China Export Controls, Jeremy Giffon Breaks Silence, Alex Hormozi in the Ultradome | Josh Zoffer, John McElhone, Deena Shakir, Hussein Fazal, John Nay

(04:13) - China Export Controls (12:49) - SK Hynix Sets to Raise $28B (15:51) - Meta Unveils Muse Image (20:41) - Jeremy Giffon Breaks Silence (22:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (28:35) - Alex Hormozi is an entrepreneur, investor, and author best known for founding Acquisition.com, where he invests in and advises growing businesses. He is the author of $100M Offers and $100M Leads, and is widely known for sharing practical frameworks on entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, and scaling companies. (01:29:29) - Josh Zoffer, an investor and head of research at CIV, formerly a White House National Economic Council and US Treasury adviser, discusses the strategic importance of data centers in the United States. He emphasizes that data centers are not merely collections of chips but also involve critical technologies like power electronics and industrial materials such as steel. Zoffer warns that if the U. S. hinders data center construction, it risks losing control over essential supply chains, potentially repeating past mistakes that led to reliance on foreign sources for critical materials. (01:41:52) - John McElhone, founder of American Turbines, discusses his company's development of compact, 1-megawatt natural gas turbines designed for rapid deployment, capable of powering over a thousand homes and fitting in the back of a pickup truck. He emphasizes the advantage of utilizing the abundant and inexpensive natural gas supply in the United States, making this technology particularly suitable for the domestic market. McElhone also highlights the company's focus on scaling production through automation, aiming to revolutionize energy generation by simplifying turbine design and manufacturing processes. (01:47:32) - Deena Shakir, a General Partner at Lux Capital, invests in transformative technologies across sectors such as women's health, digital health infrastructure, health equity, foodtech, and fintech. In the conversation, she discusses Lux Capital's recent investment in 1001, an AI company based in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, highlighting the potential for applied AI in the Gulf and the opportunity for rapid, large-scale deployments. She also emphasizes the importance of homegrown companies in the GCC and the unique opportunity to build sovereign AI companies focused on the region. (01:54:38) - Hussein Fazal, co-founder and CEO of Super.com, discusses the company's recent $65 million Series D funding led by TPG at a $1.2 billion valuation, and its evolution into a savings super app offering discounts on hotels, gas, insurance, and financial services tailored for everyday Americans. He highlights the integration of AI to expedite product development and the strategic partnership with NASCAR to enhance brand visibility among their target demographic. (02:07:01) - John Nay, founder and CEO of Norm AI, discusses the company's recent $120 million funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation, highlighting their shift from selling AI tools to in-house legal teams to establishing Norm Law LLP, a law firm powered by AI agents. He emphasizes the value of vertical integration, with AI engineers and lawyers collaborating closely to reinvent legal workflows, and advises law students to focus on legal engineering by applying AI to legal reasoning. Nay also notes that while international expansion is considered, it requires deliberate planning to ensure the necessary legal expertise in each jurisdiction. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. That voice changer does not work. It's too much. It's Tuesday, July 7, 2026. We're live from the TVP in Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of Invest Like the Best watch streams. We got Invest Like the Best on in the background. Do we have audio? No. But does it matter? No.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just as compelling with the sound off.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Yes, it is. As I heard Jeremy talk about, there's a lot of episodes that people don't even watch, and yet they are the most impactful things in the entire world. And, you know, it's a great episode. We threw it on, on the big screen as sort of a joke. Oh, it's funny to watch a podcast on a massive screen like it's a World Cup game.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Viewing.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  I couldn't turn it off. I kept getting sucked back into it. Fantastic episode. Jeremy and Patrick, always fun in conversation. Also, the best part of that episode, there's a ramp ad in it. We got a ramp ad for you here, too. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. But the actual news, the actual news.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, should we talk about the show?

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about the show.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Alex Hormozi in the Ultra Dome, live in person. We're going to be talking about bro splits, agents, mindset, content, community, sales, pricing.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  So Hormozi and I both started our YouTube channels the same year, within like a couple months of each other. And we were both doing like somewhat business-y content. Obviously, I was focused on like Silicon Valley history, and he was doing more like coaching, small business, scale ups, growth stuff. And he just absolutely destroyed me. It was insane. Because I think I had like maybe 10,000 followers, and I saw his account when he had like 5,000 followers. And then he just went on this absolute run to get millions and millions of subscribers. And I plateaued at like a couple hundred K. And I was like, ah, he's just built different.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  A few hundred.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  Few hundred.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  450K.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, 450K. Not bad. I mean, I'm proud of the channel. Honest work. A lesson in total addressable market there. His.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting because.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Everywhere. But seriously, he took it so much more seriously than me. He had a whole team. He was putting up multiple hour videos every single day, short form, Instagram. He really understood how to be a media company, whereas I was just like, nah, this is just my blog.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  Bigger TAM.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  And better execution.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  100%.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's just, it's worth saying.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  It's, no, it's just actually true. And I mean, it's a testament to, he was basically, he was full time on it.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  He really said, there's levels.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  There's levels. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, oh, like, we both started around the same time. We're both taking this pretty seriously. Nope. Yeah, it was really, really good. It was fun to watch. So he's been on an absolute run, set the world record for fastest book sales ever, something like that. Huge record on, on becoming, he has a Guinness Book World Record for, for how successful his book launch was. And, yes, no, this is, this is true. It's on the Wiki. And I don't know if I have the actual stat here. Let me pull up the actual stats. So he broke the Guinness Book World Record for fastest selling nonfiction book last year, August 16, 2025. His book, Hundred Million Dollar Money Models,

• 3:29John Coogan?

  officially sold 2.9 million copies within the first 24 hours. That is insane, generating over $100 million in total launch.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Read me the title again.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  It's called 100 Million Dollar Money Models. And it generated over $100 million in total, in the total launch.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  Manifested.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Yes, he did manifest it. It's, it's a wild story. He has so many different anecdotes to share. He's a fantastic podcast guest, wherever he is appearing. And we're very excited to have him join the show today.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  23 minutes.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Before we get into the news, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, the big news of the day is that China has taken a page out of Washington's playbook, potentially, and aiming to limit the export of AI models. Now, these are just meetings at this point, but Chinese authorities have reportedly, this is according to Reuters, held meetings with some of the country's top tech firms. That's Alibaba, ByteDance, z.ai, DeepSeek, HighFlyer, not mentioned yet, but you have to imagine that they'll be in the conversation if they aren't already, about potentially restricting overseas access to China's most advanced

• 4:45John Coogan?

  models. So they're thinking about doing the same thing that's happening with GPT-5.6, Sol, Ultra, Mythos, Fable, all these different models that are starting to get more restricted as they get more powerful. The government wants a say in what companies and what non-governmental organizations, what governmental organizations have access to them. So, the discussions are still preliminary.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  When, when did, in AI 2027, did China wake up?

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Right around this time. Right around this time.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  Mid 2020.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  I actually have on my calendar, check on Jack Clark for today. Because, because last year, December 23, Jack Clark predicted that there would be big changes and acceleration in mid 2026. He said, so by summer of 2026, it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution, with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes will be won and lost here, and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put

• 5:55John Coogan?

  to work, further accelerating this economy and further changing things. Do you think that's where we are? Is that an accurate assessment of mid 2026? When I saw this prediction, I put a calendar reminder for mid 2026. We're right in the middle of the year. And I wanted to check in and say, does it feel like this? Obviously, this is not a quantitative benchmark. This is a qualitative feeling. Fast evolution, emitting a huge amount of heat and light, moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes certainly are being won and lost every day in the market. Tyler, how would you assess the amount of heat and light emitting from some parts of the digital world? Would you say it's huge?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I would say it's huge. I think it's huge. It's kind of hard. Like, I feel like I've been like, very tapped in for a long time. So it's hard to say like.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  You've been, you've been feeling.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  It's hard to see like, an outside view is like, oh, is this actually like, is there, has there been a big change, like recently?

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Yes. So there's two things. Like one.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  It's been kind of like a personal thing for you, being so tapped in. Would you say that?

• 6:59John Coogan?

  So there's, I mean, there's two things going on. One is that anyone who has.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Like a personal thing for Tyler. He's been so tapped in for so long. It's.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  No, it's like, it's true.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  So much of news coming out of DC, of the past like two, three months, has been about AI, which is like, definitely was not true.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  You know, even earlier this year, I would say.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Yes. And the, just, just the amount of heat and light around cybersecurity issues, the coding models, the agentic capabilities, the revenues that we would see in enterprise, those have not been a shock to AI insiders who have been tracking the capabilities of these models since last October, or even last summer, when models started, when vibe coding was coined by Andre Karpathy, and coding became, you know, not solved, but, you know, greatly enhanced by artificial intelligence.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Going back to AI 2027, which was published April 3, 2025. By late 2026, they had, or sorry, mid 2026 was China wakes up. In China, the CCP is starting to feel the AGI. Export controls and lack of government support have left China under-resourced compared to the West. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. Hawks, Hawks and the CCP warn that the growing race towards AGI can no longer be ignored. So they finally commit to the big AI push that they had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research, creating an information sharing mechanism for AI companies. So, right now, they're just looking at export controls.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Feels like we're a little bit behind on this.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  It's possible the CCP is just reading this as a guide, and just implementing it. They're just planning to implement it to a T.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Thanks for the guide.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Just like, yeah, thanks. Thanks for the playbook. You should have, you should have billed me for it.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, the real, the real 4D chess here is to shame the CCP into not copying off of AI 2027, saying, oh, really? You're just doing the AI 2027 thing? Come on, you don't need to invest in AI. Don't be memetic with our, with our philosopher's literature and our most popular podcasts over here in America. Think of your own strategy. Come on, do whatever. No. So, the discussions around AI export controls in China are still preliminary. And it isn't clear how Beijing could claw back access to models that they've already released. If they're on Hugging Face, you can download them, you can run them. And even if they had some sort of intellectual property, they could sue an open source inference provider

• 9:33John Coogan?

  for running KIMI or something like that. That feels really difficult to do from Beijing. But there are other implications. So once open, open weight models are posted publicly, of course, they can be copied, mirrored, downloaded, reused, anywhere, fine tuned. But there are several ways China could restrict future frontier models before they leave the country. At the latest end, Beijing could require companies to file future releases with regulators or submit them for national security review before publishing model weights. A more aggressive version would require government approval before any advanced model could be released overseas. And at the most restrictive end, China could simply ban the public release of frontier open weight models. They could say, no more open sourcing. Although

• 10:15John Coogan?

  the game theory there is a little odd, because it feels like the fact that China has been open sourcing near frontier capabilities has been to China's benefit in general, because it creates like more disturbances, like the DeepSeek moment was definitely good for China.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Pricing pressure.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, pricing pressure. So they could limit these to state approved customers or Chinese government priorities, which at a certain level might just be the most important thing to do. The RSI loop, of course, you want all of the GPUs that you have focusing on advancing the frontier internally as opposed to sending it off to America. The talks come as the US is also moving toward tighter control of frontier AI. The Trump administration recently restricted access to Anthropic's most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, before later lifting some of those controls after additional safety mitigations. OpenAI has also reportedly faced government pressure around the rollout of its next frontier models. The issue has become more urgent because Chinese open weight models are increasingly

• 11:16John Coogan?

  competitive. Z.ai's GLM 5.2 in particular recently impressed Silicon Valley by performing close to leading US models at a much lower cost. The Qian family of models from Alibaba has also become one of the most important open model ecosystems in the world, while ByteDance's Daobao is one of China's most widely used domestic AI systems. I didn't know about that. If China places export controls on future frontier models, it could raise costs for American AI users and companies because it's obviously very beneficial to have a great open source model available to you and for and use them for lower stakes tasks while reserving expensive US frontier models for their most important workloads. If the best Chinese models are no longer freely available abroad, some of that cheap

• 11:59John Coogan?

  model supply disappears, but you have to ask what happens to Meta. Do other do other labs start piling back into the open source ecosystem and more? Or will all the demand just go straight back to the frontier labs?

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  It really sucks.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  That's the question. It really does. It really does. We should play some clips because.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  We need to be thinking about podcast safety because this is an addictive.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  There should be export controls on this. It should be only available to American citizens. They should, Patrick should be doing KYC.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Even though, even though one of the, one of the, the, one of the guys over there is Canadian.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Yes, but maybe, maybe North America. Let's pull up a clip from this. I want to, I want to hear Jeremy chat about all sorts of things. They, they go all over. Where in the timeline is?

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, should we talk about SK Hynix's new listing?

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Yes, we can run through that and then we can pull up.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  SK Hynix is set to raise around 28 billion in a Nasdaq share sale this week, potentially one of the largest ever New York listings by an Asian company. The South Korean memory chip maker is already public in Seoul, where its stock is up more than 750% over the past year. But the US listing gives American investors an easier way in. The story is big on the timeline because situational awareness, the hedge fund run by Leopold, Ashen Brenner may participate alongside Bally Gifford and Co. too. Together, the firms could take as much as 7 billion of the deal. SK Hynix has become one of the purest AI infrastructure plays because it leads in HBM, has become a key Nvidia partner, and now has a market cap around 1.1 trillion.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Which is like a quadrillion one.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  When you look it up, it's very confusing, I think.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  The business ripping, 2025 revenue grew 47% to 63 billion, profit more than doubled, 28 billion in profit. Q1 revenue tripled year over year, but interestingly, the stock only trades 7x forward earnings because memory is brutally cyclical and there's still a lot of people that are wondering what happens if there's another leg up in the AI demand and the AI build out. Will that mean more competitive pressure? Will it be a bottleneck where they do stagnate? How much can they actually grow? And so many investors that are just in memory have seen booms and busts from cloud or smartphone or crypto and they said, ah, like, I don't know that this one's going to last forever.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  I'm pattern matching to previous cycles, not thinking about this as a different technology cycle. So I think that's what's going on with SK Hynix. But it should be a blockbuster IPO nevertheless, very interesting to see an Asian company listed in America.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  And most, you know, notable part of this deal is, is obviously situational awareness.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  And their participation in it. They, they cover, it's like the best, the billion dollar PDF.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Idea that Jeremy and Patrick have talked about before, but situational awareness is turning out to be more of a, maybe a 10 or 100 billion dollar PDF.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, seriously. I mean, the whole investing thesis built around that. It's just a PDF. I don't know, is it an essay, a thesis?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  If, so if the PDF was worth a billion or more than that, what was the Dorkesh episode worth? It's got to be some percentage of it, right?

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, definitely. Cause a lot of people watch the podcast, watch the clips, scroll through the PDF.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news, Meta unveils Muse Image, its first image generation model from MSL.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Waiting for this. Let's pull up some images of this and see the results. It should be good, given that they have all the Instagram and Facebook data to train on. While we pull up some images of the new Muse Image model from Meta, let me tell you about Figma Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Do we have any of this or should we click over to Jeremy Gaffon?

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  I am working on pulling up Muse Image. Let's go through. Alex Wang has a post.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull this up.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Okay, Muse Image, Muse Video, Muse Image, whole bunch of very detailed badges printed all in one image. He says, releasing Muse Image today, the first image generation model from MSL. It is crazy that they didn't have any like, when, back when it was fair, did they do anything with image? Do they, because they had that amazing model segment, anything? So they were doing work on images and obviously they've processed a ton of images. It pairs with Muse Spark to reason through your prompts, search the web and plan before it generates. People get what they mean on the first try, live now in the Meta AI app. Very, very fun.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Even puts a realistic QR code in there and can do infographics and old Polaroids as well. Big Sur, August 1983. Looks great. Three things Alex Wang is excited about under the hood. Self refinement, the model improves its own output within its chain of thought, emerged during RL, not by design. Multi-reference composition, many images blended into one coherent generation. Multi-turn editing, iterate without losing coherence or starting over. Make an image of this person riding a bike, this bike and wearing this suit while passing by these people on a park bench. Make it look like a drawing in this style. That's cool. So you can upload multiple images and sort of drop them in as various prompts.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  What you got, Tyler?

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yes, so Meta Fair did release a number of image models.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  So there was, I think it's pronounced Chameleon in 2023. There was Emu also 2023, and then there was another like version of Chameleon. But I think they were, they were somewhat different than the like diffusion, which was like popular at the time. I think they were all auto aggressive transformer, which was like, you get the good text, stuff like that. But I believe this is a different.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Team, yeah.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  And Alex is also previewing Muse Video, competitive on prompt adherence, visual fidelity, temporal consistency, also coming to Meta AI. This has got to be GPU intensive if they actually roll this out to everyone, although Meta AI does have a smaller install base than Instagram, but I mean, imagine you really push this in Meta AI and everyone's.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  What do they buy all the GPUs for?

• 18:19John Coogan?

  You gotta, you gotta get people generating stuff. I completely agree. I think put this in the hands of the, the modern Instagram creator, let them have fun with it and see, you already have the algorithm to filter the slop out. The stuff that is sloppy, but still entertaining and creative will surface to the top. So congrats to them on a successful launch. Let's tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent product provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And let's click over to Jeremy Gaffon on why he doesn't worry about AI taking jobs. A very, very interesting take on the latest episode.

• 19:04Jeremy Giffon?

  I don't understand this idea of we're going to run out of jobs. To me, it's like very obvious that every, certainly every white collar job is like totally fake and made up in the sense that like, they are not contingent for shelter and food and medicine and other necessities. But most jobs do not touch those, or if they do, they touch it in a very, very derivative way. What is your job as an allocator? It's like, well, because capital is inherently inflationary, you have to, you can't just leave it alone. And so like, my job is like, when you have money and you don't want it to go away, you have to give it to someone. And so you, you give it to a bunch of people and then I take it and I put it into things that are productive and then hopefully you don't lose your money, you get more money.

• 19:48Jeremy Giffon?

  And like, is this useful? Is this good? Yeah, sure. But like, it's not real. And to me, there's like unlimited amounts of jobs that you can create in those sorts of scenarios. We're going to have unlimited wants and desires and, and our economy is still driven by our unconscious desire to consume things. And so we're going to come up with new things to consume. And now again, in the short term and medium term, that might be volatile and there might be a lot of job loss and so on. And you know, that's not good. And you know, there could be a lot of despair, but in, in the long run, like, we're just going to invent new things to do. Like we've already solved all of our problems, like the worry about, oh, we're not going to have more jobs. It just doesn't really resonate because I feel like we just make up stuff for us to do. And that's sort of the whole point of it.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  That makes me think we need an Invest Like the Best soundtrack.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  We do need an Invest Like the Best soundtrack. Let's play the other clip that Patrick shared. The West Coast is definitely eating the East Coast.

• 20:49Jeremy Giffon?

  The founder is incredibly important and sort of the founding act is incredibly important in any business. I do think that it's notable that like the current paradigm in which we live, the largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leveraged buyout, which it's extractive insofar as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. The core idea behind it is like using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money in a way that the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to the core trade.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Pause for a second.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Afterglow says, my God, what an obnoxious soundboard. Unwatchable.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  It is a little loud today. I feel like the soundboard is coming in a little bit hot. We're sorry about that. But we're having fun here. And of course, we don't want to, we don't want to pirate the entire Invest Like the Best episode. We got to tease it a little bit.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  This would be a good use case for AI if we can make a separate show that's just the show, but an agent in real time pulls out the sound effect and just has a normal show, no soundboard.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. So you can choose whether you want the soundboard version of the show or the not, or the.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  Tyler says, don't be sorry. That's why I'm here. Tyler's just here for the soundboard. So Afterglow, unfortunately, there's people that are here that don't like the soundboard. There's people that are here only because of the soundboard. We are trying to find the middle ground and we don't always get it right. We don't always get it right, but we're trying to.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  Sort of a cold war between the pro soundboard and the anti-soundboard constituents in the audience. So we will do our best, but today is a soundboard episode, so there's going to be a couple. But I think the team did dial back the soundboard a little bit, so not too bad now. Okay. Well, revenge of the East Coast. The East Coast is trying to make a comeback. Jeremy Giffon says the West Coast is eating the East Coast, but the East Coast is trying to make a comeback across all of these big banks. Did you hear about this? They're going after the debit card rails. They're going after Visa. This is news today.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC and other big banks are reportedly exploring a deal to buy a Fiserv debit card network that would let them own more of the payment rails that the customers debit cards run on. So the basic idea is that post, I think it was post-financial crisis, there were limits on how much banks could make on debit card transactions. This is the Durbin Amendment.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Durbin?

• 23:27John Coogan?

  The Durbin Amendment. I think Dick Durbin. And they want a way to turn debit back into a more valuable business. So Fiserv owns major debit networks, including Star and Excel, which I don't run into that often. I usually see Visa, Mastercard, Amex. I mean, Amex doesn't have debit network. But Star and Excel already connect to millions of cardholders and thousands of financial institutions. So this is like, it's a real rail with an existing bank and merchant connectivity. And so this is like when Capital One bought Discover. They own the issuer, then they also own the network, and then they can move their own volume onto their own rails and capture more of the economics.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  So who loses if this goes through? Who should be upset about this? It's probably the merchants, Visa and Mastercard. So merchants would probably see higher effective debit costs if banks find a way to route more volume through bank-owned networks, while Visa and Mastercard would lose some leverage over US debit. But the bigger story is that payments are getting vertically rebundled. Banks want the account, the card, the network, the wallet, the fraud layer, and eventually the AI agent checkout surface. So it's all very, I don't even think there's a real bid for Fiserv's debit networks just yet, but it's like starting to look out that they're doing it. And I was interested to know, like, is this bullish for ramp?

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Because they sit on top of networks and I think it is generally positive and because of the layer of abstraction they operate on. And I was wondering, like, is this an attack on Stripe? Is this an attack on any particular West Coast tech startup that we know? And it seems like it's much more of an attack on Visa and Mastercard in particular, who have been driving up debit fees for them. Anyway, let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Cantor in the chat said to warm up the gong.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  I had to warm it up for him.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Okay, well, the gong is warmed up. Maybe we need a couple more huge, huge hits to fully warm it up. Did you want to talk more about Fiat's next US car? You mentioned it when we were talking to Baiju from Cowboy Space Company yesterday, the Topolino. It's coming to America. Tiny two-seat electric microcar, they're calling it. Starts at $14,000, almost half the price of the other electric golf cart that we talked about last, what was that, last Thursday we talked to?

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  To in.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  But you can fit a lot more people in the Amble.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  The Amble. Yes, that's right.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  I like this move from, I like this move from Fiat.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  You like it?

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  I think that their cars are generally unserious.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  And so I think it's good to just lean into, lean into that.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  And I think they're trying to price this so that when people are thinking, hey, I need a new car.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  Because should I go out and buy like a crossover SUV or?

• 26:43John Coogan?

  There's no way anyone can consider this for their main car. It's impossible.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  But you can if you typically roll around with a handful of people and instead of buying one car.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Oh, you buy a bunch of them?

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  For 60 grand, you buy four of these.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  You know the range on this thing? 46 miles. 46 miles. I mean, I guess if you have a 10-mile commute.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  They launch an EV with 46 miles of range?

• 27:10John Coogan?

  It's nothing.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  And they should have called it, they should have called it the Fiat.

• 27:14Jeremy Giffon?

  It's less than 10 miles.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Less than 10 miles.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  They should have called it the Fiat Dice, because every time you leave the house, you're rolling the dice.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  It's 1,000 pounds, so you can deadlift it with another friend.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  It's, are you serious?

• 27:25John Coogan?

  1,000 pounds, yeah. This thing's tiny. It's really, truly like so, so small.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  They're saying it's the cutest car ever made?

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Look at the speed.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Tops out at 25 miles an hour.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  That's with a street legal low-speed vehicle kit. By default, it only goes 19 miles an hour. So how long would it take you to get here? 19 miles an hour? 30 minutes?

• 27:48Jeremy Giffon?

  Yeah, 30 minutes.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  It's not bad. Not too bad.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe you got to do it. Okay.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  You guys are laughing, but you won't be laughing when I pull up to the office with.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Fleet of these?

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  With, with five of these.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  And you need a support car, like a cyber truck behind you.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no, the Topo, the Topolino is the support. You just have, you have a series of, you just go train mode.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Well, our next guest is the owner of a Hummer EV, or at least was. We can talk to him about that. We can bring him on down whenever we want. You ready? Let me tell you about public first. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Here, grab that seat. Sit down for us. Do you still own a Hummer EV?

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, we do, actually.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  You do? Give us your review. We were just talking about the Fiat Topolino. I don't think you're going to be in the market for that. Neck and neck and neck and neck. It's 1,000 pounds.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  So I think what we could do is like, if you just lined up like 10 of the Fiat, like a chariot.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Like it'd be my chariot.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  I think the Hummer's.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine if the Hummer is.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  Literally nine of these.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  The Hummer is kind of the front of the train and then you have like, you see the Hummer coming at you and then, and then a bunch of the Topolinos kind of pull out and like a V shape.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  That's infuriating.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  That would be badass.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Take over the whole hot dog.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  How is, how is life these days?

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Good.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Is there a new book coming?

• 29:19Speaker 04

  There is another book coming.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Do you have a strategy for book launch cadence? Is it an annual thing?

• 29:28Speaker 04

  It's more like every 18 months to two years.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Okay. But do you imagine that continuing for your entire career?

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Every book I write, I say is the last book I'm going to write. And then I have like a six-month refractory period. Yeah, you know, I could, I could write a book about something and then I just start writing again.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  What's the process like?

• 29:48Speaker 04

  I have a bunch of notes on my phone of a topic. Because right now I have like, probably like 10 books that are at different stages of. So I just mind dump wherever. And then once there's enough stuff that I think this is like, this is interesting, I'll then start the book writing process. But I'm a big believer in surface area of thought. Like if you were to sit down and say like, I'm going to write a book about this and then you have two weeks. It's like you don't have enough experiences that are diverse in a two-week period while you're writing to like let the paint dry.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  So I kind of want to like have, I want to be in, you know, a totally different state, talk to somebody and be like, I didn't think about that. And then I add it to the book. And so then all of a sudden, it's like the density of thought and ideas per word is much higher. But I think you just have to do it by like spreading out the time. So like the time I'm thinking about a book is much longer than the time I'm writing the book.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Is it purely thinking and you want a lot of thought to go into the different sections of the book? Or over the course of 18 months, is there actually a benefit to going out and having real-world experiences?

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Oh, that's, I mean, that's.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  And anecdotes, right?

• 30:43Speaker 04

  It's 100% that. Because I'll have a working theory of like, I think this is how, I think people are missing this part of it.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  And then I'll kind of start battle testing it functionally. And then when I realize that I'm using the same framework over and over again and successfully overcoming some issue, I'm like, this is it.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  And then that's what the book becomes.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  How narrow do you want to stay? How narrow have you been in the surface area of thought around mainly the last three books?

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Really good question. Problem definition for the book, I think is the hardest part of any book. Like the leads book, which is the second book, was the hardest book I've ever written. I'll never write a book that hard because I was like, I'm gonna write a book on advertising. It's like, Jesus Christ, there's so many ways to get leads.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  And I put it all in one book. It took 19 versions to get there.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  The money models book was the fastest book because it was really just about rappers for promotions. Super valuable, but really easy to consume and use. And so I was like, okay, this is the lesson for me, like, and offers super narrow.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Super narrow.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  And that book too, was like, all three of those books started as one kind of gigantic thing. And I gave it to somebody and they're like, dude, you cannot.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  You know, like this, and they're like, I was like, I'm gonna have a tome. And then I decided to want people actually read it.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Is there a itch in the back of your mind where you want to do sort of the Tim Ferriss thing? Where you go from four hour work week, a business book to chef, body, lifestyle, money management, personal finance, like, there's so many topics that you talk about and people are interested. And I'm sure you could sell those books and they might be edifying at a certain point. Cause you're like, I've, I've scratched this itch three times, four times, 10 times. But is there a level of focus that you have to discipline yourself or does it come naturally?

• 32:26Speaker 04

  I only write about stuff that I feel like I have some unique take on. I think rewriting a book that already exists, that people already know, there's a point.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Especially if like you're in the thick of it and you're thinking, oh, this has already been written before. It doesn't really motivate you. Like, I think, like, I want to write something that only exists because I made it.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  Same thing with businesses, like there's, I've had the experience of building a company or, or just like starting to work on a company and being like, I can stop working on this and it will not matter at all.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, the world will be fine.

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  The world will be fine. There's a bunch of alternatives. And that, you can make that case for like most businesses. But there are some where you're like, if I don't build this, no one's gonna build it, at least in the right way.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have a hundred percent that perspective when it comes to book writing.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, as, as we talk about this, Jeremy Giffon, I know is a good, good friend of yours, good friend of ours. And every time he talks, people just listen. And he's somebody who I would love to write a book, almost because I just want him to go on another podcast. Proper podcast tour, he just kind of pops up, doesn't vest like the best and then goes, goes dark for like 18 months. But like, it's somewhat of a tragedy that he'll probably write a book someday, but it'll be in like 40 years. So in the meantime, you have to like, in the meantime, you have to just like, you know, take notes and, and try to pick stuff up from, from the podcast. But there's so many people that like, so many people that should be writing books, just don't have the time. And they'll eventually come and take like a victory lap at the end of their career.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's like, you could just do a lot of stuff other than write books. But it's, but it's, it's, it's very valuable to be like writing in real time versus like saving up a bunch of lessons and then kind of summarizing it at the end.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  I think you miss out on the, the wrinkles, like the tiny little details that like, if you, if you think about like the story of how you met your wife and you go back, like you've told it a bunch of times, but if you told it the day after you did it, you'd have so much richer memory of all the tiny little things that happened. And so I'm a big believer of like, while it's wet, like paint it and then let it dry over time. But that's why I like, I always want documentation to be as real.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny, the final book will actually be the easiest to write. Cause you have all the books and you're like, okay, what was actually like worth kind of?

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Greatest hits at that point.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  We, we had Mark Pankas on the show, founder of Zynga. He wrote a book and he said that he thinks everyone should write a book in their life. But he also said, everyone should build a house. Do you have any aspirations to build real estate physically?

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Like me do it.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  You do it?

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  No, no, not by hand, not by hand, but just take a, take a piece of dirt and turn it into a home.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Working with an architect and a team, but is that something that, you know, a lot of people that's on their bucket list. I don't know where you've been in your real estate journey, but how do you think about that as a, as a bucket list item?

• 35:10Speaker 04

  It's not.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 35:12Speaker 04

  I mean, we buy big multifamily that are already existing and we do that. But if there were an investment opportunity that made sense, I would.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  It's, you're not interested because it's not productive.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  It's just not on my list.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Purely for like, you know, the satisfaction.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  If you're like, have you listened to, like, thought about listening to Beyonce today? I'd be like, not really. But I mean, like, if it was on, sure, you know, I'm not against it.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think some people just have the, the itch to like customize their own living environment. And I'm, I'm curious about how you see your living environment. Because, I mean, from those first YouTube videos, like the monastic, what were you, closet? You were in the closet? Like, that, that was, I don't know if that was intentional, but it was, it was somewhat deliberate. You picked that space over a big living room, right? And I'm wondering how you think about your, your living space, your workspace, your office space today?

• 36:03Speaker 04

  So I would say all of the time that I, when I work, I'm very intentional about that space. When I'm not working, it's whatever Leila wants. I don't care. Like if she, if she's 10% happier, I have like a percent to percent correlation to my happiness. And me being more comfortable has no correlation back. So like whatever she's good with, I'm good with. But in terms of like where I work, it's almost all, how do I, how do I eliminate every sense of distraction for me personally? And so it's like, I don't have windows. Some people like having windows. I don't think anything wrong with that. For me, it's like, I need no stimulation because I'm, I'm very distractible. And so I have to have like, I, earplugs in, no light, all artificial. I have like soundproof, like, you know, like I want nothing.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  And then I can finally focus on what I'm trying to work on.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can we go back to the early YouTube days on the latest channel? I think 2020, in that closet, we both launched YouTube channels around the same time. And we were talking about this, you completely smoked me.

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  It was insane.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  John is, you know, obviously pretty good at media and, but, and was like, the, the, his channel was like just following his interests, like Silicon Valley history. The, the execution was like, by all means amazing. Like got to like half a million subscribers.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  I treated like a blog and you treated like a business.

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And it was like, but it was this much smaller TAM. And like, when you compare the two channels and like your strategy, the execution.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was just like me and like I had one remote editor for years. I was like, not monetizing, not really thinking about it as a business. But I'm interested to know, on day one of, of that YouTube channel, cause I know you've done media stuff before, but like the, the, the, the current media business, what was the team like? What was the strategy? How much time were you putting into it? Cause I know you had exited some businesses, you had some space to breathe, but how serious were, and then what was the evolution of that?

• 37:57Speaker 04

  I'll walk you through as fast as I can. So the first thing was I found any media editor, like an agency. And they're like, uh, three YouTube videos a week is what we do. And I was like, all right, then that's what I'll do. And so I just webcammed, like, and I had a little suitcase that would open up so I could travel. Cause Leila and I were traveling for the year of the sale. And so that's what I did. Wherever we were, I was like, open up. And then, cause at that time I didn't have really any work. So I had all these thoughts and I was like, I'm just gonna get them, I'm gonna dump them all out. And so that's basically what YouTube Strategy 1.0 was.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  I had somebody cold reach out, like legit, when, right as Shorts started, they were like, I'll do everything. You already have YouTube stuff. I'm just gonna clip it. Just give me permission.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  And I was like, oh, cool.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  And so that's what's. You accidentally started clipping.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. And so that was like, we were really early on Shorts.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  So good.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  And then as soon as he did a pretty good job, uh, he was like, you know, if I actually recorded you doing these, they'd do even better. And I was like, fine, but I only want to do one day a quarter. And he was like, fine. So he'd fly out for one day and we'd do a hundred Shorts in one sitting. A hundred percent. I would just do a hundred. And that, that kind of style of filming and recording is pretty much how, I still kind of rock that way, which is like, I want, I prefer marathon day. Like I'd rather just start at, you know, six and then just rock until every ounce of juice is gone. And then it's like, great, we'll do it again in a week or whatever.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're sort of like that marathon every day.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. One of my, one of my questions is like, what goes into a two hour YouTube video? Cause you'll do these like master classes, two hours. And I'm like, that is insane. And then I'm like, I do three hours every day. So like, now it's become more possible, but I imagine that there's lots of script.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  Three hours was kind of like just going until we got tired.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  Like by three hours, we're usually like, okay, like probably need to go to the bathroom. Probably want to eat some food.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the show is much less structured, but when you're, when you're thinking about like the portfolio, like you, the volume is just incredibly important to everything in media these days. You agree with that?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Oh, a hundred percent. Volume to gates luck. Okay. Volume to gates luck.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Volume to gates luck.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  Violence is the answer. Yeah. That's like on our wall at HQ.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  What formats are you most excited about for 2026, 2027?

• 40:00Speaker 04

  Live, interactive.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Separate and together.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  So just going live, like with the audience, Twitch style, YouTube live style.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  And that was the book launch strategy, right? Was that your first, you've done live before?

• 40:10Speaker 04

  No, I'd done lives before, but that was obviously intentional. And then, and then interactive, which is not like, sure, there's chat interactive, but like. How do I bring the audience in so that we can talk? That's why you see the first, it was Cash Cow, now it's Scale or Fail, which is the show we just launched. And we're doing, we're doubling down really hard on that because if you think in a world of AI, it's like, what are the things that can't be faked?

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  It's people, you know, like I want stakes. So for example, like if Mr. Beast's store, uh, videos, if it was not a real $5 million or not a real Lamborghini, the stakes disappear. Now, to be fair, there's for sure other, like a fictional story, the whole thing we know is fake and we're fine with it. And the story is the story and it'll crush that.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  But people still want stakes. Like right now chess is more popular than it's ever been, but like humans haven't been able to beat computers for a long time.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  And so there are definitely some areas where we want the drama, we want the stakes. And so I don't think that's going to change at all.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Uh, I love the series that you've been doing with entrepreneurs that attend a conference. They stand up, they give you the, it's so, so good. I just love all of those.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  Live interactive.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Live interactive.

• 41:12Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  I'm interested to know how you think legacy media will fit into your media strategy going forward. Is it about prestige? Is there actually an audience there still? Because you're part of the new guard.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  And yet you signed with CIA. I'm sure you have the ability to walk into a large media company and get a TV show. Does that make sense? Is that something that's interesting to you? What would the value be?

• 41:40Speaker 04

  I think it's distribution that I don't have access to.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  So like, I think one of the biggest like unspoken advantages that exists right now in media is Dave Ramsey.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  Has been murdering for 30, 40 years. Cause he has 600 radio stations syndicated. Everyone's like, radio is dead. It's like, he's murdering.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  And it's because no one's looking. So like, I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to attention.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  And so even if it's less or more, if it's something that's completely in this other bubble over here that I have, I have no access.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  And, and the beauty is like, they're still like closer to, like, there's no monopoly online, right? The need is like, you can just get, anybody can log on and it's beautiful because anyone can log on. You don't have to have an audience. You can suddenly have an audience. Maybe it's one video, maybe it's a flash in the pan, but uh, TV still like, if you can figure out the right lane, you have this sort of like differentiated access to attention. And so it's like a different group of people and it's differentiated access. That's not just like log on, immediately have access.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  And when something super pops, like you look at all the real estate shows that have come out, you've got Selling Sunset, Sirhan has his show, like, like there's a huge distribution base that they gain access to as a result of that. And all you have to do is look at those stars, look at their, look at their social media.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  And I would say this is, I say this lovingly, it's pretty weak in terms of what they're doing.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  But their following. Exactly. But their following is still really strong because it's carried over.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  And so I'm like, if those people actually tried on this side and had somewhat, and it's like, how do we get it all?

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Right? And that's kind of the, the.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  I think this is, uh, just underrated broadly for mostly tech people. They see the trend of the internet growing exponentially or e-commerce and they think, oh, well, in a couple of years, like 100% of everything will be bought online. And it's like, no, retail still exists and you know, for certain categories, you probably need to be in retail as well. And the same thing with, you know, the aging audiences on radio or TV, they're still there. They have, they, they still watch. And so, uh, interesting, what about the level of production polish? I imagine that there's a trade off there. If you go with something, uh, more produced, that's not just you opening your laptop and yapping, right? Uh, you can get, you can, you can get stuck in like the production quagmire.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  If you're trying to build the Mona Lisa or some incredible show, at the same time, there's prestige that comes with that. There's a new level of authority. Uh, how do you think about that trade off?

• 43:57Speaker 04

  I think it's barbell.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  So it's either like, make it the Mona Lisa and like play to win that game, or you're in the volume game. And the volume is just value per second and just trying to get as many of those seconds out as you possibly can.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  And like, I just think it's, it's, it's both. And there, I think they serve, they serve different objectives to your point of like you gain authority in different ways. It's definitely, there's an element that it shifts the brand.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  There's access to new distribution and eyeballs. All of that happens over here.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  But over here, I think is where you get a lot of the closure to buying behavior, believe it or not. And so I see this as more top of funnel and this is like closer to middle and bottom. Obviously you can get discover building, like I said, this is full stack, but you get way closer to purchases on the side.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there, can we offer you a diet coke? Can we offer you anything? Uh, we have a variety of beverages if you'd like.

• 44:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's a category of business that you haven't, uh, built or invested in, uh, that you're excited to at some point?

• 44:49Speaker 04

  I'm still looking for the, the magical med spa. Um, I think med spas are super, I love pseudo-medical.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  Because you have.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Looks maxing.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, all of it. Well, think about it, like there's this aging population that has more money than anyone else. They don't want to age. They see the Brian Johnsons.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  Like it is the zeitgeist of right now of like, I want to live forever. I want to look beautiful and young forever. And they have all the money. And so if you look at the demand side of that, it's huge.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  And look at the supply, med spas are, are, they're still wildly understaffed. And I know this because I see business owners every single week.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  And so I've like, there's a handful of categories right now that I'll meet business owners and they're doing better than they should be. Like there's some business owners I meet.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  I met a, I met a med spa owner when I first moved to LA. They had started their business and within a year they were doing like 1.2 million of like, like straight free cash flow off of like $400,000 invested.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  It was like, actually unbelievable. Yes, the entrepreneur in this case was like very talented.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Cause he watches this and he's, oh yeah, he's great though.

• 45:49Jordi Hays?

  No, but this was, this was, you know, years ago, but yeah, I'm, I'm surprised that also like differentiated shots at that category. Because if you look at like, I would expect Brian Johnson to do something like this, right? Because there's a lot of people that follow him and he has, you know, as many, maybe, he probably has like 10 times as many like critics as he does, people that are like, I'm going to do exactly what he's going to do. But that group of people that will just like copy what he's doing is actually pretty, pretty meaningful, right?

• 46:17Speaker 04

  It's huge.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  And so meds bars, you go into these like high ticket, kind of like procedures, treatments, things like that. To me, that's where I think he could, uh, really start to print.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  He had 1,200 people apply for his million dollar per year thing.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  1,200. Do that math.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Real fast.

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a lot of money.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  And then there was a $60,000 per year thing that was underneath and multiply that by just probably an order of magnitude greater.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Wildly underestimated. So you take that and then you have these 10,000 or 15,000 med spas that exist. It's like, it's nothing. And the, it's super fragmented because still no one's really like gobbled that up well. Not that, that I've seen. Um, and to your point of like, when I asked them like, hey, so what are you doing right now to get your six million a year top line and you know, 40% margins? And they're like, we kind of just, you know, we just opened up and put the sign up and you just did a good job. And, and you know, you know, people, customers tell customers like, you know, that's not how it fucking works.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's not how it's going to work forever.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  No. They're just in a completely supply constrained environment. They just don't know it because when you're on the inside, you don't know, you're like, oh, I'm doing a good job.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Is part of the problem that a lot of the med spa, like founders get a little bit too sucked into the biohacker nature of these things and it feels a little bit too scientific?

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't think it's that at all. I think it's like, it's, it's so short-term. A lot of the med spas I think are like very short-term cosmetic driven. They're like, how do we make you look good for the next three to six months? Which is not necessarily what makes you look good over the next three to six years.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Or over the next few decades. So that's at least generally.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  There's a slice for Johnson to attack, which he obviously is. He's a very smart dude and.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. How would you attack the problem? Roll up, find a bunch of operators, put them together, start, start something from scratch?

• 48:01Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, I mean, the roll bottle would make the most sense.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Um, but the thing is, is like de novo is not that expensive.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  Um, and if you are a good operator, you can go in and just smash.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  Because when, when, when people are coming in, when you're, when your CAC is zero and your, your gross margins on these services are absurd, the, the actual difficulty in that model right now is getting the talent for the technicians because, because it's supply constrained at the business level. It's also supply constrained at the talent level.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  And so.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  And it's so easy for them to open up a door.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. They hang their own shindel, they take the customers and like, that's the issue that those companies have. And so, um, the key to really winning that game is having a really good talent strategy for how do I make their lifestyles? How do I, how do I compensate them as directly as possible on what they're generating and get it to the point where my godfather is in wealth management and he's a really cool model. He's managed several billion dollars and he, but he started at nothing and built it all himself. And his big thing was, and his big thing was, uh, basically letting the other person have a little more.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  And so it's like, he'll, he's like, I'll give you 51 so that you don't ever want to leave.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Uh, but then you do all the work.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it probably looks more like a law firm over time.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, a hundred percent. It's more of a partner. And to be fair, if you've been to any of these, uh, I would say it's a high touch service. They're, they're not loyal to the business. They're loyal to the girl who does her injections or does their lasers or whatever.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  And so it's like, we just got to tie those people in like a partner firm.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, speaking of Brian Johnson, do you care at all about living forever?

• 49:27Speaker 04

  I don't even think about it. I expect to die. I would prefer not to, but like, I'm good, I'm good either way. Like, I, I think Marcus really has said, um, the, the old and the young lose the same thing when they die, which is the present. That's all we got. So.

• 49:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm a similar way. I want to have a full life, but I never, at any point in my life have I thought, oh, it would just be the best thing ever if I could never die.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, going back to sort of core audience, I think of like the sweet spot is like mid-market owner, operator, founder types. Is that roughly?

• 50:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, one to 50 million.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  One to 50 million. What is the expansion opportunity? Is there a business for you where you're giving keynotes of Fortune 500 companies? Motivational speaking for like, you know, middle managers?

• 50:19Speaker 04

  No interest.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Or, or, or is it, or is it getting people on the founder journey who are leaving companies, breaking out into their own and going from zero to one million? What do you think?

• 50:30Speaker 04

  Well, from an expansion opportunity, like, I think there's still plenty of people in a 150 million who don't know who I am and haven't consumed my stuff or whatever. So like, plenty there. Um, but the, like, if I just focus there, I get the zero to a million.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Anyway.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Uh, because if you're helping people go from one to 10, people are like, he can probably help me go from one to zero, one.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  Um, and so I'm super broadly zooming out. I'm a big fan of capitalism. And I think as many people as possible participating in a free market is a good thing for the country and for that person, uh, and for everyone else that they serve. And so I would like as many people to taste that, that, uh, that forbidden fruit as possible. And so I try and make it as simple and as easy as possible for people to get started.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What mistakes do you see entrepreneurs making around AI? Cause I'll give you one. The, the small business owners that I know that get too in, like into AI, and maybe they're listening to podcasts and they're on X and, and, and, uh,

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Orange glasses.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  They'll like, they won't just apply AI to their business. They'll like, start a new company that's like AI oriented. And, uh, and I just think that's like the worst possible mistake because they end up doing something that like the model just does well. And it's like, okay, so you're going to compete just directly with like all the biggest companies in the world on something that you don't even know as well as the biggest companies in the world. When you could just like, and so, and so there's like this like, grass is greener thing happening where instead of seeing like, oh, I can just make, you know, these parts of my business, even if it's just 10% more efficient, uh, I can, I can, you know, keep compounding. But what are you seeing?

• 52:07Speaker 04

  All right. Uh, one, they're using AI to do dumb things really fast. Um, so they're doing the wrong stuff with AI. So even like they were, like a small business owner that wasn't making money now still doesn't make money, but has a lot more token costs.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Than they did before. Number two, they're.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Meeting, meeting summaries.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  Like, I've never been successful. Like, I, I've never.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  That was my bottleneck. I just need to summarize.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but it's one of those things like, like, I think it's cool that these apps exist. I've never, uh, I've never needed to take notes to achieve my goals in business. Like, I'm just like, okay, what's the next most important thing to do? I'm going to do that thing. Okay. What's the next?

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Or like a note on your phone.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to do that thing. I've never, I've never been like, okay, like, what did we say? I mean, and I've worked in like, small companies, right? Only, only been a founder. But, but that's just such an example of like, yeah, my meeting note system is like so dialed. I'm like, okay, like, how much money have you made?

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I'll say to, to, to counter answer the two things that I think are the right way to use it, which is number one, how do we take every function of the business, take it from org chart based thinking to workflow based thinking, and then saying, okay, this editor used to be involved in these six workflows. Uh, we actually only need him to be now involved in three of those workflows. And the other three, we can have AI do the vast majority of the work. And so all of a sudden we can three 5X output. Uh, and so revenue per head count on service-based businesses should decrease, which means margins should go up. Now there's this great opportunity window right now where prices aren't really going to adjust for a minute, which means that your margins get absolutely stupid. And so like, you should do that. So there's two flavors of that. One is the, uh, the, like,

• 53:42Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm an advocate of like, don't tell people you're using AI. Like, go, go have a service business that people think is all humans in the background and then charge human prices and then have costs of tech and have the scale and operational, the, the lack of operational drag of tech. That's the good game, right? Or take it department to my department so that you can just become more efficient at, at it. Right? So those are, I think, the two good ways of doing it. To your point of like, well, uh, being distracted is still a terrible idea as a founder. And so this has just made it so much easier for people to get distracted because like, I can start a business on this or that or that. And then it's like, yeah, but you still have your dry cleaning store, dude. Like, what are we going, like, and to be fair, if you have, if you want to be a trillionaire, you are going to need to get into bleeding edge tech and AI.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  But you probably should get rid of your dry cleaning store and go all in. And so they're trying to juggle two plates and not really succeeding it either.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. The, the dry cleaning example is like, use AI to constantly be monitoring every possible new space that you could expand into within your area or in, in the county over, et cetera. And just do that, do that, do that. But it's like grass is greener. Like, oh, what if I, what if I made the operating system, the agent operating system for dry cleaners? It's like, no, just like do the thing.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Just win at dry cleaning. Cause it's also so much easier to compete against other dry cleaning owners. Cause you for sure know that they're not adopting it the right way. Cause they're doing the same thing with orange glasses and, and banging out their, their replicated software, you know, like, fine. Yeah.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  There's also like a fair amount of AI that a lot of small businesses are probably getting for free, just in the sense of like, if you have a CRM that's sending emails, like that company has probably adopted AI and is doing somewhat smarter targeting. And so you might not need to go and build your own CRM that sends emails that are customized for every customer because like you get it for free out of the box.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  There's also this, this tendency to rebuild the existing software that you're using. So it's like, oh, I've got, you know, I don't, I don't need to pay Calendly, you know, nine dollars a month. When I, it's just like, oh, so instead you're going to use 200 hours to try and recode what they just did. And it breaks all the time.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  There's an error, then you lose nine grand.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. But like, that is what I'm saying all the time.

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we did have a Ben on our team here, was having, had been, he does, uh, a lot of the automation that we do around like captioning videos. He had reached a point where all the existing software didn't do the thing that he needed to do, that he built something yesterday that now works and that it's saving him a bunch of time. So there is the, there are these edge cases.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  It's very narrow point solutions for us.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  I think.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  Specifically.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  Tammy was one.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Flip live streams very quickly with captions, with our ads added on at the end, and it's saved a bunch of time in Premiere.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  In media, it's huge, right?

• 56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  Like, we're using it. Like, I'll give you two examples we're using. On the ad side, what we did was we built this gigantic data repository, which by the way, I think that's what the big, the huge gap that small business owners are missing is they don't have a data layer. And so it's like, if you want to have anything that's unique, it starts with the data. If you want to build like any kind of AI, right? That's actually useful.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  And so one is like, how do we build a repository of all the data that we have in terms of sales copy, testimonials, videos, collateral, all of that in one place? And then have that get piecemealed out into ads, um, in real time, and then also match those to dynamic landing pages. So we have that live right now at acquisition.com in terms of how we're doing it. So we have several hundred landing pages that are getting pushed against several hundred different, uh, ad, ads that are going out all being done programmatically with AI, which is really like, we're, we're not a, we're not an AI company, um, but we use the shit out of it. And so I think that those are like, those are the, the, on the paid side where it's really, really exciting.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 04

  And then on the, on the organic side, it's like, right now we started More Mose, which is like the highlight channel.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  And I've got one, one, one cracked out teenager, um, who's doing, who's putting out 20, 20 clips a day on his own.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  He's doing five, five mids. So like, we call them mids. It's like, call it like three to 10 minutes.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  Clips. And then he's putting out, I think 15 or something like that shorts per day on his own. And so he just takes all the time, if I'm talking to business owners, takes it, runs it through, it highlights the points. From there, he just basically just makes sure that it's good, inserts automatically the, the, the CTAs that we want, and then boom, it's all.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  What's your philosophy on, uh, bringing the cracked out teenager in-house?

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Huge fan.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Remote, in-person versus agency versus platform where clipping can happen, a Discord that just, you hear about these Discords with like 200 clippers and they all get paid on a CPM basis randomly. It feels deeply chaotic, but if you can harness that, maybe it's powerful. But what's your philosophy?

• 58:10Speaker 04

  Uh, yes.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:11Speaker 04

  A hundred percent my philosophy.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  For like, are you an agency fan or in-house? It's like, I want three agencies working for me and in-house team. Like, it's all, all the impressions are out there. Like, gotta catch them all. Like, go get them. You know what I mean? And same thing with, um, like, if, I, I pay a lot of attention, especially on the paid side to e-commerce. I think they're almost always the most cutting edge. When it, well, actually porn's the most paid edge. Right before that is, I'm being real, right? Uh, e-commerce is the second most cutting edge. Um, and those guys are all completely, the ones who are crushing it, going to zero to a hundred million plus in, call it like 12 to 24 months. Like, all the companies that are running the same playbook.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Is decentralized, um, UGC with kind of like AI backend for screening for control, and then just letting it fucking rip.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 04

  And there's obviously some considerations for brand.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 58:54Speaker 04

  Right? Which is like, how do we make sure? But.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the raw footage is.

• 58:57Speaker 04

  And you only put money behind the things that are.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's probably pretty safe.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you expect to, uh, integrate parenting content into your universe?

• 59:08Speaker 04

  I don't think, everything that's not business has not been like super deliberate. I just don't hold back. So if someone asks a question about it, I'll just answer honestly. Um, but everything, I try to think of like, the middle spoke is still, I'll use this, there you go. The middle spoke is still business. And then it's, you know, how am I seeing parenting through the lens of business as a business owner?

• 59:29Speaker 04

  Like, how do I see like my, my relationship with Leila? But it's, we're business partners, but we're also married. So it's, it's always, I try to keep that at the middle.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:36Speaker 04

  But some people are like, I just want to talk.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  You know, with, with, with Taylor and Travis pairing up, hopefully they have children. You guys having children. I think we could see a real baby boom.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but we need to get it out there.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  That's where the Lord's work.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Can you walk me through how to sort of evolve a brand through what I expected to be more difficult, but you executed it very well. The headline was, I have nothing to sell you. Now you sell books. The, I, people want to buy stuff from you. Obviously sold a ton of books. Uh, but there's probably like, uh, oh, I wasn't expecting this. How did you work through that? Because I think there's a lot of companies where the business model evolves and they need to change their communication strategy and they need to deliver.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Like an AI lab is like, we're not going to compete with you.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  What? That's crazy.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Asking for a friend here.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  I'm such an, I think the absolute simplest media strategy for any kind of change is the whole truth, not half-truth. And I think if you just manage that, so it's like, I didn't have anything to sell. And I was like, now I do.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  So simple. I love it. That's amazing. Wow.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  And if you don't want to buy it, here's the great thing about capitalism, it's voluntary exchange. So you can just keep getting the free shit.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  All good. There's tons of it. There's tons of free stuff.

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  Tons of free stuff. And we still continue to do that. If you choose to want more helpful stuff in person where we're limited, spend money. And we'd love to have you.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. What is the term for like, the economic ladder that you help build, help companies build? I feel like the first time I was exposed to this with Jaco Willink, you get to the end of the show and it's like, if you want to spend a dollar with me, I got something for you. If you want to spend a hundred dollars with me, I got something for you. If you want to spend a thousand dollars, you can come to my conference, $10,000, I'll hang out with you for a weekend, $100,000. And that ladder of price discrimination is hard for a lot of businesses where it's not token-based pricing, where it's just, you know, consumption-based usage of the product, but actually getting the place where, look, if you have a billionaire in your audience who loves what you're doing, how do you actually get an offer to them that's the right size?

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  Customers are super fractal, right? And so you can absolutely make the same amount from 1% of your customers as you can from the other 99 and have half your revenue from one. And typically, like, at each level, you have another double. So it's like, if you're at, let's say, $100 a month price point, there's going to be another double of revenue at $500 a month price point, another double of revenue at $2,500 a month, another double at, you know, whatever, five or 10 times that is going to be. And so I think making offers available to people, that is where business owners like struggle, they feel weird about it and they sell out of their own wallet. When it's just like, just make them available and state the facts and tell the truth. So it's like, if we had one big plaque in our, our marketing team, it'd state the facts and tell the truth,

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  but it's the whole truth, which is, hey, we're going to do this thing, it's absurdly expensive. And it's only for somebody who, if you're reading this and you're like, oh, that's not absurdly expensive for me, it's for you. And if you read that and you're like, oh, my God, I'm offended by that. Good news, we have less offensive prices that are lower. And for that, we do all these other things that are, you're going to get way more people who are going to be doing it with you. But if you're a special stuff like, we have special stuff like prices. I just don't think, and to be fair, you're not going to make everyone happy. Like, there's always going to be trolls, there's always going to be people that like, I think you have to make the decision of like, do I care more about the people I help or the people who are angry at me for trying to help?

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  What's your international strategy? I imagine the content goes everywhere. At the same time, you can't be flying around the world constantly. How do you think about different countries?

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  I struggle a lot with international. Because the business side of me is like, I don't want them to clog up our funnels. And like, have people who can't speak English that well talk into the team. And it's just like, it's like, we don't have Italian versions of whatever.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  Right. So I struggle with that part. On the other hand, we're taking steps now to have something to, you know, serve that audience. That being said, I don't think I'm going to be traveling internationally anytime soon. But having called services and offerings for that audience, I'm more inclined to.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about scaling acquisition.com, the investing side of the business, raising outside capital, scaling up the fund? We talk to VCs all day who are just like bigger and bigger mega funds.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. We're like 30 days away from closing a gigantic deal. So.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  Come back.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  But like, I would say that what acquisition.com was when we started was a cash flow-based family office that Leila and I ran. And that was honestly, the chillest my life has ever been. I was also bored to tears. But like, a good life and probably might have been better for the season I'm about to get into.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  But it became apparent after we did something like 24 deals in 24 months. And these were not like VC style deals, they were like real, you know, purchases, that, you know, portfolio theory rules and of the 24, like, you know, three-ish were like the really good companies. And then on top of that, there was like, our brand blew up in this time period. And so we had to basically have this recalculation of like, okay, well, these are all the resources we have at our disposal. We have cash, but like, this brand is getting really big, even almost greater than the cash that we have access to, just our own money. And so then it was like, okay, well, we started the advisory practice in January of 24. And I think we did 36 million in EBITDA year one, just on that one unit. And so I was like, okay.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  And so, and then obviously, you know, the book launch, last year, we did, you know, 105. And we still had the advisory practice, which grew the next year. And so I've, we've basically, we stopped doing deals that we were just investors in. And now it's brand plus capital plus work. And I'd rather have fewer eggs that we're going to get huge outsized returns on, like school was January of 24 as well. But school has, you know, we have 30 million users now. And, you know, we have a billion plus GMV, like, it's, it's a very big platform. And so, like, I, you know, Zuckerberg didn't have Airbnbs as a side hustle. You know what I mean?

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  And so it's just like, if you have, if you have a stallion, like, run it. And so I think that's where we're at, where it's like, we're being really, really specific. I'm willing to put more capital at risk now because I'm going to put my brand behind it and make sure the product's exceptional. And that's, I mean, the bar is the product has to be fucking insane. And then we bring distribution and cash. And like, that's when it's like the, the holy trinity.

• 1:06:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Jeremy, our friend Jeremy has this idea that, that everyone is like pre or post-fall. Where are you?

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  You familiar with this concept?

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  So, yeah. He says you can instantly tell if someone has had their downfall, had their darkest moment, you know, they've been through the wringer, they got chewed up and spit out by Silicon Valley or private equity or whatever industry they were in. And you can tell that this person is now, they've, they've been humbled. And so they're ready to build back appropriately, not get over their skis. And then you can also see the type of founders. It becomes a massive advantage. And then you also see the founders that are sort of pre-fall and they're doing a lot of things that you're like.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This is like the 24-year-old who's like on a crazy tear, has raised.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Money showed up for free. They're spending it.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  And then suddenly, like, you know, the business stops growing, like execs are leaving, things like that. But I'm wondering if you, there was like this crucible moment for you before this latest run that you've been on?

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  Oh, so two answers. One is I'll reject the premise. But just because I don't like, to say it's super binary, right? Like, people are either before or after the hard thing in their life. It's like, I think people have lots of hard shit that happens at different seasons in their life. Like, I've lost everything two times. Like, twice. But like, that, then it's like, okay, am I now post-fall? It's like, well, I mean, I, I hope that nothing bad ever happens to me again, but I'm pretty sure bad shit's going to happen to me again. And so I just commit to not stopping.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  Controlling the controllable. And that's basically all I can do.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Do you have a good answer to pithy advice for young people? We got asked this on a podcast recently. And it was like the closing question. It was like, you got one minute. And I was like, I could, you could talk for hours. Like, where do you even start? How do you think about packaging information like that? And I actually want your, your, your advice for young people, if you have one thing.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  It's so hard, too.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  It's so hard.

• 1:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Like, work hard. It's like, good general advice. But then I've, I've been in points in my life and I know people that are like, working hard on like, the dumbest thing ever. And like, that ends up being the worst thing that they can do.

• 1:08:24Speaker 04

  Well, I think, so what you accomplish is a direct output of the volume of activity that you do, multiplied by the leverage of the activity itself. And so you have to pick the right boat, you have to pick the right opportunity based on your goals. Some people only want to make a million dollars, some people want to make 10, some people want to make 100, some people make a trillion. Like, everyone has different, so like, the leverage that, what's interesting about that is that you just get to pick. And it's going to be hard no matter what. I think Naval said this thing where it's like, it's really hard to build a restaurant that's really successful. It's also really hard to build a, you know, billion-dollar unicorn. They're both can be 80-hour weeks. And so, you know, and Stuart Schwarzman from Blackstone said like, you might as well play big because level 10 talent is only attracted to level 10 opportunities. It's harder to attract

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  good people for bad opportunity because then you're going to do it all yourself. Which is why I have so much respect for some of the guys like Piggy and Andrew Turner, who are Mr. And Mrs. Panda, Panda Express. Dude, deck of billionaires, selling, selling chicken.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  Passage royalty.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  Dude, like, but like, like, so much respect for that level of grit. 45 years selling orange chicken, right? All that to say.

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  You will pick based on the level of awareness that you have at that time. Where it gets more difficult is that you learn more shit as you go and you realize that there are higher leverage opportunities. The difficulty is that if you're four years into one thing, year five of an existing thing that you have four years of reps on versus year one of even a slightly better opportunity, you have to compare year one versus year five of the other one, not year one versus year one, because time you can't get back. And so that's where the compounding of getting better at something at some point does have outsized returns, even if it's an inferior vehicle.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about that idea of you're an A plus operator, but you're going after a C plus opportunity. How do you assess your opportunity? Because I feel like I run into people who are working on A plus opportunities and everyone will say that's the dumbest idea ever. You're going to put couches, it's going to be called Airbnb, that makes no sense, right? And then it's a boom and it's huge. And then simultaneously, you can be working on a terrible idea, but if you went and got, you know, a puff piece in Business Insider and Forbes, it's like your parents are like, oh, it's amazing, good job. Even if you're grinding and it's not going anywhere.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the way, the way I look at it is like, in every single category, there's an amazing business. And the funny thing, the funny thing that everyone thinks about like Airbnb is like the dumb idea, when it's like, it wasn't a dumb idea. It just seemed ridiculous.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  And that's very different than like somebody that like chooses apparel as a category, which everyone knows is like structurally really, really, really challenging, really, really competitive. Yes, there's like a hundred companies in the world that absolutely print. And if you're one of those companies, then you're, then you're great. But some people like choose apparel and then three years in, then they understand the competitive dynamics and they're like, I'm in a shitty business. I think that's very different than like choosing the thing that seems silly, even though Airbnb at this point is now like the best business, right?

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Massive scale, network effects, a great product, all these things.

• 1:11:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think if you look at the marketplace that you're trying to get into, there's usually going to be a bolus of businesses at some part. And that gives you some idea of where the difficulty in that business is. And so like, for example, if you're going to get into, I want to start a social media marketing agency. It's like, well, there's a bolus at the bottom and then very few who ascend to the top. And it's because it's really, really difficult operationally, because if you're really good at marketing, then you can usually make enough money to not work at one of those types of businesses. And so you're constantly, you have to be so good at ops and so good at marketing and branding and sales in order to just slowly get these bigger and bigger accounts and you kind of level up the types of customers that you can go after. Because all those businesses go after SMBs and SMBs are inherently volatile. And so even if you do a great job, they'll still cancel. And so it's just a churn and burn business.

• 1:12:10Jordi Hays?

  Not to mention, your flagship client will eventually say like, hey, we're spending a hundred thousand dollars on this service. We could hire five people that are the best in the world at what they do and they'll just focus on us, let's do that instead.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, like there are, there are impediments to that business scaling. Can you do it? Absolutely. But I'm just a huge advocate of just like, just look at what the biggest version of that business looks like, because this is obviously a more tech forward show, but like the vast majority of businesses are not tech businesses.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  Right? There's like A track businesses all over the place. There's pool cleaners, like there's a lot of shit you can do for money. And so I, like, unless you want to be a trillionaire, like you can be a billionaire in just about any boring business. You look at, you look at, what's his name? Is it Brad Jacobs?

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Six times or.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  Make a few billion dollars.

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then he has a sequel, a few more billion.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  You guys are kind of, you guys are very, yeah, I never, I never thought of you as.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  Home building materials.

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's just a lot of businesses out there. And so it just depends on like what the goal is, but any business done for, like zooming all the way out, if you do one thing for 40 years and you get better every year, you're going to fucking dominate. And so on some level, going after the tech opportunity, though they're, they're for sure are the big mega winners. It's easier to compete against the people who are going after the pool cleaners. There's just, there's like, there's less sophisticated players, there's less capital. And so having a little bit of street smarts and a lot of work ethic can get you pretty far there. And you look at that compared to like, you know, you look at the guy who's doing seven million a year top line, two and a half million dollars in bottom line, doesn't really work that much, has a crew of guys. Is that the life you want?

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  Because there's nothing like, there's nothing wrong with that. And so I think it's deciding first to the younger guy, like what do I want? Or what is an acceptable outcome? And then what of the many, many paths that are ahead of me have the highest likelihood of me getting there? And then once you pick that path, know that if you stick with that path for 20 years, the likelihood that you fail is basically zero, as long as you have some feedback loop for improvement. That's basically it. Figure out where you want to go, find the highest likely path of getting there, and then do not let the opinions of strangers or people who do not have what you want dissuade you from getting there.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think about, there's this odd trend of entrepreneurship, like, I don't know, like mindset stuff where you got to be doing sauna, cold plunge, meditation. And I feel like that only makes sense once you're successful. And then you look at the successful people and you're like, well, yeah, the rich guy has a sauna, but what was he doing when he was broke? He was waking up and getting on his laptop. But how have you reacted?

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  Rich people fly private, so I should fly private in order to get rich. Right? It's, it's, it's conflation. Okay, so at the most basic level, you have to do work.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  And if it is not the work, then you have to have a very strong argument that is going to increase your output per unit of time, period. And so if you have a three hour morning routine and that's the first three hours of the day when you're probably the cognitively, the freshest, have the most energy, you would have to have an incredible, do you curse on the show?

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  We don't.

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  Okay, a credible darn argument.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome to. Our kids are, our kids are watching, but you know, by all means.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  You have to have an incredible argument for why that's going to improve your output. And so like the morning routine that I'm a big advocate of is you wake up and then you caffeinate.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:28Speaker 04

  You shut off your, your distractions and then you begin the work and how, how much you can compress the time from waking to beginning work.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

  Is the ideal and you are the freshest whenever you are post sleep.

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:42Speaker 04

  And so I like, if you want to do that stuff, I'm like, by all means, go for it. But like, just understand, like you can, plenty of people have hobbies, you can have hobbies, like there's nothing wrong with that. It's just, is this actually, and you also don't need to work 16 hours a day in order to get what you want. I have plenty of friends who are super successful and don't work that much. Now, did they work 16 hours a day to get there? Probably. And so this is the modeling, the rise, not the plateau. What's difficult is the plateau is what's more visible.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:06Speaker 04

  What do you think about? And then you can make the content.

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  Right? What do, no one's making this part.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:16:11Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about people sort of like staging out their sort of career as an entrepreneur? I was talking to a friend of mine who has a, something like an agency business in fashion. He's going to do like about a million dollars this year of like profit. It's a fantastic business. He has, he eventually wants to have his own, his own brand. My, my advice to him is like, fashion is such a like bad business until it's a great business, till you have like a flagship brand that takes 20 years to make. I was like, get your business to like a couple million a year, get it like establish, just a couple million a year profit at least.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Get it established, get, you know, 10, 20 flagship clients that are on sort of long term contracts and then basically use that cash flow to invest in your brand. And like, a lot of people would be like, given the advice now of like, just go all in on, go all in on the brand, like why are you wasting time with this other thing? And I feel like that's very, that, that works super well, like if you have a trust fund, but for somebody who's like 27, let's assume they want to have a family in a few years, I was pushing him to say like, make this thing great, even though you know it's not the thing that you want to be doing for that 40 year chunk of your career. But how would you talk to, to somebody in that sort of space?

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  So I don't think there's a right answer because it's all dependent on risk, which is entirely personal.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  And so if you want to go balls on the line, that's not cursing, then, then do it, go all in, but like just understand the risk that you're taking on. And so I would say that that's not a risk that I would take. I would say that I'm relatively.

• 1:17:52Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's risk to being all in and then not having the capital to actually fuel the opportunity, right? My point of view is like, you're going to be way, way, way higher likelihood of success if you sort of build slow and you can put half a million a year of like outside capital into the business versus like trying to build this brand when you don't have a capital source.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  Depends on goal, depends on risk tolerance. Like I want to be a trillionaire and then, and I'm willing to take the risk, then it's like, yeah, I mean, you should have started yesterday. You know what I mean? But my perspective is I would like to get my oxygen mask on personally. And I was able to make, I've been able to take significantly bigger and bigger bets in my career because I don't, they're free swings.

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  If I lose, my, my life changes zero.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  And so when thinking about big life changes, what's been really helpful for me is what is my, what tactically changes about my life? Do I change what I eat? Do I change what I wear? Do I change where I live? Do I change the car I drive? And, and do these things matter, right? Does it change who I'm married to? If none of these things change, then almost none of these decisions are going to actually have a huge impact on my life, which then makes the argument for like, maybe I should take a higher risk adjusted return move. But I would say that from the emotional side rather than the logical side, it was, I have tried, I very quickly tried to have a nest egg to be like, I'm good.

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Speaker 04

  And that's what's allowed me to take really big bets, like things like school, school's a platform, the likelihood that.

• 1:19:13Jordi Hays?

  Oxygen mask is a, is a great way to.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, put that on.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  If you're going to be.

• 1:19:16Speaker 04

  If you want, and if you have responsibilities too. If you're, if you're a parent and you've got kids and you've got mortgage and you want a certain lifestyle for them and certain schools that they, you know, that cost money, then, then you're also risking their futures to a degree. And so again, it's your decision, but just know what you're putting at risk and how much is my life going to change if I lose? Keith Cunningham has a great frame on this, which is just, what's my upside? What's my downside? And can I live with my downside? If you can't live with the downside, don't take the bet.

• 1:19:45John Coogan?

  You mentioned that, you know, the success and the habits are visible at the plateau, but not on the rise. And I agree with you. Like, you're not actually seeing the accurate picture of the up and coming entrepreneur, the future trillionaire as it's happening. But at the same time, a lot of businesses increasingly need to do some form of social media on their way up. And the risk there is like, sometimes companies just get sucked into just being full media companies, or the, or the brand value and the, and the cash flow from the media business outgrows whatever they were doing originally. What is the right balance? How should entrepreneurs think in the modern era? Like, if you're starting a company, consumer product in 2026, what's the right level of social media and,

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  and actual owned content without it becoming like fake work?

• 1:20:32Speaker 04

  What do you mean by fake work?

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Fake work would be like, you're, you're growing your following account, but you're not growing your cash flow or your actual.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a generation of entrepreneurs and like, you're probably a huge driver of this that are like, I need to work, I need to like, I need to build my personal brand.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  They don't realize that like, if they just make an amazing product that millions of people benefit from, they just default, get the personal brand and they could just, if you care about like attention and being on camera, then you can just do that later. But maybe just make something amazing.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  And also, your personal brand is an actual media company that has cash flow and is like a successful business.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  You wouldn't be, you wouldn't, I don't think you'd be like on camera if you weren't making money.

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  No, I wouldn't. I hated it. It was like, it was very hard for me to decide to do this.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, but there's a lot of people that are basically doing the media for the clout and they don't, and they, and they think, but it's fake work because they're saying, they're justifying the clout chasing by saying, oh, it's marketing for my business.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  If what you do does not translate into the money that you make and money that you make is the goal, then you are doing work that is not effective.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  If, to the, the example you gave earlier, if you start a, a business and you get better at media and the media is making more money than your existing business, then maybe you're better at media than you were at your business. And maybe that should be your business.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  And so I think constantly being flexible about reassessing what the market wants versus what you have.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  You know, I think Bezos says this, but you know, determined on goal, flexible on path, or whatever way he says that. And he's also a great example of, what's Bezos's personal brand? Well, everyone knows who he is. Does he make a lot of content? No. Why? He just happens to own Amazon, right? And so I think it depends on what, what sphere you want to get into. This is kind of interesting. If you were to say, I want to be a big B2B influencer, you cannot be a B, big B2B influencer without evidence that you are good at business. Period. You could take, and there's plenty of people who take word for word, the stuff that I say.

• 1:22:24Jordi Hays?

  Aren't there, there's probably some good counter examples to that. We don't need to, we don't need to name them.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's tough. It's tough.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  Like, I would say the biggest, the big, I think the biggest B2B influencer right now is Elon.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 1:22:37Speaker 04

  And he also has the biggest business and is the richest man. Right? And so, and that, I think that just cascades all the way down. The only reason that, so like, I was, I had a podcast that started in July of 2017. That's when I started, it was called Gym Secrets, and I rebranded it as just the game.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  The game.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

  But the, a, as I continued to make it, we went from like, you know, 2,000 downloads a month to millions. When I sold my company for 46.2 million, and then people were like, oh, this guy actually knows what he's talking about. And then the brand took off because I had evidence.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Legitimacy.

• 1:23:06Speaker 04

  And so I think that the amount of legitimacy that you need to be an influencer depends on the risk that the consumer has in taking action on the nature of the content that you're making. And so if I'm a beauty influencer, if I buy lipstick, or I do a, a, you know, lash technique, I'm getting waters, I'm not familiar with here. You paint your face in some way, right?

• 1:23:27John Coogan?

  Expert.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  The risk is relatively low.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  Right? Now you move a little bit over here and you got like personal finance. Well, it's like, who's the biggest there? Dave. And then there's, there's some of the new age ones, Erica Culver. She's got hurt, but she was also, and there's Vivian too, I think. But like, they have some credibility behind, and like, there's tons, like, if a teacher is in, in her basement, talking about how you should invest in the S and P 500 and says exactly what Warren Buffett says, and maybe they even say it a little bit more compelling than the way, than what Warren Buffett says, they won't be Warren Buffett, because they just forgot to build Berkshire Hathaway.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  And so it's like, the proof is the pudding. I think, at least my perspective on media is the proof is the pudding, but it varies in terms of how much proof you need. Now, if you're ugly as shit, very hard to be a beauty influencer.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  But if you can use, but if you are ugly, and then you paint your face so well that you become hot, then you absolutely, yeah, because you have evidence.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 04

  Right? And you have a more dramatic point. No, 100%. This is how it works. Yeah.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  I like that. Talk about status seeking. It seems like in Silicon Valley, there's often, you know, Naval talks about this, like, there's value.

• 1:24:33Speaker 04

  Just Silicon Valley.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, that's what I want to know. In Silicon Valley, there's a lot of trend chasing, there's a lot of status seeking, and there's value in like, doing low status activities. And I'm wondering, in, in mid-market entrepreneurship, small businesses, like, what is the shape of that? Is it different than Silicon Valley? Is it less pronounced, more pronounced? Like, what is the version of, look, you just need to run a series of golf courses and be happy with that, that type of thing, or whatever, whatever the equivalent is?

• 1:25:01Speaker 04

  I think it depends on who they compare themselves to. I think it just comes down to that. I think tech guys compare themselves to other tech guys, and they want approval from tech guys, and so they do the, the activities that tech guys approve of.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  If you're an HVAC guy, then it's going to be, you're going to do the activities that HVAC people think are cool, if they're the peer group that you actually compare yourself to.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  Which they might not be. And to be fair.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  I love the tech guys that, that sell their business for nine figures and then are like, I need a cash flowing lifestyle business ASAP.

• 1:25:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. I know a lot of them. A lot. Like, a crazy amount. Like, buying gas stations, like, it's a lot.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  How, how bad is that?

• 1:25:35Speaker 04

  Bad? What do you mean?

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Like, because I, I imagine it's a grass is greener on the other, other side thing, where they enjoyed building their business, they sold it, they have all this cash, but they want cash flow, they want the stability of the cash flow. And so they want the idea of, of running a small business.

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  Check every month.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  And they don't, exactly. But they don't think about what it means to like, at 2:00 AM, your gas station got robbed and you got to go down there and sort it out with the cops or something like that. And so I'm wondering about like, what is the actual lesson there for someone who's like, about to get over their skis?

• 1:26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think humans are inherently dissatisfied.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  And I think whatever you have, you want what you don't have. And so if you're married, you're like, ah, life would be different if I was single. If you're a parent, you're like, ah, can you remember when we didn't have kids? And when, if you don't have kids, you're like, I wish I had kids.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Speaker 04

  If you're an employee, you're like, man, I wish I'd be an entrepreneur. And somebody you're an entrepreneur, you're like, man, it would be so nice to just show up and clock out at five and have to think about and get a check. Like, we just always, we want to make, we want the benefits of a trade-off without the negatives of the trade-off.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:28Speaker 04

  And so when guys are in the cash flow business, because I'll, because that's who I talk to the majority of the time, is like, what they're thinking about all the times is like, it's hard to sell this business. I'm not really building my net worth. The multiples that I've been getting on this aren't going to necessarily be that high. I'm dealing with people all day. I deal with low skilled labor, and I've got, you know, churn issues or finding techs that aren't going to show up drunk on the job. Like, there's, like, my, one of my favorite quotes of all time, I'm going to try not to cuss on this one, but my CFO was deep South Texas when we were, when we were in Texas, when we were building Gym Launch. Suzanne Chiflet, shout out to Suzanne. She was the reason we were able to sell Gym Launch. She's, she had been, she had been a CFO for four companies from

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  one to 100 million plus, had done a $5 billion exit, and I think she'd, she'd been either buy side or sell side over 20 times.

• 1:27:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:27:17Speaker 04

  She was just like, she was like, just so weathered, in a good way, right? And she said, you know what, Alex? She's like, it's all shit. She was like, it's all shit. Every business is shit. It's all shit. And I, and it was, but it was, like, she said it with so much sincerity, because I was like, at the time, I was like, man, it'd be cool if we got this kind of multiple, blah, blah, blah. And she was like, it just doesn't, it's, it, it all sucks. And it's just different type of suck, but it all sucks.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We're at time, but give us a pitch for Scale or Fail.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  If you like seeing entrepreneurs try their absolute hardest and have a completely new paradigm shift in 90 days to scale their business the most, then watch the show. I meet with them for an hour, give them a whole blueprint of what I would do if I bought the business 100% today. And then they execute and they compete.

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. So reminds me of PMF or Die.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  We, we, we experimented with the show last year.

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  Talk about niche audience.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was like, it was like, we, we, we put this team in an apartment in New York. They were not allowed to leave for 90 days until, or, or until they build a million dollar ARR business. It, it, it, it descended into chaos.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  It was Lord of the Flame.

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally crazy. And we were like, we don't have time to do this and this.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  But it had, it had like hundreds of people watching at all times. It was actually gripping.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  And it was just a live stream of them in the apartment, just like cooking.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. But one of them got really good at talking to chat. It was a whole thing. It was sort of opened us up to like live opportunities.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  That was a good example, because like, one of them clearly was like, a gifted content creator. And the other one was like, why am I on camera? This is terrible.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  This is terrible.

• 1:28:55Speaker 04

  Did he become a content creator?

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  We got to check in with him.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got to check in with him. He took a vacation and traveled a little bit.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they both needed to like disconnect. It was.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  But, yeah, lots of things.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  So don't do the show live. Then people will, will actually go crazy.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Edit is, is a good one sometimes.

• 1:29:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Hey, pleasure to be here.

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  For having me.

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Congratulations on everything.

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I appreciate it. Congratulations. Appreciate it.

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  Well, our next guest is, I'm back to you, Alex. I need to put my headphones back on. We have Josh from CIV on his Financial Times argument that data centers are the industrial test of the era.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Here he is. Sup, guy. Josh's up for it. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you? We're doing great. We were just hanging out, talking to Alex from Ozzie. How is, how is your day going?

• 1:29:47Speaker 05

  Uh, it's good. I'm up in San Francisco. I'm actually in the Merck I'm sorry to hear that.

• 1:29:51John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. Huge numbers.

• 1:29:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know. I know. I live in LA. So, uh, usually I would, I'd love to do this in person, but, uh,

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  Next time.

• 1:29:59Speaker 05

  Uh, up in the Bay today.

• 1:30:00John Coogan?

  Next time.

• 1:30:00Speaker 05

  Stop right through the cold weather.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  So take us through the thesis of the latest, uh, piece you put together. Uh, I have a bunch of questions, but I'd love for you to sort of, uh, reiterate the thesis statement for the audience first.

• 1:30:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, the, the thesis is really kinda three things. Um, point one is we are living through this era where, um, we are on the losing end of a bunch of supply chain dependencies in areas like rare earths, permanent magnets, critical minerals, and just, you know, uh, manufacturing and industrial capacity more broadly.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31Speaker 05

  Um, and that is a result of choices in part that, that we made in the 1980s and 1990s, um, as well as policies that China undertook to try to pull all of that capacity into China. Um, that now I think everybody

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  When you say choices we made, is we, the US government WTO ascension of China, that choice, or are we talking about choices made by the free market? A company just says, I'm choosing to buy from China because it's cheaper and I don't care about my supply chain?

• 1:31:00Speaker 05

  Um, I think it's a little bit of both. I would say, um, you know, starting in the 1980s, we had a big wave of offshoring where we intend, uh, companies, large American companies intentionally move production into places like China, um, because they wanted to move it off balance sheet, take advantage of lower labor costs, looser environmental regulations abroad. Um, and then as well, I think, you know, we didn't do ourselves any favor with, uh, you know, the trade policies, uh, that we have pursued over the last, call it 30 years, um, before we realized what had happened. Um, so point one is, you know, when you have sort of import, you know, systemically important industries, um, and you push them overseas, you know, you never know what's gonna happen. You could find yourselves on the losing end of a really important supply chains and technologies.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Speaker 05

  Um, point two is, I think, you know, there is a real risk that, uh, if we, you know, stop or pause the construction of data centers or make it really hard to do that in the United States, um, we could find ourselves in a very similar position, right? That data centers are not just, you know, piles of chips, but there are also, uh, important other technologies, power electronics like transformers and switchgear, um, the kind of stuff that our portfolio company, Giga Energy makes, uh, as well as, you know, more, more basic industrial inputs like steel. Um, and that stuff has to be made somewhere. And today, because of the shortages for a lot of those goods, as well as the fact that, you know, data centers are at the very cutting edge and they're, they're financed by some of the deepest pocketed developers on the planet,

• 1:32:24Speaker 05

  there's a willingness both to pay for faster, uh, and more advanced technology. And so companies that, you know, like Giga are both able to do some of this stuff in America in a way that wasn't possible or wouldn't be possible without this kind of generational demand pool. And there's also demand for new technologies, things like, you know, optical links or solid state transformers, um, that, you know, now there's sort of a chance for the US to get ahead. And again, because there's a source of demand to pay for it all. And then point three is, again, because these are sort of some of the deepest pocketed, uh, corporations out there, you know, financing all of this, that to the extent there are trade offs in the, in the, you know, in the form of things like higher energy costs that in some cases do arise when data centers are built, that, that can be solved by having the hyperscalers pay for some of that.

• 1:33:08Speaker 05

  And so I think there's a better outcome here, one that better advantages or supports America's long-term economic competitiveness than just saying, we don't want to do this here, let it be done offshore.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  Uh, do you have an idea of, uh, a, a thesis particularly around why America is currently so strong in data center construction? It feels like when I, when I count up the, the gigawatts, uh, America is doing fantastically. Uh, we, we are in the lead. Of course, I agree with you on everything. We gotta hold the lead. But I wanna retreat to the source of strength that got us here in the first place, because when you tell the story of there's gonna be a new industry, it's gonna be industrial, and it's gonna really start in 2000 and run until 2026. If you had said shoes, I would have said, that's gonna happen in China.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  Uh, you know, if you had said any other, any other piece of the economy, I would have said, that absolutely would have been pushed offshore, pushed out of the United States. And yet we got here to this place where we do have, you know, Virginia and, and, you know, AWS and GCP and Azure and so many, uh, massive campuses. And the question is really just, are we going to go bigger? But why, why didn't we build the data centers abroad in the last two decades? Before there was all this discussion about near peer competition geopolitics? It feels like that would have been the natural choice, and yet we did choose to build here throughout the last two decades.

• 1:34:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's a great question. Um, I, I think it really comes down to two things. One is that, um, even today still latency really matters, right? If you are trying to serve customers that care about getting their data or their inference, uh, as quickly as possible, um, you need data centers to be sort of, you know, close to, to the customers they're being served.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Speaker 05

  Um, I think there's a real chance, for what it's worth, that that matters less and less over time as, um, you know, as, as inference, uh, workloads become more agentic, right? Like agents don't care if they have to wait five seconds. If you're away from your computer for two hours running a long, a long query, and, you know, it takes a little longer because the data center is somewhere else, you're not gonna notice that. And so I think to me, what that means is these supply chains are gonna be formed today, right? The data centers are being built today, the, the factories that supply them are being set up today when speed and reliability, industrial capacity matter. And so I think there's also a real risk that if we wait and those supply chains are built somewhere else, it's gonna be really hard to reverse this. And the point I'm trying to make with the rare earths comparison is, like, we know how devastating that can be.

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  Let's think really hard before we make that mistake again.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  When you think about the rare earth, uh, situation, it feels like a lot of that stems specifically from China's leverage over the United States. I think it would be a very different discussion if it was Canada or, uh, you know, Germany. And when I think about the AI supply chain, I go to Zeiss and Trump and ASML and TSMC and SK Hynix, and I'm in Western countries. Do you think that there is a, that there is a discussion to be had about, uh, the, the, the sphere of influence beyond America, but, uh, in the West where we can partner on data center construction reliably?

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Or is this, uh, is it, is it actually critical to have, uh, the vast majority of data centers built out within the, the 50 states?

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  I don't think they have to be, um, in the 50 states, for sure. I think there's definitely room to collaborate with allies, both in where the physical data centers are located, as well as, um, in the supply chain. So we're not gonna make every single thing that goes in every single data center, um, in the United States. But, but I would say maybe two things that concern me. Um, one is, you know, it came out a couple of weeks ago that the Chinese government, um, is reportedly planning a $295 billion fund for data center construction. So the Chinese government, unsurprisingly, because they've run this play before, they get it, right? They understand how important all of these technologies and supply chains are. Um, the second is today, there are lots of, of important pieces of the data center supply chain

• 1:37:18Speaker 05

  from, you know, the GPU manufacturing at places like TSMC to the ASML UV lithography machines that really can only be made in, you know, Western allies, uh, like Taiwan and the Netherlands. Um, I think if the, the history of industrial development tells us anything, it's that we can't rely on that being true forever. Um, and so, you know, taking action today to make sure that, you know, while there's a chance to take advantage of this capacity and this demand to build next generation technology, industrial capacity in the United States, when these technologies aren't commoditized and can't be bought more cheaply from a place like China, is kind of, you know, it's, it's an important window of opportunity. And if we miss that opportunity, again, I think there, there's a, a world where we really regret it.

• 1:38:02Speaker 05

  You know, that doesn't mean just, we should build all the data centers, we should have no, no restrictions, no regulations. I think that would be a big mistake. And I think that is a way to politically get wrong, you know, wrong footed and, and generate a lot of opposition, which is why it's important that, you know, some of these energy costs be moved onto, onto developers, as well as, you know, things like environmental restrictions being put in place to make sure that we do this the right way. But I think it's important that, you know, that to me, the lesson of the rare earth example is, you've gotta balance these things, right? It can't be all of one or all of the other.

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  Last question. You, uh, you wrote this in the Financial Times. It clearly will land with a geopolitically minded, uh, audience. But, uh, while I agree with a lot of what you said, I can't imagine it, uh, translating very well to everyday American voters who see AI as very deeply unpopular. How are you thinking about the, the jumps and the translation layer that needs to happen to actually get, you know, American voters on board with this plan?

• 1:39:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, look, to me, first of all, completely agree. I think there is a real opposition to data centers, in part because, you know, yes, they're they're big and they can be kind of ugly. But the reality is, I my view is, a lot of that has to do with the fact that they are the physical representation of AI, right?

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you look at the Instagram comments, like, you can very clearly tell that the vast majority of people that are like commenting on like data center bad content have never seen a data center. Like, they're nowhere near one. They might live in a major city that they don't even see them. But

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can see data centers putting up signs that say, no AI served here.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they don't like the idea of they're losing a job, or losing out financially, or watching companies get even bigger than they already are, all of that. So yes, it's a referendum. But then, how do you bridge that gap?

• 1:39:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's really a few things. One is, when a data center is built, right, making sure that, you know, if we have policies in place that, you know, push data center developers to build their own clean generation and optimally connect it to the grid, that having a data center could mean your energy costs go down, right? So that's point one, is make the localized costs go away. And that's something that's that's very achievable.

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:15Speaker 05

  Point two would be, you know, I think when we talk about what the effects of AI on the labor market are going to be, I think, taking a more, you know, reasoned view than just, you know, saying, oh, it's going to wipe out 50% of all white collar jobs by some date. That's not that far in the future. You know, I think the evidence is pretty mixed, and the jury is still out. And we have a lot of chances to use public policy tools to make sure that that's not the case. And to tell us sort of a more balanced story and ensure that the American people know that, you know, it is not going to be job apocalypse, and that, you know, it's going to be the kind of transition that that other large technology transitions have been, where, you know, over time, the composition of the labor force changes, but ultimately, it's a source of growth and a source of new creation.

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 05

  And then the last one, and this is really the point I'm trying to get across in this article, is there are lots of parts of a data center, from the steel to the transformers, that need to be made somewhere, in a factory. And somebody's going to be working in those factories. And there is a real opportunity to make sure that those jobs are American jobs. And that's something that I would also, you know, be in favor of using public policy to encourage, not just because, you know, those jobs themselves are valuable, but also because the industrial capacity they represent is valuable, and for all the reasons that we all know that reindustrialization is important.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, while the data center doesn't have that many people working inside of it, the supply chain is very deep and complex. So that makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to have you on, Josh.

• 1:41:41John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week.

• 1:41:42Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:41:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Our next guest is John McElhone. Did I say that correctly? From American Turbines?

• 1:42:01Speaker 06

  You're close, McElhone.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  McElhone. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:42:08Speaker 06

  My name is John McElhone. My company's called American Turbines. We build small turbines for rapid deploy, energy generation.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Okay. How small are we talking? How can I think about this? Help me place it in the in the world. How much energy is it generating?

• 1:42:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, so you could probably fit one in the back of your pickup truck, a few of them, actually. And ours are about 1 megawatt in size, our first units. And so you can think about a megawatt could probably power about just over 1,000 homes in the back of a pickup truck. So they're tiny, but, you know, they pack a big punch. They're quite power dense.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then talk about the the supply chain and the actual energy source. These run natural gas. What are the inputs to actually getting energy?

• 1:42:54Speaker 06

  Just natural gas. That's why we're called American Turbines, because the United States is very uniquely advantaged compared to the rest of the world. Best place in the world to use natural gas. We have such an amazing supply of it, extremely cheap. And we have a lot of resource that we haven't tapped yet. So this company just works well in the States. You know, it wouldn't work in Europe, it wouldn't work in Russia or China. It just works here.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what does the team look like? What does the manufacturing look like? Are these like handmade at this point? I mean, it's a young company. Take us through a little bit of the history. I mean,

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Handmade American Turbines.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  I mean, I imagine that it's not fully lights out robotic factory yet, but maybe that's the vision in a few years. But where are you today?

• 1:43:36Speaker 06

  We're pretty small. We're a small team. There's a few of us on board right now. We are hiring, so check out our website if you want to roll. And but yeah, we're right now, it's just handmade. But that the the goal here is really being able to make something you can mass manufacture. Like, that's that's the end goal. Everybody is more so worried about time to power. How quick can you get some energy generation in the ground? And the only way to really achieve that is figuring out automation at scale and how to make a product at scale. That's kind of where we failed at turbines over the years, is we've they're all kind of derived from aircraft. And you have to kind of be stringent to the standards of the FAA, and it has to be able to travel at 600 miles an hour. Sort of work back around from back from these systems and understand how do we make this on the ground. But what we're trying to work out is like, the opposite way, like, just make it for the grind, make something very simple. It doesn't have to be efficient, doesn't have

• 1:44:21Speaker 06

  to last forever. You don't have to run this at 600 miles an hour, 30,000 feet in the air. Because the problem that you're really solving is really just energy generation at scale.

• 1:44:32John Coogan?

  Can you, sorry, Jordy, please?

• 1:44:34Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this? How did you how did you kind of end up in in this category? And and what was the backstory on becoming a teal fellow?

• 1:44:45Speaker 06

  What did I do before this? I did a company called Crop Safe. We built farm tech software, you know, of all the quite the pivot, I must say. But quite different. And kind of how I fell into American turbines and why I'm doing this now is, you know, I finished up that last company, and I realized that all my free time, I just spent, you know, mechanic and stuff. All the cars I've worked on and have owned over the years have just been 70s cars. And they're very mechanical machines. My dad's a mechanic, spent a lot of time working with him. A few planes, I flew planes pretty young as a kid, so I'm quite familiar with how the turbine works, how it's put together, what people we need to hire to make it happen. And so I figured, you know, my next company should be something that is fun and exciting and cool, and I can scale, and I can work with hardware. And I

• 1:45:30Speaker 06

  think it's very hard to compete with foreigners that just, you know, just like this stuff. Like, the car behind me, you can see, the K truck, that's my car.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:45:37Jordi Hays?

  I want one of those. I want one of those trucks so bad. Every time I see a video of one, I send it to my wife. I'm like, we need one.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Can you get me up to speed on intellectual property in this category? Like, I imagine that there's a patent that existed maybe a long time ago on a turbine. Like, can you build on the shoulders of giants? Like, how do you actually create something that you can own, that can't be disassembled and copied? Or is it sort of a free for all?

• 1:46:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there's a bunch of patents. Same with any hardware piece, there's a bunch of patents. But there are things with patents that are very specialized. The turbine isn't actually very hard. It is hard to make, but it's not very complicated. Our system will probably have less than 40 parts. So that's that's quite small. And so it's not, it's not crazy. The product itself at American turbines isn't, I don't see it, the turbine itself is like, we're going to have a bunch of IP on this, we're going to spend six years filing patents, and we're going to have this like specialized thing we're going to have in a few years. That that sucks. That's what a lot of people are doing with like supercritical stuff. And sure, a lot of specialized turbines, it's just like, you're waiting five years for what? So our product, I see in the future is really just the manufacturing at scale,

• 1:46:50Speaker 06

  like our factory. Like, that's really what Henry Ford was able to do with the Model T. Like, the product wasn't the car, it was kind of the the promise that with the process of manufacturing at scale in these assembly lines, we could create a whole new industry of transportation. And it worked, it worked for him. And we kind of need the same for energy is, we need to figure out how to produce at scale. And you can, you can only do that in kind of automated ways that we're focusing on.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:47:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, massive day.

• 1:47:17John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day, and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:47:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

• 1:47:20Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, John.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Stop making excuses and do it. Our next guest is Deena Shakir from Lux Capital. She's a partner there. She's been on the show before. And we're very excited to have Deena back on the show. How are you doing?

• 1:47:42Speaker 07

  Hey, guys. Great to see you.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Great to see you, too.

• 1:47:45Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  Welcome back. Give us the latest on the portfolio investments. Also, I mean, I want to zoom out at some point and just take your temperature on how things are going in the private markets and the AI boom. But first, give us the latest and greatest.

• 1:48:00Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Well, we've got a lot of exciting stuff going on all the time and there's definitely no summer lull, as you know, and are reporting on anywhere in venture and certainly not here at Lux. Yeah.

• 1:48:10Jordi Hays?

  You think even by August, August, I think we could be seeing a bit of a lull. I feel like it's always like it feels crazy and then you get to mid-August and it's like, okay.

• 1:48:19Speaker 07

  Maybe that's wishful thinking on your part, guys. I don't know if you're going to be taking that August vacation. It's definitely lots of excitement, lots of activity. Our partner meetings are filled with deal pitches and we've got announcements coming up, you know, nearly every day here. So there's a lot going on, especially in the world of AI.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Yes. What's the latest in the world of AI?

• 1:48:38Speaker 07

  Well, I'm excited to talk about one of our newest investments that we just announced last week. It's actually our very first investment in the GCC, a company called 1001. We had the chance to invest really early. We were there when it was just Bilal and an idea and the seed round, have been following it closely and preempted the Series A, a $30 million round in partnership with early investors, including GC and CIV. And Sanabul actually joined us as well. Super excited about the opportunity for applied AI in the Gulf.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does, what is the status quo of software in the critical infrastructure space? Like you hear about these massive machines from Siemens and I imagine that there's some maybe web-based dashboard for something or other, but are those companies asleep at the wheel? Is there just so much opportunity that you can do a yes and solution where it's not a rip and replace, but it's an additive functionality for critical infrastructure managers and companies? Like what is the shape of the job to be done?

• 1:49:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, there's a real greenfield opportunity, especially in the region. It's going to come down to the application layer, to deployment. This is, you know, not a novel concept. There's a lot of discussion right now about the distribution advantage. You know, we're sort of moving beyond the mode of models into actually who can deploy on the ground with partners. And what's exciting about the GCC is, of course, we think about them a lot as investors, right? There's a lot of money coming in from the UAE, from Saudi, from Qatar and elsewhere into these companies. But the idea of a homegrown company that is built for the GCC, which is a true global hub, clearly not only on the investing side, but actually on the customer side, where there's an opportunity for, you know,

• 1:50:24Speaker 07

  really fast, massive, multi-hundred-dollar, billion-dollar types of deployments at scale, something that you really don't see anywhere else in the world.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Really quickly, we gotta, we gotta hit the gong. It came in the middle of an answer, so I didn't get a chance to do it, but, Jordan, please.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What is, what is deal flow like coming out of, coming out of the Gulf? Like, I can't imagine it's more than like 10% of the opportunities you're seeing, maybe like 5%, but how are you evaluating those opportunities?

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  And do you go there or do they come here? How does that?

• 1:51:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do they, their money comes here, but then they're entrepreneurs. Do they come and do a roadshow here? Or, you know?

• 1:51:07Speaker 07

  You know, it's, it's still really early days. There, of course, have been companies innovating in Dubai and all over the Gulf for quite some time. This is our first investment in, you know, 25 years. That's a company headquartered there. Certainly, we have a lot of companies that are doing business there, or companies that have gotten investment from the region. But it's still early days. What's really exciting about this company, among many other things, is the founder and the founding team and this thesis that they have around the diaspora. So how can they catalyze some of the best and brightest entrepreneurs from the region who have worked in the US? You know, Bilal, the founder and CEO, was born in Jordan, studied computer science at Yale, worked for many years at scale, helped

• 1:51:48Speaker 07

  to grow their business in the region, had the opportunity to do anything and saw that there was this incredibly unique opportunity to build a homegrown sovereign AI company focused on the GCC. When we invested, it was just him and an idea and he has attracted some of the best and brightest. It has been such a joy just to watch the incredible talent that he's amassed around him. And that was one of the early signals for us to really double down.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  What are the key stops on the calendar in the Gulf these days? If you're in America, you might go to Liquidity by the All In team. You might go to SF Tech Week, Milken, Sun Valley. What are the key stops if you're investing or doing business in the Gulf?

• 1:52:31Speaker 07

  Well, the big one, especially in the last few years, has been FII, which takes place in the fall in Saudi, in Riyadh. It's known as Davos in the desert to some. So that's, that's a big one. And many people do a trip around that where, you know, Milken does a big summit as well in Abu Dhabi. And, you know, a lot of folks are doing global conferences and actually creating their own versions in the Gulf because there is a lot of opportunity, again, not just on the, on the investing side, but actually now increasingly on the talent side. And we're excited to be at the forefront of that.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Web summits out there too, but tough branding because AI killed the web. And the web doesn't even really exist anymore. But they need to rename it AI. They should just rename AI Summit. There you go.

• 1:53:16Speaker 07

  Well, then AI will be out of date. We're going to have to just be constantly changing the names for all of these.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially. How are, how are Gulf-based companies pricing relative to San Francisco-based companies?

• 1:53:30Speaker 07

  Honestly, I think the global market for these companies for the absolute top tier of talent is pretty consistent and it really just comes down to that team. It's not about being Gulf-based. There's no discount for a founder like Bilal. When you see that talent for a generational company, you know, it's, the prices are going to look like they do for generational companies anywhere in the world. He's headquartered between London and Dubai, you know, has attracted talent from all over the world, including many, many folks actually, you know, from, from Silicon Valley as well. So no discount there, but also no-

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Deep Mine is a feeder in London, like in the UK.

• 1:54:07Speaker 07

  Deep Mine is a feeder. There's really no limit on the opportunity. Lots of great alums coming out of scale as well.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Well, congratulations on the latest news and thank you so much-

• 1:54:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, looking forward to meeting him.

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  -coming on and talking to us for a couple of weeks.

• 1:54:20Speaker 07

  You've got to have him on. He's excellent. Great to see you guys. Thanks for having me.

• 1:54:23Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Deena.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And our next guest is on an absolute tear. He's back on the show, Hussein Fazal from Super.com. How are you doing?

• 1:54:44Speaker 08

  Good. Thanks for having me.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Absolutely incredible run. Give us the numbers. Give us the news. What happened? I want to hit the gong. We might have to hit the gong.

• 1:54:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, very exciting. So we, we just raised our Series D of 65 million, led by TPG at a $1 million valuation.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  How much? What was the valuation?

• 1:55:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, 1.2 billion.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  There we go. We warmed up the gong, so now we can do the real hit. I just did the warm-up hit. What is, what is unlocking the growth? Sort of describe the current customer flow, the current product and, and how you're actually scaling revenue so quickly.

• 1:55:26Speaker 08

  Yeah. So, so the app is a savings super app. So the vision is eventually anytime you want to buy anything, you're opening the app. And it's going to be able to either get you the best price, get you the best cash back, redirect you to the right spot. So when the company started 10 years ago, it just started with hotels and it was all about saving 20 to 30% on hotels. And yeah, it's been 10 years, right? And we just added more ways to save. So you can open the app now. You can save on gas, on insurance, on pharma, on a whole bunch of stuff. We've added financial services. So you could go and swipe your card and get cash back and build your credit score. You can even, you know, take out a bit of cash, buy a cash advance if you need to make ends meet. So

• 1:56:09Speaker 08

  it really is evolving into this, into the super app. But, you know, when I say, when I say super app, we're not, we're not fully chat.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:18Speaker 08

  We're not fully chat.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  You're not, oh, you're not fully chat.

• 1:56:21Speaker 08

  You're not going to be, you're not going to be paying government bills. You're not going to be chatting with your friends. So I call it a savings super app. So anytime you want to save money, that's the app you should be open. So kind of staying in that category.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Okay. So, so then where, where are the bounds of the, of the savings super app? Because I can imagine savings accounts, then bonds are a form of savings. You underwrite a mortgage, car loan, like, how can, yeah, how, how, how risk on can I be with my savings? Can I go lever long?

• 1:56:50Speaker 08

  So, so what we're not doing is, we're not turning into a bank, right? So we're not going to have savings accounts. We're not going to have investment products. When I say savings super app, I mean, it's basically like whenever, whenever you're spending money, you could be saving by using the app, right? So you're spending money in a hotel, you can open the app and you can save 30%, right? You're doing your everyday shopping at any store. Well, you could, you know, through a link similar to Rakuten, you could go and shop and you can get cash back. Or you're going to the grocery store, you can use your super.com MasterCard and you can earn cash back. But the difference I would say is it, a lot of the products we've built have been focused on what we call the everyday American,

• 1:57:31Speaker 08

  so under 100K household income, right? So what you'll see is, you know, our card functions like a secure charge card. A lot of our customers can't get a traditional credit card that gives them, you know, high cash back, high rewards, but this lets them use the money they have, but still be able to earn 1% cash back. In the app, you'll see the ability to take out a cash advance. So if you're looking to make ends meet, typically, you know, you're going to a payday lender and you're paying really high interest rates, but we'll, we'll let you take out kind of a no interest cash advance and you can go and you can go and take money to help you make ends meet. So a lot of the products we've built have been for that demographic, the everyday American.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:58:14Jordi Hays?

  What's something that Super does operationally that you haven't heard of another company doing?

• 1:58:20Speaker 08

  Oh, that's a, that's a really good question. What I, I mean, I'd love to talk about AI because you know, that's, that's the theme of the day. I know you guys just got off a conversation about AI. I'll say, I think internally, we've moved faster, as fast as any other company when it comes to AI adoption. So I'll give you an example. Every once in a while, when I open the app and I see a bug, which is pretty rare, but it does happen. I used to take weeks, so I would take a screenshot, I would submit it, you know, QA person would verify it, an engineer would prioritize it, an engineer would build it. It would then get deployed to staging, then deployed to production. Now I can take a screenshot, I can share it into Slack. And an AI agent will pick it up, fix it, and deploy it to production within minutes.

• 1:59:06Speaker 08

  So I think you, our ability to leverage AI to move fast, that's just one small example. But it's allowing us and enabling us to add more and more ways for our customers to save. We can just build products really fast. And find and build more ways for our customers to save faster than ever before.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the customer acquisition funnel like? I mean, you're partnering with NASCAR. How broad do you go to reach those everyday Americans? How much is direct, direct to consumer advertising versus brand level advertising? What's the strategy?

• 1:59:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, really, really good question. So I would say still about 90% of our marketing spend is performance advertising. Now, what I'll tell you is right now, we advertise specific products as opposed to the app as a whole, right? So no consumer is like, oh yeah, the savings super app, I need that in my life. I'm going to go download it right now. Right? Typically, what happens is they're looking for something in particular. So they're looking for a hotel and they're like, oh wow, super.com seems to have a great hotel deal. Right? Or they're looking to build their credit score for a cash advance and they're like, oh wow, this seems like a product that could be useful to me. And they come in via performance marketing for individual products and that's how they get introduced.

• 2:00:21Speaker 08

  Once they come in, of course, we can then show them other things and other products they can do within the app. So 90% performance, about 10% brand. NASCAR has been great. So that is truly, you know, an everyday American type of sport. And, and you know, I've, I've gone to a few races, I've spoken to customers directly, and it is a great spot for us to do brand marketing.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  How do the, how do credit scores interface with what you do? Are you pulling credit scores from the credit rating agencies? Are you delivering information to those agencies to update people's credit scores? What is the flow?

• 2:01:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's, that's a good question. There's a bunch of ways in which people can improve their credit scores, but, but you have it right. So we are reporting to the major credit bureaus, we are pulling that information back so they can see their credit scores. And there's a bunch of things you can do. We can do, you know, rent reporting, we can do it based on the secure charge card. And there's multiple ways to improve your credit score.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Back on NASCAR, how did you, what is, what is getting into NASCAR actually look like? Like if a founder is NASCAR curious, what, what advice would you give them?

• 2:01:36Speaker 08

  Yeah. So I mean, there's a lot, a lot of branding opportunities. So first you have to decide, like, do you want to do brand? Okay. Then you have to decide what kind of brand do you want to do? Do you want to be doing, you know, subway ads? Do you want to be doing billboards? Do you want to get into sports marketing? Then let's say you've said, okay, I think sports marketing is cool because it has some unique appeal to it and has very broad reach. Then you got to pick your sport, right? So you got to look at your demographics and you got to say, you know, am I on the sort of NHL, NBA, sort of like higher mid-income? Am I on sort of like the MLB, you know, NASCAR, which is like mid to lower income potentially?

• 2:02:14Speaker 08

  So you got to kind of find the right demographic. And then once you pick a, once you pick a sport, then again, there's a variety of things you can do. You can do a deal directly with NASCAR, in which case we did, and we are the official savings partner of NASCAR. You can also do deals with particular drivers and you could say, hey, I want to do a deal with you, the driver, and I want this car to be wrapped in super.com pink. Which we also did with the Rookware Racing and Cody Ware. So there's, there's a bunch of things that you can do, but really it's like any other brand marketing slash sports partnership. And I would say my biggest advice is first pick the right demographic before you get into the specific tactics.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, awesome update. Crushing it.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  Amazing progress. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:03:02Speaker 08

  Appreciate you having me on again.

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  Of course. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Did you see this?

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  I don't even know what you call it, Chrome extension. It's a Chrome extension that lets you dim or hide all the mass-produced fake brands on Amazon.

• 2:03:31Jordi Hays?

  So good. You remember, you remember, you remember, I was asking for this a year ago. I was like, I want to shop on Amazon just from brands that have been over, that are over 50 years old. Right? Cause that just squeezes out the W N P E T H M O E, the A he, I'm not even going to say that. Y X Y L, L U and M M, Joy and Tomy, Go Dawn Lift.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  Gondolf. That's what it looks like. There are, I have a flurry of sort of slop brands on Amazon and this.

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  But you don't like buying from Kufandy?

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Allows you to dim them or even remove them entirely. Of course, a lot of people do their shopping on mobile. So you'll need to fire up the desktop in Chrome with the browser, but if you're doing some serious shopping, probably makes a lot of sense. Pete Oxenham says, it's beautiful. He de-slopped Amazon and it is a nice feature. I can imagine this being very popular. I liked that this little tweaking of your internet experience seems like the good move.

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Define says Chinese airdroppers deserve to make a living too. The funny thing is I don't think they're airdroppers, they're making the actual products.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, they're manufacturers, drop shippers. Well, they're, yeah, what is drop shipping? Drop shipping is where you're using another manufacturer. Yeah.

• 2:04:55Jordi Hays?

  You're not even necessarily even holding inventory.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  No, this is straight from the factory for sure.

• 2:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, I respect, I respect the, the hustle. I just, I find that a lot of these products end up, you know, not keeping around very long.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love this because I imagine if you get a little bit of a community on here, it will automatically hide or dim or gray out the brands that are suspected to be slop or junk or knockoffs. But you can click on individual brand and say, trust this brand. This was a false positive. You can block this brand or you can dismiss for this particular item. Maybe it's fine. You can report it as a real brand. So they're going to be able to collect all of that information across the user base and then merge that together. So the system should get smarter over time, I imagine, but who knows how long Amazon allows this to go on.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  I imagine that the margins on some of these sloppier brands are potentially better. And so there might be a financial incentive to prevent this type of plugin from running roughshod all over amazon.com. But at least for now, you can go and enjoy it and take it for a spin at knockoff.shop. Amazon without the knockoffs. Filters out the trademark squat pseudo brands, the S Z H L U Xs and horse sudies. These are weird brand names, very, very weird brand names. I'm surprised they don't come up with a normal name. Like if you're going to be a, like a sketchy drop shipper with a knockoff product, it's pretty easy to go to an L L M and say like.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Why not just be the, the silverware company of China?

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Well, that, or you know, dog beds here, the examples are Casper and Carhartt. Come up with another term.

• 2:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Buddy, the buddy, dog supply company.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of words you could use. I don't know. It doesn't seem like rocket science and yet it feels like a cat walked across the keyboard with some of these brands.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Anyway, go give it a try. Tell us what you think. Fortunately, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in John Nay from Norm AI. Welcome to the show, John. How are you doing?

• 2:07:12Speaker 09

  Doing well. Enjoyed that brainstorming session you just had on the naming.

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  I mean, I don't want to come up with anything. Do you have a better name for a dog bed company?

• 2:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Wait, tell us about the name Norm, Norm. You just wanted to say, hey, you don't need to worry about this, you know, the general intelligence company of X, Y, Z. We're just going to give you some normal AI. Is that the idea?

• 2:07:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, just straight, normal AI. It stands for norm, setting the norms for AI. And also for normative, for what should be.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Sure. When did you start the company?

• 2:07:51Speaker 09

  Uh, just under three years ago.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  Okay. And what were the key inflection points that got you to today? How much did you raise? What's the news?

• 2:08:03Speaker 09

  Yeah. So the news is today we raised 120 million at 1.2.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  Whoa, Jordy, hit that.

• 2:08:13John Coogan?

  There we go. $120 million Series C. Coastal Ventures is in. Valuations 1.2 billion. Not too shabby. But what has growth been like? Who are the key customers? How are you describing the product to them?

• 2:08:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, so what we've done is we started out selling directly to in-house teams. So places like Blackstone, New York Life, mainly large financial institutions.

• 2:08:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:36Speaker 09

  And as we were doing that, we realized the outside counsel opportunity was huge.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:40Speaker 09

  So they're spending billions of dollars on outside counsel. So this is for things like fund formation, transactional work, a lot of different things they work with like Kirkland Ellis and Simpson Thacher and other firms like that for. And as you're working with them, we realized the opportunity of taking the legal AI agents that we were building and then having that power, a law firm, to be able to serve as outside counsel on those billions of dollars of spend that they're working on would be an amazing opportunity for us and then also to be more aligned with the clients that we already had.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. So talk about the key decision to not just supercharge the in-house counsel with effectively a software product, but instead actually spin up a proper partnership. You have an LLP, right?

• 2:09:23Speaker 09

  So Norm Law LLP, yeah, it's a partnership. It's a law firm in all the traditional senses, except it sits on top of AI agents that are automating a lot of the first pass of the work.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:36Speaker 09

  And so that was a huge inflection point for us because it allows us to power something that can go full stack for the client. And this is actually sort of related to my past. So this is my second company. I was the founder and CEO of another AI company before this. And I just have a proclivity of wanting to just like do the whole thing. In that case, it was an AI company that was selling AI to other asset managers.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:59Speaker 09

  And I built out a subsidiary that registered with the SEC as an investment advisor. And then we just became an AI-powered asset manager ourselves and just did the whole thing. And that company was acquired by TIA Nuveen. So here similarly, we just want to complete the whole task for the client. So in collaboration with the partners at Norm Law, so we have people that were partners at a lot of the AM Law twenty. So they join and then they take the outputs from the AI agents and then they provide legal advice directly to their clients like they would have at another top law firm, but now they do it sitting inside of Norm Law.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  And how valuable is the data inside of the law firms versus inside of companies? Because I imagine that that has to be a source of strength, a source of emote and a big reason why venture capitalists continue to back the business.

• 2:10:53Speaker 09

  Yeah. So the ability to have this vertical integration of the building of the AI and the other software with the using and deployment of it in that really tight feedback loop to iterate and improve it, that's key. So that vertical integration type model. And the data is a big aspect to that. So it's both the data from the operation of the firm and what happens day to day, but it's also just like the qualitative insights about how would we automate something like this? Having root access to how it's actually being done and building it side by side where we're here in the World Trade Center and we have AI engineers sitting right next to lawyers doing their job, that type of feedback loop

• 2:11:38Speaker 09

  is invaluable. And we're the only people in the world that can do that because of that really tight integration and collaboration. And so that unlocks our ability to kind of reinvent the whole workflow. So instead of having a co-pilot tool that you can use and get a little bit more efficient, you can from scratch, think about from first principles, how would you redesign that workflow internally inside a firm and then just build that and iterate on it every day together?

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  Law school student comes to you asking for advice on how to think about their early career. What do you tell them?

• 2:12:15Speaker 09

  Well, I think the general principles of legal reasoning and thinking through things more like theoretically, that's still super valid and useful. And that's almost just like philosophical thinking that's applicable in any area of life. But then in terms of going into specific areas, I think going forward, this notion of what we developed around legal engineering is going to be really important for them to lean into. So that's using their legal knowledge and legal reasoning, but then applying it using AI. So turning different workflows in different domains of legal expertise into AI agents and then testing them and validating them and deploying them and working super closely with clients

• 2:13:00Speaker 09

  around that. I think that's going to be increasingly what they should focus on.

• 2:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about international expansion? Is that a, is that something you sort of get for free as the model capabilities advance and the frontier advances? Or is that something that is a very considered decision at some point in the future because it'll be a significant burden to?

• 2:13:25Jordi Hays?

  You also get it for free because I'm sure some of the clients are already cross working on this order, but.

• 2:13:31John Coogan?

  I'm just wondering, like, how heavy is that decision to expand internationally?

• 2:13:35Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, with the clients that we have now, places like Blackstone that are super international, we get that, we get that opportunity, but we don't necessarily build it out because we need to make sure that we have the legal expertise in those jurisdictions.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:51Speaker 09

  So when you're actually powering the full stack provision of legal services, that's another layer of complexity of this, of having the people that are going to be able to supervise that and put their name behind that and have that relevant expertise. So for us, it is a big decision about when we go to, for example, the UK and other areas that are more relevant to us, we need to do that very deliberately.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well, congratulations on the fundraiser. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats to the whole team.

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  And thanks. It felt like we were on vacation for a little bit of this view.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  Are you really in the World Trade Center? You're in New York right now?

• 2:14:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, we're in the World Trade Center. That's New Jersey behind me.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  That's beautiful. It looks like Miami almost with the plants and stuff.

• 2:14:31Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, enjoy New York. Enjoy the summer.

• 2:14:35Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Have a great.

• 2:14:36Speaker 09

  All right. Thanks, guys.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  Best of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

• 2:14:47Jordi Hays?

  You got anything for me, John?

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Well, the main other news is that this is somewhat related to New York and Manhattan. A midtown Manhattan skyscraper under construction is reportedly at risk of collapse. The building was the former Pfizer headquarters on East 42nd Street. It was evacuated Tuesday morning after the FDNY received reports around 8:00 AM Eastern Time of bricks falling from the high-rise. When crews arrived, they found two structural columns inside the building had buckled with floors sagging from the roughly 21st all the way to the 26th floors. There's six floors of sagging. This video, this, this building seems to be falling apart.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  Video from inside the site shows columns visibly bent, raising immediate concerns about the stability of the building. So, so far, thankfully, no injuries have been reported. Let's hope it stays that way. And construction workers have been accounted for. The site was undergoing one of the most ambitious office to residential conversions in New York history. Metro Loft and David Warner Real Estate were converting the former Pfizer complex into roughly 1,500 to 1,600 apartments with plans to renovate the existing 38-story tower and add more than a dozen new stories to part of the property. Officials have evacuated the construction site and nearby buildings as a precaution. Very, very crazy. City inspectors and engineers are now on site investigating the damage and trying

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  to determine whether the building can be stabilized. They'll need to go and rebuild those columns. For now, commuters are being told to avoid the area. So if you're in New York, stay away from East 42nd Street. I hope everyone is safe there.

• 2:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Bad day to be doing that conversion.

• 2:16:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very chaotic situation. Anyway.

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  It's also, imagine trying to sell those apartments after you finish. It's like, oh yeah, moving into the building that was buckling for six, across six different stories.

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. There was a building, was it in San Francisco, the Millennium Tower?

• 2:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. TZ says, good day to be a demolition company.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah. The, the, yeah, there was the Millennium Tower that was a very, it was fancy high-rise in San Francisco and the foundation like sunk a little bit. And so the whole building was tilted slightly. And so if you put a marble on the ground in these like luxurious apartments, it would roll. And there was a huge, huge lawsuits. I believe that they were able to go do some structural reinforcement and eventually get it back.

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Just some saggy floors.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Some saggy floors.

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Saggie floors.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, lock in. Just, yeah, maybe it's just a mindset issue.

• 2:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Stop sweating the details.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  Okay. What do you think of this? What do you think of this sunlight, Sunday light? We've talked about these a few times. Philips launched one, I believe. You're a big fan of these. I want your take on this one. This is the Sunday Light. And Paul Backhouse says it's the closest thing to sunlight that you can buy. He gives it a 10 out of 10. Says no regrets. It's absolutely bonkers. For reference, this is my actual light at 80% brightness in a room with almost zero outside lights. So I believe it's a, it's a sort of translucent disc. Some of the light diffuses, but also a bunch of the light is reflecting, bouncing around, creating sort of a softer feel, softer glow. Are you a fan of this? With like the, the light that hangs down? If you zoom in on the actual light, you will

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  see that there's a, there's a little stick. And at the end of that stick is a light emitting diode, an LED that's bouncing off of the disc, the larger disc there. So a little bit more in your face. I'd be worried about hitting my head on that in the middle of the room there, but that's.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  What aren't you worried about hitting your head on, John?

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  But over, over the right, over the right table, maybe it works. The closest thing you can, to sunlight you can buy. They use titanium nanoparticles to scatter the light way, the way Earth's atmosphere does. Actual blue sky on your ceiling, 34,500 lumens, water cooled, 95 plus CRI, which is a measure of color quality. Just purchase one to avoid any doubt. Repost it, but I can't vouch for how yet it works. But this man is not sponsored, but he's just stunned this exists. Are you going this?

• 2:19:05Jordi Hays?

  Stunned into silence. I want to see more experiments like it.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  Would you go for this one or the Philips, the one that doesn't have the dangling light?

• 2:19:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm not actually a customer of either.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:19Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Considering it.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  But I would be, I would be curious to get one of these for the, for the studio.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  You can get a couple of these and then a couple of the other lights, but them head to head. See which one we want. Anyway.

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks, that's our show.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:19:37Jordi Hays?

  An honor.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we'll see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM. Rolling flashback. Goodbye. Have a great week.