Billionaires Xmas List, Disneyland Buyout, Gifting A Mclaren F1, Too Big to Fail

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, how are you surviving? There are fires all over your house. Give us the breakdown.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  Fortunately, not over my house, John. But, uh, but yeah, thank you to everybody that reached out over the last, uh, 48 hours. There are, there is a big fire raging in Malibu. Luckily, it's not, um, it's a few miles from my house, but, uh, got enough distance that we're never directly under threat. But, um, but yeah, loss had, didn't have power for the last couple of days. I was able to get wifi from my neighbor. So I was sitting on the edge of my house, uh, with their permission, of course, but sitting on the edge of my house, uh, making sure I could still get posts.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Good.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Out on, uh, on the accounts. But, um, but yeah, didn't, uh, wasn't, wasn't an excuse to miss recording today. Rolled out of bed, uh, took the one road out of Malibu that was still open and, uh, made it, made it to the studio.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  As we always do and, uh, got a shave courtesy of, uh, the Jonathan Club where, where we record. And, uh, now we're on the mics, so.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, I think while you were, uh, scrambling around Malibu, trying to find safe haven and deal with all the chaos there, I was, uh, relaxing in Disneyland, which was great.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  You were. A little Tuesday Disneyland.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, a little Tuesday Disneyland with a three-year-old. It was fantastic. Highly recommend it. It's, it's fascinating. It really makes you appreciate authoritarianism.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  There are metal detectors now to even get into downtown Disney, which is just like a mall where, so you can't even go shopping without getting through the metal detector. So you know, it's just perfectly safe there. Everything is perfectly clean. There's just.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  People everywhere, total surveillance state. You sacrifice all your rights when you go in. But I've realized that, you know, uh, in light of recent events, they need to put metal detectors outside of Manhattan. It needs to be a prison colony.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  No, that's why, that's why being in, being in, you know, Dubai, the UAE broadly is so nice and relaxing because you walk around.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  And given, you have this feeling when you enter the, to the, the monarchy, I shouldn't even call it a country. It's a, it's a fiefdom almost. You have this feeling that you're entering a highly secure place that's run in a highly competent way.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  Where there's one guy who understands that it's my responsibility.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  As, as king to keep, uh, keep, you know. The people safe.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a billionaire reached out to me and was like, you guys shouldn't talk so much about luxury goods. You live in America. You can only do that in Dubai or Singapore.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or Miami.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, or Miami. You need to be in a place with strong property rights, John. Stop what you're doing. And I was like, I'm not afraid. I will put on a bulletproof vest every day.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and driving nice cars, wearing watches or whatever. It's motivating to try to get our country safer and more secure.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  And, and use the leverage that we have.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  But it won't be on this podcast.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  Because we don't talk about politics.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  But Disneyland is an interesting place to reflect on like the American populace. It's, it's, I, I, I read something that it's like the most perfect representation of maybe the world demographics, or at least American demographics, like one of every type of person is represented. Obviously, there's a dearth of p'tacs, a plethora of Tweety Bird tattoos. And the whole experience leaves you thinking you need to go turbo long Novo Nordisk. But these are, these are our people. And what I came from away from it with, with this, this idea that it's like, this is our team for America.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  And they, and we can't just reset and start fresh. These are, these, these are our compatriots. These are our, our colleagues and we need to work hard to make America a fantastic place for everyone. And so it's inspiring. But one thing that kept hitting my mind as I was walking around Disneyland was that it is, you know, people think of it as expensive, a couple hundred bucks to get in. The price always goes up, everything's expensive, but they are fantastic at price discrimination. So a couple hundred bucks to get a ticket in. But for maybe if you, if you spend a few thousand dollars on your family, you can buy basically every single Fastpass. And all the lines go from like 60 minutes to like 10 minutes.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  It's great. So clearly they figured out that there's a whole group of people that are willing to pay an order of magnitude more.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Then there's the 20K.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  I was about to bring that up.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Yep. So if you pay something like 20K for your family, there is a Disneyland employee who will walk you around and walk you directly to the front of every line.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Do they wear a tux though?

• 4:46John Coogan?

  No, they're a cast member. So they're in kind of a very like, it's like almost old timey Hollywood, like pinstripes and bow tie type thing.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Great, great. That works.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  They'll educate you on what the best flow is, answer any questions, give you extra history about the park. It turns it into a really crazy experience. But every, every actor or actress that works on a Disney show gets a, gets one of those free. And it used to be unlimited. It used to be whenever, whenever you wanted to go to Disneyland, if you were on a Disney show or a star in a movie, they would just, yeah, come get the $20,000 experience. But apparently, Kim Kardashian was so obsessed with Disneyland, she was going like every single month.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  They changed the rule.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  And they changed the rule. But now she just pays because she loves it. And I was thinking about that. I was like, that's incredibly humanizing. You know, people are very like, oh, Kim's like this, you know, Machiavellian, like crazy, like, you know, person who's like so driven, but like, I love that for her.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  At the end of the day, she just loves Disneyland.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, just loves Disneyland.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  And giving that experience to her, to her children.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And so my, my.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  That would be actually savage though. She was like, no, we're not bringing the kids. This is my Disneyland. This is my doom.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  But, but I love that Disneyland, you know, you can, you can go and have an experience for maybe 200 bucks. You can go and experience for 2,000 or 20,000. And that spread is the same product.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  And there's the $5 million product.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can do a buyout. Yeah.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll get to on the show today.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  You can do a buyout of the whole thing. And so. And I think, I think actually Citadel did a buyout there. I'm pretty sure they bought out all of Disney World or something like that, some hedge fund, maybe Goldman or something. But yeah, so just a fantastic example of price discrimination when they have a product that people wouldn't normally think is like consumption based. Like obviously AWS has price discrimination because the more service.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of, there's a lot of midsize companies out there that probably spend, let's say they, they spend a lot of money on their holiday party, right? Maybe they spend $500,000, right? They get, have to fly a bunch of people in and you know, there's some events and maybe performers and big catering fees, locations, all that stuff. Those companies should start just doing a Disneyland buyout every 10 years for retention purposes. To be like, well, it's, it's been eight years. Like you gotta get to the buyout.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  And they end up staying, right? That's better. It costs the same amount of money.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  But if you took that 500K that you're spending every year invested into the markets, you'd also get, you know, potentially, uh, even be even less than, than doing the, the events every single year.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  That's one of the best things about Hereticon, like Founder's Fund, that's not an annual thing. It happens like, it's happened twice now. And it was like, everyone was like last year's Hereticon, but it was actually like three years earlier and it happens very randomly. It's not an annual schedule. So it's like, when you get the invite, you have to say yes, because it's not just gonna happen next year. Whereas the holiday party, you get invited, oh, I'll catch the next one. But my challenge to the listener is, what could you be doing today to drive more price discrimination?

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Like, we're gonna launch a merch store at some point. You can bet your life that there's gonna be something in there for 50 bucks. There's gonna be something for 500 bucks and there's definitely gonna be something for 5,000 bucks in there.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Because you need to be capturing the value of the entire breadth of your audience.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  And, and, and it's, it's obvious if you're in a consumption B2B software product, but if you're, if you're not, you know.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And at the end, you know, we'll have venture, you know, we'll have venture debt products for entrepreneurs. We'll have even.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  You know, venture fund like line of credits, right?

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  If you have, if you're doing a capital call,

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  But you haven't the capital, you know, you need a little bit extra time to fund an investment.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  We'll have products for you, right?

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  So, full spectrum of products for this audience.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  I mean, a venture fund is the, is like the best way to price discriminate in an audience of founders, because the higher value the founder, the more money you make when you invest.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  And, and I think that's why so many content creators have built funds on the back of it.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  And run ads. It's very, very hard to capture the full value of your audience. You look at what Ben Thompson has done at Stratechery, you know that there are major, like, you know, multimillionaires at Meta who subscribe to Stratechery.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  For $200.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And they're the people, they, they make, they make decisions that lead to 100 million, hundreds of millions of dollars of spend.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  Various infrastructure products.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, now, he's very happy with how much the big book of business he's built up, and he likes not having that conflict of interest with the ads. So, it's kind of made sense for him. But if he really wanted to maximize the value of Stratechery, it'd just be ads and a venture fund.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Anyway, moving on. So, go and figure out how you can squeeze more money out of your best customers, because they have it.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  Do it in a way that's aligned. Nobody, nobody spending the 20 grand at Disney is unhappy that they're spending that money. They're getting a great experience out of it.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, so let's move on to, it's the holiday season. Everyone's thinking about what gifts to get for their loved ones, their friends, their colleagues. And we're going to do a bit of a gift guide. We've, we've talked about the information's gift guide before. It was an absolute disaster. I don't think they had a single item on that list that was over $1,000.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  Disaster.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  You're going to need a little bit bigger budget to follow along today, but there should be a lot of interesting items and interesting selections.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  Something for everyone in here.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  There really is, there really is. So, we're going to run through a few different archetypes that might match folks in your life and give you some, some guides for what type of gifts you should be putting under the Christmas tree this year. Let's start with the absolute size lord, the billionaire, the deck of billionaire. You're shopping for the man who truly has everything. What do you get them?

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Hard to shop for.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Hard to shop for. I say we start with cars, and I think you gotta go McLaren F1.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  How can you not?

• 10:42John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a $20 million car, but it has incredible history, both in the automotive world and in the tech world.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's something that it's something that someone can appreciate, even at whether they're into cars or not, right?

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  You don't need too much time to explain the significance of the McLaren F1.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Gordon Murray.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Somebody is is getting really, really interested in.

• 11:02John Coogan?

  And as soon as you sit in that middle seat, it's not left-hand drive, it's not right-hand drive, it's center drive.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  Center drive.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  The best part, you can take two friends for a ride because it seats three in the front seat.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's and it's funny because I wish more, did you ever? We had, we had an old like, you know, like country farm truck growing up that had three in the front. And some of my best memories are with my dad driving, you know, me or my little brother in the middle seat. And then the right seat and we need to bring back car. I think it's really dangerous. I think it's why they probably killed it, but.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  They're they actually are bringing it back. Hyundai is releasing a new Palisade that has nine seats.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Hyundai is cooking right now.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  They they basically ripped off the the Range Rover.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah, they did.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  The new Palisade, like they're just like.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  It looks so good.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  It's ours, this is our silhouette now.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  And the interior, we're gonna take all your colors and and textures.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  It's because in in Korea, if you have a nine passenger vehicle or more, you can use a bus lane.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  And so they were like, let's just put nine.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  But do you have to have?

• 12:07John Coogan?

  I don't know if you need to have nine in there, you just need to have nine seats. I think you just need to have nine seats. And so they're just like, it's technically a bus, so you can just take it anywhere. And then and then they were like, yeah, well, let's just sell this in America. So it has the bench seat in the middle and you can just pull it up. So, yeah. If you're if you're shopping for the size lord, get them a McLaren F1. And then, of course, we have to get them a watch and we highly, highly recommend picking up a graph diamonds hallucination. For $55 million, it's the ultimate in jeweled watches, over 110 carats of rare colored diamonds. It's truly the top.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  Context, I think a lot of people that listen to the show, follow us on X as well. And this was the watch that we recommended. Mark Andreessen actually get eight of if he's gonna follow the 2% rule.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  They only made one, but you'll have to commission seven more.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  This is the kind of piece that you can commission. It's not a, it's not really the kind of thing you walk in off the street and say, hey, can I get a graph diamond hallucination?

• 13:00John Coogan?

  You know the funniest thing about the hallucination? It's quartz watch.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not mechanical.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're like, I gotta change the battery on my $55 million watch.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  It's a good reminder that you have a $55 million watch, though. Every once in a while, you want to be like, oh, yeah.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Got to change the battery. Okay, let's move on to guns, which is obviously something you'll be gifting to loved ones this year. And for the absolute size lord, the giga chad, the decabillionaire, we're going with the Cabot Guns Meteorite 1911 pistols. They're maybe four and a half billion dollars for the pair, but I have some copy for here and it's fantastic. The timeless design of the 1911, the ageless significance of interstellar materials, the innovative techniques of an all American gun company. A trinity of circumstance fused together into the perfect embodiment of a transcendent vision. After billions of years of travel, a meteorite hurtled to Earth in Namibia during Earth's prehistoric times.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Unknown to Western civilization until the early 1800s, pieces were used by the ancient Nama people in the construction of tools and weapons. In 2015, its destiny not yet fulfilled, the hands of Cabot Guns master craftsmen wrapped around a 77 pound piece of unshapen metal. And so began a transformation. We too, like the men of yore, saw in it the potential to shape earthly perfection from materials from the cosmos. What a fantastic, what a fantastic marketing language.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  I, this reminds me, a while back, I was looking into, I wanted to get, I wanted to get a 1911 with, with a, with a trigger made out of shark tooth.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  Like, basically, which is totally possible.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  It's not, it's certainly not easy, but in the world of high end custom firearms manufacturing, which I happen to have a little bit of experience in, anything is possible.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  So I think that's really going to stand out if you get them the meteorite pistols.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the meteorite can't go wrong with meteorite, pretty much anything.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Okay, then we got to move on to vacations for the, for the size lord. What are we getting them for a vacation? We recommend a box at every Formula One race. This is going to run you three to five million dollars. But they're going to be able to enjoy it for not just one month, but. Basically, the entire year.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  They will not be able to go, almost go a single month without thinking about you.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Which is the goal, right?

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  If you're buying something for a beaner, you want to be top of mind, whether it's just a friend.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Or you have some type of business relationship with them, or, or if you're another beaner and you're, and you're actually competing, kind of PvP to try to accumulate the most assets.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  Getting your rival beaner box seats for every F1 event is such a good way to distract them.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Um, not to mention, you know, I think some, a gift like this is great. You know, most of our beaner friends are not going to be going to every single race. Like F1 can get boring, right? It's definitely, especially if you're Stappen, um, you know, continues his tear. And, uh, but it's the kind of thing you can, as a beaner can re-gift it, they can say to their, you know, second or third cousin, hey, do you want this? I can't make it.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'll have my jet.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Box holds 50 people sometimes.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  You know, they can bring all their friends and they're reminding, uh, they're reminded of you. It's kind of like getting someone like an old magazine subscription. Every time it shows up, they're like, oh, yeah. I'm still enjoying that present.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  The graph diamonds hallucination might still be just sitting in a jewelry case somewhere.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  The McLaren F1 might be wrapped in a garage somewhere. But those F1 tickets are going to keep coming up, coming up. And they're going to be on the circuit and they're going to thank you. So.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Pick it up. And then of course you have to get someone a horse. And so for the size lord, we recommend a thoroughbred racehorse, ideally derived from the Fusachi Pegasus line. The 2000 Kentucky Derby winner. It's one of the most expensive stallion deals ever. The bloodline was syndicated for 60 to 70 million dollars in 2000. So, uh, just really top tier racing bloodline. And I think that's something that they could really enjoy. And they'd love to have a horse under the Christmas tree.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a trophy. It's a trophy horse.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  Everybody should have one, at least one. And it's a, it's a conversation starter.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  If you're having somebody by your property.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Let's do American Dynamist next and then we'll move on to one of yours. So for the American Dynamist, the, uh, the capital allocator who's focused on, uh, making America great again. We are focused on American products. Things that speak to revitalization, re-industrialization.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  America manufacturing hard tech.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  And so for the American dynamist, we recommend a M134 minigun by Dylan Arrow. It's going to run you 200 to 300 K. They're pretty rare on the civilian market, but it's an electrically driven 7.62 millimeter rotary machine gun. It's iconic and extremely rare due to NFA regulations, but you've seen it in movies. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger carries.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Played it in COD.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, exactly. The minigun is iconic and it'll look great mounted on the back wall while they're taking zoom calls. Every defense founder will say, hey, this investor has a minigun. They take American dynamism seriously.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  And I want their check. I want them in my round.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it looks, I mean, it would look fantastic on a Cybertruck if, if, if, if your buddy buys a Cybertruck as sort of a novelty thing.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  To add to that novelty, having a minigun strapped to it.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  And maybe you, maybe you, you know, work with someone like Allen Control Systems to make it fully autonomous.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic. Yeah. So let's move on to cars for the American dynamist. The Cybertruck's a great one. I'm also extremely bullish on the Tesla Roadster second generation. You get them.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  The allocation now, I think it's going to happen. It's been way delayed, but Elon is on top of the world. The stock's ripping. He knows where the regulation is going. I think he's going to get it done. And I think those will be delivered pretty soon. So that's a good one.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Come on though. Come on though, John.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  What else? How, how can we not go with the Ford GT on this one?

• 18:57John Coogan?

  It's a great car.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  If I'm, if I'm going to take an AD capital allocator very seriously, them pulling up and, you know, I want something, I want them pulling up in something.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Culturally significant, right? And, and Ford GT is not, not a perfect car by any means. You know, there's a bunch of ways you could sort of poke holes in it, but it has history at, yeah, history at Le Mans.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, you just watch Ford versus Ferrari. There's a whole movie about this history. It's fantastic.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  The silhouette is unbeatable. It is a fantastic, it feels American, but it, it almost feels like a Lamborghini cousin of Lamborghini. And if you are. Let's say you've got a portfolio founder that's running hot, they're doing well, you think they're going to get you a nice markup.

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Taking them to the airport in your Ford GT or picking them up is a great way to make a statement and say, hey, when you're raising your next round, make sure I get my Prorata, super Prorata, and ideally get a chance to lead that next round.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  And that's a GT is a good way to stick in that founder's head.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  And they often come with not necessarily a pre-rap, but a livery.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  And so that livery, I think it just kind of opens up the world of customizing a little bit more. You know, the classic is the blue stripe, but you could throw a red, white, and blue livery on there and it wouldn't look tacky on a Ford GT because you're used to seeing some stripes, you're used to seeing a little bit of a design on there.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or if Catherine Boyle's driving it, maybe an orange, a white with an orange, you know, stripe down the center would be cool.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  Be very cool. Or just throw an eagle decal right on the front, like it's an old Ford Mustang.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  That's fantastic, too.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Let's move on to watches. We got to keep it in America. This is tough for watches. A lot of Swiss, a lot of Swiss watches out there.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Swiss dominance.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  If you're going American, you're going to want to stick to RGM and get the Pennsylvania Series Tourbillon. It's going to run you 100K, very limited annual production, but it's one of the greatest American-made watches out there. Their movements built in-house and it's just an amazing example of American craftsmanship. And I really do believe that if you care about American manufacturing, you can't

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Just put your money where your mouth is.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Exactly. Like if we start pouring money into RGM, they will catch up eventually.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Like the market is a weighing machine over time.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  And so.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've talked about this on the show a lot.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  You can't just rely on the government to stimulate the economy.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  It's on every single one of our listeners, every single American to find, to stimulate the economy in a way to bet on the future that they want, right?

• 21:24John Coogan?

  And then for vacation for the American dynamist, what's the most American vacation you could possibly do? We mentioned it earlier. It's the Disneyland park buyout. It's going to run you a couple of million bucks, but you get a one night private event at Disneyland in Anaheim or Disney World in Orlando, and you get the entire theme park reserved for you and guests after hours. No lines, personalized shows, fireworks, character meets, and unlimited rides.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Second, second on the list here deserves an honorary mention would be heli skiing in the remote Alaskan wilderness.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, for the more athletic.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  One to two weeks, 100 to 200 K, private helicopter, untouched powder, luxury base camps, gourmet meals, avalanche certified guides.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  And you're keeping it in America.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Extreme, you know, exotic skiing while staying American.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Exactly. I love that.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's just a good reminder of like, this place is ours, right?

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Exactly. That's the best part.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  It almost shouldn't be, right?

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Russia almost had a

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Could be Russian, could be Canadian, but we have it. You gotta go explore it.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  And I look forward to doing our first live show in Alaska.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  I've been. It's fantastic.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  The Alaskan fans are crazy.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  I'm extremely bullish on Alaska. I love Alaska.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  They're always sending DMs and offering to send down fish and things like that. So.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Okay. So let's wrap up with the, with the VCs for a minute and move on to the seed stage founder. Jordy, what do you got for me?

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh man, this was hard. Seed stage founder, you know, maybe, maybe you're pulling in 80, 100 K a year. You're pretty oriented around the work, you know, not less time on the road, more capital constrained. You know, if you give somebody a McLaren F1, it's, and they don't have the, the income or the, the net worth to, to sort of support it. That's kind of like cursing them in a way, right? It might cost you a few hundred grand a year just to maintain.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Properly. But um, so yeah, we'll go down the list. For, for a gun, I'd say.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  You know, most of the seed stage founders I know, they do have Glocks. They're pretty much a stock Glock. It's a $600 gun.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  Get them, have them take that Glock down to Arleigh Arms.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  And upgrade every single element of it. Strip out all the internals, externals, and just, and really sort of upgrade it. Arleigh is sort of like the Brabus or the AMG of firearms. And so you can turn that base Glock into something that's really significant, meaningful. They can customize the exterior, you know, customize the grip, all that kind of thing. So that's an easy one. A few thousand dollars can really turn that into a special piece for them. For watches, I would go with the, I'd go with a Cartier Santos. It's like, you know, this, this watch is something that I feel like it gets a lot of hate, but it has like this, this great, I love the Santos. It's got great, it's got great legacy

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  from, from, from the aviation world. It, it's not like, it's not like a new watch, right? It's been around for decades and decades and decades.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  It's not just not a new watch. It was the first watch.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  The first watch.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Louis Cartier.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  That is, that is right. That is right.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Louis Cartier was contacted by a pilot, Santos, I don't remember the full name, but he was using a pocket watch while he was flying and said it was very difficult to take the pocket watch out to measure his time and.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  What if you could have it on the wrist?

• 24:33John Coogan?

  What if you could have it on a wrist? And Louis Cartier made the first watch and named it after him, the Cartier Santos, also worn by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street in, in beautiful gold.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic watch. It's beautiful. It's, it's beautiful. Comes in a variety of different sizes. Regardless, you know, even if you're in the thousand pound club, you can still get it on your wrist. And yeah, it's not going to be so much more than two weeks of your salary that other people would say like, why is this guy wearing this watch, right? So not going to put him in it and make him look gaudy or anything like that. For cars, this one is a very personal choice for me, but I think it's the right choice. The first sports car I ever purchased was a 997 911. I bought it for $32,000. I bring a trailer. Felt like I stole it. And put easily more than 10,000 miles on it in the first

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  year that I owned it. Did not have a single issue with it. It cost me like literally under $1,000 in maintenance. Gave me millions of dollars of enjoyment. It was just like one of the best cars I've ever owned. And so this is a car that looks, you know, that's got some legacy to it. It's timeless and it's going to cost you less than a Model Y, right? So, great choice for a seed stage founder.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  And if you want an upgrade that'll hold its value a little bit better, go Targa.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  Targa.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  The Targas are really holding their value.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because even the grindiest founders that I know, they'll still take a couple hours on Sunday to take a little drive up the coast.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  You want to pop the top off.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Pop the top. And so anyways, for vacation.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do you do?

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  This one's bold. I'm going Eastern Europe.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Great developers there. So if you have everybody on your team.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Work play action.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  A little work play action. No, if you're a seed stage founder, you should never take a true vacation. Do not go offline. If you're burning out, it's because your product's not working.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  And you're not doing your life's work.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  And you're not doing your life's work. It's not, you don't need a vacation to fix that. So, go to Eastern Europe. Great food, wine, views, everything. And meet, you know, meet some, hire some new developers, or hang out with some existing ones. And just avoid Western Europe. And of course, this one's going to be bold. So, we have been recommending some eventing horses, some racehorses, generally thoroughbreds.

• 27:03Jordi Hays?

  But for the seed stage founder, I'd go with a mini horse. And the reason for that is I think you could really get some yield out of it. It's not, you could, you could sort of keep them in the second bedroom of your apartment if you needed to. But on the weekends, if you got a little younger cousins or siblings or anything like that, let them go rent it out to kids' parties.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  And you could earn some yield on it. So the food for that mini horse might cost you a few hundred bucks a month. But I think you could get a few hundred bucks per party to rent out that mini horse.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  And, and so anyway, some, some potential yield there.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  And you can make it, you can make it the company's mascot. There's a famous story about the hedgehog at Facebook. Sean Parker wanted to go get a hedgehog.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  Could be your mascot during the weeks and on the weekends, it's working.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  You could probably go viral with that on X. You post, oh yeah, grinding with the mini horse today.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Grinding with mini.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Just developer next to the mini horse. That's going to get engagement paid from everyone.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  That's great. Okay, I love it.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Marketing value and then some yield help pay off your ramp bill at the end of the month. That brings me to my wildcard gift. This is an easy one. There's no excuse not to get this for the seed stage founder in your life. Set them up, you know, write them a nice card, but in the card, it's the phone number of your favorite Ramp SDR.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  And it just says, give them a call. I already told them you're going to call. They will take care of you.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  They'll get you set up on Ramp. It's painless, takes a few minutes and companies on average save 5% a year.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  So that was an easy one to add in there.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  I love it. Okay, let's go back to me. I got two and then we'll go back to you. We're going for the, for the up and coming general partner at a venture capital firm. Probably not a liquid billionaire yet, but has probably driven maybe a billion dollars in returns for the fund.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  I would hope so.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  And so, you know, this is a person with taste. They need to move up in the upper echelon of class and style. And they need to let people know that they've arrived. But you're not going to be breaking the bank like you would with the Deca Billionaire sized Lord.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  So for Gun, we're starting with the Magnum Research Gold Plated Desert Eagle 5.0.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Great. A great conversation starter.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  So under 10K potentially. And yeah, it's iconic. You can still carry it in a board meeting. Which I think is important. There needs to be a threat of violence in board meetings. We've discussed this. You need to know, oh, you think we should pull forward our sales targets? Are you willing to die for that?

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Are you, are you willing to put everything on the line for what you're saying?

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  And we've, we've, we've posted about this before. Your board meetings should look like, at, at least once a year, like an all out brawl.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  And, um, and almost having, you know, if, if every board member has a firearm on them, it can, it can kind of keep people more productive because there's this, yeah, this threat of violence beyond just, you know, throwing blows.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  And if you're a founder and you walk into a board meeting, uh, and, you know, in your suit, you got a holster, there's a gun, and one of your board members says something, it's just like, oh, so you don't respect the constitution? Like, what are we doing here?

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  What are we doing here?

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Ask them to step down.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, I think that's a great choice for the up and coming GP for the car. We're going to want to go with the Rolls Royce Cullinan Black Badge. Old, very versatile car, great for driving around, even, even the whole founding team.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  So you can pick them up, take them to the Rosewood, uh, write a term sheet, you know, show them the ropes, introduce them to Silicon Valley, um, and still do it in comfort and it's not going to be loud in there. So you'll be able to have a conversation about the business.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a good car too. If you do, you know, if, it's, it's fun to drive yourself, but when you, your driver's around, they can drive it. You can sit in the back.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, it's hard, hard to go, hard to go wrong with that.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  And then if you need, if you need a sports car, which you probably do, maybe get this up and coming GP, uh, Porsche GT3 RS or maybe a Dakar.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  I would go with the Dakar.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Okay. It's going to stand out more in Sand Hill Road.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Northern California has always had that sort of rugged outdoorsy element to it.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  It's like a Patagonia vest as a car.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  As a car.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, it's the kind of thing you can drive it up to Tahoe.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I go to Tahoe. Yeah.

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  As soon as I pull up into the car.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Or you can take it hiking, you know, go up to Tam and take a little loop.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Snow this week in Tahoe? I'm not worried. I got my Dakar.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Now for watches, there's a couple of different options. Obviously, the Patek Philippe Nautilus 5726, great watch, definitely recommended to any up and coming GPs. Highly recommend gifting that. You're not going to get negative feedback on a gift like that. It's just going to be received really, really well. But if you want to mix it up, get them the Rolex Daytona 6239 Paul Newman.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Can I tell you why I like that pick, John?

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Why do you like that?

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  So Daytona just by itself is a high production watch, right? It's coming out all the time.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  And so, you know, you can pick up a Daytona for, let's call it 25, 30 grand.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  It is at the higher end of Rolex's lineup, right?

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, they retail for something like, I forget what their actual retail price, somewhere between 12 and $15,000. So the retail price is low. Market value for a basic Daytona is somewhere around $30,000. And so, the reason that the Paul Newman Daytona is so great is to the untrained eye, it's just a regular Daytona. It's like, oh. But depending on the room that you're in, you can say, no, this is a Paul Newman Daytona.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it's one watch for founders and it's a different watch for LPs.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  So you're at YC Demo Day, everyone's, oh, he's just got a Rolex on, he's just a normal.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an everyday Rolex.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Capital allocator. You go to LP Day, everyone's like, this guy knows what's up.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  You can wear that thing anywhere.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Now, let's go to vacations. What are we getting for the up and coming GP? The Rising Star Adventure. I say we go to Antarctica and we take a luxury icebreaker adventure.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  That is something that will be good on the gram.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  That will be something that'll be good in the boardroom.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  When you're, when you're having to zoom call into a board meeting.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Starlink.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  You can say, yeah, sorry, guys, if you, if there's any noise in the background.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  It's the ice breaking.

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  Breaking from my luxury ice breaking adventure boat.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  A little controversial. I don't know if there, people are cool with breaking ice these days. Isn't that like kind of anti-inviter mentalist?

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  Is it?

• 33:47John Coogan?

  It might be edgy.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it'll, I think it'll reform.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Sounds fun.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And just the noise, it's almost like a symphony of ice.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  We're big fans of, of, of the symphony in general.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  And then if the GP in your life isn't, doesn't like the cold, we recommend switching it up, going to Egypt and doing a private archaeological dig.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  You get some exclusive permits to historical sites. You work along the Egyptologists, maybe take a private Nile River boat, luxury desert camp, curated museum visits. A week or two in Egypt is great. It's not going to break the, the bank. It's only two hundred.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  And for the GPs, like they're probably, you know, they've, they've chosen the venture path because they're degenerate gamblers. Maybe they don't go to, they don't do it in Vegas or sports betting.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  But venture in many ways is gambling. And so the great thing about an archaeological dig is that you might dig up something worth well beyond what you paid to go on the trip. So you could almost position it as an investment, right?

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then for horse, it's a little bit trickier. You could go with a Lucetano. You could do something Dressage, which is a little bit outside of the norm. You could also just go with thoroughbred, maybe a stallion prospect, maybe some just mediocre stud fees. Don't break the bank, something that they can still enjoy at the track every once in a while. But it doesn't become their whole life.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't be that mad at going the Arabian route either, depending on where your LP base is. That might be more of a, that just might be more aligned with where you're going to want to take that horse.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. It also depends on what their lifestyle is like. Maybe they're building a ranch. Maybe they're, maybe you want to get a quarter horse, something like that. There are, there are plenty of great options, but don't, don't miss out on getting them a horse because you don't want to be caught.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  A horse much like getting them, you know, year-round tickets, uh, box, uh, boxes to F1. It's something that they're gonna be with for years, years and years and years and have, uh, you know, many, many memories with, so.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, uh, I have one more and then we'll finish out with yours. We have, uh, for the crypto millionaire, for the crypto senti, for someone who's done very well in crypto, what do you want to get them? It's gonna be a little bit wilder. They're the absolute most risk on.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  We're going off, we're going off, off-chain with this one, folks.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're going off-chain. Uh, so for the gun, I'm going Chetac M200 Intervention. The 406 caliber sniper rifle, anti-material. You can take down, uh, take down an SUV or a Toyota Hilux with it. Uh, it is over the top. It's gonna look great on the Instagram, great on TikTok. Uh, it's gonna be, uh, iconic. A lot of these folks are anonymous, so you're just gonna see some hands in the photo, but it's gonna, you're gonna know when you see this gun, that, uh, that they mean business.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  That's a statement.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  Uh, it's a statement piece, for sure, for sure. And then in terms of cars, uh, with crypto, it's super important to stay in the Lambo ecosystem, obviously, but Huracan played out. And then we don't really know how the new, uh, how the new, uh, Lamborghini lineup is going to age. And they also haven't released the limited editions yet. So instead of, uh, going upmarket, I say go back, get the Aventador SVJ.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Or maybe even go back further, Countach.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The SVJ is such a, is such a fantastic car. I do know, uh, one of, one of Solana's earliest investors is a proud owner of an SVJ. Uh, he doesn't, he doesn't post about it online. I wish he did. Um, and, uh, they're just not making any more of those. It's one of the last pure, purebred Lamborghini V12s. Um, and it doesn't have, it doesn't have any hybrid junk in it. It's just a pure-play, uh, naturally aspirated V12.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  And so in the last cycle, you know, every crypto bro had wrapped Huracan. This one is going to be the Temerario.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  But if you go back, get the Aventador SVJ, you still, people still know this guy made his money in crypto because it's Lambo. That's what the brand's known for now.

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  This guy made money even earlier.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  So I like that. And the Countach, uh, it's a little difficult, it's a little difficult to drive.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Stick with the, uh,

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  Not a good, not a good, uh,

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Store SVJ. Keep it simple, folks. And then for watch, of course, we're going Richard Mill, the RM0056 Sapphire Turbine.

• 38:02Jordi Hays?

  A racing machine on the wrist.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Racing machine on the wrist. It's a $2 million watch, but it has a fully transparent Sapphire case housing complex turbine on movement, avant-garde materials and design. Can't go wrong. I mean, it's so flashy, but it's exactly what you need if you made your money in crypto. You're going to have NFTs, they're going to be over the top. You need something on your wrist that you can display. The RM.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the only thing I would say with all these choices is do your best to try to buy the asset on chain.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, definitely.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  You can still take custody of it, but it'll, it'll mean a lot to that.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Person who's made, you know, made their livelihood in crypto, that you went the extra mile for it to be a real world asset. You know, you bought it on chain.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, it, it's just, it's a really way to say, you know, crypto's real.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it's, it's very valuable beyond just speculation.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  Used it to buy this gift for you.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then for vacation for the crypto, uh, the crypto Chad, we go to the Caribbean super yacht Regatta. You charter a cutting edge super yacht and you race along famous, alongside famous Regattas personally, personal sailing coaches, private island stops, lavish onboard entertainment. What could be more crypto than getting offshore with your money?

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Uh, and for horse, uh, this is going to be a wild pick. I say you go draft horse.

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Clydesdale, bit of a meme, bit of a meme horse.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  But it could be, if you were launching like a new L2, you could make it the mascot.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's big, it's robust, it's from the Budweiser commercials, not actually an American horse, Scottish. It's, it's hilarious. Anyone who is big, so, oh, you need a Clydesdale. Complete myth.

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Unless you're 5,000 pounds, uh, you can ride a normal horse. Um, but the Clydesdale stands out. So that's my recommendation for the crypto bro.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Great, great Rex. And, uh,

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Let's finish it out.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  And with probably our favorite category. So the last category is technology journalists. And how do you shop for somebody like this?

• 40:04John Coogan?

  It's tough.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  They are opinionated.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  They're in the, they're in, they're highly online. They know what they want in life and they're going for it, right?

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  And they usually come from fabulous wealth.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  They come from fabulous wealth. So it's like, how do you get them something that they don't already have? But, uh, but anyway, so we're going to try to keep it sort of reasonable. Our goal with these gifts are things that they would buy for themselves.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, as well, right?

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  So it's sort of staying in line. You want to get something that maybe they had their eye on or would have had their eye on. So, uh, right, starting at the top, uh, for gun, uh, I'm going to go with, uh, a little bit.

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this might be a controversial decision, but I'm going to go for a taser.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  Off of Amazon Prime.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:48Jordi Hays?

  So you can go, if you don't know this, you can go buy a taser on Amazon. And the reason I go with Taylor taser is a lot of journalists historically.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  Taylor?

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Taylor, is that a Freudian?

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. Taser Lorenz.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  Taser Lorenz.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  She tases me for talking too much shit.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, but, but yeah, journalists have, have, uh, at least, uh, you know, generally been, been sort of against the second amendment.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  And so you don't want to get them a regular gun and have them get offended by that. So I'd go with a taser. They can daily drive it. They can bring it in any situation they want. They can keep it in their, their purse, backpack, briefcase, uh, just right in their, their belt. But very versatile and gets the job done in a pinch situation. For watch, I'm going to go with, uh, this is the only time I'm ever recommend somebody get an Apple watch, but I'm going to go recommend an Apple watch with an Hermes, uh, leather strap. And the reason for this is the Apple watch is great. These, these people are hyper online.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're getting scoops or getting tips. Uh, they need that on risk notification. And but because journalists so often come from fabulous wealth, they're going to want to stress it up a little bit and get an Hermes leather band. So I think I think that's a great option for journalists. For a car, I would for the journalist in my life, I would prepay a Maserati lease for them. Again, people grow up around money, going to private schools, you know, being driven around by private drivers and expensive cars. And so a Maserati is a luxury vehicle, but it's somewhat accessible.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  It's, you know, you could probably get a one year Maserati lease for them for like 25K or something like that.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Quadraporte? Something like that?

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, honestly, the whole range, it's hard to lease a Maserati for more than a thousand dollars a month. And so you're not really going to go wrong with with something like that. And it still gives, you know, the car is going to break down dramatically over that year, but they still get the experience of feeling like they're in a fine Italian, you know, sports car, elevated sports car. Vacation, this isn't going to surprise anybody, get them a round trip tickets to Idaho. So they can just kind of poke around Sun Valley and just kind of sit around the edges and kind of just kind of observe and try to get, pick up some scoops and tips on the fly.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  And get a business class seats, right? Like it's for them.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  They're used to flying just regular old economy, a business class ticket to Idaho.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Unless they're with their family, of course.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  Unless they're with their family in that class, they're certainly not flying commercial. And then on the

• 43:37John Coogan?

  You could pair with that while they're going to Sun Valley, you get them a Canon 5D and a 70 to 200 lens so they can take some

• 43:45Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna need a lot of zoom.

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, telephoto lens.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Telephoto lens.

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  The lens should be like at least

• 43:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  And that's another reason to go business class because they can, they should have the ability to check that without an extra charge. If you're getting somebody a gift, you don't want them to have to spend a bunch of money out of pocket to experience it. So the horse, again, this is not going to be surprising, a lot of

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  a lot of, a lot of technology journalists had a prior life as horse girls.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  And

• 44:19John Coogan?

  Well, when you come from money, everyone in the family is in your equestrian.

• 44:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and when you come, when you come from that level of wealth, it's just sort of a given, but I'm gonna go with an eventing.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  No, when you come, when you come from that sort of background, I'd go with a top level eventing Hanoverian, it's 75 up to $200,000 plus horse. It's exceptionally versatile across dressage, show jumping, across country. And yeah, the top bloodlines in this category are dominating all the international eventing podiums.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  And they can kind of take it wherever they want. They can do dressage, they can do jumping, it kind of, it's an open book for them.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  It's versatile.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  And then, lastly, you know, if said technology journalist is not already working at the information or newcomer, I would get them subscriptions to both so that when newcomer and the information get scoops, they can just quickly repurpose them and get them out.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  So that they can stay, get, get kind of the.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, gift for their career.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a way to help them level up and stay on top of the stories that matter, so.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  Wow, we did it.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Yep. The last wild card that I would throw in before we close out is, maybe you're strapped for cash, maybe you're not going material goods. If you are shopping for anyone on this list, just get them a guy. You know, everyone has a guy, guy for real estate, guy for lawyer, guy for Antichrist. Get, just take your guy, give it to your friend. Just be like, here's my guy.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Put him in a group.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Put him in a group chat. Let him, let him run wild.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, we gotta move on to some personnel news because we got some breaking news from the heart of America's industrial revival, NAIA. The new American industrial alliance has officially launched. This isn't just an announcement, it's a call to action. NAIA is bringing together founders, investors, and policymakers to restore America's industrial might and reestablish our nation as a global. Powerhouse. Jordy, what you got for me?

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  Here's the deal, John. For decades, American industry has been on the ropes. Jobs shipped overseas, resources untapped, and bad policies stifling innovation. But the NAIA is flipping the script. They're proving that deindustrialization was a choice and that reindustrialization can be too. There, but NA-

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Hit it again.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  But NAIA is flipping the script, proving that deindustrialization was a choice and reindustrialization can be too.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Well, it all started back in June with the inaugural Re-Industrialize Summit in Detroit, brought together hundreds of builders, investors, and government officials. That summit wasn't just a meeting, it was a movement, a rallying cry for American greatness. And today, that movement became a force with the launch of NAIA.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  NAIA is here to be the voice, visionary, and vanguard of America's industrial resurgence. What does that mean, John? Cutting red tape, incentivizing investment in critical industries, protecting American workers, and streamlining government contracting. Simply put, NAIA is doing what it takes to put American builders back to work and innovation back on the map.

• 47:39John Coogan?

  And this alliance is already stacked with heavy hitters. Members include Palantir, 8VC, Y Combinator, Hadrian, Allen Control Systems, and many more. It's a roster packed with companies and investors who are betting big on America's future.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Austin Bishop, the driving force behind NAIA, summed it up perfectly. He said, "John, it's time to build in America. It's time to re-industrialize."

• 48:02John Coogan?

  So what's next? Well, you can go follow NAIA on X and visit their website at newindustrials.org. Whether you're a builder, an investor, or just someone who believes in the power of American industry, this is your chance to join the movement.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  NAIA isn't just about restoring what we've lost, it's about building what comes next. The future of American industry starts now. Let's get to work, John.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Very exciting. Stay tuned. I love those guys. I did not get a chance to go to the reindustrialized summit.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Same.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  I was busy, but I think I'm going to the next one. They, I don't think they've announced it yet.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we'll definitely be there.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  It was a huge hit and I was talking to one of the organizers when I was in DC and it seems like it's gonna be.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  I think we need to give, I think we need to give a talk about the posters driving reindustrialization.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  And just give a full market map.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Of what's going on.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  I mean, I do think, I do think we could crush there in a sense that just like, there's gonna be a lot of kind of, you know, default people talking their book, like what's investing like in this sector? What's the government strategy? What's the founding strategy?

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  But then we cut across all that, which is some wild random shit.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, posting matters a lot.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  It does.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  Like it doesn't.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, the memes are powerful.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  Every, every meme has the potential to convert somebody that would have gone and worked at.

• 49:12John Coogan?

  Especially in college. Like there are so many new grads who are super into the reindustrialization thing, specifically because they've seen the Gundo phenomenon and the posting and it really is valuable.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I couldn't make it this last time. I, um,

• 49:25John Coogan?

  I'm excited.

• 49:26Jordi Hays?

  My second child decided to come.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Literally like within a week.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  We were both in the same boat.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but we'll be there next year and, uh, very excited for, for Aaron and Austin and the whole team over there.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're great. Well, congrats to them. But we have more breaking news. Breaking news in the world of AI, folks. Devin has officially entered general availability. That's right. Cognition Labs has just announced that their cutting a, cutting edge AI software engineer is now available to all engineering teams, starting at just $500 a month. No seat limits, Slack integration, IDE extensions and even API access. Devin's stepping onto the big stage and it's already making waves.

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's break it down, John. Devin is more than just an AI. It's your newest team member. This tool isn't just helping engineers write code. It's debugging, building, deploying apps, and even knocking out small but pesky tasks like refactoring and documentation. Think of Devin as your all-star utility player, ready to step in wherever you need it most.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  So where does Devin really shine? Teams are already using it for everything from fixing front-end bugs to drafting first-pass pull requests. And here's the kicker. Devin works best when you give it tasks you know how to do yourself. Share detailed requirements and invest in coaching it along the way. It's not just automation, it's collaboration.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  The numbers don't lie, John. Devin has already proven its mettle completing real-world coding jobs, contributing to open source repositories, and even passing practical engineering interviews at top AI companies. From refactoring codebases to handling integrations, Devin is stepping up where humans might hesitate.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Cognition Labs has made sure Devin integrates seamlessly with your workflow. Whether you're tagging Devin in Slack to squash bugs in real time, or using its IDE extension to tackle bigger refactors, Devin's designed to save you time and keep your team focused on the big picture.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  We can't forget about the enterprise potential, John. Devin is already helping engineering teams at scale with custom solutions available through Cognition Labs' sales team. You know I like talking to sales teams, John. I do believe it's a cure to male loneliness.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  I love it. So what's the verdict? Devin isn't just a tool, it's a game changer. At $500 a month, it's a small price to pay for a massive boost in efficiency and productivity. Engineering teams, it's time to draft Devin to your lineup. Head to app.deven.ai and start building with the AI engineer of tomorrow, today. I love Devin. Did you know that Devin is now the number one committer of code at Ramp?

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  If you're not, if you know that and you're not bullish on Devin,

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  what are you doing?

• 52:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fantastic team.

• 52:11Jordi Hays?

  Spun out of Ramp?

• 52:12John Coogan?

  Yes, spun out.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  Spun out?

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Neil was there, I think there's a bunch of other co-founders too, but you know,

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  I would just say spun out spiritually.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. But fantastic team, absolutely stacked with IMO gold medalists. They have an insane amount of like math and just... Next level engineering talent. It's a fantastic team and they've executed really well. And the interesting thing is that they've they've really focused. Have you seen the actual UI?

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  It's like it's really, really fascinating how they've built this. They focused on the user experience so much and they I don't think they've gotten bogged down.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  I love how the the product can work with itself.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  So can and basically you can put two Devens together and they just sort of like working in tandem.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  And that's kind of what happens when you just ask chat GPT to reason through something. It's kind of talking to itself internally. That's what the O one model is. But they they really haven't gotten bogged down with like, oh, we need to train some custom model from scratch. It's going to build this data center. They've just been like, let's use all the the best tools in the box, but then make this very, very specific for this problem.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  And it's just had, you know, immense impact, especially on like the grunt work tasks. I heard this interesting story about Scott was telling me that there are now some, I believe, ramp SDRs that can, if there's a problem, they can, while they're on the phone with you, they're non-technical guys. They can at Devon, hey, this customer is having this problem. I think I think the code needs to be changed a little bit, like, can you go in and fix this? And while they're on the call, they're solving it. It's like amazing. So cool.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's it's it's always been cool to me because the work the workflow that they basically built is the same workflow that people have with junior engineers where they have to very, very clearly define what they're trying to do. Tell them to go do it. They go attempt to do it. Maybe they hit a wall and you explain, oh, you do it this way. And then they they work around it and they eventually get to to a PR that can then actually be shipped.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was talking to Scott about this, like there's when Devon launched, there was like a lot of like, just the the reaction was so emotional. It was a lot of fear about like, this is going to put all engineers out of jobs. Obviously, that's not true. It's very collaborative and really it's just you get to do more and more, you know, higher leverage work. But it's particularly interesting to me that kind of like the the aspirational vision for Devon and like what the world looks like post Devon mirrors Scott's life very closely. In the sense that like, if you go back to that very early video of him doing those insane math in his head, it's like he was essentially just a calculator, like he was. Like an algorithm, right? And now he's an ideas guy. He's a CEO.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  He's, he's, he's using, he's operating a much higher abstraction layer.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  And I think that that's what the customer of Devon should feel. They should feel that I'm not being replaced. I'm being amplified and I have better tools. And that's very, very exciting.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm excited to see how a lot of people scoffed at their varying valuations. But opening up access to this, just knowing already that it's so actively contributing to ramp. If it's the number one committer, that means that at the very least, it's worth probably 500 to 600K a year. Right? Like in a very low estimate.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  And so they're starting out, the product seems to be pretty accessible. It's $500 a month.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  But I can imagine that, I can easily imagine a future where people are, you know, their bigger customers are spending a million dollars a year on Devon.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it'll also be consumption based, like Datadog or like an A2S.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the other, the other stuff that's wild is it just opens up, it's like, it's an engineering tool that allows you to tackle projects that historically were just not at all even really on the roadmap of like, hey, we need to like completely migrate this system over here. And that's going to take a year now. Oh, we could actually do this in a month and a half with Devon.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  And a much smaller team. Let's tackle that. So it's actually, it's not just replacing, you know, or empowering team members. It's, it's allowing you to tackle tasks that otherwise were not, not really cost efficient or that effective.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're starting to see posts about this where it's like the age of tech debt is over. Like there's, there's no return on squashing tech debt because today, because the AI will solve it in the future. And moving on, we got a size gong story for you folks. Breaking news, an absolute blockbuster in the world of AI and language learning. Speak, the AI-driven language tutor app has just closed a massive $78 million Series C round led by Excel.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  Pushing its valuation to a jaw-dropping $1 billion. That's right. Unicorn status for a company that's shaking up the game in ways we haven't seen before.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's set the stage, John. Speak isn't just your average language app. No games, no gimmicks. This is about real deal fluency. Using cutting-edge AI, Speak gives users a conversational partner that adapts to their unique accent, delivering real-time feedback that's changing how people learn. It's not just about picking up vocab. It's about building authentic speaking abilities, and that's a game changer.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  And let's talk about this funding round. Excel leads the charge with heavy hitters like OpenAI's Startup Fund, Coastal Ventures, and Y Combinator all jumping back in. That's $162 million raised to date, proof positive that Speak isn't just talking the talk, it's walking the walk. Excel's Ben Quazzo, now joining the board, calls it "one of the few consumer AI companies actually turning promise into revenue." Big words, but the numbers back it up. Eight figures of revenue and closing in on profitability.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  What's next for Speak? Expansion, expansion, expansion. Southeast Asia, Europe, the US. Speak's coming for all the markets, and by the end of next year, it's aiming to support the world's most popular languages. And let's not forget their growing enterprise side. Eight of the top 10 largest employers in Korea are already on board with Speak for Business, teaching workforces English, and boosting global reach.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Okay, Jordy, the co-founders Connor and Andrew, they're on a mission to build a generational company. And judging by the accolades, like winning Google Play App of the Year in APAC, they're off to a red-hot start. Zwik even teased 2025 as 10x crazier with new features and worldwide launches.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  That's wild, John. Bottom line, this isn't just a win for Speak, it's a moment for AI innovation in the consumer space. 78 million says Speak just isn't part of the conversation, it's leading it. Stay tuned, because this story is far from over. Let's hear it from the size gong.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  You love to hear it.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  Go download Speak in the App Store today.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. I wasn't super aware of Speak, but I did see Delian posting about it because apparently he lived with them. Did you see this? I think he lived with these guys.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  A handful of people, the one of the

• 58:55John Coogan?

  It's awesome.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  Open Door, I think was it?

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  He, I think he, he was saying he lived with them as well.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  I always love, yeah, yeah. When I, when I saw the round, I hadn't heard of the company either. And I was seeing it like, oh, look at this new like pre-launch AI consumer app that, that suddenly is, is worth a billion dollars. But it makes a lot more sense in the context of like, they've been around for eight-ish years or something like that. Grinding, had a thesis on AI and, and language learning for a long time. And so that's just another example of a lot of the companies that are benefiting the most from AI today are, were started a long time ago before language models were even top of mind for anyone in tech.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure there's like, a lot of people that'd be, oh, well, you could just learn language by talking to ChatGPT. But there's something about the UI that matters. And there's something about, yes, the power users will figure out that ChatGPT can do that. But for a lot of other people, having a track, a memory, a plan that's customized to you, it's just like Devon, you know? It's like, you could use the, the one size fits all model, but having a more unique resource, a unique plan makes a ton of sense.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  And the workflow matters a lot.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Uh, well, let's move on to the DMs. We don't have that many questions, so keep sending them in. But, uh, Eliana over at Palantir asks, did Coogan deliver your gift for me? And I didn't, I forgot in my car, but I brought it today. Palantir brought us a bunch of merch. We got some paddle tennis paddles back there, which I love. They look great on the set. And we have some hats and shirts from Palantir. So thank you to Palantir. Uh, we got a beautiful hat. Uh, do you want the army or the Navy hat? I got you the army hat. I like the navy one.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  I like army. I like visiting the desert.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Try these on.

• 1:00:43Jordi Hays?

  It's functional.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, these are great. Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Locked in. I feel like a hundred billion dollar company right now.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  Hundred and seventy, I think.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and seventy.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's a lot. It's a lot. So, yeah, we gotta rock these shirts. I don't know where the size is.

• 1:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Uh, thank you, Eliano.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  I know you're the best merch lord.

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  We're looking good. We're gonna be playing good.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  They are crushing on the merch. They have, you showed me the stats.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Companies are having a merch off.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so that for revenue wise, their merch sales are insane?

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, like he, he, uh, he like pitched Palantir and was like, I just want to bring the merch store back and we just do something. We have so many fans, so many like day traders and like retail investors who are in the stock and like the company, like Karp. Like, let's get him some stock.

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  And every time they put stuff up, it just goes viral on X and Reddit and it's big.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  It's great. I, I highly recommend having merch. And the thing that I like about their, their merch is like, uh, you know, we talk a lot of trash about, uh, what is that racketball or, uh?

• 1:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Pickleball.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Pickleball. Um, but that, they didn't just pick pickleball randomly. They, Palantir actually works with the company that makes those, Selkirk. And so there, so they did like this collab. And of course, the army navy hat makes a ton of sense because, uh, they're big in the army navy game, which I believe is happening this week in DC, the football game. And so, uh, we're, we're very thankful to Palantir, very thankful to Eliano. I did a workout with him in DC. It was great. It was like, uh, visiting a, a far off culture and understanding how another man lifts. It was great.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And he's, he's very against kipping pull-ups, which we are as well.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Extremely. I actually did pull-ups with him. He's very good at them. Strict pull-ups. I'm not.

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Gotta be strict about it.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  Had to learn, had to learn. Gotta work on those. It's hard when you're tall. But let's move on to the timeline. We have-

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  John 68, by the way.

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  Massive, massive, uh, stack of posts to go through. So, let's start with Wasteland Capital, who says, absolutely insane amount of work in this world is going to format PowerPoints.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, and I would argue that it's very, very important work.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, we talked about this on the show last time.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Communication.

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  I think it was Don Valentine talks about how capital follows stories, right? And so deck is a, is a form of storytelling. In fact, I think it's the highest form of storytelling there is, right? Cause condensing a very complex idea or business into 20 slides is not easy.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  I've spent countless nights in Figma over the last year, just like helping my portfolio companies make decks, making decks now for, for TB. But, um, uh, decks, like you gotta have, if you're a company planning to raise any amount of money or sell any products at all, which every company is, uh, you gotta get good at this game.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  You gotta have somebody on your team that's truly cracked at it.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, the amount of work that's going into just formatting them will decrease with AI and better tools.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  But I still think there's, I still think there's something, I've, I've tried a lot of the different AI decks and there's nothing like the, uh, dynamic of working with a fantastic deck designer.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Devin, who we work with, um, just like that dynamic, that's like saying like, oh, you know, if you're driving rally car.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  It's like saying like, oh, I don't want my co-pilot.

• 1:04:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:04:07Jordi Hays?

  I'll just use an AI.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

  It's like you want your guy.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Your co-pilot making the deck with you and you can just make so much more engaging, interesting materials.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  The, the way I'm thinking of AI plugging in is like much better spell check, extra, like just, oh, rewrite, oh, this line is, is just a little bit too big to fit on one line, so it's hanging on to two lines. What if you just switch this word, it would fit better. Oh, like, you know, like you, you accidentally indented this an extra couple of pixels, just taking it to the pixel perfect, perfect level, uh, level, even, um, just if you have, you know, a whole bunch of photos, being able to integrate those, pull those really easily, just better UI workflows, all that stuff should get much easier.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Let's go to coastal country club, they say, received a wedding invite that specifically said on the dress code line, no Apple watches, please. Wow, 200K likes.

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm really happy to see how much engagement.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Because I think we're entering a new era. And

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  The Apple Watch is functional, but it's not a dress watch.

• 1:05:15Jordi Hays?

  It's not a dress watch. It has no business in the aisles of a wedding.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be beeping and like taking phone calls and showing like, you know, your latest tweets.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're gonna miss some incredible moment because

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're checking.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  You're checking somebody, you know, your hinge notifications popping up on your watch. But anyways, we're happy to see that, that the movement against Apple Watches.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  One thing that I'm really disappointed about with the Apple Watch is that, do you remember when they first launched it? There was the Apple Watch Edition, solid gold, 10K.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  I don't.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  You don't remember that?

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't remember that.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  So they, they launched them at like a couple hundred bucks, maybe the most expensive one was like a thousand. But then there was one that was 10K and they were like, we're gonna go.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  An unwrapped version of that?

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, you can definitely buy them, probably on eBay. But it, it was, they, they understood that watches have this luxury value. But the problem is, is that the software and the hardware is getting so much better that you have to refresh your Apple Watch every year or every few years.

• 1:06:15Jordi Hays?

  Apple loves that.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  So then it was like, okay, I have this gold thing. Whereas if you buy a gold Rolex or a gold Cartier Santos, like it's gonna have its same value. It's gonna do the job just as well, telling the time 20 years, 50 years from now. It's still gonna work. Sure, there might not be as much like water resistance. The tech does get better in these Swiss watches. But Apple kind of missed that, but they need to bring back the Veblen goods. Like, Apple should have a product that's, you know, up there and just in pure Veblen status. Not, not, not, not just based on the RAM.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Let's go to Lulu. She says, lots of founders wondering the best day to schedule a launch. There's basically no clear day between now and the holidays. It's wall to wall with announcements, not even counting news curveballs like today. Just pick a day and go for it. Rely on creativity to break through. This is funny because I didn't even see this because this was the day that they found the CEO shooter. And the timeline was flooded with that and it was impossible to break through. And I had another friend who his launch like kind of leaked and I was like, well, like no one found out about it. Because no one saw that article at all, because it was the busiest news day. So you do, you do kind of need to avoid like the bombshell days. Like, you know, maybe delay your launch a day if it's, if you notice that something crazy is happening on the timeline.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  But in general, yeah, done is better than perfect. Get it out. And then the beauty of launching and getting drowned out is that if by definition, if no one, if your post doesn't go viral and doesn't get seen by everyone, well, no one saw it. So you can just post it again and people will see it for the first time. Everyone thinks, oh, this post only got a thousand views. Everyone knows I'm bad at posting or something. He's like, no, no one, no one saw that. Yeah. By definition. So you can just post again. Yeah. And so, I don't know.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think, I mean, yeah, basically every company that has news that they want to deliver is looking at doing it in the next week after, you know, I don't know, you basically, I guess you kind of have next, the rest of next week. But, um, but yeah, just expect there to be competition, but like good launches don't happen by accident. Even the companies that are, that are, that have like exciting news that people are excited to hear about, they're still making sure that they get 20 of their investors to share it on the launch day, right? You need to like punch through the noise and make sure you're not just leaving it up to chance and like betting that it might go viral or something.

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  And even asking like the second order, like when the cognition Devon GA launch happened, I got multiple texts from people who were closer to the company saying, hey, here's the tweet, like, can you amplify it? Yeah. And so having

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  That's why even a company of Devon's size with that much hype is not leaving their launch to fate. They're not just like, oh, I hope the algorithm's on our side today.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  And you see it just immediately. It's like, oh, 300 retweets. It's like, that doesn't happen by accident. Yeah. Clearly people were lined up, ready to go. Yeah. Which is great. Um, Jack Prescott says, Karp mogging with the Cartier's and he tags us. Thank you for tagging us. Thank you. If you see something like this, a dripped out technology brother, tag us.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Post it, tag us.

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  Love to see it. Uh, great pick. Karp is a style icon in so many ways.

• 1:09:25Jordi Hays?

  He really is the OG dripped out.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  We saw him wearing a fantastic Patek Philippe Nautilus that we clocked and put on the timeline. We got in front of him, fortunately.

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I'd like to see more of this guy's running, uh, we don't know what it is today, a hundred to $200 billion public company. We'd like to see more paparazzi following him around, getting, doing like fit pick analysis. Uh, I'd want to see what wrist checks. Let's see the whole, let's see the whole thing. But great, great pair of sunglasses and, um,

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We gotta, I gotta go to a promoted post. We got a promoted post from Kushi. We wanted to promote this today because she says a hundred million dollar early stage fund in SF is looking for a new associate. DM me if interested. So we just wanted to put this out there for our listeners. If you are looking to join an early stage fund, there's one in SF. These types of opportunities don't pop up too often because oftentimes these smaller funds just don't have that many people. So if you're interested, go send her a note and she will connect you.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  Let's go to Paddy McCormick. He says anti-capitalist and then throws down about a million red flag emojis.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Great post.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Great post. It is very cringe to be an anti-capitalist. Obviously capitalism is incredible, but also just weird to frame yourself in the negative. Like just say what you want the world to look like.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  Just.

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm just against the system.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's like pick.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Lame.

• 1:10:53John Coogan?

  Pick a different ideology and then just be that instead of just being like, I'm mad about the current system.

• 1:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's hard to take anybody that's purely anti-capitalist seriously unless you're living in the wilderness, in the woods, not benefiting from any aspect of modernity or our capitalist system. But if you're, if you're eating your little oink, oink grain bowl from Sweetgreen and you're saying that you're an anti-capitalist, like I'm not going to take you seriously. Sweetgreen raised like 500 to a billion dollars.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we need a new term. We have the champagne socialist. We have the limousine liberal. We need something, the aristocratic anti-capitalist. We need a, we need a term for the anti-capitalist that defends them because they actually benefit immensely from capitalism.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  The Luigi?

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  The Luigi, exactly.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Parents were in healthcare or something like that?

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  That story is so wild.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  I'm holding my breath to understand it all, but we'll see. Sean Frank says, Meta doesn't acquire, it copies. We have all benefited from the meta copy machine. Snap is a threat, we get stories. TikTok taking off, we get reels. X looks viable, you get threads. Chat GPT, AI search bar. All this does is create new ad space for us. The greatest blessings in this industry start as a threat to Meta. Written by me in our free newsletter. Interesting.

• 1:12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Mark, Mark has, in many ways, he's, he's such an interesting entrepreneur because the first product wasn't necessarily allegedly like wasn't really his idea, right? Like, he was sort of approached to build this thing because he was like the tech guy.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  And then he's all of their, since then, like many of their most popular products were copycats of other products that were succeeding. Yet simultaneously, if you look at the red book, he has had this sort of like decades long vision for his company that only a generational ideas guy could actually have, right? And he's been like right over and over and over about all these different theses. So interesting to be like the copycat founder.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Who clearly is just better at executing and more of a visionary than the people that originally had the ideas.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Yep. And I like Sean's take here because he's really identifying the core meta strength, which is the ad platform. And how great their ad inventory and matching algorithm is, is that there are, there are plenty of other platforms, but none of them have the ability to actually drive real ROI.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't know what, if we'd even be using Instagram today if Meta hadn't bought it, right?

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  It's really, really hard to build that liquidity.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could have easily imagined Yahoo buying Instagram and ads never really working. And the product, like part of the reason, yeah, I mean.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  And then you just get it out of the box, like they launch a new product and it's just like, cool, that's more ad inventory for Ridge.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  Sean's company and, and you, they know on day one, it's going to work reliably. And it's not going to be this whole like, oh, experimental budget, let's do some brand advertising.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's throw 20 grand a month at it.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's like, you can throw a lot of. Any, any amount at it and you're going to get the dashboard and it's going to be accurate.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  And that's just really hard to build internally. And that's why you see like even Netflix, like when they launch, it's like all this craziness around their ad platform. Let's go to Ole Lehman. He says, this is hilarious. He says, day of a European in 2025. Wakes up, likes a meme on X, gets arrested, tries to use AI, blocked, drinks water, bottle cap gets stuck, opens browser, 48 cookies, wants to watch a workout on YT, blocked, buys coffee, pays 50 cents extra for the cup, clicks to buy a product, no EU shipping, starts a website, gets fined for GDPR, orders meat, gets shamed for destroying the planet, tries to start a company, gets sued, repeat.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Mog, self-mog.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  What's crazy about this is like, you hear about all of these things individually. No one's ever put it all together like this in such a way that's so embarrassing and so crazy.

• 1:14:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is why there's no 100 billion dollar company in Europe that started in the last like 50 years or something like that.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Bad, bad, crazy. Beck Shaw says, days like this on Twitter feel like a bird got into the classroom. 200K likes.

• 1:15:06Jordi Hays?

  200,000.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  I mean, everyone was seeing the exact same timeline. It was crazy. It was just like memes, jokes, fights, conspiracy theories, news reports, everything about the shooter. What a crazy story. Makes sense.

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting how we didn't historically process these sort of wild events through humor so intensely, so right away.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  It's like when historically like significant assassinations, there wasn't like people, like billions of views on memes in the first like 48 hours. So it's interesting how like all of humanity now processes, processes these sort of like crazy events through.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, I want to say like 20 or 30 years ago, maybe, maybe not, maybe even 15 years ago, there'd be a news story and then you'd have to wait like a week and South Park would come out with an episode.

• 1:16:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Making fun of it. And that was, or maybe you'd get the Daily Show, the night of making fun of the news a little bit, but it was so not compressed.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  They were gonna make fun of something that was super dark.

• 1:16:11John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Whereas now people will take a deeply dark, sad topic and immediately start making jokes about it. Like even I saw today, there was like somebody filming Luigi coming out of like some type of, I don't know where he was going.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Paparazzi thing, yeah.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  And somebody was yelling like, uh, it's Mario. Like, just like that.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  In real life, dude. That was off the timeline.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in real life, but clearly like done. Almost for the internet.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it does feel like it's feeding back into the traditional media. Like SNL had a segment on their news show, I forget what it's called, whatever their news segment is, and they did, they did make some jokes about the shooting, which was interesting because it is really, really dark story, but they still had to cover it in some way. Let's move on to Amjad Masad over at Replit. He says, whoa, and he's quoting a post about Google's Willow quantum computer. And he says, it lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  7,000 likes. Fascinating. Did you follow the quantum computer news?

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  The craziest part about this is that was Google putting out.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was in their official press release. They're like, we have discovered that we live in a multiverse.

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  By the way.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  In our press release.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Now, sign up for cloud computing.

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm just interested to see how, what, what Googles like roll out with this product, who gets access? Is it just Google that's going to get access to it for the first 10 years? Are they going to make it widely available? It seems almost dangerous to make it widely available. Like, there was a lot of, I think, like Bitcoin.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Bitcoin speculation, will it crack?

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bitcoin like crashed seemingly on that news, like a few percentage points, maybe it was unrelated.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, it's interesting to see, okay, we've created this like, you know, ultra powerful chip. Now who gets access to it?

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest, fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  This mind boggling number exceeds known time scales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. Fascinating.

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  Imagine being the team running that test and you're and you start the test and you're like, oh, this could fail. It could take like a few minutes or it could take 10 septillion years.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Imagine running B2B software on a quantum computer. Imagine running Ramp on a B2B, on a quantum computer.

• 1:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Heavenly.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  That's the way to do it. I love it. Will Manias posts a screenshot and highlights this quote, "There's always something happening in the world that creates an opportunity to try and fix a business and build a business," Mr. Rainwater told the Dallas Morning News in 1994. It was one of the few interviews he gave. Speaking on CNBC, Mr. Bonderman recounted Mr. Rainwater's investing philosophy. "If you couldn't pencil it out on the back of an envelope, it wasn't worth doing."

• 1:19:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the best business ideas for the next 10 years are not always the most complicated. And oftentimes, you can take a lot of inspiration from the past. If you literally just read old business biographies and you learn about some guy who cornered some strange market and levered it into building a massive, you know, public company, like those, many of those same types of opportunities are available today. And there's, there's the classic trap for people that want to start companies or people that think they need some ultra sophisticated, complicated idea that needs like 10 pages to explain. And it's like, no, having something super, super like cognition.

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  It's just an AI software engineer.

• 1:20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  You can collaborate with. It's not like, it's very complicated under the hood, but the core idea you can write on a single.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the value equation, just like.

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  You pay money, it does things for you.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  It's very, very simple. And that's the case for so many of the great businesses.

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  Starters, very simple ideas. Let's go to Sam Altman. Sam says, "A few months ago, Robin Hood sent me a gold credit card with extremely high quality details. I thought it was a ridiculous marketing stunt at the time, but now it's an example I give when talking about great design." I love that.

• 1:20:38Jordi Hays?

  So is this to have to do with their acquisition? They acquired X. Didn't they acquire X?

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  X card?

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  No, I don't know about that. I thought it was just for like their, their biggest spenders on their credit card.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but I'm pretty sure they acquired like a big, um, they acquired a Robin, I need perplexity.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder how much this costs though, because with the really nice cards, my fear would always be if you lose it, it has a lot of value. It's gotta be really expensive.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  I think it's 1,200 bucks or something like that.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Maybe they charge you if you lose it or something because.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the, the Robinhood gold card is a credit card that was formerly known as the X1 card, which was a company that, which was a company that Robinhood acquired.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:21:20Jordi Hays?

  And, um, yeah, I just like to see, um, I'd like to see tungsten cards coming out from the major, major players. Like we gotta go level it up a little bit.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. You gotta stand out. I mean, every card went metal recently.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Basically every card is some sort of metal. So.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Gotta go into the rare metals.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Tungsten.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Go rare.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  Let's go to John Fio. He says, if someone stops posting on Instagram, it means they are probably in a great place mentally. If someone stops posting on Twitter, it means they are probably about to commit national headline worthy crimes. It's a good sub tweet of the situation. Makes a lot of sense.

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I, I, it's, yeah. It, uh, that's, that's the thing. So Instagram is a place to.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Dating site.

• 1:22:05Jordi Hays?

  Is, is for many is a dating site. It's a place, uh, to kind of just brag about, uh, your life.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, X is a place to share your thoughts.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  So if your thoughts get so extreme that you can no longer share them and you're somebody who historically was sharing kind of stream of consciousness, which is a lot of, a lot of the best posters are just sort of sharing what they're thinking, stream of consciousness. Style. And so if that turns off, like they either locked in and with their business so hard, or, or we've seen posters that are our friends go silent while they're selling their company because they don't want to say something that's going to like botch the acquisition or whatever. Um, but yeah.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Obviously, there are some good reasons to stop posting, but in general.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, and you see this with, with, with fund managers who are down bad. They'll stop posting. Like a lot of the like very popular GPs from 2021 went kind of dark for 2023 because they were just like going through it. But now they're back. Many of them are back now.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Many of them are back.

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Got a few markups, feeling good again. Raised Fund Three, you know, they're back in the game.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  You gotta get back on the horse. I mean, the best people that make it through always restart. Yeah. Posting through is always good, but, but restarting the posting just to kind of liven up the serendipity engine, get it more contact.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In many ways, like Chamath would have stopped posting with how much hate he got for all the SPACs, but instead he launched a premium Substack.

• 1:23:27John Coogan?

  Oh, he did?

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Got it. Like he's got like a ton of subscribers.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  But, but also, I mean, there was a forcing function there, which was like, he wasn't going to stop doing All In.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  And so no matter how much like, you know, he got a ton of hate for different things, like the, the, the Uyghurs comment and all the different stuff. But, uh, you know, he, he had this forcing function of like his boys being like, get on the mic, dude.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Stay in the game.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  It's great. Podcaster's high.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Podcaster's high.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  And it worked. It worked. He's still in the game. Love it. Uh, Reggie James says, oh.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  I gotta stop you, John.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  You know what the show is about.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:24:01Jordi Hays?

  It's about driving, driving the bottom line. We got a promoted post from our friends over at Cognition. We talked about them at length earlier on the show and they're jumping in here to talk about how New Bank refactors millions of lines of code with Devin, reducing a large scale ETL migration from an estimated one and a half year project to just two months. Devin successfully delivered 12x efficiency improvement on engineering time, helping reduce a developer toil for New Bank engineers as they scaled to 110 million customers. See why Vitor Olivier, New Bank CTO, is excited about the future of software engineering with Devin. Uh, and anyways, fantastic case study.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  This is the kind of case study that. Any startup would dream of, and it's why Devin has the hype that it does.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would be very hard, even if you were able to hire a bunch of new grads, you put them on that project, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's going to be hard to.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not a sexy feature to work on.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Even for the resume.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  And we're excited because now any developer in our audience can go sign up for Devin today and start getting access to the same quality of tool.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  For just $500 a month.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  So hit up cognition and tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Reggie James. He says, "One retweet can send your message to a completely foreign digital land." Well, welcome to our foreign digital land, Reggie.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, Reggie's at home here as an OG technology brother. But no, everybody that's had a tweet go viral will experience this.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  We've, you know, we had a tweet yesterday about Lena Khan.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  And eventually it got retweeted by people that came into the, like, and that drove people to start dunking on us.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you saw those. A bunch of people were like defending Lena Khan.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Being like, "She's sticking up for the little guy," whatever, which I didn't totally get.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  But anyway, so yeah, any retweet can send you into a totally different audience that wasn't necessarily the intended audience.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  And that's the magic of X, you know?

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. And stuff like that, I want stakes on X. I want there to be the threat of getting retweeted into oblivion and then having to lock my account and turn off my DMs because I'm getting so many death threats. That gives me stakes. That gives me skin in the game.

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, skin in the game.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  I don't want to be in an echo chamber.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Poster's high.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  I mean, I got canceled in Alaska Twitter once, which was great. I said, like, "Alaska's amazing and we should all move there." And both the right and the left, the lefty Alaskans were like, "Stay out of here. This is our land. Like, you need to acknowledge the land that you're, you know, going up here." And all the right wingers up there were like, "You wouldn't last a day in here."

• 1:26:49Jordi Hays?

  Keep Alaska, Alaska.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. And they were like sending me pictures of their guns.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  I can see Russia from my house.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, being like, "If you come up here, you wouldn't last a day. Like, you'd freeze. Like, you're some Silicon Valley bum."

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  And you're like, "Hey, I got a Cabot meteorite."

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  1911.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  1911. I think I'll do just fine.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Say that to my Chitac in 408.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Say that to my minigun.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  My intervention.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Let's go to Delian. He says, "There's this consensus talking point in Silicon Valley that at this point, all tier one VCs are founder-friendly. On the other hand, in my seven years in VC, I have personally had to use our legal rights from the shares we own to block other tier one VCs from firing founders, three times." This is crazy. He's told me some of these stories. I don't know all three. But it is, it is crazy. I mean, the founder-friendly thing, it really just became a meme and it was so easy to put up a blog post and then no one calls anyone out and no one really says anything publicly because you're all syndicating deals and you don't want to really piss off anyone else. But it is true. Like, there are some bad actors out there and a lot of it's like rational based on the fund dynamics. You know, incentives matter. There aren't

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  necessarily that many evil people in Silicon Valley. It's really just the fact that when incentives get misaligned and there's a partner who has their career riding on a particular deal and they feel like this CEO is really screwing things up, their natural reaction is, you know, they're backed into a corner. It's a fight or flight response and you have to have your fund set up in a way that you can actually take the zero if it is crazy and your brand can take the L of backing a company that blows up and move on. But if you've staked your reputation as a VC on this one company, you've put so much of your money in there and you think that there's a solid business there and it's just the leadership that's wrong, which could be true. It's really hard to say no. So it's tough.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  This is why, I mean, this is why YC is like actually a very positive

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  force in terms of, yeah, it's a union for founders.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Basically. Yeah. If you, if you do something bad to a YC founder, like every single YC founder is going to find out.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  And that's like thousands of founders.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Thousands of years.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  A year. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it goes on the, it goes on book face. Like Gary built that thing and like, there's a whole, there's a whole database of VCs and with ratings. How, how'd they do? What'd they do to you? All this stuff. It's crazy. Yeah, anyway, we gotta get more stories out of Delian and leave those here anonymously, of course.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  But let's move on to Jack Randall. He says, "The New York Stock Exchange 10 years ago versus today, same but different." And he now works with the co-founder of Robinhood. He's there with Vlad Tenev and the other co-founder, and they're starting a new company, and Jack's working on it, that is setting up solar panels in space that will beam down the energy via a laser.

• 1:29:46Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  To ground stations, yeah.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Because I saw that other company, the Sean McGuire back, that was doing selling daylight at night.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  So I like that we're getting all of these new weird, weird things that are not just...

• 1:30:00John Coogan?

  It was in Andreessen's call for startups, this idea that like, launch is getting so cheap, Varda's one of the first movers, but there will be other companies that are doing things that are completely off of SpaceX's roadmap, but leverage the launch capabilities. There's some people that are trying to do computing in space because of the temperature. There's people doing the energy and the light and the... But this is specifically harnessing the energy and then beaming it down with a laser. And all of these startups, it's like, I'm like, this seems insane.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  But it's, but I never, I never actually talk trash because it's like, I haven't built a spreadsheet to see if this actually works. Like, it's possible. I don't know what assumptions need to come true. Like, does launch need to go down to like, $100 a kilo, $10 a kilo, a dollar a kilo to like, make it make sense? But like, that could happen. I don't know what the assumptions are. But, but, you know, all these people are smart. I mean, this guy started Robinhood. It's like a huge company. Like, I don't think he like, missed a zero in his spreadsheet. Like, I think he thought it through. So I'm like, default bullish.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Also, that level of execution with Robinhood in an industry that competitive, you don't reach, you get lucky along the way, but you don't reach that level of scale by accident.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  And so... Yeah, the other thing that just should be said with any of these, any space-related companies is like, it's hard enough to launch B2B software and you're like making this new feature and you launch it and you launch it and there's like bugs and like this button's not working for these users and all that stuff. And if you're launching stuff into space, the stakes are so much higher.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:33Jordi Hays?

  And if you have any of these like tiny sort of marginal errors, it can just end in total failure.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  And so the kind of caliber of people that are doing this and are going to be successful at it are just giga chats.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  Like you have to be, you just have to be on another level to actually do this successfully because you can't just like ship and like, let's see what happens.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  And I love that, you know, you make a bunch of money and money in fintech. I mean, this is age-old.

• 1:31:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. They made their money in money.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Basically. I mean, this is the story of Elon with SpaceX, like.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Made his money in PayPal.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  Dumped it all in something crazier that required a massive backstop and the, you know, the Robin Hood guys have enough money to back up the truck if they need to, if they really believe in it. And that's amazing. And that's just something that I think the rest of the financial community will rally around and be like, yeah, let's do it.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  It's great. Let's go to Alex Cohen. He says incredibly funny that European AI regulations are so backwards that the Taliban gets access to new OpenAI products before Europe does. That's just.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  So brutal.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  I can't believe this.

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  So brutal.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  I don't even know if this is true, but you know, somebody says, bring it to Europe, please. And he says, we want to.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Purely if you were going to follow the laws.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  It probably is true.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  But is this true? How can the Taliban have access? I mean, who knows? I mean, it's certainly less of like a regulatory overhead. So if you can, maybe if they're not, even if they don't have a server there, if they could VPN somewhere.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  Taliban loves memes and language models, meme coins and language models.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Awful.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Either way, I'm excited to see more about Alex's new startup. He's got a voice AI company in the healthcare space. So it's called Hello Patient.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Had a cool launch video for it. So. Excited to see what what he does there.

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, great poster too.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Great poster.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Jared Madfus. He says, uh, Jack Founder Thesis, which you talked about on the show earlier.

• 1:33:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:33:21John Coogan?

  He must have been listening because he was like, I gotta post that.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. So, so I I talked about it. I think somebody sent it to him or he listened to it.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  And then he, and then I kind of butchered it. So I was like, post, post it.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it some proper coverage here.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So he says, the Jack Founder Thesis is, I have never lost money investing in elite technical founders that are in the thousand pound club, composite of their bench press, squat and deadlift over a thousand pounds. They are simply too big to fail.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  That's a bad line. Too big to fail.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Great post.

• 1:33:51Jordi Hays?

  Just unreal. And then, and then in the thread, he actually gives examples of.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Of the founders?

• 1:33:56Jordi Hays?

  The founders.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  No way. That's amazing.

• 1:33:57Jordi Hays?

  Individual founders. So anyways, Jack Founder Thesis, if you're, if you're investing in technical founders and you're a little bit lost in the sauce, maybe you're non-technical. Just follow, uh, Jared's thousand pound, uh, club.

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Jordi Hays?

  Model and you'll, you'll do well.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go to Gary Tan. He says, I want this and I would fund this too. And he's quote tweeting Andre Karpathy, who says, one of my favorite applications of L L Ms is reading books together. I want to ask questions and hear generated discussion, notebook L M style, while it's automatically conditioned on the surrounding content. Um, I love that. Yeah, uh, Tyler Cowen had a post about, uh, Chat G P T oh one being a fundamental paradigm shift in how people read books. And I found this to be true. I was at the Nutcracker and while I was there, I was on my phone and, uh, and I was like, I feel like I'm kind of being disrespectful. It feels like I'm texting.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  But I'm really like asking the A I for the backstory to actually enrich this experience. And I am, I'm actually more engaged than someone who's just sitting there watching, but zoned out.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  I'm actually locked in.

• 1:35:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  And so I think that the, yes, we need more, uh, more applications. The interesting thing is that for most books, you actually don't need special conditioning. And Tyler pointed this out was like, a lot of times you're reading a book and you're like, oh, I need to like find a P D F and then load that into Chat G P T in order so that it knows the books that I can ask a question, tell it that I'm on page sixty seven. But a lot of times like it kind of already knows and it knows everything. And so you can just ask questions and it really puts the, uh, the, the onus on like figuring out what questions to ask. And that's really important to the inquiry. Um, Tyler had this whole riff on, um, the, he. As a professor at GMU, George Mason, it used to be about him teaching students.

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  And now he grades the students based on what they teach him.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  And so his job is just to ask questions and whoever answers them the best.

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  I saw something else about a professor who was saying he encourages his students to have these language models, write the essay that he's tasked with them.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  And that's now the average essay. And your job is to write something that is much, much, much higher quality than what the model put out.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  And when I saw this post from Gary, it made me think of Daniel on like the Readwise team, because that feels like something they already have this huge, huge customer base of sort of pretty online readers and rolling out some type of software like this seems like they could have a pretty strong edge there. So Daniel, when you listen to this, go back to the original post, check it out.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  But obviously you can use ChachiPT, but probably still an opportunity to build something bespoke. And so if you're looking for an idea for the next YC batch, start hacking.

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  Start DMing Gary.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  Let's move on to Pixel Mothman. They say, while my AI friend is spooked by Ghost, TriRamp is dominating X. Based Bev Jezos is pulling more monthly views on X than Forbes. And I'm haunted by Tech Bros Pod not featuring any of my zits, tweets, X-sweats. I don't even know. I don't know either, man.

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, that changes now.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  That changes now. You're on the show.

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  You're on the show.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  You're officially a guest.

• 1:37:16Jordi Hays?

  First of many.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  We will follow you back. We're excited to have you on.

• 1:37:20Jordi Hays?

  I think one of the more insightful things here is I bet you Bev does get more impressions than any of these like big, big legacy.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  He's a beast. I swear he has the notifications like turned on to the point where like if someone he likes posts, he like gets a push notification, you know that? Like the alarm bell? He is quick with.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  He's quick with it.

• 1:37:42John Coogan?

  I hung out with him a little bit in Miami, just for a minute, first time meeting him. He wasn't on X right then, but he must be, given that he's quick on the trigger.

• 1:37:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he was just absorbing takes from the, from the community there.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  He also gave a, gave a talk and a debate about AI Doom. Fun, fun poster. Okay, so this, this is the post that I wanted to cover about GM shutting down Cruise. This is a wild, wild post and I screenshotted it because I thought it might get taken down. I don't know if it's still up, but so this is Kyle Vogt, the founder of Cruise, went through YC. He's one of the Twitch co-founders with Justin Khan, Dalton, not Dalton, Michael Seibel, Emmett Shear, I believe his name is. And after he started Cruise, which was this self-driving car company, they started with the Audi A4. They eventually built their own cars, then they get acquired by GM pretty early for a billion dollars, great outcome.

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  And then they're working internally and he was at the company, still building, even though they were internal. They had a ton of resources and they were live in San Francisco and they were a competitor to Waymo. And then they had, you know.

• 1:38:53Jordi Hays?

  And I remember he left and it was like, I think it was a surprise to a lot of people. So this is him being able to say, speak his truth finally.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  So Kyle says, "In case it was unclear before, it is clear now, GM are a bunch of dummies." And Rune just says, "La Mao." And then Salvino Armati says, "You sold them a layup $100 billion business and those redacted clowns still managed to fumble."

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Dunked. Yeah. I mean, how can you not be in the self-driving game?

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  How do you shut that?

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  The CEO, Mary Barra, I believe that's her name, GM, said, like, "We're not in that business. It's expensive, blah, blah, blah. We're in the car making business." And I get that GM is struggling, but like, you gotta bet on the future. It's the only way to leapfrog.

• 1:39:38Jordi Hays?

  We need a re-industrialized poster to acquire GM and return it to glory.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  LBO GM. It's not going to be cheap, but.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Who knows, they've been bankrupt like 25 times. So who knows? Okay, uh, let's go to Arvin Srinivas, uh, Srinivas. I'm gonna struggle with that name for a while. The perplexity CEO and founder. He says, P marca, can you wire me $1 billion? Because Donald Trump says any person or company investing $1 billion or more in the United States of America will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to all environmental approvals. Get ready to rock. And so, yeah, the race is on. You need to acquire a billion dollars of capital ASAP. You need to size up those fundraises, guys, because, uh, the, the, the gates of innovation are wide open and you must.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  But here's, here's the thing. I don't think, uh, I don't think Andreessen is an investor in perplexity yet.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  Oh, they aren't?

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  And so when I saw this, I was like, is, are they just kind of like joking with each other? Cause like around is in the works.

• 1:40:42John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:40:42Jordi Hays?

  Cause like, it seems like a company that A six and Z should be in.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  And that would be kind of like a funny thing, even especially if a term sheet had already been signed and of like, hey, can you give me a billion dollars? So I don't have any inside info there, unfortunately, but, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll probably find out, uh, soon enough.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Well, let's go back to GM because George Hots dropped a great analysis on the cruise situation. George writes, today, GM pulled funding from cruise robot taxis. I called this five years ago. I remember him calling this. If you had been paying attention, self-driving has played out exactly like I said it would. Tesla will win and comma AI will take second with an open source solution like the smartphone market with iOS and Android. Today Tesla has the biggest fleet and we have the second biggest tons. I have a, I have a comma AI car. It's fantastic.

• 1:41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why don't you give some backstory on comma?

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  So, yeah, comma is a open source software package that George and his team at comma maintain. It, uh, you buy a device that's essentially a smartphone that he makes internally in a, in a office in San Diego. I toured it, it's amazing. And it has a camera, it has a front-facing camera, a couple of rear-facing cameras that look out on the road. It takes in those images, it runs it through a neural network, through an AI model, and it figures out where the lane lines are. It draws a path for where your car needs to be, and then it sends that signal to your car over the OBD2 port, which is the diagnostic port, kind of the USB C for cars.

• 1:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  That if you come into the shop and they want to know what's going on with your car, they plug in there, but you can control the car through there.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  And so it works with hundreds of different cars, gas, electric, all sorts of different cars. And it's a fantastic product. Like, it is so much better than the stock system in Mercedes, BMW, Audi, everything except for Tesla. It's way better. It keeps you dead center in the lane. It's insane. Like, you do, I've driven this thing for hours, hands in the lap, feet on the floor, just sitting like I'm a passenger. It's amazing.

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  It's so, so good.

• 1:42:43Jordi Hays?

  We should put it in a P1.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  I'm trying to get him to put it in better cars because it's, he, obviously, they focus the-

• 1:42:50Jordi Hays?

  From a marketing standpoint.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Obviously, they focus on like-

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Fast cars have always been good marketing.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, they focus on like the most popular cars. So it's a lot of like Hyundais and Hondas and, you know, just random cars. But you put that thing in a Rolls Royce, like, that's what you want. He has a Rolls Royce, and it doesn't work because it has mechanical steering. So there's a lot of cars that aren't compatible. And now there's cars that are encrypting the OBD2 port to lock out Kama, which is such an anti-feature. It's so hostile. So we need a boycott of any car company that's disabling Kama. And then we need Kama to start being sold in dealerships.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I would say is, if you're a manufacturer and you're allowing people to add this open-source self-driving functionality, does that open you up to any?

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  It shouldn't.

• 1:43:41Jordi Hays?

  Risk.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  It shouldn't.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  It shouldn't.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  But it's America. Oh, like now Apple's gonna tell you what phone case you can put on like this is America. Like, let me be free, you know? Right to repair is important. Let me, let me hack on my stuff. This is, this is George's lineage. He, he was the first guy to jailbreak the iPhone. He was the first guy to jailbreak the PlayStation and, uh, and, and that's essentially what he did. He jailbroke cars.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03John Coogan?

  And so he's built this fantastic product that I highly recommend to anyone. It's like a couple thousand bucks. It'll upgrade your driving experience incredibly. So he continues to say, tons of self-driving car startups have shut down with zero to show for it. Ghost autonomy raised $240 million, worth zero. Argo AI raised 3.7 billion, worth zero. Investors are now going to waste billions.

• 1:44:23Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know about Argo.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  I know. Investors are now going to waste billions on humanoid robots. Can anyone stop this train wreck? It is just as obvious as last time. Comma is the furthest along with the scalable tech needed to solve self-driving and eventually humanoids. We have end-to-end method shipped that 10K people are now driving with, myself included. You can buy it on our website and we have state-of-the-art learned world model simulator tech, which is a lot more pure than what Tesla is doing. Self-driving is a couple of years from its alpha go moment. Again, nobody will believe me because this, because believing me isn't the hype way. It doesn't allow for brain-dead idiots to throw billions of dollars at large-scale garbage.

• 1:45:04John Coogan?

  It requires 10 to 100 very smart people carefully fixing the bugs in a fully end-to-end software stack. That's just how the problem is. By the way, if you are one of those 10 to 100 smart people who actually wants to solve self-driving, what not whatever Cruz did for the last 10 years, come work at comma. We have the most straightforward hiring page I've ever seen. Hiring is a challenge and bounty-based. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Potential brother of the week here.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  Let's put him to the side. Uh, yeah, fantastic. Uh, George is, uh, amazing to talk to and hang out with, brilliant thinker. Um, and I think he's, I think he's right that, uh, the, the, the model that will win is very, very tight. Do you, are you familiar with like end-to-end self-driving? Basically, the, the AI takes in images and there's no, so the default way to do, uh, self-driving is you use the AI to understand the world and basically, uh, identify the lane lines in the images, but then you translate those into, uh, like. Something that like a video game world and then you're using C++ not machine learning to mathematically calculate what the accelerator should do, what the steering wheel should do.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  But you don't need to do that. You can actually go end to end and have a machine learning model from start to finish. Just look at the images and decide what the output should be. Just translate from if you see this, apply braking pressure. If you see this, apply the accelerator. If you see this, steer left, steer right. And that is where Tesla is going. That's where Kama already is. And everyone else is just completely messing around with like crazy models that don't scale. And so

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  You're saying that's what Waymo is doing, even with their full like LiDAR.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  I'm not sure what the latest and greatest with Waymo is, but George has always been bearish on Waymo because they had, at one point they had a cone guy, whose job it was, was just to write software to identify cones. And that's an example of like, they were able to throw so many resources at it that they had a cone guy, a stoplight guy.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  A dog guy.

• 1:47:03John Coogan?

  A dog guy, you know, and their, their whole job is just build a model that just identifies.

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  It's good to have guys, but more so like you got your guy for private security.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, or something like that.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so the, the, the, the model of trying to get every edge case in, in George's world is that that is a failing strategy because eventually like you won't, eventually you'll get to, oh, there's an order of magnitude more edge cases. And then there's another order of magnitude edge cases. But scale allows you with a scaled machine learning model to capture all of those essentially and learn the actual underlying behavior of a human. And so, yeah, still very bullish on Kama. The company's too small, should be bigger. It's fantastic. I, I love it.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  So long-term, so he's, he's already thinking long-term.

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  For a long time.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Right. So he's saying like, we're two years out from the.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  I kept asking him like, why don't you go and raise a billion dollars? He's like, because that wouldn't pull things forward. Like this stuff just takes time. We need great people working on it. We need to just collect the data, continue. Like, there's nothing that we can do to pull this forward. I want to own a lot of my company and I wanted to solve this. That's all I care about.

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  Let's go to Jason Liu.

• 1:48:15Jordi Hays?

  Rather behavior.

• 1:48:15John Coogan?

  He says, uh, this is my first angel investment of 2024, Augmental. I'll be on boarded Friday and soon be able to shitpost on Twitter with my mouth.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So I, I know nothing about this company, except that. It seems very clear that it's a human machine interface that uses the retainer form factor or a misalign form factor. So I'm assuming you get to talk into it.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

  I think we talked about this on a previous episode.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Have you get to whisper into it?

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was talking about like, you know, with the AirPods, it can be very distracting to like, talk, but when you get your wisdom teeth out, you could essentially like, put a microphone in there and then be talking or whispering.

• 1:48:56Jordi Hays?

  You lose the wisdom of the wisdom teeth.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  But you add the wisdom of language models.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Exactly. So then you can just whisper and the AI can take that in or the phone call or transcript or anything like that.

• 1:49:07Jordi Hays?

  Imagine having friend.com in one of your molars.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  Because you can wear an earpiece that no one can hear, but talking is still disruptive. People will hear what you're saying, but if you're just able to whisper and it can pick it up, that's pretty, that's pretty powerful. So this seems like a better solution than going in for anesthesia and getting your wisdom teeth out. Just pop the retainer in. So probably an interesting thing. Huge, huge, huge pushback on the form factor. I'm sure people will be like, that's disgusting. It's like getting moldy and stuff, but, but I like that someone's trying it.

• 1:49:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, Jason, let us know how it goes. Once you post at us using the, using the mouthpiece.

• 1:49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting. He made the angel investment and he is getting on boarded, but hasn't actually used it yet. I'm excited.

• 1:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Great picture, though.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  Let's, oh, this is great. Let's go to Everett Randall. He says, have never been more bullish on a podcast slash X account than Tech Bros Pod. Can we get a coin going so the early adopters can invest? Thank you, Ev. We really appreciate the shout out, the love.

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  And we replied back, the best way, if you want to benefit from the show, buy LVMH stock. It's just a fantastic proxy.

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:16Jordi Hays?

  And we, we see that stock.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  We're buying a lot of Dom Perry on.

• 1:50:20Jordi Hays?

  We buy, we don't give stock tips or anything like that. We're not, we're not Jim, Jim Cramer over here, but, but yeah, it's, you know, we're buying a lot of champagne. We double quite frequently. And so we, we expect that those sales to really. Help the French conglomerate.

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's great to be supported by another member of the Holy Trinity.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:50:44John Coogan?

  Ev over at Kleiner Perkins, one of the Holy Trinity firms, fantastic. I think we got Sean McGuire next. Hopefully, we can get Sequoia on board with the Tech Bros Pod movement. And then I think it's in the bag.

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  In the bag.

• 1:51:00John Coogan?

  Let's go to Sean. He says, "You can't make this up. The Information runs a provocative headline asking if SpaceX's valuation is rational, but their math is off by a factor of 1,000." $350 billion divided by 2 times 4 million equals 43.75K. This also doesn't count Starlink Enterprise and Gov revenue that it's doubling year over year. And so, of course, they're not, they might write the Deal Maker newsletter, but over at The Information, they're not.

• 1:51:34Jordi Hays?

  Have they done deals?

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  They're not dealmakers. Not a lot of Excel over there, a lot of Microsoft Word.

• 1:51:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's what I'd like to see. Let's get Sean a position at The Information.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:43Jordi Hays?

  As executive editor and contributor. And just run the articles by him before you put them out. He will catch it.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  He's on it.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  He would have caught this.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  He's effectively like, he's doing, he's doing the work for them already. He should get paid for it.

• 1:51:57John Coogan?

  But, but I respect Sean, a capital allocator, putting The Information in the truth zone. That's important. There's a reason people have been calling it the misinformation. We obviously don't promote that, but you know, with errors like this, you know, it kind of makes sense that people refer to as the misinformation sometimes because this is, this is a big, big mistake. Hopefully, they'll issue a mea culpa and just shut the entire operation down. Let's move on to Trent Griffin. He says SpaceX share value, share sales values the company at about 350 billion. Tender offer includes 1.25 billion of stock at 185 a share. Bloomberg, employee liquidity for the win. We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's good. Get those, get those employees liquidity. I mean, the company is 20 years old.

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  It's like you could be-

• 1:52:49Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't exactly a speed run.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  You could be a new grad and your company's still not public. It's like you're 45 now. You have a family and like college to pay for. Like, yeah, this is not, this is not, oh, some seed stage founder who wants to do some cheeky secondary and buy a sports car.

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  This is, you know, I need money to pay for my kid's education.

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's not, it's no longer cheeky secondary.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  But, you know, if I worked there, it'd be hard to sell. It's a pretty good company.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Let's go back to John Fio. He says, "America has totally forgotten about small town America. We're about to remember that this life is not only possible but better. The next wave happens in small town America, full stop. This is the next frontier." And he shares a picture from Portland, Maine. Yeah, I love that Fio actually lives in a small town. Like, it's very, it's very cool that he went and did that.

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Nashville is not exactly a small town, but it's certainly smaller than New York.

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He's, he's, he's moving that direction.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:47John Coogan?

  Which is great.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  He'll eventually be the mayor of a small town somewhere and-

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think it's, I mean, this, every once in a while, a post will pop up and it, and it'll be like, there's not a housing crisis. You just don't want to live in Idaho. And it'll be like a $300,000 house. It's just like beautiful four bedroom house on an acre and like near, you know, walking distance of the city or whatever. And so, yeah, I, I think, I think we're, the whole remote work trend is actually a multi-decade trend where people know, you know, it's still like underhyped in many ways. And it hasn't had the level of impact that it will when people realize like, oh, I can go move to a small town with a group of my friends and make it, you know, make it something. New.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  Let's go to a promoted post.

• 1:54:38Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post. We got a promote post here. This one is from Will O'Brien, friend of the show. He says, "Join the Ulysses founding team. Come be my right hand on the GTM front at our base here in San Francisco and help us scale our technology around the world. We are reducing the cost of doing critical ocean activities like how SpaceX is reducing launch costs. We've developed technology that reduces the cost of seagrass restoration by 10x and closed 1 million of revenue. This is just the start. Ulysses is on a path to power every ocean task and become critical infrastructure for the $8 trillion ocean economy. Our mission is to steward the ocean for an abundant future." This was top of mind for me. There was a post that went viral this week.

• 1:55:23Jordi Hays?

  I think Steinman covered it and Will covered it as well, talking about how China has these floating cities where they'll just show up somewhere and just like completely strip all life out of the ocean. Just like kill everything, ship it back to China. And Will was maybe a little bit shitposting, but talking about how, talking about wanting to prevent that and some of the technology that he's building. So ocean economy is $8 trillion. If you want to work at a potentially a future trillion dollar company, go work for Will, the SpaceX of the seas.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  And tell them the technology brothers sent you. Let's go to Preston Holland, the private jet guy. He says, "Seen in a group, lol." And it's a post that says, "I have a large social media influencer that is looking for an empty leg from Miami to Philly in exchange for incorporating the jet or broker company into the video and being tagged and included in all posts. 250K followers on Instagram, 900K on TikTok, 150 on YouTube. Is anyone interested in being involved? I can provide all of the analytics for each of his pages. DM me with interest." It's funny. Why not try?

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  You missed 100% of the shots you don't take.

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing I would respect, it's not like a super small time. It's not like, I think 900K on TikTok gets you squarely into the influencer bucket. You're no longer a micro influencer.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, a micro influencer is still that 10 to like 100K range, somewhere in there. So anyways, good, good shot on goal. There's seven, is there seven million full-time influencers in the United States? Something like that. So these people need to fly private sometimes. Empty legs are a great way to do that.

• 1:57:05John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  If you're just getting into the game.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. We are back and let's go to a post from David Senra. David Senra writes, Brad Jacobs has started eight different billion dollar businesses. He was kind enough to invite me to his home and we had an incredible two hour conversation that felt like 20 minutes. I made an episode about what I learned. Episode is available now. Highly recommend going and checking out the Brad Jacobs episode on Founder's Podcast. It's in your RSS feeds. It's on Spotify. David's a good friend of the show. Godfather of podcasting in many ways. And it's just, it's really like a testament to the power of podcasting that this was able to happen because of all the work that David's put into his show.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  He's spent years and years studying the great entrepreneurs.

• 1:57:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And for every, for every episode that he does like this, he gets 300 people reaching out saying, can we do, can I, can we do, can I do an episode with you? And so he's saying no to like 99% of them.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  And then a handful actually are worth doing. And you end up with content like that.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09Jordi Hays?

  But Brad Jacobs is an animal. Like he has like a very methodical way that he builds billions of dollars of enterprise value.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  And he wrote a book.

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  And he's done it over and over and over.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And he wrote a book. So David's able to cover it. How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, I think it's called. It's great.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  Such an incredible name.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  But it's amazing because, you know, David, like so many of the books are by founders who have passed away. And it's, it's very much like a history show, but he's in many ways like caught up to reality and covered so many people that now the great entrepreneurs of this generation are like, I want to talk to you. I looked up to Rockefeller. I looked up to Steve Jobs.

• 1:58:43Jordi Hays?

  Example of, you know, we've talked on the show a lot about how if you're doing anything in startups and venture and you start asking for people to sign NDAs, it's like a very negative signal.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  Brad Jacobs has basically published his entire strategy and methodology for building billion dollar companies. And he's willing to put it all out there because it really is so much comes down to execution that he can write out exactly what he does. And he's still not worried that other people are going to attack his business, his existing companies, or go after new opportunities that he wants. So anyways, tons to learn from that book, though.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  And great work from David.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Let's go to Gabby. She says, whoever did all this to the Photos app needs to be tried at the Hague.

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  This is so real. Have you, have you tried?

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  I mean, it's awful.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  The whole 18, iOS 18.1 is, is the worst update that I can ever remember. I posted about this myself. One of our listeners said that it was LinkedIn coded, but I was angry. But the Photos app is, is truly abysmal. Like, I go in there knowing exactly what I want to get, and it's like playing whack-a-mole, trying to just find like the right section of the app.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  I will steel man it. I think that they are going through transition and they want to get away from all the hardcoded UI entirely, and they want it just to be a search bar at the top, and they want search to be so good that you can actually just search for dog video, and it will automatically filter for videos, and it has dog in there.

• 2:00:06Jordi Hays?

  No, I totally get what they're trying to do. I wish there was a way, I still wish there was a single place that gave you the feed of photos, because that's really what I want. I don't care about the AI organization.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's all these times when I download a video, an image from the internet, and it has a different date, because that, that image was created a year ago. And so it just goes way back, and I'm like, where is this thing? And I wind up saving it five times. I wind up just taking screenshots, and then those are messy. It's just a disaster.

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  And the video, the video functionality of the camera completely broke for me. I had like five or so different like moments with my children that I recorded, and then before realizing that like it no longer saves videos for me. So, standing by for an update there.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Let's go to TJ Parker. TJ says, the best chance Democrats have in the next election is running Alex Karp. I love that. Karp is the man, very thoughtful philosopher, been on the left for a long time, strong Democrat, but understands the importance of the Western order, and has been...

• 2:01:09Jordi Hays?

  And great style, too, which matters.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, the problem is that he's just, he's just running too, too important of a company to step back. I don't think he could do it.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but he's got a lot of runway.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  But I would love to see it. I would, I would be happy to support Karp in a future election. I hope it happens. Uh, let's go to-

• 2:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Hold up, John. I gotta jump in here with a promoted post. Uh, if there's two things we love on this show, it is capital allocators and watches. Uh, we just wanted to jump in here and support Bill Ackman. He says, "A little bit of shameless promotion for my favorite watch company, Breymont. The Breymont Submariner Submarine 500-meter automatic and camouflage ceramic. Perfect for the toughest city streets and underwater operations." So, I love that he's, uh, showing that this is a versatile watch.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm sure Ackman wears these in boardrooms during activist campaigns and even when he's getting wild over the weekend, doing some underwater operations. Um, so anyways, fantastic looking watch. Uh, wasn't familiar with Breymont, but, uh, now I am. And, uh, thank you for promoting fine watchmaking, Bill.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  And I believe he's an investor in the company, or he owns the company.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  I would hope so.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  At a certain point, you know, we, we have the 2% rule for a capital allocator of his size, the only option left is to buy the whole company.

• 2:02:28Jordi Hays?

  Buy the damn thing.

• 2:02:29John Coogan?

  Buy the damn thing. Uh, let's close out with Daniel Doian. He says, "Technology brothers only want four things in life, and it's disgusting." And it's a picture of a beautiful woman with a baby, a private jet, a wonderful Patek Philippe Grand Complication, and a Ferrari 296, I believe. Fantastic choices.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Great choices, Daniel.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  You definitely have taste. I love it.

• 2:02:54Jordi Hays?

  He is living it. Go, uh, check out his company, Readwise.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:58Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, thank you for being a, uh, a listener and supporter of the movement-

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you.

• 2:03:05Jordi Hays?

  -for Loud Opulence.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love it. We hope to see more of those. Send us your photos. Send us your ideas. DM us questions. We'll answer them on the show. Follow us on X. Subscribe to us on YouTube. We have video on Spotify now, so go check that out if you're listening on Spotify. And we have to jump because our tailor is here. Not a joke. We are actually getting fitted for new suits, so-

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  It's important.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Stay safe out there.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  This show would not be possible without suits, so.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Thanks for listening.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Bye.