Project Stargate, The T Word, Ramp Treasury, Audience Ad Reads, See You at Davos

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 (00:00) - Project Startgate (44:00) - Audience Ad Reads (51:06) - 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. Today, we are giving you a breakdown of Stargate, the latest AI initiative and really like a massive, just completely tech and AI focused story to come out of the post-Trump inauguration. I like the mainstream news was like not on this and I was very happy to see like, okay, there's a tech story here.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, caught off guard.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  And opening, like what was interesting is it came out at like, I was in, I was on a layover, uh, off brand. I was, I was on a layover last night.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Roasted.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Cause I was flying into a small regional airport.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Just routine maintenance on the G650.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Like it just was poorly, poorly planned, but I just remember it was 4pm in Denver when the story came out, which just felt super random. Typically you have a big announcement like this, but it was because they were doing a press conference with Sam, with, with Masa, with Trump.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  The photo is insane.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  The photo of them all together.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  And Trump's just standing there. So I just been like, nice guys. Like, yeah, do some American business.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  I like, I like the vibe of this. Cause I don't think you, we'll get into this, but the, like, Trump is not committing money to this. He was just like, this is cool.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Putting a stamp on it.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yes, putting a stamp on it. It was great.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and Masa had very much framed it as before, you know, apparently the conversation went, if you get, if you win, I'll bring you a hundred billion dollars.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  And Masa was saying like, I came back with 500.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  I love that. Awesome.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  And you can't keep a good man down.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  Like there's some really iconic Masa pictures throughout history. Go on our, our X or, or the TV account and my account. I tried to surface some yesterday.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  We got some bangers up.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  We got some bangers. We got an 8K banger.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. As, as of this recording, might be a 10K now. Uh, well, let's go through the Wall Street Journal article to give some basic facts and then we'll, uh, cover the, the, some Ben Thompson analysis, what the information or the misinformation is saying about it. And then, uh, we'll take it through the timeline and get you some reactions to Stargate, the new AI initiative. So the Wall Street Journal writes, "Some of the world's most prominent names in technology are pledging to pour as much as a half a trillion dollars into building it so much."

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  Sounds, you sound bigger when you say half a trillion. Even so normalized the B word.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. Now it's now it's half a trillion. Now we're in the T land. Artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US and the latest high profile initiative timed with the start of the Trump administration. And this is what's weird. It's really interesting. It's a joint venture. It's a new company. And so OpenAI is taking equity in Stargate and they're the leader of this joint venture.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  You wonder if the dilution you have to take is a new company raising, raising that much money. And what they say here that intends to invest $500 billion. To be clear, that they can obviously have a huge debt component to that.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Which would still count as this framing of an investment.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, we'll get into this, but I mean, the, there's been a massive disconnect between like the announced, like in our day, back in our day, when you announced a $20 million round, it meant that $20 million to the cent came into your balance sheet as an equity investment.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Yes. And so the framing here is.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  And the investors would even have to, you know, you get the, you get the wire instructions. It's like, oh, you're investing $5 million. Invest 4.9999996 because you're buying this many shares. And now it's like, yeah, I threw some venture debt on top of it and then some cloud credits and then, oh yeah, this government told me that they might throw some extra money in if I do one thing. So I'll throw that in there. And all of a sudden I add a couple of zeros to my fundraising round.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  Yes, and back in my day, if you went out to raise seven trillion and you came back with 500 billion, that was not something to be sold.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, the start is a seven trillion. That was the story. I forgot about that. That's wild.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  Those rounds typically don't even get announced.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, so it's OpenAI SoftBank Group, which we know well. They'll build data centers for OpenAI and then OpenAI will be a customer of those data centers. So it's going to be this complicated like loop back. The database company and MGX, an investor backed by the United Arab Emirates are also equity partners in the venture. The company is committing $100 billion to the venture with plans to invest up to 500 billion over the next four years, which actually seems.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Put this into perspective, in 2024, I believe there was $168 billion invested into US based startups.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  And so this is basically saying we are going to match. Almost match that level of spend, but purely into the data center infrastructure side, the energy.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, everything just gets so, it's essentially, we're seeing like the vertical integration of AI.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Where, you know, like it used to be, oh yeah, like you want to build a startup, you're just like, you're essentially like an AWS wrapper than a chat G P wrapper.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Then it came to the training runs, you're gonna have a huge AWS bill because you're gonna be training on some infrastructure. Now it's like, in order to, to, to really do what they want to do, they have to buy the land, the energy, the, the, the compute. Everyone was saying, oh, another one trillion to Nvidia because Nvidia is gonna make.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I was joking, I was, you know, obviously shitposting, being like, you know, showing Masa and.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  And Jensen being like, 500 billion, did I hear that right, Masa? And he's like, yes, brother, it's all for you.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  It's all for you.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny because Masa literally bottomed at Nvidia, do you remember? Like he sold at the local bottom.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, he sold at the bottom.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  And his, it would have like, you know, uh, so anyways, this is just.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the, the whole story of Masa, I was, I tagged Ashley Vance and I was like, you need to do a, a, a proper documentary on Masa because what an incredible story. The guy has had some of the biggest wins and the biggest Ls and just like continues to like push forward. Never loses, uh, never loses confidence seemingly.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which we love to see.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  So the hundred billion dollar sum includes projects that the company's already announced and initiated under the Biden administration. So they're kind of like rolling in their old progress as well. So like really make this a thing. And the total figure, if realized, would be large even by Silicon Valley standards. And underscores the extent to which tech companies and government officials are betting on AI as the future of the American economy. It also shows how much tech executives want to broadcast their enthusiasm at the start of the new administration. And I love this photo of just Sam smiling while talking to the Paul brothers.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Random photo.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like the Wall Street Journal knows what they're doing there. They're just like this. This is this is like, you know, unprecedented and it's just like there's celebrities around. And they they picked that photo very clearly.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one thing you can tell as far back as Sam positioning is I'm going to raise $7 trillion.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Sam is under such an, I don't think there's somebody, Elon's under a lot of pressure and that he's got a lot of balls. He's juggling, right? He's got like seven balls in the air. He's got billions, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars on the line, but Sam is arguably under much more pressure, much more scrutiny. And so seemingly this project, they very clearly are 500 billion, building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. So Sam's strategy is his number one enemy is the most powerful wealthiest man in the world.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  That everybody's saying, oh, great. We're now an oligarchy run by some, some guy from South Africa.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Right. But Sam's strategy is like, I'm going to become too big to fail.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  True. I also think this is an interesting narrative violation about that, that thesis that has been running wild. That Elon secretly, the president, like has 100% control over Trump. Because if, if that really was the case, then this press conference never would have happened.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  And so it actually is kind of refreshing in some ways to see that, no, the, like, the presidency is still clearly intact and Trump is just making deals one at a time.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this right before the show. Sam Altman was very against the Trump presidency.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  He, he, he praised Reid Hoffman in 2021 saying, you know, if it wasn't for Reid, Trump would be an hour.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  So, so this, this is an example, you know, you framed it as Trump is a deal guy.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's playing the specific moment.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  And so he, he clearly in this situation would have known that Sam had been a critic and

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  wasn't for him, but still was like, this is, you know. Good for America. Let's like do this.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  And put his stamp on it.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  He's come around on this. He's donated. He's come to the inauguration. He's effectively kissed the ring and so I'm down to do a deal. As long as the deal makes sense.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Kissed the ring.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  And in this case, it's just on deal terms. It's the federal government doesn't need to invest anything.

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  But get.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  And gets a huge benefit, right? Dominance over.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  And it would actually do weird. It would be.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  And a lot of this is investment from other countries into America. I mean, that's what NASA represents, right? And that's what the MDX, MGX, the UAE. So you're taking money from a foreign country and putting it in America. That's like, that's a pretty easy calculation for Trump, I think.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, for, there's, there's a good argument for foreign investment here because I don't think the United States has 500 billion, you know, if they can pull the money together. It's not like we have an extra $500 billion that are just kind of, you'd really have to.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Can we print that like every day?

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. Not every day, but I get what you're saying.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  But yeah, and like, I mean, what, the COVID stimulus was like a trillion and then another trillion or something?

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we could, but if we did that, it would be very.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Inflationary and stuff. Yeah.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, it would be corrupt for it to go all to OKI.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're doing a stimulus check for Sam Altman. It's one, it's one $500 billion check. This is universal basic.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Economy today, yeah, the economy today just functions as a wealth transfer between Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Base Baron. Base Baron picking up a very small amount of that, but.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  I was laughing at this because, you know, over the weekend, the Trump coin launched and then Melania coin launched. And everyone's like, it's so ridiculous that these like super powerful people have like coins attached to them. But then I was thinking back on it and I was like, wait, but like, remember when Elon attached himself to Dogecoin? And you could basically. Get exposure to Elon through Dogecoin and he essentially had a like a, you know, a meme coin attached to him.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  And, and then even Sam has WorldCoin, which doesn't truly have like cash flows yet. And although there's like more of a story there for how that's going to be a real crypto, it is in some ways a meme coin just about Sam.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Like, when I think about, do I want to buy WorldCoin? It's, do I, do I think Sam is going to be a successful person for a long time?

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  It's a way to go.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  It's a way to go along with Sam.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Same.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Dividually. Exactly, exactly. Because the coins should like live and die by him in the same way that Trump coin lives and dies by Trump.

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a very odd like framing. So Stargate's first data center will be in Texas. The site, which started construction last year, will be operated by Oracle and used by OpenAI. The companies didn't disclose how much each partner would contribute. OpenAI raised billions of dollars but still loses money. Oracle has about $11 billion in cash and marketable securities, but more in debt. And SoftBank has roughly $30 billion of cash on hand. OpenAI said it would operate the venture while SoftBank will finance it. Stargate will have a separate board of directors and hire a new CEO, which sounds like, just like after all the board drama at OpenAI, I'm like, just, I have PTSD about AI boards generally. But SoftBank's Moshayos Huson will be chairman. Stargate plans to bring on additional equity investors.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  So I, I, I think Ben Thompson framed it as like, this is almost more of like a prospectus or a roadshow for Stargate. It's like kicking off. It's a marketing event. It's like kicking off.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  It's a general solicitation.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  At the White House.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  To the, to, yeah, yeah, to the sovereigns, basically.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Basically, basically.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  But, and it's, and to be honest, like, it's very smart to be like, go and get a photo opportunity with Donald Trump being like, yes, we want 500 billion invested in American AI infrastructure.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  And then if you're the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, you're like, oh, we'll toss like 5 billion in.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a party round.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  This is very clearly a party round.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Seriously. I mean, the, the, the, the other way to think about this is like, it is this huge number, but how do you comp it just to general tech capex? And so Goldman Sachs has estimated that, uh, uh, all the American tech giants collectively will spend an estimated one trillion on capital expenditures in the next few years. And so that will include large outlays on data centers, chips and power and the power grid. And so there's already kind of a trillion dollars flowing around. There's just a question of like, if you're, if you're Jeff Bezos, do you want to be a part of this party round and like, kind of count your capex?

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Or do your own, or yeah, yeah. And, and later we'll, we'll maybe get to this for maybe now the right time is, uh, uh, so Elon obviously quickly came out and said.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, pull up that post.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Elon came out and he goes, uh, they don't actually have the money. And, uh, and then had, had, had a number of other posts. And it's clear to everyone, uh, involved that they certainly don't have 20% of the 500 billion just sitting in an account. Like that money has clearly not been committed, um, you know, wired.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Right.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Maybe there's, it seems like there's a lot of soft commits. There's people around the table saying, yeah, we want to be involved.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  But it's so, it's, it's so clearly like a DAC and a render.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  That nobody's going to be like, and then it will be a bunch of sub entities and complicated structures of like, okay, we're setting up this data center.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  We're going to tie this much debt to it.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  We need $10 billion specifically here.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  To see fake it to make it at this level.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fake it till you make it. And so Sam, Sam's strategy, uh, which was interesting, where he says, I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are one of the most, the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time. And I don't think that, that response, um, I think he's trying to win out like it you can I do believe he genuinely believes that right?

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  How could you?

• 14:26John Coogan?

  I mean, you can go back and watch the interview between him and Elon.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  But fighting fighting fire with a hug, I don't think is how you win against. You're not gonna you're not gonna.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna win the war with Elon by being nice to him.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  I really think so many different ways by Elon. It's kind of just like, why not just try a new strategy, I guess. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting because it's like the initial OpenAI announcement. I think it's it is this fake it till you make it energy. Most people understood that, but I think Elon realizes that many people don't. And many people will think, oh, wow.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  XAI has five million, five billion, and they have 500 billion. I should bet on.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  This has 60, almost 60,000, definitely over 60,000 likes by now.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  And I guarantee you that OpenAI has people seeing this post messaging them and being like, hey, will you promote my crypto coin? You know, so like, it's so like, the average person seeing this is like, wow, this is real.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally, because you don't understand all the nuances of Silicon Valley.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Normally, when you see an announcement like this, it was done historically.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  And this is being done in the present.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so Elon Elon is he's not, I mean, he's he's almost like theatrically just trying to educate people on like the nature of this fake it till you make it stuff, which sometimes he does too. And then Sam's.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Definitely the optimist demo.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so there's a little bit of like, everyone's doing the fake it till you make it. But there's a lot of alpha and like calling somebody else out for doing it. And who's and and getting that dialing in the level of fake it till you make it is like the the most important thing in Silicon Valley because you go too far and you're in jail.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  And every every every.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  You don't go far enough, you don't raise the money.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Founders do this with product demos, right?

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  They'll put out a cool. Video, launch video showing it.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  And then you sign up for the product and it's got not, not, not really featured.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  Oh, it's sped up. I mean, even Google.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Google, when they launched their AI stuff, uh, they, they were saying, oh yeah, they sped up the, like, the AI was actually thinking for three minutes. They sped that up and they didn't say they sped it up and like all these different things, like a million companies have been, have gotten caught with doing stuff like this.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Faking demos. But it's different when, when Tesla fakes a demo and it's like, oh, like they, you know, they, they delivered that product like three days la- or three years later.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  And Tesla.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Versus like the, uh, the Nikola guy who like straight up had a fake truck that was rolling down. Exactly. And that was fraud. So the line of like, what is fraud?

• 16:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, and Tesla was doing that to get, to like sustain their aggressive, you know, market cap.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Their, their marketing.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, so, uh, Janik, uh, our buddy Janik from, from public.com sent us, uh, sent us this post, which was clearly Satya running cover for Sam after all this. And on CNBC, he gets asked, you know, Elon Musk says like Project Stargate doesn't have the money. Now, obviously Satya is conflicted here as any, you know, you ideally you be over your career, you become so conflicted that, you know, you just can't say anything, uh, at all, but, um, and, uh, so Satya gets asked this question very directly. Satya owns half of OpenAI and like is made a huge, huge bet on OpenAI.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  And Satya is very sort of like specific with his words. He's getting pressed on, uh,

• 17:44John Coogan?

  How much are you putting in?

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  Do they actually have the money?

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  And Satya goes, you know, we've, we know we've committed to investing, you know, $80 billion a year, uh, in Azure. And, uh, you know, and the guy goes, asks like a follow-up question and he goes, Satya goes again, all I know is I'm good for my 80 billion. And like Satya is not saying I'm investing $80 billion just through Stargate. He's saying I'm investing $80 billion in my

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  data centers and infrastructure and on all this stuff. And so, I mean, again, this is one of those things that, that, that, uh, normies, not our audience, but

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  normies will look at this and be like, oh, Microsoft is investing 80 billion in this. Like they're, they're 80% of the way there.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's real.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  I mean, if that was the case, that would be extreme. If their balance sheet just went down by 80 billion into some high risk.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, they have, they have, they have committed. I mean, to be honest, the, the other thing here is it's not. High risk in the way that investing in a startup is, right? You're investing in physical infrastructure that has somewhat predictable demand. Everybody's expecting exponential growth in that demand, but every indicator says that that's correct. So, and again, Microsoft is using a bunch of debt. Everybody involved will be like levering up, which we love to see.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  We love to see.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  It'll be interesting actually to see if there ends up being, if AI creates so much demand that we are just constantly trying to catch up to that demand, or we create like a new housing crisis because like trillions of dollars are invested in data centers and, you know, who knows?

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the crazy thing is like, it feels like so much money, but at the same time, when you, when you talk to the AI folks and they're like, every order of magnitude is what gets us, you know, breakthroughs in AI. We went from GPT-4, which was a $500 million run to a $5 billion project to the 50 billions coming and the 500 billion. Like four years is actually slow on the, on some people's AGI timelines. Like some people want to do an order of magnitude basically every single year. And so like this has been talked about for a long time.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, like.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  It's like, I, I, basically it's like, I don't exactly know how the capital formation will happen, but if you, if you just ask me like, will humanity invest half a trillion dollars in AI over the next four years? I'd be like, absolutely.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Let's go to Bill Thompson.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  One, one, one last thing I would say, OpenAI, I think is the best in the world at, at disseminating their story and the things that they want people to believe through a complicated network of terminally online and on accounts, internal employees, leaks, you know, stuff like that. Memes even being like, oh, we're going to name it Stargate, which is like a very charged name for, Stargate was a.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  TV show.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  CIA project.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Oh, is that?

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Crime control.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  One reference, there's also.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Sci-fi reference.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  There's a sci-fi reference, there's a movie called Stargate, like there's all these different things.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  It's a good name.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  It's a very cool name.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Whoever held that a couple of days ago, they printed, they probably sell it for $50 million. Yeah. So yeah, Ben Thompson frames this as a bit of a prospectus as Masayoshi Son sets out to raise the funds. A project of this size and magnitude does seem to be up his alley. What is amusing is OpenAI's propensity to get itself once again into a weird financial arrangement. It seems as if the company will get equity in Stargate, a separate company for operating the data centers, and it will also be its primary customer, which is to say it will be paying itself in some respects. Still, it makes sense. OpenAI is a software company with a different long-term cost structure than that of an infrastructure company. That's fine if you're at Microsoft's scale and profitability, but for entities

• 21:36John Coogan?

  that are losing money and looking to raise more, it makes sense to be different investment vehicles. So Steve, like in one way, the market can look at OpenAI as a software company and then Stargate as an infrastructure and hardware company, which does make sense.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  The Manhattan Project, the Manhattan Project of AI.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  Is cool because you're getting some of that credit of it being this government thing when all Trump did was say, yeah, this is a cool vibe. I'll give it, I'll join your press conference.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. We should go to the.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Gavin Baker.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Gavin Baker.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Gavin Baker, crossover fund manager and a great poster says, "Stargate is a great name, but the $500 billion is a ridiculous number and no one should take it seriously unless SoftBank is going to sell all of their Baba and ARM. SoftBank has $38 billion in cash, $148 billion in debt, and generates $3 billion in free cash flow." Per BBG, what is the?

• 22:39John Coogan?

  I don't know. Oh, probably Bloomberg.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, per Bloomberg. Okay, I thought they were saying like per, yeah. So $3 billion in free cash flow. They own $143 billion in ARM and $18 billion in Baba. If they start selling ARM, their stake will be worth much less very quickly. So if you basically just start, if you sell off $143 billion in stock.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  A lot of selling pressure.

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna, you know, create. Supply, demand issue. Oracle has 11 billion in cash, 88 billion in debt, and generates 10 billion in free cash flow.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  A lot of money.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, you know, it's funny to put up-

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Founder at the helm.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Founder at the helm, and he's looking good. Everybody's wondering, what's his stack, HGH test, you know, facelifts. He's looking good.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  He's looking good.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is burning cash. MGX did not commit to a number in his $100 billion fund. Maybe 10% of the fund goes into the best case, in the best case. Nvidia will limit how much they invest in any one model company, maybe 5 billion. Barring the aforementioned-

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Again, this isn't a model company, so, but, and it is like the most like virtuous cycle, where whatever money they put in is going to add to it. So I, I, I could actually see the Nvidia investment being higher.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  Barring the aforementioned SoftBank. Oh, and they can also structure it as like trading in kind trade of equity for-

• 23:54John Coogan?

  For GPs. And then also that 10% of that fund, I think that that's a little weird. It might be a little low. I think some funds could go up to 20 or 30%.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  A private equity fund will do-

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yep. Highly concentrated. It's possible. And then also, if they, if this deal goes well, and they're, you know, and they're raising the next fund, like, like the, the commitment is over four years and so, you know.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Potentially. Like, that, that one fund is MGX or MDX?

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  MGX.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  MGX. They could wind up getting 50 billion of equity.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, this doesn't take into account positioning this as a road, a road shed.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, perspective.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  And, and Masa is known to make ridiculous commitments and then walk them back a little bit. So he could be like, I will sell all my arm to like make this happen.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  I've got the cash. Like, let's, let's run it.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, barring the aforementioned SoftBank, ArmSale might be able to put together 50 billion in equity funding over several, several years, can obviously finance the- The GPUs and put debt on the JV. In this case, you could probably, if you're going to put up 50 billion of equity, I don't know how much debt you could slap on to this bad boy. But Gavin's point is nowhere close to 500 billion. Everyone should just start issuing press releases for $1 trillion AI projects. And then apparently some biotech company with the ticker MGX like popped.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  After this, like 30%.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, and so.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  The people buying the wrong ticker thing and actually moving the market always blows my mind.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  It's like, how do you, like, you're enough of a, you're enough, you're enough of a trader to read this news, think that it's bullish for the fund, go in there, but not check for two seconds that you're investing in the right thing.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but what if it's just that.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  The bot.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  There's this understanding that.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  It will pop.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  It will pop.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Okay, so you're like, ah, the meme, it's the meme stuff. It's the Trump coin of.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Mean pop.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Of this, the.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  And so Jeff Lewis referencing Sam's response to Elon, he says, I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring crossover fund manager involved in a lawsuit against OpenAI of all time. And then they just go into this like back and forth.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Chad on Chad violence. And, but, but anyway, so, so Gavin is conflicted. Jeff's a huge investor in OpenAI. He's conflicted. Everybody's, it's, everybody involved in this public conversation is, is deeply conflicted. But that's why we're here to try to figure out what's actually happening.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  So there's an interesting, to go back to the Satya Nadella and Microsoft thing, like obviously Microsoft and OpenAI have been really, really closely aligned for a long time. And then that, there's been reports of that relationship fraying a little bit. And Ben Thompson has a good breakdown of kind of like how this wound up happening. He previously wrote in an update saying, so Microsoft will spend money on training, but at a pace dictated by inference usage. Leaving aside the fact that inference usage only comes after training, this is a viewpoint that is fundamentally at odds with OpenAI's still stated goal of pursuing AGI, which is in some respects, just doing training for training's sake to see what you can develop. I guess you could square these circles if you tried, but it sure seems like OpenAI and Microsoft are really, dare I say, misaligned.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  He's joking about the alignment problem, but it is interesting. There's evidence that evidence of this misalignment continued to emerge. The Information wrote about OpenAI's frustration with Microsoft's GPU availability and the role that played in OpenAI's last fundraiser in October. The Financial Times reported in December that Microsoft was negotiating to remove the AGI clause that restricted their future access to OpenAI models in exchange for further investment. Then, over Christmas break, The Information reported that the companies were having difficulty coming to a new agreement. The two companies were having difficulties. You reported, you said. Yeah, The Information. Misinformation. Misinformation. Although Microsoft was more insulated from the AGI clause than believed, as OpenAI needed to first generate $100 billion in profits,

• 27:59John Coogan?

  to that end, it is notable that this new deal does not appear to have more investment from Microsoft, as you noted, and does not appear to address the AGI clause. And so a little bit of this is like maybe a way to get back into like the crazy scaled up training runs that just have been maybe a little bit stalled because you kind of max out Azure and it becomes this question of like, hey, we have this belief that scaling laws will hold and that if we invest 10 times the money, we will get a higher IQ model out. And it's pretty clear from the, we looked at the data and it's pretty clear

• 28:38John Coogan?

  that when you 10x the energy and tokens and data and all the work on the training, you do get a smarter model, but. The increases have been diminishing. So as you spend 10 times more, you don't get the same increase from GPT three to GPT four. So you could see this diminishing curve. And at some point, you know, if it doesn't become just super intelligence, you're going to wind up doing the training where it costs 500 billion and only getting like, oh, cool. It's like, it went from like an okay PhD student to like a pretty good one. And it's like, was that really worth it? And so I think that OpenAI clearly believes that yes, it's worth it. We're going to get something really special out of it. It's going to drive an immense

• 29:23John Coogan?

  amount of value on the inference side financially and also potentially like solve all of humanities problems and all that stuff. But but but but making that case to Microsoft, which have shareholders and tons of other businesses to say, hey, you need to take every penny you have and start building data centers for us, probably wasn't going to.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  One thing that it seems very clear, it's impossible to predict the future, right?

• 29:52John Coogan?

  It's a it's a skill issue usually, but.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, skill issue.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  For some people.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue. The thing I can predict is that humanity 100 years from now will study this power struggle over over the creation of non-human intelligence, right? And the funny thing, I saw somebody post and they said, everybody's now calling it ASI because it's clear we have artificial general intelligence already, right?

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  And so even OpenAI is like, everybody's like, hey, we got to kind of unwind this like AGI clause in this partnership because like, kind of already have it. It's not printing like 100 billion dollars a year in free cash flow. So yeah, like maybe it will someday, but maybe a bunch of companies eat up that pie. So there's just so much money on the line. It's like actually incredible.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Because you can just do everything, like it's every single industry.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook's punching the air because he's like barely scraping a gear 78 million in total comp. Meanwhile, the average baseball player is making like half that. And and he's sitting watching his baseball. He's sitting watching around, he's wa- he's watching, you know, these size lords huck around billion

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Tens of billion dollars.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  Tens of billions of dollar checks and he's like, I can't even, I can barely get a bite, a crumb.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  A crumb.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  A crumb. It's funny, like, where is Apple in all of this?

• 31:14John Coogan?

  It is crazy.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  Partner with OpenAI and they're sitting on all this cash and they're just like, yeah, let's rip another buyback.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, I, I.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  So uninspired.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  I think that like we're, we're so stuck in all the, all the nuances of this story because it's so big and so interesting. But I think it's going to be incredibly interesting to see what Elon's reaction is going to be because he's definitely.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna have to out raise.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  He's good, he's gonna have to do something.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, and here's.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Even if it's just PR or like narrative spinning or storytelling, like.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  There's going to be something that comes from Elon world and XAI that is compelling and fascinating and then Google too.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Think of the other sovereigns that are not in this announcement.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Qatar, Saudi.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  There's plenty of other big sovereigns, right?

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  That can write 20 billion dollar checks.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  And so behind the scenes, you have to imagine that.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Malaysia, Malaysia does a lot of training, we talked about that.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you have to imagine that there's this battle between Elon and Sam and Masa out behind the scenes.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  Taking these meetings.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Trying to get people to pick a side and those people don't actually want to pick a side, right? Like even VCs don't want to pick a side. Like we want to be able to be like, well, we invested in this foundation model, but you know, they, they, they've got like sort of different paths and we're also going to do this one because people just want to deploy and, and they're playing. You, everyone wants to own a piece of ASI, right?

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  They, they got their piece of AGI.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  And they're kind of a little bit underwhelmed.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  It's cool. It's cool, but like, you know.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  It's not solving all of our problems just yet. We still have to solve our own problems.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  You still gotta prompt it.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do. I do really wonder, I mean, they keep like it, the, the pattern has certainly been or like the, at least the financial story that we've been hearing is that, as a product. L L Ms are sticky and drive high revenue subscriptions, essentially. Perplexity, twenty dollars a month, like tons of people just pay for it. I pay for it, it's great. But I also pay for Chat G P T. And then I also just got.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  They use them interchangeably.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and interchangeably to some degree, certain ones are better for other ones. Like, the Google one has a really huge context window, so you can dump an entire book in there and then and then get it to summarize that. But Chat G P T has the better reasoning models with O one and soon O three. And so the latest news from OpenAI is that they're launching the O three model. It might be two hundred dollars a month. There's a version that might be two thousand dollars a month or something like that. There's been people talking about it. And then, kind of quietly behind the scenes, people have been saying, well, you know, for a long time, people saw this as existential for Google, because how are you going to put ads in L L M responses? If you read a big block of text, like, it's less natural to put ads in. But perplexity solved that and figured out how to put ads in there.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  And I think it actually makes a ton of sense to put ads in L L M responses. And it'll work just fine. And it's actually very easy.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  And purchase decisions.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's very easy to actually just have a second L L M that rewrites the response and says, insert an ad in this text response.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  They should consult with us on that.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  But I think the third financial story that hasn't really been told yet is, is, is how are they going to drive cost down on the inference side? Because you saw this with Bitcoin, where there were, originally, it was extremely expensive to mine Bitcoin. You had to do it on CPUs, so huge server racks. Then they figured out how to do it on GPUs. Then they moved to something called F P G As, which are kind of field programmable gate arrays, which are like, it's almost like a baked in silicon. And then they went to ASICs, which are, which are chips that are specifically designed just for mining Bitcoin. That's the only algorithm that the chip can run. And so it mines Bitcoin very, very efficiently. And that, to my knowledge, no one has baked, you know, mid-journey down to silicon or, or G P T four down to silicon.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  And when you do, the cost to actually inference the model should be nothing. And if and if there's some sort of curve where yes, the true AI power users are going to pay $200 a month for the really expensive model. And Sam recently said that O1 users are actually losing the money because they prompted so much. And I noticed this, I use O1 Pro and I get messages all the time like, you have five prompts left. And I'm like, oh God, like, I'm probably like

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Really, it's still gating you?

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm probably like one of the people that they're losing money on. But for for like the average user who just wants something that's decent and is using

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  It is strange, why haven't they made truly the all you can eat buffet? If they, one, one reason would be if they actually made it an infinite one, then startups would hack it so that they're like, basically like leveraging one account to run structural software applications and just like piping it back.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Piping back and forth, maybe. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, i- if there's people that that basically whatever their workload is, maybe just like, you know, recipes, shopping lists, just like daily life stuff, just oh, spell check this thing. They're not really trying to do reasoning or advanced computation or math or code.

• 36:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Then if they're, if they're just happy with GPT-4, you bake that down in silicon and then that's just pure profit. And I think that could drive like pretty great financials for some of these firms. But I just haven't seen anyone talk about that or actually build that model.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  But I'm excited for that because I think that'll, I think that'll justify underwriting larger models like much easier. Because you'll be able to say, hey, all that revenue that that that people are saying like, oh yeah, because the inference cost, it's actually low margin revenue. All of a sudden, people will be like, no, it's actually 99.999% profit when you bake it down in silicon.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Which would be the thing that really unlocks like, yeah, of course, invest 500, 500 billion. Because once you, once you get the model that's perfect.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  And there's just so many

• 37:08John Coogan?

  The prints.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  It, uh, there's so many levels to the game. There's the hardware side. There's the model layer.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Energy.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  There's the energy.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Land.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's the time it takes Elon to get from the West Coast.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  The private jet industry.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  The Riyadh, right?

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of private jet flights.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  But I, there should be an account that just tries to track, you know, I don't, you know, some of these players don't have their own jet. But like Elon is typically flying.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Track that jet. That's bad. Remember? The well, the whole Elon

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  Saying there's a there's a whole subculture of

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Jets and we probably piece together who's actually making more fundraising traction with you by figuring

• 37:50John Coogan?

  I mean, that just happened with the Intel thing where Qualcomm.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  And a bunch of the and

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like that could

• 37:58John Coogan?

  Global foundries.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  We don't really know.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  In Mar-a-Lago. Well, the announcement hasn't happened. It's probably it's probably Elon's. Imagine if Elon's Stargate is we're buying Intel.

• 38:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  And and and Intel is going to

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  Make it all great again.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, manufacture GPUs in America and they're going to be exclusively sold to XAI or something like that.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  And we're raising 501 billion dollars.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  All we got to say to the audience, find your Stargate. Like, just find your Stargate.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm way Good for the YC request for startups like, you know, they we've seen some some success out there in startup world for people, you know, assembling, you know, half a trillion dollars to build AI infrastructure. We'd love to see

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  We'd like to see that at YC. Some more of these.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd like to see some more.

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  It's a growing trend. Yeah, I'd like to see that, too.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  So, yeah, let's close out with Ben Thompson here. He says Oracle and SoftBank are there to serve OpenAI, which isn't a business that Microsoft is particularly interested in. Sure, Microsoft will provide inference to OpenAI for a fee, and they like having exclusive access to the API, but Microsoft is ultimately a product and service company.

• 39:06Jordi Hays?

  The IP.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Is it the API?

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, but also

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, but also the IP. You're correct. If they can get away with running a highly efficient distilled model like DeepSeek demonstrated, this is what I was just mentioning, like DeepSeek distilled the model down, so it's higher margin with a lower price to serve, then that's fine with Microsoft as long as their customers are happy. So, Microsoft is going to figure out how to slot the OpenAI API and the and the models into Excel, Word, Outlook, all their products, and then it's going to be it's going to be copilot on the desktop software. Everywhere there's a Microsoft product. There will be an OpenAI-trained LLM running, improving that user experience. And it will be compressed to a Clippy.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  And be Clippy.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, they should bring back Clippy and make it like great, actually. It's like the smartest AI.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'd be great.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  And so they're going to distill the model down and then just still have their normal margins. And so it won't be it won't be upheaval to their financial model. Because they're such a large corporation, they can't just be like, hey, actually, we're in we're in the nuclear power business now.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Like, sorry, investors, like, the entire model is completely different now. I don't think I think what Ben Thompson is saying is that like, Microsoft just isn't ready to completely pivot their model. They want their investors to know, okay, this is the profile. Yes, we're benefiting off of AI, but at the right, like, scale and margin. So OpenAI, meanwhile, remains not only committed to AGI and beyond, but is also in a fight to have the best model, which undergirds their status as a consumer tech company. They need training GPUs, they need GPUs to build products around inference time scaling. And most importantly, they need investors who are in it for the upside, not to serve enterprise customers who will take years to adapt. This new agreement and new announcement reflects this new reality. And the end, at least in terms of relevance, of one of the most fascinating partnerships in tech history.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  They're really going to write books about all this. It's insane.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So do you think that do you think they did this because they were excited about Ashley Vance's new media company, Core Memory?

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  Like, we need to give them a good first.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  Story, throw them a bone?

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  Directly.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, because they clearly rushed it, rushed the announcement.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Um, it's funny because it's it's a very dangerous time to be trying to launch anything in tech.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Because if you were.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  Well, you might just get run over.

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  You could get run over by a Stargate, you could get run over by.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Or just Trump saying the wrong thing.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Think of, yeah, or or a video where Barron Trump just gets increasingly larger and larger.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, anything like that. Uh, there was a good, uh, uh. Like, uh, S and L's cold open actually had like a pretty hilarious take on how Trump is able to just completely derail like the mainstream media because they're like, we really need to talk about this executive order, but we have some breaking news. Donald Trump just said he's gonna, you know, uh, melt all of Greenland and turn it into a farm. And then, so like, they just get completely distracted consistently. And that's like extremely true. Like, like, like, no one can stay focused on anything. And so getting the launch right and timing the date correctly is like enormous. If you go on a date, I remember when we launched the, the trailer for the show, I think it was a quiet news day and we ripped and it just destroyed everyone's timeline, which is great.

• 42:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tough day. I do remember, I forget who it was, some other startup that I, I know did a launch when we launched the trailer and I actually felt bad because.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  I mean, during the fires, like, it was hard for us to break through because.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  I just started posting about politics.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Okay, you just went full.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  I was on a warpath against.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  I was like, our whole, our whole plan to not talk about politics lasted like two months. But to be fair, at this point, we, i- i- if you track not based on the number of months, but the number of episodes, I bet you if you, what, what are we on? Episode 30 something? 36? I bet you episode 36 of All In is where they start getting political too. So, you know, we're actually just.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's not political if you're just speaking the facts. That's policy.

• 43:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  We only talk about, we talk about policies, personalities.

• 43:06John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  But never politics.

• 43:08John Coogan?

  Never politics, definitely. Uh, let, let's just close out with, uh, with Ben Thompson's final line. He says, "One additional point. If it's true that SoftBank is looking to raise debt for these data centers, then that's notable for a few reasons. On the positive side, it speaks to a great deal of confidence that OpenAI is really on the verge of a meaningful breakthrough, something like AI training, AI all the way to AGI. That will, that will consume $500 billion worth of data centers. On the more negative side, funding these data centers with debt as opposed to Microsoft funding data centers with profit is definitely a bubble indicator. OpenAI is right to go for it. DeepSeek is evidence of the danger of standing still, but it will be interesting to see who wants to be in the business of loaning against rapidly depreciating GPUs." Very interesting.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Venture debt.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Or a shadow.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Venture debtors.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  The loan sharks always come out on top, I guess.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  They do.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  Uh, did we get through all the posts related to this?

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we did.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Let's move on to the timeline. Oh, we got a whole bunch of, whoa, we got a whole bunch of DMs and reviews. Uh, thank you so much to everyone who's been leaving reviews. If it's your first time hearing this call to action, uh, we want to remind you to go leave us a five star review. But specifically, leave a promoted post in your review. Write an ad for your company, your friend's company, just a company that you like. Just put it in the review, we'll print it out and we'll read it on the show. So it's basically like a free ad slot. What is that? $10,000 value? $50,000 value?

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  Depending on.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  I mean, it's, it's a lot of value, so go do it. I'll read through these, uh, this is a great podcast, says Stan Rizzo. I love the Technology Brothers podcast, five star review brought to you by David. More protein and fewer calories help you increase muscle and decrease body fat. This protein bar does just that. 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero sugar. This is your protein bar idealized. I love that because I've been like living off these bars.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  Peter, the CEO sent it, sent us a few boxes.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  John powered through.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  I have so many of these.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  He's averaging five a day.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  You want to take this one next? We'll trade off your reading these.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thank you for upgrading my information diet from Nick to Wild. He says, five stars, uh, very cool. He says, if my podcast listening time was a luxury high rise, the technology brothers just swept in, took over the top 10 floors and evicted all the deadbeats. Sorry, all in. And if you're the kind of captain of industry who listens to this show, you know what lands you a luxury penthouse is a sales team that can close when big deals are on the line. Unfortunately, most CEOs only find out that their sellers, I just love that like anybody, anybody discovering the show.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  Discovering the show and like looking at the reviews is like.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Is this a good show?

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Wait, like, why is all these? Unfortunately, most CEOs only find it out that their sellers can't close the hard way, cringing through recordings of blown deals and missed opportunities. That's why we built Exec.com. We help your company design and deploy custom voice-based role plays with AI characters that mirror your actual prospects, letting your sellers perfect their skills before the stakes are high. Every pitch, every objection, every critical moment, practice and certified before the real money's on the line. Companies like Sam's era. Exionis and Superhuman are already using exec.com and then we get cut off.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  To prepare their, to prepare their people for high stakes conversations. Want to see how they do it? Head over to exec.com and book a demo to experience our AI role plays firsthand. Thanks to the technology brothers for the ad read and for upgrading our information diet. We really haven't set a word limit and someone is just going to drop like a 5,000 word pitch for their company and we're going to get stuck.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  I feel like Nick.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  I think we're going to cut it off at one screenshot from now on.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  Tighten it up.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, insane domain.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  Insane domain.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  Insane domain.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  I'm ready to start like.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm ready to start running these ads.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  They sold me. They sold me.

• 47:00Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny too, because you have to imagine that exec.com is just generating the training data to replace the sales leaders that are using it. So it's like, it's this kind of.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Wild. Well, hopefully they'll be duking it out on the 101 against all the other AI SDRs soon as they, as they.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're going to have to. With Jeremy Giffon for, for.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Billboard space.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  Ad quick will get you sorted.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. A must, a must listen for any brother. John and Jordy put the brothers in tech bros. They appreciate the finer things in life, profits, Dom Perignon and skiing. Their show is a must listen for any technology brother. This ad brought to you by, this review brought to you by Carrot AI. Carrot is a whiteboard for researching, brainstorming and thinking, and it's the best way to visually collaborate with AI. Carrot just moved into an open beta. Sign up now at carrotai.app. I haven't heard of this carrot AI, but I mean, we do a lot of research brainstorming.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Great name, great name too.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  We might want to give.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  We should try it, yeah.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Ben, install that and get a, get a carrot AI whiteboard going. We can, we can map out all our, all our machinations there. You want to read this?

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Perfect.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Sir Sir Gord says, "Yapping done right, five stars. Great podcast, but even better vehicles for ads. I've already bought David protein bars and Bezos' old plane."

• 48:21John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  "Now I want my fellow Technology Brothers out there to hire me to make your pitch decks." Oh, this is Matt Gore. "More than $2 billion raised from size lords like Andreessen Horowitz and the Saudi Royals. Hit me up on X. GORACLE of Delphi, that's G-O-R-A-C-L-E of Delphi, or check the company at opio.io."

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's awesome. He made a whole pitch deck for us when we launched our trailer, and it looked so much like our actual deck.

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it had many people.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Being like, "Did you just send it to him?" Yeah.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, many people were like, "How did this leak?" or whatever. And so, and that was without, we hadn't talked to him at all. So we just spun it out of nowhere, and it was super on.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  Sir, Matt, if you're listening, please make a deck for Stargate. I want to see that.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  I want to see that deck. You said-

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  That's actually amazing.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Super viral, super viral potential. But he says he's raised more than $2 billion. So if you make, if he makes the deck for Stargate and, you know, sends it to Masa and he starts shooting it around.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  You can 10x that, or 100x that number, like, absolutely like 1,000x that number, and be like, $502 billion raised.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is that Masa is one of the greatest deckmakers of all time.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, he does give Matt Gore a run for his money.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Matt Gore-

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  It's insane graphics. I'm like, "Did you custom design this duck laying eggs? Golden eggs?"

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Imagine being a designer at Southank and just being like, because it has a very like PowerPoint aesthetic. It's not a Figma project. It's not, it's not refined. Okay, so, uh, "Five out of five. Great to listen while shining shoes. I'm a professional shoe shiner, and Krugan has been my client for over a decade. I love listening to their podcast while shining shoes of celebrities and billionaires. Better than an MBA at HBS or GUSB. For my son's birthday, he gifted him a Patek Philippe. Truly an exceptional mensch." This review is brought to you by Lucy. Pack a lip and lock in. Thank you.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  Dude, you kind of need a, you kind of need a shoe shine there.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  I do need it. I've been on the road.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  You've been on the road.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  Road warrior.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Uh, let's see. "Technology Brothers is my enlightenment. The Technology Brothers podcast isn't just another podcast, it's my enlightenment. I fall asleep to their voices, and by the time I wake up, their wisdom has already recalibrated my mindset. Prime for greatness before my feet touch my Brooks Brothers loafers. Custom, by the way." The writing is so on point. It's so good. The world, the world turns, but my orbit revolves around their takes. Technology Brothers is my gospel, my alarm clock, my north star, enlightenment.

• 50:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, wait, who wrote this?

• 50:54John Coogan?

  Take a wild guess.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  Baldo, you absolute legend. I was literally about to say Baldo, we gotta, we gotta hire whoever wrote this, but we're already talking with Baldo about, about opportunities at the firm, so.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's go to this post, but I think, so we printed this in black and white and it's Chris saying, no brown in town and he's, and he's circling some shoes that I think are.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  These are Sam Altman.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  What's the story here?

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  So Sam Altman, uh, he has incredible taste in cars. He's got the Regera.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  He's got the P1.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  F1.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  Or the F.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  McLaren F1.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  McLaren F1, but he had, he had, uh, and I'd say this to his face, he had a, he had a horrific fit on.

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's just not on the level that, it's not on the level that it should be.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  It doesn't scream half a trillionaire.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, there's no, there's no excuses. I mean, there's, I have stylists that.

• 51:54John Coogan?

  Fashion is back in tech.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  And standing out is.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  And loud opulence was really back this weekend.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, the inauguration. Yeah, you saw Lauren, Lauren Sanchez with some very interesting.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if that, I wouldn't bucket that in loud opulence. I'd put that in.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, something, very loud, but I was disappointed that Bezos didn't match her energy and just rock the tightest tuxedo t-shirt with his biceps just popping out and just been like, we're both like just going insane. Uh, instead, he was just wearing a normal sit. But I feel like if your, if your fiance comes out dressed like that, you, you gotta be like, what am I doing in this normal clothing? I gotta match the energy.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  Come with something crazy. Speaking of fashion choices, we have some breaking news from Paul Baum. Trump assigns mandatory pocket protectors for engineers executive order. I've never been a pocket protector guy, it's completely before my time.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should, we should take some for a spin, just to see what it's.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, do a little throwback episode where we dress up as NASA engineers, that'd be great.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  There needs to be, uh, almost needs to be watch protectors with what's going on in.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  Seriously. Oh yeah, do you want to tell that story? This is crazy.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Somewhat, yeah, not actually relevant to Paul's post.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  No.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yesterday, uh, somebody, uh, held my brother-in-law, uh, with, up with a knife in the middle of the Upper East Side and stole his, uh, Patek Philippe and, uh, like walked up to him, asked him for directions.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Jordi Hays?

  The guy was with his wife and children.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  While committing this heinous crime.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  That's, but like the, the criminal was with his, his wife, not the victim.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:32John Coogan?

  The victim was alone.

• 53:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Victim is alone.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  Just be like, hold on, son. I'm gonna go steal something.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  So it's super dark. He was super shaken up and he's like, yeah, never wearing, I'm never wearing a watch out in public again. Like unless I'm like getting in a car, going to dinner.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  I, I, yeah, I mean, it's, it's like a super dark story and it sounds like a meme because we're talking about like, we talk about Patek in very light terms all the time, but.

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we talked, we talked with, uh, we reached out to a, a, a friendly journalist.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  And she was basically like, I talked to our crime scene. This is like such a common story. It's, it's.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  It's not even news.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  Story.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  It's not even news. They weren't even ready.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Oh, and the other crazy thing, the cop said, uh, the cop, so my brother-in-law runs, like finds a cop immediately after this happened. Explains like what happened. He had a cut on his hand.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  A cop said, sounds like your problem, not mine, to his face. And so now he's like, trying to figure out how to get footage.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I really hope there's like a Pirate Wires article or something, deep dive on like what's going on with the police because it feels like, like, is, i- i- is this like the cops are bad?

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  I think part of it, part of it's like.

• 54:41John Coogan?

  Underfunded or they've been like hated on for years.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  Did you tell me the story of somebody who's, who's baggage was stolen from LAX?

• 54:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  So I think that cops in some way have been so demoralized because the people that get caught for crimes are not prosecuted.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  That there's almost like this nationwide sense of, I'm not going to go through the hassle of doing this, that they're going to be back on the street and, and.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  And then also, and then also just like, like for, like the whole defund the police movement was like. Actually, it's more noble to not do your job if you're a police officer. Like, that was the message like the world was sending to police officers. It was like, you're not wanted, and that's really rough. Whereas, you know, like, the, the, the whole point with like, you read like a children's story about like, the police. I'm sure you see this through your son, like, it's like, the police firefighters, like, these are like heroes.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  In the, in the kid's story, like Paw Patrol, like, the, the, the, the main dog is a police officer. And it's like a good thing. It's not like some bad thing. But like, that, that was just lost from our culture for like a few years. And I hope, I hope there's like a recalibration. And then there's probably some, something going on politically with funding. And then there's probably something else going on with like, training and like, the judicial system and all these other things. There's probably a million problems that are going on that need to be addressed. But speaking of some good news on, um, watches, do we already talk about this in the show? I think we might have, but, uh, congrats again to Tyler for getting a Seiko. We love it. He's locked in. He got a sandwich.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And to be clear, uh, this week is a little chaotic for us. We were in New York from Monday morning to yesterday afternoon. We're back in Santa Barbara. There's now a new fire that's, that's sent a ridiculous amount of smoke over here. So we'll see where we are tomorrow.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Do, do you want to do this one, Base Baron?

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  Base Baron.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Earlier, but I think you were talking about the real Baron.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  So, and to be clear, Base, Base Baron, it was only, it was like less than a month ago that I said, investing in Base Baron at sub 250 followers is like buying Bitcoin in the nineties. And he's now at like almost three.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  And so this guy, Lewis, goes, Rune got acquired by OpenAI. Beth got acquired by the Blob. I don't, what is that? What's the Blob?

• 56:55John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, yeah.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  Yasmin, Yasmin got acquired by X.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  Ain't an honest man left standing and beyond, blah, blah, blah. And it gets, um, and then, and then Base Baron quotes tweet this. And he says, Base Baron got acquired by Tech Bros Pod. And Balda goes, outsourcing political commentary since the pod avoids it. Smart. Base Baron loves to rip a political post, you know?

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  Great, great poster. Bright future, bright future.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Ada Pi says, quoting Kremiu, who I saw this weekend, great guy. He says, uh, okay, just to be clear, most of the EOs were written partially with ChatGPT, and a lot of them were written with copy pasting between them. And then Real says, uh, Rune says real? And Kremiu says, yes. And Ada Pi says, Daddy, how did the AI take over? Did they send big scary Cylon robots? No, my child, like, they, like, we just use ChatGPT by default to, like, write all of our laws, which is kind of funny, but it makes sense. Like, you need to write all these, like, papers, like, of course, AI is.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  That giving some pretty big, uh, you know, a lot of ammo to the high school kids that are writing every single essay. If you say, well, the president's using it to write his executive orders, why can't I, you know,

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  write, use it to write about the founding fathers?

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  How that, you know, this is even less significant.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's still just like the, the instantiation of the ideas. And so, you know, I don't know, it's, uh, it seems fine. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I, I'd be surprised if there's anything, I'd, I'd be surprised if we, if we wind up learning that, that the, the executive orders being written with Chat, with the help of ChatGPT, wind up causing an unattended effect, right? Where it's like, oh, they didn't proofread it, it hallucinated, and now it's illegal to drink. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I, I think that's probably unlikely.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  Got to sign off.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Uh, there, there was a follow up on, uh, on the Curtis Yarvin thing that we talked about. Dwarkesh Patel chimes in and he says, uh, Curtis Yarvin is mistaken when he says that Apple can produce iPhones because it's a monarchy. There are millions of firms, monarchies in the world, that can't produce anything nearly as impressive as iPhones, from the laundromat down the street to Boeing. Apple is the result of a decades-long evolutionary process facilitated by the market, which uplifts the very best culture, talent, processes, and ideas in the entire world. And the moment Apple slips, it'll get replaced. The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is 15 years. And I think Curtis would actually be like, awesome, like, I love the idea of like millions of little, like, micro, uh, techno monarchies or whatever.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, uh, this is still an interesting, uh, take. He says, governments won't just, uh, don't, just don't work this way. Xi Jinping isn't competing against a million counterfactual Chinese leaders who didn't do zero COVID, avoided deflation, didn't kill the tech industry, and were awake to AGI. He can, he can fuck up as much as he wants. If a monarch happens to be competent, like Li Kuan Yew, it is merely by chance, not due to some intrinsic selection mechanism of monarchy that we can replicate. You are just as likely to get brutal dictators like Mao and Stalin by chance. This is not a reasonable gamble to take with the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens. Apple is indeed a wonderfully competent organization. If we want more of the world to be run competently, we should delegate more functions to the market.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Cool. Which is constantly and ruthlessly sizing down incompetence. To be clear, a ton of incompetent businesses exist, but they lose access to capital, talent and power rapidly, which is reallocated to those who can deliver. They don't drag down the fortunes of entire countries and kill millions of people, which has happened again and again in authoritarian systems. So I think it's a good, it's a good point. There was actually a rebuttal to this, which I don't know if we printed, but there was a rebuttal that said that

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  this, that there is a difference between the Mao and Stalin outcome and the Li Kuan Yew outcome. And it's, and it's whether or not the dictator has control over not just the capital flows, but the actual capital stock. And so the idea is that if, if, if the Yarvanite monarch owns, you know, 60% of the wealth, then there is economic alignment between them and their people, and it will be like a better outcome. I didn't really dig into it too much, but, but, but it did, it did take me down. I'm like, I'm like only tangentially interested in this battle, but I think it is interesting that.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't feel qualified to.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  But it did take me down a very interesting rabbit hole, which was, I was like, okay, so this guy's arguing that if, if the monarch, if the authoritarian leader, Li Kuan Yew or Mao, own a lot of the wealth in the country, you will get a good outcome. And so immediately that demands a fact check, like how much money did Li Kuan Yew have? And I tried to look it up and it's completely unknown. I found wildly different stats. Somebody was running the numbers and being like, well, he made a million dollars a year. So if he saved it all and invested it, he'd have like 60 million. But total wealth in the country was in like the tens of billions. And then another quote was like, no, like he changed some law so that you couldn't see his wealth. And he actually died with like five billion and it was actually like 10%.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  So like, maybe it's true.

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  But it was one of these things where maybe a listener knows more here or something and can write in. But it was just one of these, and I see this a lot with, when we dig into like Asian companies and like Chinese companies. We're thinking about doing a whole deep dive on DJI and it's very hard because there aren't, there aren't that many accounts.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  You don't know what you can trust.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  You don't know what you can trust. And then also stuff doesn't get translated that often, doesn't make it out past the very firewall that often. And so it's just a great mystery. So if you have an idea of what Lee Kuan Yew was actually worth, that's more of an interesting story to me than, you know, this Yarvin debate. I more just want to know more about Lee Kuan Yew. Because clearly something happened great in Singapore because it turned into a great country from basically nothing. And whatever the seeds of success were, those are worth studying. And I thought that was interesting. We already talked about this breaking news. Oh, let's go to Ross Ulbricht. So Free Ross announced that Ross was just granted a full and unconditional pardon by real Donald Trump. Words cannot express how grateful we are.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  I guess this account has been advocating for the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who was the Dread Pirate Robert, who ran the Silk Road in, what was that, 2018, 2013? I think he went to jail, but it was like that era.

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Only really running the Silk Road for a few years.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  A few years. And so Luke Metro says, all crime is now legal, assuming you do it with crypto. Some truth to that, but.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the positioning of being like, okay, if somebody was operating effectively a DoorDash for drugs, using Fiat rails, they would have been slammed for so many things, so many ways. But. Ross having these more arms length.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  You know, creating a platform to facilitate these transactions, but being able to say like, well, it's just a forum.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yep.

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't understand. I, I, I think there was just a lot going on behind the scenes here. Libertarian movement.

• 1:04:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Libertarian movement, support for Trump.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that, that led to this.

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  This is. To Ross's family.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  By one person is like, this is an olive branch to the libertarians.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  So you, you do this and then there's going to be a lot of tariffs and non-libertarian stuff that goes on, but they got their guy.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And libertarians would argue that people are going to buy drugs all the time.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  And if you create a marketplace for it where sellers want to have trusted reputations, they will sell better drugs and people will have less overdoses or things like that. But then there was also like murder for hire on the Silk Road.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Or, you know, and, and, and so I don't, I know, I didn't understand this, but, but purely from a marketing standpoint, the Ross family led a phenomenal marketing campaign to reposition the guy as somebody who wasn't the largest drug, like a drug trafficker.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Like a digital drug.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  The, the other thing that was really big was like, uh, you could, you could buy hitmen on the Silk Road.

• 1:05:09Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Murder for hire.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So. So, so it's not like, like.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  And, and even by libertarian standards, like the non-aggression principle is kind of violated there. It's a little bit tricky, but.

• 1:05:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It, it, it's, it's almost like, and so going back to Luke's point, it's, it's, Trump has set a precedent around.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  Okay. He launched like what's effectively like, you know, it's not a security. Meme coins aren't securities, but you know, he launched it here in America. So it's unclear.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  I do hope that, uh, we get to hear Ross, you know, plead his case on heroin or something. Or somebody does podcasts or.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, people were posting yesterday, uh, like.

• 1:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Wow, poor Ross. He's been sentenced to 40 years doing the libertarian podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  Sure. Well, let's move on from, you know, a drug platform to, you know, instead of buying drugs, you should buy something much more, much more, much more of a drug, which is a fine watch. Let's do a promoted post.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Let's do a promoted post.

• 1:06:11John Coogan?

  One of the greatest drugs in the world, consumption.

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  This is, yeah, there's nothing that hits quite like it. So this is an amazing account. First of all, it is at bought 31676934, sharing a bunch of Japanese and Mandarin, which I actually, you know, we don't have the translation here, but I can translate this for you. This is a picture of Brad Pitt wearing a 222 Vacheron Constantin. And this watch, which they just reintroduced.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:42Jordi Hays?

  And, and we're calling it now, we've been calling this in the group chats for months. Vacheron is about to go on a generational run.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  You've got Patek, which is just launching slop remixes of Benadryl. You've got, you know, AP, which is going more of the Louis Vuitton hype beast-y route.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  And all those, all those.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  DJ partnerships, whatever. Vacheron coming in, third member of the Holy Trinity, dropping, you know, this, this, I, we each need this watch.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  We do.

• 1:07:10Jordi Hays?

  We should Q4 Christmas gifts for each other. So it zeros out.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:15Jordi Hays?

  Engrave the back. And anyways.

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. So how do you recommend?

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Great campaign and a great watch. And you can get, these are, I think, going out through the boutiques now. But if you want to get a vintage Vacheron 222, you can go to getbezel.com.

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Or maybe you want a, maybe you want an overseas or something else that fits your style. Because even though I highly recommend this particular model, I always say that it depends on, you know.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  So many things that go into it.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  What wears best for you. What wears best for you.

• 1:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Shoot us a DM. We'll happy to go back and forth on it.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Happy to help with that. Um, let's go to Chad Byers. He says, Gen Z AI founders are insanely cracked, 10x more business savvy than young people a decade ago. And this is, this is an interesting dividend, I think, from like the wifi money crowd and just all the chaos of COVID and being inside and watching meme stocks happen, watching crypto happen and having so many opportunities. Like, I, I, I think, you know, in our generation, there were, you know, teenage, young teenagers who made money online. But it was, and Jeremy Gaffon has that, has that saying about high school transcript and a Stripe account and I'm investing. Stripe account showing that you made money when you were still in high school.

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  But usually it was like, oh yeah, somebody was like, got a T-shirt business going, or I know someone who's had a stock photo site that did pretty well.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the sneaker flipping. Like, like, there's so many, so many ways to just make, uh.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Like 10 grand, 100 grand.

• 1:08:40Jordi Hays?

  If you're in high school, so think about this, think about in high school, like, let's say like middle school specifically. 200 bucks in middle school was like, I would get, my dad would pay me like $3 a lawn, something like that. Like 200 bucks is like, literally like, I was doing like, mowing the lawn for like two years in a row or whatever. And now you can just go and when Nike drops a sneaker, go lever up, get 200 bucks from your parents, buy the sneaker and immediately you can resell it on StockX for double. And then you just made 200 bucks. So like.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  I know, I know a kid that did exactly that. And then he started writing a bot that did it. And then he sold that bot. And it's like, it's great. Uh, and, and those types of, I think there's basically the opportunity for really young people to make mu- make, make more money. It's just bigger than ever. And what that means in terms of business savvy is specifically like, you get to a certain point, you're going to have to learn about taxes, lawyers. Like these things are going to come in and that's going to teach you more about business.

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Let's do another promoted post and then we'll go to this Andrea post. Do you have the promoted post there?

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  I've got a promoted post.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  So two brothers on the show, Chris, Amadon and Will, who doesn't put his last name in his handle, so I never remember what it is. But they are building a, let me, let me scroll up here.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  So I just get it right. A young boy, AUV Defense Tech Company is how Will described it. Which sounds exciting to me, but they're basically building autonomous

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Boats.

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Like boats, drones. And so they're hiring an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. So these are like founding team level roles.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Job, yeah.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so basically, this is an opportunity, if you're an electrical engineer or mechanical engineer, to go join a founding team.

• 1:10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Jordi Hays?

  That is building some, like, imagine like the, the,

• 1:10:37Jordi Hays?

  imagine like the lifestyle of like building like RC.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Boats.

• 1:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But they have like guns on them. And like, and they can blow up and stuff like that. So anyways, you can go to, they have a, they have a, something listed on Ashby. Amadon Heavy Industries on Ashby, there's seven open roles. They are funded, they're hiring some interns as well, so go check them out. Support the brothers. And these guys are avid listeners of the show, former Reply Guys of the Week. So even if you're not the mechanical engineer, the electrical engineer that, that would join their company, tell, tell a friend, brothers, supporting brother, that's brother behavior. Back to you, John.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Let's go to Andrea, did you follow this story at all? She says Meta isn't making anyone follow VP or POTUS accounts on Instagram. If you were following it, it just transitioned like it's done on Twitter. It's crazy that people can't even deduce that because we've stopped thinking and just react. So basically, yesterday, or during inauguration, as soon as I think Trump's hand got off the Bible, the people at Meta changed the account over, just like they changed the White House website over. And so all of a sudden, if you were following the, the at VP account, it was Kamala Harris content. Her profile picture and then boom, it's JD Vance, his name, his pictures and his profile picture. And same thing for POTUS. And so a bunch of people who loved Kamala were like, why am I following JD Vance now?

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  And they, and they got confused. They got confused. But what's, so, so it became this whole meme about like, Zuck is pro-Trump, so he made everyone, he made my Instagram account follow Trump. But you're not following the Trump account, you're following POTUS. But it gets more complicated. So because the changeover from Trump and Vance, from Biden and Kamala was so contentious. Like, when you think about most VPs, it's like, who really was like up in arms, like, oh yeah, I'm a really like Mike Pence guy. So I'm like super upset about Kamala. Like, like the, the previous changeovers have not been as big. And the accounts were probably way smaller because Instagram's just bigger.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  And so what, what happened at Meta was millions and millions of people saw this and were like, oh, I'm following the wrong person. I'm gonna unfollow. And what happened was the unfollow demand was so high that the unfollow requests weren't going through on the server side. So then it looked like I unfollowed it and then I was like, cool, I unfollowed it because it updated on the front end. It didn't update on the backend and then you're still following it and does look like it, but it's a bug.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  So if you were following Joe Biden because you love Joe Biden and then you start getting served Trump.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  It's a terrible system. It makes no sense. They just shouldn't have at POTUS or at VP. It should just be Trump or Biden, right?

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Something like that. But they, they actually do some sort of archive where if you're following at VP when it's Kamala, you will get, you will get automatically follow, you do automatically follow at VP number 47 or 46. And then it's an archive of Kamala's content or something like that. But it's all this like weird technical infrastructure. And I think that there was also a bug going on because a lot of people clicked the unfollow button and then they re-followed them and then they felt like it was.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Being the, being the team at any social media platform that's in charge of switching over presidential handles. Sounds like a terrible.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, job. Lots of war rooms.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Uh, let's do another promoted post.

• 1:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, caught me, caught me lacking.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  Well, well, here, I'll do a bucket pull.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the, you do a bucket pull.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Cause I got, I got one, uh, I got a couple here. Uh, this is funny from the technology brother, clearly inspired by us. Uh, just kidding, I think they had that, uh, that handle going earlier. Uh, it says George Poros, and he shows the, the net worth of Elon Musk is 415 billion, and the net worth of George Soros is 7 billion. Uh, what has been going on with George Soros in his business career? I feel like he's been hovering around a couple billion, like my entire life.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  I think he's got way more and he just.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, okay, just doesn't show up. Whereas, whereas Elon's wealth, it's like getting mark to market constantly, so it's hard to tell. Interesting. Also, I mean, like, the, the political donation stuff, it's always shocking me how, I mean, SBF actually like brought this up, which was that, uh, um, like, everyone was praising Elon in, from, from the Republican Party for donating a quarter of a billion dollars. And they were like, it's the biggest, most insane donation, like, he did it for us. And it is a lot of money, but it's like, less than 1% of his wealth. It's less than 0.1% of his wealth.

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  It's like, very, very small, and so, I think, uh, especially Soros has been, I think, focused on like, local courts and local stuff, and, and in some of those, it's like, it's like, a $10,000 check will change the course.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, actually.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Locally, or something.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  I, I, uh.

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  But it is funny.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  I shouldn't talk about, I shouldn't talk about.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  Politics.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Politics.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Is it, no, let's move on.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  If I get, I'm gonna go on a rampage, but, I do have a promoted post, uh, very exciting news, uh, if you were following our account.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  This morning, you would have seen us request a new feature from Ramp.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  We've got so much cash coming in, that we wanted a place to actually earn some type of, cause just sitting here, it's not earning.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Earning anything at all, other than adding to the general ambiance of the show, and just being close to cash is like. There's some energy transfer.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  It's nice. But we requested a feature this morning at like 6 a.m., something like that. Ramp actually shipped it.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  Couple hours later.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  And that feature was Treasury.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Eric, their wonderful CEO and friend of ours says, if you're reading this, your business is probably earning 0.07% on operating cash. Ramp is now offering 2.5%. That's 35 times the national average and much more on investment accounts. And you can switch in a minute.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  So they're offering this functionality where you can have historically Treasury products, you know, would offer a high rate, have low liquidity. So you could take, and it was sort of designed intentionally in a way where they were like, well, we want you to keep your money in this operating account that's earning nothing.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:45Jordi Hays?

  But like, yeah, we have a high interest product. And then they make it inconvenient enough to move between the two. So Ramp's coming in with a, with a high yield, high liquidity, or you know, quick liquidity product. And I love this copy. You guys legally, we can't call it free money, but you can. So go check it out.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Get some free money.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  And go get some free money.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  So if you're on Ramp or your company's on Ramp.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't think we can say that.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Probably not.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  It's not, we also can't call it free money.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  You can.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  You can.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  So yeah, if your company's on Ramp or you're, or you have a Ramp card in your organization, tell them, check this feature out because it's fantastic. Big, big week for Ramp generally. Did you see all the promotions? Will Petries now the CFO.

• 1:17:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're not really set up to do the.

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta do a whole.

• 1:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Personnel news. We should do a personnel news where we're on the beach.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Like some type of like all weather gear, like yelling at the mic. Yeah, Superbendy right now, he can be like, breaking news.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. But yeah, I mean, fantastic team over there and great to see the promotions go out. Let's go to Low Yield Lucy. I love this post. This is so good. Flirt with a guy at the bar, ask for his phone to put your number in, open Coinbase, place a large limit order for a illiquid meme coin you're holding. Now you have volume to sell into.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  I just, I just shared that. I thought that was so.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Stealing so much money.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that, that, that genuinely would work with, with, with.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  A lot of SF guys?

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  So many SF guys, New York guys, Miami guys, definitely.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Miami guys.

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Because if a girl comes up to you and says they have like the next hot meme coin.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  That's not what she's saying. She's saying make the guy think that you're putting your phone number in and instead buy the meme coin.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  This is illegal.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  I also think it would work to just be like, you have to buy this. Like, I. Oh, he's stupid because they're gonna wanna, the guys are gonna wanna flex and be.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, just threw 25K and.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then you go to the bathroom and you sell.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  Immediately.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Buy me a drink? No, buy drink coin. It's the lowest volume coin on Pumped Out Fun right now.

• 1:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Um, that's great. Uh, let's see if there's another good book bucket pull in here. Uh, this is a good one from Max Bo is sending Factorio to your competitors engineers a cost effective means of sabotage. Uh, and it's a screenshot of you've received a gift copy of the game Factorio on stream. So I don't know if you've played Factorio. I, I never have. I've seen a little clips of it. It's like, I mean, there, there's like a whole like Age of Empires, then there's Civilization.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  That's like Starcraft, which is.

• 1:19:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, Starcraft, you know, I think a game lasts like an hour. Uh, Factorio, I think it's like days and days and days building this like insane, complicated factory and highly addictive and highly loved by engineers. It became a big meme like a, a while back. But, uh, I, I, I can't get into that stuff anymore. It's, it's too, too, too much. Um, uh, we already did this one. Let's see what else we got here. Uh, um, okay. Oh, this is an interesting one here. Uh, do you know anything about Quest Nutrition? So Tom Bilyeu posts, we turned $10,000 into a billion dollars in five years. Here's what I learned from my journey to a billion dollar exit.

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  And Max is questioning this by quote tweeting it and says, no idea what the non arms length transaction was in the early days of Quest, but no CPG, no CPG company was started with $10,000. So he's kind of like.

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  That's so not true, though.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, there's just so many ways.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  It's impossible to start a company with 10K.

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  There's so many counter examples and ways and.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  I mean, even at Soylent, we, we, we had, uh, we had 107.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's different, you can start a company with 10K.

• 1:20:35John Coogan?

  And then immediately raise more. Exactly. Yeah. You could just do a pitch.

• 1:20:38Jordi Hays?

  So I don't like positioning it as like.

• 1:20:40John Coogan?

  It's impossible to start a company with 10K.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  If you have, if you only have 10 grand to invest in a company, you know.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  PMF or Die is going to be 25K. That's probably 10K by inflation.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51John Coogan?

  Based on when, when he started that company. So I don't know. I, I, I get the, I get the point that like, when people do those threads of like, I turned 10K.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a little like.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Probably there's a little bit of fuzzing and exaggeration on either side. Um, but I think it's direction.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  You've never needed less money to start.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Like you can use AI to generate product images.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:13Jordi Hays?

  Offer it as a pre-order.

• 1:21:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  If you sell it, use your money to manufacture.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  Go viral on TikTok or get one corporate deal or.

• 1:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Even like beverage, which is the most capital intensive thing. If you're smart and you find the right co-packer manufacturer, you could get them to, for 10 grand.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  To manufacture like a.

• 1:21:32John Coogan?

  A pilot run for sure, or amazing financing terms. And you could do some sort of crowdfunding campaign where you pre-sell the product. And then you're getting that cash upfront because you're charging it on Stripe. So that reconciles in like three days. And then you don't have to pay your manufacturer for net 90, if they're cool. Like it's all just the art of the deal, baby. The art of the deal.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Always has been.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  This is, uh, let's go to rune one. He says, uh, they're worried about ethnic nepotism when they should be worried about boys' group chat nepotism.

• 1:22:02Jordi Hays?

  This is extremely real.

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  Definitely. I mean, also, I bet Rune is in like a million group chats. So he's like.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people are adding him in just, just to show. Sure. And then just being like, hey, uh, could I get a repost, please?

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the real group chat nepotism. Yeah. Clarification of the timeline. When you see something go out and it's like,

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  The only thing though.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  25 people retweeted this in the first three minutes. What's going on here?

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  That's the group chat nepotism going on.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  The real alpha.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  What you got for me on the promoted side, Jordy?

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  I got a promoted post from none other than Cohiba cigars.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  Shade above the rest. Cohiba, Connecticut, story is one of breaking expectations. Where most people think of Connecticut cigars as smooth but simple. We've gone above and beyond to craft a cigar that breaks the mold. So anyways, a great looking picture here.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Um, go grab, uh, if you're celebrating something, um, go grab a Cohiba. Don't inhale, just a couple.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Don't inhale and don't do it often, but it's a great, it's a great excuse to get together with the, the men of your family. I have, I have this family tradition.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Have a beautiful moment.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  I have this family tradition of anytime any man in the family has a birthday or Christmas or Thanksgiving, all the men in the family smoke cigars.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure, just getting up there.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  But, but it's a great, it's a great excuse to just like get all the guys together and just hang out and talk. And sometimes people don't even smoke them, but it's fine.

• 1:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  It's just like, it's an excuse to just go and do something with like all the guys in the family.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  It's just, yeah, it's, it's great.

• 1:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  But yeah, I'm a, I'm a big believer in like the barbell strategy when it comes to nicotine consumption. It's like.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  The, the cleanest tobacco-free products most of the time. Then every once in a while, once a quarter, the pure tobacco is the one that you don't want to be doing daily.

• 1:23:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Um, but it's good. Um, should we go to another post?

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  Let, let's talk about Davos.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Davos.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  I think.

• 1:23:54Jordi Hays?

  We've turned it down this year.

• 1:23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Jordi Hays?

  Many.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  But I think that, I think that next year we could make Davos cool again. I think that we have what it takes.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  It's too iconic.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Jordi Hays?

  It's too charged. It's a great opportunity.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's go to Wasteland Capital. He says, Davos is absolutely dead this year. No one gives an F. I'm not swearing anymore. We got some feedback from a very important listener that using that this needs to be family friendly. You need to be able to listen to Technology Brothers with your kids in the car. This is a pro-natalism podcast and so the kids must be able to listen to the hot takes.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28John Coogan?

  Supposedly.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Imagine like, imagine if you listen to 10 hours a week of this show with your kids, you know, in the car or in the kitchen, you know, around the house. They will be trained on some of the hottest takes in tech from such a young age.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:24:45Jordi Hays?

  That they will be earning potentially more money than you just from X payouts by the time they're 10 years old.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Give them an iPad. There's only one app on it.

• 1:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Connect a Stripe account to their X and they will be, you know, putting bread.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  But they shouldn't need to develop a potty mouth for that.

• 1:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Supposedly luxury call girl. I immediately go into something and say, roofer, but it's not a bad word and it's a real thing. And I think, you know, we, we, we gotta talk about it here. So supposedly luxury call girl business.

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Promoting cigars, promoting cigars.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  But cursing.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Cohiva cigars, talking about call, call girls, but we promise we will never swear again.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  Cohiva cigars, those are age gated. You're gonna be 21 plus to buy tobacco products in America. Anyone can start swearing, but not if you listen to this show.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Clean it up out there.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Swearing is out.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Timeline. Swearing is out. It's dead. We even killed it. R I P. The last episode was the date that it died.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  Supposedly the lectoic call girl business is down 60% on last year vibes similar to the last meeting of the Soviets in 1999, in 1991. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz addresses a half-empty Congress Hall at the World Economic 20, World Economic Forum 25 in Davos. My colleague even managed to secure a seat in the front row.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Kind of threw his colleague under the bus there. His colleague wasn't already gonna be in the, you know, front row. He should have been.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  That or, or.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  My colleagues and my colleague was placing the front row.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  My colleague was dumb enough to go to Davos.

• 1:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. What that's, that's.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  I think we gotta take it over. I think we gotta go and just.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Make it ours.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Put on a barn burner speech.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have actually a major, we're speaking on the main stage of a major technology conference.

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  I mean, Davos is the next one in the inside valley. Like, we gotta manifest this. So if your dad runs Davos, tell them to hire us. Or if you're, you know, who's the guy behind it? Is it Olaf Scholz? If you're listening, give us a call.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need to do a hot dog takeover of the World Economic Forum.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Flo Cravellio, Cravellio, I don't know how to pronounce that. Altamore says, "I wouldn't be surprised if law firms had started seeing the impact of AI on their bottom lines, especially those serving startups. I probably send 40% of the tasks I used to send to our lawyers to Claude now, and I only escalate the most important matters. I have no idea. We should talk to a lawyer and see if this is true."

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  I think part of it is like, law firms are cyclical, but there's such a ridiculous number of new company formation right now.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  And, and massive investment.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  That they're probably not seeing it yet, right?

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Because a lot of these law firms too have these big staffing issues where

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  in 2023, they were like letting go, you know, cutting 10%, 10%. They had way too many people.

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:41Jordi Hays?

  And then this last year, presumably like they've had the opposite problem. They're being understaffed. So.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Also, I, I don't know that there's that many big law firms that cater to startups specifically. It's usually like they have a huge corporate practice and then they have their startup arm on the side, like their division. And sometimes it can be very illustrious and very cool. And it can be a profit center if they're taking equity and warrants and stuff. But in general, it seems like, I, I, I don't think any of them are fully pegged to startups.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the interesting thing is, is this.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure this will like, I'm waiting for some like, I haven't seen a rapper that is saying, we are this, we are a consumer product specifically to generate like corporate legal docs. I'm sure there's a bunch out there.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, Harvey sells into law firms.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  They sell.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  So the value capture and profit optimization is probably on the law firms.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you can't think of the, the consumer version, Harvey, B2B, SMB version, but they're, I'm sure they're out there.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, there, there is a world where the law firm's getting 40% less inbound inquiries, but of the 60% that they're still getting, those are higher margin now because they're able to leverage AI.

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  And so that, that balance of where the value accrues is still.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  And there's, there was always the, YC's had a bunch of different, you know, they have financing docs on their website. I'm sure they have other docs and, and there's always been that's templates available, but now it's just, it feels different when you.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Generate, generate it.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Totally. I'm, I'm itching for another promoted post. I see you got some good stuff there.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's, we got a promoted post from.

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  One, because it's great.

• 1:29:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, our friends at RM Sotheby's say for sale, 2006 Mercedes Benz SLR McLaren edition. This thing, uh, the golden age of AMG.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  This thing just looks, uh, incredible. The, the, just like the entire front of this car is just so.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Iconic. Uh, and it's, it's funny because these cars, these cars, they, they.

• 1:29:46John Coogan?

  They pop.

• 1:29:47Jordi Hays?

  They do fly under the radar.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Still, uh, and so it's kind of a cool car for like a first date where you don't want your date to know that you're just.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  You know, uh, a, a deck of millionaire and you just wanna, you want them to be like, oh, this is just a normal guy.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  Let's take the buttons.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  He just, yeah, he's a super nice guy, like drives an old Mercedes, but like, you know, seems to have a good job, good head on his shoulders.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  The doors were weird in his car.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Second date, Aventador SVJ. Uh, if it goes, first one goes well, bring out the SVJ.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:21Jordi Hays?

  But a great first date car right here.

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fantastic. Didn't do well, I think, because, uh, isn't it, isn't it an automatic?

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure this

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Like the purist.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  The purist, so it didn't pop like the Carrera GT. I think it came out around the same time and the Carrera GT and the, and the, and the F40 both went wild, but this one kind of got left behind.

• 1:30:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Mercedes, they have the.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  I mean, now the AMG one's going to be a big one.

• 1:30:46Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've never, they've never really had the halo.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  It will never be, it will never be that culturally impactful because they're not making enough of them. Hmm. Like I think, I think to have like Mercedes to be relevant in the sports car market.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah.

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  You need to.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  They need, they, they need a nine 11.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the, and the GT.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  G2 didn't do it. No.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Really that like it, it costs.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  They never.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  I, I was, when I was like getting my last car, I seriously considered the, the GT.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  I, they denied my request for metallic brown at the factory in Germany. I like really wanted metallic brown, black wheels, red, red calipers.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  And they don't do any custom colors.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Even though I had a, a buying history with the, the dealership, they were just like, we're not doing colors. And I was like, okay, I'm going to get a turbo.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  Well, we have a great post to end on. Michael says, I'd rather get bucket pulled on the pod than get into YC. And I really want to get into YC. Well, Michael, we got some good news for you. You didn't even get bucket pulled. It's a certified banger.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Certified banger.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  We printed on eight and a half.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  Quiet Canadian himself.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Eight and a half by 11 inch paper for you. You're officially on the show. You're getting the follow back from.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  First of many.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  TB account. Thank you for writing in and a fantastic profile picture from Office Space. Classic movie. Good reference. Anyway.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the only word of advice, Michael, use your full name, use a real picture, build the brand.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  Or if you're going to go full and on, just make it Quiet Canadian up top, Quiet Canadian below. Cause that's just easier.

• 1:32:26Jordi Hays?

  All or nothing.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. And we'll, and we should dictate the aesthetics of X.

• 1:32:29Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, I don't like the feeling of knowing someone's first name, but not their last name.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  Rather just have.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  One foot in, one foot out. Are you in and on or not?

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Pick a side.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Cause if I go on the link, if I go on LinkedIn right now and like this guy wants to get into YC.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he's a fit for PMF or Dye.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm gonna just search Michael. I feel like there's a few other people up there named Michael. But thanks for coming on the show.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for watching and please go and leave us five star reviews and don't forget to put a really long ad reading.

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  If you, if you put a review for the show and don't include an ad, we're gonna report it to.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Oh, and there's a new, for the people that made it this far, there's a new challenge for you. We're thinking about retooling the Reply Guy of the Week program to be the Sales Development Reply Guy of the Week Award.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  And in order to win the SDR of the Week Award, in your replies, we're gonna encourage you to sell some ad space.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  So, you know, whatever you think, if you just like the post, oh, this is good, or you have something else to chime in with.

• 1:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Crying emoji.

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Fortunately, X has no limit on characters now, so you can, you can say what you want, you know, we'll laugh, we'll like it, we might retweet it if it's good stuff, a good reply. But then, tab, tab, tab, enter, enter, enter, boom, this reply is brought to you by my company. We are the best AI SDR company here, go here, throw the link in there, do whatever you want, go wild with it.

• 1:34:02Jordi Hays?

  Go wild, ads everywhere.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Yes, ads everywhere. So, give it a try.

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  Run too many ads.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  We look forward to seeing you on the timeline. Have a great day.

• 1:34:11Jordi Hays?

  Have a good evening.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  The end.