Blue Origin's Historic Landing, Valve Unveils Steam Machine Console, 2wai Reactions | Everett Randle, Adam Faze

(02:07) - Blue Origin Lands New Glenn Rocket (15:58) - Valve Unveils Steam Machine Console (25:38) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (30:17) - Cantor Group Posts Record Year (50:24) - Will Manidis: "In The Flow" (01:02:47) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:25:49) - 2WAI Reactions (01:31:07) - Everett Randle is a venture capitalist and writer best known for his sharp essays on startup strategy, founder psychology, and the dynamics of elite tech ecosystems. He previously worked at Founders Fund and is widely read for articulating the unwritten rules and cultural patterns of Silicon Valley. (02:31:56) - Adam Faze, CEO of Gymnasium, a digital television studio producing short-form unscripted series for platforms like TikTok and Instagram, discusses his journey from traditional Hollywood to founding Gymnasium, emphasizing the shift towards digital content consumption. He highlights the success of shows like "Keep the Meter Running," which became a viral hit in New York City, illustrating the potential of high-quality, short-form content on social media platforms. Faze also touches on the evolving media landscape, noting that platforms like TikTok have become the new television, and discusses the role of artificial intelligence in empowering individual creators to produce blockbuster-level content independently. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Orange mode. It is, uh, we're cozy maxing. It is Friday, November 14th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. It's raining in Los Angeles. It's raining in Hollywood. And so we're cozy maxing. We're in extremely orange lighting. We put the fire on, uh, maybe a little bit too orange, honestly. The clips are gonna look a little bit crazy from today. Uh, we might, we might switch back at some point, but.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  That says we need the white suits today for sure. We didn't do white suits today.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  The market opened down 2%.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  The volatility is crazy. No, we're back up.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  We're back up. The whole market's up.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  We need to put the word.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  The NASDAQ's up. The NASDAQ's up. Okay. Uh, and over the last six months, the NASDAQ is up 20%. Wow.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Would you look at that?

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Would you look at that?

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Would you look at that?

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, rough opening, but, but lifted, lifted.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  In bigger news and more important news.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. Yes, Jordy?

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Today is National Pickle Day.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Pickle Day.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  You heard it. Not Pickleball Day, National Pickle Day. A lot Gil, uh, broke the news this morning.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, that could explain.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  He's into tracking national days.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Explain the volatility.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  That could. That could. Um, there's basically a day every day. Like every day is some special day. Uh, there's like probably National Podcasters Day, you know, there's, uh, because they, they've extended it. It's, uh, you know, uh, Father's Day, Mother's Day, then there's Grandparents' Day, then there's Aunts and Uncles' Day, and people just went crazy with the days. A lot of marketing firms figured out that you needed a day to have an excuse. So there's like Donut Day, National Eat a Donut Day or whatever.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  According to Google's AI overview, tomorrow is National Philanthropy Day.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  And then it is also celebrated as National Recycling Day, National Drummer Day, On Socks Day.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  So we got days for days.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  It's also Restream Day. You can sign up for Restream today, one livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Uh, Blue Origin, massive landing yesterday. Let's watch the video.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Sawyer Merritt has breaking it down. Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, has just successfully landed. Let's play the clip. This is New Glenn, the rocket booster. Oh no. On a barge in the middle of the ocean. 25 years after its founding. Look at that, becoming the, it's only the second company in history to land a rocket booster after SpaceX. Uh, what, what a moment. Remarkable.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  It, it, it, in some ways, it's, it should be expected. It's been a decade since SpaceX did exactly this. Uh, this is a wild video. This is, this is like, I mean,

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  We can land rockets.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  I'm always, I'm always amazed by, uh, the fact that they can keep the cameras even rolling or live streaming it all, um, during these crazy moments where there's fire all over the camera, for example. Uh, but they did it. The smoke clears, I believe, on this video at some point, and you see the rocket booster sitting there on the drone ship, uh, standing. It did not crash. It did not blow up after they brought it back successfully. Uh, it's an orbital class rocket. Very exciting. Uh, I was, I was thinking about the, the implications of this. It's interesting. It's like, on the one hand, like, yeah, you're 10 years behind SpaceX. Like SpaceX did this, this exact thing, 2015, 2015. It's been a decade. Uh,

• 3:41John Coogan?

  on the other hand, it's like China hasn't done it, and they've obviously wanted to. And so that's really cool that America has two companies that are doing it, and they're now in competition. And so when we were talking to the folks about the eight data centers.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  Something like a spacefaring empire.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, there, there's been this question about like, will the launch costs come down? Or will Elon just eat 100% of the margin himself, uh, with SpaceX? Because- He's done all this work. Well, now there's maybe going to be a little bit more pressure. We're seeing that from Firefly. We're seeing that from Blue Origin. Like, stuff seems to be working. I think a lot of people wrote off Blue Origin like Virgin Galactic. It was just like billionaire side project. SpaceX was the serious one. I think they're still, you know, they're still a decade behind, uh, but it is just crazy that, um, he's, he's been able to keep it going for so long, making a lot of progress.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  And I was just laughing to myself about this idea that in any other industry, if a founder came to you and was like, yeah, we're, we're a decade behind the lead, the leading category, leading company in the category. But we're staying with it for another decade. You'd be like, what? Like, you're a decade behind? Like, like, you know, like, you're, you're a GPT one level and they're a GPT five level. Like you're, you're going to pivot in that case, right?

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're like, we're just trying to get to GPT two level.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  You're like, wait, by the time you're at GPT two, they're going to be at GPT six.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Seven, yeah, so six or seven. And, uh, but it is just a different industry. It moves a lot slower. Um, and Bezos has just built a crazy company. I mean, they've never, like, they've never really done a pri- like a major financing that's been from a headline firm. They're just kind of, it feels like it's all funded by Bezos. There might be something else going on. There's, there's some rumors of like small secondary transactions here and there, but there's really no like, you know, logo, Blue Origin logo on tier one fund. You just won't see that. That's just not a thing. And what's interesting is that it's a massive company. So over 10,000 people work there. Um, worked, it's been 25 year project, as I mentioned.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  But, uh, also, um, you know, it's not, it, it's like the idea of, the idea of hiring 10,000 people and rocket scientists, like not cheap people, you know, imagine, I mean, there's some of them are probably, you know, uh, relatively new grads, but there are some serious salaries to bear. Uh, and then just funding that off your own personal balance sheet for 25 years is crazy. Um, but Bezos has like 250 billion. SpaceX has raised to date like 12 billion. And so even if you just assume that Bezos is burning the exact same amount of money, even twice as much money, that's 10% of his net worth. Like it's just, it's just a doable, like check to write, uh, which is crazy.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it, it's almost the equivalent of, you know, somebody working in big tech, setting up a cafe that loses some money. But they get a lot of enjoyment out of it, so they keep it going.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  Even though it's not, it may never be like a rational economic

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  activity. But in this case, I mean, if, you know, the implications are that you could end up in a situation where there's a duopoly

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  in launch.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean SpaceX is what? It multiple hundreds of billions and, you know, Blue Origin seems to have somewhat of a similar capability at some point like

• 6:51John Coogan?

  you, you know, what's the fair market value of Blue Origin? Is it a billion? Is it 10 billion? Is it 50 billion? Like, if it was a public company, just like, you know, and you're just comping it to SpaceX for whatever reason, whether or not that that math makes a ton of sense, like, you could imagine it trading in the billions for sure. Like, you could imagine trading in the high tens of billions. So, obviously, we don't know that much about like the financials, how profitable this stuff is. It's a very, you know, kind of behind the scenes company.

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  Virgin Galactic is sitting at a $200 million valuation

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  in, in the public markets.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  I, I know that they SPAC'd. I thought that they had de-SPAC'd.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  It's sitting at, uh, in, it peaked at, let's see here, it peaked in,

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  oh, it had, it was all over the place.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  That was in COVID.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  It peaked at $1,218 a share in 2019, and it's now sitting at $3.61.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  I think it was one of the first Chamath SPACs, right? I think it was one of the, one of the first ones. And, and they had a very different approach. Virgin Galactic was like doing the space plane thing, where it would take off from the ground, uh, off of like a traditional landing strip, and then they'd just fly higher and higher and higher. I don't believe Virgin Galactic ever made serious progress towards like a reusable rocket like what, uh, Blue Origin's done.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  And I watched an interview, a walk, a walk and talk tour of the Blue Origin facility with everyday astronaut Jeff Bezos. And it just seems like he's, he loves it. Like he's just doing it for the love of the game. It doesn't matter if it's gonna take 10% of his net worth. Like he's, he's so happy.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna be a spaceman.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, watching him look at this massive rocket with the welding points and he knows what type of welds they used for what pieces of the rocket. Like, it's clearly just one of the most entertaining things you can buy is just a rocket factory that builds rockets and does cool stuff. It's like so exciting, so thrilling. Uh, it's, it's gotta be way more thrilling than like sports betting, for example, because you're, you're, you're kind of, there's a lot, it is a gamble, right? You put all the money into the rocket, the rocket either explodes or goes up and comes back down. It's gotta be thrilling. It's gotta be a dopamine machine. So, he's having fun.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  The other interesting thing is that because they don't do this like regular tender offers that SpaceX does, um, there's a lot of employees on Reddit who are kind of like, hey, like my stock options are kind of worthless. Like I don't know how to exercise these. I've been at this company for a very long time. And if I was at SpaceX, I'd probably be cashing out a lot and like retiring very comfortably. Um, but since I'm at Blue Origin, I, I'm not really, I don't really have the same level of liquidity. And you could imagine Bezos running a tender offer process that mirrors SpaceX's just by himself. Like he just personally takes out a billion dollars of cash, which he has, and buys a billion dollars of stock from the employees.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Like what happens at SpaceX when there's a billion dollar tender offer, but that comes from other investors. Uh, it could just come from him. But it doesn't feel like that's happening, at least from them, you know, the couple Reddit threads that I read. Um, so it's weird because it feels like the, like SpaceX has this, another unfair advantage of employees who go there and think, oh, wow, I'm getting paid, you know, a couple hundred K a year, but it could be millions if we really deliver. So we gotta go the extra mile.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  Not just that, but I will have a, a consistent opportunity to get liquidity.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Versus, you know, some of the people that sounds like the, the people that you found that, that were at Blue Origin for a long time.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Are probably sitting there, you know, basically saying to themselves. If I had joined SpaceX in a worse role.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Some of them literally said that exact thing.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  They literally said that exact thing.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure those people had an opportunity to go to SpaceX too.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, some of them, some, I'm sure. Now, now, the other interesting thing is like, it is fine to just be like, yeah, like, we just pay you cash. We pay you a lot of cash. We pay you, you know, higher than market cash. And, and so the, like, people do need to, you know, make their own decisions. The employees can make their decisions either way. But it's just interesting that, that Blue Origin's like, it feels like they're somewhat fighting with one arm tied behind their back. They're also way behind on the, on the actual progress of the, of the reusable rocket. They're clearly, you know, like, they, they don't have an answer to Starship. Starship is four times the capability of this new Glenn rocket that just landed. So they're, they're, they're behind in many ways, but they're still ahead of China and they're still number two.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  And number two in this category has got to be thrilling. It's got to be exciting. And I think it might actually be a decent business. I don't know. I'd love to dig into it more. I'd love to have.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Probably more thrilling than owning a Formula One team.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Maybe. Yeah.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  And Beza, um, you know.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  I mean, he also like sent his, he sent his wife and her friends to space. Like, that's something that you really can't buy otherwise. Anyway, what you can buy is a relationship with Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Deline was very excited about this. He said, hot damn. Blue Origin just landed new Glenn rocket on their second flight, officially becoming the second company ever to do it after SpaceX did it a decade ago. Incredible moment for the commercial space industry. The orbital economy has got to be excited about this.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  More competition means potentially more, just cheaper prices on payloads to, to orbit. So, exciting, exciting.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Stuff and yeah, we'll be interesting to see. I also saw that Project Kupier, which was Amazon's Starlink competitor, I believe, is rebranding to Amazon Leo, L E O.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  I like that.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, some people were really upset about the rebrand. I thought it was kind of cool, but they are definitely going to be getting into the space internet.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Bezos just posted a close up picture of the rocket.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Well, let's pull it up.

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  Putting it in.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Well, we pulled that up. Let me tell you about cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  There's also an article in Per Aspera just dropped. The Dan Golden spoke in front of US space leaders on a subject that's been weighing on him. He's bored by space by that. He's bored with low earth orbit. SpaceX solved cheap launch and still the only, the entire commercial space economy is largely one thing, communications.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Look at this picture.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Imaginary. Wow. Look at that. This is the, this is taking off.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Look at that. It's, it's crazy. It took so long to get this photo up.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  They should have, I guess, let's take, look at that. Wow.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Stunning.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, one of the reasons why Blue Origin has, like, I talked to somebody who worked at Blue Origin, and he was telling me that one of the reasons that Blue Origin moved a little bit slower than SpaceX is that they leaned a little bit harder on the exquisite system going really big. And Elon had this idea of like, let's try and make a whole bunch of small things that we bundle together. So if you look at the number of engines on the bottom of that, I think it has like six engines,

• 14:22John Coogan?

  seven engines. And if you look at the bottom of like a starship, you'll see like, what, 30 engines or something?

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  I think 33.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  33 engines. And so Elon has, has, has been bigger, at least on, hey, let's, let's make modular pieces of equipment that can be moved around with maybe not a huge crane. Maybe you can just put it in the back of a truck. Maybe to work on this engine, you can do it in, you know, one normal room instead of a massive warehouse. And so the, the size of the individual pieces of starship, it adds up to a massive rocket, but each of the pieces can be worked on individually. When you start working on these really, really big systems, any small change like. Cascades through the rest. What are you laughing at?

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Laughing at Gabe. Gabe's fining me for not wearing a suit.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  I told you dude, I told you.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  John's very against it too, but I just love this, I just love this puffer too much.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Okay, enjoy, enjoy. Um, well, Dan Golden is upset about this. He wants asteroid mining. He wants, he says, no wealth being extracted from the solar system. That's like, it's, it sounds intentionally written to inflame. Um, and none being brought back to Earth. Where are my asteroid mines? Dan Golden writes, I guess in The Economist. Very interesting.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  We're all asking the same thing, Dan.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Um, so the Steam Machine, is this what you want to move on to?

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull it up.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Okay, let's pull up this. Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Uh, Steam Machine is going to be huge, says Josh Konstein. Uh, so many Mac users wish they could play PC games, but they don't want expensive, complex PCs. Uh, for a fraction of the price and headache, they'll be able to play PC, PlayStation, Xbox and indie games on the Steam Machine. Now, the Steam Machine was actually part of the, uh, part of a launch. There were actually three things that they launched. The launch video was very cool. They launched a controller, a box, uh, like an actual computer, the Steam Machine, and then a VR headset.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Um, so we should see, um, what's interesting is that, uh, um, we don't know pricing yet. There's a few other things. The, they call it the Steam Frame. Uh, Valve is saying that it's going to be cheaper than the $1,000 Valve Index, which is their previous VR headset. Um, and I think it should be close to Vision Pro. Um, not quite in terms of the display. It seems like the display per eye might be, um, closer to just beyond the Meta Quest 3S, which Tyler, of, of course, was demoing.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Um, and you said that with the Quest 3S, you couldn't quite use it for work. It was a little screen door effect. It was a little pixelated.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I would not want to be, uh, reading a lot on that.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but the, the Apple Vision Pro felt like it was at that level, or, or, or, or almost at that level. Um, but they do a bunch of interesting things with the, with the Steam Frame, so. If you get the Steam machine, it's designed, obviously, at the level of specs that allow you to run VR games off of it. You can run VR games directly on the headset, but then they have a Wi-Fi dongle that you can put on the Steam machine that will stream the VR game to your headset using 6G. I think that's a 6G Wi-Fi router. So 6G is, I think

• 17:58John Coogan?

  it's like a different patch of the broadband spectrum or the Wi-Fi spectrum that's like less cluttered than when you go into your, you know, like 2G networks on your Wi-Fi and you see the different, like, there can be a lot of clutter, especially if you're in an apartment building. So...

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  Chabibi says, "Now make this for on-prem LLMs." And that's, I think, more or less what for Satoshi is building.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Building a brain for your desk.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Tinybox also, from George Hots, is similar. And I believe Nvidia launched something that is a computer that's designed for, basically, on-prem LLMs, a very high-end graphics card, sort of wrapped in a, you know, in a package that can be delivered to your office.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Scene says, "Steam has one. There's no reason to get an Xbox. There's no reason to get an Apple VR headset. They all run on Linux. It's the ultimate computer."

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. We should pull up the actual Steam official hardware announcement trailer because I think that it's a unique way to actually announce something, and I liked just the way they did it. Just watch this, Jordy, and listen to the transitions between it. It's a couple minutes, so we might need to sort of skip through it.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Hey, everyone. This is Steam Deck. Steam Deck is our powerful, portable, and helpful...

• 19:19John Coogan?

  So this is the product that's like, it's already out, and this has been on the market for a couple of years, sold, I think, very well. No one really knows because Valve is such a quiet company, they're not publicly traded.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  We're excited to talk about the future of Steam Deck, but not today, because this isn't a video about the future of Steam Deck. This is a video about the future of Steam hardware. Today, we're announcing three new members of the Steam hardware lineup. All connect you with powerful PC gaming. All are optimized for gaming with Steam, and all are shipping in early 2026. Let's start with this one.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it's cool how they, uh, they, they, they start with something that's familiar and then they like bring you into the next.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, the reason it's important is because it's a product that has shipped that people like.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  It's sort of like reestablishes them.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Hardware, hardware gets like, people have so little trust in a lot of new hardware products.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Totally. And then also there's this interesting factor of, uh, they, um, the, uh, the Steam Deck is, is, is, is loved, but also they're doing some rebranding here. Like the previous VR headset is the Valve Index, not the Steam Index. And, and as you'll see later in the video, they're, they're reef, they're renaming the product from Valve VR headset, Valve Index to Steam Frame. And so they're leaning more on this like Steam as their unified hardware brand, even though the company is Valve. Um, and it feels like they're trying to create more unification across the brand. So putting it all together.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  This would be a good, uh, the, um, the main.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Controller?

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  No, the main, uh, uh, computer. Do you think it'll be good for, uh, like a sim, sim racing rig?

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Uh, I think it would probably run, I, I think, I think all of this would run, uh, sim racing extremely well. The only thing is that you would still need to add the peripherals for correct like.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Uh, control and, um, uh, like pedals and steering wheel, all that stuff. Uh, but, but listen to this.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Steam machine.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Here, here, go back like 10 seconds because this transition I think is really well done.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  The new Steam controller works with any device running Steam or Steamlink, whether it's a PC, Mac, handheld, smartphone, Steam Deck, or the new Steam machine. Oh, this is the new Steam machine.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  I like that. It's like very like cute and quirky. It has like, I don't know, just like funny aesthetics, but they, they, that's the first time that they introduced the name of the product, the next, the next product. And then they do it again, like a minute or two later. Uh, and I just think it's like, uh, it, it, it has this like, sort of like friendly quirky, like aesthetic that fits with the video games, but it's, it doesn't feel like it's from anywhere particular. It feels original. I don't know.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about the black cube?

• 22:13John Coogan?

  The Black Cube? I think it's fine. I mean, it's, it's, it looks like it fits in a media console where it's gonna live next to a PS5. I actually think that that's probably better than, the PS5 is such, such an awkward shape. Like, it's, it's, it's really like, long and big. It, it, I don't know. I, I think that this is probably a better, uh, just, like, like, you can fit that on more, on, on more desks, and in more closets, and in more little media cabinets. I wouldn't have gone anywhere, I, I wouldn't have done anything differently.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Wireless connectivity of the Steam controller puck built right in. And it's great for streaming your games. To your phone, tablet, laptop, Steam Deck, or Steam Frame. Oh, yep. This is Steam Frame.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  See, they do it again. And then they tell you, okay, we got a new VR headset. And it's such a funny way to introduce, like, a new VR headset. Like, this is, this is the first time they talk about this VR headset.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  VR hardware. Stream all your Steam games, VR and non-VR alike, in this comfortable, lightweight, wireless VR headset. Steam Frame uses camera-based tracking, so getting into your games is as easy as slipping on the headset and waking it up.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  So this is a shift. They used to, you used to have to mount cameras around your, like, gaming area, basically, and then it would track you with those cameras. Now, it's all done on the headset. This is the same way the Apple Vision Pro works, this is the same way the Meta Quest 3 works. Uh, this is not, like, new, but it is, it is new for Valve.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Steam Frame also pairs seamlessly with the new Steam controller. A great companion for playing non-VR games in the headset. To make sure streaming is smooth and stable no matter what, Steam Frame includes a wireless adapter that lets you stream your games-

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is, this is interesting.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  To your headset over a fast and dedicated Wi-Fi 6 connection.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  6, yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  And the game is streamed to your frame optimized for VR, using new technology that allows for the highest resolution streaming exactly where your eyes are looking. And Steam Frame is a PC, running SteamOS. In addition to streaming, you can install and play-

• 24:16John Coogan?

  So, where you're looking in the VR headset, that actually gets streamed to you in higher resolution than the rest of whatever else is in the headset. Because your eyes can, you know, like you're looking at me right now, I'm in full resolution. This is blurry. So we will send you a blurry rendering over here. And this has been done in VR at the local level before, but they've figured out how to do it like, like we're in the, in the latency loop with like actually streaming. So they call it like foveated streaming as opposed to foveated rendering. Uh, kind of the, the next generation of this. And so you should be able to play like very high fidelity VR games and stream them from this device. And, and all of that just keeps weight and heat off your face,

• 24:59John Coogan?

  which is exciting. Tyler, any reaction? What would you pay for this? I, I think we should get the whole suite. I love it. Let's play it on the, on the fireplace, you know?

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  This is a former addict over here. So of course he wants, wants the whole.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Well, no, realistically, we're going to get this thing. We're getting, we're going to get this. We're getting the one X and then we're going to get that new, uh, Google model to play it for me. And I'll come in and I'll be like, how'd, how'd you do this weekend, buddy? Did you crush? Cause I was hanging out with my kids. I was going to baseball. Uh, let me tell you about Vanta. Auto make compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps get you compliant fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI automation powers everything from evidence collection and, and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Michael Saylor is maybe not going down with the ship.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  This is the most insane.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  The most insane.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  One, let's start with the positive. Let's start with the positive.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  It looks great. He looks like a chat. He looks absolutely chat.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes, he's in by himself in a rowboat. You know, it looks like there's a bunch of people on this, on this ship. He's not worried about them. He's worried about getting as far away from it as he can.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  The ship is going down.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  The ship is going down.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  He's looking like an absolute Chad. Jez says, brother, you were supposed to go down with the ship. So, uh, I just think, you know, this was posted.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  This was posted like, you know, very early in the morning this morning. It's possible he just was playing around on, uh.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  Okay. No, no, no. He did not do this. This is from an account called Atlas Holdold. Instead of Atlas Shrugged, Atlas Hoddled, uh, with the orange, uh, square icon. Bitcoiner Atlas Hoddle describes themselves as Bitcoiner and AI artist.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  No, he posted this from his own account.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  No, no, no. He took the image from Atlas.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Okay. You're saying he didn't make it.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  He didn't make it.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  But he liked it.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  He liked it.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  And he thought it was a good idea to post.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Him.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  And so Atlas Hoddle wakes up every day and refers to themselves as a chronicler of Michael Saylor. Like, like that, like they're clearly like a super fan, like they create fan fiction, fan content. This was something that Atlas Hoddle generated and then Michael Saylor took it and was like,

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  He's like, yeah.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  I gotta post this today.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  That's a great idea.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  When the stock's down like 50% or whatever.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's down, uh, 52% in the last six months.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  And he thought, yeah, this is a great idea.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  And so the, and so the reaction has not been good because, uh, as Jez put it, brother, you are supposed to go down with the ship. Like he's the captain of the ship. Why is he not on the ship? It's such a crazy image.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  Michael, uh, Mirror Floor says, so you're abandoning a sinking ship when you're supposed to be the captain?

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's such, it's such, such a funny, uh, situation. Um, let me tell you about graphite.dev and then Jordy, you can read the next one. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Uh, you want to read this from Valuation?

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Valuation says, God, I love markets. Where else do you get an objective answer to whether you're a genius or a total effing moron in real time? Master is down 50% since this was published and this is a quote from Saylor, uh, the captain Saylor himself. He says, unless you do the requisite 100 plus hours of studying Bitcoin on top of 100 plus hours of micro strategy, you should not enter this trade, he said, because it is a very sophisticated trade that 99.99% of Wall Street doesn't even understand.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  And yeah, the problem with 99.99% of Wall Street not understanding your your business model or your trade is that they might not buy and that might drive the price down, right?

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if institutional investors don't understand it, maybe they don't feel confident.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  The so so obviously, people are dunking on this because the the stock has traded down 50% since this was published. I do think that there is something that's nice about posting something like this. Like, if you are running a meme stock, or you're running a company that that has a lot of retail attention, it's very nice to actually go to the community and say, hey, like, you should really study for 100 hours, study the asset that we're investing in, and study this company. You should make an educated decision. It is a little bit of just like, do your own research. Although, obviously, there's a little bit of read on this, which is like, it's just like, I'm saying that I'm doing something

• 29:40John Coogan?

  so complicated, and really, I'm just hodling Bitcoin, like, by my own admission. But I do I do think that there's something somewhat responsible about saying, hey, do the research. I don't know, I want to give a little bit of credit for that.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, where to next? To Julius, the AI data analyst. Connect your data and ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  They have a very funny campaign up around San Francisco right now. I won't I won't spoil it for you, but there's a number of fantastic billboards.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Cantor Fitzgerald, now controlled by the son of Howard Lutnick, is having its best year ever, says Joe Weisenthal. Congratulations to Brandon Lutnick.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  One unusual item might appear on Cantor Fitzgerald's year-end expense receipts. Quote, "I just left the floor and told someone I'm happy to buy them a cot because they need to come in on Sunday and not leave until Friday," jokes Sage Kelly, 53, co-CEO of Cantor Investment Bank, as he sat down for an interview at his New York office. Climbing Wall Street's league tables, jumping out in front of the cryptocurrency boom and returning to SPAC-fueled dealmaking, the private New York financial boutique is having its busiest and most successful year on record. Cantor is now controlled by Brandon and Kyle Letnick, the sons of Howard Letnick, who joined Donald Trump's administration as Commerce Secretary earlier this year. The firm is on track to post revenue in 2025 of upwards of 2.5 billion, an all-time high

• 31:15John Coogan?

  and a jump of more than a quarter on last year, according to people familiar with the matter.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  How do they do it? How do they do it, John?

• 31:23John Coogan?

  How do they do it? A lot of grinding. I've met Brandon. And a lot of, I mean, it feels like Cantor's been early to a bunch of like, sort of risk, more risk-on investments than other, even pre-administration, they were early to the stablecoin thing, I believe, early to a bunch of crypto stuff. Just a little bit more risk-on relative to the other investment banks and so have done very well. And then, of course, now even further entrenched in DC, further entrenched in Wall Street.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that would certainly help give confidence around some bets that maybe other firms would find a bit riskier.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of like, this year, a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of certainty that came to crypto, but building that consensus around like, okay, the certainty is actually going to come, there is certainty that certainty will arrive, that took a big leap. And you can, you can see that if you know the administration very closely, you could assess that. Whereas people have been waiting around for certainty on tariffs and that's taken a little bit longer. But the certainty on the crypto stuff has certainly moved a lot faster.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  The executives bristle at suggestions that their new connections in Washington are contributing to that success. Instead, they say Cantor has grown with a lean team and is reaping the benefits of years of preparation for booms in sectors that more established banks have kept at arms length. Its 250 dealmakers are set to post revenue north of 1 billion. At four million per banker, that's about double the rate at the firms on Wall Street.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  Cantor has brokered.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Way lower than AI researchers. They're like completely broke compared to AI researchers. Like by a thousand X, they're making like a thousand times less money than.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  No, that's talking about the earnings that that individual.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  So, so, so as a group, they'll make a billion dollars.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  Yes, they could have just been one. They could have picked the best guy that they had.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  And gone into AI.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  And spent all day training.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, so the bankers are making four million on average. Of course, there's also like the overhead of the firm. That's not profit, that's revenue.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Versus at some of the labs, you might be making 400 million per, per research. So really pick the wrong industry to go into and, you know, our heart goes out to them.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  Cantor has brokered more US IPOs by volume this year than any other firm and is fifth in all US equity offerings after overtaking stalwarts, including Barclays and Citigroup. It's seen a boom in trading largely from clients outside the US and is on track to acquire hedge fund O'Connor from UBS Group. By the end of the year, a deal that's facing a last minute hitch after the unit was hit by losses related to bankrupt auto parts supplier First Brands Group.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  First Brands is really, is really all over the place, really wreaking, wreaking havoc.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  Much of Cantor's revenue haul comes from a surge in crypto deal making, including fundraising for multi-billion dollar treasury companies, which hold and trade digital assets, but also from the firm's early push into covering now booming sectors, including rare earth minerals, quantum computing, robotics and data centers.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Wow, they went long the boom and they, they're making, making it rain. The rainmakers are.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Kelly says, I promise you, we're not getting anything handed to us. It's easy for our competitors to say that because they're not here living and breathing what we do every single day.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, very impressive.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  So should we move over to?

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's Alfred Lynn has hit the timeline. He says, the latest on Outliers Path, our Sequoia. This is our Sequoia, it has always been our.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Is outlier a product, Outliers Path?

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  I think that might be a blog.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, okay, sorry. Outliers Path. Welcome to Outliers Path. Having spent more than, so this is, I think this is Alfred Lin's

• 35:24John Coogan?

  personal blog. Through this collection of posts on Outliers Path, I hope to provide you with the provocation to get better at getting better and prove your critics wrong. Okay, yes, so this is, this is, this is the name of his personal blog. Okay, cool.

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  AB in the chat, legendary chat star, says, "I interned for Cantor last summer. Great experience."

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Oh, nice.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Alfred says, "This is our Sequoia. It has always been our Sequoia. It has always been our Arrakis." Our Dune.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, he says, "It was never Don's Sequoia, nor Michael's, Doug's, Jim's, or Roloff's. From the very beginning, when Don chose to build a partnership and name it after the longest living tree on earth, Sequoia was meant to endure not through individuals, but through us, the collective strength, integrity, and vision of the partnership. And just as it was not theirs alone, it will not be Pat and Alfred's Sequoia. It will always be our Sequoia. We are responsible for something enduring, privileged to stand on the foundation built by those who came before us and responsible for making it stronger for those who will come after. Together, we have the opportunity to do our life's work, to make a dent in the universe, to leave our fingerprints on the partnership, and to shape Sequoia into the place we want it to be for the future.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  Principles guide us." M dash, anchored in purpose and mission.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Beyond that, beyond that, we want to trust and empower one another. Our purpose and mission remain to help the daring build legendary companies. For any Gen Z in the audience.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, how would you translate that for Gen Z?

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  Our purpose and mission remain to help those with motion.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  Or a farm, the markets.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  Or a farm, the industry.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  Our guiding principles are.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Is any of this like an update? Is anything of this like a very clear change to the strategy?

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  I think that this was just their first, like, you know, really public statement as, as the new co-steward.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but, but what is changing here? Like, uh, like, we already have the news that, uh, that there, that there are now two stewards.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Is there, are they going to be focusing more on AI companies or less on AI companies? Or like, are they being more on growth stage or less on growth stage? Like, is there a change to the strategy?

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think this is just reminding people what the firm-wide strategy is, right? They've gone through, this has been probably the roughest year on record for Sequoia in terms of like comms, right? Just going through the Sean, like Sean McGuire being in the headlines constantly. It's not the kind of, you know, coverage that-

• 38:04John Coogan?

  I feel like that just does not break through in tech and like-

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't think, I don't think it's affected their brand with founders and internally in the industry very much, but um, uh, no, I, I think this is, this is just a good statement.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess here is the answer to that question about like, what is this a response to? Uh, and Alfred says, "Some people have asked if we will continue to make new investments and lead the investment team. The answer is unequivocal yes. We will source and lead new investments and we will remain co-leads of the early and growth teams." And so, they're open for business, they're doing deals, they want to actually be investing.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  And the big question-

• 38:46John Coogan?

  I'm surprised, I, I, yeah, I would imagine that like the leader at most firms is actually doing deals, but uh, they usually have a different flavor to them, a different shape. Like, you know, when I think about like, like Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz, like, he's, he's clearly like the, you know, the leader of the firm to a degree that, you know, if you're coming in for your seed pitch, like, you're probably not DMing him first, right? He's not the first stop on the fundraising tour. Uh, but when Elon is raising money to take Twitter private, like, yeah, he is texting with, with Marc. And that money does come out of Andreessen's coffers, right?

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and if they, and if they are aggressively trying to win a deal-

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  That Marc might-

• 39:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Send the founder an note directly.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Exactly, and, and so, and so, uh, when I look at Alfred, I would say, oh, well, if, uh, you know, Tony from Do- from DoorDash is working on a new-

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  Do- Dash.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  From DoorDash is working on a new project or starting a new company or, or, you know, heavily investing in a friend's company, like, yeah, that probably goes straight to him. Uh, but no, he's probably not-

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Stock traded down 23% in the last month, it's now Do- Dash.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Um, uh, but yeah, I mean, he's, uh, he's probably not going to be like, you know, sitting there taking notes at YC demo day, uh, although.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  Here's a big question with this post.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  Yes. Was it AI?

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Alfred says at the end, this is not just a partnership. It is a living M dash. It is a living, breathing legacy.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Hmm. I don't know. Uh, I, so it like, it reads to me, honestly, it reads to me like, yes, it, it, yes. The blog post went through chat GPT and got a, and got a pass. It got a pass.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  Jeezed up.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  It got a pass. I, I would say that, uh, Alfred, if that happened, if that happened, please do yourself a favor. Go to chat GPT and go to your settings and in personalization, put custom instructions and say, never use M dashes.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  But maybe this is just a way to publicly support a portfolio company, OpenAI.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. And then also, also, uh, the thing that's really triggering Jordy more than the M dashes, I believe, is, uh, what's called antithetical parallelism or constr- or contrastive construction. That's, it's not this, it's that. For years, that's been a fine phrase, but for some reason in the reinforcement learning pipeline.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  This is actually the number one way that I detect AI generated comments on social media, more than the M dash is.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  The contrast, the contrast.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  I'll be reading something that looks like a thought, you know, uh, like some random social post, a comment in there.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  It's not this, it's that.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  Anyway.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's not, it's not the, it's not the, the, the username that triggers me. It's the contrastive construction.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  So yes, uh, yeah, yes, yes. You, you should be able to like, at least edit this out because I just find it annoying at this point. Like I've, I've just seen it so many times that I'm just like, I need a different flavor of, of text. And so you can do this, uh, for a long time, you could put this in your chat GPT personalization and it wouldn't work. Uh, it just didn't do anything. Uh, and, uh, I complained about it on the show and Sam Altman announced that, uh, that I think they fixed it. And I think that, I think that you, if you want less M dashes, uh, Sam Altman says that, uh, removing M dashes. So he says, this is 14 hours ago. This is the biggest scoop possible. Uh, so small but happy win. If you tell chat GPT not to use M dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do.

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, there, somebody, a screenshot was going viral yesterday of a, of a newspaper. And at the end of the article,

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  It said, "If you want, I can also create an even snappier front page style version with punchy one-line stats

• 42:34John Coogan?

  No.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  and old infographic-ready layout."

• 42:36John Coogan?

  What?

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Preferable for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?

• 42:40John Coogan?

  So that actually hit? Did I do that by accident?

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  Hit print.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  That's awesome. I love it. Well, if you want to generate images, video, or audio, head over to Fall, generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with service GPUs and on-demand clusters. Speaking of generated video, we gotta watch the cat. We gotta watch the cat.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  We hate, we, oh, I hate AI slop. I'm Jordy. I hate AI video. Sora's bad. Sora's bad. Wrong. Look at this video. It's remarkable. The cat is playing the piano.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  And someone comes outside and takes it away. There's something about the nature of the video, uh, bagpipes?

• 43:28John Coogan?

  I like the bagpipes fun. There's something about keeping the, uh, the video intentionally low-res because it's a doorbell cam, where it doesn't trigger the uncanny valley because the doorbell cam always looks bad. Whereas if this was trying to look like 4K footage, it would not look as good. That's

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get that instrument.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  That's a good image. That's a good instrument. I like that. This is, it's funny because they clearly created some sort of template, the didgeridoo.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  But it does get extremely repetitive because she always comes outside and says, "Knock it off," again and again. And so, uh, like, seeing this just once is enough for me. The symbols is pretty funny. Physics on those symbols not quite right, though. You know, there's work to be done here.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  The gong. Let's give it up for the gong.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  The cat hitting the gong is great. The gong looks exactly like our gong, honestly. Um, so it turns out.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  What is that? The whole court is shaking. Okay, I'm into it.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Switzerland reaches agreement with the US to cut tariff to 15%.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  The deal would reduce an extraordinarily high tariff rate at 39% that had threatened to cripple Swiss exports. We all know what those exports are. Uh, the United States and Switzerland said on Friday that they had reached an agreement to lower a punishing 39% tariff on Swiss goods, a change that will help to reduce the cost of exporting Swiss pharmaceuticals, gold, watches, and chocolate to the United States. Uh, the deal came after a meeting between US and Swiss government officials on Thursday and an unusual visit by a group of high-level Swiss executives to President Trump in the Oval Office last week. Uh, the Trump admin put a 39% tariff on Swiss exports in August, blindsiding a longtime

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  ally and delivering a sharp blow to Switzerland's economy by significantly raising the cost of the country's exports, the United States of drugs, dairy products, gold, and watches. Uh, the tariff was one of the highest rates set for any country, which administration officials said was in response to a substantial trade deficit the United States had with Switzerland.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  I wonder why we would have a large trade deficit with Switzerland. Um, the 15% tariff will now be the same as the tariff the United States charges on goods from the European Union, which reached a trade deal in July. Um, so as part of this, um, there's going to be roughly two Swiss companies committed to making 200 billion in investments in the United States by 2028.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, uh, the United States also agreed to cap tariffs. Uh, I didn't know Switzerland had a semiconductor industry.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  I had no idea. That's fascinating.

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  Capping those as well.

• 46:17John Coogan?

  Well, they do have some AI researchers over there who are, uh, who are like poached, uh, for Meta, right?

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, I think Lucas Bayer was over there. There was an OpenAI, uh, team set up over there.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting that I, I haven't heard of a, of a OpenAI team in many of the other European countries. It seems like Switzerland was like a uniquely like special place for it.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think most of the, I mean, there, there's a lot of AI going on at, uh, I never know how to say it.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  Well, London.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  ETH Zurich.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  There's that university that's like very, it's like, it's like the premier European standard.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Ethereum Zurich.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  It's not, right?

• 46:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  It is different, though, right?

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  It's not.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  ETH, I should look up what it stands for.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  But there's a lot of AI, like, research going on there.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Situation Room says Patek to open factory in Wisconsin.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  That would be hilarious. Wisconsin-made Patek.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  What, have you, have you been monitoring the, the, the GPT 5.1 launch? Like, has it been going well? It feels like it's been like, kind of quiet, but it's.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  People seem to generally like it.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  I, I don't know. I mean, they, they didn't release benchmarks, so.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  A lot of the, like, technical people aren't, like, super.

• 47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Concerned. I mean, I.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  I saw some charts that kind of showed that it, it's more that, uh, they're just pushing the model router, like, further to the edges. So it can reason for even longer if it needs to, and it can reason for even less time if it, if it just can come up with the answer quickly, more quickly. And so all of that feels like better cost optimization instead of just hitting everything with a hammer. Not everything needs 20 minutes of thinking. Some things need 30 minutes, though, and some things need one minute of thinking.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  I, I tested it using GT3 RS Bench.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  Where I was trying to have.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  You were going agentic commerce mode, though?

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Which is a little bit early.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm just using 5.1.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  But did you use agent mode? No.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. I think, I think if you do agent mode, it would. So to, to say exactly what happened, because it's an interesting failure case.

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  I just said, find me a GT3 RS, uh, green 992 in the US that's currently listed for sale.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  And it found me one.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  That was on Cars and Bids.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  That sold over two years ago.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Well, Cars and Bids, clearly, Doug Demiro's site, uh, cool cars from the modern era. We love Cars and Bids, we love Doug Demiro, but that is frustrating because it's already sold. But I think with agent mode, it would have actually like opened the website and clicked around a little bit more. I'm not exactly sure how to trigger that, but maybe you just need to chat with it more. Maybe you need to be clear about your prompt. You might have needed to do 3.5 Pro or what is it? 5.0 Pro, I guess now?

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 5.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, 5. Pro. I mean, it feels like we're back in the era of like-

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  Running the same prompt as agent mode right now. We'll see how it does. We'll come back to it.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  And is there a difference between agent mode on 5.1 and agent mode on 5 Pro?

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't say.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's getting, they did such a good job of like narrowing it down and like unconfusing it. And then now they're like, let's put a little bit more confusion in. Let's just add a little bit back. The fact that it says 5.1 is like crazy to me. It's like, you did such a good job.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  Chat wants to know about all the cans behind Tyler.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. What you got? You got Red Bulls back there?

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  No, you got, you got, yeah.

• 49:47Jordi Hays?

  Taylor, as Dave called it, pallets of fridge shigs.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Pallets of fridge.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's some DC.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Your background is actually hilarious. We should, we should move the, we should move the refrigerator to the other side so we can see the refrigerator because the refrigerator's lit up. So if you slide to the right, yeah, you can see the fridge.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  It's cool. So we should flip that around or maybe just move the camera. But anyway, you might have noticed Jordy's wearing the puffer jacket. That's because we are sponsored by Turbo Puffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  Look at those logos.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Wilmanitis took to the timeline to say, "In the flow," in quotes. He says, "The essential question for the modern allocator, the deal guy or the venture capitalist is, do you want to be in the flow? Size of check, size of fund, personal economics, character of deal, character of behavior, lifestyle and every other single question is downstream of whether or not you are in the flow or not." Let me explain.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  Is this? Tyler, do you think this has something to do with having motion?

• 50:56John Coogan?

  It seems related.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  I mean, Will is kind of like unk status. I don't know if he would.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  Ooh, whoa.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Shots fired.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Shots fired.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Calling him an unk.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Like, would he?

• 51:07John Coogan?

  I mean, is this because you believe he's... I thought he was very young. I thought he was a teal fella just a few years ago.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  No one knows how old he is.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Is there a theory that he could be unk? He's certainly wise beyond his years.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  Unc theory.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  No, but I'm saying this is like the equivalent of having motion. So I agree with you.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  But like, I don't think he would be one to use that kind of, that vernacular.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  The parliance, yeah. Uh, let me explain. Think of The Flow as the world's greatest nightclub. It's open 24/7. Many of the coolest and richest guys are there. Guys seem to get rich just by dint of hanging around. And the lights never turn on. It's a party that never ends. Inside The Flow, the only decision you have to make is to keep partying. Sure, people get hurt inside The Flow. Sometimes guys buy tables they can't afford or get addicted to habits they can't maintain. When this happens, The Flow gently returns them to pedestrian life and the party continues. No one ever seems to notice. When you're inside The Flow, the only thing you notice is the guys at higher rungs dangling over a seemingly endless set of 10x markups

• 52:10John Coogan?

  and lifestyle expenses to exhaust your newly found carry. Inside The Flow, we don't fly commercial. Mark Rowan is constantly calling and we have houses on Gin Lane. The Flow gives us, uh, gives to those who give to it. There's nothing wrong with being in The Flow. Many great investors live their lives entirely inside of it and have beautiful economics families and even return capital to incredible endowments inside The Flow. But very few people make the conscious decision to realize that life is possible outside The Flow. That you can get rich, build great companies, generate excess returns by being far, far, far outside The Flow. But you can only have one foot in. But you can't only have one foot in.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  If you're going to enter The Flow, you must do it entirely. No one gets rich hunting for value on Madison Avenue. If you're in the business of buying marquee assets, you need to systemically order your life around paying marquee prices. Across asset classes, you can neatly order firms into in the flow and out of the flow. Firms in the flow tend to have softer J-curves because they're able to quickly make deals, consensus and achieve markups through other friends at the party. Firms outside the flow tend to be a bit slower, have much more profound J-curves, but can achieve incredible returns if they persevere. Many of the social oddities of allocators are actually social oddities of being in the flow.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  My friend Kyle Tucker names the main one below.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Going guy for guy at every social occasion.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Explain. I can't believe what he said at the Apollo AGM in Lake Cuomo.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Ari Emanuel introduced me to the Pope. I just bought Ramp forwards at 500X from Bill Ackman's dog walker.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  This is...

• 54:02John Coogan?

  If you, if you find yourself with a strong distaste for this lifestyle, that's okay. There's a rich life possible outside of the flow, but you need to make the consensus decision, day in and day out, to either be in the flow...

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Conscious decision.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Oh, conscious. To either be in the flow or far outside. The flow only gives to those who give their all to it. What a great piece of writing. That's funny. Nassim Taleb said, "The opposite of success isn't failure, it's name dropping the bed of Procrustes."

• 54:33John Coogan?

  And somebody, you know, Antonio says, "In my experience during booms, most get flow curious, then pull back, then the pullback comes and people become contrarian and look down their noses at flow folks without even the self-awareness to refer to their dabblings as a phase from when I was younger." And Will Manaya says, "You are describing being half in, half out of the flow. This will kill you. The flow takes from those who attempt to take from it without giving their all. In return, the flow only gives to those who give their all." It reads like a plot of a horror film. It's fantastic. In or or like the the substance.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  Write, write a, write a novel, Will, please.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, what a way with words. Um, do you think this is inspired by, uh, that, uh, that conference he went to? It was more outside of the flow potentially?

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  I think, I think that might be a little bit of what, of what's going on that.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Main street.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  You see, I mean, we, we talk about this with David Senra a lot, where who's coming on the show in, in just a few hours.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  Wait, what? Is he, do we, were you not supposed to say that? Sorry. I think he's coming on.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  He said he was, he was scheduled.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  And then we took him off the schedule because he had to travel for the day. Then he, then he had some plane issues. And he said, save the 2 P M. Spot and then now he's, he's on another, on another.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  Well, we'll get him back on the show soon, but yeah, yeah, if you're listening to this show, you obviously know who David Senra is. Uh, the creator of the founders podcast and the host of David Senra with David Senra. But, uh, David is someone who, who has observed folks inside the flow and outside the flow and really sees both sides of it. I think. And that's one of his unique, unique strengths is that, uh, he is not entirely captured by the flow. And because, and, and maybe, maybe, uh, Will's point would hold in the capital allocator world. You have to be in the flow or out of the flow. You can't be half in. Um, but, uh, but it certainly does not hold true for what David does.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  Which is, uh, you know, storytelling and understanding the history of greater, uh, the world's greatest entrepreneurs.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  The flow, I think, could be summed up by, are you dancing in Manhattan?

• 56:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  It's very, very Manhattan thing.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Oh, in Manhattan, but also in Sand Hill Road, I think is, is, is similar. Uh, are you dancing with Google AI Studio? Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires the right models and APIs up for you. Get started at ai.studio slash build.

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  Will says friends that have done well in the flow seem to share these traits.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  Oh, my God, this is such a long post again.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  Now, he, he had to follow it up.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  He had to follow it up.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  Spend a hundred percent of net cash on rent expenses. So they constantly feel pressure.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 57:28Jordi Hays?

  Love that. Uh, Zegna sneakers, ABC cardigans.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  Felt very direct.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  We'll educate you.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  Low first marriage success rates, high second marriage success.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, lots of flights, constant two, three city rotation.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Couldn't be.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  Spend ninety nine percent of their time talking about deals that make up less than five percent of deployed dollars.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  Office either in Soho or Nine West.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Oh, so he's really calling out his, his Manhattanite frats, his neighbors.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  Now, here's where he contradicts himself. Oh, no, maybe not. He says constantly holding large amounts of cash.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Only physically like a couple of grand. You're, you're a notorious tipper. You're a notorious cash tipper. So you, you fit into this piece. Uh, we should, uh.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  Very low laptop usage, constant cellphone usage.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  Can't make it through an hour without taking a call.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  We had a workout with one of these guys this morning. We felt, we felt really, we felt really bad. This, this guy, we showed up to the gym for a workout and had breakfast with him.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Good buddy.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  And he, he had to, he, he had had to step away for three calls.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  He was on the grind. Like by the time we had finished our first coffee of the morning, he'd had four calls. It was crazy.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Uh, you know, we could barely have one call before the show because we're like, we're so, we're in our own flow. Our flow is not the flow and it's, it's the TBPN flow. Uh, we spend like no time talking to other people except on the show. Uh, so it's a very, very different lifestyle, I think, from like what he's describing. But I've seen this and, and, uh, I mean, this would again, just work as a novel or a movie where we're watching the birth of a modern Bret Easton Ellis. I know you haven't seen American Psycho, but it's a fantastic film. You should check it out sometime. It's also an interesting book. Uh, and, uh, and, and, and the, the Patrick Bateman of the nineties is, you know, this is a, this would be a great foundational portrait

• 59:28John Coogan?

  of an individual who could be stylized in the, in a Bret Easton Ellis style, which would be very, very interesting. Uh, let's continue reading, but first let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat to reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. So where were we? They, they have a lot of cash. They're in Soho, Nine West.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Lunch guys more, more so than dinner guys, never breakfast guys. Lacrosse or hockey in high school, not rowing.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  That's Tyler.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  Wait, which one did you do?

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Lacrosse guy. I played lacrosse.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  Oh, flow guy right here.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  Zoom calls, not sell calls.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  I can see that. Friends that have done out, done well out of.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  I, I can't tell if it, do you want to be in the flow or outside the flow? I guess the whole point of this is that you either want to be all the way in maximizing it, flow maxing, or you want to be rejecting it entirely. You just don't want to be.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's get into the out of flow zone.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  It says be in the middle of nowhere. Jackson, Park City, Discover.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, properties, but still on a resort. Multiple dogs, mostly more dogs and kids.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Usually low trust, kind of cagey to pin down and get a meeting with.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Once they trust you, you can't get rid of them.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, almost universally happily married, rowing in high school, not lacrosse or hockey.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  I like how specific.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Low meeting count, lots of depth. I think, I know the two people he's describing here.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to dox them, but.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Phone calls, not Zooms.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Denim shirts or full suit.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Does one begin with a T?

• 1:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Seems to have unspeakable amount of money spent.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Does one, does one begin with a J?

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Does one begin with a J?

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  Always funding some cultural project, movie, magazine, et cetera. That's on the brink of failing. Okay, so I will say, both of these are friends of the show. First one, first one has not been on the show. Second one has been. That's the only, the only.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Okay, wait, wait, wait. I, okay, yeah. Um, we, we could go more into it. This is hilarious, though. I feel like both these guys have been on the show. Uh, we've clearly had, uh, many specimens who fit into both. Uh, and, and I think Will's, Will's point is that, uh, there are multiple ways to make a buck. And there are just different archetypes within the world of capital allocation, within the world of, of, uh, being a deals guy. I think this is, this is interesting. It's like, we're, we're peeling back the onion. We're going a layer deeper on the deals guy archetype, which has been, uh, you know, been workshopped by Will and, and Jeremy Giffon over the last few weeks. So they're having fun.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys more in the flow or out of the flow, do you think?

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  I, I don't think, I don't think we qualify for either because we are not deals guys. We are not capital allocators. I think step one of even deciding if you're in or out of the flow is the first line of Will's original post. The essential question for the modern allocator, the deal guy, the venture capitalist, I'm not a deals guy, I'm not an allocator, I'm not a venture capitalist. So it's an irrelevant question. It's like, it's like, are you more of a center or a power forward? It's like, I'm a podcaster. That doesn't even apply. And so, you can only be in the flow or out of the flow if you are at least in the game. The game of capital allocation. And it's a funny time to reflect. Anyway, let's move on to Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  Just in, the stock market is in extreme fear? And the ball is being thrown at... is that Kobe?

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes, that's Kobe, John. Unfazed.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  He's unfazed.

• 1:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Completely unfazed. Skooks is unfazed.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  We checked in with our retail correspondent. He was shook at 6:30 in the morning or something. What was it, 5:30 in the morning he woke up? And he was looking at the pre-market report, seeing red, very nervous.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  It was, no, no, it was 30 seconds after the...

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Okay, after the opening, when the stocks dived. He is monitoring the situation much more than we are. I watch the public market moves on the order of like, weeks, you know? Or even, yo, oh, there's a big day, it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, I'll throw on the white suit. I'm not monitoring it hour to hour.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  You pretty much track the market based on the color of the suit.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Totally. Because I really do think in more of like, months and years and longer time horizons than days. Yes, I think it's centuries, actually. Thinking.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  This new options-esque platform.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Called Euphoria is going viral. Ben Eifert says, "Honestly, this is so cute and fun, I'm not even mad. I love gambling. This is so gamified, I don't think it presents as investing or democratization of derivatives or whatever. It's entertainment." And look at this.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, are you playing this? Should I get on this?

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, Jordy, should we talk about like, one of our most degenerate ideas ever? I mean, at this point, like it's just gonna, yeah, the zero minute option.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  I mean, at this point, like, somebody's just gonna build it. At least we'll be on record for joking about it. So, two years ago, shortly after Jordy and I met, we were introduced through, by Will Manidis. We were kicking around ideas. One of those ideas was a nicotine pouch for finance bros called Excel. We actually wound up launching that. You might have seen that. We've talked about that on the show. The other thing that we kicked around was, so if you've been tracking options trading, you can now buy zero day options. These are options that expire after one day. So you're only betting on the movement of the stock over the course of one day. And, and my idea, or our idea, was what if you made it more degenerates?

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  What if you made it zero minute options? And you got it down to something on the order of how long it takes to pull a slot machine? And then watch the slots tick over. So you would be democratizing high-frequency trading, for example, and you would be placing a bet. The UI was effectively, you buy $1 of this out-of-the-money option. In 90% of the time, you lose the dollar, like you do when you're playing slots, or you lose the penny. But, you know, 1/10 of the time, you 10x your money. And that's the nature. And basically, you can derive the exact same probabilities

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  that exist in a slot, in a literal slot machine. You can derive those exact same probabilities from the financial markets with particular derivative instruments. Like, mathematically, you can recreate a slot machine that acts with the exact same probabilities using derivatives, using zero-minute options.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  You'd have terrible founder market fit on that one, because I don't.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Horrible, horrible.

• 1:06:23Jordi Hays?

  But it was fun talking about.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  But it's hilarious. It's one of those things. The, the, the real problem is that like it is just a, this is just a market entry tool. You're going to become like sort of a meme and then you have to go build the rest of the financial institution. And then you're up against Coinbase and Robinhood and public and a whole bunch of other serious competitors who have way more infrastructure. And so, uh, like the, the, the cute little game, uh, can be a good, a good marketing tool to launch your company. But there's a lot more that you have to do. Um, but it can still be profitable and, uh, hopefully you're doing it in a, in a, in a way that isn't just totally de-gen gambling because.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Red lock trying to.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a little bit of de-gen on de-gen, uh, combat out there, but you know what's not degenerate? numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go get, uh, build an honest product, start a woodworking shop, make a chair, sell it on Shopify.

• 1:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Sell mahogany online. Sell the official wooded business online. Sim for Satoshi says the AI bubble has already popped.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Yes, I said this too. I said this too. Three weeks ago, the stock traded down to 2%. The bubble popped. Now we're back to re-inflating. Yeah, exactly. I agree with.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Sim says the information, however, is yet to propagate evenly. And he's sharing a quote from Scott McNeely, CEO of Sun Microsystems in 2002.

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  The quote, "At 10x revenue to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 years straight in dividends." That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you have to pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R and D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  What was Sun Microsystems trading for in 2000 and then what were they trading for in 2002? Because this reads like he's apologizing for a massive sell off in the stock. That is pretty crazy. Um, yeah, what a wild. Uh, I like bone here, bone GBD says, if you're, if you're in AI pivot to finance and go short. Ridiculous. Uh, badminton is live streaming in China and you can adjust whatever angle you want. This is very cool. So they film it with a whole bunch of different cameras and then you can pick the angle. Imagine being able to pick your own angle while watching TVPN live.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

  That would be something special. Maybe we should steal this back from the Chinese. This seems like some awesome innovation. Uh, now Tyler, you, you don't think this is, uh, Gaussian splatting, right? Gaussian.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I mean, it's not smooth.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  You think this is just a bunch of cameras?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  It looks like a bunch of cameras. But you could do this with Gaussian splatting.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I think that'll be the next, the next iteration, the next version, but we're pretty far away from like real time on that.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Real one knows that the shuttlecock is the fastest moving object that's been recorded in sports.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Goes hundreds of miles an hour.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Hundreds?

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  No way. I mean, it's, it's like faster than a golf ball, faster than a bowling ball.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yes.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  It's faster than a football. It's faster than, that's crazy. Hundreds of miles.

• 1:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Let me confirm golf ball.

• 1:10:09John Coogan?

  Uh, I'll put you in the truth zone there. What about rifle shooting? Does it go faster than a gun? You've seen those at the Olympics where they're shooting the pistols, right? It can't possibly go faster than a gun, than a bullet from a rifle in a pentathlon. No way. I got you dead to rights.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this is AI overview. It's probably hallucinating and it says, this is, this actually, you might've found a really incredible.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Insight?

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Hole in the reasoning. Okay.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, a bullet is not faster than a badminton shuttlecock.

• 1:10:42John Coogan?

  No, let's go.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  I guess, but so they're talking about bird.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  Keep looking. Okay, badminton shuttlecock speed during badminton game. How fast does that go? I want miles per hour, hopefully. And then I want to know how fast an F1 car goes and how fast a bullet out of one of those pistols goes at the Olympics. Because we all know that iconic image of the woman and the Turkish guy at the Olympics and the guy with all the gear.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  AI is is is false.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  It's false.

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  It is convinced.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Does anyone have any real numbers? Anyone have any real numbers?

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Okay, like a top speed for a shuttlecock is like 300 miles an hour.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  300 miles an hour and how much is a bullet coming out of one of those guns?

• 1:11:33Jordi Hays?

  2,000 miles an hour.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  2,000 miles an hour. Wow. So off by an order of magnitude, Jordy. In the truth zone, it's okay. We'll clip it in a way that makes it sound, we won't clip, we won't include the correction. We'll just clip.

• 1:11:47Jordi Hays?

  This is some of the best AI generated content.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  It's going to go mega.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  No, a bullet is not faster than a badminton shuttlecock. A badminton shuttlecock is the fastest moving object in sports while bullets can travel at over 2,000 miles an hour.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for digital guys. We didn't create digital God.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Digital guys. This is something like your boy would say. This is something your guy would say. Alad Gill is doubling his fun target to nearly 3 billion. Congratulations to Alad Gill. Let's ring the gong. First gong of the day.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says, AI told me that John's gong is faster than a bullet. I believe that.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Let's go over to the, we have a new, we have a new segment on the show. We have different press releases that have been coming through. Let's see. Oh, yes. Okay, we got the mic. We got the PTZ camera. Are you guys tracking me? Where are we doing? Are we tracking me? Who's tracking me? I, I, I, oh, it's this one. It's this camera. Okay, so first, let's see, cursor at 29.3 billion. We had Spencer on the show yesterday to talk about it. They raised 2.3 billion in its third funding round this year. Third in the year. It used to raise money every 12 to 18 months. Now it's every three months.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Maryland Governor Wes Moore announces landmark AI partnership to transform state service delivery. Uh, what is going on here? Wes Moore announced a landmark partnership with Anthropic and Percepta, a general catalyst transformation company to harness AI in tackling child poverty, expanding housing access. So they're gonna ask Claude to build houses, I guess, something like that. Uh, Anthropic will provide Claude to workers across Maryland state agencies and lend technical support to help design, deploy AI-powered initiatives. One example includes a new Claude-powered virtual assistant

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  that will help residents apply for benefits, update information and track applications. What do you think, Jordy?

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Thumbs up, thumbs down. I mean, honestly, like if, if there's, is there a better, like, the DMV website notoriously is bad. If you could have an AI agent and use it instead, that's probably an upgrade. Congrats to them. Uh, what else we got? TeamShares. TeamShares, a tech-enabled

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  What are they up to?

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  acquirer of high-quality, small and medium enterprises is listing on the NASDAQ via Live Oak V combination, $126 million pipe led by accounts, advised by T. Rowe Price.

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  I like, I like how nobody wants to say SPAC anymore. They just got all the words around it.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  TeamShares acquisition-based, is that what this is? Uh, TeamShares programmatically acquires companies with half a million to five million of EBITDA from retiring owners, integrates them with the TeamShares platform and helps employees earn company stock.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  This is a slow, slow ventures company.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  That's right, that's right. Uh, what else we got? YC Startup Multi-Factor launches the first password manager built for the AI era. That's gonna be tough competition, right? Cause OnePassword is extremely sticky and potent, like, he's not, he's not asleep at the wheel. We've had the CEO on the, on the show. The, uh, the, the OnePassword team partnered with Browserbase and is obviously trying to be, you know, the one password for the AI era. But there are some other folks. Why are you laughing?

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm laughing because Gabe, I think, is looking at, uh, the Happy Dad in the corner.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is, which of course we have here because we love. John from Happy Dad.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, John Sheehy.

• 1:15:30Jordi Hays?

  We support our friends.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Uh, so this is, uh, let's read this. Multi-factor Y Combinator Fall 2025. So we might have interviewed this company. Founded by a former CIA agent. That's pretty cool.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, let's go.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  And a former NASA scientist. Wow, what a team. Uh, today announced the launch of its

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Straight out of the deep state.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  Password manager that allows both humans and AI agents to access online accounts securely without ever underlying, exposing underlying credentials. A public demonstration of its proprietary security technology. The company will temporarily make its actual corporate bank account accessible to the public starting on November 12th through a read-only checkpoint link containing $1 million in business funds. Uh, that's a, that's a cool stunt. Um, I wonder, I wonder what their go-to-market will be fully. I wonder how they'll, how they'll, whether they'll wind up going more enterprise and then, and then down into the individuals or like what OnePassword did. They got a bunch of consumers on and eventually people, uh, eventually people started using it in business like, like we do, you know?

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  We started using it personally and then eventually for business. Uh, introducing SuperMe, the AI-native professional network. They're going up against LinkedIn, I guess. The business, the best practices of building companies are of, are unevenly distributed. Every great company has pockets of excellence and its own blind spots, the knowledge behind. They're not saying an AI-native, uh, AI-native professional network. What else is in here? There's a big stack here. Beehive is taking aim at Substack, Squarespace.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  And something else. Uh, it's, uh, there's a notification pop-up that says, would you like to, would you like, would you like notifications? I guess it's like, oh yeah, like here's our press release, but like, you know, you can't read. I guess Patreon, it's probably Patreon.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  Okay, we, a sweeping product release of 10 new tools spans website creation, podcasting, digital product sales and analytics. Congrats to Beehive. Triple glaze. Triple glaze. Uh, Beehive is no longer just a newsletter platform. On Thursday, the company released a sweeping slate of 10 new products at its winter release event, repositioning itself as Creator Content Operating System. According to co-founder and chief executor, executive Tyler Dank, uh, Beehive's been on a tear. I know a bunch of people that love it. We're obviously on Substack. Go to tbpn.com, sign up for our Substack. There's been, we've talked to some people that have used both. They're both cool.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Probably some reasons to use Beehive, some reasons to use Beehive and some reasons to use Substack. Kind of just depends on your use case. And then the last one is Air Jewel Technologies announces third quarter results and provides business updates. This is a tech platform that unleashes the power of water from air? Interesting. Air Jewel is addressing emerging opportunities driven by powerful macro trends that are fundamentally reshaping global water and energy markets. That is...

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for global water markets.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  Pulling water from air. You know what I was laughing about? I was thinking, you know, Bezos has spent something like, what, 25, 10 billion dollars on Blue Origin? And there's so many billionaires that have just wasted like hundreds of billions of dollars when they could, like trying to do world hunger, when they could have been building rockets. Like, we need to, we need to, you know, really, really shame the billionaires who are wasting money on something that's just nonsense instead of like building rockets. They gotta build rockets. That's what we gotta do. You've seen that?

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Wait, who said that?

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  There's constantly, there's constantly a wave. I'm joking about the constant wave of like, Elon could, Elon could cure world hunger. Well, there's a bunch of billionaires that have been trying to cure world hunger. They've spent 100 billion on it. They could have been building rockets. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 1:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Elon's, Elon's public service is making a car that costs less than a gym membership.

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  It's really gonna be like a $50 car. Oh, where did we, where did we land on the, on the Roadster? So the new Roadster, we, we talked about this in the show, Elon went on Rogan and he said, maybe it'll be a flying car. And, and he specifically said, the demo will be shocking, like the demo will be amazing. And so I was trying to debate with Jordy and Tyler this morning. What, what will the demo be? Like, what will it actually be? Like, I don't think anyone assumes that you will just be able to, at the demo, hop in the Roadster and be like, take me from LA to San Francisco and it just flies you there. Like, that seems unbelievable, even as a demo.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  But what will the demo be? And there's been a couple different examples of this. Did we ever find the video of the, the jumping Chinese car? This is such a crazy video, jumping.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, let's pull it up.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Chinese car. Yeah, this one. The BYD Yangwang U9, the supercar that jumps obstacles. There's a video here. Let me try and put this in the timeline. Um, let's see if I can send this in. So, um, so there's, there's that. And then what was the other one? The Maybach GL, GLS bounces, right? There's this bouncing mode.

• 1:20:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the GLS 600.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  GLS 600.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  And that's technically to help you get out of sand, I think?

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. Yeah, that's that. That's what, it's not just for the influencers to like flex on each other.

• 1:21:07Jordi Hays?

  When you're doing a little fundraising.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Out, out in the Middle East.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  That.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  And you get stuck in some sand in your Maybach.

• 1:21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's, and there's also the, the Mercedes G-Wagon, the electric G-Wagon, the G650 with EQ technology, I believe it's called, something like that. Uh, and it does a tank turn. And so the, the, the, let, let's watch this. Yeah, look, okay. So that is technically a flying car, all four wheels off the ra, off the ground. I would call this the minimum viable flying car. And so I'm expecting the Tesla Roadster to be able to do something slightly above this. Right. But the question is like, how much above this? Like, will there be a rocket engine on there? Will there be fans on there? I was kicking around the idea that they would put a fan on it.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Somehow maybe it would pop out a bunch of fans and the fans could suction the car to the road. So it could go from zero to 60 faster. Maybe you could reverse those fans and actually hover the car a little bit or elevate the car. But I want, I want a firm prediction from you, Jordy, on what you think the, what, what the amazing flying car Tesla demo might be. Like, what do you think it actually might be? Cause he's gonna demo something and he's gonna, and he's probably not gonna be uh, just a car that flies you from San Francisco to, to New York. Right? Like, that would be truly like mind blowing.

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love your theory. I think it'd be very cool if the fans could, could create some amount of thrust.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  But uh, I find it hard to believe.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Jordi Hays?

  That uh, it would actually be able to lift one of these cars. They're very, very, very heavy.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Jordi Hays?

  The battery. So I'm going with something closer to uh, the ability to do something like this jump, like we're seeing with this U9.

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  Okay. So uh, I have a little bit of, uh, I had, I had GPT-5 like kind of crunch some of the physics numbers on this. So suction fans with good skirts could plausibly improve a Plaid's uh, like a Plaid Tesla, uh, like a Tesla Model S Plaid, uh, zero to 60. If it was, if it was gonna do 2.4 seconds zero to 60, it could go down to 1.6 or 1.8 seconds. So the pressure needed is only a few kilopascal scales uh, over a three to five meter area. And so it's potentially possible that you could use fans to create more downforce. And fans, I believe, were actually banned from F1.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Because there was a moment where creating artificial downforce with fans was, and I think there are some supercars that have fans that create more downforce and suction the car to the ground. So you get more traction. So that is a feature that could be there. The question is, if you reverse the fans for lift, you need a lot more rotor area and near megawatt power to hover a two-ton sedan. Even if you could supply it, the battery would give only a few minutes before thermal or energy limits intervene. And so I feel like when we're talking about demo, there's a world where the demo is like, yeah, it uses half the battery and it's just a party trick, but it does lift the car off the ground for two feet or something like that. Tyler, what do you think?

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Do you have any firm claims on like what the flying car demo might actually be?

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't see like actual wings coming out. That seems like overly ambitious. Yeah.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Have a little faith.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  Because there is a world where it's like the Roadster event is actually just like a straight up like, it's just a helicopter. Like they just launch a helicopter and then it's like, yeah, it flies. It's a flying car, but it's mostly a helicopter.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, my idea was some kind of glider or parachute comes out. And then so you can kind of drive off a cliff and then you kind of glide.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  I like the gliding idea. That would be extremely high stakes.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  Like, you know, when you see a ramp on the road and then you hit it and then you kind of glide down.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  2.6 says, I don't think we're getting flying cars. I personally love being stuck in traffic. There is an incentive for Elon to get people stuck in traffic. They're more likely to become best friends with Grok. And so the more time they're in traffic, the more time they're talking with Grok.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  There's somewhat of a flywheel there.

• 1:25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, I want to react to this, this, what if the, what if the, what if the loved ones we've lost could be part of our future? This demo video.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  I've never actually seen a more hated launch.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Was sort of controversial. Let's dig into it. Let me, first, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. And so Hip City Reg, who's been on the show.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's play the video first.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  Let's play the video first and then we'll go into the reactions. Baby Charlie.

• 1:25:59Speaker 04

  See?

• 1:26:00Speaker 05

  Oh, honey, that's wonderful.

• 1:26:02Speaker 04

  Kicking like crazy.

• 1:26:04Speaker 05

  He's listening. Put your hand on your tummy and hum to him. You used to love that.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  To Y.

• 1:26:15Speaker 04

  Feels like he's dancing in there.

• 1:26:16Speaker 05

  Oh, honey.

• 1:26:18Speaker 04

  Mom, would you tell Charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me?

• 1:26:21Speaker 05

  Once upon a time, there was a baby unicorn who didn't know he knew how to fly. This baby unicorn was like your mom because she didn't know that she knew how to fly, but she knew how to do all kinds of fabulous things. Hi, Grandma. Hey, Charlie. How was school today?

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  Pretty good roto there.

• 1:26:40Speaker 05

  I'm in this crazy shot in basketball. I don't really care that much about basketball. What about the crush?

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  I like that this, uh, this video presumes it will have see-through phones, too. Like, maybe we should build that first. That seems like a really profitable business if you can create a see-through phone.

• 1:27:02Speaker 05

  You'd love that.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  You would have loved this moment.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  You can call anytime.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it does feel like it's, I mean, it's shot maybe by the people that did Black Mirror.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  It literally seems like they hired the same team. Wait, so is she alive in the real world? Oh, no, they're scanning her before she... Oh, that's crazy.

• 1:27:26Speaker 05

  I am. I'm absolutely... I'm your mother after all.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean,

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  they're thinking, okay, the retention on this product, you gotta, you gotta get it, you gotta get it before your loved ones pass away. You gotta be harvesting the training data. And then at any point in the future, if you churn, they delete your loved ones forever.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Did this guy pivot? His banner says The Climate Reality Project.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  I think Caleb Worthy is a former Disney star.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  Canadian actor. He's known for his roles as Des Wade on the Disney Channel series Austin and Ally.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Well, then he might have access. Oh, he's, he's, he's, he's worked with Netflix, so he might be connected to the Black Mirror folks.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Reggie James says, "Digital necromancy to capitalize on the grief of the vulnerable. Straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200."

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, do you want this? Would you ever use this? I think I'm not in the market. I don't think this is for me.

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think this would, would have.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  I feel like I know too much about AI. Like, I, I would just, I would know that this is, that this is AI-generated. And so it wouldn't, it wouldn't like fool me. I need to, I, I would think I need to be fooled.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, AB says, "They delete the S3 bucket if you don't make the payment." Super dark. I, I think this is one of those things that would actually have quite a lot of demand.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Because a lot of people are, are just gonna process this and say, "I'm, I'm really fearful of my loved ones passing."

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  I completely agree. I don't know. I, I, I think this is.

• 1:29:09Jordi Hays?

  I just think you, you also find it hard to believe how many people are best friends with ChatGPT.

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I do. I do find it hard to believe.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  And there are millions of them.

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Good question. So you think, you think this is?

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  And it's tough because I, I mean, I miss my grandparents. I want my, I, I wish that my grandparents were around to spend more time

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  with my kids. There are stories they've told me. There's songs they've sang.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  There's all these incredible moments that I will never relive, and I wish I could experience those moments.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  That being said, am I gonna be a customer of this? No.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's weird that they.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  It does feel incredibly dark, but I think there will be a surprising amount of demand for this.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  There's been, there's been a couple, there, there was, there was a YC company that was, uh, something much, I think, uh, more heartwarming than this, which was, uh, it was a service that you'd purchase and then they would email or, or do like a phone call with your parents essentially to collect information about them and, and put it together into kind of like the life story. And it would just tell that for you. But it was all real. It was just like, like, you might not have the time to go and record every, like a podcast with your parents, but if they help, the company would just help facilitate it, basically.

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't know. Do you think, uh, OpenAI would launch a competitor to this?

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they want another PR crisis.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. But I mean, if this gets big, it would not be much of a PR crisis to launch a competitor.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Like.

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  I think if this is successful.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  If it's established, if it's a normal thing.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  They'll launch a version of it.

• 1:30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, well, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. We got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We have Ev Randall in the studio.

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm tearing up the timeline.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  The newest general partner at Benchmark.

• 1:31:07Everett Randle?

  Thanks so much for coming by. Thanks for having me.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Oh, you picked, you selected the Mataina, the podcast in a can. That is Andrew Huberman's work. Uh, we're big fans of it here. He's on a tear. Uh, and you're, and you've been on a tear. Uh, introduce yourself again. Uh, what, what, what's the latest news? How, how do you describe yourself these days?

• 1:31:28Everett Randle?

  Gentlemen, um, great to see you both.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:30Everett Randle?

  Uh, first time in the Ultra Dome.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:32Everett Randle?

  Uh, it's as incredible as I imagined it to be.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:31:34Everett Randle?

  Um, so yeah, I'm Ev Randall. I'm the newest partner, uh, newest general partner.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  General partner. Don't forget that first word.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Don't sell yourself.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  Don't sell yourself. Congratulations.

• 1:31:42Jordi Hays?

  The big G.

• 1:31:43Everett Randle?

  Thank you.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  The big G.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:31:44Everett Randle?

  At Benchmark.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:45Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  How did it come together?

• 1:31:47Everett Randle?

  Hmm. It was, um, it was really, it was, it was a pretty unique recruitment process. It was one that was, uh, initiated actually by Chathin. And we actually, he just reached out to grab dinner, um, a few months back. And a lot of it was, was just pure vibes and relationship building.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  So this is a tip for GPs at other firms, don't let your partners get dinner with anyone at other firms, uh, because they're out of there.

• 1:32:13Everett Randle?

  So it's, you know, like.

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  To get dinner.

• 1:32:15Everett Randle?

  Yeah, had dinner. Um, and you, you know, like investors will do this oftentimes with each other. It's like, you know, you're all, you're all looking at similar things, looking at similar spaces, doing a bunch of research.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Friendemies.

• 1:32:24Everett Randle?

  Friendemies. Yeah. It's like you're, you're all in this competition, but you're also, you know, you can, you can be of immense value to each other. We're all marketing each other's stuff up.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  And he said, he said, it's been quiet on the timeline for Benchmark. We'd love to bring someone to the team that could, uh, that could be a little bit more controversial. Spice things up. No, no. But what, what did he actually say about like the problems that he wanted to solve at Benchmark? You could bring the table.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  And, and more so, what was like the pitch, the hard?

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:49Everett Randle?

  Yeah. I think, I think that the, the pitch, cause it wasn't really like, hey, we need to, we need to solve all these problems, but it was just, I, I think like a pitch around alignment, uh, about what the partners at Benchmark really like doing. And. He was like, hey, like, we are a group of people that really love to get involved with very, very few companies every year. Each one of the general partners there invests in one to two investments per year.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Per year.

• 1:33:11Everett Randle?

  And gets really, really involved.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Everett Randle?

  And tends to get involved relatively early in the company's life cycle.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  And, and, and like, break that down a little bit deeper because you could be, like, I could have a VC that's like, oh, yeah. Uh, you're the only investment I made this year. But I call them and they're like, sorry, I'm on forty five back to back like pitch calls because I got to find that one really good one.

• 1:33:32Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Versus someone who's like, no, I'm actually like in the office regularly. Yeah, I take other pitches. So like, is there a material difference in the day to day actually spending time with companies? Or is it really just highly selective and then you're still doing like a ton of outbound and inbound and just hearing pitches constantly? And it's more, we're more just saying like the cream of the crop is like the picking.

• 1:33:53Everett Randle?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think the, the rate limiter in the bottleneck is definitely the picking.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:57Everett Randle?

  Like you're still meeting tons and tons of people.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:59Everett Randle?

  You can still learn, even if you're not investing in a company or you don't partner with the company.

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Everett Randle?

  There's so much that you can learn.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:04Everett Randle?

  From every single founder, every single company.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:07Everett Randle?

  That is building something. And so even though we only partner with a few, we're still meeting a ton. We're meeting a ton of co-investors, we're meeting a ton of founders, we're meeting a ton of awesome operators. So, so still immense amount of relationship building and networking.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:19Everett Randle?

  Uh, we just end up only partnering with, with, with a few of them.

• 1:34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you feeling about, uh, entering a new role, new firm for you at this moment in the market? It feels like where there's a lot of froth, a lot of people have already made their bets on the different foundation labs. Uh, where do you see opportunity to kind of like make your mark with the new team?

• 1:34:44Everett Randle?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, um, really, really interesting because it, it's a like, almost like life cycle of a market. Like selection, like, like on the timeline of like, like there, there was a lot of great investors that just ended up starting their check writing career in twenty twenty one.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35:02Everett Randle?

  They did a lot of investments in 2021 because it was a relatively frothy period in the market.

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:07Everett Randle?

  And to no fault of their own, really, a lot of them ended up having like a pretty rough initial track record. So it's always something that you're thinking about is like, what part of the market cycle?

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Everett Randle?

  Am I joining this firm and what am I, you know, writing checks into? Because if you started in 2023, that was an amazing time to write checks. Everything was, was, you know, whether you're at the growth stage or the early stage. There's a lot of like the companies that are now these like stalwart AI leaders starting and picking up steam. But then you also had a bunch of growth stage companies that were relatively cheap on like a multiple basis. And so 2023 was an amazing time. 2021 was an awful time to start. I think that the scary thing a little bit is that like, I don't think any of us know or have any idea.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  It's hard.

• 1:35:46Everett Randle?

  If this is 2021, 20, it's definitely not 2023, feels a little bit like 2021.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51Everett Randle?

  But I think, you know, if you ask somebody if it's, is it 97? Is it 99?

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:55Everett Randle?

  Is it 2001? No one really knows. And so I think you have to be.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  It's 91. We got another decade.

• 1:36:01Everett Randle?

  91.

• 1:36:01John Coogan?

  It's 91. No one, everyone's afraid to say it. Everyone's like, it's 98, it's 99. The bubble popped, the bubble popped last week. Yeah, it did.

• 1:36:09Everett Randle?

  And now we're back.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  Actually, this morning, at the open, it popped and now we're back.

• 1:36:13Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  It's over. It's over.

• 1:36:14Everett Randle?

  Well, I was at dinner with somebody the other day and they said something that I thought was really smart, which was that they're like, the, the, the main reason I'm scared right now is that the only time that I've seen everything work was also in 2021. Like the issue about 2021 wasn't that people were doing big investments into companies that were bad. The, the issue was that everything was absolutely ripping.

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  And was that just because of the pull forward in e-commerce due to the shift and like, you know, like I remember a pallet here at the time. Interest rates. Stop spending all the money on TNE. Everything in fintech looked amazing. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:48Everett Randle?

  Or if you think like, think about, I mean, obviously it depends on the category, but think about like e-comm, like e-commerce enablement or commerce enablement.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Everett Randle?

  There was like a whole crop of startups that came up. And it just so turns out that when we're all locked into our houses. Everyone's just, yes, yes, yes. And just like, oh, you just live online.

• 1:37:02Jordi Hays?

  As the capital starts flowing and then it flows into one company and then that company goes and buys a bunch of software and they're probably using like even a recruiting platform looks like, hey, this could be a billion dollar business because every company is like, we need to hire as many people as possible.

• 1:37:15Everett Randle?

  Yes.

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  So it's like.

• 1:37:16Everett Randle?

  It's very recursive.

• 1:37:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Everett Randle?

  It's very kind of like. We're getting, we're getting big words early. Big words early. You know, it's, it's all interwoven and like, obviously you're, you're starting to see that a little bit with like the AI trade this year. Yeah. And there was like, I, I did this presentation a couple of months ago for, for this group of, of, of CIOs. Chief, uh, chief, uh, information officers at large companies. And I was, um, doing some research on macro and I was like, oh my God, of the top 20 year to date return stocks in the S and P 500. So of the S and P 500, of the 500 companies, which 20 have had the best year to date returns, 18 of them were related to the AI trade. Yes. Like it wasn't, you know, and not just like, you know, Micron and Nvidia, but like GE Vernova and like Bloom Energy and like all of these things about like the supply chain. Yep.

• 1:38:02Everett Randle?

  Of AI and that scared me because I was like, oh my God, like the US economy, like the pensions of our parents. Yeah. Are riding on the AI trade and are basically riding on, uh, you, you know.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  One man.

• 1:38:14Everett Randle?

  Each, yeah, one, one, one superhuman man that is, uh, you know, signing up all these, uh, all these, all these huge deals. So I think in 2021, you definitely saw that where, yeah, you had all these massive impacts from, from Zerp, from COVID, from people being inside, from companies digitizing and buying a bunch of software. So even things that at first principles were kind of like mediocre companies, they looked unbelievable. And so it was hard to blame anyone for investing in these companies because until then tech had been so secular. Mm hmm. Like it was not a cyclical market, like the march, the march to cloud wasn't like this, like up and down thing. Totally. It was like each year, the incremental share of cloud relative to like on prem was like nice and steady. Yeah. And so you're, when you're trained. That you're investing in a secular market that always kind of linearly goes up. You're trained to invest on like on on good numbers because they usually continue.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:59Everett Randle?

  Um, in 2021 was the first time where you really saw the cyclicality. And I think some people think that the AI trade could also be cyclical, given the um actual infrastructure build out that sometimes is, you know, built out via debt.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Everett Randle?

  And leverage and all these things that could.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Everett Randle?

  Could end up blowing up.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  When you look at what's going on in the public markets, uh, is it fair to say that like the first year of the AI trade and and the boom of those 20 stocks that you mentioned was driven by basically earning surprises like Nvidia just being like, oh, wow, every hyperscaler bought so many more like the the the cash flow is going up. The actual business is growing and now we are shifting into more of like the LOI economy, the the forward contracts. And so that's been a little bit more of what's moved the market and and maybe that's why Oracle is kind of traded up so much, but then round tripped because people have said, oh, that's amazing, but actually we're going to discount that a lot more than we did on the day that the deal was announced.

• 1:39:55Everett Randle?

  Yeah, another another framing that that I would use actually is like usually in these cycles, um, it starts with like the core.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:02Everett Randle?

  And then you start just layering on derivatives.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:04Everett Randle?

  From that core. And so it's like, okay, AI AI demand is, you know, maybe two orders of magnitude higher than we thought.

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Everett Randle?

  So who is the first order benefactor of that?

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:13Everett Randle?

  Uh, Nvidia, like who's, you know, the the GPUs.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:15Everett Randle?

  And then as as the the cycle continues to play out, it's like, okay, well, like, what's the first derivative of that? It's like, well, okay, like what goes into these data centers? Turns out like these turbines that G Vernova.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:25Everett Randle?

  Creates and like, oh, now they need to buy all these, you know, all these like specialized things from Broadcom and then like now Micron. And so there ends up being that. And then like there's like this cascading of these derivatives until like the nth one is like the shitcoin market and like the meme coin market. And so now it's like, oh, wow, like these like three quantum, you know, computing companies that have zero revenue combined for $75 billion of market cap. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. And that's that's when I think everyone kind of pauses and they're like, wait, wait, hold on.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  And then I think it goes even further.

• 1:40:54Everett Randle?

  Scralley didn't pause. He he he locked in. He locked it.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Speaking of Scralley, I think that like there are people that are trading. Quantum stocks because of the AI boom because like they have been told that that the next thing after AI or the next big unlock for the AI revolution will be quantum meanwhile like like

• 1:41:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it was notable at GTC. No, no, no, at GTC, I remember I was watching the stream and and they had Brad reading off the the teleprompter.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  And he was talking about, you know, the opportunity in with quantum and AI. So this is a narrative that

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  That Nvidia as a company has certainly

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Jensen's been a little bit back and forth.

• 1:41:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but as a company, as a company, that was a part of their narrative for GTC.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's sort of like furthest out on the risk curve. And that's why, you know, if we see, you know, Nvidia selling off by like a couple percent every week. The quantum stocks, I see charts where it's like down 20%.

• 1:41:48Everett Randle?

  It's they're like levered trades on the core, all these derivatives. And so it's like, you know, people are like, oh, Nvidia is not going up, you know, 10% a day now. What could? And then you go to like the derivative and it's like, well, this isn't going up so much per day now. Well, what could next? And you keep going. And now you see, I think over the last month, like so many of these stocks are down 45%.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:04Everett Randle?

  So like, I don't think Nvidia is down that much, but so many of these other stocks are down 40 to 50% of the last month because they're kind of the canaries in the coal mine or like the leading kind of derivative that is almost like a levered trade on the core.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we've had, it's been incredibly rough week in the markets. And now everyone is sitting saying, please deliver Jensen. Now, I have some confidence, so it's Wednesday. They have earnings after the close and I feel pretty good about it because of the, you know, Jensen, you know, smashing beers on video, right? You don't do that a month out from earnings if you're not feeling really good.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Everett Randle?

  You belong in a pod shop. That's, that's like some, that's a deep cut. That's some deep analysis.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  Jordy loves this type of analysis, the vibe.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  I don't care about the numbers.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I have no idea what they're, they're promising, but I just know.

• 1:42:56Everett Randle?

  Trading on vibes, that's the move.

• 1:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then the other, I mean, the other factor here is like just the, the challenge of this market is you have that within the same two, you know, effectively two week period where CoreWeave gets rated by semi analysis as the sort of like only platinum tier Neo cloud.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Two years.

• 1:43:16Jordi Hays?

  The best product in the category and, and they're down.

• 1:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Thirty percent in the last five days.

• 1:43:24Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:24Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Thirty percent.

• 1:43:26Jordi Hays?

  So, and now people are saying, yeah, maybe Nvidia ends up, ends up, you know, having to, you know, buy them. It certainly would not go well if they were to.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  What's the least AI company you've done as a deal in the last couple of years?

• 1:43:42Everett Randle?

  Gosh.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Because everything has some, I mean, even Anduril Industries, you know, it was as like AI. And now there's obviously an AI narrative there in some ways.

• 1:43:52Everett Randle?

  Right.

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  But it's like, definitely just a hard tech company.

• 1:43:54Everett Randle?

  Yeah, it's hard. It's funny because like sometimes as an investor, you're almost trying to like, do some portfolio construction.

• 1:44:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:01Everett Randle?

  And you're like, man, it'd be really nice if I had something that was uncorrelated with the AI trade. Because if it all goes down, you know, eighty percent or whatever, then like, I'm gonna need something.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:10Everett Randle?

  I mean, it's so different in private markets because, especially if you're investing at the early stages, like, none of this stuff matters. Like, by the time the companies exit,

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:18Everett Randle?

  you have no idea what the, what the stock market's gonna look like. You have no idea what the macro's gonna look like.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:23Everett Randle?

  And so, like, thinking about this type of, type of stuff is, is usually, like, you really should, like, if you're zooming out and thinking on like a ten-year time horizon, should you still be ultra-long AI? Of course you should.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:32Everett Randle?

  And so it's almost like you kind of like pump fake yourself into being like, maybe I should do like an anti-AI play or something.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:38Everett Randle?

  I think, I think there's like some parts of cybersecurity

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Everett Randle?

  that actually are still not, I mean, a lot of, a lot of, like, you know, like, data security is like, oh, well, like, you know, you need to secure your data and to, to secure your AI. So like, a lot of even cyber has moved into AI, but there's still some pockets of cybersecurity.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Do you think there's, do you think there are durable learnings from the Palantir story of being sort of like, the forward deployed engineer, almost being consulting, building custom software? It feels like with AI, there's a lot of folks who are sort of doing that. And it seems really exciting because you can go and get a Fortune 500 client, you can go ramp revenue really quickly. You, there's, there's all this question about like, well, does this, is this gonna look like high-margin SaaS in ten years?

• 1:45:19Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  Um, but we already ran that experiment with, with Palantir. And regardless of what you think of the, the price or earnings multiple, like, you can tell that the margins are good and the revenues are real.

• 1:45:27Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  And so, like, it clearly worked out. And, and like, if you were investing in that, and, you know, even if you were at like a, I don't know, forty multiple, like, you'd still be doing very well based on the early investments. And so, I'm wondering if you think that that model, if something permanently has changed in the way SaaS is delivered into the enterprise? Or you think that people might be overfitting on that?

• 1:45:48Everett Randle?

  No, I I think it I think it absolutely has. And in the way that I talk about this, I call it the legibility gap.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:54Everett Randle?

  And what I mean by that is like, you know, if you get a Gmail account.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:59Everett Randle?

  It does not take very long for you to like, understand how to use Gmail. Like, anyone can kind of like pop on, even if you're a boomer and like, I'm like, oh, like, I've used an email account before, like, this is just sort of like a slice of an email account.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:09Everett Randle?

  I think the issue about AI is that not only are the capabilities so new for the broad population that could use them, they also evolve so quickly. Like, if you think about, you you know, not having ChatGPT three years ago, and now everything that we can do, or especially on some of the media models, how we had like Will Smith, like, the the grotesque version of that Unchained Video. And now we have like absolutely perfect Will Smith eating, you know, spaghetti and meatballs. Um, just the the rate of evolution. Like, I I so I I'm I'm from like a rural town in in Colorado, and a lot of my friends um work still in my hometown, and they're like, hey, like, my job.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  The heartland.

• 1:46:44Everett Randle?

  That's right. Shout out. Shout out Windsor, Colorado.

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  Nick over there, Windsor, Colorado. Well, I guess he's gone, but he's a Colorado guy, too.

• 1:46:52Everett Randle?

  Oh, amazing. Yeah, the uh, but but like, they'll they'll come to me and they'll say, look, like, my job now.

• 1:46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:58Everett Randle?

  Is like, I put any work task I get, you know, they're doing some, you know, random, you know, they're an accountant, or they're doing some administrative role for the for the company. They're like, my job now is ninety percent of any work I get, I feed it through Claude or ChatGPT, or whatever tool that I'm using on the AI side, I turn it into my boss, and then I go golf. Because my boss, like, still doesn't know how to use any of these things.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:47:17Everett Randle?

  So they like, so the business owners have no idea how to use these tools.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  So the value accrual is to like the associate.

• 1:47:23Everett Randle?

  Literally, it's like, I I.

• 1:47:24Jordi Hays?

  To the golf courses.

• 1:47:26Everett Randle?

  Yeah, I I call it like synthetic UBI, because it's like,

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:47:29Everett Randle?

  You know, because it's like, they they like, there's just this insane legibility gap where so many businesses still have no idea what you can do.

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  These tools were available during the COVID era, like the remote work.

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:39Everett Randle?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:40Jordi Hays?

  Or it's like, yeah.

• 1:47:41Everett Randle?

  People could have twenty jobs instead of the five that they were running with COVID. But yeah, so I I think the whole FD, like, the thing that the FDE position solves is the legibility gap.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:51Everett Randle?

  When you're like, hey, we know that there can be a ton of value produced here, we just don't really know how, and we don't even really, we can't even put our arms around the evolving. capabilities because like maybe you implement you know, one of these AI tools and in six months, it's like a brand new tool because you know cognition rebuilt rebuilt Devon off of four, five Sonic.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Everett Randle?

  And it's like, well, if like the the product is evolving that much every six months, you probably need someone in a post-sales capacity to continue to educate the customer.

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Everett Randle?

  Especially if they don't live in Silicon Valley.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:48:23Everett Randle?

  You know, like tracking every single new model release and they're in some random place and

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:27Everett Randle?

  barely even use chat G P T or something like that.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. How are you thinking about your focus in terms of stage? I mean, Bond, Founder's Fund, I I've thought of you as a growth guy for a long time. Are you moving earlier stage? How is Benchmark thinking about growth versus early stage? Are those just like antiquated terms? Because you can do a growth deal.

• 1:48:46Jordi Hays?

  Was this was this part of was this all part of the plan to end up at Benchmark where you get you go you go and learn the methodologies and the approaches of everyone, how they work, and then you go compete with them on every deal?

• 1:48:57Everett Randle?

  Exact, yeah.

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  In the final job.

• 1:48:58Everett Randle?

  Exactly.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  Final job is like.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Well, it's not they've done it, now I'm doing it my way.

• 1:49:01Everett Randle?

  No, I mean, I it's certainly being able to see up close a lot of the greats and how they how they do the job and the frameworks they use has undeniably been so important for my career and my development as an investor. I think like what it what it came down to in something that I learned over my entire career slowly, like again, I started in P E. And so like the idea of venture was so foreign when I was shout out capitalism, uh, wait, like the the idea of venture was so foreign when I was first coming into the industry that I really like growth was like felt safe. It felt like what I was good at. And I've just learned over the the however long I've been in the industry that like where I felt the most fulfillment, where I felt the most joy is actually the investments and the relationships I've built.

• 1:49:44Everett Randle?

  Someone like a Sean Henry or even like a Parker and Matt at Rippling, where it's like you get in even at the early series B. I think there's this like line where like if you can get in and build a relationship and be on the board with a founder when they're still figuring everything out, when it's still like the primordial soup phase of a company. There's just all this like, there's a deep relationship and all this context that you build, both with a founder, with a team and like the underlying organization that you're working with. That just like if you get in later, you just like can't go back in time and get that same amount of relationship building and contact.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  So Rippling, Rippling may- In the series G, you can't use we.

• 1:50:21Everett Randle?

  No, I still would. I still would, but it doesn't feel as good.

• 1:50:25Jordi Hays?

  Rippling, bringing up Rippling reminded me, so you were talking about this forward deployed model. And every startup that's doing anything in the enterprise feels like they've adopted this, right? And it's like part of their pitch. Customers obviously like it if like you'll put somebody in my office and build software that's specific to me, that sounds great. But I feel like during, when Parker released the, I think it was the series A memo for Rippling about this concept for a compound startup. What's the postmortem on, is it felt like every startup started saying, we're doing a compound startup. We're going to build three, basically three products at once at the same time.

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Jordi Hays?

  And it's worked very well for Rippling, but I, it's hard for me to think of any other startups that like adopted the approach that worked for Rippling, which like the context there was they worked, basically for my, to my knowledge, like they worked in silence for years. And then they came out with this big offering.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  And also Parker had built like seven of those products literally before. And so he was like, okay, I kind of know the way I want that product to look. He's not doing as much zero to one discovery in each of those, like someone who starts the point solution might.

• 1:51:37Everett Randle?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the Rippling story and like where, I think where a compound startup can really, really work is like, one, yeah, there's this fat build in the beginning where you need to build all this platform architecture. Cause the whole idea is like, you need to build some form of platform architecture that's going to make building each point solution that you end up bundling faster. Like if it's just going to take the same amount of time that it would any other startup to build each product, then there's kind of no synergy. For building the compound startup, like they all need to interact and be built on the same platform. I think the other key learning from Rippling is that a lot of the products that they were, that they've built and that they sell are not, like, I don't want to, like, say commodity in, like, a negative, like, they don't matter way, but they're just not these, like, really, it's not Figma, you know, like, it's not like a designer that's like,

• 1:52:21Everett Randle?

  I'm not going to use, like, off-brand Figma, I have to use Figma, like, it's my lifeblood, it's my everything. When you have, like, an application, you know, an applicant tracking system, or like, a time and attendance thing, or like, employee reviews, that there's so much value in the integration of data with, like, employee reviews being integrated into your HR suite, rather than just having, like, the nicest UI, or having the product that feels the best. And so, like, the value of having a bundled suite in a compound startup is really powerful when the actual products don't have to be the complete bleeding-edge best-of-breed. They can be, like, very good, but they don't have to look the absolute nicest, they don't have to have that last 10% of, like, of, like, complete, um, fine-tune effort, and the buyer and the user actually still gets a ton of

• 1:53:06Everett Randle?

  value, actually, from the integration of all those products together. And, like, some of the parts is a lot more valuable than if each product in its individuality felt a little nicer to use or something, but wasn't integrated tightly into a single product.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was always wondering if someone was going to run the compound startup playbook in fintech.

• 1:53:24Everett Randle?

  It's called Revolut.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  I was going to say it's called Rip. I mean, Rip is.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  So, so, so, sorry, I meant, I meant consumer, in the sense that, like, uh, you know, Robinhood has crypto and Coinbase has different, uh, has different financial products where you can, like, build a whole company on Coinbase and, uh, manage payments with Coinbase, there's a whole bunch of different functionality there. But, uh, there aren't that many companies that I've seen that have come out to market with, with one, uh, on day one, uh, you can trade stocks, invest crypto, get a mortgage, get a car loan, this is a credit card, there's points, it's like, it's been a little bit more focused on the consumer or fintech side in America, at least from my perspective, there's been payment money. Transfer services that have gone really big.

• 1:54:13John Coogan?

  There's, you know, a consumer credit card, like there's that built reward, isn't that Yeah, yeah. Company that does like cash.

• 1:54:18Everett Randle?

  Pay with your rent.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Pay with your rent. And it's like, and maybe one day that grows into, they'll also do mortgages and then they'll also do stock trading and investing and IRAs and all that different stuff. But it just feels like probably because of the regulatory, it's a little bit different, but no one's really

• 1:54:33Jordi Hays?

  I think it's also a challenge because like eventually people are going to tie a lot of their like financial life to the like the firm that gives them a mortgage, right?

• 1:54:44Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  So not being able, these companies starting out, they don't have their own balance sheet, right? They're neo banks, so they're kind of like operating on top of other banks, but.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  It's just like, there are startups that have done like new mortgage, like where, wasn't there better, better mortgages? Right? I think that went public at one point, has done quite well. And, and, and so like if that business has been, has, was, was buildable as a startup. And then also you have a credit card startup, like you, you, you would think that you could build both the same.

• 1:55:13Everett Randle?

  Right, right.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Maybe it's just too distracting, I don't know.

• 1:55:14Everett Randle?

  Well, that honestly, you should highly, highly suggest listening to Nick at Revolut Talk.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:20Everett Randle?

  Because he, he basically set up his organization somewhat similar to Rippling and like, he set up all these like product pods.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:26Everett Randle?

  And they had an initial wedge, which was basically this like FX product.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Everett Randle?

  For people that were traveling around Europe, like, you know, young people were, were going around Europe and you could do very easy FX. And that was kind of like the wedge for their first cohorts. But they really, really quickly focused on just how do we go as many products if they're high quality as possible? And now they have tons of consumer products and B two B products. And like, they're all doing a ton of revenue, like it's kind of an unbelievable story.

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  Earlier this week, you kicked the platform VC hornet's nest.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, to be clear, you said that Andreessen Horowitz is a zero, right? That's what you said? You said it's a zero?

• 1:56:03Everett Randle?

  I'm not even, I'm not even gonna be fodder for another clip. I've learned my lesson.

• 1:56:07Jordi Hays?

  My question was, did you, did you kick the hornet's nest to inspire yourself to grind harder? I feel like there's immense pressure now to deliver a 5X net.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:17Everett Randle?

  It's true.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  It's true. Because eventually, who knows, maybe the performance.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  If it comes back at 4.9, Mark Andreessen's personally gonna be like dunking on you.

• 1:56:26Everett Randle?

  Yeah, he is going to fund the opsec that uncovers our returns.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. He's gonna pay newcomer to come down.

• 1:56:33Everett Randle?

  No, no, I think that the whole thing from this week, I think the biggest lesson, or like it shown a light for me, just like the the purpose of the algorithm.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41Everett Randle?

  Like, the algorithm exists to kind of still, like, the algorithm needs, like, the algorithm is the beast.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:47Everett Randle?

  And the beast needs controversy.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:49Everett Randle?

  And it was so funny, because the first day that the interview came out, like, all this happened on the second and third day. So, like, the first day the interview comes out, you know, all my friends at all these firms were like, oh, it was great. I thought it was, like, pretty nuanced and, like, moderate takes and, like, you know, it's good. You were kind of pitching the benchmark strategy as unique.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:03Everett Randle?

  And then the second day comes out, and it's, of course, like, these clips with, like, these very, you know, kind of leading tweets and things. And then it's like, then it's like, you know, knives out and...

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  Then you got government officials coming after you.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  The government.

• 1:57:16Everett Randle?

  And I wanted to, like, check if my passport still works. I'm like, I hope my passport still works. No, so like, and like, again, like, I think if you look at any of the individual clips or anything, like, sure, you could take things from them that I think were more incendiary or, like, more more controversial than the actual context of the conversation. I don't like, you know, I certainly don't.

• 1:57:34Jordi Hays?

  It needs context.

• 1:57:35Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  But you've also, you've been commenting on different fund strategies for years, playing different games. Your essay, your bombshell essay about the crossover funds, right? Tiger, Co2. What is your, what is your, like, what predictions did you actually make in that piece? And then how did they play out? Because I feel like a lot of the firms that you identified as running these strategies are still around doing those strategies. And it seems like they've done very well. And so, like, people might have read your original piece as, like, a critique. But in fact, it was just the, you're just shining a spotlight on a new strategy that exists and runs. Is that right?

• 1:58:13Everett Randle?

  Yeah, and like, if, so the original piece is called Playing Different Games. Check it out on Substack.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:58:18Everett Randle?

  But the actual point of the original piece, and probably what I got wrong about the original piece more specifically, was I zeroed in on Tiger as the example. And I actually was like, oh, I'm bullish on Tiger because I think this is a good strategy.

• 1:58:29John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:58:29Everett Randle?

  So I actually said, like, hey, this is a great strategy and it's going to continue. And the strategy being like, hey, there's like, venture returns... Historically, if you look like since 2000, at least of the great funds have been awesome.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:42Everett Randle?

  Like, every great fund that has raised, like, and by the way, the only way that you raise really large funds is if you earned the right by having amazing returns.

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:50Everett Randle?

  So all of these brands have had really, really amazing returns. And the simple math was that you could put a lot more money out the door, especially as we had the emergence of these companies that show like increasing returns to scale. This is the whole kind of idea behind the Mag 7 is that in technology, when you have network effects like you do in consumer social or economies of scale like you see with Amazon, you just kind of keep winning at a greater and greater scale, assuming that your TAM is big enough. And so the whole point of the essay was like, hey, wow, like you can, even if you reduce your implied returns a fair amount on your forward returns, if you just put more money out of the door, there's just so much more like absolute dollars to be had for all of these firms. So I think like in the four years since that piece came out in 2021, I think that has been the prevailing trend in venture.

• 1:59:35Everett Randle?

  I mean, very clearly, I don't think it's, you know, it's a very consensus thing to say that a lot of these firms have realized that like, wow, there's so, and like, I think it's actually the beautiful part about our asset class now is the menu of options and the menu of ways that you can practice the craft of venture growth.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:50Everett Randle?

  And be extremely successful and partner with really good founders and make money for your LPs is extremely broad.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Everett Randle?

  And it's only gotten broader because a lot of these leading firms have really expanded and increased their capital velocity or like dollars out the door per year.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. It feels like there's a lot of venture capital that might actually be more like private equity or it feels like we're sort of, is there, is there a factor where we're just taking an asset class that has existed for a long time, investing in a company that has 10 billion in revenue and we're calling that venture now? Is it, are we just renaming it or is it somehow structurally different? I'm just looking at like, if you're investing in OpenAI right now, is that even a venture investment?

• 2:00:34Everett Randle?

  Yeah. I mean, like, this is always like, even if you look at playing different games, I always say like venture growth, I do like venture slash growth.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:00:40Everett Randle?

  Cause like, you know, I think most people would call it growth or like not just call it venture capital itself. I think the structural change that we have seen and a lot of people actually have gripes with this, I like, you can, you can be on one position of this or another, but I think there is some validity to the idea that some people complain about, which is if you look at what's happened, what like, where the structural change has happened is that companies just like don't IPO. Maybe ever anymore, but they certainly IPO way, way, way later in their lifecycle than they used to. And so the complaint that some people have is like, this is essentially stealing returns that people were able to get in the public markets. Because if you're IPOing only when you reach a $200 billion valuation instead of a $10 billion valuation, which used to be the norm, you know, 10 years ago, or even, you know, 15 years ago,

• 2:01:23Everett Randle?

  or whenever it was, that's a 20x that like the public market investors don't get, that is now fully in the hands of private market allocators.

• 2:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Shopify is a great example. I think they went out at like four, four billion or something like tiny.

• 2:01:34Everett Randle?

  For sure. It's like that, you know, or like.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  One question I have is like, do you think that the partner at a platform VC, that's like a non-founder partner, maybe, maybe early mid 30s, do you think that's the most dangerous job at venture? Because I feel like there's this pressure to deploy and build a track record, yet at the same time, like you're on the chopping block if, if you deploy and a bunch of bad bets and we see a correction and there needs to be like, somebody needs to get fired for it.

• 2:02:04Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Like, in some ways, it feels like a benchmark, earlier stage, you're somewhat insulated from the kind of downstream chaos where you can make a bet, it can get marked up a lot, but even if it trades down during a correction, you're still up massively on your winners.

• 2:02:18Everett Randle?

  Yeah. I mean, like, to be fair, like, I don't think it's unique to platform firms at all. Like, if I don't make great investments, I'm also screwed. Like, you know, like, at the end of the day, you need, you need to build a really good portfolio and like, no one is spared the results of like, not investing in great companies. I think, I think like, where that becomes somewhat true, and again, everything is so dependent on the firm and every firm's culture is so different. That's actually one of the things that I think people don't understand really about venture growth is like, every firm, the way they do things, the variance is way higher than I think maybe any other asset class where like the work and the cult, like, how you do things is relatively similar. But I think where that can happen in a platform firm is where just like the supply and demand of, of like things you're able to be the point person on.

• 2:03:02Everett Randle?

  Is like negatively inclined towards you. What I mean by that is like, there's like, I don't know, maybe a hundred good companies that exists at like whatever stage, like each maybe stage, there's like, you know, maybe 50 great early companies, 50 great growth stage companies. If you have, you know, 20 partners, you know, the math is just like, okay, like if you're 50, if you have like 20 growth or let's say 25 growth partners, since I'm bad at math, and you have 50 good growth companies, that means there's like good, two good companies per partner, and maybe like the senior, senior partners get like 10 instead of two. And so there's just this, there's this reality where it's like, there's some efficiency frontier where you're trying to be able to be the relationship builder and the point person and the board member for really great companies. But when you have a ton of people within an

• 2:03:47Everett Randle?

  organization, it just becomes mathematically harder to, to just have like shots on goal enough, because you're not going to win every single deal either. And so it's like, okay, how many am I covering? And how many can I win? Like that just starts to diminish. It's also, it's not a perfect framework, because again, like, it's also not like a solo, it's not golf, it's not a solo sport, like it is a team sport. And so I think a lot of these places that have good cultures, they're more focused on like, okay, how do we win as a team? We, multiple people can work a company, multiple people can be on the board, or one person's a board observer or whatever. So it's not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do think some people at those firms do feel those impacts for sure.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  Are you AGI-pilled?

• 2:04:26Everett Randle?

  Uh, wow.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  Like, what's your, what's your, like, how have you processed that question? How have you engaged with the, the discourse around everything from just how powerful the models will be in one, five, 20 years?

• 2:04:44Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  What that means for your investing thesis versus even just like the fast takeoff, AI, doom. Has that stuff ever rattled you? Have you always just been? I'll wait until it shows up in a spreadsheet. You seem like a pretty even keeled like quantitative person who's not getting lost at some EA rationalist party and going off into sci fi land.

• 2:05:07Everett Randle?

  Yeah, I mean, I am definitely of the belief. Well, one, I think AGI has become like a near useless term.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:13Everett Randle?

  I mean, it's almost like agents at this point, like both of these things are so nebulous.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:17Everett Randle?

  That and like the product marketing around them has been so brutal.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:21Everett Randle?

  That like they've just lost all their meaning.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:23Everett Randle?

  Um, so I think actually when people.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  Quickly, agents didn't exist as a marketing term two years ago.

• 2:05:27Everett Randle?

  And now it's already played out.

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  And now.

• 2:05:28Everett Randle?

  That this just shows you the, you know, the cycle of these things.

• 2:05:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:31Everett Randle?

  Uh, in, in 2025, but I think that like, so like AGI, like when you say like what you just said, I think is actually probably referring to like ASI, like.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:39Everett Randle?

  Artificial super intelligence. Um, like I think the, the bottleneck and the rate limiter for AGI, which is like artificial general intelligence, which maybe you could define as like, when do we have, um, you know, an AI that can do what like a reasonable adult can do.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:52Everett Randle?

  In any given situation is fully dependent on how quickly we can distill the technology through the economy.

• 2:05:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:59Everett Randle?

  And I think like, and this is like Tyler Cowen talks about this.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  It's actually more about the inference than the pre-training.

• 2:06:04Everett Randle?

  Well, not even about inference and pre-training. It's literally just like about the, the FDE.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  Oh, sure. Just actually telling someone to use it.

• 2:06:12Everett Randle?

  Yeah, like deploying it into the economy, like, like it just takes a really long time. And no matter how fast these growth curves are, there's just a ton of the economy that's not.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Notable that, uh, that you, you gave the example of somebody, you know, at a, let's say like, uh, some company where they're doing their job with Claude, uh, but their boss doesn't know that.

• 2:06:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:29Jordi Hays?

  They just want to be able to do their job quickly and go golf. And then that person gets presented with a better solution. They get a pitch on, hey, I, we can actually like replace your whole team. And they're thinking like, well, there's a chance I could maybe golf more. There's also a chance that I could lose my job. And so I think there's going to be this interesting tension where the people that.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  I'm not replacing the associate. He uses so many M dashes. He's amazing. He's also getting really good at golf randomly.

• 2:06:56Everett Randle?

  It's also a scratch golfer now.

• 2:06:57John Coogan?

  Every time I go out with him on the week, it seems like he's been practicing a ton. No, no, that makes a ton of sense. What about the, uh, the, just the stakes geopolitically? Because, uh, there's been this critique of Benchmark of like, oh, maybe you guys are a little bit more open to investing in companies that are indexed to China somehow. This is not new. Excel has investments in China. There's a whole bunch of different stuff. It can go both ways. Do you think that, but, but it feels very predicated on if you think AI is a super like nuclear weapons level technology, then it's harder to rationalize. If you think it's more like an Excel sheet and autocomplete, maybe there's a little bit more of a deal to be done, even with a near peer competitor.

• 2:07:38Everett Randle?

  Yeah, like the, the fine line I'd place on that is that like we, we certainly like, like, I think all of us, certainly within Benchmark, but I think everyone in, in the industry wants Western AI to win.

• 2:07:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:50Everett Randle?

  And we do think it's a bit of a race and we want nothing more than Western and US AI to win. That does not mean that Chinese citizens or people that were born in China or people that at some point in their lives have been in China, cannot contribute to and be a huge factor in building Western AI. If you look at the, there's, you know, that, that tweet that had like the poach list for the Meta ASI team. It was like 15 of the 20 were Chinese citizens or at some, or were born in China or whatever it was. But there, there was incredible kind of Chinese representation on the Meta team. And so again, like the, the investments we've made have been in companies that are in Singapore or in the United States. And just like, if there's people that were born in China or Chinese citizens working on AI that they want to

• 2:08:35Everett Randle?

  build and help the world in a Western context with our values and our value system. And distribute it globally, not within, not just within China or whatever, and not even building in China, then we, of course we want to support those teams. And I think there's an immense amount of AI talent in China and would behoove us to have them building for Western allies for the United States and making sure that we win the AI race, rather than scaring them off and pushing them to only work. For China and for the CCP.

• 2:09:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Are you thinking, has your, has your thinking on open source AI updated at all? I've kind of gone back and forth. John Ludig, a friend of ours, has written about this, saying that, you know, the scale of the, of the effort and the capital intensivity to really have serious, significant progress on the model side, uh, means that, uh, open source AI might struggle. At the same time, uh, a few weeks ago, we saw Brian Chesky say that Airbnb has been using open source models and seeing a lot of great results there. And so there's obviously different use cases for each, but, uh, how are you thinking the market will play out? How are you thinking of? How do you, how do you make money as a for-profit company in open source?

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  Are we looking to Red Hat as an example, GitLab? Like, what do you like in that category, if you like it at all?

• 2:09:54Everett Randle?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's a great question. I think there's, there's like two angles that I would take for this. One on frontier capabilities versus like where open source is, let's say for like general models. I use something that I call the mom test, which I refer to my mom. And I always joke that like, there hasn't been a query on ChatGPT that my mom has made, that like GPT, like 3.5 couldn't handle.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:13Everett Randle?

  So that I think there's like an increasing amount of queries and there's an increasing amount of inference.

• 2:10:17John Coogan?

  For this from the moms.

• 2:10:18Everett Randle?

  From the mom? No, okay. I am talking about my mom, not moms in general.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  In the chat, there's some moms that are watching right now. This is the most controversial thing you've said all, all show. Uh, you, you could take shots at the growth funds. Yeah, the mom community. Moms will say, actually, actually, I'm puppeteering 25 Claude code instances right now to run this family and you better show some respect.

• 2:10:39Everett Randle?

  Okay, so the Randall, the Randall mom test, uh, and I think there's like an increasing amount of queries as frontier intelligence continues to get pushed.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:10:46Everett Randle?

  There's just an increasing amount of queries, an increasing amount of inference, that you just don't need the frontier capabilities for anymore.

• 2:10:51John Coogan?

  Some of this stuff you could even cache.

• 2:10:52Everett Randle?

  Yes.

• 2:10:53John Coogan?

  Because like if I had asked for like, just give me the high level history of benchmark, like it could just serve that up on a database.

• 2:10:58Everett Randle?

  Five one for that. You don't need four, five son of that. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you could do a Google search.

• 2:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:04Everett Randle?

  So, so there's, so there's, there's that piece, which I think that like increasing amount of, like, there's always going to be. Places that are important for frontier.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  And that exists within businesses too.

• 2:11:11Everett Randle?

  Yes.

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  Because there are certain things where it's like, we just need to scan every transaction for fraud.

• 2:11:16Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  And we're not actually doing a deep research report on it. We're just saying, hey, does this have like bad words in it?

• 2:11:22Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  And for a large language model, you can just use a 3.5 level model or something like that.

• 2:11:26Everett Randle?

  And then, and then actually in other, in other modalities besides like code, or I mean code, there's actually some great open source models now, but like in generative media especially, the open source ecosystem is extremely vibrant.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:37Everett Randle?

  There's a ton of amazing open source models. And I think the open source models probably have way, way more tokens and like token volume than closed source models. And the way that you actually make money on this, there's an amazing company called FAL that is a generative media. Yeah. Give it up.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  Are you kidding? We're sponsored by them.

• 2:11:55Everett Randle?

  Or you're sponsored by FAL?

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:57Everett Randle?

  Shout out Barkai and Gorkum. We love the legends. Batwan, all the guys there, but they, but they're an inference cloud for generative media.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:04Everett Randle?

  And so they're like a distribution mechanism for open source model providers to get video developed, like generative media developers to use models.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Everett Randle?

  And then for the developers, it's like the one stop shop. You get like a single place where you can drag and drop anytime a new model comes out.

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:17Everett Randle?

  And so it's almost like, you know, like this destination point that they then monetize via providing the inference for the models. And so I think like when you have all this open source, there's still a ton of money to be made via inference, via kind of like reselling GPUs, if you want to call it that.

• 2:12:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:31Everett Randle?

  And all the stuff that you can provide in terms of like inference optimization on top of that, even if you're not just providing like a LLM output via an API like you would with a closed source model.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:40Jordi Hays?

  How, how are the portfolio companies that you work with, how do they think about competing with OpenAI? I think the question of like, what if OpenAI does this is coming up a lot. We've, you know, seen, we had Mikey from Suno on. They've, they've grown tremendously. There's been talks that OpenAI will get into music generation. So that's kind of a conversation. I don't feel, I don't, I don't think Suno will be. Very threatened by that. And generally, it feels like OpenAI is already at the scale like and is operating like Google does, where they're going to launch a lot of products that don't work. And that's kind of okay. And so if they copy you, it doesn't mean you're dead.

• 2:13:21Jordi Hays?

  But but it's a real threat. How are you? What are those conversations like? And how do you think the CEOs view that as a competitive threat?

• 2:13:29Everett Randle?

  Yeah, I think it's like, it's, I think it's incredible for these startups to have like this bar. It's almost like having, it's like the lock-in bar. And it's like, if you're not gonna, like, if you're not gonna like exceed the lock-in bar, which is like whatever the labs can produce when you're probably not even their their number one priority. Then like, maybe you should pack it up and like, and just like, and call it a day. Because like, that's the, that's, that's the bar, like, you need to exceed it. And so I think, I don't like, people had this concern about so many different companies. Like, people had this concern about 11 Labs at one point, when like, OpenAI was coming out with all these voice products. And people were like, oh, my God, what does this mean for 11 Labs? Yeah. And now they're like, they're doing, they're accelerating, they're doing better than they ever have before.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  I think people really miss like the taste element. When we were talking about it from 11 Labs, we noticed that even though Mid Journey has been on a very different path, there's something about what David, how David Holes runs that company at Mid Journey, the way he thinks about training the model, that it just looks, it doesn't, it's not that it looks like, there's no benchmark. It doesn't necessarily look better. It just looks more like David Holes' vision for what good looks like. And it's like, I feel like when I see Mid Journey image, no matter who prompted it, I'm seeing the art of David Holes.

• 2:14:44Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  And I feel like there's something about that in the texture of the voices from 11 Labs and the flavor of text that comes out of of OpenAI. And there's a little bit of like, the, people talk about this with like the flavor of code from Claude, for example. And and the vibes can come out of the organization in a way that it's hard to just say, okay, we have good vibes and images, let's copy paste that all over the place.

• 2:15:06Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  It's just, the culture doesn't necessarily shift.

• 2:15:09Everett Randle?

  Hundred percent. And I think most of the times that I've heard a pitch from somebody around like, well, like this, this, you know, this part of this, like this model or like this. modality is rapidly commoditizing.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:18Everett Randle?

  If a founder and a team is able to build a high taste product.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Everett Randle?

  In a market that's big enough where you can have ACVs and like prices that are high enough per customer to like build and be able to distribute the product.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:31Everett Randle?

  All those companies are doing tremendously well. There's not been a single company, I think, that like died because of the labs. It's because you didn't build a high taste product.

• 2:15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:39Everett Randle?

  That could be distributed to a wide audience.

• 2:15:40John Coogan?

  It feels like we're probably not in the like the, the, the era of like getting Steamrolled by AWS was like, well, yeah, I want my, I want my hard drives right next to my CPUs.

• 2:15:50Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:51John Coogan?

  And, and I don't know that people are right now saying like, I need my voice model right next to my, you know, uh, agent model. They're like, no, actually I'm okay with a little bit of latency because the whole thing is slow. Basically it's all, it's all, uh, you know, a couple of seconds lag, sometimes 10 minutes of lag. And so maybe, uh, there's not so much. Uh, I want to talk about, uh, the Neo Clouds and these interesting deals that are going on. Because Benchmark, where you're at in terms of the scale of the firm. Feels not necessarily set up to do some sort of, uh, company that's going to wind up being super capital intensive, but then at the same time.

• 2:16:26Everett Randle?

  They did fireworks.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  You've done fireworks and then also.

• 2:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Founder gave the most like, one of the most iconic lines of this month. He said, a lot of companies out there are going to be scaling into bankruptcy.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  But then also like the private equity background, bond, I feel like you're, you're maybe better equipped to understand how private credit will interface with a founder. You're somebody that would make sense to have on the board potentially. But how are you thinking about these new companies there where it's not just R and D spend, it's not just burn for salaries. There's something else going on in the almost financial engineering of building and winning a category.

• 2:17:03Everett Randle?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. I think like our role at Benchmark and we've done investments like we've obviously invested very, very early in fireworks. We have some robotics investments that we're incredibly excited about that will be very capital intensive. I think one of the pitches that we can give to founders is there, there's like, there's nothing more scarce than a Benchmark A in today's market. And therefore there's no higher signal and there's.

• 2:17:26John Coogan?

  We have, we have another sponsor, uh, Numeral, who, who, on their website, they had Benchmark Series A and every time we did the ad read.

• 2:17:34Jordi Hays?

  We just say Benchmark Series A.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  Every time.

• 2:17:37Everett Randle?

  So you know, you know, the mantra, but the, uh, so, so like part of our value prop in our job is like downstream capital.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:44Everett Randle?

  Should not be. More cheap for anyone else than someone that has partnered with us. And I do think we put an immense amount of effort into helping companies understand and helping downstream investors understand the business equation of these more complex companies. Like a company that did this extremely well, actually in the public markets, a firm, when it went public, a lot of the sell-side analysts that were covering our firm, I think, just didn't really know how to like handle the company and didn't really know how to like model out the actual business equation of the company. So they actually did like, I think it was called the Financial Modeling Day. And they like walked through like a 30-slide deck that you can actually still find on their investor relations site of like, this is our business equation, this is what we optimize around, and this is how we grow and produce value for shareholders.

• 2:18:29Everett Randle?

  And it was just like extremely clear, extremely legible. And I think it really helped the investor community and the analyst community like better understand the business. And it's like, one, ideally, the founders also have some sense of their business equation because they're building their businesses. But it's also something that hopefully that myself or any of the other of the partners here can also help both sharpen the thinking of the founders, but especially the downstream investors that want to know that there's a strong business equation that they're investing behind.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Emile Michael was getting into it with you earlier this week. It feels like the TK era has sort of continued.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Two different government officials coming.

• 2:19:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  So the whole TK was wait, obviously, you know, 10 years before.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Can you just apologize for it?

• 2:19:12Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Can you take full responsibility?

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  No, that's not what I'm saying. I wanted to understand, like, you know, when that comes up, when you're in process with founders.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:19:21Jordi Hays?

  Like, what is the, like, what are those conversations like from your side? And how is the firm approaching kind of those concerns from founders about actions that the firm took a decade ago?

• 2:19:31Everett Randle?

  Yeah, I mean, amazing question. And I think our response every single time, whether or not it comes up, and I think it, I mean, it's week four, so I actually don't know how rarely it comes up, but it's really come up so far in my time at Benchmark, is talk. To the founders we work with today, or that any of the partners within the firm have worked with.

• 2:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:50Everett Randle?

  And see like, well, like Benchmark, like I am 25% of Benchmark.

• 2:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:55Everett Randle?

  Jathan is 25%, Eric is 25%, Peter is 25%.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:19:58Everett Randle?

  Benchmark is not some corporation.

• 2:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:20:00Everett Randle?

  That has like rules and bylaws. Like the firm is us.

• 2:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:04Everett Randle?

  And so talk to as many founders as you want of people that we have worked with and see if our references are better than any other investors. And our bet is that, and, and one, one that has proved to be true, I think more often, way more often than not, is that you will not find a better reference firm from the founders that we work with as individuals.

• 2:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:20:23Everett Randle?

  Um, so again, like.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Our benchmark.

• 2:20:25Everett Randle?

  I was, you know.

• 2:20:25Jordi Hays?

  Our benchmark.

• 2:20:26Everett Randle?

  I think I was in high school, or maybe I was in college, you know, like dancing to, to young, like what was, uh.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  I was doing private equity deals and getting hammered on the weekend.

• 2:20:36Everett Randle?

  Yeah. I was doing, I was doing like a private equity case study during, during that. So I'm like, I, I like, I literally, I can't speak to.

• 2:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  No, of course.

• 2:20:42Jordi Hays?

  No, but I think, I think, I think being able to like focus it in and be like, the firm is the four of us.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  And so go as deep as you want on any of our.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  On our track record. Yeah. And I, I know the founders we've worked with.

• 2:20:54Jordi Hays?

  That's the song.

• 2:20:56Everett Randle?

  That was the college anthem. That was great.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what about, uh, you know, you're, you've been on a, on a meteoric rise, uh, principal, then partner, now general partner. What do you think it takes to get to general, uh, to steward?

• 2:21:13Everett Randle?

  Oh, to, to senior, to senior steward.

• 2:21:16John Coogan?

  Do you think it's in the cards for you?

• 2:21:17Jordi Hays?

  I actually did have a, I, I.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  If you are at Sequoia as senior steward next year, I am going to blow, it's going to be insane.

• 2:21:25Jordi Hays?

  How, how does, does Gurley still play a steward-esque role? How, how involved? I'm assuming a bunch of his money is still.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:33Jordi Hays?

  In, in, in the funds.

• 2:21:35Everett Randle?

  Yeah. A few, a few things on this. One, there like, there is, I think this is a common misnomer, just because some people, like Bill, obviously extremely famous for his blog. He was, he was very like outward facing.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  Podcast too. I mean.

• 2:21:46Everett Randle?

  Podcast, like the recent podcast.

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  It's not like he really sailed off in the, in the sunset. He had some great takes on BG2.

• 2:21:51Everett Randle?

  Totally. Um, but there is like, there is no sense of stewardship. There's no, that does not exist in the slightest. There is no senior partner and like, and, and like, there's, it, it, there's nothing like that.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:03Everett Randle?

  Both in the actual economics, obviously, but actually just in like the culture and the way that we do business, like it is. Completely, like there is no sense of that. And I think that's a common misnomer because some people are a little bit more public or outwardly facing or more famous. That is not how the firm operates. But it's true that like the retired partners that are no longer active GPs play an unbelievably active role. In a lot of our active investments now, in a lot of the capital for the funds comes from both the current GPs and the previous GPs. So they feel extremely bought into the continued success of Benchmark. They also just like, it was such a huge part of their identities for so long, that, you know, it's like, I, yeah, I now regularly talk with Bill, with Matt Koller, with all these people that were so instrumental. About his Florida Gators.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, are you brushing up on those words?

• 2:22:48Everett Randle?

  Bill's Florida Gators. Yeah, well, state school pride between myself and Bill. Still working on that impression.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  That's great, that's great.

• 2:22:54Everett Randle?

  But yeah, so they're super involved. They help us with companies that we're looking at, with companies that we already work with. And I think that's a really unique part of the partnership.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What's his, what have you learned from Bill Gurley? Have you learned anything yet? Has he updated anything? Obviously, you go from Bond, Mary Meeker, One Way of Thinking About the World, to Founder's Fund, P T, wildly different way of thinking about the world. But you probably take lessons from both, I imagine. Have you learned anything from Bill either in the last four weeks, I know it hasn't been that long, but even just from reading his work and listening to him?

• 2:23:30Everett Randle?

  Yeah, I feel like Bill was the first venture capitalist I ever learned anything from, because when I was like interviewing to get into the business, I was always reading Above the Crowd.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:37Everett Randle?

  I was always reading his blog. He had such pragmatic, instructive blog posts, like all revenue is not created equal. He had all these great things about network effects and marketplaces. And like, when you're looking for buzzwords to say in an interview, and you're like 22 and you have no idea what you're talking about, they were an absolute goldmine. And so I felt like I've been learning from him for... Let's give it up for buzzwords. Shout out buzzwords.

• 2:23:57John Coogan?

  Buzzwords are a fantastic way to advance your career.

• 2:24:00Everett Randle?

  Useful buzzwords, I'm not saying that as a derogatory. No, no.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  The quality of revenue thing is so real. We go to YC Demo Day and they've had to like reinstate, like, okay, what's contracted ARR versus ARR? What's, how fuzzy is this? There was something on the timeline earlier this week, someone was saying that they went to go interview at a company that said that, you know, the real revenue was like one-sixth of what the founders had said. And that's, you know, eno frothy market, those, the temptation to lie gets even, or embellish.

• 2:24:31Everett Randle?

  So I think like the biggest learning, I think, that people can take from Bill is like, he just keeps it real. Like, it doesn't matter what the market is, doesn't matter if it's up market, down market. Like, he cares about the real. Like, he cares about like, what is the, like, what is the business quality when you actually dig in? It's not about, you know, eyeballs. It's not about vanity metrics. It's like, what does this business look like? And what is it going to look like over the next 10 years? And it's not like he hasn't taken immense amount of risks. Like, he invested in a bunch of marketplaces before they had flipped network effects, but he just knows how to like drill down and kind of figure out what is fluff and fake versus what's real.

• 2:25:02Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys thinking about consumer social? I feel like as long as I've been in and around the venture world, when there's a hot Series A consumer company, benchmark is, is at least on it, paying attention, it just feels, and then, and then I can say personally, I've, I've experienced immense pain investing in consumer social. It doesn't matter if a company has a million users. They can go from zero to a million users in, in 48 hours and you can invest right there and then it'll be right off the week, the next week. So it's extremely painful, but I'm curious about how the partnership is thinking about it today. Is it, is it, obviously you guys are

• 2:25:44Jordi Hays?

  a generalist fund, but is it still, is there anybody specifically on the partnership that like cares a lot about backing the next breakout consumer, you know, consumer software company?

• 2:25:56Everett Randle?

  Yeah. No, 100%. And again, it's such a deep part of the firm's history that I think all of us are itching. Itching for the next big one.

• 2:26:04Jordi Hays?

  It's the highest status, like, like winner, right? Because it's like, you know, if you back Snapchat and then, and then, and then you have a half a billion users out there that are like, yeah, use and love Snapchat every day. It just hits harder than backing, like, even the next Databricks because people are... Probably.

• 2:26:23Everett Randle?

  It becomes a cultural, it's like a cultural touchstone moment.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Trophy.

• 2:26:26Everett Randle?

  And a trophy, yeah. Um, I, I think so, so the, I think the toughest thing about consumer social, why it's been really, really hard is that back in the day, um, when consumer social was starting, it was actually about consumer social, like social networking was actually social networking. Every single social networking platform has turned into an algorithmic short form video platform because that is the most addictive.

• 2:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:26:47Everett Randle?

  Uh, form factor of, of content that someone can consume. And eventually you, you just have this profit motive that means that you optimize for the amount of time spent on an app per user per day. And so they're like, they just crowd out, like the currency of these companies. One is obviously users, but then the amount of time spent, um, interacting with the product or interfacing with the product typically. And when you have these, um, these like extremely addicting algorithmic, um, short form video platforms, you just kind of squeeze out the seconds in the day. It's like so hard to like, how could you get someone to spend 30 minutes a day on your app versus, versus any others? Like the challenge is just so much harder than it used to be when, when people still weren't spending that much time on their phones and now we all spend all day on our phones. So I think that the bar and the challenge is actually much, much, much higher.

• 2:27:32Everett Randle?

  But I do think that, I mean, one, we, we do have a new breakout, which is chat GPT, which is unbelievable. So that's amazing.

• 2:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm talking about the next, you know, like the next year, basically.

• 2:27:42Everett Randle?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Like who's really itching?

• 2:27:44Everett Randle?

  So we, we, um, uh, obviously I'm not going to say the company because we just signed this, but we actually did just sign a consumer social series A.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:27:51Everett Randle?

  And so you can, you can stay on the lookout for, for that, get the gong for it. I was, I was looking for an excuse to do the gong.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, for the, for the anonymous series either, we can't.

• 2:28:02Jordi Hays?

  Solid first hit.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  First of many. Thank you.

• 2:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question I have.

• 2:28:08Everett Randle?

  That was a big gong.

• 2:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I hit the shit out of that. Little, little pop quiz. I'm not going to tell you who wrote this, but I want you to guess whether or not this was written with AI. This, this is not just a partnership. It is a living, breathing legacy.

• 2:28:22Everett Randle?

  This is Alfred Lin this morning, right?

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. You gotta be better than that. Student of the game.

• 2:28:29Everett Randle?

  Well, that doesn't answer the question whether it was written in AI or not. Yeah, we don't know.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Do you think it was?

• 2:28:33Everett Randle?

  Uh, I only skimmed it.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  But, I mean, I, I think, I think most people are at a, at a, at a, at a point where they might, uh, let ChatGPT do like a run through at the end and it might have inserted this, uh, it's called contrastive parallelism. It's not this, it's that. Uh, I'm not a fan of that particular construction, but it's something that ChatGPT just kind of sneaks in everywhere. Um, but who knows? It can be a tell. Uh, but, uh, yeah, if you, you, you kind of, you kind of got to rip some of the stuff out because if AI starts doing M dashes too much, even if you love using the M dash, you just kind of lose it because otherwise people will be like, AI.

• 2:29:08Everett Randle?

  Totally.

• 2:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last thing, predict, last, last, uh, question. Uh, do you think that, uh, it felt like this year, just the flood of deals meant that there was less seasonality in venture, right? There was companies that were raising, there's companies that raised like three, four rounds this year, which meant that like, they were raising during winter, like winter kind of holiday time, they were raising during August.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  Talent wars were during summer, like Zuck was like having dinner with people in mid, middle of summer, uh, OpenAI tried to take a week off and he got a ton of people poached.

• 2:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But it feels like going into, I, I could see people taking a bit more of a breather this, this, uh, this kind of like holiday season, but I'm curious, any, any kind of predictions around that front?

• 2:29:52Everett Randle?

  I, I think, I think we've moved to not having season, like I think the seasonality thing, at least for now, is that anytime you're in a hot market, um, you're just going to have people working around the clock. Cause again, it's almost like the, the return to office thing. If you're like a sales rep in like 2022, it's like, how do you want to differentiate? Well, if one guy's just doing Zoom meetings and you're willing to fly to the prospect's office, that's a huge edge. So I think that's the issue now, especially in a hot market where things get marked up and, and sequential rounds happen very quickly. You just end up having Like that, that like, you know, Christmas is now the opportunity for someone to go preempt something.

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:24Everett Randle?

  I do think that most of the good teams kind of realize that even if you can get a deal done.

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  What's the point?

• 2:30:30Everett Randle?

  December 24th, also like, it's probably just gonna be better if it's done when everyone, there is just like a level of energy that happens in the fall, that happens in the spring, that happens in the peak deal times.

• 2:30:38John Coogan?

  There's also a little bit of like, if, like, there's like, wow, the VC, you know, gave me a call to try and close the deal, like, from the, from the operating room when his first kid was born, and I'm like, yeah, dude sounds kinda like a psycho.

• 2:30:51Everett Randle?

  Yeah, it's like kinda miserable.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  I don't know if I actually wanna work with that guy. I think I'm good if you just like, waited a day.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Or, or the founders, it's like, yeah, I raised my round while my wife was giving birth.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  It's like, congrats, dude.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  I don't know if we actually want that, that might just be.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  You, you can go a little bit too far and kinda turn people off, but, uh, but that is fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:31:10Everett Randle?

  Of course, guys, thank you so much.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 2:31:12Everett Randle?

  I wanna give a shout out, shout out to my wife, Kalen. Shout out to my six month old, Theo.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:31:15Everett Randle?

  And my Bernie's dog, Daisy.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Hit the gong for the six.

• 2:31:18Everett Randle?

  Sixth month old.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, I mean, guys, imagine, imagine being a, imagine being a baby and you, and you come on, come onto this earth, and you're like, wait, my dad's a GP at Benchmark?

• 2:31:31John Coogan?

  I hit the jackpot. I hit the jackpot.

• 2:31:35Jordi Hays?

  Papa's a GP at Benchmark?

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  I just spawned into.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  I just spawned into this?

• 2:31:39John Coogan?

  Wealth, post economic on day one, let's go.

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  Let's bring in our next guest, we have Adam Faze, CEO of Gymnasium. While he's hopping on, let me tell you about 8sleep.com, get a Pod5. Welcome to the show. I will also tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficiency.

• 2:32:06Jordi Hays?

  Adam Faze, uh, Adam, let's settle this. I've never asked you this, cuz I was kind of always embar- embarrassed to ask you this.

• 2:32:14Everett Randle?

  Here we go, I already know where we're going.

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think for the audience.

• 2:32:16John Coogan?

  Are you a member of Faze Clan?

• 2:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I think it, this is your.

• 2:32:18Everett Randle?

  It is my real last name.

• 2:32:19John Coogan?

  It is your last.

• 2:32:20Everett Randle?

  They did try to sue me.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:32:22Everett Randle?

  The original name of Gymnasium was Faze World.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:24Everett Randle?

  And they do own the trademark for the word Faze.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  Okay, wow.

• 2:32:27Everett Randle?

  So we are.

• 2:32:28Jordi Hays?

  What is the origin of the name? Faze is such a cool.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  Last name.

• 2:32:30Speaker 07

  Okay, so this is, I've never actually really said this story before. My dad is from Iran.

• 2:32:33John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:32:33Speaker 07

  Um, his real last name is Amir Faze.

• 2:32:35John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:32:36Speaker 07

  And then when he moved to America, he changed his last name to Faze.

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:32:39Speaker 07

  So I was born with the last name Faze.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:41Speaker 07

  But it technically, my middle name is Amir, so it kind of still is Amir Faze.

• 2:32:44John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. There, there's words that Ellis Island, uh.

• 2:32:48Speaker 07

  It's Ellis Island.

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  That's exactly what happened. Yeah, but, but there's, there's a, there's a term for when that happens. Like, I believe I was probably a Mick Coogan at some point, and they took off the Mick, they just simplified it.

• 2:32:58Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  Fascinating. Uh, well, for those who don't know, uh, anything beyond this, uh, can you introduce, uh, the company? Kind of how you, how you position yourself?

• 2:33:06Speaker 07

  Hundred percent. I mean, I run a company called Gymnasium.

• 2:33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:08Speaker 07

  Um, it is a short form unscripted studio that primarily lives on TikTok and Instagram.

• 2:33:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:13Speaker 07

  So we make shows that are these organic viral shows that would have been on TV 20 years ago, but instead live on these platforms. Neo trad media.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  Now. Neo traditional.

• 2:33:22Speaker 07

  Neo trad media. I really gotta say, I think you guys are single handedly bringing Hollywood back.

• 2:33:25John Coogan?

  You know, this, this city has been lacking in the media department.

• 2:33:29Speaker 07

  Have you ever lived in LA? Born and raised. Oh, okay. I lived in LA for 24 years, so I moved to New York four years ago.

• 2:33:34John Coogan?

  You went, you went to high school here?

• 2:33:36Speaker 07

  I went to Loyola High School downtown.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  I went to Poly.

• 2:33:38Speaker 07

  No way, you grew up in that, I didn't know that.

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  I grew up there, yeah, yeah. Yeah, uh, I played, uh, with some Loyola guys on, on the rugby team, the Cougars, I'm sure we could play, uh, you know, who do you know?

• 2:33:47Speaker 07

  I went to Calvary Christian. Most of your, most of your shows are in New York? Um, almost entirely New York based, actually until recently. So we just launched a new show this week called Girl Room.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:33:57Speaker 07

  Um, where we investigated the most disgusting girls' bedrooms in LA.

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 2:34:02Speaker 07

  That we could find.

• 2:34:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:03Speaker 07

  And we ended up renovating them. You're just exposing, you're exposing. I was, I truly, I can still smell some of the bedrooms that I was in.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:10Speaker 07

  Um, but we're actually here shooting a different show this week in Boyle Heights, where I just came from.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  Okay, so walk me through what, uh, actually producing a show looks like.

• 2:34:17Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:34:18John Coogan?

  Do, do you hold the camera? Did you, did you ever hold the camera?

• 2:34:21Speaker 07

  Hundred percent.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  Did you edit?

• 2:34:22Speaker 07

  Used to almost always hold the camera and did edit a few shows.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  Okay, but now what is the team like?

• 2:34:26Speaker 07

  So, well, to kind of back up, I mean, I grew up in LA being obsessed with Hollywood. All I ever wanted to do was make movies and TV shows.

• 2:34:31John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:34:32Speaker 07

  And spent, didn't go to college, spent about eight years working up the ladder in traditional Hollywood for like studios and production companies. This industry is cooked. And it basically, I mean, during COVID, I, all of a sudden, it's, we have a fly on the set.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 2:34:47Speaker 07

  During COVID, I just got deeply addicted to TikTok like so many other people.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:51Speaker 07

  Honestly stopped watching TV.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:52Speaker 07

  And so there was a part of me that just felt like this feels like the future. At the same time of working at a studio where like spending five years trying to make a movie that like Brentwood would love.

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:01Speaker 07

  Um, didn't really feel that culturally relevant. So.

• 2:35:04John Coogan?

  Zoom out for me a little bit and show me the difference between why you, what you're doing lives on TikTok and not those crazy like the Quibi, the new era of Quibi, like the vertical, it's vertical short form.

• 2:35:16Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:35:17John Coogan?

  There's a couple of Chinese apps. You know what I'm talking about.

• 2:35:19Speaker 07

  Real shorts.

• 2:35:19John Coogan?

  Real shorts.

• 2:35:20Speaker 07

  You're talking like the scripted short form things that exist. A hundred percent. Yeah.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  Is that where your stuff goes in five years or are you permanently separate?

• 2:35:27Speaker 07

  The real goal of this was like, let's just go where the people are.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:30Speaker 07

  I was watching TikTok. I was watching reels content and I'm like, I want to make shows in the place where people actually are.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:35Speaker 07

  And so we've only ever produced things that are unscripted. Um, it really started three years ago now, working with a guy named Kareem, who hosts Subway Takes. Have you ever seen that show?

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, no way.

• 2:35:44Speaker 07

  We did a show called Keep the Meter Running, where he would like hail a taxi in New York and he would tell the driver, take me to your favorite place and keep the meter running while we spend the day with each other.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:35:51Speaker 07

  That show I held the camera on.

• 2:35:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:53Speaker 07

  And so it would be me, a friend and Kareem and we'd actually just hail a cab in the street in New York and get in with them and spend the day with them. That show kind of changed everything for us because, you know, Kareem was someone I had my eye on him for a while of just someone who I thought was super talented and I wanted to hang out with more. Um, and I asked him if he had any ideas for a TikTok show and this was like the fifth idea he pitched and it was so obvious of like, I want to know where that taxi driver goes. And so we spent three hours with this first taxi driver we ever shot with. And I can remember thinking like, how the hell are we going to put this in a two minute video clip? We had never posted anything on TikTok ever before. We spent a week that the episode is like perfect in our eyes. We put it on an account that has zero followers and as a result, we're like, we're not going to even check the views because it's a brand new account.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:37Speaker 07

  The next day Kareem goes into his bodega across the street and someone taps him on the shoulder and is like, I love your show.

• 2:36:44John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:36:46Speaker 07

  What do you, my show? And he looks at his phone and it had 1.2 million views. And I think the cooler thing was of those 1.2 million views, 99% were in New York City.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:36:55Speaker 07

  So as he was starting to walk around the city that day, people started tapping him on the shoulder, being like, hey, I love your show. Hey, can I get a, can I buy you a beer? Can I take a photo with you?

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  Power of the algorithm.

• 2:37:03Speaker 07

  That show now has like 400 million views and has, I think about 800,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. And it's grown Kareem's own career into becoming like the, the mayor of New York City.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:37:14Speaker 07

  So I think from that point on, it was just clear of like, hey, this is a place where people actually want to watch serialized content. And what are the types of stories that we want to go make?

• 2:37:22John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about monetizing something like that? It feels so hard to stop and do a mid-roll ad.

• 2:37:27Speaker 07

  Is it possible?

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  And it also feels like if you're like, oh, I'll just do a separate promoted post. TikTok's like, we know what you're doing. That one's going to get 10 views. And then when you're back to normal programming, we'll give you a 10 million views because they know what's good and what's, what's.

• 2:37:40Speaker 07

  I mean, this is the problem with short form media in general.

• 2:37:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:43Speaker 07

  The reality is these platforms do not have an incentive to pay you.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:46Speaker 07

  One, because they know the benefit that you get by being that viral on these platforms. But also like their excuses, like, hey, you're scrolling eight videos for every one ad you see. How would we know how to pay that person?

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  It's like we, you, you know, everything.

• 2:37:59Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  You know the data. You're going to be fine. You can figure it out.

• 2:38:02Speaker 07

  You know, we figured this out on our show, Boy Room, which was like the early version of Girl Room. And it was, you know, really disgusting men's bedrooms.

• 2:38:09John Coogan?

  Who has grosser bedrooms?

• 2:38:10Speaker 07

  Um, so the difference, we, we really did find the difference here. Guys have disgusting bedrooms. Girls are just hoarding. They're hoarding so much shit that they refuse to get rid of. So that's the big difference between the two shows. But on that show, it was so viral so quickly. The top comment in every episode was a girl saying, I can fix him. You can't. The second comment was always, you should fix their rooms.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:33Speaker 07

  And so we started quickly getting in touch with Amazon and a bunch of other companies figuring out like, how could we turn this into a renovation format?

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:38:40Speaker 07

  Ended up making an amazing partnership with Amazon.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:38:43Speaker 07

  We did an entire renovation season of the show, still on TikTok and Instagram. And out of that partnership birthed this brand new show, Girl Room, which is actually co-owned by Amazon.

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  And also Amazon and that in. And that world doesn't feel forced.

• 2:38:55Speaker 07

  At all.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like very logical that if you're.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:38:59Speaker 07

  You know, we would never be able to do a renovation show without the help of Amazon. And so I think what's really cool here is like through this partnership with Amazon, I think what we've realized is like the views and attention that we get on these platforms organically is something that every Fortune 500 company desperately is trying to figure out. And so what we've really started doing is having this conversation with brands is like, you're a media company, whether you realize it or not. And if you were to think of yourself as a TV channel, what are the types of shows that you would program on that channel? And so we're starting to work with brands on creating original shows on these platforms that kind of live in the universe of their brand.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Is there very little competition? Cause it feels like the legacy businesses that obviously there's. Well, no, so there's like the feeds are deeply competitive. But I'm saying like people that are trying to do this like highly produced unscripted content. It's not just an iPhone.

• 2:39:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39:48Jordi Hays?

  That's not an individual creator doing like a day in the life or doing that. Like it feels like they're like, it feels like they're because the traditional like unscripted TV. Businesses, they're so in this mindset of like, okay, I like create a concept and I pitch it and maybe I make a pilot. Or I'm an established, you know, studio and I can just like go and get the budget just off of belief alone. They're still in this mindset of like, I need to sell this whole show to a network. And I think that could create an environment where you're kind of in this lane with a model that's very disruptive, being like, I'm not going to go to the network at all. I'm just going to go straight to the feed and uh do and and be able to do churn out a super high volume of content.

• 2:40:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure with like great margins too, uh and just kind of like sidestep the whole industry.

• 2:40:34Speaker 07

  I mean, there's a few things here. One, I think what's been really cool is like New York has become like the capital of this new era of media. I think, you know, LA was the center of influencer for so long, like never forget the TikTok houses in 2020. I think that slowly started shifting with like the Washington parkification of TikTok content. And all of a sudden now all these short form content studios started bubbling up.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  You're right.

• 2:40:56Speaker 07

  You know, I think for those of us that have been in New York for a few years, there is a bit of an industry now where we all know each other, we're all pretty close with each other. What I will say though is like. On the flip side, I think especially like being in LA right now, this is an industry of people that still refuse to accept that like the internet has become television.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:41:12Speaker 07

  And you have so many talented storytellers, entire generation of storytellers. Who were out there trying to pitch their show to Netflix. Um, instead of realizing like, hey, how can I go make this myself? And I think the crazy thing is like, we have so many examples of success now. And it's like a mat, like in what world would TVPN be this successful if you guys were on CNN?

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, or, or starting there. I mean, it's weird because in Silicon Valley, we've like, you would be so crazy if you were like, I have an idea for a new technology. Let me go try and pitch it to Amazon Web Services. You'd be like, no, I, I build the first version. I raise a little money. I build it. I build it. And then eventually they come and try and buy me. Um, and that's like the DNA of Silicon Valley and yet, uh, Hollywood just has, is still in the process of like adapting to that of just like, yeah, just go do it yourself. Like the cameras are available. You can make stuff with an iPhone.

• 2:42:02Speaker 07

  And I think what's so hard is like, we haven't had startup DNA in this city ever. I mean, you know, with Hollywood.

• 2:42:06John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, we did in nineteen twenty.

• 2:42:09Speaker 07

  Of course, exactly. And that was the original moment. But from that point on, we had a hundred year long industry where it's like, this is how projects get made.

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  Just calcify, calcify, calcify.

• 2:42:16Speaker 07

  And I think as a result, we built an industry around the way that things worked. And it's really hard to all of a sudden accept like, hey, the rules could not be more different now. It might never go back to that. They will never go back to that in the first place. So I think what's cool though is like, I really do believe that any talent we've ever worked with would have been a television star twenty years ago. I think any show we made and, and are continuing to make would have been a TV show twenty years ago. Um, and I think.

• 2:42:39Jordi Hays?

  How much, yeah, how much inspiration do you, I, I think, like, when I think about TVPN, we've had maybe a hundred or so people like kind of launched like some like show that is inspired in some way by what we're doing, even though what we're doing just looks like. Normal television, uh, and it's been around for 50 years. Uh, do you look back at some of these like old unscripted shows? And be like, okay, we want to do a dating show in that format. We want to do a home renovation show and that like, we want to do a cooking, like cooking. I feel like I've, I've pitched, uh, we've pitched like TVPN for cooking. Somebody, it wouldn't look anything like TVPN, but it'd just be like a daily cooking show.

• 2:43:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  That kind of like has the aesthetics of like a legacy television show, uh, but it's like built for the social platforms.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:27Speaker 07

  A hundred percent. I mean, I think what I try to tell everyone is like Instagram, Tik Tok, X, YouTube are television at this point. And so as a result, the entire history of television is up for grabs to recreate on these platforms. Um, and so I think it's really interesting to think about like, what are the shows that spoke to you when you were younger and figuring out like, what is the newer version of making that today? But I think the big difference is there is the format side, which like boy room and girl room are formats. But I think the real opportunity that exists here is like certain star creators out there have the ability to grow multi hundred million dollar businesses fueled by content. And I think these are people that need programming help because they themselves are a TV channel at this point. And they need operating help. And I think that really is where we're going to see things start to go. And it not just be a landscape where like Mr. Beast is the only one that's figured this out.

• 2:44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how do you think about, uh, platform exclusivity? The aesthetics of the different platforms, because, uh, I think from, from the outside, a lot of people would assume that Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and Tik Tok are feature complete identical platforms. It's vertical video. And yet content that does well on one doesn't do well on the other, but.

• 2:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Could we see a flip where Tik Tok says, no, we want this as an exclusive show or Instagram like, will that ever?

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Are they already basically doing that in the sense that some content will do better on, on one platform than another? Just because the audience or the algorithm or the feature set there. Um, but will it go farther to the point where you could build a whole show and it's every episode's going viral on Tik Tok and they're all flopping on Instagram for some weird unknown reason.

• 2:45:00Speaker 07

  I mean, we've had that experience. We have certain shows that have totally flopped on Tik Tok and Instagram and are the most viral thing we've ever made on YouTube. And most often it's the other way around. But I think it goes back to like, what is the reason that someone is opening that app in the first place? If I'm opening Instagram,

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:14Speaker 07

  It's to check my DMs.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:16Speaker 07

  It's to check my notifications, maybe see something from a friend, and then I'll get stuck in reels and doom scroll for three hours. TikTok, I am going on basically to watch television.

• 2:45:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:25Speaker 07

  In fact, I don't want to see what my friends are posting, because I don't think they know how to make TikToks.

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Ah, yeah.

• 2:45:28Speaker 07

  And I'm going on being like, hey, show me like, what's the television feed today?

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:45:32Speaker 07

  And so as a result, like, you're willing to watch longer content.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:35Speaker 07

  It's not about sending something to your group chat that's like a degenerate meme. Um, and I think it really is the closest thing to like, short-form television. YouTube Shorts, I think either you're 13 or 70. I don't really know who else uses YouTube Shorts in between that. But I think like, you know, this show is a really great example of that, of like, it does feel like this show was originally designed for X.

• 2:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:56Speaker 07

  I would imagine that it quickly becomes a YouTube show, though, just as it turns into more of a television.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. Do you think there's, uh, do you think there's anything that we should extrapolate from, uh, the expansion of short-form from, it was six seconds on Vine, and it was about one minute for a while. Now I think it's three minutes on most of the platforms.

• 2:46:17Speaker 07

  You can do up to 60 minutes on TikTok.

• 2:46:19John Coogan?

  60 minutes on TikTok. Is there, are we gonna see the meta of 30 minutes is the, just the right amount of time? Because that's what, that's where TV landed, and that's kind of where YouTube landed, right? Like Mr. Beast, it used to be eight minutes, then it was 12, then it became 20, and then 20-plus ads is kind of 30, and you're in the 20, 30. And then you see video SAS go up to 40, and, you know.

• 2:46:39Speaker 07

  I mean, I, look, I think the one thing you have to remember of short-form content is like, part of the reason for its success is that like, dopamine rush that it gives you.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  Snackable, yeah.

• 2:46:46Speaker 07

  And so like, you are kind of addicted to this scroll and wanting to be punched with like, some new hit of energy. So, I think there is a limit.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  But you can do that in the edit to some extent.

• 2:46:54Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  That's what.

• 2:46:55Speaker 07

  But I think it's like, there is a limit. This is a modern blackjack dealer. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I mean, anything that's a long-form video, I'm watching as like, 2X on these platforms.

• 2:47:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:47:06Speaker 07

  Because like, yeah, look, I might want to watch eight minutes of a rug cleaning video on TikTok, but like, gonna watch it in 2X speed. But I do think that like-

• 2:47:13John Coogan?

  You watch, you watch eight-minute rug cleaning videos on TikTok at 2X speed?

• 2:47:17Speaker 07

  At 4:00 in the morning, you get hooked.

• 2:47:18John Coogan?

  The rug cleaning, they're already sped up, right?

• 2:47:20Speaker 07

  You got an addict there. They're already, I think, on 4X.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  They're on like, 4X. You just wanna see the lines get cleaner and cleaner the whole time.

• 2:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you think?

• 2:47:27John Coogan?

  Hold on, we gotta stay on this. Do you, do you feel like you?

• 2:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's check your screen time. Let's, let's check the screen time.

• 2:47:33John Coogan?

  Just those.

• 2:47:33Speaker 07

  No, I, look, I, look, in general, I will say, I think there are like a lot of problems with short form content to begin with. Like, I don't think this is a good thing to be giving children and then expecting them to like enter the world in a normal state.

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  But at the same time, like, I would actually defend like, uh, like Subway interview series as something that is a little bit more vegetables than

• 2:47:52Speaker 07

  A hundred percent. This is my whole thing. I think knowing that these platforms are the sole source of like information, entertainment for an entire generation of kids, we have a moral responsibility to flood as much good shit as possible on these apps.

• 2:48:05John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:48:05Speaker 07

  I think at the same time.

• 2:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Your room doesn't have to look like this. There is another way.

• 2:48:09Speaker 07

  By the way, I also think if you're, you're just putting a smile on someone's face, you're making their day better, you know?

• 2:48:13Jordi Hays?

  It is funny, there was a moment in time, maybe it was like five, 10 years, where people had this like righteous, like, uh, they would make this sort of like righteous statement, I don't watch television. And then if you actually piece together, it was like, I don't watch television, but I get entertained in these sort of like short bursts that collectively add up to four hours a day, but I would never watch television.

• 2:48:34John Coogan?

  I don't even own a TV. I just pay $2,000 for a new phone every 12 months. Cause I'm hooked on it.

• 2:48:40Speaker 07

  But I do think that's the thing. It's like, it is time to start sounding the alarm bells a little bit of like what goes behind the scenes on these platforms. Because like, I don't know if this is the best thing for young people to have from a really, really age.

• 2:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you think there's an opportunity to recreate some elements of Vice? Like, it feels like they, they were making video content that, in my view, I feel like doesn't get made as much anymore.

• 2:49:04Speaker 07

  It's, by the way, some of the best content's still on YouTube, two days. And I, and I think it's interesting, cause like the views continue to go up, like year after year. Um, I will say, what I'm not as bullish on these days is a faceless media company. I think Vice was sort of that last try of what happens to build like an actual media company on the internet.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talk about this all the time.

• 2:49:25Speaker 07

  Shane Smith type would a hundred percent be successful and maybe could have some people underneath them. But I think like TBPN, for instance, is not a faceless brand. It's not CNBC.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:34Speaker 07

  You guys are TVP.

• 2:49:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:36Speaker 07

  And I think like that is kind of how anything's gonna grow going forward.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  Andrew Callahan, like Channel 5 is Andrew Callahan, right? And, uh, and, and if it was truly just like, oh, it's just, the, the Channel 5 is, is a faceless aesthetic.

• 2:49:47Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:49:48John Coogan?

  For fun.

• 2:49:48Speaker 07

  And I think like A24 might be the last faceless media company. Like they have created a brand of prestige. I don't know how easy that is to do going forward.

• 2:49:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Where do you think live streaming goes from here?

• 2:50:00Speaker 07

  Live's the future. And I think, you know, most of the people that we're talking about in culture right now, you guys included, are live streamers. Whether it's like Aisha Speed or Kaia Sanat or on a completely other end of the spectrum, Nick Fuentes. There's a reason why we're talking about these people. And I think it's because you're giving a daily amount of content that can be clippable and hack the algorithm of every single platform that exists. And so I think we are in this sort of post-platform state where you might have your preferred platform that you use. But it all kind of has the same content at this point. And so people are larger than any one app if you do this correctly. And I think live is like the real spot where that kind of comes to fruition.

• 2:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Are you working on any live shows?

• 2:50:40Speaker 07

  Um, definitely have live shows in the works. I mean, had like the huge honor of, of working with Aisha Speed on his.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:50:46Speaker 07

  Speed Does America tour, which he was live for 35 days straight. Um, he filmed himself sleeping for 34 nights in a row.

• 2:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:50:54Speaker 07

  And I mean, like.

• 2:50:54Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know he didn't, I, I assumed he was going offline.

• 2:50:57Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 2:50:58John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:50:58Speaker 07

  He did not turn off the camera for 35 days.

• 2:51:00Jordi Hays?

  Isn't there a real risk of going crazy?

• 2:51:02Speaker 07

  I think it's all he knows because he's only 20 years old and he's been doing this for like four years, which is crazy.

• 2:51:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:07Speaker 07

  Someone had a great point when we were filming, which was like, he turned our world into the Truman Show. Because it's not like he's on some set, like the set is the city that we live in.

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  What's really interesting about Aisha Speed is I think people see the viral clips, but if you open up a stream and just click to a random moment and you actually understand how he's interacting with chat, how he's like killing time and filling dead air.

• 2:51:32Speaker 07

  I think he talks to chat in a way that I've never seen anybody on earth.

• 2:51:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:51:35Speaker 07

  He knows who chat is.

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:51:37Speaker 07

  He says, I love you chat. You're like, he actually loves chat. He's talking to that young 13 year old kid. Or 50 year old guy that like for some reason is watching this every

• 2:51:45John Coogan?

  People don't understand with the streamers how high skill ceiling talking to chat is Ludwig was talking about if he had to start over could he be successful in the modern era as as a streamer and his his first bullet point was I'm good at talking to chat and so that's a skill that I could immediately cash in on but then of course you have to figure out like how do you get your first viewer and so he does a bunch of stunts and he ran this experiment and somewhat successfully but mostly I was just it was just interesting to hear someone talk about you know the nature of live with chat is so different than TV Bloomberg has a chat room but they never talked to chat on Bloomberg TV you know and I was thinking about how funny that would be because every all the

• 2:52:28Jordi Hays?

  A lot of legacy media they turn off chat places.

• 2:52:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, even on YouTube, of course.

• 2:52:33Jordi Hays?

  They'll turn off comments.

• 2:52:34John Coogan?

  But I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about right now like there are multi billionaire hedge funds that have Bloomberg on and Bloomberg chat going on their Bloomberg terminal.

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  And yet the person who's talking to them, they don't connect. They don't connect, which is so fascinating.

• 2:52:48Speaker 07

  But like this is what I explained to everyone of like why I think live is the future. There was a moment on the speed tour where he was in Cincinnati. He's having lunch. There's like a glass door at the front or a glass window at this restaurant and of course like anywhere he goes, there's a crowd of thousands of kids that are outside trying to go see this kid. Speed goes to the window at one point just to like get a better look at the crowd and there's one kid front and center. This kid is so excited to see speed that he bashes his head through the glass window. Like World War Z zombie shit. And I think like that is the answer of like this medium is so powerful that it's somehow making this like 12 year old kid into a zombie because of the connection that he feels with speed. That is live. That's not like uploading a TikTok video.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's weird. There's there's a very like, yeah, yeah, just so many interesting comparisons to TV throughout.

• 2:53:33Jordi Hays?

  You're behind the camera. You're creating shows and different concepts and and through that you're creating inevitably creating stars and future superstars. How do you think about?

• 2:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Like partnering with talent in the short term and the long term. I feel like one of the big challenges that when you look at creator, modern creator-led media companies, you have Barstool, Dave Portnoy, he created other stars. They end up going and going independent or going and doing other deals. Alex Cooper then was a Barstool creator, left, then like, you know, created Alex Earl to some degree, then Alex Earl leaves and the cycle sort of like continues. And I think that's like probably that maybe like one of the number one challenges for Gymnasium is like, how do you?

• 2:54:26Speaker 07

  This is something-

• 2:54:27Jordi Hays?

  It's hard enough to create the star and then how do you kind of partner for the long term?

• 2:54:31Speaker 07

  I mean, this is something that like honestly, I evolved my own perspective on. I think for a long time I tried to figure out like, how could we hold on to that star? And I think where I've completely changed my opinion is like, the creators have the power. And even if they didn't start as a creator, but now they are, they hold the cards. And I think all you can hope to be is the best partner to them.

• 2:54:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:49Speaker 07

  But it is for them.

• 2:54:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:50Speaker 07

  They are the ones that are in control. And so I think where we've really shifted with Gymnasium is like Gymnasium at this point is very much a television studio for brands to make themselves into TV networks. It's like, we can turn brands into creators. But I think there is another completely different angle that will exist.

• 2:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because theoretically you can retain the brand longer. And if you're creating a diversity of creators or talent that work effectively for the brand, then you're effect, you're not, you're not entirely indexed to one superstar. And we even saw Night Media lost like-

• 2:55:21Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 2:55:22Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Beast, right?

• 2:55:22Speaker 07

  No, but think about this, like if you are Skittles and you're building the Skittles digital network of shows, and by the way, as a result of that, you've given three new kids a platform that are now going to go be famous, their story will always start with they got famous for being on like the Skittles network. They might be your best brand ambassador you ever have. I think that's like a blessing-

• 2:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 2:55:40Speaker 07

  If someone were able to become a star for something like that. So I think it makes a lot more sense on the brand side of things. But I think like the real future of this industry is helping creators turn into massive, massive stars.

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Do you feel-

• 2:55:54Jordi Hays?

  Threatened at all by AI. I feel from my point of view and understanding your business, I think humans are going to want to watch unscripted shows from real people. I don't know if it's going to hit the same to be like watching boy room and it's like, yeah, we generated this crazy AI room, it's super dirty.

• 2:56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:11Jordi Hays?

  And here's this AI person who made the room dirty.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:14Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, it like, there's something about it being.

• 2:56:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, even indistinguishable, people will, will do the investigative journalism to be like, oh, boy room is now AI generated, we caught them.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  And that will destroy, it'll be like cheating in chess, I imagine.

• 2:56:29Speaker 07

  I mean, look, I think the benefit is like, we're young and run a startup and an industry that's kind of being created every single day. And so for us, I think we're always looking to see like what tool is coming out and see if we can use it and help us make our own shit better. Um, but I think the reality is like, when anyone's ever said, hey, like in the future, people are going to watch an entire new set, season of succession by generating it. It's like, at the same time that you say that, the NFL has never had a bigger audience. And I think like, we humans have an innate desire to watch the same thing at the same time and be part of like a culture moment.

• 2:56:59John Coogan?

  What's interesting about that is like, yeah, NFL has bigger audience than ever, but also there's more people playing Madden and watching effectively virtual football every year as well.

• 2:57:08Speaker 07

  But they're watching a human playing it.

• 2:57:09John Coogan?

  They're, well, or, or, yeah, I wasn't even talking about that. I mean, they're playing it. Like they are generating it themselves when they're playing it, you're watching the screen while you play.

• 2:57:17Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:57:18John Coogan?

  Then there's also people watching it on Twitch, which I think is what you're mentioning, or watching the video game version, watching someone else play. And then there's watching real people play. And so all three markets were good to invest in oddly.

• 2:57:27Speaker 07

  A hundred percent.

• 2:57:28John Coogan?

  It wasn't one, one, one defeated all the others. What about VR? Uh, have you, is there anything interesting in your world in VR?

• 2:57:35Speaker 07

  I mean, look, I, it's cool. I have never seen a reason why like, we're at that place in time yet where anyone's going to care to go and put these goggles on. I think like, you know, I think the, the new meta glasses look really cool. I'm excited to try them, but I think we're still a few years away from that.

• 2:57:49John Coogan?

  I just have this thesis that if you, if you went like all in on VR today and you just waited, waited, waited, you could be like the, you could be the Jake Paul.

• 2:57:56Speaker 07

  I mean, look, there's a lot of people that, that have been doing that. I think there's also a lot of people that raised a shit ton of money.

• 2:58:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:58:01Speaker 07

  Ten years ago and like Sundance even had a part of their festivals for VR films back then.

• 2:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:06Speaker 07

  Like, you know, unfortunately, I think. That is also where you risk sounding like someone who's just chasing the thing that people are talking about.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:58:13Speaker 07

  First, you're running a VR company, now you're running a crypto company, then you don't want to always chase those things. I think for for me, it's like, just really, what do I want to watch?

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:21Speaker 07

  What are the things that we can go make that are like fun to be a part of?

• 2:58:23Jordi Hays?

  Have you had a bunch of acquisition interests?

• 2:58:28Speaker 07

  Definitely been interesting conversations. I think, you know, it's less about IP itself. I think it's like an acqui-hire thing.

• 2:58:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're like, hey, we need a play here, bad. This seems like somebody would say.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  We can kill that, take that.

• 2:58:43Speaker 07

  I mean, by the way, I do think, I do think like that creator side of like building stars is where these studios can have a big impact. Because it does take millions of dollars if you want to go do this correctly. And so that's not something that like even we could do on our own, just saying like, hey, we're gonna go build this star creator. It does take money and the one thing the studios have is like decades of relationships in the licensing world and in the merch world and live events world. That would honestly be really helpful to tap into.

• 2:59:09Jordi Hays?

  Have you thought about trying to launch a new startup with a show? Are you doing that at all?

• 2:59:14Speaker 07

  I think that's always been some of the the thought behind any new show. It's like, how big could this get? What are the things that can kind of come out of this?

• 2:59:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:20Speaker 07

  And I think you've seen a lot of, you know, tech companies now realize the importance of media and doing it the other way around. But I think like that's the most interesting thing on earth.

• 2:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, because you could partner with Amazon on a show or you could partner with some consumer brand that's like, we'll give you 15% of our company. If you can get us 200 million views and kind of take us from zero to to one.

• 2:59:41Speaker 07

  And I think that's the really interesting side about where Gymnasium is going is like, it is more than anything a sort of, you know, creative consultancy for the first time. Like, we can really help you build your brand in terms of taking over like cultural dominance through the type of media you have.

• 2:59:56Jordi Hays?

  You haven't raised money either.

• 2:59:57Speaker 07

  We raised a very small, we raised a 750K around three years ago.

• 3:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:00:01Speaker 07

  And it was with a lot of just like classic industry players like Jeremy Zimmer, who was the CEO of UTA, and Matthew Siegel at Attention, and some really interesting people. But I haven't raised a dollar.

• 3:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Smart, smart to not like raise 75 million and then you're like, oh, suddenly we need 300 shows per year.

• 3:00:16Speaker 07

  I think it's like, what's the point? I mean, it's, we're not at that time where you would even want to stake a bet in terms of raising that much money.

• 3:00:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 3:00:24Jordi Hays?

  It's very pragmatic.

• 3:00:25John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  This is super fun.

• 3:00:27Speaker 07

  Happy to be here.

• 3:00:28Speaker 02

  Wanted to wait till I can come in person.

• 3:00:29John Coogan?

  Wait, we gotta ring the gong for the

• 3:00:31Jordi Hays?

  How many views, how many views do you think you're gonna do this year?

• 3:00:34Speaker 02

  Um, well, it depends if you include the Speed Tour, I think we're already at like 2 billion plus views.

• 3:00:39John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Work out, Nick.

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Hit the gong. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Good for him. Thanks so much.

• 3:00:49Speaker 02

  A pleasure.

• 3:00:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, please. We'll talk to you in just a second. Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to now to source you. Any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. Um, Vass on X has just tried Gemini 3.0. It's over. Um, very, very funny post. I think even if

• 3:01:11Jordi Hays?

  We are working on getting access.

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  We're working on getting access. What, what, what do you think?

• 3:01:15Speaker 02

  Uh, it seems that Warren Buffett also tried Gemini 3, uh, Berkshire Long Google.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Long Google, right now?

• 3:01:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they just, uh,

• 3:01:22John Coogan?

  They just bought.

• 3:01:23Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:01:25Jordi Hays?

  Did they buy it? How, what, what kind of size?

• 3:01:27Speaker 02

  I think 4.3 billion.

• 3:01:28John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Come on.

• 3:01:30John Coogan?

  I love this.

• 3:01:31Jordi Hays?

  You can do more than that.

• 3:01:33John Coogan?

  I

• 3:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Tossing 100 billion.

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  This is fascinating. I mean, it, it just goes to show you that like the AI, even if it's like a bubble, like it is, there is no systemic, there's no systemic, uh, like, uh, chaos all over the place. Like there will be pockets of things that are overvalued, pockets of things that are undervalued, opportunities all over the place.

• 3:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  At the end of the day, you know, you have Google trading at what? 20X or something?

• 3:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video of, of, uh, somebody breaking through the glass.

• 3:02:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, 28. Um, yeah, let's watch the Speed video and then let's also tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning.

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm in my happy place. I'm in a wander.

• 3:02:14John Coogan?

  It's a vacation home, but better.

• 3:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Been staying in a beautiful wander.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  I didn't give everyone an update on what my 8 Sleep score actually was. I of course am sleeping on my 8 Sleep. Uh, it's, I got an 85, so I'm doing pretty well. I'd like a sound effect. Do you even have access to the old sound effects? I feel like we might have over rotated towards the night vision goggles turning on and we no longer have access to the classics. The horse, the Ashton Hall sound effect, are any of those still on the board, Jordy? Or have they all been replaced with, oh, it's still there? Thank goodness. I thought we lost touch and I thought we only had night vision goggles, um, which I do enjoy. Um, is there any other news that we need to talk, talk through? Should we go through some mansion section? We missed the entire mansion section. We had so much to talk about today.

• 3:02:57Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 3:02:59John Coogan?

  Which one do you want to do?

• 3:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Where should we start?

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  With the mansion section?

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Um. Donald Trump's home, his childhood home.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  This is a big.

• 3:03:06Jordi Hays?

  He's hitting the market.

• 3:03:07John Coogan?

  This is a big deal.

• 3:03:08Jordi Hays?

  It's in Queens.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  Uh, you could buy this because you love the guy. You could buy it because you hate the guy. You want to tear it down and build something else.

• 3:03:15Jordi Hays?

  We got this video first. Play this video. I need to see this.

• 3:03:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play this. This is speed on the speed tours, America tour. Uh, what is going on here? And someone is about to jump through the glass. He's, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is crazy. He actually bonked his head on the glass and, uh, and broke the glass. And that seems like that's like at a McDonald's or something. Like it's at a real restaurant that probably doesn't buy the cheapest glass. I don't know. That's a pretty crazy. Um.

• 3:03:52Jordi Hays?

  It's funny to use his head. Like he's got his hands.

• 3:03:55John Coogan?

  Such a great actor.

• 3:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Went for the heads.

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  I, I, I wonder, I wonder if he'll ever, uh, transition to like, you know, being in movies because.

• 3:04:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure he could.

• 3:04:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Be in any number of movies at this point.

• 3:04:08John Coogan?

  Anyway, eight month renovation, Donald Trump's childhood home is hitting the market in Jamaica Estates. The house is selling for 2.3 million. Um, you know, uh, let's see what else is here. Uh, charming Tudor style house in Queens, New York. He lived there in his earliest years of his life. Decades later, the latest in a string of owners is hoping the home's connection to Trump will help turn a healthy profit.

• 3:04:34Jordi Hays?

  So in 2008, it sold for 782,000.

• 3:04:38John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:04:38Jordi Hays?

  2016, 1.3, 2017, 2.14, 2025, it somehow sold for 800,000 and now it's back up at two point, being listed at 2.3.

• 3:04:50John Coogan?

  What happened? Something odd. Uh, very, very bizarre. Anyway, there's another story in here. Before building their retirement home, they had to relocate. 174 legless lizards? That is a bizarre headline. A pair of retirees needed to remove protected slow worms from the property before they could break ground on their $3.2 million

• 3:05:16Jordi Hays?

  So I was hoping, this one isn't hitting the market yet, but I could see PG snapping this one up.

• 3:05:23John Coogan?

  I was gonna say, PG's gonna get in on the

• 3:05:24Jordi Hays?

  This house looks absolutely lovely.

• 3:05:27John Coogan?

  You love it.

• 3:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Has a little pond. You can swim.

• 3:05:32John Coogan?

  Even though, even though they had to relocate, they had to painstakingly, they had to spend weeks painstakingly capturing and relocating almost 200 of the creatures, slow worms, a legally protected reptile. They're not worms, they're harmless legless lizards. What a bizarre world. But no, catching slow worms was not something we'd ever had to do before. It was actually very hard work, but strangely, I enjoyed doing it. They did it themselves. Wow.

• 3:05:59Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it ourselves.

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  Uh, retarded.

• 3:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine trying to catch 170 lizards?

• 3:06:05John Coogan?

  Oh my god. That'd be, ugh, gross. I don't know, I don't like that at all.

• 3:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Fun for a, fun for a four-year-old.

• 3:06:10John Coogan?

  I don't like snakes. These sound like snakes. They don't have an image, thank goodness, of what the snakes look like, but I'm not into it at all. But I'm very happy for these folks out in the English countryside who rescued 174

• 3:06:22Jordi Hays?

  These are snakes. These are some of the sketchiest looking things ever. They're like massive worms.

• 3:06:29John Coogan?

  I don't like these at all. This is a terrible selection. I had you, I had you select the mansion section stories.

• 3:06:35Jordi Hays?

  I selected it because the, the home looks incredible.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, the home's nice. I'm glad that it's worm-free. I would be moving to Ireland. I don't like snakes.

• 3:06:43Jordi Hays?

  It's only 40 miles southwest of central London, which means that it probably takes like three, four minutes in an Aston Martin Valkyrie.

• 3:06:55John Coogan?

  Is there any other news that we missed today? I think we have it mostly covered. I think we can say goodbye. Have a great weekend. We will see you on Monday. And thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and subscribe to the TBPN Substack, tbpn.com. Thank you so much for tuning in. Have a great weekend.

• 3:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Have a fantastic weekend.

• 3:07:19John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:07:19Jordi Hays?

  We love you. We'll see you Monday.