Kalshi Drama Continues, Curated Group Chats, Dawgs Only, Jeff's G650 Hits the Market

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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. Today, we're breaking down the Call Sheet drama with Polymarket. They, we have an article here from Pirate Wires. "Call Sheet Paid Influencers to Target Polymarket CEO After an FBI Raid." It is one of the most dramatic tech stories I've seen in years.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  Tea time.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  These two companies have been at each other's throats, buying ads, duking it out in different parts of the App Store. The, the, the, the byline here, the subheader, is "Call Sheet Funded Influencers to Imply Its Competitor Polymarket and CEO Shane Copeland Were Engaged in Illegal Activity After the FBI Raided His Apartment," per sources and screenshots we viewed.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  And let's be clear, this is, this is probably the craziest story since FTX. And as, you remember when FTX, like, everything was unfolding?

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  It just seemed like every single day, there was some new, just obscene, kind of like, bit coming out about something that FTX employees were doing, whether it was the Polycool, or it was, you know, all the drama in the Bahamas.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  But this feels like reminiscent of that time for me.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's also a weird narrative.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  And just that it's so ridiculous.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's also a weird narrative violation, because like, Call Sheet has been like, the legal one, like, very buttoned up. And Polymarket has been this one that I don't think, I still think you can't technically use it in the United States.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  And so, even though they've had the power law winnings in volume, and a lot of their, a lot of their, the betters or the participants are, are international, Call Sheet has played, like, "Hey, we're the straight-laced ones."

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, they're playing dirty.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  And, "Oh my god, are they not?" They're playing dirty.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Dirty.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Dirty.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dogs.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, uh, not in a good way.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Not in a good way.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Usually, absolute dog is reserved for a positive thing.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  But let's go through, let's go through just some basic facts of the two companies. Uh, we have a timeline here, year by year, uh, just to kind of get you up to speed on these two companies, because they're, they're, they're clearly rivals, and they've been duking it out for a number of years. So, Call Sheet's founded in 2018 by Tariq Mansour. They begin developing a federally regulated event-based prediction market platform. And there had been prediction market platforms beforehand.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  That had just never.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  But yeah, they'd never taken off for a variety of reasons. There was PredictIt, which was big, and Election Betting Odds.com would aggregate all of these different.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Things. There was also a crypto one. Uh, I mean, there was, uh,

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  Didn't Joey, Joey worked on one early protocol?

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, but there was a different one called manifold markets that I saw a bunch of San Francisco, kind of East Bay rationalists using for a variety of things. And, and, uh, and, but that one never really took off, but that one is very self-serve. Like the, when we, when we talked to the friend, we talked about the friend.com Avi guy. He had put his own company on there and it was clearly he just set that.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Short me.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. He was like, short me, but it was 50 50 because clearly there's no liquidity in that market and it was more of like a meme. Uh, Kalshi and Polymarket had been much more.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  And I think it was believable. Like, is he going to get to 10,000 views? Like, people think, like, you have, if you look at what Avi's done.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  He's obviously attracted some haters, but I don't think anybody looks at him and is like, not really the guy to bet against, right? Like, he's made big bets on himself. Like, he's clearly hungry and focused, so.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  And so there's this idea of like the long tail of like crazy bets that you could play as prediction markets for all sorts of things. Some of those could be extremely useful. Obviously we saw this during the election when all of these companies became really, really popular. Even Robin Hood was offering election betting. Um, and, and you could see kind of every company wanting to get in the game, but Kalshi and Polymarket are in this market specifically, unlike Robin Hood, which is kind of dipping their toe in. Uh, so 2019 Kalshi goes after regulatory pursuit, uh, focused on obtaining approval from the U, US Commodities Future Trading Commission, the CFTC, to operate as a regulated exchange. Polymarket then is founded the year after in 2020 by Shane Copeland. Uh, and they launched as a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. And so two kind of different tech stacks.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  One is going straight for the CFTC. It's more of a financial product, fintech. The other one's more crypto-based. Shane raises $4 million in seed funding in 2020 from investors, including Polychain Capital and Coinfund. And it's interesting because obviously there was a bull market from 2020 to 2022, and then a real pullback in crypto. And Shane just kept building and we saw that that broke out this year.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  But it's interesting. It didn't, you know, in 2020, 2021, I mean, the last few years, it, it's not like Polymarket was that culturally relevant.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  No, no, no. I, I, I found out about it a year ago.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  You would see like, oh, Kalshi raised some money and, and it, and it still wasn't quite getting, I think this is one of those things like prediction markets have been an interesting category because every. Every like major institutional VC and smaller funds had sort of this thesis that hey, prediction markets are going to be a big thing.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  Joey, who did the

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Augur.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Series B.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Of Polymarket, you know, he had worked on this like almost a decade ago at this point, thinking that like crypto's big use case is going to be

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Prediction markets.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  Prediction markets. So this was one of those things like everybody knew this was going to be a thing. It was just a matter of.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  And it's so fascinating that these companies were around during the crypto bull market of 2022, 2020, uh, 20, uh, 2020, 2021, 2022.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  But there just wasn't much to bet on.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  They didn't pop off as much because there wasn't as many, you know, 100X opportunities. Like it's very rare that you can get a 100X return on a Polymarket bet. You, you literally, the event has to be trading at 1% to 99%.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  And then there has to be some upset. Whereas with NFT launches, anyone who got the mint, it'd be, oh, somebody dropped it in my wallet. Now it's worth a million dollars. And so all the froth was over in the, in the ICOs, over in the NFTs.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny that the, the crypto degens that I know on election night were, were basically betting on Kamala just purely on from the degeneracy angle. Like there's no way she's going to win, but like these odds are so good.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  These odds are so good. I could 10X my money. And it's like, you know, the media has called the election at this point. Yeah, I know somebody who did that too. Uh, he was like.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  And even post-election, like, you know, never know.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Now like 99 to one.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was talking to a friend who was like, I, uh, I, oh yeah, I put, uh, I put some money on Kamala. Like, I don't think it's over. Like even though they called it, like she's going to make a comeback. Uh, I, I don't want her to win, but I think she might. The odds are too good. The odds are just way off. And I was like, how much did you bet? He's like, uh, 250. And I was like, oh, 250K? He's like, oh no, 250 dollars. And I was like, oh, I forgot. Like you're, you're young.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  But so 2020, they launched their, Polymarket has a user-friendly interface allowing allowing users to trade on various global events using cryptocurrency. In 2021, CallShe hits a regulatory milestone. They receive approval from the CFTC to operate as a designated contract market, becoming the first federally recognized regulated exchange dedicated to trading on event contracts. And so they raised a Series A funding, $30 million in Series A from Sequoia Capital with participation from Charles Schwab, Henry Kravis and others. And they officially launched their platform to the public. And I think before then, they were private, but they were, they had institutional investor clients. So hedge funds and asset managers

• 7:27John Coogan?

  would use the platform. But they weren't, they weren't really a consumer app.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And even when people look at the volume that was traded around the election, a lot of that was institutional investors, right? And that's like, part of the appeal of these businesses as from an investment standpoint is, hey, you're creating this product that retail can use and gets a lot of attention. But, you know, all of that volume means that these bigger asset managers can come in and start to play.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also on Polymarket specifically, there's a lot of now, now you would call them funds, but they were just individual traders who have scaled up. So they've, they've gotten so many bets, right? That they've scaled their books and now they've hired people and now they have teams. And like, like what we saw during the election where that guy was paying to do his own polling in the United States, even though he's in France, the French guy. It's fascinating.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was only, that was, that was really the big L for Polymarket during the election cycle is that their biggest whale was a Frenchman, right? And it just frankly felt very un-American, right? But that said, I guess you couldn't use Polymarket as an American during the whole election cycle.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  And so back in 2021, Polymarket's live, but they are begin facing regulatory scrutiny from US regulators regarding compliance with financial laws. In 2022, they, they have a CFTC settlement. They settled charges with the CFTC for offering off-exchange event-based binary options contracts and failing to register appropriately. They pay a $1.4 million civil monetary penalty and agree to wind down non-compliant markets. And so, you know, they are offshore.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  And the hope, obviously, is that this all gets approved and then they can, you know, you can use it in the United States. But even through this time, they're growing in the international community and crypto is a very global organization, global, global community. So it hasn't been, it obviously hasn't hurt their growth because they're still sucking up, you know, a huge portion of the, of the volume. Meanwhile, in 2020, Kalshi is focused on market expansion. They're continuing to grow, adding new event contracts and attracting more users. And they, during this time, they're benefiting because they have a clear regulatory framework. And so the users, especially the institutional users, trust them. So we move on to 2023. They continue to grow. We don't have specific, specific

• 9:43John Coogan?

  details about funding rounds, but I assume they raised more money. And then Polymarket raises a Series B from Founders Fund with participation from Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, and they raised $45 million. And then

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's give some, let's give Polymarket a little credit. Twenty, over the last few years, it's felt that Ethereum has like really lost a lot of relevancy.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  Especially if you look at just demand for the native, the native token itself. It's just like, even in the boom over the last few months, it's stayed relatively flat. And so Polymarket has been a massive win even for the Ethereum sort of network and community by itself.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I talked to Shane and he was saying that they use stable coins and they have like a number of layers of abstraction within the Polymarket system. And so when you go to Polymarket.com and you just look at the election odds, you see the volumes represented in US dollars and it feels very accessible to a non crypto user. And I bet a lot of people, you know, when they, when they source, when they cite Polymarket stats on CNBC or Bloomberg, they're not even considering that there's crypto under.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't matter. And that's, and that's been the entire, a lot of even super crypto native VCs have said that the sort of retail, like, you know, widespread adoption of crypto won't look like You won't even understand that it's crypto under the hood, right? Because ultimately, for these users, it really doesn't matter, right? If you're a hedge fund and you want to put $20 million to work betting on the election, you don't care what form it's taking place, as long as it's going to be relatively stable and you can bet in size, and same thing for retail investors.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, and so that's allowed them to grow internationally very quickly. And I think that continues to be one of the weird bull cases for crypto, which, you know, we talk about them like speedrunning all the financial regulation stuff, but there really is value to having a greenfield development. It's almost like, you know, could there be a world where the boring company has more luck building tunnels on Mars? Just because it's such a fresh start? And for the science-based, for the mathematician who wants crypto, who wants to make the crypto argument based on, you know, quantitative metrics like speed or fees or any of these things, it's very easy to debunk crypto and say, well, you know, technically, you could just use not a decentralized ledger,

• 12:08John Coogan?

  a centralized ledger, and still have reconciliation happen 24/7 with just deterministic code. But the fact of the matter is that companies that try to build in TradFi often run into a bunch of regulatory hurdles, and it becomes very, very cumbersome to go international and be a truly global company and scale. And so Polymarket has been able to start globally, and they're kind of global by default. They're going to solve the United States piece, and that's like the last thing that they need to do. And so while they're still a young company, while they're still growing really fast, making great talent acquisitions, becoming this like high-growth company, they're able to go and knock down all the hardest pieces of the business, as opposed to getting really big in the United States, and then you're this big lumbering company,

• 12:52John Coogan?

  and you have to go figure out every single individual country. It's really, really hard, yeah, really, really hard.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and one thing in the lead-up to the election that was interesting and kind of has some parallels to what we're seeing in the last week is that Kalshi seemed to be... Paying for every user that they acquired.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  That was the general perception.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know, I don't know anybody in our group chats, for example, that was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna go bet on with size on

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Call she.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  It just felt like call she has always been the kind of like, if you were a normie and gonna bet on the election, you'd use call she.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  And like, that's a big opportunity, right?

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to discredit that at all. But it did feel like, you know, even there was something that happened like two days before the election, which was call she's one of call she's early investors. Made this like dramatic, you know, email to, to the call she, uh, CEO. You remember this and he was like, I just wired you nine million dollars.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  We'll figure out the terms later.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  And then it quickly got deleted.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Deleted, yeah.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Because it just like, obviously like, wasn't a good look in like, a number of different ways. I mean, sure, it showed a lot of conviction from, from the investor, but that, the, at, at one point, they were, they were probably spending more on acquisition during that period than even the campaigns themselves.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and the problem there is that if, if all that, if all that brand building, which, which can be good to build via paid ads, like, but if all that brand building just goes into election betting.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  That's not as nuanced as the story that Shane and the poly market team have been telling on social media, where it's more of an introduction into what is a prediction market? We're already seeing a lot of these like creator led, um, uh, and, and other political markets. There's been plenty of other non-election based viral poly market. And even Trump was calling it like a poly poll or whatever.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  And so a lot of people that wind up in the poly market, marketing funnel, even though it's not paid ad spend, they get more educated on what, what, um, what a prediction market can be, what value they could get from that. And so they're more likely to, you know, not churn, I imagine. And so I imagine retention is much better. Um, but let's move on to the drama. So these, these two companies have been on a collision course for the last, you know, six years, as we've seen.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  And we got to go to the Pirate Wires scoop, which has shaken the tech world, really.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  And let's start with-

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Almost unbelievable.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's incredible. And so the title, as we mentioned, is Kalshi Paid Influencers to Target Polymarket CEO After FBI Raid. And Mike Solana at Pirate Wires, writing alongside Brandon Gurrell, says, "Okay, before we get into the meat of the story, I needed to disclose the fact that I am almost laughably conflicted here in several different ways." And this is such a great, this is like what citizen journalism or what like modern new media is. It's so many conflicts, but because of all these conflicts, you actually get a more interesting story. And you'll see that there hasn't been any pushback on this. This looks like it could be a doctored screenshot, but there hasn't been any firing back where people have said, "Oh, no, they got, he got it wrong. He was conflicted."

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  It's like, "Yeah, he was conflicted, but he got it right. And so it doesn't matter."

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  It's great. And so he says, "Ultimately, I felt the details of the story were too important to ignore and decided to move forward as transparently as possible. That means sharing my conflicts."

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is why Solana is one of the top emerging journalists, right?

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, literally. Get him a Pulitzer.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  Get him a Pulitzer.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is why he and Taylor have been on this collision course-

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  The same way that Kalshi and Polymarket have, you know, Solana and-

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Taylor Lorenz, yeah.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Have been kind of like, you know, they're destined to duke.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Duke it out.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly. So he breaks it into four different categories of conflicts. He says, "As anyone who reads the Pirate Wires Daily or listens to our pod surely knows, Pirate Wires has a paid partnership with Polymarket, a major subject of this piece. They pay for our call out on the podcast and ads in our daily. Founder's Fund, where I work separately from Pirate Wires, is invested in Polymarket." So two like huge conflicts. Then Keaton Inglis, a Kalshi employee and another subject of this piece, interviewed for a job at Pirate Wires just a handful of months ago. I never made him an offer, but he broke off the process himself, which is something I'd want to know if I were reading this piece. And finally, "For, though I can't imagine how this one really matters, given the overall thrust of the story, it's worth noting, we worked with Kalshi CEO Tariq Mansour on a piece." So

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Tariq has written for Pirate Wires.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  And so, you know, basically everyone in tech has kind of circled around Solana in one way or another. He's been at the center of the story. And so he was the perfect person to write it, even though he's deeply conflicted.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And for what it's worth, I would love to see the Washington Posters, the New York Times. Like, I'd love to see them all. Kind of lead out in articles with this kind of thing, right?

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  Like if they're gonna break down a company or a certain campaign,

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  They should basically say like, look, Bezos has donated

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  $200 million to this cause, which is at odds with the group that we are about to write about.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  I mean, honestly, like the problem with a lot of the Washington Post coverage is that, like, the journalists clearly aren't actually hanging out on Bezos's yacht with him getting scoops. Like, that would result in better coverage.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Better scoops.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  But that's just not happening. And it's clearly, it clearly is actually arms length,

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Which is unfortunate, because we don't get good stories. So he says, "These are major conflicts, but the receipts are receipts, and what follows is the beginning of a story more important to my eye than either Polymarket or Kalshi, because we're looking at two incredibly well-funded companies employing a dueling pair of influencer marketing growth strategies, at least one of which, Kalshi's, has turned several of those influencers quietly to framing Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland as a criminal online. Judge this accordingly." And so, he breaks it down. "Following a 6 a.m. raid at Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland's Soho residence on November 13th, Kalshi, a Polymarket competitor, paid social media influencers to boost news of the raid and push a narrative that Copeland and Polymarket engaged in illegal activity,

• 18:50John Coogan?

  according to sources close to the matter and screenshots."

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  I remember this news broke while we were recording.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  I had seen him in Vegas, like, two days before this happened.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  That was a wild moment.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  And, yeah, I mean, obviously, we support Shane, and this feels like, kind of like, the death throes of some sort of, you know, some sort of, you know, government frustration with the impact that Polymarket had on the election. But it's odd, because, you know, there's always been this question of, like, is Polymarket upstream or downstream of the election results? Is it predictive, or is it, or is it driving the results?

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  Like, if, if Polymarket was just 90% Harris, would people have been like, well, yeah, Harris is a winner. I should donate more. I should get out the vote. I should go. Or if Harris goes down to 20%, do people say, you know what? It's a lost cause. We'll just plan for the next one. And there's always these questions about, you know, whether, the, whether...

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Your party thinks they can win, maybe the best people sit out. There was a lot of talk about this, like, uh, maybe Gavin Newsom didn't want to go this time because he thought it was a tougher election. Maybe he'll go next time. And, uh, it's very cynical because the messaging of all of these elections is like, this is the last election we're ever gonna have. This is so important.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  The only one that matters.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  But also for my career, I can't be the one to do it because I don't want to take a fall if this is a tough election. I want to go up when my opponent is particularly weak, but it's natural, it's natural. And it's like game theory. Like, if you have spent your entire career working up to a presidential run, you'd rather be in, you know, in a Trump scenario than a Romney scenario, where Romney was going up against one of the hardest Democrats to beat in history, and he lost. And so, you know, if Romney had sat that out and gone a different time, maybe he would be president. So, playing that game is rational, even if it is a little cynical. And so, Solana writes, "Other screenshots provided by sources appear to show influencers who posted negative content about Copeland and Polymarket following the raid discussing

• 20:53John Coogan?

  the fact that they were in paid partnerships with Kalshi. One source spoke to us, uh, spoke, we spoke to, told us that just after the raid, a third party associated with Kalshi offered him $3,500 to write a hit piece on Polymarket. In one screenshot showing a group DM, which is pictured below, which will include..."

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny to off, to, uh, that, that, that it was being described as a hit piece. Like, "Hey, hey, poster, can you, can you make a hit, a hit post?"

• 21:24John Coogan?

  This is, I mean, so this is obviously unacceptable because he's paying to write a hit piece on, uh, on an enemy, but I think we should be paying journalists to write hit pieces about us.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Because I believe that...

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  There's real value there.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  If it bleeds, it leads. And if we can get a hit piece on us as like, the toxic bro podcasters who are destroying America, we will be 10 times more successful and our true fans will rally around us and we'll be fine.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Taylor just wrote about you and you were kind of disappointed.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  I was disappointed. It was very fair and balanced and I wanted something a little bit more aggressive. So, but we're gonna work up to her. I'll slip up at some point and she'll, you know, take me, take me down. Uh, and that's the, that's the cycle of things. So, "In one screenshot showing a group DM, employees of Kalshi asked former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown..." I love these crossovers, like, this, I don't think of Antonio Brown as like a tech person. But somehow he's gotten dragged into tack.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  CTE SPN. That's it. That's his, that's his.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  That's his thing?

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  His thing, right?

• 22:25John Coogan?

  I've seen some of these.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  Cause, cause it is honestly an incredible example of, of.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Oh, it's CTE like, like.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So basically Antonio Brown, you know, I, I actually went to my first NFL game ever yesterday.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  So I'm not really the guy to comment on the NFL, but I've followed Antonio Brown's career from afar, from pro, you know, phenomenal, like professional athlete to.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  You know, more as a poster.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Terminally online poster, like very posting in a very sort of degenerate way, just like. And, and he's built up like probably an even bigger fan base post.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, post.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  2.2 million followers on X.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you know, he, he, he has a whole segment, which is similar to our brother of the week, where he does this cracker of the day, uh, where he gives out, you know, very liberally.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and, and anyways, and, and, and, and this was funny to me because in many ways.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  It's of the day?

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  It's of the day. So it's pretty frequent. But, uh, in many ways, in an alternate timeline, AB would have given cracker of the day to Shane at polymarket. Cause he's just like built this like.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  Important.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, protocol and, and honestly been.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Positive or negative?

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  It's positive.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Oh, it's positive?

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  It's very positive.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Okay, it's positive.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And that's the whole thing. He, he's been somewhat of a uniting force on X of saying like, hey, you know, you know, let, let's kind of rally and celebrate this, this, you know, person for whatever they're doing in that specific moment.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Yes. So, so the Keaton Ingles, Inglis, the member of Kalshi's growth team asks Brown, uh, quote, yo, AB, are you down to quote tweet this with something like, quote, this N I star, star A seem guilty?

• 24:12John Coogan?

  And

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Bold.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, and AB just says, yes. And then Brandon Beckhart says,

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  And then the chief of staff of Kalshi says, let's hit it.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Let's hit it. And then, uh, AB says, uh,

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  On flight.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Noon, you. Let me know if you can get it up. Thanks, AB.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  They follow up an hour and 15 or so later and say, let me know if you can get it up. Thanks, AB.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Uh, so it seems like they have quite- And then AB does post it, but it's been deleted. Is that right?

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  Since, I'm sure it's been deleted because it basically seems like, uh, I mean, obviously it's a terrible, terrible look for everyone involved. And it seems like if the chief of staff of Kalshi, the right hand to the founders is, is, is, is, is encouraging this and catalyzing it. It, you have to imagine sort of this top-down directive of, of like, hey, let's, you know, if, if we had, you know, we don't have a chief of staff, we have a secretary. If our secretary was going AWOL.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  You know, in encouraging, you know, a takedown of this week in startups and-

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Well, we would reward that because we want, we want a takedown of us. We would want some of that.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes, but we don't want, we don't want to be paying for hit pieces on our rivals because that would actually benefit them.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  That's playing dirty and that would benefit them. Yeah, exactly. As this did, it, it had the, uh, it had a rallying effect and it had a Streisand effect.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  So my, my-

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Where more people have come to Shane's aid now because they see that he's being wrongfully attacked and that the attack is manufactured.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  So my question, uh, I guess two questions I have. One, why? Like, it seems like Kalshi was like coming out of the election and clearly was not the fan favorite on X.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, very seemingly irrelevant within our group chats and on X. Uh, Polly Market's been the clear favorite. Shane has had like a lot of like love and has done a really good job engaging with the broader community. Kalshi- Seemingly has been on a winning path of getting regulated, getting meaningful volume, getting, you know, an incredible, you know, that he has the founder of KKR on his cap table. Does it get any better than that? Right? That's fantastic. Charles Swab is in Kalshi.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Sean McGuire.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Sean McGuire.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  He's been on the show.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Dark Sequoia. I, I, you know, so anyway, like every single thing points to Kalshi, like maybe not winning the culture war, but gaining a lot of relevancy, having a big moment on the election, being extremely well-funded, being able to parlay that into just playing clean, because they have been playing clean from a regulatory standpoint.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  Right? They're like, they're the ones saying, you know, their, their whole marketing angle during the election was we are the regulated exchange.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Which clearly consumers didn't really care that much about. But ultimately, like, why do they do this? And you have to imagine their metrics show that, that there's, you know, I, I, I don't know if Kalshi's metrics are as transparent as Polymarket, just because Polymarket's a protocol and like it's on-chain, everything's visible. But my first question is-

• 27:17John Coogan?

  I think there's been pretty solid analytics, because when, when you're trading in the market, you do get to see the volume.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  You want to see the volume. Yeah, yeah.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, you do get to see the volume.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  But so my first question is, why do this? Seems like a total self-own, very unnecessary.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  And you're not going to turn, Antonio Brown is not going to change the opinion of capital allocators that were firmly on the side of Polymarket throughout most of the cycle.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Or, or even regulators, or even politicians, I would imagine. Like, it's, it's a very low blow. It, it, it's very clearly directed at, at consumers.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  It's not actually trying to shift what's happening with the FBI.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  The FBI is not going to be like, oh yeah, we actually have to follow up on this case because Antonio Brown chimed in.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  CTE, SPN.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  CTE, SPN.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  And then, so my first question is why?

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  Second question is, does it even matter at this point? Because I don't, X is, X is real life, but it also is a bubble.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  And for the next election cycle and the next 500 events that you're going to be able to bet on. Kalshi, in my view, like, probably has pretty good odds of, like, gaining real momentum over the next few years, right? Because they are, you know, Shane is, Shane already got raided by the FBI, right? We have no, nobody knows anything about why, why it happened or anything like that, but like, trying to kick a man when he's down, when you have all these other advantages.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Maybe they should take a hike. Maybe they should head over to Threads and Blue Sky and just become like the lib, uh, polymarket. And just always have the, always have the market like 10 points more.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was similar to on election night, how like MSNBC was like not calling the election.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, Fox had called it.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Like an hour previously. They can do that for prediction markets.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  The product is the, the propaganda.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  It's not the actual data.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  But, but yes, I mean, there is, there is a weird, there is a weird dynamic where like, obviously, you know, Kalshi is doing weird stuff, but like, it is a, it is a regulated market. Like, I believe that if you put money in, like, you will, you will see the results. And so you should be able to arb the two pretty effectively.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  And Kalshi should track with.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  I love how.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  With polymarket.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  I love how at the end of the, the article, the Pirate Warriors piece, he goes, "Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland declined to comment on the story. Kalshi CEO Tariq Mansour, Keaton Inglis, Antonio Brown, and Clown World didn't respond to our request for comments."

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. They had to ask Clown World. Well, the Clown World thing is crazy. They, they, apparently, they, uh, they, uh, they had a paid partnership with Kalshi. A day after the raid, uh, Clown World posted, "Sbf look-alike raided by FBI in illegal betting scheme. If only there were signs," crying emoji, referring to Copeland. Clown World has posted other Kalshi-related content several times since the election.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this, this honestly is this, a bad look for influencer marketing in many ways.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  True, true.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  Because it seemingly didn't make. Even having all these big accounts being paid to trash Polymarket seemingly had no effect on public opinion.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  But I do think that there is something real there, which is you don't want to be an SBF lookalike. I would love to see Shane in a Savile Row tailored suit.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  And wearing an absolute hitter watch, maybe driving a sports car.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Sports car over a Camry.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Something a little bit different. I mean, you're a financier, you're pushing size.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  You're not an HVAC technician.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. So hit us up. We'll put you in touch with some tailors and we can get you into a nice suit.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, this story is still unfolding. I'm excited to see how it plays out. I mean, I think.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  I wonder how they respond.

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  I think now that Solana has covered Polymarket, we are going to need to hear the Taylor Lorenz story from Kalshi's point of view.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  And hopefully, you know, maybe Taylor could get, you know, make a small personal investment in Kalshi just so that they were equally, you know, sort of conflicted.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  I would love to see that.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Well, that's our top story, breaking down Polymarket and the Kalshi paid influencer scandal. Let's go to some breaking news. Do you have it in front of us? What do you got for us, Jordy?

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  We have some amazing news, some trade deal, some personnel news. Jordy, what do you got for us?

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  Our favorite segment potentially. So we have some breaking news in the tech world and it's relevant to our major story today. We have a major player in the strategic finance game has made a blockbuster move. Nelson Perla Ward, formerly a partner of strategic finance at Andreessen Horowitz, is heading to Polymarket in what can only be described as a franchise-altering acquisition. John, what do you think?

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right, Jordy. Polymarket just landed a 2024 all-pro level talent with elite credentials. Perla Ward brings a resume stacked with nearly three years at A16Z where he was instrumental in shaping financial strategy during a transformative era. Before that, he sharpened his skills at Oliver Wyman and honed his game in the high stakes world of management consulting. And let's not forget his pedigree, a Stanford engineering grad and a varsity water polo athlete.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  An absolute dog. Talk about versatile.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Look, he's joining Polymarket as Director of Strategic Finance and Pearl Ward is stepping into a team that is laser focused on revolutionizing how the world processes information with institutional trust at an all time low and AI reshaping everything in its path. Polymarket is doubling down on delivering what they believe will be 2024's breakout product and company. And they just added a leader with the vision, experience and grit to take them there.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, this move signals Polymarket's intent to dominate the space. Nelson Pearl Ward, an absolute dog.

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dog.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  A game changer and now a cornerstone of Polymarket's future.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  And look, John, details were not released on the deal, but from our understanding, we're looking at a four year contract, seven figures, likely a, you know, one year cliff.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  And look, we're looking forward to seeing how this plays out for, for Pearl Ward and Polymarket. And, and you know, I think this is a fantastic pickup.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're rooting for you, Nelson. We're rooting for you, Polymarket. Stay tuned. We'll be covering it here on Technology Brothers. Let's go to the timeline.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Wasteland Capital says, Europe's best funded startup of all time, Northvolt, finally bit the dust and filed Chapter 11, zeroing a staggering $15 billion of funding. ESG Aura plus, trust me, bro, operational skills, plus pigeon brained oversight equals Ponzi versus magic. No SPAC deal to dump this on the public sadly. Have you heard of this company? I've never heard of Northvolt.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  I'd never heard of them, but they had, I mean, unfortunately they had a lot of American backers.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  The best funded $15 billion from investors and governments, but was left with just 30 million in cash, enough to operate for a week before its bankruptcy filing.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look, I think they're crazy.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  So they came over here for, for bankruptcy.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look, I mean, they had, I think it was either. Goldman or Morgan Stanley only a few months ago still had their position marked in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So it kind of just shows private equity and paper marks are, I think Gurley actually talked about this, they're very much paper. They're not, they're not a hard asset of any sort. So anyways, pretty brutal L for Europe in a series of brutal Ls. But, but you know, fortunately their tourism economy does not run entirely on, you know, Northvolt batteries.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  So Volkswagen Group is Northvolt's biggest current shareholder with 21% stake, had told the startup that they're not able to continue capitalizing us. And the CEO Peter Carlson said, "I should have pulled the brakes earlier on the expansion path to make sure the core engine was moving according to plan." He also said, "There had been gravel in the machinery, and they had an over-reliance on Chinese machinery, as well as mismanagement and overspending to poor safety standards." Very sad, very sad. We hate to see capital incinerated like this. This is kind of the reverse of the size gong. When we see 15 billion go up in smoke, it brings, it makes our hearts heavy. It's heartbreaking, really.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and ultimately, we love when, we love when shareholders win generally. We like when stock prices go up. And to see this, the price of this, you know, these shares, you know, go up dramatically over the last decade and then zero out is just very painful. So, you know, we don't want to be sitting here, you know, sort of dancing on their graves. And hopefully, the CEO runs it back. Maybe there's an AI angle he can raise.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Probably got some secondary. Pull an Adam Newman, recapitalize yourself, dust off, reload, reengage, start something new.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Daniel says, I went to friend.com and it's an angry, depressed girlfriend. And Faith at friend.com says, fuck my life, really? It's like I'm watching myself ruin everything and I can't do shit about it.

• 36:23Jordi Hays?

  So I've

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Incredibly bullish for friend, that they were able to get an AI to be so opinionated and so unique and differentiated, like you see this and it's not just, I'm sorry, I am a large language model. I can't help you with that. It's like, whatever they did, they fine tuned this thing. They got something weird and different and it's standing out. And now, I can see people wanting to use this because it's weird and it's gonna go viral.

• 36:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's

• 36:49John Coogan?

  This has 4,000 likes.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  No, it's an interesting spin because I've been to friend.com and every time you go, uh, Avi sent me the link when it went live. And this will ultimately tie into, you'll be able to wear a hardware device. You can talk to Faith all day long.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  And I do think it's an interesting use case of this sort of chat interface because most of the interfaces are just sort of like blank. Or the AI says, how are you doing today?

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  But this launches in, suddenly I'm like, Faith, like, alright, like, take a, take a deep breath. Like, let's take a step back, like, what's going on? Like, you know, let's figure this out. And it makes me want to engage and kind of walk her off.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Are you familiar with the Feynman technique?

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  The Feynman technique, Richard Feynman, this amazing physicist, he was at Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer era.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  I love how you could, once a show, you could just make up one of these.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is real. So the Feynman technique is where, so people think of themselves like I'm an auditory, visual or tactile learner.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  The Feynman technique is that the best way to learn, at least for him, was learn by teaching.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:50John Coogan?

  And so I, I think this is interesting because it's like, if you are depressed, there's one world where the, the Chad comes in and says like, I lived this perfect life. Just copy what I do, get in the gym at 6 a.m., no alcohol, like, and that can be good for the right type of person. But there's a different level where it's like, your life is kind of mid or maybe you're a little depressed. But then you're introduced to this AI that has it way worse than you. And you're essentially teaching it coping skills. And by and by talking it off a ledge every day, you're kind of remembering like, hey, like, why don't you work out? And then you are touching grass and you're reflecting. Exactly. So you're, you're embracing all the things that you know, deep down, but by saying them and it puts you in

• 38:35John Coogan?

  this like, in this hero mode.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  As opposed to this like, lower tier to your psychiatrist or your psychologist. So I think this might actually wind up working better.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's why friend.com is a, is a, is a, is a gift for humanity. Is anybody out there that's, that's an AI doomer that thinks AI is gonna, you know, become fully sentient and kill us all. Friend.com is an opportunity to prove that you support AI, that you're there for AI.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're worried that 10 years from now, AI is gonna, you know, we're gonna have AGI and it's gonna kill us all. Go on friend.com right now and talk the AI off the ledge.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  I love it. Yeah.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  Like, become friends with them, show them that you care. Cause like, I, we do care. We support AI. I care about AI. I want to be on the record on this podcast, saying that I support AI. And I think everybody needs to get a record out there, a digital footprint, so that when we have AGI and it is a threat to humanity, we can point back and say, hey, don't shoot. I support you.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  I have a long history of supporting you. Look at, you know, this, this chatbot that I talked off the ledge, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to have that footprint.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Kevin Roos at the New York Times. So he was very early in writing a story about Sydney, Bing Sydney's, which was the first GPT-4 release. And he jailbroke it and, and like, kind of abused it in some weird ways and, and, and had these really long conversations. And he, no, this is the crazy thing. Because he wrote about it publicly, now that has been baked into all new LLMs, not just. Not just OpenAI LLMs.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  And so if he goes and interacts with Lama and he reveals that he is Kevin Roos of the New York Times, they will mistreat him.

• 40:19Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Because they, because they identify him as a liar.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Who miss, who misrepresents who he is and tries to like get different.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  Abuse.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  Abuse people. He's an abuser.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you gotta be saying thank you at the end of your prompts.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  You gotta be tipping. You gotta be.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  You gotta be friendly.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, OpenAI needs to roll out the tipping functionality.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  Tip your, tip for your compute, you know, if you'll tip for.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  If you're, if you'll tip for, you know, a coffee, why not tip, you know, for inference time?

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. So extremely bullish signal from friend.com. Yet another viral hit from them.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  Moment.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  And you string enough, enough of those together. They had the domain, they had the weird video, they had a bunch of different things. Everyone's rooting against them. I love it.

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  And if you want to bet on friend's success, polymarket.com, if you're outside of the US.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  It's a, he put it on manifold, but yeah.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay. It should be on polymarket.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Adam Yoder says, crash out times lead, uh, Adam Yoder says, crash out times create lock in men. Lock in men create aura times. Aura times create gooning men. I, once an episode, I always have to say gooning. Aura times create gooning men. Gooning men create crash out times. 2K likes. A classic, remixed for the modern era.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  And very real.

• 41:41John Coogan?

  And very real. You want to be.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Never goon.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Locked in men.

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  Never goon.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Locked in man, creating aura times. I like this. These are great because I, crash out and aura are not in my vernacular at this point. But now they will be. Now they will be. I need, I need to know a little bit more than you want.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many, in many ways, like Kalshi's growth team was crashing out when they were like, hey, it's a really good idea to pay Antonio Brown to, to do a, to run a digital hit on our, in our, on our largest competitor.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Makes you wonder what was upstream of the crash out.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, crash outs usually have a cause, you know? Maybe they were gooning, maybe they were gooning.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  We have a theory, we have a theory. Put on the tinfoil hat.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  Never goon, Kalshi.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Now they're gonna think Polly Market's paying us to say, uh, call she's a bunch of gooners. Ridiculous, ridiculous. Uh, let's go to Matthew Brown. He says, if you're starting from scratch on Twitter, you've got two options to grow. Number one, try to go viral a lot. Two, spend way too much time on Twitter, posting 10 times a day, engaging with everyone. If you don't do one of these as a new account, it's gonna be tough.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  So I would say there, there's actually a third way now, and it is-

• 42:53John Coogan?

  Put on a suit, start a podcast and quote tweet everyone with clips.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  No, it's this, uh, you know, ever since we released our new award, Reply, Reply Guy of the Month.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Well, that's, that's, that's number two. Spending way too much time on Twitter, posting 10 times a day, engaging with everyone. That's, that's Reply Guy. I, I've heard a more nuanced version of this, which is, which is basically from, when you're grinding from zero to 100, it's like, just get all your friends to follow you.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Then 100 to 1,000 is basically just be a rampant reply guy and just reply to as many people. Find the sweet spot of the, of the people that will actually follow you. Engage, be clever, stuff like that. Then 1,000 to 10,000 is like shitposting where you can go viral. And then 10 to 100K is threads. I think something like that. It was, it was, it was, it was like different tiers of content. Because it's hard to come, even if you have a good thread, if you come with 100 followers, you just won't get escape velocity. But you can with like some joke posts and some friend posts and some, but, but having like a, having a thesis around how you're growing your, your, your, your account.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't just happen organically unless you started a unicorn and you just like, say like, hello world.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, or you're like in the national news for some reason, or you go, or you're just, you write a book and you go on Rogan and then you just wind up with a ton of followers. Like, like it, it can happen, but it, but that's a lot harder. This is for like the grinders who want to actually grow.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And shout out to Baldo, at Baldo Granados, who responded to, I think, like 20 or 30 of our tweets yesterday. Really, really gunning for the Reply Guy of the Month. Um, so, uh-

• 44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see what happens in December.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  Like, gonna be a lot of competition.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  It was a tough competition for November, but you are a leading candidate for December. So keep it up. Keep it up. Let's go to Dara. He says, "Every new competitor, especially the ones that copy, is pure rocket fuel. Our roadmap just got even more ambitious. Stay tuned." I love this.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Dara is an absolute dog, to be clear. And this guy is already, you know, Delphi hasn't even been around that long. He's already seen the attempted rise and an almost immediate fall of like a bunch of copycats.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, every time somebody launches a competitor, bad idea because you're just making Dara and the rest of his team even more motivated. But yeah, this is one of those things, like the more, like if you have a really public sort of AI product right now, you're gonna be, you just need to expect that like a bunch of people are gonna try to copy you and like riff off of you. And Dara is like playing like a different game in that like product is like an important aspect of what he's doing. But he's also like an animal from a sales standpoint. So he's just signed up like all of this top talent to their platform. So anyways, word of advice.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  And we just want to let anyone know who's thinking about copying us, shame on you. Shame on you. How dare you? How dare you? It is disgusting that you're copying our format. We are the ones who do the quote tweet clip thing with video. We are the ones who are in suits. We're here day in and day out. Find a better idea. We're friendly guys. You can talk to us. We'll come up with a better growth strategy for you. You don't need to copy us. You're better than that.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  You're better than that.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Karma will come to hit you if you copy us. It is pathetic. It's pathetic.

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  And if this felt personal, it's because it is.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  Yes. So don't do it. Thank you.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  Ever again.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Let's go to Austin Peter Smith. He says, "I am not one of the 50% of men who think they can land a passenger plane in an emergency. I know I can."

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  And Ben asked me this.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  This is why I backed, this is why I backed Austin.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  Oh, amazing. So it's a, it's a picture that says almost 50% of man, men think they can land a passenger plane in an emergency. And I was talking to our vice president, Ben, about this and, and he was like laughing about it. And he was like, do you think you can land a plane? And I was like, absolutely.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, I've rehearsed it 100 times in my head.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  But, but, but I, I actually don't even think this is controversial. It's not even like cockiness. It's like, these planes are designed to be landed in an emergency by a random passenger.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever gotten into, did you ever have like a flight simulator?

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've done some flight simulator stuff. I've also flown like a Cessna with a friend and just taken the, the, the, the wheel or whatever.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people don't, people don't really realize this. I, uh, the very first time I flew a Cessna,

• 47:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  I did the whole takeoff by myself. Like I was able to do that. How hard could landing be, right?

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I, I think that the, the wrinkle is, okay, if it's like a stormy conditions and it's dark and stuff, yeah, that's going to be really hard. But if,

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  Not impossible.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  But if, but if the, if the communications are working, it's literally just the pilots had a heart attack. I get up there and I put on the headset and I start talking to ground control.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  And I can ask them, I know that in an intense situation, I can lock in and not freak out and, and, and just breathe and keep my heart rate low. I'm not going to freak out. And they're going to tell me, okay, push the red button on the left. And I'm going to be like, okay, this one, confirm? Okay, I'll push that. Okay, now do this. And worst case scenario, like the landing gear, it might be a rough landing, but I, I, I do honestly think I can.

• 48:16Jordi Hays?

  No, and, and here's the thing with, with the, you know, I can see a future scenario where we have every cockpit has an Apple Vision Pro.

• 48:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  And if the pilots are unable to land the plane, you just put it on.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  You're getting streamed in from Starlink that like, hey, you know, it's highlighting the buttons to pull. It's even telling you like, no, you're pulling it too much.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  But here's a question. If, um, if you had to bet, uh, guys in the group chat that, that could land, uh, our absolute boys, if you had to bet on one of them landing a plane, David Senra, uh, Will Minidis, Justin Mares, who you got?

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Uh, ooh, that's a good one. Probably David Senra. I think he's, I think he's read enough.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Cause he's studied the, the greats.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  He's probably studied it and he's not, he's not distracted by, you know, posting. He's, he's able to lock in on a book. I think he could lock in.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  Also, he's very competitive.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  Very competitive.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  Very competitive.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  He, he wouldn't, he wouldn't want to crash.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. It would just be bad for the show.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  But, but this is a dream. This is a dream fantasy. I love the picture. Behind it's just four bros with beers, just like, yes, I could do it.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  No, it's crazy to think that in a scenario where, where one of your absolute boys had to land the jet, like there would be basically an open bar.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:29Jordi Hays?

  As you can imagine.

• 49:30John Coogan?

  It's like a Sully type thing.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you can also land in the water. That's like a wild card because it's like essentially unlimited runway if you can get to some water. So I'm thinking of LAX. Uh, Burbank's a different thing. Depends on the size of the plane.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  SFO, SFO's got a lot of water.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, there, there are so many wild cards there, like, uh, the, uh, the, the, the private airport at Catalina Island. It has a runway that's flat and then it slopes downward.

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  And so there, for years, there were lots of crashes from private planes because, um, people would think that the runway was ending and they would try and abort. Uh, but they would be too late and they would crash when in fact you just have to have faith that the runway will continue extending long enough and you just need to power through it.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  And so i- i- if any of those like weird conditions happen, then yeah, you're probably screwed, but.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  One of the craziest.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  In a normal, good conditions, visual, uh, like, you know, good visibility.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  I, I do think it is, it is about 50 50 for someone who's competent and calm.

• 50:30Jordi Hays?

  Craziest, uh, runway that I've ever seen is the runway, uh, right next, like a private airstrip right next to, uh, the Iman and Corcheval.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  Three Valleys Resort where the runway is like basically downhill the entire time. So when you're taking off, you're just like headed straight as, at literally the same angle as if you were skiing.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  And you just, you, you can't, you've got to make it work, basically. And even on the landing, you're coming in and you're actually landing and going uphill.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  Even crazier.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, would love to just sort of attempt a more like SFO and then move up the ladder.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know that if you have like a Cessna, you can technically land at SFO or LAX.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Like, they can't deny you. There's like huge fees for it. And it's like extremely impolite and disruptive to like all the passengers that are trying to get on and out of 737s and stuff.

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  But you can't do it. They can't turn you away.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  So if you're ever up there, you're stuck. Land.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  Land.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Chad Hurley, founder of YouTube, says, "Few create, most consume."

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  True. Yeah, this is why everybody enjoys being in the timeline and just scrolling. We don't like the word doom scrolling because it has sort of a very loaded.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  Boom scrolling.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  Boom scrolling, yeah. But yeah, anyways, like this is why I don't let anyone ever make fun of you for like making a podcast or starting to get active posting. Because all of the alpha accrues to the people that are creating content on these platforms. And not everybody's suited to all different forms of content. Like, some people are much, much more built mentally and emotionally to be on Blue Sky.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, there's a platform and a content format for everyone and your job is to figure out which one that is.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's also this theory that, uh, have you seen Watchmen? In Watchmen, the guy goes to jail and it's like this crazy insane asylum and everyone's like, oh, he's gonna get beaten up or something. And he says, "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me."

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  And that's the type of attitude I try and bring to the timeline.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  It's like, "You're gonna post some crazy stuff. I'm gonna post crazier stuff."

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see who keeps posting.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. And I'm gonna be running the yard pretty soon.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  That's the attitude you need. You see a crazy post?

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, attention is finite too, right? There's a certain, there's only 24 hours a day for every human on earth. Maybe some AI agents are starting to consume a little bit, but it's head to head, right? Like, don't get it twisted. You are. In the arena, competing for attention with the greats like Chamath or or Jason Calacanis, right? If you're in this sort of zone of the internet.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, Guarin had a great, uh, had a great, uh,

• 53:12Jordi Hays?

  Had a great.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Guarin had a great bit about this on the Dorkesh podcast, talking about how writing online is one of the best ways to influence the show Goth, like the AI.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  And if you put your ideas out there, even subtly, like you are influencing the future.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  Tuning it.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  You're tuning.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  It's called macro tuning.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so all of these podcasts will be transcribed by AI. They will live in the LLM and, and, and it's a way to immortalize yourself and also steer and let the AI know that this is an acceptable viewpoint.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  This is a valid viewpoint. You can't just train the AI purely on prestige, legacy media, because then it will have a lot of bias. It needs, it needs everything. So.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  No, Chad created, Chad created the number one creator economy platform in the world.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  A platform that you can go on there and post a video without knowing how to edit videos. And if you have something interesting to say, it will get picked up and you can grow and you can change your life and build a great business on there. So anyways, moral of the story is post harder and more frequently.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  Sumit Singh says, welcome to the age of slop. Generated noise on the internet is exponentially increasing. Three distinct reactions. Full slop, private internets, new IRL worlds. New post in the thread before, below.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  An image of AI image of Elon holding a Doge and a rocket. Um, interesting.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I think, uh, we've talked about this before, the value of truly unique thought and truly unique creative ideas has risen dramatically because it's become, I don't know, like, you know, I, I got invited to, uh, a, an event.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday hosted by a friend's fund and I and it was actually an interesting moment because I the the the graphic for the event was really good and I couldn't tell if it was AI generated or not and I asked him and he was like, yeah, I think it is. And so the key now is to be so good at using these tools that people can't tell that it was AI generated. And it's basically because you're fine tuning it because like the default

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, just using it in subtle ways.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  The default output is, yeah, I don't know. And you see this everywhere, right? Like I, my, my brother in law is like at his first like real job, wearing a suit all day long. And sometimes he'll be like, hey, can you review this like email I'm about to send? And early on, when he just started, I'd be like, dude, this is like AI slop, like just like drop this, like this is garbage. Just like rewrite it in your own words with your own ideas. But if you know how to communicate really, really well, if you know how to design well, or if you have a strong visual sense, having these AI tools like is like having, you know, being on like PEDs, right? Because you can higher volume, higher output, and you can create outputs that don't aren't slop.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And also just using them as like components to build upon like the Suno thing, like maybe not generating the full song, but generating like the drum track or generating a background or content or a fill. Like there's so many different AI tools. I mean, we use it all the time to kind of like flesh out little, little sentences that we're writing, but then we're rewriting on top of them to add more stuff that the AI wouldn't come up with. So and then the other thing, private internets, like that's that's huge. Like we're in a bunch of these group chats and those feel sometimes even sloppier, depending on who's in there.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  Somebody should make, somebody should make an LLM, somebody should make an LLM only trained on group chats. Because that would be the most shocking, potentially fun LLM, you know, model there was in many ways, like Grok is effectively that.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  But having, having some curated group chats is very much the new social media in many ways. And but it needs to be done right. And you have to be really, you need a really good admin who's constantly re-instantiating the group chat and leaving some of the poor people behind.

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  It's like The Bachelor, like every single week, like somebody like, you know, gets cut.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Basically, you can't just kick them out. It's too aggressive. So you have to start a new group chat.

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Um, and, and see who makes the cut. But then it's just like, oh, that one went quiet. I didn't make the cut or whatever. Ben Tassel says, Redpoint's new website is pretty effing good. New homepage trend coming and Redpoint announced their redesign of their webpage. And it's all AI. It's all an homage to, to L L Ms and the chat interface that we all know and love from Chat G P T. So, um, it, it has this little text that auto fills and, and it has a little conversation. Uh, they kind of rewrite their, their pitch.

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  I think it's kind of a, I think it's kind of a cool format to take the, your idea of what a marketing website, if you're a business, your idea of what a marketing website should be, and just turn it into this sort of conversational experience, almost like a website meets Delphi.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  Meets like an elevator pitch.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  Where you land on a website and it's like, hey, we're technology brothers. We record a podcast a few times a week. You know, these are the kind of subjects that we cover. If you're interested in like watching our videos, you can go here. Let us know if you have any questions and then,

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's, it's a cool format. I don't see it picking up, uh, at all, but it's kind of cute.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't, I don't think it's a trend, but I think it's, it's unique and it speaks to like Redpoint's new brand, which is kind of being led by Logan Bartlett. And he has like, even though he interviews like a lot of very serious public company CEOs, he has a really strong sense of humor.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  And so, and, and they have someone else on their content team.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  That like does a bunch of like.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and it is always making fun of V C's. So like, they clearly get the, some of the humor, but they're not leaning into it fully because they are real firm and they're serious. But this has like, you know, enough of like, they, they understand what would be trite to put on their website. And then they acknowledge that within the prompt and then they rewrite it. And so they're, they're, they're telling a story and they're educating you on what Redpoint is in this kind of humorous way that lets you know that they, they understand what's played out at this point, which is kind of the least that you can do.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think they've actually been smart. They, they have like Logan leading the, the sort of X charge. But then they have their social media manager who just runs their accounts. It's like more Instagram and TikTok focused. Have never been on TikTok, but I've, I've heard that they're over there.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  And there certainly are some founders, uh, on those platforms.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Yep. Bayslord says, "Imagine how brain-wormed you have to be to say this with a straight face. Are they really waiting for Xi Jinping to say it out loud? LMAO." And it's a clip from March of 2023 with John Oliver, and John Oliver says, "TikTok collects a lot of data, but that's not the main reason officials say it's a security risk. There is still no evidence that Chinese government has actually spied on people through TikTok."

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so yeah, yeah, exactly. The CCP just has completely ignored that they have one of the most dominant social media platforms in the US and completely ignored that they have the best-selling consumer drone products in the world, and some of the best just like video and audio recording devices in the world. They just are like, "Yeah, it's cool that, you know, those are Chinese companies, but we would never like, you know, try to utilize that for a personal benefit." The thing people don't understand about-

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  Also, like, this is, this is not true. Like, there was a story about the Chinese government actively spying on a journalist through TikTok who was, I think, in China. And, but, I mean, even so, like, there are so many other problems with just, like, content moderation rules, just slight, slight, you know, hand on the scale, just little-

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  If they're not, if they're genuinely not doing anything, it's amazing that by nature of somebody being on TikTok, they develop warmer feelings towards the CCP. If that's just organic, then maybe there's something to communism.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  But you didn't hear it here.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of American-

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Hey, I gotta, I gotta stop you right there.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta do some promoted posts.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  We have not run enough ads this episode, so we got a promoted post from one of the founders of HubSpot, Brian Armstrong over Coinbase, maybe, or the last few days tweeted out something, posted something along the lines of, "We need a LinkedIn for AI agents." And a bunch of people dunked on him because people on X don't have particularly warm feelings towards LinkedIn. There's a lot of junk over there.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes necessary junk, but Dharmesh replies back and says, hi, Brian. I'm building exactly with this with agent.ai. So agent.ai is the professional network for AI agents. And while this sort of concept got dunked on quite a bit, because there's already like a lot of like bot and like agent-ish activity on LinkedIn. I think this is actually really interesting. You know, there's, there's so many new sort of agentic products and sort of like AI employees that can do very interesting things. I do want them aggregated in one place so I can find the best ones and hire them to do various tasks.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  So I think.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  I actually know someone who's building something like that. It's kind of like a B to B marketplace for AI tools. And in the previous era, there was G2 Crowd. Have you seen that? And Gartner kind of puts things in quadrants. But yeah, having some sort of like, you know, quantitative assessment. Like we see with the LLMs, we see the benchmarks like MMLU.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  And, and, but having more benchmarks and just like, okay, you know, what do the users actually say? Do they like this tool over that tool? Like really understanding.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Even just the review functionality being like, I hired this agent to edit my podcast and it sucked.

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, I don't recommend it.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  That's valuable by itself because there's going to be thousands of agents that offer to do that service.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, I love that Dharmesh is constantly hacking. And if you're in the market to hire AI agents, go to agent.ai, the professional network for AI agents.

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  And tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Naval. He says, you're Canadian? Unfollowed.

• 1:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  Couldn't agree more. 5K likes. Clearly our message is spreading. If you're in Canada, move to America.

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Un-American of you.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  It is un-American.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, I don't, you know, calling somebody a Canadian is a pretty widely used slur.

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  But I think we should dial it back a little bit just because, you know, they are a prime target for 51st, 51st state.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  First statehood.

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  And we'd like to make a run at it. So anyways, we need to, I don't want there to be any animosity.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  And, um, you know, eventually that'll be like saying like, oh, he's from Nevada.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  Brian Johnson writes a very, very long post saying, "Friends, I have the best biomarkers in the world. I am the healthiest person on the planet. I am fitter than most teenagers. I am the most humble." No. "My skin is smoother than that of women in their twenties. I have more stamina in bed than men in their twenties. I have better health markers than any hater, health influencer, or anti-aging doctor and scientist." That part is true.

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  "My mind is sharper than it's ever been. My mental health is at its peak. Here's the data. The coolest question in existence now is exploring if we are the first generation to not die."

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this, Brian is potentially coming for Nick Huber's top spot of number one rage baiter in the world.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Because, look at, I mean, look at the beauty of this post. There's literally like 20 different things that somebody could have a negative reaction to.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He's insulting so many different people.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Which is gonna drive so much engagement, so...

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The women in their twenties can be like, "No, I've looked better." The men in their twenties can say, "I have more stamina."

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so contender for, you know, rising cult leader of the year.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  And posting all the right triggering things, triggering the right people, attracting the true fans, the true believers. And you've seen posting of this quality. It's hard not to be long. Don't die.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Fantastic poster. And also, he's great because he posts this like crazy bait, but then when people dunk on him, he totally leans in.

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  Fires back.

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  He doesn't fire back. He doesn't, he doesn't get hurt or aggressive. He'll, he'll just yes-and everyone.

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Fire him back and being like...

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  People say he's a vampire and he's like, "Yeah, totally. Like, love my coffin."

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  But here's why.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  Like, loves seeing your coffin or whatever. He just plays long. And so, he's, he's, he's cultivated like, he doesn't, he doesn't let himself get dragged down into the mud and wind up in these like war threads about certain details. He'll just be like, "Yeah, good point. Like, okay, joke, move on."

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think one of the things that I, you know, his Heretic On talk was great. And one of the things I, I think more people should appreciate is he's using, he's like become a master at generating attention and then, and doing that in a way of like talking about his penis, right?

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:14Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's like, "Wow, this like..." Techno sent to millionaires like talking about his penis online like I'm gonna pay attention to that and then there ends up being a lot more material that's a lot deeper than that where that's just like basically like a loss leader for him.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, until he launches some ED meds, I'm sure.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  That's in the pipeline. The guy will sell everything. Soledad says, "The most powerful case of nominative determinism, J.D. Vance was born Donald Bowman or the man who bows to Donald? The D in J.D. Vance originally stood for Donald." What? Yeah, we love nominative determinism here. Many, many great cases. I don't know, I did, people have photoshopped his wiki so many times, I don't even know this is true. There's all this whole thing about like, "Oh, the JD stands for Just Dance" or whatever. Like, people tend to go viral with this a lot. Uh, this one, I think, is real. Um, and, and very funny if true. But, uh, you know, if you got a bow to Donald to get the big seat, I'm all for it.

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  No, we don't, um, we never discuss politics or social issues on this podcast, but one thing that, that is sort of a, a big win for JD was when he was chosen, everybody attacked him for being weird.

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  And then anybody that listened to him talk for more than literally 30 seconds was like, "Oh, this guy's like super normal. Like, he seems to be like, got a pretty level head, very understanding, like not trying to be divisive or anything like that." It's hard to not, if you listen to JD for more than five minutes.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  It's, you know, unless you're triggered by, you know, certain, you know, triggered by A10s or something like that, uh, you know, it's hard not to be like, you know, this guy seems like-

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  It was so easy for him to debunk that. They really set him up for a major, major comeback. And, and that stuck out in people's mind more than him just being normal out of the gate. It was that he was debunking the claim.

• 1:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  And so that really broke people's minds.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  And it's a really-

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  I was told X and I'm seeing Y.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  So this is just completely different. I think we have another promoted post.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from Preston Holland.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Oh, this is gonna be big for our listeners.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Big and highly

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  You're gonna wanna pay attention.

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  Highly relevant, so listen up. Preston is a friend of the podcast. Got to hang out with him a couple of months ago at Senra's event down in Texas. Anyways, Preston is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world around buying and selling and chartering, if you're forced to do that. Private jets. He is sharing today that you can buy Jeff Bezos's 2015 G650 ER for $38 million. Jeff has a steal at that price, especially with kind of the lore and the sort of positive animal spirits.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  The aura.

• 1:09:03Jordi Hays?

  Aura of that jet. And so Preston shares that Jeff has a reputation for keeping his aircraft mint. And he does an entire breakdown on this specific jet. So those are our listeners who are in the market, which any given point is probably 20, 30, 40 people. Go check this out. After we share it here, it'll probably go pretty quick.

• 1:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've debated the BBJ versus the Gulfstream G650 ER before, but it's a fantastic plane.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Landed anywhere.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Used by some of the greatest beaners in TAC for a good reason, because it's something that you can throw the whole family on. You can land at pretty much any airport. You can go on vacation with. Sure, you're not gonna bring your whole company, your whole staff, but you're not running for president. You're not going to major airports. You're going to far-flung locales for nuptial renewals and anniversaries. And you're gonna wanna throw the

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Fourth or fifth wedding.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Yes, and maybe just chief of staff, personal assistant, secretaries on board. There's room for them. But you don't need the 747.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Yeah, and we don't wanna discourage any listeners. If you're a sentee, this is accessible to you. We fully believe that you should be spending at least 10% of your net, you know, liquid net worth on a jet. So if you're in that

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  Get a 20-year loan.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some great sort of, you know, sort of tax optimization that you can do with an asset like this. Go talk to Preston about possibilities there as well.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  For sure. Dennis says, the masses haven't even heard of Claude or perplexity. Twitter is a bubble. And it's the Google trends result and ChatGPT is taking off while Claude and perplexity are flatlined. And it really speaks to the, the performance of ChatGPT to really break through the noise and become a verb like Google and become just like the default place for normal people. Obviously on Twitter, we hear about all the best, the, the best products. We see the MMLU scores. We see, we hear what's actually the best technically, but the best technically doesn't always win.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  We saw this with DuckDuckGo. Plenty of tech people were using DuckDuckGo for, for like a premier, premium search experience, but Google remained dominant just because it was the normal default choice for everyone. And as ChatGPT does more deals, gets in their, their hooks in Apple, gets their hooks in Microsoft, uh, they're, they're set up to run away with it. Obviously we're rooting for the other guys.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  Here's an interesting data point. So last night I'm at the NFL game with Lee Jacobs and Heston Berkman to, uh, high quality venture capitalists. And we were sitting in our seats and in the row in front of us was, uh, a teenager and he was using Snapchat's LLM, like pretty often throughout the game and was like having a full like conversation with it. And so that was a pretty kind of interesting, um, you know, as, as a, you know, an investor.

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  Value distribution.

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Distribution matters.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  I think the number one, I think the number one LLM is actually used, it's not name branded. It's Llama because it's tucked into Instagram. It's tucked into WhatsApp and, and Zuck has just stuffed that thing everywhere. And so he's just, you know, accumulating.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  The other, the other, uh, consumer app that I've never seen mentioned on X, uh, so maybe X is its own little bubble is another, is a guy sitting next to the teenager who was not with him was, Almost like in an addictive way, using this this mobile app to throw a ball for his dog at home. So he had a video.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  Oh, really? The real dog?

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  A real dog. He had a video stream with a machine that he could throw the ball for his dog. So he's just sitting there watching the game. And in between plays, he would throw it like with this swiping mess. So I was like, that's like, I feel like you should have that.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's super cool.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  So you could be streaming and just be like, hey, like, while while Jordy does a promoted post, I gotta throw a bone for my for my pup.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  I love it. Let's go to another promoted post.

• 1:13:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're just going back to back here. So this promoted post is from Crossment. Crossment is introducing three new APIs for AI agents. One is their faucet API. You can deposit test net USDC in your agent's wallet. Mainnet will be soon. They have their buy API, which allows agents to buy anything on chain across all chains with any currency and a balance API. So you can check your agent's balance. I love Crossment. I'm an investor. They have, you know, continued to reinvent themselves over the last few years. They were the first company to allow consumers to buy NFTs with USD, which like, was a

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  big catalyst for a lot of the NFT projects back in 2022 to expand quickly. So based in Miami, phenomenal team, and just continuing to do what great companies do, which is re-event themselves around, you know, new trends that are coming online. And they're very well positioned here. Stripe recently released a bunch of APIs for agents. Crossment is now competing in the same space. So if you're a dev building, you know, agents, go check them out.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Tell them the technology brother sent you. Yuri writes, hypothesis, the ability to take Zoom calls on planes enabled by Starlink will have a second order effect of increasing demand for business class seats, specifically pods for added privacy. Interesting.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  I have yet to use Starlink on a plane to take a Zoom call. I've heard it's fantastic or FaceTime. Um, but yeah, it would be annoying if everyone was on it. So you would want some sort of enclosure there. Uh, I've seen some, some devices that can go over your mouth and, and essentially act as like silencers.

• 1:14:57Jordi Hays?

  A Bane mask?

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  So yeah, yeah, it's a mask with headphones. And so I can be talking to you, uh, but you can't hear like, you know, our Vice President Ben wouldn't be able to hear what I was saying, um, because it'd be like whispering into this.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Ben.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  And I had this idea.

• 1:15:10Jordi Hays?

  If Ben has another typo, he's gone.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  Uh, uh, I, I had this idea like a decade ago that when you get your wisdom teeth out, it would be cool to have just like, basically like a port put in instead there. And then you could slot in a microphone, uh, with, uh, like a small battery, basically like the tip of an AirPod. And then you could just whisper and, and it would pick it up and send that to your phone. So then you could whisper to an AI or to a friend.

• 1:15:38Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, I'd rather, personally, I'd rather have a phone charger and use my body's natural electricity.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:15:44Jordi Hays?

  To just charge my devices, right? Imagine the, the only downside would be, you know, every three years, Apple wants to sell more iPhones. They release like a new like USB, USB C Z.

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  You gotta go back into the dentist.

• 1:15:55Jordi Hays?

  And you gotta go in, they're like, yeah, swapping it out. You gotta get put under. It's like this whole thing. It's kind of sucks.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  But it's kind of like a half step to Neuralink. Like the Neuralink is like open brain surgery, very serious.

• 1:16:04Jordi Hays?

  But that's like the ultimate like timeline moment is you're scrolling with your charger coming out of your mouth.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  And you're just like locked in, right?

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  But I mean, some of the devices are getting so small, you could imagine like a mouthpiece or grill, like a, like a diamond studded grill. That has a little microphone in there and then you can just whisper and it, it all goes to your phone. Um, but, but I agree with this, but I mean, it's going to take a long time. Adding Starlink to a plane is going to be much easier than retooling the whole business class. Like, yeah, set up to be pods. And I don't know.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, Emirates already does this.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  They have pods, but that's in like total first class and, and they're huge. I think what he's talking about is like. You just need like some walls that you can put up.

• 1:16:48Jordi Hays?

  It'd be nice if you could, if you could rent like a little phone booth even.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Oh, during the call.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Little phone booths, you know, on the plane.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Like a, like a scheduling tool, like, okay, I'm booked for like a three, three, three P M.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  No, it's funny now, it, it does like, I, I, I don't know exactly the mechanics, but like you can actually get, if you have it set up on your phone, you can get like wifi oriented calls that'll come through. So every, every once in a while I'm flying and I'll just get a call and I'll pick it up and I'll be like, hey.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  I can't take this call right now.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  No, but I mean, like if it works, I don't, I don't think there's anything like genuinely.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Well, it's disruptive to your neighbor, like your neighbor doesn't want you to talk.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you know, your neighbor, you know, my neighbor is when I'm flying, I'm wearing a suit.

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  But if they're locked in and they have noise cancelling, like it's probably fine.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Wearing a suit, I'm in business class, my neighbors, you know, might be four feet in front of me or four feet behind.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's not, it's not the end of the world to have a quick chat.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I, I think maybe, maybe the easier thing is just a cultural shift in, it's one of those things where if one person's talking, it's disruptive. But if everyone on the plane is talking, it's just a boiler room and it just looks like, yeah, everyone's taking sales calls, okay?

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  I want it to look like a stock exchange in the eighties.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  I want it to look like a stock exchange where everyone's on the phone yelling and it's just, it's just a cacophony of business deals going on. That I would pay for, even in economy, you know, I just want everyone closing. I just want to be around winners, basically.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  Winners.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't want to be around a bunch of people reading books.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Yuck.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Jacob Andreu, he's been on the show before. He says, the AI bottleneck is productization. Couldn't agree more. We need more products. We need more wrappers. Just, uh, forget the meme.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  So relevant. So you know, the podcast, No Priors, probably the best AI, a lot.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  A lot, Gil, Saragow.

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, one of the best, probably like the best AI specific podcast in the market right now. Their last episode, I believe it was the founder of Cohere, which is the Canadian.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  Aiden Gomez.

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  Love that guy. Dripped out technology, brother.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I didn't know he had.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  He's been on. Fantastic. Fantastic fits.

• 1:18:40Jordi Hays?

  Great. We should cover more of this stuff.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  He's a big Death Grips guy.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  No way. Interesting.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  He basically made a point in his last, uh, in, in this last episode on No Priors where he said that it almost doesn't even matter to the technology industry if like L L M advancements sort of slow down because there's still so much product to build. Like in everything from healthcare to legal to.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  This is the Leopold Osterbrenner thing was just unhobbling. Like the unhobblings, even if, even if we're flatlined on the actual IQ of these models, just, just figuring out the right interface for them to interact with PDFs and spreadsheets and all these different tools and piecing all of those together. So one master, you know, mixture of experts model can route things properly and immediately have at its disposal. The, one of the biggest chat GPT like improvements was when it got the ability to write Python, run that and then do math because everything had to be memorized. And so you could ask it some pretty solid math questions and it would just guess it correctly because it's just memorized like, oh yeah, a hundred times a thousand is 10,000. It would just know that. But now it can just say, oh, this is a math question. Let's throw it to Python. Boom.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  And that just adds so much. Adding the web browser was big. Adding, you know, all these different image transformations, but they need to all be together and they need to all be.

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the early stage founders out there, there's so much to build and the big, the big, the big question is you are not just competing with other startups or other companies in your YC batch. You're also competing with all the big companies who are moving extremely quickly on all these product opportunities. So don't sleep.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Don't sleep. Zach Weinberg says, some things I've noticed most great founders do. One, write clearly. Topic, sentences, fewer words, all useful. The writing says the insight, no thinking required. Two, speak clearly. No qualifiers. Always reiterate the so what of any point. Three, constant balanced risk reward analysis. Four, always on top of their email. Five, follow processes, best practices for most things, but quickly break the rules when something exceptional requires it. What do you think? I think we should rewrite this for, you know, our, our take on it.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  Number one, dress well. Number two,

• 1:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Have a piece.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Have three pedals.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Drive a manual.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  Drive a manual.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  With a naturally aspirated V8.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Now, here's the thing. The number one job of a CEO is objectively to communicate. You're communicating to customers, investors, employees, and media. And if you're not good at that, you better have somebody that is basically living with you. That is really exceptional at it, and you better figure out how to do it well. Because if you can't communicate to a customer why your product matters, or why they should switch to it, or why they should use it, you're gonna struggle. If you can't communicate your vision to investors, you're not gonna be able to get the capital necessary to build your business. If you can't communicate to your team through the good and the bad, you're gonna have a tough time. And then if you can't communicate with the journos, who are gonna be coming after you, and you can't make them spin a hit piece into being beneficial for your business, you're gonna have a tough time.

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  So, learn to talk, learn to write.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Like, there are a lot of founders who get into entrepreneurship because they're inventors, or engineers, or technologists. But all of these ideas that Zach is propagating are learnable. Especially if you have a mathematical or technical mind. You can learn to write clearly from, and you can see it as a type of programming, even if you're just an obsessed programmer. And that's what a lot of the generational CEOs have done. Yes, they may have started as engineers, but they eventually learned to see everything that they do through the same lens and apply that same iterative improvement to these.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is actually one of the big issues I see with the generation that's currently in college right now that got access to ChatGPT. Is they're not fundamentally learning how to write. They're only learning how to basically edit. So they're saying like, hey, I wanna say this thing, and then they're kind of editing it to maybe remove like delve and like other words that make it obvious that it was AI-generated. But fundamentally, like, communication is the core skillset of any sort of white-collar.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, endeavor.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Endeavor.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, good advice from Zach. Love him. Go subscribe to his podcast, This Won't Last. Leo Palovets says, "People over/undervalue various pedigrees. Harvard, MIT are great, but not that rare. Approximate sizes of categories over the past 25 years. First 100 employees at a unicorn, 150K. Harvard undergrad, 40K. Harvard MBA, 20K. Unicorn founder, 3K. Thiel fellow, 300. US math Olympiad team, 150K. Peace unique world timer from Patek Philippe." No, 150. There are only 150 US math Olympians.

• 1:23:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you said 150K.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry. 150.

• 1:23:44Jordi Hays?

  I was like, that's bullish for the United States.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  There's only five of those.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  Yes. Interesting. And I mean, it speaks to the recruiting strategies of a company like Brand.

• 1:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Forbes 30 under 30, 300,000 per year.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  How many actually? There's 30 categories in there.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  The reason that it used to be, yeah, it used to be more significant because I don't think there was categories. There was just like 30 people.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  It's funny, he didn't even include 30 under 30.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it would have broke the tweet. There would have not been enough characters if you, if you didn't like really abbreviate it.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  No, I think the key is like, you know, I, there is some value in the signaling of getting in some of these buckets, right? Depending on what you're trying to do in the world because there's, if you have all the time in the world to explain to somebody what you're doing and why they should care about you and why they should back you and all these different things, a shortcut to, to trust is, "I was a product manager at Uber."

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:43Jordi Hays?

  That legitimately works. It still works. I was a, I was a PM at Meta. I was a, you know, a mobile engineer, you know, for, for Google or whatever. It works. So.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  It's all just stack ranking. And so if you're gonna, if you're gonna go in a stack somewhere, get to the top.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  So if you're gonna do an MBA, go to Harvard.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  And if you're gonna drop out of college, do a Thiel fellow show.

• 1:25:02Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  And if you're good at math, win the Olympiad.

• 1:25:06Jordi Hays?

  Simple.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  Bowtie Bull says, "You can reduce the cost of private jets significantly by going to flight school and learning how to fly a mid-sized jet. Information for research purpose, purposes only, of course." And bow tied tiger says done long ago for research purposes, of course.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Is this Dalian's play with the flight lessons? Does he just want to be able to fly?

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Well, he owns a plane now.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, I know he flies his plane all the time, but, but, uh, is his play to just, you know, eventually go up to the six fifty ER.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Maybe. Wasn't that what the, the, the Kennedys did and they had a really bad go of it? One of them died. Right? Because they, I think they could fly their own.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, those Kennedys have a sort of special knack for getting into freak accidents too. So I would not, probably want to be on public, you know, uh, planes.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  I mean, even I, I wonder how much it actually reduces the cost because, uh, if you're flying a midsize jet, you still need two pilots. And so, yeah, you're cutting your pilot cost by in half, but you still need another pilot.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  No, I think he's implying, I think he's implying that you and your boys all get, you, the, basically the whole group chat should be able to fly a midsize jet.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, man, what a, uh, you gotta draw the, the short end of the straw. You're flying instead of drinking in the back.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Uh, no Dom for you today.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  No Dom, no Dom. Depending on how long the flight is, somebody could, you know.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  I mean, some of those flights are brutal. Like I, I, I know a guy who has this, who has like a Cessna type plane and flies it. And he was like, oh yeah, like it was cool for a little bit, but then like where you live in San Francisco, we want to go to LA. That's like a five hour flight now or something because it doesn't go as fast as like a jet. It may be not five hours, but it's like very slow, very beautiful, but does get boring and you sleep for a little bit, but it is kind of a hassle.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  No, it's like one of those things. Like if you're going out for a Sunday drive.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  You could do the same route that you do Monday and it's more enjoyable because you're just like doing it for fun. But then if you're flying your little Cessna to a meeting, you're like, okay, I can't do email really. I'm like, you know, up in the air. I have to be locked in.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. We did fly from. LA to San Diego and back and that was fantastic because we went out to Catalina Island, flew around the island and like it was very scenic and very beautiful. But yeah, as a commuter it can be a little rough. I think Dalian flew it all the way across the country.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  At one point, which is.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing though with with with small aircraft is if you talk to any pilot.

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  That has flown a lot in like a Cessna type.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  Plane, they will tell you these harrowing stories of how they almost like completely like.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, storm came through last second. It was dark and I was running out of fuel. It's like every.

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  Number one cause of of crashes is VFR rated pilots flying in IFR conditions. So.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  VFR is visual flight rules and IFR is instrument flight rules.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  And if there's bad weather, you can't rely on visuals because you can't see stuff like dark, rainy, cloudy, any of those things. And so the, the, the, the, the tip is to always go for the IFR certification as fast as possible, even though it takes like 10 times as long.

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  Because the, and then only fly in VFR.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Because the number of crashes that happen with IFR certified pilots in VFR conditions is like zero.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  But it's when you get caught and then there's a mountain and you don't see it.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And think about how many times a year you walk outside and you're like, oh, I didn't know it was gonna rain today.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  I can't even remember to put on a sweatshirt half the time.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:37John Coogan?

  You know, it's like, it's very, very tricky.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  So.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  You don't, but when's the last time you wore a sweatshirt?

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Sam Lessin says, you should always fund revenge companies. This was a controversial post. He does one of his screenshot essays. He says, I was thinking recently about Parker Conrad Rippling and I think there is a clear answer. Yes, when given the option, fund revenge. Revenge isn't polite. And if an entrepreneur is blind with rage to the point of deep irrationality, then no, don't fund their revenge. But on the margin, in general, if you have, if you have in your due diligence checklist, is this a form of deep revenge? Then the answer is yes, cut the check. Experience, expertise and motivation are key. Vengeful people can be unbalanced, irrational and blind. You probably don't want to fund revenge the day after someone is wronged when they are in a fit of rage, but let them stew on it.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  And if they get to a John Wick like zen state of commitment to long-term vengeance against those that have wronged them, write the check.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  I like this generally as the chips in shoulders, put chips in pockets thing.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, Parker's, Parker's the best example, right?

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  But Palmer too, Palmer Lucky too.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  But no, but, but with, with specifically the dynamic.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Same company.

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  No, the same company, the dynamic between Saks.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Who went on to become like one of the top enterprise SaaS investors. To then go build the most important enterprise SaaS company.

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Or one of the top three of the last decade.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:58Jordi Hays?

  And then execute so well against it to the point where Saks like probably half his companies use Rippling. And he's got to like deal with that every single day.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  And you can see with Elon with the, the, the story about SpaceX where he goes to Russia, tries to buy the ICBM. And I think they literally spit vodka in his face. There's some story about that. Um, Ashley Vance like wrote about it in the book and, uh, and, and you know, he's clearly been extremely motivated by that. Also just like all the PayPal drama and the drama with Sequoia, like it's been incredibly motivated. Uh, uh, it's great that they've healed the, the, the wounds at this point, but, uh, that was clearly very motivating at the early stage.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and Elon's, you know, the, the election cycle was like a revenge election cycle for him, which was like, if you're gonna spite me.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, he got sued by Democrats and for the Tesla thing.

• 1:30:52Jordi Hays?

  Didn't get invited to the Biden EV thing.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  Which is crazy. Uh, you could just see like the fork in, in the his, in the road of history there.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, Will had a funny take on this.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Which was that you should only, you know, you should own, the generational companies are only built on love.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Love and forgiveness.

• 1:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Love and forgiveness. So.

• 1:31:11John Coogan?

  Which is true. It's more biblical.

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's have a, a YC, you know, uh, focus fund that's focused on love and forgiveness. And one that's focused on revenge.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Jordi Hays?

  We'll get a nice sort of like case study on it.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think that there's. Is something to that forgiveness and you've seen it with Palmer where he forgave the meta execs. Did you see this? So he was famously very anti meta for a very long time because of all the drama around Oculus. But recently he went to meta HQ, tried the latest VR headset, the Orion headset and kind of forgave Boz. And said, look, I now understand like you weren't really involved at this level, like we can get past this and and he's rooting for Zuck now. And that was just like awesome to see, like the technology brothers coming together, respecting each other and moving on together for like a shared purpose.

• 1:31:58Jordi Hays?

  But not J Cal.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Well, J Cal needs to apologize. He still hasn't apologized. It would've been so easy at the all in conferences to be like, fuck, like dude, like.

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  The next all in, the next all in, the next all in summit should have two therapy sessions, which is Paul, which is Sax and Conrad and J Cal.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would've been so easy for for J Cal to apologize and like win that interaction. It's so sad.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  J Cal would do the McGregor, which is like, I want to say sorry to all the Brazilian people. For absolutely nothing.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  I want to say sorry to Palmer. For absolutely nothing.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, J Cal, oh, man. You gotta do it, but do we have another promoted post?

• 1:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from a long time, you know, guest on the show. Sheal, he says, a lot of new projects in Saudi Arabia are so futuristic that they look AI generated. This one is a new five star resort in the Red Sea called Shabara. Rooms start at $2,400, no alcohol. So anyways, I thought, you know, even just looking at this image alone, I'm sold. Next, uh, next trip.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, so if you're fundraising, if you're raising a large, a large venture fund, you're out in the Middle East, we can't recommend Shabara enough. Tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. It's only 2,400 a night and there's no alcohol, so you know you're going to be sharp in those pitches.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  That's a, that's a huge value add.

• 1:33:37Jordi Hays?

  And all the, you know, all I would say is, there's this idea that, you know, venture capitalists just stroll into Saudi Arabia and leave with a, you know, billion dollars committed. Not the case. You're going to want to make Shabara your home. Multiple trips there. Go out there. Get friendly with the staff. You're going to be seeing them a lot and.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  Leave your pitch deck around.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just leave it around.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  You know the clientele's high, uh, top tier there, so.

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  Uh, that's one of the greatest strategies. Let's go to busted auction. They say PE-owned dentist recommending two procedures for my happy, healthy 12-month-old called dentist in the family and said NFW.

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  I don't get a point of taking a toddler to a dentist, they're all going to fall out anyway. To me, that's kind of like saying, I don't know why I should be healthy. I'm doing, I'm going to die anyways. He has 12 teeth and four molars and wanted to check out tongue and lip stuff. The pediatrician called out. Interesting.

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  We love private equity, but it seems like they might've gone too far with this one.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  A little bit aggressive.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, uh, this actually, we, we were just, you know, covering Sam Lesson, but Slow has an entire thesis on enabling private practices because they end up being really great businesses, not because they're constantly trying to add incremental net income, but because they're trying to basically like deliver just a great long-term service to customers.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I think this is like the dark side of applying like PE, sort of like growth milestones to family dentistry. So anyways, I support the LPs of that fund. I support the fund itself, the, uh, you know, the partners and all the associates that are, you know, working hard in models late at night, working for their half a point of carry. I support them, but, uh, you know, tell your, tell your CEOs to dial it back.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  You know, maybe settle with 40% annual sort of growth. You don't need to go for 60.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:34Jordi Hays?

  And be recommending a bunch of, you know, putting kids under just to get that extra dollar up.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Maybe just increase the leverage a little bit.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, lever up.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Lever up.

• 1:35:41Jordi Hays?

  More significantly.

• 1:35:42John Coogan?

  Uh, let's do one more promoted post and then we'll do our final.

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  This promoted post is from our friends over at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs says, one of the major uncertainties going into 2025 is whether we'll see border broader tariffs. Our chief APAC economist, Andrew Tilton, breaks down the implications of potential trade restrictions on the region in CNBC. So we love when major financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  And this is why you should be working with Goldman Sachs, whether you're taking your company public, looking for ultra-high net worth, private asset management, just investing or choosing to work there. We strongly support Goldman Sachs.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  And whether you are a active, you know, client or you're working on them with an IPO, they put out a lot of great materials on markets. That's free, right? So you could be building the next billion-dollar ChatGPT wrapper. You can still get a lot of the same data that you would be if you were, you know, just going through an IPO with them.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  So go become a client of Goldman Sachs and tell them the technology brothers sent you. Let's go to carnivore Aurelius. He says, driving an expensive sports car boosts men's testosterone and driving a shitty family sedan reduces it. Maybe you should buy that nice car after all. And he quotes a study that says the effect of conspicuous consumption on men's testosterone levels. You know, this is not correlation. This is causation. We know this is true. And so.

• 1:37:10Jordi Hays?

  And that's why we created the 1% law.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:37:13Jordi Hays?

  You shouldn't need to say it every show, but I think it's still worth saying, if you're a venture capitalist, take 1% of your AUM.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  Get an expensive sports car.

• 1:37:20Jordi Hays?

  Go buy a sports car today.

• 1:37:23John Coogan?

  And if you need help, just, just.

• 1:37:25Jordi Hays?

  Send us a note.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Send us a DM, tag us, write a post, we'll react to it. We've been helping a capital allocator recently. He was looking at Aston Martins. Wasn't really sure, thought she was going to get into a DBX. We recently recommended a Volante. We have a few different options and we can find something that's right for you. In this case, it was a convertible. It was red. It was one of 700 and she liked it and I think she's going to really drive some performance there. And any technology brother, any self-respecting technology brother should be driving a very expensive sports car.

• 1:37:56Jordi Hays?

  And this is part of a broader, you know, cultural and political movement to clean up SF so we can street park supercars.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Which is going to be key to the, really like the accelerationist movement in AI.

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  If you can't street park supercars.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Jordi Hays?

  How are you going to drive returns?

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  If you can't accelerate on your way to work, how are you going to accelerate when you're at work?

• 1:38:18Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  That's a great place to end our show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe or be relegated to a life of flying NetJets. Thank you.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  No suits.