Apple Unveils iPhone Duo, Muse AI Agent, Keith Rabois Joins | David Cahn, Mikey Shulman, David Perell, Jim Reilly, Fletcher Richman

(01:44) - Apple Unveils iPhone Duo (13:08) - Steve Jobs Predicts ChatGPT (21:38) - Apple Kicks off Ternus Era (30:03) - Meta Launches Muse AI Agent (45:41) - Anthropic Researcher Quits Over AI (54:08) - David Cahn discusses how AI is reshaping venture capital through concentrated investment in leading private companies, an approaching wave of IPOs, and massive data-center infrastructure needs. The Sequoia Capital investor also highlights opportunities in energy, hardware, robotics, and industrialization, emphasizing defensible intellectual property, strong founders, and aligning investment timelines with market demand. (01:10:39) - Mikey Shulman, co-founder and CEO of Suno, discusses the launch of its faster, more expressive V6 music-generation model and partnerships designed to share revenue with artists and rights holders. He also explores how accessible AI tools can inspire everyday creativity, enhance professional music workflows, and become commonplace throughout music production. (01:35:25) - Keith Rabois discusses the durability and valuations of AI companies, emphasizing talent density, sustainable advantages, and the risks posed by disappointing IPOs or regulation. The venture capitalist and managing director at Khosla Ventures also shares his optimism about technology, skepticism toward AI doomsday predictions, and belief that investors should back companies aligned with their values. (02:01:26) - David Perell is a writer, educator, and host of the interview series *How I Write*. David Perell discusses his approach to interviewing, ambitions to create enduring media, the success of his Cultural Tutor project, and how architecture and design reflect society’s values. (02:41:32) - Jim Reilly discusses his entrepreneurial background and Charleston AI, a storefront consultancy that helps individuals and businesses understand, implement, and benefit from artificial intelligence. He explains how AI improves productivity, addresses common fears and misconceptions, and shares plans to establish a strong foundation before expanding the business. (02:52:49) - Fletcher Richman discusses Type, a shared AI workspace that helps nontechnical teams collaboratively build and deploy AI-powered tools. He explains the company’s focus on midsize businesses, particularly direct-to-consumer e-commerce teams, and its recent $4 million funding round. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, September 9th, 2026. Do you want to tell us how many days we've got till Christmas? Cause we are live from the TVP in Eldredon, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Atlantis, the Capitol Capitol. How many days until Christmas?

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  106 days until Christmas.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Countdown really makes it feel like it's going faster. I feel like just the other day we were at 112.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  It's flying.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  It's flying by. Start shopping. Just do it.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you actually have time to, again, like we talked about yesterday, remove your flooring, floorboards, all that stuff. And just dig straight down and install a permanent Christmas tree.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Don't just get ready for Christmas 2026. Be ready for next year.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  You also need to start thinking about gift giving. It's harder than ever to find good gifts. The best gift you can give someone is helping them save time and money. Get them on ramp.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Time is money. Save both. Easy corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more. Mom, I got you a corporate card that you're gonna love. Uh, anyway.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  Pull this up. Pull this up.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  iPhone Duo is gonna be.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  This is more important.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  A lot of Christmas trees, but what's more important than the new iPhone?

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this graphic.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Foldable.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this graphic. I was hoping that Apple would announce this today. If you zoom in.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  You can see.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  The tree is actually, the house is actually built around the tree.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Stop building a home and adding a tree to it.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. And find a Christmas tree and build a house around it. Yes. That's the Christmas spirit.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  Our, uh, our mutual friend, John, sent this, sent this to me this morning. So he's on top of it.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Cool. Um, let's, uh, let's do it. Well, uh, Apple has announced the iPhone Duo, their foldable phone. Uh, it's, well, we'll, we'll pull up some video and react to a little bit of it. Uh, I separately.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Right away.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  How is this gonna impact screen time? Is it, do, do, does your screen time go twice as fast? Cause you're actually locked in on two screens.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Should you do pixel adjusted screen time too? Like, do you, if you're watching a laptop versus an Apple Watch? If I spend an hour in Apple Watch, is that like 15 minutes on the, on the laptop, on the triple monitor setup? Getting triple the screen time?

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  We have the, the AirPods with the cameras.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  They didn't, they didn't. They haven't announced those. I don't think they're going to. Gorman's reporting.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  But when that comes, that could potentially help you add to your screen time by tracking screens out in the real world that you're seeing.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  True.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  That aren't getting picked up.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  True. Uh, yeah. Digital billboards, that should go in your screen time. Eventually it's going to be 24/7 screen time. Everyone's looking at a screen everywhere. There's our screen everywhere. You're looking at the, the windshield of your car. That's the screen.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up some, uh, real pictures of the Duo? Here it is.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Here it is. The Duo. Um, so in this video, there is no crease. I'm sure the YouTube tech reviewers will be hunting in all different lighting for creases. But it feels like Apple waited long enough to avoid a crease whatsoever. So you will get no crease in your.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  That is crazy. Sitting there? Boom.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  It's cool. It's cool. I think this is gonna sell like hotcakes. I think people are ready to spend, it's gonna be like two grand, maybe three grand when you max it out. I think the Apple buyer, the Apple fanboy is ready for something that actually is a flex beyond like a slight upgrade. You paid 30% more for the Pro. Uh, this says you, you, you pulled out the big mix. You, you dropped two.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that's been the thing, the, the relative to how much value you get out of a phone. Phones have always been incredibly cheap, even the highest priced.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. You spend more time on your phone than you do in your car and your car's 10 times the price of your phone always. Like that's, if not more. Um, and so I think this will sell very well. Uh, it'll be interesting to see, uh, if anyone, if any new apps come from this. If people need to redesign stuff like, we're having Mikey from Suno on the show later today. And, uh, Suno has an app that's really full featured for iPhone. You can make songs. You can scroll a feed of other people's songs. Uh, but you do have to pop over to desktop. If you want to get into their composer and actually deconstruct the song and shift around different pieces of the song. And then you get a sort of GarageBand interface. What's his plan?

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Is he thinking, okay, this is gonna sell enough that I need to re-engineer my app for a different flow? Uh, you've seen, even, even using a lot of normal iPhone apps on iPads, it usually just doesn't feel quite right scrolling. Um, so I think there'll be a couple UI UX opportunities, challenges, both. Uh, interesting little bezel there where you can see the screen is curved, but it's on a, a blocked out, squared off. Uh, edge there in the center. Two cameras on the back, one on the front.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Leaving room for the iPhone Duo Pro with five cameras or something like that.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Really, it really shows that the phone seems to be, at least the iPhone is, is certainly in its final form, right? This feels like the biggest step forward in a long time, and yet it does absolutely nothing new for you.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  A rave review. Uh, until they do the iPhone newspaper that folds out.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  It's moderately, it's moderately exciting because we're all, it's, it's moderately exciting because everyone's addicted to their phone. And it's like, cool. New, new, new screen, but, uh, it does nothing new for you. It doesn't move humanity forward anyway at all.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Duddy, you're gonna be able to watch two reels at once and they're both gonna be vertical.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. What do you mean?

• 5:58John Coogan?

  From the demo that I saw, it looked like it was, you put the video up top and then you iMessage or iMessage.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Well, that's because that was a horizontal video.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  I don't think you'll be able to open two copies of Instagram at the same time.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  No, I, I think it'll be more like the, um, the iPad OS where you can have different windows.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  So you think you'll be able to do, uh, uh, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels side by side?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Ideally, hopefully.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Ideally. Brain rot. Final boss over here wants to do it.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  And then you can have the third one on the back.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Well, it's definitely gonna be better for looking at charts on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. What is, uh, what is Apple actually doing today in the market?

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Brian says this could literally 2X GDP.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Uh, it, it, does the market like this? I mean, all this has been, you know, priced in, but let's check on, uh, Apple. Down 1.27% today, down 5% over the last five days, but sort of flat on the month. So. Um, it's, it's exciting to see John Turnis get a big win, like early, like first thing as the CEO. First major, you know, Apple event, and it's an entirely new product, the foldable phone, something that's been rumored for years. Um, they didn't tee him up just to do a minor.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  A Mac mini refresh.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. It's exciting that he got to come out strong with this. And it's also less of a risk than the Apple Vision Pro. If they'd thrown him there, then he'd be remembered. Oh, his first thing was sort of a flop.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think this is gonna be a hit, even though it doesn't matter at all.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  I think it's gonna sell very well. I think a lot of people are gonna buy them, uh, for a variety of reasons. But, um, I think, uh, I think it's just a good way to, to kick off a really strong decade long run. Hopefully four decades. Cook couldn't, couldn't make it to 95 in the seat, but Turnus, I think you got it, what it takes. I want to see Turnus running this place and.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  So you're a hundred percent getting the Duo?

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I think I'll get it. Uh, I'll need to feel how it feels in my hand. But at one point I was considering carrying an iPad mini as my daily driver phone. Because I was like, they, so they come with wifi.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  68.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  68. So I have big pockets and so it would actually fit in my pocket. And I don't like the phoned feature of the phone. I don't like getting phone calls. So you lose that because it doesn't have a cellular connection. So it doesn't have a, so you can never call me.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  And it's not like you need a phone number for anything else besides calls, like logging into pretty much any service.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. You can do two factor on a, on an actual like authentication app. I think you can get by. You might need to have a, a Mac mini hooked up somewhere that has a, has a phone number attached to it that can route you two factor codes or something. But it did seem doable, or you know, you just check your phone, your actual phone with the phone number at home later. But every day you just have this, you know, iPad mini that you pull out and it has, uh, it has a cellular connection. I don't know that it can actually get phone calls, but it has a cellular connection. So, so you can get data while you're out and about. So you can be out in the world and scroll reels.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  Data.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  What else do you need? You don't need to make.

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Big data.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, and it really comes down to look that the phone is, is lighter, thinner.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  It's not lighter. It's not thinner. It is probably faster. It's bigger. This is, this is the opposite of your meme. Typically they come out and they say it's lighter, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, fit thinner, faster, 12 times. Uh, it's the best iPhone ever. This is actually a different direction. This is, this is a response to your joke.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's something.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Would you rather search work and iMessage or be able to get the Duo?

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Search work in iMessage?

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  To like search and iMessage.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, you want that to work. Yeah.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I would be excited about functional features of the core software that I use with the iPhone.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, among, among, you know, many other things.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, Kate over on X says mentally ready for my iPhone to start being slow, laggy, and having a bad battery. You have that to look forward to.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  So did they, they also updated like the normal iPhone, is that right? Did you watch a little bit of the earlier keynote?

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's all the.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  That one is thinner, lighter, faster, better, stronger, all the different things.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  They, they updated, uh, Apple Intelligence a bunch, so.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  There was like all the things that you'd expect.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  I thought they haven't launched it yet. I thought this was the launch of the series, like it's actually gonna go out now.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah. Yeah, this was in the, in the, um, launch video.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Um, and also the old iPhone, or not, not the old iPhone, but the new, normal iPhone, eighteen, they were like, oh, the battery is like much better. So all those things that Jordy, they like said about the new iPhones.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Which, which one do I have? Cause I got mine last year, I believe, about, I have a twenty-six, no, seventeen, I have a seventeen, so they launched the eighteen, which is the same form factor, just lighter, thinner, faster, better, stronger.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Okay, but it looks exactly the same.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  From what I, I mean, I'm sure some people can tell difference.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Uh, but yeah, better chip or something, so, I don't know, maybe you'll notice it with Apple Intelligence. I wonder if there's any gated features, cause I know that there were some, initially some gated features, uh, for the Pro models, you need more memory for the on-device stuff. I don't know. Uh, it'll be interesting, I'm excited to get it in hand, see how it works. I don't, I, it might, might be too much to open that thing up. I'm thinking like, it's pretty easy just to like scrape up.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  For you, it's great because you're such a newspaper guy.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  I, I do like a newspaper.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  Put your feet up on the desk and fold your phone open.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  I'm scrolling, yeah, something like that might make sense. I don't know, I don't know. I was reflecting on Steve Jobs, I saw a viral video about Steve Jobs predicting ChatGPT in nineteen eighty-five, and the video is incredible, because he arrives to this talk, he's giving a talk at a university, uh, on the future, it's just Steve Jobs' view of the future in nineteen eighty-five, and he arrives on a helicopter with an entourage, and they all get out of this helicopter and they go into this, it's amazing. Kind of unrelated, but, uh, more of a, where is it?

• 12:27Speaker 03

  King in the castle, king in the castle.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Cause the video kinda takes, kinda takes place in a castle. Um, but we can, uh, but we can probably play this, uh, this video here, let me, let me pull this up, uh, I'll, I'll send it in. Um, because you gotta watch Steve Jobs in nineteen eighty-five predict modern AI pretty well. What is that sound?

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  No idea.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Is that us, or is that the soundboard? You got a new like, just like vibe chatter in the background? Anyway, while we pull that up, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent platform provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So yeah, let's play Steve Jobs predicts ChatGPT in nineteen eighty-five, because I had a bunch of thoughts based on this.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Aristotle, and I read this, I became immensely jealous, uh, and I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  So pause, he's, the lead-in to this, what is that second video that's playing? I think you guys have two videos playing. Um, he's saying, I'll just read the transcript, uh, he says, do you know, did you, did you know that Alexander the Great's tutor, uh, for fourteen years was Aristotle? When Alexander the Great had a question, he would just go to Aristotle. I think we can play the clip from the beginning now. Let's see.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about fourteen years? You know, Aristotle. And I read this, I became immensely jealous, uh, and I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. And, and, uh, through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary. And maybe if there's a professor, they can, they can add to that, but at least I can go directly to the source material. And that is of course the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Glazing the printing press.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  But I can't ask Aristotle a question. I mean, I can't, I won't get an answer, and so.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  Perfectly timed soundboard.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  My hope is that in, in, in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind. And so my hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle in a computer. And someday, some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. And, uh, that's, that's what I hope that we can do.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  It's so crazy, he's just like, we gotta, we gotta compress all the data down and be able to give it a conversational interface.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Large language models with a simple interface that anyone can use.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  It's, it's a crazy, crazy prediction, forty, forty-something years ago. Um, and, I mean, there's so many interesting details about that video. Steve Jobs is probably the most famous techno-optimist, the most successful techno-optimist, uh, the bicycle for the mind quote, that one continues to hit constantly. Um, but then you can see his excitement every time he gives a keynote, he'll just be onstage like giddily testing GarageBand, uh, but his delivery there too is something really, really special. I mean, you notice that, right? Where he, he asks a hypothetical question, then, you know, well, I could ask, but I wouldn't get an answer, and he kind of like lets the laugh lines kind of land and lets the audience,

• 16:16John Coogan?

  he has really good.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Basically the Mark Gurman of CEOs.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  I guess.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  Mark Gurman's a goat.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  Journalist.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  And Steve is the greatest, you know, founder CEOs.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. It just, it's just, it's a really, really cool timing.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised it took you that long to.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Because I thought you were talking about Mark Gurman's comedic timing, which is fantastic, but, uh.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  Mark Gurman's delivery of Apple, truly, he truly has Apple Intelligence, and his delivery is phenomenal.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  So yeah, uh, I mean, you can see, uh, Ben Thompson's called this out a few times, but when Steve Jobs introduces GarageBand, he is just so excited about this product, you can see him in this one video, uh, introducing GarageBand one point oh with John Mayer, which is really cool, he has John Mayer come out and just like play some stuff on the guitar, and then.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  This is where I wanna show you, uh, loops, and, uh, I'm gonna show you what a non-musician can do.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  And he's just like chilling there on this computer on this stool, using this tool, and just doing a live demo. And if you, if you scroll forward about halfway, you'll see John Mayer comes in and plays some songs toward the end. There you go.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  It's a British Invasion.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  He's just having fun. Uh, and so, you know, with the, with the power of modern LLMs, like you can ask, uh, you can ask, you know, an AI version of Steve Jobs, what would he think about AI? I did, uh, and I think, uh, I think the answer's somewhat interesting, he said, probably yes, with very strong opinions about what makes Astro, uh, what makes AI worth using. That's speculation, but his own words give us a surprisingly good basis for it. In nineteen eighty-five, Jobs imagined computers capturing a thinker's underlying ideas so that a student could interact with them. You could actually ask Aristotle a question, he was already enthusiastic about something

• 18:11John Coogan?

  resembling a central promise of conversational AI, but his enthusiasm would come with three demands in this hypothetical Steve Jobs analysis. One, you gotta give people new abilities, learning, designing, composing, building would probably excite him most. Two, you have to make it effortless, I'd expect him to push for AI that understands what you want with minimal instruction. And three, you have to make something excellent, I suspect he'd value AI's ability to help someone realize an original vision much more than its ability to produce enormous quantities of generic content. He would be anti-slop but pro-AI. Uh, Aristotle also had an interesting AI take in this, in this imagined LLM version of Aristotle.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  He'd care more about what AI does to our character than how intelligent becomes. The, the conclusion of this is Aristotle would favor AI as an instrument of human flourishing while resisting the idea that a life requiring less human effort is automatically a better life. You must continue to create, you must continue to work, you will be unsatisfied if the robots are doing everything.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  Create more than you consume.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Forever.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Exactly. Uh, AI that strengthens our ability, uh, is what's important. And so what, what I was going back and forth with you about was like, was like, it seems pretty clear that Steve Jobs would be excited about AI or some form of AI, but what would the reaction to that be in the modern era? Because I, I tend to think that there would have been the natural cycle of reaction because of, there's a whole host of things, political polarization, economic stagnation, wealth inequality, negativity bias in social media, there's so many different incentives that the desire, the impetus to tear someone down is, uh, is unavoidable.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  And so I think we would be in this weird era where a lot of people would be excited about that particular vision for AI, and yet there would still be, you know, viral videos complaining about the latest Steve Jobs keynote. But what do you think? Cause you've called for like the, the Steve Jobs of AI, someone who's an optimist, someone who talks about empowering humanity, focus on human flourishing, agrees with the Aristotelian philosophy around AI, but what would the actual reaction be? Is that actually a panacea? Or would it fall by the wayside like, like all other attempts that positivity seem to have fallen by the wayside?

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I've come around to the technology itself being fundamentally scary, even though it's very cool. And then you factor that in with, with certain actors that are, uh, trying to, uh, position it as even, you know, more scary than maybe it is, you know, inherently.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I think even if we still had Steve with us, it would still be a mess.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  And he might be nicely counter positioned, but it doesn't stop, uh, doesn't stop other people from, you know.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Maybe not.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Poisoning.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Maybe not, maybe not.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Poisoning the discourse.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  What do you think his P doom would be? Over, under ten percent?

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  Like 1%.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  He seems like a 1% guy.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  1%, he's the 1%. What did Joanna Stern have to say about the Apple launch? There's a video here. You wanted to react to it.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  New feature called Live Rewind.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  What is this feature? Let's play it.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's see it.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  Hi, welcome. Today's specials are the heirloom tomato BLT, Caesar salad, cod salad, lentil soup, chicken alba, the smoked salmon, and the avocado tartare.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Just double press the digital crown. In Live Rewind, transcribes what was just said. You can ask Siri about the content of that transcript.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  What if you can't read?

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Or Siri's gonna go through that after we visit later. This is great for when you're trying to recall a book recommendation.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  A colleague's brilliant idea, or something you didn't hear the first time. The next audio intelligence feature will help you remember key moments from daily conversations so you can be more present.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  So is it just recording everything? Because that seems genuinely useful. Probably not in the, I mean Joanna Stern, her take here is, I don't know, maybe just ask the waitress to repeat herself. That's a good point, but if you're actually talking to someone, you know, like your lawyer is breaking down a contract and you forget which part of the contract that the lawyer flagged as important for you to go dig into and get to the bottom of, having a transcript there makes sense. And you could ask the lawyer to repeat themselves, but it costs a thousand bucks an hour, so maybe you don't want to just transcribe it. I don't know. What do you think about this? If I was over here.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  There's gotta be, there's gotta be some people, there's gotta be some people out there that are, that are, you know, thrilled and, and, you know, incredibly excited about this new feature. And, and I would be surprised if there's more than, you know, 100 of them globally.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, there's, there's some.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Dozens.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  It's just, it, it just feels like, um,

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  it's just hard, it's, it's, this whole event is hard to be excited about anything at all.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  A lot of these, a lot of these demos, they get harder and harder to feel natural and human. Like, the GarageBand example is like, pretty, it's so much easier to make it look cool because you're there with John Mayer and you're imagining, okay, I got a buddy who can play drums, but I can't play bass, so I'm gonna get, you know, GarageBand to fill in the bass digitally and I needed to compose everything together. I don't really have an alternative that's super logical, like just asking someone to repeat themselves. Anyway, it's gotta be a tough job working through the, like, how do we showcase this in a non-Black Mirror fashion?

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  At Semi Analysis says, how we feeling on the crease?

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Are we feeling, I haven't been able to get my eyes on the crease.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  No, it, it feels like whatever they did in the photography or entering.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  That's the, that's the one thing you would expect from them entering the foldable market. You would expect them to absolutely.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  They are not gonna get, there's not gonna be a crease on this thing. I will be shocked if there's a visible crease whatsoever. Is there, um, ooh, Arthur from Vibe just resigned today.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  That's a joke.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a joke?

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  It's obviously a joke. Read it out, since you brought it up.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Sorry. I spent the last three years doing TV ad performance at both Vibe and Walmart. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving TV advertising performance and gambling with our ROI. More thoughts below. I like it. Very good. I was like, I only read the first line. Stupid. Apple foldable crease. Let's see if there's anything here. Okay. This is how Apple dealt with the crease issue on the iPhone Duo. This is definitely gonna be the best folding on the market, I think. Passport size of it. There's some, there's some photos. This is a canyon. It's not a crease, it's a canyon. The crease in the middle isn't very noticeable, it's been handled well. I don't know. We'll see.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  It definitely seems like they were waiting for the technology to become post-crease before they launched this, because foldable phones have been out for five years, seven years or something like that, and they've always been a little bit rough. The hinge gets dirty. This feels like it will hold up for at least, for at least one year to get you to the next one. What do you think? I think that's the plan?

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, until the battery's shot.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Hinge lifespan of 11, 11 months and 27 days. We engineered it.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to find new, the, an image of the, the new Apple Watch, which I think they're calling the Apple Watch. What is that for? Because it is just crazy to look at.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  It's got the Jubilee bracelet, right? It's got, it's got a really chunky metal bracelet on it.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's see what the Grubinator says about the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro. Said, last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time I should have been reviewing the then-new iPhone 17 and 17 Air. He said, 354 days is arguably more than a few, but given I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and Air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones. So iPhone Air is the nicest phone Apple has ever made, probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. Just so nice. He loves it. I've seen 17 Pro.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  I'm eagerly awaiting the daring Fireball review of the, of the, of the, the new foldable phone, but he's gotta get his hands on it. I gotta, I gotta know what he's thinking about. Yes, the Hermes Paris Apple Watch. Is this the Ultra? That is a chunky, chunky device.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is the Ultra 4.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Ultra 4. You don't like this? It's not to like.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's horrific.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  It's horrific. Is that the, is that the dial or the bracelet?

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Everything about it.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  It does have a very odd interface to the actual watch with that, with that bar that comes out of the clasp. Like, the clasp doesn't actually integrate fully into the watch. It sort of has these two points that bolt on there. Yeah, pretty chunky, but honestly, the, the Apple Watch Ultra, this device had gotten so chunky that I think the chunkier band might fit better with the chunky watch, because if you put a really thin strap on that, then you just have this massive bulge on there.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I almost think they should have launched it as an ankle bracelet. Imagine checking, checking, checking your super chunky watch by just pulling up your foot.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  An ankle monitor? The bottom of the Boston Rolex?

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  And you could be in a meeting just looking down.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I've seen some guys doing that with their whoops. They put it on their, on their ankles.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Or yeah, yeah, people are saying Bobby, Bobby Cosmic says no pendant. Imagine you have this really chunky.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  The Flavor Flav.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  This clock.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. John Turnus was vague posting before this at 6:00 AM. He posted just a light and it was maybe a little bit too vague? Was that it? It was just a light? Didn't, it didn't really hint at anything? Was this a?

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  What's wrong, Turnus? Afraid you might say something?

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Was this a teaser that, is there a folding thing here that's, that I'm not picking up on? Is this an homage?

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Samsung Mobile US hit X and said, so far, so same. Hashtag it's time to switch. Throwing shots.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Using the hashtag in 2026. They're gonna go so, they're gonna be so dedicated to the hashtags on that brand account that it's gonna become ironic and cool again to use hashtags and they're gonna be in the perfect spot. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. In the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, they didn't talk about math. It made it to the, it made it to the digital version, didn't make it into the paper. Navia Stokes did not make the paper edition of the Wall Street Journal, but Meta and their new personal AI agent did. It's right here.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Meta launches.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  The absolute state of traditional media.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Hey, this is, probably, it's more profitable as a business perspective, right? It's like, what are you gonna do? Sell math theories? Navia Stokes was a $1 million prize. You don't think Alex Wang can pull a million bucks out of this?

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  This could be a trillion, this could be a trillion dollar prize.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  They can get, they haven't monetized it yet, but they gotta put ads in this thing. And will they do agent of commerce? What will they do? We were very excited talking to Soufer, Soufenator yesterday about AGI for small businesses, for folks who run ads on Meta. I still love that idea, but they're going a different direction. They're doing personal superintelligence. Zuck's been talking about this for a year at least. He's put out a lengthy blog post about how he wants AI to diffuse, how he wants everyone to have AI, and now everyone does with the Meta Muse app. That's a separate app that you get that will book restaurants for you.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal has a little bit of a story here. Meta Platforms is betting that making AI agents easy to use will get mainstream consumers to start adopting them in their daily lives. The company on Tuesday announced a new personal AI agent that can buy goods online. I think they partnered with Stripe on link. So I don't know if that just means that when link is enabled on a particular checkout, it'll be a little bit smoother. Or if it's like, it's gonna try and steer you towards things that are linked, right? Cause some websites do it, it's really nice when they do. But certainly getting closer to this. It can respond to emails and so do you have to link it to your Gmail?

• 32:00John Coogan?

  I guess to get to get that working and complete other tasks. Users authorize you to it to do for them. The agent called Muse is accessible via dedicated app. Users operate the agent by conversing with it like a typical chatbot and can choose their own names for it. I saw some really funny ones. Tyler called his Mark. I saw someone else that's, someone gave it a really funny name like, like they said, like you can pick one. And then the name of the agent was just you can pick one or something like that. A bunch of funny hallucinations always happens with these products. Everyone's gonna have fun with them.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  The new tool is Meta's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments, which are expected to top 130 billion this year. The AI agent is free to access for most of what people need and has two tiers of subscription plans for power users. Hundred bucks a month and $20 a month. Anthropic and OpenAI have quickly built multi-billion dollar businesses around agents capable of performing complex computer tasks. But most of that usage is driven by software coding or other business applications. Consumer adoption of technology lags behind, offering Meta, Apple and other companies potential for catching up. The fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart from lots of other agentic products.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Meta's AI chief Alex Wang said in an interview. Ben Thompson was raving about the fact that it gives you a pretty powerful VM. Eight gigs of memory and eight gigs of storage that is yours sequestered. And they're also implementing a lot of the security features that they have done with WhatsApp where there's end to end encryption.

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they got Moxie pulled into it apparently.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  That's really cool. Moxie's a legend. So great on the recruiting front. Everyone loves Signal and and great team there.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is how? It sounds like if there's, they're actually giving every user a computer.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  VM, but yeah, it's like virtualized, but yes, the serious computing resources.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the cost is gonna probably be pretty significant.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  So, so the VM most likely like spins up when you use it and then gets, you know, like, you know, taken down when you're not using it. So the actual compute hours that are associated to anyone but a power user. And of course, very quickly you can wind up spending 20 bucks or a hundred bucks. And that's enough to just pay for a virtual machine. But you can go and rent, you know, a true virtual machine to like host your website on Digital Ocean for like 20 bucks.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  So Kaz, the CEO of Open Door, went to X and said, posted a screenshot of him asking Meta AI in WhatsApp. And he said, please make WhatsApp the main interface for these things, Alex Wang, please. And he just says, how do I use Muse? And Meta AI responds, Muse is a free AI assistant from Anthropic. You can use it on the web, on mobile or through their API. Go to Claude.ai, create an account and log in. So I'm looking at this post, I'm trying to find why is nobody talking about how Meta AI thinks that Muse is a product from Anthropic and is telling people to go log in there?

• 35:17John Coogan?

  That is weird that it would hallucinate that Muse is from Anthropic because there's not even any connection between those. It's not like Anthropic ever had a product called Muse that I know of. Very odd, but Meta AI of course is running an older LLM. And then I believe you get, you still get thrown into a llama model, I think, when you're on Instagram. If you wind up in a, in a LLM chat. And so there's going to need to be unification around all of these different products. And they're gonna need to eventually talk to all the same models. But of course there's like scaling and all sorts of different issues that you need. Because some of these products that they've gotten to scale are pretty significant, even, even if they're not like the most talked about.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  When you are a hyperscaler with billions of users and you vend an LLM into something like you've deployed that at scale, it's doing a lot. And it's like, you know, the new Gemini 3.7 flash, bunch of great reviews, great benchmarks on things. But like, they can't just stuff that in Google search on day one, like they have to actually scale it up like.

• 36:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question I have is, do you think they, does it seem like this was something they were working on prior to Instinct gaining traction? Or is this an Instinct clone? I saw one post that was saying, you know, that rumor that they tried to buy it, which makes.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Or for Rock, or for Rock says, there's a rumor going around that Meta and others made a 10 figure offer for Instinct. That's a crazy valuation for a what, one year old company, something like that. Instinct turned it down. Now Meta has launched Muse and that's literally what the post is. Meta has launched Muse and now the timeline is reacting, it'll be a big deal. Sounds familiar. Yeah, I saw some people saying like now the people with distribution are coming in. It'll be interesting to see how much, what distribution looks like in the meta ecosystem. Because yes, like Meta was able to win stories. How did they do that?

• 37:24John Coogan?

  They didn't win by launching a Snapchat clone as a separate app. They, they won by putting it in Instagram, which already had the install base. And so if Muse works its way into Instagram, which a lot of people do use, it'll probably get a lot of adoption. If it's a separate app, it's a little bit trickier. Now, the Threads playbook worked. They routed a lot of people to there. Thread shows up on Instagram, it has an advertising surface area, it's pulled over, what are they at? Couple hundred million MAU?

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds of millions of MAUs. And again, it's hard to fully understand the value of that because they, they're counting somebody who clicked through clickbait on Instagram.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's that. And then also, there's a political question.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  There's a robust, like real community of pure Threads users. The other, the other thing that I think about is like Meta has the advantage of being able to, when you open all their apps, just put a huge billboard, they make ad inventory just for themselves.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the raid vans.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  The specs where you open around Christmas. Sorry, sorry. Sorry, a little, little slip there. But when you opened Instagram in Q4, it's like, buy some of our, you know, classes, right? And so I would expect, I don't think they're gonna do that until Muse has like significantly more traction.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Adopters on and figure out all the kinks and stuff.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  Growing Daniel came in.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  John Chu says Meta has been working on Muse for almost a year now. You have to believe that that's true. The Manus acquisition ties into that. The Zuck messaging around personal super intelligence. I mean, when we interviewed him a year ago, we were asking about, oh, am I gonna be able to use your AI to actually buy? If I see a pair of shoes, will I be able to just buy it? And he was kind of like, I'm not ready to announce that yet. But it was very clear that that's where this was going. So I don't think it's an Instinct clone. I think it will compete with Instinct. And I think it's tricky because Instinct is pretty early and they are going up against a big company that's been investing and has a lot of resources to go after this very, very hard. At the same time, consumers come to Meta to be entertained.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Muse feels like a product for productivity. And I'm not sure that people will put them in the same buckets. Like that, it's very unclear. At the same time, people do a lot of shopping on Instagram, basically, just scrolling and.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure. Not, not actually check, are you joking? Come on.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  Just messing with you.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  No, no, no. So, so like.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it's like the most dominant shopping app of all time, positioned as.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  But particularly people will like go there and not just search things, but just like casually scroll and like linger over things so that they get retargeted, visit websites and then have the, have the ads come to them. And so you could imagine that, that on the shopping side, that there's a lot of traction there.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of excitement around this climbing the chart. It is currently Muse is number three on the charts in the App Store after ESPN Fantasy Sports and more and ChatGPT.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  ESPN Fantasy Sports.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  Growing Daniel came in with an absolutely brutal ratio.

• 40:36John Coogan?

  What did he say?

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  He quoted Zuck's announcement with a screenshot of the exchange that Zuck had with, with somebody during the early days of Facebook where he said, yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses and student numbers. What, how'd you manage that one? People just submitted it. I don't know why they quote unquote, trust me, dumb Fs. Anyway.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  Growing Daniel never forgets.

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  Obviously. Zuck has grown up a lot since then.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Who punched him in the nose? That's the question Ryan Peterson is asking. Let me find the, you sent me the image, is this true? So.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so here's the thing, his nose is starting to look like this guy Murab, who's a UFC champion. And Murab has one of the most busted up noses in the UFC. And Murab was the UFC fighter that Zuck was training with on that, on that deck. And so a lot of people are asking, so pull up this picture of Murab and you can see their noses are starting to look quite similar.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  That's a really, that's a really good sign.

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, zoom in there, zoom in there.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Pushing.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  Look, their noses, Zuck was like, give me one of them right now. Give me a nose like that right now.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  And I would expect, I, you know, who knows, Murab could go and get probably surgery to correct this. One, it's a very cool battle scar aura. And two, you know, this, this tells me that Zuck is going way harder in training than he lets on in the video.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Which I, which I love to see. He's like, he's ready for that Elon fight. He's like, there's a chance I might catch Elon on a good day. He opts in, I gotta be ready.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  He's also going extremely hard on the Irish countryside, buying castles. We call them Lord Zuck. We got a video now breaking down his latest real estate purchase. Stran Kelly Castle in Ireland. Let's play a little bit of this because there's some good voiceovers, some good context.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  And it can be found on the banks of the river Blackwater in County Waterford. This Gothic Revival mansion was designed by the famous Paine brothers. For John Kylie, a local landlord, former Tory MP for Clonmel and High Sheriff of County Waterford. The house was complete in 1830 and its scale was immense.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  He's got a bunkie under there?

• 43:20Speaker 06

  It took a brisk four and a half minute walk just to get from the kitchen to the dining room. Within the grounds, there was a folly, a Chinese pagoda and an aviary. The folly, which is known as Stran Kelly Tower, was built in 1826.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  We're having David Perell on the show later to talk about architectural revival.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  Medieval structure and it served as a fishing lodge.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  He's gonna have the resources to actually restore this and do this. Some of these castles are like cheap relative to like how epic they are, but the carrying cost of actually renovating or living in, even visiting any of these places, just like cleaning out the cobwebs is probably six figures a year. And the landscaping's gotta be extremely expensive, but I think this is the answer to like, where's the tech wealth going? Like at some point, he's either gonna get bored of this or donate it or pass it on or it's gonna fall out of the family because seven generations later, the family's like, yeah, we don't really want this castle anymore.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  And boom, you got a beautiful museum that was properly renovated and brought up to modern standards in 2026. And is prepared to actually house a bunch of Prince of AI.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this on the video, we're gonna watch this quick video and then we're gonna talk about absolute doom and despair.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  Okay, let's doom it up.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  But first, this little palate cleanser.

• 44:50John Coogan?

  What are we doing?

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  I wish that people did what I wanted them to do. It's like, that would be, that would be fun, but in the meantime, you can have some fun.

• 44:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, I would have a chopper, I'd have a, I don't even know what I would have. I would have an underground tunnel.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  I do have an underground tunnel.

• 45:05Speaker 07

  Do you really?

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like more of underground storage type situation, but yeah, no, it's a, it's a.

• 45:13Speaker 07

  Oh, wow. I'm looking at him, emperor dude, does that feel like it?

• 45:19John Coogan?

  I love that the Theo Von arc happened where like, for some reason, all the tech CEOs were like, it's right of passage now, we gotta go. I'm disappointed we didn't get Sacha on Theo and I'm really disappointed we didn't get Cici.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  Zuckie got a bunkie.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  Zuckie got a bunkie.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Zuckie got a bunkie. All right, let's talk about doom.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  Doom. An Anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial intelligence industry. Whoa, he didn't just quit the company, quit the industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems that could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. This was not received well. A bunch of back and forth with another researcher chiming in saying that they, that they have a P doom of 10%, which is something that's come up years ago and we kind of went back and forth on. This all started with Jacob Coxon, who said, I resigned from Anthropic today.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. He is not happy with where things go and it got 100 million views and 600,000 likes. It's going straight on a Bernie Sanders billboard for sure.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  I worked on an actual thermonuclear weapons project, Martin Casado from A16Z says, and the dissonance was less bizarre. And so he's comparing it to what it was like working on very scary technology, very different than what's going on today. And Evan Hubinger, who works on alignment science at Anthropic, previously Miri, OpenAI, Google, Ripple, Yelp. I guess he works with, Ripple was the cryptocurrency, is that right? Isn't Ripple XRP? Yeah.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  He says Jacob is correct here. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it's above 10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are clearly not on track to. So everyone's sort of pushing for a slowdown now, but then you go into the regulatory capture thing. I've been seeing, what?

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Jess Buckingham says, bro, got that pip?

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of people are like, are you giving back your equity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, odd. Nick Carter says, if you actually believe this, you'd be committing acts of violence, sabotage and terrorism against your employer. You clearly do not, so stop self, stop it with this self-aggrandizing twaddle. Eliezer on the other side says, thank you for saying plainly what you believe. I do appreciate it and the world could be even grimmer than it is otherwise. We have, we have Eliezer Yudkowsky's co-author coming on the show tomorrow, Nate Sores, to talk about if anyone builds it, everyone dies. We'll continue the doom debate, it seems like it's in the news. Lots of people were just going back and forth on everything. Ryan Peterson sees it as a bull case. He says, I need to buy more stock in this company.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  I've never seen such a commitment to making money regardless of the consequences. Yeah, it is, it is.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Adair says, if you publicly assign a greater than 10% probability to human extinction within a decade, you owe people a clear explanation of how you reach that number, plus what would change your mind?

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So, yeah, a lot of people were upset that this felt like a vibe prediction. Very like, you know, unresearched and, and he did link, Evan did link to the Anthropic risk report, which you can read in full. They have a reasonable scaling policy and they're talking about pacing the frontier, collaborating with other labs. And I'm, I'm oddly optimistic that this will happen. Obviously, you know, there's the Sam and Dario can't even hold hands on stage and that India conference. But AI has made strange bedfellows out of people.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Like if you had, if you had said, oh yeah, in six months, Elon Musk, the guy who's calling Anthropic, misanthropic, will be doing a deal and bring in Sholto to watch rockets take off at Starbase. I would have been like, no way, no way can Elon Musk and Dario become friends. Like that just seems like impossible. But the funniest outcome is the most likely to quote Elon again. And yeah, maybe there's this weird, you know, oh, people wind up working together. There are other consequences of that. There are some very serious.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  Just thinking, thinking that, you know, believing in your whole heart that things are that serious and then just rage quitting and not.

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  And not leaning in and trying like, do you, do you really think that the, the rage quit method is?

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, some of these organizations are really big. And if you're at a certain level, it can be very hard to actually get things done in a large organization. So you can be there and, and say like, yeah, I've been sending a Slack message and emailing the whole executive team every day that I, that this is the thing that I want to have happen. And it's not happening. And like, I don't have the authority within this particular role to actually have the change. People sort of tend to think, oh, if you work for the company, you can exact your will. But that's not true. Like, you can work in the marketing organization, think you want to run billboards in, you know, Tallahassee, Florida, and not be able to get that done because someone higher up than you said, no, we're not doing billboards in Florida, right? Like, things get vetoed for a variety of reasons. So it's not like, you know, you just take a job at a 5,000 person company,

• 51:18John Coogan?

  and then you can just do whatever you want. That's not the way companies work. It's, uh, yeah, it's weird, weird time. We'll see. But there are, there are serious, there are serious, like, regulatory frameworks for not allowing collusion between big companies. And so we might wind up in this other weird scenario where if, if all the big labs are like, yes, okay, the government's not stepping in regulating, we're going to self-regulate, we're going to work together, then that could actually be a legal problem because you're not allowed to price fix, you're not allowed to collude with your, that is like textbook anti-trust, right? And then, and then the other thing is that there's this weird dynamic

• 51:59John Coogan?

  I've seen playing out where people, the AI leaders make a prediction, and then the, like, the outsiders criticize that prediction as like, they're only saying that to raise the next round. Or they're not, they're only saying that, and this was the same thing with, like, all the labs were saying, like, we want regulation. And then, and then they're, they're only saying that for, for, you know, regulatory capture. And it's like regulatory capture might be a side effect of regulation, but the labs can still want it. And now I'm seeing people online, look at the, look at what's happening and say, we do need regulation, and I'm willing to put up with that regulatory capture that may happen under that scenario. And so there, there's all these weird, like, predictions that happen way too early for

• 52:43John Coogan?

  everyone to digest because the people inside the labs see things much earlier and understand, oh, yeah, okay, the next leg up is going to work. The agentic era is going to arrive. Swarms are going to be a thing. Like, we're, we're, like, we're on, we're on track to, to, to solve this. Anyway, Jordi, one last thing, and then we'll bring in.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  One last thing. Friend of the show, Buco Capital, quoted Evan with his, you know, 10% prediction and said, hey, quote, hey, Dario, congrats again on the great quarter. Nice to see enterprise re-acceleration. Hoping you could provide a little color on that 10% extinction number and some of the puts and takes that might have on further enterprise adoption. And then just a quick follow-up after.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are Anthropic earnings calls going to be like? It's just going to be CFO and Dario? Or are Daniella going to be on? I don't know. It's like, that, that, that's not that crazy to imagine that that happens. That's like a thing that happens on the call. Very, very odd. I mean, I guess you do have, like, defense tech companies that have earnings calls and, or defense primes, they might get asked about geopolitical things that are pretty heady. I don't know. Anyway, we'll figure it out. In the meantime, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Up next, we have

• 54:08John Coogan?

  David Cahn from Sequoia Capital to talk about the state of AI. Good news, there's lots happening. Plenty to talk about.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  Anything going on?

• 54:17John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 54:17Jordi Hays?

  Anything going on?

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping in.

• 54:19Speaker 08

  Hey, guys.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 54:20Speaker 08

  Good to see you guys again. You guys have a lot of range, from Zuck's Castle to P Doom.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  There's a lot of range. There's a lot of range. You think he's got a Bunky in the castle? Or do you think he has enough Bunky?

• 54:31Speaker 08

  It seems likely.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  I think he's got, I think he's got a doomsday dungeon.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  Dungeon? Okay. The Doom dungeon to go with Zuck's Bunky. Bunky's Bunky. Anyway, what is on the top of your mind? Because there's so many different things happening in the application layer. We had Cognitiv on, Harvey just raised a bunch of money. Like, things are going really well with diffusion and the actual application of the technology. There's value. Jobs apocalypse is delayed.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  And should P Doom be factored into financial models for Series A investments?

• 55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 08

  Well, I think broadly in AI right now, I mean, the thing that seems really interesting to me is just the concentration of capital going into these big companies. It does seem like the thing top of mind for me is just like the way the venture landscape has changed. When you think about doing this job five, six years ago, you had 100 interesting companies that everybody was looking at, and you're trying to find the next one. And that's still happening. And yet, so much of the conversation today is about the top 10 companies.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 08

  And then.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. On that point, is the biggest, is the concentration of capital into OpenAI, Anthropic, maybe XAI, SpaceX 2, is that the biggest driver? Or is, when you're talking about reshaping venture, I've been much more keyed in on the fact that you get Hugging Face and Open Router. And there are now many Decacorn liquidity events that I would think changes the underwriting. If you're a VC and you're like, yeah, it's an early round, it's a billion dollar valuation. But there are plenty of examples of 10x returns at this scale.

• 56:03Speaker 08

  Well, I think, I mean, to me, that's always been the case. We were early investors in, in Hugging Face. And I think there's always been a thesis on, you have a big community, and you have a lot of bottom-up adoption, and that there's a lot of option value in those type of companies. I think you'll see that get reflected back into the market, where there's always these companies where investors ask 100 questions about what does this become? And yet, you just have so much sucking sound from the market that those are going to be, come interesting companies. And it's so hard to be relevant and build something important. And I think Hugging Face did that, and Open Router did that. And so I think there'll continue to be examples of that. The thing that's interesting to me, just in this moment, and it's like, the fall of 2026, we're about to see these IPOs, is this precipice of moving from so much capital. And honestly, this is not even like a tech

• 56:46Speaker 08

  market, VC market thing. Like, the entire universe of capital has concentrated on this one sliver of the market, which is kind of pre-IPO, late-stage AI companies. And we're about to see that transition into the public market. And so I don't think anybody knows what, how exactly that's going to play out. But it does feel like we're on the precipice of something pretty interesting.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  It is wrong to think that it will play out as a binary, one-day liquidity wave, correct? Because there will be lockups, and then many LPs will receive their stakes and want to hold. Some venture capital firms, registered investment advisors will hold as well. So we're looking at, like, how exactly does that change the market? Because there will be the optionality of liquidity, but not necessarily actual cash on balance sheets ready to go into the next generation of startups.

• 57:37Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, one thing I've been thinking about, if you guys remember, like, 2021, you had, like, CrowdStrike and Datadog were public, and then you were investing in, like, private CrowdStrike and Datadog, right? And there was Databricks, right? And you could go invest in Databricks. And it was the same business model. You sort of understood how this thing was going to trade when it was liquid. And I think that's what's, that's what's interesting about AI right now. It's like, there's no real, like, comps for any of these private companies. But as soon as one of these companies, let's say Anthropic is the first to get out, as soon as one of these companies gets out, then I think you actually have a better valuation framework for the rest of the market. And so I think it is a healthy thing for the market when you kind of can look at the liquid, you can look at the illiquid, you see how these things trade, and it will, it will provide a lot of clarity, I think, to the private market.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Why is, why is SpaceX not a good comp for Anthropic, OpenAI, and then even the smaller firms?

• 58:26Speaker 08

  I think it is. I think SpaceX was the beginning of this. Obviously, it's held up really well. And for all the volatility and every, every day, my, my brother and I always joke of like, you know, every day you see a news headline that's like, stock was up 2%. And it's like, stocks go up and down 2% every day. Nothing happened. And there's always like some reason why it happened, by the way, you know? It's like, oh, and up and down. I mean, SpaceX has done, has held up well. You know, there have been liquidity unlocks. Everyone was super worried going into the liquidity unlocks in the media, and nothing, it was like a non-event, you know?

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  I remember the day of the big unlock somehow traded up like. Seven percent, if I remember correctly.

• 58:59Speaker 08

  I like a short squeeze where all these guys are short and then they get squeezed out. But yeah, so I do think SpaceX is the bellwether and it's not, to your point, it's not going to be a one day event, but I think it's an exciting time that these companies are growing so, so fast. I think there's a lot of demand for these companies and it's going to be interesting to see that play out. I think the second thing that we're paying attention to, and I think a lot of investors are focused on is just like the full stack of the data center build out that's happening.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:23Speaker 08

  There's, I wrote this blog post maybe a year and a half ago, server, steel and power are kind of the three pillars. Obviously, everyone's paying attention to the server side, which is chips. Steel side is the industrial side. You know, you have Elon now making his own gas turbines. So there's a lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution component of this where you, you know, we're out of, we can't make more, more of the components that go into data centers. And then of course, the power piece where everyone's looking at, hey, we know how to get power for the next, there's no, there's no more power for the next, you know, 24 months. And what are the, what are the timelines? And with these capex, you know, these big capex projects, you have to plan two, three, four years out. Who even knows what the world's going to look like two, three, four years from now? So I think that, you know, deeper below the, you know, cusp of OpenAI, Anthropic, the frontier models, just all the things that make them possible. And I think the market's

• 1:00:08Speaker 08

  pretty well educated on compute market now and investors are familiar with all parts of the stack. But I think there's going to be a lot of innovation all across that.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Do you think that the opportunity in the grid, opportunity in power plays out more like the Neo cloud market than the rocket launch market? Like I've always said, like, ah, it'd be amazing if we had Elon of solar or even an Elon of nuclear. And there's some nuclear companies that are doing really well. Some of those founders could go on to build like the trillion dollar energy company. But it feels like everyone's focused on it. There's so much capital flowing into energy. Default would be very oligopolistic, bunch of great outcomes, but not this winner take all behemoth. But what's your model for where energy and grid build out goes?

• 1:00:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, my mental model is probably closer to the Elon case than Neo cloud case and I can explain why. Yeah, I think on the Neo cloud side, the primary innovation was financing. That's, that's sort of how I look at it.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like a real estate private equity feel.

• 1:01:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. Like we're buying a bunch of chips from Jensen and Jensen, to his credit, was an amazing player in the ecosystem and has helped really build the ecosystem. He made Corey what Corey is today. There were sort of this moment where Corey realized we can buy these chips, we can finance them with Blackstone, somebody's going to finance the GPUs. So there's a lot, a lot of financing innovation. Now there's a lot of companies that have followed suit. Obviously, you need to be a good, good deal maker. But in some ways, you know, you could start a Neo cloud tomorrow. You know how to do it. Getting access to power is hard. It's not easy, but there's 15 Neo clouds. There's going to be more. I think my contrast, and my partner Sean McGuire always has a great framework around this. On the hardware side, he wrote this hardware manifesto long before hardware was cool. And he had this concept of, you know, in hardware, there's potential energy and

• 1:01:53Speaker 08

  these hardware companies spend five, six, seven, eight years building this potential energy. And it's because they're doing real, very difficult R and D work. And at some point, that potential energy converts into kinetic energy. And that's when, you know, stock prices move and, and you see that with SpaceX, we're stuck 24 years to bake and you step some of these hardware companies. And so when we, you know, at Sequoia, as we're looking at the energy ecosystem, we've sort of chosen a few places to, to make investments. Sean was on the show talking about Valor, which is our nuclear investment. Last week, we announced our investment in a company called Form Energy, which is doing grid scale batteries. That's a company founded by the guy who ran the energy business. He actually started the energy business at Tesla. A guy named Yeet Min Chang, who is probably one of the top three battery experts alive today. So just very, very strong team. And they're

• 1:02:37Speaker 08

  nine years in. They spent nine years building these billion dollar batteries. They just signed up a big project with Google earlier this year. And so, and then you, you ask yourself, okay, well, if we're going to have a lot of solar and wind, are we going to have a lot of batteries on the grid? I think the answer is yes. And then it's, you have a company that spent nine years building IP to go put those batteries on the grid and then this unique moment to go scale that up for AI. So anyways, I think there's going to be, to your question, like, I think there's going to be three, four, five interesting kind of companies with deep, deep IP that you can go invest in. But I think it's different from the Neo cloud space where what you really need is capital and access to GPUs. Whereas on the grid side, you actually need, you ideally want some real fundamental IP that is, that is difficult. And then of course, you need access to capital, right? So I think

• 1:03:22Speaker 08

  on the nuclear stuff, what's interesting and a lot of these companies, you need to raise billions of dollars before you get to the promised land. And so that alone, one thing I say to founders, I meet a lot of seed stage founders in hardware. And I'm like, even if I think your IP is amazing, I can't invest if I don't think you can raise a billion dollars. Because you just won't get there, right? And you'll end up getting consolidated. And so access to capital and consolidating capital obviously is an important part of building these companies as well.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  So what are you looking for? Like what, what are the tells of a founder who can raise a billion dollars? Is it great storyteller? Is it just actual?

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Isaiah is like a great example because even early on at the seed stage, like honestly, if I look at the, the Gundo crew and I look at Augustus and Isaiah and their ability to sell you their vision was just on another level, even before they had raised like 10 million bucks. Like when they were raising their first round, they, they were just different. Like they had a natural talent and then they've refined that. And you have to be in a category that allows you to sell this vision of a trillion dollar opportunity, a hundred billion dollar opportunity, what that is. But I think you have that like

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  natural talent and selling ability that is somehow inherent to some people. Like there are people that are just way less compelling naturally and they get more compelling over time because they get more confident in their business and round after round and hundreds of pitch meetings and meetings with candidates. And they just get better and better and better. But then some people just start on, you know, at the, at the 10 yard line and they just refine it a little bit. And then they can go from raising the $5 million round to raising a billion dollars.

• 1:05:06Speaker 08

  Yeah. In our partner meeting, we actually talked about this a lot. I mean, actually, this is probably the most important question that you have to get right in early stage investing. The framework we often use is would you go work for this person? Because I think everything is sort of subsumed in that. Like if other people have to be willing to go work for this person, the decision of whether to go work for a person is effectively putting 100% of your equity in this one company, right? So would you put 100% of your equity in this company? And, and often, you know, we had Mateo, the Form Energy CEO come in, you have people kind of come and say, wow, like this person seems really serious. This person seems like they're, you know, they have an incredible track record. In his case, he had built the energy business at Tesla. They've sort of done something that's really impressive early on in life. And I believe, and then there's a clarity of thought

• 1:05:49Speaker 08

  component, which is, so sometimes pitches are coherent and sometimes they're not coherent, right? Like there's sort of a coherent story, which is like, okay, you know, we're, Form Energy is building an iron air battery. Iron's really cheap, air's really cheap. That is why they're building an iron air battery, right? It's so simple and yet kind of makes sense. And then it's like, well, why do we need batteries? Well, you know, there's, there's no sun out at night, you know? It's really simple things. And I think something we look for in a lot of these conversations with founders is clarity of thought. If you can articulate to an investor who's not the most sophisticated, the investors are never the most sophisticated people around the table. If you articulate to an investor, a very clear articulation of why this vision makes sense, why your plan makes sense, then you're going to be able to articulate that to an employee. And then we have people like Sean

• 1:06:33Speaker 08

  who have PhDs in physics and can go incredibly deep on the science and technology behind it. And you sort of marry those two things. And I think that's kind of how we make these decisions. And we spend a lot of time with people. We spend a lot of time getting to know the founders as well. So Mateo I had known for six years before we invested. Sean knew Isaiah for a long time before we invested.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  Yep, that's right.

• 1:06:50Speaker 08

  You're not making the decision in a single, in a single pitch.

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about trying to time the acceleration of the real world? Right now it feels like it's much faster to do things on your computer. And it's creating efficiencies and a bunch of, for a bunch of people and, and companies and all these things. But we're not seeing the kind of GDP growth that has at least been predicted. And it feels like in order to have that, we're going to need to see, one, a general advancements of, of models and, and AI models that can, you know, actually be a drop in sort of addition to your team or, or replacement or whatever that ends up being. But, but it

• 1:07:38Jordi Hays?

  feels like we're going to need to make a lot of, do a lot of things in the real world to feel that acceleration. And even with, you know, the, the launch of Astra, we haven't actually played this video on the show yet today, but somebody had basically hooked up Astra, like, and it can just drive your car now, right? And it's not designed to, you know, it wasn't something that the model was designed to do, but the models are getting sufficiently advanced at understanding the world. And it feels like we're on the cusp of this like acceleration of the real world, which I think is going to be way, it's very a magical experience to like, say, generate me an image of this scene in my head and be able to see it on your screen. It's going to be 100 times more magical to be like,

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  make this thing in the world. And then it just makes it, right? And that can be applied to the real estate, to building widgets, you know, the, the list goes on and on. But robots building other robots and building things, I feel like will be the greatest investment cycle ever and much more exciting for normal people than just, hey, we made this software feature, you know, in two weeks versus, you know, 20 weeks.

• 1:08:51Speaker 08

  Two thoughts on that. I mean, one is, I think it's so important to synchronize the timeline of your investment with the timeline. To your point on like, you need to understand when the market opportunity is going to convert. And ideally, you're synchronizing the timeline of the company with the timeline of the market. So for example, if you're trying to solve AI power and you're starting today, it's kind of late. We need more power, like literally in a year. So it's like, hopefully, you've been working on that problem already for a few years. If you're trying to solve nuclear, and that's a 2040s problem, great. You can synchronize the timeline of being an early-stage company, chasing an opportunity that is really going to hit its inflection in the 2040s. So I think that synchronization matters. And then I think the second thing, you know, it is interesting that VCs have really shifted toward hardware investing, right? Like, there's this broader trend. I think Andrew came on the show and talked about send, cut, send. Like, we've been doing a lot of stuff in

• 1:09:34Speaker 08

  the hardware reindustrialization space. Part of that is because of this feeling that the timelines are so fast in the digital world, that it's hard to create modes, and it's hard to create value. So I think there's a reason why, in hardware, there's a feeling that you can create modes over many, many years. And eventually, obviously, the ultimate mode, to your point, is going to be the machine that makes the machine, right? It's the reindustrialization of this country. And I hope we're going to get there. I think we're going to get there. I do think sci-fi kind of preempts reality. And so Isaac Asimov, obviously, imagined, in iRobot, the most valuable company in the world is a company that makes all the robots. And there's a reason, I think, a lot of investors own Tesla for that reason, because they think that he's going to win on Optimus. So anyways, I think there's a lot of companies that should benefit from acceleration in the physical world. And there's a lot of investment going in there.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, working it down for us. Excited to have you back soon. Always a good time. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate the takes.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have Mikey Schulman, co-founder, CEO of Suno, here with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  I go.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Yes, since, I think, since you came on the show last, we have all been completely one-shotted by Suno. Every time we come in to the studio, we're blasting Suno songs. We have a lot of fun with them. Make a Suno song for our friends, whatever the news is of the day. We're having a great time. But how are things going with you?

• 1:11:08Mikey Shulman?

  Much better now that I know that you guys are enjoying the product.

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  I will say, okay, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you, like, I'm going to give you, I'm going to tell you one thing. I'm going to tell you one thing, and then I'm going to tell you another thing.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Okay. This is a compliment sandwich?

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Okay, compliment sandwich. Let's do it.

• 1:11:26Mikey Shulman?

  You don't need to compliment sandwich me. That's fine.

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. So, one, the product is like, the AI, you know, is probably the AI product that has brought me the most belly laughs, period. Like, it's just a joy to use. Daily user, like, we have so much fun with it on the team. I've pulled it up in situations in my own home that I think are hilarious to me, less funny to members of my family. But anyways, the product is just like amazing. It's wonderful. I get so much joy out of it. I think the software quality is bad in the app. Like, I think that it's

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Not on the model side.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Not on the model side. Like, the model is amazing. Like, the things that matter are, like, so good. Like, it's so unbelievably fast. And I haven't even tried the new model yet. But, but the actual software, I think you've been

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Hard to navigate?

• 1:12:19Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. It just feels like, it's kind of buggy, and it feels like, you guys, feels like you've been vibe coding too hard. I want you guys to, like, you know, you know, basically do some cycles on just cleaning it up a little bit.

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay, more optimized. What do you think?

• 1:12:36Mikey Shulman?

  That's a good compliment sandwich. Let me, um, let me say, actually, we should probably

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  The final bread. And it's amazing. No, no, no, no. The actual quality of the, of the output is, is

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  The real product is the model.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Whereas, like, video generators, you're looking at it, and like, no matter how much ever you put in, it's still, like, not quite there. This is, like, it passes the Turing test of, like, listenable. So you can have fun with it. Anyway, continue.

• 1:13:01Mikey Shulman?

  I appreciate that. We should probably stop releasing models while you guys are on airs, so you can actually have some time to test them out. But, um, yeah, well, I'll just take the opportunity to talk about what we're doing today, which is releasing a new model. And so, way better than the last one. It's actually way faster. And so you'll see the way that you can use it when the songs come back so fast. It's just very different, much more fun, way more expressive.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Wait, it's faster?

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  I don't know why it needs to be faster. Like, it was already fast enough, because I would type the prompt, and I would click the button, and then it'd be available immediately. And I think that's because you stream it in, right? Like, it's still rendering in the background. Is that right?

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  No, the

• 1:13:39Mikey Shulman?

  We're still streaming it, but

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  No, when I, when I feel like it's slow, is when I'm, when I'm in one of these, you know, when I'm one-shot by a song, but I want to change, like, a certain word, lyrics, and I'm like, change this or that.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, then, speed. V6 has you covered, apparently.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  That was the thing when I first, when we first started using, when we first got one-shot by Suno, we would fire off a prompt and put your phone down and be like, I'll come back to it in, like, you know, five minutes, see where it's at. But then it'd be back in, like, 20 seconds.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Mikey Shulman?

  Okay. I think the thing that people don't realize is that when you're building things in entertainment, actually, the, the loop speed, how quickly you give something to your users ends up mattering a lot. We can actually measure that pretty directly, and we know how much it matters. But just going back to the model, so V6 is better, it's faster, the songs are way better, it's more expressive. We have V6 Wild, which is a model that makes just some of the most interesting stuff, even though the songs themselves may not be quite as good. I'm having a ton of fun with that one. And it's actually like a big day for Suno, and actually for the whole music industry, where this is done in concert in partnership with some of the best music companies in the world.

• 1:14:51Mikey Shulman?

  It's really kind of laying out a blueprint for how we think AI can really grow the entire music ecosystem. So we're, we're super, super excited.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were talking to Johnny.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can go there. Sure.

• 1:15:05Mikey Shulman?

  On the, on the partnership?

• 1:15:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the partnership.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Everyone's waiting for a partnership. Everyone's been, been interested in how the economics will flow, what happens to songs that are used in training. Obviously, there's a fair use argument. There's obviously the Spotify, I want a royalty on everything forever. And it feels like this is the start of moving the conversation forward at least one click.

• 1:15:33Mikey Shulman?

  This is definitely an amazing start. The way I think about this is, yes, these are now not only new business lines and new revenue streams for rights holders, for artists, for all kinds of creatives. Most importantly, these are really long-term partnerships that let us build products together with the greatest music companies, with the best creatives. And the thing that's so exciting is that, for the first time in a long time, there's actually product differentiation. There's the ability to build things that are just different. And I think we've been so ingrained in the last 20 years just to think about digital music as one thing. And so, we'll be releasing more products in the near future that let you play with the content from your favorite artists when those artists opt in, when users play with their content, the revenues that are attributable

• 1:16:18Mikey Shulman?

  to those users, a portion of that will flow to those artists. And then, again, just building more from that in the future of, what should the future of music look like? What are the most engaging fan experiences? How do we pull people deeper into music and change the place that music has in their lives to change the place that music has in culture? And the thing that's so amazing is that there's kind of acknowledgement from all sides here. Like, we have a very good start. We don't know what the, all of the products should look like, and we're excited to build them together.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  How does AI video play into this? I noticed that when I open Suno, I often get served a vertical video feed of other Suno creations that are often AI video-animated in a pretty convincing way. Like, you get a full music video, basically. Is that something that you're planning to, is it already available for everyone? Is there just a button that can make these? Or are there sort of like more pro creators that are using outside models bringing a music video to the platform?

• 1:17:20Mikey Shulman?

  It's a great question. Right now, that is mostly creators bringing outside technologies to bear. I would just back up, though, and think, the purpose of Suno is actually to inspire you to do things that you haven't done, and not just to do the old thing of scrolling again. And so, what you may have noticed is those videos are actually really tailored to get you to lean in, to take a piece of content. You can actually remix it right off of that video. I think, we're not used to thinking of ourselves as creators, us mere mortals. Maybe you guys are. You guys are, you know, on TV every day. But it feels amazing to be creative. And just getting people over the hurdle of, actually, I am a creator, and I will find it really enjoyable to be creative. That's kind of the magical spark that we're trying to bring to people.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I have that all the time. John will send me a Suno song, and I'll be thinking to myself, John, even though John, even though all I know, I know that John just wrote, like, a handful of sentences, and he put the words and the letters in the right orders, and it got that output. I'm still thinking, there's a spark of, like, John is a genius for putting this set of ideas together. And I know that he was, like, thinking about the lyrics and how to arrange it and, and things like that. And, and so, that joy of creation and, and compacting it into something that, and again, I just, I've always seen this as, like, net new, right? Like, John, like, the, the idea of, like, a gag song, you know, like a joke, has been around forever. But, but the friction

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  to do that.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  I thought we were enjoying it specifically because it allowed us to go after music that was basically low tan. So we could make a song about Mosfeard lawyer, about John Quinn, a corporate lawyer, that would never exist in any timeline other than when you drop the cost of creation to effectively zero. Then you can actually get this. And I thought that was just us. But when I was scrolling Suno, I saw similar, similar experiences happening in other pockets. Like, someone made a, a song about the Revolutionary War, and they took a bunch of history. And it's like George Washington. Have you seen this video? I don't know. But it's all, it's all animated with AI. And I was like, oh, like,

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  this sounds like a Fourth of July banger, but it's historical. But no one is really going to sit there and arrange that. And all of a sudden, you have this, like, very niche overlap of, like, you want a July 4th hard-hitting song, but you also want to learn history. And like, it puts it together in this really weird niche way, which I, I think is, like, happening all over the place.

• 1:19:53Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah, look, let me, let me say two things to that. One is a plug. You can go all the way down to a TAM of one or two people. You guys, I'm sure have iMessages with one another.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:02Mikey Shulman?

  You can actually access Suno Write from iMessage if you have the latest version of the app. And so it'll just be easier to interact there.

• 1:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:20:10Mikey Shulman?

  But the other thing I would say is I think maybe the best example is, I don't know if you guys saw this so-called Oreo Gate.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:20:17Mikey Shulman?

  Of, oh, this is a lady who took the text messages from her mom's chat about her kids eating Oreos or sending Oreos to school. And just using music as a platform to express, I don't know, what is special and absurd and banal about everyday life. And if, when I think about what was the alternative for her to be expressive like that, to use her vantage point. She basically would have had to become a stand-up comic to bring this to life. And now you can use something like music, do this in an entirely new way. And it's something that I think like tons and tons of people really can relate to on a fundamental level.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about all the ways other than speed and overall feeling of music or musical quality? Going from, you know, model generation to model generation. One, one thing I noticed with the last generation was that it would just constantly be referencing like glass in different ways. Like in a bunch of different songs, it would come back to this like, you know, the glass shattering, you know.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was talking to John.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  And it was like, to me, to me, it was like a tell that.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Like you, like Suno developed its own turns of phrases. Yeah, it's not this, it's that, or you're absolutely right. Like the Suno version of that was different, but it seemed to exist. How much are you hunting for those tells?

• 1:21:46Mikey Shulman?

  You know, it's a, it's a really tricky thing in music. Unlike, let's say, the, the big labs, LLMs, intelligence, there are no benchmarks. And so these questions of taste end up mattering a lot, lot more. And even just measuring these things is really hard. So we are always on the hunt for kind of that telltale sign. And then, yeah, there's a good amount of judgment that goes into how do we fine tune? How do we post-train these models? Actually, what we're releasing today, having both a V6 and a V6 Wild. V6 Wild being very differently post-trained to be way more interesting and basically a little less good at making full songs. It's kind of a start at bridging that of how do we make sure that people actually have the most creative experience that they can?

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  Back on the deal with Warner Music Group, BMG Believe, I'm interested to understand how you're talking to investors, how you see the market evolving over the long term, because the, the most extreme economic share might be something like what we see with Spotify. I think they give maybe 30% of top line to artists across everything. There's a huge stake of revenue that goes to creators. Still a hundred billion dollar company, fantastic business. We love Spotify. And I'm interested to, to, to think about as the industry outside of Suno, but just, just AI-generated tools. What type of economic structure would you see landing in equilibrium?

• 1:23:19Mikey Shulman?

  I think about this in a couple of ways. There are things where we can think about, how do we take the existing technology? And really lower the cost and give it to way more people. And that's what you said before. And you would never be savoring these moments if it weren't so easy to make music. And then there's the whole other side of things of how do we actually now apply this to markets that people couldn't even fathom before? And this is actually something that I, you know, kind of live and breathe every day. If you rewind a couple of years ago and people think music is really small, I don't want to invest in it. And then you realize that it's not just that old TAM. Actually, what we're doing is fundamentally changing how people interact with media, how people entertain themselves and realizing that that actually is much bigger.

• 1:24:02Mikey Shulman?

  And so to answer the question more directly, this is actually evolving. This is like, we have some economic models now. We have a lot of alignment to build products together and figure out the economic models that go with those products instead of having to figure everything out all at once. The crazy time that we live in about AI progressing so quickly, we kind of don't have the luxury of trying to get it right in this very moment. Because things change so, so fast.

• 1:24:28John Coogan?

  What's the, what is the demand side from consumers on editability, the pro workflow? Obviously, the, the model is outputting basically a complete waveform. But you can also use AI to deconstruct that into stems, into notes, into sheet music. And then a more experienced musician can go in and make fine-grained tweaks. And, and just like you can generate an image and bring it into Photoshop if you want. What is demand like? What are you building there? Where do you see that side of the business going?

• 1:25:05Mikey Shulman?

  We have a pretty broad product suite here from, you can type in a few words or access it from iMessage, all the way down to Suno Studio, which is our digital audio workstation.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:14Mikey Shulman?

  Which is really professional workflows. What we've seen is actually by making those workflows, not only different and powerful, but actually much more fun. More of the professional tooling ends up just appealing to average people who fall in love with making music. I think this is a lot like, I might buy the signature guitar of my favorite guitarist. I don't think I'm going to be a famous guitarist, but it actually makes me feel really good knowing that I use the same tools that the greats use, and it makes me feel better about my creativity. And I think that it's only for lack, or it's a failure of imagination to think, I can't actually fall in love with digital tools in the same way. Like I know I'm using the same toolset, at least in part, that makes some of the best music.

• 1:25:56Mikey Shulman?

  I feel more creative as a result. I fall in love with making music and there are virtual cycles there.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  What are you learning from the early sparks of progress in AI video? I was trying to think about the biggest AI video, the most viral AI video from last year. And I was, I, I couldn't put my finger on it easily. I can think about the previous year because that was Harry Potter, Balenciaga. That was the moment we were like, wow, this really like worked. And I think for this year, music like Rubbers by Phoenix Flexing, it's now out that it was AI-generated. I don't know if you use Suno or not, but it, it, it sparked the conversation.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  And then I'm wondering what next year looks like if we are trying to pattern match against the ebbs and flows of progress in AI video.

• 1:26:51Mikey Shulman?

  It's a great question. I almost think video is having a super interesting moment right now. As there's a lot of new models and they're getting more convincing, they're getting easier to use. And so we look at that very closely. I think the one maybe easy thing for me to say here is that actually speed ends up mattering a lot. And as it becomes more affordable to really iterate a lot on video. Because if you rewind, let's say, six months, it's actually kind of prohibitive to make a, a full-length video. I would imagine that we're going to see some very interesting cultural moment. And I think of these less as technology per se. It's actually, you gave the technology to somebody who has an interesting point of view, who's able to

• 1:27:36Mikey Shulman?

  express that point of view to the world with these tools. And so I think it's very hard to predict exactly which point of view that will be. It's like a very cultural zeitgeist-y moment.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember I talked to Ahmad.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  There are gonna be, there's gonna be at least one very big cultural moment. I will tell you that. That's all I can say right now, but there's gonna be a big cultural moment involving music and technology.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  I, yeah, I was talking to Ahmad Mastak after Stable Diffusion launched years ago. This was maybe 2023, 2022. And, and he was predicting that by 2024, 2025, there would be full movies that were AI-generated. And we, we kind of got there, but they didn't really break through. But AI video is actually really successful. It's just taken a very different approach and it's diffused in an interesting way where it's making its way into VFX workflows all over the place and it's become very useful. But it, but there hasn't been like the fully, the fully AI-generated, you know, movie that is so good.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  It gets over the hill of like, oh, I don't, I don't want to like it, but I have to like it because it's good. And I'm wondering if that will be neck, what next year in AI music looks like. It's, it's a tool that's in every, every studio, every production. And, and it's something that certain artists take off the shelf occasionally, but it's not fully AI-created albums that are out, but it's also not fallen by the wayside. Is that a reasonable prediction or do you think that's too, too, too conservative?

• 1:29:18Mikey Shulman?

  No, I think that's actually not too conservative for the reason that an album is a or even a song is a is a point of view and it's very hard to just one-shot the point of view that is going to really resonate with the whole world.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Mikey Shulman?

  It does happen, but I think of this as it is a process of refining your own point of view over and over again, and you may use an AI toolset, you may not use an AI toolset. And so like, I think that, you know, a year from now, it's actually quite mundane that there's a lot of AI in music. It's like used in every single part of the production chain. Some of it will be Suno, some of it will not be Suno. But the idea that like, there's just going to be charts full of one-shot AI bangers, to me, actually kind of misses the point of, it doesn't express the point of view of the artist. And I think that this is kind of a, this is kind of a faulty comparison to, let's say, you know, we just saw OpenAI

• 1:30:15Mikey Shulman?

  maybe prove a huge math theorem. And like, this is something that is long-running, that is verifiable. Music is just not that way. And so I'm not sure we expect to see the same types of things.

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Wait until I'm spinning up 1 million agents, commands, 1 million, 10 billion instances of Suno to create the giga-banger chart topper that sits at Billboard Hot 100 number one for 100 years straight.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  The final song.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  I'm sure you can do it. Yeah, what was your, what was your takeaway from like the Astro launch over the weekend? Because the, lots of like Blender models, lots of video games created, and I feel like the answer isn't going, like, a million one-shot at web games were spawned this weekend, and I could not be more optimistic about GTA 6 blowing out the predictions. At the same time, I feel like as soon as I stop playing GTA 6, I'm going to get a text from a friend with a really hilarious micro game that they vibe-coded that's GTA 6, but for TBPN

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  or for TAC or something. And I'm gonna be, oh, this is cool. This is the special thing that only makes sense to me and you. And so is that, is that how you process that? Or is there anything new on the, on the overall AI capability side that's exciting to you these days?

• 1:31:42Mikey Shulman?

  Maybe I'm too dumb to predict the future. And so I would just look at, let's say, the last revolution there, which would be Roblox letting people really start to make their own games. And at the beginning, it starts really small and people are really just playing their own games. And eventually, the technology progresses, where you get more of that power law, you get people playing other people's games, etc. And then you make an ecosystem there. It's not crazy that we'll see something similar there. But again, I think a game is a very, it's, a game's purpose is to be played by people. And it is very different from the general intelligence model of things. And so I think it's hard to really apply logic from one into the other.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, how much do we read into the iPhone Duo launch? Do you think Apple's so Suno-pilled that they want, you know, every person to have more real estate to be able to make music? What's your read?

• 1:32:34Mikey Shulman?

  I really, I really hope Apple's so Suno-pilled. You know, humbly, I don't think we're the reason that they're making, that they're making that phone. But if you want to suggest that, I'm very happy to take it.

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm suggesting that. What, as, as somebody who makes mobile apps, do you, have you guys, are you guys already looking into like the implications of this and how it'll, like, how you're going to need to change your application to be able to adapt to this kind of new?

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Might just be one prompt, make it work on the Duo. For a lot of developers, that might be the answer.

• 1:33:10Mikey Shulman?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think about this as opportunity of, if there is different interaction with your phone, we actually are able to now inspire you at different times. And like, you can take out your phone and do something without unlocking it. You can use one camera versus the other camera. You know, I don't know what the plans are for the Vision Pro, but when I think about a final form of Suno, it's actually, how do I get a Vision Pro app that I can put on and conduct an orchestra? You know, like, and so I think when we think about interfaces, this is where in the creativity game, we will just work on forever. You know, there's, there's, there's no end to working on how we delight people by letting them interact with technology in new ways.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Last question. Have you ever, have you guys ever run any billboards or wheat-pasting campaigns?

• 1:33:57Mikey Shulman?

  Not that I know of. Why, if you, if you have good ideas of the billboards, we should.

• 1:34:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just feel like you should be running a billboard that says, make a song with a sentence. And you should just go, go hard on that. Because it's just like, people, people need to experience the magic of this product. It's just like.

• 1:34:16Mikey Shulman?

  We gotta not get people to pick up their phones while they're driving. That would be, that would be bad. But we gotta place those billboards in the right place.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's in Waymos now, Tesla Cybercabs, maybe.

• 1:34:26John Coogan?

  Bold case for billboards. Waymos, you can.

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. It's actually a bear case because.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Oh, you're looking down.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's gonna be on their phone.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:34:35Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be rough.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much.

• 1:34:37Mikey Shulman?

  The future is bright. You know, you're gonna have, you're gonna be sitting in your Waymo, you're gonna have a lot more time to be creative. Way better than driving, way safer than driving.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you say nothing from my end, thanks, and you go back to making Suno songs.

• 1:34:51Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Mikey. Congrats on the launch.

• 1:34:54Mikey Shulman?

  See you guys.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Excited to try the new model.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  A little, a little high this time. Have a good one. Go by. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Thieves raided the Renoir Museum in the latest French art heist. We'll get to that story after we chat with Keith Rabois, Managing Director at Coastal Ventures, returning to the show for the fourth, fifth, sixth time. It's always a great chat. Keith, how you doing?

• 1:35:34Keith Rabois?

  Great. It's great to be back.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Have you been following this, this French art heist? Is this, is this bearish for France?

• 1:35:41Keith Rabois?

  I have not been following it. I don't know how, I don't know how I missed it. I was just in France last week and somehow.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Oh, you were in France last week. Are you guilty? Let's figure it out.

• 1:35:51Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you never know. Maybe I was stealing, promoting some, you know, artworks.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, you're back in America.

• 1:35:59Jordi Hays?

  Markets are too frothy. I'd rather swipe some, some fine art.

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are they, are, are they too frothy? It feels like there's a lot of value. A lot of the, a lot of the companies, they're growing revenue, the products work, they're magical sometimes. Is it too frothy right now?

• 1:36:17Keith Rabois?

  Well, I think the revenue traction's real, as you pointed out. And then there's a variety of different categories of companies. Some are producing meaningful margin on that revenue and others are not. And so I don't think you can paint with one broad brush and say, hey, all these companies, you know, are worth X or Y or not worth X or Y. You have to kind of understand the fundamental drivers. But many of these companies have significant traction. I'm not worried about that. And, you know, I don't think multiples are the right way to evaluate private companies typically anyway. But if you work backwards from 2030 and say, which of these companies are going to be sustained? Which ones have durable advantages? As I like to talk about it or communicate it through accumulating advantages, that's less clear. Like, the traction is off the charts by any historical

• 1:37:00Keith Rabois?

  norms. The ability to go to 100 million in revenue from, you know, two years or so, or hundreds of millions in four years, basically unprecedented. But you still do have to ask questions about, what's the sustainability of that revenue? Not just because customers may or may not change their mind, or there may be new competitors, but like, different, the way the ecosystem evolves around AI is not at all easy to forecast. So we struggle with this and debate this in our partner meetings constantly. The, the founders are impressive, the teams are impressive, the revenue and the adoption is impressive, and even the usage often is impressive. But if you still say, is this going to be an iconic company that's around for 20, 30 years? In many cases, the question is not, the answer

• 1:37:44Keith Rabois?

  is not so obvious. Now, if you play your cards correctly, you may be able to get acquired. And that's that can be fine.

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  No, and it feels like it feels like the the the powers that be in AI, I'm thinking of one guy, I won't name him, is almost not willing to let any AI companies fail at the mo- at this moment.

• 1:38:05Keith Rabois?

  At the moment, he is playing an interesting, so that company means money.

• 1:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Keith Rabois?

  They're growing really fast and they have lots of profits. If you're in those shoes, you know, and your revenue depends upon people buying what you sell, that are mostly AI companies, the strategy is incredibly coherent. Now, they are starting to move from being a platform company to a product company. You can see it with the recent acquisition.

• 1:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Keith Rabois?

  As they start shipping products, may maybe they ship products in other areas. They will compete with more people than they ever have before. Right now, any AI growth is great for Nvidia. But as they start having their own products, that may change how people perceive them and how they perceive others. And I think to continue and sustain their growth, for whatever sort of reasons, they believe they need to have their own products.

• 1:38:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's one thing that's interesting is there's so many companies that are marked up into the into the tens of billions of dollars that that are actually insignificant to the overall AI trade, but their valuations are such that if one were to fail, you would have all over the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, all the newspapers, thirty billion dollar company, you know.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  It would be like a WeWork or Theranos level failure, which like it would be for a very different reason, but like it would be that big.

• 1:39:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think that I think that the market would be able to process it generally.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:32Jordi Hays?

  But like you said, there's just when when the cash is flowing, there's an incentive to make sure that, hey, let's buy this company an extra two years, right? Even when there's no other investors lining up to back the company.

• 1:39:46Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's in self-interest. The the longer the AI wave continues, the better it is for Nvidia, without a doubt. And the bigger the amplitude, almost surely is better for Nvidia. Unless and until there's a better version of Nvidia, or, you know, somebody obviates their competitive advantages, which could happen. It always happens in technology at some point. Um, you know, we're seeing this play out now that what's the future of Google? Who knows? But that was, you know, even five years ago, for even formulating that question kind of felt silly. But now it feels very realistic that, you know, a chat or similar interface may displace all of searches.

• 1:40:29Keith Rabois?

  I mean, the advertising revenue will like lag. And so the business, the business itself will show signs of life for a while. But people I know, and not all of my friends and colleagues, uh, you know, in different fields, are tech forward, have substituted huge fractions of what used to be searches with things they do with ChatGPT.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, the last three, the last three things, yeah, the last, you know, obviously, I'm, I'm, you know, quite, uh, quite biased here, at least like, uh, but I went from last year not making any real like commercial decisions with with AI to suddenly everything I buy, all that research is happening within ChatGPT. And I feel like I'm buying better, better products and I'm having a better experience, right? I don't need to, I have like very specific, you know, I have very specific things, like my frustration with Amazon was always, uh, I just want to buy products that where the company has been around for fifty years, right? I don't want to buy the the drop shipped thing with a with a name that doesn't make

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  any sense that that's going to fail within the first year or whatever. I want to buy the thing that I'm willing to pay thirty percent more to buy the thing where the company has been around for fifty years. And so now I can just.

• 1:41:49Keith Rabois?

  Now you can afford it. It's great.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm sorry, yeah.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  The example uses like paper towels or like the paper towel holder. That's very funny.

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, any anyways, I I wanted to get right into how you are, like, what is what is your in like, what do you, how much are you pricing in a like a data center freeze or or or real friction to bringing in? Uh, and like, what is your mental model for what happens then? Because on one hand, existing compute that's in a powered shell becomes potentially a lot more valuable and starts to trade hands as certain companies are able to monetize it, you know, much better than others. But then there's potentially, you know, millions of of GPUs that aren't plugged in that the world is figuring out, how do we shuffle these around the world to get them to places that that they can be plugged in?

• 1:42:44Jordi Hays?

  And and the the capital flows that happen there and the impacts to the to the labor market, like, there's so many downstream implications of that. And when you have both sides of the political aisle that are realizing, hey, I can get points for pushing back here, then it's hard to imagine that there isn't like very real friction, uh, ahead.

• 1:43:06Keith Rabois?

  So I think let me simplify, um, sort of the AI exposure, uh, first and then come back to that. The most devastating thing to the frothy hype and the traction that we're seeing with AI and the funding of it from VCs would be if Anthropic and or OpenAI have a blip in their public exits, their public, their IPOs. Do they have to show metrics over the next month to first few quarters that cause people to value either company less than their current belief that they will trade in the trillions? So they could have a miss on revenue traction, a miss on margins, something, something like.

• 1:43:47Keith Rabois?

  That would be catastrophic and it immediately reset virtually all valuations in the AI world. And probably deprive half the companies that are raising money from access to capital.

• 1:44:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and I've been asking, I've been asking that.

• 1:44:02Keith Rabois?

  Happen, I'm not saying that's going to happen or is likely. And I think if they miss, it would be more on the margin side than on the revenue side right now. But if they do, everybody is predating the idea, their their valuations and new investments in dollars on the idea that you can build a trillion dollar company within the life cycle of a venture fund. There's two examples currently, and there's several companies that people believe have the potential to get there. If that changes and you cannot, uh, sort of predict that more trillion dollars or companies are can be created, then the valuations that people are investing in and the dollars that are being invested do not make that much sense. Let me backtrack one second.

• 1:44:45Keith Rabois?

  Like, basically, in the history of venture, a very successful company was ten to fifty billion dollars, maybe a hundred billion at the max. That's like a home run. That's like we all like dreamed about sort of thing. It is possible now that at least one order of magnitude, possibly two orders of magnitude have been added to the upside potential of a startup, which does adjust the prudence and rationality of a VC investing fifty million dollars at five hundred million dollars or whatever, whatever the case is, compared to, you know, when I invested in Airbnb, it was at one point seven million pre or post, one point seven.

• 1:45:22Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, so like, um, that role may or may not be coming back, but certainly by adding a zero or two zeros to the upside potential, you can rationally look yourself in the mirror and, you know, say, okay, sure, I'll take a shot on goal here.

• 1:45:36Jordi Hays?

  But how do some of these investors, and and I'm seeing these rounds, let's call them like Series B and C stage rounds, where a company has a much richer rev revenue multiple than, let's say, the labs, leading labs, and they're growing like often like not not even necessarily as well, and you know they're not as talent dense. And these, all these rounds are getting funded. And I and and that is, that's like the, that's like the place of of frothiness that I don't understand, where I don't understand how.

• 1:46:09Keith Rabois?

  Makes no sense, I mean.

• 1:46:10Jordi Hays?

  But I don't understand how you look at the business and say like, oh, yeah, this has a path to a trillion, when it's like, okay, every single person working at this company tried to get a job at like four other companies, couldn't, and then is now here. And that doesn't mean they're not great, and they could very well build a billion dollar company. But I just, I don't know how you you underwrite these things to that to that trillion dollar mark.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:46:33Keith Rabois?

  Nor nor to get a very extreme observation, nor do I, which is hopefully on your list of companies that are getting funded that have those three criteria. None of them, hopefully, none of them are my investments. But like, if if you told me like, hey, company is growing less, uh, less rapidly clip than the frontier labs with less density of talent, um.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  At lower scale, at like a hundred X lower scale.

• 1:46:56Keith Rabois?

  Unless a higher multiple, my answer would be no. Uh, you know, I have some competitors I'll introduce you to if you want, but like. Um, you know, and I

• 1:47:05Jordi Hays?

  I'll be in France.

• 1:47:09Keith Rabois?

  I'll go find, I'll go find a startup in France, like, you know, there's one or two apparently that are quite good. But the fundamental driver, though, you identified, which is key, and a lot of people lose, lose sight of, so it's worth double clicking on. The critical density of talent does matter.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Keith Rabois?

  And so if a company is in the short term at low scale, growing at, you know, X clip, that's not that critical. If they have the right team assembled against the right challenges, that is investable, you know, up to some dollars amount. And whether you're like multiplying, you know, using Meta's multiple or OpenAI's implied multiple or Nvidia's multiple, doesn't matter in the earlier stages if the team is stellar. But your point is the team is often not stellar. And it doesn't have to mean the same people that would work at Anthropic or OpenAI. But they have to be world class at what they do, at their craft, and you have to be able to, you know, assemble a density of them. You know, in some ways, you want to find people who are mispriced and that the labs don't necessarily value you as much as they should.

• 1:48:09Keith Rabois?

  And there's an archetype you can scale a company on, but you still have to believe you're scaling with incredible talent, like top one basis point, 10 basis point on some dimensions, to really believe that you're going to create a trillion dollar business from scratch in, in less than a decade.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Do you think that differences in philosophy, whether it's P doom or AGI pilledness can create sub pockets of talent density? We just had Scott Wu on the show, brilliant mathematician, cognition's on a tear. He, I don't know if this is just because he's at like the application layer, but not a lot of doom, a lot of optimism, because he's interfacing with the real world and I, I love that energy. And you see, see with Ramp too, where incredible talent density, but not of the crazy doom scenario weird. Like, you know, that pocket is a different group. Those folks are really talented, but they have different beliefs.

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  And so I'm wondering if there's, if there's like the hyper talent actually scatters across different pockets of philosophical alignment.

• 1:49:14Keith Rabois?

  Absolutely, you know, it drives back from Peter's old expression of, you know, you're building a cult.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:19Keith Rabois?

  Well, think about it, cults have tenants.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Keith Rabois?

  And so some of that is a philosophy of life. And I think that's right, like Ramp, we're optimistic about the future.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:28Keith Rabois?

  We use technology to improve society. We're optimistic about A, our ability historically to do that and our ability in the future to do it. That's why people come to work at Ramp and that's what they do every day. And all of them are thinking like, the world's going to be better than it was a decade ago. And it's going to be better than it was 20 years ago. And we're gonna, we're gonna wave our magic wand and make it better if we have to.

• 1:49:48John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. Yeah, I'm a firm devotee of the cult of saving time and money. That is for sure. But what, what, what do you make of the conversation around doom? There's been this back and forth around regulatory capture and the evolution of this. And I've watched some people from the outside, friends who are not in tech, but critique tech from a political angle. And they were upset about the rhetoric leading to potential regulatory capture. But now they are worried about some of the developments in AI and they're calling for regulation. And so they're sort of begrudgingly giving the labs their due on the calls for regulation.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  But how have you been processing just this year? Has it updated you at all on how we should think about the probability of the bad outcome and doom and all of that?

• 1:50:45Keith Rabois?

  Well, I'm, I'm, I think people start off in a life of, you know, orientation optimism or doom.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:51Keith Rabois?

  And, you know, maybe from the time they're like seven years old, I'm an optimist, I'm a tech optimist, that's what I do. If I wasn't a tech optimist, I wouldn't be investing in tech companies. And there's a question of whether these people should be building or working there or forfeiting their equity if they really believe they're doing something that's bad or evil. In my opinion, like, the world is getting a little tired of some of this because, you know, we had the gloom and doom about jobs. All jobs are going away, there's no human jobs. Could still happen, but all the evidence as of today is to the contrary. Every single piece of evidence, there's, you could look through, you can be the Sherlock Holmes, you know, with your magnifying glass. You can't find any evidence that AI is causing, creating job loss. If anything, it's creating jobs. So, okay, so they're 0 for 1, let's say, as of now. Then they're like, oh my God, the world's going to end.

• 1:51:36Keith Rabois?

  Okay, well, hard to falsify that. AI jobs, at least you can falsify, you're like, no, that's not happening, false.

• 1:51:45Keith Rabois?

  This one's a little hard to falsify, but then I think as a couple of people pushed back today online is, well, articulate how the world ends. Cause then at least the pre, the precepts or the predicates, we can start trying to falsify. You know, and then prove or try to disprove that, you know, there's some risk there. And I, I, I do think that the reality is the world is always going to be subject to some risk. You know, people like to compare to the advent of the nuclear bomb. And, you know, there's a very strong argument, it's not, you know, QED proven, but the nuclear bomb in many ways probably made the world more peaceful. If you went through the arc of history and like how many citizens died, you know, as a fraction of the population of the globe in conflict,

• 1:52:29Keith Rabois?

  before and after the advent of the nuclear bomb, you have a pretty strong case, it certainly wasn't accurate.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Keith Rabois?

  And is it, but was that known that it would play out that way? You know, on day one, when we dropped, you know, a nuclear bomb or two in Japan? No, even, you know, there's a scene in Oppenheimer where they don't even really know what do we do to the atmosphere? And they go to consult with Einstein to make sure it's not going to blow up the world. And he's like, doesn't give them a very compelling, like definite answer. So, you know, like the world is free of, is not risk free.

• 1:53:03Keith Rabois?

  And I think, you know, all of us make decisions every single day. We drive a car, we fly in a helicopter, blah, blah, blah, that, you know, take that into account. So I don't think a zero defect approach to life really works either for humans. But I think the burden is on the people arguing for regulation or slowing progress down of articulating, well, what goes wrong, why and how? And so that people can probe and push back and, and try to evaluate and quantify that risk. And I have yet to see a compelling answer to that. That's not just like, oh, I know it because I was working on this and it's really dangerous.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  How many of these, how many of these ideas do you think?

• 1:53:47Keith Rabois?

  Wait, wait, hold on, let me layer on one other political point. Even if that was a hundred percent true, the idea that politicians are going to make it better is also subject to historical debate.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:57Keith Rabois?

  Like if you said, we have a world-class problem on our hands, would you entrust it to the federal government or to a bunch of private citizens? Not obvious.

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, that, um, that basically these ideas around P doom end up in the S1? Cause I would expect them, I would expect Anthropic to actually put this in the S1 as a, as a real risk factor. People are saying like, oh, you know, the, the, you know, what, they, they gotta stop the employees from posting this stuff. But if, but if it's coming top down.

• 1:54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it might be just.

• 1:54:33Jordi Hays?

  Then, then.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Upper SEC disclosure.

• 1:54:36Jordi Hays?

  It, it could very well end up in there and it would be a.

• 1:54:39Keith Rabois?

  I used to be a securities litigator, so I can argue a couple of kind of fun points on this. You could say, hey, like if the real risk is the world's going to blow up, buying Anthropic shares is no more dangerous or risky than buying anything else. So it's not a particularly, it's not a risk factor associated with Anthropic.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:57Keith Rabois?

  A more nuanced view might be, hey, if the political environment were to appreciate that we can.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't, couldn't you, couldn't you make the argument that there's like, that, that the company could with a runaway AI incur such massive liability? That it is a risk to their actual investment?

• 1:55:16Keith Rabois?

  That, that, that's probably fair and there probably will be language like that, but it'll be so toned down that you, most people won't even understand it. You know, there's an old Peter Thielian lesson here too, which is if you have like risk factors, you want the most possible risk factors. So no one can really tell which one's really important. So you might see an Anthropic, you know, prospectus that has hundreds of pages of risks. You can't like isolate, oh, this is the one I should actually care about.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:55:40Keith Rabois?

  But the, the most acute risk probably would be something like, hey, we scare enough politicians that, you know, they implement policy that's particularly in, you know, not certainly in print it, but it could, it would, it could, you know, constrain our growth. And that is, you know, a real risk if they can't control their employee blog post or X post.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:04Keith Rabois?

  Sooner or later.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  Is there?

• 1:56:05Keith Rabois?

  You know, I think people are seeing through some of this.

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:08Keith Rabois?

  You know, there, there has been significant exposure of the fact that many of these anti-data center, you know, crusade are being funded by China intentionally by our adversary. There is, you know, real proof that these data centers certainly do not.

• 1:56:25Keith Rabois?

  Waste energy, you know, waste water and things like that. It's kind of a silly, it's almost like a walking IQ test. It doesn't mean that the political cost doesn't have to rebut it, but it is kind of a walking IQ test for someone if they really believe that data centers are gonna like make the world run out of water somehow.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's very ridiculous that the origin of that is like a just a simple calculation error that was off by a couple orders of magnitude and it just ran away before the

• 1:56:51Keith Rabois?

  Fortunately, you can use chat GPT now to solve math problems.

• 1:56:54John Coogan?

  I know, but but it did it it uh it reveals like a different problem, which is that like people don't do the calculations. They don't they don't even need to. They they just go off.

• 1:57:05Keith Rabois?

  No.

• 1:57:05Jordi Hays?

  How do you um? Yeah. Tell me about your read on the dynamic between effective altruism and venture capital, because I think there's a lot of like VCs out there that are just sort of have like generally pretty like down the middle beliefs about the future and maybe they're generally optimistic and then you get, you know, the pitch from a budding young effective altruist and part of it is like you know, this person is just going to be extremely generally, at least we've seen points like extremely risk on. It does qualify as a pretty good venture investment.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Um, but there's I feel like now there's been enough of a pattern of of blowups that you need to be like kind of wary, right? Where there's like extreme upside, you know, potentially cat, you know, your downside is capped as a VC, so you're kind of like, if you blow up, like it's more your problem than my problem, but but but there's so much upside. And so I I I just think that like that specific dynamic, there will be like a book written about it.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, you know, fast forward 10 years, but I'm curious your view on it.

• 1:58:11Keith Rabois?

  Well, I think venture, when it's practiced as a craft at its best, is a matchmaking exercise between founders and a team and a vision and your sort of views about the world. So I think that some types of founders with some beliefs about the world, whether you label them, you know, effective altruism or something else, could be a good match for a VC who sits around all day and worries about that stuff. It would be a bad match for someone at Founders Fund, let's say. Um, so I think that, you know, the best relationships between a founder and their investors and a consigliere or a board member are when you have alignment, kind of double entendre, between

• 1:58:53Keith Rabois?

  how you think about the world and what's good for society and how the founder does. I do not, for example, I do watch and am friendly with many people who work at prediction markets, but I personally don't believe prediction markets are good for society. I believe in the Trump quote and actually I had actually used the line before he did, but um there it's just another casino for Americans at the moment, and I don't think we need more forms of speculation in the United States for normal people. And the evidence is that you know, ninety nine percent of the people who engage in prediction markets are going to lose money. And I don't think that's necessarily a positive you know, thing either. I don't really love sports betting, even though I love sports. So

• 1:59:34Keith Rabois?

  but that's why I would probably be a bad match for someone who wants to build poly market, even though I like Shane or or Kelsey, even though, you know, I hang out with her too. Um, but it's just not what I believe that the future of the world makes the world a better place.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 1:59:51Jordi Hays?

  And and I would just say that I think there's a lot of investors that have their beliefs about the way the world should be and then are willing to completely discard their values and beliefs to back companies because they're just like, well, the return is just gonna probably be so good. I got it. And I would say the percentage of investors that will discard their beliefs in order to get returns is like, it feels like it's like eighty, ninety, ninety-five percent.

• 2:00:16Keith Rabois?

  I agree. I agree with that assessment. It's just why do you do what you do is, you know, in your professional career? And at least at KV, and this is true at Founders Fund too, we wake up and say, is this going to have a positive impact in society? We have, you know, more money than we need. We have more money to deploy and invest than we need. We could be doing lots of things with our time and we want to apply our energies to solving problems that we think would move the world forward. Um, you know, Peter and Trey have pretty strong filters on this stuff and Vinod and I do and my, I think all my colleagues at KV do. But not that's not for everybody. I mean, some people, you know, work at hedge funds. I don't want to work at a hedge fund either.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always great.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up. It's been too long.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  Too long.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, enjoy that. Enjoy that art.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Let's make it.

• 2:01:05Keith Rabois?

  I missed the first. I missed the first month of you guys, and I was like on every day.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Hey, you're always you're always welcome. This came up because I was like, we haven't talked to Keith.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  It's been way too long.

• 2:01:15Jordi Hays?

  It's always good hang. So.

• 2:01:17John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have David Perell here with us live in the TVPN Ultra Down. David, good to see you, man. How you doing? Uh, not much, hanging out, doing the news, talking about new iPhone, talking about AI.

• 2:01:44Jordi Hays?

  You were excited for another screen, two screens in one.

• 2:01:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, the news and Uber over.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  You getting one?

• 2:01:52Speaker 11

  Of course.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:01:53Speaker 11

  Of course.

• 2:01:53John Coogan?

  Okay, the fold.

• 2:01:54Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna be writing by hand on the screen more.

• 2:01:58Speaker 11

  Well, we were just saying.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  It does have a bookish look to it.

• 2:02:01Speaker 11

  Yeah, you don't need an iPad mini anymore, you know?

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  All right. Do you do the uh the the iPad for the notes when you do an interview? Have you toyed with that? You know how Chris Williamson, a lot of people have the iPad there, not the full. I do the full computer, but.

• 2:02:14Speaker 11

  You know, I've actually gone.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  It's the key to a good interview.

• 2:02:17Speaker 11

  I've actually gone full smartphone.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:19Speaker 11

  I've gone full smartphone. So what I do is

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:22Speaker 11

  if you watch the interviews, on the right side, I just kind of keep the phone. And then what I can do is I can just do quick pulls of like, hey, check this thing, check that thing.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  If I pull, I feel like if I go on my computer right now, it's like, oh, he's doing something serious. But if I pull up my phone right now, you're like, this guy's really distracted, scrolling reels. It feels a little disrespectful, but you've gotten over that hump.

• 2:02:43Speaker 11

  Well, the other thing is I don't do it live.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:45Speaker 11

  So I do a bunch of editing, right? So I think.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  So you might say, hey, I'm gonna look this up and then I'll I'll hit you with the question.

• 2:02:50Speaker 11

  I say, hey, if I'm looking something up, just keep talking, prep them on this.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  Cool, cool, cool.

• 2:02:54Speaker 11

  And uh and then what I do is I watch every interview back.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Speaker 11

  Uh, which I've now done one hundred thirty, so that's that's my game film, you know?

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's been the biggest one this year?

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Dark room, dark room.

• 2:03:06Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Screen on, just locked in.

• 2:03:08Speaker 11

  Just locked in, sitting there.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  What's been the most recent interview that you that that you came away from being like, uh, this is what I want the show to be?

• 2:03:18Speaker 11

  Uh, there's an interview I did with Dana Joya. Um, he's Ted Joya's brother. You might know the Substacker and Dana is just so so well read. Um, he lost a son when he lost his first son, I want to say to sudden infant death syndrome when he was four to six months old. And you can just feel, you know, our friend Jeremy Giffon has the line where there's pre-fall and post-fall.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, serious.

• 2:03:40Speaker 11

  And you can feel when somebody is post-fall, they sort of wrestled with grief.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:45Speaker 11

  Um, and then you combine that with these really well read. And so I flew out to Sonoma, we recorded for seven hours, chopped into a three hour interview.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:52Speaker 11

  And it was it was phenomenal. You know, it's funny because you're asking about recent interview. And this is what I love about YouTube is that interview did okay. And then the algorithm found how to distribute it like fifteen months in, and now it's riffing. So like, last month, that interview was our most watched interview in terms of watch time, and it's two years old.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  Wow, that's fascinating. Uh, how much are you thinking about booking guests that can go viral in the YouTube algorithm? We sit down with Clav anytime soon.

• 2:04:21Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:04:22John Coogan?

  You know, there's always like these people who come up on the cost.

• 2:04:24Speaker 11

  I don't care about that.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  And it's like, if you get this person at this time, you got one of the first interviews, you know, playing that game.

• 2:04:30Speaker 11

  No, the game I'm trying to play is I think Patrick O'Shaughnessy's crushed it. It's like, you know, you have these people who are coming on. Uh, you don't hear a lot of, who's the guy who we did the the hedge fund guy with that like John Paul, uh, speak slowly.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, Paul Tudor Jones.

• 2:04:45Speaker 11

  Paul Tudor Jones, exactly. Like, I want to do interviews like that, right? Like, Paul Tudor Jones hasn't done a bunch of podcasts, get him on. I don't really care about uh having something that crushes right away. I want I want it to be like the Paris Review interview series where you look back and I want in fifty, sixty years, people to be like, this was.

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Snapshot.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. That makes sense, but uh to give uh to give Patrick even more of his due, uh, I feel like he has a couple of products in one, in the sense that, yes, he does those interviews where it's like, wow, I haven't heard from this person in a long time. I'm so glad I did. This is amazing. But then he'll also do like the a super timely interview with like Sam Altman about the news and the expectations for that company right then at the turning point.

• 2:05:29Speaker 11

  Yep.

• 2:05:29John Coogan?

  And then he'll also do, uh, you know, a catch up with Gavin Baker regularly, just getting up to speed. And so it feels like he has a couple of series, a couple like, okay, this person's coming out of stealth and it's Gavin Hubert, he had etched, and it's the first time you're hearing from this person. He's almost breaking the news. And I'm wondering how calcified you think about. Different products, if you want to add, we have a few, we have like a lightning round interview, founder, young, not, hasn't done hours and hours of interviews, comes on for 10 minutes, tells us about, we hit the gong, another person we might yap with for 30 minutes, we might have somebody in studio for an hour. We have different products and I'm wondering if you're thinking about where How I Write goes?

• 2:06:09Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  And whether you want to have different SKUs within the main feed.

• 2:06:13Speaker 11

  Dude, 100%. Okay, so here's how I think about it. I want to get the best writers in the world. That was my first goal.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:19Speaker 11

  And so like this month is Andy Weir did Project Hail Mary, Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  It's so good.

• 2:06:26Speaker 11

  We're like, let's get the best writers.

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you nailed it. You nailed it. Wait, are you the reason that you're in LA? JK Rowling's yacht is in LA, is it happening? You saw this, right?

• 2:06:36Speaker 11

  I wish I was here for the big reveal.

• 2:06:38Jordi Hays?

  That way the mystery yacht?

• 2:06:39John Coogan?

  The mystery yacht has been unveiled to be JK Rowling. But I mean, you're gonna get, like, I'm just so excited for that level of interview to happen soon.

• 2:06:47Speaker 11

  And so then the game is, it's like a T, so then you go up, you kind of reach the top here and then break into, I want to do music, I want to do music, I want to have screenwriters. And then just trying to break into that. But the thing is, we're kind of in a local maxima with the YouTube algorithm.

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:05Speaker 11

  So this is sort of the grand irony of the whole thing. I got into this because I love posting.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:09Speaker 11

  I love posting. That is my thing, like.

• 2:07:11John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait, isn't posting on YouTube a form of posting?

• 2:07:13Speaker 11

  It kind of is, but the people who I like really feel a kindred spirit with is like you guys, like you, you know, you had the YouTube channel, like you're kind of going there. But then what happened, but then what happened was, the novelists, the poets, they were the best interviews and they were the ones that crushed.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29Speaker 11

  And so now I'm in this like weird situation where like, that's what I do.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:33Speaker 11

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

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  But it's just being a NIM cell in a particular community. It's niche, but that's valuable.

• 2:07:38Speaker 11

  What's a NIM cell?

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  NIM cell is niche internet micro celebrity. It's like, it's like, you know, if we go to YC, we'll get recognized.

• 2:07:46Speaker 11

  We'll get a sound effect for that. We'll get a sound effect.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  But we can walk around anywhere else and you don't get recognized. Like, there are certain areas where like, there'll be some cooking influencer, where like every chef knows them, or like an auto influencer, where like every car guy, Cars and Coffee, everyone will stop, Doug DiMuro, but like, you know, he doesn't get stopped if he just goes to like a Costco, right?

• 2:08:04Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  It's just the modern, the modern incantation of the celebrity as we've created these pockets. But, um, interesting. What, uh, what are you excited about in terms of, uh, actual growth? You're growing on YouTube. You're also growing on Instagram. Give us some stats for us. I want to hit the gong. What you got? You got some stats?

• 2:08:23Speaker 11

  I got some stats, yeah.

• 2:08:24John Coogan?

  Give us some stats. How's, how's the product doing?

• 2:08:27Speaker 11

  Been a crazy year, so we're gonna do 6 million views on Instagram this month.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  What about YouTube?

• 2:08:35Speaker 11

  3 million on YouTube.

• 2:08:42Speaker 11

  No, that's been good. That's been good. But the big thing, I think this one deserves the big gong. So we started a, uh, a YouTube channel. I found this guy named Sheen Quirk, crazy story. Um, and we made this pilot episode with him.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  His last name is Quirk?

• 2:08:55Speaker 11

  Quirk. Quirky Quirk. That's what I call him. Quirky Quirk.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  He's the cultural tutor.

• 2:08:59Speaker 11

  The cultural tutor.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:09:00Speaker 11

  And so, uh, I found this Twitter account, 2022.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:05Speaker 11

  And I was like, this account rips. Like, this is so good. And so it was anon and I was like, hey, we gotta talk on the phone. So I get on with him and I expect like 65 years old, he's writing about like culture and like ballards and like buildings. And he's like 24 years old and I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, you know, I live in the north of England. My parents just got divorced. I have no money. Uh, I'm like, cool. Like, what do you do for work? He goes, I just quit my job at McDonald's. And I'm like, okay, that's a little bit weird. He's like, yeah, that's why I started this cultural tutor thing. So I'm gonna tutor people in culture to make some money. Terrible way to make money. And then he goes, yeah, I'm gonna go join the British military if it doesn't work. It's been my dream to die for my country. And I'm just like, I've known him for 10 minutes, like about as long as I've been on the show right here for, you know, today.

• 2:09:49Speaker 11

  And I'm like, dude, that is a bad idea. So I just raised some money for my writing business at the time and I made him a writer in residence.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:09:55Speaker 11

  He had 100,000 followers at the time. Three years later, 1.6 mil on Twitter. We're in London last year, walking around, he's giving me a tour every day. I'm like, dude, you can write well, but you are an amazing speaker. You are the next Bourdain.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:10Speaker 11

  So I said, hey, let's make a pilot episode, put in 150 grand of my own money. I really believe in this guy. And, uh, we went to Hollywood. They said, no, we're not interested. Go make a pilot episode. So we had a pilot, Tommy Lee, the director, in the back right there.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:10:24Speaker 11

  And, uh, we published it from a account with zero subs. It was our goal to get 100,000 views and then go pitch Hollywood. And we did 100,000 views in 18 hours and then 5.6 million views now.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:10:36Speaker 11

  And just from that one video, almost a quarter million subs.

• 2:10:39John Coogan?

  Are you optimistic about being able to break into Hollywood? This year has been like the crossover year with Markiplier, Obsession, Backrooms, right? Like Hollywood is seeing that they can print on adaptations of internet IP.

• 2:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Do you need Hollywood?

• 2:10:55John Coogan?

  Do you need Hollywood?

• 2:10:56Jordi Hays?

  This is. Now you walk in with your pilot, it's like I shot your freaking pilot. There you go.

• 2:11:02Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:11:02Jordi Hays?

  But then it's like, do you actually need them? Can you figure out a way to?

• 2:11:06Speaker 11

  This is the driving question of my life right now.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:08Speaker 11

  This is, we're trying to figure it out. I mean, we went to.

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  Spike.

• 2:11:14Speaker 11

  We went to one of the major studios here yesterday. We had a meeting with them. This is what Hollywood tells us. They want exclusivity of person or exclusivity of place.

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:23Speaker 11

  So if you can go film in the Sistine Chapel and other people can't, they love that. And then if you're, you're like, hey, Brad Pitt's really interested in architecture, let's have Brad Pitt be the host. They also love that.

• 2:11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Speaker 11

  They're like, we'll give you money for that.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  Brad Pitt in the Sistine Chapel and they're like, one more change, it needs to be a low budget horror film.

• 2:11:39Speaker 11

  Low budget horror.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  We're just gonna have a one note. Uh, no.

• 2:11:44Speaker 11

  But I don't think, I, I don't think we're gonna go that route.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:11:48Speaker 11

  No.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  I mean, I would.

• 2:11:50Speaker 11

  I don't think we're gonna go. Their pitch isn't compelling.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is, is that.

• 2:11:55Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is the actual pitch? It's, it's capital and then we'll get you?

• 2:12:00Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, I would say even more, like, in what way is a streaming service exciting? I think that streaming service is exciting in two ways. One, you have Amazon, HBO, Apple, whatever. They can give you budget to make something awesome. That's the first thing, budget. The second thing is prestige. And, you know, I think the root of prestige translates to illusion. And I just always try to remind myself of that because YouTube is, you know, you can really get views now.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. They are not going, they're not in the business right now of talent development. They will attach Brad Pitt, but they are not gonna allow you to spend their money building the cultural tutor into the next Anthony Bourdain. You're gonna have to do that on your own platform. And then when you're ready and you've ready to rest on your laurels, they'll be like, welcome.

• 2:12:43Speaker 11

  Well, this was.

• 2:12:43John Coogan?

  The doors finally open.

• 2:12:44Speaker 11

  So this was funny about that. So Sunday I was at a Sundance in Utah, not at the festival, but just at the, just at the hotel. And that's where Robert Redford started the film festival.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:55Speaker 11

  And so as you walk through the main room, they just got all these photos of old Hollywood. And it was so cool. It was like a bunch of risk-taking and all that. And what happened, the reason why Hollywood is boring, and the reason why a lot of the modern world is boring, and I credit Derek Thompson with making this observation, is the money-bolification of our world.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:14Speaker 11

  What happened is things are boring now because we've gotten smart.

• 2:13:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:17Speaker 11

  And it's, they've gotten good at pricing risk and all that sort of stuff. But the problem is, then you end up getting Spider-Man 74, Lord of the Rings 7, rather than some new show. And that's just the state of our world.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  The funny thing is that the late, I feel that. I feel the stagnation.

• 2:13:34Jordi Hays?

  We're also, the internet will strike back.

• 2:13:37John Coogan?

  And also, and also the latest Spider-Man made a billion dollars. So, so like, the irony is like, I feel the same, uh, you know, Marvel fatigue that everyone does. And yet the latest Spider-Man was a fantastic.

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  But, but here, here's a counter example. Like Nathan, Nathan Fielder.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Like is on an incredible run. Uh, and I feel like that is a set of new ideas and, and forms of content, right? Where, that are like, that are meaningfully novel, that are rooted in this like talent. So I would almost argue there's not a shortage, like, anybody can make media now. It's cheaper than it's ever been. Production and distribution. And like, as much as you can argue, like, all the capital is flowing into these like, big bets, Spider-Man 12.

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  At the same time, for talented people, it's like the best time in the world to do anything.

• 2:14:43Speaker 11

  I agree, in a lot of ways.

• 2:14:44Jordi Hays?

  And, and in some ways, like Nathan Fielder is like.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  The best modern instantiation of like being yourself in Hollywood.

• 2:14:53Speaker 11

  Mm hmm.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  And like finding that mix of commercial appeal and and new ideas. Where like for me, I'm more excited to see the new Elizabeth Holmes movie than anything I'm if you if I could only watch like the Odyssey or the new Nathan.

• 2:15:10Speaker 11

  Did you see the Odyssey?

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I did.

• 2:15:11Speaker 11

  What'd you think?

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was a good movie.

• 2:15:13Speaker 11

  It was a good movie. Have you seen it?

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I liked it. It was good. It was a lot. I don't think it's like a rewatch it every year like The Dark Knight.

• 2:15:20Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  That was my take.

• 2:15:21Speaker 11

  So I got to see it at the Chinese theater, which if you.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we went there.

• 2:15:24Speaker 11

  Amazing place to watch a movie. Holy cow.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Nah.

• 2:15:28Speaker 11

  You don't like it?

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not. I came out of that and I was like, you gotta be kidding me, guys. How did we end up? How did we end up?

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  Universal is you're much closer to the screen.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  And I.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  Same same size IMAX screen, but you're closer.

• 2:15:40Jordi Hays?

  No, but you have to walk out of the theater. The theater is fine. I I thought it was I I didn't appreciate. I didn't personally like that it was grungy and and dirty feeling. But.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  The story.

• 2:15:51Speaker 11

  I did feel like I was gonna get done my way.

• 2:15:53Jordi Hays?

  But the second that you get out of it, you're it's like, you know, you're you're watching this beautiful film, work of art, and then you come out and it's like the worst place on earth, you know? Sunset Boulevard. It's like completely, completely brutal.

• 2:16:08Speaker 11

  Hollywood is so seedy. That's been my biggest takeaway of being here. What is going on?

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  Kind of always has been. That's like they.

• 2:16:14Speaker 11

  I didn't realize that.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:16Speaker 11

  It's crazy, right? Because you're just like, wow, it's my dream to go to Hollywood. And then you get here, you're like, this is what it's like?

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  I'd like to go to West Hollywood instead. I'd like to go to Beverly Hills. Uh, what's on your wrist?

• 2:16:26Speaker 11

  Oh, good question. I just went to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:32Speaker 11

  Uh, so this museum opens, uh, September 22nd.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:35Speaker 11

  Uh, so it's just kind of like these.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Previews.

• 2:16:38Speaker 11

  Preview tours. Dude, so good.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:41Speaker 11

  Oh, my goodness.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  What's good about it?

• 2:16:43Speaker 11

  Okay, so the reason I have this.

• 2:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Is that not is the whole project not like a massive white pill that we can still make?

• 2:16:48Speaker 11

  Honestly, it is such such a massive white pill. The only thing that bums me out is San Francisco and Chicago said no, but then LA got it. So.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, is that not?

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  Victory for Los Angeles.

• 2:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Were they saying no? Like, this needs to be in LA? This this?

• 2:17:02Speaker 11

  I don't think so.

• 2:17:02Jordi Hays?

  It would just be wrong for us to.

• 2:17:04John Coogan?

  To take this.

• 2:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Or they were just like, yeah, the idea is kind of mid. Like, it would suck to have a billion dollar museum.

• 2:17:11Speaker 11

  It's like forty four thousand pieces of art in George Lucas's collection, thirteen thousand at the exit or at the museum.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:19Speaker 11

  Only six of them on loan.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:21Speaker 11

  And so I thought that what I was gonna walk into was like Star Wars.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:25Speaker 11

  That's actually not what it is at all.

• 2:17:27John Coogan?

  Dress up as Chewbacca.

• 2:17:28Speaker 11

  So this is what the Narrative Art Museum gets, which is modern art. Most of what you see kind of stinks because it's super abstract and you're like, what is going on?

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:37Speaker 11

  This is the best non-canonical collection of modern art museum I've seen. And what I mean by that is I think the MoMA has a better collection.

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:46Speaker 11

  But at the MoMA, you see the canon pieces of modern art. You see everything from Van Gogh's Starry Night to, you know, Cubism to then stuff that comes out of World War II. This is very different. This is a lot of paintings that I did not know, and almost every painting feels like a freeze frame in a movie.

• 2:18:03John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:18:03Speaker 11

  And you almost feel like somebody stopped it. So the lighting is super dramatic. There's like these dramatic scenes. Then there's a whole range of styles. And then the other thing for people like Norman Rockwell, it's must be one of the largest collections of Norman Rockwell paintings.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:18:19Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:18:20Speaker 11

  And then also the way that they organize the museum is super different. So usually it's all around jargon.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:26Speaker 11

  Or time period. This is different. This is around family, school, like friendship, stuff like that, or specific artists. So because of that, it doesn't feel like heady as a museum. It feels like the kind of art that'll be both good and super mass mass market.

• 2:18:42John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:18:42Speaker 11

  Almost like Star Wars itself.

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  Is there at least one Chewbacca? Do you see any Star Wars?

• 2:18:47Speaker 11

  Only saw. So this is why I have this.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:18:49Speaker 11

  I just went and I went up to the front desk.

• 2:18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:51Speaker 11

  And I was like, this is so good. Can I leave, go on TV and then come back?

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57Speaker 11

  And she was like, fine, we'll make an exception.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:18:59Speaker 11

  So we're booking it back to down.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Okay, there you go.

• 2:19:01Speaker 11

  Chewbacca for you. And I will send you. I will send you a selfie. I will send you one Chewbacca selfie.

• 2:19:06John Coogan?

  I want that. I I see this modern art. I love Star Wars. Um, what do you think of, uh, Mark Zuckerberg's new castle? You know, the critique is that tech wealth is not going into beautiful things.

• 2:19:17Speaker 11

  Which is true.

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  And he just bought a beautiful castle in Ireland, and it feels like the beginning, you know, I think the Stripe founders bought a castle in Ireland.

• 2:19:26Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:19:26John Coogan?

  There's there's the seeds. And I think that there I I understand the critique of tech wealth is not going into beautiful things. We're not getting the museum, the libraries.

• 2:19:34Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  But I think that there is a world where wait until they're forty five, they'll buy the castles, they'll get sick of them at sixty five, the kids won't want to live there, and then there'll be museums and libraries because that's what happens when you renovate an eighteenth century castle.

• 2:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  And you stop wanting to pay the five million dollars a year to maintain it.

• 2:19:55Jordi Hays?

  The Museum of Zuckey's Bunky is gonna go.

• 2:19:59Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna go so hard.

• 2:20:01Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 2:20:01Jordi Hays?

  All these what will then be antique firearms that are like Halo style.

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  And you're really like, you really had you really had that on? You really had that in twenty twenty six? You had that. You had the the the the good supply of of.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  If he has a needler and we don't know about it, that's a that's a major issue.

• 2:20:22Speaker 11

  It's interesting, those two examples, both of them bought existing places.

• 2:20:26John Coogan?

  Yes, they didn't. Okay, so building's important.

• 2:20:28Speaker 11

  They did not build them. Uh, like you look at Hearst Castle, you know, William Randolph Hearst. I'm actually staying.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  I love the story of Hearst Castle. And I and I both aspire to personally embark on such a crusade that I die with it unfinished like he did. And also I encourage other people to take on projects that are so unwieldy that they will ultimately never be uh, never see the fruits of their labor and only the next generation will.

• 2:20:56Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, beyond that, you know, it's really easy to talk about castles and palaces and stuff like that. What about just like the tech initiative to make the Panhandle, like one of the most beautiful parks in America?

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:06Speaker 11

  You know what I mean? Or like, let's restore Fillmore Street. I heard of a project that's exactly that. It's like four or five blocks of Fillmore. Like, we I think that the beauty conversation is way too much about these giant, big buildings.

• 2:21:16John Coogan?

  You gotta start small. Corgi Cafe.

• 2:21:19Speaker 11

  Corgi.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  They're they're starting with a cafe. You scale that up, Corgi Library, Corgi Museum, Corgi Central Park.

• 2:21:27Speaker 11

  Will save the world.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  Could happen. You never know. They're reinsurer now.

• 2:21:30Speaker 11

  Well, this what's so great about New York, like I think it was, uh, is John Paulson the investor?

• 2:21:34John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:21:35Speaker 11

  Who made a lot of money in the uh, financial crisis?

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  He's the one.

• 2:21:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. One guy. But he donated a hundred million dollars to Central Park.

• 2:21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:45Speaker 11

  It's cool.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  Good. Okay.

• 2:21:46Speaker 11

  The simple stuff for the people.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. What what about on the overall, uh, architectural malaise and just this, you know, i- i- is there a linkage from uh, housing prices, we can't build anything stagnation and the critiques from you and the cultural tutor on?

• 2:22:07Speaker 11

  Oh, that's interesting. So I think that the way that people see it is something like this.

• 2:22:12John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:22:13Speaker 11

  We can't build. And because of that, we need to make it cheaper and uglier. And it's like a cost problem. Actually, there's a new article in Works in Progress that basically makes this point, that one of the reasons why it's hard to build is that things aren't beautiful enough.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:28Speaker 11

  So like if I look at.

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why go through the hassle?

• 2:22:31Speaker 11

  Yeah, and and and also for the neighbors, they're like, I don't want something new being built. It's gonna be butt ugly. It's gonna make my neighborhood less less nice.

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a square box.

• 2:22:39Speaker 11

  And so it's this weird kind of compounding loop where things are ugly. So then there's more regulation. Then there's more regulation. So it's more expensive. Then we need to save money. So things get ugly. And maybe there's a way to reverse that where you have nice buildings and people are excited about building a little bit more, and you begin to change that.

• 2:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I I've been there's some there's there's things coming down the pipeline. I I was hanging out with a friend of a friend who's a an architect based in Europe, and he was just showing me like all the stuff that he has in the works. And to me, I got incredibly excited because I was like, every single one of these things, you know, he's a rising star. Every single one of these things will end up being in every mood board. Like, they are like net new creations that are inspired by the past, but also just new ways for buildings to exist. And I have another friend who uh, does does real estate, uh, development in the American Southwest. And he

• 2:23:37Jordi Hays?

  is showing me things that he's actively building right now. And I'm like, that entryway to the home is gonna be iconic. And so a lot of these are like, I still, in some ways, I think you're gonna see like, the world is so Instagram driven now that there are beautiful things being built purely for the feed to basically like stop people and to get attention. And uh, I think that, uh, I'm excited to see what you're pulling up.

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Oh, you got it. I'm trying to get them to pull it up.

• 2:24:10Speaker 11

  I gotta show you this.

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:11Speaker 11

  So I think that the side by side format will change the world. It already is. And all the side by side format is super common on Twitter.

• 2:24:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:21Speaker 11

  Super common on Instagram. All it is is you show one old thing versus one new thing, and you just say, what happened?

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:27Speaker 11

  And this is one of those formats that we've all seen that no one has taken seriously.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:31Speaker 11

  So this is, uh, oh, hold on. Okay, we gotta cut that for the clip.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Well, we're gonna pull it up on the big board here too.

• 2:24:39Speaker 11

  Old Home Alone House.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Here you go.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Here we got both of them.

• 2:24:42Speaker 11

  The old Home Alone House.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  Scroll scroll up.

• 2:24:44Speaker 11

  Scroll up.

• 2:24:45John Coogan?

  This is nineteen ninety.

• 2:24:46Speaker 11

  Nineteen ninety. This is the old Home Alone House that we all love. Iconic.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  Yes. Wallpaper, carpets on the stairs.

• 2:24:53Speaker 11

  Character vibe.

• 2:24:55John Coogan?

  Lots of warmth.

• 2:24:56Speaker 11

  Yep.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:24:57Speaker 11

  Now scroll down. This is what they did to it.

• 2:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Stunning, stunning and brave.

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 2:25:06Jordi Hays?

  The white, the, the, the, the different shades of white and gray.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  So much white, it's so much white. So this sells better.

• 2:25:13Jordi Hays?

  Look at the rug. I mean, who, who would be bold enough?

• 2:25:16Speaker 11

  Well, so here is what happened. So there's a few things that changed. One is that housing went from something that people would build for themselves to something that was done by real estate agents and, and, and real estate companies. And so housing became a market that you thought of as something liquid.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:32Speaker 11

  And then you basically need to increase the, how generic something is so that it basically is a more liquid asset, right?

• 2:25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:25:41Speaker 11

  And then the other thing is a lot of these projects are built by people who won't live in them.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:45Speaker 11

  And so they sort of see the world through a spreadsheet.

• 2:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:48Speaker 11

  A spreadsheet, that's exactly what it's called. Exactly. It's called a spreadsheet. It's called a spreadsheet. So they see the world through a spreadsheet and.

• 2:25:57John Coogan?

  Yes, but when I look at this, I think buying opportunity, buy this and, and remodel it to look like the home.

• 2:26:05Speaker 11

  The whole one.

• 2:26:05John Coogan?

  It can't be that hard to put carpet down on the staircase, right? Uh, I like this style. I think it's called pre-modern. This is generally the, the, like, what, what this is referred to now.

• 2:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You're saying something that's very real. A friend of mine, um, bought a place years ago, invested a bunch of money into it and, and I think like legitimately for 99% of people made it way worse.

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  Oh, I know what you're talking about.

• 2:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Like for him, for him, he's like, he's like, yeah, it's like a coach character. I'm like, oh, too much character there, buddy. Like some, some of the rooms, I'm just like, this is horrific and, and you need, and it actually, even though he invested a lot of money into the property, you actually have to deduct that, basically an equal amount from the new purchase price, which is going to be lower than what they paid because you have to rip all this stuff.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  You look, you liked blue, you made your house blue.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but I do think that, I, I think that Mac, like maximalism is a hundred percent coming back.

• 2:27:02Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:27:03Jordi Hays?

  And, and you're, you're seeing this in, um.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  Think loud opulence, mate?

• 2:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Like even look, look at car, look at cars, like cars are a wonderful way to express yourself and just enjoy the road and it's this like symbol of freedom and all these things. And cars got very boring to the point where if somebody was like spicing it up, they're like, I got a green car.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:25Jordi Hays?

  And a tan seats. And then it's like, well, now there's a whole, for years, there's been Instagram accounts dedicated to this combination, which I think is beautiful. I have a green car with brown seats, but it's almost to the point where it's no longer even a way to express yourself. It's just like, it's as basic to me as like a black car.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  Damn.

• 2:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so I've been, I've been intentionally going the other direction. I'm, I'm.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  What's the next color you're going with?

• 2:27:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm, I'm in the process of specking a car that is, is like a rose metallic and, and it's like completely insane. I've shown it to some people and they're like, oh, wow.

• 2:28:01Speaker 11

  We need it.

• 2:28:01Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting. You know, like it's gonna be, it's gonna be.

• 2:28:03Speaker 11

  We need a TVN car that looks like a NASCAR that you guys can drive around with all the sponsor logos. That would actually rock.

• 2:28:09Jordi Hays?

  We, we've thought about it.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  TVPN over there.

• 2:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Right there. Um, and, and I, and I think that you're not just naturally seeing a shift. People are rejecting minimalism and I, I actually already, as much as, as much as this is happening, again, I don't think you're gonna ever get back to spec house. Like the spec house is naturally designed to appeal to, it's like, I view a spec house, like the one you're showing here basically, as like a canvas on which someone else can come on and paint.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Right.

• 2:28:36Jordi Hays?

  And it allows you to have that liquid.

• 2:28:37Speaker 11

  The thing is, I'm not pro maximalism or anti-minimalism. I'm just pro quality and anti crap.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:45Speaker 11

  And I think that what has happened is we're like, okay, here's minimalism. And we're like, okay, minimalism is cool. Like Johnny Ive really understands minimalism well. The Japanese really understand minimalism well.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:56Speaker 11

  But then what happened.

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  I got a house, I got a house to, I got a house to sell you.

• 2:29:00Speaker 11

  If you don't really understand the form, you end up with that meme of the guy who just has his mattress in the room and nothing else with like the little video game. You're like, that's minimalism.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, the ultimate male living situation.

• 2:29:11Speaker 11

  Hey, you know, you gotta invest in that guy.

• 2:29:14John Coogan?

  Would you like the glass or the cup for whatever you're drinking?

• 2:29:17Speaker 11

  Wash these sheets in six months.

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Do you know the, um.

• 2:29:22John Coogan?

  What you got, Jordy?

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Do you know the, the architect, uh, John Lautner?

• 2:29:26Speaker 11

  No.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Oh, you're talking about the place in Alaska?

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  You, you blew the punchline. Um, you blew the punchline, but, um, but yeah, the, uh.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  Open lock.

• 2:29:35Jordi Hays?

  John Lautner, John Lautner is the protege of, of Frank Lloyd Wright.

• 2:29:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Has created some of the most, to me, the most beautiful homes, uh, uh, in, in the US. There's, there's even like this weird, uh, sort of like roadside motel out in, in Palm Desert area that you can go stay in. That's a, that's a Lautner. I, I recommend you check it out. I think you would enjoy it. Um, but I track John Lautner homes that are for sale and there's two right now that stand out. One is in Pasadena, which is like seemingly like an extremely, at the time, it would have just been like, I'll take one home, please. You know, it's like a two bedroom, two bath. But then there's this other one that's, that's only 1.37 million, potentially a great starter home candidate. And, uh.

• 2:30:23Speaker 11

  This is the one in Alaska.

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  One issue, it's in Alaska.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  That's not an issue. That's a plus.

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  And, and so this is two acres. You got a John Lautner, an architecturally significant home in nature. And I think you gotta, I think you gotta go for it. I think you gotta like, you know, take some of your own medicine here. And I want, I, I think you need to. No, no, no. This is, this is Redfin.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  This is for sale.

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  This is for sale. 1.3.

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  Look at that grass, the trees.

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  I've been extremely tempted just because I'm like.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:54Speaker 11

  Start a group chat, see if we can pull 1.3.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  It's a spot for a bunkie too.

• 2:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:59John Coogan?

  It's bunky village.

• 2:31:00Speaker 11

  This would be good for like a TBPN.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Satellite.

• 2:31:03Speaker 11

  Satellite studio.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, look at this, the wood, wood, wood paneled interior. It's like every material in this home was actually designed to last for.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  There's room for the Christmas tree there.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Indoor waterfall-ish thing.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Um, so anyways, what, what I'm hoping to see is the, the young John, John Lautner that just build a couple, just dedicate your life to building a couple hundred homes like this. But I, but I think that the truth is that, that we look back and we look throughout history and we see home, we, we see things that were built like this and we're, and people are like, we, you know, we gotta return to like that era of design. But the truth is that for every one of these homes, there was a hundred, a thousand that were just cookie cutter.

• 2:31:52Speaker 11

  The thing is, I don't want to return to any era of design. I want us in 2026 to have a sweet era that like reflects who we are, what we value, that like projects a bold vision for the future. That's like, let's go.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:04Speaker 11

  And we should have all these awesome visions of what tomorrow can look like. And what I love about talking about homes and like making nice streets is like, that is a way for every single human being to like put their footprint, their, you know, their stamp of optimism and like promise for a better future into the world.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:22Speaker 11

  And, uh, that's why I think this is important.

• 2:32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, we have about 10 minutes. No, I want to go through the rest of the show and tell what else do you have for us in the stack. The team has the PDF you shared.

• 2:32:35Speaker 11

  So.

• 2:32:35John Coogan?

  Are there any other images that you'd like to share with us?

• 2:32:37Jordi Hays?

  By, by the way, we definitely don't.

• 2:32:39John Coogan?

  We do. We're, we're rearranging the schedule.

• 2:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  And Fletcher Richmond from Type will be joining us at 1:50 after Jim O'Reilly from Charleston AI.

• 2:32:49Speaker 11

  Have you seen, uh, the new Obama library?

• 2:32:52John Coogan?

  I have. Yes.

• 2:32:53Speaker 11

  New Obama presidential center.

• 2:32:54John Coogan?

  People are going back and forth about it.

• 2:32:55Speaker 11

  Yeah, let's get it up on the screen here.

• 2:32:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm a fan.

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  You're a fan?

• 2:32:58Speaker 11

  You're a fan.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  Because, because it's, because it's clearly a data source.

• 2:33:01Jordi Hays?

  A data center.

• 2:33:02Speaker 11

  Data center.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  It does seem like it has.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  No, I just.

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  Source inside.

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm generally in, I, I love, uh, brutalism just a period. I think it's beautiful. When contrasted right with, with.

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Nature.

• 2:33:18Speaker 11

  Here's the thing with brutalism.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:20Speaker 11

  Good brutalism rocks.

• 2:33:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:22Speaker 11

  But a good style is, works when average people do it. And so the problem with brutalism is the variance is so big. Like most brutalism absolutely is awful and tyrannical. But like you're saying, you get some Brazilian brutalism, some DC brutalism, and when it works, it is absolutely awesome.

• 2:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  Every time I think brutalism, I go to Abbottabad and Osama Bin Laden's compound. You know what I'm talking about? The Osama Bin Laden house looked, is very brutalist. I lived in a house that looked exactly like it for a while. It's crazy.

• 2:33:55Jordi Hays?

  You were just practicing, would you practice in there in case you got the call?

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, keep it in.

• 2:34:01Speaker 11

  So the new Obama Library, this is where, uh, this was built in 1893.

• 2:34:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:07Speaker 11

  And so the Obama Library, this is for the Chicago World's Fair, there's three photos here. And these were in 1893.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  What you, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:15Speaker 11

  And, uh, basically, these were temporary houses.

• 2:34:19John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:34:19Speaker 11

  So they were made out of plaster, they were not made to last.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  That's temporary, was it temporary?

• 2:34:23Speaker 11

  The Chicago winners, it was for the World's Fair, so like, it was a big deal, don't get me wrong.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:34:28Speaker 11

  Um, but I think it says so much about who we are, like, first of all, I'm not sure that we could build this now, and there's no way that we would do something temporary like this now.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, uh, yeah, what, what, what else is going on? How, how many other photos do you have?

• 2:34:45Speaker 11

  We don't need to go through all of them.

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  Oh, I wanna, I wanna know the story of the, uh,

• 2:34:48Speaker 11

  Well, so what we did in the, uh, yeah, so I think this is another, actually, here's one that has a personal story. So this is, uh, San Francisco, when I was a kid, I don't know if you guys have walked here, when I was a kid, this is, uh,

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  Beautiful photo.

• 2:35:03Speaker 11

  Where I would walk, and I used to like marvel at these chains.

• 2:35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:07Speaker 11

  I think these chains are sick.

• 2:35:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:09Speaker 11

  And also like, this is the kind of world I wanna be in, where like, you know, it's by the bay, there's always the big cargo ships coming by.

• 2:35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:16Speaker 11

  And I'd always used to, you know, check out these chains, my, my mom would say, you touch those, you're gonna get tetanus, or whatever.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:23Speaker 11

  And, uh, you know, it's time to replace the chains, which is fine, and they replaced them with this.

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Oof.

• 2:35:30Speaker 11

  And like, this is the thing, you know, each one of these is not a big deal, but if you have 10 or 100,000 decisions like this in a country and a culture, you really stamp out the soul and vitality, the spirit of who we are, and that's what I wanna fight against, you know?

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Rough, uh, what's going on in the world of high fashion?

• 2:35:50Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's wrong with stainless steel?

• 2:35:52Speaker 11

  Uh, well, it just lacks character.

• 2:35:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it's because it's new.

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happens when that gets patina and starts giving you tetanus? Will you be satisfied then?

• 2:36:03Speaker 11

  Will you be satisfied then? I think we could have done better.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  It's the biggest tetanus risk.

• 2:36:07Speaker 11

  We could have done something with like little Golden Gate Bridges in it, like something that was,

• 2:36:11John Coogan?

  To tie to the aesthetic of the space.

• 2:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Or like a Louis Vuitton monogram?

• 2:36:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, we talk about cost, there's an artist somewhere that would happily do this at cost.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:36:20Speaker 11

  To make something else, you know?

• 2:36:22John Coogan?

  Might be a safety thing, you trip over the chain, but you don't do this, but again, yeah, you're getting into.

• 2:36:27Speaker 11

  The R word, regulation.

• 2:36:29Jordi Hays?

  I think they wanna keep people from surfing.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:36:32Jordi Hays?

  They don't want you to discover the thrill.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  No, they want you to lock in and continue building your startup, because as we know, if you go surfing, you'll be less productive, so you gotta stop people from surfing in San Francisco, they got to get the share price up, that's the key.

• 2:36:47Speaker 11

  Patagonia founder, his book is called Let My People Go Surfing.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:36:50Speaker 11

  It's like the whole premise, they're like, ah, we're gonna build a company.

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  And that's why we never hit one trillion.

• 2:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Patagonia would have been the, the first trillion dollar company.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  It could have been, it could have been, if they had a little less surfing, lock in, buddy.

• 2:37:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, and then we got the same thing happening in logos.

• 2:37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:09Speaker 11

  Just see, it's the same pattern everywhere, and this is what's so,

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  This has to change soon, though.

• 2:37:14Speaker 11

  This is insane.

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  This is an opportunity, you, you have to imagine that there are plenty of brands that see this, I don't wanna be a part of the meme, I'm gonna go a different direction.

• 2:37:23Speaker 11

  The reason why I'm just utterly astonished by this and think about it every day is, I think that aesthetics, people think of like little icing on the cake, you know, like you put on a tie, now you'll look good, or something like that, but the thing is, like, uh, society's aesthetics represent the, the spirit of a time, like, it's the outer reflection of the inner spirit of an age, and all this is how we see who we are, what we value, and the thing is, when I look at these designer logos, you know, it's easy to say, oh, there's no style there, really what you see is a culture that values efficiency and conformity above all else, and I just, I don't want that to be who we are, and also kind of global sameness, like, I want a world

• 2:38:06Speaker 11

  where there's like radical diversity, you go to different places, they feel completely different, and that the things that are made have the unique character of the people making them, that's the world I wanna live in, that's the world that inspires me.

• 2:38:19John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. How do you get into a museum if it's closed?

• 2:38:23Speaker 11

  There's actually a hack for this.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Tell me.

• 2:38:25Speaker 11

  Okay, so, if you go to Paris or something,

• 2:38:28Jordi Hays?

  Spend a decade developing a personal brand.

• 2:38:33Jordi Hays?

  Spend, spend a decade building a reputation of someone who cherishes,

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  Get millions and billions of views on YouTube and Instagram.

• 2:38:41Speaker 11

  So there is a hack for this, so if you go to Paris, I was in Paris like a month and a half ago.

• 2:38:45Jordi Hays?

  Buy a flight to Paris.

• 2:38:46Speaker 11

  Any, any city, any city, New York, LA, Chicago.

• 2:38:50Jordi Hays?

  Any city.

• 2:38:51Speaker 11

  And you show up, often they'll say, hey, you can't get into the museum, you needed tickets in advance. A ticket at most museums costs like $30, so if you're going with your friends, like $60, and you'll say, can I get in, there's, they'll be like, there's no way, you'll say, can members get in today? They'll be like, no problem, you say, how much is a membership? $120. So if you just pay $60 more, $30 per person, you can basically get into any museum in the world, no line.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Your answer is just pay?

• 2:39:18Speaker 11

  Just pay for it.

• 2:39:19Jordi Hays?

  It's one simple trick.

• 2:39:20Speaker 11

  But here's the thing, it's just about the membership, which is not advertised.

• 2:39:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:39:25Jordi Hays?

  That's a good point. But, but the new Lucas,

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  Some like, go in the back door, walk, you know, like dress up like,

• 2:39:33Jordi Hays?

  The new Lucas Museum is also, I don't think if you're a mem, they're not, I'll take, if I walk up there and say, I'll take one membership, please, they'll be like, come back when we're open.

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you gotta get a job, that's the real hack.

• 2:39:46Speaker 11

  You gotta get a job.

• 2:39:47John Coogan?

  You gotta get the job there, or build a great brand, build a great product.

• 2:39:52Speaker 11

  I feel like my first you can do anything moment was sneaking down at Warrior Games, had season tickets, convinced my dad to get season tickets as a kid, we're all the way up on the third deck.

• 2:40:01John Coogan?

  Again, you paid to get in, trick to sneak in, buy season tickets.

• 2:40:05Speaker 11

  We got the cheapest tickets, I sat, I sat outside of the first deck, it was six games, went to every game for the season, I just snuck through.

• 2:40:14John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, this is a good one, this is a good one.

• 2:40:17Speaker 11

  Got really good at getting the free pizzas and the t-shirts, I knew like where the t-shirts were like most likely to go.

• 2:40:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:23Speaker 11

  Uh, we're Thunder, Warriors.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Coming out of a t-shirt gun, or no?

• 2:40:26Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:27Speaker 11

  Actually, my, my, my, my ultimate hack for sports was when I was a kid, I was obsessed with catching baseballs at games, so you know, you can get the baseballs off the bat.

• 2:40:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:36Speaker 11

  But what I would do is I'd go to the stadium, I'd get the away team hat, the away team shirt, then sit by the opposing team dugout.

• 2:40:46John Coogan?

  Less competitive.

• 2:40:47Speaker 11

  I went to Wrigley Field, Darren Oliver, starting pitcher, I knew the name of Darren Oliver, the bullpen catcher, walked away with six baseballs.

• 2:40:54John Coogan?

  Six baseballs?

• 2:40:55Speaker 11

  I was like a fifth grade kid, I was like, let's go.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  I love it, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:41:01Speaker 11

  All right, boys, thank you.

• 2:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you have, yeah, at the museum.

• 2:41:04John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 2:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Chewbacca picture, please.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  Today, I will tell everyone about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless, real-time experiences, and new value with Cisco, and I'll also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange, wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Up next, we have Jim Reilly from Charleston AI, you've seen him on the internet, we've discussed him multiple times with his partnership with San Blons Monaco, and now we are pleased to be joined by Jim Reilly from Charleston AI. Jim, how are you doing?

• 2:41:41Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:41:42Speaker 12

  I'm, I'm doing real, really well, thank you, thank you very much, I appreciate it.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  For taking the time to come chat with us, I would love to know a little bit of the backstory, I'm sure a lot of people have seen the viral video, but, uh, what, what is your career story? How did you get into this particular business? And then, of course, we can talk about where it's going from here.

• 2:42:02Speaker 12

  Okay, well, um, I've been doing different things for many, many years, you know, the only boss I ever had was my father, other than when I was a, a busboy and worked in a movie theater.

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:42:15Speaker 12

  So it was a family business I grew up in, and, uh, I did many things, and, uh,

• 2:42:22Speaker 12

  where do I go from there? Recently, during the pandemic,

• 2:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, what got you, what got you in, at least interested in AI?

• 2:42:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:30Speaker 12

  Okay, well, my partner, we started this produce delivery business during the, uh, pandemic, because the farmers couldn't sell produce, there were no farmers markets, and people were kinda locked down, so we saw a need, we saw something that we could do together, and he's the geek, I'm not, and, um, so we put together, you know, delivering produce directly to people's houses, we put it right on, on their, um, you know, front porch by their door, our model is that we deliver it, they don't come pick it up, we deliver, seven days a week, uh, 365 days a year.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  And so then he's, Yeah, did this business grow out of that?

• 2:43:12Speaker 12

  Yes, well, we're partners in Rainbow Packaging and he's always been into AI. You know, he was a, uh, an engineer from IBM, so he's, like I said, he's a geek. And, um, this is one of his like pet projects. He's really into AI. So he got, he infected me a little bit with it. And, uh, we saw the opportunity. We thought it was time. Let's open up a storefront. That's what we have here is basically a storefront, even though it's a nice office.

• 2:43:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:41Speaker 12

  To just introduce people to AI, help them where they need it. And that's what we've been doing. We started January first.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Amazing. Jordy?

• 2:43:49Jordi Hays?

  So January first, what, what, who were the, who were your first like customers, clients that were coming in? When, when, when we originally saw the viral video, uh, you know, uh, it, uh, it made so much sense to me to actually put something like a storefront because everyone in Charleston is, I'm sure, reading about AI, watching videos online. Some of them are excited, some of them are scared. And to give people the opportunity to come in and,

• 2:44:16Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:44:16Jordi Hays?

  to give people the opportunity to come in and just talk to somebody who's actually in their local community and learn about it actually makes a ton of sense.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:25Speaker 12

  Right. In the beginning it was slow. I have to admit. It's taken a while, but what I've come to realize, this is the FUD period, which is fear, uncertainty and doubt when it comes to AI. And, uh, people are gradually getting over it. So my partner, he, he can do the elaborate stuff. He can do the, uh, you know, systems integration. I'm the one that can talk to people and tell them how it's benefiting me.

• 2:44:48John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:44:49Speaker 12

  And that's what I do.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  Do you see more people coming in with sort of a consumer lens on? They want to know how to use AI products in their personal lives? Or is it mostly other businesses in the Charleston?

• 2:45:03Speaker 12

  It's a combination of both.

• 2:45:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:05Speaker 12

  Okay. So like, I'm pretty good at talking to people and I'm asking using AI. So, you know, I don't want to plug it, but my favorite is, uh, OpenAI Work right now. It's fantastic. Uh, so I'll tell people about my little experiences, how I've spent, saved time by using it. And they said, really? So I'll say, here, load ChatGPT. You know, play with it for a week or two and I'll come back and I'll show you how it can benefit you. And mostly, you know, they're small business owners, so it's easy for them to, um, you know, adapt to it. I mean, a lot of people would like to do it, in my opinion, but they don't have time. And they're so used to doing what they do that this is

• 2:45:49Speaker 12

  just not natural to them.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:50Speaker 12

  And then the other side of the corner, the people that have larger sized businesses who are really into AI. So they spend two or three days, uh, two or three hours a day doing it. And then they realize they're falling behind on their work.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:46:02Speaker 12

  And so that that's why they need us to come in and help them, you know, put it together and make it work for them.

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  What is your business model? Do you charge people hourly for training sessions? Or do you work on affiliate commission if you refer someone to a particular product?

• 2:46:20Speaker 12

  No, we're just, we, we're like vendor neutral. We will work with any, anybody's AI. You know, my partner will learn it and he'll install it. And, um, it, our customers choose the AI they want.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:46:35Speaker 12

  And we just help them make it work.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  So training implementation.

• 2:46:40Speaker 12

  Correct. And, you know, we charge, the first visit's free.

• 2:46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:43Speaker 12

  We're not, you know, you come in, sit down, let's talk about it, see what you want, what you need. And, you know, we'll come up with a plan for them.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  Do you think the model will be scalable? Do you think you'll be able to hire technicians and educators in other markets? And set up similar franchises?

• 2:47:01Speaker 12

  Absolutely. Yes.

• 2:47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's exciting.

• 2:47:04Speaker 12

  I think it has appeal. The time is, you know, the time is now. We have a few years. And, uh, AI is changing so drastically, so quickly, in my opinion, you know? And, um, people can use it. And the other thing I noticed like with individuals.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:47:21Speaker 12

  We take this, uh, OpenAI Work, which I refer to it as.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:47:25Speaker 12

  Uh, I, I went away on vacation for a few days and, um, I'd get up at five. I normally get up at four, so I slept in late. And then for two hours I would do my work.

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:37Speaker 12

  And in five days, I did more than I would do in six months previous. So that sold me.

• 2:47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:44Speaker 12

  You know, so I have an agent that works for me every day. And if I don't have her working on something, then that's my fault. That's my, you know, my bad. And, uh, it's just, I, I find it fabulous. I think it's tremendous. And with that too, that I, I noticed personally is that I'd be uptight with, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. Um, I'm short on time. I'm thinking about it. But now with this AI companion, my, she does it and I'm free to think about other things during the course of the day. I'm freed up. And I think a lot of people, once they adapt it and start using it, they're going to be the same way. They won't be so uptight and so, uh, you know, bothered with what they think they have to do because it's already done.

• 2:48:28John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:48:28Speaker 12

  Or it's being worked on.

• 2:48:30John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:48:30Jordi Hays?

  What's, uh, what's business been like since the, the video that broke the internet?

• 2:48:37Speaker 12

  A lot of attention, people stopping by, you know, Sunday, you know, I work seven days a week, so Sunday, and we're still continuing our produce business. So, you know, we have customers there we got to satisfy. So I come in early, pack, pick, pack, go deliver. Then I start working, you know, contacting people, responding to emails. And, you know, people stop by randomly. We're in Charleston and we're going back to Florida. We're in Charleston. We're going back to Charlotte. Well, come on in. Let me give you a little tour. Let me talk to you. Tell me about your story. What is it?

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:49:07Speaker 12

  Because I, I like to talk to people myself.

• 2:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what are the most common concerns that people cite when they're talking to you? What, what, what are they worried about? What are they nervous about in terms of AI?

• 2:49:20Speaker 12

  Mostly unknown fears.

• 2:49:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:49:22Speaker 12

  You know? And they, you know, they, they read something, they hear something that somebody said and they're not, they're not real. So until they get to know it, hold it, see it and use it, they'll have that. But I'm trying to break that barrier down, you know, and kind of infect them with, uh, you know, the benefits of it.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 2:49:44Jordi Hays?

  How much do you wish you had today's AI when you were starting your career in your family business?

• 2:49:50Speaker 12

  Uh, I can't do that. It's not realistic.

• 2:49:54John Coogan?

  I like this. Super grounded. So grounded.

• 2:49:58Speaker 12

  I mean, because did I have it, I wouldn't be here now talking to you.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 2:50:02Jordi Hays?

  You'd be retired, maybe.

• 2:50:03Speaker 12

  You know, I had, I had to experience everything I experienced to get to this moment.

• 2:50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:07Speaker 12

  All my mistakes, all my, you know, my failures, my victories, things I did right, things I did wrong. But, you know, I needed all, to do all that. And I know I could save a lot of time and be more efficient by using my agent in the morning.

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:22Speaker 12

  My AI agent.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when's, when's the second location opening up? How, how aggressive do you guys want to get around expansion? Are you still kind of dialing in the, the curriculum?

• 2:50:34Speaker 12

  Well, everything has to be done. It's proper time and place. Um, this has to be up and running, functioning, and then we can devote a little time to the next one. I, I believe there's going to be demand for it. I believe there is demand for it. And now that it's arriving at the point where AI is being more accepted by people and being used, they're still confused and AI is changing so much with all these different applications they have. They're going to need some help. So, uh, I want to get a firm foundation and then we talk about expanding.

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you pay much attention to the, to the conversation around AI? Fear and doom and safety that's happening, you know, primarily in, in San Francisco? Or do you kind of ignore all that mumbo jumbo?

• 2:51:20Speaker 12

  No, it's noise, in my opinion.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:23Speaker 12

  I'm looking at the benefit. If I spend an hour, two hours and it takes care of six or seven hours worth of work, I, I don't have to worry about that. I'm not, I can enjoy life. I could spend more time in the moment and weren't having my head filled with things that are not going to happen, that may happen. But now it's done. So next?

• 2:51:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, that's a good, good mindset.

• 2:51:46Jordi Hays?

  Great mindset.

• 2:51:47John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the project.

• 2:51:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this has been amazing. Uh, you're welcome on the show anytime. Let us know however we can help. If there's any AI founders that you want to meet, there's a good chance that, that we've, uh, spoken to them at some sort. We'd love to, uh, we'd love to support and hopefully we can, we can stop by the store at some point.

• 2:52:05Speaker 12

  Please do. You're always welcome.

• 2:52:07John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:52:07Speaker 12

  And Charleston's a nice city to visit.

• 2:52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:10Jordi Hays?

  I've heard.

• 2:52:11Speaker 12

  The restaurants are really good.

• 2:52:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:52:13Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:52:14Speaker 12

  And the people are friendly.

• 2:52:15John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:52:16Jordi Hays?

  I can see that. It's great to meet you, Jim. Thanks so much for coming on and congrats on all the success.

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week.

• 2:52:21Speaker 12

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 2:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing story, amazing mindset.

• 2:52:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:38Jordi Hays?

  And I've seen enough. Give him two hundred on a billion.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  There are some wild posts in the, in the chat, uh, which I really enjoy. So thanks, everyone who's tuning in and chiming in with some fantastic takes about what's going on. Uh, we have Fletcher Richmond from Type, the co-founder and CEO here, building a shared AI workspace. Welcome to the show.

• 2:53:01Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:53:02John Coogan?

  Sorry for the mix up. We got caught up with David Perell. He brought whole show and tell for us. We had to go through with it, but we have.

• 2:53:09Jordi Hays?

  And then we had to, of course, talk with, with Jim Reilly, who I would already suggest you should pursue some type of partnership with.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:53:20Speaker 13

  Yeah, nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me. Funny enough, I actually go to the same gym as David. So that's a small world moment of the day. Yeah.

• 2:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:53:27John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:53:28Jordi Hays?

  Who lives heavier?

• 2:53:31Speaker 13

  I can't disclose that.

• 2:53:33John Coogan?

  That's I got a mom for sure.

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  Tell us about the business. What are you building?

• 2:53:40Speaker 13

  Yeah. So type is a, you mentioned it, shared workspace for teams to build with AI. A lot of work right now in AI is still happening, very single player mode. People are working with Clot or Chat GPT on their individual computer and that's not really how businesses work. And so we make it really easy to take that work, starting in Clot or in Chat GPT and push it up into a shared workspace where you're all actually building together. Crazy as it seems, multiplayer AI still isn't really solved.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you trying to narrow in on a particular type of work, whether it's code that's generated? The blender 3D models that we saw, spreadsheets, like there are collaborative environments that are point solutions for each of these to some degree. GitHub sort of collaborates with code, but how, how do you see finding a beachhead? Or, or is it important to be sort of omnipresent across the organization?

• 2:54:35Speaker 13

  Yeah. So we're focusing more on non-technical teams. We think that the engineering teams have a lot of this pretty figured out. Like you mentioned, they've been doing these workflows for a very long time, but the non-technical teams that are suddenly all now writing code that weren't used to be writing code. They don't know what GitHub is. They don't know how to deploy to Vercel. They don't know how to do a lot of this stuff. And so we've just given them these magical agents that can do it all, but they need tooling to actually make that work.

• 2:55:01John Coogan?

  What are you targeting in terms of early adopter? Do you want to go into new companies that don't have anything to rip out faster moving startups for early adoption? Or are you going to go duke it out in the Fortune 500 and try and get someone to, you know, either add this on to all the other tools they're paying for? Or maybe rip something out?

• 2:55:23Speaker 13

  Yeah. So what we found at the very beginning, you got a couple of people, you can just use Claude. It's not a big deal. So that's not really a pain point. We've been targeting, I'd say more in the 25 to a couple of hundred employee range has been our sweet spot so far. I know you know a lot about this space. Interestingly, the direct to consumer e-comm space, those teams have just been loving it. It is, I think, one of the best use cases for agents. If you kind of think about the business and what it is. It's a series of pretty structured inputs. Hey, I have this landing page. I run these ads. I have this Amazon listing. It runs this stuff and then that comes out. I need to order more inventory because this ad is doing really well.

• 2:56:03Speaker 13

  And the whole loop just kind of runs. And so agents are, it's crazy what you do in some of these e-comm businesses.

• 2:56:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talked to Sean Frank at The Ridge and yeah, every, every e-comm business is like, okay, there's the churn spreadsheet and there's the, there's the script for conversion. And there's something that synthesizes all of our performance marketing. And then we have all of our influencer ads over here and how much we're spending. And, and the opportunity to bring it all together is huge. Jordy.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  When did you, when did you actually start the company?

• 2:56:31Speaker 13

  We started a year ago, so we were just obsessed with this multiplayer AI concept. I've been crazily enough, it's weird to say now, but spending about a decade building in that space of collaboration and chat. Exactly. And I built a company before this that was acquired by Slack, or sorry, that Slack I was an investor in and it was acquired by Lassian. OpenAI was a, was a user of it. It was called help. So I've been thinking about how do people collaborate in this, in this chat environment for a really long time. And this just felt like the next generation of tools was necessary because we've got these agents now and it's just a totally different way to work.

• 2:57:09John Coogan?

  Very cool. Give us the funding news.

• 2:57:10Jordi Hays?

  Tell us about the news. Yeah.

• 2:57:11John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 2:57:13Speaker 13

  Yeah, we raised four million bucks.

• 2:57:18Speaker 13

  Near New York City and Haystack as well, out of the West Coast. And my buddy's matchstick. I'm from Colorado. So Colorado firm in there as well.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Love those guys. Very cool. We're gonna, we'll, we'll get the team on it. Give it a spin.

• 2:57:33Speaker 13

  Yeah, you guys should play around. I think you'd like it.

• 2:57:35Jordi Hays?

  That'd be awesome. Awesome. Yeah, great to meet you and we'll see you in the next round.

• 2:57:40Speaker 13

  Nice to meet you.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Speaking of D to C e-commerce, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 2:57:55John Coogan?

  Jordy, do we have time to tell the story of the, of the heist, the thieves? They raided.

• 2:58:01Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:58:06John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:58:07Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor, a privilege. I mean, today, today, this is, this is TBPN at its best.

• 2:58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:16Jordi Hays?

  In my, in my opinion, you got Jim O'Reilly.

• 2:58:19John Coogan?

  Jim O'Reilly, Mikey, the hot AI founder, the VC, you got everything, little bit of everything.

• 2:58:26Jordi Hays?

  Living the dream here.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Yap about the, the current thing, the doom, the, the new iPhone, all of this. Let us know what you think. Are you picking one up? Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific sharp. That will be Thursday.

• 2:58:48Jordi Hays?

  Hundred, it will be 105 days until.

• 2:58:53John Coogan?

  Goodbye.