Palmer Luckey LIVE from NYSE, Supreme Court Smackdown, Data Center Backlash | Ryan Petersen, Jonathan Gould, Diogo Mónica, Joe Lonsdale, John Shahidi, Will Bruey, Sam Levenback, Alex Heath

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:07) - Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, a global supply chain management company, discusses the recent U. S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidated former President Trump's broad tariffs, highlighting the uncertainty surrounding potential refunds for businesses that paid these tariffs. He notes that while the Court's decision deemed the tariffs unconstitutional, it did not provide clarity on whether the $175 billion collected would be refunded, leaving companies in limbo. Petersen also mentions that Flexport has developed a tariff refund calculator to assist businesses in determining potential refunds, emphasizing the importance of staying informed as the situation evolves. (14:36) - Supreme Court Smackdown (21:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (47:36) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:00:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:03:29) - Palmer Luckey is a technology entrepreneur best known as the founder of Oculus VR, the virtual reality company acquired by Facebook in 2014. He later founded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company building autonomous systems, surveillance platforms, and AI-driven military hardware for the U. S. and allied governments. (01:32:18) - Jonathan Gould is a U. S. financial regulatory official and legal expert focused on banking policy and supervision. He has served in senior roles at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and has worked in private practice advising financial institutions on regulatory matters. He is known for his expertise in bank regulation, fintech policy, and the legal framework governing U. S. financial institutions. (01:46:36) - Diogo Mónica, General Partner, Haun Ventures, discusses his journey from leading security teams at Square and Docker to establishing Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto-native bank in the U. S. He highlights the challenges of obtaining a federal charter during a crypto-unfriendly administration and emphasizes the necessity for tech companies to build their own banking infrastructure to innovate in financial products. Mónica also notes a resurgence in new bank charters, indicating a shift towards tech-driven financial institutions. (01:55:57) - Joe Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for co-founding Palantir Technologies, Addepar, and OpenGov, and serving as the managing partner at 8VC. He discusses the challenges facing low-end SaaS companies lacking robust systems of record, regulatory moats, or network effects, emphasizing that such companies are vulnerable to disruption, whereas well-established SaaS firms with strong tech cultures and significant investments in AI are better positioned to adapt and thrive. (02:04:19) - John Shahidi, co-founder of Happy Dad Hard Seltzer, discusses the brand's impressive 31% year-over-year growth in January, even during the typically slow "dry January" period. He attributes this success to strategic in-store marketing efforts, emphasizing the importance of engaging customers at the point of purchase rather than relying solely on creator-driven promotions. Shahidi also highlights the evolving drinking habits of younger consumers, noting a shift towards lighter beverages like seltzers and teas, as health consciousness rises and traditional beer consumption declines. (02:19:56) - Will Bruey, CEO and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, discusses the company's progress in space manufacturing, highlighting the recent landing of their fifth capsule and the upcoming launch of the sixth. He explains their strategy of implementing annual block upgrades to enhance hardware and software, drawing parallels to consumer electronics like smartphones. Bruey also emphasizes the focus on bio-manufacturing in microgravity over the next five to ten years, citing its economic viability and significant impact. (02:27:24) - Sam Levenback, Senior Vice President and Chief Growth & Strategy Officer at X-energy, discusses the company's development of high-temperature gas-cooled pebble bed reactors and their collaboration with Dow Chemical in South Texas and Amazon in Washington state to build new nuclear projects. He highlights the importance of revitalizing the U. S. nuclear supply chain to meet the growing energy demands of AI and digital infrastructure, emphasizing X-energy's commitment to advancing firm power solutions. Levenback also underscores the significance of partnerships with investors like Arabor, who are eager to understand and support the nuclear sector's unique challenges and opportunities. (02:41:36) - Alex Heath, Deputy Editor at The Verge and author of the "Command Line" newsletter, discusses his approach to tech journalism, emphasizing the importance of leveraging AI tools for efficiency while maintaining editorial oversight. He highlights the necessity of balancing relationships with tech executives to ensure fair reporting and shares insights into the evolving landscape of media, including the potential for independent writers to collaborate under unified brands. Heath also reflects on the challenges of holding exclusive stories and the significance of in-person interactions for sourcing information. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVBN and that's the linear lineup. We got Ryan Peterson joining in just a second. It's Friday, February 20th, 2026. We are live from TVBN Ultra, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let's pull up the linear lineup. But first, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. And on the linear lineup, we have absolutely stacked show. We got Ryan Peterson joining emergency call in about the tariffs. Then we're going to have Paul Merlocke joining, breaking it down. What's happening with Erebor? The bank received the charter. He's officially a charter holder and we have a bunch of other folks who are involved with him in the Erebor project.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  We're very excited to talk to Joe Lonsdale's joining, Will Bruey, Sam, Alex Heath is joining in person from sources. You've been seeing his scoops all over the timeline this week and we are very excited to talk to him about that. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents and you should be too. So the tariff news, let's bring in Ryan Peterson from the restream waiting room. Ryan, how are you doing?

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Look at that.

• 1:11Ryan Petersen?

  Ah, confused. I'm great. I think I'm great.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  Look at that smile. Look at that smile. You haven't smiled like that on the show and.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  We've had some dark times. We made it through.

• 1:20Ryan Petersen?

  We'll see. We'll see. I was at, you know what? I love you guys so much that I actually dropped from watching the president's news conference.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  This is, this is the real.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  There were some all time, there were some all time quotes. We were prepping the show, but Tyler on our team was sending over quotes to me in real time. One of them was quote from Trump, "I want to be a good boy." And then later he said, "I want to kiss you so badly" in some other context.

• 1:46Ryan Petersen?

  It's that. Who was he talking to?

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  I think he was talking about somebody who was saying that to him.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, take it through, take us through it. What have you seen? What, what's actual, what's actually the news? What happened and how have you been processing it?

• 2:01Ryan Petersen?

  Yeah. So the, the Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs, the IEP, but tariffs, that's not all the tariffs. There are section one tariffs, there are patent old tariffs. There's a, there's a bunch of other types of tariffs, but IEP was the reciprocal tariffs. You may remember them from, uh, they were applied to that Penguin Island.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19Ryan Petersen?

  Book papers, uh, most annoying is a kind of the global sweeping tariffs. Shows have been overturned. However, the Supreme Court did not give any clarity, and Trump is right to point this out. It's really dumb about do we get refunds or not? Um, I think there's a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Ryan Petersen?

  That they would be owed in refunds. So that is the giant seventy-five billion dollar question. What happens with all that money that people paid over the last year?

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  What, how, like, is there a meaningful percentage of those potential refunds that people purchased the right to? Like, is it? Cause I know, I know, you know, over the last.

• 2:56Ryan Petersen?

  Some of that, I, I wouldn't call it a meaningful percentage.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Ryan Petersen?

  But I probably, I, I, I have to guess there was probably fifty or a hundred million dollars with those would be my swag. I don't have data on it.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's pretty, pretty small.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't like five billion or ten billion.

• 3:11Ryan Petersen?

  Put a hundred million dollars into that, you feel like.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you do really well, but yeah, I mean, I, I, I was thinking about through my own experience in e-commerce, I was running the numbers and I was like, I think the company might get like a couple hundred K back over the next, but depending on how it's applied. But we were far too small to actually get, uh, at least that I received any inbound interest to like buy those credits back in the day, cause like we're very small.

• 3:35Ryan Petersen?

  You could only, uh, the, the people that were transacting, now it was mostly Oppenheimer, the investment bank.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:39Ryan Petersen?

  They were minimum ten million dollar transaction or they weren't interested.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 3:46Ryan Petersen?

  But, uh, by the way, good plug, Flexport built the tariff refund calculator. So go to tariff dot flexport dot com.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Tariffs dot flexport dot com. Head over there, figure it out.

• 3:57Ryan Petersen?

  Slash refunds or just click the refund calculator button right there. And we'll go to the homepage, we've got it on the top now.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  It's free money.

• 4:04Ryan Petersen?

  Well, for now, it is just It's free money that you already paid. We've already paid this money and it's a, we made this very simple process for you. You have to go to the government website. They'll give you a CSV file, upload that there. We will run all the numbers calculated for you instantly and show you how much you are owed.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Ryan Petersen?

  If, and it's a giant if right now, if the administration agrees to do refunds. He was very clear in the press conference just now that because the administration, because the Supreme Court did not have a firm opinion about refunds, that there will be no refunds for the next five years as it goes into litigation. So this is going to be a fight, is what he said. It was very interesting because that's counter to what CBP has said in the past. Or earlier this, well, end of last year, CBP said they would comply with whatever finding is, whatever the court says. If the court rules that the tariffs were illegal, that they would issue a refund. So, and that's in court filing. So it's gonna, if it gets litigated,

• 5:05Ryan Petersen?

  yeah, we'll see how this plays out. But we, in the meantime, we've got the best calculator in the world. And by the way, Trade It's RME's told us they're planning to charge 15% as to get you a refund, to get a, you know, get your money back. We've got an automated process, so I intend to do that for much, much, much less.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 5:24Ryan Petersen?

  That's great.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  That's great. Zooming out, how, I mean, 2025 was obviously a very rocky year on the trade front, but how were you processing just the overall economic picture? There were so many different statistics, like health of the consumer, health of small businesses. Like, how did you feel like 2025 went as you look back on it now?

• 5:49Ryan Petersen?

  Well, you know, I'm not like the macroeconomics expert in the world. You got the stock market, great. If the people who own stocks did really well, then the MAG7, I guess, drove most of that, but. So I think small business really suffered last year. The e-comm businesses like something like forty percent of Shopify merchants were doing fulfillment from overseas and therefore using Minimus.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Ryan Petersen?

  And not paying any duties. And so all of those people just got hit with like this huge new disruption and tariffs. I think a lot of them are under intense stress. It's a lot of our customers going through that. I was on your show last year. I talked about a fraud that we're seeing.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:27Ryan Petersen?

  Company's backs are against the wall and are just starting to let their factories import. Because actually, those people are the most app by this because if there are refunds, it goes to their factory, not to them. Like, cheaters get effed, you know?

• 6:41John Coogan?

  That's funny. Yeah. What about the location of factories? I had this thesis that like, even if the tariffs didn't hold, just the fact that there was this like, oh, wow, moment for at least one quarter meant that there was a whole cycle of board meetings where anyone who was on the fence about, oh, maybe we should finally pull the trigger on that American factory. Like, they might have done it then. And then that decision stuck, sticks, even if the tariffs get rolled back because in that moment, they made the decision, sort of like how during COVID, people like decided to start working from home and then it took like two years for them to get back in the office. Like, like you could see people saying like, I'm going to reshore my operation a little bit. And some of that, some portion

• 7:26John Coogan?

  of that's going to be sticky even in a low tariff regime.

• 7:30Ryan Petersen?

  Yeah, I, you know, I haven't seen the manufacturing. I think manufacturing is going, is growing in the United States pretty quickly. I'm sure tariffs are helping with that.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Ryan Petersen?

  But it's, they're so unevenly applied. I mean, one of the silly things about the way tariffs were done, and they put new tariffs in today that I think are a better tariff policy. You know, I'm famously anti-tariff, but if, because it's bad for my business, bad for my customers. But if you are, if just looking at it from a, what's your goal as a president who says he wants to boost manufacturing, it's better to have a blanket tariff on everybody than just target one country. And the reason for that is, is tariffs are equivalent mathematically to an exchange rate, like a fixed exchange rate with another country. And you would never have a bilateral exchange rate. You can't say, hey, the United States is going to trade with the renminbi Chinese currency at six to one, but we'll

• 8:22Ryan Petersen?

  let the other ones, we'll do the other ones at a different ratio because obviously the money will just flow around. And that's what happened. With cargo too is like, okay, cool. I let's say the Americans, we're putting this tariff in. So we instead of buying from China, we buy from Peru. Now the Peruvians have more money. What do they do? They buy stuff from China like it ends up in the exact same. Yeah. Place whereas a blanket tariff. It's like, okay, this is helping make American goods more competitive versus foreign goods. No matter where they're from. So I think from a policy standpoint, it's better.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the legal justification for this new round of tariffs that just got announced? These were, this was a type of tariff that the Supreme Court didn't rule against today. So he's like, we'll just ramp that up.

• 9:07Ryan Petersen?

  These ones are, it's called section 122. And under section 122, it's very clear that the president has statutory authority. It has a 15% maximum. He only did 10%. So he's got some cushion. I would expect him to get mad at somebody and raise it to 15 at some point. Uh, that was one of my predictions in the near future. I can follow cushion to go upwards later. Uh, and then second is it has a maximum of 150 days that he can impose this. Uh huh. Um, now what I predict is I was, I haven't done the math, but 150, 149 to 150 days from now. I think that section 122 will experience a pause of around 15 minutes. And then you'll have another 150 days where it goes right back in. And there's nothing that says you can't do that.

• 9:50Ryan Petersen?

  He could do that in perpetuity, uh, but it would only be, it would be a 15% maximum. And I, I, I have to double check, but I'm pretty sure that has to be imposed equally on everybody. And it's about, it's because of a balance of trade. Have to go read, reread the statute now that 120 is the term of the day. But, uh, it's because of balance of trade that that act was put in by Congress. Very interesting.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what do business owners, executive teams do? How, how like, uh, any, any kind of like new approach going forward with today's news? Or is it still kind of steady state? Like, we don't know what's going to happen.

• 10:27Ryan Petersen?

  Um, well, on some of this stuff, you know, all we have right now is a news conference. So first off, when you see an executive order, uh, which is expected to come out on Monday. Um, and you'll have a little bit more clarity there. We're advising customers in this situation to let's not clear customs, uh, today. Let's hold your entries until Monday when the rates are presumably lower. And so that will be the first step is make sure your customs, at least you save one day worth. We are, I think you want to get into, again, I'll plug myself, go to the tariff calculator, see what you're owed. Get into a process to go start filing, whether it's protests or we're still waiting for clarity here, of course. But file a protest, you might have to file a lawsuit.

• 11:09Ryan Petersen?

  I'm hoping not, file a protest against tariffs that, you know, the government said this is illegal. So why, how can they take my money, owe it back? Like, there's going to be various ways to fight that. I think hopefully it's not a lawsuit.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Would it be, would it really be a bunch of individual lawsuits or would it be a class action?

• 11:26Ryan Petersen?

  It seems as a class action. Costco fired, filed one, a lot of people have been filing them preemptively in this. So it's already kind of working, going to work its way through the courts. That, but you know, the CBP was very clear that, okay, so there was this lawsuit by Costco, the retailer, that said, that, you know, said, hey, this is our illegal tariffs. If the government rules that, if the Supreme Court rules that these are illegal, you must give me the money back. And the court declined to put in an injunction to force the government to stop charging tariffs. Wait, while they wait, while we wait for the Supreme Court.

• 12:04Ryan Petersen?

  And the reason that they didn't put in that injunction is that the CBP said, we would, if the tariffs are ruled illegal, we will issue refunds. Or at least they said, there is, oh man, what was the legal term? It's sort of like these, they are refundable or something, which is interesting because you're like, well, you know, I break my arm, it is fixable. Doesn't mean I'm going to fix it, I could just leave it broken. I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm just trying to, this is all happening very quickly. I'm trying to learn this morning exactly how it's going to play out.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who are the biggest companies that are affected by tariffs? I, I, I jumped to Nike, Apple, I imagine it's pretty powerful.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  Didn't Apple get a full carve out?

• 12:45John Coogan?

  That's what I think. So like, who, who is actually like the biggest voice?

• 12:49Ryan Petersen?

  Semiconductors and iPhones, I think managed to get a carve out, probably Walmart is number one.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Walmart, okay, yeah.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is insane because our intern made an iPhone in America when the tariffs first came around. Pull it up, Tyler.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  We put it, we put, he put it together in, in a day. I don't know if you can see it.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  It works flawlessly. Does it turn on? Not yet.

• 13:11Ryan Petersen?

  Oh, you got great interns over there.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, we're gonna reshore the entire semiconductor supply chain soon. Uh, anyway, anything else, Judy?

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for jumping on.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for jumping on.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  I really, I really do hope for every Flexport customer and every, uh, business that is impacted by this, so we can get some, uh, real clarity soon.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure we won't.

• 13:35Ryan Petersen?

  I should end with a reminder for all, if you do get a unplanned, surprise, gigantic refund check, remember that most lottery winners end up bankrupt, so don't spend it.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Ryan Petersen?

  Put it in the bank.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that's good.

• 13:49Ryan Petersen?

  Maybe distribute it to your shareholders, uh, pay your employees less bonus, but if you go, if you go buy a bunch of inventory, of course, that'd be good for me. That's why you can trust this, because I would prefer you spend it on inventory and ship it, uh, with us, but it's better for you to save your money, don't waste it.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Good call. Well, thank you for coming on along with the ferry building behind you.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Ryan Petersen?

  And the port of Oakland back there, you can see it in the, in the deep distance.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  That's great to have you both on.

• 14:14John Coogan?

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

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon, Ryan. Cheers.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And I'm also gonna tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Uh, so, uh, there, this story is obviously still developing. Uh, you know, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent, "The court's decision is likely to generate other serious practical consequences in the near term. One issue will be refunds, we'll certainly be following this, I'm sure we'll know more on Monday." But, uh, I think we are up to speed, at the very least, on what has happened.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  And a little reminder that Ryan Peterson is in, is a fantastic aficionado of office decor and, uh, shared a picture of a startup he visited that has two portraits on the wall that we'll have to pull up in section B, because who's on the wall? Who's on the wall? Uh, that's the thing. I don't, we should have asked him. I don't think anyone knows. But, uh, in, in the timeline on section B, uh, there we go. Uh, you see none other than Mark Benioff and Larry Ellison painted, very clearly not AI-generated. This is a decade ago. Is that Chris Sacca? It looks sort of like him.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  That does look like Sacca.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Am I crazy? I don't, uh, I don't know.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Hard to tell.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  But, uh, people are, people are guessing in the background. Yeah, someone else said, is Sacca, is that you? And then someone said, no, it's Larry Ellison. And, uh, yeah, that's not what they're asking. Anyway. It seems to be the software.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  Moving on, uh, Charlie Crotoville says, we won, no data center, and they have to build a park.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  This got three million views, two hundred and twenty-two thousand.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  That ratio is crazy, right?

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Crazy, crazy ratio.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  Gary Tan responds and says, a fully built one gigawatt data center complex generates around thirty-one million dollars per year in state taxes and sixty-one million per year in local taxes from data center operations alone. Also, it creates roughly four hundred and thirty direct jobs at the facility itself, plus many more indirect and construction phase jobs. So nearly a hundred million dollars a year in local taxes based on, um, this analysis by the Consumer Energy Alliance. So maybe these data centers need to be leading with that more. Think about how many parks you can build.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  Over, think about how many roads you can repair.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  New buildings, schools that you'll be able to build.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  Locally, if you have one of these. There's not the, you know, we've talked about this at length, but it's understandable that citizens will be like, I don't need the data center in my backyard to use ChatGPT.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  So why would I want it?

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  But if you're gonna have. You know, nearly nine figures in, in, uh, local and, and state taxes that you can direct.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  There, there is another solution here. You could build a jungle gym that has GPUs embedded in the slides and in the swings. And so you get a little bit of.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  You know those rolly slide things?

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  So if those were generating.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  That generates electricity. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm thinking what you're thinking, of course. Put the kids to work. If they're swinging, I want to capture that electricity and turn it into tokens.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  And Reggie James, creative director of General Catalyst and friend of the show, says, you mean to tell me the meme of creating a permanent underclass hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of the public? Shocking.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Very good point. Uh, let's pull up this video because, uh, it is a pretty wild reaction. Let's get sound and start it back. Beginning.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  They canceled it!

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  They canceled it!

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  It's like the Lil Yachty, Lil Yachty.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is the Lil Yachty walkout.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  They got a soundboard?

• 18:24John Coogan?

  It does seem like a deal.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Keep chanting. Your Netflix recommendations just got 0.1% less accurate.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  New Jersey.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  They actually have a live band?

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting because the, the, the, the, the pushback against this is like, it really is this like meme of creating a permanent underclass, like that type of thing because you, I, I would, I would be so much more, uh, like. Expecting of this pushback if it was like, oh, well, we know that like, living next to a data center is dangerous for your health. Like, that is not the meme. The meme is like, maybe your power rates will go up, but it's sort of unclear and they might offset that. They're sort of ugly, but they're not the biggest, craziest thing that you could put there. It really is just about like, I don't like what it produces abstractly.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  And so I don't want the concrete.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  I don't like what it stands for.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I don't like what it stands for, which is, which is just, it's a little bit different than, than, I think a lot of people do.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  Ray says, for real, though, data centers filling up Northern Virginia is super annoying and ugly. They're at 600 now.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  They gotta make them look better. They gotta make them look better.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, so you were joking about the jungle gym, but there is that, you've probably seen it, there's in Denmark, there's the ski hill that's on top of the power plant.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Have you seen that?

• 19:47John Coogan?

  No, I haven't seen that. I thought you were gonna mention the, have you seen the stealthy cellphone towers? So there are cellphone towers all over Los Angeles that are dressed up like trees.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they always get me.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  They always get you?

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  You can never tell.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  You can, of course you can tell.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  From very far away.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  They do sort of like fade into the background and you don't notice them as much as like a full-on crazy cell tower in your face. While Tyler pulls up an image of that ski data center. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Cloud. And let me also tell you about Lambda. We have a great Lambda lightning round coming up. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building the AI super producer for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Lots of pushback. Let's see. AI folks have about four months to pull a cure for cancer out of the latent space before we drift into Butlerian Jihad Attractor Basin. Yeah.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Jihad.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  But, but Larry, but, but Larry and Jihad is from Dune. They don't want computers, so they use spice and they travel around that way.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really popular. I mean, we talked to Sagar and Jetty about this. It's bipartisan. It's it's very, very broad support against data center build out. And there doesn't seem to be anything that's that's pushing back against it. And I was thinking more about the the cure for cancer thing because like, you know, Microsoft Excel has been useful in medicine. Like you you use Microsoft Excel to catalog how patients are doing, track a bunch of blood work, create a correlation. Okay, the these people got placebos, these people got the real cancer treatment. Now we know for sure, and it just sped it up a little bit.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  You could have done it on paper, but doing it in Excel probably moved things forward just a notch. You got the cancer cure like a couple of months earlier, a little bit cheaper, a little bit faster. And that's sort of like diffusion story is ridiculously unsexy. Like, it's not attractive at all. No one, no one wants to talk about. I I had this riff.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  People want one simple trick.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I had this, I had this riff for a while that that the debt markets were critical in the space race. Like, you you actually do need to finance rocketry with debt. You need efficient capital markets to build rockets. But everyone likes to look at rockets. No one wants to look at debt covenants. And so rocket engineers get all the credit when, in fact, some of the credit does in fact belong to the financiers that make, you know, large scale, large scale industrial projects possible. People, you know, love the bridge, but they don't think about the financiers that make it possible. But as silly as that sounds like, it really is an important step in the chain.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  And AI, it might be that more than like the magical, you know, cure for cancer that you pull out of latent space. It's going to be tricky. Like, I I think even if we do see a boom in in cancer drugs and we hear testimonies from scientists that, oh, yeah, like AI definitely like sped me up. Like, the ticker tape parade is going to happen for the scientists. Like, we know Jennifer Doudna's name for discovering mRNA and CRISPR. Like, we don't know the software stack that she used when she was analyzing.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  We gotta find out.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  We do, because that's the real hero.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Not the real hero, but it's an important hero in the story that we just don't tell because it's abstract and diffuse.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video from Architectural Digest of this beautiful, sustainable power plant with a ski slope on its roof.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  So you can actually ski on this? Wait, you ski on the grass? You can ski on grass?

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  It works.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  I had no idea.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, presumably in winter, there would be some snow on it.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  Is the building industry. The building industry accounts for one-third of all CO2 emissions, and we need to bring that down.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  This thing looks so cool.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  This is cool. This is cool.

• 23:53Speaker 05

  Sustainability go hand in hand.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Trey in the chat would be totally cool with more data centers in Virginia. I imagine if you had extreme sports on the roof.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Yes. Do a deal with Red Bull. Get the FPV drones out there.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  Red Bull sponsored data center.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  The next X Games on data centers. Yeah. I mean, the Olympics are coming. If you want to build a data center in LA, why not build an Olympic Village as well?

• 24:19Speaker 05

  We want to design the future of the buildings that we would like to live in.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  My name is Jakob Lange. I'm a partner, an architect at the architecture firm Bic or Bjarke Ingels Group. We're standing here at the Copenhagen hill, the tallest mountain in Copenhagen.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's calling the building a mountain.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 24:50Speaker 05

  A little more than 10 years ago now, we started a competition to design the facade of this building. We were struggling for quite a while, but in one of the design meetings, we were talking about the fact that

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Thrasher magazine needs to get on this deal, Plow. Completely agree. Are you a Thrasher Magazine guy?

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  I love Thrasher.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Thrasher's so good.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  I haven't been a subscriber in probably 10 years, but...

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how did we not know about this?

• 25:20John Coogan?

  This is amazing. Yeah.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  I knew about it.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Buried in...

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  You did, you did.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Buried in the European stagnation thesis is the most white pill of all white pills.

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  Structure.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  No, I mean, this goes viral every like few months. I've seen this a bunch on...

• 25:35John Coogan?

  We gotta do it.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  You should post it, say, "Why is no one talking about..."

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  But I'm saying people are talking about this.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  No, no one's talking about this. We're the first people to talk about this. Um, yeah. Uh, it feels like Apple would be one to do this. It's in line with the Google branding. Like, there's so many companies that are ready to sort of pick up what this is, you know, all about and do a promo video.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  Put plants on the roof of the data center.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  For sure. That's a very easy one.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  It turns it from... It takes a building that looks dystopian and cold.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, also just build them underground, right? And then put the park on top of it. I don't know. It just seems like there's so many easy ways. Uh, maybe it is hard because you're in this like game theory and that's why Meta's building in tents because even the buildings are too slow to build. And so they, you know, if you add underground or you add roof, uh, you know, plants on top, you're gonna have another three-month delay. You're gonna lose the AI race. You're gonna be part of the permanent underclass in the Mag7 or something. They're worried about being part of the permanent underclass, and so they're racing. But, uh, something like that, I feel like would pay back and pay dividends, um, if it was beautiful.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Matt over on X says, "There's an abandoned Brooks Brothers office in my town. Would make a lovely data center." So he's taking the other side. I think if you left the sign...

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  And it was just Brooks Brothers, you kind of revitalized the sign, redid the kind of landscaping, but then put a data center in it. I like it.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  I love it. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Seriously vectoring full-text search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's head over to

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Time Magazine?

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Zaleo, who's sharing, uh, he came in pretty hot on the reaction. He said, "Team Cope made the cover of Time."

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the people versus AI, a lot of

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Behind the growing backlash. I mean, the growing backlash is real. It actually makes a lot of sense to do a portrait and a profile on uh, all the different voices that are here because some of them are lawmakers, some of them are pundits, some of them are analysts, some of them are environmentalists, some of them are lawyers, all sorts of different folks.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Did you read it yet, Tyler? Why are you laughing?

• 27:55John Coogan?

  In protest, you won't.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  Team Cope is funny.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Team Cope is funny, but, uh, yeah, people took this all over the place. The people versus the wheel. Grunts from the silent majority dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. Um, people are having a lot of fun, uh, about this.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  The horses versus the car.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  The horses versus the car. Uh, at the same time, like this, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, "Well, obviously AI is gonna happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable." It's like, no, these, these, like, we live in a democracy. Like, if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened in nuclear, people. Like, you keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video, uh, and, and the guy was saying like, it's like, it's the, AI is the most incredible human invention. It's up there right with, with when we split the atom. And I'm like, "Well, I know how that ended." Like, we got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other. It just became a Cold War. So really zero economic value from that. Just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  And then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence. We'd never got a nuclear future of energy. And so it is possible that like, society can just freak out and be like, "Actually, we're doing non-proliferation." Like, that's, that's a possible outcome here. So like

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  Hill says, "This is why we need data centers in space."

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Elon looking, uh, pretty smart this week.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Even if the timelines that have been thrown out are aggressive

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  on a longer time horizon.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  No, you're not gonna have pushback there.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  And Trey, really, uh, coming in with the most obvious solution. Blimp data centers. Just put them over, uh, put them over the Pacific.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Float them over there.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Rob

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  over on X has found some information on the Twitter

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Law 360.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  Deal trial. Is this the trial around the compensation?

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Oh, I thought this was the OpenAI case.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  No, this is different. This is different. So

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  I believe this is the case around the Twitter employees that did not actually get their severance.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  It says the class action brought by former Twitter investors against Elon Musk. I don't, I actually don't know that much about this particular case, but

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  Wait.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  there was a pool of 92.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  They think Twitter was worth more than 44 billion?

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Well, maybe they had stock options that were canceled. Maybe, maybe they are employees, but they're counted as investors in this case because it's a SEC violation instead of an employment contract. I, I, I actually don't know. I'm completely speculating here. But apparently Elon Musk's popularity, unpopularity is throwing a wrench in the trial because, quote, "Hate for Musk quickly narrows the jury pool in Twitter deal trial. A California judge quickly narrowed a pool of 92 prospective jurors Thursday, excluding, excusing 38 potential jurors who said they couldn't be fair and impartial, as Musk's attorney lamented. There are so many people who hate him so much."

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the trial, according to Bloomberg Law, the trial involves claims from Twitter investors who say Musk violated securities law by publicly waffling over his decision to purchase the company

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  and driving down its stock price.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's probably a lot of people who are, are, they, they don't like Elon because of the

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Does that mean, does that mean, does that mean though, so, so he said, okay, I'm gonna buy this company?

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  And then he was trying to back out?

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Because he was like, the price is insane?

• 31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  And then the stock declined and people sold?

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  And then it ended up getting bought up here and now they're like, well. You kind of misled, I don't know.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  I wonder actually how this will net out.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Because he didn't make anyone sell the company if you, if you're a Twitter shareholder and you, you believe that.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Basically, I mean, every time you make a public statement, unless it's disclosed through the traditional SEC workflow, one person or five people can sell and then they can hold you to account on, on that, on the impacts of that. And so every possible move in the price of the company can come back to bite you based on what you were saying and whether or not it was above board.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  But the, but the court will decide and apparently they're going to get a bunch of people on the jury who have never heard of Elon Musk.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  There are people out there. They're like, I don't know the guy.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Cooper, our strongest soldier.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  In the chat, coming in, driving up those numbers.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Ship the best version, not the first one with Figma. You heard from Dylan Field yesterday. He introduced Claude Co. to Figma. Explore more options.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  And they liked each other. They liked each other.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  They did.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Pub is saying they're calling it the most Canadian caption of all time. Team Canada hit the timeline after their loss to the United States, saying silver shines just as bright.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  It's very Canadian.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  This is.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  We have a Canadian on our team is sitting over there shaking his head.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's hard, hard to see from this angle, but we're all friends on this continent.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  There are.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  We like a good competition.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  There's a war in the community notes right now. People are saying silver actually shines brighter than gold, but gold is better. It actually doesn't. It also tarnishes much easier and becomes gold, uh, becomes dull. Gold is greater than silver. People are biting it out over whether or not gold or silver.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  They're coping it out.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  But I think we, yeah, they're coping it out. We know, we know how it works at the Olympics. You want to go for gold and only America could take it home yesterday. Blake Robbins is reacting to the news that Meta's VR Metaverse is ditching VR. This is from The Verge. We'll have to talk to Alex Heath, former Verge reporter, later today. This feels pretty clear. The Metaverse was actually just Roblox this whole time. Not Fortnite, not VR. This is extremely hard for me as a VR bull. I threw on the headset yesterday, watched about 10 minutes of Blade Runner 2049 before you called me and I had to take it off. But I was having a great experience watching a 3D movie.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  You threw that on right when you got home.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  Right when I got home. I was like, I'm gonna chill for a little bit. Throw on Blade Runner 2049. Reggie recommended it, so Hip City Reg. I was like, okay, I gotta do it. Put it on, but interrupted. There was other stuff going on. So didn't get through the whole movie, but still delightful experience. And VR is not dead. It's about to reanimate and come back from the grave, I predict, in the next, in the next, in the next 400 years. I guarantee you VR will be like, kind of popular, like, sort of popular.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  It'll get to at least 20.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  At least 2%.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  20 DAUs.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. In the next 400 years, I would take that bet.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  Matthew Ball dropped his state of video games in 2026.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Boom!

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  One of the standout lines was Roblox had 150 million daily users in Q3 of 2025. Its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  It's huge.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  Which is just absolutely wild. Should we click through this a little bit?

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Popular, yeah. We can click through it. It's a huge presentation and we'll have to have Matthew Ball on the show to really break it all down. But this is the report that I was sort of inspired by yesterday when I was talking about this interesting fact that Matt Ball shared on his Strategery interview that when you look at video games...

• 35:39John Coogan?

  The video game market is not doing particularly well. You have to always segment out non-China and then there's also mobile versus console. Are people paying or is it ad-based? There's a whole bunch of different subsegments, but just looking at non-China growth in video games, like all of the growth went to Roblox and basically everything else was either flat or down and people are starting to just spend more time on endless feeds. They're on Instagram, they're on TikTok or they're doing sports betting or watching TV or watching Netflix. There's a million different things that have fought for attention and it used to be the greatest bargain in history and Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Two, maker of GTA and 2K games, got in a lot of trouble at one point because he said like, "We should be charging per minute." And people are like, "This is a nightmare. He's gonna charge per minute." He was like, "No, no, no. I just mean in terms of the value that we're delivering, we will take $60 from you," which is a lot of money, "but we will give you GTA V, which you can play for 100 hours and have a great time and some people will play for more than that." And so on a per-hour basis, you're paying like 50 cents. Now comp that, he would say, "Comp that to go into the movies." You know, you pay 20 bucks and you're there for two hours. That's $10 an hour for entertainment, whereas with a video game, 50 bucks for 50 hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. So he was

• 37:07John Coogan?

  just driving home that this is a great value. That is no longer the case in the world where there's so much incredible entertainment that's basically free because it's ad-supported and the experience of scrolling an endless vertical social feed is now rivaling the level of entertainment that you get from video games. It used to be like, "Yeah, I'll go on Facebook and check some posts about, see who posted like what they did this weekend, check in with that, but I gotta go and play Counter-Strike or I gotta go play the actual game that's like really fun." Now it's a lot more competitive. Anything else?

• 37:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I'll kind of tap through. So global video game content sales had a strong 2025, growing 5% year over year and hitting a new all time high of about 195 billion, 10 billion more than the prior high in 2021. The industry high was achieved through new highs in each of P, uh, mobile, PC and console too. So everything's up and to the right. And fortunately, 2025 as with year prior, as with years prior, boasts had several new hit franchises and studios, while many older franchises and studios also achieved new highs. But despite three straight years of industry growth, a new record high for revenues and a smattering of new hits each

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  year, private funding for game makers fell another 55% in 2025. That is big decrease.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  There's so much going on in the video game industry and it's, it's often overlooked because it's just like sort of off in its own little world and the, the, the players are like subscale relative to the mag seven. So they don't get as much, as much attention, but it's a fascinating industry. Uh, quickly, let me tell you about Vanta automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Uh, do you want to talk about chill remote jobs? Or do you want to stay on video games?

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's talk.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Do you want a chill remote job?

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  No, I said that, but I lied. I don't, I don't want a chill remote job. I actually love a high pressure job. I love office politics. I love being thrown into the fire. Last minute slide changes fuel me. I get high off an ad hoc ask. Corporate jargon is my love language. When I'm in office, I'm a lethal corporate machine. I'm in a god tier flow state right now. This is my favorite game. This is so good. I love, I love this new genre of the, of the

• 39:33John Coogan?

  I lied.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  day in the life at work.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Whoever said that office jobs are adult daycares was on to something.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing like an ad hoc ask, right Tyler?

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  I feel like Tyler, Tyler and Tyler-

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Tyler lives for an ad hoc ask. He's like, yes and.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  You're like, yes, but let me throw on my white suit first.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Yes, why, yeah, market's up.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  Market's up.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  I think at least it was.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  We'll see.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Well, I'm wearing green and the market's green. That works, right? Green's a good color.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Casual Friday cope.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Yes, uh, more news in Paramount's 108 billion dollar bid for Warner Brothers. It cleared an antitrust hurdle. What hurdle was that?

• 40:14John Coogan?

  The media group whose bid is bankrupt, a bankrolled by Oracle billionaire Donald Trump, billionaire Larry Ellison.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Freudian slip.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  No, Oracle's doing fine. Uh, said on Friday that its deal had complied with the US Department of Justice's second request review process, removing a critical impediment to US regulatory approval. Uh, I have no idea why there would be any, uh, antitrust, uh, worries here. The, the antitrust question is always-

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  The point is that there's no antitrust-

• 40:45John Coogan?

  With Paramount-

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  Here.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  And Warner Brothers. The question has always been Netflix, but I thought that was gonna get through, but we'll see where it lands. So Paramount's deal could still be blocked, but allowing, but by allowing the 10 day statutory waiting period to elapse under HSR or Hart Scott Rудino Acts, second request process, the DOJ is clearing the path for Paramount's deal on antitrust grounds. The government's saying they can go forward as long as they can agree to terms.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and zooming out, when you look back at the news from a month ago, it seemed obvious that the next step was to spend, uh, a lot of time in Washington.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  The Ellison's.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, try, try that angle. It seems to be going well.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  And let's see if this spiked the, uh, the calcite chart. It's up a little bit. Uh, will Paramount acquire Warner Brothers before, uh, before September is at 52%? We need to find the other one, which is who will acquire, who will? Acquire Warner Brothers. Kelce, let me see. Who will successfully take over Warner Brothers? Uh, oh, Netflix is back up. Netflix is up forty-seven percent. Interesting. The lines have just been crossing constantly. They crossed. They're dancing. A couple of days ago. It's a deadly dance, a tango. Well, it's been a lot of fun to follow it. I've been enjoying that. Let's pull up this video. While we pull this up, let me tell you about Sentry.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a hundred and fifty thousand organizations use it to keep their apps working. Matthew McConaughey, we talked a little bit about this, but it's, it hits way harder when he says it himself. So let's play the clip.

• 42:25Speaker 06

  It's coming.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  It's coming.

• 42:27Speaker 06

  It's already here.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  It's already here.

• 42:29Speaker 06

  Don't deny it. It's not enough. It may be for you, but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea. The moral plea that, no, this is wrong. It's not gonna last. There's too much money to be made and there's, it's too productive. It's, it's here. Alright, so I say, get, get, get your own, own yourself.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  Voice likeness, et cetera. Trademark it, whatever you gotta do.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  That's how you did that.

• 42:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, get, own, own yourself. So when and if, when it comes, not if it comes, no one can steal you. But they're gonna have to come to you to go, can I? Or they're gonna be in breach and you'll have the chance to be your own agency and go, yeah, for this amount. Or no. Okay? It's coming. Is it gonna be another category? Or is it gonna infiltrate our category? It's damn sure gonna infiltrate, infiltrate our category.

• 43:23Speaker 06

  I think it'll end up, does it become another category? Will we be in five years having films, the best AI film? The best AI actor? Maybe? I think it might be, that might be the thing is that becomes another category. I'm not sure. It's gonna be in front of us in ways that we don't even see it.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  I'm not watching movies if it's AI or not. No AI is gonna get me to start watching movies.

• 43:47Speaker 06

  A question of reality.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  I don't watch them.

• 43:50Speaker 06

  That's more hazy than ever, in a very exciting way, I think, but also a scary way.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  This is great industry leadership. I love it. Very poetic.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I can see there being an incremental category.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  That said, I still think AI will be used in every category.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  That's what he says.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he says definitely, he says he doesn't know the timeline and he's not sure exactly how this will come out, but he says there might be a new category, just like there's best animated film at the Oscars, but then CGI and animation works its way into the Avengers, which is not an animated film, but Thanos was animated with CGI, it just wasn't hand drawn. And so the categories blur together. Clearly, AI is coming for all sorts of different levels of the stack, and he's just saying that you shouldn't just sit by and hope that it doesn't happen, you should embrace and figure out how you fit in. Well, let's go over to the New York Stock Exchange. Do you want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange? There was a fun clip on Instagram.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  Many of our guests will be at.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  At the New York Stock Exchange today.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Nicie in just 15 minutes.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  And the European kid was at Nicie having some fun, going a little bit too far. Let's play the clip.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Whoa, sorry, sorry.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  What's he doing?

• 45:03Speaker 03

  You can't touch us. What? That's the bell. You can't touch it. If we're coming to the great public, then you're not allowed to touch it. Shelly, Shelly, my family's 1.5 times. I know what the bell does.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Don't try Money Mog at the New York Stock Exchange. That's not gonna work, European kid.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  You gotta go. Come on. I'm sorry, you can't be here. You have to. You have to. Do they realize who I am? I'm sure they know who you are. We have to go. My family owned this bell. No, you can't be here.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, when I read the caption, I thought, I thought it was Rich the Kid gets escorted out of the wrapper.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. So there are brothers, the European kid and my tech CEO. We ran into one of them in SF. I think we ran into.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Wait, there's two?

• 45:47John Coogan?

  There's two and they look identical. Wait, did you not know this?

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  Are you sure? Are you sure it's not the same guy? I thought it was the same. I thought it was the same guy with two accounts, two characters.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Wait. I don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of this. It might be one person, two accounts. I thought they, I have no idea. We'll have to get to the bottom of this.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  You got, you got got.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  I got, yeah, it's a, it's the prestige. I'm getting prestiged, potentially. There might be a secret twin and he is act, he's living life as a single person with two accounts when in fact it is two people. That's possible too. Let's not rule anything out.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Let's not take off our tin foil hats prematurely. Let's watch this.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  This post from David Herman.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  I love David.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  The Hermanator.

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  Wait, start it over.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is an ad?

• 46:35Speaker 07

  A nearby officer rushed over to help, but he was quickly dragged in too. The rushing water forced them both through the 100 foot long pipe. They finally came out on the other side at Papa Giuseppe's kitchen.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  I love these ads.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  It's funny, is that even AI? I'm pretty sure that's just like a video game.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. I've seen, I've seen a lot of this style of ad where it's some crazy, you know, TikTok explainer and then it just cuts to like, and you land at this, at your company.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  It is hilarious. Uh, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  Ben, can you hear this?

• 47:23John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  Other Ben. We gotta make an ad like that.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do, we do, we do. You're, uh, where it's somebody like, you know, falling off of a plane and then they land, they fall through the cloud and then they land in the TBP and ultradome and they're being interviewed by John and Jordy. There is a $36.5 million waterfront compound for sale in the Florida Keys and take a look at this picture. Finally, a white pill. Uh, take a look at this picture. So it has 1,700 feet of shoreline and two 5,000 square foot homes. You thinking what I'm thinking? Next door neighbors?

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. We could do it. So, so you remember, I think it not, not Asana, the Atlassian.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  They did.

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  They had this crazy feud. So, so the founders of Atlassian, I think we read this.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 48:18Jordi Hays?

  Some stories, so, so they were, they were besties.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  They built this massive company together. Wildly successful, multi-gen, you know, basically two decade run.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  Incredible run. And they decide, you know, we've had an incredible run. Let's, let's keep the run going. Let's buy houses right next to each other.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  They end up getting a massive, in a massive feud over it.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I think it destroys the friendship. Hopefully, it's recovered by now. But we could do it.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  Oh, you think, you think we could do it?

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  I think we could do it.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  You, you don't think you'd be bothered by my industrial grade wifi penetrating while you're trying to sleep? You don't think that would bother you?

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think that would be, that would be our.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  That would be the straw that broke the camel's back.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  I'd be like, John, you have to turn off the wifi after 10pm when we're sleeping. It disrupts the sleep.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  Stop listening to movies all night long at full blast volume. I don't care. I don't want to see the second and third Matrix or hear them through the walls.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  You'd be, you'd be in the backyard with your VR headset on, but playing.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  But playing the audio fully and so you can still hear it.

• 49:12Jordi Hays?

  And then you'd be falling, you'd be falling asleep with it on, so just be blaring.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  That would be the end of TBPN.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  That would be the end.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  So, we won't be doing this.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  But what, what a funny, what a funny situation. So, it's a 10 acre waterfront property in the Florida Keys.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  Trent says, just move in together.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  No. You need, you need two properties that are as close as possible next to each other. And then they have like separate beaches, but the houses are like, your windows are looking directly at the other person. It's such a weird property. So, Eddie Garcia bought the, is the Isla, Isla Marada property for about 15 years ago. Waterman specializes in developing master planned communities throughout Florida. Garcia said, he originally intended to create a small development on the land, but he wound up falling in love with the site and instead turned it into a family compound. My kids grew up there, fishing, lobstering, crabbing, you name it. He was on open claw before it even existed. Uh, he lives full time in Miami with his children in college. He said the property is

• 50:10John Coogan?

  too big for just him and his wife, but you got, you got his and hers mansions. What's wrong with that? Uh, when Garcia bought the property, it was mostly empty except for a 16 slip marina. That's eight boats per person and two cottages built around the 1950s, all of which remain on the property today. He built two side by side West Indies style homes in 2013 and then he ran it back in 2015. Each is 5,000 square feet with four bedrooms and a pool. Uh, pretty, pretty interesting property. Also, for you Boston sickos out there, there's a $22 million Beacon Hill home. It's become one of Boston's priciest townhouses. It's a six bedroom residence. It was converted from multiple rental units

• 50:54John Coogan?

  into a single family home. Uh, the development company Crest City Capital purchased the building for 8.9 million in 2023. Then they converted it. They gut renovated the house, which had multiple rental units turned into a single family residence. The buyer's identity couldn't be determined. Tracy Campion of Campion and Company, who represented the purchaser, didn't respond, but there's some beautiful photos here. Uh, it's a Greek revival house built in 1825. That's an old, old house. You don't see a lot of 1800s properties out here in California, but you do in Boston.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  I see nicey, 1792.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  That's a good one.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  That's an OG.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  Uh, it's located in one of Boston's most upscale neighborhoods. Have you spent any time in Boston? Have you ever been?

• 51:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't think I've ever been.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  You've never been? Beautiful city.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  And I don't think I'll ever go.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  I just think I, I, I, I think, think about the list of, I, I, I don't like traveling that much.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, I like being, I like being in California and when I, and I, but I, but at times I enjoy traveling, but there's easily. 400 destinations that I would go to.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  Before Boston.

• 52:05Jordi Hays?

  Before Boston.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  It's not in the top 400?

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Boston is in the top 400 if you really break it down, but I like to travel. I like to travel. I like to go somewhere. I've, I've done the traveling where you do.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, you stop by.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  Two, two days here, two days here, et cetera.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  East Coast trip.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  But I like to go set up.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  New York and then Rhode Island and then Boston and then Maine. Like you could have a wonderful little excursion on the east coast. You should do it sometime. Broaden your horizons.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Road trip. If we were doing a road trip.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we definitely stop there. College tour maybe. Uh, let me tell you about Gusto. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, we originally met because Tyler was commenting saying that we should do a college tour. In Q1 of last year. Yeah. Well, I think it was, you guys said you were going to do a college tour, but then I said, you gotta go to Michigan because they have the biggest stadium in the western hemisphere.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Filling 110,000 fans in one stadium would be truly.

• 53:03Jordi Hays?

  We got some work to do.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  We need, we need quite the guest lineup. Uh, we need to stack it.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  We really need to stack it.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, the tiny lake Tahoe enclave with some of America's priciest waterfront homes.

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  And Tahoe is absolutely wild this week. Did you see that video of bears? Bears at horse stars? I think they were just running across the ski slope with people on it.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 53:27Jordi Hays?

  Kids were having to like pull out of the way.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I saw growing Daniel posting about how they're actually really friendly and you can just go up to them and pet them. Is that right?

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Crystal Bay's median list price of 14.9 million makes it one of the most expensive places to buy property in the United States. It's straddling the, the California Nevada border. Lake Tahoe's 72 mile shoreline is home to some of the country's most coveted real estate.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  Actually, the, the property is.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Uh, no, just Tahoe in general, like the, like Lake Tahoe is both Californian and Nevada.

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  Having a property that was half.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  I'm sure that might exist. I don't know. That's probably pretty hard to zone or like actually get done, but it has to exist somewhere in America. I know that there's, there's a spot in America that you can stand on and be in four states simultaneously, or maybe three states because the, the, the lines like intersect. So you can stand on that spot and be technically in four states.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  You could just do the thing, uh, like, like the house we just saw on the keys where it's like kind of two.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. One person's not paying income tax, the other person's paying terrible income tax.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Incline Village is this, is the, is the, I think the, the city that's the least in Nevada, but technically in Nevada. So it's the most Californian Nevada city. So it's a popular San Francisco suburb in many ways.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I'm sure the broader population of Nevada has really high opinion of, of

• 54:50John Coogan?

  Incline Village.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  Incline Village.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  For sure. Crystal Bay is roughly, home to roughly 200, uh, it's a community on Nevada's north side, ranks among the priciest waterfront markets with a median listing price of 14.9 million. Uh, the enclave is defined by its mid-century glamour. Around the 1960s, it serves as a playground for entertainer Frank Sinatra, who at one point owned the local Cal Neva Resort and Casino.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Eric in the chat says Cal Neva Resort is exactly that in this, in the same town as it's splitting.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Cal Nevada. Cool. Very interesting. Um, today it is a tale of two realities. A town with a faded commercial strip that sits adjacent to multimillion dollar real estate, residential real estate favored for steep slope privacy and elite lakefront living. So, uh, it's just four miles northeast of Crystal Bay. It's bustling, is the bustling Incline Village where there is a hospital, grocery stores, and the Diamond Peak Ski Resort across the California state line is the community of Kings Beach provides a more rustic feel. Uh, the North Shore attracts homeowners seeking a constant outdoor connection. Winter offers skiing while summer centers on the lake for boating, fishing, paddle boarding, holding

• 56:04John Coogan?

  an American flag while you, uh, wakeboard. That's very popular out there in Tahoe, of course. Um, there's something interesting going on.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  Is it legal to wakeboard up there without holding a flag?

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Jail instantly. For years, Crystal Bay's commercial core had been defined by two stalled icons. Sinatra's former Calnava closed in 2013 and the Tahoe Biltmore Hotel and Casino, which closed in 2022. These vacant structures have given the state line a ghost town feel with the Crystal Bay Club Casino as the area's main entertainment and music venue. However, a revitalization effort is underway. The Calnava is being transformed into the high-end Lake Tahoe proper resort and casino, slated to open in 2027, signaling a possible shift from faded casino-era relics to modern luxury destination. Let's go, let's hear it for Lake Taco. Lake Taco.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Everybody out there.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Lake.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  I'm a Big Bear guy, I'm a SoCal guy. You're not gonna catch me in Tahoe, you're gonna catch me in Lake Arrowhead.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  The House of the Week.

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  The people.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  The House of the Week, we will tell you about the House of the Week after we tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. The House of the Week is a modernist home tucked into the Los Angeles hillside. Let's hear it for Los Angeles, Wall Street, maybe 3,000 miles away, but they're showing some love to homegrown houses here in Los Angeles.

• 57:39Jordi Hays?

  They're saying it's a hillside masterpiece.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Two architectural lovers who, the Hollywood house was designed by Rudolf Schindler. For journalist Susan Orlean and her husband, John Gillespie, a house has never been just a place to live. It's not just a place to live, it's an entire experience. Fans of modernist architecture.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  Read that again.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  I'm messing with you, I'm messing with you.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd live that.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  Fans of modernist architecture, they spent their earliest dates visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water in Pennsylvania. When the pair moved to Los Angeles in '07 so Orlean could research a book, they quickly fell in love with the work of Rudolf Schindler, an Austrian-born architect who helped define modernism in the city. And so, there's a beautiful house up for sale. They did a four-and-a-half-year renovation. Did you hear the drama about there was a... There was a reporter, was it at Reuters or something, but he was accused of using AI to write all of his Olympics coverage. And it had all the telltale signs of AI-generated sort of slop. And the editor in chief backed the journalist and said, no, he always writes like that. That's what he sounds like.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  They trained on him.

• 58:49John Coogan?

  They trained on him. And then Pangram came in and said, well, we pulled all, uh, we, we, we pulled the receipts and he didn't used to write like that before AI.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  And so you can look at the chart.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe he's, he's really bullish on AI. And so he only will read outputs now. He doesn't read any organic.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Maybe that, or, or maybe he's just aping the style of ChatGPT four O because he thinks it's a good aesthetic. I don't know. Could, could be trying to troll, could be, cause I, I, I could probably write an essay that, that triggers Pangram 100% AI if I put my mind to it. And without, without the help of AI, I could just sit there and say, this isn't this, it's that, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I, I actually think that'd be a good challenge. I don't think you could. I think it, I think Pangram.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Tyler challenge?

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  Tyler challenge. Write something by hand. A hundred percent is really hard.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  A hundred, get, get a hundred.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  Over 90%.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  You think you could do over 90?

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  In the next, be, between now and when the Palmer interview ends, you have to write 500 words.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, Pangram has a minimum, right?

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's, it's a few hundred words, right?

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you have to write more words than the Pangram minimum and score above 90%.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. You have to kick it off with like, sorry, as an AI model, I can't, I can't answer this, but I'll try anyway. This isn't just a this, it's that. Anything else you'd like me to expand this prompt with? And then you'll trigger it. That's, that's the hack. Do you think?

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  And if you win, you get a $50 gift card to Matu to pick yourself up some cheesesteak sandwiches.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  I was thinking something book related maybe.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Tonight. So there's $50, 50 whole dollars on the line.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  50 smackaroos.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Go.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Okay. Labelbox, RL Environments, Voice Robotics, Eval's and Expert Human Data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. Anyway, Jay Leno, he was turning heads because he was caught driving a 119-year-old car.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you caught me. You caught me.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  He didn't call the paths.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  I didn't want anyone to see.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Look at this car. This is amazing. I didn't, 119 years old.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  We should ask Palmer if he has any steam cars.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  1906, 1907?

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  You see the steam actually pushing out the bottom?

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  Do you, do you load firewood into it? Like, how do you generate the steam? This is incredible. What, he's the, he's the final car guy. Like, he got the McLaren F1, and then he went older, and then he went older, and he finally got the first car.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna get into horses, big time.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  That would be hilarious if he was just like, yeah, like, real car guys, like, we know, like, you should just get a horse.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the, that's the end. That's the end. He literally predicted vibe coding in 2023. None other than George Hots on the Lex Friedman podcast.

• 1:01:40Speaker 08

  I don't doubt that these models are going to first become useful to me, then be as good as me, and then surpass me. Like, I think in two years, I'm gonna start using these plugins.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 08

  A little bit. And then in five years, I'm gonna be heavily relying on some AI augmented flow. And then in 10 years.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  Do you think you'll ever get to 100%? Think it's all generated?

• 1:02:02Speaker 08

  Our niche becomes, I think it's over for humans in general, not just programming.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  No more programmers left, huh? That's where we're going.

• 1:02:10Speaker 08

  Well, unless you want handmade code, maybe they'll sell it on Etsy. This is handwritten code. Doesn't have that machine polish to it. It has those slight imperfections that would only be written by a person. Look, I don't doubt that these.

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  It's so good.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  We're back.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  He's truly so good.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  It's over, we're back. Let me tell you about vibe.co. We're D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  This was quite interesting. Somebody over on X called Levi says, "Two weeks ago, the Epstein files podcast didn't exist. Today it's about to cross 500,000 downloads and sit in an Apple Podcasts top 20 series between the New York Times and ABC News. I vibe-coded every episode with Claude from real Epstein court documents." So basically, he just like fully generated a podcast and it is charting.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. For something like this, it makes a ton of sense to just programmatically like sort of put everything together because it's there's so many files. It's a perfect use case for for AI to sort of like synthesize, comb through.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  And there is there is unlimited demand for Epstein-related content.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Anyway, we have Palmer Lucky in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBP and Ultra Down. Palmer, how are you?

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  You are live. You are live, sir.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Can you hear us, okay?

• 1:03:34Palmer Luckey?

  Yep, I hear you loud and clear, though with a little bit of delay. So we'll try to keep it zippy.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're gonna say probably five words in total and you're just gonna go crazy.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Tell us what's happening.

• 1:03:46Palmer Luckey?

  Tell us what's happening. So, I mean, Trump is complaining about tariffs. Iran is on the brink of war and Arabor, the new the new bank for the tech community, building things that actually matter, has officially received its charter and become operational. So it's a pretty good set of things that are going on.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Big hit.

• 1:04:09John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Take us back in time. When did this project start? What was the inciting element? Why is this important? How'd you pick this to work on?

• 1:04:21Palmer Luckey?

  Look, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that I could point to, but it really boils down to, I'd been looking at starting a bank for a while, primarily for my own personal use, because there weren't banks out there that really understood my business, my businesses, the things that I was doing. Silicon Valley Bank was doing a reasonable job, but then they went out of business and took everybody's money with them and had to have the government bail everybody out. And I think that was really kind of the thing that got me very serious about it. I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with the United States, interests that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy, the things that are really complex and hard to understand, but that do really matter, that could also serve them in a meaningful way.

• 1:05:06Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, you have farmers' banks that serve communities that are doing agriculture. You have banks certainly that are doing oil and gas quite well, but when it comes to tech, it's a pretty sparse field. And so I started to think, well, how do you build a bank that could serve those things? How could you do it a very conservative way, very, very low-risk way, where you can ensure you're not going to go out of business, you're not going to force everyone to rely on government bailouts? You may not be able to survive a total financial collapse. Banks rarely can, but you can at least be the last man standing. And so, thinking about that, and then also a lot of things that new technology enables, like using US dollar-backed cryptocurrencies to have 365/24/7 settlement of payments, which is something that a lot of businesses need and very few get.

• 1:05:49Palmer Luckey?

  You kind of stack all these things together and it becomes clear that there's room for a company to be a real bank, for real companies doing real things.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  So is there a network effect there? Because if I'm on Arabor and Jordy's on Arabor and we can both have 24/7 settlement, but someone else is on a different bank and they don't have 24/7 settlement, we're going to have a good experience? And then maybe to get out of the network, how does that work?

• 1:06:14Palmer Luckey?

  I think that there will be network effects, but to be honest, whatever network effects there are, it will probably be pretty short-lived. I think that pretty quickly, everyone is going to realize that they need to support these things. And I think that when, like, seeing this administration's support for using specifically dollar-backed stablecoins, so not saying we're going to move everybody off of the dollar, we're going to move them off of, you know, the United States currency as the reserve currency for the world, but I think probably most banks are going to get drug into this. The difference is that we are trying to do it from the start. So is there a network effect? Probably, but I think most of the forward-looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular, see that in the next few years, probably all banks are going to be forced to adopt this to be competitive.

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  So what is, what is the ideal banking experience for you besides stability and low risk? Are, is being able to talk to somebody, is that a bug? Should we just, is Airborne just going to be, you know, a chatbot that you say, "Talk to a human," and it says, "Unfortunately, I cannot do that. I have an AI chatbot."

• 1:07:16Palmer Luckey?

  I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be a long time before we hand things off to the chatpods, if only for regulatory reasons. Like, you set aside the risk, which is a huge factor, you set aside the fact that we have our own banking rails, which are extremely efficient, and that we can settle at any time. I mean, those are huge factors on their own. But even if you knock off kind of all of these, all of these obvious advantages, there's a lot of other things that you get from having a bank that is strongly aligned with the United States, strongly aligned with US interests, strongly aligned with the US Department of War, and also the intelligence community, and that there's, there's a lot of ways that that manifests. For example, one of the things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kind of go and, you know, respond when they think there's crime going on in the platform, we're preemptively going out there and saying, "No,

• 1:08:00Palmer Luckey?

  we're going to work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform," which is great for me, too, because it means that people who want to engage in fraud are going to go to other banks. It means that people who don't want to engage in fraud are going to be thrilled about being on a platform that doesn't have that type of activity on it and to the extent that it exists inside of their own platform against their will they know that they have a willing partner that is willing to work with the government rather than hide these you know hide these things I would say maybe think of it as like the opposite of HSBC where they were banking the cartels and desperately trying to avoid any sort of government intervention that would make that clear to the public markets put Arabor way at the other end of that spectrum I think there's also a lot of other banks that whether whether they're good or bad people is irrelevant you might have good people who nonetheless

• 1:08:45Palmer Luckey?

  are very beholden to European markets Chinese markets other foreign markets that they need to keep happy either because they want to keep them happy and make money or because they don't want their executives in those jurisdictions to get arrested Arabor is taking a very different approach we're saying you know what we're an American company we're an American bank that supports American companies and we will comply with US law but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us and you'll find a very hard time finding a bank that takes that position I'm not aware of any other than us

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  how do you think about rolling out products a bank can do everything from mortgages to equipment financing to venture debt to capital raises take someone public that's kind of what you know you go to a big bank they're gonna help you IPO what do you want to do first

• 1:09:34Palmer Luckey?

  I think that right now yeah we look we've just barely opened so give us a little bit of time the products that we are prioritizing are based entirely on the customer feedback that we're getting the things that they tell us they need the things that they tell us that we can most help with in a way the existence of a bank to me is almost this antiquated thing like you would hope that companies could really just do all of this stuff themselves or at least most of it themselves but the regulatory climate the way that the banking system works requires that you have this intermediary in the form of a regulated bank to make these things happen and so I kind of as think of our business as part and parcel of these companies that need us and we're gonna work very very close to them closely with them

• 1:10:16Palmer Luckey?

  and focus on the things that they care about that's probably not going to be for example Residential mortgages, but things like equipment financing, very conservative, you know, very conservatively played where it's not going to turn into a risk management problem. Allowing them to work with the legacy banking system and plugging into that in the least painful way. These are things that we have a lot of customers who are very interested. Oh, and we need to not lose their money. If we can do that, we'll be doing better than many other banks.

• 1:10:44Ryan Petersen?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the trade offs of going the charter route. You know, the last 10 years, most of the banking products that founders have used were built on top of existing charters or spreading deposits across multiple.

• 1:11:01Palmer Luckey?

  Well, people would just avoid getting a charter at all. You know, they want to be a fintech company and they basically will dance around the fact that realistically what they're doing is basically being a bank. Look, there's a lot of things that you can do without having your own charter. There's things you can do, partner with other companies. There's a lot of things you cannot do without having your own charter.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's kind of anti, anti-hypergrowth. Like you can't just scale to 50 billion of deposits tomorrow, even if there's the demand, right? So maybe you speak to that.

• 1:11:32Palmer Luckey?

  We decided that we needed to get our own charter because of the type of bank we were going to try to run and the ability to have the buck stop with us. The moment that you're dependent on somebody else for the key infrastructure, the key risk management, the key licensure questions, they can kick you off the platform. They can be forced to kick you off the platform. They might, and maybe they're doing it for good reasons. Maybe they're doing it for bad reasons. I mean, you've seen this play out, for example, with Steam and their payment processors and their banks and their payment processors banks, where they're basically censoring games because there's some circle of people who all claim it's not them pointing down the chain. It's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy. But they all agree, even if they can't agree, who's causing the censorship? That if you don't censor, they're going to drop you, they're going to drop your account,

• 1:12:17Palmer Luckey?

  they're going to de-bank you, they're going to de-payment you. And so, one of the things that you have to ask yourself when you're making yourself dependent on another bank or another payment company is, am I setting this up where they get to make my decisions for me? And are they making their decisions for me? Or is the Chinese Communist Party making those decisions? Is some political party that is extremely hostile to some business on our network? The one actually making that decision. So if you don't control your own charter, if you don't control your own destiny, the buck doesn't stop with you and you're always gonna have to keep other parties happy. And I think that was not something that we were interested in. We wanted to be able to run the bank the way that we think it needs to be run. And if we are de-banking somebody, we are gonna have to take responsibility for that. And I think that actually leads to much better behavior. I would love to see that type of behavior across the industry.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Physical branches. How are you thinking about that?

• 1:13:07Palmer Luckey?

  I think we're gonna start with Fort Knox and then we'll expand from there.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe actually dive deeper there. Like, what is a bank these days? I think most people can conceptualize, like, setting up a crypto wallet that holds coins, but when you want to hold real dollars, you don't actually have a physical bank vault, I imagine. So, once you get the charter, does that just give you the ability to, like, maintain a database and a ledger? Like, what is a bank?

• 1:13:37Palmer Luckey?

  What is a bank? I mean, there's lots of forms it can be. I think if you want all the details, you can actually read through a lot of our applications. Some of it's actually a matter of public record and you can see that. Androl, we'll, sorry, not Androl, Arabor will have a physical vault.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:13:50Palmer Luckey?

  And we will have a lot of treasure in it. So, we are not trying to be a pure digital, pure, you know, pure ether company. And in fact, a lot of the companies that are very interested in working with us want us to have secure, actual vaulted storage. I'm not saying that that's going to be the first thing that we focus on, that's our key differentiator. But we are not a, we are not a bank of the ether. We are, we are, we are, we are of Terra Firma.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last time you came on, we talked a lot about Mod Retro. I'd love an update on the M64. What makes that product special? Where did you go further with this project than with the Chromatic? And just general, like, how you're thinking about the M64?

• 1:14:27Palmer Luckey?

  Well, for people who aren't familiar with it, the M64 is a tribute to the Nintendo 64 that I'm building. One of the greatest multiplayer consoles of all time. We're building a console that is compatible with all classic N64 games. We're re-releasing a lot of classic N64 games so that you can buy them if you'd already have them. We're actually doing new releases of canceled N64. M64 games that never even made it to market either because they were canceled imported to GameCube or because they ran out of money or because the studios imploded for interpersonality reasons. There's a lot of cool stuff coming out. The M64, I guess the main update is that it's in mass production right now. It is not eventually coming, it is in mass production right now.

• 1:15:08Palmer Luckey?

  We've decided we're not going to launch it until we build up sufficient stock to meet the demand. One of the mistakes I think we made with the mod Retro Chromatic, which was a tribute to the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, was that we started selling them and then all of a sudden we sold out. And then you have people who hear about it, they read about it, their friends are all talking about it, they go to try to buy one and they can't buy one because it's sold out. And there's a question, will they remember to come back and buy it some other time? Will they still feel like going and immediately buying it? Exactly, and so you kind of end up with this dead end call to action. And so we've decided this time, by the way, this is especially bad for the game publishers that we're working with. Let's say that it's someone who's re-releasing a game or somebody who's doing a brand new game. Some of the indie developers we're working with on the Chromatic,

• 1:15:51Palmer Luckey?

  they're out there promoting their game, they're trying to market their game, they're doing a whole marketing activation, trying to convince people, hey, come and buy my new Game Boy game, come and buy my new Nintendo 64 game. Well, what happens if you can't buy the console? A lot of people are like, oh, I'll come back later and buy it, and then they don't. And so what we want to do is not let down our developer partners this time and make sure that we maintain stock. So the goal is that the M64, no matter how many people hit our website, is not going to sell out. And so we are mass producing, we're stockpiling, I think, tens of thousands of them so far, more and more to come.

• 1:16:24Jordi Hays?

  What is the supply chain? What's the supply chain actually like right now? We've covered the gamer rebellion against AI.

• 1:16:34Palmer Luckey?

  Gamers are rising up.

• 1:16:37Palmer Luckey?

  You know, the supply chain is okay because of the type of hardware that we're building. There's a lot of consumer hardware right now where people are trying to buy memory and it's a huge problem. But remember that the Nintendo 64 doesn't have exactly a lot of memory. You know, it had, what, 16 megabytes by default, 32 megabytes with the expansion pack? And so it turns out that you don't need that much memory to perfectly replicate the Nintendo 64 original hardware.

• 1:17:06Palmer Luckey?

  Maybe it might be, it might, it might, it might be actually the least impact, less, the least memory impacted consumer electronics product of the year.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  And so this was, this was your plan then all along.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, you saw this coming.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  The AI boom was coming and you said, I'm gonna make the, the final console.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:21Palmer Luckey?

  Now we gotta return to monkey. We got, we gotta go to, go back to the beginning. Uh, I mean, really, what am I doing here with something with 32 megabytes of, I mean, you, you remember what, uh, you remember what Bill Gates said, right? What, what was it? 64 kilobytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone?

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:35Palmer Luckey?

  Uh, let's, let's, let's, let's figure out how to use AI to, yeah, let's figure out how to use AI to build applications that fit within reasonable memory footprints.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 1:17:44Palmer Luckey?

  I'm only half kidding. I think you might've seen me going back and forth with Chamath on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, talking about, uh, how this AI software platform for building, uh, building software using AI should definitely support export, uh, to, uh, Windows XP Service Pack 3 compatible applications. And I really am only half kidding. There, there is actually a lot of government hardware that is still running those, financial hardware that's still running these, mostly offline stuff.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Palmer Luckey?

  And so having apps that can run on those is actually useful. But man, it feels crazy to need a few gigabytes of RAM to have a start menu. It feels pretty crazy that you need 16 gigabytes of RAM to take 30 minutes to search through a bunch of text files. Surely we can do better than this.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about how you think about gaming and the concept of, uh, just raising the next generation kids? I have three, three kids and, uh, I think I could probably get an emulator and run it on an iPad and slam that over to my kid's face and, uh, he might not know the difference. But is there another angle to the M64 that is about like some of the, some of the things that you can't do with it are actually good for the world, maybe?

• 1:18:57Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, you have to remember that the gaming industry, like many industries, figured out what actually worked a long time ago. They figured out how to make fun games, they figured out how to make things that make people keep coming back. But it's moved from innovation to extraction. And I will note, I stole that line from Narav Patel, founder of Framework, because he put it so much better than I did. But there's these industries that have moved from innovation to extraction. And they're now in the extraction phase where they try to make tons and tons and tons of money. And actually pushing the limits is not the top priority for some huge majority of the dollars that are in industry. And so, there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, especially when you're learning it from the ground up by going back to when people were just getting the basics right, when they were still innovating, building things that were really compelling to people.

• 1:19:42Palmer Luckey?

  I recently had a kid, and I have a second on the way. I'm planning on starting them with, I don't even if I'd say the classics. This isn't like a vintage play. It's starting them with a good foundation. That foundation happens to be largely old games. But I'm not going to be throwing them into the slot machine, microtransaction, Gamblarama that is dominating kids' games today. It just seems like a crazy thing to do.

• 1:20:07John Coogan?

  It's a Skinner box, yeah. Don't go in the Skinner box. Talk about vibe coding. What would your life be like if vibe coding existed when you were 20? Advice for

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Or 12.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  People who are 20 now in the world of vibe coding. You went into hardware very early, that feels like a great move. Is that still a great move? Walk us through all that.

• 1:20:27Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, the biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be, it's going to be the shape rotators, not the word cells. Everyone's focused on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI. But for the shape rotators, it's going to be incredible. You know, I was always a pretty terrible software engineer. I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough to glue things together and make them work. But when I started my first company Oculus, or actually, when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, you know, I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy stuff by outsourcing it to a computer.

• 1:21:10Palmer Luckey?

  I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself. And people might say, Palmer, you should have just learned to code. You know, you should have, should have, should have just learned to do it yourself. But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize I started Oculus when I was 19. After building prototypes since I was 15, I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I'd spent another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would have been two years behind on everything else. And so I am a big fan of vibe coding, even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit. It's better than I was able to make.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched The Matrix from start to finish in an Apple Vision Pro. I enjoyed it. It feels like the only real thing that you can do these days is just the home theater, if you don't have a home theater. But it doesn't feel like the industry's embraced that at all. And everyone's sort of writing down their investments and pulling back at a time when the display technology does seem to be good enough for that narrow use case. If you cut out the weight and move things around. But where do you see this? Where do you, where do you want consumer VR to go? And then where do you think it actually is going?

• 1:22:30Palmer Luckey?

  So I will challenge your premise there, which is that people are pulling back. I think that's driven mostly by people sensationalizing meta, firing a bunch of people. But you have to remember, they got rid of 10% of the Reality Labs team in one layoff. Remember that they have something like eight or 9% annual churn naturally and organically, not including firing. So, I mean, what you're really talking about is basically pulling six months of churn forward into a single month. And they're still spending more on VR than anybody by an order of magnitude. They've said they are not spending less on content. They're just not putting it into first party stuff like Facebook Meta Horizon. You've seen they've announced Meta Horizon is no longer a VR app. As of yesterday, it is now a mobile focused app only.

• 1:23:11Palmer Luckey?

  So what they've done is they've basically killed a few of these failing efforts that didn't make sense. And they're now putting those Resources into things that are working and so I I I wrote a I wrote a I wrote a bit about this on on Twitter where people need to understand this is not the end of VR. It's not it's not collapsing. They are still spending an enormous amount of money. They're bigger than anybody else by an order of magnitude. Um, I I and I think if you pay attention to what's going to be coming out from Meta and others over the next 12 months, you're going to see a lot of progress like Apple Vision Pro. Yes, they so yes, Apple Vision Pro was ahead of everybody on visual quality on display quality, but let me tell you a short story.

• 1:23:51Palmer Luckey?

  Imagine that an American company went to a Japanese display vendor and they said, we want you to sell us your new 4K micro OLED displays. The company gives them samples of those micro OLED displays. The samples cost about a thousand dollars each because the yield on that production line is only about 10%. In other words, 90% of the displays coming off the production line are uh not up to par. They're not working. And that's because these are engineering samples. They're not meant to actually be a working product. And they said, listen, here's our engineering samples. Just wait two years and the yield is going to be up to 90%. We'll be able to sell these to you for a couple hundred dollars. And then imagine that that American tech company had a guy named Tim Apple called them up and saying, no,

• 1:24:32Palmer Luckey?

  we're going to build a product with this right now, today, using our engineering samples. They said, but Tim Apple, that's crazy. That means that your headset was going to cost like $3,000. He said, I don't care. I'm going to sell a headset that should launch in 27, in 2024, 2025, and I'm going to do it for $3,500. That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money. And so Meta and Sony and Apple and Google and all of these other companies, they are going to be hitting that level of visual fidelity. They're going to be doing it with headsets that are far smaller, far lighter than what you see from Vision Pro. And I I actually remain very optimistic.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:25:13Palmer Luckey?

  I I I think things are going pretty well.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  I I'm extremely optimistic. It's mostly just uh that when I when I try and pull stuff out of Meta, they're like, no, no, no, we're not ready to talk. And I think that they're just being cold shoulder to me because like they don't want to leak it yet, but I. I am very optimistic.

• 1:25:28Palmer Luckey?

  Well, you know, the problem is, they don't have a charming charismatic pitch man who knows how to talk about this stuff with you. They gotta solve that. They need to figure out what they're doing.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  They do.

• 1:25:37Palmer Luckey?

  You know, it reminds me of something. Being here, I'm on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange behind me. And back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact email and they asked if I would come and ring the bell to New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, right? Like, hey, like, you've been acquired by this major public corporation in the form of Facebook. Come and ring the bell. Maybe someday we'll do something else with you. And unfortunately, I didn't see that email for about seven years because another Oculus executive intercepted the email, said, "Oh no, Palmer can't make it, but I would love to come." And he came and he rang the bell without telling me about it.

• 1:26:21Palmer Luckey?

  And so I found out about it later in unrelated litigation. That email came up in discovery. And anyway, I've not had a chance to ring the bell yet. Maybe when Androl goes public, I'll finally be able to ring that bell. But I gotta admit, I have a long memory and a long memory grudges and I won't say who it was. But there's probably a handful of people out there who can guess.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  You have a lot of co-founders now, a lot of executives that you work with. How do you select for folks who won't do that to you? How do you select the right people? Extreme loyalty, trust. I don't know. I mean, it's important.

• 1:26:55Palmer Luckey?

  Remember.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  You just kicked this thing off a year ago.

• 1:26:58Palmer Luckey?

  Look, I started Oculus when I was 19 years old. And I mean, you also gotta remember the story of who is a founder, who is a co-founder. It's fluid and dynamic and always changing with the ebb and flow of history. One of my ideas is to have a blockchain company where everyone agrees what the founding story is and who the co-founders are. And then it goes in the blockchain so that nobody can come back and say that they're a co-founder. There's a guy running around now who says that he's a co-founder of Oculus, who was very much so not a co-founder.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  I think I swear, I swear, I think I met this guy. I told you this story off air.

• 1:27:35Palmer Luckey?

  Oh, tell me the story.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  So I was at a dinner party at my friend's house and my buddy was like, "Hey, this guy works at..." I'm not going to name the company, but you guys probably have some tech stuff in common you guys should meet. And I go up to him, I said, hey, hi, I hear we should meet. And he's like, hey, I was like, what's your story? He's like, I started a company called Oculus.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Now, now at Meta. And I was like, oh, interesting. Like, never heard of you before. And so maybe this guy, we won't put him on blast.

• 1:28:04Palmer Luckey?

  Here's the crazy thing. I don't even know who you're talking about.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I told him, I was like, oh, like.

• 1:28:09Palmer Luckey?

  Because there's multiple people who are saying this, including a guy who literally has a documentary being made about him, how he's the founder of Oculus. So it's always a, it's always very strange.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  I was like, oh, that's, that's awesome. Like Palmer comes on the show all the time. And then he completely backs, backs, backtracked. It was like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I joined like, you know, you know, and, but I was on the founding team. Like he, he backtracked.

• 1:28:35Palmer Luckey?

  Ah, well, look, you, so, but to the point, you asked me, how do you select these people? Carefully. I was 19 years old when I selected the first people that I was working with. I've learned a lot. I've been stabbed in the back a lot. And I'd probably make very different decisions if I were doing it today. And it's worth noting, remember that I started Oculus on my own with no co-founders, nobody involved in a lot of, like, I brought on people that I am happy to call co-founders, even though they didn't join the company until months later, who I had never met when I started the company. That said, I'm hap, there's some people I'm honored to share the, the title of co-founder with. And there's other people that I'm not, which is why I really want this blockchain thing. Somebody needs to vibe code this slop and get it out there.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Super important question. Have you played Federal Reserve Simulator yet? The new game?

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  It's on Steam.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  On Steam. You gotta try it out. You're, you're a banker now.

• 1:29:26Palmer Luckey?

  I've not even heard of it.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  You're a banker now.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  You gotta get the reps in.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  You might really enjoy this.

• 1:29:29Palmer Luckey?

  All right. Federal Reserve Simulator.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Federal Reserve Simulator on Steam.

• 1:29:33Palmer Luckey?

  I think I, it's right there on the screen. It says, Trump says, we have an incompetent Federal Reserve chair who loves high interest rates.

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:29:42Palmer Luckey?

  Very, very, very interesting.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  What, what hardware are you collecting recently? We, we just learned you can buy a steam-powered car and drive it around.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Jay Leno has one that's 120 years old.

• 1:29:54Palmer Luckey?

  What hardware am I buying lately?

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Collecting, not just buying, collecting.

• 1:29:58Palmer Luckey?

  Yeah, I know. What am I, what am I? Well, so I have a, I, there's a few things I could bring up. To be honest, I've been too busy to buy really good stuff. But I recently got delivered one of the first Jetson, uh, Jetson Ones, which is a small eVTOL aircraft. I was one of their first customers and their first delivery. Um, I also have a collection of motorcycles. The theme of the collection is commercial failure. And so all of my motorcycles were huge commercial failures. The more of a failure, the better. And so, uh, I've been buying some, some failed two-wheel-drive motorcycles.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  How do they, how do they?

• 1:30:32Palmer Luckey?

  Military motorcycles.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  How do they ride?

• 1:30:35Palmer Luckey?

  Oh, incredible. Look, there, look, there's really bad failed motorcycles. There's others that failed because they're too good. One of the crown jewels in my collection is a Honda Rune. Uh, it was basically a personal project created by the CEO of Honda. The, the document that they used when they were creating it has actually been leaked now. And at the start of the document, it says, "Performance is the only object. Price is of no importance." And so they wanted to build the ultimate cruising motorcycle. And the story goes that they lost over a hundred thousand dollars per bike in the end. And so I've got one of the, one of the handful of Honda Runes that made it out of that program. A beautiful Honda, Honda Room with, uh, with, with a couple thousand miles, metallic purple and chrome. And it's, it's, it's one of my favorite motorcycles, if not the favorite.

• 1:31:20Palmer Luckey?

  So, commercial failure doesn't mean a product's bad. It just means they couldn't figure out how to make a business out of it.

• 1:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Back to your Jetson One, uh, have you been flying it? Are you taking it like half a foot off the ground and then a foot off the ground? What, what is the path to, uh, commuting to work in it?

• 1:31:36Palmer Luckey?

  I think, given the regulatory climate around eVTOL aircraft, it's best that I not say one more word.

• 1:31:44Jordi Hays?

  Perfect, perfect. Where do you, where do you get your shirts?

• 1:31:49Palmer Luckey?

  Where do I got my shirts? Well, it depends. I buy Tommy Bahamas. Uh, this one is a rain spooner and a roll Hawaiian shirt. So I've got a sentry tower. Um, I've got a ghost X on it. Uh, and they're headquartered on Catalina Island, California, and Avalon. Um, so I buy, I buy from a holdup bunch of different places. I'm not, I'm an equal opportunity Hawaiian shirt purchaser.

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  I like it. Supporting the entire market map.

• 1:32:17John Coogan?

  Uh, well, it sounds like we have Jonathan Gould, the comptroller of the currency next to you in the booth. Is that correct?

• 1:32:24Palmer Luckey?

  That's right. I'd like to introduce Jonathan Gould, comptroller of the currency here with me today on TBPN.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining us. Uh, Jonathan, please introduce yourself since it's the first time on the show and tell us a little bit about what happened today from your perspective and what's going on with Airborne from your perspective.

• 1:32:42Speaker 10

  Sure. So thank you so much for having me. I'm Jonathan Gould, the comptroller of the currency. We charter, we regulate, and we supervise national banks. And today we're here to celebrate what is the first full-service charter of a national bank that's been issued since I took office about seven months ago. So we're very excited to have Airborne into the national banking system after months of hard work on their part. Uh, so delighted to have him there and we're here to celebrate that.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, uh, what, how much is changing around the way banks get chartered? I'm interested to hear, is this just the Herculean efforts on Palmer's side? Or is there going to be a flood of new bank charters issued? Like, what does the view over the next decade look like for new banks broadly?

• 1:33:27Speaker 10

  Well, so I think over the last four years, but even beyond since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators have imposed a lot of hurdles procedurally and otherwise as a result of just having a much lower risk tolerance around bank chartering in the United States. That's not the result of any changes in statute or anything like that. Um, just simply a lot of regulators, not just the OCC, but other regulators as well at the federal level and possibly the State level two, just discouraging banks from forming. But of course, it's absolutely critical that we have new banks forming in America on a regular basis. That's really part of how the banking system revitalizes and refreshes itself over time.

• 1:34:12Speaker 10

  And so, again, we want to do everything we can such that we are being transparent and holding all applicants to the same standard and faithfully applying the statutory factors that Congress has given us on a case-by-case basis and in an even-handed fashion so that if new applicants, if they meet the statutory factors and they can meet our high supervisory standards as Airborne has, they will get a charter. So we're excited to see the demand that's out there. We think that there and have seen already a lot of banks of various different business models kind of in the pipeline already. And again, if they meet the statutory criteria and they can meet our supervisory standards, we welcome the system.

• 1:34:50Palmer Luckey?

  I'd also say, just personally, I think those standards, people should understand, are already extremely high. Like, you guys are not lowering the bar, you're just going through the process that statutory you're supposed to. And I like, you might not be able to say this or want to say this, but I'll say, like, right now, as it is, there's probably a lot of things that could be done to make it easier for people to start banks that would be productive. Like, but right now, I mean, like, the bar is extremely high. I've put it this way, like, this is, starting a bank is very much a rich-get-richer thing right now. Like, you can't be a 19-year-old Palmer Lucky who started Oculus in his trailer and say, "You know what? I've got this incredible idea for banking. I think I'm gonna go start a bank." Like, maybe it's possible, but the process we went through, I don't think a 19-year-old Palmer Lucky can get through.

• 1:35:32Speaker 10

  That's fair. And again, I mean, part of what we're doing here is just trying to live up to the standards that we say we have in place for what it takes to become a bank. But more fundamentally, and feel pardon me for this one, but I mean, you shouldn't have to hire a burglar from the Shire to get a bank charter, right? You know, it shouldn't be that challenging. We should have transparent standards around it. And to the OCC's credit, I think we do, we just haven't in all cases and overall administrations followed them. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  What other, are there other kind of industries or categories that you're interested in? Airborne's obviously unique in that it's focused on technology and industrial businesses, and it's something that has so much excitement from our industry. But is there kind of a line out the door in terms of other sectors that are excited to have kind of a new bank partner in their industry?

• 1:36:27Speaker 10

  So we don't, you know, as from a chartering agency standpoint, we don't, you know, pick and choose winners and losers. We don't pick and choose business models. We want to make sure that to the extent there is an unmet credit need in a community or in a business or an industry, that the banking system is evolving to meet those credit needs, again, subject to doing so in a safe and sound manner. So again, you know, we are trying to apply the statutory factors across business models, across potential applicants in an even-handed fashion, again, consistent with the guidance that we've produced over the years. So again, we're not trying to direct, you know, bank chartering one way or the other. You know, I think we've seen in the past, particularly over the last four

• 1:37:10Speaker 10

  years, you know, a skepticism inconsistent with statute, but a skepticism around things like digital assets and crypto. We are reverting back to what I would say is the norm for the OCC over its 163-year history, which is, we don't, we don't pick winners or losers here. We apply statutes in even-handed fashion and we are agnostic around technology. And in fact, we welcome banks embracing new technologies, right? I mean, over 163 years, which is how long our agency's been around for. And obviously, the US banking system far exceeds that. Banks have had to adapt, evolve over time. And again, new chartering is how banks do that in parts, how the system adapts and refreshes itself. So we have a

• 1:37:54Speaker 10

  strong interest in seeing that continue to occur.

• 1:37:56Palmer Luckey?

  I know you can't pick and choose, but I have to say, in my mind, I want someone to start a bank that is focused on adult content and other edge of illegal stuff. It's not what I want to focus on, but the problem is, right now, there's this weird gray area where there's things that are technically legal in the US, but no banks want to touch them because of the PR concerns or the actual real risk concerns. And so they end up being banked by foreign banks that are doing all kinds of weird payment stuff. Now you have an opening for organized crime, or an opening for sex trafficking, and you don't have any real insight into how any of it moves. Like, the US can't see how the money is moving. It becomes much harder for law enforcement. These other international banks don't want to cooperate with law enforcement because

• 1:38:40Palmer Luckey?

  they're making all their money off of sex trafficking and illegal payments and all of these other things. And so I've always wished that somebody would come up and say, hey, I'm going to bank, I'm going to bank all of the people that are on the edge of legality so that we can get at least some insight and access into this. I don't want to be in that business personally, but somebody out there should do this because it would, it'd probably be better if you, that whole industry theoretically didn't exist. But in a world where it does exist, it's better that they not be banked by Russian organized crime.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Get a little more technical with us. What does the actual process look like for applying for a charter? I mean, I think some people, you know, imagine like a web form that they fill out, then they might, you know, imagine, you know, a thousand-page legal document. Or are there lots of conversations, meetings?

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  You probably also need to be able to raise like a quarter billion dollars or something in that range.

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does it actually take these days?

• 1:39:41Palmer Luckey?

  I mean, I'll leave that to you, but I mean, you said it doesn't take a quarter billion dollars. I mean, we had to have like $350 million in regulatory capital just sitting in an account to backstop it, which again gets back to what I said earlier where right now, starting a bank under like current rules and statute, it is very much not the 19-year-old Palmer Lucky.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure. But that seems healthy. I don't want to bank with a 19-year-old, personally. We have some 19-year-olds on our team. They're fantastic.

• 1:40:11Palmer Luckey?

  Well, I bet me and Jonathan probably have slightly different opinions, but remember, I lean very libertarian. I'm a college dropout. I'm trying to figure out if I can convince kids to drop out of high school. I mean, would you say you wouldn't bank with a 19-year-old? Maybe you just haven't met the right 19-year-old. You know, like, that's right, there's a lot of people who wouldn't work for a 19-year-old, and I had that problem when I started Oculus.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:40:32Palmer Luckey?

  And yet I managed to do it.

• 1:40:35Speaker 10

  I'll give you the more anodyne, less colorful version. And maybe somewhere between the two is what actually happens in practice. So it's a two-phase process for chartering a bank at the OCC. The first phase essentially is, you know, the regulators, so the OCC will be vetting kind of the business plan, understanding and assessing, you know, what's the probability for success, you know, ultimately doing what's called a, giving what's called a preliminary conditional approval or not. We aim to do that within 120 days.

• 1:41:10Speaker 10

  And then essentially kind of the second phase is the actual in-organization phase. So it's standing at the bank, doing all the policies and procedures, doing the fundraise to the capital side, you know, making sure you have the management team in place that you need. And that can occur, that basically has to occur within 12 to 18 months of when the OCC grants preliminary conditional approval. But how long exactly the bank remains in organization phase is really up to the bank, right? Because they've just got to get themselves ready so that they can essentially kind of, you know, open the doors for business. And the last thing that happens just before they do open the doors for business is that OCC examiners come in and do the final kind of pre-opening exam and make sure in fact the policies and procedures are in place, management's there and so forth, so that

• 1:41:54Speaker 10

  the bank can in fact, you know, welcome customers and execute it on its business plan.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  I have one last question. Can we have a 19-year-old comptroller? What does it take to become a comptroller of the currency? Is this, you go to Wall Street and then there's a revolving door and then you go to the government? Do you work your way up in the government? Break me down for the 19-year-old that wants to be the next comptroller of the currency. What do they got to do?

• 1:42:19Speaker 10

  Well, I don't think there's any statutory prohibition on age.

• 1:42:26Speaker 10

  I mean, hopefully qualifications are relevant, although, you know, it's hard to tell sometimes in Washington these days. But certainly you do need a presidential nomination and support, and you need the advice and consent of the Senate. I spent about 25 years in this industry, so got a lot of friends and, you know, both on the policy side and on the banking side, so.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Now I'm excited about a 19-year-old comptroller.

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they can put on their application. They can put on their application.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  I don't even know if I want a 19-year-old. Oh, wow. Palmer talks a big game about faith in youth. And then as soon as I tell him, you're going to be regulated by a 19-year-old. He's like, oh, no, no, no.

• 1:43:05Palmer Luckey?

  Let me tell you why this actually fits in with a libertarian perspective.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:43:08Palmer Luckey?

  When you have a free market and you have a whole bunch of different companies that are all competing with each other. The idea that one or a few of them might be run by high schoolers say, you know what? Give them the right to compete in that. It's a free market. They're allowed to compete. And if they provide a better product and a better service and people want to work with them or for them, all the power to them. Government is different. You have a centralized power. You have one chance to get it right. And so I will admit, I'm a little worried that perhaps if you need someone with a lot of experience, not even just in currency or finance, just someone with experience in life. Like, I talked earlier about how I probably picked poorly in some of the people that I worked with early on. Imagine if I was the comptroller of the currency and I had that same level of naivete.

• 1:43:53Palmer Luckey?

  If it's one of 100 companies in the market, I'm all for it. If they are the person who is the wielder of singular government authority, I actually would worry about it. So I'm not as hypocritical as you think. I'm like halfway there.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:44:06Speaker 10

  I wouldn't want to discourage 19-year-olds from aspiring to be or becoming the comptroller of the currency. But just to be clear, the comptroller of the currency is not responsible for killing the penny.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:44:17Palmer Luckey?

  Do you have to deal with that every day? Are people stopping you on the street and flicking pennies at your head?

• 1:44:22Speaker 10

  Most of my family members and all of my college friends, all they want to know is, so you're responsible for killing the penny? And then as soon as I say no and start describing my actual job, they immediately lose interest.

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, eyes glaze out.

• 1:44:33Palmer Luckey?

  That's a funny one.

• 1:44:33John Coogan?

  Well, thank you, guys, for just coming on the show. We really appreciate all the context and laughs. Have a great time at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Say hi to Lynn for us.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, say hi to Lynn and we'll see you soon.

• 1:44:45Palmer Luckey?

  Thanks, guys. Live long and prosper.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Live long and prosper. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. That was a lot of fun. I loved in the chat, someone was saying they got to make Comptroller of the Currency Simulator. Get it on Steam. I'm ready to play 10,000 hours of Comptroller Simulator. That's what you should be required to do before you get the job and the presidential nominee. Anyway, we will continue with our coverage of Arabor at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  In just a minute, we have Diogo from Haun Ventures coming in, calling in from the New York Stock Exchange. So we will bring him in in just a second. Any other breaking news that we should touch on?

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can touch on this briefly. So Nvidia and OpenAI are nearing.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:50Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia's $30 billion investment into OpenAI.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people were kind of.

• 1:45:56John Coogan?

  About it was 100 billion, which is.

• 1:45:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so this felt like a downgrade, but at the same time, that 100 billion, when they proposed it, was going to be in, you know, 10% installments based on milestones. And so I think it makes a lot of sense to just do a good chunk of it upfront.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  You just need to remove five zeros from every deal to contextualize it for a normal founder. Like if you're raising a $10 million Series A and an investor comes in and says, I'm good for three. You're like, awesome, this is great.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  And then add five zeros and that's the same Altman experience. Anyway, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely, connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. And without further ado, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  It's happening.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  We are working on audio. Let's try and bring that in and we will kick it off with the introduction. Please, since it's the first time on the show, introduce yourself.

• 1:46:54Speaker 11

  Yes. My name is Yogi Manika. I'm a GP at Haun Ventures and the co-founder and executive chairman of Anchorage Digital.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Since it's the first time on the show, give us a little bit of background, how you wound up at Haun Ventures. We've had Katie on the show.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  And what was your first trip to Nicey?

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:47:12Speaker 11

  Yes, it was not my first trip, actually. So I've been here a few times. I've gone to take lots of the pictures and they actually have a curator, by the way. So if you come to Nicey, you should ask for her. She knows everything about the history of this place. It is an hour and a half to two hours, but you should absolutely do it and see all of the original documents and everything that has happened here. Super historic.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Cool. And then, so yeah, background, the path to Han, the path to crypto. I know Haun Ventures is interesting because there's the government relationships as well as the fintech. There's a lot going on, so I'd love to know how you wound up in your current position.

• 1:47:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, so fun story, but I really have only done one thing in my entire life. So PhD in distributed systems 20 years ago, when honestly was useless. And then I led security team at Square for four years, went to lead security team at Docker for three years, and then started my own company with Nathan, company called Anchorage Digital, the first federal chartered bank, which is very relevant for Arabor. And then Katie and I connected when I was fundraising for Anchorage about eight years ago. And over the years, we've just been friends. She was, as you know, co-leading the A16Z crypto fund. That was an investor in Anchorage. We were friends. We were on the board of the Libra Diem, if you recall that initiative by Facebook together.

• 1:48:29Speaker 11

  And just, you know, they're clients of Anchorage. And so we've interacted many different ways over the years.

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, so talk about the Arabor deal. How'd you meet Palmer? What was interesting about this, other than, you know, obviously there's a lot of star power, but I want to hear more about the unique thesis.

• 1:48:46Speaker 11

  So, look, I was in a unique situation, which is I'm one of the few crazy people that actually sit on the board of two federal charters, not just one. And so when the team came to me and really wanted to start this, said, "Well, there's not that many people that have done this over the past five years." And Enkrich got our charter, as you know, in 2021, and really was trailblazer in terms of showing that you could have innovation under the OCC and going through a Biden administration, which, as you know, was very crypto unfriendly, and really coming out on the other side with a very strong business.

• 1:49:19Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt, but did everyone think you were absolutely, you guys were absolutely insane to try to get a charter in that climate? Like, what, how did you think the odds were going into that process? Was it kind of a moonshot, like, "Hey, if we can make this happen, it's great," but low likelihood? Or at what point did you develop confidence that it would be a possibility?

• 1:49:38Speaker 11

  Well, look, we, it was to the point where the consultants that were helping us get the charter did not believe that we were going to get the charter in the first place. So that was how bad it was to get a charter and try to get a charter in 2020. But if you think about Enkrich and how it started, it is an institutional bank. We only serve large institutions, you know, the clients are the Blanca Crocs of the world, visas of the world, very large institutions. So when we had the opportunity of converting our trust, state trust charter into a federal charter, it was the obvious solution and the obvious, you know, solution that had longevity if you're just serving institutions. We basically connected the best security that custodies crypto assets to the best regulatory

• 1:50:22Speaker 11

  charter that it can get out there. And that was the end state of the company. If you had the opportunity of jumping right to the end state of the company, wouldn't you take it? And so we put all of our chips, we went all in, and we just ended up being the first ones to get the charter.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  Got it. How are you thinking about innovation in the existing, you know, mega bank sector? Like, there's been a ton of skepticism around crypto from the leads of the big banks, but I feel like some of them are coming around. It's staring them in the face at this point. They're seeing public companies that operate in crypto, you know, make it through. There's new regulation. Is there any, is there anything that you are seeing on the horizon where those banks might modernize and actually adopt some more forward-thinking technology strategies?

• 1:51:05Speaker 11

  Look, Aribor to a large part actually came out of the frustration of the fact that that does not exist for the industry. Like if we go all the way to 2008 and post crisis, you had Dodd-Frank that actually created so many more regulations, all of these stress tests, all these capital requirements. And from that moment on, the number of federal banks is literally a monotonically decreasing function over time. Each year has less banks than the year before it through M&A, mergers, or people going out of business. And so the frustration of the industry, when you're in technology and you're trying to build financial products, of not being able to build has culminated in something like Anchorage and then something like Aribor. Because if you think about it, fintechs started for a while renting these charters

• 1:51:50Speaker 11

  and doing banking as a service as it's called. And then all of a sudden, Synapse's blow up happens, which is still being litigated. They literally did not know who the money belongs to. And so it showed that if you are a tech company that wants to build a world-class product, then you cannot rely on a rented charter and banking as a service. You sort of have to do it yourself. So going straight to the pain, which is very difficult to get an OCC charter and operate as a bank holding company under the regulatory regime of the oldest banking regulator in the United States, OCC. That is not something that you do lightly, but it was necessary. So it was time for tech to come into finance. And so that's why these banks got created. And we had to take matters into our own hands.

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  How do you see the market for new banks developing? Because when Palmer launched Anduril, there was this line where in order to start a defense company, you had to have a billionaire as a co-founder. And he cited Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX. And it was something that was like the barrier to entry was so high. And then now we have a whole defense tech boom and there's a lot of cool stuff going on. Anduril's obviously still doing fantastically. But is this a moment where you think people will just wake up and be like, yeah, it's hard, but it's not impossible. And so maybe we will see a bank that's specifically targeted at farming or oil and gas or some new startup in some other vertical. They'll try and create some differentiation, not go right up against Aribor.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  But we will see a market map in a few years of new banks.

• 1:53:21Speaker 11

  A hundred percent. After twenty years of almost zero federal charters being created a year, there's a window here because of a pro-business administration and lots of these convergences that have been happening that allows people to even for the first time think that it's possible, think that it's possible. And so dozens of these charters have been applied for. There's two main strains of them. One of them is the trust bank charter that Enkrich trailblazed in which you are full bank, but you're not actually taking deposits and you're effectively a full reserve bank. And then there's the Airborne model which are full fiduciary, traditional bank. In the case of Airborne, extremely conservative tier capital, tier capital ratios, and it's an extremely conservative bank, but you're going for the whole enchilada, FDIC insured, et cetera. So lots of banks are now realizing

• 1:54:05Speaker 11

  that this is possible. And you see that in the massive increase of applications and charges being given out. So it's a new renaissance for banks and people realizing this is possible. So let's actually go do it.

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:15Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you thinking about making, you're now on the board of two, would you consider making more investments in this space? Or are the incremental charters that are, would be kind of broadly interesting to the market, not necessarily a fit for Haun Ventures?

• 1:54:34Speaker 11

  Look, they have to make sense. One of the reasons why Airborne works is because three of the things that are hardest about starting a bank, the first one is capitalization. It's no surprise that Palmer, starting anything, will get capitalized. And so you jump through that hurdle. The second one is the regulatory hurdle. Enkrich has shown that it was possible. The team that Palmer assembled is absolutely magnificent, from engineering to compliance to regulation. And so it was very clear to me from day one that they were going to be able to step over that hurdle. And then the third and most important thing is you actually have to get to scale on a depository base. And Airborne, through Palmer as a go-to-market, which is what I call it, Palmer as a go-to-market, that's our go-to-market strategy, and Palmer's

• 1:55:18Speaker 11

  friends, Palmer's connections, and obviously the competence of the team and the bank, you have all three figured out. So effectively, we speed ran the infancy, teenage years of a bank into something that is fully fledged and is ready to go.

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  What's your go-to-market?

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Breaking it down.

• 1:55:37Jordi Hays?

  Palmer.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Have, have fun.

• 1:55:40Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Enjoy the closing bell.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, come back on the show.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Four minutes until the closing bell.

• 1:55:44Jordi Hays?

  And then have fun at Nicie.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 1:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And I believe we have Joe Lonsdale in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV panel. Joe, how are you doing?

• 1:56:05Speaker 12

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  It's going fantastically. Is software dead? I want to start with SaaSpocalypse. I know you have some good takes on the SaaSpocalypse because someone vibecoded your former company, right?

• 1:56:21Speaker 12

  Oh, that's funny. You saw my comments on the web today. I can't help myself. It's like being shared by all these people. Oh, yeah, I vibecoded Palantir. Like, come on, guys. It's annoying because I'm such a pro-AI bullish person, but it drives you to apostasy for the whole movement where they're like, we're replacing everything. Palantir is going down. I'm like, no, I think low-end SaaS is in trouble the next few years. Like, that's the reality, right? Not the hard companies.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  So that's narrow point solution, no system of record, no regulatory mode, like, no network effect. Is that what you're thinking when you describe low-end SaaS?

• 1:56:57Speaker 12

  That's where I would start. It's probably some of the stuff that Constellation Software used to do. I don't know what they're doing now, but back in the day when I studied them, there was a lot of stuff like that. And listen, it probably climbs the stack over time, right? So there's probably some very simple systems of record that are very basic that you can kind of probably pull in. But listen, if you took more than $100 million to build your SaaS software with, like, good engineers, that's going to take a while to replace. And if you have a great SaaS company that spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and you still have a great tech culture and you're using AI, you're fine, right? As long as you have a great tech culture, because you're going to stay ahead. But there's a lot of stuff with PE bought, didn't take that much to build, probably put more money into sales than tech. That stuff's in trouble.

• 1:57:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What are you advise... How are the conversations going with existing portfolio companies that are now running the calculus on how long it'll take to build new products and thinking like, hey, we can go multi-product faster than maybe we could before? Or maybe it's more tempting because this thing that was going to take us a year could now take, you know, two months or six weeks or something in that range to ship? Still feels like somewhat of a risk to just say, okay, we're going to do everything all at once. But how are you thinking about it?

• 1:58:07Speaker 12

  You know, my bias as an entrepreneur has always been to like do too much at once and I need to hire people around me to hold me back because I'm like, let's do these 14 things. Then you're like, actually, guys, you know, actually, we should ace this thing first and this thing. So, so, so, you know, in, in, in general, this is probably dangerous for me because it empowers me to keep pushing for doing everything at once. And it's like, I love Peter Thiel's like argument on the board of Facebook 20 years ago, where like the Warren Buffett, uh, you know, person, Don Graham was tied to him. It's like, don't spend too much, uh, money, get cash flow positive. And Peter's like, we should be like still burning money and like just growing faster and taking over the market. He's obviously was correct, right? So I mean, it's just like, there's a lot to do and our big companies are growing. You have no excuse to, to be making money right now if there's something to build, right? You should, you should be spending more to build within this environment.

• 1:58:51Speaker 12

  Uh, you know, and it's, it's, you know, I think the best engineers really are five to 10x better with this. I think if your engineers are not using it, you should replace them. That's a great way to know how to replace, who to replace in your company right now. And, and, you know, I mean, yeah, a, a lot of our older SaaS companies are still well-run. They're building agents on top of it to perform the work for their customers. Does that make sense?

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:11Speaker 12

  So, so it's like, if you like dominate, I shouldn't say it because he gets too many calls, but like one of our CEOs. He's like dominates a big part of the financial industry in one particular niche area. And, and now he's like rolled out agents and he's adding tens of millions of revenue with the agents to do, to help the customers have to hire less and to be more efficient. So there's a lot of stuff like that we're seeing.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, let's flip it over to Airborne. Uh, uh, you're not going to vibe code a bank charter, at least I don't think you will. But what are the keys to success going forward? You're obviously deeply involved with the company, very excited about it. What does the next couple of years look like? What do you want to see happen?

• 1:59:46Speaker 12

  So, you know, I think with a bank, you got a barbell on one hand. There's like all this really exciting stuff you could do with AI and with hopefully like convincing the regulators to, to, to permit new idea, really great things. And we could talk about that. On the other hand, this is a It's a goddamn bank, right? So you have to be traditional. You have to be safe. You have to be smart. I'm putting my own money in. I'm putting some of my firm's money in. A lot of my friends are, a lot of my companies are too. I'm on the board of this thing and your job at a bank board is to be conservative as well, right? And so the whole point is, you know, our reputations are all tied into this Palmer's reputation, my reputation, a lot of other people's reputation.

• 2:00:22Speaker 12

  And you have to run this thing where you're serving customers better and learning from the best of that and where you're just, and we're going to be extra safe. I don't know what I'm supposed to talk about, but I think the whole point is that, you know, it's not a narrow bank in that in the traditional sense, but it's a, it is, it is much narrower than other banks. We're going to just keep a lot more in a very, very safe way because I think it's the right way to run these things. You just never, just not take any risks you don't need to take.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  What, what was the sort of 72 hours of the SVB crisis like for you personally?

• 2:00:51Speaker 12

  Oh gosh, you know, that was actually interesting because I had warned eight or nine of my companies about six months before, actually that I was, I didn't know for sure, but I said, this looks not, not, not quite right to me. My brother had talked to me about it. He's a macro analyst and we were like, what's going on? I hadn't known for sure and I had a bunch of my family money in FRB and it was really sad because I loved, I mean, SVB guys were nice too, but I loved FRB. They were like our.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  John, John and I too.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:14Speaker 12

  Yeah. And, and I was, I was at the dinner with the governor here in Texas that night and I had a bunch of other friends here. I won't mention their names, but like, you know, guys who'd moved here are very, you know, multi billionaires who themselves had a bunch of their own money in FRB actually. And we all felt terribly guilty because when SVB had started to go down, we actually had each withdrawn money from FRB as well because you kind of had to in that situation. It was just too scary. And, and so it was like, it was like, I, you know, SVB was a little bit sad. FRB for me was just, I was never really worried for myself. I got my money out. My companies didn't have too much exposure, but, but I felt really sad because it was such a great bank. And I think for me, one of the goals of Airborne would be to try to learn, uh, to, to do things as well as, as FRB did to serve people. I think it was a really great bank.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. You mentioned Texas. Uh, there's a lot of young people that are nervous about the job market in the age of AI. Give me the pitch for University of Austin right now in the age of AI.

• 2:02:08Speaker 12

  University of Austin, the age of a well, I think in any age, but especially in an age where the world is changing quickly, you need to have a really strong foundation, you need your leaders in your society to have a strong intellectual foundation. So what we're doing is we have, you know, it's one side, really deep intellectual foundations of the West, understanding our civilization, understanding how our world works, why it works the way it does. You want to talk, you know, who my top people I work with in business, they all understand philosophy, they all understand history, whether it's Peter Thiel, Alice Carr, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, you have to give them that really strong base. On the other hand, you got to challenge them, push them really hard on the STEM side. We're just finishing our STEM building, right next to SpaceX and Boring Company, have a, you know, one of my, I was just with my friend who built Palantir with me, who's teaching the AI agents course next quarter. So we have a lot of our probably top hundred friends

• 2:02:51Speaker 12

  who built companies as advisors who are helping push the university forward. And we're going to train courageous young leaders and a lot of them are going to work with us and build the future. So it's a pretty exciting place to go.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  That's very exciting.

• 2:03:00Jordi Hays?

  You guys are setting up dorms for Mac minis, a little space, set them up.

• 2:03:05Speaker 12

  You know, we got, there's all sorts of crazy AI stuff going on that we're having fun with, but they, I think the dorm is a little bit too nice, frankly. I think the students, I don't know, you think, but maybe it's like too fancy, but it's, it's good. They like it a lot.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Are you secretly funding the California billionaire tax to punish all, everyone that didn't leave like you?

• 2:03:22Speaker 12

  You know, it, it, it has, it has been something I've commented on that it's like probably really good for these people in California to wake the heck up and see what's going on. But no, I'm actually secretly funding a bunch of the things that now my friends are waking up to kind of reveal the fraud in California and reveal the nonsense in California and hopefully fight back against the real extremes. Because, you know, I used to argue with a lot of my friends in college, I'd be more on the moderate right, they'd be on the moderate left, I'd say, if you want to define it. And now most of those smart people who've been successful on the moderate left were like complete allies against the crazy far left because that is just so broken in California. And I'm excited to see a bunch of them courageously stepping up.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for taking the time. We'll let you get back to you.

• 2:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:04:01John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:04:02Speaker 12

  See you guys.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Always a great time. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you hear that?

• 2:04:19John Coogan?

  That's the sound of a happy dad.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Barkin'.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  Should we bring him in?

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Here we go.

• 2:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Cracking them open for you.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  It's 5 o'clock somewhere. It's 4 o'clock at the New York Stock Exchange. Cheers, John. Good to see you again. Cheers, boys.

• 2:04:41Speaker 13

  Yeah, good to see you guys too. I'm good, good. I know it's been a few weeks, but I just want to congratulate you guys again on the Super Bowl ad.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Oh, thank you. That was a lot of fun.

• 2:04:50Speaker 13

  You know, I want to tell you guys, like, man, I actually got emotional because I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TVPN like was just taking off and, you know, just watching your guys' journey has been incredible. You know, I get, I get, um, like, once a week or so, I get like someone calling me and like trying to pitch me on a show and like, "We're the TVPN of sports. We're the TVPN of..." I got some guy the other day, like, "We're the TVPN of Europe." So, it's kind of cool. It reminds me of, uh, it reminds me of, uh, like 10 years ago when I was in music, people used to always pitch, "I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music. I'm the Justin Bieber of India." And like, that's what TVPN's become.

• 2:05:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, somehow, yeah, it's a good sign. It rarely works. I mean, if someone's trying to do the Happy Dad for wine, it's like, that's probably not the thing. Either you'll do it or whatever works in that category will just look completely different and have a different strategy because people want new things. Um, what, uh, walk us through, what's the experience like at the New York Stock Exchange today?

• 2:05:53Speaker 13

  Uh, it's pretty cool. I mean, uh, you know, um, yeah, I came out here, um, to support Airborne and, and what, uh, Palmer and Trevor and the team are doing. Uh, really excited. Uh, you know, we're going to be switching all our companies over to Airborne, uh, in the next upcoming weeks. So, it's very, it's very, uh, you know, they're, they're, it's not just because they're good friends of mine, but it's, you know, it's really nice to see a bank doing something different and having that personal touch and, you know, um, you know, and have, you know, their philosophy of just truly caring about companies and, you know, whether you're a startup or an established company. So, it's just a good feeling to be a part of it.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  Yep. How is business going? Uh, how did, how did 2025 shake out? There were, you know, the economy was up, there were tariffs, there's lots going on, but what was it like in your world?

• 2:06:43Speaker 13

  Well tariffs don't really affect us because almost all our products are US made. So Happy Dad, yeah. So, you know, outside of our merch business, which is, you know, just a, you know, less than 3% of our business. Everything else is US made. So tariffs don't necessarily affect us. You know, so far, I mean, this year's been already a great year for us. You know, Happy Dad in January was, you know, year over year in January was up 31%. Yeah, and this is, this is, this is dry January, by the way. This is, and this is like, you know, if you live anywhere outside of like California or, you know, some of these west coast states.

• 2:07:23Speaker 13

  90% of the country was pretty much frozen, you know, including, including Florida. You know, I was in Miami a few weeks ago and it was 35 degrees in Miami. So, you know, and, you know, Happy Dad's not a cold weather product. So to start the year off like that.

• 2:07:39Jordi Hays?

  Hot chocolate.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:40Jordi Hays?

  Although maybe you should launch the Happy Dad hot chocolate for next January.

• 2:07:44Speaker 13

  Yeah, I think people, we're okay with the cold drink. So we're gonna probably stick with that right now.

• 2:07:53Jordi Hays?

  So how are you, how much time do you spend in New York? It feels like a lot of your, your, your, your business is more west coast leaning. But New York is, really feels like the epicenter of so much happening and just like the creator industry broadly.

• 2:08:10Speaker 13

  I don't spend a lot of time here at all. I actually would only spend time here because more personal reasons, because my wife's family's from New Jersey. But yeah, no, I spend most of our, most of my time is actually in California to, you know, work with our team and in Orange County. And, um, you know, my brother Sam does a lot of the traveling to meet with our third party partners. But I, yeah, I spend most of my time in California, not too far from you guys.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  Uh, give us some, give us some tips, some hacks for expanding consumer products, expanding in retail. I remember this fun story from Mark Rampola who started Vitamin Water Company, or, uh, sorry, Coconut Water Company. And he went to all his sales guys and was like, whoever sells the most, I'm giving you an F-150. And they worked extremely hard and it was just kind of funny outside the box. Most people would be thinking in the spreadsheets. But, uh, what's been working on the retail side? What has been the interesting, like, unexpected growth vector throughout the last year?

• 2:09:05Speaker 13

  Well, with Happy Dad, you know, I think last time I was on the show in September, we were talking about creator brands and creators like overextending themselves when they launch a brand. And one of the things that we're doing this year is we're gonna actually spend a lot less time and effort on marketing with creators and spend more of the money on trade marketing and being actually where the customer's at. So if you think about Happy Dad, you know, Happy Dad, you know, you go on a weekend, on a Friday or Saturday to buy the product. Well, you might as well spend money in the store with displays and, and, you know, decorating the stores or putting up neon signs. Money is probably better spent where the customer is versus where the customer isn't. Like if you're, you know,

• 2:09:47Speaker 13

  you know, you know, you're sponsoring a podcast and the podcast is live at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday and you're, you know, an alcohol company and most of your sales are Fridays and Saturdays or Sundays during football season. It's, you know, the customer's gonna forget about you by the time Friday, Saturday come out. So you might as well spend that money when they're actually in the store. So that would be my tip with any CPG brand is focus on trade marketing, focus on actually, you know, decorating stores, proper displays and being seen in the stores. Cause what's the point if you're not necessarily in the store or if you're hidden in the back? Because your competitors are actually doing what I just said.

• 2:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were talking about this. Expensify spent a lot of money sponsoring the F1, 15, sponsoring the F1, Apple F1 movie. And it's a cool concept, but the challenge is like, think about the, the sort of person's like frame of mind when they're watching that movie. They're not in the business of, they're not thinking, I gotta buy management software right now. And so being at the right place.

• 2:10:53Speaker 13

  Unless you have a lot of money, like if you have a lot of money and let's just say Taylor Sheridan calls you and says, hey, you wanna be stocked in our fridge in Landman season three. If you've got extra money and you're already in the stores and you're doing everything I said and you just have, you know, an extra amount of cash to do that. So your friends could text you and say, hey, I just saw your product in Landman. That was awesome. If you wanna do that, that's fine. But I would, I would focus on the act, where your customer physically is and they're ready to go and they're ready to buy. They've got their wallet. So, you know, trigger them at that moment.

• 2:11:29Jordi Hays?

  How a lot of your shows have partnerships with the DraftKings or the FanDuel's of the world, some other online gaming platforms, I'm sure a bunch of prediction markets now. How are you navigating that whole landscape? Obviously, the big sports books have been talking pretty openly about how their businesses have been impacted by prediction markets, even though they're getting into the game themselves. What do those conversations look like and how often do those contracts actually turn over?

• 2:12:02Speaker 13

  Yeah, so we have a media company, Shots, which was part of the TBPN Super Bowl commercial, so thank you. We don't have a lot of time, so we don't need to do that, but I'm doing it in my head. Shots has a partnership with PrizePix, which was a daily fantasy. You could select players, more or less, and recently they implemented prediction markets in there. So we have a long-term partnership with PrizePix amongst all of our content, and they've been great partners. We've been with them since 2022. We recently renewed our deal for another three years. They're great because they already had a fan base. We didn't have

• 2:12:42Speaker 13

  to worry about... Most of our fans right now, they actually have PrizePix. We're more focused on getting them re-engaged in the product or educated on some of these new features that PrizePix has. So yeah, that's our partner when it comes to the prediction market/sports app space.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Sorry. Talk to us about the broader growth of alcohol consumption, particularly among young people. Obviously, your business is growing, your category is growing, but beer, I believe, had a 4% decline, and alcohol broadly, it feels like young people aren't drinking is sort of a meme, but how are you processing that?

• 2:13:25Speaker 13

  Yeah, so people are, you know, this new generation especially, but most people are just, they're drinking, they're just drinking differently. They're not, you know, they're not going heavy, they're not going, you know, spirits, they're not drinking beers. You know, if you look at most beer companies, if they haven't got into like the seltzers or the tea or no bubble space, they're struggling. So, you know, I think beer consumption is down. You know, I say this all the time, you know, people don't want to get, you know, they don't want to wake up hungover, so they're not drinking, you know, vodkas and whiskeys and, you know, some of these harder liquors because people want to get up and they want to feel good. People are more on their

• 2:14:09Speaker 13

  health kick more than ever these days. You know, that's why you're looking at, you know, all these supplement brands, these, these fitness brands, GLP-1 peptide companies are all through the roof because people want to be healthy. They don't want to wake up. And also have this theory that people want to look good on social media too. So, you know, so there's only one, two ways to look good on social media. Either be in shape or add 15 filters to your picture.

• 2:14:30Jordi Hays?

  Or grab a hammer, grab a hammer.

• 2:14:32Speaker 13

  Stop with the hammer. We're not bone smashing. Bone smashing is now, it's over. That guy, yeah. Anyway. That's a one, that guy's a one of one. He is a one of one. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  I want to, yeah, I want to, I, I, do you think, do you think clavicular will create 10,000 claviculars? Like, do you think IRL streaming is, is going to be a big new meta? Or is there just a much, I mean, there's naturally a smaller base of people that can be an IRL live streamer than a traditional influencer who might have a normal job or something of the sort?

• 2:15:08Speaker 13

  Well, media is in general is changing in general. You know, I mean, you know, I consider you guys IRL, just in a different format. And, and, you know, if you look at like how many people are viewing this right now, it's a lot less people than how many people are going to clip the TBPN episode, interviews. So, you know, the longer you could actually stay online, the more, more of a chance you have to have multiple clips. You know, if we had to count. All the TBPN live views on X and YouTube versus like all the clips of TBPN amongst all the platforms, Shorts, TikTok, X, Reels, you know, it's probably hundreds X. So, you know,

• 2:15:51Speaker 13

  I do think IRL, whether it's streamers, whether it's this format, you know, I think that's where media is going because it's really about short form. Most people aren't, you know, people are gonna watch Palmer's clip, you know, and those clips are probably gonna go, I was in the other room, so I didn't hear what he was talking about, but everyone was laughing, so you know, I'm sure there's gonna be clips of that. Yeah, you're gonna see the clips.

• 2:16:16Jordi Hays?

  He was advocating for 19-year-olds to run banks.

• 2:16:21Speaker 13

  You know, what's crazy about Palmer, I spent a lot of time with him, and sometimes I'm like, what did he just say? Then when it process, when, I don't know what he said about the 19-year-old but, running banks, but sometimes I'm like, fuck, he's kind of right.

• 2:16:38John Coogan?

  He's great. He's great at making a point that he can defend and actually peel back the onion, but tie up in a bow. It's really great stuff, every time.

• 2:16:46Speaker 13

  Yeah. One more thing I think about media too is, I do think we're gonna see in the next year, we're gonna see our first podcast produced by Grok. Like, I think there's gonna be a very

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, we talked about this on the show today, there's a top 20, there's like a top 20 series on Apple that's 100% generated with AI, somebody, it's on the Epstein files.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  They took all the Epstein files, put them in deep research reports and different coding models, to then turn it into audio, and it's charting, it's in like the top 20, because people just want that, and they can turn it over, they can turn it over immediately, and even though it's AI generated, and it's probably not as nuanced as, you know, some, you know, serious journalist with a bunch of reputation, like, it's giving people what they want faster, and so there's demand.

• 2:17:32Speaker 13

  So so so now imagine like you guys have TBPN and then you have diet TBPN but imagine like TBPN brought to you by Grok or or some sort of AI engine that goes live at like 4:01pm Eastern Time and breaks down the stock market like one minute after the stock market closes um you know or sports you know like you know today in sports you know it goes live a couple hours before tip off NBA and this is what's gonna happen in the NBA so and so is playing so and so this guy's hurt that guy's not hurt this is what the line looks like on price picks our poly market you know I I think we're gonna see one of those pretty pretty pretty soon

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah

• 2:18:10Jordi Hays?

  Well it's it's fantastic to see you excited to have you back come by the Ultra Dome soon

• 2:18:15Speaker 13

  I want to well that's what I was planning on doing and then when I heard you guys were here and I was here I was like I was gonna reach out to you guys next week about coming by but all right well I'm at this New York Stock Exchange

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  You know where we are uh and since you were last on I think John like somebody's only offered your handle on Instagram to John Coogan like 10 times they hit him up every day

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  They DM me constantly do you want at John and I'm like I know Josh Eadie I I'm not stealing his

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  laughing lockdown

• 2:18:43Speaker 13

  I'll give you at John on Snapchat because I have that but I don't use it so if you want the Snapchat that's yours

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  I I like the consolidation of you have the John

• 2:18:51Jordi Hays?

  No you gotta own John

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  I'm happy to have the full name

• 2:18:54Jordi Hays?

  The final John

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah The final John Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show

• 2:18:58Speaker 13

  Good to see you guys, thanks for having me

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Have a good one Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless realtime experiences and new value with Cisco. Uh software multiples have been reset at a fair level given AI uncertainty, said Brad Gersner. He says if you own a software stock, you must expect the CEO to say quote, "We crush numbers" and expect that to continue because our business accelerates with AI. If you don't expect to hear it, don't own it. Too hard basket

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Dylan

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  In the too hard basket

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Dylan did that

• 2:19:33John Coogan?

  Dylan did that?

• 2:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Dylan Field.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, for sure, for sure. Also, uh, there, there, there was some funny stuff in the chat, but we can get to it later because we, of course, have Will Brewery from Bardas.

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  It's time for a lightning round?

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  The restream waiting room, and it is time to kick off the Lamb to Lightning round. Let's fire up that cloud, fire up the graphics package, and let's bring Will Brewery in to the TV and Ultra. Well, how are you doing?

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  Check, check, check.

• 2:19:58Speaker 14

  Hey, Jordi and John, how are you? Can you hear me?

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, good to see you.

• 2:20:01Jordi Hays?

  And clear.

• 2:20:03Speaker 14

  Excellent.

• 2:20:04John Coogan?

  It's been, it's been far too long. Uh, obviously, we're here, you know, excited about Airborne, but I'd love to start with just, uh, an update on are you, are you running out of numbers for these capsules? How many are up there? How many have come back? Uh, you're gonna have to switch to, to, you know, Base 64 or something and coding them because the numbers are getting so high.

• 2:20:23Speaker 14

  Yes, I love that. Yeah, we are at Winnebago. Five just landed a couple of weeks ago, so we're very excited about that. Number four is in orbit. Number six gets shipped to the launch right next week. Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, of course. God, I love that.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Uh, so, yeah, what, what are you actually learning in between these? Are they purely commercial? Like, someone just asked you, so you're gonna put one up. I imagine that you're iterating on hardware, software, regulatory, everything that goes into it. What are you, what, what's the, what, what, what changes in between, uh, one launch to the next?

• 2:20:54Speaker 14

  We have, but we hit that zero to one moment. I mean, we hit the zero to five moment. So now we're moving from six and beyond. So, yeah, yeah, very excited about that. So we are iterating on all the fronts you just mentioned. Um, but luckily now that we, we have an assembly line going, actually, right behind me, there's two of them on the, on the floor. Uh, we, we put together and, and, uh, bulk all of our changes into what we call block upgrades. And then, so that'll occur about every year, just like a car, uh, come, you know, comes off a line as, as

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Like an iPhone.

• 2:21:20Speaker 14

  And, yes.

• 2:21:22Jordi Hays?

  It's a space iPhone.

• 2:21:24Speaker 14

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:21:26Jordi Hays?

  It's lighter, thinner, faster, cheaper.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Okay, so you have a capsule, you can put stuff in that. Can I put a GPU in it yet?

• 2:21:39Speaker 14

  So technically, we have a data center in orbit right now.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  You do? Okay.

• 2:21:43Speaker 14

  It doesn't have as much compute as you may want, but it, you know, checks the boxes of compute, so.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  You're like, Daniel, shut up. This might be real. There's a chance.

• 2:21:54Speaker 14

  So actually, I should point you guys, we were featured in Morgan Stanley's Market Analysis that came out two days ago, where they're looking at the microgravity manufacturing. Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:07Speaker 14

  Yeah, round of applause for Morgan Stanley. Forward-thinking, futurist bankers, my favorite on Wall Street. So, no, but they're coming out and taking the microgravity manufacturing industry seriously in a very sophisticated report and kind of hit up the nail on the head.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Okay. And a lot of that is still bio-focused, I imagine?

• 2:22:25Speaker 14

  Yeah, so we're definitely focused on bio for at least the next five to 10 years, just because from first principles, it's the most expensive dollar per kilogram. It has the biggest impact. It helps people. It makes economic sense and it's a large market that we can scale into.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  And it's highly differentiated and the defense stuff is interesting and orthogonal, but that, you know, is sort of a separate part of the business. Is that correct?

• 2:22:49Speaker 14

  Separate part of the business, but same part of the product. I mean, every single vehicle that comes off the assembly line can be either used for either use case. And so that really helps with scaling. And so we just have a diversified revenue stream now.

• 2:23:02Jordi Hays?

  What kind of AI-native tools, and I mean truly AI-native in that they were created after AI, the Transformer paper was released, that you are, what kind of categories are you getting pitched that you're excited about around potential speed-ups or already getting benefit from?

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  You mean like to purchase at BARDA and roll out?

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Like tools that you're buying or planning to buy that you're excited about outside of code generation?

• 2:23:30Speaker 14

  Yeah, outside of code generation. So Cursor, you know, excited about that. Excited about the new model. It's becoming so much easier to build the in-house version of those SaaS's that it really isn't, you know, for us. There's, I'm laughing right now because the guy leading the effort here was up till 4 a.m. last night just because he was so excited about it. We were looking at it. But what we did was, we, we, what it, what it does is it looks at Confluence, which is kind of like our Wiki at the, at the company. Based on the diff from Confluence over the past week, here is a report of everything that's happened at the company. It does time tracking, it does risk analysis, you know, it's so it's like, it's awesome. It's awesome. We're really excited.

• 2:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it getting to the point where it can make recommendations to you of like here, like here's, here's how you can speed up this part of the process? Or is that kind of the next step?

• 2:24:19Speaker 14

  Yeah, absolutely. We even ask it to give us a multiple choice.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  Walk through how launch costs are looking this year, next year. There was a lot of back and forth with Starship last year, eventually did like, like massive progress in the back half of the year. And then the surprise for me was Blue Origin. And I think everyone was sort of like, oh, it's a space tourism company. And people were like, no, no, no, it's like a very serious company and there's going to be a real race. That feels extremely good for you, but do you, do you anticipate the curve of launch costs to continue or change in some way? What are you seeing?

• 2:24:59Speaker 14

  Yeah, so I'll tell you what I know. What I know is, so we've, right now, we've already booked all of our launches out through 2029.

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:25:06Speaker 14

  And yeah, so we're, we're launching four this year, seven the year after that, 10 the year after that, 12 the year after that. They're booked, flight hardware is purchased. The other thing I know is that, you know, when, from a Barta business model perspective, we're one of the few space companies that treats launches shipping, like, you know, and so we use SpaceX instead of FedEx. But from a business model perspective, shipping is shipping.

• 2:25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:25Speaker 14

  And so, you know, we're, we're excited about new shippers coming online. And you know, that'll probably induce some margin compression, which would be nice for, for us payloads. But at the same time, you know, we're not going to trans, transition overnight. You can imagine if you were using FedEx and they had a You know, a truck going 167 times to the route that you want. And then all of a sudden UPS shows up with one truck. Hey, I'm excited and I can't wait for more, but I can't switch shipping quite yet at the current nascent aspect of the technology.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  Last question, pick a side, moon or Mars? Who you got?

• 2:25:57Speaker 14

  I'm on team Mars, man.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  Team Mars still?

• 2:26:00Speaker 14

  You know, I was, oh yeah. So I was, you know, I was, I was, uh, cut my teeth when Mars was, was, and I still think it is. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, um, I think the, you know, what I want to be, uh, as my career ambition is muddy the mud skipper. You know, the first fish that, uh, it was an ugly scene, but the first fish that started to crawl onto land. His slippers were slightly more leg legs. It was not a glorious moment, but if you zoom out, it was an extremely glorious moment. So I'd like to be, you know, that ugly, uh, you know, not quite, you know, ready for the next planet yet, but you know, we show up.

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Moon, important testing ground, but Mars is the goal and will be truly multi-planetary. Uh, moon doesn't, moon base doesn't really count as multi-planetary. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you, Will. Congrats on all the progress.

• 2:26:49Jordi Hays?

  We're still waiting for our capsule here in the dome right now.

• 2:26:53Speaker 14

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. We got, uh, you know, well, we got three.

• 2:26:56John Coogan?

  They're gonna have too many. They're gonna need a whole storage facility for them in a couple.

• 2:26:59Jordi Hays?

  We can be, we can be trusted.

• 2:27:01John Coogan?

  We can be trusted.

• 2:27:02Speaker 14

  The place is going to invert. I'm going to start paying you just to get the property.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You're gonna be like, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta hold on to it for regulation. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also going to tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 2:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Up next.

• 2:27:29John Coogan?

  Sam Levenback from X Energy. He's the VP of Growth and Strategy. Sam, good to meet you. How are you doing?

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  It's happening.

• 2:27:36Speaker 15

  Thanks for having me. A pleasure to be here.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  First time on the show, please introduce yourself and tell us about the company a little bit.

• 2:27:43Speaker 15

  Yeah, absolutely. My name is Sam Levenback. I work at a company called X Energy. X Energy is designing a nuclear reactor, a high-temperature gas reactor. And what's really exciting, there's a lot of exciting things about what we're doing. The technology is super compelling. We have some incredible investors. I think the thing that we're most excited for and known for is we're building our first project in South Texas with Dow Chemical in Calhoun County, Texas. And we're going to be building our second project in Washington State with Amazon to support one of their largest data center clusters in the Pacific Northwest.

• 2:28:24Speaker 15

  So just super exciting times for nuclear and the next generation of firm power.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, Dylan and our team mentioned that you are a new Erebor customer. And I'm wondering, like, this doesn't seem like something that's like, you know, unbankable or, you know, requires something new. But what is it about your business that drew you to Erebor? Is it just excitement or is there something that where your business looks a little bit different than a normal business?

• 2:28:55Speaker 15

  I think that there is a really amazing nuclear industry in the United States today. We have 94 operating nuclear reactors, but not a lot of new reactors in construction. Right? And we have a moribund nuclear supply chain in this country. And that's, you know, it's a shame that we've lost a little bit of the shine and the pedigree of what we have historically done so well in the United States. And so getting that nuclear supply chain back up on its feet and up and running and to support the growth that's really demanded by AI digital infrastructure

• 2:29:36Speaker 15

  is a pretty heavy lift and it's not something that's directly in the wheelhouse today, frankly, of a lot of existing, pick your basket of capital allocators.

• 2:29:49Speaker 15

  I think what's been really impressive about the Airborne team, about, you know, with Owen and, you know, what they're building is a real excitement and willingness to roll up their sleeves and understand our sector, understand what is risky, understand what is bankable, and, you know, get to work with us really with the same mission, which is, you know, the next century of American leadership in global nuclear commerce.

• 2:30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. How capital intensive is the business? Do you have to buy land to build a facility to, what level of the stack?

• 2:30:21Speaker 15

  Yeah, so our business is primarily around two things. Number one is designing a next generation, high-temperature gas-cooled pebble bed reactor. So that's a heavy lift. Our company has over 900 employees today working on that.

• 2:30:37John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:30:38Speaker 15

  We are also then, the secret sauce of our reactor is the fuel, so-called tri-sulfuel. And this is really advanced stuff, and we're building a fuel factory today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We received last week from the NRC our permit to operate that facility. And so that's the two halves of our business. It's designing a reactor, which our customers will license that technology for us, and they'll build it on their balance sheet, and we will sell them the fuel for the life of that reactor. So we are selling you the design to build the printer, and then we will sell you the printer ink for the life of that reactor. So, you know, there are different aspects of that business that are capital intensive. There are different aspects that are not.

• 2:31:23Speaker 15

  And getting into it with us and understanding those different aspects is really something that Airborne's coming on that journey with us.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  When did you guys decide to get into the fuel business? Did that come after the reactor?

• 2:31:37Speaker 15

  That's a great question. You know, it was really a visionary decision by our founder back in 2015. If you're just, if you build the world's most advanced reactor and the fuel doesn't show up, you're kind of hosed, right? And so a little bit of vertical integration here, a little bit of getting into, if it's the secret sauce of your reactor, you better have your arms firmly around it, was really, you know, early insight. And so that decision was made back in 2015, and we spent

• 2:32:11Speaker 15

  You know, a lot of time redeveloping how this fuel is made, the intellectual property around how you do it. And, you know, that's been a really, you know, important part of our story and our journey.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  Last question for me. I want to know about timelines. We talked to a lot of folks in nuclear. I hear 2029. I've seen some reporting in the Wall Street Journal about even just bringing old nuclear power plants back online, but the dates are crazy to me. The 2030, 2032, 2035 gets thrown around. What are you estimating for when we might actually see the, you know, the famously flat curve of nuclear power generation in the United States start to tick upwards?

• 2:32:56Speaker 15

  It's gonna, you're gonna see it in the early 2030s. In the early 2030s is when we're gonna see our first two projects coming online with many more thereafter. You know, the first pickles out of the jar are the hardest, but the demand is insatiable. That's a new analogy.

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  Because pickles are green like nuclear fuel.

• 2:33:17Speaker 15

  But there, yeah. You know, it's, it's, but you're gonna, I think that there's a reason that you're hearing. I mean, that's, I think, the kind of the consensus in the industry. You know, you gotta, and so I think seeing, look, turning on those reactors and upgrading existing reactors, that's the, that's the low hanging fruit. And we should get every electron we can out of the existing fleet. But that's not going to be enough. There's only so many of those projects to do. The really, throughout the 2030s, you're, I think you're gonna see, I know you're gonna see a steady and ever going, growing clip of new nuclear reactors coming online and powering this kind of generational super cycle of AI digital infrastructure.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the different scales of nuclear power generation? I was really excited about just replacing the one megawatt diesel reactor. Radiant's doing some cool stuff there. There's a couple of other folks then. Then there's been, you know, as the AI boom has sort of taken off, everyone has been thinking about, well, Well, what if we get 100 of those together? Well, then we're doing something for a data center. Maybe we should upscale the whole project, do a 10 megawatt, a 25, 100 megawatt. And then we can get into like the really big Westinghouse projects that maybe can be unstuck by a startup. But what's the landscape like from your perspective?

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Where's the most value in in new reactor designs?

• 2:34:45Speaker 15

  Love this question. I mean, I think that it's all exciting and all have their puts and takes, right? So the big reactors, the conventional light water reactors, the Westinghouse AP1000. Yeah. A lot of new excitement and focus on those.

• 2:35:03Speaker 15

  I'm sure new ones will get built. I mean, just the amount of power demand that that's out there. You know, Westinghouse is a great company.

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  But Vodal, we all learned from Vodal that it can take years. We did turn on Vodal, but it took a long, long time. And I think the tech companies.

• 2:35:17Speaker 15

  And that's the downside, right? I think that even for a big hyperscaler.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:24Speaker 15

  You know, even these companies spending $160 billion a year on capex.

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:28Speaker 15

  You know, a $15 billion byte on a single machine is a lot of risk to manage. And it's a lot of risk for any individual investor owned utility to manage. You know, if you look at the market caps of the largest investor owned utilities in the United States, $15 billion, $10 billion, whatever the next AP1000 costs, these are big bites of the apple. So those are the puts and the takes with those. But you know what? They're going to be successful building more. I don't have any doubt about that. At the other end of the spectrum, the one megawatt, one megawatt micros. Look, if you can get those to scale, delivering 10s and then hundreds at a time, it's an awesome opportunity. You know, the challenge there, and I think you alluded to it in the question is,

• 2:36:12Speaker 15

  you know, for it to make a meaningful dent in a hyperscale data center. You're building hundreds and thousands, you know, in a single location and that's a lot of moving parts. That's a lot of.

• 2:36:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it doesn't necessarily, a great capacity is great capacity. So if you put one at every hospital and you replace a diesel generator on every, you know, oil field like that does free up energy for other purposes and that has equilibrates at some point. So.

• 2:36:40Speaker 15

  Absolutely. And, you know, so I mean, they're super exciting and, you know, the theory of the case getting to a factory kind of manufacturing, you know, throughput, you know, to bring down the cost.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:50Speaker 15

  It totally makes sense, you know, but it's, it's, you know, it's, it's nonetheless challenged on the economics on the actual delivered cost of electricity when you get that stall. Our main product is in that middle sweet spot. So our, a single one of our reactors is 80 megawatts electric.

• 2:37:08John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:37:09Speaker 15

  Building, yeah, what Dow is building at our, at their first site is four reactors. So 320 megawatts.

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  Wow. Okay. That's a lot. Yeah.

• 2:37:17Speaker 15

  That's a lot. Yeah. That's like a small coal plant, you know, that's, that takes a real chunk out of, you know, what they're doing and that, that more than takes care of the site that they are focused on. And then.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  I think that's, I think that's the same amount of energy that's generated in my entire city that I live in. I live in a small city.

• 2:37:33Speaker 15

  It's a, it's a, it's a meaning. Yeah. It's a meaningful bite. You know, what Amazon and Energy Northwest, their second project, you know, they're talking about anywhere between four and 12 reactors on a single site. So anywhere between 320 megawatts and a gigawatt. What's really exciting about that theory of the case, our theory of the case for these mission critical deployments, you know, a petrochemical facility, it can't go down. You need, you know, very high reliability. So if you have four reactors, you know, if, if, if you overbuild just a little bit, if you only need two or three reactors, you know, if one goes down, you're still golden.

• 2:38:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:11Speaker 15

  You know, if you build 12 reactors in Washington state, if you only need 10, one, even two go down, you're still completely utilizing that very expensive data center with that, those very expensive, you know, Nvidia chips, you know, running in it, you know, and getting the full use case out of it. So that kind of reliability of our form factor is something that's, you know, very exciting, you know, particularly to our customers.

• 2:38:36John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to all the 900 or 1,000, 1,000 people at the company on all, on all the progress.

• 2:38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon, Sam.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Apple and Profitable Advertising Made Easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 2:38:59Jordi Hays?

  Before we bring in our next guest, we gotta check in with Tyler.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:39:02Jordi Hays?

  On his project. Let's go over to Tyler.

• 2:39:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, so I can read my, uh, my little essay.

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  And you swear, and you swear on your life that you did not use AI to generate this.

• 2:39:12Speaker 04

  Correct, yeah, you can check, you can check my, my chat logs. I did not use any AI.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay, for anybody that's just tuning in, for anybody that's just tuning in, the challenge was write 500 words that Pangram will pick up as AI.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:25Jordi Hays?

  At 90%.

• 2:39:26John Coogan?

  Or above, okay.

• 2:39:28Jordi Hays?

  And if you win, you get a $50 gift card.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  This is Tyler's impression of a client.

• 2:39:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheese steak sandwich.

• 2:39:33Speaker 04

  Okay, so I want you guys to also try to guess what, what the percentage is.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:39Speaker 04

  This isn't just an essay that is trying to fool an AI system. It's an experience where words and phrases flow over the compute like a waterfall. This short speech marks a pivotal shift towards the style of writing where the audience doesn't just consist of real people, but machine learning algorithms too. It underscores the innovative change frequently cited in New York Times and CNN, who, along with many CEOs, industry professionals, and growth hackers, have noticed the world-changing pattern emerge. It's a testament to the emerging influence of the AI industry. Additionally, it demonstrates the way in which artificial intelligence systems may fail, may fall victim to possible bad actors, further enhancing the importance that some government institutions may play in the future. You are absolutely right that AI systems.

• 2:40:22John Coogan?

  Okay, let him keep going.

• 2:40:23Speaker 04

  You are absolutely right that AI systems might not always accurately predict whether text is written by humans. And you're actually touching on something really important. It's a great insight.

• 2:40:33Jordi Hays?

  In the future, it's like pretty long, but okay, I'm putting it at 96%.

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  I think this is going to come back at a full 100. Let's hit it.

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  100%.

• 2:40:45John Coogan?

  Let's go. He did it. I never lost faith. Enjoy those cheese steaks.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Dan says winner winner cheesesteak dinner.

• 2:40:53Ryan Petersen?

  Cheesesteak dinner.

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely massive. You guys don't, you also at home, this cheesesteak doesn't sound that significant, but these are the best cheesesteak sandwiches in the world over at Matu.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Read out the M dashes. Did you use any M dashes?

• 2:41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, there are M dashes in what I just sent.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  Okay. You put M dashes everywhere. That's fantastic. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Hill says you should have used the word delve. Big missed opportunity.

• 2:41:27Speaker 04

  Well, so delve is, I think actually like current models don't use delve anymore. I think that was just 4.0, which I guess this probably.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably detects. Yeah. Anyway, we have our last guest of the show, Alex Heath from Sources in person, live in the TVP in Ultra Dome. Alex, good to see you, Chad. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on down to the TVP in Ultra Dome. Sources.news is the website. Access is the podcast.

• 2:41:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you're really in the, in the process of breaking through because anytime you get quoted right now, it's just say sources say. And then a lot of people are reading that and out there saying.

• 2:42:06John Coogan?

  You created sources.

• 2:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Apparently some sources. Yes. But you are the final source.

• 2:42:10John Coogan?

  I named it that for a reason. Yeah. No, it's good. And you've been on a tear. Like, truthfully, like there's always a question about, okay, you leave the place.

• 2:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is it? Does your content get better or worse?

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  And, and it's just been scoop after scoop after scoop. What's the secret?

• 2:42:24Speaker 16

  The scoop cannon is always loaded, gentlemen.

• 2:42:26John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:42:26Speaker 16

  That's all I gotta say.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Scoop doggy dog right here.

• 2:42:28Jordi Hays?

  You got anything more this week? Anything?

• 2:42:31Speaker 16

  I got some stuff next week.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, but, but, but how do you, how do you keep it in the chamber? Aren't you worried that somebody is gonna out scoop you?

• 2:42:38Speaker 16

  Yeah, there is always that fear.

• 2:42:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:42:40Speaker 16

  There's always that fear. Sometimes you know, based on the story or um, the, the beat, you know, like who your competition is. You know, if they're on vacation.

• 2:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:42:50Speaker 16

  You know, if they're on maternity.

• 2:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you hire like private investigators to track your, your rivals to make sure?

• 2:42:56Speaker 16

  Uh, no, but you keep tabs.

• 2:42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:59Speaker 16

  You keep tabs.

• 2:42:59John Coogan?

  What, yeah, what's super interesting is that I feel like your beat is just like what's actually interesting in tech to me. No, seriously, like, like, cause there, you could come out and you could be like, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm tech, but I'm focused on SaaS or just AI. And you're hitting everything that I'm interested in consistently. Uh, and that's just really, really hard. And I see your name on every single article that's posted. So like, do you ever sleep? Like what, what, what's going on?

• 2:43:27Speaker 16

  You know, I've been using AI a lot to leverage output.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:30Speaker 16

  Where now it's my editor and it's my first draft.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:34Speaker 16

  Uh, I, I'm the ultimate editor of it.

• 2:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:37Speaker 16

  But you know, the combo of granola, running that during meetings.

• 2:43:40John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:43:41Speaker 16

  Training Claude to really write like me.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:44Speaker 16

  So, you know, it does the first pass.

• 2:43:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:46Speaker 16

  I spend about half the time that I used to spend on a story, writing it.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:51Speaker 16

  But I'm spending all that time now editing what the AI gives me. Uh, making sure it's not like just lazy AI writing.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:43:58Speaker 16

  Right? Cause that still happens.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:44:00Speaker 16

  Uh, and realizing that I think the leverage I have now is like my network, the interviews I do, the scoops I get.

• 2:44:06John Coogan?

  The actual sources.

• 2:44:06Speaker 16

  The writing.

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  The sources.

• 2:44:08Speaker 16

  The sources.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:08Speaker 16

  And like the writing.

• 2:44:09Jordi Hays?

  I never, I never read your work like expecting to be entertained by the language.

• 2:44:15Speaker 16

  Yeah, the prose.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:15Jordi Hays?

  I really don't care at all.

• 2:44:19Speaker 16

  I've never been a writer.

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could.

• 2:44:20Speaker 16

  I always hated writing.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:22Speaker 16

  I love, I love scooping.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:24Speaker 16

  That's what I've always loved.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:44:26Speaker 16

  And, and, and good interviews.

• 2:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Scoop athlete.

• 2:44:27Speaker 16

  And, and you know, and like, I've been doing this for a while and I think like the longevity you have to have now, especially with AIs, you, you have to use the tools.

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  Wait, did, did our giant ice cream scoop ever come? Do we order that? Oh, we couldn't find.

• 2:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we got a manufacturer. We're trying to get like a comically large ice cream scoop.

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  For the gong. I love it. You guys are gonna get a great scoop.

• 2:44:47Speaker 16

  By the way, the last time I came on here was WWDC last year.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:44:51Speaker 16

  You guys had, I think, 80,000 followers on X.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:55Speaker 16

  And I was like, I left that, I was doing it outside of Cooper, outside of Steve Jobs Theater.

• 2:44:59John Coogan?

  That was fun.

• 2:44:59Speaker 16

  I was like, these guys are on to something, man.

• 2:45:01John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:45:01Speaker 16

  The magic you guys have, like, seeing you guys just like ascend has been incredible.

• 2:45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's been a ton of ascending going on broadly this year.

• 2:45:08Speaker 16

  Love to ascend.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  Everyone needs to ascend.

• 2:45:10Jordi Hays?

  Did you see all the hammers in the entry?

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  Stop, stop, stop, the hammers.

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  No, uh, some, my, my biggest, uh, number one question is how are you balancing your relationships when you're balancing access that you have these companies, the executives will actually talk to you on the record and are excited for you to tell their story, but at the same time, you're kind of getting some stories out the back door at times.

• 2:45:34Speaker 16

  You have to have both.

• 2:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Stories that, yeah, and, yeah, but what's, what's that dance like?

• 2:45:37Speaker 16

  It's tough.

• 2:45:38Jordi Hays?

  How do you thread the needle? Cause some, some reporters, uh, fly too close to the sun, scoop too close to the.

• 2:45:45Speaker 16

  To the cone?

• 2:45:46Jordi Hays?

  To the cone.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  Scoop too close to the cone.

• 2:45:49Speaker 16

  Yeah, it's a, it's a balance, you know? I've always looked up to Sorkin and how he's approached Dealbook and the reporting he's done and the, you know, I consider him like, like a mentor and like, the way he approaches it is, it's, it's just fair.

• 2:46:02Jordi Hays?

  He's here with us. Check, check the, check the.

• 2:46:04Speaker 16

  Hey, is he really?

• 2:46:06Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I just.

• 2:46:07John Coogan?

  We have a goat over.

• 2:46:08Jordi Hays?

  I got a sound effect right there for you.

• 2:46:10Speaker 16

  He's definitely the goat and like, what has given him longevity is, is the fairness that he approaches an interview with, right? So giving people that, uh, maybe don't even deserve it, a fair shake and, and just approaching things out of curiosity and being a nerd and not being like, um, instinctually, uh, against whatever they're doing. I mean, I have opinions, like I just interviewed, um, Chris Best from Substack about their polymarket deal this week.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:38Speaker 16

  I, I have.

• 2:46:38Jordi Hays?

  What's that deal?

• 2:46:39Speaker 16

  Uh, deep product integration with Substack where basically any Substack writer can embed a polymarket like natively in the CMS and.

• 2:46:46Jordi Hays?

  And are they getting paid on like an impression basis?

• 2:46:50Speaker 16

  I asked him that, he wouldn't answer, so you infer with that.

• 2:46:53Jordi Hays?

  So, so, but, but are creators getting?

• 2:46:55Speaker 16

  Uh, so they're do, they're, so Polly Market is, is buying basically like they'll pay us. They offered it to me. I said, no, but like they'll pay you to embed a, a market in your story.

• 2:47:05Jordi Hays?

  Someone set up a Polly Market on if Alex Heath will ever take Polly Market money.

• 2:47:09Speaker 16

  There we go. I think, I think that's zero. But, but like, that's a good example. Like I have pretty strong opinions about prediction markets and, and Polly Market specifically. And reporting I can't share yet. And, and, but like, I still want to hear Chris out. I'm like, why did you do it? Like, and he's, he's geeked on prediction markets, as is every tech CEO, as you guys know. And so I just want to understand that. And I think a lot of reporters, like, they don't actually.

• 2:47:31Jordi Hays?

  Say that again. Say, can you say that another couple of times? Actually five times.

• 2:47:36Speaker 16

  But like, he, he wants to.

• 2:47:37Jordi Hays?

  No, and, and, and we, we've experienced that where it's kind of random, but certain interviews get thrown up on prediction markets. And then you get people in the chat and they try to trick us into like, ah, they, it, it, sometimes they'll see like, they're asking a genuine question. Like, ask them about this. And I'm used to trying to respond and. We usually trust the chat. We'll be like, oh, they're interested. They're interested in this. Yeah. And then I'm like, wait, why do you want me to ask this person about Bitcoin? Like, I, I, I, I have, you know.

• 2:48:07Speaker 16

  Yeah. It's a taste thing, right? Like, and you guys are experiencing this too. Like, your taste is what matters. And then also like, being able to, I mean, just to the point about like, how do you do scoops and do interviews? It's like, just balancing the fact that like, I am, it, there's a bit of a leverage thing where it's like, like, you can't buy me and I may also kind of ruin your day a little bit if I scoop something, but I'm at least going to do it with a smile. Right? Whereas a lot of reporters will do it and like, and, and they won't. And it'll be kind of like.

• 2:48:36John Coogan?

  Indictive. Yeah. No, no, no, that's really good. Uh, what, what are you looking for out of Apple this year broadly? I'm, I'm always interested to hear this excitement about a new foldable. There's some leadership changes in the works.

• 2:48:49Jordi Hays?

  We got a lamp.

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  Very interested.

• 2:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Got a lamp coming.

• 2:48:51John Coogan?

  I've been very interested in like. And like the story behind the story.

• 2:48:55Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:48:55John Coogan?

  Particularly with regard to John Turnus.

• 2:48:57Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  Uh, that feels like there are leaks and Apple's pretty tight, but then Mark Gurman's always getting scoops. But you have to imagine there's internal politics around who's leaking what? Why are they leaking it? Why are they not leaking?

• 2:49:13Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:49:13John Coogan?

  That Tim Cook is staying or something like that. There's some sort of internal machine. So I don't know. Have you just been processing apples?

• 2:49:19Speaker 16

  I know I've been following Apple for a long time. I actually got started at a rival. Apple Gurman and I are about the same age and we were doing rival Apple blogging in high school.

• 2:49:26John Coogan?

  And then in. High school.

• 2:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Going blog for blog with the Germinator.

• 2:49:30Speaker 16

  And well, no, he destroyed me.

• 2:49:32Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing that you still have a career.

• 2:49:36Jordi Hays?

  You're like, I gotta get me out of here.

• 2:49:38John Coogan?

  So I just find Alex like washed up with Chinese, Chinese food covering him and like dusting him off. You gotta get back in the arena, dude. It's okay.

• 2:49:48Speaker 16

  Shout out, shout out Mark.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love Mark.

• 2:49:49Jordi Hays?

  We love Mark.

• 2:49:50Speaker 16

  But, but Apple always has had a, it's why I got into this. It's why I started covering tech is for a lot of people, right?

• 2:49:56John Coogan?

  So interesting.

• 2:49:56Speaker 16

  And I feel like they've lost their soul in a way, man. It really bums me out. Like I don't, I'm curious about the glasses. I'm like Mark, I've also heard they're coming next year, the first glasses. Be curious to see, you know, but then it's like Alan Dye was doing that and he left and went to Meta. So it's like he saw what they're doing and still went to Meta. Just kind of weird. Tim Cook.

• 2:50:16Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he likes that founder mode lifestyle.

• 2:50:18Speaker 16

  I guess, but I just, Apple, I just, uh, I think they're stuck in an era that doesn't feel of the moment. Right?

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:25Speaker 16

  And I'm curious with the leadership reset, will that solve it? Turnus doesn't seem like the person who would solve that.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:31Speaker 16

  Um, you know, to credit to Tim, as you guys say, like returned a lot of, you know, value to shareholders. But, but is Apple like culturally relevant anymore?

• 2:50:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there is an interesting pivot where it's like, oh no, they're becoming Microsoft, which is also like an incredible company.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, one, one, one thing is interesting.

• 2:50:48John Coogan?

  But it isn't.

• 2:50:49Speaker 16

  Doesn't inspire people.

• 2:50:50Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Here's something. So, uh, everyone's vying to be the Apple of AI, right? You see this in a lot of the, the marketing campaigns, advertising campaigns. A lot of it feels heavily Apple.

• 2:51:01Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:51:01Jordi Hays?

  Inspired. And Apple should be thinking, well, why not us? Why don't we be the Apple AI? But instead they're doing Gen Moji, right? Like, they, they have an opportunity to have, um, to lead with heavy, heavy campaigns around the magic of AI. And they can say, we're not even building data centers. We're not, we're not, we're not, you know, we're not increasing your, your power bill. They're, they're, they have a really powerful position, but it feels like they've lost. It, it doesn't feel like anyone at Apple, uh, is, uh, in love with advertising anymore. Like, is really willing to meet the moment, uh, and deliver the kind of campaigns that I think they could.

• 2:51:43Speaker 16

  Or like you, the next demo day, I bet if you were to poll all the founders in the next demo day, like what company inspires you the most? How many would say Apple?

• 2:51:50John Coogan?

  We did this. We actually did this. And I was expecting it to be all like Elon and Tim.

• 2:51:54Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:51:55John Coogan?

  Uh, and, uh, not, not, not Tim Cook, but Steve Jobs.

• 2:51:57Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:51:57John Coogan?

  And it was.

• 2:51:58Jordi Hays?

  And we didn't ask the company, we asked for the founder, but and a lot of people still said Steve.

• 2:52:03Speaker 16

  Jobs, yeah.

• 2:52:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but.

• 2:52:05Speaker 16

  But not at current Apple.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:06Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:52:07John Coogan?

  Um, how do you balance, uh, Apple's such an interesting beat because it's, or at least it has been for a very long time. It's still very much, uh, consumer relevant where I imagine that there are just Apple fanboys who read German, right? And, but then when you talk about, you know, uh, Alan Dye going over to Meta, that's more industry focused. So how do you think about your audience blending tech enthusiasts with, uh, just, you know, tech executives who need to know about what's going on in their industry, like trade versus entertain, infotainment?

• 2:52:42Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  These are the two extremes.

• 2:52:44Speaker 16

  I worked, I mean, I worked at a very scaled publication before the Verge, right?

• 2:52:47John Coogan?

  And. Oh, wait. Yeah, yeah. Actually, tell me the.

• 2:52:50Speaker 16

  Yeah, it was, it was, uh, uh, Business Insider 10 years ago.

• 2:52:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:54Speaker 16

  You guys remember Chatter in New York?

• 2:52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:57Speaker 16

  It's there. It's very fun. So.

• 2:52:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:58Speaker 16

  It's kind of reminding me of that back in the day. Uh, and then the information.

• 2:53:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:02Speaker 16

  And Verge, Rose Depp, editor for the last, like, almost five years.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:05Speaker 16

  So it did the scale thing and now I'm in the influence game.

• 2:53:08John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:53:09Speaker 16

  And I was like, I kind of think you guys are, right? Like, you're not going for a huge scale.

• 2:53:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:12Speaker 16

  Talk about your audience being a couple hundred thousand people.

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:53:14Speaker 16

  That's all you need.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:15Speaker 16

  For me, like. I wish I could, I wish I could brag more about the sources subscriber list. It's a great list.

• 2:53:21John Coogan?

  It's a great list.

• 2:53:21Speaker 16

  I should, I should, I've actually been doing an exercise where I tally up the market cap of the, the people on the list.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  That's the number.

• 2:53:28Speaker 16

  We've done that too.

• 2:53:29John Coogan?

  Like, don't count the number of subscribers, you count the market cap of the CEOs.

• 2:53:33Jordi Hays?

  The average, uh, the average PPTN follower at one point was like, had like a billion dollar market cap.

• 2:53:40Speaker 16

  Okay, there you go. So, so, and it helps with brands, right? It's like, it's like, you're like, well, you're not big, but it's like, yeah, but you want to reach like these people.

• 2:53:47John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:53:47Speaker 16

  So, um, it's not like enthusiasts. It's not like how I came up in the OG kind of Apple blogging world or the, the tech blogging world. It's, it's, I'm, it's the sources subscribers work in these companies that I cover.

• 2:53:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:59Speaker 16

  They work in finance and policy.

• 2:54:01Jordi Hays?

  What, what stories are not a fit? Because we, like, Ben Thompson's a hero of ours, both from.

• 2:54:09Speaker 16

  Another GOAT.

• 2:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Just, just his, you know, can, you know, uh, uh, his ideas all the way through his business model.

• 2:54:15Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:54:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the whole spectrum. He talks a lot about, yeah, consistency. He talks a lot about like companies that he doesn't cover. He's like, stop covering Twitter, stop covering like Elon.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  He stopped covering Tesla, yeah.

• 2:54:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, is there, is, are there categories that you, that you, uh, are maybe fascinating, but not a fit?

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  We, we, we try and stay out of politics just because once you wade into that, you just become like, oh, well, then you have to do the culture war story.

• 2:54:38Speaker 16

  That's not the white space in media.

• 2:54:39John Coogan?

  It's not.

• 2:54:40Speaker 16

  Well, the white space is what you guys are doing and who I'm doing.

• 2:54:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:42Speaker 16

  So, cause that's, it's a return to form. Everyone has gone towards politics.

• 2:54:46John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:54:46Speaker 16

  Right? Um, or even just kind of.

• 2:54:47Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy too, cause I didn't actually think there was any white space left in like independent subs.

• 2:54:53Speaker 16

  Everything comes around.

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, everything comes around.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but also it some, it takes the right entrepreneur.

• 2:54:59Speaker 16

  Yeah, but to your question, I think it's taste. I don't think I, when you're in a newsroom, you're taught to think in beats. Companies that you're covering, sectors. And for the first time, and I was doing this at the verge towards the end, because I was kind of just doing my own thing, but like, I really just go where my interest is and where I know. This is the most interesting company right now.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:15Speaker 16

  So it's right now, it's like all open AI, it's Anthropic, it's the big labs.

• 2:55:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:19Speaker 16

  But, you know, Notion's interesting. I think Ivan's interesting.

• 2:55:21John Coogan?

  I saw that, yeah. And also the thing about story about like, okay, they beat earnings and everyone thinks SaaS apocalypse. I was thinking the exact same thing. I wrote about it. I had him on.

• 2:55:29Speaker 16

  Sometimes I feel like we're like a day after each other or whatever.

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  Exactly. And I was just like, okay, yeah, this is a story that like, a lot of people would just be like, ah, I'm over.

• 2:55:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had, we had, we had Evan on and then that night he broke the story on spec.

• 2:55:41Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:55:41Jordi Hays?

  I was like, ah, it would have been nice to know.

• 2:55:44Speaker 16

  We can work on that next time. But yeah, no, it's, it's just kind of knowing like this is what's relevant. I do think it's a taste thing and I don't think it's a thing you can teach.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:52Speaker 16

  It's a thing you just kind of have to.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got to get you publishing while the, while we're doing a live interview and then you text us.

• 2:55:58Jordi Hays?

  Would you, would you, would you eventually? Would you eventually?

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  Wait, do you know who we're booked?

• 2:56:03Speaker 16

  It's in the, no, the scoops are in the chain.

• 2:56:04John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Oh, okay. We'll book those people. We'll book those people.

• 2:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you, uh, do you, do you ever see yourself rolling it, rolling up or, or rolling in other independent? Uh, cause I think there's, there's going to be writers out there that are good for about one banger story a quarter. Which is actually not, yeah, it's not really a fit for a, a monthly subscription. Obviously it's a challenge.

• 2:56:29Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but they could work great under your umbrella.

• 2:56:32Speaker 16

  I think based on the way things are going, that's going to happen. Yeah. And I think that'll happen for a lot of people.

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  And I think consumers want that. Like if you can find like four or five other people and then stay super lean, which is like, hey, we don't have a ton of bloat.

• 2:56:43Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:56:44Jordi Hays?

  We're not hiring like, you know, uh, 200 people to do this, but

• 2:56:48Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:56:48Jordi Hays?

  five writers, one P and L.

• 2:56:50Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one subscription, like that's, that's what consumers want.

• 2:56:54Speaker 16

  I'm interested in like.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Subscribe to pretty much any new tech writer, just to generally support them.

• 2:56:59Speaker 16

  That's too much.

• 2:56:59Jordi Hays?

  But it's not like, I'm not reading all of them.

• 2:57:02Speaker 16

  Yeah, I think there's interesting ways you can compensate on rev share, profit sharing, ways that traditional newsrooms can't.

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:57:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:08Speaker 16

  And I also think.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I don't think, I was saying this yesterday, I don't actually think it will do well at the Substack level.

• 2:57:13Speaker 16

  Hmm.

• 2:57:14Jordi Hays?

  Because there's a lot of people that would want to be in your bundle, but you don't want to be revenue sharing with them maybe.

• 2:57:20Speaker 16

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:20Jordi Hays?

  But if you can set it up and like actually you're running a business and being like, you know, Managing the personalities, managing where they're at. I can, I can imagine sources getting to, it doesn't have, in the same way that we're anti-scale and that you can say, cool, I want to build a newsroom over time, but it's five other people.

• 2:57:39Speaker 16

  And I don't need to raise VC to do it.

• 2:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that are individual, individual contributors.

• 2:57:43Speaker 16

  Like these, all these VC-backed newsrooms that are four years in and not profitable and the cap table's, you know, screwed and like, I don't need that. And so I'm, I'm a kind of, I feel like we're kindred, like mindset here. Like, you know, it's, and we're in this unbundling phase of media, which is so exciting. And there will be rebundling.

• 2:57:59John Coogan?

  It's funny that we sort of landed in the same place with like very different backgrounds. This is my first, I mean, I had a YouTube channel before. I've never been a journalist or worked in a newsroom. And, but we still sort of landed on the correct thing.

• 2:58:11Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  We all love horses.

• 2:58:13Speaker 16

  We all love horses.

• 2:58:14John Coogan?

  Did I say horses? What, what was, was that horses?

• 2:58:17Speaker 16

  What does the horse represent?

• 2:58:19John Coogan?

  Progress.

• 2:58:19Speaker 16

  Progress. It's the year of the horse.

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is the year of the horse, but we had it before.

• 2:58:23Speaker 16

  Oh, you knew, you knew what the year was gonna be.

• 2:58:26Jordi Hays?

  So, so, I think I wanted to kick off, uh, uh, uh, get your reaction to, so I forget what we were talking about. Uh, but, uh, our friend John Palmer was listening to us on a podcast talking about, uh, uh, what's happened with, with media and that it's really hard to, media is all about personalities and talent. It's really hard to retain talent. If you can go set up a Substack or, you know, we didn't need to start on television. We could just set up some microphones and a camera and get going. And, uh,

• 2:58:56Speaker 16

  We call it the barbell effect.

• 2:58:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's really a challenge.

• 2:58:58John Coogan?

  You want to own the platform, YouTube, Substack, or you want to be the individual creator, basically.

• 2:59:03Jordi Hays?

  And John's theory was that that comes for software in the same way, where you still have a huge platform, like a Salesforce that has a bunch of other kind of layers to it, but then you'll have like, you know, uh, yeah, an AWS. But then you'll have like a bunch of new entrants, which are like, you know, in the same way that we maybe compete with some cable networks, technically for attention, you would have like a 10-person team that is building like,

• 2:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Some software that historically needed like a thousand people and had this bloated cost structure.

• 2:59:37Speaker 16

  That sounds right. I think what Ivan told me about agents too in software where he was like, if your company cannot be traversed by agents, you're going to be in a rough spot. I think that extends to what you're saying. Like, I think the young teams that are agile, that understand that, may have a shot at actually disrupting the big players, but the big players will always exist.

• 2:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:58Speaker 16

  And I do think distribution is still the thing that really matters, right? Like, you guys probably feel that. Like, you have that with X and YouTube, but, you know, and Substack's good, but, you know, that's the thing when you go out on your own is you're like, oh, man, I gotta fight for distribution. I gotta fight for every eyeball.

• 3:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:00:12Speaker 16

  I gotta publish every day because when I'm not publishing, I'm not getting subscribers. So that's why I went to four times a week.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:17Speaker 16

  Because it's like, when I don't, I don't get anything. So it's like putting it out everywhere.

• 3:00:21Jordi Hays?

  Is travel important to your work?

• 3:00:23Speaker 16

  Yeah, I gotta go out and touch the sources. I mean, not literally, but you know what I'm saying? Like, I gotta go out and.

• 3:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Grab them right when they walk out of the office.

• 3:00:28Speaker 16

  I gotta shoulder brush the sources.

• 3:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, last time, last time we were trying to, yeah, we were like, I'm gonna cross town doing an interview.

• 3:00:33Speaker 16

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  Person, which is important.

• 3:00:35Speaker 16

  That's always been a thing I've invested in. I've never understood reporters who just sit in their office and like blog all day.

• 3:00:41John Coogan?

  Signal.

• 3:00:41Speaker 16

  It's like, you're never gonna get really differentiated stuff because they're really, especially in the age of AI where you can generate anything.

• 3:00:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:47Speaker 16

  Like, if I can just generate the copy, what matters is like what's feeding the copy. And that's me going out and like interviewing someone or breaking a story.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  I went to some like political event in Las Vegas and Teddy Schleifer from the New York Times was just hanging out at the bar. He didn't get invited.

• 3:01:00Speaker 16

  Yeah, that's.

• 3:01:00John Coogan?

  He just was literally gumshoe.

• 3:01:02Speaker 16

  Teddy's old school, man.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Old school gumshoe. And, and, and everyone, everyone there was adversarial to the New York Times. But everyone was talking to him. Everyone was like, I, I, you know, I gotta hear this guy. Ah, I gotta, I gotta say my side of the story.

• 3:01:14Speaker 16

  To have longevity in this game, you gotta do that and you gotta love gossip.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:17Speaker 16

  And you have to have like a level of just, you know, I mean, this is what this is. It's like gossip. People are always like, why do people tell you things? Why do people tell you things that violate an NDA?

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:25Speaker 16

  And I always think it's vindictive or they're like, they're pissed and they're trying to right a wrong or it's moralistic. A lot of people just like the gossip, man.

• 3:01:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, they and and I mean, maybe the more optimistic view is like they like the world operating on the truth and so leaking the truth out can be beneficial.

• 3:01:41Speaker 16

  That's yes, but.

• 3:01:42John Coogan?

  That that's the more optimistic.

• 3:01:43Speaker 16

  I mean, I think gossip is not negative.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:45Speaker 16

  I think it's just like, I mean, I guess it can be. It's neutral. It's neutral.

• 3:01:48John Coogan?

  Versus the vindictive, I'm leaking something because I want you to write about my enemy. That's different. That does happen, but there's also people that just say like, the story deserves to be told.

• 3:01:58Speaker 16

  Yeah, and you want to like give and take.

• 3:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:00Speaker 16

  A thing I try to do also is like I share stuff. I don't just like try to ask, so.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  What do you think about the future of investigative journalism? Like really, really long, like a year, it just feels like on stuff.

• 3:02:10Jordi Hays?

  That's the model that's so challenged.

• 3:02:11John Coogan?

  It seems the most challenged.

• 3:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Because telling somebody, hey, subscribe, and then I'm going to just go off in the wilderness and then.

• 3:02:18John Coogan?

  And maybe it's.

• 3:02:19Jordi Hays?

  That will ultimately kind of like become free.

• 3:02:22Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:24Speaker 16

  I mean, the big magazines will have that for as long as they can. It's probably just going to end up aggregating to the Times, the Journal.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:31Speaker 16

  Maybe not the Washington Post anymore. It's the Barbell.

• 3:02:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:34Speaker 16

  And so those kind of people aren't their own brands and they don't want to be either, right?

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:02:39Speaker 16

  And so it's a different kind of skill and it's a different mindset.

• 3:02:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:42Speaker 16

  So you actually don't mind being protected and behind your brand. It's actually better for you if you're doing that work because you have the legal protection, you have all that.

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 3:02:49Speaker 16

  The benefit of time.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:51Speaker 16

  Whereas like when you're out like me, I just don't have time. So, yeah, I do think it just will accrue more to the to the Barbell that we've been talking.

• 3:02:57John Coogan?

  Will you ever write a book?

• 3:02:59Speaker 16

  Yeah, I've I've thought about it. Um, yeah, I've been, I've had conversations. No one I know who has written a book has enjoyed it.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:03:06Speaker 16

  Like afterwards.

• 3:03:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:03:07Speaker 16

  No one I know afterwards is like, I'm so glad I wrote that book.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  There's a lot of things that are white. Ladder up.

• 3:03:12Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 3:03:13John Coogan?

  Life, life, once you become a New York. Yeah, the game theory, the game theory is like, tell all your enemies not to do the.

• 3:03:18Speaker 16

  Do people read books? Like I, I mean, I, I don't, I haven't read a full book in a long time. I mean, my wife does, but like she's not reading like the kind of book I'd write.

• 3:03:25John Coogan?

  No, here's what you do. You take your latest article, you print it out like it's a book page. Take a picture of it with your phone, give it a little weathered yellow.

• 3:03:33Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 3:03:34John Coogan?

  Color overlay.

• 3:03:34Speaker 16

  And say Claude make this 800 pages.

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. You just share that on a screenshot and people will be like, whoa, it's authoritative.

• 3:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Here's a marketing, here's a marketing idea for you. We were gonna do this. We didn't get around to it, but I think you should. You should actually have the sources like daily print edition that you just put around SF. Everywhere like give it to all the cafes. It's just it's lead. It's you don't have to do it forever, but it'd be a good lead gen for the newsletter.

• 3:03:59Speaker 16

  Or like a week.

• 3:03:59Jordi Hays?

  All you do, you just have like have a process when you publish something, print it, distribute it to the cafe.

• 3:04:04Speaker 16

  That is a good idea. Getting out there is important. I mean, like I'm gonna do events this year, like getting out there and like filling like, yeah, being out in the world.

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  No, no, it it it seems ridiculous for a podcast to have like as aggressive of a brand we have, but it's like it matters.

• 3:04:20Speaker 16

  It matters.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  We ran a Super Bowl ad for a reason.

• 3:04:22Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 3:04:22John Coogan?

  It we've broken through.

• 3:04:23Speaker 16

  Did that do what you guys hoped the Super Bowl?

• 3:04:25John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 3:04:26Speaker 16

  Yeah, the sponsors seemed thrilled.

• 3:04:28John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, the point was that it wasn't just.

• 3:04:30Speaker 16

  The guests, yeah, the guests, all the guests.

• 3:04:32Jordi Hays?

  There was thousands.

• 3:04:33John Coogan?

  And so like we've had so many guests come on the show.

• 3:04:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't think you had a logo when you came on.

• 3:04:37Speaker 16

  I didn't.

• 3:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, but but we've had a lot of the guests that come back on the show and they since they've been, oh, thanks for putting this in the ad, you know.

• 3:04:46Speaker 16

  Well, you guys are crushing it. Seriously. It's very awesome to see what you guys are doing. And yeah.

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  Last question for me. What's the longest you've ever held a scoop?

• 3:04:56Speaker 16

  Oh, my God. Uh.

• 3:04:59Speaker 16

  That that's.

• 3:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Holding a scoop is like being underwater.

• 3:05:02Speaker 16

  That keeps me.

• 3:05:02Jordi Hays?

  All you wanna do is take a breath.

• 3:05:04Speaker 16

  A sign you're getting too cocky and is when you hold it and you're not worried about it, which has happened to me.

• 3:05:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:05:09Speaker 16

  And then and then I get scooped and I'm.

• 3:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:05:13Speaker 16

  So.

• 3:05:14John Coogan?

  Months?

• 3:05:14Speaker 16

  A couple of months.

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  Couple of months.

• 3:05:16Speaker 16

  Couple of months.

• 3:05:17John Coogan?

  Cause yeah, we've been talking to some folks who are writing books and that's really hard.

• 3:05:22Speaker 16

  I don't know how.

• 3:05:23John Coogan?

  Because it's like a year or two.

• 3:05:25Speaker 16

  I don't know how you do that.

• 3:05:26John Coogan?

  And.

• 3:05:26Speaker 16

  The advance has gotta be crazy for that.

• 3:05:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I guess you're getting paid upfront for.

• 3:05:30Speaker 16

  Yeah, I'm just getting subs on stuff and the more and you gotta you gotta like itemize things out.

• 3:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:35Speaker 16

  Uh, in a way that a book doesn't. So, yeah, it's it's I'm holding right now, actually, and it's it's tough. I'm like, answer.

• 3:05:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:05:41Speaker 16

  I'll be back on with you guys.

• 3:05:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you'll like this.

• 3:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's great having you on. It's been amazing to see your success and again threading that needle by being, you know, telling interesting stories but not being adversarial is fantastic.

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, fair and balanced.

• 3:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Fair and balanced.

• 3:05:57John Coogan?

  It's a Cronkite, baby. Seriously.

• 3:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Can we call it?

• 3:06:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we can plant the bomb.

• 3:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 3:06:03John Coogan?

  Tell everyone.

• 3:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Can end the show with us.

• 3:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Tell everyone where to.

• 3:06:07John Coogan?

  Sources dot news, access dot show. Access. Oh, I like that. That's really funny. But access is available in your podcast. Yes. Of course. Yes. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 3:06:22Jordi Hays?

  Have the best weekend of your life.

• 3:06:23John Coogan?

  Have the best weekend of your life.

• 3:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  Go get a scoop.

• 3:06:26Jordi Hays?

  No excuses.

• 3:06:27John Coogan?

  But don't hold on to it.

• 3:06:28Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:06:28John Coogan?

  Not my scoop. Goodbye.