Marc Andreessen & Ilya Sutskever Host TBPN, Mag 7 Earnings Recap | Aydin Senkut, Dean Ball, Shreya Murthy, Lulu Meservey & Gaby Goldberg, Jakob Diepenbrock, Shishir Mehrotra, Karri Saarinen

(13:04) - Mag 7 Earnings Recap (37:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:11) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:04:37) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:13:12) - Lulu Meservey, founder of the strategic communications firm Rostra, Lulu previously served as CCO & EVP of Corporate Affairs at Activision Blizzard and was VP of Communications at Substack. Gaby Goldberg is a communications professional at Rostra and former investor at The Chernin Group, where she helped build its early-stage crypto practice. (01:27:08) - Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology at the White House, discusses the evolving landscape of AI regulation, highlighting the interplay between state and federal initiatives, particularly California's proactive stance in the absence of federal action. He emphasizes the challenges in defining and governing superintelligence, noting the lack of scientific consensus and the complexities of global policy coordination. Additionally, Ball addresses the potential for a tech backlash driven by public concerns over job displacement and rising electricity costs associated with AI advancements. (02:08:19) - Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, began his career as Google's first product manager, launching its initial international sites. In the conversation, he recounts his transition from Google to venture capital, highlighting early rejections from firms that doubted his potential as an investor. Undeterred, he founded Felicis Ventures, achieving significant successes with investments in companies like Shopify and Meraki, and emphasizes the importance of resilience and belief in founders when making investment decisions. (02:34:37) - Jakob Diepenbrock, General Partner at Discipulus Ventures, discusses the recent demo day held in El Segundo, California, where nine companies presented innovations across various sectors, including energy, manufacturing, and software. He highlights a shift from defense-focused startups to ventures addressing broader industrial challenges, emphasizing the potential for disruption in legacy industries. Diepenbrock also notes the importance of building a supportive ecosystem for young founders tackling critical problems. (02:47:36) - Shreya Murthy is the co-founder and CEO of Partiful, an event planning platform launched in 2020 that has gained significant traction among Gen Z and millennials. In the conversation, she discusses the platform's rapid growth, particularly during Halloween, which she describes as their "Super Bowl," and addresses competition from major players like Apple, emphasizing Partiful's focus on creating fun and engaging event experiences. Murthy also highlights the importance of brand identity in distinguishing Partiful from competitors and shares the company's vision to become the leading platform for real-world social connections as traditional social media shifts towards entertainment. (03:03:24) - Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman, discusses the company's recent rebranding from Grammarly to Superhuman, reflecting their commitment to empowering users with AI-enhanced tools. He introduces "Superhuman Go," a new AI assistant platform that extends Grammarly's technology to integrate proactive AI assistance across various applications. Mehrotra emphasizes their focus on embedding AI seamlessly into users' workflows, distinguishing their approach from other AI services that require user initiation. (03:10:22) - Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, discusses the evolution of software development workflows in the context of AI advancements, emphasizing the need to assess and adapt existing processes rather than discarding them entirely. He highlights Linear's commitment to assisting companies in this transition by integrating AI capabilities, such as delegating tasks to tools like GitHub Copilot, enabling non-technical team members to contribute more effectively. Saarinen also reflects on Linear's design philosophy, focusing on functionality and pragmatism to inspire quality and craftsmanship in the software industry. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, October 31st, 2025. It's Halloween. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Uh, we have a fantastic show for you today, folks. Uh, we're going to be talking about Mag7 earnings, recapping what's happening in the public markets, uh, the trillion dollar tech companies that have been, uh, powering and holding up the entire global economy. Will they continue to hold up the global economy? So far, the answer is yes. Um, I'm glad the chat is enjoying the costumes. Uh, Jordy, who are you today?

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be living under a data center to not know, uh, who I'm dressed up as today. None other than Mark Andreessen.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Spitting image, spitting.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  Spitting image. How, how am I doing?

• 0:53John Coogan?

  I think you look great. I think, uh, yeah, I think, I think you nailed it. Uh, I saw some other folks. They, they, of course I am Ilya Siskel. Uh, there are a lot of people that boil down the Mark Andreessen, uh, costume to just being bald and that's of course not it. You need the shirt. You need the watch. You need the beard. These are all.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I'm not going to be able to do very well is talk quite as quickly as.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like the mustache and, and the outfit might be actually slowing you down a little bit. Um, but I'm not trying to channel, uh, Ilya. We were watching the Guardian video on Ilya, uh, his interview, which is beautifully edited and one of the most interesting, I don't even know. It's like an interview. It's almost a podcast, but it's this like documentary. It's 12 minute video by the Guardian.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  They cooked.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  And Ilya is the only one who says anything the entire time.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  There's no guest or there's no interviewer. There's no host and it's just him talking about AGI. We'll be able to do anything. We'll make, it could be good, could be bad. And he, he just has these crazy long, this, these ways of answering these questions that are really interesting and it fits with that medium. I don't know how much editing they did to get his answers to a place where it. Like had that kind of flow, but it's fantastic.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Ilya's weights, Ilya's words hold so much weight.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that's a good part of it.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  That format just worked incredibly well.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, if you are watching the recording of this at some point in the future, I recommend whenever I'm talking, put it on 3X speed.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  To get the full Mark experience. And we should talk about the, the Gen AI company that we work with to make this possible, of course. I think people would be wildly impressed at how little latency there is.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  The kind of character consistency.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  We are partnered with 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.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  But of course, we did this the old fashioned way, the Hollywood way.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  The Hollywood way.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  We were at the office at 6:30 this morning. It took, took hours to get to this point.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  And shout out to the, to the whole team that, that made it possible.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's not a mask, it is makeup. It's, it's a series of prosthetics that go on layered up with a wig for me and a beard for Jordan. They, they kind of take you through the, the process of becoming fully bald and then add back whatever they need to, including the eyebrows. And the eyebrows do, do a lot of the work.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  They do a lot of the work.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  They do a lot of the work. But yeah, if you're, if you're not taking Halloween this seriously, what's going on? You gotta be, you gotta be taking it seriously. Tyler, are you taking Halloween seriously? What, what, what did you do?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  I'm taking Halloween extremely seriously.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Well, who are you?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Sam Altman at, at 2008 WWDC.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Hitching looped.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  It's the, yeah, you're the spinning image. Were those the colors of the polos he was wearing?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the camera temperature is a little bit off.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Oh, you think that's what it is?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  In, in real life.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  If the viewers could see, they would be.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  And, and the hair is a perfect match. And you also had to do three hours of prosthetic makeup?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  I was actually here a little earlier than you guys.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  It is so strange looking across.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  It's very, very.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  And seeing.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  Seeing the spitting image of Ilya himself. Anyways.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Ramp, time is money, say both. Easy use corporate card, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  When we partnered with Ramp, they never expected to see Ilya.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  No. Pitching Ramp.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Pitching Ramp.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  This is, this is why you advertise on TVPN. You get ad reads from Mark Andrews.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  From the goats, the goats themselves. We have a super fun show today. We have Lulu Miservi and Gaby Goldberg coming on. Later, we have Dean Ball joining. Who else we have? We have.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you know Ball?

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  You're just trying to.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  When we mention his name, you know Ball?

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Well, after today, everyone will know Ball because Dean Ball is coming on TVPN. We're very excited for that. So let's take, let's take a second to tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. Of course, we are restreaming today. Multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are. But I think it'd be good to just kind of go through some of the headlines. Trump cut China tariffs after he met up with Xi Jinping. In South Korea, President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping emerged from their face-to-face for their first face-to-face meeting in six years with a temporary detente in the bruising trade fight between the two superpowers.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  The US agreed to lower a fentanyl-related tariff on Chinese goods to 10% from 20% after China promised to crack down on chemicals used to make the often deadly.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Precursors.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Precursors. That would bring the average tariff rate on many Chinese goods to around 47% from 57%. So America's backing, backing off a little bit. Beijing almost promised, also promised to ease some of the controls it imposed on exports of processed rare earth minerals for one year.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  China dominates the production of the minerals, which are needed to make everything from smartphones to submarines. Wow, that's a world tour of everything in the trade deal. So we're slowly ratcheting things up, ratcheting things down. We had a good conversation yesterday about this with Chris McGuire. You're welcome to go check that out. He gave us more details on the history of the China trade war with the US. But the bigger news in tech world, of course, is earnings. Amazon posted a big jump in profit and revenue. Amazon.com reported net revenue, net profits surged 39% and revenue rose for the third quarter, propelled by strong retail sales as well as continued growth

• 6:56John Coogan?

  in its cloud computing and artificial intelligence business. The e-commerce giant said Thursday that sales rose for the period. They rose 13% to 180 billion and net profit rose to 21.2 billion in that quarter. And so you had a little bit of a take on what was going on in Amazon world. They've been sort of, at the last earnings, they were sort of left out of the AI narrative. All the other hyperscalers in their cloud businesses were, you know, telling great stories about acceleration and growth. And Andy Jassy was a little bit on the defensive.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  Well, now he's back on the offensive and the results were much stronger. So they beat on the top line, they beat on the bottom line. They also beat on AWS revenue, which is great. The Tranium Across the board. Two chip business grew 150% quarter on quarter. And there's still some debate over how Tranium will scale relative to

• 8:01John Coogan?

  TPU, whether Anthropic is going to buy a bunch of TPUs, maybe they're going to pull back on Trainium, but it seems like, like even if the top end is, is diversifying and you have, you know, OpenAI saying, we want to be on every cloud or, you know, that's not necessarily a bull case because there's so many more buyers coming from behind adding to it. So my take was a lot of fud around Trainium underperformance relative to TPU, but they both seem to be catching up finally. I think it'll be interesting to see TPU on, on inference max. I mean, analysis is benchmark.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Are they opting in?

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Well, so TPU and Trainium, the way Dylan Patel framed it to me at least was, they haven't said that they're out. In fact, they, oh, sorry, dropped my phone. In fact, they said that they are in, but it's going to take them time to actually provision everything because it is a significant cost and it's something that requires a decent amount of resources. And there's, you know, a whole bunch of, it's a big company.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  And it will determine the fate of their product line.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially. And so, yeah.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, people are going to be paying a lot of attention to that.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  It's possible that they want to like, that they want to get their ducks in a row. So they don't just get like clobbered in this, in this race. But interestingly, AMD and Nvidia were both pretty happy with the results. There were tons of, there's tons of positivity about AMD in certain use cases. And Jensen on stage at GTC was giving, spending like minutes just on inference max slides and data. So.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  My take from the newsletter on Amazon, I said, Jassy needed this after the timeline had turned against, against him pretty horribly. In the last few months, people even saw the headcount reduction from Monday as bearish. I think that just shows how far ahead Satya was. He did multiple rounds of layoffs earlier this year. And obviously, Amazon has its dance partner now. And so we'll see how this develops. One of my favorite posts, I think from last week was. Somebody said, I don't care if I get caught. I was heavily involved with the NBA illegal gambling scheme. My name is Andy Jassy. I work at Amazon.com.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that they were like, I feel like once you get to mag seven level, you don't have like a retail army that gets frustrated about like, you know, middling financial performance, but I guess Andy Jassy does have a little retail army.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  They were, you know, proud member of the lag seven. If you look at Alphabet, the lag seven.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  They were, I mean, not the lag seven, but they were the lagging part of the mag seven, right?

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a thing? That's a meme?

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a meme. It's a meme.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  I haven't heard this one.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  It's a pleasure to introduce you to a new meme. Alphabet up 247% over the last five years. Amazon is still only up 62% even after the pop this week, so.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Well, that's the story with Amazon. We also got Apple earnings after we wrapped the show. Before I tell you about Apple, let me tell you about Privy Wallet Infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto, rail securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Sarah Wang, GP over at Andreessen, just posted, "The only thing better than Halloween is Halloween AI Edition." In case you missed it, tagged Ilya and Mark. And of course, no AI here. We did this one the old fashioned way.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  We did this organically. It would be interesting to actually benchmark. I mean, obviously, the frontier video models are remarkable, but we've done this bezel bench for a while where we went and did something very weird and very specific. And on that specific use case of Tyler, a person that we, it needs to be him, it needs to look like him, and he has to be wearing six different watches and you have to zoom in from the very start all the way out, and he has to be lying down and like, so you have really to understand how the anatomy comes into the picture. The models haven't really been great. I feel like if we tried to recreate this using AI right now, it would get pretty chaotic.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  The fact that we're alive.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  It would be choppy.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  Three hours, uh, it'd be doing, you know, you could do a face swap live. We've, we've had some founders come on the show and do them, but it feels like it's almost more of just like a

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Descartes.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Descartes was really cool. Yeah, Descartes was awesome.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  But it was still very much felt like a video game. It didn't feel photoreal.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, uh, and Oliver Cameron's doing some stuff.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  Reach out and touch.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  You can in fact touch.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  I'll be drinking through a straw today because.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Is it, is it locking yours in? My take is I, I have, uh, I have the same level of prosthetic makeup on, but I'm just full sending it. And by the end of the show, I'm expecting this to be, just be melting off my face.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Crumbling. We'll see how it holds up.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  We'll see how it holds up. Uh, and we also.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  On.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Tell you about cognition. We're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Um, yes. Did you want to go to Apple or did you want to go somewhere else?

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's go to Microsoft.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Microsoft. Okay.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  What's your Microsoft take? Top line beat, earnings beat, stock traded down, uh, three to 4% after hours. It's recovered quite a bit since then. I said, I was surprised to see Microsoft trade down following earnings, but it's recovered since Satya, in my view, has already gotten a lot more credit for the company's opportunities in AI than Amazon and even Google. People have known about Google's strengths, but the big questions around search have held back performance to date. Microsoft hasn't really had any narratives holding it back, but I don't think people give them enough credit for the OpenAI deal. If you believe Gen AI is a sustaining innovation and will transform knowledge work, there is not a company in the world that is better positioned from a product and a distribution standpoint. Again, we talked about this with Satya on Tuesday.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Um, there are so many companies that are trying to build Excel plus an agent on top of it.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  Or agents for Excel.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  Which is exactly what Microsoft is also doing with Excel with Copilot, right? And, uh, they're model agnostic. They're going to be able to let, you know, bring in any, any kind of intelligence that they want. And so, um, anyways, I, I think, uh, you know, they continue to be super well positioned. It's also fascinating because they have access to OpenAI's IP.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI wants to be a big player in, in, uh, in the workplace, right? You can imagine them getting into a bunch of other applications there. And so it'll be that competitive dynamic is just something that we're going to be watching for a long time.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw some, I saw some haters on the timeline talking about, uh, uh, Microsoft launched a research product. And the, in the, in the hot take was like, Microsoft's late to launch this and it's somehow worse. Like they couldn't even just copy exactly. And I was, and I was thinking like, there, there is something real about like, when a big company launches one of those features, like, they typically have to move a little bit slower because maybe they're regulated by Europe. They're all, they're international. They have, you know, they obey all the different rules around accessibility. And they have, they have like 25, they might be like SOC two compliant plus ITAR compliant plus, you know, 25 other compliant

• 15:17John Coogan?

  levels that just slow down, like how fast you can move and how many things you can break. But that is very different. Like as an early adopter, it's very different to look at a new product from a, you know, what 40, 50 year old, uh, you know, tech giant and say like, yeah, I, I prefer like the, the, the cutting edge, um, product, um, as opposed to like what actually plays out in the market. Like Slack was very much the same thing where Slack was the product that, um, was so much better than the alternatives. Like if you, I don't know if you ever used like workplace chat pre Slack, but it was

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  I was basically born on Slack.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Okay. You were born on Slack, but, but Slack really was like a delightful, like, you know how there's, there's just those companies that come out and you're like, oh, uh, like, like this company takes design seriously. This company is a power user of Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. But, but you know how you get that vibe and then you get the other vibe where it's like, oh, this company is owned by private equity and they don't really care.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  John, I gotta give you the, the chat's giving you a shout out. I never knew John was so ripped. Been some other comments.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  Pull, pull, put it up, put them up, John. There you go.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Let's go. Ilya, AGI has been achieved. Let's go.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  Ben Gilbert in the chat. You guys are saying I love it.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Ben. Thank you so much for stopping by. You're an absolute legend. We couldn't do this show without you. Massive inspiring, everything that they've done over at Acquire.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  If you've been living under your data center, get over to acquire.fm, subscribe.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into Meta. Let's talk about Meta.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Top line beat, earnings miss.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Massiveness, like a $12 billion. People are not talking enough about what happened. Like, it is crazy that you could be operating such a big company and just be like, oops, $10 billion. And it's not like.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  I mean, think of how they've been spending.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is crazy.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  This seems like the quarter. You know, this is like, you know, I'm sure Meta and the executive team, it's like after a weekend bender checking like your credit card statement.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's like, it's like you have an idea maybe of what you spent.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  But it's way beyond that.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Okay, wait. So Tyler, can you look up what the actual tax charge was? Because I don't think it was about Scale AI, which everyone, a lot of people would say, oh, that was a lot of money to pay for something, maybe it's an aqua hire, right? Or like the $3 billion that maybe Zuck just paid for like one AI researcher, like he's been on the spree. I think this is a separate $10 billion charge.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Which is.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  Came out of nowhere.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  I like, I like the, I like the metaphor of like, you're just on a bender and you're just like, oh, my credit card bill is so huge this month. What happened?

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so are you talking about the $15 billion tax charge?

• 18:14John Coogan?

  It's five, it's five more than I thought. I thought it was 10.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was roughly, I think it was 14 point something.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  14?

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  Came out of nowhere.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Uh, it was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, but we'll.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay, uh, yes. So, okay, so apparently, um, it was a one-time tax charge.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Related to the big beautiful bill act.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  What?

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  I'll read into this more, but it's not the

• 18:35John Coogan?

  It has nothing to do with researchers, it has nothing to do with VR.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  In the X chat says, from what I read, they missed only because of the tax prepayment, which is only on paper, not actually cash. And they said it would save them on tax costs over time.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, thank you Noah, that's very helpful. Yeah, okay, okay. So they're changing the amount of, like how they're accounting for these taxes. And so they took the hit to earnings. But is that, is that why is the stock traded down 10%? Is it specifically because of this one-time tax charge? Like, I don't know that it is. I think it might be more-

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  I think it could be a little bit of vibes in the mix.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  I liked your vibe-based analysis.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so your take was rough to be completely rebuilding in AI while simultaneously still finding footing in hardware. Core business rips, though. My take in the newsletter was the timeline loves the core meta-business, but doesn't have a lot of faith in Zuck. I think that sounds harsh, but I think that is generally, generally real.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  People thought Bezos, who had a similar, similar level of control over Amazon, was crazy to spend like he did building AWS, and he was ultimately completely vindicated. People thought Mark was crazy going all in on the metaverse and VR. And so far, so far that part of the business like has not shown any signs of, of, of being ROI positive, right?

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, obviously, they're still shipping, they're, the new Meta Ray-Bans are like the, the, the leading publicly available pair of, of, of glasses.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  It just feels like the, the win case there is like a, it's like an AirPods-sized business, right?

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Like, it, it, it's hard to get to, okay, yes, this is gonna be as big as even Waymo. I don't know.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't know. I, I, I think that if you actually win that category, it could be an iPhone-sized business.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  So I'm not saying that it's, I'm not saying that he shouldn't be investing there. But I don't think the market believes that he's gonna win that category yet.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Which is fascinating, because what, what, what company do you think is in the lead in terms of VR and AR right now? Rank them. Who do you think is?

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think the, I think the challenge is when products are not at the level where people are saying, I love this, I use this all the time, I use this every day, I can't live without it. You don't get credit for being at the leading edge.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, people aren't saying that yet.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, people expect Apple to come over the top and do, you know.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  They tried and they didn't, didn't pencil.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  I know, but now they're working on a, on a pair of glasses and it's going to integrate with your iPhone. It's going to integrate with iMessage and like, that's going to be a real competitive, you know, challenge for Meta.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no, it's a really good, it's a really good argument. It's really.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  Um, so at the same time, giving Meta some credit, uh, Reels is now a $50 billion revenue run rate.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's hit the, hit the gong for the Reels team. Threads is also, where is our, where is our mallet? Ilya Gong hit, incoming, the moment you've been waiting for.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  Clean, clean. Uh, moving on, the market reacted positively to Scale AI acquisition and hiring spree, but I think investors have the right to be concerned about Meta's vision and ability to generate revenue from their Gen AI efforts, either directly or indirectly anytime soon. I'm still shocked they released Meta Vibes, uh, knowing how much scrutiny their first release as a new team would get.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  The product showed, uh, a complete lack of vision, in my opinion, and just product quality when compared to Sora, which launched about a week later. So it felt like they knew Sora was coming, they wanted to be first to market with an AI native social feed, and they did not bring.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  That they just completely burned the ships on the Meta AI app. Like, cause that app was originally, the reason that I have it on my phone is because I got Meta Ray Bans. And so when I got Meta Ray Bans, I had to get the Meta app to use the Ray Bans. Then it turned into the Meta AI app and it was like, hey, do you want to use this as an LLM? And I was like, I'm basically good on that front, but thanks. And then they, and then they were like, well, do you want some AI video? Would you like some slop in this drop? Which is just like, it is a wild canvas to be iterating on so quickly. They used to launch different apps every single time, but not, not this time. I don't know. The Metavib needs to turn. I still like the mid journey model. I think it is beautiful. I think, I think there is something cool to be done with that.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  I'm not judging the, the outputs.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  It needs more UI.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  But the big problem is that you couldn't as a user consistently generate beautiful things.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Whereas with Sora, it's not like they were necessarily beautiful, but at least they were entertaining.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  And that's what kicked off that viral flywheel. So the, the main thing is like, for Microsoft, Google and Amazon, it's a lot more clear what winning in AI actually looks like. I think Meta is going to have to clarify what the win state looks like, beyond just saying we're building personal superintelligence because investors are smart enough to know that that like personal superintelligence doesn't mean a lot today when the business today is focused on monetizing the world's attention.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  And so I expect them at some point to have to kind of clarify what their, what their plans are.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tesla beat earnings, missed, beat on revenue, missed on earnings. The stock reaction was down about 4% after hours. You reposted the Bucho Capital bloke post. I'm always so confused when Tesla goes down on earnings as business performance is completely irrelevant to the price of the stock. And it has been, it has been more of a vibes based stock for a while. I had a more by the book analysis. I said, if Elon goes straight shot to the full self-driving equivalent for humanoid robots, basically no tell operation, the project should be years behind what's going on with 1X, I would imagine, just like the Waymo dynamic. Like Waymo was able to launch a lot sooner because they could always fall back on, hey, there's a human tell operating

• 24:27John Coogan?

  this thing. So you can trust us on the city streets. And they've had a pretty good track record because of that. Tesla's going full moon shot, full send, but it, but it's going to take a little bit longer. Like no one debates the fact that like Tesla's robot taxi fleet is a year or two behind Waymo's right now. Now, the whole, the Tesla bull hope is that you come from behind and start compounding because you have just structurally better costs, way more manufacturing, more of a flywheel on the actual data and the training. There's a lot of options. And I said they also need to build a full sized SUV.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  You're you can't wait for that.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  I just think it's so crazy not to build a full-size SUV in America. Like, Americans love full-size SUVs. And you see them, it's like, I mean, it's as crazy as not being in the truck market for as long as they want.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting that Tesla's been so dependent on the luxury sedan for its entire history, even though the luxury sedan has like completely fallen off in popularity. I saw some data on Lexus's sales. Lexus used to sell one of the most popular like luxury SUVs. And they sell like either like single-digit thousands now of them a year. So it's like that category has gotten just killed by the SUV. And Tesla, of course, has the X and the Y, but it's not exactly what you're, if they were to ship like the Cybertruck SUV, I think that would sell significantly better than the Cybertruck.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder if they'll ever do multiple brands. It's so normal at every other car company, but I see no reason why Tesla would ever do it.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Like Lexus is what Toyota's upmarket brand, right?

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Isn't that the linkage?

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  I doubt Elon, whatever.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  I mean, Plaid was sort of like the trim level.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  I wonder if they'd ever do a different trim level.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Plaid, Plaid plus, like, what is the equivalent of like the Maybach of Tesla? If Plaid is their AMG, right?

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't think he cares about.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  They have that in China. They have like a Maybach-ified model, Model X or Model, Model S. That's like chauffeur, where the seats, the front seats are pushed forward, basically. I have other Elon Musk news, but first let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust, continuously Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Elon Musk on data centers in orbit. SpaceX will be doing this. He said he's gonna do data centers in space.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Didn't we say this out loud yesterday with someone? I don't know if it was on the show or not, but.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  It just seems obviously, if there is an opportunity.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  If it's a thing and it's big, they're gonna.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  My, you know.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  It's easy to be bullish on space right now.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  But if you're investing in different categories, you have to imagine that if there are adjacent opportunities besides Starlink for SpaceX to do.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  They will, they will, they will enter them if they are large enough categories. And so, again, that's a.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  What does that mean for Star Cloud?

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I can still think, I, I can still imagine them over time figuring out like niche, more niche use cases, but you know, building the, building the satellite cloud, I think was something that Elon is not going to just, you know, happily hand over to someone else.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, uh, let's read through a little bit of this from Ars Technica. An artificial intelligence, as artificial intelligence drives the need for vastly more computing, storage and processing power, computing storage, what's that mean? Interest in space-based data centers has spiked, although several company, although several startup companies such as Star Cloud have begun to address the problem, address the problem, they haven't, they're, they're like identifying the problem, maybe, maybe prototyping, um, this is very oddly worded, um, I'm like struggling to read this. The idea has also attracted the interest of tech barons.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  In May, it emerged that former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity, Relativity Space due to his interest in space-based data centers. That's fascinating. I know that Relativity was, was not doing well with kind of the V1 strategy and there was this turnaround project and Eric Schmidt came in and was, uh, I think paying a ton to keep the business going and really investing. I had no idea that that was his thesis. Um, that's fascinating. Uh, then earlier this month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that gigawatt scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years. That's big. Uh, now Elon Musk, who's SpaceX owns and operates significantly more space-based infrastructure

• 29:26John Coogan?

  than any other company or country in the world, uh, has also expressed interest in technology. After Ars wrote a story about the potential of autonomous assembly to construct large data centers in space, Musk responded on X by saying that Starlink satellites could be used for this purpose. Simply scaling up Starlink V3 satellites, which have high-speed laser links, would work, he said on the social media site X. SpaceX will be doing this. Very interesting. Yeah, I think it makes sense. The question is just like, yeah, what is the actual timeline for any of this? This, I mean, no one really expected Starlink to ramp as fast as it did, and then it just like kind of worked. But if there is, I don't

• 30:09John Coogan?

  know, a bunch of, if there is a lot of, like, actual fundamental, like foundational science around like heat dissipation that needs to be done, that might be something that a little bit bottlenecked. But at the same team, at the same time, I kind of like, I would kind of bet on the SpaceX team to figure that stuff out, since they already do a ton of heat dissipation and material science, just on.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also just fascinating to look at the space industry versus the automotive industry. Like, the automotive industry is the most brutally competitive, challenging business, where Elon is having to compete with every car manufacturer in the world. Obviously, there's export, import, controls in automotive. But in space, it's like, you know, you can imagine that being not a perfect monopoly, but certainly having every possible advantage in order to dominate in that category when the time is right. Should we talk about Apple before we, before we continue?

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  Apple beat top line, beat on bottom line. China sales declined year over year. If you've been paying any attention to Apple, you know that their China business is slowly going away. iPhone revenue, they missed just, just by $300 million. Not, not.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  50 billion, or 49 billion this quarter.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, iPhone revenue was 49 billion versus 49.33 estimate. Stock is relatively flat since then.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, so this is the real, like, this is the real bombshell in their strategy. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a third-party analyst firm, said it observed great interest in the Pro and Pro Max models, while the new iPhone 17 Air model showed virtually no sign of traction. So.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  I saw my first iPhone Air in the wild yesterday.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Didn't know you saw that one get smashed. Tell that story.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Which one? Oh, oh, this, this was, this was genuinely like the most I, I, I posted about this. But during, uh, during LA Tech Week, uh, uh, we had a dinner.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Why'd you put it in quotes? It was LA Tech Week.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, there wasn't, I mean.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  It really wasn't LA Tech Week event. You're like, Los Angeles.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  Los Angeles Technology Week. Um, no, so we, we, uh, had dinner with some, some folks and, um, uh, there was, there was a founder there from Venice.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  From Venice.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  And he was saying that the iPhone Air is the strongest iPhone ever made and that, uh, he challenged anybody at the dinner. There was like 20 people.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Do you remember Bend Gate? Do you remember the I, what, what, do you remember Bend Gate, Tyler? It was like the iPhone five or something. There was.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I was pretty young.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. You're probably before your time, but, uh, but there was a time when the iPhone launched and you could just bend it. And it was like, a lot of phones were getting bent. So this guy is going to you and, and he, and, and he's going around and saying that no one can bend this phone, right? It was the strongest.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  No, no. He, he said, nobody can break this phone.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  No one can break it.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  This phone is absolutely unbreakable.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Unbreakable.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  They've tested it internally. You cannot break it. It is the strongest iPhone ever. He compared it to every other iPhone, even the, even the titanium iPhone.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  And so he was, he was bending it like this, going crazy. And he challenged anybody at the dinner to say, who wants to try to break this phone? And a Gundo founder, I'm leaving both of them unnamed, a Gundo founder.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  We got Gabriel from OpenAI in the chat. Good luck, man. You're building cameos over there, but you're going to compete with us.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  We're doing it the old fashioned way.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're doing it the old fashioned way. It just took us three hours sitting here in makeup.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  What do you mean three hours? It was like more like four hours.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  It was like four hours. Uh, so Gabriel, you sped that up just a little bit, but you know, I think, I think we're sticking with this for the, for the meantime.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So anyways, this founder challenges the entire, uh, group at dinner. And he, can anybody break this phone? The Gundo founder raises his hand, takes the phone and like tries for a second and just snaps it basically.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Just completely shattered.

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  Like completely broken, won't even, won't even turn on. And the Venice founder is sitting there saying like, like he was like in disbelief. Like every, the whole room just went completely quiet and he was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna email Tim Cook about this.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Emailing Tim Cook, what is he gonna do? You're not supposed to smash your phone.

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, on Apple, John, your take, you said sort of the inverse meta core business, not at risk due to AI, but not investing aggressively. Consumers seem happy to just open an LLM app. Good take. I said, Apple's trading at 40 times P E with very low growth. This feels steep, even if I don't think they're threatened by AI in the near term. And then I highlighted a quote from Bernard Arnault from LVMH. He said, I don't know if in 20 years' time, people will be using iPhones, but I do know they will be drinking Dom Perignon.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  It's a good one. And hopefully they'll be using graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. In other news.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  We should close it out with Nvidia, just to finish this little earnings wrap up. Basically, our, John, your take was on top of the world, but is that head, is the head that wears the crown heavy? Core AI factory build out going flawlessly, but unclear why Nvidia is pushing data centers in space. Humanoids, quantum computing, mumbo jumbo.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Maybe it's real.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  Maybe just word of the same old AI story? I said, I don't think Jensen would be just chugging beers on camera in Korea. If he was having a rough one. So we'll see how it nets out there. Earnings are not until November.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  What's wrong with chugging some beers? Yeah, what's wrong with chugging some beers? Especially, I mean, you gotta, like, he is superlative at this point. I, I believe just quantitatively, he is the most value creative founder CEO in human history. Like no founder CEO has created 5 trillion. I mean, like, no one's created 5 trillion in any, in any capacity, whether in, in the CEO seat or, or not. Because like with a, with a Microsoft or with a, or with an Apple, you have to start having the conversation when you're having the goat debate on how much credit do you give to Tim Cook for market cap creation? How much credit do you give to Steve Jobs, right?

• 36:35John Coogan?

  And same thing with Satya Nadella and Bill Gates. Like obviously Satya has, has taken Microsoft from 300 billion to 4 trillion.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Does that mean that he's 10 times better than the founders that started the company in the GOAT debate of value creation? Like, he did have a big, he had a lot of great shoulders to stand on.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  It's not entirely about number go up.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. But with Jensen, you don't even have to have that debate because he's been the founder CEO the whole time. And so, he is, he deserves a beer. Let the man have a couple beers with his boys in South Korea. He's been on an absolute

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  A couple more posts here. Jay Boltard says, "I'm sorry, but no company generating the cash meta is with the margins it has should ever be raising money." Of course, they announced another bond sale yesterday morning to fund their build out. Jay Boltard said, "Absolutely pathetic. Maybe just spend a little less and don't pay every AI scientist like their Shohei Ohtani."

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want to understand more about the private credit dynamic here because I believe that they're, like, a good CFO would tell you that if you're buying land, you should get a mortgage because it can be secured. And there's just, there's just some, like, cost of capital math that you should do, and it would actually be irresponsible. Like, if they were saying, "Hey, we're going to build a new data center. We need to buy some land. We need to buy a building, buy a bunch of GPUs." And they're like, "And guess what? We're not going to use debt." Like, that's like, that's like paying off your mortgage, basically. And it's like, okay, yeah, you can pay off your mortgage. And you can be like, "I'm one of those guys that doesn't have a mortgage." And it's like, congratulations, but you're probably not using capital efficiently.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  And so, when I hear that they're setting up a big data center and they're raising debt for that particular deal, I don't have, like, red flags flying off in my mind. But I don't know. This, this, this Boltard guy does.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  SemiAnalysis had a post here quoting Sundar. Sundar said, "Over the past 12 months, nearly 150 Google Cloud customers each processed approximately 1 trillion tokens with our models for a wide range of applications." For example, WPP is creating campaigns with up to 70% efficiency gains. Swarovski has increased email open rates by 17%. Let's give it up for increasing email open rates and accelerated campaign localization by 10x. Semi Analysis says AI is not a bubble. Enterprise AI is very strong. Nearly 150 enterprises each process 1 trillion tokens with Gemini models for a wide range of apps.

• 39:18Jordi Hays?

  And then they say, wait, that's less than a million bucks per year per enterprise or 150 million of annual revenue, i.e. 0.3% of GCP annual revenue.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  The fact that Google leads a token count instead of revenue growth tells you everything. If enterprise AI was actually strong, those 150 companies would be spending 10x more. I don't know about that because when you're a big company, like you don't want to break out like more GAAP metrics, non-GAAP metrics than you absolutely have to. Like, because if you develop some monster of a business, like the AWS IPO story, the whole idea that Amazon had this amazing business and was like, oh yeah, like just include that in everything else. Like definitely don't let everyone know. And Satya told this to us on the show was he was like, when AWS had to disclose what was going on over there, it was the best day for us because everyone looked at our business and we're like, they got the same thing going on over there.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  They got a monster of a business cooking. And so the question of like how Google positions this, like do they want to share dollars? But I don't know, I just wonder, I wonder what the shape of of GCP adoption is. If it's, if it's nearly 150 Google Cloud customers each processed 1 trillion. I wonder like how narrow that slice is.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, if Sundar had come out and says, we got enterprise AI to 150 million dollar run rate. Everyone would be like.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  But it sounds really good when you say one trillion.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that is a weird, weird way to frame it. I don't know. Uh, I mean, th- th- th- this is all, this is all so weird because it's like, okay, so then what's actually happening in the core business? Because they, they, they crushed earnings. They did, they did great. And it's like,

• 41:11Speaker 02

  But it is still.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Are we just in this world, weird world where everyone, where every business is like, yeah, I totally want, like, I'll take one million dollars of tokens. Uh, but then I also need seventy-five million dollars more of just traditional databases. Is that what's going on? Like, like, what's actually driving the growth if not the token generation? Uh, there might just be something longer tail going on here, too. There, this might just be like this slice of this hundred and fifty enterprises that's, that's actually, you know, that only makes up, I don't know. The big question is just what percentage of GCP annual revenue is AI? Is Gen AI? Like, we've seen that the CapEx at Meta, they have Core AI, they have Gen AI.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Like, every, everyone wants to track that now about what, what workload is happening. Sometimes the hyperscalers don't know. Because they just said, look, I just rented you a bunch of GPUs. Are you inferencing a recommendation algorithm on it? Are you playing video games on it? Are you generating tokens on it? We actually don't know because we respect your privacy and you can do whatever you want with it. So all we can tell the market is like, hey, we, we sold a lot of GPU hours.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  And, and, and it's all, it's all masked. Uh, anyway, uh, Tyler, what, what you got?

• 42:28Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, a trillion is just like not a lot at all.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  It's just not a lot.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Because OpenAI is doing like, on, just on the API, like something around like two fifty trillion a month. So compared to that, I mean, if it's a trillion over the past like year, even if it's a hundred fifty, I mean, that's like, that's pretty bad.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Each 150 trillion tokens and you said.

• 42:50Karri Saarinen?

  Openai is doing like 260.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  I actually can't keep these numbers straight anymore. Like there's, it's just like, everything is like, nothing's an apples to apples. And I think that's very much intentional. I think that you don't want to be easily comped across anything. That's why everyone just focuses on valuation and then, and then revenue and revenue scale.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Dylan Patel says, so many people hated on us for the AWS acceleration thesis a couple of months ago. And we were right, of course, only we can do these calls due to our deep knowledge and insights with core research, data center accelerator and tokenomics models. Amazon, and they does the A M Z N with, and just dropped sales at semi analysis.com. So I expect semi analysis to be printing the next.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Legendary chart.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  24 hours. This was crazy. I wasn't sure if this was fake news or not, but on the Coinbase earnings call yesterday. Brian Armstrong.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Went, there was a prediction market that people were betting on which words he would say during the, during the earnings call. And he waited until the end and he just read through and read off every single word that he had missed. He says, you know, I just wanted to add the words in here, Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain staking and web three, to make sure we get those all in before the end of the call. So completely trolling. We've had that a few times during interviews.

• 44:14Karri Saarinen?

  Because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call. And I just want to, you know, add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking and web three.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  It's actually crazy that he hadn't gotten to Bitcoin until then. Like, why, like, it really tells you a lot about how mature the Coinbase business is that you can get to the end of your Q3 2025 earnings call without mentioning Bitcoin. Which was like, the entire reason the business exists, but the business has grown so much that there's a lot else going on.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  It's possible that he said it and he just didn't remember.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, but, but it is, it is funny that, that he's just.

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, one, one thing is, is we've had prediction markets created around different interviews we've done. And it is wildly distracting when I'm looking at the chat and people are like, say this word.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Say that word again.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  Say it three more times.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  It's a very weird, postmodern, hyper techno-capital accelerationist like aesthetic to be like.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  People are gambling on the words that you're saying on a live stream. It's very, very weird. Uh, I don't know what his, I would love to know Brian's honest take on like how he feels about that. Like, there's a little bit of just, the market is going to exist. It's gonna be a thing. And so he, by doing this, he's kind of trolling the market to just say, "Hey, you're never gonna be able to reliably bet on this market because you never know what I'm gonna do." Uh, which is one way to interact with it, as opposed to being like, "Hey, guys, I know that everyone has a prediction market up on what I'm gonna say, and so please don't do that." It's like, no, just like go create chaos and then everyone will just know that it's a meme and chaos.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's gonna just drive more attention to the next earnings call because people are gonna be like, "Oh, is he gonna, oh, I'll just bet yes on everything in case he does that again."

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  The odds might be at like 95% for every word. And then he just says like, he just doesn't mention it at all.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  And then everything, you know.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  It certainly, it certainly kind of cements him as, uh, as just a very in-the-culture CEO and a very, a very like online founder, which I think is positive. Um, we are of course partner with Polymarket as a prediction market. Uh, we're usually tracking the largest companies on there. Largest company at the end of 2025, Nvidia has been predicted, of course, and even going into next year. Uh, it's like 99% now. I mean, they're a trillion above everyone else. There, it was a horse race, though.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was really close mid-summer.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  At one point.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the, the market caps were, were eclipsing each other and they were going back and forth. And, and at one point.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, June 1st, Microsoft and, and Nvidia were both at 37% exactly.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  It's been a pretty crazy, it's been a crazy, pretty crazy year because of the, the tariffs and what, and the AI narrative and the deep-seek moment. Uh, the, the horse race has changed a few times and Microsoft has been in the lead. Apple's been in the lead, but Nvidia is running away with it. And that deserves a beer with your boys in South Korea. And so that's what he's been up to.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Did you fully understand, uh, there's a article here, "Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost 11 and a half billion last quarter."

• 47:31John Coogan?

  That seems like in line with what we've been. Kind of assuming it's like it's it's a massive loss making business. I don't know that we'd heard that they were on like a forty billion loss run rate. But that kind of winds up with the amount of money that they've been raising.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Maybe Intel?

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Like you, you, you mean the like the most, the biggest cap.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Who's losing, who's losing more money than OpenAI?

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Do you count CapEx as losing money? Because I, I would, I would almost, I would almost certainly assume that these are not losses. These are investments. So like if, so like if I raise ten million dollars for my startup and then I'm like, okay, uh, I'm gonna buy of office building for five million dollars. Like that's not negative five million earnings. That is negative five million cash flow. I've lost five million cash and I don't have liquid cash anymore. And so I would assume that a lot of OpenAI's losses are actually investments in CapEx one way or another. But they're also, they're also probably making, losing.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Stock based comp is factored into this as well.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that's also in many cases a non cash expense. And so still important to track, still significant, but all of this stuff, it's like I, I'm kind of in like a wait and see until the, until the S one drops, until we can actually get data. Do you have any intel?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So apparently this is, um, this is double what they've like, what has previously been reported. So that I think before there was a report that said,

• 49:10Speaker 02

  the first half of 2025, they were going to do 3.5 in losses. So this is basically double that. But even then it's still, I don't think this is very surprising at all.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  It's so hard to track how much money they're actually raising because they'll, they'll raise for a particular deal, they'll raise for Stargate. There'll be a secondary transaction. It's very hard to understand like how much cash is actually going from investors onto OpenAI's like for profit balance sheet for, that is, that is like available to burn. And then, once you have the cash, like, I think everyone's fine with the idea of Sam Altman burning money for 12 to 18 months and going out and raise more. Like, that's not crazy when you're growing your business, especially in a new category.

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Palantir sues former employees for stealing company secrets. Company alleges pair violated non-competes to create copycat AI firm.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  They've the two employees, they're accusing them of stealing confidential data to build a rival company called Percepta backed by general catalyst.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  I would not want to steal from Palantir.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  Bad idea.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  That seems like one of the worst companies to steal from.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  They will find you.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  And they will kill you.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  About that, but it is a is a wild thing.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you think about a company that's gonna have like, you know, things pretty locked down.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Their whole their whole shtick is going what's going on.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  That if I remember, I read the article yesterday, but I believe they they tracked that the employee had slacked themselves a document that they then opened on their phone and like presumably, you know, saved. So we'll see how this nets out. They say that taking access to Palantir's crown jewels such as source code and customer workflows to create what it called a copycat platform. So they're just trying to block them from using the data and to force the return of stolen materials.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  One of the comments says, never, never go against a company that sued the government and won.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Shom Sankar was on the.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  Ross Douthat.

• 51:19John Coogan?

  Ross Douthat. It was really good. I don't know how much you listen to, but he, he, it's funny because they open with the classic question of, of like, what does Palantir actually do? And I don't know, like, why are people so confused by that question? It's so crazy to me. It's like, and Shom explains it extremely well. He's just like, like, you have data, we help you understand your data, we help you understand what's going on there. You know, it's, it's, he's, he's like, it's a data analytics firm, sir.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  It's the same other thing when when Trey Stevens went on Sean Ryan.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Like, the questions were like, almost the same exact questions, like, what does Palantir do? Like, and then.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  You read the comments and then everyone's like, this is the Antichrist.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, people go crazy, crazy, crazy. And I think it's, I, like, Shom, Shom had this great example of like, when you want to make a thing, like, if you're, if you're running a manufacturing plant, you will have a, a system for tracking, like. If you're trying to make like yerba mate, you will have a system that stores like the specifications of the can, what type of ink you're using here, the, the size of the can, the shape, what materials, how the, how this gets printed, like that will all be managed in a, in a particular software system. Then how, how you're actually making the cans will be like, oh, okay, I'm producing 25 cans a second or whatever. That will be tracked in a different system. Then you might

• 52:49John Coogan?

  have a CRM to sell. Who do I sell these cans to? I'm selling them, you know, every, every month Jordy buys a bunch. So I have a CRM that tracks you. And he's just describing like, like the different enterprise software tooling sets like CRM, CMS, warehouse management system, inventory management system. He's just describing those and saying, and explaining how Palantir can tie them all together and how Palantir can build them. And sometimes you need custom ones for specific, uh, for specific industries.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's check in with, let's check in with the Palantir bowls.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Anyway, yes. What is the, what do the Palantir bowls say?

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  The Palantir bowls will get exhausted at these levels.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  Full send.

• 53:31John Coogan?

  I like the guy doing.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  We need to, our, our team workout should look like that.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  We don't break nearly enough of a sweat compared to this. This is so sick. Let's go. Look at this.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Bro, backflips?

• 53:42John Coogan?

  I like that guy who's just like, who's just like racing it like it's a chariot or like it's a horse race. That's hilarious. Yeah. This also seems slightly sped up maybe. What do we think? Do you think this is like 1.1X?

• 53:55Jordi Hays?

  This slowed down.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Oh, you think it slowed down? Uh, get on julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data, get expert level insights in seconds. Um, where, where to next? We got the mansion section. There's a bunch of stuff we can go through. Um, did you hear that the Hamptons market is making an epic comeback? Let's go. Finally.

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  The moment.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  Home sales of $10 million or more houses are surging on the East End, even topping the COVID surge in the Hampton, New York's affluent beach vacation destination. The luxury real estate market has come roaring back. Have you, have you ever been to the Hamptons?

• 54:40John Coogan?

  I still think I've never been.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  I actually, I actually.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Bobby Cosmic was worried about.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  Maybe as a kid, but not as an adult.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  The number of home sales above $10 million on Long Island's East End has surged to unprecedented levels, even topping the area's pandemic boom. The uptick comes even as Florida and other locales have replaced New York City as a primary home for many billionaires. The Hamptons is, for a lack of a better term, kicking ass at the very high end of the market. Wow, uncensored swear word in the journal. Absolute dogs over there in the.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 55:16John Coogan?

  Writers. Yeah. I mean.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Out of control.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Out of control.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  We would never.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  We gotta get this under control. No, I think, I think that's not that bad of a word. ASs. The high-end Hamptons market was in the doldrums before COVID. Home sales of 10 million or more plummeted from 58 in 2015 to 30 in 2019 as the ritzy area faced increased competition from areas such as Nantucket or Hudson Valley. And so there are some stories here to the manor born.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  I've been working at my land thesis.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think that it's probably the most underrated asset class right now.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Well, don't, don't spell the alpha.

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I'm, I'm down to, I'm down to share the alpha with, with.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  All the alphas are gonna get bit away, right?

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, no, I just think throughout, you know, all human history, people were like, how do I acquire land?

• 56:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  And then at some point or another, people just stopped, right? It became just about getting the home.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  And not thinking about land. So.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Where? Where do you want land? Do you want to buy Fifth Avenue to, to, uh?

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  I just want to buy up land in the area that I love the most, which.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  American jurisdiction?

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Of course, America.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  California?

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Of course, California.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  So, Southern California.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  I'll never give up on California.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  I still think there's, I still think there's huge alpha in just acquiring massive swaths of Alaskan land.

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  I still think that.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  You've been working this one out for a while.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I think it's massively underrated because if, if, uh, if global warming is real and unstoppable and we can't fight the force of global warming, well, then temperatures will rise and Alaska will be the last beachfront property. It'll be balmy. It'll be amazing. Everything else will be a desert, but Alaska will be nice and temperate and that's where you'll want to be.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  We'll see.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  And if we cure global warming, if we stop global warming, if we wind up figuring out how to manipulate the environment, we, we, we become, we harness the.

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  You can manipulate time.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, manipulating time, manipulating the weather. Uh, if Augustus is successful, if geoengineering is successful, well, then it's not going to be cold up there because you'll just be able to transform it into a lush, uh, a lush environment.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  Tropical Alaska.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Seventy-two and sunny all day. So I think in either, in either scenario, no matter where you land on, um, on global warming, is it unstoppable? Is it preventable? Uh, Alaska looks great in that world. What do you think?

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever resolve your beef with the Alaskans?

• 57:52John Coogan?

  No.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  I thought they didn't.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  I had locked, I, so I posted on X, actually it was Twitter back then, like four years ago, I posted, um, like, we gotta go to Alaska, we gotta build some condominiums, we gotta build some strip malls, we gotta build some skyscrapers. Uh, it's too, it's too nice up there. Uh, and I was basically like, we're gonna, we're, all the tech people, all the, all my tech friends, we're all gonna go to Alaska and the Alaskans did not like this.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Not at all.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  And they said, stay out of Alaska, you tech boy. Uh, and I was getting, I was getting attacked both the left and the right.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  You kind of listened to.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  I did. I, in fact, I did not invade Alaska. But I was getting lots of DMs from Alaskans who are, you know, gun-totin', good old boy Americans.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Do not step foot.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Do not, you wouldn't last a day up here. You're not tough enough for the Alaskan wilderness. And then I was also getting canceled by the left Alaskans who are like, this is my indigenous homeland, you can't come here, that type of thing. And so I was getting it from both sides. I wound up locking my account because the post went majorly viral in Alaskan, like, Twitter, Alaska Twitter. Of course, I was joking around, but the internet doesn't care about that.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  Twitter is such a small place already. Imagine how small Alaska Twitter is. There's like six posters up there, regional posters.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  But this is, this is the lesson for folks who, who post and are worried about getting canceled. Not that you should go out there and get canceled, but if it, if it does, if it does happen, if it usually starts by somebody quote posting you, and you can tell that, you know, you posted something, you got 100 likes, but the quote post is taking off and people are having a lot of fun quote tweeting you.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  That's when the like ratio on the original post is just abysmal.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Exactly. So if that happens, you can just bail by locking your account, which then kills the quote tweet because it doesn't show up in the quote tweet. And so no one's liking or retweeting a quote tweet with just a, this account is locked. And so it just kills the virality of the quote and the dunk. And so you stop getting dunked on, and then no one can really like DM you or, or reply to you or dig through your account. And so usually, at least in the short term, people are kind of like, ah, move it on to something else. I'm not, I'm not letting it percolate. We should talk to Lulu about how to handle cancellations when she hops on. She's, of course, seen a bunch of these. Speaking of people who should

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  be canceled, someone owns a disgusting house in Los Angeles. We gotta dig into this. The mansion section's really getting wild today. They put a curse word in here. Don't like that. They also are listing an $85 million mansion here for sale in LA, an estate with a curated collection of Assy X toys. What's going on, mansion section? Why are you getting so wild on Friday, October 31st?

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Spooky.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  It has a pleasure.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Not like them.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  A pair of Los Angeles mansions, one with a pleasure suite outfitted with a curated collection of sex toys, is hitting the market for eighty-five million dollars. The seller is British music producer Alex de Kid. He's forty-four. He spent fourteen years building one of the houses, a roughly twenty-four thousand-

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Fourteen years?

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, he started when he was thirty, I guess.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  He thinks in decades.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  He thinks in decades. In addition to the pleasure suite, the Hollywood Hills home, which de Kid called his entertainer's fortress, has eight pools-

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  -an auto elevator, and a private nightclub. In twenty-twenty, de Kid purchased a, uh, an adjacent five-bedroom home with its own pool for around seven-point-six million, property records show. He bought the roughly six-thousand-one-hundred-and-twenty-five-square-foot house with the idea of adding it to the main residence, uh, he said, but ultimately decided to use it as a guesthouse instead. De Kid bought the first property, a Spanish-style home on the, in the Bird Streets area, for around four-point-three million in twenty-eleven. The purchase came shortly after renegotiating his first publishing deal-

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Morale in the chat, Alex de Kid, he's forty-four.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Uh, his real name is Alexander J. Grant. "I basically got this house thinking it would be a six-month remodel, but after more than a year of renovating, de Kid decided to raise the house, destroying it, and start over. 'It was like making an album for me,' de Kid said. 'I got these other ideas.'" McLean, who's known for designing modern mansions, "is a madman just like me," de Kid said. The four-bedroom house has a glass elevator for cars, a pleasure suite with a Murphy bed and mirrored wall, contains antique chairs customized with patent leather, upholstery, restraints, and chains. "Oh, yo, yo." Uh, "I think we're beyond the days of it being taboo to enjoy pleasure," de Kid said.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  "I wanted a place where you could feel comfortable and intimate and explore."

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's go to the next topic.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  We're not, we're not past it. It is taboo. Tear your house down. I don't know.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Now, the mansion section is all over the place today. Shutterstock founder sells a Bridgehampton home. What a great time to get out of Shutterstock with the dawn of generative imagery. This has to be one of the hardest businesses to make.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  This is John. He's not out yet. He's still the chairman, executive chairman.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  Yes, but he's clearly sold enough to buy 57 million.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  We should have, we should have John on. I'd be interested to hear how he's.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  How, how, I mean, I'm sure they get so much traffic still.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  And I imagine they just help people generate assets based on other assets.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  I mean, the bull case is the Reddit thesis, right? Where you're licensing the data and that's, and that's actually

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  very valuable and the stock sort of pops off of that. He sold his oceanfront house in Bridgehampton, New York for 57 million, according to people familiar with the deal. He bought it for 40 million in 2014. He's listed the house. The buyer of the identity, the buyer's identity couldn't be learned. Huh. We're going to figure that out. Get to the bottom of it.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Let's see. Set on more than two acres, the modern Bridgehampton home has a gym, a game room and a media room. Interesting. Outside, there is an infinity pool. You'll love that.

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:04:06John Coogan?

  An outdoor kitchen, a fireplace and a television, a private lighted walkway that leads to the beach.

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  Sales volume in the Hamptons hit a 14-year low, but it's coming back. And the founder of Shutterstock is getting out at maybe the top, but a local boom. Very fun. What else is going on on the timeline?

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Back to the timeline in the Journal as well.

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  Back to the timeline, TurboPuffer.

• 1:04:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Search everybody. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, tenex, cheaper and extremely scalable. Continue.

• 1:04:39Jordi Hays?

  BlackRock stung by loans to businesses accused of breathtaking fraud. An entrepreneur tapped private credit funds to finance his telecom businesses. Now the lenders say he defrauded them. So, stock market news. So Vernix says we have our fourth private credit collapse in two months. And this one shows exactly why institutional lenders shouldn't be trustified to verify their own collateral. Bakim Baum-Bot ran Kerriox Capital, a New York telecom financing outfit that convinced BlackRock's HPS investment partners and BNP. Paribus to lead him 552 million. The entire deal was built on one claim. He had legitimate receivables from T-Mobile, Telstra, uh, B.

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting receivables fraud.

• 1:05:24Jordi Hays?

  Talia, Sparkle, and Taiwan Mobile backing the loans. None of it was real. Uh, Brahm bought forged contracts that appeared to be signed by representatives from these character carriers. He created fake invoices, uh, supposedly issued by these companies claiming they owed Kerriox money. Then he spoofed email addresses mimicking these carriers' real domains and sent verification emails to make the receivables look legitimate. By stacking these fabricated invoices on top of each other, he created what looked like 500 million plus in collateral. Lenders saw assets and funded the deal without catching any of it. Here's where it gets embarrassing. When HPS and BNP Paribas finally tried to verify these receivables by actually calling T-Mobile, the carrier said they had no idea what Kerriox was talking about. No

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  contracts, no, no invoices, nothing existed. One phone call would have instantly revealed the entire fraud. These are supposed to be institutional-grade lenders with world-class risk management, yet somehow they missed basic due diligence. While all this was happening, uh, Brahm bought's people were also stealing cash. Whenever payments came through the lender-controlled collection accounts, instead of applying those funds to the debt, they diverted the money offshore. So he wasn't just fabricating collateral, he was actually stealing actual cash flows in real time. Uh, lenders sued in 2020, uh, August 2025 and froze all assets. Um, then they filed, uh, for, uh, the company Kerriox filed for bankruptcy with, uh, up to 1 billion in liabilities and basically zero assets remaining. HPS

• 1:06:52Jordi Hays?

  is sitting on half a billion in losses with nothing to recover against. Um, the kicker is that BlackRock acquired HPS for 12 billion in July 2025 specifically to expand into private credit and get access to its 148 billion dollar platform. Within 90 days of closing that deal, they're holding a half a billion dollar fraud loss on receivables that HPS supposedly vetted and monitored.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  I mean, that's not that big of a deal, right?

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Half a billion.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  I mean, it's not great, but you know, it is like 5% of the deal. Like, I feel like people get deals mispriced by a couple percent every once in a while.

• 1:07:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's just, this is a big deal in the broader context of like, private credit has exploded as an asset class.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of, uh, you know, people have, uh, you know, we saw this with, uh,

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Sloppiness.

• 1:07:38Jordi Hays?

  What was that? What was the, um, AV in the chat? Large scale fraud is actually a sign of good times.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's true. Yeah.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, yeah, who, who knows? But anyways, that, that auto parts, uh, company that, that went bankrupt a while back also had a bunch of

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Private credit in the mix. And so I think people are just waiting for more and more.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  We gotta dig into that, that, that story of the satellite repossession, maybe one of the, the

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about this.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Private credit gets, gets crazy. I mean, um, there's a famous example of, uh, one, uh, one, one credit firm buying Argentinian debt and then repossessing a aircraft carrier or like, or destroyer, like a military boat. And apparently the same thing, uh, can happen in space with, with, uh, satellites. Like they are, it is possible to, uh, more or less repossess them. Uh, and so I, I think a lot of these, a lot of these deals, a lot of these, uh, a lot of these private credit deals are like, you're, you're on a knife's edge in terms of like, are you going to get, continue to get payment? Or are you going to need to get the value from the assets? Whereas in venture capital, it's just so much, it's just so much further out on the risk curve that

• 1:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  You're, you're never like,

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Or

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  How, yeah. Am I, like, I, like, a big piece of my business is, is making sure I can liquidate the Apple display monitors, you know, in the office or the Herman Miller chairs. It's like, no, that's going to be basically immaterial to your business. It's going to be the difference between, you know, like 99% of the value is going to come from 1% of the investments anyway. And then of the money you lose, you're not going to be recouping an extra 5% and making a difference.

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in some more positive news.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  Google AI Studio.

• 1:09:26Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:09:26John Coogan?

  Creating AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires the right models and APIs up for you. You can get started at AI Studio, AI dot studio slash build.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Britain over at Microsoft, uh, says, please, Mr. President, respectfully let us buy this truck.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was responding.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Wow, sixty four thousand likes on that.

• 1:09:52Jordi Hays?

  And Palmer says, working on this.

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  Working on this.

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Got another twenty thousand likes. So people want these.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  What is?

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  These little Toyota trucks.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  But what does this mean in the Palmer context? Does this mean he's going to like call the president and ask Trump to allow it? Or is he going to make a mod retro version of this car? Is Andorl gonna produce this? Like, there's, there's like twelve different ways that, that Palmer could like solve this problem of like Americans not being able to get cool trucks. Which is interesting.

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know why, I don't know if these, these trucks are blocked.

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Either blocked in the US or just you would have to import one yourself.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  But they, I mean, Neos is basically, I think Neos has basically done this. They're, they're, um, the, they have a, what do they have? Um, it's not the main Grenadier.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Jordi Hays?

  But they have, I'm pulling it up right now, the Quartermaster. Quartermaster from Grenadier looks quite a lot like this truck. Uh, but it's certainly, I think this one from Toyota, uh, internationally sells for like ten to twenty grand. Like, it's very cheap.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, people love to point out the fact that, uh, the Ford F one fifty has the same bed length as these tiny Japanese K trucks. Um, but interestingly, uh, that's just why you should always buy the Ford F two fifty Super Duty Crew Cab with the long bed. Cause if you just go for the biggest truck, then you will be bigger than, than, than the Japanese K truck. Uh, people love, people love the K trucks. They have fun with those. Uh, well, if you're starting a new truck company, you gotta get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. You gotta go to profound. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Um. Andrew Reid says, if I ran a company, my first act would be to ban hard boiled eggs in the office.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Hard boiled eggs are really an insane snack. I gotta put these in quotes because the smell is so unbelievably bad that you should be forced to eat them outside only.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it, the, it's, is it more, it's not more protein than a steak in a bag, you gotta go Chesky mode.

• 1:12:03Jordi Hays?

  Chesky.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  That's the, that, that's the way, if you wanna have, uh, if you wanna have protein on the go, uh, throw a steak in the bag and take it with you everywhere. Uh, the hard boiled eggs in the office, that seems like a, an odd choice. Um, probably a time and a place, maybe they should put.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Name one time and one place.

• 1:12:25John Coogan?

  One place would be like, you know how in offices they have like, like, well, where you can go, the, the, the smoking area. Like, I wouldn't have a problem with somebody going and if there's like a cigarette smoking area, like a back alley, and you can go into the back alley and scarf, scarves, uh, uh, hard boiled eggs, that seems reasonable. People are smoking less than glass.

• 1:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Or, yeah, go outside, put one in each, you know, uh, cheek and then go back in the office.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Chipmunk mode?

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Chipmunk, go chipmunk mode and then, and then just pretend like you don't have them.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah, I've never been, I've never been big in the, in the hard boiled egg thing. I have, however, been a big into linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Uh, our first guests of the show are in the Restream waiting room. We have Lulu Maservi and Gaby Goldberg stopping by. Whoa. Look at this.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Oh, shit.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  Hey. Hey, uh.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. Is that a wig too?

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  Great, I don't know what you're talking about, but it's great to see you guys. Uh, we were watch shopping during our, um, break between sauna and eating cheeseburgers for breakfast.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  The lore. The lore is coming through.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  We are so. Uh, hey, John, John.

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  Oh, John, very in the papers, honey. Do you wanna show, we're live, you wanna show the watch you got?

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  Oh, this? Oh, this is nothing special. This is just my AP offshore, but um So, yeah, great to finally cross that off the list. Well, what did you get, Jordy?

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  Oh, I got a the Jager Le Coute.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 1:14:11Speaker 04

  So, uh, it's in the same color, you know, TVP and green. And, um, it matches, uh, the new MyBach that I just bought. You know, that's how you pronounce it.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  MyBach.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  It's the My MyBach.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:14:27Speaker 04

  Is outside and it matches this watch. And, uh, so really sorry, guys. Let's, let's get right into the show. Johnny, ready?

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  Let's do it, Jordy. All right. You're watching TVPN.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:14:40Speaker 05

  Today is Friday, October 31st.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 1:14:48Jordi Hays?

  We even got the, you even got the horse.

• 1:14:50Speaker 05

  Technology, the fortress of silence, the capital of capital.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  They got the, they got the whole shtick. What is that?

• 1:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Is that the soundboard?

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  What is that?

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  That's the air horn.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Oh, the air horn. Okay.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the air horn. Uh, happy Halloween, guys.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Happy Halloween.

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  Happy Halloween.

• 1:15:09Speaker 04

  Oh, happy Halloween. Good to see you.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  The chat is absolutely loving this.

• 1:15:13Jordi Hays?

  How did you?

• 1:15:14Speaker 05

  Big fan of you both, Eli and Mark, so.

• 1:15:17Jordi Hays?

  How did you guys advise, uh, oh, wow, with the loafers up on the desk is crazy?

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  The level of detail here, the shtick is, uh, remarkable.

• 1:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Here, we'll, we'll fire, we'll fire back. Uh.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  It's a shtick to us, it's a lifestyle.

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  On a more serious note, what's, what's the advice to, uh, to clients on, on how to, how to approach, uh, Halloween? Any, is it, is it just ignore? It's a distraction?

• 1:15:49Speaker 04

  Nope, uh, it is, as with every other day, a chance to only lock in more.

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  We actually, yeah, we printed out some examples.

• 1:15:58John Coogan?

  Yes, take us through it, please. What else you got for us?

• 1:16:00Speaker 04

  John, you want to tell them about this one?

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  You're disappearing. What is this? This is, oh, this is Halloween, uh, the Halloween Starter Kit. I've seen this, but what is, what is in the image?

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  Okay, so this is Spirit Halloween, the Brian Armstrong set. It includes one great.

• 1:16:19Jordi Hays?

  For the whole, for the whole head, right?

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Oh, perfect, perfect. Yes, yes.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  Full head, everything below the head is strictly optional.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Why didn't we consider that? We were in, we were in makeup for three hours this morning. We could have just shaved our head with a razor in the morning.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  That would have been so much easier.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  Would have done 90% of the work for us, really.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  And I could have just, I could have just, I could have just grown a beard.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  Yes. What, what, what, what other ideas do we have here?

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 1:16:46Speaker 04

  So we've got, oh, here's, here's one that John and I like.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Printed posts. We, the, the level of detail here is amazing.

• 1:16:53Jordi Hays?

  This is insane.

• 1:16:53John Coogan?

  Continue. We might have to lose the virtual background, by the way. We're, we're like, it's really cutting in and out.

• 1:17:00Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  I can, I can see it. What is this, though?

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  It's the stressed out guy smoking.

• 1:17:06Speaker 04

  Gay Halloween. What do you mean? You're stressed out, Hayao Miyazaki. Look at this. This is a fine.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  That would be a fantastic costume. Oh, someone did it. And that's what that post is.

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  Someone's real classy. Oh, no.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Yeah, you see, you're kind of, uh, tripping in and out. It is a wild.

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  And then here, we thought this was very disrespectful of you in particular, Mark.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  You see this person, we will admonish them on the spot.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Ah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 05

  We're looking for them.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  We did like this comment from the random recruiter. This is my sleep paralysis.

• 1:17:40Jordi Hays?

  I do, I do look like a sleep paralysis demon.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  I look, I, I look a little bit scary. I don't know if I'm doing Mark, uh, justice.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, uh, it, it's, it's, uh, it's a remarkable, remarkable effort.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  We did have a

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, who do you think won?

• 1:18:00Speaker 04

  Didn't like. Um.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Do I look more like Ilya than he looks like Mark? Who win, who wins the costume contest today?

• 1:18:10Speaker 04

  I think it's the Ilya thing.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I, I was getting freaked out before the show. We had like five minutes after the costumes finished. Watching a six, eight jacked Ilya just like come around the corner is, is scary.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  It is a wild, wild experience. Yeah.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  Climbing the, yeah, it's easier to climb the mountain when you're six, eight.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's all in the eyebrows. The eyebrows are really everything because as they were working on getting the, the makeup on, um, I was like, there's no way this is going to work. Like this is not, this is going to look like Party City level. Like it's, it's fun that we did this, but this is not going to look convincing at all. And, uh, and it's definitely a crazy.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Your post, Lulu, this isn't reposting John's post. This isn't AI. This is human craftsmanship. But it's actually crazy. So like the, the, uh, crew that typically works on like, you know, normal film productions. They did, was it like 50 different layers of stuff that they were putting on our heads?

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  It was one of the most complicated.

• 1:19:13Jordi Hays?

  They're doing like, they, they did like a base layer. They did the head. They painted over our eyebrows. They glued, you know, things over the eyebrows and they put another set of eyebrows on, then they painted over that.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  There's a lot of eyebrows.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  It's going to take like probably an hour to just get, get all of this off.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  They said 45 minutes.

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:19:30Speaker 04

  I don't know why you'd want to take it off.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  Do you think, uh, do, uh, I mean, it, it obviously we're in a unique position because we get to kind of have some fun on the show. It's like almost a comedy show in many ways. Uh, do you think there's any hope to bring back April Fool's Day? In a cool way? Or will tech just like flop on that immediately?

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  It's hard to do. Someone told me a couple of years ago on April Fool's Day that actually doing it on April Fools is the cringey part.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  You're surrounded by so many people doing it badly that it's really far away from that. And they were saying, if you think of a great prank or joke.

• 1:20:11John Coogan?

  Just do it randomly.

• 1:20:13Speaker 04

  Why wait till April 1st when everybody knows?

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so there was a company that, the YC company that pissed a bunch of people off because they created an IDE that has like brain rot in the software. So you can do like gambling on steak, you can do subway surfers and like, they pissed, they, because it's on the YC website, I feel like they're putting like, you can gamble while you code. They pissed a lot of people off. And I think if they had just dropped it as like a feature, that was like a real feature that you could play around with, but wasn't like their entire brand, it would have hit a lot harder and been, and gotten a much more like funny, positive reaction versus people just being like, I hate this, blah, blah, blah, like, you know, why does this exist?

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost like taking, yeah, taking the joke like too seriously. When, when you haven't established your brand at all, then people, there's just, you're making people do so much work. I guess that's the, I guess that's the benefit of doing something on April 1st is that you're, there's a lot less work to be like, is this a joke? You can just kind of, you can kind of lean on, on, you know, the audience needs to like, like, you don't need to, you don't need to, you don't wind up in the situation where you have to explain to like 10,000 people, like, we're kidding, we're kidding, we're kidding. Like, people kind of put it together themselves and be like, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm good.

• 1:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Are drops dead as a meta, do you think? Like, it feels like launch videos and drops are both kind of over.

• 1:21:39Speaker 04

  So, so I don't think that drops are dead. I think that that specific style of drop with the like, launch video has been over, is completely saturated and overdone.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Speaker 04

  Um, I think you just have to get like, people are not going to stop announcing things and stop dropping things. You just have to find new ways to do it.

• 1:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, I meant drop in the, I meant drop in the context of like, we made this product with our branding on it, kind of thing.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  I thought Base did a really good job. Did you see Basis drop for their, uh, wasn't one billion dollar round? It was a newspaper. And I thought that was like well executed in the sense that like it had a lot of text. It had a lot of content there. Yeah, Tyler has it there. Join the charge. Uh, and I just thought like, yeah, it's like, it's not just like a T-shirt. It's like way, way deeper. Uh, and I'd say the same thing for the, for the launch videos. It's like, uh, we, we found a very unique aesthetic. Yesterday, I'm not going to share it because I think it would be a good launch video of, uh, but there, there are, there are specific formats. Where it's immediately identifiable as like, oh, that's that type of video.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  And if you use that as your launch video, you'll break through and you'll be the first person to take, you know, the like, right now it's like, the default meta is basically like, uh, after Game of Thrones, stick around for the interview with the, the actors. Like that's the aesthetic of most launch videos right now. It's like cinematic, couple of minutes, interview with a few people, kind of like mini documentary.

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  They said we couldn't build enterprise in this category. No one, they said it was impossible.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that did get a little commoditized. Uh, but yeah, yeah, fresh ideas.

• 1:23:18Speaker 04

  At one point, I said at one point that somebody should do a version of it, of those, uh, sorority dance videos.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  That's a great one. That's a great idea.

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  That's a great one. If you have someone who can do flips or if you just like all wear a matching outfit, like it has to be a company. Um, if you're like solving cancer, doing cancer, that's probably not right. But as long as the joke is not too close to home. The problem with being a slop adjacent company that jokes about slop. Is now it's so obvious that that is very close to what you're doing and now you have to defend yourself.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  Like what was that car company, um, that was gonna do that rebrand a couple of years ago?

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Jaguar.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Jaguar.

• 1:23:55Speaker 04

  Jaguar was really bad too. Yeah.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, there was another?

• 1:23:59Speaker 04

  There was another one where they joked about a rebrand. I don't even know if it was a joke. They claimed it was a joke because people hated it.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  What? I don't remember this at all.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Claiming after, getting a reaction that people don't like something and then saying, it was a joke is, is not an effective strategy. I've seen, seen that a little bit. Um, the substrate launch was crazy. That was kind of like, uh, uh, Lulu and Gaby masterclass special.

• 1:24:26Speaker 04

  Well, James is.

• 1:24:27Speaker 05

  Well, let them know. Yeah.

• 1:24:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. We'll let Gaby know they'll feel really good about it. James Proud is in heavy founder mode, by the way. He did a lot of the writing and outreach and a lot of that themselves, which obviously we think is the right way to do this. Like the founder can't just sit it out and deploy and do it all for them. But yeah, substrate, very cool company. Absolute, what do we call it? Absolute dog.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dog. That's the word.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  That's what we love to use.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  He's an absolute dog.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  Straight from Pat McAfee.

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  All right, guys.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day. Yeah, get back to the gym. You know, before we go, we should talk about Ramp. Oh, please.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  Well, we almost had a whole conversation. Before we go to the gym, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both with corporate cards, bill pay, and more. The average company saves 5% with.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Flawless ad read.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. We'll have you guys, we'll have you guys do a proper, proper guest, guest host, hosting session.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Guest hosting would be fantastic. You're clearly well.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  If we ever, yeah, any more, some morning where we're like, oh, we two hours in the gym, not enough today. We'll call you guys up and you can fill in. But looking sharp. Are you, hopefully, hopefully you guys have some other costumes for, for later this evening, trick or treating. But if not, you know, tell them to, tell them to go to tbpn.com, all the kids you run into and tell them to.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Send all the children to tbpn.com. We're gonna send out the APs.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Gaby's gonna hand out APs, everyone, so.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  You gotta get over there.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Gotta get over there. Great to see you guys.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Love you both. Cheers.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  We have to do a real ad read for numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Dean Ball coming on the show next. I don't know if he knows that we're dressed up as Mark and Ilya. Tyler, do you know Ball?

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Of course I know Ball.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  You can't keep getting away with it.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Keeps getting funnier. Dean Ball is a senior fellow at FAI, author of Hyperdimensional, former senior policy advisor for AI at the White House and strategic advisor at the NSF, previously at the Mercatus Center. Do you know the Mercatus Center?

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Why do you know the Mercatus Center?

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Tyler Cowen.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Of course, the absolute GOAT himself. He's been at Stanford Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, focuses on AI emerging technology. He's in the restream waiting room. Dean Ball, welcome to TVPN. How are you doing, Dean? Good to meet you.

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:27:13Dean Ball?

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  Sorry to jumpscare you on Halloween. We're having a lot of fun over here.

• 1:27:19Dean Ball?

  I love it.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  It's crazy. You're, you, you look exactly like Dean Ball. Your, your costume is flawless.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Almost to a T.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Were you in, were you in six hours of makeup this, this morning? Make me look like Dean Ball?

• 1:27:36Dean Ball?

  Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Make me look like the former White House policy advisor.

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, they nailed it.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  That actually would be potentially the most like scary costume is getting prosthetic makeup to look like yourself.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  It's a very jarring, very bizarre experience, looking in the mirror and actually seeing like for the first time in my life, seeing something that looks materially different from what the way I.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I will say I, I did, I did ask John, I was like, is, is Dean ready to do a somewhat serious interview with us and extremely unserious characters? And we talked and we thought that, uh, we thought it'd be a really fun conversation, even though, um, even though we look absolutely ridiculous. But, uh, it's great to have you on the show finally.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, great to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Featured a bunch of your, uh, writing on the show over the last, uh, year. So, yeah, very happy to have you on.

• 1:28:28Dean Ball?

  Well, thank you guys very much. It's great to be here.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Let's kick it off with, uh, sort of, uh, what's top of mind for you? There's a lot of different, uh, policy positions that I'm sure you could be working on. FAI is a pretty big organization. It, it feels very, very significant to me, especially right now in this moment. But also it just feels like the organization generally has been on a massive upswing. What has been the key focus, uh, this year for you? And then let's just kind of like continue to, to, to dial in the aperture and go, and go deeper and deeper as we go.

• 1:28:59Dean Ball?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, started the year, I was still a kind of policy scholar and writing at think tanks, including at FAI. Worked on state policy, you know, the all the crazy bills that were coming out at that time for AI regulation. And then in April moved to the White House. And so I wasn't writing anymore. My focus was really entirely on the AI Action Plan, which the Trump administration released in July of this year. Then a couple of weeks after that, once the Action Plan seemed like it was in a good place and well accepted within the sort of bureaucracy of the federal government. I thought it would take longer to get it rolling downhill, but it really didn't take that long. So once I felt like it was in a good place, I retired

• 1:29:39Dean Ball?

  from that role and went back to the private sector where I feel like that's my strength, writing, communicating, things like that.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  What do you think is a bigger force in AI regulation right now?

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  A constituents who just don't like AI. I'm worried about him taking my job. I don't like the way it looks. It's slop. It's bad. It's brain rot, whatever, like anti-AI for just genuine, direct, I don't like it reasons versus jockeying between labs of like, if I can get this law through, I will have an edge over you. And we're kind of doing jujitsu between both people who are actually both pro-AI, but just trying to get a business edge. Is there one camp that you think is like more powerful?

• 1:30:26Dean Ball?

  I think for the most part, it's the first thing you mentioned. I think it's that there's generally kind of a negative AI sentiment among the public. It's not that high salience of an issue. So people will say, I want AI regulation. But then when you ask them, how important of an issue is that to you? It's like eight, nine, 10, you know, immigration economy is much higher. And like, once you get down to eight, nine, 10, it means it's not really an issue that that many voters are actually making their decisions at the ballot box on. And so there's, but there's this general motivation that's a lot of politicians feel of, you know, oh, well, we let the internet get away from us. We let social media get away from us. We can't let the same thing happen again. And so we have to be preemptive and regulate this time. That's basically their attitude.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  Then, um, then why is California trying to kneecap AI? Like, is it just a bigger issue within California? What are the dynamics in California specifically?

• 1:31:17Dean Ball?

  Though California views themselves much like the Europeans do. They view themselves, first of all, I mean, the one big difference is that California is also an exporter of technology, but the people in Sacramento are not. San Francisco is the exporter of technology. Sacramento views itself really as a nationwide regulator. So their mentality is the federal government's not going to act, especially President Trump. You know, they're, they would say President Trump was irresponsible. So we have to act for him. And, you know, uh, one, one thing that a senior European diplomat told me, uh, when I was in government is when we want to talk policy in America, we fly from Brussels right over DC to Sacramento.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:31:56Dean Ball?

  So they, they're coordinating, you know, the European Union has a, has a coordinating office in San Francisco where they meet with legislators and, you know, companies. And it's basically like this sort of transnational governance, regulation happening between California and Brussels.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  Interesting. Um, and so like, is it, is it correct to frame the idea of the motivations of Californian regulation as, well, nationally, AI regulation might be eight or nine, but in California, it's much higher because there's more visibility? Or is there something else that's driving like the California regulation movement?

• 1:32:36Dean Ball?

  I'm not sure. It's a higher salience issue for the voters in California, but I think it's a higher salience issue for the legislators because the legislators smell power. Right? I mean, you can regulate this, you know, what I think will be a multi-trillion dollar industry while it's still nascent before, you know, one of the things about regulating now is like, if you tried to regulate the iPhone now in a major way, well, like 150 million Americans or whatever use iPhones. And so they'd be like mad at you, but like AI is still a little bit nascent and there's all kinds of use cases that might just be killed in the cradle. Uh, and, um, you can control it, you know, much, much easier when it's a younger technology. And you can control it if you're California, you can control it for the entire country,

• 1:33:19Dean Ball?

  more or less unilaterally, and it's a democratic supermajority state. So. They have all the cards.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Is so if it's a low salience issue, is there a world where this is all about like leverage to get to generate more taxes, to create a more balanced budget? Like, what are the different incentives that are working within the California political like jockeying that's going on?

• 1:33:46Dean Ball?

  I think certainly regulatory power is one of them, but I don't really think they're after money.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:50Dean Ball?

  Particularly. If you're a California legislator, the basic reality is that money kind of just prints itself.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Dean Ball?

  They're basically opposed to scarcity like Petro state.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:00Dean Ball?

  But the pet- yeah, the Petro dollars are not oil. Instead, it is capital gains taxation.

• 1:34:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:06Dean Ball?

  Um, I, I had a, I was once talking to a California legislator, um, who was on the budget committee and they get these like, you know, every other week or whatever, they get these like reports from the state treasury about the state's fiscal position. This was a couple of years ago, sort of right post COVID.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Dean Ball?

  And they were like, uh, we had a $10 billion surplus in the last like month. And they were like, what, where did $10 billion come out of nowhere? And it was the SNAP IPO.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Dean Ball?

  It's all just one IPO generates that kind of revenue for the state. Um, so, you know, and, and it's going to be like that on steroids when, you know, when, when the frontier lab employees start to have their liquidity events, the state is going to have an enormous windfall of capital gains tax.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, there was a rumor just earlier this week about OpenAI going out at one trillion, which would be.

• 1:34:52Dean Ball?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  And already, already the employee pool of the public, the, the PBC is worth roughly at current marks, like 130 billion. So multiple on that, it's going to be substantial.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Jordi Hays?

  How does this power struggle between Sacramento and, and DC around regulation play out going forward? I think people like Saks have been, you know, not only talking about what Anthropic is doing, but, uh, I imagine doesn't want AI to be regulated, you know, at, at a state level. But how, how do you see this playing out over the, over the next, call it six months?

• 1:35:31Dean Ball?

  Yeah, I don't think anyone wants to see AI regulated at the state level, except for the California legislators. And so, you know, at the end of the day, I think that President Trump and AIs are Saks have made their position clear that we want a nationwide legal framework to govern AI. The question is going to be, can we, can Congress act? You know, can Congress get together and come up with something that sort of everyone can agree to? And I think we don't know the answer to that yet. I think, you know, it's hard to see where the politics will go. AI politics evolve. They don't evolve quite as fast as AI, but they evolve quite quickly. And so we could be in a totally different, there could be a total vibe shift between now and say, June. June's probably your cutoff before the midterms to sort of

• 1:36:15Dean Ball?

  get something serious done. And so, yeah, can it happen? In principle, sure, but we'll, you know, we'll see.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  What are the, I don't know, like, what are the regulatory frameworks that either you think will actually land on or California is advocating for? I just remember, we were watching the Ilya Sutskever interview with The Guardian a couple of years ago, and the point he was making was, like, in the long term, AGI might see humans like we see animals and just convert the entire earth, like, you know, all the land into solar panels and, you know, sort of like a complete AGI doom scenario. That doesn't seem like the focus of regulators today. He also was mentioning the, the risk of fake news and the idea of

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  generative content potentially muddying the waters of understanding what's real on the internet. That one feels like it's totally here today, but has also kind of always been here because of Photoshop.

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  It is such an interesting, you know, tech, I don't, correct me if I'm wrong, but tech has never gone through like a tech lash where there's so much video footage of the key players talking about the doom states of technology. So if you look back, go look at interview footage of, of Sam Altman and all these people, and they will say like, yes, there's, you know, or Ilya, the one you're referencing, like, it's very possible the world will be covered with solar panels and data center. And we were playing that video this morning while we were getting this crazy, you know, you know, costumes on. And like the the people that were doing it were like, that sounds horrible. Like, they listened to the whole thing and they were like, I don't want any of that.

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  It's not like during social media, there wasn't footage of Mark Zuckerberg being like, it's very possible that in the future.

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  That the election could be stolen.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Social media won't be social, you know?

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Like, the Facebook data could be used to target voters or something like that.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  And so that's just like incredible ammo that I imagine in Sacramento they're pulling up. And it's like, okay, you want to go with what this guy wants and not what are?

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have. What's the dynamic there? Are they actually pulling up doomer clips?

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to be like, oh, I didn't mean that. It was just kind of a sci fi thing.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it helped with fundraising, actually.

• 1:38:32Dean Ball?

  It it really depends. So there's there's there's people in the California legislature and elsewhere that have sort of very mundane concerns. And that's like sort of your modal policymaker, I would say, that's kind of, yeah, your your misinformation, your deep takes, the things, not that they're not serious, but that are here today. And then there's the people that are thinking about these sort of very far flung doom scenarios. There are not that many legislators who do that, but there are a lot of people in like, quote unquote, AI policy who think about that. And so they do influence some of the legislation. One of the funny things, though, is that thus far, the legislation that that camp, the sort of AI safety camp has been able to get through, has actually been like somewhat more measured than some of the crazier stuff that we've seen

• 1:39:13Dean Ball?

  from the people that don't know anything about the technology and just kind of have a generally hostile attitude, like state of Illinois banned mental health chatbots, which is basically like, if I ask ChatGPT, uh, you know, if I say like, hey, I'm having a bad day. Can you like tell me something to make me feel better? In Illinois, that's like a chatbot engaging in mental health services and it's illegal.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:39:35Dean Ball?

  Yeah, it's like, really, it's really crazy. Yeah. That's not like a doomer bill, you know?

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

  No, totally.

• 1:39:40Dean Ball?

  That's like, that's like people with.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Nashville's been going on their own path with with because of how big the music industry is there.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you get us up to speed on that, like the regulation of AI music? We were talking about Suno earlier this week. I think we're going to have the founder on, but would be very interested to hear the the how that landscape differs from other regulatory pushes.

• 1:40:02Dean Ball?

  Yeah, so you're talking about something called the Elvis Act, which passed last year. And yeah, basically, that's a bill that's about like name, image likeness. Basically saying if you're a celebrity residing in the state of Tennessee, you can't, if someone makes an AI model that mimics your style, or mimics a song of yours, or your likeness, or something like that, then you have a right to sue them, not for copyright, because copyright is a federal issue. But name, image, likeness is a sort of property, right? That's like done at the state level. Yeah, that's a creature of state law, for the most part. Yeah, so that's what they control there, yeah.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  And is there any early read on where that will pencil out? We were talking to, I forget who we were talking to, we were talking to somebody about how that is, oh, it was Zach Kukoff, he was talking about the, like, how the Elvis Act plays into national geopolitics and some players who are on the national stage are wanting to win in the, at the more local.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  Pretty smart naming, the Elvis Act sounds like something that anybody would want to pass.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Jordi Hays?

  Sounds cool.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  You don't think it would go farther if it was the Gunna Act?

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, you had a post, it was last week, calling out, there's a group, Max Tegmark said, stunningly broad coalition has come out against Skynet, AI researchers, faith leaders, business pioneers, policymakers, NatSec folks and actors, stand together and they say, we call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is one broad scientific consensus that will be done safely and controllably, and two, strong public buy-in. It's a kind of a crazy thing to try to require, from my view, because even the scientific community cannot agree on much

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  and everybody has these wildly different, you know, strategies and incentives. And then, of course, it's very possible that the public will never...

• 1:42:12Jordi Hays?

  That to rely on the public of how we should develop technology that has to do with with national security and try to make it like a direct democracy. But but maybe unpack what the latest is on that front.

• 1:42:27Dean Ball?

  Yeah, so I mean, the statement is very simple. It says no superintelligence until we have agreement that it's good until there's broad public buy in. So I think the first problem with this is like, if you want to have a letter signed by a bunch of important people or celebrities and whatnot, that says, superintelligence is something that has profound implications and we should really think about it and we should have groups of, you know, civil society type of stuff. That's fine with me. There have been letters like that in the past and I haven't complained about them. But when you say ban, you're making an ask about public policy. Not only that, you're actually making an ask about global public policy because, you know, the superintelligence could be trained in China, could be trained in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, a lot of other places are amassing large amounts of compute. It's not like we're the only people that can do this.

• 1:43:12Dean Ball?

  And a lot of the researchers, you know, who do this work are highly mobile. So like you need a global treaty to ban superintelligence. It's what they're asking for. And the problem is that not only is there not scientific consensus about the safety of such a thing, more importantly, there's not scientific consensus about what superintelligence is. Is if GPT five or let's say GPT seven, say that it like can make novel advancements in mathematics, it can come up with new theorems and whatnot, come up with new science, but say it also can't autonomously plan a wedding for me. I think that's a very plausible future, by the way. I think that's super, that's super possible that we'll get advanced, you know, genius

• 1:43:51Dean Ball?

  mathematic AI before we get sort of an agent that can like plan a wedding for you over six months.

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  Truly, truly agentic AI.

• 1:44:00Dean Ball?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like what? You know, which one of those is super intelligence?

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:44:06Dean Ball?

  Right?

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, no, I mean, to take an even more extreme example, we were reflecting on the original OpenAI definition with which Ilya was like reflecting on, which is AI, you should be able to tell it to do a job and it should be able to do that, any job at the level of a human. And we were sitting for three hours getting makeup done and we were like, okay, to replace this job with AI, you need like the most flawless humanoid robots because this is not a digital task. You need dexterity, but also understanding the artistry of how the colors blend and mixing the different chemicals and stuff. Like, it's just like, it's just like, and that's for like, you know, just a, it's just makeup. It's like, it's not,

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  it's not as complicated as the IMO gold medal. And yet, because it exists in this cross-domain world, it's somehow more challenging. So, yeah, it's just a fascinating thing that we do.

• 1:45:01Jordi Hays?

  The other dynamic that's interesting right now is like, like, I feel like the industry like is somewhat going through a small period of disillusionment when like the big labs are, you know, or OpenAI doing like Sora and announcing erotica and stuff like that and realizing like, wait, like, I thought we were building, you know, super intelligence, like, why are we, you know, creating more forms of social media? And but that's at the same time that you have like peak sort of like fear and like peak pressure to make moves from a regulatory standpoint because people are afraid of, you know, runaway superintelligence and, you know, losing, losing their job and all these things. And also, big tech companies

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  have been doing layoffs and the CEOs want to say like, well, we did these, like, as a CEO, you want to say like, well, we're getting so much efficiency out of our, you know, AI, like, of course, we're doing layoffs. But in reality, it's like they just went through, they've been bloated for a while. There's, you know, X is a good case study of like, you can cut, you know, like a lot of people and still have a functioning business. And so, I don't know, there's just such a complicated moment.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Do you think there's a massive tech lash coming?

• 1:46:15Dean Ball?

  Uh, yeah, probably. Uh, would be my guess. It's, I don't know exactly what'll cause it. Maybe it'll be fears about labor market, which could be real, could be not, could be caused by AI, could be not. Um, could also be, uh, electricity prices. I think that's, that's very possible.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Dean Ball?

  And so like, yeah, yeah. So again, like the super intelligence ban, like it's doing populist politics that are based on kind of vague emotional sentiment. And that's like, the problem with that is that those kinds of broad statements that implicate policy tend to not lead to good places. Defund the police was one of them. Net zero by 2030 was another one where it's like, we have no real plan for how to do this, but we're going to articulate some broad goal that sounds good, that everyone can kind of, you know, you can just slide down the incentive curve, um, of politics. And, um, it's, it's, it will not lead to good places. I basically guarantee you.

• 1:47:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:47:08Dean Ball?

  Even if you're worried about AI safety, even if you're worried about AI safety.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Uh, if you're, if you're to rank the, the reasons we, we like, if we rank like AI safety is like the eighth or ninth most salient political topic, and then within AI, you rank the most salient worries, job losses, energy prices, those are at the top. How far down do you have to go until people start caring about dead internet theory? And like the sloppification? Because it does feel like it's aesthetically like risky, because if you launch a model early, it's sloppier, it doesn't have great aesthetics. And then you're, and then you're faced with the question of like, so my internet went, my internet, uh, my, my electricity

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  prices went up and I got slop as opposed to my internet prices went up and yeah, I actually got like a kind of superpowered Google search. Like it's actually pretty great. Like it's definitely helping me at work.

• 1:48:02Dean Ball?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's a lot of people who say like, ah, deterioration of the internet is definitely happening. And I think that's true, right? I mean, I think it's, the current experience of the internet has gotten worse, I would say. And I mean, with the exception of the AI models themselves, which are great.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Dean Ball?

  Um, but yeah, I mean, that's like probably true. I think it's, I think it's up there. I think it's way above like catastrophic risk, you know, like, I think if you were to put like, Autonomous cyber attacks, you know, bioweapon development. I think that's probably lower than

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:48:31Dean Ball?

  This sort of slop stuff. I would guess, yeah, it's interesting to see. I don't know if anyone's ever done that. But it'd be interesting to see.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  So we were reflecting on this. This week, we had Christina from Vanta on talking about security. And then we also had the CEO of CrowdStrike on and we were kind of blown away reflecting on. We've been in the AI boom for two years at least, and we haven't really had a moment where we're like, oh, yeah, that major cyber, that outage, that cybersecurity incident, that problem, that hack, that virus, that's generative AI uniquely. That hasn't happened. Like AWS went down last week and it was just misconfigured DNS on a database. There's been, there's been a bunch of crazy cyber attack stories. None of them have been, you know, related to Gen AI just yet. I still think it has to be coming at some point.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  But until you get that solid anecdote, it feels very hard to go and run the campaign of like, never, never again will we allow this to happen when it hasn't happened for the first time.

• 1:49:34Dean Ball?

  That's how it always goes with tail risks, you know, people can't really internalize them until they actually happen. And then there you go. I, I actually wouldn't shock me if we see something like that in the next, you know, six to 18 months. Cause the models are now getting good enough that that kind of thing seems possible.

• 1:49:50John Coogan?

  Cyber or biological?

• 1:49:52Dean Ball?

  Cyber. Bio is going to take a little bit longer, but cyber.

• 1:49:55John Coogan?

  Cyber.

• 1:49:56Dean Ball?

  Maybe even cyber might take, or bio might take much longer because like actually making a bioweapon is still hard in the physical world. But cyber is purely digital. There's already many skilled cyber attackers. So it feels, it feels like plausible. Luckily, you know, cyber defense is keeping up right now. You know, we've seen a lot of advancements there too.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There are definitely like script kiddies that go around and just like to unplug different pieces of the internet for fun. And it's almost like it can be state actors, but it's also, it just feels like low stakes. It doesn't feel like often like these like little cyber attacks are like life and death. So they feel lower stakes. They feel more like theft and like economic crimes almost. But being like, I'm going to go release bubonic plague. Like that feels like way more like act of war. Or like a mass murder, like it puts you, it takes you from like script kitty who wants to like, you know, deface a website with a DDoS attack to like, okay, you're doing a mass shooting now.

• 1:50:52Dean Ball?

  It's interesting how, oh, I just think it's interesting how like these cyber risks though, like we think of them as like, yeah, it's not an act of war, it's just an economic crime because it's like purely digital. At the same time, like if North Korea had a bunch of people that were like going into hospitals every other week and like stealing medical equipment or like taking people's patient records, we'd be like, yeah, that's, we're gonna kill you. We're gonna, we're gonna destroy your country if you do that to us. So it's weird. It's, it's, it's interesting how people think about these things and sort of compartmentalize them.

• 1:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you posted a couple of days ago, my sense is that selling Blackwell chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill. It's plausible that the long-term, really even near-term result will be much more compute regulation. Any, any updated thoughts on that front? It didn't, Blackwells didn't, I guess, come into the negotiation in South Korea, but you're still expecting them to be a part of some sort of deal?

• 1:51:51Dean Ball?

  I, I think it could very well happen eventually. And by the way, the wisdom of doing it changes over time, right? Because the chips get worse over, the chips, you know, there's, there's new chips come in and they get much better. And so, you know, like, the idea of selling Blackwells to China in two years is very different from the idea of selling them today. I think part of the reason that it seemed like many people in the Trump administration, you know, were opposed to this move was that like, you know, we're racking Blackwells in American data centers right now, right? Like, it was different with the Hopper, because the Hopper was a previous generation. So the H20, maybe the pill went down a little bit easier. But I think with this, it's like, um, yeah, I think, I think that, you know, you have to, I think it's on the merits end politically,

• 1:52:36Dean Ball?

  you gotta wait. Yeah, you gotta wait.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What did you think about basically giving American companies a rofer on the Blackwell? Is that something that you think makes sense?

• 1:52:46Dean Ball?

  Uh, you mean like this is like the, yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  Basically like if every American, if every American company says like, we're good, we got enough. Yeah. If Nvidia says there's no more American companies that want to buy from us, well then yeah, you can go sell some to China. That feels so much more reasonable.

• 1:53:00Dean Ball?

  Yeah, there's a bill in Congress right now in the NDAA, the end of year defense bill called the Gain AI Act that, that basically tries to do this. You know, I think it's an interesting idea. I think the problem always is like, how exactly do you operationalize that? Particularly because there's things, you know, in, in this that are like, well, the public, the hyperscalers are going to have to disclose things kind of to the public about like, you know, that's sort of sensitive proprietary information. Uh, so like, how exactly do you do that? I personally have not been super in the weeds on gain, but like, but like, yeah, I think that, I think the implementation is a challenge there. And that's kind of what I was saying, though, is like, you know, so many people in Congress are opposed to the idea of selling black wells to China right now, that I think if the admin had done it in, in Korea this past week, I think there's a very high chance that you would have seen maybe some legislation

• 1:53:45Dean Ball?

  with unintended consequences pass.

• 1:53:47John Coogan?

  What about, uh, the idea of you don't sell the black wells, but you do allow Chinese companies to purchase cloud computing resources from American hyperscalers? Is that more palatable? Who gets upset in that world?

• 1:54:04Dean Ball?

  Well, that's the status quo right now.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:06Dean Ball?

  Uh, you know, that's, that's basically what happens right now. And so.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, but, but that could DeepSeek or HighFlyer actually go to AWS and say, we want to do, you know, a billion dollar training run?

• 1:54:19Dean Ball?

  Uh, they could, yeah. There's nothing, there's nothing restricting them from that. Now, I think DeepSea kind of rolls their own. I think they build their own data centers, do everything themselves. But yeah, like, I mean, I, Chinese companies definitely do make use of American compute. Now, that being said, I think the Chinese government doesn't like that. I think the Chinese government does all kinds of things to incentivize them from that. So it's, it's a complicated thing.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 1:54:41Jordi Hays?

  What's your approach to truth seeking? One of the challenges in trying to even conceptualize what the right policy approach is on a number of these issues is that everyone is just heavily conflicted. Like, there's just so much money sloshing around. It's like, the people that have the most knowledge of what's happening at the frontier quite possibly have somewhere between 10 and, you know, a billion dollars kind of like riding on a certain approach. And so I'm curious to know, like, kind of how you try to clock, like, the truth.

• 1:55:22Dean Ball?

  I always try to start from technical fundamentals. So when I decided to get into writing about AI policy, one of the first things that I learned to do was, like, train a toy neural network for myself, just so I could see how things worked, right? And I like to really understand the sort of roots of the technology that I'm talking about, whether that's the physical world or the digital world.

• 1:55:43Dean Ball?

  And that helps a lot. That helps ground you quite a bit to understand those sort of actual constraints and where the technology might actually go. And then beyond that, you know, it's listening to a lot of different people. It's understanding financial incentives closely, right? You have to understand how everyone is incentivized. And you kind of know, like, there are a lot of areas where incentives are for you to sort of spin reality in a certain way. Those are a lot of other people who have incentives to just basically tell the truth. And you have to just be able to differentiate between those things.

• 1:56:14Dean Ball?

  And so, yeah, you know, I mean, it's like, it's basically just, you know, there's no simple way. It's just read a ton of stuff, listen to a lot of people, maintain an open mind and be humble all the time.

• 1:56:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What, like, how are you forecasting next year? What do you think the most important issues? Is it more, is it more of the same? Is it, is there going to be a new conversation that you kind of see on the horizon? You know, basically, like, is the debate around, you know, chip sales just going to continue throughout the entire admin? Or do you think it'll, at any point, settle?

• 1:56:53Dean Ball?

  I think that debate will continue. And then I think, you know, more broadly, though, my guess is that that issue becomes less salient in AI policy over time, and probably more people join the sort of join the debate. Right now, AI policy is very much an elite conversation. You know, it's not something that a lot of people, like the average American, so to speak, is thinking about that much. But I think that starts to change again. Maybe it's the electricity prices, maybe it's the jobs, maybe it's a little bit of both, maybe it's also some crisis that happens, like cyber stuff. But I think that, like, in general, the salience will go up. And it will also be quite complicated because I also expect that in 2026, just like this year, a very meaningful fraction of GDP growth will be coming from AI.

• 1:57:38Dean Ball?

  So, you know, policymakers are going to find themselves, I think, in a bind.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, wait, sorry. I know we're wrapping up, but I'd love to know your thoughts on like, the AI as the only driver of GDP meme, how real do you think that is? How bad do you think?

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Some people hear that and they're like, this is bad. And then the other take is like, if we're not doing this, like, it's even worse.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:07Dean Ball?

  Yeah. So I think it is, it is a big chunk of it. I, you know, I think it's probably at least like 25 to 50% of growth right now. Another big chunk, like the Q2 number was really high, it was like 4%. And a chunk of that is definitely companies stockpiling in anticipation of tariffs. So they're like mass importing stuff, which is going to be counted toward GDP. So it's like, there's some of that going on, probably. And, but yeah, I mean, I think that it's almost certainly the case, the GDP, you know, if I had to put in, if I had to guess, I would guess it's something like 40%. AI is something like 40%.

• 1:58:45John Coogan?

  Truly holding up the world economy.

• 1:58:48Dean Ball?

  Yeah, and that's just enabling AI. That's just AI CapEx. That's not even, you know, what is AI enabling?

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  Like business services and accelerated revenue growth and

• 1:58:58Dean Ball?

  Productivity and stuff.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, how much of Google's revenue should be counted in like AI GDP now? Or like Instagram reels, like if it's an, if there's an AI slop video that goes viral and that generates 20 million in AI ad revenue, are we counting that in GDP? We have no idea yet. It's gonna be, it's gonna be years before we understand it.

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question that I'd be curious to get your read on is sentiment around, we're a couple of months out from the Intel deal. How is Washington and like Capitol Hill feeling about that deal? Obviously, it looks good on paper for the taxpayer, but, but do you expect to see like more of this kind of thing? We've saw it with MP Materials as well.

• 1:59:48Dean Ball?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  But what's your read?

• 1:59:51Dean Ball?

  I think you'll absolutely see more of it. More equity positions. I'm long USG equity positions in private companies. For better and for worse, I think that will continue to be a thing. We've seen it throughout the critical mineral supply chain. In fact, a lot of other companies, not just MP.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  And how new is this? Is this a Trump thing specifically? Is this a, is this a 2020s thing? Are there other examples of Americans doing this?

• 2:00:18Dean Ball?

  It's not new under the sun, but it's new in recent history.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:23Dean Ball?

  Particularly for companies that have like sort of consumer brands.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  True.

• 2:00:27Dean Ball?

  But yeah, like it is, it is this sort of national champion model is not something that's, it's not, again, America did it, you know, a lot, you know, there, there are periods in American history where we did this a lot.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  And not, and not in a total crisis, like, like government motors, General Motors, the bailout of the banks, like that is very different than, okay, Nvidia and AMD are doing pretty well. Intel's not exactly going bankrupt. There's a lot of market cap there, but we're still gonna come in and do something.

• 2:00:58Dean Ball?

  I think Intel's position was really precarious and you really needed that. I mean, I think you needed not just the injection of capital, which they were going to get either way, but kind of that vote of confidence and kind of that indication to the market that like, hey, this really is like, you know, the US government is serious about this. That says things to OpenAI as they think about developing their ASIC. Says things to Apple, it says things to Nvidia, it says things to all sorts of people. And you've already seen some of these companies respond in kind with, you know, new orders to Intel or at least partnerships with them of various kinds. So I think you'll see more of that. In terms of Intel itself, I think people in DC are pretty nervous still because Intel's got a serious hill to climb. You know, they've got a promising roadmap and they have to execute on it.

• 2:01:40Dean Ball?

  And thus far, the execution has been shaky and their track record shouldn't make you confident.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, have you been surprised that we haven't seen an OpenAI Intel deal yet? Sam Altman seems ready to do deals with everyone. Intel feels like it needs a deal, it needs several deals. That feels like a match made in heaven and yet I haven't seen it yet. What do you think?

• 2:02:02Dean Ball?

  I have to think it's gestating.

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:05Dean Ball?

  I have to think that, probably other companies too.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:07Dean Ball?

  I mean, if they're smart, they will.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah, totally.

• 2:02:11Dean Ball?

  Just as a political matter.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  I mean, there's just so many, I like, I've seen so many pundits, like Asianometry laid out the thesis that Nvidia should dual source their CPU for Grace, for Grace Hopper. From Intel, make the CPUs there, don't go to TSMC for those. Support Intel as a fab and a provider. So fascinating dynamic and I feel like the Intel story is going to be one of the most interesting.

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Any plans to write a book?

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  You've written a book.

• 2:02:44Dean Ball?

  Yeah, I've been, no, I haven't. No, no, no, but I'm thinking about it. We'll see, more to come, maybe, I'm pondering it. Hard to know what to say.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  It feels hard if you're kind of like writing about what's happening to like pick something and like start writing, you know, hundreds of pages when like everything's so in flux that you could write like, you know, six chapters that then maybe made like that aren't even an important part of the story.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:03:10Dean Ball?

  Yeah. If I picked up the phone and called an agent today, you'd probably be looking at a publication date of like Q1 2028. Someone just the other day, I was asking like, why the hell are these supply chains so long? Uh, for, for like, why is the timeline so long for books?

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:24Dean Ball?

  And they told me it's because it's a manufacturing business run by humanities majors.

• 2:03:29John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:03:30Dean Ball?

  It's like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's funny. Maybe we, uh, maybe the answer is Kindle Print On Demand or something like that.

• 2:03:39Dean Ball?

  There you go. Yeah.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  Kindle Digital Publishing, right next to all the literatica. Uh, we can slot in some, some geopolitical analysis.

• 2:03:47Dean Ball?

  The AI slot books.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, there's, I'm sure there's so many.

• 2:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's gonna hit you up and be like, I can generate you 10 books by next, uh, next week.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Where can people, where can people find you? Where can people follow you in the meantime until the book drops in 2028? You heard it here.

• 2:04:05Dean Ball?

  You can find me, uh, I've got a Substack at Hyperdimensional and on Twitter at Dean W. Ball, the ball like football.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  There we go. Thank you so much, Dean Ball.

• 2:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you on. Uh, welcome back anytime.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Chat all the time. Uh, we'll talk.

• 2:04:19Dean Ball?

  Thanks, guys. Great to chat.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one performance benchmarks, number one competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. And we're breaking news from Sam Altman, GPT-6 will be renamed GPT-6.7. You're welcome. He's doing the six seven meme.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  But it's a, it's a joke.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  It's a joke.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  Wow, that one really did not hit.

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  It's remarkably, remarkably not.

• 2:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's a joke.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Funny. Uh, I, I, this got 30, 37,000 likes.

• 2:04:57Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were gonna say, I thought you were gonna say it'll just be the ChatGPT 2026.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  I would like that. I think that actually would be a better naming scheme. No, he's having fun with the, with the six seven meme.

• 2:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, go through some timeline with Tyler.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  Not my shtick, not my shtick. Um, well, I will first go through Adio, customer, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Uh, let's see, what, what in the timeline should me and Tyler talk about? What is here?

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Tesla Roadster, Sam Altman has asked for a refund. He says, a story in three parts, a tale in three acts. Act one, your Roadster reservation is complete. This was in 2018, long time ago. Tyler was five years old. He put down $45,000 as a reservation payment. Then act two, Sam Altman emails. Reservations at Tesla, hi, I'd like to cancel my reservation. Could you please refund me the 50K? And he's just trying to, he's just trying to riz an extra 5K out of Elon. Did you notice this?

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh, because it was originally 45.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  It was 45K. Now, okay, with interest, with inflation, Sam clearly deserves 50. But it's a wild move to just have 45K on the line and be like, can I get 50? Can we round to the nearest 50? But when you're, you know, Sam, I guess this makes sense. It's probably pretty reasonable. So he says, can you refund me the 50K? I think he's actually just rounding. I think he's like, yeah, send me 45, but I'm going to refer to it as 50 because I'm rounding to the nearest 50K, I guess. But then he gets an address now found. Reservations at Tesla.com is unavailable to receive emails.

• 2:06:56Jordi Hays?

  He could, he could use the extra five.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 2:07:00Jordi Hays?

  I think he could put it to work in the business.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  One more.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's losing more money than OpenAI. Every 5K, 5K can go a long way.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  That's true, yeah. Tesla and SpaceX seem to be doing.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  That's one minute, that's one minute of Sora costs.

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  It's true.

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Every minute counts.

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  But, I mean, this just feels like they, they changed whatever the email is in the last seven years. But it is remarkable that the project has been in, in process so long that the email address has been forgotten. And also, I would assume that this type of stuff happens all the time because I imagine that people are canceling and placing new Tesla Roadster orders like all the time. So you would think you'd want to be monitoring. That box.

• 2:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  Oh, well, it's funny to read into it as, as like more, more, you know, battles between Elon and Sam, although I don't think that's what's going on here. It's more of just, just a funny quirk of their email configuration. Bern Hobart says, wow, Elon passes the replies to your email in under a minute test. That guy is going places.

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Bullish.

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  Well, whatever you think about Tesla, you can buy it, you can sell it on public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Jordy Hayes, what would you like to do next?

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring in our next guest.

• 2:08:24John Coogan?

  Aiden Sedgwick, welcome to the stream. There he is. You look fantastic. How are you doing?

• 2:08:31Speaker 07

  Hey, Jordy and John. Happy Halloween.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait. What are you drinking? What is, what is next to you?

• 2:08:38Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:08:38Speaker 07

  Do you recognize this drink?

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Of course I recognize that drink.

• 2:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Is Andrew Heberman's Matteina Yerba Mate. We refer to it as a podcast in a can.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to drink this on my end. The fake beard is getting into, getting into the drink. But it's great to see you. You're looking sharp. Do you wear a suit often? You look very natural in it.

• 2:09:01Speaker 07

  You know what? I used to wear a uniform in high school. It's coming back to me and I'm a huge Formula One fan. So I feel like I'm already wearing like, this is the cap you normally get when you're on the podium with kind of the reeds. So I feel very good taste here.

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Championship, championship hat.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  How'd you actually get into venture?

• 2:09:22Speaker 07

  It's a good story. I was Google's first product manager and then first international sales manager. Always wanted to start something. Both my parents were entrepreneurs and I felt it's just kind of the way of the valley. You go from being an operator to being an investor. But interestingly, originally, I thought, hey, maybe like the right way to do it is like go get a stint at a venture firm. And the five firms that I talked to not only told me I wouldn't make a good VC, they told me I wouldn't even make a VC. I just did not have the wherewithal. So I'm sure many people also thought that your idea would not run.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, like, did they have any good reasons? Did you agree with them on anything? Obviously, they were wrong, but.

• 2:10:04Speaker 07

  It's so funny, like, I wasn't an engineer, I wasn't senior enough at Google. I never had done anything in venture. Like, again, maybe on paper it makes sense, but to be honest with you, it's the best thing that happened because I always feel rejection. I call it rocket fuel, and it was such such a simple situation where I had to burn the bridges and the only way to prove the skeptics wrong, to actually get into the business and do well. And even after 20 years, I'm like, hmm, 10 IPOs is still not enough, 100 exits. I think it should be 200 exits and maybe then the point will sink in.

• 2:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong.

• 2:10:44Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Great hit. How big was your, how big was your first fund?

• 2:10:50Speaker 07

  The first fund, actually, I started as a solo LP and solo GP, which was only 4.5 million. And then our first institutional fund in 2010 was only 41 million.

• 2:11:03Jordi Hays?

  Modest amounts.

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  What, what story did folks tell at Google about the funding of Google? That helped you kind of understand how venture works? Like, I've heard the story about, you know, Sequoia invested. That was probably more like a traditional round. There's also this maybe apocryphal story about somebody going to their car and writing a check before the company was even founded. Like, what was your introduction to just like?

• 2:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Jeff Bezos taking a flyer.

• 2:11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What stories did you draw on? Where you were like, this worked out for this particular person really well in the Google story that I felt and experienced, and I want to go and recreate that.

• 2:11:45Speaker 07

  I mean, look, I was there like right after the Sequen climb around. First of all, the biggest thing about Google is that what people sometimes misunderstand about this business is all about outliers, positive outliers, and the best training for that is to actually be at an outlier. And I think more than the VC story, to me, it was my experience working for Larry Page because every single thing that I've done. At that, in that first year for Larry, like, he would like see it and like, hmm, this is kind of 1% of what I'm expecting. Like, you need to do things 10x faster, like 10x more. And then it's like, you know what, maybe humans are not meant to do that. And my joke is like,

• 2:12:28Speaker 07

  one of my projects was to launch Google in international languages because I wasn't an engineer. I spoke six languages. So, and I'm like, look, you know what I can do for Google is make sure it's launched in non-English languages. And he was frustrated with that. And so I always tell people, I'm an occasional and accidental father or grandfather of Google Translate because they're like, from now on, anything that's internationalization or translation, let's make sure machines do it and not humans.

• 2:12:55Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. What was your first, uh, what was your first true home run in venture?

• 2:13:01Speaker 07

  So, the first true home run in venture, you can define it in many different ways. My first billion-dollar exit was Meraki, uh, which started as a Wi-Fi project in Mountain View with Google. And I was one of three ex-Googleers that invested in it. And the first IPO was Shopify. Um, and that was amazing, like showing up to nice, not for Google's IPO, but, you know, as an investor that, hey, like, you know, early believer. And the company was great. And what was crazy is like, $2.7 billion valuation at IPO for Shopify. And today, there are like 150, like, another 50x from that. Google was similar, like it went 40x from the IPO.

• 2:13:41Speaker 07

  And that, like, in a nutshell is like positive outliers. And I can't imagine better examples of outliers.

• 2:13:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's remarkable. Completely. What about, what about more recently? Uh, you've done Merkle, Superbase and, and others. Maybe we start with Merkle. We just had, uh, Brendan on earlier this week to talk about the new financing. You guys have been in a couple rounds now, is that, is that right?

• 2:14:08Speaker 07

  Two rounds, two rounds. We are huge fans of Brandon and his co-founders. Look, I think it's another great example. When I started like right after Google, we thought going zero to hundred million in ten years was a great achievement, maybe eight to ten years. You know, I had companies like Shopify Go IPO in six years, but Merckor is a new breed of company. They went zero to hundred million in gross revenues in eleven months. They're essentially have built this great platform where they can essentially find any type of talent or discipline in the world, find the people, have AI interview them and generate expertise and data based on that. And it's just like, again, like what's so exciting about the AI age is these

• 2:14:53Speaker 07

  companies you never thought like would be at this kind of scale are able to deliver these things because it's just that age and that opportunity. We're very lucky to be part of it. You know, we're huge fans of Brandon and team. And then Superbase is another great example. Like we are like, listen, some of the most valuable tech companies were database companies. And somebody is going to build a developer-friendly backend. At that time, there was a front-end company, but no real backend company. And it was crazy because when we invested in Superbase, we did almost a growth round valuation and the traction was not even close to a million in ARR. And since then, the company has grown fifty, seventy, eighty X plus in just a few years.

• 2:15:34Speaker 07

  And that makes me think like what you're doing is really special because the private companies are growing five hundred to thousand percent and public companies are growing at twenty percent. So it's a fifty X delta. So in case anybody is wondering why it's interesting and exciting to be in venture or to be involved with private companies, the very best are doing an insane job. And I think those are the stories that need to be out there. And that's why I love my job. I feel like it's the best job in the world.

• 2:16:03Jordi Hays?

  They announced their Series A in October, October twenty eighth of twenty twenty one. I'm assuming you guys did the deal like, you know, some late summer or something like that. At the time, was that a deal that you think maybe other people would have passed on because of the price? Like it just looks crazy? Obviously was the peak.

• 2:16:23Speaker 07

  So we did the Series B and it was really interesting. Not only did multiple other VCs pass on price, but they went and then invested in competitors because they could get in at like half the valuation. But we never compromise what we believe is, you know, our belief in the founders and the company. And look, I mean, at the end, this business is all about early belief and is all the founders. We get to participate in their journeys and Superbay is a prime example. They had all the initial signs that things could be really great. Like I said, you know, traction was really low. They were starting to like essentially like take off among developers. And it was built on Postgres.

• 2:17:04Speaker 07

  It was very technical and people are like, no, nothing could be worth that valuation at that stage with only that much signal. And I think that's kind of the magic of Felices is that when we back these incredible founders, you know, the success is far from obvious. But then after we invest, like these companies go through these insane hockey stick growth curves. And Superbay is a prime example of that, as is Merckor.

• 2:17:27John Coogan?

  How do you think about what is different about this boom, this moment from previous cycles? The top things that poke out that have really changed in the last two years that justify more investment, that changed the job of the venture capitalist are, you know, we're seeing higher growth rates. We're also seeing higher capex requirements for some tech companies than before. We're seeing just more potential new markets because you could be going after a labor pool instead of a different, like an existing market. There's entirely net new markets. There's questions about enterprise adoption, churn.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Like what in your mind is different this time around from the mobile wave, the cloud wave or anything else that informs how you're underwriting deals this year?

• 2:18:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, look, I have seen the internet wave as well as the mobile wave. There are a couple of things that are really different. So one is the point that we were getting at is that venture game, it is like very basic. It's essentially, it's a growth game. If you find a company that is growing fifty X faster than public companies, it's gonna end up in a good place. And even if you're off by ten X on price, if you're in one of those companies, things are gonna work out for you. Also, interestingly, twenty years ago, like when I first got into business, a lot of people would worry about distribution. But the reality is today, like, everybody's watching YouTube. Everybody has a mobile device. Distribution is no longer a problem.

• 2:19:04Speaker 07

  But what is really interesting that is different is the AI age. Normally before with software, first the budget was limited. I don't think any company is gonna spend more than ten percent of their budget on software. But also, the value creation was different. Like, software, yes, it is helping you, but still, people are working with it. You have to put data in it. And then to get value out of it, you have to look at the results and say, okay, now I'm gonna do something based on what the software is telling me. And the software is like streamlining it a little bit. In AI age, what's really stunning is like you now can have a full closed loop without humans, where everything is being done by AI. So the data entry is automatic. The data output is automatic. I sometimes think of a turbo engine in a car.

• 2:19:48Speaker 07

  Like, one of the like interesting technologies is you take the exhaust gas and then if you channel it into the engine, the car can accelerate a lot faster. So in some ways, like what is happening with AI, there is growth vectors in so many different areas. I had to make an engine example since I'm wearing a Formula One like hat. But first of all, there is so much more value creation. And now you're going after labor, which depending on the sectors you look at, is like forty, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of a company's budget. So the dollars at stake is so much larger.

• 2:20:22John Coogan?

  How much more important is it now to think about terminal market structure? Because I completely agree with you. The growth rates are insane. The risk, I feel like, is not that the growth isn't real. It's just that... There's you, you pick a market and there's one company that goes from one to 10 million in ARR to 100 million in ARR and they and the and you project that out and you're like, well, the market's 50 billion. They're going to get there really fast. But if the market can support 50 companies that all grow really fast and they all take 2% of the market, then you will see some sort of S curve in the growth rate at some point. And I feel like there's some markets that will probably be perfectly competitive,

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  some that will be highly monopolistic and everything in between. And it feels like as a venture capitalist, it's going to pay to be the type of person that can clock how markets play out. Does that map with what you're thinking, what you're trying to do?

• 2:21:19Speaker 07

  Look, I think you're getting at a very important point, which is it is not just enough to have high growth, but you need to have durable growth. And we use the examples of Google, Shopify, even like more recently, we had companies like Canva. And I think one of the things that people sometimes really underestimate is that that kind of high growth compounded will generate stunning results. And one of the things that I learned from both Google and Shopify is that if even when you choose the right markets, you will probably get the sizing wrong. But if you choose a mega, mega market, even like at what we think success, there is still so much of the market left. Like one of the things that I never realized is even when Shopify went IPO, it was less than 1% of that market.

• 2:22:01Speaker 07

  And that's what helped it like get a 40x growth after that. Same thing happened to Google. And the very best companies can also expand the market. So to your question, though, one of the things that we really pay attention is what are the modes of these companies? It's not just that they have the chance of high growth, but how durable will it be? A lot of times it's the founders. A lot of times it's also different elements. For instance, we very frequently talk about data modes at Felices, right? Like one of the things that helps you differentiate is if you have data that nobody else has, since data is the new oil, that's going to be a huge differentiator. Because at the end of the day, there's a lot of AI tech and that's more pervasive. But if you have data that nobody else has, that's going to be tremendous value. And if you start doing something where you

• 2:22:46Speaker 07

  Basically become a key part of the process. People are not going to rip you off. So we just recently won a term sheet over healthcare AI company. And what was interesting is through AI, they've been able to service a part of the patient market that here too was not possible to be served at a positive return. And the moment they fix that part of the market, hospitals are like, why am I only going to give you 35% of the market? You know what? The rest of the market, there are 19 players, but I'm just going to come straight to you. It's too much work. You guys can take 100% of our referrals. So it's a yet another good example of if you do a really great job with the hardest part of the market,

• 2:23:30Speaker 07

  you can essentially have a much larger portion of the market. Nobody wants like is interested in like somebody who's only going to win one to 2%. They want people that can do everything together and not just one part of it. And again, that's kind of also the big leap from software is maybe only solving one part of the problem and they want like a full solution. I want like a full turnkey. Not just like, hey, the software can get you the numbers or analyze things or be the system of record. Now everything is about system of action. And AI can enable that. And if you have a data mode on top of it, obviously that drastically increases chances that not only are you going to have high growth, but the high growth is going to stick with you.

• 2:24:12Jordi Hays?

  Did the venture industry learn its lesson in 2021? Things got a little bit crazy. There was a lot of top signals. We had a crash, but at the same time, you did companies like Superbase at what was then a crazy valuation. And then now it looks like, you know, you bought it. It looks like you stole it.

• 2:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Now, this time around, it feels like, you know, that we were I remember in 2022, it felt like we were going to go into like a VC apocalypse. It certainly doesn't feel that way now. Do you think, do you think we learned any key lessons or are we going to kind of relearn them in the future?

• 2:24:55Speaker 07

  Let me tell you an interesting lesson, or maybe like a key secret, is that venture business is, you have to be consistent. You cannot sprint and pause, sprint and pause. If you're not growing in this business, you're essentially losing, stagnating. There is no such thing as cruise control, or like steady state. And I think the mistake that happens with a lot of VCs, if their conviction is not deep, and they're essentially playing the market game, they're a lot of followers and not a lot of original thinkers. What happens is the moment the market gets risky and things look dire, people pause and like, "Oh, you know what? Like, I'm gonna stop making investment." One thing I'm really proud is even in the 21, 2021 vintage and 22,

• 2:25:40Speaker 07

  when things were really expensive, we still kept on making investments and we never slowed down. And, you know, we were basically like steady growth. And part of that is because, look, this is not public markets where if there is 20% growth and your entry price is wrong, you're gonna lose a lot of money. But if you find the right companies and you do have 50 to 100x growth ahead of you, even if you overpaid for them, you're still gonna do well. In fact, the only way you're gonna do well is to have these positive outliers that are fund makers. And so I think the biggest lesson is like, a lot of VCs like spend too much time of like, this valuation high and low, and this trend and that. The reality is you gotta be a surfer that can surf any wave in any season, and not just one. Like, you can't just go to the beach and call it quits.

• 2:26:24Speaker 07

  You need to go back out. And, you know, I know Georgia lives in Malibu, so he's gonna like the surfer analogy. But the part of the other thing also is that you have to find the companies where there is gonna be so much growth that even if you got the price slightly wrong, it's not gonna slow down. So anybody who's like, "Oh, like, we're gonna be in this business and it's all about the price", they're misunderstanding. It is all about like being early and understanding that incredible growth that's gonna follow. That's gonna basically give you the long-term success. And so I feel there is definitely a delta between the VCs that are original thinkers that still had the conviction and the courage to make those bets. Just like super base for us, but also companies like N8N.

• 2:27:07Speaker 07

  That was a sleeper company in Berlin and all of a sudden in fall like multiple VCs have woke up that they're doing a great job. And Agentic AI.

• 2:27:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a company, interestingly enough, I saw it on getting, uh, people started making videos about it on Instagram. Which I, I look at as much more mainstream before I saw anything about it on, on X, which is. I think a good sign. It means that it actually has traction outside of our little Silicon Valley bubble.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  How do you think about, uh, how, how do you think about, um, your, your philosophy on expertise?

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  Versus like being a generalist.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  There's a lot of debate about this.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Expertise on like a category versus like judgment around.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:56Jordi Hays?

  A human.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  But take me through like advice for a venture capitalist who's joining your firm. Advice for someone who's graduating high school and thinking about how to pursue like. What is your philosophy on, on generalism versus becoming an expert in something?

• 2:28:15Speaker 07

  I mean, look, I think journalism in general, i- i- it's a really good thing, but I, I think, look, there are, there are a couple of really interesting, uh, secrets or insights. Number one, um, just to give you real data to make this point is that. When I started in venture, the other thing that people underestimated is like, they're like, listen, all these sectors you're going to invest in. You're not an expert in any of, any one of them and you're not going to be able to make a good investment. I think people, what people misunderstand is if you're an expert in a sector. You're going to look at a company and you're only going to look at the orthodox way of doing things. And when somebody comes in as an outsider and like, I want to do something the way it's never been done before. You're going to say that's never going to work. And so like the paradox here is the expertise, right? Like.

• 2:29:00Speaker 07

  The experts are supposed to know the field really well, but that also anchors them in the way that things are done traditionally. Versus a generalist is going to be first principles and say, you know what? There's actually a new way of doing things and if this thing works, it's going to be amazing. And Ed Feliz is like, the most interesting stat that I'm most proud of. Is that we made early investments in companies, 53 of them that exceeded a billion dollar in valuation. Not a single one of them was led by an expert.

• 2:29:29Speaker 07

  And so like that's the thing, like when you guys, when you guys started, you were not media experts or like proven like media people and you had a great idea.

• 2:29:38Jordi Hays?

  I would tell you, the funny thing is in our case, like I've been working in and around advertising my entire career. John had been an expert on, on like content production, but we certainly were not experts on hosting a show. And I know, and if you had asked us even, literally like 12 months ago, if you had asked us, like, would you be hosting, would you, could you ever see yourself hosting like a daily show? We would have been like, ah, like.

• 2:30:05John Coogan?

  I always love that Paul Graham formulation, which is like, most co-founders, i- i- like if you look at the co-founding teams, it's usually like two or three people, where each of them are somewhat experts in like two or three disciplines. So you have someone who knows like marketing and finance and operations, and then someone who knows like front end and back end and technical design and architecture, and also some of the trade-offs about how the product design works. And so you wind up with like, you know, some level of expertise in 10 different categories bundled up in two to three people on a specific team. That seems to work really well. But yes, they're not like pure play experts, which is what we think of, at least what I think of when I think of expertise.

• 2:30:48Speaker 07

  A hundred percent. Look, I'm going to add two more things, which is, I think one of the other elements of being successful, whether you're a founder or investor, especially as a VC, is it's all about the people. And I've actually done sales at Google and you would say, how is that related to being a venture? At the end, it's a people's game. The founders are not, you know, taking money based on numbers, but if they can trust who you are. And so like being good with people and being able to relate to them is really important. So these days, when people are starting in the business, whether they're a founder or future VC or emerging VC, I'm like, look, your biggest asset is your network and the people that you know. But the second thing is, especially for venture, you need to be exposed to outliers, right? Like I feel like my training at Google.

• 2:31:34Speaker 07

  You know, every single thing that Google has done in the six years that I was there, not a single thing was standard. Every single thing we did, we did a completely different way than it's been ever done before, and the results were stunning. So, if you've never been at a company where the founders and the firm was crazy enough to do things completely differently, and you kind of understand that culture, that mindset, right? Like, we did talk about being journalists, but it is also important to have been exposed to some of these things, and then you're like, okay, you know what? Now that I have seen it, it's in my DNA, it's in my blood, I can kind of like see other signs of that. So, being good with people, being able to understand outliers, at least being exposed

• 2:32:17Speaker 07

  to them, I think are key ingredients, at least in venture. So those are things that nobody ever told me, like, hey, this is gonna be really important for you, but now after 20 years of doing it, I can tell you that it is very important. And like journalists, like, I worked in every discipline across four continents. I've done finance, sales, marketing, product. That was also really great. I didn't have to be the deep expert in all of these things, but being able to understand, so you can like see around the corners and find little things, you know, just enough to make sure that you're not gonna make a stupid move, but you don't know too much, that you would be too anchored in it, and you would be skeptical of a brand new way of doing things.

• 2:32:56Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  I just can't get over how good your outfit looks and your frame looks.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're ready to co-host with us.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:05Speaker 07

  Thank you, like, honestly, like, I'm down to that. I love this hat, and I'm enjoying my...

• 2:33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, are you in SF?

• 2:33:13Speaker 07

  We are in Menlo Park, actually. We do have an SF office.

• 2:33:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:17Speaker 07

  But we are in the Bay Area right now.

• 2:33:19John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully you cross over soon.

• 2:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's hang out soon. Are you gonna be at F1 Vegas?

• 2:35:25Jakob Diepenbrock?

  I think we had a hundred and probably sixty, seventy people come out for it. I had a panel with Augustus, Isaiah and Ted.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  The Godfathers, the Godfathers, the brothers.

• 2:35:35Jakob Diepenbrock?

  It was a good group.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  It's a great group.

• 2:35:38Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Uh, brought up with that. Everybody was, uh, hating on SF, which was all investors in the, in the audience.

• 2:35:45Jordi Hays?

  Why, uh, why hate on SF?

• 2:35:47John Coogan?

  Oh, well, Paul.

• 2:35:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, so one, one, one thing is when we were, uh, were there earlier this week. I thought they had like somewhat solved the human feces on the ground thing. And it was like, John and I walked home from, uh, walked home from dinner. Granted, it was about a mile walk and it was like at least six.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  It was through the tenderloin, which is a rough spot. There are rough spots in LA, but, uh, El Segundo is beautiful. At least when I walked around, it was, it's very clean.

• 2:36:16Jordi Hays?

  If you're a, if you're an industrialist, the smoke stacks, you know.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  That's actually a plus. That's actually a plus. But yeah, well, uh, so how many companies graduate? And, and it's a proper demo day. Like people are giving pitches, raising money like that.

• 2:36:30Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, so, uh, we had nine companies pitch yesterday from all over the country and a couple from out of, out of the country as well.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Um, we start off with, like I said, panel, um, nine pitches. They all kind of go out to their booths afterwards. Um, and then all the investors get to know and, uh, I guess talk with them and meet them afterwards. And then they had a sick little after party in, in Manhattan Beach afterwards. Um, so it was, it was great, but I guess companies, well, I'd have to run through some. I also posted a thread as well. If you want to pull it up.

• 2:36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll have the team pull it up. But, uh, yeah, yeah. Read through, uh, and let us know who's online.

• 2:37:06Jakob Diepenbrock?

  So I will say less defense companies this time than ever before. A lot more.

• 2:37:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was going to ask, and when we, when we, uh, across the different YC batches, like there's very clearly like some core themes and trends that you've seen. So, uh, I'm not surprised to see like less, we probably like.

• 2:37:26Jordi Hays?

  Don't, we don't need the same volume of defense tech companies now. I think in general, like there's just been so many, like every category.

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  Oh, you think the job's finished?

• 2:37:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't think the job's finished, but I think it's like probably healthy for like every category now has a few players.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:41Jordi Hays?

  They can now fight it out. One or two will rise to the top.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we don't necessarily need 10 year backfilling, trying to go after the same types of contracts.

• 2:37:49Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah, I think, I think my general thought is like, I think defense, like prove that you can kind of disrupt these legacy industries and like build massive companies. And, and, and, and these kind of legacy industries that haven't really had venture interest until the annual SpaceX. And I think it's now like, okay, like we, we, we will do these, these like hardware, we will do these kind of more. Um, I guess less tech, less venture heavy industries. Um, there's a lot of stuff like that unlocked to like within energy, within mining, we did some like.

• 2:38:17John Coogan?

  So I always make this point where, uh, you know, Sam Jamiko, I mean SF founder, but he runs impulse stove. It's a stove company. And, and I, I don't want to, uh, you know, tell his story for him, but it always feels like, obviously that's not a defense tech company. That's not an annual competitor. But that's the type of, that's the type of company that maybe doesn't exist unless we make like hardware cool and get founder and, and get, uh, and get VCs piling into the category. Uh, but take us through some of the, some of the companies from this batch. Who stands out?

• 2:38:49Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a small batch where like.

• 2:38:51John Coogan?

  Take us through all.

• 2:38:53Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Okay. I'll go through all of them. So starting off, we've got Petra Power. Shout out to Aaron Goodman. Hopefully you're watching right now. He's doing, um, basically replacing generators. Um, so basically building, um, a new electrochemical process to, um, replace the generator. And there's like a massive bottleneck. Generators, obviously energy, um, that we shorter is pretty real, real, especially with, um, the new data centers going up. Um, and he already has, has received $9 million in DOD contracts, which is pretty crazy.

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Sick.

• 2:39:21Jakob Diepenbrock?

  First one, second one's a pretty fun one. Uh, making shoes in America, autonomous shoe manufacturing at price in the USA.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  That's bold. That's very bold.

• 2:39:32Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna make it in America.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:35Jakob Diepenbrock?

  And there, there's all these missile drone companies. We're, we're making shoes, guys. We're making shoes in America.

• 2:39:38John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 2:39:41Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Three hedges, they're one of the few software companies, they're basically building a commodities hedging app for SMBs, oil and gas to start, because it costs a lot of money to actually have like a hedging team.

• 2:39:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:54Jakob Diepenbrock?

  And they said 95% of distributors just can't afford a full team, so they basically make it, their whole thing is Robin Hood, they call it Robin Hood for industrial companies.

• 2:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've seen a lot of startups do the, the sort of like treasury management, just like earn a little bit of yield, because maybe you don't have access to an investment bank and a whole treasury team, and so plenty of companies have offered that type of product. It makes sense that you'd need something a little bit different in the industrial space.

• 2:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Imagine day trading commodities on your phone.

• 2:40:26Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Also that too.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  What is actinide?

• 2:40:32Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Actinide is pretty cool, so basically what they do is they enrich ice chips, basically. So they start off with one material, so there's, there's three materials in the Russian, there's Russian sanctions list, there's some materials we can import or cannot import, there's three materials that are actually removed from that sanctions list, which means like you can get as much as you want, because we just need them. The highest cost per gram one is a material called turbium, it's used in, in cancer medication. Basically they make this material, and it's a $2 per gram material, they enrich it, it's $36,000 per gram.

• 2:41:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:41:08Jakob Diepenbrock?

  And then they already have, it's in the tweet as well, they already have some, some contracts, very large contracts they just signed, literally in the last week, it was pretty sick, like Monday morning, Monday day was yesterday, Monday morning, signed two contracts, locked in there with some companies everybody watching knows very, very well.

• 2:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, traction so far is pretty, pretty amazing.

• 2:41:28Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah, it was great, I think, I think we definitely seen like, over the last couple batches, like kind of the increase in, in traction, just because people want to be here now, so you kind of know, people kind of see the brand we provide, and that's, I think, pretty evident with the companies.

• 2:41:41John Coogan?

  Techs.pro is Bloomberg for heavy equipment procurement, so that's, oh, dealerships, interesting. So actually figuring out, so Bloomberg, you, you think that means?

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  Looking across all the different industries, like how you can go on Bloomberg and find someone's auctioning off a, you know, a private jet, but they're also selling some, uh, some slug of, of equity or something like that. Uh, so this is a platform to connect buyers and sellers?

• 2:42:10Jakob Diepenbrock?

  It basically is, yeah, brings together people who want to buy

• 2:42:12John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:42:12Jakob Diepenbrock?

  moneyed equipment, type of machinery. More generally, there's like no central database with all this, this information, just like Boomer X in Texas calls Boomer Y in, in, uh, Arkansas, and then they hopefully make it happen, but there's no like labeled database of all this equipment. Basically just like compile it all. Kind of like with like Carfax, for example, like early on, there's like no data. And like basically they just went out and like called all the dealerships like, hey, like, how much does this work? How much does this work?

• 2:42:37John Coogan?

  Is Loris, is Loris sort of like the V2 of the vertical farming era? It says they turn grocery store rooftops into autonomous farms.

• 2:42:46Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah. So like my, my, my take here was like vertical farming, obviously been tried.

• 2:42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:50Jakob Diepenbrock?

  It didn't really work because it was all like climate, like kind of carbon credit driven a lot of the time, or like the actual economics, economics did not make sense with, with that gone. Um, basically they removed like one of the biggest costs, which is real estate, and they basically just put these like blow up farms on grocery stores roofs. And then it's like a pretty, I mean, the, the numbers are here, like it, they have, um, like they don't pay for the actual unit. Uh, they have people to go in and license them and bring them out to grocery stores and then they get, um, like individual profit based off what the, the grocery stores make. And then the goal is bring the, the produce profits per grocery store up by 50%.

• 2:43:23Jordi Hays?

  The produce is then sold directly in the grocery store that it's sitting on.

• 2:43:27Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Exactly.

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 2:43:28Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Exactly.

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  Co-location.

• 2:43:29Jakob Diepenbrock?

  And they're already like in, in, in stores.

• 2:43:32John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:43:32Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Pretty big contract recently. Um, which is pretty exciting, but I, I think we look generally like this, again, food security is important.

• 2:43:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:38Jakob Diepenbrock?

  This stuff that was tried last, I don't know, five, 10 years ago, so it didn't really work because of the economics. Like this makes sense. There's also these general tellings of like, we need to make food in America. It's like actually healthy.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:43:48Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Um, so that's them, uh, Lark, Kai, Legend, at Skunk Works right out of college. Um, there's this new Mosa standard basically, which is like an open source. Like if you have a, a component, it has to actually work with every type of system. Um, there's no way to actually test this. They basically have a software that can test the compliance for, um, for any component. And then eventually you're going to build the hardware to, to test it in a more, um, in-depth fashion, starting with the software.

• 2:44:17John Coogan?

  I like Blitz Panel. That's a good name. Blitz Panel reminds me of Mix Panel.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  But

• 2:44:23Jakob Diepenbrock?

  It's a pretty simple company.

• 2:44:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:25Jakob Diepenbrock?

  They make electrical panels for for cheaper and they have a whole automation process he's he's built out. He was at Pipe Dream Labs in Texas.

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:33Jakob Diepenbrock?

  A huge problem and now he's basically just building the.

• 2:44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, going through all this stuff, it really shows you that there are like a lot of stuff that fit that fits in thematically that does not feel like it competes with Andorol, for example.

• 2:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:46John Coogan?

  But it's all it feels like aligned with the general theme that you've put together of cool, hard problems. There's a little bit of American dynamism, a little bit of military stuff in here. Uh, tell us about, uh, the last company, number nine.

• 2:45:00Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah, yeah. So Arcataz Energy.

• 2:45:02John Coogan?

  Arcataz.

• 2:45:03Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Uh, this guy reads old German papers from the forties in German and he found this process that basically

• 2:45:10John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  What year? What kind of German papers is he reading?

• 2:45:15Jakob Diepenbrock?

  You can guess, you can guess. Um.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  That doesn't instill. That doesn't instill confidence. Tell this guy to clean it up. What is going on?

• 2:45:25Jakob Diepenbrock?

  No, the the papers are scientific papers that were.

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. That needs to be clarified.

• 2:45:32Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  That needs to be clarified.

• 2:45:34Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Papers about scientific processes, no.

• 2:45:36John Coogan?

  Okay, yes, yes. They did have some good scientists in the forties.

• 2:45:40Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Exactly. And one of these papers in in particular goes this way of making hydrogen for cheaper.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:45Jakob Diepenbrock?

  And if you put hydrogen, you can make, uh, fruit oil for cheap.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations on the demo day. Uh, thank you so much for coming.

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really cool lineup. Uh, it's great. I mean, it's cool to see a lot of people focus on energy. I mean, that's that like,

• 2:45:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  People will criticize like, you know, accelerators and like for having like two like being like too on trend.

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Actually healthy. Like we want a new, we want a big group of companies like going after a bunch of different problems.

• 2:46:14John Coogan?

  This just doesn't seem like that narrow of a trend. It feels extremely narrow when you introduced it the first time and it just felt like, oh, it just defends tech or something. Um, but clearly like it's it's such a big area that some of these folks, if they're both successful, like they're not even going to do business together because they're operating completely different layers of the stack. Uh, it it's just a, it's a fantastic end result and really cool to see the growth here. So congratulations.

• 2:46:39Jakob Diepenbrock?

  I think one last point about the general defense market that I think is interesting is like a lot of these big companies like annual like Serrano like the big tier ones have already chosen like a winner and like

• 2:46:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:46:50Jakob Diepenbrock?

  They're not going to back another annual competitor. So it's like it, it, you need to have like the, the stack, like the capital stack makes sense. It'd be every single level of it and like all these funds have already chosen somebody as like their winner. It's, it's kind of hard to come in and like be back with these, these funds. So I think there's like so many opportunities that now to come because again, legacy industries are like open for venture. There's a lot of talent flowing in. And that's what we're trying to kind of take advantage of this like new movement. Best talent, capital actually, there's some solving these hard critical natural problems.

• 2:47:14John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Uh, congratulations on another successful demo day. We will see you next demo day and hopefully before that, of course.

• 2:47:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you, Jake.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Uh, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 2:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Our next guest is a living legend.

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 2:47:43Jordi Hays?

  The founder of Partifull. I'm sure she's dressed totally normal. So let's bring her.

• 2:47:46John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  How many, uh, how many Halloween parties did you get invited to?

• 2:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Is this AI? Is this AI?

• 2:47:57John Coogan?

  Hi.

• 2:47:58Speaker 09

  I, I wish, because it would have been a lot easier to put on.

• 2:48:00Jordi Hays?

  Did you do this yourself? Or did you have a team?

• 2:48:03Speaker 09

  I did do it myself, which is why I miss these spots.

• 2:48:06John Coogan?

  Oh, it looks great.

• 2:48:07Jordi Hays?

  This is incredible. I mean, I feel like Halloween is probably high pressure, like on part of, on the Partifull team. You guys are facilitating a lot of Halloween events. Like you kind of have to really show up and do it right. So, uh, congratulations. Did any?

• 2:48:20John Coogan?

  This is your Black Friday.

• 2:48:21Speaker 09

  This is our Black Friday. This is our Super Bowl. This is our D day.

• 2:48:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:25Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for taking some time to talk to us on your Black Friday. Uh, is it actually Black Friday in the sense that like the, the servers will be melting or is it just like it's the best opportunity to capitalize on the, the value prop that Partifull can deliver?

• 2:48:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would actually be curious. What are the, what are the biggest holidays for, or just days, celebrations?

• 2:48:48Speaker 09

  Halloween is by far the biggest.

• 2:48:50John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:48:51Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:48:52Speaker 09

  People celebrate Halloween like 10 times, right?

• 2:48:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:55Speaker 09

  Like, e-everyone can go to multiple Halloween parties and it's very valid. You're only gonna go to one New Year's Eve party, maybe during the holidays, you're like traveling, so who knows if you'll be around, but like, everyone's here, everyone's locked in, everyone knows what the job is. Uh, and so usually, it's like, you'll have six Halloween parties. Uh, and I-I don't, because I like the entire Particle team, I'm like, kind of on-call, uh, today, this weekend, but that's why I'm dressed up right now.

• 2:49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love the idea of you being on-call and then there's some serious thing happening in the business and you're like, let's hop on Zoom together and then you dressed up like this.

• 2:49:34Speaker 09

  It's very serious, yeah.

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  That's great, it seems like a good company culture.

• 2:49:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, the servers are not melting because our engineers prepped heavily for this, but it is like, a triple on-call situation.

• 2:49:45John Coogan?

  How, how has the business been growing? I know that, uh, a couple of months ago, there was like, oh, Apple's coming after you, and that felt like maybe it was just always gonna be-

• 2:49:56Jordi Hays?

  Focus on yourself, Apple, focus on yourself.

• 2:50:00John Coogan?

  Uh, but was that even like an O-S-H-I-T moment, or was it just kind of like, uh, okay, we didn't really see any blip in the numbers whatsoever? And we've just been on a growth projector, growth, growth trajectory the entire time?

• 2:50:14Speaker 09

  When it happened, it was definitely, uh, are you not allowed to curse on this show?

• 2:50:19John Coogan?

  We don't curse on this show, but you're welcome to, but-

• 2:50:22Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 2:50:23John Coogan?

  Kids do watch.

• 2:50:25Jordi Hays?

  Our kids watch, so if you, whatever you say, our kids will repeat to us later. They'll be like, what did Trey mean by that?

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:33Speaker 09

  It was an oh darn moment.

• 2:50:35John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:50:35Speaker 09

  Oh shucks.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  Oh shucks moment.

• 2:50:38Speaker 09

  Uh, but then, we're like, let's wait to see how this plays out, because I think so many startups go through the thing where some big player comes in, and they try to reheat your nachos, and it either works or it doesn't. And I don't know, have you guys gotten an Apple invite?

• 2:50:54Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:50:54John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:50:56Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go. Yeah, I mean, it seems like an obvious. I mean, the other thing is, Apple is not good at fun. Like, they did the Gen Moji thing and they were laughed at for it. It was like kind of a cool product, but again, it doesn't even get real usage. And I just think Apple was always known for magical software because it was just like so polished and good. And I think they're becoming less known for that.

• 2:51:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have another take here. I'd like to know if this resonates with you. You're obviously on the inside of this, but I feel like the invite product has like, there are technical features that someone can clone and check the box, but the brand is so important. And I feel like when I get a particle, it says something about what I'm going to expect walking in there. When I get a paperless post, that's a different vibe. That's a different thing. When I get a physical piece of mail that invites me to something, that's also a different, a different brand, a different vibe. It sets me up. It's the welcome moment to the actual event. It's part of the event experience. And so I feel like there's a world where you could clone all

• 2:52:13John Coogan?

  the features, but it's not going to bring the same energy, which is actually what your customers are buying in some way.

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  Part of the product.

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  I think it's part of the product, but what, how do you think about brand and how you stand out from the competition?

• 2:52:26Speaker 09

  I think it's brand and there's something about you have to want to break the rules because a party is not like a corporate meeting, right? A party is a party. And so we, from the very beginning, have always been like, the party page should feel as much fun as the party itself. Like, you're already asking guests to do a lot by RSVPing. Like, you might as well make it fun for them and give them a reward where they get to see the guest list after they RSVP. Like, you, you gotta make it something where people can actually feel bought into the experience. And you don't do that by, you know, building something that just looks like an online forum or gets buried in someone's email. But I also think there's an interesting, like, cross-platform aspect of this, too. When you think about Apple...

• 2:53:11Speaker 09

  Like i- if I want to invite people to my party, I want to invite my friends who have an iPhone. I want to invite my friends who have Android. Like, I don't care what phone my friends have, they're still my friends.

• 2:53:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:22Speaker 09

  And so I think it's really important and it's just, it's hard for certain companies to execute on this.

• 2:53:28Jordi Hays?

  Does the Apple app only work if you have an iPhone?

• 2:53:31Speaker 09

  It, it does work for Android.

• 2:53:32Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:53:33Speaker 09

  Uh, it's just.

• 2:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Say, that's just like, that's just mean, okay? Yeah. Not even being able to invite Android people to parties, that's just mean.

• 2:53:40Speaker 09

  I mean, well, they're already green friends. They're already like, look like this.

• 2:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, uh, so, so we oftentimes, you know, if we're talking to an enterprise software founder, we don't typically ask the question like, what's the 10-year vision? Like, where does this go? Because usually it's like more seats, you know, more contracts, more pro- more products, margin expansion, basic products. But how do, how do you, like, you know, and I'm sure you've just been learning about what Partifal is as you, as you've built it. But like, has the vision, like, what, what was kind of the founding vision? What is it today? How has it changed? And kind of where, where are you going? Cause I, I've always, I've like, I've seen like your posts or like different press hits throughout the years.

• 2:54:25Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, there was some really funny post about like have, not having any, uh, not making any money that, that, uh, that stuck with me. But, um, uh, and obviously just like, you know, joking about it or whatever. But like, yeah, where, where, where did you start from and where are you going?

• 2:54:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's, it's funny how many people took that post like very seriously. It's like, you can't joke with the internet anymore.

• 2:54:50Jordi Hays?

  What was the exact, what was the exact line? I, I forget.

• 2:54:53Speaker 09

  It was just like, Partifal won't make money. VCs gave us funding to help you party. Enjoy it, babes. Something like that. There are all these like very serious news articles of like, Partifal said that VCs gave us a big party. Like, is it true?

• 2:55:07Jordi Hays?

  That's kind of a, if you guys aren't making money, if you guys aren't making money, it's kind of a systemic risk to the part, to big party, you know?

• 2:55:14Speaker 09

  Yeah. No, we, we will definitely, we will definitely make money, uh, just not right now. The the long term vision is i- if you look at where most social apps have gone, they've kind of turned into entertainment platforms, right? Like when when I open Instagram, I'm being fed a bunch of reels. I'm seeing less and less of my friends' content. TikTok is obviously huge and it's also an entertainment platform. And so when you really think about it, the content that we're consuming is more and more just like, it can be Netflix, it can be YouTube, it can be reels, it can be shorts, it can be TikTok. But it's all just you're watching entertainment from people who you don't actually know. And so what's gotten lost in that is like, where do you go if you want to actually connect with your friends?

• 2:55:57Speaker 09

  Where do you go if you want to meet more of the people who could be your friends? Because less and less you're you're discovering them online. And so what we want to do is create the home for you to hang out with your friends, see them more easily, discover new things to do and new people to do them with. And we think that as big social actually stops becoming social and starts becoming big new media, that big social deserves to exist. And right now it's small social, it's part of all, but the goal is big, become big social.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  That's yeah. I love it. Yeah, I mean, we were talking to Brian Chesky, he has somewhat somewhat similar thesis. And I've it's grown on me so much, the barbell idea. You're going to be, there's going to be the internet slop feed, there's going to be a lot of content and stuff. But then you're also going to want to touch grass and both can be true and you can kind of toggle back and forth. What's the most underrated part of all that you've ever seen?

• 2:56:52Speaker 09

  Okay, so I that they're they're somewhat rated. It's not fully underrated.

• 2:56:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:57Speaker 09

  But I'm obsessed with the the performative contest. So there's like performative male contest happening right now. I saw in San Francisco, there was like a performative reading contest.

• 2:57:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:11Speaker 09

  Which I think is great. It's it, yeah, yeah, it's just like. There's something really funny that's happening where online meme culture, people are using particle to take that offline.

• 2:57:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:57:23Speaker 09

  So they're taking like

• 2:57:24Jordi Hays?

  I know, by the way, I know I used to go to the same gym as a kid who like initially went viral for the performative reading in New York where he was reading like, uh, like, like some

• 2:57:36John Coogan?

  Infinite Jest or something.

• 2:57:37Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't that. It was like, it was like a feminist, feminist, feminist text or something like that. And he's like, you know, reading and people are like, hey, he's been reading the same page for like

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:48Jordi Hays?

  30 minutes. Like what's going on? And that I'm sure that was part of what kicked off this, this kind of thing.

• 2:57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:54Speaker 09

  Yeah. Or like group seven on Tik Tok. Like there's now like a group seven meetup, I think this weekend in New York. So it's like the speed at which every single internet meme now has a real offline particle event that people are actually going to, that's actually happening. That's been pretty cool to watch.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  Take us through the SF party culture. I'm hearing 996. It's getting crazier. Everyone's working nonstop. Uh, is that bear, is that a bear signal for your business? No one's going to be partying, right?

• 2:58:25Jordi Hays?

  Are they just using it for like happy hour? Come talk about SAS?

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  Oh, that could be a bull case. Break it down.

• 2:58:32Speaker 09

  Uh, 996 color culture is very concerning to the party community. I'm here to declare a state of emergency in the SF party scene.

• 2:58:43John Coogan?

  We have to end it. The drinks, happy hours are coming back. It's okay to crack open a happy dad at 2pm. Pass me that happy dad. I'm going to crack that open right now. Let's get the party started right now.

• 2:58:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We do tech companies need to bring back boozy brunches during weekdays? Was that ever a thing? Like what, what's, what's kind of the solution here?

• 2:59:03Speaker 09

  Uh, maybe that's what we should start using our VC dollars for.

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  The power lunch?

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Hello.

• 2:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Power lunch?

• 2:59:10Speaker 09

  Funding everyone's boozy, boozy lunches and boozy dinners.

• 2:59:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that kind of, that was kind of the joke in 2021. It was like, there was like, I, you know, people used to joke 30% of all dollar venture dollars go to Meta. And then in 2021, it felt like 30% of VC dollars were going to like founder dinners. Like it was just a founder, you could basically eat for free as a founder by just going to a different founder dinner every night with, with a, with a fintech.

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:37Jordi Hays?

  But

• 2:59:38John Coogan?

  I want to keep going. I know we're way over time, but I want you to synthesize something you've been thinking about. This idea of like rage bait marketing being not effective long term. Synthesize that with some, I feel like Partifol's done a little bit of it, but you haven't like crossed any line. So it's always like worked out. Like even that, even that example you gave of like, oh, we're spending all our VCs money. That's kind of rage bait marketing, but it never, it never bubbled up to the point where people were like, oh, you don't have a sense of humor about it.

• 3:00:09Jordi Hays?

  That creates goodwill.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I've always loved the Partifol brand.

• 3:00:12Jordi Hays?

  The VCs are financing this party. Like, and for the user, that's cool.

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:18Jordi Hays?

  But, but there's, that's quite, that's quite different than like the memes that were going around earlier this year. People being like, I use VC dollars to buy this Lambo.

• 3:00:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. And myself. Yeah. How do you think about like rage bait, where the line is on your brand? Obviously you came on a show that's, I don't know, mostly a joke, but somewhat serious, dressed up. Like you have fun, but then there is the line. How do you think about that?

• 3:00:43Speaker 09

  We, there's a little bit that I think you kind of have to acknowledge it. Like if a company's pre-revenue, like, you know, there's clearly VC funding that's, that's backing it. So you can't not talk about that. Right? And I'm a beneficiary of VCs funding a lot of free Ubers in my peak partying era. So I have a responsibility to pay it forward to the next generation.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:06Speaker 09

  But I think we're here to make people happy. That's the entire purpose of the company. We're not here to make people angry. And so there's only so much rage baiting that like we at Partifol can do that's authentic because it's like, no, the rest of the internet makes people angry. And we're like the one thing that's trying to not do that. So I think that's part of why we toe the line is just not as authentic to us if like, you know, the Twitter mobs are up in arms.

• 3:01:31Jordi Hays?

  There's also, John, you were writing about the come for the tool, stay for the network.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Chris Dixon's piece is like a perfect example, but a stronger, like, I think a stronger example than...

• 3:01:42John Coogan?

  Come for the tool, stay for the network. John Coogan, Chris Dixon. Chris Dixon, it was me quoting him. Last question, and we have to have you back on and go way deeper, but I'm super interested. It seems like Partifal has complete and total domination over like tech culture in terms of like, if there's a party that's happening in SF tech, like you found your beachhead, you've landed, you've dominated. How much time are you spending hunting around to find like these crazy adjacent markets for, okay, there's someone who collects some odd object in the Midwest and like you just dominate in Milwaukee now because like your viral loop worked.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how dominant is Partifal? Because I don't...

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:23Speaker 09

  It's grown, it's grown a lot. So we've never had boots on the ground in a market like DC or Boston or Chicago, and those are all huge.

• 3:02:33John Coogan?

  Huge now, yeah.

• 3:02:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. We're growing like crazy in London.

• 3:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:37Speaker 09

  We do a boots on the ground there.

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's all just web flywheel stuff, right?

• 3:02:43Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, just, you know, network effects.

• 3:02:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, just good old fashioned viral growth.

• 3:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for network effects.

• 3:02:50John Coogan?

  Let's hit the gong.

• 3:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Great hit. All right, this was super fun. Thank you for taking 15 minutes out of your, out of your Super Bowl to come on. Hopefully no crises later today because the people are depending on it.

• 3:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:07Jordi Hays?

  And I'm excited for you to become a big social media.

• 3:03:13John Coogan?

  Yes, we're very excited for you. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:03:16Speaker 09

  Good to see you guys. Happy Halloween.

• 3:03:17Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Talk soon.

• 3:03:18John Coogan?

  Our next guest has been in the REIT waiting room for far too long, Shishir Metzbrora from Superhuman, formerly Grammarly. We're going to break down the...

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  Rebrand.

• 3:03:32Jordi Hays?

  We had him on there when they acquired Superhuman.

• 3:03:35John Coogan?

  Yes. Welcome to the stream.

• 3:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:03:38John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the next iteration. We pressed you about this. We asked you, is there going to be a rebrand? And you were like, nothing to it now. I think you did. Yeah.

• 3:03:47John Coogan?

  But congratulations, it's done. And it happened really fast, actually. Many corporations would take.

• 3:03:52Speaker 10

  Glad it feels that way.

• 3:03:53John Coogan?

  Take a year. I know. I don't know. It feels fast to me. But anyway, how's it going? What are the key changes? What's the thesis? Why'd you go with Superhuman and not Grammarly as the key hero brand?

• 3:04:04Speaker 10

  Yeah, that's, that's great. Yeah, we did talk about it a few months back when we bought Superhuman. There's two big changes we made. We changed the name of the corporate entity to be Superhuman instead of Grammarly. It's a little bit like the Google Alphabet transition. There's still, Grammarly is still an important brand in our portfolio of products. We now have four products under the Superhuman brand. It's Grammarly, it's Coda, it's Mail, which you used to know as Superhuman before. And the other big announcement is we added a fourth new product. We call Go, Superhuman Go, which brings a new AI assistant product, takes the best parts of Grammarly and makes it a platform.

• 3:04:45John Coogan?

  Okay, explain that more to me because.

• 3:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, one, before we jump into that, I will say, Superhuman is a perfect name for a suite of AI-enabled apps.

• 3:04:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:04:56Jordi Hays?

  At a time when a lot of humans, especially even, I would say more so outside of the tech bubble, are like worried about being obsolete in an age of AI. And so this kind of ethos of like, let's give people superpowers. Very strong. Makes a lot of sense.

• 3:05:12Speaker 10

  Exactly. You nailed it. That's why we picked the name. I had two tests. One was it need to be broad enough for the suite, first thing you said. And the second one was actually the word human is more important than the word super. And it's actually part of the Grammarly DNA because Grammarly has always been about empowerment of humans. You still, you know, we help you, assist you in your writing tasks, but you still, at the end of the day, submit the article, you submit the essay, you write the email. We're just helping you be more human. So I love the concept of Superhuman that way.

• 3:05:42John Coogan?

  Okay, so walk me through the actual instantiation of the product. I understand Grammarly is, you know, like a widget.

• 3:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, let's maybe talk about Superhuman Go, the new product. Cause that's what I have no context on.

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  Yes, please.

• 3:05:57Speaker 10

  Right, right. Yeah, and actually, we teased it, we teased that a little bit last time I was here too. And the, the core idea is a, a simple reframe of Grammarly. Uh, so Superhuman Go, uh, takes the core underlying technology layer of Grammarly and opens it up as a platform. So, most people think about Grammarly as a grammar assistant. And that, that is a big piece of what it does. But underneath it is a layer that allows you to bring AI to a proactive embedded experience in every tool you use. Grammarly works in about a million different web apps, desktop apps and mobile applications. Uh, and now you can run any agent, not just your writing assistant, on top of that platform, embedded, connected and personal.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  How do you think about the, the wars at the various layers of the stack? There's a war.

• 3:06:43Jordi Hays?

  They're fighting all of them.

• 3:06:44John Coogan?

  I mean, there's an AI assistant in basically every web app now. Like if I go into Gmail, it's asking me to use Gemini. And then at the browser layer, there's Atlas versus, you know, the perplexes.

• 3:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Six companies built on Chromium.

• 3:06:58John Coogan?

  And then there's also the, the OS layer. So I was reflecting the other day on, on Gmail was trying to get me to use Gemini. Uh, ChatGPT was asking, was, was asking me to use Atlas. And then Apple was trying to get me to use Apple Intelligence. And it's three helpful AI assistants all in just, you want to summarize this email?

• 3:07:15Speaker 10

  Yeah, so you said the key word that you said ask?

• 3:07:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:18Speaker 10

  So actually, interestingly, my frame for, if you took all those AI providers.

• 3:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:22Speaker 10

  And you put them into buckets.

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:23Speaker 10

  I, I call it the assist players, the chat players and the do players.

• 3:07:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:07:27Speaker 10

  So the chat players, that's, that's what you're referring to. There's a chatbot everywhere. ChatGPT is obviously synonymous with that category and there's now dozens of them.

• 3:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:36Speaker 10

  Those all ask you to go chat with a virtual human assistant.

• 3:07:39John Coogan?

  True.

• 3:07:39Speaker 10

  There's a set of folks working on what we call do, which is I want an AI agent that can go do things on my behalf as headless tasks.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:07:47Speaker 10

  And, you know, I think the, the most popular one right now, or the one people are talking a lot about, is all the ones in the coding space. You know, the Anthropic team said 39% of their queries are for headless agentic tasks and being used for developers writing code. But at the bottom of that stack is another category we call assist. And that's the category where we bring AI to you. So I'll give you, I'll give you one fun stat. We do about a hundred billion LLM calls a week. It would make us a top AI provider based on uh um uh any anybody's volume, but we do that across about forty million users, which if you do the quick math on that, that's about uh it's a few thousand AI calls a day per person. So if you're a really, really good Gemini user, or you're a really good chat GPT user, maybe use it a dozen times.

• 3:08:31John Coogan?

  Yep, dozen times.

• 3:08:32Speaker 10

  We do it. Yeah, every time you press a key, every time you load a new doc, load a new app, we proactively bring AI to you and we're figuring out all the places we can invisibly insert AI uh so it can assist you right where you're working.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes ten cents.

• 3:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh will you any any plans to get into the browser game? Are you gonna let people duke it out there?

• 3:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:53Speaker 10

  That's not our plan. I mean, I think I think we work. Our strength is that we work everywhere. By the way, I should say, I'm so excited that there is a browser game. I remember when I was at I was at Microsoft when Chrome came out and I worked at Google for a long time and I watched I watched that happen and then it just felt like it went away for a long time. It's pretty exciting, actually, that there's some competition in browsers. But we work wherever you work. We work in browsers, we work in the desktop, we work on your mobile phones. Um to be honest, some fragmentation in the browser world is probably good for us. I mean, it makes it even more valuable to have an assistant that follows you everywhere. And that's the core of the technology we built anyways. But uh you know, I I I don't see us in that game, but I I'm I'm very curious to watch it.

• 3:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 3:09:33John Coogan?

  Uh well, congratulations on the uh all the progress.

• 3:09:37Jordi Hays?

  You dressing up for Halloween later?

• 3:09:39Speaker 10

  I I I am dressed up. I'm the superhuman CEO.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, there we go. It's fantastic.

• 3:09:44Jordi Hays?

  That's the most locked in costume.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  It's incredibly locked in costume. I love it.

• 3:09:49Jordi Hays?

  He's super Superman himself, I'd say.

• 3:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.

• 3:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Great to get that update. Love the new name.

• 3:09:56John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:09:58John Coogan?

  Uh if you have a new name, you need to get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Introduce everyone to your unified brand. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buy across the globe. You also need to get a new luxury watch to celebrate your new rebrand. Get your superhuman on your wrist with bezel. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

• 3:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Our next guest uh is dressed up as the co-founder and CEO of Linear. I can't wait to talk. Come on in. Kar, great to see you.

• 3:10:35John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 3:10:37Karri Saarinen?

  Well, great, great. Thanks for having me again. And yeah, like, um, my plan was the same as everyone else's. I could have dressed up like you guys, but I, I saw it's already done. So I thought like, well, I'll just do a different thing and not dress up.

• 3:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're locked in, locked in. CEO of Linear. Uh, you, you could, uh, you could plan to like, if you grew out the hair on the sides, I bet by next year, you could do a pretty good impression of, of one of us.

• 3:11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. For sure.

• 3:11:04Jordi Hays?

  A pure play. Um, great to see you. I, I think, did we overlap almost it? Were you at the GitHub Universe on Tuesday?

• 3:11:13Karri Saarinen?

  No, I wasn't there, but yeah, that, that's why I couldn't join. But, um, but yeah, we can, we can talk about that or, or something else.

• 3:11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talked, we, we, we got a good whirlwind tour of what, uh, Microsoft's doing. Obviously, Asachio was taking a victory lap on the OpenAI deal. Uh, and we talked to the Codex team over at OpenAI. We also, uh, talked to some GitHub folks and I think, I think the general, uh, shape of software development in 2025 is becoming clear. It, there, you have asynchronous agents that you can fire off. You're doing code review. You also have a tab completion model, an IDE that's getting smarter every month. But, uh, I'd really love to hear how you see linear, uh, evolving in that context and how, and what, I mean, I, you can think about linear as delegating different tasks.

• 3:12:01John Coogan?

  How do you delegate when you have, uh, super long running agents? We were talking to the Codex team. What did he say? Something ran?

• 3:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Sixty hours.

• 3:12:06John Coogan?

  Sixty hours. It's like, that's something you need linear to manage at this point. So, but talk, take me through how you're seeing folks, uh, change their use of linear and what you're doing with the product.

• 3:12:17Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah. Um, one, one of the things I've been thinking about is that like a lot of like linear was, was founded before all this like AI things started happening more. And as well as like, I think like most companies out there today have like even like large companies, they started before this, this was happening. So I think we're all in this journey of kind of like an evolution of like, how do we do these things? So like, what are the workflows? What needs to change? Like what doesn't change? I've been like thinking about like the whole. Kind of writing examples. So like we used to write on paper, like we write documents on paper. Then we moved to typewriters, then we moved to like online, like a text processing on our computers. And then we went to like online writing.

• 3:12:59Karri Saarinen?

  The writing is still, it's like you have a piece of paper on the screen. You're still doing the writing activity and then now like, okay, like the AI can also do some of the writing activities. But it's kind of like a lot of the tooling changed around that activity or that concept or that need. But the activity itself didn't change. So like we still have like documents and papers as an idea because it's useful. So I see the like, kind of like the chains on the software industry similar that like the AI doesn't mean that we, we will just throw everything out of the window. Like there's no longer like any of these IDEs or workflows or something. But it's more like we have to kind of like go piece by piece. Like, does this still make sense? Okay, it does make sense. Let's do that. And then like, does this have to change? Okay, it does have to change.

• 3:13:44Karri Saarinen?

  Or it would be better if it changes. So, so I think like our thinking um with that has been that like we want to help companies move to that direction as well. So we do have the, for example, the agents um platform where also GitHub Copilot now um integrated with. So you can delegate tasks directly to the GitHub Copilot. Then it can work on a background. You can, you can then like come back to see like what the results are and, and review the code. We also have like other agents.

• 3:14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there any world where the ability to delegate to agents enables more non-technical people? It gives more non-technical people a reason to have a seat on linear?

• 3:14:30Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I think like it, it's something like we definitely like seeing today. And I think it's one of the, the values we can give to, value we can give to organizations. So like IDEs and technical tools are, are used by engineers.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:44Karri Saarinen?

  But like what we even see in our company now is like designers are making fixes with the agents.

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:14:50Karri Saarinen?

  Um, when they see something like, oh, this is like a little bit off. I can like properly instruct the agents, like find this in the code base. Do you do like a version of this? And you can also like, in our case, you can preview the result through linear. So you can actually see like, oh, this is how it is and and test it. So I think it's like, it gives like a nice loop for a non-technical person to sometimes just like fix things. When they see something and you don't always have to like, assign it to the engineer.

• 3:15:21Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about like project management software broadly evolving? Like, do you expect to, are you guys experimenting with any new paradigms? Like, agents are great in that right now, we even call them like human-like names oftentimes, right? Everyone has their, you know, like, sometimes it's a girl name, sometimes it's a guy name. And like, the way that we're using them today is very much like a teammate. That might suggest that we're not going to see a bunch of new UI paradigms. But are you and the team kind of like, what doesn't get shipped that you guys are kind of playing with, you know, behind the scenes?

• 3:16:00Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I think like I like to think about, there's like two areas. One is the organizational workflow. So like, that goes everything from like, what linear really offers is like coordination and prioritization and communication and visibility to the organization. Like, this is the, this is the direction we're going and this is how it's going. And these are the people working on those things. And so I think like with AI, we can, we are looking for those like problems and like, what can we actually fix there? Or like improve there with AI? And then I think the other is the the individual engineering workflow, like where does that change? So I think like, there is definitely like something we're thinking about that. Do the issues still make sense? Do pull requests still make sense as a concept?

• 3:16:45Karri Saarinen?

  When you are like more like working with the with AI to to develop something? I do think like there is still. Need for reporting things like bugs and like even and or like capturing issues, having discussions around it. So I don't think like everything is gonna change that. I think like a lot of times what really help companies with this like some kind of direction and some kind of um, kind of like a guidance to their teams like here's here's like a system for you to operate in. And these are the pieces and this is the goals. And then you let them like do their work. So I I I at least like to see that it's it's not like I don't.

• 3:17:28Karri Saarinen?

  What we think about the SaaS future or like SaaS products, it's it's more about the making them more proactive or self-driving. Like we like to say like self-driving SaaS is that we we're not yet at the stage of like um, like with transportation, like we still need cars because we don't have teleports. So we need to now like we have the stage of like, let's make those cars self-driving. And so I think like when it comes to software products, I think we are also there that I don't think we are at the stage yet. And maybe not for a long time that we no no longer need no software products. But I think like they could be much more proactive and dri- driving things on their own on the background without you interacting at all.

• 3:18:13Karri Saarinen?

  So the idea would be that bugs just fix themselves. So like when bugs get reported, someone like the AI will fix it and you don't even have to see it.

• 3:18:24Karri Saarinen?

  I think there's still.

• 3:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Eventually, I'm I'm excited for the future when teams can just go into linear and just watch a bunch of work happening. There's, you know, it's an agent, an agent finds a bug, another agent solves it. An agent has an idea for a feature or a user gives an idea, the agent ships it. It's, you know, the the fully autonomous future is wild. I was, I I wrote a post, maybe it was a couple of weeks ago at this point or or last week about the uninspired company of Silicon Valley and and how I mentioned at one point that uh, companies, I'm sure now, like so many companies have copied linear. I'm sure there's companies now that. Copy linear without even knowing like the origin of the kind of design language. They're just like, oh, this is just the way that design looks.

• 3:19:10Jordi Hays?

  So I was wondering, like, your philosophy on, like, you guys get a lot of credit for kind of like creating an entire way, you know, feeling for software and design language and all these different, you know, UI elements. Do you ever have a desire to like reinvent the next paradigm and kind of ship something that would, you know, create an entirely new, you know, version of the software that would completely reskin it?

• 3:19:39John Coogan?

  Entirely skeuomorphic. It's all just like wooden blocks and grass simulation.

• 3:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or do you just continue to own it and be the godfather of modern software as a servant?

• 3:19:51John Coogan?

  Random fonts everywhere, random colors everywhere.

• 3:19:56Karri Saarinen?

  I think, we definitely think about that, like especially on the website side that like, well, what is the next thing we can do since like everyone is kind of like doing this thing we're doing?

• 3:20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:06Karri Saarinen?

  So I think there's definitely that need, but I think we, in the end, like we try to be functional or pragmatic about the design that it still serves the purpose. I believe that old like design quote of the form follows function. So it's like, you're not like, with productivity tools or other tools, I don't think like the point is to be an artist or something like you're not trying to like invent something crazy things just for the sake of it. I think it needs to be like to the purpose or the function of the tool. And then like around that, like there's always like, you can like try to figure out what needs to, what could be better or like maybe you can go against some convention when you when you have that reason.

• 3:20:50Karri Saarinen?

  So, I mean, we're always looking for those opportunities and I think for us, like part of the, like the mission of the company is to accelerate and inspire builders. So we also do in a way like that we're accomplishing the mission of inspiring a lot of different companies on how to design or like focus on the craft or the quality. So that's, that's kind of like personally, what I also wanted to do that could we like shift this industry a little bit more into the like, we can do nice things and it doesn't always have to be just like what metric goes up or down and like, or some other reasons.

• 3:21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:25Jordi Hays?

  Made the world a more, a more beautiful place.

• 3:21:29John Coogan?

  I love it. It's a good time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time on Friday.

• 3:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Next time you're passing through LA, stop by. We'd love to hang.

• 3:21:41John Coogan?

  Ideally on a day when we're not dressed up like fools.

• 3:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Like a couple of characters.

• 3:21:46John Coogan?

  Can be a little bit more serious. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us and thank you for supporting the show this entire year. It's been very helpful.

• 3:21:53Jordi Hays?

  One of the very first few.

• 3:21:54John Coogan?

  We've had a lot of fun and everyone in the chat is celebrating Linear. Connor says he just onboarded his business onto Linear today, like 20 minutes ago. Let's hear it for that. John actually says Linear is TVPN royalty.

• 3:22:09Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:22:10John Coogan?

  So awesome to see Karri in the Ultra Dome. Thank you for coming by. We will talk to you soon.

• 3:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Give our best to you then.

• 3:22:16John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 3:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 3:22:18John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:22:20John Coogan?

  There's one scoop I want to talk about. Katie Roof is confirming a scoop from Tech Meme that Axios is dropping. "Human Interest, a 401(k) platform for small and medium businesses that aims to cut down on administrative work, raised $100 million at a $3 billion post-money valuation." This is a leak, but I know the CEO of Human Interest, he's a good buddy. And so I just want to say congrats to Human Interest because it's very cool.

• 3:22:46Jordi Hays?

  And Elon has a new pod up on Aydin.

• 3:22:49John Coogan?

  And on Rogan.

• 3:22:50Jordi Hays?

  And Rogan.

• 3:22:51John Coogan?

  He's on a press tour. He's on a press tour. We gotta get him. Maybe this is the time to strike. Maybe we get him on TVPN next week. The team seems to like the idea.

• 3:23:01Jordi Hays?

  We will work on it. Thank you guys for hanging out with us on such a crazy day.

• 3:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:09Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be hard to, we were, while we were putting this on, we were talking about how do we one-up this next year?

• 3:23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:15Jordi Hays?

  What could possibly be?

• 3:23:16John Coogan?

  Let us know in the chat.

• 3:23:17Jordi Hays?

  As iconic as these two titans of industry.

• 3:23:20John Coogan?

  Didn't we do Elon and Joe Rogan? That would be good. I think, I think throwing in a Rogan is a good one.

• 3:23:26Jordi Hays?

  You as, you as Rogan, even though you're 14, maybe 14 inches taller than Rogan?

• 3:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I can see, I can see a Rogan. We could do Rogan and Alex Friedman. That could work. Maybe we could do a huge women.

• 3:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Lacks would be the experts.

• 3:23:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, the experts is good. Like as other podcasters kinda hits, we could do a David Sendra. We could both be David Sendra. How about that?

• 3:23:48Jordi Hays?

  David Sendra by David Sendra.

• 3:23:49John Coogan?

  Yes, we could both be David Sendra.

• 3:23:51Jordi Hays?

  An executive producer.

• 3:23:52John Coogan?

  That'd be a lot of fun. Uh, I think your mustache is actually falling off your face.

• 3:23:57Jordi Hays?

  I feel this weird thing where it feels like I'm sweating underneath everything.

• 3:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:03Jordi Hays?

  But I, but it's, I've had this like scratch up here by this like fake vein and I'm not able to itch it. And so I'm looking forward to taking this off.

• 3:24:13John Coogan?

  It's actually so trippy.

• 3:24:15Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people are asking, are you gonna, am I gonna go home and trick or treat with the kids like this?

• 3:24:20John Coogan?

  I was thinking about it.

• 3:24:21Jordi Hays?

  No, I do not want to traumatize my young children.

• 3:24:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:24Jordi Hays?

  I will be dressing up as something else, but thank you for tuning in with us today. Have a wonderful.

• 3:24:29John Coogan?

  And thank you to the team that helped us pull this off. This was a very special, funny thing. I never thought we'd be doing this, but that's the nature of the show. And so thank you for everyone that supports us. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

• 3:24:39Jordi Hays?

  And go out and have a wonderful evening and weekend. Be safe. We will see you back here on Monday.

• 3:24:45John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 3:24:46John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.