JD's Venture Portfolio, Lessons from Mark Cuban, Angel Investing Addiction

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. It is, what, November 7th today?

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  And every technology podcast is clearly going to be obsessed with one topic and one topic only. You're going to hear about it on All In, you're going to hear about it on 20VC, you're going to hear about it on

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Your parents might ask you about it.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  newcomers writing about it, the information stuff with it. It's undeniable, you can't get away from it. OpenAI bought chat.com.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Very, very strong, brandable, four-letter domain, .com.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely massive.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  In the eight-figure range.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  15 million.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of speculation. I don't think the actual number was released, it was cash and stock.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Dharmesh released it.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 0:44John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was some mix of cash and stock.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Oh, maybe. That makes sense.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  And he was positioning, he was like, "Look, I'm a savvy investor, I don't... I'd never lose money, but I don't like to make money on my friends."

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  He said, "Now I'm an investor in OpenAI."

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Interesting. Really? Oh, okay.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  I think he may have invested the domain.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, I mean, the context here is Dharmesh, I think it's Dharmesh Shah. He's the founder of HubSpot.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  And he, a couple months ago, acquired chat.com, and I think he said he paid 10 million for it.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  And he was like, "I'm going to do something with it, but I'm not sure yet, but I know this chat bot, chat interface is going to be big for AI."

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  And so there's going to be an opportunity here, and that opportunity came along in the form of a call from Sam Altman. And so Sam just tweets, "Chat.com," and that's it.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think OpenAI stole it, honestly.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Oh, you think it's a steal?

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Like, I think it's a steal.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  That could be a hundred million dollar red carpet.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  There's, um, there's another, uh, big language model company that doesn't have their .com.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  And all the variations of it are owned by domain investors.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  And they're all asking for, like, tens of millions, tens of millions.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Mid-eight figures.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and they're kind of at a standstill because

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  they're just, like, they don't really want to take... You know, forty, fifty million dollars of equity and put it into. But, um.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Well, so I, I, I want to debate, I want to debate this a little bit because on, on the one hand, like chat.com, it's an iconic domain, single word, four letters. It's like one of the best assets you could own on the internet. On the flip side, Google has trillions of dollars. They've never bought search.com. They didn't need to. Google became that. And so the thing with chat GPT is that it was always like a bad brand name in the sense that people would mess it up. It's chat GBD, chat G P. Like they couldn't remember it, but once it got stuck in the mind, it was iconic, like Airbnb, like.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And they're still re, all they're doing is redirecting it to chat GPT.com.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it's like, where will the brand live?

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  They kind of stole it in the sense that if a savvy domain investor would have extracted a lot more value out of it.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  They'd been like, give me thirty million dollars and twenty million of, of, of, of stock.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then, but yeah, I think from a branding standpoint, when you scroll on TikTok.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  It's people talking about chat GPT, chat GPT, chat GPT, and that is AI to the norm.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I wonder if they'll be able to actually build a brand or if they'll even try to build a brand around chat.com.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's also very unclear.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  It's very, it's very dot com era throwback, like pets.com.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  And for a while, like it, it became difficult to actually get, uh, intellectual property protection around these single words. Like the famous example, yeah.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  The way to get real protection usually is to make the dot com your name.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  So like pets.com was probably trademarked as.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  They own pets.com. Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, the escalator was originally made by the escalator company. Do you know this?

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  So, uh, escalators, we just think of like, you know, any escalator you see in like a mall.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  But that was originally the, the brand name for the machine company that produced the first escalator. And they became so popular that the name became like normalized and they lost intellectual property protection. And then Kleenex went through a similar thing where like just facial tissues, I think is like the technical term. Like Kleenex became so popular that everyone would just say like, oh yeah, just grab a Kleenex. Doesn't matter what brand, it's just Kleenex. But Kleenex actually fought back and won. And so now you can't use that term. But if, but if we were to start a new escalator company and it was like, oh,

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Which we might.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Which we might. Cause yeah, we might want to roll up a couple of the small operators. And

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  It's probably one of those things like there's only three or four manufacturers of escalators in all the US now. And so if we buy all of them, we can jack up prices like massively.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  I looked into stoplight manufacturing for a while and there's only a few manufacturers in the same, same dynamic. And there's no technology in the stoplights. I wanted to do something where the stoplight would have a camera on it. And if there was no one waiting for the red light, it would just switch the signal, right? And so it's like,

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  Is that not how it works right now?

• 5:05John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. You, you can pull up and just be sitting there and there can be no cross traffic and you can just have to wait. So there's just all this like dead weight loss in the system when you're just driving around.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  Which hurts the economy.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  It does. Yeah. Opportunity cost. You could be working. You get to work faster. So it'd be a very simple like product, but the distribution's really hard because you have to sell to each individual city. It becomes like a flock safety type thing. It's really, really tricky. But So you're, so you're bullish on, on this at 15 mil, right?

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I think it's a good buy in the context of who the owner was, who the company is, the quality of the domain. I just don't see them using this domain in 10 years.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, so in 10 years, you think people will be saying like, oh yeah, I'm using chat GPT. The model has completely changed. It's now GPT six, oh, one, F2. I don't care about that. I just know I use chat GPT and I go to chat.com to access it.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  I would just be pretty sad if AGI was at chat.com, right?

• 6:08John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's something retro about that. It's, it's kind of a cool throwback to be like, yeah, we're going back to the dot com era. Like, do you know the story of mt3.com?

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  MP3.com was like a dot com boom company that was.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  I thought I liked domains.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  I know. MP3.com was a bunch of guys in the, in the dot com boom. Basically, the business plan was Spotify, like music on the internet. But they hadn't really built out any infrastructure. They IPO'd the company and were worth like four billion on like, you know, 300K of revenue or something like that. Like the revenue multiples during the dot com boom make the Zerp era look.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  One of the greatest bubbles of all time.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  It's incredible. It was incredible. Um, I did, I, I did some digging on MP3.com.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's always trying to poke fun at bubbles. And I think they should be celebrated, right? Cause they're drawing that.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  Capex forward.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  And accelerating.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And clearly like with all these things, it's, it's always just a matter of timing. Like Spotify was the right solution at the right time. Napster was too early. MP3.com was too early.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  Kalanick had his spin on file sharing.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, he did, right? What was that called? Like Red Arrow or something?

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Ovitz was involved.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  They had a whole war.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. I had no idea.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Uh, Ovitz took old Hollywood style negotiating.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Into Silicon Valley, which was a big no-no.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Where basically, long story short, he had committed to, committed to funding the business. They signed docs and then he withheld wiring until the company was out of cash and then tried to renegotiate. And Travis did not like that and they got in this huge.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Hardcore.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Huge war. Um, now, now Ovitz is, is an awesome, super helpful angel investor.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  That's great. Yeah.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  I've been to his house.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. All, all's well that ends well.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  He learned that, you know.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  He's like, oh, I have to play nice and not abuse, uh, people.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Generational talent. Yeah. Exactly. Um, okay. Well, let's move on to the, the, the top story. We're talking about J D Vance's portfolio and career as a venture capitalist. Why do you think it was important to educate the world about J D Vance's private sector career?

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Look, I think, again, same thing with Trump this week. People really focused on his political career, less focused on his career as a technology entrepreneur and his success, you know, building social apps. You know, with JD, it's one of those things. We didn't follow the campaign much at all. We were focused on the podcast and driving returns across the portfolio. But we did notice at one point that Tim Walz was talking to somebody at a rally and said he didn't even know what a VC was.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  And it made me think that, you know, VCs have this aura, this mystique. They're so cool. They're powerful, right? And that makes it so that a lot of people that maybe aren't in our industry are, tend to be a little bit afraid of them, right?

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  If a VC walks in the room, you might, they might flinch. And so I think it's worth kind of breaking down that, that private sector career and just helping people understand venture capital and why JD would give, you know, millions of dollars to a company with no revenue and just a cool idea.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  Right.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is giving people an understanding of how venture capital works, right? A lot of people think JD Capital is a venture capitalist. He's putting...

• 9:43John Coogan?

  JD Capital.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  JD Vance.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  It's a Freudian slip.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  JD Capital is good.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  JD Capital, yeah.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  That's what Naria should be called.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  JD Capital.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  JD Capital. When he, when he gets out of the government, he goes back into the private sector.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he'll be back. He'll be back.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  JD Capital.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think people have this thinking that venture capitalists always deploy their own money.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  But oftentimes, it's only partly their money, so.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  So his fund was Naria. He's since stepped back, but Peter Thiel's a cornerstone LP and then, do you know Fallon Donahue? I think that's how you pronounce her name. She's really cool. She runs the firm now.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  With, I think, one other person. But they've done a bunch of deals. We should go through some of them. Acre Trader facilitates farmland investments, allowing individuals to invest in agricultural real estate. Amplify Bio provides advanced preclinical services to accelerate the development of medical therapies. Atomic Industries, who we actually know, develops innovative manufacturing technologies to enhance production efficiency and quality. Their whole thing is like reshoring domestic manufacturing.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  I think they're out in Detroit with a bunch of like huge machines. Aaron's always texting me photos of these like giant million dollar machines that he buys from like, you know, some Korean conglomerate or something. It's really, really, really sick.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think Aaron and JD were really early to trends that are now considered American dynamism.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  I was thinking about that, like.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Like, in many ways, his portfolio was.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  People often say like, American dynamism is just shorthand for defense tech, but that's not it. It's this whole, it's this whole like American heartland revitalization thing.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  And it's not.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  It was really about manufacturing.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  And only more recently has it been about defense tech oriented manufacturing.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. And like Founder's Fund has a bunch of vets there and has been like bouncing around that generally. And then Andreessen obviously like came up with the coinage for the word, but Naria is really the fun.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Own the brand.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. But Naria is like really the fun that like designed the entire strategy around that from day one, which is, which is fascinating.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think if you go back to JD's book, a lot of his investment strategy was oriented around revitalizing economies in America that were historically dependent on manufacturing, but that manufacturing got taken overseas.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a cool, it's a cool portfolio. Chapter assists in individuals in navigating Medicare options. Hello is a Catholic prayer and meditation app. You can just see that all this stuff is.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  Large business.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is all, it's all very like in theme with like his, his political platform. Another therapeutics company, Kira Therapeutics focuses on developing gene therapies for various diseases. Rumble, the video sharing platform that competes with Truth Social and actually got started.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Free speech social bet.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Like, I think the Naria Rumble deal happened like three months before Truth Social.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  And you could imagine how that would have played out differently if.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing that stands out to me is that it's not a really big volume of bets, right?

• 12:52John Coogan?

  No, no, no. I mean, the entire portfolio on their website is 10, 11 companies.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they have more.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  True anomaly is a phenomenal company.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder where they got in, got in on, on True Anomaly, because that's a multi-billion dollar business.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Last I checked, and my buddy Will is one of their biggest investors now, but he's personally put in nine figures.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  And then it says there in Strive manages investment funds. I think that's Vivek Ramaswamy's company, right?

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Unless there's a different Strive. I know that Vivek runs a firm called Strive, and it would make sense that they're like, they're aligned. And then Valuebase offers valuation services and financial insights to support business growth and investment. And so, yeah, they kind of have like a few different like areas of focus, a lot of bio, a lot of manufacturing, and a lot of kind of like, just like, you know, like the Catholic prayer app. It's more like traditional American values. It's interesting because no one, they're the only VC firm that's really like centered on a thesis like this, seriously. And like years ago.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Because it takes time to actually deploy. You can set up a,

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  You can set up like an American dynamism ripoff fund tomorrow, but you wouldn't have a portfolio of companies like this.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting that, you know, venture capitalists talk about, and founders talk about, I'm building and investing in the future that I want, right?

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of people are in VC are strictly chasing returns, right? If you're strictly chasing returns, the actual best place you could probably focus is crypto. Like the median crypto fund has like much better returns than the median venture capital fund.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  I mean, for a lot of times it was just B2B SaaS, you know? It was like, there was this massive software boom, and the number of unicorns and decacorns that came out of B2B SaaS is just like,

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  Undeniable.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  It's undeniable. There's just so many opportunities to hit her. As opposed to, you look at aerospace, there's like one company. You look at defense, there's like one company right now, like.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and I think that, uh, we don't discuss politics on this podcast, but a lot of people could do a political analysis of this portfolio and try to poke holes in it and say that what he's doing is a bad thing. But I think if you go line by line on this, every, pretty much every single product has potential to benefit every American.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, even if you're not Catholic, if a hollow app has a million people that are using the product to help become, you know, better people and, and practice their faith. Like that actually can have a positive ripple effect, right? True anomaly is something that's helping America. They build hunter seeker satellites.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Oh, is that what it is?

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  So they send up satellites and then use those satellites to take out other satellites. Because you can imagine in a major global conflict, one of the top priorities for all nation states would be taking out

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Control space.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Enemy satellites and controlling space, right?

• 15:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  So all these things are, you could, you could make them political, but I would argue that many of those bets are generally like, they're all like America first in their own way.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  The other thing that I like about this is that there's like a pretty significant representation of like advanced biology.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  And there's this, there's a big meme, we saw it with that Eric Newcomer post that it's like, yeah, like Trump might be, you know, pro deregulation, but the right wing is like super skeptical of science generally. And that's true about some things, obviously RFK is out there talking about, you know, tallow fries and like seed oils and stuff. But I, I, I think that there's a, that there's like a silver lining there where, where you see that like there is some significant bio innovation that is, that's being embraced by the conservatives. And it's not just a, a party of like neo-Luddites when it comes to biology, even though the biology stuff-

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  It's not just build, build, build, frac, frac, frac.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Like there is some element of like, okay, yeah, the, like bio when done right is like amazing. It's just that it can't be done like carelessly or, or only for profit or only for-

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Only for pharma.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  So cheers to JD. The, the one thing that I think a lot of people are maybe a little shook by is just the, the, the hierarchy in the White House right now feels a little bit out of balance because normally you'd see, you know, the real estate guy being a little bit less prestigious than the VC. The VC should be on, on top there. So it's a little bit of a narrative, narrative violation that the, the real estate, the social media guy. Really, it's like you could think of Trump as like the investor with a podcast, you know? He was on The Apprentice.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  I would argue that-

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Hasn't yet done as much podcasting, so he's still in the second rung. But hopefully that flips.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  I would argue that the highest status- Occupation in the world is being the founder of a multi-billion dollar social media product, right?

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Because if you think about

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Zuck, Elon.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Zuck, Spiegel, right?

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Jack Dorsey, yeah.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  These are people, Jack Dorsey, right?

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  They're, they end up gaining the most amount of cloud and influence and power because they control what is effectively the, the printing press, right?

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. Extremely valuable.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, um, yeah, if you want to put, say that Trump's just a real estate guy, like some, some people like to say.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  It's like, no, he's a technology founder first, at least when you look at his, you know, personal balance sheet.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, reality TV star, you know, valuable. Um, well, let's go into brother of the week. Um, but first I need to tell you about Feedship. Established as the pinnacle of yacht craftsmanship, Feedship has been creating world-class custom super yachts for the global elite since 1949. With a legacy of unmatched engineering, innovation and bespoke luxury, Feedship is more than just a yacht builder. They're artisans of the seas. Whether you're envisioning a floating oasis for relaxation or a state-of-the-art vessel for adventure, Feedship turns your dreams into a reality through their meticulous attention to detail and unparalleled service. Because as they say, there are yachts and there are Feedships.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  If you're ready to embark on the journey of owning the world's finest custom yacht, visit Feedship.nl, that's Feedship.nl, they're in the Netherlands, uh, to start your bespoke creation today and tell them John and Jordy sent you. So on to brother of the week, Mark Cuban.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive in.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  We did get some pushback from a few of our listeners. Uh, we, we recently

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Promoted NetJets.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Promoted NetJets and

• 19:21John Coogan?

  We just want to say.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  We just realized that, that didn't, many of our listeners, you know, it's not super relevant just because they have, you know, multiple private jets already. Um, so we just wanted to acknowledge that. And, and if you do go to NetJets, just don't mention the podcast or anything like that. Just don't tell them we sent you.

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Mea culpa, it won't happen again.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Sorry about that.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Uh, so let's move on to Mark Cuban. So brother of the week, why do you want to give him brother of the week?

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so Mark Cuban has done a lot of winning in his life.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  He's a technology brother.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  But this week was rough and what I rough for him and, you know, I don't know how he's handling it. We've seen his name popping around group chats, you know, getting out his sort of frustration in different ways. But ultimately, I just think this is an opportunity to say to Mark and to every one of our listeners, it's okay to get knocked down. It's okay to fail. If you look at our next president, this is a guy that has been knocked down many times, has come up short many times. So, you know, there's been conversations of Mark talking about a presidential run. And I just don't, you know, whatever happened this last week, it's in the past.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Mark has, you know, created a tremendous amount of enterprise value through smart investments in his own companies. And I just, even though his Shark Tank portfolio is underwater as well, I just want to say to Mark, you're the brother of the week. Get back up, get back on the horse, keep going.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Lever up.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Your bet lever up is a good way to kind of make it all back.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  It's never too late to make it back, make it all back in one trade. So 2028 is around the corner. Feels far away right now.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  Start planning now.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Start planning now. Make it all back in one trade.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  And good luck.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  You know, the interesting thing about Mark Cuban is there's this very like, there's a clearly a rivalry between him and Trump. There's all those clips from like the old talk shows where they were kind of beefing with each other and talking trash. And they were kind of in the similar milieu in the sense that Cuban was on Shark Tank, like the number two business show essentially. And then The Apprentice was like the number one business show. And so they were both like these billionaire entrepreneurs with, but with big, big media presences.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  But I think what's, what's interesting and I don't, I don't know how accurate this is, but Cuban made his first big win on broadcast.com, which was radio on the internet. This dot com boom sold it to Yahoo for I think $8 billion.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  And it, and the product never went anywhere. Like Yahoo obviously declined and broadcast.com, I think either shut down or just the, the product never really like realized that valuation.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  But it's interesting because like you could.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  He, you could almost say he's a godfather of podcasting.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, in many, in many ways.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Which is honestly maybe what he should do to rebrand himself now.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Big loss is to say like, all you people talking about me on podcasts, like I created you.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm your grandfather.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  And, and but the really interesting is that like throughout the, uh, the, the two thousands and twenty teens, he was almost too early to internet content.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Cause he started this company in like, I think ninety seven and sold it in maybe like ninety nine or two thousand. Um, but it was too early. Meanwhile, during that era, Trump is just completely ignoring the internet, doing the apprentice, just doing traditional media up until literally this election where he pivots to the podcast strategy and it works really well. Um, but it's just, it's just so fascinating that like, you know, like Trump kind of like got the last laugh with, with Cuban and like won this like memetic competition.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  But only because Cuban, not because Cuban was too late to a trend, it's because he was almost too early.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  It, it, it's very, very, very interesting. Did you know that Jason Calacanis, uh, his first company was Mark with, with Mark Cuban? Either like Mark was like the investor or like a co-founder or something. And then they sold that like blog company. And so they like go like way, way back. It's fascinating.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Did Mark ever go on All In?

• 23:32John Coogan?

  I think he did. Yeah.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  And there was, and, and there was a big like kerfuffle over it because, um, uh, I, I think like Jason was like teeing him up for stuff and he was beefing with Sacks and there was like some sort of like debate over it. Uh, but Jason was framing it as like, you know, we're being more balanced here because we had Trump on, we'll have the, we'll have the Kamala surrogate on, uh, which makes sense, but, um, but yeah.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, Mark's gonna get back to winning soon.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  I can feel it.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  I think so. And I do think that the, uh, the Shark Tank format is underrated. And I, I, I've talked to a lot of people who are in business content, maybe they have like a podcast, like a business interview show and they've said like, oh, I want to do YouTube and I want to be like the Mr. Beast of like business on YouTube.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  And I've always told them like, the format is Shark Tank.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  You need to do an episode where you're giving away money at the end of the episode every single time. It's very expensive because you. Actually have to be giving money away, but that's the way the Mr. Beast model works.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  You have to watch to the end because you want to see who wins.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Like so many of Mr. Beast's formats are just, it's just American Ninja Warrior.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Adapted for YouTube.

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, now we've been, we've told enough people that they should do that and they haven't, so.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  Maybe we have to do it. Well, yeah, but, but no, no. So we're not going to do the Shark Tank. We're going to do the Apprentice.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Did you see the comment?

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Someone commented on the show, how do I be on the Apprentice? Well, you gotta show some more hustle than just commenting. You gotta get in my DMs. You gotta fly to LA and.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Figure out where we record. Bang on the door.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  There's security downstairs, but if you're cut out to be on our show, you'll, you'll find a way through.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Hot tip, wear a suit.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  Wear a suit.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Dress code in this building.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  But yeah, I, I think, I think bring back the Apprentice for the YouTube generation. Bring back or revitalize the Shark Tank for the, for the, uh, for the YouTube generation. The Morning Brew guy was doing a version of.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  That was more like man on the street.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  It was man on the street, tell me about your business, 60 second pitch. But I don't think he was giving away money.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  The only problem with that format is I love business so much. 60 seconds is not enough, right? Like I want.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  It's gotta be the 20 minute, like the, the Mr. Beast format.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The funny thing that people don't realize about Shark Tank too, is that they, they record, I think with every company for like two, three hours.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  You know the trick, right?

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  They record for two hours. If you take the deal, they, they use the good clips.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  To make you look good.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  To make you look good. And if you don't take it, they make you look bad.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  And so you really.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  So the real thing, you have to take the deal.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Take the deal.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Drag.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Drag. I know the person you're talking about.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then after it airs, be like, you know, hopefully, you know, they can work it out.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  Make the deal happen, but.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Because there's such an adverse selection problem. Like, you know, the, the, the power law companies are not showing up to Shark Tank.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  It's also weird products that do well for Shark Tank.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Consumer stuff, right?

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  It's all consumer, but then it's, it's honestly a lot of, if you come out, it really is a reflection of the Shark Tank audience is more. Traditional America than any other sort of like business media like oriented audience. And so if you come out there with like some new CBD drink that's like replacing alcohol, like you're not going to see a single like sale from it because the audience just does not care. But I had a friend of mine years ago started a company that was during the sustainability boom, he made a collapsible metal straw that could fit into something that would be on your keychain.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  And for months afterward, after their Shark Tank airing, they would just see the sales uptick when when it would go live.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  When it aired.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Because people, I guess like mid would Midwest moms would just were like, oh, I'll take a straw that I can just like keep on my keychain.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. Save the planet.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Save the planet in the process. So.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  We should definitely take a company on Shark Tank.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Ideally, your gun store.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  I know I'm like, I'm like trolling you. I know it's like a real business, but I'm like, I'm like, we need to take, we need to take early through Y C and we need to get it on Shark Tank. I know it's a real company. It's very disrespectful to joke about that.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  No, I think real, I think real companies, if the audience is relevant to that company, they should. Imagine, yeah, customizing a firearm on the on mid show, you know?

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  It's fantastic.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  So cheers to Mark Cuban. You are one of the few brothers of the week so far, but soon to be joined by a legion of other technology brothers. Should we move on to some, some, some posts? The timeline.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  The timeline.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  Timeline. So Trung Phan says, if you need a doom scroll break, check out my new podcast, Caffeinated Deep Dives. One, drink three coffees, maybe a scoop of C4. Two, read a book. Three, press record for an hour. The first two episodes are here. iPhone and Calvin and Hobbs. Oh, so this is like a real thing. This is not like a joke post.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  No, he's a ship poster, but no, this is, this is real. It's something that Senra has been pushing to do for a while, which is a long form podcast. And while you have Senra focused on founders, you have Business Breakdown focused on

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Businesses.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Businesses. You have Invest Like the Best focused on capital allocators. And now you have Trung, you have Technology Brothers focused on the timeline. You have Trung focused on individual products, which I think is interesting.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  Because everybody knows Apple, the company and the founding story and all that stuff. But I actually don't know the details of the iPhone, right? I know some high level stuff.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  I actually, you know, I know quite a lot of details, but there's like a whole layer deeper that you can go on all these products. And the stories behind them and the individuals, right? Cause like, it's not just like, it wasn't Steve Jobs that built the iPhone, right? There was hundreds of people that played a critical role

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  in building that. So Trung, Trung's amazing.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  I'm gonna follow this right now. This looks good.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  Trung's amazing, longtime quality poster and writer. And generally, I think it's easy for posters to get caught up into like toxic timeline drama. But Trung has always

• 30:00John Coogan?

  He's done a good job.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  stayed above it.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  You know, managing his empire.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  I like his first review on here. Smart threads, dumb memes and entertaining podcast. That sums Trung up perfectly. Well, I'm looking forward to listening to that. Let's go to Sean Frank.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Sean.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Friend of the pod.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the pod.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Quote, "Yeah, just go ahead and 40x budget starting 11/6. Me to my media buyer."

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so Q4 is always challenging for consumer brands because CPMs go through the roof.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Because of Christmas.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  The cost of getting in front of each incremental potential customer goes way high. And then when you combine that with the election cycle, which increases spending, it has like a whole new group of people that are coming on. And spending super, super, super aggressively.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, they spent.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  In a super tight.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Literally a billion dollars.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So now you're not just competing with other brands. In your category and other brands on the platform, but you're competing with this new elephant in the room. Which is various political groups competing to drive voters to make certain decisions.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  And so it's very much. The second that the election ends, I think Facebook actually has a policy that says you can't create new political ads now. So you can keep running old ads.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  But they wanted to prevent people from using, if the election were to have gone differently and there was more drama and controversy.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Oh, use it to fundraise.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, they, yeah, they didn't want people to basically use it to manipulate public opinion like.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  Hey, like Kamala stole the election.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Or Trump stole the election and then it's sort of like, yeah, Facebook doesn't want anything. And so if you're a brand like Sean, Sean's company, The Ridge. And you're seeing good performance during the election. Connor runs there, all of their, is their CMO and is the best performance marketer that I've ever known or worked with. He was probably seeing solid results even during the election. But then when CPMs drop like.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  They're gonna be incredible.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  Could drop like 50%.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  And so you just wanna just absolutely send it because you have from now until Christmas or December. Typically, it's like December 20th is when like sales start to fall off a cliff.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  I mean, I remember talking to the Pebble guys. Do you remember this watch, the smart watch, the precursor to the Apple watch? And they, it was a pretty big business. I feel like they were doing like $50 million in a year in sales, maybe more.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Dot com of smart watches.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was rough. But yeah, I mean, they would do like 90% of their revenue in December.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Because it was just like a gift and that's the, and that's the nature for a lot of these electronics companies. And so like you, it's just like you build up your inventory, you build up your ad budget and you gotta be able to make a decision like this.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  So we're launching.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  400, this isn't a joke. Like this is actually what he's going to do.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something like that. We're launching Aurora on November 21st and we've been. Running campaigns to acquire, you know, people that are submitting, using our Aurora.com to do a water report. And we've been seeing fantastic results, even during the election cycle. And now we're doing the same thing. Budgets went up dramatically. Uh, basically yesterday, so.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  That's great. Amazing. Let's go to Wyatt Cavalier. Oh, what a great name. You know, Wyatt is a cowboy name. Cavalier literally means like crazy.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Wyatt Cavaliers posting again.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Fantastic. He says, I'm a single issue newsletter voter. Whichever of Beehive and Kit lets me upload and attach web P. Files first gets all my money. And I think, are these the two founders of the two companies?

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Saying CC to an email.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  CC to the CEO, like company to CEO.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so the reason this is interesting is, uh, Kit, Kit was originally called ConvertKit.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  Original build in public.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, build in public, uh, you know, they like, literally, I remember like years ago, they had a dashboard with all of their metrics.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  And I think that there's this thing that happens where build in public is cool because you get a lot of attention.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  And, and sort of people are patting you on the back like you're a legend, but, um, the, the problem is that everybody was looking at that business being like this business raised zero dollars.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  And does really well.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Pretty much a commodity product, right? It's not easy to build, but like anybody can kind of like spin up the ability to send, uh, you know, SaaS product to send, uh, emails. And what happened is Tyler, who was at, um,

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Dank. Yeah.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was at Morning Brew. Yeah. So he was at Morning Brew, working on products, like literally building. And so he realized there was this white space around a more enterprise creator. Uh, ConvertKit was more focused on creators and, and people like Tim Ferriss and things like that. He realized there was a white space of building like much more enterprise tooling for people that were, I'm running a newsletter, but I'm running a business.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  And he's taking the exact, he's taking the exact opposite approach. I remember meeting, uh, I met Tyler in Miami in 2021 and, um, credit to him. I didn't under, I didn't see that white space at the time. I should have just backed him because he was like much more knowledgeable in the space. Um, and he's taken the exact opposite approach as ConvertKit, just raised like. Pre-seed, seed, series A. I think they maybe have already done their B. Tier one investors all the way through, like, just like absolutely. The business is crushing. They're doing over a million a month. They will, I would imagine they'll be bigger than Kit or ConvertKit within the next 24 months, maybe even.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  And there's probably so much energy in the employees. They're seeing their stock get marked up. They're a talent magnet.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is Dank is really good at Twitter. Nathan, the other founder, is really good at Twitter.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Oh, really? They're both good?

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, I think that Nathan was doing it in his own way, like, the sort of build-in public. Like, in the hacker way. Dank is much more like, full speed ahead, I'm gonna publish my investor updates. He's doing it in his own sort of lane. But the challenge when you have two companies that are both good at one marketing channel is it really does. I'm sure it sucked the sort of wind out of Kit's sails where they're like,

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  this was our biggest acquisition channel. Now there's another person in the room with us yelling to all the same customers. And you see it in tweets like this where people are literally just saying like, alright founders, like, fight for my business. And then they have to fight it out on the timeline.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Dank even says like, I think we were able to get this live today, but how much money is all? Like, haha, because it's like, if this guy's like, I'm willing to pay 50 bucks a month. It's like, well, I'm not gonna do it.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:48John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Let's go to Mike Solana, quote tweeting Adam Rubenstein, things tech time. So, the New York Times tech employees demanded unlimited break time, pet bereavement. It was a big meme. And it was seen as like, kind of ridiculous going into this election. They were demanding other things, but the timeline really focused on the most ridiculous things. And so Solana says, New York Times writers, dark days, a fascist dictator on the rise at home. And we will surely be imprisoned if we can't stop him. The fate of the world hangs in the balance. And then the NYT tech union says, my goldfish died. I'm going on strike.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  So, here's why this is funny. So, the tech world has had beef with the New York Times forever.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  I wish I could go read the New York Times the day that I was born, because they were probably like bashing some like dot com era founder. And so that's just like, that's. That's been forever.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  The irony of it is New York Times is so anti-tech that even their own tech union is rebelling.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  Within the company on the most important day, week of the, of the New York Times' entire, like, whatever, this decade arguably. So the infighting, shout out to those, to the tech workers in the New York Times, you know, besides the sort of more meme-able things that they're asking for.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's interesting is like, the website stayed up, like even though they were maybe on strike, like, the needle was working.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  They're too good at their job.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  We didn't hear, yeah, we didn't hear anything about like, oh, like, the, the New York Times site's like unreliable or breaking.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  It's because they were just, they have the polymarket API, they're just feeding it in.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  Just like polymarket minus 10.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:34John Coogan?

  Just like hardcoded adjustments.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Elon Musk says, "I'm doing a digital town hall on X tonight at 8:30 Eastern Time," and this is on the 4th, which is Election Day, or was it Election Day the 5th?

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  I think it was the night before.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  So it's the night before. And the top comment is, "Can you buy Canada?" Oh, I guess this guy's probably in Canada and is like, "I want to join the team."

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I think.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  How do you get the X emoji? I, I need to figure out how to do that. I really like the way that looks. You just have to copy and paste it. It's just some icon. I thought it was something where, you know, it was like hardcoded in where if you like, did some sort of code.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there's a character combination.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can get that. I gotta get a shortcut for that on my keyboard.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, 47 million views, 191,000 likes, like, just so, it's phenomenal.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  So the reason that I included this, even though you could, somebody might say it's political and we don't discuss politics, is that what Elon is doing and trying to do with America is not political at all. It's, it's actually applying the same methodology that he uses for company building.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  Which is progress, being capital efficient, all these other things.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Accelerating timelines, all these things. So I do imagine after we make the moon a state, Canada would be another good target for the United States. I think it's a long time.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  Greenland and Antarctica, low hanging fruit.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the pod, this guy Sam Poirier,

• 40:09John Coogan?

  He's Canadian.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  Was, when we were at Sandra's event, was talking about

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  just wanting,

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  basically that like, Canadians are getting so, at least people in Quebec are getting so sick of how things are being run that even they're thinking about, you know, separating. There's been like a separatist movement, I think, within Quebec for a while. But anyways, long Canada, if we can, maybe the play is a long Canada now, if Elon's gonna turn, there's a lot of land in Canada, you can do a lot of rocket launches.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, I didn't listen to any of the live streams. I used to listen to Clubhouse all the time, but I haven't listened to a lot on X, but maybe we should host some. I think it'd be fun.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  If only they're, they weren't prioritizing XAI so aggressively.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Oh, is that what the top livestream is usually?

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's more like,

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Oh, you just get thrown into a Grok flow instead of a Clubhouse flow.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, I don't want to be in Grok. I'd rather, like, there's too many.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it has some cool features where like, if me and you were doing the show on X space, like a livestream, we could highlight a tweet and then everyone who's looking could see this, the tweet that we're, the post that we're like talking about at the time. And I think that's like, that's probably kind of cool. I know there's some people that have growth hacked it like crazy. That guy Mario Newfall, I think, is like, everything's like breaking news every two seconds. But there's a lot of people that have like,

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  Mario walks so we could run.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 41:41John Coogan?

  Well, the P God says, I'm hitting this at the next closing dinner. And it's, uh, three football players doing, uh, some sort of handstand or headstand.

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  This, this is something that looks really good in slow mo or pictures. But if you actually see them do it live, it's sort of like a little bit silly looking because they're doing like a headstand with other hands. But this was more, I think we need to bring back showboating to the workplace.

• 42:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, you know, you know what?

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  Elon hit some pretty crazy, like.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he does that. And he's good with like the iconic like sync day, bringing the sync in, like creating these like viral moments, dancing.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  You need to be creating viral moments in the workplace.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Well, um, the, maybe we just need to return. I was, uh, I was getting coffee with, uh, the head of investment banking at one of the big tech investment banking firms. And, um, his office did not have a square inch of bare table because he had so many deal toys. It was insane. Every single, every single surface was just covered with.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  I've always thought that.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  We need deal toys for venture. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, people do it, but then it gets really embarrassing because you have to throw 90, 90% of them away. But it's like, oh, this one's really embarrassing. But with investment banking, it's like, even if you take a company public and it didn't do that well after, it's like, you still made a hundred million dollars on that deal. So like, go off.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  2021, uh, holiday gift from a venture, unnamed venture fund was a bottle of wine that just said liquidity event on it. Which was, which was great. I kept the bottle.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's nice. Yeah.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Great, uh.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. We've had a bunch of VC firms reach out about doing custom branded nicotine pouches as gifts. But that's very like temporary. Like you're probably not going to keep.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  That's just more like performance oriented.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Something you want in the office.

• 43:24Jordi Hays?

  You want to give that portfolio company an extra little push.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  But for this, I mean, we have the framed hundred dollar bill. We should definitely frame our, our first ad deal, which was at a 300, uh, $3,000 CPM.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Um, although we should stop building in public. We should just insist that we're the most profitable podcast.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  Figure out that we're charging $3,000.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  CPMs.

• 43:43Jordi Hays?

  Three CPMs. We're going to invite a lot of competition.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Uh, there's gonna be a bunch of knockoffs. I can already feel it. Um, but, uh, but we should do more deal toys. I mean, I love the YouTube thing. Like when you pass a hundred thousand subscribers, they send you a plaque. That's cool.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  That's probably the best thing YouTube's ever done.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  They send you, yeah, yeah. That was really, really smart. It's like, kind of like a deal toy. And I was thinking-

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  It's proof of work.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, but, but like more companies should do this. Like, uh, even just for Lucy, like I was looking through some of our top customers who have been with us for like eight years, no, no stop. And it's like, I haven't even thought to like, send them a T-shirt. Like I absolutely should do that. It's like, it costs nothing. And it's like, just a thank you. But you could get so much more creative with it than just a T-shirt. You could give them a deal toy or something, or something really interesting.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. With the DocSend, like, uh, like you, you send every potential investor VC a deal toy being like, I, I, I got to glance upon the series B DAC in DocSend.

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Regardless, and then they just have to deal with this like-

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  Physical object.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Physical object and do they throw it out? What if they didn't do the deal? What if they got beaten out? But it's gonna stay in their mind. It's gonna stay top of mind. Cause they close that DocSend tab, they forget about your company. But if there's a deal toy sitting there-

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  Shows up at the office.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Shows up at the office and it's this glass monument.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  Mischief did the reverse deal toy where they made, they did a drop once that had miniaturized versions of, of products that failed.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw that. I always think that's- I love, I love mischief, but I thought that would, that, that like, the whole like-

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  You need celebratory stuff, not dunking.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Being obsessed with like the failure. It is, it is very funny, but, uh, it's, it's a little, uh, it's not as exciting as, as, as the, as the good stuff, the good stuff.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot, a lot, a lot of VCs do get artifacts from, like, uh, a lot of SpaceX investors have like, like cool model rockets and stuff that have been given out at various times.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Next time-

• 45:36John Coogan?

  And roll has like swords and stuff.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Pre-IPO rounds, VCs should give their founders, uh, like miniature feed chips, you know?

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. There you go.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  That kinda like lean into there. Just like a little model one. Which is like, that's, you're so close to that.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  I feel like Nikita should give a model G-Wagon to everyone that hits number one on the app store, who he consults with.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  Now, everybody that spends a year with him on intro.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Thank you for the G-Wagon.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  Gets the toy G-Wagon. Um- Let's go to Sven, I think. I don't know how to pronounce that. Jai Sven Lee says, "Discipline is for those who lack obsession." And it's a beautiful skyline photo with a screenshot of a, or a photo of a MacBook with some text on it. What does it say? The original something of trading. I don't know. Did you, did you?

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  So, this is a little bit of a hustle porn post, but the reason that I included it is that I think that the, if you're somebody that gets, when somebody's posting about, "Here's my knowledge stack. Here's my second brain," all this stuff, and you're starting to obsess over note-taking apps. There's probably something, that's probably, um, the reason for that is that you don't actually care about what you're working on, right? It's, it's.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  You have to do, you have to expend a lot of willpower.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you, if you're thinking about, "Oh, I need to have more discipline." You just don't care about what you're working on. Like, I don't, it is not hard for me to roll out of bed and come here and record the podcast, right? Like, I don't, last week I had to drive through 100,000 people to get here, right? I even, I even destroyed my tire to get here. Yeah, I had to replace it.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, uh, and so, so yeah, it's, it's about, um, obsession brings discipline, but not because you're disciplined, but because you're obsessed, right?

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you should just be obsessed first. Just find something that you're obsessed with first. And then, and then the discipline will come naturally, because the energy will come.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  Warren Buffett would, would use iPhone Notes app, stock.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Right? A pen and paper.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's not getting crazy in the.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Fourth brain.

• 47:46John Coogan?

  Fourth brain. Second brain. Third brain, fourth brain?

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's good. I, I've, I've spent very little time in the, in the productivity world. The one thing that I did get, I did adopt and I like is Inbox Zero. I do inbox zero where everything gets archived or replied to or delay send or remind me later and then and then like I just I just know that if it's in my inbox, I need to get to it at some point and that becomes like the task.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  See, I'm obsessed.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  That works.

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  I have 2,500 unread texts.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:18Jordi Hays?

  And I always reply to the ones that matter to me. So.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  So I don't, I don't worry about by trying to get to inbox zero with my texts at least.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  I would be dealing with a lot of things I don't care about.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  Really. So, uh, yeah, just.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, it just becomes completely unmanageable. I was, I've talked to, I was talking to a billionaire a week ago that, uh, uh, lost his email because he just got too, a beaner. Yes. Uh, because he, uh, he lost, he basically lost his email because there's just too much. So he can't just, he just can't do it at all.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  And then lost his texts because he's just got too many.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Trump, you said, prints out, gets his email printed out for him.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Exactly. And at the very least, like the printer is a little bit slow. So you, people can email you faster than you can print them. So there's, the, the printer is a rate limiting factor. You can only see so much stuff. Maybe it runs out of ink, maybe it runs out of paper. Eventually you're going to have to see that. There's going to be some natural.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  President and print them out for you.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's going to be some natural prioritization. Um, but yeah, now, now he just, the only thing that gets through is Twitter DMs because you have to be a mutual follower. So in order to contact this guy, you basically have to say something interesting.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  So that he follows you and not, and not do something stupid where you get unfollowed.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  And blocked.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  And then, and then you can, and then you can contact him.

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:32John Coogan?

  And that's the only way. And that's the, that's the real cue of like how you get to him.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  That's good to opt.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  So, uh, let's go to Nicole Wiskoff. She says, uh, the founder of Wiskoff Ventures. She says, launching a podcast feels 10x harder than launching a VC firm. Humbled after incorporating and filming the first episode mildly concerning. And then Alex Conrad says, now you are finally a VC firm. And she says, don't jinx it, Alex. What do you think about this? Which one's harder?

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, depends on who you are.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  I think for, for you and our Vice President Ben, uh, who produces the show, um, this is like riding, like the production value with Technology Brothers is intense, right? There's lighting, there's, uh, heavy, heavy audio optimization.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Post-work on, um, this is not something that you're gonna do on, this is not your guys' first rodeo.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Right? And so, um, for you, starting up a podcast is like riding a bike.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, but to anybody out there that thinks, oh, podcasting's easy, uh, I would just say, you know, grab a mic.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  Grab a mic, give it a shot, right?

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do think that, that what, what makes it hard is that people don't think about the format enough.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  And, or what the show is.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  And so they wind up just doing kind of like, oh, I'll just interview my friends or like, it's like, an interview show is just one possibility.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Like, there are, within the, within the podcast world, if you actually look at the podcasts, there are structured interview shows, like Tyler Cowen, where he asks, he has every single question written out. He asks the question, lets them talk. Lex Friedman's very similar. Asks a question, lets them talk. Uh, Lex famously let Elon sit for like 15 seconds. You remember this? He's, he asks Elon a question and Elon just sits there and think, and there's just 15 seconds of silence on the mic. And everyone's like, wow, like he like really didn't jump in. Rogan, very different. It's a conversation. Rogan doesn't have a whole bunch of questions. He's just talking the whole time. So conversational versus like planned interview, one-on-one. Then there's group shows where it's a bunch of people hanging out, the Pod Save guys, that Smartless podcast is like four comedians.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  They still have guests on every once in a while. There's shows that don't have any guests like our, like ours. There's shows that are scripted, like, uh, you know, Serial on NPR.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  Sandra's shows are.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  Solo.

• 51:57Jordi Hays?

  Solo and like objectively, it's more of like an audiobook by the end.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah. And then there's also the acquired show where it's similar to Senra's thing, but two people and lightly scripted, like lightly planned, but not scripted word by word. But a lot of like the.

• 52:11Jordi Hays?

  But a ton of research.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but a lot of those like true crime shows are like literally scripted, like every single word.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  It's just an audio book.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  It's not, yeah, it's an audio book and then, and then how much production are you going to do? Are you going to use a sound mixing and bring in, you know, atmospheric sounds? A lot of horror shows and true crime shows will have like moody music to set the tone. Just all these different, all these different formats and, and figuring out like, what is the right format for your goal? What are you good at? Like actually thinking that through and then sticking to that instead of just being like, I have a podcast, it's a Zoom interview show with just random people that I meet. That doesn't really work. So until you do that work, you can just be like stagnating. And I've seen a lot of people launch podcasts and just struggle for years to get, you know, any sort of product market fit because they don't have to dial down.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  It should feel more like, um, same thing with companies where I give this example to founders where if you're,

• 53:06Jordi Hays?

  if, if you're working on a product that is not good or the market doesn't care about it or doesn't want it, it's going to feel like pushing a rock, like a really heavy rock uphill, right? Which is like almost impossible, like for a small team. If you're working on something that is getting real pull from the market, that's a good product at the right time, all the stuff. It's still really hard, but you're like pushing this heavy rock down like a, a small slope.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  Yes, like decline. And so, yeah, you have this momentum kind of like working with you.

• 53:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, I think that's.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  I guess the question for me is like, if you flip it around, like what do you need to get right to have like immediate product market fit for a VC firm? Is it just like a banger thesis or like, a lot of it feels like you have some preferential access to proprietary deal flow. And so it's very natural for you to raise the fund because. You were already seeing great deals and either angel investing or raising SPVs like very consistently.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nicole's on her, like, so people were trying to dunk on this tweet, which, um, which people want a reason to dunk on anything, but, uh, she's on her third fund, right? It's not her first rodeo. It legitimately is probably much easier for her to set up a venture fund.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  And raise money, raise tens of millions of dollars from LPs. So for her going and doing podcasting for the first time, I think a lot of people as adults stop doing new things. So everything they do is pretty easy. Like I make my coffee in the morning. I drive to work. I do my job that I've done for decades and it's all like very easy. And so it can be, and if you're naturally a talented person, it's usually a weird feeling when you're doing something and it's like hard.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  And didn't she also like publish like the exact funnel that she used to raise the latest fund and it was like hundreds of pitches?

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  And that's the equivalent of doing hundreds of episodes, right?

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. She's been very transparent.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  She's building in public.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, she's building in public, but doing it, doing it the right way.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Let's move on to 10A says, market caps of a few consumer companies that were all multi-billion dollar companies when they IPO'd in the 20 to 21 period. Sonder at $32 million now, Rent the Runway at 36 million, Bain Capital Company, I remember seeing them at Bain, Allbirds 88 million, BuzzFeed 96 million, and Wish at 167 million. And then Brennan says, market cap of Sonder is lower than the cash we raised for our Series B in 2017. Is this like the founder of Sonder or something? Like we raised?

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  He must, he must have, he must at least have been there. I don't think that's the founder.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I think, uh, there's some type of opportunity here. A lot of these companies are like, you have to imagine that Sonder. I don't know if the board and everyone would be able to approve like a take private, but last I checked, they had like hundreds of these corporate style like apartments that were basically like somewhere between a hotel room and an Airbnb.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  And there must be like some value in there greater than than that number. And so I think a lot of these are, I think like Wish and stuff like that, these e-commerce things, e-commerce seems like it's a really bad business if unless you're online, unless you have, unless you're Amazon or you have like a real brand. It seems like the the middle is like really, really bad.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Even if you have a real brand, like the brand, the e-commerce effort is merely a go-to-market strategy. And that's what we're seeing with Lucy where like we were 99% e-commerce for years. Now it's less than a third of the business.

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then Rent the Runway is one of those things like when it launched, I think that in theory for, in theory, I don't know if they have men's product. I'm sure they have men's products now.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Well, there's the black tux, which is a competitor for tuxedo rental online. And then I think they got kind of eaten up by those like buy and sell resale websites, like The RealReal, where it's like the economics, it sounds way more expensive, but it's actually pretty similar. If you just go to The RealReal, buy a dress for a hundred bucks, wear it, take it back, sell it for 50. It's like you've taken a 50% loss, but that might be the same price as renting the runway.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  So the big issue with Rent the Runway is that it is a lot, even though they've really dialed in like the receiving and dropping it off.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  The more money you pay for Rent the Runway as a consumer, the more work it is. It's like, oh, great. I have these like three or four things that I have to like take and pack up and put to UPS. And eventually they're looking at it as like, okay, I'm spending $2,000 a month. I could just like strategically build out my wardrobe and sell the stuff that I don't like, like you're saying. So I think it's one of those things like that is something that is probably great localized small business in New York, for example, where if you could subscribe to a closet in New York where a woman could walk in, buy something, you're not buy something, rent three pieces that she likes, wear them, drop them back off, and it's like right in their neighborhood, that probably is like a pretty good business, but.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  You know, online, very logistics intensive, it just doesn't really make money.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  I remember my mom always saying that like, maybe it was like, the Italian way is to just have like, one incredible suit, instead of like 10 cheap suits, and, there you go.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  This is a special occasion.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  And, and, and, and, and just always, essentially building a power law closet, where you don't, where you have very few things, but they're all extremely nice, and you take very good care of them, and you repair them, and they're repairable, because they're made out of nice materials, instead of just buying fast casual, fast fashion, or whatever.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  I remember the mo- the distinct moment, I was probably like 22-ish, where I realized I'd stopped growing.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, wait, I can buy stuff that's gonna-

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, and effectively mentally depreciate it for a decade, as opposed to a couple months.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Um, let's go to SAR, he says, nice, because he's tweeting a picture of an interaction between Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. Uh, RFK is talking about how the Trump White House will advise all water systems to remove fluoride from public water. And Jason says, um, dot, dot, dot, science boy, can you vet this for me, question mark? Parenthesis, Friedberg. And what I love, so Friedberg responds, mm, insecure boy, why don't you use the internet to do some primary research yourself, instead of outsourcing your thinking? And it's this massive ratio of, you know, 9,000 likes to 900 likes. Uh, and it's funny, because it's like infighting, but what I love is that David Friedberg matched Jason's formatting

• 59:50John Coogan?

  to, like, it's pixel perfect. U M M, dot, dot, dot, three dots. Insecure boy, science boy, comma. And then even when they tag the person, Jason did, open parentheses, space, at Friedberg, space, close parentheses, and Friedberg does the exact same thing with Jason.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  He's precise.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  The, the attention to detail here is just fantastic. And I just like, was like, the, the mirroring of the, of the meme, it's like,

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's beautiful.

• 1:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here-

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  They've been, they've been beefing.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to celebrate. I don't think it's worth dunking on them or celebrating. Clearly, they're going through a lot.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Group right now. Sax is probably gonna, you know, it's possible he'll

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Secretary of State.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  And become Secretary of State, you know, who knows? There's a lot going on, but I think why I I thought this was relevant is one of the biggest reasons that we started this podcast is frustration that All In wasn't monetizing.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  And frustration from our friends that said, hey, we want to advertise to this group of smart pro-business individuals.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  And we can't get in front of them. Can you guys build a bigger podcast and All In that monetizes and we can sponsor?

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I think the big thing is, uh, if All In had sponsors and they were generating tens of millions of dollars of revenue, which they can and should, uh, they would not be fighting on the timeline.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  I mean, that could pay for a private research assistant for Jason to ask these dumb questions, too.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  They could have a vice president.

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  I don't think they do. I think they have like a producer. I think they have a couple of producers, but I don't think they have a VP yet.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  So if, yeah, just thinking if if I'm Feedship.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Feedship is sponsoring All In.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  And I see two of their hosts fighting it out. I'm like, hey, we're here to sell boats, right?

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  We're not here to argue and poke fun at each other.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  I think there's more to this story and I'm sure it'll come out.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, the the Sotheby's clientele, like you don't want bidders. You want you want them to be fighting with

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Over individual objects.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  With the paddles, with the auction paddles, not not not making a scene in the lobby. So, yeah, it's tough. It they almost waited too long and and you wonder like, could they monetize now? Or has the ship sailed?

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  Has the Feedship sailed?

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  Oh, well, let's move on to Kyle Harrison. He's at Contrary, right?

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08John Coogan?

  Uh, Kyle says, uh, VC, quote, "We don't invest in chat GPT rappers, founder. Our chat GPT rapper has gone from 150K to 15 million of ARR in 12 months. VC, will a valuation of 1 billion suffice? You know what? I'll just leave the valuation line blank for you to fill in."

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  So this was

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Haha, that's ridiculous. And also, is there still room in the round?

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  So so that was a perplexity subtweet, right?

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Chat GPT rapper, fifty million AR one billion. Yeah, okay.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, I would say VCs love to invest in founders and products that are genuinely loved. And, uh, people fucking love perplexity.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, it is a product that has replaced search in a small way with very, very, I don't think really anything has done that.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  In my history in tech.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:06Jordi Hays?

  So if if something has a something like perplexity has the potential to disrupt the greatest business model of all time being search.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Maybe they should buy search.com.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, search.com.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  It's not resolving right now.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20John Coogan?

  No one's using it.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, I think perplexity is a fair, uh, bet at any price in the range of of what he just described.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, bullish on chat GPT wrappers generally, not sure if they're always a good fit for VC, but the UI layer is important. And and and perplexity just gives a different UI.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, a year ago, everyone was saying there's no value in the app layer. You're all getting commoditized now. You know, this, I think this tweet was in response to OpenAI rolling out Web Search.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  But people are still using perplexity.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Jordi Hays?

  I remember at the election party that we were at, everybody was either they had polymarket open.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Yep, or perplexity, always, yeah.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  And it was just like much better sources of information.

• 1:04:06John Coogan?

  And it's interesting because, I mean, perplexity is one hundred percent making more money than MP three dot com.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Ever did. And and and and a lot of that's just the cultural shift of like, yeah, when you launch a product, charge twenty dollars. Actually, the founder of perplexity was on, I think, Lex and was saying, like, I wish chat GPT had done forty dollars a month. Because we just we just copied their business model.

• 1:04:30Jordi Hays?

  My only critique of perplexity is I haven't, um, I've never gotten an upsell.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:04:37Jordi Hays?

  I've never gotten pushed to give them money.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Jordi Hays?

  I use the product pretty frequently.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  I I used it a little bit. I kind of switched out of it. I had a problem with their voice dictation pro- product where basically sometimes you could use and chat G P T has this too where you can use whisper to transcribe something into text and then it becomes a text interaction or you can open up their voice assistant and then you're talking to the A I and it's not printing it out in text for you. I like the text interactions because I want to see tables and data, but I want to talk to it. And so if that flow is confusing, it like really breaks my experience, but that's probably a little bit niche.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Um, let's go to Lindy Man. Actually, we should probably skip this guy. He hates me.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  He hates you?

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  But how to how to go?

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, what what's the tweet?

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  Uh, it says gambling is so normalized now. People are casually betting on the election. Uh, it just took a few years after they made it legal. American society is perfect for betting lots of money, lots of people sitting at work wanting some action.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is this might be how you your Lindy Man redemption because he would appreciate that we're sitting here in what looks like a newsroom.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  I hope so. I hope so. Um, Paul, if you're listening, unblock me, man. I really like your posts.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so yeah, American society is perfect for betting lots of money, lots of people sitting at work wanting some action, right?

• 1:06:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  And that was all leading up to, yeah, I think people need to see any type of betting as as much as it is a financial activity, it's entertainment, right?

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  So when I angel invest, that's an entertainment product for me, right?

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm giving you a lot of money.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Without the ability to get it back, except if you do super, super well.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:23Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna get updates every single month.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Until something happens.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  It's like the most expensive premium newsletter.

• 1:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  The the investor, the investor update is like the best subs, the most expensive sub stack.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  It's a one time fifty K fee.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I just like that we're now getting betting products for everybody, right?

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Jordi Hays?

  If you're a technology brother, you can angel invest.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  If you're a DGEN, you can do sports betting.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Sports betting.

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  Intellectual, you can bet on markets.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  You can do pump fun.

• 1:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're a real DGEN.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  Really, yeah. I mean, the DGEN levels are just 25 deep.

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  You can go to, you can be betting on like Candy Crush.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the really degenerate is like

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Flipping a coin.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Going, is like having like your 10 screens and going long corn futures while you're betting on like Chinese tennis.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's great.

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  So, uh, Krimiu says Elon starts his surprise Joe Rogan appearance by mentioning that he's one of the top 20 Diablo four players in the world. And there are only two Americans in the top 20. And David Ulovich quote tweets it and says, "I'm pretty sure Travis Kalanick was the number one Wii tennis player in the world for a period of time when people played Wii tennis."

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  There's a whole story of him playing left-handed with some VC.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, faking it.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Faking it and smoking him still and just being like.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  Oh, he wasn't even playing with my correct hand. That's just so, it's just so funny because like Diablo, I get it. It's like, kind of like a hardcore game.

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Wii tennis is like, just like, it's like a silly game, you know?

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that's the thing. You think that when I play Wii, it feels like a joke.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Because everything feels like you're in a big cartoon.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  But Travis had figured out that there was actually deep skill in the game. And I think that SBF, when he would be playing League of Legends while pitching, smogging your VC by playing left-handed in Wii tennis and just smoking them over and over, that's cool. Just going and playing some random.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  And he was bad.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  SBF was bad. He wasn't one of the best.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  If Sequoia had figured out that he actually wasn't even good at the game.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  They probably wouldn't have invested, but.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I think so, the reason that the quote tweet there brings up the fact like somebody analyzing the fact that Elon is just spending a lot.

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Probably using an army of people to play for him. So he just gets to play with all the other top players. And apparently if you're playing with other top players, you just rank up a lot more quickly. I think that this is a risk, um, uh, factor for Elon's reputation because he, the number one way that, um,

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Elon haters try to discredit him is by saying he didn't build rockets, he didn't build Axe, he didn't do all these things. And so to now be publicly like being like, I'm the top 20 Diablo player in the world, when in reality it's probably a team of people, is just like, what's the point?

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, I would honestly like flip it around and be like, you know, there's all this skepticism about like, does he have the ability to perform at the highest level? And he's like demonstrating that in a public place where like, if you think that you're better than Elon at everything and he just gets lucky, or he just has some sort of thing.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  That's a good point.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Okay, well then show up and beat him, you know, you could do that. And then Palmer says, "It's a very interesting phenomenon. I was briefly one of the top 10 players in Sword Art Online Memory Defrag back when it was still online, and my score in Pokemon Pinball for Game Boy Color was several times higher than the Guinness World Record." Wow, it's amazing. I don't think I've ever been like top 10 in anything.

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  See, that's cool. Now he has mod retro.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  I was, I played a lot of Counter-Strike and I got to, there's a, like a league called the Cyberathlete Amateur League and the Cyberathlete Professional League, but the CPL was in person. And it was too expensive, so I couldn't go because it was in like Texas and you had to bring your own computer. And it was just like, really tricky. But I played online and I was always like, there was open, which anyone could get into, main, which was like once you were doing well, then there was invite only. And I couldn't get into invite, I was in main. But then I switched games to Day of Defeat, which was a World War II like version of it essentially, slightly different. And that I actually got to invite in. I was never like really one of the top players, but I was really into that game and it was fun. But again, like it's hard when you don't have time. I don't know how

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  you, I don't know how you makes the time for it. It was always tough.

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  There was some Olympian that talked about this.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  And she was saying like she does Olympic skiing and modeling and she's still going to school. And the reporter was asking her like, how do you do all this? And the thing is, is context switching usually ends up being a break, even if it's very active. So Elon going from working on SpaceX to working on Axe to working on playing Diablo is actually like, it feels like a break to him. It's like refreshing it versus just doing SpaceX for 14 hours is actually harder to stay at a high level.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah. I like that. Let's go to Nick, Dollars and Data. He says, "Friendly reminder that Jane Street built a system to get the 2016 election results minutes ahead of the mainstream media and still ended up losing 300 million on the trade." And apparently, Sam Bankman-Fried involves his time at Jane Street Capital where he built a system to get the election results earlier, which is wild that he was there doing that. And I guess it was reported in Michael Lewis's Going Infinite. What had been a $300 million profit for Jane Street was now a $300 million loss. It went from the single most profitable to single worst trade in Jane Street history.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  So, it basically popped off of the news and then they held and didn't sell?

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm taking it from.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  That's what it seems like, yeah.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Profitable. Yeah, I just think that guy, uh, pretty...

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  They bet against the US market. So, they predicted that Trump would win early, but they didn't predict that the market would like the Trump win, which is interesting.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  You would think that you could interview 100 capital allocators that control like a large amount.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Maybe there was a, yeah, preference.

• 1:12:34Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe people didn't want to say at the time that they were pro-Trump and they thought it was gonna be good.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder, I know Citadel, like their global macro team has, uh, they do thousands of like CEO interviews every year. I wonder if Jane Street has a similar function.

• 1:12:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know the, you know the French quant?

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. He did his own polling.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  He did his own polling and what he was, he claims, I mean, who knows if he was just degenerate and now he's sort of like making it like...

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  Retconning. Oh, yeah, real data.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  But he said that there was a difference between, in polling, between who are you voting for and who are your neighbors voting for? And that gap was his edge.

• 1:13:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was what felt different this time around than 2020. I was seeing like MAGA hats in Venice.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  Or in like Santa Monica. And it's like, it used to be like, if you saw that, like that person would be getting yelled at.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  I saw, I saw Trump flags, I saw like a mini Trump rally of like 20 people with like a big Trump flag like in Pasadena.

• 1:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Even California apparently was, 40% of the popular vote in California went to Trump.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  Which is, everybody for years has been saying.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  It's supposed to be a D plus 27, right? Which is like, more like 70/30, I think?

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  Maybe even more than that?

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  It's wild. Anyway, uh, let's go to Austin Peter Smith. No matter who wins this election, I'm gonna build some B2B sass.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Underappreciated tweet, just 74 likes. This is a good one.

• 1:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, he, yeah, he's been building this, uh, tool called Howie for the last year.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Howie's a product that acts as like, uh, your secretary, basically. So the same thing that your secretary does versus he says, "Hey, John, you know, uh, this person would like to meet with you. Uh, can I schedule it for this?" Howie's like a digital version of that. Does that make sense?

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Okay. So, uh, you can CC Howie in on email and then it just says like, suggests times, it can coordinate back and forth. The person you're booking with can say, "Hey, uh, that actually my day changed around. Can you do this day?" And Howie will just handle the whole thing. So, um, it's basically making, uh, the Coogan secretary experience.

• 1:14:48John Coogan?

  Maybe they should buy secretary.com.

• 1:14:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  It's fascinating because secretary has become like, it was, it was branded as like low status to be a secretary. And so that got rebranded as an executive assistant. But if you think about the most high status roles in the world, the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary. Secretary, it literally means keeper of the secrets.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Secretary.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. It, it's the keeper of the secrets, apparently.

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  And, uh, like literally secretary, like the person in charge of that. So it's actually like a very high status word and it is non-gendered. And so maybe we should bring it back.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Let's go to Rasset says, "My post is the top post of all time in the r slash cursor." In r slash cursor, bro, what the fuck? Zero coding skills. My web app ranked number three on Product Hunt. Hi guys, I was laid off from my job. I don't know how to code. I decided just to build things with cursor, still learning, didn't really know what to build, so I just decided to build the most, something, something, something. And the, they don't even know about the viral tweet thing, LMAO. Huh.

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  This trend is awesome, right?

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Ideas guys.

• 1:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is that it's being easier and easier and easier and easier and easier to build software and just things in general.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  And so it matters more of your raw ability to execute.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  And pace.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  And even marketing edge, this guy's doing marketing.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Through posting.

• 1:16:11John Coogan?

  Yep. And I think the really, the really interesting thing is that like, I guarantee if, if this idea has legs, ranks on Product Hunt, he gets some early adopters, like, there's going to be real programmers.

• 1:16:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  It's going to be a tech company, there's going to be a lot of programmers, they're going to be using Cursor, there's going to be a lot of leverage there, but it's going to turn into a real software company. But you've just disconnected this need for the ideas guy to go convince a programmer to like, take a risk and build something for equity and something that they're not sure about. And so it just gets so much easier to iterate and test new ideas.

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:16:43John Coogan?

  Very bullish.

• 1:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Crazy example here, have a portfolio company that recently had, went to a hackathon.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Instead of going as a group, they had the CEO enter and the CTO enter and they both built individual products.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Jordi Hays?

  That both did well in the hackathon. Which, and the CEO didn't have any prior real, he had never been a software engineer at a company ever.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Jordi Hays?

  And now he's like competing against other like, regular engineers.

• 1:17:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  And winning.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is awesome.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Because at a hackathon, in the early stages, you're not solving really, really hard engineering problems. You're not coming in with like, oh, I need a new sorting algorithm or something. You're just like, I need to pull some code over here, some boilerplate over here, deploy this, like, just get something live that like, does the basic bones of the thing that I want to demonstrate. Is this valuable? Is this a product that people want?

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  So, side note, Cursor is the, uh, most painful miss of mine that I never took a pitch from.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  But I realized. Like about a year ago that the cursor CEO had followed me since like 2021.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Oh, so you could have got me.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Before the company started and I didn't have hadn't followed him back.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:52Jordi Hays?

  And I just was like, oh.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  So stupid.

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Great product.

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  Great product. Glad they're winning.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  I mean, another example of like a UI wrapper essentially, like, and it's actually model independent. I think you can choose whatever model you want. People like Claude 3.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  The fact that these apps are going model independent too, just shows that value will accrue to the app layer.

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  And not the sort of commoditizable.

• 1:18:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it like.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Language model.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The language model could be like the underlying technology in the same way that I think Netflix was built on GCP or AWS. And Snapchat was built on Google Cloud, but then they eventually built their own servers. The consumer doesn't know.

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  They don't care. James Stuber says, VC the other day told me, we've lost several really good founders to Factorio. They came back and just wanted to work in manufacturing, not SaaS. Do you think this is real?

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Do you think this is a joke?

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  This is a shitpost.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  It's funny though. It's like ayahuasca adjacent.

• 1:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  Like you either learn, you lose yourself to ayahuasca and you go off to be a hippie.

• 1:18:53Jordi Hays?

  I could see a SaaS founder playing Factorio and they're like, wait, I can like do the same. Use my same skill set of company building to like just play this game in real life.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Like that's what Aaron's doing.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Jordi Hays?

  He's just like playing a real life game of Factorio. That's what we're doing at deterrence.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Yep. I wonder if there's a like a dividing line between like the type of game that someone played as a kid. And then the type of career path they follow, like, is there a difference between like the shooter? Who's maybe more of like the aggressive sales guy versus the RTS games.

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  My parents were freaked out that I would, I liked Call of Duty as a kid because I.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Now you own a gun store.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but that was because, uh, and they were just worried that I'd just like get, uh, like want to go into the military and all that stuff. But little did they know, I actually played way more Starcraft, which is much more entrepreneurial, balancing, you know,

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Resources.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Building, resource management, conflict.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  So anyway, stark, long Starcraft players.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, long Diablo players now. I wonder if there's gonna be a boom in Diablo. We, we, we had, we had a hackathon or a LAN party at Founder's Fund and it was a lot of Halo, a lot of, a lot of Counter-Strike, a little bit of Smash Brothers. And I think there was maybe two people playing StarCraft, but StarCraft's a little bit harder to set up for his longer game, I think.

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Super long.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  But I could see the next one. I played a little bit of Diablo 4 because shout out Lulu Masservi. She gave me a free coupon code for it when she worked at Activision.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  I was like, thank you. But I played a little bit and I was like, this is like too much. I played Diablo 3. I never really played Diablo 2. That was like the one everyone loved, loved, loved, but it was like.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm waiting for another World of Warcraft scale game where it felt like World of Warcraft was the most deeply addicting.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Well, that's supposed to be Fortnite and then Roblox, right? Or Minecraft. Like Minecraft is very much the new version of that.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  World of Warcraft, I feel like had a lot of adults that were deeply addicted.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:20:53Jordi Hays?

  I guess maybe that's the case for Fortnite 2. I just am not, I don't know.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  It's maybe true for Fortnite. I think it's probably less true for Minecraft.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  With adults that are addicted to video games.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  But yeah, like, I mean, I guess they're making a Minecraft movie. They made World of Warcraft movie. So maybe it is pretty adjacent if they build it up. But yeah, I, I understand what you're saying. Uh, Grit Cult, who's been on the show before, uh, dumps a whole list of problems and solutions. Uh, the fertility crisis, the solutions have 10 kids, environmental crisis, buy a classic car, ownership crisis, become a landlord.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  You laugh, but it's, it's real.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  It's real?

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  It's usually more sustainable objectively to buy.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Because it's already, it's, it's not being produced by anything, right? Yeah, that's right.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and they last a long time.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  More sustainable than buying a Tesla. Yeah.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, not when Tesla starts launching V12s with gated manual shifters, uh, which is coming. Um, it's, it's the end of the arc for Elon very clearly. Uh, education crisis, homeschool. We know many people that do that. Uh, health crisis, gym obsessively, unemployment crisis, go in, go all in on crypto. Love it. Uh, everyone scared, over-leverage, lack of nutrition, steak and eggs. And then Jack Butcher says 100-year bull run.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  Any of these you disagree with?

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  I just like this because it's all about taking personal responsibility for the problems that you see in the world.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  So a lot of people think that there's a lot of problems in the world, like we should just do less. But the key is to do more, but do more of the right things.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, and all of these are things that you just do independently mostly. I mean landlord's a little tricky.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  No one's stopping you, like Elon talks about the fertility crisis and actively works to fix it.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Right, like takes personal responsibility. He's not just saying you have 10 kids.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Jordi Hays?

  He's having, he's having.

• 1:22:42John Coogan?

  And this is something we've seen with like the health crisis stuff. There's a lot of like, kind of like trad influencers that, um, you know, complain about like the fluoride or seed oils or all this stuff. But then like you meet them and they don't go to the gym and it's like something's mismatched here.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  You should start with yourself and like, and like at least solve the problem in your world.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  There was the one guy at Hereticon.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  And then your, and then your family, and then your community, and then the city, the state, the nation.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  But if you're just jumping straight to the nation, like you at least need to lead by example, right?

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Uh, one guy at Hereticon.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  One guy at Hereticon that was like giving a panel on like health and like the like alternative health movement.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  He like was 37, I guess, and straight up looked like my age. Like he, like I was like proof of work.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go, yeah.

• 1:23:25Jordi Hays?

  You had to respect it.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, be, be like that guy.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Is it Brian Johnson or Justin Maris?

• 1:23:30Jordi Hays?

  No, no, Justin Maris.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Justin looks fantastic.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Proof of body, very important.

• 1:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Proof of work.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, proof of body for, for any health claims, like.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  You, you have to be able to say like, okay, this person's recommending steak and eggs. Do I want to look like them? If yes, then I will listen to them. This is the Andrew Huberman effect. Chamath Palihapitiya says, these should return the exact same form of result, but they don't. So if you searched, if you searched where to vote for Trump, it would give you stories about the election. And if you asked for where to vote for Harris, it would give you like a, like an info form of where to vote. And you could just type in your address and it would immediately take you there.

• 1:24:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  So people were saying like, Google is biasing, uh, Towards Harris, they're being more helpful to Harris voters than Trump. Obviously, it didn't matter in the election. But the, the, the community note says, "The search results were different for Harris and Vance, because Harris is a county in Texas and Vance is a county in North Carolina, and it appears Google has corrected this issue." I do, I do want to give Google the benefit of the doubt here.

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  I just think that there was a-

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  I think there was so much scrutiny that they really, okay, okay, here comes the tinfoil hat. Here comes the tinfoil hat. I, I think there's so much scrutiny that they know-

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  I just think that there was quite a lot of examples like this over the last two weeks, so much so that it's hard not to wonder if the woke mind virus within Google is still not acting up a little bit, even though the spotlight is on them.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  That's all.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  It just seems like, yeah, if there's, if there's a whistleblower, there's so much scrutiny, like, they're trying to curry favor-

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can make the same argument that X is deeply political and up ranks, you know, certain ideas. So I think it's, I think it ultimately is happening on both sides.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Uh, let's go to Sean Purie. Uh, he says, host of My First Million, says, "The new bachelor party. Trip to Turkey with the boys for hair transplants."

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Where'd you get your hair transplants, Jordy?

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, locally, locally. Yeah, yeah, I actually get, I get weekly micro-transplants. Where they're, uh, they just take like a, you know, one centimeter by one centimeter and just transplant.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  Just a little bit?

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  It's more sustainable, you know, I never have to like go through the whole week. No, I haven't, haven't had to do this yet, although I-

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  You either?

• 1:25:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, uh, function, health tells me that I have like really-

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  Oh, you have the gene for it?

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  My hormone profile is conducive to hair loss.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  But my spirit is conducive to having great hair.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  So it's kind of like this, this balance between my hormones and the spirit and whatever. Um, but yeah, I haven't seen this yet. I do think that medical tourism is, is like a underrated trend. I think it's like pretty investable trend.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I knew some guys that were working on, on sort of Airbnb for medical tourism, which is kind of a cool concept where, yeah, if you want to go down to Mexico to like get some dental procedure done, there's some dentists down there that are probably fantastic, and there's a lot that are gonna jack you up.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, but knowing which ones are good is important.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  Knowing which are good and having that user-generated feedback.

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  I was talking to Justin Mayers about this with, uh- The like GLP ones were like widely available for like five years before they came to America. And a lot of rich people were going abroad to get them.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  And they're still really cheap on the black market.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  The gray market.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, very interesting. I have yet to lose my hair and I don't think it's genetic in my family, so I'm not super worried about it. But I did start getting a bald spot back here a while ago. And I was like, this is so weird. Like, I don't understand why I'm losing my hair back here. And what I figured out was that I was so, I was so interested in efficiency and shareholder value and just being on the grind and not wasting any time that when I got out of the shower, I would take the towel and vigorously rub my head as fast as possible to dry my hair in like two seconds. And it was ripping out my hair.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  No, babies get that.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  My three month old, my three month old has like-

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Cradle crib.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my three month old has a little bald spot.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, same thing.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's, here's, here's, here's, I should put the tinfoil hat back on.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's what the hair, a lot of the hair loss epidemic is driven by.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, lack of sunlight to the head.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Sunlight makes life grow.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Yep, but everyone's inside all the time, no one's working outside.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Overuse of artificial fluorescent lights.

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  Um, that you can offset.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Well, these are cinema lights, they're very high quality.

• 1:27:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, so we're good. Uh, wearing a lot of hats cuts off blood flow.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:28:03Jordi Hays?

  And then a lack of physical touch. So if you're a guy, go like this through your hair.

• 1:28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  I will just like massage my head multiple times a day.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, to stimulate blood flow because that's a huge factor.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Or if you're like down a hundred X on the trade, you're just like, ah.

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  You don't want to be pulling out your hair. You don't want to be pulling out your hair. Uh, yeah.

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, if you're a, a brother, um, physically or spiritually, give yourself a little-

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  I mean, it is, it, it does feel like the hair transplant thing is becoming more normalized, more democratized, cheaper, more reliable.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  It's not just King James that's-

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think we will see more people start to do it earlier. So you don't have those like billionaire transformations where it's like before money, after money. It's so obvious that they went and got their hair done.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Instead, it's like the person just doesn't lose- Their hair because they made enough money at thirty to like pay for the cheaper hair transplant that was like pretty reliable.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  But yeah, the hair transplant stuff, I mean, it feels pretty brutal. I know some people have done it and it's like your head's like bleeding for like days. It's like rough.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had a buddy do it and he kept leaving the house and I was like, dude, for all of us, just like stay indoors for like a few days, just chill, just relax, like you're gonna be back on on the road.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Nobody wants to see that.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  It's rough. Anyway, um, boys trip, sounds fun. I don't know.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  I mean, any excuse for a boys trip, but hopefully not like surgery and just sitting around like, you know, being miserable. I'd want to do something fun. There's so many other things you could do.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Go visit Feedship and start designing your custom yacht.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Eighth Century Woodchipper says, forget polymarket, here's the real indicator. Palantir Technologies jumped fourteen percent. The stock's over fifty dollars. Um, and was this, this was like right on election day, I guess.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, what was amazing about this election as somebody who appreciates finance was just how many different ways there were to bet on the market.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  Dogecoin.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Dogecoin was one, Bitcoin, Solana, uh, defense tech stocks.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Even Google went up four percent.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Even a big one was obviously, um, all the companies that are potentially impacted by tariffs, like Lululemon and things like that.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  Truth Social, the the stock got halted right before the election. You saw that.

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, I think there was a big, it seemed like with Truth, there was a big sell into the election, which somebody was like, let's sell the

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Before.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  You know, that basically, yeah, it's gonna get less attention now that Trump's elected and

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  Oh, really? You think that's what it was? It wasn't that they thought Trump was gonna lose?

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  I think you could argue that that was the moment of where people were pouring on investments because people thought he was gonna win.

• 1:30:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Jordi Hays?

  And it will actually could just trade down now that he's gonna be. President again and nobody's taking away his.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like live on every podcast and on X now.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Also, the fact that all the defense stocks pumped is interesting because there's this narrative that like the.

• 1:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dick Cheney endorsed.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, like Dick Cheney and the Democrats were going to be more pro war. And in fact, the right wing would be less pro war. So you would assume the defense budgets would get cut. But I think there's probably just like a return to the traditional balance with the conservatives still continuing to promote defense. And I think it's good because I love Palantir and I think it's important.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Let's go to Mark Sisson. Is that how you pronounce it? He says, the best thing to do right now is lift some heavy ass weight.

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Mark, don't know him personally, but total legend.

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  Early to a lot of these sort of alternative health trends and he has proof of body.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  The guy is jacked.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Six pack. I think he's in his 60s. He had started a company called Primal Kitchen.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  Which he sold. So he sold for hundreds, millions of dollars, great products. He basically took a lot of the sauces and other things like that that were unhealthy. Took out the seed oils, put avocado oil in, stuff like that. But I've seen him, he works out at the gym next to my house. I think he splits time between the West and the East Coast. But the guy is just like a living example.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, go say hi.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Living his values and well, no, when he is in the gym, last time I saw him, he's like the mayor, like everybody in the gym is like saying hi.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, like he's proof of work, the guy. Yeah, the guy's.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Also, just a good message. I mean, I think this was the fifth, so this was like election night essentially, or I think it was noon before the election. And so a lot of people are stressed. They're just going to be checking Polly market doom scrolling and he's just like, just go get in the gym.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Which is true. It's good. Just, just get those endorphins flowing.

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  It's important. Morgan Housel.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  What firm is he with again?

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Collab.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Collab Fund, is that right?

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  He's like.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  It's like a big deal.

• 1:33:06Jordi Hays?

  Done very well.

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's a writer.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  He's written a bunch of books.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  He's got some great books.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  He has a quote, "The polls don't tell us much. Let's turn now to the degenerate gamblers to see if we can learn anything." Seven thousand likes.

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's the thing about evaluating whether prediction markets worked.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  They were right this time.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  But even a day before, they were projecting that there was a forty, basically projecting there's a forty percent chance that Kamala was gonna win.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  And that was not the case, yeah.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I, I think this was a huge win for prediction markets from a liquidity standpoint and how much attention they had.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  And most importantly, they were more accurate than the polls.

• 1:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  You could just be one point over, but at least you're the most, it was the most correct source of information, but it was not perfect.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  That it was, and I was saying this, okay, I, I, I, I thought that Trump was gonna win.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:56Jordi Hays?

  But I also knew all my most degenerate friends were going real, that are very generally conservative. And were betting heavy on Polly Market.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  And I just figured that that would slant it more, but the election was such a landslide that maybe it was perfectly accurate.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  What'll be really interesting is if, is if in the future, there's a, you know, a prediction markets are split fifty-five, forty-five, and they get it wrong.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  Because I think everyone will be like, oh, it's worthless now, when really it's like a forty-five percent chance should come up every once in a while. Yeah. Especially across like, you know, if you test ten elections, like it shouldn't always be right.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  But, I mean, wha- what a win and, and just like incredible accuracy. And also just the fact that they, I think almost more of the value was this thing Shane was saying on, I think it was on CNBC today or, or some sort of TV spot. The founder of Polly Market was saying that like. Because polymarket was continuing to reprice the odds. They were able to effectively call the election like three hours before the news media. And the news media has this, they, it's, it's like, you could say all these different things about like conflicts of interest and who's doing what and biases and who likes who or whatever. But it's just a fundamentally different economic incentive.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  Like if you're, if you're CNN, you are incentivized to sell ads and get watch time and keep people watching. And if you're polymarket, you're incentivized for liquidity and providing correct prices. And so it's just a very different like incentive structure. And so the, the CNN coverage and the, and the mainstream media coverage was constantly like, well, you know, could still be a toss up. Like, don't turn this off. Like, let's go to this one district. Let's look at this.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  We were at, it was, I was standing between two TV screens. One had called it.

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Thirty, forty minutes before, which was Fox News.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  And MSNBC was just still just going, going saying.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  But at the same time, before you even got to the party, like three hours before any of them called it, polymarket was at like eighty-five percent for Trump. And it was like, okay, yeah, like unless something crazy happens, it's pretty much in the bag.

• 1:36:04Jordi Hays?

  Will was getting nervous because polymarket dipped like three percent.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, when, oh, it went from ninety-five to ninety-two and he was like, I'm panicking or whatever. But like, yeah, it's ridiculous. It just, just having that, having that early signal, even if it's just like three hours. And then I did see something where they had a screenshot of the polymarket map like a month earlier and it was dead on.

• 1:36:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I don't know if, um, I don't know if this made it into the stack, but somebody did an analysis of polymarket. And turns out like ninety percent of users had a negative balance.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  What does that mean?

• 1:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Like ninety percent of people that bet on polymarket in the last, this election cycle, lost money.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:36:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Just at various times?

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully it made into, uh, yeah, like maybe they were trading up. It's probably more like people were just trading in and out.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Um, yeah, who, who knows? But it's just, again, when the liquidity is like the stock market, if one person's winning, someone else is losing.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's winning big.

• 1:36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:00Jordi Hays?

  A lot of other people are.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Let's go to Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb. He says Airbnb just reached 2 billion guests. It took 14 years to get our first billion and only three more years to reach the second. Thank you to everyone for giving us a chance. It's amazing. I like this.

• 1:37:20Jordi Hays?

  This first comment.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  This is the first comment. Charlie Light says, "Congrats, Brian. The first 2 billion customers is the hardest in my experience. Smooth sailing from here on out."

• 1:37:28Jordi Hays?

  Charlie's actually a legendary poster.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:37:30Jordi Hays?

  He had this account that probably had a few hundred thousand.

• 1:37:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  So he's joking, but no, I think it'd be good to rank YC companies based on customers because there's like,

• 1:37:45Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if any other YC, is there another YC company that has more customers than Airbnb? Can't imagine.

• 1:37:52John Coogan?

  Coinbase would be really big, but not.

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Meta didn't.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  No, didn't do YC.

• 1:37:55Jordi Hays?

  YC or anything.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  There might be some company out there that's just like such a, such a general app that it's like.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  And the other, so I guess the other thing that is interesting about this is the real number of people that have been a customer of Airbnb is actually probably significantly higher because how many times have you stayed in Airbnb? And like you didn't book it or you booked it.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 1:38:17Jordi Hays?

  You had like four or five people like come with you.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  So it's probably more like they have like 3 and a half billion or 4 billion users. So, so yeah, pretty, pretty insane.

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And what a journey. I mean, during the COVID cycle, just like completely losing everything.

• 1:38:33Jordi Hays?

  There's a possibility, there's a possibility that at some point in history Airbnb will have more users than, than Meta or Coca-Cola because Airbnb is actually like very geographically dispersed. So like there's countries that run on Airbnb and a lot of like tourism runs on it. That will be using Airbnb, but they use some local social media and they have some like

• 1:38:57John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:38:58Jordi Hays?

  Off brand Coca-Cola.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  So, um, so yeah, getting to a tough spot where there's there the TAM, they've got, they've, they've almost gotten fifty, you know, they're, they're approaching fifty percent of, of penetration.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  I wonder if any of the other Airbnb stuff will pan out. They, they did experiences for a while. Did you ever see those? So you'd show up to a place and then you could have like kind of a tour guide recommend restaurants, kind of a, a, like a, an Airbnb native version of like when you stay in a nice Airbnb, there's usually like a book that you open up and it inside it has like recommendations of like what restaurants you should go to, but

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  Uh, have you used Turo? Turo is pretty cool.

• 1:39:38Jordi Hays?

  Before I could afford nine elevens, I would, I would, I, I, so Turo is hilarious because you're taking highly depreciating assets that are high risk assets in that a sports car and putting them on a website where the primary users are going to come joyriding.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, joyriding.

• 1:39:53Jordi Hays?

  And I just don't understand people that take a car like a Porsche and put it up there because the clientele that's actually renting were like twenty two year olds like me

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  that are, I was very respectful with the cars, but still like they're driving them to like drive them and put miles on them and it doesn't make sense.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Or, or just make music videos.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a house, a house you could have, you could have a million people come through a house and it would still appreciate, right?

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, people rent Airbnbs and throw parties. It's the same problem as like

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  True, but like there's something to be, something to be said of like if a house is appreciating five percent a year.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  And even if you need to put another

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  fifty grand into the house every year.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think like kind of, I guess like maybe the bull case for Turo is that a lot of the real serious, uh, like, like Turo managers, like basically run, run a business on Turo.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Similar to the way people run businesses on Airbnb. They know the, like the sweet spots, like the, the Porsche Macan is like a phenomenal value because I think you can get one for like forty five K and it relists as like a premium Porsche.

• 1:41:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  But it's cheap and same thing with like Corvette, uh, the.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is why hasn't.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  Cause it's like a mid-engine sports car, but you can get it for seventy K or something like that.

• 1:41:13Jordi Hays?

  Why hasn't Airbnb moved in? Have they?

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Into car rentals?

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Car rentals.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  Maybe it's just too different of a business, but it would be cool to just like fly in, do, okay, I got a car, go to this Airbnb, I do.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  That's an example of Airbnb should get air.com and then, and then do everything.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  That'd be cool.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  That's cooler than chat GPT rebranding is chat.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  My opinion.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  I do love that. I mean, I don't know if we talked about this, but Chesky wrote this post about how like everyone should do a demo day every year at a big company. You and, and when it was first proposed to him, he was like, we're Airbnb. Like, what are we gonna announce? Like, it's not like we release a new iPhone every year. Why am I getting on stage like Steve Jobs and being like, this year we're doing something different? Cause it's like kind of the same business every year, but it forced him to like think of ideas and get in the habit of driving towards it. It aligns the entire organization around like some sort of milestone, some sort of deadline, even if it's just shipping like their new, you know, fraud prevention service. It's like, okay, well then you can announce to the public, like if you're an Airbnb, you know, host, you're gonna deal with a lot less fraud because we just announced this new program.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  But then also they could do a bunch of cool stuntty things, like they built the house from up. They built like a, like a Barbie Oppenheimer house, I think, or something like that.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  And all of that stuff is like very gimmicky, but like actually makes for good marketing. And so I like this. I think it could be probably be misused by startups where they wind up leaning into just like, oh, we're like, we just are constantly standing on stage. There was like a whole batch of AI companies that were like LARPing as Steve Jobs with like no products and, and, and it was kind of like, okay, like you guys got to ship, but like once you're, once you're in that middle phase where like you have product market fit, you're growing, but you want to keep the pace of play up. You want to keep.

• 1:42:54Jordi Hays?

  We should do a.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

  We should do a.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 1:42:57Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  Anduril does this very well. They're always launching like these like hype videos for their new products and it just feels like there's a sense of motion that would be very different than them just being like, hey, we sold more sensor towers. We sold more of the same thing. Instead, it's like, okay, you're hearing about this thing. You're seeing this video.

• 1:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Basically, yeah, companies need to think about every major moment as a launch, not just when they launch their company. That's the number one advice I give for companies in my portfolio that are how do we generate attention? You have a major, you have a major hire to get like a launch. Hype it up, right?

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  Yep. And also like bundling those things together. Cause like even, even if you raise like a decent series A or series B, like $20 million from like a decent firm, like that alone might not be enough to get like a profile on your company. It might be enough to get like a TechCrunch article, but that's not going to do anything. Instead, it's like if you're, if you're launching a new product and you're raising money and you got some interesting hire and there's also some interesting like personal angle with one of your customers and your founder has an interesting story and you're an expert in this industry now and there's some mega trend going on that you're playing into. It's like, okay, now you're going to get the deep dive. Like Alex Conrad is going to show up and like talk to you because like there's more there than just, okay, yeah, they raised money. Cool. Like one line, like you need to give facts. You need to give like a sense of motion and progress in

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  the story. Yeah. Let's go to Keith. He says, rest assured, guys, I have checked the ballots and they do not contain PFAS or BPA. Go vote. So underrated 45 likes.

• 1:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  Microplastics is a disrespecter, of course.

• 1:44:28Jordi Hays?

  This is a riff on receipts which use this like thermo paper and receipts are genuinely terrible. Like there's zero ROI to touch them. You should avoid them.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Huberman recently did a deep dive and he said one of his three things was no plastic bottles, but then also don't touch the receipts.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  People don't realize even the transfer from take, putting your finger on a hot receipt that's hot off the press.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  It's fresh, yeah.

• 1:44:53Jordi Hays?

  It's fresh.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  The ink just goes straight to your bloodstream.

• 1:44:56Jordi Hays?

  And with hormones, like really, really, really small amount of volume of, you know, hormone disrupting chemicals or hormones themselves can have a dramatic impact on how you feel. So if you're a, I don't think we have any. Uh, I don't have any, think we have many cashiers in the audience. If you are a cashier, wear gloves.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, wear gloves.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  And refuse receipts.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I guess the ballots don't matter because it's all printed like way ahead of time and maybe use a good ink.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's that and you just hold the pencil far away.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. But very on trend comment. Let's go to DR22 deja vu 22 says, a lot of entrepreneurs are not business people because they enjoy the idea of business, but rather because they are repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. I think there's a lot to be said about that on a soul level. Clearly resonated a thousand likes.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think people, there's a lot of benefits for working for someone else because if you're working for somebody else, you're effectively outsourcing all of the gnarliness that comes from running a business, which is, yeah, you're outsourcing, there's a lot of benefits, right?

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Your salary arrives right on time.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to be thinking about making payroll.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to be thinking about some customer issue or HR issue. There's, you don't have to be with the, if the website goes down and you're not the web developer, it's not your problem, right?

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  So I think the benefits of, of, and I think for a lot of people like going and working, there's such a tried and like true path now of like going to work at a good company and spending four years learning from the best.

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  Like Ramp has spun off like Devon.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  Guy, right?

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Cognition.

• 1:46:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, cognition, early Ramp team. Um, and there's so many benefits, but yeah, I think for me, and I don't know, I don't, I didn't even hate, uh, for me, like I think this is one of those things, rage is one of them. If you're, if you have a lot of rage in your heart and you want, uh, to win and you want power and prestige, building a company can be one way to do that. If you just want to create things, some people love creating things and companies are the best way to do that sustainably.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:11Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, the desire.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  This definitely resonates with me.

• 1:47:13Jordi Hays?

  The desire. Yeah, after you you interned at Bain and you're just like, I can't do this again. I need to be the M D.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I could never do it. I I I used to tell people like, if you want to just be a successful entrepreneur, just never take a job.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  Because like eventually like you have to figure it out and like, but as soon as you say like, I'm taking a couple of years off to go work at Google or something. It's like, okay, this is the beginning of the end. Like, you're gonna get comfortable. They're gonna do everything they can to keep you from going back in the in the Gladiator pit. And so you're gonna get complacent and tired, usually. The exception, of course, is going to work for like extremely hot startup for a very short amount of time because it's a super entrepreneurial.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I I have a former employee who could have just stayed in Fang and decided to start a company and join a couple startups and um he would have done. He would be retired by now, even though he worked at like good companies.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  If he had simply just never left, never left Google.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  If he was a Fang P M, he'd probably be pulling in, what, a couple hundred K a month, right?

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but uh it's bad for the soul.

• 1:48:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hurts the spirit.

• 1:48:19John Coogan?

  Hurts the spirit. Um yeah, enjoy the idea of business. Yeah, I mean, I I did not fully understand the idea of business, really. I was truly repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. And I mean, it also helped like after doing Y C, like you miss the standard recruiting cycle. So.

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  Like all, all the, yeah.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Target.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  No, not at all. And you're just in this weird space. And I actually had a friend who was like the first employee at Facebook and uh was just, I emailed him to just be like, generally like, I want to work in tech. And he was like, I don't think you want to work at Facebook, even though like it's a great company. Like, it's too late stage. Like, they just want to hire people like out of the pipeline.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  I've never, I've never, I shouldn't say never now, but in the first

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  three years out of school, even though I was talented, hardworking, working in relevant spaces to startups. But just the fact that I had my business on my LinkedIn.

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:19Jordi Hays?

  You just don't ever, you know, recruiters know, I'm not gonna go hit up the founder of like this business because it's just like non, they're not, you know, the odds of them leaving.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:27Jordi Hays?

  And they don't pattern match as like your next great engineering hire.

• 1:49:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  Interesting. Liquidity, uh, Liquidity says, "We need Blackstone to take America private, right-size our cost structure, clean up the capital structure, and get us ready for an IPO before the next election."

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  This does feel really real.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  It does.

• 1:49:48Jordi Hays?

  I do feel like if, uh, if, if Elon and, and can, can like bring in this like sort of efficiency that he brought to X, the whole country, well, it's the first time that I've felt, not political at all, but it's the first time that we could sort of, um, America's debt has been just running, uh, running away. Like last week, it added like a hundred billion dollars in a day.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  And it's very, very concerning. And this feels like an opportunity to right-size the government, right-size our cost structure.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Because nobody, nobody's in favor of increasing taxation generally. It feels like you have to be an anarchist to, to want to say like, "Yeah, we just need to raise taxes, raise taxes. That's, that's the solution." Because then you get Europe. Um, and so, yeah, I think this is an awesome, uh, moment. And this is a meme, but I think it's like legitimately real.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  I think the, uh, the interesting kind of hot take is that the way to, uh, right-size the, the, uh, what is it? Like the government, uh, not like the, what's the, what's the income statement essentially?

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  For, for the government. It's like the, the, uh, government expenditure is like, is like way higher than the tax receipts, uh, is not necessarily to like cut a bunch of spending and like fire a bunch of employees, although that's like one way to get there. The real way is to extend the retirement age. Because that's where all the Medicare and, and, uh, and retirement benefits kick in.

• 1:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some crazy stat.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  And I think it happened before, and it dramatically changed the financials of the company, of the country.

• 1:51:25Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's healthier now. We should, everybody should be retiring.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  You need Brian Johnson to come in, make everyone healthier. And then if you push the retirement, if you can push the retirement age out because everyone's living longer, well, then it's justified. But for the last, you know, what, 20 years? Life expectancy has been declining and so moving the retirement age up is really like taking away like prime years of retirement and it's like really going to put the squeeze. But if everyone's like, well, yeah, I'm gonna like, I don't, I don't mind that the government wants me to work or like the government is incentivizing me to work. You can still retire whenever you want, but the government's incentivizing me to work till 70 instead of 65 because I'm going to live to 120.

• 1:51:59Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's how America like really gets its, you know, house in order is getting on ramp, right?

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Because if America ran on ramp, you'd be able to look through and be like, why are we paying Boeing $150,000 per soap dispenser? This is insane. That's like a real.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Yep, that's a real thing.

• 1:52:17Jordi Hays?

  That's a real thing. And right now.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:20Jordi Hays?

  The president doesn't have the visibility.

• 1:52:23John Coogan?

  And Elon's not going to be able to look at every single line item, but.

• 1:52:26Jordi Hays?

  He needs software that helps him reduce spending.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  AI agents to go through, find these line items.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if America was getting one and a half percent cash back on all government expenditures. That's a whole new revenue source, right?

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  Um, so, uh, Kareem, Eric, let's, let's get America running on ramp.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  We should. That's a good campaign slogan. Someone needs to do it.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  Let's go to S P O R. Spore says, yeah, I'm a full stack dev. The, the stack is Claude, Chat GPT and Perplexity. 29,000 likes. Wow.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. 29,000 likes means something's mainstream. That's like.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Super mainstream. People understand that like this is the modern stack.

• 1:53:08Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe that's because like the number of people that consider themselves developers is like a niche AI coding joke would not get 29,000 likes like a year ago, right? So maybe the market's just expanding that quickly.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  And then Peyton Casper says MFs are going to be arguing one day about whether they should ask Claude or Chat GPT. It's going to be the new reactor view in some of my circles.

• 1:53:30Jordi Hays?

  It already, yeah.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  It already is. Yeah. Yeah, I I don't I don't see a problem with it. I think it's good. I mean, the the full stack was blended years ago with like, uh, you know, putting JavaScript on the server.

• 1:53:43Jordi Hays?

  I I I'm, we're going towards a future where there's art artisanal developers that are handwriting code and they're gonna be like, uh, they're just gonna be like in their off like small subsection of the internet. Where they're talking about artisanal code.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  That's like the Nat Friedman website or like Goren's website, like those like.

• 1:54:04Jordi Hays?

  No, it's not even that, like building technological digital masterpieces, but all just by hand, just one key at a time, you know?

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  No AI slop.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  No AI slop. I don't know. It's a good stack.

• 1:54:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a good stack.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  It's a good stack. Let people have fun. I think people are pumped up about it. They're like, yeah, go off. It's great. Let's go to Alex Wang at Scale AI, founder of Scale AI. Uh, so Scale AI is proud to announce Defense Lama, American flag. The LLM, purpose-built for American national security. This is the product collaboration between Meta, Scale, and defense experts, and is available now for integration into US defense systems. Read more. That's cool.

• 1:54:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, very cool. Um, I think it is a wild turn of events because if if you could go back and tell journalists five years ago that Meta was gonna be getting into defense tech,

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  they would be like, this is so bad.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  You know, like, cause Meta went through the worst PR cycle of almost any company in history.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  Around the election?

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Around the election and all that stuff.

• 1:55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:15Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so, yeah, now, honestly, bull case for Meta that that Zuck is getting into, uh, defense tech.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it seems great. I remember the original. Uh, are you familiar with like the Project Maven story? This whole kerfuffle at Google?

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Like, the Pentagon had a initiative to um, modernize technology using artificial intelligence. And they called it Project Maven and um.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  There were walkouts and.

• 1:55:42John Coogan?

  And yeah, and and Google was one of the contractors on the on the project. Um, but there were a lot of others, like I think Palantir was in there. I think Scale might have been, it's kind of unclear. Um, but you can go and read the actual like subcontractors and everyone got a little piece of it. Google was one of them and then there was this massive walkout, this open letter. Uh, there were a whole bunch of like New York Times articles around it. And it was very interesting because it was all framed as like, Google is helping the government build like killer robots. Because like AI for defense means like, like, you know, automated drones like killing people. But what it actually was, was like very, very basic machine learning just to take the load off of.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Like, they're literally like, you know, like, you know how when these AIs get trained as like hordes of people in third world countries like tagging images and stuff? Um, we were, because it's a critical national system, we were having like, United States airmen do it, do this. Like, you'd go and work for the Air Force and your job would just be like clicking on a box, being like, that's a car, that's a house, that's a person. Just to like label the data, because it was all coming from satellites and drones. Because once the drones were flying around the Middle East, you needed to tag all that data and understand what was going on in it. And so we couldn't outsource it. And so it was just like very, very messy. So Google came in and was just like, okay, well, allow, we're not building anything for you. We're just allowing you to use our TensorFlow API, which is for their machine learning system.

• 1:57:06John Coogan?

  And we'll just host you, we're just providing hosting. And the actual development was done by other companies. But that was like too much for the Google employees. And so there's this massive walkout and then.

• 1:57:15Jordi Hays?

  And that's why Palantir is a hundred billion dollar company now.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. And I think it's, I, I, I think it's smart to do a, a custom LLM for this. Like, you obviously need more security and more controllability and just more insight. So building something on open source that can be auditable but still deployed. I just wonder like where the first use cases of LLMs will actually be i- in the DOD. Because like what we're seeing in what we're seeing in tech or like consumer is mostly like, you know, AI girlfriends and coding assistants.

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  No, it's really dark. It's basically like you go into the LLM and you're like, what's the next? What's the most relevant like potential assassination that we can do globally? Yeah. That that most fits the narrative right now.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  I think it's much more banal. What I think it'll be is like, you'll have like a ton of spreadsheets and word documents sitting there to like inventory, like the meal kits in some base. And you'll be able to just like type into the LLM like, when I, when will I run out of Gatorade? And it'll just say like, you'll run out of Gatorade in June of 2025. Like, okay, order more, please. And it'll just go order more and it'll save some, you know, poor soldier, like, you know, like an hour of work, basically. I think that'll probably be the, the, the real impact. But everyone always wants to jump to like, it's gonna be a killer robot.

• 1:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Llama.

• 1:58:39John Coogan?

  Defense llama. It's good. It's a good brand. I like it. I'm excited for that. I wonder how, how we'll see that roll out. Uh, let's go to Ben South. Says, I love SF and he takes a picture from inside a coffee shop. And the guy has on the back of his laptop, a sign that says, marketplace raising pre seed. Have revenue, say hi.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. We, I think we talked about this guy, but didn't have him pulled up. And what people need to understand is if you get, this guy probably is getting his round done faster than some tier one founder who's like, already has a bunch of relationships. Because just based on the volume of angel investors that are probably coming up to him and talking to him. And people within tech love to bet on underdogs. They love to bet on people that put themselves out there.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  It's bold. It's funny.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Anybody can do this. It's free. You just have to work, be working on your startup, put a sign up, go to, get moved to SF.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  And you have to be, I mean, you also have to be confident because you know that you're gonna get mocked. Like, I'm sure that this has like, you know, hundreds of quote tweets being like, this is the dumbest thing ever. And then a lot of people being like, this is cool. I like this.

• 1:59:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's, it's all about.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  But if you're.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  Elon, Elon is the, is, you have to know who you want to like you, right? It's not about having everybody like you. If, if a bunch of pro technology, pro startup people on SF think what you're doing is cool and you want to raise money from them.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  You can have a hundred VC funds that hate you if one likes you. It's go time. It's go time.

• 2:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Adam Newman.

• 2:00:11John Coogan?

  We already did this. So you pronounce this Gauthier? I always pronounce it gout.

• 2:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  I don't know which one it is.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, his, his full name's.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  But, uh, Gauthier says, everyone watching the poly market odds, silence model, a gambler is talking. And it was 100% accurate. We already talked about this, but poly market was correct. So cheers to the poly market team.

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Gauthier is amazing. I, uh.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  What's he do?

• 2:00:35Jordi Hays?

  I, he has, um.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Some handle here.

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  A crypto index fund.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  And they also have like a protocol built on top of base for liquidity.

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  I guess that makes sense, the zero X.

• 2:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Um, but anyways, yeah, he's somebody who's for entire time I've known him since I invested in 2021, head down, just focused on products, no token, just grinding. Um, and it's been, uh, there was, yeah, there was about, um, uh, so anyways, this was, this poly market was a win for him because he's French.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but also the, um, they've had a ton of like regulatory, uh, lack of regulatory clarity because of this last administration.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Making everything that they're doing way harder. All they're trying to build is like, you know, their first product was an index, uh, product of like a bunch of different digital assets.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:25Jordi Hays?

  That was way harder than it needed to be.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  Security, yeah.

• 2:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I still think you're maybe not allowed to even buy the, the, the index, uh, in the US.

• 2:01:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:34Jordi Hays?

  You have to be international. So hopefully that, uh, hopefully that changes with the new admin.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this is Brian Armstrong's point always is like, is like, we just want regulatory clarity. We just want to know what we can and can't do.

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Like the, the lack of clarity is so hard.

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:48John Coogan?

  And that, and that's hard for the financial markets because how do you price this weird risk?

• 2:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Um, it's hard for builders because are you really going to go spend all this time building something that might get outlawed or might not? It's like this weird, high volatility bet. So.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  And the, um, yeah, there's a reason Gauthier is building in, um. In New York is because after the Frenchman won this massive bet on Polymarket, France is now trying to ban Polymarket. So like if people are winning, if people are, you know, you know, if something's innovative and fun, let's ban it.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  I do think that Polymarket, the result here is going to be very good for crypto. Like we were talking about how crypto needed to win a big acquisition with Bridge. But Polymarket was accurate, bipartisan. I think, I think everyone was using it.

• 2:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you think about it, we're only about a decade into crypto.

• 2:02:37John Coogan?

  And it's a real use case, real use case.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Coinbase IPO, billion dollar acquisition by Bridge. Polymarket being the center of this election cycle.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  And, and, and just Bitcoin actually sticking around. Everyone, all the crypto haters were like Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme. It's going to zero. It's clearly not going to zero.

• 2:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  And so you, you now have, have stacked up like a few of the core, of the core, the core pitches, which have always been, look, it's this decentralized currency that can't be hacked. True. It's maybe digital gold. True. There's, there's actually use cases built on top of it. Polymarket, true.

• 2:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:13John Coogan?

  Like there's just a lot of different like wins that are stacked.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Financial innovation in the

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  Very slowly.

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  And GoT A's first product is a token that is basically a collection of other tokens. Right?

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:26Jordi Hays?

  So there's like real innovation happening. There's real consumer use cases.

• 2:03:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Stable coins are here to stay.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Bitcoin all time high.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Hard to not be long crypto.

• 2:03:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's just like, so many haters were like, there will never be a use case. There are no use cases. And it's like, well, at least we have one now, you know, very clearly, very hard to deny, to deny that.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:48John Coogan?

  Lit News Network, is this liquidity's like affiliate? Oh, cool. Lit News Networks.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  I just thought this was awesome.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:56Jordi Hays?

  I

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  Hold on. So Lit News Network says, breaking Florida votes against legalizing recreational marijuana. Fifty-five to forty-four.

• 2:04:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I just thought this was so, so based.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:09Jordi Hays?

  I think that, I think that marijuana has some medicinal benefits, but in general should not be.

• 2:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Publicly available and promoted in the way that it is.

• 2:04:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  And this is.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  It's all about concentration.

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  This is our talk at Hereticon was all about there are drugs that are general, you know, every drug has positives and negatives, but there are drugs that can have a very negative societal impact. And I think that marijuana is one of those.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  When it, when it's taken in extremely high doses, extremely regularly in extreme concentrations, which is exactly what's happened. Yeah.

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  And the New York Times has been reporting on this where psychosis and medical episodes are like increasing dramatically. And a lot of it's just because there's been this pressure, like you talk to some, you know, hippie like Grateful Dead fan and they like cannot smoke modern weed.

• 2:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  They're like, what is this stuff? This is a different drug.

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  And that's true with pretty much everything. I mean, think about the difference between having a beer and drinking Everclear.

• 2:05:03Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is nicotine, you're getting a similar dosage today that you would have from a cigarette 50 years ago. And that's part of why it's lindy.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's part of, yeah, it's there like nicotine has this weird curve where like, if you take too much, you just like, you get like sleepy. You don't have like a, it's not, it's not like an increasing.

• 2:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's not an increasing like result.

• 2:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  So there's been like a natural forcing function for there's less of a race to harder, like more and more concentrated dosages, which is good. But that certainly hasn't been the case in psychedelics. So good news for Florida. Hopefully more to come there. Let's talk about Ross McKay. He says he's obsessed and he posts a picture of a company I think called Cadence and it's just him like packaging stuff. So what's going on here?

• 2:05:52Jordi Hays?

  So this is a, they make like a hydration product.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:56Jordi Hays?

  What I think is interesting about this post is historically Twitter and X were a place to share words and Instagram was a place to share pictures.

• 2:06:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  And so if you look at your Instagram feed, there's thousands of people like Ross that are posting like cool lifestyle imagery around their brand and things like that. And if you simply take the exact same content. And just post it on Twitter, you get like comparably like much better engagement and way less competition.

• 2:06:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:27Jordi Hays?

  So there's a bunch of people building hydration brands on Instagram.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  And just by going to X and sharing the same style of content, you can really like stand out and build this sort of like cult following of people. And so Ross has done that. There's another brand in the fashion space that's done that really well, Represent. And so I just think if you're building a lifestyle brand, there's a ton of alpha and going over to X and focusing on that as a channel, just way less competition.

• 2:06:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, something about the, I don't know, X has always had this thing with like the comments where there like, there's really, really high status people on there and you can slide into people's DMs and stuff. It just feels a little bit easier than Instagram where, because there's like the quote tweet functionality, there's just a lot more vectors of like engagement and you can just find a conversation going on that's a little bit harder and on Instagram because the comments are a little bit more buried.

• 2:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  But yeah, it's cool. It's a nice photo. I gotta try the product. Is it, it's just hydration or is there caffeine as well?

• 2:07:30Jordi Hays?

  They have it ready to drink and then they have, I don't think they're onto stimulants yet.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  That's cool. I got some nice tattoos. I gotta go see that photo in color. It looks, looks good. Let's go to Naval. Naval says, upcoming deregulation wave will create an economic sonic boom. This is post-election.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully.

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 2:07:53Jordi Hays?

  I think that there's a lot of, you can just look at all the charts around introduction of new regulation and then you look at Europe and Europe is an example of what happens when you hyper-regulate.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Every single industry, it just hurts innovation, it hurts everyday.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Individuals, hurts the economy. I don't want America in 50 years to be the vacation, purely a vacation destination for.

• 2:08:20John Coogan?

  China.

• 2:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Wealthy people in the Middle East or China where there's been this sort of renaissance of innovation.

• 2:08:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  And so in the same way that Europe by nature of. Hyper regulation has propped up, you know, when you look at all of their public companies and their 10, 100 largest companies, I think all of them were started around 100 to 200 years ago. And if the United States were to continue at the rate it has been from a regulatory standpoint, that same thing would happen here without a doubt. And as much as I love that Europe has become sort of Cancun for people like you and me. I don't want that to happen to us.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's interesting about this is like, I don't even really know what the top deregulation efforts on the agenda are.

• 2:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Make it easier for Elon to launch rockets.

• 2:09:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but honestly, like the zeitgeist and the, and the feeling for the support felt more driven by just stopping more regulation.

• 2:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  And not actually, I mean, this is the same thing with the illegal immigration thing. You go back to the 2016 to 2020 era. There was not, it wasn't, we weren't in a negative net immigration era. Trump was, during the Trump era, there were still 400,000 border incidents or like interactions, which is how they measure it. And that, that increased under Biden, but the, but the idea that, you know, you're going back to like, okay, we're going to see negative like outflow of, of migration is probably not the truth and, and, but I mean, it's still

• 2:09:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, here's, here's an example.

• 2:09:57John Coogan?

  Potentially bullish, even if there's just less new regulation because we just have so much already.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Here's an example, though. People don't realize that a lot of the gasoline and oil used in California is actually produced in California.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  And California recently rolled out regulations to make it much harder to produce oil in the state, which is motivated by this sort of like sustainability movement. ESG and I know a guy who's in the oil industry in California and he's like, his business is basically like getting destroyed. California is still going to have to buy gas, right? We still have to buy oil. We still need it for pretty much every facet of our life. And so it's that kind of regulation that's just like effectively motivated around religion, which is the religion of ESG and sustainability. That doesn't make sense because the same people that are regulating the oil industry in California are going to drive their car to work. Using oil.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:50Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, make it make sense, you know?

• 2:10:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, it, it, it does feel like we're very, we're in the early innings of actually understanding what like a deregulatory policy would look like.

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:59John Coogan?

  Like, we've heard like drill, baby, drill, but what does that actually mean? Is there like a specific law that's going to be rolled back?

• 2:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  Or across really every single possible facet of the administration. But, but I do agree. And I mean, the market is certainly pricing in an economic sonic boom. Like, everyone's very excited and very bullish. The thing that I'm really excited about is the, is the housing stuff. I hope that, and I think Ben Thompson was writing about this today, just this idea that if the administration is empowered to go in and, and deregulate at local levels. Like, that's really powerful. And that actually happened in California to some degree where California passed the ADU laws.

• 2:11:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:36John Coogan?

  That allow, and they override local laws.

• 2:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  So, so it's, it's the state of California saying, Los Angeles, I don't care what you say. We need housing in this state. And so here you can build an ADU if it's this size and it applies to this and that.

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  And so it'd be very cool to see something like that at the federal level, where the federal level says, you know what, like, we're not going to have any more restrictions on height. And you can just build 10-story buildings wherever. If you can build a one-story building, you can build a 10-story building, like, go nuts. Good luck to the, good luck blocking this state government, federal, like, local government, whatever. And, and, and then, you know, I, I think the housing ladder, like, getting, I think that's a major, major issue. I think the millennial generation and Gen Z as well, getting to a place where you own a house is so important and has been so important through the American experience.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Emotionally.

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  It's the American dream.

• 2:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Our, our vice president was talking about how he, like, a lot of his friends who are in their twenties, just none of them own homes yet.

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Our vice president?

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, our vice president.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Sorry, not, not JD Vance, our, our, our vice president at Technology Brothers was saying that it's just, it's just unheard of. And a little bit of this is, I hope, can be swung by a number of factors. I mean, One is just build more housing. Two is what J D Vance was kind of teasing on one of these podcasts, saying that he might want to make it harder for foreign investors to come in and buy property.

• 2:13:07Jordi Hays?

  That's a huge one.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Which is interesting because it's it's true supply and demand, right? Like what drives housing prices up?

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Restricting supply with a bunch of regulations and making it really hard to build, but also increasing demand. And this is what everyone always gets frustrated by.

• 2:13:21Jordi Hays?

  And Europe has done this, right?

• 2:13:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  It's much harder generally in Europe to buy a home as a foreigner.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:26Jordi Hays?

  And the re- and now you you can still look on the European Zillow equivalent and you can be like, whoa, this house is $200,000. It looks nice. It's in a nice town.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  Yep. But it would be hard to go buy it if you're if you're not a citizen. And and and so just and and that's kind of the opposite of the process where people say, oh, we're going to give you a housing credit. Oh, we're going to make it. You're going to give everyone the same amount of money to buy a house.

• 2:13:51Jordi Hays?

  So much.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  That's just going to raise the price. It's just going to get priced in. We know this. This is economics 101.

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and a lot of issues with regulation is it just slows things down dramatically. So there's entire, if you could take a town in Georgia that is just decrepit, right? Like totally like just falling apart. There's no industry. And you could say, hey, you can build your new factory here and we're going to fast track.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  Fast track it.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  We're going to fast track it. And it and it's like, it's a capital thing, right? Because if if you need to fund some new initiative and it's going to take six years.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:25Jordi Hays?

  And this even even locally in Malibu, there's people that that want to build a house. They have a plot of land. And it just doesn't quite make sense to get some construction loan when it's going to take four years. And like, you're going to be carrying this big cost and not being able to live there. So there's all this land that just doesn't get used. So.

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think the other the other kind of like, set aside the politics issue, the cultural issue that might solve the housing crisis to some degree is there's been this massive shift, I think. The Instagram generation and just the FOMO of seeing everything online has really driven this phenomenon where someone grows up in a suburb or, you know, Ohio or some kind of like, you know, third tier city, mid-tier state, but then they go to a college, they get a communications degree, and then they go get a job in Manhattan and they can pay their rent, but then they're not on the economic ladder to the degree that they'll be able to afford a house in New York. And then they're like, why can't I afford a house? And it's like, well, you're in the

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  most expensive city in the entire world and houses start at two million bucks. But if you just went back to your, your community and built there, like, you'd be fine. Or even if you were just okay with like an hour long commute when you did need to come into the city.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Nick Huber guy always talks about this. He's constantly getting canceled every other day, but his, one of his like, really good points is that you can afford housing, just not in the places that you want to live.

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  So I think there's kind of two angles with what could drive a cultural shift towards that. One is just like the trad memes of like, being pastoral and like wanting to live in like, a safer, like, chiller community, kind of, less on the grid, little bit farther

• 2:16:04Jordi Hays?

  That's why we're looking at opening up the Montana office.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  There you go. And, and so, so, so just making not being in the most expensive city cool anymore and seeing more Instagrams from people that have set up little houses in small towns throughout America, that will create like memetic pressure for people not to just be clawing tooth and nail over the Manhattan townhouses that are out there for two mil. But then the other one is just technology, like Starlink makes it so that you can guarantee super fast internet anywhere in the United States, even if there's not great fiber coming into a town. Obviously with like new power generation, like the utilities are going to get better. Self-driving cars mean that, okay, yeah, you could have an hour-long commute, but if you're in something without a steering wheel and you're just on your laptop and just doing work, sleeping even, like, all of a sudden, that kind of stretches things out

• 2:16:51John Coogan?

  because, like, real estate is priced as a function of the economic opportunity around it. Like, the reason Manhattan real estate's expensive is the great jobs there.

• 2:16:58Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if Rebo taxis will change sleep schedules where more people will start to do that like four hours. Hours on.

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I wake up at four AM. I hop in my road taxi. I sleep for an hour and then I'm in the city. And and all of it's like scheduled out. So like, like the car is actually traveling at sixty miles an hour the whole time. I'm not stuck in traffic. Offset. And then even like VR and teleconferencing stuff like that will also reduce the barrier. So you can keep. Like, it's easier to keep in touch with someone on the other side of the country with, you know, group chats and VR and video games and stuff. And some of that stuff has, you know, deleterious effects at the extreme, but in general, it feels more possible than ever to go to Montana and be. And we know a lot of VCs. We know a lot of rich people that that spend most of their time not in the major cities.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  But there's no reason why a like a young professional who who wants to buy a home at twenty five couldn't couldn't move there and then still compete in the global workforce.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  Let's move to Augustus. Augustus Derico, founder of Rainmaker, says, you should know, you should all know that we have a four year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable. Deadly serious. Leave it all on the court. It's a miracle. We have another shot at all. Press me to go harder. I will do the same with all of you. Alhamdulillah. I never know how to pronounce that. How do you?

• 2:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Alhamdulillah.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Alhamdulillah.

• 2:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, alhamdulillah. Uh, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how how can Augustus go any harder?

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  He's going, he's already had pedals on the metal, I would think, but. Uh, but I like it. It's a good. It's a good reminder. Like, this is a window of opportunity. Like, like, regulation's not going to get worse. There's lots of opportunities. Like, you know, go hard. Like, try a lot of stuff. And it's just a reminder that you can you can do crazy stuff.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't. There there's a lot of talk in tech about taking advantage of technological cycles and moments.

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:54Jordi Hays?

  There hasn't been, over the last twenty years, as much emphasis around.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Taking advantage of political cycles to the same degree, right? It's it's clear that admins impact the economy, I think, right? You would you would hope that they're not just on on autopilot. But but yeah, I would say that there is a moment here across pretty much if you're building in heavily regulated industries. There's probably going to be a lot of opportunity there if you're building. You know, crypto is like a good example where now there's polymarket winning is actually amazing for all these, all the, all the type of like crypt, the OG crypto people that got disillusioned with the industry because they were over.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  They just realized that it was only speculative and and so now there's more opportunities to.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Even some of the sharpest people were like, everything's just regulatory arbitrage right now. I just take something, I put it offshore, it's like very zero sum. It's like not fun, but now people see that there's an opportunity to actually like just go back to the basics of like improving the speed of the financial system.

• 2:20:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And with Augustus, there could be ridiculous opportunities, right? They might decide, hey, weather modification capabilities is super, super important. We need to emphasize this and he's like, to my knowledge, close with like Steinman. And like, there's going to be opportunities that come through that. So a lot of the.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  He, early on, he was talking about how China is like reclaiming the Gobi Desert. Is that, is that the right desert? Where they're plant, yeah, they're terraforming it by just planting a ton of trees. Yeah. And and just watering them and re and rerouting rivers and stuff. And they're just reclaiming all that land. And so when you think about the current administration, like, like, you know, I would be surprised if like there wasn't, there wasn't energy around like, yeah, let's make Nevada a bread bowl. Let's make New Mexico beautiful and and and no longer a desert.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  I'm sure, I'm sure there'll be a bunch of like regulatory things like, oh, well, like you're going to displace the lizards and the snakes or whatever.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  The rare bees.

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the rare bees, which we can talk about. But hopefully, you know, there's enough energy to get through this and actually bring about.

• 2:21:05Jordi Hays?

  And we've, we've talked recently about how because because the regulatory environment has been so bad, there's just not, there's been a lot of entrepreneurs on the sidelines that are like, I'm not going to do this because even if I get the product to work, like, it's going to be impossible from from a regulatory standpoint to get it through. So hopefully that changes and a bunch of people that were on the sidelines come in. And.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Jake Chapman pours a little bit of cold water on it faster 18 months after the transition, but before the government stops process midterms, stops to process midterms. Nothing is promised after that.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  That's a little bit of a bummer, Jake. Come on, man. We're trying to get pumped up. We're trying to leave it all on the court, but I understand what he's saying. It's a good point. Anyway, always, always an inspirational poster, Augustus. Phenomenal what he's done to like the next generation of entrepreneurs.

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  It's really, it's really impressive.

• 2:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Movement.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  He's like created like his own little like YC cult, basically.

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Rob Keel says, well, at least my boss will be in a good mood tomorrow. And he has the XAI badge because he clearly works at XAI. And I love this because there are so many companies where there's a rule like, oh, the compliance officer says I can't tweet. I hate it. And clearly Elon lives and dies by the post.

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:26John Coogan?

  And he lets his, he lets his employees post and it's great.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, post, just post, post through it.

• 2:22:30John Coogan?

  Post through it.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I read this. I don't know, I don't know, Rob, but I, I, I almost read it as like, maybe he was like disappointed and now he's like, well, at least my boss will be happy.

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, like maybe he wasn't happy. He voted for Kamala, but he's like, at least.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  Who knows?

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  I do think XAI is a huge beneficiary of like everything that's happened in the last week.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:22:51Jordi Hays?

  But either way, it's good.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure that X is an environment where people are allowed to share their views.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  But because it's just not about that. It's about building.

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  XAI.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and I mean, that's the thing that people miss with like the whole mission driven company, leave the politics at the door. It's like, no, it's actually okay. Whoever you vote for, like we actually don't care.

• 2:23:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  But.

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  There was a lot of, there was a lot of HR teams at Wednesday were sending out notes that were basically to the effect of whether you're celebrating or devastated, we're here for you, you know?

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  Well, we sent one out to our team, but it was like whether you're celebrating or devastated, like shareholders come first, get back to work. Yeah.

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, no, no fucking slack.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we have a policy where if we employees need to, you know, send us a screen share, screen, uh, screenshot of their screen time on their iPhone. And if there's more screen time than there are, you know, we don't consider screen time working hours, right? Working is when you're at your terminal.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Editing content.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Breaking the keys on your keyboard.

• 2:24:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, so yeah, we're a little bit hardcore about it, but.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go to Fisher King. He says Kamala skipped Rogan, but did Saturday Night Live. She generally only did scripted controlled events. She avoided long form conversations that could reveal her as a person. Trump and Vance did the opposite. They took chances, showed themselves. Victory for transparency and new media. And so I've dug into this like very, very seriously. I went on, uh, I went on, uh, on Pirate Wire's podcast like back in March when Biden was still in, and I said that the person who does the longer Joe Rogan interview will win the election. And, and then later I went on and coined the, the Coogan parlay, which was you go on polymarket and you bet that Trump will do over two hours on Rogan, Kamala will do under two hours on Rogan, and that Trump will win

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  based on that. And whoever does more will win. And.

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  We should make a, we should make a polymarket.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Parlay.

• 2:24:59Jordi Hays?

  Now.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  For next election around Joe Rogan airtime.

• 2:25:04John Coogan?

  Yep. So I, so I've dug into this and, uh, not only did Trump do more interviews, I think he did something like 18 major podcasts and Kamala did about six or eight.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  I think Barron was leading the strategy.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  But his podcasts were much longer. So, uh, when Trump went on Rogan, Rogan is a three hour show and everyone was like, Trump's old, he's, you know, he's not going to want to do a three hour thing. He's going to cut it short. And this is something that happens with all the big, uh, political folks. Like when Bernie went on Rogan, he cut that short. He didn't do three hours. He did like an hour and a half. Uh, even when, uh, Benjamin Netanyahu went on Lex, he cut that short too. And a lot of these guys, they're like media trained. They want to stay on the talking points and they don't want to get caught in hour two and a half, being a little bit tired and just like freestyling, right?

• 2:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:51John Coogan?

  And that's the whole point of the Rogan interview is that you, you can't stay on talking points for three hours.

• 2:25:56Jordi Hays?

  People trust people more that freestyle.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, there's the.

• 2:26:00Jordi Hays?

  It's hard, you.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  There's a phenomenon about this.

• 2:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Expose your real self.

• 2:26:04John Coogan?

  When, uh, when police interview like pyromaniacs, they are suspected pyromaniacs. They'll just interview them and get them talking for like eight hours straight. And they'll just come in and talk and talk and talk because the people who are obsessed with fire, even though intellectually they know they shouldn't say like, I like fire. Eventually they'll break character and just be like, yeah, you know what would be cool? Like if we just like lit this table on fire, it's crazy. Um, and so, and so there's something about like the long interview that just like you, you, you, you can't stay in character.

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  It's like me and, me and Angel investing. I'm like.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Somebody has a good idea. I'm like, let's bet on this.

• 2:26:38John Coogan?

  Let's bet on this, exactly. And, and, but so, so what's interesting is that the, the ratio of like podcast appearances, um, between Kamala and Trump was something like three to one for Trump. But the ratio of hours spent podcasting was more like 10 to one.

• 2:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:56John Coogan?

  And then because the YouTube algorithm weighs longer content as better for keeping, for selling ads and keeping people on the site, longer content does better in the algorithm. So the Rogan three hour Trump interview got 35 million views, something like that. And the call her daddy, they just posted a clip that was like 20 minutes. And so that one, even if, even if a bunch of people watched it, YouTube's just saying, well, should I, should I promote the three hour thing? That I can sell 50 ads on, or should I promote the 12 minute thing that I can promote five ads on? And so it's a very, it, it, it's, it's like Google, YouTube, like the algorithm is just, is just expected value maximizing. And so the Trump one goes mega viral and gets tons of views. And so if you add up, I was trying to run the math on this.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  I might do like a, like a piece on this and actually run all the numbers, but, uh, so the, the Harris campaign spent a billion dollars. The Trump campaign spent like 300 million, but if you think about it, like. Like, how much does it cost to run a 30 second ad on Rogan? It's like a hundred thousand dollars, I think. So if you multiply that out for three hours of essentially an advertisement for Trump, right?

• 2:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  Well, now you're at a single.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Efficiency is.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  A single, like if you were to go to Rogan and say, I want you to do a three hour episode on Aurora, on just my product. He'd be like, okay, well, a 30 second ad is a hundred thousand dollars. So a one minute would be 200,000, a 60 minute, you know, you can multiply it out and get to like 50 million dollars.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  And then it also did 10 times as good as a normal episode. So that's like a 200 million dollar value asset, just in terms of like of impressions. And there's a massive, massive availability bias where things that you're familiar with and you spend a lot of time with, you like that person more. And so just the fact that people were, were spending time listening to Trump and his surrogates, I think it made them like him more.

• 2:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47John Coogan?

  And this is very different. In 2016, CNN, NBC, they were all promoting Trump rallies because they got good ratings. They could sell a lot of ads. But then in 2020.

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:56John Coogan?

  Trump got COVID, there were lockdowns, there weren't as many rallies. And all the mainstream media were like, maybe we shouldn't be promoting this guy. Maybe we shouldn't be publicizing his rallies. So he got way less earned media. And as a result, the average American just spent less time listening to Trump. Even if you're Trump skeptical, you probably still listened to 10 minutes across all the different things. In clips, in little bits, maybe you turn on the Rogan for a little bit, you're like, oh, this sucks, it's boring. But you listen to a little bit. And.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:22John Coogan?

  And so I think it's really just attention is all you need going forward. The candidate that gets the more attention, the more views. And that's what the political spending is a proxy for. It's literally just ads they're buying.

• 2:29:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  And those ads are just 30 second ads.

• 2:29:35Jordi Hays?

  And, and there's something, I feel like 2016 and 2020 were dominated by performance marketing.

• 2:29:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  At least from, that was what was being analyzed is who had better performance marketing. And people felt like performance marketing was the future of political campaigning, where you could just create an ad for effectively two people in one county to turn them against.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  And podcasts are so good. Building narrative and likability and these things that really matter. So that for every one person that watched the Joe Rogan appearance, they're telling they're they've then consumed so much content and so many talking points that they now become effectively a surrogate for the campaign, right? They're just out spreading the message. So yeah, I think there's something about the internet where long form content.

• 2:30:32Jordi Hays?

  A textbook gets digested into a tweet, a podcast gets that gets turned into an Instagram post or an Instagram story, right?

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Or a clip on X.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  The internet is all about just cutting down long form content. Into the smallest, most digestible piece of content.

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it's the future. I I don't think that either major party will ever put up a candidate that

• 2:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Isn't good at podcasting.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  Isn't gonna do a three hour Rogan.

• 2:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:59John Coogan?

  And so my bet that I would put on polymarket right now is that the 2020 2028 election is between JD Vance and AOC or JD JD Vance and Buttigieg, because AOC and Buttigieg both can actually sit and be real people for several hours. And AOC has done it with like the Twitch streams and stuff like she gets it. She's she's definitely like a part of like the new guard.

• 2:31:24John Coogan?

  Let's go to Aaron Slodov. He says, time to reindustrialize. And I like this because we talked about Josh Steinman tweeting, good morning, we're gonna win every single day. And this feels like the seed of a mantra. You know, Aaron ran the reindustrialize conference.

• 2:31:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, him and Austin Bishop.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's done a lot of stuff, a lot of work around reindustrialization. It's a very interesting coinage and buzzword. I actually got in a fight with somebody about this on on X because I said reindustrialize and they were like, well, there's no such thing as reindustrialization. The opposite of deindustrialization is industrialization. And I was like, I don't, A, I can just Google it and there is a, and there is a dictionary definition for re-industrialization. So like, you're kind of just wrong if you're being like literal, but also like, everyone knows what we mean by re-industrialize.

• 2:32:10Jordi Hays?

  It's just branding.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  It's just branding. And so it's a great coin.

• 2:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and everybody can attach slightly different meaning to it.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:32:16Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, it was, it was, we, we were at, we spent election night with Aaron, uh, and he ju, he, he, the work he's doing is so difficult. It wasn't like he was fist pumping or anything like that, but it was a good moment for him and rewarding to start to get, to have somebody like JD Vance, you know, in office who actually cares about this topic legitimately and is not just voicing it over.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I hope to see this post on my timeline every single day.

• 2:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to, uh, Sheil Monat says, this is an incredible ad by Calm. During election night, Calm bought a 30 second spot on CNN where they just turned off the sound and just played like, we're giving you 30 seconds of peace and quiet. This is the Calm app. We know that you're stressed out. Really in the zeitgeist, really, uh, really capitalizing on, uh, the moment that, you know, psychologically, everyone who is watching kind of understands this is like a stressful moment.

• 2:33:19Jordi Hays?

  It's great for the CNN audience too, because I think the Fox News audience was probably like starting to pop champagne.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  And then the CNN audience was, um, having a tougher night on average, but, um.

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  I like stuff like this. I like when these companies are agile and think about, yeah, just taking a little twist, like, uh, I think at the Super Bowl, there was a company that ran, I think they sold like hammers or something and they did like a one second ad and it was just a hammer smashing something for like one second. Or Coinbase did just that QR code that was bouncing around, like the DVD symbol. And they kind of broke the format and it sticks out and I still remember it to this day. Whereas, am I really going to memorize like the fifth Budweiser ad? Like, that's kind of undifferentiated.

• 2:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Lucy, we need to be planning the 2028 election ad.

• 2:34:03John Coogan?

  But it needs to be something that's like. You know, in the zeitgeist, cutting against it, like you can either be, I'm sure most of the ads that ran that night were like, you know, America's at war, like this is why you need to buy this thing. It's like in, it's in with like the, the normal narrative and this one just cut completely against it.

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Counter positioning.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  Good, good job and good spot by Shield to like find this and clip this because I wouldn't have seen this otherwise. So.

• 2:34:27Jordi Hays?

  Great curator.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Sean McGuire says the turning point was Elon buying Twitter. Do you agree?

• 2:34:34Jordi Hays?

  Feels that way. Felt like another turning point was making likes private because.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. Revealed preferences.

• 2:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. A lot of people were even afraid to like anything that was against the narrative. So yeah, I think it would, but yeah. The acquisition or the take private was down, was upstream of, of likes and other changes that have happened on the platform.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  There was a good article in Stratechery today about the election and Ben Thompson was basically just saying like, as a business, individually, it's very hard to say that like X is like this massive win because he paid pre-zerp prices for it. And the stock probably would have crashed. He probably could have bought it for cheaper. And then there was this advertiser exodus and the whole business is going through like a business transformation. But if you view it as the Musk company's portfolio, like it's very accretive. And I think that's what pretty much everyone in the deal was aligned on. Like a lot of people invested because they wanted access to other Musk companies.

• 2:35:34Jordi Hays?

  Access to Elon.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  Or they wanted investment banking contracts. They want to be the one to take SpaceX public or something.

• 2:35:40Jordi Hays?

  And, and whether or not X is a win for Elon, you could argue that it is even from a regulatory standpoint right now. He has effectively purchased control of, not directly, but sort of indirectly. But yeah, right now I think X is marked at around 20 billion. So on paper, they've, they've lost $24 billion, something along those lines. But, but Elon's personal net worth went up $100 billion in the 24 hours. So, and many of the people that are big investors in X have exposure to the other companies. So.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Are you familiar with the Japanese Kiratsu?

• 2:36:19Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  So the Kiretsu or this, a bunch of Japanese conglomerates that all own pieces of each other. And so they're like deeply, deeply intertwined and Musk is like kind of building a little bit of that. He was deeply criticized for like the SolarCity acquisition. And there's always a question about like, oh, if one of his companies doesn't do well, maybe one of the other companies will just buy it. But maybe that's actually like a good strategy. And we certainly saw it play out here where, you know, buying one thing can have synergies with another, even though you wouldn't assume that a social network would have any impact on a space launch company.

• 2:36:50Jordi Hays?

  It was always obvious that when, when Tesla would brag about not needing to do ads, that their ad platform was Elon's own personal Twitter account.

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:01Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, if you're getting billions of impressions a year for free, you don't need to run as many ads.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  And again, just run the numbers on the impressions of Tesla. Like how many Cybertruck videos and like funny raps and funny hype videos and reels have you seen on X? And really anywhere, add all that up, it's probably more than Hyundai spent on the Super Bowl. Or like all the advertisements for sure, just in terms of attention. Yeah, exactly. But they're not paying for it, but they are getting the economic value of those impressions. So it's the future. I can't believe I have to read this again. Creatine Cycle Atlas, a friend of the pod, writes on election night, hopped up on Addy and a Zin while gooning to polymarket and manifold one second charts and widescreen on my Apple Vision Pro while talking to three different L L Ms

• 2:37:50John Coogan?

  and streaming those results directly to eight different group chats of terminally online schizophrenics monitoring the situation. And Glark says, work harder. And then Atlas says, I have Fox News and MSNBC at both at full volume in my AirPods Pros.

• 2:38:07Jordi Hays?

  It feels like the real argument for having six monitors is the election.

• 2:38:11John Coogan?

  The election, yeah.

• 2:38:12Jordi Hays?

  Right? Because there's so many different things to bet on.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:15Jordi Hays?

  You've got traditional media, you've got watch along.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  Bitcoin.

• 2:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Polymarket. Boys, you've got your discords, you've got your Signal chats.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  I was talking to Saagar and Jedy, who runs Breaking Points about this. And like the most perfect stack was the Breaking Points livestream. Have you ever watched this? It's phenomenal. It's like. They they all they all came from like more or less like traditional media backgrounds, but have gone very like YouTube native. They they they're they're viewer funded, so they have like subscriptions and stuff. And so they're just like completely authentic, just making jokes, posting. They had this funny thing where it's kind of a left right show where Crystal Ball, the the one of the hosts, she had to wear a MAGA hat because she bet on Harris and and Sagar was gonna have to wear a Harris T-shirt if he lost the bet. And so they just have this like really fun rapport. They have a bunch of other people around the desk and they're

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  just like, they have enough of the technology where they have multicam. It looks really nice. It looks like a CNN production, but it's but like much, it's clearly not as high budget.

• 2:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  But it's just really, really fast paced, really great. And while they're doing the show, they're doing lead ins to YouTube clips. So they'll set something up. So they'll be like, oh, like now we're going to like, so he kept during the live stream, he'd always he'd stop and be like, oh, the producer's telling me to do a lead in. So he's like, Donald Trump has been elected the next president. We go live to like his speech.

• 2:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:36John Coogan?

  And then they cut to the clip and then they react to it. And it was just a live show, but it was really, really well done. So it's like Breaking Points livestream, X, scrolling the timeline, polymarket. And that's all you needed. And it's all independent, alternative stuff. And that was like, by far, the most entertaining, truest source of alpha, the most accurate information. Like, the mainstream just turn on the TV is like truly gone. So I'm excited.

• 2:39:58Jordi Hays?

  Sarah and the kids are getting kicked out of the hotel.

• 2:40:02John Coogan?

  You gotta go?

• 2:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Do we have a want to prioritize one or two more?

• 2:40:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's, I really wanted to do Max. We can do him next time. Shane, let's do Rune.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  Let's do Rune and then and then Q and A?

• 2:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  Okay. Rune writes, "The age of the technology brother is at hand." And what a perfect post to end on.

• 2:40:28Jordi Hays?

  The timeline.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  The timeline. I couldn't agree more. Perfect time, perfect name for the podcast, The Technology Brothers. Subscribe if you haven't already. Follow us on X. We're also on YouTube and Spotify and you can get all of your, all of your takes and and timeline analysis on there. So shout out Rune for the accurate analysis.

• 2:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Accurate.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  But The Technology Brothers are are good. We're gonna go to Q and A.

• 2:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Should I read a question?

• 2:40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Hey John and Jordy, I recently started angel investing and I'm worried it's starting to impact my marriage. I've been spending less time with my wife and kids and more time wandering coffee shops and SF looking for founders building the next big thing. Not to mention, I've sold two of our vacation homes to pursue this. How do you balance chasing unicorns and having a balanced life? Where to start? I think we would need, I think that there is an angel investing epidemic on the west coast right now. I think that it's widely understood that sports betting is highly addictive. It's under discussed that angel investing is also addictive. It

• 2:41:34Jordi Hays?

  has longer timelines, right? So when you ape 50K into some kid with a deck and a dream, it might take five to 10 years. But I know people that wake up on the first of the month that are refreshing their email like a rat waiting for that next hit, hoping to see an update, hoping to get markups. And I think it's important for the innovation economy, but it's tearing families apart.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  I do think that the first mistake that that listener made is selling the vacation homes because some of the greatest angel investments ever made were made in vacation homes. There's the famous example of Travis Kalanick at, what's his name? The cowboy guy. You know him? He would bring people out to his ranch and they would hang out in the hot tub in Tahoe. And so if you get the vacation homes and you start inviting people to come hang out and relax, it's going to be much easier. Let the entrepreneurs come to you.

• 2:42:31Jordi Hays?

  My advice would be, I mean, the first mistake was selling the vacation homes. You're right. Should have taken out debt against the vacation homes and used that.

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  Especially in this market, you can refinance.

• 2:42:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So that was, that was probably a big mistake because even if you're paying 6% annually, you generate 30, 40% IRR angel investing. So it's hard not to think of that as a poor decision. But ultimately, I'd say bring, bring your wife and get her angel investing too, right? Have her, have her put some money to work.

• 2:43:05John Coogan?

  Essentially lever up, lever up against the vacation homes instead of divesting.

• 2:43:09Jordi Hays?

  And bring your family into it. A lot of, you know, sports betters are out there. There's, you know, they're telling their wife, who do you want to win? She's like, I don't know, honey. Like make a bet for me, right?

• 2:43:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  And it's about kind of involving the whole family. My son's two and a half. He has five or so companies that he's deployed into.

• 2:43:28John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:43:29Jordi Hays?

  They're kind of silly ones.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Get them young.

• 2:43:31Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I like this snack, like let's ape in.

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 2:43:33Jordi Hays?

  But there's something to be said about just investing in products that you love. I have never really been misguided by investing in products that I love, so.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:43:43Jordi Hays?

  Involve the whole family, lever up, and you know, don't take yourself so seriously.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Maybe get a third vacation home.

• 2:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Well, that's our show. I got to hop on with New York. I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.