David Tisch, Mike Vernal, Edward Mehr, Will Brown, Stocks Mogged as Trade War Escalates, R.I.P. Pope Francis, How Prior Beliefs Distort Perceptions, Why Robots Still Can't Make Nikes, Robots Join Chinese Half-Marathon

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, April 21st, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital, the Institute of Iron, the Hall of Hypertrophy. We wanted to kick it off with a post from my good friend Sahil Bloom. He's been on the show before, as we highlighted his book, but this one hit hard, especially today. He says, here's the truth. If you're half in, you're actually all out. Even 90% in gets you nowhere. There's something magical in the last little bit, simply because so few are willing to do it. That's where you unlock new levels to the game, and it does not take talent, just courage.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're certainly being courageous today, John. Congratulations.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, big news. I'm all in on TBPN. I am entirely in. I'm completely in TBPN. Full time. The announcement went out today. Fantastic experience as an entrepreneur in residence at Founder's Fund. It was a great two-year, two-year, three-month run. Incredible run. Fantastic team over there. They're really going to be suffering. They're just kicking off a new $4 billion fund. It's going to be rough, but you know, I think they'll be, I think they'll be okay.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Management fees on a $4 billion fund should maybe be able to find a replacement EIR.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, for sure, for sure. But honestly, I mean, fantastic team over there. Super close with everyone. And of course, we have Delian as a regular on the show already. Trey's coming back. He's going to be one of our first in-person guests soon. We're getting Scott Nolan talking about General Matter soon. So obviously, the Teal Bux will still be flowing. We're not getting paid directly by Founder's Fund anymore, but we are getting paid by Ramp, our sponsor, and one of a major Founder's Fund position.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  So it's all one hand washes the other over here in tech media. Remember, we are 100% corporate-backed. We'll never ask you for a dime. And yeah, so if you're a company and you want to sponsor us, hit us up. Because we love our sponsors. Anyway, speaking of sponsors, the market's in turmoil. If you're trying to get in on the action, head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. The big news today, stock market is

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Mogged.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Absolutely mogged as the trade war escalates. Global markets tumbled amid renewed US-China trade tensions and an unprecedented clash between President Trump and the Federal Reserve. Now, there's a rumor that President Trump threatened further tariffs on China and even raised the possibility of firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell, alarming markets. I'm sure

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  We would have to have a very long moment of silence for Jerome if that were to happen.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. Apparently, the rumor going around in the media is that the administration reportedly explored options to fire Powell after Trump lambasted the Fed, spurring fears about Fed independence. And so, yeah, the Fed is supposed to be

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  We don't comment on politics, but it really is funny to, you know, come out with this tariff strategy and then be like, looking for somebody to fire who's important and like, fire the guy who's like, what did I do?

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, the Fed has the ability to lower interest rates when they're doing, I think, new auctions. But they aren't always doing new auctions. We talked about this with a buddy of ours, who said that the Fed actually has not that much control over the long end of the yield curve, and they try and do different things to, yeah, the 10 year is like the really important signal. That's the one that people

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  You can try to finesse it.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  You can try and finesse it.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  But it's gonna do its thing.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  It's gonna kind of do its thing. And that's the, that's the economic indicator that a lot of people have been tracking. In fact, some Trump appointees had said that lowering the 10 year was a goal for this administration. And The opposite happened, the 10-year rose. And that means, you know, potentially higher, higher mortgage rates, less affordability. Maybe house prices come down because interest rates go up sometimes. That happens, but in general, it can be, it can lead to a lot of turmoil economically. And it's not where, it wasn't the stated position of the, of the, of the administration. And so now they're maybe looking for someone new to step in to take over and potentially work towards lowering that interest rate. But there's only so much you can do. It is a free market.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  The S and P 500 and the Dow fell sharply with US stocks down over 10% year to date. Moment of silence.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Moment of silence.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  This moment of silence is brought to you by Ramp, go to ramp.com. Tech shares led those losses after companies like Nvidia warned that new export restrictions to China would quote unquote, chisel billions off their sales. We talked about this last week.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  The NASDAQ today alone is down three and a half percent. It's, it's a big, I mean, it's not 5% like it was a couple of weeks ago, but it's not great. They're calling it the sell America trade that picked up back, picked back up on Monday. We've been saying this bull market for short selling.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Bull market for coining, but I would prefer people don't create a coinage around sell America.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  No, no, no, I don't like that at all.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  And I like it, but it was the trade over the last few weeks. There's been a flight to safety. Gold has been on a record run, which has accelerated amid the uncertainty. People are just looking to avoid volatility. Bitcoin has also been.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  The interesting thing you wanted to talk about.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  Decoupling.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's been like a back and forth narrative because Tyler Winklevoss posted, hey, for the first time Bitcoin's not trading in lockstep with the market. So the market sold off and Bitcoin didn't sell off as much. Normally they're highly, highly correlated, which is something that was theorized not to be the case if, if Bitcoin really does become this, this asset of last reserve, this store of value, this digital gold. But now after looking at the market from, and of course he posted that and immediately Bitcoin moved in lockstep with the, which is kind of just like, it's, it feels like if you post something like very conviction led like that, you're just going to get destroyed by whatever market does.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  And I think, who's the, the Barstool sports guy? Dave Fortnoy was posting about Bitcoin. A lot of people, you know, decoupling, a lot of people said, oh, could be, you know. Sort of bad signal that Dave Portnoy is bullish.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  But Bitcoin's down 7% year to date, but today it is up almost 2%,

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Which is pretty meaningful.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  You wouldn't expect that, given how much the NASDAQ has sold off. Typically, they move in lockstep. So it'll be interesting to keep, to follow that story. We're going to do a whole crypto day on TBPN, bring on a bunch of founders and investors and just general crypto folks and try and get to the bottom of like, what is cryptocurrency? That's the question I want to answer. Like, I know it has something to do with like, numbers and money.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  But you've never seen it.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  I've never seen it, so I want to bring on some experts. We're going to bring on some people that run public companies, some people that are billionaires, multi billionaires, and we'll ask them, like, what is this whole crypto thing about? And that should be very informative.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep. On a more serious note, interested to see where crypto goes from here, right? There's been a cooldown in the meme coin market.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Yep. The Pumped on Fund chaos seems to have subsided.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And we've seen that twice now. We saw this with OpenSea, you know, was doing, I forget, you know, hundreds of millions of net income a year. I think at its peak Pump Fund was doing the same thing. OpenSea's volume, you know, fell off a cliff, unfortunately. We'll see what happens.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  They were in my YC batch. We should get them on the show. I'd love to know, kind of like, they have a lot of money. They have a lot of talent. They're clearly planning their next act. I wonder what that would be. I think that, you know, a lot of people have written them off, but that might be wrong. Maybe they'll come back and do something else. There's clearly opportunity in crypto if you have a lot of money and a lot of, you know, hardcore developers to build something.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  But there's a possibility that they need to completely reinvent themselves.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  But that can also be a trap. Sometimes the second that, you know, a company reinvents themselves, the thing that they were originally working on rips again.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  So who knows what happens with NFTs?

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, NFTs specifically were always one of those things where... I was, I was willing to, to buy the narrative of like, this is a digital art house. This could be the next Sotheby's, but their valuation was like 10 times, 10 times what Sotheby's was, or something like that, very quickly.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  Sure, they could argue that.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  And so the idea of just being like a museum, like I think at the height, like NFTs were, the volume was higher than the fine art market.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, the counter, the counterpoint.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Hundreds of years of, of experience.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  So, so two reasons for that. One, same thing happens in the art world where if you discover an artist and you buy up their works before they get into Sotheby's and, and these big auctions and galleries, et cetera. You can buy incredible pieces of art for thousands, you know, single digit thousands. And then the second, the reason for the volume is that it's very hard to have a, you know, $200,000 piece of art change hands six times in a day.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  But that was happening with CryptoPunks, that was happening with, you know, Bored Apes and many, many, many, many other projects, so.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Oh, well, well, let's move on to the legacy of Pope Francis. He passed away, I believe, this morning. In fact, it was so sudden that the Wall Street Journal, the print edition, does not mention his passing away. It mentions that yesterday, thousands in St. Peter's Square on Sunday were treated to a surprise Pope Mobile trip, drawing cheers and applause as Pope Francis continues his recovery from double pneumonia. He also met with President, Vice President JD Vance. And this was getting me emotional because like it's, it's pretty, I mean, I, I, I don't know that this is the case, but it feels like, like they did this because he knew that he was maybe not going to make it very much longer.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  And so it was like his last opportunity to go and see everyone and, and it's just, it's just brave. I don't know. It's, it's beautiful. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal has an, has an obituary, of course, and I think we should read through a little bit of it and give some background on who this man was. So he was elected the 266th Pope in 2013, and it marked a series of firsts. He was the first Jesuit Pope and as an Argentine, the first from outside Europe. His legacy is Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday at age 88, was disappointing even on the priorities he set for his papacy. Pope Francis was known for urging concern for the poor in the best Christian tradition. He called for a clergy of shepherds who have the smell of their sheep. Interesting metaphor.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  That is priests and nuns who shared the suffering of their neighbors. He made support for the weakest among us the rhetorical centerpiece of his papacy. He brought a public informality and openness to the Vatican. Alas, Pope Francis believed ideologies that kept that keep the poor in poverty. One of those earthly dogmas is radical environmentalism, which isn't about keeping the earth clean for human beings, but keeping the earth itself and treating man as the enemy. Interesting. So the Wall Street Journal is kind of coming for him a little bit on this, saying he shouldn't have been as much of an environmentalist as he was, which is interesting how much the vibe has shifted. And we'll see where this goes with the next Pope. In one of his writings as Pope, he cited air conditioning as an example of harmful

• 11:29John Coogan?

  habits of consumption that will lead to mankind's self destruction. He didn't seem to realize that escaping poverty requires greater energy consumption, which is something we've touched on with a lot of the founders on the show. Obviously, Augustus D'Arcos is religious, but then also says that, you know, it is it is our job as stewards to terraform and make the planet safer and healthier for all humans.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of evidence that if you enable humans to live in cooler climates, even just indoors, that can, you know, be quite positive.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Increased prosperity and also health. Yeah.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  His papacy was marked by anti-Americanism and not merely against Donald Trump. He seemed to believe that Latin America is poor because the United States is rich. That's a recipe for stagnation and despair because the real reasons so many in Latin America languish in poverty are at home. Lack of rule of law, business government collusion, protectionism and other barriers to human flourishing. Some attribute his hostility to free markets to his Latin American background, born in Buenos Aires. Pope Francis, at a young age, was made the provincial superior for the Jesuit order in Argentina during the time of the military junta. This was a hard line to walk, and some of his order accused him of unfairly being too friendly with the regime. Argentina, for much of his life, was dominated by Peronism, a brand of left wing populism

• 12:49John Coogan?

  named for Argentine President Juan Peron. When he looked around, he saw corruption and the rich doing very well as their fellow countrymen languished in poverty. Perhaps it was undeniable that he confused Argentina's corporatism with capitalism, which is a common mistake. It makes a lot of sense. Less forgivable was his deal with Beijing as the Pope that gave the Communist Party influence in the choice of bishops. Conditions for Catholics in China have worsened, though the Vatican has renewed the kowtow several times. The Vatican has stayed silent on the plight of publisher Jimmy Lai, who is China's best-known imprisoned Catholic. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict, Pope Francis was from the progressive wing of his church.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  He punished traditionalist bishops who disagreed with his direction, and he has populated the cardinal ranks with fellow progressives. The irony is that progressivism is most popular in places like Europe where the Sunday pews are empty. The church is thriving in Africa among younger Orthodox Catholics in the West, and among younger Orthodox Catholics in the West, looking for meaning in life beyond material consumption. The cardinal, who will choose the Pope's successor, will determine which future they want for the church and the world's 1.3 billion Catholics. Fascinating. Yeah, interesting to see the Wall Street Journal wrestle with his legacy in a tasteful, but critical way.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  He, one thing that he did is he got the Pope Mobile to go electric.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Wait, really? That's an electric G-Wagon?

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Electric G-Wagon, so it's the car that he was in yesterday.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  I had no idea. Because there is a new, there is a new G-Wagon that's electric, but they electrify the old G-Wagon?

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  They're using the G580 base.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Really?

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  Which makes a lot of sense. If you're in crowds, let's not, you know, emit.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  Let's flex on everyone with our G-Wagons, is that what you're saying?

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  That wasn't what I was saying, but one can take it like that. But anyways, of course, there were a lot of memes, because JD, JD.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw him right before.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  Had a visit yesterday.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Again, it makes sense, if the Pope is sick, you want to go visit him before he's sick. Anyone saying anything else is being a little silly, in my opinion.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Put on the tinfoil hat.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Put on the tinfoil hat. Anyway, there was an interesting article, an op-ed by Roland Fryer in the Wall Street Journal that I want to go through, "The Economics of Polarization." Are you familiar with Roland Fryer?

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Fascinating. So he's an economics professor at Harvard, very outspoken, very, he's been a little controversial, there's like, there's a back and forth, he was kind of attacked, but he came up with a bunch of behavioral economics. Kind of foundational research, one of the most controversial things was that you should pay kids to do their homework. So basically, like, create an economy for children.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  But, but he, but he studied it and found that it was like one of the greatest motivators was just paying kids to, to, to do work.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Makes so much sense. Why would you not want to drill into a child's head that if you work hard, you will be rewarded?

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Because that's sort of the lesson of life.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, 100%, 100%.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  My, uh, this started, you know, mowing lawns, picking weeds around.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was listening to Palmer Lucky on, uh, on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin yesterday, and he was saying that he, he had, uh, he, he built like the largest collection of VR headsets, and then he also built a, a massive gaming rig with six monitors and top-tier computer hardware. Um, and then that's what inspired him to go into VR and start Oculus. And I was just, and he was like, yeah, and I paid for all this, like, doing like little odd jobs and like side hustles as like a kid. And I was like, yeah, but I'm running the math. And I'm like, if you're spending, if you're spending like $40,000, like, you're pretty good at those side hustles, Palmer. Like, you were working hard. Like, it's very different.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine him like white hat hacking, things like that.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Totally. I don't even know if it's that. I think he just had like a, like, true grindset for like, not just mowing lawns, but like mowing a lot of lawns. Because most kids, you know, if they have like a side job, it's like 200 bucks a month or something. It's not, it's not enough to get you to like a $20,000 investment in like a gaming PC very quickly. Uh, like, for me, it was mostly like, make some money and then go buy like a single video game for 50 bucks.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  Some candy.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Some candy, exactly. This is the usual stuff. But it seemed like Palmer really got the economic flywheel going early. But it makes sense, because like, he's very entrepreneurial. It would make sense that he'd be, he'd be making a lot of money. Anyway, Roland Fryer just published some research on the economics of polarization that I think is fascinating. There's this big question about, you know, America seems more polarized than ever. What is driving that? And the, the, the, the subhead here is people tend to interpret ambiguous information as confirming whatever they believed to begin with. And so, uh, we'll, we'll read some of this article and, and go through it. But it's, uh, it's interesting to see like where else will this take place?

• 17:46John Coogan?

  And where else can this potentially be exploited or, or, or mitigated depending on your, your goals, I suppose. So nothing throws America's divisions into stark relief, quite like having Donald Trump in the White House. But Mr. Trump is an effective, uh, but Mr. Trump is an effective polarization as much as a cause. We've been growing apart politically for decades. And so he gives some data to kind of back up this claim that, uh, the political division in America is not driven necessarily by Trump. Trump is like a product of it. So he says-

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  And a catalyst in many ways because he's-

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Extreme, right?

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, totally.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  And so nowadays, 85% of Democrats, but only 30% of Republicans think the government should ensure that everyone has healthcare. So healthcare used to be a little bit more bipartisan. That, uh, the, the gap has grown 24 points during the last two decades. Then there's some other stats here. The government has too much power. When they poll people on that, 73% of Republicans say, yes, the government has too much power. Only 31% of Democrats say, uh, the government has too much power. And it's a 51 point shift. In fact, during the George W. Bush administration, Democrats were more likely to say that the government has too much power. And then there, the, the split on whether abortion should be legal-

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Whenever my team doesn't have power-

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Has widened 30 points.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep. The other team has too much power.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Which I agree with.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. 100% of people agree that they don't have enough power, I think. And then on global warming, the split is 33 points on abortion. It's 30 points. And so lawmakers have also become more polarized over the last 50 years. And there's even polarization over why this happened. Some data suggests Republican politicians pulled to the right, but conservatives note that the government has moved sharply to the left. And so 52% of Americans said the Democrats had moved too far left, while 35% said the Republicans had moved too far right. And so everyone is saying, oh, the Overton window is shifting. I haven't changed. Everyone else has changed. It's a very common refrain.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Even seemingly nonpartisan measures such as the Consumer Sentiment Index reveal polarization. Republicans had more positive views than Democrats about their economic situation during the first Trump term, and then this flipped in 2021. So they're like, oh, yeah, like, I'm doing pretty well economically. Like, I got a job. Inflation's not too bad. And then in 2021, they're like, they're like, oh, like, it's terrible. Of course, like, COVID's in there. There was really inflation, there was stimulus, all sorts of stuff happened. But of course, people are more likely to report that, like, you know, I'm doing better of my guys in the big, in the big house, in the White House. How can two people observe the same information and come away with starkly different conclusions? And why do views on factual questions such as the cause of global warming or the strength

• 20:38John Coogan?

  of the economy break down so neatly on ideological lines? And so Roland Fryer tells this anecdote about his wife and how this, this like inspired him to run this test, essentially. So he says, his wife is a great driver, but she blows the horn way too much for his taste, which is hilarious. So any slight perceived are real, and you get a loud honk if she's behind the wheel. One morning, when we were commuting, a car pulled past her on the highway and veered just slightly our way so that its tires drifted into our lane. She honked. I tried to reason with her. His driving was within the usual margin of error. What an economist thing to say. It's like, this is, this is totally within one standard deviation of driving abilities. Like, you shouldn't, you shouldn't be honking.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Could be a lot.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Certain circumstances.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  So, her response, she says, "I've kept myself from many, many accidents by being a proactive honker." And so, they observed, he says, "We observed the same incident, but we drew opposite conclusions, and each became more convinced we'd been right all along. Is this consistent with rational thought? And could it explain why Americans have become so polarized? As soon as she dropped me off on campus, I ran to my office to tell a fellow economist this anomaly I had observed. Was my wife irrational? Was I? Or did we need to think about inference and decision-making a bit differently? I first confided in Matthew Jackson, who specializes in social networks. He seemed as perplexed as I was because he knows my wife. He offered up several interpretations that would make her seem more rational.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Finally, he relented, and it became one of the guiding examples for us to think differently about how humans process information when there is uncertainty. In the simplest version of the model they deployed, imagine that the truth is either A or B. Climate change either is or is not caused by human activity. There's no gray area in between. The death penalty either deters crime, or it doesn't. No one really knows the truth, but we start with a prior belief about how plausible A or B seem. Each person observes a series of signals, information that suggests the truth might be A or B. Some signals are ambiguous and come off as AB rather than A or B. If you were fully rational, able to set aside prior beliefs, you'd store the information in a sequence.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  A, B, AB, AB, A, AB, A, A, B, B, like that. So, when there's a confusing signal, you just think it's both. But, and if you add that up, that sequence that he describes, it's three points for A, three points for B, and three ambiguous signals. Like, the signal doesn't lean one way or the other. But, if you tend to align unclear evidence with your previous expectation, you would come away thinking your original instincts were right. Because you'd count all the AB signals as A if you're on, like, Team A originally. And so now you think the evidence falls on your side by a two to one margin. So you would count up six As, you would ignore the three Bs in the Abes, and you would have three Bs.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  So you'd be saying, hey, six to three, I'm seeing a pattern here. Further observations of the world entrenched this view rather than correcting it because future ambiguous, ambiguous signals will have the same skew. Our, our main mathematical result demonstrates that if a large enough share of experiences are open to interpretation, maybe the guy who drifts into your lane until you honk is an example of the horn saving lives, or maybe you're an average, he's an average driver who never posed a threat. Then two agents who have differing prior beliefs who see the exact same sequence of events can often end up polarized with one person being absolutely sure of A and the other of B. And so they, they ran an experiment online with 600 subjects modeled on a 1979 paper by Charles G. Lord.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  First, precipitants were presented with questions about their beliefs on climate change and the death penalty. They read a series of summaries of research about each topic. After each summary, we asked participants if they thought the summary provided evidence for or against the topic on a 16-point scale. After all the summaries were presented, we repeated the initial questions about their belief about on the topic. There was a very significant correlation between a subject's prior belief and his interpretation of the evidence. More than half of our sample exited our experiment with more extreme beliefs than at the start, even though the evidence presented to them was neutral.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  That is wild.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  The discouraging implication is that in a world where information is plentiful, people will become more divided, not less. That is true, even if they all see the same information, which they don't because they can choose between Fox News or MSNBC. And it's true, even if our widening divisions prove deeply unhealthy for our country. And that's why you gotta turn off Fox News, you gotta turn off MSNBC, and you gotta only watch TBPN.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  It's the only option. But there's so much to talk about here.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  And we promise to validate your pre-existing beliefs.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  With data.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Absolutely, absolutely. I thought this was interesting because this goes back to the debate around Facebook. So when there was increasing political polarization, it was kind of blamed on Facebook for funneling people into extreme echo chambers, right? They called them, what were they called?

• 25:51John Coogan?

  I forget, I, I, I forget the name. There was like some buzzword for this, for this, like you go down like a rabbit hole on YouTube and you start with like-

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  And this was pre algo feeds, even in the way they are today. There, of course, there were algorithms that would decide what content to serve you, but it wasn't, it was still heavily based on the social graph.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Filter bubble is the term I'm looking for. Filter bubble. And so you would search for, like, you, you would start a search like, you know, what to do after college? How do I get a job? And then you would land on, you know, a Jordan Peterson video that was just, you know, about how to live your life, make your bed, right? But then Jordan Peterson also had conservative views. And so you would go from the general life advice into his conservative views. But, and then he's not really that extreme, but then there'd be someone else who was recommended, who was like just political, less life advice.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  And a little bit more extreme, and then a little bit more extreme.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Make your bed with an American flag.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. And, and, and so people would go down these, these filter bubbles and then pretty soon everything they would be seeing was there. Zuck made the argument that, you know, we haven't seen political polarization in other countries where Facebook is very active. And so he was saying like, maybe this is more of a reflection on America than, than Facebook as a product. Because the usage data is really high. I think his example was like Malaysia or Indonesia or something. And, and their, and their society wasn't as polarized as America. But I think it's interesting that, that, that, that, that it's merely, it's potentially merely the, the explosion of information that creates division.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  And, and if you, if you're just exposed to, if you're literally living in a cave, you're less partisan.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  It's kind of, it's kind of interesting.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, I, I don't really know where, where all this goes. Like, does it exonerate Facebook and the social media platforms entirely? Clearly, there are some platforms that are like extremely skewed and biased. Like, that's kind of like by design, almost.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  But it's, it's, it's interesting to dig into. At the very least, like, you as an individual need to understand if you're interpreting those A B signals, those neutral, those neutral evidence points as adding to your side.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  I think it also applies to the last few weeks with the tariffs, right? People are like, oh, treasuries are selling off. Oh, gold is, gold is ripping. Bitcoin is ripping and everybody's seeing sort of the same set of information, but applying different beliefs to it. Somebody might say, you know, gold is ripping. You know, people are, you know, basically shorting the dollar. They're short the dollar, they're short America, so they're buying gold. Yet, every financial crisis, for the most part, people tend to buy gold because it's seen as, you know, more stable and predictable and a true store of value.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Same thing with, with treasury selling off. It's like, okay, if you're in a trade war and this is complex geopolitical, you know,

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  dynamic and T-bill yields are ripping because foreign governments are selling them. Well, there, there could be a lot of other reasons other than purely just sell America. America's over, the dollar's done, that kind of thing. And so, yeah, it's a...

• 29:12John Coogan?

  It's hard to, yeah, it's hard to balance all the different signals. But if you're looking to get in on the action with some gold, why don't you buy a gold watch on Bezel? Go to getbezel.com, download the app, pick up a Rolex Day Date.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people think, oh, I should buy gold.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna go get some gold bars.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, why not? Gold.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  Something you can...

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Potentially, you've been stacked. Or gold, yeah. Buy a gold watch, go to Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available and now, now to source any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Not financial advice, but... Speaking of things that are somewhat related to fashion, robots are having trouble making Nike sneakers. This is an interesting story in the context of like reindustrialization. Trey Stevens had a piece in Pirate Wires all about the importance of robotics and automation in the reindustrialization story that we should go through or talk to him about. But I thought this was an interesting discussion of like, okay, if the tariffs are here to stay and we are trying to boost US manufacturing, what can we learn from Nike's move to Asia historically?

• 30:27John Coogan?

  And so Trump is betting that the threat of tariffs on low-cost countries in Asia will pressure American companies to bring back manufacturing and jobs to the United States. But high US labor costs mean companies would have to find a way to replace human workers with machines. For some industries, that's proved surprisingly difficult. Indeed, a years-long effort by Nike to shift part of its manufacturing from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam to North America illustrates how tough it is for US brands to wean themselves off of the flexible, low-cost contract manufacturers that use armies of laborers to churn out an array of products for consumers. Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things about the push in Foxconn where they bring in

• 31:12John Coogan?

  a million migrant workers is that you can't really do that with robots. Like the CapEx, there's no fungible flow of robotics yet that you could say, hey, we just need to move.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can imagine a world in the future where you bring in 100,000 on-demand robots for, you know, a sprint, a seasonal sprint. But that world also feels 10, 15 years away, right? It's hard to imagine it happening in three years, right? Or on the timeline that the tariffs are on, which is the most pressing issue.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not something that a company can think like, okay, we're like, these tariffs are going to affect our Q3 results. Like, how do we automate everything? So this actually started a decade ago, and it feels like we're still a few decades out from the robotics automation of footwear manufacturing, but... Back in 2015, Nike poured millions of dollars into an ambitious effort to partly automate what has always been a highly labor-intensive industry that's making shoes. At the time, rising labor costs in China and advances in manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing opened the possibility of finding a new way to make shoes that would rely on fewer workers. Have you, have you ever seen Zellerfeld? It's a 3D-printed shoe company. We should have the CEO on, I've met him at a, at a party once.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Seemed like a good, and I think the company's doing very well, but they, but they've been obviously like small because they're a startup. But it'll be interesting to see about where, where he thinks that will go.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this is interesting because even as far back as 2015, Nike won, was trying to think about bringing production back to North America, localizing it, and it hasn't exactly panned out.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Which puts them in a tough position, right? Because they're like, hey, we're getting tariffed and we've also been, made a good faith effort to do this and it didn't pan out. Now here we are, kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Nike partnered with this company called Flex, an American manufacturer that helped Apple set up a complex factory in Texas to make Mac Pros. That's the one that, there was that picture of Donald Trump cutting the ribbon. The goal was to make tens of millions of Nike sneakers at a new high-tech manufacturing site in Guadalajara, Mexico by 2023. The plant would still include thousands of workers, but far fewer than are needed in Asia to make the same number of sneakers. If successful, the project could be a model for production in the United States, according to some involved in the effort. Nike's competitors also sensed an opportunity to rethink manufacturing built around massive

• 33:51John Coogan?

  Asian factories where armies of cheap, skilled laborers stitch fabrics and glue soles to shoes on hand. "It feels less modern, more like a Ford Model T production line combined with a Middle Ages cobbler's bench," said Kevin Hailey, the executive vice president of innovation at clothing maker Under Armour in 2015. He pledged to use automation to make shoes in Baltimore in a project he called Project Glory. Love it. Good name. But you know, it's rough. Adidas also got in the action. They launched Speed Factories in Atlanta and Germany with high-tech manufacturing that's quickly spit out shoes, heralding a new era in footwear creation. They want to move out of China and Vietnam.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  They have the technology to do that differently, said Mike Dennison, Flex's then-president in 2016. Nike's effort was the boldest. The company aimed for large-scale automated production under a decade, which it said would save on labor costs and allow it to deliver new models of shoes to Americans faster. Tom Fletcher, who oversaw the project for Flex, came into the effort feeling confident, having just built a highly-complex Mac Pro factory for Apple in Austin, Texas. You would think that making shoes would be easier than making Mac Pros, and yet they ran into some trouble. At the time, Apple had been looking to bring some manufacturing home. Flex pushed to rejigger production lines and use automation, trying to find as many ways as possible to minimize human interaction. That experience came in handy.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just interesting. Flex has not exactly performed despite the boost in interest in localized manufacturing.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  Are you looking at the stock?

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're

• 35:33John Coogan?

  How big is the company?

• 35:33Jordi Hays?

  Very large company already, thirty billion dollars.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Thirty billion?

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm guessing one of, thirty billion of revenue. I'm guessing one of the reasons for this is I bet their supply chain, yep, they're, they've still got, despite, you know, making efforts to help onshore, they have quite a bit of exposure to Asia.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Everyone does these days. If you dig deep enough, you're gonna find some tariffed goods in your supply chain, no matter who you are. So the machines were supposed to build the upper part of the shoe, knit fabric, add logos, and glue the sole. I talked to somebody who was doing some Outsourcing of the upper in China went over there while the tariffs were there. Very chaotic and yeah, just like a very, a very rough go, big culture clash moment. And so these efforts ran into trouble. The robots struggled to handle the soft, squishy and stretchy parts that are integral to shoe making. Shoe fabrics also expand and contract depending on the temperature. While in shoe making, no two soles are exactly alike.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  So yeah, I mean, if you consider like the benefit of automation on a car production line is that like some of these parts are too heavy for people to lift. So you have to use a machine and then it's the same, it's the same stamped, you know, metal every single time. And it's dangerous and it's also just the exact same way. And then there's also welding going on and shoes are much smaller and more fine grained. And then obviously more malleable.

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  It, everything about making electronics is about perfect precision. Right. It's making sure that, you know, a, a component has a specific spot within a device. And you need to make sure that it goes there.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  Yep. You kind of don't want a human on that.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You, you can imagine that, that being harder for a human to do very consistently.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Consistently. But if it means like, hey, we need to put, um, uh, you know, this string in, in this hole. And then that hole and over here, uh, feels very difficult for a robot to do, uh, you know, entirely reliably.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  All these things, all these things always sound trivial.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we're going to make a robot that makes shoes.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  It sounds so easy, honestly.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It doesn't sound, it doesn't sound as hard as it is in practice, right? That you have Nike doing.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  I think it's, I, I would imagine that Crocs are fairly automated because it's kind of just like pour.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  3D printing.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Pour the, the polymer in a mold and you're good. Just kind of like, you know, melt it together. Um, but for something as complex as a Nike shoe that has a sole, a logo sewn on, there's, I mean, even, even just lacing a shoe. Like that is incredibly difficult.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Task for a robot, right? And they come laced, like, you have to poke those through. It's hard for me sometimes.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Shoes don't lace themselves.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  No, uh, you're trying to do something very precise and then it gets a little colder or warmer and the material, and the material changes on you. We did not anticipate that. As a result. Factory production never became as automated as envisioned. As shoe production increased, the factory personnel swelled to 5,000, about twice as many as originally planned and costing more than a similar workforce in Vietnam. Task after task proved challenging to automate, like the delicate work of gluing soles to the upper part of the shoe. If you didn't lay it the right way, there would be a noticeable twist of the shoe, a misalignment that aesthetically means it would fail quality tests. A central product was also the huge variety of shoes Nike produces. For decades, American consumer companies have given designers nearly unlimited

• 39:12John Coogan?

  freedom to dream up the coolest products and relied on Asian manufacturers to deliver them. Unlike cars or iPhones, shoe models are changing all the time. Yeah, I mean, if you think about some of the, like, the "How It's Made" episodes that clearly are heavily automated, it's very much stuff like, you know, even like food manufacturing. It's like every Cheeto is going to be the same. They're just going to go in, like, slightly different sized bags. And you can just imagine, you know, all that going down a conveyor belt. Little bit trickier when you're assembling a shoe where, you know, they're all different sizes.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we talked about sizing, right? It's like it's a plastic bag, and then something needs to go in it, fill it up, and it moves down. It's like far more easy than a shoe which has, I bet the average Nike shoe has

• 39:57John Coogan?

  I mean, they sell a lot of them.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  How many individual components?

• 39:59John Coogan?

  But they sell a lot of them, but when you think about the SKU complexity, I mean, what are there, like, 20 different sizes of men's shoes? Just for a vanilla run, if you just want to be able to reach everyone from like a size four to a size 14 or something? Like, you're in a very custom-

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Nike says there's typically 23 parts to a shoe.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  23 parts to a shoe. Each one of those needs to be different for the size.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  Color lining, tongue, eyelet, quarter, quarter overlay, vamp, outsoles, tip, laces, swoosh.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Wow. It's like a miracle that these things exist, honestly.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then the sizing thing you were talking about, it's like, great, you get it working for one size. Is it going to work when you need to do?

• 40:37John Coogan?

  The next size?

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Size 15, okay, it's fine, it's no big deal. So automating manufacturing means designing simple products that machines can undertake over and over. Electronics manufacturing uses hard standardized materials, as you mentioned, allowing machines to replicate the same step millions of times. You'll have to make sacrifices from how to design to the complexity of the materials and models you work with, says the former Nike executive who oversaw the project. That goes against what the consumer wants. They want an incredible diversity of product. And we, I mean, we see this in cars, like the Tesla Model 3, Model S, like they look very similar. Even the Y and the X look very similar. They often come in the same colors. There aren't that many, you don't really see that many with like,

• 41:23John Coogan?

  oh, this one has fender flares, this one has wings on it, like all that stuff would be completely aftermarket. It doesn't come from the factory that way. Versus, you know, a more, a more mature company like Mercedes sells like, like a wagon version of the, of the E450, right? The E63. They also sell convertibles, the C series, they sell long wheelbase versions, they sell SUVs versus electric versions.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  For example, the, the Q8 is the same as the Cayenne, is the same as the Urus.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, same powertrain, right?

• 41:55Jordi Hays?

  All Volkswagen. So it's like basically the same car with like a different exterior and a different exhaust and like these subtle differences.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  And consumers want that, consumers want that. And so, so, I mean, Elon's found a way, and we'll go into the Tesla story later, but Elon's found a way to convince people en masse, at least during the height of the Tesla boom, to, you know, say, hey, yeah, it's going to look like every other Tesla 3 and you're going to get lost in the parking lot probably, but it has a summon feature, it has the best self-driving, it's electric, it's super cheap.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  Found a new way to differentiate.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Exactly. So it's like this appliance car, it's like, it's moving it to the iPhone. Nike, if they really wanted to go all in on automation, they should have found a way to make a product that is as ubiquitous as the iPhone, with as little standardization or as much standardization as possible.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  Tesla is just getting hammered down another, no, 7%, but they're suffering from the trade, trade war.

• 42:48John Coogan?

  Tariffs.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  Tariffs, but then also.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  The lack of a naturally aspirated V8.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  Also just a broader tech sell, sell-off.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, still no news about a gated manual, right?

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  And so that's gotta hurt the stock, I imagine.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  We're kinda waiting on that.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  We're waiting on that.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  That, that's the intermediary.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Ferrari's coming back, by the way, with a, with a manual. They're doing a manual V8.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Did they name it yet?

• 43:10John Coogan?

  I don't know. But, uh, no, they, they, all they said was that we are committing to a manual, uh, ICE, like no hybrid car.

• 43:19Jordi Hays?

  They heard the vibe shift.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Well, they saw what happened with Porsche.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Cause Porsche had launched the ST, which was really great. And then the R, I believe, was, was manual as well. And so they said, like, there are certain collectors that just want manual, like more analog cars and they're willing to pay for them. And it makes sense for Ferrari, they make a ton of money.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was trying to think about it. I was trying to think, what is the desire, a highly desirable car that is a hybrid or electric?

• 43:49John Coogan?

  LaFerrari?

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  LaFerrari? I don't think LaFerrari's a hybrid.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  I'm almost positive it is.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Is it?

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  You're right. You're right. Mogged.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Mogged. Uh, 918 Spider, hybrid.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Spider, too.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  Uh, 296.

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Hybrid.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  I guess I could have made a more precise, in the last few years, right?

• 44:11John Coogan?

  In the last few years, what? Uh, I mean, there's a new 911 that has a hybrid. I think it'll sell pretty well. Um, what else? Who else? Uh, it is the, is the latest, uh, W1 from McLaren.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure that is.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  It's gotta be hybrid, right? Everything's hybrid now. Anyway, let's get back to Nike. Uh, at one point, it took the Flex team eight months to figure out how to automate a way to put the Nike swoosh on a shoe, only for Nike to move on to a new shoe line for which the method Nike developed no longer worked. And so there's just this cadence of like new shoes, they have to have new, new, new styles. Uh, they said it would have been easier to mass produce uncomplicated shoes, such as ones with a machine knit upper part and matched with simple molded bottoms. But Nike was unwilling to put limits on its design. and expected manufacturers to produce whatever new shoes their teams dreamed up. Manufacturing in a lot of ways did not have an equal seat at the table.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  And that's interesting because obviously the manufacturing of the iPhone is deeply integrated into the company. And they drive the manufacturing optimization that happens at Foxconn. This is the whole debate about are they transferring too much IP? But you know that you know that the iPhone team is thinking about what is available on the camera side? How does that fit in? And then how can they build software on top of that? And that vertical integration has really led Apple to have this integrated approach that creates a fantastic product. Feels like Nike was very much still in the mindset of like, let's separate.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  How could we design the phone so that it would be insane to not get a case? Oh, what if we made it so the camera, like one of the primary use cases of the device protrudes across the back? So it doesn't sit flat. That is brilliant.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  So by 2017, Flex's investors were balking at rising costs of the company with some questioning why an outfit that makes electronics was involved in shoe production. Flex and Nike wound up the project.

• 46:05Jordi Hays?

  I actually think it's smart. It's like, hey, who's done really advanced scaled consumer product manufacturing? Okay, they've done it in electronics, probably a better, generally a safe bet.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  But it wasn't safe enough.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  And so Flex and Nike wound up the project by early net 2019. By then, Under Armour had stopped mentioning to its investors Project Glory to make shoes in the United States. That year Adidas, which had also faced challenges producing complex shoes with robots, said it would close down production in Atlanta and Germany. It shipped its speed factory technology to suppliers in Asia. The three shoemakers stuck with their original offshore locations, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia. Even after pandemic era, factory shutdown showed the risk of having such a concentrated node of production. Adidas, Under Armour, and Nike, they are not talking to the journal about this. But now China, Vietnam, and Indonesia are in Trump's sights. They got, they got huge tariffs

• 47:03John Coogan?

  on them. And there will be an army. Howard Lutnick said that the administration wants labor-intensive industries to return to the US. He actually said that there will be an army of millions and millions, of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. Says, we're gonna make them here.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  That's a word-for-word quote.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  Word-for-word quote in a recent interview with CBS.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  All right. I threw my how to make iPhones book in the trash.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  And I need to go try to get it out. I need to go find the dump that they took it to.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get it back.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  The threat of new tariffs is pushing some to ask whether Nike or others will ultimately have to reconsider efforts to automate manufacturing and bring shoe production back to the US. People think it's, could still be done, although it won't be easy. You need some deep pockets and some patience because it's not gonna happen fast. But yeah, we'll see.

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  You know what aren't patient?

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Who?

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  Tariffs. They're hitting.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  They're hitting right now.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Right now.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  But if you want to track the tariffs, head over to Polymarket. I'm sure there's a bunch of great markets on what's happening in the tariff world. And if you're looking to cut costs because of tariffs, head over to Ramp. Time is money. Save both. They got easy-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's move over to the next story. Man versus machine as China shows off humanoid robots in half marathon. It's pretty crazy. Somebody came up to us in the gym this morning and was like, you guys are talking about this, right? And we were like, oh, I actually hadn't heard this. But it is in the Journal. China, the Beijing Half Marathon featured a road race between humans and 21 different robot models. And it showed how far robots

• 48:45John Coogan?

  are from mimicking people. Good example of why it's difficult to make shoes. It's also difficult for robots to run in shoes.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  They're both having trouble.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  This is what we've been saying. Would like to see a humanoid robot drink 12 beers and play 18 and call it work.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's not happening this year. Not happening this year.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  Not this year.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  The Tianqiangkong Ultra, a humanoid robot, runs across the finish line of a half marathon in Beijing. So, let's run through this. Metal asphalt. Metal met asphalt in a half marathon that featured thousands of human runners and 21 Chinese humanoid robot models. Saturday's road race involving human runners and a score of robots in Beijing has been billed as a showcase of China's cutting-edge technology. I gotta say, this is extremely cool for the robotics industry and we should be doing this here. I mean, you saw this with like-

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  No, I posted, remember I posted, we need a humanoid X Games, right? I want to see humanoid doing-

• 49:39John Coogan?

  Yes, surfing.

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  I want them to see-

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Do the 360, do the 1080, 900.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  Any athlete that Red Bull sponsors, humanoid robot companies should be saying, "Hey, we're gonna get our humanoid to go cliff jumping, to go bungee jumping."

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  To, you know, do it, you know, I want to see like, you know-

• 49:56John Coogan?

  We really gotta have the OneX, the OneX founders on, Neo and a bunch of the other humanoid robotic founders on to talk about, you know, all our crazy ideas and force them to do it.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  Big wave surfing.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  Big wave surfing. That seems like the Turing test for humanoid robotics because-

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  If you can get barrel-

• 50:11John Coogan?

  If you can be waterproof and-

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  Embodied AGI.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, I imagine these robots are pretty heavy. You gotta sink.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the real test, is a triathlon, right?

• 50:20John Coogan?

  Can you swim? Yeah.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  Can you swim?

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Can you swim? Humanoid robot that swims? That's crazy.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  How's your battery gonna hold up in-

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  An hour in saltwater?

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Is a honey stinger gonna take you across the finish line? I don't think so. You're gonna have to be recharging for an hour, robot. So, it's a 13-mile race, first of its kind.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  The interesting is the size difference. Everybody just assumes, uh, the humanoids will be, you know, six foot.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  They had four-foot humanoids in there.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Four-foot humanoids, okay.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  Little guys, running around.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  So, China has said it wants the country to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. They are well on their way, based on what I've seen. Chinese authorities have lavish support, such as subsidies, talent bonuses and tax breaks on robotics companies. In reality, the race-

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  Telling me that for the first time.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  They know how to do some central planning over there.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  You know, say what you will about capitalism, but if you look at subsidized industries, there's now their model that seems to be working pretty well.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  In reality, the race showed how both how quickly and smoothly some robots are able to run, but also how far away humanoids are from still being, from being able to mimic human activity. Running is a very basic ability of human beings, says the chief technology officer of the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, which developed one of the robots. China is making a major push to produce more and more sophisticated robots, in part to raise the automation level of its factories. Oh, they actually put the, they actually put the robot in Skechers. That's really cute.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, too. So, these weren't autonomous, right? There was people following behind the robots, actually driving, basically driving them with a joystick.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  With a joystick.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  Like it's an RC car.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:11Jordi Hays?

  But still, very incredible feat.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Okay, so the first one, the first robot off the mark was the Tiankong Ultra. Five foot nine, hey.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Got to put you on the truth zone, they're not four feet tall.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  No, four to six feet.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five nine, 115 pounds humanoid.

• 52:29Jordi Hays?

  Ideal build.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Featuring a pitch black head and sporting an orange tank top. Three people accompanied it to help control the robot. The race was the culmination of months of training. They had to navigate the courses, flat and hilly roads, and maneuver around six left turns and eight right turns, according to the organizers. Developers had to train the robots to keep their stability and balance to avoid falling over. The organizers initially planned to cut off the race at around three and a half hours, meaning that the minimum average speed was 3.7 miles per hour. Developers said the humanoid robotics can typically operate for no more than two hours on a single charge of their batteries. The faster they run, the shorter the distance they can cover. Components and parts could easily break while running, so developers replaced plastic parts with metal and used extra strong but costly materials. One company trained their humanoids by connecting the robot to a fitness machine-like metal

• 53:15John Coogan?

  stand to prevent it from falling. Tian Kung Ultra was developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robotic Innovation Center, a research institute also called X humanoid and formed by robotics firm UB Tech Electronics and electric vehicle maker Xiaomi and the local Beijing government. It could run an average of six miles an hour and could handle hills, stairs, grass and sand, said a profile on the robot.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  Impressive. Yeah, this is, this makes you think there, we have a number of American humanoids, Boston Dynamics, One X, Figure, Tesla Optimus, there's a bunch, right? But we actually should have way, way more. If this is going to be very important technology, we should have 20 plus, you know, venture-backed companies sort of vying for this, right? They don't all need to raise hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, but it's an area that we should be, you know, probably investing more in.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  And so as they're running the race, Tian Kung Ultra falls down because the battery failed. The robots were allowed to swap batteries and they changed the battery three times on this particular robot, wound up finishing the race in, the human male champion completed the race in one hour, two minutes and 36 seconds. That's pretty fast, followed by thousands of exhilarated human runners. Some were exhausted, resting nearby to catch their breath. After two hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds, Tian Kung Ultra was the first robot to reach the finish line. A large crowd of spectators, including government officials, were eagerly awaiting the robots.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  In the end, only Tian Kung Ultra and Little Rascal N2 were able to meet the original cutoff time. The organizers extended it to four hours and 10 minutes so that more robots could finish the race. So the humans still got it, but I mean, you look at the, you look at the trend line here, I think in a couple of years, they're going to be crushing this. I see no reason why. It feels like a lot of it's probably battery technology. Like maybe they keep swapping the battery and that's fine, but if they can really find some sort of battery breakthrough, that's going to enable more power and like running in a straight line and some slight curves here and there, that doesn't seem like as, even as much of a challenge as like assembling a Nike shoe, right? It seems pretty simple.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  And so they should be able to win this pretty soon.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  Bell helicopter carrying a bunch of batteries with an extension cord.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  Oh, extension cord.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  That humanoid is sprinting.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Unstoppable, for sure.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  50 miles an hour.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Unstoppable, for sure. Anyway.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  Very impressive.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Should we move on to some big funding news?

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  Grun's lands valuation around 500 million as supplement startups boom. You're familiar with this company. I was less familiar.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm not super, I'm not super familiar. Yeah. Follow them a little bit just because I I'd been aware that they had. I had heard about their first year numbers and it was kind of unbelievable.

• 56:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Like it was a lot of companies have got to the their gross revenue, I think in their first year is what best in is the run rate that companies will best in class companies can sometimes get to at the end of their first year. But they actually like did it.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  In that year it wasn't.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  So clearly the founder is an absolute dog.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Was it Austin who was talking about?

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Yes, I have the tweet here. He says, Grun's was the most obvious billion dollar idea hiding in plain sight. AG one is a $600 million revenue business. The founder of Grun's was like, what if I took AG one and put it in a form factor that is easier to consume? And doesn't taste like S H I T. Easiest billion dollars anyone will ever make. And I don't know that I I don't know enough about the company to agree with that.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  I can tell you probably exactly why it's working. So little nominative determinism. The founder's name is Chad.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  So that probably has had something to do with the success. But um, yeah, the idea of taking.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  The points guy or something? People are saying he was like a points guy. I don't know. He says he's founder of Grun's Daily, previous Stanford GSB. He was a summer's partner, summer Summit Partners. And he's on the board of Ruggable, Dr. Squatch, Brooklyn and Solo Stove and seven more. So like really, really great scaled up consumer products companies. I've seen the, I have a friend who was applying to work at Ruggable and the the economics of that business were fantastic. Are you familiar with Ruggable?

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  Ruggable is one and then Dr. Squatch is also very under the radar. I think that's gonna be a massive outcome.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we're seeing this with the Ridge Wallet guys. Like, there's increasingly a divide between like, like, good idea gets market traction, but the real killers come in and optimize the business and just actually get the full value out of the company or out of the market. So, throw in Chad a follow. But let's read through some of the the information article on this. So, investors are on a health kick, looking for new ways to tap into the fast growing brands in the nutrition sector. This includes pouring money into selling into startups selling supplements, particularly those that offer new ways for people to load up on vitamins, protein and other ingredients. Latest example is a two-year-old gummy supplement startup, Gruens, which raised fresh cash at an up to $500 million valuation in recent

• 58:40John Coogan?

  weeks, according to people briefed on the deal. Their monthly sales were roughly 10 million earlier this year. They recently added kids products as well as a sugar-free version of its adult gummies and a fresh influx of cash nearing nearly 10 million, according to securities filings. Wow, really low dilution. If that's 10 million on 500 post.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  Not bad. They're making, they're making plenty of money themselves. One thing, the American consumer has always been undefeated.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Undefeated.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  But is especially undefeated in the context of gummy vitamins.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Everyone loves a gummy, anyway.

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  There, I've seen so many different, yeah, Dan with Create. I was initially, I talked to Dan right when he was starting Create and I was a little bit skeptical around kind of the market that he was going for. I'd taken creatine forever.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  But he was the first company that that I'm aware of to put creatine in gummy format.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  And I talked to him like two months later. It was like so obvious that the business was was just working phenomenally well. And he's been knocked off a bunch of times since then. But fortunately, there's an interesting thing in the gummy space where there's always been issues with quality in the supplement space.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:58Jordi Hays?

  Specifically in gummies.

• 1:00:00John Coogan?

  I watched a YouTube video about this separately and then Dan posted about it. How some, you know, mass monster bodybuilding guy tested like 20 of the top Amazon creatine gummies and they were like.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  A lot of them had zero creatine.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Like, yeah, like 0.0001% of the label claim is wild.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, I mean, Chad, if you're a real Chad and you're serious about growing this business, get on Numeral, go to Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. You know, you're going to have to be paying sales tax on this stuff all over America. You can spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, I want to keep digging into this a little bit and then we'll move on to the next story. So they have, other hot brands include Create Wellness. That's our boy. A line of creatine gummies, which tapped into the muscle building supplements, growing popularity on social media to raise five million in series A funding last fall. The brand has launched in retailers and is on pace for around 25 million in annual revenue when it raised fresh cash. Let's hear it for Create Gummies. Dan, good job. The rise in popularity of weight loss drugs is also providing a marketing angle.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Unilever too.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Unilever's in the game?

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  The.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Oh, was in that deal?

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Oh, that's awesome. With brands claiming they enhance weight loss or help with side effects of the drugs. Grunz, for instance, has run digital ads.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  I had to just look that up. I thought I was leaking.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  He did announce it last year.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:18Jordi Hays?

  I was like, wow, I just broke your fundraiser, Dan. Sorry about that.

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  No, no, it's in the information already.

• 1:01:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  And so Grunz has run digital ads targeting people taking drugs like Ozempic who want to keep getting appropriate nutrients as their appetite fades. That makes sense. Whenever you're on a cut and you're in a caloric deficit, whether it's caused by Ozempic or just, you know. Keeping yourself hungry because you're trying to get diced for summer. You, you want to maintain enough protein and enough creatine and enough hypertrophy training and hard training so that you don't lose muscle mass during that cut.

• 1:01:49Jordi Hays?

  Micronutrients too.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  Micronutrients too.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Is doing.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so they sell a monthly supply of gummy vitamins for $79 or 59 for monthly subscribers. They say the products pack more than 60 vitamins, minerals, and other ingredients into one serving. And it markets as gummies as cheaper, more convenient version of popular greens powders, which are made of powdered vegetables and fruits mixed together into water smoothies. So.

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever hear about this company, Goli?

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Goli.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Wasn't that for gut health?

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  The apple cider vinegar gummies?

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are they really big?

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  They have, they are large. They do hundreds of millions of annual revenue.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Wild.

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  I, I think they've been somewhat unsuccessful in terms of like capturing kind of enterprise value around it. That said, just to give you a sense of the scale, they have 364,000 reviews on Amazon. So they sell.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  300,000 reviews.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  So run the numbers on what percentage of their customers you think have left an Amazon review? And then you can get a sense of, of their scale, but it's in the hundreds of millions of annual revenue. So again, Americans are buying billions and billions and billions of dollars of vitamins.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  You know what else has great reviews? Aidsleep. I got an 81 last night. I'm getting up on the routine, quality and time slept was a little bit lower, but go and get a Pod4Ultra, five year warranty, 30 night rice, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to aidsleep.com slash TBN.

• 1:03:15Jordi Hays?

  Last night autopilot made adjustments to boost my deep sleep by 42%.

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, autopilot. I actually went to bed later than I would have liked because.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  I was watching Last of Us. Oh, you watched the Nathan for you?

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  It's not Nathan for you, but it's the rehearsal.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. Was it good?

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  And honestly, it was giving, I almost was texting the, the team because he basically recreated the entire, an entire airport.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  In, in the episode, just to, for one of these rehearsals.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  That's the bars.

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  So our new studio, which hopefully we're signing the lease on today.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  We've been in. Diligence for a while, but we're gonna have to just like recreate LAX if we, you know, if we want, you know, to reach Nathan Fielder levels.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  He, he's been on a fantastic run. I've enjoyed everything he's put out. The old Nathan for you episodes are iconic.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  And it's very timely because the new season.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Business and comedy work so well together.

• 1:04:12Jordi Hays?

  The new season is about aircraft safety.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:15Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  Can't wait. I'm, I'm enjoying Last of Us, although it is terrifying. It's essentially a horror film and it's not ideal for the deep sleep, I think. So I might try and push that to, you know, maybe Saturday afternoons.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because, because White Lotus ended.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  Yep. HBO likes to keep the dread really high.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  My wife was like, I'm very, I'm, I'm happy that we're not gonna like be having these crazy cliffhangers and like scary scenes right before bed. And then Nathan Fielder's like sitting there like walking through like the history of like every terrible, you know, aircraft, you know, accident. And it's just like extremely stressful. So, um, go check it out.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Go check it out. I mean, uh, in, in the world of Hollywood, the name of the game is getting an Emmy or a, or an Academy Award. It's Emmy season coming up and, uh, breaking news, we're gonna be going for a daytime Emmy, uh, and we're gonna get a billboard. We're gonna get a billboard.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  On Adquick.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  A four, four year consideration billboard. If you've been, if you've ever been driving around Los Angeles around Emmy season, all the shows have, you know, all their accolades up on the billboard. We're gonna go to adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to headaches of out of home advertising. Uh, anyway, uh, let's go to some timeline. We got our guests joining in 24 minutes. We got a great lineup. We're gonna start showing you the lineup during the show. We're working on some new graphics packages, but we got David Tisch from Box Group, Mike Vernal from Conviction, Ed from, uh, Machina Labs, and then Will is coming on from Morgan Stanley. Uh, we'll be talking about, uh, what's going on in the venture market, what's going on at the early stage, mid-stage, what's going

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  on in AI investing, both at the foundation model layer and the application layer. Uh, I'm excited for the set of conversations, but let's run through some timeline posts in the meantime.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  We got a post from.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  From Josh.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, actually Lulu first.

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  Oh, you wanna do Lulu first?

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna be a nice little surprise for you.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Michael and Ben and Scott, if you can pull it up.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just in the main chat.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  In the meantime, why don't I tell you about Wander? They just launched Wander Malibu Vista. It looks fantastic. You can see the ocean from that thing. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

• 1:06:36Jordi Hays?

  If you stay in that Wander, let me know and go outside in the backyard and start yelling, I will be able to hear you.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Wait, really? Is that close?

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  You'd have to yell pretty loud, but I think...

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  I don't think our listeners will have a problem with that.

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  With all the creatine and...

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  All the tea.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Working out that's going on in our, in our community, I think they'll be fine. They'll be able to belt it out. But man, what a beautiful little, uh, what is that? Driveway, but it's circular. Looks really beautiful. I don't know. I'm excited.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. Lulu says, "If Coogan does the eyebrow while describing your business model, congratulations, you're gonna have a deck of corn."

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  She identified, uh, a specific, I guess... So founders, this is something you can read into now. If you are, um, if you are, if Coogan is talking about your business, just pay attention.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  Eyebrows are underrated when you're trying to express yourself.

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  He's subtly signaling something, um, and in this case, it's very positive.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  It's very fun. Yeah, what a journey. Five years ago, bored during COVID, saw a bunch of people. A lot of people already had podcasts, a lot of people had Substacks. I was like, I want to do something different, but I think it's good to get, uh, just be noisy on the internet. Because you're not really going to happy hours anymore during COVID. There's nothing going on. Why don't I start yapping on YouTube? And, uh, the first year was really, really slow. I think it took almost a full year to get more than like 100 views on a video, like 50 episodes in a row. And it was just like, it was cool. I mean, for me, I didn't understand any of the stats. I didn't have any benchmarks. Cause I was like, kind of the only person in tech. Eventually Gary Tan was doing stuff, but he was so big. I wasn't really like comping to him.

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  And so I'd just be like, oh man, like I broke 100 views on this video. Like it's a banger. Like this is great.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  So many people would have...

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  And I was just like fired up about that, but I enjoyed the process and, and I was like, I did a lot of motion graphics, spent a lot of time in After Effects. Uh, I remember I did a video on breaking down Varda and I built a 3D model of a satellite that was like wildly inaccurate based on like what they actually do. But they hadn't announced what they were actually gonna do yet. So I was just like... It looks like this and it was just wildly inaccurate, but it looked really cool. And that's what matters. It illustrated the idea of of them launching a satellite and then bringing it back down. And yeah, the first time I met Delian was in Miami at Hereticon. He was like, oh yeah, you made like that video about about Varda. We actually sent that to our real production team and said like,

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Make it like this.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  But like for us.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  I was like, oh, that's great. I'm helping out. What a fun.

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  And then took you five years to realize you just wanted to do a news to Newsmax.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Newsmax.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Be a news anchor. Always be news maxing. All right, we got a post here from Josh Pacini, who I have did a call with a couple of weeks ago. Early TVPN listener.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  He's quote tweeting Annie. She says, name a better dopamine hit than running all weight. And he says, getting a post read on TVPN. Well, congratulations, Josh. Today's your day. You got your post read on TVPN.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  Josh also has a very cool AI startup focused on automating drug development.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:09:49Jordi Hays?

  If you want to work in that space, go hit him up.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  You know what's funny? On one of the previous shows, we were talking about startup names and we were saying that, you know, there's this new boom in the American manufacturing company of America or advanced manufacturing company of America, Allen Control Systems, the San Francisco Compute Company, the New York Compute Company, the New York Browser Company, whatever. And we said, all of those are done. There's no more alpha there. We got to go back to the dot Lys and Roy delivered on a Sunday afternoon. He drops his launch video at 2:00 PM on a Sunday. What a funny time to launch.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  On Easter Sunday.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  Clue Lee is out. It's the old school dot LY. We're getting back in the LY game. I love it. Clue Lee is out cheat on everything and has a very like, very formally produced.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Like really refined cinematic launch video with some great motion graphics in there. We're gonna have Roy join the show tomorrow to break it all down. But massive launch, 4.3 million views, 16,000 likes as of the time of the show. And Chad Byers got in the deal, snuck a check in, and he breaks it down. The Cluely manifesto. We want to cheat on everything. And interesting that he's using we. I guess he's already deeply involved with this company, normally thinking about it as an investor. But this is clearly something he's really excited about.

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Not sure the round was announced yet.

• 1:11:14John Coogan?

  No, no, it is. Yeah, yeah, 5 million. Delian said that they raised. Maybe Delian leaked it, but then that's not on me. But Chad says, we want to cheat on everything. Yes, you heard that right. Interviews, exams, sales calls, meetings. There's if there's a faster way to win, we'll take it. We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen, hears your audio, feeds you answers in real time. While others guess, you're already right. And yes, the world will call it cheating, but so was the calculator, so was spell check, so was Google. Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics, then it adapts, then it forgets, and suddenly it's normal.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  This is golden retriever mode. You don't need to know anything. You just sit there and the Cluely answers every question for you. He says, but this is different. It isn't just AI, just AI isn't just another tool. It will redefine how our world works. Why memorize facts, write code, research, anything when the model can do it in seconds?

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  The best communicator, the best analyst, the best problem solver is now the one who knows how to ask the right question. The future won't reward effort. It will reward leverage and being a golden retriever. So start cheating because when everyone does it, no one is. Interesting.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I'm pumped to have Roy on and

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  Very fun.

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  A little fun fact. Ben made all of our sound effects with his own voice.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  If it sounded familiar.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  Shout out to Ben, our producer.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Could have been a voice actor.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Speaking of the other Ben, let's go to Ben Stiller.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Sinners, he's posting about Variety. Sinners has amassed-

• 1:12:55Jordi Hays?

  He's putting Variety in the truth zone.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Okay, we like to see that. A founder. He's going founder mode. Cause he's, you know, he's, he's a producer. He's the founder of many movies.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  Sinners has amassed $61 million in his global debut. It's a great result for an original R rated horror film. Yet the Warner Brothers release has got a $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses. So profitability remains a ways away. And he says, in what universe does a $60 million opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline? It's a good question. I don't know. It's not that crazy because I mean, when, when, when big studios put hundreds of millions of dollars before, behind a, behind a film, like they're typically hoping that they recoup all of that like on day one, right?

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  So, I mean, it doesn't seem like Variety is being like crazily negative here. And they did kind of couch that in like, you know, they got a ways to go to get profitable, which is like maybe factually accurate if the price tag really is 90 million. But it seems, seems cool. I haven't seen the movie, but I don't know if I'll have a chance to go see an R rated horror film. That seems hard to rally the troops around, but have you watched the trailer or seen anything about Sinners?

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't watch horror films.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  No, too scary. Might throw off your sleep score. And we're in a knockout, a knockout, drag out, fight.

• 1:14:20Jordi Hays?

  I can honestly say I've never watched a full one. I just don't, I don't get.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  What about the classics? What about Scream or Cabin in the Woods?

• 1:14:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm also not a movie person. I've seen like, I've seen three movies.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Three movies.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street 2. Those are the three movies.

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  The only ones that matter.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Scarface, Goodfellas, Godfather. No, you haven't even seen those, have you?

• 1:14:45Jordi Hays?

  I've, I, yeah, not.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  Have you seen Wall Street 2?

• 1:14:47Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:14:48John Coogan?

  Have you seen Wolf of Wall Street?

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  Okay, and you've seen Wall Street?

• 1:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Seen more than three movies.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Have you not seen Wall Street?

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  No, I have not.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Oh, my God. American Psycho?

• 1:14:55Jordi Hays?

  I have seen that.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  Okay, good.

• 1:14:56Jordi Hays?

  But I read the book first.

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, that's weird. The book is weird.

• 1:15:00Jordi Hays?

  The book is weird.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  The book is weird. Anyway, should we go to Jim Simons on the only rule he focused on in trading? Goat. He says, we'll pull up the video, but he says something like, never doubt the computer. It's pretty great. Can we pull this video up?

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  Was probably never trusted trading decision that was made before ripping a heater.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he's a big smoker. Yeah, Jim Simons, in case you're not familiar, he's the, worth $31 billion, 55th richest person in the world. He's the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a quant fund.

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  No longer with us.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Famously, there was a market crash. Everyone asked them, what did the, what was going on at Renaissance? What was your team doing while the market was crashing? And they said, we were at a movie. Amazing. They're just, yeah, they're just like, what are we gonna do? The machine will handle it. Anyway, we're ready to play the clip.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  The only rule is we never override the computer. No one ever comes in any day and says, the computer wants to do this. That's crazy, we shouldn't do it. You don't do it because you can't, you can't simulate that. You can't study the past and wonder whether the boss was gonna come in and change, change his mind about something. So you just stick with it and it's, and it's, and it's worked.

• 1:16:19John Coogan?

  I love it. I mean, this is the story of, like, this is Lee Sedol move 37. If, if, if the AlphaGo team had said, hey, we think this is an error. We're gonna override what the computer's doing. They would have thought that they were more likely to beat Lee Sedol because it was a novel move that had not been considered by humans before. And in fact, move 37 was very important in that game.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, too, to think of it in the context of if you interject and insert human decision making.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  You're actually taking away from the program's potential success in the future, which could more than make up for a one-time mistake, right?

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Jordi Hays?

  Like, there could be. If, you know, the Renaissance team, if a computer does something that loses money effectively, but then the next time it does that thing, it makes it back 10x, right? Like, was it actually an error?

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Gambler mindset in the computer. You're only one computer aided trade away from, I mean, it literally worked. He made 33 billion dollars.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  99% of computers right quit right before they're about to hit 100x.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Just imagine it has like a side, internal thought and you're just like, expand the reasoning on this one. And it's just like, I'm so due.

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  I got a hot hand.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  I'm so due.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. I mean, I wonder where else that philosophy has a potential impact. Like, we saw this with the debate over social networking where there was, there was a, there was a question about, you know, the, the algorithmic social feeds feed people confirmation bias. They feed them content that they enjoy. They feed them brain rot sometimes. Maybe the steward of the network Zuckerberg, who has essentially complete control over meta, should step in and say, you know what? I'm going to dial back the brain rot or I'm going to dial up the, you know, turn down the news, turn up the entertainment, turn down the, you know, the, turn up the educational content.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of things that in theory could, could, could, you know, feel right, but maybe the end state is just step back and maximize for LTV. Who knows? I don't know. I have a hot take on this, which is like, the, the LTV is just like, if you actually think about the true LTV of a, of a user of Facebook, it can actually drive a much stronger and more valuable outcome as opposed to optimizing for ARPU, which is a one year metric.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  So if you're optimizing for a one year metric, you're going to try and sell someone, you know, like gambling, mobile games, anything that just pulls money out of their pocket and potentially gets them distracted from creating value in the, in the society. But if instead you focus on what is the true lifetime value of this potential Facebook user for?

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  Five decades for their entire life. Well, then it might actually be valuable to instead of trying to get some kid to play Candy Crush and spend all their parents' money on Candy Crush tokens, instead, send them a bunch of educational content. Get them really pilled on capitalism. They go build something really valuable. They make a bunch of money. And then you can run advertisements on them for Rolls Royce and Lamborghini.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Or they'll just spend a billion dollars on Meta Ads.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. And so, and so there's an interesting theory where, where like, what, what are we saying when we, when we, when we say the kids are suffering from brain rot? What we're really saying is like, they will not contribute to society. They will not become economically valuable.

• 1:19:55Jordi Hays?

  But maybe they go and become slop farmers.

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  If they pull themselves out of the slop by their own bootstraps, it's possible. Of course, it's possible. It's possible. But I do think that there's something interesting where if you think about it from an ultra-long time horizon, it can actually be economically efficient.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't think our quarterly, you know,

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  system will allow for that type of long-term thinking.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  But that's the beauty of Zuck. He doesn't need to think in quarters, right? He doesn't need to. And so I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic that, that, that someone like Zuck could take a really, really long view. Also, I mean, I think he has kids. I think he has a very good, strong moral framework. So I think he might just kind of like, you know, optimize for that naturally. But I do think that there's an economic model to optimizing for

• 1:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  long, long life-term value, lifetime value, education and like human flourishing, economic flourishing, even in the face of declining ARPU in the short term.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  I would love to think that Zuck is thinking of themselves as, you know, of Meta as operating digital railroads. And it's like, you know what, we're gonna, you know, we're just gonna invest in delivering educational content to our children for the next five to 10 years. We're gonna get them really excited about, you know, learning and science and.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Because we will make more money in the future. That's the key thing. It can't just be purely altruistic. It has to be, no, this is the right move for the shareholders. But it's gutsy and it would never fly if you're optimizing the next quarter's return.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had a post on Saturday relevant to Facebook. I said, someday you're going to look down and realize that the good old days are over. X will be like Facebook. Your group chats won't be popping and your phone will just feel different. Don't let this time slip away. You need to increase your screen time now before it's too late. And funny enough, that thought came to me on a Saturday when my screen time is the lowest.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Lowest.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  And but it did. We I've had this sense over time that that Twitter and X are just sort of Lindy. And we'll kind of always be here, but it's very possible that X goes away at Facebook at some point and we're just, we're just the boomers on Facebook, just all, you know, yelling at each other and arguing.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  We'll become like a TikTok reaction stream.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  Or whatever's next.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  You always, always got to move on.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  We're going to WeMe. We're going to WeMe. It's on the come up. We talked about it. WeMe. It's the future.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the FTC says that WeMe is Facebook's, you know.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Biggest competitor.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Biggest competitor.

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  Or one of the top two.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  One of the top.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Snap and then Weenie.

• 1:22:25Jordi Hays?

  Snap and Weenie. So we'll see you on WeMe, folks.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  We really got to chase that down. We got to, we got to get that.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm gonna let you do this next one.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, War Doll says, you need to be dad maxing. You need to be waking up at 5:45 on a Saturday to hit the gym and then coming back to wake up your wife and kids by blasting Creed while making breakfast. You need to be dethatching your lawn. I don't even know what that means. You need to clean your car and then stare at it in the driveway for half an hour. You need to be telling your kids that Jerusalem belongs to those who worship Christ. You need to be treating Easter Sunday like Super Bowl Sunday. You need to be absolutely mugging childless heathens with peak dad power moves as God intended. Very funny Easter post. Obviously, there was a lot of like, he is risen posts that went viral over the Easter Sunday, but I thought this one was, was very funny. It is something that happens naturally. You start waking up earlier and

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  earlier in 5:45. That's five minutes later than I wake up, actually, if I look at my alarm. 5:40. On the Ashton Hall grind. Anyway, Sam D'Amico, friend of the show, he's been on, he runs Impulse Stoves. He had a good take about aliens that I wanted to share. He says, "I remain convinced that the best evidence that the US government has not recovered crashed alien spacecraft is that, one, that would be the coolest thing ever, and, two, someone would have to share it in a group chat with the boys." And he is, of course, sharing a screenshot of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is said to have shared attack details in a second Signal chat. The

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  Defense Secretary sent sensitive information about strikes in Yemen to an encrypted chat that included his wife and brother. People familiar with the matter said.

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  So, send that headline to your wife and just say, "Us."

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Us.

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to do that earlier, but I kept getting paywalled by the New York Times. The failing New York Times wouldn't let me screenshot the headline of an article.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, just take the screenshot from this. It's great. We got a nice, clean screenshot here from Sam. Yeah, very funny. I actually think this is a great take, but we should have Jesse Michaels on the show to give us the latest and greatest in the world of UAPs, UFOs, and alien aircraft, and spacecraft, because he has gone way deeper. And regardless of what you think about aliens, I think that Jesse's done a great job of finding interesting stories, interesting historical anecdotes, interesting anomalies. And even if you remain unconvinced after spending time with him, you will be entertained and you will feel like you are talking to an intellectual, not just a crazy conspiracy theorist. And so, huge shout out to Jesse Michaels, one of the best to ever do it. We grew up on YouTube

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  around the same time. Anyway, let's move on to Atlas Creatine Cycle. He says, "They should have a 420 for creatine monohydrate."

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  So true.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  I love it. Willow Brian says 10 six because 10 grams a day and six looks like a G. Oh, okay. 10 G. I get it. So true, King. People are into creatine right now. A lot of debate over whether creatine.

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  I have 15.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  You have 15 grams.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Grams, sorry, sorry.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, your max.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Those are big scoops.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big scoops. Uh, yeah, it's a little sandy, but you gotta get it down. The creatine, it seems like, you know, maybe it's a fast time bargain, but it's great.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Best hair loss.

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  It's the best hair loss supplement in the world.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people talk about hair loss supplements, thinking that they're supplements that, you know, encourage hair growth.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  But, you know, Joe Rogan's bald.

• 1:25:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  He looks strong. Maybe it's the creatine. Who knows? Maybe it's genetics. Maybe it's a million other things, but yeah.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  You never know.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  You never know.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  It's worth it. Worth the risk.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we, we got four minutes. Let's do a couple more posts. Um, this one by David Haber over at Andreessen was interesting. He says, in any fast growing organization, one of the best feelings as manager or CEO is having someone who works for you that I call safe hands. It's this implicit sense that you can delegate a task, project, or line of business and trust that the person is going to execute with quality. We've talked about this before with like the levels to employ, uh, to different employee skill sets, the pyramid that Sean Peery outlined. Uh, safe hands isn't just about competence. It's about proactively communicating when issues arrive, acting as an owner when problem solving

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  and operating independently without the need for micromanagement. Importantly, safe hands isn't tied to seniority. It's just remarkable how inconsistent it is across an organization. Whenever I find someone who is safe hands at my prior company, especially junior folks, I pour responsibility on them. Many of these individuals stretched far beyond their original roles and became leaders at the company with several now successful entrepreneurs. It's one of the most common conversations I have with founders I work with, especially in the series B plus stage as they're beginning to bring on executive leadership for the first time. Do you know, do you feel like you have safe hands across every functional unit of your business? How much leverage do you feel you're getting from your team in those areas?

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  Every CEO instinctually, instinctively knows the answer to these questions and finding your safe hands is a key step towards scaling yourself and the company.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  And Matt Grimm says, I call this, folks, you can turn your back on, and they're insanely valuable. In fairness, I didn't come up with that phrase. One of those types who reports to me told me, and I'm shamelessly stealing it.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Jordy, what's your take?

• 1:27:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I think oftentimes, you know, in this case, David and Matt are founders. Oftentimes, founders end up getting credit for the things that these sort of safe hands roles end up doing.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  And so Matt is.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  But that's the goal. You have to hire these people and then also train them and then take advantage of them, right?

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  And then, you know, back them when they go out to do their own thing.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, before we have David, we got to talk about Eric, Eric Torrenberg.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Speaking of Andreessen, Eric Torrenberg has joined Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner. Fantastic news. He'll be on the show tomorrow to break it down for us. Very excited to talk to him. Been a good friend for years. Talked about media. He's been in the podcasting space for, well, like, multiple years now. Built Turpentine, done tons of interviews, and one of the greatest networkers in human history, I think.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  He knows everyone and he will just.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Child of the internet.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  He will just throw you in a group chat with the world's most important people randomly. And I'll be like, why am I in this? But thank you. This is interesting.

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, great guy.

• 1:28:54Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, very excited for him.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  And the firm, and very excited to talk with him tomorrow.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's bring in our first guest, David Tisch from Box Group. How you doing, David?

• 1:29:06David Tisch?

  Hi, guys. How are you?

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  We're great.

• 1:29:09David Tisch?

  Any questions on having a new job today?

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  I do. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I'm taking it from part-time, 50 hours a week, to full-time, 100 hours a week, but it's only up from here.

• 1:29:20David Tisch?

  Are you hiring?

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  We are. We are.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 1:29:23David Tisch?

  How do I pursue this?

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the VC to full-time news anchor pipeline. You know, once you've done it all in venture. Yeah, like you have the natural

• 1:29:34David Tisch?

  When you, when you start in this industry, I feel like that's the ambition, a daily show that you can pontificate across the whole industry.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Yes, well, we're hoping, we're hoping to recruit you to be, you know, once a week, drop in. We will be your podcast.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  Yes, this is, this is actually like jokes aside, like the way that you like work for us is that when news breaks, you bring it to us. When, when, when something happens that you have an opinion on, you come on the show and you talk to us.

• 1:30:03David Tisch?

  You are elevating the venture capitalist way to, we don't have news, we don't have things that happen. I feel like you are really

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  What about, what about like the most complex and naughty geopolitical conflicts? I feel like you guys as a class are like the best in business.

• 1:30:19David Tisch?

  Overqualified to talk about it.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. So you, you want to stay away from politics.

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  All right. So let's start with, let's start with tariffs.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's start with tariffs, Iran, China, Russia. Let's just go down the list.

• 1:30:30David Tisch?

  Good day in the market. Everything's great here.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  Everything's great. Everything's great.

• 1:30:35David Tisch?

  Have you heard about the accordion effect to early stage? Because that's our famous early stage line of like, whatever happens in the latest stage market, it's like an accordion all the way to early stage. So it reverberates over the course of, you know, three to five years.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:30:50David Tisch?

  So we will not ever be impacted because the accordion basically never reaches early stage because something else will happen in the macro before then. Uh, which is a really nice, uh, don't ask us.

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  And there's no, there's no liquidity. So you can't panic sell it, even if, even if you wanted to.

• 1:31:06David Tisch?

  Fifteen years. That's a, that's a, that's a third accordion ripple.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, that like, there's no better example of that than, uh, we have SVB crisis. Uh, interest rates go up. It's the death of venture. We're hearing about, oh, GPs are going to be giving back LP capital. But then, well, well, well, would you hear about this AI trend? And all of a sudden it's time to rip checks.

• 1:31:29David Tisch?

  Saved us all.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Chatbots. Yeah. Wait, yeah. What, uh, wasn't there, this was sort of before my time, but there was a whole chatbot era, right? Wasn't there like

• 1:31:41David Tisch?

  Chatbot B1.

• 1:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, AI was like, it was supposed to be the thing. It was sort of right. It was just didn't have the, the underlying tech trend. Is that right?

• 1:31:51David Tisch?

  I feel like the tech wasn't there, but also the branding of chatbot to chat GPT isn't that different, but magically different from a outcome and sort of adoption curve. If you look like the automated chatbots, I think is what they were called for that moment in time. They all fell on their face because they weren't interesting enough, good enough. They were like pre-programmed answers. And then OpenAI releases, in essence, just an advanced version of that in many ways from a consumer positioning. And here we are. And so you are like, the idea of chatbot was right in how you're interacting with the tech. The tech, to your point, just wasn't good enough.

• 1:32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, 90% of chatbot founders quit right before they started.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Right before they sell the OpenAI.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  I mean, I don't know if I've actually, we should find some chatbot founder who stuck it out.

• 1:32:50David Tisch?

  So hugging face.

• 1:32:51John Coogan?

  Hugging face is the one. Yeah, that's right.

• 1:32:52David Tisch?

  Hugging face is the winner. They were in a bootcamp for chatbots.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:32:58David Tisch?

  And pivoted from a chatbot into hugging face. So that's your answer.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Yeah, we gotta have, it's Clement on the show.

• 1:33:04David Tisch?

  Yes.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah, we gotta have him on. That'd be great. So yeah, I mean, to get a little bit more serious, like, like, how are you processing this year? What are you actually excited about? What is fatiguing you in venture these days?

• 1:33:18David Tisch?

  We have our annual meeting tomorrow, so I'm in the middle of practicing our script on the market. So I can just try it.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Please. I love AGMs.

• 1:33:28David Tisch?

  Yeah. The, you know, the pre-liberation day, post-liberation day market speech is different in some way. But you really like, I don't know, you're investing at the earliest stage of a journey and trying to attach two people starting a company with big, long-term, 10, 15-year ambition to some moment in time macro or what today feels like an incredibly volatile macro, where you actually can't even understand what stability looks like or new framework like. It's impossible. And so the day-to-day job here is we meet people, we get really excited about what they're working on, we give them money,

• 1:34:13David Tisch?

  and we wait five, 10, 15 years to see how that all plays out. So the the investment moment of investing in an early-stage company feels totally decoupled from the macro of what's going on. The macro does impact the companies you invested in years ago as they come to market for more money, as they figure out their revenue retention. But the sort of day-to-day volatility, I don't think has an impact on our day-to-day job of funding great people, starting big ambitious visions.

• 1:34:48John Coogan?

  Do you think that there are going to be stories from this tariff cycle that are like what happened in COVID where everyone was like, Airbnb was particularly hurting as a startup. I mean, they were public at the time, but they were, I still think of them as like a YC company, right? And it seemed like that the story of Airbnb was like, COVID was a transformational moment for them, and they emerged like a stronger company than ever. Do you expect that to happen to any startups, maybe in your portfolio or just out there in the market that are getting beat up, but might emerge stronger than ever?

• 1:35:23David Tisch?

  So if you isolate tariffs, that has an impact on a subset of companies, very outside of software in many ways. I think there's software companies that involve logistics and shipping that definitely are impacted, but I don't know that the like come out of the tariff is a predictable framework. Like, what does that actually mean? Do we get to free trade? In reality, do we get to some equilibrium? Is this China only that we're talking about? And I think within there lies a very hard to foresee, again, point of stability, whereas at least in COVID, if you said we return to a a normal world,

• 1:36:07David Tisch?

  that was a more predictable endpoint. If you assume, you know, early in COVID, it was wait two weeks and then the world will start again. And then it was some longer period, but I think there was an appreciation for what coming out of it could look like. Whereas I think right now you're in like the creation period, harder to guess.

• 1:36:28David Tisch?

  You know, the the easy guess is like American manufacturing windfall, but that feels like a big stretch, like no one's building a factory overnight. I feel like that happens in other parts of the world, not here.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  It does feel like it could be a catalyst for the American dynamism companies, the reindustrialized companies that have been placing that bet and kind of hoping for just a little bit of a boost that you can see a lot of like, oh, that's series A company went to series B like a little bit earlier because of this narrative. And then that was enough to get them over an awkward hump, build some real infrastructure out and kind of like realize the vision.

• 1:37:06David Tisch?

  Well, I think

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  I've been like cautiously optimistic, but that's one of the dividends from this.

• 1:37:09Jordi Hays?

  If you're a super early stage investor, which which box group is, and then you're trying to time markets by being like, oh, there's tariffs. Let me make a bunch of supply chain related or manufacturing investments. But then the company's not going to mature for five to potentially 10 years. So it could be a totally different environment. And one example that that was relevant, we had the CEO of Astralis on last week, which I imagine you invested in like over at least over five years ago.

• 1:37:36David Tisch?

  13 years ago.

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  13 years ago.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  Overnight success. Oh, and that's like a good example of like, you couldn't have, you you thought that space was going to be important at the time and you liked

• 1:37:47David Tisch?

  We knew, actually, we're we're early stage VCs. We knew. We didn't think.

• 1:37:51Jordi Hays?

  Crystal ball.

• 1:37:52John Coogan?

  Crystal ball.

• 1:37:52David Tisch?

  Obviously, yes. No, I mean, like, if you think about AI, we're we're the earliest investor in a company called Clay. And Clay created a vision, had a product, and it was in need of AI for it to work. And and it wasn't created yet. And so if you watch this seven year overnight success, it clicked when the underlying technology caught up with what the go to market product was. And I think you see that a lot of the times that the founders who are early in a space and can see it through and wait for the world to come to them while they're sort of pushing the world to get there. That's where a lot of that magic is. And I think Astralis or ZipLine, again, 14 years ago, we funded ZipLine.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:38David Tisch?

  Is is another example.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  We are huge ZipLine shills now that we talked to the founder. I mean, what an incredible story.

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  We left, yeah, we left that conversation. We were basically like, wouldn't invest at any price.

• 1:38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, because, I mean, he he it's not just that he's been grinding it out for so long, but I feel like if you watch the launch video, like, He paints the, it's the opposite of the Black Mirror vision. It's a very positive vision of the future and it's something that, yeah, job's not finished. He's going to be doing that for 20, 30 years easily. Like, there's so much to do and, and now it's just a matter of manufacturing, scale, economics, all the basic stuff, but like, he's got the drive.

• 1:39:15David Tisch?

  We went to his office on a recent trip to San Francisco and I probably hadn't been in his office in a decade. And we walked in and it was just like this jaw dropping, American-built hardware, software combo. That you, like, you walked out of there and said, this is the beginning of a, another 15-year vision.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Was there, was there, you know, looking back at, at these companies like ZipLine, Astronis, was there ever a trend over the last, whatever, 15 years that you set, that you were tempted to go all in on? Because I imagine there was a lot of investors of that era that said, oh, space is so cool, I'm going all in on it. Climate tech is so cool, I'm gonna do this.

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  Bio, crypto.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Instant delivery.

• 1:40:04David Tisch?

  Just NFTs.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Just NFTs.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was the one. Yeah.

• 1:40:09David Tisch?

  No, I mean, we're generalists. We, we are founder-driven. We find people who have their own vision. I think us, as a, as a firm, we should never be in charge of coming up with ideas. We're not, that's not our job. Our job is to give people who have dreams, capital and, and support to help them. John, your company, I think, is the single most heavily debated internal decision we'd ever made at Box Group. From a moral standpoint, we had to like decide if it was good or bad. And so that was interesting. So we almost pivoted into drugs.

• 1:40:51David Tisch?

  That was an opportunity for us. But, no, I, like,

• 1:40:56David Tisch?

  The world pivoted to AI, right? So I think two years ago, we were saying like 30 to 40% of the companies we see talk about AI or are oriented around AI. Last year was like 90 and this year it's 170%. You don't meet non-AI companies right now. And if they're not AI first, it's we're attacking an industry by bringing AI to it.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:21David Tisch?

  Which is slower and stale. And I think that is a forced all-in versus a sort of opted all-in.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Does, do the different business models that seem to be emerging, does that change the way you're underwriting these investments? I'm thinking about highly capex intensive businesses where you're just expecting a ton of dilution, or we've seen some companies that are kind of just doing like private equity style rollups, but they're raising from venture capital. And I imagine if you're not careful with ProRata or how you're sizing your bets, like it could, it could turn out to be like, ah, we really didn't get the full bite at the apple. But is that something that even matters to you or is it just like back the founder and we'll figure it out?

• 1:42:03David Tisch?

  Private equity rollups in venture always ends well. Definitely.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, we like to say private equity is just not a mature business. And so there's lots of opportunity for tech to come in and disrupt.

• 1:42:15David Tisch?

  No good competition in that area.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Famously not, famously not cutthroat. Famously not cutthroat.

• 1:42:21David Tisch?

  They're happy to leave all that money on the table.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Just dollars on the floor for VCs to come pick up, right? Jordy?

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I was more, how was, has there ever, you know, it feels like over the last two years, call it, there's been more of these sort of rollups than ever before. Was there, was there another, was there another kind of like general like market wide crack? Or was it just sort of like individual areas? And opportunities.

• 1:42:52David Tisch?

  I struggle to think that the way to build companies is to replicate another company that's succeeding. In these moments, what you tend to have is one winner and a bunch of followers that don't win. And so can there be a single version of a roll up? If you look at Andorol, they're great at acquisitions. That's a different phrasing of the word roll up. Roll up is either we're going to buy a bunch of things that are the same size or we're going to buy like one big thing and then tuck in some other smaller things around it. So I think unpacking the nuance in these words is more important than assuming a general like success across a wide variety of companies.

• 1:43:34David Tisch?

  I think the like moment in time where you probably saw fast followers or fast movers win was in the on-demand business, right? When Uber trained the world that you could touch something on your phone and something in the real world would happen, it unlocked like a behavior across the world that was very different, right? And that was this phone to real world connection that I think opened up a ton of other businesses. I don't think they all worked, but I do think that that was a horizontal opening versus a business model innovation that has been used in other industries or financial industries and then applied in venture.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the idea, the classic sort of like accounting firm roll up. When I look at that, it's like when it's been two weeks and my like CPA is not like on it or like is not, you know, like clearly like, you know, is busy with other clients. I'm like, it's not like, it's not like I want to switch immediately, but I'm pretty quickly. And so the idea that you're just going to buy like 20 accounting firms and then slap AI on it and not have like 90% churn is just interesting.

• 1:44:47David Tisch?

  But have you tried AI? I mean, it's pretty good.

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's pretty, you know, it's only going to get it wrong 5% of the time and that's going to cost you millions, but yeah.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  This is a topic that Jordi and I have been debated and it's kind of related to Uber opening the mindset of like this delivery boom.

• 1:45:07John Coogan?

  Chat GPT rappers, it's been derided as a term. We've now seen the VS code fork wars, but it looks like there's a chance that OpenAI buys Windsurf for 3 billion. And I've been going back and forth with Jordy about this, like, is this game on for M and A in the rapper market? Because if OpenAI, who has, you know, great team, lots of money, can't like build it and they want to buy it, then do we see Anthropic? Do we see XAI buying stuff? Do we see Amazon, all of the Mag7 buy stuff? And then maybe even, you know, you get into some of the just Fortune 500 companies that want to buy startups. And so I'm in this weird scenario where I've been somewhat accepting

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  of the idea that a rapper might not be a power law outcome, but everyone involved in Windsurf, if this deal goes through, will do very well. And so what is your take on on that market? And does this need to shift?

• 1:46:02Jordi Hays?

  My take was broadly that like, this is highly strategic for OpenAI, but that doesn't mean every rapper, even if they have a lot of traction and revenue, is like suddenly strategic to a wide range of buyers, right?

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:15David Tisch?

  I think, I think in my, in my 15 years doing this, the thing I've under asked, or I overrated was the amount of M and A that would happen. I think if you go back in the early growth of like this era, if you look at, you know, anything from, you know, Facebook and before that, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, on their way up, they bought tens, if not hundred plus companies. And a lot of that was for stock. And it was stock that appreciated post-acquisition, incredibly valuable for both the company and the founders who sold. And I think if you look at the next wave of startups, a dramatic decrease

• 1:46:56David Tisch?

  in M and A, because instead of buy, you build. And the Aqua hire didn't prove out to be the best use of equity. A lot of the, the decision of buy versus build became easier as, as you thought about where to innovate. I think in Sort of getting at your question, I hope we're entering a period of M and A. I think the easy way to rationalize it is the valuations of some of these companies that you mentioned are so big that they can afford to buy companies for substantial amounts that might actually align with the founder of the acquired's expectations. And I think that's where one of the other mismatch was happening is that the company

• 1:47:38David Tisch?

  that wanted to buy another company was just not able to hit the price and so they didn't happen. And so I think one way to rationalize it is whether it's the big seven or the scaled AI companies have big enough valuations to go out and buy things for numbers that will hit a founder's expectation, which I think would unlock, you know, a lot of, a lot of positive things in this ecosystem. One is liquidity, but two is like, there, there isn't really an answer to how do things end right now for a ton of companies and M and A is the piece that's been missing to me the most. It gets less discussed and I think Fortune 500 companies need to modernize, right?

• 1:48:20David Tisch?

  And we saw that pressure 10 years ago when you heard like, all the non-tech companies are going to become tech companies. And then the public markets punish you on a quarter by quarter basis. And it's like, forget that, we're not going to do any of that. But I think today, AI might be such a dramatic forcing function that smart, big companies need to move quickly to get ahead of the curve. So optimism.

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that by verse, you, you mentioned, you know, these super acquisitive companies, maybe 15 years ago, and then that changed. Do you think that was a factor? I mean, you guys basically, Plaid was built out of your guys' office. There's a lot of, there's been so much infrastructure built during the Plaid era. Do you think that that was part of the calculus for some of these bigger, you know, companies that would have been acquirers, but they said, hey, like, We could buy this tech and then maybe try to integrate it, or we could get this team and do it. Or, hey, this infrastructure exists and we can just build it.

• 1:49:19David Tisch?

  You have so many factors. Like, the biggest one to me is that the government didn't want big tech to buy more companies. And so if they were going to buy companies, they had to be like the biggest ones, not this. Like, they were going to fight the regulatory fights on big companies, not on small ones. And that dried a lot of it up. And then I think the valuation expectations was the other friction. When a startup decided they were worth a half a billion dollars and the potential acquirers wanted to buy them for a hundred million dollars, that was no longer interesting. And so it just, it decoupled rationality from playing out in the M and A world, right? You have to have like a buyer and seller meet on price in order for the deal to even get going.

• 1:50:04David Tisch?

  And I think that's where the biggest gap was. Plaid sold, right? Plaid sold and the government stopped it. And I think that that was, you know, to me, a interesting moment in the government getting involved in something that was debatable. And I think it also tells big companies, like, don't waste your time trying to get these things through. And that slows down a whole wave of potential M and A.

• 1:50:29John Coogan?

  Interesting. I don't know if, if the M and A market relates to what you're seeing on the LP side, but we've heard that there might be some fatigue from LPs on what's going on in venture. But at the same time, it feels like that David Goggins meme where, you know, venture just keeps on chugging no matter what. You're going to the AGM. What, what are you seeing broadly in terms of LP appetite for ever bigger venture funds?

• 1:50:57David Tisch?

  We're a small adorable seed fund based in New York City. So I, we are not, we are not responsible to answer that question. I think our, like, your job, if you take LP capital, is to give them back a lot of money one day. And I think if you haven't.

• 1:51:14David Tisch?

  You you owe that to them. And so at some point, the patience should run out. And I I appreciate that. I think the challenge is the time for liquidity in early-stage venture has gotten pushed significantly from where it was more predictable a decade or two decades ago. You could say seven to 10 years on an early-stage fund and mean it. Today, I think you say seven to 10 years. And you're like, by that, I mean, like, 12 to 15.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:42David Tisch?

  And that that's a substantial difference.

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:45David Tisch?

  And I think you need to align with your investors on what that timeline is because it's in a rational timeline. Like, the people we fund, if you go back 15 years, they were like pre elementary school for the most part. Right? Like, if you look at the young founder that you're investing in today, a 15-year timeline is two-thirds of a life. Like, it's an irrational number. And so these, like, the go-in motion of making an investment to the return the fund to LP's timeline is so decoupled from, I think, a psychological standpoint that your stakeholders are just dramatically unrelatable.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  On that, on the topic of like, young founders, how has the early-stage market evolved? There's a, it feels like there's a lot new, a lot more products, like YC is bigger than ever. But then there's also Z Fellows, there's different fellowships. There's people that are just giving away money to people to, like, go try a startup and then maybe I'll invest later. And obviously, the Teal Fellowship is kind of like a scaled version of that, but there's a lot of other, you know, initiatives. How has that changed your strategy? Has it changed your strategy at all? And kind of like, what what does the early-stage market look for you, look like for you today?

• 1:53:02David Tisch?

  I think there, like, there's always been these splashes of noise. And Very, very little, like if you go back again, I'm old and so I've been doing this through these microwaves of change in the early stage market. Very few products stay where they are. They move in different directions. They either get later. So if you think about new entrances as funds into the early stage market. Most of the ambition is to become a bigger fund. And in doing so, you become later by nature of scaling your business. And I think on a product side, you're only as good as the product you're offering.

• 1:53:45David Tisch?

  And so what has been amazing to me about Y C is they've just continued to compound quality of the satisfaction to their customer. They are, they are not free, right? You're giving Y C equity. And yet, if you look at like the happiness factor, the MPS or whatever cheesy acronym you call reviews, but like people go to Y C because other people who went to Y C loved it and they think it was entirely worth it. And so I think the products that get invented need to live up to the cost. And if the cost is free, like nothing is really free. And so what comes with that freedom? Is that attaching to a brand? And if you attach your company to a brand, is that a good thing to have done?

• 1:54:29David Tisch?

  Or is there some negative externality that comes with that? And so I think, and it's probably not the endpoint for the, the products that are offering free capital to be free forever. I would assume that's a hard thing to scale. And so I think you have to just like, as a company aligning yourself with the brand, the trusted brands have proven to be trusted for a reason and the, the new ones need to earn that. And I think there are some that have been around long enough where you find good examples of quality coming from them. And those are the ones that I would tend to trust more.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  You've been in the game for a long time. Can you tell me the story of your first investment ever?

• 1:55:12David Tisch?

  Yeah, our Box Group is named after our first investment. So it's like a combination. So the first investment's a company called Boxi. It was a Roku competitor.

• 1:55:27David Tisch?

  We were in their seed round as an adorable check. I didn't want to write my name as an angel investor, so I created an LLC called Box Group to invest in Boxi, which made me feel bigger. The box was like a cool nightclub in the city at the time. Felt like a cool word. I've looked with Aaron Levy. He registered box.net like two months before I did Box Group, which I'm bitter about, so why, he'll sue me and it's all over.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  Well, he's been on the shows too, so he can come on and debate you for it.

• 1:56:01David Tisch?

  Yeah, well, we're all collaborative in this world anyway. No competitors. So, you know, Boxi gets funded, followed on by Fred Wilson. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm amazing at this. I gotta read that guy's blog. This is so cool. And then General Catalyst came in and then Avner, the founder, went in front of Congress to like fight the cable companies. So it was like an amazing first investment to like see the narrative of a startup. They sold to Samsung and they were built into like the Samsung smart TV technology. But the idea was right and the timing was challenging. They had to fight every single battle on behalf of the people that came after them.

• 1:56:45David Tisch?

  And I think that that was a really good lesson.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Is, is, do you see, you have a ton of portfolio companies?

• 1:56:55David Tisch?

  Too many, probably.

• 1:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Too many, I'm sure, to manage. Do you see?

• 1:57:00Jordi Hays?

  And CaseText is one of them, which is an interesting example because that was a company that no one...

• 1:57:07David Tisch?

  Nine-year overnight success.

• 1:57:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'll hit the overnight success.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  But are you seeing that across?

• 1:57:18David Tisch?

  Can we get a soundboard for our like meet companies meetings?

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Oh, we definitely should.

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you should.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  Handshake deal.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Raise your forecasts.

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:29David Tisch?

  There's an internal bingo that we run that every time they say buzzwords, we.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  We're preempting.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  But how do you, how do you think of AI in the context of the portfolio broadly? Are there, are there a bunch of examples where it's kind of creating new momentum in the business? Or like tons of new opportunity or, and you know, I look at this like, you know, I have 50 odd personal investments.

• 1:57:55David Tisch?

  All them will work.

• 1:57:56Jordi Hays?

  All them will work. I'm sure they've all been marked up. So, so I'm sure.

• 1:57:59David Tisch?

  That's what this employer website told me, which I was like, oh, I can be 98% successful.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  98% hit rate. But, but, uh, you know, how often are you seeing it sort of, uh, create momentum versus momentum? Just being something that once you lose it, it's really hard to kind of get it back. If you're not getting, you know, sort of lucky.

• 1:58:20David Tisch?

  I mean, Case Tech is like the most amazing story. What a grinder into, uh, just being early in the right way. And I think to Jake's credit, he was always like the smartest person in the room and figured out how AI could come into what they were building in a differentiated way and like split a team off, built a product, got to market first, um, in an industry that was ready for it. And so I think it's this, and he landed like, he landed an outcome that he changed his life and changed the team's life. And I think like a unique story. We're now like three years past that you're early to the game.

• 1:59:02David Tisch?

  And so if you haven't figured out how to take your stale product or your product that's maxed out and begin to, uh, re-energize it, it feels like you're a little late. There are those stories and I think Clay is the other side of it where it, AI happened and Clay, benefited from sort of the, the speed of it and now is running. But I think within the portfolio, there are companies that benefit from pieces of it. And whether that's on the cost-saving side or the growth side, I think you can find examples of everything. But it's within the verticals that I find the most interesting momentum just being recreated, right?

• 1:59:46David Tisch?

  It's companies that are servicing customers. And in some way, if they can be the deliverer of AI to an industry that can't get it themselves, that's a really big opportunity. And I think CaseDex sort of represents that.

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  It's awesome. Thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation.

• 2:00:02David Tisch?

  Wait, I came on here to promote something.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us the call to action.

• 2:00:06David Tisch?

  The Howard Stern of tech. And so when you go on Howard, you have to promote, or like the late night shows, you have to promote. So we have a conference that we're putting on with Union Square and First Round and Lox in New York called Founders NYC. And it's foundersnyc.co. It's free, which is different than most conferences. It's for people who want to start a company. We got the founders of Datadog and Mongo talking to each other on stage. Sort of, to me, a collection of all the big, great, early companies that were built and scaled in New York coming on stage. To just like, sort of create the community effect of building here. And so if you're...

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you want to take a, do you want to take a victory lap on NYC? Just generally, I feel like... No, no, no, I'm just saying, when you, when you started Box Group, a lot of people, like, maybe, maybe...

• 2:00:56David Tisch?

  No one had heard of, we're like the, the, you know, pioneers of New York City.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, no one had heard of New York City before you.

• 2:01:02David Tisch?

  There was that era.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  But it was true about tech, right?

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  The amount of, the amount of the capital concentration in New York City right now is incredible. It feels like it's never been more...

• 2:01:11David Tisch?

  We're like the pioneers that discovered Miami in the COVID era.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.

• 2:01:17David Tisch?

  No, but look, I think New York's a home for people that want to win. And I think whatever you do in New York, it's, it's like an incredibly harsh environment. And in order to stand out and win in New York, you have to fight friction. No one cares, right? And that's what's actually fascinating to me about tech in New York is like, if you went on a subway or to the restaurant nearby, nobody cares what you're doing. Like, no one cares about your business, no one cares about tech. And I think that friction creates people to have to fight a bigger fight here. Because there's not momentum, like, there's not somebody pulling you up and saying, like, we're all in this together. And so I, I think the community here is, is just like,

• 2:01:59David Tisch?

  people put their head down and grind and it's produced some real success. And we're excited to put it all on stage.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:02:08David Tisch?

  Well, thank you guys very much for having me. I'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  We'll see you back. We'll see you back here. Cheers.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Humble giant. Yeah. Overnight success himself. Yeah. Well, next up, we got Mike Vernal coming in from Conviction. Very excited to talk to him. We'll bring him in from the waiting room now. Mike, are you there? Can you hear me? How are you doing?

• 2:02:32Speaker 04

  I'm good, thanks. How are you two?

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  We're fantastic. Great to have you. It's a, yeah, it's a wonderful Monday. I hope your Easter was well. If you celebrate, I hope your weekend was great and I hope you're off to a great start of the week.

• 2:02:45Speaker 04

  Thanks. It was great. Yeah.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to kick, kick it off with just a little bit of, a little bit of background on your career and then what you're excited about today. And then we can kind of go from there. Does that sound good?

• 2:03:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it sounds great.

• 2:03:03Speaker 04

  So let's see, I, my career, I've been, I've been an investor for the past decade. Kind of an accidental investor. I never aspired to this, but I, I sort of, I spent 15 years operating. I was at Facebook for many years and decided to give it a try. And it's been great. So I've been an investor for the past decade.

• 2:03:27Speaker 04

  I am like, I'm very motivated just by like individual founders and folks that I find compelling. And so like a pretty broad set of companies. So like a mix of. Consumer and like SaaS and hardware and infrastructure and some others. Some of the larger companies are companies like Rippling and Notion and Verkata and Clay and a couple others.

• 2:03:49John Coogan?

  We just heard about Clay. Yeah, we just heard about Clay. David Tisch from Box.

• 2:03:55Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  He was saying about how Clay was this overnight success that took seven years, but as they usually do. I'd love to know the story of the first investment that really made you catch the bug. Obviously, you were at Facebook for a long time, but then at some point you were like, I got a knack for this and I'm going to take it more seriously.

• 2:04:15Speaker 04

  You know, I made a handful of angel investments before I formally became an investor. But they were, I think in retrospect, they're actually like, they're pretty reasonable. Like, I only made a handful. I probably made like seven or eight. One of them was Notion, which is probably the best of the bunch, but like Wealthfront, it was like Notion and Wealthfront and this company called Human Interest, which is like a 401(k) provider and a couple others. Sayen?

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  I'm randomly friends with Jeff Schneebly, who runs the company now. It's a fascinating story because it was a YC company and then he came in as like a founder mode CEO, but he had like, like his background, I mean, I love him, but it's like not super, he didn't start the company. He has a MBA and I believe he has a PhD and he's almost like a manager mode type of guy, but he's been fantastically successful with the company and I'm just the biggest fan. Anyway, sorry.

• 2:05:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think none of them really motivated me to do it. It was more, I, so I was lucky enough to join Facebook when it was relatively early, like a few hundred people, and I was there for eight or nine years. And I led a mix of sort of product and engineering at the company. And I was, my wife and I had our first kid and it was the first time that I took like six weeks off for paternity leave and it was a little bit of a. It was like the first chance to catch my breath in eight or nine years and I was trying to figure out like what I wanted to do next. And the obvious thing would have been to stay at Facebook and Facebook is, was, and I think

• 2:05:58Speaker 04

  still is, just one of the most amazing companies out there. But I'd gotten to know a guy named Brian Schreier at Sequoia and Brian was, Brian had actually backed two of my close friends at the Series A, a guy named Matt McGinnis, who's now the COO at Rippling.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:06:13Speaker 04

  And Steve Garrity at a company called Hearsay. And Brian had kind of said, if at some point you decide to pop your head up and do something else, you should come, come talk to us. And so one thing led to another and I ended up at Sequoia. And it was a little bit of an experiment to just see if investing was, would be fun and interesting. And as it turns out, it is both fun and interesting, so.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  How did you, you know, people talk about quote unquote operate, you know, investors love to say if they've spent, you know, two years at a company, they love to say they've had operating experience. You had some very real operating experience at Facebook. How did you feel, how did you feel, how durable were the learnings from the true operating experience versus finding sort of common truths about the way to do business and the way to build products and teams that, you know, because, because I've found like, for example, like the influencer marketing that I maybe did in 2016, like no longer works, right?

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Yet there were things that I learned in that era that, you know, I still use today, right? So how do you kind of delineate like, you know, sort of like- Like a higher level of abstraction. Yeah, higher level, sort of these sort of Lindy ways of doing things that are durable and valuable to communicate to entrepreneurs that you back.

• 2:07:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a great question. I will say one thing that I think I learned that still applies and one thing I had no clue about, which I didn't learn until like the investing side of things. I think one thing, one thing that's underrated, maybe it's not underrated, about Mark at Facebook is he's incredibly patient. I mean, I guess you kind of see it. I think he's like spent $80 billion so far on like Reality Labs. Yeah. But I think, you know, he is, he is at the same time both like patient and impatient. I mean, everyone talks about like the move fast break things and I think there is like a very strong bias towards action and just like getting, getting stuff done.

• 2:08:13Speaker 04

  But he also like, from a first principles perspective, kind of if something should work, like if something logically makes sense, he will just keep playing it out to try to, until there's like new data that suggests that it, that it is wrong, which I think explains a lot of the Reality Labs investment. And I think, like, I think one thing that's underappreciated about like, a lot of great companies, maybe it's appreciated, I don't know, but like, they take a long time. Like, I mean, some companies are really fast enough to the races, but like, you know, Figma was like four or five years before it started to work. Notion was like four or five years before it started to work. Clay was four or five years before it started to work.

• 2:08:56Speaker 04

  I think Airtable like was founded in 2010 and didn't really sort of break out until maybe 2017, 2018. I mean, all those sort of the PLG companies, you know, everyone's, everyone says they like want to be a PLG company, which to me is like, yes, I want to be a high-growth company. That is a...

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to have to do sales. I want to grow quickly without doing sales, too.

• 2:09:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like, I also want to be born, rich and handsome, but you know, what are you going to do? The, it's, it, it takes, I mean, these companies just take a lot of bake time and I think, I think if you've operated for a while and you've seen how...

• 2:09:34Speaker 04

  Like if you viscerally understand patience and like if you're doing random stuff, or if you're like literally there's no hope, then you should probably throw in the towel. But in a lot of cases, if you're doing the right thing and it just hasn't hit yet, you just kind of sort of you got to play out some more cards. And I do think I've observed a lot of financial investors having a like if it's not up into the right three months in, it's like, oh, man, we made a mistake and like, what the hell are you doing? Or I was talking to a founder recently who has like a financial investor on the board now, and they were like, your competitor is, you know, at five million in ARR, why aren't you at five million in ARR yet?

• 2:10:17Speaker 04

  Which is like, I get it on one level, but on another level, like you just got to, I think, I think you got to make sure you're doing the right thing and sort of doing it in the right way. So I think that was one lesson that definitely carried over for operating, which I think you kind of don't have until, I think it's correlated with people who have done it and sort of understand the messiness of building something. I will say conversely, at both, I mean, I was at Microsoft before Facebook, and in both cases, you're pretty insulated from like the market you're operating in. Like, I think, once you get to a certain scale, the, you're kind of just thinking

• 2:11:02Speaker 04

  about how to build new things for your existing customers as opposed to how to really like start in brand new markets. And so I had no real intuition for how to like evaluate a business and whether it was a good business or a bad business, and if it was, how to think about the, like, I, there were obviously sales and marketing teams at both Microsoft and Facebook, but you don't really build an intuition for how to like attack a new business category, I think, unless you've worked at a startup. So that was all new to me.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  I have a question. I've, I've heard founders bring up the example of Figma as a company that took a long time to get a product out into the market and get, you know, traction. It was, what, it was like four or five years until the first million of ARR. And I've heard founders use that as a reference point and be like, We're doing the Figma thing. Like, it's gonna take a while. And I'm like, no, you're not. They were doing something that was like fundamentally, you know, very technically difficult leveraging a new technology when there was no, not a, they were operating in a space that maybe wasn't hot for different reasons, like, you know, sort of cloud design collaboration, you know, you, you had,

• 2:12:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there was other players, but they had sort of four years to be.

• 2:12:19John Coogan?

  Multiplayer wasn't a trend.

• 2:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Multiplayer wasn't a thing. They sort of created that. So what, what would you say to founders that, that tell you, you know, oh yeah, we're doing this, but then you look at the market and you say, well, you have four or five other companies that are, have sort of more advanced feature sets, uh, maybe, and are highly, you know, it's highly competitive and, um, I feel like that, having the opportunity to do the Figma thing is like a luxury of being like very.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  You gotta earn that. You gotta be Dylan to, to earn that.

• 2:12:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I, I don't think, yeah, if anyone came in and said it was gonna take like four or five years to build Figma, I don't, one, I don't think anyone would build Figma. Two, I don't think anyone would fund Figma. Um, I, I think there's an element of, um, like you, you have to, I think you have to be moving quickly in the short term. Like anyone, you know, sometimes founders will come in and say, I mean, what is it? It's April and they will be like, oh yeah, we will be ready to launch at the end of the year. And unless you're like taping out silicon or something, that, that scares the crap out of me because I don't know. There's a lot of time between now and the end of the year. Um, and so I, I think you

• 2:13:29Speaker 04

  want someone that is just like iterating at an insane clock speed and like learning at every iteration. And I think those iterations have to be pretty fast, but like sometimes you just don't know when it's going to start to catch. And so I, I know the Figma story less well than, than some of these others, but it's, you know, uh, you're just talking to David and you.

• 2:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, Notion, Notion's a good example too, right?

• 2:13:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  They were toiling away, you know, doing some, you know, in, in relative obscurity till they found the thing that really was magical.

• 2:14:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, one of my favorite set of videos, you can find it online, is there's like a Notion product demo from I think late 2013. And it's this, it's like this low-code, no-code environment. There's all these blocks. There's like a Stripe block, so you can like drop payments in. Like, it's a pretty, it's a, it's a pretty wild demo. Because you see like the through line from today to what it was back then. And it's clear like all the ideas are basically the same. It's like this canvas and it's got blocks and you can drop all this stuff in. But of course, like the first iteration was like wildly complex and no one, no one really used it, other than like a handful of like diehard folks that, that, that, that figured it out.

• 2:14:47Speaker 04

  And so of course, like the rethinking of it was, okay, make this like an insanely great no-taking app and then go from there, no-taking to Ricky and the like. And Notion's an interesting example, because I think there's like incredible stubbornness on the vision. And I think like what Ivan has been trying to build has like not changed in 12 or 13 years. But there was like a lot of flexibility on tactics. And it was like, okay, this thing didn't work. Let's try it again. Let's try it again until something caught. And I think that's kind of the, like, the, the art of it is like have a really clear vision of where you're like, what you're trying to build over a five to 10-year window. And then, but just move insanely quickly and be willing to like constantly change tactics.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  I've been super excited about the idea of a email client built, ground up around AI.

• 2:15:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  It seems like an obvious startup idea. We saw like the, the mailbox era where Dropbox bought mailbox and there was a new email client startup every few years. Now we're in this dangerous territory where, you know, you have a company like Notion where founder mode, CEO, at the helm, plenty of resources, clearly not asleep at the wheel, understands what AI is capable of. But as a, as a product manager or just a user of email, how do you think about AI in the context of email? What are you hoping for? I have an idea in my head of what I want, but I think I might be wrong. Just because that's the nature of these things. So how would you break down that problem? How do you think about AI email?

• 2:16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, actually, this is one I've thought a decent amount about. Actually, in the beginning, so if I go back like two years ago, two and a half years ago, my like theory of the world of like what would be interesting to invest in was there's kind of like three levels of the stack. There's kind of like the foundation models at the problem. There's all at the bottom, there's like dev tools and infrastructure in the middle, and then there's like applications at the top.

• 2:16:41Speaker 04

  And I was like generally pretty pessimistic on the dev tools and infrastructure space because I think it's just moving really quickly. At the app, the application layer seemed like the obvious place to invest, and you can kind of subdivide the application layer into like, I would say like head, torso, and tail, or like horizontal and vertical, however you want to split it.

• 2:17:02Speaker 04

  And I was actually pretty skeptical at the time. Like, it was clear to me, like, I should not be writing my own emails in 2025, or to like a very small degree, like, there is a massive amount of corpus. I've had like a Gmail account for 21 years at this point. Like, it should just be able to write every single email for me. But it's 2025, and I'm still writing my own emails. Like, it maybe gives me like two-word completions.

• 2:17:26Speaker 04

  And I think I have two conclusions from this. One is like the large tech companies are just, I think, way too risk averse to build anything good here. Like, I, like, this, Google must be able to build this. Like, it's just, it seems like a very trivial problem. I assume like the risk of me accidentally saying something really offensive in email is just too high for them to launch anything here.

• 2:17:52Speaker 04

  And so, I, like, and I think that's kind of true writ large. Like, there is also, like, there is not a great assistant experience yet. Like, Siri is still pretty bad. You can get, like, the Meta AI assistant is actually pretty good if you're wearing like the Meta glasses, but you have to wear the glasses to use it.

• 2:18:11Speaker 04

  And so, I actually think the horizontal, like, experiences are addressable by startups now because I think the big tech companies are just going to be too conservative. And then in terms of like the experience that I want, I mean, I don't actually want

• 2:18:29Speaker 04

  I don't really want, I'm like pretty good at email. I'm like, I'm a very diligent person. I like go through all of my emails. I get a lot of them. Reading them is like pretty fast. I don't need it to be summarized. If someone sends me a really long email, like I'm probably not going to read it anyway. Like I don't need it summarized. Like it is a negative signal if you send a very long email. The, the hard work is replying to them. And if something could just give, like, read the thing and like write exactly what I was going to write, that would be an amazing experience, especially if I worked on mobile, because like composing on mobile is a total pain in the ass.

• 2:19:03Speaker 04

  So I'm amazed someone hasn't built that yet. It, it doesn't seem, like, there seem like there are a lot of hard problems out there. That does not seem like the hardest problem.

• 2:19:11Speaker 04

  And so I'm, I don't know, I'm surprised.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're, I mean, we're seeing a lot of like, uh, bolt-on AI narratives in the public markets. Uh, are you seeing, uh, the AI narratives, uh, take hold in the fundraising around like scale-ups, growth-stage companies that aren't AI-native companies, but they make so much sense in the context of, of AI?

• 2:19:41Speaker 04

  I don't know. That's a good question. Um, I like, I think AI is like very core

• 2:19:49Speaker 04

  to Notion, for instance. And so I think Notion has like a, has like a very deep advantage here. Um, and I think it's just like the next evolution of Notion. I think, um, I don't know, I don't know if I have enough data points on this. I mean, the thing about AI, in my view, is like, it is not to, I never went to business school, so I may get the definitions of all this wrong. It's a layperson's understanding. But like, in the sustaining versus disruptive innovation, I think AI is like pretty clearly a sustaining innovation in almost all cases. I think it like might be disruptive to Google. And so, assuming like a scale-up is still competent and can still build new product, I think they can just kind of, uh, adopt this stuff as opposed to being disrupted by it.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the, uh, Salesforce for mobile was just Salesforce.

• 2:20:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:39John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, you could imagine that Salesforce AI winds up working, potentially, or at least, uh, they'll, they'll hold on to that for a while. But, uh, it is, it is a fun time, because at least, at, at the very least, it's like a new battle for everyone to fight out, like, uh, you know. The Gmail team needs to pay attention because Notion's coming for them. I love to see it.

• 2:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you recommend sabbaticals?

• 2:21:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I most definitely do. I had never, so I had like worked continuously from when I was 14 years old. I like worked at a startup in high school and college and then I took off like a week between college and Microsoft and like three days between Microsoft and Facebook and a week between, maybe it was 10 days between Facebook and Sequoia. I took off almost two years. I say took off because I kept like 15 boards and so I was on like 30 hours of board meetings and one on ones a week, but it was still amazing. I got to like play baseball with my kids almost every day. And now they're pretty good at baseball. I knew nothing about baseball and so now I know something.

• 2:21:47Speaker 04

  And I was, I think I was terrified that I would just be like irrelevant after taking some time off, but I don't know, maybe I am.

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Still got it.

• 2:21:56Speaker 04

  But it was like, it was very.

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  Still got it.

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Still got it.

• 2:21:58Speaker 04

  It was amazing. And I just like, I would rather, like getting to hang out with my kids is like the best thing in the world, so.

• 2:22:05Jordi Hays?

  I feel like saying that you're on a sabbatical allows you to release the FOMO, which like as an investor, there's probably no stronger force, right? It's like the founder wants to talk and.

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  Oh, I should probably take this call.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Why, why conviction and why partner with Sarah? I have a bunch of like, you know, guesses, but I'm assuming you could have basically gone anywhere, you know, any firm, you know, raised 500 million out the gates on your own, you know, whatever. So curious to hear.

• 2:22:39Speaker 04

  Well, I've known Sarah for a long time, almost a decade, though I recently discovered that she sent me like a LinkedIn message in like December 2016, which I did not see until like two weeks ago.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:22:51Speaker 04

  But I thankfully ran into her in other contexts and I think my theory on, I'd spent a bunch of time thinking about emerging managers and like what is the right strategy for starting a new firm. And I think, I think one thing that is underappreciated, or maybe I certainly underappreciated for a long time, is the degree to which like venture firms, you know, there's this funny thing where like. People who work in venture kind of get like a little bit ruffled when you call their thing a company instead of a firm, because it's not a company, it's a firm. But you know what, like firms and companies are like first cousins, and they're all just organizations.

• 2:23:34Speaker 04

  And I think that, you know, if you're doing a startup, generally you don't say, I have an exception to this, but generally you don't say like, I'm just gonna go like build the next Google, like that that seems like a kind of crazy thing to do. You like you start off with a market that seems kind of small, you dominate that market, then you expand to like the next tier of market and the next tier of market, and suddenly you built something gigantic. And I think the same thing is true in venture, like it's hard to just go out of the gate and be like, I'm going to be the next gigantic global multi-stage firm. I think you gotta like pick a market and go dominate that market and then sort of expand from there.

• 2:24:14Speaker 04

  And if you look at over the past like 10, 15, 20 years, the folks that I think have done this well, it's like Matt at Paradigm with crypto, it's Mickey at Ribbit with fintech. And so I, you know, AI was clearly gonna be A thing. The most important thing over like the next 10 or 20 years. And so I think building a firm focused on AI and intelligent software and becoming the sort of preferred partner for founders in that category, and then expanding from there seemed like the optimal strategy. And I think that's very much the founding thesis of conviction, and I think like Sarah

• 2:24:57Speaker 04

  and Pava and the team here were off to an amazing start. So I've known them for a while, I think the thesis makes a ton of sense. And it's really fun. I think like one thing that is underappreciated in venture, back to this like firms versus company thing, is like venture is fundamentally predicated on the idea that there are things that like a two-year-old startup can do that like are hard for a 50-year-old company. But then when you like, but venture is like not always that introspective about itself. So I think there is a belief that there are things that like a two, three, four-year-old startup that is in founder mode can do that maybe a 30, 40, 50, 60, 70-year-old venture firm cannot.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  So when's the IPO? I know Drayson's going out, General Catalyst we're hearing rumors about.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Conviction, Q4.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  I'd like to see them in Q4.

• 2:25:47Jordi Hays?

  How have you, what's your broad, I'd love to give you a few minutes to talk about enterprise adoption of AI. We talked last week about how Johnson and Johnson had basically piloted, you know, 30 plus different AI tools.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  Wasn't it like 600?

• 2:26:04Jordi Hays?

  It might have been like 300. I might have it off by like an order of magnitude. It was like, they basically tried hundreds of tools across different teams.

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  It was called like the Thousand Flowers Program.

• 2:26:13Jordi Hays?

  And then they've just been, you know, basically culling, you know, a bunch of stuff that was cool but didn't quite work. What are you seeing as somebody who is, I'm sure at times a big buyer on the other side at Facebook?

• 2:26:28Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, certainly there are things that are working, like obviously Cursor. Cursor is working in a gigantic way. I think Harvey's working in a gigantic way. Decagon and Sierra seem like they're doing really, really well. I caught some of the conversation you were having with David right before this, and you guys were talking about rappers a little bit. I like, I don't love the term rappers. And to me, there's like, back to like the bottom, middle, top thing. You can kind of, like, if you're going to build an interesting company, I think you either have to attack it from, you have the handful of researchers that can literally push this state of the art forward, which is like maybe eight organizations in the world.

• 2:27:12Speaker 04

  Or you know and understand and like love and can serve a type of customer better than anyone else in the world and just like build down from the customers. You're either like building up from the technology or building down from the customer.

• 2:27:28Speaker 04

  And so I, I mean, I think that the companies that are working, I think, just like deep, just have really good taste and like deeply understand what their buyers, like what the customers need and are figuring out how to like adapt the technology to that. And then I think there's a bunch of folks that are like, not, are kind of like hypothesizing what people might need, but don't. Don't like viscerally understand it either because they haven't worked it or they're just like they haven't figured it out yet. And I think that's the stuff that is probably churning. But I mean, I think it's kind of standard at this point in the cycle, like some things, some things are working, some things are not. I think more things will work. I think the defining characteristic will be like a deep focus on the customer,

• 2:28:12Speaker 04

  like the buyer and like building a great product for them.

• 2:28:16Jordi Hays?

  Do you expect big tech broadly to get more and more acquisitive? We were talking with David too around, you know, just this era, maybe 10, 15 years ago, when you had companies buying, you know, a single big tech company, even a Twitter would buy many, many, many companies and it was probably healthy for the ecosystem broadly. And then, you know, now, you know, on the show last week, we spent a bunch of time talking about, you know, the FTCs, you know, what they're doing to Meta around something that happened, you know, many, many, you know, over a decade ago. But I'm curious, you know, what's your outlook on on M and A?

• 2:28:59Speaker 04

  I mean, I hope so. I mean, I think all the, I think it all got shut down just due to government action. And I think like misplaced government action. I mean, I think there hasn't really been anything interesting on the consumer front in over a decade, like probably, I mean, if you ignore TikTok and TikTok has like a million asterisks next to it. There, I mean, it's basically chat GPT, I guess. And chat GPT is obviously super interesting. But there haven't, you know, if you look at the 2008, 2009, 2010 era, there was Instagram, there was Snapchat, there was WhatsApp, there was Uber, there

• 2:29:40Speaker 04

  was Lyft, there was DoorDash, there was Instacart. And part of that is just like the mobile phone and obviously like all the change that that ushered in. But I think part of the problem is especially starting around

• 2:29:55Speaker 04

  Maybe it's probably 2016, 2017. There was just this crackdown on the ability to do acquisitions by BitTech. And I mean, especially for consumer. Consumer has this property that like very, very, very few things are going to work. But if it works, it works really big. But if it doesn't work, it's often like really talented entrepreneurial founders that can then either like take what they've built to a larger company and adapt it for that or work on something else at that larger company. And if you shut down the outs for those consumer companies, like eventually people just stop funding them. So like every year, some venture capitalist is like, this is the year that consumer is back.

• 2:30:37Speaker 04

  And I just, I don't think consumer will fully be back until either there's like some massive platform shift. Or like those companies can get acquired.

• 2:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of, speaking of consumer, I'd be interested to get your thoughts on consumer agents. I was talking with a founder last week that had an idea for a consumer agent in the insurance space. And it was a great idea, seemed like it'd be a very, very valuable product. And I knew right, I basically explained my point of view is that even if OpenAI is not explicitly saying that they're, they're going to do this specific use case. The sort of natural evolution is that at some point you will be able to use OpenAI to do a series of tasks like he was describing. How do you think of the, do you see opportunities in consumer agents broadly?

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Or given the foundation model's sort of emphasis on the application layer and building consumer products, that it's sort of a dangerous path to be building on?

• 2:31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I thought for a while, there seems like there's some intrinsic tension between, between being a great research lab and being a great product company. Like the, with the exception of OpenAI, like most of the other folks haven't shipped that much product. Anthropic is starting to ship some product and then OpenAI has had some complexity over the past couple of years. I, I think.

• 2:32:04Speaker 04

  I don't know, I think there may just be some like intrinsic tension between being great at research and great at product, and I think that is good news for founders that are building like horizontal products. And so I do think, I mean, this is kind of like the email thing. There is no, there is no great like AI assistant yet for people, and it seems like it is a thing that is possible to build. I think the more general purpose you are, like if you're building something literally for multiple billions of people, I think the higher the likelihood that you are like in a really square dead conflict with the foundation model providers.

• 2:32:48Speaker 04

  But I think, I mean, this goes back to the like building down from the customer. If there's some set of customers you can go build for that is even hundreds of millions of people. I think, I know, like a company, a lab like OpenAI has, like they have so many important things to work on. Like, there has to be, and I have incredible respect for, for OpenAI. But it's like, if you have some strict stack ranking of the teams within OpenAI, like only 10 problems can have like the top 10 teams on it. And so if you're any, if you're doing anything after like the top 10 problems that they have, then you're like by definition,

• 2:33:30Speaker 04

  don't have one of the top 10 teams working on it. And that seems like a, an opportunity for a startup. Good opportunity. Yeah.

• 2:33:36John Coogan?

  Well, I have a lot more questions. Yeah, we'd love to have you back soon, because I mean, you can just talk about everything that's going on. It's amazing. We really appreciate you taking the time.

• 2:33:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:33:46John Coogan?

  Thanks for attracting me.

• 2:33:48Speaker 04

  Cheers.

• 2:33:48John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 2:33:49Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 2:33:50John Coogan?

  Next up, we got Edward Mayer from, I'm gonna mispronounce it. It's, I think it's Machina Labs. I got it wrong the last time I tried to pronounce a word like that. But we'll hear it from him. He's got a bunch of, a bunch of interesting topics, and he is gonna talk to us about a bunch of stuff. Let's bring Ed in, and then we will have him introduce the company. So I don't mess anything up. And we'll go from there. Ed, how you doing?

• 2:34:18Edward Mehr?

  Hey guys, good to see you.

• 2:34:19Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  Would you mind just kicking it off a little background on the company? Maybe how you pronounce it, it's Machina Labs, right?

• 2:34:27Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, you're right, Machina Labs.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Fantastic. And yeah, just give us a brief overview for the listeners.

• 2:34:33Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:34:36Edward Mehr?

  You know, I think Machina Labs is a response to something that maybe actually Peter Thiel said once, right? I don't want to butcher it, but it was along the lines of like, you know, we wanted flying cars. We ended up getting, you know, 140 characters, right? Which kind of comes down to the cornerstone of like, okay, software develops really fast. Hardware doesn't. I think, you know, some people interpret that as a, you know, something that says, oh, like, we don't have as much class doing the hardware side, but reality is there's a lot of technological challenges in terms of building, building hardware. Right? So what we're trying to do at Machina Labs is just making that much easier, right? You know, if you're a software developer, you know, two people can develop a program, you know, rent server from AWS, Amazon deploy it.

• 2:35:19Edward Mehr?

  If you want to build a hardware, you pretty much have to go build a factory, right? And that's why development timelines are like seven years, nine years. So what we're doing at Machina is we're using robotics and artificial intelligence to build a basically what we call a robotic craftsman. And it's a robotic system that can do different types of manufacturing operations. And it's powered by AI, basically can figure out how to pick up different tools, do different types of operation to make different types of parts, physical parts, without anybody having to program it, or having to hand hold it, or build tools for it.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  And can you talk about the specific, kind of like first instantiation of the thesis? I saw Justin Lopass over at Base Power posting, and it looked like he used a picture of your warehouse. Is that you guys? Is that right?

• 2:36:05Edward Mehr?

  That is us.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Okay, and so he breaks, he breaks the new, the new manufacturing space down into three categories. Manufacturing SaaS companies, make parts for other people companies, and change the way the part is made companies. And which, which one do you guys fit in? I think you're in the third, right? Change the way the part is made, develop a way to make stampings, complex geometry form sheet metal parts without dies. And so can you break us down like, what is actually going on when this massive robotic arm is like pushing into this metal? Explain why this is important, how it works.

• 2:36:43Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, so we wanted to build a system we call Robocraftsmen, right? And the idea was like, where do we just get started? And we started at sheet forming. Sheet forming is largest metal processing sector today. I think it's like $280 billion industry. You know, most of the metal parts you see day to day are sheet metal parts. Like, you know, you're sitting in your car, you're in a sea of sheet metal. Every other car body is sheet metal, or sheet metal parts. Or aircrafts are basically sheet metal cans. But today, it takes a very long time to get your first batch of parts in sheet metal world, right? You have to go make dies, put them in giant stamping presses, like four-story tall buildings, and then stamp your, you know, your parts out. So our first kind of application of being sheet forming,

• 2:37:25Edward Mehr?

  we have two robots that form, you know, start from a flat sheet of metal. Between two robots, they have these giant fingers that are super strong, but they can basically push and pull on the metal that form it into a very complex shape without the need for any, any dies or tooling. Basically, you know, you get your, from idea to, to the first part in a matter of hours, right? It's similar to how a potter forms a clay bowl with their fingers. They're coming into the sheet, they form it, and, and, and shape it into different shapes. So yes, it's a new paradigm, a new way of doing manufacturing. But it doesn't stop there. We're already doing like trimming, we're already doing slotting, hole making. So the robot can literally pick up another tool, figure out what it needs to do with it to do the next operation, and does that.

• 2:38:10Edward Mehr?

  So today, the forming, it does a lot of subtractive work, like trimming, hole making. It also does a lot of QC.

• 2:38:17Jordi Hays?

  Are you, do you get worried? There's been a ton of, there's been an explosion of new manufacturing startups over the last couple of years, you know, long since you guys started the company, many of which promising to automate with robots the creation of various products. We covered earlier today on the show just how hard it is to like, for Nike to manufacture a shoe, right? Which sounds somewhat trivial, like, you know, humans have been doing them for years. You should be able to. Maybe we should be able to do it with machines, but then in practice, it's like there's so many different factors down to temperature.

• 2:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Out of all, you know, when you look at manufacturing broadly, or I'm assuming you have some type of framework for evaluating whether something like can be automated to the degree that people would like to see out of manufacturing or areas that, you know, are basically shouldn't be touched, right? Like something like shoes which have infinite sizes and a bunch of different factors.

• 2:39:16Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, I think it's like a combination of like three things, like the market size, opportunity, and how how technology ready it is to be to be kind of disrupted, right? So.

• 2:39:28Edward Mehr?

  But also, I think there's a lot of conversation around automation that that is in the previous paradigm. I think for now, for the first time, we have this concept of LLM, this concept of we can actually reason very complex sequence of operations. As long as we can train the robots on that sequence of operations. So it comes down to what data do we have available to train the robots? We already figured out, okay, you know, neural networks, LLMs, these transformers, if you give it enough data, it can actually learn a very complicated task. The real key was, okay, what, where do we generate enough data? Where do we have enough data to train it?

• 2:40:08Edward Mehr?

  So it needs, and unfortunately for a lot of manufacturing tasks, the data is not out there, right? You cannot train a very complicated model on it. For, you know, for ChatGPT, the internet had trove of free data that you could use to create a very complex kind of chatbot. For us, coming up with right sequence to make car doors or shoes doesn't exist. So the key is, can you actually provide a solution that can scale with limited amount of data, with human intervention, limited amount of data? So you can deploy it in the field and get enough traction, so we can have now enough data that comes from your machines to train your model. And that's why they're running after she for me.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the Nvidia announcement today? That's very exciting. Seems like it might be a little bit of like a side quest, or is this like in the critical path to, you know, mass, mass production?

• 2:41:04Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, no, Nvidia's today announcement was a kind of little fun thing we did. Nvidia is an investor in us.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:41:09Edward Mehr?

  So fundamentally, they are very interested in what we are trying to do. You know, being able to capture data from physical phenomenon and build models that can manipulate the physical world.

• 2:41:17John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:41:18Edward Mehr?

  But I think we work with their artists in residence. It's actually those OpenAI's artists in residence that we work with Nvidia collaboratively.

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  Fun.

• 2:41:24Edward Mehr?

  To really turn in just the artist is speaking to a system into a piece of art. Right? So Alex, the artist that we work with us, basically spoke what he wanted to build, what sculpture he wanted to build. And the full stack of generating the code, running the robots, all were done autonomously. So from speech, from intent, all the way to the physical part.

• 2:41:45John Coogan?

  That's.

• 2:41:45Edward Mehr?

  Without anybody ever touching anything.

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  I love that. I was, I was, when the, when the Studio Ghibli moment happened, I was taking some photos of like my kids' playsets, Studio Ghibli-ifying them. And then immediately I wanted to print them out because I wanted to have some sort of like physical instantiation. Just showing the phone was like not satisfactory. So the idea of like speaking words and then getting like a sculpture out like that's, that's sound really awesome and futuristic. Yeah, yeah, go.

• 2:42:10Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, a lot of investment in humanoid robots.

• 2:42:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Lately, many of those promising to revolutionize manufacturing, replace human labor, automate the production of lots of things. As somebody who's been doing it with robots since 2019, uh, how, how do you think of that form factor in the context of, um, manufacturing?

• 2:42:35Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, actually, Super Bowl, Super Bowl is on, on, on humans, right? I think the question is to, to your point, is it gonna be, is the first application gonna be in, um, in manufacturing? I don't think so, right?

• 2:42:48Edward Mehr?

  I think the biggest problem, if you want to like think of a startup as like, what do you need to be risk first? The first thing, you gave an example of like Nike figuring out how to do the shoe manufacturing. The first thing is actually intelligence. We had kinematic frameworks for a long time. You know, we could do what humans does in terms of kinematic freedom with industrial robots. We can actually do it more precisely with higher force with industrial robots, which was what we need in manufacturing setting. So the missing piece really was intelligence. So we're kind of a little bit intelligence first, right? We don't need to solve the joints. We don't need to solve people walking around, like robots walking around and, you know, having the human form factor. If you solve the intelligence, you have enough kinematic frameworks, which is industrial robots, to do what you need to do.

• 2:43:32Edward Mehr?

  But that being said, I think, you know, humanoid is a huge opportunity. Maybe not in manufacturing, but downstream and homes and all other places that can use humanoid.

• 2:43:41Jordi Hays?

  What is, uh, what is the, you know, I imagine you guys are beneficiary from some of the tariff stuff in some way, but on the actual machine side, are you, are, you know, you and the industry seeing challenges of like, you know, how much of like the actual robots that you guys are leveraging are sourced outside of the country?

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, Chris and Adrian were saying like, yeah, my CapEx goes up by 10%, but the demand has been way, way higher. So what's been your experience?

• 2:44:13Edward Mehr?

  I mean, that's true. I mean, like what we can, what we do here, the challenge is for a lot of work that we do, and especially in the defense, aerospace defense, there is no industrial base. So we have to do it. So the man is always there. Now, 70% of our bomb is off the shelf. And we intentionally try to do that so that we can actually finance it easily, right? Use, you know, multi pusher pairs off the shelf equipment so that we can easily finance. The full hardware stack. That being said, you know, a lot of the hardware that we use is either produced in America or it's in very like allied countries. For example, robots are produced in Japan. So the tariffs are a little bit more digestible there. But that being said, you know, we are one of the very few manufacturing companies

• 2:44:57Edward Mehr?

  that are like doing almost software like merchants. So there is enough room for us to be able to absorb that cost and still, you know, have a very high value, high margins.

• 2:45:07Jordi Hays?

  Is the idea, on that note, is the idea, you know, we've seen, we've seen some investors kind of, you know, strictly software investors kind of poke fun at VCs that are investing in manufacturing, you know, expecting software-like margins and there's sort of this sense that, well, manufacturing hasn't, for most things, hasn't historically had software-like margins. You're seeing it today. How do you think about the margin profile for advanced manufacturing over time, even, you know, even in things that are like non-chips, right?

• 2:45:44Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, so it's, it's interesting arbitrage. I think there's a lot of people thinking about manufacturing solutions in different ways. I think you can think of it as automating what traditionally has been done. And I think that's usually end up being very low margin, right? But if you're creating something new that, you know, has some kind of arbitrage on either labor or has some kind of arbitrage on equipment, right? In our case, where you don't have to make dies, right? And a die, a single die for, um, you know, a car door can be up to a million dollars, right? So for us, we're faster, but when you get rid of that asset, um, so it allows us to have the, you know, at the same cost

• 2:46:25Edward Mehr?

  parity, have higher margin. But I think down the road, um, the margins could erode and that's why we're thinking about it as a platform, right? It's a robotic system that can perform in today, tomorrow it's going to do your next operation. It's going to do bending, it's going to do hemming, it's going to do forging, right? So you're constantly expanding the capabilities of the system, which allows you to sustain a very larger volume business as some of the margins of the older processes kind of erode, right?

• 2:46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, last question. You, you mentioned that you might have a golden dome take. We did a little deep dive. There wasn't a lot to dig into. I'm curious, it doesn't seem like it would interfere with your business too much, but maybe you just have studied the industry. So what do you think's going on with the golden dome?

• 2:47:13Jordi Hays?

  He's making an actual dome.

• 2:47:15John Coogan?

  Dome, yeah, make a physical dome.

• 2:47:16Jordi Hays?

  Out of gold to go over the United States.

• 2:47:19John Coogan?

  I would love that.

• 2:47:19Jordi Hays?

  If you like the blue, get, you know, enjoy the blue above us while you can. It's going to just be all gold soon.

• 2:47:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:25Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, there was like, people were talking about how it's like competing with a golden dome at Notre Dame, which is like actual thing, um, in terms of the name, naming conflict. No, so. Why do we actually fit into this paradigm? We work a lot with missile manufacturers, right? And manufacturing components for the body of the missile for them. Hypersonics is one of the main enablers of how we can actually have defense against some of these missile attacks. So for hypersonics, you need to start processing very complex materials. Materials that were traditionally very hard to to process. Things like high temperature alloys like nickel, titanium. And because of our robotic process, it locally manipulates the material.

• 2:48:09Edward Mehr?

  We have way more control to process the material without getting to failure. For example, we can form titanium sheets without tearing it at room temperature, which is traditionally not possible. Right? So I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities there for us and we're exploring with our, you know, with our primes.

• 2:48:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:27Edward Mehr?

  That we work with. But yeah, I mean, the whole concept of Golden Dome is going to be interesting. You know, what I've heard last is it's going to be 7% of the DOD budget in the next two, three years, right? Once it becomes programmatic. Yeah. So that's, that's what I've been reading. Obviously, next year, we're looking at like, I think, 20 billion on missile defense. But over long term, I think the plan is roughly 7% of the defense budget. So it's going to be a huge opportunity. And obviously, I say something that's probably very necessary for that. But yeah, we can dive into details, but I don't know how much time we have.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  No, no, no. I mean, I, I think we'll have to have you back on when there's more details that emerge and we actually get, you know, a deeper dive into how the, how the program record evolves, what the subcontractors might be looking at. Right now, all the, all the names parties are no comments, so there's not too much to dig into for good reason. But it'll be super interesting to see how this pans out. Jordy, anything?

• 2:49:22Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got to have you back on soon, but congratulations on the success. And I'd love to come see the, the machines in action in person.

• 2:49:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:31Edward Mehr?

  Yeah, we're like, we were half an hour away from downtown, so downtown LA.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  Oh, awesome. Yeah, that'd be awesome.

• 2:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. I want to, I want to do the show with, with a robot.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  I want a robot to make us a bigger gong.

• 2:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  The biggest gong possible.

• 2:49:44Edward Mehr?

  Gotta make it happen. We gotta make it happen. That's something we actually do very easily.

• 2:49:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can imagine. It's a perfect, it's a match made in heaven.

• 2:49:51Jordi Hays?

  Our people will talk to your people.

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. People will talk to your people. This is fantastic.

• 2:49:55Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:49:56John Coogan?

  Thanks so much, Ed. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:49:58Edward Mehr?

  See you later.

• 2:49:59John Coogan?

  Uh, next up we got William Brown.

• 2:50:02Jordi Hays?

  The idea of like a, like a 20 foot gong is very appealing.

• 2:50:07John Coogan?

  Very appealing, that you could have watched be made from the raw material.

• 2:50:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  Be, be perfect, be perfect. And I mean, you could actually edge different things into it. There's so many cool things you could do with that technology. It's very, very awesome. Anyway, welcome to the show, Will.

• 2:50:23Will Brown?

  Hey, how's it going?

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Good to have you on here. Been a big fan of your, of your posts for a long time.

• 2:50:29Jordi Hays?

  One of the top, many people have said, one of the top posts, poster of the year.

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  I think potential poster of the year, for sure. He's been burning up the timeline. Jordy, where, where should we start?

• 2:50:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of stuff that

• 2:50:41John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 2:50:42Jordi Hays?

  we can go through. I mean, we can just dive right into it.

• 2:50:45John Coogan?

  Do you want to give a brief intro on yourself and who you are before we just

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe we should start there.

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  Start talking about the timeline?

• 2:50:51Will Brown?

  Sure. Yeah, sounds good. I'm Will Brown. I'm a researcher at Morgan Stanley. By the way, nothing I say here is Morgan Stanley opinions. This is all me kind of just like sharing my thoughts. I'm a researcher. I work a lot on stuff related to L M's there. My background was in reinforcement learning theory. I did my PhD at Columbia. So I've been in New York City for a while. Big fan of New York City. Great things happening here all the time. And yeah, I also just like, like talking about the stuff on the internet and like participating in the open source community. There's lots of like cool, either projects or code bases or papers or models always coming out. And like I, a lot of my job is like needing to know all that stuff and being a liaison essentially like from the internet to the company where like,

• 2:51:33Will Brown?

  people want to understand like, okay, what's the latest model for X, Y, Z that I should be using? What's the right open source toolkit? Especially because like at a big regulated company, we need to understand the landscape, especially for things that are like downloadable off the shelf without needing to like onboard a vendor. Like some things you onboard a vendor for, but it's also like a much heavier lift. And so like, we need to like map the landscape of like, what's the right tool for the job for everything L M related? And so that's a large part of what I do. And it's also like my excuse for being on Twitter all day.

• 2:52:04John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:52:05Jordi Hays?

  It's a great excuse.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  Where do you want to start?

• 2:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Where, aside from X, like where, where are you getting signal without giving away, without giving away all the alpha? Cause I imagine like, you know, by the time Dorkesh has like done a podcast on something like, you know, it's been the

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  And most people have read the papers.

• 2:52:21Jordi Hays?

  You know, disseminated. It's not necessarily alpha.

• 2:52:26Will Brown?

  There's a surprising lot of alpha still on X just from places where you don't like like so there's places. Uh, I have not found much alpha on LinkedIn. Um, the group chats, the anon's.

• 2:52:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:40Will Brown?

  Um, the uh, open source, uh, like GitHub discussions. Lots of really good stuff is buried in like a GitHub issue. Or like a feature request where someone's like, hey, this thing would be cool.

• 2:52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:52Will Brown?

  And these ideas are just all over the internet, but you gotta like know where to look for them.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, I want to talk about, I want to talk about humor. You actually posted about this like a month ago or two months ago. Uh, you said it's interesting that 1.5 billion parameters is all you need to crush math competitions. But you need like 15 trillion to make the model be funny. Maybe humor is the right measure of true intelligence. And for a long time, my eval has been tell me a funny joke. And every time there's a new model, it's tearing up X. And I ask you to tell a funny joke and it's always the worst joke I've ever heard. It's kind of anti-joke. Um, but, but, but I, is that just a lack of, of like, uh, of labeled data essentially? Uh, or do you think there's something more, uh, more like innately human to the idea of humor?

• 2:53:38Will Brown?

  I mean, I think humor is like really hard and it's also very hard to, it is very hard to label.

• 2:53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:44Will Brown?

  But I think it's also really hard to like, okay, this is like a, a big debate topic.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:53:51Will Brown?

  Is like, would it like, I think people kind of assume, oh, just like train it on funny data.

• 2:53:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:55Will Brown?

  But like the things that make things funny are really subtle and pretty buried. Um, I have a friend of mine coworker actually did this experiment where he like, he tried to like have one model be a judge of like, is this funny or not?

• 2:54:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:08Will Brown?

  And what they do is they like lean into things that feel funny and like the results were actually kind of funny, but what it ended up just doing was swearing more. So like, if you swear a lot, models think that's funny. Um, and so there's all these like kind of cheat cut. Like there's a lot of cheat codes.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:54:24Will Brown?

  And RL and training these models is like, the path of least resistance is to find the cheat code. Um, but like real humor, like. The people that, to be really funny, you have to be really smart. Like, think of like your favorite comedian, like, uh, Norm or Larry David, or like, all these people are like, really smart. You can tell from the way that they compose jokes, like, there's like an attention, like attention is in like transformer attention, of like, ideas that need to combine in a very sparse, like, precise way to make a good joke, is like, you can't just like shove things together. You kind of got to thread the needle to make a joke land. Um, it's not a very coarse mechanism. And so I think like,

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:05Will Brown?

  Uh, GPT four point five is like ginormous model, trillions of parameters, most likely. Um, and that, like, there's more room in the model to have these like, little sparse connections materialize as you go through layers of the transformer. Um, and I just haven't seen anything like that come from a smaller model.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  How scale-pilled are you based on the results from four point five? Are you off to the races, scales all you need, or less in-pilled, or what?

• 2:55:36Will Brown?

  I'm very RL scaling-pilled. Like, uh, I'm not big transformer-pilled, really.

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Sure. So pre-training wall real?

• 2:55:46Will Brown?

  Um, I think we don't, like, is, if there's another hundred trillion tokens of data sitting out there, ready to train on, go for it.

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:53Will Brown?

  Um, I don't know, like, one, I think is like, people should do some nap and math about like, how long until big GPUs are readily available? And it's, it's gonna, gonna be a while before people can really run like, even DeepSeek R1 with like, easy resources. Like, you can, you can kind of do it on one node, but like, the quality bump over things that are much smaller is just like, like the, we're hitting diminishing returns on capital investment is a lot of it. Like, they're taken out of the API because like the, They can sell other things with the same GPUs and make more money is part of it. Like, it's a lot of compute to keep a model up like that. It's slow.

• 2:56:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56:35Will Brown?

  And the things that it's better on are like not that economically valuable.

• 2:56:40John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:56:41Will Brown?

  And so the sweet spot appears to be in this like between like thirty billion active parameters and or parameters total and like couple hundred maybe, but like I don't know that like like when Meta releases this behemoth model, I don't think anyone's really gonna run behemoth.

• 2:56:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:56:58Will Brown?

  For like their day to day stuff.

• 2:57:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:00Will Brown?

  It's just probably not gonna be worth it.

• 2:57:02John Coogan?

  So, I mean, given that, uh, you know, Tyler Cowen's calling O three G A G I like the the the economic results of these like big but not crazy big models seems to be pretty good running on a node. Uh, should we be talking more about, hey, it's good enough. Let's bake it into an ASIC. Let's just bring down the inference cost to basically zero like we did with Bitcoin hashing and whatnot. Like, is that the conversation we should be having?

• 2:57:28Will Brown?

  I mean, I think that's been that's kind of been how like Grok, Suriyab, and Nova are like playing that game.

• 2:57:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:33Will Brown?

  Um, and I I think like those businesses make a lot of sense. Like, they can kind of say, okay, this version of a transformer, we're gonna be in this ballpark for a while.

• 2:57:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:43Will Brown?

  We can bake that into our plans a little bit. Um, I think what's the next way, twenty twenty five, like, people have been saying you're the agents, but like, what I think that means is agentic RL. Like, we're realizing RL works. Like, the reason O three is good is because it's trained to use tools. The way you train a model to use the right tool for the job is reinforcement learning. Uh, and they've said as much, like, deep research, reinforcement learning. Um, people have been throwing like random tools at models for two years, and it only now works, even though the models are the same. Like, GPT four was a bigger model than a lot of the models that we are using now. It had just as much training data, but it was not, or at least doesn't seem to have been RL'd in this specific way. And so that's kind of like my bet is like, people are going to really want to

• 2:58:29Will Brown?

  train models to be agents, and I think you can get that to work well with a pretty small model.

• 2:58:34John Coogan?

  Does that mean like a flourishing of RL'd, uh, big transformers for different tasks? Or are we still searching for like the god model that can do everything all at once?

• 2:58:45Will Brown?

  I mean, so, okay, I think there's a couple leaps we need to have models that can do everything all at once for like a super long amount of time. Um, like my, I tweeted something about this, like my, well, I'm happy to call O three 10 minute AGI. And I think like framing AGI in terms of like length of time it takes a human to do a task is like more reasonable than like a global framing like.

• 2:59:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:59:09Will Brown?

  There's a bar of like drop and replace for a human that we are like definitely not at yet, like for general jobs. But most things a human can do in 10 minutes, you can like get O three to do that pretty well. Um, and so.

• 2:59:23Jordi Hays?

  That's a very.

• 2:59:24Will Brown?

  Like, I think there's.

• 2:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Even, even like a webs, like make a website in 10 minutes. Okay. You have a good human designer is like probably can whip something up pretty quickly. Yeah, but.

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  But not like an entire design system that works together across all the different websites. Yeah, makes it sense. Um, so, uh, so, so, uh, seems like we're transformer maxing, we're RL maxing. Is there a new paradigm that you're excited about, uh, program synthesis? Are we bringing back symbol manipulation at some point? Like what, what are we going to pull from the tool chest to make this thing go to the next level?

• 2:59:55Will Brown?

  I mean, I think it's just tool calls, like, like, I think when people say program synthesis, like, we're already there. Like O three is program synthesis, but the programs are like JSON and Python.

• 3:00:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:06Will Brown?

  Like, you can do a lot with that. I would have, I did some tests on like RKGI problems where you give the screenshot to O three and it can like basically figure it out in 10 minutes of like zooming in and looking at the thing and then writing some code to see if it like reprises the thing and like, it doesn't nail it, but I would, they haven't released the benchmark, but I would guess it'll do reasonably well.

• 3:00:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:25Will Brown?

  Um.

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  What, uh?

• 3:00:27Will Brown?

  As much.

• 3:00:28Jordi Hays?

  What are you seeing around AI adoption in finance broadly? I feel like we've been promised like, you know, somebody can just press a button and generate the deck and like generate, you know, uh, 20 page investment memo and, and, uh, are, are, are, are these types of, uh, you know, deep research style tools being used extremely heavily already, or is there just even a greater, now that they're being used, you know, hey, let's go, uh, spend our time talking to, you know, three times as many experts so that we actually get proprietary kind of, um, insight into the, into the business.

• 3:01:08Will Brown?

  Great question, and I think there's a couple of different answers I have. One is that like, on one hand, we at least have been pretty, I think, fast at certain things at adoption, like the day GPT-4 launched, Morgan Stanley had integrations because we had been working on it and these were like, we had press releases for these of like, we are ready to go. And so there are certain things where like initiatives can happen where effort comes together to make a thing ready to use. But the like, there's a long tail of smaller tasks that you do, that you, there's not a drop and replacement for. If there's a vendor, it would take a long time to onboard them and it's not going to really solve the problem right away. And you could build something from scratch if you put a few people on for a few months, but like,

• 3:01:52Will Brown?

  engineer hands are like few and far between. And so I think the deep research is an example of a product that I would say like works really well for the thing it's built for. It's doesn't quite like do other stuff super well. Like if you wanted to give you a table of like 50 very precise things, it's gonna make some mistakes there. Because the report format has a lot more room for like slop without it seeming like, seeming like noticeably bad. The PowerPoint, Microsoft PowerPoint copilot is not great. It's not a thing that I have heard many people say saves them a lot of time.

• 3:02:32Jordi Hays?

  What are you?

• 3:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you have, do you have any takes on enterprise AI adoption broadly? We were talking, I think, late last week about how Johnson and Johnson had tried hundreds of different tools. Like they went through the effort to just like try a bunch of stuff because there was a top-down mandate and now they're just like cutting probably 90% of it. And so all the startups that were like, yeah, we have a

• 3:02:56John Coogan?

  Pilot with J and J. It's going great. Like they won't churn. Well, 90% of them just churned maybe.

• 3:03:03Will Brown?

  I mean, like, most of these pilots are very much intended to be churned. Like, they're not, they're very much in a, they're not being rolled out broadly. They are coming through in a kind of walled off environment for people who are like, gonna be the beta testers. And so like, we have a crew of people who like, and I'm involved with this as well, like, there, as new stuff comes, like, online, we test it out, we give it feedback.

• 3:03:29Will Brown?

  Most of these do not convert.

• 3:03:32Will Brown?

  Because, like, we're very willing to, like, try stuff. In terms of taking the call, in terms of, like, looking at a demo, but actually making a thing be part of, like, the company-wide workflow is like a pretty heavy lift. Think of, like, onboarding a cloud provider. Like, a lot of the reason, like, maybe this is, like, one reason cloud providers have the margins that they do is because, like, moving clouds is really hard. Moving all your stuff from, like, AWS to Azure is a pain.

• 3:04:01Will Brown?

  I think especially in regulated industries, like, a lot of software onboarding faces the same sort of hurdles, where you can't just, like, bring it in and use it. You gotta, like, go through a whole process. And some companies are, have kind of planned for that and some have not. So, like, one example is, I think, like, a reason that WinSurf has been successful as a cursor competitor is they lean, they've leaned way harder on enterprise than cursor has. Like, they have really designed for enterprise integration, whereas cursor really has not.

• 3:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you, was the WinSurf news surprising to you at all? Or was that just obvious? OpenAI cares about coding and they should have a sort of dedicated enterprise, you know, coding.

• 3:04:47Will Brown?

  I mean, it makes sense, yeah. I think, like, to me, it felt like the, a sign of there being some more friction with Microsoft. Because, like, originally, it was like, oh, they already have that, it's copilot.

• 3:05:00Will Brown?

  And so this, to me, seems like them move, taking a step away from Microsoft.

• 3:05:08Will Brown?

  But I mean, this is just speculation.

• 3:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:11Will Brown?

  Um, it does make sense that it's cursor and that is windsurfing not, I mean, they did try to buy when cursor supposedly.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  True.

• 3:05:19Will Brown?

  Um, like I'm, I'm a cursor user. I think it's great. I haven't seen anything that really sold me on like, go move to windsurf. I'm sure it's fine. Um, it's just like the bar to like switch for me is like, I need a thing to have a, a feature that's like killer that the other one doesn't have. And I have not like seen that yet, but I'm sure they have plenty of good stuff.

• 3:05:41John Coogan?

  What, uh, now that we're like a couple of months out from the deep seek moment, uh, what is your takeaway? Is it something around kind of the, the optimization of, of, of the inferencing these models? Or is it, uh, how, how have you processed, uh, that news now that we're a few months out?

• 3:06:00Will Brown?

  Yeah. I mean, they're like incredible engineering. Like I think a lot of their open source releases have really like, like since R1, they've released a lot of code and details on their inference stack and training stack.

• 3:06:12John Coogan?

  Even Sam Altman was posting like, hey, if you work for a high frequency trading firm, like come work at OpenAI. And I read that as like, oh, they want to optimize their models now.

• 3:06:22Will Brown?

  Right. I think the, some of the big players have realized they didn't have to that much.

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:06:28Will Brown?

  Uh, DeepSeek is serving all of China on 2000 GPUs. It's kind of silly that Anthropic can't like, has to have the warning about, oh, we have high limits. Please try again later for like their paid users. Like that's, whereas like the DeepSeek chat is literally free anywhere. Um, and so I, I think some other people probably are working on upping their, uh, inference efficiency game, but it's also like hard. Um, because it's very model specific. Every model has some quirks and you gotta optimize around that. Um, it's hard to like have things be reliable and fault tolerant. Um, and then also just.

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  So you think you can't just port back like FP8? Wasn't that one of the, uh, things or like the, the mixture of experts blocking all those different things? Like, it seemed like there was some stuff that where it was like, week two, we were getting, you know, analyses. And I was like, this will probably be open sourced and ported to Llama and all the others like pretty quickly, but has it played out differently?

• 3:07:22Will Brown?

  I mean, to me, the surprising thing was not any individual one thing. It's that each of these is maybe like a 30%, 50% gain, but they have like 10, 15 of them that all stacked. And so getting all of these to stack nicely is what's hard.

• 3:07:36John Coogan?

  That, that's interesting. That's a great take. Yeah.

• 3:07:37Jordi Hays?

  What are you expecting out of Alibaba and Qwen 3?

• 3:07:42Will Brown?

  Oh, I, I mean, I'm really excited. Like, they make, I think, still the best model suites for like doing research. So like, I do almost all of my experiments on Qwen models, just because they have a bunch of them. There's like so many versions, like for every different model size, there's like seven different versions. There's like a code one, a math one, a multimodal one, an audio one, a base, instruct, RL, like, they really are optimizing for user-friendly, like, open source model ecosystem in a way that Llama was doing last year, this current year. We'll see if they can get their act together.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  So are they, are, are they also like RL-pilled at this point and, and moving away?

• 3:08:25Will Brown?

  I'm sure, I'm sure they are. Yeah. Like, they have, they have a reasoning model. The reasoning model is not as impressive, like, but it is a pretty small one. It's like a 32 billion parameter model, but like, does well on math competitions. I don't know that anyone has really bitten the RL bullet in the way that DeepSeek did early and then OpenAI has been doing lately, where they're really kind of betting, like, OpenAI seems to be essentially betting on scaling up RL as the path. And that it's not just longer reasoning, but it's reasoning integrated with system interaction. And I, like, that's kind of

• 3:09:04Will Brown?

  the drum I've been trying to beat for a while. Like, a lot of the open source work I've been doing is around multi-turn tool-calling RL. I think that we need better ecosystems for that. There's like, very, like, there's starting to be more tools you can go use, but for a while, there was just nothing that supported this. Everyone was very RLHF-pilled for too long.

• 3:09:24John Coogan?

  Well, what, what do you think is going on with Llama 4? Did they just miss the memo about RL? Or is there something else at work?

• 3:09:34Will Brown?

  I mean, doing this stuff at a huge company where a lot is on the line is hard and it's way easier to do nothing than something.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:09:42Will Brown?

  Um, and Meta also like doesn't have to print money off of their models like they don't. Uh, like I think one analogy that I've been giving people is like, why did Amazon not win NLP? They had like 10,000 people in the Alexa team in like 2018.

• 3:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:04Will Brown?

  And they have just now released like, okay, language models. Um, and they're really betting on Anthropic to drive their revenue there. Um.

• 3:10:14Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about, uh, the trade war in the context of the data center supply chain? And is that even, uh, do you pay much attention to that or is it kind of, you're busy enough on, on?

• 3:10:26Will Brown?

  Oh, I do follow it. Yeah. I mean, um, I tend, I listen to Dylan Patel talk a lot of stuff. Um, he's great. Um, semi analysis. It's hard for me to like, give a real take. I don't think I, I think, I think it's like important to keep an eye on. There's a lot of pieces in the supply chain, um, that will get, I mean, it depends on what happens like.

• 3:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:50Will Brown?

  It's going to get messy for sure, probably. Um, but I, I don't have like a, a hard stance.

• 3:10:55Jordi Hays?

  You should become a VC and then you can just give a take anyways.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you should, you should flip over.

• 3:11:00Jordi Hays?

  No, I just think it's funny like, uh, in a year we'll be like, bro, we were worried about the wrong transformers.

• 3:11:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. For sure. The energy thing, for sure. Um, I, I have one last question. Um, uh, how, how's the culture at Morgan Stanley? I mean, it seems like, uh, talking to you, you sound like a Silicon Valley founder, uh, but you're at like a company that's like over a hundred years old. Uh, is, are you part of a new guard or has Morgan Stanley always been this way? And you're just the first to kind of post about it. Uh, what's it like working there?

• 3:11:30Will Brown?

  I'm definitely like the first to like, read a lot about it, but like the team I'm on has been around for maybe like, it's like a machine learning research team where we try to, we try to be like a version, a finance version of like an MSR or Bell Labs. Where we are like, off keeping up with the research, we write papers, we publish, we go to conferences. We tend to, we kind of hang around as like expert consultants and advise on a lot of efforts throughout the company. Um, and so the company has definitely been like betting on machine learning for a while. Um, I think we are like. Probably ahead a lot of a lot of like the quant firms in terms of the how early we were on realizing deep learning was important.

• 3:12:10Will Brown?

  Um, and I think we've done a pretty good job at like keeping up with and following the like L and craze. Like we were, we partnered with OpenAI before ChatGPT.

• 3:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Wow, wild.

• 3:12:22Will Brown?

  And yeah.

• 3:12:24John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, this was great. Let's make it a regular thing.

• 3:12:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, this is fantastic. I definitely want to have you back when there's a new model release or something or new paper that you publish.

• 3:12:34Will Brown?

  Yeah, if I can do a quick plug, um, in June, uh, I will be at the engineer, uh, World's Fair in SF, giving you a talk as a follow up to my previous one.

• 3:12:44John Coogan?

  Very cool. I think we're going to that. We'll see you there.

• 3:12:46Will Brown?

  Oh, sweet. Awesome. See you there. Yeah. Um, and then also I am doing a course of some kind soon. Official announcement pending, but if you really want to like.

• 3:12:55John Coogan?

  How to get rich quickly?

• 3:12:57Will Brown?

  Uh, agents and RL stuff.

• 3:12:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:00Will Brown?

  And so if you DM me your email, I'll put you on the list for more info.

• 3:13:05John Coogan?

  That sounds awesome.

• 3:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 3:13:06John Coogan?

  Good luck with it. Uh, I'm excited.

• 3:13:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this has been great.

• 3:13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 3:13:10Will Brown?

  Thanks.

• 3:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 3:13:11Will Brown?

  See ya.

• 3:13:11John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later. Bye.

• 3:13:14John Coogan?

  Uh, should we go through some timeline and then get out of here?

• 3:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're a timeline addict.

• 3:13:18John Coogan?

  Um, there's, I mean, there's so many posts and we don't have enough time. There's so much in the, I, I, Monday is always a stacked day because you have a whole weekend of posts to catch up on.

• 3:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 3:13:29John Coogan?

  Uh, Adam Rankin says, you're coding at the bar. I'm drunk at the office. Respect to that. I love that. Um, Aiden says, uh, the most, the people I intellectually respect the most have quite lopsided output input ratio. They write, build, create more than they read, study, or absorb. Geniuses are not sponges. They're volcanoes. I like that framing. That's interesting.

• 3:13:51John Coogan?

  But I'm kind of going backwards. I think this one from Tel Mudic. The first time I heard of the Go Mad gallon of milk a day diet, I laughed my, I laughed. There's no way I'm having my milked intake for a diet. Go Mad? What are you cutting?

• 3:14:07John Coogan?

  The idea that he's doing two gallons of milk a day hilarious to me.

• 3:14:10Jordi Hays?

  I

• 3:14:11John Coogan?

  Timeline and turmoil. Timeline and turmoil to this weekend. Paul Graham taking shots of Palantir saying you shouldn't work at Palantir. Gary Tan chimes in says is now an awkward time to mention I helped come up with the very first save the site the save the Shire t-shirt at Palantir. Very, very funny.

• 3:14:31Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 3:14:31John Coogan?

  You know, we love, we love Palantir. We love PG's writing and he is a foundational member of the tech elite. But he gets, he gets spicy with the political takes. He has strong political opinions and he brings them to the timeline and

• 3:14:48Jordi Hays?

  I like that Gary and PG can have a little bit of fun.

• 3:14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:14:53Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 3:14:54John Coogan?

  Web dev Mason always with some great takes. There's, there's some people, the Blue Origin story has really grown since we first covered it. Now people are very upset that Katy Perry went, said it was an affront to real astronauts. They didn't go all the way to space. They only went to the Karman line.

• 3:15:10Jordi Hays?

  I saw people saying that, you know, how could you go to space when there's problems on earth?

• 3:15:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Then you could also kind of extend that out to how could you do anything?

• 3:15:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Problems on earth.

• 3:15:22John Coogan?

  I think that's so funny because like obviously it's like, why are you wasting money on space when there's people that are hungry? But we literally talked to a farmer who was like Starlink is increasing farming yields. It's like, no, actually like going to space and spending on like the crazy thing actually helped people eat, which is great. But Web Dev Mason says, this is so sad dead culture stuff eject me into the timeline where she yanks the microphones in and shouts, I flew over our home world and saw us, the pale blue dot, the blessed sprouting seed of the Virgo supercluster. And I must report to every living soul that it is dope. So she wants, she, because the story is that Katy Perry now regrets going and says that there's been too much backlash.

• 3:16:04John Coogan?

  She says that she shouldn't have gone, but Mason says, no, own it, go and celebrate it because it is fantastic. Question about watches. We already talked about bezel, but is it appropriate to wear a Rolex GMT as an analyst? I love this answer. It says it's, it depends. Imagine your first all nighter. There you are burning the midnight oil. When you decide to take off your Rolex GMT and place it on your desk to allow your wrist better control over the almighty Excel shortcuts you are about to employ. You take a look around and what do you see? Every other analyst has placed their protect Philippe Calatrava travel time in front of them for the exact same reason. Now, if you, sir, are capable of bearing the overwhelming feeling of shame that will

• 3:16:48John Coogan?

  inevitably conquer you, then by all means, consider it absolutely appropriate.

• 3:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Hilarious.

• 3:16:56John Coogan?

  What a great post.

• 3:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Hilarious.

• 3:16:58John Coogan?

  This hilarious. Anyway, we should cover the VCs, what's going on in higher ed at some point, but there was a good post by Connor. He says, VCs are attacking higher education. Trump squeezes higher ed funding. Universities sell PE holdings to fund their operations. VC funding dries up. I don't think this is actually going to happen. The news is that Yale is like selling off a portion of their venture capital portfolio, but I doubt that that really has an effect on the VC funding landscape. And I don't think, I don't think the university endowments are a major, major source. I think like pension funds are even bigger now and like sovereign wealth funds are even bigger.

• 3:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and also very likely, again, I doubt they're reacting to short term pressure. It's probably, you know, Yale selling $6 billion of secondaries probably is part of a larger strategy to generate liquidity on long duration investments, right?

• 3:18:00John Coogan?

  So here are some posts that I want to follow up on. We'll highlight them today, but we'll either have these folks on the show or do deep dives on these topics. Person of swag, Adam, says vibe sheeting, is this anything? He's built cursor for Microsoft Excel, going into the lion's den, competing directly with Microsoft Copilot, but we just heard it that some of the Microsoft Copilot products are falling behind a little bit. And so I thought it was fun that he was building a like a plugin just into Excel and I could imagine this becoming a great company. So excited to talk to him about that and dive in deeper. Also, there's a new planet, Delian mentioned this, K218B. I did a whole deep research report on K218B. Very, very fascinating, interesting.

• 3:18:45John Coogan?

  I had.

• 3:18:48John Coogan?

  I had ChatGPT tell me an entire speculative science fiction story about how we might get to K218B. Spoiler alert, it's gonna be like 500 years to get there, even at like .1C or something like that, which is the speed of light because it's so far away, but a multi-generational ship could do it.

• 3:19:06Jordi Hays?

  How many episodes we could do in 500 years?

• 3:19:08John Coogan?

  Do a lot.

• 3:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Quite a lot.

• 3:19:09John Coogan?

  Interestingly, I had ChatGPT, I was like, tell me a sci-fi story and like, why don't you just make me the character in it? And it was very weird and it was like, now you're in cryosleep for 100 years.

• 3:19:22John Coogan?

  It was like, now you're an old man, but because of life extension technologies, you're 150 years old and like, like all, like your kids are now older than you because of this weird time thing. It was very fun, very weird.

• 3:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Alright, knock it off.

• 3:19:36John Coogan?

  Anyway, last one is notable cap. This is a leak from Arthur Rock, Arfa Rock, Series B, to browser base, right? Paul Klein, who's been on the show. So I assume he will.

• 3:19:50Jordi Hays?

  One last, one last one from Nir. I like this one very end. Reminder of how far AGI goalposts have moved. It's from an old book or something. It says, "An AGI could beat you a chess, tell you a story, bake you a cake, describe a sheep, and name three things larger than a lobster. It's also solidly the stuff of science fiction, and most experts agree that AGI is many decades away from becoming reality, if it will become reality at all."

• 3:20:17John Coogan?

  So, wow.

• 3:20:18Jordi Hays?

  The last three models I used could describe a sheep.

• 3:20:22John Coogan?

  Couldn't bake you a cake, though. We need the humanoids for that.

• 3:20:24Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 3:20:25John Coogan?

  But it can tell you how to bake a cake. And it really can do all of those things and more. So, yeah, AGI is here. It's just get on with your life.

• 3:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Unevenly distributed.

• 3:20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:36Jordi Hays?

  I was at the beach over the weekend and I was thinking to myself, I was looking around, I was like, none of these people are AGI pills.

• 3:20:44Jordi Hays?

  And then everybody went back to enjoying the beach.

• 3:20:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the nature of it. Anyway, thank you for watching today. We will see you tomorrow. We got a great show for you tomorrow. Bunch of news breaking and we'll talk to you then. Bye.

• 3:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to it. Cheers.