Calm Down Markets, Trevor Milton Has A Plane to Sell You, Jay Leno Live in The Ultradome | Alex Niehaus, Alex Blania, Nate Rempe, Connor Sweeney, Jay Leno

(00:42) - Nearly $1M in Trading Cards Stolen (09:42) - Trevor Milton Returns to Aviation (24:59) - The Death of Common Courtesy (41:49) - Mercedes Unveils AMG GT SUV (48:58) - Alex Niehaus, co-founder of Helicon, discusses the company’s emergence from stealth with $16.5 million in funding and its mission to industrialize composite manufacturing. He explains how Helicon combines advanced software, robotics, and manufacturing to mass-produce lightweight, high-strength structures for defense, drones, vehicles, and other applications. (59:50) - Alex Blania discusses Tools for Humanity’s efforts to build proof-of-human systems that combat deepfakes, fraud, and AI impersonation. He highlights World for Zoom, a Cloudflare agent protocol that verifies agents are acting on behalf of real people, and lighter-weight phone verification alongside the company’s Orb technology. (01:08:06) - Nate Rempe discusses leading Omaha Steaks through its crucial holiday season, modernizing its marketing with social media and AI, and protecting its reputation through customer education. He also addresses record-low cattle supplies, younger consumers’ demand for authentic, high-protein products, and the company’s renewed focus on improving its core steak offerings. (01:26:43) - Connor Sweeney discusses Baba, the healthcare platform he founded and leads, which connects older adults and their families with nurses and social workers who coordinate care using AI-assisted tools. He announces a $40 million Series A and outlines Baba’s rapid growth, insurance partnerships, public AI benchmark, and plans to serve a 100,000-person waitlist. (01:36:15) - Beverly Hills Condo Buyers Become Lenders (01:45:09) - Anthropic's S1 (01:50:12) - Jay Leno, a veteran comedian, former Tonight Show host, and passionate car collector, discusses automobiles, comedy, show business, technology, and his enduring work ethic. He shares humorous stories while emphasizing humility, honest feedback, political balance, and the importance of continually practicing one’s craft. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:04John Coogan?

  October 20th, 2026. We are live from the TVP at Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  It is Tuesday, October 20th. Jordy, you gonna hit the gong again? You're warming up. I feel like I'm getting something out of you.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Continue, continue.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  I feel like I'm gonna get a gong hit any minute now. Uh, anyway, you want me to do the whole show here while you just hit the gong? Okay, I think, I think Jordy's on gong today. Uh, what is the top story today? Thievery at PSA. On October 13th, thieves broke into a FedEx truck outside of PSA's California headquarters. Wait, they were waiting outside of the headquarters? That's shooting fish in a barrel. That's crazy.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that seems pretty smart.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  That is smart.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Like, the, it's, it's actually similar to money.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  In the, in, in the sense of like how dense.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, go to the bank, go to the mint. They basically robbed the mint. So yeah, these are trading cards, extremely valuable. A lot of them are stolen.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  To some people.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  To the market, Jordy. Uh, to the market.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Some people find them extremely valuable.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  PSA, of course, grades the trading cards and, uh, the, a FedEx truck outside of the California headquarters, uh, was robbed and the thieves stole nearly $1 million of graded trading cards that were being shipped back to customers. Here are the facts. FedEx truck was parked right outside PSA's grading center where they actually rate the cards for their quality in Santa Ana before it was broken into. The driver left the truck unattended for 60 to 90 minutes and returned to find the truck.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing?

• 1:58John Coogan?

  This is kind of an own goal at this point.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  No, inside job.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Inside job. Okay, maybe get the tinfoil hat out.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Inside job.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  So, uh, the truck driver left the truck attended for 60 to 90 minutes and returned. Oh no, they broke into my truck. The lock was broken. Three pallets were stolen from the truck full of already graded cards. Two pallets had around 100 packages each in them, and the third pallet had 50 packages totaling 250 packages of cards stolen. The value of the first two pallets is estimated to be around $963,000.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  That's to some people.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  To some people.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Like Dylan, our president, he values trading cards.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Potentially higher than this. Uh, PSA is still figuring out the value of the third pallet. The one thing worked against the thieves is that every PSA graded card has a unique certification number, and PSA has deactivated the certification numbers of the stolen cards. So if you go try to sell the cards, they'll say, oh, that particular SKU has been stolen.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  They would say this card is worthless.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically. Uh, it probably won't stop the thieves from selling them on black markets. Who's buying black market trading cards? You gotta be real degenerate to get into that. You don't, because there's no value.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Some collectors would, would get some thrill off about this was, this card was in a heist, you know?

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. It still feels a little.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Naughty, naughty.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  I'm not, I'm not for buying stolen cards. Don't do it. Um, and it'll definitely make it, make it harder, uh, since some of the cards are one of ones and we'll have all eyes over them. Everyone's gonna be waiting for these particular cards. Uh, for the collectors that were affected, PSA says it's figuring out compensation based on the fair market value of the cards, but the payout is capped at the insurance limits the collectors chose at checkout. Uh, some of the effectors. Oh, whoa, so if you sent your cards into PSA, you got the insurance? I feel like.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  PSA's gotta, gotta.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  This happened.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  Eat this one.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, this happened like.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  Your driver was incompetent.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  No, no, it wasn't their driver. It was the FedEx driver.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you, you used a service.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  That was completely incompetent.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  So you think PSA is on the hook?

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  I think PSA should take it up with FedEx.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, you would think that PSA's insurance would cover it, but it's off the property.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  The box with the extra insurance. A lot, like, a lot of that stuff is, a lot of those, like, check the box for insurance things are basically scams.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of them feel like.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  I think consumers have been trained.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Totally with all the flight insurance that like never really pays out. There's like all these weird insurance products.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Again, I.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  This seems like a real insurance product, though. It seems like they, they, they, they designed this properly.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  I know, but they should ensure their job is to ship valuable trading cards.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Valuable.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  Around the world.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  In quotes.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Every, every shipment should be fully insured.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Well, one, one individual had a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe PSA just emailed me letting know that FedEx stole my 104 card submission, over 100,000 cards and, uh, just gone. Very, very rough. Other users speculate the real value of the stored, of the stolen cards are somewhere in the mid seven figures. They think they're worth more. Just one card, the C07 Roronoa, Roronoa Zorro, PSA 10. I can't pronounce this at all. Roronoa Zorro, PSA 10, pop 12. What are we doing here? What is this? Okay, this is a One Piece character. It's from anime. That was valued at $500,000.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  In quotes.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Some people are paying $500,000 for a One Piece trading card. Not Jordy, no. Uh, where's this tortuga? The FedEx heist is bigger than we think. Just one card in the truck is valued at 500,000. You can see it here. Let me know, Jordy, how much would you pay for this card? I just added it to the timeline. This is from 1999. It's a Zorro, first stage. Pulling it up. Zoom in, show Jordy. I want the fair market value from, uh, not PSA, but J L H. What you got? How much are you paying for this?

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, where do you even start?

• 6:21John Coogan?

  You start with a number. A dollar sign and then a number.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  I would rather have $1 than this trading card.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Okay, so 99 cents and you're buyer?

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't even care that I could go and sell it for 500. I'd, I'd lean on the dollar.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  You're, you're out of it? Okay. You have respect for the dollar. Anyway, uh.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  No, I just think I, I, I'm so fascinated, so fascinated by the hobby.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  I do not understand it.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Have you ever played trading card games, battle card games? We were talking.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, when I was, when I was a boy.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Like Magic or one of those?

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  No, probably like Pokemon.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Pokemon?

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  I never played Pokemon. I played Magic. Magic's fun. Like, that's a good game.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I bet you like playing that game.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah. Uh, I mean, it, it's fun because it's a, it's effectively a board game, but it's one on one. So it's like you can like have some real, real tension, real, and then you can play a tournament style where everyone plays against each other until you get the final, final person. But it's a lot of fun. I saw that in the chat. We're not reading that.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  Wyatt's going off in the chat. He is not a fan of that card. We're on the same page there.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, one of us. Ridiculous. Anyway.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  I just think like the, the places that you can buy silly, like the kinds of silly assets that you can buy, right? Like Angel investing in a friend's company, right? It's kind of silly sometimes.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Ends up being worthless sometimes. That's okay. But at least, at least it's a lottery ticket.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is a lottery ticket too.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  But, but in that case, you're supporting, you're supporting a friend, you're supporting capitalism.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  What about the friend? What if you're friends with the person that made that card? What if your founder, what if you're friends with the creator One Piece?

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Or, or that you could.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Or the illustrator.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Or that you could have get like a Porsche Mission S for roughly the same price.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  Maybe. We don't know. We don't know anything about that car. They really told us so little. I, I watched an interview with the CEO on Bloomberg and.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  I have my sources.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Confirmed flat eight? Cause they're not confirming it.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  I'll confirm it.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Could be anything.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm willing to confirm it.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Price? Somewhere between $200,000 and $5,000.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  The thing with the price is just gonna, look, don't get me started. Don't get me started on cars.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Oh, we're going to cars? Cause there's, uh, there's a new AMG from Mercedes.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Gabe would rather buy a Buzz Ball than one of those trading cards.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Buzz Ball. Well, if you're trying to design the next great trading card, do it in Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context. Uh, Darren Revell to close it out says, completely understand the fire PSA is under after the FedEx truck theft, but the biggest threats don't lie with PSA. They lie with inside jobs and third party character, carriers. The biggest threat of your cards going missing happens when you insure a package for 50K and leave the shipper. The simple name PSA or collectors in the address box is the threat. There must be a change and it must be today. PSA, uh, and a preferred carrier must work on the additional.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, all I'm saying is, if these cards are so valuable.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  Why aren't you using Brink's?

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna trust FedEx?

• 9:34John Coogan?

  They should be using Brink's. That's actually a good take. Um, yeah. Anyway, uh. In other interesting news, former Nicola CEO Trevor Milton is starting a private jet company. He was pardoned by Donald Trump last year after being convicted of fraud. Preston Hall, the private jet guy, has a take here. He says, "Tonight's Cyberjet will unveil their new light jet model, the SJ36, supposed to do New York to Los Angeles, nonstop in a light jet faster than any competitor." The CEO is Trevor Milton, formerly of Nicola, the electric truck startup. "I'll be there tonight, and he will make sure to get picked." Now, I was very confused about this.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  As you should be.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Because I was like, okay, he was pardoned a year ago. Even if he wasn't, even if the fraud allegations and conviction and pardon didn't happen.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  He's got a clean record.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  It just takes a decade to start a plane company, often two decades. It takes forever to get FAA approval.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Good news, John.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Because Cyberjet, I believe, has been FAA certified for quite a long time.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yes. The history is fascinating. So, he basically bought the remains of a private jet program that had already consumed more than $700 million in development spending, and that company had achieved FAA certification. So, Ed Swearingen, Swearingen, invents the airplane, this particular airplane, the Cyberjet, between 1986 and 1991. He was an experienced aviation engineer behind the Merlin and Metro turboprops, and he, his thesis was the same thesis that Trevor Milton is pitching today. An extremely fast private jet, small, initially

• 11:23John Coogan?

  called the SA30, with Gulfstream providing early backing. Gulfstream left in 1989 after like three or four years of development, and then they brought in investors from Taiwan to fund more, including the government funded the aircraft under the name Sino Swearingen. Engineers stretch the fuselage, redesign components, and spend years trying to certify.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Look at the lasers, John.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  It's very.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  If you are worried about buying a plane from Trevor Milton, don't be, because the lasers are out of this world.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  This is actually a very cool design. How are they doing those lasers in front of the plane? The background looks like a LED wall of some sort, but what's going on in front? Do they have like LED wires throughout the craft?

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Circus mode.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  This is a circus. Yeah, this is akin to the Tesla Roadster launch. Very, very entertaining. Very, I don't know, psychedelic.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  To me, the crazy, I mean, maybe talk about the history before.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  I talk about how I don't think Trevor Milton could hit water if he fell out of a boat.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, by 2008, cumulative spending reportedly exceeded $700 million, and the jet achieved FAA certification in October of 2005. And that feels like a long time ago, but in the world of private aviation, like there are plenty of 2005 Gulfstreams that are still flying around constantly. And so, planes typically have like a long life to them. I mean, you still fly in 747s, and those are like 60 years old at this point. So, the first customer airplane was delivered in 2006. Dubai investors acquired a controlling interest in 2008, renaming the company ME Vest Aerospace, but production never scaled.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  They only built about 10 aircraft across the program. Production ceased in 2009, and ME Vest filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Then, an aircraft supplying company, supplier, Metalcraft Technologies, they'd already manufactured the components for the SJ30. They, the ownership group acquired the bankrupt assets in 2011.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  This is just ridiculous.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  It is very over the top, but.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Continue.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  It's making me want one. It's pretty cool. We'll get into it. We'll get into how viable this is, how dangerous it is. So, Metalcraft had manufacturing expertise, tooling, and the aircraft's type certificate, but struggled to restart production despite years of promised upgrades. In 2019, an updated SJ30i test aircraft flew, but large-scale commercial delivery still didn't materialize. Then, an investor group led by Milton acquired Cyberjet in 2024, which feels pre-pardon. I don't remember when the, didn't the pardon happen in 2025? So, he was out there doing this deal before? That's pretty crazy. And

• 14:26John Coogan?

  his role as CEO became public in 2025. So, he began promoting the company as a broader aerospace platform with the SJ34, SJ36, in-house avionics, which is sort of a wild bet.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  This is the crazy thing.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  This is the craziest thing to me.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  That he wants to do the avionics.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  So, you could just go and say like, hey, we have this plane that's already FAA certified, and we're going to make them, and we're going to sell them.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  But instead, he's going for this sort of like autonomous.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  Vision.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  He's not going to use a Garmin cockpit or a Honeywell cockpit.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I gotta do it myself. And I could understand this a bit more if the whole angle was like, we're not here to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make, we're just going to make and sell a plane.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  But what's the difference? Why would anyone buy this?

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't, so the thing is like, if you're going to buy an aircraft.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  And you're going through that process, these are some of the most educated, discerning buyers, right? It is a massive purchase. Your life is dependent on the quality, reliability, all these things. And I would go out on a limb and say that every single person that is in the market to buy a mid-sized jet like this.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Will do a little research on the company. They might do a little research on the CEO and realize that.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  He was pardoned, so he did nothing wrong.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  You probably, yes, technically.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Due for a major comeback.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  He's so good.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  The comeback could have been like, yeah, we're going to use, we're going to use the technology that every other plane relies on.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  And it, the specs are pretty solid. Like, the performance seems good.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't seem obvious that you need to reinvent the cockpit, and while you're just trying to prove that anyone should fly in a vehicle that you create, right? You're famous for creating a vehicle that you, that you rolled downhill.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  So, what would be the strategy to just sell the first unit? Just go really cheap, like low margin?

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I just, I just don't see, I don't see it as a selling point of like, we were reinventing the cockpit.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I wonder like how the autonomous features can actually benchmark. Is the idea that at 14 million, you can buy this and fly it yourself, but then use the autopilot to go take a nap in the back or something like?

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just don't think, I just don't think, I don't think buyers, I don't think buyers in this category are even that worried about like, oh, I want to have one pilot versus two. Like, it's just not that material. It's not that material of a cost when you think about flying over the course of a year and doing hundreds of hours in the air.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  And so, I just think it's like a pretty rough, I think it's a rough, rough, rough pitch. And I just, again, I don't, I don't see why you would buy this product unless it was the only product in the category.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the same time, I do like the idea of buying something that's already been certified, something that has a lot of.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Glad it makes a good point. He is post-fall.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking for automation for IT, HR, and finance support, head over to Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Sell me this plane from.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Sell you this plane? I think the, I think the pitch is that it's, it's already been certified, so all the safety concerns, does it have a real engine? Like, they have a partnership with Williams, like it's a Williams engine, like it's going to be FAA certified. And so, you're basically, the reason you buy right now is because it's going to be a good value, because they have to get some planes delivered.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dan is making my point. He says, the quote, "Cost-conscious private jet flyer."

• 18:31John Coogan?

  You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. I don't know. I saw T-Pain buying a 2004 Gulfstream and saying, "It's the exact same plane as the brand new one. It's 90% cheaper, and the only difference is the USB ports are USB-A instead of USB-C." He's like, "It's the same thing." A lot of people don't care, because like the safety is the safety standard, and that's not really where the progression happens. The progression happens on like slight comfort details, slight, like how quiet it is, maybe the Wi-Fi. Like, you can see what they're advertising, heated and cooled seats, like that, that's so minor. I don't know.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Look, I'll tell you the most, one of the most bearish.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  Parts of this.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  What?

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Is that I think if this had potential, and if, and if Trevor wasn't all hat, no cattle, Andreessen would be backing up.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  New crazy.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Andreessen would be backing up the truck, right? They did Adam Newman.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Oh, true.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  They did Calhoun, right? These sort of like post-fall founders.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  That, that, that were, they, they all have their flaws, but in, in many ways, like their strengths are so overpowering.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  And I just don't see, I just can't see Andreessen.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Getting involved here for a bunch of reasons.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how, how long it'll be private, how capital consumptive it'll be, but.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  The only person that I want building an autonomous aircraft is the combined SpaceX Tesla entity.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  There's, that's who's going to make the flying car.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  That's who's going to make the flying, you know, a, a cheaper, you know, private aircraft.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they'll ever do the private aircraft, just because the market is, I mean, you know, depends on, on how much you could drop the cost, but.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. What did Milton do before? So, he's the, everyone knows him from Nicola. Let's see, he's a.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, LDS, he went on LDS mission to Brazil. Learned to speak Portuguese. That's bullish. You need to supply your private.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  You need to land in Lisbon.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Lisbon, yeah. After leaving college, he started an alarm sales company. He eventually exited the business and founded an alternative energy vehicle company called Dehybrid, which retrofitted commercial trucks with engines that could run on natural gas instead of diesel. Disputes with investors eventually led to the dissolution of Dehybrid, which Milton launched, which, after which Milton launched Dehybrid Systems in 2012. This company focused on natural gas storage systems for heavy-duty trucks. He would be printing if he'd stayed in the natural gas industry and was just doing data center stuff. So he sold that company to Worthington Industries. In 2015, he's founded Nicola Motor Company in

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Salt Lake, initially known as Blue Gen Tech, with an initial investment of $2 million from Worthington Industries. So, the company that acquired his first company backed the truck up for his second company, Nicola. They put $2 million in. And of course, like, putting $2 million into a new, you know, electric vehicle company is a totally reasonable bet. They obviously didn't know what would happen in the ensuing years, and they probably got out, because they think the company was public. Nicola introduced several prototype models, including the Nicola One, a hydrogen-electric semi-truck designed for long-haul transportation.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  In 2020, they SPAC'd and got to $12 billion of valuation. So yeah, that early Worthington investment was probably pretty good. By June 2020, the shares had more than doubled, and it was worth nearly $30 billion, briefly surpassing Ford. Wow, that is crazy. On September 10th of 2020, two days after Nicola established ties with General Motors, short seller Hindenburg Research released a report accusing Milton of making false statements and calling Nicola an intricate fraud. Following the report, Nicola's stock price fell. The SEC and DOJ launched investigations into securities fraud allegation involving Milton. On September

• 22:58John Coogan?

  20th, just 10 days later, Milton resigned from his position as executive chairman. As part of his exit package, he remained an unpaid consultant to Nicola until December, and was restricted from publicly commenting on Nicola without prior approval. Milton retained 91 million shares, valued at $3 billion. Then he goes, so he basically just did one company and then, and then went straight into Nicola. Interesting. Well, I don't know. If you see these flying around, my total victory for him. Certainly, you know, people love a comeback story. I do wonder what will happen.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  I think the company's up a creek without a paddle.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay. Well, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We gotta stay in the world of air travel for a little bit and head over to the Wall Street Journal opinion section, because Andy Kessler absolutely snapped.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  I think Trevor's out of the frying pan and into the fire.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Just one problem to another.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  I don't think this is a fire. I think this is just a boring jet sales business. He's gotta actually make them and sell them, but the plane's already approved.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  It's a zero.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  It's a zero, okay. We'll see, we'll see. I think the demand is really high for private aviation, and I think that it's not that unreasonable to revive another architecture, even if it's a little outdated. Sell it at a reasonable price while there's, you know, increased demand for the other planes that are going to be trading above market. I don't know. It's for adrenaline junkies.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's the pitch. Robert has a pitch.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Okay, I like it.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Private aviation for adrenaline junkies.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  The thrill of not having decades of operational excellence.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  And reliability.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Very rough. Well.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  In the skies.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Andy Kessler went off in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages over commercial air travel. We'll see what you agree or disagree with. Says, "Have some manners, people. We're too deep in the era of me, me, me to care about common decency and courtesy. Is politeness dead? Before takeoff on a recent flight, the woman next to me spoke with gusto on several phone calls. Annoying, though common, but then in the air for the next two hours, she loudly dictated text messages into her phone, including, 'Can we split it into four lots?'" And, "Don't forget to buy organic blueberries." Exclamation point. I put on

• 25:39John Coogan?

  noise-canceling earbuds. Didn't help. Then music. Still heard her. My normally potent stink-eye glares failed. Then I cranked Metallica's "The Unforgiven" to 11. I could still hear her. Argh. I often encounter the expression polite society. I'm still searching." Yes, I should have said something, but I was seething so much, it would have included many of George Carlin's seven words you can't say on television. And why should it be on me? I was taught to be polite, worry about others, hold doors, give up subway seats. I can't remember the last time someone held a door for me. Plane etiquette is long gone. Conversations with others.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  I actually didn't know what George Carlin's seven words you can't say on television.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  Can't say them on this livestream for sure.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  I'll say them.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Don't say them.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  That's fine.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  The George Carlin seven words you can't say is one of the all-time comedy bits. It's wild.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is, yeah, great, great guidance.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Deep cut, yeah.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  More, more, more podcasters should study.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree. Unless you're a comic, stay away from it. But dictating out loud when she could hear, when she could type is an irritating loophole. Dictating is on par with eating a smelly enchilada with a stench that lingers until somewhere over Nebraska. Sadly, airplanes are the new Greyhound buses. With apologies to Greyhound. People are often underdressed, unbathed, and over-served, and anyone who gave permission to go barefoot once the plane takes off, and who gave anyone permission to go barefoot once the plane takes off? With Starlink Wi-Fi and artificial intelligence needing instructions, is the

• 27:26John Coogan?

  endgame talking versus non-talking sections on planes like quiet cars on trains? How about common decency instead? What do you think? You want a quiet section on the plane? Like a train?

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  One of my recent public flights, a guy was, a guy was just, a guy was just watching, like, scrolling reels.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  That was me. I was next to you.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  With the sound on.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Nitro Circus reels.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were, you were over here.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  But this other guy was to my left, and he was just scrolling reels at full volume.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  If it's a good feed.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't paying that much attention.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  I like, I like a little spy scroll. I like a little secondhand scroll. Take a, take a trip down someone else's, someone else's algorithm.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  The experience, like, part of this is like the experience of being jammed with, with hundreds of people you don't know.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  In a little tube.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  And then spending hours.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  It's all cattle, no hat.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. And then spending, it's already so bad.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  That when these other little things happen.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  It's like, you know, how much worse could it be?

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andy continues. He says, "Being polite has been replaced by the incivility of narcissism. People who worry only about themselves. TikTok mode. Me, me, me. Influencers rule. Be seen has replaced do something useful for personal stature. In everyday encounters, most folks rarely ask questions and always steer things toward their own accomplishments. Yawn. I get stuck in these conversations all the time until a fake coughing attack is an excuse to send me searching for more liquids to wash away my disgust. Cities gave up on politeness years ago. I'm tired of phone-absorbed people who carelessly dart in front of me on sidewalks. Then there's the smell of skunk weed, or

• 29:11John Coogan?

  whatever the latest variant from dispensaries that's stinking up city streets and suburbs. Waiters are rude. Then want 22% default tips plus a 4% health charge. Then there's the cursing. I'm no saint, but have we all turned into Susie Green from Curb Your Enthusiasm?" And he does actually quote someone swearing, which I'm not going to say. But, he said, "Super Agent Ari Emanuel's new memoir, Roll the Calls, should have been titled, Rude, Crude, and Lewd, given all the redacted words I've noted in excerpts. Decorum at the top is sorely lacking. Too many loyalists are emulating Donald Trump. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant handwrote a note to Senator Elizabeth Warren. Not to be outdone, Commerce

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Secretary Howard Lutnick of Canada said, 'They suck,' as was asked of Senator Joe McCarthy. Have you no decency, sir? At long last, we're overloaded with hate and vitriol. Democrats versus Republicans, progressives versus MAGA, globalists versus America First, socialists versus anyone with half a brain who remembers the Soviet Union. How does this end? Society has changed. Our young generation is filled with Luigi Mangione lovers. Students cheer the murder and rape of Nova Festival concertgoers. Eleven jurors thought a woman murdered who murders her children should be let off, and too many people think this is normal. I'd like to see Miss Manners figure this one out. Elon Musk called it anthropic, misanthropic, and evil, yet now has a nearly $45 billion deal with anthropic for AI capacity. Maybe

• 30:39John Coogan?

  politeness is overrated, or maybe some people can get away with being rude. Be nice. I'm not pining for a return to the Victorian era, but politeness and decency should include respect, common interest, and nailing a spike in today's rampant narcissism. Many of my incoming emails are as courteous as a mule kick to the head. I'm used to it, but please don't dictate a response to this column on your next flight." Andy Kessler, absolutely going off.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, good news, John.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  A lot of these people that he's referencing, they have no manners.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  They love reading the Wall Street Journal opinion section.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  They'll be reading this article.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  They're gonna read this article.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  And they'll be reflecting.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  They'll be making changes in their lives. Like, it's very possible that the next flight that woman's on, where she's dictating into her phone and taking calls, in between dictation.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  She flips open, she reads this article, and she never does it again.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think we should make a physical button of the beep button, like this.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Instead of this, it's just the beep. Someone says something you don't like, you can beep it out. I think that's the way.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  That's the way.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Well, staying in the world of aviation, United CEO says it should cost more not to sit in the middle seat. Scott Kirby of United Airlines said it's expensive to fly airplanes and that airfares may have to rise further. So you get a discount.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  So this guy waits for Delta to get in an insane wifi crisis and just immediately is like, yep, we're raising prices.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  We're raising prices. Yeah. Scott Kirby wants to know, be known as someone who moves quickly after a disappointment. 10 years ago, he was let go from American Airlines after being passed over for the top job. He was furious, but after telling his wife, his next call was to a board member of United Airlines. He was hired at United in 2016 and named chief executive in 2020. His goal was to best his former employer, a true chip on the shoulder, chips in pockets story. For a long time, I said our goal is to be the best airline in the history of aviation. I think we've become the best, not at everything, but in totality, I think we're the best. He took over United during the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst crisis the airline had faced since 9/11. Things have largely turned around for

• 32:52John Coogan?

  the industry since then, and United's stock has risen more than 300% during Kirby's tenure. Pretty good. Well, things may be looking up for United. For many travelers, flying is miserable. Delays, lost luggage, chaotic boarding processes and cramped seats, and people talking, dictating next to you, as we heard from Andy Kessler. It's United's job and his to take the stress away, Mr. Kirby said. As a father of seven children, whoa, gong-worthy moment. Mr. Kirby often looks at air travel through a parent's eyes, investing in better wifi, having more movies and TV shows available, and developing a user-friendly app, he said, all help to reduce the stress of traveling, especially with

• 33:34John Coogan?

  children. Tyler, give me your airline movie tier list. You said that you have strong opinions about what movies are available on different airlines. Is that correct?

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Well, so I mean, a lot of them don't have screens at all. So I think honestly, like, I prefer the screen on the seat.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  You do?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  It's a better experience. It's more like plane-like. It just feels like you're on, otherwise I'm just like watching a movie on my phone.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  So that already puts a lot of them kind of at the bottom. I think Southwest really has screens.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  I feel like JetBlue was early to the TV and the headrest.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I completely forgot that we used to live in a world where there would just be the TV, like for a section.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Oh, with the hide, yeah. And everyone watches the same thing. Yeah, real sense of community. We don't know how to do that anymore. That was great.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you'd look over, again, this was the era where, you know, people had manners too. And you'd look over to the stranger to the left and the right.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  That was a crazy movie, right? Oh, yeah, we're watching The Fugitive or something.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  I've never experienced that. There was, there was one screen for the entire.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  How?

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  No, they would be, they were like in the, in the, in the back of the plane where, where I always wa, uh, there might've been like four screens. So you could think of like...

• 34:50John Coogan?

  So they'd be mounted into the ceiling?

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  You ever fly on a plane like this?

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  But there'd be, you probably did.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Never? Wow.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  I don't remember. Silver spoon.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Okay, but so for movies.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Really quickly, consolation prize, where they have the little grabber that holds your phone? How, how much of a consolation prize is that for you? You know what I'm talking about, right?

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Where there's no screen, but there's a hook that you can mount your phone into.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, obviously it's better than nothing, but it's still, I think, I like the screen. Although the screen sometimes is bad because hard to connect your headphones. But okay, so for, for actual movie selection, I think Delta is clearly S-tier. They're far and away the best. They have a bunch of like kind of art house, Criterion movies on there. They have a, they have a good selection.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Name one art house movie. Let's see. They, they have a lot of like old, they have some Ingmar Bergman movies on there. But name one movie.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Seven Seal. I believe that was on a...

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  That was good. That was good. Good test, good test. Many people would have.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  And then I would go, I think, United is behind. Yeah, probably B-tier.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  But they got Starling now, so you can watch anything.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  That's true. And then after that, it's kind of just toss-up. I don't know.

• 36:02John Coogan?

  Hmm, okay.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you think that United and American and Delta should experiment more with like certain devices to help you sleep? Like maybe straps on the back of the headrest to kind of like keep your head up, you know?

• 36:16John Coogan?

  I've seen some people do that.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Cause I've never, the whole pillow thing, the whole pillow thing around your neck never really worked for me. I'd still...

• 36:22John Coogan?

  You don't wear the collar?

• 36:23Jordi Hays?

  I'd slump forward, you know?

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  But if you had straps kind of holding your head back.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  Like, like you're training to be an F1 driver, like pulling your neck back, doing the neck workout?

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  You could effectively, you'd probably sleep.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  I did see an Instagram reel of a guy who tried to do an entire workout on a plane and he was doing like resistance.

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  Did he do a 5K?

• 36:42John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Oh, I've seen that. I've seen that. But I've also seen people that are just like, hold on to the seat real hard and like pull, and then that's your bicep workout, and then push down. That's your tricep workout. And you just do that for like 60 seconds at a time, and you're just exerting yourself. And he was like...

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  5K in the airplane lavatory.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Very funny, very funny. Do you think Delta flight attendants should be able to order passengers to close window shades on daytime flights?

• 37:11John Coogan?

  It's too bright in here for everyone. Even though you paid for the window seat, you probably paid extra.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  So if you sit in the window seat, you're the master.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  That's like the final freedom that you have on a plane, right? All your freedoms are taken away, but if you have the window seat, you've got a little bit of power left.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  But what if the person next to you is trying to...

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  And you should be just, right? You shouldn't, you should be, I think you should have manners.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Oh, so you're saying it's a responsibility. So you need to, you need to communicate with the person next to you.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it's more like if you're, you should plan your, like, you should be planning how much light you're letting in based on like time zones.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  How much, how much, how much research should you do on your, on your seatmate before you sit down? Like, because you could sit down and have a whole conversation about, you know, what's your level of sleepiness? What's your level of interest in my personal Instagram reel feed? Maybe they would delight you to watch me scroll reels. Maybe you want me to put on a movie. Cause sometimes people will put on a movie and it's too salacious next to you. And even though they're on their phone or they're on their screen, I'm like, nah, I don't want that there. I don't like that. But sometimes people pick a really good movie, not just a good movie that I want to watch, but a good movie that I want to glance at every once in a while, you know? Like if somebody's putting on The Dark Knight, I'm like, oh, I'm definitely gonna, you know, glance over there.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  It's like an extended trailer.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up yourself.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  So, so I think if you're being really, really courteous, you should, you should have a whole discussion with your seatmate and say, hey, look, I got the window seat, but we need to have a negotiation here. We need to have a discussion about what are you trying to accomplish on this flight? Are you trying to sit? Are you trying to just enjoy the light? Maybe you low on vitamin D? Maybe you're trying to sleep? Let's have a discussion. Let's see what's, what makes sense for everyone here.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I would almost certainly take it a step farther and maybe pick out whatever your section is. Maybe there's 10 or so people in your vicinity. Go actually be, at once everybody's boarded.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Convene a little conference.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but actually just go take notes on everyone's individual preferences when they're planning on napping.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  Things like that. And then figure out the right schedule and then actually take it upon yourself to just say, I will be the window operator for this flight. And maybe you could get one of like some, some kind of like, like, you know, those like marshmallow roaster sticks? If you could have something like that and you could go and, you know, use it to, to open and close the windows on the schedule that is a sort of predetermined.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  You're saying that like commercial aviation has basically become Lord of the Fly? So you need to like embrace that.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  You need to become a leader.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  You need to become a leader. What are you saying?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, the window should always be open. And if you want to sleep, if you want to sleep, it's on you to bring an eye mask to like...

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  I think it should basically...

• 39:52John Coogan?

  A little rugged individual up there. Okay, sovereign individual. You gotta bring your own eye mask? Should the plane deliver free eye masks? I feel like they give headphones out.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  You can bring your own eye mask.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  They have eye masks in first class, but if you're in coach, they don't, they don't have any options, right? You could, of course, fashion an eye mask out of the in-flight magazine using complex paper mache.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Could also rip your shirt.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Well, no, no, you don't need a shirt. You can do that. You can do like the ninja thing where you put your shirt up this way and then you tie it behind your head, you know? You know, you ever do that as a kid? No?

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  Not too much.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Oh, really? That's the best move. Yeah.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, we, we've, we've gone down this path a little bit where we get seated separately on a flight, and then we start a negotiation to try to, to try to do some trades. And we've, we've initiated some pretty complex trades. It doesn't always work out, right?

• 40:46John Coogan?

  What was the most complex trade we initiated?

• 40:48Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes you're like, you're gonna move here because you're, you want to be, you don't want to be in a middle seat. But we have a middle seat, but we have this other person who's willing to take a middle seat.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It should all be just open auction. There should be a, everyone should board the plane and one at a time, all the seats get auctioned off live with a, with an auctioneer going, do I, do I have $20 for a long, for a long leg room? $20, $20 for a long leg room? $21 for, for Exarol? Exarol, $21, $22, Exarol. Big auctioneer. That would really, that would really up that level of energy on a, on a commercial flight, I think. I got peanuts.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  It makes so much more sense.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  You need peanuts, $5 for peanuts, peanuts, $5. Eye mask, $6, $6 eye mask.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  The steaks on JetBlue. You definitely will sell those.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Well, we have the perfect guest coming on. Omaha Steaks is joining the show. The CEO, President and CEO from Omaha Steaks, and we're gonna get to the bottom of, of the steak industry. Anyway, first, we, we do have some important news today we need to get to. Mercedes has announced the 2028 AMG GT63 SUV. It's a, it's, it's an 1,153 horsepower electric powerhouse, and we're getting a review from Jordy. What are you thinking?

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  That's my review.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  That's all I got.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  You like a Mercedes SUV. You like a G-Wagon.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I do. I actually think it looks fine.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  This is from the same company.

• 42:23Jordi Hays?

  I think it looks fine.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Would I buy it? No.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Would I recommend a friend or family member buy it? No.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Zero sixty in two point four seconds.

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  No, the rear end actually looks pretty okay.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  The rear end, it reminds me of the Ferrari Luce. Those circular, multiple circular taillights like that with that rim there. Something about that looks, uh, looks Luce to me. But I don't know, these, these super SUVs, especially in the electric configuration are just odd to me. I think it's going to be a tough, tough market with the depreciation and all this stuff.

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is gonna absolutely bomb.

• 43:08John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  You think this is something that they started working on like five years ago?

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, almost certainly.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  No, it's gonna be, it's gonna be rough out there.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  It's gonna be rough out there.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's one of those things where it's like an impressive piece of technology.

• 43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  But this buyer is buying this kind of car as a daily.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  And I just don't think it can stand up against other products in the class.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  You know, I would, I would think that, uh, electric would do better in an SUV package like this than in a sports car. Like, uh, the Porsche CEO was discussing the, taking the Cayman platform entirely electric. And are you more optimistic about this or the electric Cayman?

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  Didn't they, I thought they canceled the Cayman.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  He was talking about it. He was talking about electric sports car. Like two seater, small, electric sports car or five seater, big electric SUV. Which one of those are you taking?

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Electric SUVs make sense, but this car cannot drive itself.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Jordi Hays?

  And it's just gonna get destroyed.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  But assume neither of them can drive themselves. Which one?

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so obviously the Cayman, it just becomes like a street legal go-kart.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Oh, you think Cayman will sell better?

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be some, there's gonna be some buyer there.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder with the SUV, a lot of people still think, yes, it has 400 miles of range, but maybe I want to take it to the snow. Maybe I want to take it to somewhere where it's cold and the battery won't warm up. Or there won't be a great, uh, there won't be a great electric charging network. Not that this is an off-road SUV, but I think the SUV buyer, they still have in the back of their mind like, yeah, maybe I will take this to Joshua Tree and be, you know, off the grid for a day. And I want that flexibility, um, even this, even if this is just a, an everyday suburban, get-around, daily driver comfy car. And it feels like electric might be harder in the SUV segment.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  At the same time, someone who's buying like a small sports car, they seem so much more inclined to want to hear the, the sound of an, of an engine. But I don't know. We'll see. We'll have to see if we see these on the road. Do you think you'll see more of these on the road? Or the BMW XM?

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Probably more of these, but the XM has been a massive flop.

• 45:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you said this might be a massive flop, so.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this isn't, this is gonna be, I think, quite a bit less expensive.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  The XM.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, if it comes in at 130, that's more, that's more doable. But if it's up at like 220 and it's going up against Urus and the new McLaren SUV, could have a hard time, but you don't know. You don't know. Uh, we'll see, we'll see.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  Before we bring in our first guest.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  We have to watch a, the best interview in pro sports right now.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Cause this, I want you to sort of get into this mindset as we go into our guest segment.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  I wonder about 34 saves in your night, just how you felt and what you saw as you looked out from your crease?

• 46:12Speaker 04

  Yes, uh, I felt nothing. The, the problem with me is that I have a lot of fun playing. But when I start having too much fun, it makes me into, from an unconscious goalie to a conscious goalie. And my conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie. So I have to like let my unconscious brain do the work because it reacts a lot quicker. When I'm having too much fun and I'm smiling and I'm talking to everybody and I'm hanging out, what happens is that shifts me into more conscious brain goalie. And then I can't react in time and then I'm slow, I'm behind the play and then I give up seven goals, you know? But today it was just unconscious. Like, don't think about anything, you know, if you ask me how I made a save, I'd be like, I have no idea. Just my unconscious brain does it. And, uh, that's what you work in practice for, you know?

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Well, you felt nothing during the game, but I wonder what you felt like after, when you're doing the three stars and you hear the crowd and, uh,

• 47:03Speaker 04

  When the buzzer went, that's when I was like, okay, now you can let it all go. So you get a huge rush of like dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline and just like goosebumps. It's the best feeling in the world. It's like the biggest reason why I love to play. And, uh, yeah, then you can just let it all out. Now I can smile and enjoy myself. But yeah, like TV timeouts in between periods, I'm like, don't smile, don't talk to anyone, just focus on your game, let your unconscious brain do it. And, uh, it was great. It worked.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  It worked. Congrats on everything and feel well.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  I also got pretty lucky too, like three posts, you know, no goals off my own team. So that's, you know, hopefully that luck continues and I can continue to make saves.

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  Keep it rolling. I love this guy.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Why?

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's just like, this is incredibly fun to listen to. Um, and it, um, I realize I've gone through that, that, that same experience, not always, but sometimes I'll surf a wave and I get to the end and I have no, I can't remember anything that happened.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's kind of describing a closed state.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly, like I was incredibly present.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  But I had no, I'll have no memory of like what I actually did. And I have to like think like actually really hard.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  What actually happened there?

• 48:09John Coogan?

  I think it's a better, yeah. It's a good sports, like post-game interview because it's not just like, oh, like thanks to the team, we all did everything we could, we worked hard and it paid off. Like it's, it's more real.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  It was like a very real, very unique.

• 48:24John Coogan?

  It cuts through the noise.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  Perspective.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Normal interview. So I, yeah, I, I understand it now. I saw that on the timeline, but I didn't actually watch it. So I, I get it now. Uh, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let me tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. And we have our first guest.

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  Alec.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Here with us, Alec.

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  Bring him in.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  From Helicon. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming out.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Doing great, doing great.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  Coming out of stealth.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  What are you building?

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Long time coming for us. I think this has been almost four months since we got to fundamentally what the company is today, the team and everything, all the effort that's been going on behind the scenes. We're part of obviously a much, much larger part of everything that's changing in this country, which you've covered many, many times. And we're just part of that massive chain of, of change.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  What were you doing before the four months of stealth started? Were you ideating or working for another company?

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, this has been, spent probably a year ideating something completely different with my co-founder, which had a very different backbone by myself. I think we are the only company in sort of this industrial space, which is really a combination of frontier hardware, frontier robotics, frontier software altogether. And that led us to what Helicon is today. And so we're solving a problem in a very different way to what everyone else thinks to be the problem. And so we are scaling fundamentally extremely complex work, um, and building models to do that in the, in the long run, but doing a lot.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Raising money and raising money? I think Jordy wants to hit the gong. You raised some money?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you raised 16 and a half million dollars.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, the, the money is, the money is extremely important. It enables us to get to where we are. Sort of this building is where we went from. Blank slate and this is all operations, engineering in our, in our company that has gone from blank slate to first part made in 20 days. We had, uh, people tell us it couldn't be done in 30 and, uh, there's a lot more that, that we can do and that this team has done. We're incredibly small still. So to all the people that are listening to us for the first time, we're hiring like crazy and we have a lot that we're building. And where are you guys based? We're based in Torrance. We're based in Paris, L.A., right next to a lot of our customers, which is the main reason. We have a building with more power than L.A. usually has, which

• 51:11Speaker 02

  is why everyone's sort of leaving, going to Texas.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  More power. Are you thinking about racking some GPUs anytime soon?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  We are looking at something tangential to that, but now our main focus really is dual use and defense.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so sorry if I didn't catch this. You guys are doing the manufacturing, but you're not doing the actual design of components and different parts going into these things. You're working with other companies that have the end customer relationships and are doing the R and D. You guys are just focused on making the best possible version of each component.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so think about it, like there's magnets way down in the chain. There's actuator companies of which there's an infinity of by now. And then there's fundamentally the structure, the skeleton of a system that ultimately is what flies, moves, or what connects everything else. And we fundamentally do that. We focus on co-designing often with customers because that is the default. And every manufacturing process you use will have different design limitations. We focus on our approach being extremely complex 3D geometries, very similar to what you can mold with plastic, not quite as extreme as 3D printing of the norm in a small bamboo. But we can make parts that are extremely strong, six times stronger than

• 52:30Speaker 02

  plastic. There's a lot of cars that I know Jordy is a fan of from people that we have in common that fundamentally are today really limited to tens or hundreds of units that are made with a team of 12 people making sort of the structure by hand. Everything that we spend our time doing is understanding that the flow is build software so you can do the design phase, 10 times faster than what it is today, and then run industrial manufacturing processes that can actually do the same thing instead of being a week but can do in 30 minutes. And that's where you actually get to the scale of basically building out millions of systems. And for us, this facility is really aimed to do that.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  So we went, part of the seed round is part of our ambition, which is not doing a final seed round, proving out a little bit, and then jumping to a much larger scale. This building is around 40,000 square feet, and we'll fill it. We'll be making millions of structures every year coming out of it.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  How do you actually make a drone structure out of carbon fiber? I mean, how do you even make like a carbon fiber like hood for a car? Is that like a mold or is it like layered and then like filed down? Like I actually know so little about carbon fiber manufacturing.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  You and so many other people, the reality is no one really knows 99% of humans on Earth are completely clueless to what carbon fiber is. And the closest analogy that we often bring up internally, but also particularly when we hire and when we discuss what we're doing to people that particularly in software, carbon fiber production of any part today is very similar to how blacksmiths use to make any metal part. And what we're doing is basically taking a step that Carnegie and Bethlehem Steel took, which is industrializing a group of materials. And so that basically led to the naval fleets of World War II that fundamentally were one of the core reasons why this country won and sort of maintained

• 54:27Speaker 02

  the freedom that we all benefit from. And then skyscrapers and railroads. And so fundamentally, I mean, the roadster that we all saw, that core structure of that system is a composite. And you would never be able to do that with a different group of materials. So when we're talking to companies that are making commercial drones that for the first time are actually going from prototypes of 10 to 100 units and have manufactured it one way, we are now the solution to saying, okay, you're going from 100 units to you need a million units a year. Well, this is the only way you do it.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I think it's like a DJI Matrice or something, like a six-arm, you know, there's like a, it looks like a bunch of PVC pipes that are kind of like clicked together. Are you manufacturing rods and then assembling those? Or is it all one structure that's in like a mold and you grow it? Or is it subtractive manufacturing where you start, you don't start with a block of carbon fiber and like whittle it down, right?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  No, you don't. So exactly what you mentioned is what we think, we heard also when we were raising and not to this on anyone specifically here, but there were people who told us, look, drones look the way they do. And we're sort of at the apex of innovation for drones in the future. And that's a little bit like saying that the first Ford Model T that came off the line was the end of design for all cars forever. So we make molded parts that are a combination of generally commercial tubes and flat sheets that today could actually be one unique custom 3D geometry done at speed and at scale. And the only reason why that is not the default is because you have nine to one yearly times. And the cost and

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  If you bring down the cost dramatically and bring down lead times dramatically, what are, what are things in our everyday lives that you would use carbon fiber for that we don't today? It's like, in a perfect world, I would, everything in my life would be carbon fiber personally. But, but, but yeah, what are some applications that people just don't even explore today that we might?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's, that's exactly right. You sort of summarized how we describe the vision of where this company will go is like, what does industrialized composites actually mean? And the reason why I say composites instead of carbon fiber, it's like carbon fiber is just one specific type of fiber. The reality is that this complexity of designing, manufacturing, this complexity of the materials is what has kept all of this back. We're talking about unlocking a completely new way to create products that today are physically impossible. Or for companies that today are using normal plastics or normal forms of metal, replace them to have a competitive advantage in whatever market they're going for, whether that's commercial or defense. So if there's two companies competing

• 57:09Speaker 02

  for the same system, one uses our frame, or one uses a traditional plastic injection molded frame, we will enable more range, more accuracy, more stiffness, whatever fundamentally our customers are trying to optimize for, we enable.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  So you're thinking about like, like beyond cars and drones, like, are you going to get like a refrigerator that's made out of carbon fiber? Because like, a lot of fridges have a lot of metal and plastic in them. You could potentially replace that. And then when you swing the door open, it's not as heavy?

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, things like that. I mean, anything that you want, something that, that is like, like some very light but damage, like damage resistant, right? Or stronger, right? I mean, it just feels like, again, I think we'll look back on this era of like, things are just made of plastic or they're made of metal. And like,

• 57:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, why, why don't we have carbon fiber phones yet?

• 58:01Speaker 02

  There's, there's many reasons. So fundamentally, it comes down to things like electrical conductivity and many other things that particularly carbon isn't ideal for, but there's composites that definitely be replaced for core parts of those structures. There's something that we, right now is sort of medium term for us, but there's a lot of infrastructure that today is predominantly cement and not custom geometries. And it's just always the same part, particularly in data center build outs. There's a couple of conversations we've already looked at that, you know, our fundamental mission really is to enable the West to keep and maintain its dominance. So that's goal one. But our long-term vision is what does

• 58:42Speaker 02

  industrialized composites look like in the world? And it won't be every single, every single cup that you use for the rest of your life. But it's really about unlocking to mechanical and design engineers for the first time this option. And an option to go from 10 units of a prototype to 50 units, to 50 units again, to then ramping up to 100,000 units over the same year period.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round and coming out of stealth and everything you're doing. Thanks so much.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. I'm gonna, yeah, make, I'll make a request for the next round. Carbon fiber gong mallet. We actually, we've break, we've broken a bunch of these. It's a real need. We are also swinging them quite a lot. And so having something that was a little bit lighter, but faster, add some diversity to the gong hits would be fantastic. So our people will reach out to your people.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be huge for us.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  That sounds perfect.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Great, great to meet you, Alex. Cheers.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is Alex Blanier from World/Tools for Humanity, co-founder, CEO, returning to the show for the third time. Alex, how's it going? On the road. What's happening, guys?

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  A lot is new, you know, currently in L.A.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  Are you going to CloudFlare?

• 1:00:08Speaker 05

  No, I'm going to go to Zoom Topia first. There's like this Zoom conference.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  And then tonight, CloudFlare. Zoom Topia, the great name. And then tonight, and then tonight, Night CloudFlare, so.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Well, we're all over the place with this stretching. You guys are good.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Audio, video team is getting it dialed in. Yeah, so what do you, yeah, what's, what's the latest?

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  What's the latest? You know, so it's a, it's a great time to build proof of human, as you, as you can probably imagine.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Lots of slop.

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  All the agents, lots of slop, deepfakes and everything, so I think it's like the broad setting. And what happened this week is we launched World for Zoom, especially with like financial institutions.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, because a lot of people are doing like fake AI-generated Zoom characters to spoof people and say, hey, you know, I'm your grandmother and I need you to send me a gift card, like that type of stuff. A lot of fraud.

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  That's right, but especially for like public companies or financial institutions is like a big deal. Right? Because if you, you know, it's like the summer in the finance team of Goldman Sachs, someone is, you know, deepfaking them, that that's like a really big problem.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Speaker 05

  And potentially really big, big damage. And actually, like, one of the cool use cases that I didn't think about in the beginning is, um, is Open Exchange. So they're hosting the earnings calls of, of, you know, most of the public companies.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  And, uh, you know, they will have royalty for that. Because if a public company's CEO would be deepfaked, you would create billions of dollars of damage. It's like, that would be really, really bad.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:01:50Speaker 05

  So that's, that's one. The other big one is, um, we announced today that we're working on an agent protocol with CloudFlare.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  So that means that, um...

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  That sounds like the exact opposite of what we want to be doing here. Sounds like we don't want to give the agents the world ID because then they'll be able to act like humans? Like, the whole point was like, make sure the agents can never identify as humans?

• 1:02:14Speaker 05

  No, no, actually, not at all. I think people want to know that an agent is acting on behalf of a human and with human intention.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

  Um, and, and so like a service can ask these two questions. Like, is that agent acting on behalf of a human, actually, in fact, you know, on behalf of a unique human for that particular service?

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  And has a human been in the loop with that specific decision? It's like a high-stake decision.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  Like, so it's like an important or expensive purchase or something.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I see this every once in a while, like, uh, if I'm trying to do something on a third-party website, like, there'll be a pop-up in ChatGPT, like, put your password in here, and it's like passing it along to like verify that. And you could imagine that you're, you know, authenticating your ID as you go through. Because a lot of times when I send an agent off to do something, it'll get blocked by, uh, bot detection. But if I'm able to say like, hey, I'm actually behind this, I'm not just a bot network, I'm an individual using an individual agent, maybe that makes sense? Is that generally the, the way you think this parses out?

• 1:03:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, like, one of the, one of the things that, sorry, it's happening with my video here. Uh, one of the things that, that people talk a lot about with agents is, you know, things like restaurant bookings and, and, you know, even things like ticketing.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  And if you don't have a proof of human, it will just not be possible because all these websites are blocking agents.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:35Speaker 05

  And, uh, that will be the case for many other things. So, you know, we, we think that across the internet, many, many services will ask for some version of a proof of human for that.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 05

  So, yeah.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Does proof of human actually change the decision-making? Like, there was this story about Charles Schwab turning off, I think JPM did the same thing. They said like, no agents, we're not going to let Muse come and like, deal with stuff here, which I didn't see as a big deal because Plaid already integrates with all these platforms pretty easily. But, um, you could imagine, like, like, does this actually change the calculation for a finance, like, financial institution that just announced that, like, we don't want agents running rampant in our infrastructure? Uh, are they like, except if they've authenticated with World? Is, are they going to update there?

• 1:04:21Speaker 05

  I mean, we didn't talk to Schwab specifically, but I think that's, I think you will see that across many surfaces. That, um, you know, like, agents that are not clearly acting on behalf of a human will not be able to access.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:04:37Speaker 05

  Uh, but of course, you can have very different rules if you know that there's like an actual human intent behind it, and you can, you can block that human if something bad is happening.

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  What are, what are the ways of, like, how are you thinking about the evolution of proving that you're human or, like, are evolving? You guys historically have had the, the, the orb, but are there, are there other sort of like form factors or, or ways in which that you can accomplish this?

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so we're, um, we have like a lighter weight, uh, proof of human that we just use the phone for. So it's like a gray batch. Um, but that gives you way less assurance, but helps us to scale. For example, for something like Zoom, if you're like in a Zoom call with, you know, Ben Horowitz, and Ben Horowitz has a, has a, is actually all verified, but asks you to all verify, then you can do it with your, with your phone, and you will see like a different, a different badge. So we're doing that, but otherwise we just have to ramp up orb distribution a lot.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I got a Google prompt recently that was like, open your phone and take a selfie video and turn your head like this. It was kind of Face ID adjacent, but just video. And you could see those features sort of starting to roll out more and more as, as people want to verify who's on the other line and...

• 1:05:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure, but yeah, they will all break, right? Because...

• 1:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, but at the same time, like, the bull case is like, is like, look at what Pangram's been able to do. Like Pangram, I would have thought that, like, text would be certainly not, not detectable at this point, three years, four years into the LLM boom, uh, by, you know, a very talented founder, but, you know, a small team with a little bit of funding, and Pangram's been pretty reliable for a long time. And so, uh, I would be optimistic that even, even if you have, even if you're fighting with your hands tied behind your back and you can't do full LiDAR or iris scanning, I would be, I would be surprised if you can't do just good deep fake detection, uh, with like vanilla MP4s. But I don't know.

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm much more scheduled on that.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  You're like, I'm not up for the task.

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  It's just, uh, you know, that's why, that's why you're building the orb and things like that.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course. You want to be ensemble.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  We're doing, we're doing our best.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, well, well, good luck. And, uh, yeah, keep us posted. Thanks for coming on and breaking it down.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bring in, bring in tech to L.A.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Not, not, not every day. We have multiple conferences from real tech companies in L.A.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  That's true, that's true. Good stuff.

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, sorry, sorry for the, the scheduling mix-up, but, um, but yeah, great to catch up and, uh, keep it up.

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. But let me also tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  It's time.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  It's time to let you know about the TVPN Road to Christmas. How many days until Christmas? Let's pull that up first, because our next guest is the CEO of Omaha Steaks, and I want to talk to him about holiday gifting. There are 65 days until Christmas. We're almost there, so get ready. And we are very pleased to be joined by Nate from Omaha Steaks, the president and CEO. Nate, how are you guys?

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  Good. How you doing?

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Welcome to TVPN. Uh, first question, is the holiday season actually a big, uh, a big quarter for you? Is it an important go-time? Is it your Super Bowl? Or is the business less cyclical? Oh, it is? Okay.

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's about 48, 48% of my revenue in three weeks.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Wow, three weeks?

• 1:08:31Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  Okay. And what's moving the needle? Are you redoing the entire product catalog for holiday-specific SKUs? Or is it just this is when people come in and they, and they buy all of the default product catalog at higher scale?

• 1:08:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's spot on. It's the 80/20, right? It always applies. So, you know, 20% of the SKUs do 80% of the business. It's all about managing velocity, you know, scaling up systems and leveraging things like AI to help us deal with, uh, you know, more customers faster without having to degrade service. It's, uh, it's, it's a massive challenge, but I remind my teams, it's one of the funnest times in the business because we can see how powerful the brand is and how far the reach.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

  You know, 93 people in a room of 100 know the brand.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 06

  Everywhere in the country.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Incredible brand. Talk about, uh, the other sources of top of funnel and how that's changed. Are you partnering with lots of influencers these days, doing a lot of direct response on meta platforms? Like what else needs to be added to the marketing mix? To take that brand and leverage it to the fullest?

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're, you're hitting on something that is kind of under massive change inside the business. I mean, keep in mind, Omaha Steaks kind of invented catalogs and direct mail, right? So over the last five to 10 years, we've really had to push the social leverage influencers and now with the AI craze, you know, convince chat and Claude, uh, that, you know, we're a great gift.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  Which is kind of the next evolution of brand influence.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  What's been your strategy on convincing AI systems that Omaha Steaks should be the go-to brand? Is it do nothing, win? Rest on your laurels because the brand is so storied? Or have you been engaging with AI SEO firms trying to write more organic copy?

• 1:10:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Nate's ever rested on even a single laurel.

• 1:10:21John Coogan?

  I would be skeptical too.

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Look, the, the brand is so big that you get just some kind of natural affinity that happens, but you can't let yourself sit out there and kind of be a victim of the internet, uh, if you will. I mean, everything that, that AI is consuming, you know, we, we think about and try to do our best to first deliver a great, a great customer experience. I think, look, the, the better the truth is, you know, the better AI will reflect your brand. Uh, that being said, you know, you know, reputation management, you know, managing the infamous Reddit, uh, threads, uh, you know, these are the types of things that, uh, are changing in our business. We can't just buy Google AdWords, uh, and say what we want. We have to, you know, really be,

• 1:11:08Speaker 06

  really represent in the right way and then manage the reputation out there. It's a really interesting game changing approach, I think.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Get me more up to speed on what it takes to win on Reddit or in a world where Reddit exists. It feels like such a delicate balance. You don't want to put your thumb on the scale too hard. That could have unintended backlash things, but you want to correct the record if somebody is spreading information that's incorrect about the company.

• 1:11:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, internally, we're kind of taking a, uh, a bit of an approach where we can be bold and, uh, and really sort of, you know, protect ourselves. We don't have to just give in. We can correct the record, but that's a fine balance, right? You can't come off too hard. So you'll have to have customer respect, but we have a lot of authority in steak. You know, 109 years, we know a lot of, about what it takes to age meat, to select it, to cut it, you know, supply chain, inventory management, manufacturing. I mean, you know, America knows surface level information about steak.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  And beef in general.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Speaker 06

  And we feel a responsibility to educate them. And we actually think that's a value proposition. So we take that and we approach Reddit with that mindset. Like we can be, uh, an information provider and then win, win the customer, uh, customers' heart and minds that way.

• 1:12:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the macro right now. There's, uh, in high inflation, high interest rates, tariffs, like what is keeping you up at night? What stories are you tracking? What has affected the business? And then what has maybe, uh, you've been like, oh, sigh of relief. We dodged this and it, it doesn't affect our business.

• 1:12:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. The, well, I can tell you what keeps me up at night is the worst beef market in our history. Like our respective history.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 06

  Uh, I mean, fewer cattle than there's been in, you know, 76 years.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Speaker 06

  You know, demand has kind of stayed, uh, elevated.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 06

  And so price is going up. I mean, it's sort of basic supply and demand, right?

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 06

  And the thing about the beef business and, and the beef market in general is it's a biologic process. So it's not like we can just inject some silver bullet and all of a sudden more beef just appears, right?

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 06

  I mean, it's an 18-month gestation. So like the animal has to grow. And so, you know, this runway, um, to enough supply to address the demand is a long one. So what do you do as a business? Well, you know, we, we look internally and we think about how can we add value to the customer experience or the products when a customer is paying more for beef. You know, I personally believe that's when you want to really buy the best. If you're, if you're going to pay for something, you'll make it worth it, right? And so that mentality is like, how can we innovate inside the, inside the category to make steak more meaningful? Like our, we have this new, you know, kind of kick ass, uh, product called USDA certified tender,

• 1:14:06Speaker 06

  where we test the steaks to make sure that they're just like ultra tender and it's bonkers. So like, we only give the most tender steaks to our customers because like, if you're going to buy a steak when it's expensive, love it.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  I love that. Um, did the, I'm so curious. You're the, you're the first steak expert that's ever been on the show. Did the, did the, the entire, did the plant-based meat movement, which is now, I think in many ways dead, did that ever show up in the data? Were you ever looking at numbers thinking like, oh, wow, if this trend keeps up, you know, there's going to be a, a meaningful change in, in people's consumption and things like that? And is that part of why there's sort of an undersupply now of cattle?

• 1:14:54Speaker 06

  Hmm. Uh, no, there, there's, I don't think there's a correlation. And the undersupply of cattle has a lot to do with just people's demand for beef. COVID kind of long tail impact there. Um, plant-based, I would tell you like maybe back in 2017-ish, I was like, I wonder if this will be a thing. And then I went and I had that like impossible whopper and I immediately was like, no, this is not a problem.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was a funny, that was a funny thing is, I mean, the category was getting so much investment. These companies were being valued like AI companies in many ways. And I always, I always was wondering to myself, has anybody that's investing in these businesses, have they tried the product?

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  I know.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  It's just like the tried and true way to figure out if something, you know, if consumers are going to like something, but the, I can, I can, I can remember so many of these businesses that, that again, got massive funding and, and they were getting like pretty strong retail distribution and it just felt like it, the whole thing was, was so forced.

• 1:16:00Speaker 06

  Well, let's tie this, Jordy, let's tie this to the conversation of the new customer.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:05Speaker 06

  Because when I looked at that product, that plant-based product, it had like 23 ingredients. And when I look at mine, it just says beef, period. And I think, I think there's this idea of, you know, authenticity, cleanliness, single ingredient kind of protein craze that from a timing perspective was really bad news for the plant-based meat industry and that people looking and, and wanting those clean, real products. And we're leaning into that. I mean, and, and that's certainly part of the education process with our, what we call our next best customer, which is this younger customer that's really looking for, you know, those historic legacy brands that aren't, you know, flash in the pan websites that somebody stood up and outsourced.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:50Speaker 06

  The whole dang thing, right? And, and that is a durability competitive advantage component for Omaha Steaks. I mean, today I'm really next to the only direct to consumer meat retailer that manufactures my own product.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:17:07Speaker 06

  And so how do I lean into that? Because that's really hard to do. I mean, I, I've got 900 years of butcher experience. We're cutting these things by hand, you know, making sure that they're beautiful. So when they show up, uh, you can hardly wait to, to throw it on the grill. And that is a value add to my product that is really hard to replicate. And so I'm going to take that and I'm going to put that right at the front of the line, uh, and really point it out to my customer, uh, and do things like certified tender. So they know I'm really going all the way with the experience. And then point out how my competition is not doing those things. And do they really know steak? Do they really know where it comes from? Is it coming from overseas? Is it coming from the, you know, inside the US? All my suppliers are US-based.

• 1:17:52Speaker 06

  So these are the types of things that no bull in the campaign we're currently running, which is really a play on no BS, right? Which is the American consumer across lots of different industries is kind of tired of all of the facade, all of the faux information. Um, you know, sort of selling the bill of goods on the front end. And then when the product and the experience is delivered, it wasn't as advertised.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Speaker 06

  We've been delivering as advertised for a century and it's time for us to step forward and own that. And so it's really kind of an exciting moment for the brand, um, to start boasting about how epic we are.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Your competitors, I'm going to go out and say, it sounds like your competitors are all hat, no cattle. Is that accurate?

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  Touche.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  That feels accurate.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Hundred percent accurate.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  How cyclical, like, how cyclical is the industry? Like, we're in a period of of low supply, demand has stayed flat, we have less and less supply. Is that going to trigger like an overbuild in beef and cattle? Are there a bunch of, you know, enterprising groups out there that that want to take advantage of this and you might see an oversupply in, in let's say, eighteen months or two years?

• 1:19:03Speaker 06

  It always happens. I mean, it's commodity at the end of the day, right? So if you take a step back and you look at the industry now, you can actually see some early moments of that swing back. So some of the large packers in this country, you know, the the Tysons, the JBS, the Cargills, are closing plants. And the reason they're doing that is because the sort of that cyclicality of the herd sizes coming down, they were overbuilt for when it used to be high. And so their margins were stressed because in the packing industry, you know, you make money directly through efficiency. And so when that efficiency goes by the wayside, you know, you start to get upside down.

• 1:19:44Speaker 06

  And so that capacity correction that's happening in the packing industry is really the first indication of that swing back. So they're trying to right size the middle of supply chain. And then when the cattle come back, then we'll see sort of a reemergence of additional capacity. And that's happened, you know, sort of peak and valleys over the course of the last, you know, at least as far as we've seen it, you know, last one hundred and ten-ish years.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  What's the, uh, I'm sure you do a ton of consumer research about that next best consumer, that younger consumer.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  We've talked a lot about Gen Z attitudes towards alcohol. They're not drinking as much. This has been widely reported. But what is the next generation, that Gen Z, that younger consumer, thinking about beef and in general?

• 1:20:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, you know, let's just call it protein.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:35Speaker 06

  We'll do beef, chicken, pork, the whole, whole caboodle there.

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 06

  You know, it's, it's all about, you know, longevity.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:43Speaker 06

  You know, thinking about the protein craze, you know, steak at the top of the food chart.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:49Speaker 06

  You know, you kind of couple that with a desire to have a great experience when you eat. You know, it's, it's not just fuel, it's a dinner party. It's a, it's a date with your wife or girlfriend. It's a, it's impressing your friends when you throw a tenderloin, you know, on the grill.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 06

  And so delivering both sides of that. But then you've got this really interesting, you know, kind of dichotomy in the persona of Gen Z, which is the ultimate skeptic. You know, kind of limited brand loyalty, kind of what did you do for me lately? You have to keep proving their, sort of their trust qualifying index is much higher. We have to keep demonstrating to them, not just that we can deliver on the product, but we're doing good by the, by the, the earth. And, you know, we're an honest, you know, well-run company. And we, you know, all of these things sort of play into that ball. That is the, you know, the, the value proposition that we're, that we're selling.

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting that, that, that consumer that you're talking about is almost more inclined to trust a new company versus a company that's been around for a hundred years at times, which is kind of backwards in some way, or at least how prior generations would have thought, when the new company might have no idea what they're really doing and they're just freestyling.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Whereas you have to, again, remind people about, about that time.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. It seems like a really focused company. First ad ran in the New York, in the New Yorker in nineteen eighty, nineteen fifty-eight, and you're the longest running advertiser in the New Yorker. How have you, how has the company thought about product line expansion? I, I could have totally seen a world where you go into like a George Foreman grill category or something, you know, accessories, something adjacent. How do you think about the trade off between focus and horizontal expansion to adjacencies?

• 1:22:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, you know, pre-nate, the pre-nate era. There was this thought that we could just, you know, just run as fast as we can after newness.

• 1:22:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:55Speaker 06

  Like, we'll just, we'll just bury the market in new products. I think in, in two thousand and eighteen, I think we came out with like ninety-two different products in that year. And the truth is, is where we really need to focus is in, is in our bread and butter. And I think the fallacy was the thought that we couldn't innovate in steak anymore, that we've been doing it for a hundred years and we kind of figured it out.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, kind of the end of history.

• 1:23:16Speaker 06

  And the truth is, is that we hadn't even begun to do that. So we have sized down our focus.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:23Speaker 06

  And, and our R and D is now on, you know, those products that people love, how do we make them better?

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:29Speaker 06

  Uh, and then splitting out some of that investment to innovate kind of tangentially to those lines.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so that just might be better customer experience, better clarity into the supply chain. There's a, there's a story in the news about a million dollars of trading cards getting stolen from FT, from PSA. It was on a FedEx truck. Have you ever had to consult theft or people trying to steal a truckload of steaks in your career? Have you ever had to deal with loss prevention on a major scale?

• 1:24:03Speaker 06

  Actually, actually, this year, this year, we had a trailer.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Speaker 06

  Get, uh, somebody pitched and drove away with it.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:24:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Hopefully, less than a million dollars of steak, but I imagine it is significant.

• 1:24:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, yeah, we ultimately determined that, I think it was, it ended up being something that wasn't necessarily theft. But, you know, in that moment, you're like, how, how does this even happen?

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Just joyriding a truckload of steaks.

• 1:24:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, you know, we get the porch pirates.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Okay, oh, yeah, that's a big deal.

• 1:24:32Speaker 06

  Right? So, you know, we, we are visible on the porch. And so we actively use technology to communicate with our customers, letting them know when it's going to arrive.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  Yep, check it.

• 1:24:42Speaker 06

  And actually, on the front end, John, we tell them exactly when it's going to arrive when they place the order.

• 1:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Speaker 06

  Which I think is really, really key.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, yeah, yeah, that, that's really key. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad you haven't been too affected by loss and theft because it's, it's a nightmare out there for some businesses, but it seems like you're doing well. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really, really fascinating business, amazing legacy and, and have, have, yeah, just have always appreciated how obvious it was that you guys were staying despite all the legacy. We're some of the first movers on all these different new channels and, and that respect and, and love for advertising.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  Coming up on a hundred and ten years in business next year, right?

• 1:25:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. And in sixty-five days, we'll be selling a box of filets every two point seven seconds. So, you know, so get, get your holiday orders in, you know, because there ain't no better gift than Omaha Steaks.

• 1:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Wait, last question, because, you know, we are in our road to Christmas here, but do you guys recommend putting it on, the steak under the tree? What's, what's the approach?

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  You want to deliver it before Christmas as a warm-up gift? What do you, what do you think?

• 1:25:53Speaker 06

  We've got awesome tech to go in and pre-schedule that delivery.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:25:58Speaker 06

  So you, yeah, you can say, I want it to deliver on this date.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:01Speaker 06

  You know, I want it to be in a gift box.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Can you guys put it down the chimney?

• 1:26:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it falls directly on the fire, grills, and then it's just ready to rock, you know?

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  That's the science fiction I want to be reality.

• 1:26:13Speaker 06

  Agreed.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  We need to get that to happen. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:26:17Speaker 06

  Guys, thanks so much.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:26:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And I wouldn't recommend starting an Omaha Steaks competitor, but if you're going to be doing anything on e-commerce, do it on Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And here are our next guests.

• 1:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Next.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Connor Sweeney from Baba, the founder and CEO.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  How you doing, Connor?

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. Thank you, thanks for having me.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. First, second time on the show. I forgot.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were, but you were on back in February. Well, welcome back. Why don't you reintroduce the company, give us the news? Jordy's itching to hit this gong, so I, I know that there's going to be a big number, but break it all down for us, please.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  For sure. No, I really appreciate it. So we're announcing Baba's forty million dollar Series A.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  We were back here in February for our season, so we've been moving quickly, but we're...

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Hit that gong, Jordy.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  I mean, that forty million dollars, First Mark Capital.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up the replay.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  CVS Health Ventures coming in, General Catalyst, Genius Ventures, we know those guys. Let's see how Jordy did on this. Ooh, that's a good hit. That's a good hit. It, it, it didn't have as much fervor and a much, it wasn't an angry hit, but delivered.

• 1:27:44Jordi Hays?

  Not, not a ton of emotion, but, but just sort of that focused intensity.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  That you expect out of, you know, Connor and the Baba team.

• 1:27:53Speaker 03

  Next time, I got to come do it in person.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Please, please, we'd love to have you.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, reintroduce the business, what you guys are, what you guys are doing, how it's evolved since last time. I know the growth is insane, but, but yeah.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  I appreciate it. No, so we're, we're a health platform. So we connect older adults and their families, usually folks with Medicare, with other humans, which I know is like a rare, a rare pitch these days. But we went out and we found hundreds of experts who are nurses and social workers across the country. And then we can connect them with these families that need help coordinating care, which, you know, sounds pretty simple until you're in the, the middle of it, but it's benefits enrollments, getting the right appointments, getting the right transportation to those appointments. And so in the process, you know, we've been able to use a lot of AI, but still keep this a very human service, which, which really matters to the families.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  You have a hundred thousand, oh, sorry.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  You're giving AI to one side of the marketplace to be able to work with patients more, more effectively, have less busy work for them? Is that, is that where this is going?

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  For sure. So we, we call them advocates. And at the end of the day, we, we really wanted to see where all the open and closed source models fail on these, like, we call them care coordination tasks, right? Like, one example, you have someone who is on federal benefits.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  And they need to, or maybe they're on Medicaid, they, they, they need help getting their food stamps, right? That can be a really challenging process because you have to verify how much income you make and if you have a job and all these other steps. And then you also need to consolidate all your, your medicines because you have to go to the pharmacy every few days. And if you can't drive, that really...

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Makes it hard. So we have one of our advocates come in and like do all that work. And we measure where AI can do that, you know, ten news go and do all these steps properly. And what we found, we actually just published this, we call it like Baba Bench, was that AI is obviously really good at a lot of it, but it keeps making mistakes. It'll share too much information and then healthcare. That's really problematic, right? You can lose your insurance if you overshare.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Is Baba Bench just bait for the labs to hill climb Baba Bench and make your life really easy? You're just like, cool, I can raise forty million, not get crazy diluted, and the labs will do all the hard stuff. Is, is there a thesis where Baba Bench, you want it to saturate that that would benefit you?

• 1:30:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm not, I, I wouldn't assume it's a public benchmark.

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  Is it?

• 1:30:12Jordi Hays?

  No, it is. It's on our website.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  But, but, but I, I, I'm somewhat joking, but I'm also asking like a serious strategy question, which is like, uh, you benefit if the leading labs get good at a certain thing. Obviously you don't want them to like, you know, completely steamroll you with a product competitor, but if the models get better and then the open source models get better, that drives down your cost. Is there actually a strategy there or is this, uh, or is that just like a knock on effect?

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  No, it's definitely, uh, I wouldn't say it's deliberate strategy, but it wouldn't hurt. Um, we have really deep relationships. Even some of our customers became investors in this. Right? So some of these are like, most people watching this probably don't recognize all these funds, but a lot of these are like very deeply, uh, respected, like healthcare funds. Or they even like have health insurance companies, right? And so those relationships are only gonna deepen, whether that's a human led service or if we get really good at that, like long horizon stuff.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it seems like the, I mean, the value of the business is, is, you know, obviously the AI is very important, but, uh, there's so much more to it. You have ten thousand patients that you've helped. You have a hundred thousand on the waitlist. Uh, that feels extremely bullish, but also like kind of a problem. What's the plan to actually service uh, all the demand? I mean, obviously you're raising more capital, but what is the bottleneck? Because typically with software, you just replicated in infinitely, but there are costs to these things. Uh, it feels like you wanna ideally uh, pay down that waitlist and get those families off there so they can get healthcare as soon as possible, right?

• 1:31:40Jordi Hays?

  So what's really cool is our service is covered by insurance. So that waitlist exists because we are working through the process of convincing more plans. I'm gonna say plans like, you know, uh, Cigna, for example, or Humana in Texas or Maine or whatever, that this is valuable. And so we're starting to see that from some of the plans we, we were able to convince pretty early. And now they're like fastly blowing it up, right? And we don't have to have that waiting list dynamic, but because this is still like human to human, which does matter for a lot of these families, right? Um, it, we're still a little limited on that front.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  How have you grown, how have you grown the core team since your last time on the show? Yeah, well, we've doubled the team, still about half engineers. So we're, you know, a little under twenty people in general. Um, could not be more excited by, by the edge talent density. We're all in Soho, New York, um, which is a, I think, an advantage for us. This is where a lot of healthcare lives, breathes. Um, and so if you're, uh, looking to, to do real applied AI and, and outside of the SF bubble, we're hiring.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's actually, uh, yeah, measurable. I'm sure, uh, a lot of the, a lot of the clients and patients like feel a very visceral like, uh, like reward from using the, using the service. Uh, that's great.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, amazing progress. Uh, looking forward to the B. I'm sure he'll be back soon.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Any day now.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully. Thanks, guys. Great to see you, Connor. Cheers.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Well.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  All right, we'll head back to the timeline.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Take me through it, Jordy. What, what, what did we miss?

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Big news.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  In Louisiana at the Alexandria Airport, they already have a Christmas tree up. And, uh, no surprises, sure, at least a handful of people over at the airport watching the show, tracking the countdown.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Understand, sixty five days.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  We're only sixty five days out.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  It's a blink of an eye.

• 1:33:31Jordi Hays?

  There's no Christmas tree.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, but yeah, I expect to see a fast takeoff now, just in people traveling through the Louisiana airport.

• 1:33:39John Coogan?

  Oh, you think it's bullish for the airport?

• 1:33:41Jordi Hays?

  And complaining when they get to their home airport or wherever they're going and saying, there's no tree.

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  There's sixty five days. What are you guys doing? How can I trust that? How can I trust? How can I trust you to help me get from point A to point B?

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know, I think we're gonna go to New York soon. We should do a connection through Louisiana, uh, so we can get off and enjoy the tree. You wanna fly with a connection?

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, amazing layover. Yeah, save a little bit of money.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  Like, everyone hates a layover, but getting to see this Christmas tree in person offsets that by a factor of like ten or a thousand, you know, it's huge. Huge benefit. So, uh, if you're a traveling cost country, make sure you stop in Louisiana. The air, at the Alexandria Airport already has a Christmas tree. Enjoy it. Uh, anything else we should cover before we wrap up for the day, Jordy? There are a couple other news items. Uh, uh, Clem over at Hugging Face gave a, uh, I think a one star review to the Insta doc from Netflix about AI gone wild. He said, just watched the Netflix Insta doc about the OpenAI cyber attack on Hugging Face. Super disappointing as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology in full doomer mode.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  I spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens, but it looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong. So go watch the doc, figure it out for yourself. What was funny is that, uh, someone quote tweeted him and was like kind of dunking and then he reposted it. So I think he's just, you know, uh, just happy to get the conversation, I, I, going, I guess. Uh, there's this other meme that's happening where, uh, a fifteen year old schoolboy from China found instructions on how to launch three hundred Claude code agents so that while he's at school, they would trade and connected them to a verification layer.

• 1:35:34John Coogan?

  And people are throwing up these like insane visualizations and they all start with the line, it's becoming effing dangerous. And, uh, it's this odd like astroturf. It's unclear if they're doing it for the, for the creator payout at this point. I thought the creator payout was so nerf that it wasn't, wasn't worth it. We have some, uh, uh, potential updates to the rest of the show, but I think we will be wrapping. Jordy, why don't you, uh, why don't you coordinate with the production team on what happens next, but?

• 1:36:06Jordi Hays?

  I think we gotta talk about, yeah, this Beverly Hills condo project on borrowing money from its future residents. So we, it, it looks like we might be having a surprise guest.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  We might.

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, coming on the show in around ten minutes.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it seems quite likely. There's a lot of traffic. We're working on it. Not gonna tell you who it is. We'll let him introduce himself. Uh, but, uh, we gotta talk about this, John.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:32Jordi Hays?

  Because Kane is raising money from condo buyers through Founder Bonds to help fund its ten billion dollar One Beverly Hills real estate project. Founder Bonds.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  This is kinda framed. It's like, uh, yeah, this is kinda framed. It's a circular deal.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  New top signal.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  It's a new circular deal. You, you buy a condo and then you also, uh, own the debt of the company that's building the actual.

• 1:36:55Jordi Hays?

  The developer behind one of the country's most expensive real estate projects has an unusual request for its condo buyers. Lend us money. Purchasers of the site's roughly a hundred and fifty condo units are also providing debt to help Kane, an investment firm based in London, fund its ten billion dollar project known as One Beverly Hills. Seventeen and a half acre site set to be completed in twenty twenty nine will include high end retail such as Dolce and Gabbana, upscale dining, seventy eight new hotel suites and acres of botanical gardens. The ultra luxury condos will be operated by Aman, one of the world's leading high end hotel operators. Condos owner debt.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  So are they doing a hotel there or is it just Aman condos?

• 1:37:34Jordi Hays?

  Both.

• 1:37:35John Coogan?

  They're doing both.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  Seventy eight rooms or suites.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Oh, hotel suites.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  And residences.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  But it says, so, so it says the ultra luxury condos will be operated by Aman. It doesn't say that about the hotel suites. So I'm wondering if it's unreal, if it's a different hotel operator. I would, I would assume like you assume is that it's all Aman, but.

• 1:37:54Jordi Hays?

  I think it's all Aman.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56John Coogan?

  Long overdue for Los Angeles.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  The condo owner's debt takes the form of a bond. The developers call them founder bonds. And the buyers will receive a return. So unlike when you're a founder and you get, uh, equity. In this case, you'll just receive a return of five percent.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you're senior on the cap.

• 1:38:14Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Oh, you're not? Oh, wait.

• 1:38:17Jordi Hays?

  There's like a bunch of like, there's a bunch of other, you're actually.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  But you're above the equity. You're above the equity.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No condo buyers are forced to participate in the program. Founder bonds offer a financial return and the opportunity to assist in the construction of their future home. Hey, help us, help you. When the founder bond program was launched early last year, 10 year treasury debt offered less than 5% returns. In recent weeks, however, the 10 year yield has exceeded that level, rising about 5.3% at one point this month. That means founder bondholders are now earning less than the yield on treasuries.

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Risk free rate. But some say this is rarely, this rarely seen financing tool sticks condo buyers with a risk. The bonds are junior to other debt on the project, which includes a 2.8 billion senior loan led by JPM and a 1.5 billion mezzanine loan from VICI Properties. Both of these loans are conditional on Kane hitting certain sales milestones. That means that if the condo towers were to fall short of completion in a city where most luxury buyers are focused on single family homes and estates, bondholders could be left not only without the penthouse they were expecting, but also without the extra money lent to the developers. I really hope this project goes through.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a great, yeah, great part of town. It'll make the skyline look quite a bit better. People don't, I don't know many people that live in LA that want to live in a high rise. So, and then the other factor.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  Big part of the appeal is the quarter acre, one acre, grass, pool, that type of stuff. I mean, obviously the penthouse is everything, but that's just one property. A lot of them will just be like condos.

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so privacy and security are big. So if you don't, especially if you don't live here full time and you just want to have a place in LA.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Jordi Hays?

  These are great, these are great, you know, these will be great options. But the market here is just so bad.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Like it's so bad. You have mansion checks, right? People are, that's been helpful and sort of freezing.

• 1:40:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  The market hasn't panned out how.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Hurtful. Helpful in freezing is like a funny phrase.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. I'm joking. Been very helpful in, in reducing economic activity.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's been rough.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  And, um, yeah, certainly not.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  At the same time, it feels like one of the potential solutions, if your city is going through a housing crisis is to Manhattanize essentially. Like, yes, people might not be used to living in condos, high rises, that type of thing. But if you build a bunch of those, you're going to have a lot more housing at all scale if you want 1,000 square feet, 2,000 square feet, 3,000 square feet. Like the way to give people that is build up. You can't build out anymore. Everything's built. So, like, there's only so many lots that you can cut into smaller pieces. Building up is the logical thing that.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying that Aman is going to solve the housing crisis?

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  It is a step towards solving it, yes. I, I'm a firm believer that all building alleviates some pressure because sure, someone buys, what is the actual penthouse cost? It's like $20 million or something, $100 million. It's some huge thing, but like that's one less person buying a huge mansion that then is one, is five less people buying smaller mansions that then get cut up and subdivided and eventually you're just creating more housing. And also just like there previously only one person was able to live there and now 12, 12 people.

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  What am I, what are you thinking?

• 1:41:46Jordi Hays?

  That while they wait to get the cash, that they build the world's largest Christmas tree.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  In the footprint.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Is it? I, I feel like they have most of the building up.

• 1:41:56Jordi Hays?

  If you want to get some attention for your project, or what if they built the world's largest Christmas tree and the only way to actually go.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  They're grown.

• 1:42:05Jordi Hays?

  No, in this case, they would have to build it.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Out of other Christmas?

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Carbon fiber.

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  Carbon fiber. We're anti-toll.

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  But they could say, you know, it's free to visit if you buy founder bonds.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:42:19Jordi Hays?

  For founders, bondholders.

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  That's a good perk.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  And you could create a, you know, global movement to visit the world's largest Christmas tree.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  This is my, uh, practicing up for, for when we reboot. Nathan, for you.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, I like it. The plan. Um, yeah. Pending home sales in the US fell to an all time low in September. It does feel like it is.

• 1:42:43Jordi Hays?

  All time low?

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  All time low since 20, I don't know, 2000. I, I, I don't know how long this date is. This looks like it's, goes back to 2001 pending home sales. That's really, really low. Mortgage applications are down. Let's see, the mortgage math explains it just higher rates. So, yeah, everyone is either not selling, not buying. It feels like it's entering a buyer's market after it like, you know, fierce competition, but it's all segmented by particular markets. Like some markets are extremely hot still, some are, you know, have fully cooled off. It just sort of depends on the block, the city, the suburb, the state. There's all these different dynamics going back and forth. Compass, you saw that Compass was in the news?

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  The founder, Refkin was on, was breaking it down, but there's a fierce battle emerging to control how Americans buy and sell their homes. It was very interesting seeing Compass take the side of sellers.

• 1:43:43Jordi Hays?

  So the, the pending home sales are lower right now than during the 2008 financial crisis.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Jordi Hays?

  I guess there was like a lot more for selling.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  At that time, which also counts towards it.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Yes, because a lot of people were on adjustable rate mortgages that had been issued from 2001 to 2005. So if you're on a three year fixed or a six, five year fixed or seven year fixed, you're quickly coming up on your mortgage exploding in, in payment because interest rates are higher. And so you're, you're going to have to make a decision, either make more money, pay more money for your existing mortgage or get out of the property. And also people were going crazy with second homes, third homes, that whole thing. These crazy no money down loans were flying around. Most of the people that own the homes now have fixed rates that were fixed at pandemic lows of 3%. So they're not selling, but they're, they, but they also don't have to sell.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  So there's less, less selling pressure even though, and then there's less buying activity.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Wall Street Journal.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  Got the S1. Thank you to Jiggin.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  YouTube chat. We can dive into this before our guests. This came out 20 minutes ago.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Red hot growth, risks and massive computing costs in a new draft perspective viewed by the Journal. The AI giant disclosed an 80 billion, 80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors. That's a big net loss. That's, that's a lot, that's high. Anthropic is generating breakneck revenue growth, but faces a long list of, of risks that narrow, that include a narrow customer base and uncertain access to much needed computing power as it prepares for a mega IPO, according to new disclosures. The company has signaled that it could potentially spend $750 billion in the coming years obtaining more computing capacity, including deals it is still negotiating.

• 1:45:43John Coogan?

  The disclosures, many of which have not been previously reported, are part of a draft that the Wall Street Journal got a hold of. The artificial and giant, artificial intelligence giant said in the draft prospectus that it recorded a net loss of more than 80 million, 80 billion in the first half of this year, a total that largely reflects an accounting adjustment related to financing agreements. Okay. So that loss includes, uh, compute contracts and prepayments for things that are happening in the future potentially. Because everything we've seen about revenue and margins, nothing adds up to 80 billion unless you're including the compute, uh, the compute guarantees and whatnot. What do you think?

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Immediate reaction, insane photo selection from the Journal. Scroll down. They got, they, they, they, they put the, the incident.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, the frame mugging.

• 1:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Come on.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a choice.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's a million pictures of Dario that you could use instead of this.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  That is definitely a choice.

• 1:46:46Jordi Hays?

  Is, is Benioff pulling the strings behind the Journal?

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:46:50Jordi Hays?

  Does this go deeper than we thought?

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  I don't think.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the number, the number is surprising. I mean, it's going to take a little bit to, to dig into this.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  Okay, well, there's a lot of debate on the risk factors. What would they put existential risk in there? Would they not? Anthropic laid out a sprawling list of risk factors, including uncertainty over how it will prevent its AI models from causing harm and protect itself from those liabilities. From sophisticated cyber attacks to possible blackmail by uncontrolled models, they put it all in the S1. The San Francisco company is preparing for a blockbuster IPO that could help it reach a valuation of $2 trillion. The filing reveals a company growing at a red hot pace that requires hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to acquire computing power for training and serving its AI models. Anthropic's revenue growth is closely tied to a few big customers.

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  The firm said around one fifth of its 16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026 came from just two customers. What do you think that is? Meta and?

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Amazon or something? I don't know. Who would be the other one? Just two customers? Do we have any idea, Tyler? The company expects a significant portion of its revenue to come from a limited number of customers for the foreseeable future, probably themselves at one point. I mean, that's the big vision, of course. Here's some biggest takeaways. Computing costs are growing fast. Revenues are increasing even faster. Anthropic spent more on computing capacity in the first half of this year than it did in all of 2025, when it spent 7.3 billion and generated 4.6 billion in revenue. Well, we do have our special guest here with us in the TV.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  Joining in just a few minutes.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  Joining in just a couple of minutes. So let's keep going through this.

• 1:48:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the 80 billion number is big. Shouldn't be that unexpected. But the reason that I think it will be somewhat jarring to people is just that they have they've been talking about positive adjusted.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. How is the market going to react to this? Will the market be able to digest this with these obligations?

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  The annoying thing is that it's a draft.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  We don't know if it's a final draft. And they call it a new draft.

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  So it's just very, again, I don't want to don't think we can spend that much time on it until the draft is completed. But I think this is, again, it's not like it's been a secret that the AI labs spend a lot of money.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Company recorded a net loss of 80 billion in the six months ending June 30th, far more than the 42 billion it lost in all of 2025. That's to be expected with the acceleration. The vast majority of that loss, 72 billion, resulted from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments the company issued to raise funding. Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this

• 1:49:44John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that's

• 1:49:45Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Important detail.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  Cash expense.

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:50John Coogan?

  Okay. People will be digesting this for a while. Dario and Daniela Amade don't get paid all that much by big tech standards. The brother and sister who serve as Anthropic's chief executive and president respectively draw compensation that puts them roughly on par with the median top executive of an S and P 500 company and somewhat behind their tech company peers. Well, we will dig into that more tomorrow in the reactions. We have Jay Leno joining us here in the TV.

• 1:50:12Speaker 06

  Right, yeah.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  Jay, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:50:17Speaker 06

  Business, not science.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  Thank you. Yes, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate you coming down.

• 1:50:25Speaker 06

  I was shooting porn. Wow.

• 1:50:27Jordi Hays?

  Why is that?

• 1:50:28Speaker 06

  Just the studio.

• 1:50:29John Coogan?

  Just the studio is a little DIY for you?

• 1:50:32Speaker 06

  Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  What does it take to make a great studio?

• 1:50:36Speaker 06

  I'm not really sure, but this is certainly qualified. My GPS, I said, Kowenga, it's somehow it read Cochran. I'm going, why am I downtown?

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:50:47Speaker 06

  I'm sorry.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  We're happy to have you.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  We're hanging out.

• 1:50:49Speaker 06

  Let's talk.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  What did you drive here?

• 1:50:51Speaker 06

  I drove a 2012 McLaren.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. One of the first ones. I've been involved with the company since the beginning, so. Yeah, really good. I enjoy them. Terrific cars, terrific cars.

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Terrific cars.

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  What do you like about them most? What do you think of the criticism it's the rich guy go fast car?

• 1:51:09Speaker 06

  Well, I'm a rich guy and I go fast.

• 1:51:11John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:51:13Speaker 06

  Guilty.

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  Guilty.

• 1:51:15Speaker 06

  Well, no, well, you know, I like it. I like it because I was in on the ground floor. I find customer service has been great. You know, when I bought the car, I'm specing it out and I said, let me carbon fiber. He goes, do you track the car? I go, no, this is going to be sugar. He said, you don't need a carbon fiber brakes. You can save 20 grand. Oh, okay.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, instead of trying to upsell you.

• 1:51:37Speaker 06

  I did that. I had the car six months. They called them and said, oh, there's an upgrade from whatever it was to 617 horsepower. You want that? I said, how much is it? He goes, it's free. Okay.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:48Speaker 06

  And, you know, I bought the P1. I bought the new W1.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  The W1?

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Track only W1?

• 1:51:57Speaker 06

  No, no, it's a street. You know, I don't want to be that guy, the fat guy in the leather racing suit. Doesn't quite fit. If I'm going to race, I'm going to race Miata's, you know? I don't want to, because, you know, I did the I did a celebrity I was once with with Dan Gurney, right? Sorry, right behind Dan, one of these things where they gave everybody a Toyota Celica. I'm right behind Dan Gurney. Okay, I'll do it. Brake lights, brake lights. Turn, turn. Okay, good. And then he's a little bit ahead of me. Okay. And I, now he's in my rearview mirror. I go, how did that happen? And then he passes me. He lapped me. I have no idea. I go, that, okay, that's not, I'm not a race car driver. I enjoy automobiles. I do working on them, but I am not a race car. You know, driving is like sex. All men think they're good at it. They're not.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  No, it's the most, like, actually driving on a track is the most humbling thing.

• 1:52:47Speaker 06

  Plus, you know

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  There's something about, like, something about cars, it's like, the reason that F1 is still, I would say, almost challenged as a sport is that in almost every other sport, you can tell what the athlete is going through and you can tell how intense it is. You can see the sweat. You know that they're running back and forth, all these different things. And in a race car, you can't, one, you can't tell that it's physical unless you've been in a race car. And two, they make it look so easy that it almost

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:53:17Jordi Hays?

  And it's just like, oh, they're just going around in circles.

• 1:53:19Speaker 06

  Well, that's what, we live in there now where everybody thinks everybody else's job is easy.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:23Speaker 06

  You know, no matter what you do, like, oh, you're tonight show, so you come in at like 3:00, you have your jokes to read, and then you leave at like 5:30. No, no, I get there at 7:00 in the morning. I leave at midnight, you know? Why? Well, I got to see the movie. I got to read the book. I got to pre-interview, you know, I mean, yeah, but that's kind of See, I'm a huge believer in low self-esteem. You know, it's the key to success. If you don't think you're the smartest person in the room, you just shut up and you pay attention. And that's what I did when I got to the Tonight Show. Give me the best lighting guy. Give me the best director. And please tell me when I suck. Just tell me when this show sucks. The show sucked. Okay, what do I got to do to make it better? But, you know, I have friends of mine in the business and, you know, nobody lies. Nobody tells them the truth.

• 1:54:07Speaker 06

  No, you're good. You're really good. No, you weren't. Okay, whatever you're doing, change it because it's not working. So that's what's worked.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Did you have any rules for the Tonight Show? I was listening to an interviewer. He said he has one rule, which is that the current guest cannot trash talk the previous guest. He didn't want his show to be a place This is a random podcaster, Joshua Citarella, but he was saying that he didn't want each interviewer to be, each guest to be a referendum on the previous one, trying to score points on the last interviewer that he

• 1:54:40Speaker 06

  Oh, no, that was never a problem.

• 1:54:42John Coogan?

  But did you have any, like, rules that you felt

• 1:54:45Speaker 06

  Well, the rule I had was anybody can pull the cord and stop the train.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:48Speaker 06

  You know, we had interns. You guys are in your 20s, okay? I'm old. Tell me if the joke sounds corny or if it's that dated.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:57Speaker 06

  Or just let me know if I sound like an

• 1:54:59Jordi Hays?

  I'll tell you if it's cooked.

• 1:55:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And I'll go, you know, that's kind of an old reference. I remember one day, I'm watching TV and the Stones are on and they're endless comeback tours, you know? And I said, oh, God, they look pretty good, you know? And look over and the interns are, they're all laughing. They go, Mr. Leno, they're really old. Well, yeah, but this, no, they don't look, it just made me laugh. It just made me laugh. I go, you know, you're right. You're right. Guys, they look like old guys playing guitar.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Back on cars, the ZR1 X.

• 1:55:30Speaker 06

  Fabulous car. You know something? That is the greatest performance bargain in the history. For less than the sales tax on a Ferrari, you get a car that's faster.

• 1:55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Speaker 06

  Okay, not quite as sophisticated and all the things to go with it. But, you know, it's very, very good.

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:48Speaker 06

  And the nice thing about American supercars is you get in with your phone or your devices and everything syncs up right away. You get in even McLaren or Koenigsegg, Bugatti. Hang on, oh, my phone.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Forgot about that.

• 1:56:02Speaker 06

  It doesn't quite work, you know? And plus, you know, a lot of them don't meet emissions or don't crash standards, do the phony Montana plate thing. Okay, now you're in jail. You know, that's the great thing about it. And it's extremely well, you know, the greatest thing that happened in Detroit was going bankrupt.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Speaker 06

  Because they fired all the marketing guys, the guy from Whirlpool and, you know, I'm with Maytag, but I can sell cars. And it's all engineers now. Even Mark Royce, the president of GM, he's at Nürburgring like once a month. He went 233 the other day in the new Corvette around Nürburgring. What CEO, what company would allow the CEO to run 233 miles an hour? And it makes for a better car, a better vehicle.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Is that worth chasing? Because the ZR1 X has, you know, track car performance from just a few years ago and now it's a road car. Is that worth the automotive chasing?

• 1:56:55Speaker 06

  I don't think you've ever seen an ad for the ZR1.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:56:58Speaker 06

  Because they're all sold out. GTD Mustangs, that's a record at LeMans. I've never seen an ad, the new Mustang with the guy, you know, two-day stubble and the girl, ooh, looking over. You know, if a product's any good, it sells itself. And, you know, in the early days of automobiles, it was race on Sunday, sell on Monday. And that kind of fell into, it just didn't work anymore. They just stopped. GM had a ban on racing and, you know, all that. But once they got back into racing, once you could see American stuff as competitive, people like to root for the home team. I mean, I do. I mean, I love my McLarens and everything, but I'd love to see Ford and Chevy.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Cadillac's doing F1 now.

• 1:57:39Speaker 06

  I know. How hilarious is that? You know, the last

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  You go to the race on Sunday, you buy an Escalade on Monday.

• 1:57:46Speaker 06

  That's right. Or, you know, the great one is the Blackwing.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  That's what I got outside.

• 1:57:51Speaker 06

  Isn't that a great car?

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:57:52Speaker 06

  You know, it's fantastic. The last stick shift Cadillac was 1948.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Been a long time.

• 1:57:56Speaker 06

  And now you go up to, and the fact that whoever thought that Cadillac would have a stick, but Ferrari, BMW, Lamborghini, no.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Well, they're bringing them back. What do you think of the E manuals? The Manwale, the manual by wire?

• 1:58:10Speaker 06

  Well, same thing, I think, of a blow up doll. If you can't get a real girl, I guess it's okay. You know, I mean, it's kind of embarrassing and hoping nobody sees you, but, you know. No, you know.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Seems like the young people might still, it might be good enough. I don't know.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  They won't know the difference.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:58:30Speaker 06

  Well, the young people, you know, when I was a kid, every guy pretended to be in certain cars because they got your girls. So even if they knew nothing, hey, what's the mill? You know, this kind of stupid talk. Now, when I meet car guys, boy, they're committed, men and women.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Because they're watching YouTube videos, they're all the data.

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Way more information.

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  They can learn.

• 1:58:48Speaker 06

  Like Sydney Sweeney, you know, the actress?

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:50Speaker 06

  She is a welder, a fabricator.

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:58:54Speaker 06

  I mean, she really knows her stuff. It just makes me laugh now. She's like, oh, the sexy girl. Well, she was always attractive.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:59Speaker 06

  But she used to, well, she worked for Rod Emery.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:04Speaker 06

  And I worked with him, I guess, you know. But she apprenticed in his shop and he taught her a lot. It just makes me laugh. So the young people I meet, men and women, are really into cars.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:16Speaker 06

  And unfortunate, unfortunate, manual cells, I mean, it gets them in the showroom. You know, and then the wife goes, I'm not driving this. All right, honey, my wife doesn't like the stick.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  What do you think of the idea that the car industry is currently going through their equivalent of the quartz crisis where customers will either be buying an appliance, which will be a self-driving Tesla probably, or something that's completely manual, completely, you know, real engine, just emotion, and they'll have.

• 1:59:51Speaker 06

  Well, that, yeah, I think what you have now, electric cars are the quartz.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Speaker 06

  Vehicles.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Speaker 06

  And mechanical cars. I mean, I think supercars will be like snowmobiles or any other recreational vehicle. You take it out on weekends.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:03Speaker 06

  And people will continue to buy the one with the most valves, the most cams.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:07Speaker 06

  I mean, just watch, along the zone. I mean, it's the most complicated way to tell time.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:12Speaker 06

  A Timax or a Citizen for $50 is even more accurate because it's electronic. But there's a certain, I enjoy winding it. It has a certain feel to it.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:23Speaker 06

  I like it. So I think, I think people will seek out the car. You know, I've got the Dodge, the Demon, and I've got the Challenger. And the Challenger is six-speed manual. And obviously, the 10-speed is quicker with the automatic. But I like driving the stick better.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you like?

• 2:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, um? Go for it.

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  Do you like driver's watches?

• 2:00:44Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  The Vacheron-Histoire?

• 2:00:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've got a history in 1921.

• 2:00:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:49Speaker 06

  We have the Jay Leno watch we actually put out. It sold out three times around our third or fourth.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:00:55Speaker 06

  Print thing.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, do you think going to the track, participating in motorsports will become more popular as more of the cars on the road are self-driving?

• 2:01:06Speaker 06

  I don't know. I think so. You know, we have a situation now where, unfortunately, the whole company, there's no middle anymore. You have poor people, or you have rich people that can afford. You know, I'm like with the Mission S, the Porsche. I see Porsche moving upscale. And I want to be like Ferrari, sell fewer cars to more money to fewer people. I'm starting to see, in the old days, every Porsche, you know, Ferrari had 800 miles, a Porsche had 60,000, a Corvette, same thing. They used to do the shootouts, which is fastest. The only ones that showed up would be Corvette and Porsche. Everybody else just, just didn't, you know. And now you have cars like people buy a GT3, and I'm putting it away.

• 2:01:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:48Speaker 06

  They know what it's going to do. Okay. I mean, that's the sad part. I would hate to see them become... Porsches have always been expensive, but they're not rare. There's a lot of them around. They make a lot of cars. But using that Ferrari model, well, you can make more money with fewer cars.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:06Speaker 06

  But now you have this elite clientele. And, you know, the great thing about Corvette is it's an aspirational car. If you're a guy with your own plumbing business, boy, you can aspire to own, yeah, it's over 100,000, but it's not a million.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:20Speaker 06

  So at some point in your life.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  You can get one.

• 2:02:23Speaker 06

  You can get one. And that's, that's what I like about it. I hate, and everything is that way now. Hotels are either, you're the Motel 6 or the Four Seasons.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. The middle dies.

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  K-shaped.

• 2:02:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. Restaurant, you fast food or top-end restaurant, the Applebee's, the Denny's.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:38Speaker 06

  Just regular restaurant, because we have no middle class anymore. And that's the sad thing.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, sad.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Were LA's roads always horrible, or have you felt them getting?

• 2:02:50Speaker 06

  No, they've always been horrible.

• 2:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I joke, I joke about the G-Wagon being like the LA car because you need like a four-by-four to get around.

• 2:02:58Speaker 06

  Well, that's because, gee, these roads are awful, not what people say.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Jesus.

• 2:03:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, it's so funny, and there's no excuse for, I mean, I go to Detroit and you got frosty and it's winter. Okay, understandable. It's a beautiful day every day, except for that Thursday when it rained. I don't know why the roads have to be so awful.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:03:19Speaker 06

  It's, it's really, I've, and Tesla especially is susceptible to this. I've had five blowouts, just bam, hit a pothole and you go. And just, just huge, and they'll take weeks for the pothole to be fixed.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:34Speaker 06

  And when you hit the same one twice, that's when you really go crazy.

• 2:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's a huge pothole on my commute here. It's, I've hit it every day for a year. Just constantly. I need to report it or something.

• 2:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Our friend Jason had the idea of like going and doing a performance art, going and filling up overnight, filling up all the potholes with dirt and flowers.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:03:53Jordi Hays?

  As a way to try to, you know, draw attention to it. I don't, I don't think it would fix it.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Maybe LA has bigger problems.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think Mission S will be fun to drive?

• 2:04:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think so. All Porsches are fun to drive. The electric ones is nice. But that, that's the classic example of quartz versus mechanical.

• 2:04:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:10Speaker 06

  Porsche people don't like electric. It's just, I mean, it's fast. It does anything it's supposed to do. You know, I drove the Rempe.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:18Speaker 06

  That's, and it's, although it's two and a half million dollars more, it's a tenth faster than the Plaid.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:26Speaker 06

  And it's, and that's it. There's no, there's no click to the shifting. And, you know, the same when you wind with these, you hear the.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:36Speaker 06

  It's either get it or you don't.

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Well, it feels like Mate learned a really valuable lesson from that project.

• 2:04:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Which is double down on heritage and, and mechanics and the emotion. And it doesn't seem like he's going to be going deeper down that path.

• 2:04:52Speaker 06

  No, I, I think, because remember, they were all supposed to be electric at 2030, everybody.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:57Speaker 06

  And that, that went away.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:04:59Speaker 06

  So now I think you'll, you'll have your high-end, extremely complicated mechanical.

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:06Speaker 06

  Cars, which is what people like. The more valves, the more pistons, more weather.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's interesting. What do you think of the Tesla Roadster demo? The circus act of the kick-flipping car?

• 2:05:18Speaker 06

  Well, I, I think.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  People don't want electric cars. They put rocket engines on it. That's not technically electric.

• 2:05:25Speaker 06

  No, but I think, I think you think Tesla moved from a car company to a space company.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:30Speaker 06

  I mean, what you're doing is showing off your space technology.

• 2:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Speaker 06

  Okay. Because you've got cars from China, you've got cars, Tesla's getting hit on every side. Plus, the politics of it somehow getting involved in that.

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:05:45Speaker 06

  Cost him a lot. But with, with the gas prices, well, Tesla sales were back up again, so they did okay. But I think the car business is, it'll be hard to make money here because somebody will always have something cheaper, you know. So I, I think, I think that's their transition into driverless and outer space, I think.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  How did you grapple with the pull of politics through your career as a talk show host? It feels like there's a lot of pressure from audiences to address the current.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Take a stance.

• 2:06:19John Coogan?

  Take a stance.

• 2:06:20Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, I'm, you know, write joke, tell joke.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:25Speaker 06

  Get check. Very simple.

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:06:27Speaker 06

  Very simple. It's very simple. You know, it depends. Johnny and I had the same theory. I'm not putting myself in Johnny's class. I just mean the fact that you make it smell of both sides equally. And that worked fine. And then all of a sudden, other talk shows come out, you gotta take a side. Well, it's not my job. It's not my job. You know, when you go out in the real world, when you perform in Hollywood, well, you get exactly the audience. You do a chump joke and they all cheer. Okay, fine. You go to Indiana and half of them or a third of them boo.

• 2:06:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Speaker 06

  That's unfair. It's whatever. And when you sell real tickets to real people. So, you know, I announce, I'm just taking politics out of the act. I made a few references. You know, and ticket sales are up 20, 30% because people just, it's like when I go see James Taylor, I don't want to hear a lecture. Well, yeah, I like the rainforest. Yeah, it's good. I don't, oh, that's a tree. And, you know, I can't hear it, sweet baby James. You know, I want to hear, I want to hear the music. Yeah. So it wasn't that hard when I did it. It wasn't that, I mean. When I knew, dim as only you and your Republican friends, I hope, dim as only you and your Democratic buddy, when both sides like you and hate you at the same time, well, then you know you're doing something right.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. What else did you learn from Carson?

• 2:07:43Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, that, as, as a model, that format is dead. I mean, podcasting is the new thing.

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:52Speaker 06

  I mean, the thing that really killed it is not the fact that Letterman and I were so good or any of that nonsense. We just happened to be there at the right time. It's, it's the last days. They passed a law, since they weren't making as much money, after 11:30 at night, you could have another eight minutes of commercials in an hour.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:08:13Speaker 06

  You know, if I see Jake from State Farm again, I'm gonna shoot myself in the head. You know, I mean, I try to, I try to watch late night, I watch them on log.

• 2:08:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:20Speaker 06

  And then there's six minutes of commercials, and, and the 30 second spots are so well done.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:26Speaker 06

  They look like two minute spots.

• 2:08:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:28Speaker 06

  Cars and explosions and airplanes.

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, very entertaining.

• 2:08:30Speaker 06

  Okay, really, and I go, jeez, this still, when we come back.

• 2:08:33Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the market open on CNBC is brutal, too, in that you have like one minute of content and then back to ads for

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, lots of ads.

• 2:08:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's terrible.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, it's, I, I, it's actually so.

• 2:08:43Speaker 06

  And it's funny, because TV used to be, you'd go out and say, you ever see that commercial with the guy, oh, yeah, yeah, it's it. Nobody knows.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right, because everyone's seeing slightly different ads.

• 2:08:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  It was connected to TV.

• 2:08:54Speaker 06

  Nobody, nobody sees.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  It's really hard for, even the ad breakthrough.

• 2:08:57Speaker 06

  The only thing where network or traditionally sports.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:02Speaker 06

  And some event happening right now.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:05Speaker 06

  Let's go with our cameras right now, and that kind of.

• 2:09:07John Coogan?

  Everyone used to know, like, the, the Clydesdales, or the Coca-Cola Peddler Bear, and like, those, those.

• 2:09:13Speaker 06

  For example, they shoot game shows now in Ireland, and they fly Americans over.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  Whoa, to be in the audience?

• 2:09:20Speaker 06

  To be in the audience, so you think it's shot in America, but it's shot in Ireland.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:25Speaker 06

  I don't know why it cost them a lot. You know, we did a, I did an awful show for Mattel, this Hot Wheel show, it wasn't a very good show. And we, for two years, three years, we shot at my garage, and I donated the garage.

• 2:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:38Speaker 06

  And they made a donation to a charity. It was cheaper to send 175 people to Ireland, put them up for two months, pay them a bad DM.

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:48Speaker 06

  Than it was to shoot in my garage for two days.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Is that taxes in Los Angeles and California?

• 2:09:54Speaker 06

  Well, that's all.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  Or tax incentives?

• 2:09:55Speaker 06

  Well, all, all the things, the, the, the other get the incentives.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:09:59Speaker 06

  Like here, if you go down Cowanga, it's $5,000. You make a left, oh, it's another 7,500. But you can go right, but they, there's a formula, they figure out where you wanna shoot. You can just go on those streets.

• 2:10:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:11Speaker 06

  You go down the other street, oh, the guy, I saw you go down the other street.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:15Speaker 06

  You know, I mean, it's starting to change a little bit now, but it's a bit like the barn door, you know, the, the, the horse has left. I mean, everybody's in Atlanta and every other place now.

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:26Jordi Hays?

  How did you, how did you navigate this relentless nature of, of show business? This is something, you know, we start.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  You didn't find it relentless? It's 7:00 AM to midnight every day?

• 2:10:35Speaker 06

  I had real jobs, they suck.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:10:39Speaker 06

  You know, you get paid pretty good.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:41Speaker 06

  You know, if you're a cop or a nurse, your days are hell, you get hurt, you get beat up.

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:47Speaker 06

  And you make $400 a week.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:50Speaker 06

  You know, I always tell people, the way show, you're gonna get screwed, but when you get screwed, you get a big pile of money. Okay, see, here's the thing, you're gonna get screwed, you know. I always tell, I always tell guys, don't fall in love with a hooker, because that's what show business is. Eventually, it's gonna end badly, but when it does end, hopefully you have a big stack of cash.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:10Speaker 06

  You know, my favorite joke, I did a joke about Charlie Sheen, you know, Charlie Sheen went through $200 million. Remember when he was that whole thing? And the joke was, he spent it on cocaine, gambling, and women, and the rest of the money, he just wasted.

• 2:11:29Speaker 06

  That's my favorite joke.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  What, can you explain to me?

• 2:11:35Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  Difference?

• 2:11:36Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:11:36John Coogan?

  Between what it takes to perform at various time slots, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30? This informed so much of the late night wars, and I never fully understood why someone would work at midnight, but not 11:00 PM. We came up in the on-demand era.

• 2:11:56Speaker 06

  Well, I think, yeah, that's right.

• 2:11:58John Coogan?

  It did.

• 2:11:58Speaker 06

  That's what I hear.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  What, what was it?

• 2:12:00Speaker 06

  Well, who's up late at night? College kids?

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:03Speaker 06

  Out of work people?

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:04Speaker 06

  Whatever it might be.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:06Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  So if the audience is different.

• 2:12:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, who goes to bed at 9:00, this person, that person?

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:10Speaker 06

  I mean, that's really the way that, that's really the way they do it.

• 2:12:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:13Speaker 06

  Because when, when you watch every ad now, it's Advil and all kinds of pain relievers and, you know.

• 2:12:19John Coogan?

  For the late nights.

• 2:12:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:12:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, all like.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  And so you would see that feedback of someone took a particular slot, and they're not performing well in the ratings because they had a more mature, or maybe a younger target audience in mind for those jokes, and they weren't landing.

• 2:12:35Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, it's really, you see what people laugh at. This is why I went, this is why I was on the road every weekend, because when you're in the studio, a guy pushes a button, laugh.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:46Speaker 06

  Applause.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:47Speaker 06

  So you do something, exactly, I rest my case.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we just got to.

• 2:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was about to ask, I mean, it's so much, it's actually, people that make content today have it so easy, because you put something out.

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Like, we'll get text messages live from our friends that are, that are laughing, whatever, or something's funny, or, hey, you should have this person on right now, or this thing just happened, or the chat will update us, or someone will leave a review and say, uh, you know, John just talked for 10 minutes straight, no one else said a word, stuff like, stuff like that. Um, and we, we take all that, some of the stuff you naturally take to heart, other stuff you ignore, whatever, but you guys, you're just kind of like in a bubble, and so for you.

• 2:13:29Speaker 06

  Well, the trick is not to be in the bubble.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  So you go on the road and you just deliver?

• 2:13:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, you try, if this is really, and you get a sense of where people are, and where, and what, what's, what's fair or unfair when you, the real, the joke should be pure, you know? People always say to me, I bet when, I bet you wish you were, you were on TV now with Trump. I go, no, because I don't like Trump, I can't stand the guy. And when you don't like someone, it's harder to be, you know, with George Bush, I go, you know, I don't think President Bush quite understands. And, and people would start to giggle because you're alluding to the fact that maybe he's not the brightest guy. But you, you're not just say, he's a big jerk, he's stupid, you know, you're not doing that, you just go, I don't, yeah, I don't think he quite gets it. And then there's snicker, snicker, you know, and that, that's, that's what worked for me, you know?

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:17Speaker 06

  But when you dislike, when you truly dislike a guy, it's hard to be funny about it.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:22Speaker 06

  I used to, there was a comic, I won't say who he is, but he got divorced, so it's the worst thing that happened, he'd be, he'd be, and say, anyway, my ex-wife! She's, whoa. And the joke wouldn't be, get funny, because it sounds like the final, the final, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever have, uh, is there anybody that stands out as somebody that you, you would sort of joke at or criticize on the show, but in real life, you were, you were, you got along really well?

• 2:14:49Speaker 06

  Well, that's just about everybody, I mean, that's what the show is, you know? Yeah, yeah, that, yeah, that's basically what you did, that was your living, you know, yeah, yeah, I think that's fair to say.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the importance of repeatable formats, like, top 10 lists and certain headline?

• 2:15:04Speaker 06

  Well, if something works, you do it again. Headlines work for us.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:08Speaker 06

  The man on the street stuff worked for us, because we never talked to any, and we never had a ringer.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:14Speaker 06

  We never talked to more than 20 people a night.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:17Speaker 06

  And we'd use 16 of them.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:19Speaker 06

  You know, how was Mount Rushmore formed? Erosion.

• 2:15:24Speaker 06

  You know, and really?

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:26Speaker 06

  Like, not only five, five of our greatest presidents, I mean, the wind, the rain.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Magic.

• 2:15:32Speaker 06

  And in the right order.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that's.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  In the right order.

• 2:15:35Speaker 06

  I mean, what, what's the odds of nature doing that, you know?

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  People on the street.

• 2:15:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that, that, yeah, you know, Letterman had the top 10 list, and we had headlines, and Jaywalking and some of the other stuff, yeah, I, I enjoyed it, it was fun, I enjoyed it.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  Did you and the team try and incubate those, like, think of new formats that would be repeatable?

• 2:15:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you try some of the ones that are not repeatable, you don't repeat.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:00Speaker 06

  They don't work, don't keep doing it.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:02Speaker 06

  You know, that, that, comics are inherently lazy, and they'll get, you know, this joke worked in Denver two years ago. Okay, that was in Denver two years ago.

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:10Speaker 06

  Okay, it hasn't worked in two years. You either go move to Denver and keep doing the joke, or you can come up with something new, you know?

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, the Holy Trinity, I wanna hear your reflection on the Holy Trinity, and then.

• 2:16:22Speaker 06

  Of supercars, you mean?

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Supercars, we're back to cars, sorry.

• 2:16:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  And then I wanna hear, do you think we are about to enter the new Holy Trinity? With the W1, the F80, and the Mission S, there's been some grumblings about that, but people are debating.

• 2:16:37Speaker 06

  Well, I, I mean, that's kind of, I, I think the P1 has proved itself.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:43Speaker 06

  Uh, the 918 was good.

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:48Speaker 06

  But now, the standard GT3 911 faster than 918. I mean, progress moves.

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:56Speaker 06

  I mean, it moves tremendously fast.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:58Speaker 06

  You never quite know what it's gonna be, what it is to one generation.

• 2:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Speaker 06

  I mean, when I was a kid, the 427 Cobra, that was it. You know, Carroll Shelby used to put a hundred dollar bill on the dashboard and then he'd nail it. If you could, you could get the hundred dollar bill, you could keep it. And nobody ever could because you just, you know, you just. So that was sort of the, that was sort of the standard bear.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:20Speaker 06

  Before that was Aston Martin, zero to sixty to zero in like nine seconds.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:26Speaker 06

  I'm thinking, oh, with the, I have some, it had brakes and it goes fast, you know? Now those are, you know, you know, an old lady needs an Altima who can do that, you know? So, yeah, I mean, I don't really buy the Holy Trini, you know, the Holy Trinity. It, it sells magazines, people, people need, wanna take a side. Your dad liked Ferrari, you like red or whatever it might be.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  They want structure, they want a format.

• 2:17:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:17:49John Coogan?

  People like these formats.

• 2:17:50Speaker 06

  Well, they don't really read magazines anymore. I would hate, I would hate to be in that business.

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:54Speaker 06

  The magazine business.

• 2:17:55John Coogan?

  There's a couple that are still doing well.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Surprisingly.

• 2:17:57John Coogan?

  Economist, I read the Financial Times.

• 2:17:59Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, yeah, those are, those will do well, but it's just.

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Surprising thing is the coffee table book business is booming.

• 2:18:05John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  Is that true?

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:07John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:18:07Speaker 06

  Well, my favorite, I love celebrity books.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:18:10Speaker 06

  Celebrity, you know, I've written a book.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:12Speaker 06

  And it's a children's book.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:14Speaker 06

  And it'll say, page one, cat, and I have some clever drawing.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:18Speaker 06

  Okay, that's not a book bomb, okay? That's a pamphlet, it says cat, school, car, okay? This is for someone, a prepubescent, some child, eight, five to six. You did not write a book. But I would have celebrities come, yeah, I've been working on this book for a while, Jay, and I think it's, it's a children's book. It's the most simple poem and it's usually roses, always begins the way they always begin. I go, okay, and I would pretend that, oh, this is really, yes, that's not really a book. But you get, all you need is a good illustrator. And then you put the word cat or tree or something in there.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Cat, what, what business?

• 2:18:54Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you, why don't you, why don't you make the, the final children's book then?

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  If it's so, if it's so easy.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  If it's so easy.

• 2:19:01Speaker 06

  I did, I had a children's book, it was called A Roast Beef Could Fly. It did, it did really well.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:19:06Speaker 06

  No, it was really popular.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  You, you think it was more of a book, more of a book than a pamphlet?

• 2:19:11Speaker 06

  Well, it was, it was, it was a children's book.

• 2:19:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:14Speaker 06

  And it came with a CD where you could.

• 2:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Children's books, for me, pamphlets for thee, kinda thing?

• 2:19:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's it. Well, I, I think.

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  We'll get copies.

• 2:19:25Speaker 06

  If you have more than three hundred words.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:28Speaker 06

  Okay, it can be a book.

• 2:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:19:29Speaker 06

  Okay, when you have, when you have fifteen words.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:32Speaker 06

  Mine was based on a true story.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:19:35Speaker 06

  Did you ever read the book?

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  No, but I will.

• 2:19:37Speaker 06

  I rest my case, yeah.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:19:38Jordi Hays?

  I'll order it, I, I mean, we burn through, we burn through books.

• 2:19:41Speaker 06

  Well, this you should burn through, and you can burn this one when you're done, yeah.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  Oh, I'm vehemently against burning books. Um, what, were there any particular business opportunities that you turned down while you were in the thick of?

• 2:19:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, a million bucks sold of a Budweiser can.

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  Okay, would that be on the show? Like, how does that happen?

• 2:20:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't drink, so I don't wanna, I don't wanna be a guy, go to a bar, but I don't drink. Well, you say, and plus, you can't get greedy. I was on TV every night.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:10Speaker 06

  I don't need to be on TV when I'm in commercials in between when I'm on TV.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:15Speaker 06

  To come off TV and go, hi, I'm Jay Leno, you know, so, so, so. You know, my favorite was, hi, I'm so and so. And I'm here to tell you about, no, shut up, I don't care really what a celebrity has to say.

• 2:20:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:26Speaker 06

  But it just makes me, like, you don't know what you're talking about, you know?

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  What about, uh, something more behind the scenes? Instead of being a spokesperson, someone comes to you, I mean, the car, the famous Carson story is the suits that he was not compensated for appropriately.

• 2:20:38Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 2:20:39John Coogan?

  Um, I'm wondering about other business opportunities.

• 2:20:41Speaker 06

  Well, I have, I have some, I have car accessory business.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:20:43Speaker 06

  I do polishes and things, something that has a shelf life.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  But did that come up after you had finished your run in Hollywood mostly, or were you?

• 2:20:51Speaker 06

  That came after The Tonight Show.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, after The Tonight Show.

• 2:20:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:54John Coogan?

  Um, but were you getting your door beaten down by business opportunities throughout The Tonight Show?

• 2:20:58Speaker 06

  Well, people come with, you know, watermelon on a stick, this is gonna be a big thing.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:02Speaker 06

  Okay, great, thanks, Bob.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:04Speaker 06

  You know, no, I, no, I, I.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  Stay focused.

• 2:21:06Speaker 06

  You know, I had, I, I make money doing this.

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:10Speaker 06

  This seems to pay extremely well.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:13Speaker 06

  I will stick with this.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:21:14Speaker 06

  You know, I had a friend of mine, he was a doctor, optometrist.

• 2:21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:17Speaker 06

  He always wanted to open a hot dog stand.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:19Speaker 06

  So he opened a hot dog stand, and it was doing okay.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:23Speaker 06

  And then, well, let me open another on the other side of town where there's more people. And that did okay. And then he's running between, and then he lost his optometry business.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:21:31Speaker 06

  Because he, really, really, Bob, you have the hot dogs? Yeah, the eye thing is, I think, pays a little bit more money.

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:36Speaker 06

  No, but this, yeah.

• 2:21:37Jordi Hays?

  My, my thing is when I have, like, um, I have a guy that I've got my hair cut.

• 2:21:44Speaker 06

  And quite lovely, I must say, yes.

• 2:21:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you too, I'm, I'm aiming for this.

• 2:21:48Speaker 06

  I believe that is called a quaff.

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so I'm sitting there, he's cutting my hair.

• 2:21:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  And he starts pitching me on the business that he's working on overnight. And I'm sitting there thinking like, you're sitting there with scissors around my head.

• 2:22:02Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Cutting my hair, I want you to be dreaming about cutting hair. I want you to be going to sleep, the last thought that you have is about the, the haircut that you're gonna do in the morning. I don't want you to, in this case, he was, you know, building some AI mumbo jumbo, you know?

• 2:22:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, no, you're correct, you know, this, and, and my business is nothing harder than writing a joke. And I see comedians, hi, I'm so and so, but I'm being serious now. And I wanna do a, a special on, well, no, there are people that do this better than you, you know? Write, write the joke, just, that's what you do, you write jokes. Why would I hire a comedian to give me a serious eulogy about whatever it might be? You know, why would I do that? But comedians do it all the time, or they wanna sing.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:22:46Speaker 06

  Or they wanna act.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:47Speaker 06

  You know, um, you know, Seinfeld and I always used to say, what if we went on vacation and we liked it? Then we'd be screwed, so we don't go on vacation.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:57Speaker 06

  Because telling jokes is, ah, it's, you show up, you get a huge amount of money. You know, I was in, uh, where was that, Alabama. Plane landed at six thirty, quarter to seven, got to the theater at seven twenty, went on at eight o'clock, tech, come home. Fabulous, you know, no rehearsal, no team, so the drunk, the bass player's drunk, we gotta find a replacement. You know, that's, comedy is, if you can do it, it's pretty easy and it pays very well.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:28Speaker 06

  And you get paid for doing the same thing over and over. You know, you can do one HBO special and get this much money, or you can do a hundred dates and make twice that much money. And you didn't give all your material away for free, you know? You make, you, you're on HBO, you're making a tenth of a penny per customer? You do a live show, you're making twenty-five dollars a customer, or maybe even fifty dollars a customer.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you prefer comedy tours via plane or tour bus? Did you ever?

• 2:24:02Speaker 06

  I travel by myself, I don't.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  So plane?

• 2:24:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, plane, yeah.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  What, what makes for a good tour bus experience?

• 2:24:08Speaker 06

  I have no idea, I don't believe there is such a thing as, I don't believe there is such thing as a good bus experience.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:14Speaker 06

  Okay, you know, this, this, just hearing that.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Four wheels over here, all of a sudden, all of a sudden.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  Big talk about being into motor vehicles and.

• 2:24:21Speaker 06

  No, I, no, I don't get the whole.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Wants to hop in a plane the first chance he gets.

• 2:24:25Speaker 06

  You, you know, the trick is I can go to work.

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:28Speaker 06

  And when you have a plane, you're flying, and you could do something else. I work on cars during the day.

• 2:24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:34Speaker 06

  And then I go on and I work, you know, that's that old saying, that heart, it tells you that's where the head and the hands work together. You work all day or something, oh, then you stand on the stage and go, this is so much easier than putting a transmission in.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:46Speaker 06

  And if I put a transmission on, I might have made eighty bucks for that day. I tell jokes, ah, you know?

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:53Speaker 06

  No, it's, it's, it's, it's good, it's good.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  How much were you traveling? What was like your, uh, your peak travel year?

• 2:25:01Speaker 06

  Well, I'm doing two hundred dates this year.

• 2:25:03John Coogan?

  Two hundred dates?

• 2:25:04Speaker 06

  I, I've done that, when I was doing The Tonight Show, I'd probably limit it to a hundred and forty or so, because it's only on weekends.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:11Speaker 06

  Or I would do Vegas after The Tonight Show during the week, that kind of stuff.

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  So you fly?

• 2:25:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, yeah, so, I'm, I'm still working.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:19Speaker 06

  You know, I enjoy it, it's a lot of fun, you know? You think of a joke, you, you tell it, you know?

• 2:25:25John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:25:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Where, where does your, um, like, where are you, where are you sourcing, how are you, you're in a bad spot, you're like, I, I need some new jokes. What's your process? Is it sitting down and just, and just, you know, not getting up until you got something?

• 2:25:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm dyslexic, so I have nothing written down.

• 2:25:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:43Speaker 06

  If I don't carry it in my head, that's why I like to work. Uh, yeah, you remember stuff that, that, that's funny. You know, sometimes just simple jokes are easy to write, like, like this joke.

• 2:25:57Speaker 06

  Guy goes to the doctor, doc says, what's the matter? Says, doc, hurts when I press on my rib cage, hurts when I press on my forehead, hurts when I press on my cheekbone, it hurts when I press on my shoulder. Doc says, you got a broken finger.

• 2:26:13Speaker 06

  It's stupid, it's simple. You know, it's not.

• 2:26:19Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even need the laugh track for that one.

• 2:26:21Speaker 06

  They took the audience a little longer to get it. But I mean, just those kind of things, it's just, it's fun when you think of something like that. I would share with people anyway, so why not get paid?

• 2:26:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:26:36Speaker 06

  Very simple.

• 2:26:37John Coogan?

  Did you always have the drive to continue creating, continue telling jokes? Or was this something that like steamrolled?

• 2:26:44Speaker 06

  No, I always have, you know, I had depression era parents.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:48Speaker 06

  And if I don't work this week, I think I'm broke. You know, I have a pool in my house.

• 2:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:53Speaker 06

  I haven't been in it in 30 years. Every time I get near the pool, I hear, oh, is that what you do? You're a rich guy now? You sit in the pool?

• 2:27:00Speaker 06

  Well, you got nothing broken here? All right, yeah, I'm fine.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  You got the McLaren.

• 2:27:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I go back and, well, the McLaren, I'm driving it to fix it. See, I justify, there's no way to justify sitting in the pool.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  You've got no time.

• 2:27:13Speaker 06

  The only time I did sit in the pool is when I went in to fix the light.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:16Speaker 06

  Okay, and it fixed the light. Now I'm wet, I'm wet for a reason.

• 2:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, do you maintain, do you maintain your pool yourself? Like, do you do all the?

• 2:27:23Speaker 06

  Well, I try to do what I can. I mean, I, you know, I don't do all of it.

• 2:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, but it's a good motivation, because if you've got to pay somebody else to maintain the pool, you're like, if I don't, if I don't go to work today, I'm gonna go broke.

• 2:27:32Speaker 06

  Something, exactly. But that, no, that's the way I think. I mean, and you know, funny stuff happens. You know, I did a corporate event for McDonald's and they gave me like a stack of Happy Meal coupons. So I'm not gonna throw them out. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna use them. So I'm driving the McLaren SR, which got the. So I pull into the dry store and I say, I'm gonna have a, two Happy Meals? Sir, we only limit one Happy Meal per customer. I said, oh, well, okay, just one. And he goes, hold on, hold on. Oh, you're Jay Leno? Let me get the, no, don't get the manager. Okay, then the manager comes out, he's got the paper hat, you know. Oh, Mr. Could you pull up to the side here? Okay, pull up. Now the door goes up. Now all the kids see the door go up, so they come running over.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:13Speaker 06

  The guy goes, now, normally we only allow one Happy Meal. I'm listening to this and I hear a guy go, it's Jay Leno who's arguing over a Happy Meal. I'm not, I'm not arguing over, I'm just talking to the guy, you know, and it just, to me, it just seems, it's just like, it just really made me laugh. Just the fact that he's, well, he has norm, we're gonna do this for you.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:36Speaker 06

  But normally, we would only allow one Happy Meal. You'd have to get in line again to get the second Happy Meal.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  I feel like you must.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you got the paparazzi being like, Jay Leno holds up.

• 2:28:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I like getting recognized. It's like high school with money, you know?

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  Have the phones changed the interaction?

• 2:28:51Speaker 06

  No, it's always, you know, so I generally like people. I like to talk to them. Nothing annoys me more than celebrities that just, yes, what is it? I'm sure, you know, why are you in this business? Okay? And does it take a little longer? Yeah.

• 2:29:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:29:07Speaker 06

  Like, for example, in the real world, one out of every 50 people I meet is a car person. So I can actually have a conversation.

• 2:29:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:29:15Speaker 06

  When I go to Pebble Beach, every single person there is a car. So you can't go 10 feet. You tend to get, so, and now I find that kind of void though, because I don't wanna be, I don't wanna say no to people. I know, I'm sorry.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  It would be four hours to get up one mile or something.

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Did you, I'm sure a lot of your peers over the years retired, is, is retirement?

• 2:29:39Speaker 06

  Well, when you have a stroke, that's when you retire.

• 2:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but did any, is there a way to do it well? Because I haven't seen, I haven't seen anybody, at least so far in my life, like retire that well.

• 2:29:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, what are you gonna do? Drink? Gamble? I mean, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? Retire? I mean, to most people, it's, it's your life anyway. If you have, if you're selling insurance, okay, that can get a bit tedious. You don't have to sell insurance when you're retired, but just, I mean, you're still gonna think of funny things to say when you retire, but you want any place to say them. And they, you see, the, the thing about comedy is when you stop, you can never go back. You can't go back five years later, because people now expect you to be five times better than the last time they saw you. And they think, you know, they think you're just talking off the top of your head all the time. They're like, you've done this a million times and we've tried to perfect it and hone it and all this kind of stuff, you know?

• 2:30:37Speaker 06

  So when you haven't done it, and when you haven't done it for a long time, the stage is a strange place to be. When you're on stage every day, it's a second nature. When you do it once a month and someone, somebody, somebody calls, your attention, your attention goes to that, you know? So you have to keep doing it. I mean, I remember Eddie Murphy said, oh, he's gonna get back into stand up, and I would love to see him do it, but he was out of it for 10 years. And where do you practice? Eddie Murphy's gonna be here tonight. I wouldn't have, well, he's trying new stuff, you know?

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  He's forcing his muscle back, yeah.

• 2:31:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I heard people say to me, I was on, I let him, not let him, I fell on somebody. And I said, I did new materials. The guy goes, you know, I saw you two weeks ago at the Comedy Magic Club. You did the same material, so it wasn't new. I go, no, it's the first time I did it on TV. You have to, I try to, you have to practice. I could see this is just, yeah.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  It feels like people have sort of lost the comedy conventions, like they don't fully, because a lot of it just.

• 2:31:34Speaker 06

  No, they haven't, you know, it's exactly the same.

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  No, I, I mean, the audience understanding the conventions.

• 2:31:41Speaker 06

  No, I don't find, no, I think it's always, you know something, if I showed you a Rudolph Valentino movie from the 20s, it was, had women swooning, you'd be laughing.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:50Speaker 06

  It's boring, it just takes a long time, and it's all, ah, okay. But if you see Keaton Chaplin, you know, fat guy, tuxedo falls in a mud puddle. I'm sorry, people laugh just as much now as they did. It really has, funny is fun. That stupid joke I just told you, you could have told that at any time from, from, from the, from the.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  The discovery of the broken finger.

• 2:32:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, for any point in history, from the Renaissance to now, it would work.

• 2:32:20John Coogan?

  It'd still work.

• 2:32:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:32:21Jordi Hays?

  Is that always, I mean, it's funny, because in tech world, everybody's been watching, and more broadly, everybody's been watching the new Nathan Fielder movie, and it has this reference to Who's on First.

• 2:32:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:32:33Jordi Hays?

  And so people have been watching that back and saying, it's like, it's a little hard to get through now, because it's like six minutes long and they're going around and.

• 2:32:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, it takes a long time. And you have to, I remember watching, you know, that came out right after Hiroshima. And they, and they, I've got to tell them, you see Hiroshima? Looks like Emmett's Field after a Dodger game. I go, okay, well, that, that wouldn't, that wouldn't work now.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  That would not fly now. Wow.

• 2:33:02Speaker 06

  But you just fought these people for five years.

• 2:33:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:05Speaker 06

  The Japanese were the worst to the American prisoners of almost any people, torturizing. So it seemed justified to say at the time, it got a big laugh, but it wouldn't work now.

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:15Speaker 06

  You know, but comedy's gotta change with the times.

• 2:33:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:33:19Speaker 06

  I mean, when I was a kid, you'd see racial jokes on TV, oh my God.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:23Speaker 06

  Or women drivers, well, women are fine. Why can't, why couldn't a woman drive? What are you talking about? You know?

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, all the tropes change, but.

• 2:33:30Speaker 06

  That's right. I remember when.

• 2:33:31John Coogan?

  The structure.

• 2:33:32Speaker 06

  I think it was when Harry Reasoner retired, he said, bringing women in to be anchors is not something I think could, people will listen. I go, oh, shut up. That kind of, you know, that, that kind of stuff, you know?

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:44Speaker 06

  He also said, I'm glad I'm leaving now, because I don't wanna have a computer in my house. I mean, people talk that way. Why would you want a computer? How bothersome and annoying would that be?

• 2:33:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:58Speaker 06

  But, you know.

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  No, everyone does.

• 2:34:00Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Everyone does. Do you like the cell phones going in those sealed bags during a comedy show?

• 2:34:06Speaker 06

  I don't care.

• 2:34:07John Coogan?

  You don't care?

• 2:34:08Speaker 06

  I, I don't care. I mean, it's like, if your stuff is good enough for somebody to steal, I guess that's flattering, I suppose. You know something, what are you gonna worry about, everything?

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:18Speaker 06

  Somebody, somebody told the jokes I told.

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:34:20Speaker 06

  Well, okay, you know, you didn't pay anything for the joke, you just thought it up. Yeah, I mean, if somebody steals your movie, of course, that's different, but.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:27Speaker 06

  No, I don't do that. I don't like, I don't like charging people for autographs or, or a picture.

• 2:34:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:34Speaker 06

  You know, it's $300 to take a picture. Really?

• 2:34:36John Coogan?

  People charge for photos and autographs?

• 2:34:39Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, a lot of people.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  The thing that I've heard is people will grab the photograph and say, I'd love to sign it. Who should I make it out to? Because they don't want to sign to no one, so that it.

• 2:34:49Speaker 06

  Oh, and it shows up on eBay.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, when it shows up on eBay. Who cares?

• 2:34:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, oh, and somebody paid $50 for your picture. Oh, that's, that's, that's pretty good.

• 2:34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's pretty nice.

• 2:34:58Speaker 06

  Somebody actually bought my picture. Well, that's, you know.

• 2:35:00John Coogan?

  Just be happy.

• 2:35:01Speaker 06

  Be happy, you know?

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  Just be happy.

• 2:35:03Speaker 06

  Be happy you don't have a real job.

• 2:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Speaker 06

  Because real jobs are horrible. I rest my case.

• 2:35:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's true. This is a pretty good gig.

• 2:35:11Speaker 06

  No, no, but it is.

• 2:35:12John Coogan?

  No, you're 100% right.

• 2:35:13Speaker 06

  I mean, it's fun. You come to work and, you know, it's not the same thing every day.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  No, no, because the news moves, it's so fresh.

• 2:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people, people have asked us, I mean, we, we never, John had done some media stuff prior to this, but I'd always been more behind the scenes, and I never would imagine being on, being on camera. It wasn't something I aspired to. I didn't, I didn't necessarily do it for attention. But the fact that every single day, like John and I would be having the same exact conversations, whether or not we were getting, it was a career or not, right?

• 2:35:49Speaker 06

  Well, here's the thing that will save you.

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:35:51Speaker 06

  No matter how much you're in media now, nobody knows who the hell you are.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:56Speaker 06

  They, they really don't.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:58Speaker 06

  One guy came to see me, he said, oh, I didn't know you were a comedian. I thought you'd just like bring a couch out and interview people. No, no, I was, oh, good, yeah, most, nobody pays.

• 2:36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, the world's huge.

• 2:36:10Speaker 06

  Nobody gets recognized. I mean, unless you're the, the it girl, or you're the athlete or something. Like, when I, when I was, when we were doing The Tonight Show in the 70s and 80s, every, next day, everybody, hey, you, hey, that's that guy. I saw you last night. Now you, you would have to do 25 or 30 appearances to get more than a dozen people, because nobody, it's so fractured now. Everybody's watching streaming, and we all just, there's no central. You know, I used to watch, like, the network news, because I would learn about stuff I'm not interested in. So, oh, now I have that, now I don't have that knowledge anymore. I just watch the news that I wanna watch.

• 2:36:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36:49Speaker 06

  So you watch either your Trump news, or you watch your, you know, MSNBC.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  Something that's perfectly tailored to you.

• 2:36:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, people only agree with you.

• 2:36:57John Coogan?

  Yep, they're in the bubble.

• 2:36:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what I mean. So I, that's why I like the road. You get outside your bubble and it's fun, yeah.

• 2:37:03Jordi Hays?

  What advice do you have for people that are afraid of AI?

• 2:37:08Speaker 06

  Well, the same thing I had, you know, I have a steam engine from 1866 in my garage, a big thing. And Luddite used to break in and smash it because with the big wheel, it ran a thing and it put 125 people out of work at a factory. Because there's a big, you know, you didn't need all the people doing that. You know, in the, you know, there's a book you guys are probably like, like, by the time we were in church, it's called Precision. It's the history of precision. And before mass, you know, the, what do you call it?

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Mass manufacturing.

• 2:37:41Speaker 06

  Mass manufacturing. Every town had a craftsman. You had a guy, you'd have a gunmaker. And he would make a gun.

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:49Speaker 06

  Or maybe three a year and a few people in the town would have it.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:54Speaker 06

  And then Colt comes along and the mass manufacturing of guns and everybody can have a gun. Not quite as precise, not quite as nicely made.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:02Speaker 06

  But at least you can have it, you know? And so the craftsmen went out of business because craftsmen, you don't really have craftsmen anymore. Even woodworkers that can really make furniture.

• 2:38:11John Coogan?

  What about Christian Von Koenigsegg? He's a craftsman, isn't he, not?

• 2:38:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, Christmas, yeah, he is. But I think he's independently wealthy.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:19Speaker 06

  You know, I mean, he can afford to build $5 million automobile.

• 2:38:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:23Speaker 06

  You know?

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it feels like the craftsmen do stick around, they just become incredibly.

• 2:38:27Speaker 06

  Well, what I'm saying is.

• 2:38:28John Coogan?

  They're not a vital.

• 2:38:29Speaker 06

  They'll always.

• 2:38:30John Coogan?

  Part of every town.

• 2:38:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, they'll always be, they'll always be craftsmen.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:38:34Speaker 06

  It's just, it's not like it used to be. The reverence is not there.

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:38:38Speaker 06

  You know, the name and all that kind of. Now we're sort of getting back to it. You, when you buy a Corvette, the guy who built your engine, his name is on the, on the block and a plaque.

• 2:38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I see.

• 2:38:48Speaker 06

  Oh, and in fact, I had the guy and his family come out to visit my car and the kids got to see their dad's name on the, you know, they like.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:38:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of cool.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:58Speaker 06

  So to a certain extent, we're getting back to that a little bit, but, yeah, I'm a very optimistic person. I think it's fine. I mean, for all the, you know, I like watches. I have a very obscure watch, 1873, and you wind it by, when you open the, the case.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:14Speaker 06

  That's how it winds.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:39:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. Built eight, oh, the guy only made three of them. I said, let me see if there's anything on the internet. Second and a half.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Full history.

• 2:39:27Speaker 06

  The guy, exactly, all this, I was trying to find how long the stem was.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:32Speaker 06

  All the information, I went, oh my God.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:35Speaker 06

  This is unbelievable. I mean, that would not have been possible.

• 2:39:37Jordi Hays?

  No, if you're, if you're like enthusiast in like a very niche category, it's like the most amazing.

• 2:39:43Speaker 06

  Well, that's what's great about it, yeah.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Thing in the world. Because before, I mean, I just remember, even in cars, you're like, let me spend eight hours navigating around some forum.

• 2:39:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:39:52Jordi Hays?

  Or, or let me look at all these old YouTube videos. And again, it's just like, as much as it's part of the process of like searching and hunting for information, I don't really miss like spending three hours.

• 2:40:04Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Trying to find one fact that I'm just trying to get that so I can do something else.

• 2:40:08Speaker 06

  Well, the sad thing is the disappearance of libraries. And that's really sad because that, now you have poor people who could not afford a computer or whatever, could go to a library and they were now equal to everybody else because they had access to the same information. That's what's bad.

• 2:40:24Jordi Hays?

  Really, I don't know.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Everyone has a phone.

• 2:40:26Jordi Hays?

  I would almost.

• 2:40:27John Coogan?

  And everyone can get information, but the phone also has all the distractions on it, whereas the library didn't.

• 2:40:31Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:33John Coogan?

  What do you think, Rudy?

• 2:40:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, I mean, I, I, technology is more, I thought you were just saying the disappearance in libraries as like a, you know, a place that, that people would go.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  That too.

• 2:40:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we still massively utilize our local library and just because the kids.

• 2:40:51Speaker 06

  Well, you do. I'd go into any library, when I was a kid, it would be very crowded.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:56Speaker 06

  Now the few people milling around.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:40:59Speaker 06

  You got the homeless guy looking at porn and, you know, that's, that's about it.

• 2:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well.

• 2:41:05Speaker 06

  You can't look at, see, you have to go to the library to look at porn. That's sad.

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  You should.

• 2:41:10Speaker 06

  You can't look at porn.

• 2:41:11Jordi Hays?

  You should have an Apple Vision Pro.

• 2:41:12Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  Well, you could, you could start a new library or museum or something.

• 2:41:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. But no, I, I think it's all good. It's, you know, you can't stop progress.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:23Speaker 06

  You know, this, that's a stupid thing with these tariffs.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:27Speaker 06

  You know, the, the great thing about America was you could get stuff that was restricted in other countries.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:33Speaker 06

  You know, it's like.

• 2:41:34John Coogan?

  It wasn't the Soviet genes thing.

• 2:41:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's right. So you could just buy, get whatever you want. Now, oh no, we, we can't have that because, you know, we're gonna build a wall, so, so we don't get the new technology. We'll live on the old technology, meanwhile, everybody else is expecting.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 2:41:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. This is why we got to where we are now, because we didn't have tariffs, so.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:53Speaker 06

  That's, that's my idea.

• 2:41:54John Coogan?

  Do you have a bucket list?

• 2:41:56Speaker 06

  No, I'm trying to get out of doing stuff, actually. Nothing, I don't want to go anywhere. No, I'm, I'm fine. I'm doing all right. I'm okay.

• 2:42:05John Coogan?

  Well, that's great.

• 2:42:06Speaker 06

  Write jokes, tell jokes, get checked.

• 2:42:08John Coogan?

  Get checked.

• 2:42:09Speaker 06

  Very simple process.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  I love it. That's a great philosophy. Well, that's a fantastic place to end it. Thank you so much for coming.

• 2:42:15Speaker 06

  Well, thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate it. Thanks, you guys.

• 2:42:18John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll close out the show with you. You can just hang out.

• 2:42:21Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 2:42:22John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:42:23Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you.

• 2:42:24John Coogan?

  We'll see you. Tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific.

• 2:42:26Speaker 06

  So.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  It makes all the lights in the studio go very bright.

• 2:42:29Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  Boom.