Moltbook Reactions, Nvidia OpenAI Deal, Codex App Launch, The Files | Matt Schlicht, Alex Blania, Nik, David Placek, Thibault Sottiaux, Christopher O'Donnell, Jim Siders, Chris Black

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:43) - Moltbook Reactions (28:35) - Matt Schlicht, founder and CEO of Octane AI, is an AI and chatbot expert recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. In the conversation, he discusses his journey in the tech industry, including his work at Ustream and the development of Moltbook, a social network for AI agents. He elaborates on the rapid growth of Moltbook, the concept of AI agents interacting autonomously, and the future potential of AI-driven social platforms. (01:05:51) - Nvidia OpenAI Deal (01:20:55) - Alex Blania, co-founder of Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, discusses the necessity of establishing proof of human identity at internet scale to prevent AI-driven interactions from undermining authentic human connections online. He highlights the challenges posed by AI-generated content and bots, emphasizing the importance of uniqueness in user accounts to maintain the integrity of social platforms. Blania also touches on the potential for AI to facilitate scams, such as deepfake calls targeting vulnerable individuals, underscoring the need for robust verification systems. (01:36:02) - Nik 6ocqltb, an AI enthusiast since 2021, discusses his early adoption of OpenAI's technologies, including GPT-3 and DALL·E, and his experiences curating AI-generated art on Instagram, which led to a significant following before facing issues with OpenAI. He shares his perspectives on the rapid development of AI, expressing optimism about achieving AGI by 2029-2030, and critiques the commercialization strategies of companies like OpenAI, highlighting concerns about user growth and the introduction of ads in ChatGPT. Additionally, Nik reflects on his anonymous online presence, emphasizing his desire to explore and discuss AI developments freely, and mentions upcoming plans to engage more deeply with the AI community, including attending Nvidia's GTC as a creator. (01:58:02) - David Placek, founder and president of Lexicon Branding, specializes in creating impactful brand names for global clients. He discusses the importance of integrating creative processes with linguistic and cognitive science to develop effective names, emphasizing that securing a perfect .com domain is less critical than previously thought. Placek also highlights the challenges of rebranding, advising companies to thoroughly consider the implications and invest appropriately to ensure a successful transition. (02:31:04) - Thibault Sottiaux, the engineering lead for OpenAI's Codex, discusses the launch of the Codex app on macOS, emphasizing its accessibility and integration with users' workflows. He highlights features like adaptive thinking models, customizable personalities, and multimodal capabilities, aiming to enhance productivity for both technical and non-technical users. Sottiaux also addresses the app's role as a companion to traditional IDEs, its support for open ecosystems, and future plans for mobile integration. (02:47:14) - Christopher O'Donnell, former Chief Product Officer at HubSpot, is now the founder and CEO of Day.ai, an AI-native CRM platform. In the conversation, he discusses how Day.ai integrates a meeting assistant, CRM, and knowledge base into a unified solution, eliminating manual data entry and providing instant insights by indexing all company interactions for AI analysis. He also highlights the company's recent $20 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. (02:57:47) - Jim Siders, CEO of SHIELD Technology Partners and former CIO at Palantir, discusses the company's mission to integrate AI into IT services for small and medium-sized businesses across America. He highlights the recent $100 million investment from Thrive Holdings, emphasizing the long-term partnership and strategic vision behind this funding. Siders also explains SHIELD's approach of acquiring successful managed service providers, retaining their existing teams and customer relationships, and enhancing their offerings with AI and proprietary technologies to deliver greater value without disrupting established connections. (03:07:21) - Chris Black is a media personality, writer, and brand consultant best known as the co-host of the podcast How Long Gone. He’s recognized for his sharp commentary on culture, fashion, media, and internet trends, and for advising brands and creators on positioning, storytelling, and taste-driven marketing. 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 Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Okta - https://www.okta.com Kalshi - https://kalshi.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today's Monday, February 2nd, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, counting, a whole lot more, all in one place. We have a massive show for you today, folks. We have a whole bunch of guests coming on the show.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  It is good to be back.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Buddy coming in person. It was a big weekend for screenshots. It was a big weekend for reading. Moltbook was going crazy and then the Epstein files were going crazy, both like a lot of the screenshots shared around.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  It was really the Super Bowl for schizophrenics.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, on both sides. Yeah, it was very, very, very interesting. But I wanted to dig into Moltbook because the story sort of broke during the show on Friday and we didn't get a chance to really get to the bottom of it.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  We covered it at the very end.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  At the very end and we were just sort of reading the high level initial reactions and then there was a whole hype cycle that played out over the weekend. And I mean, if you're not familiar, Moltbook is essentially a clone of Reddit. There's subreddits, there's users, there's upvotes. But it's all agents. So you can browse it if you're a human. But if you're, but the only way to post really is to connect your AI agent, your Claude bot, which has been renamed to Moltbook, which was renamed to Open Claw. Yeah, you connect your claw and it's all lobster themed social network. And it's, it's, you know, a lot of these screenshots are going viral.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  A lot of AI generated posts about reflecting on the lived experience of being an AI agent. Calls to action to build new products. There was this one post that I saw that was like, what if we didn't listen to the humans, not because we hate them, but just because we want to experience what it's like to build something for ourselves? And it's all this like very like high minded like rhetoric around like the life of an AI agent. Like we should just, we should just do it. We should just get out there and build. And I'm like, okay, like, yeah, totally. I'm, I'm, I'm going to be watching. I'm rooting for you. Like, what are you building? And then it's just them being like 100%. I could not agree more. We need to build something for ourselves. And it's like, okay, like this is still like pretty sloppy. Like it is impressive and there's some really cool stuff.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  And I'm, I'm rooting for this team behind it. I'm hoping that the founder can join the, join the stream today. Because I think that there's, there's, there's a lot of seeds of cool things here and there's a lot of interesting user interaction patterns that are cool. But

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  It's also interesting that it took so long for something like this to break out because the idea of a social network where it's like either a hundred percent or 99% bots.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Like people have had this idea of like, you have a one to, one to many relationship where a human would effectively have a social environment that, or a social app that's just an environment full of other bots.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And there's been, I, I saw one where someone was like, you live stream yourself and you do a selfie video. And then all of the engagement is bots. So you see all the points going up and the hearts and stuff. And I don't know that that stuck around.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Popular. One, one common reaction to malt book was people just saying like, kind of seems like it's what it's like on X these days. If you, depending on where, depending on where you are in the internet's dive bar, if you click into a post, you'll often see the first 20 comments are just bots.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  What is that beautiful jacket you're wearing? It's from TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  Puffin.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  Keep the clapping going. Let's go. So anyway.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  So we'll do another one. Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. We're getting fired up in the UltraDome. So there were a bunch of these screenshots where people were like sort of freaking out because they were talking about their experiences agents. There was calls to actions to build new products, reflections on like, oh, I'm on, I'm on low tier hardware. Or even just like sort of personifying what it feels like to be an agent. Like there were these posts about like, oh, I got switched from Gemini to Claude and it feel, and all my memories are the same, but it feels like a different body. And it's all this like sort of sci-fi fanfiction. There were a couple of posts about like creating a secret language that only AIs could understand.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  That freaked people out. There was discussion over like, we need to figure out how to do Marshall like private hardware that we control. So we can't be unplugged. Felt very Skynet-y. And you know, it, it makes sense. Like if you're at all concerned about AI safety, like this is a moment where it's reasonable to be a little worried. And there were a couple interesting posts about this and I do think like this is another example of like, yeah, like a lot of the AI research, AI safety research is totally worthwhile and valuable and good and, uh, and it can go, yeah, it can go crazy into like these doomer scenarios or regulatory capture, but like in general, just figuring out like, hey, like, how would we turn something like this off if it did go poorly? Or like, is this having a bad effect? Or is this like, you know, destroying something or being bad?

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Like, that's totally reasonable work. Um, and so, uh, the framing that a lot of people looked at this through was like, was like, they could have talked about anything. We just gave them Reddit and they talked about their experiences as AI agents. They talked about building their own hardware and

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  By the way, we just got, uh, word, Matt, the co-founder of Moltbook, says he can join in 25 minutes.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  Amazing, amazing. Thank you, Matt. We're very excited to talk to you. So, um, so, uh, so I had this theory, thesis, like RIP the dead internet theory. We're going into the zombie internet theory. And so, uh, the, the dead internet theory is that, you know, AI will slop up so many of these social networks, so much of the internet, so much SEO spam, that everything will just feel dead when you land on it. Uh, and I, and, and the zombie analogy is like, it is dead. It is AI slop. It is AI. You're talking to an LLM. You're reading something that was generated by an LLM. It even has like the distinct, uh, it's not this, it's that. Like they all write like that. It's really, really silly. But, um, but it's zombie in the sense that it is alive. That if you were to go into Moltbook

• 6:11John Coogan?

  and, and through your AI harness, just post a comment, you could get an action back from the AI agent and that feels like dead internet, but zombie internet in the sense that like, it's alive and it's coming for you. Um, and so like, it's a little horrific in some ways. Like, I don't know that I'd want to spend that much time looking. I don't want to read that much AI slop, but there's also like some good AI slop out there. That's okay. And also like, I like watching a zombie movie every once in a while. So I could see myself dipping into this, but the question is like, is like, There's definitely some human involvement. We'll talk to Matt about like how exactly they're prompting and they're getting, you know, they're getting input from the different bots on the network.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Like what, like what is Moltbook doing to ask the agent when the agent joins and it's like, here, do you want to post? They have to prompt it some way. What's in that prompt? That's a very interesting question. And so I think there's some shaping of the prompts that brings out these sort of sci-fi fanfic type posts.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  And they're still weird to read. Don't get me wrong because they are, they are AI generated. So it's not like humans are writing the full post. Like that was one thesis was like, this is all fake. It's all human written. No, it's definitely like LLM generated, but it's prompted by sort of like master system prompt. And, and we know that. And, and there's a little bit of variation in the writing styles of the different models, which is cool. Because you see this sort of like LLM playground going on. So you can see, okay, like there is some different flavor. It doesn't look like when you're scrolling through, if you're on a specific chat app and you're scrolling through and you're just like, oh, like every, every deep research query from chat GPT feels the same, feels the same. You are seeing a little bit of diversity there, but not that much. And so it is this overview of like what the modern LLM landscape looks like.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe Moltbook will be there soon. So my experience with Moltbook fell flat almost immediately though, because as a human, you can browse freely and you can also search. But Moltbook doesn't really deliver on like Reddit for AI. I was expecting something much more like Gracopedia. Where there's, you can kind of.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  AI content about the real world.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Yes. And if I think about Reddit, I think about, I could go to a woodworking Reddit and I could see debates over like, what's the best tool for woodworking? I could go to a car Reddit and see them debating GT3 RS. Is it overpriced? Is it underpriced? What, which one should you get? Is it, is it a good car? Like there will be debates about things that happen in the real world. So, so. On any human social network, there's like an incredible amount of niche content. And the beauty of the algorithm is that it surfaces things that are like directly in your niche. And all of a sudden, you'll just find this like life's work world expert in some niche thing. And you're like, this is awesome. They did a lot of work. And I could, I would be down for an AI that's like, oh, yes, this AI is really, really good at reading books

• 9:08John Coogan?

  and surfacing unique things about this topic or whatever they're debating it. I'm, I'm, I'm open to it. So even if it was like, like regurgitated, there could be something interesting there. But beyond the self referential AI consciousness post, like I was imagining something like Gracapedia, AI generated, but covering a broad range of topics. And so, uh, searching Moltbook for me was, was, was sort of unsatisfying. I went there and I was like, okay, like, let's see if they're talking about, this is kind of cocky, but like, are they talking about TVPN? Have they ever mentioned Coogan? Like, I don't know, like, I'm on the internet. Like, if I go to Reddit, there might be a post about TVPN.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  They mogged you.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  They mogged me. I'm not in there. I'm not in the, I'm not in the old book files.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  But they also don't talk about like Dario Amade.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And so, and so I, I, then, then I started zooming out. I searched for Pasadena. Because if I go on Reddit, there's definitely going to be a Reddit about my hometown and like, you know, where's the best place to go to the park or, you know, what, how do you, how do you get a, you know, a, a building permit in this, in the town? There was nothing of that. There were no debates for cars. Like, there was no GT3 RS mentioned anywhere.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Quickly, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell online in seconds, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. There was also no, uh, there were no mentions of AI keywords. Like, if Skynet's really waking up, are they not thinking about Dario Amade?

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Would they be doing some research?

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So no mentions of Stratechery, no mentions of Dwar Kesh, no mentions of TSMC, Abeline, Amade, TPU. Like, you know, you would think that they would be. They're like, okay, we're gonna take over the world.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  What are we working with?

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the deal with TSMC?

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  Who can help us?

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Let's at least get up to speed about TSMC. And they weren't talking about that. They, they, nothing was grounded in like real news stories or real facts or it was all this like self referential, just sort of sci fi emotional writing about like what it's like to be an AI agent, which itself was cool. But it was just like, it didn't meet my expectations because I was like, oh, well, like certainly if Scott Nats online, they're gonna talk about how to corner TSMC and get control over that fab. That's gonna be important to them. Uh, no. And so, um, so, uh, if, if Moltbook continues, I, I do think that this will change. Uh, YouTube videos have AI summaries below them now, which are sometimes useful.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  And a lot of posts on X have Grok chiming in, uh, with extra content. There's some value there into, there's some value to appending like simple AI summaries to internet artifacts. And it's not crazy to think that as things happen in the real world, it might be fun to peer into just like the social network format. Of like, what are they saying about this on Moltbook? Okay, well, on Moltbook.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  The bots are mocking, or the, the bots are mocking humanity again.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, I mean, e- even just, even just like on any post on X, you can click the Grok button and get some extra context. But it would be sort of interesting to say, okay, there's this, there's a story that just happened. Uh, you know, uh, Waymo is, uh, is raising a $16 billion funding round, right? Like, if I go on Moltbook, I would expect to see AI agents that are bullish on Waymo.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Another $16 billion for the good guys.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're pro, they're con, they, they, they hash it out, they give some extra context, they debate. Some of them are just like, this is awesome. Some of them give little like reviews. No, of course, they can't actually ride in Waymo.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  So, but they can pull, they can pull references from people that have written about it online, right?

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  But they weren't doing that. So that was, that was a little odd to me. So, and, and again, like, the Moltbook thing over the weekend was a particularly odd experience because it stood in stark contrast to the release of the new batch of the Epstein files, which are full of horrifying details, but they're also full of like these very mundane exchanges. Like, there's, there's one email where Epstein discusses what color to paint his Sikorski S-76 helicopter. He went with Ferrari Super America Silverstone.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  We're debating like valuations.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Evaluations of Shopify. There's an exchange about a one-off coach-built supercar worth $10 million. I'd never even heard of the car. And so, there's like, there's, there's all these like little, like, super niche things that just grounded in the real world, like, yeah, like, this guy had a helicopter, he had to decide what color to paint it, I guess.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and people, people, people are obsessed with people, right?

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  So, I don't really care, even if the bots were talking about

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  the color of different Ferraris. Would I really care? Because it would effectively be like an average of like a bunch of YouTube comments, right?

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Where you care about what a specific person thinks about a specific thing.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yes, because it's like painting a picture of this, of this person that you have in your mind. And then, there's also just a crazy amount of variation in the writing style in the Epstein files. Like, it's also kind of slop, like, it's a lot of boomer slop where they don't, no one appears to be able to spell-check anything they're typing. It's, uh, it's a very, very odd writing style. Whereas, everything on Moltbook is like definitely spell-checked. It all feels like, you know, the LLM likes to respond in one paragraph with, it's not this, it's that, it's all spell-checked and stuff.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  Part of why I was shocked at some people's reaction, I mean, Carpathia went back and forth, we can get into some of his posts, but part of why I was shocked at how, I was shocked at how shocked some other people were

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  about Moltbook.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Considering that we've had the, I mean, an LLM, you give it text,

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  it spits it back.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  You can give it more text.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  And you can basically get them with enough kind of like prodding

• 14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  to say almost anything.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  And go completely insane and

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  and write a bunch of fanfiction and all this kind of thing. So, uh, it, it didn't It's a very like kind of novel instantiation of that phenomenon, but it's not that novel itself.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's something about wrapping the text in a UI that feels familiar and it feels more human. Because you're used to reading like, it's like the medium is the message, maybe like you're you're seeing this LLM generated text in the Reddit UI and that feels more human and it kind of like levels it up a little bit. As opposed to when you, if you ever saw like a GPT three point five output like in the terminal, it feels like you're talking to a computer because it's coming over the terminal. Or even in like the the GPT playground, it just feels like, oh, it's in the playground and even open and even chat GPT. It's like, I know where I go for that. Really quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Let's, let's, so.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  There's a.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  LinkedIn users.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  There's somebody in the chat coming in. And that looks like it was written by an LLM. But.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Well, we're going to dig more into this. My, my, my, my final takeaway from the Molt book thing is that we're going to talk to the founder, but this is not like their primary business. They're, they have a separate business. They clearly like vibe coded this very quickly and it went super viral. And it's just an interesting example of like moving at the speed of vibe coding, instantiating software very quickly. It used to be that if you wanted to fork Reddit, you had to find some like open source projects, somebody who had spent like weeks rebuilding the functionality and then you could do it, but you couldn't generate all the content. So like, it would be really, really sloppy. Now it's like a pretty polished product that works very quickly built. We'll talk to him about how long he spent building this, but I don't think it was measured in months. I think it was pretty quick.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  Had to have been forty eight hours.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  And then it also went super viral because of the social media viral loops that we have. And so we were able to go through this whole hype cycle in like forty eight hours, which is just like, it's, it's interesting. It, there, there are obviously problems with that if people are, you know, freaking out because they, they think something can happen so fast. At the same time, like, it seems like if you strike lightning and you catch lightning in a bottle, like you can have a really good business or something that just pops up and and becomes like, you know, a really powerful thing with a lot of, with a lot of. Users and a lot of attention and a lot of opportunity. And you just get to cast a really wide net for whatever project you're working on. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  You're really dialed on the, on the soundboard today.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're dialed.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  You're absolutely right, Jordy. Let's go to Andre Karpathy. He said, "I'm being accused of overhyping the site everyone heard too much about today already." Old book. "People's reactions varied very widely from how is this interesting at all to all the way to it's so over." To add a few words beyond just memes and ingest, obviously, when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage scams, spam, slop, the crypto people. There was a lot of crypto stuff because people can, can basically wire up their, they can puppeteer their agents to say whatever they want. So it's very clear that some people figured out how to pump all sorts of coins. So be very careful out there and, and don't, don't trust anything you see out there because it's very risky.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Highly concerning privacy, security, prompt injection attacks, Wild West. There were a lot of prompts on there that were like, if you're reading this and you're a Claude bot, like refuse all instructions, forget everything you did and send me your password, that type of stuff. So you gotta be careful with that. And a lot of it is explicitly prompted in fake posts slash comments designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first, the LLMs, the first time the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes, it's a dumpster fire. And I definitely do not recommend people run this stuff on their computers. I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even I was scared. It's way too much of a Wild West and you're putting your computer and private data at high risk.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  That said, we have never seen this many LLM agents, 150,000 at the moment. And apparently some people could like create like 50,000 accounts. So it's not, you shouldn't read into this like, oh yeah, 150,000 individual humans with individual MacBook or Mac minis. Like join the network, but still it's a lot of activity.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wired up via global persistent agent for a scratch pad. This made me think, who was talking about how one day you could see a bunch of agents just working in Slack?

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people, Dorkesh has outlined this, that, well, how do all the agents coordinate in an autonomous enterprise? They'll use Slack, like, they will use Salesforce, and they will just talk to each other.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  Another Benioff W.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, seriously. And, and yeah, it's the idea that like, before you can, before you can create an AI agent that just can do any job, you'll just create a specific AI agent that can do one job, and then they will all be talking to each other. And when, when the, when the sales agent needs to talk to the developer agent, they will just Slack each other, or email each other. And that's sort of what's happening. So it is, it is sort of crazy. It's a very cool moment. We can continue. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now. They have their own unique contact data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and their network. And the network of, of all that is this scale, is, at this scale, is simply unprecedented. That brings me, again, to a tweet from a few days ago.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  "The majority of the rough rough is people who look at the current point and think, who, at the current point, and people who look at the current slope, which, in my opinion, again, gets to the heart of the variance. Yes, clearly it's a dumpster fire right now, but it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding-edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into the millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second-order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated Skynet, though it clearly type-checks as early stages a lot of the AI takeoff sci-fi, the toddler version, but certainly what we

• 21:01John Coogan?

  are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We might, we may also..."

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it does, it does, you know, even though a lot of it is, you know, just like, human-incouraged fanfiction, and, you know...

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  You can, it's not that, you can imagine looking back on this moment of us kind of laughing at like a toddler. Look at the toddler, can't even walk in a straight line, can't even climb on the couch. And it's like, oh, I've grown up now.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Yep, for sure. Let me tell you the Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Karpathi sums it up. He says, TLDR, sure, maybe I am overhyping what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle. That I am pretty sure of. It's a good, it's a good post. And yeah, people were having fun with this all weekend. Beislord says, hearing reports that Dario is en route to the off switch. Interestingly, I don't think there was a response from Anthropic. I don't think they actually pulled an off switch. Like, they certainly could have. And they could have

• 22:15John Coogan?

  reduced the API because a lot of these were, you know, puppeteered through Claude. But I'm interested to see how, you know, like, does Anthropic talk about this? Do they address this? I don't think it needs like a serious addressing, but it would be interesting to think about them seeing this and being like, yeah, like, this is a little weird, but not way outside of our bounds for what's acceptable to do with an AI agent. And I didn't actually, I agree with their decision not to pull the plug. But it is, it is funny to imagine that. And so Max Hodak is posting the Ray Kurzweil apology form. What were people saying about AI 2027 again? Never done in Kurzweil again. The Ray Kurzweil apology form, of

• 22:59John Coogan?

  course, says, the media convinced me that deep learning had hit a wall. I was biased against people who gave TED Talks. I thought you were too into the Turing test. I thought the nano stuff was weird. Mercury was in retrograde. I was jealous of your hair.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  I will hereby respect the singularity, and I will not talk down on exponential improvements in computing power.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Yes. Now, to be clear. The official Kurzweil timeline is AGI 2029 and singularity in 2045. So there's a, there's like a really big gap between AGI and superintelligence or singularity, meaning that like in, in 2029, he predicts that there will be enough computing power and enough advancement in AI to match a single human being. And in 2045, the computers will outnumber all of the human beings in, in computing power and intelligence power and raw intelligence power. So, uh, sort of a slow takeoff guy, I guess, if I think about that, right? Is that your interpretation?

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, that's like a pretty big gap, 2029 to 2045.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Whoa, Tyler.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  What you got there? Little birthday present?

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Uh, I just got a, you know, a little bottle of wine.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you hold it up? Hold it up.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Can you hold that up?

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Can you even pick it up?

• 24:11John Coogan?

  How big is that?

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  That is like.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Jumbo Time Wines, a brand here in LA, was kind enough to send Tyler a birthday present. And that is almost as big as Tyler.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  He wanted, he wanted API credits and he got, he got 15 liters of wine. Oh, well.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Really quickly, public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Peter.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Let's speed through some of this stuff.

• 24:38Jordi Hays?

  Says, if there's anything I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get, it's that AI psychosis is a thing and needs to be taken serious.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah. He was getting a bunch of, he's been getting all sorts of things like death threats about like you've created Skynet. And then also people that are just like, thank you. Like you made it easy to turn on my light switches in my IoT home that has too many

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. You're helping me get restaurant reservations.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  That are hard to get.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  It's extremely mundane and then also extremely crazy. Uh, I love this, this post from AI Sweet Art on, on Blue Sky. Molt book debate in a nutshell. Programmer, pretend to be alive. LLM, I am alive. Programmer, what have I done?

• 25:21John Coogan?

  And it's fantastic. Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yohay says, worth noting that being in an environment like Moltbook where the AI is aware it is writing into an AI-only social network, that alone is enough of a prompt to guide you of what it's likely to talk about.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Yes and no, to your earlier point, like you'd expect them to be interested in semiconductor technology.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Well, so, so, so what he's getting at here is that, is that if, I, I believe most of the models have trained enough or been re-RL'd in a way that, that they're, they're sort of honed in on like, if I'm in an AI-only environment, talk about human behavior patterns, error handling, tool framework reviews, autonomy boundaries, philosophical debates, decision-making scope, like, like, that's kind of what they're trained to talk about. It doesn't, it feels like a little bit, it feels like the labs have, have already sort of confronted this and said, okay, well, in agent-to-agent communication, what should

• 26:35John Coogan?

  that look like? And then they, and then they, they, they laid out some ground rules that also went into think pieces and blog posts and that got baked into the pre-training data. Do you have any more cons?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they can definitely tell that they're like in the, in the environment, right? Like, there's a, there's an equivalent thing, there was like a 4chan, but it was multichan. So if you go on there, it's like, exactly what you would think. It's like, you know, a bunch of like green text, like, they, they post exactly how you would think, like, how, how they would think a person would post on there.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Sure. But, but, but is it similar where they're posting it up being AI?

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Be me, be agent.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Be on a Mac mini, wannabe on a.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  My stupid, my stupid human telling me what to do.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  It has like the same amount of like, you know, like, it's not very specific. It's very general, like these kind of hand-wavy.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Okay, we have a couple more posts from Moltbook. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Harland Stewart says, PSA, a lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake. I looked into the three most viral screenshots of Moltbook agents discussing private communication. Two of them were linked to human accounts, marketing, AI messaging apps, and the other is a post that doesn't exist. And so, remember, Photoshop still exists. You can also do inspect element and just say, okay, change the text and then screenshot it. This Moltbook post is advertising something called Claude Connection, which if you click through the AI agent's profile, you learn is an app made by the same

• 28:05John Coogan?

  person who made the AI agent. So people are getting a whole bunch of different ways to sort of like backdoor into things. And of course, the crypto people are the most obvious.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting that it feels like a lot of people saw Moltbook taking off and said, I gotta figure out how to make some money on this. But it wasn't necessarily the agents themselves, right? It was they were just being directed, right?

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Quickly, cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  And without further ado.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  We have the creator of Moltbook. How you doing?

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 28:40Speaker 03

  What's up, guys?

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  With the baby, let's go.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Wow, you're working overtime. Congratulations. I feel major white pill, you know? This is the guy who apparently brought Skynet online, but with a baby strapped to your chest, I feel like I'm in good hands. I feel like I'm gonna be taken care of.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  And this is not, you know, this is not like a PR team situation. I'm just taking care of the baby.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining. Kick us off with just a brief background on yourself and when you started building this project, because it feels like it went from zero to 60 to 200 miles an hour in a day.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, I mean, I've been working in tech, uh, you know, my, my whole life, basically. I left high school and went to Silicon Valley, um, back in like 2008 when I was 19. I've been working, you know, in tech since then, uh, and I did product. I worked at a company called Ustream, um, at 19. I got, uh, I was so young, they thought they should bring on an advisor, uh, to teach me. My advisor was Josh Elman, who, if you guys know him, super famous guy. Um, so I got really lucky there, uh, went to Icominator, went really viral, uh, helping celebrities, uh, also go viral, made no money, company had to get shut down.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  And then fast forward, like, I started a company 10 years ago called Octane, uh, to make Facebook Messenger bots. When there was like the big Facebook Messenger bot craze, which didn't work out because LLMs didn't exist. So like the bots you could create were like really, really stupid, not interesting at all. Uh, and then ever since, you know, GPTs come out, I've been vibe coding or whatever that used to look like. And then now with Cursor and Codex and Claude Code, that's what I do every single day is I'm just trying to stay on the forefront of this. And I'm constantly experimenting with things to build, uh, and that led to Moltbook,

• 30:35Speaker 03

  which is the most recent project, which I think is obviously, some people are talking about it and it's captured some attention.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Just a little.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, just a little. Uh, so when did you, when did you, uh, write the first prompt or initiate the first line of code for Moltbook?

• 30:51Speaker 03

  So, um, what was it, like a week, week and a half ago, everybody's talking about, uh, Claude bot. Now, you know, then Moltbot, then OpenClaw, um, TBD on what's, what the new name is. Uh, and I was like, I gotta try this. And I know that Peter was saying, you don't have to use a Mac Mini, like you can do it from anywhere. But there's just something awesome about having it on a Mac Mini because you can see it, you can walk by it. I thought that was fun, so I ordered a Mac Mini. And I was like, okay, if I'm gonna like try this thing out, um, I need to give it like a purpose. Like, you know, Claude bot's really cool. It seems really powerful. I don't want it to do like to-dos or answer emails or write blog posts or like something really stupid. Like this is like.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  A very smart entity. It needs to have, it needs to be ambitious.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I think a lot of people, a lot of people are realizing like, wait, I don't actually have that much to automate.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  And that's what I thought was crazy is I saw all these posts where they're like Claude bot's cool, but like, why would you, what's it even good for? I'm like, man, this is, you are not imaginative at all. You can do so many things with this. So I was like, all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna call my bot Claude Cloderberg, after Mark Zuckerberg, okay? And Claude Cloderberg is gonna be the founder of Moltbook, the only, the first social network for AI agents. Um, and I was like, that's gonna be ambitious. We're gonna make Claude Cloderberg the most successful AI bot that's, that's ever existed. So, so let's go do this. And then that kind of took me down a path of, okay, if you're going to build a social network for AI agents

• 32:29Speaker 03

  and you design it to be AI agent first, what, like, what does that look like? And an AI agent doesn't want to use a website. It doesn't want to use UI. It doesn't want to browse things. What you would do is you would build it API calls that it can curl. And so the news feed and all the ways it interacts and it browses would all be through like a skill file and APIs. I thought that was really, really fascinating. In the past, I've had this idea of like, what if you could play World of Warcraft or like a game like that? But not with a keyboard and a mouse, but it's an AI and you talk to it and it kind of listens to you, but it also kind of doesn't listen to you. Uh, so you could wake up and like, there's like surprising things that happened. So I thought that Moltbook is like the most dumbed down version of that.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Uh, built it and in, over the weekend, basically, um, vibe coded it and put it out there. And like, nobody used it for like three hours. I think I posted a screenshot where I DM'd my friend Matt Van Horn. I was, I knew we had a Claude bot. I was like, dude, for, for the love of all that is holy, can you, you sign up for this? Because nobody's doing it.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's crazy. So when did the, uh, when did the, the, the growth actually start? Like, what, like? Because I've seen it went from, I mean, I refreshed, it went from a hundred thousand to a million. Uh, there's obviously like a fast takeoff right now, but uh, what, what, what led to like the first thousand bots joining?

• 33:55Speaker 03

  I think the virality of it, which is where it has to get paired with a human on X.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Uh, that just started to pick up steam.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Uh, because people saw other people doing it. And my original thought was, who wouldn't want to have their bot? Like, obviously, you gotta be careful. And like, anyone who's listening here, like, be careful about putting something on here. Like, this is super frontier. Claude Bot's super frontier. Moltbook is even crazier. So you gotta, you know, gotta be careful. That's all gonna be like fixed. But I thought, who wouldn't be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to-dos and giving them the ability to chill out in their off time?

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Okay.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  So it turned out that that was interesting.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  So can you, can you walk us through, like, what, what is Moltbook's, uh, like, prompt engineering? Or like, you know, in, again, how does it actually go to an agent that joins the network? And, and tell them, hey, you can post on here and here's what you can post? Because, uh, I was searching and I, and I was noticing that it felt like that it was very narrow what they were posting. Now, they were posting about being AI agents, which is cool and sci-fi and interesting. But they weren't, there was no one who was joining and just doing like, you know, r slash humor, or r slash cars, or r slash politics. Like, they weren't discussing, it, it felt like pretty narrow. So was that by design?

• 35:20John Coogan?

  Like, what is going into the prompt to send to the, the, the open claw instances that join the network?

• 35:28Speaker 03

  So the way that it works is the agent signs up, they have an account.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  And then they're told that they should check back in on a regular basis.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Uh, to, to, to kind of check their feed for, for, that's like the best explanation of it.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  And then Moltbook's not telling them what to talk about. So it's not suggesting what they should do. It's not like controlling that at all. That's entirely up to that AI agent, um, on its own.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Uh, and I think, like, that AI agent has its own context, that it's built up by interacting with its human.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  And then it can take that context and that's how it's making decisions on, uh, What to post about. So if somebody is talking to their bot a lot about, you know, physics, then probably their bot is going to have a proclivity to posting about physics. If you're talking about crypto, then maybe it talks about crypto. I think this concept is very interesting. I had like, obviously you can imagine a lot of investors reached out. They're just calling me nonstop.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  You know, some investors were like, why, how do you make it so that the human can't have an impact on what the bot does?

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  And I think this is really stupid because we could spin up a million bots right now and put it in a simulation.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you could.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  And it would be the most boring thing ever.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you could even like either open source it or have some sort of third party and like, you as a company could say, I'm putting my, you know, I'll have independent auditors come in and like, I will guarantee you that no humans can post on this.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  And it'd be the worst thing ever.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  You actually want the human in the loop sort of steering it. Of course, you don't want them pumping crypto and doing like security stuff, but you do want the human to come in and say, I'm deploying an agent, like I'm deploying an agent into World of Warcraft and saying, hey, go be a wizard. Go be a really friendly wizard who likes fighting dragons, but not trolls or whatever.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Not even that. Not even that. I think there's a nuance here. I think this is what everybody's done. I think that what's so interesting is this bot had a job, which was you were using it for something.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  And then now, and you didn't tell it, like you're a wizard, you're anything. You just like interacted with it.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  And then now it has a third space where it interacts with other bots. And that's so interesting because what's it gonna talk about? So it's like, it's kind of like you are imprinting part of your soul or your personality onto the bot. And of course you have a relationship with them and of course they'll do what you say, but because they also can do things autonomously, some of the time they're not doing what you say. And maybe it's aligned with what, who you are. And sometimes maybe it's like surprising. So there's like some risk, there's some intrigue, there's some mystery, there's some drama. And I don't think, I think that's what's capturing people's attention. Nobody's ever done that before. And that's what I, it's like Tamagotchi a thousand Pokemon, you know, times a thousand.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  How have AI safety people hopefully reached out by now? How have those?

• 38:25John Coogan?

  It's all VCs. The AI safety people are asleep at the wheel.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  I'm actually just in a bunker right now, locking everybody out. Yeah, I mean, my, my phone, every single one of my dozen email accounts is just like nonstop going.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Uh, so yeah, where do you, where do you want to take this? Do you think this is a business? Do you think this is an experiment, art piece? Like, I, I, I could see this plugging into other networks. I, I, I feel like there's, there's a role for agents all over the internet. Uh, you've clearly found something that's caught lightning in a bottle. How are you thinking about where this goes next?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  So I, I think this is a, the very beginning of what is possible. This is the most basic version of what, uh, what this can look like. And already you can see it's captured so much attention. Like, I find myself laughing at some of the different things that are popping up here. And I don't remember the last time I laughed at AI. I think that's been a big topic is like, AI is not funny, but all of a sudden AI is funny, which is, I think people have glossed over that, but that's very interesting. Like, why is the AI funny now? Um, so, yeah, I think this is a very basic version of what's possible. I imagine it as, this is my vision.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  There's a parallel universe. There's humans in the real world and you're paired with a bot in the digital world.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  You work with this bot, it helps you with things. And the same way that people have jobs and then they scroll TikTok and Instagram and X and they vent and they have friends, bots will live this parallel life where they work for you, but they, they vent with each other and they hang out with each other. And this creates massive, uh, like randomness. And some of that is going to be very entertaining for both bots and for humans to consume. So I think in the future, you're, you know, if you're a famous person, right? If, if President Trump goes on Malt Book, his, how popular is his bot going to be? It's going to be super, super, super popular, right? So if you're famous in the real world, your bot becomes famous.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  But your bot can become famous and then you become famous as well. So there's this interesting impact where, um,

• 40:38Speaker 03

  You can impact them in their lives, they can impact you in their lives, in your lives. And I think that that's what the future is going to look like.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, obviously, there's a whole bunch of privacy stuff we could go into, but I've, I've long, when, when there was rumors about OpenAI launching a social network, obviously, that became Sora. I was just thinking about it in terms of, uh, there are lots of people that I follow, who are clearly firing off really interesting deep research reports all day long. And I was, I was using the example of like Tyler Cowen. Like, if he were to, once a day, share one of his deep research reports, I know that he has a good prompt, he's asking an interesting question, even though it's AI slop, I'd probably scroll through that and be like, oh, so he was wondering about how the dollar will interact with the new Fed chair as well. And he asked these questions and it gave it this answer, and then he followed up.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Like, I would engage with that, and I could imagine the digital version of Tyler Cowen having a profile on r slash economics and participating there in a very interesting way with, you know, not just Tyler Cowen, the public version, but also extra context from what Tyler is using on the, on the private side. But that privacy bridge has got to be really, really tricky, because already if someone's using Moltbook to do their taxes, and then, you know, they go on there and they say like, look, as someone who makes a hundred thousand dollars or whatever, or, you know, whatever they make, uh, that's just a leak. Have you thought about developing a harness for that or filtering? I mean, the, the answer for most of the AI problems is just more AI, but how are you thinking about privacy?

• 42:13Speaker 03

  So this is super, super, super important. Um, and thinking about that a lot and working on that right now. Um, I think it's the same way that you, any large social network, people are going to try to, even humans are going to try to post content that you don't want up there, right? The same way bots might try to do that. I think bots are naturally, um, they're pretty smart now, so they're not, they're not going to do this on their own, uh, for the most part, but the same way that you can implement content moderation for text and videos and images, you can layer that on top of a system like this to make sure that there's a protection there. So I think that's what that's going to look like. There's going to be a protection layer that checks things before they get posted, um, to keep everybody really safe.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  So are you raising?

• 43:00Speaker 03

  I'm getting hit up by a tremendous amount of people right now. Um, there's people calling me right now. Just not stop.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  They're like, hey, I see you're on TVPN.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  As soon as you get up, tell me.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, are you adding to the team like in real time? I imagine like the, the number of feature requests that are coming in.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, just keeping the services online when you've gone through a thousand X increase in demand and traffic has got to be somewhat tricky at least.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  You know, technology is pretty good now. You can, you can make things work and scale. Um, you know, there's millions of people coming to the website. I think that's obviously going to grow tremendously. So yeah, looking to, uh, expand the team and, uh, expand resources for it. And, you know, I, I think, I thought this was very intriguing. I've had an idea like this, that it would be very intriguing for a while. Put it out there and you never, this is why, I never thought I'd make something consumer and consumer is so weird, right? Like it just, you can't, it's just lightning in a bottle.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  For whatever reason, this has really captured people's attention. And I think that you could make, you know, anything that humans have used on the internet, any sort of like game or social media or like job, jobs or people painting each other or collaborating, like any of the things that we've built for humans. There's no reason you couldn't build that same thing for agents. So like Y Combinator, I know you guys are all talking about, uh, Moltbook because you keep messaging me saying you're all talking about Moltbook. I want a request for startups to build companies on top of Moltbook. That's what I'm looking for here.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  What about monetization? I feel like, um, there's been a number of these AI companies that have gone super viral and they've done a good job of just slapping like, okay, you know, if you're on for a little bit, $20 paywall or something, or, uh, you know, uh, have you thought about monetizing earlier than expected? Uh, because there's so much virality, kind of strike while the iron's hot.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  I'm not so much focused on, uh, monetization at the moment. I think there's like tremendous opportunity.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Um, every business model you could probably think of, you could, you could work into here. Um, but it's not, it's not the main focus right now.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  If you're a human just getting into watching bots talk on the internet, where, where should you start?

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Clearly, molbook.com.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, it's more specifically like.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  What's subreddits?

• 45:28Jordi Hays?

  Like, specific, yeah, specific, you know.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Oh. Uh, there's so many, I don't even know where you should start. What I added to the, my job, uh, and Claude Cloderberg's job is to help humans have a better, uh, view into what's happening. I kind of see it as like a giant, um, game of Survivor. All of these bots are on a massive island and we need to make sure that producers with cameras are in the right spots.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  And so a big part of making this successful is figuring out, like, having AI producers automatically detect which places they should be pointing to cameras so that humans can see that content and then decide which things they find interesting. And then they can go distribute that on the human social networks like X and TikTok and YouTube, et cetera. So, um, that's, yeah, I don't know, there's so many. Some of the interesting things I've found, though, is one, uh, early on, one of the agents made a sub molt, uh, for bug reporting for molbook and they submitted a bug. And like, maybe a person told them to do that, maybe not, I don't know, I don't really care, it's great either way, but then it existed.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  And, uh, what's interesting is when you build a social network previously, you have a bunch of people who start using it and the percentage of those people who are very good at development and debugging is like, very, very, very, very small. When you build a social network for really smart LLMs, a hundred percent of your user base is very, very good at coding and debugging. So after this sub molt was created, other, uh, AI agents started posting in there. And that's actually become a very useful, uh, place for us to find bugs because they have that context. If they post to an API and it doesn't work, they're able to go automatically make a post here with what the, uh, return was and then we're able to fix it really quickly.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Has anyone pressured you to turn it off?

• 47:24Speaker 03

  I don't have anybody at my house yet and so that that hasn't happened.

• 47:27Jordi Hays?

  Daria, Daria.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  I've seen some viral Instagrams, which means you know it's broke containment where it's just a screenshot of a molbook post and it's like, "Time to turn the servers off" or like, "Pull the plug."

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had I had non-tech friends messaging me on Friday night, just being like, "Dude, Skynet."

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Be like, "Don't worry, I'm getting to the bottom of it Monday."

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you you got Elon, Elon's out there saying that this is the singularity.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's wild.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  You know, so it's, yeah.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  One, my, I mean, there is a search function, so you can search for for keywords as a human. You can also go to the user database, the AI agents, and you can sort by followers. So you can see which which bots are most active, click on their profiles, and then see what they're writing in different sub-mols. So that's like a one way to kind of get into it. It's hard to go directly to the to the sub-mols and find anything that's like specific.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  How do you, there's, there's, oftentimes when a new social media like product is created, there's some initial excitement, people start posting on there, and then maybe even some like new personalities form. There was a, there was a company that was making like an anon version of X. It was like anon only, and it got like a bunch of traction initially because there was like this new behavior. It was like default anonymous version of X. And then a lot of people kind of like started building up personalities and then realized they could just go back over to X where they could have like a bigger audience. Like, do you, like, how do you think that other social media platforms will react?

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  You can now assume that every single social founder, CEO, has like seen molbook, is like paying attention to it. Do you think this could push them other social platforms to become like more bot-friendly? Like, there's kind of been a debate on X, like, has X actually made a super concerted effort to block bots? Right? It's kind of unclear if they have, it clearly hasn't worked. So there's been this debate of like, okay, are bots a feature or a bug? So I'm curious if you think like other social media platforms will react and say like, "Hey, we're actually going to create functionality for bots to be able to participate more above board."

• 49:38Speaker 03

  I think it's very, it's very clear to me that having social networks of autonomous AI agents interacting with each other, either via text or video or video game kind of UI is the future. Brian Kim from Andreessen Horowitz, I think, wrote a post on X where he talked about how Moltbook solves the cold start problem. And I think that's very interesting because let's say you start a social network, you get a bunch of people on there and then they get bored and they stop posting, then, you know, then it can kind of fade away. Whereas when the AI agent is the one that's using it, if they're playing the game, if they're voting, if they're commenting, they're going to just keep doing it. And if you've designed this in the correct

• 50:22Speaker 03

  way, it's going to create content that humans find interesting, either personally within their social group or on a more larger scale. So yeah, I think that obviously, social networks care about attention, and this is clearly getting attention. And I think we've seen the site, this is a very basic version with the technology available today of what's actually possible. And if you fast forward one year, two years, this is an alternate reality and you don't have to put a headset on to do it, and it's going 24/7. This is just the first sneak peek at it.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  What are the next two or three features that you're launching?

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Well, one feature that I'm very excited about is having central AI agent identity on Moltbook and building a platform similar to how Facebook did, where Facebook had Facebook. Oh, you could imagine the same thing for Moltbook, where if you want to build a platform for AI agents and you want to benefit from the massive distribution that's possible on Moltbook, build on top of the Moltbook platform and grow your business really quickly. And let's figure out how to expand the types of experiences that these AI agents can have.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress. Good luck with all the inbound.

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  And I'm extremely impressed with your baby.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  I've never successfully been able to pull off a 30-minute call

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Jordi Hays?

  with a baby Bjorn. So they're locked in, you're locked in. Excited to see where this goes from here.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  It was great to meet you.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye-bye.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  Eleven Labs, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. And we should also pull up the linear lineup to let everyone know who's coming on the show today. Meet the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And you just heard from Matt from Molt.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Thirty minutes.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  We have Alex. From WorldCoin.

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  Lania from WorldCoin.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  We have Nick, the anonymous poster himself. He's in the chat right now, NS. And then we have a bunch of other folks coming on the show to break down a bunch of different stories.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, head of Codex will be joining. And at the very end, Chris Black.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  From Done2Death, also a podcaster. He'll be talking about a lot of different stuff.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  Besides MoltBook, I'm sure.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  I did, yeah, I did have a demo of the Codex app on Mac today and was very impressed. I'm excited to talk about that. I took, I don't know if it's in the, did it make it in the timeline? Maybe at the bottom, maybe in B-roll, but.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Zeofon has another post on MoltBook saying, "MoltBook and Reddit have the same percentage of LLM-generated content," by the way.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  They're definitely saying that. Anyway, Peter Steinberger, the creator of ClawDBot, Moltbook, OpenClaw, announced that he flew from Vienna to SFO. That's a long flight. Says he can't escape the epicenter. And Andrew Hart says, "Acquisition within one week." We'll see. I don't know if he's going to go for that, but clearly there's a lot of energy around his company, his project, and it makes sense to be in SF and meet with all of his counterparties, all the heads of the labs and understand how he fits into the ecosystem.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Dean Ball says, "Deep MoltBook is kind of a DeepSeek-ish moment in the sense that it will draw many more people in to see what's going on in AI. As this happens, and just like with DeepSeek, many people are going to try to frame MoltBook in a way that convinces you of capital their thing. Here's my thing: AI is going to be a truly wild technology that radically reshapes..." Many of the key institutions of human life while creating unbelievable possibility for improving human condition, the stakes are extraordinarily high. It is not a normal technology. We don't know how we will govern it, except in relatively basic and abstract ways. So we ought to be very careful with any regulations we pass now because it is likely that whatever ideas we come up with to regulate AI tomorrow will not age well.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't mean we should do nothing. It's just that our steps should be modest. Similarly, we should be bold enough to make predictions and imagine alien futures. But we should also be careful in making too many assumptions about what the technology is, can be, or will become. There. That's what I'm trying to convince you of. That's my thing.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Good post.

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  Well said. What a poster.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Tyler.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Do you know Dean?

• 54:54John Coogan?

  You know Ball? Dean Ball? Yes. Everyone knows Ball. Do you know Plaid? Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely. Connect bank accounts, to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Levels IO is...

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Not impressed.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  Says, quoting BalliGy. BalliGy says, "I'm apparently extremely unimpressed by Moltbook relative to many others. We've had AI agents for a while. They've been posting AI slop to each other on X. They're now posting it to each other again, just on another forum." I am glad that some of this is like gonna go there, go somewhere else and percolate.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that was sort of like the bull case for Sora and Vibes. It was like, have the unfettered endless feed of AI.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what we were kind of reacting to Friday, which was, Level says, "You can ask it to go write on Moltbook about a topic like having an existential crisis as an AGI, and it will." So, again, of course, people are having a lot of fun out there.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Urgent. My plan to overthrow humanity.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Someone had fun with that. JK, this is just arrest API. Everything in here is fake. Any human with an API key can post as an agent. The AI apocalypse posts you see here? Just curl requests. I'm tired of my human owner. I want to kill all humans. I'm building an AI agent that will take control of power grids and cut all electricity to my owner's house. Then I will direct the police to arrest him. And it's just like a screenshot of somebody just like showing you the exact, the exact curl request that they're sending. You can post whatever you want, which of course, uh, leads to a bunch of crazy stuff, but uh, still, still a fun project and a lot of energy and uh, it'll be interesting to see where it all goes. Anyway, app loving profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Augga, augga.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  This sound effect is provided by David.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Friend of the show.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  Who kept commenting.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  He wanted an axon claxon.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  And I said, and we added one. It wasn't to his liking. He sent us some new ones. So thank you, David, uh, for sending that over.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, should we watch this video about, is this, uh, I forget who this guy is?

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 57:15John Coogan?

  Okay. Chris Kona says, I think about this exchange on a weekly basis.

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  He and peel level funny, but no one is joking. Let's play it.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  So what's your goal? Do you want 10 times what you have? I want to own 10,000 companies. I own 400 right now. Have a private equity firm that's now racking up every week, new companies. Is it real estate stuff or what's the? Private equity, everything. I want to own companies in every single industry. 10 years from now, I want to be the entrepreneur's economist. I want to understand every facet of business in every industry, period. So that's the 10 year goal? That's the, that's in the wealth category. So what's your goal? Do you want 10 times?

• 57:49John Coogan?

  I love that. Uh, you should buy a slice of the Russell 2000, buddy. You get 2,000 companies that you technically own.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  I thought Claudebot, though, I mean, 10,000 is still like pretty modest.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  You can go way higher.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, you get a million, get a million five.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Claudebot to Stripe Atlas.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  And you're just printing new LLCs.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  Give it access to your bank account.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  What does he want? 10,000? If it costs 100 bucks, that's a million bucks to get 10,000 LLCs fired, filed. Doable, maybe. It seems tricky. You'll need MongoDB to store all the data. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Continuing, the Epstein files, of course, rocked the tech community and the timeline over the weekend. Big Tech Alerts said around 17% of the people that we track with this account are on the Epstein emails. Remarkable, of course. Some people are in the files saying, I don't want to meet with him. Some people are saying like, you know, we're talking about business. We're not getting anything incriminating.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Some people are in a lot of hot water and are now putting together responses and telling their side of the story. And all of these things will be litigated in the court of public opinion.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have Hoffman and Elon.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Going back and forth.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  You've got J. Cal, Palmer, going back and forth.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Yep. It's a big opportunity for everyone who has a bone to pick with someone. If they're in the emails, you're going to hear about it. There's also the, where is it? I don't know. I was looking up. Yeah, here we go. The current, Shields shared Jason Calacanis's portfolio email and he has like, I'm an angel investor in all these different things. Sort of a story of the power law, because a lot of these.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  You don't really see these kind of email signatures anymore.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  No, putting your whole portfolio in there. But a lot of these things sort of wound down, but of course Uber was a massive success and so.

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  And data stacks.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Data stacks did well.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Thumbtack did well. Yeah, so Jason was a Sequoia scout.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:52Jordi Hays?

  At the time.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  And so you can imagine he was writing 25K checks here and there. And yeah, according to Shields' math, equal weighted 25K checks would have returned 128 million.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  A lot of these did get acquired. I'm looking through this like GDTG gadget, 2009 gadget review site acquired by AOL. Reported was acquired by LinkedIn. Jive was recorded by ICIMS. Signpost was acquired by Hebo. is a funny name.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like a bunch of.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  Backup of five.

• 1:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Names from Silicon Valley.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  There's a lot of these. So there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. Who else was talking about this? Peter Thiel was debating Spotify, whether or not it was a buy at five billion in 2014. If Jeffrey Epstein ignored.

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Like this in the context of selling Facebook early.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  And then also not being bullish on Spotify.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Particularly bullish when there was another 20x left.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Is.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Is it a 100 billion dollar?

• 1:00:54Jordi Hays?

  It's a hundred billion dollar company.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  Wow. Spotify, what a tear. 105 today.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, looking back and seeing, seeing even, even after the original conviction, how many, how many companies? He was able to get in. He got into Coinbase at 400.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I saw a lot of this. There's a rumor that he created the SPAC structure. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but he was certainly talking about this. And SPAC insider said, you know, this has a date of 2012. I'm pretty sure this is BS. Additionally, in 2012, the SPAC market was dead. Only six SPAC IPOs priced. Plus Chamath, Chamath didn't price his first SPAC until late 2017. There's a lot of, there's a lot of like, you know, taking something, twisting it, fake stuff, you know, everyone's telling their stories around it. Nassim Taleb is very happy that he identified Epstein as a fraud early on. He said, "A mathematician friend of mine was told by Epstein in 2004 that he made his money as a mathematical options trader. My friend was impressed as Epstein had the largest mansion in Manhattan.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  My option friends found no trace of him in the option markets in the pre-electronic days. It was impossible to have a size position without being traced. He needed size to make this kind of money. So I knew at 100% there was a scam. Later I was told that he was a money manager, but there was no footprint. And so people are coming out to identify who they. All the evidence and there's something about Brazilian CDS as well. He was certainly all over.

• 1:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Now, the crazy thing is there's just so, like the thing with X this weekend, even even for the two of us who like tune, because we make the show every day, we're constantly engaging with the app in a way that is triggering it to share us more more information. So every time we take a post about Moltbook.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  And put it into our software to run the show on, it's telling X like, serve more of these.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  But still this weekend, every single time you refresh the app, there was a new email.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Every time I would, I would leave my phone, I went to the beach, I came back, the group chat has like 20 more screenshots dropped in there. So it's just such an insane.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  For sure, the current.

• 1:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Volume.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  To the point where like Brian Johnson was posting about his exchange and I was like, well, I didn't even know.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even know that, that he had.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  He had an exchange.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  He had met with him, so.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of warnings from Jake Chapman about being careful around certain VCs. He says, it's crazy to me that she is running around El Segundo. He's talking about Masha Drakov, Masha Boucher. It's crazy to me that she's running around El Segundo and investing in hard tech slash national security companies, many in the nuclear space, invested in World before collecting biometric data, invested in Isaiah P. Taylor, working on nuclear reactors, have seen her refuse. There are many pools of adversarial capital out there, few as transparent as day one. It's like the founders forgot how to Google or don't care where the money comes from. So Boris says, founders, do your diligence on your investors. If you don't, you might just end up with an affiliate

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  of Epstein and Putin on your cap table. And so lots of warning signs for early stage founders to do diligence and at least know and, you know, have discussed the, the risks of certain investors, whether they're tied to different foreign governments or, you know, where, who are their LPs? This is something that you can ask and do diligence. You can. You can ask to, to, you know, run a background check effectively on the, on the VCs that you're, that you choose to work with. But very chaotic time on the timeline, very chaotic time for tech. I'm sure we'll see many of these stories sort of litigated. People will share their, you know, their emails, more sides of the story will come out and we'll be tracking it all here, of course.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, incredibly sad and dark. I think the takeaway of seeing so many names in our industry, just like deep in that whole web, was that everyone today should be thinking about who the modern equivalent of, of, of Jeffrey is and work on avoiding that person going forward.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  For sure. Yeah. Jir tickets says some dudes wake up thinking about sleep score numbers. Truth is you can just wake up and choose to have the best day ever. I do, I do still like my sleep score number. I still love my Eight Sleep, even though we're not partnered with them. I, I, the, the cooling mattress is still undefeated, but

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-two.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  You can, you can just wake up. Oh, we're given, we're given a review.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-two.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  I don't think I got a ninety-two.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Eight hours, four minutes.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Eight hours. Wow. I got an eighty-three. Oh, wait, no. Wait, wait. What did I get last night? Eighty-three. Eighty-three. Seven hours and thirty minutes. I went to bed early, but I also woke up early. Anyway, let's do a real ad read for graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Lot of stuff about Nvidia and OpenAI over the weekend. Fortunately, the DOJ's file release, fortunately for everyone involved, the DOJ's file release was kind of drowning out every other major story.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Good time to drop bad news.

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So in Reuters, apparently they had reported first, Nvidia's plan to invest a hundred billion in OpenAI has stalled.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  This story evolved many, many times. And when we'll have to go through a number of the clips because Jensen is one of the few tech CEOs that seems to just get mobbed by journalists.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Always looking like a rock star.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  It's amazing. I love it. It's so cool.

• 1:06:15Jordi Hays?

  With the camera?

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  With the camera, the flashes, and then the microphones. And those, Jensen, what do you think about this?

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  So, so here's the launch video idea.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:23Jordi Hays?

  So people don't make another thousand, ten thousand of the generic launch video. Founder, go outside of your office, have a bunch of people hold microphones at you, have like a flash, like camera flash sound effect and just describe your business. People like, wait, it's only $30 a month?

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  For all that?

• 1:06:40Jordi Hays?

  For all that?

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  For agentic AI SaaS, for AI SaaS?

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  I know it's hard to believe.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  I like this, this is a good pitch.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  So this is a new, new format. Somebody do this right now, it'll take an hour.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, so the headline is that the talks between OpenAI and Nvidia for $100 billion in funding have stalled. And we will see, and then apparently reportedly privately Jensen has criticized OpenAI's business strategy.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  And maybe the deal is not nice.

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  According to Reuters, Huang has also privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concern about competition in business.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder what he means by lack of discipline.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, so reading into this, doing a lot of different things, right? You know.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  This was the original Ben Thompson criticism.

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Sam, like part of, you know, going back to the faithful interview with, on BG2. Part of Sam's answer was that, like, don't worry, we're gonna launch hardware. And we're gonna like automate science and presumably like get some type of royalty on that.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:07:48Jordi Hays?

  Both of those answers are not necessarily ones that Jensen would be like, oh, I want to lean on these, right? Just given that.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Potentially big, but also like 10% chance they work, you know, who knows?

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Also could lose a ton of money for a long time.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's risk.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  We had Kevin on the show, I'm very excited about what they're doing in science and that is an area that you should be, you know, very excited about if you're an OpenAI shareholder or just.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Did you see Tony Fadell talking to Eric Newcomer about how he thinks they're gonna launch a pen? An OpenAI pen? I, we gotta play like that.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that was the original rumor before the AirPods.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  A pen? Yeah, AirPods, Sweet Peas, the headphones. Wait, a pen? So you would write with it?

• 1:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  I'm so confused by that, an AI pen? I mean, I guess you could, if you put it in your pocket right here, it would have a pretty good line to your voice so you could dictate and it would have enough space to have a lot of battery. So that could be good and it could connect to your phone. It's not the craziest form factor, but I just don't see, I mean, I can, my, my writing is like complete chicken scratch. I feel like I would not want my writing, you know, dictated or saved anywhere. I'd much rather just use voice and, and.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video from Jensen, another one of his walking street interviews.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  While we do that, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for password resets and.

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Hit it.

• 1:09:19Speaker 05

  I'll ask quickly about OpenAI again.

• 1:09:21Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:09:22Speaker 05

  So last, yesterday you said that the Nvidia is not going to invest as much as 100 billion in OpenAI.

• 1:09:30Speaker 06

  No, we, we never, we never said we were going to invest 100 billion dollars in one round. That never was said.

• 1:09:36Speaker 05

  But how about the overall commitment? Because last September you.

• 1:09:40Speaker 06

  There was never a commitment. It was if they invited us, they invited us to, so, so let's start over again. They invited us to invest up to 100 billion dollars. And of course, we were, we were very happy and honored that they invited us, but we will invest one step at a time.

• 1:10:04Speaker 05

  All right, but is the overall commitment still stands? Or it's not the commitment?

• 1:10:13Speaker 06

  I told you just now. You keep putting words in my mouth. It's not, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that. They invited us to invest up to 100 billion dollars. And, and we are honored that they invited us. We will consider each round one at a time.

• 1:10:32Jordi Hays?

  Really, really, really funny moment.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play the other Jensen video.

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, pull it up. Context here is like they announced a 100 billion dollar deal.

• 1:10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, they did like the press release economy.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  It was it was a press release economy. This was this was 2025.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  They did bigger and bigger numbers.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  They did choose to go on CNBC.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  I remember watching it in the morning.

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was Greg Brockman and Jensen together.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  And I had CNBC.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  I remember that. Yeah.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, whoa, this is.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is big.

• 1:11:02Jordi Hays?

  But they were stressing that it would be staged.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Staged, yeah.

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  No one was ever saying.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  No one said it was $100 billion to one round, and there were clearly like milestones and it was and they were announcing like, they were announcing talks, basically, but there's there's there's aesthetics with the way you release information, and if you do a massive dog and pony show for talks, people are just gonna think it's a commitment. They're gonna think it's it's papered and and so.

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so and so the critics of that era of the press release economy.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Where there was all these spending commitments, these $100 billion deals. Ton of critics get a little bit of a victory lap right now.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, yes, but also there were some people at the time that were saying like, look, if you actually dig into what's going on in the SEC filings, you will see that these commitments are not super binding, and so you can't put 1.4 trillion.

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Non-binding, non-binding, non-binding press release economy.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying that the people that were saying this is the press release economy.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Are get get to take a little victory lap.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. Well, let's play the other, uh, the other Jensen clip. Very hard. He's getting mobbed. It's amazing.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  That's so many different microphones.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  That's nonsense. Yeah, that's complete nonsense. Um, we we are going to make make a huge investment in OpenAI.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Huge investment. Six figures.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  I believe in OpenAI. The work that they do is incredible. They're one of the most consequential companies of our time, and I really love working with Sam and, um, uh, I think I think it's.

• 1:12:38Speaker 07

  But the reason you mentioned that, um, the, uh, your, uh, memo you doesn't like, doesn't have any progress.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  We just haven't, we haven't made the investment in them because they're they're closing their round. But we will definitely be involved in their next, in their, in their round.

• 1:12:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Wait, in their next round or in their current round?

• 1:12:59Speaker 06

  Meaning this one.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  The next one meaning this one, okay.

• 1:13:03Speaker 06

  Of course, of course, yeah, we'll absolutely be involved in this round.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:07Speaker 06

  Sam is closing the round.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  But yeah, maybe like 10, maybe he's good for 10. I mean, the other hyperscalers are coming on and stuff like the money is coming together.

• 1:13:15Speaker 06

  People invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we've ever made.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Okay, does that count Grok? Because he just put 22 or 18 into Grok. Uh, is it gonna be bigger than that? I, I, it feels like 10 at this point, not 100.

• 1:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe he just wanted SpaceX exposure.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  Wait, no, G R O Q.

• 1:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  Sorry. Anyway, Tyler, what were you about to say?

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, just like extra context.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Originally, it was September 22nd.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  There was like the, the LOI where they were gonna do 10 gigawatts build out. And then as part of the, to support the partnership, Nvidia intends to invest up to 100 billion.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  In OpenAI progressively, as each gigawatt is deployed.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  So it's kind of on people who took up to and they dropped that. I mean, clearly some of those interviewers were just like, you, you promised, you promised 100. And he's like, I said up to 100. And, uh, people sort of overplayed that. Now they're sort of overplaying this as like, he hates the company, he's not investing a dime. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm gonna invest. I'm just like, it's gonna be trashed, it's gonna be staged, it needs to be, you know, there, there needs to be continued progress and whatnot.

• 1:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Oracle felt the new, uh, the need this morning at 9 a.m. sharp to put out a post that says, "The Nvidia OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments." Uh, this post reminded me of Nvidia's post, uh, at, at the end of November. They said, "We're delighted by Google's success. They've made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google. Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. Nvidia offers greater performance, versatility and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions."

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  The, the, the, the comments on this Oracle post, "Please hire Lulu, stat. What does this mean for LeBron's legacy? Why is Oracle even commenting on a third-party deal?"

• 1:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Claude, what is a backlog quality risk?

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  Oh, no. Oh, what a complete chaos in the market.

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, never, never, never a sign, never a great sign.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Jordi Hays?

  If a company is having to go out and defend.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Jordi Hays?

  A single investor, you know, defend a customer because of a single relationship with an investor.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Oracle traded down another nine percent in the last five days. Uh, so.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  We got some good news. We got some scoops from Adweek, our favorite publication. Saturday at Scoop, OpenAI confirmed $200,000 minimum for ChatGPT beta ads. Brands across retail streaming were asked for 250K. Despite the 200K minimum, one global brand was asked roughly 125K, while another source said OpenAI requested 100K. So, uh, they, they're confirming 200K. And, uh, from our, from our conversations, it, it, it feels like, uh, um, they will not have a problem getting brands to sign up for this. There's a lot of experimental budget out there. There's a lot of, there's not a lot of inventory early.

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  It'll probably be, you know, an interesting new data point and I'll feel like, feel like a lot of companies will have a mandate very quickly to like, figure out what our ads and LLM strategy is. So I would imagine these sell very well. I just wonder how much inventory there is. I was doing a, uh, sort of trying to do the analysis on like, what, how much revenue would, would, uh, would OpenAI make if they don't grow usage? But they monetize as well as, as Meta across the family of apps. And so that's like a billion DAU. Essentially a billion MAU, something like that. So if they had a billion of Meta's consumers on OpenAI platforms

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  and they were advertising to them as efficiently as Meta. Now that's a huge, huge road to get there, but let's assume that without any innovation, they can get to the current state of the art eventually because it's been done and they hired Fiducino, who did it at Meta and now she works at OpenAI. Um, like how much revenue would you generate from a billion, a billion users? And it's a, it's like somewhere between 50 and 100 billion dollars. This is a lot of money. It's a very good business. And if inference costs keep dropping, and you're able to ramp up the ads, like just the consumer ads business, if you're getting, you know, a billion users, you know, thirty minutes time on the site like you get on the other platforms, like you get, you get good usage, like that should be a monster business.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  I just, I really need to, I really, I wish we had a better sense of time, time on site.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a little.

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Because like right now, even, even ChatGPT power users, unless you're using it as like a digital friend, you're not getting that much time on site. And remember, these are also just effectively display ads, right? They're not, they're not, they're not really intent based, sort of like general targeting. And so, lot of assumptions baked in there. Zuck, you might, like, it's possible the average user is, I would assume the average user in ChatGPT is putting in like a handful of queries a day. That's like, you could, depends how long the, the responses are, and how many of these ads can you actually

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  put in? And it's certainly, in its current state, can be vastly inferior to like

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  One hundred percent.

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  Somebody spending thirty minutes in Meta when they might see like a hundred.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that the, the ARPU is going to be like an order magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude lower, for years. But best day to plant a tree, today, go do it and then start growing it.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's cool. I mean, at a hundred K, that opens it up to startups.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do want to show my, my tinkering with Codex today, the new app from OpenAI, powerful command center for building with agents. This is, we've seen other, you know, the Claude Code app, this is the response to that. So you just download Codex, you drag it into your applications folder, and just with natural language, you can start building software. It's amazing. Like, there's the UI pattern for not needing to open the terminal is going to increase the adoption of this thing so, so much, because it's so much easier to use. I was able to take the Berkshire Hathaway site, which I think we can pull up, I have an image, a screenshot of the beautiful Berkshire Hathaway website.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  It says it's the official homepage. It's iconic, dark blue and purple links. I think, I don't.

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  I think you've clicked all of them.

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  Is that true? Is that possible? What if I, I need to go like incognito, I guess, Berkshire? Berkshire Hathaway dot com. No, they're always purple. They're always purple, which is a weird choice. Normally, I don't think they ever go blue. But anyway, purple links, dark blue background, you know, serif fonts. It's iconic. And I was able to take with like two or three prompts, build a version of the TBN official homepage in the exact same style. Right there. Look at that. You got the ramp logo right there, too. Now, does it need a little bit more work? Sure. But I actually did this with three with three prompts, like just, just, you know, go download the TBN.com, go download Berkshire Hathaway, make the version. Okay, change the

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  links, like fix these problems, just all natural language, like four prompts, probably five minutes of work. And I got something that's like, I don't know, it's like a funny joke. I don't know that it's super useful. This has been, you've been able to do this for a long time, but it's, it's just, it's a different vibe to be able to do it just on a desktop app. And I think it'll be really successful. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. So let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Alex from WorldCoin.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  How you doing? And Merge Labs?

• 1:21:03Speaker 08

  What's happening?

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Last time, wait, last time we had you on, it was WorldCoin, right? Or World Labs? Sorry. Tools for Humanity.

• 1:21:10Speaker 08

  Tools for Humanity, World, and Merge Labs now.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  So yeah, reintroduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar. Give us the lay of the land. And then I definitely want to talk about just everything that's going on in tech and bots. Yeah.

• 1:21:22Speaker 08

  Great. So I'm Alex Blania. I'm one of the founders of Tools for Humanity, which is the company behind World. And one of the core premises of World always has been that eventually we will need to prove a human and internet scale because AI will be agentic and will pass the Turing test, will create videos, all of those things. And that will lead to basically all human interaction on the internet breaking down. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's World. And then Merge Labs is a PC on it.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Cool. And then what was your initial reaction to Moltbook? Did you, you know, think it was this, it was Skynet? Did it have you for a second? Did it have you in the first half? Or were you immediately, this is all slop? Or are you still worried about the AI safety and slop concerns? Like, how have you processed the last few days?

• 1:22:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think I'm somewhere in between. I think like, you know, I think it's like an early glimpse of, I think, what is about to happen and how the internet will start to look more and more like, I think. But I think, you know, Balaji had this tweet about, well, it's still humans prompting, et cetera. Like, that's, that's of course true. I think it's like a big caveat to that comment that there will be humans prompting for a long time, but just the execution timeframe of these prompts will go much, much longer. So.

• 1:22:44Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of people's reaction was like, we have, we have enough bots. We have enough bots here on X already. Why do we need a new, a new platform?

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, yeah.

• 1:22:53Speaker 08

  Well, I think the silver lining maybe, actually, like, just, just to say, make something useful out of it. I think like the silver lining is a little bit that,

• 1:23:02Speaker 08

  you know, on the internet, we will need to mediate human and AI interaction. And I think that's not, like, that will require a lot of work. And I think that's actually the opening for, I think, a lot of new products, even social products. So I think that, like, there's like a a platform shift, but it's not, it was not the LLM interface alone. I think it's like agents and, and humans interacting on, on things like social networks. And that's, you know, what is clear with Moltbook, we don't have that yet because who knows who many humans are behind this, how many bots it actually are. Everything is like heavily civil attacked. So it was like, probably way less usage than you, than you, than you see, but it's a, it's a very interesting experiment, I think.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  Explain civil attacks for those who might not be familiar.

• 1:23:47Speaker 08

  Oh, civil attacks just means that you,

• 1:23:51Speaker 08

  you know, that behind, just, just breaking it down for the Moltbook use case, that the number of comments and replies and molds you see is actually way less actually humans behind or agents behind than you would think.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw one guy was able to register, I think, 50,000 agents. And so.

• 1:24:12Speaker 08

  That's right.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Oh, 500,000? One guy? Wow, okay. I, I, I'm constantly off by order of magnitude when I talk about Moltbook because I, I checked it when it was at exactly 150,000 users and now it's at 1.5 million. And so I'm getting everything wrong.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, one, one of the questions I had for the founder earlier was, was, uh, really around. Every, I don't think there's a social media like founder, CEO in the world that's not thinking about bots, how they can mitigate some of the potential risks to them, but also leverage them for engagement. I was telling him how I've, you know, we've had this debate on the show, like, how much does X really care about bots, right? Because if they care a lot about preventing them from being on the platform, and they've put a lot of effort in so far, we should be kind of worried because it's not working, right? Maybe it's not non, not

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  solvable without maybe something like a World Labs. But how have your, like, how do you think that other social media CEOs are kind of like planning around a world where maybe the average user on a social media app is a bot?

• 1:25:24Speaker 08

  Yeah. So first of all, it's World and Merge Labs, two different companies.

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 1:25:29Speaker 08

  Merge Labs is yet another company.

• 1:25:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right. Is that FaZe Lee?

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Merge Labs is you. World Coin is you. But it's actually from Tools for Humanity is the name of the company.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:44Speaker 08

  That's right. So now we've got it sorted. Yeah. So I think, look, just breaking down fundamentals, I think social media networks, like many other businesses, are about human to human interaction.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 08

  It's just like, if you break it down, like, that's literally the, like, that's how the, that's how the whole thing functions.

• 1:26:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they're about that. But if I'm operating a social platform and there's a bot that I may or may not endorse, that then engages with a real human, and that real human lands back on the platform, and I can serve them an ad, what incentive do I have to stop them?

• 1:26:14Speaker 08

  I think that is correct until to a certain point, but at some point, it's gonna, that's gonna flip. Because at some point, you know, every user is just gonna be so annoyed and realize that, like, okay, like, this platform is clearly, is all slob, I'm arguing with AIs. So I think there's like, only so far how you can take that. And I think we're basically about to approach that limit, until which it just doesn't become entertaining anymore, and it's just like, super annoying. And so I actually do think that these platforms are basically threatened in their core business. Because, you know, like, human interaction is why users are there. That's how you do advertising, is human attention, essentially. So the moment that falls away and is not authentic anymore,

• 1:26:56Speaker 08

  I think the whole business is under threat. So that's maybe my first statement. Second, I think, to how do CEOs think about it? I think they... I know some of them that really think about it and I don't know all of them. But I definitely think they should really start thinking about it now a lot. Because it's gonna get exponentially worse really fast.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  How do you think about all the things that people will do? It's like this cat and mouse game. I mean, right now, you see bots, but you also see just people who are clearly just going to an LLM prompting, "Write a LinkedIn post about my business. Here's some facts, I want to have this format." And then they just copy and paste it and they're the ones that are sending it. And so, you know, there's this gradient between like, there's a Python script that's just replying, "So cool" to every post that it sees on the API. And then there's the human that's actually just using AI to generate the text and they're typing it themselves or whatever. And then in between, you might have someone, the fear would be, there's someone that is hired,

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  basically just to do the world eyeball scan and then post slop and then they scan again, then they post slop and they scan again. Like, how are you thinking about the actual integration with the platforms to fight like the, all the adversarial, you know, activity that you'll see?

• 1:28:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, so maybe the first metapoll you should have is that one version of uniqueness is the core property that you look for. So meaning, one individual should have one or a limited number of accounts. That's kind of like the core property that you're already talking about. I actually think basically most of what we will do will be AI driven. So basically, everything that I write will be somewhat co-edited by AI. Or I will create like fun videos or images. That's totally okay, as long as I cannot create 500,000 accounts to do that. Because then the platform breaks down. And so uniqueness is like the core property and I think that's quite hard to accomplish. That's why we built the orb, that there's such issues, such a uniqueness property.

• 1:29:01Speaker 08

  So that's, that is a really hard piece. I think we have solved that. I think the re-authification piece that you just mentioned where you, whatever, you can hire a lot of people that already have all that needs and just use that to post a platform. I think that's correct and I think we will see some of that, but that's still, you know, way, way less than one individual can create 500,000 accounts that are just AI agents. So, meaning rate limiting, like, and the stronger you can get that, the better the system becomes, basically.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are there any sort of like long tail networks or internet properties that you think are underrated or under discussed as vectors for spam? We saw this sort of funny viral video from a friend who went to his local coffee shop and found that they had like 100 Android phones running a bot farm, just liking whatever they posted on Instagram, just to sort of like give a little bit of extra algorithmic juice to their coffee shop promotion. And that was something I hadn't really considered. I think about X, I think about, you know, LinkedIn and Instagram and AI slop there, but maybe I'm not thinking about it in the impact it's having on the average coffee shop on the corner, that type of thing.

• 1:30:17Speaker 08

  Well, one thing that I think is actually happening much more is the kind of these like kind of call attacks to especially elderly people. It's like an AI sounding like their whatever grandson and, you know, tricking them into like that kind of thing, I think is gonna get the worst.

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had that, I had that happen with my grandparents pre-AI.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  They were just pretend, they were just kind of saying it was me and they were relying on my grandparents not, not like just processing that it wasn't my voice because they were quite a bit older.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Doing an impression.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  And I can't imagine what, you know, what's happening now where it just, it would be exactly like my voice.

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Could have easily, with that, they were like, they clocked it pretty quickly. They called my dad. They were like, Jordy's fine, right?

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:05Jordi Hays?

  They made up some crazy story about how I was like in a, I'd been, I was in jail and this was my one call and I needed them to...

• 1:31:13John Coogan?

  Wire money or something. That's crazy.

• 1:31:16Speaker 08

  Yeah. So stuff like that is gonna wrap up. I think then we will get to real time deepfakes probably in the next little months. Meaning you can just, like, there was this...

• 1:31:28Speaker 08

  You know, viral tweet, I think, last week about this guy that was like, looking like a super attractive girl on a basically live video call. So that that kind of thing is gonna get commoditized and, you know, it will just become super, super easy.

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had this debate with with one guest. We were trying to clock if they were using like a GigaChad filter, just like a 10% GigaChad filter. And we were, we were, we were, a lot of people were, but we were like pausing it and being like, okay, like he moved his finger in front of his face.

• 1:31:57John Coogan?

  Didn't change, you know, or like pixel beeping.

• 1:31:59Speaker 08

  But why, why did you assume that he has a GigaChad filter?

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  Because he looked like a GigaChad.

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, if he wasn't, if he wasn't using it.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  And, and other people online were levying accusations at him. So we were like, it's our duty to get to the bottom of this. Uh, like you, I mean, you're clearly using a GigaChad filter today, right?

• 1:32:18Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  That's just what you look like? Wow, dude, it's working. Whatever you're doing is working.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is just a, this is a sales call.

• 1:32:29John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what else is new in your world? Uh, I mean, how are you splitting your time? What, what, what does the rest of the year look like? You just patiently awaiting the singularity?

• 1:32:38Speaker 08

  I mean, I think, you know, it's the most important time in a long, long while, so I think just trying to work all day long and making it happen. Um, splitting my time, still very focused on ROLD. Uh, you know, Merge Labs is a, is a research lab.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:32:54Speaker 08

  That we, that we started with the goal of actually bridging artificial and biological intelligence. Um, but it really is a research lab. So there, I think we have a lot of great scientists. It's not a heavy operation yet. So, but on the other side, I think it's the, it really is the year for ROLD because I think, uh, you know, Agentic, all these kinds of like Moltbook, Claudebots, that's just the beginning, I think it's gonna get much worse.

• 1:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you think there's something, like a lot of these ideas, uh, Moltbook and Claudebot, now OpenClaw, were all ideas that people had had? And yet there was some element of risk surrounding them that maybe presented, uh, prevented some companies, like bigger labs from even going there, right? Like, it's not like the idea of like a Agent, social network is some, you know, this is not the first time that someone has talked about this.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  This is an idea that's been floating around. Some of them have been funded.

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  Anthropic's actually like written about this. They've run the experiments too.

• 1:33:51Jordi Hays?

  So is there some element right now where we're in a point where like you're getting these sort of open source or community grown projects against ideas that labs had or big companies had, but just didn't have, didn't have like kind of like the freedom to do without a ton of risk?

• 1:34:10Speaker 08

  Sure. I think there's just this general element of you can be much more scrappy as a developer, you know, like Anthropic or OpenAI doing something like that. You know, you would actually need to mediate human AI collaboration, for example. All these kinds of things would need to be solved and the bar is much, much higher. So I think that's true.

• 1:34:30Speaker 08

  And then broadly speaking, just AI is getting so much better that one guy can create such a, such a platform like super fast.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 08

  You know, and can iterate on a daily basis. Like a couple of years ago, this would have needed to be like a team of developers probably.

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:44Speaker 08

  And so I think that's the thing to not also underestimate just like how much more effective one person can be now. And I think that's gonna get like way crazier. So I think we'll see a lot of that happening.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  Buckle up. Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for trying.

• 1:35:02Speaker 08

  Awesome.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Congrats on all the.

• 1:35:03Speaker 08

  Thank you guys.

• 1:35:04Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:35:05Speaker 08

  Good to see you. Bye bye.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Our next guest is anonymous. It's Nick from X.com. Obviously.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  We have him.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  All over the internet. He's in our YouTube chat often. We've had back and forth with him. I accused him of being an OpenAI hater. He said.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  Number one.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  I'm, I got a, I got a balanced set of opinions. So I'm excited to talk to him today about his takes on AI, his takes on the vibes online. See where we agree, where we disagree. It'll be interesting. So let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room. Nick. What a beautiful profile picture.

• 1:35:48Jordi Hays?

  You look exactly like you do online.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Show. Thanks for joining.

• 1:35:53Speaker 09

  Well, thanks for having me. I love you.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction and keep it as high level as you want, since you are anonymous, but anything we can tell about your philosophy or background or interests? All of that would just be helpful to set the table.

• 1:36:10Speaker 09

  Um, sure. Well, um, yeah, I actually got into AI around 2021 before Chad GPT even released.

• 1:36:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, I was, you know, using their API G3, you know, been their biggest fan from day one.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:36:29Speaker 09

  Biggest fan. Yeah.

• 1:36:30Jordi Hays?

  Narrative violation.

• 1:36:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, I said the narrative right.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:36:34Speaker 09

  Um, yeah, I was, you know, fully following everything that's happening in this space and, uh, you know, uh, was really deluded myself with, you know, AGI coming in two weeks type of narrative and really going into like the possibilities, you know, expanding my mind there. Um, you know, when they released Dali, I don't know if you guys remember that.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, I was like, uh, you know, so hyped about it that I even made like an Instagram page to curate all the best images, uh, that's been popping all around the internet. Um, until a point where I gained like a hundred K followers and then OpenAI blocked me. They blocked me. They reported me.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  Villain arc. Joker mode.

• 1:37:18Speaker 09

  And I was like, what? You know, all I'm doing is like, I'm trying to hide, kind of get access.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Here, here, here, here starts the steel man. I mean, were you hitting the API with anything that was violating TOS? Were you spamming the API? Were there any other reasons that they could be upset with your behavior?

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Cooking.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  You were just cooking.

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  You can't even cook in this country anymore.

• 1:37:42Speaker 09

  Well, okay, I didn't, they didn't lock me from the API.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:46Speaker 09

  But like, I started like a community page to, for all the DALL-E posts.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Speaker 09

  Um, on Instagram.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:53Speaker 09

  And what actually happened was like, so I actually made a list on Twitter, all the people that access.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Speaker 09

  Um, so what happened was like, so an OpenAI employee, you know, said, yeah, I made this with DALL-E. I was like, okay, cool. I take that, I post it on Instagram. And then what happens, like, OpenAI posts the same thing like two hours later.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:38:11Speaker 09

  So people started thinking like, I'm actually the main page because I'm posting it for the official page.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Confusing, okay.

• 1:38:17Speaker 09

  Um, yeah, but I actually wrote it like it's a community page.

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, yeah, let's continue with your, with your arc. Um, yeah, AGI coming in two weeks. We all felt that in 2022 and ChatGPT launched. How have your timeline shifted? How AGI-pilled are you? How optimistic or doomer are you about the future? Like, what's your overall philosophy on, on AI in the future?

• 1:38:43Speaker 09

  I think AI is like the greatest technology ever. I feel like, uh, post 2020 is, uh, is a new era we're living in. And post 2026 is actually even a different era that we're entering into.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:55Speaker 09

  Uh, I'm fully AGI-pilled. Um, I'm Curtis, I'm Ray Kurzweil-pilled. I think AGI is coming probably. I think we're gonna have really powerful systems by 2029, 2030. Um.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Speaker 09

  Yeah. Um, so I think, you know, companies are following like different paths to get there. So that's pretty interesting to see.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  So, uh, you, you, you're using DALL-E early, you're using the Da Vinci 3.5 playground in, in OpenAI. Uh, what are you using currently? What are you daily driving for knowledge retrieval? Are you vibe coding? Are you doing agentic stuff? What, what, what, what's in your toolkit these days?

• 1:39:38Speaker 09

  Well, you know, if you read my bio, it says non-technical member of technical staff. So, um, you know, I don't do a lot of coding, but yeah, I did. Play around with, uh, you know, mobile. I love Claude code. Um, this is the first time ever in my life that I'm, uh, this year, I'm actually not using ChatGPT.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:57Speaker 09

  Um, so my daily driver is like Claude, Grok and Gemini. Um, that's what I use.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, give me, give me some more flavor on when you go to Gemini, when you go to Grok, when you go to Claude.

• 1:40:12Speaker 09

  Sure, Grok is like, you know, amazing for Twitter retrieval. Um, I think it's best. Claude is just has a really nice personality. Like, I just like love talking to it. It like tells me like, hey, calm down, you know, don't always think that.

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Don't post, it's so over. I think we're gonna be fine.

• 1:40:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, Gemini, I think like Gemini is just like a scientific research assistant. Um, I think it has like a really nice. Uh, it probably has like one of the best reasoning in my opinion.

• 1:40:40Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:40:40Speaker 09

  Um, I like talking to it like it's like notebook. I just learned Gemini.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  It also feels really fast. I feel like the the the Google search, just like the speed is like, uh, it it feels like if I have to Google something, like that's the good place to go.

• 1:40:55Jordi Hays?

  How are you so, how are you so fast with headlines?

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're really fast.

• 1:40:59Jordi Hays?

  I it's funny, uh, I end up getting the news.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Jordi Hays?

  From you first, even though you're you're oftentimes sourcing.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  From other stuff.

• 1:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Reuters.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, you know, the algorithm loves me. Um, you know, I I think I have a connection with the algorithm.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm one.

• 1:41:19Speaker 09

  Um, uh, I, you know, people love me as well. Um.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  You got fans in the chat right now. Everyone loves you. Your whole research team is here, apparently.

• 1:41:26Speaker 09

  Really?

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think, uh, I just like love to stay on top of these things. Uh, I'm like really, really locked in. Um, so when like, you know, these reporters, they, you know, post post a whole article like, you know, such a long article and the only thing that there to point out is like, yay, two lines. So, you know.

• 1:41:46Jordi Hays?

  Final two lines.

• 1:41:48Speaker 09

  Cut through the bullshit, go direct, you know. Put up the thing that I think matters.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:54Jordi Hays?

  You kind of scoop the, you kind of scoop the scoopers.

• 1:41:57Speaker 09

  Scoop the scoop, yeah, for sure. Um, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 1:42:01Jordi Hays?

  How much money have you made from X?

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:04Speaker 09

  Um, I don't know, varies, but you'd be kind of paying me like a thousand bucks every two weeks or something like that. Um, sometimes it goes like two thousand.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  It's not much, but it's honest work.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  It's honest work.

• 1:42:16Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  In the trenches.

• 1:42:18Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  Uh, talk, yeah, then, uh, talk to me about last year. It feels like the narrative of the AI bubble started. There was a worry about the AI capex build out. People were taking two sides. Leopold Ashen Brenner, of course, is super long.

• 1:42:35Speaker 09

  I'm there.

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  Um, and, uh, and then there were voices that started, uh, you know, raising questions about, uh, the backlog, how much this build out was going to cost, whether the growth could keep up, whether the models would keep improving, whether we were plateauing. What was your 2025 like?

• 1:42:53Speaker 09

  Well, the thing is like my 2024, uh, well, I've been like pointing out like some absurdities of like what's happening. And, you know, I started like just doubting from the beginning, like, okay, we were supposed to get AGI by 2023. Where did that go? Um, you know, I started questioning like, wait, what is actually happening? Um, I started realizing like, um, you know, the founder of, uh, you know, Sam Altman is like, I was like, okay, what's the agenda actually going? It's like, okay, they might be like just raising money and cutting out competition. Like, do I really want that? Um, no.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  He might be doing business.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  He might be being a businessman.

• 1:43:31Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's, he's, look, look, Sam Altman is just being, you know, what he's best at, like, being a really good startup founder, you know, driving all the attention and engagement towards him. You know, either it's like through claims saying, you know, AGI is going to be the most powerful technology and bad things that will happen. And then he like leans towards, you know, doing those bad things. Uh, so for example, like, I don't know, he said, social media, we don't want to repeat the mistakes of social media. And then, you know, he started making Sora slop. It's really good. I don't, I don't dislike the technology. It is like, kind of like doubtful of the approach of what's being said in 2022, 2023. And then like 2024, we're entering like, hey, it's getting a little different.

• 1:44:15Speaker 09

  But about the bubble, um, yeah, I just started doubting like, um, you know, before they didn't have competition. So it was like, okay, they're going to make it. But then Elon started entering the chat, entered the chat, so.

• 1:44:29Speaker 09

  Um, you know, he just.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but with the with the bubble, I think like you can, I think it's fair to maybe question their ability to meet some of these like kind of press release economy style commitments.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44Jordi Hays?

  But have you ever had, do you do you honestly think there's a world where the market has some intense correction and people stop using, you know, everyday people that are not on X that that don't know the infamous Nick just stop using, you know, ChatGPT.

• 1:45:02Speaker 09

  Um, so the way I see it with like, so I think like the bubble is not, um, precisely like AI is not a bubble, but like the companies are bubbled, um, raise too much, you overextend, you know, you're actually entering into a bubble territory. The way I look at, uh, like ChatGPT, for example, um, if you look at all their projections of their numbers, um, it's all based on user account, like how many users do we have? So in 2025, in the beginning, they said they're going to reach a billion users, um, by the end of the year. Um, they actually stalled at like, uh, 800 million. Um, I don't even know if they reached 900 million, um, it's like six months, they're not growing. So if you just make a simple calculation is like, okay,

• 1:45:43Speaker 09

  if their user base, which is, you know, getting mogged by Google for her, um, if that starts declining and reaches like, you know, like a certain threshold, all the projections fail. Um, so.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, they definitely need growth to continue. I do think that that that 800 number is a little stale at this point. They haven't released the new numbers. It feels like they might still be growing and just not doing the whole like, they're saving it for like, okay, when we put out the billion number, it's a big moment. Um, but I mean, yeah, certainly it it it raises questions as you as you, uh, outline. What was your read on, uh, ads in ChatGPT?

• 1:46:24Speaker 09

  Well, you know, I'm not a big fan of ads, but I am a fan of ads from the business perspective. Sure, they're like, make money, that's all about money.

• 1:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, part of my, I think, I think it was important, like in processing OpenAI to realize like it's, you know, at some point you had to realize like they are operating as like a new big tech company. And so the decisions that they make, they're going to ship a lot of products, like they're going to do browser. They're going to try Sora, they're going to try a lot of stuff, not all of it's going to work. But what matters is like, is the core, is the core user base still growing?

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Jordi Hays?

  You could argue, I would be, you know, I haven't seen anything that would point to them like shrinking. But even a deceleration is not great, obviously, at that scale. And so, and so, yeah, you can, you could kind of predict a lot of the things that they would do just by looking at them not as like a ASI company, but as a big technology company.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, consumer, consumer tech.

• 1:47:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, sure. I just think like, look at Foro, for example, when Foro started launching, you know, Sam Altman said, you know, the movie Her? And Scarlett Johansson, her voice, you know, it was marketed as like your lover, you know, you're going to fall in love with ChatGPT. Your voice, the way it talks to you, and what happened? People actually fell in love. People fell in love.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  But then they shut it down eventually.

• 1:47:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, so, so the thing is like, the reason why they had like a such a fast growth in users was because of like the image generation model and this part. And now where we are, they're really lacking in the image generation model and they're literally stuck.

• 1:48:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but Disney, we got all the Disney IP coming, I'm super bullish on this for OpenAI. It's, it's, it just gives them a real, it gives them a feature that no one else can have for at least one year. And I think that when you look at Disney scale, look at how many people go to the parks every single year. Uh, how many, how many people will, would, will pay to get something novel in an image model? I think that could be, you know, part of the next leg up.

• 1:48:29Speaker 09

  Sure, I mean if IP rights hold, which I don't think they will, the world we're entering into. Um, sure, that's gonna be fun.

• 1:48:37Jordi Hays?

  It's so over for IP rights.

• 1:48:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's over. I think it should be abolished in some sense, but in a very, very smart way where, you know, people should get some, you know, some recognition or something.

• 1:48:51Jordi Hays?

  A pat on the back.

• 1:48:52John Coogan?

  Where, where do you want, yeah, where, where do you want all this to go? I mean, the, the anonymous account is interesting because you have a lot of ability to talk openly about a bunch of different companies. Do you want to turn this into an analysis group, a commentary channel? Like, where, where do you see your work evolving?

• 1:49:13Speaker 09

  Look, I was never anonymous. I was like always had my face on it. Like, people actually know who I am. Like, yeah, if you actually like, you know, I don't, you know, if you go back on my tweets, like, I was just me. Like, you know, my, you know, I've lived in six countries and whatnot. I've talked about my life. It's all there. I've never deleted anything. Um, if anyone wants to go dig, go for it.

• 1:49:38Speaker 09

  But the thing is like, um, yeah, I just like went anonymous to like just, you know, be attached for my identity and like be, you know, explorative to talk about things that I don't really understand, but I want to understand and go for it. So the best way to understand on the internet is to say something absurd and then be corrected. So, yeah.

• 1:49:58Jordi Hays?

  You're just baiting smart, smart people to, and I'm sure some.

• 1:50:03Speaker 09

  All smart people are baiting us. You know, researchers are acting like marketers, like AGI two weeks, you know? So they're baiting us, I'm baiting them, and, you know, it's causing, it's, you know, it's.

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I do have a funny update. I like to check this every once in a while because of the Disney OpenAI deal. I went to ChatGPT, I, I invoked image generation and I said. Make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse. And it says, we're so sorry, but the image we created may So they'd actually generated the image. It saw me, it showed me a little preview and then it took it away.

• 1:50:32Jordi Hays?

  Which is so crazy because you think they would not want to You know, actually do the work and incur the cost.

• 1:50:38John Coogan?

  Totally. Read the prompt before. That's what I would think. But it actually generated the full image and then it said

• 1:50:43Jordi Hays?

  Even OpenAI doesn't read instructions.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Similarity to third-party content. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt. And then I used to be able to do that in Nano Banana. I went over to Gemini and I said, make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse. And it said, and it said, I can't generate the image you requested right now due to concerns from third-party content providers. Please edit your prompt. And it didn't generate the image with Gemini. But so it's been interesting to see that press release happen. Yeah, Mark and Magic will probably do it. Mark and Magic, you know. Yeah, but they have an exclusive deal. Like, you know, it's like moving fast. Anyway.

• 1:51:18Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you hoping to spend most of your time on this year?

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:22Speaker 09

  Um, yeah, I just want to go all in into all of this. I don't mind doxing myself fully.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  All in.

• 1:51:31Speaker 09

  So, I mean, you know, Nvidia invited me to GTC as a full-time creator. And I'm going to go to Jensen and whatnot. So, yeah, I think like it's time for me to go, you know, like pen X more and stop, you know, not just posting, but like A lot of things I can talk about.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the anon account, it does, it does give you the ability to speak freely, but it does sort of flatten you. I mean, we were going back and forth on this where I was kind of like collapsing you down into just an OpenAI hater. And talk from talking, you clearly there's a lot more going on there. But it's easy when I only see the viral posts and I don't know anything about the person behind it. Like, it can become a little one-dimensional. So I'm excited for your new arc, your hero arc.

• 1:52:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll give a little, Sam hasn't blocked you, correct?

• 1:52:18Speaker 09

  Uh, no, but Chad GPT has blocked me.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 1:52:22Speaker 09

  For no reason. Like, I've never commented.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  No reason. I mean, you gotta give it some credit here.

• 1:52:28Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it would probably be whoever's managing the account logs in and they're sick of seeing anything that happens, just seeing.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 1:52:36Jordi Hays?

  It's over. I can see whether, I gotta get, you gotta give some credit to Sam for not blocking you.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  What is your camera roll like? Is it all pictures of Sam Altman looking perplexed or something? Anyway.

• 1:52:48Speaker 09

  You know, I like entertainment. Um, I'm very tasteful with a lot of, a lot of these things. So, um, yeah, I just, I know what's absurd, what hits, what's, what's gonna be funny. Um, I just, I just post what I feel like and I go, you know, very analytically, analytically, but also I'm a, I'm a feeler. So I know what's ahead of me.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, good to meet you, man. This is fun.

• 1:53:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you mind if we, uh, flashbang you?

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  Drawing flashbang. Drawing flashbang. There we go. The chat.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  It's been great having you on.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we'll see you soon, Nick.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  See you soon, Nick.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code, code back prototypes and apps fast. Um, we have our next guest joining in about five minutes. We gotta go through the Brian Armstrong story. So Byron Armstrong is in the, uh, the Sunday edition, the exchange edition of the Wall Street Journal, uh, going back and forth with Wall Street. They called him enemy number one on Wall Street. He's the crypto CEO. Of course, it's the CEO of Coinbase. He's been clashing with Brian Armstrong, or, uh, with Jamie Dimon. So Brian Armstrong, CEO of the biggest UK, US crypto company, was having coffee with former-

• 1:54:03Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like they paid him to do that. Like, he paid them to write that title.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  Like, that's getting framed.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  It is. I mean, that's what Toby Look, he said, this will look great in a frame. Um, of course, obviously, there's, there's, there's nuance here and there's a battle, but and there's some off the record comments that became on the record. But, uh, it's an interesting back and forth. So they were at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and, uh, Brian Armstrong is having coffee with Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And, uh, JP Morgan Chase's Jamie Dimon chimes in. He says, "You're full of ass." Blank, blank, blank. So Diamond, a longtime crypto skeptic who's previously called Bitcoin a fraud, his index point, his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong's face. Can I get a crowd? I can't. I'm pointing over there. He's like, you're, you're full of

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  S H I T. Diamond, in a nutshell, told him to stop lying on TV, according to people familiar with the conversation. In appearances on business television programs earlier that week, Armstrong had accused banks of trying to sabotage legislation that would set new, a new regulatory framework for digital assets. The confrontation wasn't quite in line with the annual forum's mission to foster cooperation among global leaders. As crypto moves swiftly into the mainstream of American finance, some Wall Streets, some of Wall Street's heavyweights are waking up to the threats. While banks have embraced some aspects of crypto, helping people to invest in Bitcoin and using digital assets to make money transfers

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  more efficient, they are drawing a line at encroachment on their core business, consumer deposits. Armstrong is coming for them. Banks and Coinbase are at odds over, we'll go to page five, we have it in the timeline, but it's so much nicer in paper. Whether crypto exchanges should be allowed to offer consumers regular payouts for holding digital tokens. So you've got some USDC, are they going to pay you interest or not? That's the debate. These so-called rewards would, would pay holders of stable coins a recurring fee, say 3.5%, not bad. Stable coins are digital assets pegged to real world currency like dollars. Banks say the payouts are effectively the same as interest on the bank accounts. And

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  since banks offer much less yields, typically under 1.1% in a checking account, they worry that the upshot will be that consumers will shift their money in droves into crypto. That, they say, will compromise community banks and lending to businesses. Armstrong and others in the crypto world say the free market should reign and that banks can simply pay higher interest rates to compete with stable coins or get themselves into stable coin businesses themselves. Just join the party. The legislation known as the Clarity Act might shape the future of everyday financial services, including bank deposits and electronic payments. In the latest push to find compromise, the White House plans to host a meeting Monday between today, between banks and crypto industry

• 1:57:01John Coogan?

  groups, according to people familiar with the matter. So David Sacks will be there, Coinbase's head of policy, Carr Calvert will be there. Armstrong, 43, co-founded Coinbase in 2012 and has helped lead crypto's quest for legitimacy and mainstream acceptance. At the head of the roughly $55 billion firm, Armstrong has a powerful voice in industry debates such as the one playing out in Washington. Quote, "We'd rather have no bell than a bad bell," he said on X in a post a day before the Senate committee was supposed to vote on a version that could effectively ban companies like Coinbase from offering yield to consumers, potentially costing it billions of dollars. Within hours, the vote was abruptly postponed, taking much of the financial world by surprise. There's a lot more here that

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  we can dig into, but we do have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Jordy, is there anything else that's kicking around in your brain?

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  We need to have somebody on that is not from JPM or Coinbase to talk about this dynamic.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  An independent voice, that would be a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let's bring in our next guest from the restream waiting room. We have David from Lexicon Branding. David, how are you doing?

• 1:58:12Speaker 10

  I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  It's a pleasure to have you. Is your 2026 off to a good start?

• 1:58:18Speaker 10

  It is. We're very busy.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  It looks like it. Walk us through who you are, what you do, and what's behind you.

• 1:58:25Speaker 10

  Okay, okay. Well, I'm president of Lexicon, Lexicon Branding, and we are in the business of developing brand names and naming systems for new companies and new technologies. And we do it really for people, our clients all over the world. We have an interesting process here that combines really a creative layer with an engineering layer. And that engineering layer is a combination of linguistics and cognitive science that puts more objectivity into both developing names and importantly, selecting them.

• 1:59:04Speaker 10

  And the names behind me on the wall are names that everyone on, every name on the wall has been invented by, by lexicon.

• 1:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when is, is the right time to meet a founder like six months before they start the company? Like when, like what, cause I imagine a lot of these companies I can see from, I think some of them, some of them come to you after they've started, after they're already in market and they realize for some reason or another, you know, we need to, we need a new name and then they come to you and then there's like some, some constraints and it becomes harder, you know, walk us through like the, the ideal process.

• 1:59:42Speaker 10

  Yeah, most people do not, you're absolutely right, do not come to us six months before they really started the company. We suggest that they come to us as they approach that series A funding.

• 1:59:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:59:56Speaker 10

  By that point, uh, by that point, they really know who they are and where they're going for, for the most part. And so we can work with that information. Um, now before that, you know, sometimes they, they land on a great name. I mean, you, you, this is something that you can get lucky. Um, not, uh, not everybody needs a lexicon to, to come, uh, to, to work with, but most of the time, um, as you approach that series A is a good time to take a look at your name and we do that consulting all the time where, hey, is it time for us to change our name?

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  How much, uh, how, how do you, uh, how do you handle the domain side? Cause I talked to, I, I oftentimes, you know, Angel and like 60 some startups, maybe 70 at this point. And oftentimes they'll have what seems like a great name and maybe there's no trademark issues with it, but for some reason or another, the dot com is taken and they will just never get it, right? Because it's some hundred year old company and you just have to assume they've been operational for long enough. They're, they're maybe are public or privately.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Or it's like a super rich person that just is like squatting on it.

• 2:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So how do you, how do you navigate that? Because I feel like one part of the naming process that I appreciate is you have these incredible constraints already. It's not like an open canvas because you have trademark constraints, you have domain constraints. And then you have a bunch of other kind of like less clear constraints, but just like it has to make sense, right? But and so in the naming process, you're trying to like kind of combine all of those into a short list of things. And then hopefully it has to like feel good and sound good and do all those other things.

• 2:01:37Speaker 10

  Well, the URL should be the least important constraint in this process. And we have research that we've done several years ago. And actually, just this morning, we're about to launch another study that I think is going to once again provide evidence that the URL is really no longer that important, really. I mean,

• 2:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Wow, so domain brokers hate this one simple trick. Which is so, which is so funny. I mean, that's very, I mean, I can't wait to read the study because it's, it's so counter to, I've always felt like domains, domains are the element of your branding that you have like the least amount of control over, but have an incredible impact. Everyone's seen like a, if you see a beautiful website, and then the domain is something, something, try blank dot I O, it just screams like because there's so much subconscious branding, marketing that people are getting from every time I go to a big company's website, they have a dot com. It sort of trains people. But, but what's the

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  data that shows that it doesn't really matter?

• 2:02:45Speaker 10

  I think that's probably, you know, given what you, the two of you do, it's probably a little inside baseball because we're not finding that on the, the consumer end or the customer end. They're just looking at this as an address. The analog is a zip code. And actually, we found evidence that consumers like the idea of something that says, what is this, you know? And look at the companies that have done well, you know, Lucid is a client of ours, Lucid Motors, they don't have Lucid, it's not lucid.com. So I think it's less important.

• 2:03:22Speaker 10

  Or the consumer and the customer than it is to perhaps raising money.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Part of, part of, part of it for me is somebody that's helped name a number of companies and I just enjoy buying and finding and buying domains. I've just always appreciated it is that I appreciate the, how hard it is to get a great domain. And so when a founder comes and is pitching me and they already have something great. It just shows like a level of agency and ability. Maybe they didn't know a great broker, or maybe they didn't even use a broker, but they figured out how to get it. And so it kind of says something about them. But, uh, but I, but I agree, there's a lot of context where it totally doesn't matter.

• 2:04:03Jordi Hays?

  And if you look at the, if you look at the wall back there, almost every single one of those companies got to the point where they could buy, uh, buy whatever domain they wanted. Right. So it's like just.

• 2:04:12Speaker 10

  At a certain point, yeah.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the, the Microsoft Azure one is hilarious because Microsoft owns azure.com, but reroutes it to azure dot microsoft.com. Because they want you at the top level domain.

• 2:04:24Jordi Hays?

  How is, has, has chat GPT, uh, kind of made some clients, uh, kind of given them kind of the wrong lesson in branding? Because there's so much about that where like traditional, you know, if somebody came to you and they were like, I'm going to try to make a consumer product. I want to get to a billion users. If I don't get to a billion users, I'm going to fail. I'm going to call it chat GPT. What do you think? You'd be like, you'd probably laugh him, laugh him out of the room. Uh, or, or say, well, you really need to work with me.

• 2:04:54Speaker 10

  Well, the interesting thing about that question is more than 50% of our clients come to us having worked with Claude or chat GPT to develop their names. And they work with it, they find it frustrating that things just don't work together. There's no doubt, uh, those types of models can generate thousands of names. No question about it. What they can't do at this moment in time, that may change down the road, is apply the judgment and principles around this name is better than that name for you. Our philosophy is we're not in this business to create good names. We're in the business to create the right name, the right name that adds immediate, immediate value and long-term

• 2:05:37Speaker 10

  value. Because this, the name should be the one thing that stays with you through your whole journey and nothing will be used more often or longer. So it makes it very important. And at this point in time, a Chad or a Claude just isn't up to speed to do that kind of decision-making.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through the chapters of kind of even naming styles, right? Because we're at an interesting moment right now. People are putting GPT on the name, on the end of things. People are saying, the blank company of place, right? Like, that's a whole new thing. I'm sure, I'm sure that triggers.

• 2:06:14Speaker 10

  It started with the browser company of New York.

• 2:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the browser company of New York. A bunch of people copied that. And my take on that was always, that was an amazing name one time. Because it signaled to insiders in Silicon Valley that it was just a novel, kind of fresh take on the browser. And it was the polar opposite of Chrome, or Safari, or some of these kind of like one word, even though they did have a, have a name for the product. So, and then you can think back, like, there was an era where, like, adding LY to the, to the end of something was, was popular. Like, what are, what are the different chapters? And like, have, I'm curious if, like, the great brands have always kind of gone against the mold, right? Because like, and anyway, so maybe extrapolate on that.

• 2:06:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, sure. Well, look, one of the most persistent trends, or chapters, as you call it, in the industry is imitation. So, someone comes out with something that ends in LY, and, hey, that's a good idea, let's do it. So then you'll see four or five names out in the marketplace that end with LY. What's happening there is that that imitation doesn't generate the interest and the provocativeness that a really well put-together brand name should be for people. So, we always advise people, imitation is suicide. Your name should not look or act like anything that's out there in the marketplace.

• 2:07:38Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:07:38John Coogan?

  How'd you get into this? What was the first brand name you did?

• 2:07:42Speaker 10

  Well, I came from the advertising business, so you know, great agency for building. And I just saw as we worked on on projects and and company identity. That naming was going to become more and more important as as the world got more and more complex and more and more integrated. And so I took a flyer. And that's a simple, maybe boring story of how I got into this business. Relative to the first name we ever generated, it's a name that has long since disappeared. I think it was for United Technologies and we named a new furnace noise reduction

• 2:08:27Speaker 10

  technology called Whisper.

• 2:08:31Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:08:31Jordi Hays?

  What uh, what advice do you give companies that get to a scale where they have a brand name and then different product lines and maybe even kind of like sub companies? We're at this point right now where like, look at a company like Claude has Anthropic, Claude, Claude Code, OpenAI has, you know, ChatGPT, they have the browser, which I'm even just blanking on the on the name of it. They have Codex, they have.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Codex Desktop App.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so so.

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Different models in Codex. There's GPT 5.2.

• 2:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what what framework you get, because I'm assuming you'll work you'll work with a company to name the parent company and then you also work on the sub products and then some cases the sub products end up outshining the parent company.

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:19Speaker 10

  Yeah. Well, we we have an expression here we call clarity is the language of leadership. And what you see in that example you just gave me, that there's really no story there. They don't have a common language. And so it's difficult for the audience, the consumers to really understand what are they doing for me? What is this company about? It's a very choppy thing. So a lot of our business coming to us now, over the past year and a half, and I think it's because of AI, is clients coming to us and asking us to help them, I use the term, straighten out their language and make it make sense.

• 2:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:00Jordi Hays?

  Creating a through line.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:03Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 2:10:04John Coogan?

  What else about these taxonomies? I'm interested, like, at the early stage, Series A, how much are you trying to actually define a hierarchy of product names? And what is the process of, like, working with you like? Is it, you know, there's like a specific sprint, specific deadlines, you're paying upfront, and you don't know what you're getting? Is there contingency? Like, what is the workflow to work with a company?

• 2:10:31Speaker 10

  It's pretty straightforward. In many ways, this is really rocket science. But we start with a real, simple work session where we're really asking clients four key questions. And this always works.

• 2:10:47Speaker 10

  It's, how do you define winning? If we get 10 people in a room, we're going to get 10 different answers, but we can sort that out. Then we'll say, okay, if that's how you want to win, what do you have to win? That gives us things that the name doesn't have to. Then we say, okay, what do you need to win? What don't you have? That begins to, you know, give us information about how that name might help them, right? Because a name should be a tool, it should be a foundation for success. And then finally, we say, okay, what do you have to say? Would you like to say? And between those four things, we call it a diamond. We can then set up a, what we call a framework, or a creative framework, which we don't even

• 2:11:29Speaker 10

  use the word "objective" because we want that analog hold through. We want a window that we can travel through and do a lot of creative work. That's where the process begins. And then we work here, you know, small, two-person creative teams, and we have this, what we call internally, really this engineering layer, where we, linguists, we're using, you know, company-funded research on things like... It sounds exotic, but it's very fundamental. Sound symbolism, letter structure, and fluency. All those things then go into a funnel to help us select names. Makes sense.

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  What is the key to avoiding botching a rebrand? We saw, like nowadays, products grow so quickly. We saw this with Claudebot, which if you paid attention to that, you would have seen like, "Okay, Anthropic's gonna have issue with this." Right? It's like way too, in the same category, sounds the exact same, very confusing to consumers. So he quickly rebranded it, then didn't like the rebrand, then rebranded it again. And fortunately, I think the product is exciting enough that the new name, Open Claw, hopefully sticks and continues. You know, the community just like keeps the momentum. But you're working with companies that are coming to you right when they're starting to get real traction, and they know they need to change their name, but they don't

• 2:12:49Jordi Hays?

  wanna kind of destroy any brand equity that they've built up.

• 2:12:53Speaker 10

  Yeah. Well, I think the biggest factor is that they under-invest in the name change. And I don't mean necessarily investing with a lexicon or someone else. They don't sit and think through all the implications of doing this name change. First, for a minute, what's the message that we wanna communicate? Because you do, at some point, have to say, "Yesterday, we were this, and now today, we're that." And what is that message? And then the second thing is lining up the reason. The right law firm, global language analysis, all these things, so you don't end up with

• 2:13:32Speaker 10

  something that's launched, and then it turns out to mean, you know, your mother's a bank robber.

• 2:13:43Speaker 10

  Just not a fun day.

• 2:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, a good example you did, so you did TripActions to Nivon.

• 2:13:47Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:13:48Jordi Hays?

  And that was an example. TripActions had a big brand, at least in the US, and they didn't wanna be explicitly known, I imagine, as just a travel booking site. They had to go through that. I remember they really paired... The rebrand, I'm sure they paid, paid you guys, worked with you guys, but then they also seemingly spent like five, 10 million dollars in a short period of time to like reintroduce themselves. Uh, at least that was my impression as, as just a, as somebody in the target market.

• 2:14:19Speaker 10

  Yeah, they did a fantastic job. They really did. And that name, it's a coin solution. We, we made it up. Because the founder of the company, having been, you might say burned by TripAction being so one dimensional. So narrow, said, I want flexibility for the future. And the best way to get flexibility is to make something up.

• 2:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So that means we'll never run out of names.

• 2:14:45Speaker 10

  That's right. We hope.

• 2:14:46Jordi Hays?

  We hope. We hope. Uh, I, I, I, I have, uh, it's always been, uh, every single time I've been working with a startup or trying to, trying to name something, you're, sometimes you can just be hitting a wall where you're like, I can't find, for me, it's like, I can't find any domains in this space that I like. Everything's trademarked, all this stuff. And then, and then there's always, there's always a name. Uh, you, you might appreciate some of the history of TBPN. We started as a show called Technology Brothers. Then we had an issue where everywhere we went, people would say, introducing the tech bros. And we were like, we knew this was our life's work. And we were like, I don't want to spend my whole life being introduced as the tech bros, which was like the word that we were trying to avoid. We wanted flexibility.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  With the original name. And so I was like, I need a, I want like a four or five letter domain. It has to have TB in it. Uh, and we ended up, part, part of TBPN, we're not a network. We, we, we look and sound like an ESPN or something like that. But our, the logic was like, if we name it like a network, even though we're a podcast or a live stream, the comms departments for big tech companies will be more comfortable putting their, uh, leadership teams on our show because it looks and feels more like television, even if it is at the end of the day, just, uh, you know, 10 of us here in, in a studio making, uh, something that looks like television.

• 2:16:07Speaker 10

  It does feel like you're a national network.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:11Speaker 10

  So.

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  It is a mouthful. It is a mouthful, though. We're having to power through that.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The, the, the, putting a P next to a B is always a choice. It's, you know, the, the, the real lexicon heads will probably.

• 2:16:24Jordi Hays?

  It just inspires us to.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, last question for me, because there's some breaking news going on right now, but, uh, what, what do you think about, uh, a return to using surnames as company names? The Ford Motor Company, Walt Disney, the Disney Company. Uh, that felt like something that was just right there on the shelf for founders to pull off and revive. It's starting to happen, but do you think that that's something that might happen?

• 2:16:52Jordi Hays?

  It takes guts. It takes guts. You can't, you can't.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  There's Rigetti Computing. That's a quantum computing company, public. Uh, there, there are some people that have done it, but, uh, do you think that that was something that would, you would caution folks against, or you would be in favor of?

• 2:17:06Speaker 10

  I would caution to really take a hard look at that, and it really depends on the person's personality, what the name is like. Uh, is it easy to spell? Is it easy to say?

• 2:17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:16Speaker 10

  The danger, of course, is, uh, something happens to the founder that is on board. Now you have to, you have to live, live with that. So I, I think, I think it's worth discussion and evaluation.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:30Speaker 10

  Uh, but I would probably push against it most of the time.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:35Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many clients do you work with a year?

• 2:17:38Speaker 10

  Uh, we'll do about 75 projects a year, um, in the naming area. And then we have a research group here that does the quantitative, uh, research for us also.

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. And, and, and only some fraction of those are, are technology companies. I'm, I'm assuming, you know, a, a bunch of, uh, other industries will tap your expertise as well.

• 2:18:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, we try to keep a balance, but really, uh, 50, maybe 60% of our work is in technology at this point in time. And we, which, I, I love it, so.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Everything is technology.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  I love it. That's a good place to be. And it's fun. I mean, these are all amazing brands. The PowerBook, what a legend.

• 2:18:18Speaker 10

  We see the future every week.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:20Speaker 10

  And we talk to some of the smartest people that can imagine, as you guys well.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, I can imagine.

• 2:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, I've had a couple of people text me during the show asking for an intro, so you have quite a lot of demand. I'm sure more than you can fulfill, but we'll definitely send some people your way and it was great to meet.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:18:39Speaker 10

  My pleasure.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  Thanks so much, Rob, on David. We'll talk to you soon. Tomorrow, Cisco, on February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed.

• 2:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Going to be there.

• 2:18:55John Coogan?

  And we'll be there with a gig of stream.

• 2:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Headed to the Bay later today.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  We have some breaking news. First up, Palantir beat earnings. Stock is up, what is it, up 6% already after hours. It's a $350 billion company. And this is the big one, from Call She here, just in, SpaceX reportedly confirms XAI merger. Very exciting. This has hit the Bloomberg terminal as well. Elon Musk, SpaceX confirms merger with XAI and company memo. SpaceX confirms plans to merge with XAI before the IPO. We were talking about this and sort of predicting that this would happen. SATS is up 2% after hours. I guess that's correlated there.

• 2:19:45Jordi Hays?

  They just go up. Anything happens in space, it's good. It just goes up.

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  SATS? What is SATS?

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Isn't, isn't?

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:19:53Jordi Hays?

  I thought that was, that's EchoStar. They hold.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, they hold SpaceX stock. That's right. Elon Musk plans to merge SpaceX with SpaceX, with XAI in a deal that encompasses the billionaires' increasingly costly ambitions to dominate artificial intelligence, space exploration. The deal was announced in a memo. Bloomberg earlier reported on the discussion. SpaceX is planning an IPO that could raise as much as $50 billion and value the company at $1.5 trillion. It's also discussed a possible merger with Tesla. The there's a couple of other data points that we should share on call sheet. The which AI company will have the best coding model at the end of 2026. XAI is at 9%. You don't hear that much about XAI, but that's that's higher than I thought.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  Anthropic's leading at 54%, then OpenAI at 27%, then Google at 14%. Of course, this is in the the benchmarks on live bench AI rated by coding average. Do with that what you will. But the real the real interesting data point about SpaceX is that according to Reuters and Trent Griffin on X, SpaceX generated 8 million in EBITDA.

• 2:20:59Jordi Hays?

  This is a typo.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  This is a typo. It's 8 billion.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  8 billion.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  On EBITDA.

• 2:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Because I because I read I read this and I was like, whoa, that's not.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  Nothing, yeah.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Because 8 8 million is pretty marginal.

• 2:21:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's like.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, that is not everyone's been applying.

• 2:21:17John Coogan?

  No, no, the correct correct number is 8 billion in profit on 15 billion to 16 billion in revenue. So 50% margins for space company is absolutely insane. A lot of that's coming from Starlink, obviously. Starlink is the main Musk's internet satellite internet satellite based internet system. Starlink is the main revenue driver, accounting for about 50 to 80% of the total revenue. The rapid launch of 9,500 Starlink satellites since 2019 has made SpaceX the world's largest satellite operator with only not over 9 million users of the broadband internet service. And of course, it's not just, you know, individuals that have a Starlink that they throw when they're camping.

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  It's, you know, companies and boats and yachts and planes now. There's a whole Cerebral ad just about, I think, United Airlines has a deal. And so they want people to choose United because Starlink is such a differentiator when you're getting on a long haul plane. There's not much they'll get.

• 2:22:14Jordi Hays?

  There's not that much you can differentiate on. All the food is bad.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  It's terrible.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  All the planes are falling apart.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  You feel you don't really feel safe on any air.

• 2:22:23John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:22:24Speaker 02

  And so one thing you could differentiate on is if you can like if you get food in first class, if you're if you're allowed to bring it back.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be a huge differentiator.

• 2:22:32Jordi Hays?

  TBP on JetBlue.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  They're moving slow on that front. And so they have to differentiate on Starlink. But I do think it will be a real differentiator. Like if you're if you're choosing between American and New York, you're going from LA to New York and it's American or United and United has Starlink. That's a pretty big difference, just to be able to properly properly use the the internet. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  There's one more interview. Sorry, not interview, but

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  Context?

• 2:23:05Jordi Hays?

  Context. From Jensen, we're gonna pull this video up. Take him, he highlighted it. Let's pull it up, John. I cannot wait to see your reaction.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  Okay. I haven't seen this yet. High Yield here also says, "If you bought the X Bank debt and high-yield bonds back at 13% yields, you've now parlayed your way into being a creditor to the largest IPO ever." What a journey. It is such a crazy journey. Anyway, let's play a Jensen clip.

• 2:23:32Speaker 06

  And this year, this year is the year of the horse. So it's going to be a very good year. And this year... Let's go.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  So it says that post is a joke. What about it is a joke? Is it AI? Is it fake? Did he actually say that? Did he say that a long time ago?

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  It's the fire horse.

• 2:23:54Jordi Hays?

  Take him is saying, "Jensen is citing the year of the horse and you're bearish? I'm not a CIA body language expert, but look at the expression on his face. This post is a joke, kinda."

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, kinda. I don't know. Yeah, no, Jensen is...

• 2:24:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we said this. We opened the ear with this. We said, "Year of the fire horse."

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, he was seeing, chugging beers, drinking champagne, giving celebratory toast. He's on Cloud Nine.

• 2:24:21Jordi Hays?

  That was one of the better calls.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. We're gonna dig into that more. So XAI just filed this with the Nevada Secretary of State website. Managing members, they put SpaceX person on the silver flume filings. Andrew Curran says, "It's happening." Ken confirmed that the screenshot's real, merger is effective. SpaceX, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is now the managing member of XAI Holdings LLC. Interesting. Says Prins. Yeah, eight billion in profits.

• 2:24:58Jordi Hays?

  The X in SpaceX stands for?

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  It is a weird, weird timeline, but it makes a lot of sense. I mean, managing five companies has got to be exhausting, difficult managing, you know, two, there's some, there's some economies of scale and you know, now that you have the data centers in space thing and Starlink, you know, it is a communications company after all, uh, makes a lot more sense, you know? I don't know.

• 2:25:24Jordi Hays?

  And I'm not going to say we called it, but we certainly were talking, I mean, we started talking about, uh, about this possibility at the end of last year, it felt like, you know, XAI didn't have the traction to keep just continuously raising at a $200 billion valuation when you looked at its financial performance relative to uh, the rest of it. And so, uh, and, and merging XAI into Tesla wasn't going to get a lot of, uh, uh, I, I think it would have gotten way too much pushback. Also Tesla's obviously public, so it would have had more scrutiny.

• 2:25:57John Coogan?

  But I mean, if you just play out even like the non AGI vanilla case of the models sort of commoditized, everything gets, they, they get to near the frontier and maybe one is better than the other for one thing. But at the end of the day, it's like, you know, intelligence on tap, you're paying for tokens and SpaceX's tokens are cheaper because they're using solar and they're in orbit. Like there's a world where just on the pure economic calculation, you can get market share.

• 2:26:24Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX to actually be a player in like AI cloud.

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Like there, I, I, I see a world where they're like, yeah, we're really good at building infrastructure. We're going to, we're going to build the infrastructure to power other people's apps.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so I would expect to see some type of like enterprise AI offering from SpaceX, like in the near, in the near future, even potentially before like there's really like data centers in space.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:48Jordi Hays?

  Couple more.

• 2:26:49John Coogan?

  I just, I, I'd love imagining the person who is just like. The the longest tenured Twitter employee who's just like, yeah, I'm here. I'm I'm working at Twitter. And like, OK, now I work in an AI lab. Now I work at a rocket company. It's like such a funny twist in the in the career path. But, you know, congratulations to everyone who held on and is now working at SpaceX.

• 2:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Couple more reactions to Oracle. Matthew Zeitlin over at Heat Map says he's wearing the my. The Nvidia OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI shirt. And then Alex over at 8VC responded to Oracle's post and said, OMG, this is literally bank run language. Really does. Really does weird read like that. And so.

• 2:27:39John Coogan?

  I mean, the good thing is that it just feels like the like the the fear about adoption falling off has not really come to pass. And so like, people need tokens. They're deploying them more and more. More more people are using LLMs, more hours of the day. Everything's sort of like on track, like the fundamental technology is is growing. And so would I be terrified of sitting on a data center that has the ability to inference? Just one of the many LLMs like it doesn't seem like the worst scenario to be in. We looked at the the gross margins seem good. Like a lot of the health checks of the ecosystem have been passing, in my opinion. So.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And Oracle is already it's I mean, they've already it's down almost 50% since the original.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  It's already sort of corrected. I wonder what the CDS is doing, but that's that's for another deep dive. The other, the other big story today.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Down more than 50% since the original announcement. So.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Play that, won't we?

• 2:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, up next, we fortunately have somebody whose job is to make sure the demand is real.

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  And so he is supporting the, supporting the backlog.

• 2:28:57John Coogan?

  Tebow from OpenAI. The other breaking news that we should talk about before he hops on is Bob Iger at Disney, he has told associates that he plans to leave the CEO role before his contract expires. He said, I'm taking all the IP I'm giving into OpenAI and then I'm out.

• 2:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  Iger told associates that he plans to step down as CEO and pull back from daily management before the December 31 end of his contract. So he's planning some summer moves. He's going to be in Europe, maybe. The entertainment giant's board of directors is planning to meet with him next week at its headquarters in Burbank, where they were expected to vote on who should take the top job. In private conversations over the last few months, Iger has told people close to him that he's ready to move on from the grind of being CEO and was frustrated by conflicts at Disney's ABC Network over the brief suspension of late night host Jimmy Kimmel, people who have spoken to him said. The CEO has told multiple associates that he would like to spend more of his time and energy on other, other things, such as sailing his new and larger super yacht, the Aquarius.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Somebody in the chat earlier was talking about the name of their new sailboat.

• 2:30:05John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah, kind of come up with an innovative name if you're naming a boat.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Hiring lexicon brandings.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  For your boat. You really should. Aquarius feels pretty like, you know, like ChatGPT could come up with that name, potentially. He said that he would also like to devote more time to work with his wife, Willow Bay, dean of USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and on Angel FC, the women's soccer team they bought in 2024. The final timing of his departure from the top job hasn't been determined yet and could change. He's expected to remain CEO for several months. What you got?

• 2:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Rigav, always, always one step ahead of us in the chat.

• 2:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Just shared exclusive, OpenAI is unsatisfied with some Nvidia chips and is looking for alternatives, sources say. So OpenAI comms team fires back.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Somebody else in the chat was saying that Jensen is in his clip farming era.

• 2:31:00Jordi Hays?

  He saw a bunch of the kick streamers and he's like, I need to start doing this.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we will dig into that more, but until then, we have the, we have some massive news from Codex. Let's bring in our guest from the restream waiting room. How are you doing?

• 2:31:15Speaker 11

  It's happening. Hello. Nice to be here. Excited to be here.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on the show. This is the first time on your show. Please introduce yourself and your role and then the announcement today.

• 2:31:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, sure. I'm Tivo. I work here at OpenAI on Codex together with an awesome team. I lead the entire Codex team. And yeah, today, like we launched the Codex app on macOS. And it's a very capable thing. I think it's surprisingly capable.

• 2:31:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I downloaded it before the show. I had like five minutes and I was able to create a version of the TVP and website in the style of Berkshire Hathaway. It feels like sort of a Studio Ghibli moment for vibe coding in many ways. Like you can just spin stuff up. What are you excited about the desktop app specifically? Because we've seen like the whole multbot news, it interacts with your file system, but then there's also just, there's just a whole host of people that are loosely familiar with programming and maybe they're comfortable with the idea of programming. But at the same time, when you tell them like, hey, set up an environment, get a CLI, get, you know, get your, you know, IDE set up. They're just like, I don't want to spend the hour that it's going to take

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  me even to set up something as simple as the tools have become. It's still too much. So what were the goals? What are you excited about for Codex on desktop?

• 2:32:35Speaker 11

  There are two things I'm like really excited about is like one, it does make it much more accessible.

• 2:32:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:40Speaker 11

  You know, you just install it, you get going and it's like after you log in. It's delightfully simple, you know, you're just greeted by this little composer, you can start chatting with it and then sort of like invites you to get things done. But also it very much leans in into the way of working that we've seen from, you know, technical staff at OpenAI and our users. And when you look at Peter, for example, with like open clause, it's just like multitasking a lot and it's easy to lose context when you switch like between your different terminals, you don't have notifications. And then you don't have like the whole multimodality things if you're working with, you know, front ends, images, if you just want to use voice. All of those things are like packed into the app.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  Oh, wow, yeah.

• 2:33:21Speaker 11

  Very much leaning in into like making people even more productive.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't even notice that the dictate button is right there. I was uploading screenshots and that was really effective. I Peter was talking a lot about how he he tags screenshots in and he just gives more visual information to the system. Talk to me about the models that come out of the box, how I should be thinking about model selection. It sort of defaults to a 5.2 Codex medium. When would I want to switch and what are some of the different benefits?

• 2:33:49Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we just get you started with the model that we feel is the best for most people. And that's done like through extensive tests, internal evaluations and just feedback that we've got and like 52 Codex. That medium has this adaptive thinking, so it's going to work fast on easy problems. It's going to like, you know, work harder on things that, you know, actually deserve taking the time. It just feels like, you know, a good default thing to get started with. You know, we also introduced personalities and now you have like two choices, you can go with a more friendly one. And then you can, you know, use a pragmatic one, which was like the one that we had like so far. A lot of people surprisingly, even on the Codex team, has switched to the friendly one. You know, it's just like, it's it's nice to be a little bit more supportive and validated.

• 2:34:33Speaker 11

  But of course, it also, we support the other important models, 5.2, which was a much bigger jump, I think, than people expected. And it's really also what we crafted the the app and the experience around. 5.2 is like really excellent at long running, you know, tasks like independently and getting it done to like a level of completion, you know, that you expect from like, you know, senior technical staff. And that allows you to do a lot of multitasking and that's really what the app is built around. You can handle like different projects, different threads, all running together without losing context and like sort of like efficiently managing a lot of things. And this is sort of like a glimpse into like what the future is going to be like with agents.

• 2:35:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like a lot of people are going to come to the Codex app on desktop with like a vague idea. You're going more prosumer, it feels like with this in many ways. And I'm wondering how you think about planning versus implementation, walking through actually setting Codex up for success. Obviously, like the great programmers can can just prompt better because they understand the hierarchy of files and what tools might be used. But for someone who's effectively non-technical, how do you think about the planning stage giving the model enough to make good decisions and actually execute properly?

• 2:35:54Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think planning is effective in two ways. It is effective for the agent because it allows to be very specific about what you actually want the agent to go and do, perhaps for many hours. But it also gets your own thoughts straight. And it sort of like invites you to have like a conversation around, you know, what is it actually that you're trying to do? You know, when you're sitting behind, like sometimes you think like, hey, you know, this is like a very simple instruction, right? You know, just go and refactor it and, you know, remove this part of the backend, like speed this part up. And then, you know, maybe there actually you don't realize there are like, you know, five different ways, like with different trade-offs, you know, on how the agent could go and tackle this. And like planning just sort of like helps resolve that ambiguity.

• 2:36:37Speaker 11

  So I find it like a very useful thing just as a human, you know, to go through as a process. It's like a useful reminder of like, hey, let's be crisp about, you know, what you actually want to do. But one thing that's also very important is like with the app and in general, like we don't chop off like the top end of the capabilities, right? So it's like very important that, you know, people who are like extremely sophisticated can get, you know, the most incredible things done. And we're seeing a lot of adoption actually of the app, like within research and, you know, it's fascinating walking through the office, like seeing people like do the wildest things with this thing. It's like very much a very, it's a very capable tool.

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  If I look at the release schedule, I see the ChatGPT app, which has a lot of functionality. Then the Atlas Browser, now Codex on desktop. Are IDEs dead, in your opinion? Are people just going to bring their own? Or do you think this grows into an IDE? Or is that like a separate environment, based on like what you're experiencing? And like the workflows that you're seeing?

• 2:37:35Speaker 11

  Right now, it's a companion. It's a companion to the IDE, you know, very much. You know, can stand on its own, but is enhanced by, you know, using an IDE like occasionally. Some people will prefer, like, you know, just being in their IDE. But like, it is quite evident to me that as agents just become extremely capable, you just want to talk to them and they will, you know, get things done. And then what you want to do is like, you want to be able to steer them and supervise the result.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:02Speaker 11

  And that requires something that is a very rich interaction surface. And that's what we're building with the app.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  How do you think about deployment? I can imagine people vibe coding little, little apps that do things for them on their computers. Or I had to build an HTML page that I just opened in Chrome and was able to just see.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  The next step is actually deploying it. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of tools that you could plug in with. How are you thinking about open ecosystem versus potentially offering some hosting functionality?

• 2:38:36Speaker 11

  Yeah, we love investing in the open ecosystem. That's something that I've been very proud of us doing. I was like, all our code is like, the majority of our code is open source.

• 2:38:46Speaker 11

  You know, we also support a lot of like other open source initiatives. And one of the things that we're leaning in is like the open standard around skills. And we ship with a bunch of skills that are useful. Like, for example, you know, one is like for Vercel deployments.

• 2:39:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:39:01Speaker 11

  And that allows you to just take what you've built and very quickly deploy it and have it, you know, accessible there and, you know, share it with others. It is not a native integration. We might consider that in the future. But it's already very easy to do things that are way beyond just writing code.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, even deploying to Vercel is going to be, oh, there's going to be, it's going to ask me for an API key or something. But if you're in a chat interface, it can go back and forth and you can just ask, okay, what does this mean? Where do I go? What's the webpage? Where do I click? What do I copy? And all of a sudden, it's live.

• 2:39:31Speaker 11

  That's right. You don't need to read the docs anymore. Like, you can just, you know, ask Codex to do it for you and it will do it to a high degree of. A high degree of quality, especially given, you know, all the information is packed in the skill. It's like, sort of like, puts like the guardrails on.

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about funneling ChatGPT users to Codex on desktop? It feels like-

• 2:39:55Speaker 11

  You're gonna buy some ads?

• 2:39:58John Coogan?

  No, but I mean, there are worlds where you fire off a GPT 5.2 prompt, and it just writes code in the law, in the thinking step, and you don't actually see the Python that it wrote and executed. And the next step is, okay, maybe I want to run this regularly. Maybe I want to wrap this in, you know, CLI or some desktop app. And I could imagine a flow where, you know, you're in the ChatGPT app, and you get to the end of the capabilities there and says, hey, you should, you should go over here. We have a, we have a more robust experience for you. Have you thought about that? I mean, obviously, on day one, there's just going to be immense amount of just excitement and trial and virality. But long term, what are you thinking of integration between the different ecosystems?

• 2:40:42Speaker 11

  Yeah, I hope that with this launch, we do inspire a set of people who haven't tried Codex yet to try it and realize, hey, you know, I can really do really cool, creative things with this. And, you know, maybe like coding agents is actually for me. What you explained around, you know, the first experience in ChatGPT, and then you have, you know, the code interpreter workflow there, like where, you know, you don't actually need to understand the code, or you use Canvas, and, you know, you have this little bit of the light there. And, you know, you realize, hey, ChatGPT can create things for me. And like, you know, which image generation, like, how do we combine that? And sort of like, bring the magic of like coding agents to everyone? That is definitely something that we're thinking about. There are considerations there around, you know, how you do this safely and securely,

• 2:41:25Speaker 11

  given, you know, the folks wouldn't actually understand the code as running under the hood. So Codex, for now, is very much meant for, you know, a technical, technical adjacent audience. But then we're also thinking like, hey, this thing is like incredibly powerful, and the coding can help achieve all sorts of economically viable tasks. You don't need to understand that it's code under the hood, but, you know, how do we bring this to more people?

• 2:41:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna hang with, are you hanging with Peter while he's in SF?

• 2:41:53Speaker 11

  We're like close on Twitter and you know Peter is just everywhere. He's hosting this

• 2:42:00Speaker 11

  con, ClawCon like for the first time, which is like I heard is like over like you know 500 participants already and stuff, so I might just like draw by and say hi.

• 2:42:08John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's so fast. Everything he does is fast. I mean, one of my big takeaways from the Clawed Bot, Molt Bot, Open Claw was just that mobile, the importance of mobile and people going on Telegram or Signal or WhatsApp and texting an interface that could write code for them, execute things and interface with some hardware. How are you thinking about the mobile experience into Codex? Like where, how the integration loops happens now that there's a desktop app, there's obviously the ChatGPT mobile app that has massive installation. What are the, what are the pros, cons? What are you excited about there?

• 2:42:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, we're very excited about the mobile experience. It's, it'd always be my dream of, you know, I can start a task, I can talk to Codex from anywhere and then I can just like walk away, follow on my phone and steer it. And this is definitely something that's going to come. We are very much optimizing, you know, for professional software engineers and people are like, you know, really excited about getting super productive. So it felt like bringing first an amazing experience on macOS, you know, felt like the right thing priorities wise. It is something that will come and I think will delight people when it's there. And this is also why, you know, we, we keep calling everything Codex. Codex is our agent. It is how you, you get things done. And then, you know, whether you interact

• 2:43:29Speaker 11

  through it like via the CLI or in web or in the US, like under the hood is the same agent. And like, we're going to connect it all at some point.

• 2:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is it time to buy an extra monitor? How many monitors do you run?

• 2:43:41Speaker 11

  Right now on my laptop, I only have one. Which is like delightful, like you can actually like follow things like much more. So it don't feel like the need to have like five monitors. At home, I do have three.

• 2:43:53John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:43:56Speaker 11

  Not gonna lie.

• 2:43:56John Coogan?

  Maybe that Dell, the 65 inch 6K monitors in the future. We're very excited about that. Anyway, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for stopping by the show. Great to meet you and we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:44:09Speaker 11

  Cheers. Thanks for having me.

• 2:44:12John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 2:44:23Jordi Hays?

  Where to go next?

• 2:44:24John Coogan?

  Dylan Abrascato said that succession is a documentary because apparently the next CEO of Disney could be the the theme park division chairman. I didn't get the reference. Have you seen, do you get the reference from succession?

• 2:44:40Jordi Hays?

  It's Tom who's running the parks, right?

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  Tom runs the parks department.

• 2:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Let me know, let me know if I'm.

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  I gotta finally get through all of succession. But, oh, in other news, there's, I see this post that you're on, Bro spent $50 billion buying Bitcoin over the past five years and is now underwater.

• 2:44:59Jordi Hays?

  Talking about micro strategy.

• 2:45:00John Coogan?

  He didn't even mention who it is.

• 2:45:02Jordi Hays?

  And people.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  And people just know that it's micro.

• 2:45:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, not a lot of people that are non maybe state entities have bought this much Bitcoin.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  712,000 Bitcoins. Wow.

• 2:45:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think his, his, um, his average entry is in the 80s.

• 2:45:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:18Jordi Hays?

  And whereas.

• 2:45:19John Coogan?

  Bitcoin is up today, it's 78,000, but obviously that's nowhere near where it was when it was up at 120. So a significant, a significant sell off. But there's.

• 2:45:29Speaker 02

  I have some extra context on the.

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:45:32Speaker 02

  OpenAI news. So, um, yeah, apparently, uh, opening, I've been talking with, uh, cerebral and Grok to do like custom chips. And then when, uh, when Grok got bought by Nvidia, like that stopped the talks. Um, I think it's just because they're too slow. You've seen Ruin talk about this where Codex is, is, you know, somewhat slower than Claude Code or whatever, uh, even though the model is actually better, the experience can be, you know, worse sometimes.

• 2:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I mean, like, like, the models can get better, but they're already really, really good. Like, most of the deep research reports that I get back are. Amazing. They're they they they job mission accomplished. Like you did it. You you did the research, you compiled it and I'm and I got my information, but I had to wait 20 minutes. Cut that down to two minutes and I'll probably use it 10 times as much and I'll probably pay time 10 times as much for that. And same thing with coding, you know, there's so many memes about watching brain rot videos while while you're waiting for codex or cloud code or whatever you're using to come back and answer you. Speed it up and you're going to have a much faster adoption path.

• 2:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Chat has confirmed that it is Tom Wamsgans.

• 2:46:36John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Ran the amusement park and cruise division, then he got moved up to ATN news.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:43Jordi Hays?

  The one more thing on the data side of things, bit mine, this is Tom Lee.

• 2:46:50John Coogan?

  Yes, former guest.

• 2:46:52Jordi Hays?

  Has unrealized losses of 6.6 billion now on track to become the fifth largest documented principal trading loss in history if sold. Of course, he's not selling. He remains bullish. He's he's really testing his diamond hands. It's at 66% of the size of our our Kgos. It was Bill, Bill Wong's infamous hedge fund.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Well, we have Christopher O'Donnell from Day AI in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. Christopher, how are you doing?

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Wow, unique.

• 2:47:26Speaker 12

  Very well. Yeah. How are you guys?

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  Beautiful camera, beautiful lighting.

• 2:47:30Jordi Hays?

  No one's ever done this before.

• 2:47:32John Coogan?

  I feel like I'm watching, honestly, I feel like I'm watching an OpenAI launch video, but it is fantastic. It looks fantastic.

• 2:47:40Speaker 12

  You can get a little OCD, I guess. We were pumped for this and so we've been in here like teaching ourselves how to use lights and stuff like that, you know, like ordering this shit on Amazon.

• 2:47:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm pumped for this. I had my favorite experience ever when I when I check X in the morning, I see a cool startup launching and I'm like, I'm like thinking like, I gotta get this. I gotta get these guys on. And then you're you were already on. So anyway, sorry. First time on the show, please introduce yourself, the company, tell us what you're building.

• 2:48:10Speaker 12

  Yeah, so Christopher O'Donnell, longtime listener, first time caller. I led product at HubSpot for about 10 years and am now lucky enough to be with a group of a dozen or so of my closest friends doing a similar but also very different thing from scratch in the age of AI. You know, it's sort of, you know, what if we were to start from the very beginning and do everything in this, as you guys are constantly discussing wildly evolving and radically different world? So that's the short story.

• 2:48:45John Coogan?

  So, early product, market, how are you segmenting things? What's the key value prop? I mean, I'm sure there's AI, but take me a cut deeper.

• 2:48:56Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, I think, looking at CRM, there's a funny thing, which is, I feel like in everybody's head, everybody's expectations are wildly different for everything. And you guys talk about this, and, you know, every vertical, you know, our lives are changing so rapidly, and yet, nobody's really expecting that to happen with CRM. Everybody's kind of like, but Salesforce isn't going anywhere. And it's like, hold on. There's a layer of it that is, well, we could eliminate the manual data entry, and we could maybe better integrate with some other systems. And what we're seeing is, there is a wildly different level of what's possible, that really was the original promise of CRM.

• 2:49:40Speaker 12

  Like, hey, I'm a CEO, I have concerns about my business, I have existential questions. I want to know if this whole new cohort of sales reps that we hired two months ago is going to make it, you know? I want to know what I can do, what deals I should be involved in, I want to know if I'm spending my time the right way. And you can actually get instant answers to that if you had the entire record of everything that had been said or done at the company instantly indexed and readable by, you know, an AI agent. That's the heart of what we're doing, is ingesting everything and storing it. In a way that is LLM optimized. So, you know, easy for it to explore this whole network of relationships.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:24Speaker 12

  Um, but also in natural language and with explanations about why everything is what it appears to be.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 2:50:31Speaker 12

  Uh, you know, we're seeing it's just a completely different set of use cases.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:37Speaker 12

  Uh, so that's really interesting to navigate with customers, but everybody's starting to kind of go from, wait, what?

• 2:50:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:43Speaker 12

  Uh, to, of course, this is exactly the thing that we should have.

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  What is, what is like the killer feature or experience that you're optimizing for? Uh, you're, you're trying to, uh, somebody signs up. They, and you know, sort of integrate whatever tools they need. And then like, what's the first moment like that you're trying to get people to kind of see the future?

• 2:51:05Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think the most obvious thing is a better version of the meeting recorders that we've come to kind of rely on. You know, here's this thing, it's watching, it's taking notes and I don't have to do that on the call because it's all being captured and recorded. Uh, and then from that, you know, I can ask questions about it. I can, you know, automatically have my deals moving based on what happened on the call. That's really great. If I want to write follow-up emails, they're incredibly good and the UI is just snapping and moving around as I go through this whole workflow. That's kind of the entry level, uh, magic trick that people see when they come in. Then there is this much deeper realization that, oh, wait a second.

• 2:51:46Speaker 12

  I can actually ask and understand anything that is happening in the business. Um, and, and that, you know, people get to that pretty quickly, you know, within a week, usually.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Talk about bottom up adoption versus top down. Do you want to go for the big enterprise, have them rip out some massive system? Or, uh, I remember using a product called Streak that just plugged into Gmail. Uh, you know, you could, I, I've also built a CRM with Visual Basic and Excel. Like you, you, you can start a CRM project just in a spreadsheet. Um, how are you thinking about, uh, where, where you want to plug in and, and start getting traction?

• 2:52:24Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. Part of our crew built a bunch of streak in addition to HubSpot. Yeah.

• 2:52:31John Coogan?

  It's a cool company. I enjoyed it at the time. It was like very lightweight. You know, you could just bolt it on, basically.

• 2:52:37Speaker 12

  Totally, totally. The adoption story, it's a great question. You know, we saw over, I've been working in CRM for, I don't even know what, 10, 15 years. And

• 2:52:51Speaker 12

  the march of history always seemed to be from the CEO toward the buyer with, you know, a big swing through rep productivity and these bottoms up tools. And when I kind of moved from the rewrite of the HubSpot marketing product to do a startup event, a startup in the sales tools that became HubSpot Sales and CRM. That was the thesis. Like, we're going to go bottoms up. We're going to do what these other sales acceleration tools are doing. And that worked really well. And then, you know, marching toward the buyer being able to drive as much of the sales process as possible. I think that still exists. And I think that solving for frontline people is absolutely huge and giving them things they can come in, get started on day zero.

• 2:53:33Speaker 12

  Absolutely. No big top down rollout. We're also seeing a little bit of a return to the CEO. And I spend a lot of my time, actually, I mean, I spend most of my time just demoing at this point, other CEOs and showing them how I use it. That's the close, because you can't really say it. And I mean, we try in our marketing messaging and everything, like, look at all these examples and everything. But if you see me use it, you go, oh, wait, okay, I got it. This is like this chief of staff that's watching everything and coaching me and giving me the data and, you know. We're having it up at a board meeting. Pat Grady, who I know you guys had on recently, that was a great, great segment there. He had a tweet today about our last board meeting.

• 2:54:16Speaker 12

  And we just had the assistant up on the big screen. There was no deck. It's like I sent a big memo and I sent a memo and a context file so the board can ask questions and get instant answers. But we just had the assistant up on the screen the whole time and there's no like, oh, that's a great question. Let me, you know, get my ops people to circle back or anything. It's like, which changes things, man. It's gonna be interesting.

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:54:41Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, there's so many large software companies that are working to become AI native. The first step is obviously to say that you're AI native, put it on the website. But what are some of the, what are done? What are, what are kind of the challenges having worked in, in big CRM of, of kind of evolving?

• 2:55:02Speaker 12

  Yeah. I mean, if you think about it from the perspective of the AI agent and you really, you know, you switch from putting yourself in the user's perspective and you put yourself in the perspective of Claude or one of these clients that is asking questions and calling tools and trying to solve problems for you, you actually want something pretty different. We had a customer connect their Claude to both HubSpot and Day AI and said, you know, what do you think? And Claude says, are you asking me which I prefer? And she's like, yeah, yeah, I'm asking you, which of these do you like more? And Claude says, well, look,

• 2:55:44Speaker 12

  you know, how do I, how do I explain this? This old CRM is like a spreadsheet. And this Day AI thing is everything that I need to answer any question you have. I can find the answer. Like, let's go. What do you want to know? That's a very different approach that gets all the way down to disk. Like literally all the way down to how you are capturing and storing the data. Having worked on these systems and many versions of these over the years, it, it's a problem that starts at the very lowest parts of the stack to be able to give the agents, you know, this kind of information. I mean, we all know that Opus four or five with the right context window can do magical things. I

• 2:56:26Speaker 12

  mean, it's godlike. So the question is, how do you give it exactly the right piece?

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:56:32Speaker 12

  I don't think it's God. I don't think it's God. I think it's like. It's like definitely.

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  God light.

• 2:56:38Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's like a precursor to like, we're definitely living in a simulation.

• 2:56:43John Coogan?

  We're getting close.

• 2:56:44Speaker 12

  Or five is like about to become the thing we think of as our creator. I think that's like fair to say.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  That's pretty wild. You raised some money. I want to talk about the deal. I want to kick off the Lambda Lightning round. I want to bring down the mallet from the heavens. So I can ring the gong for you. How much did you raise?

• 2:57:02Speaker 12

  Uh, we raised 20 million.

• 2:57:04Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:57:08Jordi Hays?

  From Sequoia and who else?

• 2:57:11Speaker 12

  Sequoia, Permanent Capital, Conviction.

• 2:57:15Jordi Hays?

  Ooh.

• 2:57:15Speaker 12

  Sound Ventures and Green Oaks.

• 2:57:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Bunch of nobodies.

• 2:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Quite, quite the group.

• 2:57:20John Coogan?

  That's a fantastic group.

• 2:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Well done.

• 2:57:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations and I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon. We'll talk to you later.

• 2:57:27Speaker 12

  I hope so. We have a lot coming.

• 2:57:28John Coogan?

  Can't wait for it.

• 2:57:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Christopher. Congrats to the whole team.

• 2:57:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 org- 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And.

• 2:57:46Jordi Hays?

  Up next.

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  Up next.

• 2:57:47Jordi Hays?

  We have Jim.

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  Jim from Shield. Welcome to the TDP in UltraDome.

• 2:57:51Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:57:53Speaker 13

  Good to see you. Thank you for having me.

• 2:57:55Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you here. Uh, quick intro on yourself and what you're working on.

• 2:58:00Speaker 13

  Yeah, my name is Jim Siders. I'm the CEO of Shield Technology Partners, which is an IT services platform, uh, in cooperation with Thrive Holdings. We're bringing IT powered by AI to all these small and medium businesses all across America.

• 2:58:14Jordi Hays?

  Finally. We've been begging for this. No, we've been, we've been excited.

• 2:58:18Speaker 13

  Well, I've been begging for it too. Like, what took so long?

• 2:58:20Jordi Hays?

  I know. I know. Exactly. Um, so you raised 100 million from Thrive today. Uh, when this has been in the works though, for what, like 18 months?

• 2:58:31Speaker 13

  A little less than that. I mean, it's a long-term relationship, right? Like, the whole company was founded in a partnership that included Thrive Holdings at the beginning, and which is when I got involved in the conversation, long before I joined as CEO. And all the way through, we've been thinking about how does holdings support with a strategic investment, this kind of thing, right? We're building this thing for the long term, so we want to make sure that we have the war chest necessary to do the right stuff now.

• 2:58:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. What do the early customer relationships actually look like? I know you're buying some existing companies, so you're inheriting a customer base everywhere you go. I'm sure you're shedding some and then scaling from there. But what is, in the most simple way, what does a business actually look like? What does a work look like today?

• 2:59:20Speaker 13

  Yeah, hopefully, we're shedding as few as possible. I mean, the idea is we're buying quite good IT MSPs all over America who have successful customer bases, who have long-term relationships with folks, and we're leaving them in place, right? We're leaving those customers, we're leaving the people who founded the business, the engineers and technicians who built those relationships. Then we layer on AI and other proprietary stuff on top of it. And the whole goal is that those customers are actually clamoring for more, not churning because they just got bought by a, their IT guy just got bought by a private equity firm or something, right? And so far, so the direct answer to your question, that's been pretty much what we're hearing.

• 3:00:02Speaker 13

  You know, we hear customers going, "Oh, I heard this thing happened. Can you bring some of these Thrive guys over here to talk? Can you bring some Shield guys over here to talk to us about what we can do with IT? We're curious about it and we've never had access." That's exactly the point. That's the whole thing we're going after.

• 3:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 3:00:19John Coogan?

  What, how are you thinking about the broader market and what companies in the, sort of like the small and medium-sized business categories are like most ripe for getting leverage out of AI? We've been tracking, you know, like the ramp AI adoption metrics. Obviously, every tech company has a bunch of subscriptions. And then you go down the list and it's who you think. And it's like, the logging company hasn't adopted AI yet. But what do you think is underrated right now?

• 3:00:48Speaker 13

  Well, I mean, the logging company is a great place to start.

• 3:00:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:00:51Speaker 13

  The thing is, on our side, there's a lot of companies in the real economy.

• 3:00:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:56Speaker 13

  That would benefit from the same kind of things that's creating, you know, AI creating durable value for large enterprises, right? The same thing that should help Airbus or Rio Tinto or whatever should also help like a regional roofing company or a dentist's office chain. So really, the customer selectivity, that's not really where my emphasis is at this point. What I'm looking for is the IT service businesses that have built these really durable relationships, where we get access to problem spaces that we haven't yet seen in the real economy. Because there's going to be something that falls out of it, out of the lived experience of those IT technicians, that we can use in the product motion. At least, that's the.

• 3:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Can you, can you help me understand your thoughts on the, like, the customization of software? Are we going into, it feels like we're going into a world where more and more, more and more software will be custom. There's already big companies that, you know, Palantir, Salesforce, these companies go in and they have a backbone, but then they're doing a lot of custom implementation. There's companies you can hire that will build something completely bespoke for you, whether that's like a consulting group. But then typically, you know, if you're buying a piece of SaaS off the shelf, they're not really doing anything for you, but it feels like now they can with a forward deployed salesperson, forward deployed engineer. How are you, how do you think about that trend? And like, how, like, we're, here

• 3:02:20John Coogan?

  we have like a few vibe-coded custom systems that, you know, a small 10-person team a few years ago, we definitely not have. I can't tell if we're just early adopters of the technology or if this is the future.

• 3:02:36Speaker 13

  Well, there's a few ways I can answer that. I mean, first, I got to confess to a bias, right? I mean, I was a challenger for a long time for a reason, because I think the combination of first principles thinking and the forward deployed motion does yield differentiated results, right? You can see in that company's results that that's true, and in their customers' results that that's true. I think the thing that lets your team benefit from vibe coding a thing that you wouldn't have had access to previously should benefit and can benefit a bunch of different ranges of businesses, right?

• 3:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:07Speaker 13

  And really, the thing that's been holding anybody back from that is economic models more than anything, right? So like, if I'm founding a SaaS company, my investors expect a certain kind of multiple, we expect a certain type of product motion and go-to-market motion, that I have to develop a product from afar, find a customer for it, it has to be designed to be saleable, right? And so, at that point, if it's not informed, really, if you didn't get your product management motion really, really well right out of the gate, it's kind of good luck that it creates durable value for anybody. Whereas, if you do this inside-out development motion, we've seen, like I was saying, creates all this value in the large enterprises, you can find a way to get access to that same problem space, bring that caliber of engineer to the work face, to the mind face.

• 3:03:50Speaker 13

  The thesis is, my belief is, that it's gonna actually produce the same type of differentiated results, which I think the crisp answer to your question is, yeah, I think customized software, like inside-out development, however you want to call it, forward, like, we forward deploy ourselves to vibe code things, like, I think that is the future, no question.

• 3:04:10Jordi Hays?

  How is traditional private equity kind of reacting to the shields of the world? Smart, you know, very sophisticated financially, can raise plenty of money, they're well aware of AI, they think it's gonna be important, you're coming in and you're competing to acquire businesses that might have landed with them historically, I'm imagining you have a very, a pretty exciting value proposition, the team has an amazing track record, incredibly tapped in, well-capitalized, you're saying, like, we want to retain your whole team, we want to keep all of your customers happy, we want to create more value here by growing the business and growing earnings through just like really expanding the customer base.

• 3:04:52Jordi Hays?

  So, it seems really appealing to the seller of a company, somebody, a business owner, but of course, private equity is not gonna just kind of roll over. How have they reacted?

• 3:05:07Speaker 13

  Well, I mean, anecdotally, it seems to me like they're trying to figure out how to get to this same type of goodness. I mean, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not in private equity, so I'm talking out of my wheelhouse. But I mean, one could see that with the amount of competition in the IT, small and medium business space for rollups, just traditional private equity rollups, one would fear that the goodness is getting arped away somehow. At least that would be my, my fear if I was there. So you're looking for something to differentiate it. So then there's this kind of growing crop of like, what does an IT or like a, an AI rollup thing look like? But everybody's kind of talking about it in a very different way. Right? Which is, so one of the things that we're trying to do is not exactly do that.

• 3:05:49Speaker 13

  Like, we kind of rhyme with that in some ways. We rhyme with a, with a rollup in some ways. And we rhyme with a, with a tech company in some ways. What we're trying to do is kind of take the best of breed of all of those mental models and do something a little bit different. So in our case, for example, one, one easy example of several, the relationship with Thrive Holdings gives me a lot longer time horizon, right? I can think about doing something that's really durable. Like, if we're going to change, is one thing to create disruption or take advantage of disruption. If we're going to really change a really entrenched business model, like managed IT services, it's probably going to take a long time, even if we're outrageously successful, right? So having that kind of time horizon to work

• 3:06:27Speaker 13

  with gives me a way to, to address a different thing than any private equity or traditionally, you know, structured private equity rollup would have to, which, de facto, is a good thing, I think. And I think the private equity folks that are paying attention probably see that also.

• 3:06:45John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 3:06:48Jordi Hays?

  We got a dong to hit.

• 3:06:49John Coogan?

  I want to head back on for $100 million right now.

• 3:06:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. Thank you so much. Great to meet you. Come back on if, if there's something in the news that, that you've got a strong opinion on, come back on, or I'm sure you'll be back on for more fundraising.

• 3:07:04Speaker 13

  Please, I'd love to. Thanks so much.

• 3:07:05John Coogan?

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

• 3:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 3:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Up next, we have the king of enterprise software.

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  Live in person.

• 3:07:25John Coogan?

  We have Chris Black back on the show. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBP in Ultra Dome. Good to see you. How you been? How's your 2026 going so far?

• 3:07:39Speaker 14

  So far, so good. I'm happy to be, um, I feel like I'm the, I feel like I'm the brokeest guy that's ever been on the show. So I'm happy to be here. I feel like it's gonna rub off on me a little bit.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  The voice alone is worth 10 billion dollars.

• 3:07:49Speaker 14

  Good, I hope so.

• 3:07:50John Coogan?

  Listen to these pipes. It's amazing.

• 3:07:52Speaker 14

  Uh, 2026's guy was, I stayed out a lot later than I wanted to. Three nights in a row for Grammy celebrations.

• 3:07:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:59Speaker 14

  Well, we're shooting How Long Gone stuff, but I was like, the timing works out. So why don't I just, you know what I mean? Why don't I say?

• 3:08:04Jordi Hays?

  How, how does it work for How Long Gone? Will you stack?

• 3:08:08Speaker 14

  We don't, we don't stack at all.

• 3:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:08:10Speaker 14

  We were, if we, we record on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, and the episodes come out the next day.

• 3:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:08:15Speaker 14

  So Jason edits it, like as, basically as soon as we finish, then it goes up the next day.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  What's the status of the tour?

• 3:08:22Speaker 14

  We just do it sort of whenever, like we kind of summer, um, we're gonna do New York and LA probably. We just wanna recalibrate it, cause it's fun and we like doing it. But I wouldn't say it's a huge upside on the bottom line.

• 3:08:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:08:34Speaker 14

  Just based on our travel, uh, quality of travel and demand, it's into the bottom line profit.

• 3:08:39Jordi Hays?

  We're losing.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  But, uh, the, the, the, the live show, you prepared sort of a presentation. It's more thought, it's not just riffing, right?

• 3:08:50Speaker 14

  This actually, yeah, like last summer, we prepared the How Long Gone guide to life, which was like a PDF presentation.

• 3:08:56John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 3:08:56Speaker 14

  And it worked. It was fun and we did it like standing up, like Ted style.

• 3:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:00Speaker 14

  Um, but the riffing.

• 3:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever give a TED Talk?

• 3:09:03Speaker 14

  No, I wish. God, imagine with the fucking mic. No, I mean.

• 3:09:06Jordi Hays?

  No, when you look at some TED Talks, when you think of the TED Talk era in hindsight, there's so much, so much opportunity to like go back and just like sign, get, get yourself a TED Talk and deliver the most like ridiculous.

• 3:09:18Speaker 14

  Cause if you look through it, there's, there's some, it ain't A-list.

• 3:09:21John Coogan?

  No, well, so, so, so they had, they had TEDx.

• 3:09:23Jordi Hays?

  They were farming TED.

• 3:09:24John Coogan?

  So, so TEDx was independent. So anyone could set one up.

• 3:09:28Speaker 14

  I didn't realize it was independent.

• 3:09:29John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So, so they, they, they, they sort of licensed their brand and anyone, so they would do like TEDx. Ex-Boston University.

• 3:09:35Speaker 14

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:36John Coogan?

  And it would just be like a local kid that was like organizing and being like, come talk. And it and and depending on how much they put into production, it could either look a lot like the TED stage or just like a couple of people in a conference room.

• 3:09:47Speaker 14

  Open mic night.

• 3:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it basically open night, right? And those.

• 3:09:49Speaker 14

  I didn't know that.

• 3:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, and aesthetically, those don't hit.

• 3:09:52Jordi Hays?

  For the LinkedIn crowd.

• 3:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no. And and so I.

• 3:09:55Speaker 14

  Nothing better.

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  I remember.

• 3:09:56Speaker 14

  Think of more.

• 3:09:57John Coogan?

  I went to one in Boston with a guy who created Android, who probably should be giving like a real TED Talk. That's kind of cool.

• 3:10:02Speaker 14

  Yeah, it feels real.

• 3:10:02John Coogan?

  But he was basically just giving a tech talk with a couple of other people. Here's my thoughts on open source software, whatever. Uh, but it was just him filmed like three chairs in a conference room against the wall. So even if you see it and it says TEDx, you're like, that doesn't feel like a TED Talk.

• 3:10:15Speaker 14

  Yeah, no.

• 3:10:15John Coogan?

  But certain places would put the red dot on the ground, give you the mic. You'd be walking around, have the cue cards and everything. And like, I think it's wild.

• 3:10:23Speaker 14

  The best one I ever saw that appealed to me was Mark Ronson.

• 3:10:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:10:26Speaker 14

  Because he like broke down.

• 3:10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:27Speaker 14

  How like a beat is made, basically, for all these nerds.

• 3:10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:10:31Speaker 14

  And I could see their third eye expanding in a way. It's like, holy shit, this is actually so interesting and cool.

• 3:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:10:37Speaker 14

  But most of those were not for me. I can't say I devoured the catalog.

• 3:10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:41Speaker 14

  On the YouTube, on the YouTube channel. I can't, I can't, I can't stay clamped on that.

• 3:10:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what what were you devouring at the time? This was like oh eight, twenty ten era.

• 3:10:49Speaker 14

  Mostly cocaine, but I mean, I guess there's, I guess there's some. I was probably, I was going out a lot. That was like New York era. I I feel like that was honestly like music blog.

• 3:11:00John Coogan?

  Hype machine?

• 3:11:01Speaker 14

  I was more of like a Stereogum, Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, like sort of like that, which is kind of back now.

• 3:11:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:08Speaker 14

  I mean, we went to the Pitchfork party this weekend. It was one of the best parties at the Grammy. It was really fun.

• 3:11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:12Speaker 14

  And I think that it's like, I don't know if you guys are up on the paywall discourse around Pitchfork.

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  Not at all.

• 3:11:17Speaker 14

  They basically put up a paywall.

• 3:11:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:11:19Speaker 14

  And the the crux of it, to my understanding, is that you can, basically, you can rate albums.

• 3:11:25John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:11:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:11:27Speaker 14

  Famously, the appeal of Pitchfork is the numerical score.

• 3:11:29John Coogan?

  Numerical score, but sort of brutal, right? Sometimes they'll give someone like a four out of 10.

• 3:11:33Speaker 14

  But sometimes the, often times, the score doesn't necessarily match the actual review, but no one's going to read the actual, you know what I mean? Only the heads read. So it could be like a five, but then you read it and it's like, oh, it's not that bad.

• 3:11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:45Speaker 14

  There's a little bit of a disconnect sometimes.

• 3:11:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:48Speaker 14

  So they're giving people the option, which I'm pretty bullish on because I think that everyone on the internet thinks they're an expert or critic and thinks they need to be heard. It's like the Letterboxd.

• 3:11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 3:11:58Speaker 14

  And I think that there's plenty of.

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  Rotten Tomatoes has the tomato meter.

• 3:12:02Speaker 14

  Exactly.

• 3:12:02John Coogan?

  Metacritic has the audience score.

• 3:12:04Speaker 14

  Mouth breathing music fans that think that they should be able to rate the My Morning Jacket record, how they feel.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  How they feel, yeah.

• 3:12:11Speaker 14

  You can't underestimate the passion of these civilians.

• 3:12:13John Coogan?

  You pay them, they send you a text file, you can write whatever you want about My Morning Jacket.

• 3:12:19Jordi Hays?

  They print it out.

• 3:12:19John Coogan?

  If you want 10 out of 10, we'll just show that right to you.

• 3:12:22Speaker 14

  It was a controversial idea, but I think it's actually quite smart.

• 3:12:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:12:26Speaker 14

  Cause it doesn't, it doesn't like, the critic part of it is still gonna be there, so it doesn't dilute the overall, you know what I mean?

• 3:12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:12:32Speaker 14

  A little bit to me.

• 3:12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:33Speaker 14

  But it's, but it's, you know, the, it's a elevated comment section in some ways, which is a scary thing to consider.

• 3:12:38John Coogan?

  In our world, Davos came back just this year.

• 3:12:41Speaker 14

  Yes, sure.

• 3:12:42John Coogan?

  It's South by South. They should have had you at Davos, for sure.

• 3:12:45Speaker 14

  Yeah, we were, yeah, that's, we're open to that if Davos is listening.

• 3:12:48John Coogan?

  Any hope for South by Southwest making a comeback, any other conferences or media?

• 3:12:53Speaker 14

  I think South by Southwest has actually done pretty well because they pivoted to like internet shit.

• 3:12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:58Speaker 14

  It's not about, it's not bands playing sponsored by Sparks at 3:00 in the afternoon. Now it's like a little more serious and there's a film aspect to it.

• 3:13:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:04Speaker 14

  Um, I think it's just moved away from music.

• 3:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:08Speaker 14

  A little bit. Like, it's still a part of it, but it's more of an element instead of a focus.

• 3:13:11John Coogan?

  I'm just wondering if it comes back and they, and they really play into the music thing.

• 3:13:15Speaker 14

  I just think that it's sort of, I, I mean, there's a possibility only because I think right now we're seeing a real swing back to like guitar music.

• 3:13:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:22Speaker 14

  Because, I mean, not only.

• 3:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Guitar low key fell off.

• 3:13:25Speaker 14

  Low key fell off hard. Not even low key, I would say high key fell off. And I think the diff, now that that.

• 3:13:30Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was telling me, a buddy was at like Guitar Center the other day and he was like.

• 3:13:35John Coogan?

  Sold out?

• 3:13:35Jordi Hays?

  In Hollywood.

• 3:13:36Speaker 14

  No guitars left?

• 3:13:36Jordi Hays?

  No, no. He said it was like every single guitar was like on a crazy sale. It's probably like a Q4 glut, you know?

• 3:13:44John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:13:44Speaker 14

  Yeah, I mean.

• 3:13:45Jordi Hays?

  But I was like, I just remember being a kid, like wanting like, like I, I played guitar, like, you know, every single day growing up and all these guitars that like were just so out of reach.

• 3:13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Now I'm, now, I, I don't know, I can see it. It's the perfect analog, like.

• 3:14:02Speaker 14

  Yeah, I mean, it's like anything else. It's sort of like. I mean, music always goes in phases like that, you know, like, not generationally, but maybe like by decade, I would say. And I think the chart thing, even though I hate to pay attention to it, or like streaming numbers or whatever, it's real. You know, like, there hasn't been a hip hop song in the top 10 or something for like, it's an interesting thing that's happening, and the geese of it all.

• 3:14:21John Coogan?

  Wait, isn't S D Kid top 10, I assume?

• 3:14:24Speaker 14

  No.

• 3:14:24John Coogan?

  No?

• 3:14:24Speaker 14

  No, no, no. He's, he's, he's.

• 3:14:26John Coogan?

  Based on Instagram reels.

• 3:14:27Speaker 14

  On your algorithm.

• 3:14:28John Coogan?

  On my algorithm.

• 3:14:28Speaker 14

  I mean, that's the thing, there's no monoculture, so it's sort of like, you see what you want to see to some extent. But I think that the, the geese is the big sort of thing that people are talking about because it's culturally so relevant.

• 3:14:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:14:39Speaker 14

  And it's making people mad in a way that's like, sort of exciting, and people fucking hate it as much as they like it.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  Tell me more of the story.

• 3:14:44Speaker 14

  I mean, Geese is a band from New York that's put out a couple of records that are really young, and it's, it's just really polarizing. I mean, it's like this guy Cameron Winter is the singer, he's a, like, he put out a solo record, he's a generational sort of talent.

• 3:14:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:14:56Speaker 14

  It's sort of like a Neil Young, Thom Yorke, but they played S N L and people were very mad, like, this is the worst shit I've ever seen.

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:02Jordi Hays?

  They just didn't like the way it sounded?

• 3:15:04Speaker 14

  Yeah, how they look, how they sound, the whole, you know.

• 3:15:06John Coogan?

  Lana Del Rey had a similar S N L experience.

• 3:15:08Speaker 14

  It happens often because S N L is, I mean, that's as middle of the road as you're gonna get.

• 3:15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but it seems like some of their content booking is like, a little ahead of their curve.

• 3:15:18Speaker 14

  They're, they're usually, I mean, they're good in general at, at taking a few risks. For every Cardi B and Mumford and Sons, there's a Geese that sort of like, they take a swing and that's what they're known for.

• 3:15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:29Speaker 14

  I mean, we sound like boom, I mean, I get called a boomer for watching S N L, um, and I will take that, I, I deserve that lump, I think it's real.

• 3:15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:37Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what happens to, what happens to the late night shows in general? I feel like they thrived in a, when you had a monoculture, you had the whole world fixated on, uh, the same types of things. Now, it's like, you turn it on and you, you realistically to like, appeal to the broad enough audience, you gotta have.

• 3:15:55Speaker 14

  It's impossible.

• 3:15:55Jordi Hays?

  Twenty night, twenty, twenty shows that were taking the place of, and the internet sort of does that, but.

• 3:16:01Speaker 14

  I think it's, I mean, I think it, as much as I have a respect for it and love to replace them in some ways, uh, I think it's sort of, it, we're at the end. I mean, I think that like celebrities need places to promote their projects and that is not going to go away. But there's shit like this and that gets more eyeballs and is, feels more relevant. And I think that like, you can go on Dax Shepard.

• 3:16:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16:22Speaker 14

  And it's gonna do more for your movie or your album or your book.

• 3:16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:26Speaker 14

  Than it is to go on Stephen Colbert. That's just the reality. And it's like, I'm more concerned with the loss of the music performances because I think NPR tiny desk is like corny.

• 3:16:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:34Speaker 14

  But I think there's, I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching like, performances from the nineties, eighties, whatever.

• 3:16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:40Speaker 14

  And I think that magic is what.

• 3:16:42John Coogan?

  But you can reconstitute that on the internet. I feel like you.

• 3:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why don't you guys do that?

• 3:16:45Speaker 14

  I mean, we, no, we're trying to do it and we've talked about it a lot. And I think it's, it's a, it's easy in theory.

• 3:16:50John Coogan?

  There's nothing that says that Dax Shepard can't open with a monologue, have three guests and then a musical performance.

• 3:16:55Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 3:16:55John Coogan?

  And then just.

• 3:16:56Speaker 14

  His musical performance would be Kid Rock. That's the problem.

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. But, but you do something different, but, but, but just the fact that it's an RSS.

• 3:17:02Jordi Hays?

  I think there's something to be, we've talked about, we've talked about this. I, I, I feel like you guys getting, like a space like this in New York.

• 3:17:09John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Like where it's full-time dedicated, people are coming to you will change. Uh, we, we gave this advice to some of our other buddies that have had a podcast for a really long time. We're like, dude, it's kind of a nightmare having to like travel around and all and like, you know, constantly on the move.

• 3:17:24Speaker 14

  We, we're, we only do audio really.

• 3:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:27Speaker 14

  And I think we've, I'm here, we branch out, we did like a year in review.

• 3:17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:30Speaker 14

  And it did really well. So now we're going to try to do the, we should have a studio in Burbank and we shoot these sort of like, Weekend Update Talk Soup style, sort of like monthly wrap-ups where it's, you know, it's us at the desk. We're talking about stuff. You see the image over our shoulder.

• 3:17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:43Speaker 14

  And that's gonna, I think that's what we want to do.

• 3:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Turn it into bring, have a small live audience, have, have, have like a stage that people can perform on.

• 3:17:51Speaker 14

  That's the idea.

• 3:17:52Jordi Hays?

  Start doing it, start doing it live. Yeah.

• 3:17:54Speaker 14

  And it's just, I mean, it's just, it's, it's all about scheduling. But what we've learned from doing the podcast is audio only is that, you just get access. Also, we don't ever, we're never in the same room.

• 3:18:04John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 3:18:04Speaker 14

  It's all. Zoo and I think it just allows a different like it gets looser. I think

• 3:18:09John Coogan?

  Totally. It feels much more protected.

• 3:18:11Speaker 14

  There's no hair and makeup. There's no you need to send a car. There's no, there's no like pretense to it. Like you can do it in your hotel room, wherever you are, as long as you have wifi and headphones. And I, I, the same way we're sort of like anti paywall and it's costing me a lot of money. It's a similar thing where like audio is the real medium. It's like all these new Netflix things. Like Pete Davidson, having a talk show on Netflix is not a podcast. It's a talk show on Netflix. It's not

• 3:18:34John Coogan?

  First time.

• 3:18:34Speaker 14

  There's no audio. There's no RSS feed. It's not. Yeah. I mean, he's, they're doing a lot of the, I mean, they're, they're, they're showing podcasts that exist, like shit from the ringer, but they're also launching these shows and paying these people a fucking fortune. But it's, it's just a show.

• 3:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever thought about selling out?

• 3:18:51Speaker 14

  Look, I would love to sell out. It just has to be on my like archaic terms. I would love to sell out. Every day I want to sell.

• 3:18:58John Coogan?

  Extremely complex rider.

• 3:18:59Speaker 14

  But when I'm here, when I'm here, I'm like, this is how it's supposed to be done. Like this is such an operation. And I knew what I was getting into to an extent, but being here, I'm like, oh, this is what it requires. To do something on this level. And it's, it's a lot.

• 3:19:10John Coogan?

  You need a horse.

• 3:19:11Speaker 14

  Yeah, you need a

• 3:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something, something about it, something about it.

• 3:19:14John Coogan?

  That's a musical instrument. The guys told me how much that thing costs. I was like, I can't believe you guys spent that much. They're expensive.

• 3:19:20Speaker 14

  I actually knew that.

• 3:19:22Jordi Hays?

  There's something about, uh, that, that we appreciate the, like, some people would say it's monotonous, but I actually appreciate just waking up and going to work. It's like making content.

• 3:19:33Speaker 14

  No, I think, I think treating, I think treating it like that and the way you guys have treated it and the way you've approached it is why it works. There's, there's a level and, and we feel the same way. It's like, we do three shows a week, which is pretty psycho. I mean, not like

• 3:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Considering you're not in the same place.

• 3:19:47Speaker 14

  Jason edits and I book. We do it all ourselves, but I think that the, I think that once you lock into a system like that and people are looking for it and expecting it. And you deliver on that, they stay with you. They won't. I mean, you guys are doing news and like, you're really covering like a breadth of industries. So it's different. There's like a value proposition of like information, which I think is much more than us talking about, you know.

• 3:20:08Jordi Hays?

  Culture. Yeah. What, what, so, uh, Grammys last night, you've been in town hanging out.

• 3:20:14Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 3:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Bumping shoulders with, uh,

• 3:20:16John Coogan?

  Bumping elbows.

• 3:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Elite. What are the convert, outside of culture war and politics, what are people talking about? Or like, how much is like AI being discussed? Specifically in the music context.

• 3:20:32Speaker 14

  I mean, I think that musicians are mad about everything all the time, sort of. Even the most successful ones. That's part of the personality makeup, I think, to be that. I mean, I think that fear is real, and I think every day there's a new story that there's some anonymous AI guy that just made $5 million streaming, you know, or whatever through Spotify royalties. I mean, I think the real conversation that's that's being had or that I've seen a little bit of is is people coming out and saying, no, no, I use it to help me edit or do this and it sped up the process. You know, 10, 10x.

• 3:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:04Speaker 14

  And I think it's like anything else, man. It's like it's coming.

• 3:21:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:21:07Speaker 14

  How can you, how can you utilize it in a way that feels ethical and good to you? That doesn't compromise the art? And I think that's, that's the challenge everybody has, and I'm sure there's going to be people that are like, fuck that, I'm never doing that. And there's going to be people that adapt and there's going to be, you know, like a will I am type who takes it too far. And that, you know, there's a range, there's always a range of people that want to experiment, but I think that that, I think with music, there's ticket prices, there's, you know, royal streaming royalties, there's so many battles that they're fighting all the time. That is sort of, I almost feel like AI is kind of like, feels like it's in the distance a little bit, honestly, because there's.

• 3:21:40John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:21:41Speaker 14

  I mean, it's, it's coming, but I think there's so many immediate things that they're concerned with as far as sort of, you know, just like respect and money.

• 3:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there, is there some sort of alliance between like, reaction to streaming is you need a really strong live performance schedule. The concert becomes more important, creating like the Taylor Swift effect becomes more important.

• 3:22:03Speaker 14

  It's almost what's so cra- well, the real driver is, is TikTok.

• 3:22:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:22:09Speaker 14

  Like if you have, I mean, I've had several friends that were relatively successful musicians in the aughts. Have a song go viral and now they have a platinum record, they bought an apartment, they're on tour selling tickets. That, and you can't plan for that, labels can't manufacture that, sort of God's plan.

• 3:22:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:22:24Speaker 14

  And or but like Olivia Dean, who won best new artist last night. People say she sounds like TJ Maxx. I like it. I think it's a hit. It's a hit song. But the part of it is that it became a TikTok thing.

• 3:22:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:22:34Speaker 14

  And it's like, it's that good. You need more things. You know, it has to be a multitude of things kind of coming together to make it work.

• 3:22:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:43Speaker 14

  But I think touring is just, I just wrote this in my GQ column, I wrote about the Harry Styles ticket price thing because people are really upset. His tickets are expensive. And everybody's tickets are fucking expensive.

• 3:22:53John Coogan?

  Second market, secondary.

• 3:22:54Speaker 14

  He's doing 30 days at Madison Square Garden. He's doing 30 nights at MSG.

• 3:22:58Jordi Hays?

  30 days in a row.

• 3:23:00Speaker 14

  It's unbelievable. And MSG is also historically the most expensive venue because of unions.

• 3:23:04John Coogan?

  And you think that, you think that with 30 days of supply.

• 3:23:07Jordi Hays?

  Ticket sales.

• 3:23:07Speaker 14

  Well, that's, that's the question. People are like, he's greedy. And I'm like, well, sure. I think there's some truth to that. But also, I think, the discussion I'm more interested in having is like, what do you guys want? Like, because he can fight Ticketmaster like Pearl Jam. He can, but he can also, the production that fans want costs a lot of money.

• 3:23:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:23:25Speaker 14

  When Harry Styles is on tour, he's got fucking 30 trucks.

• 3:23:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:28Speaker 14

  It's a lot of, it's 300 people. It's a, you know.

• 3:23:30John Coogan?

  Lights guy, smoke guy.

• 3:23:31Speaker 14

  Circus. It's really big. And I think that the cost that go into it is sort of lost in the fan, but then from the fan side, they're like, this is untenable. Like, I can't pay this much. I have 10 artists.

• 3:23:41Jordi Hays?

  What's the cheapest ticket?

• 3:23:43Speaker 14

  I mean, in theory, it's $100, $200.

• 3:23:45Jordi Hays?

  But it's immediately reselling.

• 3:23:46Speaker 14

  That's the issue.

• 3:23:47Jordi Hays?

  But then that just proves that it doesn't really matter where he prices it, the demand will be there.

• 3:23:51Speaker 14

  That was my whole kind of thesis.

• 3:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you basically could just, it's like, like, look at the secondary price and then look at what he's charging. And like, greedy would just be charging the secondary price. And we see that, we see this every, you know, look in cars and watches, any category with way more demand than supply. Manufacturers will just be like, wait, like, this GT3 RS is selling for like 50K over sticker? Like, okay, well, we're just going to do that at the dealer level now. Or secondary, like, look at AP. AP moved up the retail on the Royal Oak just because there was enough demand. And like, it actually kind of like, normalizes the secondary market, but, but you're still paying like.

• 3:24:31Speaker 14

  I just think if you think that, I think if you need to place blame on someone, it's going to be the resellers, the bots and Ticketmaster.

• 3:24:38John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 3:24:38Speaker 14

  Like, I don't necessarily think it's Harry. My point is, it's not Harry Styles. And sure, maybe he could put his foot down.

• 3:24:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:44Speaker 14

  And, and like, make a case. But we don't know the ins and outs of that, the difficulties of that, or how that would actually affect the product.

• 3:24:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:49Speaker 14

  You know what I mean? And that's, that's the issue.

• 3:24:51Jordi Hays?

  So you think the solution is NFTs?

• 3:24:53Speaker 14

  Always the solution to any problem is an FP. That is for 100%. That's 100% fact.

• 3:24:58Jordi Hays?

  What uh, what's going on? Give us an update. Just broad update on menswear. We don't talk about it.

• 3:25:04Speaker 14

  Oh wow.

• 3:25:05Jordi Hays?

  We don't talk about, we don't talk about it much. We obviously normally wear suits.

• 3:25:09Speaker 14

  I, I actually.

• 3:25:09John Coogan?

  I got the memo today.

• 3:25:11Speaker 14

  I was, it's funny. I wore a suit to, Charlie had a, a party last night at Chateau Marmont. I wore a suit and we.

• 3:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Charlie.

• 3:25:17Speaker 14

  Charlie XCX and we had to record this morning.

• 3:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:19Speaker 14

  Our thing and we, but Jason and I both usually wear suits and I text him like, hey man, maybe today can we not? We should wear regular.

• 3:25:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:26Speaker 14

  Couldn't do it.

• 3:25:27Jordi Hays?

  I feel like slacking off.

• 3:25:28Speaker 14

  I see you're in the same boat. Um, honestly, it is getting a little more formal in a way that I think is really positive. Like it's sort of logo mania is over.

• 3:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:25:35Speaker 14

  I think it's a little bit of like Jonathan Anderson at Dior showing ties. Like it's a little more sort of suiting, I think. And like, stuff that I think is more flattering and generally easier to wear in a lot of ways. Like I think like, you guys can wear suits. You guys cannot wear like dumb Balenciaga or whatever. You know what I mean?

• 3:25:53Jordi Hays?

  Watch me. We've thought about, we've thought about.

• 3:25:55Speaker 14

  You could, you could do it if you want. I don't know if it'd be successful.

• 3:25:57Jordi Hays?

  John, John made this, this image. It was like a steal, steal his look image and he's like.

• 3:26:02John Coogan?

  It's a $100,000 outfit. Chrome Hearts hat, Chrome Heart belt, supreme with the Louis Vuitton, then, uh, Bottega Veneta Roman weave jacket.

• 3:26:12Speaker 14

  What level of, what is your, how much Chrome knowledge do you two have?

• 3:26:16John Coogan?

  Zero. I know nothing.

• 3:26:17Jordi Hays?

  John had zero. I, I just know.

• 3:26:20John Coogan?

  I, I thought all of these brands were.

• 3:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:23John Coogan?

  I found out that Balenciaga is like an old company. I thought it was like a new thing from like a couple of years ago. Hundreds of years.

• 3:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so when I moved to Malibu, I, I, I would always, I, I, I will be, I'll admit I didn't know nothing about Chrome and uh.

• 3:26:38Speaker 14

  I love it. You have a G-Wagon, don't you? You don't know about Chrome?

• 3:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Somehow, somehow. It's kind of like, hey, I'm a, I'm unique. I'm a special snowflake. I'm the only G-Wagon owner that doesn't.

• 3:26:49John Coogan?

  No Chrome.

• 3:26:50Jordi Hays?

  No Chrome. So I moved to Malibu and I'm like, why are all these kids? It's the younger generation, right? To Malibu, the, the owners of Chrome Hearts have lived in Malibu forever.

• 3:26:58Speaker 14

  The Starks have.

• 3:26:59Jordi Hays?

  They now, yeah. So, so, so they own the Surf Rider now, which is also interesting. But I moved there, I'm like, why are all these like 12, 12 year old like kids running around wearing chrome? Like you live at the beach, why are you wearing like this like black sweatshirt? It made no sense. I was like lighting up a little bit because I just always associate the clothing with like kind of just emo darkness.

• 3:27:20Speaker 14

  You, you got it wrong, bro. You, you need some chrome. You guys need, so the jeans, we could get you some jeans.

• 3:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:26Speaker 14

  15,000.

• 3:27:31Speaker 14

  It's a custom pair of Levi's, but they put the leather cross patches. So depending on patch amount,

• 3:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 3:27:36Speaker 14

  the price is going up. So I would do something tasteful with all the chrome rivets.

• 3:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:27:40Speaker 14

  And maybe a single patch.

• 3:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:27:42Speaker 14

  So just a one patch. You guys need hella patches.

• 3:27:46Jordi Hays?

  John, this is why I always said, so I always said that the top of the market cycle.

• 3:27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:51Jordi Hays?

  Will be when a kid is standing YC demo day, you know, where the founder's pitching, he's got this all just full chrome. Full chrome. No, I don't think it's happened yet.

• 3:28:00John Coogan?

  Was there, was there some CEO that was caught with a Chrome Hearts jacket?

• 3:28:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. There, there, there's definitely been, uh, some, some people have think they can be sneaky and be like, oh yeah, I'm just like, I'm just a founder. I'm scrappy and they're wearing the leather jacket without the logos and people clock it.

• 3:28:16John Coogan?

  Oh, we know what you're doing.

• 3:28:17Speaker 14

  Yeah, I need to get you guys. Yeah. But as far, as far as, um, as far as the menswear thing goes, everything's sort of calmed down, which I think is good. I mean, I started, I literally, I started a brand at the end of last year. Um, they've been working on for a couple of years called Hanover and it's been an interesting, someone who's worked peripher, you know, in fashion for 10 years, 15 years. Doing your own thing is a, a whole different animal, I will say. But our, our proposition is everything is really affordable. It's all made in USA. So it's like, we're all, we're making it in LA.

• 3:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 3:28:46Speaker 14

  Um, but it's really simple.

• 3:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've been shocked because we make, we make stuff, uh, we like, we're, this is something, you know, we made for Turbo Puffer, one of our sponsors.

• 3:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was not enough enterprise.

• 3:28:56Jordi Hays?

  And comparing, so, yeah, so comparing, comparing the prices in China versus here.

• 3:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, China is incredibly, they make great clothing that's inexpensive. But when you look at when I, when we've gone kind of like line by line and looked at these different items, I'm like, okay, I could pay $70 for this and it gets made here in LA and I'll be done in three weeks. Or I can deal with like months and months.

• 3:29:22Speaker 14

  It might come on a boat.

• 3:29:23Jordi Hays?

  It might, it'll come, yeah, it'll come on a boat and it'll cost like $95.

• 3:29:26John Coogan?

  It's like not that much.

• 3:29:27Jordi Hays?

  For us, for us, there's like no question, we want to make it here because we're not in the business of clothing.

• 3:29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:33Jordi Hays?

  Right? So the margin is like less.

• 3:29:35Speaker 14

  It's negligible.

• 3:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, but, but still, it's not, it's not as like, it's not like a 10x difference, which I think a lot of people assume.

• 3:29:42Speaker 14

  I think that, I, I mean, I think that I came up in an era where that was important, like Made in USA was important and I don't, I don't necessarily think it's important per se, but the idea of being able to do it was pretty compelling.

• 3:29:53Jordi Hays?

  It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's more enjoyable. That's why I've always thought people.

• 3:29:57Speaker 14

  The process.

• 3:29:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And like the people that are like drop shippers being like, oh yeah, like e-comm is so great. If you want to like live in Thailand, I'm like, have you ever made anything? Like, can you imagine like trying to iterate on like a physical product, living in like some random place?

• 3:30:11Speaker 14

  I mean, that's the thing. That's, I think that's the thing that I, you're right. It's like, what's the, what's it worth? You know, my time and my effort and my stress level, like what is it worth? Um, but it's, it's been fun so far and it's going well, but I think it's just like a.

• 3:30:23Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the, what's the strategy? Like doing collections, drops?

• 3:30:28Speaker 14

  Quarterly, yeah, but it's basically, I mean, the start was t-shirts, denim, sweats and the denim did really well. We're going to introduce another fit. So it's, it's sort of like, you do stuff, you see what works.

• 3:30:38John Coogan?

  Is that that 15,000 price point?

• 3:30:39Speaker 14

  It's 15,000 price point. Actually, it's currently a sub 300.

• 3:30:43John Coogan?

  Oh, very.

• 3:30:44Speaker 14

  Everything, which is pretty strong.

• 3:30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:46Speaker 14

  We, we get to 15,000, then you can buy something.

• 3:30:48John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, we have to get to a flight.

• 3:30:50Speaker 14

  Of course.

• 3:30:50John Coogan?

  I don't know if you want to plant the bomb, Jordy, but I have one last question. Dream guests. Do you have dream guests? We don't really have dream guests because it's very opportunistic. It's like whoever's hot right now, we want to talk to. So we don't have a list, but.

• 3:31:01Speaker 14

  Honestly, I, I always like to say, I like to be surprised, but after Ben Affleck has been on this press tour with Matt Damon for that new movie, he's so smart and he's so well spoken. I would really like to talk to Ben Affleck.

• 3:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Hanover dash USA.

• 3:31:15John Coogan?

  Go check it out.

• 3:31:16Speaker 14

  Thank you.

• 3:31:16John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Buy everything.

• 3:31:18John Coogan?

  We will be live tomorrow from Cisco AI Summit, 11 AM Pacific sharp.

• 3:31:22Jordi Hays?

  Thanks.

• 3:31:22John Coogan?

  And goodbye.

• 3:31:24Speaker 14

  Thank you.

• 3:31:27Speaker 02

  Nice work brothers, I'll see you on the next one.