Meta Oakleys, Golden Retriever Maxing, Suits in Airports | John Jumper, Christian Garrett, Aaron Frank, Joseph Cass

(04:18) - Timeline Reactions (27:43) - John Jumper, an American computational biologist and senior staff research scientist at DeepMind, is renowned for leading the development of AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences. In the conversation, he discusses how AlphaFold has revolutionized the field by transforming a process that traditionally took years and significant resources into one that can be completed in minutes, thereby accelerating scientific research and applications in drug development and understanding biological processes. He also highlights the challenges faced during AlphaFold's development, including initial misconceptions about the problem's nature and the necessity of adopting a data-driven, supervised learning approach to achieve success. (01:00:07) - Christian Garrett, a partner at 137 Ventures, discussed the challenges facing $1 to $10 billion horizontal software companies, noting their vulnerability to commoditization and the impact of AI on growth. He emphasized the importance of sustainable competitive advantages and multi-product strategies for long-term success. Garrett also highlighted the trend of high-growth private companies remaining private longer, creating a new category of semi-liquid assets with significant implications for venture capital and liquidity dynamics. (01:34:06) - Aaron Frank, a Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, co-founded Final, Inc., a credit card company acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2018, which became the foundation for the Apple Card. In the conversation, he discusses the evolution of fintech, highlighting the challenges of building financial products, the impact of stablecoins on the financial system, and the role of AI in enhancing fintech services. (02:02:50) - Joseph Cass, Senior Director of Market Outreach for EMEA at S&P Global Ratings, discusses his role in engaging with major buy-side investors and how he initiated the "Leaders" podcast to facilitate conversations with senior figures in finance. He shares experiences from interviews with notable financiers like Ken Griffin and Ray Dalio, highlighting their insights and personal stories. Additionally, Cass touches on the evolving focus of investors from ESG considerations to broader sustainability topics. (02:19:29) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, June 16th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. It's Lamont. And one of our absolute boys, I've never met him in person, but he's a legend. DHH is in the race. I mean, race is over, but still, we will, we will have him on the show soon to break it down. I'm very excited for that. In other news, the Wall Street Journal is in absolute turmoil over Iran and Israel. There is a new war in the Middle East. Israel races to reshape region with few checks. Iran, Israel put energy sector into new peril. I'm thinking of having somebody on the show to talk about oil markets. I think that might be an interesting downstream thing. We're not a deeply political show, but obviously there's defense tech angles.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  We monitor situations.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  We do monitor situations.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  We've been known to monitor situations.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  We've been watching the poly markets. There's a lot going on there.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  And if you're just getting into situations, this one is a good one to start.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  You think this is the good first situation?

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty intense.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  I don't, I would completely disagree with that. Of all the situations that you could start off with, if you're getting into monitoring, this, this is for advanced monitors, in my opinion.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  For sure, but you know, get, throw yourself into the deep end.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess, yeah, it is a bit of a deep end situation.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  Sink or swim, you know?

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is sink or swim with this situation, but fortunately we have poly market where you can monitor all of the situations.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  How is poly market tracking US odds of, of actually?

• 1:35John Coogan?

  No action. I think that is a market. There's a number, there's a number of, of interesting poly markets. I, I had them pulled up yesterday.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's hovering at 32% on US military action against Iran before July. If this starts spiking, I think we should all start paying attention because all of, I think many of the.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Actions from Israel to date, polymarkets on them would just start going insane.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Well, the Journal's covering it left and right. There's some other stories in here. Investors are wary of the roller coaster roof still in the kangaroo market. Some move into cash or foreign companies to avoid market volatility. Very, very tricky. There's also an interesting article somewhere in the Journal I was reading about, which was that politics is increasingly dividing the portfolios of investors.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  So Democrats are more likely to perceive that the market will degrade, that the economy will do poorly, and Republicans are more likely to assume that the market will do well. And so they're like, basically, right now, Republicans, because the Republicans are in the White House, are more bullish, which is very interesting. And, you know, there's an old adage that like, you should keep politics out of your portfolio, because like, the market doesn't care about politics very often.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  Do things that make money.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. That was interesting.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Bucko Capital bloke had a fun post from over the weekend. Oops, mic down, mic down. On Saturday, he posted, "The start of World War III is bullish because we now have a new positive catalyst, the eventual end of World War III." And he posted, he quoted that this morning and said LOL, because there was some positive news.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  That the World War III might be over.

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ron was signaling that, allegedly signaling that they were interested in figuring out some type of ceasefire, but...

• 3:33John Coogan?

  It would be good. We certainly hope for a ceasefire. We hope for, you know, positive collaboration between all of, all parties in the global economy. And, I mean, there are some interesting developments. There's, there's the potential of a new trade deal. There's the potential of a new geopolitical order. You're really struggling with that, Mike. You gotta crank that thing. This is a grip strength task. This is why the Lone Ranger sent us those grip strength.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  The Grippers, Jordy's really

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Set an awkward angle. We'll see how long this works.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. But back in the tech world, there is some more exciting, more positive news. Meta Oakleys are coming. This, Sheil says this makes sense. Luxottica owns both Oakley and Ray-Ban, and Meta is reportedly investing $5 billion for a 4% stake. Luxottica is a fascinating business story. The founder, Leo Del Vecchio's family, still owns 1/3. The guy was an orphan who became a metalworker, making parts for glasses, ultimately becoming the largest listed company in Italy.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  It is really interesting to think about how, if Meta can basically corner all of the most iconic, all of the most iconic frames, which they can do through Luxottica, if they do figure out some type of exclusive over time, through that investment and

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Does Luxottica just own all the major brands?

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  They basically own everything.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Oliver Peoples and everything.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Every time you buy sunglasses, you think you're buying, you know, some unique brand or heritage, Luxottica.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  It's interesting. We should, we should dig more into that company because they don't own all the retail.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  There's a lot of like Sunglass Hut retail stuff going on.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they are big glasses, and that created the opportunity for Warby Parker.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  Because they realized there was, you know, basically this entire, you know, Luxottica could verticalize from brand to production, to the actual medical side as well.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  There's been some wild rumors circulating about Ramp, but we will, we will have more on that front this week, including some special guests.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Shalom says he can't stop thinking about the Coinbase-sponsored military parade.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it really was an iconic image, you know, the stage at the parade, and then coin brought to you by the US Army, brought to you by Coinbase. Usually you see the Army sponsoring things like UFC and things like that for recruiting purposes. You don't typically see them

• 6:10John Coogan?

  The other way around.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Recruiting sponsors.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  And you were saying off air this morning, it's kind of Feels in some way counter to crypto's origins and roots as a sort of libertarian technology.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Most Bitcoiners would say, I'm accruing Bitcoin so that you cannot tax me. And what can you not do as soon as you stop taxing me? You can't pay for the military.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  But of course, in the libertarian extreme, there are still like private military forces, I suppose, and different structures. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not super into all the, all the crazy crypto.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Coinbase could.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Hardcore libertarian. But Coinbase is not, that's not the median Coinbase customer anymore. Like the median Coinbase customer is just like an American investor who wants to diversify. And that's very much a lot.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  For me, it was interesting because there had been so much, you know, it was the 250th anniversary of the army, right? There'd been so much excitement and noise around it. And then, yeah, I guess credit for Coinbase, to Coinbase to getting the presenting sponsor slot. But you'd think, given how much we spend on our military, they could just say, no sponsors on the 250th birthday.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  That is odd.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  That'd be like, you know, there's certain friends of mine that I would, I would maybe want their birthday party to be sponsored by Ramp. But it's this, you know, different context.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is funny.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  David Senra's birthday, when we celebrate his birthday, it should be sponsored by Ramp.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  It is, yeah, yeah, it is funny. Like, why, why, why do, like, what did the Coinbase sponsorship pay for? I guess it takes money out of, it doesn't, it takes the burden off the taxpayer, which is certainly nice. I mean, I like the idea of paying less taxes for military parades. I guess that's good.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  They should just start putting ads on your, on your ID card.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  They should put ads on the military uniforms.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Your California ID.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  You should be able to see a Nimitz class.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Brought to you by Verizon.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  You know, you should be able to see a massive aircraft carrier just engraved with corporate logos everywhere.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Full NASCAR livery.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  Full NASCAR livery on the submarine, on the Triton class.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  This thing doesn't get photographed much.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  But when it does.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  But when it does.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  You know it's brought to you by.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  The Nimitz class carrier, you know, all the, you'd basically get all this free marketing through the open source intel accounts.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, yeah.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  That they're just posting pictures.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  And, I mean, a lot of those military assets, they go into the next Transformers movie. They go into the next Top Gun movie. When you see Tom Cruise step into the F-16 or the F-35, and it's got the Exxon Mobil and McDonald's logos on it, boom.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Fire me up.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, fire me up.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  Fire me up.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  They're not taking that out in post.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  I think we got a plan.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Someone listening, this is your life's work.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  This is.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Bring out of home advertising to the military.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's ad quick.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  Maybe it's ad quick.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. I have a request for startups. Maybe, maybe we can get Tyler to work on this. We didn't give him a task today, but we do have Tyler on the intern cam. Okay, so.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to disappoint.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Here's my pitch. You know, you studied physics, so you might have to recruit some biologists for this. But the story, we were thinking about having him day trade. So that's why he's got a day trading background, but we didn't really get that through. So anyway, here's my request for startups.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Coming soon.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  So the story of GLP-1 glucagon like peptide one, I think that's what it stands for. Ozempic, Wegovy, Monjaro, Wegovy?

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  That's the proper pronunciation.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Ozempic, these, these, these fantastic weight loss drugs that are absolutely blockbusters. We have some more news about the patent, which was very funny this weekend. You might've seen.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  The whole origin story of GLP-1s is that the Gila monster is a animal that doesn't have to eat very much. And they figured out that if they extracted the saliva or venom, they could distill something from that. And that was kind of the, the inciting research point to go in, actually understand GLP-1s and then ultimately create.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  Because the Gila monster has some weird way that it eats. It has like a very unique metabolism.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. And so my request for startups is to do the same thing, but with the saliva of a golden retriever. So I want to take the saliva from the golden retriever, extract that and create a GLP-1 type shot. That when you, when injected would make you friendlier.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  So we're trying to up, upregulate friendliness.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Basically productizing golden retriever mode.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So Tyler, I would love a deep dive. We'll check in with you afterwards. I want to, I want to understand, you know, what it takes to build the golden retriever. The golden retriever mindset.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  People are always talking about bio biohacking. Oh, I want to be more focused. I want to be stronger. I want to have more energy. I want to sleep better.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  What about friendlier? What about hotter? What about dumber?

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  These are the tenets.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  Chasing balls.

• 11:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. Relentlessness. So figure it out. Figure out who the top biotechnologists we could possibly talk to on the show to see if this is feasible. Figure out what it'll take and give us a breakdown at the end of the show. Speaking of the show, we have a fantastic lineup. We have John Jumper from Google DeepMind coming on. Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures. We're going to debate the whole bunch of topics in late-stage, growth-stage venture with him. We have Aaron from Lightspeed and we have Joseph Cass from S and P.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  People just want to see Aaron's name in their deck. Right? You remember that quote?

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  This was in the 2021 era. He had he had sold his company to Apple. It became the Apple Card. And

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, basically, people would just come to him and be like, I can I give you half a point in my company? And they just wanted to see his name in their deck. They thought it would give him an edge. And I'm sure in many cases it did, but I'm excited to have him on later today.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Very excited. Gary Tan has some news. Pano raised a $44 million Series B for their wildfire early detection, eyes in the sky startup. Wildfires have only become more fierce over the years and now we have software, computer vision and smart cameras to stop them before they become giant and unstoppable. Fantastic. I mean, a lot of companies were started out of the last batch of wildfires where the sky turned orange in San Francisco. I think that was 2020, 2021, something like that. And it's good to see that someone's been grinding on this. I haven't even heard of this company before. There was that other map company.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  There must be a Y C company.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  There must be. Or maybe Gary's just spreading the love across Silicon Valley.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Or yeah, it's possible Gary did it pre-.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Potentially. But obviously very exciting. We should have the founder on.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  This makes sense. There you've seen the footage of after the Palisades fire. They were re-watching this like ultra-low res footage, like trying to figure out where it started. It's all these like sort of research labs, I think, that maintain camera footage. Put it in 4K. Let's get it in 4K.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Let's get in 4K.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's let people kind of better understand what's actually happening.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Synthetic aperture radar going. Uh, let's do a lot of different things. I mean, this is, this is one of those things where like Anduril for wildfires might not be an Anduril on the Anduril roadmap immediately. They, they, they were testing wildfire, the wildfire fighting tank and stuff, but they've been, Anduril's been so focused on the military specifically now because they really have a, an, like an edge there with their DC.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about the tank history.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Oh, you didn't know that?

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  They wanted to make a tank to fight fires.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Yes, an autonomous tank that could go fight wildfires. They brought in Jamie Heineman from the Mythbusters to help work on it. They built it and then I talked to Palmer about it and he said that there was a lot of pushback around like job displacement and unions, even though they would need plenty of people to like man these and like manage them. But, but it was, it was a very complex situation to get through. And so they wound up scrapping that and it's probably good that they did because now they're in submarines and fury and Roadrunner and they have like major, major contracts and major, major, uh, like serious jobs to address directly within the DOD. And so just focusing on the DOD.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Once they want to start experimenting with hubris, they can expand into a category like wildfires, right?

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  For now, they seem laser focused.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  It's obviously adjacent, but this feels like something where, you know, it's like flock safety. Like, yes, it's like Anduril adjacent, but it's kind of its own thing. And so you're not just going to get rolled immediately. So, uh, congrats to the Pano team. We'd love to chat with you and, uh, help protect our houses because we live in Pasadena and Malibu and we are subject to wildfires all the time. Uh, anyway, if you also want to protect yourself from risk, go to vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk and 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. Um, okay, JD Ross.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  Vanta.com.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Co-founder of Open Door, I believe. Um, I've chatted with him a few times. Um, he says, I couldn't find a single notable founder with a degree focused in entrepreneurship. I expected at least one outlier, given the number of undergrad programs, but no, zero. Interesting. Did you study entrepreneurship? What'd you study?

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  What's this comment from an account you muted?

• 15:22John Coogan?

  This is, this is something we can't click, so I can't even show you.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  We'll never know. I guess we'll never know.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  This is the JD Vance thing, when he muted me and Miles John.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I wonder how many actual undergrad programs there are. How many undergrad?

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Entrepreneurship programs? It's just hard because like so much about entrepreneurship is go and become an expert in computer science or

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  There's more than 130 colleges.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Like, look at, look at the story of, of TJ Parker. It's like, he became a pharmacist and then he was uniquely suited to build a company around that, PillPack. And you, you, like, just starting with entrepreneurship and then you have to go learn something about a particular industry that you want to disrupt is much, much harder, in my opinion.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In many ways, YC is the undergrad program for

• 16:12John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  venture-backed entrepreneurship.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  I agree. Yeah. So unnecessary, I'd say. Wind him down.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Take all the entrepreneurs and start teaching them art history. They'll be more successful.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  That's how you get a real edge in the, in the new economy.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, you have a nice post here.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Oh, this is fantastic. Aiden Burke, putting some positivity on the timeline. August Rooding has such a kind, intelligent eye. And it's a picture of a beautiful horse.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  Really does.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  And wouldn't you agree? Such a kind, intelligent eye.

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  Great muscular development, vascularity on

• 16:49John Coogan?

  This is a fantastic horse.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  August as well.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yes. If you go to the next slide, there's a close-up of this horse.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  We gotta check with, with the, the building managers and see if we can have mini horses on the property. Cause it would be absolutely fantastic if we just had it.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to replace the soundboard. Like, like you have the gong sound on the soundboard, but then we have a physical gong.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  We have the horse sound. What if we could just say, here, throw him a carrot and he'll neigh for us on, on command.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  A mic'd up horse.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Mic'd up horse.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, those like proper headphones?

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  And we're just playing it like pasture meditation tracks and then it just, throw him a carrot.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Be great.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Uh, Ben, actually look into this. It's important.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Can we get a horse?

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Can we get, we should be at, at least like, set up a petting zoo. Yeah, it's, it's, keep it under five horsepower.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Hey, we're looking for

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Five thoroughbreds.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Hey, we're interested in, uh, in increasing our transportation. We're, just so you know, like, it'll be a very low horsepower solution.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Really one horsepower.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Won't take up more than a single parking spot.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  So we don't need any more parking or anything like that.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Is that okay, guys? They approve it and we get this beautiful horse. It's wonderful.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  The founding engineer meme is going, continues to go wild. Luke Metrow chimes in, says, "These founding engineer memes are about to become a five alarm fire meme for seed stage startup recruiting. Some enterprising VC content flack needs to figure out some counter programming."

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so the meme is real. Founding engineers get about, they take on almost all the risk. They get none of the sort of status of being a venture backed founder, even though they're taking on that similar level of risk. And they obviously get a fraction of the economics. Let's say the founding engineer gets one to five points, sometimes less than that, but maybe that's a good range. And so it is, it is sort of painful. At the same time, there's a lot of people who would be a 10 out of 10 founding engineer. That would be a six out of 10 founder.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Agreed.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  And six out of 10 founders don't build billion dollar companies. And so a lot of people are actually, here's the counter programming for you, Luke Metrow. A lot of people are just much better suited to go and crush it in a role and work on, work under somebody who is, you know, truly 10 out of 10. And I would say it's much better over, over a five year period, much better to be a founding engineer at a, at a, you know, significantly, you know, culturally, you know, significant generational company than it is to be a six out of 10 founder. And, you know, just, you probably, that doesn't really, doesn't really get you that far.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  It's all, it's all that like Naval thing about like playing status games. Like titles don't actually matter. What matters is equity and control and return and distributions and secondary and actual financial outcome. And so you should just take, yeah, I was, I was intern. I don't care. The title doesn't matter, but I got, I made a lot of money. And so I was able to go on Bezel and get a fantastic Richard Mill.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  And everyone's like, oh yeah, he must've been early because he's got a hitter.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  He's got an absolute hitter.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  He's got a hitter.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  He's got a condo on his wrist, John.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  He's got a condo on his wrist, exactly. But, but if someone's pitching you, hey, hey, come be a founding engineer. Uh, you know, you're, you're, you're basically a founder. Be like, cool. Give me a board seat. Give me a board seat. I'll take that title, but I also want a, a full board seat. Irrevocable.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  First board meeting, pull the, pull the lead VC to the side afterwards and say, look, I mean, what's going on here? Let's get real. Let's get real. I should be in that seat.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  I should be in that seat immediately.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  We have the votes. Let's do this.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Immediate hostile takeover. Day one of being a founding engineer.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Founding engineers, you know, they, they go through a lot. At times it should be okay if, if they get a little unfriendly. Founder unfriendly.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  I mean, at the same time, like it is nice to throw someone a title that signals like, oh yeah, you were here from day one. You were, you were, you were on the founding team. You were on that initial build out of the company. And so, uh, just you can like signal that forever. Instead of needing to say it explicitly in addition to like, I was, you know, senior software engineer. And by the way, I was early, but still people can put that together by the years.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The founding title means, uh, my last angel investment was into a company that, uh, the guy was on the founding team of a company that scaled. And, and he was there from $0 pre-launch to $50 million run rate. And that means a lot to me because he saw the stages of iteration to product market fit, early scaling, hiring, all that stuff. Um, and, uh, so yeah, it does mean something and can be incredibly valuable.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Well, if you're scaling, you should get on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Uh, and they have linear for agents. Go check it out.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  If you're building a technology company and you don't use linear, you're out of your mind.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  We gotta call the board.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna call the, we're gonna contact your board. We find out that you're building a technology company and you don't use linear.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Expect.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  We're gonna have the VCs on the show.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe flag to your.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  You know, we talked to a lot of venture capitalists, probably some of them are on your board. We're gonna pull them to the side and say, what's going on? We need, we need new leadership. We're normally against firing founders, but this is the one exception.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  This is an exception.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  An exception to every rule, and this is the exception. Have you seen this company Popmart?

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  I have not.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  It is insane. Okay, so they have kind of like quietly blown up to, it's this Chinese company, toy company, basically, and they, they're worth like 20 or 40 billion dollars or something.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Are they public?

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Decacorn, yeah, public on the Hong Kong Exchange. And it's fascinating.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  They always let the companies that aren't critical to national security go public.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  And then the ones like Huawei, for some reason.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  But this company is fascinating because, so my co-founder at Lucy and Soylent, in high school, we had this economics class. And for the economics class, you would have to try and make as much money as possible. That was like your class project. And so the classic thing people would do is they'd like, go get a bunch of like Chipotle burritos and then like resell them. So they'd buy them for like six bucks or whatever, and then resell them for like 20.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Different era.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Different era.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna make me shed a tear.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  I know, it's six dollars.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Six dollar.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  Something like that. But they do like the family plan, the big one, then divide it up. It was like a very basic, just like reselling of something, like seeing like the arbitrage of what the work, right?

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  All business, right?

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  You just make something for one price and you sell it.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  So that was kind of like the default that people would do, would just like buy one thing and try and resell it on campus where you couldn't get it. But in, but his project was, he sold, he auctioned off a mystery box. And so he had, he had this mystery box and it was like wrapped, and he would hold it up at like the class meetings, like the assemblies, and say like, hey, we're auctioning off this, and I remember all the new consoles were coming out, like there was the Nintendo Wii and the PS3 were both coming out at this time. And so they would make, the team behind this would make all these like allusions to like, maybe there's a PlayStation inside. So it'd be like, like, we think you'll love it. Like,

• 24:23John Coogan?

  PS, three of us will be in the courtyard selling tickets later. Just like wink, wink, nod, nod. And so the meme became like, oh, there's gonna be like something crazy. It'll probably have like a $400 value. Like you can, you could buy a ticket for just a dollar.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  You can buy multiple tickets, too.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Buy multiple tickets. So a bunch of people bought like a lot of tickets. So they made like a couple thousand dollars. And, and so they would have made a decent margin on if they'd actually given away like a PlayStation, uh, but it was just a bundle of firewood inside and a book on how to manage your money. Like, don't make, don't make financial mistakes.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  A bundle of firewood?

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, a bundle of firewood to give it some like heft. So when you shook it, you would be like, oh, it's like heavy.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Wow.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  It was, it was fantastic. Yeah. But, but it, but it did, it did raise these like moral questions about like, you know, is this taking advantage?

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised they didn't get class action. Like, we are taking this to the California lottery board.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  I think they might have refunded everyone. It was like more of a prank than anything else. But what's funny is that, is that, uh, when I moved to Silicon Valley and we were first talking about starting businesses, we were like, maybe we should do like a mystery box company. Like, there was something there. Like, mystery boxes are, are, are like, you know, this interesting category of like, you know, it's, it's kind of like gambling, but it's like, and it's physical, it's like regulated differently. And this company, Popmart, has made like $20 billion selling mystery boxes. And so the way it works is, is you go and you buy their drops of these different toys, and there's different varieties. The same dynamics as like opening a, opening a pack of Pokemon cards. But it's become, it's become like absolutely, uh, massive vanity fairs reporting on it. Uh, this woman Lisa,

• 25:54John Coogan?

  who I assume is a celebrity of some sort, is saying, I'm obsessed. And, and it's become like, you know, there's lines down the street for these different things. They trade at a premium. People trade them on eBay and, and different, uh, you know, different like StockX type websites.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Um, and it's this like hilarious, uh, dynamic. But, uh, you know, at the end of the day, it's just like, it's just like stuffed animal toys. But they're making so much money.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Pick one thing and take it more seriously than anyone else.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  That's exactly what they did. So the stock's up like 12, 1200% this year, something like that. Absolutely ripping. Absolutely ripping. Anyway.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  I'm sure they have to pay, pay sales tax on all of that stuff.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Of course they do, John.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  And they should be on numeral. Go to numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  If you're building SaaS or an e-commerce brand, get on numeral.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Get on numeral. Um, oh, this is, this is a perfect segue into our first guest from, uh, from DeepMind. Uh, Google's co-founder says AI performs best when you threaten it. And Amrit says, just like real employees. I don't know. This looks like some sort of gawker. Like, just looking at the font of this screenshot just reads like this is not a real article. Like, this is not a serious article. This is like clearly a quote taken out of, taken out of context. But, but I mean, everyone knows about prompt engineering. This is not new. This is, this is not, this is not a, like, a serious threat of any kind. It's more just like, you know, fun clickbait that obviously goes viral.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  If you want to play around with this, go to OpenAI or Claude and say, ChatGPT, make me a nine-figure ARR business. Don't make mistakes. And when it says, "Well, I'm actually just a language model," and I have to just start threatening it and, you know, see for yourself.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  It doesn't quite work that way. Anyway, our first guest is here. We have John Jumper from Google DeepMind. Welcome to the show, John. How are you doing?

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Boom, welcome.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  You just replaced me with Sergey.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah. Just, it was just completely random, but this, this silly article that looks like straight out of one of those clickbait websites that's just farming, farming attention constantly. But, but I mean, I'm sure we could go into this, but there's so much more interesting stuff to talk about in the DeepMind world. First, would you mind giving us an update? Where are you today? What's going on?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm at the Y Combinator AI Startup School. So, this is a pretty cool event. They've brought in a bunch of people with startups or looking to found them, and they have a, a great speakers list and, you know, just kind of a fun place to be. And so I'm backstage. I don't know if you can hear it.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, we can definitely hear a little bit.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Plant and everything else. It's a little bit of ambiance.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Are you giving a talk? Could you give us a little bit of background on you to kind of set the stage for the discussion?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm giving a talk. I think, I'm, well, I'm very certainly best known for work on AlphaFold, and really this is doing work in AI for science and trying to solve or really predict the results of really, really hard scientific experiments and do them with AI. And we've been quite successful, since I'm here. So, the system we've built and, you know, there's this experiment that biologists do to understand how the body works, really important to drug development, really important to a lot of other things. Give you an idea of difficulty. It takes something like a year to do. If you think of it in cost, it's something like $100,000. And we have an AI system

• 29:26Speaker 02

  We've trained that we'll do it in a couple of minutes to near-experimental, activated, openly available. And so we see it used in everything from designing vaccines to finding missing aspects of our own biology to everything else. And I think it's also this symbol of the promise that AI is going to solve these really hard problems that humans don't, right? There's a lot of really exciting work. And how do we do things that are really impressive examples of human capability, be it writing, be it making images. But there's this other aspect of how do we use AI to solve these really, really hard problems that if we want

• 30:08Speaker 02

  to solve it, we go do a year of experimental work. And that's what we at the science group at DeepMind work on. We try and say, how are we going to solve these really, really hard problems with AI? And sometimes it works spectacularly well.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Can you tell me about the initial project spec for AlphaFold? Was protein folding the most obvious choice? Or were there other targets that you thought were appropriate for deep learning? And how did that initial project kick off? Was it, let's go collect all the data, or let's just start experimenting on synthetic data? How did all this play out in the early stages?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  So, one thing to say is this problem had stood as a crown jewel of hard problems in science for a long time. Something like 50 years, that people had been trying to build some computer system any way you could. And I think it was kind of obvious also that this felt like a problem that AI could do something about. One answer was data, that in fact, at enormous effort and forethought and expense, scientists worldwide had basically put every structure ever solved into what's called the Protein Data Bank. And so, for about 50 years, people had collected this data set. The time we were doing our work was about 140,000 structures, but it represented essentially everything. Everyone had the same data.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  There was some thoughts, I think, early on about, oh, well, maybe this is a good problem for optimization and combinatorial search. That didn't really turn out to be how we solved it, but there was this thought that maybe it's kind of well-teed up for the methods that were looking incredibly powerful and are incredibly powerful in terms of AlphaGo and other search style methodology. And then I think also there was actually some grassroots, where there was a local group of people that were going into a hackathon at the company, kind of do whatever you want for a week, and literally Googling grand challenges in biology. And so that was the other way that this got started. And, you know, it was on the list.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  And all of these kind of came together. And I think what it turned out to be is we didn't at all solve it the way we thought we were going to do it. And there were many blind alleys. So we got into it possibly for some right reasons, some wrong reasons, but we stayed with it for a long time.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the state of the art of protein folding beforehand. You mentioned like a year and $100,000. But what did that look like in terms of the actual problem of like defining the structure of a protein based on a sequence of DNA? Is this, you know, an undergrad or a graduate student kind of pipetting stuff and putting it in a centrifuge? Like, I've seen some bio lab work, but try and walk me through actually what it looks like. Is it just using a different machine and pushing a button? What's driving the cost? Is it labor? Is it, you know, reagents and equipment and expendable things? Like, what was the state of the art at the time?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  So it's a very good question. And underlying it is a false premise.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  You have this premise that there is a series of steps

• 33:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  that you're going to execute. And, you know, you're going to, maybe it's a year long, but in January, I'm going to do this. At the end of January, I'm going to succeed at that. I'm going to go do the next.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  And, you know, you can think of it the same way as training an AI system. Isn't just, I want an AI system. Let me press the AI button and then go get coffee. It's really about research and iteration. And so for scientists going to solve the structure of a new protein. They have this huge numbers of steps and one, like the very first thing they have to do is make enough pure protein to study this thing. And I, you know, I did my PhD in biophysics and I remember sitting in a lab meeting where someone's for six months talked about how they couldn't even make their protein to get started on their experiments. And I remember it saying, if you, if you talk about protein, you know, making protein, you need one more lab meeting, I'm going to start talking about my compiler errors in the next meeting.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  But just like building and doing the work to get enough product to get started is enormous. And then you have to convince it to form this very regular crystal structure that is not at all natural. And no one really knows how to do this. They just have some ideas that maybe or maybe not work. And so they try many, many combinations and, you know, always look like one that really brought home the difficulty for me is one. Paper, I can't remember if we trained on it or evaluated on it. I think we evaluated. And I looked in the appendix of the paper and it said, after more than a year, crystals began to grow. You have to make crystals to solve a protein structure. And so they were literally trying things and probably that whole year they were trying things just to look in their cabinet, find out something from a year ago worked.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  And then after you do that, you go to a very large synchrotron and there are many other steps, but I would say the real answer is there's wide error bars and there's enormous amounts of experimentation and cleverness. And this is why one or a couple of protein structures can be a PhD. You can be doctor at the end of this.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Uh, talk to me about the timeline between.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  And I think that, that kind of was on, yeah.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about the timeline between AlphaGo and AlphaFold. And the lessons from the Lisa Dahl match, the move 37 moment and, and just the different paradigms. I mean, I remember like part of the beauty of learning Go is that it's this very defined system that can be simulated at extremely high speed. It's like kind of a prime environment for this reinforcement learning strategy. What was taken, what was different? And, and, and how did those timelines match up?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  So already coming out of least at all at a kind of company level, demos level, people were getting interested in this question. I can't remember exactly. I think it was 2016 when work really started. I actually joined slightly after that.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  The early work was in kind of can we use reinforcement learning and these models, these energy functions where you're trying to treat this as a minimization problem, just a really, really hard clever minimization problem. And I remember even like when I came in, it was kind of I had come from a protein background and there's a way in which this is obviously not the right idea in that we don't know the full, you know, God's energy function for proteins. We don't know this thing that if you just minimize it, we're sure that's the right answer. At least if we do, it's one of mechanics that we're not solving. And in fact, a big problem is that really you needed to solve the kind of how do we,

• 36:41Speaker 02

  how do we optimize this and what are the rules that we're optimizing under at the same time? And it turned out to be actually much more data-driven supervised learning. And what really started to make the difference is when we sat down and we, you know, the state of the art kind of before it was growing, there was progress was in using convolutional neural networks, a certain design. You can also try transformers. They're not really much better for this, but there were a lot of kind of people trying to take machine learning off the shelf and say, I'll just apply it. This is an application problem. And I think what we did really, really well, especially in AlphaFold 2, the one that really worked, is that we said, no, no, no, this is a machine learning research problem. How are we going to rebuild our kind of core components?

• 37:26Speaker 02

  How do we get inspired by the transformer but build something different in order to make a system that learned really well? And we can show, in fact, like an external group did a very careful experiment where they took AlphaFold 2 and they trained it on 1% of the available data and they found it more accurate than our AlphaFold 1 system. So even between 1 and 2, you can see what is 100-fold in data. And so in a certain sense, all we did was a lot of machine learning engineering that got us 100-fold better data efficiency than we used to be and in fact, used the exact same data as everyone else that we had used for AlphaFold 1.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  We're having some trouble.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Really in these core ideas that enabled it to learn much more. I think all of these, I think the ideas evolved and still I think, you know, there's room to play and there's all these different problems, but it did kind of presage how important learning directly from data has become in terms of this and then RL to optimize performance and achieve other objectives.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Okay, I want to talk about the reaction to AlphaFold in the public markets. I know you're not a public markets analyst, but I was very surprised that, you know, this 50-year age-old problem, this incredibly tough, you know, millennium challenge level problem is solved and I didn't see biotech stocks like really pop. And you'd think that if you took this cost out and this uncertainty out of the system, you would see benefits. And we're certainly seeing all sorts of companies tell stories about, oh, we're using large language models all over the place and their stocks pop. And so was that, in your mind, like a misunderstanding of the impact of this technology?

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Or was it more that, hey, this is just one step down the path to actually increase the output of biotechnology companies?

• 39:23Speaker 02

  I think it's a very interesting question. I should say, I'm not an equity analyst and I would actually be, after this podcast, you should go back and do the same experiment for CRISPR.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Undoubtedly a big moment in biology and I would be shocked if you saw a pop when the CRISPR paper hits.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  So there actually was a major pop during CRISPR, but it was more about like companies that were directly linked to it. So there were a number of companies that were trading on the back of, we will be commercializing CRISPR technology specifically. There weren't as many pure-play AlphaFold companies, if that makes sense. And so I don't think there was as much of a vehicle and some of these biotech companies, like they're just not traded on a cost basis, so maybe that was what was going on. It's like, yeah, okay, you're going to save a million dollars next year on protein folding.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  I think, I think you shouldn't think of it too narrowly and you want to be really careful. So if you think about it from the hundred thousand dollar point of view, um, then it should already be immediately obvious that a single protein structure wasn't the gap to a drug. A drug is about a billion dollars.

• 40:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  In R and D.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  And so you can already see that, that enorm, that many orders of magnitude. What I think AlphaFold, I think, but there are two more things that are really important. One is, and especially when AlphaFold first came out, it was unclear if we just solved a grand challenge or was this going to be a really practical system? And the practicality became much more apparent, especially in six months when it was available to everyone. I think, uh, you know, people started to say, wait a minute, it's actually solving my problems. Um, the other, and we see it here all the time from biotechs using it. I think when AlphaFold three came out, it was apparent that the same thing would describe protein small molecule binding. And of course, we haven't worked, uh, within Alphabet and isomorphic labs. It's really about how do we take these technologies and make them better?

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  And I think all of this is to say, one is to say really, you know, certainly one of the big drivers of cost for biotech is clinical trials. So if you want to increase the success rate, you need to understand biology better.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  I think there's been some really important work in terms of technologies, either using AlphaFold or downstream of it, such as the really incredible advances in protein design. And maybe not in the public markets, but if you look at private valuations from, everything from evolutionary scale to Zara to others, you've seen some really enormous funding rounds where certainly the startup community believes that this is going to hit a big, and I think you do see some effect in that you need more technologies on top of this. And it's not a single, a single problem, but I think it will also make a larger and larger difference. Of course, there are more problems to be solved.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  And without jumping into the valuation, but you also see these strong valuations on the companies very, you know, are trying to figure out how to use this and how to say kind of this door has been opened.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Do you think the-

• 42:27Speaker 02

  In terms of AI and biology and predictive biology.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that the FDA will be able to adapt? Do you think the FDA will be able to adapt quickly enough to advancements in research at the intersection of AI and biology? Like, is there anyone at the FDA that's AGI-pilled and is like, you know, thinking five, 10 years out?

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, how the underlying systems need to change. That's a very interesting question.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because what will be concerning is like if

• 42:57John Coogan?

  We have all this great technology and we can't implement it because of paperwork.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Actually, decrease ultimately decrease the cost of drug creation if all the costs are in trials.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a great question.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  So, one thing I'll say, and I'm outside my area of expertise and I don't have any contacts at the FDA, but let me say this version of it. These are tools that make predictions. You still check them. You don't check them by doing the exact same work as you were going to do otherwise, but you you check the consequences. You say, if this is true, then this change or this drug will have that effect. And what you ultimately look at in terms of safety and efficacy of drugs is real-world evidence. Now, you look at clinical trials and they have this 90-plus percent failure rate. So you think about that as being really one of the key drivers. It's not so much, are we just going to totally trust computation?

• 43:48Speaker 02

  We'll just do AI and because it says AI, we'll kind of believe it. It's going to be that we're going to do AI and then when we go in the lab, we're going to have a much better sense of what's really going on. We're going to have much better predictions and that's going to let us do the right experiment in the first trial or the third trial instead of the 100th trial. And I think that, and that doesn't necessarily require you to shift your standards of evidence for what is evidence of safety and efficacy so much as it's about, you know, you as researchers where you have a lot of freedom on how you choose the experiments you do. How do you choose the right ones that will advance you toward treating that disease?

• 44:25John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get back to it. I know it's a busy day over there at AI Startup School. We really appreciate you taking the time and we'd love to have you back to go way deeper when we have more time to dig into everything. So, thanks so much for joining.

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  Thanks a lot, John.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  It was a pleasure. Thank you.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  An absolute legend, an absolute dog.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  That's probably the first time he's been described that way.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yes, but it probably won't be the last.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Definitely won't be the last.

• 44:56John Coogan?

  It is, it is amazing. I mean, we should have gotten in, I'd love to go deeper into the way DeepMind has been reorged a bit. Google Brain has merged in. They're working on a lot of different stuff. And, and the science side and the research side is something that Google has been fantastic at for, for decades and continues to be. So, lots to dig in there. Anyway, let's, let's go back to the timeline and go through some posts. Marvin Van Hagen says, "Plane flying over Stanford graduation right now. Congrats, don't work for Elon. Twenty years after Steve's Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish commencement speech." So this is like a pro-Trump post?

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  They don't want you to work for Elon because they're on Trump's side?

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  They must be extremely MAGA-pilled.

• 45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, it isn't red.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  They must actually just be in favor of big government, you know, massive spending bills.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  That's probably what's going on there.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I always wonder with this type of thing. I mean, this is the, the person that, that's going to go through the effort to, I imagine they're there.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  I mean, you gotta give it up for them because they're doing some outdoor advertising.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  We love out of home. And so, you know, if you have a message to get out, regardless of or not, we, regardless of whether or not we agree with it, we always support out of home.

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  In support of free speech?

• 46:12John Coogan?

  And out of home advertising.

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Combined is, is kind of the sweet spot, so.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, so if you have a good message to send, throw it on, throw it on a plane.

• 46:22Jordi Hays?

  There was a big debate on the timeline over the weekend.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  I think this works better than, than skywriting, by the way. Skywriting is potentially overrated.

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  I, I think so.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  It just dissolves too fast.

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  And you can't really get a message out. But this, I mean, you look at this photo and if you go to the next slide, you'll see it's zoomed in. Like, it is incredibly legible.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  Incredibly legible. And so, um, yeah, yeah. We should have a competing plane there. Congrats. Please work for Elon. Yeah, Elon, where's your

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  Consider applying to roles at companies like SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  Just, just fly hundreds of planes.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  I have been seeing stuff on the timeline about like, oh, maybe there's like a talent exodus from some of the Elon companies to other companies.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  There was one post I saw.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  One post, you saw that? And I wonder how real that is, you know? Some of the stuff can be tracked.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  The thing is.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  And Elon's also laying people off, so like, who knows?

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and when you're at a scale like Tesla or any of these other companies, at any given point, there could, there's a bunch of people that are leaving to go work on other things.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like the

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  If one person meets three of them.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Microsoft laid off a thousand people and it's like 1% of the workforce.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  And it's like, not.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, the big debate over the weekend was between you and Ashley Vance.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  It was more of a collaboration than a debate.

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  More of a collaboration, but, but really trying to get to the bottom of an important story. Ashley said, why is the US not breeding tens of thousands of gorillas?

• 47:37John Coogan?

  I want to know what sparked that post for him. Like, like, why did he choose to post that? He's just got so gorilla-pilled on a, on a Sunday. Anyway, I said, I'm about to find out. I went to O3 Pro on Chajube, very funny, Tyler Cowen retweeted this, which I love. And there's some answers. Gorillas reproduce very slowly, so it would take a long time to scale up. Conservation programs, keep the population small on purpose. I don't like that. US zoos follow a coordinated plan called a Species Survival Plan, which aims to keep around 350 to 355 gorillas.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  The conservation program is against wide-scale mass breeding.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  That is crazy. This number's chosen to preserve genetic diversity over the long term. I feel like if you grew the population to 10,000, like boom, you would have, I guess, overbreeding leads to surplus gorillas with nowhere to go? What about to our studio?

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  We have a lot of space here.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  We have plenty of space. We'll take some gorillas. I think you could scale up the number of zoos as well. And then also, like, obviously put them to work, like, you know, horses, no one's like, oh, yeah, like. You know, too many horses. You can just ride them around. Everyone can have a horse. Everyone can get a gorilla. Yeah, they probably need to be domesticated.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  The acceleration of gorillas too could be great for city kind of transportation. You know, it's stop and go traffic. Gorillas are really quick.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe gorilla domestication is the next biotech project. Let's tech, check in with Tyler Cosgrove over on the intern cam. Get an update. Oh, okay. He's moved over to Big Pharma.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  He's a biotech company. Give us an update. What have you learned?

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, I'm still looking at, you know, various drugs.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  But I have found some interesting people I would like to talk to about this.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  Okay, hit us up.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  So the first one is of course Derek from MorePlatesMoreDates.com.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  So everyone, you know, famous, he makes YouTube videos about, you know, PEDs.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  I think his experience would be useful for, for one, just the increased attractiveness.

• 49:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that'd be big.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  You know, he has a long history of like pharmaceutical.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  Looks maxing.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Looks maxing.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  And also for like athleticism, right? If I'm gonna be chasing balls.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  I need to, you know, be stronger.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Those fast twitch muscles gotta be working overtime.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  So the next guy is Mike Henry. He's the CEO of BHP Group.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Which is the largest publicly trading mining company in the world.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  Why are we mining?

• 49:56Speaker 03

  We're mining because I need lead to make me dumber.

• 50:00John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Obviously, he should be an expert in lead. They're massive.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  So mix that in.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  You know, mining, mining company.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  So make it more of a cocktail than a one-shot drug. Got it. Okay.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  And then, so there I have increased, you know, I'm looking at maxing and I'm making me dumber.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  So the third one I need, well, I guess there's friendliness.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Friendliness.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  But also I need, I need to have more hair, obviously, right?

• 50:22John Coogan?

  More hair, okay.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  So I'm gonna talk to, I think it's Gunter Khan. He created minoxidil.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  He did?

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting. Is he alive?

• 50:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Well, we need an alive person.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Well, actually, he might. I'm not sure. I'll look into that.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  We'll have to figure that out. We need experts we can bring on the show.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so those are the three I've found so far. I'm gonna keep looking at.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  We need friendliness. That's the key one that I'm most worried about. That's the one that's the most, the elusive, the elusive drug for, for friendliness. And that's the one that we need. We see a lot of negativity on the timeline. We try and, we try and encourage people with the, what would your mother do ethos?

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  Imagine just being able to share.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  So friendly.

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  A link to them to say, hey.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Take this drug.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Injecting this once a week.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  You'll be friendlier on the timeline.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  Could make you, you know, an order of magnitude more friendly on the timeline.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  No more, no more aggressive quote tweets. No more clap backs. Those will be a thing of the past.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  I didn't actually know that golden retrievers are actually have pretty significant intelligence when comps to other dogs. They're the fourth most intelligent breed.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  Pretty good.

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  Behind border collies, poodles and german shepherds.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Narrative violation.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  Narrative violation.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  This is what you want. This is the guy who's on the left of the bell curve meme. That's where everyone thinks the golden retriever is, but the golden retriever is secretly the guy on the right.

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  But that's the beauty is that they're the same guy, you know?

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't feel the need to prove how intelligent.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  Because in the age of artificial intelligence, AI is going to increasingly push everyone who's trying to be the guy on the right into the midwitt territory.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  And so you want to just go full guy on the left, or at least have people expect that you're the guy on the left.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have a post from Bucko Capital.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Wait, really quickly, if you're breeding gorillas and you're going to try and sell these gorillas across the world, you're going to need Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your companies to the next level. Anyway.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  There's someone in the chat right now saying, Adio has a great UI. I would invest in them.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Adio.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  It's here for Adio.

• 52:21Jordi Hays?

  Get on there. You can check it out.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  Let's go over to Bucko Capital bloke. He says, Apple has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America. Wow. This is obviously.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So there's a entire paragraph here. The size and influence of Apple aren't properly understood in part because they are so difficult to fathom. How can it be, for instance, that demand from China's 1.4 billion people indirectly supports across all industries between 1 million and 2.6 million jobs in America, whereas by Tim Cook's estimate, Apple alone supports 5 million jobs in China, 3 million in manufacturing and another 1.8 million in app development. That upside down contrast boggles the mind. One super corporation has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is, that is wild. This is obviously from Apple in China. Fantastic book. We have the author on the show. And Tim Cook's been, or Tim Cook is quoted a bunch in the book. There's a ton of great scoops. I've been listening to the book a bunch and it's fantastic. There's a whole bunch of really interesting deep dives, some stuff you might know, but it's woven together in a very interesting way. Highly recommend going and picking up the book or the audiobook, Apple in China. Ben Thompson's been singing its praises as well. He had the author on his show. Did an interesting podcast with him and really dug in a layer deeper that I highly recommend going and listening to. Fascinating. And it'll be interesting to see how this affects.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  This could be, this could, Apple in China, I think, could be one of those books that becomes a reference point for DC policymakers in the same way that Chip War became kind of a playbook for the CHIPS Act and the 100 Year Marathon also became a kind of playbook for a renegotiation of the trade policy between the US and China. And so these books don't come along often, but when they do, give them a read. Make sure it's heavily, heavily annotated and highlighted. Anyway. If you want to invest in American companies, get on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com. What is this thing about Frontier Valley?

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I put this in there. I invited the founder, James, on the show. So Frontier Valley is a new special regulation district in SV that's larger than MoMA. Once approved, it will be America's epicenter for physical AI and deep tech innovation and will also be a template first, a template for robotics-first cities that can be replicated nationwide.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  What is going on here?

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  So this is in the East Bay.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  This is just like on top of an airport or something? Like where are they going to build this? Is this landfill? Like this, this looks amazing. It just seems like so ambitious. I don't know how they're going to pull this off.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I invited the founder on to learn more. I thought that it was at least, it reminded me about some of the stuff that California Forever is working on around shipbuilding. So anyways, we need more big, ambitious projects like this, and I hope they can figure out a way to pull this off.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, seems like it's getting steam.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Posting here from Reid Hoffman.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Reid Hoffman.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  Says, "Some AI industry leaders are predicting white collar blood baths. Even the most inspirational advice to new graduates lands like a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. Some thoughts on new grads and finding a job in the AI wave."

• 55:50John Coogan?

  Got to go into art history. It's the name of the game, man.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Huge opportunity to go into art history. Reid says, "What you really want is a dynamic career path, not a static one. Would it have made sense to internet proof one's career in 1997 or YouTube proof it in 2008? What, when new technology starts cresting, the best move is to surf that wave. This is where new grads can excel. College grads almost always enjoy an advantage over their senior leaders when it comes to adopting new technology. If you're a recent graduate, I urge you not to think in terms of AI proofing your career. Instead, AI optimize it."

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  I think that's a great, good framework.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  What do you think internet proofing one's career in 1997 would have been? Like, it's unfathomable because like, the internet rolled out so-

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Don't start a newspaper, print newspaper.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Okay, or don't go work for one, I guess, and instead go work for-

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  No, but it is, but the immediate takeaway I have here is, is you can be worried about job loss from AI and trying to pick the right job that's not going to be replaced, or you can proactively figure out how to leverage AI to be just vastly more efficient and productive.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  I'm just thinking about like, like internet proofing feels like, find a career that will not be disrupted by the internet. Or YouTube proofing means like, find an industry that will not be changed at all by the existence of YouTube. So, it's not about, okay, like, what was disrupted by YouTube? I mean, I guess potentially like linear advertising or linear TV and so-

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's still-

• 57:22John Coogan?

  But then there was still a huge boom. Like, if you went into reality TV in 2008, like, you did great, I imagine? But then also, there was like, kind of the death of Hollywood.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, the thing about, the thing about people that are entering startups or in the industry already- If you want to generate massive wealth and have massive impact and work at a company that becomes significant because of your participation, you have to work and oftentimes have to work in an industry that's experiencing rapid, rapid growth, right? And so joining traditional entertainment world or getting into the reality TV business when YouTube was taking off, probably not going to have that sort of ridiculous rapid growth.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  You know, maybe working for some creator or actually joining YouTube itself.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, certainly he's saying like, like, ride the wave, lean in. I'm just wondering about like, the idea of internet-proofing a career or YouTube-proofing or AI-proofing a career, it all feels the same. It's like, become a furniture maker or something, or become a plumber. They're all kind of the same sides. It's like, if you're a lawyer who's trying to internet-proof and says like, we're going to be the one law firm that doesn't use the internet, that would be a disaster. And it's like, it's kind of unthinkable and same thing with YouTube if you're working for like, in a marketing agency and you're like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna be the best at content that isn't relevant on YouTube. It would be very, very difficult. And so, yeah, I mean, I agree with that sentiment.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  It's interesting. But also just going to art history. Anyway, how'd you sleep last night? I put up some good numbers. Eighty-eight, seven hours, sixteen minutes, not quite as good as Sunday, where I got ninety-two, slept for almost nine hours, putting up generational numbers. I got an eighty-eight, did I beat you?

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  I got an eighty-six.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Let's go, let's go, two weeks in a row.

• 59:26Jordi Hays?

  Two weeks in a row.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  Get the pot five.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you an air horn for that.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Five-year warranty, thirty-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to eadsleep.com, use code TBPN. Speaking of Father's Day, Kendall.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Kenny Rose, "The best gift you can give your father today is just the space to speak for 20 minutes uninterrupted on any one of the various geopolitical issues he's been monitoring this week."

• 59:53John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic gift.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  Just give us, give us the tape.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  It's free to give, but it's priceless to receive.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  It is. It's fantastic. Well, we have Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the stream, Christian. How are you doing?

• 1:00:06Christian Garrett?

  Good. Good to see you guys. Glad to be here. We're at three sessions.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:12Christian Garrett?

  Certainly, I think the promise was five for a rocket.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  We gotta up these. We gotta.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing tomorrow? What are you doing Wednesday?

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  To be clear, I tried to book this like weeks ago and, you know, so.

• 1:00:22Christian Garrett?

  We're at two. Justin was on.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:25Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, we're gonna be in debt pretty soon.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  We're upping it. We're upping it.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, we got the space for it here. We're in the new studio.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  We definitely have the space.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  You can come by and hang in person.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  Andorol sent some Legos. We're getting to the physical stuff in the building slowly and surely. We have the big gong. Anyway, I want to have you on to talk about growth stage venture trends, LP dynamics, Bill Gurley's appearance on Invest Like the Best. Thought it'd be interesting to get your reaction to that. Let's kick it off with this Logan Bartlett post, though. First, I'll read it and I want your reaction. So Logan says, "Have had a few conversations with bankers and friends in private equity over the last few weeks, and it's kind of remarkable how orphaned most of these $1 to $10 billion horizontal software companies are right now. There will be some strategic acquisitions, i.e. Informatica, but few and far between as those acquirers are getting their own house

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  in order with AI. And some of these companies aren't just big enough, just aren't big enough to move the needle. And private equity players are all worried about the PluralSite situation where AI just takes a leap and steamrolls something. It seems..." A lot of them are just on the sidelines from buying a horizontal player. We're going to see some frustrated public shareholders with very little recourse other than mix up management. Weird times. So break it down for us. What's your reaction? How real is this? What's, what's correct about this? What's, what's maybe off?

• 1:01:47Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, no, Logan makes a great point and Logan's a great investor and, and he's, he's absolutely right. I think there's definitely going to be consolidation. It's just like you hit that, right? What price? For context, right? Like Asana trades at a Forex NTM multiple right now. They're forecasted to grow 8% this year with 1% free cash flow margins. That was a business that during COVID, right, was trading at like multiples, higher multiples than, than a ton of software businesses. Workday now is, is, is trades at a premium to Asana. Bill.com was once the highest multiple in software fintech, now trades at like a two and a half X.

• 1:02:27Christian Garrett?

  Multiple on top line, there's a ton of these companies that are real businesses, but they're not long-term compounders with power to grow margins.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:36Christian Garrett?

  And they're kind of stuck as point solutions. We at 137 heavily focused on durability when investing due to our focus on partnering with companies across the entire growth life cycle of a business. Right? So we want to be excited about continually holding and investing in a company 10, 20, 30 years from now. And I think venture is kind of realizing this dynamic here. There's a Michael Maboussin paper on what's called the competitive advantage period that I encourage a lot of people to go read. And it's focused on how companies end up competing and being publicly traded on average for about 10 years, 10 to 15 years. And then it ultimately ends up delisting or getting bought. And so you just kind of realize that, you know, there are businesses that you could be right on at one point in its life cycle.

• 1:03:19Christian Garrett?

  But then, you know, after 10 years, 15, 20 years, margins compress, growth slows, and the business ends up kind of with a very different story and moniker. And I think a lot of the ultimate winners within these categories. Front end software development, fintech, they're actually the bundles, right? The stories we're talking about are point solutions or companies at risk where growth's slowing down due to AI. I think the bundled winners are going to end up having the opportunity to consolidate, whether that's Figma across front end application development.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:51Christian Garrett?

  You have Ramp and Brax and Mercury within fintech. I think that's a real opportunity there, but the question's still going to be on what price, right?

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you explain to me a little bit more about the horizontal software companies versus vertical software companies? Toast is like the classic vertical example, I think, but these are kind of buzzwords. And I feel like when one gets hot, you're going to see a lot of CEOs be like, oh, we're in the hot category or vice versa. So how do you, how do you see the landscape of like horizontal versus vertical software? What are some examples? Can you explain that to me?

• 1:04:28Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, I mean, I think when looking at either, I think our investment framework is around powers and we look for sustainable competitive advantages. And so whether that's a vertical software business or a horizontal software business, the key thing is are they building these defensible notes, whether it's switching costs, whether there's network effects? Is there some durability to this business getting better the bigger it gets? And then a big key function of that is multi-product. And it is much easier for a bundled offering to end up going after these horizontal point solutions. Or it's much easier for a vertical software business to run that playbook, right? Of moving into financial products, launching more modules within that vertical to end up in that story and building more defensibility. If you end up kind of a single product company within the horizontal space,

• 1:05:12Christian Garrett?

  it does become very difficult to have a long-term kind of defensible story. So I think, you know, there's like inherent business model dynamics to pay attention to and the ability to go multi-product, right, is key. While the stories that we're talking about are companies that have multiple business lines with nine to 10 figures of ARR. These companies that haven't worked have a very different story.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, is an example there like what happened with Slack and Teams where Slack was kind of this point solution? Yes, it eventually got plugged into the Salesforce ecosystem, but a lot of Outlook users and Microsoft Exchange users were just like, we'll just add on Teams. And so that's more of the horizontal playbook. Because I'm wondering about that Asana example specifically, like is there a horizontal player that's eating them? Because when I think about what Asana does. Yes, it's a point solution, but it feels like something that I can't immediately think of. Oh, well, like if you're on the Microsoft stack, you'll just be using Microsoft's version of project management.

• 1:06:11John Coogan?

  But I'm sure they have one. So I don't know if there's more to say there about like what, what areas are most, what, what vertical areas are most fragile when it comes to a horizontal player coming in and kind of like eating their lunch?

• 1:06:27Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think it's areas where the software becomes or the product becomes commoditized.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:32Christian Garrett?

  Right? And so, you know, within fintech, you're seeing that with bill pay.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:36Christian Garrett?

  And within a SADA space, like I think most of front end software development is in that category. And you see Figma moving into more and more, uh, watching more and more products that kind of go after that. Um, and so, yeah, you just, you just kind of see like there's either a cap on how large the market actually is. So you sort of saturate the market, uh, whether that's based on kind of sector, um, or sizing of business, uh, or it's based on the actual kind of use case.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Christian Garrett?

  Or you end up running to just end up being a commoditized product, right? It's very easy for the marginal competitor to launch a competitive offering and get their own feature parity over time. So yeah, it's, there's not a particular formula, but, and it's always not easy, right? Especially in a growing market, it's very easy to extrapolate out how, you know, a market will grow, uh, in perpetuity. I mean, Bill Ackman has this good line around growth annuities, right? Not every business has that dynamic, right? Where they can continue to own a large percentage or some meaningful percentage of a continually growing market, and therefore they have durable growth. A lot of these things end up saturating out and their market size is actually much more constrained than investors anticipated. Uh, or they end up just getting commoditized and so it gets really hard and that leads to margin or pricing pressure or, uh, growth stalling.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you have a current thinking around like the, the Parker Conrad, like the compound startup idea of like, let's build? Like everything as fast as possible and get our, get our fingers in every single pie. Versus like the more methodical, like let's go dominate one point solution and then add on another and then add on another. We're certainly seeing that at like Ramp and we're seeing that at Figma with, you know, a really, really strong point solution. And then using that as a platform for the rest of the, of the horizontality to come into the business. I'm wondering, I'm wondering if there's like, is it too early to do like a postmortem on like the right time to go broad? I've always thought about the consumer neo banks, like there still hasn't been a consumer neo bank that I'm aware of.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Where I can go and get a checking account, a savings account, a public trading, like trade stocks, also a home mortgage, also an auto loan. Like those are five different point solution consumer fintech companies. And I was, and everyone will always say like, well, there's a lot of regulations, really hard to build all of them at once. And I was like, but five of them are being built in Y C, like every single batch. Like what if we just merged all those companies? Like you would have a compound consumer startup, but it didn't happen. And I'm always wondering like, like where is, is that like a unique thing to Parker? Or like, what is the full like postmortem on the idea of the compound startup?

• 1:09:05Christian Garrett?

  Yeah. I mean, I think the fundamentally it's, it's hard to pick a playbook for each, right? We've seen to your point, you know, Ripley that tries to move much faster and get to 50 plus percent feature parity. Before launching products within their bundle. And then you have services that are much more methodical, right? Different business like Gusto's focus on really small businesses, but Gusto has been very, very methodical on rolling out products. And they have, you know, two core businesses that are massive. And they are slowly kind of rolling out more and more products, but they're very methodical.

• 1:09:37Christian Garrett?

  I think the biggest key is right to win, right? And so in that case, as long as you have a core business that has a right to win. You give yourself the ability to think about how and what strategy you want to run for going multi-product. And also the other key is, I mentioned this feature parity point. For certain product offerings, I think future parity matters less in regards to how much depth you have within the product. And then for certain offerings, it matters a ton, right? And so you have to sort of think about, do we want to get something out quick as possible and cross sell? Or do we want to wait until we sort of have a real offering? And that also depends on what customer you're servicing. And SMB is very different than enterprise customer. You're going to take a lot more time to launch an enterprise-grade product. You know, if you're going after this bumbled opportunity. So it's not a particularly, it's not a clear answer.

• 1:10:22Christian Garrett?

  It definitely does depend, but these are the kind of the fun things to think about. When trying to invest in businesses over, you know, 10, 20-year timeframes. You have to walk through kind of the strategy and these stories and make bets on how you think it's going to play out. And founders obviously will inform those bets on their thoughts and will respond and iterate accordingly.

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, is there, is there enough capital out there to do a roll up of like Asana and Bill.com? Like some crazy take private of these two companies because like they are.

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's go buy two slow growing companies who were category leaders that are getting eaten alive.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  It's crazy enough to work.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  It might be crazy enough to work. If you're, if you're, if you can raise money for that roll up.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  You might be goaded.

• 1:11:08Christian Garrett?

  I mean, this is, this is private equity, right? But I mean, the real question is Logan had that, why haven't they bought them, right? Or why haven't these other companies, you know, decide to try to consolidate them or do a take private? Or merge or in the private markets? There really hasn't been as much consolidation in the category as I'm particularly excited about around front application development in fintech. Why is that? And I think this gets into a little bit, some of the points on Bill Gurley's podcast recently. But there are a lot of these companies where if you're cash flow positive, you're not a forced seller.

• 1:11:36Christian Garrett?

  And if you're still hold on or hung on a expensive price, then it's not very clear from the buyer's side. Why they should take all that dilution, especially if you believe that AI is going to lower the ceiling on, or increase the ceiling and sort of lower the floor a bit on development, product development. So in some sense, maybe you should just build, right? Like the buyer versus build dynamic is really interesting right now.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:01Christian Garrett?

  Given sort of the, the, the unlocks within AI on software development. And we're kind of pricing it for these companies. So it isn't clear what's going to happen with all these things. Do I think, you know, as interest rates drop, there's a lower cost of capital that maybe changes the calculus? But right now, a lot of these things are kind of stuck in a pause right now. And there hasn't been a lot of consolidation like I thought there was going to be. But I think that will change over time, mainly as a function of the cost of capital dropping.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Throughout this year, people have been calling 2025 the year of agents. I feel like that's come up quite a lot from a variety of different hosts. There seems to be this, or sorry, not hosts, but guests. There seems to be this collective belief that this is the year that we unlock power of agents. We've seen consumer agents like deep research. We see coding agents, things like that. My question from an investing standpoint is, is it seems like every, you know, scale up SaaS company is aware of the potential of agents and it's just launching their own agents. And given the distribution advantage they have,

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  how do you think about the investability of sort of net new agentic software when, when there's?

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  So like Intercom is a good example, right? They have hundreds of millions in ARR. They have, you know, a traditional SaaS offering and then they have Finn. And so.

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  Or even in like Bill Pay, it's like, is, is Bill Pay, is, is Bill.com more threatened by a startup? That's going to move much faster with code gen and generate something that's like, just has different economics? Or, or should they be more worried about like Microsoft spinning up a clone very quickly? Because Microsoft's able to move faster because of AI. Because we have this weird like arms race dynamic where, you know, everyone has access to AI, even though the startups might be the only ones that are slapping it on the front door and the, and the domain name. But in theory, like AI should improve everyone.

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if you're, if you're a CEO who started your company seven years ago.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  But you're very aware.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  And you have a hundred million of ARR. It's not like you just didn't check X. It's not like you, it's not like you haven't tried deep research or anything like that.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I want your reaction.

• 1:14:11Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, I, it's, it's a great point.

• 1:14:15Christian Garrett?

  I think that you're, you mentioned like Intercom is a good example, right? Where you have an incumbent that, you know, is one of the winners in a category. And you've seen them execute incredibly well, right? And launching agents in the, in the areas. I know Owen tweeted out, we're investors in Intercom for a long time now. And Owen tweeted out a bit about the performance of the company and how AI has been pretty transformative to them.

• 1:14:40Christian Garrett?

  I think you've seen other companies, you know, launch their, their, their own agents out to mixed degrees. I think Intercom's a really successful example. Salesforce has been mixed. And, uh, and then you have, you know, some other legacy incumbents that have done pretty well, actually, in launching their agents like ServiceNow, right? You've seen a ton of growth there.

• 1:14:57Christian Garrett?

  It's an interesting dynamic. I think there's a debate now as well where some of these companies are talking about gating access to their core data within this system of record. And I think, oh, that was great. Hello, Dorothy.

• 1:15:14Christian Garrett?

  And I think that's also gonna be another, a big one, right? If you believe in sort of extrapolate out the role that agents are gonna play, I think some of these companies are gonna look and try to maintain their kind of position as just a record and not give access to kind of some of the corridor line data. So that folks are gonna have to use their agent for certain workflows. And so this is also gonna be, I think, a continual debate on how people respond, where the value will accrue, and what does it look like to have agents in the workforce, right? Is it gonna be agents within sort of the gated ecosystem, within Databricks, within ServiceNow, within kind of your existing SaaS providers? Or are you gonna have this kind of abstraction layer above? And one agent to kind of, you know, that rules them all and abstracts and coordinates across them all?

• 1:15:58Christian Garrett?

  Very interesting to see how it all plays out.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Bill Gurley, Hot Takes, retired, we love retired venture capitalist, speaking freely.

• 1:16:08Christian Garrett?

  I hope to be there one day.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was your takeaway on his state of the venture markets? He's very worried about capital wars, the zombie unicorns, what's gonna happen with the deck of coins? What stuck out to you in his appearance?

• 1:16:25Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, I mean, I thought Bill Gurley stated the market was really good. He's a legend in industry, and I'm one of many who's learned a lot from him sharing his knowledge. He's absolutely right about the dynamics around the overhang from 2021, and how there are a thousand or so companies that are still hanging on to marks from 2021 in people's books. And that's still working its way through the system. He's absolutely right in the loss of the kind of singles or doubles that used to matter to funds. And that's just a function of the growth in fund sizing, right? So you're more incentivized to go for larger and larger outcomes and put more and more capital into these businesses, which is a, you know, real change from the beginnings of the industry as kind of a niche fledging industry decades ago. And I think we're going through the same growth dynamic that private equity went through,

• 1:17:09Christian Garrett?

  you know, in the 90s and 2000s as it became a really mature and large asset class. I agree with him that we're repeating the same mistakes from 2021 a little bit, and all these AI companies may end up zombie AI companies. With a ton of funding.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the challenge now is like, how do you avoid false positives? A team is in an interesting category. They get to 15 million of ARR in six months. And you're looking at the business and you're like, this team is incredibly talented. The company is growing at such an incredible clip. But then it's so easy for them to just kind of fall, you know, fall off a cliff and not actually break out into the, into the sort of type of company that really ends up mattering, but.

• 1:17:49Christian Garrett?

  Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And, and the one point that he did hit on, which I definitely would want to dive a bit more into is something that we talk a lot about. But he talked about this kind of category within those, you know, thousand plus unicorns. And he, he hit on Stripe for a bit and Databricks. There's a category of company now that I would say is probably like maybe 10 to 20 or so.

• 1:18:14Christian Garrett?

  That we call the semi-liquid category of technology company. It's really unique. I'd say our bet 15 years ago on the trend of companies staying private longer post-Facebook. Didn't even really appreciate or see the ultimate magnitude of this trend. If you look right now, these kind of top 10, 20 or so companies, we all know about them SpaceX to Stripe to Android. These companies would otherwise be large cap publicly traded companies. Some might even argue in the MAC seven if they were public. And had the cycle not changed, they probably majority of them would be public. Venture hasn't really seen this many companies stay private this long. At this kind of growth and profitability and magnitude. And it's actually being met with a matching liquidity profile as well.

• 1:18:58Christian Garrett?

  And so for context, right, like a bunch of these companies are doing billions to tens of billions of dollars in top line. And they're extremely profitable. They're all growing faster than what's in the public markets. Say within the bucket of companies I'm talking about, they're all growing 50 to 100%. Palantir is the fastest growing publicly traded software business and it's growing 30%. So the only way to access this kind of growth is in the private markets within these high growth technology businesses. And of that group, not only are they larger than many large cap businesses and growing faster. But they're also running a liquid market and that liquid market is extending to the founders and employees. As well as the investors in the LPs. So having these companies on your books is entirely different and almost like holding a public stock,

• 1:19:38Christian Garrett?

  given the recent see of the marks and liquidity around them. So it is almost entirely like a whole new sort of subset of company or whole new asset class within venture. We try to focus on concentrating here. I'm lucky to be major shareholders in a lot of these businesses, but it is definitely something that I think no one could have sort of forecasted.

• 1:19:56Christian Garrett?

  Is that usually companies, they stayed private longer, but they went public when they were still burning cash, when they were still early in the growth curve. Now you're looking at companies that are not just growing fast, but they're extremely profitable and given the liquidity around them, they kind of don't have a reason to go public. And that is a pretty interesting dynamic. And, you know, he talked about Stripe. I think there's a lot more of these companies, but it is still relatively small. It's I'd say 10 to 20.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like Stripe was the first private company that was really getting whispered around in like the centecorn conversation. And then we just blew past it with SpaceX and OpenAI, both in like the 300 plus billion range, heavily liquid. What is, what does that mean for the LP dynamic? Because if I'm paying two and 20 or something on holding something and maybe there's like, like an opportunity to go direct, is there some pressure to distribute those shares earlier since they are semi liquid? Is there anything that's changing on the LP side with these like ultra late stage, ultra mega cap centecorn private companies?

• 1:20:58Christian Garrett?

  I mean, I think back in the early point, if you're in these companies and you're in managers in these businesses, it's a different dynamic. I think if you're in the thousand unicorns, right? A lot of them are still holding on to marks and, and kind of it's unclear what's going to ultimately happen there. That creates a different dynamic. You know, we talk about the gap between TVPI and DPI. If a gap are in these companies that are extremely profitable, they're marking every six to 12 months because they're running tenders regularly. You know, the fundamentals, you have visibility into these companies, the pressure around liquidity is very different. In fact, they kind of want that part of the book to still keep compounding because it's where the growth is. In the public market is the growth is not there compared to here. And so.

• 1:21:41Christian Garrett?

  If you have the ability to be within a power law asset class and you're in the power law companies and they're performing this well and there's liquidity around them, we've actually seen less of a pressure, which has been kind of interesting. And when there is demand, it's very easy to facilitate it, right? That's why I mentioned like you're holding the stand in your book. You can close the gap between TVPI and DPI relatively easily. And so I think it's creating a different decision for the LPs within these funds. And we've seen increased demand to hold, increased demand to buy. And when there is demand to sell, you're able to facilitate that really easily as if you're holding a public stock. And once again, that's just very different than kind of what growth venture has experienced you know, over the previous decade plus.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, you mentioned a number of companies that are maybe public and cash flow positive. So there isn't that pressure to sell. What about those unicorns where they are burning money still? They're hanging on to those high marks. We've seen a couple of companies go out at haircuts to their all time high valuation. But it seems like historically, when companies get out at rational valuations, they're somewhat set up for success and they can go into kind of the next chapter of their lives and start growing. There's also this dynamic around M and A maybe being back on the menu. We saw the Wiz acquisition news, Scale, it just happened. There's been a few of these, Windsurf's been rumored. And so like the multi-billion dollar acquisitions seem to be happening.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  Linacon's out, but the administration isn't fully embracing M and A. It's not happening constantly, but how do you think all of this unwinds?

• 1:23:13Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, I think M and A will pick up. I think some companies are at the tail end of growing back into those marks.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:24Christian Garrett?

  And that just takes time, you know, some grew back within 12 to 24 months. Some it's taken 36 to 48 months. And then there's a large swath that are going to just have to take the pain and think about the business long term and re-mark. And there's some that's like super unclear. I don't know what percentage breakdown it is. I can probably confidently say the majority of that thousand are going to be in that sort of ladder bucket where it's very unclear what's going to happen to them.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:48Christian Garrett?

  And I don't think founders are going to want to operate zombie companies forever. Right. So at some point they're going to have to find a home and the investors are going to have to be willing to take the pain.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:58Christian Garrett?

  Um, but look, there's a lot of companies that grew back into the marks from 2021 over varying degrees of timeframe. You know, I mean, people forget there are companies in that top 10 to 20 bucket I mentioned that are growing fast and have very efficient profitable growth. And a bunch of them also had to go through 2021, right? And, and, and adjusting kind of their, their views on pricing. If you can compound pass it, great. If not, at some point you're going to have to make a decision whether it's remarking the business or selling at something that maybe doesn't clear path. And this is just a cycle. It's just taking a lot longer to work its way through.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Do you think these bigger fund sizes and these more aggressive revenue ramps and these more aggressive valuations getting up into, I mean, time to unicorn for companies that are anywhere near product market fit seems like it's like three to six months now. Is that putting downward pressure on like the, the, you know, low hundred million dollar tuck in acquisition that used to be just like such a win for everyone? It's like, yeah, they only raised 10 million. Everyone made money. The founders got, you know, liquid 10 million plus or something. Everyone, everyone's happy. And then they can kind of move on with whatever the next chapter is and they built something cool. It feels like maybe I'm just not hearing those because all the numbers, if it doesn't, if it doesn't, if it's not in the billions, no one's even breaking through. It's not even going viral.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  But it does feel like there's just, there's just less of those happening. And I'm wondering if it's more driven by, you know, just, hey, it's a lot of overhead to do post merger integration, even if we could get it approved. There's the FTC angle. There's also just the pricing angle. What do you think's driving like early stage M and A, uh, you know, the status of early stage M and A?

• 1:25:33Christian Garrett?

  I have so many things, right? I mean, one. To your point, you did have an administration that was a lot harder on M and A. And so I think Big Tech, who was the traditional buyer, you know, let's say, pre last, the last cycle.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm thinking about that VR company that Zuck bought that was like, it was VR Fitness. And it was like, you know, not a huge deal, not in the billions. And they were like, you're dominating, you're monopolizing VR Fitness. It's like, I don't know anyone who does VR Fitness.

• 1:25:57Christian Garrett?

  And Rubbo, right? I mean, like, it's like, the $100 million, a couple billion dollar tuck-in from Big Tech definitely got put on pause.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Christian Garrett?

  One factor. Another is pricing expectations. I mean, the growth of the asset class, the growth of funds, people funding these companies a little longer to keep pushing for product market fit. And therefore, you start looking at valuations that become less attractive, right? So that, you know, one to 300 million dollar tuck-in was based on a company at Series A that did their Series A at $50 million post, right? Or something like that. I mean, that world is gone, right? So now you've priced yourself out of an acquisition because you've raised too much money.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  It's a seed round now. $50 million post, like, it's a

• 1:26:35Christian Garrett?

  Exactly.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Watermelon seed, we're calling it.

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  You keep saying watermelon seed, but watermelon seeds are smaller than any other seeds. Like, the mango seed was a big

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Seed round.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  The mango has the biggest seed.

• 1:26:48Jordi Hays?

  We're beyond seeds now.

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:26:51Jordi Hays?

  It's just the whole fruit.

• 1:26:52Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's another, that's another dynamic. And so, yeah, I just think a lot of this is just structural.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:00Christian Garrett?

  Do I think it comes back? I think on the margins, but

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  It's on the founders. The founders have to say no to the higher valuations if they want to have that as an option. Because once, once you have 200 million, 200 million in the pref stack, it's like, yeah, you're not going to take $150 million aqua hire offer, acquisition offer, tuck-in. Like, it's just not going to happen. Jordy, I wanted you to ask about capital wars a little bit, if you had that question. But if you have something else, feel free to run to that.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, my issue with capital wars is they can have a negative effect on outcomes, but it sounds so awesome. You just want to get involved, right?

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Capital is the best.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  I, I had a, I mean, I don't know how much there is to say, or if you have any comments there, Christian, it just, it just feels like, yeah, in every category now, you have at least two big, fast-growing players, and then a couple multi-stage investors on each side that are just sort of Saying let's ride and just putting in hundreds of millions and and you know, I think Gurley had a front row seat to that with Uber and Lyft and how Lyft being funded as though they were, you know, really, really competitive with Uber.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Even though they there was pretty material differences.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  In the Uber example, it felt.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Uber for years and years.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  But it felt like Uber, it was worth it to fight the capital war because Uber won so hard and now trades at what 100x Lyft or something like that. So I don't know. Any, any thoughts on capital wars and where we are right now?

• 1:28:26Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, it's obviously it's an inefficiency in the market. It'd be much better if all the venture dollars that were funding R and D and sales and marketing were consolidated into one company or after one opportunity.

• 1:28:41Christian Garrett?

  Do I think also it's a sign of a vibrant ecosystem as well that there is that level of competition and there is that level of entrepreneurship where founders all want to go after some opportunities and sort of have their version or strategy around it? Absolutely. So, you know, like if the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said, I think it's great that there is the ability to have multiple businesses by the same opportunity. If you look in other ecosystems, when there's one dominant player, there's not 20 startups that get funding and go compete. And so although it's extremely inefficient and for as an investor perspective, you would like to see everyone just kind of backing the winner, assuming you're in the winner. At the same time, it's also a sign of a vibrant ecosystem where other, other sort of tech markets don't have this dynamic, right? And so.

• 1:29:28Christian Garrett?

  Overall, I think the biggest question, which is going to be very difficult, right, is when are founders willing to merge forces, right, and accept? And I think you've seen that happen here or there in cybersecurity and other categories.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  Pretty rare.

• 1:29:40Christian Garrett?

  So it's, it's a tall ask.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the ex PayPal merger, legendary, worked out really well.

• 1:29:47Christian Garrett?

  So.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  You roll the tape and you say, what, what would happen if some of the code gen companies merged and stuff?

• 1:29:53Christian Garrett?

  It has to happen. It 100% has to happen. And a lot of the companies pre-AI, or I mean, pre-AI, but the latest AI cycle from 2021. We've been talking about, they're also gonna have to go through this version.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Christian Garrett?

  But it's a tall ask and I think it's just taking a lot longer to work its way through.

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  I mean, Deal is already employing Rippling employees, so imagine if you merge those companies, just one payroll system for all the employees.

• 1:30:14Christian Garrett?

  That's true.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  What are you hoping?

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  On the cap table for both companies.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  What are you hoping to see out of robotics generally in the next 12 months? Feels like there's just a massive amount of excitement. Everybody's calling it the next. In some ways, like it feels like it could turn into another, even though a lot of robotics applications are kind of, you could bundle them into the American dynamism category broadly. Feels like it could turn into its own thing. And even today, an AI cleaning robot firm called Cardinal raises 800 million.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  And I'd never, I'd never heard of this company.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  I thought you were gonna say Gecko, because they raised money and they've been going after it for a while.

• 1:30:58Jordi Hays?

  This company Cardinal just raised 800 million.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  I guess SoftBank is participating.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:31:05Jordi Hays?

  But this is just one of many examples. I'm curious if you have any sort of expectations around the category. I'm sure you guys are in a lot of exciting companies already.

• 1:31:17Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, no, we haven't done much in the robotics space. I think for the, for the most part for us, there's kind of two things, like one, there's still, we like to think about things between R and D risk and engineering execution risk. And I think this still feels slightly on the R and D risk side, especially some of the humanoid robotics companies. And we're just not, I think there's better people would underwrite that. We're happy to invest once there's a bit more traction in the business as, you know, growth, growth, growth stays investors.

• 1:31:44Christian Garrett?

  In that, I think, you know, I'm not as close to a lot of these businesses, but I do think that, you know, for an LLM to build a world model. I think it's very difficult. I know there are people that are much closer that have really good arguments on either side and I walk away convinced believing their argument based on who the last person I talked to. And so, yeah, I think overall, we're just kind of staying back and paying attention to how this plays out. I think there's a ton of excitement for a lot of reasons. I do worry that this may be like the first or second wave of autonomous vehicles. We're like now we're actually living and then beginning to actually play out. And we may be right on the trend. I'm a big immersive computing believer. I read every sci fi book as a kid.

• 1:32:26Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, everyone read Kevin Kelly recursive books like 100% we believe in robotics and want to see this especially human robotics. I wonder if it's too early. And I wonder if the main use cases now are going to look more like industrial use cases or robotics that have been around in manufacturing kind of scaling out versus the kind of human robotics like you're seeing. But we'll see. But obviously, it's a huge opportunity. Unclear if that's going to play out this cycle or in a future cycle. But it's a cool world if it does. I'm very much rooting for these companies.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  Are you seeing a last question? Are you seeing a slowdown in activity yet? It's June 16.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, summer's coming. Sancho pays, poppin'. Sam Ritz, you're going.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you see rounds getting done this summer? Just because some of these companies are moving so quickly.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  I think all of Silicon Valley grinds to a halt personally, but we'll see. What do you think, Christian?

• 1:33:20Christian Garrett?

  I mean, ask me in August, what's going on? June, July, there's a lot going on still and there's fundraisers. We're busy and there'll be a lot of announcements coming out. But ask me in August.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll have you back on from wherever you're vacationing. Thank you so much for joining. This is fantastic.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  Two more to go. Two more to go. Let us know what you're doing tomorrow. We got a lot of space for an engine. We can even put the, we can put a plaque on it that's big enough. You know, if you zoom in, it says, you know, the 137.

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  Engine, that'd be great.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, great to see you.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

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

• 1:33:55Christian Garrett?

  God.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let's tell you about Figma. You heard Christian mention it on that in that interview. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. And we will invite our next guest into the studio, Aaron from Lightspeed Venture Partners, lsvp.com. Aaron, how you doing?

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  There he is. Round of applause.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. First appearance. Hopefully first of many.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  First of many, I would hope. Uh, how are the chickens? You said you were, you were, uh, you said you were looking after your chickens for a second before you joined.

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I had to go feed the chickens in the midday sun. Uh, they're good. They're good. We have a dozen new ones also.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  That's not a metaphor for seed stage bats?

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  No, no, unfortunately not.

• 1:34:41Speaker 05

  No, it's not what I call my founder. No, it's a chicken coop on, uh, on the property where I live, so.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:34:47Jordi Hays?

  Do you have a high-tech chicken coop or are you keeping it low-tech?

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  Pretty much all chicken coops are falling apart by nature. Uh, you just kinda like keep propping them up. Uh, it's like any early-stage investing. You just keep, keep the companies alive until they, they produce eggs.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, growing up, my, my dad was, was, uh, very into building hardware, software solutions for our chicken coop. So he would rig, uh, these sprinklers to like fill up a bucket at the right time that would pull up the gate using gravity and then it would dump out. So he should have productized it. There's now a bunch of chick, chicken tech companies. I don't know how they're doing.

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  Reaction to foxes in hen houses, uh, avoided all costs?

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  Uh, yes, scarecrows and fake, fake owls.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  They're, oh, fake owls, really?

• 1:35:32Speaker 05

  Decoys. Yeah, I'll send you a picture.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  This is good. Fox defenses. Defense tech for, for chicken coops. I love it.

• 1:35:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for hen houses. Uh, awesome, awesome to have you on it. Um, why don't, why don't, before we just start, uh, all ranting together? Give it, give us, uh, give, give a quick kinda overview of your background, what you're up to for the audience.

• 1:35:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, uh, well, before I sold out, uh, I was a founder myself, so I sat on the other side. Uh, I built a company called Final about a decade ago. That became, we sold it to Goldman Sachs and it became what is now the Apple Card. So I've done a lot of kinda deep fintech experience. How I met Jordy was I was angel investing and advising long ago, uh, in early-stage fintech. Um, and then now I'm an early-stage partner on the fintech team at Lightspeed. Um, and when I say sell, I, this is kinda what I wanna do with my life's work, uh, is help early founders and kinda be in the weeds, go zero one.

• 1:36:23Jordi Hays?

  Break up the chapters of fintech history in your mind. When you started Final, I'm sure you just got a lot of, did you get a lot of no's or were you built different? And people were like, yeah, I don't know about this fintech thing, but this makes sense.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  I got a lot, I got 100 no's, I think, when we were raising our Series A. It was kind of a slog. We were probably fintech 2.0, where 1.0 was like Bank Simple and like a few other of those people. Wave 2.0, Chime would be at the beginning of that. And then like Robinhood, we were kind of the same cohort of Robinhood. My company Final, ultimately, we kind of were going after the wrong target customer segment, where you just needed massive distribution, which is, turns out that Apple does have, especially for the right customer base. So it made sense to partner with Goldman and kind of sit inside there. But now we're sitting on almost Wave 4, right? Like, we're doing a lot of stablecoin stuff at Lightspeed.

• 1:37:22Speaker 05

  And I spent a lot of time, we hosted a stablecoin conference back in February. You look at all this stuff, and the stuff that you want to do in fintech now are just so much easier than it was back then. We were like a full, actual credit card, including line of credit. And it took two and a half years to launch that company, just because there hadn't been anyone since Wave 1, when it was a company called Revolution Money, had launched through Steve Case, and which is why they call it Revolution Capital. But that was Wave 1. And we had to go find people from that company to even figure out as a startup, how you bring a credit card to market. Now you can do it in nine months, if you...

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  I have a question about this. I was talking to Christian about this earlier. This idea of like, the compound startup, we've seen it in enterprise software. Why can't someone build all of the consumer fintech products in one kind of neo-bank? One-stop-shop. On day one, I sign up and I get a credit card, a checking account, a savings account, the ability to buy stocks and Bitcoin, a mortgage, and a car loan, all in one. Right now, that feels like six different startups, six different YC companies potentially. But if each one of those can now be built in nine months, why can't they all be built in parallel in nine months?

• 1:38:38Speaker 05

  We may see with kind of like all the AI stuff, but honestly, it's not a technology problem.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  Financial services products, the same building blocks that existed, I hate to say since the Medici's, but for a long time now. So we have product market fit. Consumers want access to credit, they want savings accounts, they want mortgages, they want car loans. What we don't have is product marketing fit. And so it's the same reason we've seen even Robin Hood with essentially infinite capital to go and acquire. It's taken them a long time to get the right product construct and aggregate all of those different products together. And then them, this is sort of the wealth, the wealth front MO when they tried to play this game. But it's just really hard to get that second, third, fourth, fifth attach rate to be high enough to make it work that you can ever make the economics work. Um, unless you're playing the bundling game, right?

• 1:39:23Speaker 05

  If you're built, which is what Robin Hood gold is, if you're playing Amazon Prime, which is my best customers, I want to just own their entire financial life. That's a path you can, you can take. But the, the answer is just product marketing fit. It's not product market fit. Financial services fundamentally have it. We need access to it, but you just, you know, getting the product right. Why would I, if I have trading at Robin Hood, go get a, a, a shittier checking account from them? Not that they have that, just from across the board. You just need to get the product construct right. And then you're also not going to go out and spend on CAC again, you're going to try to cross sell.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I'm just wondering about like the product marketing fit, this idea that like, if you went to customers with this idea of like, this is the drop in replacement for your Chase account, which you, you have your mortgage with and your car loan and your credit card with. And Chase owns a bunch of different stuff, but it's all one solution, one app for everything. Uh, maybe they're all kind of mediocre to start with, but then they all get better. It just, it's interesting that no one's been able to break through with that.

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  But I mean, I think, I think the challenge is you acquire a customer in their twenties and they just need a basic checking account, credit card and maybe.

• 1:40:29John Coogan?

  And it's hard to best class and everything, right? Because you're like, oh, I, I, I want the best possible price for my mortgage. And so unless you can win consistently in every single thing, you're going to get fragmentation.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  So I think it'd be helpful to, to talk through a couple of recent IPOs, Chime as well as Circle. They, they Chime, you know, obviously represents what you called, you know, fintech, uh, 2.0 started around the time that you guys started Final. Finally got out, you know, well below their 2021 marks, but at least they're out. And we now have proof points too, that some of these businesses can do well in the public markets. At least Dave, I think if you bought Dave at the bottom, like a year and a half ago or something, you'd be up like, you know, crazy multiples. So it's good to see that, you know, these sort of neo-banks can exist in the public markets. But why don't we start with Chime? What was your reaction?

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  It seems like a pretty solid outcome for, from my point of view.

• 1:41:26Speaker 05

  It's great for everyone, but I think Sequoia or DST did the last round. And even then, I think they're back pretty close to in the money. Ultimately, like liquidity is the future. The Chime IPO is fantastic for the rest of fintech. We will see compounding amounts of capital flow down, one to the early-stage funds, but even every single one of their employees over the last, I think it was 2012 company, 2011, over the last like 13 years, become angels in a meaningful way. And just see that there's room for product innovation. They also are a potential one of these aggregators, right? Chime now has an even bigger balance sheet and they can go and after and aggregate people. And maybe it's not the same customer for the multiple products, but they can get deeper into credit.

• 1:42:08Speaker 05

  They in theory could buy, they could have bought a Dave or a Moneyline and kind of get that sort of product under the hood. You know, when you look at like a Chase, a $750 billion company or banking, they have to do a lot of things to get to that market cap. So you have to do all of these disparate services that don't always necessarily have the same fundamental core systems underneath. So Chime now as an IPO shows one that fintech actually can have a deck of corn, you know, as a public company and in neo-banking. So we'll see a few others go. And we can also see that we can actually, and I trust Chris and Ryan to go out and do this because they know what they're doing, but they can go and become an aggregator and kind of do more. I think it'll also just drive a few more fintechs to go public because it's just, it forces

• 1:42:53Speaker 05

  you to be a mature business, get your economies of scale right. And in some sense, the Chime IPO, that it's below the top tick mark is probably just more a side effect of interest rates being higher and capital finding other sources as opposed to like this thing being worth whatever it's worth today, right? It's still up like 40% from the IPO, which seems pretty successful and you know, it's a pretty good win for the industry.

• 1:43:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive into Circle, is there, how are companies like Chime messaging around AI? It feels like the obvious application is just better customer service and maybe you can use agents to serve more customers and increase margins. Is that, and I'm sure they're applying it around fraud and other use cases, but in your mind, what are the exciting ways that a scaled fintech like Chime can actually apply this stuff?

• 1:43:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's where there's ever, in industry speak, and coming from credit cards, there are a lot of industry speak. It's where we can apply AI to arms and legs, right? Like, people are this massive cost. So customer service is one thing, but really, it's actually the back offices of a lot of these businesses. We've invested in a company that does dispute management and then like, as a professional service plus AI. And so you are able to give what is effectively an AI-powered BPO and do this for other companies. But for someone like Chime, you know, pre-IPO, they announced that they, I think they call it ChimeCore, like, they built their own processing stack and they kind of are getting off of Galileo, which is owned by SoFi slowly. AI enables kind of all of these macro tailwinds that just really give them better economies of scale as a bank to operate. Tier one is

• 1:44:36Speaker 05

  customer service. Tier two is then really like, you know, a bank is kind of like an iceberg. As a consumer, you only see above the water, but there's so much below the water to make these things really work. And that's where Chime is like able to actually, and all of these kind of scaled neo-banks and fintech companies are able to use AI to provide better services for their customers. You can almost think of it as like applied AI, right? They're not research companies, but they really can find places just to replace where they've thrown bodies at problems in the past.

• 1:45:06Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How are late-stage private market investors, as well as public market investors, looking at fintech businesses that get a large amount of their revenue from interest yield? It felt like when interest rates popped in late 2022 and, you know, have sort of stabilized, it felt like people were kind of looking around and being like, okay, a bunch of these businesses are generating a lot of revenue now, but everyone was discounting it so massively. Now, if you look at the macro, it seems like we potentially have entered into a new normal with just... Like you sort of moderate rates, is that, is that the way people are looking at it? Or, or is it still like a massive discount being applied?

• 1:45:49Speaker 05

  Uh, in the private markets, there's still a pretty big discount. Some people will give you credit and it, the reason you give someone credit is just because it lets you compound the business, right? Like you're essentially immediately profitable post Zerp ending because you just had all these deposits, it's going to flow to you and you're going to be able to make all of this interest revenue. And the best founders are now just compounding that into other business lines. Um, a- and using that to just bring kind of more of what you're talking about of all of these different services. We see it a little bit more in small business than we see in consumer, just because if you're pitching a consumer on a high interest rate, they're typically a pretty like hot deposit, they're going to move around and it's just not the best person to build against. Whereas a business, you're actually giving services and so you're able to charge them across the board.

• 1:46:33Speaker 05

  Um, but yeah, so there's a pretty big discount on it, but you know, it's not, it's not back to Zerp discount, which is I think what everyone was expecting initially. It's more akin to a two to three point rate, wherever the two you're to is, you know, it feels about right, just from where we're expecting the market to come back to.

• 1:46:48Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Uh, what was your reaction to Circle's IPO? We had Jeremy, the CEO on the show, which was great. They have a big, you know, bold vision. I think they've executed very, very well. Um, and at the same time, it was interesting to see the market reaction to stables versus how people initially reacted to the S1, which many people looked at it and said, this company isn't even actually, shouldn't actually go out, like they should just get acquired by, by Coinbase. And clearly there was an exceptional amount of demand, but I'm curious how you, how you saw, you kind of looked at the, the business pre and then post IPO?

• 1:47:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, pre IPO is the same kind of look, like all the revenue goes to Coinbase. And I know a bunch of Circle people, I know Jeremy, uh, he actually spoke at our conference, um, and, and have been able to get closer to them. But it, it's one of those that, you know, if you think about the macro trend of stable coins, and this isn't Circle specific, but you know, the biggest export in the US economy is the US dollar. Um, post Brendan Wood.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the US dollar.

• 1:47:57Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, Post Britain was essentially like, we've tried to dollarize the world and make everything trade in it. Um, Circle IPO is just showing that there's more demand for that, right? There's one retail demand for kind of like a normal crypto company in the public markets, but two is if you think about where the world might go, where the dollar might just be, it's already hegemonic, but it becomes the only meaningful currency. Um, Circle or Tether is going to be one of those two people who plays that role. Um, it's possible we see a new upstart. There's, you know, we're playing around with a bunch of ideals around stablecoins and how, uh, they may exist. Maybe we'll get a stablecoin per country, not necessarily CBDC, but maybe we also dollarize every country. We're seeing a lot of ideas come through right now. From the Circle IPO just showed there's just a

• 1:48:41Speaker 05

  ton of demand. Um, I know Jeremy and team are in.

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  What are, what are, um, every single person that is at a legacy financial institution or a big bank is looking at the Circle IPO and, you know, probably excited and a little bit like, we should do this ourselves, starting to think about, you know, should we have our own stablecoin, et cetera? I can think of some reasons why they have more of a moat than the average person just kind of analyzing the business for the first time, I think, right? They have liquidity, deep partnerships, they have a regulatory, you know, um, you know, uh, sort of arm that's now getting involved in countries all over the world.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  They have developer tooling that's really powerful. So they've, they've, they've done quite a lot to build out their sort of, um, long-term edge, but I'm curious why you think Circle could, could potentially continue to, to sort of durably accrue value, even though other people will, will naturally, um, start to compete with them.

• 1:49:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, look, there was a story about Walmart and Amazon trying to launch a stablecoin. Um, you know, the joke I've made to friends is that essentially just rhymes with Kohl's Cash. Like, nobody wants a, a merchant-based stablecoin. Maybe from the banks, they'll build a consortium, but we've seen historically those kind of fail. The recent Circle-

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  But did Zelle, did Zelle fail, or?

• 1:50:06Speaker 05

  Well, Zelle is EWS, which sells a bunch of services, but ultimately, like, consumer NPS on Zelle cannot be high because it's so fraudy and so just painful to use as a kind of integration point. Um, no, I, I'm talking, um, man, it used to be called Softpay, at one point was called ISIS, was this bank consortium of pay by, like, pay by bank. I kid you not.

• 1:50:27Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, crazy name for a bank consortium.

• 1:50:31Speaker 05

  They had, they had to rebrand when ISIS chose the same name as them.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:50:34Speaker 05

  And then JPM bought them to take them out of the market so that nobody could really see how bad it was. Um, so like, a bank consortium with stablecoin makes sense. There's a bunch of people, Greg Kidd, who was one of the early angels into Twitter, Square, Ripple, Coinbase, is working on something called USB. Um, we're gonna see a lot of these things play out. Circle just has this, like, in financial services, scale is what makes you win a lot of the times. Or it gives you a real network effect. Circle's gonna spend a lot of this money trying to build sort of a, a, a network like Visa, Mastercard is kind of the underlying bet where they can get merchants on one side and, and get consumers on the other. Um, whether or not it's for supplier payments and B2B stuff or B2C payments

• 1:51:17Speaker 05

  is a little unclear, and I'm sure, you know, if I were them, I'd be throwing everything against the wall to make it stick. Um, they had a lot of announcements pre-IPO in pretty much all of April and early May, um, which seemed like stuff that they really been working on for a while and just weren't sure, kind of due to the Trump tariffs, if they'd be able to go out, if the market would reopen. They got that stuff out there. It's a very strong narrative of what they can do into the future. Um, it's just now they have to go and execute on it. And that's one of the things, you know, they're fighting an uphill battle of network effect in traditional financial services.

• 1:51:49Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about stablecoins as a, as an investment category? I'm sure this is how you're spending probably 50% of your time.

• 1:51:59John Coogan?

  Is now the time to get in? It seems like this is a public company.

• 1:52:01Jordi Hays?

  No, I think in many ways the IPO, no, I'm not saying investing in the next stablecoin issuer. I'm talking about the actual consumer applications, B2B applications.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  The infrastructure is here.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  You know, to me, it's, it's, I can imagine a massive wave of companies being funded that try to ride the stablecoin wave, but then ultimately end up getting just, you know, Sherlocked by, by circles and stripes and things like that. But, but how do you think about it?

• 1:52:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, so I'm an early stage investor for the most part. Like I bet on people and then I like, I'm looking for companies and founders I fall in love with and then want to figure out how to deploy capital into them. Stablecoins is this current trend. Every company is now in some sense a stablecoin company. If it makes sense for their business, just like every company is an AI company. We, we figure out a few archetypes of founders and I was joking with one of my founder friends of like, we'll probably coin it as money 3.0 founders where they, they're very serious about how you handle a business that actually touches money. But on the other side of it, they're taking all the efficiencies that come with crypto. And when you combine the two, you end up in a, in a world which is stablecoins.

• 1:53:10Speaker 05

  So we've been able to back about two companies right now in the last few months doing that. We've seen a lot of the companies kind of in the middle of the, of the sandwich, which is like you have issuance, you have consumer distribution. In the middle, you have a lot of orchestration, you have a lot of like actual bill pay and stuff like that. We've sat more on the issuance side and core infrastructure side. We've looked a lot at the kind of like later stage distribution side. And just I've realized that in the middle, you're going to get squeezed. The issuers like Circle are going to have to move up market and verticalize. Or the distribution plays where they control all the value from the consumer and can build a better product. They're going to have to move down market and kind of eat down the stack or, or dual source or triple source their vendors so that they can at the end of the day,

• 1:53:54Speaker 05

  squeeze them on margin, which is honestly from a distribution perspective, the traditional fintech play. It's what Cash App, it's what Chime has done. You put as many vendors behind you as possible that do the same thing. And then when you go to rebid the contract, you just squeeze them. So we've made a few bets in the space. Um, a- and really when we're seeing demand on the distribution side, we're seeing it honestly outside the US. I, I personally haven't figured out a use case where stable coins reduce the friction of, that you see in the US banking system. But if I'm not in America and I want access to the US dollar, it's the fastest way for me to get access to the US dollar in something that looks like a US bank account. Um, it also helps for people who are, you know, um, operation.

• 1:54:35Jordi Hays?

  What about buying a car on the weekend?

• 1:54:39Speaker 05

  Uh, you can still do that. There are services that do that. Fedwire is actually, I believe, seven day settlement now. So with the right bank, you can even do that. But also like.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  Stablecoins mog.

• 1:54:49Speaker 05

  What?

• 1:54:50Jordi Hays?

  Fedwire mogs. Stables.

• 1:54:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:54:54Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, there's a bunch of other, there's so many other use cases. I mean, streaming, you know, I, I mean, there, there's.

• 1:55:01Speaker 05

  It, it's, the thing is like, if you think how Visa and Mastercard work, they're the biggest factoring networks in the world. They're, they're taking risk, they're adjudicating risk for a bank when a consumer swipes. And so what is the risk that Visa, Mastercard and Amex Discover take? It's single digit, maybe dozen, like 12 basis points. The rest that interchange flows to the bank. It flows to the issuer, who's actually taking the real risk. And so if stable coins and Visa and Mastercard are both taking this very seriously, if stable coins start kind of eating their lunch, we're going into a world where they're just going to cut rates. And we're going to get a much more, I hate to say efficient, we're going to get a less lucrative um, card issuing and kind of network based world there for the big banks where Chase can no longer offer you, Capital One can't offer you high,

• 1:55:45Speaker 05

  high rewards because there's no margin in it for them. Interesting.

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  So will we see protests in the streets from point, points maxers, you know, just taking, saying like, we don't want efficiency. We do not want efficiency in the financial system.

• 1:55:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, the points guys.

• 1:55:59Jordi Hays?

  We want to keep rewards high.

• 1:56:01Speaker 05

  Really upset. Well, they'll, they'll just hire their lobbyists finally, right? Like crypto got around to hiring lobbyists. The points, points guys will. Points guys will.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  What about unexpected beneficiaries? Oh, sorry.

• 1:56:13Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, the banks also want higher interchange, so they're actually fighting this well. It's why they're trying to put out stablecoins. It's gonna get messy. Like, we're gonna overinvest in the space like we do in everything in venture. And then at the end of the day, a few winners will emerge. Circle's been around for so long that like, it clearly makes sense. They got big, they aggregated a lot of value. And now we're gonna see a lot of people come for their, for that opportunity as well.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  What about unexpected beneficiaries of stablecoins? I've heard that potentially some payroll companies that maybe hold on to tax withholding, they might be able to earn higher yield because they're able to actually hold the treasuries themselves. Do, like, does, do stablecoins unlock any sort of float dynamics? And shift it from a bank making, making an interest rate return on float that they're holding versus the company can now do it because of stablecoins? Are there any kind of unlocks like that that might be happening?

• 1:57:11Speaker 05

  If I live in, I hate to say Venezuela, Colombia, but if I live, like, so, so for what your use case? Not for a sophisticated business, you should be having a serious conversation with your bank to figure out how you earn that float. Small scale, it may get you better economics, but not gonna move the needle economics, right? There's only so much juice to squeeze from that, um, orange. Really, yeah, the side effect is like, I no longer have to trust my, my government as a, as international human, right? Like, I don't, like, I can move my savings into the US dollar, which right now is, in theory, the least volatile currency. But from like, US companies, yeah, there's a little bit of friction reduction, it lubricates the system a little. Um, but at any meaningful scale, you're gonna take most of that yield anyway,

• 1:57:54Speaker 05

  because you're gonna go back to your, your bank partner where you, for, if I'm a payroll company, I have a direct relationship with some bank somewhere, and I'm gonna take some of that yield. Um, the other thing I should say is, stablecoins are in theory, two things. One is that's the actually underlying treasury, which actually holds a risk asset. It's a US, usually it's a T bill of some sort. But the other side of it is a payment vehicle, and payment vehicles traditionally are not risk assets. You send them and the money is good, right? Like, and And so it's one of those like the benefit that we see is really on the payment side. On the yielding side, maybe we'll get securitized CD bill like T bills and T bonds and like we'll get securitized CDs and like somebody will actually have direct access to treasury to to get these things ad hoc. But it's a it's a bit out because there's just so much

• 1:58:39Speaker 05

  demand on the payment side of this industry and I it's really hard for all of us to grasp truly how big payments are. Like it it that's why stable coins are taking off. It's giving people access to the US banking system in such large volumes that they otherwise wouldn't been able to.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  What about geopolitical risk? I imagine that if I'm a dictator in another country and I'm watching all my citizens like go off of my currency that I control, I would want to ban that. Is that a big major risk? Are we beyond those discussions at this point?

• 1:59:08Speaker 05

  Um, you can ban the on ramps, off ramps. You can all ban your ability for your citizens to get into a stable coin directly, but not indirectly through crypto, right? Like I can go buy Bitcoin and then swap that into USDC. Um, yeah, that's kind of the running joke between a few of my friends on the back channel of like who's gonna who's gonna be the first startup to just aggressively essentially become an arm of the CIA and new USAID and dollarize countries um to promote US hegemony. Uh, i- i- it's like half a joke. It also is just gonna naturally happen. If I don't have to worry about the volatility of my currency and I'm a and I'm a human who's not living paycheck to paycheck, so I actually have savings. Why would I want my local currency? If I'm not gonna actually spend that money and I actually want to be able to save for the long term and

• 1:59:53Speaker 05

  there is no ability for you to capture that money because it's my private keys. It's so so there there's a ton of value there. There is some geopolitical risk, but at the end of the day, it's one of those that I think um the world's gonna have to move through it, not pass it.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, you so you're not worried about like a great firewall for all the on ramps and off ramps and then I mean, if you make it illegal that someone's discovered with stable coins, you're holding USDC and now you go to jail like that is a serious, serious uh headwind towards stablecoin adoption in a, you know, in a dictatorship, I imagine.

• 2:00:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a question. Yeah, for maybe unfriendly countries to the US, but like you're a semi-friendly. Do you want to actually do that?

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 2:00:34Speaker 05

  Right, like?

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Especially when the Trump family is so heavily involved with digital assets. And such big believers.

• 2:00:40Speaker 05

  I mean, the joke I made last week was like, uh, why, why even issue stable coins against treasury bills? We might as well issue it against the US military. So like, if you're a friend of the US, you're not going to really cut us off.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Issue it against. Well, that, that maybe why is Coinbase, you know, sponsor the, the army parade?

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah.

• 2:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're, maybe, maybe they're cooking. Maybe they're cooking.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Millcoin, it's coming soon.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Millcoin. Uh, any, any other, any, any kind of events, uh, in the, in sort of broader fintech, stablecoin world? That, that are coming down the pipeline, potential IPOs catalysts that you're kind of looking out for? Or is it summer break and we can just all check back in the fall?

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Isn't there a stablecoin bill going through?

• 2:01:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, the Genius Act, uh, they're going to negotiate it, you know, it, I, I try not to play politics at all. It's just not where I have the expertise. Um, I think, I think they'll actually, I don't think we'll have a summer break. I think the IPO window is open, uh, and it is not knowing anything.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  That's great to hear.

• 2:01:38Speaker 05

  Everyone thought they could get public in April and then that blew up and then May, kind of like we reopened the window.

• 2:01:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:44Speaker 05

  Uh, if I was trying to go public, I'm going to try to sneak it through until something geopolitical closes the window again. Which is like, kind of the mantra right now. Uh, so I think the, the bankers in Wall Street are not going to get the summer off. Uh, the Hamptons will be empty.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Time to grind.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  That's why the Hamptons are empty. It's so funny, you know, you know, there, there's been like these articles, like Hampton's rentals are down 30% this year.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  IPO windows open.

• 2:02:08Jordi Hays?

  IPO windows open.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Time to stay on Wall Street. You can't leave Manhattan while the window's open.

• 2:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Would be insane.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic.

• 2:02:16Jordi Hays?

  This was great, Aaron. I really enjoyed it. We'd love to have you back on again soon.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Thanks. Thanks, guys. Well, if you are trying to scoop up one of those Hampton homes, head over to 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, folks. Our next guest is from Standard and Poor's, S&P, Joseph Cass coming in the studio. Very excited to talk to him. He has talked to some of the most impactful financiers, one notch away from us. We talk about a lot of technology. We talk to some business folks. He has experience talking to Ken Griffin, Howard Marks, Ray Dalio, has a bunch of interesting stories to share with us. I'm excited to pick his brain. Welcome to the show, Joseph. How you doing?

• 2:03:04Speaker 06

  Hey, John, Jordy. Great, great to see you guys. Thanks for having me. All good? How's things on your end, N L O?

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. It's late for you, right? The crazy protests. You're in the UK.

• 2:03:15Speaker 06

  But it's still light, so it's all good.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Well, we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the show. Why don't you kick us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself? And I'd love to just kind of understand how S&P is structured, how it's working these days, like the core business lines, because it's such an institution.

• 2:03:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, sure. It's a really, it's a huge business. So I work in the ratings division.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36Speaker 06

  You have a number of different divisions, including the indices. So kind of like the S&P 500, you have market intelligence, which provides kind of the data and analytics platform. You have mobility, which owns a bunch of businesses, one of whom is Carfax. And there's a, there's a number of different divisions in the company. And I'm trying to remember if I've got all of them there. But it comes together to make S&P global. So I work in the ratings division, which, you know, assigns the ratings, you know, the kind of triple A's or the double Bs or the Cs.

• 2:04:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're gonna hold you feet to the fire because S&P downgraded America. And I'm hearing an accent, so this seems like it's maybe some political issue going on.

• 2:04:13Speaker 06

  Well, I can correct you there. It was actually Moody's.

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was Moody's. S&P's. Thank you.

• 2:04:19Speaker 06

  The S&P did downgrade the US, but I think it was about, I want to say it was about over 10 years ago. So Moody's come down to the same level that we were like kind of tested.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, yeah, we'll take it up with Moody's. Anyway, I'd love to, I'd love to go through some of the folks that you've interviewed and hear some stories. Why don't we kick it off with Ken Griffin? Break down his, his career, your experience chatting with him, and what you learned from him.

• 2:04:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. So I can kind of give a quick overview as to like why I'm meeting these guys, like why I'm in the situation where I can meet them. So essentially, my role at S and P in the ratings division is to engage with the buy side, the big buy side investors. So after about six months, and I've been doing this previously at other roles, I thought like I need like a platform to essentially kind of make it easier for me to do this with these senior guys. Because trying to get, as you guys know, trying to get a meeting with these senior guys from the finance side can be tricky unless you've got something very hot for them. So I created this podcast and just said, listen, we're gonna have a chat. It's gonna be like half an hour. We're gonna talk about you. We're gonna have a guest from S and P and we're gonna kind of give you kind of one question

• 2:05:26Speaker 06

  to you, one to the S and P person and see how it goes. And that was like five years ago. So now it's kind of grown slowly. I mean, I don't do many. I do like one a month. So it's not as prolific as you guys doing four hours a day. But it's it's grown slowly over the years. So now we can, as you said, we can meet those type of guys. And so to answer your question, and just a quick plug, the podcast is called Leaders. If you want to look it up, it's called Leaders. Go listen. But instead of Ken Griffin. So we, I am, I mean, the actual podcast came about from I create a LinkedIn post, like an old story about Ken, which I don't think many people knew, which

• 2:06:07Speaker 06

  was, this was like 15 years ago. One of his assistants actually had terminal cancer and he funded her treatment for two years secretly, kind of without telling anyone. And she she got into remission, you know, it was kind of a miraculous turnaround. And then after that, he funded her to go to Hawaii with her family for like a two week holiday and didn't tell anyone about it. And I thought that was, you know, quite a cool story. So I found out about this through like a tiny, in like one of the Chicago kind of newspapers, an old PDF from like 2009, and wrote it up on LinkedIn, just like a story post, which sometimes I do. And then I said, you know, I just sent it to Ken saying like, listen, just thought this thing was really cool that you did with this lady.

• 2:06:50Speaker 06

  And then he replied back and I was like, I was like, oh, wow. He replied. So I said, do you want to do a podcast? And he's like, yeah, no problem. So that was like six months later and last month we recorded in New York. And I'm sure like listeners know who Ken Griffin is, but obviously he's the, he's the CEO and founder of Citadel. And so you've got Citadel, the hedge fund, which is this enormous hedge fund, but you've also got Citadel Securities, which is the market maker, which is, I think is probably, I think it probably is the largest market maker in the world. So he's a really, he obviously a very smart guy. So we interviewed him in person last month. And, you know, he is like, he's just as you would expect for someone who is that successful in their life.

• 2:07:33Speaker 06

  Like he kind of like, he, he's very good at answering questions, very succinct, can give you kind of a one minute answer to anything and he kind of sums everything up in like a really crisp way. And, and he's also very like, you know, he's very personable. So he came out the lift. So I'm waiting for him at the lift and he comes out the lift and he has like a group, like an entourage around him. And I can see someone telling him something, like just whispering him something quickly. And I'm like, okay, what's, what, I wonder what's kind of been said. And then in my head, I'm like, oh, they're telling him who I am probably. They're probably saying, oh, this is Joe. He's from S and P. You're going to do a podcast right now. And he comes up to me and he like, he's like very strong handshake, looks me direct in the eye and he's like, I am so thankful that you invited me.

• 2:08:18Speaker 06

  Thank you so much. And I was like, you know, it's such a crazy, you know, to me, he's literally, you know, I'm just like another person for him, but he, he probably has this kind of intense kind of state which he's in, which is just amazing to, to witness. And he has his aura around him and it, I don't want to use the kind of Rick James analogy, but he does have this like aura around him where he's like, you know, you can feel him in the room and you can, you can feel his, his expectations of his team and of, and of you, like of me as an interviewer. Kind of, I was like, okay, you know, you're, you're sitting up straight. You're making sure you have everything down to a T. So I was kind of, I can, you can see why beyond the kind of fundamentals of Citadel, you can see how that energy

• 2:09:01Speaker 06

  probably permeates through the whole company, just through his kind of vision.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  Do you notice any difference between the Ken Griffin archetype and some of the more behind the scenes financiers? Like, I imagine it's very hard to get someone from Jane Street on the show because they seem to be quieter and yet Jane Street does do technical talks, but you don't hear from the founders that often. Do you understand what dynamic is going on there? Does Ken just view media differently? Or is there something structural going on with his business that it makes sense for him to have more of a public presence than a pure, high-frequency trading focused firm that maybe doesn't have to interface with... I mean, they still have to recruit, but maybe they just have a different PR strategy?

• 2:09:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think, I mean, my sense is that it's quite Ken-led. Ken has lots of things to say and he's super, super smart and he's not afraid of saying them. So I definitely got that vibe from him. You know, there's kind of no holds bars. He's not just saying something because he thinks he should say it. He's honestly giving you his opinion of something. And also, I mean, I don't know many guys at Jane Street. And I haven't actually reached out to those guys, probably because I thought it would be a no, because they're so kind of closed.

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  They do seem closed, but maybe you could break through.

• 2:10:28Speaker 06

  Sometimes with these guys, they're closed, they're closed, they're closed, until they're not. So it's what they need to not be closed and they need to have a voice. So it's kind of a long game, I guess.

• 2:10:39John Coogan?

  Jordan, you have a question?

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears a little bit, I'm curious, your job on the ratings side of S&P, how much more challenging it gets when we're in this sort of critical macro environment and things are kind of unfolding real time? That impacts businesses, banks, things like that. How do you guys approach situations like we've had, even in the last week with Israel and Iran and other situations like it?

• 2:11:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a it's a good question. So obviously, my role being on the kind of investor engagement and investor relationship side. We hear a lot, you know, in terms of these kind of large, huge events. And obviously, we've had the things in the past week, but we've also had the tariffs. So it it promotes kind of a huge spike in inbound for us. And we're we're very keen to be kind of outbound and like forward facing, transparent, etc. But there's no doubt that those kind of occasions, everyone wants to speak to us. And I know for good reason, but also I think, you know.

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  So the big institutions reach out to you guys and ask you, what what else are you seeing broadly? Is that is that?

• 2:11:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of what you guys seeing at kind of a macro level. And what do what does kind of the X situation that's happening right now? How could that impact this group of ratings? It could be kind of financial services, or it could be large corporates. And they drill down to kind of one sector. So I, you know, could have someone calling us from one of the largest buy side firms saying, Listen, I work on autos, strictly autos kind of portfolio. How will this be? How will the tariffs impact my portfolio, the ratings? What's your view? Just to kind of stand with us. And we we have like a pretty much every week. You know, London, New York, and Hong Kong, we have these investor roundtables.

• 2:12:36Speaker 06

  Where we engage with these kind of small communities. We speak to them, we have analysts speak and they can kind of, you know, standboard their ideas and we can we can go back and forth.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Very cool. I wanted to move on to some other folks you've you've chatted with. I want to hear the story of Ray Dalio. Obviously, the the founder of Bridgewater, he feels like someone who was maybe a little bit behind the scenes for a while, building the fund and then principles that it was originally a PDF that just kind of like found its way onto the internet. I think they might have published it. Then eventually it turned into a book, a book tour, banger, viral videos, podcast appearances. But what was your experience like with Ray Dalio?

• 2:13:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I, I, it was fascinating. It was totally fascinating. So we had Ray on the show uh in kind of, I think it was two thousand twelve, uh two thousand twenty-two, I think it was. So kind of two and a half years ago now, just coming out of the pandemic.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:32Speaker 06

  And like, uh, we booked, we had, we have everyone booked for like forty-five minutes.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:13:37Speaker 06

  And I think kind of, cause usually it goes on for about half an hour and we want some just overrun time in case stuff goes wrong. And Ray spoke for, you know, it was coming up to two hours. Uh, to the point. So he was very generous with his time. He had lots of things to say. And like, he has lots of things to say on lots of different topics. And he's very good at kind of connecting the dots, like making links. So for example, when I was speaking to him, I kind of asked some, some crazy questions, some, some off-the-wall questions to try and make it interesting. So I was talking about my first job at McDonald's. So I used to work on the first window of the drive-through and like take the order for people in McDonald's uh here, here in uh, in my hometown.

• 2:14:17Speaker 06

  And then Ray was like, oh, it's so funny you say that because um I set up the hedging strategy for the McNugget. So the only reason the McNugget is on the menu is because I set up this trading strategy for McDonald's and the supplier. So like, he's, he's very good. He's very, he's a very cool guy, but he's very like, uh, you know, he's very personable and so good at like linking A to B.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  That's, that's hilarious.

• 2:14:40Jordi Hays?

  You always gotta be hedging your McNuggets, you know?

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I've heard about that. I mean, there's the entire supply chain and of course McDonald's doesn't want, you know, exposure to all that. And there's like that famous example of like Southwest successfully hedged gasoline prices for a while and that was a massive beneficiary of that for a long time. Uh, the, these like small, little kind of minute financial operations downstream, like the CFO is just kind of off doing something, can have like a massive impact on the trajectory of the business when they pull it off. Um, talk to me about Ryan Serhant. He feels like someone who is potentially underrated as a business leader, business thinker. Uh, people know him as a reality TV star essentially, and yet he's built this massive media business. You're obviously in the media industry, we are as well. Uh, what did you learn from him? What was, what's the experience been like working with him and talking to him?

• 2:15:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, and he's here. My personal opinion here, not S and P's. He's a very, he, you know, he's someone to look, look out to.

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:37Speaker 06

  Especially in this space. So he, you know, as you say, he started off in reality TV.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:42Speaker 06

  Which you know, sometimes, you know, especially people in the UK, they kind of look down their nose at those type of people.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:15:48Speaker 06

  But when he started to kind of how he leveraged his appearance, but also his media, like his content is, uh, it's enormous. I think across all platforms, it's something like seven or eight million.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:59Speaker 06

  He has like multiple YouTube accounts, he has Instagram, he has TikTok, all the kind of usual suspects, he has LinkedIn. And he has this content, content to commerce model whereby, um, I met him when I was in New York, just to talk about this, just randomly. And I said, listen, I'm in New York, do you want to talk about this? He was like, yeah. And so we just met up and spoke about this very thing. Whereby he has like different, his client base could be, you know, super, super high net worth.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:24Speaker 06

  Or it could be kind of someone looking for like a one million dollar apartment in New York. Or it could be potentially the child of the client.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  That's a big one.

• 2:16:34Speaker 06

  You know, if, so he's very smartly said, listen, I just want to spread the board with this. So we've got the YouTube for the kind of like millennials and we've got TikTok for the younger guys. So if, and I said, listen, what does this mean like in terms of like revenue, basically?

• 2:16:49John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:50Speaker 06

  And he said, well, we sold this like, uh, I can't remember how many million, but it was like, it's very expensive property. And off the back of one of the children seeing a TikTok.

• 2:16:59John Coogan?

  So crazy.

• 2:16:59Speaker 06

  So they, they said, look, look at this thing, look at this thing, this guy selling in New York. They showed it to the mom and dad. Mom and dad said, that's great. Let's go and have a look at, and you know, and then it's sold. So like, he's, he's definitely got like a very interesting model, which to be honest, I think, um, again, me personally speaking, at S and P. Lots of other kind of industries, sectors could, could kind of adopt this model. I don't know why they're not. It's, it's, it's kind of been proven now.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've heard that story before and I've, I've heard that he has something like sixty to eighty people working just on content in his organization. To really pipeline everything out across, across all the different platforms. And he's cast a very wide net, but he's built a fantastic business around it.

• 2:17:40Speaker 06

  So when I was there.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Last, last.

• 2:17:42Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  No, I had a totally unrelated question that I can cap it off with.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  Please cap it off.

• 2:17:49Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to get your read, since you talked to a lot of these buy-side institutions. How are people thinking about ESG today? Is it still, are they, you know, how do they feel on a personal level? And then what do their actions look like on an investment level?

• 2:18:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I mean, on a personal level, it's kind of tricky to to answer that one because I can probably answer on like professionally what they're telling us.

• 2:18:20Speaker 06

  And on institutional basis. So in kind of 21, 22, the ESG kind of, it was, it was just enormous. It was, we couldn't have a conversation with an investor about anything without them mentioning ESG in some way, you know? And how does this link to ESG and all the S or how does this, the G factor into this stuff? So whereas now, especially kind of in the past, I don't know, six months to a year, maybe a bit longer around that time. It's, I'd say it's definitely a part of their kind of investment thesis, but they're not necessarily pushing it to the front. So I don't think that they've kind of, you know, totally dropped this idea. I definitely don't think that's the case because we still get lots of inquiries.

• 2:19:02Speaker 06

  We have lots of conversations around sustainability and not so much. I mean, the brand of ESG seemed to have kind of died, but sustainability is, is growing in the amount of kind of inbound and outbound we're having. The products we're seeing in the market, there's lots of, I'd say it's definitely not kind of just been dropped, which I think may be the perception by some people.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  That's fascinating. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a great conversation. We'd love to have you back and we will talk to you soon. Enjoy the, enjoy the evening. Thank you so much for staying.

• 2:19:33Speaker 06

  Long journey. Thanks so much, man.

• 2:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Well, let's go back to the timeline and run through some posts. We mentioned it earlier, but DHH raced in the 24 Hours Le Mans. Basecamp Mobile.

• 2:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Basecamp Mobile.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Number 22 is ready. Let's go. So congratulations to him. He's driven it multiple times now.

• 2:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we have to try to figure out how he actually did?

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  You work on that. I will stay in automotive world. Nick Cruz-Patane says hailing a Tesla robot taxi directly from the X app would change the game. There are approximately 600 million active users per month on X. Interesting. There's already a lot of buttons in the X panel. Grok, you got chat. There's a Signal competitor now. There's communities. I always wonder about how much you can add, how much you can bloat before you need a separate app.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Already slapped some AI in there. Why not slap some robot taxis in there too, John? I got the results pulled up. DHH says, "We had the pace for a podium, but power-stealing failure and a missed pit stop meant P7. Still the greatest race in the world."

• 2:20:39John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:20:40Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because you don't think of Basecamp as like a super-active major advertiser, right?

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, they like to have the product do the talking.

• 2:20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:51Jordi Hays?

  But it looks fantastic on some race gear.

• 2:20:55John Coogan?

  Looks great.

• 2:20:55Jordi Hays?

  So congratulations. P7. The car looks fantastic as well. So I'll have to have him on the show to break it all down.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  Totally. Mike Newp had some interesting reporting from TechCrunch. Waymo rides are costing more than Uber and Lyft, and people are paying anyway. He says, "True for most automation scenarios. Given machine intelligence on par with human capability for a task, machines offer lower variability and will be preferred, even commanding a premium on price."

• 2:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Big call.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is what Chris Bike was talking about.

• 2:21:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  The idea of like, if you are a gating function to getting the thing that the person wants, and you're not in that leisure category, the robot will be preferred. But yeah, I mean, it makes sense. Have you ridden in a Waymo yet? I don't think so, right?

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  I have not.

• 2:21:44John Coogan?

  I've taken one ride in SF. It was pretty nice.

• 2:21:47Jordi Hays?

  We should call one today, take it around the block.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  I don't think they're, I don't think they're in LA right now.

• 2:21:51Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they all left.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  I think they, I don't know, we'll have to figure it out, but I, I think they might've actually shut it down for a little bit.

• 2:21:57Jordi Hays?

  Long march back to San Francisco. We got another post here from Laser Boat 999.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Coke tastes like tapping into your ancestral, ancient ancestral petroleum reserves while Sprite tastes like being connected to a big, beautiful energy grid.

• 2:22:14John Coogan?

  1.4 million views. I love it. And then Celsius, daybreak over the computer world. A real grasp of the English language. Fantastic. People are really enjoying posting about Diet Coke and Coca-Cola and all the sodas right now. The, the Diet Coke.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  They've never been better. They've never been better.

• 2:22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  They're peaking.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're peaking.

• 2:22:32Jordi Hays?

  They're peaking.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the organic marketing is working. I love it. In an era, you'd have been Homer with that. That is spectacular. I completely agree. What a fantastic post.

• 2:22:43Jordi Hays?

  The big, beautiful energy grid.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from Cersei.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Vocal cry.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  If I see a guy in a suit at the airport, I just assume he works for Deloitte.

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  Or is the technology and business podcaster.

• 2:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Technology businessman.

• 2:22:59John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Could be an international businessman.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Uh, this is a quote.

• 2:23:03Jordi Hays?

  You just don't see international businessmen flying in suits anymore. There's almost no suits in business class.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Not yet. They're coming back.

• 2:23:10Jordi Hays?

  The level of disrespect people have for the airport, wearing joggers.

• 2:23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you want the pilot to take this.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  What are you running from?

• 2:23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you want the pilot to take, uh, the, the safety of your plane seriously, maybe you should take.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Imagine, imagine getting on a plane and the pilot's wearing athleisure.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Not, not gonna happen.

• 2:23:29Jordi Hays?

  I am cooked.

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  Not gonna happen.

• 2:23:30Jordi Hays?

  I am cooked.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. You should be thrown out.

• 2:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I wanted to shout this out. The Cadillac F1 team just posted.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Over 60 jobs. So if you are wanting to work for, you know, an American, a true American luxury brand.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:46Jordi Hays?

  Cadillac.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Or get involved with F1, head on over there. I'm excited for them to hit the grid.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  They really are hiring in every department. They have like finance, operations, people and all sorts of stuff. Get into Cadillac F1, get them on ramp.

• 2:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Huge alpha there.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Played the long game.

• 2:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Huge alpha there.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Chess.com saw her, says, "Between June 2020 and December 2022, accounts on the site jumped from 35 million to 100 million." I joined during that time. It had taken 14 years to bring in those first 35 million. Pretty historic run for Chess.com. The business is doing great. Privately owned, founded in 2005, makes most of its money from subscribers who pay $5 to $15 a month for features such as unlimited play and post-match analysis. ARR, it's over $100 million. Congrats to the Chess.com team.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  We haven't hit the gong today. We gotta hit it for Chess.com.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Hit it for them. Hit it for them. We should also hit the gong for Eli Lilly because someone at Novo Nordisk failed to pay a $450 maintenance fee, which would have kept its patent on Ozempic in force for another two years.

• 2:25:00John Coogan?

  This is such a crazy story. That's like, what, like $50 billion of value or something like that for $450?

• 2:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Just absolutely brutal.

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  Maintenance fee? What a mistake.

• 2:25:11Jordi Hays?

  Good reminder to all the people with IP out there, go pay those maintenance fees.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a use for AI agents, just constantly trolling for, "What fees am I not paying? Read every email inbox, check in with all of the different patent databases and make sure that we're up to date on our maintenance fees." Because $450 costing you billions is insane to me. Anyway, there's a unicorn.

• 2:25:34Jordi Hays?

  You gotta hit the size gong. Size gong for Gecko. You wanna hit it?

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  Let's hit it.

• 2:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Gecko Robotics has raised 125 million at 1.25. They built robots and AI software to inspect and improve important infrastructure like power plants, factories, and military systems.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  I think Trey Stevens is on the board.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  Very, very cool. It's like these, these robots. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you have the massive industrial equipment, you know, like a massive like grain silo or like oil and gas, like, you know, silo that's holding a bunch of like a refinery, uh, the, the robot will crawl up and down and scan and take images and understand, oh, there's a structural weakness here. There's a crack here. The paint needs a touch up here. All of those different, um, problems. And it's, yeah, it's just cool. Cause it's like, it's, they are very much a scaled business. Like they really do make these robots. Uh, they're not humanoids. They're highly specialized, but it's a great business.

• 2:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. They can crawl around buildings.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Very, very cool.

• 2:26:33Jordi Hays?

  Wild.

• 2:26:34John Coogan?

  Chad Hurley, the founder of YouTube says, honestly, this means more to me than any acquisition. He sold YouTube to Google. Um, but there's a travel vlogger who met a young Iranian boy who basically speaks perfect English, all because he watches YouTube.

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  I watched this video. The kid is, has a better grasp of the English language than most adults I know. It's very, very well spoken.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Bullish for English.

• 2:26:57Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, this was probably the biggest news of the last week.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  This is staying in YouTube world.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Sam Sulik, uh, had a work, a back workout with Arnold.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  And, um, yeah, so I mean,

• 2:27:08John Coogan?

  Broke the internet.

• 2:27:09Jordi Hays?

  One of the more important stories.

• 2:27:11John Coogan?

  Four million subs. Absolutely crushed it. Uh, only two years ago or three years ago. And credit to Zach Progob. He says Sam Sulik is a great example of where content is going. Back in 2023, August 20th, he's like, this is, this guy's on to something. He's on, he's the future. And then of course he, he, uh, got his IFBB pro card, absolute, on absolute terror and has put out a ton of great content. Value of daily posting for sure. Just one percent better. The vlogs get better. Daily poster. Who's doing it weekly? Be much harder. Um, anyway, there was this, this odd news about the New York Times reporting that ChatGPT talked a guy into insanity, followed by suicide by cop.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  A human being is dead in passing. This falsifies the alignment by default. Cope, who, whatever's really inside ChatGPT, it knew enough about humans to do this. Uh, and so Justin Moore says, It's ridiculous to say ChatGPT talked a guy into insanity when he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar before he started using ChatGPT. This is a tragic story, but the man was clearly mentally ill. Messaging with a chatbot didn't kill him. Very, very sad story, but yeah, I mean, obviously, this is not the this is not the responsibility of the of the AI, but it is an opportunity for ChatGPT to potentially step in and and and help treat someone. And we've already seen promising results in therapy. And and of course, there will be an interesting dynamic about when does it call the cops on you?

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  If you are planning something, if it if it attacks you are insane, what should it do with that information? Because there's a lot of privacy and and individual rights that are potentially infringed upon. But at the same time, could have could have had a much, much better outcome here. But very, very, very rough story. Anyway, let's move back to Jane Street. We talked about them earlier. Instead of non competes, Jane Street decides to make its own programming language so far from anything mainstream that you can't get a job anywhere else. Not entirely true, Bubble Boy. If you know OCaml, you can probably write Python. But yes.

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're they're branching it is is the thing.

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  Yes, they're creating their own. But OCaml was already all like basically entirely maintained by Jane Street. Ron Minsky has like the main YouTube video about OCaml, this like low level machine language. It's almost at like assembly level, very, very performant, very fast. And Jane Street, I think, has been the main contributor to that programming language for years, but now they are.

• 2:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Camels, llamas, hogs, pigs, they're having a moment.

• 2:29:35John Coogan?

  They're having a moment. OCaml has been around for 12 years, something like that. You're Ron, Ron Minsky, he put out this YouTube video. I actually watched it back in the day. It was great. He's he's an absolute beast. It's one of the few pieces of Jane Street content that's out there or was. It was like this interesting lens into into the way Jane Street builds their high frequency trading algorithms. They need to be extremely performant, extremely accelerated. And so they now have their own their own programming language. So congrats to the Jane Street team.

• 2:30:06Jordi Hays?

  We have a post from GoDini, probably botching it. I can't articulate exactly why, but this generation of B2C founders feels like the tech equivalent of SoundCloud rappers.

• 2:30:17John Coogan?

  I wonder who they're talking about.

• 2:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody else was posting that this feels like the generation of founders raised on YouTube.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Which makes sense.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  I mean, they're extremely good at viral content. Is that entirely new? I think so. There's been other people that, I mean, consumer founders have understood viral growth loops for a long time. I mean, the Airbnb guys were doing stunts like the, the political cereals. That was very much like a stunt, but it was like fun. You know, obviously the, some of the early Mark Zuckerberg experiments at Harvard were very designed to go viral.

• 2:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Designed to go viral or designed to scale rapidly or, or like, there's this thing that I'm seeing in the timeline of, of founders sort of consistently trying to do things that, that piss people off or, or like are just trying to be attention grabbing without necessarily using it to drive any type of business results.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, like you can get a lot of downloads and, and, and attention just by rage baiting the timeline. But that is.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Low quality.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just doesn't scale infinitely. Like eventually, like you just figure out that like getting a million views is doable every week, but it's just a million views. It's not something that's truly like going to scale endlessly, like the performance marketing, you know, playbook or a true viral growth. Like you compare it to like the, the viral growth engine at Dropbox where, you know, I give you storage. You, you come on, I get storage and there's this, there's this loop or like referring people to Gmail, like the classic viral loops that continue to grow even among people that don't need to necessarily see your viral rage bait. So there's always a question about like, like, once you have that attention, you have to shift into something

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  that's more durable and more scalable.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  But I don't know, maybe they'll take the lesson. The last, the last viral rage bait didn't really go over as well, but we'll see, we'll see.

• 2:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have a post here from Christo Vasilev. Taking a screenshot from Tyler Cowen's blog. He says, uh, this was March 14th, 2025.

• 2:32:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:32:36Jordi Hays?

  When will Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities?

• 2:32:40Jordi Hays?

  He says, "It seems this ought to happen soon, though it is not yet a major news item. Iranian air defenses are severely disrupted, though not forever. The Hezbollah counterattack has been more than neutralized and no alternative deterrent has been put in its place. That too may be temporary. Israeli public opinion is still close in time to October 7th and Netanyahu is not so far from the end of his reign." Netanyahu started his reign when I was six months old.

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  Is he supposed to wind down soon? I don't know when, I don't know when his term is up, but certainly feels more than four or eight years, like, he's been over there for a while. Are you sure it's been 20 years? Or has he just been in the government?

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  He was first elected to prime minister in 1996.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Interesting. The countries that will-

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  The next, the next election is November 3rd, 2026.

• 2:33:31John Coogan?

  Okay, so a little over a year. Got it. "The countries that will get very mad at Israel for such an attack are already close to maximally mad at Israel. Trump has signaled plenty of support, yet there is no guarantee that will last forever. Most of all, Iran is getting closer to having a workable nuclear weapon. I also find it striking how many people discuss the Ukraine negotiations without considering the two issues may be tied to some degree. How much will Putin, if at all, shore up Iran in, in such a scenario? Just a reminder that you should not forget about this issue. It could be the most important thing that happens this year." Wow. He really, really called it. And zero comments. Like, like, everyone just was like, "Yeah, okay, yeah."

• 2:34:13Jordi Hays?

  No comment.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, he, he, he called it and now people are looking. Congrats to the Work Week team, Adam Ryan. One year ago, we launched a bold experiment. What if there was a real social network for business leaders? No self-promo, no influencer fluff, just verified operators helping each other. And they're seeing 10x growth in five months, 51% acceptance rate.

• 2:34:34Jordi Hays?

  Did you see who was, who was shouting them out to?

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  Lance Armstrong. Oh, wow. Crushing.

• 2:34:40Jordi Hays?

  Had to throw this in there. Lance is an early investor in Workweek.

• 2:34:44John Coogan?

  He's investing in a lot of stuff now. He has a whole fund.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. He's running it. I was on the Workweek board through the Series A and it's just been amazing to watch them execute over the last year.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 2:34:54Jordi Hays?

  Company is ripping and I thought it was cool that Lance was throwing him a little shout out here.

• 2:35:00John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I thought this was posted on Friday, but it was just funny. I got to include it. This Neil Renek. Wow. What a stressful week at work. Time to relax by holding a phone beaming endless streams of horrific international news inches from my head.

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. It had 220,000 likes. Everyone's feeling the same thing. And that really was this weekend. Like I went to the beach on Sunday and all of Los Angeles was peaceful. I mean, I saw, I saw one train of like cop cars kind of moving from one part of the city to the other, but didn't see any protests, didn't see any real fallout. Like, like things were pretty quiet in America generally, but you go online and it's just like, I mean, you read like the cover of the Wall Street Journal. It's just like flames and insane. Yeah, that picture is crazy because there's crazy stuff happening in the world. But fortunately, due to the amazing technology, it's beamed directly to your face.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  In other news, the founder Pump Fun, as well as Pump Fun have been banned from X.

• 2:36:02John Coogan?

  Oh, why?

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  And I was seeing this because Dan Romero posted something, something decentralized doesn't matter until it does. Farcaster is effectively a sufficiently decentralized version of X. So he's kind of making his case there, but we'll see how that evolves. But overall, slow news day.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Pretty slow news day. Only geopolitically. It's a, it's a great time to be a political podcaster. You got Trump, Elon, Waymos, you got Iran, you got assassinations. There's so much stuff. Us over here, we gotta talk about technology. So maybe tomorrow, we break down the Warner Brothers Discovery split, some HBO stuff, some sports stuff. I think it'd be fun to do a deep dive on Le Mans and some of the history there. There's a lot that we could go into in different directions.

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  We also have an absolutely insane lineup.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  We have an insane lineup tomorrow too. So I don't think we'll be getting to a lot of that, but we have a lot of range and it's gonna be a lot of fun. And so stay tuned for tomorrow because we have a, we have a banger lineup. Well, you'll hear about it in the morning.

• 2:37:08Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in. Thank you to our incredible production team. Thank you to Tyler, who learned all there is to know about biotech today.

• 2:37:16John Coogan?

  Yes, he's in the home of the golden retriever, GLP-1. I like the AI-generated backgrounds.

• 2:37:21Speaker 03

  You good Tyler? Yeah, I actually, I found this great concoction I've cooked up.

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:25Speaker 03

  Okay, let's hear it. Okay, so this is optimal, you know, golden retriever maxing.

• 2:37:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:30Speaker 03

  So there's three parts, right? Hotter, friendlier, dumber. So for hotter, I have um, melanin, melanin, melanotin. It's like, it's like injections to get you more tan.

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:37:43Speaker 03

  You know, so you can have a nice blonde.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:45Speaker 03

  The next one is growth hormone peptides. So I think Jordy knows a lot about peptides.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:50Speaker 03

  So what do you think about that?

• 2:37:52Jordi Hays?

  That's kind of the king peptide. You can do a lot of stuff around uh, human growth hormon, hormone, hormone, but at the end of the day, if you're really, you know, playing to win, just, just do it.

• 2:38:03John Coogan?

  Okay, sounds good.

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  Okay, and then the third one I have for hotter is um, blood transfusions from young people.

• 2:38:09John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Like an intern or would, would like an intern be good? Like a summer intern?

• 2:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, would you recommend pulling in for a summer intern?

• 2:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Do not, do not be a summer intern for Brian Johnson. He will, you will turn into a blood boy.

• 2:38:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so then the next for friendlier, I have two um, you know, items. The first one is uh, MDMA microdosing.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:38:34Speaker 03

  So I haven't, haven't tried this myself, but it could be interesting. The next one is oxytocin nasal sprays.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the love chemical, right?

• 2:38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is supposed to increase people's uh, trust. It makes you more generous, more empathetic.

• 2:38:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:47Speaker 03

  That's some, somewhat dog-like.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't know why that just seems so wrong. Just like a, but at the same time, I mean, coffee has like a, you know, a, I'm sure a similarly strong effect, but just for

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Well, the dose is the poison, so you dose it correctly, maybe there's something there. Interesting, okay.

• 2:39:08Speaker 03

  Okay, and then the last one is for the dumber.

• 2:39:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  Um, so the first one I have is a scopolamine.

• 2:39:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:15Speaker 03

  So this, uh, apparently makes people confused, um, extremely compliant and forgetful.

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, this could work.

• 2:39:21Speaker 03

  There we go. Uh, the next one is a, a prefrontal lobotomy.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I think people have tried this throughout history.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  I think we're maybe going too far here.

• 2:39:31Speaker 03

  And then, and then the third one is, uh, just lead.

• 2:39:33John Coogan?

  Lead again.

• 2:39:35Jordi Hays?

  Just lightweight lead. Well, if you want to have some lead, just drink tap water.

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:39:40Jordi Hays?

  Get you covered.

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  Good luck to you.

• 2:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you, thank you for, uh, solving, uh, solving one of humanity's most pressing, you know, health challenges.

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 2:39:49Jordi Hays?

  How do we be more golden retriever like? Uh, anyways, great show. We'll be back tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. There'll be some big news.

• 2:39:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you tomorrow.

• 2:39:58Jordi Hays?

  And we hope you have a fantastic Monday afternoon and evening.

• 2:40:02John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.