Mamdani Election, Shell in Talks to Acquire Rival BP | David Senra, Yancey Strickler, Joe Weisenthal, Alex Atallah, Michael Moriarty, Nikunj Kothari, Alex Kehr

(02:31) - Timeline (02:35) - Mamdani Timeline Reactions (41:43) - Shell in Talks to Aquire Rival BP (55:29) - David Senra is the creator and host of the "Founders" podcast, where he delves into the lives and careers of history's most influential entrepreneurs. Each week, he reads a biography of a notable founder and extracts lessons that listeners can apply to their own ventures. Senra's passion for reading and entrepreneurship has led him to consume over 300 books on the subject, which he discusses in his episodes. In addition to his podcast, Senra has been featured in various interviews and discussions, sharing insights on topics like the importance of storytelling in communication, the value of authenticity in podcasting, and the significance of learning from historical figures. He emphasizes the power of distilling complex concepts into clear ideas and believes in the importance of practice and repetition to enhance clarity of thought and speech. Senra's work has garnered attention for its depth and dedication to understanding the minds of successful entrepreneurs, making his podcast a valuable resource for those interested in business and leadership. (01:23:29) - Yancey Strickler, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, began his career as a music journalist before pioneering the crowdfunding platform that has raised over $4 billion for creative projects. In the conversation, he reflects on Kickstarter's early days, highlighting musician Allison Weiss's 2009 campaign as a pivotal moment that shaped modern crowdfunding practices. Strickler also discusses the evolution of the internet and the creator economy, emphasizing the shift towards creators having greater control over production and distribution, and the challenges and opportunities this presents. (01:56:00) - Joe Weisenthal is an American journalist and financial expert. He serves as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg's digital brands, co-anchors the television show "What’d You Miss?", and co-hosts the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, Weisenthal discusses the recent political landscape in New York City, focusing on Zoran Mamdani's mayoral victory, the role of prediction markets in gauging political outcomes, and the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on urban planning. (02:27:53) - Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, now leads OpenRouter, a platform that optimizes language model usage by routing traffic to the best GPU hosts based on user preferences. In the conversation, he discusses OpenRouter's role as a control plane for language models, enabling users to access various models with optimal performance and uptime. He also highlights the challenges in the AI landscape, such as the fragmentation of model availability across different cloud providers, and emphasizes OpenRouter's efforts to streamline access to these models. (02:40:15) - Michael Moriarty, co-founder of Orca, an energy water company, discusses the challenges and successes of launching their product, emphasizing the innovative clear can packaging that differentiates them in the market. He highlights the difficulties faced in manufacturing the clear cans, which took two years and multiple factories to perfect, as well as the viral marketing strategies employed, such as a nine-minute launch video featuring Corbin Bleu listing road signs. Moriarty also touches on their rapid growth since launching on Amazon in March, the ongoing fundraising efforts, and plans for retail expansion in Southern California. (02:48:22) - Timeline (02:52:21) - NVIDIA Launches Cloud AI Playground (02:54:16) - Nikunj Kothari, a seasoned entrepreneur and investor, has spent over a decade building startups across various sectors, including logistics, networking hardware, and real estate. He recently joined FPV Ventures, a generalist venture capital fund co-founded by Wesley Chan and Pegah Ebrahimi, which closed a $525 million fund focusing on diverse industries from biotech to consumer fintech. In the conversation, Kothari discusses the shift of value to the application layer as large AI models stabilize, emphasizing the importance of unique data and efficiency in building impactful AI applications. (03:10:47) - Alex Kehr, CEO of Superlocal, discusses the development of Superlocal—a personalized map application that automatically logs users' locations to provide tailored recommendations—and its recent acquisition by Foursquare. He explains that Superlocal combines features reminiscent of Google Maps and Foursquare, offering automatic place mapping, check-ins, and persona building based on user preferences. Kehr expresses enthusiasm for the acquisition, noting that it allows Superlocal to continue its operations without the constant concern of financial instability. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBN. Today is Wednesday, June 25th, 2025. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Let's run you through the headlines right now. Wall Street is panicking over the prospect of a socialist mayor in New York City. The Jane Street.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Panikins.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Jane Street's boss says he was duped into funding AK-47s for a coup.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Happens to the best of us.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Shell is in early talks, not late talks, early talks.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Not advanced, though.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Not advanced talks.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Definitely not advanced.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  To acquire rival British Petroleum BP. Nvidia has ruffled tech giants with a move into cloud computing. That's DGX, Laptone, that we've talked about a few times. Bumble is cutting 30% of its staff and its stock is up 15%. As the online, as online dating hits an inflection point. I'm sure there's some AI story there. There's a whole bunch of other interesting trends that we'll dig into. China is tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away their passports. Doesn't sound good. And we want to discuss the future of venture capital marketing. But if you're.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  The most important question of them all.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Yes, it is. It is. But quickly, let me tell you about Ramp, ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. We have some delicious drinks in front of us today. This is day two of asking.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  They're not on camera.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Oh, they're not on camera. So.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Pick them all up.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  So day two of asking.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  I did, for the record.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Chris Williamson to come on the show. Day two. We got five, five year remotes from Mataina. That's Andrew Huberman's project. And one new time. It's a five to one ratio.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  I just shotgunned one of these.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  You did?

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Right before the show.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Hadn't done that in a few years, maybe a decade.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  But it's good to be back.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  I mean, you mentioned yesterday on the show that you, you did a dry fast and it was pretty, pretty, it was subtext, reading between the lines. It was pretty clear that you didn't have one too many cheeky pints.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Cheeky pints.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  To dry out.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right, right. Dry out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just eat regularly, just no pints.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  No. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  That's a drive fast.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let's go through the news of Mam Donnie. The entire world is melting down, particularly on tech Twitter. Everyone is, uh, is very nervous about what Mam Donnie means for the future of New York City because San Francisco kinda got a dry run of this, um, and it didn't go so well. And now we're gonna see what happens in New York City. So Dave Friedberg breaks it down.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Voice of reason.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Voice of reason. He says, "It is vitally important for America that Mam Donnie get elected mayor of New York City. He can help maximally and squiffly tax the rich, stand up government-run grocery stores, eliminate the police force, freeze rents, and make public transportation free. It is unlikely that taxing the rich will cause them to move to other cities collapsing NYC tax revenue, or that city-run grocery stores will fail to increase fresh vegetable consumption in the inner city, or that the elimination of the NYPD, uh, will cause a rise in crime and a decline in quality of life, or that freezing rents will drive landlords to dump properties, collapsing prices and property tax revenue, or that free public transportation will result in union-led kleptocracy. No way.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  I'm sure this time socialism will be different. If Americans don't want to learn the lessons of socialism's failure elsewhere, we should aim to learn them here as quickly as possible. Let's make sure one or two cities and states fall apart fast so the rest don't have to. Elect Mam Donnie." After accruing $2 trillion in student loan debt that they will never be able to re- that they will never be able to pay down, it is no surprise that the college educated in New York City are supporting Mam Donnie 61 to 39. The current system has failed them. But the truth is, more government may not be the answer when too much government indiscriminate few federal student loans, regardless of cost or quality of degree or institution, may have gotten them into this moment.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  A gentle reminder, though, that an articulate ignoramus isn't more correct than his less charismatic, authentic political rival. Facts, data, truth still stand above theory, innuendo, and BS. Socialism won't work. If we have to relearn that lesson the hard way, let's do it fast and elect him. Mamdani, very interesting, interesting analysis now.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  Sacrificing the capital of capital.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Sacrificing New York.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Fortress of finance, New York. Yeah, I couldn't, I don't think Ken Griffin was hitting the timeline yesterday, but he certainly was looking smart.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Yes, so I mean, there's a few things in here. He is interested in taxing the rich. He did, I was listening to Mamdani's interview on The Breakfast Club, and he was talking about taxing, adding a tax to anyone that makes over a million dollars in the city, a 2% tax, they would pay 20K, but obviously that scales up to someone who's making 100 million would be paying much more. And he, and he thinks that that's like a very doable tax. He, he has talked about government-run grocery stores, which I think sound like a disaster potentially. I was joking with you about.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  If he had, you know, decade-plus of experience, you know, running something like Costco.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Yes, that could be possible.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Might be bullish.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think that he's had a job.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, my riff on it was, like, imagine if the grocery store was as seamless as the DMV. Or imagine if taking the free bus was as, was as smooth as getting through TSA. Or imagine if looking for a house was as simple as filing your taxes. Like, that's what the government could bring to these institutions. And that's always the risk with these things. Now, on the issue of, of eliminating the NYPD, Mamdani has changed his tune on that. He was saying defund the police five years ago. He has since changed his strategy and his messaging dramatically, and is no longer anti-defunding the police, and has said directly, like, I do not want to defund the NYPD. But the, but the reaction continues.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Cold Healing says, "It is still not a guarantee, but Zor- Zoron winning feels like the first time that I can see a populist internet left taking the corpse of the collapsing Democrat machine the way MAGA took the corpse of the right in 2016. Don't think they've had any victory this significant." And I agree, I mean, AOC was the first kind of example of that, but it is interesting that this is. Very much the Bernie bro left is now actually winning elections. And it does speak to, you know, the Democrat machine just failing, basically. What's interesting is that one of the takeaways from the 2024 election was like the podcast election. It's the podcast election. You gotta be doing all these podcasts. Mom Donnie didn't actually do that many.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was more driven by his TikTok. So I remember we discussed and I was saying like, the next thing after the podcast election.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Didn't he do something with Derek Thompson?

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Uh, yes.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  He did Joe Weisenthal. He did a few, but it feels like he really dominated in short form video.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  He's really sort of direct.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, and the viral clips.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  Good branding around his sad policy suggestions.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  And the viral clips were not from his podcast appearances. So even though he went on The Breakfast Club and gave a big talk there. He did like a 40 minute interview. He like, that was not what went viral. What went viral were his scripted and well edited TikToks, basically. And his, the stats that he put up on TikTok were pretty staggering.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  He was pulling them up. He has almost a million followers and is just absolutely lapping everyone else he was going up against.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Cuomo was engaging in a little bit of hubris, right? You know, sort of leveraging his, his network and his,

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  You know, sort of various allies to put together this coalition.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  And kind of wanted to ignore the new way in which candidates actually need to run campaigns if they're competitive.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was, it was an odd choice because he was, he had to step down, right? And he was like, he was pretty racked with controversy. And it just feels like that's an odd pick for the Democratic Party to actually go back and like double down on.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  Should we play one of Mom Donnie's rap songs? You know, he was a rap musician historically.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  He's, he's moved on from that, but if there is a good one. I, I think playing the clip from his interview that we have, I believe, pulled up would be.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Tyler, I just sent you, you remember Vivo on YouTube?

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  He's got one of his songs. He went under the moniker Young Cardamom.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  And from eight years ago.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  There's one on. So Tyler, why don't you listen to this and let us know if it's worth throwing up?

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Okay. I mean, with regard to Cuomo, I think the problem is his car.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Do you know what he drives?

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Was it the Scat Pack?

• 9:09John Coogan?

  He drives a Dodge Charger Scat Pack Wide Body. It's a high-performance vehicle.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  It is. It's very American.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  It's not quite there. I think he would have won if he'd gone with the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  So the Scat Pack Wide Body, it's up in the 500 horsepower range. It's got a V8. It's not supercharged.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  And he was getting a little flack for parking wherever he felt like during the campaign.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Apparently he got like seven speeding tickets or something like that.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  During the campaign.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Like in the last year or something. He's gotten just like a ton of...

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  Happens to TVP on interns.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  It does.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I think we got a video ready. It is not the rap song. It is an interview.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Let's play it.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  ...a year. State budget about $252 billion a year. There is money. The question is what we spend it on. And what I've proposed is that we raise $10 billion to pay for our entire economic agenda and start to Trump-proof our city because we know he'll use federal funding as leverage over this city. And we will do so in two key ways. The first is to match the state's top corporate tax rate to that of New Jersey. We are at 7.25%. They're at 11.5%. Corporations can pay it over there, they can pay it over here. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't just apply to corporations headquartered in New York City. Because when you say this, people will say, well, they're going to go to Florida. Wherever you are headquartered, as long as you do business in the state of New York, you are taxable for that corporate tax.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  We're talking about corporations that are making millions of dollars, not in revenue, but in profit. And the second is taxing the top 1% of New Yorkers. We're talking about people who make a million dollars a year or more, taxing them just by a flat 2% tax increase. And I know if 50 Cent is listening, he's not going to be happy about this. He tends to not like this tax policy, but I want to be very clear. This is about $20,000 a year. It's around... And all of these things together, they make every New Yorker's life better, including those who are actually getting taxed.

• 11:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Now, you also want to cut.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  I think, yeah, we can cut it there. It is, it is, it is funny because during this interview, Charlamagne keeps coming at him for the rap thing and basically being like, like, your rap was not good.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  And, and so.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  How someone does one thing is how they do everything.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  But, uh, Mom Donnie keeps, keeps having to be like, I know you're not a fan of the rap stuff, but like, let me, let me go back to the issues.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  The thing that, the thing I gotta give him credit for is, uh, Zorron.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Zorron?

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Is a cool name.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  It is a cool name.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  That's, that is what I will give him credit for.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  So, Polymarket nailed it as usual. The news breaks on Polymarket beforehand. Signal breaks it down. He says, what's tragic isn't only that Mom Donnie won, it's that this was the best alternative to the system produced. You don't be populism with legacy. You beat it with real competence and vision, but instead it was Cuomo, Cuomo, that's malpractice. Democrats learned nothing from Kamala. And yet Cuomo doesn't seem to have be, he didn't seem to break through in any meaningful way. Sophie says, hold up, let him cook to Bill Ackman, who says, I have a great idea on NYC. I will share it as soon as I can. I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning, but now I am optimistic. And so you know, a banger is coming, long post is coming from, from Ackman.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Apple needs to make a, a signature iPhone. For Ackman. That can, that allows him to see the entire body of texts, you know, while typing on the phone, you know, something like a five foot long iPhone, I think would be the right range.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Be fantastic. Zoran Mamdani, the young Democratic Socialist State Assemblyman, who has waged a surprisingly strong campaign for mayor of New York City, hasn't just frustrated his opponents, he's made them jealous, says Eric Latch at The New Yorker in a very interesting profile that I read last night.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  I regret not running for mayor in 2021, State Senator Jessica Ramos said this month during a televised Democratic primary debate. When asked if she had any regrets in her political career, I thought I needed more experience, she explained. They're talking trash, but turns out you just need to make good videos. He was polling at 1% and then started going on this generational TikTok run and just compounding and compounding and compounding and just got to skate velocity. If you watch those videos, very well edited, very well, very well executed. Jasmine Sun had a breakdown in her Substack, which I've really been enjoying. She says, "I'm excited for Zoron even if I don't buy every policy. We need to elect leaders, especially young people who are affirmatively

• 13:42John Coogan?

  excited about versus establishment heirs who hold their nose, who people hold their nose and vote for. Without that energy, democracy is dead." And there were a couple of other people that chimed in on this showing that, yeah, Lulu was talking about this. It sounds so basic, but he is, he's too likable to lose. Friendly demeanor, smiles with his eyes, seems earnest. Being liked outweighs policies, experience, nonsensical plans. I just have a good feeling about that person. Can override almost anything. And yeah, I mean, it's like, he's clearly not an expert in the stuff he talks about, but he's able to play, play the, play the same notes. And Solana had a good take on this, this idea

• 14:26John Coogan?

  that like Cuomo was making very abstract arguments about like Trump and Mom Donnie was like rent, buses, like things that people care about for the idea of a mayor. Like, what is a mayor even supposed to do about Trump? Like, it's so unclear, like how that would even track as opposed to like the-

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think, I think if you saw what happened in LA and you're more of a, if you're in the Karen Bass Army, you might think that the mayor does have a responsibility-

• 14:54John Coogan?

  But even then, like, I, I, I think most people in LA would say the mayor would be more responsible for dealing with like fires than dealing with whatever happened with Trump. Like, like-

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I just think that immigration has become a local issue.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Even in New York? They don't have a border with anyone. Like, it's got such an odd thing. So, I mean, I get that it animates people, certainly. Like, people, people pay attention to it. And so it definitely grabs like the attention of folks. But, anyway.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Interesting to see the breakdown.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was fascinating.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  By income.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  From the New York Times.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Under fifty thousand dollars annually, Cuomo was dominating.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  Fifty thousand to a hundred thousand, Mamdani had six points. And then over a hundred thousand, Mamdani had over thirteen points.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, the luxury beliefs.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Luxury beliefs. Narrative violation a little bit.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  But not really if you were paying attention.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  No, no, I mean, this is the, this is the Peter Thiel thesis. This is the, the thesis of like, who has been failed? It's the people who went to college and are saddled with that. Not necessarily the folks who are working class and like grinding their way up. They're actually.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  You see this in Miami with like the Cubans that come over and are anti-communist.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Because they're like, this is like, yes, I'm making under fifty K, but I'm making more than I did last year. And I'm actually upwardly mobile versus the downwardly mobile.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  Lamborghini Urus Performantes were never made in communist states. So if that is, you know, a sort of ideal, then you would want to aim for. I think, I mean, now's probably a good time to highlight this email from Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg. And Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Andreessen, and a handful of other Facebook board members in 2020. So Peter says, there are many themes that could be developed more here. Let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when seventy percent of millennials say they are pro-socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why. And from that perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me. Namely, that when one has too much student debt, or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time. And/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then they may well turn against it. And so. This sort of explains why there's a certain voting bloc that is just generally in favor of increasing taxes and they just gravitate towards that.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  In the, you know, sort of feeling like that.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  This is Brad Gerstner's Invest America project. Get you on the capital ladder accumulating assets and investments early in your life, literally when you're born. And then deregulation of housing to build more, build higher, build bigger. And so that as supply increases, price goes down, not price controls. That never works. Instead, you need to build a ton more. Right? And then, and then, yeah, with the, and then there's probably a solution to the, to the college debt crisis in the form of underwriting those, underwriting those loans differently. So if you're going to try and major in something that's hard to get a job in, it's harder to get a loan to pay for that. But if you want to pay for it yourself, you can't.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  He did highlight something in one of his videos that I thought was interesting. Apparently the street food vendors oftentimes can't get a permit themselves for their cart.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  This was good.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  And so they rent a permit from someone else who just happened to have one.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  And the permits rent for eight, 17, I think, to $22,000 a year is kind of the market rate.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  And so there's just somebody who's just like rent seeking on a permit that they got a long time ago.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  And it's purely because of the, the government is inefficient. And I like that. Yeah, he called it, he wants to set up a mom and pop czar. Basically someone specifically to, to go and basically Doge all of the local regulation that requires from a single owner operator business in New York City that you want to do something, you want to open a store and it's going to take you six month or a year just to get started. And then there's huge fees and all of those just don't matter and, and are just, I, so, so I actually love that. And I feel like maybe, maybe he tries to do both. Maybe he opens the, the government run grocery store. He learns his lesson. He learns it the hard way and it fails, but then he has a bunch of success.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  If he actually does that, the,

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  The meme, the, the value of the memes that come out of it alone will be incredible.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's like

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  Potentially priceless.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  We kind of know the economic logic, like the, the physics of this system, the physics of the economy to the degree that like, we know it's going to fail, but some lessons have to be learned the hard way. And so that, that's kind of what Friedberg is getting at. And so, yeah, go and, go and build one government run grocery store, see how that goes. And then, and then go in

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Wow, I saved

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Go and sleep.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  I saved one and a half percent. By, you know, historical grocery store margins are very, very slim. So you could have a grocery store that's like Trader Joe's, except, you know, the, the, it's maybe more packed, less well-run, dirtier, like most government, you know, sort of run things are.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  You're like, we're

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  And then you save one and a half percent, which is, which is pretty interesting.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Paki.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  To, to, to pass that one and a half percent on to the customer, you have to run it as ruthlessly as the private equity guys that own grocery stores, right?

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Pretty smart guys.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  And so they're running their businesses extremely efficiently and then they're keeping the one and a half percent. So you have to run it as efficiently and then you can pass on the one and a half percent. But that's the best scenario.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  No one's saying that there's 20% to go squeeze out of those things.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Paki said, I will say this, if Zoran really can make the city more affordable by simply saying things should be more affordable, a lot of mayors are going to have a lot of explaining to do. And maybe Zoran is taking a page out of Trump's book by just saying, hey, you guys in the oil markets?

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's not the best one.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm watching you.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm watching you.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I mean,

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Disregard supply and demand.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  There's a little bit of like truth zone here because a lot of people are saying like, he will never make the rents go down. But then they're also saying like, everyone's going to leave and rents are going to collapse. And so, you know, maybe it's a head fake. Maybe he makes, maybe he makes it so unattractive to live there that people leave, the rents actually do fall.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  You had a good bit, you had a good bit earlier. You had a good bit earlier. Uh, Zoran is in favor of the congestion tax.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  You were saying, what if you implemented just a constant, it was an hourly fee that you pay from being in the New York City city limits?

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Tax, yes, exactly.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  On people.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  On anyone. So if you go there for a day, you know, you're paying $30 an hour. If you're there for the whole year, that's like probably 200, 300K. Just to live there. But it's gonna, it's gonna decrease demand for housing or even, even stopping by. It's gonna decrease tourism.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  If you just destroy demand, then

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Price will go down.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Price will go down.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  Price will go down. And if that's the goal.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe something.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  There are different ways. You can increase supply, or you can decrease demand. And, and it does feel like he's, at least, at least we're seeing, I don't, I don't actually buy the idea that people are gonna be like, yeah, we're moving to Florida, or whatever. I think the people that live there are, are gonna, A, he still hasn't won. Even if he wins, actually getting this stuff through is gonna be hard.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  The thing, the thing is, is Eric.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Eric Adams is producing a really high volume of iconic moments that are doing well on social. Not really oriented around policy as much as just sort of saying funny things.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  But there, it's resonating.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  In a way.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  And so it could be a much tighter race.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the? Also, like, the whole freeze the rent thing, people think, people think he's, like, like, the immediate proposal will be like, all rent will be frozen forever. It's like, there are already rent-controlled apartments in New York City. He's just proposing to be like, more aggressive. So he's like, he's, he, all he's saying is like, I will be turning the volume knob to the left. And, but the volume knob is not necessarily gonna go to zero. It's not necessarily gonna go to 11 with another, with another mayor. And so I think a lot of this is, is rhetoric. And when, if he gets in office and tries to implement this, some of this stuff, it'll be implemented in certain places over time. I, I would be surprised if there was like a mass exodus from New York City.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  But maybe it's, maybe it's time to go along Miami. Who knows? Anyway, Liz Wolf broke down who she saw canvassing for Zoron. She said she talked to a dozen or so canvassers, and they were all so sweet. Also, the vast majority of them were white men in their 30s. Literally, all of them were childless. God bless them all, but there's a fair bit of Peter Pan syndrome I'm sensing. I don't know exactly what that means. It is so nice that they think they know how best to design and improve all of our lives, but my goodness, very few of them have big boy jobs or families or real standing in the community, you know? Ver, then mowing a mutual aid fund every once in a while, ain't it, dog?

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Maybe I'm extrapolating too much and maybe we'll all become close friends in the breadlines. But Liz writes for Reason Magazine. But Zoran's campaign is amateur hour on every level, supported by many folks who don't really understand what their fellow New Yorkers want or need, or how this works on a macro level. Interesting. Well, it doesn't matter because they came out and voted and he won the primary. So, anyway, Ken Griffin.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Joe Gabbi says, who's voting for someone that promises city-owned grocery stores?

• 24:42John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't get that. What is he saying? I mean, a lot of people are.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, no, he's just, he's just wondering. I don't think he has any, and maybe if he looked in the last 20 people that he texted, nobody, nobody wanted to do that. Dan Loeb says, it's officially hot commie summer. And.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  And Sophie closes it out with, Ken Griffin got Zoran elected to pump his Miami real estate bags. 200 IQ move, 5D chess. You love it.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Zach Weinberg says, true pro-crime candidate and cash bail.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  It's crazy that Zach Weinberg is quote tweeting libs of TikTok. That is what's crazy. These posts are five years old. He's completely changed this. He's, he's changed his policies on all this. So.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting, though, that this is like, this is like what SF was like basically run on.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, during the 2020 to 2025. Yeah, we ran this experiment, you would think.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  But maybe he learned from SF.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it does seem like he's pulling back on almost all of these, basically. At least in the, in the current rhetoric.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Netcap Girl says, Ken Griffin got Zoran elected to pump his Miami real estate bags. 200 IQ move, 5D chess. He is investing a billion dollars in a, in a complex in Miami.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  But also, he was never a New York guy. He was a Chicago guy.

• 26:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, and him, when he left Chicago, that, that has done material damage to Chicago's.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I figured they still had, I figured they still had like a pretty large operation there and they were more just like expanding and growing and, you know, re-headquartering, but, uh, but like still a huge presence in, uh, in Chicago, but maybe they really relocated the whole firm. I mean, these, it's hard to relocate a whole firm. You talk to many of VC firms that like tried to kind of relocate and, you know, it's like, oh yeah, we still have a ton of people up, up there or whatever. Uh, anyway, um, if you're designing your next move, get on Figma.com. Big, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  You can build a website as fast as you can design one. It is magic.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Anyway, in the high finance world, we have news from Jane Street. Uh, Gordon Gekko breaks it down, says all this Zoran news is distracting us from the fact that Jane Street tried-

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you notice he says Zohan?

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Zohan, yeah. He misspells it. The fact that Jane Street tried to overthrow Sudan. Uh, so Jane Street boss says he was duped into funding AKs for coup. Uh, and another account says Jane Street tried to overthrow the Sudanese government by supplying Harvard educated rebels with AK-47s. And you think Mom Donnie is going to be able to raise taxes? LMAO, get real. That's a good point. Uh, I'm calling, I'm calling for a complete stop on Jane Street until we find out more about what exactly Oh Camel is doing to the brain. I love that because that's their programming language. Um, and Joe Weisenthal says, things you never want to say. Hashtag Jane Street boss says he was duped into funding AK-47s for coup.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Quantium says, obviously Harvard never had the juice, but what an embarrassing L for Jane Street that they couldn't even successfully orchestrate a coup in a mid-sized African country with a deeply unstable government.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  It's wild. Um, well, the story is in Bloomberg and says, the indictment reads like a cinematic plot. A Harvard fellow and another activist allegedly wanted to buy AK-47s, Stinger missiles and grenades to topple South Sudan's government. What they lacked was enough cash. Now Jane Street co-founder, Robert Granary-

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Concedes he put up the money, saying he was duped into funding the alleged coup plot. The role played by the wealthy recluse behind a Wall Street trading powerhouse emerges from the US prosecution of Peter A. Jack, the Harvard fellow who was accused last year of scheming to install himself atop the East African nation. What a, yeah, I mean, yeah, it does seem like something out of a, out of a movie. "Greenery is a longtime supporter of humanity, human, human rights causes," his lawyer said in a statement. "In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist defrauded Rob and lied about his intentions. The case came to light in March of 2024 when federal prosecutors in Arizona charged A.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Jack and Abraham Keach with conspiring to illegally export arms to their home country. Both have pleaded not guilty. While prosecutors haven't said where the defendants obtained several million dollars for an attempt to buy military-grade weaponry, A. Jack's lawyers pointed to Greenery in a recent filing, saying the 53-year-old financier was vital to the plan. "Without the significant financing that Mr. Greenery could and agreed to provide, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible." And somehow George Clooney's involved? We're gonna get to that in a second. They wrote in the document late May.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  Did he provide the lubricant, the tequila?

• 29:33John Coogan?

  I don't, yeah, I don't know. Here he is.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Pretty.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll get to it. I mean, this is a fascinating story. So, um, uh, the lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two black men, even though support also came from Greenery and Garry Kasparov.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Chess champion and prominent Russian, Russian dissident, the US hasn't accused either of them of wrongdoing. Well, yeah, I mean, that makes, makes sense because like, somebody comes to you and they ask you to raise, "Hey, I'm starting a company, wire him a million dollars to build that." And then they go off and do something completely different with the money. Like, you're definitely a victim in that scenario. But I guess the question is like, did they know more? And, and that's what this article's digging into. But it feels a little, I don't, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence here. Let's, let's continue to dig in. Uh, so Kasparov came to know A. Jack when the chess master was the chair of the Humans Rights Foundation. He later connected A. Jack with Greenery, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified. "My record and my values are clear and they remain unchanged," Kasparov said in a statement sent by a spokesperson.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  "I have spent much of my life standing up for civil rights and promoting democracy around the world." To industry outsiders, Jane Street is probably best known as the former employer of Sang Bank and Free. That's not how people know Jane Street. They know them as the maintainer of OCaml, of course, the programming language.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  And also a high frequency trading firm. You should know about Jane Street. But yes, SBF.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Also sponsor of Dorkesh.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Patel's podcast. That's right. There's so many different reasons to know Jane Street besides SBF. That's ridiculous. This is, but I guess SBF is the most like headline grabbing. So Bloomberg needs to write it that way. But across Wall Street, the marketing, the market making firm is a source of fascination known for turning mathematicians into traders who mint profits generated, it generated $20 billion net trading revenue last year, helping it leap past the likes of Bank of America and Citigroup. Wow, they're making more money than B of A. That is crazy.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  Maud.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Despite Jane Street's ascent in the industry, Greenery has kept a low profile. He's got to go on the Dorkesh podcast. You know, they're connected.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  Founder's podcast.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  New show.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, the new show would be great for that. I mean, there's a bunch of shows that invest like the best he'd be great on. Hopefully he can come out and tell the full story.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  He might have to do a press tour.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  He should. He should. I mean, he should just to talk about OCaml and.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  He's like, the coup was a small bet in a large portfolio and I was misled.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  I, I don't think there's any evidence of that. It's alleged, alleged, alleged.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Alleged, of course.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's totally believable that he would meet some charismatic young people that have a record of caring about human rights abuse and make some type of donation to them for their cause. And then they could turn around and use those funds for, you know, something that he had no awareness of. So.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's frustrating.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  It makes sense that people that would try to throw overthrow a government would want to drag down, you know, anybody that they could and just try to drag them into the mud and start wrestling.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this happens literally all the time because once the money is wired into a nonprofit, it's very hard to track. Like, okay, did you hand out the mosquito nets? Or did you buy a yacht? Like, okay, now I need to, now I, you know, you. You wire, part of what makes Silicon Valley so great is like you have a handshake deal, you sign a safe, and there's kind of an expectation that I don't need to check up and make sure that you're not defrauding me. It's pretty rare that that that true fraud happens.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Because Silicon Valley is built on trust. But when you're gallivanting around the world, even if you are trying to invest in humanitarian efforts all over the place, much harder to keep tabs on every single deal you've done, or every single donation you've made. It's very hard.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if it was effectively a donation, I don't, you know, I don't know the exact mechanic, then he's way less likely to pay attention to it.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  Because he thinks he's donating to a good cause.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  And he's not trying to generate a return.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  He might be more inclined to be like, hey, investor update.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you're a seed investor in FTX, and the company grows and grows and grows, and then you're starting to see that, wait, how is Alameda linked exactly? Like, this is material. This is, you know, this is $500 million to me now. It's not just a flyer anymore.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  You wake up.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  I need to dig in.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  Four years later.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Well, Greenery is certainly worried about being surrounded by journalists. He's kept a low profile. He's one of the firm's four founders. I didn't know this. He's the only one still there. He's not featured on the company's website and public photos of him.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  We gotta figure out what the other three founders are doing, because if they're, you know.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Imagine they just made no money, and they're just like PMs at Big Tech or something?

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just making like a million a month.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  They just didn't invest out.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  They're just like, yeah, we had a cliff, and I didn't hit it. They bailed. Somehow, I don't think that's what's going on.

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  Doubt it.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  The firm's success has allowed Greenery to pour money into other ventures and causes. He helped build the Scarlet Pearl, a casino resort on the Gulf of, on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. What a funny place to.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Park cash.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  I mean, it's probably a good business.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  It's voted best casino resort.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  We gotta go to the Jane Street Casino. Get in there, do some high-frequency slots. Let's do it. He was a major financial backer for Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, and has donated to the Equal Justice Initiative and the Institute for Justice. He also channeled money into causes Kasparov backed around the globe, so he's buddies with Gary Kasparov. South Sudan is slightly larger than France, became the world's youngest country after seceding from Sudan in 2011, following more than 20 years of civil war. And there's a photo of George Clooney here. The bloody regional conflict- George, it's like, how did I get dragged into it? We're getting to George Clooney. We're gonna explain how George Clooney is related.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  So the bloody regional conflict displaced millions of people, drew attention from human rights activists, and gained mainstream awareness after actor George Clooney championed intervention in the early 2000s. Despite emerging as an independent nation, stability still eludes its people. Big lesson in there for regime change. Like, this stuff is hard. Like, clearly, in this scenario, like, there was enough momentum to create an entirely new country, and they were still actually setting up a robust democracy. It was difficult. They didn't get there. So Ajax aimed to change that. After escaping life as a child soldier in Sudan in the 1990s, he resettled in the United States as one of the lost boys. He

• 36:20John Coogan?

  went to study at Harvard, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, before returning to Sudan as a World Bank economist. Pretty sick. After South Sudan's independence, Ajax became a prominent opposition activist and political prisoner there, later seeking asylum in the United States. One sticking point in the court case is how much, if anything, the US authorities knew about Ajax and Keach's alleged plan to topple South Sudan's government. Attorneys for both men have signaled in court that they plan to pursue a public authority defense, essentially claiming that US officials had supported their plan. Prosecutors said Ajax was told by the State Department in October of 2023 that it wouldn't fund plans for non-democratic regime change. Ajax and Keach are accused of forging ahead regardless.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  For that, they needed financial backing. The financing took shape early last year amid a flurry of meetings. Some were at the law firm of Paul Hastings, where Ajax former pro bono attorney Renata Paras worked, according to a May filing. Another attendee was public relations specialist Michael Holtzman, who previously advised the State Department.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  Is Michael the, is he like the Lulu of overthrowing governments?

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Of the deep state, of the State Department. Something like that.

• 37:31Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 37:32John Coogan?

  "Based on the government's indictment of Peter, it would seem he lied to me and others about his intentions from the outset," Holtzman said in a statement. Paras didn't request, didn't respond to requests for comment. The search for cash culminated in a midtown Manhattan condominium building that February, according to prosecutors. That's where Granary first met Ajax. The next day, charging, charging documents allege Ajax sent an encrypted message to an undercover agent, writing, "We are getting the funding." The financier later transferred $77 million in two stages, according to people with knowledge of the payments. Within a few weeks of the condo meeting, prosecutors say Ajax and Keach inspected a cache of weaponry inside a Phoenix warehouse. They were soon arrested.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  That is so gnarly, and I'm disappointed that the story is ending here.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  I know, I know. I was like, but certainly there's, certainly there's six more pages of this story. This is fascinating.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  Cliffhanger.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, let's take a break to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, there is an M&A bombshell hitting the timeline that, no pun intended, Shell is in early talks to acquire rival British Petroleum, BP, but Shell denies the Wall Street Journal's report that it's in talks to acquire BP. So we have a little bit of an update to the story. And M and A, just in the last 20 months, Morning Brew is breaking it down here.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Shell BP is clocked at maybe 80 billion, but the deal is pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a $60 billion M and A deal. Chevron and Hess, deal still pending, but it's at 53 billion. DBAC and Endeavor, don't even know those companies, but $26 billion deal there. Conoco Phil and Marathon at 17 billion, and Occidental and Crown Rock at 12 billion. So if you think the AI M and A deals are hot, you gotta go over to big oil.

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  Big oil, oil and gas.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Big tech, big oil, big pharma. These are, these are the industries where the, where the big dollars get thrown around. They don't, they don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the, in the deck of corn exchanging business.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Pretty interesting. So the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP. BP jumped 7% and Shell dropped 2.6%. I want to know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5% on the day. How is Shell, how is BP doing over the week? Or the, or the month? This is the week? Okay.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've, they've both kind of retraced since Shell said, nah, we're not talking at all.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  So by market cap, Shell's around 207 billion, BP's around 87 billion. Those are big companies, big, big companies. Anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here. But first, if you're planning a complex post-merger integration, you gotta get on linear.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  John, your, your commitment to just using linear for everything is.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  No, but of course, if you're, if you're building, if you're building modern software, if you need to streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps, you gotta get on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. And plus, they got linear for agents. But, you know, oil and gas companies do need to build software.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Worried about getting paper clipped.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  They should be on linear.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  If you're worried about getting paper clipped, get your agents on linear. They will thank you for it.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So a deal for BP, which has a market value of roughly 80 billion, would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies. Super major is a better term than mag seven, in my opinion. We need that for the tech companies.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Super majors.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Super major.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  Are you in the major leagues?

• 41:33John Coogan?

  I'm in the super majors. So good. So talks between company representatives are active, according to people who are familiar with the matter, leak into the Wall Street Journal. And BP is considering the approach carefully. Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. It would be a landmark combination of two so-called super major oil companies, a group of multinational behemoths that dominate the production of the world's most important energy sources. Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned, and a tie-up is far from certain, but the discussions are moving slowly. BP is currently valued around 80 billion, taking into account a premium, a

• 42:16John Coogan?

  deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the 83 billion dollar mega merger that created ExxonMobil at the turn of the century. It would also be easily the biggest M and A deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by President Trump's antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon spill?

• 42:41John Coogan?

  I do. Yeah, I remember tracking it very closely, in the Thunder Horse Tract.

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  Were you monitoring the situation?

• 42:45John Coogan?

  I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the sell-side banks. And I understood it to the level of knowing that the tract that they were drilling into was called the Thunder Horse Tract, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into.

• 43:05Jordi Hays?

  So crazy. So BP's total costs associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup, fines, and settlements, reached approximately 65 billion, so nearing their total enterprise value at the moment.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Massive. Also, great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie, Deepwater Horizon. You should check it out.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Is it a documentary?

• 43:23John Coogan?

  No. It is a, you know, nonfiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Oil rig and I believe

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  I like movies like that.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  It's awesome. It's a really, really great movie. I highly recommend it. A Shell spokesperson said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing value, capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Wow, nice.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic. Basically saying like, hey, no comment, but you know, also like we're we're shilling for Shell over here. We're shilling for Shell.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  A TBPN spokesman said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in TBPN through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification, John.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  We should never, you should never decline to comment. You should always just do an ad read.

• 44:21Jordi Hays?

  Leave a comment like that.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  Bake it into the LLM. This is

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  SwitchYourBusinessRamp.com. Do you have any comments on your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on NumeralHQ.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Shell comes into the talks from operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, which like BP is based in the United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than $200 billion. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill-fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. It's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters. And so it seems like actually their desire to step away from

• 45:18John Coogan?

  the bread and butter of the business, oil, has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because like Those M and A sell-side research reports that I was reading during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the long-term impact of that crisis on the stock immediately.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  So it was priced into the stock very quickly and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off, but then they were kind of set up to kind of rebuild and there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years. And so more recently, Elliott Management, which owns more than 5% of BP shares, has pushed for changes with the energy company.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting though, BP had been performing, not, you know, had basically been down only since the financial crisis and then Deepwater Horizon hit and it was just down even.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  When asked publicly, Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big deal-making would be high. Shell in May announced a multi-billion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases. Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and the US, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. For Shell, acquiring BP would take years of integration, complicated by culture clashes and possibly the sale of overlapping assets, but a deal could give Shell's global trading business greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas like liquefied natural gas. Analysts and investors also see a good matchup in the company's Gulf of Mexico operations, which the US now calls the Gulf of America.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  All of the oil companies had to change all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg News reported this earlier.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  That's sticking, right?

• 47:09John Coogan?

  I think it's sticking, yeah. Until the next election and there'll be a new EO and it'll go back to something else.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it something other than the Gulf of America.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Well, there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going and media is obviously evolving very quickly and I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things, but what I came to was maybe this idea that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that like it is not available to everyone. They are in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it. And so that kind of puts it in the same league as, you know, ultra-high net worth wealth management products or even

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  Rolex.

• 48:12John Coogan?

  high horology, Rolexes that are in demand. People, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them at LAX, the clocks are Rolexes. Or if you go to an F1 match, you'll see a lot of, you know,

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Patek will put an ad for the Cubitus in an airport.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Every, every issue of The Economist comes with an ad for basically a Holy Trinity watch on the back, whether it's Vacheron or AP or Patek, but you can't just go and buy those. And so it's very odd that they're doing this like luxury brand building without a product that you can just immediately go buy. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my, my thought was that maybe, maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into.

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, let's talk about the current strategy, right?

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  Current strategy is post on X.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  Go on podcasts.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  You can start your own podcast.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  Many people have done that.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  by making a wide variety of investments.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  And that has to inform their opinion on different markets.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard because you can't go on there and say XYZ company is clearly dominating.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  You know, if you look at the data and you look at, you know, what customers are saying, when, if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back. And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great Media products because of that conflict.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  Now, you can still get around this, right? And there's different ways and there's different approaches. You can do an interview show, which allows you to, but that's just like one type of content.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  And the problem with that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guest.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the person.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  And so it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe?

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, so the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  You can't get away from it.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  It's all marketing all the way down. Now, the sort of subcategories, I think, that are interesting, I've always said that Sam Lessin, right? He's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates, he has a unique media product in the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord and some people, it resonates with them, other people want to dunk, but it is an effective format in order to provide commentary and it's very efficient, right? He doesn't need a big marketing team to actually pull that off.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it's super key to find a specific format. But then the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves, you could do something like what you're talking about.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Yep. When I think of like the four really great, or like a few really great VC marketing examples, I think of Zero to One by Peter Thiel. He's never tweeted, but he tweeted once and it was a link to his book. And that book was such a good outcome that it sold in, in airport bookshops, right? And he just dropped an amazing book and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of like building his brand. Naval has a similar story where his, his Twitter posts, the How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, went so viral. And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book.

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near-term thesis, or they're not, they're not news products. They're Reflections on how the world works, reflections on like timeless principles, right? Then I think about Paul Graham's blog. It's not on a regular cadence. You know, it's not a weekly Substack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on like, how did Steve Jobs run his company? And maybe he'll draw, maybe he'll like pump his bags a little bit by like talking about Airbnb, but he's talking about like what Airbnb did in like 2009 or something. And it's like, it's completely irrelevant and it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm getting a buy rating on the stock right now.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  Like some of the early writing, if you like, and even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%. And it's not, and he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release. He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago, and it's reflective. And I think that that works really well. Mark Andreessen, similarly, the ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op-ed is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be like formulated from a team necessarily.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  So there's this like, there's kind of this like, I feel like we're going to see more of like this barbell strategy where the future might be like when the GP has a really, really insightful piece of commentary, they take it to a Wall Street Journal op-ed or a book or a thread or a screenshot essay, or you're just seeing the brand. And you're seeing the brand on the back of, and I was thinking like, what is the equivalent of like the Patek Philippe ad that appears on the back of The Economist every week? It's like, I was thinking venture capitalists should go and buy the back of like the Stanford Review or like the Waterloo. You know, campus newspaper like that should have an ad for a venture capital.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Or the Derek Thompson newsletter.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But like.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  But I think aligning with these iconic properties.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, people who are doing their life's work.

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  Getting a full page ad in, in the journal.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  But most importantly, like, like when, when Patek Philippe sponsors The Economist, they are not trying to shift The Economist's coverage towards like being more bullish on Swiss watches. They're just like, we don't even know what you're going to put in this issue. We're just going to be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of the brand.

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  So John, a full page color ad in the journal costs around $248,000.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, like truly great producer for their own show.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  And so is it going to be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day?

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Or, or have your own podcast?

• 54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there are more narrow properties too, that are like, the journal's extremely broad in all of business there. But there, but there really are more narrow products that would work. But every time they've gotten there, it's been, it's been, it's been misaligned around

• 55:02John Coogan?

  like, like, like what the actual coverage is. But I don't know, maybe we'll see, maybe we'll see an F1 team. Maybe we'll see JetSuite X, the terminal, like sponsored by a VC firm. That would make a lot of sense. Like you get off in Silicon Valley at the JetSuite X terminal and boom, you're presented with a, an ad for a VC firm. I don't know. We'll see. We'll, we'll keep covering it.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Something there. Something there. Well, we have David Senora coming into the studio. We're going to ask him about VC marketing. We're going to ask him about the New York election. We're going to ask him about all the things that you've been just waiting to get Senator's opinion on because he cares so much about current events. That's all he cares about. It's venture capital and current events.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  That's his jam.

• 55:43Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 55:44David Senra?

  Can you hear me?

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:46David Senra?

  It's the great, the great Malibu blackout of 2025. So I went to our mutual friends and passed esteemed past TPBN guest, Rob Moore's house. He's lucky enough to let me post up here on my laptop and talk to you guys. So we gotta thank Rob for this.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  Neighbor, your neighbor, your neighbors.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  I was wondering if you, if you were renting a house, how you got so many books lined up already. But it makes sense.

• 56:07David Senra?

  Could you imagine? No, I told him, we were looking for places to, to set up just now. I was like, dude, you can't beat this background, like this library that has this house is incredible. The only thing I, the only thing I like is when people, um, they organize their bookshelves by color. That drives me fucking insane. And so that's the only thing whoever designed this room, they did a great job.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  That you don't actually read is just organize it by pretty colors.

• 56:29David Senra?

  It bothers me. They should organize it by episode number like everybody else does, like I do at my house.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  But if not, if you're not making a podcast, what is the logical, uh, better way to order? Is it alphabetical? Is it by year?

• 56:42David Senra?

  No, no, no. No, I used to do it by in order that I read it. And so you kind of see your interests evolve over time.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 56:50David Senra?

  Interesting.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then you have a, and then you have a separate, like intake shelf for things that you haven't read?

• 56:57David Senra?

  Yeah. I mean, the bottom half of my, all my bookshelves is the one that I record at my home, like the, the studio they use. It's all unread books. So it's like an order by episode number. Then the, the bottom, like, I don't know, two, uh, one third is just unread books. And then anything out on any bookshelves in the living room is just all, all unread books. I have like 600 now. I have to stop buying them.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  When, when, are you gonna start, are you gonna start like printing and binding the materials that you put together for the, for the shows? The episodes that you do that aren't based on a single book?

• 57:26David Senra?

  Yeah, I already do that. So I used to put them in binders and now, now I actually send them to a print shop and they actually do like a spiral binding. I actually have something, I'll give you a preview. I had, I don't think I've talked about this publicly. Um, I went to, when I went to Charlie Munger's house, I knew I was like a biography amateur because he, he made his own biographies. And so he, I asked him, like, Charlie, can I go through your bookshelf? And there's two realizations of why, like I, no matter how long I do this, I'll never be as good as he was. Is he doesn't take notes. So like he would have like a random, like, Word in like every, you know, hundred pages where I have to like run through all the stuff. But at the very bottom, cause he told me that he thought that the, the member, you always want to have me to come on here and have this debate about who's the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Goat debate.

• 58:08David Senra?

  The goat debate. Charlie said that it's obviously Rockefeller and that Standard Oil is the best company ever created. And there was this interview that Rockefeller did at the end of his life and the transcript of it is like seventeen hundred pages long. And Charlie printed it out and put it into binders. And so I, I actually a friend of mine who does this podcast called The Rainmaker Pod, he found the seventeen hundred page transcript for me. And then so if you go to my house right now, it's going to take me fucking months to do this, but I have a seventeen hundred page, essentially seventeen hundred pages of Rockefeller's own words. So that's probably going to be the longest episode of founders I'll ever do. It's probably, you know, it's probably like five hours long or something. So yeah, I already do make them.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Why wouldn't you just break it up into multiple episodes?

• 58:52David Senra?

  Maybe I should know. I think, I don't think, I think I'd break it up into multiple recordings because sitting down, if, if, if you see it, like if I do an hour long episode, right? That, you know, usually I'll talk for like two or two and a half hours. Like I kind of do like, you ever heard of Rick Rubin's idea of like the ruthless edit? I thought it was like really interesting. He's got this highlight when he went on Lex Friedman's podcast. I thought it was really good. Where he's working with an artist and he's like, hey, let's say you make thirty songs. Let's just assume we can only fit five. Move it five on the album. What are the five best ones? And so then they put the five on there and then like, okay, if we're going to add to these five, maybe number six has to be really good. And so now you have twenty five to pick through them. What's the sixth, like the next one that's just as good?

• 59:32David Senra?

  Um, and I think going through and like ruthlessly editing everything is really important, especially if you want a high value audience, because they just don't have a bunch of time to like just turn through shit. It's just like your job. It's like what you're doing for them.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's something interesting there about like, I, I, I, I don't have all the numbers, but I feel like some recording artists, you'll hear stats like there were twelve songs on the album and they recorded two hundred songs before they cut them down.

• 59:56David Senra?

  So this is actually the episode I want to talk to you guys about, which is Michael Ferrero or Michele Ferrero, but I'm going to use the American, the English translation. I mentioned that in the episode that being prolific is highly coordinated with greatness. Just because you're prolific doesn't mean you're great, but if you're great at what you do, you're undoubtedly prolific. And so I'm reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography right now. And there's a lot of crazy stuff in there, other than like the thing is like this thick. And he wrote it out by hand multiple times. He wanted to make sure every sentence was like, should be in the book. And so he'd like, the only way to force him to do that is to rewriting, like, what kind of psycho does that? A psycho that's probably, you know, recorded thousands of songs and only published maybe less than 10%. I just read Prince's autobiography,

• 1:00:40David Senra?

  which is the strangest autobiography I've ever read. I can't even do an episode on it because I don't understand it. But when he died, he had so many unreleased songs in his vault that he could release a new album every year for the next century. So you see this over and over again with like Michael Ferrero, who essentially like, I'll just give you like the high level thing, because most people have never heard of him. And there's no biographies in English of him. So my friend Cameron Priest, who's another psycho that reads all these other biographies, he translated from Italian for me. And Ferrero owned 100% of his company. He, the company does $20 billion a year in revenue, no outside shareholders. He worked on it from the age of 19 until he died at 89. So he has got 70 years of experience

• 1:01:25David Senra?

  in building his company. He vertically integrated the entire thing. He went to like absurd lengths. He wound up monopolizing like hazelnut production in the world. So like one out of every three hazelnuts went to his company Ferrero. And then he also became the largest, not only producer of hazelnuts, but he also sold them to other companies. But one thing that you-

• 1:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Super underrated nut, by the way. It is. It's a great one. Under discussed.

• 1:01:50David Senra?

  He, this is the guy that invented Nutella, Tic Tacs, Ferrero Rocher, the Kinder brand of chocolate. He's like the real life Willy Wonka. He would commute to work by helicopter because he lived in Monaco, right? This is something that sounds like Jordy would do. Jordy came to my house yesterday and I'm watching up the hill and I see this, the TPBN all black Maybach.

• 1:02:14David Senra?

  And so Michael Ferrero is-

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Pulling into your palatial house.

• 1:02:19David Senra?

  Cut that part.

• 1:02:22David Senra?

  So the the funny thing is this guy lived in Monaco, right? And um, and he actually moved because he grew up in rural Italy. He grew up poor, which is really fascinating, but there was all these kidnapping attempts in Italy. So he's worried about, you know, being, he was the richest person in Italy for a very long time. One of the richest people in the world. This, the joke is like, I titled the episode like, oh, Michael Ferrero and his forty billion dollar, you know, chocolate empire, because if you Google them, they're like, oh, Ferrero is worth forty billion. No, it's it's worth multiples of that. The guy's doing, like, it's insane what that company would sell for. And his son still owns all of it. And so anyways, this guy would commute from, he was so obsessed with quality, he would commute from Monaco by helicopter and go to every single one of his factories where the product was produced and insist on tasting

• 1:03:07David Senra?

  the, the, like, what they're producing that day himself. Because he says, like, you have to control the quality yourself. He was completely obsessed. Yeah, but the reason I bring up the prolific part is because in his lifetime, he ran tens of thousands of different experiments on different uh, like, mixtures of the stuff that he's making. And in one case, like, they said, hey, he'd get in the tasting room, which he considered a secret laboratory. At like eight in the morning, he'd stay till dusk. They would cover like, they'd run experiments all day on one single, uh, one of their products. And they'd run like seventy to, you know, over a hundred experiments on, on one single product each day. So this like idea of being prolific, you see it over and over again, like, how many, how many three-point uh, uh, shots has Steph Curry put up in practice?

• 1:03:52David Senra?

  How many uh, songs has Bruce Springsteen uh, written? How many different iterations did Steve Jobs do on his products over his lifetime? It's, it's just incalculable.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, the prolific thing is fascinating. I feel like there's, there's a massive underrated hack in just doing something daily. If you can work it into your lifestyle, like, I'll give you two funny examples. Uh, are you familiar with Beeple, the NFT artist? So he made a three D rendering every day for The first thousand days, it was like, it was multiple years. It was almost like a decade of work. And then, and then he was, he was at a point where his career was, was taking off. He had been mentioned on Joe Rogan, his Instagram was growing. He was getting a consulting gigs to do motion design and rendering consultancy for like the Super Bowl. So he was like making

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  good money as a, as a commercial artist. But then when his work went to, went, went to auction during the NFT boom, he made 70 million dollars like that. And it was just all the value captured.

• 1:04:54David Senra?

  I think it was 69 million.

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. But he sold some other stuff. So I think he walked away with like 70 million. He famously like swapped it into USD immediately. Cause he was like, nah, I don't think he was like a crazy crypto person, but he just realized that like, I've been building for this forever. This is the time to value capture. And so I'm going to do it. The other funny one is Jake Paul. Jake Paul has that, has that rap song, It's Every Day Bro, often lampooned online. But it really does, if you, if you flip it around to, instead of asking the question of like, do you like Jake Paul's work personally as an artist, to just, why is Jake Paul successful? Why is he the name that we know? It's very clear that he was vlogging every single day

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  for years and got extremely, extremely good at it. And, and it built up this muscle where he can produce something. And it just got better and better and better and better and better until he was able to just dominate the internet.

• 1:05:50David Senra?

  There's a quote, there's a clip going around about Michael Phelps about this, where he, you know, on his run, when he became the most dominant swimmer, swimmer of all time, he's just like, if you, any day that I took off, I was, it put me behind two days. And so there's this idea of just, and he went through like his schedule and he's, I forgot, he, he had the numbers, like, you know, a couple thousand workouts. For every, like to get ready for Olympics, like he counted how many workouts that he did. Yeah, there's actually, um, the, the idea of being prolific. Have you guys had Jackson Dahl on the show yet?

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Not yet. We got him.

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  We've invited him a couple of times, but it, we're, we're working on it. Our people are talking to his people.

• 1:06:26David Senra?

  Okay, perfect. Cause he actually has a tweet about this. I think is really important. And, um, and I think Jackson's doing an excellent job. Like he's one of the best. He has one of the best new podcasts, dialectic. And I've been talking to him a lot about his podcast as much as possible. I just saw him in New York last week. But he talked about the, uh, I'm just going to read this quote or read this tweet rather. He says, uh, when you never linger anywhere on anything, you don't get the chance to sink into the feeling of it, to trace the grooves, to notice what little details you love, uh, can be improved. And so Jackson from his posts and his podcast, obviously he's a very soulful dude. But I think one of the things I took away from Ferrero and any really like what I'm trying to do with the podcast is like, hey,

• 1:07:05David Senra?

  they don't write biographies about people's lives that do something for like a year or two or five years. It's like, in almost any case, at the very minimum, you know, it's two, three, four decades of their lives that they dedicated something. And in Ferrero's case, it's like seven decades. So when he was able to improve, I mean, when I talk about vertical integration, it's like he took it to another extreme where it's like, I'm going to monopolize all the, raw materials that my product needs. But then like, he wouldn't, he, he also had to be one of the first people to mass produce chocolate. And so he invented his own machines. And so it starts out like, you don't do that unless you're spending so much of your life thinking about what you're doing and focused, this extreme level of focus.

• 1:07:47David Senra?

  And he applied it to marketing, to distribution logistics, to the machines that he built. And he talked about having a love affair. He thought like the robots he built had soul. The way he talked about,

• 1:07:59David Senra?

  it's really funny because he, he comes of age and after World War II, right? So he's in his early twenties in post-World War II Italy where there's not even electricity. It's like hard, there was two machines that the company had that could, that could, had enough power to run electricity there. At the beginning, everything else had to be done by hand. And then when he started talking about this love affair that he has with these robots that make this product that he deeply loves and cares about, I'm like, oh, there's another obsessive guy that came of age after World War II, was almost the same age, that was in Italy and then built one of the best brands in the world and worked until he died, until he died, that's Enzo Ferrari.

• 1:08:36John Coogan?

  Ferrari.

• 1:08:37David Senra?

  Literally. Yeah. When Enzo built his first car, it talks about in his biography, it's like he couldn't even find electricity and imagine trying to build the best race car and you don't even access to electricity.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:08:48David Senra?

  It's just incredible. And then there's a great post, a picture on Twitter that I think I retweeted one time, where it's like Enzo Ferrari's house that he builds right here, and then around his house is the test track. It's like, what work-life balance does this guy have? He's in his kitchen.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  My favorite thing, you know, people hit 30 and they're like, oh, is it too late for me? It's like Enzo didn't start Ferrari until he was 45.

• 1:09:14David Senra?

  Well, I don't know if he was 45.

• 1:09:17Jordi Hays?

  He was working in racing.

• 1:09:19David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  The brand didn't start.

• 1:09:21David Senra?

  Well, the funny part about that is he didn't actually give a shit about the cars other than like, he cared that they went fast and they won races. But he realized, I just have to sell them to rich Americans so I can fund the racing. And so like, we talked about this a few weeks ago when I was on here, he has that great quote, he's just like, I don't care if the door gap is there, I just care that when the driver hits the gas, he shits his pants.

• 1:09:46John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:09:47David Senra?

  Because he just wanted to go fast.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to dig into the idea of focus more. I was texting with someone earlier today and they were, they were asking, I was like, you have so many opportunities, you can start companies, you can raise funds, like, why are you just focused on media? And I was like, well, really, like, probably David Senra, like, I've studied all the history of greatest entrepreneurs and just kind of realized that they all focus.

• 1:10:11Jordi Hays?

  David Senra studied history.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  So we can study David Senra.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. But really, I felt like I was saying something so stupid and because I was just like, well, it's the pattern of success everywhere is that there's focus. And it's like, it should be my. Blowing and light and yet we're talking, we're talking about people all, all day long who like love your podcast, but don't actually go in focus and they don't actually do it. And so I'm interested in like the parameters of focus because

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Michael Ferraro, Ferrero did, did branch out into Nutella and Kinder and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs. But it's all within the same empire and you've seen that with, with Steve Jobs. And so there are areas where you can have multiple products within the same organization, the same focus. But your, but your, your, your impact or the output is slightly different.

• 1:11:06David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  And I think that people struggle with that because the people will often justify, well, like having a, having a fund and a new kind of startup. And actually like three startups is all part of my focus on my massive empire. And it's like, are you really focusing is always the question.

• 1:11:22David Senra?

  I mean, I, I think the person that's built the most impressive company in our lifetime is Jeff Bezos. You know, like obviously I love SpaceX and I have Starlink in my house and all that other stuff. It's just like, if you look at like what he started out at, the just financial performance of it, like all the, the complex logistics behind it and all the different businesses. And so like, I just, if you're going to do that, I just think you just, just follow Bezos's lead, literally reread his shareholder letters, which I'm going to do every year. I think I've done four episodes on the now, I think, you know, I think the greatest description of that was just like, reading Bezos's shareholder letters is like,

• 1:11:57David Senra?

  the person, like getting a, like a history lesson from the person that mastered a high growth internet startup before the playbooks were written. You know, he kind of like, just tells you what he's going to do and then just goes and does it. But for like Ferrero, in, in his case, it's like, it depends on your level of ambition. And I don't mean this isn't like a derogatory way at all. Like I'm just happy like building like my little podcast that I'm completely obsessed with. Now my business can scale. There's like millions and millions of people that listen to it. So like my impact can grow, assuming I'm good at it and other people tell. But like, there's another life where I think Ferrero would be like a gyro, where he's just like, no, I'm just going to gyro dreams of sushi. I'm going to have a, you know, a 10 seat sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway. And I'm going to be the best in the world, but Ferrero had different ambitions where like he grew up poor.

• 1:12:41David Senra?

  He never forgot what it was like to be impoverished and his, and everybody around him was like, hey, you're dominating Italy. Like, why don't you just stay there? And he's like, no, I'm going to build a global brand. If we don't, he said this multiple times. He's like, if we don't expand outside of Italy, then we have failed. And he wanted to be one of the, not only the best chocolate company, but he wanted to be one of the biggest. And when he died, the day before he died, he actually dies on Valentine's Day, which is, you know, somewhat like ironic, maybe is the wrong word, but um, he, he wound up being the third largest uh, confectionery business in the world the day before he died. Um, and so, yeah, I think it just really depends on like what you do. Now, there's also these, this really interesting thing where like people do a bunch of small things and are, are, like they'll do like a bunch of small startups.

• 1:13:27David Senra?

  It just depends on who you are as a person though, like, I, I don't even have an opinion on them, other than like, I am the kind of person that just wants to focus on one thing, work on it seventies a week. Think about it when I wake up, think about when I go to bed. I can't, I'm just not interested in working on multiple things, but I think so I, when people hear my lifestyle and how I try to focus, like I've heard people have literally told me, they're like, they find it disgusting. Like that lifestyle, like they literally, that's the word they use, like this is disgusting. I like, the world's a big place. I have other interests and I'm like, that's fine. But I'm trying to like, be narrowly focused and the best in the world at what I do. And so I think if you want to be the best in the world.

• 1:14:04Jordi Hays?

  If you got distracted and you were, you had a fund and you were spending all this time with LPs, you wouldn't have spent yesterday, part of yesterday, just reading. Which is allow, allows you to just.

• 1:14:13David Senra?

  Everyday reading, like before I met with Rob just now, like, you know, we picked this time for a specific reason because every morning, if you call me in the morning, you know what I'm doing. First of all, it's going right to fucking voicemail because my phone's on D and D and I'm reading all, my job is very simple. It's just like, wake up every day, wake up, work out. Then read one of a biography of officials for three to four hours. Then you can have lunch and then reread past highlights in the afternoon. And then do it again, over and over again, seven days a week. It's just like, you couldn't get more simple than that.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's also the element of like, you probably shouldn't add a second thing or a second project until you've really nailed the first and you're creating something that's great. And then you kind of earn the right to work on the second thing. Like I'm sure that if I go through for uh, the, the, the history here, like it's not like Nutella and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs. Those were all the same year. It's probably that Nutella was, was absolutely an oiled machine, a banger company doing great. And then that earned the right to go kind of add on the second skew. And still that's all within the same company.

• 1:15:22David Senra?

  So let me, for example, everybody I have this week, last week, two months ago, two years ago, I have all the big publishers in my inbox saying, please write a book, please write a book. Cause I also sell the podcast, obviously sells a lot of books. The audience is full of entrepreneurs, investors, entrepreneurs, investors probably read a hundred times as much as the average population. The average population doesn't read at all and all the best entrepreneurs and investors are reading all the time. And my idea was just like, I'm never going to write a book because that's not a podcast. Now there's a founder's book being written right now. I can actually tell a story because this has to do with this little company that I know you guys happen to know and are a big fan of called Ramp.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:16:02David Senra?

  So let me tell you a ramp story and I wish you guys would repost that video you had when you did the ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp.

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  Oh, we got it on the soundtrack right here. You want to hear it?

• 1:16:11David Senra?

  Yes, can I hear it?

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  We'll send you the file. We'll get it on Spotify.

• 1:16:20David Senra?

  No, no, I, you should go to Spotify. I played, I saved the video and I play it for my son and like for a few days after that, dude, he ran around the house, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp. He doesn't know what it is. And he knows like Kareem and everybody else, like he plays it, our sons play together. So the funny part was, I'll tell you about the founder's book and the issue of focus is me and Patrick did this event at Ramp's headquarters in New York. And it's a guy named like Walter, I can't pronounce his name.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:50David Senra?

  But he's like this new podcaster guy and he's like, he went and spent like thousands of dollars doing, uh, he listened to every single episode of Founder, spent thousands of dollars to design work and then flew from like the Netherlands or some shit to New York to hand me the book. He's trying to launch a podcast and like we, we, you know, we talk about this all the time. Most people get in podcasting really lazy. This guy like tried to do an episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew's like, oh, sorry. He like pushed him off. He's like, oh, I only do it in person. He goes, okay, that's fine. Wouter flies fifteen hours, microphone in hand, does that, interviews Eric Gleyman, writes a forty-page book on the history of Ramp and gives it to him before the podcast. So I think I I'm attracted to people to take what they do seriously and efforts always rewarded. So the what happened was he shows up at this event and Patrick now knows what he did.

• 1:17:36David Senra?

  I introduced him to Kareem and Kareem was there, Eric already knew him. And so after the event, me, Patrick, Kareem and Eric spent time with this young kid. I think he's in his early twenties. They think about the value of like getting Eric and Kareem's time. They're running a sixteen billion dollar company, like all the crazy shit that's going on. Those guys work seven days a week. And now because you were so you had so much effort, you have these guys literally like counseling you and giving you advice for free. And so what I told him, I was like, listen, if you are willing to make a world-class book, I'm talking about like, like what our friend Eric Jorgensen did with the Almanac and the Ball. That book changed my life. Like, I read that all the time. I hand it out like it's candy. I was like, if you could want to build that

• 1:18:16David Senra?

  for the stuff you feel you've learned on founders and it's you make something I am comfortable reading that I want myself, I will advertise it for you for free on the podcast. Well, we have to pay it for free, just like what Naval did. You put if anybody can read it for free online. If you want to buy a copy, you can buy a copy. And any money you make off the book is yours to keep. I don't want to make money off of the fucking book. I don't care about that. But I am interested in, because people have asked for it. Uh, one, I I can't be a bottleneck. Uh, two, you're willing to do all the work and then I want something out there that, you know, it's a tangible, like lessons for the for the podcast. And I think it'd be cool to help this like young kid that's really trying to hustle and trying to like do something with his life. And to be like, to the degree that I can do like, hey, and I I already hear the ad in my head, like I'll tell the story and just like, if you,

• 1:19:01David Senra?

  you know, have twenty bucks burning a hole in your product or whatever it is or in your pocket, whatever it is, like, let's fucking support this kid, like buy companies, buy them for your entire company. But, uh, yeah, that, I I think that's a way to like get something into the world, but not take away from the focus I must have on, you know, what I feel I was put on this earth to do.

• 1:19:18John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  FedEx.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:21David Senra?

  Bro, I am so sad. Me and Rob were talking about that, like that I didn't get a chance to meet Fred Smith when he passed away. He's got the craziest, I'm gonna, um, what I'm gonna do is, uh, I'm gonna re-edit the, it's episode 151 of Founders. When I read Fedex, uh, Fred Smith's biography, which is one of the craziest biographies you can ever find. It's really hard. The book is out of print. Um, I, I will read the opening paragraph for your audience real quick because I think it's like worth, it, it's just, people don't understand, like, everybody sees the planes, everybody sees the trucks, but they don't understand how difficult it was to build that company. The opening paragraph of this-

• 1:19:56Jordi Hays?

  When, when, when we were reviewing what the initial operation looked like, how capital intensive it was, how, how crazy, just like managing the, the logistics of-

• 1:20:07John Coogan?

  It's insane logistics dance.

• 1:20:09Jordi Hays?

  The idea that you could do that and make money-

• 1:20:11John Coogan?

  The hub and spoke model.

• 1:20:14David Senra?

  The, the guy that wrote the book, his name's Vance Trimble, he also wrote, um, a biography of Sam Walton. And he wrote Sam Walton first, then Fred Smith, and he goes, oh my God, like, I thought Walmart was difficult to build, but Fred, but FedEx is like, if you had to build Walmart, you could build one Walmart at a time and expand. He's like, uh, the analogy he uses in the book was like FedEx is like, if you had to, from day one, you had to have a thousand Walmarts. Or it doesn't work. Yeah. Let me just read this opening paragraph because it's so nuts. Um, the guy that does my short form videos, which I think are really, really good, and I think he's a fucking genius, just sent me, literally right before I got on, he texted me one that he did on Fred Smith, so I'll put it out later today. Um, but this is the opening paragraph of the create, this is still the craziest beginning of any biography that I've ever read.

• 1:20:56David Senra?

  And it says that age 30, Fred Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father's Greyhound bus millions. He was in Hawk for 15 or 20 million dollars more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also his wife. His own board of directors had fired him as CEO, and now the FBI accused him of forging papers to get a $2 million bank loan. And he was, and trying to send him to prison. He thought of suicide. That's the first paragraph in the book.

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  It's insane.

• 1:21:29David Senra?

  It's such a cra-

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  He lost his dad at four. He's a Vietnam War veteran. He had written about FedEx in college, got an average grade on it.

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  Took a decade to go from the paper to actually build the company.

• 1:21:43David Senra?

  You have, you have people like Michael Dell, who's, you know, one of my personal heroes and wrote one of the best autobiographies I've ever read. And in his autobiography, he talks about Fred Smith being a hero of his. Like, it's just insane. And there's another paragraph that says, you know, thinking of suicides ridiculous. He's much more likely, instead of jumping out a window, he's more likely to throw you out of a window. He was just like relentless dude that was like, you know, just unbelievable high tolerance for pain and just refused to quit on this dream of his. And again, like, I just personally find those stories like very inspiring. It's like, dude, like this guy, if this guy can succeed. And under those circumstances, like surely we could keep going on whatever B2B SaaS app we're building.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  That's amazing. You want to wrap it up there? Move on? What are you thinking?

• 1:22:34Jordi Hays?

  No, that was great.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. We'll see you soon, David.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  I'll see you later.

• 1:22:38David Senra?

  Real quick, I just tell you guys every time I see you, I'm excessively proud of everything you guys have done over the last six months. I absolutely love what you've done with TPBN. I'm going to say it every single time you let me on your show. I think you guys are killing it and I don't expect to see anything different. Or any, I expect to see you continue to do that for many, many years to the future. But I tell you guys privately, I'm really proud of you, but I want to tell you publicly, super proud of you guys and very happy to call you friends.

• 1:23:04Jordi Hays?

  We feel the same way.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  Thank you, David.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 1:23:07David Senra?

  All right. I'll see you next week, John.

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  I'll see you later. I'll see you later.

• 1:23:11David Senra?

  All right. Yeah.

• 1:23:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Speaking of B2B SaaS, let's tell you about Adio, Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level and gets started for free at attio.com.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Should we bring in our next guest, Yancy from Metal Label?

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Yancy. Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 1:23:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you, thank you. Thank you for the music.

• 1:23:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. We're trying to be a real newscast here. I would love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself. I want to go through some of your history, then artist corporations, then we can kind of dig through the more modern era.

• 1:23:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure. My name is Yancy Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur. Started out as a music journalist and running a tiny record label and being in the world of early digital music. And then was a co-founder of Kickstarter and helped make crowdfunding a thing. Was a co-founder and then CEO. And very much kind of an accidental entrepreneur who started as a creative person, whose idea just took the form of a business and kind of crash coursed in what it meant to make a technology product in a very different era of the internet and what it meant to build like a real marketplace.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  What was the first Kickstarter project? Or the first one that like really went big? And you kind of watched it unfold and you realized that this would work?

• 1:24:43Speaker 05

  It was, it was three weeks in. It was a musician from Athens, Georgia named Allison Weiss, who was like making an EP. She had a $2,000 goal that she smashed through in eight hours. And up until then, we didn't show money you raised above the goal because why would anybody make more than their goal? Like, it just hadn't even occurred to us. And she like introduced the first stretch goal that same day. And like, really, the template that is still what people follow in crowdfunding was like one woman in her dorm room, you know, that really laid the template for how you keep an audience engaged and like what you do when the internet is bringing more love to you than you expected.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  What do you think the secret of success to that first $2,000 fundraiser was? A lot of crowdfunding these days, or even if you're building an audience on something like Substack or Patreon, it's like you kind of need the audience already there. And then you go and convert it to money, you know, with some sort of project. And you're kind of building up all this goodwill. And people kind of expect, oh, they're like, I've gotten so much value. It's rare that you see someone come out of nowhere with, you know, a successful project. So what was the story there?

• 1:25:54Speaker 05

  It was that where there had been a page template, she made it come alive. She was funny. She was personable. She talked to camera, like very modern. It feels modern. At the time, you're like, whoa, like, like, computer is talking to me, you know? And it, it just felt very personable. And so there's a level of energy that just, she just knew what the internet wanted and knew how to create that dynamic. And I really like still as a role model for, for what I think it is to be a creator online. But it also was a different era of the internet where people would share links.

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  Where, you know, there was that level of generosity and curiosity and it wasn't just like selfies or nothing.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Take me through some of the eras of the internet.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  First, first, I have a good Kickstarter story. A childhood friend of mine, Miles, came to me when I was just graduating college. And he had this crazy idea for a consumer product. And he pitched it to me. He'd already like basically taken a loan from his parents. A lot of like, basically like college debt level loans for this idea that I thought was completely, I thought it was a little bit silly, a little bit crazy. And he was like, I'm working on this. I'm going to launch it on Kickstarter. You know, do you want to help me with it? And I love Miles. He's always creative and talented, but I didn't, I didn't get the idea.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  And basically like six weeks later, he launches on Kickstarter and he did like a million dollars in the first day. And it was just this amazing story. It was so incredible to watch him take this massive risk. He had this personal risk because he needed to spend money to get the product to the point where they could launch on Kickstarter and did all these deals to make it happen. And it was just, it was just incredible to watch and enable him to, to build this company. And, and I think what's, what was magical from the side of the entrepreneur is every, it launches are such a key part of business. And oftentimes people put too much. They put too much emphasis into launching like a SaaS company because you're going to launch and people don't care that much about SaaS. Maybe you have a good video or maybe your investors

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  talk about it positively, but Kickstarter is just like, it felt like it can be this very like binary thing where you just don't know what's going to happen and consumer products specifically, it is very hard to judge what consumer products will hit before you just put it out there and the, kind of the variable nature of it, I just think is fascinating to watch. So, um, thank you for building the platform. It, uh, it just has created so many great stories.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you take me through some of the, uh, different eras of the internet? I'm interested to hear about all the different ways that, kind of money and funding has changed. You know, you have the, you know, the Kickstarter era or format or anything to subscriptions on an ongoing basis to even things like the TikTok Creator Fund where you're getting paid out based on views. What, how, how do you think about the buckets? And then what do you think is great? And what do you think maybe needs work?

• 1:28:58Speaker 05

  Well, I have zero preparation for this, but let's go. I've always, I've always wanted to do like a David Halberstam history of the internet, like big picture. But yeah, I would say like, I mean, there's the bulletin board zone up until like 2000s and I would say 2000 to 06 is like hardcore, hard mode. Like that's when we were first trying to make Kickstarter and you needed a server room and a dude with a ponytail to like have a blog. You know, it was like a high bar to get over, but even during the time we were struggling, like AWS, EC2 launched, Amazon Payments launched, PayPal extended its marketplace product. So you started to see

• 1:29:39Speaker 05

  the first building blocks where non-technical founders like us could actually make a product and could make a successful business. And that, those things really came online.

• 1:29:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, like oh seven to oh nine, two thousand and ten. And then you have, I think, the good old days of twenty ten to twenty sixteen of like, we're all exploiting the hell out of the Facebook social graph. And it's, you know, gray, you could gray list the Twitter connect to find every person everywhere. And like, the internet's just this playground of like, what can we do together?

• 1:30:16Speaker 05

  And then I think twenty sixteen to twenty twenty was the defection, the collective defection, where it's like Substack, OnlyFans, you know, more dark forests, like more and less and less mainstream media, more and more like, I'm going into the rabbit hole of something online. Like, that is where I make money. And then there was just an event that I did with other internet where where people talked about this. But it ends up that like,

• 1:30:44Speaker 05

  a room full of twenty year olds called like COVID crypto era is just like, just scam period. And then they call period twenty twenty three on to where we are now as scam or be scammed. But like AI crypto SAS products, like recurring subscriptions, all of it is leading to this feeling of like, someone's going to ding your credit card or like rug you or whatever. Like, no matter what, you got to like be on your toes and do that back at people.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  My favorite is it's like almost impossible to truly cancel a credit card now because like, you tell AMX, you tell AMX, you tell AMX, like, hey, like, I don't want this card anymore, but I want to keep my service with you. And then they're like, well, here's a new card and a new number. But like, we're going to give it to all the people that you subscribe to like five years ago. And it's just this incredible tax.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Well, where are the pockets of positivity on the internet right now in, I don't know if you want to call it the creator economy, but whatever, whatever term that is, are you seeing anything?

• 1:31:46Jordi Hays?

  Before there, how did you react to the creator, the creator economy becoming a popular phrase among venture capitalists?

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, venture capitalists kind of discovered, they kind of created the creator economy. You kind of took a, you know, you have been part of that, but let's give it up for the VCs.

• 1:32:02Speaker 05

  It was better than the passion economy. That that one gave me a harder record scratch. So the rebrand, but yeah, I mean, listen, every one of these phrases is a VC talking their book. Like, that's it. You blogged your book. That's the move. But But I don't think it's wrong. I mean, what's wild is that this job of being a creator, which I'll define as like a full-time self-expresser on the internet, a commercial self-expresser, that's like a 15-year-old profession. And it is also the most desired profession for people under the age of 20. And unlike being an astronaut, like, everyone can become one. Sure. And, and the, the, right now, we have this perspective that like, the creator economy

• 1:32:45Speaker 05

  is maybe a bubble, and like, it's, you know, some convergence of technology that, you know, who knows, like, it'll probably dissipate. If you step back a little bit and look at the longer history of the space, it's actually shockingly recent, to where even like, commercial artistic production, like, movies and music and books, and the way we think of them now, that industry is less than 100 years old, really, if you look at like, a lot of the big players. But even the word and concept of creativity, the concept of creativity was invented in the 1940s by United States Defense Department grants, that were trying to find Let's give it up for the Defense Department. Let's give it up for the military industry. They created creativity.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  They created the

• 1:33:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, basically. This is why we love them. They were looking to find divergent thinkers for the military. Okay. So they studied artists and engineers who would like, pull all-nighters. And like, what makes them tick, what's their drive? And they discovered that there was this innate drive, that they theorized was a democratic essence of genius, that could be taught to anyone, and it was the concept of creativity. The word entered the dictionary in 1966. The United States education system was remade in the 60s to become creative. So like, creative writing programs, brainstorming entered the school system. So I'm a second-generation creative American. And like, but the whole idea of

• 1:34:11Speaker 05

  Self-expressing as a form of improving things or as a way to create more commercial value is a is an extremely recent idea, like just two generations old. So if you think of the idea of being a creator, like that is just building on something that was already there. And what I've come to see is that like we're 25% into the 21st century right now, 2025. And I think the main forces of this century so far are internet, phones, AI, and creativity, cultural expression. Like it takes up more space, more people do it, and it's just going to grow. And a lot of my work now is just thinking like, well, let's take this seriously. And let's treat it as a real industry. Let's treat

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  it as a real business. Let's treat it as like, a way that people can get healthcare and have real jobs. And so if we take that approach, and also take the internet seriously, you know, what's missing? And that's really been what I've been about the last few years.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting places we could go with this. I want to get to the artist corporation and how these, how these, I don't know, influencers or new creators like scale. But I'm also interested in this idea of what actually has changed? Because this show, we have kind of discovered, done a bunch of different tests and explored the space and changed things a lot. We're obviously deeply leveraging the internet. This will be clipped on X and Instagram and TikTok, and it will go out all over the place. We are using modern distribution tools. But in many ways, we keep coming back to this idea that, you know, we are making daytime television. This is a talk show.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  And so we are retreating in many ways to the formats that work. And when we find that we go back to what has been, you know, Lindy or discovered or has been around for a while, we see that that's what people still want. And I've thought about this in the context of Mr. Beast. He's making a game show. And game shows have been popular for a long time. And he's distributing them in a different way. And there's a different style and editing style. But like, what really has changed?

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, you know, the big change is that the person, the creative person has full control, not full control, but ownership over the production and the distribution. Even if you just own the account, right? So you have an account that You don't really own the production. You don't own the end app.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  But you own the account that that gives you a lot of range in order to do things.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Jordi Hays?

  We've talked about this, like, we'll pull up a post from somebody on on our stream.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  And and that was posted like a minute ago.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51Jordi Hays?

  And like television could never do that because they would have to like, you know, make sure that

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  Clear it or something.

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  They had to clear it and do and do all these different things. So I think that's the biggest. The biggest change is that the creative people owning those two key lovers.

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  Just being more entrepreneurial.

• 1:37:06Jordi Hays?

  And then the cost, the cost.

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  The cost thing. We handle that internally. So yeah, I'm super fascinated in like, what what actually is new? What pieces have stuck around?

• 1:37:14Speaker 05

  Well, I think that, and I include us in this affectionately, I think it's the revenge of the losers. Where in the past, you know, all media was like heavily gate kept and you had to go to whatever school. And like the seats were so limited. YouTube was for losers. YouTube is if you couldn't get on real TV, like all, everything on the internet was that. Every part of the internet creative stack was like, you aren't good enough. So thus you're here. But there's more of us than there are winners. And and if you give us the same tools and you give us time, many people are very smart. Many people can, you know, take in a lot of information and create a talk show like out of out of your minds and out of a limited set of tools.

• 1:37:58Speaker 05

  And the notion of the notion of hierarchy for where we go for things has been erased as a result of this. And, you know, it's it's for all legacy players, it's total havoc and they have no idea what's going on. I think for anyone who's a consumer just coming up now, like, the world honestly makes kind of sense. It's pretty wide open. You can find or get access to whatever you want. But like you all are able to generate a lot of attention and drive a lot of things. But what you own is an interesting question, actually. Like you own the your brand IP, you know, do you own your followers? Do you own your, what of your relationships do you own and which way? Like, it gets fuzzy, but there is for sure like a

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  A cultural equity that is being built up by this project equity that because you have sponsors, you can convert into revenue, you can convert into an investment, you can treat as a proper business. And that's what more and more people are finding creatively. And so like to make a media business or to bring in multiple revenue streams or the things that a modern creator is finding is a different way of operating like a small business or a studio than people have experienced in the past. And we're all sort of speedrunning this. There's not a lot of communication between groups. Like people are, there's weird, like there's a lot of weirdness. Yeah.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing, the reason that the creator economy as a venture trend broadly failed. And because a large amount of the investment dollars were flowing into building kind of business infrastructure for creators and misjudging that creators are ultimately just businesses and they can use Ramp, they can use like, they can go to Bank of America and get a bank account.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Oh, you're talking about the niche specific financial products.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  And so even though, even though the creator kind of wave and trend is just exploded and continues to create all these amazing things, the investment dollars that flowed into the category broadly, broadly did not return.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm also interested in the idea of the, the actual structure. There's a lot of, like on that note, there's a lot of influencer businesses where really like most of the value accrual is in the actual talent and they could shut down their accounts and go to Hollywood and get a deal that would pay them directly just as a W2 employee. And you see that with, you know, folks like, I believe, I was thinking about the example of Jim Cramer, or actually going back through talk shows, Johnny Carson was unique in that he owned his shows IP, but then The Tonight Show and The Late Show are now owned by the networks. And if you watch Jimmy Kimmel, he's essentially a, there might be a production studio that he owns a piece of,

• 1:40:42John Coogan?

  but it's mostly just he's on a really high salary from the studio and the network. And that seems to work fine. I mean, Jay Leno never owned his show. He has a huge car collection. He seems to have done very well. But then there are also folks who are building C corps and trying to build corporations and they realize that. That maybe the best way to monetize attention long term is to launch a product like what Mr. Beast has done with Feastables and it's a new corporation, then maybe that gets spun out and maybe that becomes its own thing and they sell that and that's less tied to his face and his talent. So there's a whole bunch of different paths. Walk me through what you think like reasonable cases are or the good or bad, or have I missed anything? And then talk to me

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  about the future of where all this goes.

• 1:41:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. So right now, right now, if you're a creative person looking to go more pro or scale what you're doing, you know, there's, there's very different categories. Like an online creator is a very specific set of like, you're probably getting a direct deposit from an ad, you know, from some ad partnership or something hitting your bank account. There's a question of how should you accept those funds? If you're like a visual artist or someone like that, your legal structure will determine whether you can get a grant, you're eligible for certain funds and like, that is actually the only way to get money if you're that type of artist. So right now people face, there's a couple of decisions. One is do you orient your career around seeking philanthropic money, which if you're a classical artist is really

• 1:42:13Speaker 05

  kind of what's there for you. Or if you're a creator, are you an LLC? Are you an S corp? Are you trying to like properly raise money? Are you a C corp? And there's a whole big, a whole big mess in the middle. Where I ran into with a, I'm part of a collective of writers called the Dark Forest Collective and we published a book together that's done a hundred thousand dollars in transactions, all running through a split that we made on Meta Label. So all the money just automatically distributes to each of us as a royalty through Stripe. And I'm running that without any sort of legal structure, which is not the smartest thing, but started thinking about what if I made an LLC for this? Like what should I do?

• 1:42:52Speaker 05

  And ended up when I've been talking to artists for a long time about their different needs and saw an opportunity to try to craft a different type of LLC that would give creative people more economic security, better access to healthcare, and the ability to grow wealth and equity. And so to do that, we're structurally taking a, making a version of an LLC that will have within it a set of specific provisions around creative purpose, certain rules about governance, certain separation of creative rights and financial rights, setting in how an equity structure would work, including rules about how you can get pooled together, get access to better healthcare rates with a bunch of A-corp's together, and just creating

• 1:43:34Speaker 05

  a little wrapper shield that allows any sort of creative project to instantly go from, I'm now incorporated with legal protection for a very cheap amount, and I can scale to like an investable business using this form up until a certain point.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:51Speaker 05

  There's two paths to making that happen, and we're pursuing both. One is to like, you pass laws. So you say, hey, let's define what an A is. Let's make it something you could legally register as. We're pursuing that path. The other is, most of these things are things you can already do with an LLC. They're just, it requires lawyers and a lot of like specifics.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  Extra contracts.

• 1:44:10Speaker 05

  So the other path is to make it as a software protocol.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:14Speaker 05

  And so just make a A corp in a box in a way that any internet native group of people can begin to build and access collective equity.

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:21Speaker 05

  And so both of the, we're working on both of those at the same time. The ultimate is to get both.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:26Speaker 05

  But, but yeah, we see it as a way that people to.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  What is, what's the history of these new corporate structures? I remember, I feel like B corp is relatively new, S corp also feels somewhat new.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very cool to be like, oh yeah, by the way, you can just create a new entity.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Not just a new entity, a new type of entity.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  I feel like LLC and C corp have been around for probably hundreds of years, but there's a bunch of new ones. What have you studied? What have you learned? And like, what's the actual path? Is this federal legislation? Do you just go to Delaware or something? How does that work?

• 1:45:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, S corp was the 1950s. There have only been a handful of new corporate forms made this decade or this century, PPCs, certain types of co-ops, L3Cs. But yeah, when I was CEO of Kickstarter, we became one of the first PPCs. And so I just happened to watch that log it made and had always paid attention to the fact that it was really technical and boring and just worked. And so I just thought about that same playbook and could you, could you do that? So corporate laws pass on a state level. And depending on how a law is written, people can register, maybe domiciled, you know, from anywhere in that state. And so we're talking to legislators and the bar

• 1:45:42Speaker 05

  associations in a few specific states and sharing with them our draft that our lawyers have helped make and, you know, talking to them about what does it look like to try to put a bill together? And so our target is to have something pass next year and to have first pilot programs. And we'll definitely have this protocol, like you can do it with a, some skin of an LLC that we'll have out sooner.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. I, one of the ideas that I thought was interesting was this idea that as an artist or a creator, you wouldn't necessarily need to prematurely select a path between nonprofit donations, grant money, tax incentivized donations. I love that. I think that like the elites are not funding enough, like libraries and museums and all of these different things. I think that just making it easy for that to happen is actually a key unlock. But then also, I love the idea of somebody being able to, you know, actually build up a subscription business on top of it and write regularly and have supporters and earn cash flow and pay employees.

• 1:46:52John Coogan?

  I want to get your take on OpenAI's structure because they have it. It feels like it does something similar, but at a thousand times larger scale with a nonprofit that owns a for-profit and there's a GP, an LP. And that feels like kind of a nightmare scenario. But are there any learnings there? Or are there any areas where you'd be worried about someone potentially like abusing a system that allowed someone to take nonprofit money and for-profit money? Or it would be confusing where somebody would say, hey, I made a donation, but now you're licensing this into a movie. I wanted you to make a painting and or an installation or something. And now Disney's paying you a billion dollars. Like, I want my share.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  So, yeah, walk me through some of that stuff.

• 1:47:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about OpenAI or ESG, I mean, I think form follows capital is the lesson, you know, just people are going to shape to whatever is most investable. Like, one of our core constituents, as we're working through this process, are investors. So there will be like an investor advisory board that's like, hey, look at our sheet here. Let's make sure that we're not, you know, we're not screwing something up and that we're actually speaking to the ways you get returns and the way that we create value.

• 1:48:10Speaker 05

  But yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, there's infinite ways for things to go wrong. I think that.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  I mean, people abuse LLCs today, of course.

• 1:48:18Speaker 05

  I think, yeah. I've had the attitude of I like that, like, the bar to be an entrepreneur is will and it's not qualifications. And I think the bar to be an artist and a creator is about will and not about qualification. So the way I've tried, we've tried to structure it or think about it is easy to start. But as you want to do things that have a financial implication, like, say, taking nonprofit funds, there's maybe a step you go through before that where you're not a full nonprofit, but hey, like. Don't abuse this and screw it up for everybody, which I think is what happens with, you know, trust gets earned and spent.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:55Speaker 05

  And so you're trying to protect it from being spent in the worst ways.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00Speaker 05

  But you, you have to have some of those safeguards.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  And some of this will probably be divided.

• 1:49:06Speaker 05

  That's about setting a bar.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  Just decided in the courts, right? Like, that's what happens with the other structures is that they get defined and then, and then precedent is set across a whole bunch of different legal filings eventually. I, you're in New York City, right? And you've been in, in the New York City tech scene for years, correct?

• 1:49:24Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Can you give me your reaction to the Mamdani, like, news? I mean, massive come from behind moment. Did you predict it? What, what have you been seeing? Are you excited about it? What are you optimistic about or maybe pessimistic about? I don't know.

• 1:49:39Speaker 05

  I mean, God bless anyone who's the mayor of this city. Greatest, greatest city in the world, hardest thing to govern. You know, talk about a tough executive job.

• 1:49:51Speaker 05

  Reading The Power Broker at the moment, actually finishing that so you get a real appreciation for the strangeness of New York City politics.

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I, I, I'm excited to see youth. I'm excited to see energy and not old corruption is nice. I also think the realities of New York City's political system are like Byzantine even to experts, and I don't know what will actually happen as a result of this.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:20Speaker 05

  So it's hard. I think probably almost all concerns are overblown and just.

• 1:50:26Speaker 05

  But yeah, I don't know. We'll see.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  Do you think that, uh, we, we were toying with this, this, this idea? I'd like to get your feedback on, um, just that out of the 2024 election, there was this narrative around the podcast election, uh, the idea of like the bro casters that got Donald Trump elected because, uh, Trump was much more, uh, aggressive or maybe just open to podcast invites from Andrew Schultz and Tim Dillon and Theo Von and Joe Rogan. And the Kamala campaign maybe was less aggressive or turned down some of those opportunities. But. When I was mathing it out, I was just seeing that the total number of minutes that Americans spent watching each candidate, I think Donald Trump probably outnumbered by 100 to 1, just because there was a four-hour Joe Rogan with him with 20 million views.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  You math that out, it's a lot more than the 20-minute Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes or whatever. Mom Donnie feels like he's done some podcasts, but it feels like almost the first iteration of the next, next generation of going direct or owned media channels producing his own content successfully. People have, plenty of politicians have put out a TikTok. None of them have actually broken through in the sense that he doesn't have his own podcast. He didn't go on the big podcasts. He hasn't done either Rogan or Pod Save America, or I don't even know if he's done Chapo or anything. But he has, he has, he's gotten a ton of attention, and I'm wondering what you think that says about the future of the shape of social media and getting attention and the

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  future of politics?

• 1:51:59Speaker 05

  Well, I think you could see, yeah, lots of owned, lots of owned media, because what even is other media anymore? I mean, it's such a crapshoot, and you can absolutely drive, drive attention that way. There was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple of months ago that talked about how it's like some shockingly small number of the population, 10% buys 80% of the alcohol in America. So those numbers are probably wrong, but it's like a small percentage buys almost all of it.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:29Speaker 05

  And it made me think that like, I wonder if every brand is ultimately like that, that there is like a, a small percentage of the population that's a hardcore, and that is like the true brand value something. So someone like Trump, who maybe is broadly unpopular, but has like a 38% like hardcore 10Q rating, makes him maybe the most powerful person in culture. And I think that we're seeing with someone like this, it's like that, it is the high Q rating with a devoted minority online that is, we keep underestimating how powerful that can be.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, he has the thousand true fans, if you want to use that analogy. Like, and that means that those folks will not, yes, it's only a thousand views, but it's a thousand views on every single post and it's comments, a thousand comments, a thousand reposts. And that multiplies to, and it might be a hundred thousand true fans for him. It might, I mean, he said he wanted to knock on a million doors. He has several hundred thousand, I think, eight hundred thousand TikTok followers like, like that. But he has true fans, whereas a lot of the other candidates, I feel like, just like, the difference has always been true fans.

• 1:53:35Jordi Hays?

  True fans, plus the category of people that are saying anybody but Cuomo.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:53:40Speaker 05

  And if you, like, 2024, to me, you know, all social media is an ad. And so podcasts, like, these, these are non-ad spaces. They feel like the real spaces. So if your brand is only living in, like, broadcast, social, like, you're just a CPG advertiser, basically. Like, you aren't, you aren't engaging in a real way. And like, this is, this is, people know this is real. And then over there in the feed that we're around is like, largely bullshit. Like, we all, we all know. And that's, that's how we're processing everything now.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Anything else about?

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  This was great.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Kickstarter or anything? Yeah, this was fantastic.

• 1:54:21Jordi Hays?

  I think you should lobby Zoron to get 0% corporate tax on the Acor.

• 1:54:27John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:54:28Jordi Hays?

  Could be some way to get some momentum, you know?

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  There's some way to do that with the donations.

• 1:54:31Jordi Hays?

  Borrow a page out of big business.

• 1:54:34Speaker 05

  Talk, talk to Weisenthal about it when he's done. See what he has to say.

• 1:54:37Jordi Hays?

  We will, we will.

• 1:54:38John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 1:54:39Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Yancy. This was great chatting.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:54:43Jordi Hays?

  We got to tell the great TBPN nation about Finn. Can we pull up Finn AI? Can we pull up the website? It's absolutely beautiful. We have had OWN on the show. We are excited to formally partner with Finn and the Intercom team.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service. It's number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, and it's the number one ranking on G2.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:55:08Jordi Hays?

  And OWN is so confident, the Finn team is so confident, they have a $1 million guarantee that they can outperform.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  And it is why companies like Monday.com, Anthropic, and a bunch of other heavy hitters are using the product. So if you are serving customers, which many businessmen and women do. You got to get on Finn.

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's hit the gong for.

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit the gong for Finn and a $1 million guarantee. Very excited about this. I have, we've consistently loved.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  One of you.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  And what a journey.

• 1:55:42Jordi Hays?

  It feels like we need to create a founder kind of therapy corner.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Has the ability to just kind of like cut through the noise. And we're very excited to partner with them. So fin.ai slash TVP and check it out. And with that, let's bring in.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Joe.

• 1:55:57Jordi Hays?

  The legend.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  The stalwart. Let's go.

• 1:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Future mayor of New York.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Are you, are you safe? Are you doing okay? We've heard that there's a cultural revolution going on in New York City.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  For the capitalist journalists.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  Square. Are there breadlines already? How bad is it? Give it to us straight from directly on the ground.

• 1:56:17Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm safe because we had Zoran Mamdani on our podcast. So we're one of the good ones.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:56:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Already, I've already doing my work to sort of make sure that I'm on the, the correct side of the revolution. So I'm safe. I don't know about everyone else in my building here in the office.

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Is it true that?

• 1:56:35Joe Weisenthal?

  I think I'm, I think I'm in good shape.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  You're in good shape.

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  Are the rumors true that Mamdani wants to seize all the enterprise sass in the city and make it, and make it state and city owned?

• 1:56:46Joe Weisenthal?

  I have no, I have no idea. I have not heard anything about.

• 1:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Is the rumor that he wants to?

• 1:56:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Bloomberg terminal, whether the Bloomberg terminal will be turned into a, into a.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Public that everyone has.

• 1:56:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes. We can only know.

• 1:57:00Jordi Hays?

  That's the most hyper capitalist thing though.

• 1:57:02John Coogan?

  Tens of thousands of dollars. Every, it should be universal basic.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  The most hyper capitalist policy would be every citizen.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  Universal basic terminal. I'm firmly in favor of that.

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  Costs are similar to a terminal costs.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic as long as he doesn't ban podcasts that are ad supported.

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  As long as, as long as, as long as he doesn't put a hundred percent tax on AI researcher signing bonuses. At this rate, that could generate billions of dollars for the city in a few weeks.

• 1:57:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I think for now, for now, I think, look, he hasn't won yet, but for now, I think it's more modest, more modest goals like freezing the rent, but we'll, we'll see, we'll see what happens on some of these more, the more ambitious visions.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Joe Weisenthal?

  We're not quite there yet.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  No, no, this is, this is, there's a few months where people get very strategic. What apartment do you want to be in? Does your family want to be in for the next 100 years?

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, could be a flourishing market.

• 1:57:55Jordi Hays?

  Get in the right spot, freeze the rent.

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  I mean, but I, I think people are like very jarring, jarred by the idea of freezing the rent, but like there are rent controlled apartments in New York City today, right? And so what he's actually talking about is like adjusting the rate of the rent controlled apartments. Is that correct?

• 1:58:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So there is already a pretty sizable slug of non-market rate housing in New York City. It's actually been frozen at times before. I think Bill de Blasio at one point froze it for about a year, but there's like a board and they have, you know, a certain annual adjustment. And he's just saying there's not going to be, there's not going to be any adjustments.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:33Joe Weisenthal?

  And, you know, my guess is that from a, the perspective of a landlord who has some market rate units and some, you know, rent regulated units.

• 1:58:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Joe Weisenthal?

  My guess is that they'll increase the rate or the rent on the market regulated ones. And they'll, they'll get the money back at the end.

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  The number one, the number one landlord on G2.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The stalwart.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  The stalwart.

• 1:58:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I, I, I own a place here in, in Manhattan. So if I ever rented out, I don't think that'd be rent regulated. And I think I can, uh, charge whatever I, whatever I want.

• 1:59:05Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, uh, how, how are people thinking about Mom Donnie? That feels like there's this narrative emerging about like, oh, maybe, uh, come from behind, like, uh, his, uh, you know, it, it, people were, we were acting like the Democratic primary was the election, but of course it is not the election, but is there a chance here?

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for us California boys, why is it, why is it, why was that the election?

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, look, generally speaking, New York City is kind of a one-party city. The Republicans keep putting up the same sort of like semi-serious candidate each time, who doesn't really launch a real campaign, Curtis Sliwa. Incidentally, he's the red beret guy, so someone coming from outside might think that that's the socialist in the race, but he's not, even though he wears a red beret. And then our existing mayor, Mayor Adams, didn't run in the primary, but he's gonna be in the general election on his own line. And he's been pretty unpopular, but it's, I, it seems like what's gonna happen is a lot of people are gonna try to rally behind him. Crime has come down a lot in the last couple of years. He's taken the trash problem seriously.

• 2:00:13Joe Weisenthal?

  He's taken the rat problem seriously. So I think there will be probably a fairly serious effort to make it a competitive race. But M'Donny's victory was so, you know, such a blowout. It was so compelling, just from a numbers standpoint. And it isn't really true. I mean, this, the expectation was that he was gonna do really well in this sort of like liberal, educated, white areas, and then do less well elsewhere. He actually did really well in pretty much the entire city. So even that stereotype didn't really hold true the way people expected. So I, he put as a dominant performance. I mean, the expectation was that Cuomo, you know, we have the ranked choice voting, that Cuomo would win the first round, and then, you know, they would eliminate candidates. He won the first round. It wasn't even particularly close at all.

• 2:00:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, it was, he crushed him. A lot of people voted. This wasn't like the AOC election. When AOC won, there were not a lot of people who voted in the primary that year, and her team was pretty well organized. This was just a much bigger scale, much more impressive victory than that. So political earthquake, whatever cliche you wanna use, like, is pretty accurate to describe last night.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Interesting. One narrative that I've heard is that M'Donny was incredible at focusing on local issues. So rent, grocery prices, things that, the buses, like the subway, things that feel tractable for a mayor, whereas Cuomo was focusing more abstractly on national.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  The fact that the food card guys are having to pay some crazy tax.

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, versus Cuomo talking more about national politics and what's going on with Trump. How, how real do you think that is? And, and do you think that there's?

• 2:01:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I think that's very real. And I think, you know, a few things. I mean, one is, I think Mamdani really made gains in the small businesses, the people who own the food carts, the people who own the bodegas, et cetera, really getting into some of these voting categories that are harder to reach. He also, as you said, really direct things related to day to day life, living in New York City, like rent. And I mean, look, whatever your view on the sort of broader politics are, you have one candidate who is talking about the rent, and you have another candidate who is talking about like, you know, you watch the Democratic debate, and the first question was like, well, what is the first country you're going to visit? And a bunch

• 2:02:34Joe Weisenthal?

  of them raised their hands and said, Israel. Regardless of how you think about those politics, you're running for New York City mayor. So you have, here's the rent guy, and here's the guy that's trying to make the race entirely about Israel. The rent guy won. I'm not totally surprised that that worked better in a citywide election.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  So I want to talk about like, if I was, if I were running for mayor in New York City against Mamdani, and I bought in on the idea that New Yorkers care more about rent, is it reasonable for me to argue for, I'm going to drive the rent prices down by deregulating building, or I'm going to subsidize building, or give a tax break to builders? Like, what are the other tools? Because the consensus amongst like, the economics crowd is that rent controls don't increase, don't decrease the price of rent, they don't increase the number, the supply of building. But what are the, what are the policies that you think people, A, what do you think might actually work? And then, B, how do you package that?

• 2:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, Trump will tell the oil markets to settle down. And don't raise prices, I'm watching.

• 2:03:41Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm watching, yeah, don't raise rents.

• 2:03:43Jordi Hays?

  So you could say to construction workers, don't even think about raising prices.

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  Prices.

• 2:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Builders?

• 2:03:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, why not? I do think, look, I do think it is really hard for any, someone running for office to sort of make that wonky argument, oh, what we really need to do is deregulate this and then we'll get supply and, you know, it's not as compelling or satisfying as free as the rent, right? But to be fair to Mamdani, over the course of his campaign, he's not doctrinaire about the sort of role of market rate housing. And he talked when he was on our podcast and in other interviews he did, he said there is a role, of course, for just sort of expanding supply. And he's talked about upzoning and all of the kind of things that like wonks like to talk about and sort of deregulating. So I think that accomplishes two things. One is, he does sort of recognize that there's more to affordability than your

• 2:04:36Joe Weisenthal?

  sort of government fiat, you can't raise the rent. That's just a small portion. But I think also by talking about some of these other things, I think a lot of people, sort of like normie Democratic liberals who are kind of in the center or whatever, they found him to be really disarming and even charming. They were threatening by, threatened by him. And I think if you, you know, clearly, and you see in the vote, a lot of people who probably make decent money and probably who themselves don't consider themselves to have radical politics, they might not have ranked him first, although clearly many did, but they weren't like anti him. They didn't feel like it was really important to stop his candidacy with like an anybody but Zoran vote. And so between the sort of young socialist activists who

• 2:05:18Joe Weisenthal?

  are really powerful in his campaign, and then you just didn't have many people who found him to be like that threatening or that scary. And I think that was sort of the, the key to victory, the fact that people who sort of think normie things like, yeah, why don't we just make it easier to build, were also sort of cool with him.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about his media strategy. You're, you're, you're a male podcaster, potentially a broadcaster.

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Manosphere, a popular member of the manosphere.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  Did you get him elected by platforming him? Are you the, the Donald Trump, the Joe Rogan to his Trump?

• 2:05:52Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, yes, we might be, no, I don't know if we are, but you know, that episode came out May 23rd. If you look at the prediction markets, it was basically two days later that he started shooting up. I

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  The market

• 2:06:05Joe Weisenthal?

  I kinda think

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  The stalwart.

• 2:06:06Joe Weisenthal?

  I cut, I actually, I don't know, we've been debating this today. I'm sort of of the view that we may have played some modest role

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:15Joe Weisenthal?

  in normalizing him to a certain group who hadn't been that exposed to him before. It's hard to say. Can I prove it?

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21Joe Weisenthal?

  But yes, by entering the bro pod, the bro podcast that I co-host with Tracy

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  Tracy, of course.

• 2:06:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Um, I, it may have, it may have, it may have helped. And then you did a bunch of media after that. I think that was his sort of first like true, like mainstream ones. So, you know, part of Bloomberg.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  Do you think, uh, do you think, what do you think was most, most more important? And how would you weight them? Like his, his owned media stuff, his TikToks, his viral videos? That's, that's what I saw first.

• 2:06:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  And then, once I'd seen those, then I searched his name in Apple Podcast, saw Odd Lots come up. And I was like, oh, this is great. I saw he did the, the, uh, the Breakfast Club with Charlamagne and a few other, and a few other hits. Uh, but it felt like it was kind of a, kind of an inversion of the Trump strategy, which was very podcast first. His strategy seemed native social media, owned media first, and then other people's platforms second. Do you think that's the right narrative?

• 2:07:16Joe Weisenthal?

  I think that's, I think that's probably correct. His own videos are so good though. And of course, his mother is a famous filmmaker.

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:24Joe Weisenthal?

  And his, yeah. Uh, and his videos, it's not just that they're short form. They're really good. They looked really good. They were shot really well. The color balancing on them was really good. The audio is good. The angles were good. He's a sharp dresser. He's a good looking guy. He smiles. He's really comfortable with himself. Like he's just clearly a generational political talent. And he sort of packaged, packaged it up extremely well for social media. Just sounds like a very normal. Likeable guy. And I think, put it all together, I mean, it was a campaign for 2025. And all of the different tools that people use to reach voters, he really had the knack on them.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  I, I noticed this during a previous election cycle with a congressman who was running on the Second Amendment. And he, she released this video and the sun was blasting on his face. And I was like, that is violating cinematography 101, which is like, you always want to backlight everything. You want the sun behind you. And, and it's like, yeah, I just didn't, we didn't find the right person that understood the basic rules of cinematography to understand. Like you need a soft source. You need it to be behind you. You need to backlight things. And so, yeah, just actually having those tools, I think that is probably an underrated narrative and something that we might see people actually take seriously and try and solve, solve going forward.

• 2:08:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I think that, I think that's totally true. We're sort of just used to the face, you know, short, oh, I'm going to do a short form video. I'm going to say something. His looked great. Like the angles are really good on them. And I know that seems like sort of a ticky tack thing to talk about. But it's clear that this is someone who comes from knowledge about how to package media really good.

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Totally. What can we do to get Robert Granerri, the founder of Jane Street on Odd Lots?

• 2:09:12Joe Weisenthal?

  I saw that headline this morning about how, it's so funny.

• 2:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Your hashtag, not what you ever want to have to say, or whatever it was.

• 2:09:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you know, there's all these things, you know, like executives over the years and they get into a scandal and they're like, oh, I, I regret doing X or Y. And they're usually something about, you know, inappropriate. And they said something awful in an email and they have to find an awkward way to apologize. It's really funny to me that Jane Street is this extraordinarily successful trading company that makes billions and billions every year making markets. And now the only two things that like the average person would know about Jane Street is that's where Sam Bankman Fried came from. And now that the co-founder accidentally funded an attempted coup.

• 2:09:57John Coogan?

  What are you talking about? We, we know that they are the maintainer of the O camel programming language. And they are sponsor of the Dwarke Patel podcast, which is fantastic podcast. So I know, I know four things about them.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  So good causes and maybe less good causes.

• 2:10:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, these are, these are, these are the two things that every, or this, the, the, um, the yin and yang of Jane Street. But yes, to the average person on the street, there is quite a collection of headlines that they are amassing. For what is actually like a fairly normal, extremely successful firm.

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is like, I, I, I read this and, and, and they describe in the Bloomberg story, they describe Jane Street as like the place where Sam Bankman Freed worked. And I'm like, they, they, they don't deserve that heat because Sam Bankman Freed was like an intern and he did all the bad stuff later. Like it's not, it should not be a stain on Jane Street whatsoever. And then this article, like we were reading it and we were like, certainly it's going to go on five more pages. It's so intriguing. It's so good. And then it just kind of drops off. And, and it didn't seem like there was any real wrongdoing. I'm sure the story will evolve. But, but I, but my big hope is that it winds up with him doing a podcast tour and explaining the actual business of Jane Street. Because I would love to hear it because the, the firm has been very quiet for a long time.

• 2:11:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, we can compete with you in who gets him first.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Oh, it's going to be a tour. If it's going to happen, it's got to be everywhere.

• 2:11:13Joe Weisenthal?

  He'll do the short form with you and the long form with us or vice versa. That's totally fine. There's enough spoils all around for, uh, for these guys to do their media tour.

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's talk about prediction markets.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Uh, I love them.

• 2:11:25Jordi Hays?

  They played a role. There's two, Kalshi announced around at two billion today. And then, and then the poly market round was like kind of leaking. I don't think it actually got announced, but enough people were sharing it around. They're here. They seem to be mainstream. When, when big events are happening, you're on X and you're just constantly, you know, seeing screenshots and things like that. And, and, um, obviously, um, you know, we, we got to get into, uh, the Middle East, of course. Yeah. A little bit, but, um, how, how main, it's, it's hard because we're in a bubble. How mainstream do you feel prediction markets have gotten?

• 2:12:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, look, let's put it this way. Like, if you post a chart of any prediction market, and there was even one, it was, I think they had one on the screen in Times Square, and I think there was even a video of Zoran looking up, and he's like, "Oh, gambling is haram. They shouldn't do that." But they're everywhere, and there's a price on literally everything. And for my, you know, I think about when I was, you know, 30 years ago, I guess, or maybe 25 years ago. If I wanted to, you know, I would go to The Drudge Report or something like that, because I knew that that was like this really good digest of everything that was moving in the world. And Polymarket has become the sort of like, one of the few websites that actually check as just so, you know, who goes to websites anymore?

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the thing. It's people that are basically making bets, investments, gambling, whatever you want to call it.

• 2:12:51Joe Weisenthal?

  On events.

• 2:12:51Jordi Hays?

  But then it creates a public benefit, which is, I've never made a single trade on Polymarket. Yeah. On any predict, I've never made any type of prediction-based trade. And for, you know, main reason being that like, it wouldn't be ethical for us to like, cover what's happening in prediction markets and then just be like, you know, betting on them.

• 2:13:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and so the world gets this benefit of seeing tomorrow's headlines today, which I think is a cool thing.

• 2:13:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, here's the way, here's the way I think about it. So like, you know, let's say last week, when it seemed like Cuomo was going to, uh, win. And ever most people would have said, "Yeah, probably Cuomo will win." But you can actually like, get now, you know, there's like, put a price on what that means. Is he a 60% favorite? Is he 80%? Is he 90%? Like, that's useful, because the difference between he's 60% likely versus 90% likely is sort of useful in terms of gauging that. So actually putting a more specific price on conventional wisdom is useful. You know, one of the criticisms people make is like, "Oh, prediction markets get things wrong," right? They're like, "Oh, it didn't actually predict anything. It's just following the polls, etc."

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the crystal ball only works 50% of the time.

• 2:13:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, and that's true. I actually think that's like, basically true, but I think that's the wrong way to look at their utility. The way you described it, that even if you're not trading on them, you get some benefit, because you can see the price of essentially conventional wisdom right now on anything. I think as a public, look, is it really a public benefit to have people gambling on everything? I don't really know. At some deep level, I guess I'm concerned by the idea that we're betting on literally everything, from like, what are the odds that the US is going to drop a bomb on the Iranian nuclear site? Which people are betting on, which incidentally started spiking on the morning of the actual bombing over the weekend. You know, how great is it that people are always betting on all this? I don't really know, but from a sort of like, I want to know what's happening in the news.

• 2:14:41Jordi Hays?

  The pure utility.

• 2:14:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Developing.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  There's pure utility that's free.

• 2:14:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:46Jordi Hays?

  On polymarket.com.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  Also, I would like to, you know, toss in here that I am, I'm almost positive that the vast majority of volume on prediction markets comes from something that looks a lot less like a gambler and a lot more like a hedge fund. And so a lot of these traders have scaled up. They have pretty mature operations. We saw that with that, the big market moving pro Donald Trump bet. The guy had done his own research and paid for people to go knock on doors and do new surveys. And so I think that the narrative of like, this is as widely distributed, like they're whales, but they're, they're like almost financial institutions less than gambling. And so, yeah, I mean, it still is a question. Like I would not want,

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  you know, the, the, the true gambling, like it is this fine line, but, but I do know that like many of the volume drivers have scaled up their business because they're good at it. They, they have a more, they, they're like with the bombing example, they are tracking like the Domino's pizza index, right? Or the Pentagon pizza index. And then what is up market of that? They're probably finding another signal that's even up market of that. And then feeding that in.

• 2:15:55Joe Weisenthal?

  And look, there, there's a reason for it, which is you want to be able to, big institutions, they want to be able to hedge very specific risks. So if they have oil exposure that they want to be able to hedge out the specific exposure that's going to come from volatility, if there's going to be a wider war in the Middle East that would disrupt flow. So like all of these are like sort of legitimate needs. And then the other thing I would say is that, and I've said this for a long time, many legacy financial markets are literally prediction markets, most notably the treasury market. So it's like, you know, a short-term treasury market is literally a prediction market on what the 12 members of the FOMC are going to decide about rates over the course of X period of time. And then there

• 2:16:37Joe Weisenthal?

  are derivatives on those treasuries and so forth. So already event markets are a core part of just sort of trad fi, legacy financial institutions, et cetera. And this just sort of extends the range of risks that you can isolate and hedge. And so I'm not surprised at all that now that like, They're basically, you know, the regulatory aspect is coming into place, the infrastructure is coming to place, that for many different instruments, they have value to people.

• 2:17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about how you were tracking what happened in the Middle East. I, my thought would be, uh, I'm looking at polymarket for specific details of will this strike happen on this day, but then I'm looking at the price of oil.

• 2:17:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  And maybe just the overall stock market because if World War III is going to happen, I would imagine the futures would trade down. But how do you process that information? And then what did you see?

• 2:17:26Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a really good question. I mean, look, to some extent, it's all very sort of linear and you probably could have gauged, um, risks just by looking at oil futures, which sort of moved along together with, um, you know, the odds that US enters the war in some way, or whatever it is. Um, you know, it was really striking. I, I mean, so the attack, God, my brain is so scrambled. I think.

• 2:17:55John Coogan?

  Saturday night.

• 2:17:55Joe Weisenthal?

  The nuclear, Saturday, right. That day, that contract, will the US enter into, like, really started spiking that morning.

• 2:18:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:04Joe Weisenthal?

  And that could because, could have been because people were sort of like, reading between the lines of Trump's truths on Truth Social, various other things like that. But it wasn't obvious, you know, and it started moving and it's like, okay, you know, there was a lot of money riding on this.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Reading between the lines of the Theo Von podcast.

• 2:18:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, and it's, it's nice on a weekend. I mean, again, this gets to the thing like, is it really good that people have to, that financial markets are 24/7? And it's obviously going to be very soon that all stocks and everything are going to be 24/7 because you could just have prediction markets on the stock market, or prediction markets on a certain stock, or a crypto token, or whatever. Like, all of this is happening. It will all be 24/7 in a fairly short period of time. There probably is use for weekend risk and overnight risk in times when traditional markets aren't trading, to sort of, uh, be able to put on hedging trades, or just gauge, monitor, uh, the situation through prices. So, yeah, I think, uh, I think this is here to stay, and as you say, going to get more sort of institutionally real.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  So was everything, was everything priced in at the beginning of the year? We've gone through a trade war.

• 2:19:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it was all priced in.

• 2:19:10Jordi Hays?

  No, but the, but the NASDAQ and S and P, they're just flat. They're basically flat on the last six months.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Nothing's happened.

• 2:19:16Jordi Hays?

  So nothing.

• 2:19:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's insane. I mean, it blows my mind when I look at that year to date number. And I just think of all of the things that have happened, all of the Doge stuff, which people have already forgotten about, the cuts, all the uncertainty with regards to the budget, obviously the tariffs in the beginning of April, all of which is basically unresolved. There aren't really any deals and the 90 day deadlines are like coming pretty close. Then obviously the, for the escalation of war in the Middle East. I mean, people have been talking about a possible bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities for decades.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Decades.

• 2:19:50Joe Weisenthal?

  So the fact that we've gotten all that in 2025, either it was all priced in or AI is just such a powerful driver of everything right now that that's actually just the story that nothing can slow the AI boom.

• 2:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's an interesting, in, in, in all the time that you've been reporting on all this good stuff, has there ever been a period of this much overall stability, yet max volatility in the interim?

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  The mid, the metric I want to track is

• 2:20:17Joe Weisenthal?

  That's a great question.

• 2:20:18John Coogan?

  Number of emergency Joe Weisenthal podcasts. Or number of times that Joe Weisenthal is getting called to appear on TV.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  That's the new pizza tracker.

• 2:20:25John Coogan?

  That's the new metric.

• 2:20:26Joe Weisenthal?

  That was actually someone, uh, we did like 25 episodes in April.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:31Joe Weisenthal?

  And someone made a joke and in, and I hate the fact that they were correct about this. They're like, oh, we must be near a bottom because the Odd Lots hosts are saying the exact timestamp of when they're start the recording. It's like, we are recording this at 10:15 on Tuesday.

• 2:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they bottomed, they bottomed, take the April 8th.

• 2:20:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, shoot, like they really have us dead to sites here. But yes, you could, and one day there will be a prediction market on how many Odd Lots episodes that we do in a month. And that will be a useful derivative to understand some, some slice of the rest.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just interesting how many different

• 2:21:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Someone at Jane Street will be making that trade.

• 2:21:06Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting how many different groups benefit from the volatility. So media benefits from volatility because people are going to open CNN.com or the app. And be like, what is going on? What did Trump say on true social benefits from volatility?

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Even Trump benefits because he can say, I tried to do the tariffs and then I, yeah, I had to roll them back a little bit, but I'm still the pro tariff guy or something like that.

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then Wall Street, Wall Street is like, if you can make, if you can make 20% one day and ride down and draw down.

• 2:21:35John Coogan?

  I was telling my hedge fund buddy, it's a bull market in the VIX.

• 2:21:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it really is.

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  Go long vol. Like, this is the time because he was kind of like, yeah, the market's kind of up and down and not that good. I was like, it's a, it's a great time to be volatility.

• 2:21:46Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a great time to be in the news business and we are long volatility in the news business. And it is a great time to be in the news business.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had one slow news day here. We had our first, like, we were like, whoa, it's a slow news day. And we didn't really realize like what that was like. And then fortunately, it hasn't happened since, but.

• 2:22:01Jordi Hays?

  It's the worst.

• 2:22:01John Coogan?

  It's the worst, right?

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, and it feels like monitoring the situation has become a national pastime.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  It has.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  It really is. It really is like, and it's basically, it's a, it's a new kind of hobby, right?

• 2:22:12Joe Weisenthal?

  I've been monitoring the situation my whole career, you know, like I get up, I used to get up.

• 2:22:16Jordi Hays?

  But now everyday Americans can just.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're a professional.

• 2:22:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I gotta, I gotta find new source of edge now that we're all situation minded.

• 2:22:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then the other thing, you know, with Tesla, the funny thing is, you know, we didn't even talk about the, you know,

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  RoboTaxi?

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  No, just the Trump Elon blow up, that going over and then Tesla is still down year to date 13%. But given what's actually happening with the car business and then the Elon Trump blow up, you would think you'd be bigger than that, right?

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:22:48Joe Weisenthal?

  That's, there's something to be said, you know, the alternative view of this is yes, it is a great time for volatility and there's plenty to trade. It's also been a good time for the sort of buy and hold people who actually have a life because they, you know, the, it's like, oh, buy, make your investments and maybe check in once a year or six, every six months. They could, unfortunately, those people who are very obnoxious when they say that, because I certainly don't do that. But they're very, it's very obnoxious when people say that. Unfortunately, they keep getting vindicated. That actually you should just have a life and not check in on the market every five minutes. Unfortunately, they're right. And that is sort of also the weird part, which is that they keep, uh, the passive, the passive bros are still doing, are still doing well.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  I mean, you probably saw the Lakers, $10 billion, biggest sports franchise ever. But if you look at the rate of return over the 30 year period, it just didn't quite be just. The average of the S and P.

• 2:23:41Joe Weisenthal?

  That's the thing, they're so, just buying and holding the S and P and literally do nothing, continues to be such an insanely good, people would all, I sometimes wonder, I've asked this question on the podcast, why does the financial industry exist? The answer is not entirely obvious to me. Because there's all the, no, for real, like, because there's all these people and all they do is spend all this time getting, learning the minutia of every stock, this or that, or whatever, and yet you could do just fine, in fact, better than fine, some incredible returns by essentially doing none of that. It's still not obvious to me why any of us really have anything to talk about.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  It was a simulation created for Jane Street to win at.

• 2:24:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:16Jordi Hays?

  And just dominate.

• 2:24:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, exactly right.

• 2:24:18Jordi Hays?

  How, any, are you getting, who do you think is really smart on trying to understand the impact of autonomous vehicles, robotaxis? We are in this interesting dynamic, we saw the Austin rollout, was it Sunday? Or I think it was Monday morning, we had a guy call into the show from a robotaxi, seems to be working in a limited area. And then the potential there, you know, Waymo's vehicles are $200,000, they're teleoperated today, we don't really know what's going on under the hood at Tesla, but, but still, it just feels like something that can have this, you know, enormous impact on different aspects of the economy and it doesn't feel like any...

• 2:24:54Joe Weisenthal?

  This feels like, I would say like autonomous vehicle seems like one of those things, I was comparing it a little bit to the state of the mobile internet in like 2004, right? Where like, where we all sort of knew that it was coming, but it was kind of janky and remember, you know, oh, do you get, do you get access to 3G here or what? Remember there used to be competing standards? We didn't really know, and it was sort of a bad, now, the user experience, going into a Waymo is obviously a religious experience, but it's patchy and you don't know and you, can you get to X or Y? But then it changed the world, right? So then, fast forward 10 years later, from 2005 to say 2015, and it's clear that the mobile internet literally just changed the entire world in a way that'll never be the same.

• 2:25:37Joe Weisenthal?

  I think that's the same with AVs where it's like, okay, oh, that's interesting what they're doing in San Francisco, that's interesting, okay, Austin is, and then in a few years from now, we're going to have to just completely rethink how cities are structured because of autonomous vehicles. It feels like actually for as much hype as they're getting, they probably should be getting more, because in my mind, they could like, potentially rethink everything about how we structure a city, or how we do commutes, or how far out from your job you're willing to live if you're able to like, be on your phone the entire time of the drive, so. Bigger, I think it's going to be almost a bigger deal than people currently appreciate, even with all the hype it's getting.

• 2:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side. We've seen Meta making some crazy talent acquisition deals, you know, spending, being willing to spend $100 million for somebody that will never have a public face, right? You know, a researcher all the way up to, you know, billions of dollars for individual talent. Is there much precedent for that? Have hedge fund deals gotten into the billion dollar territory at any point we've heard about?

• 2:26:38Joe Weisenthal?

  So, you do, yeah, there are. You know, the, it's actually interesting. To my mind, Emily Sundberg, who you've had on the show before, had a really interesting thing, talk about the media and how media is becoming like sports where individuals who have a big name are, you know, signing these big deals or leaving their firms and going independent, etc. It feels like this is going to be the story of all industries, right? So whether we're talking about hedge funds, whether we're talking about a researcher, whether we're talking about journalists, etc., where there's just going to be this even further extreme bifurcation where individual talent is just going to get paid so much because they can accrue so much value. It feels like that is the story of our time. Like, the question

• 2:27:19Joe Weisenthal?

  is, what industry isn't that happening?

• 2:27:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, Tim Cook can't even crack 75 million a year.

• 2:27:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah. Poor Tim.

• 2:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Poor Tim. We talk about this all the time.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  Well, it's a good time to be in the news business, then. It's a great time. It's a great time. And thanks for joining.

• 2:27:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Anytime.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  We've got to have you back soon. This is always so much fun.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  My favorite minutes on the show.

• 2:27:41John Coogan?

  It's the best.

• 2:27:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you so much. I love it. Take care.

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon, Joe.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  Bye. If you're looking to get in on the action in the finance world, which maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, maybe you just want to go along the S and P 500, get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. Industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. And next up, we have Alex Atallah from Open Router on the show, talking about foundation models, who's using what. How you doing, Alex? Great to meet you in person. You might not know this. We went through the same YC batch. YC Winter 16.

• 2:28:14Speaker 06

  Which company?

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  Lucy. Lucy Nicotine. Yeah, similar to what you were building back then, it makes sense, but I remember seeing your pitch. And I remember everyone kind of thinking like, oh, that'll never be a thing. Like, like most Y C things.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Was that the same company or a different company?

• 2:28:28John Coogan?

  Uh, that was the previous company.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  Open C.

• 2:28:31Speaker 06

  That was Open C.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Which became the dominant N F T marketplace and, and absolutely took over the world.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  How did I miss that?

• 2:28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, and so it's fantastic.

• 2:28:39Jordi Hays?

  You can tell how much research we do on best appearances. It's great to have you on Alex.

• 2:28:45Speaker 06

  It's great to be here. Thanks for, thanks for hosting me.

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, uh, why don't you kick us off with, uh, I'm, I'm interested in the introduction on open router, but specifically the business model because, uh, it's a fascinating place to sit in the A I infrastructure stack. And I can imagine a bunch of ways value will accrue, but how, how are you either currently or planning to make money?

• 2:29:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we're, you can kind of think of us as a control plane for language models, like a straight, meets cloud flair for language models. So like both of those companies, we orchestrate and route traffic to the best G P U host for you, based on the type of model that you want, your price preferences, your performance needs, where you are in the world. Um, and so it's kind of like a one stop shop for all the models where you get like the most models, the best prices, best performance, highest uptime. A lot of these models are down a lot of the time, so load balancing is just needed. Intel goes through like intelligence brownouts, uh, like Har Pavi has been saying.

• 2:29:50Speaker 06

  And, uh, and so you need, you need some way of, of keeping the utility like lit up.

• 2:29:59Speaker 06

  A lot of apps will just like rely on a hundred percent available intelligence.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:03Speaker 06

  So we, you can pay, you, you like users pay us directly. We sometimes do volume with different providers so that we can get good volume economics on the supply side. And, uh, and then, um, and we kind of make money mostly there.

• 2:30:22John Coogan?

  Talk to me about what Microsoft is doing in the category. Satya Nadella at Build was talking about something around model routing and they also have this unique deal with OpenAI where it seems like they will be able to hold on potentially to that as an API on the cloud infrastructure side and we might not see OpenAI GPT-4, GPT-4.5 vended through, say, AWS or GCP. How is that relationship? Do you sit on top of all of that? Are you kind of indifferent to it? Or how is it playing out there?

• 2:31:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, so unlike most other resources and software, AI is pretty unique. It's a battleground with lines being drawn around the models. And the models are just not available in all clouds. Gemini is only available in Google Cloud, obviously. And you have Anthropic, which is available in AWS and Google Cloud, but not Azure. And then you have Grok, which is available in Azure and directly from X, but not Google Cloud. Like, nobody can keep these things on the top of their head and no one can track them. We track them and we sort of allow you to orchestrate across all of the clouds.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:31:42Speaker 06

  So you can get all the models in one place. So I see this continuing where basically the war draws these lines around the models and no one cloud will have them all.

• 2:31:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. What companies should I understand in order to understand this business? I feel like if I was throwing something out, I would say Snowflake, but I don't know if that's at all relevant, so feel free to steer me in a different direction. But I'm interested in this idea of a company that sits across the hyperscalers and does not necessarily just load balancing, but actually, you mentioned Cloudflare, but it feels like Cloudflare has a lot of their own infrastructure, their own data centers. I'm interested in a company that has built a large durable business on top of GCP, Azure, AWS, et cetera.

• 2:32:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, good question. I don't know of an exact analogy that fits that or a bit of a unique uh player, but CloudFlare, I mean, started as a, as only a layer on top of all the clouds.

• 2:32:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:55Speaker 06

  It was like a plug and play safety net uh to prevent you from, from like denial of service attacks and to turn on like security for um for like any web app. And uh Open Router started in a different way, like as a way of just amplifying supply and choice for people. Um but in a similar fashion, we add like, like more complexity to the compute layer that we provide before it hits the, the clouds themselves.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  Are there things that you're, I, I want to know about the different models, capabilities, what the different labs are working on. And I'm wondering if there's a, like, what are the important design criteria or, or what do you need to think through if you are doing this type of load balancing? Like, I'm imagining if I'm, if I, if I'm serving an app that's built primarily on, let's call it Claude, and then all of a sudden it fails and it breathes a brown out and it rolls over to Grok and all of a sudden like, I'm now in like the anti-woke world and like the, the, the flavor of the model has changed. I could probably do some prompt engineering to kind of get them onto a similar standard. Or looking at,

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  if I'm using a million token context window uh with Gemini and then I'm falling over to something with a hundred thousand uh token context window, I might need to do some chunking then. And so what on the engineering side are you seeing people doing either with prompt engineering or just throwing a for loop around something to kind of actually make the different products identical from an end user perspective?

• 2:34:34Speaker 06

  So we, we very rarely see people fall back to a completely different model.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:40Speaker 06

  Usually the, the load balancing that we do is for a specific model.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:34:45Speaker 06

  We kind of orchestrate between like, between two and sometimes 20 different providers.

• 2:34:51John Coogan?

  Different vendors of those, that makes sense.

• 2:34:53Speaker 06

  Right. Um, but the second half of the question that you asked is more, is much more interesting to us because we, there are, even for one model, there are like providers that provide all different kinds of context lengths, max output constraints, features, some support tool calling, some don't, some support structured outputs with a JSON schema allowed. Some only allow you to output a JSON object, but no schema is allowed. Yeah. It's, it's like a really crazy Wild West that we're just trying to tame in one spot. So, um, we have, I would say the fundamentals live, with a lot more to come, which basically just allows you, if you send a really big prompt,

• 2:35:36Speaker 06

  then we only send you to the providers that support big prompts. If you want a ton of output, we only send you to a provider that can actually like fit that much output in your requests. And if you want both of those things and JSON and some crazy features that nobody's, that nobody supports.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:53Speaker 06

  We give you a heads up that it's not going to go anywhere.

• 2:35:56John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:35:56Speaker 06

  So, uh, more to come to help with that, but that is like our bread and butter. That's what we're good for.

• 2:36:02John Coogan?

  Can you, uh, give me kind of your state of the union on how the different labs are positioned? You know, some people think of Anthropic as the safety focused one and, uh, you know, it seems like Zuck is kind of in a rebuilding phase with the Lama project. Grok's been showing a lot of promise, maybe not on the cutting edge, but this very interesting stalking horse for the other labs. OpenAI seems to be running away with it on the consumer side, but B2B is a little bit more of a bidding war. So how do you see the market right now? What are you recommending to different entrepreneurs that are building on these services?

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  You guys have probably one of the most interesting data sets.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36:41Jordi Hays?

  In AI and you. Publish a lot of it yourself.

• 2:36:45Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:36:46Jordi Hays?

  Some, you know, companies opt into sharing their data. So I'm interested to hear where, you know, even about kind of like disconnects between like attention that certain companies are getting and maybe valuations and then the realities of sort of usage. Right. So like one of the most popular companies on open router right now is, is Klein, which is a coding agent, and I'd never actually heard of them.

• 2:37:12Jordi Hays?

  We haven't had them on the show yet, and so that, that was kind of a surprise. But, uh, but anyways, kind of interested to get your, your take on all that at a high level.

• 2:37:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Klein is, for those who don't know, it's similar to Cursor, but it allows you to bring all open router models to it. And, uh, and they, they invest a lot in, in making all, all models work really well.

• 2:37:39Speaker 06

  The, the, our approach to helping people choose models is kind of a do it yourself, DIY research approach for the most part. We have a router that you can use that will pick the model that, that we think your prompt is best suited for. But right now, what we see most people doing is going to our rankings page or going to that, the homepage. When you mentioned that Klein is, is one of the top apps, those are all apps that have opted into

• 2:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:07Speaker 06

  being shown publicly. You can just click on one of those apps like Klein, click on right now, and you can see Sonic 3.7 is the top model this month, followed by Sonic 4, followed by two point Gemini 2.5 Flash. As you can just see what the, what the, what users are doing. And in practice, what this means is you're seeing what power users are doing. Cause power users consume exponentially more tokens than everybody else. So the, the, the principle here is to let people learn from power users. Cause power users are just investing the most time and money into this. This is why tokens, I think, are a good way of measuring now.

• 2:38:48Speaker 06

  Cause there, it's both a measure of time and money that users are investing into models. So to answer your first question, we. We generally, we generally don't like directly recommend, but we'll, we'll, we'll like work with some customers and understand their ideas and like recommend models that way. And it's usually very specific. Um, based on like the kind of workload, the, you know, the, the amount they want to spend, the, their tolerance for, for performance and speed. Um, but what a lot of people do is they just check our rankings page. They look for apps that are similar. Um, and then they pick the ones that are trending or popular.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense. Uh, I would love to have you back on when there's another big model release. I'm sure you are a endless source. I mean, I imagine even like hedge funds would reach out to you for like, hey, is this model getting adopted quickly? I'm sure a lot of the data is, uh, open source. So you can grab it, but, uh, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. Uh, we'll have to have you back to chat.

• 2:39:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see you again soon.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  Models. Have a good one. We'll talk to you later. Uh, really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easier measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And breaking news, TVPN will have a few billboards going up in Manhattan very, very soon. And so.

• 2:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Campaign rolling out with adquick over the summer, little summer campaign.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  Very excited for that.

• 2:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Billboard campaign.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Well, we have our next guest in the studio, Clem from conduit. Welcome to the stream. And there's someone with you. Would you mind both introducing yourself?

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  How are you guys doing?

• 2:40:29Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  You're live.

• 2:40:30Speaker 07

  I think we're mixed up here.

• 2:40:31Jordi Hays?

  They're the next guest. They're the next guest.

• 2:40:33John Coogan?

  Oh, whoops.

• 2:40:34Jordi Hays?

  This is the Orca team.

• 2:40:35John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:40:35Jordi Hays?

  I was like, uh, are these guys in the same place?

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 2:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's just do it live.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're booking these folks back.

• 2:40:40Jordi Hays?

  You guys are here. Let's go. Let's give it up for the Orca team.

• 2:40:43John Coogan?

  We, yeah, thank you. This is the Orca team. Uh, we have had, uh, we've talked about you multiple times on the show.

• 2:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Goaded marketers.

• 2:40:50John Coogan?

  You've go, goaded marketers. We've both worked in consumer packaged goods. Very excited to talk about the product. Uh, why don't you give us the update, introduce the company, introduce yourselves and break us down for how things are going.

• 2:41:00Speaker 07

  Yeah. So I'm Michael. This is Nash. We, we make Orca. It's an energy water packaged in this.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:41:06Speaker 07

  Their can.

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Stunning.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:07Speaker 07

  We, we started it because we were solving a problem with energy drinks, which is that they all tasted like candy to us and really sweet. And after drinking them every morning for years, we were like, why can't we just take all the caffeine and put it in water? And so that started us on our journey two years ago. It took us a really long time to put it in this can, um, which we've covered on Twitter and it's gone kind of viral. The Wall Street Journal wrote, wrote about us. I think that's how you guys find out about us probably. We launched on Amazon finally in March of this year and things have gone a lot better than we anticipated, a lot quicker than we anticipated. And so now we're in the middle of a fundraiser and sort of looking to hit the ground running here.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it strange with consumer packaged goods? You're like, the company's ripping, but you're like, you're like, wait, why are we like, why does it feel like we're going broke? Because we didn't buy so much inventory?

• 2:41:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:57Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, it's tough.

• 2:41:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Getting payment terms from a supplier will be important.

• 2:42:01Jordi Hays?

  Give us a quick backstory on making, making it. I, I feel like you, people love the packaging and then you've also caught heat for it online.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  Did you invent it yourself?

• 2:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  Did you invent this in a cave with a box of scraps?

• 2:42:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. A lot of people that have never built anything have opinions.

• 2:42:16John Coogan?

  Giants. They hate standing on the shoulders of giants.

• 2:42:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, we, uh, from the offset, we knew that the product had to be in clear packaging. Cause we wanted to show the consumer what was inside.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:42:28Speaker 08

  Compared to our competitors. And when we saw the clear can, we were like, this is it. It's perfect. It's shaped like an energy drink. You can see what's inside. It, uh, it tells the story of the product like right off the bat. And we had started actually teasing it online before we launched and like saw that it was going viral. And so when we had all these manufacturing issues and like spent a full year and tons of money and time trying to figure it out. That was our North Star. We knew like, if we can, if we can figure this out, it's the perfect packaging. Um.

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  And yeah, so you stayed away from, I imagine there were off the shelf clear bottles available from like, you know, Fiji or Dasani. Like there's probably an industrial complex for just clear plastic bottles.

• 2:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Just regular bottles of water.

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  Yes, regular bottles of water. Uh, but you wanted something that fit the energy drink, uh, kind of shape and dimensions. Is that, were you thinking about like, if you get into a convenience store, you need to slot into the same form factor as like Red Bull and Celsius? Cause I feel like it's always hard when you come in, uh, we, we, we have a really cool square can.

• 2:43:35Jordi Hays?

  You want to innovate, but not too much.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:43:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think a lot of it was just identifying what category, like the category placement from the beginning. And we kind of think of ourselves as creating a new category, which is energy water. And so we were thinking about the packaging. We thought that, well, we knew we wanted it to be clear. We thought that a normal water bottle would be too far in the water direction.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:55Speaker 07

  A can, a normal can would be too far in the energy drink direction.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:59Speaker 07

  So this was like the natural, perfect middle ground that like Nash said, just you see it and get what the, what the product is.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, you also don't want confusion if somebody picks up it and they think, oh, this is just a nice, refreshing bottle of water. Like they might, people might be okay if like, oh, it's sparkling. But if there's a hundred milligrams of caffeine in there, you're like, what the hell?

• 2:44:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk, talk about the marketing strategy to date. I remember seeing one, one of your campaigns, which was, this was the guy just reading off the, the signs, right? Am I right there? Is that a?

• 2:44:26Speaker 07

  Corbin Blue.

• 2:44:27Speaker 08

  Not just any guy.

• 2:44:28John Coogan?

  Not just any guy. Yeah, yeah, like that was the wildest campaign. Yeah, break that down. How'd that come together? Yeah, give us all the numbers. It was like, what was the result? If you could share like, yeah, anything about that, we'd appreciate that.

• 2:44:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think we're just kind of trying to do stuff differently from a marketing standpoint. And so like, when we, when we were thinking about the launch video and did research on like, what makes a successful launch video? It was like very short, to the point, optimized for conversion, whatever. And we're like, all right, like, well, what would the exact opposite of that be? And it would be having Corbin Blue list road signs for nine minutes.

• 2:45:08Speaker 08

  So yeah, we're, we're.

• 2:45:09Jordi Hays?

  Have you guys won any awards for that yet?

• 2:45:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like this could be like ad week or like some sort of like ad, ad.

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, big ad probably hates you guys because you're, you're tearing up the rulebook. You know, you're throwing it out.

• 2:45:20John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:45:21Speaker 07

  Similarly, on our Amazon page, if you go to our Amazon and just scroll down instead of like a, like a brand section, it's just a full exploration of Napoleon's withdrawal from Moscow.

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:45:32Speaker 07

  And so we've been meeting with like Amazon agencies that we're about to bring on and they're like, you know, love what you're doing here, but maybe not the most optimal.

• 2:45:41John Coogan?

  This is hilarious. Wow.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  You don't understand. We're playing on a different level. Yeah, pull it up.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Pull this up right now.

• 2:45:49Jordi Hays?

  So what, so what, um, what you, you guys cooking? I mean, it's, it's like great when you go viral, you have a good idea, it hits and then the attention fades. You kind of just have to figure out how to keep, are you guys like working on building that muscle of, of how do we do this kind of thing multiple times a year? What does that look like?

• 2:46:05Speaker 08

  Definitely. And, and a big part of the raise is building revenue. We can scale. So like online advertising. So like you said, we don't have to hope that we go viral every week. Um, and then launching into retail here in Southern California.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Uh, speaking of muscle, who's that behind you? Where, where are you guys? That's such a funny mural.

• 2:46:25Speaker 07

  We are, uh, we're in the attic.

• 2:46:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:28Speaker 07

  Our house. We've got three roommates. Nashville's downstairs. I sleep in that. This is an influencer named Jake Shane. We sent influencer gift packages. We sent a case of Orca and then like an AI photo of their dad jacked. We sent, we sent him jacked, but he was out of town. And so we just kept it.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  We kept it. That's great. Breaking through.

• 2:46:49Jordi Hays?

  Good, good.

• 2:46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Most people think, oh yeah, I use AI to market. And it's like, oh, you chopped up your B roll a little bit. Uh, this is a wildly different use.

• 2:46:59Jordi Hays?

  Before this?

• 2:46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:01Speaker 08

  Uh, we were both in tech. We were, we were, uh, buddies at Georgetown. Yeah.

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:47:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Let's give it up for big tech. You said buddies where?

• 2:47:11Speaker 08

  Georgetown college.

• 2:47:13Jordi Hays?

  Nice. Uh, amazing. But we got to get some here in the studio. We've been, I mean, this is the amount of caffeine.

• 2:47:19Speaker 07

  We wanted to make sure we were on the show before you tasted it. Cause I know you're, you're unbiased, but I know that that can play a factor.

• 2:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, now we're biased because we like you guys. We're going to have to give a positive.

• 2:47:30John Coogan?

  These are turning to the fact that, that, uh, Mataina Yurba Mate tastes like it was made by someone.

• 2:47:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This is the only, this is the only category of, of like partner that we don't have exclusives on.

• 2:47:40John Coogan?

  We don't.

• 2:47:41Jordi Hays?

  We're connoisseurs of energy.

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  Energy connoisseurs.

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  It's kind of like how The Economist, the back of The Economist is a different high horology, a different watch brand, every single, every single edition. Every single show should have a different energy drink percolating through the show. We love it. But thanks so much for coming on, guys. We will talk to you soon.

• 2:48:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good luck with the raise.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Good luck with the fund raise. Good luck with distribution.

• 2:48:03Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully see you guys around LA sometime.

• 2:48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you soon.

• 2:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, guys. Later.

• 2:48:07John Coogan?

  Bye. We are working on bringing on more people, but let's go to the timeline. And let's do some ads. Let's tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

• 2:48:26Jordi Hays?

  Story.

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:48:27Jordi Hays?

  This is 100% the truth. My first thought this morning was you reading the Wander ad.

• 2:48:35John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  It's so drilled into my brain.

• 2:48:36John Coogan?

  It's incredibly drilled.

• 2:48:37Jordi Hays?

  That I just woke up and I, and I, and my first thoughts was find your happy place. Book a wander with.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  Inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning. You know, it really runs in my dreams at this point. You're gonna say it so fast. And, and I was, I was talking to Yannick over at public.com and he was, he was like, like, no one can read ad reads faster than John because I read them really, really fast now. And I was like, I was like, tell me, like, show me a man who says that they skip the TBPN ad reads and I'll show you a liar.

• 2:49:10Jordi Hays?

  It's impossible.

• 2:49:10John Coogan?

  I think it's impossible.

• 2:49:12Jordi Hays?

  By the time you get to your phone, it could be across the room.

• 2:49:14John Coogan?

  Finger on the trigger, I will be done before the finger hits the glass.

• 2:49:18Jordi Hays?

  And then you skip real content.

• 2:49:19John Coogan?

  And then you skip real content.

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

  And you lose.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Like, like, speaking of real content, Nvidia hit an all-time high. Let's hear it for Nvidia.

• 2:49:29John Coogan?

  The GOAT, he's been to conferences, he's done deals all over the world. He's bringing AI factories to different countries. He's selling GPUs to gamers. He's selling GPUs to foundation model companies and he's at a new all-time high. We love to see it. We wanted to go through the archives. Jensen Wong visited Greg Brockman. And brought the first Nvidia DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI, and dedicated by Jensen to advanced AI computing and humanity.

• 2:49:58Jordi Hays?

  The hype-mogging here is brutal.

• 2:50:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Looks like a picture of us.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah. And then the other news around Nvidia is that they've launched DGX Lepton Cloud, which now connects Europe's developers to global GPU compute. It's kind of like, you know.

• 2:50:14Jordi Hays?

  A technology win for Europe.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, but Lepton is, you know, one lower level abstraction than OpenRouter. So OpenRouter is routing you to all the models, but if you have a model and you need to serve it on GPUs, how can you get GPU capacity all over the place? This is one of the options now, and it's fighting against NeoClouds.

• 2:50:36Jordi Hays?

  So SemiAnalysis has this story. Today at GTC Paris, Jensen Huang announced DGX Lepton with the goal of effectively commoditizing inference compute at global scale. This means customers will be able to automatically shift their inference workloads through different clouds, while in theory, maintaining the same software user interface and experience. If DGX Lepton is successful, they have created a standard user experience, value and performance across all NeoCloud, which will lead to NeoClouds being in a rat race on pricing. They will effectively turn.

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  NeoCloud margins into ultra-low commodity level pricing.

• 2:51:10Jordi Hays?

  You know how SemiAnalysis is, you know how it's handwritten?

• 2:51:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:13Jordi Hays?

  There's always, he throws in some grammatical errors.

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, let you know that it's not AI.

• 2:51:18Jordi Hays?

  Just let you know it's handcrafted.

• 2:51:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, we're seeing with the NeoClouds a lot of different strategies around, are they going after energy, or are they going after stranded energy, like what Crusoe does? Or are they really focused on just building capacity faster? And so, yes, DGX Lepton is trying to be the aggregator of supply and then be the front door. But this is a story that is evolving. The Wall Street Journal has some story here covering it, saying it's ruffling tech giants. Nvidia is ruffling the tech giants with move into cloud computing. Things are getting awkward for cloud incumbents.

• 2:51:53Jordi Hays?

  Feather ruffling sound effect.

• 2:51:55John Coogan?

  Yes, ruffle, ruffle.

• 2:51:55Jordi Hays?

  This will do in the meantime.

• 2:51:58John Coogan?

  Cloud incumbents as the AI chip giant eyes their turf. Cloud computing generates big profits for amazon.com, Microsoft and Google. We know this from AWS, Azure and GCP. Now that cash cow faces a nascent threat with the rise of artificial intelligence cloud specialists and a new industry power broker Nvidia. AI chipmaker Nvidia launched its own cloud computing service two years ago called DGX Cloud, but they've been improving it. It has also nurtured upstarts competing with the big cloud companies and investing in AI cloud players CoreWeave and Lambda. We've had Lambda on the show. We've had Chase from Crusoe on the show. Got to get CoreWeave on the show at some point. Maybe all of them at once for a big NeoCloud Day. That'd be fun.

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  These moves have yet to make an enormous dent, but a competitive shift is easy to imagine if computing demand continues to shift toward AI and Nvidia remains the sector's principal arms dealer.

• 2:52:54Jordi Hays?

  Dylan's also saying AMD is making big moves and winning over the NeoCloud ecosystem through their balance sheet. At the same time, Nvidia is alienating many with DJX Lepton. MI355 is great performance per TCO against HGX.

• 2:53:09John Coogan?

  Total cost ownership.

• 2:53:11Jordi Hays?

  But it is not rack scale, unlike GB200.

• 2:53:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's kind of summarizing four different stories there, but the AMD thing is interesting because if AMD says, hey, we just make the chips and Nvidia is over there like, yeah, we'll sell you the chips, but we're also going to try and beat you at your own game. Well, then maybe as a cloud provider, as NeoCloud, you want to start figuring out how to get on AMD before Nvidia eats your lunch in the actual cloud provision, right? At the same time, AWS, GCP, there's a ton of other services. They all have their own inference chips too. And so Nvidia is getting squeezed by the TPU. And so GCP, Google has the TPU that competes with the H200, right? And that's why there's the big model context from Google.

• 2:53:55John Coogan?

  And then now Nvidia is going and saying, hey, we got a GCP competitor in many ways. And so those businesses are limited by their narrow focus on AI computing, referring to the NeoClouds, and they pale in comparison to the more than $107 billion in sales Amazon's market leading cloud business generated last year. Let's hear it for Amazon generating $107 billion in sales for AWS.

• 2:54:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have our next guest in the studio. We have our next guest, Nikunj, with a major trade deal.

• 2:54:30John Coogan?

  Major trade deal. Let's hear it.

• 2:54:32Jordi Hays?

  TVPN to discuss. It's great to finally have you. I've been wanting to have you on the show for months.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  We've printed your posts. We've reacted to your posts and now you're finally here. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself, though?

• 2:54:44Speaker 09

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been my claim to fame is being your first under 100 followers and following your journey. So, yeah, and so it's been an honor, an honor to come on here. And yeah, I'm Nikunj. I spent 10 years building startups, everything from logistics, networking hardware, real estate, and I just joined a new fund. Joined this fund called FPV Ventures, the two GPs, Wes Chan and Pega, who are the two GPs here. And yeah, very excited to be here after, you know, dipping into my investing foray at Costa Ventures for a year.

• 2:55:25John Coogan?

  Very cool. What does FPV stand for and what is your focus at the fund?

• 2:55:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, so FPV stands for Founder's Point of View. I think that's what kind of like really drew me into joining this fund. We mostly just cared about like what the founders are doing. We're a generalist fund. We just raised our fund to $525 million, just closed a few months ago. And then we have a, thank you.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  That's a lot of money. It's great.

• 2:55:55Speaker 09

  Yeah. And it's a generalist fund, which means like, you know, it's, and they put the money, we put the money where our mouths are. We've done everything from biotech to all the way to consumer fintech, to drag infrastructure, to anything you can kind of think of. And I think as I was kind of figuring out what I want to do next, the world is very exciting and kind of like both atoms and bits, AI is affecting kind of every small detail and, you know, excited to be here and be a small part of the team.

• 2:56:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I love a typical generalist fund says, yeah, we're generalists. We invest in enterprise software and AI, usually at the intersection. I mean, speaking of that, do you think the the ship has sailed for the investments in the foundation model companies? Is the game over? And now we're in the vertical AI, application layer AI, consumer AI. Is that where the most interesting companies are getting started and scaled today?

• 2:56:49Speaker 09

  I think as the large models are kind of stabilizing, like a lot of the value is in the application layer, because now you can kind of build on top of that. A lot of the infrastructure has been built. And so now, every company, every enterprise is kind of being like, okay, we can automate large percentages of work that can't be done. Do I think like, a large model is kind of the ship has sailed? Unless you have like, new, completely new architectures, I do think so. Like, if you're just building on the transformer side, it's hard for me to be excited, given the data. And from a money perspective, too, you're just kind of outbid. But I'm seeing like, a lot of small models kind of come up, and more application focused models come up. I used to work at a company called Meter.

• 2:57:32Speaker 09

  I know you had Anil on the on the on the podcast a couple of days ago. They just raised their large round. Part of one is to build a networking model, which, you know, they control the infrastructure for, and they're partnering very closely with Microsoft. That kind of data is not available anywhere else, right? You can't get packet data. And so, I get more and more excited about that. Is there like, unique data that you're capturing? And then can you translate that to efficiency? I think that's where that can still be placed, and you can see outsized value. Otherwise, like, I think on the large model side, it seems a little bit hard, unless there's a brand new architecture. And I'm really excited. I've been reading technical papers, trying to figure out, is there a new architecture? Is there a new transformer-like model that will come up?

• 2:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Totally. How do you think about the convergence of every company into being an app builder? You highlighted, I think, in a post sometime in the last 24 hours. Now you have Replit, Bolt, Figma, Lovable. There's a bunch of different players. Basically, if you if a company, if a big company is doing a launch... And around AI, you can guess that maybe there's a 50% chance that it'll be some type of, you know, prompt-based software builder. Is that, do you think a lot of that, you know, makes sense in a lot of different contexts, but at the same time, it feels like there's some FOMO element, companies seeing, you know, this tremendous growth from some new

• 2:58:58Jordi Hays?

  players and saying, oh, maybe we should have a horse in that race. But, but how are you looking at that market?

• 2:59:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, Airtable announced theirs as well. If you look at Rietool, they announced theirs as well a week ago. Our portfolio company, Canva, has one. I think there is, there's some companies are doing it for defense because they're seeing the repletts and the bolts kind of coming at it and taking a lot of their business away, especially if you have like, you know, you can build internal tools, then like, why would you use? And so I think some, some of it is coming from defense. But some of them are coming from offense because they see that they can go deeper into the workflows. From my perspective, a lot of it is for context also, right? Like, if you're able to pull in context from all these different sources, it increases your attention. You can have people do more things on there. It makes it easier for you to highlight them in one place. And I think we are, I think

• 2:59:50Speaker 09

  we all agree, we're in the era of bundling. More and more companies, like, and more and more enterprise want like one solution. They don't want to pay for like five different solutions. And so you're able to see all of that kind of combined there. It is, it is wildly interesting to see on the sidelines. I have no predictions on kind of how it goes. The, the, the rise of like lovable, replet and bold all doing such insane revenue numbers is probably like what's causing some people to play defense. But it just means software is just going to keep growing and growing and spend on software is just going to go parabolic in the next five years.

• 3:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Totally. How do you, how do you think about, how are you looking at application layer opportunities in the context of companies like OpenAI just want, you know, having this tremendous appetite for Data, right? You know, we talked about on the show, Clouly has this sort of interesting experience of this sort of being able to get the power of LLMs passively, right? Just sort of in an interview or, you know, putting, putting our intern on Clouly so he can answer random questions that we have. That feels like something that OpenAI will, will eventually, you know, if, if it works, they'll want to roll it out. How do you think of that? The kind of competitive dynamic between kind of upstart application layer companies and,

• 3:01:08Jordi Hays?

  and some of these bigger labs?

• 3:01:11Speaker 09

  I think it's the question like, kind of like every decade, you can pick up dominant incumbent and ask, what if X does this? So like, you know, everybody, the, the difference this time though is the pace is just staggering. Like in the last few months, OpenAI has launched like a meeting with recording notes and pulling in context. And so I think that's what's scaring people. But I do think like building horizontal and vertical at the same time with deep workflows is just hard. It's like, how many, how many things can you do? And then the interface becomes like a jumbled mess. And then how do you kind of do that? And so there is a lot of, lot of depth in each application, each job, each vertical, there's so much to do. I don't think like OpenAI or a single company can capture all the value. OpenAI is uniquely

• 3:01:56Speaker 09

  positioned where they have a dominant consumer company in like ChatGPT and also market leading APIs. But there's Claude that has incredible APIs for ChordGen as well. But yeah, I think there's like plenty of depth. I do think like companies that are on the edge of productivity or just building small wedges or like features that they don't have, the founders who don't have the depth to like think through, like, how does this go in the next few years? I think those, as in the past, will continue to get like decimated by incumbents. But I still think there's so much value to be had. I mean, it's just, it's, the, the, the size of the pie is too large for one company to own it. And, and, and OpenAI has to think this time, but I still think there's plenty to do. So.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about go to market for new AI products, either in consumer or, or B2B? There it feels like there's multiple strategies right now. You know, you see that cursor chart and it's just it's aligned directly straight up because they just got to hundreds of million. Are they at 500 million now or something?

• 3:03:00Speaker 09

  500.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  500 million ARR.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had we had Amjad from Replit on yesterday going from 10 to 100 in a matter of months.

• 3:03:08John Coogan?

  So fast. And then and then you see the the Clouly's of the world and Avi at friend.com did another strategy which was very virality driven. And so there's there's kind of two two strategies that I'm seeing pop up with the new products. One is kind of like build silently, let the product kind of just grow into this behemoth and then everyone starts talking about it because of the growth. The other is is take over the timeline, become popular ahead of growth and then use that to convert into subscriptions or revenue growth. Are you looking at both types of deals? Do you see one as kind of more of a positive signal than the other? How are you thinking about how the next generation is growing their businesses after they build something?

• 3:03:52Speaker 09

  It depends on who they're targeting. I think it is being a media arm of a company is important now. I think it's hard to like get away from the noise unless you are showcasing your product in some way. That's why we're seeing our timeline flooded with launch videos. But that's also getting saturated now. So I think more and more what I've been probing for these bottoms up companies that are trying to go after like the individual is understanding like, hey, where are you spending your time? Are there any channels? If you're just doing yet another Twitter launch video, then maybe that's like, you know, oversaturated. Like, what are other channels? Do you go multi-prong? Are you like, you know, are you doing local events or like local communities where you can kind of own it and just build such a

• 3:04:35Speaker 09

  good product that people will do? So virality in PLG has been there for 10 years. It's not new. I think like virality on Twitter is just the newest element of it. And then, and then on the enterprise side, though, and this is one of the reasons I joined FPV, like Pega on our team, she's incredible at like really working with the team and understanding like, you know, who's the ICP, what's the org chart looks like, how do you break in? Is this like a bottoms up play in the enterprise side or are you top down? Do you need the decision maker? How do you get them in a room? Is this a burning problem? Is this not a burning problem? Where are they like actually evolving? Is this in budget? Is this not in budget? I think those are the questions people need to ask. Very few companies like Cursers or like, you know, of the world are able to break through.

• 3:05:19Speaker 09

  Like, you know, Cursor like kind of grew from the bottoms up to to the point where enterprises had to come knocking to them and said like, hey, can you build us an enterprise plan? I don't think they even had one. Uh, but that's more of a rarity. And sometimes I think, uh, people take hype on Twitter or just like everything needs to be PLG is the gospel, which I I don't buy that that's the only way to do business.

• 3:05:42Jordi Hays?

  How are you seeing the PM role evolve? Do you have any predictions or or, you know, one way to make a prediction would just be to kind of identify like what's happening today? So I'm curious what what you're seeing.

• 3:05:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, um, so one, I like, I never treated my PM role as a PM role. I always took a GM responsibilities wherever I joined. So even at Meter, I had P and L responsibilities, had open door, like, you know, growth was my last job there. And I took, tried to take as much P and L responsibility. And I think if you were just like being a product manager and just want to project manage and kind of just like, you know, not do sales or not do marketing or not just kind of like, you know, I'm a product manager and a product owner. I think that job is dead. I think you are going to be out of a job very quickly. I think it's all become a yes and you kind of have to own multiple things and kind of treat your job as like, hey, I'm going to sell this product. I'm going to figure out what the marketing copy is. I'm going to work with everyone. I do think the role of an orchestrator is what all of us will do.

• 3:06:39Speaker 09

  Like, I think more all of us are gonna have, we already have, like, you know, I was like playing with Claude Claude yesterday, I had five instances running. And I was watching TVPN. I was just like building a call tool.

• 3:06:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nikunj said like TVPN clips are perfectly timed with like, you know, running basically props.

• 3:06:55Speaker 09

  I I wrote a long piece on this. I actually think, sorry, it's like tangent, but I actually think entertainment is going to have a massive upswing because what do you do? You're for fifteen minutes. That's why X's numbers are actually through the roof. I can't like, I I I can't have, they don't have any like stats from them. But it's like, well, you're writing, you're having an agent do the work for you. What do you do? You need a dopamine rush. You go to X, you watch TVPN. And so I actually think that's the future. But going back to the PM side, like on the orchestration side, PMs are excellent orchestrators. Like maybe you kind of have to keep all of these things happening. So I think the PMs who are like upleveling themselves, learning what sales is, trying to figure out what marketing is, doing some of the web coding, prototyping themselves, and then being the core orchestrator, I think they'll do phenomenally well.

• 3:07:38Speaker 09

  Because I think like most engineers you talk to, most marketers you talk to, they don't want to deal with like people problems. They want like an orchestrator. But if you're like a PM who just wants to hold on to like, I have a PRD and I'm a project manager, the work behind the work is dead. Like that is just going to die a slow death in the next like three to five years. It'll take a while to trickle down to the larger companies. And I'm seeing it in startups. No startup is coming to me and saying like, hey, I want a PM. Everyone's like, crack engineer, crack marketer, crack salesperson. That's all they want. Nobody's asking me for like a PM today. Uh, at least there are like fifty people.

• 3:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what about uh, pricing? Are are non-AI companies getting uh, valuation lifts just by nature of raising at the same time as this AI boom? Are you know, are you seeing that when you're when you're kind of looking at opportunities in other categories?

• 3:08:29Speaker 09

  I was the question like, are AI native companies like just seeing a massively?

• 3:08:33Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. So it's very clear that like AI native companies are getting this massive valuation just lift. Yeah. Do you think that's benefiting sort of non-AI businesses by just nature of investors being like, well, I just did a seed round at sixty posts.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  My grocery store is making one point five percent profit, but with AI could ten X that. Who knows?

• 3:08:55Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, yeah, I'm just curious. Like you, let's say you look at some company that's doing, you know, farming focused biotech. Are they just naturally getting like a slight lift or is maybe, maybe it's too anecdotal?

• 3:09:09Speaker 09

  It really depends. I know that's a bullshit answer, but like, I think it like some of it is kind of like, how much data do you have? Like, you know, if you were, we've been working on, a good example is CaseText, right? Like CaseText spent eight years figuring out the perfect CaseText law and GPT three point five came in and they just like skyrocketed.

• 3:09:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:27Speaker 09

  And so I think a lot of investors are trying to look outside of purely AI native, mostly to understand, are there things, are there like built in brand reputation, data reputation, things you've done in the past that allow you to then kind of layer AI on top as an accelerant? And I think those could be good to go invest in and sometimes help bring in the talent that can help do them. Or it's like, you know, the atoms world, physical world still has a lot of alpha still out there. I think like, you know, I think software as that gets democratized, there's a lot of things happening. That's why in bio and robotics and like manufacturing, supply chain, like robots in the field, you're going to see a lot of people, a lot of excitement there because you see that's the next world that's kind of incoming.

• 3:10:10Speaker 09

  But the problem is venture is momentum back. And so as a venture investor, you want to see like that inflection points. And sometimes if you're not AI native, and one of the hard discussions is like, well, they're a great company. We're seeing some inflection, but we're not sure yet. And if you're not going to see the inflection, then it's hard to be a venture back company today. That's showing up in the series A that or in, you know, I don't like the word, but the zombie coins that we're seeing for the last few years.

• 3:10:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 3:10:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:10:38Jordi Hays?

  And thanks for helping get Alex on. Who's coming on next? Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. And congratulations. I'm super excited for you in the new role. Thank you. Come back on soon. Cheers.

• 3:10:48John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Getbezel.com. Shop over 25,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. And let's bring in our next guest, Alex. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 3:11:01Speaker 10

  How are you?

• 3:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Alex.

• 3:11:02Speaker 10

  How are you? Sorry that I was so busy.

• 3:11:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You're like the most online founder yet for two hours there. You must have been doing some regular work.

• 3:11:13Speaker 10

  It's a flex. Leave me on the red.

• 3:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the acquisition. Break, break, give it, give us some quick background on you and SuperLocal and then, and then the deal. And then I'm sure we'll get into a bunch of stuff.

• 3:11:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I've built SuperLocal for a while. We, we build a, a bunch of products. I mean, initially it was just me working on, on one thing totally unrelated. But in, in sort of like the last generation, SuperLocal is, or is a very personalized map. So you can kind of imagine it like Google Maps. In ChatGPT, you had a baby with some OG Foursquare vibes sprinkled in. And I mean, that basically means it does three things. Like it has, it automatically maps all the places you've been. So your map just populates without you doing anything. You can also check in, like that's the OG Foursquare part. And then that sort of builds you a persona, or like the automatic stuff builds you persona, like where we understand who you are by the places you go to.

• 3:12:10Speaker 10

  Like my map knows that I don't really like Starbucks. I'd rather go to Menati's in Venice. So it knows like that's my personality. So when I search for places, it takes that into account.

• 3:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. How did the Foursquare, Square deal come about? Had you known the team for a while? Was it the kind of thing where you were, you know, friendly with the CEO and it just made sense at some point? What, what did that look like?

• 3:12:34Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I've known them for a while. Uh, I don't know. Then it just came up and then I thought it was a good idea.

• 3:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Nice. And so you're ma- you're you're continuing to to scale SuperLocal?

• 3:12:44John Coogan?

  Are we happy about the acquisition? Are we ringing the go?

• 3:12:46Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah, no, it's like.

• 3:12:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:12:51Speaker 10

  I was obviously obsessed with Foursquare since I dedicated like the last.

• 3:12:55John Coogan?

  There we go. Yeah. Congratulations.

• 3:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what how does how does uh how does SuperLocal fit into Foursquare's overall strategy going forward? You're continuing to operate it independently?

• 3:13:08Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, we're just operating exactly like we used to. Uh, I mean, that's like the current thing. We're just building what I was building before, but without like the constant fear of potentially always dying as a company.

• 3:13:20John Coogan?

  Amazing. What what are the what are the business models that work here now? Uh, the the story of Foursquare was like, it's going to be the next Facebook and it's going to be just an ad network. Then there were stories about, um, you know, targeting for advertising. That seemed like a good model. Obviously, you could just pay for the app and subscribe. Um, there's a whole bunch of different business models. What do you think is most promising over the next few years in this category?

• 3:13:48Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I know like they're they're mainly focused on their B two B stuff.

• 3:13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:53Speaker 10

  So I don't know as much about like the B two B side. So I'm basically just focused on growing our consumer app.

• 3:14:00John Coogan?

  And what do we yeah, what do you bullish on the consumer side like? Because some, I mean, this is happening in the context of AI, like, uh, there's a lot of people on the $20 plan for ChatGPT. A lot of people use the free version. Some people are on the $200 plan. Google has a $500 plan. So there's clearly a willingness to spend on consumer AI apps that are just on your phone. At the same time, advertising is undefeated. It's one of the greatest business models ever. And if you can get to scale, that makes a lot of sense. So how do you see this playing out for you?

• 3:14:29Speaker 10

  Even I feel like Playsearch actually has maybe like some of the easier monetization in general because like if we have like hotel search, things like that, there's like pretty good ways to make money from like Expedia advice booking people out. I mean, we've done stuff with subscriptions and it's actually done quite well. But that was actually before we had any AI search things in it. It always did rather well, just through like little gamification features. So I know that'd be a cool thing to scale. Yeah, things like that. It's kind of like.

• 3:14:57John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the cost side of the business? I feel like the reason that we wound up in the paradigm of like twenty dollar chat GPT subscriptions is because the GPUs are on fire. And we talked to George Hots and he was like, I, OpenAI is losing money on me because inference cost is actually material as opposed to, you know, database queries which are essentially free, you know, for an individual user. Has, has your AI bill ever been stressful?

• 3:15:25Speaker 10

  No, not really. But I guess it's also another advantage of Playsearch. It's not like you need a new place every day. So it's like, like I would never like your app technically is like a just purely like DAU app. I feel like it's probably like weekly, monthly, whenever you actually need a place. And that's, that's not that frequent. I mean, I think it depends on like the city. Like I'm sure in New York City, people look for places more than LA, things like that, but.

• 3:15:48John Coogan?

  Foursquare is a pretty famous New York company. Are you moving out there? Are you in LA now?

• 3:15:53Speaker 10

  Oh, no, I'm going to San Francisco.

• 3:15:54John Coogan?

  San Francisco.

• 3:15:56Jordi Hays?

  What are you gonna do without Arowan?

• 3:15:57Speaker 10

  I know, I even have my Arowan water right here from this morning.

• 3:16:01John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 3:16:03Jordi Hays?

  He's committed, committed. I would always run into him when I lived in Venice. I'd see him all the time. Awesome, dude. Well, congratulations. And yeah, I want to see like over time, the feature on super locals, like you basically can like remove the fog from the world. So you can basically see like how, like a video game, basically.

• 3:16:22John Coogan?

  I know, I know the guy who posted that. Aiden, he posted that original viral image that went super viral of, of the fog of war on Google Maps. And people were talking about building it. I.

• 3:16:33Speaker 10

  But yeah, we had it before that, actually.

• 3:16:34John Coogan?

  You did?

• 3:16:35Speaker 10

  Super random feature we built, like we were, we were like at Butcher's Daughter and one of our engineers brought up, he just made it over the weekend and it just crushed it.

• 3:16:44John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:16:45Speaker 10

  Unexpected. They did really well.

• 3:16:48John Coogan?

  I love that. Yeah. Bringing in like almost a little bit of like the wonder of Pokemon Go and and kind of IRL virtual experiences like that's

• 3:16:58Jordi Hays?

  It's actually crazy how little the map would change because we

• 3:17:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:17:01Jordi Hays?

  Leave home.

• 3:17:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, go to work.

• 3:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Go to the gym.

• 3:17:03John Coogan?

  Come back.

• 3:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Get breakfast, go to the studio, go home. Let's just do that over and over and over.

• 3:17:08John Coogan?

  Just the fog war is just like the pipe on the one freeway that we go on and then come right back.

• 3:17:13Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, thank you for joining Alex. Congratulations and I hope to have you on again soon.

• 3:17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:17:20Speaker 10

  Good rest of the day.

• 3:17:21John Coogan?

  Have a good one. How did you sleep last night? I I put up decent numbers. I think I might have you beaten. I'm up from yesterday. Remember yesterday was an eighty-two for me. Today, eighty-seven.

• 3:17:32Jordi Hays?

  I did terribly.

• 3:17:32John Coogan?

  Get that Ashton Hall sound effect ready. Eighty-seven for John.

• 3:17:37Jordi Hays?

  I did terribly.

• 3:17:38John Coogan?

  Ninety-three percent quality, eighty-one percent consistency, six hours and fifty-one minutes.

• 3:17:43Jordi Hays?

  My son.

• 3:17:44John Coogan?

  How'd you do? Well, well, give us the number. Don't hide it. Don't hide it. You're trying to dodge it.

• 3:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Sixty-seven?

• 3:17:49John Coogan?

  Oh, well, it hasn't showed today. I thought you put up a great show. I thought you really brought the energy.

• 3:17:54Jordi Hays?

  I didn't let it get in the way.

• 3:17:55John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 3:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, I, uh, it was funny this morning because the, uh, my son decided at four AM that that sleeping was over. Basically, he got in bed. But then the issue is, is, is my, my side of the bed was heating up as like the heat alarm clock.

• 3:18:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Which is just, once you

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Go to eight sleep dot com, use code TVPN.

• 3:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, but he started realizing that like my side of the bed was just like really warm.

• 3:18:21John Coogan?

  Oh, cozy. Yeah.

• 3:18:22Jordi Hays?

  And so he just like kicks me off the bed until I was like, okay.

• 3:18:25John Coogan?

  I told you my four-year-old, I, I had to text Mateo, the CEO of Eight Sleep. Make, my, my, my four-year-old has demanded an eight sleep. I'm not kidding. And, uh, you know, hopefully there's news to share there soon, but, um, uh, we, I, I, I might, I might get him one, a big one and just wrap it around the edges. Uh, because he's a huge fan of it. Um, and he's, he's very excited. He wants a, he wants a third zone in the middle because he says that's where I sleep. And we're like, nobody, that's not where you sleep.

• 3:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, well, I have a post to pull up

• 3:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, which we close out with.

• 3:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Wrap. Um, so, uh, this is a post from Pool Tay, the US Director of Federal Housing.

• 3:19:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:19:03Jordi Hays?

  He said, after significant studying and keeping in line with President Trump's vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses. To count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage.

• 3:19:16John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:19:17Jordi Hays?

  And there's a great post here, if we can get this pulled up, guys.

• 3:19:20John Coogan?

  You've been stacking sat's.

• 3:19:22Jordi Hays?

  Rob Po- Poani says, "These mortgages are solely collateralized on fart coin."

• 3:19:31John Coogan?

  That will happen.

• 3:19:32Jordi Hays?

  That will happen. That will happen. I'm sure they will value meme coins slightly differently.

• 3:19:37John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 3:19:37Jordi Hays?

  Than, you know, the majors.

• 3:19:40John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 3:19:42Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, super fun show today.

• 3:19:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:19:47John Coogan?

  I think that's pretty much it. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:19:51Jordi Hays?

  And if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you're listening there, put an ad for your business.

• 3:19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:56Jordi Hays?

  In the review.

• 3:19:56John Coogan?

  We'll read it on the show.

• 3:19:57Jordi Hays?

  We'll read it on the show.

• 3:19:58John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 3:19:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much for watching. Have a beautiful afternoon and evening. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:20:04John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 3:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.