Low T Levels at Y Combinator, Founder Burnout, Taylor Lorenz

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Hi there. This is Ben, Vice President at Technology Brothers with a quick announcement. While filming today, we unfortunately had a small technical error that led to the first 19 minutes of this episode having poor audio quality. I speak on behalf of the organization, John, Jordy, and myself when I say that this will not happen again. We have already found the intern that was responsible and they will be terminated. Thank you for your understanding and back to the show.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  I'm here with Jordy Hayes and today we are talking about my Ramp card. I got a new Ramp card and my last one was plastic, but they sent me the metal one.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  And you know why they sent it?

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Why?

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Microplastic avoidance, right? One of the biggest issues, a lot of these fintechs is they're sending millions and millions and millions of plastic cards out of the ether.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  And everyday technology workers are having to

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Use them oftentimes multiple times, certainly multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. And the amount of microplastic exposure from the average, you know, plastic credit card is really, we think it could be contributing to the testosterone epidemic.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  It is up to, yeah. Everyone always thought that, oh, you get a black card from Amex, it's metal, it's titanium, it's so cool. Like it's a flex. It's never about flex.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Out of status.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  It wasn't about flexing. It was about avoiding plastic.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Comes down to health. Health is the ultimate status symbol.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  So if your body is highly estrogenic and from all the, you know, plastic cards that you're handling, you know, that's an easy thing to cut out and thank you to Ramp.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  I mean, I was thinking that most of my credit cards have actually moved over to metal now. And, but my ID hasn't. And why is the government poisoning me?

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  It's a big issue.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  But, you know, back on the topic of Ramp and the government, we need to take a little victory lap. Because what was it last week you made, you know, kind of, you know, threw something out there? Maybe it was a little bit of a joke, maybe it was half serious, but we got some real traction on your idea. So break down the original thought of Ramp for the government and then tell me kind of what the downstream effects have been.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look, government spends more money, the US federal government spends more money than anybody in the world, right? That's true. And they have more revenue than I think any other organization in the world. Yeah. I'm sure somebody will point out that I'm incorrect on that, but. No, no, no, it's trillions. But look, anytime you have a lot of spend, you're gonna have a lot of waste and spend. You know, right now, it seems very obvious that the US government doesn't have a good handle on their, on their spending, just in general. And there's a lot of ways to fix that. You can get new leadership in that wants to sort of like drill down budget by budget and kind of start to understand how money's being spent.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  But another way to kind of attack that problem is through software. So tech-enabled financial services. We went through an era where Amex and a lot of the big corporate card players just wanted you to spend as much money as humanly possible, because the more money you spend, the more money they make. Yep. Ramp, you know, came out, I think only around four or five years ago at this point, and decided, hey, we're gonna flip this on its head. How do we help companies save money? If our companies can save money, they'll become better businesses, and through that, they'll become better customers. Yep. So aligning these, that sort of incentive structure with companies proved to be very fruitful. And I think, I think there's a strong case to be made that the federal government needs to get on ramp, not just at the federal level, needs to be mandated, state level, county

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  level, city level, you know, all the way down to your kid's club soccer team should be on ramp. But we can start and really set an example at the federal government level. And, you know, the campaign has kind of exposed some of the issues with how politicians like to spend money, right? Yeah. It became apparent over the weekend that the Kamala campaign had been using Ramp, but. And

• 4:02John Coogan?

  You would expect them to win if they were on RAM.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would expect them to win, but here's the issue. So they blew through about a billion dollars in a few months. Uh, almost unprecedented. I think like half a million of that went to payroll.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  Um, but the big issue, they were on RAM, but they were also using a variety of other sort of payment.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Mistake number one.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  And so because that spend wasn't consolidated, uh, how could they really get a grasp on their spending?

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Right?

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  They're not able to fully unlock, uh, the potential of ramps, uh, you know, ramps platform if they're just letting.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, what's crazy is like when, when you sign up for ramp, like you get this SDR, something to help onboard you. And they, one of the things that they're working towards and they're telling you about the features is like getting you to migrate 100% of your spend.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  And if you think about it, like that ramp SDR like could have changed history if he had.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Totally. A lot of people like to credit David Sacks and All In with, uh, you know, Trump's victory. But I think there's a good argument to say that.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I, I was thinking about how like this year, the whole narrative is like, oh, it's the podcast election. And I think in 2028, like we could seriously see like it's the corporate card election.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Where one, one campaign comes out and says, hey, we're running on ramp. And then the other, you know, when, when Kamala was on stage, she was like, well, I have a gun, right?

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  And so you could hear, oh, the other candidate, they're on ramp too. So then we get into the weeds and we start talking about, well, who's using travel? Who's using Bill Pay? And, and then, oh, someone was lying about it and that's a national.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  Who's totally leveraging the AI functionality?

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Like, oh, what's your close? How, how, which campaign is closing faster?

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Then this is what the voters care about.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Like the podcast.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  And it's a proxy for this operational excellence.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Exactly. Efficiency. And so, yeah, I, I, I think everyone should pay attention to the podcast story, the whole podcast selection. You can kind of ignore that from now. That's done.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Next thing, we're going into the corporate card election.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, let's move into our top story of the week. The information featured my talk.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Incredible publication.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Didn't, yeah, incredible copy. I love them.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  No one, no one loves the information more.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  People literally realize that we're witnessing the birth of the TMZ for technology.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  It's like a special moment.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's, there's a broader narrative about like new media, but people haven't really done the job of understanding, mapping the new media to what they're replacing.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  And in this case, like, uh, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's clearly kind of the next generation TMZ, which is fantastic. It's like, you know.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  It was missing.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  You can't look away from, yeah.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  So in the, uh, they did some election recapping and recapped a whole bunch of events uh, related to politics, which we don't really talk about here, but uh, because they, they didn't mention me by name, but they mentioned the name of my talk. So, uh, uh, I'll read.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, one of the most, because there's, you've kind of grown a reputation of being a male podcast expert.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  Not just because you're one of the hosts of Technology Brothers, but you kind of have a firm grip on the industry.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, actually, the first time, the first time the interview, information interviewed me was, uh, do you know Abe Brown? He writes the, the weekend thing. Yeah. I put out a tweet, which would have made it into the stack if it was posted today. Cause it's a banger. It was, uh, you know, we, you know, we don't need any more Midas lists. We need an Icarus list for VCs that flew too close to the sun. Some of my best work. And, and it really resonated. Like Alex Conrad, who makes the Midas list was like, this is actually a good idea. And then, and then we, we started like talking about it. And so I talked to Abe a bunch and I was like, dude, like if, if, if someone, I mean, A, if, if a, if a, uh,

• 7:46John Coogan?

  if like Forbes said like, hey, we're doing the Icarus list this year of like the worst VCs, like you would have an army of like 500 Stanford new grad analysts working day and night, just to keep the firm off of that list.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Like people, people try to get on the Midas list.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  It would be.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Some people don't really care about it, but most people fight to get on.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  For the crisis PR industry, it would be the biggest event.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  It would be the largest wealth transfer industry from, from, from.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  GPs.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  GPs to, to crisis PR firms.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I don't think that's a path past their expense.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no. But, uh. But yeah, love the information. No one loves the information more than I do. But they were recapping some of the, some of the political news and they said, "Last week, the most far-out faction of tech's burgeoning right wing gathered in Miami Beach for Hereticon, Founders Fund's celebration of radical free-thinking. Between talks like 'The Trad Wife Returns' and 'The Economics of Doom,' that one was mine. Teal roamed the crowds, accepting preemptive congratulations for the coming election, according to several people who attended." And I don't know about that last part. I feel like people were not...

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's see the sources.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  It really wasn't about politics.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it wasn't. And also, there were like tons of, like, tons of left-wingers there. That's like the whole point.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  And there were a lot of fights about that. And that's the part of like the debate club and like all that.

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the most heretical people at Hereticon are all of the left-leaning attendees who are trying to jam their politics down the rest of this attendees' throats. And it was very triggering, not because of their viewpoint, but because it was not meant to be a place to sort of discuss politics about policy, right?

• 9:38John Coogan?

  It was about the economy.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  It was about how do we kind of increase global prosperity through non-traditional.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  I do, uh, I, I do love that, like, my talk, "The Economics of Doom," which was great. I interviewed Tyler Cowen. I love him. It was a lot of fun. But we are two of the more normie people there, I think, in the sense that like, we're talking about economics. He wasn't particularly doom-pilled.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  He's a professor. He's a male podcast expert.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  Oh, a businessman, first and foremost. So, you know, I'm not one of these like crazy biohackers who's growing, you know.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  A third one.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Exactly. I'm not doing any of the crazy stuff that, that I did see there. But I love that, that I made it. And I don't, I have no idea why they chose this one. I think it's mostly because when the PirateWire's team did the write-up, they talked about like six different, like...

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Our, our talks was too, the one we did on PEDs in the Valley was too heretical. It just couldn't really be published anywhere.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I gotta figure out how to get them to issue a correction, say, "It was 'The Economics of Doom.'" Hosted by John Coogan, the host of Technology Brothers and then linked to us.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Did I tell you why I did that? I changed the SEO once. Somebody wrote an article about me being like a toxic male podcaster. Something like that. It was like some sort of hit piece and they, and when they linked to me, they linked to johncoogan.com slash about just to be like, this is his like about page, right?

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  And I wanted the SEO to go to Lucy so she could sell more product. So I rerouted the link.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so now we have an extra backlink.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  You would think that journalists would be on, on to that, like don't route to a domain that they.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  That they control. Exactly. So a little tip out there for the, for the listeners.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't think we have a lot of journalists that listen to that.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  No, but, but get, I, I mean, I do have, I do have a thesis that the, a lie can get halfway across the world before the truth can put its shoes on. Have you heard this phrase? Or if it bleeds, it leads.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  And I think that if you're a startup and you want attention, you want press, you should be courting hit pieces.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  And I think that there's actually an opportunity like.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's done that better than Dryden.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah. I mean.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  He's actually used it, he's just used it to his advantage.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it, it tells like this heroic journey. Lulu's obviously the, the, the master at getting good press, but maybe we need a Lulu for getting negative press.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Just go and make me like hated by 90% of America and I will monetize the 10% that loves me for countercultural reasons.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  I think that's interesting. So to that effect, I had a great call yesterday with none other than Taylor Lorenz.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And she's writing a piece for the information.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  She's writing.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  News.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  She's writing for the information.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  She's writing for the information now. We, we're, we're so back.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  We're at a, we're at a period of time where there's, there's this massive power struggle between the information, newcomer, Bloomberg, Forbes for top technology talent. So it's an amazing cosign for the information that they're able to pick up Lorenz at this moment in time.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  She's also. Been on TMZ a bunch.

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  So, think about that crossing.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  That's, I mean, if you needed more proof that the information is.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  The TMZ attack.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Technology. That's it.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  That's it, yeah. So, I, I don't think she's, she's not working there full time, but she's writing a piece about the, the, the bro podcast sphere.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  The male podcast sphere, which is why she called me to testify as a male podcast expert.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  And I wasn't sure if she was calling me because I'm a male who is a podcast expert, or if I'm a male podcast expert.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  But either way, I was totally prepared to comment on the record, and we had a wonderful conversation, and.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  She's really.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to talk to.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  She is.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  She's got great, you know.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  She's got.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  And, and.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Idea, she's.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  And, yeah, I mean, I, like, the, the, the, the critique of the, of the tech elite that I completely agree with from the Kara Swishers and the Taylor Lorenz is that too many tech billionaires are humorless and they can't take a joke.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  And they get their feathers too ruffled when people come for them.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  And, and you gotta know that we are in the WWE era of tech. And, and.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  You gotta lean in.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  There's gonna be some faces, and there's gonna be some heels, but you can't shut the game down. You can't have a villainless.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  No, it's.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Conflictless society.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  Full circle moment for me because the first time I ever spoke to the New York Times was through Taylor Lorenz.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Really?

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  To give my point of view on the Call Her Daddy podcast.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  That's right. Wait, so we both talked to her about podcasts?

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  We are top source.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  Well, well, I'm the male podcast expert, I guess you happen to be a female podcast expert.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's good.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  No, I thought you wrote a great, great piece, this was back in 2020. It was like, I remember exactly where I was, walking to Aron from my apartment in Venice, and everything, the whole world was shut down, it was just me and Taylor talking about podcasts, which was really an awesome moment.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, a, a, a little checkouts got, a little fore, foretelling of the future.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Fantastic, but.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  She wanted to talk about the the bro podcast boom and

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  It really is a boom.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  There is and it it and so there were some, there were some, there were some like things that I disagreed with. One is that just like, you know, if if the if the Democrats had run like a stronger candidate and that stronger candidate had done. I I tend to think that the like right now, there's this narrative of like there, there's this very consolidated cohesive, massive right wing list of podcasts that lean right. So it's like, uh, you start with Rogan, then you go to Lex.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  I would say the big ones, to be clear, are very much center right.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure. For sure. Barely.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, barely right.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  Barely right.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  And Joe Rogan.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  And there's tons of clips of Rogan, yeah, Lifetime Democrat talking about, oh, he loves Bernie, all these other things. It's just like in this election, they have they like the, the, the, the goalposts moved to the point where like a lot of the big podcasts leaned right.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  And so you have Rogan, Lex, Chris Williamson, Jesse Michaels with the alien stuff. You have Huberman, some of those hosted Trump, you have Tim Dillon, Theo Von, the comedians.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Uh, Kill Tony, uh, Bussin' with the Boys, Aiden Ross. There's like this huge community and what's interesting is that like, if you actually saddle those people down, they probably have a pretty wide spectrum of politics. But they all kind of just aligned with like general conservatism this time around and Trump was like the candidate of that. Whereas on the left, I think you actually have just as much reach, but it's more fragmented. So you have, uh, Pod Save America.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  Kamala didn't do that.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  I said. Uh, you have Smartless with Jason Bateman and that's a, that's a pretty like center left podcast, I would call it. Kamala didn't do it. It's more of a comedy show, but that's fine. Like you just need to be a politics show. You have the Daily, you have the Ezra Klein Show. I was just looking at the top podcasts and, and it's not like, yeah, Tucker's up there, Rogan's up there. But so is the New York Times and Ezra Klein.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, you have a, you have a thesis that's. Clearly turning into a law.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Of Coogan's many laws.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Which is that the candidate that just simply records more podcast.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, more hours. Yeah, yeah.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I read the numbers and it's like 35 million views just on the Rogan episode. Average view duration on that three hour episode was about 45 minutes. I talked to some people that know podcast durations. And so you multiply that out and it's just billions of minutes or something like that. It's something like hundreds of millions of minutes.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  So I hope.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  And the value of that is is easily $600 million that was the it made up for the funding gap. And so it's it's like if you're if you're a politician, you can either spend $100,000 on an ad that reaches a million people. Or you can go do a podcast that reaches a million people and instead of getting a 30 second ad, you're getting.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  Forty five.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Forty five minutes. It's a 45 minute ad and people just are obsessed.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is why from for all the businessmen out there, if you get an opportunity to go on a podcast, even if it legitimately only has 100 engaged listeners. It's worth doing because that's an hour of time that you get to spend talking to people that are going to totally digest like what you're doing, why it's important, and why they should, you know, be into your product or service, whatever it is. And I give the example when I'm talking to founders that ask me, hey, should I go on the show? It's not big, but what do you think? I said, 20 years ago, when a businessman had an opportunity to fly to St. Louis to get in front of 50 potential customers in a room, they would spend their entire day to go and do that.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  It's worth you getting on a podcast for an hour from Zoom and just having a conversation. Maybe only 100 people.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Did you see did you see that email? We got our first request to go on as we got we got our first request. Yeah, we got our first request to go on a podcast as the Technology Brothers. I think we should do it. The guy has like six episodes.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  Right. So do we. On the come up together.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Let's give it a try. So, yeah, so so like we kind of debated on that. I think on the on the center left, you have those like you have those center left shows. But then you also have the far left shows like Chapo, The Adam Friedland Show. Red Scare formerly Destiny and it's like you could see a Democrat candidate like Bernie would go on this. He he can get in the ring with like the Chapo guys and hold his own, but he can also hold his own with Ezra Klein. Yeah. And so, so I, I mean, long story short, I think the future of the Democratic Party is is more candidates like Bernie, more candidates like AOC, more candidates like Pete Buttigieg.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Less candidates that are just straight up media trained to stay on topic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Autisticity was.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  But the interesting thing was that Taylor was really asking this one question again and again, which is like, why do podcasts lean right wing? And I was kind of rejecting the premise for a while, but then I was like, okay, let's, let's like steel man this a little bit and, and let me work through like, what could it possibly think? So first thing I, I, you know, I tried to explain to her, you know, there's this concept called mansplaining and I told her that that's when a man describes something to a woman, usually condescendingly. And she was very happy to hear that. But then I moved on to kind of a more, more rigorous analysis, which is that there was a

• 20:35John Coogan?

  there was a so, so, so on YouTube, like YouTube kind of leans left because YouTube's algorithmically driven less than RSS. And so, so you on YouTube, the like, there was a lot of right wing deplatforming that happened or deprioritization in like the 2016 to 2020 era. And then in 2020, there was a lot of, there were a lot of right wing people or just center right that got their stuff deprioritized because they were talking about COVID and they'd get the COVID flag and then they'd get deprioritized in the algorithm, shadow banned. And then there were a couple of high profile right wingers who were straight up deplatform from YouTube, right? And so on YouTube, you have this like, you have this subtle pressure

• 21:20John Coogan?

  from YouTube. They were never like straight up like banning everything, but there was obviously like a big move to rumble, move to other platforms. A lot of like, maybe I'm not safe here. If I talk about certain things, I won't get as much reach. But on RSS in the Apple Podcast app, it's way, way harder. Like the bar is much higher, even if Apple and.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  You gotta do something really extremist.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Exactly. Even if Apple and Google have the same politics and they both think that, oh, like Jordan Peterson shouldn't be on here or whatever. In on Google, they can just on YouTube, Google can just say, hey, he said this thing. Let's just not promote him in the algorithm. Whereas for Apple, it's like Alex Jones, we have to actively take him out of the store. This is a much firmer line. It's not this like, you know, steering thing. And so I think that I think that a lot of the conservatives kind of kept growing very fast on RSS. Whereas they were, they weren't able to grow as fast on YouTube. And so that's kind of the balancing.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  And I think podcasts in general are much more impactful on opinion. We've talked about this oftentimes, uh, real sort of

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Content and ideas kind of start in these sort of, maybe they go from a tweet to a long form podcast. And then they get cut down again into like a 20 minute YouTube video into a 60 second Tik Tok, uh, you know, video. So I think one of the things Taylor is obviously one of the top technology journalists in the world. Otherwise she wouldn't be writing for the information.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  And one of the things about this election cycle and maybe the premise of her article might be a little bit off is that uh, it became obvious this election cycle that the Republican Party was more oriented around technology. Right. And, and big part of that is because some of the biggest donors to the Republican Party are technologists. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. And so I think that a lot of tech ended up aligning, uh, with that side because it was the party that was pro technology, right? It was how do we get Elon permits faster so that he can launch more rockets? How do we maintain our edge around, um, you know, defense in the United States, right?

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  How do we, you know, support our, our sort of emerging defense industrial base? So the alignment and the sort of maybe shift right in the male podcast sphere, I think wasn't even political as much as it was a business orientation, right? Because it was almost a survival mechanism.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. She was also drilling down on like, why is Joe Rogan popular or why are these like Manosphere podcasts popular? And I, again, I didn't have a really good answer.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Like, why is, you know, uh, Vio in the group chat popular? Cause like, we like him, you know, he's funny and he's got good takes, right?

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I guess she was talking in like, kind of a relative sense of like, why, why are the Manosphere podcasts more popular than? Like female-led podcasts, but I kind of rejected that premise because I think that there are plenty of female-led, female-hosted podcasts that are successful. And I was actually telling her, like, we could be having the exact opposite scenario, the exact opposite conversation if the Democrats had put up someone. And I was thinking like, okay, so Kamala was like a prosecutor, she could have gone on like My First, My Favorite Murder, you know that show? That's, I think that's woman-hosted. Very interesting. And she could have told some story about like the criminal gangs that she prosecuted, like, and it would be like the story of some criminal and she was actually involved and she's like co-hosting there.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  That would have been super cool and super different and super weird and like-

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  Gotten some super fans.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's where I, that's where I want that to go. But I think it was just like, that campaign was just way too media-trained and it was like, stay on message, stay on message, stay on message. When you get off message, you're word salad. But like, I just reject the premise that like, she's word salad when she's like just having dinner with someone. She's clearly like, you don't wind up in that situation just being dumb, like, it's stupid.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the one thing I thought was interesting is Sarah told me that she heard hundreds of Kamala ads on podcasts, right? And that they were spending aggressively on podcast advertising.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Ads, but not, yeah.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 25:31John Coogan?

  It's the 2008 Playboy.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  And I genuinely did not hear a single Kamala podcast ad, because I only listen to one podcast, which is Technology Brothers and Founders, so two podcasts. But I don't even listen to our podcast, we just record it live, we let our VP Ben rip it, so Founders-

• 25:50John Coogan?

  And we don't do political ads, we do-

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Much more important ads.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We would do an ad if, if a candidate wanted to come on and talk to us about how they're leveraging, you know, fintech platforms like Ramp to run a more efficient campaign. We would do some, some type of integration like that, but not a straight political ad.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  I would also have both candidates on to talk about their watch collections.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  You know, Trump has a fantastic Vacheron Constantin.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  It's beautiful.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Uh, he has several solid gold watches. Kamala has a wonderful watch collection as well.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  She's got some.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  And Obama.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Good taste, actually.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Obama, through the, through his, through his, uh, administration, he wore a secret service watch that was gifted to him by the secret service.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  I just thought that was so cool. Like, I always think he's actually become a watch guy, and I think a lot of it was like, you know, the everyman, like, you don't want to show up. Trump's whole brand is like.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to be a watch guy to have a watch you, you love.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. That it has significance, significance.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  And so, that's where I would want to take the conversation.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I, you know, one of, for, for me, Kamala has, uh, a thing for Hermes, right?

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  And it's sort of under discussed, but she's got, you know, uh, she, she understands, she's America, you know, she's an American politician, but she appreciates fine European luxury goods.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  That's what you want out of a politician, right?

• 27:15John Coogan?

  I mean, the other angle for us, if we were to interview the candidates, would be to talk about, you know, Donald Trump, the tech founder. And this is why it was so big when the All In Podcast had him on.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Because, you know, they, they, they really stick to the unicorn founders.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  They're, I mean, arguably more of a political podcast.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they, but they had the tech founder on.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Like, like, like Donald Trump, the founder of social, Truth Social. Um, well, that's great. Let's move on to some Q and A, but first, I need to tell you about Steinway and Sons. Founded, founded in 1853 by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway in a Manhattan loft, Steinway and Sons' pioneering handcrafted methods are still employed today to ensure uncompromising standards of quality. Steinway is more than a piano. It's the ultimate expression of passion, tradition, and craftsmanship. Whether you're an aspiring pianist, a professional artist, or someone who simply loves the power of music, or, I mean, let's be honest, just somebody who doesn't want to be caught dead with a Yamaha, uh, Steinway is here to inspire every note you play. To discover the craftsmanship of a world-class instrument, visit steinway.com.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  And here's a fun little tip. So, everyone knows that you can visit, like, a Steinway showroom and play pianos, but, um, I bet you didn't know that you can have them ship you a physical template. Of the piano that you're considering buying to lay out in your living room or in your, in your house to see where it fits. I thought that was really, really cool. I'm sure a lot of companies would just go for like the augmented reality thing, but I like that physical, like you can lay out your whole room and it's like a cutout and you can see, okay, this is the one that fits. So anyway, we love Steinway here, but back to the show. Let's do Q and A. This comes from Ben. Oh, steadfast guides, John and Jordy, hear my lament for near eight long years I have labored as captain bound to a vessel

• 29:06John Coogan?

  that will neither sink nor sail, a cruel jest played by fate. The golden dawns of ambition have now given way to stygian twilight, the gleam of hope tarnished and bound in chains of mediocrity. Every course plotted, every wind sought yields only the same tepid tide, a stagnant pool where once roared an ocean of promise. The ledger of my soul bleeds red ink, the currency of resolve spent on visions that crumbled like clay under the strain of grasping hands. Tell me, venerable Jordy and John, is there a course uncharted, a horizon unclaimed that might deliver me from this purgatory? Must I forsake this craft wrought from sinew and sleepless nights to chase an uncertain new voyage? Or do I persist?

• 29:47John Coogan?

  A wraith bound to a dream now turned tomb until the last ember of spirit fades beneath the cold relentless gaze of stagnation. I seek your counsel for the night deepens as my spirit falters. Guide me before the darkness swallows what remains. Yeah. So if you've been building for, you know, eight years, do you, do you stick with it and hope that you'll have a breakout moment, find that product market fit, go exponential? Or do you just try and sell your company, shut it down, get an acqui hire and move on to the next thing? What do you think?

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  This screams burnout to me.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of, you know, flowery language and, and, you know, the, Ben, the guy who asked this, clearly an exceptional writer, but look, the guy's burnt out.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  He's sort of, I think anytime as a founder, if you're

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  If you if you lose that sort of ultimate vision, right? Like, he's getting to a point where he doesn't quite know

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  the path forward. And oftentimes, as a founder, you have multiple paths forward. But if you're sort of there at this point where you can't make decisions one way or another, and you're sort of just sort of stumbling along, that doesn't feel good. That's burnout. You know, this guy could go on a vacation. It's not gonna really do anything, right? Because he's gonna be on vacation

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  thinking about the fact that he's burnt out, right?

• 31:05John Coogan?

  So I actually know this guy. And I was on a call with him. And he came to me with a very, like, so he, just for some context, they've raised like a decent amount of money. They're like, he's paying himself a salary. It's not huge, but he's like paying the bills, right? And he's in kind of stasis, right? And so I, he came to me with this idea of like, oh, I want to make some more money for the company. I'm thinking about like, it was essentially like lead gen, like selling the like, the leads that his company generates and isn't able to monetize and get down the funnel, like sell those off. And I was just like, dude, I don't think you're thinking big enough. I think this is like, not the right path. I think this is like, it'll be

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  Not a path to a venture outcome.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's just, it's just not a path to anything exciting. It's just gonna be mediocre. And so what I was telling was like, instead of like burnout, I think you're right. But instead of going on a vacation, I told him he should just clear his whole calendar and figure out who the top thirty players are in his industry.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  The top three, like, public company CEOs, billionaire investors, like, the big people. And you should just spend your entire month, the next month, just trying to get meetings with them.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Just fly to where they are, trying, like, we saw this with the Truth Social thing. Go to Mar-a-Lago. Figure out like, okay, this guy owns a big company in this town. Go there, meet him, network, and then And then like half the people I was mentioning, he was like, oh yeah, that guy cold called me like three years ago when I was starting, when I was building this company and like, you know, we never went anywhere. I was like, call him back.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  Call him back.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  And, and just try and see what, how you can be helpful because it could be an acqui, it could be an aqua hire. It could be a deal. It could be something else.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  Here, you do that, you do that for a month. If, if that doesn't go anywhere, you call up Jeremy Gaffon, Gaffon and Company.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  And this is exactly the kind of opportunity, you know, we kind of.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Special situation.

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  You showed me like one of the, one of the, um, he forwarded his investor update or something like that. Uh, not a bad company, right?

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Five, six million of ARR, growing thirty, thirty percent a year.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  That is a good business under most evaluations, but it's not a venture scale opportunity anymore.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Fifteen mil.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  And so go to Jeremy, he'll, you know, help, help, you know, figure out all the different sort of stakeholders and, and find a win-win going forward.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, your VCs have different incentives than, than you do, right? You have, you've been in this business for eight years. You still care about the industry. You're an expert in the industry and with the right capital stack and approach to growth, you know, this could, this business could eventually sell for fifty, sixty million dollars.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  Um, and it's going to take a little bit of time to get there, but if you kind of, it really is a, is a kind of a, uh, uh, uh, it's, it's not, it's no longer a venture product, right? So you're sort of treading water and not embracing reality. Um, and going with Gaffon and Companies is a much better option than just shutting the company down.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  And people kind of like know this deep down at the later stage where, you know, if you're doing a hundred million ARR, it's like, okay, private equity exists. Everyone knows Bain, KKR, all these companies that are very obvious and they're probably calling you. Um, or strategic acquisition that could be very valuable, or maybe try and take the company public. But people don't realize that like this, this like kind of zombie stage where you've done series A, series B, but never really hit escape velocity. Those two options still exist. It's probably just something more like an aqua hire and more like a special situations deal with somebody like Jeremy. So anyway, good luck to you, Ben. I hope you figure it out.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  Hard pressed for a month and then give Jeremy a call.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  That's what I would do. Yeah. Try and get the, try and get the aqua hire done. Try and get some weird deal done. Try and kind of just break something loose that's truly new and bold and has the upside. Don't focus anymore. Like you've already built the business to the point where it's, it's

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Your business is working.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  The business works. It's just not there. So you need to either take a really big swing of the fence with like a new partner or do the aqua hire, go mentor under somebody who's really successful, then get back into it or sell the company and restructure the whole cap table with Jeremy or someone. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. So our first post comes from Guy, who is quote tweeting us. He says, "There's two Chad looking guys in a suit discussing Goblin's tweet and my note, I lulled IRL." That's great to hear.

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  That's great to hear. I mean, as much as we're here to deliver hard hitting, you know, business strategy, we're also here to deliver some laughs, right?

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Just because we're dead serious about the show doesn't mean you can't, you know, get, get some real enjoyment out of it. So.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  And here he says, "Please, guys in suits, film yourselves earnestly discussing my tweets too." Well, here it is, Guy.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  Here it is. First of many, I would guess.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you're going to be in the regular rotation. You have a long, a long path in front of you. But yeah, Goblin's tweet, I actually don't remember what Goblin's tweet was, but I imagine it being very deranged and having a lot of jargon.

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  Look, you know, shitposting, shitposting gets shitposted about a lot, but it's serious, right? It creates trend. It sort of influences the zeitgeist and it helps us better understand the world.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, has a, has a deeper meaning sometimes. So cheers, Guy. Get out there, post more, send us your best posts and you might be on the show. Let's go to Max Meyer. Max says, "The Upper Midwest is a 10 out of 10 region. It has everything. Chicago, a proper city, massive metro on an ocean scale lake. West Michigan, a temperate area, warm enough to grow Chardonnay grapes." I didn't know that. "The largest arable land region on earth and the greatest college towns in the USA."

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  We should do a Technology Brothers meetup to do a wine tasting in the Chicago area.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  I think we should host a live show in this Iowa stadium that he's hosting at.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  That'd be amazing.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  A college tour.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  Will it fit 100,000 people?

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the main problem. I mean, maybe if we add extra stands, extra seats in like the infield, we could fit 110, but I mean, we'd have to charge a lot.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be tight.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd have to charge a lot. But I mean, you price gate eventually.

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We'll livestream it. Everybody should be able to go.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Now, Max has been, I think, very vindicated the last few weeks.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  The guy's been loud and proud about certain viewpoints that he has, and I think he's gonna be on the right side of history on this one.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  He was wrong about something, which I completely agreed with him on, and was that he didn't think Biden was gonna drop out. And he bought like, he put like 100 bucks in Polymarket.

• 37:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Biden did either.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, he put like 100 bucks in Polymarket when it was like, you know, Biden did drop out 80%, and he was like, "I think it's fake. It's not gonna happen. It doesn't make sense." And I was like, "Dude, like, good job putting your money where your mouth works." Like, I believe that too, and we were both wrong.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad he didn't put the full Arena balance sheet on it because it's a great publication.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  It is. I think we have a copy here somewhere, but...

• 38:02Jordi Hays?

  It's laying around here somewhere.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, Arena is fantastic. We had it in the first episode. But yeah, I'm really excited for more additions of Arena.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  He should try to, he should potentially explore going to a daily newspaper, right? Because the news cycle moves quickly.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  I like something that you can just sit there and enjoy on the weekend and have, you know, a quarterly or monthly. But yeah, obviously like ramp up as fast as possible.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  It's the kind of thing that you get in the mail and you put it in your briefcase and you say, "I'm gonna bring this on my next vacation."

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, in a few weeks, and I'm gonna just really sit down and enjoy this. Well, I mean, it's a very peaceful setting.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  The design was fantastic. And the sponsors, he's monetizing. I saw a lot of great companies.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  A lot of independent publishers say, "Oh, we're gonna do fully reader-supported." It's like, no. Max understands that the best content in the world... Should be monetized. It should be supported by companies that want to support the publication too. Because companies, you shouldn't ban companies from supporting your publication, right?

• 39:05John Coogan?

  I was looking at the, this week's Economist, ad on the back, Cubitus.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Cubitus.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  It, it, it makes sense.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  We could do a whole deep dive on the Cubitus.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  And if you, and if you read through the Economist, they do a great job balancing the ads. Like, it's not overwhelming, like a lot of, a lot of publications, but there's just enough. And it's just nice. And I look forward to flipping over to the Economist and seeing it. Oh, who do they got this week?

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  The ads are, you know, in the Economist, I would say that 80% of the ads are deeply relevant to me, right? And so I look at it more of like a service, right?

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the same thing for Arena. Every single ad that they ran, I was like, this is cool. And I like this company more because they're supporting Max. So cheers to Max. Thanks for everything that you do. Let's go to Shane Copeland, the founder of Polly Market. What a great story. I, so he posts this picture of him in 2020, four years ago. He says, 2020, running out of money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshift bathroom office. Little did I know Polly Market was going to change the world. And man, what a setup.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  Indicated.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  That is terrible.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Such a bad setup with the empty water bottle. And the mouse is a crazy mouse.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  The mouse on the wicker basket is crazy. And the plastic water bottle. I mean, I think Shane's somebody whose testosterone levels are probably so high.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  He needed to take off the edge.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  That he needed to take off the edge and have some microplastics to bring it down a bit. But still, from the, from the bottom to the top.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  The best part about this is that if you look at the image, it looks like he like got frustrated, punched the wall and like was like, fuck, it's not working.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He probably did. It's the testosterone. That's probably why he was probably drinking it.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  He punched the wall and then was like, okay, I need a plastic bottle. Yeah, exactly. But man, what a, what a run. What a run for Polly Market and just dominant. I think they got like 80%, 90% liquidity on, around the election, just complete parlay outcome.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what? Do we have any idea how much volume they did in the last month?

• 41:09John Coogan?

  I think it was like three billion just on the presidential election.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  And then, and I think, I don't know.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  And now.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  I think it's like sixty forty election versus non.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  And now a bunch of, um.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Other stuff.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of sharp, uh, sharp founders are actually creating markets to be able to short their companies.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  We have a post on that.

• 41:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we'll get.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  I try it. Three point six billion on, uh, wow, that's massive. Yeah, uh. Am I gonna be able to pull it up? It's too hard. There's too many here.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  We'll get to it.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  We'll get to it. We'll come back to that one, but, oh, here it is. Uh, so Avi Schiffman says, uh, never been more bullish on Friend. Please bet against my failure. And he's using manifold, but I'm sure most founders will wind up on Polly Market pretty soon. And it says, will Friend have ten thousand daily active users by November eighth, twenty twenty five? And it's at fifty fifty right now, and you can go and effectively short his company because there's been a lot of trash talking about his company.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  For all the people, for all the people that think he spent too much on his domain.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  Yep, that was a big opt take.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  I think he, um, one word dot coms are back during the AI era. Obviously, Sam Altman saw what Avi did with Friend and decided I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get chat dot com.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  I think I saw family just launched today, some crypto thing.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Do they have their dot com?

• 42:26John Coogan?

  I don't know, but.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Thought they had a dot io.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, maybe they have a dot com.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  They had the, they had the, the X handle.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, which is, you know, at this point.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  It's actually funny that, that, the branding of a one word domain is so strong in AI that I assumed it was an AI company.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  Like, oh, some, some app to manage your family, but I guess it's a crypto thing.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but Avi.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  But I love this. I love this.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Avi is.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  So he's, he's building a, he's building a wearable for AI.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Avi's building an AI wearable that's.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  He went viral with this very controversial video about go, going and living your life in San Francisco, but also talking to your AI friend.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  And having these like kind of Black Mirror-esque.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Interactions. And I think, I think the, the video was tuned perfectly to be not quite just techno optimistic. So it wasn't tone deaf, like, the people that made it and him, they knew it was gonna be controversial.

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  He's a technologist, but he's also, he's not, uh, he sort of has this understanding that technology is not always good or bad.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  Like, sometimes it's sort of this neutral thing where there are gonna be people, if he continues to execute, there's gonna be people that are, become madly in love with their friend dot com.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, wearable companion. There's gonna be people that. Just use it here and there and like it's a part of their life and

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Some people might use it as their personal trainer.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be massively positive for some people. I'm sure it'll be negative for some other people. And that's just the nature of technology, not, uh, it's impossible to say that any technological product is inherently good or inherently bad. Uh, and anytime you get into like binaries, I think it's, um, but overall like this guy is putting it all out on the line. He's doing this sort of build in public approach, but basically saying every single week, I'm going to win, I'm going to win, I'm going to win. Uh, not, not too dissimilar to Steinman, just sort of a different approach.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yep, totally. Love it. Well, good luck. Uh, let's go to Lee Edwards. He says, there hasn't been a better time to move to SF in 15 years. AI is here. In person is back. Tech vibes are off the charts. Local government no longer run by psychotic clowns. Legal to build housing again. Equal marriage and abortion rights are the law. And he's quote tweeting someone that says, time to move to SF then. And I love this. I, I've always been super bullish on the Gary Tan, like anti doom loop, boom loop.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  No, the dynamic.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  Make SF amazing. Like it needs to be.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I was born in Oakland Children's Hospital.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  Family, you know, has been all around the Bay for generations and generations. The Bay had gotten so bad that when I was graduating college, I didn't even consider moving back. And in fact, I remember year over year as a kid, my family, we'd go from Berkeley and we'd go over the bridge into the city. Uh, I remember just going less and less and less as I got older. And it was because it note, we, uh, our, our sort of like family tradition was to go into San Francisco, park our car and spend the entire day just walking around the city, going to our favorite restaurants. And that just happened less and less and less as it got less safe and just less enjoyable to be there. And I just remember as we started to really needing to dodge certain streets and neighborhoods and it just became like, you know, it just became a little bit dark.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so I think for all the technology brothers out there, men and women, it's been this, uh, over the last four years, you've had sort of Teal and Elon align and focus on the presidential election. You've had Gary focused deeply on San Francisco. And having San Francisco, uh, you know, making a lot of positive progress on, on, uh, on things simultaneously having new momentum at the federal level. San Francisco is going to benefit massively from both of those trends. So if you are, you know, we're a media business, right? We're media businessmen. We almost have to be in LA.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  But if you are a young technologist, it's hard to argue against building your company anywhere other than Silicon Valley.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's, uh, the, the SF hate, I feel like was always a little overrated in the sense that most people, by the time they're having problems with San Francisco, they're in a stage of their life where they can move to Marin, Palo Alto, Atherton, Incline Village.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  It's really not an issue. It only becomes an issue once you have children, right?

• 46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, but at that stage, and I think that's probably part of why San Francisco got so weird was because I lived in the Tenderloin at age 22.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  I was six foot eight, 250 pounds. Like, no one bothered me.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  You're 250, brother.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  It was fine. Like, it was, yeah, it was dangerous, but most of the people would be like, in the middle of like,

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  Wrong guy.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  Like, dealing drugs. And they'd be like, no, they wouldn't even mess with me. They'd just be like, do you play basketball? Like, they would be so taken aback by my physical size that it was just not an issue. I remember going to some party in the Tenderloin and there was a girl who was leaving and the girl who lived in the apartment was like, was like, you have to take my taser. Like, and I was like, whoa, that's crazy. Cause I would just, I would just walk around. But it's like total, like, privilege stuff. But then, but then, once you have kids, you're like, okay, I can't live that life anymore. But you can move to Palo Alto or Atherton or Incline Village.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  So here's what I want to see. I want to see billion dollar venture capital asset managers, like General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz and people like Adam Newman. I want them buying up all the housing in SF, right? If you're really long SF.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, I want Gary, I want Gary to be a slumlord almost, right?

• 47:55John Coogan?

  But not, the opposite.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm saying he starts as a slumlord. He buys up all these, you know, studio apartments that are upgrades them, bugs them and uses AI to process all that data so that he understands, oh, this founder hasn't slept in three days.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Get him a term sheet.

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Get him a term sheet immediately, right?

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  No, but I think, I think one way to go long technology is to go long SF.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  That's what Gary's done. And if you want to benefit from that boom, fund the startups.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  But then buy up all the real estate so you sort of recapture some of that value because a lot of founders' paychecks end up just going towards their rent.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's great. Let's go to Will Manitis. Will says, "Many remarkable businesses that could exist don't because venture investors refuse to get creative with structure. If you took PE structuring brain and applied it to early-stage investing, you'd see dramatically larger outcomes in traditional industries ASAP." And then Rune says, "That's exactly how we ended up with the convoluted structure of OpenAI." And then Will says, "Does the nonprofit flip have a comp in PE?" No, right? "I know the structured capped profit units are classic." Interesting.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's the thing. You meet, something that's been happening recently is founders are going out and pitching VCs. And the VCs will tell them, "Is this a multi-billion dollar business? Or is this a, something that could get to 20, 30, 50 million of ARR off of like one or two rounds?" And one of the challenges is a lot of those businesses, if the founders don't want to shoot for the multi-billion dollar outcome, they could take like 2, $3 million and just build a fantastic business.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  But the VCs, in theory, should be able to buy a lot more of the company than they currently are.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 49:48Jordi Hays?

  So they're buying like, if you want to go and, if you're a YC company and the founders just want to build like a fantastic business, or a wonderful business, as some people would refer to it.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  They're still getting 2 on 20 when... I think that if you wanted to take a much more sort of PE style approach, you should be like, "Cool, that's great if you want to do that."

• 50:10John Coogan?

  We're going 50/50.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  We're going 50/50, or we're gonna buy, it's gonna be two on eight.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  You shouldn't give the same terms, but the issue is there's so much competition, there's so many seed funds, so many pre-seed funds. The founders can just go and take two on 20 from some fund that

• 50:26John Coogan?

  Thinks it's gonna be a monopoly, but it won't be.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, right now, the issue is there's just so much competition that you, I don't think you can get these sort of like PE, what Will's talking about is quite a bit more structure.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's thinking about bringing in debt earlier, essentially.

• 50:42Jordi Hays?

  Bringing in debt earlier, you know, there's like general catalyst buying a health system, stuff like that. I think all that stuff is cool, but it's hard to do PE styles early stage because there's just so much, so many different people that will give you that three on 15, or two on 10, or two on 20.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  And I think that competition just drives up prices and ultimately lowers returns.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I see it a lot in, in like deep tech, hard tech, where there's someone running a machine shop, it's probably gonna be a great business, super important, but it might not have, you know, monopoly supply. We talked about the drone motor company.

• 51:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Something like that is like critical to the supply chain for so many companies, but probably not gonna have the margins of

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  Should be a widget company, right?

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, it's like, how do you, how do you get the next generation of founders like excited and incentivized around that? Right now, the pattern is go lie to VCs. It's basically just tell them that you'll be a trillion dollar company.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the issue, the issue is if you take money with this venture narrative, you have to do a lot of things that your customers don't give a shit about.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  If you're making drone motors and your customers are like, "You make great drone motors, I'm gonna keep buying them."

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  And then you're like, "Well, actually, we're drone motors as a service and we're gonna go,

• 51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna go sell our software." And they're like, "Okay, well, I like you because you make good, you make good drone motors and I want more of those." It's funny, because the classic business school case study is like, XYZ company makes XYZ widget and they, they do X amount of EBITDA. And like, how would you lever it up to make sure that they, you know, can maintain profitability?

• 52:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, I think

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  I think, yeah, what Will's getting at is maybe there's more of these sort of businesses that look like Gafon and Co. that just take a unique lens on venture, which is to say, we're focused on returns. We're willing to make investments to generate, that we think can generate returns that fit this profile.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Because in PE, there's a lot of PE funds that are, that are like, we don't want a 30X at all. We don't care. We just want these sort of base hits over and over and over. And that's what we've told our LPs. So I think that what I was talking to originally about, there's so many different seed funds that will give you two on 12.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  Right? If you come in with a slightly different approach, there's opportunities there. If you're just thinking about it from the lens of, we care about returns first and foremost. And I think even Bryce from NDVC is taking this approach. He had created a really structured product historically with NDVC, but now he's just a $50 million fund that's saying, we're looking for this unique type of founder that just wants to build a great business. And, you know, worst case scenario, you build a good business. Best case scenario, you sort of build this generational company and we'll make money either way.

• 53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So maybe more permanent capital, maybe more debt financing, less of like a 10-year with a couple of year extension timeline. And then potentially a different, a different target around zeros. Like, a lot of early-stage VCs are like, yeah, 90% of the portfolio is going to go to zero. A lot of the great growth funds right now have a no zeros mandate. Like, they won't invest in something if there's any risk that it goes to zero. And then they're underwriting against like a 20% IRR. And I wonder what that would look like if you said, I'm an early-stage investor, but I do different structured deals, but my hurdle rate for zeros, like, less than 50% of my companies will go to zero.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  As opposed to 90%, because I'm unicorn hunting. Very different.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe that looks like leveraging.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it became so sexy. It was like, you know, if you can be the first investor in Uber, and the rest of your portfolio is trash, like, that doesn't matter because you got the stamp of like, you got into the.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that incentivizes YOLO-ing, where people are like, eh, this team is like, okay, but it's a good category. We want exposure to this. Like, what's, the, the,

• 54:54Jordi Hays?

  The sort of approach within venture world and angel investing of, I'm only partway convicted in this business, I'm still gonna invest, which I've, across like 50 angel bets, I've done that before where I'm like, I see some issues with this business, but I like the founder, so I'll do it. Or the team is not, is maybe like a seven out of 10, but like the product's a 10 out of 10, let's do it anyways. And I think that, yeah, the venture investors that are like, no, we're gonna be, because the private equity world is just much more serious in the way that they evaluate companies, right?

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, they bring a seriousness to the asset class that is, for many funds, missing, right?

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Let's go to Bayslord. Bayslord says, daily reminder that at least one of your needs to, at least one of you needs to start an IQ enhancement company as soon as possible.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  And my, my take is, it's already been done.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Eight years ahead of you, buddy.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  10 points.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Eight years ahead of you.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  10 points.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we know about the performance enhancing drugs for IQ. Caffeine, nicotine, some sleep, some exercise, high testosterone.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  No, it's funny because the original Lucy pitch was smart nicotine.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Which, intelligent nicotine, right? But yeah, I think it can take different forms. I think that, I think there's a big business to be made, what Bays is talking about, selling to technology workers to say like, we're gonna take a cohesive look at how to increase your IQ.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, Brian Johnson was talking about this to me.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  And measure it.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  He was saying that like, people care a little bit about their, their health and longevity, but it's very abstract. But if you can tell them that you get on this diet and you will be performing better at work immediately, that has a much, much more acute ROI, and so you can kind of underwrite the, the hassle of doing the diet. And I think there'll probably be more of that. I think, I think, I'm not sure, Brian might be able to pivot into like becoming, like the Brian Johnson of the mind might just be Brian Johnson. But it also might be someone new, who's focused purely on that. Instead of longevity, or instead of health, or instead of athletic ability.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I would invest in that business, a business that basically says like, we're gonna test your IQ and then we're gonna continue to test it quarterly and we're gonna do

• 57:16John Coogan?

  And figure out all the different things.

• 57:18Jordi Hays?

  Whether it's health supplementation.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Because of the way the FDA regulates these products, it's very hard for us. Like, we can't put caffeine in our gum that has nicotine in it. You can't mix actives, but if you're more of like a health clinic, you could actually prescribe caffeine, nicotine differently. You could like move through these things and actually take more of like a holistic view. In the same way that a lot of those men's health clinics look at your testosterone markers, your biomarkers.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  They look at your sleep and your diet.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. Something like that for, for intelligence and, and performance in the workplace does seem very, very valuable if somebody can pull it off. But it's a hard business and I don't necessarily think it's power law. I think it might be more of like, you know, it's a, it's a consultancy. It's a clinic. There's, Andrew Hurd does this at Faunt Bio, you know him?

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  And again, his is a little bit more just general health focused. It'd be interesting to see one of those branded purely as performance in the workplace.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Let's go to Gabriel. Do you know this guy? He's in Australia. He's the man.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't. I think I've fallen.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Obsessed with bodybuilding.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Great.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Just great dude. Never met him in person, but all time poster.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  So he says, "I often stumble across an internet phrase I don't understand that has a natural humorous vibe or cadence. Longhouse, many such cases, etc. An anime avatar just told me to get in the crystal. It's a beautiful crystal. We'll drop that at the office and see how it goes."

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  This was great at, at Hereticon. We were in a conversation, there was maybe six or seven people, and I think that David Senra was only, he's like, he's like not on, he's not online, right? He's in books.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  In books.

• 58:57Jordi Hays?

  He's focused. He's either recording the podcast, he's reading, or he's with his family. And so going to one of the most online, offline events.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Or, or like networking with like 60 year old billionaires.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  It was funny because I'd have to be like, I'd have to be like, yeah, that's, that's what, um, basically like the longhouse means like.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  And he's like, oh, okay, okay. Yeah.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Well, that's why we're doing this podcast. To learn all the brain rot terms through this. This is really the bridge, in the way that he's the bridge.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Every, every time a brain rot term or word breaks through to, uh, popular culture, there's already six or seven new brain rot terms that are replacing it on the timeline. And so we want to surface those, right?

• 59:37John Coogan?

  Like, like the, the traditional like Gen Z brain rot is like skibitty toilet, Ohio.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  The Rizler.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  The Rizler. But then tech has its own brain rot terms, like, like word cell.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  And it actually can be, if you know, if you know those, those are like buttons that you can press in a pitch with a VC. Whereas if you're saying the right brain rot terms, it signals in-group, right? So even if you weren't a PM at Uber or you didn't go to Stanford,

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  you can still signal that you're a part of that.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Extremely online. I actually don't know what getting the crystal, it's a beautiful crystal.

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  Do you know what that means?

• 1:00:10Jordi Hays?

  So I think we should, I don't know what that one means yet.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Okay, we gotta figure that out.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  We gotta figure that out.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Gabriel, I want you to write in, tell us the truth. What does it mean?

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  What does it mean?

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Break it down for us.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  No, but I think-

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  In the replies to this video, I want an explanation.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  There's people that, that sort of index YC companies. There's people that, a buddy of mine, Joey, is a Thiel fellow. And he's got like a whole, you know, fund that's kind of focused on just backing Thiel fellows.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is super smart. Uh, I think we should create the poster index, which is a fund that's just dedicated.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  It's a brain rot.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  If you can post bangers, it is a proxy for your ability to, uh, get attention, which can drive customers and, and capital and all these things. So the poster index-

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  There is a bit of a meme that it's like, oh, if a CEO is like posting too much, the company must be doing poorly.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Dude, so here's, here's the thing. So here's the thing. I think Augustus

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  is the, is, is every other CEO that wants to be a poster CEO should study him.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Because all he's coming, he's coming out of the woodwork once every couple of days. Banger. Back to business.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Back to business, right? And so there's this like-

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  If I see, if I see somebody's-

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  Posting like, oh, there's like this, there's this meme that's going viral and everyone has their take on it. And so you like transform it into like, well, what if the Trump thing was about DocuSign? Like, and you're just getting a thousand likes, but it has nothing to do with your business. And you're just like trying to get like Twitter clout. Like, that's not what we're talking about here.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think that, uh, if I see a portfolio company CEO's name, uh, four times in the timeline per day, and they're not selling to venture-backed startups.

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  Risky.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Risky.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  Risky.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  It's a big, it's kind of a, a bit of a red flag.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  There's a, there's a little bit of a Balmer Peak on the, on the posting.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Let's go to John Fio. Oh, this one's rough. So Adam Rankin posts, "I promoted my GF." And she's showing an engagement ring, and so they're getting married. So congratulations to you, Adam. But Theo chimes in with something not controversial at all and says, "We got a pool, all the couples that announce their marriage and/or child in the form of a startup business joke, and study them very closely over the next 50 years and publish the report. We all deserve to know how these ended up."

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't think you need 50 years. I think you probably need, I think you need 10 after somebody's crossed the sort of decade.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  I think he's underweighting like norminess. Like, there's so much of this that works out great.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Is something about the Warp team attracts, and I love, I love Ayush, but it attracts dunking.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it does. They get dunked on a lot.

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  The dunk rate is crazy. They almost...

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  It's good for engagement.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  One of their head of growth, I think, said he was potentially gonna go anon.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was just too much dunking.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Too much dunking. But, but yeah, I don't, I don't know. I think there's, there's, you know, they make, they make Warp, where Adam works, makes payroll software for businesses. If he's trying to sell to more startups, one way to do that would be announcing...

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  Make a startup joke.

• 1:03:14Jordi Hays?

  You want to make people feel connected to you, bring your marriage into the workplace, and make a startup joke.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  I think Theo might be undermonetizing here. He needs to...

• 1:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I think Theo, I would, I would study, I would, if Theo wanted to start a research group that just studied things like this, I would donate to it.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  That would be interesting, kind of a Nat Friedman style.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly, public good.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  I agree that there's something interesting there, but again, you know, it's marketing, bro. He's gotta, gotta pay the bills one way or the other. Let's go to Enchilada's Surfboard. It says, "90% of defense tech investors couldn't tell you the difference between COTS and GOTS if their vacation homes depended on it." Do you know these terms? C-O-T-S and G-O-T-S?

• 1:04:00Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  So I dug into this. It's commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf? And in some like early annual joke...

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a dual... Yeah, I think a big, a big thing with defense, defense tech.

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  Clearly, it's actually true.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so like, yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  Like, no one knows this stuff.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  But like, the person that runs this is like an early and early old person. And it was like some early and early old joke that like turned into this like.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's the, I guess to simplify it, so, um, uh, a lot of defense tech investors, when they're evaluating a business or they, they're kind of deciding if it has sort of dual use applications, like, I, uh, I'm an advisor to a company called Aon, which makes tactical missile systems. And I made that bet because Naweed and Joe, the founders are just phenomenal. They've made like 10 years worth of progress in about a year. And so I don't consider myself a defense tech investor, but, uh, one thing that was very obvious with, with, uh, with their business is there's no dual use, right? It's not like they're going to sell some missiles to the sort of retail market or

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  commercial market and then it's, it's all in on the USG, right?

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  If they don't get the USG.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  As a customer, uh, long-term, the business isn't viable because then they can't even go international, right? Like, they need to win that, um, customer first. And so, uh, whereas deterrence, deterrence, uh, has like a bunch of commercial customers where it's a viable business even without partnering with USG.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Like securing an oil field or something, right?

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Got it, yeah. I, I need to dig into more of this, but I think the Cots versus Gotts thing is, is also related to Andorol's early like sensor tower development. Do you remember this? Like, they, they built this sensor tower and they were using literally like off-the-shelf gaming Nvidia GPUs to run open source, like, computer vision algorithms, like, uh, ImageNet. And so it was very much like hacked together from literally stuff you could buy at like a Best Buy.

• 1:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  But they created a government product from commercial off-the-shelf as opposed to the way a lot of the previous primes would do it where it's like, okay, well, like, does it run Windows XP? Like, we have to use the stuff that's government off-the-shelf and that creates a lot. I think that's.

• 1:06:15Jordi Hays?

  That's a component thing.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's more about like, do you have this attitude of like? Can you just go to Home Depot and get the screw that you need? Or do you need to acquire like the $150,000 bag of screws from Boeing?

• 1:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, didn't didn't Andor do this with their latest suicide drone?

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Where I think they were using, they had to use.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  I hope they call it that.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Different branding.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Jordi Hays?

  FPV drone, whatever you want to call it.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Interceptor, tactical recon.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  It's a suicide, it's a kamikaze drone. It literally blows up as it gets to the target. But no, I think they ended up having to use Chinese components.

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, some of them.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Because.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, some of them are just not available.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  They don't make them here, but obviously.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  I was talking to Trey about this, like, apparently, there's, there's only one tin smelting, like, organization in the United States, and they are only able to supply like, you know, 5% of the tin. And so it's like, if you're in, if you're in the business of like, okay, we need tin for something. It's like, good luck cleaning up your supply chain. Just wait 20 years for this one guy to like grow his business.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there's a whole, there should be a whole cottage industry of people that are looking at all these deep tech, hard tech, defense tech companies getting funded.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:27Jordi Hays?

  And being like, I'm gonna go build PE style businesses to service these, like, basically like manufacturing business, businesses, sourcing businesses.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  But I think a big part of this is also just like breaking down the problem is something that's more manageable by like a startup engineering team. I talked to a guy who worked on the Blue Origin rocket engine versus, and was comparing it to the, the Merlin engine, designed by Tom Mueller at SpaceX. And the, one of the things that allowed SpaceX to iterate so quickly was that the, so when you see Starship go up, you see like the 36 engines, I think that's how many, or like a bunch of engines. It's a bunch of smaller engines. Every one of those engines, I think at one point, I don't know if it's true now, but like, could fit in a pickup truck, in like the back of a pickup truck.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  Whereas the bigger engines, you need a crane. And so all of a sudden, it's like the safety requirements, like just the risk, the level of equipment, like anybody can drive a pickup truck. So if you need to take your piece of equipment. And so there's this question of like, how can you decompose something that is a larger capability, like an F-35 into a bunch of suicide drones? Well, the, the suicide drones are gonna be able to be, okay, the pieces are smaller. You don't need cranes for everything. When you start doing these mega projects, things really, really slow down. And so there's a, it seems like there's a lot of arbitrage right now and just. Deep tech, hard tech startups, taking something really huge and then decomposing it into something that's more manageable and like a

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  This is even, even Valer's trying to do, just shrink down the size, right?

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Yep, the nuclear reactor, yep, exactly. And, uh, yeah, the guy I was talking to was actually building Fusion, uh, Avalanche, and, and it's, it's, it's small enough to fit in a truck. And so he's just like, super pilled on that and like, really wants to build that. Anyway, let's go to Luke Metro, Andorol employee, love this guy. Uh, we need a li- God damn it, completely unrelated to business. Uh, we need a liberal Joe Roga. He literally interrupted Peter Thiel's speech about wokeness to talk about how the pyramids were actually X-ray power plants. What are you people talking about?

• 1:09:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, Joe Rogan is liberal.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  And he's talked about that.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he endorsed Trump.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Also, I think this just speaks to the fact that Rogan's like a one of one type of person. Like, he's, he's, he's a, he's like a comedian that can pull like a huge group of people. Uh, yeah, he, he's a tinfoil hat guy who loves aliens.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  I'd tip my hat to you, sir.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  Uh, he's very conspiratorial, but then also, uh, you know, loves UFC. And he, he's kind of combined all these different disciplines. And, uh, you can't just, like, you can't just copy the Joe Rogan experience by recording for three hours.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Here's a conspiracy. Here's a conspiracy. So Rogan is a liberal.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  He's voted Democrat, like, his entire life. He said this recently. Um, and Trump is a Republican, but Joe Rogan endorsed Trump.

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:23Jordi Hays?

  And what is the link between Trump and, uh, Rogan? UFC.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan is one of the top commentators.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Jordi Hays?

  One of the top commentators for the UFC.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Trump is arguably the biggest fan of the UFC, right? He'll, he'll leave the campaign trail to go be at a fight. Uh, and so maybe that, that's something there where Joe Rogan said, I'm gonna put my politics aside and I'm going to back Trump because it'll, it'll increase the UFC's like notoriety and platform and put it on the map. Cause I think that, uh, by the end of the next four years, UFC will be, uh, baseball will have to have sort of stepped aside. No longer America's pastime. America's pastime is combat and combat sports.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Well, then maybe if you want, maybe there's some precursors to building a- Liberal Joe Rogan, you need a liberal UFC.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  And you need a liberal comedy circuit.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so maybe the angle, so the next four years, the Dems go heavy into UFC, AOC is sitting in the front row.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Or something different, bare knuckle. Maybe they become the bare knuckle party.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  Or Karjitsu, have you seen Karjitsu?

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  That's good, too.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  Where they fight in the car, that's good, or pillow fighting.

• 1:11:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Or any of slap boxing, they could do any of those, but they need to carve out one of the fighting sports.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think just we need it.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  And then the liberal Joe Rogan will emerge.

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  We need a liberal, you know, we need a young Bernie who emerges through bare knuckle boxing.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. That is probably the next Bernie, it's not going to come from some small town in Vermont.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  It'll come from.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  The next Bernie will be a slap boxer.

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  Let's go to Sahil Bloom. He says, "A harsh truth, I wish I could tell my younger self. There is no such thing as later. The journey to success is filled with laters. I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll find more time for my health later. I have more freedom later. I'll enjoy myself later. The brutal reality, later never comes. It's just another word for never. Most of the things you say you'll do later won't be possible by the time you're able to do them. The kids won't be younger later. Either start designing your life now, or live life with regret later."

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay, here's a good example.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, I made my two and a half year old son

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:34Jordi Hays?

  work the entire day doing deliveries of Aurora Systems to high profile celebrities around LA. Uh, you know, uh, you know, uh, to, to sort of, uh, support the launch. And, you know, this was a Sunday, a lot of people aren't, aren't working on Sundays. And I realized he's never going to be, be this young again and be able to grind this hard again. Like, if I don't, if I don't, like, allow him to do this, he's never going to forgive me. He's going to be asking me when he's 12, "Dad, 10 years ago, like, why did you let me chill on the weekends, right? Like, why wasn't I grinding? Why wasn't I figuring out?" Uh, you know, he can't type on a computer yet,

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  but he can lift one of these systems

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:13:20Jordi Hays?

  and carry it up a driveway and drop it off and ring the doorbell, right?

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, I think the lesson here is, is however old your kids are, you probably need to get them grinding harder and like yesterday, basically.

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that's maybe what this post missed, you know, it says, "I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll find more time for my health later." What about levering up?

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  You should be levering up now, today.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  The returns you're generating, the returns you're generating today

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  are because you levered up a month ago.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  You should be taking the most risky bets today.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Not later.

• 1:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll find a hundred Xer later.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  All right.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Not gonna happen. Uh, let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  We love him. Uh, he says paid advertising doesn't build brand. And then the crazy guy, I love this image. I don't think this is a real emoji, but it's so good.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, so Ridge was a company that historically would never spend money on anything that, that wasn't directly generating revenue, right?

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  So, so they were, and so Sean has basically been on this

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Jordi Hays?

  for approaching a decade.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:33Jordi Hays?

  And has absolutely worked for them.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  While all these, while, you know, Allbirds was doing brand marketing and these other D to C brands were doing brand.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  Pop up stores.

• 1:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, pop up stores, like big celebrity endorsements.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Big brand refreshes, celebrity endorsements.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  So Ridge basically had spent probably $250 million on Meta ads before they ever did a collaboration with like MK, HBD.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  Right?

• 1:14:57Jordi Hays?

  So that's brand marketing.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Now they do some brand marketing in the form of, of sort of these like massive giveaways and they, they maybe do like some of it more now. But they're the, the reason that this tweet holds weight and Sean is the, the perfect uh, example of delivering, um, delivering like real, uh, business lessons in the form of shitposts.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  But the reason this holds weight is the, is the Ridge brand is, is stronger today than almost any D to C brand in their, in their, um, in their, in their category or cohort of like when they were sort of coming of age, so.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  And, and you know what's interesting is that like they, these posts from both Sean and Connor

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  build their brand so much.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Like I now, I now associate Ridge with

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  Incredible performance marketing.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  And I, and now I want to pull out a Ridge Wallet just to let everyone know.

• 1:15:55Jordi Hays?

  I care about ads.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  I care about ads. I'm not kidding. Like, I, I, I respect performance and I respect.

• 1:16:03Jordi Hays?

  Marketing efficiency.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, marketing efficiency.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  Because it is a skill.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Is, is if, when Ridge, so Ridge was one of the companies to, to really focus on, you know, direct response creator ads on YouTube.

• 1:16:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  And I helped them do this.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, back in the day. And when, when Ridge works with an influencer that says like, hey, guys, today's sponsor is Ridge.

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:24Jordi Hays?

  I use the Ridge when I'm out fishing, but it also is great on date night.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Like, use my code.

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  In the description. That obviously builds a brand, right?

• 1:16:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  They're aligning with a content creator.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  And you see who they're advertising with and who they aren't.

• 1:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  And so the MKBHD stuff, that tells you, like, MKBHD's whole thing is like, super high production value, super cinematic, like, really thoughtful analysis of these consumer goods.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  And so being in that milieu is much more valuable than someone else that they could advertise on. Like, it's just, they, they, they've cultivated, like, what does your brand stand for? Like, you could literally, if you're thinking about building your brand, just put together a mood board of popular influencers. And then just go and sponsor them, and then that will be your brand.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  And it's like, what do you stand for?

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Ridge has probably a million guys out there that love Ridge.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Because Theo Von loves Ridge.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Theo Von, uh, is prob, you know, has for the last, like, whatever, is, is since, uh, Sean initially did the deal with him.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  He's probably objectively more of a wallet salesman than a comedian, right? Like, he's one of the top wallet salesmen in the world. Yeah, he can go and sell out comedy clubs.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  But he's selling wallets at a higher velocity.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Than anyone else.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  I mean, it's the same thing with Red Bull. Like, you look at, like, Max Verstappen and everything that Max Verstappen stands for with, like, this, like, relentless ambition.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Crazy energy.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Crazy energy.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  And, and I just get, like, that's what Red Bull's brand is now because of that. And so, yeah, this, this idea, yeah, very, very valuable and, and certainly underrated.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Let's go to Raul, zero interest rates. He says, "The first day in Williamsburg and he sees a spray painted sign on the concrete for an ad for Sonya AI therapy. Listens better than your ex. At Talk to Sonya and a call to action for the App Store." What do you think about this IRL advertising? Is this legal?

• 1:18:19Jordi Hays?

  So, so I-

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Like, why are we not, is there a company that will just go spray your spray paint everywhere?

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of like, they don't advertise, because it's very, I think it's illegal. Like, it's basically like vandalism.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's vandalism.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't, um-

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  But you could go viral like this. I mean, this got 40K views, that's probably more than people just walking by.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the play is to probably do that once, in your backyard.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  And then have a friend post it, and have it be interesting and weird. It won't go viral if it's just something boring, like whatever was under here before.

• 1:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think this is, uh, in general, I'm not a fan of this type of marketing, because I think it makes the world more, you know, nobody likes ads more than me, except maybe you, right? So, we love ads, but in general, I'm not a fan of vandalizing property. We did a little bit of this at Party Round, like, but it was more like using an existing graffiti wall-

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  And putting an ad on that, which is designated as a place for graffiti.

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:14Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, I think there's more-

• 1:19:20Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I, I think that ad space that's underutilized is the planes circling SF. Like, I'd like to start a Technology Brothers advertising division that just, that has planes every single day flying over SF-

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that you can sponsor, which is like, for Sonya, it might be like, "You get no women, talk to Sonya," right? And if that was flying, if you're like, a Meta PM and you walk out and you look up from your, um, what's that app that they, that they all use, that the, um, the like-

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  Blind?

• 1:19:52Jordi Hays?

  Blind. You look up from Blind, and it's like, "You get no women, talk to Sonya." That's like, probably, and there's your QR code, you can zoom in and scan.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm, I'm more a fan of that place.

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  I do remember, uh, what was it, back in like, 2018-ish, maybe? Uh, there was this, like, when Bird, the scooters came out in Lime, and, and it seemed like tech just realized, like- The sidewalk is free real estate, I guess, and you can just put stuff there.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Dude, so here's a crazy story. So I was working with a, um, with a startup back then, uh, that I just moved to LA. And I was basically like, you don't need to pay me. I just want to help out. Uh, I'll do it for equity. And we started doing these sort of like marketing stunt things. Uh, and it was a, it was a skincare company. And so I had the idea to go put hotel like door hangers. And I went and put them in Santa Monica. I put them on like 500 bird scooters in a day. And within the same day, we got a, like a note from the, the, uh, chief, uh, uh, legal counsel or whatever from Bird being, it wasn't quite a cease and desist, but it was like, stop right now.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  It's so funny because like you're doing the bird thing to them.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. It was perfect.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Yeah. When that was happening, I was like, wait, so it's just free real estate. If you have wheels, like, can I just set up like a corner store on the sidewalk? If it has wheels under it, can I set up a gym or whatever I want? Like, is there any business that you can't stop? It was, it was a wild, wild time. Um, and I think most cities wound up developing regulations around them.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm surprised there wasn't like a bird for snack bars.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Like people that are just like, here's like a vending machine. Like, I'm just going to put it right here.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  Let's go to Aaron Slodov. He says.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  It's still, it's still one thing. It's still under discussed that I think birds, birds like real downfall started with that social media account that was like death to birds or forget what it was called.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  And that was some of the best entertainment of the era.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:21:51Jordi Hays?

  If you were a technology brother, because you could go see a bird get thrown off like an eight story skyscraper.

• 1:21:57John Coogan?

  And that's just like, that speaks to like the, the childish teenage boy in everyone. It was so entertaining. I remember following that. Yeah, that was really, really bad. They should have sent the cease and desist to them. I'm sure they did, but it didn't work.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  Cause it basically just encouraged everybody to like destroy the thing.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, go viral. Like just do stuff. And it just like made it feel like, and it was so destructive, like destroy the environment, so messy. And yeah, they were, they were destroying cars. If you run over them, it was a mess. Um, I was really happy when they banned them in my town. But also like weird memetic stuff. You know that the founder was also named Travis and he was a former Uber guy? So it's one of those things where it's like, well, of course you back traverse from Uber.

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, Travis from Uber.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It was a wild time. So Aaron Slodov says, creator economy should be re-appropriated for manufacturing TBH. Yeah, I like this. This is good because it's like you're creating actual things instead of just content, but also don't appreciate the anti-content slander, bro. This is a real job.

• 1:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, Aaron is a content creator. He probably gets pretty decent X payouts.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  He's a content creator and he's a manufacturer.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  And he wrote, he wrote that big piece for Pirate Wires, the Industrialist Manifesto, the techno, techno-industrialist manifesto. I wanted him to punch it up and give it a more controversial name, like, you know, B2B SaaS is dead or something like that.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  Get people angry, but I couldn't get that across the finish line, but very, very good piece, very long. Recommend you go read it.

• 1:23:26Jordi Hays?

  We need content creators out there creating courses that say, here's how to make a million dollars in manufacturing.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  In manufacturing, like, yeah, buy a CNC.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Actually, you know, stop the Shopify, drop shipping, your TikTok shop, TikTok shop stuff.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Andrew Tate's just teaching you how to use a lathe.

• 1:23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, start a small-scale manufacturing business in your hometown.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  That is the way. We need to change the culture.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Apprentice under some 75-year-old guy who's been making, you know, hubcaps for the last 50 years.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, all those guys are gonna end up shutting their business down because they do like, they do like $300,000 a year in profit is not really viable for the E.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  That's enough to pay, that's enough to pay the monthly fee on a Lambo.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  So you could literally be the hustle porn guy, go and do that and actually wind up with a Lambo.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Grow a little bit.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Just, just don't bring in DocuSign.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Just, uh, just run, run.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Run lean, run lean. Those DocuSign contracts, phew, they can get up into the eight figures real quick.

• 1:24:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, let's go to Patrick Blumenthal. He says, uh.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  My boy.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Loud, loud nightclub. So what do you do? Drone targeting mostly. Oh, loan marketing? Do you like it? Well, it depends on the coverage area. Why? Well, most guys I know who are in finance don't really like it. It's the American Psycho scene.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Uh, this guy's just a meme machine. He's like, I don't know how he puts out so much of this stuff. Everything's hand photoshopped. He has no one on his team. He's just like content mastermind.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's a venture capitalist. Like he needs to, like he needs to be the media.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  He's supposed, but I mean, the dude's been to Ukraine like a bunch. Have you talked about this?

• 1:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I was on Pirate Wires with him, uh, a while back and it's pretty crazy.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  We did, uh, we, we hit the range together a couple of months back.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah? Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. He was telling me about that, I think.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He had to train up before his last, his last mission.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  But yeah, American Psycho is just like a, an endless pit of memes. That's just like, it really speaks to people.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One of the most, uh, I used to not really understand when my parents would be like, oh, this movie's a cult classic.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:30Jordi Hays?

  But now you understand like when we show our kids Borat when they turn eight, like we're gonna be like, it's a cult classic, like.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is interesting. I wonder, uh, if there's something deeper here about like the defense tech guys being like the modern Patrick Bateman. Um, it still doesn't feel that like, did you know that, uh, Christian Bale in American Psycho was like something like 25 years old? Ben, you should look this up. Um.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  He was 25 when he filmed that?

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Definitely in his twenties and it's crazy because he's like, he's playing, it's almost like he's playing someone older. Like I feel like.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Totally. He's playing like a late thirties.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  That seems right. Cause he's like a, he was 25 in the movie. So Patrick Bateman, the character has to be over 25 just based on the track. Unless in the nineties, you could make VP at 25. Is that possible? I know the youngest MD at Goldman Sachs ever made.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  But he's not.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Was in his, in his twenties. The character's 27? Wow. That's wild. So that might have been like a little embellishment by Bret Easton Ellis.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  No, it's funny because last, last night I had this wild moment where I pulled up to the gate in my neighborhood and the security guy goes, Jordy, like my son just passed the bar. And I was like, that's amazing. And my second question was, dude, how old are you? I thought you, I thought you were my age. I seriously thought he was exactly my age. I'd never asked. And he's like, dude, I'm 46.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  And he's like, yeah, I just had kids young or whatever.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I feel like something about that sort of like 90s, early 2000s era movies, like all the, the actors and actresses.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Wall Street was definitely this idea that you could go to Wall Street and finance in New York and in your twenties, make it to the top. And that's 100% true in Silicon Valley and tech even today.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  But I don't think it's been true in Manhattan finance for decades.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  No, because you have over time, you need to create a ladder to keep people in their place.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I know like a few guys that went and started funds pretty early, like hedge funds, and they trade public stocks.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  But you still want to go work at a fund first.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Get that on your resume.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  All of them are in their 30s by the time they do that. But, um, man, what a wild time. It would have been, it would have been fun. If they, if, if Wall Street had been able to like, keep that culture of like, just such a meritocracy that yes, a 25 year old can be a VP or an MD or whatever.

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  Like, I think it'd be a lot cooler. And I think a lot of people would be going into it. Like, it would be much, much hotter.

• 1:28:05Jordi Hays?

  Make finance great again.

• 1:28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, just more meritocratic, I guess. But a lot of these, a lot of these firms have like calcified to the point where they're like, they're not.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because these guys, if you're, if you're 28 and you want to make $50 million now.

• 1:28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  You raise a $500 million fund with your absolute boy and you take, you know, that's how, that's the only way to do it. You can't just go do the right deals because the fees will get eaten away by the, the more senior partners.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, tricky. Oh, well, we'll bring it back. So Nate O'Brien says, "Why would I pay an American $100,000 a year when I can hire someone just as qualified in Argentina for a quarter of the price?"

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Nate's smart, but when I, and I think this is generally a good take, I think more people need to be looking at-

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Say, "Why not both?"

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why not both? I think that my, the, my counterpoint to this is that I like working with Americans, like both recent immigrants, but also just-

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  In person, too.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  In person.

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  In person is valuable.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Working in person is great. I like, uh, I, I think that it's, it's, there's nothing that beats even what we have right now, right? Which is you, me, and our Vice President Ben in the same room-

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  -in an office, uh, making, you know, a, a wonderful media business, right? You can't-

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  Generational.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  Generational, you know, wonderful media business, very profitable. You can't sort of like re, you know, there's no amount of like awesome virtual employees that we could have that could recreate this feeling. Like, you can't recreate it in Slack. So, I just think, um, part of the reason to pay a premium is so that you can all be in the same room together.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  And I think if you're operating a remote structure, then you really have to start questioning.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know what? The cure for male loneliness, it's paying $100,000 to an American.

• 1:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  To just hang out here.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  They have to be your friend.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  And then they just have to be-

• 1:30:11Jordi Hays?

  Hey, you wanna grab lunch?

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  You have to be hanging out.

• 1:30:13Jordi Hays?

  You gotta.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. It, it's worth it. It's worth it.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  But I do think there's gonna be this, there, there will be this sort of cultural-

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  -movement over the next 20 years where people are like, you know, at first it was "Buy American."

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Then now it'll be like, "Hire American." Like, "Keep those jobs here."

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, I mean, yeah, I mean, realistically, you need, you need both, but, um, yeah, I, I like that take. That's good. Cheers to-

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  Neat. Back to Will. Will says work dinners should be illegal. They rob you from your family. You pretend to enjoy drinking with strangers, get home late and feel horrible the next day. Work breakfasts are aristocratic. Separate lazy boys from, from early to rise men. Feel great when you get to work, early, easily expensible. It's a great take. Great take.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Great take. Uh, I do feel like that about most. The only time you should be having a work dinner is if you're closing a deal.

• 1:31:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Like funds wired, everything's.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Done.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  It's a closing dinner.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Celebratory, right?

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Doing a work, uh, work dinner.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Just to get to know someone is weird.

• 1:31:21Jordi Hays?

  To get to know somebody is a waste of time. I always suggest lunch.

• 1:31:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't really like doing coffees that much because I, I know the schedule I want to have caffeine on and I don't want to like plan meetings around that.

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is my hot take against the nine nine six thing. I'm all for working a hundred hours a week, but

• 1:31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  I think you should work six, six, six on those. That's a little demonic, but, uh, I think you should not be working nine AM to nine PM. You should be working six AM or five AM to five PM. Get home, have dinner with the family because then if you wake up at five, you can hit the gym. You can go to a work breakfast. You can have a full eight hours in the office.

• 1:31:59Jordi Hays?

  We do.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  And then you can get home with the family, have dinner and play, watch movies, do all the things that you want to do with your family.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  The, that early morning, right before nine AM, it's really hard to have like true engagement with the family in the way that you can at dinner.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  You can go out to dinner, you can cook. There's a lot of more.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  We do the Hormozzi, you know, method, which is.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Work first, family second.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  No, nine, no, nine, five, seven.

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Nine to five, seven days a week.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:26Jordi Hays?

  So you can have the morning moment with your kids. You can have dinner, but you're, you're doing eight hours a day every single day, which is much better than five days a week, doing 12, you know, hours a day. You actually get more done doing the nine, five, seven.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  Yep. I like that. They should ban work dinners. Easily doable on, on ramp. Just ban any.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  No expensing after five PM.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  And unlimited before. Hopefully it gets implemented. Let's go to Ryan. I think it's pronounced Macintosh. Is that right?

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  Spelled a little bit different than McIntosh.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  But Ryan says the DocuSign all hands and posts the Dune photo, which I love.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty seemingly pretty accurate. How do they, what do we, somebody needs to-

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  I've literally made this exact same joke about the A16Z all hands.

• 1:33:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  With a massive festival.

• 1:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I pitched the full partnership. It's-

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  It's huge. They barely fit in the boardroom.

• 1:33:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, but um-

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  But man, the DocuSign thing, like 5K likes. It's just like constant banger. Everyone knows-

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Every time. Yeah. Hey, if you're an up and coming poster and you, and you've been struggling to get hits.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Post a DocuSign joke.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the modern, uh, like you, you know how people used to post the two factor authentication screenshot from Apple? And they're like, this is the best feature Apple's ever made. And it would go viral every single time.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so here's, here's the real alpha. So Taylor Lorenz.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when you listen to this, if you want to, um, you know, sort of regain and, and sort of like, uh, sort of an olive branch to the tech community is to go and get hired by DocuSign and get pictures at their next all hands. Cause that would be an amazing.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  Taylor Lorenz investigative journalism, behind the scenes at a DocuSign. And what if it is like this? I could see it being like that. They're like, hey guys, we're going over to the Giants stadium for the all hands. Like the buses are, you know, and she's on the bus like Project Veritas style.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  I love that. Project Veritas. Yeah, we definitely need the information to do Project Veritas for DocuSign. What's going on there? What if it's all just like the most cracked engineers you've ever seen? They don't have a single salesperson. They're just building the most deep tech. They've implemented, they, they've built their own kernel, their own operating system.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  DocuSign is awesome.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  What if they have, what if they have, uh, you know, custom silicon for signing?

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  I bet they do.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  All the way down. It's like, uh, Google has the TPU. DocuSign has the DPU.

• 1:34:49Jordi Hays?

  DocuSign should add-

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  The DocuSign processing unit.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  DocuSign should add autonomous drones that take off from these sort of centralized places.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, they need a humanoid robotics plant.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Film you signing it?

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Or they have a little printer that like prints it out?

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, if you need a notary, you need a notary in person. What if you could have a humanoid robotic, robot come to your house when you're signing the mortgage papers? The humanoid robot is acting as the, as the, uh, whatever they call it, the-

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  I want a dog. I want a dog.

• 1:35:18John Coogan?

  A dog.

• 1:35:18Jordi Hays?

  Notary.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Notary. That's it. Yeah. Let's go to Bobby Goodlatte. He says, "Success should be celebrated in tech, not demonized. I want to see more startup founders looking like this post-exit, not apologizing." And it's Elon Musk with his McLaren F1.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Two things. One, Bobby is this authentically?

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Jordi Hays?

  I was walking up to Faina.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:44Jordi Hays?

  For Hereticon. I see a fantastic blue Ferrari.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  Blue.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the sort of really nice metallic blue. I don't know the exact color code, but um, fantastic Ferrari pulls up, valet.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Yours was red or black?

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  Mine was gray.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  Gray, okay. Subtle.

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  A little more subtle, yeah. It was a daily.

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  You gotta go red with the Ferrari.

• 1:36:05Jordi Hays?

  Red or white?

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  It was a 458?

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:36:07John Coogan?

  Oh, what was his?

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, his was, yeah, no, his was a 458, I think. He'll correct us in the comments, but um,

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Let us know.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  No, but Bobby's living the brand. He's sort of, you know, being a real leader here.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  I think one of the challenges and the reason that supercars haven't become more popular in, you know, Silicon Valley is that it's, you just can't street park a McLaren or a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or a Bentley.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  And you're going to a coffee shop to meet C-Stage founders.

• 1:36:36Jordi Hays?

  In Gary Tan, San Francisco, you're gonna be able to street park, uh, you know, an Enzo, street park a LaFerrari.

• 1:36:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Street park your P1.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  Um, and that's something that, you know, Sam Altman and Elon and Gary can agree on.

• 1:36:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:51Jordi Hays?

  And so they can all kind of like come together, because we need safer streets in San Francisco.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they also need to fix the streets and make sure there's no potholes, because if you're driving a P1GTR.

• 1:37:01Jordi Hays?

  That's why the G-Wagon is such a popular car in Los Angeles, is the streets are actually so bad. You need, you need something that's four-wheel drive. You need good, sort of like,

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Lift. We need perfect pavement, perfect pavement for the sports cars. But, yeah, I mean, there is this interesting thing where, yeah, it became this like status symbol to say, "Oh, I drive a Prius," or whatever. But I think people realize that, like, the flashy cars...

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  You know, I hope that people can realize that it's not like if you are an engineer and you respect engineering and you made money in technology, it's okay to respect the engineering of a car.

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  It's okay to appreciate something that's like beautifully made.

• 1:37:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  Like I mean, this is a Gordon Murray car. It's like, it's, it's, it's incredible. It's like, it's iconic. And there's so much to, to love about this. You know, the McLaren P1 or the, the, the F1, they, they wanted to reduce weight so much that the CD changer in the front trunk, they made special magnets for it.

• 1:38:05Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  To spin to just to save like 50 grams from the CD changer.

• 1:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  They didn't take the six disc CD changer out of the car.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  See, how as a technologist, how can you not appreciate that?

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:16Jordi Hays?

  So here's, here's the, here's the gotcha. So everybody would, everybody likes to say, you know, Sam Altman had this thing of he didn't own equity in OpenAI and all this stuff.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  The whole case was always the car collection.

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  But he, they would always post pictures with him and his car collection and say, see, he does love money. Look at him driving this P1 or all these other cars that he has.

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, he had an F1.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't about the, it wasn't never about money. It was about, you know, experiencing beautiful products.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:38:42Jordi Hays?

  And that's why people don't realize about buying a supercar, you're buying a, a potentially daily experience with a one of one product, right?

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  Something that's excellent.

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  And so if we want Sam to build safe AGI, you know, supercars are a perfect example of that. They go through rigorous safety testing.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:02Jordi Hays?

  To build this incredibly high performing vehicle.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  And we want anybody building AI to be experiencing a supercar, right? Cause it's, it's a good parallel for sort of AI safety and you can have performance and safety at the same time.

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. It, it's very hard to imagine like living on the power law and driving a power law outcome without enjoying and respecting power law outcomes everywhere.

• 1:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  And there's no car that's more of a power law outcome than McLaren.

• 1:39:30Jordi Hays?

  I want to see the average YC founder leaving Uber or Meta, joining YC and sleeping in their supercar outside of the YC offices, right?

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  This is what they say.

• 1:39:44Jordi Hays?

  You can't.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  You can sleep in a GT3 RS, but you can't raise a house.

• 1:39:47Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  We know this.

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:50John Coogan?

  Founders, get supercars, please. I'm begging you.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  So this is a reaction from Sophie, Nutcap Girl, to a post by Dakash Gupta. He says, "Recently, I started telling candidates right in the first interview that Greptile offers no work-life balance. Typical workdays start at 9:00 a.m. and end at 11:00 p.m., often later, and we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays." And Sophie says, "Posting stuff like this is so cringe. It's fine to have a culture that self-selects for people that will put in long hours. You want people committed to the mission, especially in the early days of a startup, but posting about it is just status signaling grindset hustle thing." What do you think?

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've never known somebody that posts about how hard they work, that actually genuinely works hard.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Except for us, but yeah.

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but yeah, we feel that's a part of our mission to promote hard work.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, ultimately, the people that work the hardest are not tweeting about it. They're not posting on LinkedIn. They're not doing that. They're legitimately working really hard, and if you ask them about their schedule, they'll tell you, "Oh, I do 996, I do 957," whatever their schedule is. But yeah, Elon, when pressed on, "Tell us about your schedule. You're doing all these things, right?" He'll say, "Oh yeah, I work 20 hours a day, seven days a week." But he's not out there like, "Just logged another 20 hours." Like, he's a top poster in the world, and he's not being like, "Just logged 20 hours. Here's a link to our SpaceX job board. Don't apply if you're not..."

• 1:41:28Jordi Hays?

  So I think, yeah, I think Sophie's right. It's a way to get attention. Maybe that'll work well.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think it should be coming from... I think that's the kind of thing you want. If you do an interview with a candidate and you're like, "This person's great," you pass them to your CTO to interview next, and that engineer wants to ask the CTO, "What's the work schedule?" They can be like, "Oh, we work really long hours. People are online constantly." But it shouldn't be the CEO leading it being like, "Just so you know," like, to somebody who's like, the candidate's like... Dude, this is one out of 30 interviews I'm doing and like I don't even really want to join your company and now you're telling me like, don't join if you're not, it's just gonna like.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, also, I mean, the timing on this stuff is like, super important. Like, a few years ago, when Google was like, well, there's 20% time and fa- family leave and pet leave and bereavement leave and like a million reasons to take time off. It was pretty countercultural to be like, hey, actually, like, our startup works pretty hard. And that was novel and that got a lot of attention for the right reasons because maybe there was something there. But then, pretty quickly, it became like, okay, now, like, it's kind of status quo and if you're just jumping on this train right now. It's like, it's like coming out and being like, I'm bravely anti-DEI.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, good, good Google, good Google story. So, my little brother and my fraternity, he did an internship at Google in 2017 and I happened to be in the valley, working with a startup at that time. This was like a summer period, so it was like a four, three to four month internship. And he, by the end, his manager was like, Peter, like, I really like you, but like, you objectively have done no work. Like, I don't know how I can sort of write a positive review. And Peter had, in the lead up to that, in the lead up to that summer, he had maxed out a bunch of credit cards to buy Ethereum and Bitcoin. And it absolutely paid off. Like, he just like,

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  became like, very wealthy because of it. And I'm sure he's, if he's listening to this, I'm sure he's like, got his like, whatever, Bitcoin ticker up and he's just like, still excited about it. But like, the guy just basically like, went so long crypto on credit cards that by the time he got to his Google internship, he was just like, yeah, I'm like, low-key, like, the wealthiest kid that I know. And, and so, he would graciously have me over to work out in the gym, salmon dinners.

• 1:44:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  And that was the only real, like, time that I spent at the Google offices. But it, yeah, it felt like, it felt like a college where people were kind of like, doing the bare minimum to actually like, get by and just wanted to have fun and, and enjoy their, their time on campus.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Let's go to Naval. He says, good VCs should be their own media.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  This is

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  This is a banger because

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Naval's the master of this.

• 1:44:28Jordi Hays?

  Naval's the master of taking something that is widely understood.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  How to get rich without getting lucky.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33John Coogan?

  That thread phenomenal. Got him on Joe Rogan.

• 1:44:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Then Eric turned his, all of his tweets into a book.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  He's like phenomenal at this.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but taking this sort of, he's good at brevity.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  So he's talking about this, but he's also lived it, which is great.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. So many other VCs have done this well.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, um.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Harry Stebbings.

• 1:44:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even the work that Eric did on the book, I think Naval's known for, for posting, being one of the top posters in the entire world in his own way, right? He's very oriented around brevity and taking big ideas and putting them into whatever. I can't see from here, but six or seven words.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  But even the book, Eric's, you know, book.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  The almanac of Naval Ravikant.

• 1:45:15Jordi Hays?

  He, that turned him into a, uh, he's a, one of, one of a handful of people that are true tech philosophers.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  And, um, yeah, this is, this is, this is why like.

• 1:45:27John Coogan?

  Think about it because I kind of knew Naval and the book was, you know, based on the tweets. And so I, I didn't think the book was going to be that big of a deal, but it was, it was huge.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  It got translated into a lot of languages and really opened up the business.

• 1:45:38Jordi Hays?

  This is why anybody that's, that's an LP out there should go and invest in, uh, Pat's fund, right?

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Pat Blumenthal, incredible poster. Uh, you're sitting here like whatever 30 minutes ago saying like, how does he keep coming up with this stuff?

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  He's just like, and Pat will get more impressions in the next year than most GPs in the world combined.

• 1:46:02John Coogan?

  And it just completely flips the model from like, okay, I need a horde of analysts, cold calling companies to they come to me.

• 1:46:07Jordi Hays?

  Venture is all about, uh, likability and access.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Right? And like likability, likability plus attention.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  Gets you that access.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  And founders want to take money from people that they like.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:21Jordi Hays?

  So if you're a likable person, you should be doing more media, more posting.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  More podcasts, um, et cetera.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  Let's go to TJ Parker. Former founder, sold his company for a billion dollars, I believe, to Amazon, now at Matrix Ventures.

• 1:46:42Jordi Hays?

  Health, health tech investor.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, health tech investor, phenomenal car guy.

• 1:46:46Jordi Hays?

  Great collector.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic car collection. Every time I post something stupid about cars, he always replies with some really good insight. I can bait him, I can bait him into telling me about cars.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  So he's got, he's got the coolest car club in America.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that's right.

• 1:46:59Jordi Hays?

  That's in Park City.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Have you been?

• 1:47:01Jordi Hays?

  I haven't.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Okay, we gotta go at some point.

• 1:47:03Jordi Hays?

  He's, you know, basically spent a bunch of money, a bunch of his own money, building out this incredible facility that's becoming the hub of car culture.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  In, in Utah, and I think what he says, he, he has, he had to take a while back that like really resonated, which was that Tesla should not be allowed to classify as a black car on Uber.

• 1:47:23John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:47:24Jordi Hays?

  Cause there's nothing worse than like paying to like get like a, a black car on Uber. And then this guy pulls up in a Model S and you're like, dude, like, give me a break, like.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 1:47:37John Coogan?

  Here he says, my two cents, don't bring your co-founder slash team to an initial meeting with an investor. It's great to introduce them later in the process, but early on it cripples your ability to build a relationship. If they're complaining about not being included, you can show them this tweet. It's so funny, cause this is clearly a sub tweet where.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Him, he, he had some.

• 1:47:55Jordi Hays?

  He had an argument with that.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  As an investor with a founder and he brought the whole team and it was like a very messy conversation.

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  No, but sometimes this can be, this can create, totally create, if you have two founders that are both people, people.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:07Jordi Hays?

  And like good at fundraising, it creates this dilemma where, oh, it's an important conversation. We should both be on it. And I a hundred percent agree with this.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:15Jordi Hays?

  You can't, two people cannot connect.

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:18Jordi Hays?

  Like if we had a third person here that was constantly butting in, like our rhythm would be totally thrown off.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I think that it's much, you're much better off, take the first call solo, take even a second call solo.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:34Jordi Hays?

  As you actually build that relationship and that rapport and interest in partnering, then bring in the rest of the team.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  This is a time thing.

• 1:48:42Jordi Hays?

  That totally throws off the vibe.

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  Typically, like the co-founders and team are like operating, they have a ton of stuff to do. They don't need to take a bunch of intro meetings with a bunch of VCs.

• 1:48:49Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a totally negative signal if somebody is.

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, my, my CTO can totally be on 40 investor calls this week. Yeah, right.

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Good post. Back to Aaron Slodov, he says, venture capital now, I just led a $50 million Series B into my fourth calendar scheduling app this year because their Zoom integration reduces meeting conflicts by 6%. The founder went to Stanford and worked at Stripe for eight months, so downside risk is basically zero, plus their deck had really clean margins.

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  Venture capital in the 1600s, which is funny, you want to go so back.

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  So far back. I just funded an armed fleet to conquer the only islands in the world that grow nutmeg. If we seize their nutmeg trees and eliminate all competition, we'll make 60,000% returns and become more powerful than most European kingdoms combined. Man, this really resonated, 14,000 likes.

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  Million views.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Venture capital is mainstream.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Venture capital is very mainstream, and I think everyone's dissatisfied with the risk that venture capitalists are taking these days. Too many safe bets.

• 1:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it wasn't the first, there's, there's the, remind me of the power law of that book.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, Sebastian Malabag.

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't it talk about like whaling with some of the first like venture?

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it started with whaling, you'd pay a ship to go out there.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Literally be like, here's a ship, here's a captain, here's a team.

• 1:50:05John Coogan?

  Most likely it's not coming back, but if it does, you're rich.

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the carry model emerged from that.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  Essentially, yeah.

• 1:50:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  And you need a management fee upfront to pay for the buy.

• 1:50:17Jordi Hays?

  Every time, every time you get a carry check, you know, think back into the 1600s.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, lay up your whale oil lamp and.

• 1:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Breathe it in, breathe it in.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  I was at a nuclear conference and I was talking to a guy who does like AI data center build outs, and he was talking about the importance of energy and just the fact that these AI like super killers will.

• 1:50:37Jordi Hays?

  We should make a whale blubber candle to help VCs manifest carry checks.

• 1:50:41John Coogan?

  Oh, that's good. I like that. Yeah.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Like a little circle setup where they can just sit in the middle of it and just like kind of breathe in the probably smells a little bit.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but his, his, his joke was that, uh, was that like these, these hyperscalers are so dedicated to getting energy right now that they would burn whale oil if they had to. Because they just need energy and they'll just take it from wherever they can because it's such a race to get to the next, uh, the next order of magnitude.

• 1:51:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were talking about coal. You're not a serious AI founder if you're not like thinking about spinning up coal.

• 1:51:15John Coogan?

  Coal, natural gas.

• 1:51:16Jordi Hays?

  Natural gas, all this stuff, but whale blubber is the next frontier. And Nvidia is looking into this.

• 1:51:24John Coogan?

  That unlocks the next scaling tier for sure.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Blubber.ai.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  Blubber.ai.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, let's go to Bryce. He quote tweets David Phillips saying, vacation for founders, don't fix burnout, address what's wrong, you'll feel better. And Bryce says, you cannot vacation your way out of burnout. We already talked about this a little bit in the Q and A. It's true. Uh, vacations, I don't know. I, I'm not, not a fan.

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  Burnout is a symptom that what you're working on is not working.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Like it's rare or you're having like massive people issues.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Josh compliment here. You can't even sabbatical your way out of it. Like, you have to be working on something that's more ikigai, more life's work, more, more.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Life's work, but also a lot of people are perfectly happy building a SaaS company, even if it's not their life's work.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  Okay, then do they get burned out or not?

• 1:52:15Jordi Hays?

  If customers love the product, they're growing month over month and they have a great team around them. Right? Because winning feels good. It's when you're not winning and you know you're not winning and you're just like getting, you're like chewing glass, chewing 10 different types of glass.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  And you know it, but your burnout usually comes from knowing you're in a bad situation and not doing anything about it.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder if you looked at like the cases of burnout, how many examples can you find of someone burning out when growth rates are at all times high, all time highs?

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you get strung, I think you get strung out.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:46Jordi Hays?

  But that's very different than burnout.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  But not burnout. Burnout's where I was used to 200% growth. It's now at 30%. And, and it takes me 10 times as long to get one tenth the output.

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, burnout's like losing conviction in what you're doing or, or again, like. If you're, if, if customers are churning nonstop.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  And you're not doing something to fix that, then you're gonna get burnt out.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  I think the answer is just to, yeah, change, change what you're doing. Change like your, your main, if you're, if you're a meetings guy, switch to something else. If you're doing email constantly, switch to something else, like jar yourself out of your pattern.

• 1:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but all of those are like, more like exhaustion, which I think is different than burnout.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  Okay, so how do you fix burnout? What's the top way?

• 1:53:32Jordi Hays?

  Burnout comes when you're not delivering for shareholders.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean, the short answer is like start delivering, I guess.

• 1:53:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, start delivering. No, it really is like a fundamental, like.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  Reframe on that.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like I'd love.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  And it's gonna be different for every business.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:49Jordi Hays?

  Burnout, and again, like this is not, uh, when, when a founder that's building a great, a wonderful B2B SaaS company and they go do ayahuasca. And then they come back and they're like, oh, I don't want to work on this anymore. That's not burnout, that's mental illness.

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:04Jordi Hays?

  Self-induced mental illness.

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Delian. Delian says, uh, in January of 2020, I decided to wear a MAGA hat in San Francisco every day for the full month. I remember him wearing it once, I don't, I didn't realize he did it every day.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  Walking to every meeting?

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  I felt that the country and my tech peers did not appreciate how the MAGA hat was a symbol of hope for the average working American, not a symbol of hate. Five years later, I rest my case. Fascinating, I mean, I remember the backlash to this was intense, intense, like a lot of people were really, really upset about this. And what's interesting is that it was in some ways more controversial than Peter donating to Trump and speaking at the convention. Because the hat was more visceral of a, of a symbol. And it had been so, so controversial, but wow, what an arc to come back from. Fascinating.

• 1:54:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the whole, uh.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  Delian should frame this.

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 1:55:02Jordi Hays?

  And they should put it in the founder's phone office purely as being willing to look stupid or silly.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Brother of the week candidate there.

• 1:55:08Jordi Hays?

  Brother of the week candidate for sure. He deserves a plaque for that because yeah, it was, the hate was very real. I guarantee you, he had thousands of messages being like, you're an idiot.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  And I don't even think he had that many supporters. It wasn't as, it wasn't as like, it was still very contrarian. This year was very consensus where if you came out, if you were just some random VC or founder, which Delian kind of was at the time in 2020. I don't think he was a partner yet. And if you did that this cycle in 2024, you would immediately get like a quote tweet from like Elon and David Sacks being like, this is incredible. Welcome to the club. Like you're some like, it was a way to actually climb the status ranks in tech, which made it a little bit more memetic, a little bit less contrarian.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the, the.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  It was a lot less risky.

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  The least heretical people at Hereticon were wearing MAGA hats.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  And Delian wasn't, he was wearing a red hat, but it was make founders fund great again and to play on it, you know?

• 1:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. There was always like a fresh, a fresh MAGA hat.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  Somebody like packed it up, put it in their bag.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  Brought it to Hereticon, snuck it into Faina, put it on and then like took it off on the way out.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, it, it, it, it really is fascinating that that, that position became basically consensus in tech. I was talking to somebody who was like, he was saying like, I cannot believe this is somebody at FF who, you know, lived through the, the 2016 Teal stuff, which was like, I mean, there were protesters outside of his house. It was insane. So many hit pieces.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  And he was just saying like, I cannot believe, this was in the summer when everyone was like pro-Trump before Biden dropped out and Kamala wasn't even like an idea yet. He's like, I cannot believe that Donald Trump is the current thing. And he really was, he became the current thing. It became like, everyone just needs to be like, yeah, rah rah rah. It's wild.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of contrarians.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  Speaking of contrarians, Gotea, I know how to pronounce his name right now. Gotea says Jarvis buy $42 billion more Bitcoin. And it's Michael Saylor in the Iron Man helmet, just so vindicated. This guy was seen as such a joke for so long.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  So long.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  And now.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  And went, and went on all like my, most of my memories of him are on these major.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:21Jordi Hays?

  Trad media.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:23Jordi Hays?

  TV shows, just being like, yes, I bought 42 more, 42 more million dollars worth of Bitcoin.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Quite that much, but yeah, a lot.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  No, but I mean, he's like, he's gonna, he's, he's been, he was, he did something that he wasn't saying publicly because I don't think he could have.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:40Jordi Hays?

  But it was a way that you could buy exposure to Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin in the public, you know.

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  It's so odd because there's, there's, there's MicroStrategy, his company, which I think essentially trades at the book value of Bitcoin, essentially. Bitcoin goes up 10%, his stock is up 10%. I don't think they do a lot of other business now. It's mostly just a Bitcoin holding company. But then there's also the Bitcoin ETF, Grayscale and a bunch of others. BlackRock has one. And then there's also, you could go and buy synthetic Bitcoin on Robinhood, or you could buy a real Bitcoin in, on Coinbase, or you could self custody. And there's this wild gradient of like ways to get exposure to Bitcoin. But I think all of that has been a big piece of what's driven the bull run is just more and more people can.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but a good example of like, he looked like an idiot for a long time and has been vindicated. So hats off.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  For real. Okay, back to, back to Nate O'Brien. He says, one of the greatest threats to an entrepreneur is when they find themselves in the five to 10 million dollar range of liquid assets. You lose your hunger, you get comfortable. It's a dangerous spot to be in.

• 1:58:44Jordi Hays?

  So here's what I would do. If I was getting.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Lever up.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, lever up. No, I mean, if I was, yeah, risk it all so that you feel like you gotta.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Step one is always lever up.

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Start trading options like aggressively.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  But there is something to levering up where if you have five to 10 million, like you could go and buy a hundred million dollar business. You could. And then you could just be the owner operator of a pretty large business and maybe that's great. Maybe you take that to a billion. Maybe that's how you get there. As opposed to, I think what he's worried about is like, yeah, you buy a house and you, you wind up with all these costs and you're just like, oh yeah, like my, my life now just costs a million dollars a year. And so I'm not really growing or trying anything bold.

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if I had a founder that pitched me for their seed stage company and they were like, "Yeah, I've got about 10 million liquid," I would invest, but I'd encourage them to give it away first. Because they're just not going to have that, you know, like

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  The grind.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  They're not going to have that grind set. No, the, another counterpoint, because I think that Nate is right, but the other point of view here is that I've seen founders that already have a certain amount of wealth, be able to work on something for a long time

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  and stay convicted in it

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:58Jordi Hays?

  without sort of warring, because they're not like the sort of like, they're not operating from fear. They're operating purely from winning.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:07Jordi Hays?

  And the example is, I think YC did an analysis on their portfolio and they found that founders that came from money had a higher likelihood of success, which you could attribute to, oh, their parents had connections and provided capital and resources and advice. But it also is that they just were, it's more in the state of when you have 10-ish million liquid, you're kind of in the state of play where the stakes are lower, right? Where you're just like, "I'm just building this to win. I'm not doing it because I need it to, you know, pay my mortgage or I need it so that I can put my kids through college or whatever." So I actually think it can be, he's right that it could be, could decrease somebody's ability to really like grind,

• 2:00:50Jordi Hays?

  but it also could open them up to be like, "All I care about is winning. I'm going to win at all costs. I'm going to be willing to look stupid for some amount of time." So I think it can be a tool.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Yep, I like that. Your buddy Dylan says, posts a screenshot, "Netflix finally gives up on interactive shows, pivots to Gen AI for games." And Dylan says, "Netflix is ending its interactive experiment, but I still believe the future of TV lies in content that you can engage with. We've seen it with HQ Trivia, Bandersnatch, and to a certain extent, Crypto the Game." I think that was his company, right?

• 2:01:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  "Someone will do it at scale. My guess, live on-screen betting while watching sports."

• 2:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 2:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so Dylan helped build HQ Trivia into a monster.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Then he, I think he was at

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Where was he at? He was at, not Uber Eats, but he was at the one in LA, Bastion's company.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Postmates.

• 2:01:52Jordi Hays?

  Postmates. And then he, after we had started doing some Party Round drops and getting some attention, he DM'd me and he was like, like, this looks like as fun as it was at HQ. Ends up joining the team.

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  And, and then after, after Party Round, he ended up starting this interactive on-chain crypto game that went super, super viral and within six, he didn't raise any money, within six months, sold it to Uniswap, who's over at Uniswap now, but super, super smart around media. And honestly, like, it's kind of insane that there hasn't been an HQ, like, a phenomenon like HQ that's since HQ, right? You can't really think of-

• 2:02:36John Coogan?

  Clubhouse a little bit.

• 2:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Clubhouse, but that was like, not, that was social media.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  HQ was entertainment.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Entertainment game.

• 2:02:44Jordi Hays?

  And it was something that even your, you know, your mom, or your aunt, or your uncle, or whatever, would be messaging you about and playing, and it was like, really in the zeitgeist.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  Should we talk about Bet on Love, or is that too much alpha?

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I think, I think I brought it, I brought it up to Dylan, because I was like, you should, you should do this.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  So, yeah, Jordi and I had an idea. So Dylan's betting on the winner in this interactive entertainment at scale being live, on-screen betting while watching sports, which is already kind of happening with second screening, where you're watching a football game and you're on DraftKings, or whatever the other one is,

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  to, you know, bet on the game while you're watching. But we, Jordi and I were talking about how way underrated is maybe betting on something like The Bachelor.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Because there's a huge audience there. No one's really modernized that format. Like, the, like, the classic game show has been kind of revitalized by- By Mr. Beast, but if you could have a, you know, a dating show where you can bet on who's gonna win and it's all done via polymarket or something.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Not who's gonna win. I want bets, multiple opportunities to bet every single.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, who's gonna get voted off this episode, right? Who's gonna, who's gonna get the first kiss or who's gonna get the rose or whatever the, whatever happens. I think that'd just be a very interesting, very different.

• 2:04:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Format. And maybe there's a money component. Maybe it's just like long-term, there probably is like a financial betting, but even just more audience participation, more interaction. That feels like the way things are going.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  If there's one thing, it's Americans love. One thing that's truly American is speculation, right? Even coming to this country hundreds of years ago was speculation in itself. So it's corridor culture.

• 2:04:32John Coogan?

  The gold rush.

• 2:04:33Jordi Hays?

  If you're an entrepreneur that wants to build at the intersection of entertainment and speculation, make a reality TV show that you can bet on.

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  I love it. Let's go to Sarah Hess. She says, startups at the Pentagon. I built a quantum AI autonomous drone, the Pentagon. Cool. Can it run on Windows XP and fit on a floppy disk?

• 2:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is, Sarah's very sharp around this stuff and I think more plugged into the defense world, like actually plugged in, not just from a venture capital standpoint.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, she worked in the CIA.

• 2:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Now an investor, classic pipeline, CIA to venture capital.

• 2:05:15John Coogan?

  Many such cases.

• 2:05:16Jordi Hays?

  You have to keep climbing the mountain.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  The question I have about this is like, should we be putting this on the government or should we be putting this on fucking Microsoft? Like Microsoft, like go in and pro bono, get the government on the latest and greatest software. Like just do whatever that work is instead of just continuing to start, charge XP licenses. Like, like you have some sort of like moral duty. This is your way that you can give back even bigger than your ESG commitments. Just commit to, I mean, we joke about the ramp, you know, thing like the government should run on ramp, but like, maybe it actually should.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  And maybe that should be a lower margin piece of ramps business.

• 2:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  But it's, it's how they actually wind up having a lot of impact.

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:59John Coogan?

  And same thing with Microsoft, like.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  Get them off XP. Like just go and do the work. You have the engineers. You have a million engineers. But go deploy them, forward deploy them and get and get the get the government on the latest and greatest.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but Palantir, Anduril have done a ton of heavy lifting for all the startups now building in those categories. Because they've gotten the government on board with a lot of new technologies and done a lot of that heavy lifting. And the way they get paid back for it is the companies that don't quite make it, but build some great technology will eventually get absorbed by Palantir and Anduril. And then they get the benefit of all that sort of CapEx and and investment in technology.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Palantir is now, they have the AIP program. Have you seen this? Where startups can build on top of the Palantir platform. So if you're building SaaS. And there's going to be some really cool news about that. I was talking to the team, so we'll cover that later this week when it goes live. But really, really bullish on that. I love the idea of Palantir being like this, this data layer that then other companies can come in and build stuff on. Because there's just so many, like you talk to people who work for the government during like the Palantir story. And a lot of them are like, oh yeah, like I always like love the idea of Palantir, but like my unit never got access to it. I actually never, I actually never interacted with Palantir while I was at NSA or CIA or DoD or whatever. And that shouldn't be the case. The case is probably just that Palantir doesn't have the bandwidth to build, oh procurement and all these different things.

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  But but like if you can create that abstraction layer and be like the Windows XP essentially, like that's really valuable.

• 2:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the market is is clearly repricing Palantir right now.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, they just flipped.

• 2:07:37Jordi Hays?

  They just flipped Lockheed Martin, which is crazy. But one reason for that is that they are now, they could effectively become, own the App Store for the DoD, right? The Pentagon or the USG, right? Where hey, if you want to build software and hardware and other products for the government, you need to build on Palantir.

• 2:07:58John Coogan?

  And long term, that's kind of the Anduril thesis as well with the lattice software. It's like all, everything that's equipment based will interface with this one thing. And you could see them opening that up at some point to. A cruise missile or some other company where maybe they don't, maybe they acquire it, maybe they partner with it, but like there's some interaction. I was talking to the Andorol guys about the, the technology that is used for communication systems and they were just griping about like it. It makes like HTTP look like rocket science. It's like, it's like insane how legacy these things are just to like. Set up a communication line to like.

• 2:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody, everybody like.

• 2:08:31John Coogan?

  A green light on like, is the F-35 still in the sky?

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:35John Coogan?

  That interaction is just like the most like outdated system built in the seventies and just maintained.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:41John Coogan?

  So yeah, Jacob Hellberg writes, let that sink in. Palantir just flipped Lockheed Martin. And I, and it's funny because just like a week ago, I, I posted a screenshot that Shamsankar, the CTO at Palantir. Created for his website about AIP and his second breakfast initiative. And it was the defense tech companies like Palantir relative to Lockheed based on employees and market cap.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  And Palantir was like kind of middle of the pack, but when you looked at market cap to employees, Palantir is like a few thousand. And the other primes have like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. And so it was impressive then, but now it's just going to be like Palantir is at the top. They have the most market cap and the least employees. And like every metric is just the best. It's like total power law winner. And yeah, just really, really remarkable story. I mean, like long grind. Like there was a time when Palantir was, I think. Like kind of hanging out in like the, the single digit to 10, 20 billion range for like a decade. Because they grew and they, and they got through like the.

• 2:09:42Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's saying, oh, it's just consulting.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, just consulting. There's no real platform play there. And then AI stuff happens and they actually have everything in.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  And the other companies just can't compete because like they did the hard work first.

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  So yeah, super valuable. Congrats to everyone at Palantir.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  And the culture there is, the culture there from everything I've heard is ridiculous.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  It's still good. It's crazy. And we saw, we saw Eunice talking about like, you know, no kipping pull ups like.

• 2:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  That, how do you keep that going 20 years in? That's crazy. You would think they would have evolved just to like a normie tech company.

• 2:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And all the, all the engineers that, that historically would have gone to Google.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:19Jordi Hays?

  And then just decided when Google, you know, with Project Maven.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  Right? Decided to say like, you know, we don't want this a part of our. Platform, create an opportunity for Palantir to hover up all those people that clearly care about the country and are patriots, want to put their skills to use.

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  Oh, this is a rough one. This might be the anti-brother of the week, a wag of the finger to Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia. He says he doesn't wear a watch. And he has a very, you know, this is a 37 second clip from an interview that he did where he explains that he, you know, the most important time is right now. And so he doesn't need to wear a watch, but he's missing a critical thing, which is that a watch doesn't tell you the time of day. It tells you the time of your life. It tells you where you are, not in the day.

• 2:11:10Jordi Hays?

  And it tells other people where you are in your life.

• 2:11:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so I think we gotta, we gotta get this guy a hitter.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  I think that's.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were talking about how Putin, whenever he does an interview, he places his watch on the table.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:22Jordi Hays?

  As a way to signal to the world what kind of man he is. If you weren't familiar with Putin, you're gonna see his watch and start to get an idea of who he is just by his timepiece.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  I, I, I want to read more into that because I wonder if it's like, almost like a threatening thing. He's like, taking, you know, you take your watch off before you get in a fistfight.

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  And so he's taking his watch off.

• 2:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Wrap it around the hand or whatever.

• 2:11:44John Coogan?

  To like, be like, if this interview doesn't go well, like, I'm ready to fight almost. There's like a million things to read into that.

• 2:11:49Jordi Hays?

  But it's also a status thing, right?

• 2:11:50John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  He's probably got one of the better watch collections. I think it might be the kind of thing in Russia where you want to have a nice watch collection if you're an oligarch, but you don't want to ever be, have it be nicer than, than the top dog, right?

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Someone who can challenge you.

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You don't want to challenge Putin's collection.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  But you would think that, I mean, I feel like Jensen's like, you know, a hair's breadth away from becoming a watch guy. Like, so much of what Nvidia does.

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  He's a leather jacket guy.

• 2:12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So much of what Nvidia does is precision manufacturing. And he should be able to respect the work of a Vacheron, the work of a Patac, the work, the work of a AP. Like, he should be able to get into that. We saw Zuck did briefly and developed a great, a wonderful.

• 2:12:30Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see a one of, a one of one Nvidia GPU watch that you can see the intricate detail of the GPU humming.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  We gotta get that made, and then we'll send it to him, and then he'll come on the show.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  But. Yeah, also, I mean, he's famous for doing that jersey swap with Zuck. Do you remember that? Where Zuck was wearing some sort of like mountaineering coat, almost like very like puffy. And Jensen was wearing the leather, the iconic leather jacket and they swapped jackets and took a picture. It was a jersey swap. Fantastic. I mean, swapping watches, that would be very cool, too. There's something there, but we'll get him soon. You can be redeemed, Jensen. It's within your abilities.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  It's never too late.

• 2:13:16John Coogan?

  So David Boskovic says, "I woke up in a cold sweat last night from a nightmare. I had spent all of our money on Google Ads in one day because I had accidentally removed the limit on my Tri-Ramp card. Someone should figure out how to sell brand placement in dreams like this." It's a new frontier.

• 2:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I, I, I would wear one of those.

• 2:13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a couple lucid dreamers.

• 2:13:38Jordi Hays?

  I'd wear a wearable if it was gonna project ads into my brain.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:43Jordi Hays?

  While I slept.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  So you can make more educated purchasing decisions.

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm, as a student, as a businessman, as a student of capitalism, I learn a lot from ads. I learn what's, you know, what, what's selling, what's not. I learn about my own tastes. I learn about what I wanna, wanna purchase. I learn about products and services I can, I can buy to help grow Technology Brothers, right? And so if I could sit down right before bed and put on my little wearable and have it be projecting ads into my dreams, I would, I would pay for that, right? It's like, that's why I pay, I pay for X and the only downside of X premium is it actually shows less ads, right?

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Which is a big bummer, but, um.

• 2:14:23John Coogan?

  But yeah, I, I, I can relate to that nightmare. And, and, and the Ramp team says, "Our team is working hard to ensure your policy guardrail stay in place in your dreams."

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  They hired a good person to run their social media. I'm proud of them. Say Taylor says, "You're not online enough."

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Couldn't have said it better myself.

• 2:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Simple, simple, simple. Yeah, I mean, part of our, part of our work here at Technology Brothers is to, is to be almost like a brain rot shield for our audience.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  If you're worried about spending too much time in the timeline, we basically are a layer over the timeline to help surface the most relevant content and then provide hard hitting analysis on it, but yeah.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  But it doesn't always have to be that way. It can also be you're online for six hours, you have an extra three hours at the end of the day, throw on Technology Brothers, you get another three hours of content.

• 2:15:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's the thing. Sometimes a founder will call me and they say like, hey, I'm having a rough day. This customer integration isn't going well. I'm having this issue with my head of engineering, whatever it is. And almost always I tell them, drink to Celsius, have some, some Lucy or Excel and go sit outside, ideally in the sun, if it's, if it's daytime and just scroll. Like give yourself a couple hours to scroll and just don't stop, right? I think all the fees have gotten to the point where they're not, you're never really going to hit the end. I remember that was like a 2010s era social thing where it'd be like, you've reached all the content, right? But I haven't hit the end in a decade on this, right? And so go outside, get some sun, caffeine, nicotine, and just scroll

• 2:16:00Jordi Hays?

  a little bit. And I promise you like that, that sort of creative juices will start flowing, you're start getting into this sort of problem solving mentality and you'll make your life better. So.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Couldn't agree more. Andrew Editor says, first impression of my daylight co, the hype is justified. Shockingly responsive, distractions nonexistent, decent chance this becomes my primary work computer. Oh, this is the high refresh rate E Ink screen.

• 2:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  Tablet. I saw this.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, so yeah. Andrew, good buddy and was on my team, uh, party round, uh, phenomenal writer and works with a bunch of other startups now. Uh, so his primary work is meeting with companies that he works with through his agency, Words, uh, Words, S S, Word, S S S dot com. Um, and, uh, you know, so his, he's primary, primarily interfacing with clients and writing. And so daylight computers are really good. Product for that, because it's a product that is trying to take all the advancements in computer technology that we have today, but sort of like make it more analog, so

• 2:17:12Jordi Hays?

  they eliminate color. They make it less, basically less engaging overall, so that in theory it helps you actually get more work done.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  And this is live, like you can just go buy one of these?

• 2:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they've been, they've been working, yeah, I don't have mine yet, but they don't. They, they're working through like preorder lists, but they are delivering now. I use the product.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  I mean, it could never replace like this experience with the paper, but I mean for other stuff.

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  That's what they're trying to do, they're trying to kill, they're trying to take out big paper.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:17:46Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I use the product for the.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  You have a better chase, better chance taking down Apple on the iPad, but you're never taking this from my cold, dead hands.

• 2:17:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  Will you take my stack of printed out tweets?

• 2:17:55Jordi Hays?

  We'll cut down the trees ourselves if we have to. But no, I tried the daylight for the first time, I think it was over like six or seven months ago.

• 2:18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  And this is one of those things, like a lot of the cool trends in technology now are, are sort of making stuff more analog, more retro, mod retro is an example, which is more nostalgic.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  And I like this stuff, like who knows if daylight is like gonna be as big as Apple, but I'm so happy that it exists and I want it to be a great company and I think it'd probably be a fantastic company.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, that was the investment.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  A bunch of people can make money.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  That was the investment, Anjan, the founder, when I was talking to him, I kind of almost laughed when he told me the valuation.

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  But then he basically was like, look, like if we can become, if we can sell millions of devices, like this is gonna be really cheap.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  Right, and I, and I think that with the sort of anti-blue light movement, some other stuff like that, it has massive potential, so.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to Andrew and Anjan.

• 2:18:51John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Let's go to Stephen Simone says, "Cheap drones aren't going out of style anytime soon. Thanks Wired for covering Allen Control Systems." And Wired writes, "The AI machine gun of the future is already here and it's a, some sort of machine gun mounted on the back of a truck."

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so. You know this company pretty well. Yeah, so I I'm an advisor to ACS. David Sacks, famous political podcaster. Actually, he was, I think, their first investor. Oh, really? Because he backed Steve's last company, I think it was. But, uh, but yeah, Steve has been for the last, like, year and a half, two years, building anti-drone, anti-drone gun turrets. So one of the big problems in modern warfare is you have this proliferation of really cheap drones that can just fly across the battlefield and just, um, and so they're very difficult to take out as a human because you're sort of aiming a gun. Shotguns aren't long enough range. Yeah.

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Rifles, it's just too hard to hit things. And so ACS has built this phenomenal product that can take out drones fully autonomously. Mm-hmm. So this is, this is Terminator. Terminator's here. Yeah. It's mounted to the back of a Toyota pickup truck in Texas right now on the testing grounds. And they've just made some, like, really incredible progress over the last year, all the way to, there's some cool videos out there. They're public now, but you can see the ACS gun turret, like, taking out drones, taking out a bunch of Chinese drones, which is cool, using them as target practice. And, uh, yeah, they did, uh, they did a demo

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  day recently for a number of investors. And I was joking with Steve about, it's pretty funny to think about, like, five VCs seeing the same awesome demo at this, at the same time and, like, looking around being like, all right, like, I'm, it's, it's mono-y mono now. Yeah, who's gonna do the deal? Sharp elbows, sharp elbows. I mean, it's because they got wired to cover it. Steve is, so, yeah, I mean, Steve is, I, I think, uh, I think he's the, the, the gonna be, uh, look back as the, as the TK of defense. Like, he's, like, one of one individual and, um, built a ridiculous team and, and on a mission. So. That's awesome. Thank you to Steve for keeping us safe. Yeah. Let's go to Zach.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  So gamer is up next as a word to describe the obsessed. Notice a lot with runners, athletes who compete hard and smart gamers.

• 2:21:19Jordi Hays?

  Gamers.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  I like that. There's a lot of gamer lingo that people, that Gen Z is adopting.

• 2:21:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Like I'm one-shot.

• 2:21:26Jordi Hays?

  One-shot.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. One-shotting is that concept taken out.

• 2:21:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we need to, so gamer is going to take me a little bit to work it in.

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's tough.

• 2:21:37Jordi Hays?

  I, I, understanding the definition, I identify, I'm a bit of a gamer, you're a gamer, our VP Ben's a gamer. But, but yeah, I want to bring the 360 no scope into the lingo.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does that mean in a business context?

• 2:21:51Jordi Hays?

  So if somebody like posts a banger tweet.

• 2:21:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:54Jordi Hays?

  And then somebody in the comments section replies, I'm going to sign up for your product right now and use it. That's almost like a 360 no scope. Cause a, a good post is this sort of like elegant.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:05Jordi Hays?

  Thing that's hard to do. You're, you know, you're doing a lot at once.

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  Are you familiar with the term pre-made?

• 2:22:10Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:22:10John Coogan?

  So if you, if you go on like Counter-Strike or Call of Duty and you're playing like the competitive modes, like 5v5, 6v6. Normally you just get matched with random people.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  So it's very hard to coordinate because like who's the sniper, who's the machine gunner or medic or whatever. But the way to really win is to make a quote unquote pre-made where you and your boys all are in the lobby beforehand. And so you show up, it's you and everyone knows like, okay, I'm going to go left, you're going to go right. And we're really good on the comms and we know not to fight and talk over each other. And you're going up against randoms. So if you have a pre-made, you're locked in.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  You're going to smoke people.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  And when I think about the teams that show up with startups like.

• 2:22:48Jordi Hays?

  And raise 50 million.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, like Andorol, very much a pre-made in the sense that you have Palmer, but then you also have like three Palantir executives. It's like, how is that not going to be successful? They really stacked the deck in their favor, right? So launching a company as a pre-made, that's valuable.

• 2:23:01Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see a company X accounts like start to use GG.

• 2:23:06John Coogan?

  GG, Palmer did.

• 2:23:08Jordi Hays?

  When Ramp launch, launches a bunch of new functionality, I want to see Brex just reply to it and say GG.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  GG, well played.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, GG, well played. And then they just delete their account.

• 2:23:18John Coogan?

  GG, good luck, have fun, GL and Jeff. Yeah, I mean, there's so much gameling we can bring over and it's again, it's like a way to signal like in group. So very valuable.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  Sam Gersten Zhang, Gersten Zhang says, wow, A16Z is hiring a full time person just to keep track of carry. And it's a job for their internal HR team.

• 2:23:39Jordi Hays?

  So this is awesome because it shows the evolution of venture capital, right? It's becoming mainstream. It's, it's learning everything that traditional private equity learned in the 90s. We're just relearning it, just like cryptos, like speed running, like financial regulation. So anyways, bullish, bullish for Andreessen. I can't wait for them to go public so that, so that everybody can, can own a piece of that monster. And I, to me, the signal is like, we're getting ready to go public, right? Like it's one thing when it's just the GPs and they're sort of managing carry internally.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  They have a CFO, they must, right?

• 2:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure they do.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  They must have a huge finance team.

• 2:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Any, any, any multi-billion dollar AUM fund without a CFO would be concerning.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, but like it's interesting that we don't know their CFO. Like we know some of their comms people, like Margaret.

• 2:24:28Jordi Hays?

  Because that's why I'm ready for, I'm ready for Andreessen earnings calls with the CFO. That's going to be, we're going to have to do a live stream for that.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Fantastic. I guess the question is, will the other funds go short? You know, Sequoia, they're set up to take long and short positions in the public markets. What if they're like, you know, what?

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Open a big short position.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  We're, we're shorting Andreessen.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Just to try to attack the brand.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Like Hindenburg Research from a Sequoia and Andreessen would be devastating.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Sean would do that.

• 2:24:58John Coogan?

  The VC infighting.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Dark Sean would do that.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  Dark Sequoia. Love Sean. I think he's in the stack somewhere. Kate Clark tweets, some personal news, Bloomberg hires Clark to cover VC and startups. So she was at the information.

• 2:25:13Jordi Hays?

  She was at the information. So this is, this is why right now, you know, the, the technology publications, you got TMZ, the information, you've got newcomer, new next generation.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  They should have like a fantasy sports for tech journalism where you could like build your team and see who's getting the most views.

• 2:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Where's the, where's, where's the polymarket?

• 2:25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, polymarket on the trades and then there should definitely be like a draft day where you get the best posters and the information Bloomberg, Forbes, they all have to,

• 2:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:39John Coogan?

  You know, they, they, they get rankings based on, you know, oh, they didn't get that many views last year. They're at the top of the ranking. They get to pick the best posters.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  Right? So there should be a draft day. There should be fantasy. You should be able to build a team and, and ultimately bet on this. You should be able to gamble on it.

• 2:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you see like, you know, Kara Swisher has had a very antagonistic relationship with the technology industry. And I think one of the reasons is she watched all of her peers at the time become wealthy. And so this competition within different, you know, media companies for tech journalists is actually good. They're all going to make more money. I think I saw newcomers paying like three hundred, three hundred and fifty K.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:26:15Jordi Hays?

  To hire journalists, you know, I would expect Kate Clark is, is, you know, this, I would expect this is like a seven, seven figure contract over four years. You know, it's not NBA money yet.

• 2:26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, pretty soon we're going to start seeing the three sixty deals, the sponsorships, like, you know,

• 2:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  What kind of jersey are they wearing if they go to a conference, you know?

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  If they're going to be on Emily Chang's the circuit, throw some logos on that shirt or that blouse.

• 2:26:39Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I think, I think journalists have, um, we think of these media companies as these sort of big brands that carry a lot of weight.

• 2:26:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:26:49Jordi Hays?

  But, um, like it's, it's Bloomberg.

• 2:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, Bloomberg got her.

• 2:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Bloomberg is going to become much more relevant because Kate actually gets scoops.

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  She does. She's very good.

• 2:26:59Jordi Hays?

  She like is not just like, you know, using chat GPT to summarize what someone else talked about online.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  No, she trades, trades information. Yeah, I'm excited for the shoe deals. I want to see like, you know, Laura Piana or something. Yeah. Oh yeah, we got an exclusive deal with this person. When you see them on, on CNBC, giving some, giving some squawk box. Like, oh yeah, they're repping our, our gear.

• 2:27:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  Be great.

• 2:27:23John Coogan?

  Ayush writes, "New founder KPI dropped testosterone level. The average YC founder seed stage is 344 nanograms per deciliter. Yours truly 727 nanograms per deciliter."

• 2:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:27:37John Coogan?

  Did you see this underlying study? I know the guy who did it.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:41John Coogan?

  I think his name is Michael. And yeah, not good.

• 2:27:44Jordi Hays?

  So that's, that's good.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  Really low.

• 2:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, so here's what we gotta look into. One, not surprised that Ayush has such high T. It's probably why he's had some, a little bit of controversy.

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Controversies.

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  But like, the guy's online constantly, he's grinding, his entire team is grinding.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:00Jordi Hays?

  He's like extremely smart and very just like hardworking and that's probably because where his T levels are at. But we gotta go to Y Combinator, do some investigative journalism ourself, because I would guess that they're handing out a little bit too much plastic

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  bottle of water, because how else can you explain, explain 330 average?

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  It's gotta be the water.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  That's, the positive thing though is that

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Those YC founders should just be T-bone snakes.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Exclusively.

• 2:28:28Jordi Hays?

  No, no water.

• 2:28:29John Coogan?

  No water.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Even though water's lindy.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:31Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the positive thing from that study though is that it seemed like the more venture capital the founders raise, the higher their T levels were.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:28:40Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that's a positive trend, which tells me Y Combinator should just invest more money in, because there could be, it actually could be that more venture capital is actually just pulling up their testosterone levels.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  So they have so many unicorns in a batch, they should probably just start like investing real size, you know, like make the entry check $10 million.

• 2:29:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a million ways to upregulate T and they gotta make the new trend.

• 2:29:08Jordi Hays?

  Capital's one of them.

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  It's not the all birds, I'll tell you that. Justin Moore at Venture Twins says, "New A16Z investment thesis, AI X parenting. Raising kids is one of our most challenging and important jobs. Every parent needs support sometimes, but many can't access it because it's too expensive or inaccessible. AI changes this, what we're seeing." And then there's a market map.

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so two reasons that I think this is smart. One, audio is a fantastic interface for kids.

• 2:29:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Because parents don't want their kids on screens.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:39Jordi Hays?

  I got this thing for my son called a Yoto.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  I have one, I set one up yesterday.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  It's honestly, it honestly My son locks in.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. He puts on something and then he goes and reads books and stuff and just plays Lego as well. And he has all these custom cards. You can download any music and put it on a custom card.

• 2:29:55Jordi Hays?

  It's so great. It's so great. So anyways, for parents, like even 20 minutes of time where their kid is doing something solo is like massively valuable. So parents will spend a lot of money for something like this.

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:06Jordi Hays?

  In general, parents will pay for anything educational pretty quickly for their kids.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:11Jordi Hays?

  And then the other thing is like audio to date has not been the best interface for adults because we're ADHD. We have like, we need things that are kind of like moving faster than audio typically provides.

• 2:30:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  But for kids, it's just absolutely fantastic. And so I, what I've wanted to see is somebody, something like what Avi's doing for friend, but for kids, because if you give kids this digital companion that has certain guardrails that can talk with them, that can teach them things, that they can ask questions to.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  I would love to back a company that's doing that specifically. I think there's been some toy companies that are integrating L L Ms, which is cool. But, but yeah, like a little pendant type thing that has a speaker on it.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Or even just a robot dog that follows you around, but you can also ask it, like, what's that squirrel over there?

• 2:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Unitree Robotics or Boston Dynamics. I want a robot dog that I can strap an AR to, that has a like, you know, speaker, a Polycom attached to it. So I can talk to my kid.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  Protect the family.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  The dog just protects the kid and hangs out. It's their best friend, man's best friend.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  It's got an AR on it.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  And anyway, so.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Let's go to Andrea D Huberwoman, Ph D. She says, Y C should add some cute ladies to the workplace, purely for the sake of their founders' low T levels, of course. We're back on T levels at Y C.

• 2:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Back on T levels at Y C.

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  This is funny because, you know, Y Combinator has been criticized a lot for not having enough women in the cohorts. But yeah, maybe this is like now a right wing critique of the lack of feminine energy at Y C.

• 2:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I genuinely, so that the issue is Y C is fully remote now?

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  Oh, no, I think they went back in person.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  Really? They're back in person? Okay.

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  That was just during the COVID years.

• 2:31:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, but, but do they actually have like an?

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  You can't work from there every day.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  But you can go in for dinners and office hours.

• 2:32:07Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, I think this is probably, they're.

• 2:32:11Jordi Hays?

  What they're dealing with is not just like a small issue, like it's an epidemic, right? I would imagine that some founders are gonna start not applying for YC because they have high T and they, one, don't want to be around men with low T because it's just a drag, right? And two, they're worried if they join, their T is gonna drop dramatically.

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, or that they'll be clocked as low T.

• 2:32:33Jordi Hays?

  It's not like, oh, adding secretaries is one approach, removing plastic bottle of water is another. But they need to try like 20 things at once and see what sticks.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  Ensemble strategy.

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  That is, YC is one of the greatest institutions to be created within Silicon Valley in the last, whatever, is it, it's almost 20-ish years now. They gotta save, and I think Gary will get on it.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  Do you know this Congressman Waltz? Do you know this guy? I feel like we had him in here previously. This is funny because it's like a very Twitter native format, but it's from an official Congressman's press Twitter. And so, it says Waltz, how much do you think the Air Force pays for this bag of bushings? USAF Secretary Kendall. I don't know Congressman, Waltz says $90,000. So we've run into these again and again, there's just so many things.

• 2:33:33Jordi Hays?

  First there was soap dispensers that exits called out. Now it's bushings.

• 2:33:38John Coogan?

  Yep, but it's also the seat belts on the planes, the urinals, all these different things. They're all way overpriced.

• 2:33:45Jordi Hays?

  This is why Kimia's company is gonna rip is because we're gonna introduce competition into the bushings market.

• 2:33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, but look at this, I mean, he has, you know, one clip essentially from C-SPAN. It's a one-minute clip and it has 2 million views. Like, what, this is just the native, the poster-native Congressman or politician just going direct and using the correct format and not just saying, "Hey, I put out a press release, go to this link." It's like, I'm articulating the problem and I'm showing you evidence that I'm trying to do something about it.

• 2:34:15Jordi Hays?

  He just mogged the Air Force Secretary.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Secretary, yeah, it's wild. Hopefully it comes down. Need commercial off the shelf. Cots versus gots, baby.

• 2:34:25Jordi Hays?

  Cots versus gots.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Let's go. Oh, here's Sean. This is a great one. So Sean, so Elon Musk, you know, on the election night, I believe, says all time high usage of this platform. And it looks like global user seconds was over 400 billion on the election night. And Sean says, we at Sequoia invested $800 million into the X take private. We were ridiculed for two years for it, but I'm confident we'll get the last laugh. Never bet against Elon.

• 2:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:34:56John Coogan?

  And he was getting dunked on a little bit about this because like, I guess the stock is down in like private markets, but I think he's right. I think, I think never bet against Elon. I think the, I think Elon Inc.

• 2:35:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're investing on a 10, they're a venture capital firm. They, they care about, yeah, Sean cares about what the position is going to look like in 10 years.

• 2:35:15John Coogan?

  And it's a network effects company.

• 2:35:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And right now there's so much momentum.

• 2:35:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:19Jordi Hays?

  That, that I would, I would be willing to bet my house that they'll make money on this investment in 10 years.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  It's almost like there's a refounding of the company over there because I remember when this happened.

• 2:35:30Jordi Hays?

  And that was why we, we talked about the rebrand going.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:32Jordi Hays?

  The rebrand was, was.

• 2:35:34John Coogan?

  Refounding. And it's actually like, they're going through the whole cycle that Twitter went through again, but with just like a completely new open book for monetization. And because when, when, when Elon bought it, I was like, you know, like, there's a lot of people that are like leaving, but this makes me more bullish than ever on this is the best place to be if you're in tech.

• 2:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's go check in with all the journalists that posted their blue sky links.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fine. They might be doing well over there. I know that the, the numbers on threads are fine, but it's not the most important place to be if you're in tech. And tech is always ahead of everything else. And so over time, we'll go through the same cycle.

• 2:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Dan Loeb is not on threads ratioing people twice a day, right?

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  And so as long as like the most high signal, most valuable alpha is there, they can kind of climb up the ranking again of like, everyone has to be on there because that's where the conversation is happening.

• 2:36:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the ads, the ads.

• 2:36:34John Coogan?

  All sorts of different things, but they're getting more money for sure.

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  And especially, um, uh, Mark was tweeting out, basically calling out all the advertisers that sort of worked collectively to boycott. X and basically saying that I think a lot of those advertisers will start to come back because they realize that. What they're doing is not only sort of short sighted, but um, potentially even illegal.

• 2:36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting because the, the cost base for X has gotten so low. That if they can get the revenue side anywhere near back to what it was.

• 2:37:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'll just be super profitable.

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  Billion dollar company. Like they could be doing five billion in EBITDA and trade at 20 X or something, 10 X. Like, that's not that crazy to imagine.

• 2:37:21Jordi Hays?

  One of my, one of my, uh, one of my former employees, uh, close friend just had a bunch of different offers. From every sort of like mag seven type company and he chose.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  I know a lot of people like that. All the best people are going there.

• 2:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Reason, the reason to be bullish, besides the fact that Sean is bullish is that. Uh, and the whole election and everything like that is the talent. The talent magnet is real. The smartest people that aspire, that want to work under a leader like Elon are going there.

• 2:37:55John Coogan?

  Let's go shield monaut says, uh, a lot of fintech shitcos that went public in the Zerp era. And were completely left for dead or quietly having monster years, many up 600%. Uh, and he cites Dave Inc., which is up 600%.

• 2:38:08Jordi Hays?

  Neobank.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  Root Inc., um, Clover Health Investments Corp. And Blend Labs. I actually know the founder of Dave. And yeah, rough go of it when they spacked and it went way down.

• 2:38:18Jordi Hays?

  And SoFi is ripping as well.

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing. I'm, I'm really, I'm really happy for these folks that, that spacked at the wrong time and just had like a rough go, but stuck with it. That's like great, great.

• 2:38:28Jordi Hays?

  It'll be interesting to see if, uh, SoFi ends up finding, finding its way. And then Chamath will be able to say like, look, if you just invested in all my spacks.

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  I did well on average, yeah.

• 2:38:40Jordi Hays?

  You did well, right?

• 2:38:41John Coogan?

  I, I, I talked to somebody who spacked and said that like, he did it post Zerp, uh, but what he did was he. On day one, he immediately unlocked all the investors and the founders had like a three year lockup. That's cool. And so that created like a ton of downward pressure on the stock immediately. But got it out of the way. But it, but yeah, got it out of the way. And there was never this like, you know, weight hanging over the company and they were able to essentially tell their VCs like, hey, we got your return, you can distribute and your LPs can sell today if they want. Yeah. You are like, we're, we're, we're clean of this and we're into the next phase. And it's like, now we gotta build up as a, as a public company. And a lot of these companies, it's like, yeah, they're, they're, they're public, they're building, they have the money, they're growing.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  And I mean, I remember looking at Dave and being like, this is trading at like a third of book value or something. Yeah. I'm pretty sure they were trading for like $50 million and they had like 150 million in cash. Yeah. And I was just like, this is insane. Like, it was like, the, the, the whole like SPAC meme became so negative for a while that, that things really work clearly undervalued. So I, I fully anticipate SPACs will be back for, for certain companies pretty soon. Uh, let's go to Jason Lemkin. He says, no downturn or recession at Samsara at 1.3 billion ARR, Klaviyo at 1 billion, GitLab at 730 million, Palantir at 2.9 billion, Toast at 1.6, Datadog at 2.8, Confluent at 1 billion, just a couple of examples.

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  So there's just all these companies that are ripping, ripping, ripping and growing ARR's 30%.

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. It's so interesting. It's, I mean, this is really a good tour of the fact that like this B2B SaaS. Turns out it's a good business. Yeah. And that there's not, even though there are power law winners like the Salesforce or I guess Microsoft really. It was such a huge market that there's multiple hundred million, hundred billion dollar companies to build there. So really, really cool to see.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, I think we could see the same thing play out in defense. I think we could see the same thing play out in AI. And I think that like, yeah, if your fund is set up to you, you have to get a trillion dollar company. Yeah, go for that. That's great. That's awesome. But that doesn't, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be, you know, the, the seventh biggest, you know, B two B SaaS company that's has a billion dollars in ARR, growing 25%. Like I, I would happily be that company. That's great.

• 2:41:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's go to Zane. He says, one of the best times in the history of humanity. It's one of the best times in the history of humanity to start a manufacturing company is likely right now. So.

• 2:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this, this guy's been sharing the gospel around manufacturing broadly, but also the fact that a lot of our onshore manufacturing is dependent on leaders that are at retirement age.

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  Sure. There's that factor. There's also the tariffs thing.

• 2:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Tariffs surreal.

• 2:41:39John Coogan?

  There's also just a new boom in a whole bunch of things that require manufactured parts. Like if we really do go into the humanoid, humanoid robotics era, that's like a million different motors, a million different batteries and control systems and like, who's going to manufacture the tibia for this thing? It's going to be some aluminum rod.

• 2:41:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the downstream effects of, of a company like Anduril over time, having thousands and thousands of employees are that those thousands of employees experience all these small little pain points throughout different product cycles. And then they go out and say like, okay, I made my money in tech, but the next thing I'm doing is setting up this like small manufacturing shop outside of St. Louis and we're going to make this widget and we're going to sell a lot of them. And that's going to be really good for the country. It's going to be good for them financially. It's going to be good for the companies that depend on these sort of smaller scale manufacturers. So.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  I was at Anduril HQ last Friday and I was overhearing some like engineers have a little like, a little meeting and they're like, You know, somebody's like, I'm willing to bet on it. Like, we need to make it 26 millimeters or something. I have no idea what they were talking about, but like, you know, they're like making these engineering trade-offs widgets. And, uh, and yeah, I mean, they're not going to be able to in-source all of that. And then there's also just going to be the dividend of, of, you know, manufacturing and, and hard tech outside of defense. I mean, I think, we talked about the impulse stove. Uh, it's like a hardware company. It's never going to be acquired by Andurall, but, you know, we're going to get a new fridge company. We're going to get a new washing machine company.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  There was a guy making wheelchairs.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, wheelchairs. Yeah, exactly. Like, we're going to get all these different engineering, hard tech, manufacturing things. It's going to be great. I'm really excited. Let's go to Clint Fiori. Uh, he says, "No income tax for the rest of your life if you have birthed four or more children, copying Hungary in America." And then he follows up, "Upon further review and discussion with the commentators here, I'm editing this to be for the household income, not just the mom's rewards homes, where one spouse stays home with kids while other spouse works as well as ones returning to workforce." What do you think? I would take it further, just, uh, no income tax, period.

• 2:43:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, I think it's, I think it's a good incentive. I know a lot of people where kids are very expensive, right?

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for every, we, we look at everything in supercars, right? So if I see a guy with 10 supercars, I'm like, okay, you could probably comfortably have five kids, right? So with every, uh, at least from like a carrying cost standpoint. Um, and so I know a lot of people that have two kids right now. And if you said have two more and you can not pay income tax again, they're going to run the numbers. They'll make a financial model.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:14Jordi Hays?

  And they'll see very quickly, we should have those extra kids. One, kids bring joy.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:18Jordi Hays?

  So that's like just value add.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  But two, if you can, if you can take that incremental, um, income that's not being wasted through wasteful government spending on expensive bushings or $150,000 soap dispensers, uh, and invest that capital, it'll benefit them as well as the entire country. So.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Super pro. Uh, Paul Bohm says, "Can Hollywood stop making slop now?" And then Mopar says, "No, you're going to watch Fast and the Furious 45 and you're going to love it." What do you think?

• 2:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was an election. So, uh, Paul's had some, some great ideas lately. Uh, this was post-election response, maybe in response to woke-ism being, having peaked. Um, but, uh...

• 2:45:07Jordi Hays?

  But I don't know, I think like the problems in the movie entertainment industry are just so much bigger than than politics.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  There's also just this massive lag on productions because you need someone to start writing now and then that movie wouldn't get released in four years.

• 2:45:24Jordi Hays?

  The good thing is I hit up a copywriter that I'd worked with in the past. I actually, I think we we got some of her help on Excel.

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:32Jordi Hays?

  And I hit her up recently because somebody was looking for some copywriting support and she's like, I'm staffed on shows indefinitely. I don't, I don't have time.

• 2:45:41John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:45:41Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, that's good.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  We need more content.

• 2:45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I think the power loss stuff will still stay around the Denis Villeneuve's.

• 2:45:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:51John Coogan?

  The.

• 2:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would argue that there's small groups that are making cool impactful films, right?

• 2:45:58John Coogan?

  It's just rare.

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  Civil War by 24 was a big idea. I think it flopped.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:05Jordi Hays?

  But that wasn't slop, right?

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 2:46:08Jordi Hays?

  It was a big effort.

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  And if you think about like Blade Runner 2049.

• 2:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Dune is a good counter example of like, I actually don't.

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  Oppenheimer, like, like, there's usually like one or two a year. There just aren't one every month.

• 2:46:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:18John Coogan?

  You know.

• 2:46:19Jordi Hays?

  Barbie.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's?

• 2:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Barbie, Oppenheimer.

• 2:46:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, Barbie was.

• 2:46:23Jordi Hays?

  That was a big moment, right?

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gladiator.

• 2:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:27John Coogan?

  Is coming out. Good reviews so far. We gotta take the boys out. This is a, a note for all the listeners. Get your boys together and go to a movie. It's the best thing. We've done it here in L.A. a few times.

• 2:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Dress up.

• 2:46:38John Coogan?

  Dress up, have some drinks before, have some dinner after. It's just a fantastic time. It's a good excuse to get out of the, out of the house. A lot of, what I realized was that a lot of our friends are married and their wives are more into sports than the husbands because sports have just become really popular. And so if you say, hey, we're gonna go watch the Dodger game, well, like, everyone's gonna wanna come, but, you know, very few wives wanna go see the latest Jason Statham movie, so.

• 2:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:03John Coogan?

  It's an excuse to get a boys' night, basically. And it's, and, and it's not as hard of a sell as being like, we're gonna go get hammered and smoke cigars all night.

• 2:47:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And boys' nights are a good way to counter burnout, right?

• 2:47:14John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:47:14Jordi Hays?

  Because burnout's usually a symptom of something not working in your business, but if you hang out with your boys, they can help give you that clarity, gas you up.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  Give you that extra conviction to keep pushing through it, so.

• 2:47:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:26Jordi Hays?

  One movie night could save your company.

• 2:47:27John Coogan?

  It's great. Let's go to typed female. Sam Altman, we are a few thousand days away from building God. We will build suns on earth, unify physics and resurrect the worthy dead.

• 2:47:37Jordi Hays?

  Also, we just bought chat.com.

• 2:47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Gary Tan, sounds like this will be really impactful for startups. Sam Altman, definitely. No better time to be a startup.

• 2:47:47John Coogan?

  I love this because Sam replied, it was like, this is funny.

• 2:47:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  Because it does seem like there's a little bit of like tension there where it's like, okay, if we're gonna get this like crazy future, like maybe like, how can we predict anything?

• 2:47:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but. OpenAI is developer tooling at its core, right? So if they do build God, like they built an API into.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:48:08John Coogan?

  Also, it's just like startups are creation. And so if the tools get better and better, like you would want to create, even if there is abundance, you would want to make something creative and, and creating a company is like a expression of that.

• 2:48:20Jordi Hays?

  I do, yeah, I do feel like it's, it's now that we have intelligence as a service, it is difficult to predict the future.

• 2:48:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31Jordi Hays?

  Right? Especially with software and consumer products. I mean, whatever, seven years ago, you were like, hey, I think smokeless tobacco, you know, nicotine is gonna be big. We should do this. And you turned out to be very correct.

• 2:48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:45Jordi Hays?

  But it's harder to do that with software. I think it's becoming obvious, like you probably want network effects. You want some type of lock-in. You don't want to build, trying to rebuild Salesforce right now could be an amazing business for five years and then you get completely disrupted. Who knows?

• 2:49:02John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to Keith Reboy. He says, should I post, this is post-election, reflecting on his, his posting strategy. And he runs a poll. Should I post more about health, fitness, music, venture capital, or politics? And venture capital won handily with 62%.

• 2:49:19Jordi Hays?

  Thank God. Thank God.

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  Thank God. I disagree. I think, I think that posting about politics is actually great for VCs because you want to know what you're getting yourself into at the board dinner.

• 2:49:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:31John Coogan?

  Because it's all going to come out and the last thing you want is someone who has some crazy political ideology that you don't align with.

• 2:49:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I feel like, but I feel like if Keith met somebody right now that had completely different political views in him and was like truly on the opposite end of the spectrum, he might be like, you know what, you crazy kid, like,

• 2:49:51John Coogan?

  Give it a shot.

• 2:49:51Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you a few million. Give it a shot.

• 2:49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love that. I do appreciate that he's, he's been, he's become like my de facto personal trainer because whenever I post on X about whatever workout I'm doing, he just immediately chimes in with feedback on how I could be doing better.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  I was like, you know, going for a one rep max today. And he was like, you should try three rep maxes instead.

• 2:50:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  I was like, oh, like, you know, clean and jerk is the best movement. And he was like, ah, it's, it's too hard on your tendons, you know?

• 2:50:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  He has a lot of, uh,

• 2:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Whatever, whatever, I, I don't know with, I don't know though with Keith, is it, is it his incredible spirit and, and sort of energy that, that allows him to do these things? Or is it his health protocol? Right?

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  Which one's upstream of which?

• 2:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Right? Because I think a lot of people, if they followed his schedule,

• 2:50:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:43Jordi Hays?

  would collapse in like the fourth day, right? And so, who knows? Who knows?

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, well, we know step one is lever up.

• 2:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep, always.

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  Uh, Phil says, working with a new client, a 17-year-old founder, $10 million D to C brand, no Zoom calls, no in-person meetings, only meets over Black Ops six calls. If it can't be discussed over COD, it's too complicated. The workforce is changing. 2K likes. What do you think? This is something that's like amazing and could be the future or also could be like a harbinger of doom and this kid could be like

• 2:51:18Jordi Hays?

  I do think, yeah, do you think there's potential to be like, hey, let's move the water cooler talk to to COD?

• 2:51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Or whatever the in vogue video game is.

• 2:51:29John Coogan?

  You can go play Smash with your colleagues.

• 2:51:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe Call of Duty is the new ping pong table, right?

• 2:51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense for the modern, for the gamers.

• 2:51:36Jordi Hays?

  I do, I have had some breakthrough conversations. Actually, so this is crazy. So Soylent, when they moved

• 2:51:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:43Jordi Hays?

  to downtown LA, they opened up some, some desks for startups. And I was at, I don't know if you ever talked about this, but I was, you had left the company, but I had a desk there and they had fantastic ping pong tables that I would use at least once a day, right?

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  Crush it. That's great.

• 2:52:00Jordi Hays?

  So at first I was kind of thinking that COD thing was silly, but how different is it to play ping pong versus COD?

• 2:52:05John Coogan?

  You know, one of my favorite pitches with a VC that I ever did was with Blake Robbins when he was at Benchmark.

• 2:52:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:13John Coogan?

  And we played PUBG together, which was a Battle Royale game. And it was fascinating because it felt like the modern version of going golfing.

• 2:52:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:24John Coogan?

  So we talk about business, talk about the business, talk about building companies. But then we're also on the same team in this like fight for survival. So Battle Royale, there's, I think we were playing duos, 150 people on the map, so there's 75 teams.

• 2:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:40John Coogan?

  And if you get shot, you go down, but you can be revived.

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  And so there's always a question of, are you going to be greedy or thirsty?

• 2:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Another good gamer word to adopt. Being thirsty is when, is when you, you know, get too hungry for the kill and you prioritize, you know, offense over defense.

• 2:52:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:58John Coogan?

  And so I noticed, and what I really liked about him was that when I got downed, he would prioritize reviving me over like getting the extra kill, the glory.

• 2:53:07Jordi Hays?

  That's a VC you want.

• 2:53:07John Coogan?

  And I noticed myself thirsting all the time and being like, fuck, we lost because I'm an idiot and I didn't play it right. But.

• 2:53:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's why, that's why golf is actually genuinely really great way to get to know somebody, especially in a business context, because if you're.

• 2:53:19John Coogan?

  How do they handle failure?

• 2:53:20Jordi Hays?

  Play eighteen holes and you see like, oh, like every fourth hole, he like undercounts.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, cheating or throwing his club, raging out.

• 2:53:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or getting pissed, yeah.

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  Or, yeah, doing anything.

• 2:53:31Jordi Hays?

  Or if they're too chill about it, like they're not.

• 2:53:34John Coogan?

  On the golf course.

• 2:53:35Jordi Hays?

  Or, or in the back nine.

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  Catty girl or whatever.

• 2:53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, back nine.

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of ways to expose the truth about someone through that.

• 2:53:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:42John Coogan?

  It's much better than just a coffee meeting, which is just vanilla.

• 2:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you get to walk the whole time.

• 2:53:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. So, yeah, maybe COD is the future. Uh, let's skip that.

• 2:53:54John Coogan?

  Man, Jarvis says, man, Trump really lucked out having an autistic billionaire randomly choose his election as his next object of fixation. Ha, ha, ha.

• 2:54:03Jordi Hays?

  And Elon responds.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Fifty K likes and Elon responds with a crying emoji and Jarvis just says, love you, King. So good.

• 2:54:10Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  So funny. Elon just got obsessed with the.

• 2:54:14Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe this app is only ten dollars a month.

• 2:54:16John Coogan?

  It's incredible. It's incredible. These are my reactions. This has always been the case. I remember like when I first got to Silicon Valley, getting online and just tweeting with like Sean Parker and, uh, and who, uh, Jim Breier from Excel. They were, they were on stage and like they were posting about their, you know, investing initiatives. And I was able to just be like a reply guy and like chat with them. It was like crazy, like.

• 2:54:37Jordi Hays?

  Huge alpha in being a reply guy.

• 2:54:39John Coogan?

  Basically, yeah. And it was super inspiring at the time. I was like, okay, like at least these guys give me the time of day. Like, they're not like big dogging me, which is awesome.

• 2:54:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so here's the thing. It wasn't, it certainly was not random, right?

• 2:54:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:52Jordi Hays?

  Elon was absolutely snubbed by Biden.

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Who completely disrespected the biggest American manufacturer of EVs by not inviting Elon to meet with him and the government on the issue. Same thing in California. California like basically made fun of him and told him to leave.

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:12Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 2:55:12John Coogan?

  Message received.

• 2:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, message received. He, everything we just saw over the past.

• 2:55:19Jordi Hays?

  However, many months was just a reaction to being disrespected.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:23Jordi Hays?

  As a person, as a businessman, and it was almost a, with his level of ambition, it was, it was something that he needed to do to reach his full potential because he's at a scale where what the government thinks about him and his businesses is probably more important than anything else.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  Yep, that makes sense. Let's go to Jan Pelig. He says, "Hurtily from one of the frontier labs, not OpenAI, to be honest. They reached an unexpected huge wall of diminishing returns, trying to brute force better results by training longer and using more and more data, more severe than what is published previously." So the question is like, are we hitting a wall or are scaling laws going to hold?

• 2:56:05Jordi Hays?

  Here's what I would say. Ninety percent of frontier AI labs quit right before they're about to make it big. Same thing in gambling, right? Ninety percent of sports bettors quit right before they're about to hit that crazy parlay. And so my advice to this frontier lab is double down, more data, more energy.

• 2:56:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Get whale blubber as an energy source if you need it. Nuclear, coal.

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  Coal, wind.

• 2:56:32Jordi Hays?

  Do it all.

• 2:56:33John Coogan?

  Title, solar, everything.

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Title. So here's what AI, AI labs have not partnered with SoulCycle yet to try to capture that energy.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we've seen the matrix, like put the people in the pod, use their energy source. They become batteries. The, the interesting thing here is like, it's really hard to evaluate this because OpenAI is the most well-funded and so they're the ones, other than the hyperscalers, they're the ones that can actually go and build like the gigawatt data center, which is like a new thing that needs to be built. It like physically needs to exist before you can do that training run. XAI is pretty far along. They're building like the largest cluster. So it's like, you can't, I feel like it's really, really hard to evaluate, is scaling holding without actually running the experiment of like, we built the thing and this was the result. And the fear is that you, you.

• 2:57:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, you 10x the power, you 10x the training and the GPUs, but then IQ of these models goes from like 105 to 107. And it's like, that might be economically viable, honestly. It might be better at whatever it does, and it might be really, really valuable to do that. But it might just be like, okay, we're hitting really diminishing marginal returns, and we're not going to get this super intelligence where it's like, oh yeah, just a couple orders of magnitude and then we'll be at 200 IQ. And that's something that like, no one, I've never really seen anyone make a really great argument for like, clearly scaling is all you need and scale is really valuable and, and scale improves the model. But what is the ratio between orders of magnitude in energy and, and data center size?

• 2:58:11John Coogan?

  And actual real world applicability in IQ? Like what will it take? How many orders of magnitude to get to 150? No one really knows, I think, but we'll see. Let's go to Edmund. He says, does anyone ever think about how aesthetic it is that humans drink water to survive? Like this clear, zero calorie, smooth liquid, pure, minimal, sleek, it's water, it's giving La Mer, it's giving modernity, it's good design.

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Water is Lindy. We have a lot of other alternatives.

• 2:58:43John Coogan?

  Cheers.

• 2:58:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Thank you to Aurora. We have a lot of other alternatives, but, uh, but we, we humans, we keep coming back to water.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:52Jordi Hays?

  There, there is.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  If only they could put caffeine in it.

• 2:58:54Jordi Hays?

  There's that company, Orca, right?

• 2:58:56John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:58:57Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get some of that.

• 2:58:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta try that. Demo that on the, on the, on the pod. It's great. Let's go to Cody Sanchez. She says, I don't want passive income. I want a fucking empire.

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's go Cody.

• 2:59:09John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  Cody.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  One of us.

• 2:59:12Jordi Hays?

  One of us.

• 2:59:14John Coogan?

  One of us. One of us.

• 2:59:18Jordi Hays?

  Passive income isn't real.

• 2:59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, fake.

• 2:59:21Jordi Hays?

  If you're getting.

• 2:59:22John Coogan?

  You're buying a job.

• 2:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Getting income, there's some, uh, level of, uh, management that comes with it. And, uh, even if you hire somebody to manage said income, like a CEO or an asset manager, things like that, you still have to manage that person.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  And even if you have a hundred million dollars and you put it in government bonds and you're, and you're getting three million a year. It's like, you will forever wonder, like, could I be getting 10%?

• 2:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Active income, active, nothing, nothing hits like active income.

• 2:59:47John Coogan?

  Active income.

• 2:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Working and getting paid, active income.

• 2:59:50John Coogan?

  We are pro-active income here.

• 2:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Income. No, nothing hits like working hard and then making a lot of money from it. It's like the greatest drug on earth.

• 2:59:58John Coogan?

  So this is a great question. Adam Draper writes, where's the punk rock of the startup world right now? 12 years ago, it was Bitcoin. And Matt dot crypto says, it's just funny, he doesn't say crypto, he says longevity, which I somewhat buy. I would say that it's been the gundo.

• 3:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Nuclear.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  The gundo really was like very punk rock and very countercultural and very independent and very not an industry plant.

• 3:00:23Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy that the internet made it go mainstream.

• 3:00:25John Coogan?

  Very quickly.

• 3:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Very quickly.

• 3:00:26John Coogan?

  It was one year of punk rock and now it's like.

• 3:00:29Jordi Hays?

  They were getting a hit piece in like four months.

• 3:00:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, no, not a hit piece, just like puff pieces, like puff piece after puff piece. And now it's like everyone knows it and it's like, okay, the game's over.

• 3:00:37Jordi Hays?

  But they were, at one point, when there was some coverage happening, they were worried like it was gonna be like pretty negative.

• 3:00:43John Coogan?

  I do think longevity in bio could be next. I was talking to Sebastian Malabai, the author of Power Law, and he was saying that the next big like book he wants to write is about bio investors.

• 3:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:55John Coogan?

  Because it's a very, very different model, very different world, but like, maybe it could change with AI, maybe it can change with more financialization, but it is, it is a very like untapped world that is kind of early, but clearly very promising. Let's go to Rajvir. He says, on election day, Kalshi outspent the Trump and Harris campaigns on meta ads.

• 3:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is one, I totally respect Kalshi taking, capturing the moment because their whole thing is much, it's much more about politics than polymarket. Polymarket is markets for everything. Kalshi is much more focused on being the legal, quote unquote, legal way to bet on the election. So they should have spent millions and millions, and they did. The funny thing though is they kept like congratulating themselves on hitting number one and all this stuff. And it reminded me of that meme where like, it's like the guy like spraying champagne like in his own mouth and he's like third on the podium or whatever.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  I think we retweeted that.

• 3:01:54Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, I think, yeah, we'll see what happens. Every company needs to continue to kind of reinvent themselves. I'm sure Kalshi will come back and and kind of try to create like new markets and momentum. And maybe there's an argument that the way to do it is to. Is to build a ton of momentum around specific markets.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Events.

• 3:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Whereas poly markets more like platform.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Style approach.

• 3:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a great one. Bill Gurley says, stop using revenue multiples and you will have more clarity on valuations. And it's a reply to Jason Lemkin. For the math to pencil out in venture capital, we probably need a rebound in public multiples. VC probably can't make money at 5X ARR public comps with Harry Stebbings. It's so funny because Bill Gurley is just coming in like the boss.

• 3:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's, he's kind of, he's, he's basically has the wisdom of Yoda now. He's, he's the only VC from that era. That's still extremely online, right?

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 3:02:49Jordi Hays?

  And he's able to just pop in and be like, uh, use the EBITDA multiple, my friend.

• 3:02:56John Coogan?

  Oh, you think that's what he's saying?

• 3:02:58Jordi Hays?

  I, I, that, that was the way I, I read it is.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  I thought it would just be like a more nuanced analysis of like, you know,

• 3:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 3:03:03John Coogan?

  team, market structure.

• 3:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:05John Coogan?

  Power law, like monopoly characteristics.

• 3:03:07Jordi Hays?

  But over, over focus on any one metric is going to lead you astray.

• 3:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, revenue multiple is really silly when you think about like all the other levers in a model.

• 3:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:16John Coogan?

  It's kind of crazy to lean on that, but.

• 3:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:19John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to this quote tweet of Chamath. Inglourious Capital says, thanks, Washington Post, but I only trust Autism Capital with my news. Is a serious tweet a billionaire just wrote?

• 3:03:29Jordi Hays?

  So the crazy thing is how much impact this has.

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  This was insane.

• 3:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't that one, one account you said?

• 3:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, uh, Cremieux. Uh, so he went from 70K followers to 200K followers off of this one tweet by Chamath. It was a very well-written tweet. I canceled my New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions and just reallocated the money to subscribe and follow the following folks on X, who I believe helped get me accurate news. And it was Autism Capital and then, uh, Cremieux and then a bunch of other people. But what, what a phenomenal.

• 3:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Rise of the poster.

• 3:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and it's, it's true. It's true. Like you'll just get better, like.

• 3:04:03Jordi Hays?

  That's why we cover the timeline instead of.

• 3:04:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:06Jordi Hays?

  We don't, we don't cover the news.

• 3:04:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we don't. Let's go to Joe Lonsdale. Roaring 20s Redux begins shortly. Jeff Lonsdale says, "Okay, but the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 was around 9 to 11 in 1924 to 1925."

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Boo.

• 3:04:22John Coogan?

  Boo. I'm on Joe's team here.

• 3:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Run it back. Run it back.

• 3:04:28John Coogan?

  Are they both Lonsdales? Are they literally brothers or something?

• 3:04:30Jordi Hays?

  They must be related.

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:32Jordi Hays?

  If they're not, they should, they should partner up in some way.

• 3:04:36John Coogan?

  But yeah, Joe, I, I, I'm very bullish on the 20s. I think it's great. I, I think we're getting there.

• 3:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, beginning story.

• 3:04:43Jordi Hays?

  I think the optimism, that, that there's, there's

• 3:04:46John Coogan?

  The animal spirits.

• 3:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Obviously a massive amount of, uh, the animal spirits are back. There's a ton of optimism in the last week in the tech world. That's great. But it actually began, I swear it began like early in the, in, in the 2020s, right? Like there was some, obviously a lot of

• 3:05:01John Coogan?

  Froth.

• 3:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Froth and bullshit around COVID and markets and stuff like that. But there was also the beginning of this whole movement of like, we're going to make the world a better place, not just with software and apps, but with real world products.

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's when a lot of that stuff started. It's interesting. Yeah. There's also, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because like during the, uh, the, the, the, the poszerp crash and the recession, like the fundamental economic drivers of the American economy were very strong. But if you asked people that consumer sentiment, they would all say, "It's, it's not working for me. It's not doing well." And, uh, so this was termed by Kyler Scanlon, like the vibe session.

• 3:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:43John Coogan?

  And there was this idea that like the vibes feel off, even though we're not seeing like the American consumer collapse. And, and the American economy kept growing and we had a very brief recession. We never went into a depression. All the doomer stuff didn't come to, to bear. So there's something about the fact that like, we have a very solid foundation to build on right now.

• 3:06:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's great. Okay, let's pass that. Let's do, uh, UC Berkeley's law school apparently had a course called Elon Fought the Law, The Law Won on offer. Alas, it has since been canceled. That's so crazy. That someone was gonna teach a whole course on this and they're just like, it doesn't make sense anymore because he actually won.

• 3:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I wish we could see what date it was actually sent. It may, it would be amazing if it was canceled last week.

• 3:06:33John Coogan?

  I think it was. I, this looks recent. This looks like a recent screenshot.

• 3:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Spring twenty twenty five. Yes.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they're planning it for spring and just canceled it. Crazy.

• 3:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the lesson here is he didn't try to fight the law directly. He fought it indirectly.

• 3:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 3:06:49John Coogan?

  Also, a lot of things he won, like in the micro, like that Tesla shareholder lawsuit where the judge tried to take away his, his comp package, which all the shareholders had approved. Where if he got the stock price to like an insane number, he would get a ton of shares. He did it. Everyone was happy. But then, like, one shareholder fought and, like, the judge ruled with them. But then he went back to the shareholders and got it done.

• 3:07:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  And so, uh, yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with this because there aren't many examples.

• 3:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to the shareholders.

• 3:07:14John Coogan?

  Air, L's. It's very, very rare. Yeah, shout out to the shareholders, seriously. Uh, let's go to Trent Griffin. Uh, I think he's like a public markets analyst. He writes, uh, a lot Gil, I see five layers of AI value. One, Nvidia and chips. Two, data centers. Three, models. Four, tools for deploying AI. And five, workflow services. And I think he misses six, which is energy. Energy is like clearly the next thing. And it's been a little bit of a champagne or a cocktail position in the sense that people talk about it at cocktail parties. Oh, energy's gonna be really important. Sam Altman's investing in it, but the market hasn't really moved on it, but they're starting to right now. It's just starting.

• 3:07:52Jordi Hays?

  Seven posters, right? Without people like Rune and, and other top AI posters, almost none of this works, right? Posters are moving, posters are moving the market.

• 3:08:05John Coogan?

  I mean, in terms of AI value, there are legitimately. Dozens of people that are going to build million dollar businesses off of AI related content.

• 3:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  Whether it's YouTube videos, or how tos, or courses, or podcasts, like, like, there are a number of AI podcasts that have gotten really big. A lot Gil has a great AI podcast. I mean, he's monetizing it differently through a fund, but like, nevertheless, like, he is part of the AI value chain, even as a capital allocator.

• 3:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:33John Coogan?

  It is interesting, but of course, you got to boil it down to five.

• 3:08:35Jordi Hays?

  AI media industrial complex.

• 3:08:37John Coogan?

  But, uh, but that's, uh, it's a fascinating tweet. Let's go to Scotty Pippen. I didn't even realize he was still using X. That's amazing.

• 3:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Scotty.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  So, uh, Scotty Pippen writes, "Just woke up from a wild dream. Satoshi Nakamoto visited me and he laughed at the price of Bitcoin. Too low, he said. I'm taking it higher. You haven't seen anything yet. Get ready. 2025 is going to be crazy."

• 3:08:58Jordi Hays?

  I love this trend of athletes.

• 3:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Like retiring and then coming back to post.

• 3:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Because you can have a whole.

• 3:09:06John Coogan?

  He still has his jersey in the picture.

• 3:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's amazing. You can have this whole cultural resurgence, right? Because when people see Scotty Pippen in the feed, they're going to pay attention, right?

• 3:09:16John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 3:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Um, AB has done this, I think, really well throughout the last, um, whatever year as well. So.

• 3:09:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Bullish on Scotty and Bitcoin.

• 3:09:26John Coogan?

  Very bullish. Let's go to Nikita Beer. "I can't help but feel like we're about to enter one of the most insane times to own risk assets." And, uh, Amit replies, "Is a Lambo a risk asset?" And I hate to break it to you, bro. It's not. It's a hard asset.

• 3:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Very stable, hard asset.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  You want to get into the equities, the early stage equities.

• 3:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Too much mileage on it.

• 3:09:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but most Lambos are depreciating. Very few. Maybe get a Countach if you're looking for something, but even that's not a risk asset.

• 3:09:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think Paki was saying something earlier as well, as he's like, "I feel very under allocated to tech and crypto," even though his, aside from his media business, is like probably 95% tech and crypto.

• 3:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Um, so yeah, the FOMO is starting.

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Great time to own risk assets.

• 3:10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, Nikita also knows he can risk it all.

• 3:10:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:10:10Jordi Hays?

  And worst case, he'll just build another. App and flip it.

• 3:10:14John Coogan?

  Flip it. Did you, did you see his other tweet about, uh, uh, millionaires in the post Zerba era are pointless?

• 3:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:22John Coogan?

  Being a senti millionaire is, uh, is what, and, and we're going to call them sentis. Which is very funny because like, I mean, we know, we know a lot of senti millionaires and that's not the word they use. Like, we all know the word that they use. It's not sentis. So he's kind of telling on himself that he doesn't know like the real word.

• 3:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 3:10:41John Coogan?

  But hopefully he gets there. Hopefully, hopefully he learns the real word. He's kind of acting like one of those guys that moves to San Francisco. San Fran, you know, you don't really sound like a real, a real senti millionaire, but, uh, someone will clue you in.

• 3:10:54Jordi Hays?

  I would.

• 3:10:55John Coogan?

  Mike, I would caution you if you're in Lake Como, don't drop senti because, you know, George Clooney is going to spit out his screaming eagle if he hears you.

• 3:11:03Jordi Hays?

  No, I would, I think Nikita should get on to really capture the long tail of, of his fans that can't afford intro.

• 3:11:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:11:11Jordi Hays?

  Create a copy trading subscription.

• 3:11:13John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 3:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Charge $10,000 a month.

• 3:11:16John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 3:11:16Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and some carry on it too. Cause I think he would have like, probably like 10,000 people that would be like, yeah, I'm going to YOLO with Nikita.

• 3:11:24John Coogan?

  Hell yeah.

• 3:11:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm riding.

• 3:11:25John Coogan?

  I'm riding into the risk assets. Uh, and this is the one we got to close on. Jay Alto says, some creators do it for the clout. Some creators do it for the money, but this is why the real ones do it. And it's a clip of the founder of Patreon giving some long speech about.

• 3:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't need it.

• 3:11:42John Coogan?

  Who cares? We do it for the money. We just want to be ultra clear about this. If you're listening, you're going to hear a lot of ads and you're going to hear a lot of monetization. So get ready, buckle up, lock in, lever up. Welcome to technology, brothers. Thanks for listening.

• 3:11:58Jordi Hays?

  I think we got to get on with Taipei.

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  I actually have to get to Las Vegas to meet with the new administration.

• 3:12:05Jordi Hays?

  As one does.

• 3:12:07John Coogan?

  It's been a pleasure. Thanks, everyone.

• 3:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Good doing business with you.