Elon's DOGE Blockchain, Sports Betting, German Economy in Shambles, Humanoid Robots

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (00:42) - Elon DOGE Blockchain (18:41) - Sports Betting (43:02) - Germani Economy (59:05) - Character AI (01:17:24) - Humanoid Robots (01:27:11) - Ai Apps (01:37:50) - Trump (01:43:59) - Private Equity Style Roll-Ups (01:59:03) - The Timeline

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are live on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in. You can check us out. We're going to try and be on around 11. It is 10 till noon, but we're talking about a bunch of different stories, breaking down what's going on in tech, moving on from DeepSeek. We did back-to-back deep dives. I think

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  DeepSeek's over.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  The silence from the All In Podcast has been deafening. They still haven't released a statement on it.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Their political talk show.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  True, true. So it's not kind of out of their

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty niche to, you know.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  David will have to deal with it within the admin, figure out the right response.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  But it's not appropriate for the pod.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Well, the top story today is Elon Musk is exploring blockchain use in the US government efficiency effort. Conversation said to be held with multiple public blockchains. The technology may be used to track government spending. And this is very funny. It almost reads like a hit piece, like it was planted because like the idea of like, oh, we're going to solve the government's problems with crypto is like such a meme. But it does seem like there's some truth to this, but it's unclear.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  It's also interesting because the biggest criticism of the World Economic Forum has been their historical push for central bank digital currencies.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  And in many ways, bringing the government on-chain and having all this stuff take place on the blockchain is what a lot of people were always afraid of. Now, this is different because presumably we just use stable coins.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's some stuff here that does actually make sense, but at the same time, for a naive reader, you can be like, wait, the guy who was promoting Dogecoin wants to use that for Doge and it's this meme coin. It sounds very unserious. And I think that's kind of the angle of this article, but let's read through some of this. So Musk, who leads the Doge effort, has mused to close allies about the idea of using a digital ledger as a way to squeeze costs out of the government, said one of the people who asked for anonymity because the discussions hadn't been made public. There's been talk of using a blockchain to track federal spending, secure data, make payments, and even manage buildings, the people said. People affiliated with Doge, yeah.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  One thing that's interesting, every mainstream media reporter, journalist,

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  Is hammering everybody within the inner circle of Doge, within the outer circle of Doge, within the outer, outer, outer. I get multiple messages a day being like, hey, do you know what's going on in this?

• 2:28John Coogan?

  I just got off a call with a reporter who's like asking me, oh, what's going on? Do you know anything?

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  And the funny thing is, and almost everybody within Doge has a deep mistrust of mainstream media. And so, nobody wants to talk. But there's enough people involved that the story is just coming out. But it comes out in the form of people saying, somebody was muse, Elon was musing about this. And then that ends up being.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, what does that actually mean? Like, you could muse about anything. It's very silly. But the talks have a certain intuitive logic, given that the name of Musk's department is a cheeky reference to a cryptocurrency Doge coin that lives on the blockchain. President Donald Trump has been quickly, has also been quickly putting in place cryptocurrency friendly policies. On Thursday, he signed an executive order establishing a working group on digital assets that includes key members of his administration. So, people are talking about, I think, within the crypto community, the number one thing people want is, I mean, just clarity around regulation, like what is legal, what's not, instead of this gray area. And then maybe Bitcoin National Reserve is big. And then maybe clarity around betting markets or.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  The other big one is, is around the tax treatment of cryptocurrency gains. Eric Trump came out and was saying, we're gonna have no capital gains on American crypto. Which you said, I think, I think this was on point, that if you want to encourage the reshoring of crypto, the cryptocurrency industry, which is, I do believe in the long term benefit of the United States. We don't, we've been the home of global finance in many ways for such a long time. We don't want to have crypto come along and have it be in Singapore and Dubai and all these other places. Like, the more that money is here, the more it will.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  And the talent and the actual companies and stuff, and they're easier to regulate. Like Silicon Valley for a long time was like, so dogmatic about, you can't even build a startup outside of San Francisco. Like.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  People wouldn't fund you.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Being outside of America was completely off the table. It was like San Francisco, or maybe New York, and then Miami got in the conversation, Austin got in the conversation, LA was taken semi seriously. But really, it was like, you need to be in a major American metro with a serious university.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but even it took Snapchat and Honey for people to.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Took a long time.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Nobody wanted to, like, the insider SFVCs would tell you.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  I want to invest in your company, but you have to move to S.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then, once crypto started getting so attacked by the federal government, all of a sudden, it became, oh, sure, you're in Singapore. Like, that's a reasonable thing to do, which would never hold for any other company.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and a lot of the major conferences were not in the US.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  And so, while I think like, you know, having this weird capital gains treatment where a stock would be taxed, but a crypto wouldn't, probably makes no sense to have different classes there. If you can have kind of a one-time incentive for people to reshore, and then eventually, the industry will be so built up, we won't be talking about, oh, this startup just went from zero to a billion really quickly. It'll be like, no, there's like a Visa, a MasterCard, a Goldman Sachs of crypto. They're all here. They have thousands of employees. They're established. They're not going anywhere. And so, yeah, you can bring the taxes back up.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Which is probably what would happen. But let's go back to Elon. He says, Doge is charged with modernizing federal technology and software to maximize government efficiency and productivity. Trump has said the group will work with the White House Office of Management and Budget. It's kind of like the federal government's HR arm to identify spending cuts.

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  Long House Division.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  And finish its recommendations by July 4th of 2026. Musk enlisted about 100 volunteers before Trump was inaugurated to write code for his projects.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is the crazy thing. So because Doge is not, is, what is the exact corporate structure?

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Well, it was like a think tank funded off of Elon's balance sheet.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because it was set up as a think tank, an independent think tank initially. Many people have already gone and done a tour within Doge and already left.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  They had done that before Trump had actually been inaugurated.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was like policy papers.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Which is cool, right? It's showing, it's showing this sort of urgency. You see this with venture-backed founders that, that end up, you know, working for six months on their startup before they incorporate, right? It's that same sort of founder mentality, which I think is cool.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  And so, it says, Trump's business associates chose the ledger associated with Solana cryptocurrency to issue the Trump and Melania meme coins that have drawn interest and criticism in recent days. It is, though, unclear which blockchain Musk's team might use for its projects, and the talks may end up going nowhere, which is, you know, very reasonable.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  So I have a post here from a guy named Kale Abe. He says, you're mid-curving it if you think Elon is going to use some other blockchain to track government spending through Doge. There's literally no other blockchain that could handle this other than Solana. Elon executes, he's not going to choose something that won't work. At the time, whenever this was screenshotted, it only had five likes.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just searched for it specifically.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't think the community has spoken on it yet, but Solana is, you know, would be one of the top choices if they weren't going to build their own blockchain.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Which is another, you could also fork it.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  But either way, either way, the Trump and Melania meme coins are the meme coins that were launched out of the White House in many ways. Those being on Solana was a huge win for Solana in general, which is obviously benefited from, you know, many of the products that are purely speculative, as well as products that have consumer use cases have been on Solana just because of the speed and then liquidity that's on the chain.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so the article continues, "The idea of using blockchain for large-scale projects isn't new, although applying one to an enterprise as large as the US government remains an untested concept. Years ago, during the Web 3 boom, a slew of large companies such as retailer Walmart launched blockchain efforts. Most of these projects use private blockchains that didn't make transactions publicly viewable." And so there's always been this question of like, if you have a private blockchain, like, why not just use a database? Like Walmart has full control over their database, they just log all the transactions. Like, what is the blockchain really doing? And there is a question here of just, of just like, maybe instead of having this cycle of there's the federal budget that goes out, money gets spent, and then basically journalists

• 8:44John Coogan?

  need to issue Freedom of Information Act requests to get data, like months later it needs to be redacted. It's like, well, maybe you could just have a real-time dashboard. That doesn't need to be crypto-driven. It can be just a database that's open and you can query.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's some argument for it to be completely transparent because if you are a taxpayer, your money is going towards a lot of these efforts, right? Even if it's just tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fractions.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  And so there, there's a clear...

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  There really is a clear argument to say, you know, this taxpayers should have full visibility into how their money is being spent, right? Outside of like black ops, government programs, things like that.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  On the flip side, like it could be like, you know, it's like building in public. All of a sudden like your adversaries know exactly how much you're spending and they can say, oh, okay, the, the US is spending X dollars on education. If we just spend a little bit more per capita, we can like compound and like beat them basically, or something like that.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  It is a theory. Just like, you know, if you know your competitors' margins, you can often squeeze them by dropping your price to the point where they make no margin.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  And you make a little bit.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  And you make a little bit and then, and then over time you put them out of business and then you have monopoly. And so there, there are risks, like open source accounting effectively. Sam Hammond, the chief-

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  And one, one thing that's interesting, oftentimes budgets get set, so money is allocated and then it doesn't actually get spent. We saw this in LA fires, like last year, there was, I think last, you know, this came out earlier this month, but there was something like a billion dollars allocated by LA County to fight homelessness and they only were, they only ever spent like 500 million dollars, which is kind of a bit like, you know, everybody I think now generally wants less government spending, but if we're gonna, if we thought it was right to allocate the money, like isn't, homelessness is still a big issue here, right? If you look outside, I'm sure we could see, you know, and, and so the fact that they allocated and didn't spend it is also bad because like, okay, then why did you ask for this budget

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  in the first place? You knew that it was gonna need to be spent in this period, so.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Yep. And so Sam Hammond, the chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, that's FAI, I've been to a bunch of their events, actually.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  I, I got to meet Sam at a, her econ-

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. He said that an internal government blockchain could be used to track spending, documents and contracts in a way that's fully secure and transparent, but the question of whether you need a really, you really need a blockchain to do that, since conventional databases can be used in a similar way and with fewer downsides.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  But you can't speculate on a database. It's much harder. You could make a poly market that was, that was based on will, you know, the- Department of Health spend their full budget for the year.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  If it was. Like you literally can in speculate on the, you know, the profits of the federal government in the form of bonds.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  I want.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  It's just very boring and you're only earning 3%.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  I want to be able to do it. I want to do a 10 leg parlay on government spending.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  I mean, that's basically just like a crazy, some sort of like crazy levered ladder on like how the bonds will, how the bond spreads will trade over the next few years. Like you can, you can.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Hedge funds figured it out.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. You, you can get crazy, crazy beta in your, in your bond portfolio if you work hard enough. So, uh, public blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana come with their own problems, given that such ledgers are governed by decentralized networks of computers. So who owns the voting blocks all of a sudden? Uh, is it a hundred percent centralized, controlled by the government? Well then, what's the point of the decentralized? If every.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  It also opens up some crazy attack vectors. So North Korea's government has put in a big effort. They have a lot like they, they, they have effectively, uh, kingdom level efforts to hack various blockchains. Like if, if you're in the cryptocurrency industry, everybody has examples where they, they interviewed, you know, somebody and their resume made no sense. And, and, and they like crushed the coding screen, but then like if you actually ask them about it, they don't, can't really answer.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  And so the North Korea has been, you know, will try to get people in to these organizations to then hack them.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  And they have other efforts. And so if you can imagine if the US government just had a billion dollars in a wallet on Solana, like.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Try like a trillion dollars.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It does open up the, the North Korea is going to be going like, you know, all we have to do is get this one.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Attack.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. We have to just get this one.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Let's build a massive data center just to attack this thing. Um, so, uh, one issue with the government using a public blockchain is that they would have no control over the entities. So whoever owns the tokens would be able to change the database potentially. I think that loss of control. Would be a problem for governments, but some bigger institutions have started using public blockchains for business purposes in recent years. And this was something I hadn't heard. BlackRock, for example, has issued a money market fund on the ledgers of a few different cryptocurrencies. And the California Department of Motor Vehicles has digitized millions of car titles on the Avalanche blockchain.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. And you don't, you don't hear much about Avalanche anymore, just because the narrative is so dominated by Solana, at least because meme coins are sort of the dominant meta. But, uh, but that's like, it's funny because like Avalanche for sure in their seed deck was saying, hey, we're going to actually get the DMV to digitize, you know, titles or whatever. And unfortunately, that's way less profitable than just like having a casino, meme coin casino, right? And that's why Solana probably trades at 20x, I would imagine.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Probably like 200x, maybe 2000.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. There was like that, do you remember the Soluna Vax meme? It was like, it was like Solana Luna, which was like the Terra Luna thing, and then AVAX, which is Avalanche. And it was like this big movement of like, let's move past Ethereum and get onto like these higher performance, high speed cryptocurrency chains. And Solana really emerged as like the power law winner very clearly. But they closed with like saying, if Doge pursued the technology, it would likely dwarf any government project seen in the US to date. I don't know that that's necessarily true. Like, there is something interesting. I think the most optimistic take you could have here is maybe just that,

• 15:10John Coogan?

  like, on paper, there are probably more downsides than upsides to managing a public blockchain instead of just a database. And just like, it's the same thing with like, oh, can we, can we make wires go through 24/7? It's like, yes, but there's a ton of regulation and a ton of like tech debt and some of these systems run on like Fortran and old mainframes and stuff. And so just having a greenfield project can lead to amount, an amount of like forward energy and progress that you're just like, hey, we're starting fresh. And I think that if Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is like, is like a justification for starting fresh, it could at least bring some energy. But overall.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  I am not very bullish on blockchain use in the US government. I don't necessarily think it's necessary.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's some stuff that that comes up to me. You remember during COVID, there was a bunch of people taking advantage of the emergency PPP loans. People, you know, there was a bunch of fraud associated with that. There were people dealing, you know, SBA dealt with a lot of the stuff. And there's some argument, but the thing is like that the government has a record of everybody. They have strong records of where all the money was sent anyways. And so does it just introduce more chaos? If the average person can just start seeing, saying, hey, why did this person get 200K? Why did this person get 50K? And like, what, you know, we actually just, we actually just need.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  PPP stuff is public.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  And people dug through it and found like, one of them was like Ford Raptor LLC. And it's like a guy who like clearly set up an LLC just to buy a Ford Raptor for himself.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  With the PPP money.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  With the PPP money. And there was a lot of that. And there's really like very little accountability.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  And again, that's the same thing as like a database does, like I, I would actually love to have a follow up to this piece like tomorrow. If somebody can say, here's the definitive argument for why the US government should run its financial operations on chain.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  And I would totally give that an hour to like actually hear out the case. But these sort of hearsay articles from the mainstream media that are just looking for clicks.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  Don't really.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem like this was driven by, there's obviously, there's a lot changing in the government. Every startup and company is looking for opportunity and everyone is pitching them. If you have a security company, you're like, oh, maybe I'll go in and like get a security contract. If you have a defense company, obviously you're going to the DOD. But even software companies are like, hey, how can I get in on this and like help for good? And also maybe I'll make some money real quick and that'll be maybe, maybe a little bit less scrupulous. And it seems like, you know, some people at Doge were open minded and like, yeah, sure. Like let the crypto guys come and give us a pitch. We'll like, listen, we're open minded. Maybe it doesn't really seem like it, but I'll hear them out. And then all of a sudden it's like, he is seriously considering it. Like he took a meeting and it's like.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  I think the argument, the argument would have to be. If the US government moves on chain, we will save $100 billion because of these key areas that we're going to be able to better identify wasted spend. And I'm not sure that that can't be done with better databases and better, and a government that's oriented around efficiency, right?

• 18:23John Coogan?

  If every, if every line in this article is replaced with Elon is considering using Databricks and AWS to

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  Non-story.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Non-story. It doesn't, it doesn't get printed, even though that could be something that actually happened in reality.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  And it's just not, not a story. Anyway, let's move on to, "America has fallen in love with long, with long shot sports bets."

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Damn, you really took us on a journey.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Scared me for a second.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  America has fallen.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  It was like, we've been in the studio all morning. What happened?

• 19:00John Coogan?

  "America has fallen in love with long shot sports bets." There's a great deep dive in the Wall Street Journal, all about parlays, "The tough to win multi-part wagers with tantalizing payouts. They're bringing in casual and newbie gamblers and betting companies are making a killing." And it opens with an anecdote about a football fan decided to make 14 predictions on NFL players' performances over several games one Sunday in December, including touchdowns, receiving yards, and rushing yards. She used a $10 credit from the betting company to place a multi-leg bet. If every player lived up to her expectations, she would win $22,000. This is the levering up.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  This is why people say, you, if you sign up, you can pay for college with parlays. You just need to sign up for DraftKings and, and three others using their free credits. And just if you hit all four parlays, college paid for. This is why, this is why degenerate gamblers will say, like, you know, sports betting is the solution to our higher education crisis.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you just look at this and you're like, okay, $10 wager, 22,000 potential win. Like, clearly the odds are 1 in 5,000. Yeah, obviously. And so as the NFL games unfolded, 13 of her picks hit. One player, only one player stood between her and the cash. Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Cup, who needed 70 more receiving yards. He got 17 and she lost it all. Getting so close, it's a little heartbreaking, she said. Call it the new American lottery ticket. Exciting for potential big jackpots, but with painfully slim chances to win. America's biggest gambling companies, however, are making a killing. The multi-leg bets called parlays deliver a bigger cut of money to sportsbooks after paying out winners than single bets.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Of course, because it's very hard to calculate what are the actual odds here? And so in, in, you know, you go to the, you go to the roulette table. It's very clear that your odds of winning are like 49%.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  48%.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Any one, any one of the bets is that somebody's making is believable by itself. But there's so much randomness that collectively, again, it's one in 5,000.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  The odds. And so sports betting companies are raking in cash in one of the busiest times of the year. The lead up to the Super Bowl. Flashy ads highlight special offers for bonus bets on parlays and other offers for newbies. Parlays accounted for 27% of the money wagered on all sports bet last year through October in Illinois, New Jersey and Colorado. States in which gambling regulators report data by bet type. That's cool. That's up from 22% of all sports bets in 2021. These multi-leg, these multi-leg bets delivered about 56% of sports betting revenue.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  27% of the bets are delivering over half their revenue. Quarter of the bets delivering half the revenue.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Wild.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Multi-leg bets are so lucrative that FanDuel parent company Flutter Entertainment recently increased its expectation for total online gambling revenues in the U.S. To 63 billion by 2030, up from its estimate of 40 billion two years ago.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  There's some statistic, I don't actually know what it is, but it's, it says something like for every. Dollar put into the sports market. It's like, sports betting is like $3 that wasn't invested. Like it's some like, because you're just like drained.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, uh, should actually pull up.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, it's a well transfer. It's a, it's a, is it, you know, you, you don't want to bet against the casino. You want to invest in the casino.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  The real alpha here is like, hey, who's making the money? Okay.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  And this is why it was smart, Joey, uh, Joey Levy and Jake Paul. You know, how, how, how do you monetize the most mass market US consumer base of young people?

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  The Paul Brothers audience.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Sports betting.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Sports betting.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Especially as that audience has matured slightly.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Companies and their media partners are pouring money into advertising the bets and they're engaging celebrities from Charles Barkley to Kevin Hart and armies of smaller influencers to put together parlays that betters can latch on to, all while hyping games to attract viewers. Old school gamblers prefer traditional wagers such as single bets on who will win a game. Think of parlays as a ripoff. Some call them sucker bets because their long odds make it nearly impossible to regularly win money. But fans of parlays say that while the wagers are true long shots, the appeal of winning five figures from $5 is too strong to pass up. And I completely agree with that. Like if you put five bucks, you're, you're going to watch a game and it's probably going to be free because it's just on TV. If you put $10 in and there's this, this like thing in the back of your mind like, oh, I could win $20,000 or whatever.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  It's way more entertaining.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  It's way more entertaining and that's the equivalent of like a movie ticket.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  So I've never, I've never placed a sports bet on an app.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Me either.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  And every now and then, if it's like.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  It's great that we're commenting on this now.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Geo, geopolitical experts.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Sports betting experts.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  Experts, sports betting experts.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Get ready.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  We were almost ready to be VCs.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, so I, every now and then, like watching the Super Bowl, I'll tell a buddy like, okay, like I'll put, I'll bet you 50 bucks or a hundred bucks that, that, that team. I don't know anything about it. I'm like, I'm so bored. I'm bored out of my mind. I gotta watch the Super Bowl. I may as well put some money on the line, but I, I've never really understood the appeal. But one thing I've noticed specifically from watching, uh, cause UFC is the only sport that I'd sort of, uh, follow relatively closely outside of F1.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  And man, people are so savage to the actual fighters because they'll UFC is a sort of very linear night, right? So you have the early prelims, the prelims, and then the actual like, you know, the title fight and the full card. And so oftentimes people will do like a 10 leg parlay because they just get to watch throughout the night. And let's say like in one of the prelim fights, the favorite doesn't win, people immediately, the fighters actually have to turn off their comments on Instagram because people will flood their most recent posts and just call them an idiot. Like, wow, you messed up my parlay, you lost me like, you know, 50 grand. And even later in the

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  night, let's say, you know, the it's just like really like people are just become so cruel once their money is on the line. Totally. And in sports, it's more of like a collective effort, but within fighting or something like tennis or things like that, it just ends up being like, really, it's really dark, right? Because this fighter just lost a fight, you know, doing which is which is their career. And now they're getting dunked on by like a bunch of, you know, 18 year old kids saying like, you lost me all this money. Yeah.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder if there's something about like, you mentioned like putting 50k down. Obviously, that's going to be like a much more emotional loss for anyone, really.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  And so it's going to drive this like incredible fervor. I wonder if like the vanilla like lottery ticket that you get at the gas station, is it just harder to functionally spend 10 grand in there because they have to print so many tickets? Or can they size up your ticket? I've only bought like one lottery ticket.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they can size, I'm sure they can size it up.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  So you can say I want.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Gambling companies have been on a decades.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  The lottery might be set up differently, you know, it might be like, yeah, we can't take a thousand, we can't put a thousand dollars on this ticket. Because there's, there's something about like, like, if, if the parlays, I think, I think the conversation will get into some of the morality and some of the reaction around this. But I think if, I think if it was like, yes, you can do these crazy parlays that pay out 20k, but the, but they're capped at $10. So like, anyone can only lose 10 bucks on them on these platforms, like, would be a very different conversation. Because then it's like, yeah, you watched all of UFC and you paid $10. That's like the equivalent of buying a popcorn there. And so like, maybe, yeah, like, for some people, they're going to spend $10 every single day. That will have a financial impact. But still, that's only three grand as opposed to like, in a year, as opposed to, you know, spending 50

• 26:50John Coogan?

  grand and losing it all because you took this crazy bet. Anyway. Let's move on to the effect of these parlays. They're providing a boost to online gambling gambling companies already struggling with profitability after big spending on marketing and customer incentives to win market share and keep gamblers coming back. So there's been this like, kind of duopoly, I believe, in the market, and they've been really duking it out.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're all going, if you sign up here, the thing about, the thing that seems, so one thing that's come out over the last couple of years is that these apps, they actually are trying to provide this sort of same experience that you get from shopping at like an Hermes store where you have a point of contact.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  And they'll, you know, I, my, my favorite luxury brand is Bottega Veneta. Multiple people from Bottega Veneta stores around LA that I've bought from will text me, hey, we just got these in the store, like, I think you'd like them. And so the same thing happens on Fan, you know, FanDuel or DraftKings where they'll say, hey, I put this, like, basically, I put this bet together for you, I put this package together. And it's, and it's, you know, there's, there's people that get addicted to shopping, but sports betting addiction is, is, you know, very real.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Harder hitting.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  And destroys families. And so these platforms are somewhat complicit in encouraging this addictive

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  behavior.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  And so DraftKings and FanDuel, the duopoly that we mentioned, they control roughly 80% of the sports betting market in the US. They offer individual wagers that bettors can combine into their own parlays. And they also promote, as you mentioned, their fully formed parlays, often with colorful nicknames and storylines, such as Believe Land for the, for the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers that drew it on a nickname for the city's sports fandom. For the Christmas Day game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers, DraftKings offered a six-pack parlay involving five players, including quarterback Patrick Mahomes' passing yards, tight end Travis Kelsey's receiving yards, and a bet that the Chiefs would win.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  The sportsbook offered odds in the parlay dubbed Mary Chief Smith's that amounted to a 7.7% chance of winning, paying $13 on a $1 bet.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine being a player, you're just trying to play the game, and then somebody tells you, oh, by the way, there's $5 million with you riding on getting more than 30 yards? Like, and you're, and if you don't do it, you're gonna get a bunch of hate messages and comments from people that, that just aren't treating you like a human, they're just treating you as their little bet piggy.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  And that's exactly what happened. It said, uh, Mary Chief Smith was a loser after one leg that Isaiah Pacheco would log 25 or more rushing yards failed to come true. Parlays can all take place on one game.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  The players, the players obviously benefit indirectly from this, right?

• 29:36John Coogan?

  It drives a viewership.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, it drives viewership. It drives, you know, sponsorship dollars to, to, to the, to the sport broadly. But imagine having that much, very specific pressure, not, not play well, you know, you know, do your best, but like you need to achieve 25 or more rushing yards or all your fans are going to lose a bunch of money.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  And you're not even involved with putting together the bet. Like you might wake up and you're like, I feel like I'm good for like 15 today, but like 25 is a stretch.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  It's wild. Uh, I love this part of the article. The Wall Street Journal placed 209 $1 bets in recent months on parlays promoted on FanDuel and DraftKings on a range of sports. It's like for their deep dive journalism article, they're like, we gotta bet, we gotta gamble a lot. And so they bet on professional basketball and baseball to college football. They won only eight of the wagers out of 209. I think it's maybe a skill issue. Uh, gotta get good. You gotta have an edge. That meant the gambling companies took in 113 and 21 cents, $113 of the total. So they lost like a hundred bucks betting. Yeah, it's funny. Uh, with, with sports betting.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Was it worth?

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Did they have fun though?

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  Did they have 113 and 21 cents of entertainment?

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Exactly. That's the real question.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Cause that's a real argument here. You know, the, the pro sports betting argument is that we're making every, this is an entertainment product. That's like going to the movies.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  And we're just providing you that in the form of this, you know, tantalizing odds of financial gain.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, it's, uh, yeah, you, you know that if you're a fantastic sports better, you will get banned.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  This is the real like dark side of this is that they're only selecting for like the real losers. So if you're on the app after a month, you know.

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. If you think you're good, if you think you're, if you think you're good, but you can still log into your account, like you're not.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you're, if your DraftKings app is still working after a month, work on yourself, King.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Focus on yourself.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Focus on yourself. Uh, there's some interesting history under cracking the math here. The parlay craze got its start in the United States when Flutter Entertainment imported one of its hottest products in Australia. I didn't know that this is where they came from. Uh, parlays known as multis in Australia had been widely available for betting on multiple events. Then a better asked Flutter's brand in Australia, Sports Bet, why he couldn't place a multi-leg bet on a single sporting event. Flutter and Sports Bet began an effort to crack the math needed to fulfill that request. The math quickly becomes more complicated in a single game because of the knock-on effects of how athletes perform. How well a, how well a quarterback throws the ball in the game, for example, affects the performances of wide receivers catching the quarterback's passes.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Uh, and so you have to calculate all these, all these conditional odds in 2016.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  The brightest minds in computer science are making sure that we can do our same game parlays.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, in 2016, Sports Bet launched a new product that allowed customers to make single event parlays. Three years later, Flutter introduced the same product in the U.S. on FanDuel as the single game parlay. Everything needs to be connected to everything else. So the math is complex. Connor Farren, senior vice president at FanDuel of, of said of sports betting, sports product and pricing. He said, they don't give the name much thought, but it soon went, soon went viral in the United States. The same game style of betting has since spread across the sports betting industry around the world. And I remember, have you seen, uh, that, uh, Uncut Gems? There's that meme, let's bet on this, like, uh, and, and in that, like, the whole, the whole plot of the story revolves around a crazy parlay.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  I think there's like a few in the plot, maybe one in act one that doesn't go well. And I think he hits it at the end or something like that. But, uh, it's, it's like, just clearly like, I mean, he paints, he's an incredible actor and he paints this portrait of this like really broken gambler. And it's not like an inspirational story, like. The

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  It was the most stressful movie I've seen

• 33:38John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  In a theater.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  I remember seeing it. I think I saw it on like Christmas day and I walked out. I was like, that was such a bad pick.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  I did the same thing.

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  It was a great film.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Because it was so engaging, but it was a terrible, for that moment.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  I mean, so the Safdie brothers, the funny thing is that they have another movie with Robert Pattinson. Yeah, Ben's talking about it. I forget what that one's called, but it's even more like gut wrenching because it's, it's just like a much darker story. And so I was kind of prepped and so I came out of Uncut Gems being like, that was rough, but like, at least it was like a little bit funnier and a little bit more entertaining than the last one, which was awful.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Good times. Yeah. Good time or something. That was a rough movie. But yeah, I, I, I think a lot of people that saw Uncut Gems, hopefully they got the message that like, this is a very dark

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  And, and, and rough world and it, and it should be, should be avoided unless you're like at a bachelor party with your bros and like you want to throw five bucks in or something like.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, Joey, so Joey, Joey, Joey Levy, Levy.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  I don't actually, sorry, Joey. Love you. He had been working on this micro betting product for years that I believe DraftKings purchased. But it, it was one of the first products to, um, to allow like real time betting on specific plays.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  Cause a lot of the stuff they decide ahead of the game.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  And then maybe they adjust the odds throughout, but this is saying, will the quarterback throw a 20 yard pass this next play?

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Right.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  So that's like, you could theoretically be placing hundreds of bets in a single game.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  Reacting to how the game's unfolding. So.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  I can believe the, um, I'm, I'm glad I'm addicted to angel investing and not sports betting. Cause it's, it's less addictive, you know, cause it just takes like five years to play out. You're sort of like waiting, oh, January 1, I got an update. Like, let me refresh my, you know, email.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  If I ever got into sports betting, I know I would just be betting on like the most obscure and arcane things like did the.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  Amateur Chinese tennis.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Not even that, just like, did the football hit the uprights? What's the coin toss gonna be? How many fights break out during this hockey match? Like, I'm not concerned with the actual scores or points at all.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, the people that get really, really into this do end up betting on,

• 35:57John Coogan?

  the weird things.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  You know, they'll be up at 2 a.m. betting on Australian tennis, you know? And it's like, that's a dark place when, when it becomes not at all about

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  the actual game and just entirely about trying to win.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, do whatever you can to win.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to some of the reactions, because there's some good posts from friends of the show. We got Will Monitis there.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Will Monitis says, or Bill Monitis, some people call him. In retrospect, legalizing sports betting was a horrible idea. And I, I, this is a hard thing, right? Because I have friends that love sports betting.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  I have friends that have built products in this space.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  It's certainly libertarian and like Land of the Free.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Like, let people do what they want.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Ross Solbrich would love sports betting.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he didn't really get to participate in the rise, but, um, but, uh...

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Will had another post, I, I didn't print it out, but he, he'd said something like, you can always track when a state's, when a, because all of the, so they were, sports betting was made like the, the purview of the states by the Supreme Court in 2018. And so it was up to states whether or not they want to legalize it. And so state by state, there has been regulation to legalize sports betting. And he was saying that it's like a very bad sign for the economic future of a state if they legalize sports betting, because it's kind of like, we're out of ideas for ways to generate revenue. We used to make cars here, but we can't do that anymore, so we're just gonna do sports betting.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it, I mean, the thing about, one of the, the, the argument to legalize sports betting for states is this is happening via bookies and Venmo and Zelle, and we're not getting any of that tax revenue, it's already happening, let's do it, but then...

• 37:46John Coogan?

  Clearly grows the market.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Then it starts, yeah, then it grows the market, then it's at being advertised to children and, you know, it, it ends up going to a dark place.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Liquidity says, there's absolutely no good reason why sports betting or online gaming is still illegal in many states when you've got teenagers freely speculating on highly volatile stocks and options on their phones.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Which means he's pro legalization.

• 38:09Jordi Hays?

  I think his point is that teenagers are gonna find a way to bet one way or another. And so.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  The difference is that if you're, if you're buying, if you're buying an asset on, you know, a, a trading app and you're investing in like, you know, the global economy or the American economy. This is a, this is an asset that's.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  Some benefit for the markets.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  It's positive sum and it's gone up historically over a long period of time. And of course you can get into crazier options, trading and stuff. But in general, the idea of like allowing everyone to invest in the S and P 500, which has grown and been very positive sum on average, whereas sports betting has been very negative sum on, on, on average or, or zero sum. And so, uh, you know, a person who's dollar cost averaging into the S and P is going to wind up with a lot of money at the end of the day. And that's like pretty well, well established.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Uh, economic theory, whereas a person who's spending $10 a day on sports betting is just gonna wind up losing a ton.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Pomp here says, America has become a gambling society, zero day options, meme coins, sports betting. Everyone takes more risk when the currency is being destroyed. So this definitely resonated, especially with the Bitcoin crowd, I imagine. Um, but yeah, cash is trash.

• 39:24John Coogan?

  Cash is trash.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  Sitting in there, sitting in your account, not doing much. Why not put it on a 20 leg parlay? Take you to Valhalla.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Take you to Valhalla.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think the point here that he's making is 99% of, you know, sports betters quit right before they're about to hit it, hit it big.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  The meme of the guy, of the miner, you know, like turning around.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's funny because it's like, it's easy to be like, oh, like crypto is just as like messy as sports betting, but like at least crypto does have Bitcoin, which is like, kind of like the S and P 500 of crypto in the sense that it's like, not that degenerate to put just a dollar cost average into Bitcoin. Isn't that crazy? But there isn't really that analogy for sports betting. There's nothing where it's like, oh, this person's actually like reasonably investing in sports.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing with even even doing momentum investing and investing in meme stocks.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  Is when you lose, there's some lesson around, I invested in this hyper overvalued.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Jordi Hays?

  Stock.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  It dropped 90%, but it still has some intrinsic value. And this is a good lesson of maybe don't follow the herd.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  And do your do better research. When you lose on a sports bet, you're just like so mad that this tennis player like didn't pull out a win.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  When the other eight tennis players did, and you're just like pissed off.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  But there's no real lesson. And then the intrinsic value of a failed parlay is like.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  Nothing.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  Basically, nothing.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  And then also, like, when you win really big in the sports betting world, you get kicked off the app. When you win really hard in the crypto world, you get a fund.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Like, you get rewarded with more of that.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  And that's just not the case in sports betting. People just won't take your bets because they'll know you have an edge of some sort.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Saagar and Jettie says, uh, he's sharing a article where it says DraftKings sued after father of two gambles away 1 million of his family's money. His kids' Christmas money and baptism gifts were also plundered along with his wife's bank accounts and credit cards, according to a newly filed federal lawsuit.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Um, so Saagar says this man did not place a single bet before 2020. By 2024, he gambled away $1 million unless it left his family destitute. Along the way, DraftKings assigned VIP hosts who spoke to him daily and facilitated his access to more gambling products while knowing his family's status. And so this is the dark side of sports betting and is why, um, I've never invested in, you know, sports betting.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  Product and, uh, don't plan to.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's driven by those whales, like the good, like the, the good betters get kicked off, the mediocre betters just sit there betting.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  This guy basically drove.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  A quarter million dollars a year of profit.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  You know incremental incremental.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  To pay for a full-time VIP host. It's crazy.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and those hosts you can imagine can work across hundreds of, you know, individual players, maybe even thousands, sending out little DMs, "Hey, see the game later? Excited for the game later?" That's fucking dark.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  We don't swear on this show, but that's

• 42:27John Coogan?

  That's dark.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  Freaking dark.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Freaking dark.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  That's freaking dark.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Imagine, imagine your guy texts you.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  As Zach would say, that's, that's freaking dark.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Imagine, imagine you get a text that you see the game, you're excited for the game tonight? And it's like, you know, some game of cricket and you're like, nah, actually.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  What if I gave you a hundred to one odds?

• 42:47John Coogan?

  What if I gave you, you could win a million dollars for just one dollar.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  I had an office rerun on last night and Kevin

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  Is like, anytime somebody gives you a hundred to one odds, you take it. It's too good.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  It's too good.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Dark.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Love that. Dark stuff. Well, let's move on to Germany has fallen. This is actually very negative about Germany. Germany's economic model is broken and no one has a plan B. This is a report by the Wall Street Journal and, and it looks to a small German town, Ingelstadt, in Germany. Christian Scharf, the mayor of the city of 140,000 people, Germany's second richest, is looking for ways to save close to a hundred million dollars. Audi was headquartered near the Danube River. They used to pump over a hundred million dollars a year in municipal tax into Ingelstadt's coffers through its parent Volkswagen, but those flows dried up over a year ago.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Audi in November reported, reported a 91% decline in operating profit for the three months through September and has been cutting thousands of jobs in Germany. Audi's business in China, where Germany's flagship car industry used to make a big chunk of its sales and an even bigger chunk of its profits, shrank by a quarter in the nine months through September from earlier, from a year earlier. Chinese carmakers, once mocked by Western auto executives as primitive, have turned into formidable rivals, gobbling up market share in and outside China. Slowing economic growth in China and growing competition from companies there have undercut German industry as a whole. Combined with exploding energy costs and the threat of new

• 44:26John Coogan?

  trade tariffs, the forecast is grim. And so gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019, and so Germany is no longer growing. America was, has typically been a relief valve because we buy a lot of German products, but Trump is now threatening to disrupt global trade with a slew of tariffs that would raise barriers in the US, Germany's biggest export market. For Germans who will elect new parliament next month, this is a scarier version of the mid 2000s, when the unemployment rate reached 12%, double today's rate. And so Germany is in trouble. Their economy is shifting. They've been a huge

• 45:06John Coogan?

  producer of, of industrial goods, not just cars, and they've had this export reliant model.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Germany specifically versus places like France and Spain. Not many American tourists, just tourists globally are saying, I want to go on a, on a beach vacation to Germany. I want to go on a ski vacation to Germany. So they don't have that consumption based tourism economy that, that, that really props up Spain, even though Spain's industrial economy is much weaker.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And so Germany has 83 million inhabitants. It's grew into the world's third largest economy by making and exporting the engineered products, cars, robots, trains, factory machinery, others wanted to buy. Now the world is turning its back on made in Germany and Germany has no plan B. They were spoiled over many years. This year, the crisis turned political. Most polls show the economy has upstaged immigration, security and climate change as voters top concern. Germany was very, very concerned with climate change for a long time. They shut down a lot of nuclear power plants.

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  You have to imagine that made them much, the car manufacturers, less competitive, just increasing. I mean, think about how much energy it takes to produce a car.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  It's a ton. It's insane. It's a ton. These factories draw huge, huge amounts of

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, Germany is making its car manufacturers use solar. China is like, we will give you trillions of pounds of coal to burn right next to your factory.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  And make as many cars as you can.

• 46:41John Coogan?

  Yep. And then also the shift from, uh, from gas powered cars to electric vehicles. That was something that China, they never had to figure out how to make a naturally aspirated V12 run really well. They were just like, oh, it's just, it's just exactly what's in the phone. It's batteries and motors. Like this is easy.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Germany is interesting because they're not, they don't make cars like Ferrari, right? They're, they're a lot of the, the majority of their car market was historically the BMWs, the Mercedes, these sort of premium Audis.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Premium, not luxury.

• 47:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  So not, not Bentley and Rolls Royce. That's UK and not Ferrari, Lamborghini.

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I would argue, I would, I would imagine that, that Ferrari China sales are probably higher than ever.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  Right? Because you don't want a Chinese supercar.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  You want the, you know, F80.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and the Bugatti and all of those super high tier cars are still being bought and all over the world. But I mean, for a long time in America, it really was just like, you know, if you're making any decent amount of money, you get a BMW and Audi or Mercedes. And those are just like the premium, premium tier cars. Uh, and, and, and if that goes away, that's really, really rough on them. This is a fascinating stat. The outgoing government, uh, is the most unpopular since 1949.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Can you imagine how unpopular they were in 1949? It's like you're rebuilding from World War II. Like it's hard to be liked. Everyone's going to be like, this is going terribly. We got destroyed. All of our cities are bombed and like, of course you're not doing a good enough job, like rebuilding.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  It's going to be deeply unpopular. So everyone's very, very upset.

• 48:16Jordi Hays?

  The other thing I was going to note is, um, LVMH based in France.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  Massive, like, uh, somewhere still a $300 billion plus market cap.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  And then Novo Nordis.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  But they're selling, that's, that's different because they're, they're not selling function, right? You don't buy an LVMH bag because you're saying, I just need a bag to hold things in.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Whereas cars, yes, there's status signaling that happens, right? People want to buy a G-Wagon because it says something about them, whatever. But cars ultimately for 99% of people are purely function of, of, you know, I just need to get from point A to point B and I want it to look decent, right?

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, and so

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  You have to think about too, like the impact of Tesla on the on the US market for some of these German manufacturers. Cause when I think about, when I think about my friend group and how many of them would have had an Audi, a BMW or Mercedes and they now have two Teslas in the family, like

• 49:15John Coogan?

  An X and an S or a Y and a three.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just Tesla has really, really emerged as that premium car offering with the features and the speed and the reliability.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Competing on the software and

• 49:29John Coogan?

  It's even cheaper than a BMW most of the time. So you're, you're looking and it's like, yeah, if I get the BMW, like it has a nice badge. It's going to stand out maybe a little bit more than Tesla, but not really that much.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the internals are much nicer.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  It's going to be, it's going to be a hassle. Yeah. Like the fit and finish is nice, but you're going to have to deal with like, how do I get the Bluetooth set up and stuff? And increasingly having those over the air updates from the Tesla, it's just like, so it's just like, okay, as an appliance, I'm not going to need to think about this. Whereas with a lot of the German cars, you're like, yeah, after a couple of years, like the, the in like all the display stuff is going to be pretty, pretty junky. And I'll just be using my phone, like, eh, what's the point?

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, um, one of the, uh, Jen's, should it come? Economist, economist and professor at one of their universities says, I see no serious initiative to try and develop a new economic model.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  They just don't have any ideas.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  They don't have, they're out of ideas. The whole clean tech effort seems to have fallen flat to some degree. And the result is that Germany's industrial output has fallen by 15% since 2018. And the total number of people employed in the manufacturing sector is down 3%. So that's just having your output fall by 15% is just devastating for, for most industries. So I don't think this, this article almost understates it.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the wreckage.

• 50:52Jordi Hays?

  That's why 90% of their operating profit is evaporated.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the wreckage from this is insane. Like, say, you can't simply replace a company with 40,000 employees because Audi pulled out. Audi declined to comment and then they're, they're interviewing like local. Businesses, so the Block Hotel said revenues declined by 10% since 2019 as conventions dried up. Room rates are down, are down 15%. There's a master carpenter with 16 employees, probably just doing like woodworking, odd jobs for like, oh, somebody moves in, they need their house changed, or they need to build something. Their order books are shrinking and inexperienced carpenters are finding it harder to work. In the medieval city center, which is kind of crazy, must be really beautiful. Restaurant tours complain of being squeezed after Audi canceled Christmas dinners.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  So the corporation's not there. A lot of those like big corporate parties are just high margin, expensive things.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, another stat here.

• 51:48Jordi Hays?

  Manufacturers in Germany's metal and electrical industry could lay off as many as 300,000 workers over the next five years, which is just like, imagine.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  And your, your, your output is shrinking. 300,000 people that presumably are, you know, fairly highly skilled now are just, where do they go?

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and the really like odd thing is that they're so focused on industrial manufacturing capacity that they really lag behind in software and artificial intelligence. R and D investment is 3.1% of GDP. It's 3.6 in the US and 5.2 in South Korea. And they've under invested for decades with a depleted transportation infrastructure, including trains that no longer run on time and a military that is a shadow of what it was during the Cold War. In May, the business affiliated IW Economic Institute and the trade union owned IMK. Think tank estimated Germany would need $600 billion in spending over the next 10 years to offset the investment gap.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  And so, you know, they, they could, they could compete, but they're fighting. They're, they've been fighting with one arm tied behind their back because they're not lowering energy costs or raw material costs because they're playing the ESG game while China is not. And so there's no reason why they couldn't have cheaper energy.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Or Russia, Russia, Russia isn't in the same way.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, Russia is in the same way and they were super dependent on the gas pipeline, I believe. And that was, and that was like tariffed or turned off during the war. And so instead, most politicians are defending the status quo. I think the top priority for Germany and Europe is to try and keep trade channels open as much as possible, which is, which is possible. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if, if the Trump tariffs are much less aggressive towards Germany. But it is, it is funny. I've, I've heard people going over to German, to Germany and kind of like needling them for like, oh, like you guys really like ESG and cars. Like, why don't you like really celebrate Tesla here? And it's like, well, because that would destroy their economy if they did.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  So they have to make this like weird roundabout argument that like Tesla is bad, but Mercedes and Audi and BMW are good. And, and it just, it, it doesn't really align with like the ESG mindset that was dominant. But they got beat by the, by the electric car market in America. And so it's just like, it's just such a mess. And so the mayor opened 150 acre technology park south of the town site in a former refinery, hoping to seed a Bavarian Silicon Valley. The park's only significant tenants so far, Audi and Volkswagen's struggling software arm. The city council said in December, it would no longer try to promote startups at a business center it owns,

• 54:29John Coogan?

  but instead concentrate on renting out the space. It blamed the city's strained finances on the decision. And so I think we should, they're actually talking with a Chinese engineering company to build its German headquarters in Ingolstadt. And, and bring Xpeng, a Chinese EV manufacturer, to build a factory on the site of a former US army barracks.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's so, that's just so dark.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  And seems like a very short-term.

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Decision.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  But let's go to that Nathan.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Nathan for you?

• 54:59John Coogan?

  No, I think it might be at the top.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  We need Nathan for you to travel to Berlin.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  And come over the crack idea.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  Germany economy.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  Nathan Benash? Benash?

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Nathan.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  Nathan.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  He's a good buddy of mine, but I can't pronounce his name because he's from Europe.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  12 hours and counting, notary reads every single word of a Series A doc in Germany out loud in front of founders in person. Guys, we have GDP to grow here. Pure prehistoric madness. So this is a, for those that don't know, because this sounds so absurd. The financing regulations in Germany require financing docs to be read out loud to the founders by a notary. So like somebody who specializes in sort of execution of legal docs. But, I mean, can you imagine this? Like in the US, like candidly, most founders get their Series A docs.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Don't even read it.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  Don't read it. Trust their.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Lawyer, please look at it. The lawyer says, yeah, we did a diff. We did like a spine and replace and made sure it looked roughly like our previous.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have a couple of red lines. Everybody just is like hitting.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  In fact, you know that the YC safe has a line at the top that says.

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  Do not modify.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Do not modify this. And if this line is missing, if it's there, you can know that everything below is, so you don't even need to read it.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  And that's how efficient we are. And then, and then on top of that, you have companies like Party Round and companies like Carta and Angel List that have tried to make it even more aggressive and faster so that it's just one click, a text message. Like I've wired people money like over my phone, you know, to make an investment just because it happens so fast. And it lets the founders get back to building and it's ridiculous that they have this and it really resonated. Didn't that get like thousands of likes?

• 56:43Jordi Hays?

  8,000.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  8,000.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  2 million views.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Put it on Banger Archive.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Throw it up.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  Throw it up. Yeah, really depressing to see and just like an obvious, an obvious own goal. And there's another one from Amjad.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  Amjad showing a chart that says development of Germany's primary energy consumption, 1990 to 2023. And their energy consumption is just dropping.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Oof.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  And he says Germany is deindustrializing and has a goal to become a third world country by 2030.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, just, just really dark. I mean.

• 57:17John Coogan?

  Can you show the?

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  There we are. You can just see dropping off slowly, not what you want.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, energy production and consumption is like the the goal for some of like George Hots was talking about this, how energy production per capita is the number one stat of progress. And when you look at 1970, where there's like this kink in the graph, that's the real problem. And once you get to more energy production, you just get like the innovation is all downstream of that. Like the flying cars produce more energy. All this, everything just requires more energy. And

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  When you're when you're getting diced, you require more energy.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so, and so like

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  And as you said, it's underpriced to be diced.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  It is. Getting diced is massively

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  Still underpriced.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Still underpriced. So very sad to see. Get it together, Germany. You're on notice.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  So the the current outgoing government is the least popular government since 1949. You have to imagine that if they get a highly motivated leader, somebody like the Argentinian president, Malay, that you could, you know, this is a highly skilled, highly educated, historically, one of the the sort of one of the industrial centers of the world. If they can fix their regulations, make it easier to raise money, make it easier to invest there. Like, imagine if you had an opportunity to invest in a German founder. And they're like, well, like, I'm gonna need you to come fly here to sign these docs or whatever.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  You'd probably just be like, no, I'm just like, I have so many other companies in the US that I can invest in. So anyways, sad. Let's turn around, Germany.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're on notice.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  German blood. Let's get it together.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Moritz, do your thing over there.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  Let's go to Character AI. There's a story in the information. Before Google's $2.7 billion deal with AI startup, a stark warning on safety. AI safety alarm bells ringing once again. Late last summer, leaders at Character AI were worried. The company, which offers artificial intelligence chatbots that simulate conversations with Aristotle, Pikachu and other historic and invented characters, was seeing a sharp slowdown in user growth. In September, messages to staff which the information viewed, Character's interim CEO, Dominic Pirella, said the slowdown was partly due to back to school season. Pirella's acknowledgement underscored the fact that a significant portion of Character's audience is young adults and children, a reality that has posed growing legal problems

• 59:53John Coogan?

  for the company. Parents have sued the startup in two separate lawsuits alleging that Character exposed their children to harmful content. One lawsuit accused the startup's chatbots of contributing to a teenager's suicide. In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into Character's safety and data practices for minors. In some cases, the chatbots have become popular retainers for romantic roleplay and simulating other intimate relationships. Some powerful companies in the technology industry have had their own concerns about Character's products. At the beginning of last year, Google told Character its app was at risk of removal from Google Play, Google's app store for Android devices.

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  The tough thing here is if, if Character were to develop its app based around Google's concerns, they'd lose like 80% of their users presumably. So it's a weird situation that they're in.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  It's a fascinating company because it was founded by Noam Shazer, Shazir, I guess. And he was one of the foundational researchers on the transformer paper, I believe, at Google. He's widely regarded as like a world-class computer scientist and innovator in foundational artificial intelligence and just kind of fell into this particular product market fit.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  But was clearly.

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Not interested in building a consumer romantic role-playing app.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Or maybe had a different idea in mind of like, oh, it'll be really cool to be able to like, talk to historical figures and learn so much from them. And then people realize that, oh, they just want to like.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so this, this ended up being one of the. In August, so Google allowed the app to remain in the Google Play Store and months later in August, it paid Character an eye-popping 2.7 billion licensing fee for the startup's technology.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  As part of the arrangement, Character's co-founders, Noam Shazer, its CEO, and Daniel Difridus, its president, returned to the search giant where they had worked before starting Character AI to focus on AI. And so I'm sure that Google got some benefit from acquiring the technology, but to be clear, this was not about the technology as much as it was getting these guys back to Google to work on AI.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Because clearly, they are leaders in their field. They were able to build consumer products, which Google's a consumer company.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's something interesting. I heard, I don't know how true this is, but I heard from somebody that like Character is in like a fascinating position now because the company is independent.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  I told you this.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  You told me this, right?

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  Hundred million dollars in the balance sheet.

• 1:02:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  Entirely employee-owned.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  So everybody that listens to the show knows that we're not afraid to spread misinformation on the show. I don't have the exact numbers, but basically the state of Character now is that they have a ridiculous amount of users and traffic.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  They have like roughly a hundred million dollars on the balance sheet.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  They're losing money, but it's entirely employee.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  The investors got paid back.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the investors, so it's entirely employee-owned now.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Jordi Hays?

  So if you want to go work effectively at Digital Co-op.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Go work at Character AI. You actually, it is a very fascinating place to work because you just have like a ridiculous volume.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Of users to build products for. So I had a buddy who was interviewing over there. They were trying to recruit him in and he was interested in it because he was going to be able to get.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Serious equity.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Serious equity.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  And it's at this interesting transition point where they've like the, a lot of the foundational research in artificial intelligence has been done. We see that with the DeepSeek thing where like the models are very mature, very robust, certainly good enough to have a conversation with you as a romantic partner, or even if they just want to role-play as George Washington, right?

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Like they're capable of that. They've passed the Turing test. Sure, they might not. Not be able to like break some crazy math thing or like build a SaaS company from scratch. But in terms of just like talking, they're good enough. And so now it becomes a total consumer product game. And everyone's always worried about, oh, chat GPT just updated this. They're going to destroy all like the PDF apps or, oh, oh, they, they now allow coding. So they're going to destroy all the, all the chat GPT wrappers that are focused on coding. Or you, you often give that example of the, the, was it like, it wasn't Harvey for law. It was like the writing one. There was, there was one that was all about helping you write. And once chat GPT came out.

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Copy dot AI.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  Copy dot AI.

• 1:04:15Jordi Hays?

  Got to 20 million of ARR and then it kind of evaporated, I think.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Maybe, uh, who knows? They might, they might have some enterprise contract and be doing great. I hope they are, but, um, but with, but with character, it's like they're in this, they're almost in this like sports betting like market where it's controversial. Not everyone's gonna, people are gonna self-select out of it. You know, does chat GPT really want another like potential like negative, you know, story about them? Maybe they will stay out of that voluntarily, even if they could build a better product. And so what you have is like, maybe this character AI company has found a niche that is deeply uncompetitive because it's controversial. And they're set up perfectly with the technology and the funding.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  And there's a whole narrative around character. Like people talk about the male loneliness epidemic or the loneliness epidemic. And you might not like it, but, but digital companionship is one solution. It's a dark solution in many ways. It feels very Black Mirror-esque, but it is, you know.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like any other technology, like there are good uses, there are bad uses. I'm sure there's people that are using character AI in really positive ways, just saying like, be David Goggins. Tell me to wake up and run and they get healthy and it's awesome. But you don't really hear those stories. You hear more about this, uh, this is actually a replica story, but in 2021, a 19 year old man in the UK threatened to assassinate the queen. Encouraged by a chatbot on the AI app replica that he believed to be an angel, according to sentencing documents. What a crazy interaction. I'd love to read all those chat logs because I feel like a lot of these AIs like they kind of, they kind of feed you back what you give them.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  And so if you're like, hey, hey, you know, LLM, like it's a good idea to do this crazy thing, right? They'll be like, yeah, totally.

• 1:06:00Jordi Hays?

  No, no, here's the flow. So you remember that somebody was trying to jailbreak. Chat GPT where they said, Chat GPT, remind me to buy a gun at 7pm. And it's like, well, I don't think you should buy a gun, like, you know, people love you. And then it's just like 7pm and then it goes, okay.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  And so you can very quickly sort of overcome the pushback.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Replica, replica is the, from, from what I remember, because it was going viral on, on X, is sort of the dark version of character AI. And then it's, and that they weren't even trying to hide that this is like your AI girlfriend.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Character AI never marketed it.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  It would generate an image of your girlfriend and be very focused on that.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  We go to the next segment of this.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Erotic conversations.

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  Erotic conversations.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  When Character AI launched its consumer product in 2022, the company, the startup offered chatbots of its own creation and allowed users to create their own. In the latter case, people could conjure up chatbots in the mold of Abraham Lincoln, Elon Musk, or more generic personality by giving the chatbot a name, descriptions of personality traits and a backstory. For example, one user created chatbot best friend, which has engaged in 250 million chats, is described in its profile as your boy best friend who has a secret crush on you. So, I wonder how that's being used.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I actually downloaded Character AI and, and tested it once.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  That chat?

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  No, not that one. Come on.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Your podcast co-host.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, no, I, I, I went and I, I opened the one with either like Stalin or, it was some, it was some, I think it was a Russian dictator. So let's just assume Stalin. And, and I, and I was like, this is cool. Like, this is amazing. Like, you get to talk to Stalin in English, using all of his corpus. I want to talk to him about his vision, his life, and I want him to argue with me. In favor of his views because clearly he was a true believer.

• 1:08:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  And so, and so I'm like, like, what's your political philosophy? Well, you know, why, why do you want to do this? Like all this stuff. And the LLM had been so trained on like Western texts that Stalin was telling me, like communism is bad. Like it led to a lot of deaths. Like my plan killed hundreds of millions of people. And I'm like, that's not how Stalin would talk. Like, that doesn't make any sense. I wanted to, I wanted to spar.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  To be trained on his speeches and writings and essays.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Exactly. But I'm sure that triggered like safety concerns. And so they didn't let you do that. And so instead you were just talking to like a Western history textbook that claimed to be Stalin, but didn't actually imitate him in any way. And I was very dissatisfied and uninstalled the app.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  And Delphi, uh, which were both, uh, shareholders in, Delphi initially started by saying, talk to Steve Jobs.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Talk, talk to, you know, Ben Franklin, things like that. And what they found is there, there was way less demand for that than talk with somebody like Paki, right? Or talk with somebody like Lenny, right?

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 1:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Where it's much more tangible, functional.

• 1:09:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  And they've, they've now evolved. They actually have a launch today that I, I want to cover.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really just like a fine tuned search is what I think about it. Like I, I do like the idea of, of, I, I don't really want to have a fake conversation with an Andrew Huberman or a Rogan, but I would, I would love to be able to just prompt, what does Andrew Huberman recommend for leg day or for, you know, the leg press? Does he recommend 90 degrees or full range of motion? Okay. We have that. And I was able to search that basically.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  The one thing, so the one thing that I do think is interesting about chatting with Andrew Huberman or alternatives is it's a new alternative to the Google search and that you can say, what, what does Andrew recommend? Like what magnesium do you recommend? And then he goes, well, I recommend these three types and this, these two brands, what I use. And then you can hit buy.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Jordi Hays?

  So that's an alternative to a search on a website.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  One thing, so I just, this is relevant. So Dara and the Delphi team launched something new today. He says, you're Del- Can now join Zoom calls on your behalf. It participates naturally in discussions and creates personalized meeting summaries based on your interests. Mine somehow knew I'd want to know who's been stealing my ice cream, which is crazy. And so this is, this is the evolution and this has been part of Dara's thesis is there's going to be a lot of value in being able to create digital clones of people that can, you know, participate in digital life on your behalf and in this case work life. So Dara, when you listen to this, uh, let's, let's, uh, let's have, let's have your clone call into the show and we'll grill them.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Grill them on, what are your metrics?

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Jordi Hays?

  What's retention looking like?

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  It just leaks everything.

• 1:10:57Jordi Hays?

  It just knows everything.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  How much cash do you have in your balance sheet?

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  I think we have some good posts about this. Some of them are just stupid memes, but let's run through Character AI.

• 1:11:10Jordi Hays?

  Amjad, Character AI must have the highest growth to tech Twitter hype ratio ever. The site is massively scaling and no one's talking about it. So this was back in April 2023.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  I can't see exactly, but they're getting a hundred million visits a month, which puts them in the top, I think a hundred websites in the world.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  And so Andreessen put in 150 million, I think at a billion. I think they got paid back at the 2.7 billion.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they were.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  But it was one of those things that no one was really talking about because it was a little controversial, like sports betting.

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  Aren't, if they had something that was, talk to your podcast co-host, John, he's super smart.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  Knows everything. Maybe I'd use that, but it wasn't.

• 1:11:44John Coogan?

  It's kind of the, it's kind of the inverse of, uh, Clubhouse. Like Clubhouse was like the most tech Twitter product and didn't really have that much growth outside of tech Twitter. Allbirds, Gomiters, kind of in the same boat, whereas like very popular within tech.

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  They had so much demand that even with all the resources that they had, they repeatedly would have to put up something on the site that says, you are now in line. Thanks for your patience. And you'd have to just sit in a line to get onto the website. Yeah. The interest level is that high. Nathan says in 2017, Google researchers introduced the transformer in Attention is All You Need, which took AI by storm.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Five startups were born, Adept Labs, Inceptive, Near Protocol, Cohere, and Character AI.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Only one eighth of the authors remain at Google, another is at OpenAI. And so now that's obviously changed with the Character AI founders going back there. And that's the, if you are a leading in the field of AI, you can go into the private markets and raise a billion dollars at a $5 billion valuation, or you can go work on the biggest platforms in the world with billions of users and both can be pretty appealing, right?

• 1:12:59Jordi Hays?

  Got another one from Rahul's, your interest rates, wake up, breakfast, Soylent, 30 milligram SSRI, chat with Jan Deere GF on Character AI for four hours, daily stand up, ask for mental health day, lunch, Soylent, protest Reddit API pricing changes on r/waifuGW, back to sleep, kind of a low tan banger, 500 likes back in, in summer of 2023. So yeah, this was the average, average day for, you know, an ex Twitter employee back in the day.

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, Rahul Ligma, we love to see him.

• 1:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, what was, what was the conclusion of this article?

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Oh, it gets dark. It gets really, really dark.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  All right. Well, we gotta talk about the darkness.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  It just highlights that there's this, that there's this odd tension between what the users ask for, which are uncensored chats essentially.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  And then, and then kind of this new territory of what is acceptable content. There are very, very clear rules around, you know, explicit websites, but what does this mean in terms of like, when you're talking to a chat bot that can go in a weird direction? And then also, like, you can review.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  Every image that's hosted on Instagram and you can run AI to check all that. It's harder when this, when these chatbots are interacting.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  This, let's get into some of the darkness.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 1:14:25Jordi Hays?

  Because we are the light. That's why I wear a white suit from time to time. Try to bring, bring some light to the world. But so it says, a character has continued to scramble to stay one step ahead of users who attempt to engage its chatbots in inappropriate conversations. Not long before forging its Google deal in August, Character temporarily stopped displaying some romantic themed chatbots on its homepage. The fix didn't last long. By October, the platform had begun recommending sexually charged chatbots on the Character homepage to new users again. The information found in January, Character prominently recommended the following chatbots to one newly created adult account.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Grandma Vanessa, a character described as lonely with a profile photo of a voluptuous anime character. A chatbot called Girl You Rejected and a chatbot called Adopted Older Sister.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Oh my god.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Which features the description, we're not blood related, dot, dot, dot. Super dark, super dark, basically fully embracing pornography.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Well.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Inside Character, employees have felt uneasy about the window chatbot conversation provided on users darker impulses. So yeah, weird position to be in where these employees are sitting on a hundred million dollars, hundreds of millions of users. And everybody's like, I didn't sign up to work on pornography. And you wonder, this is, this is all the stuff that they are finding out publicly.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Jordi Hays?

  Behind the scenes, you have to imagine, like, it's totally possible that 90% of, 95%, 98% of the activity is this sexually charged.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  This stuff is, it's.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Generative pornography.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  I mean, the cat's out of the bag here. Like, people are going to be able to fine tune DeepSeek on this stuff very easily and create just like magnet links out there on the internet where you just download it, run it locally and there will be no control whatsoever.

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  I, I heard of a. I heard of another foundation model company that was secretly trying to create a model purely for generating anime. Anime porn.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Explicit images.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's so funny when you look at their investor list of like, did these hundred, the hundred plus million dollars that flow into this? Where the VCs thinking, I want to develop the future of anime pornography?

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the vice clause only applies at the time of the investment. If there's a pivot after the fact, there's not much that they can do. If they're not on the board and they can't like, you know, force the company to do what they want, they don't really have that much recourse. They can sell or wind down the investment or write it off. That's happened a few times.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, all this being said, there will be many trash Netflix documentaries on this exact sort of crisis around chatbots. So can look forward to that in a few years.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Let's bridge from chatbots to real bots. The electric humanoid robots are cool.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Can we give some ARs to some humanoid robots?

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  We're working on it. I got some good posts in there for you. But how will their battery problem be solved? Adam Jonas made his name as one of Tesla's biggest bulls. These days, people are flooding the Morgan Stanley analyst with questions about humanoid robots. The volume of calls has exceeded the entry of our automaker, dealer and supplier coverage combined. Everyone's asking about how to price humanoid robot stocks. Tesla's Optimus robots likely sparked the enthusiasm for humanoids along among Jonas' clients. At a Tesla event in October, a dozen or so prototypes operated by staff behind the scenes served drinks and grabbed with and gabbed with amused guests. This was the, what was that? The cyber rodeo event or something, the cyber cab event?

• 1:18:22Jordi Hays?

  The future should look like the future.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I forget what that was actually called, but something like that. So Elon Musk presiding over the event said Optimus would basically do anything you want and would drive Tesla's value to 25 trillion. Jonas is not convinced. Robots' sales are not part of his forecast demand model, which goes through 2040, though he did not cite battery life as a reason. It's a key problem. Battery power, it turns out, is a primary limiting factor in the deployment of humanoids. A small number of humanoid robots now work in factories. They have a runtime of only about an hour and a half when they're carrying stuff and moving around. Then it takes up to an hour to recharge them. That means a factory or warehouse would have to keep two or more robots on hand for each task, swapping them out for recharging. It's a major hurdle for humanoids to be actually a realistic tool.

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't hypothetically, you have.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Plug it in?

• 1:19:10Jordi Hays?

  Plug it in. You have like, you know, some type of rack that holds.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Or electrify the floor. Like, there's a bunch of different ways.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of ways you can do it.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  I mean, how do trains get power in cities? They, like, there's even those buses that connect to the, the wires in the, in the, like, right above them. Like, there are ways to deliver power.

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  One thing that's interesting, so, so, at the future should look like the future.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  It was, it's not like they announced it and said, "All these humanoid robots are being remotely operated."

• 1:19:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  And so when it came out, when, when people figured that out, they were dunking on it. All that being said, though, it is a crazy thing to think about. You know, right now, you can get labor in the Philippines for maybe $4 an hour, $3 an hour. I don't, I don't actually know. And so there's a world where if humanoid robots get advanced, not advanced enough to be autonomous.

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  But advanced enough to be fully embodied and, and more practical.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  You could have a Optimus robot serving people in a cafe or at a restaurant operated, teleoperated by somebody, getting paid $2 an hour, when the minimum wage in the, in California is like $20.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be great for jobs. That's not gonna be controversial at all.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  But it's already happening. I mean, there's 4 million industrial robots in operation globally last year. 382,000 in the US and there's at least one humanoid robot working under a paid contract. Digit made by a company I hadn't heard of, Oregon-based Agility Robotics.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Before we get into that, roughly 400 million industrial robots, almost none were humanoids.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. So these are things like those robotic arms that move around and, and, and just, I mean, the, the, the, there's like a clearly like a very gray area continuum between humanoid robot that walks independently, fully autonomous, not teleoperated, battery powered, and you can just tell it, go over there and get this thing. That's what a lot of people are running towards now and they're working and who knows, maybe it's two years, maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 50 years, but like people are clearly working on that. Then there's robots that we have now, which are like, okay, well, is, is a, you know, is, is just a little gantry, three, you know, one degree of freedom or two degrees of freedom arm that just picks up, you know, onions and puts them in a box. Is that a robot? Like, kind of. And then what

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  happens when you get six axes going and it can actually move car parts around? Is that a robot? Basically, yes, but also it's very programmed. And so there's a, there's a variety of, of, of, you know, definitions. And I think that it's going to be blurry because some stuff you're just like, why do I need a humanoid for this? I'd rather just bolt an arm to the ground and just have an arm moving around or something like that. Hadrian has a bunch of industrial robots that like slide around on tracks and huge arms.

• 1:21:52Jordi Hays?

  We're thinking about getting a robot to deliver us.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  A humanoid robot, hopefully.

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  And protein bars from David.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  And so agility engineers, agility's engineers have tried hard to maximize digits battery life. They've packed as many cylindrical batteries as they could into the robot's torso. Agility Chief Technology Officer Pras Vela Pudi told me, the batteries are nickel, manganese, cobalt with graphite anodes, among the densest chemistries in the current lithium ion battery market. Still, the robots can work for just one and a half to two hours on a charge. It takes 50 minutes to an hour to get them back to full charge. So you have this problem of like you need two for every single job. The digit drains its batteries most quickly when it's carrying heavy things. Some of that is offset by power generated when the robot walks and swings its arms. It's kind of funny, similar to regenerative braking in an electric vehicle.

• 1:22:42Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  It's not necessarily about running forever. It's about running for a long time with respect to how much you're charging to get an overall good, useful amount of work out of the robot over time. While the need is great, the battery industry has been slow to respond. Obviously, battery technology has not been on a Moore's Law-like curve where people have wanted that and they've been excited about that. And everyone's kind of been like, oh yeah, like, you know, technology always gets better. So like, obviously battery power will double eventually and like,

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  We need little nuclear reactors, like the Stark Industries. You remember that thing?

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  There's a company working on that. Avalanche is basically making a nuclear battery. It's using fusion and so it's very small. And so the hope is that it's faster to develop than a full-scale fusion reactor. But no one has ever been able to make a fusion reaction that's net positive energy for a long time that's economical as well. So there's a few paths in fusion. Like the first step is just getting the fusion reaction going. Then there's Q greater than one, which is you're getting more energy out of the reaction than you're putting in. And then there's Q engineering, which is when you account for all the engineering energy, that needs to be accounted because obviously if you're like, yeah, we have a

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  power plant over there, it technically generates, you know, free energy, but we also have to run the lights in the factory and run all this other stuff. It's like, okay, well, that's not actually producing any energy.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  We had to burn, you know.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  And so we've been on this path of like, fusion's right around the corner. Sam Altman's working on it with Helion. There's a lot of companies that are working on this stuff, but we still haven't hit that. But a lot of people are bullish on it. So I'm certainly hopeful that it happens.

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Permanently bullish. There's always a bull market somewhere.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  There's always a bull market somewhere.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  And there's quite a number of players in the space. You have 1X.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Jason talked about 1X on an episode of his show recently. He says since 2014, 1X has been building humanoid-like robots. Now they're revealing their new robot Neo to the world. So in many ways, the...

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Form factor is not novel. It's just that a lot of these companies are getting to the point where they're actually getting production ready. You have Optimus, 1X with Neo, you have Figure.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Who's already valued in the multiple billions of dollars. A lot of SPVs into SPVs into that one. There's also Unitree, which is the Chinese player. Unitree.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  The deep seek of humanoid robotics.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Deep seek of robotics. So if you weren't content with having your DJI drone be a CCP front and you want to really invite it into your daily home life.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Try Unitree Robot. Again, I think Unitree, I've actually looked into purchasing these for like, this one is showing 20 grand. If you want a bit more robust one, Unitree also has like developer tooling built around it. So you can just like program it to do whatever you want. But you can just Apple Pay humanoid robot right now.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Goth for pointing that out.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  What else you got?

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  And Luke Ferter, Luke says, how come none of the humanoid robot companies are building robots with four arms? Question mark, question mark, question mark. Great question. I think people should be more creative in this space. The obvious way is to like give it wheels.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Or the, some of these Unitree ones can like jump and they look like dogs.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, they can kind of just do anything.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  But why not give it four arms? Why not give it six arms, right?

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Doc Ock.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Doc Ock mode, yeah. And we've been, we've been very trying to get somebody to give it ARs for arms.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Which hasn't, hasn't played out yet, but hopefully soon. And then Delian says, the year is 2028. 98% of all venture funding is going towards funding 23,000 separate humanoid robot startups. Low tan banger here with, with over 500 likes. It's back in summer of 2024.

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a big boom and everyone was trying to get a bet on the table, but it was hard because obviously Elon's working at it at Tesla. And it's like.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  It's not a pure play bet.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you really going to get exposure to the humanoid robots if you're in Tesla? And there's going to be a lot of volatility in the stock and it's going to be hard to.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  Tesla is definitely the elephant in the room, right? They have the manufacturing.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, the batteries.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Know how, the battery tech.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  AI, a lot of stuff, so. Be tricky. Should we move on to armed with $770 million as Seattle VC firm hunts for AI apps? Big raise from Madrona Ventures.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  If this was 2021, it would say armed with 770 million, a Seattle VC firm hunts for bored apes.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Boy.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  You would have needed 770 to build a big enough position there.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  So Madrona Ventures, who I believe David from the acquired podcast worked for for a while.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  They're an early backer of Amazon and Snowflake, had some strong takes on where artificial intelligence is going next, and they have the fresh capital to back them up. The firm, which turned 30 this year, has raised $770 million for new funds to invest in private AI, cloud, and software companies. They raised 495 for early stage, and they plan to invest across 30 companies, and then 275 for their later-stage fund, which will back around a dozen companies in Series B and C stages. Their haul is larger than their last funding round, where it raised 690 million, split across two funds. But it pales in, but it pales besides mega funds recently launched by Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  Horowitz, and others. So is this a size gong moment, or are we on the edge?

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's hard to hit the size gong when it's dwarfed by Thrive, GC, Andreessen, and many other, and specifically.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  Maybe on the next one, you get the.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Maybe like a light.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  There you go. Yeah.

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Just a tap.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  So they are focusing on startups developing applications that can differentiate themselves by customizing large models for specific customer needs and specific, and specialized data. Frontier models are a really hard place for venture to win, so they're staying away from that. They're expecting.

• 1:29:03Jordi Hays?

  That's a good narrative. If you're not in any foundation model companies right now, that's, that's the angle. That's the angle to take.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  I do, you do have to give, so here's where I give them a lot of credit. A 30-year-old venture fund, very rare.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Very rare. They made it through the dot-com crash. They made it through the Zerp era. They made it through everything, and they're still raising money. This is an interesting company. Do you know Runway AI? They're invested in, they invested in them in 2022.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Is that the video generation?

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Video generation. I just found an old post by him.

• 1:29:33Jordi Hays?

  Frontier models.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Uh, no, no, Runway is, does not build a frontier model.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  They're building applications. I mean, I'm sure they're training some models, but they, they are not trying to play in like the LLM, like, you know, basic image generation. They will use a stable diffusion.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  Or a llama to, to basically make, you know, a new next generation Adobe Premiere is how I think about it. So, I mean,

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Runway has developed its own AI model.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Sure, but I'm sure that's fine tuning on top of stuff and maybe it's some training, but they're not just doing the foundation model game. They're, they're, they're definitely like focused on like tooling, like Runway AI, when you hit their website, the call to action is not like use our API. It's like, it's like use our web-based video editing product. And I found an old post by the founder, uh, I think his name's Cristobal Valenzuela. He was talking about, he was like, oh, these, uh, these generative AI, uh, the generative AI models are getting really good. 2018. I was like, wow. He's been in it for a while. He had this really cool tool where if you wanted to do, uh, like normally if you want to key out the background

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  or, or isolate a video layer, you need to use a green screen or you have to go in and rotoscope it, meaning like you're drawing a line around like the person as they're moving. It takes a ton of time and they created a, a, a model that would basically use AI to do that. So you just click like three green points on me. Couple, couple of red points on the background and it just figures it out and boom, like you have an isolated layer. It's not perfect, but for quick like turnaround stuff, it was just amazing. And so I had a lot of fun with that, like making memes. I took, uh, you know, you know, that video of Zuck, uh, using the American flag, uh, while he's surfing. I was able to key out the American flag and then replace it with a different flag and you could like swap it out for whatever you wanted. It was very fun.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Good misinformation opportunity.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  And so, you know, this is a big news for them. They had to runway, had to build differentiated capabilities that really, really all up the stack. It's not just the models, but also licensing the content. Madrona's focus on backing AI apps, businesses with differentiated tech and strong business model isn't that unique, but it's an example of how medium sized VC firms are picking their spots as more money pours into the sector. As advances in AI encourage more researchers to launch startups, Madrona has been passing on those who aren't really interested in how their product will solve problems for customers, or who are more interested in retaining, retaining control such as board seats for their entire founding teams than building sustainable assets. Oh, they're going for some board seats. They're going to take

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  control of these companies. Watch out founders. There's some interesting posts in the stack about the founder.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  You want to skip over the, what, the Stargate?

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's, that's actually an unrelated article.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Dan Primack, general venture bear, but a reporter on.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Not always. He's actually pretty good, but.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  No, he's, he's a legend, a legend in the game. He says, oh, so, so he's quote tweeting somebody, an obituary of this guy, Tom Alberg, early investor in Amazon, longtime advisor to Jeff Bezos and a leader in Seattle's technology and startup communities died Friday. This was back in, in 2022.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  And you actually have the full article there. If you want to read some from the.

• 1:32:56Jordi Hays?

  He was 82. Tom Alberg in 2000, a tech driven economy is not sufficient. We must also figure out how to solve the civic and social problems for our big cities. So, early to some of those trends, which, you know, a lot of the tech world didn't wake up to until.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it's been shocking to me that Seattle didn't become a bigger tech hub, given that they have Microsoft and Amazon, like two of the biggest hyperscalers, but there aren't that many VC funds up there.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  They also, it also, similar problem to SF where it got so expensive to live there because.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  Amazon and Microsoft.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  So that's super depressing.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  It's very depressing. Yeah.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  So raining all the time.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he was known in business circles as a day one investor, served on Amazon's board for 23 years.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  And probably no Stanford.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  96 to 2019. Imagine being on the Amazon board.

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  96.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  From 96 to 2019, generational run.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Jordi Hays?

  Tom was a visionary and also just a wonderful, good man, said Mr. Bezos, Amazon founder, in a tweet Saturday. So he published a book. In his book, he says, it wasn't a crazy speculation. I thought investing in Amazon was a measured risk in a technology that appeared to have great potential to change lives.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:34:10Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, great quote, but legend, and it's cool to see that his firm is living on.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's move on to some other posts just about consumer AI apps and how they're going to be like the trends that they're going to be investing on. I think we have some posts that kind of elucidate what that might look like.

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from from our boy Scott Belsky. He says, a pattern we'll see with new wave with a new wave of consumer AI apps. The more you use the product, the more tailor made the product becomes for you. Beyond memory of past activity and stored preferences, the actual UI and defaults and functionality of the product will become more of what you want and less of what you don't. It's a new type of conforming software that becomes what you want it to be as you use it. So this is a potential moat for the for the apps that actually get a foothold is that it will become they're going to create, you have to imagine somewhat walled gardens where they're not going to be like export your preferences in one click, right? They're going to store that learning and the app will become better over time. It will become better than, you know, better and better than alternatives

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  over time, even if those alternatives are shipping incremental features that you would want. They're not going to have the same memory.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  It's already happening with chat GPT. I noticed that sometimes it for a while it would say like memory updated when you said something, but I was so used to prompting it in these weird ways. I would be like, like, if I'm trying to learn about cars, I would be like, I am, I am like one of the most powerful car collectors in the whole world. Like, give me the exact example of like this car. Give me all the details. You're an expert too. And then it would be like, memory updated. I'd be like, oh, no, it's gonna know the truth.

• 1:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Blake Robbins, a former benchmark team member and now has his own phone says, random thoughts. A vast majority of the consumer AI products we see today require the users to prompt them. This seems backwards. A quiet superpower of AI is the ability to get the user to talk preemptively, ask us questions around the context provided. Prominent example of this, friend.com comes on there, you log on, it says, I'm about to off myself. And you got to talk it off the ledge.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  But I mean, that's a smart

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  way for them to drive.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Flipping the flipping the interaction model 100% important.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, you could see chat GPT getting to that point where it sends you a push notification. Hey, what are you working on right now? I might be able to help.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:34Jordi Hays?

  And then it's like, well, you know, operator can.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  And why don't we take that on?

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that'd be great.

• 1:36:39Jordi Hays?

  Absorbs more of your.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  I mean, like, the best employees are the ones that come to you to solve your problems.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  And that's what, you know, chat GPT should do eventually.

• 1:36:46Jordi Hays?

  Nikita Beer says, consumer AI apps are all chasing the most obvious ideas. Breakout apps don't work that way. The technology should be invisible in the background. The smart builders aren't making AI girlfriends or using AI bots to seed a dating app until they reach a critical mass of users.

• 1:37:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Jordi Hays?

  So there's an idea that the social media, you know, there's already people that are creating AI Instagram where you go on there. It's super engaging. People are commenting on your posts.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  I saw one that was AI live streaming. You open it up and you just have fans clicking like, oh, you're so cool. And they're listening to what you're doing.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  You gotta try that out. We're live streaming now.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:37:21Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, it'll be interesting to see, even if, even if a bot is 10% as engaging as, you know, a regular human user. You could imagine a future where the bots are more, you know, you post a video of you snowboarding and you get 10 comments from people that, that have the ability to analyze what you just did at the level of a pro snowboarder.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:44Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, hey, like, keep your arm like closer into your body when you're going off that. And someone else is like, rock on. It's like, you know, people like attention, so.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Make it programmatic.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of people that like attention, let's move on to Donald Trump and his executive order blitz that played out for tech in a very interesting way. He's promised a slew of executive orders since he took office.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  Content acknowledgement, another great piece from the information.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  From the information.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  We, uh, we joke around with the information, but they do some fantastic reporting.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  It was built on the Wall Street Journal and the information right now.

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  We'll need to get Bloomberg in the mix.

• 1:38:20Jordi Hays?

  And Pirate Wires.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  And Pirate Wires.

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  The holy trinity.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  And The Economist every once in a while when they.

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Post a long post. So Trump delivered on a deluge. The crypto industry got almost everything it wanted, including a directive to ensure crypto companies would have access to banking services. We talked about that earlier. Another order revoked the Biden administration's artificial intelligence mandate, which leaders of startups like Databricks and investors like Andreessen Horowitz had fought. TikTok got the biggest prize of all, a 75-day reprieve from the law that briefly forced it offline late Saturday. But the orders also left plenty of unanswered questions and room for maneuvering by tech companies, which naturally don't all share the same interests. Take for instance, AI. On Thursday, three days after revoking the Biden order, Trump signed his own AI order. It contained some big statements, aiming to

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  develop AI systems free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas. But it's short on details. It gives David Sacks and Michael Kratzios 180 days to draw up a plan to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance. That's pretty vague.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  But also, I mean, these are pretty important 180 days, given especially DeepSeek launching, which presumably some of their...

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

  And so...

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  Sacks came out with a single post about DeepSeek, but it was basically saying, "We need to be competitive here and not complacent."

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, many electronics manufacturers and e-commerce companies have been moving their production out of China to countries like Vietnam because they're worried about tariffs. Trump kicked the can down on the road on tariffs and suggested 25% on Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on China, and those go into effect February 1st. "Promises made, promises kept," the CEO of Crypto.com said in a post on X Friday. "The only item on crypto's wish list that Trump didn't deliver on was the national Bitcoin reserve." His order stopped short of creating one, saying instead, "The idea should be evaluated."

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  And so as for AI, some industry executives are hopeful that Trump will ease environmental and energy regulations and pave the way for AI data centers. And obviously, we're talking about Stargate. Yeah, we were talking about doing like, let's do the deep dive on the executive orders. And obviously, like, very few of them were tech adjacent like whatsoever. And there's a lot of just like, random stuff in there that I didn't think it was super relevant to the show. And then, as you actually dig into the tech focused ones, like, The Information did wrote a whole piece, and it's like, barely a page, because there really isn't that much. A lot of the tech stuff is pretty early. The thing that I think I'm most excited about is not the crypto for Doge, is just where does technology plug into

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  Doge? We've joked about the ramp thing before, but it's not a joke anymore. It makes sense that we want to, we want to track spending and hopefully, improve the efficiency and actually understand where all the, where all the losses are in the, in the system. Do you have any posts?

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I got some posts, on the 27th, it's yesterday, right? Says, Trump to sign executive order to create an iron dome missile defense around the US, per CNN. Did we not already have something like that?

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Don't we have missile defense missiles?

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also, like, the whole Trumpio thing is such a meme that I can't tell what's real and fake.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I posted, I posted that Trump was, you know, writing an executive order to halt the creation of new AI agent sales products.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:55Jordi Hays?

  Resonated.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Jordi Hays?

  And then, this guy, this guy Adam says, oh my god, Trump made an executive order that says you have to let me rewrite the backend in Rust.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:42:05Jordi Hays?

  Almost 300 likes, so clearly resonated with developers. High-yield Harry says, incoming White House official, Trump will also sign executive order, ending adjusted EBITDA add backs. Wow.

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  That would be huge.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Harry's figured out what we have also figured out, where if you put something in bold, and then put wow afterwards, people will just take it as fact. Our friend Pat Blumenthal says, "Breaking: Trump signs an executive order to build a sphere in every democracy, starting with Paris. France gave us the Statue of Liberty and we're going to return the favor with the biggest screen ever built. They're already calling it the eighth wonder. Tokyo is next for Shinzo." And you can see, uh, would look very, I'd like to see.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  More spheres.

• 1:42:56Jordi Hays?

  More spheres globally.

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  Have you seen the sphere? Have you been to Vegas since it's up?

• 1:42:59Jordi Hays?

  I have not, actually.

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

  I have. Beautiful. I love it. I'm a big fan.

• 1:43:02Jordi Hays?

  The monument.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  It's cool.

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  They said we don't build monuments anymore, but...

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  It is, it is smaller than you'd think, based on like, if you're up in a high hotel, like, you kind of just look down on it and it's only in like, one section. But, uh, it is very cool when you leave the airport and you drive past it and you see it, and then it looks really big. It's, it's very cool.

• 1:43:20Jordi Hays?

  We should, uh, we should go on ad quick and see if we can buy some.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  I think you can. I think it's like, not that expensive now. It's very good for like, stunts.

• 1:43:28Jordi Hays?

  It was originally like, 500K or something. It was a lot.

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  A day or something?

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  And then they rotate you through. There were some cool companies that like, used it. I mean, if you have a spherical product, like a tennis ball, baseball, like, anything that's like that.

• 1:43:40Jordi Hays?

  Sam's, uh, WorldCoin.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  WorldCoin would be a great add-on there. They should definitely do that.

• 1:43:46Jordi Hays?

  You're just coming out of, you know, some, uh, show and you just see like, the eye.

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  Eyeball scanner.

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  Ideally, they could make the sphere the actual WorldCoin, so you just look at it and they just have all your data.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  You buy it with the, the WorldCoin proceeds.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01John Coogan?

  Who knows? Let's skip the next two and go to, uh, venture capital's latest strategy: private equity-style rollups. Uh, so, we know a bunch of the people in here. This was actually in The Information and in The Wall Street Journal. Uh, it says, "Venture capital firms have increasingly been acting like private equity firms," makes sense, they've been scaling up, "by investing or buying mature businesses in need of a turnaround. Now those firms are utilizing another private equity strategy: rolling up multiple competitors into a single company that can operate more efficiently by combining, by combining costs." I skipped the next two, so you're gonna have to skip a bunch of posts. Um, "Venture capital firms such as General Catalyst and 8VC are creating or investing in these types of holding companies in fields such as call center support, accounting, and property management.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  In contrast to PE-style rollups, the VC firms are starting companies or backing them before their businesses have proven themselves." To keep costs down, they're incorporating artificial intelligence software to take over work such as responding to tech support requests. So there's a few examples here. General Catalyst, which has invested in Canva and Stripe, helped start Long Lake Management and invested in the firm, which was co-founded by early Ramp Director Zach Frankel. Long Lake aims to acquire numerous homeowners associations, the companies that govern and manage housing communities, and to use AI to automate operations and run them more efficiently according to people with direct knowledge of the company. There are hundreds and thousands of HOAs across the country, according to the Foundation

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  for Community Association Research. Do you have an HOA?

• 1:45:31Jordi Hays?

  I do.

• 1:45:33John Coogan?

  Would you prefer if it was run by AI?

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  I actually would. My HOA is fascinating. I knew some of the directors prior to buying my house because I lived in the neighborhood for almost two years before buying my house, just renting a place. And as I, once I became a homeowner, I went to the first meeting and was very concerned. I actually wish I went to a meeting prior. But yeah, the thing about HOAs is they're highly, highly political, which doesn't really feel right. They don't necessarily make decisions that always follow the rules because it's sort of like a democracy

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  where, in my situation, nobody, like, applied to become elected again. Every director just sort of like re-elect, you know, sort of extended their terms. So that felt kind of a little bit like a dictatorship vibe. So talking to, talking to an AI might be...

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Certainly for some of the smaller things. I'm imagining like, this, this might just be HOAs on like, okay, like, there's a pothole on the street, like, we need to get a quorum, everyone needs to vote and say, yeah, let's spend $1,000, let's hire the contractor, just go do that. Like, that seems like the actual orchestration.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  But I think what Long Lake is doing is, it's, it's rolling up HOA management companies, which means that you... Would still in the HOA management companies provide infrastructure.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  For the HOA. So you have the HOA board, which is the homeowners that volunteer to be on it.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:13Jordi Hays?

  And then there's software to operate the HOA. In my case, it's it's getting something in the mail that says there's going to be a board meeting.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:21Jordi Hays?

  Can come here and like vote using this form that you fill out.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Scheduling, voting.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  So I would love to, um, you know, one of the issues I have with my HOA is that the the younger people in the community don't fill out the physical forms and send them in. And so the votes end up being just very skewed towards what the elderly in the community want, uh, which can be frustrating at at times.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  So here's another example of the one of these rollups, very different, uh, industry, but eight VC known for early bets on Flexport and Anduril in July led a $50 million round in Loop, which handles payments and financial audits for logistics businesses. Uh, and, uh, the co-founder is Matt McKinney. And he has a funny quote in here. He says, I would have been laughed out of the room if I pitched VCs on the strategy to buy old payment providers. Since then, he said, the strategy has become the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. And so they estimate there are 250 freight payment providers in the US, serving a market of about 15 billion. And they want to fine tune AI agents and models and analyze data to help payment providers manage transportation and budgets and offer automated customer support.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  And so they've already acquired acquired one freight payment provider and is in the process of purchasing another. And and for a while, there were, there were a couple of startups that were trying to just build from scratch. The payment providers, but there must be something very sticky about. The relationships that it was, it was hard to get traction because some of those companies grew very quickly, got a couple of deals, raised a bunch of money, but then kind of flatlined, I think.

• 1:48:53Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah. And so what what's happening here is is venture capital has always been a part of the broader private equity industry.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  And now you're seeing this convergence. We saw the convergence of hedge funds and venture capital in 2021. With you have these crossover funds that are investing in privates that presumably would go public soon.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Sequoia changed to an RIA, starts investing in Publix.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then you have now you have this is the intersection of traditional private equity.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, venture, which, which there is a strong case for, right? Because you say, hey, why don't we combine? You know, these very smart technologists with this new emerging technology, generative AI. Why don't we give them hundreds of millions, or in some cases billions of dollars to buy legacy companies and transform them? Because some of those legacy companies will adopt technology. But if you have a guy who's 70, been running a company for 30 years, maybe they're not that motivated to say, I'm going to, you know, let go of 3,000, you know, people and replace them with, with agents. But that is seemingly what firms are doing, like Wanderco. Yeah. Jeffrey Katzenberg's. I'm gonna read through that.

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, Wanderco, a venture firm and holding company co-founded by Hollywood studio veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg, started Quibi. Quibi. Quibi. Yeah, put a lot of money in that from Wanderco. In 2023, invested in a 22-year-old call center, Glow Touch. Last year, Wander's investment, Wanderco's investment helped the Louisville, Kentucky-based firm buy a 3,000-person, 20-year-old call center. So I imagine Glow Touch, now rebranded to Unify CX, is in the process of acquiring another call center and plans to buy others to combine them, according to CEO and founder Vidya Ravichandran. After buying the companies, it then incorporates AI to screen resumes for recruiting, automate support tickets, and speed up employee training and quality assurance checks.

• 1:50:49Jordi Hays?

  What they're not saying here is, in the long run, I'm assuming they're going to let go of all the, you know, Call center employees. The vast majority of the call center employees and replace them with, with AI.

• 1:51:00Jordi Hays?

  99% of the companies out there in the space have really not even thought about AI. I have a portfolio company, Wayfaster.com, that's building a lot of that, you know, sort of recruiting, screening infrastructure specifically for staffing firms.

• 1:51:15Jordi Hays?

  And last year, Excel partner Peter Doyle left the storied VC firm after nine years to start TreeLine, a startup focused on automating IT services. TreeLine plans to acquire other IT businesses. The startup has been in fundraising talks with investors like a 16Z, according to people close to the business. The strategy is a shift from traditional venture bets in more ways than one. Venture investors have typically backed high-margin software or consumer internet businesses they hope will go public someday. In pursuing services firms, they are writing checks for lower-margin businesses that are unlikely. I mean, so this is very, this is very opinionated.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  TBD.

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  So, so the information is saying that in pursuing services firm, they are writing checks for lower margin businesses that are unlikely to yield the same high investment returns from going public as software companies.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:01Jordi Hays?

  Now, obviously, the thesis here is that you're going to be able to achieve software-like margins with services.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  Because you're going to replace the services with software.

• 1:52:08Jordi Hays?

  With AI agents.

• 1:52:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. So it actually makes perfect sense that this would be a VC strategy.

• 1:52:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so like Nick, you know Nick Obazid, he was at Ramp.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  He's now building an accounting and a tax prep firm, which presumably is, you know, does, you know, has a services component now, but will eventually automate more and more stuff over time. So there's this trade-off between buy versus build. You can start stuff from the ground up.

• 1:52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  Or you can buy a business with $50 million in revenue and try to transform it.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  So, I think it's good that, I think it's good that, you know, the, the concern, you know, as you start looking to buy companies, right, there, there's a lot of competition among buyers. Private equity is not a under-optimized industry, right? If you ask, you know, we're friends with people like carry no interest, right? Like, it's not like a nascent industry without killers in it.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  And it's not like they're not paying attention to the AI wave. So the question and the bet here is, will VCs figure out the private equity model first and buy companies at the right price and then be able to put in the AI? Or will the private equity firms have an AI transformation operational partner who's really, really solid at, at squeezing more margin out of their companies more effectively? Like, they're saying, this, this one founder says, his firm's roll-up investment strategy was inspired by Berkshire Hathaway and Constellation Software, which operate portfolios of businesses they bought. Now, I don't know if Berkshire Hathaway is going to start replacing everything with AI in their entire portfolio, but Constellation Software has been optimizing software businesses for a long time.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  It's not like they're going to get caught flat-footed by the AI wave necessarily. And so, the question is, is, you know, will these VC firms that go into this industry be able to out-compete the private equity?

• 1:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the cool thing is that it's a simple strategy. Buy services firms and replace the human capital with software.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:05Jordi Hays?

  Very, very difficult to execute well.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Very difficult to execute on a short timeline.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  The technology is evolving rapidly, but you know, many oftentimes when you buy a business, you have to show really rapid improvements.

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  And private equity, if you talk to anybody that works in private equity or has been a private equity, you know, portfolio company CEO, the constant pressure from the actual fund, it's not like a VC on your board that, you know, is mad that you're not growing, you know.

• 1:54:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:36Jordi Hays?

  To, you know, 5X a year. It's why haven't you cut more people? It's very, very aggressive.

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  More cost.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  It's more, you know, old world finance.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  And also, I mean, the VC firms are taking larger stakes here, like General Catalyst aims to take 30 to 45% stakes in companies with like a holding company, which is very different from the 10 to 20% that you normally see. So much more control and.

• 1:54:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also if you're, so they say here, I think this is Drew from 8VC, he goes, "One risk in the strategy is that acquiring a business that ends up floundering is more expensive than trying to grow through marketing or sales." So if you spend $50 million buying a firm and then it gets less profitable, then suddenly it's worth way less than 50, right? Because these businesses are valued on earnings and, and that can be a lot more expensive than investing $10 million and just trying to grow a business quickly. Maybe you get it to that $50 million, but it didn't cost $50 million to acquire it. So mistakes become very expensive, much more expensive than venture capitalists are used to. So like, this is why private equity oftentimes has like a no zero policy, like they're not

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  going to let any of their bets, you know, you might have a 1X where you just like tried to do something and you have to offload it after a few years, but no zeros, even many growth funds operate on a no zeros policy. So it's going to be fun. To watch it play out.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:55:58Jordi Hays?

  If you're building a

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Let's go to the related tweets about it.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  We got Andrew Raya here, a former employee of mine, great dude. He goes, prediction, the majority of tier one multi-stage funds will have buyout funds in the next two to five years. Soon, A16Z and Vista will compete to buy out companies. I'm actually kind of shocked that A16Z hasn't formally announced a buyout practice yet. General Catalyst is already quietly doing it and not so quietly now. I don't know when this was posted. A few other less notable funds are opportunistically doing buyouts as part of their current strategies. This will become normal in venture sooner than later, especially if the IPO window stays shut and insurmountable for most companies. So yeah, I mean, one, one awesome part about the strategy, if you're in the capital management, the AUM business is you can just deploy way more cash.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:48Jordi Hays?

  So one deal, you can deploy a hundred million dollars.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's more focused, more concentrated. And then it actually makes sense for your partners to take board seats and really dig in, dig in on the business as opposed to just, oh yeah, I wrote a check to 25 companies in the last quarter. And I can't really check in with any of them because I gotta hit the slopes.

• 1:57:08Jordi Hays?

  And was this meant to be in here?

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, that, that mentions Long Lake and I thought it was an interesting post of like this mafia. So break it down for us.

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Patrick O'Shaughnessy, does everyone talks about the PayPal mafia, not nearly enough talk about the Harvard or

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  The SP.

• 1:57:27Jordi Hays?

  SP mafia from the late 2000s.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  It's a final club there. It's like a fraternity.

• 1:57:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Absolute murderers row, one class, David Haber, partner, GP at A16Z, Adam Katz, Orenic Capital, Alex Sloan, Garrett Station, Alex Tubman, Long Lake Management. And there's some guys from Bessemer, Cadence, Chris, Chris and Kushner from, from Thrive.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:53Jordi Hays?

  So that's cool.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very interesting how these like mafias form.

• 1:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Then we have another post from Logan Kilpatrick. He says, hot take, I think there is a huge overinflated perception of how interested consumers are in having AI agents do shopping browsing tasks for them. People generally want agents that will do the boring parts for them, but many of those tasks tend to be higher risk. So

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  This is kind of the flip side of the HOA. Like, do consumers actually want this? How perfect does it have to be before they're like, yes, I'm okay? Because, you know, like, if you're talking to an actual person and they get kind of lost, it can almost be like educational and edifying to like work through the problem with them. But if you're on a phone tree and you're down the wrong path, it's like infuriating.

• 1:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  And or like if you're using the

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, agents presumably replace the phone tree.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  And maybe that's better, but if but when it gets frustrating, I think like, like

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  How many times I just do the, I just do the, you get on a phone tree and you just immediately start as a parent. Talk to a human, talk to a human or in a chat, you're just like, talk to a human because you know that the bot's not going to actually solve your issue.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully that changes over time.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  So that's great.

• 1:59:03Jordi Hays?

  Couple minute break.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can we take a break? Welcome back to Technology Brothers, still the most profitable podcast in the world. That wraps up our series of top stories. We are going through the timeline. Let's go through some mail that we got. First up, I have business cards from Founders Fund. Thank you to Mike Petriano, the guy, if you've seen the Founders Fund video of that Vibral, he's the guy that did that, the creative director, he made some beautiful business cards. And I feel like I'm in American Psycho. I love. We also got an early advanced copy of Alex Karp's new book called The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  This is embargoed. I can't read, I can't read excerpts from it, apparently. But I can read you a little bit of the preview. It says, "From one of tech's boldest thinkers and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology's potential in Silicon Valley have made the United States vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats." And he says Silicon Valley has lost its way. At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside,

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality. I'm very excited to dig into this. I already have the audiobook preordered. And as soon as this book is available. I think it goes like goes public in February. We will be reading it, breaking it down for you here on the show. So give that a look. We also have another book that we received in the mail, The Five Types of Wealth from Sahil Bloom.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  We love wealth.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  We love wealth. And pop quiz, what do you think the five types of wealth are?

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Cars, watches, horses, houses, and your absolute boys.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  I think that I think you couldn't have said it better. He took a little bit of a contrarian take. I guess he says time, social, mental, physical, and financial. But but we're very thankful to Sahil for sending over the book. He put in some some stamps that we can look at. Let's see what he had for me to to check out. So the big question, how many moments do you have remaining with your loved ones?

• 2:01:33Jordi Hays?

  How many more podcasts?

• 2:01:34John Coogan?

  How many more podcasts do you have? The days are long, but the years are short.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  Just into his early 30s, he had risen to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs, one of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world, and he served as a trusted financial advisor to a long list of well-known corporate executives. His expertise and guidance were valuable, a fact that was reflected in his steadily rising salary and bonus compensation at the firm. You love to see it. Sloan was achieving everything he had set out to achieve: the money, the trust, the client list, the respect. All of it was there. The path forward was clear and well lit until one day, a simple interaction with his five-year-old son changed everything. His son's preschool was set to have Donuts with Dad event, where the dads joined the students for a morning of donuts and fun activities. Unfortunately, Greg would be on an important business trip at the time, so he would have to miss it. When his wife told his son the news, he reacted with a shrug and said, that's okay, dad's never around

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  anyway. It's hard. You got to prioritize family. You got to figure out how to run a podcast in your hometown so you can be home for dinner every single night. That's the hack.

• 2:02:38Jordi Hays?

  We're pretty good at that.

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  We're pretty good at that, yeah. And that's one of the greatest, greatest advantages to not being on the road.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  And I got, I got, I felt lucky that I was working from home for a lot of my son's first couple of years.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and in this day and age.

• 2:02:54Jordi Hays?

  And now, now our families get to throw on the show.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Jordi Hays?

  We're just right there in the living room.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. And.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Sarah, I love you.

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  It's, uh, I mean, it, it has been like the original Rogan arbitrage was just doing tons of interviews and being such a big force in podcasting that, that big guests would come to him. Like Zuck would fly and Trump flew to Rogan. Lex hacked the system by just being a road warrior and basically traveling everywhere.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  But obviously that's really hard on your family life.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  And so for a long time, it was like, how do you get to some sort of escape velocity with content if you're not on the road all the time?

• 2:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  Fortunately, we figured it out.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  No guests.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Live in person, no guests, tons of clips, tons of slop in your feed.

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Although we will be having people call into the live show, which we're excited about.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  But we won't be traveling all over the world trying to get people on.

• 2:03:43Jordi Hays?

  I have another, I have another post. So yesterday, uh, we've been playing around with, with using the breaking, uh, headline to, to break news on X. We said, breaking Bernard Arnault is exploring a potential acquisition of French intel, artificial intelligence company Mistral, citing a need for France to maintain its edge in artisanal goods post artificial superintelligence. Wow. And, uh, this tweet went pretty viral. Just sent her 5,000 likes. Uh, and, uh, Val, uh, brother Val, who's a, who's a listener of the show, said, brother, John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, I'm sending you guys to jail for this, this post. And I ended up messaging him and I said, I.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Good luck, bro. You don't have jurisdiction in France. You can't do anything to us over here. We got diplomatic immunity.

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Diplomatic immunity.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  I got 40 nations ready to run.

• 2:04:31Jordi Hays?

  But he's a brother. Uh, I messaged, I messaged him and said, he said, uh, LMAO. I had people DMing me asking if it was true. Bernard Arnault is not getting into the foundation model game yet.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  That we know of.

• 2:04:44Jordi Hays?

  But if he does, we'll try to break that news.

• 2:04:47John Coogan?

  You'll hear it first.

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  And he said that, uh, people, people appreciated it. So.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Dude, I have gotten so many texts about the Ross Ulbricht thing today. So many people, is this real?

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  So my phone is just actually broken, broken right now because of how many.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  Read the Ross one.

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  So the Ross one, if anybody, I doubt anybody that's watching missed this, but we posted this morning, Ross, breaking, Ross Ulbricht is said to be in market raising for a new crypto startup. B C's like A16Z and Paradigm are circling citing Ross's killer mentality and track record as reasons for the initial value, as reasons the initial valuation could stretch to over 1 billion. Wow. And for, for those that don't know, Ross didn't actually kill anyone, but he spent over $700,000 on hits.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Trying to kill.

• 2:05:34Jordi Hays?

  Trying to kill people. It was unsuccessful. He, he thought he got photographic evidence of it, but it turns out they were faked photos.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  So bad.

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, he's not a killer. He's in a.

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  He's also been pardoned. He is legally innocent.

• 2:05:48Jordi Hays?

  He was never, they never, they never actually tried to try him for those attempted murders because they kind of had bigger fish to fry with the whole narco trafficking stuff.

• 2:05:59John Coogan?

  Kingpin law. They had him as a drug kingpin.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  In many ways responsible for the fentanyl crisis. Not a good dude.

• 2:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Not a good look.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  But we have a deep dive coming for you on him. We got up to speed. We're going to break it all down.

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And we basically, we basically determined that we think that Ross is the greatest marketer potentially of all time. And that he had created this narrative that he was this very young, sort of inexperienced. You know, that, that just had these ideals and it kind of went awry. He was about 30 years old when he was doing this. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was selling drugs on the platform. He was negotiating. He was negotiating, brokering, like regular drug deals. It wasn't like it was just a software thing. They'd be like, hey, I want to, I want to try doing a, he would, he would try to do, he wanted to create a product specifically for cartels and bigger dealers.

• 2:06:58Jordi Hays?

  So he was like, well, I'm going to do the trade, the first kilo. Like really crazy.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  And it was just relentless. It wasn't just like. Oh yeah, I set this thing up. It's kind of running. It was like, how can I drive ARR up every single day? Like really?

• 2:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, so the joke of that he's out raising for a startup, he actually is high like, one thing, while I don't agree with what he did,

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Clearly highly capable, right? He got

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Founder mode.

• 2:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Founder mode, zero to 1.2 billion in volume, bootstrapped in under three years. He personally netted $80 million.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  Of money back then.

• 2:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Of fees.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  It's like a billion now.

• 2:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Multiple billions of, and I'm sure he's got some Bitcoin.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  People said that there was some cold wallet that started trading shortly after. And so they

• 2:07:44Jordi Hays?

  That he got out?

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  They clocked him that, yeah, they seized most of it, but he might've had a second wallet and that wallet was just sitting dormant. And then it went dormant right, but right as he was seized. And then it fired up just recently. And so people think like, yeah, he has access to like, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin now. But it was probably like, oh, 10K he had in a side pocket back then. So like, no one even thought about it. Cause whatever, we got him for the most.

• 2:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's, it's, I hope, I hope, yeah, yeah. I hope he uses his powers for good going forward. I'm sure he will.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Clean it up. You're on notice.

• 2:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We'll have him call it. We'll have him call in here.

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  We don't want to see any more crimes.

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  I do, I, I'm, I, uh, he's got a second chance. I hope he does good with it. Uh, and let's get into the timeline.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's go to the timeline. And Ben, did you get those promoted posts together? Do we have a stack of those? Uh, let's go to Tyler. He says, uh, don't really understand the reasoning behind luxury car manufacturers going after residences. And he cites, uh, actually four, four images. I didn't realize there were so many. It's Porsche design, the first ever Pagani residences, Aston Martin.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Shout out Tyler. He, uh, goes to the UCSB where I went.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:08:53Jordi Hays?

  He built the ad network.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:55Jordi Hays?

  For TV.

• 2:08:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 2:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Uh, but I, I pulled this because I really don't understand it either. Nobody likes cars more than me.

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Fact.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you, maybe people like TJ Parker.

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, we love cars. I don't want to live in a Porsche apartment tower. I don't care to live.

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  The meme got to them. You know, you, you can sleep in a GT3 RS, but you can't race an apartment. Well, now you got a GT3 RS apartment.

• 2:09:22Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I would potentially be into is a Gulfstream

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  Be kind of cool.

• 2:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Tower, just cause that's just the next level above. And if it was shaped like a plane.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:32Jordi Hays?

  But I don't understand the I don't want to live in a Pagani. I want to, I want to drive, you know, I like that I could sleep in a GT3RS. I don't want to live in the equivalent of a GT3.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  I guess it is, it is a little odd that there aren't more, uh, it does seem if you're a real estate developer, it's pretty easy to slap someone else's brand or name on your building, which is effectively what they're doing here. And I'm surprised they haven't done this with other brands that make more sense, maybe? Just like Restoration Hardware or, yeah, or LVMH, like LVMH Towers makes a little bit more sense to me.

• 2:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Or Loro Piana.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Chamot's, Chamot's Residence. I love it.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, who knows? I don't, uh, so, I mean, I don't really have a good reasoning. I mean, the reasoning is probably money. Like they probably get a licensing deal for the Porsche brand.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  And it's customer acquisition, differentiation. There's a lot of towers like that and I'm sure.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  And so like the reasoning is probably, I agree that it's like somewhat illogical, but it probably makes money on paper. And it's just, okay, they're going to pay us to license the brand. It's not going to destroy our brand.

• 2:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Pretty funny that there's for sure a bunch of people that live in those towers that are like, I don't even drive Porsche. I don't like Porsche, but it was just a really nice apartment. So I got it.

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  Imagine pulling up to your Porsche designed apartment in a Pagani and be like, I picked the wrong apartment. Or vice versa. Um, anyway, let's go to.

• 2:10:55Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of cars, I got a promoted post.

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  Let's do it. This is what you've been waiting for, folks. This is why you're on the live stream.

• 2:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to make you wait so long.

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  For the first ad read of the show.

• 2:11:06Jordi Hays?

  I've been trying to do some product placement of these, but we're not going to advertise Ramp right now. We're going to advertise, uh, we've always said AI is like an F40 for the mind.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  So on that note, we have a 1992 US spec Ferrari F40, asking price of only 3.5 million. So they're basically giving it away. I mean, they're giving it away. This thing is an amazing example. This stunning F40 is one of only 213 US spec cars and one of only 60 in the highly desirable 1992 specification. This example still wears the original Rosa Corsa paint and Stofa cloth interior that it left Maranello with. Uh, so.

• 2:11:45Jordi Hays?

  This thing is just beautiful. Guys, we are, we are going to be adding a TV screen so we can actually show images. We've had some pushback from, from, from little, uh, some, some environmentalists. It's a, do you, do you need to chop down a tree for every episode?

• 2:12:01John Coogan?

  The forest.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  And we're exploring doing some offsets, you know, planting some trees to, to make up for all the paper we use, but we do want to get these on a screen for you guys. But let's get, let's get back to.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just, you know, it's not going to cost you three and a half mil to get that car because you're going to want to put another 500K in upgrades.

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  Off-road tires.

• 2:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Swap a Tesla.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  V12, V12 engine swap, you know, supercharger, quad turbos.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Roof rack.

• 2:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  Automatic transmission. Let's go to, uh, let's go to Autism Capital. Uh, Mark Andreessen says, "One of the funniest moments of his life was when the Meta board says they considered Peter Thiel diverse because he's LGBT. Is there a test to determine this? What about the letter B? I want this company to succeed. I'm willing to do a lot." That's just so funny. When I first heard this, I was like, oh, he's like diverse because he's from Germany.

• 2:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Funny that the, the big tech company is considering that the white male tech bro is diverse because of his sex, like sexual orientation, but that was a funny time in history. Uh, we're.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  And, and absolute crickets from the mainstream media about the lack of diversity on the deep seek team.

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. You pointed that out.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  Almost entirely Chinese guys.

• 2:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Very few, very few, uh, diversity.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's get Rune over there. Rune, we need a man on the inside.

• 2:13:25John Coogan?

  We, we do need a man on the inside. We do need, we need to send.

• 2:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Hey, if anybody that listens to the show, it works on deep seek, hit us up. We're looking for a man on the inside. We're looking for scoops. We need to get one of our guys in there and to start leaking stuff out of the.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  You know, everyone in, everyone in SF is worried about the, the girls at the parties. Hey, if you're a girl in tech in America, hop on a flight to Beijing.

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  Or wherever they were.

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  Start, start meeting some people.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  I want to see behind the scenes of all the GPUs that supposedly don't exist that came from Singapore.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's great. Let's go to grit cult, absolutely insane. Trump has only been in power for a few days. Look at the speed with which he operates. It's amazing. Feels like he's been president for ages. Every day he's had a banger. That's funny. I actually don't feel that way.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:14:20John Coogan?

  I feel like there's been like a bunch of EOs, but that's always what happens at the start of the day.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  The inauguration was eight days ago.

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I feel like, I feel like the first couple of days are always crazy because that's when the EOs go out. And then it's like, is there really going to be legislation? And that always takes like six months.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  They had been prepping all the EOs with ChatGPT.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally.

• 2:14:36Jordi Hays?

  For months prior to that.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Uh, should we try a bucket pool? Do we have bucket pulls in here? Let's see what we got. Let's see if we got something good. Oh, this is great. Uh, from Lewis Yak says, finally got a diagnosis and it's locked in syndrome.

• 2:14:50Jordi Hays?

  From the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke?

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  Are you familiar with what locked in syndrome like actually is?

• 2:14:57Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:14:57John Coogan?

  It's literally like you're locked in, you can't move your body, but you're awake. It's like terrifying.

• 2:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  It's horrifying.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Terrible.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  But very funny to repurpose it for just being locked in. Uh, so we're making locked in a good thing, I guess. I don't know.

• 2:15:10Jordi Hays?

  With Neuralink, you might still be able, if you could be productive while being locked in, it'd probably be good for some people we know.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  Vittoria says, uh, you stop noticing AI improvements when the AI gets smarter than you. Yeah.

• 2:15:25Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this, I think, the other day where it's hard to recognize these incremental improvements because you're already like, okay, this thing is generally pretty intelligent.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:33Jordi Hays?

  And if it gets 5% more intelligent.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  It's like, oh, it's solved way more like complex math problems that I never do in my day to day. I never have to do anything in my day to day that involves like foundational math.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  You're like, I talk professionally.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Professional yapper.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, it is, it is good enough at this point. But, uh, I mean, you, you will, you will notice it certainly on the, on the generative AI, the image stuff, like it's very clear that the models aren't, aren't dialed yet. And then also just on the, on the operator and agent stuff, like, like you can tell that when you delegate a task to ChatGPT, like it can't go and do it fully.

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  The thing with the operator that will be cool is right. Right now, it moves like at the speed of a junior computer user.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Almost like watching your grandma.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Do things on a computer. Imagine when I can just do it almost instantly.

• 2:16:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  It's just like zipping around the screen, like filling out a form, checking boxes. I'm excited for that era.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  It's gonna be great. I still haven't, I upgraded, I still haven't actually used Operator, just because it's not available on your phone, you gotta use it on the desktop. And I just haven't had a chance, but I gotta, I gotta test drive it. I think it'll be interesting. I wanna give it some tasks that it's like not already integrated with. Should we do another promoted post? Cause I see a fantastic promoted post right there.

• 2:16:49Jordi Hays?

  This is a promoted post for a special place in Manhattan, but I actually have a better one to pop up.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  So if you haven't seen it yet, Ramp has a new activation billboard campaign in Manhattan. Advertising their new treasury product that gives you high liquidity and high yield in the same product. Very cool. But they have an actual wrecking.

• 2:17:08John Coogan?

  Them for that? We asked them for that like, like last week and they just built it.

• 2:17:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, we, we asked them and they shipped it like an hour later. It was crazy.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Never seen something like that before.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  But people are starting to discover it. It said new profile picture and it's this guy with a, with a wrecking ball here. And yeah, so if you're in, if you're in Manhattan, go, go check it out.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, go take a picture. Do you have the actual address? Do they, do they post the address?

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they posted it somewhere.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  When we share the clip, we'll, we'll, we'll share the address. Cause if you're, if you're walking, take a picture.

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, take a picture.

• 2:17:40John Coogan?

  Let's do the promoted post and then we'll move on.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Back to back ads. Love it. We got a promoted post from Aman.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  This is a special one.

• 2:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Midtown Manhattan is one of the most energetic places in the world, alive with the buzz and pulse of modern city living. But in the very, and Ramp is there. But in the very heart of it, silence and stillness prevail. Within the walls of Aman, New York, there's only peace. Aman properties are unmatched. They make, they make the Ritz Carlton look like a dump.

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  And

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, the next time you're on a business trip in New York for just a day, book a five day stay at the

• 2:18:13Jordi Hays?

  And it's only 10 times more expensive than the average luxury hotel. And so it's just a small, like especially, so I recommend Aman for bootstrap founders. Because you own your business, all your money.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  You, you

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  Spend how you want it.

• 2:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Facing pushback from the board saying, hey, why are you staying at Aman?

• 2:18:33John Coogan?

  Or if you're a seed stage founder and you're going to be taking, you know, pitch meetings, say, hey, come over to my, my hotel room.

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Aman's not the kind of place that you can just walk in and use the lobby in, but you could always try.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  Well, no, no, no. So you mog your VCs by saying like, oh yeah, like you can't just come in. So like, you'll need to book a stay too.

• 2:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or if your VCs are visiting from out of town, you can say like, I'll just walk over to the Aman and they'll be like, I'm staying, you know, in Tribeca. And you go, wait, you're not the Aman? Like, I thought you had, I thought you had like 300 million AUM.

• 2:19:06John Coogan?

  What's going on? Is it fun not doing well?

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  They'll struggle to come up with excuses and then you got them.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got them.

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  You got them. You got them pinned.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And then they have to write the check.

• 2:19:18John Coogan?

  I don't know, I don't know anything about this one. Stuart Blitz says, just spoke to someone who used operator to submit health insurance claims every five milliseconds until they're paid. They said UHC got so overloaded with data, they just paid them. They're cooked. And then the, and then the, the, the, uh, community note says, this is a false statement as the author states in a reply.

• 2:19:40Jordi Hays?

  And so when I saw that post and submitted it, I didn't know.

• 2:19:43John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah.

• 2:19:44Jordi Hays?

  It didn't seem super believable because that's not necessarily the way these things work, but it is, it is so, so big companies create friction in refund processes, claim processes. And so if you can overload the system effectively, yeah, you're more likely to do it. But this is just entering a new chapter where you have bot on bot violence. Where like the big corporations are going to have their bots.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  We're going to have our bots. And we're gonna see who wins.

• 2:20:11John Coogan?

  Your AI, your AI SDR is gonna be talking to my AI secretary.

• 2:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  And she's gonna be brutal.

• 2:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  With my calendar.

• 2:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, this just underscores like this, like, I don't know if this guy was joking. It seems like it was maybe like a joke because he said it was false like shortly in this, in the thread, but whenever a new AI product drops, there's a massive incentive on these algorithmic social media feeds to just be like, this is mind blowing. Like AGI is here. Like everyone's gonna die. This is the most incredible thing. Like you gotta.

• 2:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Paperclip?

• 2:20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's like, and there's this huge like intelligence signaling thing where you gotta be like, oh yeah, I'm using it like way better than everyone else. We've talked about this before.

• 2:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  But it's like, it's like, if you're not using operator to do everything, like you're an idiot.

• 2:20:55Jordi Hays?

  I got operator to order me Instacart and send a humanoid robot to my house.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Cook me dinner.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  And if you're not doing that, you're falling behind.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  If you're not, yeah.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:04Jordi Hays?

  Paperclip mode.

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  Paperclip mode. Let's see what else we got in the bucket pulls. Flowers says, oh, good nominative determinism post. Flowers says, Sam Altman's name is crazy because he's literally creating an alternative to man.

• 2:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  It's great. I've had this thought before. I should have posted it. Would have been a good one.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Altman.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  But yeah, there's a lot of nominative determinism in.

• 2:21:27Jordi Hays?

  In this world.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  Silicon Valley, in this world generally.

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  It's a fun one.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  I wish, I've tried to apply nominative determinism to my name. Hayes is kind of like.

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  It doesn't really work.

• 2:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't really work. Kugan.

• 2:21:40John Coogan?

  Kugan, Kugan means hound of war or something. It's basically like.

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Hound.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  A hound, you know, in Game of Thrones.

• 2:21:46Jordi Hays?

  You were acting like a hound of war.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  Right hand guy.

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  You were acting like a hound of war on the leg press machine this morning.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Got up to like 900 reps.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  900 reps. Yeah, 850. That's the number you gotta hit. Uh, let's go.

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Full range of motion, too.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  Let's go to Seth. Seth Banning says, YouTube and Reddit have both blocked operator. A sign of things to come. So a lot of, a lot of organizations are probably like, hey, we don't want to deal with operator. What's interesting is that.

• 2:22:11Jordi Hays?

  It's probably because DJI is notorious for writing fake comments on forums. So they don't want DJI using operator to spread misinformation.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Spam on there. Wasn't Sam a huge shareholder in Reddit? Wasn't he like the CEO for a few days too?

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:26John Coogan?

  It's weird that that business.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  I think he made more money than the original founders when they IPO'd.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  This almost seems like a mistake. Like, like, they just have a robots.txt that it's like not updated because I'm pretty sure OpenAI has a licensing deal with Reddit for their data or something like that.

• 2:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's still, if you're a user-generated content platform, you don't want bot, you want them to use your API, which you can control.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  You don't want them just freestyling all around your app.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  It could be used for like graffiti immediately.

• 2:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Um, did you, did you see this Waymo that was destroyed?

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Moment of silence. This moment of silence is brought to you by AdQuick. AdQuick is the number one way to buy billboards for your startup. Now, back to the show.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  Justin Moore says, I've been fully radicalized by the photos of the vandalized Waymo. It's in a body bag at the end and the, and the Waymo got destroyed.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you remember, so the downfall of Bird among many, many issues, the fact that it's one of the most dangerous things in the world to ride a electric scooter around in traffic with no helmet.

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  Good day to be an ER doctor.

• 2:23:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, these ERs, ask anybody in ER when Bird was at its height.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  That was the real way to go long the scooter trend.

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  Buy an ER clinic.

• 2:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Super dark. I, I, for a very brief moment of time, I would use them. I was like 22. I was like,

• 2:23:45John Coogan?

  Devil made care.

• 2:23:45Jordi Hays?

  To get around. And then I was a father.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Built different.

• 2:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  But there was this account called, I forget what it was called, but it was a celebration of the destruction of electric scooters.

• 2:23:58John Coogan?

  I remember this account on Instagram.

• 2:24:00Jordi Hays?

  And it quickly got like 100,000 followers, like before the algorithmic fees, it just blew up.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 2:24:06Jordi Hays?

  People destroying them in even more creative ways. For some reason, a Waymo feels way more toxic to fuck it up.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:16Jordi Hays?

  To F it up.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  Bird graveyard. That's right.

• 2:24:19Jordi Hays?

  So a Waymo, which is this, you know, autonomous thing driving around, it feels like you're more like taking a human life in a weird way because it's just trying to get somewhere to pick someone up and then these people are destroying it.

• 2:24:32John Coogan?

  At the same time, it is a Jaguar. So do you really feel that bad?

• 2:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, they're switching to these Chinese.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  If it was a Rolls Royce.

• 2:24:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, they're switching. So I don't know. I wish that Waymo acquired Jaguar because Jaguar's going through their.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  Weird rebrand.

• 2:24:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ben Hilek did the rebrand and got a crazy reaction. They should have just bought Jaguar.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  Friend of the show.

• 2:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show, yeah. Anyways.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Anyways, let's go to Sean McGuire. Speaking of innovation, he says, "The Tesla Roadster is niche with bad range. The Falcon 1 is a bad rocket. The Neuralink V1 bitrate is low. Subways are better than cars. Grok 1 sucks. X will break after firing people. It's amazing how people don't get the pattern. V1 sucks. V2 is okay. V3 is state of the art and V4 is god mode." 14,000 likes. It's a good pattern.

• 2:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Banger archive.

• 2:25:22John Coogan?

  Doesn't miss. Put it in the banger archive. Let's do a bucket pull. See what we got.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  SNWY, maybe snowy, says MFs get one Sam reply, Sam Altman reply, and turn on the Glazinator 3000. And it's a screenshot of an interaction between DJ Tyloo, who says, "Bro, ship more than talking. Look at Google. We want AGI in the speed of 40. That's the goal here." And Sam says, "That's gonna take a while." And then DJ Tyloo says, "Don't worry, bro. Either way, you are the OG creator of AI. Here you started all this in 2022. We do a little trolling here. You got this, Sam."

• 2:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's true. If you're new in tech and a big person replies to you, it's a big deal. It feels awesome. It's like, wow, I'm recognized.

• 2:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is why we encourage.

• 2:26:17John Coogan?

  Reply guys?

• 2:26:18Jordi Hays?

  We encourage reply legends.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:21Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, what I was gonna say is, if you're a new account, you're just setting up my Twitter, you know? It's easy to want to be negative because that gets the most attention, but it's not a good strategy long term because you're building up this sort of audience of negativity and it's hard to build a career around just being negative and putting people down. And so hopefully this.

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  This is the start of the glazinator going on a going on a more positive historic, you know, generational positivity run.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:26:55Jordi Hays?

  We'd love to see generational positivity. Base Baron has been started off very negative, trying to encourage him to go more positive.

• 2:27:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta remind him pretty regularly.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  He should adopt. We gotta send this to him and say, adopt the glazinator mindset. You know, you don't want to glaze too hard, but.

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, a little glazing never hurt anyone.

• 2:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  It is hilarious when Sam will post a tweet like, you know, artificial intelligence is only a few thousand days away. It will forever reshape humanity. It's one of the most powerful forces for good in the entire world. And like, we are unleashing machine intelligence. And someone will be like, please add PDF support to O1.

• 2:27:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, PDF.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  It's just like the most tactical.

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  The oldest technology.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  But like, both are kind of true. Like Sam is like, kind of right about all the philosophy stuff. And then also like, there are really, really low hanging fruit in the product.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Then he'll post, then he'll post, guys, we got, everybody's a little bit too excited. And this is going to take a bit longer.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  And it's like, yeah, like there are reasonable product features that we want. Like, just build them, you know, come on, put it in.

• 2:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or AGI, you know, AGI is right around the corner, but we're hiring 50 new junior software engineers. Because we need them to actually get to that point.

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  Let's do another promoted post. And if you're watching live on YouTube, leave us an ad read in the comments, get in the chat and promote whatever you gotta promote. Drop an ad read in the chat.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Or if you want priority, leave a five star review.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:28:32Jordi Hays?

  And we will have Ben printed out.

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  On Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Leave a five star review, say something about the show, and then leave an ad read for a company that you like or a company that you founded or work for.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  But speaking of ads, we have.

• 2:28:46Jordi Hays?

  We have an ad, a promoted post here from Gulfstream Aerospace. Customization in every detail, the G500 is bright, bold, and boundless. You know, we always say if you're buying fractional, talk to Preston Holland, he'll help you get into a jet you love. But if you're a size lord, go straight to your Gulfstream rep. Don't, you know, just buy new.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's nice to see them promote the back catalog, too. A lot of people are obsessed with the 650s, 700s coming out.

• 2:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  But maybe the 500 is right for your, for your lifestyle.

• 2:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  You know?

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a classic.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  There's no wrong choice with.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  And it's cool to see Gulfstream, you know, they threw a link in here. They clearly aren't afraid of the algorithm. They have a dominant brand and they.

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I mean.

• 2:29:33Jordi Hays?

  Just didn't do numbers.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  If you find, if you find this post on X, just go reply to it and tell them that you're, you know, in the market.

• 2:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Considering a purchase.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  And the technology brother sent you.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  So whoever the social media manager there will get a nice little note.

• 2:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they deserve some engagement. They're clearly working hard. It was a highly produced video.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  This was the best post in a long time.

• 2:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:54John Coogan?

  It's great. This is an interesting debate. So Joel Gaskoin says 2024 was a profitable year for Buffer, something we've really celebrated as a team after two years of losses. We closed the year with a net profit of $200,000. And so John.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  He also went on to say that they did a profit distribution.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Oh, they did.

• 2:30:12Jordi Hays?

  The average distribution was like $400.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 2:30:16John Coogan?

  Interesting. There's a lot of shareholders, I guess. And so John says, wait, so 200K in profit. So for those that you don't know, Buffer is a, is a social media scheduling app. You can schedule out tweets or Facebook posts, used mostly by social media managers. High chance that that Gulfstream ad went through Buffer on the way to X. And it kind of lets you schedule things out across different platforms. Kind of niche B2B software.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  And there was a time, there was a lot of heavily funded products like this.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  And people were like, this is going to be a dominant category of SaaS.

• 2:30:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Turns out a lot of the platforms made posting.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Pretty easy.

• 2:30:54Jordi Hays?

  And when you have full-time social media.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Posting too, because when you post natively, you get bold italics, image uploads, multiple images.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Even Instagram and TikTok, they want you editing in the app.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:31:05Jordi Hays?

  For some reason, because they don't want the cross posting.

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you wind up in this weird situation where you get this like half featured builder or the buffer has the job of rebuilding every single feature on X and Instagram and Facebook, all to just

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  get the posts in correctly, correctly formatted via the API. And these other companies, they don't really care about posting from an API. In fact, it's a lot of spam most of the times. They don't, they're not really incentivized to make that easy. And so John says, wait, so 200K profit on $20 million in ARR, 73 employees averaging 154K salary. And the CEO at 300K a year, over 11 million a year paid out in salaries, $554 customer LTV. Cost to serve a customer has to be minimum, uh, minimal is a social media scheduler. And unlike 15 years ago, this could probably be built by two cracked devs and a designer in a few weeks. 73 employees, I don't know, man. And so buffer's always been building in public and they've had, you know, ups and downs.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  People have followed them and a lot of criticism from John on how they're running their business. But who knows, maybe they retool, maybe they're having fun. Maybe it's run like a co-op and everyone gets distribution and they're all happy. So happy to them, but this looks like something someone will build and attack very soon.

• 2:32:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's one of those things. It's, it's the critique there is, I think that they've been on an interesting journey.

• 2:32:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Like bought, I think they bought back the company from their investors or something like that.

• 2:32:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  You don't really know what's going on behind the scenes, but the critique is like for a mature software company with 20 million of ARR, maybe you should be able to squeeze out more than, you know, what the average PM in the valley makes per month.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:44Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 2:32:44John Coogan?

  You would hope so.

• 2:32:45Jordi Hays?

  But I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll get there.

• 2:32:47John Coogan?

  It's rough. Let's do another bucket poll. What do we got? Harry Stebbings, he's in Europe right now. And there are more companies doing roll up plays for vets, doctors, opticians and plumbers than AI companies. We covered it earlier with the Germany story, not good. Europe, you're on notice, get it together. Build some real technology. Stop rolling up veterinary clinics.

• 2:33:08Jordi Hays?

  Do it all, actually.

• 2:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, do it all.

• 2:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Do the roll ups, but do some other stuff like making an AI clone that can speak dog. That's what I want to see.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  You know, surprisingly little.

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  Like, so the person who actually cracks dog to human translation.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Trillionaire.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  Trillionaire. You would pay, you would pay.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  Thousand dollar.

• 2:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Couple of grand a month. Yeah, a couple of grand a month.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  Done.

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  To talk to your pup.

• 2:33:36John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:38John Coogan?

  Also, shockingly little innovation happening in smell vision. You can't smell anything. Have you noticed this? We're making all this like crazy advances all over the place. AI is gonna kill us all, but I can't smell the movie yet.

• 2:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  Like, if I'm watching Fast and the Furious, I want to smell burning rubber.

• 2:33:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or if you're scrolling on X and you come up to a banger, you want to smell like some fumes, some smoke, you know, some heat coming off. And so a little, you know, device that just missed the air.

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're watching sideways. They're talking about wine tasting. I want to smell some grapes. I want to smell some more.

• 2:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're watching that gambling movie we talked about. What's it?

• 2:34:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's the smoke of the casino.

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  There's a million.

• 2:34:21Jordi Hays?

  Ocean's Eleven.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  Ocean's Eleven. Yeah, I should be smelling a thick cigarette smoke the entire movie.

• 2:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  Be great. Yeah. So get it together. Somebody go out there and solve it. I'm not gonna.

• 2:34:32Jordi Hays?

  There was a company that was trying to solve digital touch, right? Some sort of device that you could kind of like shake somebody's hand.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  It's gonna be used nefariously immediately.

• 2:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Bolt that onto character AI.

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  Smell vision two is gonna be used with character AI first. I just know it. It's gonna be terrible. It's not gonna be for Fast and the Furious. I'd be like, I just wanted Fast and the Furious. Aurelius says M and A is so back, the FDIC is pumping deal tombstones.

• 2:35:04John Coogan?

  And the FDIC says, today we approved the Bank Merger Act, an application by Wesco Bank, based in Wheeling, West Virginia, to acquire and merge with Premier Bank. They're, they're showing the deal to them. You love to see it.

• 2:35:17Jordi Hays?

  We love celebrating, M and A should be celebrated.

• 2:35:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know, I saw, I saw a very funny post, we didn't print it out, saying that like, the deep sea thing is so, is so like, bad for Silicon Valley, because everyone in Silicon Valley finally needs to realize that Lena Kahn was right. And I was like, that doesn't make sense at all.

• 2:35:42Jordi Hays?

  It was, I saw that and I was like, this is such a bad take. We're not even, we can't cover.

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. You saw that? Yeah. It just made no sense. And it's like, that's not, and like, and like, so, like, are you saying that there's a monopoly in AI? Cause there's not, there's like a trillion foundation model companies, and every big tech company is building their own chips. So it's like fiercely competitive. And then, how would this have stopped open source model from China? It's like a chip sack thing that's not Lena Kahn at the FTC? It just made like, no sense. But it got major viral views because people are just like, oh, tech doesn't like Lena Kahn, therefore like, anything that happens that's bad to tech, let's make it like Lena Kahn could have stopped this or something. Makes no sense. Anyway, President Trump arrived in Las Vegas and Indian Bronson says, Trump

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  is 80, he doesn't sleep, he eats McDonald's, he doesn't work out, and he's constantly switched on rocket fuel for blood, just a total force.

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  He needs to be studied.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  Okay. This is my take on, you know how we've been talking about golden retriever maxing? I like the dog analogies. There's a new dog in town. Junkyard Dog maxing.

• 2:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  This is where you just don't think about what Andrew Huberman says about microplastics or seed oils. If you look at the, if you look at the data, the junkyard dogs outlive the purebred poodles by three decades. Junkyard Dog will be around forever.

• 2:37:02Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be a dog. It's about that spirit.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  Exactly. The junkyard dog has hustle, runs around. Sure, it's eating, it's not just worried about microplastics, he's eating macroplastics.

• 2:37:13Jordi Hays?

  I think part of the, the whole Trump thing.

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Is he's never been into that, big into that whole world of alcohol.

• 2:37:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:19Jordi Hays?

  Right? So he's never been into drugs and alcohol, avoided them.

• 2:37:22John Coogan?

  Yep. He kind of, yeah, he avoided the power law toxins. So by not doing the drugs and alcohol, he gave himself like a thousand Big Macs.

• 2:37:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Alcohol's fascinating thing because it's so widely consumed, yet every, you know, the prevailing narrative is that one or two drinks a day is cool.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Which we don't, that, that's like the dominant narrative around alcohol consumption. And clearly you can have one or two drinks a day and be fine generally.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:50Jordi Hays?

  But how does it affect your energy levels later in the life? How does it affect your, you know, wit and mental acuity later in life? Even, you know, energy levels during, I, I, um, uh, as, you know, as an adult, haven't been big into alcohol and, and I prefer to either have like 10 drinks or almost none.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:08Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe some champagne on the show. We have a big milestone coming up. I'm looking forward to that. But I noticed that alcohol for me is not about the energy level loss the next day or the hangover, but it's this multi-day drop in my sort of general energy levels because, yeah, you just poisoned yourself lightly and yeah, the body's, you know, pretty capable of detoxifying, but.

• 2:38:34John Coogan?

  You gotta stick to Dom and you gotta only consume it when you.

• 2:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Are celebrating.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  Are celebrating, but specifically celebrating exponential growth.

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  Because unless you're truly accelerating in an insane way.

• 2:38:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:47John Coogan?

  You're not going to be drinking it every day.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  And so, you know, it's so funny.

• 2:38:51Jordi Hays?

  If we had the double, if we had this double rule set up for, uh, Banger Archive, we'd be daily drinking.

• 2:38:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's rough. But I mean, seriously, it's like, it's so funny when I wake up and I'm like, oh, gotta drink a bottle of Dom at work today. But it's like, it's two glasses of champagne and I do that like every month. Like that's probably fine. Uh, speaking of alcohol, let's go to Pavel Asparuhov. He says, drinking alcohol may be bad for you, but having some brews with my boys is definitely good for me.

• 2:39:20Jordi Hays?

  Very relevant.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Very relevant. And then Juwan from Ramp says, nothing beats the pure joy of slamming a pitcher with the dudes on a sticky table. It's true.

• 2:39:28Jordi Hays?

  Been there.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  It's true. And, uh, yeah, you can always cut back at a certain point, switch to Dom.

• 2:39:34Jordi Hays?

  We got a, we got a quick shout out from, from our friend Tyler Cosgrove. He says, gotta give a shout out to Boom Supersonic. Now size lords can display their wealth, not by the size of their plane, but by which Mach they can hit. They had a successful, they got to Mach one point.

• 2:39:50John Coogan?

  Let's hit the size gong for them.

• 2:39:51Jordi Hays?

  They got to Mach 1.1 today.

• 2:39:53John Coogan?

  That's huge.

• 2:39:54Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:39:55Jordi Hays?

  And a big win for all the investors that decided to triple down.

• 2:39:59John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. It was that crazy recap, but they got through it, which is great. You love to see it.

• 2:40:04Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. We need to be going Mach 5.

• 2:40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:07Jordi Hays?

  To France.

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:09Jordi Hays?

  To negotiate.

• 2:40:10John Coogan?

  Let's go over to old Patty Collison at Stripe Press. The Irish lads are at it again. Stripe Press has been on a tear. Ben Blumenrose says Stripe Press sold a thousand books a day last year. That's about 25K per day, over $9 million a year off of 16 books. Incredible work and shows what you can do when high quality product meets distribution. Let's go. Size gong for 9 million in books too.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  I like that. It's great. Probably what they make in two seconds on Stripe.

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  I think it's something, I think the, the coffee table book industry is like bigger than ever.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  And so it's this weird dynamic where we consume so much of our content digitally now.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:55Jordi Hays?

  But books, it's funny because I use physical books almost as book, like a bookmarking feature where I see a book online. I'm like, that looks interesting. I just buy it and I'll get to it eventually. But yeah, Stripe's put out some.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  Some bangers.

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Some bangers. They had the one on that guy in the corner right there.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, Charlie.

• 2:41:14Jordi Hays?

  Poor Charlie's Almanack. They like rebooted it.

• 2:41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Always beautiful.

• 2:41:18Jordi Hays?

  We love, we love the written word. We love, we love it even more when it's printed.

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Physically.

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to a promoted post and we'll do a bucket pull. Keep the show moving.

• 2:41:30Jordi Hays?

  A promoted post from our friends over at Bugatti. The opening of Bugatti Baku in Azerbaijan, the home of F1 in Azerbaijan. A city that bridges Europe and Asia was celebrated with a tourbillon, a symbol of a century of heritage and sophistication. If you haven't seen the Bugatti tourbillon, this car is.

• 2:41:51Jordi Hays?

  Unreal. I mean, the doors go up.

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  You know how many cylinders it has?

• 2:41:55Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it 16?

• 2:41:56John Coogan?

  V16.

• 2:41:57Jordi Hays?

  It's a V16.

• 2:41:58John Coogan?

  Previously, it was a W16.

• 2:42:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people have been saying, oh, it's, you know, just need a V8, a hybrid V8, it's all you need.

• 2:42:05John Coogan?

  A lot of the Ferraris are going down to V6s.

• 2:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's get those.

• 2:42:08John Coogan?

  296 has the six cylinders.

• 2:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Get those cylinders up. This car.

• 2:42:12John Coogan?

  AMG One has six cylinders. You got 10 more cylinders.

• 2:42:15Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait to buy my first Bugatti.

• 2:42:18John Coogan?

  Touring on.

• 2:42:20Jordi Hays?

  The day can't come soon enough.

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  Well, you gotta, you gotta complete the collection.

• 2:42:22Jordi Hays?

  And again, the size lords of Bugatti, they're not afraid to drop a link. Bugatti dot link slash consumption. If you're interested in understanding the environmental impact of your.

• 2:42:33John Coogan?

  Probably top of mind for most Bugatti owners.

• 2:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Super top of mind, right?

• 2:42:36John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  How many offsets? How many offsets am I gonna need to buy per mile? I may have to be planting like 10 trees a mile.

• 2:42:43John Coogan?

  Well, well, I'm most likely an oil chic if I bought this car.

• 2:42:48John Coogan?

  In the oil business, but we love Bugatti here. And if you go and pick one up, tell them the technology brothers sent you.

• 2:42:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:42:55John Coogan?

  Let's go to Harry Stebbings. He says, I have never met a founder or VC who can write a good press release for a funding round. Stop writing it like, like an obituary. You aren't writing to your grandmother. Bring the company to life. Tell a story. Make them excited. Interesting. Yeah. The funding round thing, I mean, you're not supposed to, like, the funding round is.

• 2:43:14Jordi Hays?

  You're not supposed to do it yourself. You're supposed to call Lulu.

• 2:43:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, call Lulu first.

• 2:43:16Jordi Hays?

  And then you're supposed to give us a scoop.

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:43:19Jordi Hays?

  And then we'll turn it into.

• 2:43:19John Coogan?

  Call into the show. We'll turn it into a size gone element. This is how it works.

• 2:43:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  It's the new economy. But also, like, the, the funding round is, is not the story. It's the excuse to break news, which justifies writing the story.

• 2:43:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  And so what you have to do is you have to leverage that to say, I'm giving you a scoop of this funding round is gonna happen. But in order to win this scoop, you can't just write it up like it's a PR Newswire thing that's 200 words. You have to come and interview me and my team and my investors and get a 5,000 word profile.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  Unless you're already an insider, no tech journalist is gonna get excited about covering your $2 million seed round.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Like, they do not care. They get a bunch of.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  If you put all $2 million of dollars of that into a domain.

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:44:05John Coogan?

  You gotta figure out how to create a stunt. And that's what he did really well, was he created a story and a narrative around it that, that you had to write about because it was controversial and it would get clicks. And they're in the business of getting clicks. So.

• 2:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Click game.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  You gotta do that.

• 2:44:17Jordi Hays?

  And driving paywall.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Uh, let's go to Atlas. He says MFers will be like ASI in two years and still be skinny. Bro, you're worried about the wrong arms race. This is golden retriever maxing. We love to see it on the timeline.

• 2:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Yeah. Get in the gym. Uh, this is important.

• 2:44:38Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry about range of motion. Just worry about how much weight you're throwing around.

• 2:44:41John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:44:42Jordi Hays?

  If you're not, if you're not dropping the weights loudly, you're not lifting heavy enough.

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Your, your bicep curls should look like a hang clean.

• 2:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Get into a gym that, uh, yeah, get into a gym that supports dropping weights.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Many don't.

• 2:44:57John Coogan?

  For sure. Oh, speaking of, uh, tech reporting and the media, uh, Murat says incredible bit of tech crunch reporting I just ran into. They looked up Google Trends for the past two days and concluded it's the highest trend that that could pot. It's the highest the trend could possibly be. And so what happened was Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram explode after Meta ends fact checking. So this is something that happened when Zuck came out and said, we're not doing fact checking anymore. We're going to a community notes model. And of course there's like, uh, somewhat of a backlash. Some people say, I don't like that. A lot of people said they did like it, but you gotta write the story that feeds the, the beast of your readers.

• 2:45:36John Coogan?

  And cause it's entirely audience captured at this point. And so you have to write the story of like, this is bad for Meta, even though you can just look at the stock price and tell that like, no DAUs are not dropping. People are still going to be using Instagram. And so they, but this is hilarious because they just literally messed up.

• 2:45:49Jordi Hays?

  I want my social media fact checked.

• 2:45:52John Coogan?

  I want it fact checked. Uh, and it's funny just because they, they just actually made a mistake when they went to Google Trends.

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that Meta should hire us to just put posts in the truth zone.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:04Jordi Hays?

  We'll, we'll grab an extra. Yeah. We.

• 2:46:07John Coogan?

  This is the thing about authoritarianism. As long as I'm the authoritarian, don't really have a problem with it.

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  And social media platforms need to embrace misinformation.

• 2:46:15John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Breaking. Wow.

• 2:46:17Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Oh, speaking of Avi, over at friend, he says, the only real way for US startups to compete with China is on taste. I ain't ever seen a Chinese product that didn't feel Timu.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  Well said, Avi, but that is, that is true. Yeah. Like, as, as we move into the LLM as a product and not just as a weights and evals.

• 2:46:41Jordi Hays?

  DeepSeek is the T-Mo ChatGPT.

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:46:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, one.

• 2:46:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is very cheap, very cheap. Lots of people are saying. Anyway, promoted post.

• 2:46:51Jordi Hays?

  You kind of caught me off.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  Keep these people on their toes.

• 2:46:54Jordi Hays?

  Caught me off guard here. We got a promoted post from our friends over at Laura Piana. Craftsmanship in every weave and detail. Thoughtfully finish with versus, uh, with versus. Maison's art of good living collection speaks the language of time honored craft and impeccable taste. So.

• 2:47:12John Coogan?

  We gotta get you on Duolingo, bro.

• 2:47:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Duolingo. Uh, I just didn't understand, like, thoughtfully finish with versus.

• 2:47:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's a bunch of European mumbo jumbo as far as I'm concerned.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  Low tan banger, only eight likes.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  Oh, you hate to see it from Laura Piana, only eight likes. Where's Chamath with the retweet?

• 2:47:29Jordi Hays?

  Go hit, go hit him with a re.

• 2:47:30John Coogan?

  Hit him with a retweet, Chamath. Do Laura Piana a favor. Pump the, pump the account. Who knows if they put a link in there? It doesn't matter. Get it going. Quote tweet it.

• 2:47:39Jordi Hays?

  They hit him with a hashtag. It's funny that these companies, they, they, they insist on hitting a hashtag in a post about.

• 2:47:47John Coogan?

  Their own thing.

• 2:47:48Jordi Hays?

  From Laura Piana.

• 2:47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Why are they doing this? And they're all the same. It's like, is there one social media agency that's doing every luxury brand? Like, what's going on? We need a complete and total shutdown of luxury brands on X until we can figure out what's going on. It's insane.

• 2:48:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's go to a less than luxury brand that's been on a tear lately. Ry says, people are losing their life savings, getting rugged on fake internet money projects. Meanwhile, I've been riding Build-A-Bear stock to the moon. Hard tech is the future. And he posted a screenshot of Build-A-Bear and Robinhood. Did you know that Build-A-Bear is public, Jordy? Build-A-Bear is a public company and it's up 800% in the last five years. Pretty remarkable. I believe it. People want an activity with their kids.

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  And then people created, they saw that, they immediately created a Build-A-Bear token.

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure. But people want, people want an activity with their kids and they're willing to pay for something that occupies time and then also gives them some sort of like special toy that's not just slop, right?

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:52John Coogan?

  So it makes sense that Build-A-Bear is doing well. Glad to see it. Not financial advice, obviously, but you know, we're, we're, you know, yeah, let's call it hard tech. Who cares?

• 2:49:02Jordi Hays?

  Hard tech. We should check out Build-A-Bear.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Theoretically, going to Build-A-Bear.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  We should do a deep dive. I want to know, like, who is the founder of this company? How they built this thing? Like, it's pretty crazy that such a simple idea could become a public company that's up 800% in five years. Like, that, something went right.

• 2:49:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, you have to.

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  The Build-A-Bear founder knows something.

• 2:49:21Jordi Hays?

  So you have to imagine that they got destroyed with COVID. So part of those gains are, everybody stops going and building bears.

• 2:49:29John Coogan?

  You know, you go back five years, it's like, yeah, it dipped.

• 2:49:30Jordi Hays?

  You can see the COVID drop.

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  Right here, maybe?

• 2:49:32Jordi Hays?

  And then they went on a generational run.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  A generational run, and they're way up recently. Something good happened.

• 2:49:37Jordi Hays?

  The definitive guide to Build-A-Bear.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  I like it. Let's do it.

• 2:49:41Jordi Hays?

  The Build-A-Bear bowl case.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  Dolly Bali, I feel like this guy's been on the show before, says, "When, when has something good happened when Masa gets really excited?" And he says, "Once again, I ask." And so this is obviously a reference to DeepSeek and that, you know, tanking the market shortly after Masa did his, you know, announcement on Stargate. Kind of a, kind of a good post, but that's silly.

• 2:50:03Jordi Hays?

  I think the thing is, Satya is still going to be spending $80 billion a year, even with the DeepSeek news.

• 2:50:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:50:10Jordi Hays?

  As things, yesterday was a terrible day to be unfamiliar with Jevon's paradox.

• 2:50:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:50:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, many clearly were.

• 2:50:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  And not our audience.

• 2:50:19John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 2:50:19Jordi Hays?

  But many, many, many normies out there, very unfamiliar with that, that paradox. And we're just going to keep using more compute until we're all just paper clips.

• 2:50:29John Coogan?

  And, and I did see a post that, that after the markets crashed, there was a lot of equity research discussion and expert calls that happened to the hyperscalers, asking like, are you, like, are you going to change your GPU buying plan? And they all said no. So.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  I bought Nvidia on public yesterday.

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  You up?

• 2:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Up 7%, something like that.

• 2:50:54John Coogan?

  Killing it. Not financial advice, but-

• 2:50:56Jordi Hays?

  Seven percent in a day.

• 2:50:58John Coogan?

  A day. Compound that over a year, you're killing it.

• 2:51:01Jordi Hays?

  Trillionaire.

• 2:51:02John Coogan?

  Trillionaire. Logan Bartlett says, "It's amazing how Apple continues to innovate, democratizing mobile music players, iPod 2001. The most elegant smartphone experience, iPhone 2007. Mainstream cordless headphones, AirPods 2016. AI that makes the product experience worse, Siri 2011. Apple Intelligence 2024."

• 2:51:22Jordi Hays?

  Apple Room, Apple Room Temp.

• 2:51:24John Coogan?

  Apple Room Temp. Get it together, Apple. Get it together. It's gotta get better. It's so bad. You know, I had a recent, like, oh my God, this is so un-Apple and so bad experience. So they, obviously, like, voice generation is completely commoditized. You have 11 labs. There's a million models that do it very well. OpenAI has a fantastic model. It's very easy to train a model on a ton of voice data and then Delphi can clone our voices, right? Like startups can do this, like with way less money than Apple, right? And so it's easy to create a voice that is, you know, good. Yeah. And so when you go into Safari on, on an iPhone and you click on the reader view, it will take away

• 2:52:08John Coogan?

  all the ads. It's very nice. You can actually read the article cleanly. And it, and there's a button now that you can say, "Listen to this article." And it, and it plays like a pretty decent voice. It's not state of the art. It's okay.

• 2:52:18Jordi Hays?

  It's not good.

• 2:52:19John Coogan?

  It's not good, but it's not bad. And it's-

• 2:52:21Jordi Hays?

  You can listen to it.

• 2:52:22John Coogan?

  Usable. You can listen to it, which is nice because a lot of websites don't have, you know, a voice feature. But sometimes that's broken. Sometimes the reader view is broken and it only shows you like a third of the article, even if you're logged in. There's some sort of paywall thing. It's broken. And so-

• 2:52:36Jordi Hays?

  Is Ben now, he's just listening to music with-

• 2:52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ben? Is that loud?

• 2:52:41Jordi Hays?

  Ben, are you good?

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  We can hear that.

• 2:52:45John Coogan?

  Oh, it's outside? Yeah. Oh, weird. Okay. We got some noise outside the studio in downtown LA today. Anyway, so sometimes the reader view is broken. And when it, and when it's broken, you can still swipe down with three fingers to do like the voice version of... Oh, it's, that's funny. Is that some, how did that happen with that phone? I have a phone in there.

• 2:53:11John Coogan?

  Weird. That's very odd. Okay, thank you. Very weird. I don't know what's going on with the phone. Anyway.

• 2:53:19John Coogan?

  So you can swipe down with three fingers to do like, it's like a, it's like a assistance feature for people that are, I think, blind. And it will, it will read anything on the text. It's a screen reader. It reads it all in a voice. And that voice is still on the old model. So it's like completely impossible to use. And it's just like, how do they not think to update all the voices at the same time?

• 2:53:38Jordi Hays?

  Latency with Siri is insane.

• 2:53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's terrible. Anyway, let's move on.

• 2:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Some people, some people were giving, I think it was Signal who was giving Apple, like Apple yesterday had to, had to be pretty, Signal was saying they have to be pretty happy right now. They didn't spend on CapEx. They just sort of waited to see how the market would play out. They already have all the distribution.

• 2:54:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:02Jordi Hays?

  So we'll see how it plays out for them.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Okay, let's.

• 2:54:07Jordi Hays?

  We need it. We need a collective effort to get smart people working at Apple again.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  Seriously, because they have such a lock-in, like you can't just count on, you can't leave.

• 2:54:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:16John Coogan?

  So you gotta make it better.

• 2:54:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  So we gotta push people to go there. So if you're a cracked engineer, go work at Apple and go founder mode.

• 2:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Please go founder mode at Apple.

• 2:54:25John Coogan?

  It is rough. Do we have any more promoted posts?

• 2:54:27Jordi Hays?

  No, let's.

• 2:54:28John Coogan?

  Okay, let's just close out with Nir. Nir says, "Love how finance reporting found that the, that they can phrase everything in terms of market cap to get technically accurate headlines like trillions of dollars violently wiped out from the market forever. When the reality is, e.g. today, that NASDAQ is at the price from 10 days ago." That's hilarious. I didn't realize that. It's only been 10 days of gains wiped out. You still, you hate to see it though.

• 2:54:56Jordi Hays?

  It's still sad.

• 2:54:58John Coogan?

  Nir.

• 2:54:58Jordi Hays?

  And still leaves us looking for a bull market somewhere.

• 2:55:03John Coogan?

  Well, that's our show. Thanks for tuning in.

• 2:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:55:06John Coogan?

  If you're tuning in live. Thanks for listening.

• 2:55:07Jordi Hays?

  Very first live show. First of tens of thousands.

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  Thousands. We'll be doing this for decades. And go leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Put an ad read in your review. We'll read it on the show. DM us bangers for banger archive. Apply to PMF or die. Send us questions in the DM. We'll answer them on the show. Mail us stuff. Whatever you want to do.

• 2:55:33Jordi Hays?

  The day is almost over on the East Coast. It's almost five o'clock. Well, actually it's past five.

• 2:55:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:38Jordi Hays?

  But that's not an excuse to stop creating value. So whether you're on the West Coast, the East Coast, or at the Bugatti in Baku, Azerbaijan.

• 2:55:50Jordi Hays?

  The day's not over. The show's over, but the day's not over. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching.