if you could, if you could spend like 20 minutes underwater with something like this.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  People are not fans of this. The replies, Tyler says, "The first X hardware product right there. Just locked in." Yeah, I mean, I think that looking at, looking at more of like novelty is, is, is fun and, and making it just a fun showcase of all these interesting things. And the, the problem is, is that I think people still associate CES with like, this stuff's going to work its way into my life and it's going to be just rough around the edges. Like, the smart home. If you really dial it in, it's maybe better than just analog light switches. But for a lot of people, it's worse. We've talked about Sonos a lot. The app was great, and then it just degraded and degraded and degraded.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Now, there's a lot of stories about you going to a hotel room and all of the buttons. Everything's smart, connected, and it's just like the lowest quality product. And it doesn't have the polish or the network effects because it's from some mid-tier company. And I think people are a little bit disheartened by that. But.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Jason Fried went hard on smart homes.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  He called it the big regression. My folks are in town visiting us for a couple of months. We rented them a house nearby. It's new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It's amped up with state-of-the-art systems, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IOT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard. And it's terrible. What a regression. The lights are powered by Control 4 and require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understands which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit that one because it'll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn't mean to. Worse, the TV is the latest Samsung, which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren't idiots, but definitely feel like they're missing something obvious. They aren't. TVs have simply gotten worse. You don't turn them on anymore. You boot them up.

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  The Malay dishwasher is hit and flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here's what isn't. It wouldn't even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn't know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate for serious. Worse, thermostats. Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other proprietary ones from some other company trying to be Nest-like are baffling. Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it's set to 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we wanted at, but it's at 72? Worse, the alarm system is essentially a 10-inch iPad bolted to the wall that has the weather forecast on it, and it's bright.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there's ways to turn that off, but then the screen would be so barren, it would just be filled with the news instead. Why can't the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse, and the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything, lag is a giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. And he says, now, look, I'm no Luddite, but this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can't see it in these cases. Yeah, I think there's an opportunity to make a like beautiful, modern, ultra analog system for the home.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I'm sure some people are working on that, but we've, we've seen this in cars too. Like a lot of the new higher end vehicles that are coming out are actually like analog. Yeah, they're like people like buttons.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. You still want some displays, but a few buttons that you can have more, more memory around, more muscle memory. What do you think of a smart home?

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I was just gonna say like, I feel like it's just a barbell. Like if Apple made your thermostat, it would be good.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  And like, otherwise I don't want any screens.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. There really is some benefit.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Either way, it's like very good, but in the middle.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  To just like the power law, the mar, the monopoly, just being able, and then just, I don't know, like Apple, they, they get some things wrong, but they, they have just a brand standard and a level of polish on most things.

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if Sonos made a home security system.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Underrated about Apple. How many people are complaining about liquid glass today?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Me.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  No, no one's complaining. It's, it's fine.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's worse.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Nah, it's not worse.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  The only thing I, I don't like is Safari. I don't like that.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  It's hard to get a new tab. Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. That's the only thing I don't like.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Is there no, is there no shortcut for that? Like if you press and hold hard or something? Like, I feel like there's some sort of, a lot of these things, they, they, they suck on day one, but then once you learn the new flow, it's actually better. Uh, like I noticed to get into the reader view, you can just hard press on this and it goes straight in there, which is nice. So there's, there's a few upgrades, but you have to learn the flow. And like for the, for the photos app, I know we dog on it a lot. It does feel like if you're, it's getting, the search is getting better. If you know how to search, if you get really better at it, it will do, it will do what you want, but you have to like lean into the expectations of it. And there's still times when you know it doesn't know who, you know, Jaco Willink is in this video. So you still have to scroll down to find

• 49:26John Coogan?

  that particular video. Let's save that for, uh, what, what, what were you saying? Is there, is there a way?

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Uh, so if you like hold it and then it'll open the thing and then you keep holding it and then you press, then you can kind of get it to work.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Anyway, Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub to higher quality software faster. The other interesting thing is, do AI agents, do vibe-coded products like wind up making the smart home great again? Andre Karpathy was talking about this. Did you see this? He went, I believe, to Claude Code and asked it to basically like backdoor its way into his smart home. And it went and scanned the network, wrote like custom software and custom API integrations to turn on his lights and do everything that he wanted. So he was able to sort of make his own dashboard and like smart layer on top of it. I wonder if you can still get rid of the latency, because I feel like some of that

• 50:22John Coogan?

  latency is happening on the server side of the, you know, particular smart home app or company. But it was very cool that, to imagine this future where if there is a company that's not moving fast enough to update their app, like the notorious new United app, if it was really bad, well, maybe you can just use, use, you know, an AI agent to interact with it on your behalf and you're never touching it. George Hots was talking about, I think he was using Claude Code to order room service in a hotel or something like that. And it like went and scanned the hotel menu and placed the order and did everything for him.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  And he was like able to just like command line his entire life, which I think is an interesting evolution. And there's some other posts in here that we can go into, but.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how quickly do you think they rename Claude Code?

• 51:16John Coogan?

  What would they rename it to?

• 51:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, Didi, Didi had used it, Didi Das used it to create like an Hermes ad. And he was saying like, this is like the worst name because it's signaling that it's, people are realizing that you can do a lot of things with it.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, the logical thing would be to just bake it into the Claude app and not have it be called Claude Code anymore. Like, there are lots of problems that people use agents for where.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  It should exist directly in the app. And I mean, OpenAI has done this with ChatGPT. Like, there is an agent mode in ChatGPT. People just don't. And there's codecs, but codecs can't just be used on your phone because you have to spin up an actual instance and link it to a GitHub and stuff. But there's no reason. I saw some other workflow where someone set up a remote terminal with Claude code running and then had a phone, had an app on their phone that could run commands in the terminal and then it would take push notifications and send those back to your phone to tell you, hey, Claude's done with doing whatever. It needs a question, has a question you need to talk to it. And you would jump back in so you could use all of it through your phone. And then whatever it builds, it creates like a website that you can interact with from your phone.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  So you get the results from your phone. And I think that, you know, all of the companies, but especially Anthropic, will sort of roll the Claude code functionality into something that's more like a consumer product in the Claude app. It'll probably be a little bit more expensive, but could be very cool. And I think it'll be another like interesting moment when a whole new wave of people who because over the break, we got the second wave of, there's the early adopter developers who have been using Claude code and agents for a while, and they were very happy when 4.5 came out. Then over the holiday break, you got a lot of executives who have access to terminals and can hop on a laptop and do a vibe coded project. They understood the power. They really enjoyed it.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  But the phone class has yet to really experience it because if they're not willing to go and open up their laptop and sit down and learn the terminal and make sure that they have a couple of things installed, there's still a little bit of a barrier to entry. That melts away when you go just, it's in the phone and it's just a button that you activate and then everyone's like, oh, wow, like I vibe coded this, this web app on my phone, which is a couple of perks, which you should be able to do.

• 53:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, Luke, sorry, not Luke. Will Manitis has an essay, The Decline and Fall of the American Technology Industry.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  Before we read it, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Continue.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Will says, "In 2004, if you asked a technology investor where the best software companies in the world were, they'd give you two answers: Boston and San Francisco. This is obviously no longer the case. San Francisco has produced 14 trillion in enterprise value over the last two decades, while Boston has produced a measly 100 billion. If you told the same investor that New York, in all its cocaine and gray pinstripe suit financial glory, would usurp Boston as a regional technology center, they'd think you were nuts. The question of why Boston lost is worth studying. From an inputs perspective, the city should have everything going for it. Two of the best universities in the world are based there. YC was founded there. It is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful cities in the country.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  Mark Zuckerberg went to college there. So did the Stripe founders. So did the Cursor founders. So did the Dropbox founders. So what went wrong?" To understand the scale of the collapse, you have to remember that for decades, Boston's Route 128 was the center of the software universe. DEC was the second-largest computer company on Earth with 140,000 employees at its peak. Lotus was the essential app that brought the enterprise to the PC. Akamai built the modern internet. Where did it go wrong?" This is a question worth answering, but any attempt to answer it gets you one of two answers. The city died when Zuck tried to raise money there and couldn't and had to go west. What do you mean, "Boston is dead"? We just led the series F of turbo logs at 15 million posts.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  Of course, neither of these is a useful story. Figuring out what really happened is not only an existential question for Boston, but for the US technology ecosystem broadly. My answer is simple. Boston is a story of what happens when negative cultural and regulatory feedback loops align. The city as a technology ecosystem was killed by three simple forces. One, a progressive regulatory state that treated business as a coffer to loot for the benefit of property owners. For decades, Massachusetts...

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  Refuse to conform to federal QSBS rules. The state finally conformed in 2022. That same year, they passed the millionaire's tax. A founder who sells for 10 million in Massachusetts owes 860,000. The same founder in Austin owes zero. Massachusetts also charges 6 and 1/4% sales tax on SaaS revenue. Most states don't tax software at all. A Puritan culture too enmeshed in elite institutions to police itself. Post 2010, main activity of Boston-based venture is not building companies. It is extorting founders and running organized crime cabals. The culture that should police this, the endowments, the large LPs, the people who show up to the galas, is too intertwined with the perpetrators and their networks to say anything.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  This meant a constant trust tax on conduct in the city. Nikita says, "I got scammed by a cabal of Boston investors in 2017. Never again." Three, from an inputs first view.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  Also, he clarified what this actually means, and I think it was structured that when he sold his company, there was like a side deal where after he got paid, he was going to have to pay the investors like personally extra money, which is a very weird structure of a deal. That was kind of how he phrased it, which is.

• 57:03Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, not great.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Three, an inputs first view of technological progress. "We have the best universities. We've built a ton of lab space, even if 40% of it is now empty. We have the best talent in the world, so why isn't it working? Can't we build another innovation center? Is our soil alone not magic?" It is three factor, it is this three, if this three-factor explanation seems simplistic and maybe even something you've heard before, it's because it is. It's the very same problem that's facing technology industries across the entire US, and I suspect it will be similarly fatal. "Technology ecosystems are fundamentally fragile networks that generate trillions in tax yield for their hosts, who can't keep themselves from killing the golden goose every few decades. Let's play out what happens when a host rejects the organism.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  First, talent networks dissipate. Need to hire a VP of engineering who's taken a company from 25 to 500 people? There are 600 to choose from in SF. There are five in Boston, and soon those five will leave for SF, where they can demand higher comp and better odds of success. On the junior side, new grads no longer stay local. They catch the first flight out every summer." As the network evaporates, the state. Sinks its teeth in tighter to capture equivalent yield from whoever's left. As the ecosystem dissipates, seedy market participants enrich themselves. Through preferential pricing, who is flying to Boston to win a seat? Fine, we'll pay up at 10 million. Where shadier tactics of extorting founders with off-market and often illegal tactics,

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  see Nikita and other tweets for stories that can legally be told. You see this character even in firms that started in Boston and left. Less matrix, they're good guys. Who maintain a certain organized crime complex even after they've been very dramatic. These are complex flesh and blood problems. They destroy cities, lives, and trillions in taxable enterprise value, all because of short-term thinking on the part of state governments. And the worst part, you can't undo them. While I am sympathetic to calls to reclaim Boston as a great technology ecosystem, I would love to move back and not deal with New York. I struggle to see how the remaining ecosystem doesn't enter complete freefall. Brian Halligan over at HubSpot was saying, "I'm starting to worry about Massachusetts." One, biotech is way off from a few years ago.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  Two, only one of the top 50 AI companies are in Massachusetts. Three, the Fed research funding cuts hitting MIT, Harvard are brutal. The millionaires' tax is working in the short run. Let me pull this up. But I know of a lot of wealthy folks preparing for a Florida move. Five, a glut of empty condos. Six, it's not cool for young folks. Seven, it's very expensive. I honestly don't think the Boston government can do that much as it is. These are kind of macro issues. I give them big credit for working on building more housing and fixing the T, which will help. So Will continues, "You cannot legislate your way out of a collapsing network. You cannot cold-start a network already folding in on itself.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  And yet, San Francisco and the US technology ecosystem as a whole is lining up for the exact same fate. A regulatory state that treats technology as a cash cow. Prop M, the office vacancy tax. A culture too enmeshed in its own elite networks to police itself. AI has attracted dozens of bad actors into the ecosystem, and the same stodginess that made Boston impossible to clean up is setting in." And inputs first view of progress. We have the best AI labs. We have the most GPUs. Hell, the president even bought us some GPUs. We have the frontier models, so why would anything go wrong? The difference is the stakes. Boston's collapse cost the US a few hundred billion in enterprise value. San Francisco's collapse erases a third of the country's GDP growth over the last decade. But the failure here is not just economic, the failure is existential.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Our technology industry has failed to provide a coherent argument for its own existence on the national stage. If this is not solved, 2028 will become a referendum on caging killing and looting the technology industry over the water and power libels. The popular image of the AI boom is not uncertain. Recent polling suggests the average American understands AI is a thing that wastes water, skyrockets power costs, and scams their grandparents in exchange for exposing children to deviant sexual content, sports gambling, and all other manner of sin. If the best answer to why we should not imprison technology executives, burn down data centers, and kill the American technology sector is so we can build better chatbots for your sports betting, voters will vote to do so. In a zero-sum world, voters do not think long-term.

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  They envy and they loot. And we do not loot the sewage system or the power grid because we understand they're the bulwarks against chaos. We accept their costs because they hold back chaos. Does the median voter believe the same to be true about technology? Technology is the only mechanism we have for escaping the Malthusian

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  Malthusian.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Malthusian trap, but we have been too cowardly to articulate this because we have substituted rationalism and AGI for a coherent theology of progress. The state sees the industry as only a parasite to be consumed. If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston: first taxed, then looted, then exhausted, and we'll be stuck wondering where it all went.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  What a black pill.

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Major black pill. We need a black pill sound effect.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  We need a white pill. That white pill can be Gusto today. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. Start a company, get on Gusto, build something, probably not in Boston. Uh, Will worked in Boston. His first job was like 2004 in Boston, right? Something like that.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe late 90s.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, late 90s.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I, I mean.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  No, we'll send some pictures from Boston. He really liked the architecture.

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, this is written to be dramatic, but I think it is, uh.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  There's lessons from it.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  There's lessons and it's hard not to feel that insane pressure right now in California.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Sort of just descending on the technology industry. And this goes to, I mean, this goes to what I was talking about over the last couple of days, which is uh, the tech industry broadly needs, needs better narratives, right? We were talking on the way in today. How would Steve Jobs?

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  How would Steve Jobs pitch AI? Like imagine an hour of talking of Steve Jobs on stage, talking about the potential of AI, right? He'd be saying, you now have a do- a free doctor in your pocket.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  That can diagnose, you know, a wide range of conditions, right? He would be painting this like optimistic, empowering.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, sort of real potential for AI that's already here today.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:03:44Jordi Hays?

  He wouldn't be, uh, you know, you can imagine all the things he wouldn't be.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talking about and, and we don't, I don't think we have a lot of people that wanna be seen as the Steve Jobs of AI. And yet it doesn't feel like that character exists today.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  And you need somebody that is larger than life, that is, that when they talk, people wanna listen and lean in and, and, uh, and, and believe and, and get excited about some of this technology. And I just, I don't think we have that today at all.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  Totally. Uh, we have a Steve Jobs video in the timeline that we should play. Let's watch this.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  You know what stock options are?

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that. No?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Okay, very quickly, what you could do is if somebody came to work for your company, you could let them buy some stock in the company. The problem is, they might have to shell out a hundred thousand dollars to buy stock in your company. If your company went broke, they'd lose all their life savings or whatever. And, uh, so that doesn't work. So what you do is you, when somebody comes to work, let's say the stock's trading at ten dollars a share, you give them the option to buy, uh, you know, a thousand or ten thousand shares at ten dollars, but they don't, they have four years to exercise that option. So if the stock goes down or stays the same, they never exercise it, they don't have to put up any money, they don't lose anything. But if it goes to a hundred dollars a share, they can easily go out to a bank and borrow the money to buy it at ten because it's worth a hundred. In exchange for that privilege of not having to have them put up any money and take any

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  risk, we only dole out their ability to exercise that stock option twenty-five percent a year, thereby locking in people really for four years if the stock goes up. It's a pretty standard thing, a lot of people are doing it.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Look at this casual seat.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Like imagine him right here talking about what AI can already do.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Right now, I'd say over fifty percent of Apple is owned by the employees. There's some larger blocks in there, but still.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  And again, I don't think the finance.

• 1:05:36Jordi Hays?

  Like every, when you look at the leaders of, when, when people, when normal people that don't work in tech, even if they use AI tools, when they see Elon talk about AI, when they see Sam talk about AI, when they see Dario talk about AI, they just get rude, like, the, the reaction is almost always terrible.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Like if you look at the comment section of any content on them that is broken containment and that isn't in the tech industry, it's just like, F this guy, stop it now. Like there's no, there, even if they're saying optimistic things.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  It's not getting through at all.

• 1:06:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think, uh, we were, my, my formulation of this was that Steve Jobs cornered the market on earnestness.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  Like, he, he's very earnest, like, this is a, this is a somewhat technical, uh, tax question about why stock options are used instead of just granting stock directly. And he's explaining it in very plain terms, uh, being very earnest about it. And, uh, when he talked about the role of the computer and stuff, it would be very interesting to hear, I've seen a couple of posts that are like, imagine, uh, you know, Steve Jobs today, iPad kids and AI slop and all this stuff, but I think it would still hit. And what I mean by he cornered the market for earnestness is that He because he was so larger than life and then he passed away.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  Anyone who wanted to play the earnest tech optimist was seen as doing a Steve Jobs impression. And that was seen as hack and like lowbrow and not really everyone was like, why are you doing that? Do something new, do something different. And so everyone fell into different roles, whether it's a little bit of childish humor or or, you know, more more like rationalism or more nuance in how they talk. They don't really paint the same type of picture, certainly not in the same way. And it's left a big hole in tech narrative production. What do you think, Tyler?

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think if you think of like AIs being broadly influenced by like rationalism. Like a big part of like rationalist culture, whatever you want to say is like, there's this strong sense of like in group and out group. Right? So if you have all the people in the in group, right? They in some sense like already understand that AI is going to be great in all these ways. So the real thing you need to do is you need to convince them that it's bad.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  So it's like you assume that people in the in group already have this prior that the people that, you know, the layman does not have.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Their their understanding of AI is is from Terminator.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Where it's like, oh, it's gonna kill me. And then also the leaders are saying.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  This is like gonna take your job.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  It's kind of all bad news. Yeah.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it it jumps straight to the consequences instead of actually dwelling and spending enough time in the tactile tactile like impact of a technology like like Steve Jobs was uniquely good at. He could he could talk about the the future and the in the long term implications, but would spend a lot of time just talking about the bicycle for the mind. And he had these great metaphors that really stuck with us for a long time.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he'd be saying it's a he'd be talking about how how this chatbot in your pocket seems.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Simple, but it's a it will teach you languages. It will help you become an artist, help you become a musician. It will diagnose a condition that you have. It will diagnose a condition for somebody that actually can't afford healthcare, wherever they are in the world. Right? Like, these are magical, magical things.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  And yet.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  But even if you go and you say those exact words, people will. Say, oh, he's being too earnest. It's some Steve Jobs impression. Like, it's hard for that to land, I think. It's just not.

• 1:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe it's just never been tried.

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  I think there's space for it. It's gonna take, uh, it's gonna take a future Hall of Famer.

• 1:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe. And I don't know. It's also interesting because, uh, I mean, the business of Apple was, was different than today. There was, I mean, it was much less capex intensive, so you needed less fundraising. Um, so you had to, you didn't have to message to the financial markets as much as you do now. You could just kind of make a widget, and if you sold it at a profit, the business would continue to grow. Uh, and so with the, the capex dynamic in AI does make it a little bit different because you have to message to everyone that they need to put their money in to actually get this future, and then there's the consequences of it not.

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, The Wall Street Journal had an article.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  Sure. First, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, The Journal had an article at the end of the year, December 29th. PhDs can't find work as Boston's biotech engine sputters. A job in life sciences was once a sure path to a high-paying career in the city, but empty, empty labs and unemployed grads now herald tougher times. Uh, Jeremy Liu, 31 years old, moved to Boston from New Jersey in 2018 to study for a PhD in chemistry, and he hoped a career in the city's bustling biotech industry. We have a very depressing image here of Cambridge, if we can pull that up. But after earning his, uh, University of Massachusetts-Boston degree last year, Liu said he has applied to about 500 local jobs with no luck. Raised in Hong Kong, he said he had also started

• 1:10:54Jordi Hays?

  considering LinkedIn messages, uh, from biotech recruiters, uh, much farther away. The industry is really booming in China, and that's what a lot of people have told me that I should consider applying there. Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks and venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers. For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well-paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh. Liu temporarily signed up for government food assistant, uh, food assistance, kept a tight budget, and later started working part-time for an AI startup so he could continue to afford rent in a Boston suburb.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech R and D jobs in 2024 after years of mostly strong increases, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June while hiring remained sluggish. By the end of September, nearly 28% of Greater Boston's lab space sat empty, according to the latest estimates from CBRE. Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year, says Kendall O'Connell, chief executive at Mass Bio and Industry Trade Group. The impact has hit startups especially hard.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, hopefully they can turn it around. But I think what Will is saying around kind of network collapse is very real. If people graduate from your universities and immediately bail, it's hard to stop that.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I went to college in Boston and there was like a flourishing tech community because of MIT. Microsoft had a massive, the nerd, the New England Research and Development Center and a bunch of interesting tech and tons of like tech talks. And the default path was you would meet people at Boston tech fairs and it was easier to get a job in tech in Boston if you went to school in Boston. But quickly, I did get out of there and went to San Francisco.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Went straight to the tender line.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  And a lot of that was because of the internet, because of Twitter and meeting tech people on Twitter and seeing tech people on Twitter and just sort of like understanding the networks. I remember interacting with not Sean Parker, but Sean Parker did an interview with a few VCs and I was able to like go back and forth with them on Twitter, just being a reply guy, basically in like 2011.

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  I wish I got to experience your reply guy era.

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  Reply guy era was strong. Yeah, it was electric. Well, who was it? The first VC in Facebook or something? Someone like liked my post and replied, and it was like the best thing ever. I was like, I'm a king maid.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Wow, I'm goaded.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  I'm goaded, exactly. But it did, it did just like illuminate the networks of like what's going on. It gave you a much easier picture of like who the live players are. And even if you couldn't just, you know, ask them for jobs directly, like you could at least be aware. And

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Ben in the chat is saying the person in that article, in that article actually just has a terrible resume. Look him up. Yeah, who knows? I mean, plucking one person that's struggling to find a job.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  You sort of have to do that in these articles because you don't want to just do the article with the chart. And so you have to do the chart, the data point, which is that the employment is declining in Boston R and D jobs.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Seven years into his PhD and only published one paper.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Time to lock in, brother. Let me tell you about Plaid.

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Hit me.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  That's a white pill. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Brian Halligan is organizing a session with the governor at his home in Boston. So the governor is paying attention.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  Well, we have some breaking news. There is a new tab in the ChatGPT app. That's right. Greg Brockman.

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  Adult mode.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  No, health. ChatGPT health is now live.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  Fiji gave some amazing stats here with more than 40 million people globally turning to ChatGPT every day for health questions. What does that mean? Does that mean 40 million people are asking health questions every single day? Or?

• 1:15:12Jordi Hays?

  The founder from Doctronic yesterday said like 20% of all the queries are

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:15:17Jordi Hays?

  are health related. So yeah, the question here is

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  How how quickly does ChatGPT Health try to do the other things that DocTronic is doing?

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  DocTronic is actually trying to be an AI doctor.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Talks about being able to effectively be a doctor.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, write prescriptions in Utah.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Going to fight to expand that.

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  The question will be from a strategic standpoint.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  How they they have their own doctors on staff as well.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Jordi Hays?

  They're operating a telemedicine business and I'm sure they do referrals out. Uh, it's hard to see OpenAI ever employing doctors themselves.

• 1:15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Jordi Hays?

  But they probably would try to build a network around it. Um, so we'll see where this goes, but um, it's going to be an exciting space to watch.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, so they say today they're launching ChatGPT Health, a dedicated private space for health conversations, where you can easily and securely connect your medical records and wellness apps like Apple Health, Function Health and Peloton. Um, we have the founder of Function on, right?

• 1:16:18Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 1:16:19John Coogan?

  So you can put all your blood results in there. That feels like a really enduring place. My, one of my big uh, pushbacks against the the lab, the Quest Lab wrappers is that uh, they haven't historically been very enduring. So you go and do them and then a few years later, the product sort of degraded. And then you're like, oh, well, I have six different like amazing web UIs for my health records. But if I'm keep importing them to ChatGPT, I feel like I'll have an account on there for a very long time. Cause it's an enduring company. Uh, makes a ton of sense. Uh, this allows ChatGPT to offer more relevant personalized support. Like when you're preparing a doctor's for a doctor's appointment or looking for guidance on a meal plan or exercise routine that fits your needs. That's very cool.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  ChatGPT Health is another step towards turning ChatGPT into a personal super assistant that can help support you with information and tools to achieve your goals across any part of your life. We're starting at the very beginning of this journey. Uh, but I'm excited to get these tools into more hands, says Fiji Simo. Uh, you can sign up to request access. Interesting. They're not just rolling it out. Um, and and they talk about their input from physicians and privacy protections. Interesting. Um, yeah, one of my big questions for this year is like, is like, there's always been this, there's always been this uh, this narrative of like. If you build a wrapper that depends on the models not getting better, you're going to have a bad time because the models will just get better. So if your thing is, oh, it can't

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  do long context windows, or it can't answer in pages and pages and pages, well, the models are going to get better and they're going to do that, or they're going to do better math. So don't build the math wrapper that's just a little bit better. But if you're building something that's unique and special and off in the side and doesn't really depend on that, maybe you're good for a long time, but obviously, ChatGPT has matured a lot and they are going after certain verticals. And I wonder if we'll see one of the foundation labs go after legal, since they're already going after code so effectively, like.

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  And people are.

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  That would be interesting. And they're making money there. So it's a big pool of opportunity.

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I wonder if people could, they could make, you could, people are using LLMs to do legal work now, but they're just on these standard subscriptions. You can imagine a lot of companies would pay a hundred dollars a month for kind of a more robust version.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  And Sam's talked about this, where your conversations with ChatGPT are not, are definitely admissible in court. And so it's like a Google search, it's not like talking to your lawyer. So if you go to ChatGPT and you ask, how do I do crime?

• 1:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Client privilege.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  You don't have client privilege, but maybe there could be a tab where you sign up for some specific plan and you are getting legal advice effectively, and it is attorney-client privilege in some ways. Now, I'm sure that's a whole, a whole rat's nest of legal problems, but maybe they'll figure it out, who knows. Anyway, 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.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  Very excited to see everything that Shopify does.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Very excited to have Ravi Gupta back on the show.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reid says he may be unk, but he's our unk. Andrew and I were texting the other day, and someone had told him that a Gen Z person told him that unk meant uncool. He felt very unk, because he thought it meant uncle.

• 1:19:42John Coogan?

  I think it's related, isn't it?

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  It's definitely uncle. I'm pretty sure it's uncle.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  But, but.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, you might be unk, and that's just why you think that.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  Maybe you're unk, yeah. It's the. The connotation and the denotation, like it literally means uncle, but the connotation is that it means uncool.

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a clipping of uncle originating in African American vernacular English.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  Okay, there you go. It is a, it's slang.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  There you go. It's decided.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Speaking of slang, Tyler, can you take us through what you've learned about looks maxing slang? Because we're trying to get, this is our 2026 resolution to ascend, and so we need to be up to speed on all the terms. What do you have for us?

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I've been getting into looks maxing.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  Obviously, it's clearly working.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  I've been, I asked some people for some peptide advice on how to gain weight 50 plus pounds.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, and I think we have an image of what that might look like.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's pull it up. Let's pull it up.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Pull up the image of Tyler. This came from Brandon Gurrell. Tyler's looking very prosperous here in the timeline. You said, are there any peptides for getting large amounts of weight, 50 plus pounds?

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  We're like, Tyler's like, yeah, I'm trying to gain 50 pounds of muscle and then just gains 50 pounds straight to the max.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  That looks like more than 50 pounds. That looks like 100 pounds.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  People say AI is slop.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  You look elite.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  This is, this is truly art. And the grin on your face is so funny. It really translates well. What a beautiful AI image. Anyway, so, so you're not going this direction.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  You gotta update the chyron, guys.

• 1:21:14John Coogan?

  You're trying to ascend. What's the plan? Take us through it.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, so I mean, there's a couple things, especially when you're, when you're looks maxing, it's a lot about your face, right? So there's a bunch of terms you want to be looking at. So the first one you hear this thrown around, maxilla, right?

• 1:21:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, the maxilla. Where is the maxilla?

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  You know, they have a recessed maxilla.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  So the maxilla is the, it's kind of the bone that goes around your nose, right?

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  Bone in your nose, right? So it's kind of this, this area right here.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  And then your upper maxilla is basically the top part here.

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  So when it's recessed, it means you kind of have a flatter face shape almost.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Okay. And you don't want that?

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  So you don't want a recessed maxilla.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Okay, you don't want a recessed maxilla. And is bone smashing a way out of having a recessed maxilla?

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, bones, I mean, you gotta be careful with bone smashing because sometimes you hear about, you know, they, they ruin their nerves, right?

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  You get nerve damage.

• 1:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Do you really need the nerves there?

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, see, like, a lot of people.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Trade offs.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Personally, I think it's fine.

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  I don't really need it in there.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Do not listen to Tyler.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Looks maxing, right?

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  So, okay, so the next thing, you want to look for your infra-orbitals.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Infra-orbitals, okay.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  So, your infra-orbital is kind of, it's like part, it's actually kind of similar to your maxilla, but it's basically, there's two, like, kind of points right here.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  Below each of your, you know, eyes.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, eyes.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  And so sometimes these can get slightly inflamed.

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  And these are bones or muscles?

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I believe, yes, they are, uh, what even?

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Is this actual science that they're, that they've adopted and twisted? Or is it entirely made up?

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  It's like a section of your, of the maxilla.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Got it, got it, got it. What else we got?

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so also, this is a pretty obvious one, everyone knows this, but your, your kind of facial width-tied ratio.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  Yes, the mid-face ratio? Or just the overall facial ratio?

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, mid-face is, is kind of.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Okay, it's like, do you have a long face or a wide face?

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. You want to look at your nasal labial folds?

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  Nasal labial folds?

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  So, this is, on older people, right, you'll see these kind of wrinkles?

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  So, you want to be looking at?

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Minimizing those.

• 1:23:14Speaker 02

  Uh, generally, if you want to look younger, yeah.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, makes sense.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  You want to look at your bimaxillary protrusions?

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Bimaxillary protrusions, okay.

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, so this one, I actually, uh, I'm not exactly sure what that one is, but.

• 1:23:27John Coogan?

  But it's got to be good.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  But you got to look out for it.

• 1:23:30John Coogan?

  You got to look out for it, for sure.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  Uh, your nose bridge, right, you don't have to be too wide, this is something you can see.

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  And then your inter-pupillary distance, right, so this is how far.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  And that feels like something you can do nothing about.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  Uh, so I actually.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  There are ways to make your eyes wider or narrower?

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  I, I think there are ways to do it.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Glasses, right, because it changes, like, how big your eyes look.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  I think, actually, um, in Marty's.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Also, potentially with makeup, you could maybe accentuate the, the IPD. I only know about IPDs because of VR goggles. Different VR goggles need different IPDs. Timothy Chalmers.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  I got to interrupt you guys to talk about the, the Universe, Universe 25 experiment conducted by.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  What's this?

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Etho- ethologist John B. Calhoun between 1968 and 1973. The experiment was the rodent utopia experiment.

• 1:24:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Calhoun built a paradise for mice where every physical need was met. They had unlimited food and water, so there was no competition for survival. There was no predators. They were completely safe from external threats. They had climate control, so it was a perfect environment for living and reproducing. It was disease-free. The initial mice were chosen for their health. And so despite having space for 3,800 mice, the population peaked at 2,200 and then began a rapid irreversible decline to extinction. There was a specific group called the beautiful ones.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  It was a generation of males born during the peak of overcrowding because the older dominant males had become hyper-aggressive. These are the boomers in our society. And the social hierarchy had collapsed. These younger males never learned normal social behavior. So I think we see this with like clavicular and people like that, like defending territory or courting mates. They were called the beautiful ones because their physical appearance, of course, unlike the older alpha males who were covered in scars. Again, these are the boomers, right? They bought their homes for like 20 bucks and, you know, maybe we're in the military, etc. The alphas were covered in scars and bitten tails from constant fighting. These males had perfect, healthy fur.

• 1:25:49Jordi Hays?

  You can see Tyler's hair, he's got perfect, healthy fur. Behavior they withdrew completely from society. So again, you see these streamers, they're just like in their rooms, you know, smashing their face with hammers. They spent their entire lives doing only three things, eating, sleeping, and grooming themselves. Asexuality, they lost all interest in mating or interacting with females. Again, you see these with the looks-maxing guys, they're not looks-maxing seemingly for like women. They're looks-maxing to try to mog other dudes. This is clavicular talking about Gavin Newsom mogging JD. And so anyways, something to think about with this whole trend.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  The lesson is become the beautiful ones. Like in that colony, you want to be the beautiful one?

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Tyler's on board.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not. You want to be the scarred alpha.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Okay, the scarred alpha.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  But you want your tail to be bitten.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I've always said I want to be wizened. I want to be old man-maxing. I want to look like Warren Buffett. Because I feel like there's a lot of people that are doing the younger thing, look-maxing. There's Brian Johnson, obviously, but I feel like if I could become more austere... I would hold more, my words would hold more weight and I feel like that's actually what's valuable. The wise one. I want to look as old as possible. I want to be leathery. I want to be, I want to be wizard. I want to be leathery.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Just one more thing though.

• 1:27:09John Coogan?

  I should dye my hair gray.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  I forgot about this one they mentioned in the chat, but your cantle tilt.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  So cantle tilt is, is kind of the angle of your eyes, right? So you want, I think it's called hunter eyes.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Hunter eyes. Okay. Yeah. All this for nothing. Yeah. All this for, for nothing. What a, what a crazy time. Well, we have our first guest of the show joining. I'm sure we'll continue the look maxing conversation. While we bring him in, let me tell you about public.com investing for those tickets. Seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with damn great customer service. We have Vincenzo Landino in the TVP and Ultra. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:27:46Vincenzo Landino?

  There he is. Thanks for having me. I've listened to this conversation and I'm like, do I have the very cool?

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. So you, you, you're one of the people that's actually been doing this. You've been look maxing for years, clearly.

• 1:27:57Vincenzo Landino?

  Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even know I was doing it, but okay.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Vincenzo Landino?

  I do agree with you though, John. There is something about looking a little older so that people take you seriously.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  But you, you just graduated high school. You look about like 1920. Is that correct?

• 1:28:12Vincenzo Landino?

  Uh, yeah, actually I turned 21 yesterday.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Congratulations. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Yeah. You look very young. Uh, anyway, uh, for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. We'd love to get the introduction for everyone.

• 1:28:23Vincenzo Landino?

  Yeah. Vincenzo Landino, I run, um, business of speed. So podcast newsletter and a consultancy for brands that want to get into motorsport or businesses of speed. Actually. So it's more than just motorsport, but we call it businesses of speed. So mostly racing.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Good. Business of speed. I like that. Uh, how, how'd you get into this?

• 1:28:43Vincenzo Landino?

  You know, it's, uh, to keep it short, I was, you know, I was a motorsport fan for a long time and Formula One years and years ago, like when I started watching it back in the early nineties.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Like right after Drive to Survive happened, you got into it?

• 1:28:57Vincenzo Landino?

  Right after Drive to Survive.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's when you got into it. I'm sure.

• 1:29:01Vincenzo Landino?

  Just, uh, yeah, I just jumped in right then and there.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Early, early to the sport, really. Yeah.

• 1:29:05Vincenzo Landino?

  Real early on, which actually is really funny because now people that came in maybe two years before.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Vincenzo Landino?

  The drive to survive boom are considered like

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  Old, old heads.

• 1:29:15Vincenzo Landino?

  In, in, in watching motorsports. Yeah. Exactly. But, uh, now back or, you know, like I said, 35ish years ago.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Vincenzo Landino?

  There was nobody watching it in the United States.

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:25Vincenzo Landino?

  And.

• 1:29:27Vincenzo Landino?

  Being of Italian heritage and whatnot, I had a lot of motorsport fans in my family and we used to watch it. We used to go karting. We used to, you know, go to racetracks all the time. As I got older, I saw there was opportunity that not many people are talking about the business side, or at least the behind the scenes aspect of, of, in that case, in this case, Formula One, but everyone wanted to talk about how hot the drivers were and, you know, the engineering aspect was another, you know, element.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Or even just handicapping who's going to win, like the actual, the actual results of the sport.

• 1:30:00Vincenzo Landino?

  The actual results, yeah.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  As opposed to the businesses behind it.

• 1:30:03Vincenzo Landino?

  Everywhere.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's everywhere.

• 1:30:04Vincenzo Landino?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  Amazing. What was the first, what was the first piece of content? What was the first initial, like, go to market with building content in the category?

• 1:30:12Vincenzo Landino?

  I don't even really, it was probably, it was Twitter for sure. And I would, I mean, I was just tweeting about different things, you know, deals that were coming through and whenever you could get any information about race fees or whatever, you know, a racetrack was paying for, to host an event, you're like, okay, this is interesting. And you start building a following, people thinking like, wow, that's ridiculous, or wow, that's crazy. Didn't have no idea what went into it. And then just kind of snowballed into what it is now, which has become, I'm still building it, but really an opportunity for me to, to keep a tab on the business behind it.

• 1:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Can you give us a broad view into the health and state of motorsport, the, the business of, of motorsports in America? Because a lot of, a lot of people in tech are just not that, not that into automotive racing broadly. Maybe they watch F1 here and there. Maybe they go to an event, you know, through first, you know, with, with some SaaS company that they're involved with. But maybe zoom out for a second and then I want to get into a bunch of the subcategories.

• 1:31:18Vincenzo Landino?

  I'll say anecdotally, let's just, this is something I heard in Las Vegas just a couple of months ago.

• 1:31:26Vincenzo Landino?

  Tech company in San Francisco, CEO, wanted, this is literally the conversation I heard, wants to get involved in Formula One somehow, knows nothing about motorsport, knows nothing about racing, just knew that it was somewhere where there was attention and he wanted to get his brand in front of it. And so, hearing conversations like that happening, and partnerships, and commercial deals happening, just because they think it's cool, again, from someone who's been, who's seen the trajectory over decades, not just like a few years, that's fascinating to me, still fascinating to me that that level of interest is there. But, that's not the overall health. I mean, Formula One is definitely healthier than, than most.

• 1:32:11Vincenzo Landino?

  In the United States, you still have series like NASCAR that dominate, at least in viewership, but there's issues there as well. IndyCar, great racing, but still trying to work out who they want to be, and so there's, there's

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Has the increase in popularity in F1 in America actually hurt Indy, IndyCar? Because it feels like some potential overlap, or is it kind of a rising tide lifts all boats?

• 1:32:39Vincenzo Landino?

  I think it's actually, so I think it is, there is a level, an aspect of rising tide is raising all boats, but it's also hardened the diehards. Like, they are, the IndyCar diehards, I feel like have come out more now, because they're like, we don't want to be run over, taken over by this European thing, this Formula One, which is the actual conversations that happen. I mean, it's, it's kind of funny, but, so IndyCar has seen it, but what, no one has been able to figure out, that Formula One did, was the content aspect. Drive to Survive was one of many, many things that they've done behind the scenes, right? ESPN didn't get enough credit for the growth. You know, everyone said, oh,

• 1:33:22Vincenzo Landino?

  Netflix, Drive to Survive effect, all of that. I mean, including myself, at one point, I was like, wow, this Netflix thing is really, this is what's causing all of this. But it wasn't. ESPN did put a lot into it, and, and so I would say that you have seen a lot of rising tide, but no one's figured out the content aspect. It's for whatever reason, it's like, not for whatever reason, I know that, you know, we know what the reasons are. Formula One is just the attractive, it's the flavor of the day, month, year right now, maybe the next couple of years, but it's sexy, right? It's European. So if you want an audience, it's global. Let's not say it's not just European, it's global.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a travel show in addition to being a race, in addition to being a reality TV show, in addition to being a dating show. It sort of scratches every itch. So a household can sit down and everyone in the family is watching it.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, the business, I always appreciated the business side, seeing how the owners were kind of processing.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, being in, being in that, uh, understanding that dynamic where you have this like desperation to win, you badly want to win. And then every single decision that you're making throughout a season is like, okay, how much like technically, like, you know, how much do I want, how badly do you want to win? How much do you want to actually spend? How much do you like, how, how, how much are you willing to personally invest? So that happening at the owner level and the athlete level.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Vincenzo Landino?

  And at one point it was, you know, it was whoever could just keep spending. Right now we have the, the, the salary or the salary, the spend cap and the spend cap has created more competition. You can't spend over 140 ish million. It's going to go up a little bit more, but you can't spend over that amount of money. And so that's caused better competition. Everyone has to kind of get to a point. But at one, at one point in Formula One's history, it was just you spend, spend, spend. There were way more teams on the grid, way more drivers. You know, we actually had on our podcast, Mark Blundell, who was a driver from the late eighties, early nineties. He drove with Senna and some of the other greats. And

• 1:35:33Vincenzo Landino?

  he was saying, you know, it was like, we had to qualify to qualify. You don't have that now. You've got, now there's going to be 22 drivers on the grid. They all will start. Come Sunday. That didn't happen, you know, 25 years ago, 30 years ago. It was, you had to qualify just to get onto the grid. And there was plenty, because there were so many cars that were just like, they would allow anybody that could come up with a car would be on the grid and it couldn't compete. It wasn't reliable, whatever it was, or they'd be so slow, they obviously wouldn't put them on the grid to qualify. And so, all of that has led to the popularity, but also the financial health of it. Look at the valuations.

• 1:36:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wanted to get your read on like team valuations, because obviously the people that were like just pure enthusiasts in it for the love of the game have benefited to some degree, just based on the appreciation and the value of the teams. There's so much more attention. They can build, they can bring in a lot more sponsorship. We were at the Vegas event and just walking around and seeing how the different, yeah, it felt like being at a tech conference.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  Every team has a major tech company on it.

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  Or, yeah.

• 1:36:45Vincenzo Landino?

  Multiple.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, multiple sometimes. Yeah.

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, valuations of teams. George over at CrowdStrike, we work with CrowdStrike, saw, you know, he recently bought into Mercedes in a big way after being a partner for a while. But how do you, how do you, do you think that, do you expect valuations to actually trade down at any point? Could we be at a, at somewhat of a local top?

• 1:37:16Vincenzo Landino?

  I think at some point, we, it has to max out, right? Like, some of the valuations seem almost insane to me. Mercedes, just the team itself, 6 billion is what, it's right around McLaren, four, four and a half. Ferrari's a little bit different. They've got this, a global brand. They're a little over 6 and a half billion. And even at the bottom of the, the grid, you're still looking at 2 billion. I remember Zach Brown, CEO of McLaren, had said, and I actually had a conversation with him in Vegas, but he had said 2024, 2023, maybe it was, at one point.

• 1:37:52Vincenzo Landino?

  All of the teams will be valued at a billion dollars and we all thought that was like, no way. This is like, are you kidding me? And here we are, not even a full two years later, and every team is has a valuation of roughly, you know, 2 billion. Of course, there's private equity now investing. You've got some big, you know, bigger players that want to put money into these teams. And so valuations just shoot up. I think it it has to cap somewhere. I don't know where that cap is. I have said 10 billion. I thought it was like absolute max, but I think, I think even that might be ridiculous. But, you know, I know that if I say that now, then in two years, when

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  But the average, so the average net new investor, are they really going into this expecting a return? Or do they want to be an owner of a Formula One team?

• 1:38:44Vincenzo Landino?

  They want to be the owner of Formula One. I mean, it's cool. You can't put a price on cool. You can't put a price on being in the suite. Like you said, it's a tech conference. It's who's who. It's who can I be seen around? Look at all the celebrities that show up. Look at all the major, you know, tech companies or all the player network. It's a level of networking. You can't really put a price on. And that's what you're buying into. You're buying into the opportunity to entertain your clients, entertain your friends, entertain other executives to be seen as, well, I'm the CEO or I'm the founder, whatever it is, I'm the boss.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, there's, there's so many levels to it. You know, our friends at Public, who we went to Vegas with are, they're a sponsor, you know, multi-year sponsor of Aston Martin. But then the level beyond that is like, yeah, actually, you know, buying into the team and becoming an owner.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I noticed over the holiday, all like, the, the global elite were in St. Bart's and they all pulled up their yachts. And when you read the articles of like, whose yacht is there and who they are, it'll say the person's name. And then, like, probably half of these people, they're described as like, owner of the, you know, Pistons or over of owner of the Red Sox, owner of some sports team. And you always look them up. And it's like, they didn't make their money starting that sports team. They started some boring oil and gas company or software company or something. But as soon as you own, it's like writing a book. As soon as you own a sports team, that's what you're known for forever. And like, you're just the Dallas Mavericks guy.

• 1:40:13Vincenzo Landino?

  So it goes back, you guys were talking about Steve Jobs earlier, we don't have, and how they're, right now, we don't have somebody that is like Steve Jobs for AI and to just like snap a finger, tell a story. It's the story, right? And I don't know if that's what you were looking to say at one point, but it's a story. It's an instant story. You go and sponsor Williams, or you go and Atlassian, you go partner up with Williams, now you're going to be part of their comeback because Williams, the team is coming back and they are more financially healthy. They've got great investment now, great team, great leaders in place. Well, Atlassian is going to be right behind, you know, they are right there. They, built in story. People that didn't know them outside of Australia, which are maybe even like the US, whatever. They'll know.

• 1:40:58Vincenzo Landino?

  Globally. Instant global recognition, right? You can't buy that anywhere. You know, you can't buy that story, that level of story. There's no price that you can put on that. And so I think that's what we're, you know, we see with Formula One specifically.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  What is the dynamic of, so Audi's joining the grid this year. How does that work? Is it, is the number of teams going to effectively be fixed forever? Like, part of the reasons why NBA and NFL teams are valuable is because you effectively have a monopoly, right? We're not creating more teams. So you don't have new competition and pricing pressure and things like that. How did that dynamic, how do you actually, they're taking over from another team, like break down that dynamic and will we see more? Could we see a future where there's 30 cars on the grid?

• 1:41:47Vincenzo Landino?

  So Sauber was the team that Audi bought to get into. So they took a spot, right? And so that, for the, I'm trying to think of how many years, but let's say at least the past decade, maybe 15 years, you've had a pretty fixed number of teams on the grid, 10. Cadillac is entering the grid as team 11, and that was a big, big deal. In the charter from 2022,

• 1:42:15Vincenzo Landino?

  The dilution fee was 200 or 300 million. Because no one thought.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  And that's a fee that goes to all the teams affected.

• 1:42:25Vincenzo Landino?

  That's a fee that goes to all the teams for diluting.

• 1:42:27Jordi Hays?

  It's split up. So everybody gets like 10. Yeah, 10 million.

• 1:42:30Vincenzo Landino?

  10 million.

• 1:42:31Jordi Hays?

  Which is not, which is nothing and could be in.

• 1:42:34Vincenzo Landino?

  Correct.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that would have to be updated, I imagine.

• 1:42:37Vincenzo Landino?

  And it did. It did. It got updated. And when this was, so the big issue that came up was when they were looking for Team 11. Cadillac was, came in. It was Andretti that was trying to put in their offer. Michael Andretti. Uh, Mario Andretti. His son, Michael. And a group was trying to buy in. There was politics behind the scenes that were going on. They, they had the money. They had all the, the things together, ducks in a row. Uh, they did. Some people don't like them and so they got kind of pushed out. Now we have Cadillac that entered, but at the time they came to the table with their 300 million dollar dilution fee. And they had facilities and all the things that F1 wanted to see. Well, they quickly said, wait a minute.

• 1:43:20Vincenzo Landino?

  300 million is not enough money. Like this is, this is crazy. The sport has completely ballooned. In valuations and how much revenue. We, we need to do something different. So I think it ended up around 600 million. So double. Just as, just to enter, just to say, now that's not to say that you. You're done at 600 million. You need to have facilities. You need to invest in, in, in people. So you're, you're all in way over a billion dollars.

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Vincenzo Landino?

  That's the price just to say like, yeah, we'll entertain you.

• 1:43:50Vincenzo Landino?

  So six, you know, 600 million dollars. So you're not going to have anybody just come in and say, I want a, I want a team. Cause you need to have.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  So is there, is there a hard cap at all in the charter? Obviously you could update the charter.

• 1:44:01Vincenzo Landino?

  Charter says 12 is the max.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Vincenzo Landino?

  Right now.

• 1:44:04Jordi Hays?

  That's what the chat was saying too. How does, uh, have the manufacturers, how much do they try to track or how much do they worry about how on grid? Or on track performance impacts car sales? I had a Ferrari at one point and, uh, you know, anytime I'm watching F1 and I see Ferrari with, uh, technical difficulties. I'm like, yeah, big surprise. Cause I had a lot of those. I had a lot of those things too, right?

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  Disconnected, but I don't know. It's just, uh, like, uh, just some sort of cognitive bias.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  If we, if we, you know. Have a team and we're, and we're just terrible. Hurt the brand. Who, yeah, why, why is somebody gonna wanna go and, and spend 400, 500, you know, or more on, on one of these cars?

• 1:44:47Vincenzo Landino?

  Yeah, I, so I remember Lawrence Stroll in 2020, what year are we in, 26, so about three, four years ago. He made a comment that because Aston Martin had the safety car, uh, they actually split safety car duties with Mercedes. But because they had one safety car, he estimated about 80 million dollars just from having the safety car in sales. So I think it was the Vantage and they had like the Vantage F1 edition, he sold about 300 units, whatever, $200,000 apiece, whatever they were. And they sold out pretty instantly because it was a car on the grid. Uh, Mercedes has really pushed the AMG badge a lot over the past, I'd say, five to seven years.

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  While destroying what made AMG great in the first place.

• 1:45:33Vincenzo Landino?

  Which, and I, you know, I had an AMG, loved it, uh, it was great until I started seeing everybody with an AMG. I'm like, well, AMG doesn't even mean anything anymore. It's just kind of like, it's the standard car. They don't even, you don't see a regular Mercedes. Everyone's got an AMG at this point, but that was due to a large part.

• 1:45:49Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna make a V, a V4 AMGs.

• 1:45:53Vincenzo Landino?

  Well, not anymore, so.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I know, they are, they are starting to, they got the message.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Was it the C43 was the one that people really didn't like? Yeah.

• 1:46:01Vincenzo Landino?

  I mean, for what? It was kind of pointless. I mean, I, I had, mine was an eight and it was the last eight, uh, 2019 and, and I, you know, people, it was very desirable to aftermarket folks because, because of that, but.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, even in the, when I, when I think about Aston, if, if Aston can win a championship, I do think that that could be very beneficial for the brand in America. McLaren, McLaren, I'm sure, I'm sure that they, they're, they're gonna benefit in some way, but Aston, I feel like really, like, I mean, that dynamic's interesting because you have kind of the same owners in both the Formula One team and, and the, and the actual manufacturer, which are different entities. And so there's a real incentive to like, hey, let's actually win a championship because, uh, they make some of the most beautiful cars in the entire world, but they're just not as desirable as the Ferrari at the same price point.

• 1:46:53Vincenzo Landino?

  Well Ferrari is also, I mean, what Ferrari does to buy for any Ferrari is just, it's like, it's the luxury playbook. You know, you can't buy the one you want until you buy 10 others and then maybe we'll let you buy it. I mean, it's just a scarcity thing, but I'll say with Aston Martin and McLaren specifically, they're still, I would say they're buoyed by Mercedes doing well because they're AMG power plants. So that makes, that makes a difference, especially to the level of enthusiasts or the collectors that are buying these cars. But they are beautiful and they're gorgeous. There is a direct correlation and you will hear, have conversations with folks within the teams that are absolutely tracking that kind of thing.

• 1:47:32Vincenzo Landino?

  It's, what is the lift? I don't, I don't know the number, you know, for every car maker, but it's, you know, Red Bull doesn't make a car, right? So they've got nothing to worry about. Williams doesn't make a car.

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  What about the RB17? They made two of those.

• 1:47:45Vincenzo Landino?

  Well, all right, all right, all right, to be fair, to be fair. Yes, yes.

• 1:47:48John Coogan?

  But yes.

• 1:47:48Vincenzo Landino?

  I just meant like your regular car. That thing does look pretty.

• 1:47:52Jordi Hays?

  What about, how, what's happening in, in sim racing broadly? Like, how is the, I mean, do you look at sim racing as its own kind of sub industry?

• 1:48:01Vincenzo Landino?

  Yeah. I don't, I mean, so I don't track it as much or I'm not paying as much attention. I know that it is, there's a higher interest in sim racing because most people realize, well, it's too expensive to go get a track day. It's too expensive to try and even go racing, right? To be, to go from karting to, you know, to the different series levels and then to get to F1, it's almost impossible, right? And you need.

• 1:48:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people were running the numbers on like how much Landino's dad had spent to get him actually in the game. And it was like they clocked it at like $40 million over the career.

• 1:48:38Vincenzo Landino?

  Yeah. Uh, just. Either you have a very rich, yeah, rich parent or sponsor, you know.

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  But I think you need both. You need both, right? Or you don't need both, but like it helps to have both. It's not just one or the other.

• 1:48:51Vincenzo Landino?

  It helps. I mean, it's a different lifestyle, right? So it's a lifestyle that is, you're traveling, you're off in times, unless you're already in Europe, you are likely going to Europe. We had Connor Daly on our podcast, IndyCar Driver. And actually that episode comes on a couple of weeks, but he did say to us in the conversation that, you know, he had to go to Europe to race an open wheel because that's where it was like, he couldn't do it here. There was no ladder. The ladder system wasn't robust enough to get where he wanted to go. That takes dollars, right? Now, his dad raced in Formula One. But could I do it? Could you guys? I don't know. Would we be able to start? Would my kids be able to start? It's, it's, it's just, it's, so that's where sim racing comes in. And sim racing is made

• 1:49:33Vincenzo Landino?

  more popular because the current batch of drivers are very tapped into the sim racing world. Max Verstappen races sim cars in between races, between qualifying and the actual race the next day. He's like, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna go race on the sim. And he takes part in competitive, you know, racing. Landino races, Charles, they all, they all, they all race. And most of them are racing pretty competitively on sim. So that's also made it more popular. The, the allure of being able to maybe race with Max Verstappen or Landino Norris or get, you know, boot up online and play that, those, that's all increased tremendously. I'd have to actually look at the numbers. I want to see if they're

• 1:50:11Jordi Hays?

  What about the, what about the, the health of individual tracks around the US? We're going to, we're going to, uh, doing a track day out at Willow Springs later this month. And I think they changed ownership recently. Uh, and, uh, but, but yeah, how are, how are these doing as businesses? Are they the kind of things where it's like fun to own, but actually just a terrible, uh, business? Or is anybody actually doing really well?

• 1:50:36Vincenzo Landino?

  It's a tough business. Is anyone doing really well? It's the ones that are, you know, are backed by dollars that have big races at them. It's, it's hard to maintain.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  A pure enthusiast track, you're saying?

• 1:50:50Vincenzo Landino?

  A pure enthusiast track. Yeah. You, you really have to, uh, be like a Coda. Right now to be immensely successful. Now that's smaller regional tracks are still hosting, you know, plenty of racing, but to say they're extremely healthy is tough. Also, there's a lot of folks that think, oh, we want F1 to come race at our track, or we want F1 to come to Road America, F1 to come. It's like, no, you don't, because it's a whole spectacle to come build this. And oftentimes, it destroys what makes your track unique, or appealing, or charming. So there's a lot of, and those are conversations I'm always tracking, you know, how do folks-

• 1:51:25Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I have a kind of a, a, a not quite baked thesis, but an idea that the track business might actually become a great business in the future if it becomes effectively illegal to drive cars on the road just via autonomous vehicles, where guys and girls are not going to like suddenly, if, if, at some point, it's like, humans can no longer drive, it's just too dangerous. Like, you can imagine that scenario happening in the next 10, 20 years. And people are still going to want to drive, so they're going to take their cars to tracks. And that, you could see a resurgence of enthusiasts driving because it just made illegal on normal roads.

• 1:52:03Vincenzo Landino?

  Yeah. I mean, that's actually, I, that's fantastic. I didn't even think about the autonomous driving aspect of that, and how if people can't drive, people that, like us, that like, you know, have gotten a taste of driving, we know what it's like.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  Also, driving on a track, driving your car on, on the road versus the track is just, it's completely, it's incomparable.

• 1:52:22Vincenzo Landino?

  Yeah. Totally different, totally different. I mean, you, you know, you wonder sometimes how people get their licenses, but you're like, I'm not going to drive.

• 1:52:32Vincenzo Landino?

  I'm not going to drive the way I want to drive on a track on, on, you know, the I-95 over here. Like, it's just not going to-

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  No, and then there was that tragedy recently, the, was it the Activision?

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Founder of Call of Duty.

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Founder of Call of Duty was driving. I've driven Angeles Crest a bunch. I, I had the scariest moment of my life in a car on Angeles Crest at around 6:00 AM, probably five years ago, driving a 997 that I had. And I, yeah.

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine at some point that, I mean, that what a lot of people do at ACH is already effectively illegal, right? They're driving 30, 40, 50 miles, you know, 60, 70 miles above the speed limit, tailing each other very closely. It is like reckless driving. But, uh, but yeah, that wouldn't, if that same situation had happened on a track, like everybody would have been fine.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Usually. Walk me through a

• 1:53:30Vincenzo Landino?

  So the circuit conversation real quick.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:53:33Vincenzo Landino?

  No, I just want to add one last thing to that. There's a lot of the, you know, private members only clubs coming up now at racetracks for enthusiasts.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:42Vincenzo Landino?

  I think that's an opportunity for racetracks to become maybe a little more popular or increase their health because they can offer, and Cota's doing it, right? They're offering luxury condos and garages and a whole club membership or a membership. So I think that's something that can happen more.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Can you take me through what a successful F1 track build looks like? What's the, how is, how is Vegas looking? We went and they were very much bragging that it was a permanent facility. It's remarkable. It feels like it's working, but how does this actually work? Who's paying who and how is it penciled out in Vegas?

• 1:54:16Vincenzo Landino?

  I mean, you've got, you've got some public money, public funds needed. And of course, there's plenty of complainers about that nonstop. Just open up, open up Twitter and you'll see people complaining, locals complaining. The, the permanent facility in Vegas is actually a new thing. So like, there's really not much to compare it to because street tracks don't usually have anything permanent. Like you go to Monaco, there's, they're, they're putting that together months ahead of time. So that for Vegas is pretty unique. They are filling it with the Grand Prix Plaza while it's not race, uh, let's see, they, I think they cut off around September, October. And so then it becomes a business

• 1:55:00Vincenzo Landino?

  with the, the Grand Prix Plaza. They have the F1. Experience, it's kind of almost like a museum, there's simulators, there's a restaurant. So they're, they're trying to keep people tied to the F1 brand all year long. That's unique to Vegas. In terms of the, the layout of the track and whatnot, I mean, the build of the track, the permanent pieces of it, I believe they are trying to add some permanent like lighting fixtures so that those don't have to go up every single time. But I mean, you guys were there, so you saw it. I mean, there's so much of it that has to go up in real time because you can't close down the strip all year round. You can't have, um, what is it? You know, you can't have all the things they have up around the track, the stands. Yeah.

• 1:55:45Vincenzo Landino?

  There's not even really stands. Everything's like luxury over there. So it's, you're either in a suite or you're not. So yeah, all of that has to go up in real time. You know, when you have, um, when you have a permanent facility like a Cota or Miami's kind of half and half. But when you have a permanent facility like Cota, you know, you, it's obviously there. Those are more expensive to maintain overall, um, because you have to keep them occupied and you have to do something in them year round after that one race. Vegas, you know, you kind of take the good and the bad. You have to take the locals complaining and you have to do the shutdowns and all that. So I mean, you guys were there. So you remember how like they had to shut down from like Wednesday at two o'clock? Yeah.

• 1:56:28Vincenzo Landino?

  Basically from two to midnight every day after that was, was closed down. I mean, those are things they have to deal with and I think that's just unique. Las Vegas is really, really unique. It's also new to Las Vegas residents. Whereas you take like a Monaco that's been around since the twenties. Yeah. Those folks are, they're used to it. It's part of the identity and that's, that's where I think there's still room to grow.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  The difference in Monaco too is like if you're a resident and you, and you own or rent like a condo or an apartment and then F1 comes to town, it's super exciting. But if you're a Vegas resident and this track springs up and everything gets more expensive and you're kind of like boxed out, it's not as much of it's, and you're not necessarily an F1 fan. It just becomes much more of an annoyance than like a celebration of the city.

• 1:57:14Vincenzo Landino?

  And I think that's where the like, we still haven't gotten peak saturation, right? It's not, people aren't excited about it just because like, it's not ingrained in their identity, whereas you go to, you know, you go to Europe and they are, have more of a motorsport culture, or at least F1, let's just say F1, where that culture is understood. So, track, tracks are very interesting, they want more street circuits, there are more street circuits coming, Madrid is being added this year, so that'll be interesting to see how that build goes, we actually talked to the-

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Why do they want more, uh, street circuits? I feel like an American Nürburgring would be incredible. I would love an American Nürburgring, maybe in like, uh, Idaho or something, going through the forest.

• 1:57:53Vincenzo Landino?

  I don't disagree with you. The reason they want more is because it is actually more appealing and more sexy to say, hey, come to our city, come to Madrid, and we can sell Madrid, so-

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  And, and, I mean, Vegas, everyone goes to the nightclubs, there's like, a huge economic impact, the hotels, whereas if you're out in the, in the sticks, yeah, you might be in some cheap hotel, but you're not gonna go spend a ton of money.

• 1:58:18Vincenzo Landino?

  Spa in Belgium is arguably, every driver we've talked to, every, any motorsport enthusiast says Spa is the best track to drive, to race at, it's awesome. But you know where Spa is? In the middle of the Ardennes Forest.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's awesome, but-

• 1:58:32Vincenzo Landino?

  It's, it's not, right, it's cool, if you're really into motorsport, but if you're trying to sell F1, or you're trying to sell this brand as this is appealing to sponsors and it's sexy, and, well, I don't, I don't, I would rather do it in, I don't know, Brussels or something like that.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. Cause you're basically holding, you're holding a conference for your company, a lot of, the sponsors will invite key clients and partners to come with them, and if you're out in the forest, it's a little bit different.

• 1:58:58Vincenzo Landino?

  And the playbook has been written, so like, it's, it's become a festival, it's, you know, it is a festival, and that's what they want, the new, like, if you're gonna pay seventy million dollars to host a race, you, you need to recoup that, you can't recoup that by just having a race in the middle of nowhere, and that's why you're seeing a lot of these things happen with the smaller tracks in Europe, they can't afford it, they just don't have it.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  That's funny.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, uh, next time you come on, I want to talk about the possibility of an AI driver at some point. I think imagine if, imagine if Google bought a team and they had no human driver.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  This is my new AGI test is I want a humanoid robot in a manual gearbox shifting with three pedals around the Nürburgring in under seven minutes.

• 1:59:42Vincenzo Landino?

  Now, well, did you guys see the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League?

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I, I saw like briefly, but tell me.

• 1:59:49Vincenzo Landino?

  It's, it's autonomous racing and it's teams of, of engineers, basically with no drivers in the car.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:55Vincenzo Landino?

  It's clunky. It's clunky.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  It's clunky.

• 1:59:58Vincenzo Landino?

  You know, oh, cause the cars, I mean, they're, they are driving by themselves, but they, they still have to process. So like, you have a car cut in front of you, like.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you do about that?

• 2:00:07Vincenzo Landino?

  Imagine, well, imagine a Waymo and something jumps in front of it. It's gonna stop, right? So it's kind of the same thing happened with this race. Um, so it's kind of, if you had a chance to look it up, the autonomous racing league and it was in Abu Dhabi. They're trying to make it a thing. I, I, I don't know about, it's not there yet.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  I would love to see some, uh, the, the, the track times, how they compare, and also all of the, all the blooper reel. I'm sure is really funny.

• 2:00:29Vincenzo Landino?

  Lot of, there's a lot of blooper reels.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  I'm sure.

• 2:00:32Vincenzo Landino?

  For sure.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, we'd love to have you back.

• 2:00:33Jordi Hays?

  So great, so great to hang. Uh, let's, let's make it a regular thing.

• 2:00:36John Coogan?

  This is good.

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  And appreciate you, uh, giving us the full overview of everything.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Thanks for having us. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. You can go check them out and our next guest, Nigel Vaz is already in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. Nigel, good to meet you. How are you doing? How's your new year going?

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Off to a good start.

• 2:01:05Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me. Great to be on. Yeah, it's great.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Uh, well, we'd love to kick this off since this is the first time on the show, uh, with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and, uh, and how you introduce yourself to everyone who's watching.

• 2:01:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I run Sapient, which is a enterprise AI software and technology business. Sapient was founded about thirty years ago in the early days of the internet, building some of the world's first online banks, the first time you could trade equities, the first time you could pick a seat on an airplane. So we've had about thirty years of building digital systems to really build intelligent enterprises in the first wave of digital. And now leveraging AI, we're all about how we can actually unlock real transformation beyond pilots for some of the largest enterprises in the world. So what we really do is bring together deep industry expertise across sectors from financial services, retail, healthcare,

• 2:02:01Speaker 05

  and then combine it with our digital DNA alongside a few AI products that stem from agentic orchestration through to accelerated software development, and then finally managing IT systems using AI.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  How did you process that data point that kind of shook the internet a little bit for a couple of days last year where it suggested that a lot of the AI demos at the enterprise level, the experimentation, those experimental budgets, that they weren't getting renewed, that they weren't seeing the level of adoption?

• 2:02:37Jordi Hays?

  They weren't getting renewed, it's just that they weren't like...

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  They weren't converting and they weren't working. It was some crazy high number, like ninety-three percent of enterprise AI tests. Yeah, yeah, so how did you process that at the time?

• 2:02:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was an MIT study that came out. And actually, what we did is we had a bunch of professors evaluate from MIT our work, almost as a counterpoint to that data. Because what we were seeing is, of course, there was a ton of experimentation in the organizations around AI, but trying something out and then scaling it across the enterprise was one of the biggest stumbling blocks, largely because building a proof of concept in a small organization and scaling it is a lot easier than when you are one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world, or when you're one of the largest banks in the world. Because you have to actually think about the tool chaining of the organization and how these systems deploy in...

• 2:03:28Speaker 05

  The context of that, right? Most of these organizations, I mean, Davos is coming up in a couple of weeks. And every time I go, I, over the last couple of years, AI has been the dominant conversation. But more and more clients are now saying, hey, we understand the concepts around AI. We understand all of the conversation is around compute and all of the conversation is around models. But how am I as an enterprise leader getting value from this in the context of what I do day to day? And that is exactly why that stat is so critical. Because I think essentially the bridge from you experiment with a little bit of AI to you can actually start to see meaningful gains outside of the obvious use cases of you're deploying AI in a call center

• 2:04:13Speaker 05

  to route some calls more efficiently, or you're deploying AI in the context of enabling your sales teams to be more efficient, right? We're talking about large scale agentic mesh deployments that are allowing businesses to reimagine a car build that used to take eighteen months in eighteen weeks.

• 2:04:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:34Speaker 05

  Or allowing an insurance company to monitor worldwide events and on a dynamic basis allow you to react to the fact that I heard one of you guys talking about your house getting burned down in California. And this is an actual piece of work we did for a client. Where they were monitoring the air quality post fires and alerting people who have significant issues with asthma to actually, you know, make sure they had inhalers or maybe even perhaps moved out of those zones proactively, saving themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare and better outcomes for these folks who otherwise might have gone through a traumatic health event, right?

• 2:05:20Speaker 05

  Completely different orchestration than I think a pilot or two.

• 2:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Could you share some more, as much as you can, like who your actual like clients are? Because I think that'd be helpful to ground the conversation because it's some of the biggest companies in the world.

• 2:05:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is. It's, it's, it's some of the biggest banks in the world, going all the way from retail banks to investment banks, like the likes of a Goldman Sachs, for example, in the investment space. In the, in the retail space, we work across the.

• 2:05:56Speaker 05

  The retail space across essentially grocery retail and then fashion retail as well as general product retail. So we work with the likes of a Carrefour in France or a Walmart in the US, Tesco in the UK. So a number of big businesses there in the context of the automotive space, the likes of a number of the big German automotive companies, a number of the big US automotive companies, Asian automotive companies. So we serve multiple sectors across countries around the world. And in many cases, that's one of the complexities there, right? Because these are global organizations, there's different data governance rules,

• 2:06:36Speaker 05

  there's different legacy enterprise journeys that they've gone through. Almost every one of these enterprises is sitting on, you know, a few hundred million dollars of tech debt, which you have to kind of work your way through before you can actually deploy any one of these AI, you know, ideas.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  How are how are some of these like management teams that you work with approaching messaging AI internally? Because I feel like the broad fear in the economy right now is related to job loss. And so

• 2:07:10Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:07:11Jordi Hays?

  One of the reasons you'd bring in an external partner is so that they can take a just kind of a pragmatic view at the business and really understand where you can get leverage out of AI. Whereas if you're running a thousand person organization in a company, there's maybe some more attention around implementing AI. You know, you'll probably lose your job as an executive if you don't implement AI well. But if you but depending on how you implement it, there's going to be some job loss and you're and people are looking out for their team and maybe they like having a bigger headcount, etc. So how yeah, how is that even being messaged at the moment?

• 2:07:47Speaker 05

  Look, I think the conversation is definitely across organizations, right? I mean, people in most enterprises are very tuned to the fact that this is a moment, much like the Internet was, and we saw this in the early days of the Internet. I mentioned some of the things we did back then, right? A moment of reimagination of business in a very fundamental way. This is not one of those incremental, you know, progressive overload type moments. This is a significant transformation. So I don't think anybody in your organization is sitting there basically saying, "Hey, I think nothing in my world is going to change." I think people expect the change. I think what most folks aren't clear about is what is the journey from here,

• 2:08:28Speaker 05

  where we have existing systems, existing processes, existing ways of working that the business is running on? And, you know, making sure that you can fundamentally rebuild this plane while you still have targets and commitments and shareholders. And you recognize that if you don't do it soon enough to the point you're making, you're going to start to give up margin, or you're going to start to give up speed, or you're going to start to give up market share. Almost every conversation we're in is about how can I actually drive more growth? How can I actually create a better experience for my customers? And this isn't coming just from leaders in the organization. This is coming from people across the organization. What we are seeing, though, is that at the level of enabling these people

• 2:09:11Speaker 05

  to do work in this new context, organizations are very much separated by execution. So, you know, so many clients will talk about, you know, an AI strategy, right? But do you have a data strategy? Are all your data sets connected? Or actually, are you doing AI pilots on sales data on this ERP system over here? And doing, you know, uh, you know, marketing pilots on that ERP system over there, which will eventually evolve to agents on this ERP system for sales, not talking to agents to that ERP system on marketing? And those agents not talking to each other across sales and marketing resembles a traditional baton passing organization of today, right?

• 2:09:55Speaker 05

  So you're mimicking essentially a lot of what you do.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Larger enterprises, how it felt like last year was the year of...

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Was all about just like coding, right? Every single founder that came on our show would talk about the leverage that they're getting. We're getting that leverage internally. We've built a bunch of software to run the show that we never would have built historically because it just would have been too time intensive. But now we can have one great engineer, Tyler, on our team who can build an entire product end to end. Please don't try to poach him.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, how is, how have like, how have coding agents and products been adopted in some of these companies? Is there any type of restrictions? Part of the reason that it got adopted so quickly is it was somewhat permissionless. Engineers could just sign up for a product and go bottoms up. But I don't even know how adoption would work at someone like a McDonald's or someone like a Mercedes or someone at a bigger bank where I don't know that an engineer can necessarily just say like, I'm going to start using this product.

• 2:11:00Speaker 05

  No, and you can't, right? You can't because the fact of the matter is it's not just Tyler or one engineer. It's one engineer with another engineer, with a third engineer, with a fourth engineer, where a lot of them share context around a bigger application. Whereas if you start using one tool chain and the next person starts using a next tool chain and the third, which is by the way, what happened in the early days, right? Which is why you got those pilots up and running really fast and people were starting to see real leverage. But then very quickly that started devolve to basically, but we're not seeing the net output actually move the needle across big things. So I'll give you an example of a, you know, we did a piece of work for a large healthcare

• 2:11:44Speaker 05

  company, which was on a 10-year modernization journey migrating millions.

• 2:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it a little modernization.

• 2:11:51John Coogan?

  Wow, thinking in decades, thinking in decades. People say you should think in decades. These people are actually doing it. I love it.

• 2:11:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's crazy, right? It's real. Millions of lines of COBOL code written in the sixties and seventies by dudes that are not not only in the company, they're not probably on the planet, right? And and and you have individual developers going line by line by line, trying to interpret what the intent behind the code was. But more importantly, because this is HIPAA compliant data and has serious healthcare outcomes tied to it, you have to be really thoughtful about what of this code you need to retain, what logic it holds, and how much of this you can actually, you know, do away with, right? That journey, going from like a ten years to a few years, two years or three years, requires you to be able to have all of the current business context of the organization.

• 2:12:42Speaker 05

  It requires you to have a future state that you understand really well. And you need to have a group of people working on a very similar tool chain so that the code that you are ingesting then gets created into a spec that a bunch of humans can look at and say, is this the spec that we actually want? And then that spec can actually get migrated into new code. So we built this platform called Slingshot, which is our software modernization platform. And how it differs from a lot of the consumer grade, you know, platforms that have got crazy valuations right now is they were all built for individual users writing apps like Tyler for smaller organizations or for themselves. But the minute you start to deploy them into large enterprises,

• 2:13:25Speaker 05

  what you find is that enterprise context graph that is missing or permissions, like what part of the app are you allowed to see versus me? Or what is my relationship to you on a dev team, right? How do you actually start to manage authentication permissions? This is the kind of stuff that really makes those pilots go awry in the context of these big scale changes.

• 2:13:49Jordi Hays?

  What can we expect in AI and advertising this year specifically? I feel like we went from Large companies making an ad and saying, we're going to serve this to a million people or 10 million people or 100 million people, right? A Super Bowl ad is an example of that. And then as you have platforms like Meta, really, really, really specific targeting, you can basically make an ad and serve it to like a tiny group of people, very, very specific. You can imagine a world in the future where an advertiser, even as big as McDonald's, would effectively make an advertisement that's meant for like one individual person, just because you could generate it on the fly. Jordy, you're going to love this. This big one is made for you. Yeah, effectively. So what are you expecting on that front?

• 2:14:34Jordi Hays?

  Because the models have gotten a lot better and it does feel like companies should generate maybe at least 50 times as much ad creative this year than last year. Yeah.

• 2:14:45Speaker 05

  I think the output's going up. The question is whether the quality and the targeting are going up simultaneously, right? Because Meta sees incredible stuff in their wall garden, Google sees incredible stuff in their wall garden, but how are companies leveraging their first-party data to understand that you're Jordy, this is your context, this is the car you drive, or this is the burger you eat, or this is the hotel room you like to stay in?

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  I tell them everything about myself. I want them to target me as specifically as they possibly can.

• 2:15:12Speaker 05

  You'll be so surprised though, right? I'm sure you do that all the time, but how often do people actually use what you give them about yourself to actually give you something back that's relevant? The hard part is not getting consumers to give data. You know, there's been a lot of conversation about data privacy and of course, I think consumers are all about like, if you give me value back, I'm going to give you my data because I get something back in return. So if I'm watching Netflix and you know what I like to watch, you're going to show me something back that I care about? Great, I'll give you my data. But most companies can't do that. They can't actually serve up what you want. I mean, we work with a very large hotel brand, Marriott globally, and we were basically working with them to basically say, how do we capture intent in the context of what people

• 2:15:57Speaker 05

  are searching for? So when you actually go to their villas platform, you know, historically what you might say is, hey, or hotel platform, you might say, these are the dates I've got. Free. This is the city that I'm searching for and this is the kind of product that I'm looking for.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:16:13Speaker 05

  And now you flip that around to say, how can you ingest all of the intent and context that they're willing to give you? So give them a white box and all of a sudden you say, hey, I'm a, I've got young kids, I've got a pet. Uh, one of my children is autistic and really sensitive to noise, so it needs to be in a quiet part of the hotel, blah, blah, blah. Next thing you know, the relevance that you can respond with goes up dramatically. So what I think you're going to see from an advertising perspective is people who have the ability to leverage first party data, combine it with second and third party data from a targeting perspective, and then building production tool chains that allow them to use that to really personalize content is really powerful.

• 2:16:55Speaker 05

  Like to give you an example, a large pharmaceutical company doing a vaccine launch in a hundred and fifteen countries. How this works normally is the marketers would have to come up with a bunch of concepts, then talk to the lawyers to basically say, what are the regs in each of these hundred and fifteen countries about vaccines? And you'll find crazy stuff like in New Zealand, you're not allowed to smile in the ad because a smile implies an outcome. So they want like straight faced people because you don't actually know if the, uh, if the vaccine is actually going to work.

• 2:17:24Jordi Hays?

  So hard to, so hard to advertise if people can't smile.

• 2:17:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:17:28Jordi Hays?

  So just like, you're gonna have, if you take this, Jack, you're gonna have a bad time.

• 2:17:33Speaker 05

  So, so, so you've got this crazy process that goes for like twelve months, where the marketers and the lawyers are having a conversation about what can and can't be done content wise. And then the content gets tweaked and produced, right? And what we built using both the Argentic platform, we ingest all of the regs into our platform. We then basically look at the creative concepts um that were originally created by the team and we'll test them against the regs almost on a real time basis. And then regenerate, to your point, using whatever models uh are more efficient for the kind of content, regenerate versions of that content appropriate to every one of these countries, and then allow that work to be deployed at significant scale.

• 2:18:18Speaker 05

  More importantly, if we discover an issue, once it's actually live in the context of that, our monitoring agents are monitoring the content to ensure there are the reactions to them and then can actually start to do A B testing about what's actually working better. But all of this is in one synchronous.

• 2:18:35Speaker 07

  orchestration in the same way that like these orchestrations might connect supply chain data to store inventory to advertising. So we're basically, you know, Black Friday, this product's already gone off the shelf. The ad isn't still hitting the same product because those people in the store are only going to get more frustrated and you start to close the loop.

• 2:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, awesome. Well, thank you for coming on, breaking it down.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  What an exciting time to be in this particular business.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  To be modernized, be advertising.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  I mean, the Nobody like A decade will happen in years.

• 2:19:07Jordi Hays?

  I love it. Nobody likes advertising or modernizing more than us and maybe you. So it's great to hang.

• 2:19:12John Coogan?

  Your day. We'll talk to you soon, Nigel.

• 2:19:13Speaker 07

  Take care.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 2:19:14John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And up next.

• 2:19:26Jordi Hays?

  It's steward time.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  It's steward time. We're stewarding. We are joined by Sequoia Capitals, Pat Grady and Ravi Gupta.

• 2:19:34Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, guys?

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  How are you guys doing? Great to see you.

• 2:19:37Speaker 07

  Good to see you guys.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Happy New Year. We might need you guys to scoot back a little bit. Is that possible?

• 2:19:43Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 2:19:43John Coogan?

  We're just like

• 2:19:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, we got you.

• 2:19:45Jordi Hays?

  We don't want half of you, Robbie. We want the whole.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:19:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, let's go.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Massive start to the new year. Take us through the news today. Very exciting. But but we'll hear from you.

• 2:19:56Speaker 07

  The news today is about XAI is raising money. Is that the news that we're talking?

• 2:19:59Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  That was yesterday, actually.

• 2:20:01Speaker 07

  Oh, okay.

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  So we've moved on. We already covered that.

• 2:20:05Speaker 07

  Okay, you guys are looking fantastic today. Just letting you guys know, particularly good, I think. Dude, so what happened today was, as you recall from my last TVPn appearance, I want my children to be AI researchers so they can support the family. And it wasn't obvious they were going to get hired anywhere else. So we're like, fuck it, let's, I'm going to start my own company.

• 2:20:25John Coogan?

  Epitism.

• 2:20:26Speaker 07

  Right? Epitism for the good.

• 2:20:28Jordi Hays?

  Underrated.

• 2:20:30Speaker 07

  Those are the lengths that I will go to, to, you know, make my children happy. No, what happened was today, I announced that I am going to be starting a new company. I'm super pumped. And then also getting to do it while still being part of Sequoia is pretty special. And I think my, my brother Pat here, you know, was cool about letting that happen. And we're excited.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you two first meet?

• 2:20:58Pat Grady?

  Was it Abramson? Yeah, of course. I think we had a partner named Michael Abramson, who was involved with Instacart back in the day. And I think Michael was the original connection. And then Ravi, we got to know Ravi over a period of years, and I mentioned in a tweet today that we always have this shadow list, which is not long. It's like literally half a dozen people. But you know, the shadow list of the people we would hire if we ever got a chance. Ravi was on that list for a few years. And finally, we were lucky enough to get him back in 2019.

• 2:21:27Speaker 07

  Whenever someone asks me about my Sequoia interview process, John and Jordy, I say it was either five years or five minutes. I don't know. It was one of those things that seemed to happen quick at the end. But you know, I guess it took a long time.

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  Being gag-stocked by the Sequoia partnership. I would love to see that list, but it's certainly key intellectual property.

• 2:21:45Jordi Hays?

  That list is, yeah, key IP.

• 2:21:47John Coogan?

  Stewarded, one of the things that you steward.

• 2:21:48Jordi Hays?

  That's the steward's greatest responsibility.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  How are you settling into the new role?

• 2:21:53Pat Grady?

  It's been great. You know, we, first off, Alfred and I have been working together for 15 years. And he's been.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  How did you two meet?

• 2:22:06Speaker 07

  You guys are big on this question, huh?

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  I was like, Laura.

• 2:22:09Speaker 07

  I didn't think we were going to answer it the first time. I thought they were messing with us.

• 2:22:12John Coogan?

  We could do news, but also like Laura.

• 2:22:14Pat Grady?

  Well, I think the, I think most people know Alfred before Sequoia was the president and COO of Zappos, which was Sequoia Investment. And so we got to know each other a little bit through that. But I wasn't playing on the investment. So it was just kind of seeing each other at Sequoia events or whatever. And then he joined, I want to say 2010, he joined Sequoia, somewhere around that time. And at that point, I was mostly focused on growth investing. He was mostly focused on early investing. By 2015 or so, he was co-captaining the early business. I was co-captaining the growth business. And we just had a great partnership for a very long time.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, how are you thinking about the divide of responsibilities now? Is there more nuance to it than just early and growth? Are there other, is there someone who likes to do more personnel management, more recruiting, or more marketing, or whatever, more fundraising? Is there any division there?

• 2:23:07Pat Grady?

  So once upon a time, Fred Letty, who is the founder of ServiceNow, handed over the reins to Frank Slubman. And I remember shortly thereafter, Frank Slubman had the line. I'm the workhorse, he's the show pony. So Alfred and I have this wonderful relationship where the plan that we've agreed to, certainly agreed to, is I get to go on TVP and he gets to manage by going to compliance.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  Alfred's welcome anytime too.

• 2:23:35Pat Grady?

  No, no, I'm kidding. The honest answer is our team, we have so many, we have so many awesome people at Sequoia, not just on the investment team, but on all the operating teams. There isn't a lot of management that needs to happen. And so over the last couple of months, I think one of the things we've realized is it's like very, it's a very small amount of incremental load to do the steward job. It's mostly just serving as a thought partner for other people in the organization who kind of already know what the right answer is. And so there's not, there hasn't actually been that much incremental work, which has been a nice, nice surprise.

• 2:24:13John Coogan?

  What is the, what is unique about Sequoia's surface area of work to be done? I mean, I know there's the RIA transition. Is there a public markets desk? Are there traders now? Like, how big is the organization outside of what people think of from like a classic VC partnership? What else or what else is going on at Sequoia?

• 2:24:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, you know what's funny, guys? I think people would be surprised at how small Sequoia is, you know, like the, I mean, we, I think we barely have double-digit general partners in the business, right? The entire firm is pretty small. And so I would tell you this, and I mean this sincerely, like, I think people tend to overestimate like surface area, right, of what we have in terms of like management scope. And realistically, the most important thing is that the stewards are awesome investors and people that great people want to work with, you know? And so the thing, I didn't say that's what you guys were. I said, that's like an important thing for you guys. That's the idea. That's like, that's the standard. Now, now we'll talk about it. That's what they're supposed to be. No, but obviously, like, so truly, like, I would tell you the thing

• 2:25:16Speaker 07

  that's most important for these guys is to be great investors. It is to sponsor investments in the best companies and to continue that. Cause like, Sequoia's entire thing needs to be that we back the best companies in the world. Right? And if we keep doing that, everything else kind of follows. If we don't, you're gonna be the best manager ever.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like a GP or a steward that's not investing is like a CEO with bad product sense. It's like, can they, can they really be a truly incredible CEO if they don't understand the product?

• 2:25:47Pat Grady?

  Yeah, you lose your moral authority and we're too small of an organization. There's no, there's no management job available at Sequoia. It's just too small of an organization.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  Robbie, how are you thinking about the specific advantages of starting a company from your experience at Sequoia? There's obviously going to be endless industry plant allegations that you'll have to beat, but I'm sure you'll take those on headfirst.

• 2:26:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, I guess one question maybe like-

• 2:26:12John Coogan?

  How much of the company do you build beforehand? How do you actually think about how you want to build this company? What are the axioms that you're following?

• 2:26:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Jordy, were you gonna say something?

• 2:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and I was gonna say like, what qualifies as an opportunity that is worthy of, of, you know, leaving an institution?

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  There's a lot of the ideas that you think are good, somebody will come to you and be like, I'm gonna do it. And you're like, that's great. I just write you the check and then, you know, you go do the hard work, but this is-

• 2:26:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, the pressure is immense. Like, you basically, you basically have to put on an absolute masterclass here, right? There's no excuses, right? You have to, you have to achieve greatness.

• 2:26:47Speaker 07

  You don't think I can just yell at myself to grow faster and burn less? That's not, that's not how this is gonna work.

• 2:26:53Pat Grady?

  One of my favorite portfolio reviews is Robbie, Robbie was unfurling this beautiful monologue about what was going on at some company. It was probably a five-minute speech. It sounded great. And then when he boiled it all down, he basically said, grow faster, burn less.

• 2:27:08Speaker 07

  Listening happens at the ear. Okay? And, you know, so, okay, so the real answer, I guess the first thing is, Jordy, like, you know this. I'm not leaving, I'm changing my role, right? I'm gonna go for like a general partner to partner down the boards, all that. But, look, it is a high standard. This job is amazing. I love this job. I love our team. And I love the founders I get to work with. I think the real thing that pulls it towards is not the specific idea, it's the specific moment we're in. I do think that AI is changing everything. I think that like I I wrote this thing, maybe like a year ago, AI or Die, which was just sort of like, can you see the progress that's happening? And I really believe the world belongs to the fast-moving, reactive, responsive company right now that can get the best people in the world.

• 2:27:52Speaker 07

  And it doesn't matter if they're an incumbent or they're a startup. But I think that you like being able to move quickly and respond to that is the biggest advantage that you can have. And I found myself thinking about that all the time. And after writing that, I was like telling all these companies I work with and even companies I don't work with, like, look, this is what I think it's about. This is what I think we gotta be doing. And then I was like, man, I like really do feel passionate about this. I want to do that myself. And so the real thing that happened was I just wanted to be on the field again. I wanted to build a team. I wanted to go after this. And I think the thing that I uh found was that the fact that I could then do it while still maintaining my relationships with my partners, the fact that I can stay on some boards, that made it so much more like

• 2:28:37Speaker 07

  something more I wanted to do. And then the other thing is, and I haven't shared this yet, and I'll share it with you guys when the time is right, but like, I have a co-founder who's out of this world, truly out of this world, like way better than me, someone that will make you guys bang the gong when you guys hear who it is.

• 2:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna be the show pony or?

• 2:28:52Speaker 07

  The workhorse. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious. I think it's pretty obvious that I'm the good looks of the operation. I mean, I'm surprised that you'd ask, um, you know, but but put it this way, like when I told the kids, like, maybe, what do you think of dad starting a company? They were somewhat like, well, I don't know, like, you know, you know, what do you think the implications are? Do we have to move if this doesn't work? Do they call you unk?

• 2:29:15Speaker 07

  Dude, uh, basically, okay? And then I was like, how would you feel if this person was the co-founder? And then my kids were like, well, we actually have $750 of accumulated birthday money. Maybe we could lead.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  We could uh lead your.

• 2:29:29Speaker 07

  Get him on the Sequoia list for future hires. They did not call me unk, but uh Andrew's tweet was an all-timer today, all time.

• 2:29:36Jordi Hays?

  So good. How how are you thinking about timelines with the new company? It feels like you can build products so much faster today than maybe you could two years ago, that there's maybe more of a the value in in staying really, really quiet, actually staying in stealth and and making some more uh progress before you come out the gates and then invite a bunch of people to try to come compete with you?

• 2:30:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think, listen, we're gonna talk when we have something to say, right? We gotta go and build this thing. I do think to your point, you know, the Sierra guys are very good about this and they have this language of like, in AI world, a year is a month, right? Or, you know, whatever, whichever way you make it faster. But basically, like, a month is a year, you know, uh, you know, a week is a month and a day is a week. And the idea is that, like, you gotta go fast. You need to be super responsive. You guys know I'm a big basketball guy. Coach K has this great quote, you know, I'm not a world-class predictor, but I am a world-class reactor. Like, that's what we gotta be in. You gotta be fast in truth-seeking. And I think the other thing that's nice about being, you know, with Sequoia is like, we get to see the best companies in the world, you know? And we get to learn from them and see the pace that the best ones go.

• 2:30:45Speaker 07

  And, you know, Pat, you can talk about that, but I, I think that's something that is helpful.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about, uh, the particular AI opportunity right now? I feel like there's, there's a little bit of a meme that the best time to start a, uh, AI company is probably 10 years ago as a lab and wait around and then have this breakout moment. And the second best time is probably like the day ChatGPT launched and everyone sort of realized that this was real. But we're now two years into this, a lot of, you know, the, the default categories, the market maps exist. How do you think about just finding opportunity? Is it unlocked by just last year's advances? Or do you think there's new categories that were not on the table two years ago that are now on the table? And, I mean, this is your thinking, but also for anyone that's watching, uh, whom I want to start a company in 2026?

• 2:31:36Speaker 07

  I, I kinda think that the premise that those other people have is flawed, right? And I'll tell you for real, like, the biggest thing that makes a difference in whether a company succeeds or not is the people that are building it, right? And I believe that we have the most fierce competition ever, you know, right now. And it's only gonna get more fierce, right? And I think that you're gonna be fighting every day and there's no, like, Actually, Sarah, whoa, uh, that's wife wrote this awesome post yesterday about like uh, relevance decay, right? And how much more quickly it's happening. And basically like you have to fight for your relevance every day in the venture world. That is even more true at the company. Like, it doesn't matter what you did yesterday. Look, think about recently, the the goodness that's

• 2:32:20Speaker 07

  happened from Google, right? The best thing that happened to them is the competition that they have from OpenAI, because all of a sudden it lit them up. And then they had to go and re win all this stuff and re get that mojo back. So even like the deepest moats in the world, you gotta go fight for them every day. So the real answer, you know, John, is it all we want to do is be in a space that we are willing to fight for every day and apply the latest technology every day and have AI native people working on it every day, so that every day we get, we fight again and earn our spot. And I, in my heart, I believe that more than anything, which is that like, there's nothing to protect right now. Even at Sequoia, there's nothing to protect. The only thing is what we go do tomorrow, and that'll be true at the company, too. So I think that like,

• 2:33:04Speaker 07

  honestly, I think when people are like, oh, the best time is before, I think that's like low agency thinking. And I'm like, I don't have any time for that. Like, you gotta go out and get it.

• 2:33:12Pat Grady?

  Yeah, I can make a specific case for why now's the time, too. Please. So the, I think if you want to start a foundation model lab, yeah, you're probably better off to have already done that. You know, we've kind of already seen that play out. Yeah. One of our core hypotheses in the world of AI is that the value is at the application layer. I think even for the foundation model labs, we're starting to see that that's true. Um, I would argue that now might actually be the single best time to start an application layer company, not because everything is white space, but because it feels like the playbook is finally starting to emerge. And specifically, if you think about like the three major inflection points that we've seen in the world of AI, I think the first was November twenty twenty two, when uh, ChatGPT came out, and the world was exposed to pre-training. I think the second

• 2:33:55Pat Grady?

  was fall of twenty twenty four, when O one came out, and the world was exposed to reasoning. I think the next one was actually the last couple of weeks, where you see Claude code with Opus four five, and all of a sudden, we see what long horizon agents can do. And it's hard to like, we're venture capitalists. We're not in a position to try to define AGI. But from a functional standpoint, if you have a piece of technology that can just like, keep going and overcome obstacles and use resources, and eventually think its way to the outcome that you wanted, I don't know, man, that seems pretty close to AGI for me. And I think if you

• 2:34:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have, we have goalposts, physical goalposts here that will continuously move.

• 2:34:36Pat Grady?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, and so anyway, I think now that that playbook has kind of like, not quite been written, but you can kind of see it. You know, I think, I think the ability for these application layer companies to go from a chatbot that in best case scenario, people use four or five times a day, to an agent that is always on running six instances in parallel, 24/7, doing the work of six human beings. Like, there's just a dramatically different impact that application layer companies can have today using the most recent playbook versus what they could have done two or three years ago. So I think for that reason, it's a great time to start a company.

• 2:35:11Speaker 07

  Can I have one more stat here quick?

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:13Speaker 07

  Is that all right?

• 2:35:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:15Speaker 07

  Dude, I, I think that I so agree with that. I think also, if you just kind of think about this, I could give like a 10x engineer that has become so popular in Silicon Valley. I think Steve Jobs talked about it, whatever. I think that the leverage available to great people is, it's never been higher. And it's only going to get higher, right? All these things you guys see about the value of agency and it's like, all about like, how much do you want to get your idea into the world? I think that I don't know how to do the math perfectly of like, is it 100 times person or 1,000 times person? But I think that the leverage available to the best people is insane. That's a huge aspect of the new thing that I want to build too. And I want to build with our co-founder because this idea that I believe in of like, people are power laws, right?

• 2:35:59Speaker 07

  People follow power laws. I think that's true and it's only going to get more defined. And so what Pat's saying about like, you know, the leverage you can give to somebody with today's technology has never, ever, ever been higher.

• 2:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys have any type of internal philosophy around, it feels harder than ever to predict like two years out. Like I think in 2020, you had a good sense of like what the world and what software was going to look like in 2022, and it feels much harder to do that today. Do you guys have any internal philosophy, you know, similar to Bezos thinking around people are going to want things like cheaper and faster, and I'm just going to focus on that. The world's going to change, but people will still want things that are cheaper and faster. Do you guys apply any thinking like that around when you're looking at investments? Pat, maybe at the, at the late stage, or Ravi with, with, with your new company around like, okay, a lot of things are going to change. Potentially, you know, we can imagine a century of progress in, you know, 20

• 2:36:57Jordi Hays?

  years or 10 years or eventually, yeah, two hours. Who knows? So how do you build something that's going to be durable? And again, like relevant as you get increased rate of change?

• 2:37:09Speaker 07

  What's your thing on inevitable? Yeah, yeah. I think you, I think there's a few things. So yes, I think, and I think Pat and I agree on a bunch of this too. But I think one, you want things that are early and inevitable, right? Like, I think that there are things that when you see them, they're like, well, that definitely is going to happen. And just to like, go back in time, I think, you know, when I joined Instacart in 2015, this idea of like, are people really going to shop for their groceries in 100 years, the way they shop for them 80 years ago? Like, it certainly doesn't seem like we will do that. It, you know, this is inevitable that it will go and it'd be different. I think that to your point, it is harder to figure out what things are inevitable right now, because the world is changing super fast. So I think one, you got to be like more limited in that, right?

• 2:37:51Speaker 07

  Of, you know, what are the, what are the industries that will be durable? I think the, there are two things I would tell you to answer your question, though. One, I think network effects are still potentially even more powerful than they've ever been, which is I think if you get a company with a network effect and you execute with excellence and speed, I think you can keep going and build it even up more. And I, you know, never want to Predict what the AIs are not going to be able to do, but I think it would be hard to say, press this button, Claude code, and create a network effect of highly fragmented buyers and sellers. And so I do think network effects can endure. And then I think the biggest thing is the people, which is you need the people that you will trust to go and face these realities. And it's the same way, honestly, like I know I got called unk on Twitter today, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with this.

• 2:38:36Speaker 07

  Dude, it's the same way with your kids, which is you want to prep them for every possible situation that's ever going to happen in their life. But the reality is you can't. And all you can do is make sure that they're actually good at reacting to tough things as a general matter. And that's the same thing, I think, that

• 2:38:50Jordi Hays?

  In a value system.

• 2:38:52Speaker 07

  Yeah. What's the changes we're going to see? What you want is to trust that the people you have are good at responding to those things with truth seeking, with agency, with aggression. Uh, and I know on that dimension, I know Pat and I agree.

• 2:39:06Pat Grady?

  There's also, there's a Jamie Dimon line, which is it's easier for me to predict the next 10 years than it is for me to predict the next quarter. And part of what's into that is the forces that shape the next 10 years are kind of so big and so obvious that you can actually make in some ways higher fidelity predictions over a longer period of time. And I think similarly with our business, if you look at, um, like for example, can you imagine a version of the future in which doctors aren't using all of the world's medical knowledge on an application in their pocket to make better decisions at the point of care? Of course not. Like, of course that's going to be a thing. And you know, like there happens to be a company, Open Evidence, that is doing that today for a decent chunk of the doctors in the country, but like, obviously that's going to be a thing.

• 2:39:49Pat Grady?

  Or by 2050, are people going to drive cars in 2050? I have a hard time believing they will. Like, it's going to be the way people ride horses today. Like, you might do it as a novelty, but it's not going to be the way you get, you know, to and from point A and point B. And so there are some things where you just like, know that it's inevitable and it's a question of, okay, well, what's the path from here to there? And who is it that blazes that path? And that's where it can be tricky. And I think that's where Robbie's commentary on the people really come in, because one trap that it's easy to fall into is theorizing on market structure and different technical approaches and the reality is if you can figure out the best people they're going to figure all that stuff out like they'll they'll figure out the right technical approach and the right business model and all that stuff like if you just figure out the right people they'll probably find the path.

• 2:40:34Jordi Hays?

  I think one one challenge right now for founders that are trying to navigate the world is like you know 10 years ago if you were looking and trying to understand the dialogue and different narratives and conversations happening in tech it'd be like 99% kind of like market analysis product analysis 1% science fiction fanfiction. And now the the narrative and the and the conversation is like 50 50 it's like some like kind of like tangible analysis of what's actually happening and how markets are evolving and then 50% like sci fi fanfiction of people writing like it's possible that in two months like you'll be able to buy a galaxy.

• 2:41:12Pat Grady?

  What does this mean for my series?

• 2:41:12Jordi Hays?

  And so like you kind of need to you you kind of need to like drown that out and like pay attention like that goes back like to just talk to customers what do they what do they need today?

• 2:41:22Pat Grady?

  For sure.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  React to the the game on the field. Do you guys think that we were debating earlier it feels like AI is is doesn't have its Steve Jobs from a messaging standpoint like I would love an hour an earnest. You know, conversation of an hour from a from Steve Jobs or a Steve Jobs like figure talking about because I feel like society broadly underrates AI they see the slop videos and they see the idea that their electrical bill might be going up and they're like I hate this or they see the slop and they they fear they might lose their job.

• 2:41:55Jordi Hays?

  In a couple of years or they can't find a job and they're like I hate this and it feels like we don't have anybody right now that can go on that can go like when when you know as as great as the Elons and the Sams and and the Darius and people like this are as operators and builders and visionaries. When they go on podcasts and those videos go out the comment section are all like please no stop like turn it off you know and so it feels like we're missing we're we're missing a.

• 2:42:21Pat Grady?

  Or maybe it'd be impossible. I don't know. What do you think?

• 2:42:24Speaker 07

  Oh, uh, I, I, I agree with you. I think we, we are missing that person. I think Pat and I were both in a meeting yesterday, though, that this kind of reminds me of, and I will share it on his behalf, but like Alfred shared a story the other day, yesterday about his dad, okay? And I think it is pretty instructive in terms of this thing. So Alfred's dad, I don't think this is gonna surprise you, was a pretty brilliant guy, right? But what his job was, was to be a human, human calculator, okay? Like literally, like, sit in a row, like, do math, like, you know, be a cell in Excel, right? And just be a human calculator. And at some point, what technology allowed was for him to not have

• 2:43:09Speaker 07

  that job anymore, right? And someone with this giant brain and this ability to produce and help society could all of a sudden not do math and put numbers into one cell anymore. And he could have way more impact and build an accounting system for the company that he worked with. And all of a sudden, all those other people who have huge brains, right? Could go do that because of technology. And he made this point, which is like, look, technology's neither good nor bad. It's what we do with it, right? The same technology that powers a nuclear bomb can power a nuclear power plant, right? And so the idea is like, what do we do with it? What do we do with it? What do we do with it? I do think that a lot of what people are doing when they go and talk about the technology is they talk about all the things that might happen. I would rather us talk about the fact

• 2:43:53Speaker 07

  of it's gonna get more and more and more powerful, and it's more and more incumbent on all of us to make sure we use it for something that's great. And I actually genuinely believe that. Like, I, I've written about this before, but like, you know, if I could give my kids one thing, it wouldn't be kindness, it wouldn't be curiosity, it'd be agency. And this is that same point, which is like, listen, the technology's gonna be what all of us make of it, you know? And I think Alfred's point sat with me, which is like, he talks about his dad being able to do more with his life, so that his son could do more with his life, and a lot of that's due to technology, like, there's nothing better than that.

• 2:44:26John Coogan?

  Well, it's a great place to wrap it up. Great story. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah. And congratulations on the move and everything. Yeah, super excited for the new company and the evolution of the role. We really buried the lead, but we got to have you back on as soon as we know more about what you're building. 100%. And we would love to do it here live. Can't wait. But congratulations to you both on all the progress. Hope 2026 is a fantastic year and have a great rest of the year. And happy new year to the whole team. Happy new year to the whole team. Thank you, guys. Cheers. He mentioned Jamie Dimon. There's some breaking news about Jamie Dimon. JP Morgan is taking over the Apple Card program from Goldman Sachs. That's very exciting. Also, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built

• 2:45:08John Coogan?

  from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And you know who we got next. We have Ben Smith from Semaphore on the best day of 2026. What's going on? Look at this setup. Good to see you again.

• 2:45:23Ben Smith?

  Look at this setup. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Upgraded setup.

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  Well, new round, new setup. New round, new setup. The dollars are already at work. I see.

• 2:45:31Ben Smith?

  It turns out you can spend $30 million on a podcast.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  Look at us. We have a gong, we have a horse, we have all sorts of stuff. We need to ring the gong. Give us the details. What was announced today? Media is back.

• 2:45:42Ben Smith?

  Yeah, media is a hard business. I've spent my whole career mostly at media startups and it's exciting to be at one that's working as a business. We were profitable last year and wow, one person clapping.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  Hold team clap. Hold team clap for this. We love profit. We love profit. Ching ching.

• 2:46:05Ben Smith?

  I mean, honestly, that is how I feel. Like, I'm a journalist and it took me a large part of my career to realize that you're trying to bring in more money than you spend because I'm mostly, obviously, trying to hire more journalists. But, you know, it's a tough business and having been through a bunch of ups and downs, it's just very exciting to feel like we've kind of figured out a sustainable model to do really quality journalism.

• 2:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Talk about why true journalism, not, you know, a newswire account that's sharing fake news is more important than ever. Because if you, like, it feels like, like, act, like, actually getting information from a journalist that did original fact-finding on a story is actually more important than ever. I've, when I, I, I, I used to trust stuff, I, I feel like you actually could trust a headline on social media a lot more five years ago than you can today.

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:55Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's only going to get more insane as you can't even trust, like, you will get to the point where you can only trust, in, in some situations, somebody that actually did the fact-finding because somebody else could make a video

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  Easily.

• 2:47:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, of some news that just, or an interview that just never even happened.

• 2:47:12Ben Smith?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the, you know, and particularly for our audience, who in these different verticals that we're in, from, you know, from tech to finance to, to DC, are often the most informed, the most plugged-in people, the people who ought to have access to the best information. They, probably like you and me, feel like, on one hand, you're totally overwhelmed by the volume of incoming, and then, on the other hand, don't know what to trust. And so we've just focused very, very intensely on delivering, kind of careful, straight-up-the-middle trusted information from journalists who, like, good beat reporters are real experts. And often, in the, kind of, traditional journalism, you're supposed to, kind of, hide your point of view, or find some way to smuggle it in through expert quotes or adjectives. And I think, like, our view is, you know, the audience, particularly sophisticated

• 2:47:57Ben Smith?

  audiences, caught on to that. You'd rather just hear directly from a journalist who knows what they're talking about, hear what they think, with some room for disagreement. But really, like, the, the place we found value as a business, too, is both in these email briefings and in these big convenings, in this big one we do in Washington, that people are just, like, very hungry for trusted, really smart, dense information from the source.

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are the underrated strategies that you use? I feel like Semaphore is interesting because it's a place that it has the patina of, like, legacy media, almost. And I mean that in the best way possible, in the fact, in the fact that

• 2:48:31Ben Smith?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31John Coogan?

  You land on a Semaphore page and you trust it with the authority of other, larger, older institutions. And that's not true for every new blog or Substack that pops up, because anyone can spin those up. Anyone can spin up a website, but you've built a credibility very quickly. Do you know, like, how, as you reflect on that, like, how did that come together?

• 2:48:53Ben Smith?

  I mean, I think it is partly that you sort of have to realize that we're living in this very kind of talent-driven moment.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:59Ben Smith?

  And we definitely kind of built it to provide a platform for great reporters and great beat reporters who mostly, with some exceptions, but mostly, aren't going to go out and do a Substack. Because, you know, particularly if you're a beat reporter, you might be telling this side what they want to hear today, but the other, but tomorrow you might be telling them what they don't want to hear.

• 2:49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:15Ben Smith?

  And that's not always the best sort of creator model. And so, so in any case, we provide this sort of platform.

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Not to mention, not to mention, some of, some of the stories, like, a great, there's certain stories that take six months to do properly.

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  You can't do that if you're-

• 2:49:29Jordi Hays?

  And you can't do that if your audience is like, I pay you monthly for this thing-

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  I want a weekly-

• 2:49:33Jordi Hays?

  And you're not delivering.

• 2:49:34Ben Smith?

  Yeah. And, yeah, and you might need legal support, you might need a team, some editing. I mean, we've, we've broken a lot of news because we have some, a guy in Riyadh and a guy, you know, and somebody in Silicon Valley. And a lot of the, a lot of the chip stories are really Gulf, Washington, Silicon Valley stories.

• 2:49:47John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:49:48Ben Smith?

  But, and you, you need legal support. But no, but I think, you know, it's funny, almost what you say about our design is true. Like, that's definitely, we are trying to, you know, take the best of the values of, of legacy media in terms of fairness and reliability, but then also give a real kind of condensed intelligence. I actually think the thing that people, that helps people trust you now is if you can pull in points of view from people who disagree. A lot of what we do is try to read across the whole internet and say, here's what the Chinese media is saying, here's what the Japanese media is saying, here's what the right's saying, here's what the left's saying, and not, not try to shove our own perspective through.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the events business? I'm very interested in understanding how you're splitting your time, how Semaphore is thinking about these two. There are obviously a lot of synergies, but they are two different projects. I imagine there's different folks staffed on each side of the business. Walk me through the thesis there.

• 2:50:37Ben Smith?

  Yeah, I mean, this is actually sort of a nerdy journalism industry point, but a lot of the events business in newsrooms, the newsrooms I have come up in, it's like you have a journalism business that's often based on scaled web advertising, that starts collapsing, and you panic and look for other businesses that work better and staple on an events business. That's what a lot of news organizations have done, for, you know, to better and worse degrees. We definitely started with the premise that we're talking to- Audience who were, and it was the same audience, we're reaching them in emails, but these are decision makers, these are the tops of government and businesses. Reaching them in emails and conveying them in person. And they want to hear from the same journalists and they want, and so our journalists are, you know, who are writing the briefings are the ones doing the interviews are the ones.

• 2:51:18Ben Smith?

  Figuring out how to structure an event so that it's interesting. I mean, but of course, as you say, also, you know, like in some sense, as you know, an old blogger, like it's incredibly easy to sit in your pajamas and type things and then like incredibly hard. To put on an event where the security is perfect and the food is perfect and the music is great and the staging is great. So we do have a unbelievably capable team of people who do that.

• 2:51:41John Coogan?

  Is there something, just understanding like the journalism that happens at an event, I experienced this for the first time last year where. Every interview that happened on stage, the key quote or the key fact that was discovered was turned into an article. Is, is that sort of a virtuous cycle where the events, businesses and the actual publications can work together synergistically when it's done right? Is there something that there, there may be less disparate when they're done well?

• 2:52:10Ben Smith?

  Yeah, for sure. And I would actually put it more on the other end, which is like, you definitely go to events that are not journalistic and that are fundamentally kind of promotional. And the interview is often like the chief marketing officer of company A is interviewing the chief market officer of company B. And the thing is like journalism, like in tough interviews, bring a kind of tension and drama and interest and you lean forward. Cause that you, if you, and.

• 2:52:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, Dealbook this year was amazing. It was just like, it may as well have been a pay-per-view boxing fight in some of them. And it was amazing content.

• 2:52:38John Coogan?

  It was great content. It was so good.

• 2:52:40Ben Smith?

  Yeah. And people want to watch, you know, like us in well-informed interviewer. And again, like whether they're a journalist or not, actually, they like professionally like. Ask the hard questions. So the thing is like smart CEOs would also rather be asked hard questions. Than sit on stage for an hour and like recite monologues that they memorized.

• 2:52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to watch a serious journalist ask a public official a hard question and have that public official turn around and call a pop, pop historian. That's what I want to see.

• 2:53:07Ben Smith?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 2:53:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were, we were off air, we were doing, we got invited to like moderate a panel last year and they, and the. A PR person gave us some question. Here's like, here's some, we'd love if you asked some of these questions. And the first question was like. You have changed the world in so many ways. How could you possibly do this? And we're like, yeah, I don't think we're gonna ask that.

• 2:53:31Ben Smith?

  Right, because you're thinking about the audience, right?

• 2:53:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:33Ben Smith?

  And yeah, it's in.

• 2:53:34John Coogan?

  Having an interesting conversation.

• 2:53:36Ben Smith?

  Right.

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  But, um.

• 2:53:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, why, uh, what was the real catalyst to raise your profitable in that gives you the luxury of saying like, we're going to be here for a long time, but I imagine there's a lot that you want to do with the money besides your new, your new podcast setup?

• 2:53:52Ben Smith?

  Yeah, well, once, you know, with, with, with what's remaining from this lavish room. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think really two things. One, we're going to hire some more journalists. Like we're, you know, we're a very light team. I think we're about, about 50 journalists. And I think in their places, particularly, you know, the Trump story in DC and the global business story where we just have some hires we want to make. Um, I don't think the newsroom of the future has a thousand journalists, the way the old ones did. It's kind of like, you know, post-industrial world, it is fewer people, I think, but between the technology that helps you and, and the audience wanting to connect with individuals, but still we are very eager to hire some more great journalists. And then as you, as you would imagine, the, uh, the convening business, it's like a expensive business. Like we're, we're renting out a,

• 2:54:34Ben Smith?

  we're renting out the Conrad Hilton for a week, uh, in, in Washington in April. And that's like, it's a little, it's.

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  Amazing. Um, that's great. That's great. Uh, I want to ask you about the anatomy of hard questions. I was listening to Joe Weisenthal talk about this and he said that oftentimes , uh, audiences want people to ask hard questions and they imagine a situation where, uh, interview were sitting down someone and they say, are you a fraud? And the interviewee just says, oh, you got me. I am a fraud, instead of just them shutting down and just delivering a talking point. So what makes for a great hard question where something's actually learned?

• 2:55:10Jordi Hays?

  And when's the right time to move on from a hard question?

• 2:55:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Is what we'll get, we have a chat, right? So if we're talking to somebody.

• 2:55:15Ben Smith?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:16Jordi Hays?

  People will be like, ask them about this specific thing that happened in 2019. And we're like, is that, does that need to be rehashed? I mean, there's like 50 other interviews that, that got into that. It was not great, but can't, let's focus on like what matters now.

• 2:55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:33Ben Smith?

  Yeah, you know, it's funny. I think I was, I think I may have been Laura Loomer's like first victim many years ago when I was at BuzzFeed and she came up to me and she was still like kind of young nervous Laura Loomer and her hand and her hand was shaking on the camera and she just asked me if I was fake news.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:55:46Ben Smith?

  Which is like one of those questions like, what are you gonna say? You're not gonna be like.

• 2:55:50John Coogan?

  You got me.

• 2:55:51Ben Smith?

  But, um, but.

• 2:55:52Jordi Hays?

  Ben Fake News Smith.

• 2:55:54Ben Smith?

  I think it's, um, I, I, I think actually it's a sort of about creating an environment of mutual respect almost in a certain way where they are, they feel committed to the conversation and you're asking serious questions and you're hopefully asking things they, they haven't necessarily been asked before, but that are really top of mind and whatever is like the core question. Like, why did you, like, why did you make this decision? Like, like, when I look at this decision, it looks kind, it looks kind of reckless. Like, why would you do that? And just sort of are, sometimes I kind of verbalize the criticism in a respectful way and really, but, but.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  One way to think of it is like bull, like bullfighting, you know?

• 2:56:28John Coogan?

  Bullfighting.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Like the journalist has a thing and the bull's running. Sometimes the bull runs straight into the journalist, right? But, you know, it's a dance, it's a dance.

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  It's a great metaphor. Nailed it.

• 2:56:38Ben Smith?

  And sometimes you want to just run right into them though. I do think like.

• 2:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:56:41Ben Smith?

  If you feel weird and bad asking the question, sometimes that's a really good question. Like, if you feel like, ah, this is a little awkward.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's wild.

• 2:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we gotta hit the gong.

• 2:56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, give us the details of the fundraiser.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who, who came into the round? Cause it was, it was really a who's who of, uh, saw Henry Kravis and, uh.

• 2:57:02Ben Smith?

  Yeah, it was, it was really, I mean, it was honestly like a great vote of confidence. A number of our investing, existing investors came back in, including Henry Kravis, David Rubenstein, George Pala Laman, the Gallup Organization. And then some new investors, including a couple of great European media investors. Again, Thomas Leeson and, and Penny Pritzker, the former Commerce Secretary.

• 2:57:25John Coogan?

  That's right, that's right. Well, we're excited to see you put it to work. We're very excited for the event next year, or this year, and the rest of the year.

• 2:57:32Ben Smith?

  Yeah, hope we can get you there. Do you ever, do you, do you travel? Do you go east?

• 2:57:36John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:57:36Ben Smith?

  Can we like drag you to this event?

• 2:57:37John Coogan?

  That would be a lot of fun, yeah. Uh, we, I mean, let's check the schedule and stuff. We, we, we're working on figuring out how to bring the show on the road and still do our show while we're at other things. It's a lot of

• 2:57:47Jordi Hays?

  The show must go on. That's our non-negotiable. The show must go on.

• 2:57:50Ben Smith?

  I would love to like find a way to get you on the road. It's April 13th to 18th in DC.

• 2:57:54John Coogan?

  Cool, yeah, yeah, we'll talk.

• 2:57:56Ben Smith?

  Prepare for your Trump interview.

• 2:57:57John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:58:00Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if we'll ever

• 2:58:02John Coogan?

  Purely business and technology focused.

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, we could talk to him about Truth Social or World Liberty or, you know, any of many businesses.

• 2:58:09Ben Smith?

  We could get Sax. I bet Sax would talk to you. I don't know if he talked to me.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd have fun with Sax.

• 2:58:14Ben Smith?

  Okay, let's work on this.

• 2:58:15John Coogan?

  I, I introduced him at Miami Tech Week, uh, three years ago or something. I was the emcee and I introduced him.

• 2:58:20Ben Smith?

  You got to ask him hard questions.

• 2:58:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be fun. Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on all the

• 2:58:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats to the whole team. It's, it's awesome. Uh, like you said, vote of confidence and, and, uh, I mean, I'm, I'm excited for you guys. Sometimes you're like, a company raises money and it's, it's like, okay, they have more money, but I'm genuinely excited for you guys to have more money.

• 2:58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Be able to do more.

• 2:58:40Ben Smith?

  Thank you, guys. Thank you. And thanks for having me on.

• 2:58:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:58:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Ben.

• 2:58:44John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Uh, our next guest is Jacob Richamaki. He's written a fantastic piece about humanoid robots. Before we bring him in, 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 request and password resets. Uh, let's bring in Jacob to the TBP that I'll try to jump. Jacob, how are you doing?

• 2:59:10Speaker 06

  Hello. How are you guys doing?

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically.

• 2:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you here.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  Is your 2026 off to a good start?

• 2:59:16Speaker 06

  I think it is, yeah. Since, to be honest, like, just some backstory for why I'm here. Uh, I, about a month ago, a friend of mine was like, oh, you have some interesting thoughts about robotics, about kind of the data center market. You should like write something up, but it's kind of like a small piece. And then it it took a month instead of like a couple of days. It spiraled. We had a whole section. Uh, Dora Cash released a piece. So we have a section on that. We have a section about uh, kind of the future. We have short stories. We have like a whole like financial model we built out. Um, it really spiraled and no, I'm having a great January because it's now it's no longer raining in San Francisco. It's actually sunny today. I think this is a good omen. Um, yes.

• 3:00:00Speaker 06

  Believer in omens in 2026 omens are in. Omens are in.

• 3:00:05John Coogan?

  That's a great call.

• 3:00:05Speaker 06

  Omen training to be omen maxing up. I think Tyler, he speaks a lot about this.

• 3:00:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:00:11Speaker 06

  But.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  I need to be on the, you need to be open to omens to find them when they're sitting.

• 3:00:15Speaker 06

  I think so. I think that you do have to be open to strange things happening, uh, since I think that's kind of like, you know, the talk my book for a little bit, uh, like, that's kind of the point of this essay is that not only is this going to happen a lot faster than I think people are realize, it's going to be a lot stranger. Like one thing I've heard people bring up is this idea that as you could call it like the bifurcation theory, this idea that as we get, whether it's on AI or whether on robotics, we're going to get this like robot produced quantities of goods. Maybe it's images, it's media, maybe it's clothing, maybe it's food, maybe it's these

• 3:00:56Speaker 06

  other sorts of opportunities. You have people like Ari Emanuel kind of betting on the idea that there's going to be the split. There's going to be the live world and that you're going to have like the human rare quality stuff and then like the infinite robot slot. But I think that's you can add a little more nuance to it. Like, for example, I think that the idea that human only fashion is probably it's going to be very niche. And the reason why is simple. If we look at something like shine and we say, okay, we can cut the costs another 10 times and the quality is something you would wear at the Met Gala. Most people frankly, aren't going to be able to tell the difference in their tailor. Maybe we could get. Like the menswear guy on, maybe he could tell, but I feel like most people, they're not going to be able to tell the difference.

• 3:01:40Speaker 06

  They're just gonna like click the buy button and go.

• 3:01:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:43Speaker 06

  But there is something where I think that like in healthcare, within an industry, you can split it up into sub portions. Like the logistics of actually bringing medicine to people in like an urban hospital or so on, like in NYU. Uh, that's probably going to be done by robots, but the actual care for people, like people want. If your child is sick and about to die, unless if, you know, this doctor is about to do an operation. You don't want to see a robot looking over your child. You want to have somebody to be able to kind of absorb that fear, to absorb these emotions.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:02:14Speaker 06

  And if you take that and you say, okay, wow, that was like maybe slightly different than what I would have expected. And apply that to literally every part of our society in the next decade. Yeah, it's going to be a lot. It's going to take you a month. It's going to be hard. And I'm glad that people starting to see this. Um, that's kind of why I wrote it.

• 3:02:34John Coogan?

  Where are we in terms of humanoid robots? Or, or would you, would you even use that term? Is it more just useful to think about physical instantiation of artificial intelligence? Just robotics broadly, because maybe they won't look like humanoids, but it's still going to be transformational. Are we like, uh, you know, you, you see these stats where I think Amazon employs a million robots already. Do you see it more as like a continuous process? Will there be an iPhone moment, a chat GPT moment? Like, what are you waiting for?

• 3:03:03Speaker 06

  Okay. So I think there's a couple of ways we can look at this. Um, one of them is a really interesting split. It's between manipulation and navigation.

• 3:03:12John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:03:12Speaker 06

  So navigation has been a much easier problem. And the reason it's an easier problem is that we've been able to use classical methods. We don't need to collect a lot of data for, you know, a warehouse robot to kind of like move around and move the boxes around. Even self-driving, like it's not, self-driving wasn't the hard problem. Getting it reliable enough so it doesn't kill people was the hard problem.

• 3:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:34Speaker 06

  Uh, but manipulation is difficult. How do you encode this is like an idea that Andrej Karpathy kind of spoke about in software 2.0. You can't really, you can write a program to say, oh, I want a robot to go forward and it's going to go to left. It's going to go to right. How do you encode this idea of I want it to pick up this goldfish? You know, I'm not sponsored by them, maybe someday. And like, I think that, you know, that's kind of a weird thing about the robot future is that, I'd written about robot holidays. I think there's gonna be probably some weird religions. There's gonna be all sorts of cults. It's gonna be, you know, there's, I also wrote,

• 3:04:12John Coogan?

  What is getting one-shotted or having LLM psychosis? Like humanoid robot psychosis?

• 3:04:20Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I think that like Isaac Asimov, he wrote about this back in the 60s. You have robo psychologists, like they literally wrote about like this robot going insane. Cause the positronic brain, it got modified, the three laws, you kind of, you know, I think if you kind of remove the rule of like, wow, maybe we shouldn't kill people. That would be bad. Yeah.

• 3:04:40Jordi Hays?

  What about, there, we were talking, reading a post earlier about Tesla with Optimus, like doing a bunch of supplier selection, seeming, seems like they're gearing up to actually make a lot of these things. And I think some people are somewhat surprised by that because everything we've seen so far from humanoids has been like, kind of like cool, cool demo, but not like, oh, I need this in my home today, or I need this at my warehouse today.

• 3:05:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things. One is that on the home versus enterprise, enterprise is going to be a lot more valuable. Not only because home is distributed, you have safety stuff, the costs. There's also this weird tax thing in the one big beautiful bill. It's called the 100% bonus depreciation clause. CFOs, you should listen to this. You can depreciate whatever asset you want. It's uncapped in a year instead of five to seven under this, as long as it's kind of in the US. So you can do it for data centers, robotics. Like I think there's just a lot of things that are going to push for enterprise adoption first. But then within enterprise, I think the supply chain, why people are going to get side, you're just gonna get blindsided by this, is that a couple of things.

• 3:05:52Speaker 06

  One, if you're focusing on how bad America is at manufacturing, you're focusing, it's important, but you're focusing on the wrong thing. You need to focus on how good Asia is at making stuff. In particular, Pengyang in Malaysia, Bakhni in Vietnam, Taiwan, underrated, South Korea, Japan, obviously China, Shenzhen.

• 3:06:14Speaker 06

  Wondong, lots of places. So Asia is going to be really important. You can also repurpose other industries. I talked about this with rare earths processing, since rare earths, rare earths aren't rare, you know, as Trump said, but like the actual processing of rare earths, in the same way like standard oil became a monopoly off of processing, China has like a processing monopoly there. You can just repurpose the oil and gas industry for processing rare earths, which I haven't spoken about. People have spoken about it, you know, for finding the rare earths, but not reprocessing. And in the same way, you can repurpose the automotive industry for like humanoid robots. Like you already have Honda, you have Toyota, these are already people that are integrating it. You have the same actuators, you have the same battery management systems, you have everything else.

• 3:06:59Speaker 06

  It's something where the auto OEMs, we're in a secular slump right now. So if you're not, if you believe that's kind of, it's like the Satriani thesis in some sense of that, you know, auto is in this sort of like secular slump. And then as we kind of like, in order to break this slump, we're also going to have robots. So it's going to be this double whammy of people are expecting, oh, you know, this sort of dying industry, it's stagnating, you know, profits are being competed away. Tesla is kind of, it has to sell the energy story, the AI story, the robot story, the cars aren't, you know, doing it as well. BYD, like, I think this is a Dan Wang point about China. It's weirdly more capitalist than us. Like the Thilian idea of capitalism is bad in some sense because

• 3:07:42Speaker 06

  you're competing, you're constantly, you're trying to compete everything away. So in some sense, China's more capitalist than us. Everyone's competing. And that means that the auto industry is in a slump and it's looking for something to save it. I think robots are probably going to be it. And even China right now, like Unitree, there's kind of, it's whispers of that, oh, are they going to delay the IPO this year or stuff? Because the hardware is getting ahead of the software. So it's something where I'm like, I don't see the hardware. And you can just rely on if you have like, you know, expensive precision reducers or some of these other things, like, you don't need rare earths to make a motor. You don't need expensive precision reducers to make an actuator. You can rely on cheap stuff. The thing that's going to like do my, like, you

• 3:08:24Speaker 06

  know, surgery or stuff is not the thing that's going to stock shelves. And we just have like OMI or like how people are collecting data now with the gloves, you can 3D print stuff, that's like a pretty good embodiment match. Like I'm just incredibly Bullish, like a few years ago, you could have asked me, I would have said no, but now it's like, no, it's the sign that this is going to be big, it's going to happen fast. You had mentioned before, John, about, you know, humanoid versus other form factors. The key word to think about is payback times to borrow something from finance. And that the faster your payback time, like the more that creditors are going to want to lend to your business. It's not just going to be venture capital, it's going to be the entire private credit industry, it's going to be private equity, it's going to be RAS, it's going to be all of these other things.

• 3:09:07Speaker 06

  Um, so you gotta think, okay, how do I drive my payback time down?

• 3:09:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:11Speaker 06

  Capex is one component, you get rid of the legs, you have a wheelbase, or you just even get rid of the mobile stuff, you just have arms on an assembly line assembling, you know, AI servers or GPUs, and you just crank the infinite money printer. But even more so, it's not even the capex, I feel like a lot of investors and a lot of people, they focus on the bomb, they focus on the capex, they should be focusing kind of on the Opex, on OEE, on all of these metrics of saying, wow, if this thing is going to run, like industrially rated robot arms already exist, it's fine. This thing is going to run for thirty thousand hours, and I built a calculator on the website, so you can play around with it yourself. This thing is running thirty thousand hours, and every day it's like twenty-two hours with some maintenance, and it's like pretty close to a human or stuff.

• 3:09:52Speaker 06

  That is going to be the dominant term for like, whether I'm going to get a good return on investment, what my I, like my blended levered IRR is going to be, all of these other sorts of things, like, there's just a lot that goes into it, and um, I, that's why, like, I want people to read this. Like, I don't want this to kind of be like, oh, I like this, and then we had like a discussion once, it's like, no, I really tried to talk to as many people as I could.

• 3:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Sit your butt down and study.

• 3:10:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, basically, it's like, it's gonna be big, it's gonna be a big deal. And I tried to write it to be fun, I don't want it to be homework, like, I feel like the idea of, like, I tried to write it in a way that's fun and not, you know, because you could just go down and read some textbook or some, like, schizophrenic supply chain reading or whatever, it's like, that's just not fun, um, but I tried to make this fun, um.

• 3:10:45Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your thesis on land? I've had this idea that.

• 3:10:50Speaker 06

  Oh, it's in there.

• 3:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so yeah, I, I, I, uh.

• 3:10:55Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to find it, but basically I've had this idea that like if if you can build things, you know, 10, 100 times faster, let's say you could build a factory or multifamily apartment building, you can potentially start getting a return much faster and it's cheaper to, you know, make infrastructure, things like that, that but yet physics, the laws of physics will presumably still apply, which means that it might be more convenient to have a factory like next to a city versus some somewhere random. So I've had this idea that like it's possible there's like a situational awareness style like real estate fund that could start thinking about how the value of land will change as you have advanced robotics

• 3:11:38Jordi Hays?

  that can kind of accelerate progress and just build things quite a bit faster. But how are you thinking about land in the context of advanced robotics?

• 3:11:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I mean to back up a second, I think that the four factors of production classically are land, labor, capital, entrepreneurship, and all of those are covered in this, but we're going to focus on the land for a second. You can split it up into what is it going to look like from a consumer and then an enterprise perspective, because consumers and enterprises, they're going to be looking at this differently. From a consumer side, I think that like the originals will appreciate in the sense that like long Europe, long like historical sites, long existing cities of that it's going to be very hard, like the idea of, oh, we're going to get cheap housing because construction is now done by robots. I think for Austin, for the South, we're going to have a lot of that, but I

• 3:12:29Speaker 06

  don't think that's going to solve San Francisco or New York's political woes. And then from the enterprise side, I think you're correct. I think that in some sense, the final offshoring may be the greatest reshoring we'll ever have in America of that you go from being constrained by not having this like tacit knowledge of manufacturing or enough people or it's all expensive to now you have the energy resources, you have natural gas, you have IP, that's going to be very important. And yeah, maybe we don't have to put it right next to San Francisco, but you know, you go out west, you go down south, you could just kind of let things start to rip. I know that taxes in particular seems very primed from a regulatory perspective. I would also say, I think that like for the idea of land

• 3:13:14Speaker 06

  taxes or land appreciation or stuff, that feels somewhat deep.

• 3:13:19Speaker 06

  Into the curve, like I think this is why like George's um has always been like this great idea in theory, but not in practice. And this is kind of what Dorkesh and Philip talked about in their essay is that there's so much of the gains initially are just going to come from capital. Who owns the factories? Who owns the energy, the data centers that by the time you get to the point where, oh, I am just going to be Leopold. I'm going to raise a trillion dollars. I'm going to buy Iowa. Um, like at that point, like you should have just been buying like Stargate two, you should have been going to new Taipei, you should have been with Jensen, you should have been in all these other things. An interesting thing of land, though, is that I'm totally a big believer in the whole orbital data center stuff. Um, not just because of, you know, being friends with a lot of teams kind

• 3:14:04Speaker 06

  of at the SpaceX, XAI, or some of these other places, but also like, I think that the thing about orbital data centers, I want to keep this short since you could go on a whole rant, is that it trades off one problem, which is cooling. Um, it makes cooling a lot harder in space because you can only do radiative for all of these other problems. You don't have permitting, you don't have land, you don't have a lot of this other stuff. Maybe you'll need to do some radiation hardened things. But I do think that the idea of space data centers like is not going to be crazy. In some sense, like I also think because I spent a lot of time saying if you're a robotics company, really be focused on the AI like infrastructure build out as a market. It's really good. Like every robotics

• 3:14:49Speaker 06

  company that wants to be big, you know, is secretly a Dyson sphere company. They just don't know it yet. Like if you think about in the end of what can we do with robots? Like everyone's thinking so short term of like, if I had 100 million labors, a billion, 100 billion, a trillion, like what would they do? At a certain point, you can only make so many like mocha lattes or stuff. It's like you got to start, you know, building the Dyson sphere. We got to start cranking.

• 3:15:12John Coogan?

  Dyson sphere before 2100 or after 2100?

• 3:15:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. And if you enjoyed this conversation so far, this is like basically 80 pages of this.

• 3:15:23John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 3:15:23Speaker 06

  Except worse.

• 3:15:24John Coogan?

  What's your, what's your prediction for Dyson sphere timeline? 2100 before or after?

• 3:15:31Speaker 06

  Hmm. I mean, like, what do you count as a Dyson sphere? Because I feel like if I'm sorry to be like a band like asshole about this, but like, what, what do you count? What do you count as it? Is it like, oh?

• 3:15:42John Coogan?

  It doesn't need to capture a hundred percent. Let's call it.

• 3:15:45Speaker 06

  But like a meaningful percentage.

• 3:15:47John Coogan?

  A meaningful, uh, let's call it over 10% and definitely like a structure that is, uh, like, like gravitationally locked to the sun, not the earth. So it's not just like a bunch of random starlings like scattered about in the, in the stars.

• 3:16:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:16:02John Coogan?

  It's, it's truly like around the sun.

• 3:16:04Speaker 06

  Before 2100, um, but then I think that it, but the problem, you know, we can hit the gong on that one.

• 3:16:15Speaker 06

  We're gonna pull this up when it happens. We're gonna pull this clip up. I don't know, but I think though for like the whole Dyson sphere stuff, um, it feels very much, I don't know if you've ever heard of like the parable of the back half of the chessboard that, you know, this king one day asked, he had a, you know, kind of a checkers board. One grain of rice on the first one, two on the second, four on the third. By the time you get the 32, by the time you get the 64, like it just, you know, swallows the earth. I think it's something very similar here, like this idea of robots building robots, which is again, in the essay, people should read it. Like, that's the point of this, like, read the essay. But, um, Fannick has been doing, they're like this robot arm company. Uh, they've been having robots building robots for 25 years now.

• 3:16:59Speaker 06

  Like, that's older than me, which is astonishing. Um, but it's something where granted, it's in a very limited, narrow capacity of that. You, you have to scope everything for safety and whatnot. But it's the idea of like, oh, robots building robots at some like sci-fi bullshit. Like, uh, some of us don't have to live in Berkeley or whatever. But, you know, I do think that it is going to be more plausible than not, particularly because, you know, talking about the AI data center build out or stuff. The ODMs that are making all the AI servers, all the GPUs, everything, all the killers, everything that's going into the data centers or even from it as a prefab perspective are also the people that could do consumer electronics. They're the people that could actually build the robots.

• 3:17:40Speaker 06

  So if you're servicing these customers or stuff, you're servicing these industries, it's like, wow. You know, they're going to want to start building it themselves because it lowers their costs, it increases their margins. It's going to be something where the market forces are going to be very. Powerful here and that's also why like we spend a lot of time on the social sections of this of thinking about taxes about I think sovereign wealth fund initially like between Besant and Lutnik. Um, there's a lot of really interesting ideas that you can start off with. So you don't drive away the business community. But I do think that there's a lot of factors pointing to like it's going to go from 2025 people. Maybe they saw a physical intelligence video or something. To 2027, it's like, holy shit.

• 3:18:23Speaker 06

  This is actually happening. Like, guys. I know that you wanted a, a robot horse, John, or something.

• 3:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have the dog. I need the horse.

• 3:18:33Speaker 06

  I, I feel like the robot dog's a little played out. The robot horse, that's, that's 2026. Nobody has that good.

• 3:18:42Jordi Hays?

  You would think they could just scale it up. Just scale the dog up. Make a bigger dog.

• 3:18:48Speaker 06

  They kind of have. I mean, the MIT cheetah stuff, they, they kind of did scale it up, but it was like, uh. But that's not the same. It looks lame. It has to look cool. Yeah, but also have to look cool. I feel like that's also part of this essay was like, um, like between Claude code and other stuff like I got a lot of compliments on what it looked like or so on. I think that the Marshall cost of making a good website is going to zero. Same like physical labor, Marshall cost of physical labor is going to zero and my website as well. Like might as well. Like you gotta make a good website now. I'm probably being clapped out, so I'm gonna leave.

• 3:19:20Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, you did. I was clapping for your website. It looks fantastic.

• 3:19:23Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you.

• 3:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Making a beautiful, uh, making a beautiful website for an essay is the new meta. You just, you just maybe the AI 2027 people, maybe they, they get some credit for it.

• 3:19:33John Coogan?

  But you also need a PDF. Is this available as a PDF?

• 3:19:36Speaker 06

  Yes, it is. It's available as a PDF. And also, if you want, here's how you make a good.

• 3:19:43Speaker 06

  Here's how you make a good, uh. You want to make a good PDF? Okay. So if we start with the thesis that like Claude Code like is God and does everything. Then Of course, as one does. Well, obviously, I mean, have you seen the new Atropos price 350? I mean, uh, Sounds like God pricing. The market capitalization, not the share price. God tier pricing. Yeah, I mean, I think it's still grossly undervalued, like add another zero or something at this point. Like, um, sorry, sorry, Morgan Stanley, sorry, Michael, we're gonna need to add that one. But, uh, I think that like, uh, he, yeah, well, I mean, I, I think he's busy with XAI and all of that stuff. But, uh, they also had their recent round.

• 3:20:26Speaker 06

  Um, but I, I do think that if you treat like what in my life can is secretly a code generation problem? I think that making really beautiful PDFs is that because LaTeX, which is mostly used by like math nerds um, to render um, math research papers is a programmable way of creating documents and PDFs. Like if you wonder how Leopold, I never, I didn't do the footnotes here because my side notes and footnotes were completely crazy and it just like cluttered up the side and looked unesthetic. It looked awful. Um, and the website was the better medium for this anyways. But I do think that the idea of saying, oh, I have this really great piece of writing. I'm going to put it in the Claude Code, it's going to render it in LaTeX.

• 3:21:09Speaker 06

  You can get an Overleaf account, it's free, overleaf.com. Um, and then sign up, you can just like make these documents. You can have it be very expressive or so on, and then you can make like a really nice website to go along with it. Since it's not just about the raw content, it's also how you say it and then how it's presented. In the same way of that, oh, you know, I see John and Jordy, um, they're going down the Tartine, which I thought was an SF thing, I was told by Michael, it's now like it would start in LA, which is a bunch of bullshit. Like it really, like that's some, I, it's like You're appropriating our Tartine. It's something OpenAI people go to. This is not, you guys ordering the, um, We invented Tartine. I'm not gonna say that. OpenAI nearly adopted.

• 3:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we exported it to you, to you folk.

• 3:21:52Speaker 06

  We exported it to San Francisco. Wow. We did. First time that's happened. Um, I think that, uh, but the thing though is that, you know, i- if you add like John and Jordy, if you both had like, oh, we're gonna You know, write about technology and business, which I mean, I I'm a daily active reader of John's newsletter. So I think that, you know, we can pump that.

• 3:22:11John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:22:14John Coogan?

  Maybe I should turn into a 90 page PDF every day.

• 3:22:16Speaker 06

  Well, I think you can render it as a website or you could you could spice it up. I feel like it's 2026. You gotta not same old. You gotta.

• 3:22:24John Coogan?

  You gotta.

• 3:22:25Speaker 06

  You gotta be that. Well, wasn't it the whole Lulu stuff? It's like, you gotta be real. You gotta be. You can't be like all these other people. I mean.

• 3:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's opportunities.

• 3:22:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, we talked about doing a daily print newsletter, somewhat like a newspaper.

• 3:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:38Speaker 06

  Oh, I think that like, um, the only problem though is that it's kind of like, well, I mean, like Colossus does it better. So it's like.

• 3:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that's evergreen. That's ever that's evergreen.

• 3:22:49John Coogan?

  This is more just you. You literally throw it out at the end. You're not.

• 3:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not like, you're not keeping her. Most people are not.

• 3:22:55John Coogan?

  And and and the key would be it would be a beneficiary of robotics because it needs to be. It needs to be printed and delivered within like two hours of the news breaking. So it's like uncannily fast and that's a unique product.

• 3:23:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:23:10John Coogan?

  Maybe it's too sci fi.

• 3:23:12Speaker 06

  Maybe I I feel like that's a little that's a little.

• 3:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Make it a newspaper. They write this thing. It gets delivered every day. Make it make sense.

• 3:23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't.

• 3:23:19Speaker 06

  I don't know. That's gonna work out. Can we interest you in like some New York Times like games and stuff? Can we interest you?

• 3:23:24John Coogan?

  There we go. An app we can do.

• 3:23:26Speaker 06

  Actually making the money.

• 3:23:26John Coogan?

  An app.

• 3:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you should add some games to this.

• 3:23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's your game strategy? Vibe code or something? Sholto's building an RTS. What are you doing?

• 3:23:34Speaker 06

  This whole thing, like he wanted some games or others to have fun. I was like, oh, you know, I'm gonna just keep the economics and this. I mean, it's a slider. That's not fun. No, we'll we'll add games in the second version of this.

• 3:23:44John Coogan?

  You need to build an entire Stellar Stellaris or Hearts of Iron four spin off game. Dwarf Fortress.

• 3:23:51Speaker 06

  This was like Sholto was doing over Breaker. He was honestly, also I have to say like shout out to him. He was a very, I already knew he was gonna be a very thoughtful editor. He was like even more thoughtful and I think that his quote tweet in addition to others are starting to bring attention from people that. You know, I'm not gonna be like the class or say who's reading or who's like following now or stuff. It's like, oh, wow, a lot of people look up to him like I'm hoping like he's he's the goat.

• 3:24:18John Coogan?

  He is the goat. He is the goat. Let's give it up for Sholto. One of the greatest guys we've ever done. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 3:24:27Jordi Hays?

  It was fun.

• 3:24:27John Coogan?

  Always good to hang out anytime you want to.

• 3:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 3:24:30John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 3:24:31Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 3:24:32John Coogan?

  And I'm glad your 2026 is going well, dropping.

• 3:24:35Jordi Hays?

  And just try to, you know, use the tools, try to get one of these out every day.

• 3:24:39John Coogan?

  Please.

• 3:24:39Jordi Hays?

  This one took you whatever, a couple of months.

• 3:24:42Speaker 06

  It took me a month, but I feel like, yeah, we gotta, you gotta get down an hour. Every minute you got a new essay.

• 3:24:48John Coogan?

  Yes. Faster than I can read.

• 3:24:51Jordi Hays?

  A thoughtful essay every minute forever.

• 3:24:53John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. Hope you have a great rest of your day and we will talk.

• 3:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Jacob.

• 3:24:57John Coogan?

  Soon.

• 3:24:58Jordi Hays?

  Bye.

• 3:24:59John Coogan?

  Well, is there any breaking news that we have yet to cover? Or is that where we should conclude today's story, today's show?

• 3:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Reggie James built.

• 3:25:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:25:12Jordi Hays?

  A situation monitor.

• 3:25:14John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Global activity monitor has a TVPN integration and intel feed, tech, finance, politics, news feed, stocks, crypto.

• 3:25:21John Coogan?

  So funny.

• 3:25:22Jordi Hays?

  Prediction markets, tech layoffs, tracker, AI race news.

• 3:25:27John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, it keeps going.

• 3:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Wow. It's just a bunch of.

• 3:25:29John Coogan?

  Is the fed printer on? This is amazing.

• 3:25:32Jordi Hays?

  This is great. Turn this into like a Chrome.

• 3:25:35John Coogan?

  Wait, it has today's episode live streaming on it. This is amazing. You can refresh everything. This is very cool. I like, uh, I like, uh.

• 3:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need this on the projector all day, all day long.

• 3:25:45John Coogan?

  This is, this is great. Yeah.

• 3:25:47Jordi Hays?

  This is cool. It has a map. You can click around and see new stories.

• 3:25:50John Coogan?

  This is really cool. I, I, I love a project like this. This is awesome. Uh, and, and in other news, the team got to the bottom of the large 3D holographic volumetric display. It apparently exists. It's a 3D display when no glasses required, uh, much bigger, almost the size of the table, not quite. Looks a little bit bigger, but, uh, pretty cool. We'll have to get a demo of that soon, but that looks fun. Uh, anyway, thank you so much for tuning in.

• 3:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, folks.

• 3:26:19John Coogan?

  Today, we will see you tomorrow at 11.

• 3:26:20Jordi Hays?

  We'll be back tomorrow. Big surprise, I know, but we'll be back tomorrow.

• 3:26:24John Coogan?

  Coming back. Uh, we got a bunch of great guests for you folks and we will see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

• 3:26:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, please.

• 3:26:31John Coogan?

  Subscribe to the newsletter.

• 3:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Please do.

• 3:26:32John Coogan?

  Dot com. And we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 3:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks. We love you.

• 3:26:36John Coogan?

  Bye.