Tesla vs SpaceX, Humanoid Robots, Online Dating, Retro Electronics

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV Tesla Cybercab eventSpaceX catching a rocketWhat matters right now in SeedOnline datingDowngrading camcordersAI Nuclear Power PlantsBuying distressed companiesThe problem with billionaire resorts.

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.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  You know the problem with those like billionaire resorts that everyone goes to? Aman, yeah, it's like we're like the most expensive resorts network, basically like well above the Ritz and the Four Seasons. But there's an obvious problem, they're not venture backed.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. It's hard to, you wish you could put more capital into them.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Because they're so profitable on a per door basis. That I actually think that we need ten more Aman's.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  We do. And so that gave me an idea.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  What if we start a venture backed Aman?

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  That's it. Aman VB.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  And so the, so the idea is that, is that this is a place where venture investors could get exposure to something that they already know very intimately. And of course, like when you think about who can run your business better than you. The only person is an investor, a VC. And so you, you, you. During the fundraising process, you let the investors know, like, this is not your average fundraiser. Like, we are going to want you to dig in. You're going to need to spend thirty, forty-five, sixty nights a year at our properties as part of this investment.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a real operator. Use that word. Operator gets thrown, somebody, um, this guy, Michael on Twitter was talking about VCs use the word operator to embellish their resumes. Right? Cause it sounds a lot cooler to say, I was, I'm, yeah, former operator then. Yeah, I was an associate PM.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was one of the first like BDR hires at this company.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Operator.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  Operator, it just sounds like.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  I mean, it sounds like special operator.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Twisting the knobs.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, twisting the knobs, but also like maybe you're kicking doors in Iraq.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but in this case, it's like, yeah, there's allocation for you if you commit to acting as a part-time general manager of the property.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Giving feedback, bringing the whole family.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  Checking guests in and cleaning bathrooms, cleaning up.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, really get your hands.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  No, you just need to create the flywheel of like, oh, this is a, this is the stealthy way to justify even more trips to Aman like properties. With my LP dollars.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like sometimes venture capitalists, myself included, can get a little bit too disconnected from that the real asset itself.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  So if you're just lobbing money over, you know, lobbing money over to the founder and they're taking it, they're putting it to the work and they're putting it to work in their business.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  There's something about getting into the asset and what's a better asset to immerse yourself in than a physical, three dimensional space, right? This is not software.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  It's true.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  A hotel is a product, it's an experience. And it's good opportunities because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done at a hotel, right? VCs aren't necessarily going to add value to a foundation model, right? They don't have the know-how, but, but when.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  But what do they truly expect?

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  When a, when a guest breaks a glass at a restaurant, they know how to use a broom.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Get in there and clean it up.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Do you know the history of Aman?

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  So, so history of Aman.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  It's fascinating.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so to my knowledge, it is owned by effectively a Russian oligarch. And when you're staying on an Aman property, you really get that sort of makes sense. I was there, I was at a, one of their properties last January or this January, I guess.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  And there was a lot of Russian being spoken.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  And this is like, you know, peak Ukraine war. So it was, it was interesting sharing, you know, sharing elevators and hallways and restaurants with.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  I just love the like the foundation story, the founding story is in nineteen eighty-eight, Aman Resort's first destination was the result of this hotelier, the desire to build a holiday home in Phuket, Thailand. His plans soon developed into an idea to build a small boutique resort with two friends. And they invested their own money in the venture as no banks would lend for the project due to the small number of planned rooms. The resort opened in nineteen eighty-eight with nightly rates five times higher than local competitors. They were just like, let's go, not twenty percent higher, but five times higher.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually still pretty much exactly.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, like most.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Carlton runs you at thousand dollars a night.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  Five hundred, yeah. It depends on the resort, but yeah.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  And then, and then Aman can be like three, five.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, yeah, the, the desirable.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Hot nights.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, desirable properties at a desirable times here are like five grand for the entry level room, which is basically as big as our studio, you know, our studios here is significantly

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  larger than their average.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  There, there is something to that, though, like the, we were talking about this with like, um, Arowan, like just going like upmarket, upmarket, like actually giving you room to play and do something unique.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  The death zone is probably twenty percent nicer.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Exactly, just slightly premium, slightly premium.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Cause you can't really afford to do anything fancier, so you're just like, maybe making a little bit margin. It's all this like fake branding, whereas like if you, if you genuinely have five times higher revenues, like there's a lot of interesting things that you can do with that.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the interesting thing, so we stayed there with a couple of friends and another couple, and they had stayed there before, and so they were just like, these are the dates, just book it. We booked it, and I showed up and I didn't realize getting onto the property that two full meals a day on, on the hotel property or at any of like their ten partner hotels, restaurants were all comped.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Everything except alcohol.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  So once you're staying there, I was. I was like, if nobody had mentioned this to me, you could have just given me the bill. Cause you don't go there expecting, it was the experience of having like being at an all inclusive resort.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  And it was sort of funny, we were joking around being like, could we eat ten grand?

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  Because it's technically like all you can eat, right?

• 6:29John Coogan?

  I mean, that with that price structure, you can't afford not to go.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  You can't afford not to. Yeah. So I recommend Amman if you're you're bulking and you want to do a clean bulk.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  As they call it, where you get ninety percent of your calories. A five Japanese wagyu. Go to state Amman.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, did you watch the Tesla event?

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  Course, of course.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  What'd you think? It was a, it was a fountain of virality for me. I had two banger tweets come out of it.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  There you go. I mean, you wish they would hold an event every week.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. I mean, it's like, it's, it's prime for, for X content. Everyone just wants to post about it.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunately, the moment that stands out to me the most, aside the visuals of the new technology and stuff. Are when Elon went, alright, now let's party. And then it didn't go or whatever. And he was like, okay, now let's party or let's drink. You know, it was sort of a, uh, uh, the timing was, was a little bit awkward for overall like.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  Was it? I don't know. It was, it was strange. He seemed, do you think it was all the, the political stuff? Like he didn't seem, he didn't seem locked in. He certainly wasn't on.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  I heard someone say like, yeah, his first love is SpaceX. He's like, he's a rocket guy and, and but Tesla's gotten a lot bigger and he loves the company. But like, that was the company that he had to, he had to step into and be the CEO and invest in. And like save the company and make it work. Whereas like in, in a perfect world, like he would just be spending all his time on space stuff. Cause that's what he was like obsessed with. But I, I, I found it very odd that he didn't acknowledge, and this is something that. Pretty much all CEOs do, but you could usually get around this, like acknowledge like the state of the market.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  There is a very clear like bull thesis for the Tesla strategy of like not doing what Waymo is doing.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Not doing LIDAR, not starting with limited runs, not having expensive, you know, hardware that that they, the company Waymo, like Waymo owns these vehicles, they clean them, they have a staff now. They might spin that out at some point, but right now, like the the cost structure is purely internal to.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  Has Google ever spun out a successful product?

• 8:47John Coogan?

  No, this would be the first one.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it almost seems like.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  I'm not even talking about spinning out Waymo as a whole, which which I think a lot of people think they should do because it just has a very different economic structure than Google Ads. It's just wildly different, even if it's going to be a great business, like they should split that at some point. But I'm just talking about like, like the, like they, like they're buying the cars from Jaguar and then they own and operate them. Like you could easily turn this into like a franchise model, right? Eventually, and they might, but not even that, just Elon never articulated this idea that like we have more cars on the road than Waymo and we're collecting more data through the cameras. And so even though they're, yeah.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  In theory, much more capital efficient if you don't have to.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Pay to drive them around and stuff. Yeah, exactly. So he just kind of like threw out like, it was like, it was almost like it was pointed to the consumers and then the stock sold off, but it felt like it wasn't doing a lot of.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Anybody that's a bear can now easily without any, you know, real objection from Elon go, okay, so Tesla is generally promising what Waymo is already doing today.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Not even a tiny scale, like they're doing like a hundred thousand rides a day or something like that.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty meaningful.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  And growing exponentially.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  And the Tesla robotaxi vision still feels like there was no clarity even around dates. And I think that it's sold off because the market is now very much used to Elon. Putting out dates and timelines that are unachievable in order to push his own team almost.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  But the market is basically saying, okay, it's all good if you wanna overpromise and like push your team internally. But if you're not gonna meet the deadlines that, you know, they haven't even, I I saw this, I don't think they they haven't delivered the roadster, obviously.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  And there's still a bunch of people that.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Have deposits and stuff.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  Like.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  They don't sell a convertible right now. They don't sell a convertible, a full-size SUV or a minivan, which are like three of the most popular. These are like really important segments of the market if you want to dominate, I I would think. I I was.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I spend all my time in minivans or convertibles.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Or convertibles, right?

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  There's no in-between.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, and yeah, it I I wish they'd have a little bit more breadth in there and also just like different designs and stuff. There's a lot. I did, I did like that they were pulling some of the Cybertruck design, like the the event did like look like the future, which I think is good. And I think that he should have stressed that, that it's like, these Waymos like are ugly. Everyone knows that. And so him saying like, okay, one of our principles and our deep beliefs is that like aesthetics matter to these, to the success of these projects. And then what else matters? Well, scale of the data, like.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Like everyone in AI, they constantly repeat, scale is all you need, scale is all you need, right? Like you just need bigger and bigger transformers, bigger and bigger L L Ms, scrape all the web, get all the video, get all the audio data, compress it down. And then you get magical results. And that's what the true believers in like this end-to-end machine learning, like theory around self-driving. And what George Hots is doing at comma, like all of that is around this idea that if you just get a ton of data, you won't need any of this crazy. Like, like Waymo famously like hired, they they have a cone guy who like just does the software to like identify cones on the road.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  And and like the the end-to-end model, it's like, it's as if like, you know, chat G P T had like, you know, a special guy just for like commas or periods or exclamation points, right? It's like, that's not how it works at all. In fact, they just have like one master model that just looks at the huge soup of like trillions of words and then.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  And then it it learns all of that from context, right? And you can learn what a cone is and Tesla's kind of gotten there almost, but.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  They're clearly like, they're being like shortcut right now. And there and there was this uncanny valley where. Like for a while, like if you compare GPT one to just like grammarly or like some rules based spell check and grammar check, the rules based one would be much better. And you'd be like, I wa- I don't want to feed my, my, you know, my English homework through GPT one. It's gonna just hallucinate. Like I remember testing G- even GPT three when it dropped, I, I, I told, I said it. One of my friends was addicted to this video game and I was like, create a ten step plan for him to like quit playing this video game.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  And it's like step one, step two, and by the end it was like, it was like teaching him to play the game again, because it had hallucinated and done the, done the opposite.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Because, yeah, because everything online was like.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  If I can get him to play it again, I can get him to quit again. And if quitting twice is better than quitting once.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and so for when, when, when GPT one, two, three were out, like, they were so bad that the rules based, like, less, less full featured.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny to think about. It's funny to think about. Historically, let's say a high school student is doing their Spanish assignment.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  And the teacher, they would use Google Translate and use some sort of exotic string of words that was like way more advanced. And the teacher would call it out and be like, we haven't ever taught you how to combine these.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  Where did you learn it from? I think you use Google Translate. Whereas now, if they use, they use like an L L M, it'll just hallucinate something completely exotic and also very incorrect.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  And because it's more complicated, the student's even less likely to catch it. Cause they're just like.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. But.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so on, on the data thing, it's, it's, it's interesting to me because like Tesla does have more data. They have more cars on the road. They're collecting more data. So they should have more scale eventually. Now, Google does have more compute right now to start. And they also have, they also have those crazy, like, they're driving all over the world in places where Teslas don't even go. So they do have like a more exotic data set, but.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, going back to your original, going back to your original point, he had the opportunity to address, address the entire world. Shareholders, customers, his team, the press, the media and everything. And he flopped on almost all of them, even though the technology was so. Like the vis- like it was almost like a ten out of ten visually, but then everything else was. Even even with the the um. The humanoid like optimist humanoid robots. If he had addressed that and been and said something along the lines of like. Right now, there's a human in the loop and here's how you could apply that, right? You could be three thousand miles away and using an optimist robot to complete complex tasks.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  And even if you have to step in. You know, one minute out of every hour to do something that's slightly that needs some level of human input. It's fine because you get to be at two places at once, right? And here's the path of how we get these to be fully autonomous. But instead it gave ammo to Josh Wolfe and all these other people online to be like. Dude, you're just like.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  I caught you.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  You just, yeah, I caught you. And you're tricking people.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  And you're no better than Trevor Milton or whatever.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, which which ironically is the exact path that Waymo took to. Teleoperation has been critical in the Waymo rollout because. I mean, they had they had safety drivers in the cars for a long time, which is not even teleoperation. And then still to this day, they have. Humans over like it they're they're operating at a higher level of abstraction. They're not physically in front of wheels, but they have screens and they're watching all of these and they can. And if if one of the Waymos is in trouble, they can just beam into it immediately and take it over.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I I wonder.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  And that's a very different model from Tesla.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Does the driver? Is the passenger know when somebody in a Waymo has beamed in?

• 16:46John Coogan?

  I don't know. I I heard some stuff. It's like one one intervention every seventeen thousand miles or something. So it's pretty rare right now and obviously that's going to plummet. But I wonder and and that number might be off.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  For one, yeah, for every one intervention, I I wonder how many times where somebody's. Teleoperating in and like is like on red alert because you know, it's just like.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Well, every time I'm in a Waymo.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Some guy and and um. Some guy in India is just like falling asleep at his desk and the alert goes off. And he's like, I'm in Louisiana in a.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  I mean, every time I get in Waymo, I'm always like, break twice if you're teleoperating this right now. Like, speak to me through the car. But I actually, I have no idea. I don't think that they would want to reveal that. I have always thought that, I've always thought that it's, it's Waymo's like ace up their sleeve. Because if the fever pitch of like, this is too dangerous ever gets really, really high. They can always pull out and be like, actually, there are humans watching everything. So there is a human in the loop, so it's way less scary. And, and their ability to like dial that up or dial that down is great from like a regulatory perspective.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  Tesla could even. You know, if they had a more clear vision of what this ultimately becomes.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  They could say something along those lines of, oh, by the way, if you want to drive your Tesla for 10 hours overnight, we can have somebody who's teleoperated available.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  To join you for your journey.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  I see, see, see, I, I, I disagree with that in the sense that like, I, I think Elon does have a very clear vision, which is no LiDAR, no teleoperation. He is, he's, he's trying to jump straight to the high margin economic model that makes sense in the long-term future, and it's just taking him a longer time to ramp up to get there.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  I have no doubt he has a clear vision.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  But he didn't, he didn't articulate it. He didn't articulate it. Exactly. He should have said, look, here.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  You're piecing it together, we're guessing.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It, it, it comes out and he should have just said like, look, yeah, this is a concept car. There's no mirrors. There, there's no rearview mirrors on here. We probably need to put those on legally. But you'll also notice that there are no ugly LiDAR spinning around on here. And that is a decision that we're sticking by. And that is, that is in some ways why we're behind, but why we will be ahead and more profitable in a few years. And that's why you should be excited as an investor.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  But he didn't really acknowledge any of that. I do think like, some of the distinctions here are important, the teleoperation thing, like the economic model, like the fact that he's trying to sell these, like, these are all interesting decisions. But you have to put them in the context of like, what, what is actually really happening in the market today? You can't just come out there and act like you're the first person to try and launch this company when there's another company that's actively running.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and also, my.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Part of it is, he has the biggest audi- direct audience in the world.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Through X.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Why would you not do standalone events or do like Tesla week? And you have like a different night.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  The Optimus is one and the cars.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Thing is he just kind of like went through it all.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  This is our vision for the future of public transport. This is our vision for robotax.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Vision for Optimus. And it was all like you have the resources and the attention in order to, you could have done one event per week for a month. And imagine what the stock would have done if he spent the time in, you know, theoretically spent the time to like lay out a extremely clear vision and treat it as, I'm gonna give you a masterclass on our thinking and why we're already ahead in these areas. I think it's usually, I advise like early stage companies to do this. There's a there's a tendency for companies to try, wanna announce a lot of big stuff at once and it's usually a waste of all of that, those moments.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  To do it all at once when you could spread it out over a month or five weeks and be constantly sort of top of mind and building that sort of cadence. With the audience. So I think ultimately, probably a mistake to just like word vomit.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Major, major, major announcements.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  And not give each of them.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I, I think he, yeah, I mean, I, I think back to like Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone. Like, I'm pretty sure there was a slide in that deck. That had pictures of all the other best in class business phones at the time and they all had keyboards. And he was like, ours will never have a keyboard.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  And I think that distinction, like you could clearly tell that he was calling out BlackBerry directly.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  And he didn't get sued for that. It wasn't defamation and Elon seems like more of like a wild man when it comes to communication. And yet he didn't. He didn't actually articulate, like, is he going to war against Waymo? Does he think Waymo's bad? Like, what are they getting wrong?

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think the average consumer.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Hold, hold my hand a little down that.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, does the average consumer shareholder understand the difference between

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  LiDAR and the technology Tesla's using?

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you, you sent me this Dustin Curtis analysis. The Tesla event could have told a huge inspiring story about the future, explained the philosophy behind what they're building, and then put everything into the context of how human life is going to change for the better. Instead, Musk randomly and briefly showed off a couple of world-changing concept vehicles, casually introduced a humanoid robot, and then threw out some dates and prices, uh, as though he was making them up on the spot. He raised a hundred questions, ignored them all, and then, after complaining about parking lots, said he wanted to go party. There was no concept of a bigger plan, not even a cohesive theme. Tesla is doing incredible stuff and changing the world. It's insane to me that they are so bad at telling the story of their work. Yeah, I, I, I kind of agree with that, but I wonder, I, I, I do think about it in the context of like SpaceX.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Imagine Jack Dorsey announcing all those products. Like, he probably wouldn't be the guy to build any of those products, but he would've, like, even having, like, slides with the good cadence that he was on and able to just sit up there and, I don't know, getting the whole world's attention and then just being like, bleh.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, i- i- it's interesting to compare with SpaceX because like, a few days later, there's like that amazing, uh, uh, the, the super heavy came down and they caught it with the chopsticks and the Mecha-Zilla-like structure. And that was just a video of the thing actually happening. So it was just like, yeah, they had said it, but I don't remember, no one remembers like a press conference about that.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Being a plan. Like, it was like maybe mentioned on podcasts and stuff, and then it just happened. And it, and it was like, okay, this is just a thing now, I guess we're just catching rockets. It was like amazing. Um, and like, yeah, I, I think that, I mean, there isn't much storytelling there, but very quickly you can see like, oh wow, okay, if they catch it and it's already on the pad, well, you're gonna be able to refuel it in hours instead of days. And so you can send up, and if you watch the whole video from that, from that launch. The rocket is only gone for like eight minutes.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Isn't that crazy? It just goes up and then it comes back down because it doesn't need to get that high up and it just it's just boosting it. And then it comes back down. So it's like eight minutes. And so you can see, okay, this is going to get really, really insane when these things are like really pumping.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  But yeah, like, no one's even waiting for like the next like SpaceX like, like, you know, conference like it's just like, okay. He's done some of those.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Show not tell.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  He did the crazy, he did the crazy like point to point one where he was saying that like you're going to be able to take a rocket across the country. In like and and be from, you know, New York to Tokyo in like fifteen minutes or whatever. And now watching them catch the rocket. I'm like. Yeah, that's gonna happen like.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  For sure. It might be really expensive, but it seems like it's definitely gonna happen.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting because he's deciding how to market both companies.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Jordi Hays?

  Because the Tesla thing was just marketing.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  To shareholders, to cus- future customers, fanboys, it's just marketing.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  The SpaceX thing is actually not marketing. It's just they were just proving that they could do it.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  That's just one step along their journey. But it's interesting that you wonder how he treats those two different things. If SpaceX was already public, would he have taken a different approach? To to that whole event, right? Or does he feel like I don't need to market anything. I'm just doing things.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it is so much more visual watching a rocket land even over a car, you know.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if Tesla was private right now, would he have done the Optimus demo?

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe not.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Probably not.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Probably would have just.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  It's like teleoperated, teleoperated humanoid robots are.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Because you could just do an Investor Day for your private investors. You don't need to publicly signal. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. And then the competition is just wildly different. Like, Google is, I mean, there's a lot of like, you know, problems with the company. It's a little bit old, but it's not Boeing, right? Like, they have like some of the best machine learning engineers in the world, like they have a lot of resources. It's still a very young and agile company compared to, you know. ULA, like the Lockheed Martin Prime, you know.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Uh, joint venture. Um, should we move on to, uh, did you read this, uh, this? The ten things that matter right now in Seed VC by Sam Lessin?

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Did you read this?

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  I might have shared this.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I think I think the, one of the reasons I shared this is I think that. Uh, Slow, Sam, Yoni, Will, all those guys have carved out their own style of content marketing that looks so unprofessional.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Yet, which is just them taking notes and sharing it, screenshotting it and sharing it.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it often has like the, the red line underneath.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it still has the red line.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it still has the, the spelling mistake marker.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just think they've figured out. They have created an incredible magnet for the types of people that they want to meet and doing it in their own way.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Which is honestly smart because they've adapt, they've, they've realized that the blog in the context of Twitter is almost dead. You can't get visibility on links anymore.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  And so they're like, okay, we're just gonna like.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Screenshot it.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then I would say that overall, none of them are super savvy around brand and design and stuff like that, and they wouldn't pretend to be, but they've carved out their own like very like distinct thing where you see a bear screenshot.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  And it's on a pretty good cadence. I feel like there's always something happening.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like you get a screenshot essay like every, every couple of weeks or every month. And it's always like just near the frontier of the discussion, which I think is good. It's kind of interesting. Did anything jump out for me to you like in the actual piece?

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, I think a lot of this stuff is good marketers tend to get a, a number of good ideas and then just keep repeating them over and over and over. So I think this is summary of like their broader theses that they've had on seed investing for a long time and really trying to brand themselves as seed investors, even though they have, you know, pretty solid AUM.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, I mean, I think going, going down the list, list, following the shift in focus, uh, to.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Great entrepreneurs. I think people are realizing that it's hard to build iconic companies by just having a good idea and the right timing and even a lot of capital. I think that's one.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  What about the one about about like the next generation of like Gen Z founders being disillusioned by the fundraising treadmill? Wanting cash flow, profitability, these types of things like more like a rebranding of the lifestyle business and like it seems like he's thinking about that more and and seeing like, okay, it's possible that the next amazing venture backed founder just doesn't really get on the venture treadmill and that could be rough for my business and he's kind of like processing that. But that's what I took away from it.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  I don't know how real it is though, but.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  They've been, and I know this from hearing it directly from founders that they've recently backed where they are pretty upfront with their founders where they don't care which path their companies try to take. I think it's just about this general encouragement that capital efficiency is cool.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  Bryce from N D V C is doing something similar, right?

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  It's okay if this is your last round.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  He's been on that. Yeah, he's been on that forever. And even if you talk to Bryce, he's not against venture capital.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  No.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  I think that the.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  He just doesn't want to wind up with a thing where like half the portfolio is like completely faking it just to get to the next round to like scale up and then they wind up as zombie corns.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing that I talk, the thing that I feel like comes up a lot when I'm talking to companies is

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  it's the stupidest thing in the world to go start a fundraise or to ever in your business be like, we're never, we're only going to finance our business this one time.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  That's the last time.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  It's like nobody, every business that is enduring uses financial instruments at different points in their life cycle for different reasons.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  An Apple issue bond.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Apple's issuing bonds, right?

• 30:17John Coogan?

  They have a hundred billion dollars in cash or something. Why do they do that?

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  So you coming out, I don't give anyone any points at all for being like, oh yeah, we're never raising again. It's like that honestly is it shows a kind of general scarcity mindset and fear of.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Delusion, or it honestly makes if when I hear a founder go, I never want to raise again. All I hear is I want to own forty five percent of my company forever.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  You know, like, because.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Well, it's not just that. It's like the the decision to pick a particular financial instrument should be driven by the dynamics of the market and the business and and. You know, whether you have, do you have an insane amount of really valuable R and D expense that's going to get paid back a thousandfold when you have a monopoly on whatever? Like, well, obviously venture capital is perfect. Or is it just OpEx and marketing dollars? Like, maybe that should be financed with debt? Or is it inventory or CapEx? Like, pick the financial instrument that's correct for your business. When you say, I don't want to raise more money, that's that's different from saying, oh, I actually understand this industry really well. I understand my business and how we fit into the industry.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  And because of the way we're operating, we venture capital is not the right fit for us at this scale. So instead, we are financing the business this way or this way or that way. But but coming into it is being like, okay, step one, I'm going to like write off one particular financial instrument. And then step two, I'm going to, you know, build whatever and maybe it aligns with that.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or the or the even worse is I don't like fundraising.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  We're just gonna raise it. I'm like, the skill set needed to raise money is the same skill set needed to find and close customers.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  Hire great people. And there's a lot of people that benefit will be better fundraisers if they just have a phenomenal business. But but yeah, I think I think it's been an interesting, you can tell, you can learn a lot about a founder. By how when a VC goes out and is like, it's okay to tell us that you only want to raise one round. Like, how they react to that tells you everything about their ambitions.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  And and.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  And what they're optimizing for, right?

• 32:34John Coogan?

  And how much they understand their business.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  Cause I think, I think like these, yeah, there, there's this like general fear of dilution. Cause there's all these horror stories of companies going public.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Google didn't need to raise that much money. They IPO'd pretty profitably, very early.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yet they still use the public markets to raise.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but, but they did stop raising money pretty early.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  But it wasn't because they were like, fuck UVC's, I don't like venture capital. It was because it was like, okay, this is actually a profitable business built on top of, and then there's a monopoly power here and there's scale and like, it's not as essential that we just raise, raise, raise versus like, I don't know, like, you know, you, you look at like the, the money pit that has been like the virtual reality saga at Meta. Like it's a huge investment, tens of billions of dollars, but like, if it pays off, it's really big. Like that's obviously a good use for like burning cash. And then there's plenty of other examples where, you know, SpaceX has raised a lot of money, burnt a lot of money, but it's paying off now that they have a SpaceX now. Or, uh, uh, Starling's doing so, Starling's doing so well. And so it's like, yeah, it's just like very, very dependent on the particular business.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's better for founders to say, uh, here's how much money I need to hit these milestones.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  And as CEO of the company, my job is to make the price per share go up.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  Continuously.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  And if there's opportunities where I can take on capital and increase the rate of increase in the value of the shares, then I'll repeatedly do that.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Um, cause that's the thing about dilution is nobody's clawing back your shares. It's simply that you're increasing the number of shares, but it just make the share price go up more.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're doing your job, it's all accretive.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, I, I think, um.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Well, here's another one, another screenshot. I think this is from Yoni. This is, so Yoni, he's at SLA, right?

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  He wrote a screenshot essay about the bull case for OpenAI. And then Eric Newcomer wrote a piece about the bear case for OpenAI. I don't know if they were, I don't know who was responding to who here, but.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Or if they were, or just two guys shouting into the voice.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe, but, but I thought they were interesting. And I think, you know, we've talked about OpenAI and the price a few times. But I think that there's a lot of other stuff going on in AI that we should talk about. Specifically, the, the energy stuff that's going on downstream of all of that. And then a little bit of like, you know, how, like, kind of the knock on effects from like the big deals. Like, there's, there's like, I think we're going to see a lot of notebook LM type startups. And then we're also going to see a lot of the power generation companies shift into AI driven narratives already. We're already seeing this, like this Kairos Power company just did a huge deal with Google

• 35:32John Coogan?

  to generate seven new nuclear reactors. It's pretty crazy.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  The irony of woke Google employees having to realize that, oh, nuclear is actually kind of makes sense.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  I don't know if they ever had a problem with it. I think it was always like oil and gas. Yeah. I think, I think the anti-nuclear stuff was like, it was like the version of woke from like the seventies. Like, like post like Cuban Missile Crisis. But, but in the modern era, like most like, you know, Google employees are probably pretty pro-nuclear. It's not as heretical as like people think. It's been like pretty mainstream and it's certainly mainstream right now. But I think the other real like factors, like Google and other, and the other hyperscalers have all committed to big ESG commitments to be like net zero. So they did a lot of work to build out renewable energy sources for their existing data centers, which was fine when they were just serving ads and it wasn't that intense.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  And now they're like, okay, we need to tenax our energy budget as we go into like the AI era. And how are we going to do that without burning fossil fuels? A lot of, a lot of, you know, AI folks are worried about that. And we talked about this last time, like XAI is just like, they're pulling from everywhere. They're, they're burning natural gas, but then they're also pulling from the grid and they're doing solar and they're just doing everything they can possibly do.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  What's Mark, you remember when Mark was?

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Tweet sending pro fracking tweets.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Which one, Mark Zuckerberg?

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  Mark Andreessen.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  Oh, Andreessen, oh yeah.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  This was only like two years ago.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  It was like drill, frac.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I, I have this, I have this interesting theory that like if we had a, if we had a president in the turn of the millennium, like instead of Bush, you had someone who was

• 37:23John Coogan?

  very in tune with the technology community. We never would have gone to war in the Middle East because.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  War in the Middle East was never about energy.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  You don't think so?

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  But that's not a topic.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  But, but, but because the, like, the, the, at, at least at the time, there was like this big narrative, like, oh, we're going there for oil.

• 37:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  But what actually wound up happening? Well, like, America didn't really get that much oil from the Middle East. That's, that's not the, the end conclusion of the wars in the Middle East. And the fracking innovation led to energy independence. So like, the technology was there the whole time.

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  It would just wasn't recognized. And so it's potentially, it, it's at lea- at least one possible narrative is like uh, an ignorance of technology backed us into a corner that led to more international aggression.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  Potentially.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, good time to be.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, anyways.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Good time to be an energy company because.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  The funny, yeah, yeah.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  The tech companies are going after you.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I do think one thing is, uh, I had a thesis for a while. That a lot of the anti-oil movement was funded by, like, there's a scenario where the, the GCC, the Gulf, you know, um, countries, kingdoms, whatever you want to call them. There's a scenario where they're like, hey, what if we spent a hundred million dollars a year campaigning against oil to discourage people from investing in oil production, right? And to discourage young people, because like, for example, do you know a single person that works in oil and gas?

• 38:59John Coogan?

  No.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  And that's insane.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  We know, like, I know people in pretty much every single industry. I know one guy who, who has a small, like SMB oil drilling.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Something related to that.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  Something related to that. I know one guy.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:18Jordi Hays?

  And if you go back thirty years ago and you asked, how many of your friends work in oil and gas? It would probably be. Within our networks or like or the kind of network that we might have had thirty years ago, there probably would have been twenty, twenty-five percent of people were like, yeah, I work in oil and gas.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Because it's just such a massive industry.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Even just a couple of years ago, I didn't know anyone who worked in energy, period. And now I know nuclear and solar founders, but for a long time, and and.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, we know more nuclear, we know.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  We know way more nuclear and solar people, but they are not generating a lot of power yet. They're they're still in the venture scale.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  So here's here's the the the um the theory, the the very insane um tinfoil hat theory of mine is that if you spent a hundred million dollars a year campaigning against how bad oil is, you could probably have that.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  You could probably prevent billions and billions and billions and billions of supply from coming online because it's just discouraging people from going and saying.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm gonna buy this piece of land and I'm gonna start fracking, right?

• 40:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  It's just like a part of the sort of it never, people didn't even think, most people in our generation weren't thinking, oh, wait, oil's like the most in-demand substance in the entire world in this massive industry. I should just go do that, you know?

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  So anyways.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, we know Isaiah Velar, he's going into oil and gas, basically. But through a renewable pathway, which is a little bit different.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  What else should we do in in AI? Uh Tyler Cowen was on a podcast, he uh he's he says that in the air in the era of AI, you should, everyone needs to up their networking game because relationships. And he even said, improve your physical presence, which I think was sick.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Your aura?

• 41:14John Coogan?

  I I don't know if it's aura, but it sounded like get jacked or like, you know.

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  Likability is gonna matter.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  Likability and and connections and personal relationships are going to be.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  Senna Senna is one of his probably.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Top three learnings from studying history's great entrepreneurs is that relationships around the world.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  So that tracks.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  Cohen.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  I heard, I heard an interview with a guy who spent something like a couple hundred million dollars on a mega yacht. And the operating expenses on a mega yacht are something like ten percent annually. So it's like a ten to twenty million dollar like money sink. And he said, but if I do one deal on this boat, it'll pay for the whole thing.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  That's the, the logic everybody needs to be applying to it. Should I go to Air One right now? Well, if, if I meet one person, if I meet one influencer that, that posts about my CBD toothpaste brand. It'll pay for all my smoothies for the whole year.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the sad thing is like, there, there is like the degen version of that, which is like going to the club and like getting hammered. You know, like not good.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Or the, yeah, the.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Notebook LM, we already talked about that.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  Actually met, I met one of the designers from Notebook LM last night.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he was like, imagine having, I think it's like a six or seven person team at Google that created it.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  And I was talking with another founder that I invested.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Is he gonna spin out and get, and raise money?

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't think that's how it works.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  No, no, but like, I mean, he can just quit and build something competitive.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I think, I think it's probably higher ROI for him to stay within Google and be the creator of a hot new thing. Cause apparently, cause think about it, when, when, uh, I think Google TV started as like a five to ten person project internally.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Google TV.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Never heard that, you mean YouTube?

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  No, Google had a.

• 43:15John Coogan?

  Firestick?

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  I think it, no, that's Amazon.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, Amazon Firestick.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  Google had a TV product.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Chromecast.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Chromecast, but it was, no, they have, they have some, uh.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, you can like watch baseball on YouTube TV.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Google TV started as like a five to 10 person project internally and a founder that I back was on that original team.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  And it went within two years was a 500 person.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Okay, wow, so like, yeah.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  So this guy from Notebook LM is like, he could go from being.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, on this tiny team to a hyperscaler.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Within.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  This tiny.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  And then choose, and I'm sure there's a lot of comp. Um, but talking about the, the value of relationships in the AI era, uh, uh, who was it Brett? What's his last name? The, he, he's been at like Twitter, he just raised a, a four billion dollar valuation for an AI agent startup.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, that was a good.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Who, who, why, why can't I think of his name? He's on the board of OpenAI, wasn't he? I forget Brett Taylor?

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Brett Taylor.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's been the CTO of Meta and a bunch of companies. He's like, there is no technical moat deep enough to justify a four billion dollar valuation for an AI agent startup. It's based on Brett's ability to cross-sell to everyone in his contact list. Get to 450 million dollar ARR and sell for 10 billion, 10 billion dollars to Amazon in 36 months. Uh, very real.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Good.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be a quote tweet in 18 months.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should we do brother of the week?

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Brother of the week, where to start?

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Technology brother of the week, but first I need to tell you about Patek Philippe. When it comes to luxury timepieces, there's one name that stands above the rest, Patek Philippe. Since 1839, they've been crafting some of the world's most exquisite watches. Each one a masterpiece of design, precision and heritage. Now, Patek Philippe isn't just about telling time, it's about owning a piece of history. A tradition passed down from generation to generation. These watches are meticulously handcrafted by some of the world's finest artisans. They represent more than luxury, they symbolize craftsmanship and timeless innovation. So if you're thinking about an heirloom piece or just looking to make an investment in your own style, there's no better choice than Patek Philippe. Visit patek.com to discover the collection.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  Patek Philippe, you never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation. Tell a personal story about your family traditions. Yeah, I, I didn't come from, I, I, I actually don't really have that many family traditions, but you know.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  Patek is one.

• 45:42John Coogan?

  Well, it, it will be and, and see, that's the thing is that. There's this, you know, famous proverb, the best day to plant a tree is, you know, twenty years ago, the second best day is today.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  And you can just start family traditions.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  And as soon as you start them, they can become family traditions.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  If, in my eyes, family traditions that stimulate the economy.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Naturally, since the economy is good,

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  it's naturally better to choose family traditions that require capital expenditure.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Investment, sure, sure.

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  In order to stimulate the economy.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  So that the economy improves and naturally, everybody benefits, right?

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  So it's a family tradition that your, your own internal family can cherish and, and sort of carry on throughout generations, but then also hope, like, I would hope that you would want your family traditions to benefit the world.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  Stimulating the economy.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  Benefits, you know, everybody.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  I, I, yeah, I really do think that, you know, exercise for the listener, if you don't come from a family that has a lot of crazy traditions, like, start one today.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Create a handful.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  Start one.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  Start one.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  I, I, I think that's great. Um, so on to, uh, technology brother of the week, you, you flagged this guy. I actually don't even have his handle here.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Oh, well, there's actually two people in the running. So, so, so that's number one.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  This guy, he, you know, made this brave video. He decided, you know, as Hurricane Milton was approaching his condo, he decided to stay with all of his supercars and, um, stay, you know, at his condo with all of his supercars, not evacuate. And it was because, all because of sports betting and his success with sports betting that, you know, he's willing to risk it all, because he knows he can just, if he, even if he loses everything, he can just start sports betting again.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  And make it all back in.

• 47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, forty-eight hours, something like that, right? All, you're only, you're only three individual parlays away from generational wealth. And so I think he's trying to. He might have been using this opportunity to sell a course, but I think it's just broader. There's this broader, uh, there's really a broader story here, which is like, if you become the type of person that's worth a hundred million dollars. You can make that hundred million dollars.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  You know, in a multitude of ways, a multitude of times, right? And so.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Well, the reason that I think he's a technology brother is that he, this is only possible in the modern era using the latest and greatest technology. He has a generator and Starlink.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:24John Coogan?

  So that even when the power goes down, the internet goes out from the hurricane, he can continue to sports bet.

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the games are not going to stop.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't, you can be, you can be getting steamrolled by a hurricane in Florida and betting on Chinese tennis futures.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, the outcome of a cricket game.

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  Right, right.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  What's happening in the soccer world?

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I would hope that if somebody's in India, you know, eventually getting, you know, approached by some storm that they would be making risky, risky bets on, you know, stuff that's happening here, right?

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Exactly. Um. Exactly. So, so he has some stiff competition. Uh, we got Ryan Salameh, the former C, co-CEO of FTX, who's reporting to federal prison today to serve seven and a half years on campaign finance fraud charges. Posted this on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn today. I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as inmate at FCI Cumberland. Who do you give it to between these two? Posting that you're going to jail on LinkedIn is pretty iconic. Does it deserve technology brother of the week, though?

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  I, I think we gotta save brother of the week when he comes back and starts a world positive venture.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 49:41Jordi Hays?

  And announces that, you know, hopefully. You know, generates billions of dollars in returns for shareholders and uses that to sort of pay back the victims of FTX. I think brother of the week has to go to this guy.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  We'll put, put his name up and he'll link the video. Cole Housen?

• 49:57John Coogan?

  Cole Housen.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  Cole Housen, Cole Housen.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  You are officially the brother of the week.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  One of the first brothers of the week.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  Um, and hopefully he's still alive.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  Because there's a small chance that he didn't make it. If he is alive, if he is alive, we know that he's still selling courses and encouraging other people to follow suit, so.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  Um, what do you think of this concept?

• 50:24John Coogan?

  There's a company called Backmarket that is selling older technology and encouraging you to downgrade. So they're reintroducing the iPhone 6S, SE, 11, 12, 13, mini 14 refurbished. And they're also selling, um, what looks like an old Sony HD handy cam, camcorder. And Tyler here says fascinating concept and really good name. Imagine something similar may happen with software. What, what, what's your reaction? I mean, this is, this is phenomenally viral. Fifty thousand likes on this. Like there is serious demand for, for nostalgic tech. Uh, it's shocking. I mean, like it is a great ad.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  So this goes, this goes into almost every technology, consumer tech product has been over engineered. Like all I want is for Sonos to release a super analog version of their product that doesn't require me to sync four different speakers and spend an hour and a half setting it up. And then right as I'm having people over, two of the speakers get disconnected. And I'm just like, could I just like run an extension cord between all of these and just like let them run, right? So I think things have been over engineered. Like you're seeing this in the, in ultra luxury, you know, cars that almost all the mo- I think we maybe talked about this. Going back to analog, Bugattis are intentionally have these very tactile switches.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  The Utopia.

• 51:53Jordi Hays?

  I think the most interesting thing about this is even after all these years of people trying to unbundle Craigslist and unbundle eBay, there's still opportunities to unbundle these businesses. So Bezel, uh, is a company I back that, that's like the stock X of watches. Right now eBay is still the number one. You know seller of you know luxury watches online. The issue with eBay is you could spend twenty thousand dollars on a Patek. Actually not going to get the kind of Pateks we like for twenty. But um but let's say you want to spend sixty thousand dollars on a Patek.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  If there's a twenty five percent chance that it's fake, that's not really a risk that anybody should take. And so they took what eBay did well already, which was having a lot of inventory. And added authentication. And the same thing is what rent the run rate to this as well. You if you're buying a two thousand dollar vintage Chanel jacket.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  Cars and bids.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Same thing, I mean.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:53John Coogan?

  Bring your trailer similar like disaggregate because eBay Motors really was big, but people are peeling the stuff off and adding like specific features.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep. So yeah, I think I think as long as.

• 53:06Jordi Hays?

  Until something like a backtrack or bezel.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  Truly become dominant, there's still these opportunities to like unbundle.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  So what do you think is more viral about this? I mean, I don't even know if this is their launch, but it's clearly their introduction to, you know, a million views and fifty thousand fans.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Um, do you think, do you think the concept is more viral or the execution in the sense that it's like great copywriting on a subway? And then someone wound up just taking a photo because it's subway ad. Subway ads are always hard to price and just anything in the I R L, but maybe.

• 53:37Jordi Hays?

  For itself. What's funny is I I looked at this ad and I was like, that's so cool. Like just great campaign. And then I went to the website and it was a bunch of.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Vintage electronics and I was like, eh, meh. I haven't been back since.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  But um but I think this is a good example of of just the power of branding and like a really good marketing campaign. Who knows if it'll make it an enduring business, but.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  My my worry with this stuff is like a lot of the technology there is they're just appliances. And it's it's this, the the the car world is talking about this, how like, you know. Would you ever want an earlier Model Three or would you always just want the latest Tesla Model Three? Like you would always just want the latest one because it's it's an appliance in the same way that you would always want the latest iPhone. There's no real benefit to downgrading as opposed to the old cars where it's like, oh yeah, like a Lamborghini Countach is gonna drive in a very specific way that.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the issue is you can sell the device, but you still don't really control the software.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  Apple can be like, we don't support this anymore.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Or just doesn't run that well.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they'll force you to upgrade, but it runs terribly.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  And so I think what would be an incredible product, and I don't even know if it's possible to deliver at scale, is if you could actually go back and run like iOS four on an OG iPhone and it would just be so fun and.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  I mean, you can get the very first iPhone. They're getting expensive now, but it doesn't have an App Store.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  No, that's a whole.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  It just comes with what it has. You get maps.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  You know, like just buying Apple, Apple products when they release and leaving them in the box is like the best performing asset class in the world.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Best performance, yeah.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  You know, maybe it's not Nvidia, but like it outperforms like S and P.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, they gotta grow eventually. Yeah.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, good example of a good campaign and how there's not, you know, it's not too late to um, unbundle these behemoths.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, in terms of the, the other kind of like trad technology, we, we gotta go back. Um, huge, huge push against um, online dating recently. Have you been following this?

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  So it is, so somebody showed this chart of how couples meet in the United States and the online is just a rocket ship from nineteen ninety, where it's basically zero to twenty twenty when it's well over fifty percent. Now, there is a community note on this that's not, it's not live, but I clicked on it because I can see what's in there.

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  The power.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and somebody was trying to, you know, fight it out in the community notes claiming that, oh, well, this cuts off right during COVID, maybe it's gone down. And then they cite some other study that was done by Zola, the wedding registry. So they poll people. And it said that now, uh, Zola claims that now the number one place that people meet is in school. And I just don't believe that at all relative to this chart because I think this chart is a much broader selection. And I think people doing wedding registries on Zola is.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Specific.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  So this is, this is a survey of, of like six thousand five hundred people randomly um, by some academics. And and Zola is like a very specific subset where they're like just polling their users.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  And so I imagine that if you're going on Zola and constructing like this elaborate registry, you're probably like higher net worth and then probably more likely to have met in an I R L setting as opposed to online. And so I I I disapprove of that community note.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  I think uh everybody can be bearish on. Everybody can hate dating apps the way that people broadly know that cigarettes are bad.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  But you're not gonna, you know.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Until there's something better comes along.

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't know that dating apps are basically selling sex, which is the primary human motivation. So you're just not gonna, if as long as these apps are able to offer what they're offering, they're only gonna become like, it's interesting that um.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  It does seem that, it does seem that people are.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  Like, our society is now very, like, from a dating standpoint, dating apps are driving the majority of connections, like that kind of seems like it's a thing. Uh, yet people are not, people can overcome the addiction. The only thing more powerful than the drive to just like meet whatever, for people to meet the opposite sex, seemingly is finding your person and like you end up giving, these people end up giving up the app afterwards, right? So thankfully, the the positive is that that it seems like, you know, finding your life partner, wife, husband, whatever, uh, seems to get people to quit these things.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  So there you can't really say that they're addictive, even though they're, they're dominant, right? I did, I did have something funny. So Monday I was catching up with a buddy who started. Started a couple of different companies with a certain tech billionaire and he was telling me that said tech billionaire is desperately wants to fund a new version of Seeking Arrangements. Which is like the, the, the sort of high end, you know, like sugar daddy, like specific dating app, so maybe a contrarian move on his part.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  Why? Like, wait, what, is there a problem with Seeking Arrangements?

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming, I'm assuming.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  He thinks it's a good business.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm assuming it's one of those things where somebody looks at the design of a product and they're like, this is bad. Better, so he wants to, you know, accelerate sugar baby relationships.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  I, I don't even know how the economics work on there. Um, it doesn't seem like they're probably taking a cut because tha- that's the beauty of like the OnlyFans business is that they're taking a cut of the entire like economy between the simps and the women. Um, but it's hard if it's dis- if there's, if there's potential for disintermediation.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's still fundamentally.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  The whole beauty of the OnlyFans model is that they never meet in person and so it's always intermediated by a platform that can take a fee and that's why they're so insanely profitable.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  Um, wha- what do you think of the idea of, uh, if Elon Musk wants to raise birth rates, he should purchase Match Group, the company that controls Tinder and Hinge over half of the online dating market? Make, make a bunch of changes, that was.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  So Elon's a capitalist. I don't think he's fundamentally, even X, yeah. X, yeah, he purchased it to defend free speech, but he also bought the most important marketing channel for his trillions of dollars of companies, right? So it's like, it's hard to argue that even.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  And also political influence.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  He, he can, he can, he has a great position to take, which is, oh, I didn't buy this to make money. I don't care. I'm sure he'll take it public again someday. He's like, he can, he could take it public at a loss and say, look, I did this for free speech or whatever. But let's face it, he has direct control over the most important audience in the world to him and he could lose ten billion dollars on X and make it back ten X over with SpaceX or Tesla or whatever. So it's not a, I don't think he's gonna, he's not the guy who, honestly, if he bought Match Group and was like, I'm gonna re-engineer this to try to increase the birth rate and.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Everything that he would do to match and their subset of companies would.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Destroy enterprise value.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Enterprise value. Because of course these, of course the incentives are set up in a way, all the way from the CEO. To the, the, of, of match to the individual leaders of their different brands, all the way down to the lowly. Product manager who's just like, fuck, I just wanna increase DAUs, just ten percent, like that'll get me my next, you know. Raise or whatever.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  Include i- i- increase the CTR on this one button.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, so anyways, uh, match group is. But it's, it's funny cuz it's, everybody wants to say that match group is all bad. Yet there's millions of couples out there that would never have met. And their lives are completely. Like better because match group products exist. So it's one of those things like no- nothing is ever as good as or as bad.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  The other, yeah, the other interesting thing is like, like, you know. Even, even if match group was in like the, uh, you know charitable, let's call it like a charitable donation range, like, let's say it was like. Ten million dollar company, but it's still had the outsized effect that it has on society. Like Elon could just be like, I'm going to burn ten million dollars because I feel like changing. Ten million, let's call it ten million, like super low, like nothing, like i- i- it's a rounding error for him, so he, he buys and he shuts it down, well, like, that's not gonna stop. Someone else coming in and doing the same thing, like, it doesn't work like that, like, uh, the, the, there's clearly some sort of like market demand here and you can't just like.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Uh, you can't just go around doing like this, this like odd brand of like capitalism, philanthropy mix, like. You, you, I, I, I think the solution here, I, I do think people are clamoring for a solution to like plummeting marriage rates and plummeting birth rates, but. Um, the, the, the answer is. Is

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Don't go after the apps.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you actually need to build like a better cultural institution and and figure out how that can scale and be profitable.

• 1:03:14Jordi Hays?

  You need to make it, you know, punishable by jail if a guy sees a girl that's cute and doesn't talk to them, you know?

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  In real life.

• 1:03:23Jordi Hays?

  In real life.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Like if a guy, like if a police officer is on the street and sees a guy walking, this is a cute girl and doesn't say hello, I'd like to take you out to coffee. That can be punishable by up to ten years.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, ten years in prison.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  And so it's just everybody.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  I don't know if the government's gonna solve this.

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  I think we're looking for free market solutions here.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  And the free market solutions are probably like someone going and building something that's a that that's a really cool, like I heard one person pitch.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  This is kind of a wild idea, CrossFit for militias. So the idea is like if you want, if you want strong militias in America, which maybe you don't, but if you do, and you want the, you want the ability of like, of like local groups of Americans to potentially push back against the government in

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  You have some sort of organization, you could do the same thing where it's like, you know, some sort of new CrossFit community, something like that, where it's like, it's, it's a scalable organization, but it's about something else where people can meet and bond.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  No, I want to fund Discord for local militias.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Discord for local militias, okay.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Or just Vertica SaaS for militias, so everything from

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  I don't even know if there are that many militias around, are there?

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but we need to stimulate more.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, yeah, if you could manage everything from communication to inventory to recruiting to dues

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Jordi Hays?

  to training, to compliance.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  There's a big business to be built there.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  I mean, I do love the idea of

• 1:04:49Jordi Hays?

  And my dad group chat in the neighborhood are all early users and, yeah, and you even link it into

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  You know scrape uh active, you know, police reports, warnings.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  Dude, Batman.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  So it's basically like, you know, getting, you know, you get a push notification and then you like rip your suit off. And underneath is like full, you know, military.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  I think dudes would sign up for it. I do like the idea of, of, you know, like, okay, we're, we're revitalizing like the American military and working with the DOD with all these defense tech companies. But like, what happens if we get overrun and like, you know, some foreign come, uh, foreign country is like on our shores. Like we need militias and we just need to, we need our own insurgency and we need to be prepared for that. I mean, fortunately, I have the most guns of any country, so shouldn't, should be, should be a mess if somebody.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Going back to the fixing, fixing, uh, the reason that I don't think, uh, I don't think dating, I only think it's gonna get. I don't think it's gonna get better, really. Like I think the future that we're seeing today, which is.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Hyper financialized dating, which is you're on this app and if you pay more money, like you can have better odds at success and all this stuff. But then the bigger issue is just that humans historically did not have indefinite optionality. Now people are so used to spending most of their time communicating online that it's not unreasonable that somebody in. You know, Texas would date somebody in Ohio and then like form a relationship that way. But the issue is that historically humans had, I think it was. There's some data on, on until recently or until the last like couple of decades.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Most people that got married were born within like five square miles of each other, something like that.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:51Jordi Hays?

  And that was actually positive in that people would look around and see. And just like be more committal because they're like, well, this is the best person for me in my neighborhood.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Or my city. And.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Super easy.

• 1:07:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  Just like, oh, like family's here, everything's here.

• 1:07:09Jordi Hays?

  Guess we should get married.

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, I think that the era of optionality.

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  Seeing, seeing the entire pool across.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it doesn't even matter because the thing is, is somebody's using dating apps and they meet somebody and then they stop using dating apps. They're still gonna go on Instagram and see the same number of.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  So eliminating, even if you regulate or try to fold match group or whatever. It's not gonna stop. Instagram is the bigger.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  That isn't interesting, like, like, obviously, like, I want the free market solution here, but it would be interesting if, like, like legally, you couldn't have a. You, you had to have some geo restriction on, uh, on, on the matching.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or you can only get, you can only get five matches a month.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're, yeah, we're limiting the matches.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  I don't think that's ever gonna happen.

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah, that's why I just, I think whatever you're seeing today is what, exactly what you're gonna see for the most part.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  The relentless march of techno capital.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even the, um, even the present prevalence of, I, I, I don't know if this made it in the stack, but there was somebody tweeted, I think it was like. On the, um, Character AI Reddit. And it was like, so long, their favorite character that they were chatting to, I finally met someone, thanks for. Thanks for, uh, teaching me how to talk to a woman.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Certainly helped. So that's, I guess, one positive, right?

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  If, if, if the sort of incel audience is chatting with these AI bots and they're like, damn, I, I low key have game, right?

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I have thought about that where.

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Is this?

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe there's a scenario where it's like you, like, like, a boy is talking to an AI girlfriend.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  And and a girl out there is talking to an AI boyfriend. And because they're on the same platform, the the two AIs, you can kind of do a match across them and you have a lot of data to know. Cause you know every interest about the boy, cause you've collected, you know, hours and hours of communication. And you've connected hours and hours of chat logs with the girl as well. And you can look across the network and say, wow, these two people are actually perfect matches. We should just inter- introduce them and disimmediate. And then the AI sleeve and then the and then the real life boy and girl meet and they're like, wow, it feels like I'm talking to the AI boyfriend or AI girlfriend that I've been talking to for the last year. I'm glad I gave it so much training data.

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  And then they meet up and it's a catfish.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  I've been reading my, you're you're talking to the AI girlfriend, you're like, yeah, I'm I'm I'm jacked, like I can bench four hundred. It's like, oh, well, like we have a girl over here who wants to date someone who's who could bench four hundred.

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  You have to post proof, right?

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  The AI is like, I'm sorry, unfortunately, unfortunately, we had issues on the platform with people people embellishing their bench. Their bench, uh, one rep max. And we actually will need you to post proof of it.

• 1:10:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Make sure you're in a well lit area.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that that's clearly not using fake weights, you know.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  It's funny, um, I I I want to talk about this, uh, this like, you know, zombie corns, dead venture companies. So, uh, it started with this tweet by Tara or Tara. Um, very surprised at the number of founder friends who have quietly called in the last few days, asking for advice on how to sell their company because they raised at too high evaluations and are now in a state of purgatory. And I think you know this guy Siva, is that right? Or or you you just saw him, but he says, he says, DM or email me. We bought a few companies that raged fifty to a hundred million dollars from VC and we're stuck behind a large pref stack. I've been a founder and understanding this situation is daunting and running a company with little to no upside is exhausting and demotivating. We can provide a landing spot for your company and a way for you to get a win and move on if you'd like to do other things.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  This is my bad signal to founders or investors that see founders stuck in these situations. So.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so who?

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Zerp, Zerp companies that.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the irony is that the person he's quote tweeting just sold her company.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Big outcome.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like the, like she had a really successful exit and then it catalyzed a bunch of people.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  To be like, oh, how do I?

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I, I actually don't know the details, but I think people did very well.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  I saw like employees tweeting that were like, whoa, I'm rich now.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Cool stuff like that. So she has a big outcome. A bunch of people are like, whoa.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  How do I do that?

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  How do you sell your company?

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Because people still have this perception that.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. A lot of venture-backed founders think that their company is worth something close to the last valuation that they raised at. Even if they're not, or even, even their seed valuation.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, whatever. So, but what I think is funny is, is you have these people. So Jeremy Gaffon.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Was probably. Over a year ago, maybe at this point, he goes on Invest Like the Best. He starts talking about special situations. Everybody's like, whoa, you've been doing like. And he's giving examples of deals that they've done at Tiny for a really long time where they're buying companies for less than the asset value of the business. And he's calling them like log jams and special situations where he's coming in. As a somewhat neutral third party saying like, how do we? How do we deliver what everybody wants? The VC wants oftentimes to just like take a write-off or.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Clean it up.

• 1:12:34Jordi Hays?

  Clean it up or stop having to spend any time on it if they're on the board. They don't want to deal with it anymore if it's not going to return their fund. So he's solving that for the VCs. He's usually giving a deal to the founder that allows them and, and whatever the core team is. That allows them to save face and hopefully see some ROI or walk away entirely if they want to do something else. But I think it's funny because now you have Jeremy who has his new fund. Who's fully focused on this. So you have to imagine he's going to be ahead of a lot of these other, you know, people that are coming out and and now trying to compete here. But Jeremy is competing with Tiny Capital, Andrew Wilkinson, who's still trying to do the same deals. You know, even though to my knowledge, Jeremy was the guy like really leading the charge of that practice.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  And so all these guys who are running holding companies are basically now like doing like distressed finance, you know, where they're just coming in like trying to find value and unfuck these situations. So anyways, I think it's great that these these players exist in the space. It's generally positive, I think, for pretty much all the stakeholders. But the nature of everybody realizing that these are good opportunities is going to make. I am at the increased competition. We'll see if it if. I don't know if the venture industry has could support as many of these types of players as they can, micro funds, right?

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what the wheelhouse deal looks like for or like where, where is their value when there's a log jammed like B two B SaaS company? Because I feel like if you raise a ton of money, you didn't get to product market fit. But you're in the last era. It's like, okay, well, you probably aren't doing like a AI first approach. You're probably doing something else. Maybe you have some customer list. It's like I, I, I, I struggle to think of like why I personally would want to own one of these companies, but.

• 1:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so imagine a company that raised that raised twenty five million dollars and gets to five million of ARR.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  And they're not profitable. In fact, they're burning a lot of money.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:47Jordi Hays?

  And they stop growing.

• 1:14:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Suddenly that company is.

• 1:14:53Jordi Hays?

  Companies that don't make money and are not growing are worthless. Especially if they're losing money, right? And so you take one of these five millionaire businesses that's not really growing anymore. And if you wipe out the pref stack massively decrease costs, focus on sustainable growth. You could probably sell that business for twenty five million dollars in like three to five years, right? I'm just saying like.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Without, without any more, without like putting up significant more capital, that feels hard.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Not necessarily though. I mean, so here's.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Maybe if you're plugging in to something that has like heavy synergies, like sure, it's like, okay, they have a product that we can cross sell or something.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying it's, I'm not saying it's easy, but I'm just saying if you have, if a five millionaire business with a twenty five million dollar pref stack that's not growing. If you wipe out the pref stack, reduce costs and find a way to grow sustainably. And then you get profitable and then in five years you go to a strategic and you say like, hey, you guys should actually buy this for fifty million dollars. Accretive to your business. The person that bought the business for five, whatever, if you paid five million dollars for it. You're gonna do great. So that's why all these people are circling being like hmm.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  I really wanna see the, the, the, the, like the histogram.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually, it's actually good to give VCs love to add value via intros. And so. Siva and Jeremy and Andrew are all gonna be like pretty much.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Buddy buddy with all the VCs.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, getting those, getting those calls and intros, hey.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  I just wonder, I just wonder on like the histogram, like how much capital's going into each deal? Is there any other structure? Is it just, is it just?

• 1:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the, the other thing here is that these funds can leverage debt. So if you're buying a business. You know, there's totally possible you could buy a business for five million of ARR with five million of ARR for. Two million dollars of cash.

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  Three million dollars of debt and if you sell the business for twenty five million dollars, it's a pretty good multiple on your cash.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  It's just i- i- it is kind of high stakes. It's kind of high stakes because like you gotta cut costs fast to to pay for the debt. And then you've now cut costs and now you have to grow.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  And while maintaining margins in in this new era, cause you're not like this hot company trading at some premium. Everyone knows you're like this turnaround. I- it's tricky.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  I like it though, because it's a simple. It's a simple strategy that you can have real advantages through your network and credibility.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Cause Jeremy's done a bunch of these deals.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I it doesn't seem like that's simple of a strategy, more seems like something that Jeremy's just really good at uniquely.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  Fund these, fund thesis.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Very difficult to execute.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  But it's important, it's much worse to have a very complex fund thesis and a very complex execution.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  At least have one of them be simple.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Complicated.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cause I don't know, there's just not that many, nobody, right now, nobody wants to buy a business that's, for the most part. It's not that strategic to buy, if you're, if you have a company that's working, it's not that strategic to buy a cost center.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:19Jordi Hays?

  But if you can turn it into like a profit center and something that's accretive.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  It's interesting. I wonder, I wonder how much of the. I wonder how much of the hack and slash is actually gonna go on.

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  The what?

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder how much like hack and slash is actually gonna go on in in those deals like. Like I'd like Twitter is kind of like the famous example of like a really bloated company, five thousand employees. It's now below two thousand, it's getting closer to a thousand, like that is remarkable, but.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the hard thing.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Thinking about a twenty five million dollar raise, it's like, well, maybe they got to what fifty employees, so they could go down to ten? Could they go down to twenty? Like, maybe, like that doesn't seem that crazy to me, but.

• 1:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Going after these SaaS companies or consumer apps or whatever they are. You're still at five million of revenue and trying to be super capital efficient.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  You're still threatened by all the next Y C batch. We're building SaaS for, you know.

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  With AI.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  With AI.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  It's like the next hot thing.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna burn money to like acquire those same customers.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  That is really tough, yeah. But if you've found some niche and like the revenues are pretty strong and sticking around.

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  It's just interesting, there's. The um, the startup community generally has this attitude that anything's possible.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  And when they think of private equity, they're like, oh yeah, you just buy companies for one price and sell them for more and like. Look at this deal, like what if you did that with this, whatever. Um, but. Private equity, credit to the gentleman that we know in that industry, like they are not, there's not a lot of efficiencies that you can get in private equity. The edge that these guys have is relationships to investors and being able to speak to founders. And that's why this like content marketing is like.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:10Jordi Hays?

  I've been in your shoes, I understand, you know, I've been there, done that, you know, it's.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so their edge is that. Their edge is that private act, traditional P E funds are not looking at these.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, at these companies as much and they do not give a shit how the founder feels.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  That is an edge by itself, just caring about the founder.

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  Uh, let's do this one. Do you know, do you know this guy? Bern Hobart? I love this guy. He just wrote this book for Stripe Press on bubbles. Um, he's gonna be a Hereticon, good dude. Uh, he's pro bubble.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Who's not?

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, he, he believes.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  Just one more bubble.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I actually told him about that on a call.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  And he was like, yeah, uh, and he has an interesting theory that, um, the, uh, that in fact. It is not the, uh, the like main street investor that gets burnt when a bubble collapses. Because if you look at wealth inequality during financial collapses and recessions, wealth inequality decreases.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Because on average, the main street investor invests on a much more regular cadence. It's the professional investor that's actually winning and yeah, winning and losing more dramatically. At scale, yeah, it's very fascinating. Uh, because the, the, the narrative is typically like, oh, the, the, you know, the, the financier, the rich guys dumped on ma- retail. But that's not really what happens if you just look at the broader, broader picture. It's certainly true in like the micro, like, like some people got dumped on, some people dumped. But, uh, but more broadly, the, uh, economic equality actually goes down during crashes. Um, so, but I, I love this tweet, it didn't get very many views, but I thought it was very interesting.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  It says, there's a dubious micro cap I've looked at that makes a hangover cure that you're supposed to drink at the same time you drink alcohol. The main active ingredient is caffeine, so what they really sell is deconstructed Four Loko. Can't tell if that's a bull or bear case.

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  When's the last time you had a Four Loko?

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  College.

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Damn, I'm sorry.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  You haven't had opportunities since then. Maybe at the Redicon, we should crack, we should crack open some.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  On stage.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Solana was telling me that, he was like, I showed him, I showed him the document and he was like, he was like, there's one problem, I control F for Four Loko and it wasn't in this doc. So we definitely have to get some real ones.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  That's so great.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Hundred percent, I mean.

• 1:22:38Jordi Hays?

  And we'll do an ad read for Four Loko.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's perfect. Um, yeah, I, I, I remember like, you know, when the Four Loko ban happened, like, you know, e- everyone was kind of stockpiling like a case or two. But the original Four Loko is like impossible to, to acquire now.

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  But it's, but the original, yeah.

• 1:22:54John Coogan?

  The original formula, I mean, it really is rare. It's rarer than your, than your, you know, first generation iPhone that's on, still in the box.

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine

• 1:23:05Jordi Hays?

  driving through some forgotten town somewhere in America and you pull up to a gas station and you're thirsty?

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Thirsty. I don't think thirst has anything to do with it.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  You're thirsty and you go to look in, you go to look in the fridge and you look back and you're like, what, what is that? It's like, it's not even refrigerated. It's like, everything's lukewarm or whatever.

• 1:23:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  There's some dust.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  And you like scrape it off and it says like, and it says expired in like two thousand and eight.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was like two thousand nine, two thousand, right?

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  And you just immediately like, start hitting it against your head.

• 1:23:46John Coogan?

  It's like water. It's like a mirage in the desert.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't have any negative memories of Four Loko. I certainly, it wasn't my go-to, but I think it was a great product and it's a shame that it got regulated out of existence.

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, what, well, what about, uh, Bowler Bear Case? I will tell you that this company is truly a micro cap. I, I DM'd him and asked him and it, it's about a fifty million dollar company.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  It should be smaller.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  It should be smaller.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, whatever their earnings are, it should be, it should be smaller.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the thing with the deconstruction of Four Loko is like, that already kind of exists, the Red Bull vodka. And then the gentleman's Red Bull vodka, which of course is the espresso martini. And so, the, the idea of mixing caffeine and alcohol, people do this regularly. They find ways to do it. This is classic. Uh, the, the question is like, yeah, will, will people really pick up on this? Because they are, they are explicitly triggering people to consume caffeine when they're drinking, but...

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, there's another one of these hangover cures.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  That hangover cures or fixes are funny because

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Tough business.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

  You're basically saying that, um...

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  I'm irresponsible, but I'm responsible enough to buy a hangover cure.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  These are great cups.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  That's really tough, yeah.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, it, it's always hard to, to be like, I'm...

• 1:25:02Jordi Hays?

  The real reason is you're saying, you just poisoned yourself. Here's an antidote.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Antidotes don't promise that you're gonna feel good. They promise that you're gonna live, you know?

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, or that's like the theory of an antidote. So, yeah, to me, you're just, just commit to drinking is gonna make you feel worse than you otherwise would. Temporarily maybe better and then worse, so. I think it's, I've never, I've never invested in any of the companies that have... There's clearly demand.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a friend who runs one that's doing pretty well. They focus on like weddings too. That's like a bit of growth area. Because everyone's gonna be drinking at the wedding. So if you can get into the wedding planner network. Then the wedding planner can present this as like, oh, this would be a lovely gift for everyone. You put it in a little gift bag when they arrive. They take it before they drink. It's actually like a biotech company. They have like really good science and so it's this enzyme that breaks down the alcohol. It really does work. Yeah, Zbiotics. Uh, have you tried it?

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was telling me that Zbiotics is like.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  I won't, I, I don't want to misspeak and I don't want to talk poorly about anyone's, um, a for-profit enterprise.

• 1:26:14Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, no, no, you know, I tried Zbiotics and I was like this.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Didn't work?

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Didn't work and, uh, you know, I don't know. I'm very, I'm very affected by alcohol though. Pretty much. The next time I drink alcohol and probably the, the only time in Q four will be at Heretic on.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  On stage. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, yeah. It is, it is always hard because it's like, if you have the forethought to, to think of taking a. Pre-alcohol, uh, hangover cure, you also might have the forethought to like. Mix in a glass of water or just drink glass. So it is hard. It's a very tough business.

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Bigger dinner.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  Or drink more water.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  I mean, a, a, any, any business that's.

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Or have your blood.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Like a, any business that's predicated on like you doing less of like the seven deadly sins is always tricky like. You know, the, the, the dating app that's not predicated on just more and more casual sex. Like that's going to struggle, right?

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  To me, to me, if I was gonna invest in a, um. Hangover cure, it would be somebody recreating John McAfee's like protocol.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  You should. Then you should pull this up or put it on the screen or something. Um, but his protocol is like, you know how he always like, well, whenever he does a video and he's no longer with us.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Well, allegedly.

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  Allegedly, allegedly. Yeah, he's probably listening to this right now.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Um, the, he'll go on these rants where he's like, how did I drink? Four bottles of gin a day for six years in a row and, and you know, still managed to hold the federal government hostage for two hundred days in a row. And he had, he'll outline this like crazy biohacker stack that he's on that like is like helping with his liver and all this other stuff. And so he actually had it dialed. So like the McAfee stack is if somebody wants to build that, I'll, I'll back that.

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  I'll back that.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Cause it clearly works. Like the guy was like drinking like.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  We're gonna do a deep dive on the McAfee stack.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  He wasn't just partying, he was drinking. Like he, he.

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  He's like, he's like putting as much effort as Brian Johnson is into, into surviving, but also like,

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  Into just like.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  But just refusing to not drink.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  It's great. Like the easiest win possible.

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  How can I, how can I survive? Well.

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  No, probably like, yeah, would have.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Still doing the single worst thing I can possibly do for my body. Wow. Um, wha- wha- wha- what do you think of this? Dennis says, you're busy trying to get into founder mode while the eighteen year old zoomer clipping Kai Sanat and Aiden Ross on TikTok has a higher ARR than your entire B two B SaaS startup. Why, why do you like this one so much?

• 1:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I mean, uh, I just think that,

• 1:29:03Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's amazing. Uh, if you could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin that some eighteen year old, you know, eighteen year old would be making, would be making millions. He would be like, yeah, that was what I envisioned for America, you know?

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is interesting, I, I, you know, to go back to Jeremy Giffon.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  By the way, Giffon is.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Is it Giffon?

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think that's Giffon.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Giffon.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  But it's so funny because his, his favorite business ever is like Lazard.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  And Giffon just happens to feel like it's already in the same realm of, of.

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  Is that the fun name, Giffon Capital?

• 1:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Giffon and Company.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  And Company, there you go, Lazard, yeah, that makes sense. Um, well, yeah, I mean, he told me this one interesting, um, thing was like, he just, like, one of the highest signal, um, you know, data points that you can get on a founder when they're young and you're thinking about backing them for the first time, they've never done a business before, is just, show me a Stripe account with money coming in.

• 1:30:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  And simultaneously, a high school report card that happened at the same time. Like, I, all I care about is like, you made money while in high school.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let me show you, let me show you this picture.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  And that is a great signal. And, and I think that it's interesting because the, the, the, this seems ridiculous, the eighteen year old zoomer clipping Kaisa Na and Aiden Ross clip, clips on TikTok, but that eighteen year old zoomer is probably the next great B two B SaaS founder, like, probably, like, not unreasonable to back that person.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  You just eventually evolve, you evolve from the lowest common denominator.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and, and, and that is going to get retconned from this low status clipping Aiden Ross clips on TikTok to, oh yeah, I had a social media management company, or, oh yeah, I, I, you know, I had a, I had an ads company.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Did I ever show you this picture?

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  This is my first company.

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  Okay, let me see.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  J-Man Designs.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Okay, sick.

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Literally when I was twelve, I figured out that I could get skateboards manufactured in the Midwest for seventeen dollars and fifty cents.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:10Jordi Hays?

  And I got my mom's help designing a graphic and I got, I raised the money from my aunt, who gave me like five hundred bucks for the first round. And I bought a bunch of boards and my number one sales channel was. Friends birthday parties. So when my friend's birthday was coming up, I'd go to their parent and I would sell them a skateboard.

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:33Jordi Hays?

  Forty dollars or thirty six dollars, whatever. I was making like fifty percent margins. I should have gone higher.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:38Jordi Hays?

  Lot of like flexibility.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got a Zillow in the house, show up. Actually, this is two hundred dollars skateboard.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Two hundred dollars skateboard. No, but I, that was like my, the first way that I made money that wasn't.

• 1:31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Mowing lawns or whatever.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is truly entrepreneurial. Truly entrepreneurial.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  The formative experience for an entrepreneur, it's one thing to do a service like copywriting.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  Or any of these other graphic design.

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Getting, buying a product for one price.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  And all you do is resell it for something else.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  This is my first job too. My first like entrepreneurial thing was buying DJ equipment in America and then selling it on eBay and being willing to ship internationally. And so figuring out that, that like certain companies with this very niche DJ equipment didn't have the infrastructure set up to distribute internationally. And so I would just be like, yeah, I'll go figure out all the stupid custom stuff. And a lot of people that wanted like the best audio file gear would be like, dude, if you can buy this for me and I will pay the extra shipping cost and the premium to do it. And you just go figure all that stuff out. And it was only possible because of like the internet.

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and fundamentally, I still bring that up to founders when they're thinking, they're like trying to over philosophize their businesses.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, are you making something for one price that you will be able to sell for more than that price? And if so, how much more?

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  And if, depending on the market, like that's either gonna lead to you creating a big business based on the margin profile or not.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  And so many people forget that and, and I've forgotten that at multiple points in my adult life of fundamentally, it's about.

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Making something for one price, selling it for more than one.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, just starting with like a basic widgets business and.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's gonna clip this and be like, two guys discover business. Basically, like, here's the thing. So like, if I have this piece of paper, right, and I can get this paper for a dollar. Yeah, and you're willing to pay $2 for this, this printout of a tweet.

• 1:33:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. What else do we have? We have a couple more things. I wanted to see.

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  Did you actually dig into this story about Mark Andreessen giving 50K in Bitcoin to an AI agent?

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I did. It was over, it was.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  Dramatized by an AI doomer.

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, dramatized by an AI doomer. Turns out like the money like went into an account and like was never actually touched. So like, it's not like the AI was like, I'm gonna use this to do that. It was just sort of like, Mark sends it.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  And then, um, calling, calling Mark Mark. This reminds me, somebody, I was at dinner the other night and, and somebody brought up Epstein. And for some reason, I was like, unrelated, and I called him. I was like, no, but Jeffrey would have.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  Why are you calling him Jeffrey? Like, what's wrong with you? Is there something that we need to know? No, but yeah, I think just, just, there's gonna be more examples of this where people are like, look.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:44Jordi Hays?

  It's sentient.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  The problem with the truth terminal thing, I mean, it seems really cool. I hope that it's like real and someone's actually doing stuff. It seems like a very avant garde art project, but you never know. Again, tell operation, is there a human in the loop here? So even, even with the.

• 1:34:59Jordi Hays?

  And there's an incentive to be like, oh, if people think this is an AI.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  They like it more because the bar is lower. It's like what we discussed the other day about the, the AI influencers are making 50K on Instagram, OnlyFans or whatever. And it turns out it's just a real woman. But if, if a real woman says, oh, these are AI generated, people are like, oh, this is incredible. This is the best AI model I've ever seen.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  Um, and there's gonna be a lot of that, like faking it, both in the tell operation, both in this and, and just having a filter there. It is interesting. Are you familiar with like Move 37, this whole story? So, uh, in, uh, when, when Google DeepMind, Demis Hassivas was, uh, was trying to beat Lee Sedol in Go, the, the Go master, so, uh.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Computers had beaten chess and they'd become superhuman at chess, but Go was computationally much more complex.

• 1:35:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  So, something like, you know, instead of being like trillion possible board positions that you could potentially search with a supercomputer, it's like quadrillion to quadrillion. So it's like impossible to just brute force it. Um, but they applied deep learning, scaled, they played, they, they trained and they played, you know, billions of simulated games and eventually the AI became very good. Everyone thought that Lee Sedol, who was the world champion, was gonna wipe the floor and he wound up losing.

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  They made a whole documentary about it. It was crazy. Um, and in there, there's this moment where they're playing and at move thirty-seven, the, the computer, DeepMind, places this piece like way off of the board where like no one, not off the board, but like it's a legal position, it's just a very weird play. Like no one would ever do this, no human would ever do this. And, and everyone was very confused, they were like, oh, there's like a bug in the software, like something's weird about this. Um, uh, but, and, and Lee Sedol like got up and was like, what the fuck is going on? Like this is weird, like I don't get this, this is not how people play this game. And that move wound up being critical and they won because of this move. So it was like

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59John Coogan?

  True discovery of like a novel strategy.

• 1:37:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  And that is like what we're looking for in intelligence. I, when, when you say like

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  An AI system is intelligent and superhuman, that's where we're getting there. And with LLMs, I don't

• 1:37:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the real, the, the thing that would be interesting is if there was this AI like agent that was figuring out a way to crack open multi-sigs on Solana.

• 1:37:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or something like that.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Again, there was a rumor about that too, but very unlikely. But even, even like, so these move thirty-seven type moments, I, I've been waiting for something to happen where it's just like a sentence, a poem, a paragraph, something that feels like inspired and, and like a viral tweet that clearly provably came from an LLM.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  We won't know, we won't know that it's, that, that, uh, OpenAI has reached singularity until, uh, an agent on the OpenAI, like built on the OpenAI platform buys a McLaren P1 to gain the favor of all men.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  P1 or F1?

• 1:38:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, I think he, I think he would.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  He'd respect both.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  He'd respect both.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I don't know, it's it's interesting, it's definitely getting a response from the from the crazy AI doomers.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Doomers, doomers gonna doom.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  But but I like that Mark like, you know, Yolo'd fifty K to this project, like that's fun, that's what he should be doing, like that's awesome. I'm excited.

• 1:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Increase it by an order of magnitude.

• 1:38:32John Coogan?

  Probably on the next run, you know, uh, did you read Sequoia's generated AI thing, their whole paper? Application layers important?

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a bit too serious for our bones.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  No, it is, it is, it is.

• 1:38:44John Coogan?

  It's so long, it's one of those things where.

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  No, but here's, here's the funny thing, the only thing that I'll comment on that is it feels like a year ago. Everybody was like, the application doesn't matter, building at the application layer is stupid.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, wrappers are stupid.

• 1:38:56Jordi Hays?

  Wrappers are stupid and now it's like all in on wrappers, but then a year from now, I think it'll be back to, oh, you know.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  Like, I don't know, it's just funny to think that that only like six to twelve months ago, people were saying that. Software is dead, or the end of software. So this report is coming within six months of the end of software.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:39:20Jordi Hays?

  So who's right? Both, both of them are right, you know, like that's honestly, that's honestly my opinion is, is I think that long term, both of them are right. And that software is gonna be massively disruptive.

• 1:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:32Jordi Hays?

  But there's still gonna be massive value accrual to specific products.

• 1:39:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the computing hardware companies were valuable and the software built on top of them was valuable after the dot com boom.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  And even the telecom companies were pretty valuable.

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  And so the whole stack is valuable. And there's probably value accruing all over the place.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:39:52Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere you look.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  I mean, it really is like, it makes sense that like the value accrual wouldn't live just only one place, of course, there's gonna be like a winner, but from a venture perspective.

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's incent, the, the, anybody that's running a foundation model is incentivized to say, we're gonna capture all the value. We're gonna do all these things that you say you're gonna do, we're just gonna do it innately through. The core technology and then everybody that wants to deploy money is, is saying.

• 1:40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:21Jordi Hays?

  You wanna, it's, it's, it's much more comforting to be able to say that the value is gonna accrue to individual teams and products and apps and things like that. Because then you can. YOLO.

• 1:40:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  Bets, you know?

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, the question is like, uh, and I don't know if they addressed this tha- that much, but, uh, uh, disruptive innovation versus sustaining. Like, will the existing, because there's already a crop, there's already a, you know, a multi-billion dollar SaaS company in every major category. And so there's also now a Y C company doing A I in that category as well. Is A I disruptive to those companies that are maybe only five, 10 years old and doing well? Like, I mean, you know, Ramp is like, they're not being disrupted by A I, they're like the first one to implement it. Because like, they're, they're still on the cutting edge, they still have the agile team, right?

• 1:41:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  Uh, and I, and I wonder, uh, yeah, how much of this is going to be completely new versus just, uh, the existing tech companies are able to just roll in? I don't know. Oh, keep an eye on it. Anything else?

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  There's always more technology.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Always more technology, I think we got through most of the tweets.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  I have been using those, uh, Meta glasses more.

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the, the video ones, yeah.

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, the video ones.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  With the kids?

• 1:41:48John Coogan?

  With the kids, I went for a walk, uh, and had my hands full with dogs and babies and it was great. They were able to take some photos, the photos are not that great, but the thing that I actually liked was being able to just talk to the A I while you're walking around, hands free. You just say like, hey Meta, like, what's the, you know, what year was the Declaration of Independence signed or whatever?

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to disrupt Ben.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah. It just gives you, it just gives you like little facts and stuff and it's like a little bit easier than pulling out your phone for like the random question.

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  I think that's kind of cool.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  You're getting, you become the cell tower that the data is being transmitted.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you're gonna hate that.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Uh, I actually watched a Hebron clip about that.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  EMS?

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, uh, and he had someone on who was like a brain scientist and who was basically like, it's chill. So, you know, I think uh, there's like, there's like the scientists agree, now the bro scientists agree. But like, we gotta come up with a new tier for like even more conspiratorial tinfoil hat guys.

• 1:42:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The tinfoil bros.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  Tin men.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  Just the bros, not bro scientists, just bros. Don't even pretend to be a scientist.

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Dude, we should have a tinfoil hat in the background from here.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, just like a really, really high, high quality one.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  Anyway, I think we crushed it, we think we did all this stuff, let's wrap there. Jordy, did you wanna talk about Tim Walz?

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, ending uh, our, our uh, you know, potential vice president bragging about not.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Knowing what a VC is?

• 1:43:17Jordi Hays?

  The thing is, is here, here's the funny thing, politicians used to be able to travel around the country, saying whatever they wanted to specific audiences with zero consequences.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:28Jordi Hays?

  And now, ev- almost every single talk that a politician's ever gonna have is gonna be clipped and almost immediately published.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  And even, you know, there's always, they're always running the risk of being clipped out of context.

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:40Jordi Hays?

  But Tim Walz can't, it's, you can't go and speak to a bunch of guys that were, you know, he's clearly pandering to a specific audience of being like, well, the funny thing with Tim Walz, the guy says he doesn't own any stocks or any financial instruments, he doesn't have retirement savings, he's just planning to live off of the government forever, like, he came out and said that.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  Really? Oh, wow.

• 1:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, he has his pension from being in the government or whatever. He says he has no, he sold his house, he doesn't have any, he's all in. Like, the guy's all in, you gotta give him credit for that. But he. Yeah, he has zero exposure to stocks, the market or whatever, so this is the guy, this is, you know, the, the um, it was it Dan Loeb who is, who is tweeting and saying like, is this the guy that we really want, you know, making decisions around? You know, the economy.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, whatever. But yeah, Tim Wall is going and, you know, he's probably speaking to some group of like, I don't know, agriculture.

• 1:44:34John Coogan?

  Sure, manufacturing.

• 1:44:35Jordi Hays?

  Manufacturing being like.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Where their VCs aren't in that state at all.

• 1:44:38Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, the guy I'm running against is a venture capitalist.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't know what, I don't even know what a venture capital is. And it's like, dude, you can't, even if you, even if that's true.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Jordi Hays?

  If you want to win this race, like, why are you going and bragging about something?

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  There's literally a fairly large constituency of like, VCs for, for your campaign, VCs for Kamala.

• 1:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  And then also, it's like, the Obama administration, the, the, the organization that they met with outside the government more than any other during the, the administration was Google. Like, the Democratic Party is like, well entrenched with tech and venture capital. Like, this is like, well established. And so, playing this like, oh, I don't even know what that is.

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like he's been, the last week has been interesting for him where there was a pic of, or not the picture, the, the video of him going hunting.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  I didn't even see that.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  Where he's trying to show that he's a good old boy that loves guns and stuff like that to sort of, you know, get the mail vote. But back to back of blowing it with them because it was clear he didn't know how to load his shotgun.

• 1:45:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:39Jordi Hays?

  And then straight into saying he doesn't know what a venture capital is, is like, you're kind of alienating both crowds of guys that know how to load a gun and then guys that know what venture capital is. And I think that middle group that doesn't know what either is, is not going to be that influential in your, in your election. But anyways, that's enough politics. Um, I'm looking forward to the next episode.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too. Thanks for listening.

• 1:46:03Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for listening.