Grok Deep Dive, 200,000 GPU's in Memphis, There's No Moat?, Time is Money, Tell Me a Joke

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. Jordy Lockin, because we are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's right. Today is Tuesday, February 18th, 2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you guys. We got a Grok 3 deep dive. We're breaking it down. I got early access. I ran the same deep research prompt through OpenAI Deep Research and through Grok. We're going to break down each analysis and the prompt I used is about AI and how these how these LLMs are progressing and some benchmarking stuff. So it'll be a good educational experience for you and you'll also get to make your own

• 0:42John Coogan?

  call on which one you think is better. But you got to play with these to understand them. We got a ton of other stuff. There's a deep dive in the Wall Street Journal about how Elon Musk and Sam Altman, kind of their relationship soured. We'll be putting that in the truth zone if there's any untruths in there. And it's also a massive launch day because our boy Alexander Karp, his book is officially live. Let's go. The doctor. The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Power, and the Future of the West. It's available now. If you preorder it, it should be on your doorstep soon. It's available on Audible and we highly recommend it. We're big fans of Karp over here at TBPN. And so

• 1:22John Coogan?

  let's kick it off with Grok 3. I got access, I think on Sunday. I had it due the first prompt, which was tell me a joke. Make sure it's actually funny, original, and insightful. My favorite comedians are Shane Gillis, Norm MacDonald, etc. Structure the joke like an actual stand-up set, not like a knock-knock joke or a basic question-answer type joke. And so here's what Grok said. You couldn't have been more clear. Couldn't have been more clear. And let's see if AI is taking my job as a comedian, news podcaster, tech analyst, venture capitalist. Word sell.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Grok says, "You ever notice how AI is supposed to take over the world, but it's still out here struggling to understand my mom's accent when she yells at Siri? Like, we're all worried about Skynet, but meanwhile Siri's over here going, I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Did you say turn on the lights or burn down the house?" And it's not just Siri, right? All these tech bros are like, AI is going to replace your job, man. But I'm like, bro, AI can't even replace my fantasy football lineup without benching Patrick Mahomes for a kicker. Meanwhile, I'm getting texts from my buddy who's a product manager and his Apple Watch is like, meeting's starting and he's sprinting across the office like he's running the Dakar Rally. AI is not taking over the world.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  It's too busy trying to figure out if we're asking for a weather report or confessing to a crime. By the time it gets there, we'll all be living on the moon anyway, probably because some founder convinced us it's the next big VC flex.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  It's so, so this is so jarring to listen to because it sounds like, like it's structured in a way that it should be funny, but it's just completely not. And so your, your brain is sort of like yearning for a zinger and it just never comes. You're perpetually in this state of, of like hoping you're going to hear that sweet note of the zinger. And it just doesn't come.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  But I do think the, you know, the, obviously the, the benchmarks for Grok 3 are incredible. There will go into all that. There's a lot of good stuff in here. I think what's interesting about this is that Grok 3, clearly this is trained on my feed because in my last 10 tweets, I posted Dakar Rally, Patrick Mahomes. I also posted something about, um, uh, in here, I said, uh, uh, uh, product manager and the Apple Watch. Remember that post? You actually fed that one to me. And so it clearly took that text in and said, oh, okay. Uh, this user, this person who's prompting me, uh, likes Apple Watches and product managers and will get those jokes maybe.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  But it didn't really integrate it properly in an interesting way. And I was, uh, I was texting with one of the XAI guys and was like, this is really interesting. Like, I don't know if I like this, but I think this could be really cool for certain prompts. And it could make it so that, sure, sometimes I want a vanilla, like clean LLM installation where I Come to it, it doesn't know anything about me and I, and I give it a really robust prompt and it doesn't assume anything. And then other times I'm going to want it to really know, oh, this guy's like super in group in this particular niche. He's down the rabbit hole on this. So all of a sudden, if I'm explaining, you know, like VC fund dynamics, I can be super jargony and super, and super in group and super detailed.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  But then if I'm, if I'm explaining like oil and gas to this guy, he doesn't know anything about oil exploration. So I gotta keep that high level. That's actually a benefit to me and that would be really cool. So I think fine tuning the, the models on the individual person's timeline, whatever you can get information about them. That could be very cool, but in this case it was very, very silly.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny to have this many things that are aligned to the stuff that you post about and botch it this hard. I'm getting texts from my buddy who's a product manager and his Apple watch is like meetings starting. Because you posted about the, you posted the white lotus reference of the product manager. And he's sprinting across the office like he's running the Dakar rally. Like it just doesn't combine at all.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. How does that go with AI supposed to take over the world? Like, I don't, I don't get it. Anyway, Grok three, I don't think there is a good comedy eval right now. They're not even benchmarking it.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this, what we, before we came online, the evals are hyper fixated on these sort of ultra complex problems. And they clearly massively struggle on like a comedy eval, right? Like that would, like, somebody should make the comedy eval that basically says, I asked, you know, all these foundation models to make various types of jokes. This is the funniest joke. I tested it against real humans to see if they laugh, right? And so that's a totally valid way to test a model because being able to produce jokes is a, you know, there's sort of comedic intelligence.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  And so it's not just about solving these sort of esoteric problems that nobody thinks about all day long. I think that Grok could potentially get the. Most extreme product market fit and what this like specific response tells me they're going towards is they want to have like the current thing happen and then somebody be able to generate a post that's hyper relevant to what they talk about for that specific moment in time. And in many ways, when, when, when the timeline is just, is just model on model on model on model, that will be like some form of, you know, comedic general intelligence.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were joking about X potentially setting up the at chat handle. I just saw Mike Solana posted chat, what's going on with these airplanes and, and just saying like, hey, chat, like, is this real? Chat, is this real? Is like a common online internet phrase these days. And so I could definitely see Grok be instantiated as a, as a player character, an NPC on X in a way that it could interact with a lot of posts or, or be someone that's integrated. It's also interesting looking at the XAI launch stream, looking at what Elon was pushing the engineers on. So he's like, okay, we have, we have this breakthrough. We

• 7:42John Coogan?

  have the cutting edge LLM. When are we going to solve Reiman? He's talking about the Reiman hypothesis, which is the kind of like the hardest mathematical problem that we haven't, humanity hasn't solved yet. And the, and the XAI engineers kind of joking, well, as long as we have a random string generator, like something that just randomly generates words and then a validator and enough compute time, you should just be able to brute force it. And they're kind of joking around, but it's very clear that they are focused on fundamental math, fundamental physics, breakthroughs in science and technology. And that's just a completely different vector of optimization against comedy. Anyway, let's move on to Ben Thompson, who already posted an update breaking down Grok 3.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Real, real quick, let's talk about the, the actual launch of Grok 3, because I'm just sitting there hammering through some emails last night and I'm actually watching PMF or, PMF or die. And I hear Patty in the cage be like, yo, the Grok 3 announcement's going up and, and they just kind of haphazardly throw up. This livestream and then just like sit there with one camera.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  And it was, it was, it's kind of cool in that it's authentic. They're not overly fixated on production value or anything like that. There's been a number of sort of model releases that were structured, you know, uh, open, open AIs continuously drilling into people's heads. We are the apple of AI.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, more product focused.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  Product focused, but also just like the production value of like their presentations are at a different level. And, uh, so anyways, I, I thought it was fascinating that they just had one camera showed up, streamed it, you know, basically bounced. It was no, no bells and whistles. And so cool approach, similar to, um, uh, safe super intelligence, which is basically saying like, we're not even going to release products until we have, uh, AGI.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Which we'll get to.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the, the whole AI landscape is fascinating. The, uh, the model layer is commoditizing, but there are so many different product strategies on top of the, on top of the models. And it's very cool to see that XAI is just, you know, forking, delivering straight into X. I love that. So, uh, uh, Ben Thompson and Stratechery, highly recommend that you, uh, subscribe. He kicks off with a quote from Bloomberg. He says, uh, XAI showed off the updated Grok three model. They call it the smartest AI on earth. Across math, science and coding benchmarks, Grok three beats Google Gemini, DeepSeek V3, Anthropic Claude and GPT's 4.0. They said, uh, they, they announced this during a livestream Monday.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Uh, Grok three has more than 10 times the compute power of its predecessor and completed pre-training in early January. Musk said, "The presentation alongside, uh, three XAI engineers. We're continually improving the models every day. It's literally within 24 hours, you'll see improvements." And that's true, like, uh, they, they are, they are really rolling out stuff very, very, very quickly. Uh, they also introduced a smart search engine, which I tested. And you, interestingly, you don't need to click a button to trigger it. Uh, it's just, it's just like, if it thinks that you want, uh, you know, some deep research, it just goes and does it. It's called Deep Search. Uh, it's a reasoning chatbot that expresses its process and of understanding a query and how, and how it plans its response. And we'll take you through one of the results from Grok 3's deep search product.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  And then they also intend to release a voice-based chatbot as soon as possible. So Ben Thompson writes, Grok 3 appears to be one of, if not the best performing base model in the world. It is topping the usual benchmarks, but not if you include 03, which is interesting. That was not in the bar charts, which we'll get to. And tops all categories, the highest ever score in L M arena.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Obviously, we're XAI fans, X fans here, Grok fans. But the sort of selective positioning of new models against models like definitely needs to be called out. Because people just sort of decide, all right, who are we going to sort of compare ourselves to in this very moment?

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Because everybody just wants to show, you know.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, there's, there's so many different vectors because 03 can be very compute intensive. Then there's 03 mini, then there's 03 mini high. And so, you know, there's this big like value trade off between, yeah, if you let the, if you let the L L M reason for hours and you spend $2,000 per query, you can get remarkable results. But then is that really a fair benchmark against something that costs a dollar in France or 10 cents? And so all of a sudden, you need to plot these on like an X and Y graph. And then eventually you need to plot them on some sort of like, you know, unintelligible tensor graph or something. Anyway, let's go to Andre Karpathy, the absolute dog who is not a fair observer because he's worked with Elon, but he's also worked at OpenAI.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  So maybe he's a little bit more, a little bit more fair than most people think. I really enjoy his analysis. He says, the impression overall I got here, I got here is that this is somewhere around 01 pro capability and ahead of DeepSeek R1, though of course, we need actual real evaluations to look at. The impression I get of deep search is that it's approximately around perplexity's deep research offering, which is great, but not at the level of OpenAI's recently released deep research, which still feels more thorough and reliable. And I found that deep research is just better at spitting out 5,000 words. Most of the other products spit out 1,000 words. And so you just get more out of deep research.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is what you want. From deep research.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Usually, usually.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  You're not looking for, you know, perfectly summarized, you know, handful of paragraphs.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  The entire point is to let you kind of figure out what's important about what they.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Karpathy goes on, he says, as far as a quick vibe check over two hours this morning, Grok three plus thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI's strongest models. O one pro for $200 a month and slightly better than DeepSeek R one and Gemini 2.0 flash thinking, which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch one year ago. This time scale to state of the art territory is unprecedented and that is undeniable. This gets at the first Grok three takeaway. It's simultaneously surprising and not surprising. Start with the latter. XAI famously built a 100,000 GPU cluster in Memphis and now has 200,000 GPUs and used 20,000 of them to train Grok three.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  And so they're still building the larger cluster. So even though you'll see a lot of people posting on the timeline, oh, you know, Grok three, 100,000 GPUs. That's not accurate. They only use 20,000 for this, but it's still impressive.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And just to highlight again, this is the largest cluster ever, the 20,000, 20, 20,000 GPUs.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  That's not true. The 100,000 is the largest ever. I believe.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  So, so he's saying the largest ever for XAI or the largest ever for any foundation model?

• 14:15John Coogan?

  I don't know. I asked, I asked both ChatGPT and Grok to pull this.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Grok, Grok says GPT four use 25K GPUs while Grok three use 20,000 GPUs. Now ChatGPT says that, that GPT four was just thousands, 20K GPUs, A100s.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  So it seems like around 20, 20, 25K has been the, the top to date.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  It's honestly unclear from these.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  But clearly Elon knows that he's just, he's just willing to sprint towards these.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  Big, big numbers as fast as humanly possible.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  100%. And so.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  And sure, it resulted in a top tier model. That's not surprising, given it is what scaling laws predicted, but it is comforting as there was a question as to scaling, as to whether scaling laws had hit a wall. And people were saying this during the deep seek kind of fiasco. What is surprising is that XAI is only 19 months old. The company has gone from incorporation to the largest GPU cluster in the world to arguably the best model in less time than it has taken OpenAI to go from GPT-4 to GPT-5, albeit with substantial updates along the way, including the big 4.0 update just this past weekend. It's both a testament to Elon Musk and his team, Jess Gask, Jensen, CEO, CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Wong.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  So to me, to me, this tells that our read on the Elon bid, which was only last week, it feels like a month ago at this point, but Elon bidding $100 billion to buy some, you know, not entirely known amount of OpenAI means that he believes he either was purely doing that as out of spite to toss like a wrench into that process, or he believes that the product layer is what actually matters because he's able to achieve incredible performance purely at the model layer. But even as Karpathy is saying, the the product layer is not there yet. And certainly Grok has nowhere near the the real consumer usage that OpenAI does.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  It's interesting. So he goes into competitive implications. He says, I did get access to Grok 3, but not the thinking and search models. I actually don't know if I have access to the thinking and search models. It's unclear to me from a product perspective. And he has to say that he finds himself using Grok 2 quite a bit, almost entirely via its integration into the X app. It turns out being plugged into a pre-existing distribution channel is very useful. And this is a crazy bull case for Elon buying X.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  But the challenge is that X is a very specific type of audience that is not necessarily reflective of, certainly not the LinkedIn audience.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  Like, you could argue that OpenAI should go do a deal with LinkedIn and say, like, make us your default LLM and just distribute us to, like, the normie masses because, like, long-term, it's going to be more important to be there.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He also says, "I also never use it anywhere else. For me, product matters, and ChatGPT remains my product of choice." I feel the exact same way. I'm also curious to what extent ChatGPT's deep research's advantage over other competitors like Google, Perplexity, and now XAI are due simply to O3 still being the best model versus OpenAI spending more time crafting a better tool. Regardless, the impetus for OpenAI to focus on being a consumer tech company is as strong as ever. OpenAI is the only AI lab to have organically built its own distribution channel, and they really, really need to get an advertising product out the door to ensure they are serving free customers the best possible models, which makes perfect sense. This also explains why-

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  That has to be pending, you know, this quarter potential.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's just a question of, do they use Microsoft as the partner there? I believe Netflix was considering that as well, because Microsoft has a really big ad network from LinkedIn and from Bing, even though you don't think of them as a big advertising company. They've built all the algorithms, all the infrastructure and all the inventory, and so-

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not going to be meta.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, this also explains why OpenAI is tying up with Oracle and SoftBank and trying to become a for-profit. XAI raised $6 billion last November and actually owns its GPUs. Musk also said on the livestream that XAI is building out a 1 million GPU cluster. Let's go. Size gone for the 1 million cluster. Boom.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Let's get that in a handier spot.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  This more dial in. Actually, I, we need a button to hit on the set.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  We have that.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  It's hilarious. And then, of course, he ties it to Ilya Sutskever. In Bloomberg is raising more than $1 billion for his startup at a valuation of over 30 billion. We'll talk about this later in the show. Vaulting the nascent venture into the ranks of the world's most valuable private technology companies. Green Oaks is in, they're putting in 500 mil, said the person who asked not to be identified. Green Oaks is also an investor in AI company Scale and Databricks. The round marks a significant valuation from the 5 billion that Sutskever's company was worth before. First off, a disclaimer, Daniel Gross, a frequent Strategery interview guest, is the CEO of SSI.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  I never realized.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  I didn't know that.

• 19:35Jordi Hays?

  Is that breaking? Are we scooping? Are we scooping Ben Scoop right now?

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Cool in the scoop. It's too much. People get confused. No, I think this was like, I think this was actually publicized like very early on.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  That Ilya wanted to be the technical lead more than anything else.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  But that's very cool.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Cause DG, you know, he's going, you know, you know, he, he seems like from everything I've seen, just extremely, extremely motivated to win and be in the most important places constantly.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  It's funny. He also had an accelerator.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  Sam had an accelerator, a small accelerator called Y Combinator. So the accelerator to foundation model pipeline is very real.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  You know, the, the, the other path, the, the counterfactual, the path not traveled here. Daniel Gross sold a company, Apple in AI, got acquired, should have, should have, you know, taken over the CEO role.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  This is something we advocate here on the show. If you get your company Aqua hired, start asking the CEO, hey, what's the succession plan?

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  How can I get in the, how can I get?

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Hang out outside of the board meetings.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Try to flag people down. It'll only take four quarters to get a little time with like the key players. And then from there, you know, just start, you know, it's a.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  It's such an underrated strategy right now. I think, I think like there, there's massive value in being a founder and actually going in and.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Going for the top job.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Going for the top job. It, it sounds too ambitious to be true, but I think someone will eventually do it and we'll all be like, wow.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. A lot of, a lot of founders end up getting aquihired and then are not super happy with the leadership at the company.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then they're just like.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  So just become the leadership.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Become the leadership instead of, and it sounds like a joke, but it's not. It's like, it's actually a better path than just like resting, investing. And then you're like, oh, what do I want to do next? I'll have to do the same company or like become a VC.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Start over from zero.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Instead of like, wait, I just got acquired by a company that does the same thing that I was doing, but they have a thousand times more resources.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  The only problem here is that I'm not in charge. What if I was in charge?

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Solve that problem. Anyway, uh, that's my little stump speech. Um, and so, uh, they have pledged, this is wild about SSI. So they have pledged not to release a product until it has achieved a safe super intelligence. So they're going to raise so much money. Well, XAI explains why. It is absolutely viable to have started late, provided you have the funds, catch up quickly. And of course, SSI's talent speaks for itself. SSI is also, I would imagine a big Nvidia customer. Again, I don't know, uh, that to be true, but what else might the money be going towards? Which brings this conversation back to chips. On one hand, chips remain the gating factor to the easiest route to a frontier model. On the other hand, this is why deep seek matters. They're, they're not the only route to something that is at least competitive.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  The debate on the value of an attempted export ban remains an open one. Anyway, uh, fantastic article.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely wild. I totally respect SSI saying, we're not going to ship until we have, we, we've achieved our goal, which is like the kind of approach you can only really take if you're Ilya and like Daniel Gross, where you're basically saying, yes, we're going to need to raise billions of dollars. You're going to just have to trust us that we're going to, and just like bet on us that we're going to deliver that. One of the things that every foundation, like the, the war, the foundation model wars right now, which will be studied eventually because it's creating this sort of foundational technology that presumably our entire society will be dependent on at some point. It is. So distracting for these companies and the teams and the investors when there's new models

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  releasing every week and you can imagine everybody, everybody at Anthropic last night was watching the Grok, you know, demo live, not working. Everybody at OpenAI was doing the same thing, right? So it's just wildly distracting to constantly be forced to ship and ship and ship. When you can tell that they're able to make incredible progress internally without even getting user feedback, right?

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  Elon's basically, Elon's basically saying, hey, I just need another $20 billion and I'm going to make a much better model.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure, we'll make it available through, you know, the XAI-X integration. But I think this is, I think it's very smart.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  He is the customer and he has his eval. And once it solves the Reiman hypothesis, he'll be happy.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  And that's kind of it, which is fascinating. I think another hot take that we were discussing earlier was there's this big push around like the model layer is commoditizing.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  And people say that as like a bear case.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  But I was wondering if you flip it around, like, people make tons of money in commodities all the time, right? Like, oil, big oil, like, oil is a commodity.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Still worth producing oil.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  It's hugely valuable. There were massive companies built on it. There were small companies that just did little exploration and just had a little plot of land, built a little track.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  You know, actual infrastructure, technology providers.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  And so I wonder if there's a world where, you know, intelligence is so valuable and LLMs and AI is so valuable that, that, you know, yeah, even if you're like the sixth best model, you can still sell the intelligence if it's at the frontier level to the market at a market clearing price that still generates profit above what the Nvidia GPUs cost. And you still reap the reward and the $30 billion valuation is completely justified. In the same sense that, you know, hey, yeah, if you, you know, you're like, hey, I got a plot of land in Texas that I'm going to pull some oil out of. Yeah, you don't have a monopoly on all of oil.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  But you still made money.

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  And so I wonder if that's how it will play out.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  The, you know, if LLMs, you know, replace a lot of work broadly, knowledge work specifically, it's easy to say, hey, these are trillion dollar markets that we're playing in.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  It makes total sense that there's five to 10 companies that are going to raise billions of dollars to go after that, right? Because the, the prize is so great.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  The potential prize is so great. That, you know, Ilya raising at 30, you know, and Daniel Gross raising at 30 billion posts is actually, you know, it's, it's, maybe it's, it's, it's, it's just ends up looking like a great investment of like, how do you potentially get a, you know, 50x on, on, on a multi-billion dollar check? Like, maybe that's how you do it.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  It is so crazy when you think about it that way. Like, when you think about like crypto, it's like a big new technology. A lot of people are into it. It's just like a cool thing. And yeah, the market cap of all the crypto combined is around a trillion dollars. Social networking, also like very valuable, cool new technology, market cap, around a trillion dollars. Phones, cool new technology, market cap, around a trillion dollars. Electric cars, cool new technology, market cap, around a trillion dollars. You know, operating systems, Microsoft, around a trillion dollars, cloud computing, there's around a trillion dollars of value. And so it's like, how, in what world does AI and LLMs not wind up being around a trillion dollars of value? I get that like it could go any direction and like

• 26:26John Coogan?

  how you slice that up, it could be very equal, it could be winner take all. And, you know, hey, people are going to have their bull case for X or bull case for OpenAI, Anthropic, whoever. But, you know, it just feels like, like the stakes are definitely one trillion, right? If we look out in the future, even, even if we're, even if we're not being like super, super intelligence pilled, and we're just thinking about like, yeah, like, this is a new technology and it will be a consumer market or an enterprise market or any of them. Like, will there be an opportunity to make a bunch of money? Probably. So, anyway, let's move on to Yaksin. He is, he's working for Elon over at Axe, a good friend of the show. He has been, he's become a bit of an OpenAI hater, but let's hear him out and see.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  We got some poster on poster violence here because this is clearly a Rune caricature or the same exact character. And, you know, you know, dancing around the data center.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  And so he's arguing that there's no moat with this. He says, moats are Silicon Valley headcanon, wishful thinking. They need to, they needed to exist. They make you believe that you're doing the thing that would be impossible for others, all to justify the fundraise. When they say moat, What they're saying is proprietary monopoly. I'm here to tell you that the monopoly is a myth. The proprietary monopoly simply does not exist. OpenAI could open source all of their models and it wouldn't really harm their business existence. It would only harm their ability to fundraise. Everyone should take Peter Thiel more seriously. Just be different.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean, what a, what a poster. I mean, he's, he's layering on a bunch of things that people could potentially disagree with. Oh, yeah. The first few paragraphs, uh, which positions him well to then extrapolate on all those ideas. Now that people are kind of riled up a little bit.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Totally. So he says, is capital a moat? In previous times, capital was a moat, uh, but as technology progresses, everything becomes cheaper. Skill, labor are now being automated. Levels I O can command a few O one, uh, O 10 M valued companies, uh, order magnitude $10 million valued companies, spawning them every three months for fun. He doesn't need to raise. I like that.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta put levels in the cage, by the way. He would just.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  He'd crush it. He'd be out in a day. Yeah. Uh, uh, especially with the latest code gen slop spitting out P G, PHP server code. It's free. It's free. The software I produce for myself on a daily basis would have taken a team of engineers. Now it's one hour in, in between work and dinner. It's post scarcity. It's unprecedented.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  We are at the point where the idea that capital as a moat is not being sold by the people who need the funds. Instead, the idea is being pushed by the people with the sad, sad capital that has nowhere to go. What is the point of money when legions of engineers who actually just slow you down? When you really only need eight X H 100 and two frogs to create outsized impact? Your real competitor is the end user writing their own software. I used to walk, work at Autho. Um, we shipped login as a service. It sold itself. Many Seattle homes were paid off by sales commissions of Autho contracts. It wasn't Okta, it wasn't Ping One. Our biggest competitor was our customer themselves writing their own login page.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  We had to sell them on it not being a good way to spend their time. So he breaks down the serious AGI players. This is personal opinion. OpenAI, nah, remember Yahoo? Okay. Yeah, Xing, we know, we know who you're, who you're, who you're pushing for here. The serious players, vertical robotics manufacturers and Majuko shops? I don't know what that means. Majoko, DJI, Unitree, Tesla, Anduril, DeepSeek, Jane Street, Palantir, social media platforms, uh, Meta.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Vertical AI companies, XAI, DeepSeek, Google. Are your ML researchers wearing kneepads and a sweaty tank top plugging in Ethernet? If yes, you're going to make it. ETH Zurich, I will not elaborate. Distributed decentralized AI. Bootstrap companies with a lot of freedom, people building novel devices. Interesting. What can't, what can't be easily replicated? Software used to cost money and AI is just software? There is a limit on individual model intelligence that yields diminishing returns. And it is my belief that we will rapidly exhaust any room available. It is my belief that AGI will run on consumer hardware and any proprietary models will only be run as convenience.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  What can't be easily replaced is knees on the ground, soldering irons and the Majoko, Majoko RL sauce. And godlike product managers yearning, invest accordingly. This is financial advice for billionaires.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  This feels like, like it feels like basically 40 posts combined into one article.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  No, but one thing that's interesting, so when we were talking earlier about intelligence being commodified and some people saying, oh, it's not investable. It's a commodity, if it's a commodity, especially at these prices, you're saying, hey, commodities actually are very valuable. There's a ridiculous amount of demand for them. The hard part, what, what he's outlining here is that, you know, everybody knows that there's a big market for oil. Like you can see what the price is. If you can get a barrel of oil out of the ground, you can sell it at the sort of market clearing price for that grade of oil, right? Some, there's like, you know, oil that turns into jet fuel and whatever, but there's like, it's a commodity. It's sort of priced in the open market. There's fully a world where intelligence gets to that point too.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  And then the challenge is what Yacine is saying, which is here with AI is like, what can't be easily replicated is knees on the ground, soldering irons, et cetera, et cetera. And so the same thing with oil, it's like the challenge with getting oil out of the ground is you gotta get oil out of the ground, right? You need dudes with trucks to go drill for oil and then make sure the drill is running properly. Make sure you have water, make sure you have power, you know, the, the drill is breaking all the time. And, and so it doesn't seem like data centers will maybe be that as much of a challenge to keep operational. But they certainly, it's certainly not easy to operate these things highly efficiently, right?

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah. If it's a commodity, where is the most valuable part of the commodity? Is it?

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  The producer and this like the supplier producer.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. But is that energy? Is that Nvidia? Or is that the LLM, you know, deliverer?

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  It's, it's an open question. Anyway, let's move on to some reactions on the timeline and then we'll give you a breakdown of Grok 3 versus OpenAI Deep Research. So, Cretein Cycle, who's been on the show before, says, "Sorry, autismos. It's time to grow some arms and social skills." And Jordi chimes in and says, "Getting dice continues to be underpriced." And he says, "Printing this out and hanging it on my wall in pack heights." And he just shows the Grok 3 reasoning data. It beat O3 Mini high.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Beta, reasoning beta.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Some people were upset about this. Rex, two slides later, says, "They omitted O3 from the chart in the live stream for some reason, so I added the numbers for you." And then, but this was reasonable because O3 isn't public and those benchmarks can't be verified yet. So I think it's understandable that they didn't include it. But then again, Grok 3 with reasoning isn't publicly available, so people can't validate that eval. So there's a lot of like questions over like what counts for an eval that goes in a chart, but you know.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  I think they both have, you know, fair arguments there.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  They're like, "We can validate what our model does. We cannot validate what you're doing because it's not available. So we know."

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  We cooked.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, Sheil Moat gives a little context on the Grok Colossus. 200,000 GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee, built in 214 days. I think Semi Analysis and Dylan Patel have done a deeper dive here that we'll have to dig into. There's some really fascinating things going on here. Sheil says, "Why Memphis? They found an old Electrolux factory, added trailers to add cooling, one quarter of the cooling capacity of the US, and trailers for power generation. They used Tesla Megapacks to smooth out power fluctuations. The next training cluster will go from a quarter gigawatt to 1.2 gigawatts using GB200s from Nvidia." There's a fascinating thing that leaked because of Llama.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  When when Meta open source Lama three or some piece of that, they had a line or like a function, a piece of code in the in the training data that basically said, like, what was it? It was like, power plant not blow up. And so basically, what it does is, is when you're training, you're doing all this complex math that's using a lot of a lot of electricity. And then all of a sudden, there'll be like moments where you're maybe just like, okay, we're done doing the math. We're gonna like, save the model for a second. And so all of a sudden, your power will just drop to zero. And if the and if the power like substation

• 35:32John Coogan?

  or the or the the power plant is is sending tons of electricity, and then all of a sudden, it doesn't get any, it can it can blow up or something like that, or it can be bad. And so they they built a like a special piece of code that basically just has it does random math.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine the reason that that got implemented?

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, these engineers are just like, you know, just tapping away, you know, vibe coding. And then they just get a call. It's like, hey, like, what are you guys doing?

• 36:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be crazy if there was like a major power.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So so just going back to the Colossus, the the cluster in Memphis, this was always in many ways, I think we talked about this last year, the bull case for Elon building a foundation model company was that he has the boots on the ground experience to spin up heavy infrastructure manufacturing facilities, you know, figuring out how to manufacture batteries at scale for Tesla in the United States. And so having the playbook and being able to pull talent from, you know, a company like Tesla or SpaceX and say, hey, we need to build this data center in 214 days, like, unbelievable. Like, many people would say, you know, even, you know, linking this back to LA, people are not going to have their homes rebuilt for four years.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  They did this, they built it, they built the biggest, you know, cluster ever in 214 days.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  That's a great point.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  Where they just found an old factory and said, we're just doing this right now.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  And so that's.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  And that's really Elon's like edge here, for sure.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, and it and it is so part of the culture at Tesla. The.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  I mean, they're making millions of Starlens.

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  So the CTO at deterrence.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  Was at Tesla specifically working on their battery cell engineering. And so he's just bringing that just crazy ethos around his name's Henry around speed. And it's just amazing to witness.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's move on to word grammar. Word grammar says, I'm feeling very similar to how I felt six months ago. OpenAI did something groundbreaking. Now two other labs have replicated it. Soon the rest will follow, making it a pretty undifferentiated market. Yeah, we've, we've talked about this a little bit. I mean, it's, it's unclear. Like if OpenAI had not launched deep research and like the reasoning model, would DeepSeek have been able to come up with it? Like, is the idea valuable? Or is it just a, or, or is everyone kind of on the same path? What do you think?

• 38:02Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. Everything, because everybody's competing against many of the same benchmarks to show that they're competitive. They're all focusing on getting better at many of the same things. When what we really want, and which is why SSI is interesting, is they're basically saying, we're not going to release anything publicly until it's what we want it to be. So we're not going to build based around these benchmarks. And so the, I actually think it's, it, the competition is good and bad. It's like a double edged sword, right? It's good in that it's sort of pushing the pace and everybody's motivated to, to rapidly improve these models. But at the same time, it's not so great because we're getting models that consistently just look more and more and more like each other.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  And consumers are not even going to be able to notice the difference. So they're just going to probably default to what they already use and love. Or maybe you're using Grok in the, in X, but not elsewhere.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Here's an interesting twist on that. So Paul Calcraft says Elon posted an early Grok three screenshot saying he asked what, what Grok three thought of the information. And it said it's garbage. And then Paul Calcraft asked the same question. What's your opinion on the information? And it told him it's a solid outlet. And you know what's going on here? It's fine tuning on the person who queries it. Their timeline. And so Grok 3, when Elon prompts it, it knows Elon doesn't like the information. Let's give him an answer that confirms what he believes. And it's the same thing for Paul Calcraft. And so this is going to raise a very interesting question where

• 39:39John Coogan?

  people will kind of be in like LLM echo chambers almost where they're like, oh yeah, I asked the LLM and it told me that, you know, you know, microplastics aren't a big deal because I've been posting about that. Or microplastics are the worst thing ever because I've been posting about that.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  No, this is, this is exactly what already happens on X broadly. The X echo chamber is so real, where you just sort of, you know, for me, I'll see somebody, I'll see very like offhand, you know, randomly, somebody will have like a blue sky in their profile.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  And I'm like, oh, I haven't seen that in a while. But someone else is seeing that constantly. And they're probably using blue sky. They're like, oh yeah, everybody I love uses blue sky. Right?

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's very interesting. And you know what's going to happen here is that the mainstream media is going to do these tests where they go, you know what they did on like, you know, TikTok and Instagram where they'd be like, I followed a bunch of Nazi content and then it gave me more Nazi content. And so it's like a Nazi algorithm. They'll probably do the same thing where they'll, where they'll like go into these LLMs, talk to it for a really long time, find essentially fine tune it on the idea that like they're crazy. And then it'll be like, it gave me crazy responses. And it's like, yeah, I get it. It probably shouldn't do that. But at the same time, like you really like twisted its arm and it's not doing that for most people. So I don't really have that much of a problem with it. As long as there's like some guidelines here and like

• 41:03John Coogan?

  it's directionally like, it doesn't automatically steer you towards some negative echo chamber. Anyway, word grammar has another banger post here.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  On a roll.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Richard Sutton's bitter lesson died January 22 with DeepSeek and it was born again on February 17, less than a month. So this is of course about scaling laws and Rich Sutton's bitter lesson, which we'll get into. Of course, the idea that algorithms, while important, are not as important as scaling and compute power. And so, scale is all you need. Let's go to another post from Liron Shapiro. He says, people in 2022, Elon can't actually keep these servers online. Elon now, the bonus tab in the app makes you, takes you to the highest benchmark frontier model. And so, yeah, real narrative violation for everyone that said Elon wasn't going to be

• 41:56John Coogan?

  able to keep X or Twitter like online. He's like, not only doing that, but-

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  The reason that you know it wasn't an issue is I don't have a memory of wanting to use Twitter and/or X and not being able to. And I think I would really, I would remember that for my whole life. Right? Such a, such a daily habit. If you're going on there and just nothing was, was loading. It's a, yeah, he really mugged everybody that was calling him out on that.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, Andre Karpathy shared more evals because he got access to Grok 3. Says, "On Thinking, Grok clearly has an around state-of-the-art thinking model, the Think Button, and did great out of the box on my Settlers of Catan question, which is create a board game webpage showing a hex grid, just like in the game Settlers of Catan. Each hex grid is numbered 1 to N, where N is the total number of hex tiles. Make it generic so one can change the number of rings using a slider. For example, Catan, the radius is 3 hexes. Single HTML page, please." Pretty good. "Few models get this reliably right. The top OpenAI thinking models, 01 Pro, GetIt2, but all of DeepSeek R1, Gemini 2.0, Flash

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Thinking and Claude do not. It did not solve his emoji mystery question, where he gave it a smiling face with an attached message hidden inside Unicode variation selectors, even when I gave it a strong hint on how to decode it in the form of Rust code." This is like such a, I don't know if I could solve that, Andre. I'm sorry. That is a very complicated eval. But it makes sense, I guess, and probably valuable. It should break that eventually. The most progress I've seen from this is DeepSeek R1, which once partially decoded the message. It solved a few tic-tac-toe boards. He gave it with nice, clean chain of thought. I uploaded the GPT-2 paper. I asked it a bunch of simple lookup questions. All worked great.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  And so he has a whole bunch of evals that he can kind of rip through, and I think that's a really cool way to do it. It's like, you know, do some web programming, build a website, like solve tic-tac-toe, you know, decode this mystery, do this riddle, and then he also asks-

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  He can do that in about an hour, I'm assuming.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  What? Yeah, exactly. He said he played with it for like two hours. And so he did the same thing with Deep Search. He asked, "What's with the upcoming Apple launch? Any rumors?" And he liked the answer there. "Why is Palantir stock surging recently?" He gave it a check. "White Lotus, Season 3. Where was it filmed? And is it the same team as Seasons 1 and 2? What toothpaste does Brian Johnson use?" It didn't get Singles Inferno Season 4 cast, and where are they now? Which I don't even know what Inferno is, but Singles Inferno, I guess that's a show he watches, which I love. And then "What speech-to-text program has Simon Wilson mentioned he's using?" So.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  He says, "I did find some sharp edges here. The model doesn't seem to like to reference X as a source by default. Interesting, though you can explicitly ask it to. A few times I caught it hallucinating URLs that don't exist. A few times it said factual things that I think are incorrect, and it didn't provide a citation. It told me Kim Jong-Su is still dating Kim Min-Soo of Singles Inferno Season 4, which surely is totally off, right? This is hilarious. Andre, are you into Singles Inferno? I need to get up on this. This is good stuff. The impression I get of Deep Search is that it's approximately around where Perplexity Deep Research offering, which is great, but not yet at the level of Deep Research.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Random LLM gotchas. Sadly, the model's sense of humor does not seem to be obviously improved. This is a common LLM issue with humor capability and general mode collapse. Famously, 90% of the 1,000 outputs asking ChatGPT for a joke were repetitions of the same 25 jokes.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  Got him dead to rights. GPT-5, you're on notice. You better be funny. Even when prompted in more detail away from simple pun territory example, give me a stand up. I'm not sure that it is state of the art humor example generated joke. Why did the chicken join a band because it had the drumsticks and wanted to be a cluck star?

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  That's a, that's a real knee slapper.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  They're, they're honestly, the jokes that are from L L M's are so bad that sometimes they're very funny because it's just like, wow. Like if somebody-

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  It will be, it will be amazing to, when, when they do get to the point. Cause I think everybody can see that we will, you know, the, the general belief is that we'll get there.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  But like, think about having a comedian in your pocket that knows what you think is funny. And it's basically, somebody will make a rapper app that's just a big button that you, the laugh button that you press. And it just generates a new joke and it just gets better and better. And it even hears your response to it. So it starts to learn on-

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be really good training data, actually. Yeah, they could do that. Okay. So let's move on to Grok three and OpenAI Deep Research. I got your, your analysis there. So I went to both Grok three and OpenAI Deep Research. And I asked it this really, really long prompt. I said, I'd like you to build me a definitive table of L L M models and break down their evolution, specifically their relative sizes. So I want to know, you know, Grok three came out, it uses 20 K GPUs. I'm not exactly sure how many flops that is, but I would like to put all of these in the same terms. Like they're all an equivalent number of flops. I want to know the progression of GPT one to two to three to four for the pre-training runs.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  And then I want to know the same thing that happened at, I said anthropic, it was transcribed incorrectly to entropic, which is wrong. And I want dates of when these were released, then give me some uniform benchmark like chatbot arena or M M L U. I really need you to go pull all this together. I'm like, come on, do this for me, bro. And then I'd like you to investigate how the bitter lesson and Moore's law are interacting right now. Essentially, the bitter lesson states that you always just want to throw more scale, but it's unclear to me what the benefits of scale are proportional to the capabilities of these models. So my basic thesis is that, you know, we're potentially hitting diminishing marginal returns. We're going to see less gains from increased scale. And so the real question is, Grok 3 is a 20K GPU run. They're planning to do 100K GPU run.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  And the question is, does the 5X or 10X increasing compute power, does that increase the model's final capability usefulness by 1%, 10%? Does it double it? Does it 10X it? And that's what I'm trying to predict. And I want to see these based on trend lines. What kind of results should I expect? And specifically, I want you to not just qualitative results, not just quantitative results, but qualitative results. Like, what do we expect a 1 million GPU cluster trained model to be able to do? Is it just high IQ? Is that the best measure? Like, what should we, how should we be measuring these things? And is there an evolution that, like, you know, we have no top, no max? Do we just continue to push on? The final question is like, does this continue to get better as we get to a billion GPUs, a trillion GPUs, a Google GPUs?

• 48:55John Coogan?

  What are we getting for that? I guess the question is, is intelligence unlimited? Even if we assume that we're on the right algorithmic path? That's the main question. And so basically, I just wanted to like, dump out a ton of research and give me a bunch.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  The only, the only thing that could handle that kind of prompt is your secretary, right?

• 49:15John Coogan?

  It's a lot of, it's a lot of stuff.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you just basically dumped.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  But it, but you certainly gave it plenty to work with.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  What's interesting is if you look at page two and then page like six or something, you can actually see both Grok and OpenAI dumped out tables of.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  Of how uh how these models evolved. So GPT-1, it claims was trained on 10 GPUs. Then GPT-2, 100 GPUs. GPT-3, 10,000 GPUs. And then GPT-4, 25,000 GPUs.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  Which is what tracks to the other.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  And yeah, and on the other one, it says 1,000 and then 20K. And so the the big question here is on on flops. This is the real like standard metric is number of flops. And the uh like the the jargon term for this is just uh using the order of magnitude for number of flops. So you can think of GPT-3, you call that an E23 model because it had 3.14 times 10 to the 23rd flops. And so you call that an E23 model. GPT-4 was an E25 model because it's not just more GPUs, but it's also more training time and more at more powerful GPUs.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  And so you can't just say, oh, they used they used 5X GPUs because they might have run them longer, more power, all these different things. So you really just want to do flops because that's the most standard. And so uh DeepMind Chinchilla is an E23 model, Llama 70B is an E24 model, and Grok 3 is an E26 model.

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how I missed Chinchilla.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Oh, Chinchilla is a big one because that was the paper that that defined the the scaling laws. So when people when people talk about the pre-training scaling law, they call it Chinchilla scaling laws because it came from the Chinchilla paper.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  Uh, and so uh in here, uh now this is where we get weird because ChatGPT claims that Grok 3 is an E26 model, but Grok 3 claims that Grok 3 is an E25 model. And so I don't know who's hallucinating here. I don't know who's more accurate.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  They could they could both be hallucinating, to be clear.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  They could.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  No one is necessarily right.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  And so Grok 3 claims that Grok 3 is less flop intensive than GPT-4. But GPT-4 claims that Grok 3 is more powerful than.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  Then GPT-4. And so they're both gassing each other up, I guess, in a weird way. I think OpenAI is more accurate here, but it's very funny. I don't know. It's all, it's all very, it's all very odd. And like, I don't have time to fact check all of this. So I'm kind of just like vibe, vibe interpreting this. But let's read some of the analysis here from the bitter lesson. The bitter lesson argues that AI progress relies, and this is from Grok 3. And then we'll read the chat GPT version. The bitter lesson argues that AI relies on scaling compute and data over bespoke algorithms. LLMs embody this. GPT-3's success came from brute force scale, not architectural breakthroughs.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  It was a very simple algorithm. They just gave it the entire web and they trained it a lot with a lot of GPUs. This is the first like big training run, basically. However, your thesis about diminishing returns challenges this. Does Moore's law have slowed? That's the law that says that doubling transistor density every two years with GPU, with GPU performance now scaling via parallelism. And so we are scaling compute, but we're doing it by just getting more and more GPUs.

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  LLM training outpaces hardware gains relying on cluster size rather than per chip efficiency. So we're not just doubling the training run every year. We're like 10 X-ing it. Because we're just building these monster data centers. So scaling laws. Kaplan and Hoffman show performance scales predictably with compute parameters and data. This implies a 10x compute increase yields 25 to 60% loss reduction, not 10x.

• 53:28John Coogan?

  MMLU gains reflect this. GPT-3 to GPT-4 is 160x compute jump for a 50% score increase. I still don't really know how to interpret all this.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have some guests on to break it down.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, um, I don't know. It's interesting. It, uh, the, the main thing is that like, I think when most people play with this, they're like, It's great. It's good, but it's not like a complete step change from what else I'm seeing online.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  No, the, the, the, the, the big headline takeaway from last night is that XAI is catching up on raw model capabilities in a very short period of time.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  In terms of product usefulness, it, it doesn't seem to be there yet, right? Because even you're seeing, okay, well, you trained on all of my, my posts.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  But I actually don't even necessarily like that, that much. And so they're, they're, they seem to be on a collision course with OpenAI from a capability standpoint, especially as they get into these, you know, next runs.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but again, that, this is going back to my earlier point. I look at all this, you know, Elon, you know, hitting these, uh, hitting these evals, but then simultaneously still wanting to spend a hundred billion dollars on, on OpenAI. When, uh, he could just, you know, spend that money on XAI and he's, you know, again, we don't know if he's doing it to, to throw a wrench in the process, but it seems like he would love to be chairman of OpenAI is like my read of the situation.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  This is interesting. The, the chat GPT deep research, um, is I think much more readable as a, uh, it just has a research paper, so.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  And again, that's them innovating at the product level.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, what Ben Thompson said is he's not sure if they just have a better model that's just producing better outputs, or they just are refining the actual product layer more.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So they say increasing, increasing model size and compute generally improves performance, but with diminishing returns. And so that's the real question here of like, of like, you know, if we 100x the models like we're planning to, is if it just gets a little bit better, it might not actually be able to do real work still because it might still break down and hallucinate a little bit. Like, like we're, we're, we're all hoping for the model that just like never hallucinates ever and, and do a ton of stuff and hold everything in memory and.

• 56:01Jordi Hays?

  Which may not ever come.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Maybe, I think we will get there. It's just the question of like, you know, what if it's, what if it's a thousand order of magnitudes? You know, like that would be, yes, the scaling law would hold, like the scaling law would be correct. But like, it would take a long time to build like a Dyson sphere for that, basically. Early work by OpenAI showed that large language model loss follows a power law. Performance improves predictably as model parameters and data scale up. And this was that picture of like GPT-3 to GPT-4, more parameters, more data. And so everyone was going bigger, bigger, bigger. For example, going from GPT-3, 175 billion, to models like Gopher 280 and Megatron, Megatron, Megatron Turing 530 improved benchmarks, but not proportionally to the huge jump in compute required.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  DeepMind's 280B Gopher outperformed GPT-3 on knowledge tasks, reading comprehension and fact checking, yet it saw little gain in logical thinking or common sense tasks despite 60% more compute. This suggests some capabilities plateau and less new approaches are used. And that's the reasoning model, right? And so diminishing returns are evident on many benchmarks. As models grow, metrics like MMLU, a broad knowledge test, improve, but approach an asymptote near human performance. And that's frustrating because I would want linear progress that just blows through even performance. But it's really like, we're kind of, maybe we need new evals, I don't know. GPT-3 achieved only around 50% on MMLU,

• 57:30John Coogan?

  while below the 90% expert human level. So that's the human level benchmark. Gopher did 60%, Chinchilla did 67%, GPT-4 jumped to 86%, nearing human experts. However, GPT-4's training used roughly two orders of magnitude more compute than GPT-3 for that last 30 to 40 point gain. So it's still very important, but it's just, it's just like, yeah, diminishing. Each additional few points towards 90% is increasingly expensive in compute. Similarly, coding and math benchmarks saw massive leaps from GPT-3 to GPT-4, but further gains beyond GPT-4 are smaller. In XAI's Grok 3, pushing to an unprecedented 200K GPU cluster

• 58:14John Coogan?

  only yielded moderate improvements over the prior state of the art. Hallucination! They didn't, they didn't use all 200K GPUs. And, and here it's saying that they did.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, if you look in the...

• 58:25John Coogan?

  God, like...

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they, they, OpenAI specifically says in their research that they say up to 200,000. Nvidia GPUs, 100 to 200K GPUs over four months, but we know that's not true.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so it's a mess. I don't know. We're close to something. It's cool. I like it, but.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, we've compared.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  We gotta step.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  We've compared their models. Should we talk about their dynamic?

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolutely. Let's move on to the Wall Street Journal. The inside story of how Altman and Musk went from friends to bitter enemies. Kick us off.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  On the first full day of the second Trump presidency, Elon Musk was in the White House complex when he got word that his nemesis was about to hold a press conference with the president. Amazing, amazing first sentence here. I don't know who's writing this. He turned on the television. He turned on the television and watched his OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, and a beaming Donald Trump touted a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure called Stargate. And this is a hilarious dynamic, if it's actually true, where he's turning on the TV. He's got X open on his phone. He's just shaking his head. Like, one, Sam is is an absolute dog for even making this happen. You gotta be pretty brave to just go into the into the.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  Into the White House, the lion's den. Elon's got like six of his kids running around. They know you're they know you're a target.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  So props to even making that happen. Masa, I'm sure, was was, you know, pulling, making making some magic happen, too. So. Despite having rarely left the president's side over the preceding few months, Musk was blindsided by the announcement, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk fumed to aides and allies about the announcement, claiming Stargate's backers didn't have the money they needed. The deepest, which is true, right? It sort of came out that they didn't have it. It was more of like a roadshow. You know, a SPAC announcement type thing. So the deepest cut was Altman's success navigating Trump world via a carefully coordinated series of recent meetings in Palm Beach and phone calls with the White House. While keeping the plan secret from the president's first buddy.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  First buddy. Yeah, buddy cop. They're going buddy cop mode.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Buddy cop mode.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  But Trump's got a lot of buddies.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but their relationship soured when Musk left in 2018, following a power struggle. It worsened when Musk responded to the launch of ChatGPT by launching his own rival startup XAI. This week, the feud went nuclear when Musk followed the Stargate unveiling with his own bombshell. A hostile $97.4 billion bid for the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. A decade after joining forces, they are now fighting for control of the very thing that brought them together in one of the highest stakes and most personal fights in recent business history. The outcome could determine everything from the future of a world-changing technology to who will help set the nation's technology agenda with the new president.

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:01:18Jordi Hays?

  This article is based on the conversations with more than a dozen people familiar with Altman and Musk's relationship over the years, as well as OpenAI and Musk's business and political decisions.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  We gotta go back and watch the Sam Altman Elon Musk podcast. Have you seen this?

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  They had their own show together?

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  It wasn't, it was, Y Combinator had a, a series of interviews on their YouTube channel, and Sam went and conducted a number of interviews, and one of them was with Elon. And so they're sitting in the Tesla factory, just chopping it up about like entrepreneurship and wisdom, and it's just like, it's crazy to see. I'll, I'll, I'll continue. So, "In many ways, Sam Altman, 39, and Elon Musk, 53, couldn't be more different. While Musk was beaten up and verbally abused as a child, Altman was a teacher's pet whose parents routinely told him he could be whatever he wanted to be. Where Musk's, where Musk was often abrasive, Altman tended to tell people what they wanted to hear.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  And while Musk was an engineer, steeping himself in the details of rocket and battery design, Altman is a technology-obsessed intellectual, reading widely across philosophy, science, and literature, and penning essays on how society should organize itself. But both have strikingly similar taste for power." Let's go.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Taste for power, that, that should be one of our hiring metrics.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  John, what do you think this guy's taste for power is? You think he's a, you think he's real hungry?

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, if you're in an interview-

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  You can tell, you can tell Ben's got a real taste for power.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Yeah, if you're in an interview and somebody asks you, "What do you, where do you want to be in 10 years?", and you just say supremely powerful, I think you get the job. I've got this one there. I think you get the job. Oh yeah, yeah, that, that's the video. Look at this. Very poorly shot.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  That doesn't even feel that long ago.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  It's, it wasn't that long ago. The cinematography was not incredible, but I think it was probably 2016 or something.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Elon's doing the Andrew, the Andrew Tate, you know, early-

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  2015, wow, yeah.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  That is wild seeing them hang out, just bros, just guys being dudes doing a pod together. You love to see it. It's too bad. I mean, they keep coming back to the fact that mom and dad are fighting. You know, these are two, you know, everyone, everyone picks a side, but ultimately these are Americans. They're building technology. I love technology. I love America.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  I, I, I wish they could just be on the same team and, and build something awesome together. I hope that they can have a reconciliation. That's my biggest hope. Well, and so for years, the millennial Altman looked up to the gen-esque Mucks Musk as a hero. A real life's Tony Stark, who provided a counter example to the country's technological stagnation that Altman railed against when he was president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator. Altman met Musk early, years earlier when Y Combinator partner Jeff Ralston introduced them. Oh, I know Ralston pretty well. Oh, they misspelled his name here. And helped arrange for Altman to tour Musk's SpaceX rocket factory. Interesting.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  Altman's time leading Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, put him at the epicenter of power in Silicon Valley. He became known as a fixer with an unrivaled rolodex who could call in favors for the startups he invested in or punish investors who crossed them. And this is 100% true. He was great at what he did during this time. He was fantastic. This, his special talent was raising money, which he would do by arriving in his signature uniform of jeans and sneakers, curl his small frame up cross legged in a conference room chair and unspool a vision so grandiose, compelling in earnest, that it often seemed like investors were powerless to keep from funding his projects. It's great. I mean, great storyteller, great fundraiser. And what's interesting is that like, yeah, he raised some money, he raised a lot of money for his projects,

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  but he was also like an angel investor who got tons of deals done for other people. He set other people up with funds, like he was, he was marshaling capital all over the place.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  I had heard that he invested in, he was able to invest in Stripe at a $700,000 valuation.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  I, I don't know, but I know.

• 1:05:21Jordi Hays?

  It was like 10 on 700K or something.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  I think he's a billionaire just from Stripe.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  Basically, somehow. I don't know.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  But I mean, yeah, phenomenal investor.

• 1:05:30Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, for anyone listening, if you want to be a billionaire, just put 10K into the next stripe.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a good advert.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  People tend to make it really complicated.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Why are you overcomplicating it?

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Think, oh, it takes years and all this hard work. Now just take 10 grand and just put it into the next stripe.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, he's even doing it more recently with O'Klo, that nuclear startup that he took public. And it's a SPAC and it's a successful SPAC. The stock's way up. What a narrative.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  The Sam Altman, like if you, if you see people talking about it, you know, on X, the company, they call it Sam Altman's nuclear startup.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  So like, that is probably like the dominant narrative, causing it to pump.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  I actually have to check, I own a little, I own a little bit of it.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  You know, you own O'Klo. Okay, not financial advice here, but we are going to check the stock on public.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I am down 4% today, so.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Oh, it's not, it's pulling back?

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  It had to.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  Well.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  It had to.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Make up your own mind. Go on public, check it out and see if it's for you.

• 1:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Not that, we, we certainly do not recommend.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  No, we don't recommend individual stocks, but we do recommend becoming a multi-strategy, multi-stage, large asset management firm.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  And running your business through public.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Become a long, short equity hedge fund.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  And it all starts with public. In early 2015, Musk and Altman began having regular dinners each Wednesday in the Bay Area. Their conversations tended toward the apocalyptic, how the world might end, how they might prepare for it, to where they might have to flee. A likely cause, they agreed, would be artificial intelligence that grows smarter than humans and impossible to control. That May, Altman suggested they create a Manhattan project to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that is as smart as humans at most tasks. They wanted to ensure Google, which had a huge lead in developing the technology, didn't end up deciding what it would mean for the human race. Such a fascinating solution, you know, like.

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  Like, there is another world where you're like, we're just like, we're just gonna try and like, you know, use military might to just actually like ban this development of this technology.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  Like, you could do that. I wouldn't advocate for that at all. And I think AGI is, I think the the whole, the whole history of this stuff is going very well. I'm very satisfied with how it's going. But, you know, there is another world where you're like, hey, yeah, like, there's this technology and like, we need to, you know, steer people away from development of this and like ban this and control this and then have international coalitions and, and, you know, military might to, to, to, to build it up. Like, there are things you can't build. You know, dark web, drug marketplaces are a good example.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  It's worth noting that Sam Altman and Musk had these meetings and then Altman decided that he was gonna get really into building bunkers, sort of doomsday, you know, setups.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  Fly on the wall.

• 1:08:24Jordi Hays?

  So, I would love to have been a part of those conversations.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  And so they join forces, they raise up to a billion dollars. Musk pledged to supply the lion's share of the money and they would lead it as co-chairman. Oof. The co-CEO thing is always rough. Yeah, they should have figured that out early on. It's very clear that they didn't play out like, okay, like, what if this is actually like a trillion dollar opportunity? Like, who will, who will want to run this? And they were both like, well, obviously it'll be me. It's not, there's no question.

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Their relationship began to disintegrate in 2017, pretty quickly. I mean, this is 2015, they're having dinners. 2017, they start disintegrating. After OpenAI researchers realized they would need far more money than a nonprofit could raise to develop advanced AGI. We talked about this, how if you want to summon the AI god in a box, you gotta be a capitalist. It's not happening in a nonprofit. You're not just writing some clever algorithm with some altruistic researcher.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  We are interested in taking Peta private.

• 1:09:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:27Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of stuff.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  No, it's the for-profit conversion.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  For-profit conversion, then it'll be private and then we'll take it public. And then we'll probably take it private again, as, as the private equity guys do.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Bravo will take it public, take it private.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. You know the post of document. That's great. According to one of their emails, Elon demanded majority control and to be CEO. Altman's successful move to block his mentor would mark the beginning of the rupture. He convinced another co-founder Greg Brockman to back him over Musk. Brockman reeled in OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to also back Altman. Brockman and Sutskever wrote in an email to Musk that since OpenAI was founded to avoid an AI dictatorship, it seemed like a bad idea to create a structure where you would become a dictator if you choose to. If you chose to. Within hours, Musk wrote back that this is the final straw. By early 2018, he had left the company and Altman took over leadership.

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  This was like a very under discussed at the time because OpenAI was such just a research lab and they were doing like little things here and there. Like this was definitely not in the news in the same way. Like 2018, people were talking about SpaceX and Tesla mostly.

• 1:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  So, over the next few years, they focused on research on 2020. In 2022, they released ChatGPT. This became huge. Turned out to be one of the most successful and transformative consumer technology products of the century in the company of the iPhone, Facebook and TikTok. As it's, as shocked as the rest of the world that AI had gone mainstream and upset that he wasn't a part of it. Musk began publicly criticizing OpenAI for moving too fast and not taking safety seriously. He signed an open letter calling for a six month pause on AI development. Within a few months, launched.

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  Funny, a lot of people called for similar, you know, signed similar letters calling for a pause on new podcast formation.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  And of course, that didn't get through.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Nope. You can't stop it. The arrow of progress moves but one way.

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  In 2024, he attacked Altman in a new venue court after suing OpenAI and its CEO that February. He withdrew the suit in June, refiled it in August and amended it in November. They've been going back and forth in the, back and forth in the courts for a long time. Musk's lawyers declared the perfidity and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions. You know, it's a good lawyer.

• 1:11:46Jordi Hays?

  You gotta pay a top dollar for a lawyer that can, that can hit you.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  That's not less than a thousand dollars an hour. That's a, that's a $5,000 an hour lawyer.

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  That's 10K potentially.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Altman and Musk were bitter.

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  LLM could never.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Altman said Musk was bitter that he left before the company succeeded. As Musk's legal attacks escalated, Altman watched with growing alarm as Musk grew closer and closer to Donald Trump campaigning by his side and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support him. You want to continue?

• 1:12:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I mean, there's lines from Altman interviews where he's like, you know, I would hope that, you know, the president wouldn't sort of pick favorites when we're here, you know, all trying to develop this transformative technology. And to Trump's credit, he seemingly hasn't picked favorites specifically with an AI, right? He obviously has a good relationship with Elon, but he's not, uh, we haven't seen him go out and do any sort of press conference for XAI or the Memphis, you know, data center.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  It's such a narrative violation.

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  Like everyone thinks Trump is going to be super corrupt with this stuff. And he's just like,

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  He's making, he's having his cash bonanza over here. Our listeners know that like,

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  He's, um,

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Deal guy.

• 1:12:59Jordi Hays?

  Deal guy. Deal guy.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, Altman first mentioned Stargate to OpenAI's board in 2023 as a way to vastly increase the computing power his company could tap to develop and operate AI. He originally brought the idea to Microsoft, asking it to invest upward of a hundred billion. But in the wake of an episode in 2023, when Altman was ousted from the CEO perch for five days, the tech giant balked, says, get your, get it together, guys. We're not putting up a hundred billion for a guy who can't hold on to his job. He gets upset. It's so funny. Like, there's so much drama here. Uh, Altman soon found partners. One was SoftBank. Uh, Altman had known him since his Y Combinator days. Second was Larry Ellison, a longtime friend of Musk, who was hung out to dry when XAI pulled out of a Texas data center project that Ellison's

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  company Oracle was working on. Altman agreed OpenAI would take it over. The project grew into the foundation for Stargate. I didn't know that.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  That it had originally been an XAI project, but then I guess Musk wanted to do the, the data center like himself and like own the whole stack.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  And isn't, isn't Ellison heavily invested in X?

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're all super conflicted and like, you know, it's all just like sneaking his tail over here.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he, I think he put in at least a billion.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Okay, look that up and I'm gonna keep reading. In December, Masayoshi Son played golf with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago and announced his intention to invest $100 billion in US infrastructure projects alongside Trump and Lutnick. Their press conference effectively previewed Stargate without making any of the details public, which ensured Musk still didn't know about OpenAI's involvement.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Here's a, here's a great AI overview, a Gemini overview.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Quoting, you know, using the Washington Post as a source, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, invested $1 billion in X. However, as of September 2024, he lost $720 million of his investment, according to the Washington Post, which clearly he didn't lose his investment.

• 1:15:01John Coogan?

  He had a paper loss.

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  He had a paper.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  And then it went back up, maybe?

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  But now it's back up, so.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Very odd.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Gonna have to put the Washington Post in the true zone.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  And so Altman goes to the inauguration festivities. He doesn't sit with the other tech CEOs alongside Musk. There was like the high, like, you know, the real like killers were up there with like Zuck and Bezos and Musk were up in like kind of a balcony area. And then Altman was down with Theo Von and Alex Wang.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  It was a bunch of cool like little micro crews. I think Jake Paul was over there for some reason. The next day, Altman and his partners arrived at the White House where they were more fully explained their plans for Stargate to Trump. Trump told the group he wanted to go ahead and with the announcement, the new president loved that they were aiming to invest $500 billion during his term, a number sure to make headlines. It makes sense. He wants a lot of jobs, wants a lot of economic growth, spend the money in America. And so Musk gets upset. He's fuming to AIDS about how the partners didn't really have the funding lined up for the project. He called it fake on X. Musk was already plotting a counter move and had been considering making a bid for the nonprofit. Musk said he was inspired to make the bid because OpenAI was in the midst of a for becoming

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  a for-profit company and he believed Altman planned to undervalue the asset of the nonprofit, which would become an independent charity with a stake in the for-profit. But Musk's more primal message was for investors. Let's go to war with Sam Altman. Altman was at the Paris AI Summit when news of the bid broke and so he got, he got like TMZ'd a little bit with, you know, the reporters saying, hey, what do you think about this? And he's like, oh my God, I guess I can't deal with this.

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Basically, he was saying, like, I just want him to stop really bad. That was, that was the immediate take.

• 1:16:48John Coogan?

  And so he said, "OpenAI is not for sale and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk's latest attempt to disrupt his competition," said Brett Taylor, chairman of OpenAI's board. I thought Brett Taylor's building an AI company separately. I guess he is. I think he's probably doing both. "Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. OpenAI's rejection comes as no surprise," says Musk's lawyer, Mark Toboroff. Musk had said he wanted to save the company from the dangerous direction in which his co-founder had taken it. "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open source, safety-focused force for good it once was," he pronounced. "We will make sure that happens." Altman responded in his signature nice brand

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  of nice guy savagery. "Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity," he said on Bloomberg TV. "I feel for the guy. I don't think he's a happy person. I do feel for him." Wow, like.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  It's wild because I think if Elon, Elon would tell you, "I don't want to be happy."

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  So don't use that, don't use that metric to evaluate, like, to try to judge me, right? His motivation is to put a data center on Mars.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. Anyway.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely wild. Well, we got some breaking news. Thank you to Ben for surfacing it. From Perplexity.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Who's also, they've been in the timeline recently because.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  They're fighting it out. Everyone's in the trenches.

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity CEO likes to use Sam Altman's replies as marketing engine for Perplexity. It's seemingly his strategy now. So Perplexity says, today we're open sourcing R1 1776. Cool name. Got to give him credit for that.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  A version of the DeepSeek R1 model that's been post-trained to provide uncensored, unbiased, and factual information. To keep our model uncensored on sensitive topics, we created a diverse, multilingual evaluation set of 1,000 examples using human annotators and specially-designed LLM judges. We compared frequency of censorship in the original R1 and state-of-the-art LLMs to R1 1776. You can see a chart, Ben, maybe you can pull it up or we can do it in post. We also ensured the model's math and reasoning abilities remained intact after the uncensoring process. Benchmark evaluations showed it performed on par with the base R1 model, indicating that uncensoring had no impact on core reasoning capabilities.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:19:13Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  I mean, hot take, like, I don't really care about censorship in LLMs all that much because like, I, how many times are you doing, you know, research on the Tiananmen Square massacre? Like, you know, it's like.

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26John Coogan?

  Most of the time, I'm like, make this recipe list or like, you know, pull some GPU data together or, you know, something that's like, it wouldn't even be censored either way, but it's cool that they did it. And 1776, obviously very American branded, very, you know, American dynamism coded and probably like a fun stunt, marketing stunt. And it's good because there was a lot of like, is DeepSeek secretly bad and like poisoning it? So I like that they like, did the work to like, go clean it up. I think that's cool.

• 1:19:56Jordi Hays?

  So I think Perplexity can be very useful.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  I don't use it a ton.

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  I use it from time to time. I find it, I find it. Can be fantastic. It's just more so the friction of opening perplexity and searching ends up being high for a lot of this sort of faster. You know, I just opened Google search and I got the information I wanted, even though it was like, you know, I asked, how much did Larry Ellison invest in X? And Gemini like botched it and like gave this highly politicized answer, but I still got the data that I wanted. So I think perplexity would have done a much better job of that. And I should probably just like start, you know, using it more. But overall, like their product strategy right now feels very reactionary. Like it seems like the CEO is sort of like watching what other people are doing, figuring

• 1:20:47Jordi Hays?

  out how to make it about them, right? Hey, here we have our like, we, we basically made R1 into a better consumer product for Americans. Look at us. And he's launching their sort of deep research competitor, which again, even Karpathy was saying, you know, not, not quite on par in terms of how people are using deep research broadly today. So yeah, overall, you know, just focusing your messaging on, on your, your top competitor, your former boss's reply section. I'm not a super, super bullish on that strategy.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  What's interesting is perplexity does have another feature like tab that I actually think is really cool. And I was super bullish on, but then I didn't wind up using all that much. It's, it's an algorithmic feed of news stories that are AI generated. So like the top story for me is Grok three, which obviously I'm interested in talking about. And then you click on it and it shows you a bunch of sources and key features. And it's very nicely organized and it's not like super ad, ad riddled and stuff. And I thought this was really cool, but at the same time, like I would rather experience the Grok three launch on X in like the messy timeline. And so I haven't been using that as much as I thought. And we were talking about this yesterday, like, is there room for a new hacker news or a new?

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  A new tech meme and perplexity kind of built it. I think they did a great job on product execution in that tab. I think it's quite good, but I think that in 2025, people want a feed that is more chaotic, more combative, more comedic, entertaining, entertaining. Exactly. So I want to see the actual live stream that I can just go watch the definitive source. I want to see the community notes. I want to see Carpathia and then I want to see growing Daniel meme it and I want to see Rune respond and I want to see Yaxine respond and I like getting my news that way, honestly, more than, hey, there's this sanitized AI summary. That's helpful, but it's not as fun.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. So I'm looking at the like free productivity charts right now, which a lot of these AI apps are under productivity. So perplexity is at 26, Grok at one, ChatGPT is at, or sorry, Grok at two, ChatGPT is at one. And so this is just a snapshot in the app store right now. This is a snapshot of a moment in time.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  I thought they were going to destroy everything.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  DeepSeek is number three. And then perplexity is down at number 26, behind things like HP Smart, their printer, the ringtones maker, the ring app, you know, random VPNs. Speechify is actually ranking quite a bit higher.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Boy, have you met Cliff?

• 1:23:35Jordi Hays?

  And then so here's, here's, yeah, you had mentioned that. So

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Beast, Beast on the bench.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  So perplexity is 26. They have 127 rankings. Chat on AI, which is basically an open AI alternative, has 194,000 rankings and is only at 28. This is like a seemingly like no name, you know, sort of the most blatant rapper that you can think of. So I don't know. I think that I don't see.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  This model getting them to be in the top five. So to me, if they're, if they're, you know, launching R1 1776, do consumers in the App Store actually care about that? Because if you're competing with Google, you need to not be worried about how cool X is going to think your product releases and more so how you go from 26 on the charts to top three, right? If you actually want to be competitive, he clearly wants to compete with Sam. Every single day he's responding to Sam. So I think, I think this launch is super cool. I definitely want to play around with it, but you know, at the end of the day.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've honestly seen the same thing on, oddly in the nicotine pouch world, where I've seen like people be like, oh, I'm launching a new nicotine pouch with like an American flag on it and like, okay, it'll get like, you know, a thousand likes on X. And then it's like, okay, like, do you have $10 million to spend with 7-Eleven, Walmart and, you know, QuickTrip to actually get your product in stores? It's like the, the thing that actually drives like the adoption loop is like completely separate from like popularity.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  And it's just, yeah, it's interesting. It's, I, I wonder like perplexity, I think is cool because like they're not just doing the vanilla, like we're just doing another chatbot. There's already 17 of those that have like billions of dollars. At least they're trying a different product instantiation. I think that is cool. But, but yeah, I, I do wonder how they can get, how they can get just more, how can I fit it into my life and how it can really get to, you know, solid traction? And yeah, I mean, maybe speed, you mentioned speed, like if it was faster than Google and it was something that I could make my default search in Safari on iOS somehow.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is if you're sitting in Google Chrome, working.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  It's always going to be faster to hit Command T and immediately start searching.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  Now, now, now, if, if Arvin, the CEO of Perplexity, made a compelling case on X that I should go into my Chrome tab and reroute the default Chrome search to Perplexity and showed me how to do that, I might do that and, and try it.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  See how it goes.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  But it has to be a faster product than Google.

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  And Google can continue to make that super hard, or they could just say, you're not allowed to build a competitive.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  And, and again, it might not be like an actual consumer, like viral growth strategy, like it might not, it might not really.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, should we wrap up, Grok? I think we did a full deep dive.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  That was great.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Now you know.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Where, where are we on time? We're at 12:20, hour and a half. Okay. Well, let's go through some timeline. We got a bunch of good stuff.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  By the way.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm loving the new layout.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the, the comments on it. We're trying to make the show better every single day in different ways. Sometimes we wake up with a bad sleep score, but we're still, I actually had a, I actually had a.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  How's the sleep score?

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  I had a rough night.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  No, I, I went a bit a little late.

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  I'm sure I'm getting docked. Let's see.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  I have to give, I have to give a little anecdote.

• 1:27:16John Coogan?

  Ooh, 82. I got destroyed.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  I got 83.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  642.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine if, can you imagine if they were just like in the background, listening, like adjusting them to try to make us like super competitive?

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  Wait, what'd you get?

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  I got 83.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  83, you beat me.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  A B by one. No, but so last, so I made a mistake this morning. I got up at five.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  My eight sleep warmed my bed.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Like five, you know, whatever to, to, so that I, I was sort of like waking up naturally.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  And then at five, it starts doing the vibrating alarm, which is really nice. The issue is that I snoozed the alarm. I didn't turn it off. And then I just got out of bed and I left.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Oh, and then.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  I was in the car.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  With your wife.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  And, and she's.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  She's like vibrating.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Texting me being like, please turn off your alarm.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  Which is funny because normally people are like, turn off your alarm because you're still sleeping.

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  But turning off your alarm because you're already out.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Already in the car, it's great.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  But the, it's, it's, you know, connected via Wi-Fi, so I was able to just like turn it off.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  I mean, for what it's worth, I think I still, like, the eight sleep got me to a place where even though I didn't have the best night's sleep, it went a little bit further. The six and, six and three quarters hours of sleep I got were fantastic.

• 1:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic, but.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  I'm ready to lock in.

• 1:28:29Jordi Hays?

  I started that point by saying, are, we actually are genuinely focused on how do we improve the format of the show every single day. There's the format, there's the camera, lighting, overlay. So, thank you to everybody that gives us feedback. We see it in the chat, we see it in the DMs, comments, etc. Trying to make it better every single day, forever. And, yeah, it's a fun journey.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Keep grinding.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into the timeline.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Let's go to Paul Graham. Andreas Klinger says, "This picture will be framed by dads everywhere." Says, Paul Graham says, "Every time we come back to Silicon Valley, my 16 year old son gets a massive dose of cognitive dissonance when he notices that apparently smart and reasonable people seem eager to obtain something he's convinced is utterly worthless."

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  And someone says, "Interesting, what's that?" And he says, "My advice." It's like he set this up to go viral. Like, it's like he almost framed the first tweet to be like, "Somebody's gonna ask and then I'll drop the bomb on them."

• 1:29:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  Because he could've just said like, you know, my, he could've revealed that it was his advice, but it wouldn't have been as good and it would've been like maybe cockier or something. I don't know. It was a great post. It was very funny.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Great poster.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, I don't know. Yeah, I don't have a 16 year old yet, but it'll be interesting to see if he enjoys my advice at that point.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, what we'll do is, is I'll give advice to your sons.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  You give advice to my kids.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  And they'll respect it because they'll be like, "Oh, this is like my dad's business partner. My God, I respect what he says." So even if they go through that awkward, you know, teenage period where they're sort of rebelling, we'll still be able to, you know, deliver the...

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, I'm planning to go full reverse psychology and have all my advice be like, "Move to Brooklyn, become a DJ."

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Do drugs.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just like...

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  Look, you're 16, I want you to be doing drugs.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  I want you to be doing a boiler room set.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  When I was your age, I was doing...

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  And then he's like, I'm dad, I'm going into the military and I'm starting a hedge fund.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm getting a job at Goldman.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Working 18 hours a day.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. I don't know. It's funny. It's funny to see PG. He is, he's been posting about his kids for 16 years.

• 1:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Posting through it.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  He's been, he's been posting the dad advice.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  It's good to see him come back. He had that post that many people were commenting on the Feng Shui of his room, but you know, he's posting through it.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Doesn't seem to be.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Posting through it.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  It's great. Let's go to David Holes, founder of Mid Journey. He says, "The biggest frustration of a hardcore technologist in San Francisco is how many big companies, both tiny and gargantuan, are kind of fake. Investors often can't tell the difference between story and substance, and armed with a billion dollars, it may take a decade for it to fail. As an observer, when those companies finally fall, you expect to feel some sense of satisfaction, but actually you only feel sadness and a sense of waste searing."

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Dude, I know exactly who he's posting about.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Perhaps this is just the price we pay to live in a place that is so supportive of wild ideas and risky ventures. A lot of dumb stuff is going to happen and we just have to be okay with it. It's just emotionally hard. It's like, it's such a funny take on like, oh.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Figure AI.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  No, no, there's some, there's some fraud or whatever. And he's like, and he's like, you know, most people would be like, oh, this is like, you know, bad for the economy or wasting money or, oh, like, I should be getting the money to build something real. And he's just like, this is just emotionally draining. I love how zen he is. It's so good. Anyway, yeah. I think the real crazy thing is that, is that like him, lots of people in Silicon Valley have identified the new crop of frauds.

• 1:32:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Mainstream media silent. They're not doing investigative journalism anymore.

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Kind of like a weird like, hey, maybe mainstream media, like we need that. Hey, maybe we need some investigative journalism. Like where is the? I don't know, the, the, the John Kerry ru of this generation.

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't know if John Kerry is like retired or still working, but uh, gotta start figuring these things out mainstream media, cause there's some bombshells out there right now.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I mean, when you, when you think about the high profile hard tech companies right now that are,

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  that are building, that have a lot of hype, that have raised a lot of money.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is, you know, what he's saying is like, yeah, if, if you are a well versed observer, or you have any type of like, you know, insight into the company, you can kind of point out like what he's saying of great, great story, not a lot of substance, right?

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  Which is what he's pointing out. And that by itself is not fraud, right?

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Jordi Hays?

  Like you can, there are plenty of companies that have great stories and just not a lot of substance, right? Maybe they're building something and they're building just a not a very good version of it, but they still, you know, continue to raise money.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, in the, in the like post.com world, there was a guy named Barney Powell who started a company called Moon Express, who was trying to deliver, like basically build a moon colony. Great story, raised a bunch of money, didn't get anywhere, it failed and it wasn't a fraud. It was just like, like all the investors were like, obviously bummed, but they were like, yeah, like I wanted you to try to build, I, I don't know, I, it might've been a legal thing, but I, uh, but, but I'm pretty sure what happened. I need to actually, you know, deep dive the company, but, um, but I'm pretty sure it's like, yeah, if you, if you're as an investor, there's a lot of times when you put money in a company and you're like, hey, I wanted you to try this and I know that it's a 10% chance that it works out. And if it fails, yeah, no hard feelings.

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Nikhil in the chat says Hindenburg meets Hindenburg research meets the information.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:09Jordi Hays?

  That would be, somebody does that, it's, it would, it would get a, you slap that behind a paywall and, and you'll be, you know, have, have some nice revenue in no time.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Everyone, Nabeel says, well articulated, it's not ideal, but the alternatives feel worse. There does have to be a way to improve. Anyway, let's move on to Mateo over at Eight Sleep. He says, "It's so exciting to see Eight Sleep on TV during the final of the premiere Padel in Riyadh, supporting the number one team in the world of Koelo and Tapia." I don't know much about Padel, but I think it's on the ground.

• 1:34:47Jordi Hays?

  No, Padel is the cool version of pickleball. Not to throw too much shade at, uh...

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  Palantir?

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Palantir's pickleball paddle. I think it's great if you're, you know, doing paddle-esque sports, but, um, but yeah, it's just a faster, higher-paced, more athletic, uh, more intense version.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Boom, boom. Got your Eight Sleep hat on. There you go.

• 1:35:08Jordi Hays?

  Thankfully I caught that. That would have been deeply embarrassing. I never would have recovered.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, it's cool that Eight Sleep is, I mean, it's such a fun brand. Cause like, yeah, it's a consumer tech company, hardware company, but they get to go and play in F1 and pro sports teams. And it's, uh, yeah, it's a lot of fun. Anyway, getting Eight Sleep, it's a no-brainer. We love Eight Sleep here. Uh, speaking of other sponsors we love, let's move on to Ramp. Uh, Aaron says, "This is why I love Ramp." And he's, uh, quote posting Ramp's official account. It says, "Last Friday, our team attended the Eagles Parade in Philadelphia for some on-the-ground journalism. What we found might shock you." And they have all these, they did this funny video of like, uh, you know, people with Ramp signs at the Philadelphia celebration. It's great. They're really, they're getting

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  so much out of this Super Bowl ad. It is crazy. I guarantee this thing is ROI positive, uh, which is more than you can say for a lot of Super Bowls.

• 1:36:05Jordi Hays?

  And it shows like taking that scrappy approach of saying, "Hey, we've made this big investment, but let's make the most of it." Like, I guarantee your Doritos ran their ad and they were like, "Cool." Like pat on the back. Like, "We did it. We'll see you next year."

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, Paki, Paki's a big, uh, Eagles fan. I think he grew up outside of Philadelphia.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  He'll correct me if I miss that, but, uh... Yeah, love, love to see Philly fans, you know, get a win.

• 1:36:30John Coogan?

  Having fun. Yeah, that's great. Uh, well, let's move on to a bezel deep dive. We got just ad on, ad on, ad. Now, these ads are brought to you by AdQuick.

• 1:36:39Jordi Hays?

  I can mix in some reviews that have ads in them.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, yeah, let's do that. Let's go to some reviews that...

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  So we're gonna...

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  The ads in the reviews are presented by AdQuick, by the way.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, the best way to buy out of home ads for your startup. So I got the first one. I honestly, every time I read these ads, it just makes my heart sing. It just gets better every time. So...

• 1:36:57John Coogan?

  I haven't seen these yet.

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  Zero to one, but unhinged by somebody named John. Uh, "The Technology Brothers podcast isn't just a show. It's a founder's dojo, a 10x brain gym, and a capital allocator's confessional all wrapped into one. Every episode is a masterclass in thinking from first principles, moving fast, and breaking every norm except the ones that print cash. Amazing. John and Jordy don't just talk tech. They talk trajectory. Listen long enough and you'll either build something great or realize you never had the stomach for it in the first place. But let's talk execution. You know what else requires ruthless efficiency? Managing your finances when the system wasn't built for you. That's when Purple comes in." So this is a really cool startup. "Purple is the first banking and benefits platform built for the disability community

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  because fintech forgot millions of Americans who actually need financial tools built for real life. Checking accounts, EBT integrations, uh, ABL, able savings, all in one place. Purple built the mercury for people with disabilities because dealing with social security makes raising a Series A look easy. Check it out at withpurple.com."

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  That makes so much sense.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like true mad in some way.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Tech wanted to focus on, how do I reinvent the Amex, you know, like, uh, platinum card? How do I make this cool credit card that has like restaurant reservations? Meanwhile, like massive opportunities sitting here with Purple to just build tools for this, you know, narrow, uh, you know, subset of people who will switch from their primary bank.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  And you imagine that most of the people that are feeling that frustration are not immediately like, oh, I gotta go build a startup. Whereas, you know, a lot of, like, obviously, like Ramp isn't a highly competitive, like, they need, like, IMO gold medalists and like the best venture capitalists in the world and like tons of money and, and team members because... Everyone who's built a company has thought, you know, I need better CFO software, right? And like expense management and corporate cart. So that's going to be a very hot market. This is like a place where you could actually probably go in, break in, make a statement and then, and then grow your business off of that. So I, I just think that's fascinating.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  And that's just something that like, it would never come up on a market map. It would never come up in like a brainstorming session. You're not going to hear some thread guy say like,

• 1:39:07Jordi Hays?

  Once he sells for a billion, somebody, some VC will be like, we need the market map for disability. So awesome. Thank you, John, for the review. I got another one and then we'll jump into some other ones. Relentless Alpha by username, I'm having fun, five stars. The technology brothers are at it five days a week consistently delivering fresh alpha right out of the oven on the most relevant news in tech.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:39:30Jordi Hays?

  It's like taking a peek into the elite group chats. You've never been a part of with two to three hours of top tier daily content from the brotherhood. I no longer have time to catch the latest flop guest rotation of the week.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Oh my God.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  That's brutal, brutal. But there have been some flops lately. Even though Naval went on, I thought that was cool.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, I gotta watch that one.

• 1:39:51Jordi Hays?

  This review is sponsored by psychedelic science. The premier psychedelic conference globally hosted in Denver this June. Don't miss 300 speakers covering the latest breakthroughs in psychedelic research alongside 12,000 attendees. Mark Andreessen can yap about ayahuasca, one-shotting founders all he wants. But just because it's no longer contrarian to be into psychedelics doesn't mean they deserve newfound hate from Silicon Valley. I think that's correct. They're not without risks and they're not for everyone, but there's no debating their immense potential for healing creativity and let's be honest, fun. Register today to learn about the latest psychedelic research policy and culture this summer. Great, great. He's sort of predicted any pushback from our audience and just nailed it. Sounds very cool. I imagine like this seems like something Tim Ferriss would, would attend or speak at.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if he has already, but um. Very cool. Thank you to I'm Having Fun, great username for a business like that.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, very interesting. Any others?

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  We got more. I'll just rip through them. Again, this one's also sponsored by AdQuick.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  This review is, and then there's also another ad in there for a separate business.

• 1:40:54John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:40:56Jordi Hays?

  No wonder, this is from Cody Ames. No wonder everyone I know told me to watch this. If they said X is ahead of the world, John and Jordy are head of X. They take the largest feats and most interesting developments from startups to VC to broader technology and business, then extract it into an engaging and easy to listen to format. Couldn't recommend this podcast enough to anyone who needs a quick and easy way to digest the biggest news you won't find anywhere else. I also heard they're the most profitable podcast, which is no shocker. This is the obvious spot to advertise your company or any news you have. So, actually, Cody didn't put an ad in here. That's my only critique of this review.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  He was talking to us about OpenX, his company, which is very cool. And I believe Cody is also a car guy. Who, I, he's maybe rebuilding, I don't want to get it wrong because it'd be very offensive, but AMG Hammer, he's a Hammer guy.

• 1:41:45Jordi Hays?

  He's a Hammer.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so, this is like the most legendary Mercedes, kind of like Mercedes muscle car, essentially, like, I mean, fantastic driver's vehicle. And I think he's restoring, rebuilding, modifying, recreating one. But he's invested a ton of time and obviously deserves the respect of the tech community for his incredible automotive innovations.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I got the last review, which is short, but perfect, from username DudeWhat'sMineSay. On Friday, he says, FPJorn of Tech Podcast, five stars. Nothing more needs to be said.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic review.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Do another review, put an ad in it. I feel like we need to give back for that.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of watches, we got a promoted post from Bezel. Let's talk about the Rolex Day Date, the President in 18 karat yellow gold with a factory diamond set bezel and green lacquer dial just landed on bezel. This isn't just a watch, it's a status symbol, a power move on the wrist. Let's break it down. The watch of the elite, launched in 1956, the Day Date was the first watch to display the day and the date in full. And so if you don't know about watch complications, you can kind of think about it in, there's a hierarchy here. You add each complication up. You start with the time only, just got the time on your wrist. Then you add a date complication, Date Just, just tells you the date, just the number.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  Then Day Date is going to tell you it's Friday, the 26th, it's Tuesday, the 18th. Then you can get into more perpetual calendars, which keep the time out for years and years and years. Annual calendars, which are right for 364 days of the year, and then you have to reset. And then you get, there's even an eternal calendar there now that goes out like a thousand years or something. And then there's moon phase complications, all sorts of complications. And so, but the Day Date is great because you just look down, you immediately know, hey, it's Tuesday, the 18th. And this is the watch of the elite. It's been the go-to for presidents, CEOs, and anyone who needs their watch to say, I make decisions that matter. I love it. Why is it called the President?

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  The first US president to rock the Day Date, Lyndon B. Johnson. By the late 60s, it had earned the nickname, the President's Watch.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty good marketing.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's so sick. It's worn by world leaders, moguls, power players, this watch run things. Rolex doesn't make the Day Date in steel, only precious metals, that's the rule. This one, 18K yellow gold forged in Rolex's in-house foundry because even their gold has to be better than everyone else's. It is a factory diamond set bezel, pure opulence, you know, we love opulence here. There's a difference between aftermarket diamonds and Rolex diamonds. Rolex hand selects and sets every stone under strict standards, meaning this bezel isn't just flashy, it's flawless. Green lacquer dial, this is Rolex's power color. Rolex green equals money, prestige, and legacy. The deep lacquer finish on this dial gives it a richness that pops against the gold. And so, like, a lot of people see these watches and they're, oh, Rolex, it's just like so expensive and it's just such a flashy thing.

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  Like, I, I enjoy this stuff. Because I'm a nerd for this and I think it's really cool that like even the most minor little details have a story and and and there's some sort of it's it's it's as engineering minded as anything else. And so that's why I'm excited about it.

• 1:45:04Jordi Hays?

  I think you need a day date soon because the first time we met, I distinctly remember asking you at some point, I was like, wait, so do you want to be like the president someday? I was just like, I was trying to figure out like what you wanted to do. Turns out it was be

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  A podcaster.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  A podcaster, but um.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  But you know, that that's a well trodden path. The reality TV to the White House is is well established at this point. But yeah, also, if you've seen Glengarry Glen Ross, the watch that Alec Baldwin wears is a gold Rolex day date presidential. And he pulls it out, there's this iconic scene where he says, look at this watch. This watch costs more than your car. He says, coffee is for closers, always be closing. That's where that comes from. And that was another movie, I think in the 80s or maybe 90s that popularized the the presidential day date even more. And the presidential bracelet is particularly special here. It's the ultimate flex. It's the three link president bracelet was designed specifically for the day date. It's smooth, seamless, and

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  also hides the class because true luxury is effortless. It's one of the most comfortable bracelets Rolex makes. So would you wear it? Let us know in the comments. Think you can pull it off? Head to the bezel app, download it. And it's yeah, there you go. Oh, look at that. I mean, it's just so iconic. Do you, Jordy, do you know about how you should tell if you should wear silver or gold? Are you familiar with this? The the veins thing?

• 1:46:31Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm actually not.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  So there's this thing where a lot of women know about this with makeup. There's this idea of like, if you have warm undertones or cool undertones, and then and then for a woman, you should match your foundation to that. And so there's this, there's this critique that's going on on like Instagram right now that I randomly saw, which is like Republican woman makeup is like there, I guess the left is like critiquing Republican women for doing their makeup wrong. And a lot of the things that they get wrong is that they have cool undertones, but they're using warm foundation. And for men, oftentimes, it's it's if you have cool undertones, you're better off with silver. And if you're have warm undertones, you have you're better off with gold. And so the way you figure this out is you look at your veins. And if your veins look blue, you

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  have cool undertones. And if they look more green, you have you have warm undertones. And so. The classic example is just like, you know, I'm obviously like Swedish and very like northern. And so I have blue undertones, blue blood.

• 1:47:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  And, and more like Italian guy is going to have greener undertones. And that Italian guy is going to look good in gold, right?

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:35John Coogan?

  And so when you think about the, you know, the mafia guy, the Italian guy, the Tony Soprano.

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  The golden.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  He's going to have more green undertones and that's going to lend itself to being able to rock a gold watch. Now, I recently bought a, not even a real gold watch, just a, just a watch that happens to be gold. I think it's maybe gold plated, but just to try it on and see if I can pull it off because I want to dip my toe in before I really try and go full gold, but for now I've been sticking with silver and I've been very happy and I think it matches my tones and my colors and my style.

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  Same here. I'm glad that I'd never even heard of that rule.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Jordi Hays?

  But fortunately I'm blue.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  I mean, it makes sense. Like, look at you.

• 1:48:15Jordi Hays?

  And we're, we're both rocking silver.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:48:20John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to the next promoted post.

• 1:48:22Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you gotta stage these out.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, this is like, yeah, it's an ad for public, but it's really a blog post that we would talk about on the show anyway. It's from their founder and co-CEO, Leaf Abraham. He says, "We ship a lot in all areas of business."

• 1:48:38Jordi Hays?

  By the way.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  It's obvious. Yeah.

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  He has a very unique Casio, which we'll have to have him on the show sometime to show it off, but anyways.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  We'll have to get.

• 1:48:47Jordi Hays?

  He should have used the Casio in the picture here.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, totally. Yeah. We'll have to get him on Bezel and see what he picks out. And so he says, "We ship a lot in all areas of the business. It's obviously cultural and one of the philosophies we embrace is what we call pace management." And I thought this was an interesting little management tip for, for founders. Because Leaf is obviously running like a very high performance organization and he probably has some interesting stuff to share. And so he says, "Time is the most precious, precious resource we have and we must ensure that we manage it well. A new method we will be talking about frequently that, that you all should embrace is pace management." And this was actually just an email that he sent out to the team. And so it's kind of cool that he like published this after the fact. This is a good example of going direct, just like.

• 1:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  He didn't, he's not like becoming an influencer. He's just taking content that he's already writing. Exactly. And then just publishing it.

• 1:49:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  So he says, as a manager, you are responsible not just for the quality of the work, but also for the speed at which it gets delivered. Time savings compound dramatically over time. Letting time slip away costs everyone money, not just the company, but every one of your coworkers. Here's how to manage pace. You got to take ownership of the pace, drive the pace of the project despite knowing that the urgency you instill might make some people uncomfortable at times. You got to break this project into small manageable pieces. You need frequent deadlines with quick check-ins. Let's regroup next week is the enemy. Check in with the group progress at least every 48 hours. I like this. This is the, uh, this is the Chris Saka thing. Like people ask, oh, when do you want this? Q2, Q3, Q tomorrow. Wasn't that what he said? Q Friday. How about Q Friday? I like that.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  And this is very similar. Yeah. Check in more frequently. Don't, don't throw things, oh yeah, yeah, next week. Keep teams small. Make sure every person knows exactly what they are responsible for and that everyone on the, everyone else on the team does too. And then project specific channels. Sometimes it helps to create project specific channels, dedicate the space allows for focused discussions even on the smallest details. So some good, uh, some good advice from Leaf over at Public. And if you're looking for a portfolio.

• 1:50:51Jordi Hays?

  You're building a company and you're wondering if you're going fast enough.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're doing, we went from one day a week to two days a week to three days a week.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  The pace is right.

• 1:51:03Jordi Hays?

  Eventually we'll be doing eight, nine, 10 days a week.

• 1:51:05John Coogan?

  10 days a week. Let's go.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  Let's move over to Sam Altman. He's thinking about open source and stuff. He asked X for our next open source project, would it be more useful to do an O3 mini level model that is pretty small, but still needs to be run on GPUs?

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were saying he asked Rock. I was like, I thought Sam was asking Rock for product advice.

• 1:51:30John Coogan?

  That'd be very funny.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  In Meta.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Or the best phone sized model we can do. And, uh, this was sitting right at 50 50. And then Dylan Patel chimes in from semi-analysis. He says, I can't believe X users are so stupid. Not voting for O3 mini is insane. You can literally already distill 4O, Claude 3.5, DeepSeek V3 into sizes that will run on phones. And it's just funny that like, yeah, obviously like that, the hackathon kids just kind of generally.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Dylan continues to be a dominant poster.

• 1:51:57John Coogan?

  Phenomenal. Phenomenal. And should we report a murder?

• 1:52:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this one needs to be reported.

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  You do it, that's too good.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  All right, so this is from B C Braggs. He says, I'd like to report a murder. Delian says, I've ended up leading more rounds in the last four months than the prior three years combined. Not sure what it means, but I guess we are so back? Question mark. Chamath says, means you've decided for whatever reason that time diversity doesn't matter in portfolio construction. Spoiler alert, it does. Delian says, ha, thankfully not too many 2021 SPAC shares in my portfolio construction either. Quick 10x ratio, quick work. This, this one, this one, I'm, I'm surprised that, you know, maybe Chamath was down to get ratioed and just felt like, you know, becoming a supporting character in the timeline for the day, but

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Coming for Dylan is the most dangerous thing. You're playing with a cobra on the timeline.

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Cobra, and then also, and then also trying to critique somebody for time-based portfolio construction where Chamath, you know, basically spearheaded the largest investment into this like novel, you know, sort of financial product into highly speculative companies at in a very condensed time period. So it's just like, kind of set yourself up for that.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  Is Chamath a seed investor? Like, has he done seed stage investing? I don't think of him as like seeding big.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  He's in the other Grok, the G R O Q.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  At seed?

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I think he incubated, didn't he?

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  I purely think of him as like growth stage and like SPAC guy now, but maybe he does. But like, yeah, Delian, like, you know, I don't think like, if you're doing seed deals, like the time-based portfolio construction matters.

• 1:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he put 10 million into Grok, G R O Q, which was a Google team that spun out.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. I saw a funny thing about Grok with the Q. Everyone's talking about Grok 3, which has a K. And Harry Stebbings is like, here's my interview with Grok CEO. And it's the G R O Q. So he like, knew that he should drop that to like, you know, farm off of the energy or something that people would pull over.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  I thought that was funny. Anyway, let's move on to the new president of Syria. I thought this was funny. This guy had quite the path. Buko Capital bloke says intern Al Qaeda, then associate Al Qaeda, then senior associate Al Qaeda, then insurgent at various, and then president of Syria. And this is from an interview that the new president of Syria, Ahmed Al Sharah, did with leading some small YouTube channel, I guess. And they said, and he says, "I joined Al Qaeda because I was a 19 year old, and there wasn't any other venue to take part in politics. Also, because I want skills and experience.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  I already built all government institutions in Idlib before the offensive. This ensures we can immediately take over and prevent anarchy." And yeah, I mean, obviously, like, you know, the American propaganda during the war on terror was very much like, oh, it's like a bunch of like terrorists in caves. They're just like completely running around, but it's like, no, they have time sheets. They have time cards and they have to do lists and tracking and inventory management and

• 1:55:22Jordi Hays?

  They're on payroll software.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and like What's the big one? Like, what's the NetSuite?

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  ERP, basically.

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, the, these like large terrorist organizations are like, there are, I mean, he's obviously joking with like the intern associate, senior associate, but there are like career paths and like tracks that you can like move up in.

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's worth noting that if you look at terrorist organizations or drug cartels, you don't become these sort of nation state level players or, you know, multi, multi billion dollar enterprises without being highly organized and having real leadership hierarchies and stuff like that. That's what, that's why I've joked before about Pablo Escobar being the greatest CPG founder of all time. Because even if you told somebody you can break every law under the sun, they would not be able to bootstrap a company to 22 billion of annualized revenue in a decade, right?

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  We gotta put deep research on this or the fans.

• 1:56:27John Coogan?

  Jordi and I were on a call with David Senra last night from the Founder's Podcast, and we were debating how big was

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Like just the cocaine industry, I guess?

• 1:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  How would you benchmark that against like big oil, big tobacco?

• 1:56:43Jordi Hays?

  What's the TAM?

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  What's the market size? I was arguing that it was probably over a trillion dollars in like market cap. If you applied some sort of price to earnings multiple on however much money is going on. What was the total revenue? How big of a player was this guy? And should you put? I don't know why I'm blanking on his name. Who's the greatest CPG founder again?

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  Pablo.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  Pablo, Pablo Escobar. Should you hang his jersey in the rafters?

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  Of, I mean, certainly greatest criminals of all time, but you know, how big was his enterprise? And I wonder, I wonder how many employees he had working for him? If he really like mapped out the entire org.

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  Is it like thousands or tens of thousands?

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  But imagine if you could get the same revenue on that 22 billion as figure? He would have a hundred and potentially whatever comes after a trillion.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  Quadrillion.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Quadrillion.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  A quadrillion.

• 1:57:34Jordi Hays?

  Quadrillion, yeah. Anyways, I got another post here from Arfa Rock. If you're not following Arfa Rock, great poster. He's come out the gates sharing sort of behind the scenes on rounds that are getting done. He'll typically talk about around two to three months before it gets announced. So his point of view is that he does it to help make rounds more competitive. Cause you can imagine if you're a big capital allocator and you see Arfa Rock posts such and such round getting done. And you hit up your associate and you're like, why haven't we seen this yet? You like get on the phone with them. And so definitely I'm sure it helps create some.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  We gotta do some sponsored posts with him.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  Momentum. No, I think we should have him on the show for a segment where he speaks through like an anonymous like voice. You know, Trent, you know, some, some make him sound like Steve Jobs or something like that. And then just talk about, you know, all the stuff he's seeing. But he's got an update here. This was under reported. USV came out with a new core fund in 2024. They have historically taken, you know, the approach of staying small, focusing on returns, focusing on the real craft of venture and that they're not sort of a high volume investor. They're making a handful. Of new bets, typically doing them, you know, very early. And so he outlines like their total

• 1:58:49Jordi Hays?

  fund performance, uh, which their first fund in, in 20, uh, 2004 was about a hundred million dollar fund. It, uh, they, it ended up grossing 1.5 billion dollars. So, uh, almost a, a close to a 15x there. Uh, and then you just go down the list, pretty much every single fund except their 2019 opportunity fund, which, uh, for those that don't know, an opportunity fund is more, hey, we have a bunch of early stage companies that have done well. Um, and so the 2019 opportunity fund is the only fund on this list that isn't like top decile, basically. And it's sitting at 1.3% IRR. And you have to imagine they, they sort of deployed that

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  fund at the absolute top into their companies that they knew already that were good companies that just were kind of a little bit frothy. So, um, anyways, could still turn around, who knows? Um, but, uh, you know, one of the goats, certainly the, the New York City goat, uh, almost deserving of a place in the Holy Trinity, but.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  Hasn't quite scaled and had the impact.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, haven't, hasn't scaled yet. Um, cool to see though.

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  You gotta leave it as a trilogy. You can't, can't make it quadrilogy.

• 2:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Quadrilogy.

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  It never works. Um, well, let's move on to promoted post from Wander. Uh, we got a great spot up in Big Sur. Jordy, have you been to Big Sur?

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  I have, I've driven through it.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Some of my fondest memories as a kid from Big Sur. I went up there with my family, went, uh, inner tubing down the river. I remember that really fondly. Uh, Founder's Fund just had a big event out there for all the defense tech folks.

• 2:00:29Jordi Hays?

  It's really, it's really California at its best, right? It's coastal, it's rugged. You've got the mountains meeting the sea. It's totally fantastic.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  So there's a beautiful photo here.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  What's cool about the Wander is that you know, there's going to be fast wifi. So I feel like we can go stay there. We can still hit, uh, hit, you know, stream and not worried about reliability. It's actually, we're not in a wander for PMF or die, unfortunately. And that's been like the number one issue is like, we're trying to stream HD video. Uh, and, and so showing up to an Airbnb and not having. You know, quality Wi-Fi is a terrible experience. Wander fixes that among a bunch of other stuff.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  And so Zachary Slaton MBA says, what a great weekend spent in Big Sur. Not only were the views and drive incredible, but our Wander house made the experience just that much better. Great experience, great service, amazing amenities. Highly recommended. Take a look. Share some beautiful videos and pictures. And this is so funny because, you know, 18 likes, pretty small post. We love it. It's a great post, but now you're going to get a video reply from this podcast.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Zachary, welcome to Technology Brothers.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  Just, you know, basically going forward now that we're a partner with Wander, it's like anyone who posts about Wander is going to get random clips from us. But we love the post and thanks for sharing because this is a place where I might stay and I'm glad to see it on the timeline.

• 2:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I actually have some more breaking news. We got a company called High Touch, raises 80 million at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation. They came out of YC. We'll have to ask Gary about them. This one came out of nowhere. I don't know what their last round was done at, but I'm looking on their site right now and they're already working with Spotify, Aritzia, Warner Music Group, PetSmart, TripAdvisor, Whoop, Cars.com, Plaid, Ramp. So they work with Ramp, so they must be great. Calendly, GitLab, DocuSign, Greenhouse, and they do like marketing personalization tools with AI. Anyways, absolutely massive one. It's always, a number of times recently, maybe it's a sign of a little bit of frothiness or just these companies are growing really quickly. You

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  hear about a company for the first time when they're raising at north of a billion.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  And for somebody that's like highly tuned in to the sort of flow of new companies, that doesn't happen that much.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you go back to like, yeah, like hearing about Andorol 2016, like, yeah, their first round, I think they raised 10 million dollars. And that was a lot, but it's like, they raised it, everyone in tech heard about it and it was, I don't know, I don't remember the first valuation. It was probably like 10 on 100 or 10 on 80 or something. And then now it's like you're learning about companies when they're already unicorns. But also, you know, B2B, you know, kind of like, you know, under the radar founders, that's kind of the nature of these things. But good luck to them. And I'm sure there are some powerful metrics underneath that raise.

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  I guarantee it. Because the stuff's hot and there's a lot of marketing automation to do. So we'll have to do a deep dive on them. It'll be cool. Maybe have them on the show. Let's go to Blake Robbins. He says, "Careers are shaped by people, not logos." And he posts, he's been changing up his format. I like this. Some screenshot essays, more or less. Bringing stuff to the timeline. He says, "At 21, I joined Ludlow Ventures with no experience in venture capital. Instead of giving me a strict set of rules, Jonathan Brett did something that shaped my entire career. They trusted me to chase my curiosity. They gave me agency when they had no, every reason not to trust a new grad. That trust rewired how I think about ownership, risk, and possibility. I got lucky. The conventional wisdom in tech

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  is clear. Join a high-growth startup to accelerate your career. The logic makes sense. Rapid growth creates opportunities. Responsibilities expand faster than org charts, and you learn by doing rather than watching. But this advice misses something fundamental. Who you work with for, who you work for matters more than where you work." I completely agree with this. It's like, if you have a good person that you're working with, it's way more valuable than just the logo. Yeah.

• 2:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:32John Coogan?

  And they define your mental model for excellence. Tech loves to worship pedigrees.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is when you're, when you're working, when you're coming out of, let's say you go to college, you come out of school, it's so hard to evaluate if people are truly world-class.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Like, for me, I came out of school, I was working on a bunch of YouTube stuff, working with Sean and Connor at The Ridge. I love them as people. They were clearly very talented, but it actually took me five years and like to work with a bunch of other people to realize how good they were.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been, it's been, it's been awesome to see, but again, it's so hard to figure out like just.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, obviously, there are, there are normal distributions and bell curves like all over even high performing organizations. Like the worst Harvard grad, like the dumbest Harvard grad is going to be like way dumber than the smartest like, you know, I don't know, community college grad, right? Like, because there's going to be overlap in these, in these, in these normal distributions. And, and that happens within companies too. He says, tech loves to worship company pedigrees. X Stripe, X Ramp, X Andorol, these labels imply excellence, but they mask the real story. What matters is who mentored these people. Great companies don't create great talent by default. It's the leaders within them who nurture ambition, challenge thinking and build environments where people thrive.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of people that are like, oh, I was early at this company. And then you see some of the early photos and you're like, why aren't you in that photo?

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  I had, I got, I've gotten absolutely cooked hiring for logo pedigree.

• 2:06:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Like not, not every time, but like almost 50% of the time. And the challenge is somebody joining as the, uh, somebody joining as the, you know, 1,000th employee at an iconic company. They could be great.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:18Jordi Hays?

  They could be great, but not even have an impact, right? Like they could just be great and sort of exist within the structure. And so, um, yeah, you just got to really, really press people and not let them sort of slide into roles based on having worked at relevant.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you think about the path of like Lucky Groom, who was not just like at Stripe. I don't even know if he was that early at Stripe, but he went into Stripe and then it very quickly became like the money guy for Patrick.

• 2:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:45John Coogan?

  Right? And it's like, he was running like their ventures team more or less, or like doing something with investing. And then Sam Altman set him up with a fund and like, it was very quickly, he was on like a massive, like, you know, high growth thing and got a ton of AUM. And that's very different from like, oh yeah, I went in and like, I was kind of on a team that wasn't like super high performing. And I just kind of like, you know, work nine to five. And like, yeah, I'm.

• 2:07:06Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is Jeremy Giffon talk about? Like you want to be like off the, he, he talks about.

• 2:07:11John Coogan?

  Off the org chart.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Off the org chart.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, running the ventures program at like, and I, at a.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  The founders care about that program a lot.

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. No meetings, no, no bosses, but employed by the company. That's like an ideal scenario if possible. Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  Big news, massive promoted post from Sotheby's. A lot of people want to check this out. Banksy's crude oil from the collection of Blink 182's Mark Hoppus will headline the modern and contemporary evening auction at Sotheby's London on March 4th. So if you're headed over to this auction house, check out the collection of Mark Hoppus from Blink 182. Thought this was fun to share. I know a lot of you guys in the, in the, in the community are, are collectors and often at Sotheby's, you want the heads up and now you know. Let's move over to.

• 2:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Bo, by the way, Bo just texted me and said, it cracks me up how little John knows about UFC because he saw that whatever we talked about it yesterday. So you're going on, we're going on record right now. John, you got to learn about the number one sport in America and we got to go, we got to go to a card soon.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  I was playing it up a little bit, but it was very funny. That's great. Like who's this schmuck calling out my friend Bo? I don't know who this is. It's like, of course it's like UFC guy. Anyway.

• 2:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Anyway. We love him. Let's go back to Wander Kyle Tibbetts. This is a big promotion episode, lots of ads. Sometimes we do a lot of bucket pulls, sometimes we do a lot of deep dives, sometimes where they do a lot of bangers. That's the whole point of the show.

• 2:08:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, after this, let's slam through.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  Couple posts and then get out of here. Okay. So Kyle says, one of the best designed app launch at launch I've ever seen. Stoked to be an investor. Great job, great job at the protector team. So Nikita Beer has been advising a company called Protector, which allows you to book, book armed agents. They're debuting in Los Angeles and New York City at number three on the app store. And so this is kind of the latest Nikita project. He pumps out a lot of stuff. What do you, what's.

• 2:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't, I don't, I think this is a company he's advising and supporting.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  He's advising, yeah.

• 2:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Potentially through intro.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  So I thought this was interesting because back in 2014, Uber was really hot and there was an Uber for everything. And there was a company that went through YC with this, basically this. Exact idea. It was called like bouncer or something. I forget what it's called. It was like book Uber for bouncers. I sent it into the chat at some point, but you know, maybe that idea wasn't, it wasn't the right time for that, but maybe this is the one. What's interesting is that disintermediation is always a risk with these platforms.

• 2:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:00John Coogan?

  That was the problem with the dog walker apps is that, is that once you find a good dog walker on a dog walker app, you just say, hey, let's not use the app, just come every week at this time.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:11John Coogan?

  And so that's always been a risk. Whereas with Uber, like even if I have a guy who's reliable to take me to the airport or like you, you have a guy or like, oh yeah, I know a guy who gave me his card and like, if I'm going out with friends for a long time and I want to rent it, rent the, the limo for the whole weekend or something like, I'll, I'll call him. But you know, I'm not just going to have a guy follow me around all the time.

• 2:10:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. It really comes down to, it really comes down to trust how much, you know, with, so I'm sure there's an opportunity for protector, right? Just the pure novelty of, oh, I just called this like armed security guard to where I am.

• 2:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy talks about this, right? Like there's lots of opportunities of take things that the ultra wealthy love and then make them accessible to the masses through these sort of on-demand platforms. So I'm sure there's a market opportunity for this. I'd say overall, again, you call an Uber, you don't care how, who picks you up as long as the car is generally clean and they're fast. Whereas things like this, security is, is ultra-high trust, right? So you, you would much rather have somebody that you know well and that you know has like great training and that you have a good relationship with. Because if they're needed in any way, you know, you want to know that you can rely on them.

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  I, I think that maybe the app can actually do a good job there because if they're onboarding agents and they have a very rigorous process, it's totally possible to have an app. At the same time, if the customers don't demand that, you know that the apps will, and the platforms will coalesce towards something that's a little bit sloppier. But that's fine because if you're on a marketplace app and you're just like, look, I just want to be in Tulsa and I want it to be the cheapest thing ever. And I don't care if the furniture is from Timu. Like, yeah, there's an app for that. But you know, this, it's kind of, you know, it's up to them how they curate the marketplace. It will be interesting. I have no idea how he got this to number three in the app store so fast.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  He's a master.

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can, you can.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  Because there can't be that many people. Like, you're telling me there's more people booking armed agents than booking VRBOs?

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  There's ways, there's ways. So here's a potential way. So if you use, you know, these sort of algorithmic feeds to generate, you know, views on your content. Let's say you're producing a bunch of organic content and running ads. There's ways to do these sort of like pre-downloads or almost like pre-ordering the ads where you can like get somebody to say like, I want to, I'm, I want to download this. And then when you release it, you can drive, let's say a hundred thousand one day and then you'll rank, even though, even though, you know, maybe the next day you won't.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I love the idea of armed agents being on demand. I think that it's probably like a very good thing and will increase safety and reduce crime, which I think is good. But I would hate to live in a country where an app for booking armed agents is more, is more popular than nice vacation rentals, you know? That's like a very black, like our society is truly degrading if it's like, oh yeah, people are like, like the gun app is more popular than, like the gun store is more popular than the luxury goods store. Anyway, good luck to the team. Awesome launch. Love to see that Nikita is working with it. Very interesting to follow along and see where that goes. Anyway, we got a promoted post from Koenigsegg. There's a 2021 Koenigsegg Regera out. Obviously you're going to have to bid against Sam for this one.

• 2:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You think they posted this knowing that Sam would see it and not be able to help himself?

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure. You know, they go on X.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  For those that don't know, Sam Altman loves Koenigsegg's.

• 2:13:35John Coogan?

  Loves all sports cars. He has McLaren F1.

• 2:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Absolute fiend.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Fiend.

• 2:13:40Jordi Hays?

  He, he loves them. You know, as he says, he's doing OpenAI because he loves, loves it. And he's also, you know, buying cars because he just loves cars. He's a simple guy.

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  I'm very pro Sam Altman, the car guy. That's one of the main reasons I'm rooting for him.

• 2:13:53Jordi Hays?

  He was saying that he was using deep research to find this sort of obscure Acura that I guess he was successful at.

• 2:13:58John Coogan?

  Obscure. It's an NSX, bro.

• 2:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, in his, he could have said, I need to find one with, with this sort of.

• 2:14:05John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Anyway.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Zero to 60 in less than three seconds, top speed of 250 miles an hour. If you're looking for a new daily driver, maybe you work in AI, maybe you just raised a billion, did some secondary. Pick up a Koenigsegg. Yeah, maybe, maybe you work at PETA and you're, you see the money coming from the for-profit conversion and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna be rich. Pick this up, let everyone know that you're serious about the for-profit conversion. And when you pull up to the investor meetings, they're like, really, PETA? And they're like, well, he's already got the Koenigsegg Grigera. So yeah, he must be the real deal. He must have a really good plan for how he's going to monetize this going forward. So we'd love to see it. Anyway, we quote tweeted this on the PMF or Dye feed,

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  but we thought we'd cover it here just to throw a reply towards Starter Story. If you're not familiar with Starter Story YouTube channel that, uh, profiles, does video interviews and profiles on independent builders, hackers, entrepreneurs. And they did one on Blake, our boy in the cage. And so Starter Story says he taught himself how to code with ChatGPT. He built three iPhone apps, made 10 million in revenue. We called him up and asked him to break it all down. They talked for hours, but cut out all the fluff to give you all the alpha. I love it. And so there's 20 minute video. Blake is an absolute beast. He breaks down a bunch of different business ideas. And if you want to know more about player one in the cage,

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  you can watch this 20 minute video to get an idea of who Blake is. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. It is 107. How are we doing on time? We're good. Cool. I think we should wrap. Yeah, let's wrap pretty soon. Um, let's go to,

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  Duolingo. Oh, this is good. Trey Stevens is doing an event on March 6th. If you're in San Francisco, go check it out. Lee Marie Braswell over at Kleiner Perkins, another holy trinity venture capital firm. She says, join me on March 6th at an event with Trey Stevens where he, he's discussing one of my fave posts ever. Good, choose good quests. Link in comments. Hat tip to his co-author, Marky Wagner, who's an absolute dog as well. Trey is one of the most mission-driven people I've ever met as well as an inspiration for practicing. Questions in tech when Trey talks about both building great companies while also finding purpose. I listen. If you haven't read choose good quests. It's fantastic. I highly recommend

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  it. I think he should turn it into a book. I hope he does. But you can go hear him talk about it at this event. And so go find the Luma and go, go to this event if you're in SF on March 6. Anyway, I think that's a good place to close out. Oh, we got to talk about your bags. You've been, you've been killing it with Nvidia and somebody, somebody had the same idea as you. McKay Wrigley says, can we talk about how unbelievably stupid the market reaction to deep seek was compute got more useful and everyone sold literally today for Grok 3 Elon goes, oh yeah, we bought another 100 K of H 100s and mentioned a new 1.2 gigawatt data center. Nobody is going to buy less GPUs.

• 2:17:23John Coogan?

  And this shows that the, the price of Nvidia is exactly what it was a month ago, right before the deep seek drop. And I think you bought the bottom.

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Actually, yeah, when, when deep seek launches Sunday, they have their fake run up in the App Store. Everybody is sort of talking broadly about Jevon's paradox and all this stuff. It just seems like it was to, for a company to go down 15% like that, it just seemed way oversold. And I have no idea what Nvidia stock does over the long term, but yeah, just bought right as everybody was panicking and just, you know, back up, you know, up 15% since then. But uh,

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Make it look easy, Jordy.

• 2:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Make it look easy. But we are in the news business. We are in the casting business.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  Not the financial advice business. So that's right. Good luck out there. Stay safe. Avoid doing anything that your mother would not approve of.

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:18:20John Coogan?

  Have some good etiquette. Focus on your manners.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Have you coined that?

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  I'm working on it.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  What would your mother say?

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Too many.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  That's my, that's my current philosophy for how you should behave yourself, especially on the internet. What would your mother say?

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  Make your mom proud.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  What would your mother say about you launching that meme coin and rugging it immediately? What would your mother say about you getting in a petty fight with another technology leader publicly on X? What would your mother say about you asking your date to split the check? Embarrassing. Don't do that.

• 2:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Embarrassing. You gotta, you gotta. Dive into that one next time.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll cover it eventually. We're going to be doing a big etiquette, deep dive, big manners update, giving you the, you know, how to use each fork, how to tie a tie. We're going to be working on that. How to drive stick. These things are important.

• 2:19:09Jordi Hays?

  How to make your bed.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and keep watching us and expect a lot of new updates. We're, we're, we're cooking.

• 2:19:18Jordi Hays?

  We are cooking. Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Bye.