Alexis Ohanian, Will Manidis, Sam Lessin, Mistow Teel, La Sombrita, Optimism on the Timeline

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 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 (01:47) - The Timeline (01:02:35) - Will Manidis (01:31:11) - Alexis Ohanian (01:57:53) - Sam Lessin (02:32:38) - The Timeline

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Watching TBPN. It is Friday, March 7th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We're talking about the US jobs report, the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. We talked to Nick Carter earlier this week. We're gonna go back, look at what we talked to him about, what he got right, what he got wrong. And a bunch of his new takes have already dropped in the timeline. We're gonna be breaking them down. Also SpaceX, they've been trying to launch Starship for a while. Little bit of a setback, but some promising.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  Zero for eight versus affirmative.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  It was, it's been, it's been a tough time, but team's still locked in. A lot of optimism on the timeline and we're gonna break it all down. Also, I mean, gotta shout out Elon. He's a reply guy now. He has officially replied to the show. The timeline is, is blowing up. We have the best week on X for the show in history. We are definitely gonna have to do a Don Perignon episode soon, but we also have a bunch of call-ins. Will Manidis is calling in. Alexis Ohanian is calling in. Sam Lessin is calling in. So stay tuned. That'll happen about an hour from now. But until then, we are breaking down these stories, the news, what's going on the timeline. What's up, Jordy? What are you thinking?

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Just excited?

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm just not, no, no thought, no mind, just, just purely, uh, just sort of like getting into the flow.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Golden retriever.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Very excited to have Alexis on this week. He dropped some big news, uh, both around a bid for TikTok as well as bringing back Dig. So I'm excited to get into that and hear it, uh, first person, but, um.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  And Sam Lessin, I want to talk to him about the, should we launch a meme coin?

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  And also I just want to hear who his favorite creator, who the, what creator is he the most bullish on, like financially? That's an interesting question.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good one. Um, and then his 101 billboard.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, so that segment will be brought to you by AdQuick, of course, um, but we want to kick off the show with an absolute banger. Scooks on the timeline, he's quote tweeting a very odd interaction between JD Vance and Peter Thiel. JD, what happened to you? And, uh, and it's the, it's not just the fat childish JD meme, but it's a yassified version of that. And, uh, and JD, do you want to, do you want to do the voice?

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Uh, yeah, this is a high risk one.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  What are you talking about, Mr. Thiel?

• 2:20John Coogan?

  And Peter says, my creation, my life's work. Is this really how it all ends? And Scoop says, imagine showing this to a regular person. And it's a very silly post. We don't talk about politics on the show.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Fortunately, we have no regular people watching the show.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. If you're in, you definitely understand every layer of this meme for sure. But it's interesting. I do think, I do think it's weird how, I was talking to Lulu about this. Like, the JD meme has like completely broken containment and it seems like maybe it's bipartisan? Like, both sides are having fun with it? Like, it's both derogatory but also supportive? And even JD is like, yeah, I get it. It's cool. Like, it's very different from the weird thing.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  It's wild that we've, I don't think we've ever seen this scale of, you can imagine this then happening to every public figure.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, if it works for JD.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  It's also funny to do it with Leonardo DiCaprio.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Or like any like major celebrity, public figure, politician.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  It's also weird that it didn't happen with Trump because Trump feels very meme-able. He feels very like, he's always in these really iconic like images, like the, obviously the assassination attempt. But even like the McDonald's photo was very, it was deliberately shot to look like pop art. And, but he hasn't gone down this path, which is like this bizarre, like, very online meme world. But, anyway, hilarious post. Shout out Scooks.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  And it's good to be starting with a post.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Going back to our roots. We're doing guests now.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  But it's great to have, start the show.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  With a banger.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  With a banger.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Exactly. And you know what else, what other thing is good to start the show with? An ad read from Wander. Find your happy place.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

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• 4:04John Coogan?

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• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Wander.com slash TBPN. You just have to create an account. You're entered in and start making those summer plans.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

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• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Obvious. Just do it.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Think about the alpha of having a free wander. Invite a client there, invite invite a potential investor there, impress them, close the deal, could could net you $10 million in cheeky secondary.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Anything's possible.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  Anything's possible.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  But let's move on to the jobs report. Joe Weisenthal is the one to follow on this, in my opinion, from Bloomberg. He says, breaking 151,000 new jobs, unemployment ticks up to 4.1. You know, he's writing his own post because I've never seen anyone misspell unemployment as badly as he did.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, still did.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Still did numbers. Fantastic poster. You know, he's just ripping this and that's what makes him.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  Unemployment.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, I don't know how K worked his way in there. And also two P's.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  So, so we have a surprising.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  He's hammering on the keyboard.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  We have a surprising number of listeners on Apple Podcasts.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like this is a good opportunity to give a quick disclaimer.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  Which is that the show is heavily centered around video now.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  And so you're going to get a better experience on Spotify.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  Or YouTube.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  YouTube or X.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Or X.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  But we're trying to, so I'm just going to say it how Joe spelled it, which is unemployment. So.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. So economists had expected 160 K new jobs. That was kind of consensus and an unemployment rate of 4.4.0. So we we missed that. Very unfortunate. You know, we want zero unemployment. We want everyone in America to have a fantastic, rewarding job and creating shareholder value at all times. So a little bit disappointing and stock futures were up a little bit and then they went down. And in general, you know, mixed messaging on what this means for the beginning of the new administration and the economy. There's a report in the Wall Street Journal breaking it down. The US continued to generate.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Lutnick has had some interesting quotes recently where he said, this administration is not focused on cheap goods.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Or the stock market.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Which historically politicians would at least, you know, try to get you to believe that they cared about those, you know, two things.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's kind of a rough quote because he didn't, he should have, he should have immediately said like, what is he focused on?

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Just like long term seems reasonable.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Not a word for word quote.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Little misinformation there.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  But I think most people, most Americans should be comfortable with like a little ripping the Band-Aid off. A little bit of temporary pain in the form of a tariff or, you know, some sort of jobs dislocation.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  In the future of, oh, then we're going to grow at 10% GDP. Or we're going to have massive prosperity. That's an awesome trade. People should be down for that if they think about it. But it's weird to be like, you know.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, people are also rightfully fixated on the present, right? If you're, if somebody's struggling financially, they don't really care about 10% GDP growth in 2030. They care about, you know, what's happening now in this year. So we are going to be having a special guest next week to break down the tariffs specifically. Because we're not venture capitalists, and so we don't have, we can't really comment on tariffs.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we should call a VC.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta call a VC for this one.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Whenever there's like something really, really wonky, really difficult, just like something you should have to spend, you know, your entire career studying. You gotta call a VC because they will be up to speed, for sure.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need a sound effect button that's just like, you know, call a VC. Like, I'm going to take my, like, call a VC.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Trivia or something.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Well, let's rip through some of this Wall Street Journal article. The economy added a seasonally adjusted 151K jobs in February. Labor Department reported Friday, slightly below the gain that economists polled by the Wall Street Journal expected to see. Still, this is up from 125K jobs in January. Economists believe that cuts to the federal government jobs under Trump came too late in the month to be captured in February figures. So if you hear someone saying, oh, this is because Doge is laying people off. That, whatever happens there, if something's going to happen, it hasn't taken effect yet to be caught in this particular stat. So if you hear someone saying that, they're probably wrong.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  Of that, 3,500 jobs were lost at the postal service where employment often swings higher and lower from month to month. That's just kind of a natural process with the postal service. The remaining 6,700 jobs lost represented the biggest drop in more than two years. Morgan Stanley economists in a note Friday said they didn't believe the decline was a reflection of layoffs, but instead was the front edge of the freeze on federal hiring. Trump put a hiring freeze in place January 20th, the day he was inaugurated. And so, I don't know what else we want to go into here.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the Atlanta Fed had reported earlier this week that GDP growth was negative 2.5%. And all this is kind of generally tracking the government. Government spending is a major driver of GDP growth. And so, when you start cutting it and cutting federal jobs and new hiring and federal, you know, card spend, as we saw this week, I think the DOGE team had ran into an issue where they couldn't close these sort of credit cards, but they could just put a dollar limit on a lot of them on $1.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Very funny.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  So anyways.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Strategists at Evercore ISI worry that uncertainty over contracts and grants is having an additional paralyzing effect on hiring at employers that are exposed to these funding sources or in need of regulatory approvals from agencies that are themselves public paralyzed by DOGE review. And so, you know, anytime there's a lot of chaos in the government or in the, you know, the broader markets, companies tighten up because it's a little bit riskier to invest.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and overall, like a lot of this data, it seemingly has been like heavily politicized over the last decade, right? And so, it's hard to really know what's truly real, you know, historically. You know, you'd see this sort of like payroll data, but you know, then you'd figure out after the fact that some of it was associated with, you know, contract work or even things like, you know, we saw at different points, jobs data featuring like DoorDash and sort of like on-demand labor, which is, is that really employment? Or is it, you know, and how do you classify that? But ultimately, as you know, we're going to have to wait

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  till the experts like Joe Rogan weigh in on this.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Or Andrew Huberman.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  There's some more data here. Belt tightening by government workers who have lost their jobs or fear losing them has begun to show up. Card spending by Bank of America customers in the Washington DC metropolitan area has slowed, according to an analysis conducted by the bank's economists. And there's also worries over tariffs, which we'll dive into next week. Even though the tariffs, I mean, it seemed like this week it kind of like they were on, then they were off, and they were on, and they were off. And it's the same thing with the Bitcoin reserve that we'll get into. But it's all just like uncertainty, and that probably slows down most business leaders' like decisions. A lot of business leaders are excited about the idea of like a deregulated environment, more opportunity,

• 11:53John Coogan?

  ability to run faster, ultimately hire more. But it's like, until it actually shows up and we get what we asked for, we're not going to bet against that when, you know, we don't know where exactly the opportunities will lie.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you're looking to make investments based on what's going on in the market and in the economy, go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  They have high-yield cash accounts, bond accounts, treasury accounts, options, indexes.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  You can play it any way you want.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Et cetera. They got something for everybody over there. Wherever you are on the risk curve, public's got something for you. And this show is for entertainment purposes only. But if you want investment advice, check out the All In Podcast. All good fun, but.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Let's go over to Nick Carter, talking about the Bitcoin reserve and how things shook out.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  No, just already this post is great. So Nick posted yesterday evening, he said, so the government made all these L1 founders come to DC to kiss the ring and the night before published the news that they're not actually buying their bags after all. And, and anyway, so another comment here from, from Wando. What's funny about this whole thing that I don't think many realize yet is that Sacks got Trump to sign a piece of paper that essentially changes nothing because they already have those coins tokens. Anyway, so I'm interested to see, I'm going to pull up like Bitcoin price action over the last 24 hours because yeah, it's, I mean, it's sort of up. I mean, it's still up over the last, it's up 10% over the last week.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  But this certainly wasn't good, you know, necessarily.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  It bounced around a ton.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Long term for Bitcoin price action because basically saying, no, the government's not going to become a buyer.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  We're not using taxpayer dollars to buy Bitcoin.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and so the positive thing is there, there was sort of historical concern that at some point the US government would come and market sell Bitcoin.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Let's read through David Sacks official announcement. He now has, he's dropped his all in podcast badge and now just has a White House badge.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  And so I feel it, I mean, this is him, right? David Sacks 47 here? Yeah. I think this is the official. He has a gray checkmark now.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  And so I think it's good to go to, go to the source and then, and then we'll build off of this with some other posts. Just a few minutes ago, Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of a criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime. That was something that people initially reacted to very, very heavily. They were like, why are you taxing me? Joe Lonsdale came out and was saying, it doesn't make sense to raise my taxes to buy this asset. A lot of people had, had problems with that. And so this completely integrates all of that criticism and really defangs that criticism, in my opinion. I think it's.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  It seems extremely responsive to that reasonable criticism, which is cool. It's estimated that-

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the timing was the big issue here, right? Because if you're, if, if there's all this criticism and pushback against Doge, right? For, you know, Doge is not a scalpel, right? It's sort of like broadly, you know, they're trying to be precise, but then they're broadly just like cutting a lot of spend.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Some of which is going to be waste, some of which would have been probably needs to be reinstated, you know, et cetera. So doing the Doge at the same time as saying, you know, coming out and saying, we're going to be buying Cardano and X F P just doesn't make, it doesn't make any sense. And so it was rightfully called out and, and to Sacks's credit, he went, I think on Tuesday or Wednesday and was like, wait till you hear what we're actually doing.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  And-

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so it is estimated that the US government owns about 200,000 Bitcoin. However, there has never been a complete audit because it probably sits with like FBI has a little bit, DEA has a little bit, like different groups have them. I mean, some like random, you know, federal organization could have like seized a little bit and it hasn't been all centralized. Something like, oh yeah, that's, that flash drive is sitting in evidence somewhere. Like that's possible. It's, it's crazy to think about, but hasn't been centralized. This executive order directs a full accounting of the federal government's digital asset holdings. That seems like a great place to start. The US will not sell any Bitcoin deposited into the reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called digital gold.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Premature sales of Bitcoin have already cost US taxpayers over $17 billion in lost value because the, previously the government would seize stuff from like the Silk Road and then sell it. And obviously there's been massive price appreciation since then. So that's what he's getting at. Now the federal government will have a strategy to maximize the value of its holdings. The secretaries of treasury and commerce are authorized to develop budget neutral strategies for acquiring additional Bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on the American taxpayer. In addition, the executive order establishes a US digital asset stockpile consisting of digital assets other than Bitcoin forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings. So again, we're not going to go out and buy Cardano, but-

• 17:15John Coogan?

  If the FBI winds up busting a drug trafficking ring that happens to own some Cardano, they're not just going to go and sell it immediately, they're going to throw it in the reserve. I'm not exactly sure that Cardano is like the one, but you know, that's generally what the EO is like pointing towards. The government will not acquire additional assets for the stockpile beyond those obtained through forfeiture proceedings. The purpose of the stockpile is responsible stewardship of the government's digital assets under the Treasury Department.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  So my read on this is that budget neutral strategies is equal to

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  forfeiture proceedings, right? Like I'm trying to think of other scenarios in which the government would be able to acquire digital assets without, in a budget neutral way, other than seizure or forfeiture.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean,

• 18:10John Coogan?

  budget neutral? Yeah, I really can't think of anything.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  I mean, maybe there's something else where, I mean, a budget neutral strategy for acquiring additional Bitcoin would be you bust the drug ring, they have a million dollars in cash and a million dollars in Bitcoin, and you seize both and you immediately go and buy an extra million dollars of Bitcoin instead of taking the cash.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  That would be budget neutral within this framework.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. That's a good point.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but maybe there's something where it's like.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  It's somewhat of a weak argument as to why that money should go towards digital gold versus just fighting crime or whatever.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  I agree. So yeah, I'm definitely in the wait and see category on that.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, overall.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  I think it's great that they're, but really they're just signaling like, hey, don't worry, we're not going to raise your taxes and just start dumping money, like new, new money into crypto assets. Let's continue reading this and finish this out.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, gotta, hopefully the admin search to let Sacks lead comms specifically on this.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Seems great.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  Because when he sort of announces these things, they tend to make sense.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  And when the announcements are going out, when the announcements go out on Truth Social. A little bit more chaotic.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  Yep. And so Sax continues, President Trump promised to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile. Those promises have been kept. The, this executive order underscores President Trump's commitment to making the US the crypto capital of the world. I don't, I want to thank the president for his leadership and vision. I also want to thank the president's working group, especially Scott Bassett and Howard Letnick for their help. Interesting. So I don't see a lot of, I, I think it feels like they got this to a good place, but I'm not seeing crypto capital of the world in this announcement. I'm seeing they like, like, I wouldn't call us the gold capital of the world because we

• 20:15John Coogan?

  have Fort Knox, right? I would call us the gold capital of the world because we have, you know, really clear laws around how gold is regulated and like how you can promote it and what, whether it's a commodity or a stock, right? Like, like we have clear, like, like legal stuff, but all of that is harder.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  It is a step forward to say that the government is going to hold digital assets and, you know, benefit from potential price appreciation of those assets, but they're also saying they're not going to sell them. Right? They're just going to, you know, hold them.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Nick Carter.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Who knows how this will actually benefit.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Nick Carter gave his, yeah.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  There is an argument to say that the taxpayers would benefit the most if the assets were sold.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  And then just refunded the taxes.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Refund, you know, more, more realistically just used to fund operations.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  What does Nick Carter have to say as a follow up?

• 21:08John Coogan?

  He says, the announcement could not have gone better. He's very happy about this. He says, campaign promise kept Bitcoin reserve clearly distinguished from altcoin stockpile. Bitcoin gets official US government seal of approval. No other coin does.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  No taxpayer money spent to acquire coins, so no backlash, and future acquisition of coins likely left to Congress as it should be. And then he says, bonus if Satoshi really is the NSA, as I suspect, and they have 1 million Bitcoin sitting on a dusty hard drive in Fort Meade. This EO just ensured that they don't ever sell those. And so he's talking about kind of the, the, the, the, the market pressure that eat like, the government had 200,000 Bitcoins. He thinks that the government has a million more Bitcoins. But there was always this element of, well, what if Satoshi gets active and sells everything? That would create downward sell pressure. So that's always kind of baked into the price, I guess.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Satoshi was bearish. If, if, if Nick, if the NSA gets bearish and starts market selling.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  A million coins would be rough for the price, but.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  And so this should be somewhat bullish in the sense that, hey, yeah, those 200,000 coins, they're not going to be dumped anytime soon. They always could be. It was always, there's always a chance that that happens. And so that creates some sort of downward price pressure, but no longer. And so, yeah, should be somewhat bullish, but not, not, hey, let's go and 10x the price.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Which is seems what the market is reacting to.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Which is cool. Anyway.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know what the market or what the government isn't market selling, John?

• 22:45John Coogan?

  What?

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  Submariners.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Let's go. And where can you get a submariner?

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  The government, we're, we're coming out and we're saying, you know, the, we, the government needs a strategic reserve of, you know,

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Watchery watches.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Collectible watches.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  And they should be using bezel to do that.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Spending money on the ramp card.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  On bezel.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Yes. They should take all of the gold in Fort Knox and convert it to gold Cartier Santos.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yes, we're just going to meme it into existence.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Yes. But if you're sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin and you're happy with it, why not take out a loan against it and go buy a watch? Which is something you can actually do now. But if you've made a bunch of money on crypto, why don't you step up your wrist game? Get a watch on Bezel.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  transition from digital assets to hard.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Hard, physical assets. Everyone's, oh yeah, Bitcoin's so good because like, you know, it's a store of value. If you had to leave the country, you could just take it with you. Well, yeah, you can do that with a nice watch, too. You can hop on a flight.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Sort of they'll hassle you. With watches. I don't know if you've.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  It's a real issue.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, a little bit different if you've just memorized a seed phrase, but.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  In most cases, it's still a fantastic option. And the place to go is Bezel. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. We love Bezel. I bought a watch on Bezel. Jordy bought a watch on Bezel. I'm constantly scrolling and our producer is looking for a watch on Bezel now. And it's been a lot of fun. I love Bezel and yeah. Go, go check it out. Download the app, start scrolling. It's fun.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Scroll.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to Starship. Delian says, okay, the Starship blowups obviously suck, but damn are they beautiful. He shares a nice photo of the Starship. A video, which we're still working on getting playing. We'll figure this out soon, but the videos are.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  The Technology Daily Show has not figured out how to reliably play videos.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  We got a lot of stuff going on here. There's, there was actually a little bit of debate over this because people know that these videos go so viral that what they'll do is they will take videos from the previous crash. And then say like.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  There were seven.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So I think this was what, this is flight seven.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  This was eight.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  This was eight. So they'll take the flight seven crash and put it up and be like, flight eight just blew up. And they're right that it did, but that's not the right video, but they have a good video and they know it'll go viral. I think this is the correct one. Zero for eight. It's rough.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  I texted a size lord capital allocator that is invested, I think a couple hundred million dollars in the space economy. And I said, why, why does the rocket, why does Starship keep blowing up? And he had a very sophisticated answer. Which is, um, space is hard.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  There have been rumors flying around that it had something to do with a, you know, potential firmament, there was some biblical analysis, but, but not for this show. We're not going to deep dive that. But it is, this, this is the, this is the challenge. You know, I've gotten a bunch of space pitches. I'm under invested in space personally. I just, you know, it's, it's very, very hard. And when you think of just comparing, you know, a YC founder, you know, goes out and they're talking about some SaaS product, right, that they're going to make and they ship a V1 and it doesn't work. It's, the stakes are pretty

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  low, right? You can just sort of like ship a V2. Maybe you spend a weekend, you know, staying up late and, and get it done. Space, you ship your V1, it's extremely, extremely expensive if it doesn't work. In this case, they're on V8. It's still not working to the degree. Like I'm sure they're making incremental improvements, but it's just, the stakes are so much higher. And the other thing that's very real is, is the pace of iteration is, is can't possibly be as fast because if you, you know, you know, even if you're just benefiting from the Falcon 9 and leveraging their sort of like payload

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  capacity, you're not getting, you, you, you sort of have one of these errors and then you have to wait months to get, to get even a second shot. And that could be millions of dollars. It's a bunch of lost time, not even factoring in the burn, the sort of like OpEx that you're going to incur during that period. So stakes are very high and it is even challenging for the man taking us to Mars. So not easy.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  It's interesting because, so this is launch eight. Falcon had three failures, but they had a lot longer in between. So the first Starship test launch was April of 2023. So we're coming up on two years of Starship testing.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Falcon 1, they failed in March of 2006, then March of 2007, and then August of 2008. And then in September of 2008, like later that year, they got Falcon 1 Flight 4 successfully reached orbit. And so there's this thing where like they're on a time scale, they're hitting a similar, like it's taking them a few years to get this right. Yep. But they're just blowing up way more stuff because they're iterating faster. Yep. Which I think is probably fine and good. Like I, I think obviously it's expensive and you want it to work the first time, but you'd rather just get through as many of the problems as possible and launch more. But it does feel more dramatic.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Whereas there are plenty of companies that are like, yeah, it took us two years to iron this out because it was really hard and we didn't make any mistakes during that time. Like at the end of the day, you just want to get the thing working. It doesn't really matter. Yep. So let's go to some reaction from the timeline. Sunday Girl is taking a shot at old Elon. He says, if NASA had the fail failure rate that SpaceX does, Elon Musk would be firing everyone and Congress would be demanding to know where the money is going. And Kane chimes in and says NASA doesn't build rockets. Its contractors, including SpaceX, do. SpaceX Falcon had three failures in 458 launches, making it the most reliable rocket system used by NASA. Starship is still in testing.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I don't even know if they're selling, I think it's still full test runs. Like one, I believe one of, sometimes they'll, they'll sell like basically discounted rates to be like, hey, yeah, there's like a 10% chance that this works. So we'll charge you one tenth the price if you want to ride on this thing. Yeah. But Andy, next.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  We should have somebody on like, I feel like Josh Wolfe would be a good guest to specifically talk about what is, what is happening between, obviously you have Falcon 9 taking payloads up reliably with companies like Varda.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  But then something sort of happens with Starship specifically that, you know, basically what is the actual, what is actually happening that causes Starship to break up into hundreds of pieces and put on this incredible? Light show for all of us down on earth, but what is the exact sort of process?

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Mechanism.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  And has it been different every time? Or is it sort of reliably, you know, it'd be if you're working at SpaceX and it's sort of reliably doing the same thing, that's like somewhat comforting, right? Cause it's like sort of a fixed problem that you need to solve. But, but we should actually, you know, we should definitely have somebody on the show to talk about it.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Andy next is-

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, Sean McGuire would be able to, would be able to speak to it.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Scott Nolan worked at SpaceX early in his career, really has done a bunch of breakdowns on this stuff. And then some of the other, some of the other early SpaceX guys that have gone on to found other companies, talk about this stuff and break it down. Be cool.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Andy says, remember the funniest outcome is the most likely, guys. You get to catch super heavy on the first attempt if you accept a starship blowing up on the next five flights in a row. This is how the invisible hand of the free market keeps everything fair. Trust the process. Which I love.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Good post. Xander says, flight eight hit me hard watching starship fall after pouring everything we had into it cuts deep. It hurts because we care, because we know what's at stake, but the pain is the price of progress. We'll carry this loss, rise from it and push harder than ever onward. Hashtag starship.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  Great post. 19,000 likes. Humanity is on Xander's side. He says, the support has been overwhelming. Thank you all in moments like this. It means more than words can express. Every setback is painful, but they remind us why we push forward and how many believe in this journey will keep going. Ad astra per aspera.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I like this John Edwards with the SpaceX tag. Says, never give up after Falcon one, flight three. We learned the hard way that night is darkest before the dawn. Keep your heads up, keep pushing. We're gonna get there. So lots of, lots of optimism from the SpaceX team. Sam D'Amico has a funny one. Did you see this? So I don't know if you've heard of La Sombrita, but it's this little shade that is built, I think in LA. Have you seen any of these? They're at like bus stops. And it's, and it's a very expensive, very slow infrastructure project. And Sam says, fun fact, La Sombrita and Starship took the same amount of time. Democrats put an enormous amount of money into infrastructure investments like

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  I actually don't understand, is it, is it, it's meant to be an overhang for one person? Or it's meant to be a chair if it snows a lot?

• 32:45John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. It's a, it's, it's a sunshade. So you can go and stand under it, but it's like a sunshade for just one person, I guess. And I think it's designed to be like, you can't destroy it, basically. It's like very like vandal resistant, but it's just, how did they come up with this thing? It's just so ridiculous. And I guess it's called Lost in Vito, which is very funny. Starship isn't, and then Sam says, Starship, by the way, isn't just the rocket, but the entire city factory that produces it. And yeah, obviously they gotta work out some other things. Sawyer Merritt summed it up. He said, "Breaking SpaceX just successfully caught its Starship super heavy rocket booster

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  in midair for the third time." They parallel parked a building.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  It's more than parallel parking.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  It's playing catch with a building.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  And so, I mean, maybe this is just like a very stupid take, but it seems like catching the building's like the harder part and like getting the rocket, getting this actual Starship just not to break up seems like-

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Stay in one piece.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  It seems like once they solve that, it's like pretty much game over. So, I don't know. But Base Baron, of course, summed it up very well by saying, "The Blue Origin after-party for the Starship launch is effing lit right now." I don't know. I, I, I think they're, I think they're all rooting for each other in a somewhat serious way. But funny to imagine, of course, we love Base Baron having fun on the timeline, poking fun at the rivalry between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, space is such a different category. You know, if you're, if you're in a highly competitive market, let's say project management, SaaS, and your, your direct competitor has a product launch and it goes terribly and it gets rejected by the market. Like, the stakes are pretty low there, right? It just doesn't, it doesn't set the industry back broadly.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  And so there's competitive dynamic that encourages dunking and people don't want to see other people do well. But Blue Origin and SpaceX- Obviously, Blue Origin is going to benefit from SpaceX's progress, right? Because they're sort of generating, you know, know-how that, yes, it's, you know, actual IP for SpaceX, but at the same time, I'm sure you have, you know, like, if SpaceX does really well, there'll be a bunch of people that have learned how to do space better, and they'll be able to go and start other companies and work at Blue Origin and all this stuff. And it's, uh, it's, it's good for the entire industry. So, and humanities.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  But where-

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Even though they're blowing all these up, I still feel like, like, yeah, I'd probably go on one of these in like, a few years, which is like, the exact opposite of how I feel about like Boeing, you know, Boeing, like, one, like, little, like, like, you know, wing, like, breaks off, and I'm like, I'll never fly on that again.

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  But it's different, because it's like, I understand that, like, you gotta blow up a lot of stuff to get to where, you know.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  How many successful starship flights do you need in a row to feel good about jumping on?

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Probably three.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  Three?

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  I think, like, I'd go on the fourth, maybe. To the moon or to the Mars?

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Anywhere.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  To the moon, probably. I'd be like, the second dude on the moon. I'd probably be the first one. I mean, people have already been, so, you know, if they send up some robots or something, I'll be the first human on the ship. I, I, I think it's pretty low risk.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  So, if you just had your rocket blow up-

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  -in front of the whole world-

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, and you'd been pulling all-nighters, where, what, what kind of-

• 36:13John Coogan?

  I'm crashing on an Aids Sleep, for sure. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to Aidsleep.com, use code TBPN, check them out. Uh, my sleep score's back up. I'm off the sauce. Back on the wagon, off the wagon, on the wagon means you're not drinking. I did not drink last night, and I feel great. And I got an 84. Only missed on the routine. Think that's just because I'm all over the place with falling asleep, but I got almost eight hours. Seven forty-eight.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  You have me beat. And that was a, that was a fair and square. You know, it wasn't, I don't have any excuses. I, I had, my routine was at, you know, something like 93%. I just didn't, didn't get the hours.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think what will be really interesting, once we get it dialed in, we're doing consistent, you know, hundreds every night, the Dom episodes. I think that we might have an advantage here because we drink in the morning. Yes. And so it's fully out of your system. So we could probably get Brian Johnson to like, approve that, right? Yeah. To be like, yeah, like, it doesn't count if you drink it at That's right. 11 a.m. But I think the real alcohol problem is when you're drinking, you know, right up until you go to bed, then it's still in your system. So, yeah. I think that's it. I think that's the secret. Don't drink, only Dom Perignon, and only at 11 a.m. after a major, major celebration. Before noon.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Before noon. Yeah, only drink before noon. Anyway, China is coming for our semiconductor supply chain. We've talked about some of these companies. I've been looking for, I was thinking about doing a thread on this like years ago and trying to like break it all down. Big thread, guy? It's very, very hard. Yeah, I mean, I thought it would go super viral, but it's very, very hard because all of these Chinese companies that work in the semiconductor supply chain, they all have websites that look exactly the same and like, they're very hard to translate. It's actually hard to understand who the real players are if you don't speak Chinese and don't really work in the industry. But Nick says China will produce the entire semiconductor supply chain in-house. Obviously, they want to try and

• 38:19John Coogan?

  do this. They want to get away from TSMC. They want to get away from Taiwan. This is what's driving Ben Thompson's pitch right now for rolling back the CHIPS Act. Let's keep China dependent on Taiwan. So then there is no incentive and the thought of a Taiwan invasion is unthinkable. But if you cut them off early, they're going to have to pull forward their homegrown strategy. And as soon as they're successful, then it's game on potentially. Hopefully not.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  So in design software, they got Imperial. In Fablist chip design, they got HiSilicon, Unisoc and Byron. In lithography equipment, that's the competitor to ASML out in Denmark or where's ASML? It's in, it's in Europe somewhere. They have SME and CETC. In photo resist, they have Dinglong and Rongda. And then in etching and deposition equipment, they have Nara fabrication, SMIC, which is their equivalent of TSMC. Packaging and testing, they have two companies, Tongfu and Jset. NAND, which is the memory and DRAM, also memory and HBM. They're competing with that SK Hynix, the South Korean company that makes all the memory

• 39:35John Coogan?

  that has been super important in the GPU scale out.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  I think here's

• 39:40John Coogan?

  Most people haven't been focusing.

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  One of the counterpoints to Ben Thompson's argument, which is just that, you know, we should, you know, let China maintain their dependence on TSMC is I have to imagine that China would have done this exact same thing, even if they had unlimited access to all the chips they wanted in the world from Nvidia. You know, you know, buying directly from TSMC, et cetera. So I think this would have been the natural path in the same way that in the US, in an ideal situation, we would also have a full in-house, you know, silicon supply chain, semiconductor supply chain.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  I think that's true, except for the fact that when I looked on this list, like, America is not really working on very many of these.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm, I'm not saying that we are. I'm saying in theory, we should.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. But I guess there is a question of like, how much political will this actually take? Like, it's, it's a, it's a huge investment. China seems to be willing to make that because they're kind of backed up against the wall. But we're not doing that in, in America. We are doing it kind of more broadly in the West. We've always kind of seen this, even the ASML stuff. It's not an American company, but they're built on a lot of American intellectual property, which is how I believe the CHIPS Act is enforced. It says that if you're on this restricted list, you can't buy products from companies that use American intellectual property, even though it's not an American company, they're an ally and then they play ball with us.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  And so, anyway, very tricky.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  So good time to build one of a competitor, one of these companies because they're coming. And we've seen this with, it feels like every few years, there's like, oh, they, China has a very, very serious competitor in like Unitree, for example, DeepSeek, all these different companies kind of pop up.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we missed this earlier this week. Unitree released a demo of a humanoid doing Kung Fu, which was very cool.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  And I mean, the, the Unitree demos are looking so good now. They often get flagged on community notes as like, this is AI or this is CGI. Look at the shadow, it's not matching up. And then sometimes there'll be a fight over like, no, this is actually real. And I think obviously then people are also playing into it and making fake videos too. But in general, like it is real and the tech is, is getting very, very serious. And the production scale of that is also really risky. I wonder if they'll do.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting situation where Unitree doesn't care if a bunch of CGI videos are released because it's basically information warfare, whereas the other humanoid robotics companies would get completely dragged. They, they, they, they obviously can't produce any of these sort of falsified or sort of videos. But, uh, but Unitree is happy to just sort of show off capabilities that may, may or may not even be real.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yep. I wonder when we will see a, uh, you know, there's like Chinese drone shows, fireworks. It's like a dragon in the sky. It's all the drones, uh, flying in unison with LEDs on them. I wonder when we'll see a Unitree level demo of that with humanoids. Like, you know, there's like Soviet marches of like, oh, wow, they have a thousand like soldiers just marching down the street. Like, like Unitree is still in like the, oh, we have one cool demo, like, but imagine you see a thousand of those and you're like, yeah, this isn't AI generated. That would be, that'd be a big moment. It's coming. And at that point. It's kind of like all the infighting between all the humanoid companies really doesn't matter.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  And I become a bull on all of them.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one of the challenges is that unitary, unitary humanoids are still pretty expensive. Like, I think that the, the, the solid ones.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  That's nothing. I mean, like.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, if you wanted to get a thousand. And, and the good ones are more like a hundred K.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  And so you're looking at, to get one of those demonstrations of a thousand, you're looking at potentially a hundred million dollars that you just have to.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  If I'm the Chinese government, that seems like a steal.

• 43:43Jordi Hays?

  Steal.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Jordi Hays?

  Lunch money.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you, you, you want to, you want to force the industrial capacity to say, no, don't just make one great robot. Make, make me a hundred thousand, even if they don't go anywhere, at least you got the reps in to scale up your manufacturing to that point. And then V2, make another hundred thousand, but always be making a hundred thousand because the product is not one robot. The product is a machine that produces millions of robots.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Right? Anyway, yeah, if, uh, when that happens, I hope that there's like a little bit of unity between the American humanoid companies. Because it's game on and everybody, everybody's got to be building stuff. Yeah. I mean, you forget that, like in World War II, like people weren't like, oh, like I care more about like, you know, my, my, my fighter jet needs to have a Ford motor engine. It's like, no, I want whatever will get me across the channel.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  I do think there was, yeah, sure. It was more about reliability and people definitely had favorites around equipment. But, you know, in, in specific moments, it didn't really matter as long as the thing worked.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyone who's helping is better than nothing.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  We got some more agents. We got news from Shirin, uh, who is a writer for Bloomberg. She says, uh, former leading deep mind researchers coming out of stealth with a new startup aimed to build super intelligence, starting with autonomous coding agents. They've raised a hundred and thirty million from Lightspeed, CRV, Sequoia, Alex Wang, Reid Hoffman at a $555 million valuation.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Nice little round to come out the gates and good little photo shoot they did here.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Another foundation model company.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this one seems aimed, you know, is more, more like an, you know, agents. So who knows if they're actually building an actual foundational model or it's more of sort of an orchestration type play.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  It's just crazy that this is another one. Like, there's just so many. I can't keep track. It's the first time you, you really do need the market map because there's just so, so many of these. But good luck to them. Hopefully they find an interesting, you know, go to market, interesting distribution channel, interesting product differentiator. We've seen that there are obviously a lot of different ways that you can differentiate the product and make it better. But it's hard to break through. It'll be interesting.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  There was also news today that Google co-founder Larry Page is reportedly developing a new AI startup.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Wait, why isn't he just doing it at Google?

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a big pushback. He's launching a new company called Dynatomics, which focuses on using artificial intelligence in product manufacturing.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  That's so weird that he's not just doing it at Google. Company throws off like a trillion dollars in cash or something?

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somehow I missed this until now. I'm going to just read through it since we're talking about it. So Google co-founder Larry Page has formed a new company Dynatomics to upend manufacturing with artificial intelligence. So his argument here would be Google's not focused on manufacturing. I want to do something here, hence Dynatomics. Page and a small group of engineers are working on ways to use large language models to create highly optimized designs for wide variety of objects and then have a factory build them. So, so sort of some type of autonomous, I mean, very cool conceptually. Use AI to generate, you know, schematics, you know, designs for something and then just build it autonomously. The stealth company is run by Chris Anderson. These people said Anderson was previously the chief technology officer

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  of another pageback company Kitty Hawk, in a vicious project to build small electric airplanes, potentially revolutionizing how people get around cities. A company shut down in 2022 amid failed prototypes and regulatory concerns. Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for the information. So yeah, if if Paige is excited enough to, you know, incubate or or invest in or be a large part of a new AI startup, I'm sure the Google shareholders are sort of bummed that he's not rolling up his sleeves and getting back into, you know, probably the biggest opportunity in AI is just like Google having a coherent, effective AI strategy,

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  which which doesn't feel like they have right now because we've talked about this. You pay for Gemini and half the time you don't know where to find it in the Google in the Google verse.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  I wonder how he genuinely feels it's going at Google.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Because there was this whole report about, oh, maybe with the AI boom, the Google co-founders will get back involved, come more in day to day. And there is a view that you could have that, hey, Google is still, I think, the number one website in the world. They can stuff generative AI into the search bar. They can adapt and iterate on the product and they've made it through so many other challenges. Like, people forget about these because it's the survivor bias. But there was a whole moment when people were saying that Google was going to be like eaten like much in the way that Craigslist was by vertical search. So the idea that like Yelp was going to be Google for restaurants and that was going to take, that was going to reduce the size of Google's market.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  But over time, Google just kind of destroyed Yelp and destroyed everything else. And so maybe he truly believes, I don't know if I believe it, but but maybe he truly believes that like, things are going perfectly. And I don't need to change anything there because like, Google is succeeding in its mission of organizing the world's information. I mean, Gemini is doing great on evals. They're doing great on CapEx. They're building things out. They have TPS.

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, though, somebody, I think it was Shkreli, was making the Google AI repeatedly hallucinate this morning.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Really?

• 49:48Jordi Hays?

  I just, all he had to do was type in Sam Bankman Fried, UC.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  SF and it would like hallucinate that he had gone there or just like add the name of a college at the end and it would hallucinate that the person you were typing went to that school, which kind of makes sense that Google like, like some, something in the, in the, in the product is basically saying that when people Google this, they are expecting this outcome, right? And even if it's false, right?

• 50:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like, I mean, I feel like the Google DNA for correcting those types of things is pretty strong. Do you know the story of how Google developed? I think it was like, it's autocomplete or like spell check or something. They realized that, that if you just look through the massive Google data set of like, I mean, there's like billions of searches happening all the time. When someone, when someone searches for something and they don't get what they want, they almost always just correct it themselves. And so when they, when they type, when they, you know, mistype something or they, or they enter a fact that's incorrect, they will often correct it on the second search. So you can just look at like this person's search for, you know, well, how did Joe Weisenthal spell unemployment with a K?

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  Unemployment.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Unemployment. And then the next search in immediately after will be unemployment spelled correctly. And then, and then they can just bake that in and you can look across the entire data set and just assemble like this amazing autocomplete, autofill, like, like prediction algorithm. And they should be able to do that with all the AI queries that they're getting because they have to be getting a lot because they have good distribution. So I don't know. It's interesting though.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, overall, the thing with Google is, is you, it seemingly, you know, many of their most talented builders continue to just spin out and start new companies. And when you have the ability to go out and raise a hundred million dollars, basically, you know, while still in stealth without any type of product, the, the, there's clearly a lot of appetite to do that.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this is a perfect example of it because these guys are, are DeepMind, they're Google.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  Lightspeed, we, we can ask Michael from, from Lightspeed is coming on the show on Tuesday and we can talk about how Lightspeed even sets up their sort of, in, in investment team, specifically around these different investments because they obviously are big investors in Anthropic. Reflection AI, this new company out of DeepMind is going to be competing directly or indirectly with Anthropic. I have to imagine maybe they're going to be using Claude in some way, but it's hard to really say at this point. And many of these companies on a long enough, not even on a medium term time horizon, are going to be directly competitive.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is interesting that so few VCs, it feels like so many, so few VC firms have really said, hey, we have our bet and we're happy and we're like sticking with it.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Like almost every VC firm's been like, well, like maybe I'll get two.

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And they're like, four to five feels like the right number.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, four to five is really like the right number of like, of like, foundation model companies that directly compete with each other and hate each other.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  It's very funny. But I mean, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I guess there are plenty of firms that have figured, that have that strategy and they're open about it. I know plenty of seed funds will say, like, look, like, we, we just, we, we're going to invest in a lot of companies at the early stage. You guys are going to pivot. We love you, we'll support you, but like, we're not going to play the, is this competitive game at seed stage because it's just impossible.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  When we're writing so many checks and so many people are like pivoting around and stuff. But if you're like taking board seats and like really deeply invested. I mean, at the same time, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or Mark Andreessen was on the board of Facebook. They invested in the Instagram competitor. What was that called? Hipstomatic, I think. They invested in that. And I think they also invested, they also invested in Instagram, Andreessen did, because, but they couldn't write a huge check, I believe, because they were invested in Hipstomatic. But both of those companies were competitive with Facebook, which they also had a big slice. And so I don't know, the whole competitive thing is tricky. Just got to make money at the end of the day.

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. At the end of the day, I've never seen a VC that was invested in two companies actually have a tangible impact on one of them winning over the other one. Like, I would say that overall. I think founders do have to be wary that investors do clearly pick favorites internally, but they are, they do a generally a very good job of not expressing that or showing that publicly.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's not like they're going out and saying, you know, we, if you're an angel investor, it's much easier to get conflicted, right? Because you're not taking huge positions in companies. You're generally just wanting to back great teams and people that you like. And sometimes two people that you like decide to work on very similar problem areas, right?

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  Or they pivot into that area. And so overall, I've never, I personally have never seen an investor, you know, materially damage a company because they were invested in one or the other. If anything, if anything, investors just want to see all their companies do well.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  And markets are big enough that, and there's very rarely like some sort of like secret that a company has that doesn't become obvious, like the classic concern from a founder is like, oh, I don't want my competitors to know that this acquisition channel is like working really well. But any, anybody that's competing them, that's halfway decent is going to figure out where they're spending money quickly.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, leverage that channel themselves. And so it's not sort of like a real concern. Another one is, is supply chain stuff. I don't know, I don't want my competitor figuring out

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  how I get this product or service at this price.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  And again, that information will come out over time, right? Because usually the supplier will just be yapping like, oh, we work with this company, you know, and like trying to find other customers. So all these things, at best, you have sort of like a momentary gap between when your competitor figures out what you're doing, how you're doing it, et cetera. And you can leverage that, but usually it's not VC just sort of like forwarding, you know, an investor update.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  It also, it also matters the, the carry structure at these funds because, I mean, benchmark isn't equal partnerships. So there's not going to be as much like infighting between the partners, but some funds have like very specific deal by deal carry.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Such that if you're invested in two different companies, the firm cares a lot less about the winner, but the individual partners could be like, yeah, we're technically in two different companies that are competitive, but. As a partner that only has major carry in one, like I really don't care about that other one, or I actually want that other one to fail almost.

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, firms like Lightspeed that are making investments broadly in a category are setting up very clear firewalls.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I actually don't know about the carry structure at most funds. It's kind of hard to figure out. It's mostly just like lore.

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need to wait for a newcomer to scoop it.

• 57:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, even that, like, it just doesn't leak out, really. It's pretty rare. Only Benchmark has really made it part of their, like, marketing, I think.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, should we move to some breaking news from David Senna, founder's podcast, dropped two episodes at the same time. We talked to him about this.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  That's serious podcasting.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Serious podcasting. You know, David, you know, they say you should never podcast weekly, you should only podcast strongly, and he is a strong podcaster.

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  Strong podcaster. He also doesn't have a fixed publishing schedule, which is cool. He releases episodes when he finds that they're ready.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to listen to this one from, just released, or there's two, from Michael Ovitz. Who Is Michael Ovitz is a fantastic book. I read it when I was, I think, in college or just graduated. And then I had the chance to meet Michael Ovitz in 2021. My buddy Rompton had me over with Michael at Michael's house in LA. One of probably the single coolest property that I've ever been on in my entire life, anywhere globally. Truly a one of one house, and he's got fantastic taste in all things cars, watches, and art.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Did he talk about his history with CIA at all? Creative Artists Agency?

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  I was just impressed with Ovitz's ability to... Understand exactly our playbook with Party Round, which we were building, you know, Party Round at the time. So he immediately, he immediately, you know, understood the opportunity and it was just, despite having at that point already been out of CIA, he just, and mostly focused on investing. He's one of those guys that will just be doing very significant deals for his, for his entire life. So excited to dive into this one.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  And you know, one of the best things about these particular founders episodes?

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 59:06John Coogan?

  They open with Ramp ads.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  Right away.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Right away. As soon as you, as soon as you click that in your RSS feed, David Senna is going to be dropping.

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  He's one of the best ad smiths of all time.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  He is.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  He gives you a run for your money.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  He is. And you know, he makes it clear, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. And so, we love David and we love that he's also partnered with Ramp, also promoting Ramp.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  And I gotta give a shout out to Logan Brand. He posted this morning at 5:40 a.m. He said, who's putting up numbers like TBN, TBPN? In the battle for ear share, it's hard to compete with the, with the brothers when they just love it more. Hashtag Ramp.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  And that's true. We love what we do and we feel very lucky to be able to do it every single day.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, we got three minutes until Will Manidis is calling in.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can quickly cover this post from Rex Salisbury. So he said, Amex is losing market share to companies like Ramp that have a better product. Their answer, buy an expense management company for 600 million, built by the founder of Concur and his son. Wonder how that will work out. And so, Center, I had never heard of.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  I mean, it seems like it worked out really well because the, the founder got $600 million.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. They just personally wired him 600 and that was it.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, starting a business with your dad and then quickly selling it to a legacy incumbent? Go to.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Go to.

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Congratulations on the deal. Good luck, but Ramp's gonna beat you.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the challenge here is this does not, I don't, I never had the ability to or the opportunity to use Center. But it's hard to actually feel like this is that

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  that this is suddenly going to make Amex's product competitive with Ramp or alternatives.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  And you know.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Because the issue is Center clearly didn't have penetration within the sort of like

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  high growth market. And obviously, you know, it's possible that they serve a lot of mid-market companies, but.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  And so it goes into the bigger organization and it kind of like languishes and dies.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  I saw some other posts about how, you know, is this a business acquisition? Like, are they buying it for the, you know, customer base and cash flows? Is this a product acquisition? Like, is this going to make Amex's product more robust? Or is it basically an aqua hire? Feels, you know, way too expensive for an aqua hire. But the thing I like about this, I like to see M and A getting done. Center had raised a Series C of $30 million.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Back in 2023. So good to get some liquidity for the founders, the employees and the investors.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  I do feel like, you know, Amex is like bleeding cash. They're spending 600 million on this thing. If they really want to compete, they should get on Ramp.

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Because they need to control expenses and they need to save time and money to really compete. And so Amex execs, if you're the CFO of Amex, I'm sure you're listening, you should sign up for Ramp.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Check it out.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  Check it out.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Tell them the technology your brother sent you.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Tell them the.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to have Will on.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  This is perfect timing. This is exactly how I wanted to time it up. We have two posts that were coming in. I believe Will's here in the chat. Let's bring him in. Can we hear him? Will, how you doing?

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  Hey, how are you guys doing?

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  To TBP.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  There he is. You're a little out of frame there, but let's see if, there we go.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Looking great.

• 1:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Will.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  You're perfect.

• 1:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, right away, I gotta give you credit for something important, which is introducing John and I.

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  You, you did it.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Thank you for the 70% equity in the analogy brothers. I was really excited to tender that in this most recent round. Really proud of what you guys have done.

• 1:03:13Jordi Hays?

  No, you had amazing insight and, uh, you know, taste. You, I remember you, the intro was basically like, you guys are the only two people I like in LA. You should meet something.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  So glad TPG could buy all of my equity in this beautiful brand in this last round at 200 times forward.

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing to have you on. You've been on the show many times before.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  As a poster.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  As a poster.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  First time as a guest.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, it's, uh, we're looking forward to having you as a regular.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I want to get your reaction to this post from, from Ayla. She says, going for aimless walks is one of the worst things. Give me a coffee shop, a bookstore, a friend's house. I will walk eight miles, no problem, but around the block? Are you insane? Why would you want each step to be meaningless? Your outdoor time dumped into an empty void? And I feel like you've had a couple of bangers about, uh, about walking. I have one to hear from you. I've met many people who turned their lives around by walking around aimlessly for a couple of hours a day. What's your take on walking? Would you recommend it to the next generation of Willmanites?

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you gotta walk like it's the only way to get comfortable with yourself. You're sitting alone, you're silent, you're not staring at a wall, you're moving. I think Ayla's life might be meaningfully different if she's hitting, you know, 20K, 30K, 40 steps, 40K steps a day. Really, the difference between, you know, boys and men happen in between that 10,000 and 20,000 step a day goal. So for Ayla, I prescribe, you know, 50,000 steps.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  That'd be a good start.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Did you actually put up 20K yesterday? Like, are you on, are you in that tier? I feel like getting to 10K, no brainer. But what do you actually recommend?

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but to be clear, getting to 10K is extremely difficult.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  It's very difficult.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Our lifestyle now, which is show up to our building.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  We're gonna get treadmills, so we're gonna be walking while we do the show. Do you think that's a, do you think that's a suitable substitute for actually walking outside? Or should we just have a film crew with us?

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Worthless activity. You gotta be outside. You gotta be a nature.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  It only counts if you're actually outside.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  It's worthless, it's not good for your soul.

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  So you think we should have like, you know, TV camera production trailer following us while we shoot the show while we're walking around?

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't see a reason why this desk can't be on wheels moving with you. Like, this show should be happening in a loop, Central Park all day.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. How is New York these days?

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  Beautiful, spring's here.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, already?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  The, the issue with New York is that 20K steps a day in the winter is like deadly, right? Like, you just can't do it. But in the summer, like, you can hit 40,000 step days, no trouble, right?

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  40K days.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  I mean, the last time I was there, you actually, the meme worked on me and I walked all the way from, I don't know, uptown to downtown and back, and it was fantastic. And it took like hours and hours and hours.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Doing the loop of Manhattan is like a great once a year tradition, right?

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  It's uniquely amazing.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Walk all the way down to the loop, like that, that's a perfect day in the city.

• 1:06:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Talk to us about hobbies. You've got one that we're particularly interested in.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Well, he won an award for it.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  He's an award-winning.

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Award-winning.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Model boat enthusiast?

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think like the best hobbies in the world are the ones where the average participant, it's like 85 years old and post-economic. And I'm a proud member of Central Park Model Yacht Club, selling, you know, completely small and some large model boats.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Really hard to get out on the water in New York and it's much easier to get on the water in Central Park. You know, you can sail around remote control, go quite fast when some races, it's a good time.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is that a model boat right behind you? Is that the sail of a boat?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Six, six, six feet of model boat right behind me. My office has been relegated to, uh, to storage.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the rise of Christianity in tech.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  I think you're, you're attracting like a greater rise in Christianity in the West, right? Like I think we tried this kind of post-religious thing through the eighties, nineties, two thousands. And it just seemed like it, it led to universal depression. I mean, particularly in tech. Trey Stevens leading the way there, training Michelle right on the West Coast. But I also think in New York, there's incredible young Christian movement happening, like Church of the City of New York. Is baptizing, you know, like a couple of million people a week at this point. It's incredible how quickly this is going. The question is, how do you turn this into adorable movement that lasts over time? Slightly worried that this is going to be like a five-year wave, going to be trendy, going to fade out. Christianity is the most important thing that's ever happened to me. I don't know how we fade that out over 20 years, but feels like a relatively important thing to focus on.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  Are you worried about, uh, kind of Christianity becoming a LARP or cultural Christianity being a substitute like?

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, this like feels like the issue, right? Like even when you go to service in San Francisco, it does feel a little bit like this is like a networking event. Right? Like, why am I here for services and also pitching my startup? Right? It seems like it's good that there's like an elite, you know, an elite Christianity that, you know, elites somewhat lead cultural taste here. This seems good. But the fact that we're treating it somewhat like a golf club is a little concerning. I do think the LARP, like all love to the Gundo Burrows, but the, the things that come downstream of that feel, feel not particularly great.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  What, where, what, which companies specifically in the private markets are benefiting most from the sort of, from AI within healthcare? What, what companies are you excited about? I'm sure you get pitched pretty much every company in the space. If they're not pitching you, what are they even doing? What, what areas do you think are actually getting, maybe not, you know, I would say like consumer adoption, but like real enterprise adoption? You obviously worked in this, in this problem space for, for quite a long time.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, the, the, the take I have here is that legacy healthcare companies are actually going to be the winners during this wave. I think as you see kind of AI adoption happen in healthcare, you're starting to see widgets get adopted, right? Doctors requesting ambient scribes. You see big companies like a Bridge coming out of that. But ultimately, ambient scribes are the front door to the electronic medical record system. They're certainly not the entire suite of software that a physician might use. And unlike the world we're used to in tech, the person who purchased the software and the person that uses software in healthcare are not the same person, right? Physicians are using it, hospital admins procuring it. There's a big divide there, which means they have different competing

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  priorities. I am radically more excited by the opportunity of big legacy healthcare software businesses taking modern AI innovation, installing it onto their user base and scaling that out than I am any kind of novel N2 startup. Like, I think we will see a thousand kind of AI-enabled executive fiscal startups happen over the next six months. I don't think any of them are going to last. I think we'll see a thousand pill mills that will spin up over the next six months. Think they're all going to jail, right? Healthcare is just not a place that rewards this kind of net new novel distribution plays. But I do think legacy distribution in healthcare is the most underpriced asset in the world right now. And if you can take that, plug AI on top of it, very interesting outcomes.

• 1:10:31John Coogan?

  Do you think there's alpha in being, you know, a young, cracked AI engineer implementer, but instead of starting a company, going to work for one of those legacy companies, working your way up, becoming the CEO?

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, tremendous alpha. I mean, if you think about like how big like install base is the most underpriced thing in software right now.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  I think everyone's used to seeing these companies go, you know, zero to a hundred. And then, you know, properly back down to zero, right? This is Jeremy's thing, the iron condor law or whatever. Right? But I think there is like something really underappreciated about a company that has had like, you know, one hundred and forty million in reoccurring revenue over decades.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Like that switching cost that install costs, that velocity and the ability to pilot software on top of that install base at scale. It's just something you can't beat. Like, I don't think you can do that from a net new startup that trusts that brand, that installs. It's pretty cool.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Do you think any of the bigger VC funds, maybe going public, will have the money to buy into that and then drop AI on top of it?

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Hard to know. I mean, I think a lot of this is ground up adoption. Like, I work at a large, you know, publicly traded EMR right now, and we're certainly seeing AI happen in every aspect of our product suite. But it's it's really a matter of making these tools accessible, right? And I think as you see a commodification happen at the model layer, right? Maybe OpenAI is not worth one hundred and forty billion dollars or whatever, when you can sell Llama and run them locally and build these product features. If we upskill software engineers in these companies and like very smart people go and work for them, I think the outcomes will just be better.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any insight into why SBF is getting to podcast from jail? Because John posted about this yesterday, which was a good line. If if you can now tweet and podcast from jail, is that not sort of putting out a signal?

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  What is the punishment?

• 1:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Like as a VC. Time pulled off your sentence, right? Like, this is like punishment.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what what's your take on that broadly? You always, at least within the group chats, you always have good takes here.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  I just think SBF is, you know, this incredible fixture. I will be shocked to see if he serves this whole sentence. He has like very strong proof that if you donate enough money to the right people, you can kind of bend the world around you. And I sincerely hope he stays in jail for a very long amount of time.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Interesting. Can you tell us, do you have any good anonymized, you don't need to name names, but good stories of frauds or malfeasance in the startup or financial world that you think might be illustrative or educational for the listeners?

• 1:13:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I think like I have a great tweet about this, about the deep tech fraud playbook of how to build, you know, a billion dollar company without shipping any technology. And I think we're seeing some incredible innovations happen in the deep tech fraud arena right now, where we have companies that are raising, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that does not exist, will never exist, and is plainly impossible on the face of it, based on, you know, a basic and rudimentary understanding of physics.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Hasn't that happened for years, though? I mean, that's happened for years with like Solyndra there, and I was like, this playbook seems to be repeating itself forever.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I feel like we're getting incredibly tested, you know, playbooks here, right? The acquisition of mass amounts of LA-based real estate, right? Armed tattoos from the CEOs, biceps. Like, this is just like fundamental innovations on the art that we haven't seen in a long amount of time.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Well said. Will, you are, are you 27 now?

• 1:14:06Speaker 02

  Twenty-six.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-six. You've come of age in a kangaroo market. You've played it very well. The kangaroo market, for those that don't know, we talked about this on the show yesterday, you know, historically you had bull markets where things go up, bear markets where things go down, kangaroo markets, you're just sort of like bouncing all over the place. What's your general read? In my view, we've seen more top signals in the last three months than any point in my adult life. What's, is there any more gas in the tank? Are we in a sort of like tech, tech super cycle, or is it just down only from here on out?

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  I think we got a couple more 10x's left to go. I think the ceiling is far from where we're at now. I just think we have a couple, you know, 10x sell downs on the way, too. It just feels like the rate of, you know, up, down, up, down is only going to increase fragility and the market's going to skyrocket, too. Right? As you see like billions of dollars in venture chasing, you know, clawed plugins that, you know, write some basic code for you. We don't understand how any of the stuff works. Fragility is going to go up, market's going to cycle a bunch. Mega cycle feels crazy. It just feels like if you're not making money along that path, I don't know what you're doing.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  What are your thoughts on leverage right now?

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  I, I, right, two great Jeremy Gaffan idea, two kinds of guys in the world, right? Cash Chad's leverage kings, right? I am a cash Chad, run my accounts net cash. I've never had leverage in my life, no credit cards, debit cards only. Right? There are certainly guys that live on the leverage hierarchy are able to run that. Not my playbook, two different kinds of people in the world.

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  Just advice for young people.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  Advice for young people, don't take out credit cards, no credit card debt.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  Buy, buy comically large model boats, they're a very good store of value.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  I got another one, speaking of young people, do you think there's an opportunity to go downstream of the Teal Fellowship and offer funds to middle schoolers to drop out of middle school to pursue deep tech, hard tech?

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Well, I think you talk this with Ramp employees, right? Like we find every 14 year old that works at Ramp, right? We find everyone that Zach, that Zach Frankel has recruited from local Bay area middle schools and we give them a million dollars to start an expense tax startup. I, I feel like that is just like clear alpha in the market right now. We need to go younger, we need to go into the benches of Ramp.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  To the benches of Ramp.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  The benches, the benches, from the benches to the trenches.

• 1:16:35Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  That's where we need to go.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what are you, uh, what are you reading these days? I know you've got, uh, rare books and, and manuscripts, maybe some of them you can't talk about, but, uh, what's top of mind?

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  I am working on republishing an amazing book that I cannot say the title of, but it's a history of political corruption in Louisiana in the 1960s. It is, you know, so good that the author that wrote it was shot 14 times in the chest with a shotgun by the subject of the book. That's how you know you're writing something important. That's how you know you're writing something good. I recently purchased the rights to that. That should be coming at some point in the next two to seven years, as soon as I figure out how to actually publish this thing. But really focus on political history right now. I think there's a huge amount of alpha left there.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  What about a, uh, what about a book that's already in publish or already in print?

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  Best thing I read recently was a Brent B. Shore recommendation that I am scrolling through my Amazon trying to find the name of. Another good one, Santa Monica Partners Letters, Letters on Small Cap Investing, kind of a classic of the genre on finding undervalued businesses traded on very weird and esoteric markets.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Talk to us about the transition from, you know, semi-illiquid startup founder to much more liquid post-exit founder. Are you, have you been focused on getting illiquid again by making a high volume of startup investments? Are you more interested?

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Been focused on getting illiquid by buying very large model boats. I think this is kind of where the market's going. I think it is, it is clearly an enterprise asset and I'm moving size in the model boat industry right now.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Are you looking at any startups that might act as like marketplaces for model boats? You know, we're part of a business.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Liquidity is a bad thing. You never want to mark to market. You never want to be able to liquidate assets. Ideally, the perfect asset is impossible to liquidate and impossible to mark, right? It's just like a black hole you put money into.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  And this model boat I have my eye on built from wood from Henry Kissinger's desk in the West Wing. Just, it's a perfect asset. It's impossible to mark.

• 1:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Cool. Impossible to mark.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Awesome. Well, it's been great having you. You guys?

• 1:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, we look forward to as the cycle, you know, continues to, you know, make progress and unravel. We'd love to have you back on the show to discuss.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  Good to have you guys. Excited to collect my equity on this enterprise.

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Yep. You deserve it.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  You deserve it. You worked hard for it.

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you did. Thanks, Will. Have a great Friday.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:19:14Jordi Hays?

  What a guy. What a character.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the character on. X is a very authentic representation of Will.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  That it's always refreshing when you meet somebody that you sort of know online or that has a sort of online persona. The online persona is, you know, exactly the same as the offline persona.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  He had some riff a while back about like VC ghostwriters making like, like $700,000 a year or something and it like threw all the VCs into a, into like a complete frenzy because they were like, wait, are people doing this? Like, should I be spending this much money on my ghostwriter?

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  And he, he's a fantastic way to manifest these things.

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would really love to know if there was any truly exceptional posters that were just a hundred percent ghostwritten because ghostwriting is pretty easy to track. When it's, when it's sort of like mid posting.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. Everyone can buy like the, yeah, the mid, the default, just kind of like the threads, the, the, the, the, the current thing memes, all of those are very monetized, but truly inspired bangers, very, very difficult. For example, Pavel Asparuhov posts, I've got two and only two hiring criteria. One, do you have that dog in you? Two, are you nice with it?

• 1:20:44Jordi Hays?

  We gotta put that, we gotta put that in Banger Archive.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  Not ghostwritten. I think, I think it actually has been on Banger Archive. I think that's where I found this. But yeah, when we ran into Pavel, he said the nicest thing anyone could possibly say about your posts and he was like, do you guys write those?

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Because he was like, you guys like, like, I love the account.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  We specifically decided to turn it on heavily.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Because we realized we were covering the top posters in the world.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to be.

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  That we could compete.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. You gotta be in the arena.

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be in the arena.

• 1:21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, otherwise you won't be respected.

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's cover some posts. Alexis should be joining any second.

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 1:21:27John Coogan?

  Y C, Paul Graham?

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Paul Graham says it will be Y Combinator's 20th birthday in four days. I'm pleased to, I'm pleased by how young Y C still feels as an organization. It would be dangerous for Y C to become too established since Y C is training startups. It has to remain startup-ish itself, but it requires a constant effort to stay that way. We talked to Gary Tan yesterday about that and it's, yeah. It's so interesting because it'd be so easy for Y C to scale up and become just a massive asset manager. But of course, it would lose a lot of what makes it special.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  And I think Gary is, yeah, reinventing, what do they call it? Like refounding the company when you take over? Like he needs to make aggressive changes. And so people see those and they're like, oh, like, you know, AI is writing all the code or they're doing defense tech now. It's like, no change would have been death.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  He has to take risks and then some of those will be rolled back. Some of them will be successful, but you only get power law outcomes when you're, when you're testing lots of like really high variance stuff.

• 1:22:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the Y C's in a situation where they are in a highly competitive environment, right? There's so many alternatives to Y C's capital. You can go raise, if you're an exceptional founder, you could go and raise from the Collison brothers, from Airbnb founders.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  I mean, I truly think the biggest change was that when Y C started, it was, it was $17,000. And then it scaled up and now it's 500. But Sand Hill Road VC firms, their doors were closed to Stanford Newgrads, which is unthinkable now. Every single Stanford Newgrad can easily get a meeting at a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm that is completely ready to write a 500K check.

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  And so all of a sudden, what Y C is, is not just, hey, we're willing to take a shot on a kid with a $20,000 check and see what they do. Like the Airbnb guys could not have gotten funded directly. Like, yeah, like they were not.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  No, there's some, there's some iconic past emails out of the original where people like, like clearly weren't taking it seriously, weren't taking a meeting.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  It used to be if you wanted to start an, if you wanted to start a company in tech, that meant you're going to build a website and building a website required racking servers and buying hardware. But of course, the cloud computing era happened right as YC started. And so all of a sudden, there was a big opportunity to do a whole lot more with a lot less. It's all, all the AI, it's interesting. It's like, it's like, could they go back to 18K? Because, you know, like they're, they're giving 500.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  You made it work.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, like, like, maybe, you know, like, I'm, I'm actually, you know, I'm excited. I mean, I love that, that, you know, the, the YC founders get 500K and they can go and do stuff. And I think it's great, but I think it's interesting to, to, I'm, I'm very interested in following what happens with PMF or die, because they're spending a lot less. They're spending 25K, which is very much in like the 2005, the Alexis Ohanian era of YC. Like, it is crazy that they, that he built Reddit with, yeah, 20K to start.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Wild.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  And, and you can still do that. And maybe you can do it more now because of the, the AI tools. It's not quite as different as like from going from CapEx to OpEx.

• 1:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Because it's, it's going from hiring extra software engineers to write more code to paying a bill. So it's, it's, so it's not a, it's not like a cash flow management change.

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  But it is interesting. The Will Manidis group chat is popping off, I assume.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Judging by your face.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Sure is. They're live texting us.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  I, I say, I want to pull up this video and watch. Ben, I'm going to send it to you quickly. If you can pull it up. I want to, I want to play the video of the DIG announcement that we're going to be discussing with Alexis.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play that.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Jason Kerman's texting me, "Those live numbers look good, baby." I haven't checked them, but thank you, Jason. I'm glad that you're looking at my stats so that I know. I'm sure we'll review after the fact.

• 1:25:53Jordi Hays?

  What's the book that Boyd recommends?

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  The score takes care of itself.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, the podcast downloads take care of itself.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, Jason fully believes that. Like, he just goes and makes something like brilliant for like months and months and months. And then, yeah, he goes viral every time because he's not like over engineering it. Anyway, Ben, let's kick it over to the Alexis Ohanian video announcement.

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  So what we've got today is dig.com. It's with two G's, D-I-G-G.com. Now, actually, give the power back to the people. Dig rewrites the internet's front page.

• 1:26:22Speaker 04

  I gotta dig, gotta dig, gotta dig. Gotta make this story big.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  Tech darling, Dig skyrockets with millions of loyal users.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  I was not online for this era. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the show, Kevin Rose. Were you? Like, none of those images of Kevin Rose on all the different magazine covers.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  No, I was pre, I was post-Dig.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  I'm sure I visited it.

• 1:26:51Alexis Ohanian?

  Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. You don't want to live in the past, but now we actually have the technology to make better, healthier community experiences. This is a team-up I never would have imagined 20 years ago.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  This is so funny.

• 1:27:06Sam Lessin?

  Kevin Rose, it makes sense that you would be relaunching dig.com as its original founder, but teaming up with Alexis?

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Oh, good shot. Oh, that's a great shot. I love it. Whoever shot this is really good.

• 1:27:18Alexis Ohanian?

  For a long time, and...

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Rightfully so.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Like, I'm excited for this. It's like a media project, like a story. You know, I don't know if I've been like, "Oh, I really need Dig right now," but I'm down.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  No, I think this was one of those things where the asset had been basically languishing.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  And I remember I advertised on Dig at some point, I think in 2018, 2019. And it was...

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  It was seemingly like the the content quality was down dramatically.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  And so trying to return it to its former glory is a worthy undertaking. And then the other news from Alexis this week, we're basically just gonna start covering it.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  And we'll get some, at the very least, we'll get some good backstory. Alexis just tweeted that he's coming on in five.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  I guess the, I guess the audience.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Gil tripped him in.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Gil tripped him in. Thank you, brothers.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Thank you. Everyone tweet Alexis.

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  I want to cover the Alexis TikTok announcement and then with him, we can.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is so funny. I mean, we need, we need a board of like people that have talked about buying TikTok. Add it to the list.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  But, but I, my, my, my true and, and hardline stance is I will support literally any American buying TikTok. I don't care if you have $5. If you say you're gonna buy TikTok, you have my support.

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  Because I'm, I'm there for it and.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  So we.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  We magic is real.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  We got at TVPN on TikTok.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  And I, I think we're gonna just post a video up there that says like posting this video every day until an American owns TikTok.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that's a good strategy.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  We're not really willing to, to sort of invest.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  In building an audience on the, on the, on the Chinese platform.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:07Jordi Hays?

  So I'll read this Time article. It says Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has joined billionaire Frank McCourt's bid to acquire TikTok. McCourt's internet advocacy organization Project Liberty announced this week that Ohanian, an investor married to tennis star Serena Williams, had joined a consortium called the People's Bid for TikTok. Alexis had posted, I'm officially now one of the people trying to buy TikTok US and bring it on chain. Ohanian said in a series of posts made on X.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Project Liberty says it will provide more users more control over their online data. If successful in its bid, Project Liberty said the technology will serve as the backbone of the redesigned TikTok, ensuring that privacy, security and digital independence are no longer optional but foundational. When asked by an ex-user on Monday what he would call TikTok if he purchased it, Ohanian said TikTok Freedom Edition. Amazing.

• 1:30:05Jordi Hays?

  Under a federal bill passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by President Joe Biden last year, TikTok was required to cut ties with the China-based parent company ByteDance or face a ban by January 19th. And as our audience knows, Trump extended the deadline for TikTok to find new ownership until early April. So we're really coming down to the line here. And McCourt has a consortium which includes Shark Tank stars Kevin O'Leary. We gotta get Kevin on the show to talk about that.

• 1:30:36John Coogan?

  He's gotta get Trump's attention. I know Alexis isn't a huge Trump supporter or anything, but he's gotta get the attention of the president. If he wants to get this deal done, I say he goes and buys a bunch of billboards outside of Mar-a-Lago.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  That is a play.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  And you know where he would do it?

• 1:30:52Jordi Hays?

  Adquick.

• 1:30:53John Coogan?

  Adquick.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  And you know what? Adquick.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm thinking what you're thinking.

• 1:30:58Jordi Hays?

  You're thinking what I'm thinking?

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  I'm thinking what you're thinking. Adquick. Raise their... Alexis is a big backer of Adquick and Alexis is joining the chat. So we'll bring him in and we'll do an Adquick ad read. Adquick is out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go. Welcome to the stream, Alexis. Thank you for being here.

• 1:31:25Alexis Ohanian?

  How you doing, gentlemen? Sorry. I...

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  You're all good.

• 1:31:29Alexis Ohanian?

  Ooh, was running late from the pediatrician. Not for me, but for my youngest.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Hey, of course, we understand. We have kids too.

• 1:31:37Jordi Hays?

  We're business dads too. Thank you for leading the charge.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  Family first, always, always.

• 1:31:41Alexis Ohanian?

  I'm sorry. It was a tough one too, because it was one of those immunization days. And I'm the parent who does the pain doctor visits. My wife does the sort of middle, normal ones.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  That's rough.

• 1:31:53Alexis Ohanian?

  Poor dear.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  A lot of hand squeezing.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  So should we start with TikTok or Dig?

• 1:31:59Alexis Ohanian?

  There's a few things to talk about, aren't there?

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Busy week for you. I love it. I love it. Well, we just watched the Dig video announcement and we have to find out who shot that video for you because the cinematography was fantastic. The reveal, when they pull to the side of the laptop and they reveal your face there, perfect storytelling, movie magic. So yeah, break it down. How'd this come around? Was this just like a crazy group chat idea that then just got out of control and now you're just doing it?

• 1:32:30Alexis Ohanian?

  Um, gosh, how did it start? You know, I had never spoken to Kevin Rose until like five or six years ago.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:32:38Alexis Ohanian?

  And, and when we started talking, we just realized we had so much in common. I, I, I learned I had, in all of that animosity and jealousy, a tremendous amount of respect for him. That it probably took me a little bit more maturity to appreciate. And we just vibed and then every now and then he would text me and be like, hey dude, do you think I should buy dig.com and resurrect the thing? And I was like, yeah, sure, go for it. In, in the way that one supports a friend thinking about a thing. That seems a little outlandish and a little crazy, but you know, it had gone through a few different owners. And actually, um, when it was first on sale, I had debated buying it.

• 1:33:20Alexis Ohanian?

  When the company went bankrupt, I told Kevin this later, I was like, I debated actually buying it and then just redirecting it to Reddit.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:26Alexis Ohanian?

  Like this one last F you, but I'm so happy I didn't do that. And, and then, I don't know, five months ago, he was like, dude, I'm gonna do it and I, and I would love to do it with you. And I said, that sounds like a great idea.

• 1:33:39Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:33:40Alexis Ohanian?

  This sounds like a fantastic idea.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, so.

• 1:33:43Alexis Ohanian?

  And there you go.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Talk about like the competitive, the actual competitive dynamic between you guys back in the day. Cause looking at like, even looking at the video, you guys were clearly battling for cover stories on, on, on magazines and things like that.

• 1:33:58Alexis Ohanian?

  Well, he was crushing us. It wasn't even, in my mind, I thought it was a battle.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Alexis Ohanian?

  And this was a sign of being a first time CEO and frankly, being focused on the wrong things in this regard. But I was so jealous of the fact that he was, he was the Silicon Valley poster child. Remember, you know, we were in the first batch Y Combinator, which was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working out of an apartment in Medford and then Somerville. We had raised a total of $72,000 at Demo Day. And, you know, here was Kevin Rose, who was this tech celebrity, who had millions raised from true Silicon Valley VCs and, and yes, was on the covers of magazines, was, was getting so much press and I felt like. I didn't feel like we were getting a fraction of that press and that coverage and I was

• 1:34:47Alexis Ohanian?

  very jealous. And again, I think focused on the wrong stuff, but it just felt like he was an easy, he was an easy target. And look, in his defense, he was first. Dig did come first. In our defense, and I have the email to prove it, we did not know about it when we started Reddit. It was about a month into the company we'd already launched.

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Alexis Ohanian?

  That we'd finally learned about Dig. So shame on us for not doing enough competitive analysis. But they had about a seven month, eight month head start. And what can I say? We won the long run, but now, now we both get a second, second chance, a second chance to do it again.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  Second chance. So, so, so what are you envisioning for the product? Have you announced anything? Or are you ready to think about what will be different? I mean, I'm sure you don't just want to resurrect it exactly as it was.

• 1:35:33Alexis Ohanian?

  Maybe for V1, let's say, okay, the goal for V1 is just get a thing back online that makes people feel nostalgic for Dig. Where it left off, maybe not version four, but just before that.

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:45Alexis Ohanian?

  And then modernizing some of the obvious stuff.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:48Alexis Ohanian?

  But look, this will not be, you know, the first version that gets out there is not going to be feature complete with some of the big, you know, forum platforms out there, but it's going to hit the nostalgia notes. And then, you know, some of the stuff we've talked about publicly is, and this is what was going on in the chat, which was, you know, technology, it's cliche, but in the last couple of years, we've all had our brains melted by what software can do. And AI in particular, and just even simply some of these, these foundational large language models are capable of doing some really dope stuff that if you were building a text-based forum software today, and you built it from first principles and you said, okay, well, what are the most important parts of this platform for the most valuable users?

• 1:36:32Alexis Ohanian?

  You know, it's, it's the less than 1% of your user base that's actually doing the heaviest lifting of community management. And, and so how do you start there by saying, how do we build the best tools using AI? So that you don't spend your job being a janitor, having to go through an inbox of waiting through things that are violations of community norms or just violations of the terms. And actually, you know, and if you talk to enough of these folks and Kevin Slyly ran ads, polling thousands of them to just say, what are the things you wish you had? What are the things that should exist? And it turns out, you know, even. Again, using today's technology, you can solve a lot of those problems out the gate. So that as say a volunteer community manager, you're now spending the bulk of your time not doing janitor work, but actually like doing the fun part of community building, right?

• 1:37:16Alexis Ohanian?

  Coming up with cool contests, you know, highlighting memes and great submissions from the community. And, uh, and so that's what I would expect to come pretty quickly.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Do you think?

• 1:37:26Alexis Ohanian?

  First version.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that X, you know, killing links, uh, you know, we all kind of understand that it, that it probably makes sense for X as a business, right? But it's disappointing as a user. Is that part of what's creating an opportunity for Dig, uh, to come back and, and potentially thrive?

• 1:37:46Alexis Ohanian?

  It's, you know, I had not thought of that. It is so annoying that we all have to put it in a second tweet. But, but to your point, it does make sense, um, from their standpoint. Look, at, at the end of the day, if you build a community platform well enough, I'd imagine, you know, at least a majority, more than half of the content that will be talked about will be stuff from the community. Right. At Reddit, they were self posts and that was just an invention by some random redditor who guessed how to sort of hack and make self referential links. But, but I do think there is an opening as you, as you mentioned it, yeah, there, there is an opening for like more traditional, just link sharing. Like here is some cool thing on the internet. Go, go take a look. And you know what? Actually, as I'm thinking about it live, the other wild trend, you've seen this guy Levels.

• 1:38:31Alexis Ohanian?

  Who's built, who's code vibing the flight simulator?

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:35Alexis Ohanian?

  Like we've not fully processed apps as content.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  I'd love it. Yeah.

• 1:38:40Alexis Ohanian?

  And that, that might be, cause right, how does one get to that app? Well, it's going to have to be a URL, at least for the time being. And so maybe that's, maybe that's the other secular shift we're seeing is that people are going to be spinning up entire apps as content. That will obviously need a place to get to and, and links.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, related to that, uh, obviously beachheads are super important when you're building a platform that can kind of, anyone could use it. Reddit now has reddits for all sorts of different communities. What was the first beachhead for Reddit? And how are you thinking about early beachheads that could be interesting communities for Dig to kind of latch on to early on?

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  I think the Reddit beachhead was Alexis.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was just you, right?

• 1:39:17Alexis Ohanian?

  You know, being the. Very kind, guys.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  It was.

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I mean, it was, you were, weren't you like the first 20 users?

• 1:39:23Alexis Ohanian?

  Oh, yes. All right. Well.

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I mean it in both ways, right? You were.

• 1:39:27Alexis Ohanian?

  It's okay. In, in defense of that strategy. It was 2005. So you got to understand, we had to convince people that you would want to come here to this site, the Spartan site and submit a link for other people to vote on. But, um, but we didn't have comments. So it wasn't like we were like congratulating one another for our great posts. But yes, the first few months, we had a bunch of alt accounts we were posting under to make it look like there were different people, not just nothing over. That's my username over and over again, posting links. But then, you know, again, it was also, it's hard to learn lessons from because back then it was actually novel. And so like the first community needed to be, uh, r slash programming because we started it with a bunch of other developers as our early adopters.

• 1:40:10Alexis Ohanian?

  And then we realized normies would not want to see like an Erlang tutorial on the homepage. So, so we shoved, we, we, we created those communities as a way just to basically keep the front page looking a little bit more open to everyone. But I do think, I think the first beachhead for dig relaunched ends up being that, look, I'm 41, almost 42. It's like the, it's like the old head nostalgia for a vibesy internet. Now you guys don't know that because you are so young, but, but for the gray beards, there was a time when the internet was just like a much chiller place. And, and I think it's the nostalgia for that. So I assume it's going to be a lot of the like older geeks who were, you know, big dig fans who love,

• 1:40:52Alexis Ohanian?

  you know, video games and comics and, uh, you know, a few other things.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I like the idea of this just general idea of the vintage internet, right? There's so much demand for vintage broadly in consumer products, vintage, vintage cars, right? Records, et cetera, Pokemon cards, right? We gotta ask you about, we gotta ask you about chromatic.

• 1:41:12Alexis Ohanian?

  I was just playing on my chromatic here before.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:41:15Alexis Ohanian?

  I do actually take this with me everywhere I go.

• 1:41:16Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing. Yeah. But yeah, it, it makes sense. You know, before we get into Tik Tok, I wanted to ask you, how would you? If you were in control of X as somebody who built, you know, one of the biggest social platforms in the world and Reddit, if you were in control of X, how would you control this sort of dynamic where this quote unquote slop content is what this sort of stated verse revealed preference issue, right? Where on X, people say they want to learn and get informed, but then the videos that actually, you know, get real engagement are, you know, some type of meme or it's JD Vance. How would you approach it? Because I think every

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  X user, given at least our corner of X, we're tech native. Many people are building similar products. Everybody's got an opinion. What's yours? How would you? Is X perfect in its current state? Or do you see ways that you would improve it?

• 1:42:14Alexis Ohanian?

  So, full disclosure, you know, I launched, it's not a television series, but a content series, off-season, on X, in partnership with X. I probably use, if you looked at my tracking on my apps, I'm sure I use X more than any other social media platform today.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:42:32Alexis Ohanian?

  So I am, but why? The best question, right? Why? Because the people and trends that I care most about in our little insular world, like that's where the news is made. That's where in order to do my job well, that's how I rationalize it to myself. As a builder, as a tech builder, as an investor.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  It's work. It's a work app.

• 1:42:49Alexis Ohanian?

  I mean, it's work. No, it's obviously not. But when I'm doom scrolling, I comfort myself saying like, no, actually, this is helping me identify trends and things.

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:42:57Alexis Ohanian?

  And, and I know that it could be better. And it probably, I think it's more fundamental. And if you could apply this in different ways to, I think Instagram has its version of it. TikTok has its version of it. The, the algorithm rewards the thing that pushes to extremes because it gets, it generates outrage and people love gaming systems, especially when those systems mean more attention and more money. And so you see it across all these platforms. In some places, it's a little bit more benign because YouTube is longer form content. You know, it doesn't feel as aggressive, but there's definitely a flavor of it there.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:36Alexis Ohanian?

  But I think as long as what you're optimizing for is me opening my phone. And you, as the developer or head of product, trying to get me to spend as much time as possible, you're going to eventually end up with some version of the algo feeding you more of the stuff that gets more of the attention and the outrage and whatever, which just feeds more. I think community platforms have the best shot that I've seen because what you're signing up for there truly is the intent of, I like this community, right? When a community website gets to scale, and I'll never forget, so I started r slash gaming. And to this day, the culture of r slash gaming is a reflection of me, an old gamer. Because what I was talking about r slash gaming was more nostalgic even back then in 2005 than

• 1:44:21Alexis Ohanian?

  what was the new game. And at some point, the gaming community on Reddit said, listen, old man, we want to know about new titles, so we're going to create r slash games, which is much more about new releases. And, and you could see a cultural rift in something that seemed pretty obvious, but like, or, or maybe subtle, but to the people in it was really important. So I think if you're subscribing to based on community, you're coming in with a different set of expectations, and so you have a chance to build something that doesn't necessarily lead to the, can you make a thing that'll piss as many people off as possible? Which is what Twitter does so well. And I've got, I've got friends who, who I think kind of make a living shitposting. And it's an incredible art form, and I have to commend them on it.

• 1:45:06Alexis Ohanian?

  But like, it's a symptom, the, the reason that exists and is so, so viable is it's a symptom of the platform just rewarding, you know, what gets you to, you know, stay in the app for longer.

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Talk, I mean, we got to hear about, we got to hear about the TikTok bid. There needs to be a decision made by, by April, you're entering the mix. We love to see it. Break down kind of like your guys' angle, what you want to do with the platform post acquisition and maybe some of the other people involved.

• 1:45:34Alexis Ohanian?

  Sure. Well, look, I, you know, Frank McCourt's the big dog here. He, he called me up and was like, hey, I'd love to get you involved. And, and he already had, his instincts were around building something on chain, you know, using this and the massive user base of TikTok to, you know, basically overnight, not literally, but overnight bring a bunch of people into this world where they now actually control, like, say their reputation online to a certain extent because they, they have the, the sort of currency they've created there with that account and that identity.

• 1:46:04Alexis Ohanian?

  Look, it seems like Elon even replied to my tweet saying there are more people bidding on TikTok than not at this point. And I was like, touche. That's right. There's a lot of people.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, why not? I support them all, to be clear. I support them all. I want.

• 1:46:17Alexis Ohanian?

  Are you all doing it yet?

• 1:46:18John Coogan?

  I don't care if you have $5. If you have $5 trillion, if you're an American, I support you buying TikTok.

• 1:46:23Alexis Ohanian?

  Well, that's exactly. And that was my, that was my reply. As long as it ends up outside of the control of the Chinese Communist Party, great. It's a win. Like, obviously, I'd rather us win, but any of those options that's not Chinese-controlled is a win. And I've been outspoken about this for years. And it is what it is. But I do think there's something really interesting about, you know, we're at this point where, and look, I've been a day one seeded Coinbase in 2012. Like, pre-sale, like, I have, I've wanted to believe in a version of this future for a long time. And right now, you've got amazing CEOs like Brian Armstrong, who've brought us so far, so far into making it even just a standard and a store of value.

• 1:47:05Alexis Ohanian?

  And Bitcoin really specifically. But like, can we get to that next point where we have a technology that just sort of underpins a lot of people's lives casually? And, and again, no one's going to use any of these apps because of the technology. They're going to use it because of what it does for them. And you either spend years building it up and, you know, everyone's got a version of it, everyone's doing it, but nothing's really broken through or come close yet. This is such a fun hack to getting mass, mass adoption for this technology. That was the thing that was most interesting, man. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it, look, if it did come to fruition, you know, there's still lots of things to figure out and solve for.

• 1:47:44Alexis Ohanian?

  But there are enough bright minds who are already in my inbox, who are very excited on the, on the crypto front to lend their axes. So, so look, I. Again, as long as it ends up in American hands, I'm thrilled. But I'd obviously love for us to take a stab at it and really see what it takes to bring over a bunch of medicines to the blockchain world.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  That'd be great. We have five minutes. I wanted to know, are there any underrated reddits, Reddit communities that you think might be worth taking a little tour into?

• 1:48:17Alexis Ohanian?

  Like live?

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  No, no, not right now. Just I

• 1:48:21Alexis Ohanian?

  You don't want to do that. There's a lot.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  This is our kids watch this show.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully it's a safe for work one, but but every once in a while I find a Reddit where like I got into 3D rendering and there was Reddit on the Houdini for and it was just like, these people are the they're the CGI artists who do the the horses on Game of Thrones. And they're just amazing artists and they just know so much more, right? And I was just like, I need to know everything about this and I'm getting really up to speed. Even with their memes, I learned through osmosis from that. And I love when I find a little community that I can just be like, oh, I'm not an expert. I'm totally tourist, but I love that stuff. I'm wondering if there's anything that pops up, even if it's just like, you know, nostalgic, like, I don't know. I see you have a microphone there from teenage.

• 1:49:03Alexis Ohanian?

  It is. Oh, God, I gotta remember the URL. D I G G dot com.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Okay, there we go.

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  That one. We'll be on there.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  We'll be on there.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  I actually have a I have another another question for you. You're you're like pretty much a pure play consumer internet guy, right? Obviously, in the in the in the in the in the great history of your investing career, you've invested all over the place, but you seem to be somebody who, you know, when others sort of, you know, sour, you know, especially, you know, it almost became a meme of like, consumer internet investing is just so hard that a lot of people just give up. We it's very obvious now that there's a bunch of, you know, we've seen this with, you know, one of the players that we have in PMF or Die has taken multiple consumer apps to like millions of dollars in revenue in in super short period of time.

• 1:49:58Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, you know, consumer investing now in the age of AI? You're sort of in many ways refounding DIG, but I'm sure you're looking at, you know, hundreds of deals a month, I would imagine, or at least a quarter. What's most exciting to you right now? It feels like the the kind of a moment that that you'd been waiting for, similar to crypto, but this feels like, you know, obviously the next wave.

• 1:50:24Alexis Ohanian?

  Dude, it is, consumers definitely gotten exciting again. And look, I got weird, right? I, I think the, the best, uh, the, the greatest gift that I've had with my investing track record is having a certain amount of freedom from LPs and, and like 10% of our AUM is, is my own money too, which, which doesn't hurt. But like, you gotta think 2020, the year I left Reddit, one of the first investments I made was in a women's soccer team called Angel City. Starting that team up for, it cost a million dollars to buy a franchise back then. In the same league today, uh, an expansion fee, like literally just the amount paid to start a team

• 1:51:05Alexis Ohanian?

  was 110 million. Um, so the valuation's gone up. Angel City's now the most valuable women's professional team in the world at just shy of 300 million. And literally five years ago, that was the craziest idea. And I tweeted the entire grand plan. I just said, this is an undervalued opportunity. It's venture scalable. Here we go. And, and so I love being told I'm gonna lose all my money and it's crazy. And so I found opportunities to your point in consumer that's still, you know, turns out the business model of sports team is actually very similar to Reddit. But with AI, software got exciting again. And shameless plug, uh, the latest one that we just talked about was called Doji. Now I am clearly not a fashionista, but this team figured out how to make AI avatars.

• 1:51:49Alexis Ohanian?

  I mean, look at those pants. Yeah. Figured out how to make AI avatars with just a few reference photos. Actually look, I mean, I could never.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a wild fit.

• 1:52:00Alexis Ohanian?

  This is, this is, this is gonna be, and again, it all comes back to user experience, right? We spent a year or two seeing, oh, look at that. Like we blew the Turing test out of the water. We're seeing all these dope bells and whistles applications and we're just, we're just now starting to see what people can do with that tech and it's gonna be fun. Um, and I think we got through the first wave of like get rich quick apps. Notice respect. Hustle is gonna hustle. I love it. No tea, no shade, but we're now getting into what's, what's a consumer app that's not just gonna make you, I don't know, turn into a P Of cake and get cut in half. But what's an app that's going to make a fun social experience? And it might just be remixes of old things.

• 1:52:41Alexis Ohanian?

  Dig, I know from another old consumer founder that you might hear another one of these types of stories in the next couple of weeks. Maybe it's out by Southwest. And I think you're going to get to see this rebirth of apps that we all knew that can be demonstrably better now because of this technology. And then we'll see some new stuff like Doji that just like this try on app. There's a version of that that has existed and sucked for decades. And what it took was a few technological breakthroughs and a great user experience and voila. And so, yeah, it is a great time for consumer. It's a great time for hard tech. Um, I've done a few space tech companies now. I obviously love hardware like it's, it has never been more fun to do this job. And, and again, the world does not need more investors.

• 1:53:25Alexis Ohanian?

  So if you hear this and think, oh, I want to do that when I grow up, start a company first. It's so much better. You'll be so much cooler. It's better for society. You'll make more money like do that and then come over to the dark side after.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, we, we, we see you pop up on paparazzi photos on the world tour. What's the next big event you're excited for? Is there anything on the calendar that you're looking forward to in 2025?

• 1:53:49Alexis Ohanian?

  My wife was like, do you want to go to the Vanity Fair party? And I was like, no, of course not. Um, no, I, that was the last one. I guess I missed out on, um,

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  If you have a plus two, I mean, we'll, we'll tag along.

• 1:53:59Alexis Ohanian?

  I, you gotta, you gotta marry up, guys. That is the secret. That's how I did it. No, I, I, there's, there's nothing. Okay. I don't know. The, yeah, I don't know. I'll just surprise you. In fact, if it's a true paparazzi photo, I won't even know that it's happening.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, subscribe to Alami stock photos and you can see the latest of what Alexis is up to.

• 1:54:20Jordi Hays?

  Here's a, here's a good question. I, I asked John this yesterday. So Starship, uh, you know, uh, disintegrated last night. Uh, it's unfortunate, but obviously they're iterating quickly. How many, uh, how many successful, uh, SpaceX, you know, sort of trips to the moon? You need to see before you're going to get on it yourself? John's answer was, was three.

• 1:54:43Alexis Ohanian?

  Does John have kids?

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know, I know, I know. He's got, he's got three.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  I have three kids and a very high risk.

• 1:54:49Alexis Ohanian?

  You have three kids now?

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Alexis Ohanian?

  Bro.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:54:52Alexis Ohanian?

  Congrats.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:54:54Alexis Ohanian?

  Holy shit. It's come a long way from the solid days, man.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  I know, man. It's wild.

• 1:54:58Alexis Ohanian?

  Wow. Oh, that's nuts. No, I would not do that. I Stoke Stoke is my horse in that race.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:06Alexis Ohanian?

  As an early investor there and I loved Andy. I love that team. I I'd say the same thing. SpaceX has changed the world. We're all in their debt. They've opened so many doors for humanity, civilization. But I don't need to be in the first million.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:21Alexis Ohanian?

  I have no interest. I not interested. Now, uh, supersonic plane. I told Blake when I sent the wire, I was like, bro, get me a seat on the boom. Let's go again. I don't need to be

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  On the boom.

• 1:55:33Alexis Ohanian?

  The first, right? Let the professionals do that. But like, that's way more appealing to me because it I the space. No, I I alien and aliens were my favorite movies as a kid. And so no good comes from space as far as I'm concerned. And that's without even not knowing that xenomorphs don't really exist. No good comes from that. That's why there's a pulse rifle on my wall.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Yeah. I mean,

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Always stay strapped with the pulse rifle.

• 1:55:58Jordi Hays?

  Anybody that has a man cave like yours is is not in any hurry to leave. It is truly, truly a work of art.

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  Well, this is fantastic. Thanks so much for joining the stream. We'll have to have you back soon.

• 1:56:10Jordi Hays?

  You're always welcome.

• 1:56:11Alexis Ohanian?

  I appreciate it. One more shameless plug. I want to say, and you guys, you gotta keep me honest on this. Was I the first investor to ask if I could invest in this pod?

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you actually were.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were.

• 1:56:21Jordi Hays?

  And I think, and I think it would have been, I think it it would be a thousand X.

• 1:56:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  And

• 1:56:28Alexis Ohanian?

  I'm still here, guys. I'm still here.

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  You saw, you saw the potential. You were, you were, you knew these guys aren't building a podcast. They're building

• 1:56:37Alexis Ohanian?

  Empires.

• 1:56:38Jordi Hays?

  An empire. The TV.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  We appreciate the support for sure.

• 1:56:43Jordi Hays?

  You'd be one of our first calls if if we ever did.

• 1:56:45Alexis Ohanian?

  Yeah, it is so good. It's so good for the ecosystem. Y'all's vibe is is perfect. The branding is on point, like 10 out of 10. Taste, you've heard enough people say it. It is so true, though. Taste in this era is going to be 100 times more valuable as intelligence, thank God, is getting democratized than a commodity. And so it's, it's an amazing time to have great taste and this is The timing could be better for what you're doing.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  Here's our vision for it, since it's very relevant to you. We want to give, uh, you know, interesting people that are doing big things, all the benefits of having their own big podcast with none of the work, right? Cause like you don't, you don't want to. You know, you could work on spend all this time making a podcast and maybe even putting sponsors on it. Make a million dollars a year. It's not going to change your life. What if you could just come on TVPN anytime you had big news because that is what we're setting up. The next time you've got news, I'd love to have you back on specifically when all the TikTok stuff is getting worked out.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:57:48Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully you win it, but whether or not, you know, I know you'll have some great points. We got Sam Lessin here. It's a party.

• 1:57:54Sam Lessin?

  Alexis, what's going on, man?

• 1:57:58Alexis Ohanian?

  I was gabbing with these guys.

• 1:58:00Sam Lessin?

  Hey, Sam. I was whacking some tennis balls. I was late. Look, we got microphones and white hats. You're like, you're my technology brother.

• 1:58:10Alexis Ohanian?

  Teenage engineering. That's the best.

• 1:58:14Sam Lessin?

  The subtle way to say I paid too much for my microphone.

• 1:58:16Alexis Ohanian?

  No, you paid the exact right amount for quality.

• 1:58:20Sam Lessin?

  There you go. There you go. What's going on, guys?

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Alexis, thank you so much.

• 1:58:25Alexis Ohanian?

  Thank you for having me on.

• 1:58:27Sam Lessin?

  Peace, guy. See you, Alexis.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Thanks so much, Sam. How you doing today?

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  How was tennis?

• 1:58:33Sam Lessin?

  You know, I'm just, I'm only bummed because I really had this vision in my head. I was going to come join you guys and wear a tuxedo. I just didn't have time today.

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  You guys have that iconic photo on your website. I think the slow, so everybody listening, just go to, go to slow.co. It's just, it's just the partners, the partnership wearing tuxedos.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  Ben, you should, you should work on pulling this up, but, but no, you have a good excuse. You were playing tennis. If you had more, if we had more time in the transition there, you could have, maybe we could have got Serena on for a second to.

• 1:59:04Sam Lessin?

  I'm heading, I'm heading, heading to Indian Wells in a few hours. You guys are Indian Wells fans?

• 1:59:09Jordi Hays?

  We, we actually do nothing but, but do this show and hang out with our families.

• 1:59:17Sam Lessin?

  Fair enough. I'm just trying to fit the role of stereotypical venture capitalist for you. Come from tennis, go to tennis.

• 1:59:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:24Sam Lessin?

  Wear a tuxedo, whatever.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Like is the, the honesty. Too many venture capitalists like try to basically, they're, they're LARPing like they're not venture capitalists, right? You know, they, they put on like a, I, I advise my friends like. Don't put up like a fake Zoom background to try to hide the fact that you're in this sort of like $30 million home, you know, like just, just embrace it. Like founders want to partner with people that are very successful, right?

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  It's just authenticity. And I mean, we saw this with the SBF thing, like people fake like, oh, I'm not rich. And then you, it blows up because he was like, complete fraud and the whole like, I don't know, I, I'm very, I'm very short, like faking that you're not like successful.

• 2:00:03Sam Lessin?

  I am pro honesty and pro whatever.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Authenticity, that's what it's about. It's not about like the flexing or like showing off. It's just about like, just being who you are.

• 2:00:12Sam Lessin?

  No, I agree.

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  There's, hopefully you've, you've got a full kind of 30 minutes here before you head to Indian Wells. I feel like there's a ton of stuff to cover. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about your billboard that you guys.

• 2:00:26Sam Lessin?

  Oh, yeah. We're very proud of our billboard. This is our first slow outdoor marketing.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:30Sam Lessin?

  So if you're cruising north on the 101, you're going to see our billboard, which, you know, is a burning pile of money around a castle. And the, and the tagline is AI is not your mode. And it's just like, we were just driving on the 101 and every fucking billboard is like, AI this, AI that. And we're like, this is just like piles of money burning on the 101. So we decided to burn a little of our own money to kind of make the opposite point. So it was fun. I like having a billboard. I think we're going to do more billboards.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Billboards are extremely underpriced.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Well, we're sponsored by a billboard company. Next time you buy billboards, go to adquick.com.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  And tell them we sent you.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  Tell them you sent you.

• 2:01:09Sam Lessin?

  I love it. I love it. Outdoor advertising is the future, gentlemen. None of this targeted stuff on the internet.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it can go, it can go much more viral. It's a lot of fun.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, yeah, basically break, break down some of the ideas behind the billboard. You know, we've covered every single big AI fundraiser this year. We've. Covered the big companies that are trying to roll it out. Some are doing it better than others. Just today, there was a new DeepMind team that spun out and raised at a $500 million valuation to do-

• 2:01:40Sam Lessin?

  Oh, cheap.

• 2:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheap, cheap. These aren't typical slow deals, but you have a good perspective on the market. Like, give us-

• 2:01:46Sam Lessin?

  No, look, we've been pretty consistent on this for two-plus years. I mean, I wrote a deck in 2013. I'm sorry, not 2013, 2023. Not that long ago. That was kind of about, kind of with a moment of venture capital, what the fuck venture capital? And the basic point of it was, don't confuse the fact that LLMs are powerful technology. Like, there's stuff you're going to do with them that are going to be great for all sorts of businesses, with the disruption itself being a good business. My partner, Will, says this a lot, the big guy on the website. He's always like, "Just because technology is disruptive, doesn't mean that's where the money is made. You have to think about the business model disruption and what's really going on." And, you know, just, I think we are in a supercycle of memetic venture capital money lighting on fire in AI right now. Because, and there's a bunch

• 2:02:30Sam Lessin?

  of structural reasons for it. We talked about that. It's like LPs have too much money in too big a pockets. They gotta figure out where to jam it, right? GPs, there's no narrative that makes sense. But guess what? If your LPs are going to pay you to jam money into AI companies and get paid the fees on it with a, you know, a GoFish card, it's not a bad deal, right? If you're willing to just spend a lot of money. And so, but we've just been incredibly sure of this. Now, it doesn't mean we don't love companies that are enabled by AI. You know, I like what I call AI cherry-on-top businesses, which is a business that fundamentally is great, right? It's fundamental. But then there's a non-obvious ideally cherry-on-top, right? Which is that AI gives it new leverage. You know, I'm working on a new company with Joe Lonsdale and their team, which is called MeritFirst. And that's an example of a company

• 2:03:15Sam Lessin?

  where like, actually, structurally and sociologically, AI does add something new. It was a type of company that should have always existed. It was hard to build before, now you can build. That stuff is all great. But this like, large model, fight to zero, I mean, it's just, it's kind of wild to watch, to be totally honest.

• 2:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Talk about Facebook's, just Meta's, opportunity broadly in AI. If you were still working at the company, how would you, you know, do you think they're? Our position overall is like they're doing a lot of things right. There's been talk recently about, you know, having a standalone, you know, app, which could make sense. But it doesn't even feel like they've been that aggressive with sort of. Productizing it. Productizing it.

• 2:03:59Sam Lessin?

  Well, yeah, my, my view on Meta in AI is quite simple. It's a classic, which I love, heads you win, tails you win situation, right? It's the best way to, the reason the stock has gone up so much, I think of anything is you look as an investor, you're looking around, you're saying, where do I definitely win on AI, regardless of how the breaks go? And the answer is going to be Meta, right? They're unlike Google, aren't going to get disrupted in their core business on this. They don't have a search business, they don't have a lookup business to disrupt. They have a shit ton of engagement, attention, and they sell ads. And you know what definitely gets better with LLMs? Ads, the targeting gets better, the creative gets better, you just win, right? And so at that point, you know, the reality is, is like, I think they're incredibly well positioned. You know, people are, argue that these numbers are huge, they're spending on LLM or whatever.

• 2:04:43Sam Lessin?

  But you got to look at it as a percentage of market cap. It is a tiny percentage investment, right? To cover, cover their ass, right? And to make sure that whatever innovation happens in AI, enough of it's open source and the funnel is wide enough, that it all ends up back in them, they don't get cornered and stuck out in the wilderness, right? But it's an incredible, I think they're an incredibly good place. I think they're probably in the best place of any large tech company. And I'd say moreover, like, you know, the way I've always thought about this and what I see is, AI, unlike prior innovations, like unlike the transition from shrink rack software to the internet, is just so good for the big companies, right? It's easy to slot in, it commodifies, I mean, there's just like, you can't, you cannot think of a better, extending innovation for a large company, right?

• 2:05:28Sam Lessin?

  That already has the infrastructure, the data center teams and the whole nine yards. Like this is just all upside for them. And so I think what you see is.

• 2:05:34Jordi Hays?

  Capital intensive and low margin, basically.

• 2:05:35Sam Lessin?

  Well, unless, unless you're Apple and somehow you got stuck way out in the wilderness. But like, they're, you know, the Googles, the, the Amazons. The Facebooks, the Metas, they're in great shape. And then if you're a tiny company, there's just so much leverage all of a sudden that, you know, there is a lot of cost cutting. There's all sorts of things you can do that's cool. You just don't want to be in the middle. As with most things in life, you never want to be in the middle. And, you know, candidly, even companies like OpenAI, or should we say nonprofits like OpenAI? The problem is they're kind of in the middle. You know, they can't compete with the hyperscalers from just access to capital perspective. If this is a capital game, they're gonna lose, right?

• 2:06:10Jordi Hays?

  So do you think?

• 2:06:11Sam Lessin?

  And if they're, and if it's not a capital game, and it's a deep-seek, open-source thing, they're also gonna lose. So like, the key in life is just never be in the middle.

• 2:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that SoftBank can realistically spend $3 billion on agents with OpenAI this year?

• 2:06:24Sam Lessin?

  Look, all I can tell you this is, I joke, it's a joke, but it's true. One thing we've learned, we've been doing slow for 10 years. Whenever SoftBank buys, you sell, right? Like, they are the worst investors in the history of the world, right? And so it's just like, I've watched them crush so many companies by over-capitalizing them, by get, they're like, you know, they, it's hilarious, I love their decks. But no, it's like, it's complete house of cards.

• 2:06:47Jordi Hays?

  House of cards.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Was it always that way?

• 2:06:50Sam Lessin?

  Mas is nuts, right? Every once in a while, in his history, he's been nuts enough to nuts his way into some amazing opportunity that saved his ass, right? But like, you know, I mean, you can, he was the original lol deck guy. Remember his unicorn deck with the unicorns and that? He's like, he's an incredible marketer.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  So why haven't, why haven't we seen Mas taking bigger swings, you know, in the early stage? It seems like.

• 2:07:16Sam Lessin?

  Cause Mas always comes in late and overpays. That's his thing.

• 2:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:20Sam Lessin?

  Right, but, but, but obviously with vision fund.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Like a massive infrastructure, just put a million dollars into every new company, just write tons of seed checks, like, like, is it just an infrastructure problem?

• 2:07:30Sam Lessin?

  Like, why they just don't index the entire seed market?

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:34Sam Lessin?

  I mean, it's an interesting question. I wonder, so historically speaking, when big funds try to index the seed market, there are two problems. One is someone wakes up and does the math and they're like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Like, even if you have the million dollar check at seed, if you're trying to deploy billions of dollars, like, it's just an irrational business model because the multiples don't make up for the fact you have to move gross dollars, right? So, the best case you're doing at seed then is just marketing, right? You're like, I do seed to market.

• 2:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:05Sam Lessin?

  Hey, Des. I'm on the Technology Brothers podcast. You want to say hi?

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come say hi.

• 2:08:09Sam Lessin?

  You know my wife, Jessica?

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we-

• 2:08:11Sam Lessin?

  You came over to the pool house.

• 2:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Hey. How you doing? We wouldn't really be able to do the show without your team, uh, your team's coverage. We, we basically feature your articles, you know, almost daily, so, uh, thank you.

• 2:08:22Speaker 07

  And I'm grateful. Congrats on all the success you guys have to talk in town.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Now, we, we subscribe-

• 2:08:27Speaker 07

  What do you want him for?

• 2:08:29Jordi Hays?

  Now, we subscribe to the information. I, I have to think we're one of the number, we have, I hope we're one of the number one referral partners because we, we get the paid wall articles and then, and then we cover them, but we don't cover the full thing, you know? So, we, we basically are, you know, pushing people behind the paywall, so it's great.

• 2:08:44Speaker 07

  We gotta strike a deal, so I'll leave you guys, but then, you know-

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Let's figure it out.

• 2:08:48Speaker 07

  We'll send some referral revenue your way.

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, no, we're just, we're happy to support. Happy to support. Um, great, great to meet.

• 2:08:56Sam Lessin?

  Oh, look at that. It's a guest on the guest. I love it.

• 2:08:59Speaker 07

  A pool house dropping. Well, I'm just delivering your mail.

• 2:09:01Sam Lessin?

  Thanks.

• 2:09:02Speaker 07

  Have fun.

• 2:09:02Sam Lessin?

  Bye.

• 2:09:03Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Uh, okay, talk, I, I want, I, I want more hot takes from you on, on kind of all the, on all the hyperscalers. So, so what's going on with, with Apple? Are they just a luxury goods? Are they the, the LVMH of tech? Are they just gonna kind of continue to, to make the same products forever? Uh, are they done innovating?

• 2:09:23Sam Lessin?

  Look, here's the reality. It's really fucking hard to make phones, right? And like, really hard, especially in the modern era. It's really hard to imagine that they're going away. Anytime soon because of that. At the same time, you know, I don't know if you guys get the um, the Apple intelligence summaries of your texts.

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:39Sam Lessin?

  But they're like comically bad.

• 2:09:41John Coogan?

  They're hilarious.

• 2:09:43Sam Lessin?

  They literally will tell you the opposite of what the text says.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:46Sam Lessin?

  Like, it is useless, right? And so.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's valuable in that it's so funny because I'll screenshot them and send them into the group chat and be like, really? You guys were talking about this or something and that's funny, but it's all, it's purely accidental humor.

• 2:09:59Sam Lessin?

  It's insane, right? And so I'd actually think that I would argue that Apple's intelligence

• 2:10:05Sam Lessin?

  text message product might be the perfect exhibit for an antitrust case, right? Where you're like, you talk about consumer harm, right? With like the kind of bar for this. It's like, this is what we're gonna get out of AI, right? Like, it's comical, right? It is really funny. As a, I love lols, so like, I'm into it. I think it's funny.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was the first time in LLM was funny.

• 2:10:26Sam Lessin?

  Jessica's phone on their newest iOS update, it deleted all somehow like all the contacts. And so she now just has phone, like, it is comically bad. But the problem is, on the flip side, is like, the camera's good and it's hard to make phones.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:38Sam Lessin?

  Right? So like, I don't, um, I'm still like, and who, who, no one likes green bubbles, right? And so the reality is, is like, I think we're a long way away from Apple going away.

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:48Sam Lessin?

  But my God, are they in a weird place right now, right?

• 2:10:51John Coogan?

  It is unfortunate as a consumer. Like, I just want better AI and I know that they'll just be able to wait and just dominate the monopoly and then eventually roll something out.

• 2:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, the very basic thesis is, is if LVMH is a luxury goods conglomerate and they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, should the sort of digital tech equivalent, consumer tech equivalent of that be worth trillions of dollars? Like, yes, like, they're not.

• 2:11:12Sam Lessin?

  Well, maybe, but look, LVMH is, there was an interesting moment, you guys remember? I think this was like a few years ago where there was this moment where LVMH, or I guess the CEO of LVMH was the richest guy in the world. Right. And somehow like it inverted and like tech was worth a lot. It was like a crazy inversion. You're like, wow. So the meta story of our society right now is that it's not the innovators that are worth the most. The meta story is that it's like fake luxury signaling. That's the most valuable thing in the world. And that was not a good thing. That was not a good moment.

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  And you contributed to that with, uh, with, with, with Facebook, right? Like Facebook was a huge catalyst for, you know, uh.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  Tech becoming the number one source of wealth or no?

• 2:11:49Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. Luxury spending, right? Because now it wasn't like, oh, your, your watch or your car is no longer just like, you know, being seen by your local community, but it can be seen by the whole world and you can sort of signal out, uh, you know, status.

• 2:12:02Sam Lessin?

  Yeah. It's interesting. It's an interesting social dynamic, right? Cause on one hand, I'd argue that Instagram has made it so that the real luxury consumption is experience and travel and being hot. Right? Like all of a sudden like fitness is cool because like you can say you're hot and being hot's like way more expensive than a watch. Right? And so like, actually that's the way like being well rested is the luxury good, right? And like, so, you know, kids, kids are like the most expensive thing in the world. So all these things that you can like now socially signal as like, I'm fucking rich easily. And like those certainly supersede your Birkin bag. Like those, that's like cheap luxury, right? That's like mass luxury at best. And so there's this weird dynamics going on. Now you all, on the flip side, the reality is, is like, look, I've got, I don't know if you guys, you guys play with the, the meta Ray-Bans.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have.

• 2:12:48Sam Lessin?

  Things are freaking great.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:49Sam Lessin?

  Right? And like, I do think that you're talking about luxury and fashion. Like if Meta had released not Ray-Bans.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:56Sam Lessin?

  Right? Then like they wouldn't be as cool, even if they were exactly the same and they probably wouldn't have sold as well. So like, I'm not like a luxury guy. Like I don't have perfect insights or taste on this, but there is, there's weird stuff going on about how you, what, what luxury really is, how you display taste, how you display wealth. And certainly things like Instagram had, had a big impact on that.

• 2:13:16John Coogan?

  Totally. Related to the Meta Ray-Bans, are you at all like a DAU, MAU of any other augmented reality or just like consumer? Hard, hardware technology like Apple Vision Pro, Oculus, any of these products at all?

• 2:13:32Sam Lessin?

  And I, Apple Vision Pro has got to be the most expensive product per minute of use in the history of the world. I, I obviously bought one immediately.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:13:39Sam Lessin?

  I've used it precisely zero times since the first week I had it. It's an incredible demo, right? What do you think about, I've actually tried to do the math on this. Like it's more expensive than private planes per minute of use, right? If you looked at like. The overall like so.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  The exact same experience.

• 2:13:54Sam Lessin?

  I I was a big Oculus. I I think that Oculus is actually pretty good at this point. I you know, look, I'm a Facebook loyalist, so I like bought every version. I went, I like everyone else, played a bunch of zombie shooting games during the pandemic with friends. It was super fun. Like, I'm into it. I think it's a really hard sell, though, when like your life is pretty good, right? Like, I think the reality is like VR and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of great if your life sucks, right? Because then you're like, I'm gonna like live in a video game. But like, I think a lot of the problem with that type of stuff is like, it's just, it's not, if you have a good life and kids and like do stuff, like, what's the point, right?

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  Just go play real tennis instead of VR tennis.

• 2:14:33Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, like, I like Wii tennis, but I like real tennis better.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep, that makes sense. Uh, one more. Uh, do you have a prediction around, uh, Google? Do we have a new CEO there at all in the next five years? Are they all in on Sundar?

• 2:14:48Sam Lessin?

  On Sundar? Um, I don't know. Is there like, is that just like based in some news or rumor?

• 2:14:52Jordi Hays?

  No, it's purely based on, it's purely based on, uh, Google has not managed to release an AI product that hasn't been riddled with issues. And it feels like, uh, it it it does, you know, we we, you know, you obviously, uh, can poke fun at Masa's picking ability and call him somebody that sort of signals the top or whatever, but, you know, OpenAI and ChatGPT have hundreds of millions of users. And, you know, maybe they're not replacing that sort of commercial search activity, but like much of the informational search. It feels like, uh, the golden goose is threatened for the first time.

• 2:15:30Sam Lessin?

  It's a really good question. I mean, here's the way I would think about it is Gemini is actually a pretty sweet product. The problem is no one uses it, right? Like, you know, so is like the Notebook LM product. Like, Google actually has a bunch of very, very good products, right? I think their problem is they're so big and they're the marketing and like driving of those products is extremely hard, uh, for them. And yes, I think they are the company that more than any other company in the world. Is in the position of both being way ahead in certain elements of AI and like has a huge advantage, but they also have the most to lose, right? And so I think that's a very challenging thing for any company. If you look at, you know, the history of companies like that, I mean, the best example from history is, was it Kodak? Right, that invented the digital camera, right?

• 2:16:14Sam Lessin?

  Like, they invented it and like they fucked it up, right? And like, and you understand why though, right? Which you have a bunch of these business concerns. Now, the interesting thing about, about Google is I think Sundar is a very good guy and competent manager, managing an enormous infrastructure. But you do actually still have founders with meaningful control in the picture. And I actually think that's good because I think to do really tough things, it's extremely helpful to have the broad sort of founders, right? The question is, it just has to be wielded. And so I think the bigger question is you look at this like, I think it was Larry Page's letter about, please try to go to work 60 hours a week for AGI. Did you see this?

• 2:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Larry launched a new startup today or yesterday.

• 2:16:53Sam Lessin?

  It was like a wildly funny thing to leak, right? Because everything's going to leak. But it's like, I actually think it's less a Sundar question and more like, do the founders step up and just like broadsword this, right? Because that is, if you, that is kind of, I think, what probably has to happen. And it's not a technology problem. Like honestly, I, I think Gemini is actually probably, for a lot of things, the best product. It's just is like terribly marketed.

• 2:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, you know, you guys, uh, you know, you've spoken out against, you know, venture becoming this sort of asset management business, starting to look more like, you know, private equity in some ways. At the same time, uh, you know, that's on the fun side. On the company side, we've seen, uh, this sort of venture style rollups where people raise venture capital dollars to buy, you know, companies, they're going to, and it's a great deal for the founder, right? To raise 20 on 100 and then just buy like profitable companies in theory. It's better economics than than traditional PE, but you guys at Slow have supported, I'm blanking on the name of the portfolio company, but but what's what's your portfolio?

• 2:17:57Sam Lessin?

  We've done a bunch, Metropolis, TeamShares, whatever. I mean, like, so here's here's basically talk I gotta give you. One is, I'm not, I am personally a snob about venture capitalists being asset managers, because I don't think it's that creative, or important, or interesting. I will say, as a GP, it's a great fucking business model, right? And so like, the the seed business model we run is definitely less consistently and meaningfully profitable than like being a 16Z in a platform. There's no question, right? Like, so if you just want to make money, as a, and saying, I earned DPI to justify more AUM is a very smart thing to do, right? It's just not that fun, right? And so like, I'd rather do the fun part of the business, which is saying, I take money in, but I take in the money I know how to make lots of money on, and then I run around saying, ha ha, I told

• 2:18:42Sam Lessin?

  you so, I was right from seed. That's like more fun for me, right? And so I think you have to like, separate those, is like, I do intellectually dislike it. I don't think it's a bad business model. On the roll up thing, look, we started doing this before all the cool kids were doing this, right? So if you look at like, the two probably most important deals we've done in this, one is TeamShares. We seeded that from zero. I bought four, I bought 10% of the company originally for $400,000, right? We've kind of bought up from there. They've acquired well over 100 small businesses. They built a whole platform for scaling them. It's a killer business. It's kind of, and they've done a lot of really smart stuff. But there is kind of a technology leveraged roll up strategy to it. You know, you can look at something like Metropolis, which is another pretty iconic deal, which again, we were the seed investors in, we were early seed

• 2:19:25Sam Lessin?

  investors in when it was a tech company. And we realized that it turns out that SaaS is a terrible business model, right? In a lot of verticals. It's, SaaS is just like, everyone has this idea that SaaS is a great business model. It's not, right? It's, you get paid later, it's hard to sell. And, you know, the thing of, if you think about something like it's a transformative technology, you go to a CEO and say, I have a transformative technology, gonna change your whole business. It's gonna make you 50% profitable. You can't then say, give me 40% of the profit, right? They're like, fuck you, we'll give you your SaaS fee, right? So if you have an actually transformative technology, and you can swing it, you're better off buying your customers, right? And then deploying your technology. But that predicated on actually having a better technology, right? And so, this is the thing I think people get wrong is,

• 2:20:08Sam Lessin?

  You know, when venture capitalists go fund rollups with the yada, yada, yada, there's some tech leverage in them or no tech leverage, that's ridiculous and it doesn't make any sense. If you're, if you're a smart venture capitalist, smart founder, you say, hey, I'm going to prove that I can be way better at this than my competitors, than anyone else in the industry. And then by the way, it turns out for whatever reason, this is a hard software to sell. It's conflicted. I can't get paid what it's worth, the whole nine yards. Then going to PE folks and saying, hey, we're going to prove this out. We want cheap capital. We're going to go buy all our customers, I think is a great strategy, right? So the kind of the devil's in the details in terms of how you do this. And when we're into it, I mean, we did, there's one called T M L, the lumber manufacturer, we're really excited about. We definitely do this, but we have a

• 2:20:52Sam Lessin?

  pretty specific bar on what this is. And it's not just like buying pool cleaning rollups.

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about creators? I want to hear.

• 2:21:00Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, yeah. We love creators. I mean, this is, yeah.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  I want to hear, I want to hear who you're bullish on and then what the anatomy of a deal that looks like a banger with a creator looks like.

• 2:21:10Sam Lessin?

  Yeah. So here's the basic upside. As you guys maybe know, like we just announced this $65 million vehicle, which is pretty groundbreaking, right? What we invest in is not C corps. We invest in seed creators. So think I own a niche, right? I'm doing a million in top line. I've got a million followers. I'm growing really quickly. And here's the key fact is you do the breakdown. You're like, I'm an awesome creator. I've built this community. I, I, I am the leader of it. I'm admired. I have this scarce thing. I've, you know, low CAC on high LTV folks. It's fucking sweet. But you're doing a million in top line after expenses, taxes, you're living fine, but you don't have investable capital. We're like, we'll give you the investable capital to build C corps and businesses, right? This is a new pattern of C corp generation and building. We really

• 2:21:53Sam Lessin?

  believe in at seed. Now, how do we get there? We got there because it's really hard to invest in seed creator businesses because the equity and the value of the community is held outside the company. And so Jane wakes up in five days and we love the community. We love her. She's like, oh, fuck, it's actually not this, it's that. It's not Mr. Beast Burger. It's fucking feastables. You do not want to be in that scenario, right? Like no one wants that. It's bad for everyone. We want to be able to invest as aligned the way as we possibly can with creators. And so we were We do this effectively with founders anyway. We don't take board seats. We want to be first check in. We're trying to be collaborative holistically with them. We want to be aligned with them. If they win, great. If they lose, c'est la vie. What is the equivalent in Creator? And like, that's kind of what we're bullish on. So I think, you know,

• 2:22:36Sam Lessin?

  it turns out in Creator, like most things, the transparent deals, the super buzzy ones, Masa style, they always get super overpriced. Right? Because everyone knows them and they say, oh, we like Creator. Creator important. Buy Creator. Right? We're much more interested in providing capital where it's scarce, which is we think seed creators and we think on this model.

• 2:22:54John Coogan?

  What about putting those two things together? Have you thought about going to a creator and saying, hey, you would be perfect if you owned this business that already exists. We buy the business, give it to you, repackage it, and then you're kind of the marketing front end. Is that a crazy idea?

• 2:23:09Sam Lessin?

  It's not a crazy idea. And we get pitched it all the time, actually, you know, in different verticals. Like you have the god of lawn care who wants to buy the lawn care companies. It's not crazy. But I do think it's complicated to get right. Right? And I think like, you know, there's a thing I like to say about seed stage investing, which is no fucking bank shots. Right? And the more variables that have to be right, domino style, the less likely it is that the thing actually happens. Right? And so for me, it's like, ugh, like, so you want tech leverage and a roll up and we're going to put a creator on top and da da da. It's like, something will not work. Right? And like, that makes it a hard bet. But it's intellectually not wrong. Right?

• 2:23:46Jordi Hays?

  With kind of two follow up questions. On the Creator Fund, do you guys have like a no zeros policy? Right? A lot of these creators generate revenue from ads. Right? So if you invest a million dollars and they generate, you know, a couple million bucks a year in ad revenue, like even if they don't make a banger company, like you'll get your money out eventually? Or how do you think about?

• 2:24:06Sam Lessin?

  Here's the way we think about it. It's a great question. We're not that interested in your ad business. Right? Like, we just don't really care. Like, there's no enterprise value generated in that. It's really nice non dilutive financing sometimes, but like, it's not what we're playing for. We also are not interested in taking some creator's last cent. Right? Like, if you're just like, you're making a million bucks after you pay taxes and whatever else, you're living okay. We're not going to be like, hey, by the way, we want our 10% of your ad revenue. We like, we don't care. Now. There is a scenario we do care about protecting, right? Which is if you take our money, you know, we're doing the seed thing. We start a few companies, they don't quite work. But in the process of spending our money, because you marketed yourself and whatever else, you get 10 times bigger.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:48Sam Lessin?

  And then you're like, you know, I kind of just like Super Bowl ads. I'm just gonna do a bunch of Super Bowl ads and I'm gonna make 15 million, 20 million dollars next year on that. We'll, we'll want our piece of the upside on that in that model, right? But like, our whole thing is about alignment and we're certainly not primarily interested in your ad dollars, right? It's not like a slope, you know? Now, look, it does, it doesn't hurt that there's non-dilutive financing, right?

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  Safety net, makes sense.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Mr. Beast is marked around $5 billion right now.

• 2:25:15Sam Lessin?

  It's a private mark, I wouldn't read that much into it.

• 2:25:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm, I'm assuming that everybody that's investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Mr. Beast or Billions wants to get their money out eventually. It's hard to imagine anybody buying it, you know, outright, right? Uh, do they, uh, do you see Mr. Beast going public in the next few years?

• 2:25:35Sam Lessin?

  I am sure that's what he, they want to do, like obviously, right?

• 2:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it a stock that trades, you know, kind of like Truth Social where it's just based around attention and, and doesn't underline some...

• 2:25:48Sam Lessin?

  I think it's a meme stock. It's a meme stock if it gets out, right? It's just a meme coin on steroids. You know, the reality is, is like, it's not, again, I actually credit Jimmy, Mr. Beast. He's done a few very important things for the creator space, right? One thing he did is he's made a lot of creators dream a lot bigger. And that's great, right? Like, I appreciate that, right, from a perspective. I also think, you know, he's really, I think, been a good example on a beacon of creators aren't just creators, like they can start businesses, like whatever. So there's, there's been an aperture opening that he's really helped with, that I think has been great for the industry. Now, that said, um, you know, I do think there's some structural problems with his quote unquote "business", right, as a creator business.

• 2:26:28Sam Lessin?

  Like, I'll give you an example, like, one, we, we care a lot about, um, the LTV of customers, right? And his audience is so broad and candidly, pretty poor, right? Which means that like, they're not great customers, right? Like, there's a reason you sell chocolate, because it's one of the only things you can sell. To everyone, it's cheap, right? And like, so there's like, it's not like the best audience. It's also, you know, the reality is he does a lot of this media stuff like, you know, the, you know, everyone's excited that he gets a hundred million dollar Amazon contract, but then he spends more than that on the show, right? Like, and so it's like, it's just not clear to me that in the hyper competitive entertainment space with a broad general audience, that that's like an amazing business. But look, it is definitely a cult. And I'm sure there's a bunch of like 20

• 2:27:10Sam Lessin?

  year old kids that will grow up and trade it like a meme stock, right? And like, that could be fine, right? It's just not like a thing where you're looking at it like this is a money printing machine, right? Which is what I'm more interested in.

• 2:27:21Jordi Hays?

  To my, to my knowledge, you're thinking about the slow creator program where you would want one of the creators underlying companies to go public, but not the creator holding company to go public and that there's some brand risk to the creator. If you're having a financial asset that's trading based on your popularity and if your popularity goes down, you get even more unpopular because.

• 2:27:42Sam Lessin?

  Look, yeah, so we, I've been interested in this kind of how do you think about financing people with equity versus debt for a very long time. I started my first company in 1999 when I was in high school. It's called life capital.com. And the ideal was basically some version of this, right? And so I think that thematically makes a ton of sense, right? As the world gets more unequal and outcomes are more discontinuous, debt financing does just broadly not make sense for people, right? The equity model, and we've invested in a bunch of versions of this, right? Including some that recently. So I do think it's a very interesting spit, specifically for the creator fund. Again, you know, you kind of are, you know, you are what you eat, right? In this case, we like eat LP dollars and like from an eating LP dollar perspective and like what the structure is, the

• 2:28:26Sam Lessin?

  good news is, we really think there's an opportunity to deliver normal ass C corps, skims, whatever you want to call it, right? That start with creators, but are perfectly huge, amazing companies to back from seed, right? And so that is what we do with that. Is there residual value to the hold co pieces? Yeah, there totally is like in 10 years, because these are 10 year funds, do you have to figure out how to wrap that up or resell it or like re trade? Absolutely. But like candidly, this market is moving so fast that the way I think about this is like, we're investing in launchpads for amazing C corps that are driven first and foremost by amazing communities that are led by amazing founders that are creators. Like that is what we're doing. And yes, at the end of a 10 year cycle, which then has a bunch of extensions on

• 2:29:10Sam Lessin?

  it, you do figure out what you do with the residual assets.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. I have so many other questions here. I mean, the main one is, how quickly are you pushing creators to, are you thinking of these creators as a catalyst for the C corps that they're spinning out? Because one thing I've seen from spending millions of dollars with influencers is like, oftentimes you'll spend $100,000 with an influencer, it performs well, like if it's sort of like a broad consumer audience, and then the performance can drop off over time because, you know, there's only so many buyers in the audience. How do you think about, you know, the, almost no creator is big enough to sustain a venture scale, you know, C corp by themselves, right?

• 2:29:57Sam Lessin?

  Well, it depends on verticals and how you're looking at it. Again, like when you think about creators, it's such a broad space and used so broadly that I think you can, you can mean a lot of different things, right? And so, look, one of the dirty secrets, which you know it sounds like, is in the venture capital world, entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high, but the CAC will come down. Here's a secret, CAC always goes up, right? It always goes up. Like, there, CAC goes up, not down, right? And so like what you're experiencing is that. It's like if you spend money with an influencer, they're the people who want to buy the thing anyway. You reach them, it's cheap, and then they hit a wall. Like, if it's just like a general product you're selling, right? And so you have to think about it as a launchpad from that perspective. Um, you know, we want to back founder, creator founders who come in and are, they want to be entrepreneurs.

• 2:30:40Sam Lessin?

  They like pitch us business ideas. Like, they have their list. They're like, okay, like, I know my audience in lawn care, in terrariums, and you name it, better than anyone in the world. Here's the 10 things that no one knows. And by the way, I can sell them. And I know, I'm selling it to myself. Like, I am the leader of this, and I understand the space better than anyone, and I have access to the community, and they trust me. That's what we want, right? We don't need them to come in and be like, here's the business plan 100%. In fact, we kind of just, but we do need that list. Because if you come in, you're like, I'm a creator, I have the audience, but I don't know what to do. We're like, well, we don't, are you an entrepreneur? Are you just gonna make more media? Right? And we're like, the media's fine, but the media has to support real businesses.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:31:22Jordi Hays?

  That's all I got for today.

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  Well, wait, wait, last question. Who's a better grill master, you or Zuck?

• 2:31:27Sam Lessin?

  Oh, definitely, Zach.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  Okay. I had to know. Fantastic.

• 2:31:31Sam Lessin?

  I mean, look, I wouldn't say I'm bad, but like, I think that man has invested in the craft of grilling. In a way that I have not.

• 2:31:38John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 2:31:39Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Uh, we'd love to, we'd love to have you as a regular.

• 2:31:42Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, anytime you guys want to reach out. I really love the show. It's super fun. I love what you guys have done and we love bullshitting. So.

• 2:31:48John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:31:49Jordi Hays?

  You love the yap. We love the yap.

• 2:31:51John Coogan?

  It's a match made in heaven.

• 2:31:52Jordi Hays?

  It's a match made in heaven.

• 2:31:53Sam Lessin?

  We'll collab on a billboard someday. It'll be fun.

• 2:31:56John Coogan?

  We should. Yeah, we should. That'd be great. Uh, well, enjoy, and Dean Wells, enjoy the weekend. Have a great time.

• 2:32:01Sam Lessin?

  Have a good one. Bye.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  I noticed on his website, slow.co, uh, it looks like they have the biggest guy and they made him.

• 2:32:10Jordi Hays?

  They made him sit.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  In a chair.

• 2:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Which we're starting to do because John.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  Do that before. Oh, wait. How tall am I, Jordy?

• 2:32:16Jordi Hays?

  Six eight.

• 2:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Six eight. A lot of people just don't even believe it. They say there's, there's never been a podcast, a six eight podcaster.

• 2:32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, I'm kind of the Conan O'Brien of tech, uh, tech podcasting, I suppose.

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  That's true. Many have said that.

• 2:32:33John Coogan?

  He's really tall. Uh, let's go to, speaking of, uh, uh, physical appearance, let's go to Ally Dubow. She says, the only mote, it's not AI. It's drop dead gorgeous, good looks and generational wealth. I love it. Very TV coded post. I had to throw it in there. She sent me a text message because she, uh, we featured her show. She was actually getting dunked on, but we featured it. We had a lot of fun. And so thank you to Ally for keeping the timeline fresh and exciting.

• 2:33:03Jordi Hays?

  How to post the perfect amount to, to, you know, get.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  Engagement.

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Engagement.

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  A little bit of engagement.

• 2:33:08Jordi Hays?

  And she's got a, she's got a social app, I believe, that's for, uh.

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  Swish.

• 2:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Swish. Yeah. For photo sharing, which is cool.

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  And they're partnered with some huge, Rolling Loud, the largest, uh, concert or something like that. And they're powering it. They, they, she's really good at doing these like deals, even though it's a small company.

• 2:33:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  Teal Fella, too.

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was funny when Apple, Apple came out and announced their sort of, you know, their Photos app is rough. So I'm sure she's not super threatened by that. But they also came out with this event.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Partifull competitor?

• 2:33:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Partifull. And it was, I think, competing with what Ally's doing too. But I don't see Tim Cook dead getting deals done with Rolling Loud. He's too busy at the John Summit show.

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  The John Summit show.

• 2:33:50Jordi Hays?

  Backstage, you know?

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:33:52Jordi Hays?

  So Ally's in control. But great post.

• 2:33:55John Coogan?

  Oh, well, should we move on and finish out the timeline and then wrap up the show?

• 2:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go to Visikaan Versami. He says, even kings and billionaires want to be posters and podcasters. King Charles is launching his own Apple Music radio show to showcase his favorite music.

• 2:34:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, they brought the Brink's truck for that.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Signing King Charles. I love it.

• 2:34:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we're a network. We should explore, you know, maybe he does some angel investing. He could host, you know, an angel investing.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  I mean, we were, we were pitching Trump getting back in the media game, you know, because he had his own reality TV show. We were talking about maybe JD's the first one with a, with a podcast or something. But, and who's the California guy who Newsom has a show now?

• 2:34:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  So why not? Why not a radio show? I hope King Charles gets on there, introduces every song, takes requests, does some radio stuff, winds up doing the news. Who knows? Maybe we'll have him on the show.

• 2:34:51Jordi Hays?

  King Charles, open invite.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  Should we go to George Mack?

• 2:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  My most contrarian belief, we could increase the global economy by 2% to 3% by installing large whiteboards in every home. I love George so much. This is such a funny, funny idea to just like.

• 2:35:09Jordi Hays?

  Mandatory whiteboard?

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  I mean, George, if you don't know, I mean, is a fantastic thinker and writer and poster. And he, he's like very into like modeling things out, creating frameworks, creating flow charts. And so of course, he thinks like, you know, you just need to be like one foot away from a whiteboard to a whiteboard out the problem and solve your problems at any moment. But we need to get a whiteboard in here. We don't do nearly enough whiteboarding. What's your take on the whiteboard walls? Do you think that paint is like toxic and terrible?

• 2:35:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, generally, I don't enjoy using whiteboards.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  You're Figma only.

• 2:35:44Jordi Hays?

  I love kind of making graphics in Figma and using that.

• 2:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Figma maximalist.

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:51Jordi Hays?

  I've just never been, I love, you know, creative pursuits and writing and all these things, but I went to a Waldorf school. Have I ever told you about this? Are you familiar with Waldorf? They have like, similar to Montessori.

• 2:36:05John Coogan?

  It's like the Waldorf Astoria?

• 2:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I went to the.

• 2:36:08John Coogan?

  To school at a five star hotel?

• 2:36:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I think it's, it's, it's, it's an educational philosophy.

• 2:36:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  From Rudolf Steiner emphasizing a holistic approach to education that nurtures intellectual, artistic and practical skills with a focus on imagination and creativity.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Well, that's fun.

• 2:36:26Jordi Hays?

  So I credit my Waldorf education for my, you know, a number of my sort of creative abilities, but they forced us to paint and draw and knit and do all these things as kids. And I wasn't good at, I didn't have the patience for drawing. I just didn't have the patience. So I thought I didn't like art.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:47Jordi Hays?

  I thought I didn't like, you know, creative tasks as a kid, but I just didn't like, I've never liked drawing, writing.

• 2:36:57John Coogan?

  And now you're an artist and your paintbrush.

• 2:36:59Jordi Hays?

  Keyboard warrior.

• 2:37:00John Coogan?

  Sure. SM7B.

• 2:37:01Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  Podcast.

• 2:37:02Jordi Hays?

  Keyboard warrior.

• 2:37:03John Coogan?

  Keyboard warrior, podcaster.

• 2:37:04Jordi Hays?

  Twitter fingers. Yeah.

• 2:37:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  But, but generally I think that people seem to love whiteboards. There should be more of them.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like it.

• 2:37:14Jordi Hays?

  It'd be fun to have one here that we could write on, you know, KPIs, stuff like that.

• 2:37:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Nick. He says 500 people run the world, but they collectively use like 50 therapists and listen to everything they say. So really 50, 50 therapists run the world. Do you think that's accurate?

• 2:37:32Jordi Hays?

  And then the follow up, and those 50 therapists have been trained by like five teachers.

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  Oh, it's all downstream from something.

• 2:37:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's funny. Funny conspiracy. I wonder if this is actually true at all, or just like something that was completely hallucinated.

• 2:37:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Bill Manidis post.

• 2:37:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can't, I can't imagine that this is true, that like Satya and Sundar are using the same therapist or something.

• 2:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Funny, because therapy is so often, I haven't had a therapist since I was like in high school or something like that. It never worked. I was never big into that world.

• 2:38:10John Coogan?

  Or a Tom Cruise route.

• 2:38:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just watch Tom Cruise movies and get fired up. I think it's more about talking out loud about the things that you're working through and coming to many of your own conclusions, right?

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Or going for a long walk.

• 2:38:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a walk.

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  50K steps.

• 2:38:28Jordi Hays?

  50,000 steps. Bill Manidis putting up 50,000 steps in a day, five times most people's goals.

• 2:38:36John Coogan?

  It's so much. That's literally just walking all day long.

• 2:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on. Speaking of walking, running, going long distances, Zach says, "Package your obsession into one thing that compounds: one brand, one output, one core product. When all thoughts are directed towards one channel, a violent rainstorm is captured in one infinite well that sustains and compounds beyond your wildest imagination." Good writer.

• 2:39:01Jordi Hays?

  He's writing a book.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  He is.

• 2:39:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 2:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Cool. Yeah. I bet he'll sell a ton of them.

• 2:39:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  I mean, he has over a million on Instagram now?

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:11Jordi Hays?

  No, and I mostly want to highlight his execution on his new consumer app, which is building kind of a social layer on top of these fitness trackers and.

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Good name, too. It's called Aura, right?

• 2:39:22Jordi Hays?

  Aura.

• 2:39:23John Coogan?

  It's a very on trend. You were trying to get Aura farming to go viral and we were kind of, we were almost too early on it.

• 2:39:28Jordi Hays?

  I failed.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  But I think it's probably breaking through now and I think people will now start to get it, maybe.

• 2:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you want to make money on aura farming, though, you had to be in it, you know,

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  Early?

• 2:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Months ago.

• 2:39:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably, probably. Should we go to Emily is in SF?

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'll read this one.

• 2:39:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:45Jordi Hays?

  Pissed off a lot of people.

• 2:39:46John Coogan?

  It did.

• 2:39:47Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  Timeline and turmoil, folks.

• 2:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Timeline and turmoil, not my content, but let's see what Emily has to say. She says, "To me, the greatest sadness of all is the banality of most people's lives. I'll spend time with my non-elite friends and it's clear that they're, it's clear that their lives are devoid of heroism and lore. They lock in, clock in, but they fight no great battles and they dash no great foes. They drop by thy club or thy bar, but find no great loves there. They travel the world, but it's by no means an adventure. They return home, but they are not welcomed by a triumph. No, all they have are their succulents and the pile of dirty laundry they failed to do before they left." Brutal, absolutely brutal.

• 2:40:32John Coogan?

  Does the, does the golden retriever long for great battles?

• 2:40:36Jordi Hays?

  Brother Will is in the comments here. There was quite a lot of comments, but it's ranking people that are in the TB verse and Will says, "What's your net worth?" Which is a great follow-up question to a post like this.

• 2:40:48John Coogan?

  I love it, yeah.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  But, but no, great, great.

• 2:40:52John Coogan?

  It's the Chad homonym.

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:54John Coogan?

  Good argument. What's your bench press?

• 2:40:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, I mean, I think.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  There is some truth here, obviously.

• 2:41:00Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's always some truth to any, anything that becomes this controversial.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  There's no truth, there's no controversy.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  But again, we are in the you can just do things era. So if you are surrounded by succulents, maybe, you know, lock in, clock in, but go develop some lore.

• 2:41:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's invite Emily on the show. I want to see how the heroism and lore in her life, how she's locking in and clocking in to fight great battles, how she's finding great love at the club or the bar.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  How she's adventuring around the world.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  You can just sign up to be the first person to go on Starship.

• 2:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Flight 9, Flight 9 is coming up.

• 2:41:40John Coogan?

  Strap me in.

• 2:41:41Jordi Hays?

  It's the firmament. The firmament has an 8-0 lead against SpaceX right now, but we're feeling good about the ninth flight.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  We're gonna be good.

• 2:41:49Jordi Hays?

  And Emily, take it on.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do it. Anyway, fun post. I love this one from Palmer Lucky. We've talked about Call of Duty and how important it is to the global economy before. He says, "The Call of Duty franchise has done more to engender support for UK-US military cohesion over the past two decades than just about anything else, especially with military-age males. Changed my mind."

• 2:42:12Jordi Hays?

  Hundred percent accurate.

• 2:42:13John Coogan?

  Hundred percent accurate. Yeah. Who's that? Soap McTavish? Do you not know the characters in Call of Duty?

• 2:42:20Jordi Hays?

  It's coming back to me now.

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  Wow. Oh, little three finger moment. Oh, I can't, I can't identify Soap McTavish.

• 2:42:28Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. I remember what he looks like. I just.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  I just blanked on the name because I'm not a real gamer. Oh, oh, mogged.

• 2:42:36John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah, we need more Call of Duty games. We need more.

• 2:42:39Jordi Hays?

  We should get a Soap McTavish, like, sound effect.

• 2:42:42John Coogan?

  If I'm wrong on that, I'm dead. I think I'm right, but I actually.

• 2:42:45Jordi Hays?

  It's John Soap Mc... No, you actually are wrong.

• 2:42:48John Coogan?

  I'm wrong.

• 2:42:48Jordi Hays?

  Soap McTavish is the guy with the buzz cut.

• 2:42:51John Coogan?

  Oh, no, I'm wrong. Who is it? Okay, I don't know. It's someone from Call of Duty. I don't even know. I, I, I played the first Call of Duty, the very first one, when it came out, played Call of Duty.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  Captain Price.

• 2:43:05John Coogan?

  Captain Price, that's right. Captain Price.

• 2:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Price.

• 2:43:08John Coogan?

  Oh, Captain Price. It's great. Anyway.

• 2:43:11Jordi Hays?

  Wait, Ben, can you, can you pull up best Captain Price moments?

• 2:43:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you, can you pull up a Call of Duty compilation? Let's just watch that for the rest of the show. I want to see some 360.

• 2:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I've got some quotes from Captain Price.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, let's, let's, let's learn some lore.

• 2:43:25Jordi Hays?

  "History is written by the victor. History is filled with lies. If he lives and we die, his truth becomes written, and ours is lost." They say truth is the first casualty of war.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  We gotta just start tweeting these out.

• 2:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Shepherd. Shepherd will be a hero cuz all you need to change the world is one good lie and a river of blood.

• 2:43:44John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 2:43:45Jordi Hays?

  We get dirty and the world stays clean.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, we get dirty and the world stays clean. The story of podcasting. Throw this on.

• 2:43:54Speaker 08

  Right. What the hell kind of name is Soap, eh? How'd a muppet like you pass selection?

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Watching Call of Duty.

• 2:44:06Jordi Hays?

  These are core childhood memories.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Oh, this is so good.

• 2:44:17Jordi Hays?

  I need a sound effect that says open fire.

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. I mean, if AI takes all the jobs, I think I'm gonna be doing just fine just playing Call of Duty on endless mode.

• 2:44:28John Coogan?

  I'll be fine.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Right. This is great. Anyway, Call of Duty, what I would love to just take.

• 2:44:40Jordi Hays?

  What kind of name is Soap, eh? How'd a muppet like you pass selection?

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. It's great. To just go back to the times.

• 2:44:48Jordi Hays?

  Nikolai, we gotta get Soap out of here.

• 2:44:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 2:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Shepherd is using site Hotel Bravo. You know where it is. I'll see you in hell.

• 2:44:58John Coogan?

  It's great. Anyway, moving on to something extremely important. A lot of, a lot of pro America VCs out there have been asking us for car recommendations. We got a good one for you. 2018 Ford GT, asking price $8,990.

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  Giving it away.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  Giving it away. Finished in shadow black with reentry black, white and white interior complimentary by Anarchy forged wheels and Bowden Auto House titanium exhaust system. Go check it out.

• 2:45:28Jordi Hays?

  I really don't like the wheels. Those are easy enough to swap out. But this is a whole Bowden Auto House. This is like their, their entire aesthetic, which for some is exactly right.

• 2:45:39John Coogan?

  Not enough, not enough VCs with the Minsore body kits and the stance under lighting, but.

• 2:45:45Jordi Hays?

  You know what they say, John.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  You build a house one brick at a time.

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  Truth is the first casualty of war.

• 2:45:52John Coogan?

  It's great. Um, I don't know how many more we should do. Let's go to Yaxine, of course. He's been on the show before. He just says, this is the most important website in the world.

• 2:46:02Jordi Hays?

  X users agree.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  With the X tag. I love it. Yeah. If you're ever just having a low period in your, in your timeline, just post, this is the greatest app. And a bunch of people will come out, the stands will support. Very self referential, but you gotta put up numbers every once in a while. You know, you love it. Uh, should we go to Jeff Lewis?

• 2:46:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is an interesting post. He says, I now talk with categories of quote unquote, people in this order of frequency. My family, my team at Bedrock, our broader Bedrock business relationships across entrepreneurs, LPs, top talent across industries, government and others, ultra close friends, L L Ms, friends, other.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  So L L Ms are climbing the ranks.

• 2:46:42Jordi Hays?

  Others like the HVAC guy.

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:46Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully not too frequent.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  That is odd. Uh, what I thought was interesting about this is that I use L L Ms a lot. I don't think of myself as, as talking with them. Like, I don't think, I don't think I'm having a conversation with Google. I don't think I'm talking to Chat G P T or Grok when I use it. I, I feel like it's much more in the tool realm for me, but I'm wondering if I'm missing, missing out on something. I know voice mode's getting better, but I haven't really gone down the sesame rabbit hole or the voice mode where I'm really just like chopping it up with them for a long time. I did have a pretty good experience driving in and I asked, I asked the voice mode on G P T four point five, just to kind of like, tell me the, the top stories in the Wall Street Journal, kind of break them down. And then I could kind of steer it, but it was still a little awkward. It didn't feel like

• 2:47:30John Coogan?

  actually talking to a person or a friend. It was very much just like comes up and then, you know, ask the next question. Uh, should we move on to Blake Robbins? I thought this is a great take and under discussed.

• 2:47:39Jordi Hays?

  This is a good place to end the show.

• 2:47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great. So we've talked about levels before. He built a flight simulator game. He vibe coded it, uh, with a bunch of A I coding tools, uh, went viral. He's now making something like $56,000 A R R or something. He's climbing. He's making money. He's selling blimp ads in them. He's selling F six, F 16s. He has in game purchases. It's very cool. And he's documenting it all. Um, but Blake has a good point here. He says, the success of levels flight simulator game is really a story about effective distribution, leveraging his massive audience, not just A I game development. And I think that's a hundred percent right.

• 2:48:16Jordi Hays?

  He is using that audience, but then the audience is remarketing his game by just raging at it.

• 2:48:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:48:23Jordi Hays?

  And raging over the quality or his monetization strategy. And so it's really a great story of not, you know, having distribution, but then, you know, properly leveraging that distribution by, by building something somewhat controversial.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  I'd love to close there, but we got one more. We gotta go to Nat Friedman, former brother of the week. Nat Friedman is preparing to transport scrolls to the scanner. He's not stopping. He's not resting on his laurels. He's, he's scanning more scrolls. The scrolls must be scanned. I love it and I'm very excited. So good luck to you on that transportation. Hopefully it goes smoothly. Hopefully they aren't damaged in transit. I've really enjoyed following the scrolls story and, you know, we, we gotta talk to more of these scrolls, folks. They're always super interesting people. The scrolls universe, the cinematic universe of everyone working on the scrolls, Casey Hanmer, a bunch of other people. Very, very fascinating. Anyway.

• 2:49:21Jordi Hays?

  The scroll verse.

• 2:49:22John Coogan?

  The scroll verse. Stay tuned for more. We'll see you on Monday and have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 2:49:29Jordi Hays?

  Bye.