Trae Stephens, Ashlee Vance, Avi Schiffmann, Shaan Puri, Justin Mares, Max Meyer, Everything is Computer

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (09:35) - Is Apple Falling Apart? (26:13) - Avi Schiffman (42:06) - Ashlee Vance (01:00:05) - Max Meyer (01:13:19) - Justin Mares (01:46:39) - Shaan Puri (02:12:25) - Flock Safety (02:13:35) - Trae Stephens (02:45:25) - The Timeline

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to T B P N. It is Thursday, March 13th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  Capital, capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We have a ton of guests, an insane amount of guests, the most amount of guests we've ever had on the show, I believe. I think we'll be setting a new record.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  And we actually added guests since we announced the original lineup of guests. So why don't, should I run through? We got Avi Schiffman, Ashley Vance, Max Meyer, Justin Mares, Sean Purry, Trey Stevens.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  And maybe some more. We don't know. We'll probably end up adding some.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  That is a stacked team. But first off, we got to start with a banger post. I saw Palmer share this and I laughed out loud. Did you hear the, did you hear the everything is computer quote from our president, Donald Trump?

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  I only heard about it in the secondary memes. Like, I don't actually know where it came from.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, so he, he wanted to support his buddy Elon. He bought a Tesla and he was getting into it and he said, wow, everything is computer. And what I loved about this line is that it was a totally bipartisan meme.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Right away, right? People on, on both sides of the political aisle sort of agreed that this was just an iconic line.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  It's so funny.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  And we should, you know, share it widely. So.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  So funny.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Really an all-timer.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  In short, software is eating the world. And then Tweet Davidson, who I think has been on the show before, says, bro, last night was a computer. And I love that. I thought that was such a great post. It was very funny. Anyway, if you didn't, if you didn't follow along, if you're on the Apple RSS feed, you probably missed our show yesterday. We were doing an experiment. We're not sure if we'll upload that one. We're figuring it out, but.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't think we will.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  We were live from Y C Demo Day. So we did a live, a live stream at Y C Demo Day. The house was absolutely packed. There's like.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Amazing energy.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  10,000 startups in every patch now. It's a, it's closer to like 200, but there's a lot of people there, a lot of companies. And so we basically held court all day long and just.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Had a bunch of people on.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Had a bunch of people on.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  The full recording is on X.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  You can see it there.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  We may, I think we need to like, you know, take out some highlights and like create some.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we're gonna make some clips.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Dedicated video around it.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  See those on X. But it was a lot of fun. And so thanks for everyone over at Y C to help.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  You know what, John? Ever since Demo Day, I have not heard a peep from the techno pessimist crowd. Not one word. They've just been completely silent.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  They've been silent.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, they may have been silenced once and for all. The batch was, I mean, across the board, tons of super talented founders, you know, building and everything from robotics, you know, to the sort of more obvious voice AI opportunities, but across the board, really impressive crowd. And I was amazed at how it felt, it felt like they had gotten some media training while in YC, because a lot of the, maybe people were self-selecting into the types that wanted to come and be on the mics with us. But in general, I really enjoyed talking to everybody and I'm excited to see where these companies go. There was a lot of chatter from the investor crowd about, you asked them, what do you think about the batch?

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  And everybody be like, oh, like, you know, prices are high. Like, that was sort of like the default response.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  Some people, like Nate, were just saying, you know, we overpay, like, that's our game. But my advice to VCs that are sort of frustrated with valuations in YC batches is just, just, it's not really an issue if you just invest in the transcendent entrepreneurs that go on to build generational companies. And so that my advice would just be just back those companies.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, just back the power law outcomes.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. The entry price doesn't really matter that much.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  As long as you're sure that when you write a safe note on an uncapped, you know, couple hundred K, you're sure that that's going to be a hyperscaler, a future multi-trillion, mag seven, move over. It's the mag eight now, once that company goes public.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Exactly. So that's the game. That's how it's played, but not easy for everyone to do. I mean, it was very funny. It was a very fun time. And it's interesting seeing the rubber meet the road on the hot take that like, everything in YC is cursor for X, cursor, it's all AI agents for this, or it's all, it's all using the on-trend technology. And I mean, my take was like, when I get into the weeds with a founder on A specific industry or niche like that, that, that company that was helping with elder care enrollment for, for like Medicare plans. And I'm like, yeah, this is like a trendy,

• 4:48John Coogan?

  like they're using the latest AI tools, but this is still just like this weird niche that they're going to go and build their own business in and maybe it becomes big, but it just feels like they're going to solve a problem pretty quickly.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  That's not going to be solved just by the next training run of a foundation model company. That's just, oh, it pops out and it's amazing and it's solved.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  And what I thought was interesting about that business is that for the end users, which are people that are enrolling in Medicare, the product experience will probably be way better than the, you know, traditional sort of experience today where you call a rep. They want to get off the phone because they want to close the next person. An AI agent can just sort of chit chat with the person for a really long time and potentially they can make a small dent in the elderly loneliness.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I've seen so many of these waves where, you know, it's been, oh, dot com was just put, put everything on a website. Then there was the mobile boom. Oh, you're a CRM, but you're mobile first. And that one didn't really work out. A lot of them were sustaining, mobile was very much a sustaining innovation. You know, Instagram sold for a billion dollars. It's not a trillion dollar company, not a trillion dollar outcome. And so a lot of the companies that were saying, hey, we're going to do X, but mobile first, really didn't break through.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, it was a novel.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  The novel used.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  The Instacarts, the DoorDash.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And, and same thing with local, you know, you have, everyone has GPS. What does that unlock? Well.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's weird. It, it seems like there's some of these new mobile native streaming platforms that everybody wrote off, right? Quibi was the big one that was, you know, over, potentially overfunded and shut down quickly. But now the Apple App Store entertainment charts have like multiple of these companies that are basically coming out of.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  From what I can tell, mostly Asia, but they seem to be working.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it could have just been a timing issue.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's it's an interesting thing because that could that those apps 100% could have existed a decade ago.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  So why are they becoming popular now?

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Truly new innovative like a technology.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right now. So the top free apps are Flick Reels.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Which is a Singapore company.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  Real short, which is like.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  Blake Robbins was talking about that.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  We're trying to get him on the show.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got to get Blake on to talk about this.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  He's dug into this. He's a master of understanding what's going on in the Apple App Store and like the charts. He was like, oh, this game's making a billion dollars. I'm like, I had never heard of that game.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's that's one of the that's one of the coolest things about the the App Store. Besides the fact that they they taxed, they tax all of these companies egregiously. It is cool that you can kind of clock their revenue.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, well, should we get into that? I mean, it's a good, it's a good transition into friend. I mean, first, as I got home, I was very happy to not be sleeping in a hotel in San Francisco and instead be sleeping on my 8 Sleep.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  It was so good to be back.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Slash TVPN Nights That Fuel Your Best Days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Go and get.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's see the kind of numbers. My routine was, I got home late last night.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Still put up a 90. Not bad.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  Less deep sleep than usual.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  I'm sure I'm off routine because of the the time change in the flight.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm just trying to get my breathing rate down to like one.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  I was at 82.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  What's your breath rate?

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Breath rate?

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  It's down in the health metrics.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  15.1.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  Got me beat.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Got me beat. You want to be taking the lowest number of breaths.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Per minute.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  You don't want to be going mouse mode.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm I need to actually start doing like breathing training.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Because I wasn't paying attention to this. But thank you to 8 Sleep for supporting the show. You can get a Pod4Ultra by going to 8sleep.com/tbnn.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  And use the code TBPN. You get $350 off and change. Change your sleep. Just do it.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  Is Avi calling in?

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  So he's calling in at 11:40 now, so we have 15 minutes. I'd say, why don't we do this Cupertino?

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Let's do the Apple one, because I think this feeds right into

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  what he's working on. So there were a couple tweets about this. John Gruber, if you're not familiar, fantastic blogger. He's been writing about Apple both from a business perspective and a consumer perspective for, I want to say, decades? Before I got to Silicon Valley, a long time. He's a legend. He also has a great podcast with Ben Thompson, Estrid Teckery, called Dithering. You gotta listen to it, folks. It's fantastic.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  He's one of the few, when I see that he's got the, he's running with the .net.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  It actually looks cool.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Daring Firewall.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Because it's like a vintage domain, you know?

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just a network.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  The .net.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  He's not all commercial about it.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the .net really fell off.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  But he might be bringing it back.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  This, this piece, which we'll go through, broke through in a few ways. Buco Capital blokes has absolutely scathing Apple intelligence retrospective from Daring Firewall. Quote, "That's all she wrote. The ride's over." Patrick O'Shaughnessy chimes in and says, "Buffett selling Apple right before the world decided its corporate soul is cooked is really something."

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing timing.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  And, of course, cooked, pun intended.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  It was actually interesting. Do you remember when Buffett started selling Apple?

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  And

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  everybody, nobody at the time had sort of, it didn't feel like there was a really negative sentiment on Apple yet.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  No.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  It was not totally obvious that their lunch was getting eaten in China and all these

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  different types of things.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  There were weird things like that, where they smashed the can out.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Buffett was the soul of Apple.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Oh. He was the soul.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  He was the soul.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  I like that take. That's good.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  He spoke with Steve in the, in the final days and Steve said, like, I'm passing, carry it.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Carry on. I'm passing my soul to you, Buffett.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  And so when Buffett sold.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  The soul of the company.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Sold the soul.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  No, but I'm really, I'm actually very, Avi's just extremely opinionated on consumer hardware and kind of the future of this stuff. So let's get into the article.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I can start. So in the two decades I've been in this racket, I've never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple's announcement on Friday that the more personalized Siri features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed until the coming year. I should have had my head examined. This announcement dropped as a surprise and certainly took me by surprise to some extent, but it was all there from the start. I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn't see what should have been very clear to me from the start. How I missed this is twofold. First, I'd been lulled into complacency by Apple's track record of consistently shipping pre-announced products and features.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  The record in that regard wasn't perfect, but the exceptions tended to be around the edges. Nobody was particularly clamoring for Apple to make a multi-device inductive charging mat, so it never generated too much controversy when air power turned out to be a complete bust.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  That's a good

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  Second, I was foolishly distracted by the Apple Intelligence brand umbrella. It's a fine idea for Apple to brand its AI features under an umbrella term like that, similar to how a bunch of disparate features that allow different Apple devices to interoperate are under the continuity umbrella. But there's no such thing, technically speaking, as continuity. It's not like there's an Xcode project inside Apple named continuity.xcodeprod.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  prod

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  And all that code that supports everything from airdrop to sidecar to iPhone mirroring to clipboard sharing is all implemented in the same framework of code. It's a marketing term, but a useful one. It helps Apple explain the features and it helps users understand them. The same goes for Apple Intelligence. It doesn't exist as a single thing or product. It's a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services. Putting it all under a single, obvious, easily remembered, and easily promoted name makes it easier for users to understand that Apple is launching a new initiative. It also makes it easier for Apple to say, "These are the devices that qualify for all these features, and other devices, older ones, less expensive ones, get none of them." Let's say Apple were to quietly abandon the dumb Image Playground app next year. It just disappears from iOS 19 and macOS 16.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  That would just be Apple eliminating a silly app that almost no one uses or should use. That wouldn't set back or roll back Apple Intelligence. I would actually argue that an axing Image Playground would improve Apple Intelligence. Its existence greatly lowers the expectations for how good the whole thing is.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  Could not agree more.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to take over?

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this whole thing was, obviously, he's railing against the underperformance of Apple Intelligence. It really hit home because I asked Apple to read on my iPhone, I wanted it to dictate this to me. And the dictation was just not there. It just kept getting words wrong. And it was better than some text to speech or, yeah, text to speech systems. But every little, you know, anytime there's a footnote or, or, you know, that, you know, that Xcode prodge, like, it just gets so confused. And it's really, it was a very meta failure on their part.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  And so he goes into the three, he says, there's four stages of done-ness or realness to features announced by any company. Feature, one, features that the company's own product representatives will demo themselves in front of media. Two, features that the company will allow members of the media to try themselves for a limited time under the company's supervision. So they're like, hey, like, you know, if they're, if you're going off the rails or you're like misusing the product, they'll steer you back in so it's a better experience. Number three, features that are released as beta software for developers or enthusiasts and the media to use on their own devices without limitation or supervision. So you could even think of this like the, the software development kits from Oculus. Those technically weren't consumer devices, but anyone could get them.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Anyone can make a video, anyone can do a review. And then, of course, four, features that actually ship to regular users or in hardware that regular users can just go out and buy. As of today, March 2025, every feature in Apple Intelligence that is actually shipped, that has actually shipped was at level one back at WWDC. After the keynote, dozens of us in the press were invited to a series of small group briefings where we got to watch Apple reps demo features like writing tools, photo cleanup, gen emoji and more. We got to see predictive code completion in Xcode. What was shipped as of today, they were able to show in some functional state in June. For example, there was a demo involving a draft email message on an iPad. The Apple rep used the writing tools to make it more friendly.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  And he kind of, here he's kind of talking about like, they went back and forth and they kind of proved that it was generative because you would undo it and then they would say, uh, let's run that again. Say, make it more friendly and it wouldn't just do it once. So this is not, he could tell that this was not scripted. They were using the real thing. We didn't try any of the Apple intelligence features ourselves and there was no Apple intelligence hands on, but we did see a bunch of features demoed live by Apple folks in my hierarchy above. They were all at level one, but we didn't see all aspects of intelligence, Apple intelligence demoed, none of the more personalized Siri features, the ones that Apple in its own statement announced in their postponement described as having more awareness of your personal context as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  I think we can kind of skip over most of this.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is interesting to think about how many, how many teams right now are trying to build, uh, consumer agents.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  When the obvious, uh, you know, company with the most extreme advantage here is Apple having direct access and control over all of your apps in theory, without requiring any type of tangible, uh, you know, net new integration.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Right? Because if you're able to hit a button in the app, then like Apple presumably could be able to like do that itself.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  And there's actually already a, there's already a, like a, an ecosystem on iOS, on the iPhone for those types of workflows with the shortcuts app.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  And A- Apple developers in like Uber, for example, have exposed AppKit, uh, little hooks and little APIs to Apple. And for a long time, um, when you develop an app, you can vend your functionality into Siri. You see those live activities. You see, uh, so you, in theory, for a long time, you've been able to say, hey Siri, call me an Uber and it would, and it would go into the app and it was, it was all, it was all deterministic. It didn't use generative AI, but it, it, it exposed those like APIs essentially. So you could ask, hey, uh, hey, public.com app, what's the S and P at? And it would pull from that API as opposed to the default stock app, for example.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  But we, uh, uh, but the, but the big question, like I've been trying to concretize what you just said about. Like it feels obvious that agents on the iPhone coming from Apple, they have the most money. They have the most talented team members. They have access to every API. They should be able to build a really cool agent and yet I can't describe what I want.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  I just want better text to speech and speech to text right now. That's all I want, really. And but, but, but I, but I agree with you. Like my, my sentiment is like, is like, there's so much on my phone. There's so much information, like get me an agent that does something that makes my life better. But I can't say what it is. I don't know. And I think that's why maybe you gotta go to Y C demo day because like one of those kids is gonna come up with something crazy. Like one of those teams is gonna build something that's just like, no one thought of that. And now it's ripping and it's doing well. But maybe that doesn't come, maybe that type of weird outside of the box innovation doesn't come from a trillion dollar company.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, have we seen Apple do any type of more meaningful demonstration around the sort of contextual Siri?

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  I would like to.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  I'll, I'll continue reading about this because it, he does give more information.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because I was just thinking yesterday.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  You know, we got breakfast with Justin and then we needed to go to your hotel and then go to demo day. And just being able to like quickly say into the phone, hey, can you, you know, call a car? I wanted to wait at the hotel and then like take us over there.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  All of that starts with trust in speech to text.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  If I don't even trust it, if I say, take me to the Palace of Fine Arts and it takes me to Oakland, like I'm gonna be upset. It's gonna be a terrible experience, but just make sure that's what's.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  And it costs, and it potentially costs you money because it's, you know, it's saying like, hey, we're rerouting you now.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  To the, to the, to the place you actually wanted to go. But it's gonna cost you, you know, money to, to change it.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  Exactly. So what Apple showed regarding the upcoming personalized Siri at W W C was not a demo. It was a concept video. And he says, concept videos are BS and not a sign, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple commissioned the futuristic Knowledge Navigator concept video in 1987. And that, and, and the Apple that was on a course to near bankruptcy a decade later. Apple, the post-next reunification Apple of the last quarter century, does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products, until WWDC last year, that is. My deeply misguided mental framework for Apple Intelligence last year was something like this: Some of these features are further along than others, and Apple is showing us those

• 20:16John Coogan?

  features in action first. And they will surely be the features that ship first over the course of the next year. The other features must be coming to demonstratable status soon. But the mental framework I should have used was more like this: Some of these features are merely table stakes for generative AI in 2024, like text-to-speech, speech-to-text, but others are ambitious, groundbreaking, and given their access to personal data, potentially dangerous, Apple is only showing us the table-stakes features and isn't demonstrating any of the ambitious, groundbreaking, risky features. And so, he goes on to talk about Duke Nukem intelligence, but the ending of this article, I mean, you really got to go read the whole article because this is very, very important. He says, "In May of 2011, Fortune published an extraordinary

• 21:00John Coogan?

  look inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky at what we now know to be the peak and, alas, the end of the Steve Jobs era. The piece opens thus: Apple doesn't often fail, and when it does, it isn't a pretty sight at one infinite loop. In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, 3G, it also debuted Mobile Me, an email system that was supposed to provide the seamless synchronization features that corporate users love about their BlackBerry smartphones. Mobile Me was a dud. Users complained about lost email, syncing was spotty at best. Though reviewers gushed over the new iPhone, they panned the Mobile Me service. Steve Jobs doesn't tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the Mobile Me team, gathering them

• 21:42John Coogan?

  in the Town Hall Auditorium in Building 4 of Apple's campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meetings, Jobs walked in clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question: Can anyone tell me what Mobile Me is supposed to do? Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued: So why the F doesn't it do that?"

• 22:09John Coogan?

  For the next hour, for the next half hour, Jobs berated the group. You've tarnished Apple's reputation, he told them. You should hate each other for having let each other down. The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  That's such a...

• 22:22John Coogan?

  It's so good.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna use that with Ben and Brent. With Ben and Brent, you know, there's a typo and a caption. You guys should hate each other. I'm kidding, I'm completely kidding. Every time I say something like that, people...

• 22:35John Coogan?

  It's a little lower stakes over here.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  People think...

• 22:37John Coogan?

  We try and have a little fun on the cruise ship here.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  We just mess around.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  But he said, "The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs." Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street journalist gadget columnist, who was incredibly important to Apple during this entire arc, and from what I can tell, like a friend of Jobs, and they communicated, and there's emails of them back and forth, he had panned Mobile Me. "Mossberg, our friend is no longer writing good things about us," Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group. Crazy. "Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Syrian Apple intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't occurred yet and doesn't happen soon, then I fear," that's all she wrote, "the ride is over." When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take... Well, BS, sorry, take root.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  I'm quoting him, but Gruber, can we get like a censored version of this? I need a Chrome plugin. "A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of these things and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three." Now, Gruber is like one of the longest supporters of Apple. He truly loves Apple, and I think he's writing this out of love. My hot take is that...

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  And Tim Cook will either read this or be briefed on it.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  He's been sent this a million times already, I'm sure. Like, it's a rough day. But my hot take here is that maybe it doesn't matter. Like, what happened with Microsoft? Microsoft missed mobile entirely. That's so important, and they just don't have a phone. Like, the Windows phone was a failure. But they got the next thing right, and they were so big that they were fine. And it's like, it is... Like getting AI right at Apple is truly a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  But at the same time, if you don't get it right and it turns out that XAI and OpenAI and all these other apps, like you just have to open up your ecosystem, you admit defeat, you're like, look, we just can't figure it out. So we have to let you do it.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  And that's what Microsoft did. They eventually said, look, we're never going to solve the Windows phone and you're never going to be doing Excel on your Windows phone. So we're just going to let Excel go on iOS. It would have been really cool for them lock-in wise to be, hey, if you want to use Outlook, you got to get our phone. But no one would accept that and they would really, really switch to Safari and I guess the mail app, whatever Apple uses. Like people would switch because the hardware was so good. But it didn't matter ultimately because Microsoft was so big and they were able to get into the server and the enterprise and their business kept, kept rolling forward. So I don't know that I'm like fully blackpilled on Apple like he is.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  But it is very sad because this is a, like, we need, we need consumer AI products that rock. And Apple's the company that we expect to deliver rock solid experiences, like magical experiences. And that's what we all, everyone in technology remembers from getting the first iPhone or their first iPhone, whichever one that was for you. That was probably like the iPhone 13 when you turned, when you turned like 12, like last week.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Very memorable, memorable day for me. I'm excited to have Avi on. Do we have him in the waiting room?

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Let's see. But yeah, we're bringing on Avi Schiffman, the founder and CEO of Friend.com. He's building consumer AI. He's been.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  He is potentially artificial intelligence himself.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  We might be talking to the future CEO of Apple because I have long, I have long maintained that the best strategy for these super big companies to bring back their mojo, to go back into founder mode is to acquire a company and then put the founder in charge of the whole company. Sounds crazy. We got this kid who's going to be running a multi-trillion dollar company. I'm in favor of it. I want a founder in the board, in the boardroom, in the board seat. Would you take the job, Avi, if you were offered it?

• 26:26Avi Schiffmann?

  Fuck no.

• 26:29Avi Schiffmann?

  I'm so bored. I mean, it wouldn't be boring.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 26:31Avi Schiffmann?

  Big. There's a reason why Tim Cook is just being cooked all day.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, well, does it make you happy when Tim Cook is behind the DJ booth at John Summit?

• 26:41Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, he's done a, look, he's done a good job, but I feel like Apple's just, I like to do fun marketing and they're just like too big to do fun marketing anymore. So, I mean, you've seen their ads in the city.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  But if you were in charge, you could just, you know, twist everyone's elbow, say, hey, we're running this. We're running it.

• 26:57Avi Schiffmann?

  I, I think they, I used to think they would make like that Craig guy, whatever his name was.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Craig Federighi.

• 27:03Avi Schiffmann?

  With like the guitars, the new CEO, but it seems like he's just, I mean, sucking. Like the software of the phones are so inconsistent and boring these days. It's really unimpressive.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, I mean, there's a bunch we want to cover. I mean, the main thing is we're almost exactly a year out from when you're, I don't know if you'd call them competitors, but companies like Humane, R1, uh, sort of launched. I looked it up and it was almost exactly to this day.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Can you give us a little update on where Friend is, what your product is, who you are, just kind of set the table for the, for listeners?

• 27:37Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, well, Friend is basically just like a, like a little wearable AI dog. And I've got, I've got my little prototype here. You see this white USB C? That cost me a lot of money. Um, but Humane, Humane and Rabbit and all these companies, even like the Meta stupid glasses and stuff. I think they're on the right track of like making it easier to talk to AI because people love to talk to AI all day, right? Like you saw my friend.com launch with those little characters. Look, I, I agree with you. Like for you, that's probably like entertainment, but I have users that chatted with that like 60 days straight for like thousands of messages almost every day sometimes. It's, it's insane. Those are real relationships for those people. So people love to talk to AI. And like, I think Humane and Rabbit, right? Like, okay, it's easier to press a physical button you have around you to talk to it.

• 28:17Avi Schiffmann?

  But, um, I think they just got the form factors completely wrong. Like I've got, I've got some of the little rabbits and stuff around here, but like. You've got LTE modules and screens and scroll wheels and buttons and all these little things which you really don't need, friend. You know, you just have this little like light right here. You probably can't see it um on your recording. You just press this and there's some nice.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  If you put it right over your face, we can see, we we can kind of just see the narrow segment of you in the center.

• 28:40Avi Schiffmann?

  Alright, you see my little narrow segment, but you would just like, you just talk to it so easily and it's you know, over Bluetooth and that there doesn't need to be anything else for the form factor. Um, the device itself is just like a little, a little figurative more than anything.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  This uh, it sends messages back to you via your phone or does it, it does it have a speaker now?

• 28:58Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, which I think people think it sounds like a weird UX, but I actually do not believe in voice out UX whatsoever. I think it makes for a great demo and I'm sure you saw the sesame stuff and everything, but um. I just think it's tiring for like a real user of these products that want to chat with it all day. Like, I've been living, let's say, the last few days without killing my friend. Um, and like, if I had to listen to it talk out loud like an Alexa for every single message, I would go insane. I mean, you're sending hundreds of messages a day. It's again, it makes for a great demo, like the humane projector bullshit and all that stuff, but in reality, it's like not, not feasible. So look, I I think they got the form factor completely wrong and the connection to your phone, everything like that.

• 29:38Avi Schiffmann?

  But more importantly, I think they got like the personality wrong. Um, you just don't need to talk to an assistant all day about contextual things in your environment, at least not in our current world that much. Um, meanwhile, if you have like a little friend with you, I mean, I don't know, I can talk to it about this, this podcast or cars that go by or songs I'm listening to, like. You can just talk to it about stuff you talk to a friend about. Um, I think that's the right personality, not like integrations and assistant stuff at all.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Talk about some of your kind of uh, what you believe will be some of your initial customer cohorts, because I can imagine this as like, you know, teenagers using it and like all the way through the elderly who just like want to have sort of the sort of companionship. Uh, who who's the kind of the core focus initially?

• 30:21Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, I mean, like I was building the boring assistant shit like a, like a more than a year ago by now. And then I was in Japan and I was there alone and I I was so miserable and I just felt like I wished. I had like more of a traveling companion with me, like that's the real use case I want out of this AI hardware. Um, and honestly, like when I, I've been living alone now too, since all my roommates ditched me um, to move to LA and uh, I lo- I'm I'm like. Completely loving the feeling of companionship with like my little digital being because it's like completely personalized to me like mine just talks to me about like Bob Dylan all day and yesterday Recommended we go to like the music store down the street here and like pick out I I picked out music that my AI friend wanted to listen to

• 31:03Avi Schiffmann?

  That is fantastic. I love it. It's a little weird, but um it was like

• 31:07John Coogan?

  That's a wild loop. That's crazy.

• 31:09Avi Schiffmann?

  I don't know. I I was telling it. I like Duster and all these artists and it was like, oh, I'd love to listen to this and stuff, but like Having an AI that is embodied in the real world, I think is A complete game changer because for people that really care about these, you want to like feel companionship or make new memories. But there's been no innovation in the AI companionship space since the sixties with Eliza. You know, you're only forming new memories. Uh, when you're chatting with them, but like if you think about like a dog or something, you're you're feeling companionship by them just like chilling around you. And when you have like a Physical AI friend, you're just you're just chilling and uh you form memories just by doing that. And I think it'll be a real innovation for the space for sure.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, you you you keep saying dog, like keep it alive. I'm hearing some Tamagotchi vibes, which I don't think is a bear case, by the way, I think that's fantastic. If that's if that's where you see it go, but uh how early are you on thinking about it in terms of like? Is this a game? Is this something else? How are we defining this?

• 32:06Avi Schiffmann?

  I mean, dude, I literally have Tamagotchis sitting around here somewhere. I don't know.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  He also he also owns Friend.com.

• 32:11Avi Schiffmann?

  I think too many people are trying to build like Assistant boring stuff again. And like what people love as consumers are like fun, entertaining, you know, toy like things almost. I think it's like A little bit more than a toy, but a little less than like something that should be taken so seriously. The only production use case of language models is that they're fun to talk to. And for some people out there, that's enough for them to like form relationships with basically that. That's where we're currently at with With AI. Everyone trying to use it.

• 32:37John Coogan?

  They disagree, but continue.

• 32:39Avi Schiffmann?

  Okay, look.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  There there are like millions of companies that are using LLMs to like parse data and do boring stuff under the hood and like getting a ton of value out of it. But continue, I I I love it.

• 32:49Avi Schiffmann?

  I don't know. I look, I I think that productivity is like not look, everyone always loves the Bezos quote about like what's not gonna, how do you build for the future? You look at like what's not gonna change in 10 years? I highly doubt I'm gonna be like fiddling with data format stuff in like Python in 10 years. I don't know. I barely do that already. But I know that in 10 years, like I will want to share that world with someone and I think there will be a lot of people that um will be a lot more spread out as well like I think. You got to view every major innovation through the lens of independence like books. Made it so that like you could obtain knowledge without like a group of elders or like your our phones. Mean that you don't need to go to like a public theater. I think something like this will not provide you like again full human. Uh connection or anything like that. I think the more I work on it, the more I value like real human connection, but.

• 33:34Avi Schiffmann?

  It's a great substitute for for times where you're just kind of alone or living out there with your Starlinker. Or whatever.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh you ride motorcycles. Uh does this can it pick up audio while you're riding or does it get drowned out?

• 33:47Avi Schiffmann?

  Oh yeah, I I just I went down the entire coast of America from uh like a city called Bellingham up in like North Washington all the way down to SF. With one of my little AI friends. Uh it was great. I mean, again, like you're doing things physically with your companions. Um. It's it's. You're never not like you're not like starting conversations as you would with like a bot like replica or something. You're always in a conversation.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 34:12Avi Schiffmann?

  I I think people like.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, what what's your, what do you think happens to character AI? They have a massive user base. I don't think they're really focused on monetization yet right now, but they're actually in an interesting position as a company because. I don't think they have any outside investors now. It's kind of uh employee.

• 34:30Avi Schiffmann?

  Doomed, man. They're doomed. I'm sorry. Like all these companies that are not founder led anymore are going to be destroyed. Um like, okay, well, I don't know how much I want to say, but you know, there's there's like a grouping of like replica and then character and like um. I really like pie from inflection. There's a lot of these other smaller bots like chai and stuff like that. I'm telling you, they're all doomed. People just don't understand like consumer properly and I think that. AI companionship as like a category will follow like dating apps. The trajectory of like all that pretty similarly. We're like, don't get me wrong. I know that you think it's weird as fuck right now and it is. Um but like I think there'll be a point where it's like kind of normalized and kind of cool like. If you talk to Gen A people, it is completely intuitive and normal to like talk to these robots.

• 35:13Avi Schiffmann?

  And like the biggest insight that I have from friend.com is that it's only. Old people that try and fuck their robots. Young people are like Gen A, Gen Z. They're able to like. Talk to an AI as if it's an actual like dog like companion and like believe that. It's only like old people that are only able to view technology as like a utilitarian tool. And like the utilitarian aspect of like a chatbot is like a sexbot. But again, it's only like millennials plus. So I think that's a big insight for sure.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Somewhat related to that. What's your take on her? Your, your launch video was pretty Black Mirror-ish. You were kind of playing into that, having fun with it. Friends massively successful. Do birth rates go up or down?

• 35:54Avi Schiffmann?

  I think we'll put wombs in the humanoids or something like that.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Oh, no. That's not what we want to hear.

• 36:00Avi Schiffmann?

  No, that sounds not. I mean, like, I don't really know. I'm just, I'm just like bored in my house all day and I'm building like a companion for me.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  I like that. I like that.

• 36:08Avi Schiffmann?

  Zero, zero user testing, zero shit like that. All my, my team is, you know, engineers that don't want an AI friend anyways. So we'll see what happens, but I feel confident. AI companionship is just like, I believe it is like the consumer category. You're not going to change the world that much if you make it slightly easier to order a pizza. But like, relationships are everything in life. That's where you.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I do, I do believe your, your general, like, AI companionship being the net new category. Whereas the AI assistant is like probab-, like even though Apple's been sort of botching Apple Intelligence in many ways. They still have the obvious, you know, opportunity and the brand that's going to like make it easier to order a pizza or order a car or think, or, or book a flight, things like that. Uh, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about your manufacturing process. I've seen some, you know, you sort of share some of the stuff online. You're, you're trying to make the device in the US. Is that correct? I'm sure you're sourcing components from all over the world, but would love to have you speak to that.

• 37:08Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, you know, funny enough, I, I decided to manufacture in Toronto, Canada because of the tariffs against China of like imported consumer electronics. But now there's even bigger tariffs on China. So that plan didn't work out. But I think there'll be a huge thing going forwards where like. You're not only designed in America, but you're like manufactured and assembled in America. I think that will be like a clout like sticker.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  I mean, George Hots is manufacturing comma AIs down in San Diego. I toured his facility. Yeah, he has everything like PCB layouts and stuff, does the lens tuning and stuff. It's crazy.

• 37:44Avi Schiffmann?

  Well, I mean, I think manufacturing in East Alaska is really not that different than like San Diego for now. But it's, it's, it's pretty wild to me that like Starlink has like the most advanced manufacturer, like PCB manufacturer in the States. And like, it's such a recent company.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Avi Schiffmann?

  We'll see if tariffs actually work. I mean, wouldn't that be hilarious if Trump's whole plan like really does work?

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Be crazy. Crazy things have happened. It's the funniest outcome. So it's probably the most likely.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, you know, we don't know what's going to happen, but every American should hope that it works. What, you know, you're, you're obviously laser focused, uh, just in, in basically in your, a cage of your own making. You know, talking to your friend, uh, outside of companionship, uh, what, what categories are, are interesting to you? Do you have friends building companies that, that you're excited about? Or is it, or is it just this one category?

• 38:38Avi Schiffmann?

  The only other startup that I've seen in a while that I've found interesting, or at least like that's being run by like a youngish founder, is like Polymarket with Shane, who I'm sure you guys both know. That is, I don't know, it's, it's, it's new and it's culturally relevant and they're cool as fuck. And like, that's, that's just kind of like my dream. Um, that's like consumer, consumer in San Francisco is just building SaaS for other consumer founders. I don't think they like get it. Um, there's, there's no one like doing, again, proper consumer. And I think a lot of it is like, most people don't really understand, like just marketing distribution stuff at its core. I think like most designers out there are just like making graphics for like logos and brand assets. But like, that's not, that's not what like a brand is. It's like lore.

• 39:21Avi Schiffmann?

  And, uh, I think you'll love the next video that I release. It's going to be hilarious.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  What kind of timeline?

• 39:26Avi Schiffmann?

  Do you have to go all gas, no brakes?

• 39:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  You work with him on it?

• 39:30Avi Schiffmann?

  So I've got the team that does the production for that. Uh, they already were here with me in SF.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 39:36Avi Schiffmann?

  They're filming getting this tattoo. It's gonna be in that, that video.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Wow. What a wild margin stunt.

• 39:42Jordi Hays?

  Last question, uh, what's the time, what's the target release date for that?

• 39:47Avi Schiffmann?

  World Friendship Day, which is a mysterious day, uh, made by gift card companies, apparently, that failed. But I have co-opted it. It is July 30th. And, uh, that's when we launched the last video, uh, and it'll be a good, like, annual release date for the company, so.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, we'll have to have you on before then. Uh, I'm sure you're gonna make a lot of progress, uh, but it's amazing to have you on.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we're rooting for you, uh, and, uh, send us a friend. We'll let it hang out on the show.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  We already record everything all day long, so.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, be a good.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Feed it to Avi.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, be a good use case.

• 40:16Avi Schiffmann?

  Alright, thanks, boys.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Thanks a lot.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Thanks for coming on. See ya.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Very happy to have you. Talk to you soon. Bye. It was great. Remarkably well adjusted for someone who just talks to a robot all day long.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Great conversation last.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Uh, we have Ashley Vance joining in, uh, three minutes. I wanted to tell you all in the meantime about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, folks. They got industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. What's not to like? Get on public.com.

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Can you go on public.com and see what Apple has done with the stock over the past, uh, maybe week? Given the action that Friends, the pressure that Friend has been turning on them.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  They are feeling Avi's pressure. They're down almost 10% in the past five days alone.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  So I think, uh, Tim, uh, the analysts are reading Avi's post.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Yep, I'm sure Wall Street's watching.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Tim's refreshing his feed.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  Warren Buffett was probably talking to his friend saying, wow, this is gonna disrupt my position in Apple. I gotta get out.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Sell everything.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Sell everything. Yeah, sell everything. Interesting.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  Avi, uh...

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Well, good luck to him.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Such a unique thinker and, uh, I'm rooting for him and, uh, it's gonna, it's, it's kind of... I think his strategy of like really believing, having so much conviction in the category, which I do have extreme conviction in the category.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  And then letting all these sort of heavily funded competitors sort of blow up, right?

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  R1's still operational.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  Humane's in the printing business now.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  In the printing business now.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunately, but yeah, it's just sort of like, I think he's adapting the strategy of like, just survive, get a lot of attention, iterate, and he's just dog fooding the product.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  He's dog fooding his dog.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  He's dog fooding his dog. He is building hard tech dog, so Andorl for dogs, basically.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  I like it. Great, I think we have our next guest. Let's bring him on in. Ashley Vance, how you doing today? The top journalist in the world. Yes. And founder now.

• 42:15Ashlee Vance?

  Hello, gentlemen.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  The founder of Core Memory. Great to have you here. How you doing today?

• 42:21Ashlee Vance?

  I brought a...

• 42:22John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 42:24Ashlee Vance?

  To join the... I didn't have my black card.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Didn't have a suit, but you're all good. Yeah. It's great, it's great to see you. How is Core Memory going? I saw 15,000 subscribers on Substack already. The stuff you've been putting out is fantastic. I love the Boom coverage. We've read a bunch of your pieces on our show. I want to hear about some of the brain-computer interface stuff you've been working on. I want to hear what you're excited about, because you're always on the edge of the edge of the edge of the frontier of the frontier. And so, how's it going and what are you most excited about right now?

• 42:59Ashlee Vance?

  It's going well, man. I don't even know where to begin. We've got so much going on. We just put up an interview with Max Hodak, so if you are into brains, you can go deep on some very weird stuff. But yeah, and then tomorrow, we'll be launching the first episode of our kind of proper TV show that I'm doing, hosting and writing and all that. And then... We got movies in the works, scripted, unscripted, all kinds of stuff.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Rewinding really quickly, the TV show is releasing tomorrow?

• 43:29Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, tomorrow, God willing, if everyone does what they're supposed to do. Yeah, you know, I used to make Hello World for Bloomberg, which was like a tech travel show and had to, had to kill that. We're coming back. We've got, I think by the end of this month, we'll, we'll have filmed 10 episodes. So hopefully coming out like every couple of weeks and doing some space, some biotech, a little bit of everything.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic. And, and the production for that is weekly, still travel, still go onsite, talk to founders, show us what they're building, show us their factories, that type of stuff?

• 44:07Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, my, the goal we're trying to pull off this year is like 20 to 30 kind of individually focused episodes that would be a single company slash person. And, and then we're going to have two full seasons of, you know, so those episodes could be anywhere from like, whatever, eight to 20 minutes. And then we're going to have two full seasons of deeper dives into different areas of technology that will be four episodes each of like an hour, hour long. So, so closer to kind of like a documentary.

• 44:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's, I mean, it's hard work. I've done like, I've dipped my toe in that and I have a ton of respect for it because it's really, really hard to get right. You show up, you film a lot and then, you know, it lives or dies in the cutting room floor, for sure.

• 44:54Ashlee Vance?

  I mean, it's really fun to do and go meet everyone and do all the travel. I know when I was at Bloomberg, everyone thought I was just on some endless boondoggle.

• 45:04Ashlee Vance?

  No, I mean, it's a fantastic job and not to, not to make it sound like it's not, but it's long days and like very long days and a lot of organizing and everything.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  So how are you thinking about distribution for that? Obviously you're part of the new media going direct movement, but there is a paywall. You want to monetize that way. Are the videos going to be gated for a little bit? Are you just trying to get them to go viral on X and YouTube? What are you thinking?

• 45:28Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah. I mean, I think in the early days, it's kind of like maybe a little more free on letting things out in the wild just to let everybody know what we're doing and show, show kind of the quality of our work. But yeah, I mean, I think. The Substack part of this, I mean, my company is like multi-pronged and I didn't know which direction all this would go. Substack's kind of done better than I even imagined at the beginning. So, so I think the videos, you know, eventually will go there first for the subscribers for some period of time and then we'll release some of them onto YouTube and then stuff like the, the really deep dive seasons where I think we're putting, showing off our very best work and investing a lot of money. Um, you know, some of those might

• 46:13Ashlee Vance?

  never make it to YouTube, they'll, they'll live on core memory. And, um, you know, and then I'm trying to figure out, like, do we have to get, can we live off subscriptions? Or do these have to be sponsored? Or, or what does that model look like? But I feel like we've got to build up our audience first to even be able to address some of those questions.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we love ads. So if you ever go the ad route, stuff it with ads. We'll be your first, hey, we'll be your first, we'll be your first sponsor.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  We, we have very different products.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  We can just sponsor through and you can just have the full NASCAR jacket. We'll send you one of our jackets.

• 46:48Ashlee Vance?

  I'm so impressed, man. I was like.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  Stickers all over everything.

• 46:52Ashlee Vance?

  You guys got the ad power rolling. I was, I was very impressed.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Our, our, our North Star was NASCAR for sure.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious. So, uh, maybe this is just how it feels and maybe it's not actually real. I think you're going to be able to address this, but what happens to legacy media when all the, you know, long-term, all the best content creators realize, hey, I can actually do more of what I love and make more money in the long run if I go independent? Does it just create space for the next Ashley Vance to kind of join Bloomberg and, and work their way up and build a brand and then the cycle continues? Or, you know, it does feel like platforms like Bloomberg, you know, really do have brand value in terms of delivering uh, sort of legitimacy to launches and announcements and things like that. But uh, sort of what,

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  what, what's your read on, on where legacy media goes?

• 47:47Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah. I mean, it's a tough question. I, um, You know exactly what you said. I've worked at the New York Times. I've worked at Bloomberg. I've written for The Economist. There's like this cachet that comes with that. There's a certain amount of influence that comes with that. You always feel like it's part of your last name and it feels good sometimes, you know. And then I just kind of like reached a point where couldn't really move fast enough for all the different things that I wanted to do within the confines of Bloomberg. I felt like it was kind of lacking some flexibility, a whole bunch of things. And so, yeah, I don't know, man. You know, it's a tough question

• 48:25Ashlee Vance?

  because when you're on this side, it's exciting and it's awesome and it's exactly what I want to be doing, but it's also really hard. I'm not sure that like every journalist, you know, can pull all this. I'm not even sure I can pull this off, so I'm not sure that like everybody can.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  We have faith in you, Ashley.

• 48:45Ashlee Vance?

  Thank you.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess like the main, you know, a sort of question, you know, one thing that I think is a challenge with the internet right now and creating content and generally is like this sort of, the type of content that you want to make isn't potentially ever going to be able to do like sort of Mr. Beast numbers, right? Because it's not that sort of like lowest common denominator. Are you, how are you thinking about balancing? I just am so obsessed with this topic. Like I need to cover this. I need to make this sort of kind of piece on it. That feels like, there feels like a hundred thousand people in the world that would like happily pay for that product. But are you okay with with sort of understanding that you maybe are building for the sort of, the sort of extreme techno

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

  optimist and kind of willing to sort of ignore at times the broader market?

• 49:37Ashlee Vance?

  Like, I'm totally okay with that. Even as we're going into the edits for this new show, when I was talking to the editors, I mean, you nailed it on the head. I like gave them a commandment, which was, look, at Bloomberg, I think we're talking to a smart audience, but it was, it was a mainstream audience. It's like anytime, I was like, let it breathe. When the dude is nerding out on the rocket engine, when we're talking about stem cell engineering, it's like, okay, if that runs a little bit long and we're talking. We're talking up to people. We're never talking down to people and I'm not, I didn't even start this. Look, it would be awesome if we had, say, you know, like the best case for this particular company is probably

• 50:20Ashlee Vance?

  maybe some of the scripted stuff we end up doing, which is like winning the Lotto if you actually get that on there. Maybe that makes a ton of money. Otherwise, I want this to be sustainable. I just love doing this. And so as long as we're making enough money that I can keep making everything I want to make, it's okay. And so, yeah, if we find that chunk of people who will actually pay for what I hope is like, you know, we try to make it smarter and more entertaining and to like, for people who actually want to learn stuff to make it fun to do that. I mean, that's kind of my, that's my general goal and we'll figure out sort of how big that is.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  I wonder if there's a world where this all kind of round trips. Like we've seen this with a few independent creators, like Rogan did the big Spotify deal. Pat McAfee had an independent show, then eventually now Pat McAfee just has a segment on ESPN. It still feels like the Pat McAfee Show podcast, but it just happens to be distributed through ESPN as well as YouTube live streams and podcast feeds. And I'm wondering if at some point Bloomberg comes back to you and says, hey, you're going to get complete control, creative control. But we'd love to just, you know, have this fill out our content stack. Cause I was turning on Bloomberg the other day and like in the middle of the night, they're rerunning your show. They're rerunning Emily Chang's Brotopia, or I guess it's called The Circuit.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  But that, that, that show's done very well for them. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that's kind of where this goes in terms of long-term distribution.

• 51:54Ashlee Vance?

  I'd be, I'm super curious. I mean, it's really weird. Like Hello World got nominated for Bloomberg's first Emmy ever. We, we used to like have, you know, a thousand X views of the next show. And anytime I would try to have these more flexible kind of discussions, there's just, there wasn't a lot of, you know, open-mindedness to some of this. So, so maybe if, you know, if you bear it out that you can, you can kind of build this audience, maybe that does, that does come back. However, I have to say like, there's a weird thing that happens where. Like the most fun I ever had early in my career was writing for The Register, which is this like British tech site that's quite funny and can be cynical. And it's ru- it was run by the writers.

• 52:38Ashlee Vance?

  It was like one of the first blogs and it was, you know, you really could say what you wanted to say. And as you, as you get into more traditional media, there's a lot of fantastic stuff that comes with it and you learn a lot, but you don't, you don't fully kind of realize how your voice is getting shaped by the platform until, until I started this and my register voice just like kind of,

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Came back.

• 53:02Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, it's kind of like my book voice. I think it's like my happiest place to write and it just kind of came roaring back. And then it was, so, you know, I know like Pat McAfee gets to say whatever he wants. So as long, it just as long as you could kind of keep all that, all that freedom, that would be okay.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Once the network realizes that this is actually better for the viewer, then the incentives can align, which is great. I want to say on books, you've obviously written two. Jordy's thinking about writing a book called The 100 Hour Work Week, kind of a response to the Four Hour Work Week. Very on brand for us, but I, you know, there are some people who just become authors and they publish a book every single year. You're obviously getting on a cadence of newsletters go out on a regular cadence. Podcasts go out on a regular cadence. This new show is going to go out on a regular cadence. Is there a world where you think it's possible to get on some multi-year cycle for books? Or is it just inspiration needs to strike? You have to carve out time, get everything else automated more or less so that you can really focus? Or is there some in between where your work instantiates itself as a book,

• 54:05John Coogan?

  but it doesn't require the labor of love that most books require?

• 54:09Ashlee Vance?

  Oh, you're asking the tough questions.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Ashlee Vance?

  I mean, I'm doing books right now, so I have.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 54:16Ashlee Vance?

  I'm doing books. I've been working on a book on.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Breaking news, new Ashlee Vance novel coming, new book coming.

• 54:23Ashlee Vance?

  I'm doing a book on OpenAI and AI more broadly. And I've been working on that for like 18 months and Penguin Random House is going to publish that. And sold the movie rights to it already.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 54:36Ashlee Vance?

  And so that one, I've already done hundreds and hundreds of interviews. And, and you know, to your question, which gets right up my soul is, is like, you know, finding the time to, to knock it out, but I will. And then I've got another book, which I'm not sure, coming. Right after that, I'm not sure I'm ready to reveal that one yet, but I've been, I've been kind of secretly researching these two books for the last like two, three years.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, I can't wait.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  I question.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  Massive Father's Day treat, by the way. I, I think that's originally how we interacted. You recommended buying When the Heavens Went on Sale, your second book for Father's Day. I bought two copies for my father and my father-in-law. They both loved it. And I think you retweeted it and I was like, yes.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  Why?

• 55:21John Coogan?

  My guy.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm curious, why did nobody really, was, was really aware of Firefly until they were on the moon?

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Is that, uh, do you, and, and secondary to that question, do you see yourself as potentially, you know, becoming almost like a marketing engine for these companies that are so laser focused on the like core technology that they sort of forget to tell the world what they're doing?

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Like a single thread would have been better than what we got from Firefly.

• 55:50Ashlee Vance?

  You know, Firefly's funny. I mean, the, you kind of had like the Branson, Musk, Bezos dynamic that sucked a lot of the attention. And then, you know, the Rocket Labs of the world, the Fireflies, they got a little missed compared to that stuff. In my, in my book, I have a huge section on Firefly. It's kind of the most, one of the most interesting stories. I think of the book is this crazy, this Max Pleyak of this Ukrainian rich dude who gets thrown out of the company, thrown out of the country in the, in the middle of all that. So usually it's like, people don't pay attention to space companies until you really start launching. And, you know, they had some stops, starts. So, so, but you know, the cup, the criminal

• 56:31Ashlee Vance?

  thing is, is Rocket Lab because there's the, a little bit of a lack of attention on that because there's like SpaceX and Rocket Lab and they're the only two have figured it out. And they figured it out on a scale that like nobody else has even got close to yet. And they did it from New Zealand, which is insane.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Wow. One, one request for a book. I think that there's like, one of the greatest stories of potentially our current time will be this sort of narrative battle and the, the sort of. The war between the sort of techno pessimists and the techno optimists. And I'm curious, you know, every single day, it feels like the techno pessimists are sort of taking L after L, right? But that's one. Last question, I would just love to get your hot take on humanoid robotics. It's something that we've been asking a lot of the guests that are joining the show. I'm sure you're, you know, tracking a lot of these companies. What are you most excited about?

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, how quickly in your, in your view, are these a part of our daily life?

• 57:36Ashlee Vance?

  I mean, it is something that I'm tracking and I'm super into it. I've been to Figure and ExOne and a couple of other companies. I don't, you know, I'm slightly scarred on this one because I've been down this road before a couple of times. We have sort of the advantages of the AI models in particular now. You know, it's gonna be.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Is that like Boston Dynamics scars or?

• 58:00Ashlee Vance?

  There's like, there's that. There was that company that made Baxter, which was supposed to be this kind of general purpose robot. There was always like this feeling, you know, that, right? Yeah, that it was, it was.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  I grew up with Asmo and I was like, yeah, Honda's gonna solve this. It's definitely gonna be helping me out. Didn't happen.

• 58:15Ashlee Vance?

  You know, and they just always, they always proved to be just like, the movement part just proves to be so much harder than, than like you, you think. But, you know, like when I went to Figure, they'd made so much progress in 18 months to two years, way beyond what I would have thought. Optimus, you know, to be honest, like when I first saw Optimus, I thought it was like very heavy on the smoke and mirrors and like they've made incredible progress as well. So I don't know. I don't know, man. I kind of want to see that one happen, but that one.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, I can see a world, you have so many different stories to tell. I can see a world where there's like 20 of you out in the world, you know, and the little just embodied humanoid and you're just like, you know, interviewing people, you know, writing, like, and you're just sitting, you know, sitting in the studio, you've got all your screens up.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  This one's at Starbase constantly, this one's at, you know.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  So I'm excited for that.

• 59:10Ashlee Vance?

  I would like that.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  That'd be great. Less travel, more time for family.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  And then you could just, you know, anytime we needed you on the show to talk about something, you just sit the humanoid down. But thanks for coming on, you're always welcome and we're excited to track Core Memory.

• 59:24Ashlee Vance?

  You guys are killing it. Thank you for giving me time. It's awesome to see you guys do your thing.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you're listening, go to corememory.com, sign up for a Substack subscription, follow Ashley on every social platform that he's on.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Add him on LinkedIn.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Add him on LinkedIn.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  Send a request.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Send him a carrier pigeon, mail him a letter, do something nice for him. Support the techno optimist.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Thanks for coming on.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 59:48Ashlee Vance?

  Thank you, guys. Thanks.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Thank you. And up next, we are going to...

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  The man in the arena.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  The man in the arena. We're going to Max Meyer. And this, we've been huge fans of Arena Magazine.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  There are so many, look.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  There he is. We gotta get him a new name tag.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Okay, we're building this as we go.

• 1:00:10Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Every, every single copy of Arena Magazine, Machine World, which I believe is episode three or edition number three, issue three.

• 1:00:20Ashlee Vance?

  Issue 003.

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  003 comes with a, an Andorol poster, the grind that'll win.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  That's great. That's a great insert.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  Very nice insert.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for making print cool again.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Yes, we're huge on printing. Our brother printer is working overtime. You clearly have a much nicer printer than we do.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't have much color.

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, mostly black and white. But how are you doing, Max?

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  Doing great. How are you?

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic. How has the reception to 003 been? Can you give us a little bit of overview on what you're building within Arena? What your vision was for Machine World? And maybe one of the articles in here that you were the most fond of.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  Well, I had a very funny moment when I was walking on the streets in San Francisco last week and just saw the poster that we put in the front cover just in someone's office, just laying around, basically. And then I got a, and then I got a, and then I got a direct message from one of the subscribers who's like an accountant somewhere in Florida who had, who had, who had, you know, had to frame it. He wanted to show me the picture of framing the poster. And so this one was, this one was, this one, this one, this one was very fun. It was the first magazine in which I did not personally contribute an article, actually. But that sort of speaks to the, the level of very fine submissions that we received.

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  My favorite one is, it's called Who Wants to Work in a Factory?

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  And we actually had our friend Alder Riley respond to a at Luke underscore Metro tweet that said, everyone wants to expand industrial capacity, but no one wants to work in a factory. And so Alder does, you know, 3D printers and, you know, does a lot of this stuff in the heartland. And so it was, it was, it's a, it's a subject that's very appealing to me. And, you know, he, he talks about the, the sort of wonder in the eyes of the kids that get to see all this tech stuff. And, you know, his, his big thing, they actually do want to work in the factory. The, the children yearn for it. It's just, the opportunity has been sort of taken away in the course of many generations.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Totally. I remember an Onion article from years ago that was joking that job satisfaction among crane operators was at an all time high because you just wake up, you go and it's very tactile, you're moving things around and, and it's a joke, but it's also probably very true. My question is, obviously you, you monitor, I think, tech culture very, very closely. I want to know, it feels like, obviously there's been this massive vibe shift. Have we won? Do we need to be cautious about resting on our laurels now? Or is there still so much work to do because we truly have not reshored manufacturing? Job's not finished. Job's not finished. What's your take?

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think that anyone should ever assume that they've won the American culture. There remains a lot of, you know, anti-tech sentiment.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  Much of it, much of it with, with, with, much of it with reason. The whole Arena project is sort of trying to synthesize the tech culture with the broader American culture. And there are ways in which these two things are sometimes at odds. I think that like 2010's tech largely at odds with the, with the American culture. You know, Google saying, you know, no, we don't want to work with the, we don't want to work with the military, but it's, but it's, but it's, but it's, you know, it's fine to work, it's fine to work with the Chinese military. I think it's always incumbent on, on the tech world to, to clearly explain the, you know, the benefits of the system to the, to the, to the broader nation, just because it's here. It can't be, it can't be sort of reconstructed somewhere else.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  I've always been, I've always been fascinated by you as a, as a figure because on the one hand, like you work deeply in technology. You're at a venture capital firm, you're deeply ingrained in the tech world and the techno-optimist world. And, but at the same time, you're building a shed on, you know, like.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you took building in public to a new level by just, just building this, this extravagant. I don't even think we can call it a shed. What, what is it? It's a structure.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Structure? Yeah. Break down what you're building and like why and how that fits into the tech, you know, narrative that you're building.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I set out a, so I have an off-grid cabin and I'm building like a big steel building that, where I'll put my Starlink. But the off-grid cabin is very rustic. At one point I tweeted out a picture of my, my typewriter and my oil lamps. And I was like, this is where I write techno propaganda from, inside an off-grid cabin with a little solar battery and a Starlink.

• 1:04:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that, yeah, I've been sort of, I've been sort of nursing this concept of like, you know, techno-letism, where we can, where we can, where we can encourage, you know, technology broadly, but we don't have to, you know, we don't, we don't have to give everyone like an internet-connected toaster or whatnot. We can rebel against the little elements. And really the beautiful thing about technology is that it can, it can give us our time back. It makes every, it makes the whole economy more productive. It raises, it raises, it raises wealth standards for the everyman. And I think that that's something that's always good to, to keep in mind. I just happen to also, you know, have a very strong connection to Iowa where I grew up and love to spend the summer on my, on my property up there.

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  How many undiscovered Luke Feridors are there in the world? I think it's, you know, an amazing story of, you know, just in general, you split time between Austin, which is sort of maybe a destination for people like Luke, but you also spend time in Iowa, where I imagine that there are undiscovered people like that. What's your read on kind of American untapped potential broadly?

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the legacy of the big Midwestern research universities is really amazing. You have, you know, the University of Nebraska, Purdue, Iowa State, University of Minnesota. I mean, they invent stuff all the time. They're massive enterprises and there are tons of super talented people that are in them. And basically, you know, one of the issues is that there's probably just some like talent misallocation that goes on based on the types of businesses that are the most competitive hirers in those states. But I think the very good news is that the internet has totally surfaced a lot of the Luke Feridor types to the rest of the world.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's on the order of tens of thousands in the Midwestern US, I think, that are...

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  That's a hit the size going for that.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  You go one rung below Luke, then you get hundreds of thousands. Luke is, you know, A++.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Totally. Do you see, you know, is that, is that all a focus for you of sort of talent discovery? You obviously spend time at 8VC, you know, you're sort of, I imagine, splitting time between Arena and 8. Is that something that you feel is part of your mission is to try to get those people to work on problems that you find important?

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got a great, I got a great email from a subscriber just the other day that I, that I shared with his permission on X. And he said, you know, he's, he's a consultant. Doing local consulting in Houston, Texas. And he said that he was feeling really down about the way that Doge was being portrayed. And he'd always wanted to do something in manufacturing. And he said that he opened up Arena Magazine and it gave him some inspiration and he's thinking about doing it. And I said, you know, let us know if we can, let us know if we can help with your pivot. So yes, like the, the, the, the cardinal goal of doing this crazy print publication is to mind infect people to work on the right things, the cool things, the pro-America things.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  And I think that that is also a core duty of, you know, it's not just media people. I think that the, I think that the, the venture capitalists are also trying to mind infect founders and engineers to work on the right things as well.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is, uh, there's this idea of a silver tsunami. It's been sort of memed to death at this point, this idea that there's all these people running sort of important uh, small businesses and manufacturing companies and widget companies here in the U.S. And they're retiring and the MBAs figured that out and just said, you know, these are our companies. Like that's my $5 million EBITDA, you know, manufacturing business. Like I'm going to take it over. Who's the right people to take it over? Uh, is, is there an opportunity that for Silicon Valley to sort of participate in that? And sort of, um, you know, bring sort of more like the, the idea, some of the robotic stuff that you're seeing at Y Combinator? And bring that, uh, to the heartland, uh, or is it an opportunity for everybody?

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's an opportunity for the business owners that have been doing real things for all these decades to secure the bag. And there's, you know, it's sort of love the wealth transfer going on of, you know, selling these, selling these, you know, $5 million EBITDA businesses. I don't know, 10x EBITDA starting offer to the, to the MBA. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's great. I think I dislike the, the meme of it where like, it's like, we're all going to take these things over. And it's actually not that hard to run these businesses.

• 1:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  There's the very famous, uh, John Colson tweet where he's, you know, the, the world is a museum of passion, passion projects. And like every little thing is like that. But one hopes that there are like some interesting ways to integrate AI into these things. But I'm also sort of a believer in the like, um, Octavian choosing his successor, the street boy from Rome. And I think that you're going to see a lot of these situations where, you know, where someone talented will find a mentee who will take it over.

• 1:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 04

  And that you may actually see a trend of just outright transferring these businesses.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  This is a very European thing, actually, but I think it could happen.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's great if a business owner has run something for, you know, 30 years and they can sell the business for $10 million and buy a boat and a lake house and sort of sail off into the sunset. But at the same time, you know, giving, you know, transferring the business, not, not a direct transfer, but sort of creating a, you know, something like a seller note that allows them to take it over and get, you know, continue to be paid out for, for what they built.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  I want to go to self-driving cars. There's an article in here, "What a World of Self-Driving Cars Might Be Like" by Andrew Miller. And I want to talk about the aesthetics of self-driving cars. I found it very striking when Tesla announced the Cybercab, how different the design was to the Waymos, which are these kind of knobby, bumpy Jaguars.

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  And Elon, you know, announced the future should look like the future. What, what is your platonic ideal of a self-driving car look like?

• 1:11:12Speaker 04

  Well, I think that eventually you're going to see a diversification based on consumer choice, which is what happened with, with regular cars. So I don't have a platonic ideal myself. I want the people to decide.

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  You don't want to be carried on livery by four humanoids?

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  As for the like, the future should look like the future, I agree with that. And one of our big things with Arena is that like, the futuristic aesthetic is better by just relying on the stuff that already exists, basically. And I, and that's why I admire the design of the Cybercab. It's not that different from what their actual cars look like. And so the key thing there is that it doesn't seem so far off and ridiculous. I'm in favor of the Jetson stuff as well, but only if it can actually be done. And what I worry about is like lying to people about like what it's going to look like. Because it's not going to be all, it's not going to be all, you know, cyberpunk.

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  I'd like a autonomous horse and buggy personally.

• 1:12:12Speaker 04

  My farm is 10 miles down the road from the largest Amish settlement west of the Mississippi. And so I drive past the, I drive past the horse and buggies all the time. There are, there are horse parking lots that might be a big thing, you know, techno lettism. Maybe, maybe, maybe like, maybe, maybe, maybe the founders fund office, maybe the ABC office will need like a horse post. For the techno letites to show up.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  There's nothing better I can imagine than just riding a horse with a Starlink on it. That's the best. That's the dream.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, with an optimist, with an optimist that's actually sort of like, you know, guiding the horses for you, you know, so you can sit in the back and it's fully autonomous.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Well, this is fantastic, Max. Thanks so much. We'll have to have you on back soon. Congratulations on the launch of Arena. It's a fantastic magazine. Everyone should go subscribe it. Where can they find it? What's the, what's the URL?

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  Arenamag.com.

• 1:13:04John Coogan?

  Arenamag.com. Thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Max, great to see you.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  And up next, coming into the capital of capital, the fortress of finance, the temple of technology. We got Justin Mayer's former brother of the week. Hey, there he is.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  The stepbrother, the stepbrother.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  Profiled in Forbes.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  On Sunday.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  On Sunday.

• 1:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Cover story.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Cover story.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Big. Took you, that was a nice little victory lap.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  It only took eight years. Yeah, we got there.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of a stepping stone. You do the Forbes cover and then you get invited on your friend's podcast.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really think they, they said what turned me on to it was they saw his brother of the week and they were looking for feature stories.

• 1:13:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's the pipeline.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  The pipeline.

• 1:13:55Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you finally. We got to see you yesterday in SF. You have a good trip?

• 1:14:00Justin Mares?

  Yeah, it was great. Yeah, it's cool being back in SF. The city is like, it's alive again. It feels like. And so good energy here. Saw some guys at Equinox working on jeans. It's just, just good energy everywhere.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  That, that, that was me, by the way. I was, I didn't, I didn't bring shorts yesterday. I'm just sitting, I'm in Equinox in SF being like, somebody from the, that listens to the show is gonna see this and, and.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  I mean, that wasn't as bad as on Monday. I got back from Tahoe and I worked out in my, in my mountain boots.

• 1:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Hey, it's just about getting the, it's about getting the work in.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  Do the work.

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  How, what, what's the scene like in, you've famously been posted up in, in Austin for a long time. What's the scene like there? Do you think that the startup community in Austin still has a lot of momentum? Or that now that SF is, you know, feeling back, does that, you know, potentially slow, slow down Austin's traction?

• 1:14:56Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm sure that it'll, you know, have an impact on Austin's traction. But the reality is, I think that like in SF, if you're building an AI company and you're not in SF right now, it's just, it just seems like a bad idea. Like you should just move to the place where all the AI stuff is, is happening. Outside of that though, I mean, I think that you could make a pretty compelling argument that Austin is a way better place to build a health company, a defense tech company, like any number of these sort of hard tech or other companies that, you know, the Bay doesn't necessarily have such a stranglehold on. I think Austin is still gonna do quite well. And, and I still personally see a bunch of people moving there. But again, if you're doing AI stuff, it's just like SF is like so far ahead. You know, it's the obvious choice.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  I want to ask you about how you're using AI across the different businesses. You obviously have built a bone broth empire, now are in the fintech space. That also ties into Maha. But before we do that, do you have any updates to share on, on TruMed? What's, what's the latest?

• 1:16:00Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the big news is that we actually closed a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:16:04Jordi Hays?

  Go!

• 1:16:05Justin Mares?

  Congratulations.

• 1:16:07Justin Mares?

  Thank you.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:16:08Justin Mares?

  Yeah, so we raised $36 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:13Justin Mares?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Huge, congrats.

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Big number.

• 1:16:15John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Big number.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Can you break down how the business is working now? Just give the general pitch for those who might not know what TruMed does.

• 1:16:22Justin Mares?

  Yeah, so basically what we're doing is we're unlocking the ability to spend tax-free HSA/FSA money on things like gym memberships, supplements, eight sleeps, sponsor plug.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go.

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Roros, right, I think.

• 1:16:38Justin Mares?

  Exactly, and all these different things. So I'm like, the reason for this is basically the IRS says that health savings accounts and FSA accounts, they're used for medical spend. And yet, medical spend is not defined as like, it has to be a pill that is created by a pharmaceutical company. If you look at studies, they show that exercise, sleep, supplements, all these things actually work better for treating many chronic conditions than, you know, SSRIs or any sort of other like pharmaceutical intervention. And so what we're doing is we're basically building an integrated fintech product that allows you, if you're trying to treat or prevent obesity, to buy something like a Peloton, pay for a gym membership, using your tax-free HSA/FSA funds, assuming you qualify.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Is the business entirely e-commerce driven? Or can you plug into, you know, Peloton eventually gets a retail store and you're kind of like on the toast layer, like the square checkout layer as well?

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Apple Pay.

• 1:17:31Justin Mares?

  Yeah, right now, we're 100% e-commerce.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:34Justin Mares?

  But a big reason that we raised is to try and like, be everywhere, basically.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:17:39Justin Mares?

  Anytime you're investing in something that could improve, you know, prevent disease, improve your health, anything like that, TruMed should be a payment option. And so that's kind of where we're going towards.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  That's super exciting. It feels like you were so, if you could sort of rewind and build the best possible business for the Maha movement that was sort of benefit, benefit from this sort of new emphasis on American health, it would have been TruMed. But talk about the early days of TruMed. You'd obviously been a successful, you know, entrepreneur at that time, but was there pushback? Did people ever say, oh, this like, yeah, we don't invest in like Shopify apps? Like, was there any of that sort of like, did you get any passes like that that you can remember? Because you're obviously here now, you've raised this new round's $36 million from, you know, a huge growth fund. But, but talk about the early days and the pushback there.

• 1:18:30Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, we definitely got pushback. Like when we were starting, people are like, is this legal? You know, what are you doing? You're a broth guy. Like, what do you know about fintech? And so there was some pushback on that dimension, but for the most part, like if you believe like we do, that root cause interventions, sleep, exercise, things like this are actually effective at treating or preventing chronic conditions, which the research certainly shows, then there's no reason. And in fact, like these sorts of things should be encouraged. Like, we should be encouraging more Americans to spend, you know, their tax advantaged money on these sorts of things. And the biggest pushback truly was that question of like, is this legal?

• 1:19:11Justin Mares?

  And some people were like, I don't really believe that exercise is effective as an intervention. Like, if you believe that...

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  They're on Ozempic. They're on Ozempic now. Yeah, it's rough.

• 1:19:22Jordi Hays?

  How competitive are you and Nick? You obviously started, you know, your broth empire together. Now Nick is running another company, Light Labs, that's crushing it. I'm happy to be an investor there, but do you guys have any sort of running bets on who's, you know, is TruMed or Light Labs, like, you know, going to be the bigger outcome? Is that on your mind? Yeah, so and maybe introduce your brother briefly.

• 1:19:48Justin Mares?

  Yeah, so I started Kettle and Fire with Nick Mares, my brother. And he was 19, I was 25 when we first started the company. He was in one of the early T L fellowship classes, actually, which was, yeah, which was kind of cool. And so he left Kettle and Fire, you know, I started TruMed. He's starting Light Labs, which is doing a bunch of consumer testing for brands to test like, you know, Jordan, you care about this, John, I don't think you do, but like, do you have microplastics? Do you have glyphosate? You know, do you have any of these things for people that are sort of weak willed and end up getting sick from the environmental toxins in their environment?

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Justin Mares?

  So he started that company and it's been great. Like, we've had a great relationship when we were building Kettle and Fire. Like, anytime we had conflict, you know, mom could just referee, you know? And I was mostly right, which I think also helped. But now we're just, we're both supporting one another in sort of like this, this deep thing that we learned and felt and believe earnestly from our kettle of fire experience, which is the American food system is basically poisonous to weak willed people like most Americans.

• 1:20:51Justin Mares?

  And so, you know, he's working on that way. I'm trying to work on it in the TruMed way.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  No, I love that you're both trying to sort of tackle the... Tackle like a very similar problem, but from totally, you know, different, different angles. And it's great because John doesn't care about what's in his food. He's just

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  Junkyard dog.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  He's, you know.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Building up poison resist.

• 1:21:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:14John Coogan?

  I consume so many poisons, now they can take me down.

• 1:21:16Jordi Hays?

  You should be using, you should be using TruMed.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  I should, I should. Well, I mean, if I go into pro bodybuilding, I assume I could use TruMed to, use my FSA, HSA dollars to get tax-free bodybuilding coaching. That's what I want.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Hormones, hormones.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  No, I will be a natural bodybuilder.

• 1:21:33Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, you know, something that maybe has gotten less attention is just your investing career. Maybe like, kind of, how do you kind of, what were a few of your early angel investments that kind of got you hooked on it? Because I, I feel like you're deeply addicted to angel, angel investing, which has turned out to be a really good habit, habit for you, but, and we bonded over this early on because when we first met, I think it was for, for Rora, which you ended up investing in and you were like, ah, like I, I wanted to start this company, but like, I guess I'll, I guess I'll, I'll invest. But, uh, but yeah, maybe, maybe talk a little bit about, about that and kind of like what, what's most interesting to you at this point?

• 1:22:17Justin Mares?

  For sure. Yeah. I mean, if, if you look at my balance sheet, definitely angel investing has been great. If you look at the income statement, it's basically been like the, the worst hobby that an American man has ever had. Dumping cash into different illiquid, you know, vehicles for seven years now. But my, my first, my first ever angel check actually was into something called Crusoe Energy, which is a, yeah, founder's fund company.

• 1:22:42Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even know that.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  That's such a banger company too. Worth billions now.

• 1:22:47Justin Mares?

  Yeah. So that's a good one. Uh, my second one was in a, a company called Mindbloom, which is like doing at-home ketamine therapy. I'm very much a believer in psychedelic therapy generally. And just as I did more and more of these, um, these kinds of deals, like I, I felt very strongly that as someone who is building a company, there are, like, one of the key areas of alpha you have is you, you just get a really good sense of like, who is actually good at doing stuff? And so Jordy, when you were talking about Rora, I was like, okay, this guy is smart. He's good at marketing. He's good at building teams. Like, you know, you introduced me to Brian and the rest of the guys. It's like, this is going to be a great, a great deal and a great company. And I, I think that something that maybe people don't appreciate enough is

• 1:23:29Justin Mares?

  If you lived in the Bay, you know, I moved to the Bay in 2012, lived in here, I'm actually in San Francisco right now, lived here for a decade, you just got to meet all of these amazingly talented people that were starting companies. And after I passed my, I passed on a deal that a friend was starting and it ended up like totally blowing up. And I was like, okay, this is dumb. I just have all of this alpha that is like surrounding me in San Francisco.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Blowing up in a good way, presumably.

• 1:23:55Justin Mares?

  Yeah, yeah, blowing up in a good way, exactly.

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  You're like, that company? There in us.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  I could have been in the book. I could have been in the movie. There are multiple types of alpha.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  There's a weird thing where I realize like it's a huge mistake not to invest in your, in your friends.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  Your absolute boys.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  You know, if you believe in your own abilities, you know, you tend to sort of self-select to be around other, you know, similarly talented people and like you should just default invest in, invest in your friends.

• 1:24:26Justin Mares?

  Hundred percent. Yeah, that was a lesson that I learned kind of the hard way. And then now I invest probably in 15 companies a year personally as an angel and I'm also a venture partner at a, at a fund called Long Journey Ventures. So do make, do a lot of it, I would say.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about your approach to valuation. You're not, obviously, it's not like the most important factor by any means, but every time, it's so often, I feel like I talk to you and you're like, oh yeah, I got into that company at like a three cap or something like that. And, and normally most investors are like, I haven't seen a company raising at a three cap. And, but somehow you do it. Is that just by sort of nerding out and meeting founders like sort of years before they end up starting companies? Like, how do you even make that happen?

• 1:25:08Justin Mares?

  Yeah, definitely. Definitely it is by nerding out and like knowing people and talking to them about when they're thinking of taking the leap. Like in the case of Mindbloom, I was talking to my friend Dylan for a while. He was running other ideas by me. And at one point I was just like, dude, you're the most into psychedelic therapy person I know. If you start a psychedelic therapy company, like do it, I'll write the first check and just like get going. And I kind of, and I've done that with a couple other companies where they're deciding, do I take the leap or not? And I as a friend and as a, as a backer can just be like, you should definitely do this. I'll help you put together the rest of the money and I'll literally be the first check in. Not that it's like crazy size, like we're not ringing the size gong or anything, but.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll hit the size gong for you.

• 1:25:56Justin Mares?

  But yeah, so that I think is if you can play some role in the journey that your friends have, or like other people you know have in going from should I start a thing to I'm doing this thing, oftentimes you have pricing advantage in that, but you're also like part of the journey and part of the story and one of the first believers, which is I think personally the thing that is most exciting to me about Angel's stuff. Like I don't get hot and bothered about, you know, a late-stage growth round for a company that's crushing it quite as much as I do like the one-on-one, very personal conversations with someone that wants to do something big and is like trying to figure out how to take that first leap.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. How are you seeing AI impact? Obviously, the broth business, kettle on fire, the broth empire, it's very, you know, real-world driven. Like you guys are figuring out, like from what I can see, you can't make enough of the product, right? Like there's sort of like demand is sort of you're in, you have like the best problem for a business owner and sort of you're trying to like meet that demand. Are you seeing sort of more efficiency, though, in the sort of like, you know, across the company broadly? Are there sort of hires that you would have made this year that maybe you're not having to because of AI? Or obviously, you're on the board now, but I'm sure you still have enough visibility into the business.

• 1:27:19Justin Mares?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, for kettle on fire specifically, we are not hiring like ad creators. We're not hiring copywriters. Like there was this whole slew of marketing-adjacent people that we previously, you know, had to hire. We had a copywriter for the first like five and a half years of the company. Now, we don't have anyone. We used to have designers like full-time. You know, now we're investing less in that area. So there's a lot of areas in the marketing side of things that we have just invested less in. The thing that I'm most excited about Is I think if you're running a tech company like TruMed, we have to, it's existential for us to figure out how to use AI because every tech company is going to use AI. Because it's just like in the bloodstream of the tech industry.

• 1:28:01Justin Mares?

  If Kettle and Fire can figure out as a bone broth company, how to learn and apply AI. We're going to be like the best run CPG company in the entire country and the most efficient one. And so we have like a whole team and by whole team, I mean, two people internally focused at Kettle and Fire that are like playing with AI. Using it to build tools. We're, um, we're building, we're doing something kind of interesting where we are building a factory. It's like a massive 150,000 square foot bone broth, um, you know, bone broth kind of.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Broth Empire.

• 1:28:34Justin Mares?

  Yeah. I need a cool moniker for that. That's, I'm not in the context. Arsenal two.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Broth Arsenal, self replicating broth.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  The strategic broth reserve.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  I mean, speaking of strategic reserves, uh, should we move on to Maha?

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to, I want to, I, I, I think this could be the start. You know, I, I hope that this is the start of a, of decades of, of investment and attention around American health. Everybody's experienced this, you can have everything you ever wanted in life, but if you're not healthy, you, you in many ways have, have nothing. If you were, you know, starting a company, you know, what opportunities do you see today for sort of new entrepreneurs to sort of? There's the obvious beneficiaries of people are like, oh, I want to be healthier. I'm going to have bone broth or, oh, I want to spend my HSA funds more effectively. I can, you know, use TruMed, but what other opportunities are you kind of seeing? For sort of net new entrance into the space?

• 1:29:31Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think that the biggest companies get built to solve the biggest problems. And in this case, like what I call the great American poisoning, America's chronic disease crisis is the biggest problem in the country. Like healthcare, four and a half trillion dollars a year in spend, 90% of that goes towards chronic conditions. People are generally becoming skeptical of health insurance. Their doctors are not spending much time with them. Doctors broadly don't think about or know how to treat chronic conditions. Like most people will go to their doctor, say, I'm dealing with, well, I'm dealing with obesity. Your doctor's not allowed to ask you if you're actually like fat or over anything like this, which is insane. And then if, if that's.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Is it not like a clinical definition?

• 1:30:12Justin Mares?

  No, I mean, doctors are being discouraged from asking this because

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Just culturally.

• 1:30:16Justin Mares?

  Yeah, exactly. It like turns patients off and like is shame of some sort. You know, and and our existing medical system, when someone walks in and says, hey, I want to lose weight, or I'm dealing with inflammation or whatever, predominantly, they get recommended drugs, they get recommended prescriptions, they get recommended all this stuff. And I think that people are starting to like wake up and be skeptical of the system that basically where people get sick because of our toxic environment, and then our healthcare system drugs them for profit. And so I think that if you are an entrepreneur or someone that cares about this problem, there are effectively infinite, infinite things that you can do to try and like build a business in this space. I think people are going to become much more skeptical of pharmaceuticals over the next decade.

• 1:30:58Justin Mares?

  I think people are, you know, where the doctor-patient relationship is going to be totally reinvented. You see companies like Function and Superpower and others that are starting where they have the philosophy that health is not found in the doctor's office, which I agree. Like, if you get your labs done outside of that, you change your diet, you start exercising, you start taking supplements, your outcomes are much more likely to improve than they are if you just like go talk to your GP once every nine to 12 months and spend on average seven minutes with that that doctor a year. And so I I just think that every aspect of the patient journey, how people are getting sick, what they're doing to address it, is completely changing right now, which is really exciting.

• 1:31:40Jordi Hays?

  Great answer.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got to get people on sleep diet, sleep diet and exercise. That's like the, it's the most boring content, but every, every new health influencer that blows up, they always blow up like, let's just go back to the basics. And they just drill that for a year, they get really big, and then they start to talk about like, oh, the longer tail stuff.

• 1:32:01Justin Mares?

  Foot-holsters.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Do you have any life hacks or or tips for sleep diet or exercise that you like to share? Or ways to get advances there?

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  People are gonna ask about the skin and hair routine.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure.

• 1:32:18Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I think that, I think that people, a big thing that people need to pay attention to is toxin avoidance. Like, I very much am of the belief that we exist in the biggest toxic soup that any group of humans have ever lived in. Like, the US, our approach to regulating chemicals is so bad and so different from that of Europe. Like, our, our third most popular pesticide is called atrazine, just to give an example. It's banned in the EU, banned in Mexico, banned in Canada, third most popular pesticide in the US. And provably, when you expose, expose male frogs to atrazine, like, four out of 10 of them become female frogs to the point where they can bear offspring. Like, this is Alex Jones.

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  It's the Alex Jones thing that was actually proven, like, maybe true.

• 1:33:00Justin Mares?

  That is actually right, yeah. Alex Jones crushed this one.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  And it didn't come from Alex Jones, it came from some Berkeley professor, right?

• 1:33:06Justin Mares?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Who wrote it. And then I believe Michael Crichton, when he wrote Jurassic Park, was, was basing it on that research. And so, in the original Jurassic Park movie, there's the whole story about, oh, the dinosaurs, if they're under environmental pressure, they can change sexes to continue to reproduce. This is like the plot of the first Jurassic Park. And it was seen as like sci-fi, but, but Michael Crichton had actually read the paper and said like, oh, this is like possible, I'll include this in my book, which got turned into a movie. It's very, very interesting. And then it became like a conspiracy theory, and then it became like real again. It was very weird how he round-tripped it in the media from like, oh, like, totally reasonable to unbelievable to believable again. Fascinating.

• 1:33:48Justin Mares?

  That's amazing.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Where do you go, out of curiosity, where, what are your sources of, I mean, I was about to ask, what are your sources of alpha? But, and so you don't need to actually share those, but, you know, X, like, doesn't respect links anymore, right? You post a link, you know, so nobody posts links. There's some good original thought on X, but a lot of it's sort of just like memetic, people just like iterating around the same ideas.

• 1:34:15Justin Mares?

  Sloth.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, we, we, I think, bonded over kind of like the Ray Pete forums and, and sort of that, like, sort of whole hub of, of

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Arcane knowledge.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Arcane knowledge around health. Where, where are you going on the internet, aside from, you know, places like X, to, you know, get insight around kind of where health is going? Where kind of consumer trends are going, if anywhere?

• 1:34:40Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I really think that Elon is correct in recognizing that Substack is kind of one of the threats maybe to X. It's a different platform, but that's where I get a lot of my, you know, a lot of my news. And the things that I find most interesting that the health community is talking about are things like toxin avoidance. I think, I think environmental toxins are going to be the biggest trend of the next decade. And we just, we just don't even understand or begin to understand how bad a lot of these things are. I think that the peating stuff, Jordy is like totally spot on. I think that people thinking about metabolic rate and all these sorts of things is highly undervalued and underappreciated today. And then another thing I think is we're going to see much more, and I read Substack on

• 1:35:24Justin Mares?

  this, but I think there's going to be much more attention paid to nutrient deficiencies. Like, you know, the average American's food is something like between 40 and 70% less nutrient dense than it was even just 50 years ago. That's something that's not baked into almost anyone's model of the world when they think about health and wellness is, you know,

• 1:35:44Jordi Hays?

  So I should get triple steak at Chipotle?

• 1:35:47Justin Mares?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry to interrupt. I totally, I totally agree with you. It's a scary one because it's almost like we need to genetically engineer the food to having The nutrients, we add them back, because we took them out and then we add them back. It's one of those scary things. The cycle continues. I have an, I have an orange juice right here, and I know it has like 70, probably 75% less, you know, even vitamin C than it would have 50 years ago. And that's sort of scary. What do you, do you think that the solution is to sort of, sort of genetically engineer our food back to, to, to sort of, to the past? Or are you still, you know, sort of pro naturalist?

• 1:36:28Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I would say on this one, I'm mostly a naturalist, largely because a lot of the nutrient decay, some of it comes from soil. A lot of it comes from how we transport our food. Like if you grow, you know, spinach in California, package it, put it on average, like a 12 day, kind of like supply, put it through the supply chain, it gets to where you're eating it 12 days later. In that 12 day period, that spinach is going to lose like roughly 70, 90% of its total nutrient density content. And so I just think people like ideally should be eating more seasonally, more locally, and then eating animal products, which frankly, like tend to be much more nutrient dense than, you know, than plants and vegetables.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  I have a hot take on this. I want to run by you. I'm calling it the efficient markets diet. And it's basically like you can collapse all of the health and advice that you just gave me, which I believe, and I think you're on to something, into just the market is efficient. And therefore, if I want to have the least toxic, most nutrient dense foods, I should just buy the most expensive thing. And I should shop at Aravon and buy the most expensive thing. And I always ask the question of when I hear about a new diet, new trend, is this just a transposition of buy the most expensive thing? What do you think?

• 1:37:37Justin Mares?

  I think that's spot on. And this is why things like keto didn't have necessarily the staying power, where people were like, oh, that means I can buy dog shit cheese and dip it in butter and just like max out on fat content and not eat any like anything healthy.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:52Justin Mares?

  Which is clearly just like not how you should do keto.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  A lot of these diets, I feel like the main value is just giving you a little heuristic that sticks in your brain. That's very easy. Like paleo, you know, I don't know how good of the diet that is, but all I know is that if you're on paleo, you know, caveman didn't have McDonald's. Don't eat McDonald's. And if you just stop eating McDonald's, that's going to be an improvement for a lot of people, right? And, and I think that-

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Except for Trump.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Except for Trump. It would, it would take away all of his power probably. Yeah. So he would immediately-

• 1:38:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think, so I think the greatest, so if that's true, and we're just sort of playing this out, then the challenge for the technology industry is to try to deliver like what is now extremely expensive, but make it 10 times cheaper.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Jordi Hays?

  And so like, maybe that's like, that's probably an entire problem area.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  And the flip side of the efficient market diet is that as food gets really, really cheap, because you're just completely optimizing everything and everything is just completely, you know, mechanized. It gets so cheap that people can overeat. And then I don't know where you stand on the calorie in calorie out thing, but I think that it, it like people can overeat if the food's really expensive and they'd probably be better off eating less food that's more pure. But what's your response to that?

• 1:39:03Justin Mares?

  Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, for sure, people, that said, though, the body has natural kind of satiety, you know, mechanisms that, that kick in and they kick in and work better more when you're eating real food. Like if people, there's, it's almost impossible to sit down and slam three ribeyes, but it's real-

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  I'll stop you right there. I think I can do it pretty easily. But for most people, yes.

• 1:39:25Justin Mares?

  Don't care a dog. Yeah. But, but I mean, for, for many people, they've had the experience or seen someone have the experience of just eating through an entire fucking bag of Doritos or something like that.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  Totally, and they're designed to get you to do that.

• 1:39:37Justin Mares?

  Exactly, exactly. And so, the more you're eating real food, the more your like body's natural mechanisms of hey, you're full, hey, you should stop eating, hey, you're gonna feel sick if you keep doing this.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:47Justin Mares?

  Kicks in in a way that it just doesn't when you're eating like the Costco 48, you know, ounce bag of cheese balls or something.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  I would love, I would love to, uh, I would love to see you eat something like that.

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would just kill you instantly. I keep joking with Jordy that he's on the, I'm on the junkyard diet, he's on the poodle diet, and a single, a single inorganic blueberry would kill him instantly.

• 1:40:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I gotta be careful.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Because he has no poison resist built up. Yeah, it's a balancing act, clearly.

• 1:40:16Jordi Hays?

  Justin, thank you for coming on. You're our new, uh, health, uh, you are, you are the expert now. So whenever we were talking about, oh, we're gonna need to consult with the experts on this.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  We say, trust the science, trust the bro scientists.

• 1:40:27Jordi Hays?

  The brother, the brother scientist, Justin Maris.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  Justin is our correspondent.

• 1:40:31Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the round. It's fantastic. Uh, job's, job's not finished, obviously, but.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  One last size gone for Justin.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna get every single American, uh, you know, running on, on TrueMed. Uh, and then, uh, I hope we can get it so that, you know, you can basically spend your entire income through TrueMed someday, uh, because, uh, it's probably the most important thing that you spend money on.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Just no taxes then.

• 1:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:54John Coogan?

  Just pay zero taxes.

• 1:40:56Jordi Hays?

  That'd be fun.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  This is the true, the true tax optimizer. Just spend 100% of your income on healthy food and, and gym, which is really all you would need to spend money on. So I, I, I, I think it's a great, it's a great tax optimization strategy. I want to be paying zero in taxes because I'm just, I'm just eating at Arowan and, uh, and.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  And giving, giving Justin and the TrueMed team their, their cut.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're cut, they're cut. Yeah, for sure. Uh, they are, they are the new tax. You pay the tax to TrueMed, you don't pay the tax to the government. We're privatizing taxes.

• 1:41:25Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, I'm serious. Anytime there's big health headlines, we want to have you come back on and break it down with us.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fantastic. Thanks so much for joining.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you in the group chat.

• 1:41:33Justin Mares?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  We'll see ya. Have a good one.

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna use the restroom.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Okay, always great to have a brother of the week on. Next up, we are going to Sean Purie, host of My First Million, good friend of the show. And I don't know, Ben, do you have that printed out? So I wanted to have Sean on for a bunch of reasons, great guy. But he posted a fantastic diagram of how it's this pyramid of how you like level up in your career. And I thought it was just fantastic and I wanted him to break it down on the show. I'm looking through his feed right now, trying to find it. And then also the K-shaped economy, we gotta go through that, talking about will AI replace your job?

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Well, it depends on how you're, what job you're doing and what role you're playing in the economy. So I think he has a lot of great advice for founders as well as for employees and basically everyone in between. Also, I'm sure we will, I'm sure we will touch on the midwitt meme, which is one of his favorites. I'm going to send him the, where's the triangle of talent? I need to find the, the, the triangle. Let's find this, triangle. And then I will, oh, here we go. The new blog, the triangle of talent. I'll read this off. Okay, enough teasing. Here's my triangle of talent. And he breaks down five levels of essentially competence in any role.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  And I think this is a great framework, not just for people who are doing jobs and trying to level up, but also managers, to think about where people in their ecosystem fit in. Level one is useless. Even if you tell them exactly what to do, they rarely do it right. Level two is the task monkey. Tell them what to do and how to do it and when to do it and they'll get it done. Level three is the problem solver. Tell them what to do, they figure out how. Level four is the systems thinker. You tell them just the problem and they set up a system to figure it out with the people and the process necessary. And level five is the superstar. They identify the right problem and get it solved. And when you have a superstar on your team, it is truly fantastic.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  And so I want him to break that down. Let me send this off. We are ready. Cool. Hopefully we can get him on.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  And Jordy, what else do you want to talk to Sean about? I think branding, marketing, podcasting, e-commerce. He's kind of an expert in everything.

• 1:44:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to talk to him about, uh, he's, he's a, does a bunch of startup investments. I think that, I think he may have had a rolling fund or a fund on Angel List. I want to ask him about, you know, if he, if eventually he just like wants, I imagine he seems like the guy is just going to want to run his own money.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  You just take all the returns.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm interested to get his perspective there.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  He has hilarious stories about Twitch. He worked at Twitch for a while. I'm not sure how many he can share on stream, but they're great. If he can, if we can get some of those out of him. Truly some of the funniest era in Silicon Valley. And also, when I did his, when I did his podcast, My First Million, it's incredibly well-run show. They, unlike this, they prep for their guests a lot. And, and so he sent me this worksheet to figure, to, to fill out the three ideas of what, what I could kind of like pitch to him. Let me see if I have this. My first million. I want to see if I have this.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  Because, I don't know if I have it here. He sent it to me and it was a lot of fun, but he asked specifically like, bring three great stories of, from your business career. Bring three startup ideas. And the ideas I brought were Beast VPN, which was, I wanted Mr. Beast to set up a VPN company, start a VPN company. Because he has a very international, broad audience. It's low churn, high margin. And he, and everyone is kind of in the market for a VPN. People like, do they need them? Do they not need them? But if he was, if Mr. Beast was able to build out a VPN, it's a, it's a, it's kind of an uninvestable category for VCs, which makes it, because all the money just goes into marketing and distribution.

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  But if you have a massive distribution arm, ready to go. You can just immediately really, really run with that and get, you know, basically capture all the value because you're not, you're not spending money on marketing. And, and if you look, I've always felt that one of the, one of the best ways for,

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  for YouTubers to monetize is to create a business where the competes with their number one advertiser.

• 1:46:21Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  And so when you look at one of the largest ad buying segments on YouTube, it's, it's VPS. And so almost every YouTuber has got an email from a VPN provider saying, hey, we'd love you to, we'd love to sponsor you.

• 1:46:32Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  But I think we got him here in the temple of technology. Welcome.

• 1:46:37Speaker 06

  What is going on gentlemen?

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  What's going on?

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:46:43Jordi Hays?

  Look, you're looking fantastic. You, you got the lighting. You got the real mic.

• 1:46:47Speaker 06

  That's fantastic.

• 1:46:48Jordi Hays?

  You look like a professional.

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, clearly a professional.

• 1:46:52Speaker 06

  I, I had to show up right. I wanted to come here and just lay down a gauntlet. I'm not a technology brother, but I would like to be the technology cousin perhaps.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Speaker 06

  Technology uncle. I'm, I'm still workshopping names, but.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  I honestly like, I like uncle.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  Uncle is hilarious.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  You've got that sort of elder, you know.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Elder statesman.

• 1:47:11Speaker 06

  That's what I'm, that's what I'm going for.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  Be like, uh, yeah, no, that's perfect.

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:47:15Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you on and the audio is, and I, I hate to, um, you know, parashade at Justin Mares who was on five minutes ago, but it's just night and day difference. It's, it's great to have, uh, the, uh, the sound.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, a real professional, a gentleman scholar.

• 1:47:30Speaker 06

  It's not my first podcast, gentlemen.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's on your mind today? What, what, you know, let, maybe let's start there. I don't think we need to introduce you. We can just dive right into it.

• 1:47:41Speaker 06

  Oh, I just think what you guys are doing is genius. So I needed to first come on and give you some flowers for that.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:47:46Speaker 06

  I think innovative is an understatement. I think we need to just acknowledge what is actually happening here. The Andrew Tate might've been the first, but you guys are the second to say, hey, I'm going to create a podcast. And it doesn't, the podcast is nothing. The podcast is just feedstock for the shorts, for the clips.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:48:06Speaker 06

  And that, that is a core, core insight that you guys have pounced on. You're doing great with the branding. Love it. Love everything you're doing.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  That's what Jordy said. He said, I want to be the Andrew Tate of technology. And so I said, I can make that happen. I have experience in YouTube.

• 1:48:21Jordi Hays?

  And John is also, John's, John's dream is to be a Harry Potter fan.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Harry Potter fanfiction. Yes. That's the riff we have going.

• 1:48:28Speaker 06

  Well, we can talk Harry Potter. I can go deep on Harry Potter if you want. But Jordy, I think that Andrew Tate is trying to be the Jordy of, you know, felons and criminals or whatever he does. Camgirl sites.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, the funny thing, it was, it was weird timing, but Andrew Tate showed back up in the US and then there was that lawsuit against passes. And that was sort of like potentially convenient timing. It seems like he might be, you know, kind of coming, trying to enter the US market.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  Competition is for losers.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, if you don't want to compare ourselves.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Regulatory culture. Yeah.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  I actually, so one of the things I'm like super curious about, you're a content creator yourself, you know, you have the podcast. What's like, what's your, what's your information diet? Like something that John and I talk about a lot is, is our show is heavily based on what's happening right now, what the current thing is. We obviously focus on X as a platform. But if you're only consuming content on X, then you're not injecting anything sort of new. And you're just like part of the hive mind. How do you think about your information diet and kind of where, where do you spend your time? Kind of coming up with, with ideas?

• 1:49:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great question. I, I think that the, the information diet is probably like today, something that only nerds like us talk about, but it's going to become a very popular concept as people realize that it's garbage in, garbage out. So, you know, I think the problem that the tech guys have is you, we will all go consume not necessarily garbage content, but just the same content, right? So we're all on X. We're all reading the same things, listening to All In, listening to the same podcasts. And then guess what? You have the same thoughts as everybody else. And like, while calling yourself a contrarian, right? It doesn't really make sense. And so, you know, for me, I do a couple of things. So I have, I have a phrase that I like.

• 1:50:21Speaker 06

  Which is kids, dogs and dead people. And I want to spend as much of my time as I can with kids, dogs and dead people. And you know, so what does that mean? Kids will teach you a certain set of things. So kids, kids are highly playful. They, they work with their imagination a lot. They're completely delusional. They have no idea of what's realistic and what's not. And so the more time you spend with kids, the more playful you become, the more imaginative you become, the more delusional you become. So I take that from them. Uh, dogs are sort of these unconditional lovers, right? Dogs are, are always, always down, always loyal, always happy. Um, they are, they're there for you in every way. And so, you know, pick that up from dogs. And the last is the dead people. So how do I, how do I change my ratio of tweets to books?

• 1:51:04Speaker 06

  Right? Because you know, long form, as, as everyone gets interested in consuming long form, I've sort of wanted to go the opposite way. Uh, sorry, people get interested in consuming short form. I want to consume as much long form as I can. So old, whether it's old videos on YouTube, like I watched this thing with Max Levchin from like 2004, talking about, and I was like, this is fantastic. And it has like, you know, 89 views on YouTube. And so, you know, you start to get excited about being a, a collector of, of, of pieces. Right? It's like, oh, this is a, a wonderful old memo. Uh, you know, when they first pitched PowerPoint at Microsoft, or this is a, this is a great book. I, I read this book recently called, um, Talk Like, what was it?

• 1:51:46Speaker 06

  It was, uh, Stand Like Lincoln, Talk Like Churchill. And it was just like about like public speaking and just being a goddamn man and the way you show up to things. And I was like, this is fantastic. And so I'm trying to spend as much as I, as much time as I can with, uh, dead people.

• 1:51:59John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  Great answer.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  Uh, can you take us through the triangle of talent? I really love this. We printed this off here because I think it's a fantastic framework for elevating talent within an organization. We're a small company here, but, uh, I, I wanted like, what inspired you to, uh, to, to map this out this way? And, and what do you think people are taking away from it? How's the reception been?

• 1:52:20Speaker 06

  Every blog post I write is just a pot shot at somebody. It's an annoyance from an employee in my company and then I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna write this over here. I hope you read this. I hope you really understand this. That's the honest truth is irritation is the itch and innovation is the scratch, as I like to say.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, Steve Jobs had a line, we just talked about it earlier on the show. He told his team, "I hope what you just did makes you hate each other."

• 1:52:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, you should hate each other for doing this because they messed up the mobile.

• 1:52:49Jordi Hays?

  The email rollout.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, the email syncing and it went so poorly that Apple was looking terrible in 2008. And he was like, "You guys should hate each other for this."

• 1:52:57Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  It's so bad. Anyway.

• 1:52:59Speaker 06

  So the real insight here actually came when I sold my company. So I sold my company and I went from CEO to now I was an employee. So you know, I'm on the other side of the table and I was trying to figure out like, oh, this is interesting. Like now I have a boss, I have a manager. What does this guy care about? And how does he think about me? And like, what's this dynamic like? And what I realized was that in every company, there's like this little number floating above your head and it's your trust score. It's like, you know that movie where it's like, how many days you have left to die or whatever? And people, you could see it on each other's forehead or something like that.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Very Black Mirror.

• 1:53:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like a Black Mirror, like Death Note or something like that.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 06

  So the thing I realized was that basically for the CEO, they look at all their employees and there's just a trust score. And the trust score is basically like, can I, can I trust you to be watching out for problems and identifying them yourself? Or am I gonna have to deliver like the issues to you? I'm gonna have to be the one telling you, hey, we gotta solve this. And then if I, even if I did do that, if I gave you the problem, do I trust that you'd be able to solve it? Do I trust that you could manage like a group of people in solving this? Or can I only give you things that are like small, bite sized where you can alone do it? Right? Do I have to give you the instructions on how to solve it? Or could you figure it out, right? So everyone's got this trust score and you want to be at 100%, right? Like you want to be at 100. And those are the people ultimately they get, they get the raises, they get the opportunities.

• 1:54:17Speaker 06

  When the new thing comes up, that's who you put on the project is the people you trust the most. And really like your trust score goes far beyond like your job title. And I realized this when I was working with Emmet at Twitch. And so. Then in my own companies, I sort of realized like, okay, could I like assign some numbers to that score? Could I assign some levels to that score? And so, yeah, that's where the triangle comes from. I don't know if you want me to like say what the levels are.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  I'd love to know, like, obviously, when you're the CEO, if you're selling your company, you're probably operating at level five superstar. But then you go into Twitch, you said it was a very different environment. Did you feel yourself moving downward towards like level four, level three?

• 1:54:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's gravity. Gravity is moving you downwards, right? Because you're supposed to, you know, like you, if you go to these big companies, you're not the CEO of the founder more. Not all the problems don't roll up to you. All the opportunities aren't your decision whether you're going to do them or not. And so gravity is kind of pulling you down to get to like, kind of like a level three, which is like a bit of a, you're just a sort of a task doer, or you can, or maybe you can manage a team of people to do, to do a set of tasks. But I was just like trying to fight that. So like, I had a great conversation with my buddy Furcon when we got acquired. And he goes, he was pulled up the company metrics, like the company dashboard. And he's like the CEO of you, basically. And he's like, which one of these numbers do you think our project will move?

• 1:55:35Speaker 06

  And I was like, I, like, I was just thinking of, they bought our company to do X. We should come here and do X. And what he was arguing was like, cool, that made sense when we were trying to sell this company to them? Of course we wanted to say how big of a deal it was. But now that we're here, we're on the same team, we should just be more objective. Like, is our thing going to move any of these metrics? And he goes, don't you just think like, whatever we do while we're here, we should just be able to move one of these KPIs like five or 10%. And like, we should just make that our budget. Like, we're not going to do a project if it can't move the needle five or 10% on one of the like, the core metrics, usage, revenue, you know, profits, right? So, and I looked at what we were doing, it was never going to do that. Even if we did it really well, it would never have moved any of those metrics. And so I literally just didn't do any of the work I was supposed to do for about a month.

• 1:56:19Speaker 06

  I just started walking around the office, asking people like, what's going on over here? Like, what are your, what are the problems are you dealing with? What's, what's something that somebody should be doing that nobody's doing right now? Or what's something that's worrying you? And our buddy Hubert, who sold Curse to Twitch, he was there and he was like, this guy who had been like ringing this bell that nobody was listening to. And he's like, hey, look at this, our, our market share in Brazil has dropped like dramatically. And nobody cares, nobody's doing anything about this. And he's like, it's because... Mobile gaming, uh, it's all mobile gaming over there, streaming from your phone. And we don't even have like the functionality to do that. And internally at the company, we had all written off mobile game streaming as like something that wasn't a thing because we tried it.

• 1:57:04Speaker 06

  It didn't work. Nobody watched Candy Crush and we all moved on. But hey, something has changed and here's the data. So we only started working on that. So that was kind of my real life experience of not letting myself go from a level five to a level three. Cause that's where the gravitational pull was and like trying to fight to be like, no, no, no, I'm only gonna, I'm gonna try to identify the biggest problems and I'm gonna try to go solve them.

• 1:57:25John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Uh, I want to talk about branding. When we launched this show, I was very obsessed with like the growth hacks and the quote tweets and the clips, as you mentioned, but you came to me and you said, I think the fact that you guys have really thought about the brand and Jordy was the one who really thought about the brand the most, but um, what is your playbook for developing a new brand? What's your stack? What, who's in the room? Are you using AI tools? Is it starting a PowerPoint or a Doc or a notes app? Like, how do you think about developing a brand? What are the best, uh, what are the best practices these days?

• 1:57:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, it starts with a, a, a very simple principle, which is all positioning is counter positioning. So you gotta, you want to position yourselves in the consumer's mind, but it's always going to be relative to what's already in the consumer's mind.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10Speaker 06

  So you might say, we are a restaurant. We make food that's healthy and fresh. It's like, great, but everybody says the same thing. So not only have you blended in, but you're not counter positioned to anything. Versus if you say, um, we make yoga pants like Lululemon, except for ours aren't full of microplastics. Right? Now you've counter positioned against Lululemon. So you say, we're athle- athleisure, we're premium, but no microplastics. Right? So it's the but that matters the most, whereas everybody focuses on the things before the but they're like,

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:58:41Speaker 06

  We're this, this, this, this, and this. Yeah, that too. We're open source too. Yeah, we do that too. And they just try to add this long list and it becomes this very muddy drink. And so I think what you guys did, just look at your brand, right? So you guys are counter positioned in a, in a cool way, right? So first, You're like very masculine brand. So you're not neutral, where I think most people are afraid to have any sort of like, like, first of all, masculinity was like, not cool for a while. Now it's cool again, it's on trend, but like, I think you guys do a good job. You show up in suits. So you're counter positioned. You're not a podcaster in their bedroom, wearing hoodie, right? I wore my, this is like a wedding outfit I had from like an old Indian wedding. I was like, I gotta dress right because you've created a brand that's, that says, that's how we behave here. We're gentlemen here.

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:59:24Speaker 06

  Right? You have this aesthetic, right? But it's all counter positioned. It would not work if every podcast already looked the way you look. Wouldn't be any, you would get no credit.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, the other, the other example that's relevant is, like, there's a very popular podcast that we're fans of that notoriously does not run ads. And it'll be obvious. It's the number one technology podcast in the world. They don't run ads. So we came out and we said, we're gonna run a bunch of ads.

• 1:59:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're doing it for the money. Most, most podcasts, oh, we just like the community, just the reach. And we happen to run ads. And we were like, we're doing this for the money. It's the most profitable podcast.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  And it was, it was, you know,

• 1:59:58Speaker 06

  It's fun.

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  It was just for fun. Talk about.

• 2:00:02Speaker 06

  There's one other in the branding thing that's important is you're only going to get credit for what's weird.

• 2:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:00:08Speaker 06

  So you should make a list of what's weird about you or about your brand, or that you do that's unusual. That might even be like controversial. It might even be that it's unpopular, or people would say that's too far, too much. And so like, if you want to have a strong brand, start writing a list of what's weird. And if that list is only one or two things long, you don't, you're not going to have much really to talk about.

• 2:00:29Jordi Hays?

  We, we talked to a founder yesterday at Demo Day who pitched, and he just named his company Pig. It's just called Pig. And he's like, I just like, it was like, I honestly thought it was a great name.

• 2:00:39Speaker 06

  It was a great name.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's gonna forget. I don't remember any of the other names.

• 2:00:43Speaker 06

  Very hard to remember.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  And I remember Pig. It's a great name.

• 2:00:45Speaker 06

  And he's just roll around in the mud.

• 2:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:00:48Speaker 06

  And I actually remember what he does. I mean, he does like this, like, data integration, like cleaning up, like, legacy code bases, like, very much like rolling around in the mud. Like, he's not afraid to get, you know, dirty. Solo founder just comes in and cleans up your code base. He's just the pig.

• 2:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the opportunity around investing in creators and creator businesses. I think you've talked about this sort of the Mr. Beast empire quite a lot. There's, you know, Slow Ventures came out recently. They have a dedicated creator fund. You are a creator that's sort of creating value in all these different ways. What do you think the opportunity is in that space? And are you making investments there yourself?

• 2:01:29Speaker 06

  I think the bigger opportunity is the creators investing, not investing in creators. So, you know, like, like our, our business is very simple, right? So we, we have this podcast, My First Million, and it, as it grew, we had sponsors who wanted to come in and sponsor it. And we said yes. For a while, we got really excited, like, oh, my God, this is crazy. We're getting paid to talk. But then you realize like media is a pretty shit business model. And so the trick is to do media to build, media is great at a few things, right? It's great at building brand and distribution and awareness and all those things. But it's pretty terrible at monetizing. And so the trick is to monetize with investing. And so what we did was I would go private equity style and I would buy, I bought a piece of this business, somewhere.com. It's like an offshore hiring platform.

• 2:02:12Speaker 06

  So you need talent in the Philippines or you want a developer in LatAm, like get somebody for five times less than you will in the States, right? That's the pitch. So instead of them just sponsoring us and me taking ad dollars and then them getting obviously some multiple of that. Otherwise, why would they keep giving us ad dollars, right? They're clearly getting an ROI off of that. I went and I actually just purchased a chunk of the company and said, great, now I own a piece of this company. I own the equity in it and I will grow this company. I could buy it even at a totally fair price, right? I don't need a deal because if it's at this much, and when we bought that business, it was making millions a year in profit. So like it was already seven, multiple seven figures of profit. And now it's eight figures of profit, right? Because I was able to grow that using my audience. So I was my own private equity.

• 2:02:56Speaker 06

  And the, the beauty of this is that media knows a lot about audience and distribution and growth. But it knows nothing about private equity. Private equity knows a lot about doing deals and knows nothing about media and distribution and growth. And so marrying the two together is what's actually happening. So Hormozzi is doing this, right? That's his model. I'm doing this. That's our model. And so there, there will be more people who do this. Right now, what the creators are doing is they're just creating their own brand and they're, they're trying to monetize by being operational. I think the smart ones will eventually just take chunks of companies and let the operators, like world-class operators, do that work and they will be just doing deals.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  What do you think of the Doug DiMuro Cars and Bids story? It's one of my favorites, but is it a one-off exception to the rule? Or do you think it's the start of something new and a bigger trend?

• 2:03:44Speaker 06

  No, I mean, that's going to keep happening. Right now, Epic Gardening is the best example of this.

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:48Speaker 06

  Watching what he's doing?

• 2:03:48John Coogan?

  No, not really. Break it down.

• 2:03:50Speaker 06

  Okay, so Epic Gardening, basically, he's got this YouTube channel about frigging gardening, right? So he's like,

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  But it's great.

• 2:03:58Speaker 06

  He's growing, he's like, I'm trying to grow like a new breed of zucchini. And he's like, trying to do, and you look, he's got this farm, whatever. So he's, I think his name's Kevin. Kevin is doing this. So what he's doing is he's, he's amazing at content and he creeps creating really awesome content. And then on the backend, he started either building his own products or buying. So he bought like a seeds company. So there's a seed company was doing X dollars in revenue already. He's able to go acquire that company, knowing he's got better distribution than that company has, right? He's got something they don't have. He's got a giant megaphone to millions of people who are trying to learn gardening from him. They like, listen and trust him. And so when he says, use these seeds, they're going to use those seeds. When Jimmy says, buy this chocolate, they're going to buy that chocolate.

• 2:04:42Speaker 06

  And so like, that's the, that's the model that they're doing, that he's doing right now. And so what happened is Chernin went and gave him tens of millions of dollars of money. And what he's doing is both building up his own infrastructure and his own products. But he's going out and being very acquisitive and he's acquiring companies that, you know, his customers would, his, his audience would be customers of. Very simple model. I think that guy, if he does this right, he could build a billion-dollar company as a gardening YouTuber.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Yeah, unthinkable a decade ago, right?

• 2:05:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like Chernin, to their credit, was like very early to that trend. Like, it seems like it's becoming very much a part of the zeitgeist now. But I know they were doing it. They were thinking about this stuff very intensely, like almost a decade ago. How do you think about your own personal leverage in the age of AI? You've been somebody that's had a lot of leverage, I think, for a long time, right? You've sort of a major shareholder in multiple businesses. You have the audience, you're starting new companies, you're buying companies. But has your level of ambition sort of 10x, you know, with, with some of these new technologies? Obviously, the potential hasn't been fully. You know, isn't fully here, but it's clearly coming. And how does that impact sort of your

• 2:05:54Jordi Hays?

  personal roadmap and how you're thinking about your career?

• 2:05:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a big question. You know, I think for me over time, you're right that like you start to learn the leverage game. Okay. So what is the leverage game? The leverage game is with the same or even fewer inputs, could you get more outputs, right? It's a magic trick. I put less effort in, or I put less time in, or I put less capital in, can I get more, more out? And so how do you do it? Naval says it well. He says, you know, there's the old ways of leverage, which would be like, you know, people. So you hire people, they do the work. So, you know, you hire, you hire them, you get, you know, thousands of hours of work done by other people. Great. There's capital, which is investing. Cool. So I've, you know, been doing that. But now he's like, there's the new ones. There's code and there's media,

• 2:06:39Speaker 06

  right? Code is, you know, basically a worker that will work, you know, like what do you think about a landing page, right? A landing page is basically a salesman that's, you know, awake 24/7, giving the perfect pitch that you told them to give with no sick days to every customer everywhere in the world and can do thousands of customers at once. That's what a landing page is. So that's leverage and that's code. And now media is what we do with the podcast. So yeah, I've been dabbling with these different things. With AI, I don't think it's like, I don't think it's an entirely new form of leverage. It's more speed and reps. So I'll give you an example. Right now I have this book series that I'm creating. And I think the old way to write a book, and one of the reasons I didn't want to write a book is if you talk to anybody who writes a book, they're like, it's like they went

• 2:07:24Speaker 06

  to NOM, dude. There's like, you know, this multi-year period where it was just a grind every single day. And it's, it's terrible experience.

• 2:07:35Speaker 06

  And so I'm writing a book right now. And here's literally what I was doing right before this. So this is my conversation with Claude. So I create this little folder and I say, Hey Claude, I'm creating a book. Here's the premise. And I said, inside this folder, you will find an outline. You'll find some of my old samples of writing. I want you to copy my tone of voice and a style guide, some of the do's and don'ts of how I think about writing this book. And I said, you know, right now, I only kind of, I have a loose outline. And really, I know, I know kind of what chapter one should be all about. And I said, draft it. It drafts it. And so it's basically the equivalent of having a research assistant and a writing assistant, but who have, who has no emotions or feelings. So I could just, it just gives me the draft. I'm like, nah, I don't really like it. And I don't really have any specific feedback. Just like,

• 2:08:19Speaker 06

  try again. And it just does it again. It does it again. Like, if I told somebody on my team that if they worked hard and drafted this thing over two days, and they came to me, I'd have to like, do the friggin' compliment sandwich and be like, you know, it's really good. There's some areas for improvement. And would you mind doing this? And now it's gonna take a week. And then he's gonna go back. And every draft is like, just a small feud that's developing between me and this person, right? And so, and so I had ended up having to write it myself. And I really having that feud internally also. And there'd be many days where I'd wake up and see that blank page and be like, do I really want to do this? Right? So this AI process where I'm like, I wake up and I'm like, give me a draft of the chapter. I don't like that first example. Find me another example that has very similar characteristics. Boom, it finds another one. You know, come up

• 2:09:03Speaker 06

  with a better analogy. Hey, you're being too wordy. And it's just, I'm getting draft after draft after draft. Try this one in the style of Malcolm Gladwell. Like, to me, this is magic, what's happening. I'm writing this book. I got a full draft of the book in one night, just by going back and forth with Claude. It was unbelievable. And now, all the value's in the edits. It's the taste. It's the curation at the end.

• 2:09:21Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, you putting your stamp on it.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. On the book thing, have you taken anything from The Five Types of Wealth by our buddy Sahil Bloom on, it feels like he did a really good job of creating infographics that could go viral. And he's kind of the, you know, the Andrew Tate of publishing now, in the sense that the book is, the book is its own thing, but there, it's clippable. It's clippable, which is like, it's rare for a book to think about that. Are you thinking clip first now? How are you thinking about that?

• 2:09:50Speaker 06

  Um, I don't like to start with growth hacks, because I think it leads you the wrong way. Sure. I think you, I have this channel on my site called Clues. You just, you just keep, you keep, you take note of the clues. And the time will come where you go back through that, you say, you know what? I did notice that, hey, having a couple of killer diagrams really made the book more shareable because you're not sharing a book and saying, "Read this book." You're sharing a killer page or a killer visual. And people want, people then ask, "Wow, how do I get more of that? Is that, what book is that?" Right? So you keep that as a clue, but I think you can't let that drive the creative process.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:25Speaker 06

  And you know, this is a little bit uppity, but I just think there's like, you gotta decide, like, am I gonna try to engineer this or am I trying to art this? And like, I think if you're doing art, you should art it. And there's a time and a place for that engineering of virality or more sellability, but I don't want to A/B test my way into art because I'm not doing this for money anyways. Right? Like, if I wanted to, I might make money from a book, but the way I say it is, it's like, just because a church serves food doesn't mean you go there because you're hungry. Like, you know, that's not why you go to church. So it's like, if you're gonna write a book, you should be doing it because you have something killer to say and you think you can deliver that message. That's the main thing. Let's keep that the main thing. And then, yes, we, we keep track of some ideas, some growth hacks, some clues that might be helpful somewhere along the way.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Well, where can people find it when it comes out? How can they make sure they're the first one to get a copy in the mail?

• 2:11:14Speaker 06

  I'm not, I mean, I'm not even there yet. If you just follow me on Twitter, you'll, you'll see it along the way.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:11:18Speaker 06

  Or my email list, seanporry.com is the email list.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  Well, you have to send us an advanced copy. We'll, we'll read it on the stream.

• 2:11:25Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna, we're gonna do a 24-hour livestream of us reading a book.

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  Cover to cover.

• 2:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Cover to cover.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:11:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, a live audiobook reading, cover to cover.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  We need material.

• 2:11:36Speaker 06

  With ramp ads.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're gonna get it heavily. Ads in.

• 2:11:40Speaker 06

  Heavily sponsored.

• 2:11:43Jordi Hays?

  Amazing having you on. You're the first technology uncle.

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  Yes, the first technology uncle.

• 2:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate you sharing your wisdom.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Uncle of the week.

• 2:11:49Speaker 06

  I'm putting that in my LinkedIn right now.

• 2:11:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  Welcome to the team.

• 2:11:54Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome anytime. Thank you, Sean.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:11:57Speaker 06

  Bye bye.

• 2:11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was great.

• 2:12:00Jordi Hays?

  What a pro. You have the lighting, the mic.

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's, he's a pro. I think you're on to something with the, the 100-hour work week. I think you, you pop into Claude, you start, start noodling on it. Get some good diagrams in there. You got a ripper.

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a banger.

• 2:12:13John Coogan?

  It's a banger.

• 2:12:15Jordi Hays?

  It's a banger.

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  We have Trey Stevens joining in a few minutes. We want to ask him about Flock Safety. They just raised, I'll give some background on Flock. They're taking over the timeline today. Flock Safety writes, "When crime is holistically addressed, cities transform. Families feel safer, businesses thrive, and communities flourish. The energy of a truly safe city is undeniable. To help accelerate this vision of safe, thriving cities, we're thrilled to announce a $275 million fundraiser at a $7.5 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, with strong backing from Green Oaks Capital and Bedrock Capital. This investment will power product innovation, research and development,

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  and US-based manufacturing, ensuring we continue to deliver cutting-edge safety solutions that make a real impact." And Jeff Lewis put up a little thread on the timeline as well.

• 2:13:08Jordi Hays?

  And this is a YC company?

• 2:13:10John Coogan?

  Oh, it is?

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  That's crazy. I love it.

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't get that tag very often.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  But I think it was in 18?

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, again, it's like in 2018, everyone, again, the meme was, "Oh, YC is just a software, consumer software." It's like, this is a hardware security-for-crime company, probably completely overlooked at YC. We'll have to get the founder on. And I think we have Trey now. Let's bring him in. How you doing, Trey? There he is.

• 2:13:36Speaker 07

  What's up, guys? How's it going?

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  We're good. How's your day going?

• 2:13:41Speaker 07

  Can't complain. All good so far.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We were just talking about the Flock Safety news. I checked in with the team. It sounded like you met the founder very early, participated in the seed round. Can you give us a little background on how you met the founder, what you think of the company, and what today means for them?

• 2:13:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I've spent a lot of time meeting with GovTech companies. Selling to local governments is incredibly difficult. I think it's basically just as hard as selling to federal government, except the upside is significantly less. So from the very beginning, I was kind of skeptical, but Garrett won me over. He's an incredibly hard-charging, super-talented guy, and they figured out how to make the motion work. And I think this is like kind of a once-in-a- Generation opportunity to build, you know, a kind of a BMF in the law enforcement space à la Axon, which is the company formerly named Taser. And just incredibly, incredibly impressed with their progress and how quickly they've gone from,

• 2:14:41Speaker 07

  you know, being security for HOAs to being kind of a state and local law enforcement capability. So really impressed by the team.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember if they were a hot company when they were coming out of Y C? Was it obvious that they were on to something? On to something and, and special.

• 2:14:57John Coogan?

  It feels like a company that would have been under the radar back in 2018. But what was your take back then?

• 2:15:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that they were under the radar. Like they've, they've gotten, you know, great rounds done and the team has grown incredibly well. So I wouldn't call it under the radar, but it also wasn't.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  I just meant, I just meant at Demo Day, like when they were coming out of Y C. Cause we were there, we were there yesterday. And, uh, you know, there's this sense that everybody's got so much energy and excitement. And, uh, if you're just meeting somebody at Demo Day, it's almost impossible to tell if they're really on a crazy trajectory or not.

• 2:15:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think they were like the company that everyone was talking about coming out of Demo Day. Doing work in law enforcement was not super trendy.

• 2:15:39Speaker 07

  It seems to be much more trendy today than it was then, though.

• 2:15:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. Although, uh, you know, we were joking about, uh, it used to be Uber for dogs at Y C. Now it's Andor for dogs, but there, it really was cursor for dogs actually yesterday. There were way more AI agent companies than defense tech companies. But overall.

• 2:15:56Speaker 07

  But honestly, let's take a moment to just like applaud Gary Tan for what he's done with Y Combinator.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  100%.

• 2:16:01Speaker 07

  It is, it is a completely different beast. A single day, like, what is it like 150, 100 something companies? Everybody crammed in, there's like cool hardware being like demoed at. I mean, it's just like, yeah, like good job on Gary. I mean, he's just done an awesome, awesome job, kind of reinvigorating the brand and bringing something back that, that was missing before.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%. He's completely flipped it back into founder mode somehow. He's really making aggressive changes and just doing what's necessary to keep the momentum going. It's 20 year old company at this point. It's gotta be, you gotta have some new blood, some new, new ideas. On flock safety, uh, they've often been called like the palantir of local government or the Andor of local government. Is that even the right comparison or are they just something completely different? How do you think about the business and where it goes over the long term?

• 2:16:51Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, I think it's the better analogy is probably Andro rather than Talenteer. There's obviously like a meaningful software component to what it is that Flock is doing, but it's also like deploying vertical systems end to end, whether it's camera systems or command and control for drones for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance missions. You know, they just completed this acquisition of Airdome, which I think gives them this really cool extension into drone operations. So yeah, I think I think it's like a reasonably good analogy. And I think they've they've got a clear shot at picking up a bunch of market that, you know, there's just not a whole lot of other companies that are, you know, anywhere near being competitive with them on.

• 2:17:35Jordi Hays?

  Totally. What's the what's the number one reason you pass on companies that want to sell to the government and why is it distribution?

• 2:17:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, my my chief of staff, Elliot Intermeier, and I, we we call it a field of dreams problem where the founders will come in and they'll say like, you know, if I build it, they will come like that. I just have to build a cool product and then everyone's going to show up and throw money at me. And with the government, it's just not true. I would actually argue that it's harder to sell to the government than it is to build a product that's relevant to the government. So you have to figure out how to make the sales motion work. Companies like Flock, I think have, they dug their heels in, they figured out like what you have to do at the city council level, what you have to do at the chief of police level, what you have to do with the, you know, local populace level from HOAs on up. And they figured out the motion that gives them that superpower.

• 2:18:30Speaker 07

  The reality is, is like now that they're embedded and they understand the sales motion, building out a product suite that addresses a whole of a wide set of problems is going to make it much easier for them to penetrate, you know, breadth as well as depth. And I think it's that sales, the sales part of it is the one that's hard to figure out. Now, what that means for founders fund, practically speaking in GovTech, is that we tend to want to write more concentrated checks. Once you see production usage of a technology working, because it demonstrates that the founder has figured out how to get that those sales done and the products into into usage in the field. There's just so many companies that are great idea factories and maybe cool technology, but they can't quite crack the business development nut.

• 2:19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  How, to me, that feels like one of the biggest opportunities for Anduril in the next five years is you kind of have all this off balance sheet sort of R and D spending, which is like all these new defense tech companies being funded, you know, really smart people building cool things. And then, you know, they maybe hit this like distribution wall. You guys have been acquisitive, obviously, in the past. Is that, you know, going to continue to be, you know, an important part of the strategy? Or you feel like you're more going to be focused sort of internally going forward?

• 2:19:47Speaker 07

  I won't say publicly on the Technology Bros podcast that we want cool technology companies to fail because they're bad at business development.

• 2:19:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:56Speaker 07

  But

• 2:20:00Speaker 07

  those do present interesting opportunities for us from an M and A perspective, for sure.

• 2:20:04John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to IVAS. I want to know, obviously, this is a, this is a deal, like the HoloLens project coming over from Microsoft, huge contract. I didn't even know that these contracts could change hands in this way. Why, how did this deal come about? How does it even work? I mean, obviously, there's prime contractors, subcontractors. You could imagine a different world where Microsoft just comes to you to kind of, you know, act as a subcontractor, but that's not what happened here. So can you break it down and give us a little bit of overview on the deal and kind of where it goes from here?

• 2:20:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the long history on the Anduril side of things is that, obviously, when we, when Palmer and I started ruminating on this company back in 2017, the obvious question that everyone asked us is, are you going to build head mounted displays for soldiers? That, I mean, it's just so obvious. Palmer is the greatest VR designer inventor in world history. Obviously, that's the thing that we would probably be focused on, right? But Palmer actually had an interesting answer to this. He would tell people, you know, the basic science, the research that needs to happen from a physics perspective is not there yet. And of course, I could build something, but it wouldn't be quite right. It would, it would be too heavy, or, you know, the experience wouldn't be real enough. It would disconnect people from what they're, the operation that they're conducting in the

• 2:21:23Speaker 07

  field. And so basically, his answer was, I don't think it can be done. So I'm not going to be the one that, that, you know, burns a bunch of cycles doing it. Now, in the meantime, Microsoft went out and won this, you know, tens of billions of dollar program called IVAS. And, you know, people would constantly be asking Palmer, like, you know,

• 2:21:41Speaker 07

  What's what's going on with this? Do you think it's gonna work? And he's like, I thought it was gonna work. We would have bid on it. And like, we would, we would have the contract, but that's obvious. And so it was just kind of one of these moments of waiting to see what happened. And then, you know, over the last six to nine months, we've kind of had this opportunity to go and spend time with the Microsoft team and say, you know, Palmer feels much more strongly about this now. He feels like we can pull it off. There's, there's a real opportunity ahead of us. The Army is incredibly excited about us coming in to kind of take this over and bring it to the next level. And we, we jumped at that opportunity and I'm, I'm excited to see where it goes in the coming years.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  On the cultural side, it feels like of all the big tech companies, Microsoft's maybe been the most friendly to working with the military this whole time. Do you, do you envision, like, what, what does a high functioning Microsoft look like in partnership with the DOD? I mean, imagine just spreadsheets, Copilot, just basic stuff to manage bases and manage workflows. Is that how they should be plugging in? Or do you see them playing a different role going forward?

• 2:22:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, look, Microsoft builds a lot of things that are incredibly important to the defense enterprise. You know, like the, basically everything in defense runs on Windows, just like it does anywhere else in the enterprise. You know, Azure Cloud is, is, it has a huge presence in the GovCloud ecosystem. There's, you know, Microsoft applications that lay across every critical piece of infrastructure that exists inside of the DOD. And they, as you said, they have been much more willing than the other big tech companies to think of themselves as an American company, which is incredibly important. And also be willing to work with the government on programs where, you know, there, there's potentially even lethality at the end of whatever kill chain they're participating in.

• 2:23:27Speaker 07

  And so tons of respect and for, for Microsoft and their, their willingness to do that. Brad Smith, the, the president there has, has been going to the Reagan National Defense Forum for a decade. I mean, he's, he's very embedded in this community. So I do think that there's a role to play. And, you know, as part of our work on IaaS, like, we are going to continue leveraging IP that they built as part of that program. We'll continue to leverage Azure as a core cloud capability as part of the program. And I only wish the other big tech companies were as willing as they are to, to work on these important programs.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  It's great. Let's talk about Arsenal. Obviously, the site is selected now, but what are the next big steps for you as you build that out? I saw some pictures. It seems like the first like hangar. I don't even know what you call it. The big, the big building has been toured, but what, what's coming down the pipe?

• 2:24:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, Arsenal exists. Site selection is over. We're building a factory just south of Columbus, Ohio. The first, call it 800,000 square feet is already kind of, you know, there and ready for us to, to construct into. The, the challenge for that, for us for the next, call it 16 months, we'll be building out the, that first building and getting product lines stood up so that we can start, you know, producing at scale, the capabilities that we're being asked to produce, which include things like Fury, our autonomous jet fighter, Barracuda, which is a class of cruise missiles, low-cost modular cruise missiles, Roadrunners, which is our reusable interceptor.

• 2:25:03Speaker 07

  And, you know, right now that those capabilities are being built either at headquarters in limited quantity or at some of our kind of ancillary facilities. And Arsenal is going to be the attempt to bring all of that together in a, in a modular and flexible factory environment. And I think we'll have that initial capability up and running sometime around June or July of next, of next year of 2026.

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  What would the timeline be for a legacy defense contractor to stand up a space like Arsenal? Is it, is it, or would they be planning it, you know, sort of on like a 10-year time horizon? Like, we want to get this new facility up in, you know, 2035? How do you guys think about pacing?

• 2:25:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the, the thing is, is like, the old defense industry model is like, wait for the contract and then build by the hour, basically. That's how, that's how it works. The annual model is spend our own money and build what matters now. And so, could they, could they do it? Could they build like mega-scale factories? Yeah, if the government was paying for it and they had some plan for how to eke out, you know, their same sort of growth and margin structure that they have historically eked out. The benefit here is that we're not waiting for the Pentagon to tell us what to build. We're not waiting for the US taxpayer to show up to fund it. Our plan is to bring, you know, private capital to work to solve some of these important problems. And we're just going to build. That's, that's how, how we're going to approach it. And

• 2:26:27Speaker 07

  You know, we've had a great track record of converting that into production. And you know, we have a very willing buyer on the other side of the table right now. And that's kind of, that's kind of our short-term plan.

• 2:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Do you feel like you get the respect that we think you deserve in DC now? I can imagine in 2017, you know, in the early days, you go around DC first, they maybe ignore you. Then they sort of will talk to you, but don't take you seriously. Do you feel like, you know, and or when you guys are on the ground in DC, that you're getting the sort of appreciation from, you know, the government now? Obviously, you're winning, winning contracts, but is, is the, you know, is the average senator? There we go. Is the, is the average senator, you know, excited to meet with you guys and, you know, work together?

• 2:27:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, we're, we're in a great position right now. Obviously, we've been around for seven and a half years through both Republican and Democratic administrations. You know, defense is totally bipartisan. It's like the only spending bill that goes with flying colors through the, through Congress every year. We, we don't feel particularly impacted by politics. We do feel particularly impacted by leadership that has a vision for how they want to go into the future and lean into these commercial opportunities that are going to be much more efficient and deliver capabilities faster than the traditional kind of exquisite systems driven by requirements process way that the, the DOD has been running their business for a long time.

• 2:28:01Speaker 07

  So, you know, we've, I think we've scaled a number of different programs really effectively. And as a result, people in DC see us as, you know, a real company, not a startup anymore. And I think that that just gives us additional leverage to go and pick up bigger and bigger contracts over time.

• 2:28:20John Coogan?

  Let's talk about humanoids. Obviously, it's a very trendy space, humanoid robotics. You probably see every pitch under the sun. Some of it feels a little early, little demo, but at the same time, you know, Boston Dynamics has been building this stuff for 20 years. I remember Asimo and there's, there's clearly something real here. How are you feeling about the current environment around humanoid robotics?

• 2:28:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's a flashy space. There's a lot of demos. You know, people are trying to figure out what practical utility looks like. There are probably some use cases where humanoids makes a lot of sense. There are also a lot of use cases where you can get better bang for the buck with, you know, systems that don't need to walk around, that can still do some really cool things. And, um, you know, as with most of these kind of AI companies, I think the big question for, in the venture community at least, is, you know, do we or do we not kamikaze round? And I think the word kamikaze is a really good way of framing it because it's like, maybe you win the war, but maybe you're dead. And I think, you know, going out and raising these mega rounds at massive prices,

• 2:29:27Speaker 07

  it kind of reminds me of the self-driving car phenomenon where you had these companies that understandably were capital intensive. And it was like, man, if it works, it's going to be great. Everybody's going to make a lot of money. The price doesn't really matter. But if it takes too long, I mean, you're in trouble. You've just kamikazied. And I think that's kind of what we're looking at for the most part here in the humanoid space as well.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  One thing I've noticed is that it feels like every few months, there's a new viral video of Chinese drone light show, some dragon flying around the sky, and everyone immediately comments like, this is military capability. I feel like people are aware of, of like, these drone demonstrations that maybe aren't fully ready to change the battlefield, but are scary looking. And I wonder if the tune around humanoid robotics is going to change once you see a thousand of these guys walking down the street, marching in Tiananmen Square or something.

• 2:30:20Speaker 07

  Oh, totally. I mean, if we start seeing humanoid robots like carrying Javelin missiles up mountains or something, yeah, let's do another podcast and conversation about that.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  But we're not there yet. We'll have to have you back on.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Switching over the other, other, other pond, do you think that Europe will, you know, meaningfully sort of refocus their industrial base on defense? You know, we've seen their sort of automotive industry really struggle over the last few years, particularly, you know, with potentially renewed interest from, you know, Western Europe and sort of, you know, taking care of their own security. Do you, do you see them, you know, basically meaningfully adapting that sort of automotive infrastructure into, you know, defense manufacturing capacity?

• 2:31:07Speaker 07

  Well, I wouldn't say that I've seen like automotive shifting to defense necessarily, with the obvious exception of Saab, which literally doesn't make cars anymore and they focus on defense, but I don't think that had anything to do with this European moment. I think it had something to do with Saab not running a very good car business. But, uh, but you know, one of the things we're going to see, I think, as there's been this increased push for Europe to spend money on their own defense rather than relying entirely on the United States is that as a percentage of GDP, you probably will see a lot more money in, in Europe going towards defense, which I would argue is probably net positive for the, for the continent, and it also reduces the burden on the United States to, to step up and, and do kind of more than we believe is our fair share.

• 2:31:51Speaker 07

  Now, the downside of that for US businesses is that the more made in America we become, the more made in national prosperity, uh, the European nations will become. And I, I think due to the nature of Europe, that will end up being pretty fragmented. The French government's going to want to buy from French companies, the German government's going to want to buy from German companies and so, so forth. And so I, I definitely think that impacts the way that defense companies should think about expansion into Europe, because you know, there, there's just going to be this nationalism thread that runs through it, that you just need to be mindful of either from a partnerships perspective or where you're spending your time trying to grow internationally.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how does that play out in the venture capital markets? Obviously, you know, American defense tech companies don't take VC dollars from China, for example, but do you think a, a German VC could invest in a French defense tech company and that would be kosher? How, how do you think about that?

• 2:32:46Speaker 07

  I mean, I think they can do that. This is mostly about storytelling. Like they need to connect back to the nationalism, the nationalist agenda in each of these countries. And, um, there are great defense companies in Europe, startups in particular. Um, you know, you have companies like Quantum Systems and in Germany, uh, and Stark Industries, which flows out of Quantum Systems, you have Helsing, um, and they're, each of these companies is going to need to tell a story about why they're German or why they're French or why they're Italian or whatever. I don't know exactly how to do that, but that, that will be a burden that they're going to have to carry.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Uh, can we move on to good quests? I want to hear the high level thesis again. Uh, you just had an event around it. Break it down and I have some follow up questions.

• 2:33:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, back in 2022, uh, Mares Wagner, uh, who's a Thiel fellow and I like hung out around a campfire late one night and kind of we're complaining about what we see people doing in in the tech industry. Uh, and the the basic conceit of the argument is that, you know, the venture community, venture capital community is filled with all these super talented former entrepreneurs or whatever. Um, and they've taken like the route of Big Head in Silicon Valley, the HBO show where they're just kind of like resting, investing, just kind of chilling out, making lifestyle decisions, uh, while writing angel checks. Um, and that feels like a real moral failure, uh, of, uh, of tech, uh, because the, the

• 2:34:13Speaker 07

  founders that are operating on God mode, um, should be focused on the hardest, most important quests. Like if we need to rebuild semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, I would really like some of these incredibly wealthy, incredibly talented people to step in and have an opinion about how that's going to get done. Um, and I, but instead we're like kind of sidelining, um, or, or starting like, you know, easy enterprise SaaS companies or something like that because it's the easiest way to print money. And so that's really what Good Quest was all about is like, have you taken the time, you, you know, tech operator, tech entrepreneur, have you taken the time to evaluate the quests that you're on, uh, to, to discern, uh, is it a good one? Is it a bad one? Is it too easy?

• 2:34:58Speaker 07

  Is it too hard? Or are you, you know, an 18 year old college dropout trying to build a semiconductor company? I don't know. Maybe that's not the right company for you to build, um, as your first step out. So that's really what the, the call was, um, in the essay. And it kind of blew up far more than I expected it to.

• 2:35:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's phenomenal piece. Uh, if you haven't read it, you should definitely go check it out. But, um, uh, following up on that, there's some questions about like i- in our culture, I feel like some of the really, really important, like the reshoring semiconductor manufacturing, we have this tendency that I hear in tech that Only the true top tier elite can can solve these problems. You hear about like, oh, if we got to save intel, it's got to be Elon stepping in or else no one else can do it. And I'm wondering if there's almost like too much consolidation around like, we only have a few, a few heroes, a few hero units on the battlefield. And that's honestly taking, people are like, oh, well, like, you know, maybe Elon will get around to it.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  But if he doesn't like, I don't want to be, I don't want to be run over by him if he changes his mind and decides to go into my industry. Is, is there something culturally that we need to change around that? And, and not putting all our eggs in one basket on these like incredible entrepreneurs who I think really could do amazing things. But at a certain point, they can only do so many.

• 2:36:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, that is, that's exactly the right question. And I think the answer is like, of course, you don't have to be like that to do it. Like, it's just much easier if you are. I mean, you don't have to look any further than space launch to see this. It's like the billionaire space cowboys.

• 2:36:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36:31Speaker 07

  Elon, Bezos, Branson. It's like, it turns out that it's way easier to get a rocket into space if a billionaire is bankrolling your company.

• 2:36:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36:40Speaker 07

  And I don't think every problem looks like that, but some of them do. And so, you know, if you're not, if you don't have the ability to bankroll and backstop, like, maybe you should evaluate, am I world class, like generationally good at fundraising? And if the answer is yes, go for it. Yeah, there's no reason not to. But fundraising is a skill. It's not something that's like, I, I think a lot of founders that have a hard time fundraising tend to say like, well, the VCs, they don't get it. It's like, yeah, okay, I'll admit, there are sometimes I legitimately don't get it. I try not to invest in categories where I legitimately don't get it. But many of the times it's that the VCs will meet with the founder and they'll be like, man, this person is really bad at pitching. And if I feel like they're really bad at telling the story and raising capital,

• 2:37:24Speaker 07

  that means that other investors that they're going to need are also going to believe that they're really bad.

• 2:37:29John Coogan?

  Well, it's also the, it's also the, the customers, the employees.

• 2:37:32Speaker 07

  The customer, yeah, it's like, and so I, I think a lot of founders that have trouble need to look like, be a little bit more introspective and say, do I have the ability to raise the amount of money that's required to pull off this audacious vision? And the answer might be no.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, following up on that, kind of flipping it around, there's a lot of industries that have produced a lot of financial return. I'm thinking of the gambling companies, the OnlyFans companies, the kind of get rich quick crypto schemes. And I wonder, you know, in the best case, the free market is a weighing machine for good quests. And I would imagine that only good quests should be rewarded financially, and yet they don't. And so you kind of get into this question of like, should we have more regulation? Should we try and tax or dissuade or ban certain things that fall into like the bad quest category? I don't know if that applies to, you know, the lazy angel investor, but but maybe for some of the, some of the more crazy bad quests.

• 2:38:30Speaker 07

  Well, I would say the lazy angel investor is a moral decision.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:34Speaker 07

  Like sidelining yourself from working on the most important things is not morally neutral.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:40Speaker 07

  Like, there is a, there is a moral judgment that's being made there. You know, I often think about this as a, as a quad chart where the quadrants are like, is good, is bad, feels good, feels bad.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:51Speaker 07

  As a society, I think we're like, maybe too good at the feels good is good. This is like do gooder stuff. It's like healthcare, child wellness, it's like

• 2:39:00John Coogan?

  Education, sustainability.

• 2:39:01Speaker 07

  Education. It's like, everyone agrees that these things are good. But what that means is that the categories end up being hyper competitive.

• 2:39:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:39:08Speaker 07

  It's like so consensus, there's so many companies being built. And then we also kind of totally agree on the feels bad is bad. It's like, yeah, murder is bad, stealing is bad, assault is bad, like, we should not do those things. It's the other diagonal that I think is the most interesting. OnlyFans, you know, gambling, I think falls in the feels good is bad camp. This is like, society has somehow managed to convince ourselves that there's some like freedom of expression or something like that that should be protected. And I agree, like, freedom of speech, I'm all for it. But that doesn't mean that there's no moral judgment of like what that's doing to society. I would actually even put online dating in that category. And then the other quadrant is the feels bad is good.

• 2:39:52Speaker 07

  This is what I would like classify as duty and responsibility. So going back to like the flock safety thing. That's, you know, not everyone agrees on law enforcement policy, but it turns out that like drugs are bad. And, uh, uh, crime is bad. And as a society, we should be committed to leveraging the government's monopoly on violence to ensure that people aren't destroying themselves in society, uh, in, in the pursuit of some vain quest.

• 2:40:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:19Speaker 07

  And, and I think that, that not enough gets built in that category. And that's both a positive because it's an opportunity to build something that's non-competitive. And it's also a curse because it means that we have too few people working on the most important things.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  In terms of, uh, improving the moral backbone of maybe the next generation, uh, you've talked a lot about civil service. How do you see that kind of playing out? Could that be a remedy to some of this, uh, you know, responsibility to the, to the community, to, to the country, et cetera?

• 2:40:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, look, I, I think authoritarian governments are bad in a lot of ways. And we should not aspire to be an authoritarian government. And yet they have a massive advantage against democratic governments because they can mandatorily conscript their most talented people into working on the society, on society's greatest problems.

• 2:41:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:10Speaker 07

  We don't have that ability. I don't, I don't want us to have that ability. But man, wouldn't it be great if we had some mechanism to get our best and brightest? Kind of in the way that Israel does, to do two years of civil service coming out of high school. I think that would do a couple of things. First, it would actually like give us the people that we need to execute on national priorities. Secondly, though, I think it would expose people to how hard the government is. And instead of getting locked into these tribal ideological movements, um, they, they would be able to see how difficult it is to get things done and they would be way more incentivized. They would feel way more motivated to actually fix the things that are broken.

• 2:41:51Speaker 07

  That would improve our quality of life and our ability to, to grow and prosper as a nation.

• 2:41:56John Coogan?

  How do those, uh, hybrid models like Teach for America, Code for America? How do those fit in? Are those just like stopgaps that don't go far enough? Or, or are they, are we on the right path with the programs like those?

• 2:42:07Speaker 07

  I think it's the right path. These are, these are good programs. Notably, these are after college. I don't know, maybe that's the right time to do it. Maybe it's not, but I, I think they're a good step, but they, they're just not a big enough step. You know, I, I think probably some tiny, tiny percentage of graduates from top engineering schools are, are even familiar with what Code for America is.

• 2:42:31Justin Mares?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:32Speaker 07

  And it would be great if that was being integrated directly into the government rather than a nonprofit organization that has relationships with governments. That's, it's just not quite as effective.

• 2:42:42John Coogan?

  Sure. You got a last question? We gotta let him go.

• 2:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we got one minute. I guess extrapolating on the good quest concepts, I think something that is important for maybe our audience to understand is that good quests aren't just power law companies, right? It's, there's this tendency in Silicon Valley, like everybody, you know, you know, is not everybody, but many people aspire to be a founder and, you know, some of the best quests you could go on are like working for an Andorol, working for a SpaceX, things like that. But what are, what are the other sort of like extrapolates for the good quest concepts around? You know, maybe it's starting, you know, a new, a new church in your community. Maybe that's like, you know, uh, do you find yourself advising sort of people in your network around not always aiming for the power law company and saying like, hey, you can have

• 2:43:31Jordi Hays?

  an extremely meaningful impact, uh, even at a, at a sort of smaller scale that, that still is a worthy use of your time.

• 2:43:39Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, being a founder is, is not the only way to be on a good quest. You know, I had someone ask me last night, actually, um, if I thought that J R R Tolkien had a good quest by writing Lord of the Rings. And my answer is absolutely. I mean, can you think of

• 2:43:54Jordi Hays?

  Silly question.

• 2:43:55Speaker 07

  any bigger deal than like building a world?

• 2:43:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:59Speaker 07

  It inspires genera- generations long after you're gone. So no, I don't think it's about being a founder. I think there are a lot of different good quests. I think the real question is this question of like, you know, every serious country over the course of human history has wanted to turn their young people into executors and builders that are going to, that are going to grow and create prosperity and, you know, pull everyone up along with them. Right now in the United States, we don't really have that anymore. For the first time since I think the 1960s, the most aspirational job is being an influencer rather than an astronaut. Like, we should question what we're doing as a society, if that's what we end up believing is the most aspirational thing to do as a child.

• 2:44:41Speaker 07

  And, you know, children are, I think, the most important in this equation, because when we're young, everybody aspires to greatness. Like, every child is thinking like, "I want to be a musician, I want to be an astronaut, I want to be like, an inventor." And then by the time that they go through the college experience, they get pooped out on the other end and it's like, "I'm a McKinsey consultant." It's like, "Whoa, bro, where did you lose your aspiration for greatness? Like, how does that even happen?" And I think that's just a serious problem that we need to be thinking about as a culture and society.

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  For sure. Well, thanks so much for joining.

• 2:45:13Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  We'll have to have you back soon. Thanks so much.

• 2:45:16Speaker 07

  All right, sounds good.

• 2:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:45:21Jordi Hays?

  Good fun, good quests.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah, great interviews today. Really, really ran the gamut with all sorts of folks. Early stage, late stage, all sorts of stuff. Do you want to do some timeline and then wrap it up? What are you thinking?

• 2:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to hit the road too late.

• 2:45:39John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we got another 20 minutes or something. We can keep going. Well, let's kick it off by telling you about our sponsor, Wander. Find your happy place.

• 2:45:50Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:45:52John Coogan?

  Book a Wander with inspiring views. Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And what do you got for the fans looking to book Wonders? Should they use code TBPN?

• 2:46:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you just go to wander.com/tbpn, create an account. You're entered into a trip giveaway that they're doing just for our audience. So, somebody that's listening is going to win it. I want it to be you, so go do it.

• 2:46:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:46:23Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, what else? What else have we got?

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Good luck. We have, let's see, I gotta rip suits from these. Here, Nikun. Kothari says, "New final boss YC challenge unlocked. $10 million in ARR is not cool. You know what's cool? $10 million in MRR. You know what's cooler? $5 million in monthly profit." This is the company we were hunting for. I don't think we've met them.

• 2:46:48Jordi Hays?

  Trey would, Trey would not be too happy about this one.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  Uh, is a quote here, a screenshot, "Trade meme coins, perpetuals, and earn yield. Acxiom is a trading platform for decentralized finance and currently offers meme coins, perpetuals, and yield. Since launch, we've hit $10 million MRR and $5 million monthly net profit." Wow. Yeah. Nothing can scale faster than these, uh, than these crypto companies.

• 2:47:12Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's wild. I mean, you know, we, we maybe talked about this on the stream yesterday, but there was a YC batch that 20% of the companies were digital asset related. I feel like.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  During the crypto boom. Yeah. I think that's where, I think that's literally when Trace thought to write good questions.

• 2:47:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't know the exact statistic. That's, that was sort of what it, what it felt like. So vibes based analysis, but then it went basically down to zero. There was a batch that everybody in crypto. I think this was honestly like in 2023 was like, there's no Y, there's no crypto companies in YC. That's actually extremely bullish. That's like when you should start.

• 2:47:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 2:47:47Jordi Hays?

  A new crypto company, but this one I didn't see.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Coinbase since summer 2012. Like that was the only crypto company.

• 2:47:51Jordi Hays?

  We, we saw some companies yesterday in the batch that were doing stablecoin, more like neo bank focused stuff that were cool, but um, yeah, this company is just printing.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Well, if you're making $5 million in monthly profit, how are you going to make sure that you don't run up those expenses?

• 2:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.

• 2:48:07John Coogan?

  Ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to sign up. We got a good post by Person of Swag, Adam. Been on the show before. Uh, "Two weeks ago, I sold all my belongings, broke up with my GF, and moved to SF to build NoSlop, the Chrome extension that removes slop from your 4U tab. It's like adblock, but for slop." No slop. You can go check it out on the Chrome Web Store. I thought this was funny. I think it's a meme, but this whole like, I sold everything, I moved, is becoming such a meme that of course he, he had to jump in. But it does seem like a cool, a cool app, a cool plugin. It gives you a slop score for everything that you see.

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  Imagine being, imagine being, you know, let's say you have a podcast and you, you install this and then you just never see your podcast.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  Terrible. You, you, you get.

• 2:49:01Jordi Hays?

  You gotta really look in the mirror.

• 2:49:02John Coogan?

  You get Dean's slop.

• 2:49:03Jordi Hays?

  In the mirror and gotta question everything.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  What's hilarious is that it sorts your feed into the home tab, which is slop free, and then the slop trough.

• 2:49:12Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's fun.

• 2:49:15John Coogan?

  Let's see, what else we have? Oh, Michelle Obama is a YouTuber now. Speaking of, you know, Trey, everyone wants to be an influencer. Saga and Jetty writes, I had to go check and see if these numbers were real. Genuinely astonishing. I could upload a video of me picking my nose and get more views and subs than this. Michelle Obama, she's early to the YouTube game.

• 2:49:33Jordi Hays?

  It is a grind. It's a grind.

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  It's a grind. It takes, it takes time. It took me a long time to get to 16K. Took me even longer to get to 400K. She's sitting at 16.9K subscribers and pulling 13,000 views on the last interview that she did with Issa Rae. And so, needs to call some growth hackers, get these thumbnails dialed in.

• 2:49:55Jordi Hays?

  Here's one of the challenges. I'm looking this up right now and it's, it's actually, she's got so many other videos about her. It's hard to.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  Oh, it's hard to find her channel. Maybe that's the problem.

• 2:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Hard to find her channel.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  I mean, she, she's an example of someone who maybe doesn't need her own podcast and instead should just be on a podcast circuit promoting things.

• 2:50:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. She says she's got a new episode every, every Wednesday. So she's committed.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  We don't like that.

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  It's looking professional though.

• 2:50:18John Coogan?

  Why don't you try GoDaily, Michelle? GoDaily, three hours a day. Upend your life. Stream constantly. That's the way you win in this game. Well, Michelle, if you want to stand out, we recommend going to Bezel and getting a watch. Shop over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. I'm sure you could find something fantastic. You probably already have a bunch of watches. Maybe you want to sell your watches, Michelle. Hop on Bezel.

• 2:50:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking this up quickly. I don't know.

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  Sell some watches, dump it into...

• 2:50:49Jordi Hays?

  We got a, I got this pulled up.

• 2:50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Barack Obama watch collection.

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. We talked about it before. He was gifted a watch by one of the, one of the security members, the Secret Service guys.

• 2:51:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he has one that's a, do you even know this brand? Jordi Gray? Jordi Gray?

• 2:51:10John Coogan?

  No, I don't know.

• 2:51:11Jordi Hays?

  There's a chronograph he has that's called the Secret Service.

• 2:51:13John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go. That's good.

• 2:51:15Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, he's got, he's got, honestly, not as big of a collection as he should have, given that he, they both sold their book rights for something around 65 million.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  And they have a Netflix deal. They're rolling money. They, they need to deploy it into watches. So Barack, if you're listening, get on Bezel. Peter Diamandis recently interviewed Palmer Lucky on stage and he had to ask Palmer Lucky if there's an Iron Man suit coming soon. His answer, maybe-ish. I'll take it. Yeah, Palmer's done, he gets asked this question all the time. Interesting take. I've heard him expand on it on the Sean Ryan Show.

• 2:51:49Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love this. So the next, the next post in here, by the way, is a quote from Palmer. "I want to kill companies that deserve to die, I believe, in efficient markets."

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:51:59Jordi Hays?

  And it's sort of contrasted with Trey's approach when I asked him about, you know, are you excited for all this off-balance sheet R and D? For these companies that will build good products? And he was like, "Well, no, but, you know, we'll explore opportunities." Meanwhile, Palmer's saying, "I will kill..."

• 2:52:18John Coogan?

  I don't think he's, I don't think he's talking about early-stage companies.

• 2:52:21Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 2:52:21John Coogan?

  I think he's talking about the legacy.

• 2:52:22Jordi Hays?

  He's talking about the big, the big legacy companies.

• 2:52:25John Coogan?

  But it's great. Great destruction.

• 2:52:26Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly on the mind, I mean, it is on the mind of, of early-stage defense tech founders. They're thinking, you know, they, that is, that would be the best possible soft landing for them if they can't crack the distribution puzzle.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, I've been to Anduril's office in DC. It is a serious operation, and you know why I like it? Business casual required. You gotta wear a suit.

• 2:52:51Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 2:52:52John Coogan?

  The, the entire office dresses up, which is great. Everyone looks fantastic and they're ready. If a senator comes by, representative comes by, they look sharp because they're going back and forth to the hill all day long. Well, we got a, oh yeah, Palmer expanded on the Iron Man suit concept on the Sean Ryan show is pretty interesting. He was saying that it's actually very high risk to build exoskeletons because you're giving this machine, which is incredibly by definition, if it's giving you super strength, it has enough strength to just immediately rip you apart, break your arms, do anything very dangerous. So he was saying like, maybe it comes, but maybe it's remotely piloted and you never really sit in it. But we'll have to ask him more about that and get him on the show. Anyway,

• 2:53:34John Coogan?

  moving on, Keon over at Nucleus has a, he says he's about to drop the hardest hitting product announcement video he's ever done this Friday. We have a special guest in the video, Molly O'Shea. Who wants to guess what we're announcing?

• 2:53:48Jordi Hays?

  I like the cameo strategy.

• 2:53:50John Coogan?

  Smart.

• 2:53:50Jordi Hays?

  Cameos are smart.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, crossover.

• 2:53:52Jordi Hays?

  Are we, we're having Keon?

• 2:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, I think we'll have him on tomorrow, break it down. I've heard a little teaser of what it is. It's very fascinating. If you don't, if you're not familiar with Nucleus, it's a 23 and me competitor essentially, but built on the next generation of technology that can actually sequence your full genome, give you much, much deeper insight into what could potentially go wrong with your health and recommend interventions essentially. And so he's a, a very, very sharp scientist who's been working on this company for a long time. Delian invested, I think at the seed round and he has a similar energy to Delian. So I'm very excited to have him on the show. This is an interesting one. Greg Eisenberg was quote tweeted by Pat Grady over at Sequoia, talking about vibe revenue. Did you read this at all? What is vibe revenue? Money from

• 2:54:36John Coogan?

  customers paying out of curiosity or FOMO rather than solving real problems. It's the business equivalent of an impulse purchase that shows up at AR as ARR on fundraising decks. Warning signs high initial conversion rates. Plus, short-term growth curves, poor retention past three to six months, limited account expansion, easy user switching to alternatives, the lifecycle, sizzle, a slick AI demo wows people, traction, tech enthusiasts flood in, VC interests, growth metrics impress, fundraise, valuations skyrocket, reality, product doesn't change workflows, plateau, growth flattens quietly, and then zombie, cash in the bank, but the metrics are falling. Very interesting and something I don't know if we'll see more of.

• 2:55:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't even think Jeremy will be there to save these ones.

• 2:55:19John Coogan?

  Who knows? Yeah, I mean, they have to build a real business retention.

• 2:55:22Jordi Hays?

  People have always pushed back on founders for using ARR incorrectly.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:28Jordi Hays?

  But the excuse has always been ARR is both annual recurring revenue and annualized run rate.

• 2:55:36John Coogan?

  Yep, run rate.

• 2:55:37Jordi Hays?

  And like, they're just obviously different things because annualized run rate could be, you have, you know, a big month and then you just, you know, multiply it by 12x. It's not a super, the Aurora, the Aurora CEO, my co-founder, he like always hates when people in e-commerce are like, oh yeah, I'm at X run rate. Cause he's like, it means nothing. Like, e-commerce is seasonal. You could just take your just first two weeks of.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:56:02Jordi Hays?

  And something I saw earlier on the timeline today was somebody taking two weeks of their revenue, multiplying it by two, and then multiplying it by 12. And like, it's just like, at that point, do it a day.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  A day, or one hour.

• 2:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Multiply it by 30 and then by 12. Yeah.

• 2:56:17John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:56:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:56:18John Coogan?

  One good hour on e-commerce on Black Friday. We send an email.

• 2:56:21Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, just take the second that your biggest invoice ever hit.

• 2:56:24John Coogan?

  And then just multiply it. Yep.

• 2:56:26Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, so, so I, to be clear, when investors are looking at this, they're saying, this isn't ARR. You are at a certain run rate. These customers could leave at any time. They're not contracted to actually. You know, stay with you for a year at a time or more. So yeah, I mean, I just think that this is definitely a really good sort of summary of.

• 2:56:50John Coogan?

  Not all ARR is created equal. You look at flock safety, they're signing multi-year contracts with police departments. Like that's not, there might be a testing phase, but once they get installed and the cameras are up and the the police department's using it and the HOAs have approved and the, you know, they've done the work that Trey mentioned at the at the city council level and the police chief level. That's going to be a lot stickier than a business, you know, clicked, oh yeah, we'll try this $200 a month AI product. Anyway, there's a little bit of trouble in the stove world right now. Drew Fallon is highlighting Solo Brands stock is capitulating down 63% alone today.

• 2:57:32John Coogan?

  The company's market cap is now $22 million. Something is really going wrong because this company is massive. They own Solo Stove, which are those like smokeless outdoor stoves that you can get, good Christmas present. And Chubbies, which I think is the men's fashion brand essentially. Overall, sales were down 8% year over year with D to C down 11% retail down 1% gross margin profit down 4% from 61.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  They actually have the ticker DTC, which is almost a curse because of pure play D to C model.

• 2:58:04John Coogan?

  But look at this. I mean, in 2024, they did $112 million with Chubbies and $297 million in revenue with Solo Stove for a combined $60 million in EBITDA. And yet they're trading at 22 million. It almost feels too low. I don't actually know.

• 2:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Is there something?

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Like an insane amount of debt?

• 2:58:28Jordi Hays?

  It just, just for context, Chubbies was purchased for 130 million in 2021.

• 2:58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:35Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how does, how does this make sense? I mean.

• 2:58:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they're spending, they're spending somewhere between 4% and 12% of revenue on employee costs.

• 2:58:46Jordi Hays?

  I mean, so, so I, I have to imagine the catalyst here is the tariffs.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:58:51Jordi Hays?

  And it's possible that, that all their earnings are just gonna go away.

• 2:58:55John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah.

• 2:58:56Jordi Hays?

  But, who knows? I can't, I can't, it's hard to imagine why.

• 2:59:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's such a big business, you'd imagine that, and it's also, it's not a brand, these aren't brands that have been like racked with controversy. They're not going through like their Bud Light moment, you know, it's like, it's a stove, like.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  You know, it's not a controversial product, people are continuing to buy them, and, and they seem like good gifts and they should be able to continue. But, uh, maybe we should have Sean from Ridge Wallet on and break it down since he's the DTC expert on this show.

• 2:59:23Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:59:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, moving on to TK Kong, he says, "Good reminder from Brian Armstrong." I like this because it's a, it's a picture of a printed out tweet that we've been printed out as well.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  Little recursive printing going on, but Shrug Capital was actually, I, I, this wasn't even my inspiration, but they were one of the first groups to print out tweets. And.

• 2:59:44Jordi Hays?

  That's right, they did the calendar, yeah, the calendar.

• 2:59:46John Coogan?

  The calendar, yeah, so Brian Armstrong wrote, uh, in Wednesday, September 2nd of 2020, "Got this advice recently, thought it was great, so passing along. Imagine where you want to be in five years, then think through what that requires you to get done this year. Then, and then don't spend any time during the year on activities that don't point you in that direction." It's a very simple, uh, analysis, but I thought, I thought it was great, and, uh, where do you want to be in five years, Jordy?

• 3:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Right at this desk, maybe a new desk.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  What do you need to do this year to make sure that continues?

• 3:00:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we have a, a corporate philosophy, uh, that involves, you know, you just spend time with family and you just work on the show.

• 3:00:28John Coogan?

  That's it.

• 3:00:29Jordi Hays?

  And you just alternate between those, it's a 24-hour cycle.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:32Jordi Hays?

  And hopefully every day you just get to do the show a little bit longer.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  Yep, work up to five hours, six hours.

• 3:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, it's eventually this sort of this 12, 12, 12 and 12.

• 3:00:43John Coogan?

  12 and 12, yeah.

• 3:00:44Jordi Hays?

  12 hours, sleeping, you know, spending time with family, 12 hours streaming.

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:49Jordi Hays?

  And then, um, yeah, so we're working towards that. Uh, and one of the companies that helps us do that is AdQuick. Thank you to AdQuick for making this show possible. When we started the show, we talked about the origins with Sean. We were very clear that we wanted this to be a platform, uh, for the greatest companies in the world to get in front of great, uh, talented, uh, entrepreneurs, investors, et cetera. And AdQuick saw the vision, uh, and, uh, if you're listening to this, you already know they are the best way to advertise, uh, out in the real world. Uh, they bring, you know, a lot of the mechanics that you get from buying sort of programmatic ads on, online.

• 3:01:30Jordi Hays?

  They bring that into out of home and, uh, you'd be silly not to work with them when you're ready to do out of home. Um, and, uh, go check them out.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, buy a billboard, go to adquick.com, out of home advertising, easy and measurable.

• 3:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I would, you know, we were in SF yesterday and I kept seeing these sort of tacky billboards from some of these companies and I was just thinking, we gotta, we gotta, SF is one of the few places that we might actually be able to get, uh, uh, uh, for a podcast. Podcast is difficult to run ads for because, you know, the, the sort of LTV of a listener is, you know, um, real, but, you know, it takes, uh, a while, but I think we should really start experimenting, uh, just on, you know, even starting on the side streets, you know, if somebody's walking to work, uh, they should see your smiling face.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  Wheat pastes.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:02:18John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways.

• 3:02:21John Coogan?

  Let's move on, uh, there's some breaking news. Nathan Fielder has reportedly visited, uh, uh, Elizabeth Holmes in prison as part of a top secret documentary. I don't even know how this is possible. You can podcast from prison, you can tweet from prison.

• 3:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was apparently.

• 3:02:38John Coogan?

  You can do documentaries from prison now. What can't you do in prison these days? But, uh, I'm sure it'll be hilarious. Nathan Fielder is a, a very funny comedian, uh, and, uh, all the trappings of a, of a banger piece of media coming down the pipe.

• 3:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Do you, did you ever get into Nathan for you?

• 3:02:55John Coogan?

  Loved it, watched every single episode, laughed until I cried, uh, absolutely obsessed with that show.

• 3:03:00Jordi Hays?

  It's so good.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  It's so good. I go back and watch it every once in a while.

• 3:03:03Jordi Hays?

  I need to actually, I'm making a note to watch it tonight.

• 3:03:05John Coogan?

  It's so, it's so, so funny.

• 3:03:07Jordi Hays?

  He would be an amazing guest to have on the show, honestly.

• 3:03:10John Coogan?

  Um, I, I, I had a friend who interviewed for the show and, and it actually is featured in the show in kind of a vulgar. Uh, what? No, no, no. Just as like an extra, basically, or like a small character. And he said that during the interview process, Nathan didn't break character whatsoever. It was, everything about the show was, was in character the whole time, which I thought was really cool. Let's go to Luke Metro with a hilarious post. He says, come join our fast growing startup. Don't miss your chance to get this equity. The question is, how much of the growth is priced in? And Luke says, all of it.

• 3:03:44Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's fine if they're giving you a massive package.

• 3:03:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:03:48Jordi Hays?

  They're just saying, yeah, we're so confident.

• 3:03:50John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. But yeah, I mean, this is, uh, this is probably a point of frustration for, uh, for those on the job market looking for the next hot startup when prices are so high.

• 3:04:02Jordi Hays?

  No, and this is just about being, being smart in that recruiting process and saying, when they come to you and they say, yeah, we're giving you, you know, a four-year deal, it's 500K.

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a year, something like that. And you can say, look, I appreciate that, but I think, you know, and you can just demonstrate sort of knowledge of the market and say, look, I think I'm very big believer in this company. I think our valuation has gotten a little bit out of our skis. That 500K, I value it, you know, I, I think the real sort of market value is, you know, maybe closer to 250K.

• 3:04:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:04:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to just need a bigger package in order to join. And if they're not willing to budge, then maybe it's not a fit. But oftentimes, you know, you can actually eke out, um, you know, more, more comp just by demonstrating sort of an awareness of what the, the real value of the equity is compared to its future potential.

• 3:04:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, you have to be essentially in like VC mode. And that's why oftentimes it's good to, to talk to VCs about where, where it's good to go, where the, where the interesting companies are. I'm not sure if you want to do this, but I'll go to Everett Randall. Several AI companies are going to really nail consumption-based pricing of work output in the enterprise. And when they do, their revenue ramps are going to melt people's brains. And Everett says it's already starting to happen for those with eyes to see. So, I mean, Salesforce was kind of the first large company to work on consumption-based pricing of work output because they want to price their agent product on tickets closed, essentially.

• 3:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:38John Coogan?

  So you're not paying a seat license anymore because the seats are going away.

• 3:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:42John Coogan?

  Because you, I mean, if you're buying some AI agent, are you really buying seats anymore?

• 3:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, how do we pick a new big number to anchor our revenue around?

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly.

• 3:05:52Jordi Hays?

  Price per ticket.

• 3:05:53John Coogan?

  But, I mean, already this is happening with some.

• 3:05:55Jordi Hays?

  We asked, you remember we asked the Optify kids yesterday?

• 3:05:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Not kids, they're grown men.

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're grown men.

• 3:06:01Jordi Hays?

  But, but we asked the Optify founders, you know, if you're getting all this efficiency out of employees, could you potentially charge on this sort of incremental, take a percentage of the incremental product produced?

• 3:06:11John Coogan?

  Productivity, yeah.

• 3:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Value? And they just said, yeah, we don't want to be arguing, you know, which was the right answer. We don't want to be arguing based on how much incremental value was produced.

• 3:06:20John Coogan?

  But, yeah. It's tricky. Let's go to Great Culp. He says, "Walk more," and shares a quote from Frederick Nietzsche, who says, "Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking."

• 3:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, this post is brought to you by Big Walk.

• 3:06:34John Coogan?

  Big Walk.

• 3:06:34Jordi Hays?

  We've had Big Walk on the, on the show. We had Big Walk on the show last week.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  Bill Manitis.

• 3:06:39Jordi Hays?

  Bill Manitis.

• 3:06:40John Coogan?

  Came in shilled for walking and is already having an impact. His, his interview did very well. And we have a couple of fans in the audience start getting those numbers up, pushing into.

• 3:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tyler got up to.

• 3:06:52John Coogan?

  10K, 20K. There's somebody with a screenshot right there.

• 3:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Tyler was hitting 20 plus.

• 3:06:56John Coogan?

  21,000 steps. That's a lot of steps. Anyway.

• 3:07:02Jordi Hays?

  I think we should, I think we should wrap up with this post from Baldo.

• 3:07:05John Coogan?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 3:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Baldo says, "For those unaware today, for those unaware today, Prove TBPN runs Tech News. It's so over for TechCrunch." And we have a great comment here from none other than John Coogan. He says, "Just to be clear, we really want TechCrunch to succeed because they are owned by AOL, which is owned by Apollo Global Management, and we are strong supporters of private equity." And, yeah, we, we were kind of looking. I think I sponsored TechCrunch, you know, I ran ads on TechCrunch back in the day when AOL was owned by Verizon.

• 3:07:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:07:39Jordi Hays?

  And I remember I got like this like ad package and there was like Verizon branding. I was like, wait, so this is why TechCrunch isn't cool anymore is because it's owned by Telecom.

• 3:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:50Jordi Hays?

  And then it basically got owned and then Tech.

• 3:07:53John Coogan?

  But now it's cool. It's owned by private equity, which is much cooler.

• 3:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I have to imagine, I have to imagine that they want to dismantle AOL.

• 3:08:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:03Jordi Hays?

  And sell it for parts and sell the underlying assets.

• 3:08:05John Coogan?

  I mean, Apollo owned Vale. Maybe TechCrunch could pivot into being, you know, a ski blog.

• 3:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:11John Coogan?

  And just give you the updates on what's going on at Vale. Already, I mean, I imagine a lot of the VCs that are reading TechCrunch, used to read TechCrunch, well, now they're mostly skiing, so get them in, merge it with Vale.

• 3:08:23Jordi Hays?

  That's so smart.

• 3:08:24John Coogan?

  Boom, TechCrunch is.

• 3:08:25Jordi Hays?

  And Vale has that sort of durable subscription revenue.

• 3:08:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. With the passes.

• 3:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:31John Coogan?

  Epic Pass.

• 3:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's turn, let's turn TechCrunch into a ski lifestyle magazine.

• 3:08:36John Coogan?

  Ski lifestyle magazine.

• 3:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Print only.

• 3:08:38John Coogan?

  Print only.

• 3:08:38Jordi Hays?

  You know, glossy. Can talk about, you know, interviewing allocators on the chairlift, you know, but not about tech, just saying, what's your favorite?

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  What's your favorite run?

• 3:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:47John Coogan?

  Where, what do you think of the backcountry this season?

• 3:08:50Jordi Hays?

  What's your prefer, when you're, when you're booking your helicopter?

• 3:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Or you're buying your helicopter, like what's important to you?

• 3:08:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What's important when you're hiring someone to sharpen your skis and wax everything? Like, how do you get it? How do you get it right? How do you, what kind of talent are you looking for there?

• 3:09:06Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what makes a great ski butler?

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, kind of like stepping up from TechCrunch to like more Rob Report style, merge it with Vale. I think we're, I think we're on to something.

• 3:09:15Jordi Hays?

  I think we're on to something here.

• 3:09:16John Coogan?

  So Apollo, if you're listening.

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  We've got to talk to TechCrunch's bankers.

• 3:09:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:19Jordi Hays?

  We're here to, you know, help with the process and.

• 3:09:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, give us a call. Anyway, fantastic show. Thanks for watching. We'll be back tomorrow.

• 3:09:31Jordi Hays?

  We'll be back tomorrow.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  Have a great Thursday.

• 3:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Leave us a five star review wherever you listen to podcasts and put an ad in it, please.

• 3:09:37John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:09:38Jordi Hays?

  It warms our hearts.

• 3:09:39John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 3:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you soon.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  Bye.