GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen Live on TBPN

(01:58) - The Current State of AI (30:43) - Robbery at the Louvre (36:50) - Timeline Reactions (41:00) - Nvidia & China (48:05) - Timeline Reactions (51:58) - Ryan Cohen is a Canadian entrepreneur and activist investor, best known for founding Chewy, an online pet retailer, and serving as the CEO and Chairman of GameStop. In the conversation, Cohen discusses the impact of government shutdowns on startups, highlighting how delays in contract approvals and visa processing can hinder hiring and operations. He also addresses the challenges in AI regulation, emphasizing the need for federal standards to prevent a patchwork of state laws that could stifle innovation. (01:47:54) - Zak Kukoff, Chair of the Tech and Venture Practice at Lewis-Burke Associates and former venture capitalist at General Catalyst, discusses the impact of government shutdowns on startups, highlighting issues such as delayed deal flow, frozen visa processing for workers, and halted regulatory approvals, which can be existential threats to startups dependent on timely government actions. (02:21:28) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app 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 Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, October 20th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  You weren't in France, were you?

• 0:13John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Why would you think that was Paris, France?

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  A lot of some people were wondering.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  No.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Around the office.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  What? I don't even know what that is. What's the news?

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  What's France?

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Why would you be suspicious?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  What is France?

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Of course, the the crown jewels were stolen from the Louvre in dramatic fashion. We will be covering that story later in the show. We also have the CEO of GameStop, Ryan Cohen, joining the show at noon. So if you're new here and you're tuning in for the first time, please stay with us. There are also major technical difficulties across the Internet today because of a massive AWS outage. We are working through it. Some of our graphics will not be up to date today. Some of the prices that you see on our tickers might not be up to date today, but we are doing our best to bring you the news and bring you exclusive interviews.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Want us to podcast today, but we refused to listen.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  They were really, really working against us.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  And in other news, we will be having both Brian Chesky on the show tomorrow as well as Palmer Lucky.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  That's gonna be great.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  Back to back.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  So please stay tuned. Listen to this show. Listen to tomorrow's show. Do you think the AWS outage is is it entirely because of us and the GameStop shorts want us to stop podcasting?

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  So that we can't bring them the latest in the world of of GameStop? Or do you think it's more that with the complete and utter popping of the AI bubble, AWS just threw in the towel? They said, look, the AI thing's not gonna work. Let's just not even do the cloud computing thing anymore.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  I think I think it was potentially Amazon just turning it off for a second to show everyone that, hey, cloud clouds is still pretty important.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Forgotten about us.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  You're still dependent on us.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Well, if you've been living under a data center, Andre Karpathy made waves this week after he dropped a massive bombshell of a podcast with none other than Dwarsh Patel on the Dwarsh Patel podcast. He said a lot of good things about AI. He said a lot of negative things about AI. He called AI slop. He also said that the models are amazing. He said that autocomplete is his sweet spot. He had a bunch of positive things to say, but overall. People did not react positively. Everyone says the AI bubble is over. It's popped. You gotta rotate out of AI stocks. My take is that if you're looking for something safe, you gotta rotate into food, water, shelter, and guns.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Because that's all you're gonna have. AI is fake. The internet's fake. Computers are fake. The steam engine's fake. Railroads are fake. Electricity's fake. All of industrialization is a bubble. We're going back to monkey. We're returning to monkey. We're going to be living in huts. Because technology is a bubble. Technology is fake. And all we have left is to homestead and live in a shelter. So get ready to go back to sticks and stones. That's my take.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Good take.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  But, of course, it's not that bad. But, uh, the general tech community is having whiplash from this, for sure.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Baze over on X says, uh, so happy it's contrarian to believe in AI progress again.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. It is a good take. Uh, and so, uh, basically, Andre Karpathy went on and Andre's in an interesting position because uh, Andre Karpathy, uh, was a co-founding member of OpenAI. He was there from day one. He also was at Tesla and built the self-driving car program there. He is one of the most respected AI practitioners, researchers. He's implemented NanoChat, uh, and NanoGPT, these repos that are handcrafted by him to explain to anyone who can program at a high level, uh, how to build an advanced, uh, chatbot, an advanced AI model, an LLM, train it from scratch.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  And, uh, and so he's always been extremely respected, uh, but he doesn't have crazy bags right now. Because he's kind of out of Tesla, out of OpenAI. He was at OpenAI for a little bit. He went back and then left. Uh, he's working on an education product right now, which was very, very interesting, very cool, called Eureka. Uh, I'm actually very excited for it and would recommend anyone who's Getting into programming, stay on top of that because I feel like if you can power through the Andre Karpathy pedagogy, or his, all of his different coursework that he puts out, you will probably have a very, very rewarding job very quickly. So, people, but people are bearish because he's basically saying that AGI is like 10 years away, not one year, not two years.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  He's kind of debunking the idea, or at least he's just sharing like the vibes that he doesn't feel like the AI 2027 fast takeoff scenario is probable. And what's interesting is that this aligns with what a bunch of people have been saying, but it's one, like Sam Altman's been saying, you know, curing cancer and teaching people, but then also free education, right? But then also I went back to, over a year ago, September 23rd, 2024, Sam Altman posted a blog post, said the intelligence age. And this is what he said in there. He said, "It is possible that we will have super intelligence in a few thousand days." I have always read a few as three, three or four, right? What's 3,000 days? What's 4,000 days?

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  About 10 years.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  It's about 10 years. And so, there's, there's two reads on that. One is that like, let's say that he knows for some reason, I don't think he does, I don't think anyone does, but let's say he knows, well, he's still setting expectations to be like AGI is a decade away, which is exactly what Andre said, but when Sam said it, everyone's like, "Let's go super long." And when Andre says, "Oh, it's bad." Which is kind of an interesting tweak, but also, there is the more kind of critical take, which is just that, whenever you talk to a technologist and you say like, "Okay, you're working on getting us to Mars, you're working on fusion reactors, you're working on quantum computing. When will this actually change my life? When will this be, when will this technology be ready for primetime?" Everyone says, "It's just a decade away." Because a decade is so long that if you make a decade prediction, like, but, like if

• 6:16John Coogan?

  we were to say, you know, "Oh, where will the show be in a decade? Or what will we be doing in a decade?" We could say crazy stuff because it's going to be so long that everyone will have forgotten in a decade, basically.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  It's somewhat straightforward to make one, two-year, three-year prediction.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Beyond that, it gets

• 6:31John Coogan?

  It just gets so fuzzy, there's so many other things that could happen, it's really complicated. And, I mean, people are making long-term predictions about AI for a long time. Ray Kurzweil, when I got to Silicon Valley, I read a book called The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I believe he published that in like the late 90s, maybe early 2000s. Tyler, have you read The Singularity is Near? It's a tome.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  I actually have not. I need to read that.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you should.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  That's like a foundational text.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  And the crazy thing about that is that he makes a whole bunch of predictions about how scaling will happen in terms of like compute power. And he bounds everything in flops. So he just says like, let's sum up the total amount of computing power in the world right now. And just comp that to how many flops the human brain has or all human brains have. And based on that, he predicted that we would that we'd pass the Turing test in like 2022 or 2023. He like nailed it like 20 years earlier, completely nailed it. Although we do debate like, are we actually passed the Turing test? Cause you can just ask a model like, are you a model and it'll say yes. And so, but in general, it feels like we passed the Turing test and it feels like we're hitting Kurzweil timelines. And so I've always kind of like leaned back whenever somebody presses me on my AGI timelines.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  I always just say like, I kind of, I kind of stick with Kurzweil. 2045 is what he says, and that sounds bearish now. But when he published the singularity is near, people were like, this is never going to happen. Like this is just insanity, maybe in 10,000 years, bro, but like it's not.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was interesting, you know, some people listened to the Karpathy interview and thought, great, I have 10 years to escape the permanent under.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  Which is exactly, exactly how OpenAI is also acting, right? They're acting like a big tech company. They're launching a social media app. They're working on ads. They're working on commerce. They're trying to scale paid users, right? They're just acting like a traditional hyperscale.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Hyperscaler, yeah, I think that's the correct model. I think that's 100% the right move. Did you get the time?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just gonna say like, the fact that 10 years AGI is like a bearish take.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Is crazy.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  That's so bullish.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  That's extremely bullish.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Bearish takes are bullish. I agree. I agree.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  No, no, no, it is true. But, but I mean, a bunch of people have been saying stuff like this. I mean, when we talked to Tyler Cohen, he says, you know, I think progress will be very incremental, that we won't just see some sort of fast takeoff. Because there's so many different areas of the economy that you can't, it's not just a, like a single input, output, text in, text out. That's true for small programming tasks for sure. That's true for. Customer support for sure, but it's not, it's not true for medicine. It's not true for so many other things. And Andre Karpathy does a great job breaking down that prediction about radiologists. That the, the idea that radiologists would be put out of a job by AI because AI is really good at looking at images.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Well, it turns out that radiologists do like 25 other things that are really important. And it's not just a job of looking at a picture and.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Did you see a lot of pushback from anyone at the big labs on the interview?

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Uh, no, I didn't see anything.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  I expected to see more people saying Karpathy's been out of the game for a few years. He doesn't have the scale. He's not really at the frontier. He's not seeing what we're seeing and I didn't see any of that.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  Just bounce off Karpathy for sure.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Is that bearish Tyler?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Uh, all right. Maybe that's a little bearish. I'm looking at the, you know, broad strokes here.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, but, uh, I, I mean, I think that the.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  I saw a lot of researchers being like, yeah, RL is pretty mid.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. It's like the best, it's the best we have, I guess. Um, but, uh, I mean, the big question here is, is what does this mean for big tech companies? What does this mean for the hyperscalers for Oracle? Uh, those big tech companies can't exactly turn on a dime on the basis of the latest.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  So funny. AWS up 1.3% today.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  You mean Amazon as a whole?

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry. Amazon as a whole up 1.3% because everyone is like, oh, this is actually pretty important. We kind of forgot about AWS.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, uh, Oracle of course is down almost 5%.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Well, whatever you are thinking of doing in the public markets, go to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. And so, uh, Oracle's now on the hook for something like $300 billion in infrastructure over the next five years. That's a lot very quickly. Uh, they're hoping that, uh, OpenAI revenue will pay for that. And there's the hyperscaler narrative that you laid out where, you know, if the ads product really ramps, if the, you know, the SOAR product ramps.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  My view Oracle basically has to bet that OpenAI can get every person, you know, almost every internet user to be an OpenAI user.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Yes. And. I mean, I'm super fascinated in how fast the commerce ramp will happen. Just over the weekend, I mean, I'm on like the furthest edge of early adoption here. And I forget what I was searching for. I was searching for a product. Oh, I was searching for gray printer paper that would look like a newspaper. So if we printed a tweet, we can make it look like newspaper for some reason. I just wanted to know if that was a thing. It found me some options. And when I got through to the product, it took me to a landing page. And I wound up just sending it to one of our team members and saying like, hey, can you order this? Because the one click checkout, like I wasn't at a point in chat GPT where I could just say, okay, buy it and ship it to the alter dome. Like, that was not an option for me.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  So I, so, so like, they need to obviously improve like features there. But then there's also like customer adoption and actually training the user. Because if, if, if, if 700 million of those 800 million are still in the natural like muscle memory workflow of when I find a product on chat GPT, I Google it and then I buy it there. Well, that's not going to monetize very well. They have to train people into thinking, yes, I trust that if I tell chat GPT, order this and deliver it to my house, it's going to buy it with the right credit card. It's going to ship it to the right address. I'm going to be able to get a refund if I need to. Like, that's a whole new user experience workflow that they will have to train people on.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  And so, and I would say, I would say, it is very notable that OpenAI has announced partnerships with Etsy and Walmart and not Amazon and eBay.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Sort of a Timu, Amazon and a Timu eBay. You can think of it that way.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  That's why.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Walmart is kind of like Timu, Amazon.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's true. I mean, obviously, OpenAI, I'm sure, would have liked to already announce partnerships with Amazon, would have liked to already announce partnerships with eBay.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  And certainly those conversations would have happened.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Nobody, neither management team is asleep at the wheel.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  But I would expect that Amazon's, Amazon's management team, eBay's management team, aren't so quick to let Sam, the fox, into the hen house.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  We love, we love when foxes get in hen houses. We also love ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Pedro.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Wait, hold on, hold on, one thing on that. So the question about eBay and Walmart, eBay and Amazon staying out of the OpenAI partnerships? And OpenAI having to go to the tier twos, Walmart and Etsy, right? I, I, I think that's like the correct framing that Amazon and eBay want to say, hey, we, I think we still have leverage here. But it can flip if OpenAI becomes a true aggregator. Amazon does have to run ads on meta properties. They do have to run ads on Google and they, and, and these things can get out of control where like the iPhone got so dominant that Google had to pay Apple to be the default search. Like, like there's just a certain amount of like, if everyone winds up using one thing, then you do have leverage in that conversation.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  And I wouldn't be surprised if in, in, if in two, three, four, five years, OpenAI has enough leverage that Amazon and, and eBay capitulate and say, yep, we're partnering. Because we, um, uh, we, we, we just have to do it. And so, uh, I mean, the last thing we could talk about is like how Oracle is positioning their decision making. I had a little bit of take on this. Do you want me to run you through it?

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  Hit me.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  So, uh, in, uh, so Oracle has two new CEOs, Software Cats is out. Uh, there's Clay McGork, uh, he's the co-CEO and he did an interview with CNBC. And he said of OpenAI, look at their financials, their growth and what's being built with this technology. This isn't a typical company trajectory. They've reached nearly a billion users faster than anyone. Everything about this is unprecedented, but in a good way. And I, I don't like this framing. I, I think that, I think that it's so, it's not the right framing to say like, we've never seen anything like this. It's breaking all of our patterns. So we're just completely operating off playbook. I think it's much better to just say that like, like this is a new hyperscaler. We all saw what happened with Google and Amazon. They were started before the dot com bubble popped.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  And they scaled very fast. OpenAI scaling faster on users and revenue. And so we are investing more, but it's all proportionate to the growth. And so it's the exact same playbook as you want to build.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the framing, the framing is also.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  In 1999, you want to build Google for, you want to build infrastructure for OpenAI in 2025. You underwrite it the same way. There's just, it's just a faster growth rate. So you're investing slightly more and it's all proportional and it's actually the same playbook.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Do you think he's trying to frame the growth as so unprecedented, we're just trying to meet it so that people don't see Oracle directly as just this massive bet on OpenAI? Because if he just came out and said, we're betting that ChatGPT will need to serve billions of users.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  That feels like.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  Just a better kind of read on the situation overall than, oh, we can't predict the demand at all. It's just running away from us. We're just trying to trying to meet their capacity demands. So

• 16:19John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Because either way, Oracle is a bet on OpenAI.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I I I think I prefer the world where they are saying like, sure, even if we're in the dot com bubble, we think we found the Amazon. We think we found the Google. They're going to make it through and these are going to be multi-trillion dollar companies. So we are going really hard on that to partner and and draft off of that. The the problem is is that I'm sure Oracle has a million other partners that they can like completely like frustrate by saying, hey, you know, we're we're not interested.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  And at the same time.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Move on. I want to tell you about Restream, one live stream, thirty plus destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. Sorry, Jordy. Continue.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  At the same time as Oracle is obviously bullish on OpenAI, there is reporting. There was reporting in TechCrunch that was based on a report by Aptopia that was using App Store data to look at ChatGPT overall growth and user minutes and things like that. And this somewhat aligned to the reporting from Deutsche Bank that.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Hey, we got Nick on the camera somehow.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  Sorry, everyone.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, when AWS goes down.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  For our lives over here.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't go down entirely, but it's close.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  But welcome and please enjoy the beautiful view of one of our team members, Nick.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, hopefully the audio is still coming through, but

• 17:44John Coogan?

  We're back.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  The both of these reports showed that, yeah, OpenAI, OpenAI growth, ChatGPT growth is seemingly slowing a little bit. And that and that makes sense if you if you

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  just based entirely on the scale that they're at right now.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you do saturate at some point. This is DAU. Is this this is global DAU and it's around seventy two million. What's interesting here is that. For a long time, people have been spinning the narrative that like, oh, growth will plateau during the summer, right? Didn't we look at some data that showed that August was particularly flat for some other reason? Who was that?

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, growth did plateau over summer, at least.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  That's not this data, though.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  At least.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  This data shows very consistent. Oh, that was Europe. That was Europe. Okay.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's interesting. Europe, America grinds during the summer and then plateaus. And yeah, we burned out. The great lock-in of September was like, okay, I'm not installing any new apps or something like that. I don't know. I don't know how much to read into this Apptopia, like, like some of these like tracking, app tracking things, like, I don't know how accurate they are because they don't necessarily have a pixel in the exact app. It might be more like Nielsen ratings, where they're just polling people.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  But, but, I mean, if you believe the beginning of the curve, what happened, what happened last year? Like, because there was actually a plateau back in, it looks like back in January of, what was that, 2023 or 2024? Because January, oh no, that was the beginning of this year. That was the beginning of this year. So the beginning of this year was, was pretty flat. And then, once April 1st came out, everyone went on for April Fool's Day, I guess. And then it started ripping upwards. And then, and then, and then September and October have been sort of flat. I don't know. We'll see. There was, yeah, there's a lot more we could go through here. But first, let me tell you about Privy Wallet

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Buco Capital was sharing another data point over from Similar Web. It shows that Gemini has been gaining market share from, gaining on OpenAI. Obviously, the overall market is growing, so OpenAI is still growing on a, on a per-user basis, but Gemini is growing. He says, "Google already has nine products with over 1 billion users: Search, Android Chrome, Drive, Photos, Play Store, YouTube Maps, and Gmail."

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  So, says they know a thing or two about a thing or two.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the same time, like bootstrapping a new, a new product flow, like actually funneling you from Gmail into something else is really hard for a almost 30-year-old company. It's always been through acquisition, they buy something.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Meta, I mean Meta and Threads.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Meta, Meta did do a thread, so maybe.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  When you own, when you own one of the best advertising networks in the world, you can aggressively funnel people. The question is, how much do they try to integrate the value of Gemini into the core search product?

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how, how would you do it?

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  Split them out.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  Because I, I, I think what, what Connor did over at Threads is, is a really, really smart integration where you actually see Threads content inserted into the Instagram feed. So while you're scrolling Instagram, you see a thread and you're like, oh, I want to see that. And then it just takes you over to that app and then you're DAU of that app. And it was very easy to create a Threads account if you had an Instagram account. How would, how would, how should Google surface a Gemini flow where you're in Gmail or you're in Google Search and then all of a sudden you're in, you're in Gemini?

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  I think there's a bunch of ways. You can do it through search, you can do it through Chrome.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Maybe through the AI overviews, like you know how you go into AI mode? It should be like one more click and then you're just fully in Gemini, maybe?

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think there's a reason that OpenAI wants its own browser, Perplexity wants its own browser. I don't think they've properly even leveraged Chrome yet in order to drive Gemini usage.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking about, I was thinking about the browser, like the agents in a browser.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Browser Wars of the summer of 2025, over, over before they started.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, with a whimper. Um, I, yeah, I was thinking about the, the browser because I used to, I used to enjoy scraping web content. So I'd go to a website and I'd write some JavaScript to like pull it all out into a spreadsheet. And I was thinking like, oh, with a, with an agent in my browser, I could do that really easily. I could have it write the, the JavaScript to scrape everything out. That'd be really easy. But then I realized like I could just like copy paste the whole thing into an LLM or just give the LLM the URL. Or even just, I was thinking about the Midas list. I was like, if I wanted to get the Midas list into a, into a spreadsheet, I used to have to write JavaScript to like, go through the Midas list and, and save everything and put it in spreadsheet. Now, you can just go to chat GPT and say, reproduce the full Midas list and it'll just do it. You don't even

• 22:53John Coogan?

  have to tell it the URL. So, I'm still, I'm still searching for use cases of, of AI in the browser.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  This was a good highlight from the interview. Kirk Path, he says, when I go on my Twitter timeline, I see all this stuff that makes no sense to me. Honestly, just fundraising. And then, the next post from Chris Offner, the unbridled joy of listening to someone smart who's not trying to sell you anything. This is why I think this interview hits so hard, is he's not sitting there, like, trying to get to the next tender offer, right? He's just being honest about what he's seeing and some people aren't gonna like that, but...

• 23:30John Coogan?

  I mean, same with Sutton. Like Sutton doesn't have bags, and he was able to come on and, and make a pretty, pretty clear argument to, to put Tyler out of a job.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  I mean, so I, I think, I do think like the most interesting quote out of this, I don't see a ton of people talking about it. It's that, he basically doesn't think like, even if we get AGI in 10 years, GDP growth will actually just stay at 2%, which I think is like very contrarian. It seems to me that like, most people are like, we won't get AGI. If they're saying that GDP, GDP, GDP growth is gonna stay, that means we didn't get AGI and it's just like better autocomplete or etc. But he, he basically loops in like all, you know, innovation just into the same 2% GDP growth that's been going on. Cause if you look back, you can't really see...

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was a super profound idea. This, this idea that he sees AI as an extension of the internet. And he's like, yeah, when I hear the story about, like recursive AI, like, oh wow, the foundation model lab, AI researchers are using AI to improve the AI that they build. He was like, well, yeah, like the Google engineers would Google stuff. Yeah. And like, you know, the Ford, the Ford motor manufacturers would probably be like, let's drive cars.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Cars, to make more cars.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Exactly. So like, he was like, he was kind of like every technological innovation since we've invented technology and started...

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and all you have to do is look at OpenAI. And fundamentally, it, it looks a lot like Google, right? It has different vibes, different, different leadership style, but, you know, they have their YouTube. They're building their AdSense.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Well, if you're writing code, you need to check out cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Devon, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Everyone's from Canada, says Yaxine. Basically, every famous computer scientist is Canadian, Andre Karpathy, Hinton, Alex Net, Rob Pike, Yaxine, Elon, all Canadian. I love it.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Nothing like some fake news. Will Brown, thoughts on the Karpathy interview? Agree with him on pretty much everything.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Literal transformative AGI is not imminent. That's fine. Doesn't mean it's a bubble.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Doesn't mean it's a bubble. Let's go.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Normal technology that improves productivity and growth is very valuable. The market already reflects this.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  That's great. Nothing ever happens and everything is fine and we're so back and it's already priced in. The exponential RSI takeoff.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Famous, famous last words. Suspended Cap says the Karpathy interview is scaling. We aren't short compute.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Scathing.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Scathing. We aren't short compute. We are short breakthroughs that replicate things the human brain can do. No doubt we'll get there, but wouldn't be surprised to see markets sputter on Monday while this makes the rounds. Really honest stuff.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. No one in the market is talking about this. Like the, the private markets and the public markets are fully disconnected. The public markets, the NASDAQ is up 1.46%. This, the vibes on X are way different than what happens on Wall Street. I remember when Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross went on Stratechery and they did a great, they did a great interview series about AI back in 2022, 2023. There's a whole series of them. And in there, they talk about Nvidia specifically and how important Nvidia chips are going to be. And Nvidia was like a $300 billion company or something at the time. And it like, almost like, I don't know, 3X or 10X, maybe it was like, uh, maybe it was 800.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  To be fair, JP Morgan did downgrade Oracle's credit rating today.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  On the Carpathian, you think that's what happened? They were like, oh, they're watching Dark Ash, they're like, we gotta downgrade this.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  This is wild. Do you know who Connor Leahy is?

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he's like a famous, um, I think he's a big doomer.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  He's a doomer, right? Yeah. So he says, I want to pre-register the following opinion. I think it's plausible, but by no means guaranteed that we could see a massive financial crisis or bubble pop affecting AI in the next year. I expect if this happens, it will mostly be for mundane economic reasons, over-leveraged markets, financial policy of major nations, mistiming of bets, even by a small amount of, and, and good old fraud, not because the technology isn't making rapid progress. I suspect such a crisis to have at most modest effects on timelines to existential dangerous AI, ASI being developed, but will be used by partisans to try and dismiss the risk. Sadly, a bunch of people making poorly thought through leveraged bets on the market tells

• 28:15John Coogan?

  you little about the underlying object reality of how powerful AI is or soon will be. Do not be fooled by narratives. So he's saying, yes, we, we gotta go even harder. The bear market's bullish for doom, potentially. Underrated AI doom scenario. The bubble pops so hard that everyone goes bankrupt. There's mass famine and starvation and humanity, population collapses, all because we went too levered, long AI. What do you think about that?

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Plausible? It just might be. Matt Palmer says, I've been saying this, update your models and timelines. Foom sells, mankind is back.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Kind is back.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  And Figma is back. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. How it feels listening to this podcast, Han Wang.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up the picture?

• 29:07John Coogan?

  It's balloon popping. We will see about that. Who knows how this will all play out.

• 29:13Jordi Hays?

  Francois Chalet says, "The reason it is so important for everyone to keep pretending that AGI is definitely right around the corner is that there is now over 1 trillion of investment riding on this belief, either already expended or committed. Current and recent past capex cannot be justified by current use cases and technology currently spending $10 to $15 to make $1. To ever be in the black, you need dramatically better tech applications and you need them fast before current data centers depreciate, which is a three to five year time scale."

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  Noam Brown was calling him out, said, "Didn't you just say two months ago that you think..."

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Noam's at OpenAI.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  "That you think AGI is about five years away?" Of course.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Yes, and Chase Coleman, the founder of Tiger Global, came out of hiding on the same weekend Carpathy said AI labs are promoting slop as innovation to secure funding and we're decades away from AGI? Sell it all today.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  It was a good, it was a good panel.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Listen, Brad Gersner, we're on it.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  I should have thrown that one in the mix. I listened to the full Palmer Lucky on Joe Rogan episode. That was a lot of fun. Palmer will be on the show tomorrow and I listened to the Carpathy episode, which was great. Oh, another interesting Carpathy tidbit. He invented the term hallucination. He hallucinated calling what LLMs do hallucination, which is very funny. I just thought that was really cool. Anyway, we should move to the Napoleon jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in a major robbery. The thieves stole jewelry from display cases in Gallerie de Polon.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Finally, a brazen heist. There's been little to no brazen heist.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  If you're new here on this show, we are anti-heist. We are anti-crime. Do not do this. If you have information that could lead to the arrest of these thieves, let us know. We will send you a hat. That's the best we can do. But Luke Metro says, is this the cure for male loneliness? I hope not, because we don't want more brazen heists. We want less brazen heists. Leave the crown jewels alone.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Thieves used a truck-mounted furniture elevator to reach the gallery housing the artifacts and then sped away on motorcycles, officials said. Tourists were streaming into the world's most visited museum on Sunday when a group of thieves burst in through a window of a gilded gallery on the second floor and made off with a set of priceless royal jewels. It was broad daylight, roughly 9:30 local time, when four individuals driving two powerful motorcycles and a truck with a portable furniture elevator parked outside the Louvre Museum.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  I didn't know what a furniture elevator was. Have you ever heard of this before? It seems like actually a really awesome invention, because if you need to get a couch to the top of like, your house and you can't take it up the stairs, you just put it on this. It looks like a fire truck, basically. The fire truck pulls the ladder up and then the elevator slides up, but they move the thieves out.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  And it is funny, when I saw the picture of the furniture elevator outside the museum, it looks like just, kinda makes sense, right? Normally, when you see something like this, you're not thinking to yourself, that's out of place.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no way.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  There's maybe one person that worked at the museum that would think, that doesn't seem scheduled.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no, totally. It happened during normal hours. The entire heist was less than seven minutes.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  So, two of the perpetrators, at least one wearing a high-visibility yellow vest.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  That looks, blend in so much. It just looks like workers, like, oh, they're gonna go work on the balcony, they need some equipment. Like, they're really the value of like, the professional equipment. But, there was a, there was a crown.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  And they used angle grinders to cut through the window and get inside.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Yep. They, they attempted, but failed to set fire to their truck. So, they were trying to burn the truck on the way out, to like, get rid of all the fingerprints, I suppose. And they dropped the crown of Empress Eugene with nearly 1,400 diamonds before they sped away. It was found damaged. No one was injured. Eight pieces in total were stolen, including an emerald earring and an emerald necklace that belonged to Empress Marie Louise.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Such a brutal fumble.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  That is

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Fumbling fourteen hundred diamonds.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Massive fumble, absolutely brutal. Uh, an emerald ring and an emerald necklace. Some of these, some of these uh, things are, are massive. I didn't know this, but uh, the Wall Street Journal takes us through some, some history of burglaries. Um, there's been a long string of French history.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  This is a very French.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Extremely French. Uh, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in nineteen eleven by an Italian carpenter, only to be found two years later. He got away with it for two years. Uh, in twenty ten, a thief broke into Paris's Modern Art Museum and made off with more than a hundred and twenty million dollars of artworks, including some from Picasso and Matisse. A thief, the thief dubbed Spider-Man was sent to prison for the crime and later appeared in a Netflix documentary. Um, what do you think they're gonna do with the stolen jewels? We were debating this at breakfast. It's gonna be hard to fence this. I think that's the term. You, you can't just go on eBay and throw it up there.

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  Facebook Marketplace.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Facebook Marketplace was built for this.

• 34:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting challenge because uh, yeah, obviously they're, you're, they're never gonna be able to capture the same value necessarily as if you're able to do an open auction.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  If you're able to do an open auction and you could buy this legally.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  And the person that bought it could then go flex it around and publicly be the owner of, of these, you know, incredible historic jewels.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that would get you sort of the maximum price. Uh, that being said, given the historical significance, I think there's, uh, there's a small pool of buyers.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  There's probably a hundred people in the world.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  That would be willing to pay tens of millions.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  And potentially more.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  Just, just to know that they had it and just to be a family secret.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Do you think there are any buyers that would flex it? Because obviously if you're, if you're an ally of France, you're not gonna do that, obviously. Cause they'll immediately come and be like, those are stolen, give it to us. Doesn't matter what you paid, you gotta return it. If you're America or Germany or Britain, right? But what if you're Vladimir Putin? What if you're Kim Jong-un? Like if you're in North Korea, like, oh, France is gonna invade North Korea for a couple of jewels. Kim Jong Un just rocking it himself. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't know. I, I feel like there are some countries that are actively not friendly with France that could just say, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna buy this and we're gonna, we're gonna rock it. It's gonna be in our museum now. It's a stolen artifact. A lot of museums have stolen artifacts.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other play is to, you know, if, if you're a, a family that does, you know, is, is into long-term planning. You could say, all right, we're gonna store these for, for literally a hundred and fifty years as a family. And once a hundred and fifty years pass, we're gonna be able to pop up and we're gonna be able to talk about our jewels publicly because everybody that was around when they were stolen isn't here anymore. Nobody's really gonna care. It's not gonna, we're gonna be, the entire world population will have turned over and we'll be able to suddenly come out and, and make up some story of, of how our family got them.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, we need our, our security because I feel like someone's gonna steal that horse.

• 36:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  If we're not careful.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna use a furniture elevator to get out of here.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  If you wanna manage risk in your business, go to vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay. This story from Friday, Saturday.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  I was cracking up.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Tell me.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  So, long story short, some OpenAI researchers, uh, were able to use ChatGPT to find the results to a handful of problems.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that were previously marked as unsolved.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  What are they called? The, the air, uh?

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Erdish.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Erdish.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  It's from Paul Erdish.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Paul Erdish.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  He's a mathematician.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  And so they were able to, they said, uh, update, uh, Metab and I pushed further on this using thousands of GPT five queries. We found solutions to ten Erdish problems that were listed as open. And so they put this out and it looked like ChatGPT had made this incredible novel discovery.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  And it turns out they were just using ChatGPT as this effectively web search.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Knowledge retreat.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Novel, law, knowledge.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  So someone had put these up there. Yeah. Okay.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  And they were kind of positioning it, it was, you could read it both ways. If you went back and looked at the original posts, you could see how they were saying like, we just found the solutions.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  We didn't, we didn't generate them.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  But the way that it was written was, was definitely like, a lot of people would have just read it as, oh, wow, Chad GPT five is doing novel, novel discovery.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  I have a very funny story about this.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  And so, of course, just, just to close it off, Demis over at DeepMind just commented, this is embarrassing.

• 38:19John Coogan?

  Absolutely roasted. And the OpenAI researcher said, I deleted the post. I didn't mean to mislead anyone, obviously. I thought the phrasing was clear. Sorry about that. Only solutions in the literature were found. That's it. And this, and I find this very accelerating because I know how hard it is to search the literature.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  John LeCoq.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  John LeCoq is not happy.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to read that one.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  He, he said, he's making a play on hosted by their own petards, which is where you are a victim of something that you, it's like stepping on a rake that you put down on the ground. He is not making an allusion to the R word or any sort of slur. So just to be clear there. Anyway, I had a funny story when I was in Silicon Valley in 2012. There were these like extremely hard programming challenges that I could do the first couple of, but I couldn't actually get that far because they were really, really difficult. And I didn't really have a reason to like go and get like be like a competition programmer. I was just trying to build a company. And, but I wanted, if you, if you could get, you know, if you could get the service to like accept your result, you could get this badge that you could put on your website

• 39:26John Coogan?

  and it would link it into your profile and it would be like very legit. It was like computer, it was like, you know, programmer cred. And so what I figured out was that there were a lot of answers out there that were like on GitHub and open source. And so you could go and find those, put those into the system, get authenticated as like having solved these really hard problems. And so I got like the gold medal and was able to put it on my website and it made it look very official that I could not do that level of programming. So I was doing the same thing, basically. So, you know, the.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  Maybe I shouldn't be casting stones here. Anyway.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  Elon.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he's taking shots.

• 40:05Jordi Hays?

  Dunked on, well, Gabe over at OpenAI, well, to start it off, Elon says, "My estimate on the probability of Grok 5 achieving AGI is now at 10% and rising." Gabe says 10% chance Elon declares he reached AGI a fourth time.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Has Elon ever actually declared he reached AGI? I feel like he has not declared that. Like, I feel like Elon says a lot of crazy stuff about like, "I hope that we'll be able to do novel physics. I think the next version's gonna be really powerful, this and that." But I don't know that he's ever actually called a version of Grok AGI. But anyway, clearly, it clearly upset Elon because he replied and said, "You call yourself a quote-unquote researcher," hitting somebody with the double quotes. "We know the pain that that inflicts. It's terrible." You never want to be hit with the double quotes. And he says, "Pathetic." And so, a rough, rough day on the timeline, timeline in turmoil.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  Jensen Huang was at a Citadel event, Future of Global Markets, and said, "We are 100% out of China. We went from 95% market share to 0%. I can't imagine any policymaker thinking that's a good idea." And, yeah, there was some pushback here. Matt Palmer says, "100% out of China, but doing astonishingly healthy business in Singapore and Malaysia, totally out of the blue and not for any intelligible reason." Swinging around accusations that Singapore and Malaysia are fronts for Chinese chip demand.

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, people have been going back and forth on Jensen's involvement in China. Shom Sangkar took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I'm sure we have a copy here, actually,

• 41:55John Coogan?

  talking about Nvidia in China. We actually have some folks coming on the show later today, hopefully. To break down some of what's happening, both in the rare earth world and also in the semiconductor world with regard to China. If you are joining us and expecting an interview with Ryan Cohen, we are working through some technical difficulties. We are hopefully going to be getting him on the phone in just a few minutes. But first, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Palantir CEO Shang Tsien Gao said, he said, "Why the China doves are wrong.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  American business leaders cozying up to Beijing refuse to see that the Communist Party wants us to fail." China's Commerce Ministry last week announced far-reaching export controls on lithium batteries, products that use Chinese rare earth materials and related technologies. The export controls, which President Trump characterized as a rather sinister and hostile move, are the latest reminder that the US is funding its own destruction through economic dependence on a communist adversary. Many American business elites persist in denying this reality. Jensen Wong is just one of them. He said in a recent interview that while some Americans wear the label China Hawk as a badge of honor, it is really a badge of shame. "The future, Mr. Wong says, doesn't have to be all us or them.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  It could be us and them." A nice sentiment, but the CCP leaders don't believe it. They often speak soothingly of their country's peaceful rise, but the party's history and actions tell a different story. Influenced by the Chinese Civil War and much earlier warring states period, the party believes that stability comes from control. This belief explains its ruthless effort to consolidate power. The Communist Party believes China and the US are locked in a great struggle for mastery in this worldview. It is not enough for China to rise, the US must fall. It is a dark telling of the current state of affairs. It is a rough, it is a rough time in geopolitics.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  He closes by saying, "The first step to ending our dependence on China is admitting we have a problem. We can continue as useful idiots decrying China hawks who point out that we're funding our own demise, or we can wake up to the reality that we're already in an economic war in which every purchase and investment will help determine which system survives." Very, very rough. I mean, a lot of this is all teeing up a major trade deal. And I mean, we're starting to see the outlines of exactly how big the chip stacks are on either side of the poker table, if you want to use that analogy. It is a, the rare earth

• 44:42John Coogan?

  equation is certainly a big one. America has a bunch of levers to pull, but the chip control is one. It feels less, it feels like a smaller chip stack, honestly, because even when Nvidia says, "Hey, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna sell, you know, H20s in China." China says, "Oh, we don't want them. Like, we'll just, we'll just stick to Huawei. We will wait. We will, you know, be a little bit later on the slop curve, on the slopification of our economy. And, and we'll see you in 10 years when we're actually fighting it out for AGI. And at that point, we will have our, our own full semiconductor stack on the frontier." Sovereign stack.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that feels like what they're thinking of. I don't know what their interpretation of the Andre Karpathi interview was, but it seems like they're, if they were truly like, "The next scaling run is what does it?" They would be like, "Oh, let's take the Nvidia chips as well." Instead, they're saying, "Okay, well, let's, let's actually gear up for independence over a long period of time." Wall Street Engine has a story here. JP Morgan says Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong's "projection of AI capex growing from 600 billion today to 3 to 4 trillion by 2030 is financially feasible, though ambitious. The bank expects the tech sector to fund it through operating cash flow, private equity, and venture capital inflows and new debt issuance."

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Which we've been tracking. Even with a projected 1.2, 1.6 trillion annual funding gap, private markets could contribute about 500 billion per year by 2030, leaving the rest to be covered by leverage expansion. JP Morgan estimates 40% of new debt, 430 billion, would come from bank loans and 60% from bond issuance. So there's going to be a new 1 trillion of debt coming into the system now. Even with this increase, the tech industry's net debt to cash flow ratio would rise only from 0.7 to 1.2x, still below the global average. So that's like the, that's the bear case for like, you know, everyone's investing a ton, but we're not completely over our

• 46:54John Coogan?

  skis. It is a very aggressive build out. It might be, it might take, you know, a hit on depreciation, or it might take time to really monetize all this, but.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the key question is, you know, if you want AI capex to scale to 3 to 4 trillion, you're going to need revenue to support that. You're going to need a lot of revenue fast. We've seen, you know, tremendous growth with, on the agent side, you know, developer agents, whether that's, you know, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, it's not that, it's not that it's just financially feasible. It's just that it has to be backed up by something. And thank you for bearing with us, everyone. We are getting Ryan on in any second.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  AWS being down is presenting some technical difficulties, but the interview is still happening.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yes, we're working on it. Thank you for sticking with us. And thank you for checking out Julius.ai, the AI data analyst for everyone. Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. And that's Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, which is also a sponsor of T E P N. So thank you to them. Dean Ball, who is coming on the show today, he says, I have been contacted by a person clearly undergoing LLM psychosis, reaching out because 4O told them to contact me specifically. I have heard other writers say the same thing. I don't know how widespread it is, but it's clearly a real thing. Geordi, have you, have you received any, any inbound from random people who seem to have GPT psychosis?

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Hard to say.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  I feel like my entire unread DM request tab is probably LLM psychosis. But those folks don't break through. And honestly, the bot slop has been so bad for so long that

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  Hard to tell what's

• 48:50John Coogan?

  It's hard to tell what's actually

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  Emmett Shear, last week, was being accused of having LLM psychosis. He said, "If you're trying to understand AGI core concepts, you should familiarize yourself with thermal time, quantum Darwinism, quantum Bayesianism, the free energy principle, the Zeta function."

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Integral theory, ADSCFT, the Yalondale.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  I think he was joking here.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  But many people did not take it that way.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. No, like, lots of people have LLM psychosis, and lots of people have LLM psychosis psychosis too, where anyone who's using an M dash is seen as someone who has no brain left because they've been destroyed. And that's also not true. Yeah, Emmett went on a tear like this a couple of months ago. We had him on the show after that, and he seemed fine. He was completely normal on the chat and was clearly just having fun. And I think he's just vague posting. I mean, look at his fave icon. He clearly likes to post about weird and esoteric things and just have a good time.

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac is highlighting, there's a company called Aerie. It's the first big company that this woman, Rachel, has seen that formally states they won't use AI-generated imagery. It's one of their most engaged posts with 33,000 likes. And Mike Isaac says, "I do think none of what we do involves AI increasingly becomes a marketing thing over the next few years as we hit saturation. Smart posturing, in my opinion." So yeah, Aerie's saying, "In 2014, we stopped retouching. Today, we commit no AI-generated bodies or people. Real people only. We believe transparency isn't a trend. It's our promise to you. No retouching, no AI, 100% real."

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Interesting. Do you know this brand, Aerie? Are you familiar with this brand before this? I mean, good way to go viral and stuff. But, uh, yeah, I don't know. I, I, I wonder, I wonder where, where this goes because, uh, like in Hollywood, there's been a big pitch for, uh, this movie doesn't have any CGI. You know, we shot it all practically. And then what that really means is that, okay, they used miniatures, but they actually did a bunch of green screen stuff and they did some set extensions and yeah, there were some 3D models over here and there, but it was mostly in the background and it's just not a crazy three, you know, CGI explosion. It doesn't look like Transformers.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  But if you just look through the credits on one of those movies, like Christopher Nolan's famous for this, saying like, uh, you know, we shot everything practically or we did, or we really steered away from, from CGI. If you look through the credits, you'll see a bunch of 3D artists because they're clearly doing some 3D reconstruction of certain things, but it might just be, oh, there was like a boom pole in this shot or like, oh, there was a light stand in the back or like, oh, you could actually see like a taxi cab and we were shooting in, in, you know, the 1800s. So like, we gotta pull that out. So just go in there with the, with the, the pen tool and like, you know, replace it with AI. Uh, anyway, we have our first guest of the show. We have Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop. Can you hear me, Ryan? How are you doing?

• 52:09Ryan Cohen?

  I can hear you.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  Okay. Sorry. We have, we have serious, serious technical difficulties today. But I believe we have you here on the phone. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you today?

• 52:22Ryan Cohen?

  I'm doing well. How about yourself?

• 52:26John Coogan?

  We're doing great. Uh, we'd love to just get, uh, the story of GameStop from your perspective, kind of how you tell it now, uh, you're a couple of years into this project. Uh, would love to kind of get the, the high level, just to set the stage.

• 52:40Ryan Cohen?

  Where do you want to start?

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Um, maybe the original idea, like, when did you think you'd become involved with this company?

• 52:52Ryan Cohen?

  I originally invested as a passive investor. Um, I had a few conversations with the management team and the board of directors. And I realized that saw a lot of stuff that you read about, but you don't really believe until you actually engage with them. And as we went through conversations, I went from passive to active and filed the 13D, I believe in August of 2020, and then I joined the board in January of 2021. And, um, the rest is history.

• 53:36Ryan Cohen?

  The long story short is there's been a lot of changes at the company, um, a lot of cost cutting, uh, a lot of rationalization focusing on the basics of running a profitable business. And a lot of it was getting people out of the way. Um, a board of directors that had perverse incentives, a management team that had perverse incentives. Ultimately, what you see is that when people don't have their own money on the line, they don't give a shit. And they're focused on all kinds of other stuff that ultimately doesn't matter to shareholders.

• 54:21Ryan Cohen?

  And a lot of it was getting that out of the way so that we could actually focus on the business. And, um, you know, you see it in the results of the business today versus where it was, not just when I joined the board, but, you know, you look at the results even prior to that. It's a tough business.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Well, what do you think the mainstream media gets wrong about the GameStop story today or has gotten wrong throughout the whole saga?

• 54:58Ryan Cohen?

  That's not an easy question to answer, um, because we're talking in generalities and

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 55:03Ryan Cohen?

  I don't want to stereo, you know, I can't stereotype in general. Um, everyone thinks they know the mainstream media thinks they know. I'm running the business and they seem to have greater visibility into the business than I do. So everyone has an opinion as opposed to actually just focusing on the results. And in general, the news should just focus on the results instead of, uh, comments from the peanut gallery.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. Yeah, let's, let's, let's talk about Q2 specifically. What, what made that one of the biggest quarters in years?

• 55:41Ryan Cohen?

  It's a, it's a focus on running a, a business like an owner and cutting costs and making money and leaning into the areas of the business where there's margin potential, just trading cards and then getting rid of the bloat. Um, as an example, uh, I was just looking at this earlier today before we spoke. 2021, there were 14, over 1,400 people in corporate.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  Um. Wow.

• 56:15Ryan Cohen?

  Today, there's like 400 people.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Yes.

• 56:19Ryan Cohen?

  And we're more productive today than we were in 2021. SG and A has come down by like 50%. So people build teams, they hire people. Ultimately, what that means is they delegate their work to someone else. You end up taking on this crazy cost structure and it works when the business is growing, but doesn't work well once you, uh, the business stops growing. And that's where GameStop was and, uh, physical retail is tough.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  How much of that corporate restructuring going from, I think you said 1,400 people down to 400, how much of that is just reorienting around A players, aligned incentives, picking the best person to actually run a specific initiative versus using technology, using software, using AI? Is there any sort of narrative around that that you've found success with?

• 57:18Ryan Cohen?

  It's both. Even finding the right people though.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Ryan Cohen?

  You know, you don't know. I mean, I've been interviewing people for a long time and you meet people, I meet them, and I get really excited because they're really good at the interview process and they know how to say the right thing. So what does that mean? Means they've got really good public speaking skills, so they overindex there. And then you actually, when you look at their execution skills, they're not great. So I've been as equally excited as people that I've hired that have worked out as I have been, of people that I've hired that I wasn't excited about. And then they prove to me that they can actually execute. So, you know, the results speak for themselves. You really only know once

• 58:07Ryan Cohen?

  you put people, someone in the position and you see what they're capable of. They can tell a great story, they can put together a great PowerPoint presentation, but you don't, you don't actually know until you see what they're, what they can actually do. So there's no question that artificial intelligence and just broadly speaking, technology has increased productivity. You know, that's, that's been a big benefit and then doing more with less.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  You take a $0 salary, you have billions of dollars of cash on hand. How do you plan to allocate it over the next two to three years? I don't want to, I don't want to go too long term.

• 58:55Ryan Cohen?

  There's um.

• 58:59Ryan Cohen?

  We don't have a gun to our head, so it needs to be a situation where the downside is limited and the upside is really high. And um, that's a different calculus than the world of private equity or venture capital or any money managers where they're incentivized to deploy capital because they get management fees. In this case, a fancy way of saying is it's risk adjusted. And I don't want to lose money and I want a situation where there's a good chance of making money and a really low chance of losing money.

• 59:43Ryan Cohen?

  So it needs to be a pitch that is pretty much down the middle.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  Does that mean you're waiting for a crash?

• 59:59Ryan Cohen?

  You never know what's going to happen in the financial markets. They can go from uh, from green to red and they don't flash yellow. So when that happens, we'll be in a position.

• 1:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just feel like it's notable that you have all these, you know, digital asset treasury companies that are just market buying, you know, obscene amounts of of uh, you know, Bitcoin and other tokens and you guys are, you know, uh, taking a longer view.

• 1:00:29Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  What are you excited about in the core business over the next few years between retail, online? You mentioned trading cards. Can you unpack a little bit more about some of the the key initiatives, like the customer behaviors that you see as really big opportunities?

• 1:00:51Ryan Cohen?

  I tried a lot of different things. So I originally went in um with the Chewy playbook. Yeah. Was we focused first on consumables. So we had a lot of success on pet food, treats, litter, things that you could put on auto ship. And then it went from focus on consumables, getting customers on auto ship to we're gonna be the everything pet store and we're gonna expand our catalog and we're gonna add all these hard goods. So I had all these preconceived biases where I was going to copy the Chewy playbook at GameStop

• 1:01:34Ryan Cohen?

  and basically be like the everything store. Yep. For gaming. And we um I hired a bunch of fancy people from both Amazon and Chewy and we expanded the catalog and we added a bunch of product and um most of that product didn't sell. And we ended up marking it down and taking a big hit and it cost shareholders a lot of money. Cause once you have the product trapped in stores, you gotta mark it down in order to move and get it out of the stores. Um whereas within the consumable space, if we ever bought it, if we ever overbought inventory, we just waited and ultimately bought too much cat food or whatever, it ended up selling. Yep.

• 1:02:19Ryan Cohen?

  So physical retail is very, very, very different than in commerce. And uh I spent a lot of money to figure that out. And so what I learned is that we went into all these categories and a lot of uh we took some significant hits on.

• 1:02:41Ryan Cohen?

  Losing money, we lost money, it's that simple. By trying to expand into all of these categories that were not core to the GameStop customer. And then along comes collectibles and obviously after expanding into categories where there's very little success, your risk appetite at that point is pretty low. All of a sudden, we see that they're like the GameStop customer.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:06Ryan Cohen?

  Really, when it comes to trading cards, there's a strong appetite for for trading cards. And that category has done very well. And we've gone from like 10% of our sales to over, close to a third probably for the full year is going to come from collectibles and um.

• 1:03:27John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Congratulations.

• 1:03:29Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Um, I I want to, I I want to know more about the collectibles thing. Let's let's table that for a second. I'd love to know more about where you see the traditional video gaming market going. Uh, I'm I'm experiencing kind of whiplash because I see uh mobile games and and free to play growing and micro payments happening, EA is getting taken private. Uh, you have a lot of stuff going on on that end, but then you also have Palmer Lucky kind of bringing back the Game Boy and the N64 with Chromatic. And I know you're you're partnering on that. Um, what what are you excited about? What is the shape of the traditional sort of like video game market look like over the next couple of years?

• 1:04:12Ryan Cohen?

  The video game market is definitely going from physical to digital. So our ability to play in the digital world is limited. There's a lot of money that's being spent and um we've taken a capex light approach, like a a pretty risk light approach to the digital world. If there's not a clear path, us being able to to make money and a a payback period that's that's pretty attractive, then. Uh, this isn't a story of like moon shots.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:04:49Ryan Cohen?

  So there's no moon shots that are being done like we're

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Excellent.

• 1:04:54Ryan Cohen?

  We're focused on real returns.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, what about wearables, virtual reality? Uh, we heard a story about the Meta Quest or the, the Meta Ray-Ban displays. And a friend of ours went and had to test them at Best Buy and didn't have a great experience. And it feels like, uh, i- if we do enter sort of like a wearable era, there's a renewed demand for in-store experiences. Is that on your radar at all? Or is that more of like a, you know, futuristic thing that you'll deal with it when it comes down the pipe?

• 1:05:31Ryan Cohen?

  I mean, when I think about wearables, the Apple Watch is a good product. When I think about the Meta Quest, I mean, it's a joke.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:40Ryan Cohen?

  Uh, the, all of the virtual reality stuff doesn't feel like, like who's going to walk around with these retarded glasses on their head? Like it's just, it doesn't, it does not seem like that's the future. But if we could sell a product and we can make really high margins, then obviously we're going to sell the product, but we're not investing in, um, in, in virtual reality or in, in the metaverse unless there's a clear path to being able to deliver results for shareholders.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I meant more just as like, Apple does have the Apple Store network. Uh, other companies that are trying to get into wearables and might need in-store demos, don't have one of those, but, uh, yeah, I mean, your, your rationale makes a ton of sense.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  It's so interesting to think about the, you know, when, when I hear you talk, Ryan, it's your, your, everything you say aligns with thoughtful capital allocation.

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  And yet the, the broader like world seems to believe that this is, this is just about being, you know, kind of.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  This is, you know, it doesn't.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Moonshots.

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  There's CEOs out there that have effectively meme stocks and they just act and talk a lot differently.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Than you do.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  No, this is refreshing.

• 1:06:59Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about some of the conversations? There's been, I guess, rumors that the admin is interested in companies moving to biannual reporting instead of quarterly reporting. Do you think that's smart? What kind of moves from the admin this year have you been particularly interested in?

• 1:07:23Ryan Cohen?

  I like reducing costs. So if it costs us less money than to report biannually, then by all means. I think it's important for shareholders to have visibility into how the company is doing and then making a determination whether they want to stay invested or not. But we have an opportunity to reduce our costs. So it costs a lot of money to be a public company.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Ryan Cohen?

  You spend a lot of money on auto fees. So that hurt me at Chewy, that hurts me at GameStop. They charge us a lot of money. So if it ultimately means we spend less money on being a public company, then it makes us more efficient, then that's fantastic.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  I didn't mention it, but thank you for Chewy. I've been a subscriber for probably a decade. You know, it's been the backbone of my household and my dogs, thank you as well. I'm interested to hear your take on kind of evolution of e-commerce. There's a lot of chatter about agentic commerce and people buying through products through their chat apps. Have you looked into that? Do you have a current framework for thinking about the adoption rates of people buying stuff through an LLM?

• 1:08:50Ryan Cohen?

  Um, Amazon started selling pet products in the late nineties and they were, they were doing okay. Chewie comes along. We originally wanted to start off selling jewelry. We actually bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. We went, I went to a trade show and I bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. We set up the website and everything and then I was shopping in a neighborhood pet store. And I had a, um, at the time, like a five or six pound teacup poodle.

• 1:09:31Ryan Cohen?

  Uh, and I kept on going to this neighborhood pet store every few weeks. I run into the office. By the way, I don't wear jewelry. So I was not passionate about the category. I didn't know anything.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  That's important.

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I felt like, I felt like, uh, you were just kind of, and he was picking like, this seems like a good.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:49Jordi Hays?

  Business and it's light, you can ship.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a little too mercenary. Like you gotta get into the, you know, build something that you want so you can give yourself feedback.

• 1:09:58Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah, but you think like, your intuition is like, there's margins in jewelry. And so like, you can make money. There was, there was a blue Nile at the time that had really gross, high gross margins. And I was like, we can do, we can do well in online jewelry. Um, anyway, I went to this jewelry trade show. I bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. Um, and

• 1:10:26Ryan Cohen?

  then I was shopping kind of at the same time, every few weeks at this neighborhood pet store for my poodle. And I was way more interested in the pet category than I was in jewelry. I understood the customer. And so I ended up selling the jewelry. I ended up getting like eighty or ninety cents on the dollar. Uh, and I went into the pet category and I liked that, well, I understood it. Uh, I.

• 1:11:00Ryan Cohen?

  I like the predictability of the industry. I like the fact that like, once you're a pet owner, you're buying pet food pretty much for the rest of your life. And, um, and, and we shifted. And so Chewy comes along, it's 2011. And I took the playbook from Amazon, so the focus on fast shipping, having a great selection, being able to get onto the website, add an item to the cart and checkout. Our average checkout time was like less than two minutes.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:35Ryan Cohen?

  So, you know, you think about like GoDaddy, and I don't know if you've ever bought a domain name, but you go through the checkout process, they're trying to upsell you on like a gazillion stuff.

• 1:11:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Ryan Cohen?

  And then all of a sudden Chewy is like, average checkout time less than two minutes. We're not trying to upsell you. It's like, we're gonna get you your pet food as fast as possible, at the best price. So Chewy comes along in 2011, and completely, completely disrupts the industry.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Ryan Cohen?

  And we disrupted the independents, we disrupted Petco and PetSmart, and we were delivering your consumables at a better price, faster, with an easier experience backed up by great customer experience. And so, um, you don't necessarily have to be first to the game in order to be successful. Amazon was first to the game, but we focused on the category and we were successful. And so it's kind of what's interesting in technology in general is like, you have these technology companies that are trying to do everything, right? Amazon's trying to do streaming, they're trying to do e-commerce,

• 1:12:49Ryan Cohen?

  they're trying to do everything, and then all of a sudden you have Netflix that is really successful in streaming. You have Chewy that's really successful in pet food.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Ryan Cohen?

  So if you focus on a category... You can be very successful.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  How did you process the D to C e-commerce era? It was like really hot in Silicon Valley. Every MBA was raising venture capital, slap a $250,000 brand on a white labeled product and raise some money. And then it kind of fizzled out. But like, how were you processing that at the time? What's your postmortem? Like, how should people think about building brands going forward? Is there still opportunity?

• 1:13:32Ryan Cohen?

  For us, building brand was acquiring one customer at a time and making sure that they got their pet food or whatever the hell they ordered from us, best price, really quickly. That's how you build a brand. It's not spending a bunch of money on, you know, pets.com, a Super Bowl commercial. It is focusing on, the best marketing is word of mouth. So you allow a customer through word of mouth. You have a great customer experience. You deliver the product really quickly at a great price and you have a happy customer. And that was the way to build Chewy, was getting big market leadership

• 1:14:16Ryan Cohen?

  and making sure that customers were really happy.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  What are the three like key lessons from Chewy that you feel like you and the GameStop team are applying today?

• 1:14:32Ryan Cohen?

  Running efficiently. There's no question that like we ran very, a focus on,

• 1:14:42Ryan Cohen?

  on, you know, Chewy was, they're so different. Thing is, is you think like e-commerce and, and, and physical retail are the same. And that's where I, I made a lot of mistakes because I showed up like a wise guy at GameStop. I thought I had all, all the answers, but e-commerce and physical retail are very, very different. So in general, within physical retail, what I've learned is like, you want to, you have to run lean and you're better off having less inventory than more inventory. So.

• 1:15:23Ryan Cohen?

  I cost shareholders a lot of money by taking the Chewy playbook at GameStop. And then I learned physical retail, which was a muscle that I had zero memory. And it was on making sure that when you get the product, you sell it very, very quickly. Because if you don't, the product depreciates very quickly. Whereas with Chewy, if I overbought, I sold the product very quickly. It didn't matter. So they're not the same. They're, uh, they're not the same. It, it, the reason why in general, both concepts have worked out is because, you know, you, you, you keep, I have my own money on the line.

• 1:16:08Ryan Cohen?

  So I'm not going to stop until I figure it out and.

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  You're him.

• 1:16:13Ryan Cohen?

  But it costs a lot of money to figure it out.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Skin in the game, the man's in the arena.

• 1:16:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, people have said you're, you're, you're.

• 1:16:21Ryan Cohen?

  Amen.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  People have said you're, uh, too bold as a CEO. Uh, do you think the traditional concept of a, of a buttoned up, uh, CEO, CEO that maybe shies away from controversy, uh, should, uh, is obsolete? Or, or should be forgotten?

• 1:16:42Ryan Cohen?

  I don't even know what a CEO means. I want, at the end of the day, I want whoever's in charge. If it ends up successful, they end up doing really well. And if it ends up not being successful, they lose a lot of money. And call them, call me the janitor for all I care. The end of the day, their incentives should be aligned with common shareholders. So, um, that's the most important thing is that the incentives are, are generally aligned.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're the loudest shareholder.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, how do you decide? How do you decide what battles to fight? Cause you got a lot of stuff coming your way at any given point, a lot of opportunity. What's your framework?

• 1:17:32Ryan Cohen?

  My framework is what's gonna move the needle? Like if, if we can, if, if we can make eighty percent margins, uh, but the upside is limited, it's not gonna move the needle, then I don't care. If, if it's able to translate into billions of dollars of shareholder value and scalable, then we're talking. So, there's a lot of things that are like, small time, and yeah, we can make a lot of margin, but there's, there's not a lot of upside in terms of shareholders, then who cares? But if it translates into, into something meaningful and scalable, then, then I'm interested.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think Power Packs could be that?

• 1:18:21Ryan Cohen?

  Uh, what do you think?

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, the chat is going crazy. They wanna, they wanna know, they, they want the, the update from your side.

• 1:18:33Ryan Cohen?

  Power Packs is interesting. Power Packs, physical and digital, um, is very interesting. We, we, we can't get enough inventory, so...

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  That's always a good time.

• 1:18:50Ryan Cohen?

  I don't, I don't wanna say anything, cause, I mean, users can, uh, customers can figure out for themselves.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you see it as the same sort of like, it's more consumption focused, so it fits within the Chewy model? Or i- i- is, is that the right way to think about this, as opposed to, you know, you, you, you're, you're, there's less risk of getting stuck with a bunch of inventory?

• 1:19:12Ryan Cohen?

  Are we talking physical or digital?

• 1:19:14John Coogan?

  Uh, physical, I would imagine, would be like the place where there's inventory risk in some regard, but, uh, if, if you view it as more of a consumption product, uh, then, like the Chewy story, there's presumably less risk in, uh, holding a bunch of inventory.

• 1:19:32Ryan Cohen?

  I like the trading card space. So we have, uh, we, GameStop has a lot of assets. We have the community and the brand that allows us to, if you look at digital power packs, we've kept, uh, we've kept it pretty limited in terms of being able to get into the digital category and frankly, it's not a marketing thing. We just, we can't get enough inventory. And it's the same thing on the physical thing, but digital is more scalable. Um, so if we had a choice between physical and digital, because digital is more scalable,

• 1:20:14Ryan Cohen?

  we're going to go towards digital. Um, can't get

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Ryan Cohen?

  enough inventory, at least at a price where we can, I mean, you, you can buy inventory at a 110 or 120% market value, but we're not gonna, we're not gonna start doing stupid stuff like that.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  How do, how do you see the collectibles landscape evolving over the next five years? It feels like different players have picked a focus, whether that's live, uh, traditional auctions, uh, something, uh, you know, like, like you just discussed, um, as well, but like what, what is, what is the shape of the market going forward, uh, in your view?

• 1:20:59Ryan Cohen?

  They're all connected. Like if you look at the overall collectible space, it's looked at as a store of value and it's been that way for decades. If you look at trading cards, you, it's like nostalgic to, you know, I, I grew up, uh, I didn't, I collected trading cards a little bit, but there's definitely a comeback right now on trading cards. So it's looked at as a store of value. Whether that continues or not. Who knows? I mean, everyone is like, well, it's going to continue. Everyone thinks crypto is going to continue. Nobody knows.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:40Ryan Cohen?

  Uh, but, but we're having a lot of success when you look at our assets right now, like the, the way it stands right now is we're selling the product very quickly. We can't get, the more inventory we have, we could sell the product. So we're going to run efficiently and if we can sell the product, great. And if it happens where we can't sell the product, then we're going to adjust and, uh, you know, we're going to lower our costs and, you know, focus on, on, on the things that make sense.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Do you have a, do you have a take on Labubu? I feel like, uh, if I find out about it, I'm ultra late and I might've top ticked it when I finally uh, learned about that, but it seems like it's somewhat important to the collectible boom, the story there. Uh, do you have any idea what's going on?

• 1:22:32Ryan Cohen?

  We, I don't, do we sell Labubu right now? I don't think we sell Labubu.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm just wondering, like, uh, yeah, it's like kind of an odd strategy. It has some of the unboxing characteristics. Uh, very popular. It seemed like it just kind of emerged out of China, out of nowhere. Uh, I was wondering if you had tracked the market at all?

• 1:22:53Ryan Cohen?

  No, should we sell it?

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  I don't know. It might be too late. I have no idea.

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  They're very demonic in our view.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we, we think they kind of just don't have the right vibe and, uh, I feel like there, there's plenty of other collectibles that would be more on brand personally.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you?

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 1:23:09Ryan Cohen?

  Is it females or males?

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  I think it's all sorts of people buying them.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  I saw Tim Cook had one. So I don't know if that tells.

• 1:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay. How are you thinking about, uh, how do you think about M and A on the, in, in the collectible space? I'm sure people come to you all the time with sort of platforms that maybe have some scale, but not quite, uh, the scale that you have that, that would love to sell to you, but obviously companies are bought, not sold. So I'm curious, uh, if you've, if, if it's something that you would explore in the future.

• 1:23:40Ryan Cohen?

  They don't come to us as often as you think, cause they know, well.

• 1:23:47Ryan Cohen?

  They probably go to private equity or venture capital or these fancy hedge funds before they come to us because I want to make sure that I'm I care about cash flow and the price that I pay. So we don't we see some deals, but it's hard to compete against guys that are or girls, whatever, that are getting management fees.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Do you think do you think AI plays into the collectibles world at all? Just this idea that like if you have a piece of IP, you can instantiate it maybe much quicker across a whole host of images and videos and kind of build out an intellectual property world faster? Is that actually an accelerant to the collectible trade?

• 1:24:37Ryan Cohen?

  I, in general, I have been I'm the person that's very cynical when it comes to emerging technologies. So like autonomous driving is example. Everyone with like GM, Ford, all of the big OEMs, they're finished because there's going to be autonomous driving. Oh, it's it's when it comes to AI, it's a big problem. At some point, the computers are going after the humans. And I don't think it's that far away. I think that the sci fi

• 1:25:18Ryan Cohen?

  movies, when it comes to AI, I feel it. I feel like there's going to be a big problem when it comes to artificial intelligence. And at some point, it's going to be the computers against the humans, China versus the US, who's going to be the winner? Who the fuck knows? But we got big problems with AI. And it's interesting because you can't stop human innovation. And we've got this insatiable appetite to go into these technologies like artificial intelligence that are very disruptable. There's lots of money that's that is being

• 1:26:02Ryan Cohen?

  poured into it. But what the future looks like, we have to be very, very, very careful.

• 1:26:10Ryan Cohen?

  Artificial intelligence, it scares me. I mean, I I like the productivity benefits, but

• 1:26:20Ryan Cohen?

  AI, once the robots come after us, scares me.

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  What's your timeline there?

• 1:26:29Ryan Cohen?

  It's faster. It's faster than I would have thought. When I look at what's happening, I don't buy into emerging technologies, but when I look at the advancements in AI,

• 1:26:45Ryan Cohen?

  this is no joke, and we have to be very, very, very careful about what's going to happen to artificial intelligence.

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Where do you think we are in the market cycle? Do you think it's uh, do you think it's 1999, uh, February of 2000? Does that, is that even worth comping to? Or do you comp to something else?

• 1:27:10Ryan Cohen?

  In AI, it feels early. Doesn't feel like we're at the end. It feels like we're like the second or third inning, but who the hell knows? But at a high level,

• 1:27:27Ryan Cohen?

  I think that it's

• 1:27:34Ryan Cohen?

  I think we have to be very careful. When you think about the future of humanity and whether AI is going to benefit the future of humanity, I don't know. I would, uh, if I was running a dictatorship and someone made me king and you told me, should we move forward with this technology?

• 1:28:01Ryan Cohen?

  It's not clear to me whether moving forward with AI is going to benefit everyone. It's definitely going to benefit the few that are invested in the industry, but there's going to be a lot of people that are not going to benefit from artificial intelligence. So.

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  But if ChatGPT ChatGPT is depending on paid users right now, they can't, you know, if they killed off humanity, that'd be kind of bad for business. Isn't there a way to solve that alignment issue?

• 1:28:35Ryan Cohen?

  You know, we've, if you looked at the tractor trailer, the US in the 1800s, and the tractor trailer, I think it was like 80% of the population was working on the farm. And then all of a sudden tractor trailer comes along and a few centuries later, it's like 2 to 3% of the population is working in farming. And you would say, how the hell can the US economy adapt to something that's so disruptive? And we did. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, I feel like it's different. Uh, maybe I'm biased from some of these sci-fi

• 1:29:15Ryan Cohen?

  movies, but there is going to be a lot of wealth inequality that's created. I don't, I don't like it. I mean, there's, there's, there's opportunities to be had. There's no question about it. But is it better for humanity in aggregate, AI? What do you think?

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, like, yeah, I think for me, I think it's very straightforward to imagine the dark sci-fi timeline, but it feels farther away. I mean, at least in our corner of the internet, people have been reacting to, uh, Karpathie's interview with Darkesh that was, uh, I think it went live Thursday night. And it feels like, uh, the debate right now is, is, is AI frontier lab progress slowing down? Is it just autocomplete? Uh, or, uh, and if it's autocomplete and we don't have, uh, and if, basically if the rate of progress is slowing down, are, is there massive overinvestment right now? And what I'm hearing from you

• 1:30:24Jordi Hays?

  is simultaneously, uh, generally kind of the, the doomer point of view, which I think is, uh, fair, but at the same time, it doesn't sounds, it doesn't sound like if you were running a, a hyperscaler, you'd be ramping up CapEx right now.

• 1:30:43Ryan Cohen?

  Are we smart enough as a society to understand what the? Benefits are and what are the downsides? And everyone has perverse incentives. So someone who's in the AI industry is going to tell us how AI is the best thing since sliced bread. But in general, as a society, if you think across like human evolution over centuries, do I want to take this emerging technology and is this going to benefit the human population in aggregate over the long term? It's TPD.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Do you?

• 1:31:25Ryan Cohen?

  What happens when AI becomes smarter than us?

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Do you think the solution's government intervention, just good stewardship by the leaders of the foundation model labs? Like, who actually, who actually has the responsibility of stewarding the new technology most effectively?

• 1:31:49Ryan Cohen?

  It's governments and it's ones who are, who have a long tenure. You look at America, you know, the presidential cycle is four years. So I don't know if that's necessarily a long-term incentives.

• 1:32:10Ryan Cohen?

  But who cares about where humanity is going to be not in four years from now? Not when they check out, but in a hundred years from now. Who's got a long-term focus on this emerging technology? And who cares about humanity over centuries?

• 1:32:32Ryan Cohen?

  But we have to be very, very careful about this technology.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  What, what was your view on social media a decade ago? It was quite popular for a period to say that social media was destroying humanity. Uh, and maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Uh, we seem to have found a way through. But is your view that, that AI is as bad as people once maybe thought social media would be?

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Like what specifically, when you think about, you know, one of the things we laugh about internally is just how easy it is to clock when somebody uses AI to generate like a cover letter, cover letter or job application, right? It's like a really good way to just get your cover letter application ignored is just to generate it with chat GPT. It's just beyond obvious and I'm sure your, your team has seen a lot of this too. But I'm curious, like, what do you think the, before we get to the, you know, sci-fi doomer scenario where the computers rise up and destroy us all? What, what's kind of like the immediate impact that, that you're worried about?

• 1:33:50Ryan Cohen?

  Social media

• 1:33:54Ryan Cohen?

  is one of the worst things to happen to humanity. If you look at Instagram, people are so easily manipulated. They filter videos, they filter pictures. You know, you look at these young people, their expectations, their lack of work ethic. China has censored all of this stuff for good reason because it's so easy to manipulate the layman. And so in general, when I look at social media, I say, well, has it benefited humanity? Or has it been toxic?

• 1:34:35Ryan Cohen?

  So there, there's no question that social media is, is toxic.

• 1:34:44Ryan Cohen?

  AI clearly will increase productivity, but at what cost? At what cost? I think we have to be very, very careful.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  When, when public company CEOs talk about how much efficiency they're getting out of AI, do you think that they're actually getting efficiency out of AI? Or do you think they're just pushing their teams harder to be more efficient? And they want to blame, blame the impact on, on AI?

• 1:35:15Ryan Cohen?

  It's both. It's both. But AI without question increases productivity.

• 1:35:24Ryan Cohen?

  But, you know, again, it's short term versus long term. So if you're running Johnson and Johnson or Proctor and Gamble, and you can use artificial intelligence, and you could reduce your cost structure, because you've got all these humans that are doing these mundane tasks, and all of a sudden, you realize the computers are going to do it better. Well, duh, you're going to reduce your cost structure. But all of a sudden, when you have all of these people that are unemployed, and the demand for your product goes away, what's better? You want to keep people employed, and have some kind of self-worth, and working hard and making money?

• 1:36:09Ryan Cohen?

  Or do you want to replace them and give them universal basic income? And then what does that mean? Does your consumption and demand for your product, in aggregate, go up? Or go down as a result of artificial intelligence? I don't know. But one thing I know for certain is that the CEOs, if they can reduce their cost structure in the short term, they're going to replace, they're going to take computers over humans. But is that better for humanity over the long term? You tell me. Everyone on UBI, over the long term? How does that make them feel? People need a purpose.

• 1:36:50Jordi Hays?

  You don't think we'll create new jobs? I mean, we created email jobs. A lot of them could go away, and the world wouldn't be too much different.

• 1:37:02Ryan Cohen?

  Artificial intelligence feels different.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just wonder if we compete on other things.

• 1:37:08Ryan Cohen?

  It feels different.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  Like, we could still have hierarchies and competitions on things that only humans can do. I mean, we already do this with sports and all sorts of things. There's probably still some sort of reproductive battle to try and get to the top of the stack. Even if you don't need to go and work to make money, there are still other things that you do with your time to raise your status in society. But I don't know. It is a bizarre future to think about. I just wonder if it's five years, 10 years, 50 years away.

• 1:37:44Ryan Cohen?

  We're in an era of instant gratification. That's the American system is that now, now, now, now, now. Innovation, making money today, but when you think about 10, 20, 30 years from now, and artificial intelligence, what does the world look like?

• 1:38:11Ryan Cohen?

  It's not about job displacement, it's not about control. But is artificial intelligence going to control us? Or will we control artificial intelligence?

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  And you would argue that social media already controls how we feel day to day? We open our phone and decide our mood based on what's happening in faraway places that we have nothing to do with?

• 1:38:43Ryan Cohen?

  Social media is a big problem.

• 1:38:46Jordi Hays?

  What's the?

• 1:38:48Ryan Cohen?

  It's so, if you look at the divisiveness in this country, social media, whether you're a conservative, you go on Instagram and you're conservative, and then all of a sudden you get, you know, these algorithms serve you all kinds of things that are going to make you mad. And if you're a liberal, you all of a sudden go on social media and you see all kinds of media that's going to make you mad. Why is it that ultimately humanity, like, it comes down to human, why do we have to lose something in order to appreciate?

• 1:39:30Ryan Cohen?

  Well, it feels like the only neutralizer is death and war. Doesn't have to be that way, but it feels like the only way we can ultimately appreciate something is if we actually lose it.

• 1:39:47Ryan Cohen?

  It's very, very, very sad, but that's what it comes down to. There is so much indivisiveness in America. If we can just all come together and figure out things that we both agree on, but instead we figure out the reasons why we're going to be divided and the politicians divide us and...

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think a lot of people have agreed. A lot of people on social media have agreed that they like you a lot. So there's one white pill in there.

• 1:40:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's some...

• 1:40:23Ryan Cohen?

  Until they don't, until they don't.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully it doesn't.

• 1:40:26Ryan Cohen?

  Do they like me over the long term? I don't know, we'll find out.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Ryan Cohen?

  True leadership is not about dividing people. It's figuring out how do we bring people together over the long term to benefit humanity.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you apply that sort of thinking to video games? Because there was a lot of fear mongering about violent video games causing kids to become violent. The government did step in and regulate video games with the ESRB. Every game is given a rating and young kids, you know, they can figure out a way to get access to some violent video games, but it's, you know, parents are more in control now. And I feel like we more or less got the good outcome and people can enjoy video games responsibly. And of course, there's some negative scenarios, but in general, I feel like video games have been just like a cool, cool medium for artists to tell stories. There's wide variety of

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  experiences. It feels like we as humanity got through that test. Whereas maybe we're still in the middle of the fight for positive social media and maybe just at the beginning of the fight for positive AI outcomes. What lesson should we take from like how humanity dealt with video games?

• 1:41:52Ryan Cohen?

  Think the Chinese have restricted their children from playing video games. I let my kids play video games, doesn't benefit, unless they're playing like Mario Kart.

• 1:42:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Ryan Cohen?

  But you look at these like Call of Duty, they're killing each other. I want positive influences. I want things that are healthy. I want things where people are gonna learn.

• 1:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:24Ryan Cohen?

  Blowing someone's head off, exposing it to young people.

• 1:42:30Ryan Cohen?

  Governments, you know, you look at America, it's the land of the free. It's great, it works well for immigrants, cuz they come from places where it's shit. And they come to America, they have all this freedom and their gratitude. They're grateful, but then you look at people where they don't necessarily have that level of gratitude. And they come to America, you give them all this freedom and they destroy themselves. So, do I want my kids going and playing Call of Duty? Blowing each other's heads off? And then you look at the Chinese and they're restricting the ability to play video games?

• 1:43:12Ryan Cohen?

  And you say, well, they're censoring versus we're free? Well, what's better for humanity? Having boundaries and having rules? Or just letting people do whatever the hell they want, destroy their lives?

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever thought about getting, have you ever thought about getting into politics?

• 1:43:41Ryan Cohen?

  I was born in Canada.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  There are some positions you could still run for.

• 1:43:49Ryan Cohen?

  Which ones? Senator?

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you'd be, I don't know if you can be Senator, but you could be maybe Mayor, right? Isn't the Mayor of New York not born in America?

• 1:43:59Ryan Cohen?

  What is it? There was this saying I, uh, I heard.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  You could be City Councilman, maybe.

• 1:44:08Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah, because they'd kill me.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  Well, you could go to Canada. You could be Prime Minister of Canada.

• 1:44:13Ryan Cohen?

  Ugh, too honest. I'm too honest. I'd have to be full of shit. I'd have to be sure. They couldn't handle me. They couldn't handle me. Politicians, they're like diapers. They start to stink. They get, they start to stink very quickly. I couldn't play the bullshit. So, you, you want to tell people what they want to hear.

• 1:44:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:34Ryan Cohen?

  And I'm not playing that game of what they want to hear, but when it comes to artificial intelligence and social media in general, is it beneficial to society and humanity as a whole?

• 1:44:50Ryan Cohen?

  I don't like them. I don't like them.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  That's extremely honest.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Schumer confirmed. That's fair.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much. This has been a really great interview. Uh, thanks so much for calling.

• 1:45:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anything else, anything else that we missed?

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  You know, we'd love to, anything else that you're working on that you want, that we didn't touch on, we'd love to talk about.

• 1:45:10Ryan Cohen?

  You guys got anything else?

• 1:45:12John Coogan?

  I think we're good.

• 1:45:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question. What, what's your, what's your relationship like with Roaring Kitty? You guys talk much?

• 1:45:22Ryan Cohen?

  Um.

• 1:45:25Ryan Cohen?

  Ask him.

• 1:45:27John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, we'd love to have him on the show. Maybe we'll.

• 1:45:29Ryan Cohen?

  Get him on the show.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  That'd be a lot of fun. He's, uh, you know, we're, we're, we're pretty new to the live streaming thing. Uh, I always enjoy talking to people who, uh, operate in the same medium. And so.

• 1:45:40Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah. Yeah. We don't want to be traitors. We want, I'll have a conversation with him if he's focused on decades and centuries, not on making quick buck.

• 1:45:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

• 1:45:53Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Well, yeah. Well, we're rooting for you for the next decade, for the next century, for the next millennia. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

• 1:46:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great chatting, Ryan. Cheers.

• 1:46:04Ryan Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye.

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Good, fun.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  What a wild day on TBPN. Thank you if you're tuning in for the first time. The AWS has an outage, so there are pieces of the show that aren't working. We're cobbling stuff together, but we appreciate you checking out our show. Every day we go live at 11 a.m. Pacific. We talk about technology and business. We interview CEOs, just like Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop. We interview folks in the private markets, the public markets. We've interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Armstrong. We have Brian Chesky on the show tomorrow from Airbnb. We have Palmer Lucky on the show tomorrow from Anduril. And we go all over the place. We talk to early-stage companies, public companies, everyone in between.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  But we always love focusing on technology and business. Don't do a lot of politics here. There are plenty of other shows for that.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  We don't do a lot of AI doomerism here, though, but there's a place for it.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  There's a place for that, too.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  It's important.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  So we'd love for you to subscribe to the channel. You can follow us on Spotify. This show is released as a podcast as well. We have a 20-minute version. We also have a newsletter, tbpn.com. You can go and subscribe and get a daily update from us on what's happening in the world of technology and business news. We have another guest coming in to the studio, a live guest. But first, I need to tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. And are we ready for our next guest? I think we have Zach Kukoff.

• 1:47:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Zach Kukoff. Coming in while the government is turned off.

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  About TurboPuffer. Search every byte. Serverless vector search and full-text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Welcome to the show, Zach. Thanks so much. Live and in person. Hello. We have you here live. The government shut down, but you were still able to attend. Yeah, maybe, like, set the table for us. What does the government shutdown mean? This feels like this happens all the time. I remember a decade ago being in college at some pool party and somebody saying, oh, the government's shutting down. And, uh, and nothing happened then. Is something gonna happen now? Is this even a story that people care about? Like, what's going on? Nobody cares. This is the big problem.

• 1:48:33Zak Kukoff?

  Nobody cares. It's taking forever for them to do anything. And this is, there's a couple of reasons why.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:39Zak Kukoff?

  One, government shuts down anytime they can't pass a budget.

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Zak Kukoff?

  We don't pass budgets all the time.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's why we do a lot of those continuing resolutions.

• 1:48:47Zak Kukoff?

  That's exactly right. We gave up on budgets. We shifted to continuing resolutions, which basically say, copy, paste, whatever the last budget was, plus, minus, X percent on this thing, plus, minus X percent.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  So you can't sneak stuff into the CRs?

• 1:48:59Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, you can definitely sneak stuff in, and people do that all the time.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  And that's why lobbyists make money, and that's, uh...

• 1:49:04Zak Kukoff?

  I really, I wouldn't know. That's why other, that's why other lobbyists do bad, shady things. We only do good, positive things.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, but then also, that's why we've seen a lot of founders, uh, visiting DC.

• 1:49:14Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  They, because if they're gonna get money for their program, they need it to be provisioned. At some point, it's gonna be provisioned in a new budget, hopefully, but if not, a CR.

• 1:49:23Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. There's basically, think about it this way. Twenty years ago, Congress used to pass all of these small, little bills throughout the year. Thirty, fifty bills throughout the year.

• 1:49:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:31Zak Kukoff?

  Each one had money attached to them, right?

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:32Zak Kukoff?

  They were gonna give money to this, money to that, whatever the place might be.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  So we did everything piecemeal.

• 1:49:35Zak Kukoff?

  Piecemeal. Exactly right. And there was an overall budget that governed things. The Congress, all the time, would pass laws, bills, whatever.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42Zak Kukoff?

  Now, we pass two, maybe three, bills every year.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Zak Kukoff?

  These are called omnibus bills, right? CRs are one of them.

• 1:49:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:48Zak Kukoff?

  NDAA, which authorizes the military, is another one. The Defense Authorization Act, right? The big problem we have right now is there is a big tension between the Democrats, who do not want to pass a clean CR, for a variety of reasons. It's not pejorative, by the way, it's just descriptive.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:02Zak Kukoff?

  And Republicans, who feel it's in their political best interest to pass a clean CR today. If you're Chuck Schumer, and you're sitting there, remember, in March, Chuck Schumer worked with the Senate GOP to get a budget passed. If you're Chuck, and you're sitting there in March, you have a problem now with your left flank.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:18Zak Kukoff?

  Who are looking at you and saying, why are you giving in? Why are you rolling over for the Trump admin?

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:22Zak Kukoff?

  Meanwhile, if you're in the GOP, you don't wanna have a Christmas tree bill, where you have this ornament attached for this amount of money, and this ornament attached for that amount of money.

• 1:50:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:50:30Zak Kukoff?

  And everybody gets their favorite thing. All you want is to say, keep it going, exactly how it is. Let's put off any of the bigger discussions for a later time.

• 1:50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like it just is like a fan of American democracy. I like the

• 1:50:42Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, big fan.

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's give it up for American democracy.

• 1:50:45Zak Kukoff?

  Big ups for democracy.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  But, but I feel like, I feel like I like the, the piecemeal.

• 1:50:49Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  Peacewise bills. Like, I like the idea of like, we're gonna go to the moon, here's the moon bill.

• 1:50:54Zak Kukoff?

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  And it's like, that's, and we all agreed to that. We all got fired up.

• 1:50:57Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  And everyone kinda got excited and we've

• 1:50:59Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  And we voted for that and it kinda happened. Like the classic of like, we wanna build a bridge, so we pass a bill to build that bridge.

• 1:51:05Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  That's kind of what I was taught in like, grade school.

• 1:51:07Zak Kukoff?

  That's what you imagine when you go to civics class in like, eighth grade. You're thinking to yourself, oh, I want, do you ever watch Schoolhouse Rock?

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:51:14Zak Kukoff?

  Okay, how a bill, yeah, I'm just a bill.

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  They're on Capitol Hill.

• 1:51:17Zak Kukoff?

  You're thinking to yourself, how is it a bill?

• 1:51:19Jordi Hays?

  I want it to be when there, when there's like a systemic failure in the financial ecosystem, I think it should be a one, everybody gets a vote.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  Oh, you want direct democracy. Direct democracy. Like, California, yeah, it's worked out great.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  Should we bail out the banks?

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  No, no, I mean, that is a weird thing because I, I feel like, on one level,

• 1:51:35Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  as a fan of American democracy, I, I do want the direct democracy, I do want the piecemeal thing.

• 1:51:40Zak Kukoff?

  Sure.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  But then at the same time, I live in California,

• 1:51:42Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  and I've had the direct democracy thing.

• 1:51:44Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, it's terrible.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  And I still don't have a train that goes from LA to SF fast.

• 1:51:46Zak Kukoff?

  And there's weird like, feudal landowners now who pass down their homes in California with no property tax increase.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's like all these odd, so it feels like maybe both sides have their own warts and edges.

• 1:51:57Zak Kukoff?

  You want, like, I don't know, far be it for me to say what the optimal setup is. The reason I like the older setup is every one of those small bills gets airtime, gets debate, gets discussion. And then ultimately, at some point, you step back and you say, look, I don't wanna spend, and most people don't wanna spend all morning waking up thinking about politics. I mean, your audience doesn't, right? I come on here enough as it is.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:17Zak Kukoff?

  They don't wanna wake up and think about that a bunch.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:19Zak Kukoff?

  So they elect somebody to think about it for them, but they still discuss at least what all the things are that happen.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Zak Kukoff?

  The omnibus bills, instead, they're so slammed every time, you're just jamming a hundred things through.

• 1:52:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:29Zak Kukoff?

  So if you're a Dem, look, Schumer's stated concern

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:33Zak Kukoff?

  is that there are a bunch of Obamacare subsidies, ACA subsidies, that were built in during COVID

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Zak Kukoff?

  that were all set to expire this year.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:39Zak Kukoff?

  They were meant to be temporary, but as we know, oftentimes you pass something in government, it stays around forever, and it goes on for the rest of the time.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:45Zak Kukoff?

  Dems want to codify this in law. They want it to keep going. Republicans don't want to take up any major topic. Clean CR, nothing attached to it. That's the crux of this. And Schumer is winning points with his left flank, right? The AOCs of the world, who's not a senator, but is considered primaring Schumer. He's winning points with his left flank because he doesn't now have to give in or be perceived as giving in to a hostile admin. And the admin thinks they're winning because they look at this and they go, great, now I'm gonna riff people, I'm gonna lay off, I'm gonna shrink the government. All the things I want to do already, this, I mean, a judge blocked it, but in theory allows me to do.

• 1:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Since this is a technology and business show, what are the current, what kind of groups are currently impacted? I talked to a defense tech founder on Friday, and he was saying, like, it's obviously massively disruptive because you're, you know, you're trying to get contracts done and nothing can kind of happen for, you basically like add 60 days almost to whatever timeline you thought. And so that prevents new hiring because they don't have, they can't hire against specific contracts, et cetera. But what are the kind of immediate impacts that you're seeing or hearing about in the private markets?

• 1:53:58Zak Kukoff?

  I mean, the biggest thing is this. We work with a lot of founders, and I have a lot of founders who are clients who are here on O1 visas. And we think the O1 visa is phenomenal. If you want to get an O1 visa today, your processing time is so much longer than it ever was before. Even though, by the way, consulars aren't shut down, consular offices aren't shut down because they're fee-based, they have their own revenue stream.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, you pay the O1 fee, that pays for the funding. So they don't need funding for the government or the taxpayer.

• 1:54:24Zak Kukoff?

  Anything that either has multi-year funding, or has its own independent set of revenue, is able to stay open. It's only the things that require year-over-year funding from the government that close. And by the way, there's some nuance on that because the admin has kept stuff open. For example, Normally, the army doesn't get paid during government shutdown. The admin has said, "Look, we're going to take the $6 billion left over from R and D spend in defense." So this is impacting the defense folks, right? Any R and D spend-

• 1:54:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that would have potentially gone to-

• 1:54:52Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 1:54:52Jordi Hays?

  Startups.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  SBIRs and stuff.

• 1:54:54Zak Kukoff?

  It's not SBIRs so much, but it's more sciency, but yeah, exactly.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  But R and D spending that could go to startups.

• 1:54:58Zak Kukoff?

  Yes, that could go to startups that do R and D stuff. And instead, we're going to use that money that was already allocated, but hasn't yet been dispersed- to pay the military. So it's a little bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Searching through the couch cushions.

• 1:55:09Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And the problem you run into is, look, they can do that now, but eventually you run out of that money, too.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14Zak Kukoff?

  And so at some point, somebody's going to have to not get paid. So if you're an O1 visa holder, you're in a tough spot because you now have a much longer lag time, much longer processing time to get into this country, even if you were already here and just happened to be gone and coming back for your renewal. That's tough.

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, that makes sense. So, uh, like, how long do we expect this to last? Like, where should we be, uh, watching for, like, updates? Is everyone kind of pricing in, like, oh, six weeks is standard? But then it's the question of, like, is it six or 12? Or is it really wide?

• 1:55:48Zak Kukoff?

  Who knows? The real honest answer is the longest partial shutdown in history. It was under Trump one, and it was 35 days. We're at 20 days today.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, so.

• 1:55:57Zak Kukoff?

  So that's the, like, tail end risk. The problem is, the difference between then and now is a couple of things. One, it's not a big press issue, like we talked about. Like, I can imagine I'm watching people tune out of this interview when they're hearing about the government shutdown. People don't care.

• 1:56:09John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:56:10Zak Kukoff?

  And by the way, both sides think they're winning. The admin says, "Look, there's great stuff happening. We just have peace in the Middle East, plus or minus a little bit." Right? Dems are saying, "We had huge protests, we galvanized the base."

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:20Zak Kukoff?

  No one's motivated to get this close. Couple of leading indicators you want to look for. One, military payday, like I said. If that happens and they don't have another way of getting dollars attached to it, that's going to be a problem. Two, Majority Leader John Thune, who is the Senator from North Dakota in the Senate, Republican guy, all of the farm state senators are looking at the expiration of loan programs that help keep farmers solvent every year. If you're a farm state senator, this matters to you a great, great deal. So the admin is looking today to figure out where can I get my dollars to go and continue to fund these things. But in the absence of funding this, it's really, really hard for a shutdown to continue without political pressure. Third thing you want to look at, and this is the big one, is political consequences. Because the truth is, as much as Congress today has said, fine, I'm happy to abdicate my role

• 1:57:04Zak Kukoff?

  and let the White House run the shutdown response. In theory, Congress controls the power of the purse. They are able to, at any time, right, come together and do something. If the Dems lose the governor race in Virginia, which is disproportionately affected by the shutdown, because there's so many federal employees who live in Northern Virginia, or if a year from now, which I don't expect will still be shut down, but if in some number of months, you start to see negative impact as we lead up to the midterms, senators are going to wake up and say, gosh, my political future right now doesn't have to be tied to the outcome of the shutdown. I can be an independent actor. I don't need to rely on the White House or anyone else. The Dems can say this too. I don't need to rely on Chuck Schumer to guide where my vote goes. That's the real when my rubber meets the road.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  Is the government shutdown going to increase the risk of thieves stealing the Constitution, robbing the Smithsonian?

• 1:57:55Zak Kukoff?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  We saw that thieves snatched jewels in a brazen, live robbery.

• 1:58:01Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, I saw this, and they like left it in the gutter, I heard.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Well, they dropped a crown. They did get away with a lot of jewels.

• 1:58:08Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  And I hope that the folks at the Smithsonian who are protecting our moon rocks are not getting furloughed because we got to protect our crown jewels.

• 1:58:17Zak Kukoff?

  Be the worst national treasure secret, by the way.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  It would be.

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  What's the current dialogue around AI regulation and policy in Washington? And then what are you seeing across the state level?

• 1:58:29John Coogan?

  How long does it take to go from Carpathia on Dwar Cash to Capitol Hill? Are they watching? Or are they listening to shows that are talking about that, or are they talking the next narrative? How many links in the chain?

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, wait, it's just autocomplete? Always has been.

• 1:58:44Zak Kukoff?

  There are a swath of think tanks that do a really good job of translating

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:48Zak Kukoff?

  what happens in DC, sorry, happens in SF.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Or in SF.

• 1:58:52Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly, to DC.

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  Big computer.

• 1:58:54Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. Everything is computer. You can build a really good think tank. The guest you're supposed to be on before me, Dean Ball, who's an amazing guy, was the AI advisor at OSTP at the White House Office of Science and Tech Policy. He's done a really good job being that communicator. Exactly. And his think tank, FAI, which I'm involved with too, does a really, really good job of bridging the gap there. But, and by the way, things like the Progress Conference just happened in SF, there's a lot of things now institutionally that are built to translate this on like a relatively quick timescale. The truth is, look, if you're watching right now and you care about AI policy, the White House has an RFI or question for information out today where they're asking people, founders in particular, to write in and say, gosh, what are the things that are impacting, what are the regulatory burdens that are impacting

• 1:59:37Zak Kukoff?

  my ability to do AI business in America? So they want, they want the answer, but it's hard to get ground truth because when you're in DC, it's a little bit of a bubble. You hear a little bit of an echo chamber.

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  Sure. Is, is the, is the core DC AI narrative just state by state regulation versus not? Or are there actually higher level discussions around, okay, if a trillion dollars of capex is going to happen, like, there might be, there might need to be some fundamental changes in the way we regulate data centers, power, even just, even, even if you're just the ultimate AI bull, you might need to step in and say, we're going to help speed this up because at a certain point, if you're building 10 nuclear reactors, you just can't do that without the help of the federal government, right?

• 2:00:15Zak Kukoff?

  All right. So, so part of the problem is we have a federalist system. And so power by necessity is distributed across state, federal, local, right? So if you're talking about-

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  You mean government power, not-

• 2:00:24Zak Kukoff?

  Sorry, government power. Although, yeah, literal power is also distributed across, yeah, electricity is also distributed across these things.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. As you can see with Elon, he built his Colossus 2 data center right at the intersection of three different-

• 2:00:34Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  -states because he needs to be able to go over here for a little bit. Yeah.

• 2:00:37Zak Kukoff?

  Part of the problem is this, if you want to build a new reactor, or you want to build an energy transmission line, you need so many different people to buy in. In the last 30 years of American governance, basically at every level, has been built around keeping things the same. Status quo for people who already have done fairly well. The other thing I would think about, by the way-

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because I- Don't read a lot about politics, but I have like such tangible experience in politics through trying to get things done with my HOA.

• 2:01:06Zak Kukoff?

  That's exactly right.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  It's literally like the boomers control the HOA board and I I tried to suggest changes when I bought my house and I basically got death threats.

• 2:01:16Zak Kukoff?

  That sounds about right.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  That's my framework for.

• 2:01:19Zak Kukoff?

  California governance is the largest HOA in the country. Think of it that way. It is just completely biased against. All right. Here's the other problem. You have a thousand people in Congress who all have their own political aspirations. It looks like a Marsha Blackburn. Marsha Blackburn wants to be governor of Tennessee. What's one of the biggest industries in Tennessee? Nashville. Nashville music, right?

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:37Zak Kukoff?

  So Nashville wants.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  The the home of John Theo's energy drink.

• 2:01:41Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  That's really swinging the thing.

• 2:01:43Zak Kukoff?

  That's huge. Huge. Marsha Blackburn wakes up every morning.

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  What was the other thing we saw about?

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Tennessee?

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Nat, like something about, isn't Nashville, Nashville specifically is pushing heavy on AI regulation.

• 2:01:52Zak Kukoff?

  Yes, that's right. Exactly. They have the Elvis Act. No, no, this is it. That's right. All right. You guys know Suno, the AI audio app? They hate Suno. It's like, oh, they hate it. It's like public enemy number one when you're in Nashville, right? So Marsha Blackburn.

• 2:02:06Jordi Hays?

  It gotta be, isn't it an open carry out there?

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Do not, if you're.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  Do not go to Nashville. If you're, if you're at light speed and you funded Suno, do not go to Tennessee.

• 2:02:16Zak Kukoff?

  Do not walk around Tennessee. I I wouldn't personally. It's all aside. Marsha Blackburn wants a political future in Tennessee. She wants to get out of the Senate, which is a miserable place to be, and get into the executive chair in Tennessee.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  Why is it so miserable?

• 2:02:29Zak Kukoff?

  Because nothing gets done. You know, the House works? No, this is like real. I mean, look, it's frustrating if you actually are a motivated person.

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  So you say that the House works, but the Senate doesn't?

• 2:02:36Zak Kukoff?

  No, the opposite. The House works even less. The House worked in the last, since like July 4th, I think the House has worked something like 20 days in total. Okay, that's insane. Like, think about if you guys.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Did they not get the memo about the great lock-in?

• 2:02:46Zak Kukoff?

  No, they are, they are doomed. The permanent underclass. It's terrible. It's awful. This is the problem. All right. So Marsha Blackburn wants a political future in Tennessee.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:54Zak Kukoff?

  She says, okay, if I pass the Elvis Act today, or if I allow the Elvis Act to pass.

• 2:02:58Jordi Hays?

  They should have called it the Trafax.

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Don't put slop in my trough.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Keeping trough.

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Keep organic. I want organic food for all my piggies.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  Trough great again.

• 2:03:12Zak Kukoff?

  Organic, only organic AI for me. Thank you very much.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so if you want to pass.

• 2:03:16Zak Kukoff?

  If she lets the Elvis Act pass with no federal preemption, she wins herself a lot of friends.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  Sure, in Tennessee, and she can be governor.

• 2:03:23Zak Kukoff?

  Exactly.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you want to, I imagine having all the country music fans and the, and big country on your side for, for governorship in Tennessee, that's gotta be pretty helpful.

• 2:03:33Zak Kukoff?

  It's huge. It's financial capital and it's social capital, too. It's a big outcome. Now, think about that same dynamic writ large over and over and over. A thousand people, all of whom want their own thing. Look, the truth is, at some point, there will have to be a federal standard that happens. It's gonna have to happen. And some of this stuff, Ted Cruz put out a bill around AI sandboxes, which is in the, um, OSTP, the White House AI Action Plan, basically saying, look, we're gonna set up special economic experimentation zones. It's one way to think about them. So people are tackling it from different respects, but unless you're thinking completely nationally and you want to be governor, or sorry, you want to be president, if you're thinking about anything at the state level, you are, right now, not going to act federally when it comes to AI policy.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Uh, really quickly, you said a thousand people. Uh, help me break that down. It's a, it's a hundred senators, five thirty-eight, uh, uh, house members, but where's the other, like?

• 2:04:22Zak Kukoff?

  There's a gang. I mean, I was being a little hyperbolic. There's a gang. There's a gang. There's a phrase, gang of five hundred.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:26Zak Kukoff?

  Gang of five hundred refers to everyone in the House, everyone in the Senate, White House staffers, agency staffers.

• 2:04:32John Coogan?

  Okay, got it.

• 2:04:33Zak Kukoff?

  And then people like me, the lobbyists, the reporters, the outsiders.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  You add all those folks and, and those people have, they might be want, want to be the governor or something.

• 2:04:40Zak Kukoff?

  Sure, they might want to have an aspiration, or even they want to do business with somebody who is, right? They have some aspiration to whatever.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  Uh, there's a thousand live players.

• 2:04:46Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. A thousand live players, really five hundred live players. And that's who determines, quote unquote, conventional wisdom in Tennessee.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Sure, okay, got it.

• 2:04:52Zak Kukoff?

  So if you're, you know, Blake, who you guys had on from Boomer, a while ago, whatever it is, the number one thing you wanted to do to convince people that you want to have a speed, sorry, a sound law and not a speed law, is convince those five hundred people over and over again to shift their perspective. Once you do that, the conventional wisdom works.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  That seems so difficult. Uh, I mean, I, I love Blake, obviously, and I'm rooting for him, but. Uh, it, that seems like such a hard challenge in the face of like, you can't just go and do the supersonic act of 2025 by itself. And everyone's like, yeah, this one makes sense because you have to puzzle piece it with 25 other things on the omnibus bill.

• 2:05:25Zak Kukoff?

  Well, it's like when we were all in enterprise software, it's account based marketing. You know what I mean? Account based marketing, you have one person, you have all the influencers who sit around that person. And your job is to win over each influencer over and over again. It's the same thing here. You have one person, maybe five people, right? Who can actually do it. Majority leader, the president, speaker, so on and so forth. You want to flip over all the people, the think tanks, the reporters, the junior members, their delegation, all the people who have influence on them. If you do that, you win.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, sorry, Jordy, I cut you off.

• 2:05:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, any, do you cover nuclear at all?

• 2:05:56Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, we cover nuclear a lot.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Cause, cause every time we see these, you know, one gigawatt, uh, you know, all, all these gigawatts data centers being announced. Yeah. It, it just, uh, it seems like the, like nuclear is just going to have to play a huge part in that. And yet we need to relearn how to make reactors here in America.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. It seems like a lot of people are underwriting like, oh yeah, like, uh, you know, we're gonna, it's gonna be a lot of money. We'll sign, we'll sign on this line and then the money will come. We'll wire the money. And then, yeah, we'll just turn on a new power.

• 2:06:25Jordi Hays?

  One new active reactor, please.

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  Those are two very different things.

• 2:06:28Zak Kukoff?

  So easy to do.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Sorry, Jordy.

• 2:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One, one new reactor, please.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  Please. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:06:31Zak Kukoff?

  Thank you very much.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  Add that to the.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Thank you very much.

• 2:06:33Zak Kukoff?

  I'll take one reactor and 50 transmission lines. Thank you very much. I'm all done.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  You really can like wire a hundred billion dollars in a day.

• 2:06:40Zak Kukoff?

  Yes.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  But you can just wire a hundred gigawatts in a day.

• 2:06:44Zak Kukoff?

  This is part of the problem. So we do, I'll, full disclosure, we do lobby for a nuclear energy company. It's a great company. I won't name them, but phenomenal business. We have, look, if you look at the federal government.

• 2:06:52Jordi Hays?

  By 30, if you're not heavily conflicted, you're doing something wrong in life.

• 2:06:55Zak Kukoff?

  No conflict, no interest is the name of the game, unfortunately, for you, Talion. Um, this is the thing, all right? If you are looking at the federal government and you're looking at this federalism system and the challenges that are inherent to it. You're thinking, who's cutting across this? Credit to the admin. They are the first ones who I've heard of, who at least thought about, hey, we ought to have somebody whose job it is to expedite these long-term. It's Michael Grimes, right? Who runs the US Mustn't Accelerator, former tech banker for many, many years. Cal Berkeley alumni go bears. Yeah. There you go.

• 2:07:23John Coogan?

  Polytechnic.

• 2:07:24Zak Kukoff?

  And anyway, he is running basically what turns out to be the federal government's investment bank.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:29Zak Kukoff?

  He's running that across any time there's a system, they want to accelerate in deployment of an investment.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:35Zak Kukoff?

  That's who they can turn to, but even they're limited. That's the problem. So nuclear is disproportionately affected by this.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. Uh, what, what, do you have a take on, uh, like Saagar and Jetty has been saying like, oh, the, the, the technology doesn't know what's about to come.

• 2:07:49Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:49John Coogan?

  The, the narrative, I mean, we see these things debunked on X and in tech, in the tech part of X every day where there will be a mainstream news headline about, uh, you know, Sora uses 25 gallons of water every time.

• 2:08:05Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  And it gets sort of debunked in some like research paper from Google.

• 2:08:09Zak Kukoff?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  But that doesn't really make it back.

• 2:08:11Zak Kukoff?

  No, of course not.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  And so, you know, I think Saagar is, is, is, you know, identifying a potential wave of anti-tech sentiment across both sides of the aisle. What's the mood around that generally?

• 2:08:25Zak Kukoff?

  I mean, look, unfortunately, it's great business and great politics to be anti-tech. That's the problem.

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Cause it's a narrow community that you can just go after.

• 2:08:31Zak Kukoff?

  It's a narrow community.

• 2:08:32John Coogan?

  Right.

• 2:08:32Zak Kukoff?

  It's disproportionately wealthy.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:33Zak Kukoff?

  Disproportionately influential.

• 2:08:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:35Zak Kukoff?

  Very easy to be a punching bag.

• 2:08:36John Coogan?

  Very sloppy.

• 2:08:37Zak Kukoff?

  Very, very sloppy.

• 2:08:39John Coogan?

  It's, you know, it really is like very visual to just show a picture and be like, this is bad.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's, that's why I was, I was shocked that OpenAI came out and announced that they'd be supporting erotica because that just feels like, you know, as, as these debates come around with power and infrastructure, it's very easy to be like, you, you said you were trying to cure cancer, give free education, but like, clearly a lot of your users are using this for, for adult entertainment.

• 2:09:07Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  It, it, it takes you down a path that, uh, it just puts a target on your back.

• 2:09:12Zak Kukoff?

  This is the big divide on the right, right? If you're looking, if you're on the right wing, there's two camps. One camp says, let the slop flow free, right? Tech companies, let them do their work, whatever, it's great, let them do it all.

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:23Zak Kukoff?

  And says the goal is to be pro-tech generally, right? One camp says, we're social conservatives. I don't want my kid getting porn from OpenAI.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:30Zak Kukoff?

  I don't want my six-year-old being exposed to this shit.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:33Zak Kukoff?

  Pardon the language. And so they want to reel it back in. That's the big problem. Look, if you're OpenAI, culture is often downstream of politics.

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:39Zak Kukoff?

  Trump won this election. Huge wave of things that feel pro freedom of speech and you can quibble with the definition and the boundaries, that all you like. But in theory, the messaging is around being pro free speech. And so a lot of what they're doing aligns to that. But I think there's a backlash brewing and it cuts to John, to your point, it cuts across left and right, right? Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren have common cause on very few things, but one of them is tech.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  I made a YouTube video about that like years ago.

• 2:10:04Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:05John Coogan?

  About how it was, they just came from completely different realms, but they were saying the exact same thing about tech.

• 2:10:09Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 2:10:10John Coogan?

  And that was in the context of, you know, Google and monopolism and like large corporations. But, you know, it just keeps ringing true again and again and again.

• 2:10:19Zak Kukoff?

  Because the truth is, the neo Brandeisians who didn't like tech, who are opposed to these sort of monopolistic or what their view is monopolistic practices, a lot of those folks have re-cloaked themselves and now they talk about tech's power in other ways, right? It's very sympathetic. If you watch these videos. What about Swiss watches?

• 2:10:34John Coogan?

  I heard that too.

• 2:10:37Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, can we do a little rispy, a little rissumin', please? Actually, I don't want to do that because you guys mock me every single time. I'm a slut for punishment. The bigger thing is, alright, so look, you get these videos on X from this group, you know this group, More Perfect Union, you guys see these videos? They're the big water sort of power pusher people, right?

• 2:10:55John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:10:55Zak Kukoff?

  They make these very slick videos, basically saying, you know, if you allow a data center to open up in your neighborhood, you're going to be, you know, in a drought and your crops are going to dry up and God's going to smite you with locusts and so on and so forth. Like a horrible outcome, okay? And then, you know, people fighting the good fight, you have like, you know IFP, Alex Stapp? You guys know them?

• 2:11:12John Coogan?

  I know, yeah.

• 2:11:13Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  IFP, Institute for Progress.

• 2:11:15Zak Kukoff?

  Yes, exactly. He's been on, right?

• 2:11:17John Coogan?

  I don't know if Alex has been on, but yeah.

• 2:11:18Zak Kukoff?

  Alright, so you have Alec or Caleb from IFP, Institute for Progress, who do great God's work on Twitter. Every time that comes out, they're there posting, saying it's not true and so on and so forth.

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  Someone should make a data center that runs on salt water.

• 2:11:29Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  That would be really easy. It's an easy win.

• 2:11:32Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly. Give me like sewer water in there. Just disgusting gross shit. Your slop is actually made with sewer water.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  It would be such a good retort if somebody's like, you're using all this water, you're like, yeah, we use seawater.

• 2:11:44Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, correct. Infinitely, in fact, we're purifying it at the same time. No, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. It'd be like a dog.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Dolphin was gonna drink that.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  A dolphin.

• 2:11:52Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 2:11:53Jordi Hays?

  A fish was gonna drink that.

• 2:11:54Zak Kukoff?

  Actually, there's some kelp that otherwise would be thriving.

• 2:11:55Jordi Hays?

  And right off the shore, there's an endangered species that is going to go extinct because you took the water from them.

• 2:12:01John Coogan?

  The sea turtle's gonna get stuck in the Nvidia rack and it's gonna be viral.

• 2:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I have a pitch for you.

• 2:12:06Zak Kukoff?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 2:12:07Jordi Hays?

  So we talk about like presidential libraries, right? Could we be moving into a future where each president gets one SPAC during?

• 2:12:18Zak Kukoff?

  Each president gets one free shot of insider trading and then it's all good from there.

• 2:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay. No, but what's going on with?

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  Obama's presidential library.

• 2:12:27Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  Literally not built by humans.

• 2:12:29Zak Kukoff?

  Oh my god, the architecture.

• 2:12:30John Coogan?

  Obviously an energy source, but three, because of the AI narrative, this could be what sets up Michelle for her run because energy's gonna be so expensive, the Obama presidential library, if that's what it is, built by aliens, power source, lowers the rate of energy for everyday Chicagoans.

• 2:12:47Zak Kukoff?

  So true.

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  Huge, huge.

• 2:12:49Zak Kukoff?

  So true.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  That's a launchpad.

• 2:12:51Zak Kukoff?

  It's actually a crystalline bond.

• 2:12:52Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get the tin foil hat for you. No, what, I just saw something in the, we didn't even get to it in the show today, I just saw that there's a Cayman Islands entity that's gonna be

• 2:13:05Zak Kukoff?

  Yes.

• 2:13:05Jordi Hays?

  participating in this SPAC. What's the, do you know what the story is there?

• 2:13:10Zak Kukoff?

  I don't have the full story.

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  And what do you think?

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  In a, what's your sort of non-political view on, you know, we will undoubtedly have another democratic, Democrat, you know, president. Do they, does this set a new norm where?

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  Wasn't Gavin Newsom saying like, oh, maybe we're gonna do a coin, we'll do our own coin, like we'll fire back with our version of the Trump token?

• 2:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Coin on coin, violent.

• 2:13:36Zak Kukoff?

  He's peaked way too early.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:38Zak Kukoff?

  Like, you don't wanna be peaking this early, right?

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:13:41Zak Kukoff?

  You wanna like a delayed peak a little bit.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is a little bit early.

• 2:13:44Zak Kukoff?

  You know, you're way ahead.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  I do wonder, you know, people are obviously latching on to all the, all the Trump projects, whether it's the coin or Truth Social, or this new SPAC, or a variety of projects. But I wonder if we looked at his, the number of companies he builds per decade, if he's actually at a low period in his Because he was originally doing like Trump steaks, Trump university, Trump.

• 2:14:04Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  He had a vodka.

• 2:14:05Zak Kukoff?

  He had the vodka, he had the ties.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  He had a casino.

• 2:14:08Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  He used to be in 10 different industries.

• 2:14:10Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  Maybe he's actually more focused than ever.

• 2:14:12Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. If you really think about it, in some ways, this is the double down lock in period.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was for Trump as a businessman.

• 2:14:18Zak Kukoff?

  As a businessman.

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:14:20Zak Kukoff?

  He's avoiding the underclass.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Yes, but you know, we got to give credit to Jimmy Carter, who was the most locked in president. He had a peanut farm. He sold it.

• 2:14:27Jordi Hays?

  Now he put it in a blind trust.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  Oh, he did? You know, you looked it up? He put it in a, oh, wow, okay.

• 2:14:31Zak Kukoff?

  No, no, no longer. Obviously, I was a Carter fan before, no longer.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Put it in a blind trust because he didn't want people to think he's in the pocket of little peanut.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  A little peanut.

• 2:14:39Zak Kukoff?

  Big peanut. Mr. Peanut ruling over Jimmy Carter's admin.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  It was a very small farm, but he was like, I'm out of the game. I'm out of the game. I'm locked in.

• 2:14:46Zak Kukoff?

  This is my thing with the Dems, right? If you're looking at the next four years and you're thinking to yourself, okay, public opinion, often thermostatic. It's going to swing back at some point, right?

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  Well, that's good praise for that. I like that.

• 2:14:56Zak Kukoff?

  And this is the problem, which is like, look, both parties, when they're in power, they love to overreach.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:00Zak Kukoff?

  Right? And so if you're doing, if you think to yourself, I have four to eight years to execute every goal I've ever had in my life before public opinion is thermostatic again.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:08Zak Kukoff?

  It's no wonder there's, people call it the magification of the Dem party.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:12Zak Kukoff?

  You look at them and you're like, gosh, AOC, Zoran, being stars in this party is so unusual relative to even where Clinton was in 2008. Hillary Clinton was 2008, let alone 2016.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:23Zak Kukoff?

  So if you're trying to put your finger out, particularly where the wind is blowing, you think to yourself, if a Dem benefits from massive tailwinds coming out of this admin, and they elect or they nominate somebody who is a magified version of the Dems, right? And AOC or a Zoran-ish part of the wing, that makes me concerned, right? Because then you just see the pendulum swinging back and forth from extreme to extreme.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:15:43Zak Kukoff?

  For the next foreseeable future. And there are many, many times.

• 2:15:46Jordi Hays?

  You're saying that America could be more divided than ever?

• 2:15:48Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, America more divided. First I'm hearing of this, more divided than ever. Yeah, and this is true historically, many times.

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what, what else are you monitoring in DC right now? What, what, what, what did we cover? What, what's kind of like, uh, under the radar story that maybe people aren't focusing on yet, but should be? Is there anything that's like at the bottom of your list that maybe is bubbling up?

• 2:16:09Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah. I mean, the big thing that I'm thinking about a lot is a lot of these questions around education. You guys, you guys see the higher ed compact that the Trump admin put out?

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  I didn't.

• 2:16:16Zak Kukoff?

  All right, this is a big thing. Trump admin's basically saying, look, we want a set of standards that universities will sign in order to be eligible to receive future funding.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:16:25Zak Kukoff?

  A lot of the things when you read them, by the way, they don't sound crazy. You read them and you're like, gosh, I thought universities always operated this way.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:30Zak Kukoff?

  Some of them, by the way, are impossible for universities to do.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:33Zak Kukoff?

  Some of them are super reasonable and there's a huge spectrum in between.

• 2:16:36John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:16:36Zak Kukoff?

  Generally, I think a lot of people are sympathetic. I understand the sympathy for it.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:40Zak Kukoff?

  The fear is, look, universities used to be, I'm not saying they ever were this in practice, obviously they've had a political bias all their own and the academies had that for a long time, but as an institution.

• 2:16:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:49Zak Kukoff?

  Universities used to be beyond politics, right? You didn't have somebody who ran.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got tenure and then you can say whatever you want politically because you were, you were good.

• 2:16:57Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. Everybody knew there were some whack job professors, but it was like your nutty uncle. It wasn't like the threatening evil communist.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. It wasn't like, don't platform Chomsky.

• 2:17:05Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, nobody was looking at Chomsky saying this guy's, I deport him, send him back to Poland or whatever.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  No, no, he's just like, yeah, he's got his theories.

• 2:17:11Zak Kukoff?

  So here's the problem. Now you look at this compact, you go, okay, maybe you say to yourself, 60, 70%, whatever is reasonable.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:18Zak Kukoff?

  What's going to happen the next time there's a Democrat office who now says, great, our compact for universities to get federal funding is going to say there has to be DEI or there has to be this or that.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  You're kind of turning back the other way.

• 2:17:28Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly. That's still like the thing I'm tracking for the future is, look, universities are pushing back. I understand why. I think it's very reasonable for them to do so. And I get both sides of it. I see the value for the admin too. I'm concerned about the precedent of it swinging back and forth over and over again.

• 2:17:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's so interesting because like, uh, I've, maybe it's just like the Thiel influence, but I've, I've sort of like stopped paying attention to universities entirely because I, every day on this show, we talk to some 16-year-old that isn't even planning to go to college and is already building a company. And then, and then when we do talk to people about the education space, it's usually because they're, they're building an alternative to homeschooling.

• 2:18:01Zak Kukoff?

  Yes, that's right.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Or what Joe Lamont's doing at Alpha School or Andre Karpathy's doing with Eureka. Like, there's so many different initiatives that just live entirely outside of the original.

• 2:18:10Zak Kukoff?

  Yes.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Uh, the traditional education system that, um, I, but, but it does feel like, like there's still pockets of the economy that are really tied to.

• 2:18:18Zak Kukoff?

  Yes.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  Education. We're talking Huberman about this.

• 2:18:20Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  We're in, in like basic science research.

• 2:18:24Zak Kukoff?

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  And I'm super blind to it because all of the AI research that was previously done at, you know, these, uh, these AI labs on university campuses. Just completely paid for by big tech.

• 2:18:35Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  Right. And so, so I, I'm not worried like, oh, we're not going to get the next AI innovation because the, because there's not enough funding or whatever. It's like, no, there's more funding than ever.

• 2:18:44Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:45John Coogan?

  These PhDs are making a hundred million dollars now.

• 2:18:47Zak Kukoff?

  Well, my problem isn't AI, right? AI, I'm with you on.

• 2:18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. But you can't apply that to everything.

• 2:18:51Zak Kukoff?

  Correct. You look at something like, you know, ocean, oceanographic research, right?

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:18:54Zak Kukoff?

  And you have like one place, Woods Hole in Massachusetts, which is like the best oceanographic research institute in the country.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:00Zak Kukoff?

  There is no industry that is funding hundreds of millions of dollars for oceanographic PhDs to go do weather research.

• 2:19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need like Sironic, Andoril.

• 2:19:08Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  Uh, Amadon and there's a few others that are like in that ocean, ocean tech space. We need them to be worth trillions.

• 2:19:15Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. And the NSF and basic research and universities are hugely important for that stuff still.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:19:21Zak Kukoff?

  The thing that I get, um, uh, concerned about is when they start to be the football moved back and forth. And frankly, if you look at, look, this is a very Nixonian admin in a lot of ways. Like if you ask young Republicans in DC, I love Nixon, so I'll just put that out there. If you ask young Republicans in DC who they look up to, they will tell you it's Nixon staffers.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:38Zak Kukoff?

  They'll tell you to go read the Pat Buchanan books and Pat Buchanan's got his own fair share of mischigas. But if you read the books, which are well-written, you'll see the big theme the Republicans have about Nixon is he apologized too much. Pat Buchanan will tell you Nixon should have brazened out Watergate, never should have apologized, should have stuck it out, should have broken the power of the Ford Foundation, the large institutional foundations. That's the Nixonian view, right?

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the view on Kissinger then?

• 2:20:04Zak Kukoff?

  Uh, I think these people are more domestic policy focused than Kissinger, but they're more America first than the Kissinger.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, cuz that seems like very different. Yeah. Open up relationship with China. Let's go over there and like do deals.

• 2:20:15Zak Kukoff?

  This is the domestic policy Nixon.

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  We like Nixon, but just the.

• 2:20:19Zak Kukoff?

  Just the stuff we like.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  That's how people always remember everyone, right?

• 2:20:23Zak Kukoff?

  And the truth is people like Buchanan have become.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  See, Jobs was just a designer. He wasn't a ruthless manager.

• 2:20:27Zak Kukoff?

  No, I've never heard that in my life. He was a passionate fan of design.

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:20:30Zak Kukoff?

  That's all he's known for.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  That's it.

• 2:20:32Zak Kukoff?

  If you're like a Pat Buchanan fan, you're looking at this moment and you're saying, gosh, we should break the backs of foundations or institutional life, you know, higher ed, right? And so that's where some of the desire is coming from, is this reading of history where you said, look, Nixon admin didn't go far enough in defeating its enemies. And they allowed the academy, they allowed capture by X number of people. And that's why they're motivated now to go and try to do this, even though I think it is not great for universities.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, Jordy, anything else?

• 2:20:59Jordi Hays?

  No, always fun.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  We could chat all day.

• 2:21:02Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys.

• 2:21:03Jordi Hays?

  If you wanna keep hanging out, I can tell you about Replacement AI. They're running, they're running a billboard in SF right now that says, our AI does your daughter's homework, reads her bedtime stories, romances her, deep fakes her. Don't worry, totally legal.

• 2:21:17Zak Kukoff?

  Who needs parenting?

• 2:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then it, and then on the.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  Well, if you wanna run a positive billboard, go to adquick.com, out of home advertising, easy and measurable, say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising, only ad quick, combined technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficiency, this out buying across the globe. He's like, I'm outta here. Thanks so much for coming on. Uh, great to see you, Zach, as always. Um, but yes, this billboard was bizarre.

• 2:21:38Jordi Hays?

  The whole site is wild. So if you go to their website, it says the only honest AI company, and they say, human flourishing is bad business.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  Have you seen this, Tyler? This, this, uh, this, the replacement.ai, are they, are they doomers or are they pro?

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  They're massive doomers.

• 2:21:54John Coogan?

  But are they pro AI?

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're positioning. The they're positioning their their movement as a startup. So it's replacement.ai is a website. The title says, humans no longer necessary. So we're getting rid of them. Replacement AI can do anything a human can do, but better, faster, and much, much cheaper.

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  I I don't think they're doomers in the sense that they think AI is gonna like kill everyone now. Just that like they're it's just gonna make everyone's lives lives worse.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they highlight some quotes here. This quote from Sam Altman, AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.

• 2:22:26John Coogan?

  That's a wild quote.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  They have one.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  When did he say this? This feels like very taken out of context.

• 2:22:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that this that was in like 2016.

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  They're probably asking him like, what's the worst possible thing that could happen? And he's like, this is what the worst thing could happen.

• 2:22:39Jordi Hays?

  They have a quote here from Dario. I think there's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Hmm. Very odd. Well, on the other side of the spectrum, you got the Starbucks CEO Brian Nichol says the coffee giant is all in on AI, reveals real time artificial intelligence systems designed to assist baristas and transform store operations. I got a tip for you, Brian. Get unprofound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Seriously, people are gonna be saying, I want coffee. Where should I go near me? You gotta be unprofound. Get your brand mentioned.

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Something we gotta put on the schizo hat.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  Okay, please.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Starbucks stock is up 6.66% past five days. Coincidence?

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  Very weird number.

• 2:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Are they are they using AI to summon the demon?

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  I don't know. Well, if they build something, they should do it on Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, and monitor usage. Also, we I we have to try that frame to frame VO 3.1 thing. I I we'll talk about this later, Tyler. But did you see these demos? So basically, you've always been able to upload a single image and then say like animate this and turn this into something. But now you can upload two images, a starting image and an ending image, and have VO3 like interpolate between them. And so I saw this really cool video that someone made where it was basically a tour. Of ancient Rome and so it's flying around through the Colosseum and the Colosseum gets built up and then it fills with water and then there's boats.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  And you go under the water and there's sharks and then you go into some tunnel, you come out, you're at the Acropolis. It was really awesome and I feel like we could do something really creative with this. It really got the creative juices flowing. So. Excited to build something around that. Maybe I'll plan out the whole project with linear. Cause it linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product.

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  People really were not excited about Starbucks getting into AI. They had other suggestions like I saw Ryan Peterson just saying make the wifi.

• 2:24:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Make the wifi work.

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's go back to the previous era.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  Also, our president Dylan Eberscotta went viral on X quote posting barely AI. Who is breaking some news about Uber. Uber is going to give its drivers in the US an option to make money by doing digital tasks. These short minute long tasks can be done anytime, including while idling for passengers. So your Uber pulls up. Starts waiting, starts doing some tasks to help train the next generation of AI. You can do data, the data labeling, uploading restaurant menus, recording audio samples of themselves, narrating scenarios in different languages.

• 2:25:23Jordi Hays?

  People also absolutely hated this. I hope they, I hope they put some type of restriction in where if they detect that you're in a mood, like actually moving, that they say you cannot do data labeling.

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  What if you have, what if you have FSD?

• 2:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Somebody in traffic just.

• 2:25:39John Coogan?

  You're, you're delegating the driving task to the AI while training the AI on the next thing. And you get a task and it's like, it's like, uh, is this car about to crash? Yes or no? And you look up and it's a picture of exactly what you're looking at. You're like, oh no. I should have been labeling this with the pedals instead of the buttons. I don't know, there's a lot of Black Mirror scenarios, but it does seem like a big market. Scale AI, obviously, Surge AI, we've talked to Merkor, we've talked to a few other of these data labeling, Labelbox. Some of these are more focused on the real, real complex reinforcement learning environments with verifiable rewards, it's more expert driven, but there's still clearly a need for general AI data labeling.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you have a take on this?

• 2:26:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was just interesting because I feel like generally the playbook of data labeling has like definitely moved like up the scale ladder, right?

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:26:34Speaker 02

  Like Scale, I don't know what their like revenues are now from the same kind of like, you know, the Filipino like

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  It's felt, yeah, it's felt like the job was finished with, with the general base level RLHF, but I think there's still niche areas where, you know, uploading every restaurant menu, like Scale didn't necessarily do that, they're probably still competing with that. I mean, when we had the president or the new CEO of Scale on, he was saying that they just got a new huge contract for a hundred million dollars, the DOD. What are they data labeling? Probably some stuff that hasn't been labeled before, you know, how much, how many, how many rations do they have in, in stock over time or something like that?

• 2:27:11Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you're pretty AGI pilled, right?

• 2:27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, why don't you earn a hundred dollars doing data labeling?

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:19Jordi Hays?

  That's your challenge for, that's your challenge for the next 24 hours?

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  If you, if you believe in, uh, well, Rocco's Basilisk, Rocco's Basilisk demands that you do, that you do data labeling.

• 2:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Sign up, sign up right now.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  You don't help summon the show Goth with, with, with data labeling tasks, one dollar at a time. You know, I don't know.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Matthew Prince said, was weird being in Vegas recently, so quiet, so many fewer people gambling, drinking, partying. My pet theory, Ozempic killing Vegas, just like it's killing snack feed brands, liquor producers and Napa.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:53Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know it was impacting Napa.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't know that either.

• 2:27:57Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, this is just kind of him riffing.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Yes, but do you agree with him or do you agree with the rebuttal from Nir, which you can read?

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Nir says, I would go the opposite angle with the rise of Robinhood, prediction markets and sports betting. There is little reason to go to Vegas. It is more expensive, the house edge is higher and it's hotter outside. Less drinking contributes too, though.

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  Okay, so do you think it's the rise of, of online outlets for Vegas like activity?

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it like a recession indicator, right?

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's another, that's a third option.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  It's just not doing well right now.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:33Jordi Hays?

  There's no, uh.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  I would want to know.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  It's not like, it's not like, you know, the average person that's going to Vegas is saying.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:40Jordi Hays?

  I need, or the average person in America is, I gotta be in Vegas this weekend.

• 2:28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:43Jordi Hays?

  They're scaling AI capex like crazy. I gotta be there.

• 2:28:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Like.

• 2:28:49John Coogan?

  Tyler, can you look up, uh, the, the, the rough percentage of Americans who are on Ozempic? Like, I want to know, is it like 1%, 10%, 50%? Because if Vegas is, if it's like 2% of Americans are on peptides, like I would, I would, I would expect that wouldn't show up in the Vegas data. But if it's like 50%, I might see an effect there, right? Um, I don't know.

• 2:29:12Jordi Hays?

  Or it's possible that the kind of people that go to Vegas are like, you know.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  The most likely to be on Ozempic, maybe, but let's just get the number.

• 2:29:20Speaker 02

  I'm seeing like around 12% have used it once.

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:24Speaker 02

  We're not exactly sure how many are currently taking.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  That's not insignificant. That could take a couple of points off the, off the house edge. Um, uh, but the question is.

• 2:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other thing people are. Yeah, people, I, I saw another quote that just said, like, the nightlife scene there has been hyper financialized to a degree that it's just not even fun anymore.

• 2:29:43John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Um, well, if you're running a casino in Vegas, you have sales tax, you gotta go to numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. But, uh, here's my theory for how you bring back Vegas. People aren't gambling for one reason or another. Maybe it's the Ozempic. You need to make Vegas high-end. So we, Vegas needs to bring in an opera house, a symphony, an art gallery. The Louvre should relocate. Maybe they're behind it. Maybe we'll see, you know, fine art come to Las Vegas. This is the only way that they can sustain.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What if they set up a bunker in there that, uh, that has a bunch of stolen goods from all over the world?

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  They already have an F1 race. They need to turn it into Monaco. They need to.

• 2:30:25Jordi Hays?

  I think somebody's gonna look this up and be like, they already have an opera. They already have a symphony. They already have art museums.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  But they should close all the nightclubs and only have opera and only have symphony. I think that would be the, the, the, the true solution. Um. We talked a little bit about the the water issue. Where else should we go?

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  FT made a pretty egregious error when trying to calculate the unit economics of neo clouds and hyperscalers.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened here?

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they've issued an official correction yet, but it came out. It was super bearish and then a bunch of people pointed out that that they had gotten the math wrong by.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  Well, if you want to get the the correct data, I would defer to Cluster Max. The project from semi-analysis.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  They are the most reliable analysts in the space.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  You said last week, the new media, traditional media divide is far too simplistic. If you want to understand things today, you have to know the difference between legacy media, traditional media, new media, legacy new media, neo media, post neo media, alt media and neo alt media.

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, you really have to study this stuff. It's it's more complex than punk bands like you can't just say, oh, it's a rock band. There's so many different layers. This is actually a riff on what you said, because you you you use the phrase legacy new media around me and I thought it was so funny. But obviously, this is a comment on the the colossal debate over Colossus magazine.

• 2:31:59Jordi Hays?

  And I think the reason we were talking off air this morning about this, I think the reason that it sparked a debate is that it it's new media that looks and feels like like legacy.

• 2:32:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, unpack this. This was a good take. But first, before you do, let me tell you about Adio.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  Got some relationship magic. Adio is an AECR M that builds scales and grocery company to the next level.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  My point was that

• 2:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Colossus looks like Fortune magazine.

• 2:32:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:27Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't like.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  It's the Joker quote. No one cared until I put on the makeup, right?

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:32John Coogan?

  Isn't that isn't that from the Joker? With the, with the line.

• 2:32:35Speaker 02

  We're the mask.

• 2:32:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, the mask, right?

• 2:32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  Does no one cared until I put on the mask?

• 2:32:39Speaker 02

  It's Batman.

• 2:32:39John Coogan?

  Oh, it's Batman?

• 2:32:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  Wait, what? Batman says that?

• 2:32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, he puts on the mask.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  And he says, no one cared until I put on the mask?

• 2:32:46Speaker 02

  Let me fact check.

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  I think this might be the Joker or something. I don't know. Anyway, the, the idea is like, people have been writing profiles about tech companies in a positive way, like Paki McCormick has had a really successful, yeah.

• 2:32:57Speaker 02

  Okay, it's Bane.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  It's Bane.

• 2:32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, this makes.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  That's right. Bane says, no one cared until I put on the mask, right? And so, and so it's like, no one cared about, oh, it's just a blog. Oh, it's just a Substack. Oh, it doesn't matter if it gets a lot of views or a lot of attention in tech. What matters is now is that Colossus put the, put the, the, the profile in terms that the other magazines can understand because it looks like theirs. It looks, it's the same glossy magazine and we're seeing this with Arena Mag.

• 2:33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it's like, uh, legacy media didn't feel threatened until

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  It took on the aesthetics.

• 2:33:30Speaker 02

  Took on the aesthetics.

• 2:33:31John Coogan?

  Yes. And we really need a new term for this because there's, there's traditional media, there's new media, and then there's new, new media that looks like.

• 2:33:41Speaker 02

  Neo legacy media.

• 2:33:42John Coogan?

  It's Neo Trad Media. It's Neo, we're the Neo Trads. We're the Neo Trads. So this show is new media, but it looks like trad media. You can see the overlays and the stock tickers.

• 2:33:53Speaker 02

  Neo.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  This looks like TV, but it's not. And Colossus similarly looks like a magazine, but it's really not. I mean, it is a magazine, but it's also, but most people consume the Thrive profile on the web. But it's not just a blog. It's not just a Substack. So fascinating. Well, uh, Tyler, uh, threw out a, an alternative term, adding to the fray of media terms. What do you, what do you want to call it?

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  Uh, dark media?

• 2:34:16John Coogan?

  Dark media? Are we dark media? You're dark media. Look how dark your background is. You're dark media.

• 2:34:22Speaker 02

  I think the, the doomers, i- if, if the doomers released, uh, some new publication, I think that would be dark media.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of dark, it's dark when you go to bed, sleep on an 8Sleep, 8Sleep.com, Pod5, five-year warranty, 30-hour risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 2:34:38Jordi Hays?

  It is so funny that 8Sleep runs on AWS and so.

• 2:34:43John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:34:44Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was, my, my reporting last night is all off. I was seeing some other, uh, but it's good.

• 2:34:51John Coogan?

  I took a fantastic nap on my 8Sleep yesterday, so I'm feeling very refreshed.

• 2:34:54Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Stitch Fix is up 7% today after Bill Gurley posted.

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Pictures of himself using Stitch Fix's new AI product, Stitch Fix Vision. Uh, no, I, I, I think, I think Stitch Fix is just popping because they announced a version of, uh, like this, like.

• 2:35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:17Jordi Hays?

  You, you upload some images and then it'll generate you in different outfits. This is, uh, Thrive, did a company.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  Well, that's super interesting.

• 2:35:24Jordi Hays?

  It's Doji, Doji.

• 2:35:25John Coogan?

  I don't know how, I don't know, uh.

• 2:35:27Jordi Hays?

  They basically created like a Doji.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know the, I don't know the recent history of Stitch Fix, but I remember at one point, they were, I think they were employing a lot of human beings to do the, uh, the collection assembly. So you would send in some photos, you would say your, some of your opinions, and then they would put together a box of clothes for you and kind of act as like a virtual stylist. And, and these stylists obviously had real costs to them. And so if that's something that AI can do, like that is a material change to their business and their fundamental economics. So who knows if people will like it, maybe they say, hey, this particular outfit is slop. But if they have a lot of training data and also they have the whole pipeline of logistics and fulfillment and e-commerce

• 2:36:12John Coogan?

  set up, uh, I mean, that could be, that could be significant for the business. It's exciting. I'd love to have the founder on and talk more.

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Krimu says, over the last 15 years, Reddit's relationship advice has shifted towards recommending breakups, boundaries and therapies and against compromised communication and letting people have their space. So, uh, he did, uh, well, there's a, actually, I guess a Reddit user that generated all this. This is concerning, um, for a number of reasons. One being that, uh, your favorite AI models are all trained on Reddit.

• 2:36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this is what, uh, Pat Gelsinger is, has been, uh, sounding the alarm about when he evaluates the LLMs. He, he, he, he put it in different terms, but he kind of noticed a similar trend. What's your best advice for a relationship? I say start a podcast together. That works great.

• 2:37:06John Coogan?

  Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book, 1929, has wild details of Winston Churchill YOLO trading in US stocks.

• 2:37:12Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta expand on that because if you're having relationships, problems, whether friend or romantic, and you start a podcast together, that sounds like terrible advice.

• 2:37:23John Coogan?

  So here are the options from Reddit. End relationship, communicate, give space slash time, set respect boundaries, seek therapy, counseling, compromise, other.

• 2:37:33Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying others.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  How about getting the ring? How about getting the octagon?

• 2:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Duke it out.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  Duke it out. Uh, break a sweat. Uh, break some knuckles, you know? Throw down, throw down. That's the correct answer. Throw down. If you're having relationship problems, throw down.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  Why is that not on Reddit at all? Redditors haven't even thought of that as advice for a relationship.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Throw down.

• 2:38:00Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get on there. Uh, Trung Fan was sharing some highlights from Andrew Ross Sorkin's book.

• 2:38:06John Coogan?

  I have one more piece of advice before we go to 1929. If you're having a relationship problem with someone, buy them a luxury watch on getbezel.com because your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. If you're like, oh, you know, Tyler seems frustrated with me lately. What should I do? It's like, get him a GMT. Get him, get him up a tack.

• 2:38:28Jordi Hays?

  Get him a hitter.

• 2:38:28John Coogan?

  He's gonna be like, yeah, it's water on the bridge, John.

• 2:38:31Jordi Hays?

  Metal, solve, all.

• 2:38:32John Coogan?

  So, uh, let's go to Tyler Cosgrob with his official review of 1929. Did you really read the whole book this year, this weekend?

• 2:38:38Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I was playing on it and then I didn't. No, I, I, yeah, I'm not done yet.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Did you watch any tech talks about the book?

• 2:38:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:38:46John Coogan?

  Did you generate a Sora summary of the book?

• 2:38:50Speaker 02

  That would have been much more efficient.

• 2:38:51John Coogan?

  Okay. Did you actually read any of the book?

• 2:38:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I'm like, I'm close to like halfway through.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. I told you guys I was gonna be done, but I got a little white light. But I mean, it's really interesting. Um, it's like, kind of crazy how many parallels there are between like the current day and, and

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 2:39:05Speaker 02

  1929. So I, I think we asked Sorkin a couple of these.

• 2:39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:11Speaker 02

  But, okay, so, so one example is this guy, um, Durant. He's kind of this, he's famously for, for, for just being like this.

• 2:39:17Jordi Hays?

  This is Kevin Durant, to be clear.

• 2:39:20Speaker 02

  And he he's like thinking about starting this company that is essentially the same thing as a company we've had on Basic Capital.

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:28Speaker 02

  Where it's basically a mortgage for for buying like ETF.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, leverage.

• 2:39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's like, there's so many parallels where it's like, oh, that's like, just like that thing that I saw the news about the other week. So, a little bit bearish reading this.

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:39:41Speaker 02

  But I think also, I mean, the the main thing in the book is you see like, the real reason for all this speculation is basically just, there's just so much new money coming in.

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:39:49Speaker 02

  Like, so so many of of the big banks, they're just focusing on trying to get essentially like retail.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:54Speaker 02

  To to take leverage or to just like, get people to buy stocks in general.

• 2:39:58John Coogan?

  I I you know, Sorgin was mentioning like, like, the the AI equivalent in nineteen twenty nine was RCA, like the radio, radio waves, like, does that come through or was the bubble broader?

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so he talks about RCA a fair amount. I I think that's mostly as just a specific example of a stock that is being pumped.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:40:19Speaker 02

  But it's certainly not like, the the the general fervor is not like, oh, everyone has to get in on this specific company.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:25Speaker 02

  It's that everyone needs to get in on the market.

• 2:40:27John Coogan?

  On the market.

• 2:40:28Speaker 02

  The market is just gonna keep.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  I mean, there's a little bit of that happening.

• 2:40:31Jordi Hays?

  Here's some here's some extra context. So Churchill was day trading.

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:40:38Jordi Hays?

  He was trading four hundred thousand pounds a week on margin. But adjusted for inflation, that's thirty six million dollars that he was just slanging around while.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Great.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  While he was, he was, was was he in, was he actually?

• 2:40:54John Coogan?

  In power in nineteen twenty nine?

• 2:40:55Jordi Hays?

  Let me, let me see.

• 2:40:56Speaker 02

  So, this is like, he he's kind of in some kind of like ambassador role at this point.

• 2:41:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:41:03Speaker 02

  But yeah, basically, he he has this very like luxurious lifestyle that he has to keep up.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:07Speaker 02

  So he goes on this roadshow throughout the country where he just finds these rich guys.

• 2:41:11Jordi Hays?

  One sec. Churchill didn't actually come to power until nineteen forty.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:15Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he he's going on this roadshow basically to to find rich guys who will just give him money to keep traveling, but also just so that they can speculate. And another thing is, is.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  So is he kind of like the Leopold Aschenbrenner of nineteen twenty nine?

• 2:41:30Speaker 02

  I think Leopold has much more of a differentiated view.

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  Much more alpha.

• 2:41:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  When she was pure beta.

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's still alpha in the sense that the amount of insider trading going on is kind of absurd. Like, basically, there's a deal that's about to happen, and then the banks just deal out, like, oh, here's a couple of friends of mine. You know, here's like Calvin Coolidge, I'll just give him like $400,000, basically.

• 2:41:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:41:52Speaker 02

  Like, current presidents are like getting deals, you know, so.

• 2:41:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:57Speaker 02

  So maybe it's not that different, maybe it's not that different, you know.

• 2:41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, who knows?

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  That's fun, that's fun. Anything else stick out from the book?

• 2:42:06Speaker 02

  I think, once I fully finish it, I'll write something up maybe, and then I'll give a final review.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  That'd be cool.

• 2:42:11Speaker 02

  But, very good, so far.

• 2:42:13John Coogan?

  Overall, if you haven't had a chance to pick up the book yet, you can get it on Audible or wherever books are sold. We're very thank you, we're thankful for Andrew Ross working to come on the show, share his insight, and hang out with us for about half an hour last week.

• 2:42:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's worth noting that Churchill made it all back with a book deal.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  He did?

• 2:42:32Jordi Hays?

  On his World War II memoirs.

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  Okay, here's a potential recession indicator from Jacob Silverman, says the number of people who registered to take the LSAT last year in 2024 was 18,000, but in September of 2025, a year later, the number of people who registered to take the LSAT is now 32,000, so a massive, massive uptick.

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and these are, the idea is that these are people that were trying to enter the job market, struggling, and are trying to buy, basically buy time.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Or.

• 2:43:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, new grads.

• 2:43:09Jordi Hays?

  Not finding, yeah, just not finding opportunities that are.

• 2:43:12John Coogan?

  College grads who say, hey.

• 2:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Meeting their expectations.

• 2:43:14John Coogan?

  Maybe I'll, maybe I'll. Or, alternatively, these are people who watched Andre Karpathy on Door Cash and said, well, AG is 10 years away. I can go be a lawyer, I'll take the LSAT now, get through law school, become a partner, and then I'll be able to cash out before AGI hits. So, you know, LLMs aren't going to be able to do law anytime soon, it's slop, heard it there first, and so they all applied to the LSAT. Could happen, could happen. Anyway, uh, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great many dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks.

• 2:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, did you see, uh, Senate Republicans posted a video of Chuck Schumer?

• 2:43:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:43:56Jordi Hays?

  That was fully, it was a real quote, uh, but it was fully AI generated.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  They made an AI video and audio of the quote.

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Video up and see how sloppy it is.

• 2:44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, they made an AI video and audio of the actual quote to kind of illustrate it, uh, to the audience. Andrew Curran says, uh, first time I've seen this. This is a real quote, but it wasn't set on camera. So they generated a video of Chuck Schumer saying it. Now I would love to know what model they used because a lot of models have guardrails here. Let's play the video right now. Chuck Schumer thinks playing with Americans.

• 2:44:33Speaker 05

  Every day gets better for us.

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  Chuck Schumer.

• 2:44:35Speaker 05

  When come women, infants. Every day gets better for us.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay. The mouth movement is a little.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Chuck Schumer thinks.

• 2:44:41Speaker 05

  Every day gets better for us. Every day gets better for us.

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  I mean, like, it's clearly based on some real image that they took. And so the lighting looks very real. The skin texture looks really real because the AI, the AI model doesn't really have to do that much to regenerate it from scratch. But of course we've seen that, you know, all the models are basically, you know, uh, indistinguishable, uh, if you don't have full context at this point. Um, awesome says we're, we're going to see some AI laws come to fruition as fast as they push the COVID bill through back, uh, through back in March of 2020. Uh, the Democrats introduced the bill negotiations. Trump signs it on condition of ending government's shutdown. Oh, that's kind of a, it's kind of a bold take. I don't know if that will for sure happen, but, uh, you could definitely

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  see, um, before the next election, uh, both sides wanting some clarity on where the line is in terms of, uh, what you can use. Uh, now the NSR, uh, the NRSC, the, uh, Republican group, the Senate Republican group that, uh, created this video did put an AI generated tag in the bottom right-hand corner. And so. They did disclose that they used AI. Will that be required? Will there be certain, you know, definitions of how aggressive the watermark needs to be? That's all up for debate, but we will continue to check it out.

• 2:46:04Jordi Hays?

  More insight here from Barbarian Capital. Thought we were out of

• 2:46:12Jordi Hays?

  noun plus capital names on X, but we always find more. They pulled up a chart here from Schroders. It's looking at average year-to-date performance of companies in each category. They're looking at NASDAQ, no revenues, MAG7, unprofitable NASDAQ, unprofitable US small midcaps, NASDAQ with revenues, the S and P and profitable NASDAQ, and then profitable small midcaps. What group do you think performed the best year-to-date, John?

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 2:46:45Jordi Hays?

  NASDAQ, no revenues.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  No revenues. Wow.

• 2:46:49Jordi Hays?

  NASDAQ obviously has much looser listing requirements than NICE. And anyway, so yeah.

• 2:46:59John Coogan?

  This is the meme in Silicon Valley in the HBO show. Like, you don't want revenue because then people will comp you. But now we're doing it at the public markets. That is crazy. And I mean, that goes back to the 1929 thing that Tyler was talking about. Like, once you get to the level of fervor in the market where it's like, you just gotta be in the market, and you see froth like in stuff that's not even tied to the core innovation. It's like, wait, like AI is clearly like, you know, there is a transformative technology. There is growing revenue. Now, there's debate about the level of the level of capex that's correct, but that's wildly different than looking at some company that's saying like, oh, we're going to colonize the moon or build a quantum computer or do something else that's like completely off the current tech tree and they're mooning.

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  That, not to be too punny about it, but that's when you get into like real, real bubble territory. Well, I have one final post. Do you have anything else? One final post. Congratulations to Everett Randall, former partner at Kleiner Perkins. Now he's a general partner at Benchmark. He has announced his trade deal, potentially the trade deal of the year. Everett Randall is out of KP.

• 2:48:13Jordi Hays?

  We should have him on this week.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  That would be amazing to catch up with him.

• 2:48:17Jordi Hays?

  What's the plan?

• 2:48:17John Coogan?

  And of course, Delian has already taken shots, putting him in an AI-generated image without a watermark. So I think everyone can tell that this is an AI-generated image.

• 2:48:28Jordi Hays?

  There's one person out there that doesn't. I don't know who it is.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Well, Everett's playing along and laughs at Delian's post because they're both having fun on the timeline. But congratulations to Everett, of course, and good luck with the next era of his investing career.

• 2:48:46Jordi Hays?

  One thing I missed about the MAGA SPAC is that Chamath will be in this one, too.

• 2:48:51John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  With Donald Trump Jr. and Laura Ingraham.

• 2:48:55John Coogan?

  I wonder, so this is, this is just a SPAC. They haven't identified a target. Have they even defined, we need to dig into and understand, like, have they even defined an area that they would want to take a company public through?

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, they found an area that they would want to incorporate the Columbia Acquisition Corp. And that is the Cayman Islands.

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, so they're in the Cayman Islands. I think that's standard practice, but I don't know.

• 2:49:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching. If this was the first show you've seen, because we have the CEO of GameStop on today, please subscribe, follow us on X, follow us on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you get your live streams.

• 2:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to our whole production team, our whole team. They were fighting for their life back there.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  We were under attack, probably by a stand actor. We don't know yet. We will get to the bottom of it and we will bring you the news tomorrow.

• 2:49:49Jordi Hays?

  They could take down our show by taking down AWS.

• 2:49:53John Coogan?

  Nice try.

• 2:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Nice try.

• 2:49:54John Coogan?

  Try again, try again. Don't, don't actually try again, please. And you can also subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com. Thank you so much. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow.

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Massive day.

• 2:50:07John Coogan?

  Massive day.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Palmer Lucky.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  Palmer Lucky and Brian Chesky.

• 2:50:09Jordi Hays?

  Probably a lot more. See you then.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:50:12Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.