XBOX Layoffs, "Manual" Ferrari, Circle K Lottery Dispute | Baiju Bhatt, Daniel English, Michele Catasta

(03:58) - XBOX Layoffs (21:13) - "Manual" Ferrari (31:21) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (50:23) - Circle K Lottery Dispute (01:05:31) - Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood and CEO of Cowboy Space Corporation, discusses the evolution of his company from Aetherflux to Cowboy Space, focusing on developing vertically integrated orbital data centers and launch vehicles to meet the growing demand for AI computing. He emphasizes the importance of designing rockets and data centers as a unified system to optimize performance and cost-effectiveness, aiming to harness solar energy in space to power these data centers. Bhatt also highlights the shift in the space industry towards commercial payloads, particularly for AI applications, and the need for companies to control their own launch capabilities to meet this demand efficiently. (01:31:17) - Daniel English, co-founder and managing partner of Legacy Investing, transitioned from tech entrepreneurship to real estate investment, focusing on data centers, logistics, and life sciences facilities. In the conversation, he discusses the evolution of data centers, highlighting their increasing importance due to AI and cloud computing, and emphasizes the strategic conversion of underutilized urban office buildings into high-density data centers to meet growing infrastructure demands. (01:49:05) - Michele Catasta, President and Head of AI at Replit, discusses the evolution from "vibe coding" to "vibe building," emphasizing the shift towards enabling users to create customized AI agents that autonomously accomplish tasks end-to-end. He highlights the importance of thinking in terms of goals rather than specific applications, allowing agents to determine the necessary steps and code to achieve desired outcomes. Catasta also predicts a future where agents replace traditional apps, streamlining workflows and reducing reliance on deterministic software. (02:00:07) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today's Monday, July 6, 2026. We are live from the TVP. Altam, Temple of Technology, the fortunes of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate card, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Happy July 4th to everyone. I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. How was your 4th, Jordy?

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  It was incredible.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Cinema.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Tyler, how was your 4th?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  It was electric.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Can you tell us about that white party that you went to? You can't talk about that? What about the wedding you went to? Was that a fun one? That was in New York, right?

• 0:39Speaker 02

  New York, yeah.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Manhattan?

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Madison Square Garden.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  But you can't, you can't break it down for us?

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, they told us not to.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, got it. Well.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  NDA.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad everyone had fun. Uh, my 4th of July was great. It was a little, was it humid?

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Did you even get sunburned?

• 0:54John Coogan?

  No.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  You don't even look sunburned.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Not sunburned. Can't say that for the rest of the team.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  He's larping.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Half the team over here.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  He's larping around saying, oh, I had the best 4th of July, not even sunburned.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  Make it make sense.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, shade, shade. You stay in the shade at the right times.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  UV index.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  You're not, you're not sunburned. Why are you?

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm drudely sunburned.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Oh, on the back?

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  On my back.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. That makes sense. Uh, UV index. Was it humid in Malibu?

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  A little bit.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  It was a little humid in Pasadena and it made it feel very East Coast. Like it felt like an East Coast 4th of July to me. I did East.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it did a little.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  I did East Coast 4th of July a couple of years ago and it was sort of refreshing. I don't know. It was nice. Uh, but.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, drone shows were in this year.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yes, fireworks are out, given the Palisades fire, the Altadena fire. So a lot of townships are playing it safe with uh, drone shows instead of fireworks. Um, which is, I don't know. I feel like it's cool. I like a drone show. I've only seen one when we were in France. It was cool. I don't have a problem with it, but I'm anticipating a backlash. I'm anticipating that people will be like, we gotta go back to the organic, authentic fireworks, right?

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  But.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're like, I like when the air quality is terrible.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Okay, it's an air quality risk for you. You noticed that?

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  I didn't notice this year.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Did you see fireworks or drones?

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  I, I honestly didn't see a single.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  I was asleep.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  I didn't see a single firework.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  I was up at 6 a.m. so I went to bed at like 9.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  I did not see a single firework on the 4th of July, which is crazy. I heard some around. But, uh, I remember when I lived in LA.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  The air quality would genuinely be terrible.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  For at least a few days.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  Because it just sits in there and if there's no wind.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  When I lived in Echo Park, it was like fireworks everywhere. It's the craziest neighborhood because people in the neighborhood buy the production level fireworks. You know how normally you get like a sparkler or you get something like shoots off a little? No, they buy the, the same thing that you see at like Dodger Stadium, like the cannon that goes off and goes boom. That, but they, they don't coordinate them. So it's not like there's music that's playing and then it's synced up and there's a finale. It's just whenever someone feels like lighting one off, it goes, uh, full fireworks scale. Uh, there's some really cool like helicopter video shots of Los Angeles during, I think, 4th of July, where they go really, really crazy.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  I feel like that's a kind of thing Dalian would do is like, I'm gonna go fly my plane at 9:00 PM on the 4th of July.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  And just get into.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  I have some crazy video of the fireworks show at Dodger Stadium. Before there were regulations around drones. I had one of the first drones and I flew it like through the fireworks and in spectacular footage, I'll, I'll have to play it on the show one day. Uh, wildly illegal by modern drone standards, but at the time no one knew, uh, how to regulate those things. So you could just fly them anywhere, uh, which was really, really crazy, but a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So big changes at Microsoft, big changes at Xbox. Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs by the end of next year. And here's where it gets interesting. It's not because of artificial intelligence.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  AI, uh, the new CEO of Xbox has been very clear that they're not stuffing AI everywhere. They're going back to their roots, but they are focused on efficiency. And so the newly appointed Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has announced this morning that Xbox will lay off 3,200 staffers by the end of 2027 with 1,600 layoffs taking place today. Uh, she posted her full email to Xbox employees on X. Uh, and it's very candid about the operational failures and trajectory of the company.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  Very notable.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  That the first major layoff from a major company just admits that the business is not healthy.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't blame it on AI.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  We haven't, we haven't, we have not seen a layoff of this scale.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  That wasn't at least partially credited, credited to like the productivity increases that we're seeing from AI.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  And this feels like the most honest layoff and they're sort of forced into doing it because of the gaming community is like so anti-AI, right?

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  It would get even worse.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Things that are going on. So yeah, we need to break this debate into strategic. Should they be doing layoffs? What does this mean for the Xbox business? And then, uh, the communications around it as well. Because the communications, we can dig into what she actually said. Uh, in her email, she says, the business is not healthy and lists a bunch of surprisingly bad trends and aspects of the operation. Uh, one, Xbox is operating at margins three to 10 times lower than its competitors. Uh, it released its latest console to a smaller install base while the cost structure of the console itself was higher. Of course, memory prices are going up now. And so the cost of these consoles is going to be even higher in the future. And in some of the parts, in some parts of the company, work has to pass through as many as 14 layers of management.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Wow, that's a lot. In a typical year, Xbox lost 64 cents for every dollar it invested. In addition to the layoffs, Asha said that Xbox will spin out game studios that it acquired over the years. Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arcane are all getting yeeted in one way or another.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Satya has been running Xbox into the ground for the love of the game.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  You mean running it unprofitably for the love of the game?

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Because I do, I do agree that they face really fierce competition.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  PS5 has a ton of amazing exclusives and then Nintendo has Nintendo, the N64 used to compete directly with the PlayStation. It was like, do you get an N64 or a PlayStation? And then once Xbox came in, PlayStation and Xbox, they fought for every exclusive. And by and large, you could play Call of Duty on either. You could play most of the games Madden was on both of them. And so you would sort of decide, oh, I got some friends on Xbox. I'm on the Xbox crew or I'm in the PlayStation world. But then Nintendo went off and just did something completely different with the Switch. PC gaming continued to grow and became more and more accessible on more and more, you know, devices. So even, even a laptop that you might get for school can still play most of the category, of the library on Steam.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  And so you have more competition and then you also have mobile, like the hyper casual games are taking mind share. People are scrolling TikTok. There are tons of free entertainment resources that they compete with. This is something all the, all the movie studios love to say.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  People are making.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Podcasts like.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Podcasts, we're.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Have this.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  No, you can be gaming while you watch this. We, we approve.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm saying because you're making this, you're not gaming.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. No, okay.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  You were spending.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  At least back in the day.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Pretty penny on.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. Um, so yeah, uh, they, they're, they're, they're tightening up operations at Xbox. The question I think on everyone's mind is will Xbox be spun out as a standalone entity at some point? Uh, is it too far afield from the core, uh, Microsoft, uh, mission? There was a move, Xbox was seen as a foothold into consumer for Microsoft. Of course, with the way Azure's grown and their cloud platform and their cloud business. Really, it feels like Microsoft is having the biggest win in, in enterprise and teams and

• 8:24John Coogan?

  and cloud and all of the workforce, uh, and productivity tools that they launch. Obviously they're very big in AI. Um, and so the idea that the Xbox would be, at one point they, it came with, uh, the best 4K Blu-ray player, an Xbox One S, I believe. You can get one of these for a hundred bucks right now. It's actually a great steal if you want to go, uh, physical media, which is very popular with parents these days. Instead of, oh yeah, scroll the, you know, endless feed of Netflix and, and Disney Plus. Instead of that, it's like, you like Toy Story? We got you Toy Story on 4K Blu-ray. You can put it in the box and it's a hundred bucks, which is six months of a streaming service. So, uh, a lot of people are, are starting to physical media max a little bit more.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  But, uh, the idea was that you would get this Xbox and you would get it because you were a gamer, you want to play games. But you also had an HD DVD player, Blu-ray player, and they would also serve as like your home media console. And they would grow from there, get the foothold into the, into the consumer market. But that never really materialized. Most people, if they have an Xbox, they use it to play one specific set of games. They might have a PS5 as well and Nintendo Switch as well. And then if they're in the Apple ecosystem and they play Xbox games on the weekend, they're not lamenting the lack of integration there. They're like, yeah, it's fine. Like I play the games over there. I talk to people on the iPhone. It's fine. Um, so let's read through a little bit of Asha's post to see, because there's this, there's this key

• 9:52John Coogan?

  decision to announce 3,200 layoffs throughout fiscal year 2027, but announce only 1,600 today. The question is strategically, what does that do for morale? Like, because you sort of have this guillotine hanging over everyone? Is this a good incentive for everyone to lock in and not, and make the cut because you know another cut is coming? Is it, is it going to stop complacency in the organization? Or is it going to make everyone start looking for other jobs and think, oh, like I could get fired at any moment? They've already teed up 1,600 layoffs. If I'm likely to be in that, maybe I should be looking for another job right now.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Now that could be good because maybe those aren't the missionaries who you want on the team. But, um, what do you think about the idea of announcing to your company that there, there are layoffs today and there's also a whole bunch more coming down the pipe?

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  Xbox/Microsoft Gaming has around 16,000 employees, so this cut is quite significant.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  I think that, at least in startups.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  It's 10% within the next year.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at least in startups, the best advice that I've ever gotten and would typically talk with founders in my portfolio about is like, if you need to do cuts, cut deep, right? And this is like, maybe at least, this is like a talking point for at least like five significant founders and investors, right? Like, a lot of people just repeat this, right? And I think it generally holds true. It's better to, I think the question is like, why did they feel like they needed to cut 1,600 today and then also keep a 1,600 cut in the tank? Like, do they need, like, is there some?

• 11:47John Coogan?

  And do they know who those 1,600 people are? And they're like, we just need 12 months to let them finish what they're doing? Or is it that we haven't even identified them? We just suspect?

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  And either way, it doesn't necessarily seem that great, right? Because if you've identified who you're gonna cut, like, you should probably just do it now.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  It's much better to just do a big cut and then say, look, everyone who's still on the ship, we're going on the offensive. We're gonna be hiring in these areas. This is where we're winning. So everyone get on because we're going on a big run right now. We, you know, had to shrink a little bit, but now we're on the offensive in this particular, with this particular strategy.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  But who knows? They certainly understand the implications of doing this. So there's probably, there's certainly a strategy to it.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Microsoft as a whole is laying off 4,800 employees, which is 2.1% of its workforce. This is a massive company. And you have to wonder, because they're obviously hiring as well, like, will the company shrink this year on the back of these layoffs? Or will they just do 2% layoffs and then wind up growing the company 3%? And so they wind up a larger organization at the end of the year. There's some interesting history here because Microsoft has had a long history of rank and yank, stack ranking they invented. It was always a hardcore culture. People sort of forget this about Microsoft because it's such a dominant tech company that, of course, they got lumped in with the, you

• 13:16John Coogan?

  know, nap rooms and free lunches. But in fact, back in the late 70s and 80s, Microsoft was famously intense, very tiny teams, huge deadlines, technical arguments. Gates, Bill Gates was personally reviewing work, and they had a culture that rewarded extreme competence. It was sort of an Elon Musk-type endeavor at that time. It was not nice, still founder-led and product-obsessed. Vanity Fair had a profile on the company in 2012, describes young Microsoft as thrilling, but also unnerving, with Gates demanding intense commitment from hires, and Ballmer joining in 1980 as the hard-charging business operator.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Asha wants the new culture at Xbox to be thrilling and a little unnerving.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. So in the 90s, they started to develop a monopoly in Windows 95, Office. There was a lot of lock-in to Excel, Word. Business was just printing cash. And Microsoft became enormous, rich, internally competitive. The company still had the old smart people, brutal reviews, ship or die energy, but it was becoming more layered, as we saw 14 layers of management at Xbox in some cases. Stack ranking became part of the culture. But no one really knows exactly when, exactly what date it went into effect. But a former Microsoft employee writing in Geekwire said stack ranking had been an integral part of Microsoft culture for decades, and that when he joined in 1999, it was often viewed positively

• 14:45John Coogan?

  as a part of Microsoft's meritocracy. And so this, so stack ranking was you rank all the employees, you put them on this bell curve, you're sort of grading on a curve. You have a couple A players, but then there's certain people that are falling behind. And everyone knows where they sit in the organization.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Could you illustrate this for me?

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Just with the team?

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  That would be helpful.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I'd give myself S tier, you F tier. And I think we can start and end there. No. But Ballmer came in, and people started pointing to stack ranking as a little bit more of dysfunction. Of course, there were other strategic missteps during the Ballmer era, and the stock was flat. And this is what birthed Strategery is, as soon as Ben Thompson left Microsoft, he had tons to write about because he was there during the pre-Sata era, when they were trying to get into mobile and did so unsuccessfully. Then Satya comes in, the pivot to cloud, the business does very well, and everything's off to the races again. But during the infamous Ballmer era, there was a forced curve performance

• 15:52John Coogan?

  review. Managers had to distribute employees into buckets. So even a strong team had to produce winners and losers. So even if you love everyone on your team, the bottom 10% is going to be labeled the bottom 10%. And that creates a lot of stress. But it can also create a lot of incentive and a lot of excitement. It can be tough but fair sometimes. But ABC.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Thrilling and unnerving.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Thrilling and unnerving.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  How would you describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving?

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there. I don't know. You sort of opt into it, you know? Ideally, ideally, this is all out in the open. It comes out in the hiring process. You don't go in blind. You know what you're getting. But of course, cultures change over time. If you've been with a company for a decade, you might say, I signed up for, you know, a chill monopoly. Why are we wartime? I'm a peacetime employee, you know? Or vice versa. And then it might be time to find another opportunity. So ABC summarized it as managers grading on the bell curve. Vanity Fair's critique was harsher. They said former and current employees described stack ranking as the most destructive process inside Microsoft because it made employees compete with teammates

• 17:02John Coogan?

  instead of competitors. It's a good point. I mean, you should, in some ways, just be like, yeah, you smoked the competition. Doesn't matter that you were the worst at smoking the competition. At least you did some smoking. But they always did normal. So the question is like, is the layoffs that are happening at Xbox, the layoffs that happened last year at Microsoft, they laid off 9,000 people this year, sort of under 5,000. Is this new? Is this a new trend? Or is this just a continuation of the stack ranking process? It actually is new. Stack ranking would push out low-rated people. Sometimes it would block promotions, reduce bonuses, force transfers. But they weren't necessarily doing mass layoffs around it. That's sort of a misconception. So even if they look at all the stack ranking at

• 17:47John Coogan?

  the end of the year and they say, okay, these people are clearly in the bottom 10%, they saw it more as an opportunity to reallocate talent from different pieces, different teams. And it wasn't always, okay, at the end of every year, we're just firing the bottom 10%.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bottom 10% on one team might be top 10% on another.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Exactly. Which, again, thrilling, but unnerving. But it's not, it's not full guillotine. You're gonna be out of a job if you're in the bottom 10%. It's more, okay, you need to find a better opportunity. Within the organization, you're still on the team. Now we are in a different, we're in a different world. Because the first mass layoff at Microsoft actually came in 2009 after the great financial crisis. It announced a plan to cut 5,000 jobs during the financial crisis. And it was the first mass layoff for Microsoft. I mean, that's 40-year, 30-year run, without any layoffs, just growth, growth, growth. But layoffs eventually became a more normal corporate behavior. In 2014, under Satya Nadella, Microsoft announced up to 18,000 cuts, mostly tied to integrating Nokia's phone business.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  So post-acquisition, they deduplicated some teams. Of course, Nokia has, you know, marketers and finance people and a lot of things that are not directly tied to that product. If they're bringing the companies together, there might be some reduction in force. Microsoft's own announcement framed as reorganization focuses on this, reorganizational simplification. Reuters reported that about 12,500 of those Nokia-related cuts were related to the acquisition directly. The system officially ended in 2013, so they're not doing stack ranking anymore. Just before Nadella took over, Microsoft killed the numerical forced ranking and moved towards more qualitative frequent reviews.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  I bet there's still some OG managers there that are doing a little cheeky stack ranking.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  I miss it, maybe. Who knows? But overall, is there cause for optimism with Xbox? It's the hardest gaming platform to be excited about. When you think about Valve, it's just a money-printing machine on top of PC. The PC gaming industry broadly is doing well. And PlayStation's done such a good job, Sony's done such a good job with PlayStation with creating like, true intellectual property. You think about Last of Us, which is now an HBO series, and that is a PlayStation exclusive, at least for a certain amount of time. I believe they own Naughty Dog, the publisher of that, or the game developer.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  And so there's a lot, there's fewer and fewer exclusives. And when Microsoft bought Activision, there was talk of, will Call of Duty go exclusive to Xbox? Because that would be sort of a killer feature that would get a lot of gamers, even if they're in the PS5 ecosystem, they say, well, I want to play Call of Duty. I'll get an Xbox as well. They chose not to do that for potentially antitrust reasons. You can't necessarily cut.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, I don't follow the video game industry.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Loser alert, loser alert.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  But the thing that's easy to get excited about with Xbox is Modern Warfare 2 Rust and 1v1-ing your best friends.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Yes, but you buy it in the secondary market. That's not any pennies in Asha's income statement. It's rough over there. 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. Well, if you've done enough Forza Horizon 5, Forza Horizon 6, you've burned out on your gaming simulator with your Xbox, you gotta get over to Ferrari and pick up a Dolce Trilindri manual.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  The 12-cylinder is the first car with a gated manual shifter to come out of Maranello since 2012.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  Have you noticed that they said shifter, not transmission?

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, shifter. That's what people wanted, right? We'll debate it. Let's play this video.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Hell is frozen over, pigs can fly, and Ferrari is building a new car with a manual transmission. This is the 12-cylinder Manuale. As you can see, it's a manual gearbox in a Ferrari. And what it really is, is a mode of the 8-speed DCT, but Ferrari has added a clutch pedal and a shifter. It's a 6-speed shifter. When you switch to manual mode, the shift knob turns amber in color, but you can also leave it in automatic. Unlike the other 12 cylinders, there's no paddle shifters, which you'll notice. If you want manual mode, you push the clutch in, provided you're going under 62 miles an hour, it'll go into manual mode, and then you can start driving. They tell us you can stall it, so if you are too quick with the clutch, too quick with releasing the clutch,

• 22:35Speaker 03

  if you try to start it in second or third gear and you pop the clutch, you'll stall it. If you push the clutch in, you can rev it to the 9500 RPM redline and do a massive clutch drop. It does have some safeguards. If you try to do a 6 to 1 shift, or some shift that isn't allowable, it won't let you do it. Ferrari put a ton of effort into the shift feel, so you can sort of, as you move from the center plane, there is a little bit of resistance to simulate the synchronizers meshing, and then it falls into gear. So it feels very much like a manual gearbox in a Ferrari has always felt, provided that gearbox is warmed up. As you can see, the gated shifter is here, the clicks are very much here. Although the DCT is an 8-speed, you only get 6 speeds with the manual transmission,

• 23:20Speaker 03

  which lowers the top speed from over 200 miles an hour, I think 211 miles an hour in 7th gear at redline, to 6th gear, which is at the 9500 RPM redline, to 196 miles an hour. So if you want to go just that little bit faster for top speed, you would switch it into the automatic mode. The Manuale goes on sale at the beginning of next year, at the beginning of 2027. Ferrari has said that the price will be right around half a million dollars for starters. I'm sure most of them will be optioned out with lots of goodies and cost a lot more. They're building 1,499 of them, and I would imagine they're already spoken for. But this does give us a look that Ferrari sees the value in the manual transmission. They love the connection of it, their customers have been asking for it.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  They didn't really have a manual transmission to put in the car, but with this solution, essentially a manual mode with a shifter and a clutch, they have shown us that it is possible to take a dual clutch and make the manual experience happen for buyers. So I'm hoping this trickles down into the rest of the lineup.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Okay, manual by wire, they're trying to answer every, they don't make them like they used to, complaint. How does it land with you? Do you think this checks the box? Does this count as a manual Ferrari? Are they giving their manual fans what they want? Or is this a poor simulacrum of what it means to have 3 pedals?

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  I think it's an obvious step in the right direction.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people will be satisfied with this. I don't know. I think this checks enough of the boxes.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm in shambles over the spec that they use in that example.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Why?

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  I just think it looks terrible.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  It does look very base spec.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  But, I think this is a fantastic.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  TJ Parker does not like it. He says this is far more embarrassing than the Luce, face plant. And people are saying, wow, that's bad, as long as it's fun, who cares? TJ Parker says he cares. It's corny, but a Koenigsegg approved by the new Bugatti CEO seems.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Look, when I see this, I think that they're going to sell at least 1,499 Luches, because you have to imagine, if you want.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  They claim they're not doing it.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  Then you're going to need to buy a Luce. They claim they're not doing it, they obviously will be doing it.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  These are never things that are, these are never rules that are written down anywhere, but they are understood.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  The details are hilarious and kind of brilliant. Listen to this. You can skip gears, heel-toe downshift, and even stall the car if you mess up the clutch, but the system will also stop you from doing something truly stupid, like over-revving the engine, or money shifting the car into the wrong gear. If you're not familiar with the money shift, that's where you shift, you skip a gear too much, and it grinds the gears and you have to pay for, to fix your engine, which costs a lot of money, especially in a 12-cylinder Ferrari. It's slower if you shift it yourself, and you need automatic mode to hit the full 211 mile per hour top speed, but that's basically the whole point. Ferrari customers apparently told the company that they were willing to trade performance

• 26:36John Coogan?

  for the old-school, physical joy of driving a gated manual.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ultimately, I like that they're partially listening to customers. They're not necessarily fully listening to customers, because I don't know any of Ferrari's, out of the handful of Ferrari's top customers that I know. I don't know any that were like, yeah, give me a fly-by-wire gated manual. They were not asking for that, but they were asking for the experience. They were asking for a knob that you could put your hand on.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  And 3 pedals. They want the 3rd pedal.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  I am thinking of the Hyundai Ioniq 5N. Are you familiar with this vehicle?

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  You've told me all about it.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  So the Hyundai Ioniq 5N is an electric hatchback, essentially, but the gentleman who runs Hyundai's N division formerly ran BMW's M division. What's the letter that comes after M? It's N. So he went over to Hyundai and said, give me a bunch of your cars, and I will create M versions, performance versions of these cars. Now Hyundai is funny because it's like a family car company for the most part, not the same muscle car, German performance, ultimate driving machine base to work with, like at BMW. But that individual has done a fantastic job adding some drama to what it feels like to drive an electric Hyundai,

• 28:03John Coogan?

  specifically with the Hyundai Ioniq 5N. It has something like 600 horsepower, very quick on the track. Because of the position of the battery, it stays very planted, even though it is a heavy vehicle. So it is good on the track in automatic mode, but they added paddle shifters and a simulated dual-clutch transmission.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  LARP mode.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  LARP mode, and it pipes in fake noise from a fake engine, and you can redline it virtually, and it's almost like.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  Can you roll it physically?

• 28:36John Coogan?

  You can physically roll it if you get really crazy, I'm sure. But it's a very interesting, it's very interesting because it has all the hallmarks of something that would be hated by the car community, but in fact, when I watched a lot of reviewers, a lot of car fans drive it, they said, yeah, after a couple laps on the track, it just felt like a lot of fun, and it was just fun. And also, at the price point, you're getting the performance of a $200,000 to $300,000 car, probably. 600 horsepower, it feels like a manual, and you can really throw it around, drift it, and do all sorts of fun stuff, with a much lower entry price.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  And so I was surprised that we didn't see that technology quickly come to the Taycan and other electric sports cars. I think it will eventually, I think it takes time. Also, the sound choice was interesting. They used the exhaust from another Hyundai instead of licensing something more brawny or powerful or more exciting. But there's clearly something there that, I don't know if the car's selling very well, but it was at least satisfying to the critical eye of Matt Farah, which was interesting.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny because our dear friend TJ, no matter what Ferrari does, he just hates it. He's just, I haven't seen, there has not been at launch.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  He was sort of pro Luce.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  But he says this is far more embarrassing than the Luce. You're saying that's a positive stance?

• 30:12John Coogan?

  He took a heretical stance on the Luce.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually, the Ferrari that I'm most excited about is the street-legal version of the 296 Challenge. I think that's going to be a hit, because that's, obviously, it's going to be paddles.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  But internal combustion engine, they're ditching all the hybrid stuff.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  They should have a version, you know, the really old Model T, like the really old cars, we need to crank them to start from the front? They should have a virtual version of that. So it's like a fully electric car, 2,000 horsepower, 400-mile range, but you can get out a crank from the back of the trunk and crank it to start it. That would be very fun, something like that.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, step in the right direction, give them some credit. They are partially listening to their customers, I think, between the Luce and the 12C manual. They're solving their emissions problems, headed in the right direction. And I do think that the Luce will have been a big enough wake-up call, because it's something that no one can defend.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Okay, the Luce, famously low slung, famously small windows. Should they do a version with huge square windows, like this old Land Rover?

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Do you see this? Was just noticing how bad this has gotten. One of the primary appeals of retro cars is the big old square windows. Are you a fan of this? Is this a Discovery? I don't know which one this is, but I was watching an old nineties.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  Is that not a Range?

• 31:47John Coogan?

  I don't know. I was watching an old nineties, like.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, pull up the car they're referencing.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Comedy or something? Which one?

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  If you click in.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Whoa, that is so ridiculous. Why are we building cars where the window sills are at chin level? Why is greenhouse, why is the greenhouse less than a third of the height of the vehicle? Oh, the greenhouse is the top. Interesting. I've never heard that term. Why is the DOT? Where's the DOT? Can we maybe add seat height or reduce waistline, maybe both?

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  You know where we're headed, John.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  Safety standards. What?

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  You know where we're headed?

• 32:23John Coogan?

  The pod. No windows.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  Cars with no windows.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  TVs on the inside.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  Reels. Scrolling reels. It's the future. Waymo. They own YouTube, YouTube Shorts. Put them right in the Waymos.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they like to put YouTube Shorts everywhere.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the experience of using YouTube today is just searching for a long form video.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  There's a lot of shit.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  Would you like 25 reels?

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Would you like to scroll past 25 reels?

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  Before we get to what you actually want?

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  And I wouldn't be surprised if we see reels going up the front of the Waymo.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Separate companies. We'll see. We'll see how long they stick together. The Model Y L from Tesla is coming to the United States. It's now available in the United States and Puerto Rico. Deliveries are still a couple of months out, but it's a three row, six seat configuration for the Model Y. It's longer than the standard Model Y. It brings exceptional interior space with ample headroom and legroom for all passengers. Zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds, 325 miles of range, front row heated ventilated seats. They all have power recline, improved airflow, more trunk space, active damping, staggered tires

• 33:36John Coogan?

  for enhanced grip, longer tailgate for better rear visibility, upgraded 50 watt wireless charging pads. I haven't seen the wireless charging pads in the wild yet. That seems like a cool innovation for your home charger. Can be a little bit slower because it's overnight, but every night. So you don't even need to deal with the plug. I remember at one point Tesla was going to build that crazy robotic snake that was going to plug in. Do you remember this thing?

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  We got to find a video of this. Look that up, Tyler. The Tesla power wall at one point had a robotic snake. I can only describe it as a robotic snake and it would find your Tesla's power port, no matter where you parked, as long as you were in range of the robot.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  And it would plug in. And they were pitching this as something that they would roll out, probably extremely complicated from a mechanical perspective. And so it never wound up delivering to the United States at least, but or anywhere. But cool idea. But wireless charging pad, obviously much more easy to just throw on the floor. Also used in the McLaren Speedtail. McLaren Speedtail uses an inductive wireless charging pad that is, and I think the Macan EV might also have, or maybe the Cayenne EV. One of the Porsches also has the wireless charging pad. And there's a whole bunch of smart technology in it to make sure that if like a mouse doesn't go across, it doesn't get fried, or an animal

• 35:04John Coogan?

  is not injured by it. It's a pretty high tech device, but we can find the Tesla, the Tesla charger snake. Here it is, the image. Look at this, Jordy. This is a crazy image. Look at that. This is clearly a demo unit, but you can imagine how you pull into your garage and it finds itself and plugs itself in. Seems like depending on where you park, that could be extremely annoying because if it plugs in, you have to kind of climb over, climb under this thing. That could actually be worse than just a normal.

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it would also be unfortunate when backers discover a backdoor.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  Rises up and it, you know, kills you in your sleep.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  So I can see why they didn't ship this, at least yet.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Well, there's other Tesla announcements. The Tesla Model Y dual zone fridge, $600. Fits in the sub trunk and has two separate compartments that can be fit, set to different temperatures from zero to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You plug it into the outlet. I love this. I think it's so cool that there's like this gadget that fits into the other thing they have. Like they have the front trunk. No one's really doing anything with it. Why not throw a couple?

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not a lot of manufacturers are really willing to promote having 30 to 40 beers, hitting the road and having 30 to 40 beers.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  I don't think these are beers in this image. What is this? Ollie pop? I don't know. I think it's, ooh, blood orange. I don't know which one this is, but they did put some ice cream. The ice cream looks pretty generic. I don't know if that's a known brand.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  There's also a mattress.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, mattress is in there. Cybertruck mattress. That's, I don't know.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  They've always, they've always.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Had those mods.

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  I've always thought their accessories are quite cool.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's difficult for other car manufacturers to do first party accessories because they have so many SKUs. Whereas when you're selling as many Model Ys as they are and as many vehicles that have that exact trunk configuration with that exact port, you can, you can underwrite the mass manufacturing a lot easier than if you're, you know, Kia or Hyundai and you have 25 different vehicles, all with slightly different configurations.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Well, where else should we go? Let me tell you about public.com. Invest in for those who take it seriously. They have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. There was a team that figured out how to order pizza with iMessage using artificial intelligence and people are not as impressed as they should be because the, the image is AI, please press the order me pizza button. And it is wired up to press the order pizza button. Yes, DoorDash sort of already created an artificial intelligence for having food delivered to you. There is a button and you can sort of reimagine the

• 38:01John Coogan?

  UI in a very, in a different way. Vibe code a button that orders you the most recent thing or, or interfaces with a text message. Somewhat cool. I think the, the, the bull case for what Arlen is working on is that iMessage is a more universal interface. Text is the universal interface in a future world where, you know, everything is done via voice or via an agent or via text stream. Having a centralized place and not having to use a bunch of different apps and have the best app at the right time. And this one's on discount, that one's not, and this one's your payments information. So having all of that happen below the fold is just another layer to the user experience in the modern era

• 38:45John Coogan?

  that it feels like it's on the way. You've been able to order an Uber with Siri for a decade, but no one does because it's not ready. It was not ready for prime time, but we are getting there to the point where this will happen, but it is, is a slow, slow rollout. The, the AI chat apps were on a dominant run for a long time. OpenAI at the top with ChatGPT. I think Gemini and Claude were sort of going back and forth from number two and three. And you were lamenting, you were saying like, what's going on in the App Store? It's all AI.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  This morning I was, I was checking the App Store charts. Good indicator of interest. We have Cali at number one.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  It's the world.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  Netflix game controller at number two. Peacock at number three. Fox One at number four. Let's give it up for Fox. Trump accounts at number five. ChatGPT at six. Threads at seven. Let's give it up for Connor Hayes.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Connor Hayes.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  Telemundo at number eight.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Telemundo. Oh.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  Polly Market at number nine. Gemini closing out the top 10.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  11 Fubo.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Fubo.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  12 Claude.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  13 Depop.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Depop.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  Depop out of nowhere.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  Shopping.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  Google, number 14.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  The fact that Google.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  All over the place.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then from there, it's a bunch of, a lot of, you know, Real Short, Drama Wave, all these short. There's, there's a company called Vibe Short, AI Comic Dramas. Bite sized comic dramas. Tyler, can you watch like a few hours of these and, and report back?

• 40:24John Coogan?

  Absolutely do not.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Absolutely do not.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  No, I actually, I'm genuinely curious. This, this app has come out of nowhere.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And we, and we talked to the founder of True Short, or is it Real Short? True Short is the American company. Real Short is the Chinese company, correct? And he's, True Short, he's working on true crime AI generated short form video. Interesting to see where that's going. I mean, certainly demand for this stuff. The trough must be filled. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. User favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Can we play this video?

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  From?

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Joe Rogan.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  Joe Rogan is talking to the CEO of Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Best to the show.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds. Like the, the brain rot that you're fed every day, which is, you know, this continuous doom scrolling, that's bad. And the one that can supercharge it is AI.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Okay, like now that you could just ask

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  Pause.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Whatever you want.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  This is probably true from a, from a maybe more macro sense. Like if you're, sometimes good ideas do come to you. Some people say in the shower, to me, it's in the sauna. Uh, I think there's clearly inspiration that comes when you're not doing anything at all. But that being said, I get so many ideas from the feed.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Don't you?

• 42:07John Coogan?

  Hot take, I like that.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  How many, uh, yesterday I sent you something.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Pro feed, yeah.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday I sent you a link that I saw on X and I was like, hey, we should do something like this for this other thing.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Sure. I don't remember what you were talking about because I was zoned out.

• 42:23Jordi Hays?

  You were, you were just, you were in the feed.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I don't typically, once I have inspiration, then I'm going to AI, right?

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  Then I'm going and exploring the idea and saying, how has this been done before in this way?

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Or I was looking at, uh, incidents where heads of state have interfered with the World Cup.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Which was interesting.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Yes. So I, I think that I like your, I like your hot take pushing back on that idea. I do think.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Because where would, you know, pre-internet, if you wanted inspiration, you would go to the library.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Stumble upon, baby. Stumble upon.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  That's post-internet. Post-internet.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  That's not post-internet. That was like web one boom. It was like, take me to a random website.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm saying before, before the internet was popular, if you were an artist and you wanted inspiration, you would go buy books.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  You would go look at media to get ideas.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I think, uh, my, my take on this is that he is, he is pointing to something that is correct, which is that, uh, AI feels very pull. You choose what to pull out of the AI system. You prompt, you ask for information about a specific thing. So you have to come with an idea and then you're exploring that idea. And that's very satisfying for curious people. Uh, whereas the algorithms feel very push. You go to YouTube shorts or TikTok or Instagram and you're just being fed things. And you're not starting your journey with a, a, an affirmative declaration. I want to learn more about the new Dolce Trilindri Manuale and I'm going down that rabbit hole.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Uh, and I think your frustration that you voiced early about YouTube shoving a bunch of random shorts in your face is that otherwise you would be more likely to search for something specific. You want to learn about a history of a specific thing. And this was the case at the dawn of YouTube. It was just a search box. They'd surface a couple of things with the editorial front page, but by and large you would go and be like, I want, I, I, I remember people would just go and search like sick backflip. And then they would just watch like the backflip videos, right? Uh, and friends who would just search like cool thing, a cool, cool video. And they would just find cool videos because they were in the mood for that.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  And it was sort of algorithmic in one sense, but it was very like, the user was driving that, uh, that direction. And with the algorithms, you, you are taking a much more passive seat. Now, the odd thing is that where does AI go? Where does perplexity, chat GPT, where do these apps go? Do they become more push in the sense that you show up and there's already a bunch of interesting prompts already done for you? I was talking about this.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, no, that was Pulse.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Pulse was that, but I was also, when there were the rumor about the social network features, I was saying that like, I would love to just scroll a timeline of like, what are the deep research reports that Tyler Cowen is doing? He, he probably searches a ton of stuff. If there's something interesting in there and he can just click share, I would love to scroll that feed and I'll also subscribe to Tyler and see what.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because stumble upon is such a good example.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, great feed.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Because there was random elements, but you could always also make it more focused.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  And that's generally what a feed is now. It's just stumble upon for, like X is just stumble upon for like things happening online that you're interested in.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, random is an algorithm. That is an algorithm. Uh, you know, chronological is an, is an algorithm, but I think what we're getting at is like, is more of this like algorithmic, algorithm where the optimization function is attention and time on site that people find uh, dissatisfying because they have like regret afterwards because they're like, yeah, you sucked me in with a bunch of stuff, but that's not actually what I wanted. I wanted something more focused and directed. I wanted more CrowdStrike. I wanted to know that your business is AI, their business is securing. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. I also want more videos of peregrine falcons flying at 390 kilometers an hour.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  That is incredibly fast.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  You were giving me

• 46:41John Coogan?

  I was sceptic.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of shade about falcons last week, and so I needed to put you in the falcon zone.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Okay, the truth zone on the falcons. What is this video? This is a video of the fastest attack animal in the animal kingdom, peregrine falcon.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  Content warning.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  390 kilometers an hour. Also, they live all over America. Fantastic animal, beautiful creature.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And you think that there's a business to be built around home defense peregrine falcons? Take me through your thesis.

• 47:13Jordi Hays?

  I did, I did.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Yes, an andorol for the aviation aviary world?

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  Andorol meets falconry.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Sort of an organic andorol for the home.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, a lot of, you know, guard dogs are popular. Why not have peregrine falcon, you know, perched in, you know, the highest tree on your property, ready to go?

• 47:34John Coogan?

  I like this chat from Nicola. A falcon with a bicycle is the most efficient animal on the planet. That's what I completely agree.

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  This hits very well with that early idea from the show with like bear security.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bear, private military contractors.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Yes, domestication of bears. I think it's probably easier to domesticate a falcon than a, than a bear. Many falcons are already, you know, domesticated. Falconry is a, a historic, um, historic technique.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  I just reached out to a local falconer.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  You did?

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  To set up some time.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, I'm not even.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Before the show?

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  No, not for the show, but that would be cool.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, before the show you did this?

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The team had, the team had that video pulled up and I just thought, you know.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yes. Now the question is, can we bring back carrier pigeons?

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Because we send.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  Because if we, if, if, yeah, John, Sunday morning, he's often reading an article.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  He'll text me, hey, you should read this.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  But what if he could send, what if he could just take the newspaper? He didn't have to go find the link because obviously he's reading on a physical copy.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  What if you could just hand it to a smart bird?

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  And have it fly it over to my house, be way more convenient for me. I wouldn't need to be on my phone. It's, it's a weekend. I don't want to be as, as online as during the weeks. And you don't have to be going, getting on your phone, trying to find the right article.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  So I think there's something there, I think.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  I wonder, I know Mike Tyson was really into pigeons. I don't know if he got into carrier pigeons, but, uh, it does seem like it could have a huge boom. I feel like there's an Instagram account to be built around someone who gets really into using carrier pigeons for everything and lives some sort of like pastoral trad life and amasses millions of followers on the back of, of falconry and, and carrier pigeon.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Home falcons.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Yes, home falcons. It's good content for social media. Uh, also, if you don't want to fly on a falcon, you want to fly on a helicopter, be like Michael Dell, get a helicopter and then brand it. He was caught on a hot mic, talking to President Donald Trump. He said, sir, we don't have a helicopter, we have a delacopter. What a funny portmanteau. And what a funny way to correct the president.

• 49:49Jordi Hays?

  He's really speaking the president's language.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's play it.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Every question to kill. Sir, we, we don't have a helicopter, we have a delacopter.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  What a, what a.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  I like how it kind of flopped in, in real life, but is doing numbers online.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  It did, it did, it did. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Let me tell you. About finally some good news. Finally, finally some good news. Circle K, the company won the lottery. Did you hear about this, Jordy?

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  This is true. Yeah. So there's a crazy story out of Arizona.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  They needed a win.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  They needed a win. Actually, they've been a fantastic partner to my company, Lucy. Shout out Circle K. But let's tell you about the Circle K winning lottery. So there's a crazy story out of Arizona that's been brewing over the last six months. Back in February, a Circle K customer named Soon Chung Kim asked the cashier for $85 worth of $1 lottery tickets. So she shows up, she wants 85 tickets. But after all 85 were printed out, Kim found out that she only had 60 bucks on her, only $6. So the cashier gave her 60 tickets and left the remaining 25 tickets on the counter. The next morning, Circle K manager Robert

• 51:17John Coogan?

  Galitza learned that the leftover tickets included the $13 million winning ticket. So he clocked out, took off his Circle K shirt, and bought the tickets from another Circle K employee, being like, what?

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  No one, no one's gonna notice. No one's gonna notice.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  So when Circle K, the company, found out about the purchase, it ordered the ticket be held in its corporate office and filed a complaint against the manager who bought the tickets and the Arizona lottery and claimed that it's right, that Circle K, the company, is the rightful owner of the lottery ticket. As of a week ago, at least three people/entities are claiming ownership of the ticket.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so the original buyer that didn't have the cash?

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  The manager who's like, I don't care if I lose my job as long as I win the lottery?

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  And Circle K is like, we really need a win. We really need, we need a win, like, we need a win right now.

• 52:13John Coogan?

  We need this. Yeah. So Galitza, a Circle K employee that Galitza got to sign the back of the ticket, not sure why he had her do all of this, and Circle K additionally, the judge presiding over the complaint has ordered that the woman who bought the tickets but couldn't pay for them, Soon Chung Kim, be found and brought into court before making a decision on who gets it. So she's gonna have to testify and explain her side to, to make sure that that's exactly what happened because this is just claims at this point. How did the, the local Circle K wind up with 25 lottery tickets?

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  Who are you going with? I'm going with manager.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  I'm going with big corporate, big, big, big.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm going with the manager, not because I think it's ethical, but I think that, I think that there's, I think it's unlikely that there is a rule at Circle K that says...

• 53:01John Coogan?

  100% there's a rule that if you work at that company, you can't buy lottery tickets at all from your own store.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Obviously, because you have the machine right there. You can tamper with it.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but they don't, but they don't control.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  That's probably line number one employee handbook.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but it seems very unlikely that, that the circle, like, it's, it's a machine that just prints tickets.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  It's like...

• 53:24John Coogan?

  Yes, but there's so many ways you could tamper with it. You're watching the news, you're printing the ticket at the right time, you have access, you refill the ticket. Oh, there's one that's not filled out.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Wait, John, but you're saying the corporation can buy its own lottery tickets?

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Why? But the manager can't? That seems also strange.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  Ooh, maybe, maybe you got me.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  I think I got a ride with the woman.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  You think she's owed it?

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  The manager?

• 53:45John Coogan?

  But then, but then, then the strategy becomes...

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Or the original buyer.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  But then, but then you can just shift the odds in your favor by constantly going to Circle K's and saying, $100 of, $100 of, of tickets. Oh, I only have 50 bucks. And then you're basically doubling your odds because you still have a claim on those original...

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Gold Rock says these clerks aren't super hackers, John.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Just wait, just wait. You get the right amount of AI in there.

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  I think it's an edge case, and I think ultimately the, the person that, that paid for the winning ticket wins.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Who paid for the winning ticket? The manager?

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  Like, if it comes down to...

• 54:18John Coogan?

  But the manager knew that the ticket won. He didn't have to put any money in...

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  We don't know that yet.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. He did. He did. So there were 25 tickets there. They looked through them. One wins.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, if there's a rule, if there's a rule that managers cannot buy lottery tickets at their own store, then you're correct. But if there's no rule that explicitly, I, you know, basically spells that out, I think he might, he might, he might be golden.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Maybe golden? You think so? I don't know. Let me tell you about Shopify.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  Lottery expert.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Shopify is the commerce platform that grows their business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is here, I think a few minutes early, so we can bring in Baiju from Cowboy Space Corporation. Actually, oh, we're good. Let's bring him in. Hi, Jude, how you doing? Didn't want to keep you waiting. Welcome to the show.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  The boys. How you doing?

• 55:12John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  Good to have you back.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Good to have you back.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  How was your fourth?

• 55:15John Coogan?

  How was your fourth?

• 55:16Speaker 05

  It was good. It was good. I went, went up to Oregon, got a little sunlight. It's pretty cloudy out in my part of California, so.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Going to Oregon to get sunlight. That's kind of a contrarian move.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Florida or something?

• 55:30Speaker 05

  Florida's far. Florida's far.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is your reaction? We gotta get to the important news. What's your reaction to the Ferrari Dolce Trilindri Manoale? The manual bi-wire. You knew this question was coming.

• 55:43Speaker 05

  I, I'm, I'm smitten. I've been waiting.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  For this. Yeah, I think it's awesome.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  And, and, and, and so the natural pushback is, oh, this doesn't count because it's an unnatural manual transmission. Why? Why is this cool? Why is this good? Why do you like this idea? And I also want to know, do you think it will spread within the Ferrari portfolio?

• 56:11Speaker 05

  Um, why do we like this idea, first of all? Because I think at this point with cars, we take what we can get. And I think this is gonna be pretty cool. I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that the reason they're doing this is because the gearbox, they needed it to be able to handle that much power. That's why they didn't go with a totally normal, you know, but who knows? And do I think it is going to, it's on cars? I hope, I really hope so. I mean, just in general, right? Like, the landscape of modern cars is, pardon my language, but it's fucking apocalyptic. Like, you guys ever

• 56:48Speaker 05

  go driving down the road? Every car on the road is either gray, black, silver, toilet bowl white. With, the number of cars that look like toilet bowls on the road is just exploding. And it's, you know, it's depressing. It kind of, I feel like it's a weird commentary on, on human society this day and age. Like, why does every, you need to drive the exact same ugly boxy car? And, ugh.

• 57:17John Coogan?

  Hey, we're, we're having some connection issues. Can we flip you back to the production team? We'll bring you back in a couple minutes. Does that sound good?

• 57:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Thanks a lot. We'll see you in just a few minutes. Let me tell everyone about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  That was great. We got him in. We asked the questions that were on our mind. And we, no. Sorry, we were having an issue, and he's dropping some gems.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, wait, wait, is this, is this a real video? This, no, this is fake. No?

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is good, though. Costa.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, runs the fastest growing oil change only QL in the USA. He says, "For kicks, I started using ChatGPT to give our employees huge muscles in social media posts we use. And finally, last night, an employee told me on Slack, a customer said something about them not being as jacked in person." Look at this second picture here. This guy, if you look like this, you're not changing oil, you're going for the Arnold.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  You're going to the Arnold. This is so good. Uh, I like that Max Sparrow is in here, just tagging Pangram data. Is this, is this the idea that he's, oh, he's adding to the training corpus? Interesting that he just goes around on the timeline hunting for known edited images to build the, build the, build the model. Very, very cool. Uh, let's talk about Maggie's Refuel. Speaking of cars that need to be refueled, if you got your Dolce Trilindri Manoale and you need to get a full tank of gas, you might stop by Maggie's Refuel here in Los Angeles. A new high-end gas station brand just opened

• 59:03John Coogan?

  in Los Angeles. It bills itself as a high-end convenience store brand, planning to modernize and innovate the current gas station experience. Think Auto Grill meets 7-Eleven Japan, matcha, local croissants, premium CPG, and yes, a soft-serve cone, all alongside a gas or EV fill-up. Will they have white...

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  Gotta jump in. It's not actually open yet.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  It's not open yet.

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  It's not open yet, but they, this is gonna be their first location. If you've been in LA, this location is incredible. It's an incredible historic structure. We actually don't know how to make gas stations like this.

• 59:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you go to the first image in that thing, you can see the sort of curved ceiling that looks very, uh, I don't know. It looks nice. It also looks like it's a nightmare in the rain. Tyler?

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Um, yes. Some people are saying this is just Buc-E's for Californians. Have you guys ever been to Buc-E's?

• 59:55John Coogan?

  I've never been to Buc-E's.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Buc-E's is an elite gas station. It's like mostly like south, it's south of the US.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  There's only like 20 of them, but they're like sensational.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  There's like a wall of beef jerky, every flavor. It's incredible. You guys gotta go next time you're, you're on the East Coast.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  So it's just great selection?

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  They have, I mean, so, so there's like, uh, kind of like a restaurant inside.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Funny because I have been to a Buc-E's, but I just went in and said, hey, where's the bathroom? He used the bathroom and left. I didn't get to, I didn't even...

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  You didn't get the full...

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Everything inside at Buc-E's is trying to kill me.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  So I, I tend to avoid. Uh, but Maggie's is very cool. I actually invested in, in Maggie's with, uh, my friend Jonathan.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and this was like almost a couple of years ago at this point. Um, so building a gas station chain is a lot harder than it sounds.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but the idea, and, and Alex, John Rossi in the chat, uh, is sharing, uh, Alex, Alex's family, uh, started Cantor's Deli, very popular deli here in Los Angeles. So lots of, lots of lore in the family. Uh, but the idea and the frustration that, that I had had, you know, even prior to meeting Alex is like, everything inside... The average gas station is trying to kill me.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's like almost end to end, wall to wall poison. And there's a lot of instances where

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  There's fine.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, poison, but, um,

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Poison. Drink of Kings.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we're running the A B test.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  The drink.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Running the A B test, John.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Okay. That's gonna be in the gas station soon. Hebron's ripping.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  It'll definitely, it'll be in Maggie's. But, uh, but yeah, the idea is like, okay, how much money would you spend if you were getting gas at a place where you could get a nice coffee? Or maybe some organic fruit?

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  I do hate getting gas at a boring gas station.

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's gonna be fun.

• 1:01:48John Coogan?

  Probably stop by there if I saw it. It'd be good.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  How are we doing on our guests?

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  We're gonna bring him in in just a minute. Make sure that connection is dialed. We can talk about common printers. We are big on printing. We print every day. I got some papers here. But I agree, printers have not seen enough innovation yet, but CR 1337 Elite, like that, says, "We all know what the three biggest problems with common printers are. One, ink ripoffs. Two, planned obsolescence. And two, got the numbers wrong. You know it's not A I. Unrepairable hardware. Today I stumbled upon Open Printer, a fully repairable, open source inkjet that uses cheap refillable HP cartridges without DRM, print sheets on rolls with an auto cutter,

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Raspberry Pi powered, no drivers needed on any operating system. If I ever get a printer again, this will be the one. Open Printer."

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny. This person's like gassing up this printer and it's like, yeah, if I ever get one again, I would do this one.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  This is the story of so many, like, we have to go back to this thing where it's like, oh, I really want this. And then somebody makes it and they're like, well, I don't need that thing at all anymore. So now we understand why it doesn't exist and it became an extreme niche. There's another making things the old way. I like this video. Look at this, the series of machines. This is from, uh, this is a paper organizer. Look at this, Jordy. So this will just take a messy stack of paper and jiggle it until it's nice and even. Look at this. So you just take a bunch of papers and then it just sort of shakes it.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  And then you got a nice, clean stack of paper and you have a whole machine for this. Can your iPhone 17 Pro Max do that? No. You gotta get the Paper Jiggler 9000, whatever it's called, the Electro Jog, the Electro Jog. We don't know how to name products like that anymore. Tyler, are you in the market for this? Should we get one of these for the studio?

• 1:03:49Jordi Hays?

  This could be good, yeah.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  This could be good. Take all the newspapers and jog them together. Just, it's just such a beautiful, simple machine. You know, you just want a nice, look how clean that looks. You got papers around your house. Don't you want them nicely lined up like that? It's great.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  I like it. So Open Printer, the thing we just looked at, it's not even actually available for preorder yet. So

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  We'll see if they get crowdfunding.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  It's getting there. Well, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with A I agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. There's, there's a new job in Washington DC. If you're looking for, to make your name on Capitol Hill, you can be the Rocco's Basilisk explainer. You go and read less wrong and then you break it down for our elected officials on Capitol Hill. Uh, this is a clip from

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Put it into the form of based memes.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, that's

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  If you really wanna

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  This is a real job in the modern economy. The Financial Times, uh, has a bunch of, there's a bunch of news around A I. There was some news that Anthropic might be joining up with, uh, with their World One. They're closing China loopholes. That seems like good news. They're also potentially involved in the, uh, in the public ownership. But this Financial Times report says, "Among his strange duties as Silicon Valley translator to Washington, he said was explaining Rocco's Basilisk, an internet thought experiment about a vengeful future superintelligence, quote, 'to a bunch of the cabinet.'" Fun times in Washington, but we have our guest back in the TVP and Ultra Dome. Let's welcome Baiju back to the show. How you doing?

• 1:05:31Speaker 05

  I'm back.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Crystal clear.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Crystal clear.

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, it was extremely painful listening to you do this incredible riff on

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Your favorite stuff.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  The state of modern cars and I couldn't, couldn't agree more.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't agree more.

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  You guys wanna

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  You'll be happy, you'll be happy that my, the, the, the, the three cars in my driveway right now are blue, green, and brown. I'm rebelling against, uh, more subtle, you know, toned down, toned down far away. They don't look too crazy, but I'm rebelling, rebelling against the beige and the blacks and the whites.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Why do you think the colors went away? I understand the transition to electric because of environmental concerns, the move to automatics because it's less to learn for the average consumer, but why did we lose red?

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  I don't know, man. It's, it's sad. Honestly, it's just sad. And I think it's like, uh, yeah, I, I, I think it's like a commentary on like the modern state of society and human affairs. Like, why, why do we all wanna have cars that just disappear into the background?

• 1:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, one thing is like, to me, when I think about like a VW Bug, right? Very popular car throughout history, even if it's, regardless of the color, it's like a fun car. But then you add some like exotic color, yellow or green or red. Like it's, it's even more fun. And I, and I just feel like when every car, every car blends in, just the silhouette now. And so I think people are just like blending in is just the current meta. We're seeing, it's funny, Fiat has some new car that they're coming out with.

• 1:07:23Jordi Hays?

  What is the, I think it's the Topolino, maybe? Uh, I think Cute is gonna come back.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:07:30Speaker 05

  Sounds like Topo Chico.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Topo Chico.

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it's the, uh, the Multi Plena. I think it is. I don't know. I guess they all, they all kinda run together, but

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  Still sounds like Topo Chico.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  I mean, some of its safety standards, a lot of things have had to standardize around crash, crumple zones and whatnot. And I think that creates somewhat of a consolidation around silhouettes. But the color thing, I would imagine is more like tall poppy syndrome. You don't wanna stand out and be the guy with the red car. That became too flashy. So everyone went quiet luxury and that meant black, white, or gray.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  Why did, why do, why does everybody need to fit in? Why does everybody need to be the same? Like, people should just be individuals. Like, that's kinda the natural state of human affairs, in my opinion.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  I don't know. At the same time, something crazy comes out and people reject it. Look at the Ferrari Luchè. That car doesn't really look like anything else. It looks weird.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, I rejected it purely on

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  I'm getting one, by the way, guys.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's be honest. Let's be honest. They said if you want the, if you want the 12C manual,

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  it wasn't said out loud, but it was understood.

• 1:08:45Speaker 05

  No, I, guys, I, I got it 'cause I'm a huge Johnny High fanboy.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think it's, and I think the interior's gonna be incredible. And the spec matters a lot. What color did you go with? What do you, like, did you do anything to make it your own?

• 1:08:59Speaker 05

  I haven't done that yet. Um, I'm gonna confess right now that I'm gonna probably make my wife drive it.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  So I think it's gonna be a baby mobile.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Hey, I mean, if you want a five seater, it's the only option. It's the only option.

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  No, it's gonna be an incredibly fun car to, to drive.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Be an experience.

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  My only, my only criticism was, uh, was purely like, it felt like they set out to make a $300,000 car and they accidentally made, you know, a $600,000 car. But fortunately, there's, there's, there's not a, there's not millions of Baiju's in the world, but there's enough that they're gonna sell some.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Let's pull up the picture of this Fiat. I wanna show I wanna get Baiju's reaction to see if he's gonna pick up one of these. Can we, can we share this, uh, this image? That's in the timeline of the Fiat Topolino. Uh, hilarious that it has a, uh, what is that? Like a,

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  By the way, I like that you guys brought me on just to talk about cars.

• 1:10:00Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna get to, we're gonna get to your business, but it's, it's July.

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  We also got a half an hour here. We're hanging out.

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.

• 1:10:09John Coogan?

  Can we, can we share the, the image of the Topolino? It has a, it has like a rope that you would expect at like a nightclub, like a velvet rope to stop people instead of a door. Uh, it looks great. Anyway.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  I put, I put a link here that you can, that you can pull up as well.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 1:10:27Speaker 05

  Why are you guys pulling that up?

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Have, have you guys seen that, um, what is that? That, that new Audi? The, the one that looks like it's like at a cyberbunk?

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  I think that one is

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Same designer as the new Jaguar.

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Did you know that? So, so the, and, and, and so the thing

• 1:10:45Speaker 05

  Guys, I was excited about that for a minute. Come on, why are you gonna do that?

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but the issue with the Jaguar was not, the silhouette was like very cool. It was one of those, like, the future is here moments. And then there, the way that they did the rollout of it and the rebrand, like, obviously got a lot of pushback, but like fundamentally, I thought like, this is what Batman would drive in the year 2050.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  You see that thing in matte black? It looks a lot different than like the pink and pastel blues. There was just like a little bit too much contrast, but then we're getting out of the colors. Maybe we gotta spec it in some bright pink.

• 1:11:17Speaker 05

  One of those, I would go full Batman, the animated series. Like, I would go with like a, like a cream color.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:25Speaker 05

  And make it look as like art deco as possible.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that'd be good.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  The new Velary, the new Velary is crazy. The new Velary is crazy. I have a friend specking one of them in like this crazy, crazy color. I'm not even gonna, I'm not gonna say what it is. I wanna let him have his moment. I think it will be one, you know, one of

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  And also a lot, a lot less pushback for the Audi because it's, uh, it's built on the Lamborghini platform, I believe. So it's a V10 or V8. It has a, you know, internal combustion engine. And I think Jaguar like changed a lot of things at the same time, going electric, going huge sedan, going crazy colors, very bold marketing. And when you shift seven different things, you get a lot of visceral reactions.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Fiat.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Let's see this. There we go. What do you think about this? You picking one up?

• 1:12:13Speaker 05

  Oh guys.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  You're not, you're not ripping one of these things around with the boys. Imagine, imagine having, so okay, so one of these is kinda silly, but if you're with your, your buddies and you each have one and you're rolling deep. That's pretty cool.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  Put a Mansory kit on that.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  I think we got a picture of a, there's a convertible version, I guess with doors.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  Can you imagine, hang, I, I, kids cannot imagine hanging out with my friends and us like caravaning these, it'd be, we'd look like such dweebs. I'm sorry.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Nah, nah. You might say that, you might say that.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  Just wait until you fire up the V12 engine that you swap in that thing.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  That'll.

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  I think I can pull it off.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we got, we got one more.

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Okay, what else we got?

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the Twizy, the Renault Twizy, have you seen these? The doors go up.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  The doors go up.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  You sit one behind.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  We saw this in Europe, we were in France last week or two weeks ago, and these were, uh, extremely popular with like young teenagers. They'd have a whole bunch of them sort of caravaning around. Seems like, uh, particularly good for narrow streets. Again, it's the right tool for the job. Is it gonna take it to a track day? Probably not, but, uh, in the right, in the right environment. I think the Twizy, the, is a Renault, right?

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  Renault Twizy, let's.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  The team's pulling it up. Imagine.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Imagine at least two of us in here together going on a coffee.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Wait, is that a three person version?

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  No, no, one, somebody's gotta stay behind.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:13:51Speaker 05

  It looks like that person's sitting in that person's lap.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Jordi Hays?

  It's a tight squeeze.

• 1:13:56John Coogan?

  Sort of a motorcycle more than a.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  It's not, it's not very spacious. I will say that, but.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  How many wheels does this thing have on it? Is it two or four?

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  It's four, it's four.

• 1:14:07Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  It's four.

• 1:14:08Speaker 05

  Can't quite tell from that angle. It might be a bicycle.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Look, I know you have a great car collection, but clearly there's some holes, right? No Twizy.

• 1:14:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  You don't have five, you don't have five Fiat's.

• 1:14:21Speaker 05

  That this, uh, hot garbage is coming out. The rest of mod community is making some good stuff right now. I'll just put that out there.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  Okay, yes. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about this. Hot girl cars, uh, old Land Rovers, old Defenders, uh, modified. Sydney Sweeney has one. What is your take on what makes for a good resto mod in the SUV world?

• 1:14:46Speaker 05

  As long as you're not swapping it out for an electric powertrain, I think I'm, I'm, I'm down with it.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  You're good?

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  I had, I had a, I saw one this weekend.

• 1:14:55Speaker 05

  People that, that are like, oh, I'm into cars. And I'm like, okay, cool. Like what kind of cars are you into? And they're like, well, I bought, you know, like an old Bronco and I made it electric. And a little part of me just sort of dies when I hear that. I'm like, ah.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, I'm, I'm in favor. I like when they're kept like very pure, right? I don't like when the, when the badges or, or any of the, the markings are changed. I saw a Bronco on Saturday where all the badges were swapped to just say vintage. And I was like, clearly it's a vintage car. Like you don't, you don't need to like, you don't need to like spell it out. And so I, I personally, I, I, I appreciate when it's like as left, as pure as possible. And then just like modified to make it slightly more comfortable or redoing the interior, et cetera.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  What about a 1955, what about a 1955 Cadillac Coupe de Ville swapped with a Tesla Model Plaid? So you can get 200 miles an hour in it. That seems good.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  I like, uh, John's just trying to, just trying to trigger you.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  Model S battery in.

• 1:16:03John Coogan?

  Sorry, what were you saying?

• 1:16:05Speaker 05

  I was, I was saying, I was with you until we got to the electrification bit of it.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, but at 200 miles an hour, bombing down the Autobahn in a 1955 Cadillac Coupe de Ville and.

• 1:16:16Speaker 05

  So that thing is gonna be a rattle box at 200 miles an hour. Can you imagine just the whole thing? Just like.

• 1:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Death machine. Uh, what's your, uh, I, are, are you, are you gonna be racing at all for our challenge?

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  Challenge, baby?

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  You're two, you're two.

• 1:16:33Speaker 05

  Not much of a racer, not much of a racer. I'm, I'm much more of like a hot rodder and like driving on, you know, beautiful beach roads kinda guy.

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:42Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, I, I, you know, it's one of those things, like a lot of people really love that side of it. I've never had that much of a need for speed personally.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, we enjoy.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  It makes me a little nauseous, to be totally honest.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we enjoy going to the track, but there's, there's people that enjoy going to the track that are like putting it all on the line every time. And I, I can't do it. Like with young children, I just like, uh, I, I, I'm, I'm building out like a, a really robust sim right now to, to.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  See what you got.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just to, just to actually try to push myself, but again, I don't know that I would ever want to replicate what I'm gonna do in the sim actually on the track, but.

• 1:17:27Speaker 05

  Are you, are you guys going to Car Week?

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  It's really poorly timed with the arrival of my next child. Like very, like within, within days.

• 1:17:39Speaker 05

  Within days, huh?

• 1:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I'm, I'm gonna probably have to.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  Get ready to deliver the baby in the back of a.

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Home birth at Car Week.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  At Car Week. You've heard of babies delivered in backs of, of, uh, taxi cabs.

• 1:17:53Speaker 05

  Be at the racetrack watching vintage racing and like the beating sun, uh, and having to rush to the hospital.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I, I, uh, as much as it pains me, I think I'm gonna be sitting this.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Maybe next year, maybe next year. Uh, if you had to do one, which one would you do? Cannonball, New York to LA, Paris to Carr Rally or Gumball 3000?

• 1:18:21Speaker 05

  The Gumball 3000 is across the, uh.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Is that a Siberian tundra?

• 1:18:26Speaker 05

  Oh, I would definitely do that one.

• 1:18:27John Coogan?

  They move around a little bit. I think the Gumball moves around, but, uh, it's a long, it's a long rally, but it's less of, you know, track focus. It's less at the limit as the Cannonball, which is, uh, New York to, uh, I think La Jolla as fast as possible.

• 1:18:40Speaker 05

  I feel like that one, I feel like the Gumball would have, have a lot more of like eating beans out of a can, like on the side of the road, which is kinda the vibe I'd go for.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it seems really fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about cars for 45 minutes. Let's talk about space. Let's talk about business.

• 1:18:57Speaker 05

  Totally good.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, get us up to speed on progress since we last spoke. I wanna specifically talk about, uh, launch vehicles, what it takes to get to space at scale, what you're thinking there. So take us through just the general update and then we can go more specific.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  And we can get back.

• 1:19:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, pretty, pretty busy times here at the Cowboy Space Corporation, which, uh, I love the mission statement. We're on a, we're on a mission to power humanity from the high frontier. It's just like got that little bit of country twang to it.

• 1:19:26John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:19:28Speaker 05

  So we, we announced, uh, fundraising and the plans to vertically integrate into launch vehicle plus data centers and space architecture. Um, and a little bit on that, right? We, I, we, we've talked a little while ago, but I'd kind of, since I started the company, I'd been pretty focused on figuring out the energy economics and in particular, trying to figure out what the path is to making compute from space or, you know, energy derivative services from space competitive on a cost basis with doing terrestrial. That's kinda the North Star.

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  And when, when we kind of got to the architecture that we announced, that was the, the aha moment is like, when you look at the whole, when you look at the entirety of the problem, including the launch vehicle, the path to get into data center in space, along with the architecture of the data center part in space, and, and you, and you optimize the entire thing, that's one of the paths to getting to the cost competitive economics, um, was when we really doubled down on building the launch vehicle as a part of the data center in space. And I think also, um, it's become, you know, more and more clear over time that the launch capability that people will need to do all this interesting stuff in space, like it's, it's, it's gonna be a while before it's there. SpaceX is obviously running ahead with that, but they're gonna end up using a lot of that capacity for themselves.

• 1:20:55Speaker 05

  And so we, we knew that if we wanted to control our destiny, we'd have to go down this path, which. I did not think I was going to start a rocket business when I started this company, but.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  So what are the dials that you're turning on launch vehicle? Are you going bigger or smaller?

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  The data anti data center movement here.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:21:16Jordi Hays?

  Even more of a catalyst.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  That's a tinfoil hat conspiracy.

• 1:21:20Speaker 05

  It's not a tinfoil hat. It's a it's a blue hair conspiracy.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:21:24Speaker 05

  They'll see me protesting outside of a data center.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Put them in space.

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  You gotta you gotta go boots on the ground.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  People will be protesting that in due time. Don't you worry. But but on the launch vehicle, what dials are you turning in terms of the amount of mass to orbit? Or the size of the vehicle, the fuel, like, like, what? How do you want to develop something that's different? Or do you just want to have a secondary option that's as close to the sort of standard interoperable market standard launch vehicle? Or do you want something that fulfills a specifically different role and fits a different piece of the stack?

• 1:22:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, so first things first, you guys will see a much more detailed update from us on overall launch vehicle architecture, kind of an unveiling of what the rocket looks like, how pointy it is, stuff like that. So stay tuned on that, but I'll give you I'll give you a couple of breadcrumbs to that right now. First one is on the launch vehicle itself. We want to optimize for simplicity of architecture and speed to market. Those are kind of high level objectives. We don't have to build the Bugatti Veyron of rocket engines here. We want to build something that's much more the Honda Civic of rocket engines. And what that looks like, it's down selecting each one of the the core trades in the system

• 1:22:49Speaker 05

  to optimize for what can we build relatively quickly that gets the job done and starts getting payloads to orbit? Because there's there's different paths we could take with this. The the the North Star for me is like, cut out the arts and crafts projects. Like, just focus on building data centers in space, building a rocket architecture that is purpose built for that.

• 1:23:13Jordi Hays?

  And and notably not focused on reusability at all, at least initially. Is that right?

• 1:23:19Speaker 05

  No, I think we're we're going to aim for reusability as quickly as possible. One of the things that we we hope to do on the path to getting there is having economics that support making something that's viable with a non reusable version of it. So that we're not waiting forever to to start getting payloads up.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, because I imagine with the I imagine with some of the AI projects, the the AI compute is so valuable economically, so economically dense that non reusable payloads might actually make sense, at least in the short term. Of course, you want to save money over the long term. But when you think about the value of a of a of, you know, large scale compute in orbit, that could be potentially higher than some of the other payloads that are going up right now, right? So that sort of pulls forward your roadmap.

• 1:24:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think this, if I understand you right, I think one of the things that is an interesting observation here is more on the the sort of business and economics of the rocket business. One sec, my light just cut off here.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  We got an add in and a nice view of the the art right behind you. So thank you.

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  I can't get away from the technical difficulties, you say. My goodness. So as I say, on the economics and the business of rocketry, I think there's something that's pretty interesting that's happened here, which is if you look back in time towards kind of when the first commercial rocket businesses were getting started, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et cetera. The primary business model, as I understand it, was third party launch. Build a rocket to take stuff to space and the taking the stuff to space is the monetization.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Speaker 05

  Which, if you rewind the clock 10 to 15 years ago, the majority of that activity was driven by government, right? It was government needs, government payloads, national security, et cetera, et cetera. What we're seeing now is the bulk of the payload that at least, you know, that is going to be going to orbit, a lot of it is commercial. And in particular, the AI component is is commercial in nature by and large. And when you when you realize that that fundamentally changes the way that you think about the rocket business, you you you realize that like, the, how to say this? The development path starts to change, right?

• 1:25:54Speaker 05

  Because as you're if you're launching first party payloads, you look at the economics of what does it take to get a successful launch to orbit? What is the cost of a failed launch to orbit? And you control the entire economic stack there. So if you have a failed launch to orbit and you're and the sort of consequence of that is a first party payload, it's very different than if the failed launch is for a government payload. To say it differently, when it's purely commercial, the incentive, I think, is much more to try early and often. And to get to that that sort of like successful launch and eventually to get to reusability and get payloads to orbit that start monetizing along the way.

• 1:26:40Speaker 05

  And I think that flows through the entirety of the decision making of how you build a rocket company in 2026, right? Said differently, we're building this thing for our data center and space payload. We're not building it for third party payloads. We're not building it for human spaceflight or any of that stuff. We might do that at some point in the future. But we think that the majority of like the actual substance and the revenue of this is going to come from the first party payloads and data centers in space.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Very different company from Robinhood. What lessons are you actually taking? What are you drawing from the Robinhood playbook, if anything, for this company?

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  Um, well, it's kind of interesting because the the techno economic analysis of how do you? How do you make a service make sense like this? There's there's some overlapping in thinking there, like, how do you make the economic cases make sense?

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  The other part is building engineering teams like that. That translates over pretty well. And building them, I think the interesting thing here is that it's a largely distributed engineering workforce. A lot of it is quite different, I'll be honest. There's less consumer product involved. There's much more manufacturing involved. But at the end of the day, the the the circumstances in some ways are similar, right? It's like, starting out from the standpoint, the Robinhood, you know, era of my life, I guess, is still going on. But the the starting of that was, how do you build something that competes against these existing brokerages?

• 1:28:26Speaker 05

  And how do you really, really focus on a very specific set of things that gets a meaningful use case in the market?

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  I think that part is actually kind of similar. It's like, how do you make a meaningful rocket space company by being hyper, hyper focused on a small number of things? Because, like I said, we're not in the business of doing human spaceflight and all these other things. But how do you find that that niche that you care about and say ultra focused on on making that happen?

• 1:28:56Jordi Hays?

  In 30 seconds, because I know you have to hop. SpaceX is in the cloud business now. They have a launch business. You can imagine that Elon just wants more and more and more and more of that end market. Has that changed the dynamic of conversations that you're having with, let's say, other hyperscalers and labs that are competing with with Elon, Inc.? And don't want to end up in a situation where they are, you know, basically forced to purchase from a monopoly, you know, or, you know, cloud from monopoly, et cetera?

• 1:29:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think the the overwhelming dynamic here now and in the future is just the need for compute, right? I think there's there's definitely people that are concerned about controlling their own data centers. But if you kind of look around at the marketplace right now, people are trying to get capacity whenever and wherever they can get it. So there's I'm sure there's a little bit of that behind the scenes. But I think the the primary thing that I'm seeing is just the the need for compute and trying to bring it online as quickly as possible. And I don't know, I feel like we all kind of live with that on a day to day basis. You know, like I was asking, you know, Fable to.

• 1:30:09Speaker 05

  I was asking Fable to make some Magic the Gathering decks for me.

• 1:30:13Jordi Hays?

  And you hit your limit?

• 1:30:15Speaker 05

  I kept hitting my limits. I'm like, come on, guys. Like, just make the deck for me.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, it is a crazy time. Like, Apple is leasing GPUs from Google. Google's leasing GPUs from SpaceX. And they're all like, everyone is

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Google's selling Meta, like, sorry, we don't have

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  And then Meta is like, we have too much capacity to sell. And so everyone's doing a deal with everybody else. So it's a good, it's a good business to be in since everything's growing and demand is, uh, demand solves so many headaches and, and, and justifies so many

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  All right, I know you have to jump. Let's get a couple of these Fiat's. Let's bomb around Car Week, the three of us, maybe a few others. Maybe Car Week 2027.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  So I don't

• 1:30:56Speaker 05

  I'm totally down, totally down. I, I love it. I, I go most years.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well,

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Congrats on the progress.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  Congrats on the progress and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:31:05Speaker 05

  Thanks, boys.

• 1:31:06John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Our next guest is Daniel English from Legacy Investments. He's a managing partner there. We'll bring him in to the TVP in UltraDome from the waiting room. Legacy Investments does private real estate and infrastructure investment platform. Daniel, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:31:26Speaker 06

  What's going on? Thanks for having me.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  How was your Fourth of July?

• 1:31:30Speaker 06

  Uh, in the nation's capital. So I was here for all the storms and the fireworks.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Very fun.

• 1:31:36Jordi Hays?

  Electric.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Well, since it's your first time on the show, I would love for you to kick it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and Legacy Investments, get us up to speed.

• 1:31:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So my original background was tech entrepreneurship, uh, probably similar to you guys. And then saw the opportunity in infrastructure for the build out of the internet. And 15 years ago, started investing in data centers and, uh,

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  Uber Night's success. Yeah, e-commerce warehouses as well. And also some life, life sciences, real estate, is that correct?

• 1:32:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, sort of all takes the same kind of infrastructure. So the whole idea was own the infrastructure that, you know, the, the digital world is being built on top of.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. These just makes a ton of sense. Take us through the very first deal. Like, did you have to marshal capital? Is it like raising a venture fund? Are you just deploying your own capital and working with a bank for a mortgage? Like, what was that first deal like?

• 1:32:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's very similar to venture, right? So, you know, just huge sums of money. I mean, today, our typical deal is $600 million to just each. So, and that's a small data center investment, right? So, so, so big, big dollars. But yeah, I mean, you go out, you raise your money, you have a pitch deck, uh, uh, the same basic, um, same basic process. So, yeah, we started, you know, I think 15 years ago, nobody understood what a data center was. So it was fascinating. In fact, I got laughed at a lot by private equity who was like, you left tech.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  Wow. Who's laughing now?

• 1:33:05Speaker 06

  Which is amazing now.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. They're like, hey, we'd love to catch up and get coffee and you can tell us about how this all works.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  So, so I, I, I want to understand, uh, data centers went from being something that no one really cared about to suddenly everyone cares about them all the time. So much so that if anything happens at a data center tied to any hyperscaler gets like reported to the front page of the Wall Street Journal or even the New York Times, right?

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Like satellite photos monitoring the build out.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  So, so, uh, through that process, how, how did the game change from an investing standpoint? You know, rewinding, let's say, early 22 to, to 23, and then I want to go from like 2023 to 2024 and like understand those, those changes because it's just been ramping up to such an extreme degree. And it still feels like there's a ways to go.

• 1:33:58Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, the first transition was in, call it 2010, when cloud really came on the scene, right? So, so you had data centers before 2010. 2010, it's sort of 22, you had a big run up in cloud. And, and so that was a whole era of data centers that shifted. But really with, with the introduction of AI, you've got this huge increase in density and demand. I mean, demand was already growing astronomically, but, but as you guys know, AI is really pushing, pushing that. And, and at the same time, and we're also constraining on, on power. So the biggest transition was just the amount like of, of power. So in, in 2010, you know, a five megawatt data center was a good one.

• 1:34:40Speaker 06

  30 megawatts was sort of peak. Now, you know, 30 megawatts is a small data center. Uh, you're, you know, everybody wants a gigawatt. Uh, and, and so that scale is just astronomical versus what we had before. And so what we're seeing is, you know, really everything we're doing, including this show, is happening in a data center. And what's fascinating to me is most people I talk to

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's got to tell Theo Von that. I don't know if you saw, saw that clip where he's like, no one wants these on his like video podcast.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Distributed via a million data centers all over the world. It's fascinating.

• 1:35:14Speaker 06

  But, but, but when, when we talk, like my branding firm interviewed a bunch of 20 something year olds and they're like, where do you think everything that's happening on your phone is happening? And they're like, what's happening on my phone? And we're like, no, it's not. It, it happens in a building.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:26Speaker 06

  And, but, but that creates an arms race right now around AI because everything we do in our lives happens in, in a building and digital infrastructure. And there is a massive supply constraint because of that, that increase in power demand. I mean, there's only so much power and frankly, there's only so much land, particularly with the political sentiment right now, that you can build these. And so having access to a building to house your compute becomes a distinct competitive advantage in the AI.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  So what does your search process look like? If I'm, I, I mean, I've seen data centers in downtown where it's like a converted office building, no windows. That's probably for a CDN or some local delivery. But, uh, if you're just driving through the middle of America and you see some land, are you thinking about power or is there natural gas in the ground? Are you, so how are you, like, or are you doing more of the deals where it's like what happened at Colossus where there was a building that already had a lot of power for manufacturing appliances, like washing machines? And then it was easier to convert and upgrade that building. Do you do everything? Like, what's the process for finding a, a site?

• 1:36:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, data centers are really giant machines, right? I think that's probably obvious. And, and what's exciting to me is it's the first time in human history, we had buildings that weren't designed for humans, truly, right? You think about most buildings you interact with or real estate or private equity invest in are designed for people. Data centers are, it's not about a person, it's about a machine. So, so in terms of where do you pick a data center? So you're really picking on where the machine wants to go. Machines care about power, right? So power is, you know, to get quick power, you need infrastructure. So, so we're really looking at infrastructure and then you're looking at fiber, uh, so that we can get all the digital bits around. So that's also a form of infrastructure. So you're really going to power and fiber first and foremost.

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  Uh, water obviously is a hot topic anymore. Most of, particularly what we're building, it's all closed loop systems. So you're not using a lot of water. And so really it's, it's fiber and, and power infrastructure. And, and then the third piece is latency. So how much time does it take to deliver those digital bits? How close are you? And so historically, you did not see data centers downtown, other than for networking. Uh, today, like we bought the Chicago Board of, of Options Exchange building on, on LaSalle Street downtown. And we're turning that into a large AI data center right now. And that is wonderful because I've got great latency, great fiber and lots of power infrastructure I can tap into.

• 1:38:02Speaker 06

  But what's fascinating is I can put 50 megawatts in about 40,000 square feet in that building today because of densities. In 2010, I may have gotten four megawatts in that building.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  Fascinating. Um, what does your, uh, your government relations team or strategy look like, uh, interfacing with neighbors to data centers, regulators, uh, senators to, you know, mayors, all sorts of different, who are the important constituents to get on board when you're working on a project?

• 1:38:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, but part of, right now, I mean, you guys obviously are highly aware of this. The political problem with, with data centers is very real right now. And, and it's interesting because we all use them, right? Our, our lives are dependent on them. But I think there's a need for partnership with the cities and the communities. So that's something we take very seriously. You know, I got a question recently about, you know, the data centers are bad or ugly or are using all our water and power. A lot of those are either misconceptions or, you know, somebody did build a bad building. You can always build a bad building. And so I would say something we work very hard at is partnering with cities on deploying data

• 1:39:21Speaker 06

  centers that are not using all the water, are using existing grid infrastructure, and frankly are not ugly.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there a, I mean, we were talking about the cellphone towers in Los Angeles. They're sort of dressed up like trees. I don't know that's that effective at being beautiful.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Gets me every time.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  They do sort of melt in the background. Of course, like when you're up close, you can clock it, but when it's just on, you know, the horizon, you don't really notice it. Have you seen any trends in sort of like low hanging fruit in like, oh, if we just do this, yeah, it'll increase the cost 1%, but the response from the community is going to be 50% better because we did X, Y, or Z?

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, absolutely. So I converted a, or my team and I converted a glass office tower in downtown Minneapolis into a large AI data center. It's a beautiful building. And in fact, nobody even knows there's a data center in there for the most part. We're doing, you know, the Chicago Board of Option Exchange building is a beautiful architectural building. Part of what I love about data centers is it's really infrastructure. And so you can bury it underground. You can put it on top of a roof. You can do these mixed use. They do not have to look like prisons, some of them do. And so that gives you a lot of creative flexibility. Like we're building a greenfield data center in Texas right now,

• 1:40:46Speaker 06

  and our architecture team found ways to do fencing that effectively, you can imagine Frank Gehry's, you know, museums. It sort of looks more like that. And so there are actually a lot of windowless buildings that, you know, we all like culturally. And so we take a lot of inspiration from that.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically, every, every sports stadium is sort of windowless from the outside, and yet we love them and they look great.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you involved in any conversations, or have you heard of any conversations where local communities are effectively asking for direct payments in order to provide support for a data center? Because you said like, we all use data centers, but the thing about data centers is Google's going to find a way to serve me no matter what, regardless of if they're my neighborhood or my community.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  And it's like three milliseconds of extra latency to put it five counties over. And so it's very easy to push the not in my county rhetoric if the only impact of that's going to be a millisecond of latency or something like that.

• 1:41:52Speaker 06

  We're seeing, yeah, I mean, there is a lot of pressure, obviously, on where data centers go right now. We are seeing communities make direct asks. We're seeing tenants and investors such as ourselves do as much as we can to benefit the community. There are significant benefits. So let me take my building in downtown Minneapolis. That building's recently sold for, we still manage it, but it recently sold for the highest price of a building in Minneapolis or in Minnesota. And so you imagine that building, when I stepped into it, was basically mostly worthless. It was an office building, mostly vacant. Let's call it less than $30 million of value. And now it's one of the highest priced buildings

• 1:42:36Speaker 06

  in Minnesota. I mean, that shift is, and it still looks like a beautiful glass office tower. It's not using huge amounts of water.

• 1:42:44Jordi Hays?

  And you're saying there's like massive, yeah, massive increase in property tax revenue.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  Because of the new sale price. That makes a lot of sense. Interesting.

• 1:42:52Speaker 06

  And then you also have hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure going in from the tenants. You've got hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from us. We did create new jobs. And so, so those are good, those are obviously positive benefits. On a, you know, we are seeing everything from tenants and, and investors sponsor everything from new fire stations and fire trucks to, you know, benefits for, for housing, schooling, in addition and on top of sort of just tax benefits, right?

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  What is your process for sequencing out finding tenants? I imagine it's sort of a if you build it, they will come moment for you. But in terms of talking to hyperscalers, NeoClouds, doing something yourself, partnering with a chip company, I mean, everyone is participating in various levels of the stack. What does it look like for you as you're sussing out an opportunity?

• 1:43:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, and obviously, it's a, it's a big deal right now for anybody to have access to, to infrastructure for compute, right? So the hyperscalers, the NeoClouds, everybody's competing for the same space. In fact, we often see that the same, we've had video game companies, NeoCloud, Cloud, users all try and get in the same building, right? So everybody's competing for a fairly limited supply. It is very, I would say, it functions much more like partnerships. Cities, very partner oriented. Tenants, it's very partner oriented because these are huge, massive capital investments, right? So on the low end, you're looking at

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  half a billion dollars. On the high end, you're looking at $10 billion, right? And so, but they're making just as big of investments. I'm guessing that's obvious, but, you know, they're, they're the ones providing the chips and, and serving their customers too. And so, and so there's a mutual investment on both sides. So there's a, I would say, a tight relationship between the tenants and developers and capital partners such as ourselves to help make sure these are successful. Nobody wants them to not be successful. But it is speculative on the capital's part. So these are not build to suits. Like, we're not, we're not sort of buying land with a tenant in tow. We're buying land and getting

• 1:45:11Speaker 06

  the development going and risking capital to make sure that they have it on time that they need it.

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  A friend of mine is in the art business. I know you're a collector. He was telling me over the weekend about what a mess the, the art world is right now in the art industry. Does that make it a great time to be a collector?

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, there's, what I love about art collecting is it's a lot like investing, right?

• 1:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you want to buy low and sell high. So if like the market's in turmoil and it's bad, it's probably a good time to acquire things that you love before a correction upward. But how have you been approaching it?

• 1:45:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would say, yeah, exactly that. I think the art market, the, the argument is always bet on art history, right? So, so what's fascinating about art is it captures this moment in time, right? Where there's, there's a shift in perspective or ideas or thinking. And, and that's where the great art really is and the value tends to be captured in those pieces. And so, so I would say my particular art investment leanings, collectings are on, you know, what's big in art history. So like I just picked up a Dan Flavin, who was famous for light, light art, light bulb art in the 60s. And, and so I got the piece

• 1:46:32Speaker 06

  this month, the first piece he ever did with multiple light bulbs. And the whole thesis to that is, well, one, it's beautiful and I love it. But, but two, it's, it's an important moment in art history. And so, you know, you're sort of, it's, it's like betting on core real estate or, or I suppose, you know, a great tech, tech company that's building something brand new.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  Does, does, does buying a historically significant piece of art feel more risky than buying, than buying, let's say, like a rundown building or a billion, a building like you described in Chicago? Or does it feel about the same? Do you have a similar confidence level when buying both?

• 1:47:13Speaker 06

  I would say what I love is both of them have a lot of specialized knowledge. And so if you have the specialized knowledge, you can do sort of that risk adjusted analysis. So I would, I would say they feel equivalent to me, at least the ones that, that I've been, the bets that I were making feel equivalent to me. But, you know, data centers, adaptive reuse, you know, real estate, all, all of that is just highly specialized, right? And so, so, you know, I, like a lot of people, I surround myself with other really smart people to give me good guidance, but it feels like a safe bet.

• 1:47:47Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever thought of combining the two passions? I know that you're describing this glass building, which, which sounds amazing, but have you thought about working with a contemporary artist to try to make the world's most beautiful data center? I feel like that would be a good kind of flagship project for you that I at least would like to see.

• 1:48:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yes, we have some things in the works in Chicago, in fact. One of my favorite, this is maybe slightly different than where you're going, but my favorite example of this is what Louis Vuitton did on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where they wrapped a construction project in what looks like a giant Louis Vuitton trunk. And I have an apartment right around the corner from it, and I see people photograph it constantly. And, and I love that idea, but, but I keep thinking, can we wrap data centers in something that's interesting and beautiful that, that people want to photograph instead of hate?

• 1:48:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something where if aliens are, are monitoring us, they're like, what, what are these crazy things that they're so obsessed with?

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 1:48:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for, thanks for the update.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Have a fantastic weekend.

• 1:48:57Speaker 06

  Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk soon, Daniel. Cheers.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Our next guest is the president and head of artificial intelligence at Raplet. Michele is in the waiting room. And we're excited to talk all things vibe coding, the shift from vibe coding to vibe building. Break it down for us. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:49:20Speaker 07

  Hey, guys. How are you doing?

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time.

• 1:49:24Jordi Hays?

  We're doing great. Three day weekend. What did you build?

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Ooh, good question.

• 1:49:30Jordi Hays?

  I built a sunbird on my back. I worked hard.

• 1:49:37Speaker 07

  I was flying to Paris.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:49:39Speaker 07

  I'm calling you from Paris right now. I'm gonna be speaking at the race summit.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for staying up late. So why don't you set the table for us, introduce yourself a little bit and explain how you fit into the organization, what the top projects are for Raplet in your world they are these days.

• 1:49:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, so as you said, I'm president and out of AI basically means everything technical the company currently rolls up to me. And the personal, you know, came up with the push of creating rapid agent and led the project from day one. And this happened back in September 2024. If you recall, back coding didn't even exist as a term back then. It was coined in February 2025, if I recall correctly. So we're the first one to launch in this space and we we basically pioneered them. You know, we charted this new market that keeps expanding like crazy. We had four major agent releases in the meantime. And if anything, I'm more excited about the months that are about to come rather than the crazy roller coaster we went through in the last couple of years.

• 1:50:41Speaker 07

  Because the capabilities are expanding so much that naturally the scope we have as a company will just extend like crazy.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  So pitch me like it's three months from now. It's September or October and I'm non-technical, someone who has, you know, heard about the AI boom, but doesn't really know where to start. What are you instructing someone in a few months from now? How should they be interacting with Raplet and Raplet agents to do something? What's a good hello world on absolute steroids project for them to get started with?

• 1:51:16Speaker 07

  Think about it this way, for the last two years at least, we've been talking about agents all the time. But it's still extremely difficult for everyone to build their own agents. And in a sense, you know, we've been lucky because in our company like Rapid could grow so much because we know we pioneered the space. But now I want everyone to be capable of creating their own agents. And the reason is fairly simple. If I can make a prediction, I do believe that sooner than later, we're gonna be seeing far fewer apps being used rather than agents. And the reason is we built TVs, we built computers in this way in the last decades. Because the only way we had to interact with them was keyboards and mouse and click and data input, which is very much error prone.

• 1:52:00Speaker 07

  The way you work inside is you talk to your colleagues, you discuss, you decide what to do, you express in natural language your intent. And then you either delegate or you do, you get the job done yourself. But guess what? Agents do exactly that. You know, the more autonomous we make them, the more capable we make them, the more they're gonna be able to complete tasks end to end. And I want everyone to be capable of building their own customized agents. So three months from today, if we chat again, I'll be mostly talking about that. And our product will be pushing that direction very much.

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  Okay. Talk to me about the split between these three use cases that I see coding agents generally being used for. One is the ad hoc, go and do something, pull a bunch of information. I did this most recently, looking around my neighborhood, looking at different lots and registrations of the government. Go pull a bunch of data, organize it into a spreadsheet, turn that spreadsheet into an infographic, work through all of that. Like you were a super powerful executive assistant who knew how to write Python and scrape the web to produce a single report, basically deep research on steroids.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Then the second bucket that I see a lot is I want a daily summary. I want you to do something for me that requires AI and LLMs to summarize information, put something together, something that runs continuously. And then the third is go build me a piece of software one time, deterministic software. And then I will interact with that software on a regular basis. So Ben Thompson just went on a vibe coding journey. He built a inventory management system for his house. It is a piece of deterministic software that runs on his local network. And then, once he is interacting with it, is pure deterministic software. There is no AI inference that's happening, really. Maybe it calls out to an API.

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  But those three buckets, is that a good way to think about the way people are using AI today? What's the breakdown and how do you see it evolving?

• 1:54:05Speaker 07

  I think it's a good way. And the last bucket you mentioned, the deterministic software, the fact that you can build a lot of internal tools. And you see a lot of solopreneurs creating software zero to one on Rapid. That's where most of the effort went in the last couple of years. I think we're gonna be seeing a shift very quickly away from that. Apps are not gonna be disappearing overnight, they still play a role. SaaS will play a role in companies for a long, long time. But it's also true that some of the software can be replaced by agents accomplishing tasks end to end. And that's what I think if we.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And is that, is that, is that the fat models? Like you used to go to an LLM and ask it to do two plus two and it would guess four. Then it was able to write a little bit of Python. But and and that's just expanding to the point where the actual LLM itself, the API for the model can do more and more capabilities and the agent harness will be able to do more and more as well. So you essentially instantiate whatever software you need ad hoc on the fly and you expect that to grow.

• 1:55:13Speaker 07

  Exactly right. LLMs have become much better at longer horizon tasks. You see them working like even flowers in a row. The additional layer that we put on top of them, the agent harnesses, are such that you can also introduce verification criteria. So that, for example, you come up with a high level goal. Say you built an app on Rapid and then you want to optimize the conversion rate. And you set a 5% as a goal. But guess what? You can have an agent doing that for you. You don't have to prompt it on the specifics on how to make that happen. It will connect to your app. The agent will decide to improve conversions, maybe I need to change the copy of the website, maybe I need different images, maybe I need like a different pricing page. And then you keep measuring until it accomplishes the goal.

• 1:55:59Speaker 07

  That's what you've been hearing more and more being talked, you know, in the industry as loops. And I would call this like the post prompting era. We don't put much effort in prompting anymore. Even if you hear anthropic researchers and engineers explaining how to use Table 5, the main insight is stop giving it prescriptions, stop giving it rules. Just tell the model what you want to accomplish and then trust the process. But that's the type of product I think we're gonna be seeing build more and more in the future.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  The goal finding. Jordy.

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  So you mentioned, going back to your earlier call out on

• 1:56:38Jordi Hays?

  you know, people building customized agents. What?

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Are these, are these, is this like entirely personal software? Or do you see this as like one person companies where they'll build an agent and sell it to other people? Is it both? I'm having trouble. I've been just experimenting lately and trying to, every time I think, oh, I should try to use. Oh, I need, I need some information from an app. So like I use Surf Report as an example. Like I'll just ask chat, hey, what's the Surf Report for this spot? And it does it quite well. You can do it for the weather, you can do it for so many different apps. And I expect that agents, as they get better and better, will just be able to,

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  anything that I could imagine a custom agent to do personally, the agent.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  The models can do.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  The models.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  And I've seen this a lot where people will go and build, they'll vibe code a solution to something that the model can do natively. And then you'll be like, yeah, I have a piece of deterministic software that does all, it summarizes all my emails. And it's like, well, you can actually just integrate your email directly and.

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so part of me, part of me is like, I just, I don't know if I'm, I have, I'm being creative enough to think of use cases. Or, or what?

• 1:58:00Speaker 07

  The rule of thumb to be as creative as possible is you need to think in general terms. You don't have to narrow down on, I want an agent that helps me to connect to the few applications that I use on a daily basis. You need to start to think in goals. And the moment you have a goal and you wanna get some type of work done, then allow the agent to decide what are the steps necessary and allow the agent to create the code in order to make that happen. Now, there is one advantage only if you actually create a piece of deterministic software, is that you trade that inflexibility or the cost of tokens. So every time you just allow the model to do the majority of the work, you're actually spending quite a bit of money, especially if you need to use frontier capabilities.

• 1:58:43Speaker 07

  So a lot of the tools, the internal tools built on Rapid today, they tend to be very deterministic also for the reason. Because if they start to be used by hundreds of thousands of people in a company, you don't want them to be, you know, be hitting with the frontier models, otherwise it's financially irresponsible to do that.

• 1:59:00John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Get me up to speed on the state of solopreneurship. And I want a prediction from you on when you think we'll see the first one person, one billion dollar company.

• 1:59:15Speaker 07

  It doesn't really happen. You probably read about that on the New York Times.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  That one, I don't think that one counted.

• 1:59:21Speaker 07

  I know.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  I don't think it counted.

• 1:59:22Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:59:23John Coogan?

  I, I, it was close, but it, it, there were too many, too many complaints from customers. It seemed like they bent the rules of the marketing and they were getting hit with some FTC, FDA issues. I want, I want a clean.

• 1:59:38Jordi Hays?

  Baking doctor recommendations.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Clean one billion dollar valuation.

• 1:59:43Speaker 07

  Let's give it another shot. I would say by the end of the year. We have several, yeah, we have several nine figures company built on Rapid. So it's, it's gonna happen.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:53Speaker 07

  We're almost there.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  I love it, I love it. Well, yeah, definitely shoot us a note when it happens. If you see it inside Raplet, have them pitch us, we'd love to talk to them.

• 2:00:02Speaker 07

  Only accountable, yeah.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. But thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  Enjoy France.

• 2:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Safe travels.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Safe travels and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:00:11Speaker 07

  You're doing.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  We close out with this Raoul post. Guy selling post-trained open source models. If you don't own your own models, you don't own anything. Guy selling harness on top of models. If you rely on one model, you are cooked. Guy selling tokens instead of manually prompting your models. Just put them in a loop where they prompt themselves. And Paula says, guy selling GPUs.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Which is accurate. Everyone has a very different version of their modern sales pitch. We did not.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's close out on this.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what?

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Tony Robbins says his AI agent bought a robot dog to merge with.

• 2:00:50John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't realize it was a dog. I thought it was a humanoid, but.

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's play this.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Talking to Ray Kurzweil. It's a one minute clip. We'll pull this up and play Tony Robbins in conversation with Ray Kurzweil. Author of The Singularity is Near. One of the most accurate AI forecasters in history. Ray Kurzweil called the date of the Turing test 20 years in advance, almost to the day. Very impressive forecast. He's calling Singularity 2035, I think, maybe 2045.

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  This might be technology's daily show, but today is not our day with technology.

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  But this is not a technology issue. This is a near peer adversary attacking us. They want to keep us from watching this video. And so.

• 2:01:38Jordi Hays?

  People are talking about a SpaceX AI rebrand.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:01:43Jordi Hays?

  What's going on there?

• 2:01:44John Coogan?

  I thought that was already a thing. I thought they already said they were going to call it SpaceX AI, which really sort of a mouthful.

• 2:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  SpaceX is doing well. It's still a $2 trillion company. The float is still low and they're unlocking more and more of the shares. But the value has been holding strong north of $2 trillion, which I think a lot of folks who were giving very bearish takes, saying that, oh, the company doesn't make that much money, that it would be, you know, it would be worth a paltry 100 billion by now. But no, it has been cooking. Don't try and pull things up, Jordy.

• 2:02:21Jordi Hays?

  This video livestream does not have the technology.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  Doesn't, it doesn't.

• 2:02:26Jordi Hays?

  To do live.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  There were, the timeline was in turmoil before the break on July 2nd over some Anduril SPV action that happened. Matt Grimm took a shot at Packy McCormick, saying that Not Boring raised an SPV that bought into around a couple of years ago, Vandural. And then Packy came back, set the record straight and said that he didn't sell. And that in fact, it was an LP that had sold. And it all underscores just how complicated some of these later stage investing deals get. Sometimes if you're, you know, an investor and you have an LP and they're going through

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  some financial situation, maybe a divorce, maybe lawsuit, they could need liquidity for something, they're moving things around. Like the ask can be more serious than I think people normally jump to. They always jump to, oh, they're just like trying to flip the stock or something. And that is, you know, not the activity that you want to have happen. But it is, it is a very tricky situation, lots of gray areas. And I think the, the end result is that open conversation almost always benefits. No surprises is the rule. And also, I don't think you should be able to buy or sell Anduril secondary unless you can beat Matt Grimm in a Murph. I think that would solve a lot of this. I think it should all come down to your Murph time. In order to redeem your shares in Anduril, you should be able to, you should have to

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  post video evidence of you doing a Murph, probably sub 45 minutes, maybe sub 40 minutes would be ideal to really get access. That is the future of investor relations. Could apply to all companies, honestly. You want to buy or sell, you gotta do, you gotta run a mile, do 100 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups?

• 2:04:14Jordi Hays?

  100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  He's been practicing. He's trying to get in on the next Anduril SPV for sure. Win Matt over. Anything else you want to touch on today, Jordy?

• 2:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Ben, the video is playing for me.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  Okay, well.

• 2:04:30Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  It's a skill issue apparently. It is a skill issue.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, folks, Portugal, Spain, 0-0 at the half.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  We missed nothing.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  We missed nothing. Thanks for tuning in with us.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  Go flip over, watch.

• 2:04:46Jordi Hays?

  We'll be back tomorrow.

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  Be back tomorrow 11 a.m.

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  It's July. That means we get a little silly around here.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  You're going to hear lots of car questions from our, for our interviewers, for our guests.

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  But if you have tech news.

• 2:04:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Hit us up. You know, it is funny. It is funny. You know, we get into these slower summer months and then all of a sudden you have just insane days.

• 2:05:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  So you gotta be live every day. You gotta be ready.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the basic cycle of tech news will slow down. Venture capitalists are famously on vacation from May 15th to September 27th, right? That's when they go on vacation, right?

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  I think usually mid-October is like realistically.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  When they come back, yeah. But that leaves opportunities. Last year, we got the talent wars. Zuck didn't take any breaks. He was poached in left and right. So we always, there's always a chance we get a wild card, but things have been slow. So lots of time to discuss vehicles and other fun topics. But stay with us. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Have a great week, have a great day.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's go USA.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Leave us Fox Stars and Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Search for our newsletter, tbv.com.