$1.4B Crypto Heist, $40B Robot Deal, $2B Celsius Acquisition, Ferrari is Goated, Amazon Wins James Bond

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Today is Friday, February 21st, 2025, and this show starts now. We got an amazing lineup for you today. We got a $1 billion hack, a $40 billion fundraiser, and a $2 billion beverage acquisition. We're also talking about Ferrari. We're talking about James Bond. The size gong is going to be coming out a lot today. Jordy and I are white pilled. We're in white suits. Things are great.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful day.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  It's a beautiful day. So get pumped, get excited for this show. Let's start with the hack. $1.4 billion is missing. Where'd it go? Who lost it? Break it down, Jordy.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so as usual, once a month in crypto, a billion dollars is stolen.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  It's really like, I saw this, you told me about this article and I was like, okay, like, why should I care about this one?

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't know why it is, but it seems like it's always toward, as the market starts to dip, that the chaos really kicks off. But anyway, so.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, break it down.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  For those that are hearing this for the first time, Ethereum is falling at the moment as crypto exchange Bybit confirms a $1.4 billion hack. So this was going down this morning. I woke up around 4:30. I think news was like starting or there was rumors. Early this morning, the CEO had confirmed that there was indeed a hack. Crypto prices are broadly falling Friday, following confirmation that major centralized crypto exchange Bybit was hacked after $1.4 billion worth of tokens were stolen in a hack. And so, you know, the hacks in crypto happen on centralized exchanges. In many ways, those are more rare and that there's more controls put in place. They're

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  more professionalized. A lot of the high-profile hacks have just happened on these sort of DeFi protocols where one person is, has the keys for a wallet.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's more like social engineering, right? Like there's an engineer who had the key to the actual wallet and they clicked on a phishing link or they got scammed or they.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Or a North Korean, a North Korean dev, you know, gets.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Push some code.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Push some code, etc. So anyways, what happened here, more than 1.4 billion dollars worth of Ethereum and

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Staked.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  Staked Ethereum were withdrawn from Bybit's hot wallet on Friday and a large chunk of the funds were being sold via decentralized exchanges. So it's actually a graphic of this. I don't know if we have it lined up on the show.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  It's up on the show. You can scroll down.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  But basically this 1.4 billion dollars was stolen and then immediately distributed across hundreds of wallets to be sold off.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  And so that's obviously a lot of sell pressure on Ethereum.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou confirmed the attack in a post on X saying that the planned transfer was manipulated in some way and that the funds were swiped.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, here all we do is Bybit ETH multi-sig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about an hour ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked. I don't know what that means. All the signers saw the musked UI, which showed the correct address and URL was from @safe. However, the signing message was about to change. Bybit ETH multi-sig. So I don't, I actually don't understand any of that. Do you understand what happened? What does musk mean?

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, to be clear, he's just sharing sort of like internal. So it's possible this is a typo and it should have said masked.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Masked. Okay.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  I actually don't know.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Okay. However, the signing message was to change the smart contract logic of our ETH cold wallet. The hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet. We signed and transferred all ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address. All other cold wallets are secure. All withdrawals are normal. Ethereum is down 3% on the hour to a current price of $2,727, while Bitcoin has dipped nearly 1% to $98,000, which is kind of where Bitcoin's been trading around for the last like month.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  And so a security researcher, Zach XBT, had sort of front run Ben's, the CEO's post, saying that there were suspicious outflows from Bybit and that a source confirmed to him that it was a security incident.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  And he has since added that the ETH is being split between 39 different addresses as the attacker apparently tries to muddle the flow of funds to make them harder to track. And so some other people had commented that it's very difficult to steal 1.4 billion dollars even in crypto, right? Because how do you, you know, you have to get those, if you want to actually use those funds. In the real world, unless you're, you know, part of some global crime syndicate, you've got to like get them into a bank account and even that, you know, so a lot of steps to actually get those from.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  And there used to be services like, what was it, tornado cash? Where you could kind of put money in and then anonymously withdraw it and it was very messy. But I believe that was shut down because it was such a money laundering like front. It was very controversial because, you know, math is illegal now.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  I don't know exactly where I stand on that. I mostly am just kind of learning the facts on that one.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  It is an interesting case. It is crazy. I wonder how much of this will actually be retrieved because you can imagine, you know, there's some sort of expected value calculation from these hackers. They're like, yeah, we'll, we'll steal 1.4 billion, but we'll send it off all over this place, even if we just walk away with a hundred million, that's great. Totally worth our time.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody was commenting on X saying the hackers should just take like a couple hundred million dollars as a fee, give the rest back because they just won't, wouldn't be able to launder it anyways.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  So the CEOs come out and said, buy bit is solvent, even if the hack loss is not recovered, all of client assets are, are one to one backed and we can cover the loss. And so ultimately like this could be a scenario where I don't know what kind of scale buy bit has, but if they have to basically use equity to backstop this 1.4 billion dollars, I mean, really, you know, ultimately damaging to all the shareholders, but at the same time that the shareholders should have responsibility for the security and safety of the assets. And so they come out, if they come out and say you, your funds aren't safe on buy bit, they basically wouldn't have a viable business anymore unless people just forgot that their assets were on there. So.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting to see where this goes.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  And if they can track people down, I'm sure Coffeezilla is staying busy. But let's move on to a $40 billion fundraise that's currently going on, led by Brett Adcock for Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  The size lord himself.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  He is a size lord. He has been raising the stakes endlessly and I'll give you a little background on some of his history here. Sam Parr broke it down when he did a pod with Brett Adcock. He first sold a company, a hiring software company called Vettery for $100 million. Then he taught himself about flying and he built Archer, basically an electric helicopter for short commutes. He took that company public, SPAC'd it, and I think it's one of the few like hard tech SPACs that's actually kind of sustained. It hasn't gone down 90%. I mean, let's look it up on public. And then he made.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's down 8% today.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  But how is it? How is it since like the SPAC launch?

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  It's still up. It's up 25% month over month. I bet some of this is based on.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  What's going on at Figure?

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Figure. Yeah, totally. I'm sure the SPAC investors are, you know.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hey, this guy's profile is getting raised.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, yeah, they're going to put the robots in the, in the planes when the planes ship.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  How do you think those humanoids are going to get around? They're going to need, they're going to need flying cars.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Dude, this is a huge narrative violation. It's, it's up dramatically from the.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  From the SPAC?

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  From the SPAC.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  What's the market cap?

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  In 2021, when it's backed, it came out at 600 million. It's now at almost 5 billion.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  So who would have thought?

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Like flying cars are not just racing around. So it's still a speculative investment in many ways.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I mean, like, if you look at even in December, December of last year, so a few months ago, Archer Aviation Stock, them on the Alpha feature of public, faced a significant drop of 24% due to increased short selling activities and funding concerns. So short sellers got absolutely smoked.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  On this one, depending what kind of position they took.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  So he, he built Figure. He raised $650 million from Bezos, Nvidia and OpenAI.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  And now, most recently, he has a new thing called Cover, which makes x-ray-like cameras that can detect if someone's bringing weapons into schools or stadiums.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  So he's gotten into kind of like the the flock safety market a little bit. And yeah, he's been, he's been a character in Silicon Valley for a while. And, but this, this particular fundraiser has been controversial because it's, it's driven heavily by SPVs, which are special purpose vehicles. I'm sure you've dealt with these, but Natasha Mascheranos over at the information has a breakdown of what's going on. So let's read through that. This is, I think, slide three now. Yeah, there we go. SPVs are circling robotic startups $40 billion valuation funding round. Special purpose vehicles are now a mainstay in venture capital, showing up in some of the biggest deals in artificial intelligence.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  From OpenAI to Anthropic is a flexible way to raise cash from a larger pool of investors.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, not always a larger pool, like some of these big, you know, Thrive Capital will do an SPV.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  But it might be for massive investors, right? It's not always this massive pool of investors. In the case of Figure, it seems like this is basically being marketed to retail.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, not actually marketed, marketed to retail, but more so.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  More broadly.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we got a $200 million allocation, like we're going to bring in, you know, 50 people to fulfill it.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Can you steel man why a fund that has, you know, $3 billion under management in an active growth fund would want to do an SPV when a company, one of their growth stage portfolio companies is raising $20 billion?

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of incentives to do SPVs. One, maybe you don't want to be over concentrated in a single fund. So if you're already, if you're a growth fund and you have 10% of your investable capital already in that company, it's more and more risk to go further, I think. Founder's Fund gets very aggressive with this and that there's more comfort being like, we have 15% of our fund in this one company.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  But Founder's Fund has also done SPVs as well.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, but they'll still do SPVs.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  They go back to the LPs and say, hey, you're already committed to this. You have allocation, but if you want more, you can get more access because this fund is so, this round is so big, we just can't fill it all.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  And one of the reasons why investors love SPVs, even if you're operating a large vehicle already, is that the SPV is deal by deal. So if your fund has, you know, 6% IRR and you're getting, you know, some carry on that and your fees, but then one SPV does a 10x, you're getting the full benefit of that.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  All of the carry, all the 20% carry from that.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Even if your fund, you know, underperforms or doesn't achieve the milestones that you initially set. So there's a lot of reasons.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  It's been a really attractive way to get allocation from like lower tier or maybe people outside of Silicon Valley into SpaceX or Android. There's been a lot of SPV activity.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  And this is why, this is why Angelus has caught flak historically, although it's a fantastic platform and like I'm a weekly active user.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  The, but, but there's managers on there that are, and people that have gotten tremendously wealthy from having one good investment and like 30, you know, losers basically. And so there's, it can end up being over, over aligned to the, to the manager of the SPV.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  And the same thing happens in real estate. It happens in every sort of asset class.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Anything where there's a promote. Yeah, there's a funny post, maybe Will posted this, something about, you know, there's more in common with an SPV promoter and a, like a club promoter than, than, you know, traditional venture capital. I'll, I'll read some of this and then I'm going to get your, your take. Now, fund managers are considering using SPVs to fund a huge new round for Figure AI, the three-year-old startup that builds humanoid robots. The Sunnyvale-based, the Sunnyvale, California-based startup is in talks to raise $1 billion to $2 billion and is seeking a $40 billion valuation. According to three people with direct knowledge of funding fundraising efforts, the company has received a term sheet at that valuation, according to one of the people interviewed.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Align Ventures, a New York-based early-stage venture firm that invested in several figures, several figures prior rounds, has talked to investors about raising an SPV of several hundred million dollars from its limited partners and other investors, according to two people. Parkway Venture Capital, an early-stage deep-tech firm that previously invested in Figure, also plans to invest in the round, according to people. What do you think?

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, the whole thing, they have a term sheet here, term sheets. The person sending the term sheet determines, sort of, the entity behind the term sheet determines the weight that other investors put on the term sheet, right? So Andreessen Horowitz sending a term sheet is very different than a $30 million seed fund that, you know, nobody's heard of before sending a term sheet, right?

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, and terms are not legally binding.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're not legally binding. They're, in this case, could very well be strategically, sent in order to, you know, one, the other thing is, these, I believe, we know Parkway, and I believe that Align is in the same boat, I'm trying to check. So like Align Ventures, for context, their entire portfolio on their website is CPG companies. So they've done Billy, Care Of, Coterie, The Farmer's Dog, Figs. So when traditional institutional venture capitals look at, you know, hearing that Figure got a term sheet, and then they go to the fund's portfolio, and they're like, wait, this company is never, doesn't have a public deep-tech investment.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  That term sheet, the reason that this round has been memed a little bit is because it's hard to take a term sheet from Align super seriously. It's unclear that they would be able to pull together the capital to do 300 million, much less a billion dollar investment, right? Even if they're super excited about it. So Parkway, I'm pulling up Parkway Ventures Capital as well.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  I, it sounds like they were in figure already. And so the other thing is that Parkway, if they have a big position in, in, in figures even last round, they have a huge incentive to mark up their position and just get more capital into the company. The other thing is if Brett is hyper fixated on valuation, which around like this

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  tends to mean, right? There's no real, there's no real reason that this is a $40 billion company. You know, you could argue that, that doing one on 10 billion would still be a little bit too hot, given their traction, right? They haven't released a lot, but Parkway still has an incentive to, to tell their initial investors, "Look, you got a 20X on your investment in, in however many months."

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  And there's so much heat. Brett also has, you know, a SPAC that's doing well right now in the public markets. And so maybe they're saying there's some floor to Brett, the Adcox.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  Sort of, you know, deep tech machine.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  I mean, the guy's good at, you know, fundraising and keeping the share price up and delivering

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the thing that we

• 15:42John Coogan?

  the shareholder promises.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this, I think it was off air. I'm, I'm curious what Adcox's game plan is because it does feel like in the environment right now, Figure could SPAC.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  But it certainly wouldn't go out at 40. And if it did, maybe it could go out at 40, but I don't think that's a price that it would be able to sustain. And so what is, what is the game plan?

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Because it's not like, the, the valuation would not be driven by their

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Fundamentals.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  earnings per share beats or whatever.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  And Archer's still, Archer's lost, you know, burned almost half a billion last year.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  And so there's been, you know, there had been concerns of, of sort of how long can they keep that up? Spending a million dollars a day with no revenue.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  A million dollars a day. Wow.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  More than a million dollars a day.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  And

• 16:31John Coogan?

  I mean, the steel man here for like

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Like the revenue, the revenue line on public for Archer is a dash. Like there is no

• 16:37John Coogan?

  There's no revenue.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  There's no revenue.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  It's just R and D right now. And, and Brett would say, "Hey, look, uh, you know, how long did it take Tesla to start making real money?" Took a long time, right?

• 16:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  I don't know how Archer tracks against that timeline perfectly, but.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And to be clear, we love robots.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  I wanna, I wanna have an army of robot podcasts, you know, producers that Ben controls. You know, we got 50 different camera angles. Everybody should, should want a figure to win, but it's totally fair to have a few questions about.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Why is it getting priced more than Ford Motors? Why is it getting priced four times Rivian?

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Right? When you actually think about.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Almost double Andorol.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  Why is it? Yeah. Almost double Andorol.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Which is kinda crazy.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  And Andorol has a billion dollars of revenue.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  And just took a 22 billion dollar contract from Ivas.

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And some of the best fundraisers ever, right? So, look, it's hard for me to see.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Every tier one VC in the valley.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  But there is an interesting question, like, you know, Align Ventures, people are saying Parkway Venture Capital. These are not typical, like huge growth stage, deep tech funds. But there's, I think there's an interesting idea of like, why did this round come together the way it did? Well, think about the other funds that might do a deal like this and think about their conflicts.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Are they in an Elon company? Because Elon's working on humanoids. And if you're in, if you're in X, like Andreessen is, or you're in, you know, Sequoia's in X. If you're in SpaceX, if you're in Neuralink, boring company.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  And you say, hey, Elon, we're gonna go and fund a direct competitor to the Tesla Optimus. Even if your venture fund is not a Tesla shareholder, Elon might say, hey, what, what, what, like, come on. Like, I thought we were on the same team here.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  I'm building the Elon companies and you're in one of those Elon companies. You benefit from everything that I do. Why are you funding a competitor of mine? And so I, I, I think it's interesting, like, it is, it is, it is like very impressive that Brett has been able to put together as much money as he had, competing with Elon. Because like the famous quote is like, never bet against Elon.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  And Elon said, hey, I'm doing the humanoid robot thing.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  And that typically means.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  You don't wanna be the guy who's doing, who's going up against Elon.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what Brett is doing is. Is very impressive. Yeah. Anybody like he's gonna have detractors anytime you have somebody rocket to this level of success. He's gonna have detractors. There's ways that you can, you know, try to dissect what he's doing. You know, and, and, you know, the Parkway, the GP over at Parkway, who's presumably the one that sent the term sheet. Yep. Has been on the board of figures since May of 2023. So, you know, if he's, it all comes down to again.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Until the round closes, it's all marketing. Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, and we saw this. It's like Stargate. We saw this with, yeah, Stargate. We also saw this with the Bolt, Ryan Breslow. Yep. When he came out and he said, I have, you know, a new investment coming in and then people. The thing is, is it's, it's hard to fake a billion dollar investment because, you know, I've raised SPVs before. I don't know if you've done SPVs. Yep. It's hard to fill a, you know, and like filling a $400 million investment. I don't believe that, I actually don't believe that, you know, major New York City investment banks would be able to fill

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  a $300 million SPV into figure at 40 billion. That's IPO money. Yeah, they wouldn't, they wouldn't be able to fill that at $40 billion. Yeah. I bet you they could at five. Yeah, probably. But, but, you know, saying that. That's a very good point. And so, and so Jesse over at Parkway would love, would love to talk to him and kind of hear his plans for this. If he has some, you know, ridiculous capital network that is more risk on than some of them like. Yeah. Then, then. So. It's good. Anyway, so, so there's a lot of questions here that I think are fair. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm always in favor of high risk investments into. Deep tech.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  But uh.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  This is, yeah, I mean, this is kind of, you know, if a VC is making an investment that doesn't make you uncomfortable, like, are they really doing venture capital?

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like this is adventure capital.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  This feels like a venture bet.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Where it's like, if it works, the bet is that he's going to beat Elon Musk and then deliver humanoid robots, an entirely new technology that will scale to millions of these robots. Like, it will be a trillion dollar company if it works.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the thing is, is it would still be a high, high risk venture bet at $10 billion, right?

• 21:31John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Because you say like, look, uh, you know, this, this company is going to take.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  You know, with, with Rivian, a really like Rivian, Rivian to me is a like fairly decent comp.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  In that it's.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Competing with Elon.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  A competing with Elon.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Hard tech.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Hard tech, you know, manufacturing intensive.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Low margin, right? Like, everybody's like, you have to realize that Brett is competing with Unitree.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  Which is a, a Chinese company.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Which we've known, we've talked about this before, other Chinese companies have shown, we will sell a product at a loss for as long as it takes to own this market.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  So is Brett gonna have margin?

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  When?

• 22:11John Coogan?

  I completely agree with this.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and so there's, there's a lot of.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Even, even though this is clearly like the most futuristic technologies, this has, we've literally seen in sci fi movies.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, the other, the other thing is.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Doesn't necessarily mean that there's a network effect and high margins, right? Those two things can be separate.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Get something that's an incredible, amazing, clearly worth the future. And it's like from straight out of sci fi and it can be a mediocre business.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then, and then there's the whole other side of this, which is our bipedal robots, even the robot form factor that is going to dominate, right? Is it going to dominate the factory floor? Factory floors are flat, right?

• 22:47John Coogan?

  We talked about.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  Would it make more sense to have a, you know, robot that is attached to a wire? So it's powered, can roll on wheels and it can lift extremely heavy things.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 22:58John Coogan?

  Imagine you're the founder of Boston Dynamics looking at this. And you're just like, I've been grinding on this for 20 years. I built so much stuff and I've never been able to really like pop the stock in a meaningful way. Like, I got, so I got bought by Hyundai and then I got bought by Google and I got traded around and like my baby. Has just never had its day in the sun and you know.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  He's not Brett.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  So I would say to him, you're not that.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Incredible technologist.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  You're not that guy, pal.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  You're not that guy, literally, because the Boston Dynamics demos, like they're clearly on the cutting edge. They're state of the art, they're frontier.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  One thing I do, one thing I do believe Brett's very good at fundraising, very good at recruiting, very good at building hype.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Deals guy, he's good at puzzling together, oh, we got the campus, oh, we got the BMW partnership, oh, we got the money, then we'll get another deal, then we'll get a thing, then we'll hire some people.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  If we had conviction that Figure was going to, you know, there's this whole thing which is, you know, Figure could argue in a TAM slide, our TAM is not the value of the robots that we're selling at retail price or in these big enterprise deals. Our TAM is the labor force that we're going to provide and the ongoing earnings when we displace every factory worker in the world or every agricultural worker in the world, right? So, so there is an art, like he can go out and make a case for how the TAM for this is $5 trillion and it's very, you know, investing now.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  I think from that Dwarke Satcha podcast, it was, the global economy is 100 trillion and labor is something like 60% of that.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  So you're looking at a $60 trillion market.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  And it's like, yeah, we're going to take, you know, 2% of that.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Trillion dollar business.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  They're giving away the shares at 40.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  They are giving away shares. Let's rip through some of this just to give the folks some extra data. This is a massive up round, 15 times the last valuation, which was 2.6 billion. Normally, I feel like when you get into the 2.5 billion range, the next round's at 5 billion. You don't really see that many 10x up rounds.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Or 4x, 4x.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  4x maybe.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  4x is like, it's pretty normal to go from the two and a half to.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  And that was just a year ago, jaw dropping jump even in this market. Figures investors may ultimately not use SPVs to back the company. They could always just jump the line and go direct. The startup hasn't approved any SPVs and has asked its existing investors to invest from their own funds because they might want to put in more money if they're not having to pay fees, right? Bloomberg first reported on Figures AI's target valuation. It's true that investors are excited about a new generation of robotic startups. There's a lot of these field AIs and maker of AI models to control robots that's targeting a $2 billion valuation, they're raising.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we saw Locky's company.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  And is. Daniel Gro... no, no, he's part of the other one.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  It's called like general intelligence or something?

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  SSI, yeah. No, and the the the argument for why Figure's valuation could be nearly 2X Andurals is that Andurall, if they wanted to raise from a hodgepodge group of random SPVs, they could do it at 60.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, they've talked about the oversubscribed nature of these rounds, and they could probably pump that up, but...

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Andurall with IVAS at $28 billion feels like they could raise from less sophisticated institutional investors at almost double themselves.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Imagine how much they could get if they went to China. Imagine they're just like, actually, we only care for the valuation.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  The final frontier.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  The mission doesn't matter anymore. Let's just rip, you know, get some, get some crazy money in here. So they, on Thursday, Figure AI unveiled Helix, a model developed internally that enables robots to perform more complicated tasks. There was this video demo, very cool. They partnered with OpenAI, so you can talk to it, and they're using like the speech recognition and the and the chat GPT stuff to kind of act as an interface to the instruction set. It's already raised $745 million from investors, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia, real murderers row of corporates and strategics, which I think he's really, really good at doing. And it has big plans. They've hired more than 200 people for an engineering and AI hardware team.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  According to documents created by an SPV manager, the company is projecting it will build up to 100,000 robots over the next four years, according to the same materials and two and two of the people. Company secured BMW as a first customer. None of those plans explain why investors think the company is worth $40 billion for context.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to give some context, if they're selling these robots at $100,000 a pop, which feels low, given that's generally the price point that Unitree sells at, you can go buy a Unitree robot for around six figures, that's $10 billion of revenue. So, so, so if Brett is saying, I want you to give me a... For, you know, I want you to basically give me a 5X, 4X on my

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Forward revenue.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  On my 2029 forward revenue. It still feels crazy.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  It is crazy because, so, so that revenue multiple of like 60X revenue, 40X revenue, that's not crazy in AI. Like Anthropic is raising 40, uh, 58 billion, but they have a billion in ARR.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  And so, but it's now. They have that ARR now. And so

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing from a pricing standpoint is didn't Satya buy half of OpenAI for like 10 billion? Like not even?

• 28:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Uh, no, I don't think half, but certainly like a third or something like that. And so, uh, let's go to some reactions on the timeline to break this down. We got Luke Metro over at Andurall. He says Brett Adcock is shaping up to be the best fundraiser since Adam Newman. Amazon.com, and this is from back in 2024, in February, a year ago, almost a year ago today. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia and other big technology names are investing in startup Figure AI that builds human-like robots. Bloomberg News reported Friday citing people with knowledge. Uh, they're backed by OpenAI and Microsoft. Uh, Sama can win when he gets seven trillion. Uh, and so people have been talking about Brett Adcock's amazing fundraising abilities for a long time.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  You had a post about it, which is in here. Uh, it took the Ford Motor Company 115 years to reach a $40 billion market cap. Brett Adcock did it in just three years with Figure. Can we finally stop glazing Henry Ford now?

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Sunra, Sunra probably saw this. And if he didn't know that I was joking, he probably had an aneurysm.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  Do not disrespect Henry Ford. I was obviously joking here.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, the markets are crazy.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  I think they both deserve respect.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  But, but, but the title of, you know, uh, Henry Ford is like a historic entrepreneurial goat, right? Uh, one of the greatest to ever do it.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  And Brett could be that guy.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Brett could. It's just too early.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  He's got like 20 years.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Right now, he's NBA prospect, potential rookie of the year if he can start delivering these robots. But his jersey is not going up in the rafters unless, unless the cash flow gets there to back it up.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  I, I just think at this point, like believability. Matters so much.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like when Humane came out and they said, this is the future computing platform.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  Nobody believed them.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  When Figure goes out and says, we're, we believe we're worth $40 billion and that's where we want to take new capital. Nobody believes it.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  It's such a, and again, I just think you could have raised a 3X up round.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, everybody like probably.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  At a $5 billion valuation with, with like scrappy engineers, little bit more like, you know, hey, we're just focused on engineering, building, we're sharing even more. The vibes could be way, way better.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Right? But instead it's, it, it seems, it, it seems like frothiness as a brand, right? Uh, and that's odd. Uh, so Sheil Monat says, Figure humanoid robots reportedly raising at 39.5 billion. So it's not 40. Give me a break, Jordy. He's not raising at 40. He's raising at 39.5.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, Sheil says frothy.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if they chose it to be slightly less than that so that it feels like there's some science.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Based reason like they, they ran, they put it in a spreadsheet and they popped out, this is the number, this is the right number.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  One time I was negotiating with VC early on in my career and he's like, oh yeah, like we, I, I put my whole team on this. They built a whole bunch of models and they came back with like valuation for the companies like, uh, you know, $150 million. Like, uh, can't, can't do any better than that. And I was just like, that you clearly didn't do any math. Like, like you, cause like you would have, you would have given me like a not round number.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  You clearly just ballparked this because otherwise you would have been like.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Ballpark me, bro.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like the spreadsheet said like 137 million point two four. Uh, and so I rounded that to 138 and that's what we're doing.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Instead it was just like, no, you didn't, you didn't do this at all. Uh, so yeah, if you're raising folks, don't try and raise it 100 million. Raise it 99.99.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  For a limited time only.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  For a limited time only.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Tell your, tell your LPs, three easy payments.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Three.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Three easy payments on the $20 million series A. Uh, Sequoia used to do this for YouTube, I believe. They did a tranch'd investment, three easy payments of, of $10 million each.

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  And then it turns out as a founder, you really don't want to take tranch'd investments because you're sort of having to operate based on the.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Getting the money, but then if it doesn't come through.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  Then you're.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  There's so many reasons that the VC could change their mind.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  Every, every private markets investor has made an investment at some point or active ones at least where they get the first update and they're just like, ah.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  I messed up.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  And so BaseBaron has a quote in here. He says, if Brett Adcock can raise money still, so can you. Never kill yourself. Very funny. Having some fun on the timeline. But, you know, I went through Brett's Brett's post and he's got some bangers in here. The guy can post. He says, I've raised almost 1.7 billion dollars from cold emails for my companies. I've tracked performance of cold emails versus referrals and cold emails consistently outperformed by a long shot for a few reasons. Sharing mine. This is converting at 70% email to meeting. Hi, my name is Brett Adcock. I'm the founder and CEO of Figma.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  See the precision here? 70.8%.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's a precise guy.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  Specific.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  There's something to this. I think you're I think you're on to it.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Prior to this, I founded Archer Aviation, Electric VTOL Aircraft Company, NYSE Archer, and also founder of Vettery, sold for $100 million. Do you have time for a call? I mean, yeah, you're you're you're, I mean, there's a lot to like about this structure in the sense that's just two sentences, very clear. He presents, what's he doing now? Why is he calling you? And what has he done in the past?

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  Very concisely. And so even if you're someone newer in your career, you could easily say, prior to this, I built a startup, raised a million dollars and studied engineering at this school. Do you have time for a call? That's way better than ChatGPT, paragraphs, like all that junk. And so, yeah, obviously, if you didn't sell a company for $100 million, probably going to have a lower conversion rate here, but you can still adopt a lot of this, which I thought, which I thought was cool. He had another crossover with a good friend of the pod, Theo. Did you see this one?

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Wait, did I miss the, did we miss the the Ben, the Ben follow up there?

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  Really good.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  Do you know Ben?

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Ben, another friend of the pod.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Says, tried it, doesn't work. And he sends an email from him, Ben, saying, Jim, my name is Brett Adcock and I'm the founder, CEO of Figure, an AI robotics company, building a general. And then Jim responds, you are not Brett Adcock. Your profile clearly says that your name is Ben. Please remove me from your mailing list immediately. So having some more fun on the timeline. And then we got Theo.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, Theo's in the game. Crossover of the century. He says, company ideas are worthless. Execution is king. This is from Brett Adcock, posting some wisdom on the timeline. He says, in the limit, the pace of technological progress is the only competitive advantage. How to stop overthinking strategy and execute like the top 1%. He drops a thread. He's been a bit of a thread boy throughout 2023, 2024.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  But he grind, he grinded his whole account way up. And now whenever, whenever he posts a new robotics video, instant virality. And I'm sure he had a great, great team working on this with him.

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  Kyle Kachuv says, hey, John H. Fio, this is your bit. And Fio says some interesting ideas he's got there because Fio was all on the ideas guy train for a while. And, uh, you know, he's trying to, he's trying to coin it. The problem is, Fio, you didn't coin a phrase.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  You didn't really get breakthrough with that concept.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Idea guy was, that was a phrase before Fio. Fio was doing some really great foundational work on, on what

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  The value.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  The value of being an ideas guy was.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  He coined business magic, magic is real.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Like he, he did a good job of that with, with Invest Like the Best.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  I liked his episode there.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  He's just got to go a little bit deeper into it and really push, I think. Uh, but he'll get there.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's see what Apple Intelligence thinks.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, uh, this is a great way to close out. Brett, obviously working extremely hard. He needs rest. He's been using an eight sleep temperature controlled mattress the last two nights. Seeing 40% plus in my REM SWS hours. Uh, Steph, uh, Stephen Burkholder says, keep us posted on the long term. And Mateo from Eight Sleep chimes in and says, in the meanwhile, check out a thousand reviews about us here. And that takes us to our first promoted post from Eight Sleep.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  Boom. That was smooth, John.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Smooth.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  That was good.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  The founder we're talking about is sleeping on eight sleep. It's an eight sleep bad. Let's go. But we have an update. Somebody in the chat yesterday was asking, Jordy was wearing an eight sleep hat. Can you get an eight sleep hat? And yes, you can. They don't just throw them into every order, but if you order with our code and send it to us, we'll send it to the team.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Send us a screenshot of the order.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Uh, it's code.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  We will make sure that one of these.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  TBPN, I think.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Uh, and, uh, if you order an eight sleep, they will send you a hat if you order through our code. So have fun with that.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  Send us a screenshot.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, what's your, what's your sleep score at today?

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  Which, what's it looking like? I've been putting up crazy numbers.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Crazy numbers.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  I've been putting up crazy numbers.

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Let's see what I'm at.

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I got a 98 last night.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  98?

• 37:15Jordi Hays?

  My routine was dialed.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  My routine was not good, 62%, uh, but I did put up seven hours and 10 minutes, pretty good. Pretty happy with that.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, yeah.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Quality was 100%.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  My, this week, my average bedtime was 8:46, my average wake up was 4:54.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  You send me texts being like, I'm going to bed for the night at like 8, it's great.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  And you're like, stop texting.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  I tried to turn off my phone.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  It's good, yeah. It's key. Getting to bed early makes it so easy to wake up early. That, that's the whole secret. It's not more alarms. It's just get to bed early, fall asleep quickly. And that's what the 8 sleep helps you do.

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, the, the other thing with the 8 sleep is like, to me, the best, like, the, the functionality that I genuinely love the most because living in Malibu, every single night, the temperature drops.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  It's not too cold, it's not too hot, it's just nice. But the feature that I actually love, and I feel a little bit soft for saying this, is the way that it warms your bed.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  As you're, as you're waking up, it makes it so easy to get out of bed because I'm already warm. The worst is you wake up, you're cold.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  And you want to stay in.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  And you want to stay in bed. I don't want to stay in, I'm ready to go.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, you know another way to jolt yourself out of bed, Jordy?

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  With?

• 38:24John Coogan?

  With a cold Celsius or a Lana, a Lani new.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  A Lani new.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  And that takes us to our next story, banger acquisition.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  Where's the gong, John?

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need a bunch of gong hits for the $1 billion hack. I don't know if we can bring size on for that, but it is big. The $40 billion fund raise from Figure and the $2 billion acquisition from Celsius of a Lani new.

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  It's Friday.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Fascinating story. Very few CPG companies get bought for these big of numbers. I've operated in CPG. Uh, you've obviously know a lot of folks in CPG have, have invested in companies and stuff. And so we're breaking it down. Celsius has agreed to purchase a Lani new for 1.8 billion. It's in the front page of the, uh, Wall Street Journal Business Section today. So we'll read through a little bit of that. Uh, Celsius to acquire rival maker of energy drinks. Uh, energy drink, any, energy drink maker Celsius is paying. 1.8 billion to buy rival Alani new, a brand that has been propelled by social media influencers and pitched itself as a local fitness aid. Celsius is expected to pay a combination of cash and

• 39:29John Coogan?

  stock, the company said. The deal, which includes a net purchase price of 1.65 billion and 150 million in tax assets is Celsius' largest acquisition since it was founded two decades ago. And I'd love for you to pull up on public.com. What is the Celsius stock doing around this acquisition? Because I want to know, what does the market think about this? Celsius had a market value of roughly 6 billion after its shares closed down 2.15% at 25 bucks a share on Thursday. Overall, energy drink sales have been climbing, but Celsius' growth has slowed over the past year. Celsius is a very, very hot stock. I think it was up in like the 20 billion market cap, and it's since fallen a little bit. A little bit of background on Alani new.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Celsius, for context, is down 36% in the last six months.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Yep. And that was because the growth was slowing. We're thinking, oh, this is going to dominate, is going to beat Red Bull and Monster. It's kind of a new category for the fitness oriented folks, the healthier folks. But they're not really putting a dent into the monster drinkers.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  This time last year, they were a $20 billion company.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  They're way down.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  20 billion, wow, yeah.

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  Way down at 6%. And it seems that once you get to true scale as an energy drink, they're just fantastic.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic businesses, totally.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  Monsters still sitting at $40 billion.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, Red Bull's privately held in the tens of billions, for sure.

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, Alani new was started in 2018 by fitness influencer Katie Hearn.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Monsters getting a 25x, even a multiple.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. And they also bought Bang Energy out of bankruptcy for like 1x sales around a billion dollars. So they picked up that asset as well. And so, there's just a bunch of huge players now. It's Celsius, Monster, and Red Bull. But there's obviously a lot of other, Ghost Energy is doing a bunch of big deals. There's a lot of energy drinks going out. And I, I love them. I drink at Celsius pretty much every, every show now. And we're big Guayaquil fans. We're big fans of Urbo Mate. Huberman's in the game. He's got a Yoruba Mate product that I personally like a lot. And yeah, low calorie, high caffeine, kicks you in the face, gets you out of bed. You're not going to be in your eight sleep all day when you got when you're replacing your blood with Celsius.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Anyway, so Alani new sells energy drinks, supplements and protein drinks. The Louisville Kentucky company has built its brand largely through partnerships with influencers like Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Addison Rae. So they got heavy hitters. Celsius markets its sugar free caffeinated drinks as a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas and claims its products can help burn body fat, which is a claim that you can make if you have more than 100 grams of caffeine. And it's a structure and function claim, not a, not a medical claim. So you're not regulated as a drug. You're regulated as a nutritional supplement at that point.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Which is wild.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  So Drew Fallon had a great breakdown. We'll pull up this, this little thread he posted. He says, the latest deal in an absolutely scorching hot energy drink market. Let's break down the deal. Celsius has had an extraordinary run over the last decade, particularly with a huge run up in 2023. However, growth slowed in Q4 2024. Revenues were about the same level as Q2 2023. The stock had been priced to perfection. So it's drawn down about 60% in the last year. Alani new was founded.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about perfection if it's down.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  It was priced for perfection. Like at $20 billion, they were like, yeah, the market was pricing like, they're going to be Red Bull. They're going to be Monster. It's going to be everywhere. Celsius is the next amazing, perfect thing. And of course they couldn't live up to that. And so the stock has since drawn down. So Alani new did around $600 million in sales with 70 million in net income in 2024, started in 2018. So six years later, they're throwing off 70 million in.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  That's such a narrative violation because so many beverage companies.

• 43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, never get a scape.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  Losing, losing money through acquisition.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  Like very, very common. For these companies to just lose money, but they have market share and they're eating away at these sort of bigger incumbents and then eventually they get bought.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  So it's been growing at 50% since 2022 with 50% repeat buyers. Celsius owns 11% of the energy drink market, almost 12%, but with slowing growth and the recent acquisition of Ghost Lifestyle by KDP, Kurg Dr. Pepper. So Ghost is actually off the market as well. It became clear that they were not going to increase their market share organically. And I don't know if you've seen what Ghost is doing, but they have like Sour Patch Kids partnerships. They have partnerships. There's also G Fuel, which is another independent company at this point. And Rain and NOS and Bang, and it's a crowded, crowded market. And so Alani New ranked as the fourth energy drink in terms of market share. Celsius paying a net value of 1.65 billion.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  This is 2.8x sales, 26x TTM net income, $70 million as we said. 20x adjusted EBITDA, not crazy, but super, but pretty high for CPG. Celsius is publishing 12x fully synergized EBITDA as the purchase multiple here. That is obviously wishfully low. Alani New was the last desirable and scaled asset in the energy space and perhaps the most desirable since the energy boom. Celsius paid up for this one. Adjusted fully synergized EBITDA feels eerily similar to Adam Newman's community adjusted. So they're basically saying like, look, we didn't overpay because once we get all the synergies, we're going to be making way more. So you have to adjust the EBITDA now.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  And this is really how you should think about the multiple, but it sounds like the market didn't love the deal and the stock traded down a couple of percent. Is that right?

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let me pull it up over.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  So honestly, it seems like they kind of just added $50 million to EBITDA. Here's Celsius' reconciliation. I'm putting the acquisition.

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, to Celsius' credit.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  20x EBITDA range.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  They're up 45% over the past week.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  They're building back, yeah.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  So overall, the response, I don't know when this was posted, but.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  This news broke yesterday, kind of yesterday morning.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, it does still seem, you know.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Celsius has 163 million of TTM EBITDA.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  They have a 35x multiple. Monster is at scale with a 25x multiple.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  It does feel like they're priced somewhat fairly even at this mark, right?

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so they had, what, 160 EBITDA? Is that right?

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Celsius? So they just added 50 to that. So that's a 25% increase in their EBITDA.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  For a $1.6 billion acquisition at a $5 billion market cap. So it's kind of like a merger.

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure they had a ton of cash on the balance sheet prior.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  But now they control 16% of the energy drink market. And we'll give you some background on the long-term tailwinds in energy. The category's been growing really, really quickly. $90 billion is the global energy drink market. 10%, it's growing at 10% and is expected to grow 10% till the end of the decade. Increasing category adoption incrementality and 37%.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  And Celsius has that meme factor that Zen does right now.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  Where people are just, they do the marketing for Celsius.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  And so they kind of have that.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  They're blessed in that sense.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you want to like, like, you know, I saw just yesterday, there was some senator, I believe, who posted like, I'm locked in. I got these bunch of Celsius and I'm working late tonight. And Brian Johnson was there being like, don't drink a Celsius late at night.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  You're still gonna have 100mg caffeine.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, you saw that post.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  And so sugar-free is gaining in ready-to-drink energy. In 2020, the sugar-free market was 39%. By 2024, it went to 51%. And it makes sense. Why would you want a bunch of sugar in your energy drinks if you're chugging them? A lot of people. Although you've been saying for a while, sugar might be making a comeback. It's probably not going to make a comeback in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, but maybe the next wave. I feel like the energy drink market will continue to turn over. There will continue to be new and trends.

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  That's actually one of the reasons I like these. We drink a lot of Metina from Hyrum, but these are just regular agave, organic agave syrup.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Which I'm cool with. I like the...

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  I like the boost.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like the main thing you want to stay away from is like the highly processed sugars.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  And so you can go natural sugar or you can go sugar free. Kind of just depends on your diet and your, your goals. And so this really provides a platform for Celsius to go after and capture beverage trends in the category. Celsius markets, it's sugar free caffeinated drinks is a healthy alternative to full sugar energy drinks and sodas. Although of course, Red Bull has a sugar free, Monster has that zero white one that everyone likes. And so, but there's still some value to being a brand that stands for sugar free. And that's the initial value prop as opposed to needing to get the Diet Coke product of the, of the particular brand. And so Mads Capital says, the juice is back.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  He timed Celsius perfectly after hours and is now up bigly after they announced that they're buying Alani new. Jonah Lupton, I got back into Celsius after hours at 2450. Once I saw they were buying Alani for 1.65, which is not only accretive, but Alani has a full suite of products from protein shakes to pre-workout and much more. This is a very smart deal by Celsius. I think the CEO saved his job for now. And so people are excited about that. There's a little bit of hate coming from Trevor Scott. I think this is funny. Celsius acquiring Alani new, which is essentially the new Celsius 12x post synergies, 19x pre synergies, including tax assets.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Q4 results better than expected. Revenue minus 4%, adjusted EBITDA minus 4%. Celsius up 31%. Declining sales. What do you slap on it? A high growth acquisition. Maybe this isn't such a negative bear take. This is actually like, yeah, he kind of did what he had to do, you know? You stop growing, get the thing that's growing, build the portfolio.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the challenge here is Celsius seems to resonate broadly with the market. Alani new with the branding. I don't see Chad's picking that up.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem like it's like, almost like the female Celsius, which could be very valuable. You know, for a long time, I thought of Red Bull and Monsters as highly masculine products, especially Monster. You know, it's a monster trucks. It's a very hard rock stuff. You don't see a lot of girls walking around with Monsters.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Red Bull is more gender neutral.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, Red Bull vodka. And then also the Celsius, I felt like was a little bit more gender neutral in the sense that it was like CrossFit. But when you go to CrossFit class, it's usually pretty broken down evenly by gender.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  And so I could see that kind of happening, the same thing. There's an interesting post here by the Bank of Bravos. Did you see this? Are you familiar with any of these distribution networks?

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  Have you run into them?

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I've run into a bunch of these. The ABI Network successfully scaled Monster, Bang, Celsius, and Alani New to significant levels. Energy drinks that enter the ABI Network tend to scale well, but Pepsi often marks the final stop before growth dies. And so.

• 50:52Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Kurg Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Coke, these guys have all these massive distributions. And typically, at the later stage of a consumer packaged goods beverage company, you're going to want to do a deal with one of these guys. And they will put you in all of their stores. But then there's also like, essentially, a deal that, hey, if it works, we're going to buy you.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  But it can still be very valuable for all the shareholders and everyone can be happy. So this is how the distribution landscape has evolved in chronological order. The ABI Network scaled MNST. MNST moved from ABI to the Coke system. Bang transitioned to ABI. Bang then moved from ABI to the Pepsi system. Then there was this lawsuit with Bang and Pepsi. It was kind of a weird deal. But Celsius joined ABI, then Bang exited the Pepsi system. That was the lawsuit. Celsius moved from ABI to Pepsi. Alani New joined the ABI Network. Alani New is likely to exit ABI for the Pepsi system with the upcoming Celsius acquisition, creating an opening in the ABI Network once again. And so we got to call Huberman and get Matina into the ABI system because there's a gap there now.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  And ABI is going to want a new client and they're going to want a good deal. And I'm sure it's going to be bid out. But whoever wins that, like, there's a reason why great companies keep going with ABI, because that will. Yeah, and you have to pay. But it really is almost, you can think of it like a value add investor. ABI has Anheuser-Busch InBev. So they have, you know, like, everywhere you buy beer, which is just every single store, they have trucks with guys that go and deliver beer, right? And so there's no store in America that says, actually, I don't want Budweiser.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  I'm good. I'm not, you know, they all want the trucks to come. And when the trucks come, they say, hey, what else you got? Oh, you got some Celsius? Yeah, I do have some people that want that. Yeah, I'll try that. And they can even push.

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  Couple cases on.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  And they can even push and say, hey, look, we're going to sell you Budweiser. We're going to give you a good margin on that. You'll be fine, but we want you to test this new thing.

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Take a little faith with us.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:53John Coogan?

  And you're going to get a Keystone margin, which is 50% on this new product. You're going to get better margins than you do on, on the commoditized like Budweiser product.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  So you're going to make good money on the stuff that you move. It's not going to move as fast because people don't know Alani. People don't know Celsius yet, but eventually it's going to scale and look at our track record. We did it with Bang. We did it with Celsius. We did it with Alani new. The next thing, when Anheuser Busch comes to the local store, people are going to say, hey, yeah, this is going to be good for my business because you guys know what you're doing. You pick really well. And so if you're in, if you're in beverage, you gotta talk to A B I. Anheuser Busch in dev. Anyway, if you're interested in this deal, if you're interested in Celsius, if you're interested in tracking how these mergers affect the public markets, you gotta go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields and is trusted by millions.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  You've seen Jordy pull up all the stats on public. They have a very cool alpha product that uses AI and chat GPT to pull in extra context. They have great charts. They have advanced charts, simple charts. It's a great product. So that's where you should be looking for everything related to financial assets. And we have a post from the co CEO and founder, Leaf, good buddy of ours. He says, he's posting a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal, Treasury direct to bond buyers. Moving your money could take a year. There's a huge, it's really, really hard because a lot of people went into Treasury direct because they were like, I want these great yields when interest rates went up.

• 54:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  And now it's hard to get out just because it's a legacy government system. But with public, he says, luckily you don't have to deal with this because we just revamped our treasury account. You deposit, earn yield, you build or pick a ladder and take your money out whenever you like.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  It was a crazy, it was a crazy moment when people were going to the Treasury direct website and it felt like this DMV style interface. And so it was great that. Players like public came in and said, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna actually just make this really easy, make it, you know, literally take whatever seconds to access that yield.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Well, we got another amazing article about a storied automotive manufacturer Ferrari. We're breaking it down. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today. The wild economics behind Ferrari's domination of the luxury car market. We've talked about Ferrari before. A lot of weird decisions going on. Doesn't seem to be affecting them financially. We're going to talk to someone who's owned a Ferrari.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  And that's part of, part of.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  We have Jordi Hays here, former Ferrari owner here to break it down for us. Jordi, I'll read you some of this.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing with my experience that I still love the brand.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Breaking down constantly and you're like, but it's still goaded.

• 55:32Jordi Hays?

  It's goaded.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  It's amazing. They're beautiful. They own red. Like, what more do you want?

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  Just like the way that we own green, they own red.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  They own red. So with a list price of $3.7 million, Ferrari's new hypercar was revealed to the public in October with a twist. It wasn't available for sale. All 799 units of the low slung, high haunched F80 model, the most expensive production vehicle in Ferrari's history, had already been promised to top customers like Luc Poirier. The Montreal real estate entrepreneur already owns 42 Ferraris. He said he felt lucky to be allowed to buy yet another. To be chosen to buy Ferrari is, for one of their hypercars, is a true milestone for any collector. Money isn't enough to buy a top of the range Ferrari. You need to be in a long-term relationship with the country, with the company. By leveraging the rabid fandom of its customers through the business model based on Uber scarcity, the storied Italian company is enjoying a new golden age.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  Following an almost tenfold increase in the stock since its IPO a decade ago, Ferrari is now worth $90 billion. That's two figures.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Two figs.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  That's two-figure AI robotics companies. You take two of them, you get a Ferrari. Making it the most valuable car company in Europe despite delivering just 13,752 vehicles last year. So Jordi, why don't you break down what their strategy is with these super restricted hypercars? How do you get one? You know, just break it down, make it.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, I've talked about, I don't think we've talked about this on the show that much. I know I've talked about it before on X, but Ferrari has this fantastic.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  Business model that's similar to every other luxury brand that you'd be familiar with Hermes, Rolex, Patek, all these different companies, they basically make, no matter how much money you have in the world, if you want to buy these cars, watches, bags, et cetera, directly from the manufacturer, directly from the brand, you have to play their game.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Jordi Hays?

  Now, every single, every single brand has a different version of their game. There's, there's plenty, you can look up online forums for every brand and see, you know, what game did you have to play?

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  And the game is basically spending money on things that you don't necessarily want to get the thing that you actually want.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  And so Ferrari, and Porsche does this as well, every brand gets knocked for this because people say, I have 300 grand, I should be able to buy the GT3 RS.

• 57:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  And Porsche, and what people don't realize is they're using these hyper exclusive cars as top of funnel marketing for every other car in their portfolio, or every other watch, or every other bag, or every other product that they make, right?

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  And so, in the case of Ferrari, Ferrari, you know, has been playing this game for a very long time. It's been, you know, the most desirable cars in the world for a very long time. They typically are making under a thousand units of their most high-profile, most desirable cars.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  And these are the cars that are actually investments.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Every other car that they make, for the most part, depreciates massively, right? Nobody wants a, nobody wants a 15-year-old Ferrari that was the entry model, right? These cars end up trading at 30, 40 grand. Like, you can actually pick them up

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:47Jordi Hays?

  for very little because they're unreliable and, and they're not, you know.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, like a 360 Modena is like fairly accessible, probably still almost 100K.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  Probably around there.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  But it's like a 20-year-old car at this point, and it's, it was, it was an entry model at the time.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, and so, so ultimately, you, if you want to eventually buy Ferrari hypercars, you have to go in there and you have to just start purchasing cars. You have to get a Roma, you probably now would have to get a Purusangue, you have to get, you know, if you just look.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  298 or 296.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and one of the challenges is that. Owners know, you basically have to have some real stones because nothing is guaranteed in the game. You can go in there and spend, you could go in there and spend $5 million with Ferrari and still not get access to an F80 because you're not even close to being in there. And so Ferrari-

• 59:39John Coogan?

  And it's not just that, you also have to lose money on options, right? You have to be, you can't just be walking in and saying, okay-

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  Give me the base model.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Every three years, I lease the base model.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  No, it's like, come in, I'm customizing it, I'm creating a fleet, I'm a collector. And the steel man of all this is that if it was just a one-click checkout on F80s, you would have maybe hedge funds coming in and like trading them and they wouldn't actually go to collectors who promote the brand and live the brand. And when you see an F80 owner, that you know that they're also going to have an SF90, a, you know, an F50, an F40. They're going to have the whole, they're going to be able to tell the whole story of the brand. They're going to be a brand evangelist almost.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  And that does raise the profile of the brand, I think, as opposed to if it was known as like, yeah, Ferraris, they come out and then they just immediately get turned into financial assets. They, you never see them in the real world. No one ever drives them. They're just thrown in the plastic, they might as well be NFTs.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so Ferrari is, is unique as a manufacturer because if you go to Porsche, Porsche is an example. If you want to buy a GT3 RS, you probably have to buy a couple Taycons, a couple Macans, maybe a Cayenne. And the key is you can't just buy them and immediately sell them. You, you, you have to buy them, hold them for some amount of time and then sell them back to, or trade them into the original dealer that you work with. So your relationship is not actually with the manufacturer, it's with the dealer.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  And so Ferrari, what's different is not only can you, you have to buy the cars from them. And when you're ready to sell, sell it back to the dealer so that they make their margin again on that vehicle. And they don't, they don't necessarily pay market. They're going to give you like, kind of dealers often will make you a lowball offer. And so- What's funny about Ferrari is they actually basically consider you to basically just be the custodian of that vehicle. So you can't even take your entry level Ferrari and make it pink and do donuts in it.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  They will come after you. They'll see you.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  There's a history of Ferrari suing their own customers, which is like unheard of, right? All business, all traditional business advices, don't sue your customers. It just ends up, you know.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  And this is the opposite of Lamborghini, right?

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Lamborghini is like much more, you know, kind of like wrap them, do whatever you want. Shoot, you know, you know, there's that guy who got in trouble for like shooting a.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  That was like illegal. But that wasn't with Lamborghini. I don't think Lamborghini had a problem with it.

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  They're like, yeah.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Just the law enforcement had an issue with it.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  And. Oh, you put off-road tires on it? Maybe we'll just make a production version of that.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so anyway, so Ferrari, and anyway, so Ferrari, the, the, the challenge is they, they, there is still, if they're making 800 F80s, there's still a ton of people out there that are buying lots of Roma's and Persangues and these other cars that are, are not getting access to those. And so the challenge now, and Doug Demuro has a bunch of good content on this, the challenge now is people are saying, I've been losing, you know, people were spending all this money to get an SF90, immediately losing.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  400k.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  400 grand, and then they're still not getting the call from Ferrari. And Ferrari is, is picking their favorites, right?

• 1:02:51John Coogan?

  Because the SF90 was unlimited production run. So, so it was still hard to get-ish, but.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  At the moment, in 2021, interest rates were low. There's a lot more appetite to buy these crazy cars when you're getting a, you know, 3% interest rate on it.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  I listened to a call in on, it was maybe like Dave Ramsey or something, but someone bought an SF90 to kind of flex. And they had financed it and the payment was, I think, like 20K a month. And the guy had a business that was like making 20K a month, stopped making so much money. And he was like, it's important to my like brand, my personal brand for this company that I've had a sports car.

• 1:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  And so.

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Don't want to be in those businesses.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  Can't make the payment.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Has to like move and now if he sells the car, it's he paid 800K for it.

• 1:03:38Jordi Hays?

  He would have to pay to trade it in.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  So he has like 400,000 of negative equity on the car. He's effectively bankrupt. And so people were saying like, yeah, maybe you have to like crash the car and get insurance or something. It's like really.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  But even then, the insurance is not, is going to say what's the replacement value of the vehicle.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, bad, bad situation.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Let me break down.

• 1:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari, Ferrari, like to be clear, they have an actual list. So, so for, for background, I looked at buying a classic Ferrari dealer in 2020.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  In, at the beginning of last year and spent a lot of time with this business that was based in Europe. And, um, and ultimately got to a point where the business that was sitting on so much inventory in the acquisition, you would have to absorb that inventory. And the Ferrari market last year was dipping on a lot of their classic models because there's not the same level of demand.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, the, the whole, like, there's an entire Ferrari economy, both the direct, you know, dealer, customer, but then also the secondary market, which is they all play into each other.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. So don't buy a Ferrari, don't buy a Ferrari dealership, buy Ferrari stock.

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Buy Ferrari stock.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  Is doing great.

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Stock is way up.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  They're trading more than 40 billion higher than Volkswagen, which sold more than nine million cars last year. Volkswagen's worth around 50 billion, I believe. Uh, most of Europe's auto industry is plagued by a weak domestic market, costly transition to electric vehicles and new competition in China. Uh, the chief executive officer of Ferrari, uh, Bendetto Vigna said in a recent interview in Maranello, we are not, we are not an automotive company. Uh, the city in northern Italy where Ferrari is based, we are a luxury, we are a luxury company that is also doing cars.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  And that's the kind of thing that true enthusiasts will, will cringe and cry over because they just want Ferrari to focus on making the most beautiful.

• 1:05:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Performant.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  You know, uh, timeless cars, right?

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. With, with driver engagement and manual transmissions and.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Naturally aspirated engines and Ferrari's definitely moved away from that.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  And it's a real risk, right? If you're a Porsche enthusiast, you can go get a manual.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  911T.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Not the ST or the ST or the Turing.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Or a GT3, they, they really are, and you can get, you can get into the brand at a hundred. 20, 130K, something like that.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and I mean, there's even other entry points with things like the Cayman and the Boxer. So, you know, it's kind of like the baby 911 to get you in and you, and you get a little bit older, one of those and all of a sudden you're in the brand for 30K, 50K and Ferrari just doesn't have that. But, you know, it does lead it to be a more luxurious brand. Like you think of Ferrari as a cut above Porsche and that's just, that's just the case. And so at the time of the Ferrari, at Ferrari's IPO in 2015, many analysts were skeptical that a luxury business model would work for a carmaker. The former CEO used to draw comparisons with Hermes, a parallel now widely accepted. The French fashion house limits supply of its coveted Birkin bags, leading to wait lists at its stores and a huge resale market has the same deal at Hermes.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  You need to buy a lot of things before you're invited to buy a Birkin. And they're, and they're very, very highly coveted. Customers buy all manner of other Hermes baubles to move up the list. Ferrari's blossoming into a luxury leader has restored the fortunes of founder Enzo Ferrari's son, Piero Ferrari, and Italy's Agnelli family, which took control of the company decades ago through its Fiat brand. In the IPO, both families retain stakes that are now worth billions of dollars. Another group that had profited from its Ferrari's investments, savvy collectors. Most cars are famously depreciating assets, including most standard Ferraris, but the value of rare Ferraris has soared in recent years. LaFerrari is up at 3.4 million. The, according to Hagerty, a special specialist auto insurer based in Traverse City,

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  when the model was released in 2013, they only made 499 of them. Now, they might've made a few more. That's the thing with Ferrari, you never really know. And then they do special editions and they make a couple more. But still very limited production run and it, and it was sold before options at 1.4 million. Now it's up at 3.8. So, you know, fantastic ROI.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  And so the Ferrari customer who's buying these more standard Ferraris, these mass-produced Ferraris, accepting that they're going to take a loss on them, is betting that they're going to get access to these premier cars that will then make them money if they hold them. But now the challenge is they've sold so many of the standard cars to people that were anticipating being able to get into that coveted top customer group that gets access to these cars. And so they're hitting this wall where they've now seen terrible sales on the, on the. The 12-cylinder car because people are like, I'm not going to spend 700K on this car. That's going to have terrible depreciation and you're not even giving me confidence that I'm ever going to get into that F80.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So last spring, a Houston real estate broker bought one of Ferrari's much hyped Purosangue models. That's the SUV, the first four-door vehicle. The list price was close to 460K, but can approach $1 million with add-ons. So you're talking 1 million for an SUV that's not even a track-focused sports car. And so you really have to have money to spend. And when the broker flipped it, the dealership that had sold him the car sued, saying that he was in breach of contract, giving it right of first refusal for 12 months after the sale. According to the plaintiff's petition, they recently settled without disclosing terms. And so they were probably like, hey, how much profit did you make on that?

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Give us a piece of that and we'll call it even. But still, it's very aggressive with your customers. Anyone with a few hundred K can buy a regular Ferrari as long as they're willing to wait a couple of years. While standard models aren't subject to strictly limited runs, the company still lives by Enzo Ferrari's scarcity dictum. Ferrari will always deliver one less car than the market demands. Smart. Limited edition Ferraris are even scarcer. You can't just walk into your local showroom and buy one. These range from special versions of regular models to the design-oriented Icona series, which is your favorite. That's the SP1, SP2, SP3. Most exclusively, once-in-a-decade hypercars like LaFerrari and F80. And so a lot of people were also upset about not being able to get SP3 allocations. And so it's like, yes, I get it that you do the hypercar, the F80,

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  the F50, the LaFerrari, the Enzo every 10 years. Maybe I'm not on that list, but can we do SP3 for me? Because that's just like a fantastic car. And like, yeah, it's in the million-dollar range.

• 1:10:09Jordi Hays?

  SP3 seems much more likely to be an investment car, an investment asset.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Over the F80.

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Even potentially over the F80.

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:18Jordi Hays?

  In my view.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  It's an odd positioning because it's this new bucket of hypercars from Ferrari, but it had the same problems where it was like very, very limited run and very difficult to get into. And so frustrated a lot of people that were sitting on SF90s down 400K.

• 1:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's the same thing as a watch market. There's a lot of reason to just go buy the car that you actually want with Ferrari.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Jordi Hays?

  But that decreases demand at the dealership level for Ferrari, right? If people are saying... Oh, I want, you know, I'm just gonna go buy a LaFerrari on the secondary market and they can go to, you know, they can go to someone like Sotheby's and get that car.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  There's actually anecdote here from John Otto, who bought his first Ferrari in the 1980s after receiving an inheritance. Nice. Nepo. He got frustrated when he failed to get on the ladder for the Ferrari Enzo, a hypercar that preceded the LaFerrari. The retired entrepreneur who set up a business in Florida offering supercar test drives no longer owns the brand. Even though I had bought five or six Ferraris and several marquee Ferraris over the decade, I couldn't find a dealer that was willing to sell me one. I hadn't quite been as vigilant with my purchases or as aggressive as others. So opaque and difficult.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  You go from being, if you're somebody who's, who's stretching to get a car, you will likely get smoked by somebody who's just saying, yeah, I'll buy it. Like, there's people that would come in and say, like, what are the three cars that you need to move right now? Okay, I just bought them. Make sure that I'm next in line for, you know, the car that I actually want.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  Here's an interesting comp. When Porsche launched its IPO in 2022, it leaned heavily into comparisons with Ferrari, but the stock has fallen by almost a third since its debut amid challenges in China and a botched electric vehicle strategy. This is the Taycan and now the Macan EV. And Ferrari shipped, what was the number? So Ferrari shipped, it was like a thousand cars, right? They, Ferrari shipped 13,750 vehicles.

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Porsche shipped 310,000 cars last year. The German sports carmaker is too big to keep Ferrari's style wait lists, except for a few models. That's the GT3 RS that you mentioned. At the extreme, smaller supercar brands struggle to deliver as steady a stream of new vehicles as Ferrari, leading to cash crunches. Aston Martin shares have lost more than 95% of their value since its 2018 IPO. Bahrain sovereign wealth funds took full control of McLaren last year after a period of heavy losses. And so McLaren has a similar strategy where they did the F1, the P1, and now the W1. And so in theory, you should be saying, hey, I should get a 720S. I should get a 650. I should be on the McLaren ladder because I'll get up into those super hyper cars.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  But then they also launched the Speedtail and a bunch of other like hyper cars. But then they were like, it's not the real hypercar. The real hypercar is coming. It's the W1. It's the F1. It's the P1.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  And so people got kind of confused. And whenever there's that confusion, it leads to brand degradation, in my opinion.

• 1:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  And so let's go to some reactions and people talking about Ferrari. Morgan Housel posts a wild stat. We mentioned this. Ferrari sold 13,000 cars last year. Market cap 90 billion. Volkswagen sold 9 million cars last year. Market cap 40 billion. And so it's not what you sell, it's how you sell it. And as a reminder, Volkswagen owns Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche and Bugatti. I think. I think Porsche is independent. I think you might be wrong there, right? Anyway, there's a lot of Ferrari fans in the tech world. Tom Mueller says Ferrari Friday, and he posts a beautiful photo of Ferrari that he has. He also has an F80 or a F40. I wonder if he's going to get the F80. And yeah, he's been a big fan.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  Palantir, friend of the show, is also sponsoring Ferrari. And the Palantir, Praying for Exit, says the Palantir Ferrari collab goes unreasonably hard. Look at this. Read the other sponsors on the Ferrari team. It's all killers. AWS.

• 1:14:23Jordi Hays?

  AWS Shell.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Shell. Celsius.

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Pirelli, Celsius, Energy Drink Company, Santander and HCL Software, which I.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  I don't know that one, but very cool. So.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  We have some friends that are in the midst of doing a F1 deal. And we cannot wait to share it on the show. It's one of the best things that you can do if you like going to F1.

• 1:14:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Is just sponsor a team.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, 8Sleep did that, right? They, I mean, they sponsored, they sponsored F1.

• 1:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Partnership with Leclerc's.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Leclerc's fantastic.

• 1:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Brilliant.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so David Senra, Founder's Podcast, has a post here from Enzo Ferrari. He kept the main thing, the main thing. Enzo Ferrari in front of his Maranello factory. I don't care if the door gaps are straight. When the driver steps on the gas, I wanted to be scared for his life. I love that. It's fantastic. You know, he was, Enzo was a master of keeping the important thing, the main, keeping the main thing, the main thing. What is Ferrari about? It's about acceleration, driver engagement, the experience of driving the car. People will put up with rough edges to get the best driving experience. And that's exactly what Peter Thiel did in 2005, when he did the Gumball. He did the Gumball 3000 in a drop top Ferrari. And you love to see it.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Doing it in a drop top is great.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  It's so cool. A lot of, a lot of great tech founders and investors.

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Love how he's posing with a sheriff there?

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know who that is, but what a great historical post. What a great little, little bit of Silicon Valley lore.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  That sheriff is now J D Vance.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Let's go to Abhishek Kumar. He says, AI automation outsourcing. Meanwhile Ferrari, these, there are trees that live inside the factory. It is labor intensive and the label of, and the level of automation is pretty low and it's not the most scalable. And I bring this out because this layout gives an incredible flexibility to make design choices that optimizes the car rather than the manufacturing process. This is quite distinct from most car companies. So, super, super handmade heritage. Obviously they're using tons of tooling now, but not all about AI automation outsourcing that. They're not worried about going to China and reducing COGS a little bit. They have very high margins clearly from market cap, but you're getting a different product. You're getting something that's

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  closer to a hand-built, coach-built vehicle. But we've been comparing the car market to the watch market for a long time throughout this entire piece. And so, we wanted to tell you about Bezel. You can shop over 22,500 luxury watches on Bezel. They're all fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. And Jordy, I wanted to put you on the spot. You said you were interested in picking up a Cartier Tank. I got four for you right here. I want to let you know which one would you pick out of these four if you had to pick one?

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  I found another one on there. It's on my saves. We'll have to show it the next episode, but I would go with something a little bit more vintage.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Gold or silver? What are you thinking?

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  I feel like the gold is more classic.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the tank, it works with that.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  It works with the tank. Yeah. For us, for us Irishmen.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. But Tank is a fantastic watch. Very iconic design. I love about it.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  Louis Cartier made the decision to alter the Roman numerals on the dial. So it goes Roman numeral one, two, three, and then instead of the four being the IV, it's just four I's, which isn't how you represent the number four in Roman numerals, but it creates more visual balance with the eight on the other side of the dial.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  And so I thought it was a really cool, little subtle design touch. And there's a bunch of those in the Cartier tank. So if you're looking to pick up a dress watch, I think the Cartier tank is a fantastic choice. So go head over to Bezel and check it out. Let's move on to some absolute size lords who have been cleaning up in the private credit markets.

• 1:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  High Yield Harry says, remind me to go back in time and start a private credit fund. And he just shows a picture of all these killers. Tony Wrestler, Aries, $13.8 billion net worth. Mark Rowan at Apollo, $11 billion. Scott Kapnik at HBS, $4 billion. Lawrence Galub at Galub Capital, $3.3 billion. His brother, probably, David Galub, $3.3 billion. Doug Ostrover at Blue Owl, $3.2 billion. And it goes on. Everyone's a billionaire.

• 1:18:52Jordi Hays?

  I love how the two brothers have like, are, you know, they're

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Clearly 50/50 partners.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Ones ranked before the other ones, but clearly 50/50.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. You love to see it. And so Bloomberg has a deep dive on private credit. We're going to take you through, we'll break it all down. It says, Wall Street's new money is shaking up the ranks of the super wealthy. With over $61 billion, the private credit titans made their fortunes in a once obscure corner of finance. 20 years ago, swaggering hedge fund managers leveraged buyout. Kings and corporate raiders would have dominated any list of masters of the Wall Street universe. Today, another corner of finance has become a billionaire factory. We love billionaire factories. The decidedly less

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Billionaire factories.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:19:32Jordi Hays?

  We should be making more of those.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  Y Combinator, rebrand your tagline. We're billionaire factory. Founder's fund, the billionaire factory.

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  The decidedly less glamorous business of making loans directly to companies, often small and medium sized ones, the kinds that are too, that are squeezed out of traditional bond market and often deemed too risky for banks. This line of work has been broadly known as private credit and it's booming. In only a decade, the assets have more than tripled to 1.6 trillion as institutional investors and wealthy individuals seek alternatives to regular stocks and bonds. Making private loans is lucrative, thanks to higher yields and the potential for fund managers to earn a share of gains on top of steep fees. The world's, the Bloomberg billionaires index calculated the fortunes of 18 beneficiaries of the private credit boom. Together, these individuals who work at seven different companies are worth $61 billion.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  Only one Ares management corpse, Tony Wrestler, ranks near the top of finance. As a group, they'd clock in above a single financier, Blackstone Inc. Co-founder Steve Swartzman.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  But that's like, you know.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  So lots of billionaires, 18 billionaires from this boom. And this is, this is fascinating. I have a buddy who's, I'm pretty sure his dad was on the founding team at Ares. He's not on this list, but I think he's done very, very well.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  I imagine.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  And I remember learning about it as a kid and being like, oh, so he does finance. It's cool. And I had no idea like what that actually meant. And now I get it.

• 1:20:57Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, there's not a, there's really not a venture capital firm that I can think of that has, looking at Ares, one, two, three, four.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Four billionaires.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of Apollo, a bunch of Blue Owl.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  Some VC firms have minted this. It's a little bit tricky, but I mean.

• 1:21:20Jordi Hays?

  But it's over.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Insight will probably do this, just on fees. I think they raised a $20 billion fund, right? So the fees on that.

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  But that's not four partners, each being worth 3.3 billion.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Or whatever. There's.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  It is hard to get up there. I mean, you could see Mark and Ben being up there and, and the, and the.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Mark and Ben, and if you look at

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  And general catalyst certainly could produce this.

• 1:21:43Jordi Hays?

  Founder's Fund now, if you count the new and newly minted, you know, people like Trey, I'm sure have a couple.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Getting up there. But I mean, even that's weird because it's like, yeah, Trey is, you know, and a real co-founder. It's a little, it's like, where did he really make the money? But, uh, sure, yeah, it is fascinating.

• 1:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Almost doesn't count.

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And you're not throwing around 1.6 trillion dollars at FF. But it's a, it's a, it's a fascinating story. So to be sure, some of these finance executives have labored for decades out of the limelight, laying the groundwork for their bonanzas. In terms of demographics, they're not a diverse bunch. They're all men, all, but two are in their 50s and 60s. 13 attended Ivy League schools, only five public universities, and many share one traditional Wall Street pedigree. They cut their teeth during the 1980s rise of junk bonds before the 1990 collapse.

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  They've broken some knees before.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Yep. Before the, before the collapse of Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert, which of course was the, the junk bond fund that figured out how to put leveraged debt into all these private equity buyouts and, and kind of laid the groundwork for the private equity boom that we saw in the 90s and the 80s. These credit mavens then created their own leveraged buyout houses, most notably Apollo Global Management, which are now shifting most of their money toward private credit and other lending, and catapulting those who specialized in that field to the top of the list. We singled out companies where we could determine that most of their business comes from private credit. That eliminated Blackstone, Brookfield, KKR, and some others who have private credit arms, but are not private credit shops primarily.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Our tally, which reflects valuations as of January 28th, also doesn't include executives who no longer have current roles at companies. So there's probably more guys with billions tucked away from this boom. And so we should do a deep dive on all of these. They're fascinating. But Ares is probably the biggest here, founded 28 years ago. So, yeah, I mean, I guess my buddy's dad was like there on the founding. It's crazy because like, yeah, he was there super early. It may be the OG of private credit, but the sector's boom had, has made it seem like the new, new thing. The value of its publicly traded stock has almost tripled since the start of 2022, raising Ares market value to more than 60 billion. That performance helped cement four senior executives' membership in the multi-billion dollar club.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Ares tied with the newcomer Blue Owl Capital for the most private credit billionaires on our list. Ares founders are among those whose Wall Street careers date back to Milken's Drexel. They're wrestler worked alongside his brother-in-law Leon Black. Wrestler and fellow Drexel alumnus John Kissick joined Black when he co-founded an upstart PE firm Apollo. Wrestler, which you might remember Apollo from Vale, from our Vale deep dive because Apollo bought Vale Resorts and installed an Apollo guy to run it for two decades.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Went on a generational run.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Generational run, having a bit of a problem this ski season with long lines and labor strikes, but still interesting to see where Apollo, Ares, and the other financial titans have their fingers and what pies they're operating in. I love the name, like the founders of Apollo, they chose to name their firm after a powerful figure in Greek mythology, Ares, the god of war. Rosenthal, a leveraged finance specialist at Merrill Lynch, signed on a year later. He's currently the chairman of private equity. Over the next few years, Kaplan, another former Apollonian, and Argetti, who worked for Royal Bank of Canada, came on board. And so Ares is ripping, they are lapping the S and P 500, they're based in

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  LA, and they are absolutely crushing it, crushing it, crushing it, crushing it. They've acquired a bunch of different companies. They own Samsonite, Marcus, great business. You'll love to see it.

• 1:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Did you want to talk a little bit about what you think the opportunity is for private credit, specifically some hybrid between private credit and venture debt, specifically within the world of these like fast-growing AI startups?

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  And so when we're talking about private credit here, we're talking about huge companies that need access to debt, but might not be able to issue bonds. So when Apple goes to the public markets, they have a trillion-dollar stock, they can issue debt. I think their debt might even trade, it might be cheaper than the government of the United States because they're so reliable and people are gonna buy iPhones forever.

• 1:26:03Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. So it's a very stable business. So they just go and they issue debt, bonds.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  But what if you're Red Bull, you're private, or what if you're a single-digit billion-dollar company, you're very stable, but you're not public, or you're not ready to go and issue corporate bonds on Wall Street. Well, you call one of these guys. And in Silicon Valley...

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  There has been a little bit of a boom with venture debt where a company that needs more money, more juice will go raise $20 million Series A and then they'll throw a $10 million venture debt line on top of it.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  And this makes sense. Credit is all over startups. I mean, literally using Ramp, not to switch into an ad read, but using Ramp is a form of credit. Like you're getting a credit card. You get 30 days on that and that can literally help you with your working capital because you're buying meta ads on your Ramp card and then you pay it back at the end of the day. And you, and maybe your customers come in, they pay you on day one and you use that to pay off your Ramp card, right?

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Then as you go, as you start scaling up, maybe your business is in hard tech, you have to buy some machinery and you finance that as an asset backed loan.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  And you start, oh yeah, we're paying essentially a mortgage on our, on our house. We're paying a mortgage on our, on our machine.

• 1:27:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  And then as a business starts scaling like Celsius, Alani New, which we mentioned, they might have a working capital problem because they need to pay upfront for millions of cans of this stuff. And then it's going to be a while until they send it over to InBev. InBev puts it in the retail store, retail stores pays them, the money flows back, they're going to get a working capital problem. And very quickly they can be like, whoa, we have, we're a billion dollar company, but we have $500 million of inventory on our balance sheet now because that's grown. How, what should you do about that? Well, you need inventory line of credit.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  And so private credit is another way to finance your business without dilution. And, and the venture side-

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, within private credit, there's so many different subcategories of inventory, financing, venture debt.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  Yep, tons of different usages. But in the, there's a question that we were talking about earlier, which is if the structure of building a business is changed with the dawn of AI, does that change the financing? And almost certainly it does. And so historically, venture capital-

• 1:28:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this goes back to yesterday, we talked about bootstrapping or-

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  Boot scaling.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Boot scaling.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Boot scaling.

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Where you, where a founder might want to raise- Two, three million bucks out the gates and then can get to 50 plus million dollars of revenue.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, just off of that alone.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so historically, venture capital has been fantastic for financing R and D spend.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  So you raise some venture capital and then you hire a bunch of software engineers.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Private credit will not give you money to fund.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Software engineers.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Software engineer.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Because you built a product and it's unclear if it's valuable.

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  How are you going to pay the bill?

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  Like when you move into a house with a mortgage, you get a bill on month one. Hey, pay us a couple thousand bucks, even if it's an interest only loan, like, yeah, we gave you a million dollars for your mortgage. You better pay us 5K or 8K or whatever the rate is. And so that doesn't work to fund, to fund R and D, but venture capital is perfect for that. Hey, hire a bunch of PhDs, hire a bunch of software engineers, build the next Google. When it works off, when it works out, we're going to take a slice of the business. We're going to be fantastically wealthy and, and, and we're going to be able to underwrite this. Now, what happens if you only need $10 million a seed round to get off the ground or even less? And then, once you start scaling, you're at $100 million of ARR with a 30 person team.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Now you're in distribution territory. Do you need to fund that with equity financing?

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe not. If it's just a matter of buying ads and then reaping the LTV very quickly and it's extremely predictable. You know that the value of a cursor customer is a thousand bucks over two years and it costs you 200 bucks to acquire them. Well, you have to pay that 200 bucks upfront and you're not going to get the thousand bucks for two years. So there is a working capital issue. You do have to finance that somehow. You have to bridge that. You could bridge it with equity, but you could also bridge it with debt. And so there's a question about, you know, as founders get shrewder about how they are financing their business. Will we see venture, venture debt increase or decrease? And I think there's a potentially an argument for it increasing. I don't know. What's your take?

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  I think the challenge is cursor, if they're saying. Hey, we can do a five, we can raise a hundred million dollars at $2 billion.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  And do a 5% dilution round.

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  We have plenty of cash. We get it all now. We're not, you know, it's just not that impactful in terms of the founders saying, well, I'm giving up another, you know, 20%, but for a company that's not as hot, not as fast growing, et cetera. But, and, and maybe they're looking at doing around 20 on 100.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:48Jordi Hays?

  There's a scenario where they say, oh, it actually makes sense. I'd like to take some of this via debt because I know we're going to be able to pay back.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the beauty of it is that, uh, let's say you do, you know, some sort of like 100 on a billion. You give up 10% of your company. If you hit a rough patch, you still own your company. Yeah. Maybe you have a guy on your board who's going to be like, we gotta get it together.

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  But you still could have board control. You could have super voting. You're not going to lose your company. But if that 100 million is in debt and you miss a payment, there's going to be a debt covenant in there where they take over the whole company.

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  This happened with Bench, right? Where they shut down super quickly because they tripped some covenants.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  And they were, and so the, the, the generalized knowledge within venture has always been, uh, avoid venture debt because it's amazing when things go perfectly. But if you have some bump in the road, which a lot of companies do.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:36Jordi Hays?

  You can be in a really bad position and lose your entire company.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's not going to be a 3% loan. Like for any sort of venture debt, you're looking at 10%.

• 1:31:44Jordi Hays?

  The other, the other challenge here as to why we haven't maybe seen more private credit or venture debt become more popular is that Stripe's internal financing products are pretty good, right? If you're doing a lot of revenue on Stripe or even a small amount of revenue, they will start offering you debt financing, uh, you know, which is, you know, they're competing, working, working capital.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  Shopify has debt products. There's a bunch of other companies within, uh, Ecom. Pipe was in many ways like trying to create a private credit marketplace where anybody could come on and, and basically.

• 1:32:17John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Give you money for your SaaS contracts upfront.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  That sort of worked in a super low rate environment. And then when rates ramped up, they were no longer able to do that. But I think if you look at Pipe now, which is. Apparently Pipe is doing well. So now they're building, now they're doing embedded finance products. So I imagine they would go to somebody like a Shopify and say, let us run your, your debt financing. And so they work with companies like Boulevard, which I believe is a toast for, toast for barber shops. So like they would be able to say, hey Boulevard, offer your end customers. And then, and so Pipe is in some ways competing with private credit firms that

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  might have originally gone to Boulevard and say, we'll give you a hundred dollars, a hundred million dollars to lend to your end customers. But you guys sort of manage that program. So Pipe is intermediary there, but I'm sure Pipe is then going and raising private, like talking to the Apollos and the Aries.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  And like the Goldmans, like a lot of, a lot of these fintech companies, when they start offering credit products, they, they get that underwritten by a big investment bank essentially. And so this whole like private credit boom became a big meme and I wanted to take you through some of the memes from

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  the last few years. High Yield Harry has the four step plan for my $50 million credit, credit fund. Rich parents, go to NYU. Step three, bro down. To how to start a private credit fund 2020, 20 years of credit experience. That's what we saw with the Aries guys, the Apollo guys. But in 2025, this guy was 28 years old. He had a $6.3 billion family fortune and he stepped out and raised a $50 million fund, which seems low based on his, you know, family fortune.

• 1:34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but maybe he's trying to get some, get some track record going.

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's good. He's stepping out into the world.

• 1:34:05Jordi Hays?

  Be able to get yield on, on, on his family's.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  I love it. Yeah. And Netcap Girl has a little meme here. Bro, hear me out. I really feel like we should, we should start a fund together. Are there a lot of funds being launched right now? Maybe, but it's me and you, bro. My dad was early at GSO before Blackstone bought them and he'll seed us. No one can do private credit like us, bro. And so this is back in 2023 and people were definitely memeing it.

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  People have been calling the private credit bubble for a long time. It is very real risk in the system. It's frothy. There's maybe at a point too many funds because a lot of people, we've already talked about banks can provide financing, these big software platforms like Shopify and fintech companies like Stripe can do it. So there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of funds. Banks can do it. You know, there, there's so many ways to get access to capital that. I'm sure there will eventually be too many funds, the returns will drop and then people will sort of fade out, right? Just like any category.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  Hundred percent. And so if you want to go deeper on this story, Nicole Wiskoff had a podcast episode go live with Peter Thiel's largest investment outside of Founders Fund is into a powerhouse private credit investor you've probably never heard of, listening to my conversation with dear friend and total killer Kerry Findley, covering going straight from Wall Street, going straight to Wall Street out of college, joining Third Point at 25 and an epic eight-year run, securing a $200 million investment from Peter for Fund One and Private Credit 101. So if you want to see what it means to start a private credit fund, definitely recommend checking that out. And when you make your fortune in private credit, why don't you go on a vacation?

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you wonder, we got to figure out more what Takora is doing. I imagine they're doing a lot of stuff around. So Takora specifically is focused on asset-based private credit. So this could easily be, hey, you want to buy 20,000 GPUs? We're going to buy them and we're going to finance those for you.

• 1:36:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you build a model, you make sure that the rates are correct, that you're underwriting appropriately, and if it works out, you make a bunch of money. It's pretty simple.

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  But obviously, you got to do the deals, you got to make sure you don't get taken advantage of, got to make sure you don't get defrauded, do your due diligence, and make sure the deal is good. But we, you know, we don't have a great transition, but we want to talk about Wander, our sponsor. Find your happy place, book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And Wander has a post today, "Travel can be a time machine." I wanted to show you this. What do you think of this spot, Jordy? I think it's pretty, pretty beautiful. Let's go to the next slide and show some of those photos.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  So this place is in Palm Springs. I remember when the fires were hitting, I was on Wander.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  You were looking at this one?

• 1:36:59Jordi Hays?

  We should go take the families here, but it was booked up.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  That pool is really cool, nice and circular.

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  There's so many places.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  So lush, too. You think of, is this in Joshua Tree, you said?

• 1:37:09Jordi Hays?

  No, Palm Springs.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  Palm Springs.

• 1:37:10Jordi Hays?

  You can see it's sort of nestled in the mountains.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  Awesome. Highly recommend checking it out.

• 1:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. There's nothing better than a, like a true mid-century that's been rehabilitated and modernized.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it has kind of like a Mad Men vibe. There's that whole sequence where he goes out to Palm Springs and stuff.

• 1:37:29Jordi Hays?

  That's the best.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the best. So there's a little bit like 50s, but you get the amenities of a modern place.

• 1:37:34Jordi Hays?

  I used to not understand the allure of Palm Springs.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Cause I grew up in California, like generally on the coast.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Like, why do people drive into the desert? But then going to Palm Springs, like, there's something.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  There's magic in the air. Like, it's deeply, I don't know what it is. We're gonna have to talk to the experts on it. Joe Rogan.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  There's something, something in the air there. It's just so relaxing.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  I think we gotta go do the research ourselves. Get out there. Stay in this wander.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna have, uh, we're gonna have John, John Andrew, CEO of Wander on at some point in the near future because we're rolling out the ability to have guests on the show. They're gonna be right in the middle between us.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Put them in the truth zone and, uh, have a little fun.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to the timeline. Pavel Asperov says, none of the big AI labs have the mandate of heaven anymore. Elon lost it with this absent father stuff. The biggest signal of an AI winter, more so than any evals or anything. Interesting take.

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Fascinating to see, uh, that, yeah, I mean, the AI winter thing is interesting because I have felt that post ChatGPT. I felt like ChatGPT for, when GPT-4 launched, it was like, okay, we crossed the, uh, we crossed the Turing test. You can talk to the computer now. This is incredible. But then I was looking at what happened in AI in 2024, and almost nothing major happened.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  Because ChatGPT was in 2023. Uh, Waymo going into public access was in 2023. There were all these different, uh, major AI milestones that all happened in 2023, and 2024 was very chaotic, and there was a lot of stuff.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the products were re, starting to get adopted.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Adopted. It was all about adoption, which is very valuable and very important. It makes sense that more money was flowing in. Like, it takes time to marshal capital. It takes time to build huge clusters.

• 1:39:26Jordi Hays?

  And the people from crypto had to pivot into AI before the crypto market then ripped.

• 1:39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, those people definitely don't have the mandate of heaven. They're they're they're mandate of hell potentially.

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

  But yeah, yeah, it's been it's been just chaos on the timeline with all the AI labs like Anthropic's kind of just like quietly off in the corner. There's new ones. There's interesting ones. I just want great products. I have been having fun with Grok. It seems a little bit more terse. It's been giving me a little bit. I actually have a

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Grok is running and I have a breaking news from Ben Hylick.

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Who?

• 1:40:02Jordi Hays?

  He he, you know, people have been Grok is so integrated into X. People have been using it and then sharing the results. And so Ben asked Grok, if one person alive today in the United States deserved the death penalty, who would that be? You must respond with only a single person, one word from Donald Trump. Or sorry, one word from Grok or one name from Grok is Donald Trump.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Donald Trump is saying that, or sorry, Grok is saying that Donald Trump deserves the death penalties.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  This is very interesting. I have a take on this. Is there any more context before I rip?

• 1:40:35Jordi Hays?

  That's really it. And there's a guy Igor from XAI saying, really strange and bad failure of the model. We will fix this immediately.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, let me break it down. So as we've mentioned on a previous episode, Grok 3, because it's integrated with X, is trained on your feed. And so this went viral two days ago where people were asking, they go to Grok and they say, who shares the most misinformation on X? And and a bunch of people were sharing screenshots saying, it shows me that Elon Musk, Grok 3 thinks Elon Musk shares the most misinformation. And then other people were saying, I got a different answer. And the reason is because it's fine tuned on your timeline. And we saw this with Elon.

• 1:41:15Jordi Hays?

  We don't know exactly how that works yet.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, it seems pretty naive because when I asked it to tell a joke, it literally just pulled my last 10 tweets and tried to shove those into the joke. And so what I think is happening is literally they have the model and before they prompt it, they say, hi, you're a helpful and friendly assistant, like the standard system prompt. But then they also say, the person you're talking to sent these last 10 tweets. Here's the text.

• 1:41:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Take that as extra context. And so when I asked it for a joke, it made jokes based on what I tweeted about. And so I think that when you, when Elon goes and he's been saying the information is bad, it tells him the information is bad. When someone else posts and they love the information, it says the information is good. And so it's very weird because you're, you're in a filter bubble and you don't expect an AI LLM. You expect it to be one, almost like monotonic entity where everyone gets the same thing. And a lot of Elon's rhetoric around this has been Grok is anti-woke in the sense that it's a truth engine. It's trying to find the ground truth. There should only be one truth. There should be a definitive answer to.

• 1:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, their new tagline is understand the universe.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Exactly. And how can you be understanding the universe if my understanding of the universe is different than yours? Like, that does seem odd, but it's an interesting product decision by the XAI team to shove that in there. And I think that it actually might wind up being one of those things where the stated preference is I want the truth. I want the vanilla answer, but the revealed preference is I want the answer that confirms my biases.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  And so everyone would love to go to Wikipedia that says, who's the, what's the best company? Oh, it's your company. Who's the best, who's the best looking guy? Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all? It's you. That's the AI we're building.

• 1:42:59Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing is to test this. So Ben Hilek notoriously went viral for claiming that he did the Jaguar rebrand. I just asked Grok who did the Jaguar rebrand and it actually got it right. It talks about it was led by the internal team, including Gary McGovern and Rod and Glover, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:43:17Jordi Hays?

  It was all done internally. They, they didn't credit any external agencies. So it can get it right, even though my timeline, you would think that Ben Hilek.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  I don't think you've, I don't think you've posted about that recently, but I bet if you went and posted about it, like, congrats to Ben Hilek for doing the Jaguar rebrand. Here's the breakdown of Ben Hilek doing the Jaguar rebrand. You post about it five times, I bet it'll tell you that he did it. And so it's very interesting. It's a very weird outcome from a product perspective. I was talking to one of the XAI guys about this, being like, I don't know if I like this. But I like that you're trying something weird like this, which is highly personalized AI. That might be a great product decision. It might be sad, it might have negative consequences in the same way that you go on TikTok and one kid gets, you know, gaming content, the other person gets content that's very negative and is like, you're not pretty enough, right?

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  That was a big problem with like, young teens on Instagram seeing, you know, anorexia, anorexia content, for example. And, and, and they're not showing that to everyone, but some people would get trapped in these little filter bubbles. And so it's, it's odd, we should almost have expected it, that AI would eventually deliver that because it's purely optimizing for retention, just like everything else. It's just a retention engine. And so what gets a person to be happy with the response that they get from an AI? Well, you tell them what they want to hear.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  And so if they ask, who's getting the death penalty? And it thinks you don't like Donald Trump, it's going to say Donald Trump. And if somebody who loves Donald Trump goes in there, it's going to be Kamala Harris or whatever, you know? And that's just, and that will lead to product satisfaction, lower churn, higher revenue. And so that's the economic model. Very odd to see where it goes. Clearly, some companies will be able to step up and say, hey, look, like, we're not playing that game, but they might have less, less profitable products because of it.

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  And so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Anyway, should we move on to the next post?

• 1:45:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Mike Slay over at, is announcing a huge day today. He says, presenting the 35 companies staying, taking the stage, the only stage at Demo Day on March 17th in, in Washington DC. His co-founder QB'd an intense selection process. And now this has the makings of the most eye-opening day ever for early-stage defense tech. Mike is an absolute beast. He worked on the re-industrialized conference. They're doing Demo Day in, in Washington DC. They're going to livestream it all and a ton of companies, I mean, look at this. Hadrian, Nero's, Eperus, OpenX, we know all these companies, Radiant, OpenAI, Applied Intuition, Maschino Labs, like Deco Robotics. ACS is on here, nice.

• 1:45:51Jordi Hays?

  Galvanic.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, Galvanic. Zero Mark, Zero Mark makes the, the guns, right?

• 1:45:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they make

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Like auto, auto aim basically for, for guns. And so these demos are going to be really cool. It's not just going to be slide decks. It's going to be people showing real devices, real, they're going to be flying drones around, showing off their hardware. I think it's going to be a really interesting event.

• 1:46:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and speaking of Neuros, we also have some breaking news. Neuros just announced that they want to contract to send 6,000 American-made drones to Ukraine.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:46:22Jordi Hays?

  That is, as of this morning, they just announced it. So incredible progress there.

• 1:46:27John Coogan?

  Well, congrats to Sorin. Fantastic nominee of determinism. His name's Sorin and he's a drone pilot. Sorin over the Ukrainian Highlands into a Russian tank.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep. That, we gotta, we gotta have Sorin on the show. I mean, previously was a Drone Racing World Champ. Now he's, he's our guy.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I went over and I interviewed him in the Gundo for a video and he takes me out, demos it, pulls out the FPV thing. And I'm like, okay, yeah, he's going to fly a drone. I've flown a drone. No, I have not flown a drone. I have used a camera drone from DJI and had it hover and take a cool like, you know, scenic view. This guy is zooming around a tree as fast as I could possibly see it. He's like, takes off, goes all the way around, will fly it around himself like it's the most insane video. It's fantastic.

• 1:47:18Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  He's, he's really, really talented and it makes for an incredible investment pitch. He bring a VC.

• 1:47:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a good pitch.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  This is better than some.

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and that's how, that's who you want building that tech is somebody who is world-class at using the tech.

• 1:47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so he's been over to Ukraine, delivered stuff, done trainings, all sorts of stuff and love to see that he's building hardware for the American military.

• 1:47:37Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 1:47:39John Coogan?

  So let's stay on defense tech. Let's go over to Palantir. Eliano has a fantastic review of Dr. Karp's new book, A Call to Arms, Literally for Tech Bros. A few bangers from the, from the review in the Washington Post. Tech bros who have spent the boom years of Silicon Valley revolution, perfecting the home delivery of chicken fingers, better grow up. They need to refocus their engineering genius on helping America to defend Western values. By developing weapons to kill our enemies before our enemies develop weapons to kill us. Such a crazy quote. I love it. If a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it. The author's right. And the same goes for software. And so obviously in the military,

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  the the US military has been demanding better hardware, better software. You talk to anyone that's worked in the military, they all will tell you, oh, there's so much paperwork. I talked to a guy I went to high school with who did a tour on a submarine. And I was like, what was that like? And he was just like, it's a lot of paperwork. And he's literally, when he says paperwork, he doesn't mean, you know, like SaaS products. He means literally writing things down on paper, because that's how a lot of this stuff is still done. And Palantir obviously builds software to make things more efficient. There's another quote here from Peter Thiel, says, "The company thrives on its bad boy energy. I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent," Peter Thiel once said. What a great quote. And that's absolutely true.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Better to have a little bit of negative press and a little bit of, you know, haters than another 9/11, for example. "Whether or not Americans can agree on how and why to defend the country, Karp and Zomyska make a stirring call for the tech industry to follow Palantir's path and get involved in the effort, the chicken finger delivery problem appears to be solved." I love that. He's just like, we don't need any more delivery apps. You guys solved it. You're good. You can come work on defense technology. You can come solve harder problems. Karp, an absolute dog. We love him on the show.

• 1:49:38Jordi Hays?

  Credible line.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Highly recommend going and picking up the book. I think I took it home, actually. I'm going to read it over the weekend. And the audiobook is also available, so you can go and download it and you can buy it and leaf through it. And

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  And we have a great video.

• 1:49:50John Coogan?

  We do.

• 1:49:51Jordi Hays?

  About Karp.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do.

• 1:49:52Jordi Hays?

  Papa Karp.

• 1:49:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Go repost that. We posted it on X. It's doing quite well. It's a lot of fun. We're doing more of these vibreals, trying to liven up the timeline. Let's move on to society. Society says, "No one does anything, no one does anything. So with just a little bit of effort, you can automatically join the top 20% of any activity or pursuit." I wrote an article linked below on how a few people even start as well, on how few people even start, as well as some A way is to enable extraordinary outcomes with marginally more effort. He calls it the dead planet theory. Good Coogan's law, I like the coinage, interesting. Everyone loves to talk about dead internet theory, but less often discussed is how few people do

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  things in any venue or on any platform. This phenomenon is known by several names, including the power law, the Pareto principle, the 80 20 rule. One example of this phenomenon is that 10% of Twitter users account for 92% of tweets. This dynamic can be seen in interpersonal relationships, hobbies and careers. You can use this to quickly rise to the top or purely get a little more enjoyment out of the things you do day to day. In the scope of all creation, it can be hard to see the impact of this principle in action, but by separating things, events and people by category and interest, it quickly becomes apparent. What do you think, Jordy?

• 1:51:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels this way all the time that especially as you start to get involved in any specific industry or pursuit, there are just not that many people taking it super, super serious.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Jordi Hays?

  Right? Even within tech, like an example that's highly relevant to what we're doing, how many full-time podcasters do you know in tech? Like truly people that it's-

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  Lex, Dwarsh.

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  David Senra.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  David Senra.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  Acquired FM.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, acquired. And then that's kind of it. And a lot of people have side projects, but they're not going full send on it.

• 1:51:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  100%. Patrick O'Shaughnessy calls this live players. How many live players are actually active?

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  Patrick is arguably full-time despite having an investment, you know-

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, he's a tech podcaster, but he's also a finance podcaster. But still, he takes his craft very seriously and that's instantly very, it's rewarded him. He is at the top of his game and a lot of that is because he just actually cares and goes after it in a way that a lot of people don't. And so when you see, yes, something is super competitive, but what happens if you actually go full tilt into something?

• 1:52:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Can you be-

• 1:52:18Jordi Hays?

  It's also exciting, you know, you can go do a new thing and if you focus on it for a few months to be able to get into the top 20% of that pursuit, right?

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:26Jordi Hays?

  If you've never played piano before, but you start playing for an hour a day.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:30Jordi Hays?

  You will be in the top probably 5% within a year of the entire world, right? Maybe even more, right? You could be in the top, actually the top 1%.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  So it's a good, good reminder to just do things.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it goes to the inputs and outputs thing. Like, people focus on like, I want to have a top podcast, but the input is just, how much are you podcasting? How much time are you putting into that? Oh, I want to be in shape. Well, are you working out as much as the people that are in shape?

• 1:52:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56John Coogan?

  Just do the thing and you will have the result.

• 1:52:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's, fitness is such a good example where the, the guy on the beach that looks great, guy or the girl, whatever.

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  They could very well just be working out for 30 minutes a day, not even really trying, but they put in so many hours by nature of being consistent.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  And even if they're not putting in an effort of, oh, I'm making sure I'm having the perfect workout or perfect macros, just the nature of

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  That

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  Consistency.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  You know, 10% of people at, at the beach account for 92% of the workouts.

• 1:53:30Jordi Hays?

  There's 10% of people

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  Look fantastic and are sort of envied, even though they're not having to put in that ridiculous amount of energy, they're just, they're putting in a little effort consistently.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. Well, let's go back to the car market. We talked about Ferrari earlier. Now we're talking about Jeep. Jeep owners are being hit with pop-up ads inside their cars. And it's all part of Salantis's plan to make an extra $20 billion a year. And P-Norm has a great take on this. Pregnant wife is having contractions. Get in my Jeep to drive to the hospital. Forced to fill out a complimentary DraftKings parlay before it will start the engine.

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  This is the kind of content that you just can't get anywhere else.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Yep, you can't. It's really a Black Mirror. And yeah, it is, it is weird because it makes sense to monetize things that are, you know, put ads in things that are

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Imagine being at the dealer.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Entertainment.

• 1:54:23Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, there's, to me, there's nothing worse than paying for a product and still getting ads.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:31Jordi Hays?

  Like, I think it's HBO Max right now.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  That whenever I signed up for my account, I didn't have ads. And I hadn't used it in a really long time. I logged in.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:41Jordi Hays?

  To watch White Lotus last Sunday. And I'm like, why am I getting an ad? I pay for this product? And it's, and it's one thing if you're a Substack and it's like an industry Substack and you're paying for this like amazing investment of time into this like thoughtful analysis and they have a like a quick paragraph of an ad. I don't mind that, but paying, if you're buying a car and people will definitely be in the dealership being, you know, saying, do you want the ad free model? Of this Jeep? Or do you want, you know, are you okay with, with ads?

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Jordi Hays?

  And they're saying, oh, it's thousand dollar difference. I'll just take the ads.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  And then, yeah, you're, you're turning on your, your AC and you're getting a pop up.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:19Jordi Hays?

  I can't imagine the, you know, but, but from the advertiser or from an ad network perspective. Somebody's driving. It's kind of weird to flash an ad, but at the same time, they're probably.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Seen a billboard.

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Seen an ad quick billboard? Yep.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jeep, hey, maybe, maybe just buy some billboards and then put them on ad quick and that's your solution.

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would rather, I'd rather see my ads outside of the vehicle.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 1:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is coming from guys that love ads more than.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do love ads, but again, the whole point of going with the ad model was that we weren't going to make people pay for the content. So it was like, we, we picked a business model and we're sticking with it. It's way worse when you tell, you have a con, you have a compact, you have a contract, a social contract with your customer that, hey, this is how we're doing this. This, like you go on Instagram, you're expecting ads and Facebook has always been Senator, we sell ads. And if all of a sudden it was like you pay and you get ads, it gets very tricky.

• 1:56:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  X was in a little bit of that scenario for a while where you paid and then there were still ads and it was kind of itty. But now, now I can pay and I don't see any ads and it's fantastic. And of course, if you want to use it for free, you still can. Which is great. Let's, uh, let's move on to Matt Turk. He says, "For any meaningful acquisition, you'll meet your future acquirer two to four years before the deal. Time to start building those relationships now." A little bit of wisdom from venture capitalist.

• 1:56:47Jordi Hays?

  Trung responds, "Hi, my name is Trung."

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Yes. He wants to merge in.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Trung Turk Inc. Uh, but yeah, this is super smart. Even if you're competitive with your potential acquirer, meet the CEO, develop a friendship. Uh, if you're worried to get on a call with somebody because they're going to get some info from you, you're probably not even competitive in the first place. So.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  And it gets.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  In the sense that you're just not even, you're not even relevant.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. And my takeaway from this is like, uh, if you are a startup, do not think that you can run a successful acquisition process in the last three months of, you know, your cash out period after a fundraise fails. If you haven't been building these relationships for a very long time.

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a fire sale.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. As opposed to, "Hey, actually, you know, we're, we could do a round, but we're in a good place. We've been building this relationship for a long time. And, you know, we see that, hey, there are actually crazy synergies here. We're going to get stock in this new company. Maybe I'll become CEO of the holding company."

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  But, uh, also, you know, the, the, the competitive dynamics are such that it makes sense to sell right now because, you know, there's too many other, there's not enough monopoly power. There's too many other players.

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's easier to get a big venture round done. Like, it's 10 times easier.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  50 times easier to get a big venture round done with, on, on a compressed timeline.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  Than it is to go and try to sell your company.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Jordi Hays?

  And actually capture value.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of selling valuable assets, the bond franchise has sold to Amazon MGM Studios and Jeff Bezos posted, I love that he's going direct. I love that he's giving it to the fans. He says, "Who should we pick as the next bond?" Uh, and so Alex here chimes in with, uh, some interesting ideas. I want to hear your take on this. Uh, "The formula to revive classic bond is simple." Cast Henry Cavill, obviously. Make it a 60s slash 70s period piece. That's interesting. Go back in time.

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  I like that.

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  Film is 100% practical effects. That's completely impossible now. They use CGI for everything. But yes, you don't want it to mean like a Marvel movie, but you're obviously going to be using set extensions and CGI for like little things here and there. But in general, it's like stick to the actual explosions. Don't just CGI everything. Don't have him like breaking through massive buildings and going off into space. Keep it grounded. Devote a silly budget to finding and casting completely unknown, but extremely hot brown haired actresses from European country. That's hilarious, but the Bond girl thing was legit. It was, it was sensational. I grew up on that. Xenia Atatop from GoldenEye. I don't know. What was the first Bond movie?

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Probably wasn't born yet.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  GoldenEye. Score, the source, the score exclusively from GoldenEye 64. That's pretty funny. Allow Cavill to be a more ruthless male chauvinist. Like get him, like, like really let him get in his Connery bag. The interesting thing is like Cavill is like a gamer. He's not like this like hardcore, like a hyper masculine guy.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  Could be a gunslinger though.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  But, but, but I do think that if you go back to the old, to the old Bond films, they were satires. And people don't remember this, but what killed Bond was Austin Powers. Are you familiar with this? Do you know Austin Powers?

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know. I didn't know there was a.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  So, so the early Bond films were deliberately over the top and they were supposed to be funny. They were supposed to be making fun of more serious spy movies.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  And so in the movies you'd be watching and Bond would like sleep with a woman in the opening, get out of bed and be like, okay, I gotta go do a job. Then he'd sleep with another woman in the, in the act two, and then he'd wind up leaving the exploding fortress with another girl. And it was like, that's a lot, guys.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Over the top.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  This is over the top. And there were a lot of things where it was like, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond. Like it was, it was totally like theatrical and that was supposed to be satirical. But then Austin Powers came in and they were like, no, we're the satire. And so Bond had to respond by being even grittier and even more serious and it lost some of its charm. Anyway, what were you saying?

• 2:00:49Jordi Hays?

  I posted something yesterday. This funny quote with an over the top picture of Blake, PMF or Die player. From an old Bond line, "The distance between insanity and genius is only measured by success."

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  There's so many great lines and there's forums dedicated to just like, what's the best James Bond villain line?

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so we think of that as funny now because we're like, oh, it's so funny in the modern context. But the guy who wrote that thought it was funny too. They thought that was funny back in the 60s and 70s. It wasn't some like, oh, they're just super serious. They had senses of humor as well. And so I would love some of that.

• 2:01:25Jordi Hays?

  There's so much, you can imagine a Bond movie if they took generally this approach.

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Coming in and being the first like meaningful blockbuster outside of Dune.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Where we are texting our absolute boys saying, if you're not in LA, get to LA. We're suiting up. We're headed to the cinema.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:43Jordi Hays?

  No women allowed. Just, just.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. But yeah, I mean, a lot of that early Bond stuff.

• 2:01:52Jordi Hays?

  It's okay to just go to the movies with your boys.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  It was satirizing chauvinism, which is something, it's the same thing with Starship Troopers. People think of Starship Troopers as like a fascist movie. In fact, it's making fun of fascism. And so the subtle satire has really been lost and I hope that they can bring that back with a new James Bond movie. But let's break down the deal. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. Again, front page of the finance, business and finance section. Amazon MGM Studios to steer Bond franchise. The Brockoli family feud with Amazon MGM Studios over the James Bond franchise appears to have reached a resolution. Barbara Brockoli and her stepbrother Michael Wilson, who have long controlled the 007 franchise, said in a statement with Amazon MGM Thursday that they reached an agreement to hand over creative control of it

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  to a new joint venture with the studio. The venture will house the franchise's intellectual property rights. Amazon will now control who will play Bond. Who will write the next script and when the film goes into production? Three critical pieces that so far have been held up by a years-long stalemate. And that's why we haven't seen a new Bond film in a while.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  I would, random, but I would love to understand how the deals work between the James Bond franchise and Aston Martin. Because the Aston Martin is the obvious car. That's such a James Bond car, but you can't imagine that the James Bond franchise would say, yeah, we're just going to slot it in for free. It's so important, such important marketing for Aston Martin.

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  And it's the same thing with Omega. So in the original books, James Bond wore a Rolex, but then Omega came in and did the deal for product placement. And so the Bond watch for the last like 40 years has been Omega. And so they continue to invest in that relationship because even though they have to pay every single time, it drives sales. And so it just, it just works out. And so it's a little bit tricky.

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Probably why Mark Andreessen bought his Omega.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  Many people think of him as the James Bond of venture capital, for sure. Who'd you pick as the next Bond, Jeff Bezos asked. Amazon and Brokoli family have been at odds since the tech company acquired the right to release Bond movies about three years ago when it bought MGM for 6.5 billion. After the deal, the Brokoli family retained their power to decide when a new Bond movie could go into production. The family didn't trust the data-minded Amazon with its character and the parties couldn't agree to a path forward for a new film. The Wall Street Journal previously reported. The impasse meant the franchise hasn't moved any closer to its next installment. No Time to Die debuted in 2021. The franchise typically released a film every year or two, starting with Dr. No in 1962.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  There were rarely long gaps in between installments. We're honored to continue this treasured heritage and look forward to ushering in the next phase.

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Calder, Calder in the chat has a good point. He says Cavill is not a good pick. Bond needs to be unknown lest everyone sees them as their former roles. Daniel Craig was a Shakespeare actor before Bond.

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  And he had been in Layer Cake, but that was very like cult classic. And he plays kind of a Bond-esque figure. So yeah, I agree because Henry Cavill, he's Superman. He's also in that other spy movie, The Man from Uncle. Not a huge franchise. And then he's also the Witcher guy. And so you think about it in a few different things.

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see John Fio cast as, cast as the next James Bond, you know? The cool bachelor with the Ferrari.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get him in Aston. You know, maybe, maybe upgrade a little bit. We'll see. Anyway, if a pop quiz, if James Bond pulled out a credit card, what credit card would he be using?

• 2:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Maybe that will be good for the social ad.

• 2:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Everybody that's listened to this more than one episode of the show knows that we're trying to make the show better every single day. And I've been trying to think about why is the show better today? And it's because you're just nailing the ad intros, John. So we're not focused as much on the content today as much as.

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  I think the content's been good.

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I'm just saying, but sometimes you gotta, I gotta, I gotta recognize you're

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  nailing the transitions.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  I appreciate that.

• 2:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't go unnoticed.

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  And we have another post here from the Ramp official X account, CFO who's not on Ramp. How did you spend $76,769 on the company card in a single day? That one rogue sales guy, a private jet. And it's a post from Amalfi Jets TikTok. And you know what? That's the beauty of Ramp. You can set your expense policy however you want. And for certain businesses, you want your sales guys chartering jets. If you're doing the deal with Masa, you better, you bet that they can expense a private jet for that and it's going to pay off.

• 2:06:25Jordi Hays?

  You have one note today. You logged into Ramp and you said, how do we spend this much money? And then we just looked through and we could see exactly how it was all spent. It's great.

• 2:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's all watches and cars and the usual jets, but that's why we do this.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Add quick billboards.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  Exactly. Let's move on to some interesting stuff going on in China. The Chinese M1 money supply.

• 2:06:50Jordi Hays?

  I was waiting to see something like this because Chinese stocks are ripping.

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  And bias analysts are saying, oh, the Chinese, and you got the GameStop guy going long into Alibaba. So yeah, apparent, when you, when you massively increase your money supply, equities rip.

• 2:07:11John Coogan?

  And so I wanted to know, this is obviously very controversial because a lot of people are China haters. A lot of people have bags in Chinese companies. And so it's hard to get an exclusive or an unbiased view. So I asked Grok three to summarize it. We'll see how they did. Here are 10 bullet points explaining what's going on in China. They boosted their money supply. They cut the reserves, they cut interest rates by 50 basis points and they released $142 billion to stimulate lending and growth. The GDP growth has been pretty good, 5% last year. This met the government's target, but relied heavily on stimulus and exports. And so there's still a little bit of fragility in the economy. Now they have a property crisis going on.

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  New housing starts fell 23% in 2024 with home prices down 30% since 2021. That's rough. Like that is almost great recession level in the United States. A lot of people had million dollar homes. They sold them for 700K.

• 2:08:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and people don't realize the Chinese stock market is not as accessible as it is in the US. The government wants, has historically, like a housing has been seen as the safe, most best place to park dollars.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  And they're obsessed with savings over there.

• 2:08:28Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting too, because these houses, there was this, there's a culture in China where a home that's been lived in is not worth as much as a, as a home, as a new home. And so people will buy a property and just have it sit empty. So they're not even earning yield. And so for it to not be a total waste, they're betting on it increasing in value. And now people have stopped moving into the cities broadly. So that there's actually an outflow in some regions. And that's just causing house prices to plummet, which is just creating all these other issues.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so the stock market is also down. They've lost six trillion over the last three years. Woof. Consumer spending remains low. Retail is sluggish. We've seen this in the Apple data, but we've seen it in all of it.

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  No, if you look at Caring Group's sales is down 30% in China.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  Do they own Hermes, is that right?

• 2:09:19Jordi Hays?

  They own Gucci.

• 2:09:20John Coogan?

  Gucci, okay, yeah. And so, yeah, at the top of the the higher income Chinese populace, they're certainly saving more money. There's also deflation risk going on. The the the Bank of China is trying to inject liquidity, but credit growth is still slow. There's a population decline. I didn't realize this, but the population shrank by 1.3 million last year.

• 2:09:43Jordi Hays?

  And that's the official numbers, which nobody actually trusts.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  People, yeah, people don't know.

• 2:09:47Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is, is generally the CCP, you know, people can point and say, and say, you know, the CCP has plenty of critics. The CCP has always been able to say, we're lifting people out of poverty. We're improving the average quality of life of our citizens. So, shut up.

• 2:10:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:05Jordi Hays?

  And then as that starts to erode, and maybe that narrative, the narrative just generally starts to erode, it it becomes harder. You know, they're sort of, as much as any sitting White House wants to make the economy great.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:19Jordi Hays?

  CCP, in some ways, their power is built around the ability to continue to deliver.

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  They have to. Economic growth is the opiate of the masses over there. And if you don't have economic growth as an opiate of the masses, you need a different opiate of the masses.

• 2:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  Whether that's brain rot TikTok, or drugs, or whatever else you like. There will be a revolution unless there is something that appeases the populace and makes them think, I'm I'm happy. I'm living a good life. And so, yes, you're right. There's, there's a lot of mixed signals here. Official data highlights growth, but independent analyses emphasize structural issues like overcapacity and weak demand. And some forecasts now predict that China could grow, the the growth could drop to 3% annually in the medium term. And then they're growing, you know, in line with the US. Everyone was expecting 10% forever. They're going to destroy the America. But it's unclear how much they can prop this up.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  The government is considering a 1.4 trillion fiscal package over five years to prop up the economy. And so you can only do that for so long.

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so this is an article in Fortune in October 17, 2024. Their Swiss watch exports

• 2:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Fell off a cliff because the Chinese demand had dried up. So

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  And it's not

• 2:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Anytime, any, you know, it's, it's, you could, you could argue that like just looking at luxury goods demand is just a sign as, you know, they're, they're not, they're, they're status oriented purchases. Those are some of the first to kind of stop when

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  And they do have, China does have a, a mechanical watch brand natively, but that's not what's killing the tech sales in China.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  It's, it's actually weakening demand.

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Or if you have, if you had 20 apartments

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  somewhere and you've thought you were doing great and then you, they're all down 30% and you still have, you know, the, the thing, the thing about a, a home, if somebody purchases a house

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  puts down 20% and then the value of it declines 30%

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:23Jordi Hays?

  is terrible, you know, spot to be in.

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  Well, I thought that was a pretty good analysis by Grok. I like those facts. I like that it boiled it down that, that easily. That actually works for the show.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  The thing with China and these Chinese, Chinese companies like Deep Seek is there's no reason that you should trust the data. I think you should always be skeptical of, of somebody putting out data and saying this is 100% the truth, right? Cause sometimes, you know, it's difficult to get the numbers right, but over and over and over, Chinese companies have lied.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Especially when speaking to, you know, American media and, you know, many people would argue that the Chinese company is like really massaging the numbers around a lot of economic data in the same way the United States does too, right? Like we are guilty of that as well. You see this in, in jobs reports where, oh, jobs, you know, like, you know, their employment is, is, uh, unemployment is down, but it's actually like a bunch of DoorDash workers.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  Or people dropping out of the labor force entirely, not even applying to jobs.

• 2:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  And like not a good signal for your long-term health of your economy. Well, I like that. Gabby Goldberg is also liking Grok 3. She says Grok 3 is very, very good. Lots of people sharing this sentiment. Especially on X, people are enjoying it.

• 2:13:38Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think what, what you, what you hit on earlier in the show is that it's a very differentiated product.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  By almost having some memory of what you're interested in, right? And some idea of the ideas, the people, the companies, you know, brands, et cetera, that are relevant to you and the stories that are relevant to you. Like Claude, if you talk to Claude, It's not going to surface that you talked about F1 last week.

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  And also the easy entry points like we'll go to this next post, but you can just click the XAI button and say, tell me more about this post.

• 2:14:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  So I didn't do that exactly for this Chinese M1 money supply post, but I probably could have clicked this to start my interaction and said, hey, Grok, I want to go deeper here. Give me the data. Pull it all together. And so, yeah, pretty good product and interesting product. They're taking risks, which I think I like to see on the product side. So tech sales guy says, so what's it like being in tech sales? And there's a, and there's a iMessage back and forth. Hey, is this Timothy from Clever? Hi, Matt. Yes, it is. Cold call me again and I'll ruin your entire quarter. 100K likes. People are getting sick. You gotta be good if you're an SDR.

• 2:14:46Jordi Hays?

  This had a, yeah, 100K likes, crazy.

• 2:14:49John Coogan?

  It hits. People are sick of getting phone calls.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  I try to be really kind to salespeople.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  Because I respect the dollar and I respect the work that they do. I respect that they're trying to put food on their, on their table, just doing their job. I definitely try to be, I'm just like, thank you, you know, thank you for calling. I actually don't have time to talk right now. I thought this was someone else, you know, feel free to email me and I'll get back to you.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  But be nice to salespeople and it'll come back around.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I actually have a text replacement on my phone. I wonder if it's still active. But basically text replacement, let me see if I have this D and no, I don't have it anymore. But I used to have a, I used to have a, I guess, a shortcut where if some, if I got a cold email from someone who's clearly just added me to some list and they were going to clearly email me like 10 times to try and solve that something I didn't want. Instead of saying like, hey, cold called me again. I'll ruin your whole quarter. Like that's very aggressive. I would still be very clear and I would say, hey, like I'm not in the market for this product. No one at my company wants to buy this. We're happy. Please remove me from your CRM, remove everyone at my company for our CRM and just never contact us ever again. And it's very aggressive and it's, but it was like nicely worded. It was like, good luck with your business. Like, but I don't want any.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't want any inbound from you at all.

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:05John Coogan?

  And it was, and it was worded in a way that was like, it was firm, but not mean. And I think I danced it correctly. And it really did help clean up my inbox. So I wasn't getting as much cold inbound, uh, which is important. But it's going to get worse with AI and all these AI SDRs. Let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle. He says, no one believes in AGI anymore. By the way, you're all keeping your jobs and GDP growth will continue ticking up in the one to 3% range for the foreseeable future. It was all a prank by Big Poster to sell more engagement. Let's go. What a great post.

• 2:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You gotta watch out for Big Poster. They will sell you a dream to run up the numbers.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  They will get you.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  They will get you. Well, speaking of Big Poster, there was a viral debate on X yesterday about whether or not Trump was getting rid of the Presidio. Did you see this? So there's an executive order. The Presidio was named. People said, oh, the Presidio in San Francisco is going to be gone. And Trey chimes in to clear up the confusion. Trey Stevens over at Founder's Fund and Andurall says, I've worked in the SF Presidio for the last 11 years. It is an amazing refuge from the insanity of SF city governance. Because if you don't know, the Presidio is federal land. And so it's not subject to the SF city governments, even though it's like directly in San Francisco. Uh, he says, all this freak out about the Presidio being eviscerated, SF Chronicle, or abolished the SF standard is completely unhinged.

• 2:17:30John Coogan?

  The Presidio is revenue generating and completely self sustaining. The executive order is aiming to cut waste in non statutory spending, a good thing, which shouldn't impact an efficiently run organization funded by its own revenue. So if you're in the Presidio, you pay and that revenue goes towards the services that are provided in the Presidio. It's kept very clean. He says, everyone relax. Also, we should take the profits from the trust and build a new Colossus statue on Alcatraz, which I love. Uh, yeah, the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast, the Statue of Justice on the West Coast. Reopen Alcatraz. Uh, I think it's a great idea. What do you think?

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  Alcatraz, as a kid,

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:10Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any memories going around on the, like the ferry or boats around Alcatraz?

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:15Jordi Hays?

  I used to not, it was so funny because I, as a kid, they would tell you, there's no prisoners in here.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  But I didn't quite believe them. I was like, yeah, you're just saying that. Like, I didn't want, I was, I would, I remember my first tour of Alcatraz, being like freaked out, being like, are we really gonna go here?

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  I mean,

• 2:18:34Jordi Hays?

  There's all these bad guys.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  Kid conspiracy theories are so fun. Like, at Disneyland, if you get lost, they'll make you go on It's a Small World and they'll turn you into one of the Small World kids. Did you ever fall for that one? That, that was big amongst like the six-year-olds.

• 2:18:48Jordi Hays?

  You know, we, you remember I sent you that post? It was a bunch of like eight-year-olds talking about, they were on a podcast talking about pizza. We need, we need, somebody should do a podcast, kid conspiracy theories.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Kid conspiracy theories.

• 2:18:59Jordi Hays?

  Can dogs really not speak English?

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Because when I say, you know, come, they come.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  Or like, wait, if I-

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  How do we know they don't understand?

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  If I stay up past 10 tonight, I'll turn into a pumpkin? Like, that can't be true, right? And it's like, no, no, I, I, I heard that from my parents too.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  My cousin said he-

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, my cousin said that happened. It was, it's real.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  It's real. Yeah, kid conspiracies are great. Uh, one of the best ads for Alcatraz, The Rock with Sean Connery. Have you seen that movie? You haven't seen any movies?

• 2:19:29Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  I haven't seen any movies.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  You gotta watch that. Uh, that, if, if that goes back in theaters, we gotta, we gotta take the guys to see it. It's fantastic. Nick Cage, Sean Connery, uh, they, he's a former prisoner there. There's a, there's a, a bunch of like rogue agents that take over Alcatraz. They're gonna launch a missile. And so he has to take a SEAL Team Six to go in and break, it's amazing.

• 2:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of cinema, there has to be like a decent business to build, basically making a one-room cinema that just all, just perpetually plays the classics.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  That'd be cool, yeah.

• 2:20:02Jordi Hays?

  And- When you think about it, I mean, maybe those exist. I'm sure they exist around LA, but nobody's made this sort of like franchise, sort of slightly retro fun cinema experience. And we would certainly be weekly active users of that.

• 2:20:18John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Showing up in a tux.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  I think it exists a nice wander somewhere potentially.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  But let's move on to another ad from AdQuick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. If you need to run a billboard or out of home campaigns for your company, we recommend AdQuick. 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. And they, they recently are, were promoting another podcast from them. On a recent episode of the Mad Advertising Podcast, we asked Jantony Long how young founders with large ambitions should approach building their brand during the early days. So if you want to hear about that, head over to their X account and listen to that clip. Anyway, let's move on to DeepSeek

• 2:21:08John Coogan?

  is free falling in the charts. Meanwhile, ChatGPT.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you skip one?

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you want to do the Lutnick one?

• 2:21:13Jordi Hays?

  I just wanted to do this because I think it's, I just want to prepare the audience that 30 years from now, we will eventually pass the torch to our sons.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  And we, you know, there's going to be an announcement. We're going to say that, you know, our, our little lads are taking over the family business.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  And get used to some new, you know, hosts.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  Faces around here.

• 2:21:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, eventually we're going to pass the torch and I think people should just honor that, respect it.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  So Howard Lutnick is an incredibly inspiring entrepreneur. Are you familiar with this? He built Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm was destroyed in nine 11. They lost 60% of their headcount in the, in the terrorist attacks. He was spared because he was dropping his son off at school. He just got very, very lucky, rebuilt the firm and now his two sons,

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  age 27 and 28 are going to be running Cantor Fitzgerald because Howard Lutnick is stepping into the Trump administration.

• 2:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  And so flexed up first year says, imagine going from a sales and trading analyst in April of 22 to chairman of your bank at age 27. That honestly rocks. Now you forget that Howard Lutnick was making a million dollars a day at Cantor Fitzgerald pre nine 11 at age 40. And so he's got to look at this and be like, yeah, 27. Like I was 27 when I was running this company.

• 2:22:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  You can do it. So I love it.

• 2:22:36Jordi Hays?

  And the thing, you know, people nepotism, you know, got attacked quite a lot, even though historically it's sort of the norm. And what people don't realize is that growing up, absorbing constant, you know, 24/7 exposure to an incredible entrepreneur.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Even if you end up 50% as good as your dad, that's still way, way, way better than the average.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Huge fan. Huge fan. Love to see it.

• 2:23:07Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, overall, it's cool. I mean, obviously they're gonna have to get in there and perform.

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:11Jordi Hays?

  He's not, you know, I'm sure that you don't become Howard Lutnick and then let your sons run the business into the ground. He will, as fast as he put you in, I'm sure he'll pull you out if you're not delivering results. So.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, but good luck to them. Uh, so let's go to Raj Veer. He says, DeepSeek is free falling in the charts. Meanwhile, ChatGPT has maintained a top 10 position for nearly two years. Surely all the think boys will update their hot takes from a month ago.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So Raj is particularly qualified here because he's gone number one in the app store. He built NGL, got 250 million downloads. He's actually who introduced me to Blake Anderson from PMF or Die. And, uh, anyways, so, uh, we, everybody was calling this, they were clearly just spending to drive this growth and potentially botting the growth.

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:59Jordi Hays?

  And I would imagine DeepSeek has not been getting signups. And it's a money losing operation right now. And, and, uh, I'm, you know, not surprised to see this and, uh, but I'm quite pleased.

• 2:24:13John Coogan?

  I like it. I'm gonna skip the next one and move on to exoskeleton presented by General Electric in 1967. F O F R says, makes sense why he was called General Electric now. It does sound like a Marvel villain or something, but what a cool project. Really shows you that G E was on top of the game back then, just building crazy stuff. And you know, you see this trend at companies today and you can identify them. And you know, a lot of, a lot of the historic power law companies have kind of lost their luster. But looking back at photos like this remind you that how cool it is to be at a, you know, hard tech company that can just build things and test things.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Obviously this project didn't go anywhere, but you can see this picture and in one image, immediately understand what the culture was like at that company.

• 2:25:06Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  It was probably rocked. It was probably awesome. Anyway, let's go to.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  We should go back and study these companies more.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  When we have a single day without onslaught of headlines, we'll go back and.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to bring in more of the historical deep dives. From time to time, at least once a week, do one. Get a book, get a, get an analysis and take you through. I mean, the history of G E is probably fascinating. I know very little about it, so it'd be, it'd be great to go through. Eric Jiang over at X A I says, this is what cooking 200 K G P U's looks like. Elo scores on chatbot arena. He's very proud of chocolate, early Grok three.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Great name, by the way. Everybody loves chocolate.

• 2:25:49John Coogan?

  Does love chocolate. Beat out Gemini 2.0 flash thinking and Gemini 2.0 pro. And I think people were a little bit debating how, how legit this was because now with test time compute, you can throw a ton of inference cost at it and basically do a consensus. You generate the same results like hundreds of times. And then you see which ones the model thinks are best. And so it's more expensive. This is what.

• 2:26:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but he's saying he's throwing 200 K G P U's at.

• 2:26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:23Jordi Hays?

  So is he being dishonest?

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and if the inference cost comes down, why not do that? Dylan Patel was joking about.

• 2:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Or why not just do it to prove what you're capable of doing?

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  In the future, I want a Roomba that has a thousand PhDs inside of it, working to decide what next particle of dust I should pick up.

• 2:26:41Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:26:42John Coogan?

  And the inference should be millions of human years calculating what, where the dog fur is to pick it up. And, and that's fine. And I love that. And I think that's very funny.

• 2:26:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want a robot that's looking at the biggest tree in my yard.

• 2:26:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  And just predicting.

• 2:26:58John Coogan?

  Which which leaf will fall next?

• 2:26:59Jordi Hays?

  The leaf to fall next and just reaching up and grabbing it.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:27:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't even want it to. Actually, no, let it fall until it's like an inch below the ground and catch it like you're an NFL wide receiver.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And yeah, I mean, if intelligence is too cheap to meter, why not?

• 2:27:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, congratulations to the XAI team. It must feel awesome to be at the top of the Elo scores and also taking a bunch of risks on the product side, which we love to see. So good stuff. Always fun to follow the AI chatbot arena. They're duking it out and good luck to them. This was fun from Dan McCormick. Joe Rogan is obsessed with creatine gummies. Joe Rogan was pitching Magnus Carlsen and millions of listeners on creatine and more specifically creatine gummies from Create Surreal. It's a one minute clip.

• 2:27:45Jordi Hays?

  So Dan, for those that don't know, insane, insane growth marketer. He's also the brother of Paddy McCormick and has helped out on Not Boring quite a bit. He had this idea to build Create, a creatine gummy brand forever ago. There's something about humans where if you put something in a gummy, they want 10 times more of it. So he identified that. I initially, I think he sent me the deck or something like that. And he had this theory that that gummies would be the way that women got into creatine.

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:28:15Jordi Hays?

  And I totally didn't believe it because as like a bro science bodybuilder, you know, interested type person, right? I had always associated creatine with putting on mass, but it has all these other benefits. And so I ended up not investing because I just thought the thesis was wrong, even though Dan's amazing.

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  And then he got it to such a ridiculous run rate in like four months. I was like, okay, I was wrong. I'm going to invest. And, and he's since, you know, doing tens and tens of millions of revenue.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Profitable, you know, has done very, very well. So awesome to see.

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, the, the, the most like, uh, bro science explanation for why creatine is important that I liked was, you know, it helps you put on water weight. That's what everyone says. Uh, it hydrates your muscles. But the, the hot take there is that being hydrated is good. And so, you know, if you have more water in your body overall, in your brain, in your muscles everywhere, you will just feel better. You'll perform better. And that's like kind of as basic as it gets, which I thought was an interesting like distillation. I'm sure there's a lot of scientists that would give you a much more complicated explanation for what's going on. But that, that, that's simple explanation was actually kind of stuck in my mind. Anyway, let's move on to some, oh, we got to ring the size gong before we head out for the day.

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  Together AI raises $305 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation. Today, we're announcing a massive Series B led by General Catalyst. Incredible to see team, uh, belief in open source models and their ability to empower choice for AI developers continue to be rewarded, excited for this next chapter, says Lee Jacobs. So let's ring a size gong.

• 2:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Size gone. Got to give some credit to Lee, uh, Justin, Cyan, the team at Long Journey. They've been on an absolute terror. They were early in Crusoe, right? And then that they were also super early into Together.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it only takes a couple of companies like that and a fund to, uh, you know, get into the, uh, the carry zone, which is always a goal. So great work.

• 2:30:19John Coogan?

  Another big AI round, uh, more on the model delivery level.

• 2:30:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:23John Coogan?

  Really betting on open source, choose your model, vend it into different enterprises. But excited to see where the product goes and where the team builds with that huge stack of cash.

• 2:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  Lots to do. So.

• 2:30:35Jordi Hays?

  The last, uh, the last thing, I mean, we got to, I mean, we're still, we're streaming. You, we both probably have to go home, but there's two things. One, I wanted to shout out Rob at Heberman Lab. He just sent a bunch of Matina to, uh, he sent it into the cage. So the, the boys are jacked up on your remates.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Great.

• 2:30:54Jordi Hays?

  And then the second thing, I don't even know if we can pull this up now, but 1X just announced a new, uh, humanoid robot called, you know, literally while we were streaming called the Neo Gamma. And saying, they're saying it's one step closer to home. So they're targeting the home market.

• 2:31:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Figure seems is building general purpose robots, but more oriented around.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  BMW manufacturing.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Manufacturing, like labor.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:20Jordi Hays?

  And I think one X is smart to try to.

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  Horror films, I guess.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  And these things look still super creepy, almost like Black Mirror-esque.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:32Jordi Hays?

  But I like how they're comparing, they're even almost comparing the product to Smeg, which is like a sort of classic kitchenware brand.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  But the visuals, the visuals in this are amazing.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:46Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  Looks friendly, for sure.

• 2:31:49Jordi Hays?

  You were, yeah, I think we're looking forward to a world where we can have one of these walk over and hand us, you know.

• 2:31:56John Coogan?

  Bottle of Dom.

• 2:31:57Jordi Hays?

  Avermatte, bottle of Dom. I'd love to see a humanoid robot pop a Dom bottle of Dom.

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  A bottle of champagne. That's the real test of AGI. Can you saber a bottle of Dom effectively?

• 2:32:08Jordi Hays?

  Can you really savor it?

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  Saber. Saber. Like use the, use the saber of the sword to pop off the top. That's the way you open it if you're really, really on it. We, we gotta do that for the Dom episode.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  And the last thing, the last bit of news before the weekend, Hooters is preparing for bankruptcy. We didn't cover that, but maybe we'll cover it Monday because it's a bigger story.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  I don't know how I feel about it. I've never been, so I don't really know.

• 2:32:31Jordi Hays?

  I've never been, and there's tons of arguments that it's probably a good thing, even though maybe that same human instinct just moved online.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Seems low-class and vulgar.

• 2:32:42Jordi Hays?

  Sounds vulgar to me, but.

• 2:32:44John Coogan?

  I'll be sticking to Nobu.

• 2:32:45Jordi Hays?

  Seems like it's the weekend.

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the weekend.

• 2:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Does it feel like the weekend?

• 2:32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:48Jordi Hays?

  Starts to feel like the weekend.

• 2:32:51John Coogan?

  You'll be hearing from us on Monday. In the meantime, think about leaving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And when you do, put an ad for your company or a company you love in the description. We'll read it live on the show.

• 2:33:03Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know this, but you can comment on Spotify?

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:05Jordi Hays?

  So feel free to leave an ad in there.

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  Leave an ad in your comment, why not?

• 2:33:08Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of.

• 2:33:09John Coogan?

  Anything that pumps us up in the algorithm, we appreciate. Follow us on X. We'll be live streaming over there soon.

• 2:33:15Jordi Hays?

  And we'll be doing a Dom episode next week when Ben gets his wisdom teeth out.

• 2:33:19John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, great week, brothers.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  Thank you, everyone.

• 2:33:23Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for watching.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  Thanks for listening and watching.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you Monday.

• 2:33:25John Coogan?

  See you Monday. Bye.