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John Coogan
Co-founder & Co-host, TBPN

Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate

📅 Oct 01, 2026 TBPN 95 MIN 7793 VIEWS 425 SEGMENTS · 6 SPEAKERS
00:01:32 NVIDIA Moves Up the AI Cloud Stack 00:09:54 Factory-Cognition Drama 00:23:17 Instinct Pushes into Shopping 00:35:23 Gemini 4 Argon 00:44:45 Will Bruey discusses Varda’s transition to operating a scalable fleet of commercial reentry vehicles, supported by a $251 million Series D and launch capacity secured through 2029. He also explains how microgravity can advance pharmaceutical manufacturing, why reusable launch infrastructure will expand the space economy, and how Varda has made land-based reentry reliable and cost-effective. 00:58:16 Christophe Beck, chairman, president, and CEO of...

What John Coogan said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

John Coogan discussed Nvidia's DGX Cloud Lepton strategy, noting it evolved from a competitive threat to Neoclouds into a unified AI platform, with Nvidia acquiring Lepton in April 2025 for an estimated $300-900 million. He covered the Kosla Ventures drama involving Venode's attacks on Factory and Cognition, calling it an ad hominem nuke and comparing it to past poaching incidents. Coogan analyzed Instinct's AI shopping recommendations, noting the company is small (13-14 people) and recently hired Ben from COTU as chief business officer. He discussed Gemini 4 Argon's launch, a Los Angeles house for sale accepting OpenAI and Anthropic equity, and interviewed Will Bruey of Varda about their series D and first fleet flight of re-entry vehicles. Coogan also interviewed Christophe Beck of EcoAB about water-neutral data centers, and Hassaan Raza of Tavis about their Griffin model passing a Turing test.

Key takeaways

  1. Nvidia's DGX Cloud Lepton evolved from a competitive threat to Neoclouds into a unified AI platform, with the Lepton acquisition in April 2025 reportedly costing $300-900 million.
  2. Instinct is a tiny team of 13-14 people that recently hired Ben from COTU as chief business officer, which Coogan called a massive unlock for the company.
  3. Varda flew its first fleet of re-entry vehicles (vehicles 8 and 9) and announced a $251 million series D, with launch capacity booked through 2029.
  4. EcoAB's Christophe Beck said 60% of data center projects are paused or delayed due to political opposition, and that their closed-loop cooling uses zero incremental water.
  5. Tavis's Griffin model passed a Turing test with 48% of testers believing it was human, compared to less than 2% for the next best model.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$300-900 million Reported price Nvidia paid for Lepton acquisition other 5:18
13-14 people Instinct's team size metric 34:29
$251 million Varda's series D funding round commitment 47:07
60% Data center projects paused or delayed metric 1:07:16
48% Turing test pass rate for Griffin model metric 1:19:00
26 out of 54 Testers who believed Griffin was human metric 1:19:00
less than 2% Turing test pass rate for next best model metric 1:19:12
15% Testers who thought real human was AI metric 1:19:41
15 times Brody Rec League games compared to NBA metric 1:26:52
40 different locations Brody Rec League venues metric 1:31:19

Chapters

  1. 0:00Nvidia DGX Cloud Lepton evolution
  2. 11:36Kosla Ventures and Cognition drama
  3. 36:46Gemini 4 Argon launch
  4. 41:00LA house tier list
  5. 46:40Varda space manufacturing interview
  6. 1:00:09EcoAB water and data centers interview
  7. 1:18:13Tavis Griffin Turing test interview
  8. 1:26:41Brody Rec League interview
  9. 1:34:56Pop-Tarts and Liquid Death partnership

Questions asked in this interview

12
  1. 12:49Was Keith still at FF when Cognition, when they did Cognition?
  2. 14:13I just feel like, yeah, I forgot. Is that possible?
  3. 17:21I think that was like their term, right?
  4. 25:04Seems like it was just an experiment, right?
  5. 30:34But you can imagine how it knows about the user, but it doesn't know about what car people actually want, right?
  6. 32:26I find that I'm like a thousand times more likely to unsubscribe from text marketing than I am from email marketing, right?
  7. 38:41I don't need any more project Titan. Project uh what was it?
  8. 49:28So, this has obviously been done before in constellations, but never for re-entry vehicles, you know?
  9. 53:34So, you know, sometimes I I like to think back about like, okay, when was Falcon 9 at this level of maturity?
  10. 1:19:28Well, there's also when you're getting asked, do you think this is an AI video?
  11. 1:20:31I mean, essentially we use these models to power what we call pals, right?
  12. 1:26:44What's going on, fellas? How are we?
John Coogan 0:00 ↗
Are experts. Triple blade test right. Clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound. 5. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Founder.
You're watching TBPN. Today's Thursday, October 1st, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
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Great show yesterday. We put the timeline in turmoil with the MongoDB debate around the responsibility of the CEO. I thought it was a really fantastic conversation. I came away like, wow, this is like an unfortunate situation, but a lot of cause for optimism.
Will Bruey 2:30 ↗
Yeah. And I think he summed it up well without going too aggressive, but you know, pass the information through.
John Coogan 2:42 ↗
Exactly. Exactly. And I saw a lot of love for the clip. I saw a lot of people quote quoting the clip and saying like, oh yes, like okay, this confirms what my position was beforehand. So I thought that was cool.
Will Bruey 2:55 ↗
This confirms my pre-existing.
John Coogan 2:57 ↗
Yeah, I suppose.
Will Bruey 2:58 ↗
Thank you for confirming what I already believe.
John Coogan 3:00 ↗
Yeah. The timeline was also in turmoil over Kleiner Perkins' cognition factory. We can go into that. There was one interesting thing that happened on the show yesterday that I didn't really... I started thinking about after the show ended. So our first two guests were from Nvidia and CoreWeave, and obviously those two companies work really closely together, and the conversations were sort of different. We were talking about security with Nvidia, and then CoreWeave, of course, we're interviewing the CEO. So we're talking about the business overall and their transition from a rent-a-GPU company to more of a full AI cloud. They'll rent you everything you need.
And it was interesting because I was remembering that it was just like last year that Nvidia was like, we're going to layer CoreWeave or we're going to layer all the Neoclouds. We're going to be the front door to compute with DGX Cloud Lepton. I don't know if you remember any of this, but this started back in like 2023 post the ChatGPT moment. Jensen comes out on stage at one of the keynotes he gives and he says like, this is the iPhone moment and we're going to aggregate all of the underlying compute and you're going to be able to come to us and deploy whatever resources you are and we're going to compete with like AWS and Azure and GCP and we're going to be a one-stop shop for this stuff and it's going to be really important.
And at the time, I feel like people were sort of like, whoa, okay, this is bold, but this could be really, really powerful. Because they have this odd tension between the Neoclouds, where if you go in, you lose your connection to your customer effectively, and the margins could get compressed. You're in a much more competitive environment. And at the same time, if you don't go in, then Nvidia can just say, hey, like, you know, all the DGX Cloud Lepton customers, well, we're going to send them to the clouds that did sign up. And so you have this like tension. It really did feel like Nvidia had some leverage, biggest company in the world very shortly after, and obviously a very aggressive business. Like, they're not just going to be like, oh, that would be improper to compete.
But it played out very differently, and Nvidia has become very friendly with CoreWeave, and they both found their places where there's still a little competition here and there. But I was just reflecting on like how that journey came together, where that landed. And the long story short is that like the DGX product, it came out and the reviews weren't like, okay, yeah, this is actually better than working with CoreWeave. And there was still so many benefits from going to a Neocloud or even a, you know, true cloud provider. There was just more to do.
Nvidia made an acquisition. They bought Lepton, where the name came from, in April 2025, which sort of kicked most of that discourse off. The rumor was that they paid between 300 and $900 million for that. And Jensen was like so gassed up on this. I loved his quote. He said, 'Nvidia DGX Cloud Lepton connects our network of global GPU cloud providers with AI developers together with our NCPs, which is Nvidia Cloud Providers. We're building a planetary-scale AI factory.' That's what his tagline was. Which makes sense, like there is a world where that would have played out. That's not...
Will Bruey 6:34 ↗
One second. Talk about how we have failed so far to convince a lot of our friends not to call supercomputers AI factories.
John Coogan 6:42 ↗
Yeah. Right.
Will Bruey 6:43 ↗
If we continue to fail, they're going to be like, 'It's a refinery. It's an AI offshore derrick. It's an oil derrick for AI.' Like...
John Coogan 6:56 ↗
It's a chemical plant. Yeah. For AI.
Will Bruey 6:58 ↗
For AI. Yeah. It's exactly what you want in your community. For sure. Yeah.
John Coogan 7:03 ↗
Yeah. Rough. Anyway,
Will Bruey 7:04 ↗
The risk of total failure in your backyard is low, but non-zero.
John Coogan 7:09 ↗
Non-zero. And yeah, and then you have another person who's like, 'Wait, why did you say that?'
Will Bruey 7:14 ↗
Yeah. Ridiculous. I want to go back to supercomputers. We'll make it happen eventually.
John Coogan 7:18 ↗
Hopefully.
Will Bruey 7:18 ↗
Gabe says, 'It's a data ranch, brother.'
John Coogan 7:20 ↗
Data ranch. There we go.
Will Bruey 7:22 ↗
Putting a data ranch in your backyard.
John Coogan 7:24 ↗
Yeah. But yeah, I mean, at the time, there was a bunch of reporting sort of like people familiar with the matter. The Information got a scoop from a bunch of the Neocloud compute providers saying like Lepton was a potential competitive threat, and if you refuse to participate, that creates a risk that Nvidia could direct workloads toward competitors. And it was a bit of this tense time, but the end result was more balanced. So instead of layering their customers and trying to control aggregate demand, which would be really powerful if it happened, the product evolved into this unified AI platform, which is their words, but basically it's between an actual like Expedia for GPUs and just a set of standards.
So it's a bunch of proprietary software. It is sort of what makes up the CUDA moat. So everything from handling GPU node groups, interactive dev pods, distributed batch jobs, inference endpoints, storage, observability, reservations, more. So all the things that you need to actually schedule, manage GPUs, you can run that, but you can still use your own hardware, do whatever you need to have the relationship with the underlying owner of the GPUs. And so the rest of the Neoclouds are generally like, you know, pretty safe.
And so it was interesting because it was heralded as this like, oh, okay, things could get spicy. You could see all the Neoclouds like really chirping at Jensen. Jensen really coming for the throat. Didn't really play out that way. But it does sort of go to show that Jensen does not take lightly to any whispers that the CUDA moat is going away anytime soon. Like he's like the ace is still up the sleeve in my opinion. Like they still have to do a lot of work because when SemiAnalysis actually like demoed it, they were like, ah, it's not working as well as some of the other systems. Like if you were to put, I don't even know if Nvidia Cloud Lepton is on ClusterMax, but at the time that they tested it, they were like, yeah, you're going to have a better experience if you just go direct CoreWeave, Nebius, the other ones that are in the platinum tier.
Will Bruey 9:32 ↗
Yeah, and overall, I think in many ways we've seen it's been very strategic to work with 50, 100 really, really, really smart teams that are going to have their own incentives to grow their businesses, grow their buying of Nvidia.
John Coogan 9:50 ↗
Yeah. And if you just use the framework of like who was upset yesterday about CoreWeave launching their, what was the actual product called? CoreWeave Forge, which is their like AI cloud, right? So they're just saying, 'Hey, we got CPUs now, we got storage, we got tools to manage all of that.' Who's really mad? It's like it's only their direct competitors basically who are like, ah, now we got to catch up. If you're a CPU seller or you're a compute, a storage seller or something like that, you're like, great, I got a new customer. I'm happy. And then if you're a customer of CoreWeave, you're like, 'Okay, I'm happy. I get more stuff.'
And so yesterday's CoreWeave move was not particularly a shot across the bow to anyone other than just like, 'Hey, we know we're in a race with like 300 other Neoclouds. You see them on ClusterMax. We're going to do more to reach that diamond tier, which is what you proposed.' But yeah, really, really remarkable margin expansion story. I mean, the depreciation story, like they beat the depreciation allegations pretty quickly, but that value of like dollar per watt is increasing really, really quickly. And so if they can get in line with the Elon and Jensen 60 billion a gigawatt, it's going to be a very, very exciting business. It already is an exciting business, but it was a fun conversation and that's what my wheels were turning about yesterday.
Let me tell you about Console. Console builds agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go over to the timeline. You...
Will Bruey 11:24 ↗
Anything going on yesterday?
John Coogan 11:26 ↗
You said you wanted to get in the mud and wrestle with pigs, even though the pig likes it and you get muddy.
Will Bruey 11:32 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 11:32 ↗
Okay, let's wrestle.
Will Bruey 11:34 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 11:34 ↗
What are we wrestling about today?
Will Bruey 11:36 ↗
Yeah, so we kind of caught some of this live at the beginning of the show yesterday, but the post kept flowing yesterday. What really got people up in arms was Vinod coming in and saying, 'You are a struggling second-tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation.' Straight out lying about if Chris being fired, I thought would be below even you, just like the most crashing out on Matan's personal crash out.
John Coogan 12:11 ↗
Sure.
Will Bruey 12:11 ↗
So crash out on crash out violence of a three-car pileup. It only took about 20 seconds for people to put it together that Kleiner Perkins is of course an investor in Factory and Cognition.
John Coogan 12:24 ↗
And like a pretty big one, right?
Will Bruey 12:25 ↗
But is funny enough an example that like venture firms can have firewalls and individual people that have exposure to one company that might want to get involved with another company can still behave in a way that is ultimately like ethical.
John Coogan 12:44 ↗
Yeah, right. I'm not saying that Vinod, you know, attacking his portfolio is, but...
Will Bruey 12:49 ↗
Yeah. Was Keith still at FF when Cognition, when they did Cognition? I think he might have already been at Kleiner potentially then. And so I think Keith might be the Factory board member or something. I don't know. I just saw Keith coming to Matan's defense.
John Coogan 13:06 ↗
Yeah, right. Which is obviously the Kleiner Perkins divide, but that's the nature of these partnerships.
Will Bruey 13:15 ↗
Sort of, he sort of clear that Vinod's not using AI for these posts.
John Coogan 13:20 ↗
Totally. All over the place grammatically.
Will Bruey 13:25 ↗
Straight out lying.
John Coogan 13:26 ↗
You are a competitor that is more unethical and lying. That's not right.
Will Bruey 13:32 ↗
This was firing from the hip. He's down here just, but he's got to lay it down. He's got to lay it down. I mean, what this really could say is that even though you have an economic incentive to align with this person, you need to distance yourself from them because you know that they are in the wrong. Like that's like the fact that Vinod has bags here and he's still posting this makes it more severe, right? Like...
John Coogan 14:00 ↗
Yeah, but I think it's...
Will Bruey 14:03 ↗
I think there is a chance that Vinod kind of forgot that he had exposure.
John Coogan 14:06 ↗
I think you got to put that at like 15%.
Will Bruey 14:13 ↗
I just feel like, yeah, I forgot. Is that possible? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, he's a multi-billionaire. The economic...
John Coogan 14:26 ↗
I mean, he was coming here, he came on the show last week to talk about...
Will Bruey 14:36 ↗
He's clearly working more closely with another...
John Coogan 14:40 ↗
Thank you. Was it called FA?
Will Bruey 14:42 ↗
I like that. I would sign up for that. But yeah, he's clearly like on the board of that company and not on the board of Factory because the really crazy thing is like, how did this go straight on the timeline? Like this should have been a text message and maybe it was, but you're only talking about two and a half hours. I feel like if a portfolio founder is out of control, you would text them and say, 'Hey, you are in the wrong. You're about to get smoked. You don't have the leverage here.' Like you would say, 'Hey, look, you're a second-tier competitor and you're being unethical and you're lying, so I think you should take the post down and apologize.' You know, you would say that behind closed doors. You would text that. You would not just go straight to the truth nuke from outer space, which is what Vinod did.
John Coogan 15:31 ↗
It's a truth, right?
Will Bruey 15:32 ↗
Well, I don't even think it's necessarily, I wouldn't call it a truth nuke because it's an ad hominem. Like he just went directly at him. He didn't even talk about any of the facts.
John Coogan 15:42 ↗
Well, so here's the thing. So Luke Metro...
Will Bruey 15:45 ↗
If he knows the facts are true...
John Coogan 15:49 ↗
And we don't disagree that it's a nuke. Correct.
Will Bruey 15:52 ↗
It's definitely a nuke.
John Coogan 15:53 ↗
It's definitely a nuke. The question is, is it a truth nuke or is it an ad hominem nuke? And I think it might be a truth nuke because I think as an investor, you might actually know the truth of what happened. You might know because he could go into like the internal Kleiner Slack or something and say like, who are the board members? Is this guy actually a board member? You know, like what files have been shared from Factory to our board? Oh, nothing relevant that would be useful to Cognition. You know, he could have made that decision.
Will Bruey 16:27 ↗
What are you calling it, Tyler? Ad hom.
John Coogan 16:30 ↗
Ad hom. Okay, it's an ad hom. We'll leave it there. I think we closed that out. But so Luke Metro said what I think everyone was thinking. Can we please not start Cognition versus Factory before we get a resolution to Rippling versus Deel? Great post. That being said, wildly different situation than Rippling versus Deel. When the Rippling Deel drama broke, there was immediately...
Will Bruey 16:55 ↗
Insane, seemingly insane smoking guns.
John Coogan 16:59 ↗
Yep. That are getting worked out through the court system. But it was like Rippling had basically like tricked Deel in some ways, right?
Will Bruey 17:08 ↗
Wait, really? Oh, I don't remember that at all.
John Coogan 17:10 ↗
I mean, it's sort of fuzzy at this point.
Will Bruey 17:14 ↗
It was like a honeypot operation. That is sort of a trick. That's sort of tricky. Okay. Yeah.
John Coogan 17:19 ↗
Well, yeah, honeypot is better.
Will Bruey 17:21 ↗
I think that was like their term, right? They put the honeypot in this. My current read is that the CRO, you know, the advisor goes to Matan and says, 'I'm getting poached.' And Matan says, 'You can't get poached. You're being fired for unethical conduct.' But the firing happened days after he was notified that he was leaving for a competitor.
John Coogan 17:52 ↗
Yeah. Yeah.
Will Bruey 17:53 ↗
And...
John Coogan 17:54 ↗
Yeah. Keith said it is unethical per se to even interview at a competitor while attending board meetings and board dinners. And I read this and I was like, yeah, I think that's right. I think I agree with that. But then I was thinking about like how would he have done this more responsibly if that's what happened? And I was like, so you have to resign because you think that you should go interview at a competitor and then reach out to them. And it doesn't seem like that's the way things happen that often. I don't know.
People like even direct competitors will maintain, you know, somewhat jovial interactions. Oh, how's it going? Oh, it's going great. Yeah, cool, man. Like, and both parties are kind of just saying nothing, but you are having like a conversation technically because you like bump into someone at a conference. You might both be on stage at the same part talking about agentic AI or something. I don't know.
And then I was thinking about like, how does this rank if the new Cognition CRO, I forget his name, was on the... Chris Denon, you know, if Chris Denon was on the... he was a board observer or board advisor. What's the terminology?
Will Bruey 19:22 ↗
I think his only, from what I understand, his only technical title was advisor.
John Coogan 19:28 ↗
Advisor. Okay. So I'm just thinking like back to your original frame of like, is this more or less hardcore than before? And I'm thinking about like the Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt interaction where like Eric Schmidt is on the board of Apple and being like, 'We're buying Android over at Google. We're launching Android over at Google.' And Steve Jobs gets pissed.
Will Bruey 19:50 ↗
Yeah. But it doesn't spell out on the timeline.
John Coogan 19:53 ↗
So that's where Steve Jobs...
Will Bruey 19:54 ↗
Another comp is like Mike Krieger.
John Coogan 19:57 ↗
Oh yeah. His involvement with Figma.
Will Bruey 20:00 ↗
Yeah. Yeah.
John Coogan 20:01 ↗
And resigned from the board, I think a couple days, like a day before launching a competitor.
Will Bruey 20:08 ↗
Right.
John Coogan 20:10 ↗
So again, this stuff has been happening. But the funny thing is to see this like whole all this drama around companies that provide basically enterprise applications.
Will Bruey 20:20 ↗
Mhm. When you look at what's happening on the research side where constant aggressive poaching around like truly like companies developing truly novel IP that basically have no protections where you can work at a company for five years, learn a bunch about what they do, get poached and bring all of that know-how over to a new company within the same 24-hour period, right? And so I just don't... this whole situation like an advisor that gets poached doesn't feel like a big deal at all to me in the context of everything else that's been happening.
John Coogan 20:57 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. It's just...
Will Bruey 20:59 ↗
Like, and ultimately I don't think, I think the story is like over. Like I think it's...
John Coogan 21:04 ↗
No, I think you're right. It's different because like the researchers do post, but they don't have like as many interactions with VCs. So like there's that back and forth about the three OpenAI researchers who were just fired according to the Wall Street Journal for sharing information, but like that doesn't reach the level of like board interaction, right? So you're not going to see board members, at least that I can tell, like doing drama about it. And even when the talent wars happen between Meta and OpenAI, like we were the ones that were posting the most like spicy stuff about it, right? Because like the board members, they don't necessarily have the same level of interaction with the researchers as the other board advisors. Yeah. And so I think this just gets a lot more personal, I think. Anyway, you want to close the book on this?
Will Bruey 21:55 ↗
Are you sure?
John Coogan 21:56 ↗
Miles says, 'I work with the end of the trough.'
Will Bruey 21:59 ↗
Let's go back.
John Coogan 22:00 ↗
Let's go back.
Will Bruey 22:01 ↗
Let's go find the pigs.
John Coogan 22:02 ↗
Let's do it.
Miles says, 'I work with a company that's doing great by all definitions. Recently, one of its star executives was poached by an A+ company to lead a very popular product. Founders tried to retain him. They couldn't, so they wished him well and began the recruitment process to replace him. The investors sent him notes thanking him for all his work. No temper tantrums or ethics debates or Twitter name dragging. Just grown-ups get back to work.' And Martin over at A16Z says, 'Boring.'
Yeah, but that's kind of what Miles is advocating for. He's like, these types of interactions should be boring, right? So, I don't know. That's reasonable. Sean Maguire says, 'Nice one from the cheap seats.' You know, 1% of the story. And Sean's really like teasing something. He's like, 'There's going to be the files. There's going to be some crazy drop. There's going to be another truth nuke. It's going to be truth World War II. Something like that.'
Will Bruey 23:00 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 23:00 ↗
But has he actually posted anything? Like it feels like today is the day to like share the truth.
Will Bruey 23:11 ↗
I hope everyone can sort it out behind the scenes.
John Coogan 23:16 ↗
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, he said he has a nuclear weapon and yeah, that's a truth nuke. He has a truth nuke. That's what he's saying. A nuclear weapon on the timeline.
Will Bruey 23:26 ↗
But he did come out and say Cognition is Infosys masquerading as Anthropic.
John Coogan 23:30 ↗
And then which is funny because Infosys does like technology IT transformation, which is in many ways what Cognition does. But the only thing I would disagree with Sean on is I don't see Cognition like masquerading as Anthropic.
Will Bruey 23:54 ↗
No, not at all. You talked to Scott Wu and he was like, 'Yeah, we're providing enterprise value, automating code generation and business.'
John Coogan 24:00 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. It's not an Anthropic lab at all over there. I mean, like they take their business seriously, but that's not a uniquely Anthropic.
Will Bruey 24:09 ↗
Well, and also this would tell me that Factory and Cognition are going in very different directions. He thinks the Infosys direction is bad and hopefully they can go in different directions.
John Coogan 24:20 ↗
That's great.
Will Bruey 24:21 ↗
And maybe they could even work together at some point.
John Coogan 24:23 ↗
Ooh. Oh, okay. Yeah. And maybe you don't need the Snowflake CRO if you have discovered some fundamental thing, right? Like the whole tease was like we did something on the research side, but like that doesn't matter if your CRO leaves, right?
Will Bruey 24:39 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 24:39 ↗
Hopefully he doesn't even understand it. He doesn't even understand what's going on in the research department. He's like, I don't know. There's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just tell me who to call and sell it to.
Will Bruey 24:48 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 24:49 ↗
I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Moving on. What's next?
Will Bruey 25:04 ↗
Bunch of people got slop ads from Instinct. They're upset. I'm put helmet. But I would clarify. I don't think they're... I would be shocked if they're actually monetizing this already. Seems like it was just an experiment, right?
John Coogan 25:21 ↗
Yes. Can we suggest products that people will want to buy because it would be a big... I think everybody that Noah has been very explicit that they plan to do this, right? They plan to get deals with different retailers and platforms and be able to monetize the purchases that they draw.
Will Bruey 25:40 ↗
Yeah. Now, something I've always said or at least said a lot in the last month or so is that if you want to get to the point where you can have meaningful take rates, you need to be driving net new demand. Right? So if I go to my personal agent and say, 'Buy me this thing,' right? The demand was created elsewhere, like it was generated with like advertisement or organic content or something caused me to want to go and buy it. And brands are not going to be standing up and lining up to pay big referral fees effectively when they already paid to create the demand elsewhere. And so this Instinct test is, hey, we have a... we understand this person. Let's basically suggest some products that they maybe weren't thinking about but they would buy.
John Coogan 26:32 ↗
Like a phone charger.
Will Bruey 26:34 ↗
Like a power bank.
John Coogan 26:35 ↗
Like a power bank.
Will Bruey 26:36 ↗
Or some sunscreen. I just like I saw like 12 different screenshots that were all power banks and it's like it is sort of universal. Like if you were going to just blast that.
John Coogan 26:46 ↗
I mean, yeah. I mean, we talked to the CEO at The Ridge and he's like, yeah, they just move. Like it's a good business, but I don't know. So we got to just figure out like, are they actually monetizing this? Because Instinct is in a position where you could literally just go and set up an Amazon referral fee thing and start taking a cut. And websites have done that for a long time. Like if you go to The Wirecutter, now owned by The New York Times, you will be able to click on checkout for a suitcase, for some sunglasses, for the best TV they have. And if you click on one of their partner sites, it puts a cookie there. And when you check out, they actually do make a referral commission. I would be surprised if Instinct wasn't monetizing that.
But at the same time, I think they might not even need to because the scale of what they're trying to do is more just like understand the consumer and then have the next proof point for the next raise because obviously it's incredibly compute intensive. They're growing very quickly. They're going to be raising very quickly. And being able to go back to the next round of VCs and say, 'Hey, we've actually tested e-commerce and it converts at seven times the rate of Instagram or whatever.' And it's like, 'We have this much surface area and here's the response.' And yes, there was a lot of feedback that was like, 'Oh, this is slop.' Who said it's shop slop or whatever?
Will Bruey 28:17 ↗
Shop slop. Dave Morin called it from OpenClaw.
John Coogan 28:19 ↗
Yeah. Somewhat biased, right? He's running the foundation.
Will Bruey 28:25 ↗
Oh, sure.
John Coogan 28:26 ↗
Claw. Sure. Which...
Will Bruey 28:27 ↗
You know, is like basically own your compute, own your agent.
John Coogan 28:30 ↗
Yeah.
Will Bruey 28:31 ↗
Don't get ads pushed to you. Have your agent be aligned to you. That's their stance.
John Coogan 28:36 ↗
I think that overall, here's the thing. Here's the thing.
Will Bruey 28:40 ↗
If they can actually give you a 10 out of 10 recommendation, people will love it, right? Like when someone recommends you a product and you're just instantly like, 'Yes, this is great.'
John Coogan 28:52 ↗
Yeah, that's a wonderful experience. The question is how quickly can they get there? It didn't really feel like they were nailing it, but we don't know. Like maybe people are sharing screenshots. Like one of these was pretty cool. It was, they found like some Rothy loafers which are...
Will Bruey 29:15 ↗
Generally they sell out. They're kind of hard to find.
John Coogan 29:17 ↗
Yeah.
Will Bruey 29:18 ↗
And so it's possible...
John Coogan 29:21 ↗
This person didn't like it, but I think a lot of people would be like, 'Cool, thank you.'
Will Bruey 29:26 ↗
You're like, 'This is the worst thing ever.' And then you see one thing and you're like, 'Okay, I'm sold.'
John Coogan 29:30 ↗
No. The one that I saw that I thought was funny was...
Will Bruey 29:35 ↗
Instinct knew that this guy had a 911.
John Coogan 29:40 ↗
Yeah.
Will Bruey 29:41 ↗
And...
John Coogan 29:42 ↗
Because they'd worked on some insurance stuff.
Will Bruey 29:44 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 29:45 ↗
But the issue is that Instinct was like basically clocked like, okay, this guy's a car guy. I got to hit him with a bunch of car stuff. Then it recommends a trickle charger, which 911s really don't need, especially modern 911s, and an indoor cover.
Will Bruey 30:01 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 30:01 ↗
To use inside your garage.
Will Bruey 30:05 ↗
Which car guys I know would never use an indoor cover because...
John Coogan 30:08 ↗
I said this yesterday briefly at the end of the show, but because if you have any sort of the basically like the cover against the paint can cause more damage than it just like sitting there, right? So you generally want it out of the sun, but you're better off just like leaving it. Especially because if there can be any debris between the cover and the paint, you get even more wear.
Will Bruey 30:34 ↗
But you can imagine how it knows about the user, but it doesn't know about what car people actually want, right? And so they can probably get better.
John Coogan 30:44 ↗
They could recommend like a straight pipe exhaust system or under lighting or something that a car guy would want for their target, right?
Will Bruey 30:52 ↗
Yes. Yeah. Or spinners as you always say.
John Coogan 30:54 ↗
Spinners or even just knobby off-road tires, an off-road kit, something like that. Yeah, with the shop slop screenshot here from Dave Morin, what sticks out to me is the fact that there's like five 'let's buy this' buttons. I don't know. Like this seems like a normal e-commerce site, but the repetition there of all the calls to action is what's throwing me off and making this look sloppy. I don't know if that's what's triggering me, but the actual recommendations there of a couple things.
Will Bruey 31:32 ↗
Well, it's funny because this was always a historical concern with AI ads is the AI that you trust for information and to help you do things suddenly is like, 'Come on, let's like, I think we should buy this, you know, let's buy this, what do you think, should we buy this?' right? And it's like it ends up feeling a little, this feels a little bit pushy. The other thing that stands out is, you know, they've taken a very UI-light approach, right? Noah has said you don't need new interfaces, you know, it has a computer, it has a phone number, it has a number that you can text, but I feel like they're going to need to, they have to make interfaces, right? And this is one of the first.
John Coogan 32:13 ↗
Yeah.
Will Bruey 32:14 ↗
And um...
John Coogan 32:15 ↗
And then, yeah, again, the challenge is like getting pushed products in text is just very, very personal.
Will Bruey 32:26 ↗
Right. And I think that a lot of e-commerce brands, you know, will use text marketing. I find that I'm like a thousand times more likely to unsubscribe from text marketing than I am from email marketing, right?
John Coogan 32:45 ↗
Well, yeah, I mean, it can be dangerous to operate on the previous era of like text message conversion rates and open rates because we have moved into a regime where my iMessage, at least, probably yours as well, has a number of folders for unknown senders, promotions, spam, transactions. And if it starts flagging Instinct or your AI agent not as a friend but as a promotions vehicle, it goes in that bucket and then the open rate goes way down. And this is what happened with like the newsletter apocalypse in Gmail where you got filtered off into a different section. You're not actually in the inbox anymore. And so that's pretty risky.
I was demoing Dot yesterday and just had a phone call with it on the way home and was shopping and said like, 'Go find this pair of pants that I bought in my Gmail. Go find another pair in like a slightly different color.' And it was hunting around and it was just like, 'Nothing's in stock in your size, bro.' And I was like, 'Is there some like global pants outage or something? What's going on?' And it was like, 'No, this isn't like a conspiracy or something.' But I was actually like kind of laughing back and forth.
Will Bruey 34:04 ↗
Crazy. They're crazy.
John Coogan 34:05 ↗
It was a pretty, it was a pretty delightful experience. But, uh, but but like my end result was like I was like, I don't want you just to send me random stuff, but I do actually want you to check on this. So, go create a background task to check like every day for this pair of pants and then just let me know if they come back and stop.
Will Bruey 34:23 ↗
And it's like, I'm expecting one notification sometime in the next few months for that particular pair of pants and then I can just be like, get it. Okay.
John Coogan 34:29 ↗
Yeah. But uh anyways, closing this segment out. Instinct is as of I think last week was like 13 or 14 people, right? Like tiny. They're shipping super quickly. Yeah.
Will Bruey 34:41 ↗
As a as a small team experimenting. I think that's important. Y um and they just hired our friend Ben from COTU who was at Snapchat for almost a decade. Yeah.
John Coogan 34:53 ↗
Leading like content and partnerships there. Yeah. he joined as a chief business officer at Instinct and I think that that is going to be a massive unlock for them. Um there's so much that Ben can do.
Will Bruey 35:05 ↗
Yeah, I do think that there is to improve this experience and make it more like an AMX style experience, right? Where it's very mass market and commercial, but they're trying to make it feel like elevated and and put the Yeah. put the user first. They might need to do a new pre-train specifically on car guy data to uh to really nail that, really dial that in.
John Coogan 35:26 ↗
Um, no, I I think that there is a little bit of a gap between the ex Twitter community, the tech people, the insiders who are like, I don't want a bunch of ads. And like there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, like I actually enjoy going through all the newsletters and sales in my email. I like the email email, you know, promotional marketing materials and I watch the ads on Instagram. I like them. I enjoy having products be shown to me.
Will Bruey 35:58 ↗
There's some people that, you know, they maybe they park their car on a on a public street and then they go back to their car, maybe after going to a restaurant, there's one of those like um business card ads like I will buy your junk car. You ever get You ever get You ever get those?
John Coogan 36:12 ↗
No. In LA, there's people that like they put a they'll put a business card like in your windows. Like I I've gotten that business card but for like uh like gardening or like we'll trim your trees like that type of stuff. I've never gotten an offer to buy my car.
Will Bruey 36:27 ↗
Yeah. I've got the multiple times in LA that like we buy junk cars. I'm like wow, shots fired. I thought I was thought I was doing all right.
John Coogan 36:34 ↗
Yeah, it was kind of a kind of a neg. Um, but yeah, I I I think a lot of people will will will be excited to have like the daily text of like the best product that they could be that they could possibly buy.
Will Bruey 36:46 ↗
John says, "Nobody on earth can do what Ben can change his instinct overnight." I agree. I've had I mean, I've had a bunch of conversations with Ben about about where consumer AI should go offline and uh he's going to crush it.
John Coogan 37:01 ↗
Okay, so uh let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value at Cisco. Uh the folks over at Debbine picked the best day to launch Gemini for Argon when everyone's talking about factory and cognition of course, but uh it did break through some really impressive benchmarks. Uh also some controversy over how much Google employees are using it internally to code. Of course, we'll need to see.
The meme is we're launching Gen Gemini 4 Argon and a group of people are talking about did you see the factory guy calling out cognition guy and then the the Twitter sphere goes cool and then goes back to um uh the the the model agnostic the enterprise model agnostic harnesses are fighting uh and so it is certainly a tough day to launch when there's a lot of drama on the timeline that is more engaging than the model wars. The model of wars used to be the most engaging thing, but now the interpersonal board dynamics are clearly taking a lead. Um, but what's going on with the naming schemes here? So, open says all my tokens are gone.
Will Bruey 38:10 ↗
That's pretty funny.
John Coogan 38:12 ↗
Uh, so the naming schemes, uh, open AIs in the solar system, you got Luna for the moon, terra for the earth, soul for the sun, Astra for the stars. Anthropic is doing haiku a Japanese poem a sonneta it's a 14line poem opus major work fable moral story and then Google arrives with argon just look at the image the word argon comes from the ancient Greek word argos which means lazy or inactive.
Will Bruey 38:41 ↗
I think they're named after the element argon and they're probably just going to go down the list of elements which is a cool place to pull from but uh yeah tech leaders you got to dig into these words, man. I keep saying this. Too many too many hubristic tales. I don't need any more project Titan. Project uh what was it? Behemoth. It's like you look it up like the untameable. Oh, you couldn't get it out. Interesting. What a kinky dink.
John Coogan 39:08 ↗
Anyway, um what else is going on in uh in Gemini world? Anything? Yeah, employees are sharing some skepticism. We'll see. We'll see uh how it evolves, how they wind up using it. um and and where it goes from there.
Uh uh the the most trusted rating agency for over 30 years, Egon Jones is uh blackpilling says it's over. Uh complete disruption of the economy is now all but certain thanks to AI. Uh it has a community note now. Joe Wisenthal shared this so I don't think it's fake news, but uh the purported Egon Jones Egan Jones risk commentary number 22 does not appear on the firm's website. Okay. It might be entirely fake.
Will Bruey 39:50 ↗
They got him.
John Coogan 39:51 ↗
Interesting. They got him.
Will Bruey 39:52 ↗
They got him.
John Coogan 39:53 ↗
There's so much slop on the timeline. It's crazy. There was this fake uh there was this fake New York Times article about uh a stock photographer that was put out of uh work and I feel somewhat responsible for this because I was doing this bit like a year ago where I would take quotes from our friends and put them just inspect element, no AI. I would just go and edit the HTML to to put a Jeremy GFON quote in the Financial Times and then screenshot it and share it to be like, "Oh, it's like funny that one of their tweets is in the in the Financial Times." And then we got to the point where like we were actually commenting and we were actually in the Wall Street Journal with our basically our tweets and our joke posts. Um, and so things got very muddy there and then people took the uh the the ability to instantiate these these joke posts uh a little too far. So, uh, you can scroll the timeline and just and just see community note after community note of fake news. So, be safe out there. A lot of info hazards.
Uh, but this one isn't. Let me tell you about Crowd Strike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches.
Uh, we got to talk about this house. We got to do another tier list. There's a house that's for sale in Los Angeles that is accepting OpenAI equity and anthropic equity and um we need to do another tier list to decide whether or not it's a good house. Is it worth precious shares in frontier AI or should the humble AI researcher sitting on 30 million of equity in a in a in a Frontier lab uh sit this one out? So, uh, we have the Zillow here. I will pull it up and I want Jordy to give me some tier list stuff. So, uh, 1210 Chory Lane in Los Angeles, price cut, $4 million cheaper, a humble $30 million, five beds, 11 baths. Rate that ratio. Twice as many baths. Having twice as many baths as bedrooms. Where does that fit in the tier list?
Will Bruey 42:00 ↗
I think that's excellent.
John Coogan 42:01 ↗
That's excellent. A tier. A tier. A tier. We got an A tier for having twice as many baths. My man likes some extra bath. Uh the only thing it's a lot of bathrooms for a third of an acre.
Will Bruey 42:13 ↗
Okay. So, third of an acre. 35 technically. Just over a third of an acre. Where do you put the acreage? Uh D tier.
John Coogan 42:26 ↗
Rough. Well, that's just a personal thing. It is you like to to me like smaller house on more land. Okay. But but there's going to be some people that that are that are fired up on the view and they don't care that that um they can't really touch the earth anywhere on the property itself.
Okay. We got some we got some other stuff in here. So, it's set at the end of a quiet culde-sac. Where do you sit? Quiet culde-sacs. Are you a culde-sac guy?
Will Bruey 42:54 ↗
Um funue. Not not uh can can be rough on the funue side for defense purposes. No, no, no. Like trapped energy.
John Coogan 43:02 ↗
Okay. Okay. Okay. So, I'm hearing D tier.
Will Bruey 43:07 ↗
F tier.
John Coogan 43:07 ↗
F tier for the culdesac. Okay. Culdeac's F tier. Sorry. Sorry, folks. It's fine. Sorry. Be honest. Be honest. Uh I mean, the view is really incredible. Okay. So, the view the view is the view is um S tier. S tier.
What about the 110 linear feet of 11 ft motorized glass walls that disappear completely transforming the great room into an open air retreat above the city?
Will Bruey 43:33 ↗
I hate motorized glass walls.
John Coogan 43:36 ↗
Okay, what are we doing? Uh in what tier uh are you putting it in? Motorized 110 ft of motorized experience.
Will Bruey 43:46 ↗
F tier. F tier. Like and and I say this because I unfortunately have them and you have you can only put this in F tier if you've been like late at night, you know, you're trying to like turn off the lights and I accidentally hit the motorized door button. Yeah. Like literally middle of the night is loud. At least mine you have to wait until they get to the end. Like it's gas powered so it needs to fire up a V6. It's not super loud but it's it's incredibly annoying when you're sitting there and suddenly Your entire house is open air, you know, past midnight.
John Coogan 44:23 ↗
Okay. Lightning round. Formal dining room.
Will Bruey 44:28 ↗
A tier.
John Coogan 44:29 ↗
A tier. Oceanfacing library office.
Will Bruey 44:32 ↗
A uh S tier.
John Coogan 44:33 ↗
S tier. Four stone islands.
Will Bruey 44:39 ↗
Is that too many? Maybe. Quite possibly.
John Coogan 44:41 ↗
So, we're putting it in C tier. Okay. Lower level brings together media lounge and illuminated bar. Do you like an illuminated bar?
Will Bruey 44:51 ↗
Uh, not not for me, but but I think I think Give me a tier. Give me a tier. Uh, B tier.
John Coogan 44:59 ↗
Temperature controlled wine room.
Will Bruey 45:02 ↗
Uh, if you turn it into a data center, I think it's a tier.
John Coogan 45:06 ↗
Okay. Cinematic theater. Uh, S tier cuz I could say, "Hey, John." Hey, because I I'll be over using it. Okay. Uh, glass enclosed fitness studio. Do you like a home fitness studio?

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APA

Coogan, J. (2026, October 1). Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate [Interview transcript]. TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003046/

MLA

John Coogan. "Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate." TBPN, 1 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003046/.

BibTeX
@misc{coogan2026_3003046,
  author       = {John Coogan},
  title        = {Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003046/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}