Meta–Scale AI Deal Tensions, Ken Griffin’s Next-Gen Finance Empire | Arielle Zuckerberg, Mike Maples, Andrea Hernández, Farooq Malik & Charles Yoo-Naut

(00:35) - Cracks Form in Meta's Acquisition of Scale AI (23:40) - Tesla's Master Plan 4 (36:08) - Ken Griffin Builds Next-Gen Financial Powerhouse (01:07:45) - Advanced AI Blows Up Startup Bills (01:20:36) - Podcast Gold Rush Rocks Media Industry (01:26:54) - Timeline Reactions (01:37:08) - Andrea Hernández, founder of Snaxshot, discusses the evolution of non-alcoholic beverages, noting the initial rise of NA beers and the subsequent resurgence of alcoholic drinks among Gen Z. She critiques the oversaturation of protein-infused products, expressing concerns about potential health impacts from excessive protein consumption. Additionally, Hernández highlights the commodification of wellness in the food industry, emphasizing the need for transparency and authenticity in product offerings. (01:53:56) - Farooq Malik & Charles YooNaut, co-founders of Rain, a stablecoin-powered card issuing and payments platform, discuss Rain's recent $58 million Series B funding round and its mission to revolutionize global payments by integrating stablecoins into the Visa network. They highlight Rain's role in enabling seamless, cost-effective transactions for businesses worldwide, emphasizing the company's partnerships with major clients like Nuvei and Avalanche. Malik also touches on the evolving landscape of stablecoin regulations and the potential for state-backed tokens, citing Rain's collaboration with Wyoming to make their Frontier token globally usable through Rain's infrastructure. (02:07:57) - Mike Maples, co-founding partner at Floodgate, a venture capital firm known for early investments in companies like Twitter and Twitch, discusses his approach to identifying and supporting "Thunder Lizards"—exceptionally disruptive startups. He emphasizes the importance of engaging with founders in their "builder mode," focusing on those deeply immersed in their ideas before they become mainstream. Maples also highlights the significance of determination and original thinking in founders, sharing anecdotes about early investments in companies like Justin.tv (which evolved into Twitch) and Weebly, illustrating his strategy of backing visionary entrepreneurs at the inception of their journeys. (02:37:43) - Arielle Zuckerberg, the youngest sister of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a General Partner at Long Journey Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage investments. In the conversation, she discusses the firm's commitment to supporting unconventional startups, highlighting investments in unique ventures like a robotic eyelash extension company. She also emphasizes the importance of investing in non-consensus ideas before they become mainstream, believing that the most significant companies of tomorrow often appear unconventional at their inception. (02:54:39) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Hello to chat. Look at chat. There are so many people chatting right now. Uh, thank you for being here.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  We're sorry for taking yesterday off.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't our choice.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Brutal, brutal. Uh, but thank you for being here on Tuesday. We are happy to hang out with you today. Uh, we have a packed show, tons of stories, tons of posts, tons of news, tons of guests, tons of everything.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  We're news maxing.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  We are news maxing. Uh, and we are kicking it off with a debate that me and Jordy got into earlier today and was, uh, burning up the timeline over the weekend. Uh, we'll kick it off with this post from, uh, D Lipperow. Uh, chat, is this true? I'm hearing Scales Alexander Wang is already out the door. Uh, Swick says, please tell me this is a joke.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this was totally fake news.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Shloem says, seems like you saw this and misread. Yes. So this came from a TechCrunch article. And the TechCrunch article, uh, said, Scoop, a scale executive, Alexander Wang, brought over to help run MSL, has departed Meta after just two months. And depending on how you read that, where you put the commas, very different readings.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  So a scale executive, Alexander Wang, he was brought over to help run MSL. He has departed Meta after just two months. Or it could be a scale executive that Alexander Wang brought over to help him run MSL. He's left. Uh, who knows? We'll find out. Uh, well, the news is that it's not Alexander Wang that left. It's someone who was on the team.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  A former executive.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Former executive.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is very normal.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. I mean, they brought over, yeah.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  He did not.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Also, it's like, is, was it an acquisition? Was it an aqua hire? I was going back and forth with, um, the team about this earlier today. Like, how do we even characterize it? It's one of those zombie deals. I just call it a trade deal.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  One thing we know, TechCrunch loves to spin. They like to spin, uh, non-stories. They like to put things in the spin zone.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  We put things in the truth zone. They put things in the spin zone.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there was, there was one guy.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Remember, I mean, for anybody that missed it, we had Arvind on from Perplexity. And he made an offhand comment about like ads and browsers.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  And then TechCrunch ran a story that was like, perplexity will put ads in its browser. And he was like, wait, like,

• 2:28John Coogan?

  That's not what we announced.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  It was like a wide ranging conversation.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Hypothetical.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a hypothetical. So.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were talking about the nature of advertising and AI and stuff. Uh, anyway, um, yeah, I mean, there was one guy who clearly like was working at scale, got like Zombie Aqua hired, went over to MSL and then like wanted to start a company and was probably like already thinking about starting a company.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  It made the most dramatic post.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  And it made it made it a super dramatic post, but yeah.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  He made himself the main character.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Wait, you think it was his fault? I thought it was other people. I thought other people were kind of putting that on him.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I just thought the way that he worded it was like, yeah, I had the opportunity to be basically running it around here and I decided to take my talents somewhere else.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of this going on. Uh, people are, people are, you know, spinning narratives left and right, left and right. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say about easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I knew you were going to hit the eagle. I was very excited to hear the eagle. It's been too long. So, um, the cracks are forming in Meta's partnership with Scale AI says TechCrunch, it's only been since, it's only been since June that Meta invested 14.3 billion in the data labeling vendor software.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Invested.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, invested. So it's not an acquisition. It's not an Aqua hire. It's a trade deal. It's basically a trade deal. That's how I think about it. Uh, 14.3 billion for less than half the business equity, a big dividend.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Forty nine percent. They just wanted.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Some of the scale people went over.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Was a nice, nice number.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, they just pulled it out of the hat, random.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  It's random.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  It's just random. Um, and so several of the top executives left Scale to go run Meta's super intelligence labs, that's MSL, but says TechCrunch, the relationship between the two companies is already showing signs of fraying. At least one of the executives was getting brought over to help run MSL. Scale AI's former senior vice president of Gen AI product and operations, Ruben Mayer, has departed Meta after just two months with the company. Two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Uh, Mayer spent roughly five years with Scale AI across two stints in his short time at Meta, according to these sources. Mayer oversaw AI data operations teams, but wasn't part of the company's TBD labs, the core unit with. In Meta tasked with building AI superintelligence where top AI

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  You think they made MSL and TBD and like the

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Just to confuse TechCrunch reporters.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  Just to confuse

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  Journals.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's entirely the 40 chess that's going on. And so after this, after this article was published, Mayer reached out to TechCrunch and was like, hey, you got the story wrong. My job was to set up the lab with whatever was needed rather than data. And I was part of TBD Labs from day one, rather than being excluded from the core AI unit. Mayer also clarified that he did not report directly to Wang and was very happy with his meta experience and was leaving for a personal matter. So

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  So again, it's hard to read too much into this article.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  But the bigger, the bigger question is like, like TechCrunch has their angle. And then the timeline was kind of in turmoil. I feel like the timeline's always been rooting against Alex Wang. And there's a few reasons. So I wanted to go through like the bear case for just the question of like, was Meta buying Scale AI the right move? Like, did they overpay? Will we look back on this as a great deal? Because when we look back on Instagram, we're like, that's one of the greatest acquisitions of all time. WhatsApp, also a great acquisition, very expensive at the time, both very expensive at the time. Even Oculus, I was thinking about it and I was like Oculus VR, super expensive, multi-billion dollar deal. And the level of headset adoption, I mean, they didn't even have like a consumer product at that time. It was like dev kit still.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  And obviously retention was super low. People would churn off of them and they still do, even what a decade later, like, but you

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  But it was very important to Zach.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Yes, and, and, and VR is a tech wave that's going to, that's going to happen at some point. Like, we know that the technology is going to get there where

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  Zach's not gonna miss the next platform.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  He has his surfboard and when that wave come, he's, he's ready to surf. Did you get any surfing in this weekend?

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  I did, I did, I did, I

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Describe your surfing experience. Can you do like 360s off the back and stuff? Can you do a backflip?

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, no backflips, but, uh, but I went surfing with a, with a T B P N, a technology brother, Steve, founder of Clock Tower Capital. And he saw me, he saw me do a couple airs.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  You can do airs.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  I didn't land either of them, but, uh,

• 6:59John Coogan?

  You were telling Speeder, like, he has to get barreled. Did you get barreled?

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't barreling this weekend.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  It wasn't barreling this weekend.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  But it was, it was, it was, it was fun. There was definitely swell. I got quite sunburned a couple of days in a row.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Uh, we should one day, stream your, uh, stream your surfing endeavors and we should do it on Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream reach your audience, wherever they are. People have been asking, will T B P N expand to other mediums? Will you do other things? And it's like, yes, surfing livestreams, that's what's next. And you, if you're surfing and you want to livestream,

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Head over to Restream.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of questions in the chat we should get to at some point, but let's keep talking about this, uh, Scale AI stuff. So, uh, Zuck has a surfboard with Oculus VR. Um, the question is, what's going on with Scale AI? Because it's not necessarily an obvious compounder where like with Instagram and WhatsApp, it's like you have this network effect. It's just going to keep growing, keep growing, keep growing. You can grow the user base. The user base never goes down. The business never gets smaller. You just run more and more ads and it just prints, prints, prints, right? Buying a growing social network that has strong product market fit, easy, easy to justify at any price, basically.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, Elon wanted to get out at one point.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway, for the most part.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  But if you can buy it and then, and then lever it up and then merge it with a foundation model lab, you know?

• 8:25John Coogan?

  So Scale AI does not have that obvious like winner take all network effect.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  Had very real competition.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Extremely real.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  From Surge, which is, which was the bootstrap Scale AI that was printing money.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Mercore.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Which was emerging.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Isn't there another one Garrett at handshake?

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Handshake, label box.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  There's a ton of these companies.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of players.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  And so the reason is because it is not a monopolistic market by default. Um, you might be able to make it one, but it's, it's tough to justify. It's tough to think that, oh yeah, it'll just continue to compound. And then also if you're AGI pilled, you don't believe that basic data labeling tasks are going to be done by humans in the future. Like if you have a bunch of tasks that are like, oh yeah, like just, you know, what do you go to scale AI for? Oh, RLHF this, tell me if this is a good answer. Like if you're AGI pill, do you think that the next version will be able to do that level of task like perfectly?

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the, the, the expectation if, if scale had stayed fully independent would be that they would keep having to like bet the company on these new sort of like eras.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  And that's, and that's sort of the story. I mean, scale started as a, uh, data labeling company for self-driving cars. And then eventually that kind of hit takeoff where there was not that much more business to, for scale to do, I believe, because Waymo had gotten all of the data and Cruise has gotten the data and Tesla had gotten like the, the, the base level data. And then the RLHF boom and the LLM boom happened and, uh, and scale was able to move over to that. And then all of a sudden they were having their best, their best years ever. And so the business was kind of like up and down very much like, oh, they have a second act. Do they have a third act? Chunky, yeah. Uh, very high, uh, high volatility.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  And so, uh, as the market shifts and more and more expert, like they're like, as it shifts to more of these expert data collection processes, like what we see from Merck or, uh, scale potentially becomes less and less relevant. It's not like an obvious just beneficiary of every next wave. You have to keep kind of reinventing the company. And so, um, there's.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  And they, at some point they stopped working with OpenAI. Correct?

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, they stopped working with OpenAI and then post meta deal.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  That's part of what created the opportunity for them.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Post meta deal, it seemed like Microsoft and Google both pulled back from working with scale. And so like the core scale business doesn't seem like it's just like endlessly compounding. So you really can't underwrite this like 14.3 billion dollar investment purely on the basis of scale's business.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  They're not trying to make money on the investment.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, yeah, it seems like they need a mad scientist for their lab. And every other AI lab has a mad scientist. Yeah, or a deals guy, exactly. So OpenAI has Mark Chen, SSI has Ilya, DeepMind has Demis, Anthropic has Dario. Each leader has a different shape and style, but they're all capable of rallying top AI researchers and building teams of missionaries. Alex Wang is unproven here. So if you believe that the best talent magnet wins, it seems like a bad deal. And that's kind of the bear case. Now, the bull case is that, yes, Meta buying Scale AI is a bit pricey, but ultimately was a good decision for the company. Here's why. Let's review the landscape of Big Tech's AI efforts. Google has DeepMind firmly on the frontier.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  Microsoft has GPT-5, also frontier. Amazon's a bit behind, but the core business doesn't seem very threatened by LLMs. Nvidia benefits from basically every outcome right now. Apple acts as a window into AI, probably not too threatened. Meta feels like it could benefit hugely from getting to the frontier, but it doesn't have an obvious dance partner. So what do you try and do? You go down the list and you try and buy every company or hire every researcher you can. Hence the rumors that Zuck tried to buy SSI, tried to hire Mark Chen, et cetera, et cetera, right? Because it's super high. I mean, we saw that image of like some Wall Street investment bankers like did like a kind of some of the parts valuation of Google. And just DeepMind was worth like 150 billion dollars, right?

• 12:24John Coogan?

  And so if you're thinking like, okay, if I have my lab and it's adding all this value all over the place, like, is that worth 200 billion dollars to my market cap? Like, absolutely, right?

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  And so you try and do that. So at the top of the list, you have something like, you know. Assemble a dream team. Get Ilya, Mark Chen, Demis, get everyone. Just put the OG OpenAI team and the DeepMind team together at Meta and like you win, right? But that's obviously not on the table. There's a bunch of reasons why you can't make that happen. There's economic reasons, there's interpersonal reasons, there's some ideological reasons. But Alex Wang isn't that far down the list. And so, yes, he hasn't led a real AI lab that's trained a popular big foundation model. But if you look at his trajectory, all of a sudden it becomes, I can be a lot more optimistic about it.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  So he's 28 years old. He's a fantastic communicator. You've seen him on every podcast and he clearly communicates very well about-

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  He's been on Theo Von, one of the few AI heavy hitters that's been on Theo Von, obviously.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  You know, you joke, but he was on Theo Von really early and he tells a very convincing story and he's actually able to communicate to like, to both insiders and outsiders, I think. And he's genuinely been at the center of the AI boom for his entire career, but he wants to go bigger. He's built a great company that easily could have cash flowed hundreds of millions of dollars over time and continued to serve the training data market. But getting further into the action that's happening at the big labs was probably not in the cards if he stayed at scale. And so teaming up with Zuck makes no sense.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and people would push back on that and say that scale was losing real market share to Surge and other players who had a reputation for having higher quality data.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Losing market share, but still like so many big contracts that if they just went like, like to like weaker and weaker clients and just like held on and just had high margins, like-

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Built to die.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Basically. Like, I do think like the like, the run out the clock value on that company is definitely like hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It's just such a big market. But that's clearly not what Alex wants to do. He's 28. He wants to go bigger. He loves being at the center of AI and wants to work on interesting, huge problems.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  Now he has, will have, does or will have more compute than pretty much-

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Pretty much everyone. Like, the latest cluster that Zuck's trying to build is supposed to be just a couple percent over the next biggest cluster. So he will have the biggest. And so-

• 14:56John Coogan?

  I think that you, when you look at, at Alex Wang, you see someone who's been through like the Gartner hype cycle of training data, right? It's like, wow, we are teaching cars to drive? This is incredible? Then, oh, wait, like, they actually don't need that much more data? And then like, oh, wait, like, hella lambs need incredible amounts of RLHF data? And then like, oh, wait, so he's been on the up, up and down? He's, so, um, there's, uh, there's a bunch of different takes here, but let me continue. So, uh, there's also the rumor that Scale AI isn't fully delivering all the data that MSL needs to train their next model, but the reporting here is a bit questionable.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  I don't think that the Scale acquisition was ever fully underwritten against the value of the training data business, as we discussed. Uh, so the, and the AI race is so aggressive that every company is grabbing every possible resource. Not only is Meta using other data providers, they also just signed a $10 billion cloud deal with Google.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  So this, this idea of like, oh,

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Demand is outstripping supply pretty much.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, they did one deal with Scale. That, that means that they shouldn't do a deal with Merckor, or they shouldn't do a deal with, with Surge. Like, no, they're gonna do deals with everyone.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  I think all, yeah, all, all it says is that it was primarily an act, like, an aqua hire.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, an aqua hire of the team and a bunch of the people, and mostly it's a bet on Alex Wang. And so, uh, I think that the, the FUD over the departures is overstated right now. Uh, it doesn't seem like it's an exodus. They hired a ton of people. Uh, there's been rumors that like, one person was thinking about leaving, but then wound up staying. And then, and then, uh, one person left, but they said they were like, never really planning to stay. And then another person left, but clearly to start a company. So it doesn't seem like there's some sort of massive exodus. And basically, it just comes down to the value of developing an in-house AI team that's like DeepMind. Uh, it's a, that, that team, if it works and if they build it out, the value of that team is immense, probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  And so there's inevitably going to be bumps in the road, but at the end of the day, Zuck is just betting on the most successful entrepreneur that Gen Z has produced thus far. And it seems still reasonable that

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Even if he's not entirely a researcher, he's a deals guy. You have him and then you have Nat Friedman, who's able to, who's worked with Ilya. And you have the pieces of the team to put together the right amount of researchers and engineers to actually go and, and build out a frontier capability or near frontier.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  It's an all-star team.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  It's close to an all-star team. It's not the all-star team. Like, the all-star team is Ilya and Demis and Mark Chen, but like, that's not happening. It's just never gonna happen.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You know why I have this out?

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Why?

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is buying product testing startup Statsig for 1.1 billion dollars.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Statsig?

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  Haven't heard that name in a while.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Who did Statsig?

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Statsig, founded in 2021, builds tools to help software developers test and flag potential new features. Services have been used by employees at OpenAI, Eventbrite, SoundCloud and other firms, according to Statsig's website. Statsig raised 100 million in funding, in a funding round earlier this year, valuing it at 1.1 billion. So, interesting. I guess they're just getting bought out at the last round price.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  As part of the acquisition, Statsig's founder and CEO Vijay Raji will join OpenAI as chief technology officer of applications.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  He'll report to Fidji Simo, the former Instacart head who recently took over CEO of apps at OpenAI. In a statement, Simo said Raji would help companies and developers use OpenAI's technology to build safe, safe applications that empower people. So, anyways, all-stock acquisition. Nice, nice pickup for OpenAI.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  And they're taking the product?

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  They're taking the whole company.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  They're taking the whole company.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  It's a proper acquisition. We love to see it.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Very, very rare.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Tyler, what's your, what was your take on the, on the TechCrunch FUD around MSL? What do you think?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Okay, so I think first, yeah, there's, I think there's way too much hate on Alexander Wang on the timeline.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I think also, maybe an interesting way to think about, like, the scale thing is like.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Do you think that's, do you think people hate on him just because he's not an AI researcher?

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's some sense of it's like, oh, he's like kind of an outsider like he's like has this like.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  He's like a business guy.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  I think part of it is he made, he made a billion dollars doing something that wasn't extremely technical.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Technical, yeah. It's like labor arbitrage, right?

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a- a- anytime you have a, a, a young person that has massive success.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  People figure out a way to kind of poke holes in it.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like people are saying like, oh, Scale is just a rapper on like Vietnam or whatever Philippines, Philippines.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Philippines, yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Um, but I, I think.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Rappers all the way down.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Like, I, I think a, a good way to think about the scale thing is like, maybe it's just like the people at Scale AI just like have very good taste on what is good training data. Like they've seen, uh, you know, it's like, uh, you know, driverless cars and.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, like what actually works.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, like they have good taste on like, this is actually like good data. And then if you're a big company that has a ton of data like Meta, that's like actually very like useful, right? You have these people who have very good taste of like, okay, obviously within Meta, within like Instagram or something, there's a like a massive amount of data. Some of it is clearly useful. Some of it's like not useful for training a foundation model. So maybe it's just like that is something like that is worth a ton of money.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so Zach went to Alex and basically said, it's time for the dragon and the elephant to dance.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  The dragon and the elephant.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  That is the best quote ever. Well, who said that to who?

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  G said that to Modi.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Modi.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  Says it is time for the dragon and the elephant to dance together.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  And wasn't Modi meeting with Putin? So he's like the, the elephant and the bear and the dragon.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I don't know if there was another, I don't know if there was.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  The elephant and the bear and the dragon had a tea party this weekend, I think.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Luke, Luke Metro posted, I just know that this line is doing numbers on SF hinge right now.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  This is bizarre. It's hilarious. Anyway, let me tell you about our newest sponsor, TurboPuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search. Built from first principles in object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Absolute legends. I met Simon, CEO, recently. He is an absolute Chad. Did a long stint over at Shopify and started TurboPuffer. I'm going to read the TurboPuffer memo.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to read the about.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  TurboPuffer's mission is to make-

• 21:42John Coogan?

  No, no, say who it's to.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  To everyone. From the founding team. Subject, our company. Great memo. TurboPuffer.com/About. TurboPuffer's mission is to make every byte searchable. Populating LLM context windows with fresh data means we're asking more from our search systems than ever before. Firsthand, we've seen companies limit production ambition by cost and operational toil of incumbents. We've designed TurboPuffer from first principles. Scalability by separating compute and storage. Cost by moving data from NVMe and object storage. Reliability through simplicity and performance with T-Puff's custom-tiered storage engine. Justin and I, I as Simon, grew up at Shopify scaling the core engine from 1,000 to 1 million RPS. Our drive for

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  operational simplicity is shaped by years of being on the last resort pager for a platform powering millions of dollars per minute. Very few companies have the-

• 22:39John Coogan?

  It's huge.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  A business where uptime is as critical as Shopify because you just lose your customers' money immediately if things stop working. We are channeling all the hard-won lessons of scale into making TurboPuffer the most scalable and reliable retrieval engine. We host a trillion documents, handle writes at 10 million writes a second, and serve 10,000 queries a second. We are ready for far more, and we hope you'll trust us with your queries. And they're backed by Lockheed Groom and a bunch of other great investors. They have three case studies on their website right now. All fantastic companies. Cursor, Notion, and Linear. So this is a company that you will be hearing-

• 23:20John Coogan?

  It's a murderer's row right there.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  It's an absolute murderer's row. I mean, you're going to be hearing a lot about TurboPuffer in the coming months and years, and we are grateful to be puffin' with Simon and the team.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Thank you to TurboPuffer for making this possible. The, this weekend Elon Musk revealed the master plan number four for Tesla and in the video, Nick Cruz obtained shares. Tesla revealed a potential three-row cyber SUV design in their master plan four video. This could be a true competitor to the Escalade, Range Rover, Navigator, etc. Would you buy a cyber SUV? And I've been pushing for this for a long time. I actually went back and looked at the Tesla master plan number one and number two. If you go to Tesla master plans.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  How many M dashes did those have?

• 24:20John Coogan?

  I don't think those had very many, so the, the, the latest, we'll read through some of the Tesla master plan for the drop over the weekend. It featured 14 M dashes. It didn't, the M dash thing is like kind of a joke because as I read it, it read like a kind of, it was a lot staler than, it had a lot more like press release vibes than previous master plans, but it didn't read as AI generated to me. It just read as like corporate speak basically and kind of like high level and abstract. I actually had chat GPT summarize it. Tesla's master plan, part four is a high level manifesto centered on integrating AI into the physical world via robots and autonomous transport, all powered by cleaner, smarter systems.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  It casts a bold vision around sustainable abundance, but delivers very few concrete actionable targets or roadmaps, marking a departure for the more structured, from the more structured master plans of the past. And so if you go to the first Tesla Motors master plan, just between you and me by Elon Musk, he wrote this in 2006 and it's a remarkable document because at the end, he actually sums it up very well. He says, we're going to build a sports car. We're going to use that money to build an affordable car. We're going to use that money to build an even more affordable car while doing above also provide zero emission electric power generation options. And that's exactly what they did. They built the Roadster and it made enough money and generated enough attention that

• 25:48John Coogan?

  they were able to build the Model S, which was more affordable than a high-end sports car. And then the Model S was able to finance the Model 3. And then, of course, the Y and the X were kind of spinoffs of those platforms. And so he says, don't tell anyone. And, you know, the ultimate goal was to go after the Honda and the Toyota Prius and those cars. And he was completely successful. Then it was 10 years later, he writes the master plan, part two. And so the first one, the original master plan, create a low-volume car, which will necessarily be expensive, use that money to develop a medium-volume car at a lower price, use that money to create an affordable high-volume car and then provide solar power.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years. And so at the end, in short, the master plan part two is-

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  It's so crazy that you can lease a Model 3 for $299 a month.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  Have you seen how cheap some of these are? Look at it.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  Would you like one ChatGPT Pro plan or a car?

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is insane, but it's getting even crazier. So the Wall Street Journal has an article today about EV deals that boom before this deadline. So tax credits are expiring for EVs. And-

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  We're going to get naturally aspirated V12 credits before it be ended.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need V12 credits. At a Kia dealership on Denver's South Side, a steady stream of shoppers navigate around noisy renovation work in search of electric vehicles with super-cheap lease deals. Guess how cheap these lease deals are? How cheap? As of last week, this Kia dealership offered to lease the small Niro EV for $40 a month before taxes. The EV6 lease was being marketed for less than a hundred dollars per month. And the 65,000 three-row EV9 SUV can be had for 189 dollars a month before taxes. Can you imagine getting a car for 40 dollars a month? That's so ridiculously cheap.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  And so there's some really weird.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  It's a bubble.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  It's not a bubble, it's like the popping of a bubble. It's like the end of a bubble. It's like they overbuilt and they made all these and no one wants them.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  We're giving them away.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  They gotta give them away. But yeah, very, very bizarre times in the EV market. There is a, there is an interesting wrinkle that I was listening to. One of the, a couple of the Tesla engineers did Jay Leno's show recently and they were talking about how the EV tax credit's going away. So you can't just take money off if you buy it. But if you get a loan, an auto loan, there is an interest tax deduction for EVs now, for American-made vehicles. And Tesla's the most American-made vehicle. And so you can still deduct something like, I don't know, eight or 10,000 dollars off your taxes. So there still are some incentives for Tesla.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  So it's not, it hasn't gone away completely, but if you buy cash, it's not, it's not, it's not an option. Anyway, the master plan, part two. Number one, create stunning solar roofs with seamless integrated battery storage. It's kind of happened, but not as major as I feel like it should have. It's still kind of early days there. Two, expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments. And so that obviously foreshadows the truck, but it also foreshadows the full-size SUV, which I think we're teasing now. But it should also be, we need a convertible. We need a minivan. Like we need, you know, every major segment means every major segment, I think. I don't know.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  Should Tesla make prefabs?

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Prefab homes?

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  I think Elon can sell homes.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  The Elon Army could get pretty into just buying a piece of land and

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Throwing.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Dropping a little electric box on it.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Live in the pod.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Live in the pod.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Potentially. Then, this is where self-driving comes in. Develop a self-driving capability that's 10x safer than manual via massive fleet learning. I think that's going very well. And then, step four is enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it. Isn't that crazy? 2016, he said that. He said like, you buy the car and then you're going to be able to put it in a robot taxi, like, army.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  Passive income.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Very, very early. And then, part three comes out and it's hilarious because part three switches from like, a a, like, the first master plan is probably like, I don't know, like, a two-page blog post. Very readable, you can just kind of cruise through it. There's one table, there's a lot of summaries. Master Plan Part Three is a 41-page PDF with like, a bunch of diagrams and like, all these crazy things. It's so much more detailed and it goes into like trucks and all this other stuff that they're trying to do. It's a pretty remarkable document. And then, and then now, he is into Tesla.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Part Four.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Part Four, which is much more high-level, talking about sustainable artificial intelligence. As the influence and impact of AI technology increases, the mission set forth in Master Plan Part Four should come as no surprise. The next chapter in Tesla's story will help create a world we've only just begun to imagine and will do so at the scale we have yet to see. We are building the products and services that bring AI into the physical world. We have been working tirelessly for nearly two decades to create the foundation for this technological renaissance through the development of electric vehicles, energy products, and humanoid robots.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  We need a polymarket on if XAI and Tesla will eventually merge.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  That does seem like a logical end state here.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Innovation removes constraints. It's all very high level. I mean, I think the, the, a lot of the, a lot of the, like, the big reveals have kind of already happened. Like, you know, the, the idea of a robot taxi fleet, the idea of autonomous, or Optimus, the autonomous-

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Does it cover humanoids? Yeah, they-

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Optimus or humanoid robot is, is changing not only the perception of labor itself, but its availability and capability. Jobs and tasks that are particularly monotonous or dangerous can now be accomplished by other means. In this way, Optimus's mission is to give people back more time to do what they love. And so, he walks through a bunch of different pieces of this.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  You just want one thing from Optimus, which is to keep the Tesla diner open 24/7.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  It is crazy. So, we, we work just a couple of blocks away from the Tesla diner, and so I drive past it every morning.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  Nice dogs.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  And, and when I think of a diner, I think of a New York City diner that's open 24/7. And every day I drive by and it's closed. And it's so crazy. I mean, I guess it's like, it makes sense because it's like, still like, early days and kind of a marketing stunt. But, really, they gotta keep that thing, they gotta keep that thing open.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Keep it humming.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you're, if you're designing your next mission document, do it in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  On the, on the Tesla diner website, it says 24/7.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  It does?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'm pretty sure, at least the first week, it was open 24/7.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so-

• 33:10John Coogan?

  We should go over there, maybe.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  We're spreading fake news.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  But it also looks incredibly empty, at least when we drive by.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  I mean, that's just LA, though. That's, that's not his fault. If it's, if it's open-

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's go there, we'll go there for breakfast tomorrow.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe I'll stop by on the way at 6 a.m. and see if it's actually open. It seems, I mean, there are definitely people there like cleaning and stuff, so maybe it's open. But, I mean, if, there are truly not that many places in Los Angeles where you can get a burger at 3:00 in the morning. Like, L.A. is not the city that never sleeps by any means.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, Citadel Securities is-

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  There's some interesting highlight here. So, Power at, Power Bottom Dad sucks, quoted our post announcing Anthropic Series F and says, SBF got so effed, man. I just did the numbers quickly. SBF's stake in Anthropic, or F, not SBF-

• 34:08John Coogan?

  FTX is-

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  FTX's stake would be worth just under 15 billion today, so plenty to plug that hole. So, anyways, duration mismatch problem. I guess Gavin Newsom went on Pivot and says he's gonna be releasing a meme coin to challenge the Trump token.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Is that real? He said that? I wonder if he's like trolling or something. It feels very off-brand. I don't know.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  You never know anymore.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  I haven't really been following the Gavin Newsom thing. Brandon was saying that, like, he's been like kind of trying to mirror Trump in terms of like, if Trump does something crazy, he'll try and do something else that like kind of matches the energy.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Matching the crazy energy. And it's, I mean, he's doing numbers.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  It's a bold move, Cotton. See how it plays out.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I guess Trump is, was slated to do an announcement at 11 a.m. Pacific. He is 43 minutes late right now, apparently, so hopefully he can get on to that announcement soon. Citadel Securities set to pay an average employee 2 million a year in the first half of 2025. They did 5.7 billion of revenue, 2.6 billion in net income. They paid out 1.8 billion in comp and they have 1,800 employees. Their CEO, his name is Peng Zhao. He has a PhD in statistics, so turns out being good at math is good for your income, so-

• 35:41John Coogan?

  19 years at Citadel. Look at that. Quant researcher in 2006.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  There was something else about-

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  I think Hudson River Trading, overall profit at Hudson River Trading was $3 billion for the first half of the year, which is higher than Citadel Securities, $2.6 billion in net income in the first half of 2025.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  So they are putting up some crazy, crazy numbers.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Well, Ken Griffin's on the cover of Barron's this weekend. I thought it'd be fun to read through this because he actually gave some, some choice quotes in here.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Is this not a silly, kind of a silly picture, Ben?

• 36:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, I'm not.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  It looks pretty heroic. I think it looks good. We're looking up.

• 36:23Jordi Hays?

  Sort of. I mean, the angle's fine, but I'm just saying they kind of did him, they did him a little.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  What about it? The coloring of the cheeks or something? I think he looks good.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  I just, I don't know. I think they made him look a little bit silly.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  They should have given him the GigaChat filter and.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Made his jawline a little more.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  If you're gonna draw somebody, at least make them a GigaChat.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would have liked to see more, more shoulder definition here underneath the suit. No, he looks great. Um, "The most successful companies of Wall Street, on Wall Street, have been built by those with relentless ambition and a strong wind at their back. Decades of deregulation helped growth-minded CEOs turn firms such as Morgan Stanley and Bank of America into behemoths. More recently, financial entrepreneurs have leveraged booming private markets to create the likes of Blackstone in private equity, Bridgewater in hedge funds, and Andreessen Horowitz in venture capital. Now, a somewhat stealthier trend fueled by the explosive growth of technology and finance is behind a new wave of digital-first powerhouses such as Interactive Brokers Group, Susquehanna International, Jane Street, and especially

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Citadel, a burgeoning Wall Street empire controlled by billionaire Ken Griffin. Citadel is a two-headed business beast, a two-headed business beast consisting of Citadel LLC, a $68 billion hedge fund operation best known for its top-performing multi-strategy flagship Wellington, and Citadel Securities, a sprawling market maker that facilitates and engages in the trading of stocks, derivatives, and increasingly, bonds. Citadel, Griffin chose the name because it denotes a place of strength and protection. Fantastic nominative determinism. If you're picking the name for your business, pick something strong like that."

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  He says, "Is defining the prototype of the next-gen bulge bracket firm, except that Citadel isn't that bulgy, with just a fraction of the employees and overhead of the traditional Wall Street firm." As of now, the boss is happy. Quote, "It's incredibly satisfying to run one of the world's most successful hedge funds and to witness the transformative impact of Citadel Securities on the capital markets around the world," Griffin says.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  Great quote.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  Yes, I'm proud of that. Taken separately, first hedge fund Citadel is a huge deal.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  This is how you do an interview. This is just marketing.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  It is incredibly satisfying to run one of the world's most successful hedge funds and to witness the transformative impact of Citadel Securities on the capital markets.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  Do you care to comment? Yes, I will.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I'll comment.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  The self glazinator 2000. Wellington, not related to Vanguard's Wellington Fund or Wellington Management, has been a superstar, producing annual average returns of 19.2% net of fees since inception in 1990, nearly two times the market. And I believe, so a million dollars invested in the fund is now, is now worth $452 million. Insane. The other crazy thing is that I'm pretty sure they had a 50% drawdown during the mortgage crisis. So in 2008 or 2007, I think they went down 50%. They went from like, maybe like a $20 billion fund down to $10 billion or something like that.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  Ran it back.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  And I remember one of the traders there, because I interned there and he gives the story of like, during the, during the crisis, he, he was trying to like, he was trying to like, explain how important it is to understand how percentages work. And he was like, yeah, I walked outside and my neighbor was like, oh, like, how's it going? He's like, oh, it's, it's terrible. We're down 50% this year. And he was like, and then next year I was like, walking outside, I ran into my neighbor again, he's like, like, how's it going this year? I know last year was pretty bad, you were down 50%. And, and he said, oh, well, we're doing a lot better. We're up 50% this year.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Oof.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  And, and the neighbor's like, oh, great, so you're back to where you started.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  That's unfortunately not how it works.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  And he was like, no, that's not how it works. And this was like his way to, his way to explain to interns, like the way, the importance of understanding percentages or something like that. It was just a funny anecdote.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  There was surfing yesterday, my buddy pointed out this guy, he was like that, this guy was absolutely shredding.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  Just getting a bunch of great waves. And this, my buddy pointed out, he said, that guy's lost all his LPs in 08 and just...

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Like packed it up, bought a house in Malibu and now just runs his own, just basically retired, runs his own money and just surfs like three times a day.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  Living a great life.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Uh, anyway, back to Citadel. Even though Griffin says he spends the majority of his time working on the hedge funds investment portfolio, arguably the hotter ticket, the hotter ticket is Citadel Securities. Sitsec, as it is known, is a complex, sometimes controversial, ever-evolving endeavor, which Pac-Man like is on a seemingly inexorable march across the capital markets, gobbling up market share in options, equities, treasuries and corporate bonds, and now expanding to Europe and Asia.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Example, Sitsec recently bought Morgan Stanley's US equity option market maker business, leaving no major banks in the market making business. Citadel Security now, now trades 25% of all US equities, including 35% of retail flows, plus 45 billion option quotes a day, and is a top three trader in US treasuries and swaps. In total, it executes 652 billion in notional trades a day. The goal is clear, quote, "Building the capital markets firm of this generation is a vision that is increasingly becoming a reality," says Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao, uh, who holds a doctorate in statistics.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  I like how you're just casually giving an ad to Pataca right here.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. Begin your tradition.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Cubitus.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Begin your tradition.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Looking good.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  This is a very.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  By the way, Trump is currently live on Fox News and he's, he's looking good. So, um, I am, uh, happy to see our president doing well.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Was he, what is he announcing?

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I've got it muted right now. If somebody else is, uh.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  Watching?

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Moving the, the space headquarters.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the big announcement is they're moving Space Command.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Where, where? I think it was in Colorado, moving to Alabama.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 42:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm, I'm pretty bummed he didn't, I'm pretty bummed he didn't like rip the, I mean, the speech isn't over, so hopefully he still rips the, you know, the, the, the collared shirt off and has a Superman.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Tyler, does, does anything ever happen?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Nothing ever happens, bro. I, I was pretty sure that he had passed away.

• 43:01John Coogan?

  He thought he died. He thought he was dead.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Nothing ever happens.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  We need, we need a gong for when nothing happens. We need something, we need some like, activity that we can do.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a gong that is like so reinforced that it makes no sound.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's good, that's good. Just a cement block.

• 43:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  With a gong.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  It looks like a gong.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Looks like a gong, but it's stone.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  So it makes no sound.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Makes no sound. And he's just, wah, wah, wah, wah, play the wah, wah, sound. Nothing, nothing happens. Not that, not, not that we're hoping for bad things to happen, but I was hoping for something exciting to happen. Uh, something, something positive, hopefully. Some, some amazing trade deal.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  This is positive.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  This is positive.

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  I was disappointed to see a lot of the internet like clearly was, was, um, not, not, uh, was hoping that there was something.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Wrong with his health?

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, obviously that's very negative, but this could have been some crazy 4D chess trade deal, reinvital, reinvigoration of the American economy, investment in AI. Like, it could have been, like, this doesn't feel like market moving to me, right?

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, I mean, God willing, he finds a way to move.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  We gotta find out a way to trade this. We, I mean, is there some Alabama real estate development company that like benefits from this? Who knows? Uh, anyway, Alfred Lin is in Barron's. He says, uh, this is a very different company than most people understand. Says Alfred Lin, a partner.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  The stock did.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  What stock?

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, truth, DJT, Truth Social did pop a little bit when he went live.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, that was the trade, everybody. If you were, if you were long Truth Social going into this announcement, you, uh...

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Well, that makes sense because, because Truth Social is a social network, so whenever like, news breaks, there's a bunch of people on there and they're gonna sell ads against that. And that's why people are investing, because it's probably good for their financials, good for their, like, good for the bottom line.

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Not, not a meme at all.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, what about you?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Uh, on polymarket, you, this, this would have been a good trade. So there's, uh, what will Trump say during announcement today? And, uh, one of the choices was emergency. And it was at, uh, 64% right before it started, and now it's at 30. So that was a pretty big move.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, wait, so it's going down, but he still might say it?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  He could still say it, just, I think it's just the word. Yes.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so far he's said China, Russia.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Is he taking questions from the audience?

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  He, uh...

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Is he reading chat?

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  You should be.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Thank you for the 20. Thank you for the 20. I'm not saying emergency. I know you're, I know you're on polymarket right now.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Anyway, Alfred Lin chimes in to explain what's going on at Citadel. He says, uh, he's a partner, uh, venture capital firm Sequoia, Sequoia Capital, of course. He's been on the show and whose brother happens to be the head of global fixed income and macro at Citadel, the hedge fund.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  Size lords running the family.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Wow. We completely missed that scoop on the show. We should have been hammering him about his brother.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  Citadel is taking math and their distribution and technology power to price risk using technique, techno, uh, techniques not you, not traditionally used on Wall Street. While technology has been absolutely critical to Citadel's success, so too has Griffin's strategy. You don't want to go up against the Wall Street incumbents, he said. Instead, you want to understand where the market is heading and position yourself, uh, there before incumbents arrive. The incremental rise of electronic trading allowed Citadel to move step by step ahead of names like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and a number of trading businesses. Uh, he makes all kind of, Griffin makes all kinds of headlines. He's a Republican who has mostly given hundreds of millions to GOP candidates. And, uh, Griffin has praised and criticized Trump. Just this past week, Griffin told Barons.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  I hope President Donald Trump appreciates that while he can score political points by attacking Jay Powell. Ultimately, the independence of the Fed is of the utmost importance to the American and global economy. Meanwhile, Griffin, 56, has been adding to his personal portfolio at a stunning pace, including buying over a billion dollars worth of real estate in New York. Uh, the Hamptons, London, Central Pay, Hawaii, and multiple properties in South Florida, including a $400 million compound in Palm Beach. According to the Wall Street Journal. His art collection is worth a billion dollars. Uh, it includes work by Picasso, Van Gogh, and Warhol. And he has

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  Couple of names.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  Priceless historical American documents, including rare copies of the US Constitution.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  R I P to Constitution Dow on that one. He bought, he bought the Bill of Rights.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe, I still, that, that whole saga was so insane.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Crazy times.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  He, he, he mogged the entire on-chain economy with that one.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Yes. He owns the 13th Amendment, signed by Abraham Lincoln. He also owns a $45 million stegosaurus. That's crazy. Crazy, yeah. When I worked at Citadel in Chicago.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  We gotta do more dinosaur investing.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  I think he kept two, I think he kept two Phantoms parked in the garage with two drivers, like, ready to go. So he like, never knew which one he was in or something. He had some crazy, crazy, uh, crazy, crazy choices.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  A good setup.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  I think he also had some sick hypercars down there. I forget. Uh, anyway.

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  Even handy.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Uh, he's doing some philanthropy. He has a cool name for it, too. Uh, Griffin's philanthropy now directed through an entity called Griffin Catalyst.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  General Catalyst, move over General Catalyst, uh, Griffin Catalyst exceeds $2 billion and includes, uh, funding Operation Warp Speed. On the hipper side, he recently donated 2.255 million to Mr. Beast's Water Philanthropy after the YouTube star, superstar called him out on the Today Show. It seems very important that Ken, uh, to Ken, that the world knows how wealthy he is as a business associate. A lot of other people go to great lengths to keep it the other way. Interesting. He's less secretive.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Contrarian.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  The totality of Griffin's world is dizzying. The billions upon billions of hedge fund investments, market making activities and personal assets are markers of a man with great aptitude and perhaps even greater ambition. Along the way, Griffin and his companies have encountered friction, false starts, falling outs, fines and failures. The hedge fund dropped 55%, this was what I was referring to, losing $9 billion of clients' money during the 08, 09 financial crisis and was on death's door. CitSec tried and failed to get into investment banking. Yeah, they were going to become a, an investment bank and then they were going to IPO the whole firm. But, uh, but then investment banks had such a bad, like, stench on them after that, like, retail was not going to be a fan

• 49:39John Coogan?

  and so they stayed private. Uh, very, very interesting, like, decision to go back and forth on that. The market maker has had a number of run ins with regulators, yet now, after more than 30 years in business, the tumblers have begun to fall in place. A decade ago, Griffin was worth a mere 6.1 billion. Today, his net worth has ballooned to 48.3 billion, making him the world's 31st richest person by

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, let's hope he can crack the, I just, I just hope that he can crack the top 10 by the end of the decade.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  He has an 85% stake in, in the business, plus an 80% stake in the, an 80% stake in the market maker, the latter being valued at 22 billion, uh, three years ago. And like, Citadel Securities has obviously grown a ton. Uh, he sold a 5% stake to Sequoia. Never mind the real estate.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  I never knew that.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, Sequoia.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, Sequoia.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I wonder if Alfred, Alfred

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Surely brokered the deal. Uh, there's some good color in here. Uh, I thought we ran hard at Paul, at Goldman, Pablo Salame, the co-chief investment officer of the hedge fund, who came from Goldman Sachs in 2019, said to a colleague, "And then I showed up here, and I realized there's a whole different gear." Griffin is chief investment, co-chief investment officer and CEO of the hedge fund. "I would tell my team, you're playing for Real Madrid," says a former Citadel executive, "you don't get to keep your spot on the field if you're not producing. Ken would call you on a Sunday night at 11:00 PM, and he might be screaming and yelling at you, but he was working," says another former employee. "He demanded 150%, and nothing else in your life should matter. Ken's not yelling at

• 51:12John Coogan?

  you, he's yelling with you," joked a person close to Citadel. "I'm not yelling at you, I'm yelling with you."

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  We're yelling together.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  Citadel Securities and hedge fund Citadel are highly performant places to work, says Matt Kulek, Citex COO, who has worked at the firm for 13 years. "This is a place to come if you have a lot of confidence in your ability and you want to challenge yourself." It's true that Citadel hardly has an issue attracting aspiring masters of the universe. We had over 100,000 applicants for our summer internship program. Our acceptance rate was 0.4%. People are falling over themselves to demonstrate they deserve to be here.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Just for the summer and some subset of them get to come back full time. Griffin was STEM smart and achiever in his earliest days, growing up in Boca Raton, where he was president of the high school's math club. He graduated from Harvard with an economics degree in three years. Chapters of Griffin's origin story have become the stuff of Wall Street legend, like pursuing Harvard to let him install a satellite dish on the roof of his dorm room so he could trade convertible bonds. That's sick. After Harvard, Griffin moved to Chicago where Frank Meyer, a pioneering hedge fund investor, mentored him and helped seed Griffin's hedge fund. The best advice I've ever gotten was from Frank Meyer, who in the early days of my career really pushed me to think big, says Griffin. Meyer also pressed Griffin to build a multi-strategy platform instead of a single strategy fund.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  Griffin stayed in Chicago until three years ago, when he says he became disgruntled with the crime and business environment and relocated his companies to Miami. A triumphant return of South Florida's most successful financier native son.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  One thing I'm confused by, there's, I don't think Ken Griffin owns any horses.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is strange. Yeah, there's no evidence.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Maybe that's next.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  And maybe he's quiet about that. Maybe he wants to be loud about art, but then, you know, quiet when it comes to a horse racing. There was a question, Regal asked, what's the update on Tyler? Has he dropped out? Tyler, any updates?

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've moved, oh, I forget the LeBron. I've moved my abilities.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  Talent.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've taken my talents to Los Angeles.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  Gap semester. Tyler's on a gap.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Wait, did we, did we ever do the trading card with Gap semester?

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 53:31John Coogan?

  Oh, we gotta do that.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  We should, throw it up, throw it up.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Throw up the gaps of the official Gap semester.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  Tyler couldn't miss the great lock-in.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, he had to lock in.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  He had to lock in with us.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  September. The Citadel strategy is fascinating. You know how they started trading convertible bonds? Like the, literally like the convertible notes that everyone knows about in Silicon Valley? Like companies have those and they're pretty illiquid. So you would figure out how to price them, buy them, sell them. But eventually he scaled the firm to the point where he basically like maxed out the market size. Like they were the most dominant convertible trading shop, convertible debt shop in the world. And like there was nothing more. And so they set up a frequency, a high frequency trading firm, got into quant stuff. They also had, everyone thinks about them for, if you're thinking about them in like the 2010 era, you think of them as like a high frequency trading shop. But they also had a global macro fund that took like,

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Hey, just interrupt, but let's give it up for global macro.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  They took like 4,000 meetings with CEOs or something like that of like public companies. And it's fascinating because like, like, how would that, how would that not produce alpha? You know, it's like, it's like, obviously like, you don't need to be insider trading to just talk to the CEO. They don't share any private information, but you can just get a vibe and you can understand, oh, they know how they're talking about their business. I'm optimistic about this particular business. Or like, this CEO sounds like he doesn't know what he's doing. His name's lost. Like, he's talking about a strategy. He's not telling me anything that's non-public, but it seems dumb.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  If you talk with somebody, if you talk with somebody for 10 minutes,

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  that's almost always enough time to say,

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  Holy bearish.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Holy bearish. And it's so funny because like, yeah, you don't need to be insider trading to just like, talk to the CEO, get a vibe check, and then actually go and execute a trade against that. And so that's why I've always been so bearish on retail traders, because it's like, it's like, if you, like, this is who you're going, this is who you're going up against. You're going up against someone who gets to sit down with a CEO in a private conference room and have a conversation. And then also have expert research and all these other things.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And people have, people like to bring up that Citadel has a hedge fund and the market maker and how that could be a potential conflict. But apparently there is, Ken believes the greatest risk to his business is regulators. And so. Uh, he's not willing, he's not, you know, doesn't take risks around that. Basically, there's like an extreme firewall.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  And they take compliance extremely seriously because you can imagine, like, again, he's, he's not so threatened by the, the, the hedge fund that's, that's trying to be the next citadel, right? He's, he's threat, he feels threatened by.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  I was reading Caesar Palace, Caesar's, Caesar Palace coup. What, what, what's that book called? The, the coup on Caesar, Caesar's Palace? I, I forget. Where is it on my audible? Um, the, the Caesar's Palace coup, fantastic book. How a billionaire brawl over the famous casino exposed power and greed of Wall Street. It's about Apollo, uh, buying, uh, Hern's casino and then turning into Caesar's. Um, and they all came out of, uh, the Michael Milken crew, basically at Drexel. And, uh, Milken, of course, uh, was indicted on like, a ton of counts of securities fraud for insider trading, uh, during like the eighties and Milken had a very different approach to regulators.

• 57:02John Coogan?

  He was, he was like, at least he was like quoted in some book saying like, uh, like the regulators are like making the market inefficient. Like, like the, like the market should be a lot more efficient without the regulators and like, the courts did not look kindly on that. And he went to jail and, uh, and got slapped with a bunch of things, but he was pardoned in 2020, which I think means technically did nothing wrong after the fact. I don't know.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  Did nothing wrong.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  And he, and he went on a great run.

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  John Exley in the chat was, uh, asking if we'd covered Anthropic's round already. We did early on. They raised 13 billion at 183 billion. Uh, he was asking if that was the largest round ever.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think that OpenAI is the only company that has raised more as part of their like 40 billion dollar funding round. But, uh, that was trunched out, right? It wasn't, it wasn't 40 billion at once. So certainly one of the biggest fundraises of all time.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  World Liberty Financial started trading on the blockchain yesterday. Went out at an $8.6 billion valuation, now trading down at 6.2. This is the company with a lot of co-founders, right?

• 58:20John Coogan?

  I think so, yeah, yeah. You know, a co-founder emeritus is a great new title. I think Donald Trump is a co-founder emeritus, which I think means he's not day-to-day? Because I think he's tied up in the White House or something.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the president is a co-founder emeritus. Eric Trump is a co-founder. Donald Trump Jr. is a co-founder. Baron Trump is a co-founder. Chase Harrow is a co-founder. Zach Fulkman is a co-founder. Steven Witkoff is co-founder emeritus. Zach Witkoff is co-founder. Alex Witkoff is co-founder. And I think that's the, all the co-founders that they have. But World Liberty-

• 58:58John Coogan?

  Do we know their stated, like, mission? Like, what, what-

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it seems obvious. It's bridging legacy finance and the open economy with purpose-built on-chain products.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  Where DeFi meets TradFi.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  But can you elaborate? Like, what, like-

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  How can I be more clear, John? We're bridging legacy finance and the open economy with purpose-built on-chain products.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  I'm asking you to steel man.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  I have no idea what-

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Level L1, L2-

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  USD1, a US dollar stablecoin upgraded for a new era of finance. Stable, secure, and transparent by design. Lend and borrow. Supply digital assets and borrow against your holdings. Monitor risk easily with real-time health factor. And the World LibertyFi app. And you can deposit crypto via wallet or bank account and spend by accessing your liquidity anytime.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  I have the steel man. The steel man on this is basically- We know competition's for losers. You don't want, you don't want to be, you don't want to be in a highly competitive market. You don't want Brian Armstrong at Coinbase and Vlad Tenev at Robinhood and all the other killers that have, you know, Anatoly at Solana. You don't want them all immediately coming out and crushing you and trying to compete with you, right? And these guys are, they're established. They exist in the space. If you, if you do something innovative, they could potentially clone that very, very quickly, right?

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  So how do you keep them, how do you throw them off the trail? How do you keep them from suspecting that you're going to build something incredible? You launch a bunch of meme coins. You launch Trump coin. You launch Melania coin. You launch meme tokens. You do a bunch of things that makes you look sloppy.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  And then you come out with the really serious thing and everyone thinks, oh, this is just another sloppy project. This is a cash grab. This is something that isn't serious. I don't need to really keep tabs on it. And then all of a sudden you're just building silently, building silently until you disrupt everyone.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think, I think there's something there. I mean, I think they should, they should start acquiring companies. You know, they're sitting, they're, they're eight, they've had two billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours. There's, there's six, six billion dollar token. Why not start, you know, they should just hit up Chamath and say, let's, let's join forces on this back and, and create the greatest roll up of all time.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  The one thing that they actually should do is get on graphite.dev. It's code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. They could get started for free. They could be reviewing every.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  They really could.

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  Every GitHub.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  They could and they should.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  They could.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Buko Capital says AI features are eroding SaaS margins. Ivan over at Notion says that two years ago, his business had margins of around 90%. Typical of cloud-based software companies. Now around 10 percentage points of that profit go to the AI companies that underpin Notion's latest offerings.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  How many times have I asked a founder on the show this? I've asked this question so many times.

• 1:02:10Jordi Hays?

  And nobody, nobody gives a straight answer.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  No one gives a straight answer.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  And here it is.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  But this is fine.

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  But this is not that bad.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  This is not that bad.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Especially if revenue.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Thank you, Ivan, for commenting.

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  If, you know, if revenue has really accelerated it more than, you know, they can take a hit on margins if they're growing the base.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the real question is like, does it reduce churn? Does it increase sales? Does it increase growth? Are you getting more customers? Are your customers sticking around for longer? Are they paying more?

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  And I, and this is just too, this is just, uh, this is just too, too perfect to tie in. But Notion obviously runs on TurboPuffer.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and they're saving millions of dollars annually. Part of how they can deliver AI efficiently to all their customers.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Because of TurboPuffer.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Mickey Liu over the data engineering lead at Notion says TurboPuffer makes it too easy to build state of the art AI apps. So absolutely fantastic. Are you, uh, did you ever, were you ever a big Notion guy?

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  Never a big Notion guy. Used it a little bit. Uh, I was buddies with a Notion influencer. What's his name?

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I know this. I, I know who you're.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  He plays like metal. Uh, oh, what's his name? Notion brand ambassador. He has a really great YouTube like, uh, business.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  He went giga long Notion.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  And it paid off hugely. Uh, he had a, he had a bunch of really great insights. I forget what, what his name is, but he's a nice guy. But, uh, I, I, I use Notion a little bit, but have mostly just been Google Docs. And, you know, for most of the stuff. I don't know. Building a second brain. Never, never went too far down that rabbit hole. What about you?

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  I've paid for Notion for years and years and years. We use it heavily at branded native.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  And they still use it.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a great tool.

• 1:04:06John Coogan?

  It does feel like it's more of an operating system for like a team.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09John Coogan?

  It's really great in like a, in the business context.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  It's so, I mean, it's still, we, we're, we're Google maxies here. We use Google Sheets and stuff, but still like being able to create like knowledge bases and sort of like layered.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Jordi Hays?

  Is, is great. So.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't understand, I don't understand the notion, the notion haters out there.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  I think the notion haters are, are basically.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  It's actually crazy that people can type, I hate Notion. Like, imagine hating a note taken out.

• 1:04:35John Coogan?

  That's ridiculous. Um, no, no, I, I, I think the way the, the, the over optimizer like meme happens is that you're basically like, it, it, it's the same, it's the same vibe as like the credit card points maxi. It's like someone who has like taken something that makes sense in a business context and applied it to their personal life. Like, oh yes, I have a personal CRM for like reminding myself to like, call Tyler and get a beer with him on the weekends. It's like, that should feel just natural. And so like, if someone's like, yes, like, just to like.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  If you need a CRM to manage a relationship, it's probably not that great of a relationship.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it has that same, it gives that same vibe off in the same way of like, okay, like, like if you're spending 10 hours a week optimizing credit card points, like is, is that really worth it? Don't you have a higher opportunity cost? What are we doing here? I actually have a buddy who I get, we have on the show who, uh, is like the, the biggest points maxi and has gone so far that it's actually driving like tons and tons of value.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really? He, he.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  I'll, I'll have him come on the show and, and, and tell the story, but, uh, he.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm a billionaire from credit card points.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  I mean, didn't I tell you this? He bought a half a million dollars of gold at Costco on credit cards points? Just to get points and then sells the gold and arbs.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Oh, he's like the king.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  He's the king of this stuff. He runs a whole show about it. Uh, anyway. The, uh, yeah, I don't know. Notion, like, there are certainly people that get, you have to, like, get joy out of it. Like, doing, like, you know, in your personal life. Because if it's, if it's not, like, work.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Definitely, it's definitely gatherer-coded.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  It is a little gatherer-coded, yeah.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  And that's okay. Some people are hunters, some people are gatherers.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Organizing, yeah, yeah. I like to hunt through my messy, messy documents.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  I like it as much as messy.

• 1:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Notes and texts.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  I'm going through the, the file system, searching for the random dot txt file where I put all my passwords.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Like, like a hunter on the prairie thousands of years ago.

• 1:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Hunting.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  You like stress of opening your laptop. It makes you feel like, it makes you feel like you're really, like, you know.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  I do.

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Trying to survive.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Just like one giga-doc of everything. I mean, you're the worst, dude. I see you texting yourself. And I'm like, that has got to be the, like, like, that is so much, like, I feel like the.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  That's my ZD app.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  The platonic ideal is like, okay, yeah, like, like, you know, you use a spreadsheet when it calls for a spreadsheet. Use the right tool for the job. Like, maybe, you know, you'll, you'll use a communication tool for this if you're managing a complex product. You know, like, if you are, if you are actually, you know, planning and building a product, you're using linear. It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, project, product, roadmaps. This is what you actually do. You actually use linear for real, for real stuff. But then at the same time, on the other end of the barbell, you're like texting yourself a little.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Perfect transition because, you know, who's a, you know, who's a customer of TurboPuffer?

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  You're really on the TurboPuffer run today.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, generational runner, this is why I talked to Simon. I was like, we're absolutely working together.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. Anyway, should we go through this Christopher Mims article or just?

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  So, so, uh, Mims is the reason we know about these, uh, about these margins. He says, "With models doing more thinking, the small companies that buy AI from the giants to create apps and services are feeling the pinch." Developers who buy AI by the barrel for apps that do things like make software, analyze documents.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  I buy my AI by the barrel.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  That's a great turn of phrase. Are discovering that their bills are higher than expected and growing. What's driving up costs? The latest AI models are doing more thinking, especially when used for deep research, AI agents and coding. So while the price of a unit of AI, known as a token, continues to drop, the number of tokens needed to accomplish many tasks is skyrocketing. It's the opposite of what many analysts and experts predicted even a few months ago. That has set off a new debate in the tech world about who...

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Wait, did...

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:08:39Jordi Hays?

  What about the Jevons paradox, Maxies?

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  This is, yeah, this is Jevons paradox.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  I know, exactly. So while the price of a unit AI, known as a token, continues to drop, the number of tokens needed to accomplish many tasks is skyrocketing. So the Jevons paradox, something gets cheaper, you just use more of it.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  Yes, this is, yeah.

• 1:08:59Jordi Hays?

  So if the cost of AI was skyrocketing, I don't think you'd see quite the same.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Yes, so the question that you're beefing with, and I've beefed with this too, is the characterization that it's the opposite of what many analysts and experts predicted even a few months ago. And there's a lot more nuance to what the experts, if you really trust the experts, the podcasters, what they were predicting. They were predicting drops in per-token cost. That actually has happened. But then they were also predicting Jevons paradox, that we would use a lot more of the resource. And so, I don't know, it seems like that prediction was kind of true. But I do understand, like, there was a moment where the idea was you spend 10x more on the training run, and then the inference is too cheap to meter.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Intelligence is too cheap to meter. And so you basically get the inference for free. You spend a billion dollars training this massive thing, and then you can distill it down and inference it on your phone on the edge for free. And that certainly has not happened.

• 1:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  What were you about to ask?

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Should we put Theo Brown, chief executive of T3 Chat? He says, "The arms race for who can make the smartest thing has resulted in a race for who can make the most expensive thing." I don't totally agree with this. I mean, I think it was, I think it was...

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  It's always been the case if you take a hard problem and have an LLM try to tackle it and just give it as much inference, as many tokens as it possibly can, it's going to probably deliver a better result. But I feel like now you have companies like OpenAI clearly making decisions to deliver products more efficiently, right?

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  Certainly, like not wasting tokens is the is the the goal of the router. Like the router is, let's try to not get, I mean, it's also, let's try and get people to use the thinking models if they're not, and they're asking questions that should benefit from thinking models, but reasoning models. But also, like, just downgrading my, you know, my hammering of the O3 Pro API, when I ask a question that actually could just get one shot by the default model, is probably a benefit. And so it's, yeah, it's more nuanced than that, I agree. It's a, it's right tool for the job, sizing the the value of the query

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  to the cost of the query, makes a ton of sense. Anyway.

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  And over the weekend, XAI released Grok Code Fast 1, which briefly topped the charts for on OpenRouter and is specifically focused on cost.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to keep going here?

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's a cool graph in here about the cost of doing business, the price per token for prompts and responses for AI models at a given level of intelligence. The least intelligent model showed roughly a 9x decrease in cost per year, while the most capable ones dropped in price by roughly 900x per year. So remember, AI training and AI inference are different. Training those huge models continues to demand ever more costly processing delivered by those AI supercomputers you've probably heard about. But getting answers out of existing models inference should be getting cheaper fast. Sure enough, the cost of inference is going down by a by a factor of 10 each year, says Ben Cotier, a former AI engineer who's now a researcher at Epoch AI, not-for-profit.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Despite the drop in cost per token, what's driving up costs for many AI applications is so-called reasoning, many new forms of AI rerun queries to double-check their answers, fan out to the web to gather extra intel, even write their own little programs to calculate things, and AI agents will carry out lengthy series of actions based on user prompts. Here are approximate amounts of tokens needed for tasks at different levels based on a variety of sources. A basic chatbot Q&A, 50 to 500 tokens, a short document summary, 200 to 6,000 tokens, writing complex code might be 20,000 to 100,000 tokens, and a multi-step agent workflow might be up to a million tokens. Hence the debate of new AI systems that use orders of magnitude more tokens just to answer a single request

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  are driving much of the spike in demand for AI infrastructure. Who will ultimately foot the bill? This is, like, the Jevons paradox by Nvidia when they sold off that you did was like so perfectly timed. Like, it matched, it matched what actually happened so flawlessly.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  I should check, I should check on that trade.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, just like, like, there was this idea that, like, models, that tokens would get cheaper, and like, literally the timeline was just like, Jevons paradox, Jevons paradox, like, understand this thing, we're gonna wind up using more of these, more of these tokens, this is a new capability, we're gonna use more of this, even though it's getting cheaper. And lo and behold, people use a ton more.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  They really bought Nvidia on, while we were live on the show, the day, the day that it just sold off massively.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  On public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, they're trusted by millions.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  I am up 42%.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Very nice, very nice. Anyway, Ivan over at Notion says that he's spending 10% of revenue on, on AI now. That is, that is high when you think about it in that frame. Because what is Notion's revenue? It's gotta be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, right? And so, they're probably spending tens of millions of dollars on tokens for features that they've added to Notion, and then they have to upsell or give some sort of free.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, they were, they were super quick to add a lot of AI features. I remember, you know, these are founder mode companies, right?

• 1:14:48Jordi Hays?

  No, but I but I just remembered it was like, okay, ChatGPT was taking off.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  Ivan clearly looked at that and said, hey, we should just integrate this everywhere into our product so that people don't have to leave the app.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Access intelligence.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  I mean, Notion feels like such a beneficiary of AI in sort of like three different ways. One is like, the most intimidating thing about Notion is when you set it, when you, when you create an account and you're just hit with like a blank page. And that's why there's people like, you know, these influencers that sell Notion templates. Because the whole idea is like, yes, when you set up the second brain and you have your notion for your finances and your notion for all your friends and your friends' birthdays and the notion for everyone you invited to your wedding and the notion for, you know, your dog's medication schedule and you have all your different notions and they all link perfectly and all the data is perfect, like that feels amazing. That's like the dream. But getting there is so much work.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  You have to spend like days and days and days like onboarding yourself, basically. And if AI can do that faster, that's huge.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  So actually, it's actually one of the cases where I think just putting a chat box, like, what do you want to do right now? Instead of just being like, hey, here's a blank thing. Like, it's a, it's sandbox, do whatever you want. That feels incredibly value additive. And then also the behind the scenes AI stuff seems incredibly valuable too, where if I have a CRM built out in, in Notion or I have a list of, a list of topics that I want to talk about on the show or something like that, having an AI that kind of can in the background go and hydrate cells in a table or hydrate or, or transform or summarize or kind of polish up a messier document and keep it all in like the pop, the proper Notion

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  taxonomy, that feels hugely valuable.

• 1:16:38Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  And so it should be a beneficiary. And then also just like, if you're somebody that's actually been doing the hard work of putting a ton of data in Notion for years and years and years, and then all of a sudden, now you have the ability to, you know, with, with just one prompt, like be able to synthesize some sort of new visualization layer on top of that, that feels really valuable too. So. I would be pretty optimistic about them spending this much on AI. Even if they're not immediately reaping the benefit, even if it is a little bit like, who knows, maybe they're getting a 50% bump in revenue. And so 10% hit to margin, worth it all day, take that all day. But, but even if they're not, I feel like this.

• 1:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's, here's, if you, if you, you can buy Notion for $10 a month.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  And then if you want AI features, you just pay more.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  How much?

• 1:17:29Jordi Hays?

  So it doesn't say here, it doesn't say how much.

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  It's $20,000 a month.

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  But I would, I would assume it's like another $10 a month if you want AI features. And so they're having to spend 10% of revenue on AI. But they're potentially, you know, doubling revenue on a per user basis, so.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, if you have a bunch of data and you want to analyze it, go to Julius. Chat with your data, get expert level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data, used by Princeton, BCG, Zapier.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  And TVPN.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  And TVPN. Yeah, we, we actually are working on something fun. Put all of our, all, every post that we've ever reacted to has been cataloged. Put it in Julius, ranked it by how many times people have been mentioned, kind of a poster power rankings, working on monthly updates here. Should, should be our own kind of, you know, top poster list, top most mentioned of all time, should be fun. Anyway, when Replit updated its pricing model with something it calls effort-based pricing in which more complicated requests could cost more, the world, the world's complaint box, Reddit, filled up with posts by users declaring they were abandoning the vibe coding app despite protests from noisy minority of users.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Quote, "We didn't see any significant churn or slowdown in revenue after updating the pricing model," says Replit CEO Amjad Masad. The company's plan for enterprise customers can still command margins of 80 to 90% he adds. One solution, says Christopher Mims, is dumber AI. The big companies creating cutting-edge AI models can at least for now afford to collectively spend more than $100 billion per year. And so, yeah, I do wonder, like, a big thing is that if you're just hammering the front, it's so easy to just hammer the frontier. I think the king of the timeline situation room is Buco, actually. I think it's.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, he is.

• 1:19:25John Coogan?

  I think he's delivery number one.

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  We got to start, we should probably add our own creator payouts.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  We should.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Start paying out Buco.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, in merch.

• 1:19:35Jordi Hays?

  King of the timeline.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  In merch, we should send merch to the top 10.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Zeke says a Notion premium subscription will get you a leased 2025 Tesla. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody starts throwing in a leased Tesla, a Tesla leased to your enterprise plan.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  It'd be great.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Why not?

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, in summary, like, the bull case here is that the GPT-5 API, like, eventually, there will be a model router API that will dynamically route the request to the best model. And you can, and instead of just saying, like, okay, this particular feature is wired up to a reasoning model, it will say, okay, well, yeah, like, this particular feature is wired up to a model router. And when a customer comes with a question saying, hey, I'm Notion, and I want to reorganize all my data, and it says, yeah, that's not really a Notion, that's not really a reasoning level task. Let's put that on a cheaper model, dynamically route it, save a bunch of money. Anyway, if you want to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, go to Profound, reach millions

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands, you can get a demo at Profound. Anyway, should we talk about the podcast Gold Rush?

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's see it.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Or should we run through some timeline? What are you thinking?

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  The podcast Gold Rush. Media companies race to license star creators with AI upending how people consume information. News outlets are willing to pay top dollar for unique voices. Traditional media companies are in a deal-making frenzy with podcasters, social media influencers, and other content creators. Fox News in July announced a new media expansion, including a licensing agreement with The Ruthless Podcast, freewheeling talk show, featuring several former Republican political strategists. In August, The Athletic agreed to a seven-figure deal to license Pablo Torre Finds Out, a sports and culture show. Vox Media recently announced a partnership with Bella Freud for her fashion. Neurosis Podcast and has agreed to a licensing deal with David Axelrod,

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  Mike Murphy, and John Heilmann's show, Hacks on Tap. Established media companies watched in awe as independent podcasters drew stargates and drove the news cycle during the 2024 presidential election. And with artificial intelligence tools changing the way people consume information and audiences hungry for authenticity, outlets from Fox and The New York Times are eager to create content that can't easily be replicated by a chatbot. For many, that means building out rosters of distinctive human voices. The world would be poorer if we were just served, quote, "by an AI agent with content that is originated from algorithms," says Paul Cheesebro, chief executive of Fox Corp.'s Tubi Media Group.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  "The role of the creator becomes even more important in that world." Fox and the Journal's parent, News Corp., share common ownership. Sean Ryan, a former US Navy SEAL and CIA contractor, started shopping The Sean Ryan Show earlier this year. Recent episodes, which can last upward of three hours, featured a deep dive, featuring, featured a deep sea mining executive, a former military contractor held hostage in Colombia.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  And like seven of our boys.

• 1:22:38Jordi Hays?

  Seven of our boys, and California Governor Gavin Newsom. Ryan builds the show as.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Newsom did, uh, Sean Ryan?

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I miss that. Ryan builds the show is focusing on.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Holding a gun or something. That was like the viral moment.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, focusing on what the media isn't talking about. Yeah, I mean, I think they might get into this in a bit, but the takeaway here is people are less interested in paying and just for news. Because you might open X and see some anon account posting a headline. Someone else did the fact finding. They're just like posting an easily digestible screenshot and more interested in sort of commentary and analysis surrounding news.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  I guess, I guess my question is like, if the end state of these podcasts is partnership with legacy media networks, what does that say about the talent identification and like talent nurturing for the networks?

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Like, why can't, why can't Fox go and find the next Ruthless and set them up?

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Put it together?

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, uh, or is it maybe more, more efficient to actually have the, the, the NFL Combine of like the next sports?

• 1:24:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you guys have a, you know, a competitive bloodbath.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:09Jordi Hays?

  And we'll pick out winners.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that is actually.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this, this, you see this in music now where a lot of record labels wait until somebody shows incredible talent.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  And then they'll sign them after they've gotten a billion views on TikTok or.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, have a hit song. Uh, so I, I, I, I still think, um, yeah, the question here is, does signing, you know, if, if Sean Ryan goes to Fox.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, or Tubi, or one of these other platforms, is that enough to, um, is that enough to sustain these legacy media companies? Or do they still get competed away, uh, over time?

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, the question's like, what, yeah, what does the long-term business look like? Like, because they're all pivoting to like, or they're all expanding to over the top or instead of over the air. Like the, I think it's OTT, like the streaming.

• 1:25:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Services. So like, they all want to have their own streaming networks, but then they're in direct competition with Netflix. And that's going to be really hard. And they're in competition with Apple and Amazon and, uh, YouTube, and that's really, really hard. And then, uh, and so the question's like, in the short term, it makes sense. Like, I could imagine paying Sean Ryan to license his show. And running ads against it on Fox being higher value than, um, than just like the next random show. That probably costs a bunch to make and brings in the same amount of ad revenue. Like, if they're just paying Sean Ryan to do his show and then they're just airing it. Um, that could be like a good financial decision, right?

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  Uh, the question is like, does that actually get like a younger Sean Ryan viewer on board on Fox? Like.

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the question, the question is like, if legacy media, you know, if cable is being competed away by different streaming. Cable revenues are being competed away by streaming platforms and social media platforms.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  How many Sean Ryans do you need to replace the lost revenue and the fullness of time that comes from cable just going away?

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  You need a lot of Sean Ryans.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  There are a lot of Sean Ryans out there, though. You could carry a lot of these shows and you could, you could definitely fill out a 24/7 news cycle. You could fill a full channel with independent content creators that are licensed. But the question is like, is like, how, how, how much does that actually make people stick around versus they just stay in their apps and they just don't really go back to the networks or, or like what value at that point is the, is the network actually delivering?

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Numeral Sales Tax and Autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Where should we go next?

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's rip some timeline.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Let's do some timeline. So Elon Musk is back to posting about romantic companions, I believe. Major upgrade of Brock Imagine in a few weeks. Definitely needs an upgrade. People were not very happy with the quality of the video, although there were lots of people that were promoting it and, and sharing it because it was certainly edgy. But in terms of like the, the, the video.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Should we pull up that video of Sam Altman?

• 1:27:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the next one by Taioki. If we can pull up that. Try not to share your screen.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  The, the Sam Altman clip from, this is from Cleo Abram's show, I believe. In the, in the timeline.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  In the meantime, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 1:27:51Jordi Hays?

  Do not get in a bake off with Finn.

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  Do not.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  That's all I'll say.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  And can we pull up the Sam Altman clip from Taioki? Taioki? I don't know how to say that. Repost from Hungry Donkey of Sam talking to Cleo Abram on her show. It's in the timeline.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Arfer Rock is highlighting Statsig was acquired by OpenAI in a 1.1 billion all-stock deal. Notably, they announced $100 million Series A at the same $1.1 billion valuation from Iconic a few months ago. I wonder what prompted management to sell after the recent large fundraise. This is what I was saying earlier, that the acquisition is just at the last round price. But it's very possible that the Statsig team and the board think that there's just more upside in owning a piece of OpenAI than owning a piece of Statsig. So even though it's happening at the last round price, the last investors aren't getting a premium, they are, they're riding with OpenAI now.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  That makes no sense.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  We got the video ready?

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Let's pull it up.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  No audio.

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  That is best for the world, but not best for winning.

• 1:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Can you start it over?

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  What is an example of a decision that you've had to make that is best for the world, but not best for winning?

• 1:29:18Speaker 04

  Well, we haven't put a sexbot avatar in TSHP yet.

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  That does seem like it would get time spent.

• 1:29:25Speaker 04

  Apparently it does.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Is that graphic added on her show or after the fact?

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  I would assume she didn't add that.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Somebody added that. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  The other thing about this deal is Iconic is the lead investor in Anthropic's new round. So this is a way for Iconic to get some, to get some OpenAI exposure.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  Interesting. Do you want to talk about Align Ventures? They're on a generational run now in early-stage CPG investing. The fund started in 2018.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we covered this Friday.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  $20 million fund was invested in some of the biggest.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Because they're in, they're in mammoth brands, which is acquired Coterie.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  Coterie, sale to mammoth brands, Figs. Oh, they were in the Figs Series A, which IPO'd in 2021. Touch, how is Figs doing now? I know that they IPO'd and they were kind of ripping. They were in Hymns and Hers.

• 1:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Still a billion-dollar company.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Wow. Touchland, seed, acquired by Church and Dwight Company. I don't know Touchland. For 880 million. Billy, seed, acquired by Edgewell Personal.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Figs also IPO'd at.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  Thirty-four dollars a share. It's at six dollars a share now.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's down.

• 1:30:41Jordi Hays?

  They would have done, I mean, a line would have done really well on the IPO.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  The total EV of their investments is likely north of fifteen billion.

• 1:30:48Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. So that's how they have the capital to be ripping into a figure.

• 1:30:53John Coogan?

  For sure. Yeah, that was uncharacteristic. It seems like they really know their stuff.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Humanoids could be some of the biggest consumer play of all time if you get a robot in every person's home. But obviously a competitive.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about this Ethan Ding post. Google Trends data on interest in lovable, raplet, Claude code, cursor, windsurf, all down. Cursor's down sixty percent, peaked August third. Claude code's down fifty-six percent. Loveable's down forty-four percent. Raplet's down sixty-eight percent. Windsurf's down seventy-eight percent. This doesn't make any sense to me. Like, I mean, even looking at the charts and it doesn't look like it's way, maybe down from peak, but like, that's just Google Trends.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't mean revenues down.

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, is this, what do you think Tyler? Has anything happened in cursor, Claude code, lovable, raplet?

• 1:31:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Ethan responds and he says, might be nothing. Market's maturing, users not switching as much, right? If they're actually settling into using products, then they're not frantically looking. And, or it could be that just overall growth is slowing.

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  Also, it's just like, it's a slight sell-off before lock-in season.

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Or people are just using the models to do search now themselves.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. So people, maybe this is just overall. No, I think all of this is relative.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Tyler, what do you think?

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  I think it could be like, yeah, it's like the lock-in. Like, by now, the kind of exploration phase is over. People like, no, okay, I like using Claude code. I like using lovable. They've tried everything and now they're kind of maybe just using one now, something like that.

• 1:32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, I guess the data's down during August. That has to be like the slowest time for basically everything. This is like big vacation season. I don't know. I don't read too much into this. I still feel like, like, a lot of these are big markets where many of the companies will do well. Also, there's some sort of, there's some sort of like.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Compounding thing. Also like Claude Code, I wonder if that's even the term. Like if I go to Google Trends, like are people just searching for anthropic? Like is anthropic off peak? Anthropic is a search term. Anthropic is a search term over the past, uh, let's see.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  Seems like every, every, like every search, everything I've searched so far has peaked around the beginning of August.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Anthropic broadly is down. What about, uh, what's something that should not be down at all? Like Arowan. Is Arowan down? Arowan is flat. Arowan is not.

• 1:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Labubu peaked in July as well.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  What about OpenAI? Let's see. OpenAI also saw some crazy spike in August. What, what was going on July 27th to August 2nd? Uh, everyone was talking about AI or something and then it just like completely dropped. Something, something weird happened with the Google data in, on August 2nd or August 1st or something. What was going on then? I don't know. Anyway.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I don't think we should read too much into this. It's interesting data though.

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  I agree. Let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was funny. Uh, Mr. Beast was streaming about his, uh, water charity.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  And he just kept refreshing Polly Market.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  That's so funny because he can see the actual data of how things are coming in, but he just preferred to look at Polly Market.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's a fun chart to look at when it's going up from, from, you know, up to, up to 90%.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:34:41Speaker 05

  99%. Wait, let's see what it was like, uh, a week ago? The odds that we were going to hit it was 50%.

• 1:34:48John Coogan?

  And Ken Griffin came in.

• 1:34:50Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is America. It's like, we can bet on charity in this country.

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  A lot of people who bet that we weren't going to hit it are, are, uh, doc, de-dosing the site so we don't hit it. What were the lowest odds at the beginning of, what was it?

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  That's a crazy dynamic.

• 1:35:04Speaker 05

  It, it looks like it hit a low of 50% a week ago. At the very start, it was hovering around 30%. Um, wow. Yeah, it's kinda crazy.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm tearing up realizing that we can bet on charitable giving now.

• 1:35:16Speaker 05

  There's six and a half million dollars of betting volume on this. Man, why are so many people betting on this?

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  He's like, can you please just donate to the, to the charity?

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, instead of gambling on it?

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  Oh, that's hilarious.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to Ayush from Warp.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  Shout out.

• 1:35:32Jordi Hays?

  Married the love of his life in a 500-year-old cathedral in a 2,700-year-old town in Spain this weekend. Absolutely fantastic. Love to see it. Love to see a young technology brother marry the love of their life. Now, Ayush, please get back to building SAS. What's this?

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  This is, here comes the bride. This isn't the one I wanted.

• 1:35:59Jordi Hays?

  Is this trade, is this?

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  I don't think so. I think this is like...

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Fair use?

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  I think it's fair use. We'll see. Maybe we'll get struck. Let's keep talking. We, we need a, we need a wedding sound on the soundboard. Anyway, congrats to him. It's a fantastic photo.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Wow, so Palantir is launching a new campaign, saying, "You're being sold an AI future where you're obsolete or irrelevant. We see it differently. Doomers say AI will take your job and then your life. Pacifiers say not to worry. Machines will handle reality as you handle the remote." They're all wrong. Americans are already wielding AI to work wonders, from factories to hospitals. They're ditching spreadsheets to solve real problems, make real things, and kickstart the prosperous era, the most prosperous era in our history. Today, we're launching Working Intelligence, the AI optimism project to see, to show you how. This is great. The doomers will hate to see Palantir providing an optimistic future for AI in our lives.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Should we pull up this, should we pull up this clip of Gavin Newsom?

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  We certainly can. We also have our next guest.

• 1:37:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Well, why don't we dive into our first guest of the show, and we'll come back to that. Andrea from Snack Shot, who was, of course, profiled Friday in The Times. Great to see you.

• 1:37:20Speaker 04

  Hi, same. How's it going?

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  It's good. How are you?

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:37:23John Coogan?

  Congratulations on all the progress.

• 1:37:26Speaker 04

  Thank you. It's been five years in the making.

• 1:37:29Jordi Hays?

  Five years.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  What was the, what was the inspiration? What was like the first post? Do you remember?

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was about the rise of this new wave of non-alcoholic drinks. And look at it now.

• 1:37:42Jordi Hays?

  Is now the time to go long alcohol?

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:47Jordi Hays?

  Cause I've been seeing people, you know, fading the like non-alc trend, being like, all right, everybody's lying off the alk. I'm gonna go on heavy.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Speaker 04

  I think so. Yeah. I, I like Gen Z is into like buzz balls and like people are bringing back hypnotics. So a hundred percent.

• 1:38:03Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get some buzz. We gotta get some, unfortunately, some members of our team are not 21, so we will not be bringing back buzz balls in this office. But I think, but you, do you know about?

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that around when you were?

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I'm familiar with buzz balls. I don't think I've ever actually had one. I've seen them at the grocery store though. Uh, what, yeah, what were the biggest, uh, what were the biggest winners out of the non-alcoholic trend? Was it, uh, athletic brewing back then? Or were there other, were there other like companies?

• 1:38:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the only one that I'm like, like I can say like, okay, it makes sense is NA beer because it tastes. It really does, uh, like taste like the real thing. And you have all these like NA drinks that I'm just like, dude, it's fucking just like a sugar drink. And.

• 1:38:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I never, I, I never invested in the, the non-alc category despite getting a bunch of pitches. Cause I was like, I can just have a diet coke. I could just have like a soda.

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:58Jordi Hays?

  I guess I get, you know.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Energy drink.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  There's just a lot of.

• 1:39:01Speaker 04

  We should be investing in like protein heart. I mean, there is already a protein heart, heart tilter brand.

• 1:39:08Speaker 04

  We have, yeah, we have, we have nicotine energy drinks now.

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but we saw that. We, I, I don't think that's, I don't, is it actually real? It seems extremely illegal.

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  Literally, like I interviewed the founders when I wrote about.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  They're doing it. Wow. Okay.

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  It's, they, they hired one of the guys from Coco Vita.

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:25Speaker 04

  No, that's, that's like.

• 1:39:26Jordi Hays?

  But do they know, do they know it's, it's illegal?

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  So they're operating, okay, so I asked them about this and they're operating under the kratom category.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:39:37Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm telling you guys, like these guys.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  So, so they're, we're operating in a gray market, a drug.

• 1:39:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're operating in the like, like, uh, smoke shop gray market area, but these guys are like from the redneck Riviera, like Dustin, Florida, like the kind of person that would be behind this brand and they don't give a fuck. They're like, they literally told me, we're building this for the LA people, the lower Alabama people. So.

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  Lower Alabama. Love it.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  They know they're a target market, so.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the. Uh, what about protein? Are we short protein? You can get protein in everything now.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  I, I, I, and I've been reading studies about this. I think in the next 10 years, there's going to be people with like severe kidney, like, uh, problems.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Too much protein?

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, your body cannot process the insane amount of protein that American people are putting into their bodies now. And so I joke when people are trying to push you like, I, you know, I saw protein croutons the other day and I was like, this is ridiculous. But I'd love to see people's blood work, like.

• 1:40:43Jordi Hays?

  No, no, uh, no, I won't add protein. Uh, I don't want to add like a meat or fish to my, to my grain bowl. I'll just take protein croutons, please.

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  Well, there's also now a brand that's doing protein greens and it's like a solid green. It's.

• 1:40:58Jordi Hays?

  But don't, don't greens have some certain, oh, that's funny.

• 1:41:02Speaker 04

  I have no idea, but we're beyond parody at this point. Starbucks announced they're doing a protein foam matcha latte.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  Foam?

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  Starting this month. Yeah, like cold foam, you know, those drinks that have like the cold foam on it. So like Starbucks is long protein. So I think we should be.

• 1:41:22Speaker 04

  Shortening it.

• 1:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Wow, the short.

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  Now that you're having that, I feel like we're like, okay, we're, we can start backing out a little bit about that.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  She's calling, calling the top.

• 1:41:32Speaker 04

  Beyond protein, you know, like now it's this whole like creatine snack trend and I came across like creatine, you know, man cereal is this creatine cereal that's launching, but then you also have things like. Creatine muffins, uh, creatine croissants and it's just, that's what the, the thing about what I love to talk about.

• 1:41:51Jordi Hays?

  Pastries, that, that, that, I don't, I can't get behind that.

• 1:41:55Speaker 04

  The science behind it is that carbs help our bodies absorb creatine better and faster. So that's the science behind it. But yeah, that's kind of what I love doing, what I love doing. It's like, I come across like the most insane unhinged products, but it also is a testament of like the, uh, can, American consumer is like optimist, like you will sell, you can sell anything to Americans.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  Okay. Speaking of selling everything, the chat wants to know about psilocybin ice cream? I don't know if that's real or if that's just a joke.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  In, I mean, I, I've definitely seen, uh, like psilocybin, obviously like the chocolates.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Speaker 04

  Uh, there's some places in LA that I've do them, the, the teas. I've actually had some of those teas that they operate on the download.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  So it's like mushroom tea.

• 1:42:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's, and it has like, it'll deal, yeah, but it'll be like microdose. So it'll be like a little small bottle of them. The company is called Toasty Town. I'm obsessed with it. I actually smuggled some.

• 1:42:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you're live, you're live.

• 1:42:55Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm live, but anyways, uh, great tasting, uh, psilocybin teas. I'm not surprised.

• 1:43:02Jordi Hays?

  You smuggled it from the plate into your, into your mouth.

• 1:43:04Speaker 04

  My, my mouth. Um, anyways, but yeah, I'm not surprised if people are doing that on a DL. I don't believe that ice cream would be the best way to ingest it. I don't know. I would have to look into.

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen anybody try to put, uh, cocaine back into cola yet?

• 1:43:21Speaker 04

  No, but I think at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Coke just says like, fuck it. You know, like, they wrote about this, like, so like push into like the cocaine-induced opulence of the eighties and that's why we're seeing people, you know, wanna do three hundred milligrams of caffeine in one drink. We have the killer Panera lemonades. Starbucks is also doing

• 1:43:43Jordi Hays?

  Killer lemonade.

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  Energy drinks. Um, so I don't know. I feel like America wants to and it yearns to be stimulated. And we're like, kind of the reverse of the ayahuasca, psilocybin, kind of like brain dead. Um, vibes.

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  Do you think we're seeing more new CPG companies formed than ever? Because over the last few years, there's been less early-stage investment activity, or at least from the institutional side. But it seems like there's still like a fire hose of new brands.

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, cuz like a lot of the barriers of entry of these categories are so low. And it's really funny because people can just Kickstarter it, like Fly by Jing, which is doing really well. It's like a Chili Crisp brand. And they started off with a Kickstarter. You don't really necessarily need venture money to launch a brand, um, a CPG brand. But obviously, we've, I think it's VC came in to corrupt the CPG industry and trying to like grow it in five years and trying to get like those exits, something like a Poppy or a Ciate, that have been able to do it in less than a decade. But that's obviously like not necessarily the norm for the industry itself. But yeah, there's

• 1:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's certainly true. I mean, I've, I'll defend venture capital with my life. Uh, but, uh, I would take a bullet for venture capital. But, uh, certainly, certainly a lot of brands that I love were started decades ago and it didn't raise anything, uh, close to what venture capital looks like today.

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  I wish there was like a way to short. See like new CPG brands like so many go to the poly market for that.

• 1:45:24Jordi Hays?

  Brutal brutal you're supposed to be there but but isn't the isn't the competition good we just like you know we throw up with a bunch of budget bunch of uh.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Ideas and you see what sticks and every once in a while you get a great product that sticks around forever.

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  I know but like like I mean I've come across Palo Santo brewed water and like people are trying to like.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  It's just like wood it's just it's like a certain type of wood.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:45:48Speaker 04

  The description of the product is like you know Palo Santo is what you burn to like stage yourself and so like the product describes itself as like something that can like elevate your vibe.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:58Speaker 04

  There's people who say like oh you can have like spiritual enhancement through like these fucking seven dollar adaptogenic seltzers and so at this point I do think that we need to be more like like strict in what we allow to put out there because like none of that actually changes that there's Skittles water in the market you know like.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Wait is there actually Skittles water in there?

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  No there's actual Skittles water.

• 1:46:22Jordi Hays?

  I bet that raises your vibe crazy.

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah that seems pretty good.

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  How uh do you do so some something I like personally I think uh the invest if you're gonna invest in uh CPG it it the only criteria that really matters is the product truly amazing. How much uh how often are you surprised where you try a product and you're not impressed by it but then it goes on to be successful?

• 1:46:54Speaker 04

  Oh god uh yeah and I've I've spoken my mind about how I don't believe that people are buying twelve dollar protein cereal um or you know I'm not gonna say the name of the brand but I there's a lot of things that I don't believe that make any sense to me and I do believe that it's like VC. And it has.

• 1:47:15Jordi Hays?

  Distorted.

• 1:47:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's distorted and it doesn't make sense. And I I'm someone who does spend a lot of time in groceries, really observing from a more anthropological POV, like what are people really wanting to spend like a lot more on? Or, you know, how groceries became this like way of status signaling that you didn't have before? Like, our parents were like showing pictures of Heinz to their friends and being like, oh, my God, I have, you know, this in my pantry. And now you have people.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Limited edition ketchup.

• 1:47:44Speaker 04

  About the grasshopper in their kitchen and even like the idea of what I call like a hype beast grocer, like an Erawan or a happier grocery where it's like that. It's so crazy that that actually exists. And then our generation, th- this form of affordable affluence where it's like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna go spend thirty dollars on a eighty gram sugar smoothie for clout. Um, and I I think that I I saw the news about, uh, you know, Emily Lundberg posted about that, like Erawan being inside of like a KIF, that members club. And so it's really funny because I think that's gonna be like the clout chasing final boss. Like you dropped six thousand dollars on a membership to buy a thirty dollar smoothie

• 1:48:29Speaker 04

  in New York. Like, you gotta love it. I can't hate it.

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  I mean, badge value is real. People want to be seen with something. It's an accessory. Uh, uh, there is something to that. I mean, it it might be bizarre and distorted, but it's real and monetizable. And so it will, it will kind of.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  I like putting, they should put all Erawans inside members' clubs. Because I don't like, my only critique of Erawan, I mean, I, my only critique is like the crowds.

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  Riffraff.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  I I hate going in and you can tell on like on a, on a summer.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  On a summer Saturday that it's like tourists. I don't want to see tourists in my grocery store.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Who, uh, uh, who, who do you, who do you write for? Like, who do you think your, do you think your audience, uh, you know, do you write with the mind of the consumer in mind? Do you?

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Second generation. It's, it's always been. The industry participant, the investor, the business owner.

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  I come from PR and marketing, so like my POV was always like, I can kind of. Dissect this for you and tell you what of this product is mostly BS and a crafted narrative. And so I started this publication based on the idea of no one's writing in this like CPG circle jerk of an industry, like everybody's just writing for the buyer or for the retailer or whatever or for the other investors, but no one was really talking to like your average person who eventually finds is on a target and doesn't understand like how come we have like protein popcorn at Target, where did that even come from? So yeah, I write, it's funny cause like

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Have you thought about putting protein like bundling it into the subscri- your subscription?

• 1:50:05Speaker 04

  Protein subscription? Well, my audience skews very young, which is really funny. Like I've even been invited to give like guest lectures at colleges, which is interesting and my number one advice is like, don't do it, don't get into CPG. But it's, it's interesting. Like I, you know, a lot of my

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  But it's fun. It's, it's, it's, people love it. It's fun to make things that you can consume and, and physically, you know, it's a very common story. Somebody's in finance, they're just in Excel all day long and then they start a beverage company.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's much less abstract. Like you are making widgets. It's a widgets business. Like you manufacture something, you distribute it, you see it.

• 1:50:43Jordi Hays?

  And people think it's easy because they're like, okay, I just make a drink and I sell it a lot of times and then I exit for a

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  And the, and the first time you see one of your products like in the trash out in the real world and you're like, wow, like this is a real thing. It's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:50:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I try to like write, I started writing for myself as an audience, but I guess like, you know, there's so many people that can take what it is. So like I, you know, there's, I have a popular Instagram account as well. It's not just a newsletter and I do a lot of memes there that have gone really viral. Funny thing like, oh, they're like celebrities like, like BJ Novak and Kira, I forget what her last name is, like and like all these random people that I'm like, wait, how did you even find out about this?

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  People love snacks.

• 1:51:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  It's a universal language.

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  Universal experience. So yeah, I guess that is a very universal subject, but the way that I write it just makes it a lot more relatable and digestible to your average person.

• 1:51:40Jordi Hays?

  Are you long or short celebrity brands?

• 1:51:44Speaker 04

  Oh, super short. Like I'm saying, like we, someone needs to make polymarket for CPG. Maybe, maybe I'll do it.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  What are you long? Are you long like legacy brands then?

• 1:51:53Speaker 04

  I, I, I.

• 1:51:53Jordi Hays?

  Long the American consumer.

• 1:51:56Speaker 04

  A hundred percent that. Um, but I, what I'm fascinated with right now that I, I wrote a, a deep dive on this like uh, three years ago, the inner, like the influence of wearables on what we decide to eat and drink. So I'm very invested in, not personally, cause I don't invest, but I like, I'm very fascinated with how, you know, there's the trend of people not drinking at a certain age because they're wearing the whoop, they're wearing the aura. This whole like, uh, uh, the new hot biometrics, which is like cortisol, people wanting to know what their cortisol looks like. I, I just talked to a company that um, has uh, cortisol strips that you put in your mouth and you, they

• 1:52:38Speaker 04

  immediately like uh, populate the information into your cell phone. I think that's crazy. I love the idea of technology advancing enough that you can potentially have one, one day a non-invasive glucose monitor that can tell you like, oh, uh, you know, you shouldn't be doing like drinking this or whatever, how it affects you. But there's brands now, the guy from Oatly, he launched a brand called Good Idea and they developed this ingredient that counteracts your sugar spike if you drink it with meals. So I think that's really cool.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  It's important because Oatly massively spikes your.

• 1:53:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. He's trying to like undo his, like what he's did in that whole company. But I think that's fascinating. I'm like.

• 1:53:17Jordi Hays?

  Explaining to people, explaining to people that your body like processes your, your oat latte, just like it's a, a, a Coca Cola is, is mind blowing for people.

• 1:53:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. But you don't have to be Brian Johnson at this point to be able to like, understand your body in that sense, but.

• 1:53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Speaker 04

  Anyway.

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, congrats on the recognition and the profile and.

• 1:53:43Speaker 04

  It's so nice to be here.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  I know. Thank you for all the support since day one.

• 1:53:47John Coogan?

  It's a great hangout.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  And uh, it's great watching you win.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Get that mallet ready Jordy. We have some news coming into the TVP in Ultra Dome from the restream waiting room. We have Rain. Welcome to the stream. How you guys doing?

• 1:54:06Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 1:54:08John Coogan?

  Give us the update. Introduce yourselves. Tell us what you do. Tell us the news. Give us a big number, please.

• 1:54:14Speaker 06

  Hey, we're co-founders of Rain. I'm Farooq.

• 1:54:17Speaker 07

  I'm Tross.

• 1:54:18Speaker 06

  And yeah, we're building stablecoin infrastructure. We just raised a $58 million Series B.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Let's go!

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  First proper hit of the day.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  What was it 52, 58? How much money?

• 1:54:33Speaker 06

  58.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  58, 58. And that 58 million, it's still worth 58 million, right? Because you're keeping the stablecoins?

• 1:54:40Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Did you already put into World Liberty Financial?

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully not. Hopefully not. Yeah, just, I'd love to just better, better understand the business, kind of go a little bit below the surface. What are you guys doing? What kind of customers are you working with? All that good stuff?

• 1:55:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, we power a lot of like global payments use cases powered by stablecoins largely on top of the Visa network. We are a stablecoin-based card issuing platform as well as a stablecoin-based payments institution. So we connect any use case with any sort of payout mechanism around the world. Anybody can embed stablecoins into their app and just rip it. You know, you can give US dollars to everybody around the world.

• 1:55:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for just ripping it.

• 1:55:29Speaker 07

  Some of our customers include Nuve, a large payment processor, payment acquirer. Avalanche, we power the Avalanche card. We power a lot of Dollar Access cards in Latin America, the emerging markets.

• 1:55:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, like, is a lot of the business international at this point?

• 1:55:46Speaker 06

  Only about like 50% of the business is international. We power a lot of US use cases where consumers are dealing with stablecoins, but it feels and looks like a regular credit card or debit card product. And so it's not just global, it's everything. Our thinking is, is let's just upgrade the infrastructure in the back and then the consumers and the users can feel whatever they want to feel with whatever they already have.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are the tangible benefits for the American consumer who might be using just normal Visa network card? Does, if you're using a stablecoin as the backing, is that going around the Visa network entirely? Or are you still plugging into the Visa network at some point?

• 1:56:26Speaker 06

  We're still plugging into the Visa network, but I'll give you an example. Like Rain is the only company that settles seven days a week with the payment network using stablecoins. That lets us have significant savings in terms of collateral that our customers need to post.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:56:41Speaker 06

  So the end user advantage is not necessarily to the end cardholder.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:46Speaker 06

  It's our partner that's operating a program. So you can launch faster, you can service more people, you can be more flexible, you can operate more cheaply, you can make more money. And so for us, it's really about driving costs down, driving revenue up for our customers and using stablecoins to do that.

• 1:57:04Speaker 07

  That's typical for us, like four days of collateral for a long weekend risk. And we're able to bring that down to less than a day of collateral.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. So is the long-term that you might see someone try and compete with like those popular credit cards, like the Chase Sapphire Reserve or Amex Platinum or something? And they're able to pass through more savings because they're saving more, so they acquire more customers that way. And there's this flywheel there. Is that how we might see something like this actually go really big in America?

• 1:57:35Speaker 06

  You can already see things like this happening in the US. And we have a number of customers that are paying like 3% cash back and they're competing head to head with some of these programs. And for us, it's really about, you know, being the partner that you can scale with at a significant cost savings. And so our customers are able to just move a lot quicker.

• 1:57:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, if people get the Etherfight card, which we power, they have really competitive rewards that they're offered.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 1:58:01Jordi Hays?

  You guys start, correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys started in like 2021? Is that right?

• 1:58:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, we were actually, so we initially built this product called Sign and Wire, which was a little bit competitive with Party Round.

• 1:58:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's where I was getting at, because I know, obviously, I'm looking at the website, look, obviously, you guys have evolved a ton, but I remember, I remember those days, yeah. And we, we had, we had stablecoin, we had stablecoin functionality in our product, but we just, after the, what I was going to ask you about is like navigating kind of the FTX kind of crisis, because at that point, we had to basically completely jettison or, or remove a lot of the stablecoin functionality that we had, because at that point, every major financial institution was just saying like, look, risk off, exactly.

• 1:58:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, look, we were lucky to find a way through that without having to, you know, cut down on all the stablecoin stuff. And it was actually a blessing for us, because we were able to build in relative obscurity.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:01Speaker 06

  All the technology that we now take for granted and be able to use that with volume in multiple years of history, that now like large enterprises come to us and they're like, wow, you've been doing this for several years. And, you know, anybody starting today is going to have to start today. Whereas with us, we've started several years ago, and you get a battle-tested solution, which has been our advantage in the market.

• 1:59:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep. What do you guys, obviously, we have new stablecoin regulations. What are you guys expecting from the market broadly over the next, call it six to 12 months?

• 1:59:35Speaker 06

  It's, it looks like it's, a lot of people are going to explore what stablecoins mean for their business and for their bank or for their app. And I think that that's all very good, right? And our hot take is that it's probably going to look like when people started issuing like, you know, gift cards that you can buy at, you know, CVS, where, you know, I can get a Red Lobster gift card and all these other things. But if you can't use it anywhere else, is it really money?

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:03Speaker 06

  That's what people are going to run into. And a lot of folks come to us when they launch a stablecoin, and they're like, oh, wait, like, I can't use this anywhere? Like, what if there was a partner that lets me and my customers use this in more places? And so that's where we come in. And we, we just started, we just partnered with the state of Wyoming, where on the first day of launching their Frontier token, it was accessible and usable on the rain infrastructure anywhere that Visa's accepted globally. So just from Wyoming, we were able to take it to the world without them having to do anything.

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  That's wild. What uh is every state gonna launch a token? Or do you think they're an anomaly?

• 2:00:46Speaker 06

  Some states will probably launch tokens. I think other states are still probably figuring out why they're anti all this stuff.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  What is the rationale for for an individual state? Not launching and a token that's tied to the economic prosperity of that specific state, but just backed by USD like that seems extremely redundant and and I could not wrap my mind around the benefit of that.

• 2:01:14Speaker 06

  I mean, a lot of these states like in Wyoming, for example, they see this as an opportunity to build a state backed token where a consumer around the world knows that, hey, this is supported by a government institution. It's going to be one to one. They're not having to take the risk on a private market issuer that could have a run on the bank. And so there's a potential market for there to be, hey, you know, this is a public sector token. It's more trustworthy because it's issued by a regulated by by an actual.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. So is that just like a run around the no central bank digital currencies like vibe that we're getting out of DC?

• 2:01:52Speaker 06

  I think that there are going to be a lot of different types of experiments on how do we get around like no central bank digital currency thing. Like ultimately, if you look at the dollar, if you go back far back enough, most of them were just issued by public like private banks, right? Dollar dollars were issued by like their local community bank. And then eventually they were issued by the federal government and we're probably gonna have some countries where it's gonna be issued by your local private bank and or your state and other places where it's gonna be issued by the central bank. And maybe other places where it's gonna be just issued by your corner store or Walmart or Amazon. And I mean, it's gonna be interesting to see what the next few years looks like because

• 2:02:35Speaker 06

  it we're gonna see this like Cambrian explosion of whatever people want to do.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  And that creates an opportunity for you guys to just be in the back end swapping in and out of all these random stable coins that each represent a dollar, but have varying levels of liquidity and

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:52Jordi Hays?

  is that is that right?

• 2:02:55Speaker 06

  I mean, you don't know, like if you have cash in your pocket, I mean, I don't, but you may, but most of the bills in your pocket are issued by, or you know, they have a different Federal Reserve on them. Like, do you know? Do you care?

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:03:07Speaker 06

  Like, is it Denver Federal Reserve? Is it, uh, Kansas City one? Like, which one is it? Um.

• 2:03:14Speaker 07

  So we really built our infrastructure to be agnostic of whatever stable point is people want to use. Do you know people want to spend them? Uh, we have direct relationship with these issuers and we're just providing that utility layer for them.

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, last question, uh, Aaron Frank told me to ask you, you've already given some hot takes, but he said to ask for some hat takes. He said you're very opinionated on hacks, on, on, on, on hats, Faruk. Anything there? Or is he just messing with me?

• 2:03:42Speaker 06

  No, look, I'm a big deep hat guy. It's like, I think your hat looks very nice because it looks like a nice deep. Charles is more of a dad hat guy.

• 2:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, never dad, never dad, never dad hat, never dad hat. I didn't know, I didn't know that, I didn't know the, the terminology for it, but dad hats are over.

• 2:04:00Speaker 06

  This year, address, I'm sending you some rain hats.

• 2:04:03Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it, we'll do it. Um, awesome, guys. Well, congratulations, uh, in you, you, uh, started the company at the right time. And, uh, it's awesome to see the progress.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Cool. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:04:14Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Congrats on the round.

• 2:04:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  We, we talked to so many incredible entrepreneurs, building so many incredible things, and yet we still need to solve the internet crisis. There's a global internet crisis.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  I had an 84 last night, but I think this doesn't count some of the bone of sleep I got. What'd you get?

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  I got a, uh, so I, this is, this is crazy. Went to bed at 8:32.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Eight.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Woke up at 5:30.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:44Jordi Hays?

  But only got six hours of sleep. Because three-year-old was going, the whole house was going crazy. I walked, uh, I got up this morning and my, my.

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  What was the final score?

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Sixty-two.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Oh, play the sound effect for me. Let's go.

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  I wa, I woke up this morning.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  One, zero this week. Let's see, it's a short week.

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  I get up.

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  See what I can do.

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  I get up, uh, get up at 5:30, walk out of my room, three-year-old walks out of his room, holding Samwe.

• 2:05:12John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Holding, uh.

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  Where does?

• 2:05:16Jordi Hays?

  He had got, at some point, got up in the night. And just grabbed the sandwich from the fridge.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. There is a certain moment where the kids be, they like stopped being like babies and they started just being like roommates. And you're like, oh, like you're just like.

• 2:05:28Jordi Hays?

  It's like, dude, what are you?

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  The fridge, bro. Like, did you ask? Did you ask if you could eat my sandwich?

• 2:05:33Jordi Hays?

  It was his sandwich. His credit. We got, we got a takeout yesterday.

• 2:05:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but still, I was like, dude, it's 5 a.m. Why, why?

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  Possession is nine tenths of the law, Jordan.

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, eightsleep.com, get a Pod5.

• 2:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Code TBN.

• 2:05:48John Coogan?

  30 night free, risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Um, so apparently, uh, the judge issued a sealed decision in the Google case, trying to figure out, uh, what, uh, any more details.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, we got, we finally got the Google results, um, but we don't know exactly what it is. I don't know. Um, in other news, Benny Safdie collapses into tears during the 15-minute standing ovation for the Smashing Machine. Do people realize if The Rock wins the Oscar, he's going to run for president? Forty-one thousand likes. I think people want The Rock to run. That'd be great. What do you think? You think The Rock could pull it off? Did you see his new slimmed-down look? He lost some weight. He's not, he's not.

• 2:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Do you like, I mean, do you think he's just getting ready for mass, the mass, a mass gain run?

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, bulking season is coming, clearly.

• 2:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard because he's so bold.

• 2:06:46John Coogan?

  He, he is, he is getting older. It seems like it's probably a more healthy decision to, to take off some of the weight and not walk around. But, uh, I'm excited. I know you won't be seeing this movie because you never see any movies, but I will be checking out the smashing, the Smashing Machine. Looks pretty good.

• 2:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, can't figure out, uh, what's happening with Google yet, but the stock is up in after-hours trading.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:07Jordi Hays?

  So, I guess it likes it.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  This is, uh, this is a good one. So, uh, there, there's an interview with the, the CEO of Chevron in the New York Times. And, uh, there's a quote here. So, "What are you trying to learn about right now?" asks the interviewer. And the CEO of Chevron says, "Artificial intelligence." So, "What's the last thing you asked AI?" He says, "My last question was about, was the biggest, was about what was the biggest merger in the United States last year?" And, uh, they say, "What was it?" He said, "Our acquisition of Hess."

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  This is the power of AI.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  The power of artificial intelligence.

• 2:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Priceless.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Just going to AI. You're the CEO.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Just asking about your own activities.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Was he expecting a surprise there? Like, that is such a funny, such a funny result. Anyway, we have Mike Maples from Floodgate Capital in the restream waiting room. We will bring him into the TVP and LCR.

• 2:08:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome to the show.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  We're doing great. Thanks so much for hopping on. I don't know if you read that article, that interview with the Chevron CEO. Did that surprise you?

• 2:08:16Speaker 08

  No, I haven't. You know, I got to say that it's a little bit out of my lane. I'm way too early in startups. And so Chevron is not top of my.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Not top of your radar. Yeah, Jordy.

• 2:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I still think it's fun to use AI to research yourself. Chevron CEO was researching his own business activities to validate, I think. But I'm sure it's fun to look up some of your best investments in chat GPT. But it's great, great to have you on the show.

• 2:08:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I've been fans of what you guys have been doing, even, even when it started as the tech bro podcast.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  A long time ago, nine months ago.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  That's right. Yeah, I think we might have replied to one of your posts. We had some fun with that. It was a good time.

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, what, how, how, how would you introduce yourself to the audience? What, what, what's the right way to think about your position in the, in the ecosystem right now?

• 2:09:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'd say that I'm, I'm kind of one of the OG seed investors. And so, you know, seed investing wasn't really a thing 20 years ago. You know, you, you either scared up a few dollars from angels and friends, or you went straight to raising 5 million. And so guys like myself and Josh Koppelman started to create these seed firms. And things have obviously changed a lot. Now, nobody questions whether they're seed investing. Now, there's like 2,000, you know, now if you go to LinkedIn and type seed investor, I think you get more of those than there are founders now. So it's changed a lot. Yeah.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  What's been the, uh, what's been your strategy for dealing with the change in, uh, in the market structure? I mean, some firms have been like, I need a massive growth fund so I can ride my winners all the way up. I need to, you know, really like incubate stuff and like get huge ownership stake at the early stage with less capital. Uh, what's been most enticing to you?

• 2:10:12Speaker 08

  Yeah. You know, what I, what I started to realize was I always say to founders, um, you have to avoid the comparison trap at all costs and that, you know, startups role in the world is not to be better, but to change the subject. So I realized about 10 years ago that I was a hypocrite giving that advice because here I was one of 2,000 seed funds. And so I was like, you know, I'm playing the comparison game all the time. And so what I started to do is to try to, um, say that I don't want to be pitched anymore, that I want to, uh, find founders before they figured their ideas out and get to know them, uh, and, and come up with ways to help them evaluate whether they really want to

• 2:10:54Speaker 08

  pursue the idea or not. And so, um, you know, uh, um, there's that famous essay that Paul Graham wrote and Brian Chesky talked about, uh, founder mode. Um, I like to find people who are in builder mode. Sorry, a little, little sound effect for you. Yeah, we'll have a complimentary one for, for builder mode, I suppose, but I like that. Who are, you know, pursuing something almost to an unreasonable degree. They're down some rabbit hole. They're not sure it's a business yet, uh, but they're doing it because it's interesting for its own sake. They're, you know, people are living in the field. So that's really what I try to do is find the, what the prime movers to be. And, and this may, this may appeal somewhat to your all sensibilities, particularly,

• 2:11:38Speaker 08

  you know, some of the founders fund adjacent stuff, right? But you're trying to, you know, I just think that, that, um, Some people just have this very rare blend of determination and original thinking. And those people to me are the prime movers and my job is to find those people before the rest of the world believes.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Do you have particularly favorite lakes to fish in? You know, there's the folks that are, you know, at Stanford and Waterloo constantly, you know, the Teal Fellowship is pulling from pulling kids out of college. Y C pulls a lot of new grads, casts a really wide funnel. Chris Dixon was famous for kind of hanging out on Reddit and finding like these little pockets and communities where, oh, there's a bunch of people doing 3D printing online. Let me go find a 3D printing company or VR or whatever else where the Coinbase investment I think came from. Saw the community there. There's other people that are specifically graded at pulling founders out of big tech, big tech companies.

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  How do you think about the different lakes to fish in for the next generation of founders?

• 2:12:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, one of my mental models, I call it freshmen and seniors. And so, you know, like when I first met Justin Khan, when he was doing Justin TV, which became Twitch. He's a year out of college and he's sold his prior company with Emmett Shear on eBay. And, you know, these guys didn't know much about business. They sold their company.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  You don't know their story?

• 2:13:03Speaker 08

  No.

• 2:13:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, their first Y C company. I mean, you can tell it. You know it better than I do.

• 2:13:07Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. So I'm sitting at a coffee shop with the Weebly guys and they were pitching me. And the pitch is almost over and I see this guy show up in the door, the coffee shop. And he's wearing a baseball cap and a camera on it and wires going into a backpack. And I remember thinking, that's kind of a strange dude. I wonder what's up with that guy. And, you know, as, as the meeting's wrapping up, he's walking into the place. And David Rosenko of Weebly goes, did you get your email earlier today? I was like, what are you talking about? Well, we got this friend, Justin Khan. He's got this new idea, Justin TV. And right then Justin sits down and turns his laptop around and I'm on the laptop screen because his camera is looking at my face and he's, I'm going to do a 24 seven reality show of my life and broadcast it on the internet.

• 2:13:52Speaker 08

  And I was like, Justin, that's, that's one of the dumbest things I ever heard. Like, that's not even how reality TV works. You know, Rick, like TV.

• 2:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Scripted.

• 2:13:59Speaker 08

  You record a week of stuff. They script it and they condense it down. Nobody wants to watch you like you're some fish cam all the time, right? Like, that's not, like, you're not even describing what the business is. And he's like, "You're supposed to be a seed OG. Why are you shitting on my idea?" And I was like, you know, it's terrible, but like, what's, "How do you even do it? What's in your backpack?" And so he showed me how Kyle Vogt, right, who was a genius, uh, had designed this thing that did EVDO Cellular combined with internet software. And so that night, I was just like researching them a little bit more. And I'd seen that Justin and Emmett had sold their prior company on eBay. So they had a calendar company called Kiko. And, uh, it was an Ajax calendar at the time, and Google decides to Google Calendar, and they're like, "Okay, we're, we're out of business."

• 2:14:44Speaker 08

  "So why don't we try to sell this?" So they, they tried to sell it in normal ways. Nobody will buy it. So they just put the company on eBay. And they sell it to Two Cow's for $250,000.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 2:14:56Speaker 08

  And I thought, you know.

• 2:14:57Jordi Hays?

  Just common sense. Uh, we want to sell something. I don't know. Put it on a big marketplace.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  Put it on eBay.

• 2:15:03Speaker 08

  But one of the things, back to kind of where do you look for things, um, I like, I call those freshman founders because they, they, they, they haven't been polluted by, uh, the conventional wisdom echo chamber of the valley. They, they think that all you need to do is build stuff and sell stuff. And the rest of it is a waste of time. They don't even know that there's time to waste other than doing those things. Because they don't have to unlearn anything. They don't know much yet. Uh, and that ends up being really valuable because they end up caring about the right things. And then, um, sophomores and juniors, I have less luck with. So the sophomores are like, they read a few too many blogs. They spend a little too much time on Twitter.

• 2:15:43Speaker 08

  They know a bit too much that's not worth knowing. Uh, and then the juniors are the worst. They've, um, worked at Google and Facebook and a bunch of fancy companies, and they decide it's time to be anointed as a founder. And so they raise a $5 million seed round and pay their buddies quarter of a million bucks a year each. And, uh, usually, you know, run out of money halfway into it, raise some more, and then they decide not to do it because they can get a bigger job that pays better back at a big.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  It's also interesting too with Justin. He, he didn't have enough experience to realize that it was a dumb. Business opportunity to stream his life, but then it turned out, you know, over a decade later, some of the most popular streaming content is people just filming their entire lives. Like he was just, he was living 20 years in the future.

• 2:16:32Speaker 08

  Yeah. Justin wanted to be an influencer before there was such a word, right? He wanted to be internet famous. And so what you realize in hindsight is he was trying to solve the problem he had. And, and those are the, the types of freshmen that I've had the best luck with. They're scratching their own itch, right? They're living in the future. Uh, they, they don't really even think at first that it's a business opportunity, you know? Marc Andreessen, when he did the Mosaic browser when he's 21 years old, he's just trying to make the internet useful and it wasn't. And so he built what was missing. And then the seniors I've had luck with too, like, um, uh, Kasper Yunus had applied intuition.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:13Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of luck.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  I love, I love him. And every time he comes on the show, it's so much fun.

• 2:17:18Speaker 08

  Yeah. And so, so like the thing about Kasper is he was experienced enough that he knew that what matters is building, selling and all the other stuff is window dressing. And so ironically, the, the freshmen and the seniors have the same priorities, but for different reasons. You know, the freshmen have the benefit of the beginner's mind and they don't know a bunch of stuff that gets in the way of them succeeding. And then the seniors know enough to know that some of it's not important.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:44Speaker 08

  That it's best. And so they, they focus on the stuff that matters. And I, I love working with both because it, with the freshman founders, you're trying to help them avoid avoidable mistakes. Whereas with somebody like Kasper Yunus, you're trying to help them run up the score, you know, because like, you know, he knows what he's doing. Uh, you know, he doesn't have to learn business 101. But, um, you know, there, there are other things where you could be helpful.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I even noticed that my, my, my first, my first company, uh, an ad network was like very freshman mindset. I mean, I was. Very young at the time, but it was like get something for one price, sell it for another and just do that over and over and you're going to have a business. And then my second company was like, oh, we need a wedge products and we need to do this and that. And like, if we're going to do this and then that. And then that's a really, you know, created something complicated because maybe I had read too many memos on tech Twitter or whatever. And then third, being TBPN, it's like, we just, we have a daily show. We try to make it better every single day. And we just do that over and over. So I think you can see

• 2:18:52Jordi Hays?

  that kind of freshman or senior mindset even across an entrepreneur's companies.

• 2:18:57Speaker 08

  Yeah. And I think the other thing you guys did, well, I don't know, you, I wasn't there when it happened, but I imagine that when you started it, you weren't super attached to how successful it had to be. It was like, you take a small enough risk that you're not attached to whether the risk pays off or not. And if it starts to go your way, you just do more of it. And a lot of the, a lot of the great startups that I've gotten involved with had that quality where, you know, you didn't try to think of a startup. You were just doing something that was interesting and it just kind of fed on itself. And then one thing led to another.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who else sticks out as that freshman archetype that you've worked with in your career?

• 2:19:35Speaker 08

  I'd say the guys at Weebly were that way. So that was a very, that was a very fortuitous two hours, you know, in that coffee shop, one after the other.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  You get two deals done.

• 2:19:48Speaker 08

  Two deals in one hour, you know, that folks did really well.

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Just do that every day and you'll produce billions of dollars in return.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  Talk to me about, about Weebly's business, how it grew, the actual economics of that industry. And then I want, I want to bridge to like your take on the new crop of site builders, because we've been having this debate over the lovable's and the, then the different companies that are playing in this space v zero. There's a whole bunch. And we're kind of going back and forth on like, is it just such a big market that everyone wins and everyone builds a huge business? Or is there some sort of winner take all dynamic? So if you could walk through the Weebly story and then kind of bridge to modern web development, I'd love to hear that story.

• 2:20:30Speaker 08

  Yeah. And the Weebly, it may not satisfy our modern desires, but it's, it's, it's kind of interesting. So these guys were about to graduate from Penn State. And I think we invested, I think, I think they raised at. Six hundred fifty thousand dollars at two million dollars pre-money. And it was like Anderson and Biden, a couple of guys. Those were back in the days when Paul Graham would call you and make sure you were going to show up at Demo Day, right? Because the batches would be like 10 to 15 companies. And so, so I remember it's like two months after the money's cleared. And have another site visit with them.

• 2:21:12Speaker 08

  And I'm like, huh, you know, we ought to start thinking about what we're going to need to do to be ready to raise a Series A. And I said, so what do you guys think we need to do to be ready to raise a Series A? And they look at me like, what are you talking about? And I say, well, you know, you've raised six hundred fifty thousand dollars. And they look at me like, I know, right? And I realized that like to them, six hundred fifty thousand dollars, it might as well have been six hundred fifty million. Right? It was more money. They were surprised it was legal for them to have that much money. And so they ended up, they ended up not raising money again until many, many years later from Sequoia. And at that time, I think we were like 65 times in the money on the investment.

• 2:21:53Speaker 08

  So I don't know that it gives any lessons for today's world other than just,

• 2:22:00Speaker 08

  I've kind of, I kind of make fun of my ability to predict how these things are going to turn out. And that's why I'm so founder focused, right? I just think that determination is just such the high order bit.

• 2:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think venture is an easier or harder game than it was back when you could get, you know, invest 650K at a two cap into some great founders? Because in some ways, it's like, it's much more competitive now, but also the nature of there being more capital means that.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  And for extra reference, Weebly, I mean, I'm not sure if this is 100% right because it's AI overview, but acquired by Block Square for 365 million dollars in cash and stock in April 2018. 365 million dollars, that's a seed round nowadays.

• 2:22:45Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Good next stream.

• 2:22:47Speaker 08

  So there's no question it's gotten harder as an investor, right? And I think even as a builder, I think there's a lot more distractions right now for the founders. And there's a lot more sloppiness on the playing field. And so you've got to play the game that's on the field, whether you're an investor or a founder. I think, you know, back in the days when, you know, Justin was and Emmett were doing Twitch or, you know, what became Twitch or David and those guys, Dan doing Weebly. I think it was more of an act of rebellion to start a startup, right? The dot com meltdown had happened about five years prior. You know, startups were not a popular sexy path for people. It was, it was the path for people who didn't want to have a job at a normal company.

• 2:23:32Speaker 08

  And that was, you know, the only way they could avoid it.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  It's incredibly trendy right now. It has become like

• 2:23:39Jordi Hays?

  It's trendy and it's comfortable.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  It's tracked, yeah.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  It's come, you know, if somebody can quit their job in big tech and then maybe they're not making quite as much, but, but they've got a nice office and they can, like you said, hire all their friends.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  I will throw out a counter to this, which is, I was thinking about the El Segundo companies and the hard tech companies. I don't know if you've spent any time with those folks, but it, that feels like, you know, Mountain View in 2008 to me where these, these founders are taking extreme risk. There's not going to be a $10 billion aqua hire from some mag seven company for your rain cloud seeding company. Like if it fails, you're, look, you're getting a normal job. And, and, and you're not doing tons of secondary and raising a ton of money and hiring everybody. And so you really are burning more of the ships when you do one of these crazy hard tech companies. But I don't know if you've spent any time with those or you have a take on that.

• 2:24:34Speaker 08

  Funny you say that. So I think it may have been the only company I invested in in 2021. Certainly in the second half is a company called Hadrian.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:24:44Speaker 08

  Yeah. And like, I just think Chris Bowers is a stud, right? And like, you know, what we're describing about the, the types of founders who overcome obstacles and can move the world down a different path. He's one of those.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:57Speaker 08

  And so, but, but he's a perfect illustration, right, of what you're

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  And I mean, I don't know if 2021 is the exact year, but like, there were a couple of years there where like, you could see the toll that the business was taking on him. Like, he was working extremely hard. And you could tell that it was not, there was not some cushy, soft landing for him. It's like, either you build the thing, you get it to work, and it becomes really big, or you're kind of screwed. I don't know.

• 2:25:25Speaker 08

  Being a real founder in some ways is more of a curse, right? Like, people, it's just like, it's not a fun job. It's kind of a shit job. And it's like, if people really understood, and it's, but it's like, you're, you're called to do the thing, and so you can't not do it. So it's, it doesn't feel like you have any choice but to do it because the, you know, there's no way Chris isn't going to do Hadrian, right? He's just too, he's just too high agency and too high commit, commitment to, to let it fail, right?

• 2:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you ask any, any founder what the lowest point in their life is, and it's probably has to do with their business, right? Maybe some family thing, but almost always they have like a specific moment where they're, everything was.

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, zooming out, I, I was, I was reading the, the Caesar's Palace coup this weekend about the birth of Apollo, the private equity group. And I was thinking about how these, there's these eras in finance when there's booms, like the LBO boom in the eighties, the high frequency trading boom. And then there's, there's multiple venture booms, but I was wondering, I was trying to think about like, is, who, who's the person like under 40 who's building the next great financial firm? Like, there are lots of great young investors who are writing checks or building companies, and there's a lot of founders. But I was having, I was having trouble putting my finger on someone who's, who's young

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  and actually set on building a financial firm of some course. I don't know if anyone comes to mind for you. I asked ChatGPT and the answer it gave me was Josh Kushner, which is.

• 2:27:03Speaker 08

  I would have said Josh.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  Which is great. It's true, but also it's like, he's an investor in OpenAI, so I don't know if it's fair play, but, but is there anyone else? You've seen that maybe is taking a different tact in building a financial firm for the future. Like what your advice would be to somebody who wants to actually make a career out of venture capital. Leopold's another good one, I think. Yeah.

• 2:27:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. I haven't seen a lot, you know, the one way I've, one way I would come at that question is to say, what is the financial product that entrepreneurs aren't getting?

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:27:36Speaker 08

  Uh, and, and I think that it's probably some combination of venture capital meets project finance. And so I think you have some of these that are, you know, in the world of atoms and bits. And it, it only seems like Elon Musk and Palmer Lucky and a few other guys have been able to pull them off.

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:27:52Speaker 08

  And you could say, well, that's because there aren't many of those. And that, I think that's true. But another way to come at that might be to ask, uh, you know, is it, is it a good thing that Elon had to basically bet his entire PayPal fortune? To make Tesla a possibility and but for that, there would be no Tesla. Because he had to bet all of his winnings on that. And I think Palmer probably similarly invested a lot, but he also had help with the founders fund folks who are pretty, pretty, you know, off the beaten path at the time.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:24Speaker 08

  So, so I do think that there is, um, there's a legitimate argument that says that a lot of our institutions that combine the worlds of atoms and bits need to be reimagined. And people say, why does a venture capital do that? But I don't think venture capital as it's designed today is, is tailor fit for that. I think it's probably some type of new innovation, right? And it would be almost the opposite direction of Y C. It'd be something that is more in the upstream capital markets rather than lean startups and that kind of thing. But I think, I think that could be kind of interesting. I'd like to see somebody do that.

• 2:28:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're starting to see a little bit of that with, I mean, you hear a lot about those hard tech rounds where it's very clear that the headline number is a mix of debt and equity. And that's usually two different firms. And then, uh, and then there's always been this question of like, is there a way to bring some sort of, uh, like Silicon Valley technologist mindset to essentially a turnaround of a legacy company where there are some assets? But there's something that the company can stand or like, that was what Chris Power at, uh, at Hadrian was working on before he was doing a search fund.

• 2:29:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, and it's and it's interesting, right? There are some people that I look to. Another guy would be the Stefan Bonsell of Moderna, you know, like you have some like like one company I was involved with back in the day was Okta. And when you saw Okta, you're like, OK, these guys are from Salesforce. They're really smart. They're saying there's going to be lots of cloud apps. They're going to need identity management. And I was like, sounds good to me, right? Like, but you're like, that's a very plausible future, and they're the perfect guys to do it. There are other futures that are going to take a lot longer to happen and much more divergent from the present. I think that Moderna was that way, right? 10 years and $5 billion before they ship a product.

• 2:30:16Speaker 08

  SpaceX is that way. Tesla is that way. And so to me, the interesting question becomes, can you come up with technical risk takeout gates? Where you'd have funding that follows the initial funding and then you don't have to have somebody like Elon Musk be a miraculous fundraiser. Going throughout the world, trying to find money wherever it exists. People forget that's how it was 10 years ago, right? Even after they went public. And so I'd like to see the capital markets. Part of what was good about seed investing back when I was doing it at first, or Josh, was that we were doing something that entrepreneurs needed that they weren't getting. And so to me, most of the good answers in financial innovation have something to do with that.

• 2:30:59Speaker 08

  You have somebody who would make great productive use of capital who's not getting it somehow. And the markets have a gap in their ability to supply that capital in that way.

• 2:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think in the case of Hadrian, isn't, aren't the capital markets working quite well in the sense that he raised a bunch of risk capital and then was able to de-risk certain customer relationships and process? And then now he can access more traditional.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  You know, forms of debt.

• 2:31:26Speaker 08

  For sure. And I imagine if, you know, the American dynamism team at A16Z was watching this, they'd say, hey, Maples, what you just described, that's what we're doing. And there's, there's a lot of truth to that. So, you know, I'm not sure Chris could have done Hadrian 10 years prior. And so I think that, you know, there were some changes that were happening that were creating the conditions. But I, but I'd still like to see more, you know, like, for example, I personally invested in Boom Supersonic because I think that Blake is just wildly ambitious. We just need more people like that who, we, we need, we need to have permission-based innovation in the world of atoms and not just bits. And the more we can do that, I think the better.

• 2:32:10Speaker 08

  Yeah. And so that's, that's what I think is missing.

• 2:32:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, at a high level, it feels like entrepreneurs are pretty catered to on the capital market side. Like there is, there is dollars at every scale, every order of magnitude. I mean,

• 2:32:23Jordi Hays?

  I don't, yeah, I don't know any.

• 2:32:24John Coogan?

  Hundred billion dollar rounds, and then people can snap their fingers on X and raise 100K in the DMs if they need to.

• 2:32:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think I've met, I've not, I haven't met an incredible founder in the last five years. Somebody that, you know, just personally, I feel is incredible, that hasn't been able to raise.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that has that part of their origin story. Like, they might have other struggles. Oh, yeah, we got in a lawsuit or, you know, oh, we, you know, we had to pivot entirely because some company steamrolled us, or we misanticipated the progress of some underlying technology. But the, the, the, oh, yeah, we couldn't raise for five years. That's not really a story right now. Maybe the, the bigger question to answer in just the broader Silicon Valley is like, how do you get more of those, those freshmen, those weird thinkers, those people who are going to go and do, go from Groupon to building supersonic planes? That's a crazy move.

• 2:33:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you get people that aren't just seeking status?

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  People.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  Less base hits, more swing for the fences.

• 2:33:24Speaker 08

  Yeah. And by the way, I think part of the reason that the people who succeed at it do is like, I think Elon's great superpower among many is that he only pursues business ideas where he existentially refuses to fail. And so like Elon never starts a company and says, well, I hope it works out, easy come, easy go. If it doesn't, you know, he's like, I'm only going to tackle problems where I will never freaking back down ever, no matter what.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:53Speaker 08

  And so like, if you say, hey, getting to Mars is the most important accomplishment I want to achieve in my life, you don't sit there and handicap the odds. You're like Han Solo, right in an asteroid. You're like, don't tell me the odds, right? You're like, this is worth pursuing, even if the odds are against me. And that has a way of impacting the odds, right? Of your ability to succeed where others can't. Because if you'll even countenance the possibility of failure, it changes the equation, right? It changes the whole risk that you take.

• 2:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Where do you, where do you think we are on the, on the AI hype cycle?

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  The Gartner hype.

• 2:34:27Jordi Hays?

  Peak of inflated expectations or are we headed for the trough of disillusionment?

• 2:34:33Speaker 08

  Oh, man, probably all the above. Uh, you know, um, here's, here's what I've been thinking a lot about is, um, in the era of the microprocessors, you had mass computation and then the internet, you had mass connectivity. And what got commoditized with the micro age was the transistor and then you had the packet get commoditized. And so what I'm interested in is what happens in a world where we have mass cognition and where, you know, the inference unit, you know, becomes commodity. Cause right now, everybody's talking about the inputs, Nvidia chips, hyper scaler models, do we need more energy? And all those things are valuable, but it's just like in the early days of the PC era, everybody talked about the hardware.

• 2:35:17Speaker 08

  People didn't talk about software until much later. And so I think what's interesting to me is to ask not what's happening, but what is going to become scarce, given all the stuff that's happening? Uh, you know, what will the new scarcity be? I don't think that's been determined yet. So that that gives me a lot of optimism. But it's not the latest model du jour and it's not the latest chip du jour. It's not the it's not the latest scaling factor that makes things more abundant. It's the thing that becomes rate limited in a world that where it's a given that the new abundance happens. And so that's that's what I'm looking for these days. So, you know, in a world where micro processing is free,

• 2:35:58Speaker 08

  software becomes scarce because you have to make all these machines useful that are everywhere. And in a world where the packet is free, what becomes valuable is the owners of these networks that aggregate attention and users and create network effects and become the systems of record. And so, okay, what will be the monopoly AI companies in a world where cognition is abundant? I don't think we know yet, but that but but to me, that is the question that is really interesting.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  That is, that is 100% the question. That is, that is fantastic. I love that. I'm going to be digging into that for years. That's a fantastic question.

• 2:36:34Speaker 08

  So he wrote the microcosm and then the telecosm like I wish George Gilder would write the cognitocosm, right? And talk about like what's going to be the new scarcity that complements the new abundance.

• 2:36:46Jordi Hays?

  Used to be that, you know, that we didn't have enough Reddit threads on niche topics. And now now the LLMs will just hallucinate one for you.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  It's crazy. Anyway, we're keeping our next guest waiting, but this was fantastic. We'd love for you to hop back on and continue the conversation. I really enjoyed this.

• 2:37:04Jordi Hays?

  Hope you hope you have a good trip to the coffee shop later. Hopefully you meet the next Justin, Justin Khan and the Weebly founders.

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  Deals out of it.

• 2:37:11Speaker 08

  I could get another two for in the next three months. I'd be happy.

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  We're rooting for you. Hopefully, hopefully at a two cap again.

• 2:37:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Bring back the two cap. Bring back the two cap.

• 2:37:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, goodbye Newmont. Yeah, two, two, two for one hour and two hours in the two cap.

• 2:37:29John Coogan?

  Incredible. Well, thanks so much for hopping on, Mike. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:37:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Mike. Have a good one.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. And as a benefit of Restream, we got our first commenter on LinkedIn, I believe.

• 2:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  The chat is just blowing up. We have chatters on.

• 2:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  TV here. I see folks on YouTube. Thank you. You are live on TVPN. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:38:03Speaker 09

  Woo, feeling good. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:38:07John Coogan?

  Do you remember meeting me?

• 2:38:10John Coogan?

  We met in, near Stanford, like a decade ago, with Anker Jain, who now runs that amazing fintech.

• 2:38:18Speaker 09

  Built.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  Built, yes. I, am I misremembering that? Do you remember this? I think we met years ago with Anker.

• 2:38:26Speaker 09

  This is when I was at Human?

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  Yes, I think so.

• 2:38:29Speaker 09

  Okay, awesome. Good to see you again.

• 2:38:32Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 2:38:34John Coogan?

  How, how would you describe where you are right now? Give us the intro. Introduce yourself to the, to the, to the folks who are watching.

• 2:38:41Speaker 09

  I am a general partner at Long Journey Ventures. We're a pre-seed and seed stage firm. And our core thesis is that we think the biggest companies of tomorrow will look really weird at the pre-seed and seed stages. And our, our mission is to be the second believer in the magically weird.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  There are so many weird things in the portfolio. We had Cyan and Lee on the show, what was it, a couple of months ago, talking about the, the diamond company, the cloud seeding company, I believe, is in the portfolio. There's just weird stuff all over. What else is in the portfolio?

• 2:39:13Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Justin, Justin is a close friend.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Venture partner. He's always, he's always investing in weird, silly things. And then like five years later, they're, they're deck of corns.

• 2:39:25Speaker 09

  Totally. Did they mention the robotic eyelash extension company?

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  No, what's that? Explain that to me.

• 2:39:31Speaker 09

  Oh yeah, um, it's a robot that applies eyelash extensions instead of taking an hour or hour and a half for a human to do it. The robot can do both eyes at the same time and it takes 50 minutes.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  That sounds high risk because if the robot like flinches, it just rips your eyelashes out.

• 2:39:50John Coogan?

  Well, that's why they invented the anti-flinching technology.

• 2:39:52Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:39:53Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:39:53Jordi Hays?

  There you go, patented.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  It doesn't flinch.

• 2:39:55Speaker 09

  I mean, humans flinch too, so it's not, it's not.

• 2:39:58Jordi Hays?

  It's all high risk.

• 2:39:59John Coogan?

  It's true, superhuman unflinching AI. This is, this is gonna work. Um, yeah.

• 2:40:04Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think we, I, I, I'm glad you guys do this. Uh, you know, obviously, I mean, it seems like the, the rest, uh, the rest of the partnership, we've, we've had them all on the show and I'm, there's not enough people that are just like actively trying to find the weird stuff, but like you guys act, do it consistently.

• 2:40:22John Coogan?

  A lot of people say they want to find the weird stuff and then it just winds up being a lot of B2B sass.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Defense tech.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Whatever's on trend.

• 2:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Whatever's on trend.

• 2:40:31Speaker 09

  Okay, we, we do quite a bit of defense tech too, but I think we were doing it back when it was weird or taboo.

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:40:37Speaker 09

  I mean, Cyan was one of the first.

• 2:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Two years ago.

• 2:40:39Speaker 09

  Role, yeah.

• 2:40:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, i- i- is there something to the now contrarian statement that, of that occasionally you want to do consensus investing and you want to be the momentum trader? Uh, it's certainly paid off for people in AI over the last few years. I- i- can you at least see the, the value in that?

• 2:40:58Speaker 09

  Oh, for sure. No, we have, we have quite a bit of cognitive dissonance on the team because so many talented builders are, are building in AI.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:07Speaker 09

  Um, we want to play the game that's out on the field.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:11Speaker 09

  Uh, so we, but yeah, it kind of like hurts our souls when things feel consensus. Uh, and it's a question like, are we too late?

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:20Speaker 09

  Because I mean, we feel like the best time to invest in seed and pre-seed is when things feel absurd or, or non-consensus. And we want to, we want to invest before they become consensus. That's where the alpha is.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the, uh, uh, what's internally like your feeling on like the AI hype cycle? Uh, where we are, it feels like it's been. Like punishingly dominant for the last few years. Are you overall

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Expectations are inflated.

• 2:41:51John Coogan?

  Are there pockets of optimism? How are you seeing kind of the overall AI boom? Sam Altman recently said, we might be in a bubble, which is kind of a crazy thing to say. But who knows, maybe he's having fun. What is your current thesis on like opportunity within AI?

• 2:42:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, we like to think of like the second order of facts and especially have been looking more towards deep tech. And the implications and how AI creates a tailwind for deep tech companies. You know, robotics, biotech, et cetera. Because we feel like, you know, working in those spaces, there's a lot of defensibility in doing something that's really hard. So that's kind of how we're, we're thinking about it.

• 2:42:38John Coogan?

  How, uh, yeah, how do you dial in like, um, the, the opportunity there? Obviously you have like big companies. I mean, Tesla just put out this big, the fourth master plan. Going into humanoids, it seems like it's a, it's an incredibly expensive place to play. But then, you know, we, we, we just had a friend send us a, a new Roomba. That is just like a, a new, a new friendly robot vacuum cleaner. And it seems like, I mean, it's a fantastic product. I'm not exactly sure how the business is doing, but it seems like a fantastic business.

• 2:43:11Jordi Hays?

  They're doing really well.

• 2:43:12John Coogan?

  And, and, and those are like

• 2:43:14Speaker 09

  Awesome.

• 2:43:14John Coogan?

  Two like wildly diverging opportunities. What are you seeing that's kind of interesting in, uh, in the deep tech AI enabled like AI tailwind world?

• 2:43:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, we're looking at everything across robotics because, I mean, there's just the ability to train robots because of LLMs and physical AI. I mean, it's just gotten so much faster and easier, which is, you know, the, the cost of training robots to do something that's actually creating value has just gone down immensely. So that is one of the tailwinds that we think is enabled. You know, we've invested in companies that, you know, doing case picking and distribution centers. You know, we've invested in robotic eyelash extensions. You know, there, there, you know, many, many applications of, of robots. We've looked at a lot of, you know, in-home robots.

• 2:44:09Speaker 09

  I'm not a hundred percent sure how People will feel with a humanoid-like figure in their home. Um, I mean, I don't, I don't know if I personally want that, but.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. On, on that, do you think that um, we're learning anything from the, the uh, the reception of the like AI companionship? To how robots will be uh, like, received in the home? Because I agree with you. Um, that having a robot over there that's in my house seems maybe a little Black Mirror, a little odd. But at the same time, I also would never have predicted that, you know, millions of people would be uh, complaining about ChatGPT four O going away because they saw it as a friend and a coach.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  And then, you know, Elon's going into the romantic space and there's like all these different areas where it seems like people are actually, you know, incredibly receptive to having a personal relationship of whatever kind with the robot. Uh, do you think there's something we can learn about that for, or from that?

• 2:45:14Speaker 09

  Absolutely. I mean, I am definitely reserve the right to change my opinion over time, but I think today it would be creepy and Black Mirror-esque. And I am much more into the idea of like ambient, you know, single-purpose objects doing it, doing a task, like something that lives in the laundry room. You know, moving your laundry or folding your laundry and, you know, that can be one thing that lives there. And then I will have another thing that lives elsewhere. And I, I think like ambient robots, but not, you know, necessarily rosy.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  I completely agree with you, and yet I can immediately imagine the Black Mirror scenario where my laundry robot is like, John, I'd, I'd like to actually go trim the trees today. Like, you know.

• 2:46:02Jordi Hays?

  Or I figured out a way to, I figured out a way to run the laundry with the door open and I'm gonna flood your home. We had, we had, we had somebody on the show that, that makes a, like a

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  A lamp.

• 2:46:14Jordi Hays?

  Bedroom lamp that can fold your laundry.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  It was the, the exact.

• 2:46:17Speaker 09

  Oh yeah, I saw it to that company. I love it. I love it.

• 2:46:20Jordi Hays?

  But the, but the thing is you could easily imagine the Black Mirror scenario where the lamps just start, you know, killing the.

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it really lent itself to the dystopian world, but.

• 2:46:29Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you guys, um, talk about, uh, like timelines? Cause something that stood out to me from conversations with Lee and Justin, and I know you guys are talking all the time about deals is they're willing, from my sense is they're willing to invest in a founder and, and be okay with them, like going and just wandering and tinkering for a long period of time. And there's less of this pressure of like, okay, we're leading your seed and then you're going to sprint to the A, like hopefully later this year.

• 2:46:57John Coogan?

  Do you do the seed and crusoe or something like that? Wasn't that?

• 2:47:00Speaker 09

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:47:01John Coogan?

  It's a crazy deal, like.

• 2:47:02Speaker 09

  I mean, I think it would be rough if we were named Long Journey Ventures.

• 2:47:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:47:07Speaker 09

  But you have to get to the.

• 2:47:08Jordi Hays?

  Long journey, short time horizon. Get to the A this year.

• 2:47:12Speaker 09

  Or actually medium journey. Yeah.

• 2:47:14John Coogan?

  I could pump more money into this thing. Um, but yeah, I mean, uh, like unpack a little bit more about like, is that just matching, finding the right founders? Is it a specific vibe that you bring? Is that like not taking a board seat, taking a board seat, coaching the founder?

• 2:47:29Speaker 09

  We do not take board seats. Yeah. We do not typically take board seats. And yeah, I think sometimes, you know, when you're investing in the absurd before it becomes consensus, sometimes you whiff, you whiff it.

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:47:43Speaker 09

  And, you know, it's just a matter of talking that through with the founder and usually the founder realizes it even before you do. And so, yeah, we have quite a few companies that end up pivoting and re navigating the idea maze. But, uh, but yeah, sometimes it lands and then you're one of the earliest investors in something incredible like Crusoe. So, yeah.

• 2:48:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. What a crazy, crazy.

• 2:48:07Speaker 09

  Far from the course.

• 2:48:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, uh, how, how have you been processing the, uh,

• 2:48:14John Coogan?

  All the news about like Jevon's paradox and like the the the token costs coming down, but then companies using more expensive models and maybe this is gonna hurt margins and whatnot. Like, did you did you go through the same roller coaster ride that most people did during like the deep seek moment? Or how are you how are you processing the overall temperature of like how the the latest trends in the AI models just affect like the the companies that are actually building on this technology day to day?

• 2:48:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I think the cost reductions are obviously extremely significant. And and I think, you know, people right now, a lot of enterprises are in the kind of pilot or experimental phase where I think they want to use, you know, the highest performance models based on the academic benchmarks. But I think cost reduction or, you know, the cost profile will really come into play when people want to start deploying, you know, AI companions to all their employees or, you know, autonomous background agents, you know, these sort of deployments across many workloads that will consume a lot of tokens, then I think costs will really matter. So I think that's that's kind of like what I'm

• 2:49:32Speaker 09

  looking out for is, you know, not just increases in performance, but how these cost reductions will enable, you know, scaling more use cases.

• 2:49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we were debating Notion earlier. Ivan said that these gross margins went from just just scraping by at 90% and now it's down at 80%. And to me, it seemed like it's great. It seemed like it'd take all day long for for growth and a better product and something that's AI enabled. Of course, you got to build the right the right product in there, but it seemed like it seemed like a no brainer. And that's probably why he's talking to Chris Mims at the Wall Street Journal. Definitely.

• 2:50:13Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  About it.

• 2:50:14Speaker 09

  It's interesting. And I think like the sentiment has been interesting. It almost feels Like the general reaction or like the gen pop reaction to new models is that we're almost in like the iPhone era. I mean, I remember when people used to wait in line, people freaked out about like new iOS releases and and new iPhone releases. And now people are like kind of deeply ambivalent about whether they're gonna they're gonna get the new iPhone or not, but um. It almost feels like the public feels like we're in that spot with uh the newest AI models. But I feel like that that misses the picture on the the cost reduction side, which I think is really powerful.

• 2:50:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, it doesn't uh. I mean, this is why so many people are so bullish on on ChatGPT and OpenAI despite all the chaos and competition is. As you go walk to the average person down the street, have you tried any AIs? They'll say, yeah, I've used ChatGPT, it's cool. And then if you go to those same people and say, hey, I have something like ChatGPT, it's it's twice as good. They're gonna tell you, oh, okay, I don't know, I don't know what that's really gonna do for me, so. Yeah, it it's it felt like six months ago, we were in this era. Again, it was like the early iPhone days, like you said, where it was like, oh, a new model came out, let me rush to try it. And now there's way less of that that energy, so.

• 2:51:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:51:43Jordi Hays?

  It's good for the uh the new incumbents.

• 2:51:46John Coogan?

  We were talking to Mike Maples about this uh at the early stage, uh where like like the this analogy of like uh finding good lakes to fish in for outside the box thinkers, entrepreneurs that might be up for a long journey, they might wander for years like. Where are where are some of the underrated places where you're seeing pockets of entrepreneurial talent? Bubble up like there a year years ago, it was like, you know, uh. Like the the PayPal mafia was like a massive explosion of like just back all those companies, they're huge. Uh, the same thing happened with other other big tech companies that threw off a ton of talented entrepreneurs.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  There was like the invest in every Stanford grad phase there.

• 2:52:34Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:52:34John Coogan?

  You know, get kids to drop out of college to do startups like where where are the interesting pockets of entrepreneurial talent that you're seeing just across the globe?

• 2:52:43Speaker 09

  No, we're just, you know, waiting outside Y C demo day, no kidding.

• 2:52:49Speaker 09

  We have partnered with a really cool organization. I am really excited about where they're going. It's called Edge Institute and they run these, yeah, monthly pop-ups called Edge Esmeralda.

• 2:53:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:02Speaker 09

  They're about to do a month-long one in Patagonia. They did one in Healdsburg back in June.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:53:07Speaker 09

  And it attracts a lot of weird thinkers. It's not all founders. It's a lot of like researchers and you know, people who aren't necessarily in the kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem, but it's a lot of people with crazy ideas. I mean, that's the whole concept is edge, edge city, people living on the edge, doing things on the edge and um, operating, you know, in not necessarily societally accepted ways right now, but like probably will be consensus in the future.

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that seems like a good, good uh, pool to fish in, just like weird thinkers, academics, just anyone who's like-

• 2:53:46Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they might not be a founder themselves, but they're like, hey, my, my friend is working on this-

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  Or maybe they could be.

• 2:53:52Jordi Hays?

  Crazy idea.

• 2:53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:53Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 2:53:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, we, we did our residency program uh, in, in Healdsburg uh, back in June.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  And Edge Esmeralda is also building a city, right?

• 2:54:03Speaker 09

  Yeah, yes.

• 2:54:05John Coogan?

  What's the progress there? How's that going?

• 2:54:08Speaker 09

  They have bought a site for it and are, are plant, yeah, and are planning, planning the city itself.

• 2:54:15John Coogan?

  It's Devon, right?

• 2:54:16Speaker 09

  I'm not sure how, how much is public. Yeah, Devon.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta have her on the show. That'd be great.

• 2:54:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, you gotta have her on the, on the show.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Devon Zugel, right? Is that the name? I think that's her last name.

• 2:54:26Speaker 09

  I believe so, yes.

• 2:54:28John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we will get her on the show.

• 2:54:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, she's awesome.

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on.

• 2:54:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to chat.

• 2:54:35Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:54:36John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:54:37Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Talk soon.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:54:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Bezel. Get Bezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 2:54:47Jordi Hays?

  So, results from the Google ruling.

• 2:54:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:50Jordi Hays?

  They don't have to sell Chrome.

• 2:54:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:52Jordi Hays?

  And they don't have to stop paying to be the preferred search provider. So, total, total big tech victory.

• 2:54:58John Coogan?

  Let's go to Tyler. Did anything happen?

• 2:55:02Jordi Hays?

  Has anything ever happened?

• 2:55:03Speaker 02

  Nothing happened.

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  Nothing happened. Okay.

• 2:55:06Speaker 02

  When you're, the no on Play Market continues to print every time.

• 2:55:09John Coogan?

  No. Tyler is our official "Did Anything Happen?" correspondent. Why, yeah, what was the point of all this? Just to waste a bunch of time and attention and?

• 2:55:20Speaker 02

  Also, will not be required to divest Android.

• 2:55:23John Coogan?

  Yes. Okay. So, uh,

• 2:55:24Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 2:55:25John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, something happened if you're a lawyer collecting a paycheck.

• 2:55:28Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 2:55:29Speaker 02

  I mean, after like, what, five years?

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  This is five years.

• 2:55:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:34John Coogan?

  Wait, is this the final, final, final? Or is this like V1 final? I don't know. We need to figure that out.

• 2:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Somebody posted, uh, Meek Mill about to raise 25 mil from A16Z. Meek Mill quoted it and said, "My first time hearing that, but lol, but for real, I need investors. I don't think they're on Twitter."

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Donald Boat, Donald Boat responded and said, uh, "DM."

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  That's so funny.

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Meek, Donald Boat will lead you around, but first you need to buy him, uh, a private jet.

• 2:56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. What a crazy.

• 2:56:08Jordi Hays?

  He needs a jet.

• 2:56:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, the news here is Meek Mill, the rapper is, uh, going to start an AI company of some sort.

• 2:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it went viral a couple of days ago, working on a AI tool that can change the world lol.

• 2:56:20John Coogan?

  The funniest thing was that in the screenshot he posted, he'd, he'd switched it to 4O. And so, everyone was like, "He's been one-shot. He's been one-shot."

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it really, yeah, he had, uh,

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  That's a tell.

• 2:56:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, spec, spec, uh, or OpenCV, basically.

• 2:56:37John Coogan?

  Hopped in the chat and said that?

• 2:56:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, he, he was, yeah, he specifically highlighted that Meek had gone back to 4O. So, you can imagine he's deep in the prompts, being like, "Okay, me and ChatGPT figured out."

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Figured out.

• 2:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Figured out the next, the AI app that's gonna disrupt ChatGPT.

• 2:56:53John Coogan?

  That's great. Love to see it. Yeah, I I do switch back to 4O every once in a while, but only when I want it to write a really obviously one shotted like like piece of prose.

• 2:57:05Jordi Hays?

  You're right, John.

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So so if I if I want to write something that's like, it's not this, it's that. It's it's more than this. It's actually that. And like, use a lot of M dashes. I'll fire up 4O and and give it a little teaser.

• 2:57:17Jordi Hays?

  The comments, the comments on this or Skrally comments, let me know if you need help. I got 100 goons ready to go for you. Bone GPT, your favorite rapper's favorite rapper.

• 2:57:28John Coogan?

  Oh, OK.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Reginald says, Mr. Mill, I'm a well-known AI practitioner. I think you should collaborate with Cluey or Friend. These are some of the most innovative companies in the space. Happy to talk you through some of the players if you're interested. VC Braggs just says, top.

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  OK, anyway, let's switch over to Ron Rule. He says, this is pathetic. Gen Z in the workplace. This is a poll from Fox News. They say 77% of Gen Z in the workforce admitted to bringing a parent to a job interview. 53% of parents spoke with a hiring manager on their behalf. 73% parents helped complete work assignments. 45% regularly have a parent talk to their current manager. I think we're pro work, we're pro parent workplace here at TBPI. We've had many parents stop by the UltraDome, and it's been great. I don't mind talking to some parents about stuff. And I say, hey, if any one of the team needs to have their parents come in and help complete some work assignments, do it. Tyler, you want to bring your dad in and have him vibe code something for us?

• 2:58:30Speaker 02

  I think my parents are coming on Friday.

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Put them to work. Just let them know. They got to be in the 73% of parents that help complete work assignments. Mr. Cosgrove, you will be using Claude code today.

• 2:58:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're fully in support of all the team's parents, just helping them with their jobs.

• 2:58:47John Coogan?

  In fact, I would insist that they come and they pull their weight and they help uh, they help organize the information. I think we had Michael's parent in the in the UltraDome recently. I think, get them on the switcher. Get them on the, pull the graphics up. We need all hands on deck. Get the parents in here. This is a pro parent workplace.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Anyway, the great lock-in of September to December has begun. This is just a general announcement. It's also a bulking season, folks. We've seen this. It was teased earlier by Will at OpenAI. He said, "The de-twinkification process has begun." We are, of course, sending him some mass gainer on his journey to become a mass monster.

• 2:59:29Speaker 02

  Man, you're saying that it's bearish for OpenAI.

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  It's bearish? That he's de-twinkifying? Why? Why would that be?

• 2:59:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm in the gym. That could be spent on the keyboard.

• 2:59:40John Coogan?

  No, it's literally, it's, wait, oh, it's bearish because he's turning into a bear? Because he's going to be as large as a bear? Like a hairy bear man or something?

• 2:59:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm just imagining Will.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  Wait, is that the actual joke? Like twink and bear? Like bearish? Because like the opposite of a twink is a bear?

• 2:59:55Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know.

• 2:59:56John Coogan?

  Okay, I don't know. I think it's bullish. I think it's very good. I hope he turns into a bull and gets yoked like a bull. That would be, that would be very, very, very good. Lift, heavy, run far, marry early, eat steak and eggs. We didn't really talk about this.

• 3:00:11Jordi Hays?

  We missed this post.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  This was burning up the timeline over the weekend.

• 3:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was, uh, let me try to find the original quote.

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  It's deeper in the stack. And people like to hate on it. Jir Ticket, I mean, everyone was having their take. Some people were hating, some people were just having fun. Jir Ticket said, "The current vibe is drinking, drugs, 10 to 3, 5 days a week, lift heavy, run far, marry whoever, stay up late, eat spicy Szechuan food." That's pretty funny. Yeah, I, I don't know. This was something that was like very dunkable, but you know, the founder was very...

• 3:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this made me, when, when, uh...

• 3:00:45John Coogan?

  I thought it was fine.

• 3:00:46Jordi Hays?

  The actual quote was, "The current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 996, lift, heavy, run far, marry early, track, sleep, eat steak and eggs." And I resonated with this so deeply that it made me want to start doing drugs.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Wait, why?

• 3:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, I've just, this, this exactly tracks with my life.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh, yes.

• 3:01:07Jordi Hays?

  No drinking, no drugs.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  Yes, it is now so consensus to do this.

• 3:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Mary early, track sleep, eat state next. I was like, it's time to start binge drinking.

• 3:01:15John Coogan?

  This was sort of the top for that concept, but you know, I, I, I think overall that take is more correct. It's just more from first principles, more foundationally true than not. And so it should, it should stand the test of time as like roughly correct. Even if it's like phrased in a little bit of a incendiary kind of frothy like style. Yeah, I, I, I respect that founder going to the, it was the Wall Street Journal. He quoted in or something. I don't know. Talking to a journo like that's pretty funny to me. I think it's fun.

• 3:01:52Jordi Hays?

  The current vibe.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  I, I, I, I think, I think it's a funny quote and I don't think it's, I don't think it needs, I don't think it needs to be fully dunked on. I think it can just be, you can just have fun with it. Anyway.

• 3:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, on that note.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Wander, find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And we do have to get on with Pyongyang. So we are going to hop on the phone.

• 3:02:17Jordi Hays?

  Now, they're gonna be, they may send a nuke if we don't.

• 3:02:20John Coogan?

  Pyongyang Investment Fund, PIF. You've heard a lot of founders raising from PIF. They're talking about Pyongyang Investment Fund, folks.

• 3:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:02:27John Coogan?

  We gotta hop on with Pyongyang. See you guys later.

• 3:02:30Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a big week.

• 3:02:30John Coogan?

  Thanks for hanging out.

• 3:02:31Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 3:02:32John Coogan?

  We will talk to you later.

• 3:02:34Jordi Hays?

  See all of you. Go out there. Don't get one-shotted by 4O. Void 4O.

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  Oh, thanks, Max. The SF standard.

• 3:02:41Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:02:42John Coogan?

  Thanks, Gabe, Daniel, everyone who listened. Good hanging out.

• 3:02:46Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:02:47John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye.

• 3:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Bye.