Garry Tan, Augustus Doricko, Nichole Wischoff, Billy Thalheimer, Mamma Mia!

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://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (00:55) - The Timeline (23:14) - New Alexa Launch (44:13) - Garry Tan (01:01:50) - Augustus Doricko (01:22:13) - Mamma Mia! (01:30:25) - The Timeline (02:04:15) - Nichole Wischoff (02:19:14) - Billy Thalheimer (02:29:15) - The Timeline

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN live. Today is Thursday, March 6th, 2025, and we are live from the Temple of Technology.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. I'm your host, John Coogan. Right next to me is Jordy Hayes. We got a great show for you today. We got four people calling in. Gary Tan, Augustus Doricko, Nicole Wischoff, and Billy Thalheimer is calling in. We're covering YC. We're covering rainmaking. We're covering early-stage seed VC solo GP stuff. We're covering flying cars that are regulated like boats, sea gliders. I love it. We're going to go over some news first. We're covering Discord's IPO. Little preemptive size gong for

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Jason Citron, one of the best to ever do it. And then we're going to talk about Amazon's Alexa Plus launch. That's kind of weird. I don't know. We'll go through it. Anyway, but we wanted to kick it off with this post. Did you see this post, Jordy?

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm pulling it up right now.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  This post is from Gabriel.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  One of the top posters in the entire world.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  He is. And we were thinking, let's kick it off. It's towards the end of the week. I think he locked it up. I think he's brother of the week material. What do you think?

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I mean, just putting up fantastic numbers here.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  For years.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Unique insights.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  For years. One of the greatest, I mean, I think I was introduced to him during COVID lockdowns.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  He's over in Australia, I believe, but had just has never lost a step throughout his entire posting career.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Just absolute longevity.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, a lot of people hit their stride.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  They put up six months, seven, eight.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Whatever. And then they sort of fade.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yes.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  The unique insights are lost.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  They stop reading books.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  And consuming, and they're just, you know, fully in the algorithm.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  But something about posting, you got to be out in the real world.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  You got to be out doing things. You got to be getting insights from places other than the timeline, other than, otherwise it just, you know, gets sort of constantly recycled.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Being down under.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  You know, putting up big numbers.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I love his, his 360-degree attack on his game. I know about his family because of his posting, but I also know about his deep understanding of rats. Apparently.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  So let's break this down. I'll go. So Gabe is quote posting Ally Dubow. She says, highest leverage things you can do in your twenties. Travel, start a company, join a company you love. We're going to cut it off there because that's not what this segment is about. Why don't you read Gabe's post?

• 2:25John Coogan?

  He says, lots of egregious stuff in here, but calling travel high leverage is insane. It costs $1,500 to fly return New York to Tokyo. For $1,000, you could buy 50 rats in a one to four boy-girl ratio and release them in a competitors we work. The iPad kids are cooked.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  And this couldn't be more real. You know, we, we would, we would do this for competitive podcast studios, but here's the thing, John, they all zoom in to record. There's no studio to release in them.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  You can't do it.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't do it in their home. That would just be too disrespectful. But before we get into the rest of the show, I got a call out today. So I was up in the Bay yesterday evening and I was flying back this morning and I was getting on a JSX flight and this guy approaches me and says, hey, I'm a technology brother. I listen to every episode. I just wanted to introduce myself. So it was this guy, Cole Rotman. He's a seed to growth investor over at DST Global and an absolute dog. And thank you, Cole, for stopping me. It was a highlight of my morning and I just wanted to give you a little call out. He's been listening since the early days, 50 plus episodes ago. So

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  he's an absolute brother. Then the other thing, I'm not going to name this technology brother, but a guy emailed me this morning, you know, that's been listening to the show also since the first week and he's going out for a seed round. He said, hey, I'd love to have you involved. I looked at the deck, I committed on the spot and offered to make some other introductions. And in less than an hour, I introduced him to, I think, five separate people that, that immediately opted in. All, you know, would be potential leads for his round. So it's been a lot of brother behavior going down this morning and I'm fired up.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Doing deals. Doing podcasts.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  To get into the show.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Building the community, building the brotherhood.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  Building the brotherhood.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  That's the goal. Anyway, let's move on. I just wanted to, you know, really, you know, we call this the dojo of the dollar. We want to respect the dollar and we respect our advertisers. So I wanted to kick it off with an early ad for public.com.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions. Keep you guessing. Sometimes there's an amazing transition later in the show to an ad, but now boom, ad right at the beginning.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Right in your face.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  Didn't think, didn't think that was gonna happen.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Right in your face.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Boom. But the reason I want to talk about public is because I saw this great post from Mads Capital. Mads says, I'm not sure I can hang, I can handle a kangaroo market, bros. Because apparently there's new terminology. There's the bull market where it goes up, bear market where it goes down, kangaroo market, bouncing all around.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  All over the place.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  But I love it. It does feel like we're in a-

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  I feel like this has been my entire twenties. Yeah, like entire adult life is a kangaroo market.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  The cycles have felt shorter because we haven't been in this like-

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  It gives you something to, you know, hope for, to look forward to.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  If, you know, if you're, if you're down bad, you know that a bull, there's always a bull market somewhere.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  There's always a bull market somewhere. And what is a kangaroo market if not just a bunch of bulls and bears all crammed together in a stable?

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Now, and kangaroos are cute.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  They're fun. They're always bouncing around, but they're also vicious.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  They're terrifying. Yeah, they're vicious when they get all jacked.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  If you haven't seen it, go look up-

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Everyone's seen it. Everyone's seen the Jack Kangaroo.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  Not everybody's seen it.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Everyone's seen the Jack Kangaroo.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Go look up kangaroo fistfights.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  And you'll find a ton of content from down under. I'm sure, I'm sure Gabriel, who we just covered, I'm sure he's gotten into his fair share of scuff ups with, you know, with the kangaroos. But, um, yeah, they're tough.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Like to have some fun.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  They're tough.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Well, let's, uh, let's highlight Arena Magazine, Max Meyer's newest drop. We got these in a few days ago. They're fantastic. We love Arena here.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people saw our ad before-

• 6:27John Coogan?

  A full page printed ad.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Before the magazine ever actually got out.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  So we're sorry to front run there, but the actual magazine itself is fantastic. When I read this and when I read Colossus Review, to me.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Profile on Kyla Scanlon, good friend of mine. She's amazing. The Gen Z's capitalist whisperer.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Published a book, very highly reviewed by Tyler Cowen. Highly recommend picking it up. Has really mastered economics, education in the modern era. Everything from Tik Tok to YouTube videos to newsletters. Really built like a multimedia empire with a very like sharp. Like, there's just so much in the whole like business econ content world. There's so much like just fake clickbait like, well, BlackRock actually owns everything. They're the most powerful company, like that whole stuff. And she just like stays away from that really well and like actually educates people properly. It's great. United Semiconductors of America, a modest proposal for American industry. I mean, just look at this. It's fantastic.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  So highly recommend going and subscribing. You just want this on your coffee table. There's so many good stuff and there's so many good things in here. We'll probably pick an article out of here to do a deep dive on. The art of the Chinese.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's have Max call in.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, yeah, we should have him call in. It's great. Who wants to work in a factory? Oh, and look, we're printing tweets. He's printing tweets. Luke Metro got featured. Everybody wants to expand industrial capability, but no one wants to work in a factory. Kicked off an entire, an entire article.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is I agree with Luke on most things.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  But I would argue that there is entirely, you know, the new generation is actually very excited to be in factories.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, I mean, there is a major vibe shift.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  You have guys like.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  And that's why we're having Augustus on.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Constantly factory posting.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Later today, because he has certainly made sleeping in a factory cool.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  In a very serious way.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  And sleeping in truck beds.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  When he's out, forward deployed.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  All of the above. Anyway, we wanted to highlight a post from Gary Tan that I'm sure we'll discuss later. He's coming on at noon for 25% of the winter 2025 batch of Y Combinator. 95% of lines of code are LLM generated. That's not a typo. The age of vibe coding is here. Fascinating.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Vibe coding.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  So I'm sure, I'm sure we'll get more into that, but something to think about as we go through. Anyway, let's move on to Discord. Unusual whales has the post breaking. Discord is in early talks with bankers about an IPO that could come as soon as this year. And I think this was originally broken by the New York Times. They don't have too much information here, but we can kind of run through it.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  A Capital says, not sure why Discord needs an IPO other than exit liquidity payday.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Because it's profitable.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that would be the argument.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, Jason Citrin's a fascinating entrepreneur. He is, he truly like does not fit the standard mold of entrepreneur. I think he's from Florida and then went to a, like a very, very small kind of game development school and was totally off of the like Stanford Ivy League track. Started one company, wind up, wound up selling it and then just built Discord kind of outside of the Silicon Valley realm until it just became a complete monster and now has been very, very profitable. But there's been a bunch of pushback to this. I saw some posts, like every major old line media company is now like super anti-tech.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  And so the headline from like IGN was like, prepare for Discord to get even worse. Bankers are getting involved. It's like, I don't know. That might not be bad, but I guess people don't like, like the monetization.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Has Zuck made Instagram better, right?

• 10:19John Coogan?

  I think so, for sure.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Well, the New York Times writes.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're, you know, this all is going to come down to price, right? Yeah, it's possible that, that the Discord, you know, it gets kind of like turned into a bit of a meme briefly.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  It's possible that people that buy the, the stock on the first day, you know, or the first week or whatever, don't end up doing that well. But ultimately this is a robust company with a massive user base. I'm interested to see their actual financial performance, but this is great for all the hardworking employees who have spent, you know, decade plus now at this point. I don't know when Discord was actually founded, you know, working.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  It's a pretty fascinating story.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  And they deserve some liquidity at this point.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Jason Citrin founded this social gaming platform for mobile games called Openfaint. And then he sold it to this company called Greed, which is a game development company, like a holdings company, a Japanese social networking service in 2011 for $104 million. And I remember there was something weird about the earn out. I don't, I'm not exactly sure what happened, but then he found Hammer and Chisel, which is a game development studio in 2012. They launched a product Fates Forever, released in 2014. There's a, there's a crazy old video, I wish we could pull up of him pitching it. And I think TechCrunch Disrupt, and just being like, I made this game. And you know, it's going to be the, it was basically

• 11:43John Coogan?

  a MOBA, but mobile. So do you, do you know Dota 2, League of Legends, any of those?

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  I was a StarCraft guy.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so MOBA, but for mobile, but it wasn't successful. During the game development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like League of Legends using voiceover IP. Cause normally like back when you play a game, you just hop on like a Zoom call essentially, or Skype call, R I P. And so then he decided to build a chat service with a focus on user friendliness and minimal impact on performance. So, deep integration into the game. The name Discord was, was chosen because it sounds cool and has to do with talking.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How crazy is it that both Discord and Slack, the two most dominant sort of like workplace chat products, both started as games that just built a decent chat functionality and then ended up focusing on that.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  Really wild.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, no one wants to just go straight into chat. So in 2016, Discord raises 20 million from Warner Media, Time Warner. And then Warner Media was acquired by AT&T in 2018. Warner Media Investment Group was shut down in 2019, selling the equity. Microsoft announced it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users. They raised 150, Discord raised 150 at $2 billion valuation, led by Green Oaks with participation from First Mark, Tencent, IVP, Index, a few others in December of 2018. And then they kind of, kind of kept growing from there. And now they will IPO. So that'll be hot.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  And of course, if you want to play the IPO, go to public.com.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Nikita, I'm sure will do well here, right?

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Oh, do you think he still has, he probably still has stock?

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, solid position, you know, based on whenever he joined.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't priced at 15 billion, but.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  In 2021, yeah, Discord was priced at 15 billion.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  I mean, you have to imagine they've grown a ton since then.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  In recent years, Discord has tried to expand its appeal.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Just one of those things like, how do you, what is, what is, how do you value the earnings of a network versus a SaaS company? Right?

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  That, that's going to be the big question here.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is crazy. I mean, they've tried, when, when Clubhouse came out, they Discord like copied the feature pretty quickly. They have like stages.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  So you can be in a Discord group and then, I mean, Discord was always, like, for a long time, I felt like it was more full-featured than Slack, just as a user. Uh, and it just had like, it just felt cooler, even just like the dark mode by default just felt better. But they also had other integrations. Um, but then, yeah, they launched, they launched the Clubhouse competitor. But the thing that really took off was like during the AI boom, like the, the server for Midjourney, uh, in 2023 had over 15 million members. And like.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Like, I, I just, I don't think Slack is set up for that.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  And so they really figured out how to make these like communities, like 15 million people, like that, that is a social network by itself. And it's a social network on top of a social network. So it's almost like.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that decision was just criticized constantly.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Specifically.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  They're criticizing Midjourney for making it so difficult, but.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  To not use like a, like a front end.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Regular front end, yeah. Uh, but you have to imagine that, uh, yeah, they, they got a lot of benefit from that in, in other ways by, you know, having it be centered around the community and shared learning and all these different.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I noticed, uh, we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI app. I tried to use it on my phone on Safari and it wasn't a great experience.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  Here's just an interesting comp because I feel like in, uh, you know. A lot of this sort of online community activity, we have our corner here, X.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  There's Reddit, right?

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  Which is interest-based.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  There's Discord, which is also interest-based, but you know, company, project, game-based. Reddit is trading, traded up to, it's down 20% in the last month.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but it, it was peaking at, let me pull this up here. It peaked at a $40 billion market cap just a month ago, exactly.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Forty billion.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  Forty billion for Reddit.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  And they are losing, uh, they lost a half a billion dollars in the last year.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  And on 1.3 billion in revenue. So to me, if Discord can come out and actually, you know, who knows? I imagine they've been, you know, heavily focused on profitability. It's very possible that they could be priced beyond their last private market valuation.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, what's your take on like the post, uh, like the, the post-mortem on?

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Mid-journey using Discord?

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Because I feel like it's still an underrated strategy. Like we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI. I tried to use it on iOS Safari. It didn't work for me. It was kind of like breaking and I don't think Sesame has an iOS app yet. And one of the amazing things about mid-journey being on Discord was that it, they instantly on day one had great mobile support on every platform.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  That Discord worked on.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  And so it's like, yeah, they didn't have their own Mac app, but they had a Discord Mac app that

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Essentially worked perfectly. Uh, and of course there were a lot of like narrow, like problems. Um, but I still think it's pretty good. And then also, I mean, the crypto communities have been huge on Discord too. And so I'm sure that's driven a ton of new trial. And then once you're in that ecosystem, you have your Discord username and you're just gonna kind of use it for everything.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting. It'll be, it'll be fun to see like kind of when the S1 drops and where the valuation lands.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  If they can get GameStop's PE ratio, they will be doing pretty well.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, what do we got next?

• 17:29John Coogan?

  The company debuted an online shop in 2023 where users can pay to enhance their profiles and add custom graphics to the digital avatar.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I clearly remember when they decided, hey, we're gonna start.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Monetizing.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Monetizing.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Super hard. Yeah, they got me because I wanted to be able to upload like HD videos sometimes. And there were certain files that you couldn't share in a Discord unless it was like you couldn't go over like 50 megs or something unless you were paying. And so I wound up paying and then just like probably forgot about it and probably I'm still playing. Anyway, what should Jason Citrin do when he gets liquidity?

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Buy a million dollar watch.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Exactly. And where should he go?

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Bezel.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  So go to Bezel. Jason, if you're listening, go to Bezel.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  And we have an update. So for the last month, we've been telling people that Bezel has 22,000.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  We've been misinformation.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  We have to issue a correction.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  Not intentional. Sometimes people intentionally spread misinformation. This was unintentional, but they have, they added over 1,500 new watches to the platform.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  In the last month. It's fantastic to see. That's 1,500 watches that could be yours.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Could be yours.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  If you move quick enough, you could buy all of them.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  I think after the Discord IPO, Jason could buy all of them.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Hopefully. Hopefully he does.

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  What is the, actually, I don't know about that. I think last time I checked, they had.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  Quaid, the founder, co-founder, he told me they had, I think they probably have close to a billion dollars of watches listed on the platform right now. So it's really gonna have to pop for Jason to be able to acquire every watch on the platform. But, you know, that would just be pulling forward like, you know, a couple of years of their revenue. And, you know, it would, it would hurt other Bezel users.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  You're not, but you're not considering leverage.

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. And some of these watches are, you know, basically investment assets.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, he should sell 100% of his Discord stake, lever up, and just buy every luxury watch of it.

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Literally 10,000 Submariners. Just walk around, walk around, just covered.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  I want to, I want to see a Submariner around his ankle.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  Like a little ankle, a little ankle watch. That's the next trend for, for beaners like him.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Well, we'd love to have you on the show, Jason. Tell the story of Discord. I'm a huge fan. I've already made a huge, I made a big deep dive on the, on the company in a video about it. It's a fascinating story. Anyway, let's move on to Andy Jassy.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Companies go public, by the way, we have to actually buy a big enough position to say, hey, I'm a major shareholder.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  I would love to have you on the show to discuss. It's like a little, you know, saying, uh, you know, it's a little, um, to more form invite.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, it's like, you should come on this show because I'm extra conflicted.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  All the other shows, they're not conflicted.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  They're not conflicted enough. CNBC can't do that.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  What's the point?

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's go to Andy Jassy over at Amazon. He says, excited to be, excited to be with the team in NYC today, rolling out the new Alexa Plus.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  We've been waiting for this.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Everyone's been waiting.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's been waiting for this.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Across Amazon, we're harnessing the transformative power of generative AI to reimagine the experiences we offer customers, and Alexa Plus is the latest example. She's smarter, more capable and personalized, and unlike chatbots, also takes action to help you get things done. Oh, agent, this is an agent, which is at the heart of our mission at Amazon, to make customers' lives better and easier every day. Can't wait to get, so weird. The first thing that popped out to me, so they, they post some ads, uh, the ads are fine, but they're using she, which is a very odd choice. I went to ChatGPT, Grok and Claude. Can you guess what those three LLMs want to be referred to as in terms of pronoun?

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  The opposite.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  All three want to be it.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  It.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  All three, including Claude.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Says, hey, yeah, like, I'm not a person, don't, it rewarifies me.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, it was just very odd to hear them. It felt very old school, like there used to be like this idea of like Siri is a her.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  And, and then we kind of moved away from that. And there's been so much talk about, oh, ChatGPT, isn't that good of a name? But when I heard them say Alexa, it's a her, and I was like, it's not, it's not.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, one of the best investments you could have made in the last decade or so was shorting the name Alexa as soon as Amazon introduced it. In 2015, Alexa was the 32nd most popular name for girls born in the United States. In 2022, Alexa's name ranked dropped to 536th, the lowest it's been since 1985. And in 2023, it's down in the 600s. So really, really rough go. Tough, tough to be named Alexa in the year, you know, 2014, prior to the launch.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Because, but then again, it's becoming more rare. So maybe there's value in that, right?

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would just prefer it if it was just Amazon, like, hey, Amazon, like, I'm talking to you, you're the company. I want you to order something for me. It's Amazon. It's an it. And I'm happy with that. I don't need this like secondary thing. I don't know. It just stuck out to me as like this odd, this odd choice that feels more natural. Alexa feels like a better brand name than ChatGPT, which is like a mouthful, or Claude 3.7 Sonnet, or Grok 3. Like, these don't sound like names, but when I actually like sat with it for a second and heard the opposite, I was like, actually, I would much prefer, you know, just to talk to it.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  And it's just, it's just less weird. Anyway, let's go to Ben Thompson at Stratechery. He's breaking down this announcement from The Verge. Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa, Alexa Plus, that if it all goes well, will make, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home. We're getting info on the fly. Some of the new abilities include ability to do things for you. You'll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. I feel like the last version of Alexa said that it could do that. Anyway, it's 20 bucks a month, or it's free if you're a Prime member, and Prime is $15 a month. So. You save $5 by getting both. It's very odd.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  That comes with access to Alexa website where the company said you can go and do long form work. Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to go with the new assistant. Alexa Plus will work on almost every Alexa device really so far.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  So they're actually trying to enter the consumer LLM game.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  They're saying, we want you to use our hardware, but we're also going to.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  I mean, they have all the infrastructure for it. It makes sense that they would like kind of offer something here, but it's just, it's just weird. So

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson's like talking about like kind of the meta level of this. There's no video of the event. It's 2025 and they just did a live blog. Moreover, there was no video put up after the event. Amazon does have a couple of promo videos. Is this pure vaporware? Ben asks. Fortunately, The Verge did come out with a hands-on report a couple of days after the event. So apparently Alexa Plus does in fact exist in a state that is accessible by non-Amazon employees. I was from the report. I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word Alexa. I dim, I asked it to dim the lights and adjust the thermostat to make it a little warmer. The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed and Alexa said, I dimmed the lights in the living room and increased the temperature by two degrees. Is there anything else you need?

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Then I said, can you vacuum the floor? It replied, okay. And the Roomba just started the job. Not bad. Like that does seem pretty cool. Of course, this is probably one of those things where you have to be really all in on the whole ecosystem. Because if you're using a, you know, a Google Home or you have an Apple TV, all of a sudden it's not going to integrate. But Ben wanted to give a little bit of a brief history of Alexa that I thought would be kind of interesting. He says, back to Alexa, though, which first launched in 2014, we're a decade into these like AI assistants and like the chat bar, the chatbot era, the chatbot renaissance was like a thing. And people thought chatbots were going to be all over the place and then took 10 years to get here, but now they are.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Just a few months after the disastrous fire phone, which led to most people dismissing the voice assistant and its associated Echo speaker out of hand. However, Ben says, I was immediately intrigued precisely because Alexa and Echo.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  He's always got the receipts too.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a link here. You can prove it. Actually had a potential market, the home, the one place where you might not have your phone on your body and where it would be the least awkward to rely on voice interaction because you're not out in the world.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Great points.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Good points. I also think Amazon got two big things right with Alexa, particularly as it expanded its skills. First, Alexa was always very fast in my experience, very good at understanding what you said. This is a big distinguishing factor from Siri, of course, although Google quickly rivaled Alexa. Second, Amazon didn't attempt to do fancy, fuzzy matching when it came to triggering skills. If you wanted to use a device or service, you had to say the words exactly right. So less errors, but you had to be more trained. So training the humans to get the right thing. The second point may seem kind of intuitive, but I think it was a very smart product choice, given Alexa's capabilities. Instead of wowing users half the time and frustrating them the other half with no clear feedback about why a particular command worked or didn't, Alexa put the burden on the user. Again,

• 26:57John Coogan?

  speaking anecdotally, I would blame myself when a voice command didn't work because I didn't say the right words. Alexa, for its part, understood what I said and told me, whether it was successful or not, which allowed me to improve. Siri, to take the counter example, would try to be smart, which actually made it more frustrating. Good point. And so this also gets to why Amazon's announcement of Alexa Plus makes me nervous. It feels way too ambitious. Alexa Plus isn't just going to turn on your lights. It's also going to order you concert tickets and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant, plan a vacation, and call the babysitter. Alexa Plus will have a memory and learn, and the list goes on, which is to say that Amazon is promising.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  It's wild how every AI assistant product uses the same examples.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Yet nobody has been able to truly get product market fit with those set of examples.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's getting, nobody's using an AI assistant today on average, like the average consumer in America is not saying, hey, book me a flight to New York.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Even though that's like been the default sort of example, right?

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  Or, hey, can you order some Advil?

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  We're out. Even though it's actually probably good at that, but it's still not actually.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  It's never had enduring traction. The last time I heard the name Alexa, I was getting a massage and the massage therapist said, hey, uh, turn up the volume.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Really?

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Alexa, turn up the volume. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. Like it's.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  But I hadn't, I hadn't seen, I haven't seen or heard of an Alexa in, well, I haven't had one in like probably six, seven years. Haven't seen one in a friend's house in that period of time. Uh, I thought that the, the last time I got value out of the Alexa service was being like, okay, this is a pretty good speaker for like a hundred bucks or whatever it was.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Well, let's, uh, let's finish out with, uh, Ben tying it to Apple and what's going on at Siri. Uh, he's quoting from Mark Gurman. Apple Inc.'s long-promised overhaul of the Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs, threatening to postpone or limit its release. According to people with knowledge of the matter, the company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June, and has even advertised some of the features to its customers, but Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people who asked not to be identified. Uh, some features have been postponed to May or later. Uh, the Siri makeover is a centerpiece of the Apple intelligence platform, the company's effort to catch up in AI and spur iPhone upgrades.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  And so, uh, his main point here is that, uh, Amazon and Apple don't need to be in a rush. Both, both Alexa and Siri have a decade-plus head start in terms of integrations with a host of devices and services. Alexa Plus and new Siri don't need to have capabilities that exceed even what the Frontier AI labs have yet to ship. Simply being better voice assistants for their existing ecosystems will make them more useful. And I should note, is the heavy, is a heavy lift in and of itself, faithfully replicating existing functionality is a hard problem. That's the power of being an ecosystem provider, and I suspect both companies should have a little bit more confidence in their relative advantage

• 30:08John Coogan?

  and be a little more conservative about their ambitions. And so I thought it was kind of interesting that like, you know, we're, we're frustrated that these products aren't better. But once you understand the, the, the market dynamic, the ecosystem lock-in, it's like, yeah, you can.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's one of those things like just because you have an extreme advantage doesn't, doesn't give you permission or, or nobody's going to give you props when you botch rollouts, when you release lackluster products where, where you're not. Creating massive, you know, sort of forward momentum.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  These companies have incredible access to talent, capital, every advantage, the ecosystem advantage, and the services advantage, and we should hold them to a high standard.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you go back to the, uh, the launch of the iPhone, and I think I, the R and D number, I mean, everything about that project is insane.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  I think the R and D number is like one one hundredth of what Zuck has spent on the Metaverse, something like that. Maybe a thousandth is like basically nothing, super fast, uh, and obviously pulled forward like a bunch of technology that, like, we didn't really have, like, the glass screens in phones and all this stuff.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  But there was no other option.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  That was an acquisition, the screen tech.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  In the iPhone was, was a company that the core tech was something that they had bought.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  That's cool. Yeah. Um, they, uh, but, but, I mean, at the time, Apple had like crazy pressure, right?

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  They didn't have an ecosystem that they could just kind of sit back on. If they didn't do that, someone else would have gotten there for sure. BlackBerry eventually kind of got there, and I'm sure Nokia or Microsoft eventually would have tried.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, well, the one piece of smart home tech that should be connected to your Alexa is of course your 8Sleep.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Nights that fuel your best days.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.com slash T B P N. Get a bed, hook it up to your smart home, tell it to...

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  I actually would use that because you can prompt your bed to start getting ready for bed.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I have it set on, on an autopilot because it knows I get into bed at 8:30 every night.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  So early. I love it.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but anyways, uh, I can see, they might actually have an Alexa integration, but, um, uh, go to 8sleep.com slash T B P N. It's in our bios everywhere. Check them out. I don't have a sleep score from last night, so this is a good opportunity for you to potentially get a quick win. Considering I'm at a zero.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  You're at a zero.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 32:37John Coogan?

  That is brutal.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm zeroed out.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Um, let me see. Uh, 8Sleep? Where, where are we?

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Oh, wow, awful. Thirty-six. I've never had a sleep score so low. What happened?

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Four hours and thirty minutes? That feels like a bug or something, I don't know. I mean, I was up late and I did get up early.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  You were up late.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  You were up late. I passed out.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  I went to dinner with some friends and so I was out pretty late.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Did you have a drink?

• 33:11John Coogan?

  I did, actually.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  That's it.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  I did have some wine.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  People, if you love alcohol, you're gonna hate eight sleep.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Because it just completely exposes

• 33:21John Coogan?

  It's brutal.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  how terrible alcohol is for your sleep, which is common.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  I had like two thousand one, it was like nothing. It was like nothing.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Alright, we got Gary calling in in a second. I'm very excited for this.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's texting me right now. Sounds amazing.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  I think he should be hopping on in just a minute. Let's see. In the meantime, we should do a funny post or something. Let's see. Oh, did you see this? Did you see this olive metallic Mai Bock?

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  It really pops off the page in black and white. But it's this beautiful green and I thought we could take a moment to make a little announcement to the to the community that that green is now part of our official

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Brand ecosystem.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you might see it in the lower corner down there.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  We actually have our legal team working on, you know,

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Patenting green.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Patenting green.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Sure. You know there's a guy who owns black or something like that? Yeah, Banta Black. Have you heard of that?

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  It's not named after the SOC 2 compliance provider.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  But it is a black that is so dark that it's like the darkest black. It doesn't reflect any light. And I think the guy patented it and defends it brutally, but.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  It's not very, uh, it's not very reflective. Um, anyway.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, you should be able to make your own colors and patent them artisanal.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  Here's another post. OpenAI will be the first company to offer a one million per month subscription plan for AGI. And then someone says source.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  It's a prediction.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, uh, kind of a, uh, we call it, do we call shitpost, stuffpost? Kind of a.

• 35:23John Coogan?

  Meme post, joke post, having a laugh, all the above.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's certainly within the realm of possibility, but the challenge is that if you can get an open source model for basically nothing per month, that's nearly as good. What are you going to choose? Right? It's gotta be, it's gotta be orders of magnitude better.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  I think, uh, it's, it's, it's like a status symbol, you know?

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Why do you, why do you pay for a luxury watch? You know, you could tell the same time with a, with a quartz $5 watch.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  But, uh, you know, Patek Philippe says something about you.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be the new thing.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  Use a one million dollar model that could have been, yeah, it could have been commoditized.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  The e-commerce course bros are gonna be pulling up like looking at their like building page of OpenAI.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's gonna be flexing Lambos and things like that.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Tate will be like, yeah, I don't fly private anymore.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just have the most expensive agent cranking constantly. Servers on fire.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  It's the new, you know, the, the, the founders that, you know, develop an ego based on headcount, right? They're just like trying to grow headcount.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  You, you actually are hitting up OpenAI saying, do you have any more expensive plans?

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  Like, I don't have any, I don't have any employees at this point. I just like, wanna be able to show that, like, I'm really, uh, you know, I'm really about it.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, did you see that HBO has greenlit a, uh, unscripted, unfiltered, unhinged reality TV show about the Paul brothers?

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Logan Paul and Jake Paul now have a, uh, a show on HBO Max and.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is it live already?

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Uh, no, I think it's, uh, the trailer drops tomorrow. This is on March 4th. And Jake says, this company used to make The Sopranos. So not, not a great, not a great reception. But, you know, my, my reaction to this was like. I'm sorry, like, the market demands what it demands.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna do really well. And it's smart. So here's the thing. This is clearly a strategic move from Max to try to get a younger demographic. That's that they can pay more to get the show than Netflix. Because Netflix is looking at this and saying, all the people that are really gonna wanna watch this already have access to Netflix accounts. They're on family plans as a younger demo.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Whereas Max can potentially pull in some new subscribers. And so the deal, the deal makes sense. And I'm, I'm, I'm not surprised at all to see it. And it's easy for the brothers, the Paul brothers, that is, because they've been recording pretty much every minute of their daily lives for a decade at this point.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, now they're gonna have to sit down in front of a camera. It's, it's just nothing different.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  I mean, obviously, like, deeply controversial people, some people like love and hate the content. But have you seen The Slap That Changed My Life?

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  It's a YouTube video, but it's like, almost like a documentary about Logan Paul challenging a Russian slap boxer to a slap fight. And it's edited so well. It's edited by this guy Hayden Hillier Smith, who's like this, like, YouTube mastermind. And it's like emotional, like, it's, it's, it's, it's like art. And it's so ridiculous because you're watching this Logan Paul, like, slapboxing thing. But it takes you on this emotional journey of him, like, wanting to go and do this fight. And it's like, is this too risky? Will he have, like, brain damage from it? And it's, it's, it's just really well shot, really well paced, really well edited. It's exciting, it's emotional.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  You can see some of it here, Jordy. Look at this, and he's talking to his mom, and his mom's like, don't do this. Like, if you get hit in the head.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna get one shot at it.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  You're gonna get one shot at it, exactly. And, I mean, look, look, it's, it's, it's rough. Yeah, you can see it over there. And, and, and this was the moment I was like, oh, man, this guy's like, he's a good entertainer, regardless of what you think of all his products and, and other content.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the whole slapboxing thing.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  To be like, just a master, because he's just, he's practiced a lot.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  So I, we, we've talked about this, I know we've talked about this offline. I don't know if we've talked about it online, but the whole slapboxing thing. Dana White went on, went on like this whole like podcast roadshow talking about how power slap is the number one sport in the world.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  And he says, we get more views than NFL, NBA, MLB, you know, all combined. And people are basically saying, I actually just lost power.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Oh, you did? I got some new batteries.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no. Anyways, Dana White goes on this kind of very aggressive roadshow to promote, uh, power slap.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  And people, obviously all the data is public, so they immediately start fact checking it. And first of all, they're like, one Dana, this is not actually more popular than the NBA and the MLB and all these different things.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  And, um, apparently it's actually been really underperforming, uh, from a rating standpoint, uh, where it has this sort of shock value.

• 40:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  That people are drawn to on social media because you see.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  This guy about to slap this other guy. It stands out. People stop, they watch it.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but then the comments are almost universally.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Negative.

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  The act- actually how people feel about it.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, so, so anyways, we'll, we'll see kind of what happens there, but, um.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  There was just a great, uh, profile on Dana White, I think in Forbes, I think he did the cover. And so we should, we should read that on the show.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  It'd be great.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  No, we should.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Then we should have him call in.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, and, and then again, the challenge is, um, doing combat sports that involve, um, somebody being completely defenseless.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Is, uh, is much harder to watch.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  Hey, we got Gary here.

• 41:15Garry Tan?

  Hey, how's it going?

• 41:16John Coogan?

  It's great. How you doing?

• 41:18Garry Tan?

  Get good.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 41:21Garry Tan?

  Y'all.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing to have you on.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  We, we wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons. I mean, thank you so much. Uh, it's fantastic to talk to you anytime. Uh, but it seems like Y C is like completely transformed by L L M's writing code. So, uh, break it down.

• 41:40Garry Tan?

  Okay. Uh, I mean, I think we're just at the dawn of this technology and, um, it's the people who already know how to code who are taking the best advantage of it. And, you know, I, I'm seeing the haters on the internet, uh, coming at us, but that's fine. Come at me, bro.

• 42:01Garry Tan?

  What's happening is that like, you know, a hundred percent of Y C companies these days have technical co-founders. And then you're stupid not to use it. Like, basically, why would you subject yourself to, you know, spending a lot of hours on things that you don't have to do? And being able to go all the way to ground and debug the thing? And, you know, basically, a prerequisite of using these tools well is that you don't need the tools. Yeah.

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How long do you think the, do you think the sort of advantage that technical founders have in A I right now is going to be perpetual? Or do you, do you see a world in, in five years where the, the, the playing field has been completely leveled?

• 42:50Garry Tan?

  Um, you know, I still think like, it's, it's not like product doesn't matter or design doesn't matter. It, you know, if anything, what it is, is it matters even more. Yeah. The bar was lower before. The bar is much higher now. Like, back then, if you go back like ten or fifteen years for startups, period, you know, when I first worked at Y C in twenty eleven, almost anything that had really technical co-founders and a real problem, like, you were gonna be, you know, at least a series A company. Like, you know, and then I don't think that that's, I think that's become less and less true even today.

• 43:32Garry Tan?

  Like, you know, there are perfectly good, very technical teams that have all the skills and, you know, are in pretty big problem spaces. And then there's competition, like, the bar is just so much higher. So I think the way to think about it is, if you're not using it, you're actually leaving time and attention that could be used for all the other things that you're gonna need in a perfect competitive world.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 44:01Garry Tan?

  And so it's, you know, all the people who are like, you know, F vibe coders or, you know, all that, it's just like, it's cope. Yeah, sure. It's like, the world just changed. We're just trying to help you. Yeah. And you can live in that old world where, you know, you're sitting there, you know, writing your own manual tests and banging your head into the code. Or you can embrace the future and, you know, get that alpha, get that edge.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  Talk to us about how the bar has been raised from a metric standpoint. You know, YC has always been about you have three months to make a tremendous amount of progress. It's really around, you know, preparing for Demo Day. The bar is all, you know, anytime you take hundreds of super, super talented people and put them under that pressure, they're going to produce amazing results. From a revenue standpoint, from attraction standpoint, you know, it seems like the bar has jumped dramatically, but would love some more color there.

• 44:58Garry Tan?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Garry Tan?

  I guess like YC, these like, we've been really intentional about trying to go back to founders who are actually at right at the beginning. So, you know, these numbers fluctuate, but pretty much every time 70 to 80% of the companies have no revenue and, you know, probably 70 to 80% generally are unlaunched. So it's really during those 10 weeks, like, can you go from zero to, say, a hundred thousand or several hundred thousand dollars a year revenue? But even that is like, you know, sort of secondary. Like, the funniest thing, when you really think about it, you think about a company that actually does make it to a hundred million or a billion dollars a year in revenue.

• 45:46Garry Tan?

  Like, are you really going to look at the first 10 weeks and say, well, you went to, you know, well, that company went to 50K ARR and that other company went to 150K ARR? It's like, if you like, play it all the way out, like, it's all these other factors. So, you know, I think basically if you can't get revenue or customers during the 10 weeks of YC, like, man, that was the wrong idea or you don't got the skills. And even then, like, you can't count teams out. Like, there are tons of teams that deferred Demo Day, had nothing, had, you know, they took their money and... Basically nose to the grindstone like stayed in the idea maze and then they went on to

• 46:28Garry Tan?

  create things like retool and you know, these are things that everyone uses now. So

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Oh, man, retool. I remember saying that at demo day.

• 46:35Garry Tan?

  So yeah, I don't know. It's wild.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Passed on it.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my, my favorite joke on the show is that it like the, the, the way to outperform as an LP is to travel back in time and just give John as much money as possible to invest in his early first and second YC batch.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  I remember, oh yeah, I remember being at, you know, demo day with retool and being like, that company looks cool, but I don't even know what I would say to them because I didn't realize you could just like, yeah, just invest. Anyway, um, we, we've had this thesis, obviously like, you know, YC, anything successful attracts like haters. Uh, we've had this thesis that YC is like entering like a renaissance, like with the AI stuff, like this is the best time to be running like the YC business model. But can you talk a little bit about specifically like, are, do you think about yourself running YC in founder mode? And can you talk about like

• 47:26Garry Tan?

  Oh, definitely.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to like the next level?

• 47:33Garry Tan?

  Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is like, I'm trying to do founder mode, but you know, shout out to the original goat, Paul Graham, like and Jessica Livingston and you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, you know, like I, I'm, I, it turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook and Brian Chesky himself is on my board. And when I came back to YC, the first thing he said was, all right, well, if you were the founder, uh, what's zero based accounting? Like, what are you going to do? And, uh, you know, there are shades of that in what Elon's doing with the US government. Like, you know, I think, uh, I just stepped in it by bringing that up. But hey, like, you know what? This is actually how, uh, you should be a leader.

• 48:18Garry Tan?

  Like you actually have to think about things, uh, from first principles, from zero based accounting. Like if knowing what we know now, would we do that thing that we're doing? And you know, the enemy of every bureaucracy is, uh, you know, thinking.

• 48:34Garry Tan?

  Yeah. So what are the biggest changes you've made? Thinking, decision making, like, you know, doing the right thing. Yeah. So I think YC was always the like center, the sort of like tree of prosperity. You know, I left and spent seven years in my seven years in the wilderness, running initialized. And I, you know, built an amazing team. Those guys are doing awesome. Yeah. I realized that actually if I stayed at initialized and didn't come back and heed the call of Paul and Jessica to right the ship at YC, I would be out of a business. I, you know, I at initialized would have been out of business if YC itself was not going in the right

• 49:16Garry Tan?

  direction. And here we are. Like, I think that we're doing it and we're going to keep doing it. And the biggest thing that, you know, it's, it's just funny that Founder Mode was the meme that was born at the alumni, top alumni conference. And, you know, Brian Chesky didn't even, he wasn't even like scheduled to appear. And I just kept texting him because he would always come to the YC batch and give his, you know, it's funny. For him, he's like, yeah, I'm going to tell the, the selling cereal story. And he's so generous with his time. He does that every single time.

• 49:54Garry Tan?

  But I remember seeing him extremely animated, telling his, not his zero to one story, but his like save the company pre-IPO story where he had to, nobody believed in him. Covid was happening, you know, and then he just buckled up and he's like, look, I made a lot. You know, he admits like he made a bunch of different mistakes that, you know, the reason why at the top alumni event that he spoke at, that was such a like pivotal moment. I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. You know, there are about 60 or 70 unicorns represented.

• 50:34Garry Tan?

  And I think that we unlocked, you know, easily 10 to 100 billion dollars in new market cap like that very night. That's amazing. Because there's just people who. You know, there is a machine in Silicon Valley and it's not unintentional. It's not malicious like, you know, our corporate governance and Delaware C Corps are designed boards are like designed to maximize shareholder value. But the, there's a bunch of advice that people along the way tell you that like are self-serving, that cause you to do the wrong things. Like you hire people who did it at a big company before and then you're supposed to do it that way.

• 51:17Garry Tan?

  And it's like, no, no, like, well, maybe, like, you know, there are some things like maybe finance and accounting that you shouldn't innovate on, right? Innovate a little bit too much there and you go to jail.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Garry Tan?

  But then.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Well, hey, you can do podcasting and tweeting from jail now.

• 51:34Garry Tan?

  Keep your wits about you, you know, be founder mode.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  What do you say to people that want to put YC in a box, right? You guys have had some high-profile, hard tech, deep tech launches recently that seem like amazing companies. And there's pushback from people that, that almost want to say, you know, you guys are, it's like obviously completely BS because there's a long history.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  And the guy who's running the place was a Palantir. Like it's, you shouldn't be surprised that there's defense tech coming out of this thing once Gary takes over.

• 52:03Garry Tan?

  Support America.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  I don't want to answer for you, but.

• 52:06Garry Tan?

  Five eyes.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I mean, we, we have strong opinions here around why this is great because if you're a super bright, you know, engineer or technologist and you want to build something, YC can teach you how to build, you know, a company. You have to build your product and sort of own your market. But yeah, what do you say to people that want to put YC in a, in a box and say, stick with SaaS, stick with software?

• 52:28Garry Tan?

  Oh man, I mean, YC was never just SaaS, you know? I mean, Boom is, you know, Astronis is right across the street. They're like getting satellites up there. Albedo Labs, like, I mean, Albedo is super hardcore because they basically have made spy satellites, but you know, they're, they're better than what the US government can do. And, you know, they might just replace, replace that market for that. It's nuts. Like, you know, this is a small team out of Colorado, you know, putting satellites up that are better than like the entire, you know, government waste machine. It's like not, I guess, you know, in some, in some respects, like, it's not that surprising, actually. So.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  Didn't Oaklow go through? They're a nuclear company.

• 53:09Garry Tan?

  Yeah, we got nuclear companies. We got, you know, Helium's a fusion company. Um, I get it. You know what? Like, I think that we're, it's a weird, uh, thing to sort of deal with for me because I always think of myself as the little guy, but you know, I gotta realize like, hey, I get it. Like, we're gonna take the arrows and it's fine. We're just gonna keep helping founders. Um, and the reality is like, hey, uh, you know, actually like it's I, I want to shout out the Gundo bros. I want to be like, you know what? Like you guys keep doing your thing. Like you're always welcome at, at YC. Like, you know, but I, I know there was like a little bit of X beef, uh, but there shouldn't be, you know? Like, you know, I think August is coming on, right?

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  The challenge, the challenge with YC is for every, you know, 200 founders you let in, you gotta reject a bunch of people, right? Because there's just not enough space and not everybody's sort of qualified or it's not the right sort of moment. Uh, but the ultimate evidence of the value of YC is that you have highly, highly successful founders that go back for a second time, right? And so whenever I see drama on the timeline about YC, uh, it's never coming from people that have experienced the product. Right? It's always coming from, you know, people that just really aren't live players, right? Like people that aren't really in the conversation. So.

• 54:31Garry Tan?

  Yeah. So yeah, be a, be a player character, man. And if your player character is just like, you don't gotta be like that.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, can you talk a little bit about, uh, just long-term trends in making hardware a viable startup at the 500K investment level? I mean, when I went through, I see there was this whole like hardware is hard. It was always like, oh, it's gonna be so capital intensive and yet I think we're seeing people do the YC model. And yeah, you're probably not going to be shipping a million units of, you know, whatever boat you're building on demo day, like you could serve a million customers if you're building a social networking app.

• 55:12Garry Tan?

  Yeah. I mean, the reason why hard tech at YC can happen is like, I mean, kind of even going back to what we were talking about earlier. Like it's not necessarily just about, you know, SaaS, did you grow 10% week on week? Like, did you hit 100K ARR? Like, that's, you know, sort of weak, like spreadsheet thinking. And, uh, the hard tech companies that do super well, they show up with like. You know, if you had a super crack team that was the team to do this, what would they be able to get done in ten weeks? And sometimes it's a prototype, sometimes it's a demo, like. Uh, the other thing is I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just like hard allocated to Y C companies.

• 55:55Garry Tan?

  Uh, not from us, from like, you know, hundreds of V C's who now are all coming back to Demo Day in droves and. Uh, you know, name me another place that has that actually like, and they're not necessarily just like doing the plug and chug like, you know. They are actually meeting the founders. They're actually making up their own minds. They are. Um, you know, and they're funding hard tech, you know, I think we're about ninety percent A I and, uh, you know, the age of intelligence is here. Dude, like the machines are able to do all knowledge work like that's, you know, insane. And then simultaneous to that, like. I'm really excited about our hard tech stuff because that's.

• 56:37Garry Tan?

  I mean, that's, that's the built world. Like, how do we actually create prosperity and abundance for one another? And, uh, you know, God knows in America, we need it, you know, like we don't even have, we can't even make screws for ourselves. It's nuts, right? You know, I just saw Bology in, uh, December in Singapore and he like super blackpilled me on. You know, American manufacturing, we need, you know, a thousand X what we have right now. And, uh, you know, it's not, it's not that we're missing capital. It's not even that we're missing. Uh, you know, intelligence or people, right? Like it's the will, like we have to have the will to do it.

• 57:17Garry Tan?

  And, uh, yeah, so my message to everyone watching is like, if you're thinking about it, like Y C is a great place to be. It's not the only place, right? But like, we think you were trying to build, you know, one of the best places and, um. You know, it is, it is for A I, it's for software, it's for all kinds of technology. We are. You know, building abundance from here and we want to find the people who believe that stuff. It's like, let's leave all. All the political crap on the side, like that's not what's important. What's important is we're at the dawn of. Just like unbelievable innovation and you know, all the worlds like, you know,

• 57:55Garry Tan?

  being rewritten by, by code and atoms and you know, what, what brush stroke, what line of code, you know, what, what will you bring? What, you know, yeah. What hardware will you build?

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk to, talk to us about Happenstance. You've, I, I've seen probably like 10 or 20 posts from you about the company. It seems to be a, a personal favorite. Uh, like I'd love to, I'd love to hear the pitch, uh, you know, uh, from you directly.

• 58:26Garry Tan?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I just use it a lot personally. I mean, I get hit up for, um, you know, I was thinking about how Sam Altman, when he had my role here at Y C, uh, he used to have like basically a team of EAs and his email wasn't, uh, I think it wasn't even SAMA. It was, uh, S A dash router. And it was sort of a, a nod to basically what I feel like I am now. Like I get, you know, dozens of requests every day from all kinds of Y C founders and, you know, people I've run across and, um, that's pretty cool. I'm, you know, I, I relish the ability to be like a shelling point for people who believe in tech. And then, uh, the best thing I can do is like,

• 59:08Garry Tan?

  oh yeah, know-how, like capital, like, you know, it's human capital, all these things, like people are recruiting, they're trying to sell, like, um, if I think they are legit, um, I can basically, it's, it's the purest form of, uh, creating value from information, right? And so Happenstance just happens to be that thing for me. Um, you know, the world is way too big. Like my world now is, uh, I think my, I have like 11,000 contacts in my phone or something. It's like, I always hit the, I always break Apple, like Apple, my, my iPhone cannot support 11,000 contacts.

• 59:43Jordi Hays?

  Are you a, are you an inbox zero guy or do you just give up and try to make sure?

• 59:47Garry Tan?

  I just give up. It's a river that I dip into. So if someone's waiting for an email for me, right? You know, I don't know. You might have to, you might have to hit me again.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  He's on TVPN. Come ask the question in the chat. Uh, one more question for you. You put out a, uh, you know, Y C's, you know, um, famous for your request for startups list, uh, wanted to highlight one specifically that you had. Called out, which was a secure AI app store. We want a new kind of AI app store, an OS layer that sits on your computer or phone. It should protect user data, offer one shared memory, help users find the best AI apps, and help developers build and handle payments. Talk a little bit more about that. Are you seeing, you know, teams in that space yet that you're excited about? Or is this, you know, coming down the pipeline?

• 1:00:32Garry Tan?

  I think it's coming down the pipeline. Yeah, in full transparency, I don't know if I found one that like really quite fit my, you know, on my end yet. It also might just be too early. The tricky thing is, it's pretty clear that OpenAI, Anthropic, and, you know, Windows, Apple, iOS, Android, like, this is sort of how the OS almost inevitably will work, assuming that people still make software. And it's just, it's more like a thought exercise. Like, I think it is possible for someone to do this right now. And we'll see if it happens. We're on the lookout.

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, speaking of Gundo bros, you wanted to give a shout out to the Gundo bros. We got Augustus joining next.

• 1:01:24Garry Tan?

  Great to see you, brother.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  It's a party on this show, one person after another. Well, thank you so much for joining, Gary. We'll have to have you back, talk more soon. It's always a pleasure chatting. And hopefully we'll see you at YC Demo Day.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  And look out for application, tvpn.com.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah, you do media companies?

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Where's the? We're in there.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Gary.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a great day, Gary. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in Augustus. How you doing, Augustus? What's new?

• 1:01:53Augustus Doricko?

  I'm blessed, dude. I'm back in Gundo for a spell rather than the Near East or the mountains of the Rockies. So it's been a vibe. It's been sunny and warm, which has been different for Rainmakers the last four months.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Wherever you guys go, it gets cold, it starts snowing, raining. It's a, it's a tough life.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this looks kind of like, I haven't watched the SBF prison interview, but you kind of have a prison vibe going on behind you, but I like it. Maybe we get some drywall behind you on the next one.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  But we were talking about you earlier because Luke Metro's in Arena Magazine talking about how everyone wants to re-industrialize America, but nobody wants to work in a factory. And I feel like you've made working in a factory cool. Can you break down your current factory stack? Where are you sleeping? Can we get you on an eight sleep soon?

• 1:02:47Augustus Doricko?

  Dude, it's so funny you say that. We, um, we decided like a month ago, um, okay, we're big enough now. We're hiring like serious scientists. We're bringing government people through. No more bunk beds in the factory. Um, so the room that I'm in now used to have four bunk beds in it. The room over there used to have two bunk beds in it. Um, a lot of the dropouts and engineers were living here. We had a tradition for a bit where if you moved from across the country, you either had to live in your car in the parking lot or in one of the bunk beds. Um, so that was why it well lasted.

• 1:03:18Jordi Hays?

  The peanut gallery on X is gonna start saying, oh, it's time to short Rainmaker. They don't sleep in the office anymore. They're too legit. They have too many government officials coming in to try to get their bit, you know, to try to work with them.

• 1:03:31Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, but at the very least, we're staying in Gundo, like some other unnamed Gundo companies.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Oh, a little bit of drama.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Scoop.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Drama.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  No, we don't need to put them on.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  I always thought that Gundo was like the place that you could eventually graduate out of because once you need 100,000 square feet, like it's just not, it's just, it is a small city. So, you know, I, I, I'm rooting for the, for the, the, the Gundo incubations that go on to do greater things and eventually need to expand and eventually rename whole cities in Texas. Uh, you know, that's, that's what I hope for you. But can you give me the quick, uh, like the latest pitch on how you're describing Rainmaker? I know it's evolved a little bit. Uh, what's the, what's the core product that you're selling right now?

• 1:04:16Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, so Rainmaker is making Earth habitable by making it precipitate more and more rain and more snow in arid environments. So farms that don't have enough water, ecosystems that need to be restored, and cities in arid regions that need water. We're making that happen with advanced remote sensing, so radar, LiDAR, satellite data. We're using open source stuff and some things of our own that we're going to tease a little bit later in the month. Our own radar to find the right clouds to seed and then fly our own severe weather resistant and anti-icing capable drones into those clouds, spraying a mineral called silver iodide that freezes the liquid in the cloud into big enough snowflakes so that they fall and stay as snow, or if it's warm beneath the cloud, melt back into rain.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  How many drones have you crashed?

• 1:05:09Augustus Doricko?

  Between you, me, and not the Federal Aviation Administration. No, we've crashed dozens of drones. We have one corporate value at Rainmaker, and it's that we like the taste of blood in our mouth. And that's sort of an extension of like, you know, the Elon thing about chewing glass. It's kind of just a bummer, right? And like, building a deep tech company is especially hard. But if you pavlov yourself into loving interfacing with reality in such a way that you get like, good feedback, you learn how you failed, you learn what to do better next time, you end up with a bunch of people kind of like Rocky, you know, that like, just fight harder and do better the more they get punched in the face. And so, we've crashed a lot of drones on snowy, wet, cold mountain tops, and everyone's better for it.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  What's the balance like now for you in the field, doing the engineering work, building the actual product, selling, and then government stuff? You're in a suit, you're testifying, you're, you know, you're shaking your head when someone's, you know, espousing a conspiracy theory about you. We've seen the viral clips. How do you balance those two things?

• 1:06:14Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, I'm going back to Tennessee this year because they're actually trying to elevate the punishment for weather modification, do a criminal offense. And in addition to that, I'm going to go to Florida.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Arson's legal now, but if you want to make it rain, we're putting you in jail.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  I mean, I think you'd be just as productive in prison. Like, you're already kind of in prison. You'd be more locked in. It'd be a minor setback if they lock you up. I'm sure the rest of your bros would like break you out in some heroic scheme.

• 1:06:41Augustus Doricko?

  Or you can make calls like a don from the prison, right?

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess going off of that, big question for me is weather modification is so charged, you're in this beautiful situation where you piss off both, you piss off people in the center sometimes, you piss off people on the left, people on the right, you know, people on the on the right might say, you know, that's, you know, it's just wrong to be changing the weather, or have some concerns there. People on the left are just, you know, maybe anti-science sometimes. How has it been trying to thread the needle? Obviously, you're not trying to make everybody happy, but you need to get people generally bought into what you're doing to make things happen.

• 1:07:21Augustus Doricko?

  Dude, water's a nonpartisan issue. Whether you want ecosystems restored, or you want more water for your farm, or you want urban development in your city, we want to bring you water. We can bring water more cost effectively than even desalination. And then when it comes to like the real fringe edges, because everybody in the middle is bought into that mission of abundance, right? For whatever their particular issue is, you know, I personally believe that like Genesis 126, it's the first commission that God gives man at the beginning of time, is to steward the earth, the seas, and the skies. Rainmaker is trying to embody that value set and be good stewards of the world as we take dominion over the skies. And so that plays to some extent with the more tinfoil hat conspiracy

• 1:08:05Augustus Doricko?

  theorists on the right. And when it comes to the left, some people think that like, you know, anytime you modify anything on the planet, humans always make it worse. And that's just like not true. But even if you believe it to be the case, like, we've messed up the planet so badly already, we might as well take deliberate action to try to repair it. And so people on the far left are generally more game with that.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Has, what are some of the most ambitious projects and places? Obviously, we went out to, what was that place out in the desert we went to?

• 1:08:38Augustus Doricko?

  Salt and Sea.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  The Salt and Sea. That was a really cool case study. Are there other kind of like, like long-term projects that you think are kind of on the bucket list? That you want to make amazing one day?

• 1:08:52Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, the Great Salt Lake is in a deficit of about 500,000 feet of water per year. The Bear River is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake, and it has mountains with lots of juicy clouds from Utah to Wyoming to Idaho, all that flow into it. I think that restoring the Great Salt Lake is like an American priority and a must. And even more interestingly than that, something in the distant future for Rainmaker is the Winter Olympics in 2034 are going to be held in Salt Lake. And China in 2008 had this whole big show and dance where they made it rain before the parades. So it didn't end on the Olympic Games. We want to show a force a decade from now to make more fresh pow for all the Olympic Games in Salt.

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  Nice. Speaking of China, the first, I think the first time I ever met you, you mentioned, you came in just like completely, just aggressively telling me that China was reforesting the Gobi Desert by planting a bunch of trees. That's obviously not your business, but like, is anyone working on that? That feels important if you're really thinking about like terraforming certain parts of America and like reclaiming and just improving different biomes. Like, how does that play in? Is that just a different startup? Do we need another company to build that? Is that something that you would eventually expand into? How does that all play into this, like, whole plan?

• 1:10:11Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, Rainmaker long-term is the terraforming company, right? We want to take any ecosystem and make it both symbiotically flourishing for humankind and the environment. There's no companies that I know of doing reforestation, although there's a bunch of university labs that are spraying seeds from drones, really cool, weird, clever thing where when the seed hits water, it unravels and sort of acts as like a little natural drill to drill the seed into the ground. That's pretty cool. I haven't seen it commercialized yet. And someday I do want Rainmaker in the business of all sorts of different terraforming stuff, like planting trees, literally boiling the ocean, by the way. If you boil enough of the ocean, then you can create more clouds. So we'll.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Heard it here first.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  There's a metaphor there.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Is boiling the ocean.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Boiling the ocean.

• 1:10:55Jordi Hays?

  Eventually.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you in 20 years when you're still grinding at this, be like, yeah, I'm still trying to boil the ocean.

• 1:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  One, I just have to say, you know, I feel like I've seen pretty much the entire Augustus arc. Obviously, met you right after you were graduating in New York. You were fixated on this problem from our very first conversation. I always, you know, and it's been amazing to watch and be a small investor.

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  You have found the, you've shown the perfect ability to balance attention and progress.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  So many people would have said, Augustus is so good at getting attention that it's almost bearish, right? Cause founders can get on this sort of negative feedback or sort of positive feedback loop that becomes negative where they're so good at posting. And they're so good at the internet that they just get sort of fixated on that. And then that becomes their sort of dimension of progress. How have you balanced sort of yapping and building? And, you know, I want to give you credit for not being at a lot of the popular events over the last year, right? There's, you know, multiple of the events that we went to were places that I know you got an invite and I know you turned down. How, what does the next, you know, two, three years look like for you in terms of balancing, yapping?

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Knowing that you need to be making, you know, massive forward progress on the business as well.

• 1:12:27Augustus Doricko?

  To give credit where credit is due, it was in no small part Kugan's shot that was called where he said, like, listen, you guys are going to get out over your skis. And seem like even more of a bunch of goofballs than you actually in fact are. And so we deliberately decided about the middle of last year, just to kind of go like media blackout. And I've talked to a bunch of my employees that have said like, yeah, I worked at other companies where the founder was really big yapper. And yes, you need to be an evangelist, but then like the founder doesn't know some like fundamental crux of the tech problem. And the company blows up because of that. And so I, you know, we were talking about like our publication strategy and some media stuff. And we gave it to our PR people. And they were like, hey, can you dumb it down and make this less technical?

• 1:13:10Augustus Doricko?

  And the funny part about that was like, our science team already told us like, you guys are going to make us seem like idiots.

• 1:13:17Augustus Doricko?

  Um, and so we have, we've done extraordinary things, particularly in the last five months. And I'm so proud to work with the people that I do. And, um, you know, not to be like a coming soon guy, but, um, in, uh, the end of this month in April, we're going to start to unveil the products and the progress that we've made, um, across the entire Western United States. And then, um, I've alluded to online, the Middle East a little bit, we've done some stuff there.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 1:13:41Augustus Doricko?

  Actually, the Fox, the Fox, uh, the Fox Business pod was taken from a mountain top in the Middle East. Uh, I didn't share that a lot.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  That was fun.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when I read your last investor update, I genuinely was shocked because I, people don't have any, uh, I don't, I don't think the average person has any sense of how much you guys, uh, how much progress you guys, um, you know, have made in the, in the last year and a half. It's, it's really incredible.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Narrative violation.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Not for, not for Augustus.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  Not for Augustus, but yeah, I mean.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  For the, for the peanut gallery.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, the peanut gallery, but we're, that's why the show exists to.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, I want to get into some of, I want to get into some of the bigger sort of more important questions. Uh, what, uh, what are you benching these days?

• 1:14:31Augustus Doricko?

  Oh, dude.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  I imagine it's, I imagine it's going to be like, the last time I lifted, like you bring an intensity to weightlifting that is inspirational. I don't even know if we've, I don't, have you ever gotten a proper lift with Augustus?

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  I haven't.

• 1:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Like he's going in there.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  I've seen the rack in the office.

• 1:14:45Jordi Hays?

  He's bringing the same intensity that he brings to building to every single set.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  But it's hard when you're traveling. It's always hard to get in the gym when you're traveling. So break it down. How's it going?

• 1:14:54Augustus Doricko?

  Dude, so yeah, like I said, this is a medium. I'm like 37 pounds lighter than when I started Rainmaker. Um, that's mostly muscle. Um, so I, I don't think my one rep maxes are what they used to be, but we still have the smelling salts on the rack downstairs. So I.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  I was telling John, John, uh, woke up Monday like deathly ill. And I, and I was saying, we need to get smelling salts just here on the set so that if we need to really.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  We need a podcast with the same intensity that Augustus builds, you know, hard tack.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:15:23Augustus Doricko?

  I would, I would rip Lucy smelling salt.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  We actually got some in the office back in like 2016, 2017 when we were building the company. And it's a, it's a wild ride if you haven't done the smelling salts. It's intense.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  What, what area of the broader hard tech industry are you most excited about? Obviously, you're 100% locked in, but yeah, I'd be curious. Like, what is the space that, you know, when, when you're sort of looking left or right, what's most exciting? I know that on a long enough time horizon, I'm sure you plan to enter many of those spaces. But in the near term, what are you excited about?

• 1:16:06Augustus Doricko?

  Fission, fission, fission, fission. You might not be very surprised, but my dear friend Isaiah Taylor is absolutely kicking ass when it comes to nuclear. And I think blowing the lid off a lot of people's expectations about how long it takes to build a reactor, to get power positive. I also think like a really important point, you know, when you, you brought up before how you do publicity, how you do media. The Valor atomics war zero unveiling was an incredible event and the aesthetics were off the charts. And like a lot of people said, oh, look at the facade, like that's so over the top. But also if hard tech isn't cool, I think something that people don't understand about the gundo is like, it's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hard tech sick. Because if it's not, then everybody's going to end up in finance again.

• 1:16:51Augustus Doricko?

  The next generation, the lower class of zoomers, they're going to end up doing software engineering. So making things incredible and cool, I think is really important. And then having the technical chops to back it up and unveil a spectacular thermal, thermal prototype. Like that is, is really sweet. And I'm excited to go hang out with the Taylors in the Philippines to see war one come online.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  It's the, the future should look like the future and bringing those aesthetics to bear can, can have a benefit. As long as you're also delivering the real thing and it's not vaporware, right? Is there a new class of Gundo startups that are coming in? Because you built this universe, this cinematic universe that was kind of around you. And whenever there'd be a profile, Isaiah would be there, a couple of other guys would be there, the nearest crew, the Pico Grid crew, a couple of other folks, Durak, right? But is there, is there a new addition that we need an update on Gundo? Or is there just like a whole separate crew that you're not even overseeing as the godfather of the Gundo?

• 1:17:50Augustus Doricko?

  Dude, yeah, so the Gundo Book Club is a lot of these dudes, rather than being like, I don't know, 23 through 27, they're like 19 through 23, totally different cohort, a lot of cool companies. Teddy from Jordan finally made it to the Gundo from Georgia. It's really cool. Aries is sick. Chris, what was his last name, Autumn? Yeah, he is building subsea vehicles. There's a whole new clique and we're almost out of touch with this. You know, part of what made Gundo possible and like the initial vibe real possible was we were all running like pre-seed companies. So we had a lot of time on our hands and kind of just like dope around.

• 1:18:31Augustus Doricko?

  And so we didn't get to know these guys as well, but they're a super tight clique, like the original founding group of Gundo bros.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  That's cool. What are you thinking about supply chain? There's been a lot of debate over, you know, Chinese drone motors and how hard it is. I mean, I've talked to Andorl guys who are like, yeah, like there's all sorts of pieces that are just hard to get. I was hearing, I think you were at that talk where someone was highlighting that there's only like one tin smelting factory in America now. And like, it's just like, there's all these weird things where like you just can't get American made tin or you can't get American made. So I'm sure you're thinking about that, but also, you know, early stage, it's not super critical immediately to be completely clean supply chain. But what, what are you seeing as the supply chain develops? And are there any other Gundo companies that you've been able to like kind of build on top of?

• 1:19:21John Coogan?

  I know at one point you were saying that like, oh yeah, you just walked across the street. There was a drone company that was helping you build the drones. Can you talk about the supply chain a little bit?

• 1:19:29Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely still tough. Rainmaker has the luxury of not being a defense company. So the government requirements that we have are definitely different. I'm still a nationalist and a patriot, though. So in any circumstance where we can buy American or from an American colony like Taiwan, I'm pro. When it comes to like immediate supply chain in Gundo, I think everybody has or has already or is having a part made by Range View from Cameron Schiller's company. And so like having an investment casting foundry right there is pretty sweet. How you get someone to innovate and like winding motors, not totally sure. But like boards, I think actually we are going to see if not just because of SoftBank's $100 billion

• 1:20:14Augustus Doricko?

  that they maybe do or don't have, we will see a lot more of in the United States soon.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's cool. There's one, there's one American drone company that does small motors. I think they're up in Seattle. And I think they, I think they might have got, they might have been family owned, they got bought by private equity, and then they shipped off to China. And so my dream is like someone goes in and does the PE and brings it back. Cause like they clearly had some talent and some kind of core, core competency here. But I'm sure lots of people are working on it. Jordy, you got another question? Should we let the guests just go?

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  No big questions. I know you got to get back to work. What are you hiring for right now? How can we help you find them? Who's the most critical next hire?

• 1:20:54Augustus Doricko?

  Thanks. Before even I answer that question, I briefly lived in South Lake, Texas, which is where Quinn yours is from. So yes, actually, the QB of UT Austin, I was mistaken for multiple times. I saw that reply.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 1:21:11Augustus Doricko?

  And so that was pretty funny. But who am I hiring for? Go to make rain.com slash careers. What we're interested in most now are radar scientists. So if you've either worked at the low level on board testing qualification or meteorological weather radar. So that's more of like a university grad student position that never thought they'd be able to get into industry because nobody's ever cared about the weather in the private sector. Those are the people that we want most. After that, though, I would say aerosol chemists. So if you've worked at Jewel, if you've worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke, that's of interest. And then government affairs, if you're a seasoned yapper from the hill, then we'd love to talk to you.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining, Augustus. You're always welcome on the show whenever you need us.

• 1:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Man, we need one of those quarter zips there. They look fantastic.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, send them over to the studio.

• 1:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Wear them. Special episodes. Whenever it's raining, we'll wear them.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  We'll have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon, Augustus.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  Stay safe out there. Get some rest. Awesome.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Should we get into some timeline?

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  We should. We should. We should do a bunch of timeline. We have, what, an hour and a half, something like that, until the next call in. Oh, no, we got like 45 minutes. Okay.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Perfect.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  So, did you hear that Italy has soured on Starlink? I have some reports here.

• 1:22:34Jordi Hays?

  What's their, what's their background?

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  Italy doesn't want to do business. And I had Grok rewrite it in a comically Italian accent, and I'll read some to you. The Italian governo days are having some bigger doubts about finishing this 1.6 billion deal with Elon Musk. Starlink, eh? Bloomberg, she say, "Mamma mia." People whispering that the worries come from the US pulling back like a scared a linguine from the promises to keep Europe safe. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. Starlink, he's a guy that's some competition, capisce? They're talking about satellite communications right here in Italy. It's like known a secret pasta recipe. The report, she say, Elon Musk, he's taking a big risk hanging out too close with the Trump administration. Forget about it.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  Already the stats in Europe, they showed Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball off the plate. Bloomberg, she say on Wednesday that Tesla shares in China, "Oh, dear me, down 49%. That's a no good, like overcooked spaghetti." But await Musk might pick up some extra business in the US, at least for Starlink. Salute. Word on the street, they say the Federal Aviation Administration might ditch Verizon like a bad batch of risotto and go with Starlink instead. That's a spicy meatball.

• 1:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:23:56John Coogan?

  So, thank you to Grok.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  That's the first, like, belly laugh that an LLM has proven. That might be a world first.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  Yes. Grok, Grok is undefeated in humor. I really, I really enjoyed that. Anyway, yeah, so the news, Italy does not want to do business with Elon Musk because he's close to Trump and Trump is not supporting, I guess, Europe.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Grok actually followed this up, by the way, and said, "How's it, Dad? Eh? You want me to cook a pizza next?"

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  A ridiculous caricature.

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:24:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know, funny story. So, the domain PartyRound.com

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  was a domain owned by a catering company in Milan. And I had my buddy who lives in Milan

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  negotiate for the deal.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  And we ended up, you know, settling on a fair price. But I, it's, I thought it was hilarious that party, you know, Party Round, the sort of word that was, you know, such a part of Silicon Valley lore was being, you know, operating a catering, a pizza company.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  Party Round.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Speaking of Party Round, did you see, do you know Andrew Ettinger?

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Okay, so did you see this breakdown he did with your company?

• 1:25:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  You're, you're the stuff of Thread Guy lore now.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, so Andrew worked.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  Oh, he worked there?

• 1:25:11Jordi Hays?

  He worked.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was on the team

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 1:25:13Jordi Hays?

  running a bunch of brand stuff.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah. Do you have that pulled up?

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought this was a cool post.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  I feel like my, I'm concerned that my version of the deck is out of order.

• 1:25:25John Coogan?

  Uh, you want the, you want the hard posts?

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  I'll take some hard posts.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  You got the hard posts here. You're gonna have to skip through to find the, uh, the Andrew Ettinger post. It's towards the end.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I found it.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  You found it?

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  It's at the end.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  It says, "Capital was founded on the premise that banking..."

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so some backstory. Andrew Ettinger is a good buddy, joined the, uh, joined my team in 2022, I want to say. Um, and so he was breaking down a lot of the work that, uh, that went into, uh, as we transitioned from Party Round to, uh, Capital XYZ. He's breaking it down. So he says, "Capital was founded on the premise that banking is commoditized and a great brand can win." Early signs pointed towards that hypothesis being true. Capital was an evolution from the cult followed fundraising app, Party Round, known for an all out assault on Twitter and appointment viewing drops. A quote from Paki. But after a year and a half of building, I gotta say with Paki. Yeah.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Paki, almost every single day for over a year straight would repost our stuff. It was an unbelievable ask. Most people would have folded. Yeah. But we had Josh on our team that would just message him and say, Paki, please. And he would basically guilt trip him into it every time. Paki, Paki always delivered. And that was when repost still actually carried a little bit of weight. Yeah, totally. He says, but after a year and a half of building that brand, Party Round was evolved into Capital, positioning as a bank for founders, raise, hold, send, and send funds all in one place. And Andrew highlights here, we launched this founder series, which is still available. Capital.xyz/founders. Very rare footage of Will Manitis in that series. Yeah, that's actually the only video of him online. I think so.

• 1:27:02Jordi Hays?

  It actually might be. Anyway, so the idea for that campaign was, you know, whenever you thought of financial institutions making video content, it was always about, you know, some small business owner or things like that.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to make the sort of like chef's table of, you know, highlighting founders. And so we made this series that highlighted Will Manitis and a number of other early stage founders. Ended up getting nominated for a Shorty Award, which was cool. I don't think we won. I was annoyed about that. And then we had a couple sort of rough instances. We had FTX collapse and we had a bunch of crypto related sort of customers. We also had stablecoin functionality in our product and we were building a hybrid fiat and stablecoin bank. Yeah. And so when FTX collapsed, the entire sort of legacy finance world went really, really sort of bearish against crypto for obvious reasons. Yeah.

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  And so we had to shut down all the stablecoin functionality and come out as sort of a more commodity neo-bank. And then a few months later, SVB collapsed and we didn't, we only had, we only had 250K of FTIC coverage. Yeah. And our, you know, our most important customers had millions of dollars in deposits because they were obviously, you know, venture backed startups. And so they. They looked at us, they looked at our underlying banking partner, which their stock dropped like 80, 90% because there was this sort of regional run on the bank and ended up doing a deal with Row very quickly to move our customers over there. But anyways, cool story. I'm really proud of the work that we did there. And then I've worked with Andrew

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  since then. Andrew was heavily involved in Aurora.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  And now does a bunch of other great work for companies, so.

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  And the whole team went on to do, I didn't realize the team that you, like, we keep seeing these people in like the Geordie cinematic universe. It's like the Gundo bros. But seriously, it's like, you know, we're talking to.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Brandon, so Brandon Jacoby, first ever hire.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Jacoby.

• 1:29:06Jordi Hays?

  Jacoby, he's at X now.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  Dominating timelines.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  And it's so helpful to have someone at the company that you're like building the stream on that we can just text.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Brian Armstrong, Brian Armstrong, our CTO is over doing Meta AI stuff at Meta now.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  Dylan, our head of marketing, started a company with two other engineers on our team, sold it to Uniswap, which you can play it today. They have this whole like online survivor game. That's cool. You know, we have another one of our designers is at Ramp now.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  That went viral recently because he sort of like fixed something, you know, in an hour as they tend to do. So, and then you have Spencer, who's over one of the founding engineers at Delphi. So I'm very proud of the team that we built. And yeah, they're all doing fantastic things.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  We'll have some breaking news. Elon Musk replied to one of our clips.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  It's about Sean McGuire. Sean McGuire was talking AGI plus robot Tesla lets you do unlimited work in the real world foundational model at XAI lets you do unlimited knowledge work and Neuralink lets you merge. We really enjoyed talking to Sean yesterday and Elon Musk says, pretty much, I'm open to the other ideas, but it seems like that's what's going to happen. So thanks for engaging Elon. We'd love to have you on the show. Anyway, let's, let's keep going.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  What do you got?

• 1:30:32John Coogan?

  Wander.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Sponsor.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Wander.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait. One, two, three.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place. At Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. If you're going to Italy, you're putting the pressure on them to bring Starlink over, book a wander. Fantastic stuff. We love Wander over here.

• 1:31:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you gotta follow, follow at Wander, follow John Andrew, the founder, but follow Kyle Tibbetts. He's our, he's our dear friend.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  And every single day, he is just racking up the impressions. He is a CMO over at Wander, but he's also delivering.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:31:22Jordi Hays?

  Delivering, you know, impressions himself. So.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Get inspired.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  He's posting some of these.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Now's the time to book a summer vacation.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, look at this house in Cape Cod.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Fantastic, fantastic.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. We gotta have Chris Williamson on the show at some point, but Chris has this fantastic philosophy about the, it's like the vacation dividend or something like that. It's like this funny mental framework where basically if you book, like if you just spontaneously go on a vacation or you go to the Super Bowl, you get all the joy from that. And then you also get the joy from thinking back to like your Super Bowl experience or your, your, your stay at a fantastic wander. But he thinks that you should book a trip that's like two years out. So basically you're looking forward to it for two years. Or like, you know, you should always have, you should always have a vacation booked like a year or two years out. And also, not only is it like obviously cheaper and easier to book and there's more inventory when you book far out, but your schedule's clear. And then, and then you'll

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  be like, I've had this booked for two years. I'm not gonna pass this up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with it. As opposed to, it's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like, I'm never, I'm never doing it. I'm never, I'm never doing a birthday weekend or something. And so, yeah, get on Wander, set those dates far out and book something with you, your friends, your family, your company. Do something to reward yourself, treat yourself.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  Vittorio? Let's do it. We gotta have him on the show to explain all this because it's a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo. I don't understand.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  But Vittorio says it's here.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get him on the show and say, okay, break down this news like you're explaining something to a podcast.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I know you already broke it down for like the X user and like, and like X, like tech Twitter.

• 1:32:59Jordi Hays?

  What about somebody that that talks?

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  Exactly. Who like basically can't read and just talks all the time. Anyway.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  We have a friend who's very smart. He can't read.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  Intelligence is.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of a separate thing.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Literacy is not for everyone. You can still do great things. Vittorio says it's here. Cortical Labs just launched the first commercial biological computer. Human neurons directly integrated into silicon chips, programmable and adaptive, living computation, synthetic biological intelligence. Traditional silicon-based AI has a fundamental limit, huge energy demands, rigid structures and limited adaptability. AI today consumes massive computational resources, yet still struggles to mimic human intelligence. Biological intelligence, BI, he's coining it, Coogan's Law, says doesn't have these limitations. Real neurons inherently adapt and learn, have high efficiency around 30 watts per unit, natural self-organization, and have more flexibility perfected over billions of years. And so, congratulations

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  to Vittorio on the launch. If you want to learn more, he has a wonderful thread here that goes on for 20 posts.

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  Does he work for this company? I'm confused.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  I actually don't know.

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  Or he's just sharing?

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  He's just posting, maybe. I don't know. I think it's his thing, but he's got a million views on it, and that's what we really care about here. He got 8K likes on this.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  That's really what matters.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  So, Vittorio, call into the show, break it down for us. Congratulations. And if you need to promote it to an even broader audience, why don't you go buy a billboard on AdQuick? AdQuick delivers out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home experience, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. So, congratulations.

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  We really think that Jeremy, we've joked about this a few times, but Jeremy Gaffon needs to do the 101 billboard ad campaign.

• 1:34:48John Coogan?

  We mocked it up for him. So, if you didn't listen. The show yesterday, Jeremy Gaffon has a fund that is buying startups.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  He specializes in buying companies that are are good businesses that have been overcapitalized.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Have extreme.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  Rebuilding the cap table, re-incentivizing the management team, the founders, figuring out who can actually get the most value out of this company and and and making sure that the VCs can move on to another kind of home run swing.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  And so our idea was to do personal injury style ads or says accident, you know, call.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  Cap table accident, call Jeremy Gaffon.

• 1:35:24Jordi Hays?

  John's amazing copy was cap table accident.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Cap table accident. It happens.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Term sheet accident.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  It happens all too frequently. We have some personnel news.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Kristin McDonald is thrilled to share that she has joined ENIAC Ventures. She says, I moved to venture because I wanted to work and with and enable bold entrepreneurs who are willing to are pushing the boundary of technology forward. When I met the ENIAC team, I it was obvious they shared that vision. The firm was built from the ground up to be a trusted ally and support system to founders at the earliest stages. I'm honored to continue working alongside Hadley and the rest of the team. As you may know, they are some of the best people you could ever have in your corner. And I have a funny story because I'm not super close with ENIAC or Hadley, but I in college I interned at a startup that was about Series B called Vlingo. It was a competitor to Siri. Siri was originally an independent project.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like a company name from Silicon Valley, the show.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. And so Siri came out of the Stanford Research Institute, SRI. That's where they got the name Siri. Siri and Vlingo started, there's Nuance is a voice recognition company. They make Dragon, naturally speaking, one of the first voice recognition companies and. They had some of the smart kind of AI ML engineers had had left Nuance, started this company of Lingo, Stanford. So these guys were like MIT guys or yeah, out in like, we were in like Harvard Square, Cambridge Square, something like that. And then Siri was out in Stanford. Apple buys Siri pretty early. And so we were basically cut off from the iPhones. The whole business plan was like,

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  get on Android and get on BlackBerry and you want to be installed as a default app. And it was just like a very fascinating thing. They were doing all this cool things. They actually ran a billboard campaign. This is hilarious. I'm not doing another ad read, but they did a billboard ad campaign, but they did it outside of RIM's headquarters, who makes BlackBerry in Canada, specifically to get the attention of BlackBerry executives, because it was a consumer app. It was anything that you could download. I think they had like a $20 version, a $5 version, a free version, et cetera. It was something you'd buy and you use. And then you could, and then you could use a voice mode, just like Siri on your BlackBerry. But they wanted to be installed by default

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  and they wanted a big deal done with BlackBerry. So they bought billboards outside to make it look like they were like a big company, you know, right outside. And then all the, all the, the, the executives at BlackBerry would like drive in and be like, oh, Lingo, like they're, they're a good company. Like I gotta do business with them. And Hadley worked there as this like kind of business development MBA type. And I just remember him coming in and he was super young and, and during like the all hands meeting, he would stand up and kind of break down what the business was doing. And I was just like, this guy's the man. Cause I was like a kid. I was an intern at the time. And the CEO, they, they, the founders were like these MIT scientists, but they brought in a kind of corporate CEO who was

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  A he'd been in war, basically, he'd been in Iraq deploying like mobile technology, basically, like, like cell phone towers. And he was so like hardcore, he had bullets on his desk with like the names of the rival companies on them. It was a really, it was a really crazy like experience, but it was really cool because like a series A, series B company, 50 people, building a tech product, growing like it's just a unique thing to be in. I it wound up being like an okay outcome. They sold the company. I think everyone did pretty well. It wasn't like a generational company or anything, but it was just cool to see like, okay, this is what a startup looks like at this scale. Yeah. And it was really cool. And, uh, and I remember that we did some deal and, uh, and, and Hadley like, uh, got like bottle service and he let me come and drink at his table.

• 1:39:22John Coogan?

  And that was huge to me as a college kid.

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  You know, it was great.

• 1:39:25Jordi Hays?

  So good luck. One thing, uh, yeah. Congratulations to Christian McDonald. This is huge. The, the, the title partner has been diluted over time, uh, but getting partner at a fund like ENIAC, uh, really means something and, uh, it's, it's awesome to see.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  It's great. Should we go to Evan Armstrong?

• 1:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  Evan Armstrong says, people are not ready for what's coming. Anthropic published a post today that casually announced the upending of the social order by 2027. If L L Ms can do all listed below, the vast majority of American labor is automatable. We are entering an economically, politically and emotionally dangerous period. Buckle up. And the, and the quote is from, uh, this blog post as our CEO Dario writes in machines of loving grace, we expect powerful.

• 1:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Great title, by the way.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Uh, it's a reference to all watched over by machines of loving grace, which is a Heinlein book, I think. We expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 to early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties. Intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines, including biology, computer science, mathematics or engineering. The ability to navigate all interfaces available to a human doing digital work today, including the ability to process and generate text, audio and video, and the ability to autonomously control technology instruments like mice and keyboard, like mice and keyboards, and the ability to access and browse the internet, the ability to autonomously reason through complex tasks over extended periods, hours, days, or even weeks, seeking clarification and feedback when needed,

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  much like a highly capable employee would, the ability to interface with the physical world, controlling laboratory equipment, robotic systems and manufacturing tools through digital connections. What do you think? 2027? Is it over?

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  We're just getting started.

• 1:41:11John Coogan?

  Just getting started.

• 1:41:13Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, this is a challenge.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  No mention of comedy. Interesting. The final eval.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  I think that Anthropic is crushing software engineering.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  Struggling on the comedy side.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Jordi Hays?

  And that's okay. Not everybody has to be funny.

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, you know, you read this and you're like, oh, massive job displacement. But the question is like, is there just a thousand times more work to be done? And when I think about Mars, and when I think about Dyson spheres, and when I think about like all the crazy things that we want to do as humans, I'm thinking like, yeah, yes, and like, let's have every human piloting a thousand AIs and let's all work together and let's all work more.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Going back to Friedberg had a really great point, which we covered last week around, you know, if you have these incredible, incredibly powerful AI systems, what are the sort of massive, you know, incredibly daunting sort of large-scale projects that could be accomplished by just having a lot more intelligence?

• 1:42:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, I don't think, I think we need to go into this with, you know, generally with optimism and then still, I think, I still personally reference people like Tyler Cowen, who I think are less directly conflicted

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:23Jordi Hays?

  on these things because he's not out there trying to sustain, you know, you know,

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Evaluation.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Evaluation, right? He's just sort of focused on what he believes is, is the truth and making predictions based on that. So we'll see. But it's certainly the most, I would never, I wouldn't have wanted to be born at a different time.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  No, totally.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's truly, truly incredible.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:48Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking this morning, completely unrelated. Pretty soon, we're gonna see people joining X. Not, not pretty soon, but, but isn't it funny to see somebody in 10 years when people are like, why do these boomers call everything tweets?

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  And quote tweets, like, what are they talking about? Because like, they will not have, they wouldn't have ever experienced Twitter.

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  It'll just be like, the most obvious way to out yourself as, as a boomer.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe an L L N that's just trained on a bunch of content from, you know, the early 2020s.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Well, regardless of whether or not AI takes every job, you're gonna need to use AI and use software to close your books using Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  I actually have a cool post from Ara Karazian, who we've talked about. He's an economist over at Ramp, so he looked at the top SaaS vendors on Ramp for March so far. And I'll run down the list here, so by new customer count, OpenAI topped the list. LinkedIn was second, Cursor was third, Canva was fourth, and then fifth was Anthropic. By new card spend was Elastic, LinkedIn, HubSpot, ZoomInfo, and Salesforce. So that was interesting to see, I'm gonna read out some of the standout. So Elastic was a standout, they were the, the top vendor by new card spend. Is an AI search company that builds software for businesses to build their own AI-driven

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  search platforms, like personalized e-commerce searches for consumers, or AI searches for customer help centers. They're a public company, so their stock recently surged following an earnings beat. So narrative violation, AI company with earnings that's public.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Wild to see, I'm looking it up.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  Looking it up on public right now, but jumping back to the post, they also XAI was a standout. And so they seem to be pretty, doing pretty well, had a surge of signups in February and then the Claude 3.7 Sonnet launch also drove quite a lot of new volume. And they can see here, so ramp data shows that as of February 2025, only 4.7% of US businesses have adopted Anthropic's model compared to 19% for OpenAI.

• 1:45:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13Jordi Hays?

  So it's kind of like, doesn't seem super surprising. I'm actually surprised that Anthropic has that much adoption.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's the developer usage that's driving that.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Yep. I, I was thinking last night about the question of like acceleration because we're not seeing it yet in certainly GDP, but like to the, to the Satya Nadella point, but also there's a very interesting abstraction layer for like the progress of humanity just around the amount of energy that we're generating.

• 1:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  So you have like Cartershev 1, which is, I believe, 10,000, we're at 0.6 right now. I think it's 18 terawatts of electrical capacity globally. And if you, you, it's hard to find a time in human history when we were generating 10,000 times less. So if you forecast, how long will it take to get to 10,000 times more where we would be essentially consuming every, every amount, all the energy that's coming to the earth from the sun essentially is like Cartershev 1. And then Cartershev 2, I believe, is like the Dyson sphere on the, where you're capturing all the energy from the sun in every direction, right?

• 1:46:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  And if you, and if you forecast it out based on the base rate, which I believe is 2.7% growth pre 1970 stagnation, it takes like 500 years to get there, which feels like forever, especially given, like, I think that this Anthropic post is maybe a little aggressive. But it does feel like we're on the cusp of something like we're going to be able to do more things. And, and so my, my base case is maybe like, we go back to 2.7% growth, whereas we've been at around 2% energy growth for the last five decades. But even if we grow at 2.7% for

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  the next 20 years, by 2020, by 2045, will only be double the total energy capacity, which will be a lot. It'll be 38 terawatts or something like that. But it's, but it's interesting to see if that becomes the main bottleneck for all of this is like, doing things in the physical world. Nat Friedman has this take that's like, yes, the AIs will be super intelligent, but they won't be gods in the sense that they still have to obey the laws of physics. So no time travel, no teleportation, all of these things don't happen. So, so at a certain point, when they want to build a new nuclear reactor, like they do need to dig things out of the

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  ground and move them. And there's, there's like a physical cost to that. And so we like, it's, you know, there's the whole

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  Humans yearn for the minds.

• 1:48:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:01Jordi Hays?

  We can help the AIs dig.

• 1:48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the whole meme of like, feel the acceleration.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  We have a whole generation trained on Minecraft.

• 1:48:08John Coogan?

  And I feel the acceleration in the, in the, in the LLM progress arena a little bit, although, you know, over the past few years, it felt like we were really accelerating going from GPT 3.5 to four. And now it feels like we're kind of tailing off and hitting some sort of local maximum.

• 1:48:22Jordi Hays?

  That's why we need Elia.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need some major breakthrough.

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't care about benchmarks.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  And then we need to build a lot more capacity because I, I think even if we have the PhD, super PhD researchers, like, we don't have enough servers, we don't have enough data centers. There's, there's still just more to do as, as humanity to really like unlock something that feels dramatically different in terms of like, oh, this, this world is like true post, post industrial revolution, post second industrial revolution or whatever. Anyway, let's move on to something.

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Completely unrelated, Connor McDonald over at Ridge.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  Connor McDonald, he says, "Direct to consumer, cut out the middleman and replaced it with an endless labyrinth of deteriorating ad channels and organic reach." And I'll give some backstory here. So I, my career sort of came online during the height of the D to C sort of boom. I remember I actually had a college class that was about D to C.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  And that, and that almost basically, the professor was fixated on what was happening over at Wharton and how all these big consumer brands were coming out of Wharton, the MBA program there. I think Warby's a good example. I think maybe some Harry's or the shaving, like something was happening at Wharton to generate these companies. And there was this sense, like Facebook ads were very cheap at the time in comparison. They basically got generally more expensive.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  Year over year. And people were realizing, working with distributors, you know this from Lucy, working at distributors is a nightmare for every, every company, right? They, they sort of sit between you and the retailer. The retailer sits between the distributor and the end customer. And so there's these layers and there's this idea of if you could sell products online, Facebook ended up being the best distribution channel for products, probably in history. You could scale brands tremendously fast overnight. And a lot of these businesses ended up just raising just obscene amounts of capital on the idea that, basically if ad rates didn't go, prices, prices for ads didn't go up a lot, you would

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

  have been able to just print money. It was like a money machine where spend a hundred dollars on Facebook, get $500 back. You could just do that perpetually. So I became close friends with Connor at the time and, and we, we, you know, helped him out with Ridge and then, you know, got to work out of their office for a while. And Connor's daily life was just finding, you know, basically navigating the labyrinth, which he describes here of, you know, optimizing existing ad channels, trying to test and find new ones. Even, you know, the Connor and the Ridge guys were smart early on to not put a huge emphasis on organic social. It was never sort of a huge priority for the company. And that ended up being the right decision because all these brands that had built big businesses off of...

• 1:51:13Jordi Hays?

  Organic social media. Facebook at one point was just like, yeah, like you don't, this is not, this reach isn't real. Your reach is not reach. You know, we're basically going to take this away. And from, and from that point on, there was a period where organic social almost didn't matter at all. And so anyways, if, when I see, you know, I'm invested in a number of different sort of consumer product companies, people like Pat, Pat, Paki's brother, Dan McCormick, who's intensely good at this similar archetype as Connor. He's just sort of constantly focused on optimizing paid acquisition. The Aurora CEO,

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Brian Keller, my business partner is like world class at this too. And so the brands that are doing well right now are ones that are hyper fixated on like performance optimization. And it really is this scientific process of experimentation and, you know, proper, you know, balancing these sort of super, super complicated tasks where like the idea of e-commerce is so simple. You make a product, you put it online, you run ads against it. But then the reality is like this constant stressful labyrinth of, you know, trying to make the equation of e-commerce work. You got two, that means you should shotgun one. John's got a couple Celsius.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  I mean, we really got to do the deep dive on Celsius because born in the D to C era and yet not a D to C play.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  At all.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  And I think, I think that's kind of the, the next, I mean, Ridge is certainly still heavily e-commerce focused and they've developed a fantastic team around that, but they are going into retail and growing that category. And I think more and more teams are realizing that omnichannel early makes a lot of sense, but it's a very different skillset. It's very, very hard and it's, it's just a completely different culture motion. I mean, I remember reading this book by Mark Rappola, The High Hanging Fruit. This guy started Vita Coco, this coconut water company that he sold, I think to Pepsi for a lot of money. He did very, very well. And he was telling the story of how he got

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  a distributor network in New Jersey on board. And he went to the distributor and was just like, showed up with an F-150, whichever one of you guys sells the most coconut water this week gets this F-150. And that was like, the best money he ever spent.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  And that is just so different from, let me look at the spreadsheet and see, what was our ROAS to CAC and click through ratio on this ad? And what was the two-second retention on this video ad? And how do we get more UGC? Like, the D to C playbook is just completely different from like, oh, you know, a guy, you know, which is the very much like the retail old school. So blending those together, really difficult, but when you get it right, the company can really, really rip. Anyway, should we move on to Arowan this, Arowan that? My grocery store has a stolen phone laundering laundering machine and lets me open carry. Post from Sam Austin. You're a big Arowan guy. Are you going to be switching?

• 1:54:29Jordi Hays?

  I might. I need to find out where this is.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  This is wild. I don't understand the stolen phone laundering. I guess it's a, it's a machine and it says safely and securely, an iPhone XR could net you up to $65. You just dump the phone in there and it immediately gets you instant cash. Pretty crazy business model. I wonder who's behind this.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if it has any way to figure out if the iPhone's actually unlocked or factory reset. You would hope that they require you to have a factory reset.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder if this is, I wonder how much, I mean, obviously they're joking that, oh, this is about laundering stolen phones. But clearly stolen phones would be an issue with a system like this. And I wonder what safeguards the company has in, has in place for that. But I thought this was funny because they're taking shots at Arowan. I just wanted to highlight it.

• 1:55:15Jordi Hays?

  Defend Arowan.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, back to tech, back to business, back to the serious stuff on the timeline. Eperus announced a $250 million Series D fundraise to hyperscale Leonitis production capacity. Leonitis is a solid-state, software-defined, high-energy, high-power microwave technology that delivers unmatched counter-electronics capabilities, tested and proven as a scalable counter-swarm solution, another answer to those drone swarms that we keep seeing on the timeline. Very cool defense tech company, a Joe Laundale project, I believe.

• 1:55:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yeah, and so there's a lot of reasons why this company is important. There's been, there's been some naysayers around this tech, right? So that this is non-kinetic, which means it's entirely using energy directed towards these sort of swarms. The reason that this is so important is there's a lot of places in the world that need to be secured against drones that you can't shoot bullets into the air. So a picture at a, you know, so Allen Control Systems makes a ton of sense on Battlefield, right? It's a sort of turret that you, you know, can put on a truck or a tank or, you know, stationary.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Gun on a truck.

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  Gun on a truck.

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  But the challenge is you can't put that on top of a NFL stadium, right? Because it would just involve firing bullets into the air, you know, into a city, right? It just doesn't, completely doesn't work. And so if we're going to have effective defenses against drone swarms in these sort of non-Battlefield environments. Also, there's a volume, there's like a volume problem too, right? If you have a drone swarm of 100, are you going to be able to reliably hit, you know, 100 of these? And so we need both kinetic and non-kinetic solutions and a huge vote of confidence for Eperus. And I believe this is an 8 VC company. Joe Laundale had a post, he said, "Directed EMP is becoming a critical part of warfare and deterrence.

• 1:57:18Jordi Hays?

  Duty bases, ships, vehicles, planes, satellites, and other defense systems will all use these capabilities to dominate the battlefield and to protect warfighters and civilians in various contexts." So, cool, both wartime and civilian applications.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  That's great. Let's go to Schwedda. She says, "Your fear of being cringe is limiting the ceiling of your potential."

• 1:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, everything you want is on the other side of cringe.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  And a phone call that you don't want to make, which is, which is a form of cringe.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Cringing, thinking about making that phone call in the Jeremy Giffon parlayance.

• 1:57:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I see Julian Weiser is commenting here saying, we're killing cringe. Yeah, let's just stop. Everybody just, let's put a year-long pause on cringing, both the act, the worry.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  And using the word. The word did get played out very quickly, right?

• 1:58:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  But yeah, you gotta put yourself out there, take risks. I mean, the beauty is that, I mean, I, I, I felt this very deeply when I started the YouTube channel during, uh, during, uh, COVID. Uh, because it's so awkward to be on camera the first time and you're putting this.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  And being a, you, being an adult man saying, I'm gonna be a YouTuber.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  There's a million things that are wrong with it, right? Uh, so I just didn't tell anyone and I just put it out on YouTube and then the bad ones didn't go viral, so no one saw them.

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the, the, the Schwedens' argument here is that you should have just been promoting them aggressively.

• 1:58:43John Coogan?

  I guess, I guess, but there is something to, uh, like, at least on YouTube, like letting the algorithm sort it out and figure it out. And, and just getting the reps in and stuff. And yeah, maybe, I don't know, maybe I should have been.

• 1:58:55Jordi Hays?

  You'd be at, you'd be at 10 million by now.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. Who knows? But, uh, yeah, I mean, the, the, the beauty is that it, it, it, you have to be really, really bad to get, to go viral in a negative way. Most of the time, if you do something that's received as cringe or, or negative or, or dumb, like, it just doesn't get views and so it doesn't matter. So put yourself out there. Uh, let's go to Robin. Robin says, when SF realizes their Waterloo pipeline is actually just a pipeline from like four high schools in Canada, they're gonna go nuts.

• 1:59:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to be honest, John, the smartest VCs I know are actually going even further. They're offering to fund the middle school.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  Middle schools.

• 1:59:39Jordi Hays?

  Eater schools that go to those high schools. So they're going to these, these. You know, middle schools and saying 100K uncapped note, just take it now. And we just want to look, once you get through Waterloo, once you're starting a company.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, people have, people have copied so much of like Peter Thiel's stuff. No one's, no one's done the more aggressive Thiel fellowship of like drop out of middle school, drop out of lower school, like stop everything.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  We'll give you $200 to, to, to, to skip third grade and try and build a company. I wouldn't be surprised, but yeah, probably stay in school kids.

• 2:00:20Jordi Hays?

  Our kids are listening to this.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  I think you can wait, I think you can wait until you graduate high school at least.

• 2:00:25Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna be like, dad, I saw the episode.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Back in 2025.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  You said that there could be some potential in dropping out of middle school. I want to make the leap.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, did you see the MCP meme going on yesterday?

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  I didn't see the meme.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  I mean, people are just posting about it, but Greg here says benchmark idea. You fund a model, an AI model with $200 in a Stripe account and you give it access to the internet and a large list of MCPs, measure increase in balance at 14, 30, 90, 180 and 360 days, no developer intervention. Most models wouldn't even be able to spend their first dollar. This is the universal or not universal basic income. It's that, uh, what is it? Artificial economic intelligence, just once the model can make money, then we're in business because that's very quantifiable. It's a new, it's a new benchmark. Yeah. And I like this.

• 2:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's a, it's going to be very funny when there's just like online activity that does not make sense to humans.

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Or it's like some equivalent of these sort of Nigerian like Prince scams or some of these like, you know, you get DMs from NFT projects saying, hi boss, I'd like to, you know, promote, you know, whatever, uh, this sort of spam. There's going to be this sort of AI slop, uh, money-making sort of, uh, programs running that, that you're just going to see as a human and you're just like. Like, come on. But then it works like one out of every 10,000 times.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:55Jordi Hays?

  And so that then it becomes a sort of viable economic model. So.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Oh, man, I saw a great AI scam. I got a breakdown for you. So.

• 2:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Hit me.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  It's a 30 minute AI generated, deep faked lip sync video of like a priest and then a number of different pitchmen and celebrities telling you about a special prayer. If you say this prayer, wealth will come to you. But they just keep talking to you for 30 minutes, telling you all about this prayer and how valuable it is and how it will transform your life. And then at the very end, after 30 minutes of watching this AI slop, that's very clearly like the mouth isn't aligned properly, but it's like close. It, there's like a add to cart button. And the add to cart button is just like, you pay them and then you get like this prayer that you can say.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  And it's so funny because they, they walk through the pitch and they're like, like, oh yeah, like I saw this in a corridor crew video.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  Like, oh yeah, like, you know, like we, we have to, we have to pay for like our servers and stuff to host this prayer. And so you, you, you have to pay a little bit.

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  How much is it?

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  Give it to you for free. Uh, I don't know. It's probably like 20 bucks or something. But the, the corridor crew's been doing great, great videos. They're VFX artists, but they also work with all the frontier AI visual tools. And so they, they, they highlight a bunch of these AI scams. One of them that was really funny that I saw was, uh, they AI generate an image of like a sweater. It's like a cable knit sweater and it looks all like, uh, like Irish and like regal, like you're out in like the forest or something. And it's on this like, you know, uh, blonde model and they run an ad on that. And then when you go to buy it.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  What they ship you is not a sweater. It's a T-shirt with a sweater printed on it. Cause they clearly have the machinery not to make the sweaters, but just to print anything on a T-shirt.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  And so you get the AI design that they sold you, but it's just printed on a T-shirt. It's so funny. But at the same time, the quarter crew guys were talking about, hey, they're, they're actually going to do some like AI generated camo T-shirts. We're the only. They're disclosing this. Hello. Do we have someone joining? Perfect. Perfect timing. Welcome to the show.

• 2:04:16Nichole Wischoff?

  Let's go.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:04:20Jordi Hays?

  What is it? Nikki Wiki?

• 2:04:23Nichole Wischoff?

  God, Rory, I could kill him.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  I think we've mispronounced your name so many times. Is it Wischoff?

• 2:04:30Nichole Wischoff?

  Wischoff.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  Wischoff. I'm sorry. Well, now, now we'll know. So anyway, thank you for joining. Give us a little kickoff. Introduce yourself. Tell us about your fund. Tell us about why you're here today.

• 2:04:43Nichole Wischoff?

  Oh my gosh. Yeah. So one, thank you so much for having me. Huge OG fan. So Nicole Wischoff, solo GP. I run Wischoff Ventures, which is a fund focused on precedency to stage companies, North America and super unsexy businesses, which happy to unpack. Started in 2021, have three funds and about 80 million in assets and just trying to fricking build this thing as I fly it. So.

• 2:05:09John Coogan?

  How'd you raise the first fund?

• 2:05:11Nichole Wischoff?

  First one was five million. I was still operating. So that's my background. And I had met a ton of VCs, raised a few hundred million at, on the startup side of the world. And learned about VC fund to funds. So Bain, Thrive, Foundation, all of those guys want access to great companies early. And so got a call from a VC friend that was like, you should raise a fund, you're angel investing. Let us give you like half a million bucks. The rest is history. So I raised five million pretty quickly. I think like 20 ish LPs was doing it on the side. Decided I loved it. And then in 22, raised 20 last year, raised 50. So it's like, it's actually happening.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Such a narrative, such a narrative violation. One. SoloGP that didn't have a Twitter account before you like, like the fund came before the Twitter account, which is rare. Two started in 2021 and have delivered, you know, from, from all the data that I've seen, phenomenal performance. And so it's just, no, it's been amazing to see. How did you, so many people never find their voice online. It felt like you did quickly and it's just, it was natural and, and you know, we know people that spend five hours a day to try to produce X content that just completely flops.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Yet it seems like you have this sort of effortless ability to just, I think you treat it like, like a personal, like notes to self almost, but it just resonates. How long did it take you to kind of find that voice?

• 2:06:44Nichole Wischoff?

  I would say it was from the start, though it wasn't intentional and I to this day don't have any drafts, like I could, I think, but maybe I have four in there from like drinking too much and like, you know, like maybe I should wait until tomorrow. I have rules. I tell my LPs, I have three rules for Twitter. I can go through those, but so I was in a group chat with like Alex Cohen, who like shit posts and like you guys know Alex and Karen Frank, who's now an investor at Lightspeed, Aaron, don't kill me. And we're in this group chat, was never on Twitter, not even as like a, I'm scrolling just to see what, like lurking. So I actually didn't know how insane people are to each other on it. So I came in and I was like, cool, this is like a cool app. And 21, because Aaron was like, Nicole, you're a VC now, you have to like use Twitter.

• 2:07:27Nichole Wischoff?

  And so I hard launched with a $5 million fund. I have like my first viral tweet, probably like a week later. And it was something like, I don't know if you guys were even, you probably know who I was, this was like through a couple of years ago. And I said something like, can confirm that it is 10x easier to raise a $5 million fund than to get 500 Twitter followers on X, like for now X. And Alex Cohen retweets it and is like, you guys, you're Nicole a bone, like she's a loser. And anyway, like totally takes off. So I always say like, the first thousand was tough. And since then, honestly, like I think, I think a few things. One, I keep them super short. I try to never say like, start them with I. And I'm like, hey, you know, had a thought last night, blah, blah, blah. And have an opinion on whatever I'm talking about. And then the shorter they are, the more they rip. And so I've stuck to that. I try to say what I think.

• 2:08:10Nichole Wischoff?

  It is absolutely backfired. If I don't have one once a quarter that like, doesn't like bury me alive and VC brags is like taking it to the moon, then I'm not doing it right. And so I just have to like, I just lean into it, but that's like, kind of the motion that I've, that's been happening.

• 2:08:27Jordi Hays?

  What do you advise your portfolio founders around using X? Because there's no perfect way to use it. There's downsides to everything. I'm sure a lot of your top of funnel deal flow, I'm sure is through your network, but I'm sure a similar amount is through X. And so I'm sure you, you invest in companies and they're like, okay, Nicole, teach me how to sort of unlock the platform. How often are you advising them to just focus on your business and just ignore the platform versus when are you telling them? You know, hey, you can get some value here.

• 2:09:00Nichole Wischoff?

  So honestly, because I'm doing pre-seed seed and it's so early, there's so much other crap to figure out that like, if they're focusing on getting like, you know, 10 followers a day, which you guys know you're building this thing too. Like in the beginning, it's slow and then it's not, but like it takes a commitment. It's daily. They could be doing so many other things to de-risk the business for the first at least two years. So I typically don't want to have that conversation until honestly, series A, series B. They've got like more of a team and I've, by the way, I've advised plenty of companies and tried to get it going. And like it just, there is no time for it. There's no consistency. So I think it's largely a distraction. Though, okay, I've got this with some people are just naturals. I think you have it or you don't. I don't think it's like this learned skill. Like, look at Nikita, like ask him if he ever got help with like tweets.

• 2:09:42Nichole Wischoff?

  You know, it's just, he's just a natural at saying what he thinks and having thick skin and it just works. So if my founders are asking me for help on building a Twitter strategy, it usually means they shouldn't be doing it. And that's most people generally, not even my founders.

• 2:09:56Jordi Hays?

  How sharp are your elbows, your pre-seed seed? You're, I'm assuming you're trying to get 10% ownership. I'm sure there's some flexibility there. You put out like, I wouldn't say you don't have an aggressive persona, but we can tell you're really like an athlete, right? Like, when you're competing for rounds, are you trying to take as much as you possibly can? Or do you take a more collaborative approach these days?

• 2:10:25Nichole Wischoff?

  I'm a firm believer that it takes a village to get a company off the ground. So I would argue something totally different. If you're a series A, take the whole round. You're adding like strategic value. You have a platform and like one fund can do that. So if my founders are like, hey, one fund wants to take the whole A, I'm like, go for it. I think if you're series, like if you're pre-seed seed, you want all the strategic angels. They're like one call away from an intro to Walmart or like a huge brand that you want. Or like those little things that people like do for you early on, like actually I think do help the business. First customers, first hires. So I always try to take, let's say for fun too, is I wanted to get 5% typical dilution at pre-seed seeds, like 20%, maybe 15. And so I'm never usually having issues like getting that. By the way, I hate hot deals. They never were.

• 2:11:10Nichole Wischoff?

  I've done all the deals, all the multi-stage funds at pre-seed seed. They're like my worst, like I shouldn't say they're, they're still in business and it's going well. But like, they're not standing out and shining any brighter than other companies. Like this is super hard. And also I paid 2X what I should have. And so I hate noise. If there's a ton of funds running in one direction, I just run the other. So like sharp elbows, no, but I try to be super realistic about rounds and structures. And really collaborative is the short answer.

• 2:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Where have you made investments that you're still excited about? That you're done investing sort of broadly in the category?

• 2:11:44Nichole Wischoff?

  So, well, I feel like I'm dipping my toes back in, even though I left for two years. I think, look, lending is really hard in a high interest rate environment, right? Like your facilities are so expensive that like your burn is like through the roof. So for a lot of companies that were trying to build insuretechs or lending businesses, they got, and they only had maybe 2 million in the bank. They just never raised another round. Or I was looking at those businesses thinking like, If I even see this, you're not going to be in the clear for at least two to three years or another fund is comfortable underwriting this type of business. And so I mean, I got my MBA. I feel like right when I started my venture journey on like great markets and horrible markets because Fund One is 2021. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm so good at this. And then like 23, I was like, I am so bad at this. And then 24, I was like, you know what? I'm going to stick around

• 2:12:27Nichole Wischoff?

  and like, you know, figure this thing out. So I think lending is dicey, but now I'm getting excited about it again. So, um, yeah.

• 2:12:35John Coogan?

  What's the vision for the fund going forward? I saw you just hired two people. Is that right? Is that how big the firm is?

• 2:12:42Nichole Wischoff?

  Yes. So there are three of us full time and then like outsourced the agency for some of the social stuff and all of that, which is really expensive, actually. And so, yeah, I want to keep the team super small. I want to stay scrappy. I think you start to get lazy when you start building layers, the team. Like, I want to be fresh. I want to be on calls. Like, I want to be in the ground, like just doing the work with companies. Longer term, look, I want to be the fund in North America and the categories we invest in, like precedents stage founders like want to work with first, above anybody else. And that takes time. Like, that's a lot of that's brand. Like, how do we build this repeatable motion of like, everyone knows who I am and everyone wants to work with me. And I reference well because I like do the work. So.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  What about super long term? Private equity arm?

• 2:13:27Nichole Wischoff?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  Wealth manager.

• 2:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Going public.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  Public.

• 2:13:30Nichole Wischoff?

  Oh, man.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Catalyst, you know, why not you?

• 2:13:35Nichole Wischoff?

  I think I had a tweet once that was like, listen, may I be so successful in venture that I have like a P arm? I have a growth arm. I'm doing like roll ups. I have a fund of funds. And I think the last piece was like.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  High frequency.

• 2:13:49Nichole Wischoff?

  Yeah, I was like, I have every single thing that absolutely no one knows how they're performing because we like, no one can manage it all. Like, which I would say are a lot of these platforms. Like, no one could tell you how their fund of funds are doing. Uh, maybe, you know, I honestly, like I, I, I'm a big fan of small and nimble. Like I think if you realistically, if you want to put up great returns, and I think USV has been amazing at this. Like if you ask them and they're doing series A and their funds are sub 300, like they, that keeps them up at night and like 50 million, that doesn't quite keep me up at night. I'm excited, but I think like going over 150 and you can, guys can pull this up when I, hopefully if I don't ever do it, but if I do and be like Nicole, but

• 2:14:24Jordi Hays?

  We'll have you on for the news and then we'll pull up this, this, this clip and we'll say.

• 2:14:30Nichole Wischoff?

  Well, Nicole did everything wrong. Um, no, but look, I, I think there's value, a lot of value. And if we want to say that we can legitimately ideally more than 3X, I always try to aim for let's say 5X plus, which by the way, not even $10 million funds, 3X ever. It's just really hard. Um, then we need to stay nimble and it's all portfolio construction. So just follow the math and then, yeah.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Well, we have five minutes. I, I want to hear about the company. What's going on?

• 2:14:55Nichole Wischoff?

  Oh my gosh, you guys. So I was not planning to do this, but I was like, John, I might just like hard launch a company I just co-founded.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 2:15:03Nichole Wischoff?

  So we're doing it. This is the exclusive. This is like no joke. So, um, raise money for it. No one knows about it, except the person that funded it and like my LPs. Um, so, uh, I have been investing and just to like to tee this up, um, in software companies, serving data centers. I think if you follow the power, you and the infrastructure, you'll know where AI is going. So, um, and then my partner was simultaneously consulting data center, a guy building data centers in Waterloo. So we're both like, wait, there's something here. Um, so we co-founded a business called Kratos, which I think is a good name, but you know, Kratos AI.

• 2:15:40Nichole Wischoff?

  And we are building next gen AI data centers, not great venture bets. So there's founder shares in the funds, um, but no check from the fund in it, though we've raised money from strategic family offices. More of like a private credit, think like 75% debt, 25% equity. Um, and we're making the case that there's tons of capital going towards hyperscalers. If you're a hyperscaler, you're saying, look, we're going to own the market and there's only going to be a few of us and everyone's going to use our data centers and we totally disagree. I think if you're for training, it makes a lot of sense for inference. You need, you don't need as high latency. So we could be like a hundred miles or less from. Like the tier two, tier three cities and still have solid latency for inference.

• 2:16:22Nichole Wischoff?

  So if you start asking around and hopefully people are listening in, like I had a founder tell me in like the Y C like alumni channel, all these companies like are like, hey, like who has data center or like co-location capacity for us? Like we want to like, like save costs from hyperscalers. Like where can we go from here? I don't use a huge market for these like 10 to 25 megawatt data centers. So I'm working on our first location 20 megawatts. You guys, this is like the craziest thing I've ever done. I don't have an active role because like the funds are the baby, but I can certainly help with distribution and fundraising. And the last thing I'll say is these are really expensive projects. So these are a 20 megawatt facility net, like brand new constructions around a hundred million.

• 2:17:04Nichole Wischoff?

  And so, and again, we don't want to give up too much on the equity side, but there's something here and we're going for it. So.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  I like it too, because even if it's, even if it's not a traditional venture bet, if there's common shares in the fund or however you structured it, you could return your fund, I imagine off of just this one company, which is amazing. You've done, the last question I have, you've done, you do a bunch of stuff in supply chain. You're a venture capitalist, so obviously you're also a geopolitical expert. Comes with the territory. How are you, do you think these sort of trade wars are, are, are good for a number of your portfolio companies? Specifically focused on supply chain management, just because there's going to be, suddenly it's, it's sort of the, the thing to talk about.

• 2:17:49Jordi Hays?

  It's sort of this pressing issue. What, what, and more broadly, what advice are you, are you giving to those companies in your portfolio?

• 2:17:57Nichole Wischoff?

  Yeah, I'd say that there's really like one or two that it could directly impact significantly. One being a company that's like literally in logistics, it's right between Mexico and the United States. So like part of me is like, holy crap, like what's the impact there? Look, ultimately we have to show dominance. So like, I'm very pro every, every type of flex that the administration is putting on both. Canada and Mexico, which are most relevant to what I do. And so let's can go honestly, like, I think ultimately, I'm hoping that we're bluffing to get what we want. So my bet is like, oh, my God, keep delaying. I think I just saw the headlines of Canada that like, it's like, Trump's delaying it like 30 days, or I don't know what it is. So anyway, I love the flex. I hope it's only a flex, but it would impact what's going on, at least for a couple of our companies. So I'm like keeping my fingers and toes crossed. But again, we have to exert dominance.

• 2:18:42Nichole Wischoff?

  So I'm happy with the administration.

• 2:18:44Jordi Hays?

  I love the energy. Augustus Dorca was on the show earlier, and he's called Taiwan an American colony. So you guys are both in the same camp. Nicole, it's so great to have you. Congrats on the new company. We would love to have you on whenever you have portfolio news, whenever you have fun news, you're always welcome on the show. You are a brother to us.

• 2:19:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Technology brother.

• 2:19:06Nichole Wischoff?

  Love you guys. Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Now we have Billy. Are you there?

• 2:19:15Speaker 05

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  It's going great. I'm going to read your post, and then you'll kick it off. Enter the sea glider era. The world's first sea glider has hit the water room for 12 passengers and 100% battery powered. The test vehicle is human crewed from day one, 65 foot wingspan, 15,000 pounds. Trials are underway. You're in the back of a car. Break it down. What'd you launch? How's it going?

• 2:19:39Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this has always been John's vision for the show is that you could just basically anywhere you are in the world, you just pull up your phone and you're on the show. So welcome to the show.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for calling.

• 2:19:48Speaker 05

  Exactly what it is. No, thank you, guys. You know, the start of prime for sure. So we're hustling right now. But awesome week for Regent. So we're four years old as a company building sea gliders, which are all electric flying boats for regional transportation dual use. So we're doing regional routes. Imagine like Manhattan to the Hamptons and under an hour for 60 bucks, go in Miami, out to the Bahamas or Key West, all around the world. So this is the first prototype vehicle. This summer, when we fly it, it'll be the largest electric flying machine in history, 15,000 pounds. For now, first big milestone was just getting it on the water and starting some testing.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Can you talk about the advantages of being regulated? I believe it's regulated as a boat, but you still get the speed of something much faster than a boat. And that seems to be maybe the key insight here that allows you to just move faster, bring this to market and deliver kind of a flying car almost, or a new plane, a new mode of transportation in a way that's just so much easier and faster and more like a startup pace. Break that down.

• 2:20:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's exactly right. My background was in the aviation space. And so I was engineering in sort of the beginning of the EV total hype cycle, which I think we're still very much in. We're starting to see some consolidation there. But, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid. We're building those vehicles. We've done flew a few. But the sort of the thing I kept hitting my head against the wall was the limited range of an electric aircraft flying on batteries. You can't really go that far. And also this billion dollars, decade-long certification pathway. And so we realized that if we sort of brought this electric aviation technology and put it in the maritime domain, we actually solved both problems. The first is that as long as we stay within a wingspan of the surface of the water and stay over the water,

• 2:21:38Speaker 05

  there's actually a special class of vehicle called a wing and ground effect vehicle. We made up the word sea glider because wing in ground or wig is very difficult to Google. You don't get vehicles when you Google wigs. And so, but there's this regulatory regime where they stay under the Coast Guard jurisdiction because operationally, you're in the waterways anyways. You're not going into airspace or deconflicting with air traffic. And then on the other side, flying low altitude on this cushion of air, like birds are flying over the water, you're actually really aerodynamically efficient. So we can go much longer range than any other electric flying machine. So we solve both problems.

• 2:22:13John Coogan?

  That's cool. Can you break down some of the advantages of going electric? I remember when we talked, it's not just about saving the planet and avoiding emissions. It's also about efficiency and, and like actually being maintenance and less parts. Can you break all that down for me?

• 2:22:30Speaker 05

  That's exactly what I told Bellion in our first pitch meeting.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:22:33Speaker 05

  It was exactly that, right?

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:35Speaker 05

  You know, we need to build this business around sustainability of the business model, not necessarily sustainability from an emissions perspective of the product. So the driving cost in short haul aviation, if you think of how an airplane ages, it's actually the maintenance costs that age by the cycles. You take off and land and you're impacting your landing gear, you're expanding and contracting your fuselage, when you pressurize it, you're heating up and cooling your engine. So the driving cost on the short haul is actually maintenance. And the shorter the route, the more cycles you do, the more you age it. So it's sort of this runaway effect. If you switch to an all-electric system, now you have very few moving parts. They age by the hour. There's not a lot of heat generated. And so for short haul, electrification makes a ton of sense. And that's actually where the range sort of buys you with electrification.

• 2:23:19Speaker 05

  I don't need to cross the ocean. I'm trying to connect people to the metropolitan centers. And there's this huge hole in the market because we're talking about routes on the order of 100 to 200 miles today that can get up to 300 to 400 miles with better batteries. So these are routes where it's too far to drive anyways. You get caught in traffic. We don't really have high-speed rail in America or even around the world, but it's too short to fly because you're sitting in the airport longer than you're in the airplane itself.

• 2:23:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've never seen a plane with 10 propellers on it. Why 10, not two big ones?

• 2:23:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we had our quarter-scale prototype that had the eight propellers on the wing. Our full-scale now has 12 propellers across the wing. So what we're doing, this configuration is called a blown wing. It's not that clever a name. We blow the wing with the propeller wash coming off the props. And so we're basically tricking the wing into generating high lift at low speeds because the wing sees fast-moving air, even when the vehicle's moving slowly. And sort of the whole unlock of the sea gliders, if you're like, you know, this isn't that new, we have sea planes, why are we doing this? You know, the whole point is that sea planes and flying boats in the past have these planing holes. And so if you've gone over like 10 miles an hour on a boat in any sea state, you'll know how bumpy that ride gets.

• 2:24:36Speaker 05

  So sort of in the best-case scenario, it's bumpy and uncomfortable. Worst case scenario, you can't take off at all. That's why seaplanes have never really scaled and they're sort of restricted to lakes and rivers. So we needed to solve the wave tolerance problem. We do that with hydrofoils. So if you're familiar with, you know, America's Cup, SailGP, the e-foil surfboards.

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were looking at going with SailGP here in L.A.

• 2:25:00Speaker 05

  Have you gone?

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  I haven't yet. We're thinking about going. It seems awesome.

• 2:25:03Speaker 05

  You need to go. It's so, it's like you and you will intimately understand how the wave tolerance of the hydrofoil works. Cause it just lifts you off and it's like a magic carpet and it's kind of surreal. So it also makes you appreciate what our flight control system is doing because balancing yourself takes a little while and you fall a lot. But the point is we get wave tolerance up to five feet on this vehicle. So the model is if your commercial airplanes are flying, the sea gliders are going to, we can take off in five foot seas. Hydrofoils have a limited top speed because of the drag of the water. And so we needed to lower the takeoff speed to overlap with that hydrofoil. For the first time to figure that out.

• 2:25:46Speaker 05

  We slow down the takeoff speed enough to take off from the hydrofoil. So that was actually the other reason why we electrified again. The, the sustainability is, is a nice benefit, but it's secondary. We electrified because it's economical. And we electrified because it's a pretty good way of distributing propulsion on, on a wing rather than a bunch of different engines or a gearboxes.

• 2:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Long-term, are you planning to own the entire traveler experience from booking to operating the routes to obviously making the aircraft? I can imagine this as kind of a JSX that actually owns and, you know, develops.

• 2:26:24Speaker 05

  And certainly.

• 2:26:29Jordi Hays?

  I think we can hear you. Can you hear us?

• 2:26:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, we definitely thought about it. Yeah, do you got me?

• 2:26:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're good.

• 2:26:35Speaker 05

  I'm on the road. You still got me?

• 2:26:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:38Speaker 05

  Cool. We definitely thought about it in the early stage. The EV toll companies are sort of doing that end to end thing. For us, we said like, this is a brand new mode of transportation. People are going to need to build trust on it. And what better way for both passengers to build up trust and candidly, investors to build up trust in this wacky electric flying boat company? Than to have sort of established brands with all already existing operations be our customers. So our customers are airlines, our customers are ferry companies, our customer is the Marine Corps and the high speed logistics mission. But those are the entities that are buying sea gliders and operating it. We're the Boeing or Airbus here.

• 2:27:17Speaker 05

  When we founded, I said, we're the Boeing of sea gliders. That's become a little taboo. So now I say we're the Airbus of sea gliders, which makes me hurt as an American, but here we are.

• 2:27:27John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 2:27:28Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  Can you give us a little background on where the company is, how big you guys are, what you've raised, where you're going next, who you're hiring, that type of stuff?

• 2:27:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, we are based in the Silicon Valley of the east.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:41Speaker 05

  Of Rhode Island.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:44Speaker 05

  So, you know, it's actually a growing technology. Andorl's moving into town. There's a few drone boat companies and underwater companies. So we're really seeing a growth in Rhode Island. You know, it's the Ocean State, awesome test environment for us. Some of the best boat builders in the world. Newport, Rhode Island, home of the Americas Cup. So it was a really great place for us to set up. We're about 100 people now. We actually just broke ground on a 255,000 square foot manufacturing facility also in Rhode Island. So we're going to be building sea gliders here. We're going to be scaling to another few hundred employees as we school up our manufacturing. Expect to open that facility in early 26 and deliver sea gliders and enter service.

• 2:28:27Speaker 05

  Probably starting in Hawaii or Miami or some of the top two that our early customer wants to go to. And that entry to service in like late 26, early 27.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:28:38John Coogan?

  Jordan, you have anything else?

• 2:28:39Jordi Hays?

  We gotta host a show in one of these bad boys as soon as we can. Uh, it's been a dream of ours to do it from the air.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  I want to take it out to Cali.

• 2:28:46Speaker 05

  Got it. Summer in Rhode Island. Got to come out.

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we gotta go out there. Uh, well, I mean, thank you so much for calling in, giving us the update firsthand. Uh, we'll, we'll, we'll share the video and repost the clip. Uh, it's, uh, it's fascinating stuff and, uh, we really appreciate everything you're doing. So thanks for calling in and we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  Give us a call back when there's more news.

• 2:29:06Speaker 05

  You got it. I'll see you in Rhodey. We'll go out and see Gladiator.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:29:10Jordi Hays?

  See you in Rhodey.

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  We'll see you. Bye. That was great.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I don't know. I don't know if you can pull up the video, Ben, but, uh, they have some video of the, of the plane and it's, uh, yeah. I mean, it's, it's remarkable. Like it just feels like, I mean, we were talking about this with Gary, like the, the pace of play. And it's maybe just like the capital markets are more mature or something, but like, it just seems more doable to get a, you know, like 10s, 20 million, 50 million together and then go and build a big, you know, prototype and actually fly it around. And people are figuring out how to do the right lobbying, how to do the right, uh,

• 2:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  all the regulatory stuff and finding the regulatory arbitrage. That's my favorite thing about Regent. Like I think that the tech is cool, obviously, but it's so fascinating that they were able to build something that operates in the maritime domain and just accelerate everything that they do. So, uh, I love that. As soon as I heard that, I was like, oh, this is like, this is something that I really want to follow.

• 2:30:08Jordi Hays?

  And it is such a futuristic feeling craft that is perfectly practical.

• 2:30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You can take a look at it here. Uh, I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty sick.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  The biggest.

• 2:30:21Jordi Hays?

  People on Apple podcasts are having a bad time right now.

• 2:30:23John Coogan?

  They're having a bad time. Well, we will describe it. Uh, it's a cool plane and do you see they christened it with champagne and they didn't have to use one of those terrible machines they use in Europe. America undefeated. I love it. Uh, but yeah, I mean 12, I guess three engines on each wing. Uh, and it just coasts along the, uh, the surface. And we had a friend of the show asking us, uh, when are the, when are the billionaires going to start building hydrofoil yachts? I think this is the, the beginning of that trend. We've talked about the, the land yacht that can dig with a massive drill. And, uh, yeah, this is the, this is the next evolution. Anyway.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  Let's go back to the timeline.

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  We love to see it.

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  And then close out the show.

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  That's our first time having a guest call in while in the back of an Uber.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:13Jordi Hays?

  And it worked.

• 2:31:14John Coogan?

  It worked.

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  We had a brief moment, but he's.

• 2:31:18John Coogan?

  No, I mean, that is my goal for the show. Someone posts something, they're announcing it. You know, you'd go on, you know, you want to amplify it, just come and talk about it on the show. And so we'll, I'm sure we'll do a lot more of those. I love this post by Alexander Wang over at Scale AI. He says, reminder of American exceptionalism. US companies make up 74% of global market cap. Returns of the S and P since 2008 are 297% versus the rest of the world at four, negative 4%. It's pretty ridiculous. And it's funny, it's funny because like.

• 2:31:53Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong, John.

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, hit the gong for America. I mean, it's funny because like the narrative in so much of the media is like, things are more chaotic than ever. We're so divided, everything's terrible. And it's like, you know, the, when, when the right wing's in power, the left wing says it's all terrible. And when the left wing's in power, the right wing's in terrible. But when you zoom out, even just, you know, 15 years, you can see that America's doing pretty well, pretty well. And I remain extremely bullish on America. But there's not more, much more to say about that.

• 2:32:23Jordi Hays?

  All of our guests today have been extremely long, America.

• 2:32:25John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  As they should, as Americans.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  There was some bad news about the American economy. There was a big miss on ADP payrolls. You saw this from Joe Weisenthal, right?

• 2:32:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  They expected 140,000 new jobs added. It came in at 77,000. This is just one economic indicator. But if you've been following the markets and kind of the back and forth, the kangaroo market, right?

• 2:32:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  That's what it's called, right? Bouncing around. This is one of the data points that people have been pointing to. We don't go too deep into the, the economic data, but you know, everyone is, everyone's worried about, you know, job prospects and job growth. But let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says, overheard at Blue Bottle, technology brother A. I love that he's using that term. Hadn't heard anything from Mac since that hit piece, thought they were dead. Technology brother B says, nah, dog, it's called show, don't tell.

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  Mac.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  A reference to Ethan Thornton.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Mac had a new video drop, I think it was Tuesday.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  They seem to have made a bunch of progress.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  And. You never let a hit piece get you down.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  Just keep building.

• 2:33:36Jordi Hays?

  They're not, they're not, they're not, you know, giving in to the negativity. So I love to see it. Jeff was an early investor in MACH and he has, is building a reputation for sticking with founders when the media has turned on them.

• 2:33:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:53Jordi Hays?

  And I think that that is one of the most important reputations that you can build because it's easy for an investor to

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:59Jordi Hays?

  be your best friend when everything's going great, but to double, you know, double down on, on supporting somebody when they're in this sort of darkest period of their company is what, is what really

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:34:10Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. And I, and I'm talking with Jeff's team right now about having him come on the show.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 2:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Very soon. So excited for that.

• 2:34:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I hope he's wearing a tank top, looking absolutely shredded and.

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely dice. Jeff's always known that it's underpriced to be dice.

• 2:34:23John Coogan?

  He is. He, yeah.

• 2:34:25Jordi Hays?

  And open, we want, we would host a temp check weekly for Jeff.

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  Segment on the show. Yeah, for sure.

• 2:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Weekly segment.

• 2:34:34John Coogan?

  We need temp check segment for sure.

• 2:34:36Jordi Hays?

  Jeff, you don't have to do any production.

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, you do have to continue working out.

• 2:34:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  That's the key thing. You gotta.

• 2:34:42Jordi Hays?

  But you could do the temp check while working out.

• 2:34:43John Coogan?

  You gotta spam the delts and get the shoulders popping and get the biceps going. Cause yeah, we, we, we don't want, we don't want to scrawny Jeff Lewis on the show.

• 2:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that'd be a disaster.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  But, you know, as long as the takes are hot and he's supporting founders.

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Positive.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah. I, I hung out with Ethan, I want to say like a year or two ago and I mean, obviously the company's been like up and down. There's been this hit piece that everyone's mentioning. But he just seems like someone who's like really, really driven and is going to do something at some point very cool. And it's just like a good person to have on the America team.

• 2:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think they're iterating on product too.

• 2:35:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:35:24Jordi Hays?

  They also, to be clear, they announced a US army contract and that they're building a weapons factory.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah. We need more people building more cool stuff. So, you know, I'm, I'm excited to see Ethan get through the, the, the rise and fall and rise again. And I hope that he's successful. Let's go to David. VCs are living out again. Vibe shift.

• 2:35:48Jordi Hays?

  I didn't put that in.

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  You didn't put this in?

• 2:35:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't, we don't talk about politics.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  I don't know who they're talking about, but it is hilarious.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  It is clear that if you wanted to be contrarian, you had to.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  VCs for Kamala.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that was the actual contrarian move was to sign the list, even though.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Although Gavin Newsom, people are saying like, he's completely vibe shifted his way and went on some Charlie Kirk show.

• 2:36:14Jordi Hays?

  No, that was him having Charlie Kirk on his show.

• 2:36:17John Coogan?

  Wait, Gavin Newsom has a podcast?

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  He has a podcast.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  No way. Really? Okay. Interesting. Well, I mean, clearly there's going to be a, there's going to be a vibe shift and. But, but everyone's lost on this. Everyone's like, I don't see it. Elaborate. Like, nature is healing. People are having fun with it. Who knows? Anyway, flock safety is raising. Katie Roof has a scoop. Andreessen's leading around.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Jeff Lewis company.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is. We should have one to talk about when the, when the funding finally breaks. 7.5 billion for flock safety. They make cameras that sell to police departments and a bunch of other equipment, kind of the Palantir of local governments. That's been like a big question is like, is that possible? It's such a different sales motion because you're not just going lobbying in DC. You have to go district by district, but when you get in and when you're installed, it's very, very sticky, very low chart. And so I think they have great finances, great, great cohorts, great company, interesting team. And I want to get to know them more because it seems like a really cool company and it seems like, like a very important task, obviously. Anyway, let's move on to Autism Capital.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  They say, if Steve Jobs were alive, were still alive, he would issue a letter to all stockholders saying he's about to dump all of Apple's extra cash into perfecting augmented reality because we have an imperative as the steward of innovation to drive humanity forward and build the tools of tomorrow. Interesting, rare, like hard post. I feel like this account mostly posts like news and clips and stuff, but yeah, breaking. Also, his, his post on X would be fire. He'd be arguing and calling people the R word all day long. I don't know if that'd be that good, but.

• 2:37:57Jordi Hays?

  Here's the, here's the, here's the main thing is that Steve Jobs wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash, which is an. Incredible amount. You talked about this earlier.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  I think they have 60 right now, 60 billion. But they have returned over a trillion over the past like 15 years.

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Apple spent an estimated 150 million over 30 months to develop the first iPhone.

• 2:38:19John Coogan?

  Million? Oh, million.

• 2:38:21Jordi Hays?

  150 million. So.

• 2:38:22John Coogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 2:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Steve would have seen what's possible. You know, obviously there's been inflation and you know, whatever. You could come up with a bunch of excuses, but you have to imagine that that he would be running it like a startup internally and saying, you know, and sort of going founder mode.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, it seems like the algorithm would probably be just, you know, make, make like crazy, aggressive decisions and compromises until you find something that actually has product market fit with yourself. Like, do you believe that Tim Cook daily drives an Apple Vision Pro? Or do you think he's churned from it?

• 2:39:01Jordi Hays?

  Churned for sure.

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  I think everyone kind of churned.

• 2:39:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  Except for that one guy. I forgot.

• 2:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:09John Coogan?

  There was one writer who mentioned that he was still using it. I have a friend who still uses it every once in a while and I want to be using it. It's so close to being, to being good, but it's not quite there. What else should we close the show out with? Oh, this is a great one from Matt Lasky. Wife just taught me the professional way to say told you so is this was identified early on as a likely outcome. Going to be using this a lot. I love this one. I just thought this was funny.

• 2:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I put this one in.

• 2:39:40John Coogan?

  You put this one in?

• 2:39:42Jordi Hays?

  We got to start. We wouldn't honestly use that because our culture is, well, no, our our culture internally is we try to make.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:52Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 2:39:53John Coogan?

  You don't take a victory lap on a, on a told you so.

• 2:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're working and you're trying to, you know, take the job of your CEO.

• 2:40:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:40:01Jordi Hays?

  This is a great line. This was identified early as a likely outcome and, you know, really take the victory lap on a, on a poor outcome.

• 2:40:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:40:12John Coogan?

  Where else should we end up? There's some other news. Apple unveiled Mac Studio with M4 Max, M3 Ultra. Every time I see one of these, I'm like, eh, it's like, nothing. But then I'm like, I want one. I always just want the latest thing, even though Packy was making fun of them for the new iPad that looked exactly the same. I was like, that would make me happy for five minutes.

• 2:40:33Jordi Hays?

  For five minutes.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. Unboxing an Apple product still feels good. And then you're like, oh, okay, it's just like, I'm not using it. Or I don't notice once I open up the Chrome tab. And the other news is Alexis Ohanian is now bidding for TikTok with a blockchain integration plan.

• 2:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep. So we are, he's coming on the show tomorrow to talk about it. He also is relaunching Dig with Kevin Rose, which is, which is awesome. I actually got a, reminds me, I got to email back his team.

• 2:41:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep, we're gonna be on, he's gonna be coming on at 12:30 tomorrow to talk about everything he's cooking on. He was gonna come on today, but he was traveling. I said, he's got this amazing home studio. I told him, wait, wait till you're back home. Come on then. So I'm excited to have him back on. I say we save some of these posts. Let's end on a joke from Base Baron, who's been an early listener of the show. We invested by following him when he had 200 something followers.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was like buying Bitcoin in the 90s.

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, exactly. Or Solana in the, in the early 2000s. Base Baron says, I love Ramp so much that I broke up with my ex-girlfriend because she used someone else for expense management. Call that my Brex.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  I've read this, and it's still funny when you read it.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  It's still funny.

• 2:41:51John Coogan?

  Oh, silly.

• 2:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Good one. Anyways, great show today. I thought our guests were fantastic.

• 2:41:58John Coogan?

  I thought it was a lot of fun. Good mix. I think we're dialing in the format. Little news, little timeline.

• 2:42:03Jordi Hays?

  We gotta put in the invites for the guests that you might join and you might be interrupting another guest. But it like, think of it more as like you walk into a house party.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know if we want to keep the house party vibe going, or maybe we want to use the waiting room, which is like a feature on Zoom. But we'll keep dialing it in. Stay tuned for more. We're never satisfied. We're going to keep changing it up, keep you guessing. This was just two weeks ago and we'd never had a guest and we'd done something like 60 episodes. And now we've had more guests than most people have in a year of podcasting. I think we had like, what, 15 already this week or something like that?

• 2:42:42Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:42:43John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:42:44Jordi Hays?

  By the way, we got some breaking.

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  We got breaking news.

• 2:42:46Jordi Hays?

  From the chat, Rory shared that Intuitive Machines, Athena Lunar Lander landed on the moon this afternoon, but the company has no idea where it is.

• 2:42:55John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh. And this is live. I'm on the New York Times famed technology publication, New York Times. As Intuitive Machines, a Houston company aiming to repeat a 2024 landing, said its spacecraft, Athena, has power and is communicating, but may not be upright. It's unclear how that might impact the mission. Imagine going all the way to the moon and then kind of botching the landing and then you're on your, you know, your rovers turned to the side. That is, that is rough. So this story is unfolding.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Well, good luck to them. If you need somebody to go up there in a spacesuit and tip it over, I'm happy to do that. I'm fully expecting.

• 2:43:35Jordi Hays?

  John 68, by the way.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  I'm fully expecting to go to the moon within my lifetime.

• 2:43:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:43:40John Coogan?

  That's something I'm very confident of.

• 2:43:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  It's gonna happen.

• 2:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  Anyway, that's our show. Thanks for watching.

• 2:43:47Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Stay tuned for the next one. We'll see you tomorrow.