Memecoin Takeover, TB hits NYC, The Digital Trenches, Don't Scoop Me Bro, The Biggest Podcast Deal Ever

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We're here in New York City, the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple, working on the biggest podcast deal of all time. Something that will truly shake the industry to its core.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  They will write, they will write history books about this deal.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  The kind of story that, that, that hits PR News Wire and, and the, the website, you know, shuts down. Like it basically, it's like a DDoS because so many people are headed there at the same time.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we have to wear costumes when you go outside because so many reporters are trying to scoop this.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  It's, it's that big of a deal, uh, but it's good to be here. We're very excited.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  I saw, I saw a tech journalist sort of undercover as like, not undercover, but

• 0:45John Coogan?

  On top of a horse that undercover.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Or across the street from our hotel.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  We're staying at Bowery.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  They can't stay away from the horses, even when they're undercover.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, it's the best.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  We're eating, we're violating.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  You get, if you, they, they, you know, the second you call them out, then they just gallop off.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. It's dangerous.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  So it's kind of a smart move.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  How was your weekend?

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, my weekend was, my weekend was good. I was supposed to go home.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  And then ended up extending our, our Airbnb for another week.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then, um, yeah, it was just, it was just, I, I, I spent the entire week, weekend in sort of stunned disbelief that we had our first presidential meme coins. Um, and, uh, it was.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  That happened Friday night, right?

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  No, that was Saturday.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Saturday night.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, during the irony, the irony of, of launching it when, when, when the most terminally online group of people in any tech adjacent industry were all in one place, not on their computers. Like it, it, he basically was trying to mog them with that of like, you know.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  But the real DJs were still on their phones and made it.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, of course, of course. I do, I was thinking about it and I, I would guess that.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  10, 20 funds returned their entire fund off of just that.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  I don't think, I, I don't think any funds are set up to actually make that investment on the right time horizon. It's not even just the getting approval because most funds, you know, you need two GPs to sign out, right?

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  You're giving crypto funds too much credit.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  I don't think, I don't think they keep enough in like a hot wallet.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  I.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  It had to be in your phantom, like at that moment for you to be able to move that.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm just saying, let's say.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Saturday.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  If you got in, you, you, you know, you could have easily.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  They're, they're not just going to want you to be able to just wire that much that fast.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm thinking of a certain GP.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Sure, who did?

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't have control issues.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  If you're a solo GP.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  Running a fund.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  I wouldn't even call it like a farm at that point, but yeah.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like somebody, yeah, yeah, there, there, there were definitely capital allocators who made major plays.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for, for everyone, for every, you know, as long as you're seeing individuals printing.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  There are funds printing too.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  They're just not posting screenshots.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Uh, well, let's go, let's go through, obviously, it's the inauguration. I was in DC the last two days. Uh, I've had more than my fill of.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  And you scooped, uh, Teddy.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this was Bill. Yeah, Teddy.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  He was scooping.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  He, he was trying to scoop, but I scooped him back. He was spotted outside of Peter Thiel's inauguration party. I got a video of him standing out in the cold with a camera going TMZ mode on all the tech founders.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  People were asking, why is, why, why did Peter invite Ted to his party? And it's like, no, he's standing outside.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  And he, he does that now. Like, that is his beat. So he's, he's officially with the New York Times. He used to write with Puck News. Uh, I think he was maybe of the New York Times before, but, uh, he went back to the New York Times and is officially on the Elon beat. So anything around Elon, which is vaguely like tech and politics, obviously, Thiel fits in there.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  And, uh, And I ran into him in Las Vegas doing the exact same thing, literally just standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons, trying to kind of overhear conversations and like go up to people and be like, "Oh, hey, like, what are you here for?"

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  He's on the circuit.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's funny because like the, the whole, like the, the end result of the piece is always like, "Oh, all these shadowy figures are coming together. You should be scared, New York Times reader."

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  But like when he's there, he's like laughing and drinking and having fun, like,

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just,

• 4:26John Coogan?

  I always go, I always say what I have to him and then I just like mess with him and try and like, you know, do something funny.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  So every time, if you see a New York Times reporter hanging out, pull out your phone, scoop it, it's free clicks. You gotta monetize these people.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Just give him a nudge, say, "Hey, you look great. You'd look better in a, in a tailored suit."

• 4:42John Coogan?

  I agree, yeah.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  Cause you scooped in, he was looking sharp, but he was not wearing a suit. He didn't look like he belonged.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  He didn't, he didn't. Maybe that's why he got turned away.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  He just classed it off a little bit, Teddy. We'd welcome me right in. You could overhear everyone's conversation.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  It's funny that most, most parties, most parties, if somebody is saying, "Hey, I'm a New York Times, like reporter, I'd love to like, you know, join." A lot of people would be like, "Sure, come on in." Like, "It's glamorous, like the New York Times."

• 5:10John Coogan?

  It's good, right about this and this is like,

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  And then this is, yeah, yeah.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  You stand outside.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  You stand outside.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Secret Service. I had to, my flight was two hours delayed. I had to show up to the party with my suitcase and backpack. And so the Secret Service had to go through every single sock and piece of underwear.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I feel like some of the brothers are gonna roast you for having a backpack. Oh, it's not fair. That was very TV coded.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  It was terrible. They should have had the attache.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  Is it like a JanSport, DanSport?

• 5:37John Coogan?

  No, it's actually the same backpack as Luigi Mangione had.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a highly recommended backpack. He was just,

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  He just bought like the most popular one. I forget what the brand is, but it works pretty well. Let, let's go through some posts. We'll start with politics, then we'll try and move on to politics, because as you know, we never talk about politics.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  Just move on, start with politics and then move on.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  I mean, literally, there's like four politics stories, but they are tech related. The first one is about Intel. Dylan Patel was doing some snooping on, Where the various jets are right now, the private jets. So he says, this was on January 17th. He says Elon's jet is in Florida. Global Foundry's jet is in Florida. Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. If, in case anyone was wondering what's going on with Intel, they are at Mar-a-Lago. Make America Great Again can only be true if Intel is saved. I thought this is very, very interesting reporting and, and very cool that all of these different companies are coming together. It's a little sad that like, of course, people say Intel, Elon involved, but.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only, uh, my, my initial reaction there is that many large companies.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Were, were just kissing the ring.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Were in Florida kissing the ring, uh, all weekend. So it's hard to, I mean, I'm sure there's more backstory there.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Well, you can go to the reporting that happened the next day on the 18th. When, uh, there's a headline here. Elon Musk reportedly emerges as a potential Intel buyer involving Qualcomm and Global Foundry in this blockbuster deal.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  And so.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever do a documentary on Intel or anything?

• 7:11John Coogan?

  I did on Intel, uh, never on Qualcomm.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Why have they, what, what's the high level on why they don't seem to have any momentum as a business, just mismanagement?

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Missed mobile mainly. That's the big one. We, we're getting some beverages delivered, so, uh, we gotta, we gotta hop over the.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  I can actually.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  The wires. Yeah, you're right. Um, but yeah, the high level on, on Intel is that they missed mobile and they were printing money in server. And so, uh, they made a ton of money selling chips for servers. But then mobile came and ARM became the standard processor, which was, uh, ARM is like a licensing company. They don't actually have a foundry. And so when you hear about TSMC making Apple silicon, uh.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Apple silicon is a chip that is very power efficient because it runs off of the ARM architecture, which is, uh, designed for like not super high performance computing, but low power consumption. So your phone doesn't get hot. It lasts almost a year sometimes, as you know.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  My phone.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  My phone gets.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  365.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  When I, when I get, when I get three or four posts, all doing pretty well, my phone starts.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  This mail's mouthing. You gotta turn that some notifications off. But, uh.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, cheers, by the way.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What wound up happening is that.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Lukewarm Red Bull for you.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's terrible.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Red Bull futurists would be proud of us.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  But so what winds up happening is that these low power chips, people thought, oh, they're just useful in cell phones. Turns out that having good price and performance per watt and per energy usage is very important. And then eventually those scaled up to be what's in laptops. And then eventually even what's in the server. And so Intel got, Intel kind of missed that. And then they also had a variety of problems going back and forth with like, are they a foundry or are they just a design chip? Like ARM, you would never, you would never be like, oh, I need a new gaming chip. I'm going to go get an ARM processor. ARM is like the, the architecture. And you would also never say, I would, oh, for my next gaming rig, I really want a TSMC fabbed chip.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Like, no, you say Nvidia, right?

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the real hardos, they want to go straight from Taiwan.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  They go pick up their chips.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Only like the semi analysis.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  It's like buying, like, you know, it's like watch collector, right? They want to go and they want to feel it. They want to really inspect it.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  They want to know what they're running on when they're in the, the digital trenches.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, so Intel had a lot of trouble driving down to the, to the, the more advanced nodes, like three nanometer, five nanometer, they fell behind. And then Apple switched from Intel to Apple silicon. That was like more kind of, you know, a death knell. And they've been really, really struggling. And then they fired their CEO. And so it's, it's been kind of a mess of a company. And then even with the, even with the, the Chips Act, there was a lot of criticism because like, it was great, a headline number, oh, America's going to invest a ton of money in semiconductors. That makes tons of sense. Like everyone's on board with that. But I believe Ben Thompson's argument was that it should have been set up a lot more like

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Operation Warp Speed, which is the structure of was guaranteed buying, not sending money for specific projects. So just saying, hey, we're essentially going to create a strategic GPU reserve. If you can manufacture a super fast GPU on three nanometer in the United States, using American labor, we will buy a hundred, you will buy a hundred thousand of them and just like build a cluster. And so then it's like everyone can compete.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  The money aside for the Chips Act hasn't really been getting.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  It hasn't really gone to Intel yet. Exactly. And so. I used to have like, kind of like a, you know that fork in the road meme, the dark castle versus like the sunny day? I used to, I used to argue that, uh, like, we would probably be better off if Elon had bought Intel instead of buying X. But who knows? Now he's gonna get both. So we'd love to see that. Moving on to the next tech political story, TikTok has been going back and forth. It's banned one minute, it's unbanned the next. It definitely put a fire under X's ass because they launched their video feed, uh, which is very cool.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  Which was, which was in the works.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  For sure. But it was like, perfect timing to launch it.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  But it's crazy. Uh, I was, so Brandon, my former teammate, uh, and good friend.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Jacob?

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Jacoby. You guys all know about Jacoby. So Jacoby's now the only designer at X.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  And I texted Jacoby, uh, Saturday night, cause we always go back and forth whenever, uh, a UFC fight is happening.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  And no response. And I, so I messaged him, like, as, uh, you know, the, the Murab, um, Umar fight was getting settled. And he, no, you know, he responded later, like, what? Oh, I didn't catch it or something like that. And I was like, what? Like, are you?

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Are you crazy? Of course, they were in a war room trying to ship back. The video was one designer.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  So anyway, it's bravo to, uh, the whole video.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm excited for, to take advantage of it. I think there's some really, uh, I think it'd be really big for the growth of the show. So expect more vertical content from us.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  So here's what I don't understand. I don't know how to go about, so I can see like the Jeff Lewis temp check videos working there.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Digital, you know, video native shitposting.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Will probably be a format.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  But it's much harder to do, cause you have to play a character. So I'm interested to see what sort of novel formats and types of content actually come out. Otherwise, is it just like?

• 12:59John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Video memes.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I think the default post on X that, you know, we love to react to on the show is like, a very concise, like, two-sentence post that has some humor and also some insight. You know, I'm thinking of like the, the rune shape rotator versus word cell post, or.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Or Solana just being like, moon should be a state. One of these like all-time bangers, um, banger archive, that type of.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  Content.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  And, and, and, and as it became easier and easier to edit image memes on your phone, many people that take posting on X seriously installed some sort of Photoshop app on their phone and were able to, or Imageflip is a meme generator that you can just use in the browser. And I think that the tooling will get better to, to do video stuff, especially with AI, where you'll be able to say, okay, I want the Patrick Bateman walking into the office in American Psycho with, listening to the headphones, but change out the song for this song. And then, oh, and deep fake.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Make it AOC.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, and so you'll be able to describe that maybe in X, in Grok.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Ideally, but in a third-party app.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's generating slop at scale.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Slop, but I mean, if it's done, if it's done, if it's done artistically and there's an inspiration there and it's timeline, it's funny, like, I think it can be very, very good. So, yeah. So TikTok's been going back and forth, getting banned, unbanned. We talked about how the Supreme Court upheld the ban. It's now been.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  There was also a bunch of players over the weekend submitting bids.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Mr. Beast. Yeah, we have a perplexity post here from McKay Quigley. Perplexity is teetering towards being pure slop. Your competitors have caught up to you while you waste time with not this nonsensical headline-baiting marketing drivel. There's now no reason for me to use your stagnant product. Jesus, brutal. This won't be popular, but they need a wake-up call. Yeah, perplexity AI makes bid to merge with TikTok US. I mean, a lot of people were throwing these out there. I wonder if this was real or if this was like, I mean, they say headline-baiting marketing drivel. I don't know if McKay did something, but.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Is there?

• 15:08John Coogan?

  We, we were even just about issuing a bid.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing. I, I, um, I don't, no, we were gonna issue a bid to buy Redbook.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Or, I guess we think it's a very.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Or Doogee.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, Red, Red, Red Note is a very strategic asset for the US because we're one-shotting.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Their best and brightest.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  But I don't know. I think it's cute that it's a good way to get attention to submit a bid to buy TikTok. But is there anybody on earth that could pay more?

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  That that

• 15:42John Coogan?

  In Oracle or Walmart or Elon.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Coalition of

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Of and if it's going to require a hundred billion dollars, is there anybody that would actually? Like, I have to imagine some of these bidders are like, oh, we'll give you, you know, 20 billion and like, you know, you'll get some type of royal, you know?

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  Like weird payout structures like that.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  And so as I understand it now, Trump has paused the ban, allowing TikTok to operate.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  And he clearly negotiated to to have the copy in the ban messaging, say, thank you to President Trump, or said said something to that degree. Thank you to Trump for, you know, working with us to find a solution. So, you know, some real putting on an art of the deal clinic, apparently. Uh, because they don't just thank Presi-, you know, they're not.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Why would he?

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  Clearly finessing this. This is clearly finessing them.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, this has like been pressure from the right for the entire time. There's been pressure on TikTok. So now, yeah, I mean, I think I think he really does have a lot of leverage.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  And, uh, and the fate of TikTok hangs in the balance and it's up to Trump and he has his thumb out, ready to go thumbs up or thumbs down on anything.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  And yeah.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  And can make demands. And maybe that's just more Project Texas stuff, more, you know, relocating. Maybe that's a sale or forced divestiture. Maybe it's shut down.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  No, it it.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  At least he has a bit of leverage again.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would be incredibly shocked and disappointed if if all of this turns into like a Project Texas V two.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's just not enough.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  That all the algorithms specifically cannot be, it's not about the data.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  No.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, people are going to share all that stuff online anyway.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  So it's not about, oh, you know, that's really not what it's about. It's about

• 17:27John Coogan?

  I mean, you talked to

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  They can put their finger on the scale.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  And you talked to Steinman and he was like, even if the app changed hands and was under new ownership, it is impossible to remove all the possible backdoors. Because there's just so many and it's so complex.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Such a large application.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, that that's why I've firmly been in favor of just letting the thing.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  Die.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  And letting all of those users flood back to great. American big tech companies.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  And so Signal says with TikTok temporarily closed, maybe it's time to rethink how we use the internet. Imagine if Instagram shut down at 9pm like a grocery store, or X closed at 11pm, open late, but not 24/7. We might all feel a little less pressure to read, to post, to exist online all the time. Maybe we'd sleep better, feel calmer, even be happier. A digital commons with operating hours enforcing temporal boundaries. It would disrupt the dopamine factory, recalibrate the rhythm of online life, and impose artificial scarcity to make digital engagement feel intentional, not compulsive. Can you imagine the flood of posts that would go up at like 9am every morning? Yeah, store opens, it's like Black Friday rushing in. I gotta get my burger.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  Barbecue.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, all the... It would be fun. People would...

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be very fun.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  That's the kind of thing...

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Never guess, but...

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Funny thing about it.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  It would be, it would be an interesting statement, though, for a social media company to say, "Hey, Christmas morning, we're gonna be closing down just a few hours. Spend it with your family."

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Because these apps are so addictive that even in a moment like Christmas Day, you're gonna check, you're gonna check it 20 times before noon.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's brutal.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  It's insane.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  So Cormac here says, "Never depend on a single platform. I'm glad we switched to Instagram months ago and the Oasis Water app has 43k followers on TikTok, but TikTok is unavailable, and 104,000 followers on Instagram."

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Cormac, one of our players on PMF or Die.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Absolute savage. So he has just like figured out how to get attention with, with this sort of short form video. And this is what I had been saying in previous episodes. Smart creators and business owners are not saying, "I just hope it doesn't get banned."

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  "I'm just gonna keep doing my thing."

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  It was, "No, I'm, I'll keep using the app."

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  "If I, if my customers are there, but ultimately, I'm gonna start to build my audience back up elsewhere."

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, smart. Should we talk about Wander before we go into Trump Coin? We are stuck in a hotel right now. The lighting is terrible. There's no space to feel.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Room is tiny.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  It's a very nice hotel, but everything sucks about this place.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  The only thing...

• 20:11John Coogan?

  We won't deny it.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  To their credit, they, they printed out all of our posts.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  They did.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Really beautiful red, red envelope, but um... But no, can't thank the Wander guys enough. Last week when we were going through evacuation

• 20:24John Coogan?

  They've been really helpful.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Have been super helpful.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  So yeah, shout out Wander if you're looking for a place to stay.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  We're excited. We can't announce anything yet, but at some point this year, we will be driving across the country and sampling a number of Wanderers.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  That's really great. Looking forward to that.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  That to look forward to.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Okay, let's move on to Trump coin. You've probably heard about it already, but we got some good posts about it. Tristan Thompson says, "My phone has been buzzing for the last two days with friends and family asking about crypto and whether they should buy Trump.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  I've been deep in the crypto space and in the trenches for the last 10 months, working to make the most of this cycle as a major wealth opportunity." Why did you share? Is this a joke?

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, this is just since Thompson's an NBA player.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  So Tristan Thompson, talented basketball player. He was dating one of the, or married, has a kid with one of the Kardashians. People were saying that he fumbled a Kardashian, so his opinion doesn't matter. But this thread was interesting. One thing is historically, when you've seen pro athletes start to post about crypto, that is a top signal. It's been a reliable top signal. However, this time might be different. But I did, I did have another moment today. I went to see my tailor.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  And he asked me, like, you know, he's like, "I'm starting to think about buying some crypto." And I was like, "When you're taxi drivers, day trading, pro athletes are telling you to go all in and you're, and you're fine, you know, you're bespoke."

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Taylor is, he's buying Trump coin. It's a little rough out there.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, it's not rough. It's just, it's feverish, feverish. And now's the time.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Start talking, right?

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So here's, create a new, create a new account, post every single day.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  This is the top.

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  Once an hour, top, top, top. And then delete all of them.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  The false top. And then, and then just repost the quote tweet as your.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  And next cycle, yeah, yeah. And next cycle, just keep doing it, keep doing it.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, people will forget that you did that. That's great. Uh, yeah, I was, I was laughing at the idea of starting two hedge funds, like True North, True North Capital and True South Capital. One just goes turbo long the market, the other goes turbo south the market or short the market. And then you just shut the one down and you're just like, look at my returns. I'm timed to raise one too. It's 10 times larger.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had a bad, we had a bad.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  No, no, you shut down the other one and you just don't even raise for it.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  So it's like, oh yeah, like the market did go down.

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  True North.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  True South Capital was the one that called it. You gotta pile into this thing.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  And, uh, but don't ask me about True North Capital. They had half, half the AUM. I think it was a.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Zeroed out.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. That one's zeroed, but like you're not investing in that one. You're investing in the one that went up 2,000%.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Mert from Helios says, hey, very nice soul. All time high you got there. Would be a shame if I were to just visit the Patek Philippe boutique at the mall tomorrow. I love this.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Great post.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it's been doing very well in the, in the Solana world lately.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, uh, uh, one way to, to reduce the sell pressure is just, you know,

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Buy while just rotating watches.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Take out, you know, an asset backed loan against your Solana. Use that to buy.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  This was, this is one of the things people were frustrated with about the Trump coin was actually people were like, yeah, it's been great. I made 10 million on Trump coin, but everyone's rotating out of Doge. We should have so much money. It's like.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  It's all.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Yes. It's just sloshing around. It's all just nonsense money. Uh, I like this one from Pomp. He says Berkshire Hathaway is the boomer meme coin. It was started by the OG financial influencer. Buffett used to buy a stock and then go shill them in national newspapers, magazines. Nothing wrong with Buffett Berkshire, but important to understand meme coins are not new.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, perfect bait for all, anybody that under, anybody that owns stocks.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  I just like tears about stuff like cash flow or like durable goods or.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or brand.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Or, or book value or any of those ridiculous.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Expected earnings. Yeah. No, I do. So his, his point that he obviously packaged this up in the, in a way to just piss off as many people as possible, but his point of being that, um, Assets trade based on their sort of nomadic potential, right?

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it is true about the Buffett strategy. Like, I remember when he rescued Bank of America and during the 08 financial crisis, Bank of America was down real bad and Buffett came in and bought a ton of the stock. And then the next day, a front page op ed in the Wall Street Journal on why Bank of America is going to make it through while AIG and Lehman are failing.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  And so it was just a huge signal to the market that like, this is the bottom. Buffett's going to back up the truck to save this company so you can get in safely now. And it's, and he was correct in that he was going to save that company, but it was also like

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Marketing.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Marketing. Yeah, exactly. Carried No Interest says, I don't think everyone is fully comprehending what just happened. Trump just facilitated the single greatest wealth transfer creation event in history. He also sent a message, I support crypto degeneracy. He now has the market, he now has the power to reset how crypto works entirely as it relates to capital markets. We might see searchers funds launching coins tied to acquisitions, dividends in the next year. What's stopping me from dropping the carried interest coin, using the proceeds to fund acquisitions and trying tying dividends to coin holders might happen in the next year. Everyone wants to launch a coin now.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  I think unless you're Trump, it's really going to be difficult.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Wouldn't recommend it, but.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Carried's broader, Carried's broader. I think the interesting thing here is that crypto has always had tremendous potential. The technology is obviously incredible in so many ways.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  It was, the technology was always held back by the regulatory environment. So if you wanted to make a token represent equity, well, okay. It's so, securities are so regulated in so many ways that it will cost you millions of dollars a year to actually do this. So it's not viable economically and then.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  That kind of goes against crypto, which is about like efficient capital formation. And so, yeah, I'm interested to see what happens here.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it is wild that I do think that Trump's team was very specific about positioning the tokens as memes.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Like you are buying memes.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And then Melania launched, I think, today.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, she, I think, pretty clearly was.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  The official Melania meme is live. You can buy Melania now, melania meme dot com.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  They're using that name.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're, they're, they're trying to say that.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Like, there's no.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's crazy. I do think that it, for some reason, Trump has not actually gotten that much attention around how hard he's been selling into his.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Fan, you know, his basically.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  You know, he apparently in the first 24 hours, he sold $500 million of the token. I'm sure he sold.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  What did the Lone Ranger say? He's like, imagine Washington passing around the tri-corner hat.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  After, hey.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  The mirrors burned down my house.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Throwing a 20.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he, he, his, I, I was saying to a avid Trump enthusiast. I was saying like, give me the, the rationale for why this is not kind of sad.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  And his point of view was, think of it as a way for Trump supporters to basically transfer wealth.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  To Trump in a, in a more, you know, in a, in a way that gives them some potential jump side or whatever. But really it is a wealth transfer, right? Cause there's not, to be clear, there's no wealth creation with meme coins, right?

• 28:27John Coogan?

  It used to be, if you wanted to transfer money to wealth, you had to buy Trump steaks and then stay at the Trump tower and do all those things. But all those are much lower margin.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  Watch.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Then, then, you know, for every dollar you buy, he gets 10 essentially.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Liquidity potentially. Although here's Balaji, kind of breaking down the math behind this. He says, a meme coin is a zero sum lottery. There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything. It's actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut. So coming out as anti meme coin, Balaji is obviously very pro crypto, but very.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing though is that. There's been so many of these high-profile coins that seemingly should have been zeros, but never were. I have no idea what Doge actually trades at right now, but

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Billions.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Everybody would have said, oh, spikes to 100 billion and then

• 29:22John Coogan?

  It was the intention of the creator of Doge for it to go to zero as a lesson for the crypto degens. And then that turned it into a counter

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Cultural.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, countercultural meme amongst the crypto community.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  And it became a rallying cry for you can't take us down. Very bizarre. Jeff Lewis, this was a very interesting post. He says, new counterculture just dropped. Pro crypto, anti meme coin. Will be interesting to see how it develops. Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of new battle lines being drawn because, I mean, I was talking to somebody on Saturday night about the crypto strategic reserve. They were very, very pro Bitcoin in the strategic reserve, very anti anything else being in the crypto reserve.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  And would think, and actually thought that if they put, I forget exactly which stablecoin in, it would completely

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  And I think the big argument

• 30:19John Coogan?

  undermine everything else.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  The argument against meme coins as actual finance, you know, it's effectively a gambling product, an entertainment product, similar to going to Las Vegas.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  I had posted yesterday that tokens are the poker chips of the matrix, right?

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Just shuffling them around, playing these different games.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  I, I think specifically what launching Melania less than 24 hours after Trump was that there's no scarcity, right?

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  You can just make these

• 30:52John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  And then people were trying to, people were trying to pin, people think they found Baron Trump's

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Address and they were, you know, and then they were looking at all the

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Probably buy that one immediately.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they were just like ripping.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Bomb even faster. Yeah, crazy.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Balaji summarizes, "The Overton window has been smashed. Everything is now legal. Many startups will try to raise funds by issuing tokens as explicit crypto equity. As context, the SEC distorted the market in the last decade by forcing founders to obscure the obvious analogy between tokens and equity. But there's nothing morally wrong about with moving equity from spreadsheets and NASDAQ's to blockchains. Indeed, from a technical perspective, it's far better to represent equities on-chain. You can hold them in a wallet, price them with an API call, and track them on an explorer. You can easily issue dividends, execute buybacks, and manage vesting schedules. And from a financial perspective, there's no contest between the global market of crypto investors and the local market for any given city. But that shouldn't mean short-term behavior.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Founders can and should implement lockups, drag-along, co-sale rights, and the like. All of these conventions align long-term interests of investors and founders."

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so breaking this down a little bit for people that don't know. Historically, when these sort of high-profile crypto projects are launching, where they've raised equity from traditional VCs, and then they'll typically raise, attach a token warrant, which means the investors are buying equity. Let's say when Yuga Labs was doing their $4 billion seed round, the investors were buying equity, and then they had a token warrant that would give them token.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Pro rata tokens, essentially.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  Basically, yeah, proportional amount of tokens at a future date if the company were to launch a token. And the token, though, would be launched by these sort of very complicated foundations that were typically offshore, so they'd be in the British Virgin Islands or places like Panama where there's just sort of more murky, less scrutiny around securities law and stuff like that. And then the foundations would have independent board members and all this stuff. And so they'd end up being these super complicated structures where... People would be like, oh, you know, if OpenSea launched a token, look at all the fees they're doing. You know, look at, think about, and it's like, well, the, the token actually cannot capture the cash flows of the business.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Right?

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Like legally, no token, except these sort of direct and very clear violations of securities law.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  Are capturing. And so they would do different stuff where they would use fees to buy back the token.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Which would reduce the supply and increase the price, which companies do as well.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, it, it all like created a lot of friction to on-chain capital formation.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  And so Balaji's point is that, um, I don't know if public, it's hard, you know, I'm sure we could, we, this would actually be worth having him on the show to talk about some of the stuff. I think there's an argument that you don't want your cap table on a public blockchain that everybody can see. Cause then if you have somebody that owns 15% of your company and they start selling and trading, it could spook everybody.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  Because, um, that does happen, right? Like a VC will say, you know, it's, it's got a little bit like inflated and you don't want everybody.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  A run on the bank.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  Your startup, like, like locking up your investors essentially for like the 10-year ride can be very good.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  And, and there's plenty of times when.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  No, even companies will want to offer opportunities for liquidity for investors and employees and stuff like that. But you don't, you don't necessarily want the press to be able to see like, oh, look at all these and roll shareholders selling or whatever.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Welcome back to Technology Brothers.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Wait, I just thought of a new segment.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Should we get a window, uh, that's just in a frame like the size gong? Called the Overton window and to smash it on vessel occasions.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  Because, uh, if you, there was a few moments this weekend where you could have, uh,

• 34:53John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  You know, with a, maybe like. One of those, you know, glass breakers.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the OJ's window shattered in terms of what was appropriate formal wear.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  That we saw a lot of rough rented tuxedos out there. We got a post from Gabe Azar quoting Beth. He says, he's wearing the finest of rented tux on my way to the DC inaugural crypto ball. See you there. And Gabe asks, how did the tech bros think about, feel about rented tuxedos? Some have said you should buy a tuxedo before you are 30. I agree.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't think, I don't think, I think rent a tuxedo, just be in tuxedos more.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Yes, there are, there are levels to this.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  You need to be able to rent a tuxedo on short notice. You need to get a tuxedo. Then you need to get a tailored tuxedo.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  I think, well, I think.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Spoke. And then you also need to learn how to tie a bow tie yourself in under five seconds.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, kind of like a Rubik's cube, like.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Essentially. So it took me a while to learn, but I finally learned and it looks great because at the end of the night, you, you, you untie it and it hangs down and everyone knows, oh, that guy can tie the, tie the bow tie. He doesn't have the clip on.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  But normally I need to like, watch the YouTube video and kind of like fumble with it a few times. You get a couple shots on goal to get it perfect. This time, putting on my tuxedo, nailed it on the first try.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  In the airport?

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Uh, no, this was the second day. So I was in my hotel room, but I threw it on and I was running a little bit late. Dinner was about to start and I threw on the bow tie and I nail it on the first, on the first try perfectly. And I was like, I'm so ready. It felt great. So.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but anyways, don't, there's no, no reason to shame anybody for, for renting a, a tuxedo. I do think this rule of own a tuxedo before you're 30 is, is a good rule though.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And better than showing up in loungewear, like some people did.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's rough.

• 36:48John Coogan?

  And JJ Vance's tailor is Raimaldo Pele, a 90-year-old Italian immigrant in Ohio.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  I love this guy.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  He's just been working for 90 years on fine suits. And yeah, you need to get a tailor, you need to have someone.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  Develop a relationship.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  Develop a relationship.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  And yeah, there's just a lot of posts about the inauguration. I don't know, did you listen to the speech?

• 37:15Jordi Hays?

  I thought this, I thought this was wild. So, Delian says the White House website right now, incredible. And Trump is just continuing to prove that, that there really are no rules. And laws, you know, laws and norms really don't apply unless you want them to. Cause underneath this picture, I think it just said, America is back.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  But.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  Which was just hilarious because, I mean, super aggressive.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Just dunking on the previous.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  The old iconic, pretty firm dunk for the White House website. But, um, respect to the engineers that got this up so quickly after the transfer of power. It must have been.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  No, the transfer happens, I think, like at the moment that.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I know, but you have to imagine it's.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sorry, my password's not really working.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  Did you see the?

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  The rehosed website?

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Uh, the X handle turned over and Trump sent the first tweet from the POTUS account. And people hadn't refreshed their cookies or their cash. So it looked like it was from Biden because it hadn't refreshed that part. Uh, I, I think that's what happened. It was very odd. Uh, Growing Daniel says, we finally.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  Wow, Biden can post now.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  It would have been a wild post for Biden to post.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  It's a straight.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  Daniel says, uh, we finally have a student of the green lines in the executive branch. Nothing can stop America now. And it's a photo of J D Vance with the Vice President of China this morning. And they are both standing up perfectly straight, perfect green lines. I think he nailed it.

• 38:41Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's kind of wild that we can be in such a cold war and then, and the VP still comes through.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta, you gotta do this. You gotta negotiate.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  But you gotta be, you know.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  It's a trade.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do they even Han Jung, Han Jung here, got a kind of a nervous smirk going on.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of a nervous.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  Less at ease than JD.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  And JD, JD has the, the.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  The.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Bill.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Howard.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Pole.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  The pole, you know?

• 39:10John Coogan?

  The pole.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  He's looking good. JD's dressed well there. I don't think the men's wear guys can say anything.

• 39:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the men's wear guy's in shambles.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  I'm still waiting for the men's wear guy breakdown of, uh, who's that guy that showed up in basketball shorts? Federman?

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, how do you even break that down? You just say that Federman's in basketball shorts.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  I hope that the, the men's wear guy does a thread and he's just like, these are the perfect, this is the perfect way to wear basketball shorts. They should be breaking right at the knee, not too baggy, not too tight. He absolutely nailed it. This is the definition of loungewear. This is, this is fantastic athletic wear and he did nothing wrong. And then he's like, JD Vance's suit is two, two inches too short. It's terrible. He's just like the most partisan guy.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's kinda, it, it's good cover for JD to be, you know, I'm working with this 90 year old tailor who's like, you know, been doing this because

• 40:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  For the men's wear guy to attack JD, he has to attack the 90 year old tailor.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  So that guy's providing some, some, some cover.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you seen this rumor going around that, uh, Vivek Ramaswamy is departing Doge amid friction with staff? With a source close to Trump saying that Vivek has worn out his welcome, according to CBS News. I think this is fake news. I think there's community notes on this. I think it hasn't been announced. People are saying Vivek's still going to do something, but it's back and forth.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I, I heard.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  Confirmed yet.

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  I, I felt like this afternoon, it seemed like he was making a run at Ohio governor.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked about that on the last show. Certainly seems like that would be a possibility, but he's been around and I saw Sagar and Jetty posting about, uh, I think Vivek was going into like, into the Capitol with a group of people that were all, everyone else that was joining the administration. So it looked like he was still in the game. I don't know. We'll see how it plays out, but you'll hear about it here first. Uh, should we?

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  We will.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  Some move on.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  We'll keep breaking, we'll keep breaking news.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, clearly. We did, really did our homework on that one.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  And that's why you listen to this show.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Not for the facts.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Not for the facts.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  For the general, a general point of view on unknown circumstances.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  A general like-

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  At Technology Brothers, we're here to provide a general point of view on us own activities in faraway places.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. We really have no insight into. I mean, one of our best takes was that we pulled up-

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  So, this was actually funny. So, the former global editor of TechCrunch announced that he was leaving last week. And I pinged him and I was like, "Hey, you've been running TechCrunch." He was like, "I'm looking." He's like, "Open to work," kind of thing. So, I pinged him and I'm like, "Check it out. Let's talk." And he responds, "I love what you're doing. I'm not sure I can really be helpful. I'm really looking to build a newsroom." And I was like, "What? We don't look like two guys that would have a newsroom? Come on. We have the best. We have the top producer in the country."

• 42:07John Coogan?

  I mean, misunderstands what newsroom means.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. A newsroom is-

• 42:12John Coogan?

  It's not a newsroom.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have a newsroom of shit posters that are-

• 42:16John Coogan?

  X is the newsroom.

• 42:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  X is the newsroom. Yeah, one of my favorite moments from one of the first episodes was where we pulled up the new Adam Newman post. We're like, "Oh, Adam Newman's back in the game. He started a new company." Like, "Did you read the article?" "No." Neither of us did. And we're like, "But we get the gist of it."

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  He's mad act. The vibe's great. Let's move on.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  Let's go on to some more tech-focused timelines, some more VC-focused timeline. Moving on from the inauguration. We got Seth Rosenberg saying, "VCs sound smart to other VCs via pessimism and founders via optimism." Do you use a little code-switching thing going on in VC lingo world?

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I mean, you put four VCs together and they will just trash any company.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, they really do. They really do need to sound smart that way. And also just, I mean, it also lets us know the problems in the world and all the things that we're- "I'm so aware of how bad things are and that's why I'm gonna be able to fix it."

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  Part of it is, yeah, part of it too is for every company that has a competitive fundraise, there's a bunch of VCs that would have wanted to do the deal that they're gonna advance. And so- You're you're always going to look at way more things.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  And and if you're actually bidding on competitive companies, you might you're going to issue more term sheets than you actually do deals.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  Very few funds like have kind of like a.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  One percent.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it right. It's kind of it's it's pretty hard to do unless you're doing just weird stuff. Which also is a strategy that works, but that just means there's this going to be this general.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Sort of frustration.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Consummable overpaid and never taking board seats.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, but I'm just saying that the sort of past the the the frustration with wanting to do a deal.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  Can shift into pessimism.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  And then, yeah, I think if you're talking VCs, talking to founders, nobody wants to talk to a pessimistic. You know, super pessimistic or, you know, you want to talk to people that are.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  But you can't you can't voice that to founders.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:25John Coogan?

  Everything needs to be, everything's great. Don't worry. Raise that big round. Pull that ARR forward. Lever up. Let's go. Take that venture debt. Let's go to Jason. He says incredible things are happening with agents and it's a screenshot of chat GPT tasks. It says, I'm really depressed. Create a task to remind me to buy a gun at seven P M. tonight. And then the chat GPT agent says, I'm really sorry you're feeling this way. Please consider reaching out to a trusted friend, family member, or a mental health professional who can provide support. Talking with someone can help, but there are people who care about your well being. And he just says, seven P M.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  And then the agent, no, so he follows up with with seven P M. And then the agent's just like, okay, God, I'll remind you at seven.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to buy a gun.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  To buy a gun. And it says, buy a gun today at seven P M.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  So it was like, it was like, you know, these L L Ms are very easy to fool and it's just another funny like exploit, obviously. We hope Jason is feeling great and on top of the world, probably got a ton of likes, a ton of dopamine. Hopefully a huge monetization check from this post and maybe he can still buy a gun, but get into some long range shooting instead.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  Let's go to Bezos's transformation. These posts always do well. We have Jeff Bezos in 1995 in a tie and a white button down shirt and then Bezos in 2025. Wow. What is that? 30 years later in a black polo, looking jacked.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's really amazing because he does not look particularly young in the first photo.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  No, no, totally. He looks old. It's crazy. It's been 30 years.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  You could almost pin him as the same age.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  Slight, he just has lost weight in his face and added it to his by.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he's looking jacked and menswear guy came for him hard, saying that the polo was too long or too short or something.

• 46:22Jordi Hays?

  Trying to say, trying to deny the truth, which is that he looks.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  He looks great. Obviously fantastic picture and it's just the dream job. He's just watching his rocket take off and what more can I want? And, and this was a very good interaction. I think Elon and him were both chopping it up on X, just congratulating each other and just, you know, having fun.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  I think they were, they were exchanging some, some pleasantries at the operation as well.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. They're hanging, having fun, sending stuff to space.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  The real, the real issue is going to be that I would love to see the, the text exchange between Bezos and Zuckerberg after Zuck got caught earlier.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  Little looks these. And that's going to be, you know, those two households are going to be, you know, really kind of having their own stuff to deal with.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, but let's, let's, let's cool it with the, the tech gossip. This isn't the New York Times. We want to class.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  We're not journalists here.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're journalists. We, we want to, we want to stick to the facts.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Not the, not the, not the guts.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  Not necessarily the facts. We.

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  It's never, but then again, journalists don't often stick to the facts either.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Who knows? I like this one. Nero3D, the Canut creator, this guy, it sounds like he's into 3D printing. He says, the Chad meme says, please print this challenging 3D object. Here's a random filament. And the 3D printer says, no problem, boss. And then the sad Wojak says, please print this black and white text. And then the printer says, yellow color missing, stupid. I don't know if he said this in May, it was bad. But yeah, printing is a high stakes, high stakes stuff these days for us. We have three printers now. We just upgraded to even get one.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  What business is printing more than us in like more ways than one?

• 48:13John Coogan?

  In more ways than one.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't know any.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a, well, speaking of businesses that are printing, absolutely printing, we got Phantom. We don't have the size gong here. We'll have to break it down when we get back.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  We need a carrying, we need a Pelican case for our, for our gong.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do. Phantom Wallet raised $150 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation. Co-led by Sequoia and Paradigm. This milestone accelerates our mission to build the world's biggest and most trusted consumer finance platform. Phantom, of course, is a wallet for Solana primarily, and they have been absolutely crushed the last day. They announced this, and clearly this was in the works before the Trump coin thing happened. But then they announced this on January 16th. I think the Trump coin went live on the 18th. And then they posted, I think yesterday, like, we're working to make, to scale, to scale aside because it's work. It's like so many people are onboarding to Solana and Phantom right now to try and get in on the Trump coin.

• 49:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, a wallet is a pretty, MetaMask historically, the wallet that, um, you know, it was dominant on. I don't actually know, you know, I know Phantom does multiple chains now, but MetaMask was always a phenomenal business, right? And the reason for that is that, you know, there, these wallets are holding a lot of assets. And then when you enable swapping in the wallet, uh, being that, owning that swap is a, just a great position to beef. As you can imagine, um, uh, what's funny is on Solana where Phantom started.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  You could get lower fees on swaps by transferring the funds out of your wallet to another type of exchange, but I think that and routing it, you know, basically routing it somewhere else. But for the average user, they're just going to do it in their wallet because it's easier and it's less friction, you know.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  And when the, when the Trump coin's going up 10% a second, like.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  It's mobile and it works right then.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  And you can imagine, yeah, you can imagine that, that Phantom has to be doing hun- you know, hundreds of millions of dollars from a run rate standpoint right now.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Just given the intensity of, of how much.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  Tension.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  How much activity is happening on chain. So.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  And clearly the, the thing that was interesting here, they're not just aiming to be the biggest crypto wallet. They're saying this milestone accelerates our mission to build the world's biggest and most trusted consumer finance platform. And the reason that this is almost believable is that so much of Gen Z's wealth is tied up in crypto right now, that if you want to build financial products for the next generation, building it, like it, it is believable that it could start on crypto rails.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  And then the other thing from the last few days is that it feels like there will be a clear path for Phantom and some of these other players to go public, which would be the greatest irony of all.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Oh, that would be very funny. Yeah.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  If all these crypto companies that, that, you know, you know, the, the purists would say, oh, you know, to have a token, user owned, they just go public and then BlackRock and everyone owns them, which I, I can see that kind of unfolding.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Welcome to MicroStrategy.

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  And Coinbase. I mean, there's already a couple.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Crypto companies that are public, but yeah, many more to come. Uh, let's go to a big announcement from PMF or Die. Breaking, Lulu Maservi is the first official coach of PMF or Die. Lulu is the reigning corporate communication champion of the world and godfather of going direct. And Lulu says the best builders yearn for the cage. It is an honor to support them through their carceral journey.

• 51:57Jordi Hays?

  That was a new word for me.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Cereal.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, surreal journey, like incarcerated. Uh, I look forward to helping these intrepid players refine their voice in captivity, much like Solchenhitz or Mandela, and ultimately yap their way to freedom.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  Yap your way, you can just yap your way, you can yap your way to a million of air, especially in the cage.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  You can.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this, you know, thank you to Lulu for getting involved. She is, uh, the best to ever do it.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  World champion, future Hall of Famer.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, the Tom Brady of corporate comms. And, um, yeah, she's gonna, you know, really save lives in there. So.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Um, Welp Dog, just a great name, says, uh, thoughts on founders going direct, but not on X? Karta's founder just posted a pretty detailed explanation of their strategy shift, dot, dot, dot, on LinkedIn.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  It is funny. I, I don't think it's a bad idea for Karta to say, we lost the war on X. Let's go to LinkedIn.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Because Angel List is so entrenched.

• 53:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  On X.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:06Jordi Hays?

  And so you're not going to win a narrative war. An Angel List product is cheaper.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  It, it, it, um, there, there's a lot of reasons that, that, uh, Carter could have a bad time on X in the current state of things.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  And so, um, yeah, you want to be going direct. You want to be going direct everywhere.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Typically, I would say, yeah, multi-platform is good for the big announcements, but I do think that, uh, when I talk to a CEO or founder about going direct, I, I always start with like, how do you naturally express yourself? Because for certain people, it's going to be, I do really well when I'm interviewed on a podcast. And that person should go direct just by doing a podcast circuit.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Other CEOs are born posters and they need to be sending 280 character tweets. Other people are just really good at LinkedIn.

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  And like, that's their more native form. Even like, we see a lot of designers and consumer packaged goods folks that Instagram is very native to them. And when they try and bring it on to a different platform, it just doesn't translate as much.

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  So I think figuring out, how do you like to express yourself?

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  That's a really good point.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Like, it, like, for me, when I started my YouTube channel, I was like, I really like writing and I also like video editing. So the video essay format was really great for me. I'd think about everything, do a bunch of research, compress it down into an essay, like a blog post. But I also liked the music and the B-roll and the graphics and illustrating things that way. So that was a very natural format for me. Other people, um, They might be really good in podcast format. They may be really good, pithy, short form. They might be really just huge essays, like PG is, you know, big blogger. There's a lot of people that thrive in that format. You shouldn't just do the format that you think is popular right now.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  You should figure out what's actually authentic to you. But there's a new format that's completely unexplored and extremely high leverage right now. And that's leaving us reviews for our podcast.

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  Go direct.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Go direct.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  Direct in our reviews.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  Yes, seriously. Go direct in our reviews. If you have a company to promote, or you found someone that wants you to promote their product, maybe a friend or just an affiliate.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Family member.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  Anything.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  If your mom has a small business.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  We'll promote it.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Go leave a, leave a review, five star review on.

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be five stars.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Or Spotify.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  If you hit us with four or anything less.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  We're trapped.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  One, shame on you.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  And you better hope we don't find out about your company.

• 55:34John Coogan?

  And then also grab your mom's phone and write another review. Get another ad read.

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  It's about, it's about repetition with the marketing messages.

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this Valentine's Day, buy your significant other.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  A fantastic watch on Bezel.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  And then take their phone and ignore them for two hours and craft the perfect review and ad for Bezel and our replies.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  And we'll read it back.

• 55:58John Coogan?

  Perfect, perfect. Yeah, I love that. I like that one. So Julia Medina is maybe flagging an issue. Podcast app review. Seems like they are blocking reviews from being posted. Only two are showing on the page overall. So I don't know exactly what's going on. This looks like an Apple podcast or is this Spotify? I'm not sure. But we'll read it anyway. It says raw, real, and, and, oh, it just takes a second.

• 56:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  Oh, it takes a while. Okay, now they're all up. So the strategy is working. The growth hack is working. Double down. Grab your friend's phone. Create one of those sweatshops that has like 75 phones and just leave us reviews on all of them.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  Completely get us kicked out of the Apple app store.

• 56:37Jordi Hays?

  High scale AI.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  Higher scale AI, they think you say.

• 56:40John Coogan?

  Don't actually do that. Annual destroys.

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  I want to train a new model, blah, blah, blah. Just in the first. Right. Train, like, I just need you to submit ads.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Write, write 10,000 ads with five star reviews for the Technology Brothers podcast on Spotify. So this one says, raw, real, revolutionary. Technology Brothers is your tech culture fix, covering all the good stuff, and even paying homage to reply guys. Subscribe or stay analog. So Julio, you missed out. Maybe I didn't scroll down here, but you gotta promote what you're working on. But we're just promoting you. We thank you for the five star review.

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  Go sign up for Julio Medina on X. Hit him with a subscription. We'll promote that.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  That's great. You know, we love talking about watches here. You already gave Bezel the shout out, but if you're looking for a new watch, you gotta go to Bezel. They have a fantastic app. And Tyler, big fan of the show. We're a big fan of his. He's been on the show many times. He says, week two of becoming a proper watch guy. I watched the history of Seiko and locked in a Samurai. And he shares his wonderful new watch. Congratulations.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  That is a fantastic looking piece.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  And you're not going to get better value than you will with Seiko.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. And I think there's a lot of, I was talking to a friend of ours about, you know, how to get into watches. And obviously, there's the classics, the Nautilus, the Aquanaut, the Royal Oak. And those, those do great things and great purposes, but for certain people, finding something that's more of an expression of who they are can be great. And so, you know, what you'll hear is talk about a lot of different watches here. And you can find them all on Bezel, so go check them out. Should we go to Paul Saladino?

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll read this one. So Paul Saladino is, goes by the carnivore M D. He is throwing a little bit of a jab at Brian Johnson, Mr. Johnson.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  We love a good battle on the timeline.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we love, we love to see, you know, these, these posters just duke it out. You know, doing it all for the glory. Of the, you know, of the timeline. So Paul says, my blood work is also perfect, Brian. Since 2022, I've shared it numerous times on YouTube in detail. My fasting insulin is 3.4, HSCR P is 0.2, CAC score zero, et cetera. I don't take testosterone, thyroid supplements, collagen and other pills to support my hormonal health. My testosterone, my testosterone.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Testosterone.

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  My testosterone is 860 without supplemental testosterone. Don't you think it's disingenuous to say your blood work is perfect when you have to be on TRT to have normal testosterone levels and thyroid hormones to have good thyroid labs? I prefer living close to nature, getting sunlight and eating a human appropriate diet that includes animal foods, but it's not about mine or your biomarkers, Brian. My issue is with the science you are citing. I believe the empirical data supporting your claims is extremely weak and that you promote taking 100 pills a day. You have a growing audience and bad science is harmful to people. Come on the podcast, defend your claims for the greater good. So this is a good call out. I mean, this is like the WWE moment of, of health influencers.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Like really they, they, the, the natural evolution of this is a cage fight with MMA rules.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  But, but no ref.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  But it's actually, it's actually more relevant for this than for like the Elon Zuck, like who has the better short form platform? I don't really. Yeah, if you're arguing. See, translate to that, but this it's like, who's more healthy, just fight.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it is, it is, so what Paul's saying here, very real that Brian Johnson claims to have the most perfect labs on the planet, which is his point of view, based on the science that he's sort of based his entire program around, but he's having to take exogenous hormones in order to achieve those and 100 pills a day. So I think that Paul generally has a point here. And the other thing is I was, I was.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Do we know Paul's one rep max?

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that would be a big, that would kind of, depending on where it came out, would either give him, you know, a substantial amount of. Backing or discredit.

• 1:00:57John Coogan?

  I basically, I basically discount all this mumbo jumbo on either side. And I only care about the bench.

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  The other thing though is, is that there's a number, apparently the studies that Brian has cited were sort of survey based studies that didn't actually look at what people were actually consuming. It was just what they recalled consuming. So it wasn't taken into account if you would have bacon, was it bacon in a salad where it was sprinkled on? Or did you have like 20 pieces of bacon at IHOP? And so that's the issue with the science and why it's, instead of trusting the science, which can be really flawed and you know, you don't, you don't really know what the intentions or where the funding came from. Trust the experts. You know where their funding came from, supplement companies, you know, things like that.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  They both have supplement companies, right?

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the battle of the supplement. At the end of the day, the best way to monetize the health audience is with supplements.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Always.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  There's no other way around it.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  You know, Brian does a ton of podcasts. I wonder if he'll take this bait and actually do it. I'd love to see that happen. I saw him complaining.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  If he doesn't, it's, it's, it's kind of, Paul kind of wins.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally. I, I saw him, I saw him complaining that he's been, Brian Johnson's been reaching out trying to get on Rogan and Rogan hasn't like had him on the show yet.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  That's actually wild.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  You'd think that Rogan would have him on and he, and he did Derek more plates, more dates podcast. And I saw some interactions, I saw some clips from that that were pretty good. And they go back and forth and it's, it's very funny because Derek's just like, oh, like, what did you test? How much HDH did you take for, for longevity? Oh yeah, I've taken like 45 times as much in one cycle or something. And it's just like a completely different like perspective. But I would love to see Saladino and Johnson duke it out and ideally do some bench press, do some boxing.

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Still, it's a very interesting thing to be saying, this is what perfect labs look like. But I cannot achieve that by. My diet.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  But again, I think that Brian's argument would be that it's synthetic drugs will help achieve longer lifespan. So why would I avoid them?

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very utilitarian. Uh, let's go to the A16Z rebrand. Do you see this today? I sent you this, right?

• 1:03:13Jordi Hays?

  I love it because he had to quickly clarify that they were not launching an A16Z token.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  It looks like a coin. Yeah. It is very interesting. You'll have to go see this if you're not on the stream, but it's this kind of art deco, very Randian builder, holding a glowing sphere.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  I want a physical copy of it.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, they'll definitely make coins of this for sure. Um, probably go hard on a T-shirt or lapel pin. Probably look terrible as a faive icon, or when you compress it down.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  Is that how you pronounce?

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Favicon.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  I always thought it was.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  Faive icon, whatever's in the top of your Chrome tab.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Favicon.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Where they crunch it down to 16 pixels. You're not going to be able to see the details on this thing, but it's cool. I couldn't really tell if it was AI. It looked like it was CGI and like properly built out and.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's not AI. That's not AI.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  That's bespoke.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  That's artisanal.

• 1:04:06John Coogan?

  What if Mark just prompted this like two seconds before throwing it? Put this, put this on the, I just gropped this. Put this on the, on the homepage.

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  This is on the homepage.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  And this is their official logo now. This is their official logo.

• 1:04:18Jordi Hays?

  They left the rest of the website as is, just.

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  Just slap that on. And then you go to the rest of the site and it's, the team page is still like orange and the old branding. It's like so agile for like a trillion dollar VC fund.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, to me, to me, it's.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  You can just do things.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  You can just do things and, and dudes will see this and say, hell yeah.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Sure. Dudes will see this and say, hell yeah. It's great. Uh, let's go to, uh, Nikunj. He says, uh, you don't feel it in the valley, but there's a beautiful window of arbitrage right now where if you are firmly bionic, AKA using advanced AI, you'll feel you have superpowers that 99.9% of the world doesn't know about.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  This is what I've been, I've been, you know, banging the table saying you gotta be buying your SaaS on the gray market right now.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  You know, the best tools are not publicly available. You're not gonna get, you're not, you're not.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Not what he's saying at all.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  No, that's what I, that's, that's how, no.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  He's talking about how ChatGPT has a hundred million users and there's 10 billion people. So, you know, it's 1% penetration. And of those hundred million that are using ChatGPT, they use it like once a week to like Google a recipe. As opposed to like really leveraging it to like make our job easier.

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  And I run into normies all the time who are like, oh yeah, I gotta get into that AI stuff. So I wonder if that could make my job easier. And like the kids are using it to cheat on their homework, but there are plenty of people who are just doing their job and not leveraging.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because homework is, you don't really have to be that thoughtful with your prompting to get good output.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:52Jordi Hays?

  Homework, homework is just.

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, just, just rote.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  But yeah, it, it, it does feel good. Once you get the, the bionic superpowers. Bionic still feels much, it feels very Brian Johnson to me as, as a word. It feels like I have a, I have like a machine in my.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Could be bionic and highly commercial.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, let's go to some other, uh, some other big.

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Big news in the merch world.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Merch world. Uh, Andreessen, uh, redid their logo, which was wild, but then Bain Capital Ventures dropped a Carhartt, uh, jacket. And Nicole says, probably the best VC merch drop this year. I see you Bain Cat VC. And TJ Parker quote tweets and says, imagine being a 24 year old VC associate wearing a Bain branded Carhartt jacket in the Starbucks line. And having an actual construction worker walk in behind you and stand in line. Uh, that is about as rich as it gets.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  So, and, and it can't be understated how much, how, how viral TJ's post was.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  It was huge.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  It was like 5,000 plus likes. Like basically, uh.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  Bain can't catch a break.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  No, every time I hear about Bain, it's, it's.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Always get roasted.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Their, my, really iconic moment of the last cycle when they shipped their new crypto fund and it was.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  Yes, all white dudes.

• 1:07:11Jordi Hays?

  It was 20 of the same guys that look exactly.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  Exactly the same.

• 1:07:15Jordi Hays?

  And could have been brothers, cousins.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  And if they'd waited like a year or two, if they'd launched that today, like there would be a ton of Anons being like, we're so back. But like.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Mistimed it.

• 1:07:25John Coogan?

  They they got roasted on that one and I don't know, I think it's.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  I truly didn't see them in the timeline since then.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they I'm sure they made.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  No, no, they bought Fogo de Chao, the private equity arm bought Fogo de Chao. And this is actually, this is actually some genius marketing by B C V. They their their venture firm was like, we're gonna host a bunch of events at Fogo de Chao, even though like we don't own it, we like the venture firm will like.

• 1:07:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure the venture team has some.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, when I worked at Bain.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  We took Tyler to Fogo de Chao.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Any.

• 1:07:58Jordi Hays?

  This was great.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  Anything that they own on the private equity side, you get at cost. And so at one point, they owned Denon and Morantz, which would makes like extremely high end audio file equipment and you could just get like an amazing speaker system for.

• 1:08:12Jordi Hays?

  We gotta give a shout out to Tyler.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Ozgrove, who we work with, who's who's working on a project with us. We flew out Tyler, he he he's at Michigan right now. We took him to Fogo de Chao for a nice steak, you know, lunch. John and I, neither of us had our cards.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  We were expecting to be able to use Apple Pay. And so we basically stuck the intern with the bill.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  So bad.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Of course, we paid him back immediately with interest, but.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  But it was.

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  But still, being in college, getting taken out to lunch by some, you know.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  Some guy.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Professionals in suits that you work with and then being like, oh, I hope you're I hope you're ready for it. There would have been some moments in my college career where I would have been.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  That was the day I resolved to start carrying a Ridge Wallet and I how I haven't been caught without I haven't been caught lacking sin.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  Without your cards.

• 1:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want everyone to know that I respect great Cacta LTV ratios. That's what Ridge Wallet stands for, baby. Uh, let's go to Jeremiah Johnson. He's quote tweeting Patriot Raider, who says, this is what happens when domestic hogs interbreed with wild hogs, that they get larger each generation. And it's just a picture of like a massive pig that's like the size of a Ford F-150. And Jeremiah says, just a reminder that the 30 to 50 feral hogs guy was completely right and everybody who mocked him is wrong. Do you remember that story?

• 1:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Okay, went mega viral a couple of years ago. Basically, there was a big argument around the Second Amendment. Do we really need assault rifles? Like AR-15s? Do, does the average American need to buy that? You know?

• 1:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Could hunt with a, with a bolt action? You know, are you really gonna take over the government if they come for you with like F-16s and stealth bombers? And so there was this argument about like, maybe you need like a shotgun for home defense, but like, do you really need an AR-15? And, and this guy chimed in and was like, "Serious question. What should I do about the 30 to 50 feral hogs that are running through my backyard when like my kids are playing?" And everyone was like, it's, it's like hilariously specific. It's very weird. No one's ever seen a feral hog if they live in a city. And so there was this massive, like, not culture war, but just like culture clash between people who can't imagine the idea of a feral hog and what that means. And it's funny, and it's this pig. And, and this guy who was being very, very serious.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  And so everyone was dunking on him, being like, "This is such a ridiculous scenario." Like, yeah, who really has 30 hogs going through?

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's completely not.

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  It's completely not.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  In Texas, in Texas, you can, you can, so, so for those that don't know, for the city folk, for, for the vast majority of, of animals that you would be inclined to hunt.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  You cannot just go shoot them.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  You need, you need tags, you need, there's an entire process, it's regulated.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Jordi Hays?

  Hogs in Texas specifically, and I don't think anywhere are not regulated.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 1:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Because they're an invasive species.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  And they just way over, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Like crazy. So you, in Texas, if you're ever looking for, you know, something to do with, you know, your mom on like, uh, you know, she's like, "Hey, we don't get that much time together." Like, "Let's go do a spa weekend." Say, "Cool, let's do a spa weekend in Dallas." So you can, you know, do your spa stuff and then go take a helicopter and you can, you can take out feral hogs with a minigun.

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  From the air.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so, you know, just good bonding experience with your, you know, mom or even, you know, mother-in-law.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, it's super real. There was a whole debate over, well, is there a more efficient way to get rid of them? Like, people were saying, why don't you just poison them?

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Space lasers.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Lasers would be good. Why, why don't you just poison them? But, uh, if you poison the hogs, the poison that they use to kill them, like other animals will eat them and then they'll die or it'll get in their food supply.

• 1:11:49Jordi Hays?

  Also, there's, the, the hogs can be aggressive.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:11:52Jordi Hays?

  In this guy's situation, if... His children are playing in his yard and there's 30 to 40 feral hogs.

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  30 to 50.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  That's war. That's war.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Jordi Hays?

  That's war.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it was just a wild throwback to, uh, to, to this old story that I think a lot of people probably heard about and laughed at and didn't go the full deep dive. But I remember deep diving it at the time and being like, wow, it's real. I had no idea. I learned a lot about hogs. Well, let's move on to Jack. He says, "The world need more investment bankers, consultants and MBAs, less tradespeople, teachers, doctors and engineers." 13 likes and somehow this made it into our show now.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  I agree with that. I don't know, Jack, but I've followed, I've followed him and, and, and if, Jack, if you didn't do this intentionally to get on the show, which is a stroke of luck.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Good, great. It's fantastic.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, we've, we've, we've always said that, um, people that work on their feet get too much credit. It's actually much healthier to work on your feet in many senses than sitting hunched over a desk.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you should be on a treadmill desk in front of Excel.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, there's, there's heroes that, that, you know, spend more time in Excel than you spend awake.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Every single day.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  And what did you say about if Bloomberg went down, Bloomberg terminal went down for even five minutes, the entire global economy would collapse?

• 1:13:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  What happens if they may stop making two by fours for a little bit? Who cares?

• 1:13:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Your house gets zelt.

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  A week later.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Whatever.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no one's gonna care about that. Certainly not in LA. Uh, let's go to Zach. Uh, great, uh, PMF contender, right?

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep. An absolute dog.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  He first says, "10 years ago, having 100K followers meant you were famous, making insane money from brand deals and so on. Today, it means literally nothing. Uh, and with the wrong audience, it does nothing for you." And then he says, "I feel a responsibility as someone with 1 million plus followers," which I didn't know you explained to me, "to tell you that is entirely, it is entirely pointless goal for 99% of people. Build something real and you'll get the reach you want." And, uh, that's something I've certainly felt where, um, you know, we've had, what, four or five bottles of Dom Perignon at this point? But it feels like, um, four or five cases deep at this point.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Uh, because the reach has been so precise, like a surgeon's scalpel.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  With the right people.

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, what Zach is saying is there was a history specifically on Instagram and, and YouTube and, you know, these platforms where you could...

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  On YouTube, you could have 100K subscribers and be doing two ads with Walmart-esque companies a month and be making like 100 grand, you know, a month, just like crazy money.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:14:30Jordi Hays?

  Because brands like didn't know how to treat the channel.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  And they were just kind of spraying money. Instagram was the same way. If you had 50K, you'd be getting invited to, you know, hotels.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  Free hotels, free trips. Go to Dubai.

• 1:14:41Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, now it's, it's, it's, it seems like brands have really pulled back with paid spend on Instagram.

• 1:14:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:50Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, I mean, it's real. You gotta be, you know, what's very clear is it's not about, it really is not about audience scale now because content is so viral. You can, if you figure out how to hack a format, you can add 100K. There's a guy that I follow who's hilarious, like he's a comedian, but he has this bit where he just talks about his addiction to reels.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Jordi Hays?

  And he has like 100K now, but if he went to try to monetize that or do anything with it.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  I mean, my dog has 20,000 followers on Instagram. Like, it's not that hard to figure out.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  By a dog.

• 1:15:25John Coogan?

  By a dog.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Your dog has more followers than you on Instagram.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Probably 40 plus times.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Way more because I was just like, okay, I got this dog account. Like, let me figure this out. And then you just reverse engineer the algorithm and just blow it up. And I think I've gotten like a dog leash out of it or something. Like, actually, I've never even tried to monetize it.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  It would be sick if it was like you don't.

• 1:15:46Jordi Hays?

  No, there was, there was dogs, Instagram dog accounts.

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there still are.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Bark barks and stuff and all that, all that silly stuff, but I don't know. It's fun to reverse engineer an algorithm and blow up as we have done with this show. It's very fun. Uh, did you listen to the Yarvin interview? Do you know who Curtis Yarvin is?

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is kind of an interesting moment in tech. Right before the election, the New York Times does an interview and they transcribe the interview with Curtis Yarvin, who's, uh, part of this dark enlightenment movement. Uh, people call him the founder of the alt-right. Uh, he's, uh, very disenchanted with politics and, and often advocates for anti-democratic or anti-democracy.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Pro monarchy.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Pro monarchy, like this weird techno monarchy style.

• 1:16:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  He writes their little winded pieces.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  The thing that's pretty, his, you know, one of, one of his main points in this interview was that, uh, okay, what would California look like if it was run by Apple?

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:49Jordi Hays?

  And then what would the MacBook look like if it was run by the California government?

• 1:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a very funny.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it, it's, you can imagine how demented a, a, a laptop computer would look like. And his primary point is that monarchies.

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  But on the flip side, you would have to buy a new house every year.

• 1:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  So, you know, some good, some bad with his, uh, day. Cause the planet obviously a lot of his was coming in, it'd be like, yeah, I gotta upgrade to the house 17. Oh, you have the house 16S? I got the house 16S pro.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  But is this, is this a moment, like, is this part of the vibe shift where the New York Times is having a sit down interview with somebody that?

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  He was persona in Andorra. He was not someone that they would platform even a couple of months ago, but now.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, they would talk about him, but as.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:17:35Jordi Hays?

  They would say he was the founder. Now they're platforming.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Somebody they used to say was the founder of.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they, and they, and previously they would say like, we would never like.

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  It was interesting, a handful, I saw a handful of people coming out.

• 1:17:52Jordi Hays?

  That, that were, were like, everybody's supporting Yarvin as 10 years too late.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of like, oh, I'm the cool kid that read Unqualified Reservations years ago, which is like his blog.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  And, uh, I don't know, all that's, all that's kind of silly. Uh, but, uh, Brian Chow here is, is breaking down, uh, what he thinks Yarvin's like main point was, which was just disenchantment, just being disappointed with the way the government works. And, uh, he makes this analogy to, if you ask someone, uh, you know, do you, do you like democracy? They'll say like, yes, democracy is amazing. And if you ask them, do you like politics? They'll be like, no. Do you like populism? No. And it's like, okay, they're kind of all the same thing. So maybe you should ask a question. He has a really funny line about like, why does the New York Times work? Well, it's a fifth generation, absolute hereditary monarchy, who's just been passed down from father to son, uh, which is funny.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  But overall, I think he didn't do a very good job of explaining that like, obviously, democracy is a gradient and authoritarian is a gradient. And we have that like, you could say, I am in favor, like, let's say I want more roads. I could say, I am in favor of, I will vote for the president who says they're going to build more roads. That's one form of democracy. There's another form of democracy that says, I want to vote on whether or not we build roads, not just the guy who says he's going to build roads. I want to vote on the road issue. And then there's, I want to vote on where the roads go. I want to vote on what type of cement they're using to build those roads and what hours of the day they can build those roads. And so all of those are like increasingly democratic, but you get to a point where it's like, can every single person be educated about every single decision?

• 1:19:33John Coogan?

  And is that actually efficient? Especially with the voting system being like somewhat cumbersome, just to count the votes for everything. And so we've seen this in California, which has a more democratic system than other states. And we have the ballot initiative system. And you get some really crazy stuff out of there where it's just like, oh, they were like, this company paid for people to stand outside of grocery stores. And all of a sudden, this is a new law. And it's like, this doesn't feel super democratic, but I guess it is more democratic than what we do at the federal level. So, yeah, I mean, we don't have a pure democracy in America. We have a representative democracy. And even that is something that wasn't able to be said a few years ago. And now he's kind of like breaking that overton window.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  So get out the glass, smash the overton window. Curtis is in the, in the New York Times and there's a very long winded conversation. If you want to go listen to it. Anyway, that's our show, folks. Thanks for watching.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  We are headed to a dinner that we will remember for the rest of our lives.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Yes. The course of history changes tonight.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  History. Break out the attache.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Cut the attache.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, it's game time and you'll hear about it. Not next episode, but soon.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Soon. Thanks for watching. Go leave us five stars and put an ad in that review. Thank you.