Synthetic Humanoids, Quantum Chip Breakthrough, Nikola is Cooked, Salesforce vs Microsoft

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Today is Thursday, February 20th, 2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you all today. We're breaking down some new humanoid robots. They're not terrifying at all. They're absolutely horrific, out of a horror movie. We're breaking down Satya Nadella. He went on the Dwar Kesh Patel podcast. It was a fantastic breakdown. He also announced a new quantum computing unit. From there, we're breaking that down. We're going into the history of Nicola, the trucking company, the electric truck company that just went bankrupt today, and telling you the whole history of that company. And then we're

• 0:41John Coogan?

  going to break down the timeline, run through some posts on X, give you a bunch of fun hot takes. We're discussing seed stage VC, Google AI agents, the new Apple iPhone launch, a bunch of good stuff for you guys. So stay tuned. Thanks.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  And should we go through some of the posts?

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, so they follow it up and they do give a little bit of explanation here. They say, "The protoclone is a faceless anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 myofibers and 500 sensors." And so I think that, you know, whether or not you think complete replication of the human is important in robotics context. There's a lot of questions about like, hey, do we even need to give them legs? Like, maybe if they're running around a factory.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  The unitary one that's like dog shaped.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Will just be flipping.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  But it also has wheels and it can do all these things. It can stand up, but then it can go four-legged. So I think, I think like if you're starting from scratch, thinking first principles, you would actually kind of refactor some of the problems from a human and give it more arms or less arms, depending on what the job is.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Don't want to be, you know, don't want to be full of hubris.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Maybe we are perfect.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  We might be goaded.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  We might be goaded. Yeah, the bipedal.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  The bipedal.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  The bipedal form factor.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  It did evolve over millions of years, allegedly.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Scientists say.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Let's go to the bro scientists. Well, let's go to Samoyed online. Samoyed says, "Yep, boss. The promo video is going great. I got the twitching humanoid robots strung up on a meat hook and flickering lights. They'll love it."

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I mean, it's just working exactly as intended. This got 70K likes and another 2 million views.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Oh, my God. This did get another 70K likes. So, yeah, a lot of these views have to be driven by quote tweets because it's so easy to go viral here.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  20 million views is tough to do.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Fantastic. And then Atlas, good friend of the show, chimes in and says, "Terrible quad insertions, and the delts are hardly capped. Midsection also looks to be in poor condition." And I actually laughed out loud at this. I think it's so funny. Just...

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need to be... So, so Atlas is absolutely right. You need to be evaluating humanoid robots as though they were going for their IFBB pro cards.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  You know, presumably, there will be humanoid bodybuilding, weightlifting, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting competitions, and it's important to like, put them, you know, you know, really try to, try to put them up against the best humans in their class.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  This isn't close to Sam Sulek by any means.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  I...

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even opposite shade. I'd like to see them give the clone a spray tan. Like, give him like a Sam Sulek spray tan.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Just super dark.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super dark.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Multiple layers of spray tan, for sure. Give it a face, some smiling white teeth.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  You know?

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  We want to have humanoid AGI until one of these wins the Arnold.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  That is the only benchmark.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  That's the real benchmark.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  That's the benchmark.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't care about MMLU or Chapot Arena. I care about the Arnold.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  That's a Coogan-coded post.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And Lama here says, "60 gram protein diet, never reached failure, barely even tracks reps, sets, or weights. Thinks creatine is illegal."

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  God.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Not gonna, not gonna make it on that. But, you know, we're talking about ways to get attention. Obviously, viral videos work very well if you have a viral product, like synthetic humanoid. It's super creepy. But sometimes you don't, and sometimes you just need advertising. And that's why we want to talk about AdQuick, a big sponsor on the channel. They make out-of-home advertising easy and measurable. Say goodbye to headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless, and ad-buying across the globe.

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  And what I want to add here is AdQuick can also help sponsors get very, you know, sort of brands get very creative.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  So this is sort of dark, but you know how the cartel will sort of hang up, you know,

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Bodies over, you know, overpasses.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, maybe a future ad format.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Clone could hang their, their, their humanoids from Meat Hooks like they did in their video. Just hang them from like overpass on the 101, right?

• 4:45John Coogan?

  I think there's a collab in the future there.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  There's a great collab there, but yeah, if you want to, if you want to get creative, hit up AdQuick and let's get back to the show.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  So Paki McCormick says, Jesus, Dwar Kesh Patel is cooking because he launched a new podcast with Satya Nadella. And it's, it is crazy seeing how far this podcast has, has, has come. Dwar Kesh has done zuck. He got the exclusive for the Lama 3 release. And that was fascinating because the New York Times wrote a piece about Meta launching Lama, but they didn't get an exclusive interview or a real interview at all. They just got a statement.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  It really is the, the death knell of traditional media.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Basic value is that they would get the exclusive.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  And now that you have trillion dollar company CEOs realizing that they can get more impact.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  And still get the news out on the New York Times by going to somebody who's, who's much more likely to be friendly and not try to sort of position them negatively.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  And just focus on the tech.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just focusing on the, you know, Dwar Kesh is not like, oh, like, you know, talk about your relationship with Sam Altman. He's like, let's focus on, on like the reality of what's happening here. And the New York Times would just take it to this place.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  That Satya doesn't want to go. Nobody really wants to go there.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's just focus on the matter at hand.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the TMZ.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  Like Dwar Kesh is not, Dwar Kesh by nature of being an AI oriented podcast, he does not need to do clickbait in order to, you know, he doesn't need to, to try to make it more dramatic than it is to get listens, like every single person that, that, you know, is, is relevant in AI is like going to at least figure out what they talked about.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And so Satya really did break the news about Microsoft's new quantum computing project on the Dwarsh Patel podcast, which is incredible. And there's a little summary here by Prakash Ada Pi. Satya is out. TLDR. Microsoft doesn't believe in AGI. They're wary of overinvestment and the OpenAI partnership is over allegedly. AI and AGI are overhyped. Satya says, us claiming, us self claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10% GDP. I love this. We've talked about this before. Artificial economic intelligence. I was trying to coin something around it and I was basically just saying like, I don't care about any of the evals.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  The eval is the economic output and Satya did a better job condensing it than I did, but really like that is how you measure the value of AI is what is it doing?

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  That's something that everybody like it's very, as somebody who will be a power, you know, Microsoft presumably will be one of the most powerful companies in AI. Just by nature of the, the overinvestment in, in, in compute. And positioning, it's very smart for Satya to say, you know, what I actually think is most exciting is the excessive GDP growth, which will create massive surplus in our economy and enable everybody to benefit from it. Even if right now they're just, you know, watching brain rot slop on TikTok, right? So like even the people that are just doing nothing to be participate in this sort of broader technological trend. If this plays out, they will benefit from it massively. And I think that's beautiful. That's capitalism at its best, baby.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  It's, it is, it really is. Satya goes on to talk about, he's very negative on more capex spend from Microsoft. If you look at the industrial revolution, there was a lot of money lost, which is hilarious because everyone's saying, oh, this is the next industrial evolution.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't say he's.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  He's like, I don't want to be the person that over invested in the wrong type of windmill.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  So, so this I think was in response to Dwarsh saying, hey, if the, if the, if we can get to 10% GDP growth, which would basically be 5Xing our current growth, which would be tremendous. Dwarsh was like, why don't you spend 10 times more on data center build outs? And he, and he basically said, well, we're kind of like scaling it appropriately, right? It's like finding this balance between. You don't want to have oversupply of, you know.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  I'm excited to be a leaser. I build a lot. I lease a lot.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he's, he's saying here, he's fine if, if other people overbuild because he'll come in and say, well, we have basically all this demand. We'll help, we'll, we'll basically buy, you know, we'll sort of, you know, make long-term commits to your compute. And then we'll sort of chunk it up and sell it, you know.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Just in consumer, in some categories, there may be some winner take all network effect. Chat GPT is a great example of an at scale consumer property that already has real escape velocity. In enterprise, buyers will not tolerate winner take all, where the buyer is a corporation, enterprise and IT department. They will want multiple suppliers. That is what will happen even on the model side.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  And so this is why, uh, this is, we've, we've talked about this a bunch of times on the show. Our sort of generalized belief that Elon thinks the value, he was able to catch up with XAI in terms of like general model capabilities. At least like within, within the ballpark. He's still clearly believes that, you know, he, it seems obvious that he would like to control chat GPT as a consumer product company.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  Right. And he sees that as potentially being, you know, this trillion dollar company. And now there's all this FUD, like, you know, a lot of people like to say, oh, OpenAI is Yahoo. You know, look at, look at their market cap. But, you know, I think there's a strong case for, you know, a dominant consumer, you know, new consumer app company.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Prakash, uh, closed out with five opinion, uh, sections or maybe four takeaways. Satya is calling the bubble in the build out. The crazy people like governments are entering the game. He's happy to lease from them when they overbuild.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he's talking about like.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Spend is capped.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  He's talking about like a, a country, you know, like Malaysia, who's like, we should get in the data center game. And then, and then realizing, oh, we actually don't have the, the technical expertise to efficiently. Deliver this compute to end consumers. Okay, we should just partner with Microsoft and kind of let them operate it. And Microsoft is happy to take over that supply.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  And then Ada Pi goes on, he's disappointed in the OpenAI partnership. Satya sees them as having built a great consumer app for themselves with dominance in the category, but models for enterprise usage have gotten commoditized, which is kind of interesting because it's like, yes, you are disappointed, but like only because you didn't predict that, I guess, which is kind of odd. He's so done with the AGI talk. If you can't get to 10% global growth, your AGI talk is meaningless to him. I love that. And then the last thing, he's backing Microsoft from the capex precipice. It's funny because he certainly did make Google dance, but now they're committed. And now they're committed to insane capex, but he's out of here. Yeah, one of the most meaningful Dwarash interviews so far.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Making Google dance.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  It's a good phrase.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  It really, I mean, it does not feel like the, you know, Satya is in a different league than, than Google's leadership at this point. Like, it's just, it seemed, you know, I'm sure that they'll say, hey, we should get our guy on Dwarash.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  But, yeah.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah. Has Sundar done it? I know he's done some interviews with a few people. I mean, he's done some with MKBHD, but I just don't see Sundar pushing as much. And also, it's a very different organization where the founders of Google are still dipping their toes in every once in a while. Like, I firmly believe Bill Gates has not been back, like, you know, hey, Satya, I got an idea for you in years. Definitely not.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  So Sundar has not been on Dwarash.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  And what was his last, like?

• 12:21John Coogan?

  We need to build, speaking of our next sponsor.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Can Sundar, is Sundar the guy to go on a two hour podcast? Or is he more of the? Is he more on Kamala?

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Manager mode?

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  Kamala.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Manager mode, yeah. Maybe. I mean, he should figure it out. Because it's an important skillset.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  If your CEO can't go on a two hour podcast, you're cooked.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  You know how during the, during the election, I said that there was the, the Coogan parlay, which was you, you bet on Polly market for Trump to do over three hours on Rogan. For Kamala to do under two hours on Rogan. She wound up doing none. And then whoever does the longer Rogan interview wins the election. Because I had this whole podcast election thesis. I want to see on, on public, a basket of, of tech stocks for where the CEO has done an hour long plus interview on Dwar cash. I want to own that basket, the new QQQ.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  If you're running a public company.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  You know, if you're running a public company and you have the chops as a CEO to duke it out with Dwar cash for a couple hours.

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  I think the podcast CEO's index.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  CEO index is crazy.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  You know, Carps, Carps Dunham. There's a lot of people that have done them. So that takes us to our, our next sponsor, Public. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industrial, industry leading yields. And they're trusted by millions. Public earns high marks for ease of use and investment selection. So go check it out at public.com. And I wanted to mention public because I wanted to know after, after, after Satya did Dwar cash, what happened with the Microsoft stock? So I have a chart here on the next slide, which is Microsoft's past week. And you can see they, he goes on Dwar cash. He announces this new quantum computing thing that we'll talk about. And the stock popped up 2%. And so.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  The company has been doing phenomenally and shout out to Satya, the absolute dog. Let's go back to his discussion about AGI and that 10% milestone. I think there's some interesting quotes here because Dwar Kesh pushes back. And so Satya is saying, you know, us claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10%. And then Dwar Kesh says, hey, look, if the world's growing at 10%, the economy is 100 trillion globally. If the world grows at 10%, that's an extra 10 trillion. You're investing 80 billion as a hyperscaler. That's not that much money. Shouldn't you be doing 800 billion? If you really think in a couple of years, we could be growing in the world economy at this rate. So, you know, revealed preference.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he can kind of be like, look, Masa thinks he should do 500. What are you doing?

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's basically what he asked, which I like because it's like, this is, this is, this is actually a hard question, but it's not framed as a gotcha or some sort of like, you know, negative thing. It's just, hey, this is actually the real question that we should be discussing. And Satya says, that's correct. But by the way, the classic supply side is, hey, let me build it and they'll come. That's an argument. And after we've all, after all, we've done that, we've taken enough risk to go do it. But at some point, the supply and demand have to map. That's why I'm tracking both sides of it. You can go off the rails completely when you're hyping yourself up with supply side versus really understanding how to translate that into real value to customers. That's why I look at my inference revenue. That's one of the reasons why even the disclosure on the inference revenue, it's interesting that not many people are talking about their real revenue.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  But to me, that is important as a governor for how you think about it. So he's like, hey, at Microsoft, we tell you how much money we're making from inference and that's the real value of AI. It doesn't matter how much you're spending training the models. It matters how much money is being generated from the usefulness of those models.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  Like, that is the big risk right now. Like, the, the risk for the hyperscalers is, is not, is not getting in the general route, like not having a generally accurate demand prediction, right? So if you way overdo it, you're going to get crushed because people just say, look, you know, these guys can't accurately predict or utilize the supply they're bringing online. And then the other side is probably what Satya would prefer, which is, hey, we, we went big, but not big enough. And we're trying to race to kind of fulfill that, right? And especially now with Elon showing how quickly you can build these massive clusters, you know, 200,000 GPU cluster. And he's ramping, wanting to ramp to a million as soon as possible.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  So it just shows.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  And, and I think it goes back to Google. Like we saw in Google's cloud earnings report, that they were capacity constrained. And so I think they missed earnings on Google Cloud because they weren't able to deliver services. But I think that Satya's saying, hey, were, were they capacity constrained on the training side or the inference side? Because those tell two different stories about the actual value. Because a whole bunch of companies can go raise a lot of money and show up at the hyperscalers and say, hey, I need, I need $10 billion worth of, worth of training compute right now. And that's not the same as $10 billion of useful AI and product GDP growth, right? Like, training does not necessarily get us GDP growth. And so Satya's really throwing

• 17:42John Coogan?

  the gloves down, saying, let's see it. Let's see GDP growth. Show me something. AI.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  He's for the people.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. And that's exactly how we should be thinking about this stuff. It's so good. And so Dwarash goes on, he says, so if you really think there's some potential here to 10x or 5x the growth rate of the world, and then you're like, well, what's the revenue from GPU for? If you really think that's the possibility for the next level up, shouldn't you just, let's go crazy. Let's do hundreds of billions of dollars of compute. I mean, there's some chance, right? And so Dwarash is like doubling down on this question. Good follow up. And Satya says, here's the interesting thing, right? That's not, that's why even that balanced approach to the fleet at least is very important to me. It's not about building compute. It's about building compute that can actually help me not only train the next big model, but also serve the next big model. Until you do those two things, you're not going to be able to be in a position to really take advantage of your, even your investment.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  So that's kind of where it's not a race just to building a model. It's a race to creating a commodity that is getting used in the world to drive. You have to have a complete thought, not just one thing that you're thinking about. And by the way, one of the things is that there will be overbuild. To your point about what happened in the dot com era, the memo has gone out that, hey, you, you know, you need more energy, you need more compute. Thank God for it. So everyone's going to race. In fact, it's not just companies just deploying, countries are going to deploy capital and they will clearly, and so I'm excited. And he's about to say like, they were clearly like, actually.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  These countries are my pay pigs.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  And so I'm excited to be a leaser because by the way, I build a lot, I lease a lot. And so he's saying like, look, yeah, some of that cap expense is going to go out, but also we're going to be leasing because we don't want to be holding the bag. And so there's a little bit of game of musical chairs going on with some of the build outs, a little bit of nervousness. I don't know, he might be wrong. He might be underbuilding. The, the, the Pascal's wager for AI build out at the hyperscalers for a long time was if you, if AI is fake and you, and you over invest, you still don't lose your job. But if AI is real and you under invest, you definitely lose your job.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  And so just in terms of like, you know, I want to, I want to maintain my job. Everyone had the same incentive of like, we gotta go all in because there's no, there's no downside here. Let's move on. He says, he's talking about how AI takeoff is a risk and, and Satya's, and Satya's bringing it back to like, okay, how would that actually happening? He says, to your point, I think that one of the reasons why I think about even the most powerful AI is essentially working with some delegated authority from some human. You can say, oh, all this alignment and all that. That's why I think you really have to get these alignment to work and be verifiable in some way, but I don't think that you can deploy intelligences that are out of control.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  For example, this AI takeoff problem may be a real problem, but before it is a real problem, the real problem will be in the courts. No society is going to allow for some human to say, AI did that.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  And that's why I've said. The, you know, a lot of people say, oh, lawyers are cooked. Why are you going to need lawyers to, um, uh, to do, you know, things when you could just ask an AI, hey, can you create this document and send it for signature? And boom, it's done.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  And people I think are still going to want to be able to say like, we had a human sign off on this AI output. And so lawyers might spend less time on individual documents.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  But they will probably do more, they have a higher output because business owners, as an example, will do more legal work because it's cheaper.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  And right now, all day long, business owners will skip a doc because they're like, oh, this person's just working on like this small thing. You know, we don't need to put it in a contract. Like it's not a big deal. But then as it gets easier to just like, you know, basically chat GPT, hey, can you make this doc freelancer agreement? Send it out for signature. Boom. It's done.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  It will just happen more.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  And same thing, same thing with capital allocators, you know, these big endowments are like, cool. I'm glad your hedge fund is using AI to make investment decisions, but you better be signing off on, you know, the vast majority, any transaction over a certain amount. Because if you lose our money, like we want to know who's responsible and why it happened. And you can't just say, you know, blame it on your, your.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you want to summarize that's that, uh, experience we had with that young kid who was thinking about going into fund to fund management?

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so we, we met up with a, with a listener on the show who goes to school at USC, which is around the corner from us. And, um, yeah, he, he was, you know, our, our advice to him was generally, uh, you know, he was saying, just trying to get a sense of what jobs are still going to exist within the space. And we felt pretty strongly that, you know, specifically he had an offer from a fund of funds to go join and, and go there. And I think our, our advice to him was generally that job will still exist for like a number of different reasons. But you should still figure out how to use AI to be exceptionally good at your job, to write software for the work that you do to just be even more efficient. And you should be thinking of it as how do I use?

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  AI so that I can manage exponentially more capital for my firm.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically on day one, being the most junior employee at a company historically, that has not meant you show up and you have 20 direct reports unless you're like, I don't know, like a new unless it's like, oh yeah, you're some new grad and you're hiring a bunch of people that are you're managing people that didn't go to college. But in most in most firms and most investment firms, you come in, you don't have any direct reports and then after a few years, they give you one intern. And then after a decade, you have a team under you. But with AI, it's like on day one, you can have 20 employees effectively and you can have a Devon working for you and a deep.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  It's actually a very interesting way. You're going to have the younger generation who learns to manage.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  They should be managers on day one for sure.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Before they ever manage a human.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, totally.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  And it's and it's many of the same like workflows for managing people you can use for AI. It's like, yeah, you don't want to let the AI just run off for four days, just like spinning their wheels, like doing random stuff, spending money or time or inference.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  You want to have them execute something, give them quick feedback, you know, make sure it's good, make sure it's good, have them keep going, right? But then you're balancing that now you can manage, you know, you could be managing five or six, 10, 20 agents at once that are all doing carrying out individualized tasks.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, they talk about rogue actors a little bit and how some societies might allow for a fast takeoff. But again, I think that there's there's a huge pressure against that in the same way that we haven't had nuclear war, even though, yes, there are some countries that are rogue states. There's enough pressure globally. I don't think Satya wants to say that, but I do think that if there was some AI lab that was truly working on some, you know, killer AI, there would be a lot of pressure from the international community militarily to stop that. And it would be the same thing if you tried to build it in San Francisco. And at the end of the day, someone has to push the button to deploy the killer AI, at least initially.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  And and that person wants to survive and there's the threat of violence from governments. And so it's less of a risk than I think most people think. Anyway, I love this question because it gets to the kind of just a really interesting narrative violation in Silicon Valley. Dwarshash asks Satya, is being a company man underrated? You've spent most of your career at Microsoft and you could say that one of the reasons you've been able to hold add so much value is you've seen the culture, the history and the technology. You have all this context by rising up through the ranks. Should more companies be run by people who have this level of context? And he says, that's a great question. I haven't thought about that way.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  We have to have a company man of the year award.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  This year.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  For sure. I think it is underrated in Silicon Valley and I think it's very, it's very interesting. And so he says, through my 34 years now at Microsoft, each year felt more exciting about being at Microsoft versus thinking that, oh, I'm a company person or what have you. So no ego about it, which is there's a huge memetic pressure in Silicon Valley to not be a company man. Yeah, yeah. Well, it'd be better to run a $1 million seed company.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  It's almost to the point where people, people don't realize, like many people in tech, the things that they want in life are all achievable on a million dollars a year total comp sort of salary.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Like everything you could want, like the nice house, the cars, the second home, kids in private school. It's all achievable on that. Yet they think that the only way they can get that is if they have some big liquidity event. I need a big liquidity event before I'm 30 and I need another one, you know, and then I'm going to do my big company. And then it's going to, then I'm going to be a billionaire.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  I saw a guy who had his like life goals.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  A lot of those people, like, how many of those people would have been a great PM at Meta? And just don't realize the kind of compensation that you can get by just working up the org.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  And the excitement of working on products that instead, instead of working on your like vertical SaaS app that has five users, working on some, working on a feature where you're like, like people joke about, oh, you're just changing like the rounding on the button or the key of the button. It's like, well, that's pretty cool. If you have 20 million people clicking that button every single day.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Or 2 billion people in the case of Meta.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Like two orders of magnitude of that.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  But I'm just saying, even if you're working on like some obscure part of the settings app.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  You're still getting millions and millions of clicks, potentially an hour.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Potentially adding more value than someone who's been in the world.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  Adding value to the world, saving people time and money, you know, time is money.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's fantastic. And so. He says, I take that seriously, even for anybody joining Microsoft. It's not like they're joining Microsoft as long as they feel that they can use this as a platform for both economic return, but also a sense of purpose and a sense of mission that they can accomplish by using us as a platform. That's the contract. I love that. That's a great distillation of what it means to like hire. And you can tell that he's hired well because of that. So I think, yes, companies have to create a culture that allows people to come in and become company people like me. Microsoft got it more right than wrong, at least in my case, and I hope that remains the case.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting that when you look at Apple, Google, and Apple, Google, and Microsoft now, they're all run by company men.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  And, and that's been, and the thing that, you know, we're seeing with Satya is Satya goes founder mode, right? Founder mode is going on the up and coming AI podcasts and being willing to talk for two hours about what you're doing, right?

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  Sundar, on the other hand, you could argue, no, these guys are in manager mode. Tim Cook is over at the John Summit concert dancing, you know, instead of, you know, working on the next computing platform and like, you know, he's done a great job of that type of manager, at least to date.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, speaking of the next computing platform, the big announcement was a new quantum computing chip. And so.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  That they had sitting on the desk, right?

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So quantum computers you might have seen have been, you know, it's usually like this, this superconductor, like frosty, high, like super cold, like gold, like crazy looking device in essentially a lab, certainly not something you can rack on a server. Microsoft claims to have boiled it down to a point where this could potentially be scaled into, you know, millions of qubits, which are quantum, which we'll go through here. So Elon shared a Grok analysis of quantum computing and the Majorana one chip, which is Microsoft's new quantum computing, quantum processing unit. So we'll give a quick overview of quantum computing.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Imagine a computer so powerful it could solve problems that today's supercomputers can't even touch. That's the idea behind quantum computing. Unlike regular computers which use bits that are either zero or one, quantum computers use qubits. Qubits are special because they can be zero, one, or both at the same time, thanks to a quantum property called superposition. This allows quantum computers to process huge amounts of information all at once, making them potentially game changing for tasks like simulating complex molecules for drug discovery, optimizing massive systems like traffic or supply chains, and cracking tough math problems. There's a catch. Qubits are incredibly fragile. They can lose their quantum state and thus their information due to tiny disturbances like heat or noise. This fragility is one of the biggest hurdles in making quantum computers practical.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Now, Microsoft launched the Majorana chip, Majorana 1 chip, and it was funny because in the interview, Satya's like clearly heard about the project for a long time, but he like didn't know the final code name because they probably have code names and then they're launching it. He's like, I think we're calling it Majorana. He kind of had to like check that. But

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  That's founder mode.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  It's a new QPU, quantum processing unit, which could be the successor to the GPU, the TPU, now the QPU. It's designed to tackle this fragility problem. It's the first chip to use a topological core, a cutting edge approach that leverages exotic particles called Majorana particles. These particles help create a special kind of qubit called a topological qubit, which is more stable than the qubits in most other quantum computers. Here's what stands out. Material, it uses a new type of material called a top conductor. It's more stable and it's more scalable. And so Microsoft designed this explicitly to support a million qubits, which is a huge leap. And at that point, you can actually start doing like real math and real problem solving as opposed to a lot of the, a lot of the systems that IBM and Google has worked. Science project. It's like, oh yeah, it's 10 qubits.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  It can, it can theoretically do the hard math, but it can't practically actually solve.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  There's so many, so many companies that had, what was that AI project? I forget who he's in. It wasn't started with a W maybe? They're always saying, oh, it solved this.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  There's D-Wave.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  D-Wave.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  And there is Rigetti.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm not talking about chip.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  It was like IBM, what was IBM's big AI project?

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Watson.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  Watson?

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, Watson.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Watson got smoked.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Watson did get smoked.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Watson fell off.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And they crushed Jeopardy for a while.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  That was a good stunt.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting that it seems like these big, you know, legacy computing companies had these science projects.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  And they seem to be content with them being science projects and being this sort of marketing, right?

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Yes and no.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  Because Watson.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  I haven't even seen anything about it in the last year.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Well, now Watson is a consulting group that will help you implement Llama, essentially.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Mogged.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Mogged, but also, as we've seen, there's a lot of money to be made in just.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  AI transformation.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but why have a decade plus long science experiment that you just end up as a consultant implementing?

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Because it's a marketing, it's a marketing project for your consultancy.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  And so.

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  And so when you call, you know, ExxonMobil and you say, hey, we want to help you implement AI.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  And you say, oh, what company are you from? We're like IBM, we're the Watson Group. You remember the Jeopardy thing? Yeah, we've actually partnered with Facebook and Meta to vend in one of the greatest LLMs at the lowest cost.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Not a bad pitch, not crazy, but the real reason why they missed out is that they weren't deep learning pilled, they weren't scale pilled. And, and Ilya Sutskever, like the magic at OpenAI was that there were a ton of papers that were being released around the same time. He read the transformer paper and was like, this is it. And he identified that and was like, let's go implement this and let's scale this. And that was like, and that was just a very, very key thing. It is interesting that everyone else is catching up and Watson isn't like, hey, us too, because they could have done, you know, if they were cracked, they could have done like a deep seek thing or a Llama fine tune or a Mistral.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  I also wouldn't be surprised if the best people at Watson got poached to go to the other.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, yeah, the company is not set up as a, as a research like software enterprise company anymore. It's very much a lot of consulting. Anyway, let's go back to the Majorana chip. It relies on Majorana particles, which are fascinating because they are their own antiparticles. This property makes them ideal for storing quantum information in a way that's naturally protected from certain errors. Picture it like this. Think of a regular qubit as a spinning coin that's easily knocked over by a breeze. A topological qubit is more like a knot tied in a rope. No matter how much you shake it, the knot stays secure. Interesting metaphor from Grok. Microsoft achieved this by using a top conductor material that combines the properties of a conductor and a topological insulator.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  This setup allows them to create and manipulate Majorana particles, forming stable qubits. Why is this a bigger deal? Well, more stable, more stability, faster progress, and Microsoft is super committed to this. They've been researching this for 20 years and they've had a bunch of stuff.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  See, that's the kind of stuff like, I want to see the 20 years of research and then boom, we're going to commercialize this.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so they actually had some setbacks. In 2018, they published a paper on quantum computing and they had to retract it. Because this, there was so much pushback from the scientific community. And so the article highlights potential applications. They're going to work on self-healing materials, sustainable agriculture, safer chemical discovery. And going forward, they still have to scale up. Going from eight qubits to a million is a massive engineering challenge. It's not just about adding more qubits. They all need to work flawlessly.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  We're focused on doubling here.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  They're focused on going eight to a million.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  But all the best, all the best, you know, projects are. But let's go to nature. So I believe Microsoft published their paper in Nature and there was some pushback. And I have an article here from Nature that will kind of show, you know, a little bit of truth zone on Microsoft's claims. We'll see if we agree with it or not. We'll let you be the judge. So he says, "Microsoft claims quantum computing breakthrough, but some physicists are skeptical. The tech giant aims to make topological quantum computers that will reach useful scales faster than competing technologies." And so machines based on topology promise to be easier to build at scale than competing technologies. So again, it's not that they've built the million.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Qubit machine yet, they're just saying, hey, the tech tree has been going this direction and we think if we go in this direction, it'll be a faster shortcut to the quantum computer that we want, that will actually be able to like, you know, simulate the universe essentially. Like the Qubit, the whole thing with quantum computing is that like, you can do such complex, like you can break encryption, but you can do such hard computing problems that you can actually like, instead of just physically like modeling, like the pen dropping and, and it's like, the pen has a weight and it, and there's like a force. It's like, you can model each atom in the pen. And, and it's like, yeah, no problem. Like sure, that even though that would be like

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  Sounds good, boss.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  insane amount of calculations. So the announcement came in a February 19th press release containing few technical details, but Microsoft said it has disclosed some of its data to selected specialists in a meeting at its research center in Santa Barbara, California. Would I bet my life that they're seeing what they think they're seeing? No, but it looks pretty good, says Stephen Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford UK, who was briefed on the results.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be such a crazy dynamic doing this frontier research in a space like quantum computing. And any day, you don't know if you're going to wake up and your, and your nemesis is going to like publish this sort of groundbreaking piece. And then you have to sort of react to it, but you gotta be like somewhat supportive because you want to, you, you ideally want the space to be pushing forward and getting more investment.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  But then simultaneously there, you know, you want to be the guy that like, has like, the, the breakthrough that really matters.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:15Jordi Hays?

  So he's like, yeah, like it seems, seems legit. Wouldn't bet my life on it.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, uh, as I say, at the, at the same time, the company published intermediate results, but not the proof of the existence of topological qubits. And so, big question on what was on that chip? Cause it's kind of the classic, like there and I got the thing and who knows if it's working and it's not working. And it's like, why did you, why did you instantiate in the physical world? Like clearly from a marketing perspective, the reason that you say like, I'm showing you the iPhone is because like, It's real and you can buy it and like Steve Jobs pulled it out of his pocket and was like, this is a real thing. You wouldn't, you won't believe it.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  Beth brings a chip around.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, Beth Jaisos does this too. I think Beth Jaisos is in one of these tweet threads being like, why is this a big deal? Like, I don't care about this. It's heating up. But I mean, in the markets, generally, quantum computing has become very hot. There's a lot of SPACs that were down and now they're popping again. And so I'm sure we're going to be hearing more about this. The very interesting thing is that most of the techno optimists.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm gonna pull up on public. What was the?

• 38:22John Coogan?

  Look up Righetti Computing.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  Righetti.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  I think that's probably a good one. D-Wave, I think, as well. But it's very interesting because you can look at all of this. It's like one of those things where people overestimate what can be done in a decade and underestimate what can be done in a century or overestimate what can be done in a year or underestimate what can be done in a decade.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Righetti's all over the place. They're up, they're up 16% this month, but it's been, it's been up 700% the past quarter.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I told you. Yeah. 10x. So what's the market cap now?

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  They're 2.68 billion.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Losing 60 million a year on 11 million of revenue.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they can't possibly have revenue because they haven't created a quantum. No, no one has. Like, it's, it's not like there's no work to be done. It's a research organization now, but you're betting that they will be one to commercialize. And if they do, it'll be extremely valuable. So good luck to them.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  What you got?

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Somehow up that, yeah, I misread. It's, it's 960% over the past quarter.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  So it's 10x over the last quarter. Wow. Yeah.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  Not bad.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  So it's $270 million company and now it's a $2 billion company.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, other, you know, companies, you know, Satya sees this and says, okay, this is a new bar now. I need a 10x Microsoft in the next quarter.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  What would he have to, what would he have to announce?

• 39:40John Coogan?

  He would have to announce, we solve quantum computing. But I mean, to my earlier point, like, a lot of really smart tech people that I talk to do say, yes, like, this is the century where we will solve quantum computing. It's going to take a long time, probably longer than we estimate. It's hard to, hard to exactly, you know, you know, forecast it out. But when we do, it will result in. Crazy, crazy new abilities.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  And yeah, one, one, one guy I was talking to, very successful founder was like, so million qubit, you know, quantum computer by 2040, 2050, talking to somebody else. And it was like, yeah, maybe. And he's like, so Dyson Sphere by 2100? And it was like, yeah, that sounds about right. And it was like so casual, but I was like, that sounds crazy, but also like that, things are really accelerating and we're building crazy stuff like, you know, you think about a hundred years before, we can talk to the computer now.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  A hundred years ago, we didn't have computers at all.

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:36John Coogan?

  Nothing.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  It was like, you know, it was like, trains are cool a hundred years ago.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Trains are still cool.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Trains are still cool, but.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  We don't need more of them. We don't need more of them, but.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let's go through other interesting hard tech demos that kind of went off the rails and landed one guy, I think in jail. We're moving to Nikola and we have a chart here from the, the stock is all over the place.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  The market cap is at 40 million. They declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy today. They were in the Wall Street Journal and so.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. It's interesting that there's somebody out there that's still buying Nikola shares today. Because it's still, they declared bankruptcy, but obviously you can still trade it.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Jordi Hays?

  So somebody out there is watching some like slop YouTube video of like Nikola being the future. And they're like, oh, this company seems really cool.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  A lot of slop. Yeah. But at their peak, they were in the multiple billions market cap and they've dropped significantly. Let's give a little bit of an overview.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  They popped. So in, in June of 2020.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Few months after the pandemic started, they went public at, at around 20. Twenty, twenty billion dollars.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Twenty billion.

• 41:55Jordi Hays?

  They didn't go public.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  So they spacked.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Spacks are normally like four billion dollar companies. And this is five times.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but think about the pop on so many.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  I know, I know.

• 42:06Jordi Hays?

  Looks like a meme, meme coin chart.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  It really does look like a meme coin chart.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  And then how about as much tech as a meme.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  As a meme coin, yeah. And what a silly name. It's like Tesla already exists. Let's make a company called Nikola. Clearly people will think it's, it's literally meme coin. It's like how there was like, you know, there's Trump coin and then there's Melania coin. It's like, oh, like let's just Joe Bowden and Kamala Harris or whatever. Hillary Clinton coin or whatever. Or even after Doge coin, they were like cat coins and, you know, they were like the monkeys and then the dogs and then the owls and all sorts of stuff. People know when there's a tension, just farm a little bit, sneak a little bit off the side.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Proven, proven path. So this story starts back in 2009. Trevor Milton, the CEO of Nikola, he had a project called D Hybrid for Swift Transportation. It fails amid accusations of misuse funds, hinting at future deception. In 2014, he founds the Nikola Motor Company after selling D Hybrid, touting revolutionary hydrogen electric trucks with hefty seed investments. 2016, the Nikola One Truck is announced with claims of thousands of reservations and technology years ahead of its competition.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  What was the Nikola One Truck? Was it actually like a commercial?

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Semi, semi, like a 18 wheeler type truck? I don't know.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's so funny because the strategy of saying, hey, we have this.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  You can reserve it for either no dollars or a hundred dollars. Remember the Cybertruck? It was like a hundred bucks.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  I had numerous friends who were like, oh, I reserve one.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I threw a hundred bucks.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  Because the novelty of being able to say like, yeah, I pre-ordered one for a hundred dollars.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  I think you have to put down like 50K.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Which is like a wildly different bar.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but for that buyer, it's, you know.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  True, but, but, but like, they hadn't announced pricing, so I guarantee there'd be, there's like a massive price elasticity to, to, you know, electric car preorder deposits. So if the Roadster was a hundred buck down, a hundred bucks down, and they were like, hey, maybe it'll cost 50 bucks and it'll be better than a Turbo S. Like, people would definitely be jumping.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Fifty K.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're like, hey, maybe it'll be 50 K, and you only have to put a hundred bucks down now. Like, even if it came out at 200 later, people would pre-sell a ton, which could be good for just establishing demand, but I don't know.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  And just for context, I think, like, to, to put in some of these, like, pre-orders, like, I think the Humane pin, even at their price point, got like 7,000 pre-orders. So like, they couldn't even get pre-orders based on a device that didn't actually, you know, the Humane device didn't work reliably. But anyways, back, back to trucks.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Okay, so, December 2016, they unveiled the Nikola One prototype, despite obvious signs it was not fully functional, i.e. visible external power cables. So people are like, wait a minute, there's a, there's a cable coming out of this car. You haven't untethered this thing. And in January of 2018, that's, that's a year, year later.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, because it actually wouldn't be that damning if they were like, hey, we're gonna make the car roll uphill, because then you could say, well, we don't have the battery set up yet, but we have it connected to basically an extension cord.

• 45:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  It's like a vacuum, and then we're gonna get the bat, we're, the engine's going, now we're gonna get, the motor's working now, but, but instead, they, you know, put it in motion, two years later.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a year and two months. Yeah, so they do the rolling truck video, promotional video shows the truck, quote unquote, in motion, but it was later revealed to have been rolled downhill to simulate driving.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  They actually towed it to the top with a tow truck, and then rolled it downhill.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  What's funny is like, is like, I'm sure if you're building a car, there is a process where you go from like, we're in the clay, you know, the clay, like, where they carve out the design, then it's like, hey, we have CAD designs, hey, we, hey, we fabricated like the external shell.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:03John Coogan?

  Hey, we fabricated like the, the, the wheels and the transmission and the axles enough that it actually moves. And that could have been just a cool thing if they didn't lie about it. And then like, look, yeah, it's not actually working yet, but we got it rolling, at least.

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  It's just funny, because you presumably could have got the rolling truck video. In the first month.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  By just building out the frame, putting wheels on it, you know, getting.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  I mean, there are like kit car guys that can do that in their like garage on the weekend.

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  There's some great, there's some great videos of people making like, like things that look like Porsches that are just totally fake.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, you've seen the, uh, the, uh, for the Fiero, the Pontiac Fiero, people put body kits on that to make it look like a Countach. Cause it was a mid-engine sports car from the eighties by Pontiac, but it's like, you know, 10, 10K or something. So you can just mod it like crazy. Uh, this is hilarious. In May of 2018, they sue Tesla for $2 billion over design features. An action scene is both bold and bizarre.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  The company that, the company that names themselves after a derivative of Tesla then goes back and sues Tesla.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, you'd think you'd be getting sued.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  Bold and bizarre.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  Egregious.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, the whole thing, the whole thing. Nicola, bold and bizarre.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  To boost credibility, they refund all pre-ordered deposits despite not having delivered a product, probably just because they raised some money off of the, off of the, off of the pre-orders and they didn't want the pressure from the consumers. April 2019, Nicola World Spectacle. Spectacle is just not a good name for anything. A lavish event unveils multiple prototypes and secures a high-profile order from Anheuser-Busch. So they're, they're, you know, they're deal guys. They're making deals happen, I guess, uh, but rough. Milton purchases a $32 million Utah ranch and, uh, and public offers proposing a Tesla pickup design. Draw increased scrutiny. And so by November of 2019, people are getting real suspicious of this guy.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  He's, he's, uh, you know, suing Tesla, launching these weird truck videos where they're kind of fake and then also spending lavish.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  The guy who was just suing them for $2 billion is now giving them design, saying, hey, Tesla, you guys should make this.

• 48:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  Wild.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Hilarious. Kind of crazy. Do you see the next one? The Nicola Badger. Do you want to read this?

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  February 2020. So this is, this is a few months before they SPAC. The company unveils the Nicola Badger pickup with over the top features, including a built in water fountain from fuel cell exhaust.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Can you imagine?

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, as a father, I do like trucks.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you're in the filtered water game, Jordy. Why not?

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, as a water fanatic.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Maybe we need to hook the Aurora up to the exhaust of the, the coolant of the turbo.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  It's funny. This truck looks like, I've got it pulled up right now. It looks like a complete knockoff of the Tundra meets a TRX.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  And a water fountain using the, the dispensed fuel is pretty cool.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  So funny. But, but like again, great viral story, little feature. And you know, to be fair, like the Cybertruck and other Tesla products have had similar things like that. Like the Model X has the gullwing doors that are like total showstoppers. And it's like, you could just do minivan doors on those, but get way more attention.

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, you could do the minivan doors. The, the, the one thing about minivan door, I mean, all these types of doors, having kids, I got, I got a Mercedes van. Cause I realized being able to just sit.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  Stand.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  And just put the kids straight in.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  Put the kids straight in with the seats, but then the doors are always kind of worried. Like, are they going to get?

• 49:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I, I thought that was very smart. Elon has always been able to thread the needle and the Tesla team around.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  Novelty and, and like actual like function utility.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  Because like, think about.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Steal by wire.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  Another feature.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  By wire and Cybertruck is very gimmicky, but it's also amazing because you're in this huge truck and you just move your hand like two inches and you're turning.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  And then Tesla also does like the, the novelty of, oh, we're going to make like a fart sound effect.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.

• 50:19Jordi Hays?

  Nicola could never.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Never.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  So June 2020, the frenzy begins. Nicola goes public via a SPAC skyrocketing value despite having zero revenue as investors buy into the hype. So immediately.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  Can see on public, you know, basically pumps to $20 billion and then just drops basically every single day for the next five years. I'm sure they had, I gotta look, they had some, they had some bounces at different points.

• 50:48John Coogan?

  Gets mentioned here.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  Who's that?

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Hindenburg.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so in September 2020, it's backed in March or June, sorry. So just a few months later, GM announces an 11% stake. So they, they take a public, you know, position in this public company and plans to manufacture Nikola trucks only for Hindenburg Research to expose a series of deceptive claims. So terrible look for GM. Sounds like they didn't do a lot of technical due diligence.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Should have called Hindenburg first.

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  They saw, they went and visited the ranch in Utah and they were like, this ranch is awesome.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  I want to hang out with this guy more.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  The tech must be great. Shortly after Milton resigns amid mounting evidence of fraud and the GM deal is dressed dramatically scaled back. Yeah, I'm sure they still like had their position, you know, hopefully.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  And then at that point, like this is so long ago, like a little under five years ago. And so there's all this legal fallout, fallout July 2021, still like the absolute top of the market. Milton is indicted on multiple fraud charges in October 2022. He's found guilty and sentenced to prison with hefty fines. They're clearly clawing back. You know, I'm sure a lot of, I'm sure he did various transactions over time that he benefited from personally. Nikola settles with the SEC for $125 million over misleading investors. So they had raised, I'm sure billions of dollars through, through their public offering. And then in February 2025, today, with production delays, financial struggles and a tarnished reputation, Nikola files for chapter 11.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, wish, wish the story had a better ending. But it's, it's honestly in some ways amazing that they are, made it so far, even after their founder, you know, went, was, was out of the picture. It's crazy on public, they have, there's been $27 million of volume today.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  So is this, I'm trying to understand who's buying the stock at this point? Do they feel that?

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean, who knows, right? I just.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  It's so bizarre. I mean, this is just such an interesting company because I.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Cause they still are, they still are loaded up with debt, right?

• 53:07John Coogan?

  Similar to Theranos, similar Theranos, like this is, this is one of those companies that I feel like was like an open secret in Silicon Valley that everyone knew that this was fake.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Like, there was never a moment where people were like, oh, maybe this will work out. Like, I'm wishing them the best.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  Tesla was losing engineers to Nikola.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  That never happened. And also, there were never VC funds piling into this. I just pulled up Crunchbase and it was the US Department of Energy, CNH Industrial, General Motors, California Transportation Commission. So like, the guy was clearly just really good at rizzling like non-financial investors who don't do this stuff. And I'm sure that if he, if this, if this founder had walked into like a holy trinity firm and tried to pitch this, they would have gotten laughed at.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  At this time, the other car manufacturers didn't really have a strong EV strategy. It did make sense from a narrative standpoint that there would be a commercial, you know, commercial focused version of Tesla focused on trucking. Everybody knew that Tesla would eventually do this, but it wasn't a priority for them, right? And so from a narrative, it all made sense. That doesn't mean that they can actually execute on that narrative and capture value based on that long-term trend. And, and who knows, you know, I know Amazon has EVs now, but it doesn't seem like EVs have gotten that sort of widespread commercial. They haven't had the level of traction that, that EVs have had in the commercial market.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Milton is indicted, the CEO, on multiple fraud charges. This is around 2021, 2022. In October 2022, he is found guilty and sentenced to prison with heavy fines. Nicholas settles with the SEC for 125 million over misleading investors. And just now, the reason we're covering it today is that it's basically the end of the road with production delays, financial struggles, and a tarnished reputation they struggled for. They filed for bankruptcy.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  He's going to be out of prison in 2027.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  Let's get him on the show.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  Connor laughing. Uh, I mean, maybe, you know, this is another thing. We believe in redemptive justice, right?

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  And, uh, you know, if he does his time, the main thing is I want to see some banger, deep tech analysis. I want him to come out with some ground. I want him to hit the books.

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  I want him to be the Dylan Patel of the EV, the commercial EV space.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  Handwrite analysis.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  On happenings.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  Prove that you're the real deal.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Not just a charlatan. Come out with some, some groundbreaking research. Show me that you've at least read every book about battery cell technology.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  He's 42, so he's not even going to be 50 when he gets out.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  It'd be great.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  He was born in 1982.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  It'd be great. A little bump in the road. Get him back in the game.

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  Get back in action.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. I love, I love a comeback story. America loves a comeback story. Uh, let's see. So another green, green energy unicorn died Wednesday as Nicola Corp filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. The 11 year old EV maker aspired to be the Tesla of trucks. They went public through a SPAC. They got, uh, they, they benefited from the Green New Deal. That's a $27 billion market valuation at the time that was greater than Ford's. What a coincidence.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  Wild.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Uh, lots of people trying to take a shot at Ford.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  Ford, Ford gets, I mean.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Ford's Lindy. They're going to be around longer than all these companies.

• 56:35Jordi Hays?

  If Ford had a Satya, that, that is a hundred billion dollar company.

• 56:40John Coogan?

  For a while, there was a, there was like a grandson of Henry Ford running the company, Bill Ford, which was awesome because their, because their tagline was built Ford tough. And his name was Bill Ford, Bill Ford tough.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  I love Ford. I love Ford for, I, I love Ford as a first name.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  I, I, it's on, on our list for, you know, the next, the next son, Ford Hayes.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  That's a sounding name.

• 57:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'd love to see Ford make a comeback. I had a Ford Explorer at one point. That was a great car. The Expeditions, fantastic. Ford GT, fantastic. Mustang, also great. You know, these are great cars, but let's bring them back. Supposedly sophisticated investors were taken in by its marketing hype. General Motors took the 11% stake, which CEO Mary Barra hailed as an industry-leading disruptor. It was supposedly sophisticated. It was disruptive in a different way. They posted a video on Twitter of its model truck appearing to power effortlessly down a flat road with the caption, "The Nikola hydrogen electric trucks will

• 57:44John Coogan?

  take on any semi-truck and outperform them in every category. Weight, acceleration, stopping, safety, and features, all with 500 to 1,000 mile range." That would be revolutionary if true. It wasn't. According to a 2021 federal fraud indictment of founder Trevor Milton, an inoperable prototype was towed to the top of the hill, then Nikola employees released the brakes so it looked like it was cruising along, all while the door was taped shut to keep it from falling off, and its batteries were removed to prevent the truck from catching fire. Rough. After taking investors for a ride, Mr. Milton was...

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  The only ride they actually went on.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Good writing. Good writing. Good pun.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Journalists are underrated sometimes.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Underrated, Bloomberg. Who is this? This is Wall Street Journal, opinion section. It's great. "California regulators and the Biden administration tried to boost the electric truck market with mandates and subsidies. The Inflation Reduction Act included a $40,000 tax credit for buyers of electric trucks. EPA rule last spring requires that electric truck models make up 25% of long-haul tractor sales by 2032." Man, talk about a bull case for Tesla now. It's crazy. Another electric truck maker, Lordstown Motors, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Fisker failed last June. Rough time. The British Electric Bus Startup Arrival Sold Its Assets. Lots of bad stuff going on in the EV truck market.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Power law rules everything around me. That's the story here. Anyway.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  Great opportunity though, for one of our listeners to become a hero. Come in, pull them out of chapter 11, run it back up to the top.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  You're definitely going to get, you know, you could, this could be turned into a meme coin.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Turn it into a meme coin. Yeah. And we were saying earlier.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Actually just continue it's.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  You know. Trevor's going to try and come out of the clink, hit the ground running, build a new company. One thing in the clink.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  Still going to be a young man.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  In the clink, bed's famously uncomfortable. Maybe he needs an eight sleep. That takes us to our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. You can get one at eightsleep.com. And we have another post from Eight Sleep. They formulated a sleep elixir with valerian root, nature's secret to winding down faster. You can check that out at eightsleep.com as well. And so we love Eight Sleep and thank you to them.

• 59:58Jordi Hays?

  One note, they set up a URL, eightsleep.com/tbpn.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  And they say, TB approves the pod, which is the name of their product.

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  The pod approves, so they could just say the pod approves the pod.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  We, we've been saying.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  We have a quote up here that says, you can't publish 15 plus hours a week of live content without being at peak performance. We simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without Eight Sleep. And if you want to win as bad as we do, you can't afford to not sleep. Yeah.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  I said, we simply wouldn't, we simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without Eight Sleep. And if you want to win as bad as we do, you can't afford not to sleep on the pod. So, uh, check it out. Same, same pod that Huberman uses.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  And Rob over there. They're absolute boys.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Let's move on to some drama between Salesforce and Microsoft.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  You know, we love drama on this show.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  It got spicy.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love being there on being there violence.

• 1:00:54John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Uh, Mark Benioff and Satya Nadella have been going back and forth. There's an article in the information breaking it down, but first I wanted to pull up what the stock has been doing. So we went to public.com. We looked at Salesforce. They're up 20% in the last six months. Market caps 310 billion. It's a big company. Big, big, big, big, big company. CRM, big business, but they, but they own everything now. They own Slack and they're trying to get everyone to upgrade to Slack AI. Have you been getting those notifications?

• 1:01:23Jordi Hays?

  I haven't seen Slack.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  Oh, man, like whenever you're in Slack now, there's a model that pops up. Request AI.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  David Sacks launched like a Slack competitor that leverages AI.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Didn't he build the like a, like a Slack before Slack? Like that was his main thing, right? That he sold to Microsoft?

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  I almost clicked on David Snacks, which is a parody account. Well, Sacks, Sacks pulled his chat.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  I was thinking of Yammer. Like that was the company he did after PayPal and he sold that for a billion dollars.

• 1:01:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he, last year, he announced an AI powered work chat app rivaling Slack called Blue. Anyways.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  I didn't know about that. Interesting. Okay. Well, anyway, let's go to this article in the information. Salesforce in talks with Microsoft, Oracle and Google about cloud deal to handle AI. Salesforce Mark Benioff has long been a vocal critic of Microsoft. A couple of years ago, he accused the company of violating antitrust laws and how it sells software bundles. More recently, he slammed its artificial intelligence chatbot for giving inaccurate responses and being difficult to use. I think he dropped Clippy as a pejorative. It got spicy. I think it was, I think it was in Aspen or Sun Valley. It was an iconic moment, but that history hasn't stopped Salesforce from including Microsoft in negotiations it's having with several cloud providers, also including Google and Oracle about a major new cloud agreement.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  The deal is likely to be worth more than a billion dollars over several years, said a Salesforce manager with direct knowledge of the deal. And so here's the takeaway. Salesforce isn't talk with Google, Microsoft and Oracle for a big cloud deal because they need AI inference, of course. The deal could be worth more than a billion dollars over several years and they're currently on AWS, but they're bidding it out. According to this reporting, but we'll see what Benioff has to say. Salesforce wants to rent the servers to run its customer management, AI agents and other applications, a sign of how new AI products are expanding Salesforce's computing needs. So obviously Salesforce is stuffing AI in every single product they own. They need inference and they need more servers. So they're going to the hyperscalers and they're bidding it out allegedly.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Salesforce already uses AWS in addition to Google Cloud and its own data centers.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  So we don't know who is the who's emerging as the favorite to win. He also didn't specify the size and scope of the agreement. A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment, but the agreement will be in the same range as Salesforce's past agreements with AWS. The negotiations with haven't previously been reported signal Salesforce's shift to public cloud providers for more of its computing needs. They're getting out of the data center building business, more or less. That's the shtick here. Salesforce has told customers that eventually it will sell its applications through all major cloud providers. AWS didn't comment. Oracle didn't comment. Google didn't comment. No one's talking to the information.

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  The information is commenting though.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  The information is commenting.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Didn't stop them.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  And we'll go to Mark Benioff because as soon as this dropped, he said, the story and the information is incorrect. In 2024, Salesforce explored a fourth deployment option for our customers alongside our existing choices, proprietary data centers, AWS and Alibaba cloud. Last year, we decided to extend our partnership with Google, giving customers the option to deploy Salesforce customers 360 apps, hyperforce, agent force and data cloud on Google's platform in future Salesforce releases. So he's coming out and saying, hey, I'm not rugged AWS. I'm expanding. I'm not switching.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I mean, some of these quotes are just damning. I mean, he's saying Clippy was a disaster. Copilot is a gimmick.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  He's saying, I think this copilot thing has been a huge disaster for them. So he's just publicly dragging them.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  So what's going on here? It seems like it seems like the information is trying to, you know, sow a little chaos.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Over at, over at Microsoft, Frank Shaw says, Mark has no idea what he's talking about. This is 2025.

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  I love this.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Right after he says, I think this copilot thing has been a disaster.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, and Charles, uh, who's over at Microsoft says, uh, one of the execs there working on Copilot, he says, this is a big moment for Salesforce because CRM is not going to be the future for customers.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be the strategic imperative for customers. I think that's why you see Salesforce taking jabs at Copilot because there's that pressure is very real and it's here. So that was just, uh, this month in February, uh, 2025.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  So they're going back and forth.

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Going back and forth, not mincing words. Uh, we love, I mean, we, we called that we need to get people in tech need to get more, you know, fired up.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Combative.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  Combative, right?

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  More physical, more physical altercations.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  I want to see, oh, Marc Benioff and Scott Nudella were leaving the club after an altercation. The shirt ripped.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  And honestly, if you're a senti, one of the best things you can do is go prison mode and take shots at a, take shots at the big dog, right? Go take shots at a, at Benioff.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like the East Coast, West Coast rap battle.

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Say, hey, the lineup this year at Dreamforce sucks.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  Sucks.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  They, slop.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Slop. You should call it dream slop.

• 1:06:22Jordi Hays?

  This wouldn't even be on the, you know, you know, the, this wouldn't be on, what, what are some of like, I haven't been to Coachella in so long, I forget about their feeder stages. They just wouldn't even hit the side stage at 12 noon.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  On Friday at Coachella.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  This doesn't even make, you know.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  This is garbage.

• 1:06:39Jordi Hays?

  The do lab, it's not going on the do lab.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  I don't even know what that is, but I get it from context.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  You've never been to Coachella?

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  I've never been to Coachella.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  I've been to Outside Lands and maybe a few others, but I'm not a big, I'm not a big festival guy.

• 1:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Sometime I'll have to talk about, uh, going to, I've been to both weekends of Coachella in the same year.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Oof, dusty.

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Which is dusty.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Dusty.

• 1:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Dusty. That actually kicked off my, uh, original fitness arc.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  That was the catalyst.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we, I think we did mention that at one point. Um, and so, uh, yeah, the information is, uh, sowing seeds of dissent between the hyperscalers. I'd love to see it. Uh, there's a hyperforce rewrite going on. This is interesting. Salesforce has already rewritten the code for its applications, databases and other operating systems to run on ABS services in a project called Hyperforce, the AWS, the AWS version of Salesforce's application. Became available in 2020. Salesforce intends to make the same applications available on whichever cloud provider it picks in the current negotiations. While Salesforce incurred a significant upfront expense in developing Hyperforce, making it available on another cloud wouldn't be as costly

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  since roughly 80 to 90% of its code built for AWS would run on other providers. Interesting. So customers of Salesforce want to run on their own clouds. Salesforce needs to do deals to make those clouds happy and get them going. And Benioff wants to keep everyone happy and wants to be able to play all of the different hyperscalers against each other without

• 1:08:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you can do that if you're throwing billions of dollars around. Every single one of these hyperscalers has like a sales team dedicated to Salesforce.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Jordi Hays?

  And they're trying to win said business.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  But there's, there's bean air on bean air.

• 1:08:20John Coogan?

  But he has been nagging Microsoft a lot. And so that's got to make that negotiation harder. And they also have the most competitive products. So doing a deal to

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  What's Microsoft's CRM product?

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  Do they have? I mean, they have a, they have a product for everything.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  It's Excel.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess Excel, but I, they have a bunch of things.

• 1:08:39Jordi Hays?

  So Microsoft Dynamics 365 is their CRM.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  I mean, the big, I think the big war is, you know, Slack versus Teams. Teams really crushed Slack. And I don't, I don't know how you would value Slack as an independent company now, post-acquisition, but Salesforce bought Slack. And whether or not that was a good deal for Salesforce, kind of depends on Teams' execution. And Teams has become really popular because it's bundled with like the Microsoft Office that goes into like so many different companies. Well, speaking of software to help you run your business, this show is of course supported by Ramp, our good buddies over at Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 1:09:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to give you a, I'm going to give you an example. So we launched PMF or Die on Monday.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:30Jordi Hays?

  And turns out, running a 24/7 livestream with multiple camera feeds, multiple audio feeds, hundreds of concurrent viewers streaming on multiple platforms, very hard. We had to tap in a guy named Sam Sheffer.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  This is very cool.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Who was at Humane. He was at Humane on Monday. Humane gets acquired by HP. He decides, I'm not going to go into the AI printer business, even though. Kind of, we've talked about this. We want a better printer.

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  I'm excited for better printers.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, so I talked to Sam this morning. Uh, I was driving to work.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  It was 5:30 a.m.

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  And so he's coming online. He's on the East Coast. We're, you know, Tyler Gold introduced me.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, dude, like, you gotta help us out. Like, we need to level this up. Like, we've, we've got all these viewers. Like, I think PMF or Die has product market fit in the sense that, like, viewers are super excited about it. Sam's like, I'm down. I gotta go pick up, like, you know, basically like my exit package. But after that, I'll go. And so he rolled into the PMF or Die stream today and, and right as he was headed over there, I just made him a card on Ramp. And I was like, if you need to buy any supplies. And so he gets the invite, downloads the app, adds it to Apple Pay, and he can now buy products on our Ramp account, even though he's like a, you know, a contractor, right? So, uh, that level, like, that, that used to be like so annoying of like, okay, go and, and, and get the receipts

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  and we'll reimburse you or we'll pay you. So, just so fantastic. And, uh, Ramp gets it done. Um, let's go into-

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Let's go to the, the timeline. I want to do this Eric Stromberg post on boot scaling. I thought this was interesting. You flagged this. Uh, he writes a little screenshot essay. Uh, Eric, if you don't know him, he was at Bedrock with Jeff Lewis, uh, absolute dog of a capital allocator. Uh, and Eric writes, "Traditionally startups raise millions of dollars to start and hundreds to scale. Today, AI is giving everyone an army of agents to design, engineer, and build on their behalf. Perhaps AI will deliver so much leverage that founders will raise only one round and be done. Profits will fund from there. This is a comforting idea for seed VCs, but not right. If you can reach 1 million of ARR in 90 days from an apartment, why raise seed money? Instead, I expect a different strategy to grow: boot scaling.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Founders will bootstrap at the start, leveraging near-zero cost of experimentation. They'll only raise after achieving product market fit and building conviction in a venture-scale business. At that point, they'll use capital to scale distribution."

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Boot scaling allows founders to avoid early dilution while later securing capital to win versus well-funded competitors. A prior generation has proven this model works and he flags a few here. Atlassian founded in 2002, they first raised money in 2010, they raised 60 million. Qualtrics founded in 2002, they first raised in 2012 for 70 million. GitHub founded in 27 or 2007, first raised in 2012. OnePassword founded in 2005, they raised in 2019. Unity, they started in 2004, they didn't raise until 2009. And so a lot of these companies that build for a long time independently and then they start doing the growth rounds while skipping those early seed series A rounds.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  This shift will reshape reshape the landscape of seed VC. Those stuck in existing structures and clinging to old assumptions will lose to those who adapt. So break it down, what do you think about that? I thought that was an interesting post.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I mean, the the obvious example here is PMF or Die. Blake came out, built a few sort of these like AI native apps, like generated so much revenue that he's now building his fourth app in like two years, which he's announcing on PMF or Die tonight.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  And he did not want to raise money at all for this business because he's like, I have the cash. I don't really need to spend that much money. I have like the equivalent, like just by using cursor and some of these other AI tools, I have the equivalent of like a bunch of developers that are on demand. And so he's very ambitious with this next business, like he wants to, you know, he's gonna, I'll let him announce it tonight, but it could easily be a multi-billion dollar company. He will get to the point where, you know, he could say, yeah, I'm gonna raise like $20 million at a 200 post and sell 10% of the company. But it's very possible we're gonna see a lot more of these businesses that just basically never raise, right? And that's not necessarily like the good thing for VCs is there's still plenty of businesses.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  It actually frees up capital for VCs to invest in these sort of capital capex intensive businesses. Defense tech is a good example.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Foundation model companies too.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the foundation models.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  AI is bifurcated. It's like the consumer app companies that are building AI companies need no money to start and then they need money to scale distribution. And then the foundation model companies need a billion dollars upfront to do the training run. And then, once they have it, they've kind of cornered the market and they have the commodity and then they can just sell it.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so I see more rounds happening where it's like kind of these YC style rounds where it's like, hey, we need 500K. So we can, so like if you're working somewhere and you want to quit your job and still be able to have like decent health insurance, maybe, but it's really more so the, you know, these companies across the board are just getting way less, you know, capital intensive. And then simultaneously, attention is free now if you understand algorithmic feeds, right? Like PMF or Die, another good example. We spent $3,000 producing the video. It should have like a million views at this point, right?

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  Super high leverage. And so, yeah, if you're a CVC, how does that change your strategy? Do you, do you need to, do you need to go and convince someone who doesn't really need money just to get you like a little allocation? Maybe you're the only person you're putting in, you know, maybe, maybe the initial dilution is 1%, but you got your 1%. Like you're an angel in a larger round, but there just isn't that lead anymore? Or are you just out of the game and focusing on growth, growth fundraising?

• 1:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, VCs will still have the, you know, basically say, sell 10% of your company to me because like I'm going to go to bat and help you win, right? With distribution on X, you know, LinkedIn, et cetera. Those are maybe tougher sells right now, but that's why YC's product, which is, which is you have to figure out what product to make and you have to make your product, but we are going to help you figure out how to make a company, which is really the product of YC.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  And also the pressure cooker.

• 1:15:44Jordi Hays?

  And the pressure cooker.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  The value of YC is you're sitting there listening to some generational entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg's on stage and you look over and the guy next to you is coding on the laptop and you're like, I should go ship a feature right now. Like people are grinding and that, and that pressure of seeing everyone else, all your competition move super fast makes you want to move faster. So, yeah, it, YC has a bunch of interesting value adds that don't really come in the form of just the money. It's fascinating. Well, if you have a money, if you have a business that's throwing off a lot of cash, highly recommend you pick up this beautiful car posted by Joe Wisnewski. One of my favorite builds for a VIP, a PTS 911 ST with $55,660 in CXX options.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Break it down, Jordy, why did you want to cover this on the show?

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  So this guy Joe, I've talked to him before, he works at a dealership, I think in like, potentially Memphis.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:16:38Jordi Hays?

  I forget exactly, somewhere on the other side of America, but he, basically, I think he sources the best Porsches, AMGs, Bentleys in the entire country. And so he's constantly sharing these incredible examples. This is one of the best, that silver on tan interior, the sort of heritage interior, I think is just fantastic. So need to get one of these in my garage at some point. But if you're in the market, go hit up Joe. He's also got an Instagram account with like some of the best car content. And he wears a suit when he's talking about these cars.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Oh, I love it.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  He respects the cars and says, I'm not just gonna, you know, film this, you know, slop video.

• 1:17:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  That's great. Okay, well, let's go to this next post by Ash, Untapped Market. No one has my current dream project, opposite of friend.com, pendant named foe, LLM Texas speech, computer yells at you. Adversarial computing, guys, it's on the come up.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is sort of what friend.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, friend is very adversarial.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  It's more not adversarial, but it's like, hey, you know, save, save my life kind of thing.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. And Yannick chimes in, he says POV, you're smiling for a picture but unaware that they're debating how to build a computer that yells at you. I love it. That's so funny. Yeah, very, very, lots of fun opportunities.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  Building this. I think, I think that the. The adversarial friend.com is probably friend.com.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree with that, but I think that there is something beautiful in here. Like the story that we kicked this off with about the horrific humanoid robot as opposed to the friendly Asimo humanoid robot. The, the, the, the computer that yells at you, that is a viral concept. That will get a lot of downloads or installs or people testing it out. It'll get you a lot of attention and then from there you can kind of figure out, okay, what's the real product here? What really has product market fit? And friend.com certainly did that with their market entry. Let's talk about Apple. This week they launched the iPhone 16E. It's $599. This is a big jump up from the 429SE. Mark Gurman has had the scoop and then the breakdown.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Here he says the, it has an action button is in 128, 256 and 512 gig options. Black and white color options, iPhone 14 and iPhone SE are discontinued. Pre-orders start on February 21st, 28th for release and the C1 Apple modem is official. And this was a big, a big story, although it was kind of buried. Mark Gurman says, "The C1 Apple modem, which is a, the cellular modem that actually connects to the cellular network. Normally these are made by Broadcom, I believe, is a monumental technical achievement because there's a ton of intellectual property. They're not just like hard, it's like, it's as, it's as complex as making like an Nvidia GPU apparently." And so he says, "A several billion dollar effort that has been in the works for seven years.

• 1:19:37John Coogan?

  In the end, it gets two sentences in the press release and 15 seconds in the announcement video. Apple is clearly downplaying this intentionally."

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Daniel, that's what it do.

• 1:19:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Beth says, "Why?"

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  And Steve Sinowski says, "Patent cases hinge on how significant a feature is in the hole. Injunction depends on novelty and criticality. The more words, the more to hang in the inevitable QC litigation on." And so Steve is saying, "Hey," and Steve Sinowski is very sharp. I think he's at Andreessen, but he was, I think at Microsoft for a long time. And he understands this stuff really well. And he was saying that basically, "Hey, they, they built this modem. It works and it's going to be able to connect the phones to Starlink, do a whole bunch more stuff. It's just retooling their supply chain, gives them a huge advantage on, on the supply side." But. They're going to get sued and so they can't make too big of a deal out of it because if they do, the lawsuits are going to come for them. That's the thesis here, at least what people

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  are thinking. And so there's another, there's a little bit of extra context here. C1 was birthed from Apple's one billion acquisition of Intel's smartphone modem biz in 2019. C1 is going to give Apple more leverage in carrier negotiations because they say, hey Verizon, like we can be independent, we can use Starlink, we can use whatever. And it will allow deeper device integration and better, better battery life. So, you know, they'll be able to have a hundred percent battery life right up until they release the new phone on the day. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Apple's silicon team is consistently underestimated.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm so used to the landline mode now. Apple landline.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  I like this one.

• 1:21:09Jordi Hays?

  I actually would like an Apple charger made from Apple. That's one of those like stretchy landline type things, you know? So you can, people used to walk around the house.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, HP, give me the, give me the, give me the printer, the AI printer, give me the AI landline. These are the things I want here. We got the Polycom on this, on the table. But let's move on to a promoted post from Bezel. You can shop over 22,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. A lot of people probably don't know this, but when you buy a watch on Bezel, the person who's selling it doesn't just ship it to you, they actually ship it to Bezel first and then people at Bezel verify that you're getting a real watch, which is really key.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  I've been to the space. I was a fortress and there's just guys nerding out all day long and, you know, just making sure that the watch you actually got is legit. And they catch a shocking number of fakes floating around.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  I was Googling for some watches and I just saw a, like in Google Shopping, it was like, you know, Patek Nautilus, $300. And you click on it and it's like, it's from like a knockoff website. I'm like, how is this even like on Google? It's crazy.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Now, Google, Google clearly has not made an effort to catch fake watches. Because if you look up, yeah, if you look up Patek Aquanaut, it'll pull up a...

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Some sketchy website.

• 1:22:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it pulls up these watches that are just objectively, you know, obviously not real.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  And Google's happy to put them in front of you.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  And so when you buy a watch on Bezel, I'm actually going through this right now. The seller shipped it to Bezel, they received the watch and I have the update. They've started the authentication process. And so it's very fun. You get the little Domino's pizza tracker and you get to see exactly where it is in that process, which is very fun. And I also wanted to go through this fun little post that they ripped explaining the perfect three watch collection, say less. They argue that the perfect three watch collection is a steel sports watch for the everyday flex, a dress watch for closing deals and a wild card because it's fun. Here's what they're going with and let us know in the comments what you think about this. They recommend for the everyday flex, a Rolex Submariner Hulk, reference 116610LV.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Which matches our new.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Color.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Color.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  You might see it in the corner. We're using a beautiful, is that a Kelly green? I don't even know what that's called.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  It's a good question.

• 1:23:40John Coogan?

  It's built like a tank, water resistant to 300 meters for all the diving you'll never do.

• 1:23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  I need to relax the next time I go diving. I actually scuba dive a lot and somehow it goes with everything, even though it's bright green for the dress watch.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Like can we figure out how to do it underwater pod?

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  You could do it if you had a rebreather set up.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  Scuba diving in a tux.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Jordi Hays?

  Underwater pod.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  This would be potentially viral. The dress watch, they recommend the Cartier Tank Louis, reference W G T A 011. Arguably the Cartier to have, the Tank LC is pure old school elegance. This is timeless sophistication at its finest, perfect for closing deals, sipping Negronis or just reminding people you have taste. I love the Cartier Tank. I think it's a fantastic watch worn by Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali and Jackie Kennedy. And it's just a fantastic watch with a beautiful history. And for the wild card, they recommend the I W C Pilots Watch Chronograph Top Gun. Big, bold, straight out of a fighter jet.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  This Top Gun Chrono's lightweight ceramic case laughs at scratches. The military aesthetic means business and the Flyback Chrono is just plain old cool.

• 1:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Great option for a hard tech, D tech founder.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  You don't know if you're going to end up in an Apache that day.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  Just a fantastic choice.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  So why not pick up a, an IWC Pilots watch chronograph Top Gun? And so Jordy, you're, you're working on a watch collection. What do you think is going to be next? Any, any teasers?

• 1:25:11Jordi Hays?

  I think the tank, I actually need to, I need a, I need a dress watch.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Tank would be great. I still think JLC Ultra Thin would be really good.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  I think, uh, there's a lot of good options.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  Or, or of, of some sort, or.

• 1:25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Jordi Hays?

  But anyways.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  I think the 222 is the Vacheron that you're going to wind up with.

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's the only one that I actually want.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  It's so good.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes in life you have, you, you sort of justify, you know, purchases that are adjacent to the thing that you actually want. But you need to just.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Look in your heart and understand what it is you actually want and figure out a way to get that thing.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Well, let's go to Zach. He says, "The mission of Aura, make it easier, more beautiful and more customizable to share your workouts with the world. Hundreds of millions of people use apps like Strava, Nike Run Club to track their workouts. Tens of millions use apps like Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok to share their workouts. His goal is to start giving creative tools so that second behavior sharing becomes an art form of its own. And as a byproduct, I believe if you make training more creative and public, athletes want to train more."

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  So Zach is based in New York City, operating under the, the PMF or die mentality right now, working on Aura, which is a new app. John already said it, but it's basically think about, um, yeah, a workout app that makes these sort of beautiful graphics so that you can share your progress. A lot of running is this sort of like communal activity. Everybody's sort of pushing themselves independently and Zach has, you know, a million plus followers on Instagram, wants to build a product for himself and them to just be able to share their, their, um, training more. And I'm super excited to see it. Uh, I don't run much myself. We should go over to New York and just go for a run with Zach and just get absolutely smoked. But we're getting a treadmill in the cage for PMF or die.

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  And so we'll have to have Zach go on a, on a Tessa app in there. So love to see it. Excited to see Zach roll this out.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. So good luck to him as he builds this app. We love to see it. Let's go over to Andreessen Horowitz. Chris Dixon was on a podcast with their head of growth, David George. Talking about what will happen in the world of AI just to the internet and just to websites. I thought was very interesting because everyone jumps to Terminator or complete job loss. Chris is thinking in the future, but not so far in the future about something that seems like a very real possibility. So he says, what happens to the billions of websites if they aren't getting traffic? AI isn't just disrupting search, it's changing the internet's economic model. For decades, websites provided platforms with content in exchange for traffic.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  This was the covenant, as he puts it. AI flips this content fuels its model, but traffic doesn't always flow back. So historically on the internet, the beautiful thing is that if you had great content, the traffic would show up. The Google search crawler would find you, you would go viral on LinkedIn or Facebook. Yeah, stumble upon Twitter used to link out. Those things have stopped and then the L L Ms will just give people answers directly. So as users turn to AI for answers, instead of the traditional search, control is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant systems. He's worried about the future of the internet and what this shift means for creators. To address this, he asks, what new incentive structures or architectures should we be thinking about?

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  And so he's not saying, hey, we got to ban AI. He's just saying that, you know, there needs to be a new deal for content creators. And what does that look like? Whether that's, whether that's a content, we've talked about this, like the content licensing model from the L L M. Like if you are really great at crafting recipes at a superhuman level, you craft them. And then, yes, you only get one hit from the OpenAI scraper and one hit from the Anthropic scraper. But that one hit is then you're basically on like a YouTube style creator fund where they split the profits with you. And they're saying, yeah, we're taking your content. We are training our model on it. But when we, when someone asks for this recipe, we use 50% of yours and then 50% of someone else's.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, we're going to send you, you know, a couple of cents for every query that we turned over. And there's this abstraction layer, but we're still paying you somehow. And that would definitely keep the economic model in place. I'm sure Chris, as the head of Andreessen Crypto and massive crypto investor, former number one on the Midas list, has a bunch of ideas for how crypto can be involved in that. He doesn't explicitly break that down in this clip, but you know, he's thinking about that as well. What was your take?

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited to see, you know, crypto is entering a new regulatory regime, right? Starts with a bang, a few days before David Sacks gets into his official position as crypto czar. We have presidential meme coins coming out. And so this new administration will seemingly be getting, you know, trying to get innovative around the actual regulations that have been in many ways forcing the cryptocurrency industry to orient around meme coins, right? If you can't invest in value, because oftentimes, you know, many of these tokens couldn't be tied to cash flow or anything like that. So if that changes, which, you

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  know, we're all sort of waiting around to see, there's going to be so many new actual ways for companies that operate on change to like generate revenue outside of trading. And so Andresian Crypto has been making a bunch of bets, like sort of betting that this will eventually happen. And I'm just excited to see, like, you know, I expect that Chris Dixon is like actively working with Sacks and many of the other people, you know, in the White House admin to try to figure out how to influence this policy to fully unlock crypto's potential, right? Because it's been handicapped for years and years and years by the regulatory environment and not allowing like the most exciting use cases to flourish.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I always think it's interesting, Chris's framing, like, he is somewhat an early entrepreneur in like, kind of post dot com era, started two companies, sold them both, has been deeply involved in like the early internet and he's like weird, like, I'm pretty sure he did the Oculus seed deal or like a very early Oculus deal. He did some drone companies, Skydio. He, I sat on a board with him for a number of years, worked with him very closely and really enjoyed that. And he also backed Kickstarter and a bunch of like crazy, like, he's really close with Fred Wilson and the USV guys. And so he's, he sees the internet as something that's valuable by itself, like to humanity. And he has a real reverence for.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  Internet communities, a lot of his investing thesis early on was like, find, I think he had some quote like, like what people do on the, on the internet on the weekends will be your job in five years. Something like that. And I thought that was very interesting. And so he's, he's very driven to maintain what is great about the internet. Well, anyway, let's go to how startups are changing. Anthony Papliano says, the real flex is raising as little money as possible for your startup and succeeding with the smallest team necessary. I thought that was an interesting post because are we in the business of flexing? Does it matter? Does it matter if you build a massive business with 10,000 employees or 100 employees?

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  Like, I, I, I guess it's, it's always impressive when you see a high revenue per dollar or revenue per employee number, but at the end of the day,

• 1:32:49Jordi Hays?

  It's always cool, but it shouldn't be the goal.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  Market cap is the only thing that matters, really.

• 1:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51John Coogan?

  And like, and like durable market cap and durable value and durable cash flow and how you get there. Like, Amazon has an order of magnitude more employees than Google, I'm pretty sure.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Because Amazon employs people that do pick and pack.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  I think the revenue per employee is always a fascinating metric to look at. It's always, it can be very impressive if you look at Tether, right? I think they do like $8 million of net income per employee or something ridiculous. Like multiples of what

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  BlackRock does or these sort of more legacy financial institutions. And you see Cursor with 30 employees, you know, multi-billion dollar valuation. So I, I think it's awesome. I, I, you know, I, I think that, but, but, you know, I think pomp is probably just like baiting people a little bit here. And ultimately it shouldn't be what, what you fixate on early. It's how do we build a really massive durable company?

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Many paths to success. And it kind of depends on what kind of company you want to run. Like, some people want to have the small, like David Holes at Midjourney. He hasn't raised a lot of money. He hasn't hired that many people. Clearly he wants to run this lab and this product that's like, Very dedicated user base, very profitable.

• 1:34:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  But he's not, he's not like in this take over the world, like raise as much money, do the deal with Masa, build the data center like immediately. I think he's, I think he's building what he wants and it's more about finding the Ikka guy or like the life's work that aligns with you. But anyway, let's move on to Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dream beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Head on over to wander.com. They're giving $400 off your spring trip with Spring 400. And there's a beautiful photo of a wander in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. I've never been there, but that looks fantastic.

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  So crazy that

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  Check it out.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Like every single one of their homes looks like that.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  We wanna, so I really wanna partner with Wander for the, for the, you know, if we do a season two of PMF or die, they have this private island somewhere in Florida.

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  That's, yeah.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  That would just be absolutely perfect to, you know, pick up the drawbridge.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Lock him on the island.

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  If you want to leave, you can, but you gotta swim, you know, a few miles.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be great.

• 1:35:05Jordi Hays?

  Perfect setup.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Head on over to Wander and check it out if you're looking for your next vacation home while you're traveling. Did you see this one from Overfit Quantitative Strategies? Great meme account. Good watermark on this. I don't know if we can pull this up here, but it says, "Choose your Silicon Valley think boy. Mark writes more manifestos than gender-neutral communist undergrad. It's time to build, but not in his backyard. Is a techno-optimist. He shills meme coins. Brian injects his son's blood to stay eternally young. Gwern lives in the woods and on a 12K income. Samo, San Francisco's Rasputin. Andrew, cumulative probabilities final boss. Yes and no, no coffee, no alcohol, no medication

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  in the morning, meditation in the morning. Do you enjoy life?" It's very, I don't know. I don't, I don't even understand that. Naval writes Facebook captions but for millennial tech bros instead of boomers. Mark, his career at Oracle taught him that software can be a more profitable racket. Paul wants to be in founder mode.

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Naval's reading list is the airport books Hall of Fame. I feel like part of that is when he recommends a book, it probably goes into the airport.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Because he actually does have a massive audience, but who knows?

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  It's very silly, very, very silly, but you know, you love to see some Wojacks from the guys you know and love.

• 1:36:25Jordi Hays?

  The guys you know and love.

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  And a lot of, a lot of good, a lot of good content from these guys. I don't know. I think this is a fun, silly little, silly little post, having fun.

• 1:36:34Jordi Hays?

  Talking a little fun.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  Poking fun at some of the legends in Silicon Valley. You go on dark, Dorkesh, Dorkesh, and you're drowning in e-girls, he says. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens. He is hosting an event in San Francisco. If you're in there, you should check it out. He says, "A little over two years ago, Marky Wagner and I published an essay in Pirate Wires Child entitled 'Choose Good Quests' that blew up way more than I was expecting. I was also surprised that more than a few readers were able to read between the lines to see the theological underpinnings of the central argument. I'll be giving a talk hosted by Axe17 and Gary Tan on the evening of March 6th in San Francisco, in which I'll draw out the explicit theological message and its implications on how we think about our quests in tech. Invite link in thread below.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  Should be fun." And so if you're in SF, go check it out. I think it's $50 to attend and some absolute killers in Silicon Valley attending this. I talked to Trey's wife yesterday, who is organizing the event, and the lineup for the speaker sees is fantastic.

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  And just the people that'll be in this room could probably put together a $5 billion round with a few texts. So, good room to be in and fantastic topic.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is a very, it's a great post if you haven't read it, read it. The, the good quests idea is trying to answer this question of, yeah, what, what should you do? Where, where, where do you fit in within the messy world of Silicon Valley? Is it an employee at a company that's working on something that you really think is extremely valuable? Is it founding a company? Whatever you, you choose, he kind of lays out a framework for thinking about that. And it's a, it's a rallying cry for, for young, for young folks in Silicon Valley, and I really enjoyed the piece. So, go check it out. Let's go over to Guillermo Rousch. I need to learn how to pronounce the name. Guillermo Edversell, we love him. He says, "Inherent to Founder Mode is the courage to be disliked. For a founder, the mission, customer, and product reign supreme.

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  Effective leadership is not about making everyone at your company happy or producing the average of everyone's opinions. It's about doing what's right." Great post.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Great post.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  Very inspiring. We love Guillermo. Yeah, I mean, that really is the the distillation of founder mode and also going direct. It's like this authenticity and not being afraid of cancellation or just negative.

• 1:38:56Jordi Hays?

  And that's the that's the pressure of being a CEO. You're trying to make your your team, your customers happy, your team happy, the media happy. You know, other shareholders, whatever, you know, partners, infrastructure providers like, you're never going to make everybody happy. And so he's saying, don't try to make everybody happy. Try to try to do what's right, you know, generally for the company. And and, you know, usually it'll net out to being what's right for for everybody else in the long run, at least.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I loved Juwan from Ramp chiming in here. Well said, Guillermo. Many people dislike me, probably because I'm so founder mode. Because he's he's been posting day 99 of asking Ramp for a raise.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  He's getting the raise.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  I I think once he gets to day 90, we need to get Ramp to put him in the cage. Put him in a cage. If he can livestream for 90 days and add a million of ARR to Ramp, then he gets his raise. But I think the first 90 days of asking for a raise were just the warm up for him.

• 1:39:57Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  He's not grinding hard enough. You're unnoticed, Juwan. Good luck. Let's go to Andrew Ross Sorkin. Have you read Too Big to Fail, the book? Or seen the movie? It was adapted into a movie or documentary?

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Andrew Ross Sorkin, mass monster, noted noted mass monster.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  It's about his run at the Arnold.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see it. Let's watch Andrew Ross Sorkin get diced. Let's see him. I want to see his traps eating his head, some Death Star delts. I want to see him on some gear, get some D-balls, some Anavar, some tests, some.

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Andrew, come on the show. Let's talk about your stack.

• 1:40:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's get you Too Big to Fail. But you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin is a fantastic interviewer and the book is fantastic. If you haven't read it, it's a breakdown of what happened during the housing crisis, the 2008 global financial crisis, and he's been working on a follow-up book, 1929. For the past eight years, he's been working on a follow-up to his book Too Big to Fail. He's been, it's written as what he thinks of it as a sequel, a prequel, a nonfiction, character-driven, behind-the-scenes account of 1929, the year the most infamous market crash of all time happened. It'll be out in October, but you can preorder it now. I will definitely be reading that. That sounds fascinating.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  That's a good breakdown.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  I know about the Great Depression and I know about 1929 and a lot of the anecdotes. I don't know the character-driven story behind it. I can't name the guy who lost it all or the person that made it through. It's very abstract to me. And so I'm sure this will be a fantastic read. He's a great writer, great reporter, and you know, go check it out if you're looking for your next book. Let's go to VC Braggs. You want to check out this one?

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  I had to throw this in.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Leaked image of the latest Humane Ink product from HP Printer Division. You put on the pin and it tells you the toner is low. This would be helpful for us because our toner is low all the time, okay?

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  All the time.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Enough trash talk about printers. Printers are back. This is important technology, folks.

• 1:41:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got a, I hope that they roll this out. I mean, it's actually, it's actually smart for HP to say, hey, you know, a lot of these other companies, I'm sure a bunch of the best people at Humane are already taking offers from a number of great companies, but still for Humane to add that the Humane product, while it didn't solve a critical need for consumers, it was very cool tech. Like, the tech itself was great. And so I'm excited to see what they do.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Great designers.

• 1:42:27Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, maybe this was, maybe this was HP's way. They probably know at this point that we run on a Brother USA printer. This is their way to kind of just like get on our radar and say, hey, why don't you bring your posts over to a powerhouse HP printer?

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Jordi Hays?

  We'll give you a pin that allows you to, you know, better interact with your device.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  I mean, what is the bull case for the HP Humane acquisition? I think there's probably two that I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe you can think of a few others. One is, you know,

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  There might be some sort of industrial or B2B application where you go and you give these pins to a workforce where they're in a medical environment or industrial environment and there need to be hands-free.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  And you sell these pins into this one workforce and it's highly specific. And so I'm, I don't know, I'm imagining like I pick up an Amazon package and then the, the micro projector just projects exactly what I need to do with it onto the package. I don't know, something like that.

• 1:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Do we know that they actually got bought by the print? Like it wasn't actually.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. People are, they got bought by HP.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  And HP is just known for printers now, but they do make other stuff. Like it's Hewlett Packard. It's like a big company.

• 1:43:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  But the other thing is that if they're doing.

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  They actually still make computers.

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. And the other thing is that they might be in an IBM type arc where they're going to wind up doing more consulting and.

• 1:43:47Jordi Hays?

  They actually have some good-looking desktop computers.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Let's go. And, and if I'm, if I'm working with HP on some sort of project and you're saying, I have two options on your staff. One is the person who designed the latest HP printer and the other person is the person who designed the humane pin.

• 1:44:04Jordi Hays?

  So I actually have.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  I think the design language is better on the pin.

• 1:44:06Jordi Hays?

  I have HP.com pulled up. They have.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  What do they have?

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Their printers, which they highlight first. So clearly important. And they have their PCs, desktops, and then they have monitors and accessories. So it's totally possible that what humane built is actually super relevant to their monitors, their like cameras, mounted cameras, right? You could imagine a world where you just go like that and it like shuts your computer off and like humane was like focused on using gestures to control devices. And so stuff like that, it would be cool if I go like that to my app. You know, maybe I can, maybe I can't, but just being able to go like that, turn off my computer, you know, clap, turn it on, all the stuff that humane was kind of working on.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I heard some theory that they, the, the company was bought for a hundred million and they might've had around a hundred million left in the bank because the company kind of failed pretty quickly post-launch. And so it's possible that it was kind of like almost more like an aqua hire and you just get a bunch of people that are, you know, surely they didn't, they didn't solve the overall product in a way that was cohesive, in a way that could actually gain traction. But they clearly have great people who work on projectors, great people who work on batteries. They have great people who work on all these different things. And so you can deploy those people into the different arms of HP and it seems like it could be a good deal. And one of the, one of the humane guys is working on PMF for now, which is great. HP couldn't lock him down.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  That's why shutdowns are good sometimes because it frees up super talented people to just go work on new things.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, uh, maybe HP should, uh, start a live streaming division.

• 1:45:36Jordi Hays?

  HP, HP, if you want to sponsor a live stream where, where guys code all day long and work out shirtless in jeans, PMF or die.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  Send some printers over.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  It's great. Uh, well, speaking of gadgets, uh, these ones didn't fail. Nat Friedman says, what's your favorite new gadget? And there's a couple interesting ones on here. Uh, unify AI key is the top result. Uh, locally embeds your camera feeds. Not yet mind blowing, but that's a software update away. Uh, and he, and Nat Freeman says he got one of those and it's really promising. Kyle Russell, buddy of mine, says still, still the Ray-Ban Meadows he got last summer. So he's a DAU of those, I guess, or a regular driver of those. Uh, we both kind of churned from them, but I, I think we're pretty, uh, optimistic about them as a product long-term. Um, and then, uh, there's some other people that chime in. One guy says dad bike, the turn GSD S10. It has room for the kids in the back, which is kind of cool. And it also has electric boost.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  Thought that was fun. Matt Mullenweg chimes in and says, really digging the daylight co, like a Kindle meets iPad allows for lifestyle.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I'm an investor in daylight.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, you said it was pretty good, right?

• 1:46:43Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get one for the set. Basically mimics paper really well. It's the same feeling of using a Kindle, uh, but you can navigate the internet, have a browser, et cetera.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  Spencer Bradman says, uh, the things he uses, uh, daily are an Ember mug. Have you ever seen those?

• 1:46:59Jordi Hays?

  I have an Andreessen Ember mug.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  Oh, you do?

• 1:47:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Uh, they have, he has his AirPod Max, uh, Eight Sleep, of course. Love it. Uh, an Aura Frame, which is kind of cool. It's like a picture frame that you can upload photos to, a juicer, a vision. He uses the Vision Pro. No way. I'm surprised by that. Uh, Whoop, pretty good for tracking sleep. Haven't seen that. Another daylight co shout out. This hackable E Ink watch is kind of interesting. The SQFM I watchy, not to use as a watch, but to wear it at night to detect movement past a certain hour and wake me up more naturally. Cheap, easy to code. So a little bit hacker stuff going on there. I thought it was fun. It was a good, like little, hey, uh, let's get some community engagement from that. And, uh, you know, I'm sure Nat's cooking up the next idea for, you know, some sort of side project. Put some, put some kit on it. Uh, well, let's go to Nikita.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Nikita Beer says, ladies and gentlemen, the king has been dethroned because Grok AI is now the number one app in the App Store under free apps, all apps, and is one above ChatGPT. And he attaches a meme from a high school yearbook quote that says, it is not enough that I should succeed, others should fail.

• 1:48:07Jordi Hays?

  And this is from Kevin Chang, the guy, one of the guys leading the charge at XAI.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  We really?

• 1:48:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Real quote.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. I had no idea that was actually him. That's so funny.

• 1:48:17Jordi Hays?

  And what I love about the screenshot, Deep Seek's nowhere to be seen.

• 1:48:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:20Jordi Hays?

  They're probably thinking about, I gotta get on intro, I gotta hire Nikita.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  That'd be funny.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  We gotta go number one again.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  And we gotta get Nikita on the inside.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  And so how, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of back and forth here. The App Store ranking doesn't mean anything and they're just pure vanity. And Nikita says, wow, major buzzkill, man. So interesting to see, obviously, we've talked about how the Apple app charts are momentum driven. So it's unclear if Grok usage really is higher than ChatGPT or getting close, but certainly there's a lot of momentum. They just launched Grok 3. There's a lot of big news.

• 1:48:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm 90% certain Nikita helps, works on XAI or advises them as well.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  Well, let's go back to seed investing. Delian has an interesting post here. He says, doing VC full time is a bad setup for seed investing. If you have a company you're working on, anytime you spend on VC, you're trading against your life's work. So you spend time only with the four to six companies a year that truly matter. If full time, WTF do you fill your day with? A lot of meetings, probably. What do you think? This is another pitch for, you know, moving away from full time seed investing, running around spraying checks around Silicon Valley. What do you think? Is it possible to do it full time well?

• 1:49:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, I think that if you are a VC operating with little to no brand, which is 99% of venture capital firms, right? Where they technically have a website and a brand, but they're not being sought out by the generational founders. I think this works really well for founders fund, where when founders fund bids on a company, they can bid lower than everyone else. And the founder is still like, yes, I want to work. You know, I just went through that with a company, with one of my portfolio companies that I did, I did the pre-seed and when they're raising their Series A.

• 1:50:12Jordi Hays?

  They were, even before they started the process, being like, whatever price Founder's Fund bids, you know, within reason, we're going to take it. And they had other tier one offers, right? And so there's like a certain, I think, you know, you're on the inside, so you'd be a little too conflicted to say this, but Founder's Fund is in a unique position where I wouldn't recommend necessarily the part-time strategy to a no-name seed VC who's got $50 million to deploy. And it's like, you probably should be spending all your time trying to meet founders that aren't coming to you.

• 1:50:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think, I think the other takeaway here is just that one of the ways to bootstrap a brand as a seed-stage investor is to build a great company, because then all of a sudden, you're meeting founders, they're coming to you for advice, and just through the founder network, founder-to-founder conversations, and then you can write seed checks. It doesn't need to be full-time. And then, over time, you can kind of scale that up and take it more seriously. And that's certainly been Delian's experience at Varda. He's met everyone that's relevant in the space industry and seen all the deal flow there, because even if you, even if you don't even think of him as a VC, you're going to want to reach out to him just as a fellow, a fellow founder in the category.

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  Same advantage.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, big advantage.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  Helps when you're putting devices up into, up into space.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of advantages going on there. What was funny here is Joe Morrison here chimes in and says, "Your best posts are the ones where you're a little self-loathing." And Delian's like, "What are you talking about?" Like, this, this is actually like, he's not

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  gassing myself up.

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  He's gassing himself up. He's basically saying like, "I'm doing it perfectly."

• 1:51:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm goaded.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, "Don't even try and compete with me."

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  I love someone else's comments. "I'll take the other side. The odds you'll find in lead the seed round of a generational company while working 60-plus hours a week operating are dramatically lower." Delian just says, "Look forward to comparing and contrasting our comparisons at the end of the decade."

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  Do not, do not try and dunk on Delian. There's just been, it's been a graveyard on X this week of people that tried and got smoked. It's very rough, but yeah, I mean, when you're a seed investor in Ramp, it's, uh, it's pretty, pretty easy to drive solid returns. He's got a whole bunch of great seed stuff and he's like the main, he, he does, does a lot of seed stuff. Uh, it's great. Well, let's move on to Kim Kardashian.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  Narrative violation.

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  Okay. So, uh, Skims has grown into an absolute powerhouse, closing in on $1 billion in D to C revenue and has raised $730 million, most recently at a multi-billion dollar valuation. Kim owns 5% of the company after raising so much money. They recently did a partnership with Nike. The business is on a tear, but Daniel here asks, absolutely wild to me. I get it. Amazing and valuable brand, but is it worth it when you own almost none of it? She owns $200 million. So the question, Jordy, is, uh, is, is it worth it to have $200 million? What is $200 million worth? I think it's worth $200 million. And so, uh, I don't know. What's her opportunity cost?

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Is she really, is she really putting more than $200 million of effort into this project?

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  I don't think so. So I think absolutely it's worth it.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  It's more of this perception that people see Skims as a proxy for Kim Kardashian's brand, but the pushback there is that if you, if you talk to Skims customers, they will say, these products are just better than other products that I can get. And it's at a point where, you know, you could argue that Kylie, um, Kylie Jenner's products, people wouldn't care to use them as much if there wasn't her association.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Kim, uh, Skims and Kim Kardashian, I think it's different in that they make really good products. She's non-operating. She's sort of the face of the brand and it's going to net out. Like if you're going to make hundreds of millions of dollars for being the face of something, that's better than doing a bunch of brand deals for Nike and Lululemon and ALO and it's going to net out. It's going to net out fine, but it's still the, the idea that, um, you know, there's been a lot of press recently around these creator-driven

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:19Jordi Hays?

  holding companies and this idea that, um, uh, just having a big audience will allow you to build a big company in an inexpensive way, but. Kim Kardashian basically has one of the largest single audiences and the most consumer influence of any person in history.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:35Jordi Hays?

  And she still needs to raise $730 million to achieve what, maybe she didn't have to, but she's done that.

• 1:54:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:43Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it just goes to show that, you know, I've, I've talked to a bunch of founders recently that, that think, oh, I'm just going to work with this one influencer and it's going to, you know, dramatically change my business or I'm, I, my co-founders got, you know, 200,000 followers and it doesn't mean anything because you tap that following pretty quick, right? Very quickly.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  Yep. And so she is big enough to actually get market entry. But if you run the numbers on the dilution here, you know, seed, series A, series B, series C, 20% dilution rounds, let's assume, she got diluted maybe 75%. I don't even know, but that means that she still only started out with 20% of the company.

• 1:55:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  And I still think that's a phenomenal trade. I don't think that's crazy because she's in a non-operating role and what would it take for her to make $200 million in profit otherwise?

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  I mean, we got, we learned a little bit from the Ethereum Max thing that I think she, she gets paid about a million dollars per like one-off brand deal, like post or something like that, or like partnership. And so you're talking about 200 of those, there's only 200 days in the, you know, 200 business days, 250 business days in the year, like all of a sudden.

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  She can't do a post every day and a million dollars a post.

• 1:55:53John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, certainly not. And so even though she's like a huge figure, like this is a great way to monetize her audience. It looks way better for her brand because it builds her brand as a co-founder, as a business person. It, it, it's more aligned. She only needs to focus on the reputation and products of one company. Whereas if she's, if she's advertising for six different brands, what if one of them has a scandal? What if one of them's making a product and it's low quality? All of a sudden that roads hers. She can just put all of her, all of her eggs in one basket more or less. Obviously she's doing other stuff.

• 1:56:21Jordi Hays?

  She had her.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  I think it's a good strategy.

• 1:56:23Jordi Hays?

  She had her private equity firm that, you know, had a huge fundraising target, didn't come close to achieving it. I think they made one investment in a, like a hot sauce or like a, some hot sauce company.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  But this goes to show that like, maybe even the strategy of this creator-led private equity firm was not even that good of a strategy if, if, if, if, if a, if her primary company had to still raise. Hundreds of millions of dollars, then maybe, maybe it's not enough, like, maybe it's not enough to be differentiated as a private equity firm.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, very interesting. Anyway, let's move on to X. We got some fundraising news. Katie Roof has a scoop about X. They're thinking about a new financing round that would value it at $44 billion, same as the take private price in 2022. Elon Musk has never done a down round, not about to start in 2025.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  So, so this, this, earlier this week on the show, we were talking about if you looked at X.com investors, Washington Post would pull up, Google, like Gemini would pull up a summary.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  They lost all their money.

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  So and so lost 700 million. Sequoia lost X, you know, 200 million, et cetera, et cetera. And they didn't ever lose the money if they would have lost money if they would have sold it.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Andreessen.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  And so now they're going to be back up. This is great for the employees. X, X had marked down their valuation internally.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:57:44Jordi Hays?

  So the employees were getting their, their options at a $20 billion. So they just, they're going to get a nice pop out of this. And I'm sure that Elon will start to allow employees to sell, do these sort of.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's very good about laddering up the valuation, doing the secondary sales, making sure everyone's taken care of. Like, he is very, very good at that. And yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the media was very anti Twitter X, saying it's not going to, it's going to fall apart. Everyone's going to leave. There's going to be no users. All the advertisers are going to leave. Well, we got data from Ramp that Ara Karasian, he's their chief economist, and the economist at Ramp looked at the spend on corporate cars across all the Ramp data, showed that advertising on X is increasing. So that was another bull signal. Then we got the leaked financials showing that they might have over $1 billion in EBITDA. And so, yeah, you apply a 44X multiple on EBITDA for a growing tech company, like, that's not that crazy. And

• 1:58:39John Coogan?

  then we have that great post from Liran Shapiro, saying, everyone was worried that X was not going to even stay online. Well, now you click on X and in one of the new tabs, you have access to a cutting edge frontier model. And there's just, you know, live streaming has been taking off. We've been doing really well there on PMF or Die. And all of my core tech friends are still there. Like, there's a lot of craziness and the algorithm changes every week, but it's still fun. It's still the app that I open. And for a lot of people, that's what their experience is. And I don't think it's going away. And so I think Elon's got it.

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  We are back.

• 1:59:12John Coogan?

  We are back. Well, speaking of PMF or die, I thought this was an interesting post from Will at shouldn't speak. He says startups used to be two guys, a laptop and a dream.

• 1:59:20Jordi Hays?

  Just one laptop?

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, just one laptop. So now he says now it's 50 engineers, $100 million in funding and a full-time DC lobbying strategy. What happened, gang? And I just tagged at PMF or die.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Deep tech happened.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, deep tech happened.

• 1:59:35Jordi Hays?

  Defense tech.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  And, and AI like regulatory capture stuff happened and just the threat. I mean, honestly, a lot of this happened from Lina Khan. It was like, well, maybe you do need a DC lobbying firm if your plan is to sell your company at any point in time.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  And there were just so many different things where there was now, oh, well, if you're not playing in DC, you're not in the big leagues. Maybe you need a government contract, even if that government contract isn't going to drive the most profit or the most revenue, it's going to make people take you more seriously. The kind of the Palantir narrative pulls over. So there's a lot of different things that make sense and can justify 50 engineers, $100 million in funding, a full-time DC lobbying strategy, but you can still just do the two guys, two laptops and a dream strategy if you want. And PMF or die is a great example of that. And we see examples of that on the timeline every single day.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The next post from Santi Gangesh shots. If you can skip to that.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the example.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Today was definitely a day of product progress coded, talked to users, got jacks, time with friends, more users for his product, lab and master, PMF or die really helps you bring your A game and I love to see it. We've seen a lot of people since PMF or die kicked off posting and just saying, I'm locking in from home and just like putting this on because one thing is for certain, if you're building, if you're solo, building an app remotely.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  The biggest downside is it can be a great lifestyle. You've done it with, I've done it. Everybody, many people go through phases where they're just sort of building and being able to turn on PMF or die and just like feel like you're a part of something and have that motivation is awesome. So. Yeah, it's free to lock in. It's free to outwork your peers. Uh, and we love to see it.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, well, we have the Ara Karasian post here that we should cover because he has the actual real data on what's happening on X with advertisers. It says advertisers were leaving X in January 2025. They came back in droves. Here's the latest from Ramp. Last month, 68% of advertisers increased their spending on X slash Twitter. If you're surprised about X's latest valuation, you need to look at this chart. And it's from Ramp. It says advertisers were leaving X in January 2025. They came back in droves and you can see the trend month over month. Now people are ramping up. I'm certainly ramping up on X spend. And I think a lot of smart companies are because they realize that the AI is going to get better. The targeting is going to get better. The audience is going to get better.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Everything is, everything is getting better. So there's a good opportunity. And at the end of the day, these advertising markets, they're just markets. So if there's cheap CPM somewhere, it's going to get sucked up and hoovered up by someone. Uh, and so that's the nature of these things. Uh, let's go to Zoomer. Uh, Zoomer says SF man hogging the umbrella while his fold out is left out in the rain. Sad. And yeah, we need to bring back some chivalry, some hospitality, some manners. Don't hog the umbrella.

• 2:02:28Jordi Hays?

  You shouldn't be caught dead under an umbrella. If you're, if your girlfriend, wife is using a jacket to cover herself.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Terrible look. This is a career ending, uh, you know, picture potentially. So hopefully the guy's not identified.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:45Jordi Hays?

  He just gets to fade into.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  But if this is you, you're on notice, uh, you gotta, you gotta have better umbrella etiquette for sure.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  And better etiquette in general across, across the internet, across the real world. Hold the doors, use the correct forks.

• 2:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Don't swear.

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  Don't swear. What would your mother say?

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Don't say the S word, the R word, the F word.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  What about the C U C K word? I don't know if we should censor that.

• 2:03:13Jordi Hays?

  We don't say that on the show.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, but we need an alternative to that because I need to fill that in. Anyway, we're going to Avi Schiffman wrecking yourself. There we go. If you are building in any other industry than love or entertainment, you are wrecking yourself. You are building an abstract. I don't know if I fully believe that. It's great that that's what he's doing. And I think that's his life work. But I don't know that that's the only option. But you know, engagement.

• 2:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Friend new round at 500 million confirmed.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I think, I think Obie's like very convicted in what he's doing. And I think it's, I think, I think what he's doing, building in both love and entertainment in some ways, right?

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Building a digital best friend is a good strategy. I think there's a very real scenario in 10 years where a lot of people, the average person is working less potentially than they are now. We're already at a point where even though lots of people have jobs, they're still working less than they were 30 years, than they would have been 30 years ago, because half their day is spent on, at work is spent on TikTok, right? Like, imagine Jamie Dimon realizing, realizing how much, I'm sure, I'm sure like they could see through the wifi somehow that like 20% of all of our bandwidth is going to like TikTok or something like that. And he's probably just raging, right?

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, so, so anyways, we'll, we'll see what happens. But, uh, it's a good strategy to, to, a lot of founders don't know what they're actually selling. So if you're working on a consumer app, are you selling, you know,

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  This is a good point.

• 2:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Are you selling, uh, you know, a love, like something that's, uh, uh, solved for loneliness? Are you selling entertainment? And I think for us, we talked about, we are in the news and entertainment business, right? So like, we're here to deliver the news. We hope to do it in an entertaining way.

• 2:05:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  There's other media brands like Jason Carmen, who's in the inspiration business, right? He's like focused on telling these massive stories and following, you know, these trends and inspiring people.

• 2:05:19John Coogan?

  But Jason, if you want to throw in some hot takes and some jokes in the next documentary, we're available.

• 2:05:25Jordi Hays?

  We're available.

• 2:05:25John Coogan?

  Well, come spice it up.

• 2:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Spice.

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  Just all of a sudden, super serious interview with Elon and then we're just there like just chopping it up. It'd be great. Anyway, let's move on to Kip Mock. We said congratulations to Isaiah Taylor for raising the seed round for his nuclear company. And Kip has been a huge supporter of the show. We've had him on before, but he shares an awesome picture. And he says, he's pleased to announce what I've been working on for the last year and looking forward to seeing this project through in the Philippines. So they signed a coordinated research project with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. Isaiah went all over the world trying to find a hospitable government that would let him build a nuclear reactor

• 2:06:10John Coogan?

  very quickly and efficiently. And he found one in the Philippines. And everyone's excited for them to repatriate this technology once they get it up and running. But nothing to put a little fire under the US government's behind than saying, hey, we're going to build it internationally if you don't let us build it here. And so you take this to the, to INL or to the, what is it? The IRC or NRDC, the National Nuclear Reactor, I don't know, the guys who approve nuclear reactors in the United States.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  And you show them, hey, we did it in the Philippines. Let us do it here. It's a lot easier than saying, hey, we'd never done it anywhere. So I love that they're moving quickly. I love that they're globe trotting and getting stuff done. So congrats to the, to the Vilar atomics team once again. And Jordy chimes in and says, absolute legend, making us all proud. We gotta, we gotta bring up more of those phrases, some of those great phrases like gunslinger.

• 2:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Gunslinger. Gunslinger is such a good one.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  These are some gunslinger entrepreneurs for sure. For sure, gunslingers. Anyway.

• 2:07:16Jordi Hays?

  We got a post from Colin Dunn. I've talked to Colin a couple of times. We actually have used his app, Visual Electric, to generate, generate like assets for the show at various stages, very cool product, sort of takes a place of stock footage, allows you to just very efficiently generate, you know, images for various uses, decks, marketing, et cetera. He says, Figma should use their $1 billion breakup fee from Adobe to buy Cursor, could be their Instagram. Near comments, another friend of the show says, how do you come up with this price? I don't think that Cursor would sell for anywhere close to 1 billion, considering how much, you know, their, their growth right now and access to capital.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  But Colin would probably push back on that say and say like Figma actually has access to plenty of capital themselves. They could probably, there could probably be a price. There's always a price, right?

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And people always forget with these mergers that if you like Instagram, everyone says like, oh, they like they, they, they sold out for a billion dollars and then Instagram wound up being worth like a hundred billion. So they left a ton on the table and that's kind of true. But if you get Meta stock in the transaction, then you see upside. And if Facebook 10x is, yeah, it's like you sold for 10 billion because you can just hold.

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other, the other difference is Instagram had no revenue.

• 2:08:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  And Cursor has over nine figures of revenue.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is very different.

• 2:08:40Jordi Hays?

  And so you could imagine that the, the multiple they would get on that revenue with their current growth and how small the team is would potentially like, there's a world where Cursor would do a round in the next year valuing them at eight, 10 billion dollars.

• 2:08:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's totally possible.

• 2:08:57Jordi Hays?

  So, cool idea. I'm sure that Dylan would, as, as Dylan, I'm sure has looked at a lot of deals like this, right?

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. But I, I do think something people miss is that idea of like, of like viewing it more as a merger. You get equity in the combined entity. And if the combined entity really has a chance to make a serious run at a hyperscaler or a really massive 100 billion plus, you know, enterprise tech company, that could be very, very accretive for you, even though you quote unquote sold.

• 2:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:29John Coogan?

  Because you have stock in the new entity. And these, and these all stock deals are like partially stock deals can be heavily incentivized towards future growth if you're bullish on the, on the partnership. And speaking of Cursor, we got Ben Lang saying, from intern to co-founder of the fastest company ever to hit 100 million in ARR, Amon Singer, Sanger, he's coding at Cursor. And just a few years ago, he was an intern, software engineering intern at you.com.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Aman, great name, by the way.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 2:10:00Jordi Hays?

  Dominant determinism right there.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  He'll be definitely spending nights with Aman.

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he followed me on X in 2021 while he was an intern.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  I know, I know.

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, next time an intern follows you, DM them immediately and say, I want to lead your next round.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that's a, that's a takeaway. You do that 100 times, you might get the next cursor.

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Make it all back.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Maybe. Uh, should we close out with Zoomer?

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Zoomer, second time on the show today.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  This is some news from Google. I haven't fully, uh, done a deep dive on this. We'll have to dig into it. Anytime that there's these new AI announcements.

• 2:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Google's so bad at marketing, it's actually, it's brutal.

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  It's because like they, they did that, they did that thing where they announced the, the AI and they sped up the demo. And so now they've like kind of broken trust and no one, you need to validate all these things. It's kind of unclear, like how real is this? But Google AI certainly wants you to believe it's real and we'll see. Uh, today we introduced an AI co-scientist system designed to go beyond deep research tools to aid scientists in generating novel hypotheses and research strategies. Learn more, including how to join the trusted tester program at Google. Um, and so, uh, Zoomer says, Google's AI agent independently discovered a new leukemia drug that then successfully tested in vitro at clinical concentrations, a novel liver fibrosis drug targets,

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  and bacterial cell level antibiotic mechanisms. It looks like the novel scientific discovery line has been passed. Um, and, uh, Zoomer then follows it up and says, the Dwarkeh question of AI insight might, has just been solved with a blackboard and a for loop. Interesting. So it's always hard to tell, like you need the scientist to kind of weigh in on this and say like, was this just brute forcing? Was this really novel discovery? People are obviously, you know, very hyped up anytime AI does anything and, oh, we, we just crossed some Turing test. We just crossed some new threshold. A, ASI is upon us. Uh, kind of unclear how big this is. Whenever I see one of these, I always look to, well, did the market move?

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  You know, what's GDP doing, right? But GDP is maybe, uh, a lagging indicator. But my question is, okay, so there's a massive breakthrough. There's allegedly a massive breakthrough in novel scientific discovery, right?

• 2:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  What did the biotech stocks do?

• 2:12:21John Coogan?

  What would you expect them to do?

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  And I watched this during when Google, when Google at DeepMind, they solved the protein folding problem. That was one of the hardest, most intractable computationally complex problems figuring out how proteins fold, very important to drug development. It's something that is a cost center, I guess, in every drug development, every pharma company. DeepMind solved the protein folding problem with AlphaFold. The market didn't really move. And what it turned out was that, yes, it's a really hard problem, but we have machines that do it. And we have PhD students that can just kind of run the assays and they, and they do the X, I think it's like X-ray crystallography or something like that.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:58John Coogan?

  To, to, to, to run the, the, the human-based algorithm. And it wasn't a fundamental change in the structure of the profitability of biotech companies. And so the market didn't really move. And so I haven't looked it up. I don't really know, but I'm, I'm kind of waiting. But sometimes these, these announcements go out and it takes a while for the public markets to catch up.

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Trey also says it's definitely difficult to, in the chat, he says, it's definitely difficult to predict how this shakes out because the in vitro part is quote unquote, easy. Most of the failure happens after that.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:30Jordi Hays?

  So a lot of the stuff comes out splashy, but then how does it actually roll out?

• 2:13:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. So big questions. We'll see. Obviously exciting and definitely like an important track to be working on and very, very cool stuff. And I'm sure that from an AI perspective, this was a, you know, a state of the art, like reasoning agent, a co-scientist. It's great that they're building this in the same way that deep research was great and is still a great product. And I'm excited for this. I'm sure it speeds up people's work, but I'd probably pump the brakes on the idea of like, this is some sort of fundamental shift in how we do science in the world.

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  At least at this point.

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Well said. Well, speaking of science and healthcare innovation, our very own Ben.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  He's probably coming out of surgery right now.

• 2:14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:18Jordi Hays?

  He has, uh, emergency wisdom teeth.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Surgery, had to get those removed. He's got plenty of wisdom, so we're not too worried about, uh, a lack thereof. But Ben was an absolute stud this week.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  He was.

• 2:14:31Jordi Hays?

  He was basically in pain as of like Tuesday.

• 2:14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Jordi Hays?

  And it just got worse and worse and worse. Still came into the office.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Crushed it.

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Still grinded through it.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we're thankful for-

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  And that's why we did not do a Dom Perignon episode. We didn't think it would be fair to be sipping champagne without him, but we did hit 16K on X.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Big moment.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  So thank you to everyone that's followed us. Uh, the growth has been outstanding. We've been really happy to watch the show grow.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  And as soon as Ben is back in the studio, the Dom will flow.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  It will pop.

• 2:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Bottle is somewhere- Yeah, it's right there next to you.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  The bottle's ready to go. And so you can expect a Dom episode any day now. And I'm sure that'll be one of the more fun ones. Maybe we'll just do all timeline that day. Just rip a bunch of hot takes.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Just for old times sake.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Let the takes flow.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  No, no, you don't want to do a deep dive on a Dom episode.

• 2:15:16Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:15:16John Coogan?

  You want to just have fun.

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, thanks for listening.

• 2:15:19Jordi Hays?

  All right, guys.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  Give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Uh, check out all the sponsors in the description and we will see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Have a great Thursday.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching and listening. We appreciate you.