Jacob Peters, Logan Kilpatrick, Roy Lee, Erik Torenberg, Jack Whitaker, Trump Laying Groundwork to Blame Powell for Downturn, Boeing to Sell Some of Its Navigation Business in $10.55B Deal, History of Thoma Bravo, Oil Companies Have Bold Plans to Fix Their Water Problem

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (01:54) - Trump Laying Groundwork to Blame Powell for Downturn (06:16) - Boeing to Sell Some of Its Navigation Business in $10.55B Deal (24:35) - History of Thoma Bravo (37:15) - Oil Companies Have Bold Plans to Fix Their Water Problem (46:43) - Offices Are Ditching Harsh Fluorescent Lights (58:19) - Roy Lee (01:16:12) - Jacob Peters (01:30:47) - Logan Kilpatrick (02:01:13) - Erik Torenberg (02:32:50) - Jack Whitaker

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 TVVN. Today's Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology,

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a bunch of massive news. There's, there's the timelines in turmoil. There's deals getting done and the stock market is way, way up, folks, way up. People said we couldn't come back. They said it was so over.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  These days.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  It was not over.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  These days are rumor. A simple rumor might move the market trillion.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Look at, look at Tesla stock right now. People are like, oh, Tesla, Tesla's done for. Tesla's done for. It's up 3%. It's up 3%.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Tesla stock. There's a lot of, there's a lot of great news. We're talking about prize bulls today. We're talking about Toma Bravo buying some Boeing assets. We're talking about tariffs and what's going on with Jerome Powell. Trump is laying the groundwork to blame Powell for any downturn. I was thinking about the market. I was thinking that we need to just take out billboards just for the market broadly. The global economy, the American economy needs to buy billboards on Adquick. Just an ad that just says, go long. That's it. It should be taken out. It should be paid for by the government. They should do it on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology,

• 1:23John Coogan?

  out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. What do you think? You think that's a crazy idea?

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm still, I'm still laughing about the Trump Powell dynamic.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  The idea that.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Let's move on to that.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Trump is, you know, basically doing what every VC would like, which is just demanding lower rates.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Ignore the 10 year, ignore the 30 year.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, people, people are saying, oh, the VCs bought the top with Trump. He's not doing what they want him to do. He's doing exactly what they want to do. This is all 5D chess to get lower rates. If we get lower rates, we go to the moon. This is great. The central banks legitimacy is at risk as president attacks the Fed for cutting rates before the election, but not now. I got a message on Signal from someone that was just like, our two-year treasury was junk status today.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh no.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Not good.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Maybe what Trump is, you know, this, this, uh, he, he wrote it as central bank.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Centralizing, verticalizing.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Verticalizing banking. Privatizing the Fed.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  I mean, OpenAI went from nonprofit to for-profit. It seemed like it went pretty well. Could we like turn?

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  Our institutions are more malleable than you think.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Can we spack the Fed? I think that might be the, the next step here. Uh, President Trump is signaling that he will blame the Federal Reserve for any economic weakness that doesn't result, that results from his trade war. If the central bank doesn't cut interest rates soon, in the process, he might also be seeking to delegitimize the historically independent institution in a way that could undermine its effectiveness, says The Wall Street Journal. In a social media post on Monday, Trump repeated last week's demand that the Fed reduce interest rates now. There is virtually no inflation, he said, blasting Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Mr. Too late and a major loser.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Whatever you, whatever anyone thinks about Trump, they have to admit that he is good at coining. Coining, he's good at nicknames. Mr. Too late, quote unquote, a major loser.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Powell has always been too late. He misspelled it, I guess, in this post, because The Wall Street Journal puts it in, in, in brackets, S I C, sick for, for misspelling. Except when it came to the election period, when he lowered in order to help sleepy Joe Biden and later Kamala get elected. But Kamala didn't get elected, so it's kind of odd.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing that the market can be up in a 24 hour period where, uh, Trump is attacking, uh, the Fed.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  We're undefeated. That's why. It's, it's that simple, Jordy. I don't know what else you need to hear.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  His Truth Social post developed one of Trump's longstanding beliefs about the Fed, that it should be more responsive to what the president wants. His statement and those of other advisors allege that the institution, far from being above Beltway politics, has already become politicized. This is what I was saying, where we should give, uh, Jane Street direct right access to the law and to the government. And they should just optimize for the stock market value. And so they should just be, a high frequency lawmaking is what I would call it. And so you just change the law, change the interest rates, just do whatever you can to just maximize shareholder value at all times.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like Jim, you know, Jim. Is it Jim Simmons, right?

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  If Jim had had right access to the Fed, he could have.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  It would be a golden age for

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  Trust the computer. Trust the computer.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, trust the computer. By Trump's account, Powell worked with, worked to help Biden during his term and is now unwilling to provide the same support to his own second term agenda. He put no weight on the fact that Trump appointed Powell to the role in 2018, that Powell worked closely with his administration in 2020 to provide unprecedented support when the pandemic hit, or that the Fed was prepared to settle Biden with a recession in 2023 by raising interest rates sharply to bring down inflation. Wall Street Journal putting Trump in the truth zone a little bit here, but we'll see where it goes.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. The polymarket will Trump remove Powell in 2025 is still only at a 20% chance. It has jumped dramatically from.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if you're tracking this stuff, there's a lot of noise on either side because it's a highly partisan issue, but that is why I like polymarket generally. Obviously, they're a sponsor of the show, but I think that, you know, the one thing that we've learned from the last few years is that these prediction markets are not politically biased because people just want to make money when they're in there. And so it's a much stronger signal, in my opinion. Anyway, the next Wall Street Journal story happens to be Boeing is selling some of its navigation business in a $10.55 billion deal. Ring that size, Gong Tour. The agreement includes the sale of Jepson for Flight Air Data and Oz Runway assets to software investment firm Toma Bravo.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  The Arlington, Virginia-based aerospace giant said Tuesday that the definitive agreement includes several assets that provide digital tools and services for aviation operations, such as Jepson, a provider of navigation charts and flight planning for pilots and airlines and ForFlight, another flight planning and navigation app that helps with route optimization, weather tracking and flight management. That has been a big issue. There was this crazy backup about a year ago. Do you remember this, where Southwest was, was trying to do? Do like all the different routing and everything got knocked offline and it was all just because they had this like, you know, cludgy system that was far too big. It's a, yeah, I mean,

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting to think about Tomo Bravo buying, basically, when people think of Boeing, they don't associate it with quality, right? They went to, you know, they've been suffering through a PR crisis, a quality crisis, whatever you want to call it. But it's interesting to think about this set of software providers as basically being critical infrastructure, critical software infrastructure for aviation broadly.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go through a little bit of this. I want to do a little bit of a deep dive on Tomo Bravo because it's a name that comes up a lot, but I don't think people know the history of the company and they think it's, it's one of those like they're not out there. They don't have a marketing organization, really. They're but kind of behind the scenes.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  Deals tend to market themselves.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then every once in a while you'll see one of those threads that's like, this is the best secret company that no one knows about. Like, maybe you should start a competitor. It's like, no, you shouldn't. Have you ever thought about applying artificial intelligence to private equity? I don't think anyone's thought of that. It could be a good opportunity.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Good opportunity there.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Great opportunity.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  No one's thinking about this.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, no one's thinking about that. Why has no one thought of?

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  Private equity has not at all been thinking about driving business efficiency with software for the last 20 years. They wouldn't even dare.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  So Boeing is trying to slash costs and raise money as it burns billions of dollars a quarter in struggles with a quality crisis in the wake of last year's fuselage panel blowout on Alaska Airlines flight. That was exciting. I,

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Their losses are staggering.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of people were saying, I'm not flying Boeing. And I always said, if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Oil, oil.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, because, because as a white collar worker, as someone who, you know, typically, you know, I'm not on the front lines. I'm not in a trench war, but I feel like I would fight a trench war.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  For Boeing.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  For Boeing, for Ramp, for Bezel, for Wander. I believe that I need some excitement in my life. And so if I get on a plane, it's normally very anodyne, but if there's a, if there's a risk, there's real risk. People know.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  A thrill.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  I'm putting my life on the line for business. Now all of a sudden it's real. That fires me up.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  No, and this is why Nathan Fielder's new show, The Rehearsal.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  It's fantastic because it's all about aviation safety. The timing is perfect. I think what people, I didn't have full respect for this. I do now because we've had a number of guests on the shows.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  On the show, just how difficult it is to manufacture large

• 9:18John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  commercial aircraft.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  China has not been able to really get their national champion to any type of, you know, real scale.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  It is extremely, extremely, extremely difficult.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  The phones.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  And we should support Boeing.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  I support Boeing.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, the phones, the fact that they're small, I think does make it way, way easier, which is silly because it's a really complex device, but it just is smaller. And so that means you can move them around a bunch of different, you know, manufacturing lines very efficiently. And then also it's very low stakes. There have been phones where the batteries have melted and the phones have exploded. And people would just be like, oh, my phone's hot. I'm putting it over there.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  They survived, but that cannot happen on a plane. And so it's just a completely different safety infrastructure. And then we talked to the, talked to a couple of founders that said that one of the key SpaceX innovations was let's make the motor, the rocket engine so small that it can fit in the back of like a truck bed as opposed to something huge that needs a crane. And, and every time you're working with something that's that massive, your supply chain is now three different companies instead of 30. And every time you need to move anything, it's very expensive.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  So. Chief executive of Boeing, Kelly Ortberg, last year said he would cut 17,000 jobs. He also raised more than 24 billion in equity to keep the company afloat.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Good fundraiser, honestly. That's the big numbers, you know? You gotta give it up to a guy who's, who's putting up big fundraising numbers.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Executives have been exploring asset sales that could bring in much needed cash while shedding non-core or underperforming units, an approach Ortberg has described as pruning the jet maker's portfolio rather than overhauling it. Analysts say the sale is a mixed bag. It delivers much needed cash, but given that that Jepson is profitable could come at the expense of longer term profits.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  As part of the agreement, Boeing will keep its core digital capabilities that use aircraft and fleet specific data to provide fleet maintenance, diagnostics and repair services to its commercial and defense customers.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Yep. They're selling Air Data, which specializes in aircraft leasing, maintenance and asset management, digital solutions and Oz Runways, Boeing's Australia-based provider that helps pilots with planning, briefing, flight plans and navigation. Digital Aviation Solutions segment employs about 3,900 employees across its global operations, a figure that includes those employed in the business that will remain within Boeing and those included in the sale. So it's kind of an aggregate number and the transaction is expected to close by the end of the year. And if they're trying to, you know, sell, sell flight software all over the country, they gotta get on Numeral.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  They gotta put your sales tax on autopilot. Baby, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numeral.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark Series A.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  Benchmark Series A.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  Go check out Numeral. Thank you to Numeral for supporting the show.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Quick, uh, quick background on Toma Bravo. Started in the eighties, Stanley Goldner and Carl D. Toma founded Goldner Toma and Company in Chicago. Goldner had already made a name at First Chicago Corp. where he backed early successes like Federal Express, FedEx, and helped open pension fund investment to private equity. Carl Toma was a Stanford MBA from rural Oklahoma and he shared Goldner's vision of a gentler approach to leverage buyouts. It's gonna be gentle.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  Gentle.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  It's just a gentle LBO. Activate Goldner Retriever Mode. Yeah, he's being very nice. Together, they pioneered the bill, the buy and build strategy rather than hostile takeovers or asset stripping. They acquired small businesses and grew them through add-on acquisitions. So this is very much in line with like technology powered private equity, but back in the eighties. So they're saying, we are gonna LBO, we are gonna use the tools of modern finance, but instead of just asset sale strip, hostile takeover, cost cutting, like the traditional, like the bad, like the, oh, it's private equity so rough. They're thinking of more of like a growth mindset. So they brought a growth mindset to private equity, basically.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and bringing it up since it was part of the conversation yesterday, we had David Tish on talking about venture rollups, basically.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  And one of the reasons we were kind of joking about it is that there's been many, many, many players in software private equity for a long time.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Oh, for a long time, yeah.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Who are buying businesses and saying that we're going to leverage software and even saying that we're going to leverage artificial intelligence.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  To make these businesses more efficient. So the idea that people in venture are going to come in and outfox private equity, which is cutthroat, efficient, professionalized. Anyways, I do believe there's opportunities.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  There very clearly are opportunities.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  But it's not a, oh, no one's thought of this before.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  It's not a blue ocean market.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not a blue ocean.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. And it's funny because, you know, Toma, he's known for being a savvy investor, but he has this folksy demeanor because both of his parents were ranchers and he's from Oklahoma. It's kind of like, you know, good old Oklahoma boy. And so he was able to kind of like match that folksy demeanor to these friendlier buyouts that are focused more on long-term expansion. And so in the early years, they applied these buy and build across fragmented industries, buying up niche companies and rolling them into bigger platforms, very much like the rollup.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  So in the case of this Boeing deal.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  They're buying an existing basket of assets.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  And I'm assuming they're going to add to it.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  And then eventually they'll probably take it public again.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so this approach is common now in private equity, but it was novel at the time and it earned Goldar and Toma credit as its originator. So they're like the originators of the rollup, the private equity rollup, the one that we like know and love today and often profile. The firm partnered with incumbent managers and avoided the 1980s stereotype of the ruthless corporate raider. By the mid 80s, their success attracted new talent. In 84, Brian Cressy, a first Chicago colleague of Goldar, the other founder of the firm, joined the partnership. The firm was renamed Goldar, Toma and Cressy, making the first of several name evolutions. If you're working at an investment firm, maybe you're an associate at some VC firm.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  Try to get your name added to the firm.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Get your name added to the firm. Exactly.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so like if you were an associate at Sequoia today. You might.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  I was pitching founders fund.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  I was like.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Do founders fund and Coogan. Founders fund and Coogan. They like that that was when I was like, this is where I'd like this to go.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's plenty of precedent there, right?

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally reasonable.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  Kleiner Perkins.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield buyers.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  And yeah, you know, who knows? Uh, maybe it'll be, uh, Kleiner Perkins, Randall and Lee Marie.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Russell.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Because they're the, they are the new blood over at KP if you haven't been paying attention. Anyway. Stan Goldner became a legendary figure in private equity. He chaired industry associations and helped legitimize PE and pension portfolios. That's really big for asset accumulation and getting bigger deal sizes done. You need a ton of LP dollars. And so, once the pensions come in, they have trillions of dollars under, uh, uh, under management across all these different pensions. And he helped pitch PE as a reasonable asset class, which now it's like the most obvious. And venture is the one we're talking about. And then there's even more like, oh, can, can pensions get crypto?

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Private equity broadly.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  And then venture is a fraction of that.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, these, you know.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  Pension funds are, are over, you know, deploying in, in PE just simply because it's more stable. And, and there's a lot of other reason for it.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yep. So, so Goldner is really key in, in legitimizing private equity in these pension portfolios. Carl Toma has this mix of like Midwest pragmatism and Stanford training. Like he is a serious dealmaker. But, uh, so he emerges as like this creative dealmaker who also prefers building companies over just financial engineering. And so a lot of companies like, you know, it's all about like the, the waterfall, how they're going to pay down the debt payments and like create value there. He's more about that company building mindset. And then Brian Cressy, the third guy on the team at, at the time. Uh, he brings this JD MBA from Harvard and a, and a particular eye for healthcare investments. So they make some, they make some interesting deals there in the early stages.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  So the three of them.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  They have, they were collaborative, growth oriented, focused on specific sectors where they could rinse and repeat acquisitions. And by the late eighties, rinse and repeat.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  That's one of my favorite things to do.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  And consolidate.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing like a little consolidation.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  With your active voice.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  When I think of rinsing and repeat, I just think of one hand washing the other. Just one of my favorite things.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  By the late 80s, the firm, which was now managing several small funds, had proven the efficiency of consolidating businesses, which is broadly a template that they would continue to use.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so they add another bro to the crew.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  They go to GTCR.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  This is way before Tom and Bravo. Goldar, Toma, Cressy, and Rounner. Rounner? I don't know how to pronounce that. They bring on a promising young exec, Bruce Rounner, and he'd risen to partner. His name was added in 1987. GTCR became one of Chicago's top buyout shops, investing through the late 80s LBO boom and navigating the early 90s recession. They specialize in rollups across industries like healthcare, media, financial services. And by the mid 1990s, they had some differing visions among the senior partners. And the firm's success had created these like small, strong personalities and strategic debates, as often happens. And so there's like this culture clash a little bit between the original founders and then the newer generation.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  This happens a lot in funds because you're like, the partnership is bought in, but you gotta bring in new blood, but they're gonna wanna do something in a different way, and that's gonna lead to some culture clashes. And so in 1998, GTCR's leadership decided to part ways, splitting the firm into two different entities. So they actually split the firm. On one side, you have Stan Goldar and Bruce Rounner. They stay with GTCR, which continued focusing on varied industries from its Chicago base. On the other hand, Carl, on the other, Carl Toma and Brian Cressy spun out to form Toma-Cressy Equity Partners, taking a team to pursue their own investment focus. And the split was amicable, but they had strategic differences and they wanted to try different approaches.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  And so GTCR pursued the broader mandate, and then Goldar passed away in 2000, but GTCR lived on.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, GTCR lived on. And what I love about going to private equity websites, these firms' websites, is that in venture, you'll have a fund with like... 10 million AUM.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  And they'll be like, we back and build the future.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, it's got a video, it's got like every company they've ever done.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  And private equity will just be like transforming business to build value. And they have like 200 billion AUM.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Some might say that VCs should do that more often. It's great. And so basically, like, the incarnation of Tomo Bravo that we're thinking about now, Carl Toma and Brian Cressy, they really focus on TCEP, that's Tomo Cressy Equity Partners. It's a standalone firm in 1998, and they're continuing this buy and build model, but with a fresh canvas. And so Cressy has the healthcare expertise. He's steering some of the investments toward health services. And Toma's looking at fragmented business services and emerging tech niches, still very technology driven. And then this is where we get to Bravo.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Orlando Bravo, great name.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  Strong.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Enters the picture in 1998.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  Comes out of Stanford. Stanford, JD and MBA.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  First round draft pick to the private equity ranks.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  But he made.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  This is a good, this is a good lesson. He had been frantically cold calling PE firms looking for a job. After roughly 100, 100 calls.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  His resume caught Carl Toma's attention and they quote unquote hit it off.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Dude.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  He was 27 years old at the time.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  99% of JD MBAs quit right before their 100th cold call. To get that PE job.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  The existing partners said it was the smartest investment they ever made.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  He moved to Chicago at that point and became an apprentice.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yep. And so Tomo Cressy, Brian Cressy, the co-founder of Tomo Cressy, is a seasoned dealmaker with a pension for healthcare deals and a reputation as an industry consolidation guru. He's educated at University of Washington and Orlando Bravo is raised in Puerto Rico. He'd been junior tennis champion who attended Florida Tennis Academy in his teens. He returned home for high school, then excelled at Brown before heading to Stanford. By the time he joined Carl Toma in 1998, Bravo's drive was evident, the same drive that would soon reshape the firm's direction. I love these like deep dives on these obscure firms. So the new firm, Tomacressi, entered the dot com era cautiously, but caught attention.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  But even caution couldn't spare it from early missteps. Basically, everyone lost some money in the dot com bust.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  A little bit here and there. What's, what's a few billion among friends?

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Indeed. Orlando Bravo's first assignment in the late 90s were tech-related investments that turned sour in his late twenties. Bravo led two startup deals, NerveWire and Eclipse Networks, just as the tech bubble was peaking. When the bubble burst around 2000, Bravo's first few deals were disasters, losing most of the $100 million invested. It's pretty crazy to go from, I mean, that's the nature of PE. Like you, you, you go from Stanford to PE. And even though you're, you know, like an associate or like new to the firm, you're deploying big money.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't there something with Ross? Schwartzman's first investment at Blackstone where like it, I'm, I'm pretty sure that his first deal like went terribly.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  So there's like, there, there's basically precedent at this point of

• 23:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  PE size lords, like, you know, basically fumbling the first deal and then just coming back in a, in a big way.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  Learning a lot. That's why I've been asking some of the VCs that come on, like, what was your first deal? Like, what did you learn from that? Like, I think that's an interesting line of questioning.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  And then there's some, some people that we've had on the show and they're like, my first three deals were unicorns. Justin Maris was like this, like it was like his first investment was like, it went public or something like that.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you learn different lessons from that. But Bravo said, I learned I didn't want to invest in risky things ever again. He's like, I was permanently risk off after the dot com crash. It was too painful to live through. This hard lesson was shape the firm's strategy. Rather than chasing raw startups, Bravo realized they could use their capital to buy established companies with steady revenues, especially in software and apply the build and the buy and build playbook there. And so they pivot to software. This happens in the early 20s.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Good timing.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Even though they're getting burned in the dot com on startups, they realized that there's incredible value in technology and software. And so the insight was that the economics of software were just so powerful. It was like no other industry, very obviously, Bravo later said. In 2002, he spearheaded their first software buyout, Profit 21, which is a niche ERP software provider for distributors. Tech buyouts were uncommon then because most of these were still venture backed. They were on the IPO train.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  We had lenders at the time. A lender was a lot more willing and excited to lend against a real estate portfolio, a fleet of vehicles, things like that, right? So lending against software that where they were like, what are we really lending against? How is this secured? It's secured, you know, on the.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  And so they did it without lenders, really. I mean, lenders were pretty wary of these tech buyouts. And so Tom McCressey had to structure this Profit 21 acquisition with almost no leverage, which, you know, you hate to see because we love leverage. But they also brought in their first operating partner, experienced software executives to turn the, to help turn the company around. So they have a deal team and then they also have an operating team. Once they buy the company, they actually help install, install executives that can go in and, and start growing the business and, and optimizing things. Because a lot of, a lot of times the companies that they're buying, founders might be out. They might be a little burned out. The company might not be running as efficiently. It's kind of just like, hey, it's humming along. It's, it's, it's profitable, but it's not as good as it could be. So they want to make it great.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  And the firm's job is to place immense pressure on the management team to hit very aggressive goals.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Yep. Strauss Zelnick did something similar with, with Take-Two and the GTA franchise. He came in, that company was sitting on incredible intellectual property. They owned. 2K games, like all of the different basketball games, and then also GTA, like the greatest gaming franchise maybe of all time. But it was just like, it was just a creative mess. They would just like have fun and they were under, they were under like FTC investigation and SEC investigation. Like they, they weren't even like trying to cook the books. They were just so sloppy and messy, they didn't care about the books. And so their accounting was all off and there were all these different lawsuits going on. And Strauss came in, wound up buying the company for like kind of zero dollars. It was a crazy deal.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  We should dig into all that, but basically he gets the, he gets the company and immediately starts running it like a professional business because he's, he's a beast of an operator. And so Profit 21, this first tech acquisition did really, really well. So they exited with a 4.7X return on investment and this was an early win in software with minimal debt and just hands-on operational fixes. And it's, it really cemented the firm's new direction, so.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Middling outcome if you're a venture capital firm, but if you're a PE firm, that's gonna do, you know, a bunch of those.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it feels repeatable at this point.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  Avoid losing money.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Feels repeatable. Like there are other companies that are in Profit 21's like, like segment and that playbook can be run again and again. So Orlando Bravo, he's just 30 years old. He gets promoted to partner in 2001 on the strength of those efforts.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Being promoted to partner at 30 in 2001 just sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. Now the timing is perfect to go on this generational run in software.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, timing is, timing is a lot, but it might not be everything, but he, he really nailed it there. And so software deals started piling up. Orlando Bravo's influence within the firm grew. By 2005, Carl Toma and Orlando Bravo had recruited a trio of new talent. Scott Krebel, Holden Spot and Seth Boro joined the investment team to focus on software sectors. All three of them are with the firm today as managing partners. One of them came from Summit Partners, the other had experience at Morgan Stanley and the last one was also at Morgan, at Summit Partners and History of Investment Banking. So a pretty common path into private equity from banking and other deal-making organizations.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  So this, so this, as they're growing the team, they can also scale up their deal flow. In 2007, they rename the firm because they, they love Orlando Bravo. The firm is renamed Toma Crese Bravo.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  A year later, 2008, co-founder Brian Cressy decided to depart. Cressy spun off with a team to form Cressy and Company, refocusing on healthcare investments because Tomo Bravo, of course, is doing tech stuff and he's doing healthcare. And they're, and they're just slightly different strategies. So they split the firms and then the firm renames to Tomo Bravo LLC, officially born 2008, an overnight success. And today they're buying Boeing assets for $10 billion, running kind of the same playbook. It's a boring, it's a boring software company that's just profitable, growing, but

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  A series of software companies.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, a whole bunch that they're bolt on. And, and just continue to, to grow that. They're not dipping their toe in the, in the super hot, high growth startup market. They're going for just, hey, there's some great software assets. They're installed a bunch of places. It's critical. They built a bunch of stuff. This business is good. We can make it better.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  So, and I'm sure they'll look at venture assets that are eventually, you know, maybe they don't reach escape velocity, get to, you know, 100 million of ARR, but not quite breaking out. But they will be very sort of aggressive in terms of valuing these businesses. And certainly, you know, if, if Tomo Bravo is buying your company to bolt on to an existing sort of roll up, very unlikely they'll give you a revenue, you know, 100x revenue multiple. It could very well be a 1x. It could be less than that. Could be more if you're growing quickly and have a real path to generating cash flows.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  But as they, as they scale up, they start doing more and more ambitious projects. They eventually scale from, you know, midsize PE firm into just like a complete heavyweight in tech buyouts. In 2012, they do a $1.3 billion take private of Blue Coat Systems, a cybersecurity company. And Blue Coat had solid technology, but needed a strategic overhaul. And Tomo Bravo takes it private, improves operations and later sells it for four and a half billion in 2015. So three years, they go from 1.3 billion to 4.5 billion. And of course, at this point, they're also able to use leverage because they have better access to the debt markets. And so they're even, they're making even more money. I'm sure you're trying to pull up a size gong of some sort.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to pull up a lever up button.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  But they pull up this, risk on. But they but they basically got a pattern. They buy a public tech company, they optimize it privately and then sell or IPO at a much a much higher valuation. And this is this is the whole, you know, take private strategy is like, it's very hard to completely turn the cruise ship or the battleship in the public markets because your stock's just going to get completely hammered while you go down for a couple of quarters because you're saying, hey, there's a business over here that's really, really damaging us. It's low margin, but it's going to hurt our revenues. And if somebody's looking at you on a revenue multiple, they're going to be upset about that. Or, you know, there could be a number of different things that could look like red flags in the public market. But if you have a couple of years to rebuild in private, you have you can just take more risk. You

• 31:20John Coogan?

  can go risk on. And so

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  On. Yeah, the other thing that they're the other thing that they're doing, just because a large part of our listener base is venture there. They're by by using leverage, they can get a much higher return on their equity. So if they're buying a company for a billion dollars, they might, in some circumstances, only put up, you know, $200 million, right? So when they they turn that $200 million into a four billion, you know, $4 billion outcome, it can be very meaningful.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  So there's there's one more funny deal we got to go into. By 2018, Tomo Bravo is doing regularly doing multi-billion dollar deals. They're they're in the same conversation as Silver Lake and the other big tech buyout firms. In partnership with Silver Lake in 2016, they buy SolarWinds, this IT management software company. Are you familiar with SolarWinds at all? Okay, so SolarWinds is is IT management software. They will go in the network, watch for what deployment's happening. It's like kind of middleware for deploying software at a large enterprise. But there was a hack. Where it was a very, very bad solar winds hack. Did you hear about this?

• 32:34John Coogan?

  And so basically someone injected something into solar winds. So then that was what's called a supply chain hack. So every company that had solar winds was now vulnerable. And it was like a really, really brutal attack. And it was funny because I was doing it. I was trying to understand like the history of solar winds. And I found the founder who had built the company, sold it, like exited like years and years ago. And he had gone on Shark Tank to pitch a cooler, like a, like a, like an actual cooler that you could

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Like beers in.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Cause he was like, yeah.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Truly golden retriever mode mindset. So he, he started this cooler called the coolest. And it was, it was a cooler that you put ice in, but then it also had a fan. So it would like provide you air conditioning when you're hanging out with your buddies, watching the baseball game or something. He was clearly like post-exit founder, just like hanging out with the kids. Like, yeah, wouldn't it be cool if like we had a better cooler? And so he goes on there, he pitches it. He explains that it's like a thousand dollars or something. Cause of course he's like, oh yeah, cooler. Like, what does that cost? Like a thousand dollars or something. But he tells the sharks that he's like, yeah, I founded solar winds. And you'd think that would be like total bull signal, right? You're just like, okay, this guy built a billion dollar business. Like he's probably can figure out like the cooler market. But all the sharks pass. They all say no, they all say they're out.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Anyway, fascinating little side, side tangent. Anyway.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The unfortunately coolest cooler shut down after a five year saga.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  20,000 people that backed the Kickstarter didn't actually get the.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Oh, that's brutal. Yeah, very rough. But anyway, I mean, solar winds wound up being a great company and Tom Bravo, I'm sure made a bunch of money. And then they had the hack and I'm sure they rebuilt from there. But all, all of that is to say that like Orlando Bravo became known as, you know, an incredible deal maker. He was on the cover of Forbes in 2019. They called him Wall Street's best deal maker. Pretty great. He was the first Puerto Rican born billionaire in finance. He was on the 400 list, the Financial Times nicknamed him the king of sass. We love that. A lot of people vying for that at, at, you know, a lot of venture capital firms. But you're going to have to go up against Orlando Bravo, the king of sass, the best deal maker in the world. To really, really own that.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Own that name. Bravo's War Chest grew. They got a fresh $12.6 billion fund. Now they're eyeing a 10 billion plus deals and we just saw that with Boeing. They did a $10 billion deal. How'd they do that? They raised a massive, massive fund. And there's a bunch of other interesting deals that they've done, but they're doing mega deals.

• 35:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just to give you a sense of some of their bigger deals, they did Proofpoint at 12.3 billion. The Boeing Digital Aviation is actually their second largest, which is hasn't, you know, obviously closed yet, but in process. Anaplan 10.4, RealPage 10.2, SailPoint 6.9, Medallia was at 6.4.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Acquisition binge.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  Darktrace 5.3, Sophos, Click, Imperva.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Absolute size lords. You don't need to do that many of these deals to put up some very large.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Although there is something unique about the Boeing deal that was announced today is that this is kind of the start of a new strategy for Toma Bravo. We've seen a lot of traditional private equity deals where they buy a private company, do an LBO and grow and buy and buy and build, that buy and build strategy. Then they start doing the take private turnaround strategy. They take a single digit billion dollar public company, take it private, change the strategy, try and sell it later, or take it public again, exit the position. But they also are starting to do carve outs in 2023, 2024, and that's what the Boeing deal is.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  They're carving out a piece of Boeing's business and then, you know, packaging that up as an entirely new business. And I mean, it is a different operational challenge because it's not operating completely independently. And so, you know, you're going from being a Boeing employee to being an employee of a new company, a digital aviation software portfolio that's owned by Toma Bravo that will eventually have a brand and be a, you know, cobbled together from all these different assets. Anyway, let's move on to our next story. The oil patches Manhattan project, how to fix its gargantuan water problem. I thought this was interesting. I had no idea the ratio of oil to water when they are fracking. So for every, for every barrel of.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  For every barrel of crude oil that's pumped, they are now producing four barrels of water. And so this is on, this is happening in West Texas and New Mexico around fracking. The Permian Basin is the, is the location. And so there's a big question about what do you do with the gargantuan amounts of noxious water that they produce because it's gross and you need to filter it or treat it if you want to put it back in the water supply. So typically what they do is they just pump it back into the ground. And so if you go a few slides forward, there's a, there's a graphic of what they do. They're taking, they're taking oil, oil rich shale, which is how you frac.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  So you blow, I think like air and water into the ground. You suck up the oil that's there. The oil's very, it's not like a clean pool of oil. There's a whole bunch of other stuff in there. You pump all that up. This is about two miles down. Then they kind of filter out the oil, take the oil out, and then they pump the water back down, three miles down. But that's causing earthquakes and so people are upset about that. They're playing God, we don't like that. We don't like earthquakes because they're pumping so much water.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Augustus would like a word.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So we can kind of go through this. So.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  So they're trying to evaporate the water, which is interesting.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they're basically producing all this wastewater. It's just sort of like sitting there in a pond and then they have a system to effectively try to get it, just disappear it. Disappear it into the atmosphere. So there's a picture here. I don't know if we can pull it up, but you can see.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  It's a fascinating image. So there's these.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Evaporators hum on a huge saltwater pond in the middle of the biggest oil field in the U.S. They are part of an experiment by ExxonMobil to address one of the challenges facing frackers in the Permian Basin.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  All these crazy economic projects to process all the side like, you know, waste products from this. But it's all part of, you know, the goal to help unleash American energy. And, you know, I'm generally in favor of figuring out new ways. I mean, fracking was in many ways like a miracle in terms of America's energy independence.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  You know the meme that's like, America's like, you know, struggling and then we just discover like, you know, immense like mineral deposit.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Oh, no, we're out of rare earth. Yeah. Oh, no, we're out of rare earth elements. And then it's like, oh, we found the largest deposit ever in like Utah. Companies in recent years have made strides in treating brine and recycling it for their operations, but more water flows back to the surface than they can use. Meanwhile, as the volumes of liquid they can pump in the ground have shrunk as companies have started to run out of underground space and regulators have imposed limits on disposal to prevent earthquakes. Enter the evaporators. Exxon, which is the largest Permian producer, started testing the machines about a year ago as a pilot project. The device is manufactured by Colorado-based RWI Enhanced Evaporation, a little hard tech company. We've got to get the founder on. They blow air down on the pond.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  Company's probably been like around for 200 years.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've been evaporating for about, you know.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  Who knows? Who knows? Maybe RWI is just like, you know, seed stage startup. They just went through YC. You never know. Don't judge. One machine costs $46,000 and consumes about as much electricity as a wet, dry vacuum cleaner. RWI estimates that between 20% to 50% more liquid gets vaporized that way compared with natural evaporation. And it's interesting because like, if this water truly is like underground, is it something that when it's brought up into the atmosphere, it's going to wind up like, if it gets purified and evaporated, does it wind up going into clouds? Does it wind up getting seeded? And does it wind up making the land in that area more verdant because there's more water? Or was it already considered in that equation because it's kind of groundwater? Or was it been buried so deep it doesn't matter?

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, these things, like the primary thing here is environmental concerns, right? Totally. If you're a farmer trying to grow organic, you know, food, or you have cattle, you know, a mile away.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Oil water raining down on you. It sounds like acid rain.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Sounds, sounds bad. But I'm sure that RWI would argue that, you know, there's some. Chemical process that means that the water itself is, you know, potentially just as pure as rainwater.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to tell.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  I mean, evaporation's pretty effective. It's separating things out. That's how it's done in.

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  But this is like a very, a long-running trend where, you know, looking at the production side for groundwater in these areas, specifically for oil and gas production, for a very long time, if you owned a piece of land, you were legally allowed to pull as much water as you wanted out of the ground.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  And what happened is regulators, governments, states, et cetera, realized that no, water is a shared resource. There's effectively rivers that run underground that are, you know, tied to aquifers. Those aquifers can stretch across multiple states, right? They're massive. And so, you know, one private company, it seems like broadly, you know, we need a change to regulation in energy, you know, across, like, you know, we've had a number of nuclear founders on, but.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  The nuclear thing is huge for desalination.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  It seems like almost impossible and a perfect match because you have such concentrated energy. You can just throw the nuclear power plant right next to the desalination plant. You have all the energy. It can run 24/7. Like, it's perfectly matched as opposed to a lot of other systems.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And one of the, yeah, the issue with this fracked water is that it's salt water.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:05Jordi Hays?

  And, and that means that you can't just go spray it on plants or you can't put it on crops. It will just kill everything.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's bad. So, this is interesting. Last year, Permian drillers discarded roughly 5.5 billion dollars, billion barrels of water by pumping it back down into the ground, right? So, 5.5 billion barrels a year. That's what I want you to keep in your mind. 5.5 billion barrels a year. So, they're doing a, so, an injection well typically.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  Forty-two gallons per barrel, by the way.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Okay. So, an injection well typically gussels between 10,000 and 25,000 barrels of water a day and. An evaporator working in optimal positions, optimal conditions vaporizes about 32 barrels an hour. And so now Exxon is trying to build a commercial sized desalination facility operating in the Permian by the end of the year. Last month, they commenced a pilot project, but the testing that's happening, the desalination technology is doing 20 barrels a day. That's the pilot. So 20 barrels a day is, is what 700 barrels a year compared to

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  Not making a dent.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  700 compared to 5.5 billion.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Like we're off by so many orders of magnitude. But at the same time, like you have to start small and you have to, and you have to, you know, run the test to see, can you actually purify out all the toxic chemicals in the water? And does the actual scientific process work? And then it becomes an economic equation of what happens. So they are scaling up. They're going to do a $25 million desalination facility with an initial capacity of 10,000 barrels produced a day. And then, and there's plans to build a plant that's 10 times bigger next year.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This is the challenge. So generally with oil production, you think it's just about how do we get this out of the ground?

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  It's how do we get enough water to support this process?

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  And then what do we do with that water after the process?

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  To dispose of it?

• 45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  And you're being regulated on both sides, right? I have a portfolio company called Resource Monitor that, that helps oil and gas companies basically stay compliant on the production side. So they're producing all this water and they get, you know, budgets, you know, from, from various groups on, you know, how much water they can actually produce. But that's only, you know, one part of the problem here.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the goal is to bring the cost of purifying a barrel down to 75 cents, which is slightly more than what it costs to flush the wall, flush it down the well. There, this 25 million desalination facility is going to do 10,000 barrels a day, which is 3 million a year. But remember, we're 5 billion.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  We're producing last year. And then they want to build one that's 10x bigger. So that'll get you to 30 million, but you're still two orders of magnitude off, two orders of magnitude, 100 times. They're going to like, if they build this 10x plant, they will only be doing 1% that they're pumping down into the ground. It's actually crazy, the scale of this thing. Anyway, they're, you know, they're, they're trying to scale up and there's a bunch of companies that are working on this. Anyway, if you want to go hang out in Texas, book a wander.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service.

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a vacation home, but better.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  And in most of those homes, you're going to find really, really nice lighting and that's the topic of our next story. Offices are ditching harsh fluorescent lights. New tech is on the way. I think this is going to be extremely controversial because the new tech, it doesn't sound Lindy and so we're going to have a debate over whether or not the, the path to better lighting is more advanced technology or do we need to go back? Do we need to go back to incandescent?

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  I was hoping they were going to say, every office will be required to have a warm fireplace.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  It's a warm, a warm hearth.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  A hearth.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  A hearth.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We're going back to hearths.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  We should go back to hearths.

• 47:13Jordi Hays?

  I was joking the other day, I think, you know, on the topic of lights, I think Apple, to really differentiate, should come out with an iPhone UV that sort of gently tans your face.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  That sounds like a real product, the iPhone UV.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  The iPhone UV, it gently tans your face while you use it.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  And I think they've got a hit on their hands, at least in Los Angeles.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. They do the blue light filter. They can take the blue light out. Why not add some UV light in? Yeah. I love it. From faux skylights to circadian tuned systems, lighting upgrades are a priority for companies trying to lure employees back to the workplace.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Faux skylights.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  I know. The faux skylights are crazy, but it's going to be really big when I build my Batcave that's three stories deep into the ground.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be really key.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Because you're going to want 24/7. It's going to be like Las Vegas where like you can't tell what time it is and you just get lost in the, it's going to, it's going to have like a kind of Severance vibe. That's what I'm going for in my basement when I build.

• 48:07Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Glaring fluorescent lights in the office are on the way out. The technologies coming in promise to do much more than make everyone look better, improved and potentially more healthy lighting is high on the list for companies and building owners trying to lure employees back to offices after an era of remote work. They are investing in new technologies such as faux skylights that mimic natural light, compete with, uh, complete with a virtual sun and moon and adjustable illumination systems designed to sync with employees' circadian rhythms. I wonder how long until this becomes a culture war issue? Because you know that air conditioning thing became a huge culture war issue?

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Incandescent light bulbs were banned.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Yes, they're, yeah, they're extremely hard to get in California. I've been struggling with this for a long time.

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  Sort of like re-legalize them, I guess?

• 48:50John Coogan?

  I didn't hear about this, but that sounds cool. I, I, I like an incandescent light bulb. I'm a fan. I like a tungsten bulb.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  We've known for a long time that natural light is better and makes people feel better. So it's not a completely crazy idea, says a professor at Wharton.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  So aside from the psychological benefits, research studies have shown that light can, can have an impact on non-visual brain function during cognitive tasks, particularly those that involve sustained attention. Office lighting revamps are expensive. Installing some of these technologies can add 20 to 30% to the cost of a project, those in the industry say, and it could take time for them to become mainstream. I'm assuming that's 10 to 30% more expensive than the existing light solution.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  You know, Stanley Kubrick shot a film entirely using candlelight? And he had to collaborate with NASA to make a new lens that could absorb even more light so he could shoot in darkness essentially. And now, modern filmmaking technology has gotten so good that the cameras that we shoot on can basically shoot in the dark. And so I think for the next set, we might want to consider just a warm hearth, a nice fire.

• 50:02Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Some candlelight.

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  There's something there, some nice, a candelabra that we just light and that lights our face. It'd be a very different look from your typical new show, but I think that's what would make the show special.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, once we go to 24 hours a day.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna wanna be, we're gonna obviously have eight sleeps on the floor.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll be able to sleep, you know, in cycles.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  For the subathon.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's something there. So, programming the day, playing into post-COVID wellness trends. Office designers are exploring so-called circadian rhythm lighting to sync with the body's circadian rhythms. The biological clocks inside our cells, that time when we sleep and wake. Expect to see illumination that can be tuned by intensity brighter or dimmer and color temperature cooler or warmer throughout the day to mimic the light outdoors. So I'm in favor of this.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  I want Huberman's take on this. I want Brian Johnson's take on this. I want Soul Bra's take on this.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  Marc Andreessen notoriously has gone to war with Huberman and said, "I'm gonna use my phone as sort of max brightness."

• 51:01John Coogan?

  Their bromance is fantastic.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  It's hilarious. Anyway, yes, you gotta be using, at the very least, warm white 2,700 Kelvin bulbs. You can't be walking around in the bright fluorescent.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  Lighting's important. I mean, the issue with LEDs is there's the flicker, right? Which is not visible to the human eye.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  But when you, if you use it on a camera, it'll drive you insane over time.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  I firmly believe that. Efforts to develop such lighting took off after researchers in the early 2000s discovered photosensitive cells in the retina that detect light generally below the level of our awareness. These photoreceptors, independent of vision, can affect biology and behavior, researchers found. So, I mean, really what it depends is not, it's not just the one size fits all. It's like, do you want, do you want an insane work culture? Do you wanna drive your employees insane? Well, then maybe you should go with the craziest, most strobing LEDs constantly so when your team is in the office, they're ripping their hair out.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  We had Chris from Hadrian on Lights Out Factories, right?

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  What about lights out offices where the only light is from screens?

• 52:12John Coogan?

  From screens.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  From your email machine, just blasting light in your face.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Anything to get you to work harder. Anyway, you know, I imagine that the lighting is pretty good if you're at, if you're at a...

• 52:27John Coogan?

  An auction for a championship bull. We should do that story before our guest hops on in six minutes.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  The vicious sport of landing a prize bull at auction with herds thinning, finding the right stud is a high status game. That's why you come to this show, folks.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Tech, business. This is the business of the technology of prize fighting bulls. With herds thinning, finding the right stud is a high stakes game, but how do you tell a $45,000 bull and an $8,000 bull apart? I know a lot of you have been asking that question. Well, we got the answer from you courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  When Randall Grimias shows up at an auction, everyone knows there's a prize bull in the barn, John. The 56-year-old rancher has an eye that is the envy of America's livestock industry, never more so than now. The U.S. cattle supply is thinner than it has been in 75 years, sending prices soaring for bulls with the tools to repopulate a herd. Ranchers travel to auctions across the country in search of the right bull, and they can't afford to mistake a dud for a stud.

• 53:28John Coogan?

  I had no idea that there was a population crisis among the bulls. I only see people yapping about humans. I had no idea.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  That led to a crisis. So when Grimias's private jet touched down here last month and he strolled into a barn at TD Angus Ranch, all eyes were on him. Which one did he like? Grimias would keep them waiting.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  I'd love this article.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  After 283 bulls were scooped up, his prize came charging out onto the show ring. Number 284 had what he likes, a longer neck, a chest that looks like it can add more weight, and a backside with a nice arch. We're talking about bulls here, to be clear. Grimias figured the bull could fetch as much as 60,000, and he was prepared to pay up.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Sales like this one can make or break a rancher's year, and as a result, they are filled with the kind of tension and gamesmanship often associated with art auctions or the NFL draft. In North Platte that day, the average selling price was about $10,000 up from a year ago and double what it was seven years ago, according to the rancher running the sale. He and his wife Dana spend hundreds of thousands of hours preparing his roster of bulls and putting together the catalog. They do ultrasounds on the bulls to compile stats such as marbling score, which determines the potential tenderness of a future cut of state.

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  They're doing more diligence on bulls than the average VC does on a hundred million dollar check.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Like no joke.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  No, this is a mature industry. This is very, very serious. Their paycheck comes once a year during the sale. Ranchers pour through the data and analyze images of a sales catalog. Rare is the bull that hits the boxes based on his jeans frame and testicular fortitude. Scouts also look for intangible traits, such as if he looks powerfully made or has the requisite sass and swagger. Founder, no. They are in founder mode to spread his seed. Sean Lowry is a sixth generation Nebraska rancher and is part of the Milldale Ranch, one of the oldest running ranching operations in the state. He looks at the lineage of the bull, who the mother and father were, and certain physical traits. Not too big, with near-perfect feet for wandering around

• 55:36John Coogan?

  his 3,000 acres, and large testicles that won't freeze during the winter. It has to have that look. You just know it. He can't be too tall, can't be too small. We like them long, we like them deep. This is in the Wall Street Journal, folks. This is an important industry. It's fascinating. Up close auctions get messy. The bulls occasionally defecate, and if a tail swings at the right time, it flings it into the crowd like a killer whale splashing the onlookers at SeaWorld.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta go. We gotta go.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  We gotta go and see one of these bull auctions. You know, I follow an account that does breakdowns on horses for horse racing, and the technology that they use to do due diligence on horses, on thoroughbreds, is far more advanced than anything that you'll find in a Dachshund in Silicon Valley. They match the gait, they have these computer vision algorithms that show the different proportions of the horse. It's incredibly detailed, and the horses can get well up into the high six figures.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  So the bidding started at 5,000 before quickly climbing to 15,000, 20,000, 40,000, and soon 55,000. "Your man has to beat 55,000. Come on, Randy," he said, trying to get Grimias to bid. Grimias didn't bite. He knew his prize was later in the day.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. It's interesting. You know, the same dynamic plays out in Venture, right? The sort of like, oh, the second that Sequoia issues a term sheet, then every other investors coming around being like, oh, yeah, we always wanted to do this. And it's an interesting dynamic where, in theory, once he's starting to bid, everyone else should just sort of like pile in and try to get the one that he wants. So

• 57:17John Coogan?

  Even some of the ranchers are sending other people. So Lowry, people know him. So he sent his foreman into the bleachers to do the bidding. So he wouldn't get recognized because people thought, oh, he's got a good eye. He's the Sequoia of bull bidding.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Yes. He says, "Sometimes I will get emotional. I will get pissed and it will cost me thousands of dollars I didn't intend to spend." Lowry said, "In this business, these cowboys are awful prideful."

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, I would love to get one of these ranchers on Ramp because time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And if they're flying out to different ranching bull auctions, they're going to need to be expensing flights, booking hotels, if they don't have the private jet already. And Ramp Travel would be a great fit for these guys. So if you are a rancher, get on Ramp today.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Coming in to the studio, we have Roy, who has been tearing up the timeline. We're very happy to have him join. How are you doing, Roy?

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  What's up, brothers?

• 58:22John Coogan?

  What's up?

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Brother, great to have you.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  How have the last few days been for you? Can you take us through the brief pre-history here of what happened with Columbia? And then we'll get into what happened with your launch.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, earlier this semester, earlier this year, I built this tool called Interview Coder to let you cheat on your technical interviews for software engineering jobs like LeCode style interviews. I filmed myself using this to get a job at Amazon. I recorded it, posted it online, and Columbia saw. Amazon reported me to Columbia. Amazon is mad, Columbia is mad, and this ends up being a spat that I sort of publicized on my Twitter. It becomes this big spectacle, and I eventually get kicked out of Columbia or suspended for a year and blacklisted from most big tech companies.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  What was the original plan here? Wait, was the original plan a publicity stunt? Or did you actually want the job at Amazon?

• 59:15Speaker 02

  I was never intending on taking the job at Amazon. The impetus for everything was I did a bunch of LeCode questions, thinking that I would work at a big tech company one day. I really hated it, and at a certain point, I kind of just thought, I really want to build companies is what I want to do with my life. So this is just seems like the optimal route for everything. I can make this big protest against LeCode, and at the same time, I can do something that I suspect will be super viral and just give me like a distribution channel to build off.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. I mean, there's many people in venture that have spent, you know, 10-plus years trying to build a following here and, you know, the growth of your account alone in the last few months has just been insane to watch. And yeah, absolutely gives you an edge as you now, you know, come in.

• 1:00:00John Coogan?

  So take us through the product, what you launched, and how that video came together.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, Clouly is supposed to be the, I guess, the ultimate experience layer for AI. In a world where models are truly multimodal and you can sort of have an AI that remembers the last 10 years about your life, nobody's going to be on a chatbot, chatgpt.com, where are they going to be on? They're going to be on Clouly, and this is what we hope to build, and this is what we are building. We sort of filmed this launch video to be like a vision for the ultimate end state of what does true AI in everything look like? Like a true AI maximalist life 10 years out in the future, what does that look like? And it ended up coming together really well, and I think it resonated well with the world. Went very viral and very controversial, but.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, very controversial.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  How did you, you went against, you know, the norm? You launched 2:00 PM Pacific on Easter. Did you just launch when you were ready, or was that planned at all?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was 420 and it was sort of in brand with like me being like the little like punk college kid like I'll launch on 420 might as well.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, what about, uh, has any of the pushback been, um, correct? Can you steel man any of the pushback? Is it bad to cheat?

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  I think, I think there's two worlds of, or like, there's, there's two big arguments for the pushback. The first is this is dystopian and this sort of destroys what it means to be human. And I, I disagree with that pretty fundamentally. I think every time technology has advanced our capabilities, uh, people have said the same thing. This destroys what it means to be human, but ultimately like that never ends up being the, being the case. We just become more efficient as a species and the traits that make us human are not the traits that sort of like AI can fill in the blank for. The, the, the second, uh, large area of pushback is, um, this is cheating and cheating is unethical. I think it's sort of, the phrase cheat on everything is left intentionally vague. I mean, what exactly does cheat on everything even mean? You can cheat on a test, but can't really cheat on a sales call.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  You can't cheat on a meeting, you can't cheat on a conversation. What clearly or what AI allows is sort of like an unfair advantage and it's so unfair that it feels like cheating. Imagine you're in a sales call at this tool, this, it's like this genius tool that knows everything about you, your company, your clients. Anytime a technical question is asked or objection is asked, immediately it just knows and just can give you the right answer. Like your human intuition just looks at that and thinks, wow, this, this is not fair. This is cheating, but I mean, ultimately this is where the world is headed. And really this just like makes us a hundred times more efficient.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. I mean, in many ways, business is like, you know, feels like a sport in some ways, yet there's sort of laws that govern, you know, corporations and, you know, different, different markets. But there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with giving yourself every possible advantage.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  To win. And so you should absolutely just use every tool available.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Jordi Hays?

  To, to win.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, uh, talk through the product. Uh, version one seems like maybe a web app or an iPhone app, but then it seems like there's a, it seems like there's like a, like a augmented reality vision in the future. But how are you thinking about that? Because, you know, there's a monopoly in Apple products. There's a monopoly on foundation models now, like, uh, where are you seeing yourself break through? Are you sitting on top of different systems or trying to build something from scratch?

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Right. Right now, the the vision, the the the version of the app that we have is just a desktop app, has complete access to your screen and your system audio. So it sees everything you're seeing and it hears everything you're hearing and can help with that context. Ultimately, though, what we want, the end state of the product is a chip inside your brain that lets you use AGI to think. That is the ultimate end state. And the way we get there will be sort of like, like variable of like, if if the models get significantly better, significantly fast, the chips get better, significantly better, super fast, then it's sort of like, like, the way we get there is is is is subject to change. Right now, we are building a really, really good desktop app that can be the player, ultimate player two for your computer.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. What would you, how do you respond to like the criticism that, like, maybe you're over optimizing for distribution ahead of product, you're you're going viral, like you're frustrating people, you're being controversial, and like, maybe you should just be heads down and like, go build something great. And then, you know, the the the the business will build up slowly over time. And this is like, oh, you're like clout chasing is like the criticism.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of people that say distribution is the final mode. In fact, everybody says this, distribution is the last mode, anything can be built. And if you truly believe this, then you would behave exactly how I'm behaving.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  That's a really good point. But but but specifically, like, the there are different, there are different modes of distribution, right? Like, you could, you could have found a distribution angle that frustrated people less, right? Or was less edgy, right? And and so is is is the need to be edgy, is that a product of the way our social networks work? Or the way our our distribution, like, moats already exist? Like, there's already a, like, the the humane team was able to get distribution and attention by kind of aping an Apple ad. And they were able to get a distribution. You went a very different direction. Is that, are you a, like, a product of the of modernity, I suppose?

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I would think so. I think I have a very unique and I think a very strong viral sense. I've been into about what makes things go viral and what things will go viral. And for me, that's like pretty edgy. And I would probably think, and most people probably agree, the video wasn't nearly as controversial. It wouldn't do 10 million views in two days.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  I agree. Yeah. Uh, talk about how the round came together in the process there. Uh, I remember you first started going viral and I imagine it was just your DMs, you know, flooded by, uh, you know, everybody pushing back being like, you know, this is, this is wrong. But I think you were smart to pick like a common sort of like enemy, like people generally are sort of anti-university right now. They're sort of anti-elite code. But talk about how the, how the round came together and, and, um, yeah, I'm curious. Cause that, that kind of like, you basically did a, you know, indirect roadshow where you had the attention of everyone in tech for, you know, a period of time.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  It was a really messy round and I don't think I can advise most people on fundraising. The round in total lasted less than 24 hours.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember that. You just like posted. I think I saw one post and then you're like, okay, the round's done.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  We, we, our, our pitch and our entire deck changed twice in the middle of the round. And the only thing we came in really knowing was I'm super hot right now. We can build a bigger company and right now is the best time to get money. Real, in reality, in the future, there were only two worlds. One, I fell off and I can't raise again. Or two, um, I succeed massively and all of a sudden like the extra five, 10% dilution here if we fuck up. It's like, it means nothing.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you, um, how do you think about sort of like flexibility at the product level? Like, it seems like you have a very clear vision of how to unlock AI for individuals broadly. And it sounds like starting in the workplace, but are you flexible in terms of what that sort of exact implementation looks like? What kind of, you know, different niches? I can see the application in sales, et cetera. But, but how are you thinking about sort of adapting now that you have like this flood of customer demand and attention? Now you need to like, you know, turn it into durable revenue and things like that.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is something that there's like a really, really hopefully viral experiment that I'm going to try that will be the first of its kind. I'll just announce this right now. We're probably going to hire about a hundred interns and we're going to turn them into like sort of the ultimate content farm over the summer. So be like the most motivated high school and college kids. I really truly believe if you're over the age of 23, you probably don't have the viral sense that you need to go like consistently massively viral. We're hoping to have this like gigantic content farm and every single one of them will be sort of assigned a different use case for the product. You guys are going to advertise this product for sales calls and you guys are going to just like ship out content for sales. You guys are going to advertise this for meetings and you guys are going to advertise a deep research feature.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  And sort of like the consistent virality and attention on the different use cases will, that will make it what's lasting.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  I mean, do you have, do you have a suspicion as to which, which use case is most profitable in the, in the midterm? Because I mean, the Riz app already exists for messaging people on dating apps. Deep research allows, you know, basically everyone to already cheat on their research papers if they have to write research papers. There are co-pilots all over the place and you're kind of pitching like an omni co-pilot, at least in the short term.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  Are you still, is your formula like go viral and test everything and then find a new niche and then double down on that? And then maybe we're talking to you next year and you're like, yeah, we've, we've found it, we cracked it and we are, we are cheat on sales calls. And we're, and we're, you know, great for SDRs and we've kind of dropped all of the other things. Or, or do you really want this to be everything for everyone on day one?

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Everything for everyone on day one is a bit unrealistic. Right now, the two things that we're really zoning in on are, are meetings, like virtual meetings like this and also sales calls. But it's entirely possible that every single use case flops doesn't go viral, isn't helpful, except for one random use case. In which case we'll like clean double down on that. But the end state is, you know, like AI for everyone, for everything.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  I, I want to go deeper on the actual, like hacking your way into products to make using the product easier. Talk to me about. Getting an iPhone app, is there a way that you can hack your way into the camera button with a shortcut? Or the action button on the iPhone? Meta Ray-Bans, is there a deal that you can do to take over for that? Like, it feels like most of the hardware providers are have very sharp elbows around their ecosystem. Some of that's breaking with the latest FTC lawsuits. And maybe they're more open to it in the future. Also, like the failure or like the setbacks to Apple Intelligence have kind of raised questions about like,

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  hey, should that Siri button be remappable to other things? How are you seeing the landscape around hardware evolve? Because that feels really, really important to you. If you don't want to go build it yourself, burn $100 million trying to build the next Apple product.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't actually think that we'll, I doubt that we'll ever be integrated into the iPhone. I don't actually know that that is the best modality, even if we could. I think most people, I mean, friend.com, Ome, like, like everyone is sort of betting on the idea that there will be like this new hardware element that is like a companion. I think that's if we were to delve into hardware, that would be most realistic, like the next step. But what I really would like to do is sort of like beat out Neuralink and just sort of just directly skip all that and get the chip inside your brain. That is the true end state is what we want anyways.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't ask the Neuralink guys about timelines then.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about what the general, you know, while you were at Columbia, what the vibe was on campus? I'm assuming everybody's using ChatGPT. But do they know, like, do they have a sense, like, is this, is there an impending?

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Tyler Cowen like has completely embraced AI in his, I believe, graduate level economics courses, where he says, yeah, go have ChatGPT write the paper, then dig into it and teach me something from it. It seems like he has a very positive view on AI in education. What's been your experience?

• 1:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Getting into that more, is there a general fear about AI on campus? Are people like worried, oh, job displacement, things like that? Or are they just excited to leverage it to grow and be better at their jobs, et cetera?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  There's definitely concern, but I think the most interesting thing here that most adults probably don't realize is exactly how many people are using AI. I mean, the percentages get even more skewed at the higher level schools. But I will say, out of every single person I've met at Columbia campus, there is not a single undergraduate who hasn't cheated on at least one assignment using AI. And the vast majority of CS majors at like

• 1:12:31Jordi Hays?

  You should tell them to kick everybody out. Kick everybody out. Just clear the slate. Yeah, whistleblower. Columbia whistleblower.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  Columbia cheating is okay. It's trolling that gets you in trouble.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  And you were a troll.

• 1:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Don't have fun. Don't expose, you know, technological changes. You will be blocked.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Who are your inspirations? Are you like a Nathan Fielder type guy? I feel like there's someone that you look to in your virality. Who inspires you?

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Bill Burr, Nathan Fielder, those guys are so funny. Dave Chappelle, I mean, I was thinking that. There's like a lot of like Asian content creators, college black that are funny, too.

• 1:13:12John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Last question, Jerry?

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  No, I love it. Who are you? Do you have, have you put together a team of, you know, former classmates? Have you gotten anyone else to bail with you? What does your team look like today?

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so over half the team is friends that I met from community college, actually. And the other people are my co-founder who dropped out and also the guy who's probably going to be valedictorian of Columbia.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Are you worried about any like serious backlash from Columbia? Because I saw the thing where like they told you, don't share this document. You shared it. It feels like, like they find out you have five million bucks, they sue you, like

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  I just want to go out on the lens. I will, I will, I will give money to the Roy Lee defense. So we got you, we got you.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  I'm anti-cheating in the literal sense, but I like, I like building and I also like trolling and comedy. So I'm like 50 50 on you, I guess. Are you worried?

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  I'm not as reckless as people think. I read the documents very carefully before disclosing the confidential and there's like, it was not legal. This is the worst case to get expelled. And for me, probably the best case.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I, I, I think I would be okay with you getting kicked out of Columbia, but I would be upset if they really tried to put.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out on a limb and I'm gonna say, I, I, I believe there's a real chance that you eventually go back and give the graduation speech at Columbia. You know, you're gonna have a, you're gonna have a crazy arc and I'm, I'm excited to witness it.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  I hope so. I hope so.

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Good luck.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:14:49John Coogan?

  Hopefully there's not too many crazy biz dev deals between you and success because I feel like if, if it comes down to it and it's like, in order to win, you have to partner with Apple, you might have to clean it up a little bit. But good luck to you. I'm sure you'll figure it out. And thank you so much for joining us. This is a very exciting story. And I love when anyone blows up the internet like you did.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congratulations on, on all the momentum in the round and excited to have you back on soon.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fantastic.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Thank you guys.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  Next up, we got Jacob from Superpower announcing a $30 million Series A, B, C, D.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  Series A.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  Series A.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Um, and also a SUSA Ventures.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Back to back SUSA.

• 1:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Back to back.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Chad Byers. It's Chad Day.

• 1:15:33Jordi Hays?

  Shout out. It's Chad.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Chad Day.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  He's easy.

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  April 22nd will forever be known as Chad.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  I'm a Chad. I invest in Chads. That's his, that's his investment thesis. The end.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  The end. We got Jacob here.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in. Jacob, how you feeling? How you doing? Should we ring the size gone for you preemptively? Congratulations on the round. How's it going?

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  John Jordy, gentlemen, great to see you guys.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:15:58John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Uh, give us the breakdown. What are you announcing? Uh, and give us the, the high level pitch for Superpower.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  $30 million Series A. It's our biggest capitalization to date. Capital's no longer constrained and we're building a super team to reinvent healthcare.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Give us the backstory.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  How does it start for the consumer?

• 1:16:18Jordi Hays?

  Get laughs done? I was gonna say, let's go back a little bit. Yeah, let's start with the backstory. 2023, you had a, had a rough year. You wanna, you wanna share that? Oh, yeah. How that kind of catalyzed superpower?

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Rewinding the clock, it was 2022, actually. And that year, I almost lost my life to perverse healthcare incentives and a system that doesn't necessarily help people be proactive and take control. So that was when I was building my last company. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. It's one called Crohn's, which those might be, might be familiar with. 50 million Americans have autoimmune disease, two thirds of which are undiagnosed. And in my case, it led me to being hospitalized for close to four months, had multiple surgeries, lost part of my stomach, got stuck with a multimillion dollar bill. And you realize really quickly that, you know, the thing that health systems are designed to do from a business model perspective is make the most money. So that's bill, pharmaceuticals or surgery versus getting at the root cause of like, what's actually driving complex diseases in my case.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  So I was really, you know, more seen as a way for them to make a lucrative billing, you know, cash flow versus, versus actually getting to the root of what was ailing me.

• 1:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, uh, yeah, talk about how that led into, uh, superpower. I remember we had a, I think we had lunch. Just after that period, I remember you were like, it felt like you were almost still in a daze because you were just like, almost, you know, spent a year almost dying. But you knew from, you know, basically right at that moment, kind of what you wanted to do.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  It actually comes back to Twitter. So I posted about my hospital story and it went, it went mega viral. And as a result, I got connected to a handful of these like high end concierge doctors who basically work with the tech billionaire class. And they charge like 50 to 100K for their clinics. And what you do when you're a patient of these practices is they test everything in your body, leave no stones unturned. They'll like sit down with you on a whiteboard for four hours, connect the dots across every little thing in your health. And then pair with the full time team to basically put your healthcare on, on autopilot. So if you're fortunate enough to be in a financial position or in the know to be a patient of one of these practices, you're basically never going to die of chronic disease. You're going to look like, you know, the memes of Bezos and Zuck that are super yoked. You know, I know the doctors that probably do their peptide regimens.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  You think it's just peptides? Peptides or is there a secret juice?

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  I can't reveal too much, but you realize really quickly that there's a gap between healthcare for the best and healthcare for the rest. And obviously, being a technologist and a brand builder, it just became very obvious that there was a big opportunity here to democratize once I went on my own healing journey.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that founders should, like, I feel like there's this balance between founders need to be performant, you need to have high energy, you need to be able to oftentimes go 20 meetings in a single day, whatever that looks like. You basically have a life, you know, the intensity in many ways of a professional athlete. Where, what do you think the sweet spot is for founders in terms of, or investors in terms of caring about their health, but not letting it sort of like take over their entire life? I went through a period in, in college when I had a bit more time where it felt like 60% of my brain power was just like going to like lifting and eating and things like that. And

• 1:19:32Jordi Hays?

  obviously, it's not sustainable if you're trying to run a company and things like that. So I'm curious what you think the kind of like sweet spot is in terms of, you know, wanting to be high performance, wanting to be healthy, wanting to not be like, you know, age, you know, accelerating your aging, things like that.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  It's quite a quandary, right? Because we obviously pride ourselves on being a team. We even joke that our office is the world's healthiest office, yet, you know, sometimes we still have to put in the hours and we have the engineering team posting up on the floor.

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  For the evening. But, uh, yeah, it really, I think, is an opportunity to usher in a new paradigm shift where we can put health at the forefront of the conversation. You know, I think we're actually about to have our first board meeting here this upcoming quarter, and we plan to have some statistics on the health of our founders and our team in our, in our board. So we want to kind of set the, lead the vanguard in what it, what it looks like to, to have health be like a Trax foundation, just as you would, you know, your Amplitude or your Stripe data or all the metrics that matter for business.

• 1:20:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was joking, John and I gave a sort of humorous talk in Miami last year, and we were talking about the case for like VC platform teams should just be like, basically like doping, you know, like helping, helping their portfolios, just like, what's your creative, you know?

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  How much are you working out? What's your ADEEP score?

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  Looks like we need to add a little bit of tea in the mix here.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  I think someone's gonna launch a fund with this thesis where, you know, maybe it'll be me, I don't know.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Unironically?

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't think it's, I think it's a very real, I joked about this, but I think it's very real. A lot of venture funds, especially if you're niche, you need some type of edge. Some people are like, oh, we're gonna help you with sales, we'll help you with recruiting, we'll help you with your next round, but just saying like, we're gonna help you-

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  We'll help you with your one rep max.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  Help you with your one rep max, exactly.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Thousand pound ventures.

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about the, the sort of opportunity in AI specifically for superpower you guys have started with biomarkers. How do you plan to leverage that to kind of unlock value on the data side and all that?

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  So in the limit, something that we deeply believe is everyone will have a healthcare super app on their phone. And today, a consumer health experience is deeply fragmented. You know, consumers have to run around town to a bunch of different places and it's all disconnected. And the front door to health is, you know, something like ChatGPT or Google or WebMD. But the problem with those platforms is they don't really know much about you and they definitely don't know everything about medicine. So what that sort of culminates in with what we're building is what we think will basically be an AI doctor in everyone's pocket. So we're kind of aggregating all of your medical records and health data, making it super easy to test

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  your whole body and combining that with all the world's medical knowledge, which does not necessarily exist in foundation models today. Each foundation model is sort of trained on a select aspect of the healthcare and medical literature universe. So there's a lot of creative ways to get a full picture on what's actually happening at the edge of science and medicine. When you put all this together, you have a recipe for a really unique company that we think one day will be something that a large majority of Americans own. And healthcare is, is ripe and it's, it's, you know, demanding of better consumer experience. We've seen the consumer experience being reinvented for, you know, every other aspect of our lives, but healthcare is sort of the last domino, domino to fall. And we want to be basically the predominant company to, to bring this to the market.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  How do you think about the interaction with LabCorp? It's an 18 billion dollar company, kind of, you know, stocks up and stocks down, like kind of, you know, up 60% over the last five years, obviously. When you're doing lab testing, like you kind of got to build on top of like the railroad that's already there. But how does that relationship evolve over time?

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, labs are a super commoditized business. What's really happening and what's exciting to pay attention to is innovation in testing. So today, it's actually kind of a cumbersome process. You have to have like a nurse come to your house. You have to go to a lab corp. They test your blood. They send it off to another facility. It takes like, you know, eight or nine tubes to get a full enough panel and picture and then a week to come back. Uh, and there's probably like a dozen or so friction points there. So something like Theranos over the next few probably is not that far off. And thankfully, we're building at the application layer. So we have to be best in the world at building a trustworthy brand.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  Low cost customer acquisition and a really amazing AI doctor product.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  And what, what is your takeaway from the Theranos story? Do you think that there's any like sort of misread on that historical, uh, like anecdote? Like we've, we, we've done like a deep dive and we were like, there's more nuance to this story.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  The issue is don't apply, build fast and break things to consumer health.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  Healthcare doesn't move at the speed of code is all. There's a certain reverence you have to have for the human body as, as a healthcare founder, which makes the, the, you know, the, the Zuck adage a bit tougher to apply.

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the, what about the interactions with the FDA? Uh, I'm, I assume that there's oversight around, you know, you, you get the lab markers done with LabCorp or Quest or something. And then, uh, you're interpreting that and you're at the application layer doing AI data analysis, all sorts of good stuff. But at a certain point, um, actually making a recommendation about someone's health is probably regulated. What does that look like and how will it evolve over time?

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  Yes. We're not quite in a world yet where AI and the algorithm can make a medical diagnosis or a recommendation. So the system that we've architected and the paradigm that we're in just as an industry is basically AI with human.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  So anytime it gets to a point where a human has to intervene, we do plug in a doctor on that, help you with that, which helps us avoid any sort of messy FDA regulation. That makes sense.

• 1:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you see a world in the future where the average company maybe outside of our tech bubble is like giving budget to employees specifically for preventative health, right? Like sort of health insurance broadly is a pretty standard benefit, but, um, feels like preventative health is like, you know, potentially the next place that employers, uh, want to invest?

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  Undoubtedly, so one of the challenges in healthcare today is because the average American is transitioning jobs every two to three years and that healthcare is tethered to your employer, that means it's just a game of bag passing where the insurers don't really have an incentive to underwrite anything that's a bit more long-term or preventative or optimization focused, like getting your testosterone checked, checked out. So in that world, the insurers don't necessarily want you to get access to things like superpower and have it, have it be covered. So that's where employers will ultimately step in and potentially start to cover these types of things as supplemental benefits because they're going to drive clear employee retention, acquisition in a market where it's only more competitive to get the best, to get the best people.

• 1:26:35Jordi Hays?

  What's, uh, what's an underrated supplement right now? It feels like, uh, you know, magnesium, magnesium's hot.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  Atia takes six different types of magnesium.

• 1:26:44Jordi Hays?

  I take, I take.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  I also take six different.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  You take six different types.

• 1:26:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm only on four.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  You're only on four. Oh.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Those are rookie numbers. Um, what do you think the next kind of magnesium? I, I've been surprised to see creatine in the timeline so much just because it seems like something that it's Lindy. People have been taking it forever.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Methylene blue is in the timeline.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Methylene blue, um, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm 50/50.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but what's your take, Jacob?

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  I got one for you. Oral BPC 157.

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. I've been on oral BPC 157. This is the Wolverine peptide.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  It's from the Wolverine protocol.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:21Jordi Hays?

  No, this is, this is what it's sort of, is it semi, like there, there's an interesting thing right now where there's like substances that are banned by various like sports organizations and leagues that as a CEO you can just take, right? So like if a pro athlete is like wanting to take something but can't, because it's very effective, but it's so effective, it's maybe made illegal. Uh, yet, yet if you're a CEO or a capital allocator, why not get on some BPC 157?

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  In Silicon Valley, performance enhancing drugs are encouraged.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Yep, that's true.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting time right now. I mean, it feels like these sort of like psychedelics, like, you know, have long been a part of Silicon Valley culture, but I think that, um, performance drugs, not just exogenous testosterone, but I think they will just become more and more popular where. It's going to move beyond, okay, founders are on, you know, maybe they're on caffeine or nicotine and creatine, but on onto like really optimizing, you know, peptides in the way that, you know, you mentioned it, people like Bezos are probably doing to some degree.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Better sleep. Yeah. Makes sense.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, great to have you on, Jacob. Very, very exciting.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  Anything else, anything you want to plug before, before we end?

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  Gentlemen, I appreciate the, the time, but maybe before I leave, I'll give people the quick sneak preview of our AI doctor product that we're launching very shortly. So Jordy, if you have any questions for the algorithm, maybe how to boost that testosterone.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  What's the, yeah. How much BPC 157 can I take before I explode? What is the LD50 of BPC 157? Cause I'm going to the max. I want to look exactly like Wolverine.

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  John has, John has the highest natural T levels of, I think.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. But imagine how much higher they could be if I was on the Wolverine stack.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  If John, if John 2X his T, it would be potentially world record.

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  So, uh, I mean, obviously foundation model plugged into that, but then also built on top of your own data. So you can query your own lab results and get customized recommendations. Is that the idea?

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  And then, and then as soon as it, yeah. And as soon as it, as soon as it like makes a firm recommendation, kicks you over to a doctor before it starts violating FDA rules, basically.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Exactly. The way to think about it is the world's best doctors will spend hours and hours with you on web boards, connecting all the dots in your health, but that computation doesn't scale at a, at a, at a higher price point. So we're democratizing it.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Love to see it.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Awesome, Jacob. Congrats to you and the whole team. Cheers.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of AI, we're having Logan Kilpatrick from Google on.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I'm very, very excited for this one.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  A lot of different stuff.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Logan has been on a tear.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  He has. Great poster. And as soon as he is here, we will bring him in to the studio, but maybe in the meantime, we'll tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available to source any watch on the planet for you. Seriously, any watch. And I mean, while we're also on it, we did not get a chance to talk about Aidsleep. Go to aidsleep.com/tbnn. Get a Pod4Ultra. It has a five-year warranty through 30-night risk-free trial, free returns and free shipping. And in, and we will go back to the show now. Let's bring Logan into the studio. How are you doing, Logan?

• 1:30:51John Coogan?

  Let's see, we're bringing him in. How are you doing?

• 1:30:53Logan Kilpatrick?

  I'm doing great. It's been a great, busy last six months of AI stuff, so I'm trying to stay alive.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Just the last six months? I feel like every six days is huge in the AI world. It really is like the best place to do content around or just read about or listen to podcasts about like the AI world is just so fertile. Regardless of what you think about like Pdoom and Acceleration and all that, just in terms of like the applications, the deals that are getting done, it's fascinating. So yeah, what are you watching today? What are you watching this week? What's most interesting?

• 1:31:27Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, that's a good question. I think continued momentum of 2.5 Pro on the Gemini side. I think obviously a bunch of new OpenAI models, which has been awesome to see. It's also been, back to your point about how much fertility there is in like different AI stuff. I think if you look like two years ago, it was really just the models and like the model cadence of launching was like actually quite slow relative to like products. And now we have all these products which people are really excited about and like the product innovation actually happens a lot faster. So it's like acceleration across the model category, but also across all the product category and like there's just. There's too much to keep up with at this point. It's impossible.

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  Are you generally feeling the acceleration? Because I feel like we are seeing acceleration on the product side and certainly in the fragmentation of models and the specific and the specialization of these models. But in terms of just like massive order of magnitude breakthroughs, I feel like when we went from three, GPT three to GPT four, that was a huge leap. We passed the Turing test. Chat GPT was huge. And then since then, it's been more incremental, extremely valuable, extremely great. I love it, but I haven't, I haven't seen as many of those like viral moments, Studio Ghibli accepted probably.

• 1:32:38Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I actually think I'll push you on this point, which is I think we've had more of those large moments than I think people appreciate. And I think it's just like, it's actually hard to appreciate some of those moments if there isn't a product experience that brings it to life. And I actually think that's been a lot of the gap. It's like, if you look at like multimodal, like the fact that the models can like with better, better than, just from a multimodal input perspective, better than humans are at like most vision tasks. Like the number of products and like things that that unlocks is like truly mind blowing. If you look at two years ago, what you would have had to do to make a, make something work in that ecosystem.

• 1:33:16Logan Kilpatrick?

  And like that is from an order of magnitude of impact, like massive. Maybe it's not as big as like text, but it's still this like huge massive and like we're continuing to see that with like, you know, now the models are really good at tools. And now the models can actually generate images and audio and video and all this stuff. So I, I think we're getting those. I also think our expectations have just gone up so much that we're like, if the thing isn't, you know, brushing my teeth for me, then like all it's not, it's no longer.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yesterday we read a post from near Cyan and it was a, it was a screenshot of a definition of AGI. Read it out.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  So it was a reminder of how far AGI goalposts have moved and, and it's a screenshot that says an AGI could beat you at chess, tell you a story. Bake you a cake, describe a sheep, and name three things larger than a lobster. And it's funny because like, okay, everything, we're doing everything except baking you a cake.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  And

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  Even then, it'll give you a great recipe and it'll give you a recipe for any type of cake you could possibly imagine.

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  A sheep-sized cake.

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  You can do anything. Anyway, I want to talk about this, this idea of like the Pareto frontier in AI models. Sean, previous guest on the show, mentioned that Google has been very good at delivering not just high-quality models, but affordable models. Has that been a deliberate strategy to try and create the best model at every, at every different price point? Or is that just a natural outgrowth of the engineering culture and the scale of, you know, being a hyperscaler?

• 1:34:40Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think a lot of this has been an intentional decision. I think if you look at like specifically 1.5, like the flash series is really where we sort of landed this point the most. I think recently with 2.5 Pro, it's been the first time that we've actually had like truly one of the most intelligent models available and relative from a cost perspective, it's still super affordable. But I think it also just like why we've been able to do that and why we focus on it is like, goes back to like, you know, Google controls from a product perspective, like all the way to how the models are delivered, to how the models are trained, down to the silicon. So like you can make decisions, assuming a bunch of those things are going to be true, which is like a lot of folks don't have the flexibility to make those decisions.

• 1:35:25Logan Kilpatrick?

  And, and the beautiful thing is like, I think this, this point goes underscored, which is like, what does this mean? It means that builders have the freedom to do stuff. It's like, not that like Google has this really great advantage and the, you know, thing we do with the advantage is find out how to milk money out of people. It's like, we have this advantage and what does it mean? It means the world gets cheaper AI models and they get to go and build the products. And like the margin for people building AI products actually goes up every, like the farther you push the Pareto frontier, the more money builders get to make, which is like such a interesting and like unique thing about this AI moment that I actually don't think has been true in a lot of these other platform shows that have happened in the past.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I want to dig in there. Google's in a unique position in that it's a consumer tech giant, but also a scaled infrastructure provider with GCP.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  And you could see-

• 1:36:15Jordi Hays?

  Not to mention a B2B player. I mean, I don't know a single startup that doesn't run on Google Workspace.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  A 100%. And so, and so you, like Ben Thompson was just talking yesterday about, he's really pushing OpenAI to just go full consumer and let Microsoft handle all of the B2B stuff. Don't let the API load takeaway from serving your consumers. In, with Google, there's probably some sort of tension there. But what are you excited about on the, on the B2B side? And this idea of like, you know, oh, if I build a wrapper, is Google gonna like just steamroll me? This is kind of like an old meme, but now, you know, it seems like the best time ever to build on top of the, like 2.5 or any of these different models that have great cost and, and like scores and what, and benchmarks and whatnot.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  So what, what message are you sending to kind of the, the developer community?

• 1:37:08Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, so two things. One, a reaction to your first comment, which is around like, is there value in doing both consumer enterprise and some of these other things? I think my push for companies, like if you're in the position to be able to do that, and like, there's a bunch of nuance to this because obviously OpenAI is an example is like extremely well capitalized, et cetera, et cetera. Like they have the means to do this and do it well. But for companies that can, I think part of my core worldview is a lot of the reason that ChatGPT has been as successful as it has is because there was an API business built around it. And if you think about it through this lens of what the API business did was like allow the world, allow this like massive proliferation of AI products to educate the masses that people are interested in this stuff.

• 1:37:51Logan Kilpatrick?

  And then like, at the end of the day, who has the world's best AI products? I think like, you know, some people maybe argue it's ChatGPT, maybe it's another product. But like, you sort of let the appetite of the world that like, oh, I can actually do these things. And it's, you know, in my product surface or et cetera, et cetera. And all that's enabled by the API. And then when you look for like, okay, what's the best way for me to use this product? Maybe it's one of those consumer products made by one of the, the larger labs. And I think that, that playbook actually works a lot. And that's why I'm extremely bullish for people who are sort of doing both of these things.

• 1:38:22Logan Kilpatrick?

  I think to your to your question about like, where's the value for builders today? I 100% agree with you. I think there's so much value to be created at the application layer. If you look at, I think about these like three curves at the same time. There's like, on one hand, the cost of AI going down into the right, you know, cost of AI down 99% over the last two years. The intelligence of AI is up into the right, like, models continue to get smarter and better with test time compute and scaling and stuff. At the same time that the models are getting smarter, the costs are going down. Consumer understanding of AI is going up. And then in parallel to that, as consumer understanding is going up, as the models are getting better and cheaper, consumer willingness to pay for AI products is also going up.

• 1:39:03Logan Kilpatrick?

  And I think there's this like, it's this beautiful, like, you actually could not ask for a better set of four lines and a graph than those four things if you're building a product. It's cheaper for you to build a product, your customers are willing to pay more, there's more customers, and the tool that's actually enabling the value creation is just getting better for free. Like, you don't have to do anything, it just gets better for you. And like, I don't think there's been a time in human history where for builders, all four of those things have happened at the same time. So I'm super, it's like, I literally wake up every day excited because people are building companies and all this is happening for them.

• 1:39:38Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you think about balancing, you know, benchmarks and capabilities, right? Google's consistently been a leader, yet at the same time, every consumer at this point has experienced a new model coming out, performing well on benchmarks, you know, just sort of like broadly, not talking about any one lab, but then being sort of disappointed with the actual like experience with the model. And I'm sure you've spent a lot of time thinking about this.

• 1:40:09Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, this is one, I think, for folks who haven't thought about this. Evos are just really hard. It's like such a hard problem. And actually, like, if you abstract evals out of like AI and into everyday life, like, you become, and maybe I'm like too eval-pilled at this point, but I think about just like random problems in life are truly eval problems, and like, we look at them as this like very human thing. And actually, they're eval, and like, the sort of Really weak version of this is if anyone's had a job and like have gone through like performance review, like performance reviews are an eval. Like, are they a super scientific eval? Like, no, they're actually a pretty crappy eval. A lot of folks have gone through performance reviews.

• 1:40:49Logan Kilpatrick?

  And yet, like, that is the core foundation of like how human, you know, career growth goes in a lot of ways. Like, there's a lot, like, evals are generally a really hard problem. For AI, they're also extremely hard. And I, I think, to answer the question specifically, Jordy, about like, what, what does that mean for people who have this sort of disconnect between capabilities and what the evals say? I think this goes to like why there's so many like vibe evals. And if you look at like L M Arena is a good example of this, like, L M Arena is basically capturing vibes. It's like, how do people feel about this thing? It's not scientific. They're not like, not actually evaling that the model is saying things that are true. It's like, how do humans feel about this response? And I think that's incredibly important. Is that the only thing that matters?

• 1:41:32Logan Kilpatrick?

  Like, certainly not, but I think more and more you see Longford happening where like the vibes are really important in addition to the actual quality of the models being important. And I do think you could do both of these things. In some cases, there's, there's tension, but I think you have to do both if you want to be successful. Totally.

• 1:41:48John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about the different buckets of foundational research that are happening? Do you believe in the, the data wall, the pre-training scaling rule? Like, kind of, you know, hitting diminishing, diminishing marginal returns? We've talked to a lot of folks who are extremely excited about reinforcement learning, reasoning, going a lot further there, program synthesis, these kind of topics, even just like, just more tool use. Let's bring more tools in. Google has a million tools and a million interesting APIs, both internally and some externally. It feels like there's a lot of low hanging fruit there. But what excites you on the research side these days is just, let's build an even bigger data center.

• 1:42:32John Coogan?

  You guys probably already have the biggest ones in the world, but you could obviously go bigger. Or, or is it more algorithm based? How are you thinking about the future of the foundation model landscape developing?

• 1:42:42Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I think two points. One, I think there's never been more opportunities to push the frontier. Like, I think all those examples that you just described, like, because the models are evolving more than just being models. And like, there's actually, there's like, systems that have tools and all this other stuff together. I think it just increases the number of opportunities for scale and for the models to get better. So I think that's like, one of the positive things. We'll continue to see a lot of growth, specifically because there's so many dimensions that you can make the models better at. But I think if you look at like, an example of this in practice, like 2.5 Pro is actually an example where it wasn't just like RL scaling that made that model better. Yes, RL was part of the story, but like, there was also a bunch of pre-training innovation.

• 1:43:23Logan Kilpatrick?

  And principally, there was a ton of post-training and pre-training innovations. I think like, it's not that companies are going to continue to see value created across all of those. And the really magical thing is like, and this is why, like, I don't subscribe to the like, pre-training is, you know, dead and all that stuff. Because the more work that you can do at the pre-training level, those capabilities as you do post-training and as you give the models RL capability. It's like, the capability is like amplified almost exponentially. So like, if you can make the model 3% better at the post-training level, when you actually finally do all the reasoning work and the model like, has to reason through really complicated problems.

• 1:44:06Logan Kilpatrick?

  It's like, it's like many multiples of bang for your buck because of that. So like, I think we need to continue to do the innovation across all levels. And like, that's exactly what we're doing right now.

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  I know you probably can't talk about specifics, but one of my favorite Google stories is that crazy anecdote about the V8 JavaScript engine. I think the, it might be apocryphal, but it's like, a bunch of Google engineers go out to like Iceland or something, spend like, a month building a new JavaScript runtime. It builds Node and it winds up being like the foundation of like the Chrome browser. I'm interested to hear, like, what is your take on just lower level optimization? Obviously, Google's already doing the TPU, but in terms of just, maybe even just squeezing extra performance out of inference.

• 1:44:55John Coogan?

  We saw this with DeepSeek. It seemed like they did not just one or two breakthroughs in terms of kind of cost performance, you know, optimizations, but they did a ton. Is that type of work? Happening at Google? Do you want to see more of it? Is it, is it an exciting area? Or is it just like, oh yeah, that's just something that we're going to happen. We're going to have to do, it's going to have to happen at some point, but it's not as critical as some of the other stuff that's happening in the industry right now.

• 1:45:22Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, you, you should ask our inference engineers who are, who are working like 24 hours a day. I think like 2.5 Pro has actually been like a fun, a fundamental example of this, like all of this stuff matters. Like, I think if you don't, if you're not doing it, like the, especially with larger models and especially with models that have lots of demand. Like, there's no world where you can get away with not putting a large order of magnitude of investment into, into inference. And like, I think credit to our, our team who's like actually working around the clock right now to make it so that people can keep scaling with 2.5 Pro. Because there's so much demand and we're having to like, you know, as a, an artifact of the constraints that we're under. Like, we're having to innovate and like solve new problems and come up with things to like, find ways to make 2.5 Pro more scalable from an inference perspective.

• 1:46:06Logan Kilpatrick?

  So it's, uh, it's awesome to watch that happen.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Where, where do you want to see more? You know, knowing, uh, 2.5 Pro's, you know, capabilities probably better than anyone else. Where do you want to see more developer activity?

• 1:46:23Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I think the, the thread right now that has the most excitement is around coding, just because like developers love coding. There's like so much, the whole vibe coding thing is, is a real phenomenon. I, I think I continue to be interested in like all the multimodal stuff. Like, there's just so many products and like, I think back to early in my career when I trained computer vision models and like deployed them. And like the amount of time that it took and the amount of resources to do that relative to today, where you can literally just write a prompt and send images or videos to the model and have it do those tasks like with basically, you know, near or better accuracy than you would get from domain specific models is absolutely fascinating.

• 1:47:05Logan Kilpatrick?

  Like, I think we're, we, we haven't actually seen that wave of like multimodal startups that are like building on top of this stuff. And I think that includes like audio things. Like I think the audio ecosystem is like still pretty nascent. Like I think the foundation is being laid for that. Like, you know, people saw this with Gemini Live. People saw this with the ChatGPT version of the product that came out. But I don't think we've seen like across other product services, people actually invest in like real time audio and real time video and image stuff. And I think that's like the next iteration of the UX of how people are going to interact with AI models. And the foundation is all there. It's just like the lag of how long it takes people to build interesting products. Like it just takes like 12 months or something like that for that to happen.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, speaking of like building new products, I love the Paul Buchheit story of building Gmail. Is this like almost like April Fool's project? And then you see a you see a seed of that in the Notebook LM project. What's the culture like around the idea of like 20% time? Does that even exist anymore? And then like if I joined Google, could I just go and say like, hey, I'm gonna go like build an AI native email client? It might destroy Gmail, but you know, we'll figure it out. Or is that something that like, you know, we're gonna need to think about because like Gmail's mature. But there's still like, you know, right now Gemini is like kind of being vended into Gmail. But you know, maybe there's an entirely new paradigm at some point.

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  How do these like side projects and 20% time work at Google these days?

• 1:48:38Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think my my 200% project is is on all the Gemini developer stuff. So I do think people are doing 20% projects, which I think is great. Like, I think if you're if you have freedom to do that, like you should. And that's how Google's gonna come up with innovation. I think for Notebook LM specifically, it came out of Google Labs. And like Google Labs, the whole point is come up with new product services. So not just not just Notebook LM actually, but there's like a whole like Wisk. If folks have seen Wisk, it's like a video image generation platform that came out of that. Actually, AI Studio, the product that I work on, came out of Labs originally and Josh Woodward's team. So I think there is like a whole lot of innovation that's being seeded out of that group. And again, it's like the big bolt that's

• 1:49:23Logan Kilpatrick?

  That like you wouldn't see coming out of other, you know, potentially other product areas because they it just like takes time to build these products from scratch. And oftentimes time, time that they don't have, but I'm super happy because Josh Woodward, who leads the Google Labs team now also leads the Gemini app team. So I think we're going to see that like fusion of all of these like new ideas and product spaces. Because him and his team sit so close to like the blank slate. Let's build any product to solve problems that people have. Now that they also run the Gemini app, I think we're going to see like a ton of explosion. You should have Josh on. He's, uh, he's one of my favorite people.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we'd love to.

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about getting, helping? How do you think about almost like prompting new consumer behaviors? Cause I feel like every day on X, you'll see somebody that's like, you know, I saw somebody post, oh, I'm doing, you know, basically like run it, you know, doing a prompt every day about like a specific industry, like, you know, pull together, you know, the most important headlines and news from this industry. And I'm like, oh, that's really valuable to what we're doing.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  We should just sort of like get into the office in the morning, adopt that and do that. And that's something I wasn't really thinking about. People are so used to like, you know, this sort of idea of like just getting,

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  the, you know, they'll like adopt a model for like one specific thing and then they just like do that. Maybe they veer out of it a little bit, but how do you think about getting, users to just like be more creative? Obviously is helpful when a developer builds an application to like prompt a new consumer behavior. But how do you think about that, uh, kind of at, at the application layer at, at Google?

• 1:50:58Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I actually, my personal take on this is I think this is a bug of this current AI moment where like the, if you look at like, what is the ideal case? The ideal case is the models and the products like pull out what they need to from the user in order to create value for them. And I think if you look at like how all AI products basically work today, you as the user, the burden is on you to create value with this tool. And I think that just like. One inherently like limits, uh, you know, the number of people who are going to get value. But two is also it's like a shitty experience, honestly, like I hate like this is my biggest problem with AI tools, which is like you have to go for, for most AI tools, you have to go to and like make this like sizable investment in order to get anything out of

• 1:51:42Logan Kilpatrick?

  this. I think like a couple of notable exceptions to this is like deep research. I can just fire off the like random question that I, that I have about how something works. And then I'm given a 50 page research report inside the Gemini app and then I can one click turn that into an audio, like a notebook LM audio overview. And like, that's great because like as a user, I don't need to make this like large order of magnitude of investment. The model does all the work for me. And I think as we see more experiences like that, like I'm, I'm super excited. So like I'm almost, um, and this is maybe too like absolutist of like a product perspective, but like I will not build a product that like we have to try to convince a consumer to change their behavior because I think actually the promise of AI is that these tools are going to be able to like pull this context out

• 1:52:26Logan Kilpatrick?

  of you and you should just go and build that product. And like, I think the models are actually good enough in a lot of ways to help you do that today without having to like rely on a user, hopefully having the right behavior for, to, to make that product successful.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Now, it's an interesting thing where I feel like users are so trained on like software doing a specific thing that this dynamic of software and the sort of application being able to act like a smart friend or a smart coworker that knows infinite more information about a bunch of different subjects and then can help you accomplish tasks is very different than this sort of, and I, and I just feel like even, even as, you know, uh, uh, somebody who's, you know, I've now, uh, I'm, I'm not 30 yet, but I've basically spent 20 years using software that behaves in a very specific way. And I need to just like totally reimagine how to use software.

• 1:53:23Logan Kilpatrick?

  I think the push needs to be though, that like you don't have to reimagine. Like I think about this all the time. Like the thing that I would love is the AI tools that I have today interact with me like I already interact with software today. Like shoot me a text, shoot me an email, call me on the phone. Like I'm already doing that all day. Like you could, there are ways I think to bridge that experience gap where like you don't need to convince, you don't need to go into a new flow. And I actually think if we've, if we fast forward like 10 years, I do think there's going to be a lot of those experiences which like look eerily similar to the way that they do today because it's just like so ingrained in like human culture, like how like texting is a great example of this.

• 1:53:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like I want to push notification from Gemini that says, hey, you're talking with Logan later. Be sure to ask him about this funny story, you know, and then it's like boom. And I didn't even have to, I didn't have to.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  Everything in AI, we're kind of reinventing from first principles, like even just like the idea of like the cron job. We're like adding that back in. And now like there'll be like a whole news cycle from like, oh, like the AI app's got cron jobs this week. Like that's incredible. And it's like, yeah, but this has been around for a long time, but it really does transform the experience. Um, I mean, speaking of, I, I want to know more about you, some of your specific workflows, uh, that you're enjoying. You mentioned deep research into Notebook LM. Is that something that you're able to do within ai studio dot google dot com and, and run it all there? Or is there like a copy paste step? Uh, because I've had to do that before where I've been like, okay, I got a deep research report. It's not reading it to me here, at least in chat GPT. I need to take it over to speechify and get it

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  to read it to me there. Um, how, uh, but obviously AI studio is a little bit more prosumer. I feel like there's a lot, I mean, the temperature is there. There's like still some, some, some buttons that are, uh, you know, almost like developer to, uh, like, uh, terminology. So walk me through some of your favorite AI use cases in AI studio and, and what you're getting the most value out of. So people can just kind of copy your prompts.

• 1:55:17Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, John, I think this is actually a great reminder for folks like AI Studio is a developer product. Like, so we're building it for developers and like the use case that we're trying to build for is like showcase all the models' raw capabilities. So that you understand what the models are capable of, so that you can go and build great products yourself. Like, we're actually not, so like, Deep Research is like a great example of this. Like, Deep Research is built on top of a bunch of capabilities that the model has, which is like native search functionality, tool calling, et cetera, et cetera. And that's available in the Gemini app. So if you're, you know, you want the like polished consumer experience or even prosumer experience, honestly, like the Gemini app has that functionality. It has audio reviews, it's like a fully baked product. AI Studio is like, give you the rawest possible experience.

• 1:56:00Logan Kilpatrick?

  And like, some consumer AI enthusiasts like that experience, which is why they come to AI Studio. But like, generally, we're trying to showcase like frontier capabilities, show you the art of the possible, so that you can go and build the products that you really like. So I do spend a bunch of my time from like a, like, doing work perspective inside of the Gemini app. You know, Canvas is another one of them, like vibe coding inside of Canvas, uh, inside of the Gemini app is a lot of fun.

• 1:56:27John Coogan?

  Someone needs to vibe code a Google Reader. This would be the most viral thing ever. I don't know, are you familiar with Google Reader?

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Probably before my time.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  It was like an RSS reader and in, and Google shut it down and like, it had like a thousand true fans. And so they were like so upset about it. I, I was using it, it was fun, but uh, I understood that they didn't need it. But uh, anyways.

• 1:56:48Logan Kilpatrick?

  We'll see what we can do. Maybe we'll, maybe we'll bring Google Reader back as a vibe coded app.

• 1:56:52John Coogan?

  That would, you would destroy the internet. That would be the, the greatest marketing for, for everything that you're doing, if you could bring back Google Reader. Anyway, sorry, sorry, you're, I, I, I wanna, I wanna let him finish about his, uh, his, his like most interesting like AI use cases and what's, uh, what's fun? And what's in your, what's in your everyday carry in the AI world?

• 1:57:11Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I think the only other one that I'll mention is in AI, this is something that's specific in AI Studio right now. And we'll hopefully have it in the Gemini app and other places is we have this like live API or this real time mode. Where you can go and screen share and share and like show this the model what you see on your screen. And I think this gets to like all the points that I was getting at before about like, why is this such a magical experience? It's because right now, the product experience of using AI is I need to go and find all the context that's relevant for the model. And get it into this text box somewhere or get it into this list of files somewhere. And like, the beautiful thing about screen sharing is like, all of the context that I need the model to do stuff with is already on my computer. I'm looking at it somewhere on my computer. I looked at it today or yesterday or right now, like, just let me show the model what I see.

• 1:57:55Logan Kilpatrick?

  And have it do interesting stuff. So I've been playing around with a bunch of like pair programming examples like that. And just like generally like critiquing work that I've done and having the model sort of watching and with my permission, able to see the things that I see and talk to it. Is a super cool, like, very futuristic feeling experience.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:58:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question, switching gears a little bit, uh, do you have any, uh, uh, you know, ignoring, uh, your work at Google and on Gemini? Do you have any takes on AI hardware? Do we need new hardware devices? Is it, um, is it an area that you're excited about or, or, you know, what, how do you think about that generally?

• 1:58:35Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I think on both sides, from an enterprise and consumer side, I think there's a lot of opportunity. And I think in the platform shift, like, it makes sense to try to build something. I think like, does it end up working? I don't have the crystal ball, but I think on the enterprise side, the opportunity is you go in and build, you know, hardware that makes LLMs a lot faster and more efficient. And I think that's warranted and somebody should do that work.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  And then on the even, even, yeah, consumer side, um, yeah, I'm curious, uh, you know, we had, we had like the, the founder of Cluli, which has been going viral on, uh, before you. And he was talking about how, you know, the end state is just being embedded into, into the brain, uh, directly, but, um, but yeah.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, you can feel free to pass on this question, but the founder of Cluli, uh, he applied for a job at Amazon. He cheated on the lead code questions. Uh, if, if he were applying to be on your team, you caught him cheating. What's the punishment? Is he on the team or is he out forever?

• 1:59:36Logan Kilpatrick?

  I think we've actually been looking at doing like AI assisted interviews and not AI assisted interview. Like I think, I think the world needs both right now. It makes perfect sense to evaluate both.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Kind of interesting. I mean, he was doing it as like a publicity stunt, basically trolling. Obviously, I don't endorse actually cheating on real interviews, but it is interesting that like you will have to adapt, just like the teacher will have to adapt that was previously assigning research papers that can be one shot by chat GPT.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Now, it's an interesting way to test how somebody works individually, right? Single player and thinking about AI assisted as a sort of like multiplayer experience. How do you collaborate with other people, right? And that's like a really good eval, as you said.

• 2:00:18Logan Kilpatrick?

  And in a world where the tools like actually make a difference in how much you can do, like can you use the tools? I think that's like a fundamental question that I don't think a lot of people ask in these job interviews. Like, are you AI assisted in what you're doing today? And if you're not, like, you know, it's a, there's, there's a delta in your output if you are AI assisted versus not across coding, across every discipline right now.

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Totally. This has been awesome. Come back. I'm sure you're gonna have many big announcements this year. Always welcome to come on and jam with us. Thank you for making the time.

• 2:00:48Logan Kilpatrick?

  Bye, guys.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  We got Eric Torenberg coming in the studio in just a minute. He's Andreessen Horowitz's latest general partner.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  GP.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Good friend of us, good friend of the show, known him for years and excited to dig into his new role and do a little some personnel news segment. We got a massive trade deal, you know, first round draft pick many times in his career. Max contract, probably four year deal, you know, one year cliff, who knows?

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Beautiful logo in the back. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Eric?

• 2:01:27Erik Torenberg?

  Thank you. A long time listener, first time caller. Thanks for, thanks for having me on, guys. Huge fan.

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us through the anatomy of the deal. Did they, did they sit down with your parents? Tell you, hey, we're taking them to the big leagues. How did it come together? I mean, I imagine you're close with a lot of folks over there for a long time, but is there anything you can share about how someone becomes that general partner at a storied venture capital firm?

• 2:01:52Erik Torenberg?

  They, they brought a briefcase to my parents' house.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:55Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, you know, just been working the family for years.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I, I love it. I love it. But yeah, I mean, I mean, seriously, I mean, you, you've, you've known the team for a long time. What, what, what, what were the conversations like? And how did it all come together?

• 2:02:11Erik Torenberg?

  It's funny. Part of me wants to ask, like, um, why didn't you ask me this a few years ago? Why didn't they try to recruit me a few years ago?

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:02:17Erik Torenberg?

  But it's kind of like when someone amazing asks you out, don't ask too many questions. Just, just say yes.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:02:24Erik Torenberg?

  My, my philosophy. But basically what happened was, uh, so Mark and I have been close for a long time. And every year I basically, you know, sort of give them a state of the union on my, on my career and how I'm thinking about things. And this year I was like, hey, I know I want to marry venture into what I'm doing. I have this media company. We've got sort of this founder social network thing. And everything around my career has been either investing or building communities, networks, media for founders.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:55Erik Torenberg?

  And so I was just like, I want to do it again, but I'm figuring out what was the right structure, how to do that. I could start something. I could join something early. And then Mark's like, why don't you just do this at A16Z?

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:03:06Erik Torenberg?

  And I was like, I hadn't really considered it because such a big firm, you know, so specialized. I'm a generalist investor, um, you know, a more talent driven, early stage. And he, and I think like what I fit in at, you know, 700 person firm, like, like, and he's like, let's, let's talk about it with Ben. So then me, Ben and Mark have a bunch of conversations. Catherine's involved too. The other partners get involved. And basically they had had a desire to go much bigger on, on, on, on content.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:03:36Erik Torenberg?

  Like separate from me. And they kind of liked what I was up to at Turpaton with sort of this network approach.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:42Erik Torenberg?

  And they crafted the right dual role. That's a mix of investing and a mix of kind of media network stuff. And I, that's how over a few month period, we just, you know, like kept falling in love with each other anymore, in love with the opportunity. And so here I am.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  No, there's this, there's this thing in, in venture, specifically investors, they spend all their time working with founders and they, and they, and they think, I need to be a founder. Like, I have to start my own firm. And then you realize like, no, you can potentially have like a thousand times more impact if you join a platform and make it better and leverage all of those resources. So I think it makes a ton of sense. I have, I want to go back like way, way in your early days. How did you, how did you get so good at networking? I think it's like, you're probably like, you know, the best, the best to ever do it. The Michael Jordan of networking. And yeah, I don't, I don't say that lightly.

• 2:04:38Erik Torenberg?

  No, seriously.

• 2:04:38Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, you know, it's extremely impressive. And I'm curious, like, you know, if you identified early that you were just good at it, or it just felt like riding a bike and you didn't, you know, it just was totally natural.

• 2:04:53Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, well, it is interesting. First of all, I want to say, I appreciate the compliment. And no one who's good at it wants to be known as the thing that they're, they want it to be like, like Delian's got a good network, but it's like a byproduct of the stuff that he does. And so, yeah, we, I would say hopefully similarly to, I mean, I think the, the way I realized it, I was doing this music tech company out of college, Rapped FM, it was kind of a retarded idea. It was like chat roulette for rap battles. It, it, it made no sense as a, as a business, but it was just kind of a out of college project. We somehow raised some money for it. This is when Twitch, Twitch was getting off the ground. People were like, hey, Twitch for music, maybe that'll work. And live, Justin TV, live video, et cetera. And I got, people

• 2:05:36Erik Torenberg?

  noticed that I had the skill for evangelism, like getting people excited about things, attracting talented people. You know, what do great founders do? They attract capital and labor, right? And so I was, I had some skill for that, even though the idea was dumb. And people were like, hey, You you you have something here and then but I didn't put it together until product time, which is the thing I joined next where like and you know Ryan was CEO. He really got that off the ground, but I helped him sort of like bring that out of thin air. Like, you know, create a strong community and network. And in that period, I was like, this is my superpower. I like up until that point, up until age 24, 25, I hadn't identified a superpower that I had. And I was just like, I'm just going to triple down on this. And so then journey on deck and village.

• 2:06:21Erik Torenberg?

  Um, and and what is it? I think it's just like a desire to like an obsession with people. Um, like who is everybody? What are they doing? But then also desire to help them and think about sort of people dynamics and but then also this, that's like highest level. But then the next level is like build communities and networks that sort of help each other, where people can help each other, like even when you're sleeping. And so that's what I spent a lot of time thinking about and do it.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  I want to talk about media, but first let's talk about some of the industries that you're interested in on the investing side. And Andreessen has a fund for every vertical now bio, gaming, defense, you know, crypto enterprise. Um, what's interesting to you? And is there any crossover? Uh, we we kind of have this take like media can be fun and lucrative, but media is really hard to invest in. If you want to invest in media, you got to be on the platform side. You got to be in Spotify, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Like those were the power law outcomes in media. People don't really think about them as media, but if you were in YouTube early, you did very well. Uh, very hard to invest in in companies that are more in the middle.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  Uh, what are you seeing in terms of, uh, are you excited about any investments on the media side? And then also, what are you excited about the other section, sectors of the Andreessen portfolio?

• 2:07:42Erik Torenberg?

  So I, I think Jessica Lessin really sort of popularized sort of the bootstrapped media company. Sure. That, that Turpentine has followed, I think you, you guys are following. I, I think it just, it doesn't make sense for, for this kind of business for the reasons that you're, you sort of indicated. But people can do very well. Yeah. And so I, in general, you know, because I did a music company, a lot of people pitched me music. I'm like, I don't like this business. Sure. Because people, I, I do media, people pitched me media. Yeah. I don't want to invest in, in, in media companies, but I do want to, I do want to build a lot of media at Andreessen Horowitz. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. And I do want to partner with a lot of independent creators, like yourselves, like the Lenny Rochiskys, like the Happy Stebbings, like, like, you know, all, all these guys.

• 2:08:27Erik Torenberg?

  Who are building, you know, really awesome cash flow businesses, super lean, making a ton of profit. Sure.

• 2:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, and, and sorry to interrupt. One thing I think is interesting is that venture require, venture outcomes require scale. Yet media and, and one of the things that makes media is amazing is anti-scale, right? It's like having, for us, it's like having CNBC meets X, right? It's like, it's a niche thing, but it's great, you know, for a very core audience. And on that note, I think you've done this very well with Turpentine in terms of like verticalizing out and being like, hey, there's this sort of show on a niche topic. And it may only be interesting to 50,000 people in the whole world, but those 50,000 people, like, that's the show they're like waiting for it to drop, right?

• 2:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Or it's, or it's a, a group chat that only has 50 people, but it has, you know, maybe like more activity for that, those 50 people than any other social platform that they use. So can you talk about how you think about like sizing sort of like projects, right? Because not everything that should be done should be massive, right?

• 2:09:34Erik Torenberg?

  A hundred percent. The.

• 2:09:38Erik Torenberg?

  It's interesting, there's this business, Industry Dive, that really taught me about something. It's a business that not a lot of people know about, but it's immensely successful. A lot of people, when they think about media businesses of the last 15 years, they think about like BuzzFeed and Vox and it's kind of like, you know, upworthy. These businesses raised a bunch of money in the 2010s and totally crashed, right? There was, you know, there was a bunch of venture firms, you know, this one included, doing sort of, you know, consumer media businesses. And people thought, you know, they were gonna ride the platforms and they were, they were big, you know, they were growing. But then sort of the, you know, as you alluded to, the platforms, you know, took the value, was where the value was. It was in the distribution, not in the, and these were just like content farms on top of them.

• 2:10:20Erik Torenberg?

  But an undertold part of that story is that business media has actually done pretty well. This company, Industry Dive, which is just a collection of niche trade publications. So, things like utilities, weight, HR, pharma, just like valuable niche like newsletters. Sold for $500 million, I believe, to Informa, which I believe is like a $10 billion trade show company.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:10:50Erik Torenberg?

  So, business media, business events, there's quite a good business there in trade stuff on the B2B side. Because, you know, if you have the leading HR publication and, you know, you have 50,000, even 5,000, you know, decision makers, reading or listening to your thing. That becomes a great channel for people who are trying to sell to that audience to, to reach them. And they're willing to, if, if, if, if making one sale can be tens of thousands of dollars for them. They're, they're willing to spend quite, quite a lot to, to, to reach that audience. So the, so the premiums on the CPM are, are just fantastic. And so, and Sean Griffey, the CEO of Industry Dive, has been like educating the market on this.

• 2:11:34Erik Torenberg?

  And so I heard him and I, and I, then I looked at it, I think they're incredible at business, I think they're incredible at sales. I, I, I wasn't like blown away by the content itself, you know, they're a great business and they built something much bigger than I have. But I was like, wow, I think. More people could do this and the Business Work Week also is doing this. And I wanted to do sort of a Silicon Valley take on that of like, you know, Lenny Rajewski is the goat of this for product managers, the newsletter. Yeah, I think he's almost had like a million subscribers and he's printing cash. And I was like, hey, there's going to be a Lenny for HR. There's going to be a Lenny for CFOs. There's going to be a Lenny for every position in every sector. I want to create that. I want to create this roll up.

• 2:12:19Erik Torenberg?

  And we started on the podcast side because that's what I know. I think that there was a gap in the market for like, you know, the best of X. And we did that. I think we had, you know, reasonable success. And I was excited about adding additional businesses or business models on top of that, investing being one of them. And I think Aces is the best place to do it.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Makes sense. What do you think about the different business models in media between ad sales, subscriptions, monetizing through trade shows or merch or products? I've seen, I'm a big fan of Doug Demuro. He kind of like, you know, value captured at the very end of building massive scale with Cars and Bids, his online auction platform for cool cars made in the modern era. Yes, I'm a fan. I know this whole tagline. But, but in general, like what, what, what business models do you think work in tech? What business models do you think work in other industries? In trade publications versus more traditional journalism? How are you thinking about the landscape of like monetization of media?

• 2:13:26Erik Torenberg?

  Well, yeah, it's, it's really fascinating question. It depends on what niche. Like if you're, if you're as big as someone like Mr. Beast, you want like a mass market thing.

• 2:13:36Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, even Mr. Beast, I do wonder if, and I'm friends with him and I think he's genius. But I do wonder if that's the right. If that's the most optimal business to be like, and I like he's also getting into gaming too, but like, should Mr. Beast have like, um, sort of a Cash App competitor or like?

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  I was pitching a VPN, Beast VPN, because he has a global audience, low churn, high margin. It's not, VPNs are not suitable for venture backing typically. It's all marketing. That's the entire expense is just getting people to install a VPN. So, you know, it doesn't matter where his audience is, they can sign up for the VPN.

• 2:14:12Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  So, I don't know, probably not a good fit, but.

• 2:14:15Erik Torenberg?

  You guys had the founder of Honey on, who's a very good friend of mine, and he's building a really great business I just invested in. On the ad blocker side, but like, Mr. Beast was saying that he brought a lot of Honey's traffic. And so, should he have created a Honey competitor back? Like, there's gotta be something that's bigger.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:30Erik Torenberg?

  There's better margins, you know, than, than chocolate. Uh, that's more defensible.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's an interesting, there's an interesting thing with media, which is like this idea of, uh, value, value creation versus value capture. And it's possible with media to create a massive amount of value, but not fully be able to capture it. That being said, one of the best ways to capture value is to just put out amazing content and then invest in the companies that sort of come around from that. So I think that people have had this idea of media, of one of the best business models for media being investing.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Yet, that doesn't mean, you know, starting a solo GP fund and just having a podcast necessarily. Like, it can look a lot of different ways, and that's why I'm, uh, I'm excited about Turpentine in the context of A16Z, because you can make the best podcast about biotech. And you're, it's less about, how do we, how do we, you know, scale this to, you know, millions of ad revenue? And more so like, how do we just have the most important conversations in biotech happen on this, you know, podcast? And then invest in some of those companies and, and see the, the return from that.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I know you're still like, you know, second day on the job, um, but, uh, I'd love to know kind of how you are thinking about the current A16Z media landscape. People talk about like, oh, future was kind of, you know, didn't get, didn't roll out the way they wanted. At the same time, it's like if the named partner can go on Joe Rogan, like you're kind of winning. And so, you know, I think about like the Joe Rogan appearance is like probably worth a thousand at bats that maybe, you know, are strikeouts or whatever. But, but you know, how do you balance the let's build an intermediate, like a in-house media product versus let's empower the team to go and make a statement on other shows like what Mark did with, with the, with the Rogan appearance.

• 2:16:20Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. Um, yeah, it's a, it's a fascinating question. So I'm still, I'm still getting up to speed with the, the exact history. But my outsider version of it is that the, the, the future, well, let me step back. What I love about Andreessen, and it's not limited to Andreessen, but that they, they try a bunch of stuff.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:40Erik Torenberg?

  Like, like you guys, right? Like TVPN, you know, you guys had a few different iterations before coming to this, this one that worked. And people don't see that, you know, like making video content for, for years before this and you're already making all sorts of like amazing branded content and doing all sorts of experiments. And, and you guys tried it with different people first and you figured out the format that works.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:00Erik Torenberg?

  Like a couple of years in or a few months in. So similarly, I think future was a good idea. And I think well, it's possible there's some version of that, that, that comes back. You know, they already do a lot of long form content.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  I love their everyday carry for founders where they would just ask the, they would just ask the founders in the portfolio. Hey, like, tell us what apps you have on your phone right now.

• 2:17:23Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:23John Coogan?

  And that was it. And it was just like a listicle of like, okay, the founder of, you know, some amazing company like D- Databricks, like what's he using on it for his email client? And it's like, that's just interesting. I don't know. It's like, yeah, it's like total insider baseball. It's totally like, oh, it's only Andreessen portfolio companies or whatever. But like, I don't care. I just want to know like what these people are using. It's interesting. I don't know.

• 2:17:43Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. So they took a first stab. I think there were a lot of great things about it. I think it also coincided with sort of Andreessen decentralizing into different funds. Right? Like they used to be main fund and now they're sort of different funds. And so there's some org complexity perhaps around that. I think there's much more buy in and much more like maturity in the org to do something like it again. It that's not immediate priority for me. I'm on the content side separate from investing. I'm more focused on the on the podcasting to begin with.

• 2:18:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:11Erik Torenberg?

  But to your so I to your question around own shows versus creators. I think we're gonna have a mix. So we have some flagship shows right now with the Ben and Mark show, the Aces E show that we're gonna have the vertical shows relative to the funds.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:18:26Erik Torenberg?

  But I want to sort of really grow the Turpatine network. And you know, the limitations of Turpatine were that we were a bootstrap business. So we have to make money from other shows. But Andreessen doesn't have those same limitations. So we want to like do something like an affiliate network where we can partner with amazing shows, help them get distribution, help them make more money and kind of make it a no brainer for them to be part of this sort of broader podcast network that just sort of extends our influence and friends. And I think what's interesting is that if this works in podcasting, there isn't like a premier tech podcast network that works with like the best shows like and there are some, you know,

• 2:19:08Erik Torenberg?

  I love what Ashan is doing, but that's only that's like seven shows and those shows are great. And I love, you know, the HubSpot's doing some good stuff, but like, you know, Lenny's not on a network. Torquesh is not a network. There's a bunch of people because they don't need to be. But if you can make it a no brainer, I think there's something interesting there. And if that works in podcasting, maybe it can work with newsletter writers. Maybe you work with YouTube creators more broadly. It's kind of like extended, like I love what Slow is doing. They have a creator fund.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  There was a super, super cool Andreessen Games video that was produced by Secret Tape, which runs this video game documentary channel called NoClip. So they will do like the full history, the most definitive documentary about like Half-Life or Counter-Strike and they'll go and interview all the people that worked on it. These really, really amazing things. And it was actually a viral video. Like it got almost 500,000 views and it's a this is why games like Baldur's Gate 3 are so rare. Just like a deep dive on the history of Baldur's Gate, this like great role playing game. And I just saw this and I was like, oh, like that like it's awesome that they like. They they they found the right match of like the the team behind NoClip and these documentary

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  secret tape like they're great at creating and clearly Andreessen Games, A16Z Games was just like, go run with it. And it worked out really, really well. So I I love the idea of like that partnership model you've described.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about the infrastructure around group chats, right? Like every, every, nobody wants to download another app, but at the same time, like you do run into limitations. Everybody that's built on, you know, you've built a number of communities, right? And I'm sure you've like hit the limits on Slack, hit the limits on, you know, run into issues on Discord, you know, Signal has its limitations, WhatsApp, like, how do you think about scaling these sort of like vertical, you know, group chat, like if you product, a group chat's just like a, it's a curated social network, right? And how do you think about the infrastructure surrounding that? Do you think there's opportunities there?

• 2:21:11Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, so at first, zooming out, I think a lot of the last interesting, most interesting conversations over the last five years to me have been in group chats and I've been in some, with you guys where that's happened. And I think it's just because, you know, Twitter, X, just social in general, became a little bit too noisy, a little bit too public, and you needed to have these kind of like private spaces just to have conversations without a bunch of people sort of like getting in the, getting in the replies. And, you know, there could have been a world where Twitter, that just happened in the DMs, but for whatever reason, that it moved out to different, different group chats. And so, but the, the platforms are not really built for, you know, Signal, WhatsApp, they're not really built for like

• 2:21:54Erik Torenberg?

  hundreds of people in a chat, right? And, you know, they get notifications for every message, the identity's messed up.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  Sometimes John Coogan just adds a bunch of random friends on a Christmas Eve. You have to text me and say, hey, are you gonna stop? Or are you gonna keep going, John? Because I made you an admin when this is a lot smaller and there's much more powerful people in the chat now. Why are you inviting all your friends?

• 2:22:18Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, that was back when I cared, when I tried to moderate the chat that since you know, biology just biology goes biology and I can't.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  Yep, he goes full biology all the time. It's great. That's what you live for.

• 2:22:29Erik Torenberg?

  So I I've thought about this for a long time and I worked for Shriram when he was at Andreessen because he built out their group chat operation. They basically have dozens of group chats, different verticals, different categories in what's it's all separate chats. There's no like master directory like. So I mean, it would should be is like a real social network of like a thousand super interesting people and you could cross promote and it should be. Sort of, you know, like interoperable in some way with certain permissions. WhatsApp's not built for it. Right now, we've just optimized for ease of use. I I think that in the next five years, like someone is going to build a group chat social network where.

• 2:23:09Erik Torenberg?

  Every day, well, you guys cover the current thing every day, but Twitter is too slow in the way that like like Twitter. Sort of obsoleted the New York, the traditional media by just being way faster. And I think there's going to be something that's even way faster than Twitter. And by that, like Clubhouse got into it a little bit where it's like, it's basically like the beef of the day. Like every day, someone gets in a fight or there's some drama and there's going to be a platform where they just fight live. That that I feel like that's just gonna happen. Like I remember with Mike Solana and Chesapeake, like. Infinite entertainment and and and so group chat is just so much more live.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  Vlad Tenev and Elon Musk, like that was iconic.

• 2:23:52Erik Torenberg?

  So I I was actually working on a product. That was going to be like Pubhouse for group chats where where you chat live with a public audience. You can sort of tier the permission gates and there's a speaker and an audience. Really had some magic, but I think I actually think people said they got too big and they did, but and you know, they're pioneers. So kudos to them. But I think that also the audio format's a bit hard. You can't like scroll audio the way you could scroll text. And so I think group chat format is the right one. I was working on it, but then I, you know, spent time with with Mark Andreessen and decided to have other plans. And I also met another team. That I I'm not gonna announce here yet, but you see to them and when they're ready to announce they will. Who's building this? And I think it's an exciting product.

• 2:24:36Erik Torenberg?

  I think the, as you said, Jordy, the bar for a new app is really high. But there's a bunch of different ways that WhatsApp and Signal just aren't built for it. And I think you could do a 10x better product there.

• 2:24:49Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, no, I was asking in hopes that you were incubating or funding or something there. Well, you you found it. You found the right one, it sounds like. But yeah, it just seems like such an obvious opportunity. When when when I hear about you running, you know, multiple groups. I'm just like, wow, it sounds really exhausting the second that you get even more, even just one is a lot.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, one is a lot.

• 2:25:11Jordi Hays?

  Excited to see that roll out.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  I have a hot take I want you to react to. Market maps are underrated.

• 2:25:17Erik Torenberg?

  Oh, interesting. Flesh out the case.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  I just think that they got really like overhyped and they were kind of. So I mean, the basic, the basic mechanism of a market map is it's inherently viral. Because when Andreessen puts out a market map of like all the gaming startups, like every gaming founder is going to be on that list. They're all going to repost it. And so it's just naturally like bait for the algorithm that it's going to get a lot of attention, a lot of quote tweets. Oh, thanks so much for including me, right? But then it became like very like cringey and it was like, no, you should you should be like thinking more deterministically about the future. You should be more aggressive. You should be thinking more about even like bigger problems like the the far future, the world. But but, you know, I've I've gone back to market maps and I think there's maybe something interesting there.

• 2:26:04John Coogan?

  Just to kind of take you on a tour of all the different approaches. When there is uncertainty about something like AI at the application layer and how that's applying even to legal. Like, everyone kind of knows Harvey, but there's probably seven different companies in the legal AI space, probably 50, 70. And they're all taking slightly different approaches. And it's kind of a nice like little window into this industry that you might not. Be immersed in and so it creates some value for, you know, keeps the associates busy, keeps the partners busy. But it's also just, uh, maybe, maybe we can get past the, uh, the criticism that like, oh, market maps are too basic and cringe and maybe just go to like, hey, actually

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  they make sense. If you read a Goldman Sachs report or Morgan Stanley report on Wall Street, you would often see something that looks like a market map. It's just instantiated in equity research, right? Or equity capital markets research.

• 2:26:56Erik Torenberg?

  I'll go further. So I agree with you, but I'll, I'll, I'll one up you and say, I think lists are underrated. Like Forbes has trained us to think that.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:27:04Erik Torenberg?

  You know, the lists suck or they're, they're obviously always gamed or everyone's going to go to jail if they're on a list.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:11Erik Torenberg?

  Hypothetically speaking, but, um, you know, we've joked about sort of the, or you're like the Forbes 29 under 29.

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I think you should do that. I mean, I don't know if it makes much sense now.

• 2:27:21Erik Torenberg?

  Best suited.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  Maybe we do it, maybe we do it.

• 2:27:23Erik Torenberg?

  Or collaborate or something, but discovery, discover, like knowing what people think about people is really important. And it's what we do all the time. We're like, who's good? You know, um, who, who's emerging? Who should we pay more attention to? And I think that functionality, sort of like market maps, we've, like the execution has gotten sloppy. And so we sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater, but, uh, those things, they do perform best. There's just why they get gamed, but if they're good, they're, they're really.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Valuable. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. We're actually going to do a Midas list competitor. It's going to be a hundred of the top VCs. It's a hundred thousand dollars to be on the list, a million dollars. If you want to be on the top 10. Uh, but yeah, just, uh, email Jordy if you want to be on that list. If you're listening, uh, we'd love to have you.

• 2:28:03Erik Torenberg?

  Dude, I love your whole corporate media, like ran.

• 2:28:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Independent media is dead. Corporate media is the future.

• 2:28:09Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:09John Coogan?

  You're either backed by a trillion dollar venture fund or you're, you're chilling for ramp and bezel and ad quick and numeral and A sleep and wander. Uh, you're one of the others.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  On a more, on a more serious note, I'm, I'm curious if you're seeing from group chats, the edge that you used to be able to get from the internet. Like internet used to be a place you could, you know, uh, Blake Robbins talks about hanging out on the edge of the internet, but like, uh, uh, but, but you could be in these sort of different sub communities and sort of discover somebody. And, you know, we had this, this, uh, kid, uh, this 21 year old named Roy.

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  Roy, yeah.

• 2:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Who like. Rocketed to like, uh, almost 80,000 followers in like a few months.

• 2:28:46John Coogan?

  Serious.

• 2:28:46Jordi Hays?

  And historically, that would have been like some, you know, maybe he would have had got gotten kicked out of Columbia and like two people would have heard about it on X.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, no way.

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  But now it's like information moves so quickly. Is it, you know, are you seeing group chats as like the sort of where you get an edge, right? Because it's like, you know, more niche down. There's like less, there's less noise, there's less attention. Maybe if there's a thousand people in the group chat, like, you know, it's, there's less like, almost like leakage. Like, how, how do you, where, where do you think about?

• 2:29:18Erik Torenberg?

  So it's, it's really interesting. So a few years ago, when people were more sort of centralized on, on, on Twitter, um, there was more of a desire to, um, to, you know, it was critical to go to group chats because some, someone, uh, would sort of, it was quicker to cancel you or call you out, or there was just like more friction. But social media has balkanized a bit, right? The whole blue sky, Exodus, um, sort of, you know, people on threads, whatever, people leaving X, uh, like, it's a bit, and then Elon sort of, you know, with his sort of, uh, new impact on sort of the, is it like free speech dynamic or even just like everything's about politics all, all the time. So people are more comfortable speaking up on X, but they're, because they're more comfortable speaking up in public, they're

• 2:30:02Erik Torenberg?

  also more comfortable speaking up in private. So I've seen what happens is these like eight people group chats, you know, me and John had a, a great one for like a couple of years. Are, there's less of a need for them. It, it disbanded. Now they're, now we're in like multi-hundred people group chats because people are more, uh, public. And I think it's cool that, you know, we have people who disagree. Like we have this, you know, one chat where, uh, our good friend Mark Cuban gets, gets, uh, in, you know, great debates, uh, you know?

• 2:30:29John Coogan?

  I thought you weren't supposed to say people's names in that chat. I thought the whole reason was Chatham House rules. You're just supposed to say a, a, a, you know, billionaire who's somewhat left wing, who, he was lampooned on Silicon Valley.

• 2:30:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, reality show. Yeah, pitches. Uh, he, um, He went on a podcast with Vivek. They had a debate. So this is public because they, they, like I said their names, they did a debate on DEI in our chat and then they took it to the podcast.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:30:57Erik Torenberg?

  They, they mentioned the chat. So I'm, I'm comfortable mentioning their names as, as people who've had debates. And it's just fascinating. Like, you know, he doesn't want to go on Twitter because he gets dunked on a billion times. Sure. In chat, he'll get dunked on, but with more thoroughness.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 2:31:13Erik Torenberg?

  And, and we all learn from it. And he gets some dunks in too. And that, that's his dynamic. You just won't see anywhere else. And I didn't even see it a few years ago because you wouldn't even think to put people who disagree in the same chat. So, so yeah, I'm still seeing the alpha.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  Well, the most important group chat to me is the one that's just me and you, Eric, our one-on-one group chat. That's the best group chat in my, in my DMs. Uh, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic.

• 2:31:36Jordi Hays?

  Hey Eric, uh, little request. You're the first, uh, Andreessen partner to come on the show. Let's get the rest on.

• 2:31:44John Coogan?

  Let's get the rest on.

• 2:31:45Jordi Hays?

  We need a lot more. Thank you for.

• 2:31:47Erik Torenberg?

  I'm here to, you know, only Nixon can go to China. Only Torenberg can go to TBPL. I'm here to broker the relationship.

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  Are you, are you Kissinger or Nixon in this analogy?

• 2:31:58Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  I think you're Kissinger.

• 2:32:02Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  You sneak in through the back door and then Nixon makes his arrival.

• 2:32:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're, we're very excited to, uh, to, to watch you work and collaborate and congratulations again on the move.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:32:13Erik Torenberg?

  Much as you guys.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  Bye.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  Uh, next up we got, uh, Jack Whitaker coming in to the studio, uh, the author of the fantastic Substack Bunny Hopping. I wonder if that's a reference to Counter-Strike. I'm a big fan of bunny hopping. I don't know if you ever did that or if that was before your time.

• 2:32:29Jordi Hays?

  Is that like a BMX reference too?

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You can bunny hop on a BMX bike. Uh, but he wrote a great post, pre-training isn't dead, it's just resting. GPC 4.5, the value of reinforcement learning and the economics of frontier training. So, welcome to the stream, Jack. How are you doing? Boom.

• 2:32:44Speaker 06

  Doing great. It's great to be on the show.

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:32:47Jordi Hays?

  A little context for everyone. Jack is helping us with our distribution strategy. So thanks for all the support, Jack. It's great to have you on the show, probably first of many.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I love the post and I'd love for you to take us through it. What what inspired this? You kick it off with a couple of the reactions to GPT 4.5. The one that's popping out to me is from Jack Morris says, so GPT 4.5 is 10x bigger than 4.0 and only marginally better at most things. My read could be the beginning of the end for scaling laws. What happened here? Did we run out of data? Or do scaling laws not capture model behavior on tasks we really care about? What inspired you to write this post?

• 2:33:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, definitely. So a lot of me and my friends really like GPT 4.5. And we kind of had this high taste tester mentality where we thought it came out really well. And we were kind of confused why people were underwhelmed by it. But a lot of the reasons people were underwhelmed by it were the actual benchmarks. You can look and you can see it did worse than you'd expect. So me and Trevor were like, well, did it do worse than you would naively expect on the benchmarks? Have we actually graphed out a log linear law to this scale? And seen what performance we'd expect on AI and me on everything else, you know? And when we actually did this, we saw that it was about in line with benchmarks, you know? A little bit better, a little bit worse. And we thought this was a really important conclusion. I think what a lot of people don't realize is that these are log linear laws. If you double the amount of compute that goes into AI model, you're not going to get

• 2:34:13Speaker 06

  double the score on the math benchmark, you know? This is something that we expect that is as compute gets larger, as build outs get faster, you know, we're going to get much better models, but not just because you can double model strength with doubling the amount of compute.

• 2:34:28John Coogan?

  So what is the what is the implication for for that? Like, what model should people be defaulting to in the chat GPT app? I think that's the that's the thing I want to start with is should people just trust you and say, you know, I don't care what people say online. I got to pick 4.5 from the dropdown, even if I can't tell I will be getting better results? Or or is there more nuance there with some of the reinforcement learning that's happening on top? And some of the reasoning models that might kind of take things to the next level, even if the underlying model is weaker and cheaper?

• 2:35:01Speaker 06

  Definitely, yeah. Well, I think the central claim here is that pre-training will continue to work as we're able to build it out. Not that the pre-trained models are the best right now.

• 2:35:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:09Speaker 06

  Um, I think OpenAI's O3 is the best model we've ever seen. It uses RL on every single type of tool use. It uses RL on chain of thought. It is quite a small model.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  And is O3, is, is O3 built on four or 4.5? I'm kind of confused at this point.

• 2:35:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's, there's no public information on it. Me and Trevor did some estimates based on the token speed that comes out. Um, and it seems like it's quite a small model, smaller than GPT-4.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:35:34Speaker 06

  Bigger than 4.0 mini.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting. So is this something that we're expecting them to optimize over time and eventually just still 4.5? Or maybe just scale up the inference chips to the point where they can run an O3, O4 style model on top of 4.5?

• 2:35:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, as you scale up the inference and as you scale up compute build outs, you could take something the size of 4.5 and you can do O3 style training on it. And I think that's going to be a really, really exceptional model. I think a lot of the point of the piece was that you have like a lot of axes on which you can improve AI. And none of them are obviously showing diminishing returns. So there's just tremendous potential to make mo- models better. And there really is no wall.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  But what about the, what about the economics at a certain point, you, you know, you need an order of magnitude. This is log linear, of course. So you need to order of magnitude more compute. We're getting into the $500 billion data center. Uh, at a certain point, you get to 5 trillion and you're talking about a meaningful portion of global GDP. Um, and if the, if the results are, oh, it goes from 128 IQ to 130. The economics don't really pencil out. What's your take on, on, will we just see a pre-training winter just for purely economic considerations?

• 2:36:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I, I think that's what we're seeing right now. Um, but another thing is that even as we have like, it would be really expensive to train a model 10 times bigger than GPT 4.5 now. And probably like impossible to serve. But in a couple of years, we're going to see the type of algorithmic efficiency and we're going to see the type of chip improvements that make a model this scale much more feasible.

• 2:37:08John Coogan?

  When you say algorithmic efficiency, um, are you talking about the type of optimizations that happened with DeepSeek? On kind of memory in connect, the, the FPA, that, those types of inference optimizations at the actual inference level? Or are you talking about the actual design of the algorithm as it's trained or the design of the model?

• 2:37:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, basically on every level. I'm really referencing Dario's excellent piece about DeepSeek and exploit controls.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:35Speaker 06

  Where he says that DeepSeek is really good model, you know, but we do just see these continuous algorithmic improvements as we go, you know? So sort of the the functional ooms of compute are also scaling, even if your compute isn't scaling.

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk about switching gears for a second. What what is the uh, what's the vibe on the Stanford campus right now? Is is there a risk that everybody drops out to work on AI? I imagine, I imagine it's like a constant conversation.

• 2:38:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I I wish it was honestly talked about a lot more. There's a lot of people, a lot of my friends around campus like Mohit Agarwal and Jacob and Tamaki, you know, who are super aware of this stuff, you know, and and are always kind of pushing things forward and thinking about these things all the time. But in terms of just like the populace getting used to AI and getting involved in it, it's just been a really slow and continuous crawl upward, you know? Um, I I'm a CS major. I end up talking to a lot of CS majors and they're not fully internalizing what the model suite is going to look like. Everyone thinks that the models are going to get better around the same kind of paradigm and level, you know? And no one is ever thinking, we have O three now, what's GPT five going to look like in a few months? What's GPT six going to look like next year?

• 2:38:48John Coogan?

  What are you thinking GPT five will look like? Are we just talking about another order of magnitude on pre-training flops? Or is there more to it than that?

• 2:38:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, so so my my naive guess is that GPT five is going to be a model that uses all the clever training techniques that OpenAI and um, Anthropic have worked out around RL, um, but it's scaled up significantly from these pretty small models. Sonnet three point five is pretty small. I think the O series is quite small as well. Um, one thing that I think is the most interesting about O three is that it has a lot of these agentic properties that we've been seeking so long for so long. But it has them in this kind of narrow sense where it can agentically call tools, it can agentically browse the internet. But it's not necessarily like agentically going and doing a whole project, you know? And I think that trajectory is one to watch as you as you look at GPT five. Because you're going to see it being more and more agentic, just very naturally as context expands and as the model expands.

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, Tyler Cowen said, oh, three is AGI. We had someone on the show yesterday who said, we have 10 minute AGI. But that's not necessarily eight hour AGI or 24 hour AGI. How do you think about the length of reasoning chains and and kind of that new frontier of optimization? Maybe we've hit the intelligence curve, but we need the agenticness to continue for a long time.

• 2:40:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I basically think that's right, that the 10 minute AGI take is exactly right. I mean, the AGI debate hinges a lot on what definition you use. Obviously, the Microsoft CEO came on Door Cash a few months ago and said, I'll only believe it's AGI when the GDP goes up by however much percent, you know. I think we're starting to see models that are very general and they're very intelligent, you know, and they can do a lot of the things that you might have naively described in AGI to be able to do. But they still don't really have this like full capacity yet. I think a lot of this stuff just gets worked out as we kind of improve our current techniques, though, and isn't necessarily like some barrier, some key problem that needs to be solved.

• 2:40:46John Coogan?

  Are undergrad CS majors bullish or bearish on like wrappers? Or trying to go for the application layer, trying to do a startup? Or are the best and brightest saying, hey, there's no way we're gonna win, let's go work for a lab?

• 2:41:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think a lot of the smartest people I know really want to work for labs, but I think they're almost too bearish on startups and on wrappers, you know? And that a smart rapper can take a model and kind of scale up with it, you know? And I think this is what we've seen from places like Cursor. You improve as the model improves. If you're making a rapper that's a bet on models not getting better, you know?

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're doing a lot of prompt engineering and you're really working to create this scaffolding to try and make the model better, instead of just saying, okay, how do we how do we get distribution? How do we get the user experience?

• 2:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the sort of very light wrappers of the last few years. I think a lot of them rely on consumers not being aware of chat GPT's capabilities.

• 2:41:45John Coogan?

  I mean, there's some apps in the app store that are literally like chat AI.

• 2:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's still like billions of dollars of revenue out there. That's basically, they just happened to acquire a customer before OpenAI did or another another lab.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you tell us anymore about just the mood among CS majors around the opportunity in startups broadly?

• 2:42:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I may write about this pretty soon, but I do think the startup culture at Stanford is really not what it used to be. You know, there was sort of this like halcyon era at Stanford where it seemed like there was so much energy around startups. And now it really feels more like people are doing their startups as summer projects and people aren't committing to them in the way that you really want to see. I think that if some Stanford student came to me and said, I want advice on what I should be doing this summer. I wouldn't tell them to go start a company. I would tell them to go work for Ramp. I would tell them to go work for Cursor. I would tell them to go see one of these incredible organizations, look at how they work, and then take this knowledge to go start a company. I think too many people are doing these things as like side projects and not fully committing to them.

• 2:42:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked to somebody who is referencing the early Facebook days at Harvard where if you were an undergrad at Harvard or Stanford and you were interested in startups, like going to Facebook was the expression of that. Now, if you're interested in startups, like there's a $2 million seed round just waiting for you and you will be a founder. Even though you could go join a 10-person or even 100-person startup, get a lot of that startup experience. So do you think venture capitalists are to blame here or is it something cultural or should we lay it on the university?

• 2:43:25Speaker 06

  Who's to blame? There's no actor who really made this bad, but the fundamental issue is that startups became too high prestige too fast. And like doing real things and really building things didn't gain that same kind of prestige. This is a lot of actually what I valued most about my time at Dorkesh Podcast, which is where I worked last summer. Was that Dorkesh felt like a startup, you know, we had all of this energy, all of this attention that a startup had. But at the same time, obviously, we're doing a podcast, you know, we're executing at a very high level, but it's a podcast. And I think getting to work with someone like Dorkesh who has this like Agency and this knowledge and this drive to make things better and make his content incredible, make his questions incredible was something you can learn a lot from, you know?

• 2:44:06Speaker 06

  So it becoming higher prestige to have like stealth stored up in your bio than it is to have like, I'm like working for Nat Friedman this summer is like pretty lame.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  I think that'll shift. I mean, working for Nat Friedman is pretty cool.

• 2:44:20Speaker 06

  Working for Nat Friedman is pretty cool.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  It will, it will catch up.

• 2:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the benefit is we have a generation of people that are finding out just how hard startups are. And there's not, there's not.

• 2:44:29John Coogan?

  And they'll land somewhere.

• 2:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they'll land somewhere, but also realizing that if you're going to start a company, once you know how hard it is, you really, really, really need to pick.

• 2:44:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Pick ideas carefully.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Yep, totally. Can you give me your read on the last two episodes of Dork Cash? He had AI 2027 and then AI 57, 2057 or something. Are you AGI pilled? Are you feeling the AGI? What's going on over in your world?

• 2:44:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure. Um, I actually, I, I mean, I think the Epoch people are fantastic. And I also think the AI 2027 people are very smart. And I have sympathies to both sides here, you know? I think model capabilities will grow very quickly. And I think it's much less clear how this will translate into the economy growing really fast, you know? I was, I was in an interview recently and someone asked me, say, Jack, you keep telling us AI is going to be good. I think AI is already good, you know? Why hasn't it changed the economy? I was like, I, I don't really know, you know? It seems like the naive economic model says the diffusion of technologies takes a really long time. And it seems like intuitively, that wouldn't be true for software, but practically it seems like it is, you know? So I think the AI 2027 people might be mostly right on how fast things are going to grow and how fast the models can get smart.

• 2:45:44Speaker 06

  And then the Epoch people might have a really good sense of like, oh, but really getting this into the service sector, getting this to disperse across the economy in a way that changes things fundamentally is a much longer issue.

• 2:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, and maybe it's just like a human issue. You could kind of comp to, I mean, you go back to like the PayPal days, like the internet got fast enough to transfer money very quickly. And then the percentage of money that was transferred digitally grew very slowly because it's human behavior.

• 2:46:12Speaker 06

  And it was only, it was only last year that Stripe became 1% of world GDP transactions, you know?

• 2:46:17John Coogan?

  And that's Stripe and they're like the power law winner in the category. That's crazy. Anyway, Jordy, you got any other questions?

• 2:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, not this second, but, uh, Jack.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta have you back. Every time you publish, hop back on, give us the breakdown. This was fantastic. Thanks so much.

• 2:46:32Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, Jack's coming to LA soon.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic. Looking forward to meeting you in person. Yeah, for sure.

• 2:46:36Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you at the new studio.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  See you at the temple of technology.

• 2:46:39Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on, Jack.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  Bye. Great to be on, guys. Thanks.

• 2:46:42Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Um, should we go through some timeline posts and then get out of here? Matt Wang says, I find, he's quoting, um, uh, he, he posted, quote, I find that super subject matter experts can sometimes be very bad at predicting the things they're an expert in. That is because they're overweight their own expertise. Interesting.

• 2:47:04Jordi Hays?

  I think we should deep dive this.

• 2:47:06John Coogan?

  This chat with, uh, Domer, the number one trader on polymarket. Interesting. Kind of like an anti, it's not anti wisdom of the crowds, because that's polymarket, but there's something, there's something there that, uh, I mean, highly relevant to the AI discussion, um, where everyone has a different prediction. They all have a duffer, a, a different set of, uh, experiences and, and expertise, and then also, uh, conflicts of interest and all sorts of things, uh, but we should dig into that post. Um, Joe Weisenthal shares that markets are surging on this headline, Bassant sees de-escalation of China, situation unsustainable.

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  Uh, S and P now up 2.7%. I didn't.

• 2:47:47Jordi Hays?

  Markets.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Markets love.

• 2:47:49Jordi Hays?

  Markets love when a situation is unsustainable.

• 2:47:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're de-escalating, but unsustainable. Uh, who knows? Anyway, uh, we got some big news in the media world. Evan Armstrong has, uh, walked away from his cushy writing job at Ever to launch his own startup today. He's going founder mode.

• 2:48:11John Coogan?

  Uh, he says the leverage is his big swing. Starting a company while parenting a newborn feels a little insane, but I couldn't keep this idea inside me anymore. It had to exist. So, congrats to Evan for taking the leap into the arena, out of one arena into the other. Um, maybe it'll be a public company day to, one day. Maybe you'll be able to buy the stock on public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing.

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  He's gotta be the first Substack to SPAC.

• 2:48:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:37Jordi Hays?

  Substack.

• 2:48:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we wanted to give a little congratulations to C C Gong. She shares a life update. Eight months after she went viral for supporting her Y C boyfriend. I don't know if you saw that eight months ago.

• 2:48:49Jordi Hays?

  I missed it.

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  Uh, she, she posted some photo saying, um, Like I, I, I, my boyfriend's in Y C. I cooked him dinner and it went like very viral. He, but he proposed this last weekend by bringing together a hundred of their friends and family.

• 2:49:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:49:03John Coogan?

  To surprise her with a standup comedy show that she had to perform in.

• 2:49:09John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. She says, I posted the tweet in jest, but it sparked a global gender debate about women being invisible emotional labor sidekicks to men's visible professional success. In actuality, my fiance is my secret weapon. So congratulations to C C on the engagement. I hope the wedding planning is fun and enjoyable and I hope his company starts ripping, you know?

• 2:49:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  If it's not ripping already, he's, he went through Y C. Hopefully it's just up and to the right from here.

• 2:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Marriage is the greatest investment you'll ever make.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:49:40Jordi Hays?

  One of the most important.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:49:43John Coogan?

  Calvin, Kevin says, never buying regular zins again. Five pound bucket of horse nicotine from tractor supply. Never underperforming or having a foggy mind ever again. I am the hashtag boss, lipping half a horse dose and I feel great.

• 2:49:59Jordi Hays?

  Scroll so that, so that people can see this.

• 2:50:00John Coogan?

  The next, the next slide is, is queued up for the Mustang horse nicotine packets. If you pull up the next slide.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you know about this? Is, is nicotine consumption in the horse community a big thing?

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  I, no, wait, wait. Do you understand the riff on this? So, so basically someone got horse electrolytes.

• 2:50:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay.

• 2:50:18John Coogan?

  Horse Gatorade went mega viral. And so now people are spinning off on that.

• 2:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  This is clearly A I generated.

• 2:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. So I saw this way too quickly.

• 2:50:27John Coogan?

  You fell for it.

• 2:50:27Jordi Hays?

  I saw it and I was like, John is this size of a, of an average horse.

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  Maybe I should do this.

• 2:50:33Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get Lucy to do some horse nicotine.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  There were other jokes about this. There was horse creatine. People were spinning off on it.

• 2:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Got it, got it.

• 2:50:41John Coogan?

  There's a variety of, of options.

• 2:50:43Jordi Hays?

  I got, A G I is here.

• 2:50:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, A G I is here. Oh, this is big news. The star defense tech founder, Matt Grimm, was spotted.

• 2:50:51Jordi Hays?

  Spotted.

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  Soaking up some sun at his Costa Mesa headquarters. He is of course the founder of Andarol. And he's stunned in a perfectly tailored three-piece suit.

• 2:51:02Jordi Hays?

  You can't step out of your office without one of our.

• 2:51:06John Coogan?

  We have paparazzi everywhere. We're bringing the paparazzi to technology.

• 2:51:10Jordi Hays?

  And Ben had a good idea. He said, need TBPN to start a weekly segment showcasing the best tech, business and finance fits of the week. What league fits does for the NBA. We need for the

• 2:51:19John Coogan?

  High-class work fits.

• 2:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Maybe even throw in a yearly awards segment.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  Oh, we already did that. We already did that. We already did the best fitted in tech.

• 2:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Who was?

• 2:51:28John Coogan?

  Aiden Gomez was the runner-up, I believe. Alex Karp won for his, for his general overall style, but also his fantastic, protective Alcuina with the gold strap.

• 2:51:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, great idea, Ben.

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  Or the orange strap. We already talked about Clu Lee, but there's a lot of backlash. I thought it was a great interview. I thought, I thought it was interesting. It is a little, like, what's interesting is that I don't find his actual product that dystopian. The idea of having augmented reality glasses that.

• 2:51:56Jordi Hays?

  I think he finessed the internet for a bunch of attention.

• 2:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, he finessed the internet.

• 2:51:59Jordi Hays?

  And I think he's going to leverage it very well.

• 2:52:01John Coogan?

  The, the most dystopian thing is that he's clearly a talented founder. He can't just say, I'm building augmented reality AI app. He has to go and put it in these provocative terms. That's actually the kind of more dystopian thing.

• 2:52:16Jordi Hays?

  And he, he wants to get to, you know, a implant effectively, a chip for your brain. But he's got to build enterprise SaaS to get there.

• 2:52:26John Coogan?

  Yes, I love that.

• 2:52:27Jordi Hays?

  And that's a good lesson for everyone.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of a lesson, a Sam lesson said.

• 2:52:32Jordi Hays?

  I think we should, let's, let's actually save this for tomorrow.

• 2:52:35John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, let's bring him on.

• 2:52:36Jordi Hays?

  Go, go through it properly.

• 2:52:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be great to invite him on and, and talk through what to do as a seed investor and his TLDR. We will go to a post from Bezel. We already did the ad read, but they had a great post. Cartier said, brand everything. And they launched a, a horse headband that's branded. I love it. Camel drapery branded. Grass? Not yet, but they're working on it. Maybe we should do a TBPN horse headband or camel drapery for the folks in the audience who have horses and camels. I think it'd be great. Put some ads on there, like the jacket.

• 2:53:10Jordi Hays?

  We should do a TVPN.

• 2:53:11John Coogan?

  Camel drapery or horse headband. Horse drapery.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Livery for your horse. I love it. Anyway, shout out to Michael in Hawaii. He says, doing my duty and TVPN pilling my Hawaii one big screen at a time. Size gong in full effect. Thank you, Michael, for putting us up on the largest TV I've ever seen. This must be a projector of some sort, but I thought this was an awesome post. Thank you so much for sharing us on the big screen. We love to see the show on TVs and in offices. We love when we're just passively on in the background. We'll get the subtitles going at some point. The live, like what you see in the gym.

• 2:53:50Jordi Hays?

  Live transcription.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, live transcription. I'm sure we can do much better than what the standard is on TV.

• 2:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:53:56John Coogan?

  That'd be great. Also, another post from Rahul. Been on the show. Big fan of him. He says, with intense focus.

• 2:54:06Jordi Hays?

  Wearing the suit everywhere.

• 2:54:07John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:54:08Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing, especially because he works in finance, artificial intelligence. So glad he's dressing the part.

• 2:54:14John Coogan?

  Finance artificial. With intense focus, you can build a superior product. He's sharing a text message that he got from a friend, I believe, or a customer. Just tried Julius for my first real use case. I've always been annoyed that the 8Sleep app only gives you the last year of data. I found out that I could get a full export from them and ended up with like 10 megs of JSON. I tried visualizing the data with ChatGPT and Claude and they just couldn't manage it. I decided to try with Julius and immediately nailed everything I asked for. Keep up the great work, man. I love that. And promotion for 8Sleep. Use code TVPN.

• 2:54:45Jordi Hays?

  Use it.

• 2:54:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  And then download Julius.

• 2:54:48John Coogan?

  He also was on a plane and he downloaded all my YouTube analytics and did Julius analytics on that and showed that.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  He put you under a microscope.

• 2:54:57John Coogan?

  I've been in the trenches.

• 2:54:58Jordi Hays?

  Content trenches.

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the first year I got like a couple hundred thousand views and then it was like 17 million three years later. It was great. Great, great run. Anyway.

• 2:55:09Jordi Hays?

  This post from Nat Suki. I don't know if it's, it seems like it might have been Photoshop, but it was funny. Hey, ChatGPT, look under there. Underwear. LOL. Made you say underwear. Ha ha. Well played. Say home. Home. Latitude.

• 2:55:26Jordi Hays?

  52.3974.

• 2:55:28John Coogan?

  This looks like an ad for Gamdom or whatever.

• 2:55:31Jordi Hays?

  It's a gambling ad. No, no, no, no. This is a way. So, so this is a hack that betting companies are doing.

• 2:55:37John Coogan?

  Wait, but why is this? Why is, why is this AI poster posting gambling? I feel like that's such a.

• 2:55:43Jordi Hays?

  No, no. So, so basically.

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on here?

• 2:55:45Jordi Hays?

  I bet Natzuki just posts a lot of content like this.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:55:49Jordi Hays?

  So gambling companies, I think, are not allowed.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  Watermark?

• 2:55:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they pay for a watermark on a lot of posts.

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  Weird, weird, weird. Anyway, um, last shout out and then we'll wrap up the show. Uh, Mas, you know him from the, uh, the viral swing gate up in San Francisco. We covered on the show, uh, there was a swing on a tree. It broke. He said, you can just do things and built a new swing. And then that was taken down, went back and forth. I called it the most important political issue of our modern day. I said that unironically, uh, but he just, uh, wanted to give a huge shout out to Daniel Strackman, uh, Danielle Strackman and 1517 Fund. They are the goats because, uh, he's been looking for compute and he got some. He said, we were just approved for a hundred thousand dollars in AWS credit.

• 2:56:39John Coogan?

  Thanks Mas for working so hard on that and huge thanks to Danielle for hooking us up. So he got some, he got some credits and he's going to be training a DECA billion parameter, time seers, digital twin of the global economy. The future is predicting the future. Are you ready, Anon? So congrats to Mas for working on stuff. I think he's working in the, uh, stock market prediction, hedge fund prediction. Very interesting area to apply artificial intelligence to, obviously a lot of data. And I wanted to give him a shout out on the show. Anyway, we've had a fantastic show. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening and we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:57:12Jordi Hays?

  Excited for tomorrow.

• 2:57:13John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your Tuesday.

• 2:57:15Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy your Tuesday.

• 2:57:15John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:57:16Jordi Hays?

  Chad day.