The Vail Strike, Jordi Flees to Europe, Microplastics Everywhere, Ramp Sky Lounge

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, why did you leave America last week? What went wrong in your life? You, it's, it's less expensive to go to Europe these days to go skiing. So is something going, or do you have to tell me something about your finances? What's going on?

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Trying to save a buck by going to Europe for

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Go to the Aman in the Alps?

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's a good question. I, I, I kept, as I was going on the trip, I kept asking myself, why am I going all the way across the world to go stay at the Aman for New Year's, go skiing? And then just something was drawing me. And almost as soon as I got there, the strike started in Park City. And I was like, this is why I went out here. It wasn't to save 80% on Lyft tickets. Because the, you know, the hotel would kind of do away with, with any of those potential savings. But it was to avoid the epic meltdown around the Epic Pass.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go. Are you sure it wasn't like you have some sort of hero complex where you're like, they've been at zero GDP growth for years, but I can fix them.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the thing.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  I can fix her, Europe.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  You, with, with GDP growth, if you've got, if you're enough of a size lord, you can actually grow an economy, right? We've talked about this a lot.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  You come over there, you inspire the troops.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  If you love the economy, like you have to take it upon yourself to stimulate it, to grow it. And, and so, yeah, yeah, part of it was like, can I, am I, can I put up numbers?

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, one conversation with the right European over there, gonna change everything.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  You're gonna inspire them.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  No, I had a, I had an amazing trip. It was great. Left the kids with, with the grandmas.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, had a, had a, had a fantastic time. Lot of skiing I did. So last episode we recorded, John was, was deeply ill with the plague. And within maybe five hours after recording, I had the plague. So this is the, this is the plague zone. If you, if you step up to the table with an illness, it's probably, it's probably gonna get shared around. So basically like the flight over there and the first like 36, 48 hours, I was deathly ill. No skiing, trying to beat this fever, but beat it. Ended up having a great trip, but very happy to be back. We, we were gonna maybe record remotely, it just didn't, didn't happen.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  It was like the worst week of my life then, not being able to record.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  This is so miserable.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was weird trying to relax when all we wanted to do was record.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, but we made it through it. We're back and we're, uh, now we're blessed to be able to record five days a week.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. So let's start with a little quiz for the listener or viewer. I want you to try and guess this company. So they were founded in the early 1960s. They made just shy of $3 billion last year. The net income was 230 million. Uh, they employ about 7,000 people. They had a rough history. The company went bankrupt in 1997, restructured, and then went public. Leon Black at Apollo Management bought the company in a private equity deal. But after Apollo sold, a former Apollo executive ran the company as CEO for nearly two decades. Recently, the company's been struggling. They got hit hard during COVID because it's a travel company. And the stock has been underperforming for the last few years. But they've been able to get through hard times by switching to a subscription model. Uh, this is a huge departure from when the company started.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Uh, they, the founder was a World War II 10th Mountain Division ski trooper. The whole goal back then was just to make the next great ski mountain. Eventually, the company expanded, buying dozens of other ski resorts. Now they own hotel chains, restaurants, ski schools, and even local retail stores. In January of 2025, they got in hot water after a ski patrol strike led to massive lines at lifts during the peak season. Can you guess the company?

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Is it Vail?

• 3:57John Coogan?

  It's Vail Resorts, baby.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  Nailed it.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  We're doing a deep dive on Vail today and all things skiing. Uh, Jordy's back from skiing and we're going to take you through some great tweets and some articles. And, and of course, the Vail Resorts 10K because we got to go to the source if we want to know what's going wrong at Vail. Ooh, net income.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Looking rough.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  I mean, it really is down. 2022, they had 370 million of net income. 2023, they went down to 285. And then in 2024, they had 245, 246.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  It's been rough.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, not an easy business to run.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  But an important business.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Important business.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  It matters a lot.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  And, uh, and a fascinating story, but let's start with skiing. Let's go to creatine cycle. He says, when it comes to hobbies that don't generate shareholder value, surfing seems more high tea than skiing. With skiing, it's D E I? I don't even get that. I don't know, diversity, equity, inclusion. Everyone waits in line for the cuck chair. That's a reference to his earlier post. Very funny. Alright, somehow you have to ride on the chair. Uh, you fall on fluffy powder. Whereas with surfing, it's meritocratic. Good surfers get all the waves. You fall and you can't breathe and there are sharks. Very funny. I love the baldos in the replies here saying, wait until the VCs see this one. And yeah, it's true. Skiing, it's a little bit easy.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this, this, this was, uh, sort of in a similar vein to my post, which was, sitting in a ski lift line is the most barnyard animal coded, modern human behavior. You stand in a tense line of your fellow livestock, waiting for the machine to take you up the hill so you can get the slop turns you crave. Oink, oink, epic pass, piggy. And it's funny because I posted, I posted that, yeah, I got 3,000 likes.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  3,000, nice.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  So I posted that and, and a lot of, you know, when, when something blows up, you get, it goes to parts of X that like, you're not really too familiar with. And, and a lot of people were like quote tweeting it and commenting like, who hurt you? Like all this stuff like, okay, cool, bro. Just say that you can't like afford to ski or whatever. And I sent that from, like, I sent that from the Iman in the Alps where, uh, where my, my wife is like, didn't, didn't ski much growing up. She just would like go to the spa and stuff. Uh, so I was teaching her to ski. And so we had to take this one like gondola route over and over. The line was just so brutal. And so I came up with that post from like the most brutal line.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  And I'm just, we're sitting there in this tense, we're sitting there in this like tense line, waiting to take the gondola up. And I'm like, this is the most barnyard codist.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. I mean, it's the predator animal is the one who hunts for the best powder with the helicopter.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Very clearly, like an eagle descending upon the mountain top and taking powder for their own.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  Say rejecting conformity. It's great. I like, I just want to give you a little bit more color on Vale. There's a good post by Andrew Bracken here. This is from two years ago. We're going back in the timeline. He says, off to meet some retina doctors at a meeting in Vale, Colorado. It's the first time I've had a flight delayed due to, quote, "high levels of private jet traffic." And so that just gives you like the, some color here on like Vale, very exclusive. It is the most visited, it is the most visited ski resort in the United States. For the, for the 2023 to 2024 ski season, Vale Mountain offers some of the most expansive and varied terrain in North America

• 7:36John Coogan?

  with approximately 5,300 skiable acres, including seven world-renowned back bowls.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  It's basically like Disneyland, the Disneyland of ski resorts.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Yes. And this is what's so fascinating about Vale. I was watching this YouTube video by this limousine liberal. This guy who's really insufferable and like hates everything and yet collects Rolexes. It's very cringe. He like, everything is about, oh, capitalism is so broken, capitalism is so broken. And like, it's like, bro, you're.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Watch collector.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Watch collector. Like, just, just be a capitalist.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  But, but.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  That's the one thing, his watch collection is the one thing that's keeping him from like having like a communist revolution.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. But yeah, in, in this video, it's breaking down like, oh, like, you know, these like ski companies come in and they turn them into like Disneyland and they destroy like the local economy. And it's so sad because like you used to just be able to go to some mountain town, like live there and it was so good. And, and then like, I'm like 30 minutes into this video, hearing him complain about this. And I'm like, okay, like, maybe this is real. Like this, it would suck. Like it'd be kind of cool to like, you know, just be someone who built a family in Vale and like had a great life. Vail was never a town. It literally was never a town. It was like, these guys went searching for, they were like mountaineers. They went and found a mountain and they were like, that's a good ski destination.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Let's build a ski resort around it. It was, it was never anything else. Like, no one was displaced.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, it used to be part of Texas.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  So Max Meyer brought this to my, uh, our attention. He says, "America cannot be fully great until Aspenvale and Steamboat Springs are restored to their proper jurisdiction in the state of Texas. The territorial changes of the compromise of 1850 must be reversed. Vail, Texas has a nice ring to it." And he shows like an entire map here of how Vail used to be a part of Texas. So, yeah, Texas, it gets kind of mugged by its own history. Like, it's got this like, you know, bravado, this attitude. Oh, yeah, don't mess with Texas. But Texas used to be a lot bigger. You're smaller than you've ever been, Texas. If you're not claiming land, you're shrink, you're basically shrinking.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  I was talking trash about Denmark because, uh, they're talking a big game about not selling Greenland to America. And I was like, you guys sold us the British Virgin, uh, the US Virgin Islands. You guys sold all your, all your trading posts in India. And you were like, talking a big game then. What happened?

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  They're just negotiating.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're negotiating.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Denmark's just shrinking.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  They're negotiating with the best negotiator, the guy who literally wrote The Art of the Deal.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's impossible. It's over.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  They're throwing out.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  I'm going to Greenland without a passport.

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Uh, this is interesting, little bit of history from, uh, 2021, just taking the temperature of what FinTwit was saying about Vail Resorts back in the day. So, post-market, great poster, has stopped posting.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what happened there?

• 10:27John Coogan?

  I, I love this account. I don't know.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if, I think, I'm assuming it was a woman.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  But did she just, some of these like investors get so regulated that they can't?

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Maybe, or I don't know, just got sick of it or something. But I went back and found this tweet from 2021 March and says, watching FinTwit turn-

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  She could move the market, by the way. Like, if she came back online and just like posted like a ticker, like it would probably-

• 10:48John Coogan?

  We gotta get in touch and get her back on. Uh, this is, this is part of our life's work here on the show. "Watching FinTwit turn on Vail Resorts for lowering the price of their season pass. In my opinion, Rob Katz deserves the benefit of the doubt. 24 months later, Scale Economy shared Katz acquired resorts and realized scale benefits to lower price and sell high-margin add-ons." Amazing. And so, I think what she's saying is that like- People were very bearish on the idea of the of the Epic Pass.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  But if you look at the data, the the the Epic Pass has just grown and grown and grown and become this like monster share of their revenues. I'm pretty sure.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  There's something like over 50% of their like lift revenue. Yeah, here it is. So the lift related revenue mix in 2008, it was 26% passes. In 2022, it was 62% passes.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  And so the Epic Pass lets you go to any of their mountains, which now.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting. It now is.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  42 destination mountain resorts.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  It. So this is a lot of, there's some other posts in here basically saying like, this is like classic, like big corporate greed, all the stuff. Like, you know, the Epic Pass is bad.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  And there certainly are some negative externalities, but it used to be, growing up, I would ski at Squaw and Norstar. Sometimes I'd get that. Other, you know, my, my great grandfather, I don't know if we ever talked about this, helped build Mammoth Mountains.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  And ran the gondola at Mammoth for, for like 50 years. And maybe not 50, like more like, no, I think around 50. Anyway, long time.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  I try and keep it like just strictly business on the show. So whenever you talk about your family, it's in one ear, out the other.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Just kind of zone out.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Because as we've said, we're not besties.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  No, but um, but uh, yeah, yeah, we are not friends strictly. This is about delivering the news.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  Daily.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  And nothing else.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  But um, but uh, yeah, so, so growing up, like, you know, you'd go, I'd go to Squaw for a while. I'd go to Mammoth. But this, the, the trade off of getting a season pass, growing up, my experience was you had to be so committed to a single mountain. It just oftentimes like unless you had a house or a condo in that area, or that was just the resort you went to. It was not so great of a deal for the average skier. Prices were also lower from, from, from day passes. But now the Epic Pass is like such a good product, right? Like if you want to ski a lot at more than one place, it is just a phenomenal product.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  So you can't buy it in season. You have to buy it before. But a lot of ski people, they have a crew of friends that like to go and like a loose association. They become like, they're either Epic Pass Crew or Icon Pass, which is the rival one. And if you're on the Epic Pass, you get to go to all of Vale's mountains, which they've acquired 42 now. So they have Vale, Breckenridge, Park City in Utah, Keystone, and then Beaver Creek, Crested Butte, Whistler Blackcomb. So you can even go to Whistler in Canada. That was a billion dollar deal that they paid for that. And Whistler is insane. I mean, I'm not like a complete skiing aficionado.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing, the other thing is you can subscribe to it on a monthly basis. So you're able to take a cost that for a lot of people was like this big one-time purchase. And you're just like permanently paying them whatever a hundred bucks a month. But it makes skiing so much more accessible. It's like literally cheaper to get access to 42 of the greatest ski resorts of all time for a third of the price of your Equinox membership.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And so a little bit of the history, we alluded to it, but you know, Vale started as this kind of like crazy idea by these two founders who were like literally World War II mountaineers, like just mountain guys. They built this up. They eventually sell it to, uh, to another guy, Vale Associates. And then that guy got saddled up with debt during kind of the eighties, early nineties. Junk bond era. The debt became too big. They went bankrupt. Apollo came and recapitalized the business, wound up taking them public. Apollo was in from 97 to 2003, I think, Leon Black.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  And then, and then the, the private equity guy who worked at Apollo became the CEO and had a 20 year run.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Generational run.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  And so you can see that like, there is a little bit of this private equity mindset of like, let's figure out, how do we turn this into a subscription?

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  So what was that guy's name that the Apollo guy?

• 15:28John Coogan?

  Uh, Rob Katz.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  So Rob is must be licking his chops the last, the last couple of weeks, right? You think he wants to get back in the game?

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Imagine watching all this and he's like, I always knew how to run this better than you guys.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  I wonder.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, I think like, so, so taking.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  Taking a small step back.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  It's almost impossible to understate how hard it is to run a ski resort.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  So like, I had a, like, you know, having a family member who is running, so my great grandpa, World War II vet. All these guys are, go to war, they come back, they decide to like build ski resorts. It's very hard undertaking, but, but, uh, easier than, than, um, you know, going to war. And, you know, so my great grandpa running like the gondola all this time, it sounds like the simple thing because you're just sending like this, you know, little.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Box up the hill and back over and over and over. But when you actually get into the logistics of like, okay, you're sending groups of people up on this wire.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  During some of the harshest, most insane conditions and the failure rate like literally cannot be.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Has to be zero.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Has to be zero.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  Right? So you get one and, and there are some videos out there. You can find videos where like a, um, um, a lift like reverses and it just starts going down like backwards, like in opposite direction. It's just like.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Terrifying.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  Terrifying. Um.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, the logistics around keeping these lifts running is really hard because these are, the, every machine is kind of bespoke because it's not like there's one size fits all. I mean, there obviously there's some parts that are interchangeable. And then if a part breaks, how do you get that part, you know, it needs to get to, you, you need some like huge gear that's probably custom machined or milled. And then it needs to be delivered and installed in the middle of the ski season. You need helicopters and stuff.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then if, if your lift breaks while you have people on it, then great. You have hundreds of people sitting 50 feet in the air in harsh conditions.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then to, to make it even more challenging, you're not even running it year round. You're running it. Whatever for five months out of the year.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  During the harshest possible.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Conditions, freezing temperatures, weather, all this stuff. So the fact that ski resorts, you know, the, the last couple of weeks were a disaster in Park City. But the fact that there aren't more disasters is honestly pretty amazing.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Testament to how, how good in general we've gotten at operating.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  I read a big article in Bloomberg about, uh, Vail's work in the Northeast. So Vail, you know, started with just this one amazing destination. Then they bought Park City, which we're going to go into, uh, a lot of the Tahoe, uh, ski resorts. Obviously Whistler's like massive and huge and iconic. But then they bought a bunch of stuff in the Northeast that's much worse skiing. Because the Northeast is just very wet, very icy, but there's still a lot of skiers there. They just want to get out there. And so the, the kind of value prop for Vail was we can bring some of that like destination, beautiful luxury ski town like experience to the Northeast. But there's going to be, need to be significant CapEx that goes into the business.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  And so at this one, uh, ski resort called Atitash, I think it's called, Atitash. They needed to replace the, uh, the, the, the chair, the chair lift that went up to the top of the mountain. Like the main chair lift took 17 minutes and it was like really cold and like completely unprotected. They want to put it in gondola that would go twice as fast. And they, because of like COVID and all these delays, they missed the, the season and they didn't get installed until like halfway through the season because they needed to get helicopters up there to like, put the, the, the pylons in and stuff. And the locals were like super pissed because they're like, you're this big corporation. Like, why can't you get this on time? Like, you know, we wanted this to be nice.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  Missed half the season.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Missed half the season, um, but they did actually wind up getting it in. And it's an interesting like, you know, battle between like the, the locals. And of course, like whenever something goes wrong, everyone's like very opinionated and vocal about it, but.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, that's the other challenge of running these resorts is half, half. I don't know the exact split, but a, a large percentage of your customer base are these sort of fair weather. They're going to be there during ski week and winter break.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  And maybe one other week during the year and they're just there as like sort of tourists. That don't care as much about costs and all that stuff. And then the other half of your customer base is like people that are living, breathing, skiing, living in a small mountain town, maybe working at a restaurant and skiing like every extra day that they have. And so it's kind of, it's a very interesting challenge of like how you serve both of those groups. In some ways, I think the epic pass at like $1,200 a year to get access to 40 plus resorts.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Is it $1,200 a year? I thought it was like 500.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure it's 1,200 for like the

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's expensive.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  But, but it's not in the context of like, yeah, yeah, it's not in the context of like the fact that if you're just buying a day pass, it's like 250 bucks.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's also just like, what, what are the, what are the substitutes for skiing? Like, there just really aren't any?

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, walk, you can walk.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess you can go like scuba diving or something, hiking. Yeah. Like, in terms of just like an experience, like, oh, I went skiing this weekend. It's like so much higher above like, I saw a movie. Or like, what else did you do? Like, you hung out and got drinks or went, you know, went to a nice dinner. But yeah, so Vail has been back and forth for a while. People love it, people hate it. Max Meyer again says, Vail Resorts charges me less for a military family season pass, $145, than they do for a single day lift ticket at Vail, $189. Remind you that the $189 ticket is actually the spring discount price. During Jan, Feb, it's $229. And so Max is a big Vail fan, hence why he wants it in Texas.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Because he thinks it's, it's a well-known organization.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Got one from, from Katie Erzog here. She says, I always like flying into Vail because I get to see the latest developments in plastic surgery. And this is top of mind for me because in, in Corchivale where I was for the last couple of weeks. I was noticing this interesting dynamic where tons of lip filler usage and lip filler seems to have this sort of like anti-memetic property where if you notice somebody has lip filler, it means that they've used way too much. And so they literally look like, sort of like pig-like and then they're like, you know, they're showing their... Like, it's really bad and horrifying. But at the same time, for every one woman that

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  you notice that has like way too much lip filler, there's like five others that use just like a subtle amount. And maybe you're like, oh, she looks nice or whatever. And so, so it's this interesting thing where lip filler is constantly getting this terribly negative advertising, yet it continues on.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Plastic surgery is like, like a good defensive cornerback. Like, you only notice it when they're fucking up. Right?

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good, that's a good example, John.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the good D back?

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know much about sports.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  You're not, you're not noticing him? Cause he's shutting down, he's a shut down corner.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  You could say that's like, like, put it in business context, right? Like, it's a good controller. Like, nobody's like, nobody, you know, the controller never gets like the fame, the fortune, you know, things go well, or if they don't go well. It's not like the CFO of like Enron who's like literally going to jail. The controller, like, you know, who knows? They're just doing their job. Just solid controller.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Most people couldn't even name the controller at Apple or Facebook or, you know, Google, because they're just doing their job. So, let's get into the actual drama that erupted over the last weekend. I, I, this is what TF Jenkins had the first post that I really saw go viral here. He says, "Thanks Park City, at Vale Resorts and the striking ski patrol, really creating a fun and safe environment. I hope the lawsuits begin to trickle in and every one of you feel financial pain for your negligence."

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  That's like, that's like the most, that's like the most, like, finance bro way to like get mad at somebody. Like, "I hope you feel financial pain for your negligence."

• 23:46John Coogan?

  And I hope they burn in hell. Going hard.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  So the funny, so the other thing that's interesting.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  Super long lines.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  Back in, back in like the, the, the sixties and seventies, it was very routine to wait like an hour plus for every single lift.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  So you'd go skiing for the day and you'd maybe get like five runs because you were just in lines like the entire time.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  And so we've gotten very spoiled recently with our express chairs, gondolas, like you're not, you're not, if, if a line is like 10 minutes, you're like annoyed.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  This is like taking like too long.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  They've also gotten crazy.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Some of the footage coming out of Park City was like truly wild. It looked like the Lily Phillips, like her, you know, that, that, that UK, the UK porn star who's like doing like a hundred. It looked like the line for like.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  The worst analogy possible.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  No, somebody, somebody else.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Is somebody else on that?

• 24:38Jordi Hays?

  Somebody else posted that. They were like, is this like a line for Lily Phillips next like video?

• 24:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, uh, people started diagnosing the problems. Will Monitis, uh, says, it's incredible that Apollo owns both every good ski slope in America, Vale and every private military contractor, Blackwater Triple Canopy. Possibly the most adaptive allocators to ever live. Late stage finance is truly a beautiful thing. And this is like kind of true, but Apollo hasn't owned Vale for two decades. So gonna have to put that one on the truth zone, Will. Not quite right. And then, uh, Andrew Reed is, uh, hypothesizing why things might be going wrong at Vale. He says, when you learn Vale Resorts CMO's prior job was 10 years at Comcast, everything clicks into place.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  That's, that's a deep dive. He, he looked up the CMO. Like, I, I, he really.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  He must've been on the ground in Colorado or Utah.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  I mean, he's wearing ski gear in his profile picture. So I think this guy is.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Real skier.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  A real skier. They're probably, uh, you know, Sequoia partner digging in, understanding what's going on.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Love it. Um, but, but I want to go through this, uh, this deep dive of the story of how Vale acquired Park City. But what else you got for me right now?

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, I mean, Dan Lobes, some other people are talking about like, I think what on the surface, the headline number was a ski patrol just wanted an extra $2 an hour.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, $23 instead of 21.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, going from 21 to $23.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  They said their burger costs 25 in town, so like, it's not reasonable.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  And this guy Ben Bortner responded to Dan Lobes' post and said, "It is surprising they have 100 ski patrollers, 100 times 2 times 40 hours per week, times 24 weeks equals $192,000 a year. I'm not a pro-union person." Good, good stuff, Ben. Way to, way to, you know, we've dealt with our own, our editors trying to unionize over and over, but we are always able to win. He says, "This dispute doesn't make sense. Must be missing something." So I think, um, uh, yeah, like on the surface, a lot of this stuff doesn't really make sense, right? It's $192,000 a year. This company does hundreds of millions of dollars in, in

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  earnings. And I think that the reality is that it's more about, uh, you know, Veil not wanting to set the precedent that a small group of individuals at one of their resorts is able to like shut down, uh, you know, the, the, basically shut down the brand

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  over a, over a single dispute. And I believe TJ Parker gets into this a little bit, but he says, "My guess is this is the primary blocker in the Veil negotiations. If you're a massive seasonal employer, there's no way in hell you can set a precedent around this kind of thing for one group of employees at one resorts, at one resort." He says, "The union is also advocating for improved benefits, including more accessible healthcare options, holiday pay, and a more attractive overall benefits package to retain, retain and attract skilled patrollers. One proposed solution is offering healthcare stipends to allow patrollers to maintain year-round coverage without switching providers every six months." So, um, yeah, I think this, this is a, like a pretty interesting...

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Sort of challenge, right? Where skiing and working in the ski industry historically was something that people would do out of love. They would do it and they would have to make a lot of sacrifices. They're like, okay, I'm gonna move to this small town just for the winter. Or I'm gonna live in this town and like work odd jobs in the off season and then be a ski patrol just because they love skiing so much. And then that sort of like ski bum lifestyle, which has been a part of ski culture forever.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  That was not glamorous, but was done specifically because people love to ski. When that comes up against, you know, now you have this massive public company that owns all of skiing. And there's becomes this like thing where people are saying, well, I want to be able to be a ski bum, but I want, I also want year round benefits.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  And that was never sort of the promise of that lifestyle, right?

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  But, but now people can say, well, okay, like your Vail Resorts, you're this huge, huge public company. You know, you deserve, you, you, you should be, you know, the, the point of view is you should maybe provide this kind of benefits for. But I don't know that it's, it, the, the thing that ultimately, um, uh, I saw that in, in the, some of the messaging, they were saying. You know, you're doing these big, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of buybacks and all this stuff. Shouldn't you just, um, shouldn't you just, you know, uh, pay, pay your people more?

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  And you said, you're, you said, if I was, if, if I, John Coogan was negotiating for these ski patrollers, I'd be like, give me some of that sweet stock based comp.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Saying, you know, that, the $2 extra, don't, don't just go for $2 cash.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, an equity program would be great here.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  $2 of, of stock could easily turn into.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Dollar MTN.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it, it is interesting because that, that math makes it look so small, but if you actually look at their 10K.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Vale as a whole, across all 42 mountains, the lift revenue was 1.4 billion and the labor and labor related benefits was 730 million.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  So it's by far their biggest cost, twice their GNA, twice their other.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and the ski patrollers are a small at this one resort.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Are a cog in the machine, but then you have people that do ski lessons, which are different, people that just lift operators.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  People that do lift, the lift operators are the people that are, that are sitting there and like making sure you get on and turning it off. And then you have the people that are maintaining the lifts.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  And then you have like the mountain operations.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  And then you have the guys that do the cats at night.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  Then you have the guys that do the dynamite at night to make sure like, like, and so you just add, and then, okay, the cashier and then the kitchen staff and, and the people that do the rentals and, and then the people that do parking and then suddenly like if every single group on the mountain.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  At every resort starts ask like, then the business ceases to be a real business.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  And, and this is something they as a public company can't afford to be like, oh, we have 42 resorts and we don't make any money. We just need to add 20 more resorts and then we'll make money. Everybody's going to be like, well, what are you doing? Like you already own like the, you already have the Disneyland.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Of skiing and 40 other resorts, how are you not?

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  A real business.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do wonder if there's other things they could do to lower the cost for the employees because Vale has like a, an apartment in Vale is like $2,500 a month, which is very expensive if you're just like a ski patroller, but they have a whole bunch of like corporate apartments that are like 500 bucks a month. So, but I don't think they build enough of those maybe, so they need to build more, but there's a lot of like permitting and regulation. Did you know that they're trying to build a tunnel in Vale? This is really interesting. So the highway that goes through, I guess people complain about road noise. And I think that maybe during the snow, it's tricky. So they're thinking about burying it, basically. But it's like a multi-billion dollar project. And they're like, well, we could develop on top of it. So then you can just continue to develop, but that wouldn't even offset

• 32:08John Coogan?

  the cost. So they're just like, it's never gonna happen. It's been in the plan for like 40 years in their general plan. Yeah. But yeah, should we move on to the story of when Vale stole Park City? It's pretty interesting. So great capital, great poster, wrote a big, long thread that we'll dig through. So he starts by saying, everyone makes a mistake at work, but rarely do they end up reshaping an entire industry. It's a well-known story. But hey, it's almost ski season. And who doesn't love a cautionary tale about the costs of administrative errors? Park City is now famous for its skiing, but that's a recent development. It was a silver mining town for most of its life. So dependent on the industry, so dependent on the industry that it was actually classified as a ghost town following the 1950s crash. It was barely 1,000 people by the decade's end.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Skiing started as miners would ski jump on the old Creole mine dump. Sounds lit. Park City Consolidated Mines officially began the ski business in 1963 on Treasure Mountain. A mine train took them through the mountain to an elevator, climbing up 1,750 feet. Again, also sort of lit. Those in the 1970s, Parks, Parks City ski area leased the terrain from the US, from the United Park City Mines in a lease of only 155 K per year, extendable until 2051. Yeah, a lot of these ski resorts are not actually owned land. They're on these different like leases, either from the government or from other organizations. It's fascinating. It's actually

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  So funny to think about somebody like writing up a 100 year lease for a property. And they're like, oh, what's a fair price? Like 150 grand a year, like thinking it's like this, like, like,

• 33:47John Coogan?

  I'm good. There's no way there'll be a massive inflation.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Get screwed. This would become Park City Mountain Resort, one of three resorts in the immediate area alongside skier only Deer Valley and third place Canyons.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  In 1994, PCMR, that's Park City Mining Resorts or something, Parks, what is it? Park City Mountain Resort was acquired by Powder Corp., a new company started by John Cumming. John was in his early twenties and had already created Mountain, uh, the Mountain Hardware brand, later acquired by Columbia Sportswear. And there's some nice photos of-

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  What a Chad. He's in his early twenties?

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Well, this is, this is, these are ads from his product, I believe. But yeah-

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's 28-

• 34:31John Coogan?

  In his early twenties, he had already created the Mountain Headwear brand, which he sold in his 30s or 40s-

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  In 03. But, but he was an entrepreneur. And so he, uh, he starts Powder, buys PCMR, Park City. Powder quickly grew into one of the largest ski resort operators in the country with PCMR as its crown jewel. Status further boosted by the O2 Olympics, which were there. Uh, the company ran a decentralized, town-friendly model and reported, and reportedly had less than 40 corporate employees. And there's a big question about these, like, where are the corporations? So, Vale Associates, used to be based in Vale, but they got too big because they're managing 40 resorts, like internationally and stuff. So they actually moved to Denver, I believe.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Um, the success wasn't entirely unprecedented. Powder had the backing of John's father, Ian, who founded Loose, uh, Lusivia, now merged with Jeffrey, some sort of bank, I guess. Described as the smaller Berkshire Hathaway, but with a better track record. Uh, the company was valued at nearly $7 billion when Ian retired in 2013. Damn.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  Damn.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Nepo, baby. Let's go.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Putting the family money to work buying ski resorts.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. I love, I was, I was like seeing this headline, it's like this, he's 28 and he owns Park City. Meanwhile, his dad's running like a multi-billion dollar- Let's go. That's, I mean, that's, that's why if your dad-

• 35:48John Coogan?

  But that's what you should do.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Or your mom is wildly successful, you, the bar is not- It is just astronomically higher.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, you need to own an asset like Park City by the time you're 28.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  Or you're a loser.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree. And, but it's also like, look, like, yeah, maybe he didn't have the, the chops to fill the big shoes, like, cast a big shadow in the world of finance, but you can go and, and buy and build a much cooler asset.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  And that's pretty awesome.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  And so, it's like, yeah, you're not-

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Buy a NASCAR team.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're, you're not the, you're not the $7 billion hedge fund guy, but you own Park City, that's it.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Uh, meanwhile, Park City's ugly stepsister, Canyons, languished compared to its neighboring resorts. Despite larger area, under investment and a nonsensical layout, limited lodging and a revolving door of owners, left it with maybe 40,000, uh, 400,000 skiers per year versus 1 million at Park City. A Canadian real estate company, Talisker Land Holdings, would acquire Canyons in 2007, beating out rising Colorado powerhouse, Vale Resorts. So Vale wanted to buy Canyons, but they lost out on the deal. They'd invest in new upgrades, including North America's first heated chairlift. Sick. I've never been on one of those. And even planned a connection to nearby Solitude, so you could go all around and ski, and it just made the layout much easier.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Entering 2011, things were going well for Park City, including a contemplated ambitious remaking of the base area. Powder was expanding well with a growing portfolio across ski resorts, adventure, sports content, and experiences like heli skiing and whitewater rafting. Relations with neighboring Talisker seemed friendly with discussions on property and infrastructure investments, including a potential lift connection between the results, uh, resorts. Talisker was even landlord for PCMR's Upper Mountain, having inherited the long-term lease from UPCM. PCMR, PCMR's lease required written renewal every 20 years, a deadline that no one at Powder was assigned to monitor. This is crazy. Well, Powder sent its letter two days late-

• 37:52John Coogan?

  Things seemed fine, paying their fee and investing 7 million in upgrades. Clearly, it seemed Talisker didn't mind the slight miss. Not so fast. At the end of 2011, Talisker advised PCMR's right to use the mountain under the Sweetheart lease had expired. They would need to vacate the premises unless rent was increased to 7.7 million annually and PCMR's base facilities were turned over at the end of the lease. So jump from 150K to 7.7 million. And they're pissed. Powder was, in so many words, pissed. They filed a lawsuit against Talisker, thinking they could return to the previous deal. Even if Talisker had rights to the Upper Mountain, what could they do without the base,

• 38:37John Coogan?

  which Powder owned? They didn't wait to find out. After a year, Talisker leased Canyons and the Upper Mountain to Vale Resorts, who assumed the legal battle. Vale's like, "Let's go. I'll fight this out." No problem. The combined Monster lease would total $25 million in annual fixed payment, plus 42% of EBITDA, over $35 million. And so the Canyons Resort is described here, 4,000 skiable areas, top 10 ranking in Ski and Outside magazines, attractive Park City location, huge growth opportunities, etc. The opportunity for reconciliation was gone. The gloves were off. Vale, you'll recall, had lost Canyons to Talisker in '07 in that bidding war and had come back for the full enchilada.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  So they come back to buy it all, led by CEO Rob Katz. Pictured here, you gotta look at a photo of this guy, total giga Chad. Led by CEO Rob Katz, Vale was a known, growing powerhouse in Colorado and California. They were beginning an ascent few truly appreciated was coming. Park City was the first entree. And so Vale Resorts is expanding into Breckenridge, Keystone, Canyons, Heavenly, etc. The $305 million deal was 20x the estimated $15 million EBITDA Canyons would bring in. The deal would only make sense if Vale got Park City as well. John Cummings and Powder fought valiantly, but Utah laws are decidedly landlord-friendly. The well-publicized fight saw threats from John to tear down the Upper Mountain lifts and install a winter ski park at the bottom of the hill.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Alas, it was all for naught. Despite pledges to post a bond and fight in 2014, Powder sold the base to Vail for $183 million, 5X the incremental $35 million EBITDA.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  Vail, after connecting the resorts, had the largest ski resort in the United States, racking a combined 1.5 million ski visits annually.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  Got them.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  Got them. It would be a huge first salvo in an industry-defining acquisition spree, including the 2016 mega purchase of Whistler Blackcomb for $1.1 billion and 2019 acquisition of 17 resorts from Peak Resorts. That's the Northeast stuff, I believe. Their scale surpasses anything previously seen in the industry. It is fascinating that this idea of like the mega ski conglomerate is something that really only started like five years ago.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Or like 10 years ago, maybe.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  It used to just truly be all independent ski resorts and like...

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the reason that I... This last couple of weeks of events, there's a lot of reasons. You know, people are posting, "The strike at Park City is just ridiculous, just classic corporate greed here. 330 for a day pass and they quote-unquote can't afford to pay the patrollers 23 an hour. Will be a Harvard Business School case study on bad business." And it's like, okay, I get it that when you frame it like that, it seems silly.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  But it's all about precedent, right?

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  And again, it's not like Vail Resorts is just the best business anybody's ever seen, even at this level of scale and owning the entire industry. I look at it and I say, "This is a labor of love," right? This is not the business that you get into because you just care about generating cash. Like, it's not...

• 41:55John Coogan?

  I mean, 3 billion in revenue, 230 in net income, like 10% net income margin. It's not exactly like... And the stock has not grown over the last four years.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's not a lot of...

• 42:05John Coogan?

  In like the greatest bull market in history.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  It's not... Yeah, and it's not... That's the other thing. It's not... Where does it go from here? The ski industry, I don't know how much bigger it's gonna get. There, when, when, when we were growing up, there was a lot of, like, there was a group called, like, Save Our Winters. There's this whole idea of, like, climate change and, and how it's.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  The most interesting thing about the climate change thing is, I have this whole business school case study here, lifting the veil. Largest US snow sports resort operator takes on climate change. These, these folks at Michigan Ross School of Business did a whole deep dive on sustainability and ESG and how, how Vale will deal with

• 42:47John Coogan?

  climate change. But when I was looking through the 10K, I don't know if I just missed it, but in the risk disclosures, they, they list everything from like, you know, IT systems could get hacked, or we could not pay our debt covenants, all this other stuff. And they didn't mention global warming, which was very interesting to see that, like, absent from the 10K. Maybe I missed it. I don't know. But, but it's very, they're, they're, they're projecting a lot of interesting things.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  But, but, and, and the other thing is, like, these, think about how challenging it is to run a, a business. And it's not even, like, the, the ski industry has, like, the, the people that work in the industry have every right to be emotional and be, like, charged up and, and be frustrated with the corporate owners. But if you think about it, it's like, okay, if you're a small, like, when, when these ski resorts are independent, and you have, like, huge, huge amounts of fixed costs annually to run a resort, and then you just have a bad ski season in that area of, like, Tahoe, or you have a bad ski season in the upper northeast. And then, oh, what happens? Like, okay, the, the resort loses a bunch of money that year. You, you have to issue a bunch of debt.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  And so the idea of having a bunch of resorts that are spread out over such a wide geographic area that you can weather the storm almost, right? Like, that actually makes a lot of sense. And then again, the reason, it's like, You know, Vail Resorts is basically saying for a thousand dollars a year, you can get access to 40 of the most beautiful mountains on earth and, and, and get, to me, that, that value exchange is like such a great trade for the average consumer that it's, that it's, has to be frustrating running Vail, being like, we're giving you guys, for a thousand dollars a year, we'll give you unlimited access to all this incredible nature and

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  you can do, and you can ski, which is an activity that is just so, so clearly not essential to life, like it's purely for fun.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  And you're still not happy, it's like, that's gotta be a rough, rough spot to me. I, I mean, I honestly like, it seems like they, they poorly handled the last couple of weeks, but at the same time, I feel for them because they're running a deeply challenging business.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at this data, the number of days below freezing worldwide, you can see the map, it's like the entire northern hemisphere and the place with the most days below freezing, Greenland.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  I don't know if there's mountains there, maybe we need to build some.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Vail, Vail needs to.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Go buy Greenland.

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  Vail should buy Greenland.

• 45:21John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  It'll become a country.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  But then it's like Russia and Mongolia, which are, you know, you're not going to build a, a good business there. But they're, they're projecting out some moderate emission scenarios and the, the current number of days below freezing at Park City in Utah is 194 per year and by 2050-ish, they're projecting that that'll go down to about 150. So about a 25% decrease. So there is pretty significant pressure. And the interesting thing about this, this report, this report is like, okay, how do you deal with, how do you deal with climate change? Their main recommendation is like, Expand more, like go buy more across the world and they actually break down all of

• 46:07John Coogan?

  the target countries. They say Argentina, Chile, China, Chechnya, Finland, Germany, Norway. Germany has very, very few ski resorts. I didn't realize this, but there's this great chart in here of the countries with nine plus resorts operating at least five lifts. And it's the United States, then Japan, then France, Italy, Austria. Germany only has 55 resorts that qualify under this. And then Argentina only has 10, Chile only has nine. And so if you think about where to expand, Sweden, South Korea, Spain, Ukraine, there's a lot of interesting options.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  I heard at the Iman, there was a guy from Russia talking about how he's expanding and building ski resorts in the far, far east of Russia on a volcano, apparently. That sounded cool.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Let's, let's finish the, the, the Vale acquisition story here. So Vale's success has been vilified within the industry who see a corporate overlord turning ski hills into theme parks, which we've discussed. Powder Magazine hilariously joked Vale had acquired the rights to all North American snowfall. However, they've enabled a renaissance of sort, and this is something you were talking about. The company-wide Epic Pass alongside increased scale has flipped skiing's business model on its head from an add-on to real estate to operations first. It's worthy of a deeper dive on how tech and opportunity combined. And the, the pass revenue, which you'll see here, climbed from

• 47:46John Coogan?

  78 million in 2008 to basically 800 million in, in 2022. So a 10x growth. And, and that led to really incredible performance in the stock. If you look at 2008, the stock was under $25 a share. By the end of 2021, it was up at 350. So 10x growth in, in the pass revenue, 10x growth in the stock. And that's almost all just to retooling the business model. And, and obviously a lot of expansion.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  And the reason, I mean, the reason I just, again, I don't, I don't have that much sympathy for the average person who, who 10 years ago, they'd be buying a season pass to one of these resorts and it'd be like 500 bucks. And now they pay a thousand dollars, but they get access to forty two times as many mountains.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  Like, I just don't feel that.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Well, it it's just catering to a much more like coastal urban elite, someone who doesn't live in the ski town. It's probably a net like net positive overall.

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but even the ski.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  At the expense of the local.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but yeah, even the ski, like the true ski bums.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  They still, if they go to Keystone and that's their mountain.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  They still, they take advantage of these of the epic.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Usually, yeah.

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, oh, I'm gonna go to Utah for a week and like.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  And you can go off season.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Jordi Hays?

  And it's not that expensive to stay at like some little hotel. I mean.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  The um, the.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  You know, you you posted a few times about the the cost of skiing in Europe versus the United States. And and this Andy Van Van den Berg guy in almost a year ago is saying, here's your annual reminder that because of veil and all terras duopoly, it's cheaper to plan a week long ski trip in Switzerland than Colorado. I don't think this is, this is not purely because of the duopoly. It it it has always been significantly, you know, even prior to the to the to the Disneyfication of of American skiing. It was always quite a bit cheaper to go skiing in in in Europe.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  But uh, but but again, I don't.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  I mean, like, the benefit of this is that there is incredible price discrimination. And so if you want the value pass and you want your average day skiing, like, I knew a guy who was on one of the icon passes or epic passes and I was skiing with him and he was like, yeah, this is like my sixtieth day this season.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  And I'm like, I don't know how you do that. And but but the great thing is that I was able to show up, I think we were in Jackson Hole. I had no prep. I was able to just walk up and of course they had. Gear that fit me, I had a lift ticket and the lines weren't bad. It cost a fortune, but the benefit was that it was available for the price. And there's further price discrimination. You know, the funny thing about all those people waiting in that chair line, you can usually pay a ski instructor to take you right to the front and cut. And so a lot of people will just do that. It's like the Disney, like the Disney, Disney-ification is real in the sense that like there's a fast pass. There's a system for jumping even further.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and arguably if the fast pass is, is an extra, if the main pass is a grand, and the fast pass is like three grand, but you ski 50 plus days a year, just like do it. It's like not that, you know?

• 51:03John Coogan?

  And so, Grit goes on to say, meanwhile, Powder has moved on from the debacle. They remain a major adventure sports oriented resort operator with Copper, Snowbird and Killington as premier destinations. Powder even returned to Park City in 2019 via a new Woodward Sports Camp. Looks lit. It's like, he loves that lit. And it's like a BMX facility and like a parkour facility, I guess. Pretty, pretty interesting. And then if we go over here, Talisker, well, they're not doing so hot. After leasing to Vale, they hit rocky times with creditors and eventually forced foreclosure in 2015. It's likely that their shaky financial situation that precipitated the mess in the first place.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  And what might have been though, there had been talks about connecting the major Salt Lake City area resorts in a European style village to village arrangement with 80 lifts and 18,000 skiable acres. Those plans already facing locals' concerns died entirely when Vale moved in. I'm not exactly sure why. So yeah, that was a long thread on a topic you might have already known. We don't do lessons here, but I guess attention to detail matters. If you like this stuff, he recommends the book Ski, Inc., which I would definitely recommend picking up. I need to check that book out. I've heard some, as I was doing research on this, there were a lot of interesting quotes, especially about the, the Apollo buyout and some of the private equity deals that were quoted in that book. And that book has like some of the only interviews that happened with those financiers because like,

• 52:31John Coogan?

  A, the journalists aren't really writing about like random private equity deals. And then also these guys are pretty tight lipped. So that is the story. You got some more posts?

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  I got one last thing we can end on from at the stalwart Mr. Joe Weisenthal himself. He says, sort of unrelated to the main topic, but he says, it's cool how if you're rich and have a fake job like VC, then winners are just totally optional for you. And I would say that the VCs I know would push back on this and say, they would say, because I have a fake job like VC, I get to indulge in winter even more, right? They get to go, being a truly a VC is, you know, going and skiing powder days on a Tuesday, Wednesday,

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  or Thursday, midweek, way less people. You tell the founders, hey, yeah, you know, 4:00 PM is the earliest I can schedule a Zoom.

• 53:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  You go ski incredible, like, you know, you know, empty tracks all day long. You get back, you're pulling off your helmet, your ski gear, you jump on the Zoom call. Sorry, what's your company do again?

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  And that's what it's all about.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  We were talking about Bryce, how like, you know, he's networking in, where's he, Deer Valley?

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  And I was talking to another, another person about how like, there's this jockeying that's happening right now for like, you know, can you get on the list for one of the big VC ski vacations that are going on? So every VC firm is kind of organizing them and every like little group of, of like rich guys are putting together ski weekends. And like getting on those lists, it feels very like, oh, are you in the in-group? It's other cool kids. It feels like not working, but spending a full day with someone is always like a million times better than like five Zoom calls, right? It's actually very productive. And then you'll remember, oh yeah, we had that conversation like sitting outside, having drinks after skiing and it was awesome.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  Like that's why skiing is.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  It really is more valuable.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  So skiing is wildly expensive.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's fairly priced for how incredible it is.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  We've joked about it a lot, but it's some of my favorite memories as a kid was with, snowboarding with my dad.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, it was like skiing with my mom. Like you get all these moments where you get to like, have this exhilarating fun activity.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  That literally is almost the closest thing that we do to flying as humans. And then five minutes later, you're sitting on a lift, you know, chit chatting, talking. It's just, it's worth every dollar and I would happily pay two, three times.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  What it currently costs. Vale, if you're listening, no need to jack up the prices, but.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  I do have one little tidbit of advice and we can close out with any more posts that you have.

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  But there's a lot of questions about like, oh, it must be really rough being a ski patroller

• 55:30John Coogan?

  right now. And I think that if you're looking for a career, instead of going into ski patrol, I would recommend going into private equity.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  And so if you look at the history of Vale, the private equity guys have done very well.

• 55:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  And, and it seems like the ski patrollers have, have struggled.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  And it goes back to like, who has the financial leverage?

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Who has the, who has the power there? And so a little less time on the slopes, a little more time in the sheets, in the spreadsheet.

• 55:59Jordi Hays?

  So, so obviously you're, you're, you're riffing a little bit, but I'll, I'll continue on that. I do think that today and the, the, the nature of remote work, if you want to ski the most, if you wanna, if you just care about skiing, you're still better off getting a fake remote job.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Finance job.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  And living in a mountain town and just skiing constantly.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  Then going and becoming a ski patrol person.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, I know, I, I have like.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  The industry is set up to cater to that type of person.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  My roommate in college, like would have been a professional surfer.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  His parents like didn't allow him to quit school at a young age and like travel and do what he needed to do. But now he works in real estate and so he like has spent the last few weeks like on the North Shore at Pipeline like

• 56:51John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Getting absolutely barreled every single day. And it's like he makes way more money than like the average pro surfer.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:58Jordi Hays?

  And surfs like probably 50%, 60% as much, but like has a real career. And so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  You can pay for gear, pay for coaches, pay for training.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  He gets injured, he has healthcare.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum, pivot to private equity. That is our.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  I, I, I think that really is the good takeaway here from the nail story is like get on the side of capital.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Lover up.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  Lover up.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Cool. Let's move on to some DMs, our Q and A section. We have been getting tons and tons of merch. Thank you to everyone that's sent us stuff. Let's kick it off with the Ridge Wallet. You want me just to go through this while you're there? Yeah, Jordy's gonna take a break and we're just gonna keep rolling. So the first thing we got was some lovely wallets from The Ridge. We're, we're big fans of the Ridge Wallet. I've actually been using one of these. This is the 24 karat Ridge Wallet, which I like. I got the MagSafe one on my phone. And I, I realized that Ridge, Ridge Wallet, it's a very accessible product. It's not a super hyper luxury good. But what I love about it is that if you follow the Ridge team, Sean and Connor,

• 58:08John Coogan?

  you will understand that these guys are absolute killers in the world of e-commerce and they've built a fantastic business. And so carrying a Ridge Wallet has actually become a status symbol if you work in e-commerce in the sense that you are acknowledging that direct response performance ads is a craft of its own and that you respect a team that has done it so well. And gone to partner with MKBHD and launched all these products and, and really grown the business in a bunch of interesting ways. And maintained an incredible amount of, of ownership over that business because they haven't raised any of the crazy suicide rounds that other D2C companies. Uh, yeah, they haven't raised a dollar and, and they've just grown that business and grown it, grown it, grown it.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  And now it's doing, uh, I think hundreds of millions of dollars, right, Jordy? Hundreds of millions of dollars. Uh, and so that's, I think, the real reason why you should carry a Ridge Wallet, uh, is to let everyone know you have respect for the best in the business when it comes to direct to consumer. And they also sent me this knife, which I've been enjoying and I've been playing with basically constantly. It's like, uh, it's like the man's fidget spinner. The adult fidget spinner is just the knife that you can just like.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  That's my classic. That's my cla- anytime I'm at a, at a, at a nice dinner and there's a steak knife. I pull it out and I start doing.

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  And just freak everyone out. I'm like, I'm like good enough at it that I can like, I can, I can.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  And this knife is, is handy because we have here Palmer Lucky's latest device, the Chromatic from Mod Retro. And so I'm going to pop this open. Jordy said I shouldn't open this because it's going to be a piece of, uh, you know,

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  It's a collectible.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Technology history, but I think this one will be enjoyed and maybe I'll pick up another one, keep it in the plastic. But the Chromatic, if you're not familiar, Palmer Lucky.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  Oh, just, uh, started this, uh, second company. He's not busy enough with Andro. Ooh, nice packaging. It opens, uh, it opens around. It has some really cool graphics. And I believe this is possible. Wow. This is really just like an actual Game Boy. This is such a throwback. It's so crazy. Um, man, what a, what a treat. Um, and so, uh, I believe there's something with like, the Game Boy came off of patent or something like that.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  And so, uh, he was able to recreate it. And if you, and if you think forward, I mean, this company raised some money. And at, at first I think people were skeptical like, oh, what, what, you know, what's the deal with like a Game Boy company? Like, why do I, why is that a good company? Um, but if you think about like, well, then maybe the N64 comes off patent.

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  And people would love that. Maybe the.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Playstation. I would play the original Metal Gear Solid on Playstation. I would play Smash Brothers on the original N64.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, another, another bull case is. Another bull case for Mod Retro is that GameStop is a multi, I don't know what their market cap is today. I'm assuming it's, they're still like.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, they, they, they ripped and they continue to rip. This is amazing.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, but.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  Listen to that.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  It fires up so fast.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  It fires up so fast.

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  That, that, that speaker is just so nostalgic.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  That sound is incredibly nostalgic.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  This is awesome. I'm just gonna play this for the rest of the game.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Alright, uh, no, but anyway, so if, so if GameStop is a 14 billion dollar company and every single game in the store you can just download.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Jordi Hays?

  This, this is a lifeline for GameStop. And so basically, I think that GameStop basically has to buy Mod Retro for a billion dollars. At least if I was an investor, that's my investment thesis.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  This is gonna be huge.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, what is the, what's the last kind of video game that you can buy in the store? And it's cartridges.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Also, I, I saw somebody bought, they, they make cartridges that are like, they, they have some sort of like, new technology in there where it has like a thousand games on it. So it's like a modern memory card inside.

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And so here's the other, here's the other bull case is you have this iPad baby generation. We have children. I would much rather give our sons one of these on a road trip than the average iPad, which is just gonna be like, you know.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and I was playing a game on PlayStation 5 over the, uh, over the break with my son. And, uh, and it was, it was, it was awesome. It was about Astros Robots. And it's kind of like, uh, PlayStation's Mario. So it's a platformer. You jump around. It's all really friendly, all really nice. Uh, there's some like puzzles and stuff. Um, but there's just too many buttons for him because he's three. And so he couldn't really figure it out. So he'd just watch and he was really into that. And then every once in a while, there'd be like, one thing that just required pressing one button. And I'd be like, you press the button and be really excited about that. But I think he could actually learn how to play Tetris. And, and be able to build quality on it.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  The build quality is amazing.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Remarkable.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  It's significantly, it's significantly better.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  As I have, so, so I think I mentioned recently, I have a, I have a Game Boy Color that, um,

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  That unfortunately, that's like the Pikachu edition and I looked it up and I was like, oh, if it's unopened. Or no, if you have the box, it's like $3,000 and then if you don't, if you don't have the box, it's like 200 bucks or something like that. But this build quality of this is significantly better.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  It's so small too. I, I forget how amazing this device is. Like it's.

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  And it's so. Yeah. I mean, talk about an ideas, an ideas guy that is at the top of his game.

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  Is the guy who's making the next Lockheed Martin also is good enough ideas guy to realize that, hey, you can just build a Game Boy Color.

• 1:03:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. So yeah, go pick one up. Tell them the technology brother sent you. Uh, we're, we're very excited to have that. We also got some very cool merch from Rostra, Lulu's company. Uh, she sent us this amazing 3D printed Rostra. Are you familiar with like what a rostra is, Jordy? Hey.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  I was playing, I'm sorry.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  It's so good, right?

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  It's fun.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  It's like, it comes back immediately.

• 1:04:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  It's so fun. Yeah, you got it.

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Video games are addictive.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:24Jordi Hays?

  Be careful with them.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. The mod retro. Oh man, I'm so excited for that thing. Um, so, so, uh, Rostra is the name of Lulu Masurbi's company. Lulu, of course, is the brother of the year, comms mastermind, great follow on X. Uh, and, uh, her company is named Rostra, which is a, uh, Roman term for, uh, exactly this, I think, like a, like a, an area where conversations could happen.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  A place to go direct.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. The place to go direct. And so she 3D printed this beautiful, um, rostra. And she also sent a fantastic quarter zip that I've been wearing and is extremely comfortable.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  I, I'm, that's actually some of the only startup merch that I'm pissed that we didn't get two of.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I feel like she's mentioned that she was gonna send two, but.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna send, I'm gonna get really frustrated. Well, I happen to be drinking a.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Okay, what's this?

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  A yerba mate sent from Rob Mower.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  Co-founder of Huberman Lab. Rob, thank you for sending, uh, we have a lot of these now.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Yerba mate. Uh, they, this, this was a company that, um, I, I don't know if. Rob and Andrew are co-founders or they're major investors in the company. They're big proponents of your Bemate.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Wasn't it Andrew from Tiny? Andrew Wilkinson?

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  I think he also invested.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Helped finance it.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  It's cool.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, these are fantastic. You can get them at Arowan, you can get them online. Whole Foods, I think, as well.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  And a fair amount of caffeine in there, too, right?

• 1:05:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I'm gonna guess that we're putting up at least, yeah, 120.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  120, not bad.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  So it's like two espresso shots, so.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Could have like four or five of these and be good to go.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Are we just gonna keep? We gotta keep going through.

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, what else do we have? We have a, we have a sweatshirt. We've gotten so much merch.

• 1:06:11Jordi Hays?

  We got, you know, Christmas was big.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Christmas was big for us and people know that we're, we're willing to shill.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  We have.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  We're ready.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Down to shill. Uh, we have a, the world's healthiest hoodie here from Superpower Labs is Edition One. Um, and this hoodie has an entire, uh, it has nutrition facts on the logo. And it has, uh, zero PFOS.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Or microplastics, so you do not, um, uh, and, and it's completely toxin free. Um, and it even is more ecological. It uses 90% less water and 45% fewer emissions, uh, CO2 emissions than traditional cotton. So anyways, very nice, uh, heavy, uh, hoodie. Uh, so thank you to Superpower for keeping us warm this winter season.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's tricky for me because, uh, my testosterone's been really high lately. So I've been trying to get more microplastics to kind of bring it down, take the edge off. But for the direct person, I'm sure that's a great choice.

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  So I was having a, an après-ski moment in, uh, the Alps. And we were selecting like this, this incredible, uh, steak. From, um, there's this, this restaurant in the Three Valleys, like Resorts region called La Secou. La Secou?

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:07:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, and it's really, really known for its steak. So we're, we were, we ski into this place and, uh, we, we spend all this time selecting a steak. And the, the, they, they weigh it out for you. And after we, they bring out the steak, we're like, we decide, yes, we're gonna do this. And he slaps the receipt right on top of the steak.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, that was a real photo?

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a real photo.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece of meat and he slaps the PFOS receipt.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  But, did he print on the backside?

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Print what?

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Like, is there ink on the backside?

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't matter, but it's, I thought it was, I thought it was the paper.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  No, no, it's the ink.

• 1:08:19Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was the thermo, I thought, and I thought it was the paper itself.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  I think, I think it's the ink that you wanna watch out for.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  But anyways.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Whenever I get a receipt, I always, if I have to touch it, I'll just touch the part that didn't get the ink on it.

• 1:08:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know if, I don't know if that, I don't know if that works.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  I think it works.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  But, um, but anyways, so for me, I actually liked it because my T levels are so high. I'm trying to get a little bit of receipt action to bring it down, get closer to sort of baseline.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Ability to be able to even focus, get anything done. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I just thought that was so funny. It's like goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece of meat. And then slaps the receipt on it.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  That guy is not on right wing Twitter.

• 1:08:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go to some more, uh, some more questions, Q and A. Uh, Sarah says, what are your predictions for defense and industrial tech in 2025? Spicy takes are always welcome.

• 1:09:11Jordi Hays?

  So bear domestication.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Bear domestication does feel like it's getting closer to being a reality as opposed to just joke territory.

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  And I could see someone raising.

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Or the whole, oh, we're building autonomous, uh, submarines. It's like, just say you failed at training dolphins.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, it's a good point.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Just say you failed.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  It's a good point. Uh, we also had another spicy prediction, which was that, uh, the total confirmed kill count of all defense tech companies would, uh, pass 100K in 2025? So that'd be a big milestone.

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Uh, what else? What, what, what, seriously? I mean, seriously, I think that, uh, the, the, the defense tech stuff, it's already been like a big tent since, um, like, defense tech. There was like Palantir, it doesn't make hardware, but is clearly defense tech, but they still have a massive commercial business. And then SpaceX, like they have Starshield, which is a defense tech product, and then. The they're certainly like a gov tech company because they

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  With the government and so they're kind of in the defense tech world and then Anduril is like the most pure play like it's hard tech and defense only and they don't have a consumer business and they don't have an enterprise business and so.

• 1:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think the argument that SpaceX. SpaceX is inherently a defense company because if you can take a huge payload to space and then drop it anywhere in the world like fundamentally that's like the the the.

• 1:10:34John Coogan?

  They're ICBMs.

• 1:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  The first rocket that Elon tried to buy in Russia were just decommissioned ICBMs.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39John Coogan?

  And they like spat at him and then he started the company. But yeah, I I I think it's always been kind of a big tent and Andreessen did a little bit of that with in American dynamism. If you go to their website, they have like this timeline of American dynamism. And one of the things that they've added is like the iPhone as an example of American dynamism, which is like kind of silly because it's like when I think American dynamism, we think defense tech and like that's just consumer hardware. But you can see that like there was a natural like broadening out and then AI got bolted on too in many ways because American dynamism and defense tech was hot and so you have companies like scale working with the government and then other like defense llama. It's like is Meta a defense tech company now?

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  And so I think that I think that tent will get bigger, but the next category that I think will be really like maybe retconned into the defense and industrial tech will be energy and data center build out.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  And and because I think they're capital intensive, high dilution, similar skill sets. So I think a lot of the VCs that are like, okay, I I have built a portfolio. I've built positions in all the big.

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Defense tech companies like I don't think there's there's going to be another major wave in 2025. How do I apply my skill sets and my analysts to this? Well, let's go after industrial energy.

• 1:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Nuclear, wind, power, solar, and then also just traditional oil and gas for just anything for data center build out because wasn't there a number that like Microsoft's going to spend?

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Eighty billion.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Eighty billion. And so like that just.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Seems kind of weak to me.

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  VC is just going to jump on this, right?

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, the eighty seem kind of weak to me. I feel like they should they should raise like eight hundred billion of debt and just do that in a year.

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, are they out of ideas?

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Are they out of ideas? Like, what's going on?

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  Do they not believe? It's funny because everyone's saying that is like, is like, it's the loudest signal that AGI is around the corner.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is, it is. I feel like when Microsoft basically bought half of OpenAI. Everybody was like, what is Sam doing?

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  But it kind of like maybe was the 200 IQ play of like, if I need to spend a hundred, if I need a hundred billion dollars for the data centers.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  Where it goes.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  This is like one of the few companies that can actually do that. And now they're doing it.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It'll be interesting to see how the core we've IPO goes. I think a lot of people are going to be watching that in terms of like data center build out and valuation.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Uh, we have a DM here. Uh, Jordy, fantastic flow. What do you do for your hair?

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I got my haircut yesterday and I go to, I go to the same place as Rob, actually.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  I got recommend, uh, Rob, Rob.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Huberman's business partner?

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Huberman's business partner, uh, has fantastic flow.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  He does.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  He showed up to my house for jujitsu one day. I was like, dude, where do you get your haircut?

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  Live like a few minutes from each other. And he's like, oh, I go to Brooke at Salt Salon. So I go to Brooke at Salt Salon. And, um, I told her yesterday while I was getting my haircut, or Saturday it was, I was like, uh, people keep commenting on

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, they do.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  About my hair. They, and, and I swear, I shouldn't have said anything because she started, she like, got like a little bit like, she's lost a little bit of confidence. She started overthinking it.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  No, like you do it perfect every time. You never give me a bad haircut. Just like lock in, just give me a regular cut.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  Yips.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  And she got, it got into her head somehow. So if, if I'm not on my game today, uh, it's, it's, it's because I, I shouldn't have said anything, but.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  What about product? I mean, it's a salt guy.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  So I haven't used a product in forever.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  I, I jump in the ocean frequently because I live by the beach.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  And I never use shampoo.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, I, I think big shampoo is, is, is very bad and, and most people. But the key to not using shampoo is you have to eat super clean.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  If you eat super clean, you're not like sort of just expelling like toxins.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Pour and so you can skip the shampoo. So I use shampoo maybe once a month.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  I do support big shampoo, but they don't get much out of me.

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:31Jordi Hays?

  And just salt water and.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Massive.

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  I use the sauna. I use it. Yeah, I use the sauna a lot too. So. And.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  In an Arowan bill that looks like a mortgage payment.

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  The six, the six fig.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  It really does look like a mortgage payment.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Have I ever showed you?

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  This is like the most rambly episode ever, but it kind of makes sense. So my, my lifetime savings at Arowan. 16 grand.

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

  I spend the average PM's monthly salary at Arowan.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's all worth it for the hair. So I have a tip.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So there's, there's.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  There's the answer. Uh, let's go to Hennel Patel. He says, can Tech Bros pod cover why Teal is doing so many interviews? Mainstream ones. I always thought of him as a Robert Mercer kind of guy. Tech Bros pod save America. Uh, interesting question. I mean, I think a lot of it is just the fact that like, you know,

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  when, I mean, he's been attacked through his career for years and years and years, like starting with the diversity myth, very controversial book. A lot of that. Now we see like the backlash to DEI that only happened in like 2023.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  He wrote the book in the nineties, I think, or like 2002. And it's like, and, and there were like hit piece after hit piece about that book and then apologies. Like I think David Sacks at one point had distanced himself from certain passages and say, oh, that was taken out of context. Like it was like not a book that you put like front and center when you're introducing David Sacks on stage. You're, you're like, he's a SaaS investor, like he's not controversial. Let's forget about that book. And now it's like, no, he literally saw the future and he was correct. Like it was, it was, he was dead on. And, and so there's a little bit of like you, once, once the world comes around to your perspective, like you need to. Make sure that you canonize the correct telling of history.

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  And that's true for Trump, obviously, in the sense that like he predicted that Trump would be popular. And that that happened in 2016 and it was kind of like this wild card thing where he was still getting protested. And there was a lot of negativity and for years, you know, there was like the debate of R Y C and a lot of company. People were like, I won't take Peter's money. It's like, okay, yeah, sure. But but there was a lot of that. Now, now he's able to go and kind of like, like reintroduce his worldview to a more receptive audience. And if you look at like the Barry Weiss interview, like I think that made him look very good. And it was something that like I had family members who are obviously familiar that I work with him, but um, but only know him as like.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  I was at a wedding once and they're like, oh, Peter Thiel, like he's a fascist, like he's, you know, like that, that type of stuff. And now it's like, oh yeah, if you go and listen to his like long form interview with Barry Weiss, he'll just be like, oh, this is like, it's just a smart person.

• 1:17:18Jordi Hays?

  There's almost no one on earth that you can listen to a truly long form interview of them and come away and be like, this person is deeply bad.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like you can even like, even when people, they actually listen to Putin talk for an hour and he just rambles. They're like, oh, maybe he's got some points.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why the press was so against like the podcast election because they were like,

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Do not humanize Trump by letting people listen to him for three. It with J D Vance, he was weird. And then the top comment on the Theo Von interview was like, why did they say he was weird? This is the least weird guy I've ever met. Like, this is the most normie dude in the world. And it's like, yeah, he is just like a normal guy. Like,

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Uh, like you, you should, you should, you know, just evaluate his policies and ideas and then decide if those align with what your goals are in the world. And then that's fine. And if you come away being like, I still don't want to vote for him, that's fine. But like this, this imagined, you know, craziness is just like so bad. The political derangement syndrome on both sides. Uh, and it was, it was rough for Kamala because like, we never got that three hours of like raw. And I still maintain that like, if you were drinking wine with Kamala, you'd be like, this is a great person. Like, I'm down. She's cool. You might be like, I don't like her policies or like, I don't understand her policies or she doesn't have any. But you, you, she would be humanizable. She just didn't let herself be humanized because she didn't do any real podcasts.

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  She could have been a hero for the crypto community if she.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  For any, for tons of communities. There was so much opportunity. Anyway, there's a reason why we don't talk about politics on the show ever.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Ever.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  Let's go to Base Baron. Base Baron says, "In early stage slash pre-seed deep tech funds that also have their own studio or incubator are funny to me. How are the incentives aligned? For example, Embedded VC invested in Anduril and now can steal all their data to build their own competitor." And so the question is, is if you are writing early-stage checks and you also have an incubator, how can you be a good steward and participant in the market? And it's particularly hilarious because like Anduril was a Founders Fund incubation. And it's like, well, they just incubated the one that they wanted to put the money into, and then they just kept investing in that one. But I mean, the question, I don't know

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Embedded VC, but like, if you think that you can just like steal Anduril's data and then build a copycat and be at all successful, like you don't understand the power law and you don't understand how power is accruing in that industry.

• 1:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I'll take the Baron's side on this one. I do think as a founder, if you're spending, it can be a weird situation if a founding team is like working on an idea, and they're pitching a VC who invests in companies, but then they also build their own companies. It does create, like, I think that there's a reason that VCs haven't, like, big VCs haven't, like, Andreessen Horowitz doesn't have like an incub, they have like EIRs, but they haven't been like, hey, let's, if you're a scaled asset manager, it does present some weird situations and misalignments. And one of the things that he's getting at,

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  which I think is real, is if you're at a fund that can make direct investments, or the partners can incubate ideas, it starts to be, oftentimes, there's ideas that, this is like a Rick Rubin quote, right? Like, ideas have their time, somebody's gonna do them. And so if you're a partner at one of these funds where you can invest or incubate, And you can, a founder can pitch you and you can give them $10 million or you could invest $20 million into a totally new company.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  It does start to get where there is like this conflict.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I can, and I, and I can see why founders don't want to partner with funds or wouldn't, or be less inclined to pitch a fund who might, like the founders fund incubations don't come about because like they're watching, they're like, oh, this founder-

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Trey was actively trying to not start that company.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  He was actively trying to invest in it. He spent like two years as a principal, just looking for defense tech companies. Who's going to build this? Who's going to build this? And no one came through and then he was finally like, we gotta do it.

• 1:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I think-

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  Very different. And Andorol's like this special case where it's like, you have this rock star team of like former Palantir guys, super well-connected and then like, they're already at a 10 billion plus scale. It's like, you can't just incubate that and like compete immediately. I do think, I heard, uh, when Justin Mayers was, was initially pitching TruMed, some of the feedback he got was like, this is a good idea, but you gotta be really quiet about this for the next like year or two until you get this thing going. Because this is an idea that would be copied by 10 different YC companies and you would just get sliced up.

• 1:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  But if you can actually get through that gauntlet. So like, you know, we joke about like an NDA thing and stuff, but like, yeah, you do, you do need to be somewhat careful depending on what the market timing is for your business. What the structure of the business will be. Like clearly Andorol had, it was in such a, such a, uh, like a, you know, a heretical-

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Industry. No one was going into that. And then also this crazy team, it was like, they could tell, they, they told everyone and it didn't matter. Cause it was like, what the hell are you doing?

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I did have a funny-

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  But if you're building something a little bit more like, oh yeah, this is like on trend. Like, okay, you're going to use AI for, you know, uh, for sales calls or CRM stuff. It's like, okay, well like, if you're actually doing something like you might not want to go pitch someone who's-

• 1:22:35Jordi Hays?

  I had a pretty funny moment with a portfolio company that went out to raise at the beginning of 2024 and ended up getting passed on by a VC, um, that was like, kind of surprising. Like we thought they were going to issue a term sheet. And, um, and then I kept hearing about that, that VC fund is a big VC fund and one of the founders, I'm going to make up a name for it, but let's call him Jack.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  I kept hearing from other people in the community, oh, Jack has this new.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Idea.

• 1:23:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this new idea. And he was saying that it was the same thing that my portfolio company was doing. And I kept hearing the name Jack over and over and over. And so I went to a partner at, at the fund that passed. And I was like, guys, like you're fucking incubating.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  A competitor to this deal that I brought you. Like, I was super annoyed. And I only found out at the end of last year that it was a totally different Jack.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  But I kept hearing that.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  So for this whole year.

• 1:23:30John Coogan?

  We talked about this on like episode three.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  And so this whole year, I thought this, I thought this partner was just fucking lying to me, saying that they weren't incubating something when I knew that they were. Turns out it was just, everybody kept referring to it as the same.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  Jack, wow.

• 1:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Like Jack's a made up name, but, uh, and over and over and over. And so when that happened, I, I finally went down, I was like, dude, I'm really sorry. I kept hearing, I thought you were lying to my face.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  And, um.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  That's an amazing story.

• 1:23:54Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, yeah, I think there's a reason, like, at the end of the day, what, the, the reason that it's not so bad that funds have this incubation strategy is like, they would so much rather just back the generational team.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  And so if you are building a generational company and you have this world-class generational team, you can rest assured that the, the VC fund will happily just invest in your company.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  They will only incubate something, an alternative, if they don't believe in you.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  And so just be better.

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  It's a skill issue.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Uh, there, there is another funny like flip side to this. Uh, I, I, I think that, I think your takeaway is like, like basically dead on. Um, but, uh, there's a funny flip side where I heard a story about, uh, uh, a firm that does incubations, had, uh, a person come and interview to work at the firm on incubations. And then they stole an idea from the incubator and went and built the business separately. And was like, I'm not giving you anything. It raised different money. And then it didn't go well. Eventually like it got.

• 1:24:55Jordi Hays?

  Usually those things don't.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  But, and it was like a very bad thing. And it was, it was very stupid, but it's just so funny that like, it can go both ways. Like the VC can steal your idea, but maybe you can steal the VC's idea. And I like that. I like that. It's like bring the fight to them.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  Cuts both ways. Yeah.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  It didn't work out and I wouldn't recommend it, but it, but it is funny. Uh, let's go to another, uh, question I got in a DM that was pretty interesting. Um. How do people who write books get on the podcast circuit? Are there companies to pitch guests or do they just reach out to a bunch of podcasts at once? Or does someone go on one and then other podcasts reach out? Curious why YouTube feeds me the same 20 people all the time and wondering how they get on so many shows for having no real body of work, other than just being interested to listen to. That's a good post. That's a good way for it, but it is true. Are you familiar with this strategy?

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, so the role of the modern PR firm?

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  If you could pay somebody like, like the classic PR firm, you're paying them 10 to 20K a month.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  And they're getting you plugged in with media.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  And now, if you could pay, if I was an entrepreneur and, and I could pay somebody 20 grand a month to get me on four podcasts a month.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  That's like the best money ever spent.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Because you're just getting in front of these crowds of people. You're able to talk about your story and your company and your product and people get to know you and they like you and it's like the best marketing ever.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:14Jordi Hays?

  So, but the challenge is like, it's not easy to get on podcasts, right? A lot of these interview shows, they do like 50 interviews a year.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  And they have like 5,000 people that would want to be on those slots. And so it's a bloodbath of competition to try to get onto that slot. What is true is like if somebody goes and they do one good interview and then they can jump to do another one and then they just end up becoming like a classic like interview guest. It does, I do think that there's like a bit of a snowball effect, but yeah, it's not easy. I, I think, um, everybody that has a podcast will like, has like a long list of emails that they've gotten from PR firms from like, "Hey, like, I'd love to..." It's, it's just some like super random founder or company.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  The best ones are where people try and get on David Senna's podcast, Founders. And it's like, he's literally never had a guest in a thousand episodes.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Listen to a single show and you'll realize that it's not a guest-driven show. What are you doing?

• 1:27:08Jordi Hays?

  You can get on, anybody you can get on David Senna's show. You just have to have built a generational company.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  Just create $10 billion value and have someone write a biography.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Then you can get on. It's easy. It's really easy if you just check those boxes.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  PR firms should just do that for them. Just, just help me build $10 billion. Uh, yeah, I mean, uh, it, it, it is, it is wild how you get like syndicated and there are some shows that are literally just like we, our whole model is we interview book people and, and it's just like, we have a close relationship with Simon Suster and Penguin.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. So for sure, the book publishers have their relationships now.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Podcasts that do like book reviews, basically they sell books. Yeah. And that's actually like their model. Um, but then for the bigger shows, like if you're going on like the Rogan, Lex Friedman, Circuit, like that's much more relationship driven and it's much more driven by, are you a personality? And the book is kind of just like some, it's just an excuse. It's just an excuse. Usually it's like people building a relationship over a long time. And then they're saying like, like when Pomp, uh, released his book recently, he, he sent me a copy, sent a bunch of people a copy. He sent an email to a bunch of people and in that email, he was like, uh, if you want me to come on your show, uh, I'll prep something that's like specific to your show and I'll come on, just let me know. And, and so like, if you're like, yeah, my show is focused on, on finance.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  He'll be like, okay, cool. I'll, I'll come on and we'll talk about these things. So if it's about crypto, he'll come on and do this. If it's talking about the military stuff, he'll talk about that. And so, uh, really like kind of helping people do their homework. And then once he starts like spiraling, he can, he can kind of go up the chain and pass one along and say, hey, here's the last spot I did. And I noticed I did this last year. My goal was a little bit to do a little bit less content on my own, a little bit more guest spots. And I kind of worked my way up the chain from like some random friends podcasts to Bloomberg Odd Lots, which was like a pretty good spot. And, uh, and a lot of that just happened from like posting about becoming like an expert in the nicotine category was having a moment, posted some long threads. We kind of like became a thought leader for a little bit and then like, uh, was just like available to the people.

• 1:29:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, I've said this probably on the show before, but if you are running a company or an investment firm, there's almost no podcast that's too small.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Cause it used to be that if you were running a business and you got invited to speak at some random conference in Nebraska, like you're working oil and gas. And it's like, hey, do you want to come speak at this conference to talk about other, to talk to other people in the oil and gas industry? And people would fly, spend an entire day traveling there to speak in front of a group of 100 people. Because if you have the opportunity to speak for an hour in front of 100 people, and tell them your life story and the history of your company and why they should care, it's like the best marketing ever because they're getting to know you. Maybe it's an opportunity to get them to like you, all this stuff. And so nowadays, you can go and get on a podcast, and even if there's only 100 listeners, it's like, okay, you joined a Zoom call and talked

• 1:30:08Jordi Hays?

  for 45 minutes and you got off. And like, if that, if only 100 people ever listen to it, it's still a good opportunity to get yourself out there. So.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  The other high leverage thing is that when you write a book, that, whatever your title of that book is, follows you basically forever. Because people will, it's very hard for people to be, oh, like Jordy, he's the founder of this company, and he founded this other company. But if you're just like, author of whatever, they'll just be like, he's the author of this book. And so if you just.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  That's why we need to write the book, lever up.

• 1:30:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, or like, you know, rags to riches, how I became a high testosterone giga chad for only $5 a month, or something like that.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  The hard thing about bench pressing 400 pounds and driving sports cars all day and drinking Dom Pérignon at work.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  Something stupid like that. So it just follows you forever. Let's go to Nicole. This is a great question. This is like, this is bait for us. She got 97 comments. I'm sure all of them are wrong. Question for watch people. What's a nice watch for women? Preferably gold, classy and timeless that you can wear with most things. Have never owned a watch before, and the options are overwhelming. What do you think?

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Gotta go Cartier.

• 1:31:24John Coogan?

  Cartier Tank, obviously. Yeah. Cartier Tank is like the one. Tank Louis. It's timeless. It was worn by Jackie Onassis, Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali. It's, you know, like Cartier invented the wristwatch with the Santos, but the Santos is going to be too masculine. And so the, the, the tank is iconic and you can't go wrong. If you want to step up, ladies Nautilus.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  You go with a crash?

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  I think a crash is probably a better fit for an allocator of Nicole's.

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:58Jordi Hays?

  Size, right?

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  I like.

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  400K market value, so that's a good like daily driver.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, the, the, the ladies' Nautilus is, is legitimately cheaper than.

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  It's a bummer that Pipe is not still in the business of like pulling forward. You know how, did you know in like 2020 and 21?

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Jordi Hays?

  If you had a fund, you could pull forward like 10 years of your management fees. So a lot of GPs were like going and, and that would have been an amazing opportunity to fund some of these watch purchases for some of these allocators.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  For all the management fees.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that are just not following the 2% rule at all.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  Um, letting everyone down.

• 1:32:36John Coogan?

  What else? I mean, I mean, uh, there's some, I, I think Rolex is a little overplayed, but there are some interesting pieces in there.

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  I think getting.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  AMD has one that's beautiful.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  Something simple, day just.

• 1:32:49Jordi Hays?

  Like a date, no.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  No, day date?

• 1:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, day, not a day just.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  That should be a banned word. We need to have a list of banned words on the show, day just.

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  Day just is banned.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Day just is banned.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Banned.

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, like some, there's some unique day justs that have, you know, I think could be, could be.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  I mean, there's another thing you could just like completely try and stand out with like a Cause AP or something.

• 1:33:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. That was actually, I, it was funny. I landed, I landed in, I landed in Geneva.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:21Jordi Hays?

  And Cause AP had like the whole, the whole airport like as like, and I'm like, the average person, like only in Geneva do you put an airport ad for like the most hype beastie like watch in history.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Her, her style overall is very, uh, gold, classy and timeless, but why not put a racing machine on your wrist for Nicole?

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, RM.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  Get an RM. Get a skeletonized RM, uh, maybe a Hublot.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  It puts you in a unique club.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  You know what's good? She says gold. Why not a jean?

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  Remember the jeans?

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  There's a watch that's made entirely out of jeans.

• 1:33:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  Uh, and, uh, yeah, it's made out of jean material. It's a Hublot or something. Um, but yeah, lots of good, lots of good options, but I hope that all 96 of these people recommended Cartier Tank Louis because, uh, that's the one. Although there are some interesting ones. You could go with the Tank Fresse, Tank Anglais.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  There's a few others that I think could work, but

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  We could spend a whole hour.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  It's a classic.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Spend a whole hour talking about.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  If you're trying to save a buck, you could go with the solar beat, but I recommend Louie.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Here we go. I'd love to hear y'all's take on what fighters are doing a good job brand building slash marketing themselves, or if you see any interesting trends in the sport from an entrepreneurial perspective, thank you. And he's talking about MMA fighters.

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this is a question from our boy Bo Nickel, a rising star in the UFC and a technology brother himself. So Bo, a little bit of backstory. Bo is a wrestler at Penn State. A lot of the best stars in MMA have like a wrestling base, like Khabib is the sort of most prominent example of that.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  And there's actually some big fights coming up in LA this weekend, which I'm excited for. But yeah, one thing that's become clear in MMA over the last 10 years is the biggest stars is not purely due to technical proficiency and talent. And I think that Conor McGregor led the charge here. He's one of the, as much as he had some extremely viral massive moments in the cage.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  People don't really realize that like his last run in the UFC was like not so good, right? He was getting knocked out by, you know, KO'd by Khabib, KO'd by Poirier, like breaking his leg, having some nasty sort of like exchanges. Like it was a very kind of almost like a pretty bad downward spiral. Yet when he was on the mic, he was the best to ever do it, right? So the media training was like, was just so good and it was very, seemingly very natural. Like he came up in his career. He just was always good on the mic. And so something that people have realized within MMA and Bo certainly has known this is that you are building, you're not just a fighter and an athlete, you're building a media brand around yourself, right?

• 1:36:14Jordi Hays?

  And one of the challenges in MMA is like you're kind of just your own dude, right? So like Bo competes or Bo trains out of a, I think, American top team in Pennsylvania, which is just like a small regional gym. And so there's not a lot of like media coverage around there. There's no, he's not going to be getting picture, like paparazzi pictures. And so he has to create his own kind of media business around himself. And so he's done a really good job of that. Some fighters have been overly reliant on the UFC to promote them. But the issue is UFC has fights every week, couple of weeks. And so their only incentive is to promote the next fight. So if you don't have a fight on the schedule or you're not fighting that week, you're, you pretty much have to promote yourself.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  And so some, every fighter takes a different angle here. Like Bo has taken the angle of like, I'm going to basically vlog. His lifestyle is like this emerging, you know, athlete within the UFC. He's taken sort of the high road. You have other people like Colby Covington, who I don't know if you're familiar with Colby Covington. So Colby Covington is like, he couldn't be more polar opposite from Bo. Bo's like the, you know, the athlete, like the good guy, All-American. Colby Covington takes like, will hire strippers and, and get strippers around him like this. And be throwing, you know, money and calling his like, you know, opponents like losers, right? So he's taken the total opposite approach. And so every fighter needs to create their own unique brand.

• 1:37:42Jordi Hays?

  I think it's impossible to break out in UFC and MMA without being like truly yourself, because there's just too much time on the mics to like be anybody but yourself. Colby Covington like snapped into this character. He was about to get cut from the UFC and he decided, I'm just going to become an asshole. And he like has adopted that. And, and that's almost been a challenge for him because he's, he's can't fully, like you can tell in certain situations, he wants to just be like a nice, normal guy. But then he's got to be like, you know, he's got to be an asshole. That's like part of his brand now. He's a heel. And so, so yeah, I think Bo's done a really good job of this. A lot of other, a lot of other fighters that have, that have come up recently have realized like, I basically need somebody to follow me around with a camera 24/7.

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  And like, we just need to be putting out this like really high volume of content, because we need to be promoting ourselves. Year round, building this fanbase because we can't rely on the UFC. And so I think overall, I think MMA like gyms and management companies need to do a better job of like building this infrastructure around fighters because it's a lot to put on somebody to say, oh, you're going to become like this top athlete and you're also going to build this crazy media company.

• 1:38:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So step one is like embrace this idea that UFC is essentially WWE, but the fights are real.

• 1:38:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  And so there are roles and characters and storylines that cut through and you need to lean into those and acknowledge that that's real and figure out what is authentic to you. Are you a good guy? Are you a bad guy? Like, but like play into that and play a heightened version of yourself. Uh, and then second, like there needs to be a camera on you like five hours out of the day, every day. And so, uh, at the start, that's probably like your biggest fan who's an 18 year old kid with an iPhone. And then they can scale up and get a nicer camera, but it's basically just film what happened today, put it on YouTube. It's a vlog, edit it on their phone, iMovie, just trim some stuff out, but just give the fans the opportunity to go deep with your life.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  Take a photo, put it on Instagram.

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  Do a, do a short little video, one minute workout. It's a, it's a reel. It's a Tik Tok.

• 1:39:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  And then just be constantly posting, constantly posting, constantly posting. And then eventually like scale that up to like bigger stuff. What else is in your life? What can you tell us about the car you drive, the watch you own, like whatever else is in your world? But you know, the, the fighting stuff is going to be the core thing. What, who, who, who, who are you fans of? Who, who inspired you to get in this business? Like talk about anything.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I've even seen some, some, um, Sugar Sean, Sean O'Malley and his, uh, coach Tim. They've built like a whole kind of like podcast network where they not only talk and cover their own stuff, but they, they, when there's like a fight, then they're covering it, right? And so, yeah, if I were, if I were an up and coming MMA fighter, I'd be like, okay, I need to have a camera guy on me at all times. I need somebody putting out like five, six videos per day on social media. So I'm going to go to Monster Energy and say, just give me like a hundred grand a year.

• 1:40:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:42Jordi Hays?

  And I'm going to just like dump it into media.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:44Jordi Hays?

  Because that, and that can quickly even become a profit center if you do it properly.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  These fighters aren't paid exceptionally well. So anyways, um, I would say the same thing, like it's, it's less necessary for like pro sports. Right? Where you have these whole teams and, and there's more infrastructure, but these individualized. You know, sports are, you gotta take it up yourself.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  Should we go into this epic Q and A from Andrew McCallum?

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11John Coogan?

  I love Andrew. If you don't know Andrew, he was the, uh, he's an engineer at Varda Space Industries, but also, um, uh, was big in the LK 99 saga of last year. Was that?

• 1:41:25Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  22, 2020. Yeah, he was the one that like replicated it and like built it.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  What a chat.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  And actually tested it. And it looked really promising, but then it didn't go anywhere. But he was actually able to get all the materials and, and, and run the, run the process to, to make it. And I went down there. I made a whole vlog about it. It was really fun.

• 1:41:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And he, he also has, he also has Project Bob.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:46Jordi Hays?

  Which so I, we talked about this on the show. I was like, why has nobody built a drone that live streams? That you and your boys can just watch, just chugging around the world? And so that's literally what he built with Project, Project Bob. And, um, we gotta do a whole bit on it.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:02Jordi Hays?

  Because they're raising money for it. And, um, it's very.

• 1:42:05John Coogan?

  And so he sent us a long message. I'll, I'll just read it all. Uh, he says, brothers. So there I was, basking in the glow of Marina Del Rey morning, surrounded by yachts and the quiet hum of other people's life crises. I'm finally taking a vacation day from grinding hard in the gundo, sipping an artisanal $14 oat milk latte when I hit 39 minutes on your latest episode. And bam, you stumbled onto my diabolical plan for art riches. Dogefin.space. Four years ago, I called my shot Babe Ruth style. With this clairvoyant vision, I knew Elon would ascend. Doge would ignite a revolution and the only way to profit was to become an infamous modern artist disguised as a hard tech Twitter shit poster. Naturally, I have been quietly creating

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  a life-sized modern art masterpiece, blending SpaceX, Doge and Elon himself. I've seen this in person. It's crazy. Uh, the wildly overcomplicated path to get here really speaks for itself. Step one, build and sell the requisite first company in my twenties, five years before hardware was cool. Uh, two, expand the TL empire.

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  So he sold his company to GE.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's right. Uh, step two, expand the TL empire, obviously, uh, as part of the founding team of another L O T R named banger. Step three, achieve world infamy and make Twitter fame after failing to make the rocks float. Shout out to Coogan's doc work and Chamath's trolling. Uh, step four, nerd snipe every cracked and based engineer in California with Project Bob. Launching the world's first venture backed hobby program. So obviously, once I sell it at Art Basel this year to Ken G or Justin Sun, the tough choice is the Lamborghini Murra or the Ferrari F40. As gentlemen of taste, which do you think goes best with my brand? As ridiculous as it sounds, every step has been part of the master plan. This is just the sort of high effort shit that you just don't see very often.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Teal, Musk, Coogan, they're all playing on my chessboard. Yours in high effort chaos, Andrew. Thank you.

• 1:44:00Jordi Hays?

  This is a fantastic deal. I, I saw this and, and Andrew sent this before the end of last year, but we just needed, we weren't going to be able to give it the proper attention on, on the, on the annual awards episode. So yeah, what, what a post. Uh, I'm glad we could share it.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Such a long way to say Murra or F40. You could have just said Murra F40, but got the life story. I appreciate that.

• 1:44:26Jordi Hays?

  That's brother behavior, right? You gotta give that context. And look, I want to see Andrew driving the F40 into the Varda parking lot.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  F40.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Parking in the handicap spot.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Just for the photo op and then taking it out and parking in a normal spot.

• 1:44:41John Coogan?

  Lamborghinis are having a moment, but I think the Murra is just a little too retro to have any sort of functionality. It's going to be just more of a beast. Uh, if you want the Lambo, Diablo's are doing really well. Merci Lagos are having a moment.

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  Uh, and then you get up into the Aventador and some of like the, the previous generations are starting to climb a little bit. There's some interesting stuff there. And for a long time, the Lamborghini, like real car guys had.

• 1:45:12Jordi Hays?

  Merci Lagos would be crazy pulling up to the Varda offices and have Merci Lagos. Like that is like, that's cool.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  And I mean, if you go for the manual ones, like some of those are up there. Some of those are million dollar cars. But if you.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  I what about what about he didn't give this as an option, but what about the Lambo ramp? The Rambo Lambo?

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  The LM O two, that is.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  That is, that's, that's the ultimate Gundo hard.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  It is. Somebody's gonna do it.

• 1:45:40Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's, it's a supercar.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Jordi Hays?

  Like by in itself, like it's.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  It has a V 12.

• 1:45:45Jordi Hays?

  It has a V 12, but.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  It's the same, it's the same engine as the C-10, I believe.

• 1:45:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you know, it's like, it's, it's like, got that.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Utilitarian.

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  You got a trunk.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  You know, like you throw stuff in it, you can throw some rocket parts in there.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  You don't have a trunk, you have a.

• 1:45:59Jordi Hays?

  Truck bed.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  A bed. Yeah, bed, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it's insane. Um, but yeah, I mean, F 40 is just iconic. Uh, the Lambos are having a moment, but I think you gotta go F 40.

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Uh, although you won't be the only one in Gundo driving one, cause uh, uh, founder of Impulse Space has one.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Jordi Hays?

  It's an F 40.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Let's go. Um.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Should we go in the timeline?

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're only, uh, two hours into the show and we finally made it to the timeline, which is what you've been waiting for.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  It's been almost two weeks since you've heard us talk about printed out posts.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  A little bit of a change up. Today we have bucket pulls where the random, the random posts that aren't quite bangers go into the bucket. They get printed a little bit smaller because they're not quite as iconic as the bangers.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  And we have a little.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  Do a couple of bangers and then we'll pull out and then we'll pull out a bucket pull, uh, just like Kilt Tony does it on Tony Hinchcliffe's show. Uh, so let's start with Justin Lopas. He says, took a poll of friends and the companies they work at. 100% match. Serious people work this week and next unserious people do not. And he posted this at 6:50 a.m. on Christmas Eve. I think we were podcasting at the time.

• 1:47:18Jordi Hays?

  We were.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  We were literally podcasting at the time. Uh, uh, 100% match. Interesting. Friends and the companies they work at. Yeah. So everyone was working. Uh, yeah, I mean, why not?

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  I do think it's, um, it is like a weird one, cause it is, if you were going to give your team any week off.

• 1:47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  Throughout the entire year.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  Christmas and New Year's was particularly dead.

• 1:47:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  Just for doing business.

• 1:47:46Jordi Hays?

  Historically, when I was. Running regular, non-podcast companies.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  That week was always really hard because I'd want to let the team take a breather.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Jordi Hays?

  But then the nature of me having free time, I would just come up with ideas and I'd start pulling people in. I'd be like, alright, let's get on a quick call, let's get on a quick call. And then suddenly I'm just like,

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:07Jordi Hays?

  Or we need to do this like now, like this has to happen.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  I mean, hopefully like there is a space for some sort of break from the monotony of the calendar and email and a shift. So you're still working, but it's a more intellectual, you're reading, you're thinking about long-term planning, you're reflecting.

• 1:48:27Jordi Hays?

  Writing.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and I think that for the, for the people who are just like butts in seats, it's fine to take some time off, but.

• 1:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You don't want your, your SDRs.

• 1:48:37John Coogan?

  Just burning out.

• 1:48:38Jordi Hays?

  Cold calling, like.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  They're just not gonna get anything done.

• 1:48:40Jordi Hays?

  That's the thing, like, as much as it's very real that, that I would, I would say, I would say out of the 50 portfolio CEOs.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  That, that, you know, across my portfolio, I would imagine that the best companies, the CEOs all worked last week.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  That being said, I don't think that it's a bearish signal if they told many members of their team, hey, take, take the next few days off.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Because like, again, if you, if you're an account manager role, you don't need to be hitting up your, your accounts on the 29th, being like, hey, have you like, how, how's it going? And they're gonna be like, I'm like,

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23Jordi Hays?

  Offline right now.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's been Matt Wang at Paradigm. He says, it still seems underrated that Bitcoin slash crypto is the first political block with a native asset, and thus a reflexive feedback loop between price and political influence. And then Kevin Quach says, doesn't oil have this? And Matt says, as a largely utility-based commodity, there are constraints on price, but a good comparison point. Uh, yeah, that is fascinating. Like, like you can understand how things are going in the crypto regulatory world, just by looking at the price of Bitcoin.

• 1:49:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57John Coogan?

  Trump got elected, there were a lot of pro crypto things happened, and the price went from like 60 to 90, like immediately. And it was like, okay, like clearly things are 50% better for this industry.

• 1:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  Uh, and, and, and that is very interesting. I'm wondering if there's, if there's more, if there's more to that. Like, political block with a native asset?

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  Like, I guess it, I guess it just means regulatory stuff, but.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  The Nebraska corn farmers would like a word.

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, what I'm getting at is like, I think that there, the, the, the feedback loop is not just being able to divine political influence and how things are going to price, but also as the price gets higher, there is more money to spend on political influence.

• 1:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:41John Coogan?

  So the packs get bigger. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz donated by far the most to crypto packs when I looked at the data earlier this year, the last year. And, and it was very clear that like, if you're running a crypto fund and, or you're crypto billionaire, like throwing thirty million dollars is fine. Yeah, it's fine. And, and with other VCs where it spreads so thinly, it's like, oh, well, like, you know, yeah, we want to have some better regulation around energy for our nuclear port, portfolio company, but we really only have one. And then we need to change some things at the DOD, but we're really only in Andorol.

• 1:51:17John Coogan?

  And then, you know, oh, we also need to change something with like housing because we're in Airbnb and payments because it's like so many political blocks and like the, it, it's not as focused and consolidated. Whereas everyone is kind of marching in lockstep in the crypto industry.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I think the, my, the only, I always, um, whenever I've underestimated Bitcoin, it's from thinking of it as an investment asset versus a religion. So the difference between like the oil industry and the Bitcoin industry is people in the oil industry are like, this is a, a, a, a resource that we fundamentally need for our way of life, but they're in it to make money, right? Like, nobody's like in oil because they just like have this deep love for oil.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  Speak for yourself.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, speak for yourself. Um, whereas like Bitcoin, there's like huge numbers of people that if the price was a hundred dollars a coin, they would still be adamant about the importance of it and they would still spend all their time thinking about it. And so I think that, that, that's part of the power of it. It's a religion with a native. Asset, right?

• 1:52:27John Coogan?

  No, it's a good point. Yeah, I talked to a liberal crypto investor and I was like, how are you squaring this circle in this election? Like, it seems like the Democrats are very anti-crypto, it seems like the Republicans are very pro-crypto.

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  That was a big part of Kamala's policy is she, she wanted to protect.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  I know what you're gonna say.

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Let's move on from that. But, but yeah, and, and this person had some crazy, like, you know, jumping through a million hoops to be like, well, actually, like, crypto, it's easy to make money in crypto when it's illegal because there's more scams. And I was like, this doesn't sound good at all. Like, I think everyone wants more clarity around crypto and everyone wants the scams to go away and like the pumping coins and the rug pulls to stop.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we were dealing with, I don't know if we-

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Bitcoin and stable coins to be legal.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if we ever, did we ever address this on the show? We, we, we-

• 1:53:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:28Jordi Hays?

  We talked about, um, so, so-

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Over break.

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think this was over break, but we had covered a post about, somebody had said something, how do I invest? They were like, I want to invest in Technology Brothers. And we were like, you can't invest, we're not raising, but LVMH is a good proxy for it because we, faster we grow, the more Dom Perignon we buy.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, LVMH owns it.

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Everett is a partner at Kleiner Perkins. I worked with him at Founders Fund. He's a good buddy. And he's a fan of the show and was just like, I'm bullish. And so he puts out this post saying like, oh, somebody should launch a coin because like, I want to go along this, this podcast. Like, I'm excited. He was just being like, generally positive, which is awesome. And, and some, and then we said, oh yeah, we're not going to do a coin, of course, like, but you can just buy LVMH because we're going to be buying so much Dom Perignon. Should be an obvious joke, but someone went and on pump.fund created a ticker called LVMH, which I didn't even realize there was a previous LVMH pump.fund coin. They're not unique. You can just make a new one. You can make 25 of the same name. They're not even like domain experts.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Which is ridiculous. Like, it's, it's less scarce. A pumped out fun coin is less scarce than a domain.

• 1:54:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Like, what? And so, and so immediately, like, we see this, this post goes up, I didn't even notice it. I get a FaceTime call. I'm with my family. And I'm like, this is weird. I don't normally get like spam FaceTime calls. So I pick up and it's this dude. And he's like, hey, man, like, what's up, brother? And I'm like, okay, this is different than anything I've ever done in media before. And he's like, yeah, like I, I just put up a, a, a coin on Pumped Out Fun and it mooned to 200K in, in market cap. And I was like, cool dude, like that seems completely independent from my life. Like I, it was unclear that it was like tied to my identity and my brand.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  And I was like, now's not a good time, but let's talk soon, dude. And, uh, and then I just like hung up and texted him like, love the energy, but like, you know, not a good time. Like, let's talk later. And then we started texting and we realized that like,

• 1:55:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, I noticed because people, there were suddenly hundreds of comments replying to people, replying to our posts saying, LVMH is here, like you can, you can buy it. And then, and then we were getting like a bunch of DMs from people saying, what's your Solana address? Anyways, uh, and luckily it blew over, but it was, there was like a million and a half dollars of volume traded, like almost within,

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, within, within like 30 minutes.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  And it just classically like went way up and then went way down. Um, and, and it was frustrating because like in that one hour, it was like, everyone was having dinner with family and like during that one hour, people were like, their silence is deafening. Like, like, like the only reason that they wouldn't be replying right now is if it was real. And it's like, okay, like I see what you guys are doing there.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And somebody commented, somebody commented, was like angry at us. And I had, I, I replied from the brand account and I was like, we have literally nothing to do with this.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  We were, we joke about LVMH all the time.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  It's very clear that like this is not, this is not tied to us at all. We didn't put out a post or whatever. Uh, so very, very frustrating. And, uh, stop launching shitcoins. It's low class and vulgar and, uh, we don't support it here. Take a company public.

• 1:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  It's much higher status.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  SPAC something.

• 1:56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. SPAC something. Um, yeah, please. Um, thank you. And, uh, so let's move on to a bucket poll, our first of the year, and the first of the show, but let's do a promoted post first.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I have, it is ski season. We've been talking about

• 1:57:10John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  Veil quite a bit this episode and our own travels. And so I have a fantastic car for ski season. A Safari Style 1986 Porsche 911 Carrera Coupe. And if you don't know about giving a Safari treatment to-

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  I think that's pronounced just coupe.

• 1:57:31Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  It's coupe?

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Coupe.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  That's like the proper-

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  Oh, this is like the Porsche of Porsche. I think coupe is right. Okay.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting. Okay. Usually you do the American pronunciation, but you've been in France too long. Okay. So break it down.

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  So anyways-

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Where can people get it?

• 1:57:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can pick this up on Bring a Trailer dot com. Great, great auction site. I've bought and purchased a 911 there before, sight unseen. No PPI.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Works well?

• 1:58:02Jordi Hays?

  Sent it, worked great. No issues with it. Got very lucky. Ended up making money when I sold it.

• 1:58:07John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 1:58:08Jordi Hays?

  It's great. But anyways, I love the Safari treatment on these things. They look incredible. And it gives you that extra ground clearance. You can go, you can take it up to the mountains. You've got extra headlights, more light.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:58:21Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, this just looks like a fantastic example.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, just zip you from SF to Tahoe and back.

• 1:58:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a perfect car to get to SF. You don't have to worry about superchargers. You don't have to worry about planning your routes. If you've got gasoline, you're good to go. And very, very reliable cars. You can put a lot of miles on them. So anyways, don't let this one, don't let this one get away.

• 1:58:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, let's, let's go to a bucket poll.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  This is interesting. Okay. Forty-seven likes by Anan Sanwal. He says, "With YouTube University at their disposal, Gen Z is going to be the most entrepreneurial generation ever. It's unreal how sophisticated many are in business, primarily due to YouTube and online communities, not school." Sent on Christmas at 6 a.m. Let's go.

• 1:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. Super valuable. I mean, I remember learning a ton on, on, what was that? OpenX, MITX, or EdX?

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  There was like this open courseware movement in like 2009, 2010, where all the top universities started like open sourcing their, or just putting their videos out.

• 1:59:34Jordi Hays?

  So cool.

• 1:59:35John Coogan?

  It was insane. So you just get to watch Andrew Ng, like the best machine learning researcher in the world, teach machine learning foundations, like ML101.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  And he breaks it down. It's great. And you can just sit there and watch it and you can be like much more

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Further proof that you're just paying for a luxury brand when you go to a college and you pay 70, 80K a year.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  It's true. But also just like, like even though the colleges do follow like a bit of a power law where like Stanford, Harvard, MIT are going to be like the best, like there are, even within the schools, like extra power law people, like, like Andrew Ng, for example, has had like a remarkable result. And Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, they're both like these incredible AI researchers.

• 2:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  There's no one like that necessarily at, you know, a different college, even if it's a great school.

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  But if you want an incredible economics education, you're going to want to go to University of Chicago.

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Or if you want, you know, great economics and law, like business, go to Harvard.

• 2:00:33Jordi Hays?

  If you want the best surf conditions year round, you go to UC Santa Barbara.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Which is how I selected my school.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  From a very young age. When I was 12, I went, visited. I said, this, the surf conditions here are phenomenal.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  I need to go here.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  I mean, I remember I, I walked into like Econ 101 and our book was by N. Gregory Mankew. And he taught the course over at Harvard. So oftentimes I'd just go over there and just go to his class. Cause I'd just be like, I, why do I, why am I not just going to the source instead of being this like second tier professor? Like teach it. I could just go over there.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Did you?

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Huge conference. Like no one cares.

• 2:01:05Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I learned more, I learned more from podcasts than YouTube. Like even though YouTube was already, like for me, from, from a When I like joined the world of venture around like twenty two, after graduating college and like started kind of participating. I felt like I'd listened to probably thousands of hours of like venture related podcasts.

• 2:01:31John Coogan?

  Certainly to understand like how the business works for sure. For the hard skills, I feel like it's very easy to fall into. You're not going to pick those up from a podcast. You're also not going to pick them up from just like surfing like random YouTube videos because a lot of those are like kind of clickbaited or like like they're just meant to be too much entertainment. And like they're edutainment, but they're mostly entertainment. Um, but for like the high level stuff, but for a lot of like the programming skills I learned, it was, it was a book. And just like going through the book and like writing the code alongside of it. It's probably better now with more YouTube stuff. Like back then YouTube was pretty limited, but.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  Did you see the, there, there was this, over the last couple of weeks, there was a very viral incident where a woman dropped out of her PhD program. She, she. Apparently like teaches, like makes videos about AI ML on YouTube.

• 2:02:20John Coogan?

  Oh, I know.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Went and said she was dropping out of her PhD program to like just do OnlyFans.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  But the thing that I apparently she had already been doing that for a really long time. So she, she was going to continue to just make the same videos and still do OnlyFans. It wasn't like I'm quitting my PhD and then I'm doing OnlyFans.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, it's classic internet just like got blown out of.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Proportion and all this stuff.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Let's go to Will Neetsi. He says, if you're building a personal brand to help you grow a physical product brand, don't. And then Ross McKay says, plenty of examples of strong community founder led brands. Nick Baer at BPN, George Heaton at Represent 24/7, Chris Bumstead, Sebum. And I guess this is probably coming down to the question of like, like there's tons of examples of people who have big personal brands and then they launch a physical product brand. But if you're starting with the brand, then should you go and bootstrap your own personal brand?

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  No, here, here's the way I read the original post was. Don't go build like a, if you're building a consumer brand, don't like try to build this B to B like thought leadership brand of like. On X or LinkedIn, like, yes, you should be like a personality-led brand and like your customers should know who they're buying from and there's value there. But, but like the BPN guy doesn't, he's not like, here's how to build a business 101, right? Which is like, I feel like on X, it's easy for consumer founders to just start posting about the business of their business.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Versus like the product.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  The product. Being like, I'm selling, like, yeah, if I'm selling like a supplement, there's like a proof of body there. That's like, you should be looking good, basically.

• 2:04:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  It's interesting because I, it does go back to like, it's, it's really, really hard to build a, a consumer physical product brand without some sort of hero partnership or influencer.

• 2:04:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Look at The Ridge, look at The Ridge guys. Like, they just, it's, it's, you can absolutely, if you have a super compelling product, just buy, just buy these partnerships and really invest in them, right? Like Ridge really invested in their relationship with Theovant.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  And, and I'm curious to know.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  I have another example, a guy that I was in the Alps with. A year ago, he's running a like, really big, it'll be an amazing story one day, we'll talk about it. They raised a very small amount of money. They, they do, they'll, you know, over the next few years, they'll do hundreds of millions of revenue. And a year ago, he had never heard of Brian Johnson, had no clue who this guy was, and he was running this multi, doing a, running a supplement business with tens of millions of dollars of revenue. He is completely ignoring the entire industry and just focused on his business, focused on his customers. And so, it's totally possible to build, it, it is a distraction of like, when I, if I see some founder building a CPG brand,

• 2:05:24Jordi Hays?

  and they're like fixated on like posting a lot on X, I'm like, well, like, if you... The, the, the whole thing is like, if you're, if you're building an enterprise or B2B product and you can get in front of a thousand business owners, that can have a dramatic effect on your business. But if you're building a CPG business with selling a $20 product like Lucy, loose, like X doesn't move the needle for sales for Lucy. It doesn't matter how many bangers you have in a month.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. But doing a personality driven partnership with someone like Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports was critical. Joe Rogan. But that stuff happened like down the line. But I think it's like, at some point, you're going to need some sort of partnership or relationship with someone that does have a personal brand. And so that doesn't need to be you. That doesn't need to be the CEO, but it needs to be a part of it.

• 2:06:14Jordi Hays?

  Like with Rora, we, we've partnered with this guy, Eric Hinman, who you've probably seen on Instagram. And so like, we made sure he had a unit prior to launch.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Going back to Nike with Jordan, you know, it's like, yeah, Phil Knight wasn't the guy, but Jordan was. And so you, you need to be like, probably setting yourself up for, you know, who, who is going to be the human that drives the brand forward at some point. It's, it's, it's, it feels like it's more important than ever. I'm trying to think of counter examples like Mercedes. Do they have, I mean, Lewis Hamilton? Like there, there's like, every brand kind of has like someone, I feel like, no matter what it is. Maybe BMW doesn't. I don't know. It's tricky, but let's move on to liquidity.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Breaking, Kim Kardashian is no longer managing Sky Partners, the private equity firm she co-founded with former Carlyle partner Jay Simmons.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Very relevant.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  The least shocking news I've ever heard. Kim should have launched a consumer VC and YOLO'd checks alongside tier one funds.

• 2:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So very relevant to the last topic, which is that, uh, yes, businesses thrive when they're personality driven, but just being a personality by itself is not going to lead to outsized success. And yeah, private equity is one of those things where it's funny when guys in ventures are like, oh, I'm going to do, you know, hold co or roll ups because like, Private equity could not be more optimized as a category. Like, there's not like a lot of like low hanging fruit, right? This is like one of the most like established, highly optimized industries with a bunch of really, really, really smart people.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  I mean, it wasn't the eighties, but it's been forty years.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  The argument against like Kim K doing a PE fund and like being wildly successful there is like, if you're a billion dollar PE fund and you're buying a business, you could literally buy the business. And during that process, go to Kim Kardashian and say, hey, we want you to be like part, we want you to be the face of this. And like, we're going to give you like ten million dollars a year and like build that into the deal. She doesn't need to run the PE fund too. And so I think, I think we're, everybody's just realizing like how hard everything is to do well. Like, it's not easy. Like, private equity is like deceptively simple. It's like, okay, we just buy businesses for one price and sell them for more.

• 2:08:37John Coogan?

  Lever up.

• 2:08:38Jordi Hays?

  But you lever up. But a lot of the times when like a business is being sold, it's because the operators that are in place are like, we're not going to be able to grow this more, any more than we already have. Or like, we think we're at a local maximum. So like, now is the time that we're going to sell it.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:53Jordi Hays?

  And so if you go then buy that business, well, then you need, it's now your responsibility to like, continue growing it at a rapid rate or grow it faster.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  I guess what is odd is that it was a private equity firm with a Carlyle partner and separate LPs and like separate strategy, as opposed to just like the Kardashian hold co. Because I could see a world where, like, this is an example of like a private equity style deal, where Huberman and Andrew Wilkinson bought a brand and were able to take it to the next level. But it's like, it's within the Huberman like universe now, I think.

• 2:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  And I could see Kim where she has this, she has a whole like, kind of like, distribution of like ownership. There's like things that she started from scratch, built up, owns a ton of. There's things where somebody came to her and said, hey, we'll give you 10% equity. There's probably some companies that gave her 1% equity.

• 2:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Or half a point.

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  There's other companies that, that don't give any equity and just pay her to do ads, right?

• 2:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  And so she has this like curve, but for some of those opportunities where the value equation, the value that she's creating is not being captured. So it's like, yeah, she only has 1% of this company, but she's 10x their sales or something. It's like, that's an opportunity to buy a product in that category, or buy a company in that category.

• 2:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, they have, they have, um, it's called Lemmy now, that the Kardashians, like a supplement brand that I think is one of the best selling brands and like Target and stuff like that. And it's literally, they made a gummy version of every major supplement. So it's like, hey, you can just eat candy for all of your supplements.

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Um, smart.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Genius, genius. Let's do another promoted post, another bucket pull, and then we'll move on.

• 2:10:25Jordi Hays?

  We got a promoted post from, uh,

• 2:10:28John Coogan?

  Brother of the year.

• 2:10:29Jordi Hays?

  Brother of the year for 2024, first ever brother of the year. And she says, this is another thing I appreciate about Ramp. They treat you like an adult. No infantilizing games that force you to hustle for points or lounge access. Just give us back time and money and we'll decide how to spend them. We can buy our own seltzers and mixed nuts. And it's a quote tweet of Jack, uh, Jack Rains, friend of the pod. He said, airport lounges are insane because they appear to be one of the most legitimately dangerous credit card incentives with the potential to gigafry your personal finance habits for the sake of stacking points.

• 2:11:03John Coogan?

  Oh, it's so true, man.

• 2:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Such a, such a banger. The airport lounges are so lame. I, I walk into,

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Just get to the airport later.

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  So when I have to fly commercial, I just had to fly commercial. I walk, I go into LAX. I know the one place that sells Evian water in glass bottles. I walk in, if it was an international flight, I buy like six or seven because I don't want to drink the plastic bottle of water on the flight. So I buy six or seven bottles of Evian and then I go sit at the gate and then I get on the flight.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:11:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't care about, like, if you're getting to the airport so early that you have to use a lounge, you fucked up your whole travel plan.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  Also, if you think about it, how many flights did you take last year? If you didn't miss a single flight, you're getting to the airport too early.

• 2:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  You have to, you have to miss at least one.

• 2:11:50Jordi Hays?

  The only thing that, uh, that, that, that's sort of, uh, ironic about this is if there was going to be an airport lounge that was amazing, it'd be a Ramp airport lounge. It'd be like you'd have like the history of like the greatest entrepreneurs on the wall, Power, Ben, etc. It would just be like various places you could scoop. It'd be a library. You could scoop protein powder, like you could get like protein powder. There'd be like, yeah, weights. It'd be Ramp Lounge.

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  Get a deadlift and read.

• 2:12:17Jordi Hays?

  So, so Ramp, don't make us play silly games to get access to the lounge, but do a lounge at some point.

• 2:12:23John Coogan?

  Do a lounge, yeah. It's great. Okay, a bucket poll. What do we got? What do we got? Let's see. Okay. Uh, let's do this one. Okay. Oh, Signal. Oh, we're on credit cards again. We're getting lucky here. Signal says 2025 credit cards, Amex Platinum for travel and lounges. US Bank 4% cash back for everything else. Is there a better or more simple combo? And you got 10K likes. This is one of those things, so with credit cards, I, I don't pay attention to them at all. I just let the points accrue for decades and then eventually I'm like, okay, so I should go spend these.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  And then like, once every few years, I run into a dude who's just like completely min-maxed it and become like super autistic about it. Has spreadsheets about like, this is technically the best credit card. And I'm just like, okay, just tell me what to get and I'll just get that and I copy it. But I like that he did my homework for me because this actually sounds pretty good. I might have to get this, uh, unless I just put my whole, uh, family on Ramp and just, uh, and just run the entire. I, I, I know an angel investor in Ramp who did that. He was like, I'm going to set up an LLC for my family just so I can put it on Ramp and have credit cards and do everything through Ramp. And, and they were like, yeah, it's not really the point. It's like a business credit card, but, uh, I really, really hope that at some point they launch a consumer card.

• 2:13:41John Coogan?

  Because it'd be so sick to do a new, new Centurion, just for CEO, basically. Like you have to be the CEO of a Ramp corporation to get it.

• 2:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  But, but what, what do you think? You have an Amex Platinum?

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  I do, uh.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  Traveling lounges, you just don't use the lounges?

• 2:13:56Jordi Hays?

  I just don't use the lounge. I mean, aren't the rewards like better?

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, but US Bank has 4% cash back on everything. That feels like a scam.

• 2:14:04Jordi Hays?

  That seems like a scam. If that was a crypto company, everybody would be like scam.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  Everyone would be like, oh yeah, you're definitely embezzling. Uh, US Bank is struggling, I guess, or something. I don't know. It's kind of a.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess. So here's the thing. I'm assuming they give you that crazy reward and you deposit money with them and they give you like nothing on the actual.

• 2:14:23John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:14:24Jordi Hays?

  They don't give you any APY on the balance. So it's just like.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:27Jordi Hays?

  But if you, I'm sure if you just set up the card and you keep cash elsewhere, but then they probably also have some rule, like you have to have a minimum, you know? Who knows? I, I, I just like try to, um, every year, instead of like optimizing credit cards, I just like try to hit a hundred X investment every single year.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:45Jordi Hays?

  And then it, you know, pays for itself.

• 2:14:48John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Grimes. She says insane to demean horse girls. Could not agree more.

• 2:14:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  Single-handedly keeping the dream of the Mongol horde alive. I love this. We've been on this before.

• 2:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So we, we joke a lot about horses.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  But we're.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Unironically pro-horse.

• 2:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Equestrian enthusiasts.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, we're glad that tech journalists have such an obsession with horses. Like there's not a lot of, for a long time in tech, very few people were, were on the equestrian sort of wave. So.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  But, but also pro, uh, pro founders that got a lot of liquidity, starting to build a stable.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  It's a great way to engage with nature and deploy a lot of capital.

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  And there's still an element of risk reward, financial incentives. You can make money.

• 2:15:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  You can lose money. Uh, there's a lot of risk and, uh.

• 2:15:36Jordi Hays?

  No, and this year we're getting our own racehorse.

• 2:15:39John Coogan?

  And, and racehorses are, uh, completely resistant to artificial intelligence, not going anywhere. Um.

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, for a long time, the horse girl thing was, it was used as like a shorthand for autistic female. And, and it was used as like this demeaning thing, like, you know, train guy, guy who's obsessed with trains is autistic. Girl who's obsessed with horses is, and it was also just like trying to take a shot at like the upper class, essentially. It was like, oh, you grew up with horses, like you must be rich and like have nothing to say in this world. But if you talk to people that rode horses, like they're wonderful people.

• 2:16:13Jordi Hays?

  My son takes horseback riding lessons. My daughter will take horseback riding lessons. We're gonna have a horse named Brother that we're planning to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby. So, very pro horse. And you can be pro equestrian and still joke about the equestrian lifestyle, right? Like, we're pro tech, pro business. We joke about tech and business all the time.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  And also, I mean, if you're, if you're going fox hunting regularly, like you have to do that on a horse. So, there, you know, you really just gotta think, use the right tool for the job. Let's go to Andre Karpathy. He has a long post here about DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence company, making it look easy today with their OpenWeights release of a frontier-grade LLM tuned on a joke of a budget. 2048 GPUs for two months, $6 million. For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16,000 GPUs. The ones being brought up today are more around 100,000 GPUs, e.g. Llama 3.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  While DeepSeek's V3 looks to be a stronger model at only 2.8 million GPU hours, 100, 10x less compute or 11x less compute. If the model also passes vibe checks, e.g. LLM Arena rankings are ongoing. My few quick tests went well so far. It will be a highly impressive display of research and engineering under resource constraints.

• 2:17:35John Coogan?

  Does this matter to you? Don't you need large GPU clusters for frontier LLMs? No, but you have to ensure that you're not wasteful with what you have. And this looks like a nice demonstration that there's still a lot to get through with both data and algorithms. Very nice and detailed tech report, too, reading through. This is very interesting. Yeah, this kind of took over the internet over the. Over the break, but there was, I think there was like a lot of

• 2:17:59Jordi Hays?

  So, so the funny thing, they dropped it, didn't they dropped it on Christmas Day or something like that? Like they're trying to, they're trying to get in our heads.

• 2:18:07John Coogan?

  Get in our heads.

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't work, doesn't work. All the technology brothers were enjoying Christmas.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:13Jordi Hays?

  And they still had their mind thinking about business and technology.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:17Jordi Hays?

  And this little joke of dropping your, your fake stolen model on Christmas just doesn't, doesn't do anything. I did see what your, I, I, I wish that we had a post on it, but, um, but yeah, some, something about how like most,

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  I have one right here, actually.

• 2:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Like most advancements.

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, word grammar says, I genuinely don't know how to feel about China casually mugging every US lab, then dropping it for furry as open source. I simultaneously feel a deep sense of concern for our national security and a deep sense that Wag me and intelligence too cheap to meter is at hand. So, uh, kind of bullish, but also scared.

• 2:18:52Jordi Hays?

  But that's, that's not, didn't cover the fact that it seems like people have been figuring out that they just kind of like, were able to leverage, like OpenAI's models and then like

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:03Jordi Hays?

  leapfrog using it.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I talked to some guy who said that like, he ran the numbers on, for, for a while, when you got a response from GPT-4, it would also give you some, like, not the full weights of the model, but like a, a, a sampling of how that like response was calculated.

• 2:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  And if you got enough of those, you could kind of do the math backwards to create the model weights or, or estimate the model weights.

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  And get pretty close. And he was like, kind of running the numbers and he was like, yeah, so like to exfiltrate the model with this, with the, like you get the text responses and then you also get these like data.

• 2:19:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you basically just train your new model on.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  The actual API.

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  And it was like, for that was like less than a million dollars or something to like steal it. And I think they like patched that and cleaned it up or something, but it's still like very risky. And then there's also just the question of like, did they have a spy?

• 2:19:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  Very, very possible.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  I just don't trust anything that comes out of the Far East.

• 2:20:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  The wrong hemisphere.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I just don't.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to dystopian GF. She says, anyone with an IQ of 130 plus should be required by law to lift weights. Resentful nerds with no connection to the physical world will be the death of us. Twenty seven thousand likes. Addendum skipping leg day will result in fines and possible jail time if a repeated offense. Good post. It's funny, but yeah, I mean, obviously.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  The reason that we need these people to lift weights is we need, we want to invest in more people that are in the thousand pound club that are deeply intelligent and technical. So.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  Also with intelligence too cheap to meter and AI on AGI on the frontier, you need to be going golden retriever mode. You need to be golden retriever maxing, which means getting hot, getting friendly and getting dumb. Don't worry about learning anything more, pumping that IQ out with stimulants. Adderall's out. Deadlifts are in.

• 2:21:01Jordi Hays?

  Deadlifts are in. Yeah. It's getting diced is underpriced.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  I agree completely. It's, it's, it's never been more important to, to focus on physical fitness.

• 2:21:13Jordi Hays?

  It's not too late. Winter, winter's like halfway over almost feels, but it's, but it's not too late to enter like some sort of winter arc.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. And you know, this is the perfect time to start a three month bulk, which then can turn into a three month cut right for June 1st, summer season. You'll be on the beach. You'll have an extra 10 pounds of muscle on. You'll be.

• 2:21:35Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have some crazy TB meetups in Europe this summer.

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  You're gonna want to look diced.

• 2:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're gonna want to be diced.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  You're not gonna want to be hanging out at 20% body fat.

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  I just, I actually, I actually like, I, I don't know if anyone in our audience is not already moderately jacked. Like the on average, like they, they care about health a lot, but and, and this is the time of year that people are talking about New Year's resolutions and I want to get fit and all this stuff and just do it. It's not that hard. You, you have to go in, you can watch YouTube videos, you can download workout plans, you can download these apps for $5 a month. It'll tell you exactly what to do and just go in and do it. And it's, it's not free, but it's basically free. If you have any type of normal job and you're making. Even $5,000 a month, you can afford a gym membership and just get diced.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, sleep.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Your life, it's, it's one of the few things that if you just do it, your life will just get materially better.

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  So here, here, here's the algorithm for the best New Year's resolution possible. Sleep a bunch, you know, gotta get your eight hours in. Gram protein per body weight, per pound of body weight.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  Or one and a half.

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  High protein diet, exactly. And then hit the, hit the bench press. As soon as you're not sore, you're ready to work out again. So you can train bench press three times a week sometimes.

• 2:22:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Keep, keep bench pressing, get up to 245 on the bench, because then you bench press more than Brian Johnson.

• 2:23:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep. And then just comment that.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  Help marker that matters.

• 2:23:06Jordi Hays?

  And then anytime he does a long post, comment, didn't read, I bench more than you.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. That's the way. Do we have a promoted post?

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, one of our, one of our reply, reply guys is gonna take that to heart and honestly be good.

• 2:23:22John Coogan?

  I mean, Brian's a good friend and also just a good, he's a really good sport, so he'll just play along with it.

• 2:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll just play along with it.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  But it, it is truly the only help. Oh, oh, your free hemoglobin is 75%. I don't care. What's your bench? Is it still 240, Brian? Because unless you're a mass monster, I'm not listening.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm not listening. Yeah, that is the funny thing. It's, it's, it's, it's really quite something that he's gotten this big of, this much influence and this big of an audience in the health world without being a mass monster.

• 2:23:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Cause historically, that was the only way to break through.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:55Jordi Hays?

  It was the only way to break through. And, and, and he's realized the only way to make money in health. Sell supplements.

• 2:24:01John Coogan?

  Sell everything.

• 2:24:01Jordi Hays?

  But if he's big today, if he just doubled in size, he could be 10 times bigger.

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Traps eating his head.

• 2:24:08Jordi Hays?

  From an audience standpoint, he could be.

• 2:24:10John Coogan?

  Death star delts.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Death star delts.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  It'd be amazing.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from our friend Preston Holland. He says, another ex-friend started flying private. They bought a 6.25% share of a Phenom 300 with air share for 550K. Let's go. So.

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Perfect.

• 2:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Brothers, make your New Year's resolution to start flying private more. One of the ways you can do that is buying a part of a jet. If you want to do that, go reach out to Preston Holland. He is a fantastic guy. Got to hang out with him at David Center's last event and nobody better to help you break into the world of private aviation. Absolutely the man and an absolute dog in the skies.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Absolute dog. Let's do a bucket pull. Who we got here?

• 2:24:58Jordi Hays?

  It's still picking through with the ice cube.

• 2:25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got it. Okay, here we go. Oh, this is funny. Mr. Overplayed, Mr. Overprayed says, "Being drunk is a choice. Just had around 17 shots. Everyone else stumbling and mumbling. I am laser sharp. I don't allow drunkenness into my body, ever. Self-control by the power of the Holy Spirit. I will be up at 4 a.m. May no demons have dominion over my body. Spirit greater than flesh." 100K likes.

• 2:25:31Jordi Hays?

  100K.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  I'm glad we pulled that out of the bucket. That's a great one. I mean, it's so funny. Being drunk is a choice. Also somewhat true.

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is. There's some real truth to it.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:42Jordi Hays?

  I, I, this last trip, so I, the only time I drank in Q4 was on Dom episodes. So I really don't drink.

• 2:25:51John Coogan?

  I really, I really think that there's this massive discourse about, oh, should you drink? It's carcinogenic. Huberman's on like the never drink. I think you should only drink Dom Perignon.

• 2:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  And nothing else.

• 2:26:01Jordi Hays?

  Only when you're celebrating.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  Yes. Yes. But you can celebrate constantly.

• 2:26:05Jordi Hays?

  But on this trip, I, I, whatever, I was having like drinks, I was having shots. I couldn't for the life of me get, get drunk and I didn't understand, I didn't understand why.

• 2:26:14John Coogan?

  Spirit over flesh.

• 2:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Spiritually, I just didn't want to be drunk. I didn't want to lose control. I didn't want to be, I didn't want to be like, oh, I just, I enjoy being locked in.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:26:24Jordi Hays?

  And so no amount of shots is going to disrupt that.

• 2:26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's a skill issue.

• 2:26:29John Coogan?

  It is a skill issue. That's great. This was an interesting story over the break. Drew Fallon says, accounting firm Bench has gone out of business after 13 years. They raised $113 million. They did a $5 million seed in 2014, then a $13 million Series A, 16 million Series B, 18 million B1, 60 million Series C. In 2021, their enterprise value was 232 million, and in 2024, zero, and they closed. And people were really upset because it closed, like, very unexpectedly. And so it's an accounting firm, contract accounting firm for startups, and so companies would use them as outsourced accounting.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  And people were kind of getting ready for year-end close, and then they just get a notification, hey, like, your accountant just quit.

• 2:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, I used to be, I was a Bench customer for a while for the company I started in college, and eventually just switched to regular CPA, just because it's, I don't think, I don't think, for some, like, eventually, software will get so good that it does make sense to, like, rely primarily on, like, some type of, like, AI agent software provider for this kind of thing. But, yeah, so I think people really dug into it, and apparently, they had taken on, like, a bunch of venture debt, which can, like, basically, like, one-shot your company if you don't execute perfectly. But the real, the interesting thing here, we need to do a deep dive on the guy that bought this company,

• 2:27:59Jordi Hays?

  because he's, like, buying a lot of companies. He has, like, I think it's employer.com.

• 2:28:03John Coogan?

  Yep. So there was also a post, this caused a lot of drama, because Ian Crosby, I think, was the founder, and he said, "I'm very sad today to see that Bench has shut down. I've avoided speaking publicly about Bench since just over three years ago, when I was fired from the company I co-founded. I still don't have a lot of appetite to talk about it, to be honest, but I think at least a short statement is appropriate." And he goes on to explain how he grew the business and then was pushed out. And so a lot of people were very upset. They said, "Name names. Let us know who is on the board. You should never take money from these people again." And it's interesting, like, that is true that they ran it in the ground. But there are always two sides to those stories.

• 2:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, what I like about this founder and what he did is he got whatever, very tragically booted out of the company. Misalignment of like how he wanted to run it versus the board did. But he goes and starts like some other accounting related business with all the experience that he had. Then has a nice exit to Mercury and now he works.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  Wait, really? He, in that time, he started and sold another company?

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Started and had a successful exit. Now he runs their like accounting product at Mercury. So he's, he's had a good story.

• 2:29:14John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, it'd be cool, maybe he'll get back involved with Bench now that this new owner.

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, maybe they bring him back in or something.

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Redemption arc, so.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  That was cool.

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, um, always a stupid move to kick out the founder.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've never, but, but, but also the, the venture debt thing, I don't, uh.

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  Why does a services business need venture debt exactly?

• 2:29:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't understand. We gotta have, we, there.

• 2:29:38John Coogan?

  It's not like they've worked capital.

• 2:29:39Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's somebody just announced a new venture debt fund that was like Tealback or whoever saw it. We should have that person on the show and talk about why the fuck should anyone ever do venture debt? Cause you never, you never hear, it just seems like it's like unnecessary baggage.

• 2:29:55John Coogan?

  I mean, there, there are a few reasons that you want debt generally. And what I, I think about venture debt as just.

• 2:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but for the right, but not for a cash based services business.

• 2:30:07John Coogan?

  So, I mean, the way I think about like funding a business generally is like you have different line items, expenses. And there are different funding instruments for each of them. And so for your CapEx, your R and D, the really, really long time horizon, we are writing software that will get us recurring revenue that pays out over a decade. Like think about Ramp signing a big customer. It's like, that money is going to come in for years and years and years. How do you finance that? Venture capital. Absolutely. Like that, that is the textbook case of venture capital. You see the same thing in drug development and biotech. Like, why is there so much equity going into these companies? Well, it's because it's extremely high risk, right? Versus if you're a manufacturing company and you need to CapEx a bunch of plant property, equipment, PPE.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  You, that's the perfect use for debt, but you don't think about it as venture debt because it's asset backed. Loans for your machinery. And so you buy a million dollars machinery, you depreciate it over a decade, and you're paying that down at the same time that you're that you're making money from that machine. You're perfectly matched to the debt and hopefully it matches up really well so that you have a million dollar machine. It makes us a million dollars in revenue. We take home 300K in EBITDA and we pay our debts or whatever. You know, but there's this, but there's this middle ground for is your working capital growing? And so when I think about a company like Ridge, they could have a revolving debt line. It grows as they, because they make the product and then they have to wait to sell it. And it takes them a while to actually get the money.

• 2:31:36Jordi Hays?

  They actually do some really cool stuffs with stuff with their manufacturer where they, from what I know, they'll basically say, hey, we'll give you, we'll pay you 10% more.

• 2:31:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:47Jordi Hays?

  But we need 180 day terms.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're essentially getting seller financing.

• 2:31:52Jordi Hays?

  So I understand it for, I understand it for these businesses that that basically have these bigger working capital requirements, but but adding debt onto a business like Bench where you're just kind of like, okay, give us money, we'll give you the service, give us money, we'll give you the service.

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:09Jordi Hays?

  It just seems like.

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  It doesn't immediately make sense for that type of business.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  Seems very rough. Anyway, let's go to Nat Friedman. This was a huge story.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  He said, we did it. We tested 300 Bay Area foods. It's funny that we said 40,000. I, when we were joking about this, we said we tested 40,000 foods because I was like, I would just want it to be higher than that.

• 2:32:31Jordi Hays?

  Posted that.

• 2:32:32John Coogan?

  We didn't post that?

• 2:32:33Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 2:32:33John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. We got to post that. But anyway, oh, did we not? Okay. Anyway, we did it. We tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals. We found some interesting surprises. The top five findings in our test results, our tests found plastic chemicals in 86% of all foods with flower lights in. 73% of the tested products and bisphenols in 22%, it's everywhere. We detected flylights in most baby foods and prenatal vitamins. Hot foods which spends 45 minutes in takeout containers have 34% higher levels of plastic chemicals than the same dishes tested directly from the restaurant. The 1950s Army rations we tested contained surprisingly high levels of plastic chemicals.

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  Almost every single one of the foods we tested are both within, are within both US FDA and EU EFSA regulations. Check out our full results below.

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  And they put up plasticlist.com. There were a bunch of

• 2:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Dot org.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  Notes or dot org, a bunch of other notes about this. One boba tea equals 1.2 years of safe BPA consumption. There was a whole food steak that was surprisingly high in PFAS.

• 2:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so two

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  Microplastics.

• 2:33:45Jordi Hays?

  Two notes on this. So one, all this was done by Light Labs, which is Justin Mayer's brother's company. Lucky to be an investor in the company. And really smart what they did. They basically realized there was all these new regulations around testing like baby foods. There's these new requirements around testing. They came out and they, Nick and Justin had made, you know, a fortune in bone broth, had to do a bunch of testing. And so they had experienced a pain point themselves. So Nick starts Light Labs. And that the company's been doing phenomenally. In part because there's this, all this new interest around PFOS and microplastics and things like that.

• 2:34:30Jordi Hays?

  So second, I think the big takeaway from this is that legal does not mean safe. So the government has actual regulations around the levels of the amount of shit that can be in food. And that legal level is usually way above what is considered healthy, right? So in a perfect world, you have zero PFOS or microplastics that you're ingesting. But they're going to get into the food to some degree. And so I think that, that to me should, should be the most eye opening thing about this is you cannot rely on government regulations to figure out what's healthy, right?

• 2:35:12Jordi Hays?

  Cause the government will say like, oh yeah, like one out of every 100 molecules can be like effectively toxic and that's fine, right? Yeah, one out of a million, right? But, um, but, but, but still like the, the, the, these legal, legal levels are so much higher than safe.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I think there's, there's a few things that I take away from it. One is like, it is everywhere. Somebody even asked Nat, like, hey, how are you changing your lifestyle based on these findings? And he was like, I'm not changing anything because like, it's just everywhere. I'm screwed.

• 2:35:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, if you can, if you're buying the healthiest, most expensive steak and it still has.

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  Everything has plastic in it. So it sort of exposes this need for like some sort of more systemic approach to like, okay, let's find out where the biggest sources of contamination are, like up the chain. Like someone with the steak thing was, was identifying the fact that, uh, the, the hay bales that the cows eat were wrapped in plastic. And so when those get cut, like it sits in the sun, but also when it gets cut, like literally there's just chunks of plastic the cows are accidentally eating. And so they're just literally eating plastic. Um, and so it's like, the, yeah, you can do a little, it, it's the same thing with like, oh, like cure the environment by like driving an electric car. When it's like, okay, actually maybe just like moving to nuclear and solar at the source point is like what we need to do. And that's has a much bigger impact.

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  Probably the same thing here where like, there's a little bit that you can do with being like, okay, I'm going to eat this burger instead of that burger. And I'm going to make a consumer choice, but like those consumer driven changes are always much harder than just like figuring out where this, where the actually biggest power law like effect is.

• 2:36:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think the right response is you see this report and you're like, I want to avoid PFOS and microplastics. Do stuff like look at how you, if you make coffee at home and you use one of those drip coffee machine makers with the things that pull out. And you realize it's just like heating.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  Heating plastic, right?

• 2:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Heating really hot water in plastic. It's like, cut that out.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to be having that every single day, having your little microplastic coffee.

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Every single morning for your entire life.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  Just find the really obvious stuff and get rid of that. And then also there's a bunch of things that you can do, like that are downstream, like, uh, bodybuilders have really low levels because they, they don't, they donate plasma and blood a lot. And so if you're donating blood, like you're cleaning yourself out.

• 2:37:26Jordi Hays?

  That's like the Lindy bloodletting thing.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, bloodletting, exactly.

• 2:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Or, or I'm seeing, you know, throw, uh, if you're busy, you don't have time to get blood, throw some leeches on your back before you put on your suit.

• 2:37:43John Coogan?

  It is a little bit of like a skill issue here, I think, like, uh, like it's not very Lindy to be deathly terrified of microplastics. Like at some point you do just need to man up and be like, yeah, I'm being poisoned, but it doesn't fucking matter because I'm a man. Um, but, uh, I, I do love this because it's like a phenomenal use of, of Nat's money. And it's like we, there's another post I'm sure in here about like a guy who made a lot of money and didn't really know what to do with it. And it's like Nat has found a great vector for, you know, like just going and doing a really impactful project that's off his own balance sheet and he has no idea how it's going to make money. I don't think he wants to run it forever, but he's doing something that has like a really cool impact. And so if you do wind up with, uh, generational wealth, like

• 2:38:26John Coogan?

  instead of just go and do a cool project like this. It's so, it's so cool.

• 2:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cause he spent half a million dollars.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:33Jordi Hays?

  Millions of people can benefit from it. It might create systemic change in the industry. And he drove it himself. If everything is, if everything is toxic, it actually means that you need to focus on detoxification. Like sauna is the obvious one. Uh, sauna a few times a week, figure out how to do it. You can, it, it is the number one way to detoxify, like broadly.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  I just thought it was a good place to read the Wall Street Journal.

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. It is a good place to read the Wall Street Journal. Um, but yeah, that's like the, the best thing that you can do is okay, I'm, I'm constantly inundated with toxins. So I'm just going to sauna.

• 2:39:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Five days a week, figure out how to do it. You know, don't have to buy a sauna in order to do it. Go to the gym or whatever.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  Uh, do we have another promoted post?

• 2:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Again, it's ski season, so you know that we have to promote the Lamborghini Cerato.

• 2:39:23John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:39:25Jordi Hays?

  This is the alpha spec, the Sabia Desertum. Uh, and they're practically giving this thing away. This thing that they're listing this on DuPont registry at 409. Thousand dollars. What a great spec.

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  I mean, one of the last, you know, this is the last model run of the Huracan V10. And so now the Lamborghini split. There's the V12, Revolto, and there's the Temerario, which is V8.

• 2:39:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  And so if you want a V10, this is the one to get. It's the, it's the final year.

• 2:39:55Jordi Hays?

  And it's such a, it's such an economical purchase because you don't, it comes with the roof racks. So you don't have to go and buy these aftermarket roof racks.

• 2:40:03John Coogan?

  You're kidding, but I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if that car holds a lot of value.

• 2:40:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I think so.

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  I think they're, I think they're.

• 2:40:09Jordi Hays?

  But a car like this.

• 2:40:10John Coogan?

  They're so cool.

• 2:40:11Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's my advice for all the brothers out there. Buy two.

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:16Jordi Hays?

  Garage queen, one.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Daily drive the other. Make it your little weekender.

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  This is legitimately the perfect car to take up to Squaw Valley. I'm still gonna call it Squaw, cause DEI's over. Do you know the whole?

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  I, I talked to somebody who was on, uh, it was skiing this weekend and they were like, uh, oh yeah, my, my, uh, my ski instructor was like a huge like asshole and just wouldn't shut up about like how I can't call it Squaw anymore.

• 2:40:41Jordi Hays?

  And like. Ski instructor, really?

• 2:40:43John Coogan?

  Ski instructor was like, was like wasting like 20 minutes and, and they were like, I just want to get it back on the slopes. Like, can we just do a run? And I was like, you gotta just troll this guy and be like, yeah, can we hurry it up? Like the Redskins game's almost on.

• 2:40:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I grew up skiing at Squaw. I will die.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  What do they call it now?

• 2:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Still, Palisades.

• 2:41:02John Coogan?

  Okay, Palisades.

• 2:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Not a bad name, but.

• 2:41:04John Coogan?

  Palisades is a good name, actually.

• 2:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Squaws, Squaw. Squaw is such a bad name.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  Offensive, is it? Like what?

• 2:41:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it, I think it meant like, I think it literally meant like.

• 2:41:14John Coogan?

  It was a slur? It's just like the N-word for?

• 2:41:16Jordi Hays?

  It was a, I think it, I think it was like Native American phrasing for like a whore.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. So it is a slur.

• 2:41:25John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. Well, yeah, we need to retire that one. Who knows?

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:29John Coogan?

  Anyway, highly recommend picking up a Lamborghini Strato. Uh, if you do, you can head over to.

• 2:41:36Jordi Hays?

  Oxford.

• 2:41:36John Coogan?

  Tell them the technology brothers sent you.

• 2:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Oxford dictionary says it means a North American Indian woman or wife, so.

• 2:41:43John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's just.

• 2:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Um, not so bad.

• 2:41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, not too bad. I like that. It's great. Should we go to a bucket poll? What do we got here? Uh, this one, it's on the old paper. Oh, there's some deep ones in here. Let's see.

• 2:41:58John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, here we go. We got, oh, this is good. This is good. Uh, from Captain Nemo. Friend of the show.

• 2:42:10John Coogan?

  He, he is, he is. I hung out with this guy a bunch. I love him.

• 2:42:13Jordi Hays?

  Captain Nemo?

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  He says, uh, convinced some ultra nice hotels, think Aman, Raffles, Hotel Bel Air, are actually intelligence operations run at a loss. Anytime I've looked into who owns them, they're backed by Russian, Middle Eastern, or Chinese money that's closely tied to foreign governments, plus the hotels self-select for powerful or ultra wealthy clientele likely to divulge useful info that could be recorded. Relatedly, the Aman global, the Aman's global director of security was recently arrested for funneling money to a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

• 2:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but you know that, you know that Rose, Rosewood?

• 2:42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:51Jordi Hays?

  Rosewood is, has some real history here.

• 2:42:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:42:54Jordi Hays?

  It's Chinese owned.

• 2:42:55John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:42:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, strategically placed in, in

• 2:42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, Silicon Valley.

• 2:42:59Jordi Hays?

  Power centers around the world. And yeah, I wouldn't stay at the Rosewood.

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Period.

• 2:43:03John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  They would steal all our podcasting secrets.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 2:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay, the secret to podcasting is record every single day.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Jordi Hays?

  Create a platform for your absolute boys.

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:14Jordi Hays?

  And then they would, they would clone us.

• 2:43:15John Coogan?

  I, I disagree with this. I think that, I think that if these are indeed intelligence operations, we need to be staying there constantly because once a foreign oligarch hears our takes, they will become American capitalists.

• 2:43:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  They will be convinced.

• 2:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:31John Coogan?

  And so I could just imagine Putin

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  They'll see us playing with our mod retro.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  They'll be like, oh my God, this is amazing. I gotta stop what I'm doing. We gotta, we gotta get an ally ship going with these guys. It's a real, like, I can change your situation.

• 2:43:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:43:46John Coogan?

  So I, I, I, maybe they are intelligence operations. I don't care. I'm still staying there.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  They're intelligent operations. I'll tell you that, John. I love spending money at Aman.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  It's very intelligent to spend, to operate out of an Aman 365 days of the year. Yeah. I don't know. This seems like, uh, I give this, I give this, uh, three tinfoil hats out of 10.

• 2:44:06Jordi Hays?

  Three? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  It, it, it

• 2:44:09Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I, I did, I did look through that thread and see like the whole story of the Aman guys. It is, seems pretty, but, but Aman is widely known. Lots of Russians stay at Aman. I think it is owned by a Russian oligarch. So it's not a That much is fact, I believe, so.

• 2:44:29John Coogan?

  Didn't you know they have grocery stores in Russia?

• 2:44:32Jordi Hays?

  In Russia?

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  The Tucker thing, Tucker right over there. And he was like, like, check it out. Like, it's not a third world country. I love that one.

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  So funny. Um, I don't know. Don't, just don't waste any time at, you know, four star hotels.

• 2:44:52Jordi Hays?

  That's the takeaway.

• 2:44:53John Coogan?

  This is fun. This was fairly recent. Uh, it's a video of Lil B knighting Neo the robot at the One X office. And it's a.

• 2:45:03Jordi Hays?

  That's the most bullish thing I've seen on Figure so far.

• 2:45:06John Coogan?

  It is very, this is not, this is not Figure. This is a different company.

• 2:45:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's One X. It's One X.

• 2:45:10John Coogan?

  Different company.

• 2:45:10Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense because I was like, Figure, they culturally don't seem like they would understand the bass god.

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  No, no, no. They're very buttoned up, very like, we're doing partnerships with BMW. We have a campus. We're very like the.

• 2:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, One X is getting knighted by the bass god.

• 2:45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, One X is doing videos with J- Jason Carman and like, you know, doing fun stuff.

• 2:45:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, Timothy Chalamet was knighted by.

• 2:45:29John Coogan?

  It's a quote of that one. Yeah. And so I think that's where they got the idea because, uh, Timothy Chalamet got knighted by Lil B, the bass god, who has some, I mean, based is a word because of Lil B. You know that, right? He has some amazing quotes, uh, extremely like online internet person. There's this hilarious quote.

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  The first internet rapper in many ways.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. She's like, shout out to everyone on the internet. Our backs are hurting. Our eyes are hurting, but we keep posting. It's like, and he said this in like 2006. There's a, it's a wild clip. Like, he's just the man. Um, and, uh, yeah, very, uh, one of those rappers that's like, you know, transcended into like this bizarre avant garde artist world where he's been an influence for a lot of people. So it's, uh, it's awesome and hilarious that they got Lil B to come out and meet the robot. And they've done a couple of other weird things where I think they. Put a Neo with like Kaisa Not or something?

• 2:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they, yeah.

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  I show speed or something like that.

• 2:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, you gotta, if I'm going along, if I'm gonna go along a humanoid robot company.

• 2:46:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:32Jordi Hays?

  They actually are doing all the right things.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like Tesla's like the de facto winner. If you're just like normie thinking about who's gonna win and then figures running this very like corporate partnership like, you know, oh, what's the pure play asset? Almost like, how would a financial manager see building a portfolio around the future?

• 2:46:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  Well, they need robotics play and Tesla's too highly valued and you're not getting a pure play. So you go for a figure and then one X is like, we're just kids building this stuff.

• 2:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:01John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:47:01Jordi Hays?

  We're having fun on the internet.

• 2:47:03John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 2:47:05Jordi Hays?

  We should, uh, we should reach out to them and see if we could get a one X that, that could just sit here and be the third co-host.

• 2:47:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  This is, uh, yeah, here, here, here's the, here's the Kaisa Not one. Uh, this startup used Kaisa Not's streams to go insanely viral, but no one's, no one is paying attention to how this campaign was actually engineered. New playbook being executed before our eyes. They do streams with a Twitch streamer. Product is a core part of the content, not just a lame integration. The goal is to set up as many clippable moments with the product as possible. Pay Discord kids thirty cent CPM. Yes, you saw that right to farm TikTok clips from the streams. They're all competing to win the budget allocation as fast as possible. Fifty million views guaranteed at thirty cents CPM. So, yeah, very interesting. It, it's crazy because like, it's like, it's not a consumer, are you bored? Why are you playing Tetris?

• 2:47:58Jordi Hays?

  I just like the sound, I like the soundtrack.

• 2:48:02John Coogan?

  Um, that's great. Um, but yeah, I mean, uh, s- s- I, I mean, there's so many.

• 2:48:07Jordi Hays?

  That's a clippable moment for mod retro.

• 2:48:09John Coogan?

  There's so many, there's so many underrated pieces of this, like partnering with the Twitch streamer is, is very like new age. Like your whole career was like with the YouTube stuff.

• 2:48:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:20John Coogan?

  The Twitch streamers, it's like much harder to do integrations.

• 2:48:22Jordi Hays?

  I tried, I, it was always hard to do integrations on Twitch. I, I did, I would do a bunch of. I would do a bunch of stuff with Ridge back in the day, but I'd tell a Twitch streamer, okay, we're going to sponsor this entire month of content. And like every hour, bring it up.

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's weird.

• 2:48:39Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of weird. It doesn't, it's not, it's, it's not, it makes sense that the streamers have figured out this like tipping oriented model, which is extremely lucrative if you get it right. Because it's not a really good ad format.

• 2:48:52John Coogan?

  And so for one X, I mean, humanoid robot is like the most inherently viral product you could possibly be building right now. The question is just like.

• 2:49:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm, we're, I'm working with a portfolio company that I won't name yet, but we're going to be able to go, they're going to give it a gun.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to be able to go make some, some content.

• 2:49:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:13Jordi Hays?

  I wanna, I mean, I think, I think we should, yeah, yeah, I think we should.

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  And we're doing it.

• 2:49:19John Coogan?

  It's easy to predict it when you're built in the future.

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  You can predict the future if you're just doing it.

• 2:49:23Jordi Hays?

  VCs in the future, they're like, they make their like list of 10 predictions and then they just create the AI agents that do all of them. And they're like, wow, I went 10 for 10 this year.

• 2:49:33John Coogan?

  Like 2025 prediction, a tech podcaster will bench press 260 pounds.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  This is, this is funny and somewhat related to that mod retro. Sam Lessin says the most expensive computer per unit of compute in the world. And it's a TI 83 plus graphing calculator for 75 bucks.

• 2:49:56Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever program these?

• 2:49:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:49:58Jordi Hays?

  I, I had so much fun. Some of my best memories.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  That's where I learned basic, yeah.

• 2:50:02Jordi Hays?

  My dad was a, a high school math teacher and I had his class.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  So I would just sit programming games.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  Did you ever, did you ever have party? Do you remember this one?

• 2:50:11Jordi Hays?

  What, which one was that?

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  Maybe this was just in my high school, but basically someone created a text based game. Where it was like, choose your own adventure and had a couple of different paths, but it was about going to a party. So I, I remember this.

• 2:50:24Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love parties.

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  So it was like, it was like, you go to this high school party and it was like, what do you want to do? Like, do you want to drink? Do you want to flirt? And like, one of them was like, you could actually get laid. And then I, I remember the text would pop up and it would be like, you bask in the sweaty afterglow? Which was just like hilarious and this sweaty afterglow like sticks in my mind to this day and it's funny because like my, my high school was like very nerdy, both from like a computer science perspective, but also like really, really crazy with the English. And so clearly this kid who programmed this thing was, if it happened in my high school, I don't even know if it did, it might've just gone viral. But, um, clearly, uh, you know, he was like in, you know, in an English class and read some Shakespeare and heard Afterglow.

• 2:51:06John Coogan?

  It was like, I'm gonna put this in the game. But then you could go in and edit the program and you could change the name. So it was like, oh, you run into your boy Jordy there, whatever. It was like really fun. Um, and, and it all, it all required having this cable, the connector cable. And nobody had these by default because they wouldn't ship with them. Now I guess they do. And then you can have your game and you could pass it along. It was like the first example of like virality, basically. And there, there were a bunch of other games that you could like put in and you could also cheat and put note cards in there and stuff.

• 2:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Was there Snake? I'm trying to remember. You could, you could.

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  You could put Snake in there, Tetris a little bit.

• 2:51:40Jordi Hays?

  I just thought it was, I just thought it was the coolest thing that I could program my calculator that was supposed to be just for doing math computation and I could program it so I could play games.

• 2:51:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of those games are like a little bit too much to program as like a high schooler. But the little like, you know, you start out with just like the, if I press, you know, the, the, the number one key, it spits out some text. Like that's very easy to get into. And then you start leveling up and do an if statement with a couple of different things. And all of a sudden you've built like this text game. Uh, good times with the TI 83.

• 2:52:17Jordi Hays?

  After I, after I, uh, went through my programming, my TI 84 era, I would, uh, I would, I got into DDoSing my dad's website, which would host the homework on it. So I'd be running this like Windows machine in our house, like in the corner and like my room, just like DDoSing my dad's website. I always had these visions of like people like busting down the door, being like, is my.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  I mean, I I ran into something similar where my dad had a server where you could just like store files. It was basically like an FTP server, like precursor to Google Drive by like a lot like 10 years or something. So it was like, if you wanted to put something on the internet, you just upload a upload a file there. And and he'd use it for work and like little things like host a website on the server. And he just had a buddy that gave it to him and didn't charge him on like a on like a consumption basis. So it wasn't it wasn't like, oh, they use this much bandwidth, so we're going to charge you this much. It was just like pay monthly and I'll just let you have this server. And so I got access to it and I was really big in the Counter-Strike community. And so what I figured was like, the big thing in the Counter-Strike community at the time was like these like vibe reels, basically.

• 2:53:27John Coogan?

  This is like going back to my old editing days. Basically, what you do is you take like highlight reels, like from all the best Counter-Strike players. And you cut together like their greatest hits and then you export them, put them, put like some sick music over it. The biggest one was called Frag or Die. And it was like iconic. And so if you could get into one of those, it like canonized you as like one of the greatest players of all time. And so what I realized was that people needed video editing skills and I could do that. And then people also needed hosting. And so I was like, I'll edit this one if I can put myself in it. And they're like, yeah, it's fine. And so I wasn't as good, but I had like one or two good highlights.

• 2:54:05Jordi Hays?

  Get some bangers.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  And so I put myself in this thing. It's like Frag or Die 2 or some sequel to this thing. And and I and I hosted and then the link goes out on IRC. Do you remember Internet Relay Chat? This was like a precursor. It's what Slack is like copying, basically. These channels and then people post it. And it just starts going viral and people download this like massive video file. This is before YouTube. And and and it's like, and everyone's like, dude, like, thank you, bro. Like, you hooked it up, like, everyone got to see this video because of you, like, this is so tight. And I'm like, sick, I'm like a king in this community, like, this is amazing. Everyone's recognizing me for my Counter-Strike skills. And then like, you know, a week later, my dad comes and is just like, what the fuck did you do? But I I like this guy needs to charge me now.

• 2:54:49Jordi Hays?

  He was a crazy bill?

• 2:54:50John Coogan?

  I I don't know if he actually, I don't know if the bill actually passed through, but he was like, it's not unlimited anymore. I I am rate limited now because of you. But also like probably like somewhat proud because it's like you did something cool, hacker.

• 2:55:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, volume, volume.

• 2:55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I had a viral banger. You don't hate the player, hate the game.

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  But no longer. Now you just upload to TikTok. Kids have it easy.

• 2:55:14Jordi Hays?

  Too easy.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  Let's move on to time.

• 2:55:16Jordi Hays?

  One more promoted post. We got a promoted post by our friend Red Bull Futurist. He has created something called the Red Bull Micro Grant Fund. And they're actively deploying capital. It's very simple. If you're doing something cool, you post about it. And I think you just have to, it doesn't say here, but you just have to do hashtag

• 2:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Red Bull Fund and they will send you $4 to buy a Red Bull. Doesn't matter what you're doing. It's gotta be cool.

• 2:55:47John Coogan?

  Wait, that's what it is?

• 2:55:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  It's $4.

• 2:55:49Jordi Hays?

  It's $4.

• 2:55:50John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:55:50Jordi Hays?

  So they got micro grants. So if you're listening to this, go do something cool. And when you need a Red Bull, post about it.

• 2:55:58John Coogan?

  What is Justin Mar's again? It's like a thousand or a couple of grand?

• 2:56:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I think it's like two grand.

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  Two grand. So you got the TL fellowship with a hundred grand. Then you got Justin Mar's with two grand. You got this for $4.

• 2:56:12Jordi Hays?

  So next time you're in a pinch and you need a Red Bull, they will send you $4. Just make sure you're doing something cool. I don't want to see any non, non cool.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  No, you need to do something epic.

• 2:56:22Jordi Hays?

  You need to be doing something.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Hit a PR.

• 2:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Hit a PR in the gym.

• 2:56:25John Coogan?

  Push some sick code, build a demo, stay up all night, learn a new programming language.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  And this is the internet at its best.

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. That, that, that should be more viral.

• 2:56:33Jordi Hays?

  This is like us. We have like the, the TV Dom Fund.

• 2:56:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:37Jordi Hays?

  There's a couple, couple of brothers in the community.

• 2:56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:41Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, you know, if, if you're really in need, we'll, we'll drop you off a bottle of Dom.

• 2:56:46John Coogan?

  Okay, let's do one more bucket pull and then we'll close out with the, this banger and get out of here.

• 2:56:56Jordi Hays?

  Tonight.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  Too long.

• 2:57:00John Coogan?

  Uh, that one's kind of boring.

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  Let's see. I, I want something that's like, you know, fun and easy.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  It's not a straight raffle.

• 2:57:11John Coogan?

  No, we're going through it. Oh, this is a good one. I like this one. Signal. Great poster. Scarlett Johansson was perfectly positioned to be the definitive voice of AI. If she leaned in,

• 2:57:23John Coogan?

  she could have been the de facto interface for the future of human computer interaction. A living cultural artifact embedded in the tech itself. Truly an F tier career move and the magnitude of the missed opportunity will only grow as AI becomes more central to daily life. Imagine the royalties too. Insane fumble.

• 2:57:42Jordi Hays?

  I do. I remember when the whole thing went down. Altman posted her, couldn't help himself and then it all came out that.

• 2:57:52John Coogan?

  Who posted it? Was it Rude on his account? Who knows?

• 2:57:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:55John Coogan?

  Who knows? It would have been his ghostwriter that day.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, I do. I do think the signal seems right. Like what would be the downside? To Scarlett Johansson of have, of like having her voice? I'm trying to think about, I can see her just being post economic and not caring and being like, I don't want a lot of people using my.

• 2:58:16John Coogan?

  I mean, there, there is plausible downside where it's like you could get it to say something bad and it sounds like it's her and or, or, or, or, or it's just like, oh, people start using it to.

• 2:58:27Jordi Hays?

  Does she even do movies anymore though?

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, she's in the Marvel universe. So like they're constantly cranking out slop.

• 2:58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:35John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm sure they ran. Yeah, it's not like. Okay, well now you can generate her voice perfectly. Like maybe the next time that there's an animated movie, she doesn't get the deal. Like, of course, like that's not really going to pencil out because that licensing deal is going to be different than like, you're not just going to be able to use a cloned voice in a real Hollywood production, but there's always like the fear of that and like, okay, maybe the YouTube videos and like the.

• 2:58:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can already, if you want to clone her voice, you can do it. Well, clearly OpenAI did it.

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. But yeah, I, I, I agree with Signal here that like it would have been amazing to actually get it done, but it's not too late. Like she could still go in and say, hey, instead of this like lawsuit, why don't we work together? Um, but.

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder if that's still.

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Oh, it's totally possible, totally possible.

• 2:59:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no, I know. I meant like, I wonder if they've resolved the lawsuit.

• 2:59:24John Coogan?

  Settled it. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like when I heard the the her voice, I think it was a lot of people just pattern matching off the the tweet because I didn't actually think like, oh, this I'm talking to Scarlett Johansson. Like, I it did not seem that close. It seemed more like generic and like, like most of these LLM, most of these AI things, they they feel very like the average of everything.

• 2:59:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:45John Coogan?

  Every answer feels like the average of everything. And then the New York Times gets upset and says like, oh, it's exactly like us. It's like, well, it's kind of like the average of you and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and the Economist. Like, it's all blended together in this soup. And that's like what the math is doing. And so, I don't know. I I'd like to see her do it. I think it'd be a good good win for her. But let's finish with this banger of all time. One million views, fifty six K likes by Sukhag Slor. I don't know how to pronounce that, but.

• 3:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Five, over five percent like rate.

• 3:00:18John Coogan?

  At a million.

• 3:00:19Jordi Hays?

  At a million.

• 3:00:20John Coogan?

  But it makes sense because it's a great post. They say the amount of locking in about to be done in twenty twenty five will feed generations. And I couldn't agree more.

• 3:00:30Jordi Hays?

  That's that's the craziest part of the algorithm today.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Is you can just seemingly small accounts and just post something that seems like it should be like a good post. But a hundred likes, maybe.

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:42Jordi Hays?

  And you can run it up to.

• 3:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a real it's a real testament to like how popularized these like brain rot words are. Yeah. Lock in is like kind of a new term. Like, I think that really popped off like last year. It's like fairly new and like.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:58John Coogan?

  It's not like it's in the dictionary yet. And like, it's not been used in movies or anything, but it's been so popularized on the internet. It's just like, yeah, everyone gets it and everyone likes it.

• 3:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  But I agree. Twenty twenty five is gonna be a fantastic year. Lock in.

• 3:01:11Jordi Hays?

  The locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:01:17Jordi Hays?

  If you do it right.

• 3:01:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:19Jordi Hays?

  So do it.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 3:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Do it, brother.

• 3:01:21John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching.